President Joe Biden and the House Republican leader huddle for a pivotal meeting in negotiations over an upcoming deadline to raise the government’s debt ceiling or risk default. A major Ukrainian nuclear plant loses power again. Will artificial intelligence take over the music scene?

Lauren Boebert.

Jacquelyn Martin-Pool/Getty Images

• Lauren Boebert has denied claims that she is having an affair with country singer Sean Feucht.
• “How can I be with a man with better hair than me?” Boebert told the Daily Beast jokingly. 
• The Colorado Republican recently filed for divorce from her husband of two decades. 

Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert has denied rumors that she’s involved with the right-wing Christian country singer, Sean Feucht. 

Boebert, who this month announced her divorce from her husband of nearly two decades, Jayson Boebert, denied accusations that she’s involved with Feucht in a new interview.

“How can I be with a man with better hair than me?” she told the Daily Beast’s Zachary Petrizzo. 

—CoffeyTimeNews (@CoffeyTimeNews) May 17, 2023

 

“There is absolutely nothing romantic between Sean Feucht and I, nor has there been,” she added. “So he is a wonderful friend, and he and I have done a lot of events together.”

The duo have been seen in a prayer circle together in the Capitol building. 

 

In contrast, Feucht — who is married with four children, per the Daily Beast — came out swinging against the claims.

“This is false. And it’s defamatory. I’m giving everyone making this accusation 24 hours to retract and apologize. If you don’t you’ll hear from my lawyer,” Feucht tweeted on Friday. 

The rumors of the affair came just days after Boebert told The Colorado Sun on May 16 that she’d filed for divorce Jayson Boebert, citing “irreconcilable differences.”

According to an affidavit, Jayson Boebert got “extremely angry” with the process server who delivered divorce papers to him, and tried to reject the documents. The server said in the affidavit that Jayson Boebert “closed the door” on him and “then let the dogs out.”

However, Lauren Boebert denied the server’s claims in a tweet on May 17, which said: “Our own home security footage shows he didn’t “sick dogs” on the process server. The dogs were outside when the server pulled up, they never showed aggression toward him, nor did he appear afraid of them.”

Jayson Boebert also told the Daily Beast that he was not expecting the divorce, but added: “I just want her to be happy.”

Boebert’s representatives and Feucht did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment sent outside regular business hours. 

(Reuters) – A judge dismissed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Elon Musk that claimed he cheated Twitter shareholders several times last year in the course of buying the social media company for $44 billion.

In a decision on Monday, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco said plaintiff William Heresniak lacked standing to sue because he challenged “wrongs associated with” Musk’s buyout, not the fairness of the buyout itself.

Breyer said Heresniak did not show harm from Musk’s belated disclosure of a 9.2% Twitter stake, which the suit said let him buy more shares at lower prices before the buyout was announced, or from the closing’s taking place 1 1/2 months later than planned.

The judge also found no proof that Musk helped two friends then on Twitter’s board, co-founder Jack Dorsey and Silver Lake private equity firm managing partner Egon Durban, breach their fiduciary duties by favoring their own and Musk’s interests.

Breyer said letting Dorsey roll over his approximately $1 billion of Twitter shares into an equity stake in the new company merely reduced how much Musk had to pay at closing, and did not “improperly divert” money from other shareholders.

Heresniak’s lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside business hours.

Musk also runs electric car company Tesla Inc and is the world’s second-richest person, according to Forbes magazine.

Lawyers for Musk, two of his holding companies and Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In a March 3 court filing, they called Heresniak’s claims “a disjointed laundry list of – often irrelevant – grievances against Elon Musk.”

Heresniak sued on May 25, 2022, one month after Twitter accepted Musk’s $54.20 per share buyout offer. The transaction closed on Oct. 27.

Twitter has since struggled to maintain ad revenue, with some advertisers expressing concern that loosened content rules could leave their ads associated with hate speech or other “wrong messages.”

On May 12, Musk named former NBCUniversal advertising chief Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s new chief executive.

