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Federal judge “likely” to order the Trump admin to release SNAP funds. On Thursday, Judge Indira Talwani said during a hearing that a $5.5 billion contingency fund should be used to provide Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits after states run out of aid money due to the government shutdown—lapses that may begin as soon as tomorrow. “Congress has put money in an emergency fund, and it is hard for me to understand how this is not an emergency,” Talwani said. She also said the USDA should be figuring out how to allocate the $5.5 billion, even though it’s not enough money to fund an entire month of the program. She called the agency’s search for a reason not to disburse the money “lawyering” and said, “I want agency action, not lawyering.” The SNAP program provides food assistance to 42 million Americans.—HVL
Palantir says two former AI engineers stole company secrets. The company named after the object with which Pippin nearly gave away the secret that Frodo and Sam were carrying the One Ring to Mordor has accused two ex-employees of stealing its secrets. Palantir sued two former senior AI engineers, alleging that they stole information to launch a “copycat” company, Percepta, Bloomberg reported. According to the lawsuit, the employees lied about their plans to start a competitor when they resigned in November 2024 and February 2025, respectively. Palantir also claims one of them stole “highly confidential” documents the day before she resigned by sending them to herself on Slack. Percepta’s parent company declined to comment to Bloomberg.—AE
Taylor Sheridan is staying at Paramount (sorta) to write a Call of Duty movie. The move heard ’round Hollywood got even spicier yesterday when news broke that writer-producer Taylor Sheridan will in fact still co-write a Call of Duty movie for Paramount, just days after the highly coveted Yellowstone creator reportedly defected to rival NBCUniversal. Earlier this week, The Hollywood Reporter said Sheridan was moving his overall pact from Paramount to NBCU, where his film deal will start next year and his TV deal will kick in in 2028. But apparently not before penning a film adaptation of the US’ top-selling video game franchise. Call of Duty has sold more than 500 million copies and generated tens of billions of dollars in revenue.—AE
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Trump lowers tariffs on China, which agreed to pull back some rare earth restrictions. The developments came as the president concluded his trip to Asia with 
Big Tech had a big earnings day. Meta, Microsoft, and Google’s parent company Alphabet all reported earnings yesterday, with investors watching to see whether their massive AI expenditures are paying off. Meta’s stock 
Microsoft suffered a cloud outage. As if reporting earnings didn’t make for a stressful enough day at Microsoft HQ yesterday, starting at about noon ET, Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service experienced an hourslong 