By Daniel Wine, Toni Odejimi, CNN

Welcome to 5 Things PM! What could go wrong when trying to touch the genitals of a 16th‑century statue during a bachelorette trip? A lot, apparently.

Here’s what else you might have missed during your busy day.

5 things

1⃣ Dire conditions

The worst spring drought on record is gripping the continental US, and it’s fueling wildfire and water shortage concerns as the summer heat approaches. Sign up for the new CNN Weather newsletter.

2⃣ ‘They loved life’

Sisters who enjoyed dancing, an outgoing spirit with a thirst for learning and a burgeoning young reader. Meet the eight children — from 3 to 11 years old — whose lives were cut short in the Shreveport mass shooting.

3⃣ Hope for the future

María de Jesús Estrada Juárez was living in the US under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for immigrants. Then she was deported. Now she has accomplished what seemed impossible.

4⃣ Psychedelics

Once relegated to the fringes of medicine, these drugs are drawing new interest from the Trump administration as a potential treatment for people with certain mental health conditions. Could FDA approval be next?

5⃣ Highs and lows

From piracy and downloads to playlists and global hits, Spotify has reshaped the music industry. Watch as CNN’s Clare Sebastian breaks down how the streaming giant racked up hundreds of millions of users.

Watch this

Freezy Drake: Fans chipped away at a 25-foot ice sculpture in Toronto, some of them wielding pickaxes and hammers, to uncover a hidden surprise tied to the popular Canadian rapper.

Top headlines

• Trump threatens to shoot boats laying mines as tension escalates in Strait of Hormuz
• At least 10 injured, including ‘some innocent people,’ after shootout at Louisiana mall, police say
• Meta to cut 10% of staff as it pours billions into AI

Check this out

‘Art world Olympics’: Every two years, the US taps an artist to transform its pavilion at the Venice Biennale. But what is typically a career‑defining moment looks Read more

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(CNN) — The image was instantly iconic: Donald Trump, moments after an attempt on his life, is surrounded by Secret Service agents attempting to rush him to a car. Face bloodied, he takes a defiant turn toward his supporters and pumps a fist into the air. An American flag waves in the background.

Was it too iconic? In the hours after a man tried to assassinate Trump at a 2024 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, baseless conspiracy theories about the shooting — and that photo in particular — flooded the internet. Some anti-Trumpers declared it too good to be true, arguing that the incident must have been “staged” to boost his campaign.

More than a year into Trump’s second term, the claim has acquired new life, now among prominent people in the MAGAverse, disillusioned with the man they once supported.

“Just admit you staged it in Butler,” comedian Tim Dillon, who helped drive support for Trump in 2024, said in an April 11 episode of his podcast. “It was the heat of the campaign. People do crazy things in campaigns.” As WIRED’s David Gilbert wrote last week, recent comments from Dillon, as well as right-wing personalities including Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, seemed to open the door to further conspiracy theories from the MAGA coalition.

Before “staged” entered English as a verb around the 14th century, the noun “stage” was in use a century earlier to mean a horizontal portion of a structure, floor or story of a building or a raised platform constructed to exhibit something for public viewing. In its earliest verb sense, to “stage” meant to set up a platform or scaffolding for construction. Later, it also became a term for the process of putting on a theatrical production and eventually, any event requiring planning and preparation. Both forms come from the Old French “estage,” meaning “dwelling,” and its verb form “estager,” meaning “to stay somewhere.” “Estage” is also related to the Latin “stagium.”

Around the 1930s, “staged” additionally came to refer to a particular kind of planned event: a situation deliberately faked to mislead people about what happened. The Oxford English Dictionary cites an early use in a 1935 story published in “The American Magazine,” in which a man reportedly “staged” an argument to gain the trust of a lumber company superintendent and secure an offer of employment from him. Other citations from the era refer to faked crime scenes.

Assassinations and attempted assassinations, combining both politics and crime, have proved especially ripe for claims that they were “staged.” The implication appears to be older than the word itself. After an assassination attempt on President Andrew Jackson in 1835, the opposition party accused him of faking it for public sympathy. A February 16, 1835 article in the “Republican Banner” reported the “Richmond Whig

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By Tal Shalev and Dana Karni, CNN

Tel Aviv, Israel (CNN) — Israeli police detained a Jewish man on Monday for wearing a kippah embroidered with an Israeli and a Palestinian flag — then cut up the religious head covering, he says — in a rare case that has drawn national attention.

Alex Sinclair, a 53-year-old author and adjunct lecturer at the Hebrew University, told CNN that police approached him while he was sitting at a cafe in his hometown of Modiin about 22 miles southeast of Tel Aviv. Within minutes, he said, he was taken to a local police station, searched and detained.

In a detailed Facebook post, Sinclair wrote that he had been working on his computer when “a religious man came over to me with an angry face and shouted that my kippah is against the law.” Sinclair said he attempted to engage the man in conversation but that the man refused to listen and called police.

Two officers soon arrived and told him that his “kippah is against the law and that they are going to confiscate it,” Sinclair said.

He was then taken to a local police station. “Take off your belt. Face the wall, hands against the wall. They frisked me. Then they locked me in the cell, on my own, no water, no phone, no idea of what was going on or what the process would be,” he wrote of the experience.

After about 20 minutes of detention, the officers agreed to release him, initially without returning the kippah he has worn for 20 years, Sinclair said on Facebook. It was only after he insisted that the officers returned what was left of it, he said.

“She had cut out the Palestinian flag,” he wrote, referring to a young policewoman he said was in charge. “She’d taken my possession, a religious ritual object, something that is very dear to my heart, and destroyed it.”

Sinclair’s case may well be unique. Israeli police have for years confiscated Palestinian flags from Palestinians, accusing them of disturbing the peace. And Palestinian flags are occasionally displayed at ultra-Orthodox Jewish rallies, where a portion of the population opposes the modern state of Israel. But it is incredibly rare for police to take action against a Jewish man for wearing a kippah, even if it shows Palestinian and Israeli flags.

While Israeli law does not ban public display of a Palestinian flag, Israeli authorities can restrict or remove it if they determine it constitutes support for a terrorist organization or poses a genuine risk of public disorder. In 2023, Israel’s far-right minister of national security, Itamar Ben Gvir, instructed officers to remove Palestinian flags, a directive that the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) said was illegal.

In a statement, Israeli police acknowledged the incident but made no mention of the flags or of Sinclair’s allegation that an officer ruined his kippah. It said they received a call alerting them to a man “wearing a kippah bearing a Palestinian flag” and that he was detained but then released “following a clarification process.”

Sinclair told CNN on Thursday that his kippah holds symbolic meaning for him, as “a proud Jew and proud Zionist that also believes that the Palestinians, like the Jews, are a people with a right to self-determination and a legitimate historical connection to this part of the world.”

“There are people on both sides who try to erase the identity of the other. Being a Zionist does not contradict recognizing the rights of the other people who also have a legitimate connection to this country,” he said.

“I don’t want to over-react to this but it’s ha

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