The case is Heresniak v Musk et al, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 22-03074.

Seven U.S. states that depend on the overused Colorado River on Monday reached agreement to cut consumption and help save a river that provides drinking water for 40 million people and irrigation for some of the country’s most bountiful farmland.

Arizona, California and Nevada will reduce intake by 3 million acre-feet (3.7 billion cubic meters) through the end of 2026, an amount equal to 13% of their river allotment, under a deal brokered and announced by the Biden administration.

Those three make up the Lower Basin states of the century-old Colorado River Compact, which assigns water rights to them plus the four Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

While the Upper Basin states draw their water directly from the river and its tributaries, the Lower Basin states depend on Lake Mead, the reservoir created by the Hoover Dam and whose spigot is controlled by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

The river’s long-term health is critical for the entire region, particularly for the economies of major cities such as Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix, and the agricultural industry.

Monday’s agreement clears a major hurdle for reaching a three-year plan for distributing water rights starting in 2024. Without a deal, the federal government might have been forced to impose cuts, likely provoking a flurry of lawsuits.

The agreement, billed by the states as a “historic success,” followed a year of arduous negotiations that featured two blown deadlines.

It was facilitated by an extraordinary deluge this year that filled reservoirs and packed the mountains with snow.

Moreover, the Biden administration made it rain with $1.2 billion in grants under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 that will compensate local water districts, cities and Native American tribes for cutting back.

“This year’s hydrology was really important, and not only the rains in California,” said Estevan Lopez, New Mexico’s signatory to the deal as the state’s commissioner to the river compact. “That made this possible, along with the funding from the IRA.”

Now the seven states must go back to work on longer-term deal starting in 2027, most likely for 20 years, that must be reached without being able to count on rainy years or a flood of federal dollars, and with effects of climate change looming.

“There are significantly more difficult things in the future that are going to have to be agreed to,” said John Entsminger, Nevada’s representative.

The Colorado River Compact has long been problematic as it was agreed following an usually wet period, misleading signatories into believing more water was available to them.

The river has been further strained by rapid population growth and, in this century, a historic drought that – until this year’s rains – threatened to drain reservoir levels below the intake valves that deliver water downstream and cut off hydroelectric production.

Entsminger said officials now acknowledge there will be less Colorado River water available in the 21st century than there was in the 20th.

But he cited Las Vegas, which has seen its population increase by 800,000 people since 2002 while cutting Colorado River consumption by 31%, as an example of how to grow amid scarcity.

While significant, the deal leaves out two major river users: Mexico and Native American tribes.

Lopez said Mexico, which receives 1.5 million acre-feet per year under a 1944 treaty with the United States, has signaled a willingness to cooperate, and the tribes, which have an estimated one-fourth to one-third of the water rights, have been kept informed of the talks.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry said on Monday that Group of Seven nuclear “rhetoric” has the sole aim of exerting psychological, military and political pressure on Moscow and Beijing.

In the first ever communiqué on nuclear disarmament issued at the G7 summit last week, the group called on Russia and China to show greater transparency about their nuclear arsenals, akin to steps taken by the United States, Britain and France.

In comments on the document, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov – the ministry’s point man for arms control – said the statement reflects the group’s anti-Russian and anti-Chinese tone.

“One gets the impression that Western rhetoric on the topic of the size of their nuclear arsenals has a single goal – to exert psychological and military-political pressure on Russia and China,” Ryabkov said in comments published on the ministry’s website.

“Behind it is clearly a pathological desire to denigrate our countries.”

The comments follow both China and Russia’s furious response to the G7 summit and declarations that singled out both countries on range of issues. Moscow called the summit an “incubator” for anti-Russian and anti-Chinese hysteria.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his “dear friend” President Vladimir Putin committed to a “no limits” partnership just before Russia’s invasion on Ukraine in 2022, and have since further strengthened economic, political and military ties.

In a continued flurry of bilateral visits, Russia’s Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin arrived in China late on Monday for talks with Chinese officials and businesses, adding to the West’s unease over the two countries’ relations.