AG nominee Todd Blanche says he’s Trump’s lawyer in slip at Senate confirmation hearing

Todd Blanche fueled widespread concerns about his lack of independence when he committed a gaffe by saying he represents President Trump during a stormy Senate confirmation hearing for his nomination to be U.S. attorney general.

“I’m his lawyer,” Blanche said, referring to Trump, before quickly correcting the “is” to “was.”

Slip or no, the remarks powered questions by Democrats and at least a couple of Republicans about whether Trump’s one-time personal lawyer is an appropriate choice to be the nation’s top prosecutor.

Blanche needs the votes of all the GOP lawmakers on the Judiciary Committee to advance his nomination to the full Senate, where Republicans hold a 53-47 edge.

—New York Daily News

DMV says suspected cheating is why 11,000 Californians must retake the written test

LOS ANGELES — Thousands of California drivers are being required to retake their knowledge tests because the Department of Motor Vehicles suspects them of cheating.

Last month, the DMV sent letters to around 11,000 drivers who had passed the written test informing them that abnormalities were detected in their results. They were instructed to retake and pass the exam within 30 days or have their license canceled.

The letters spurred mass confusion and frustration as drivers were not provided with information on what specific issues were found. Some speculated that the letters were due to an internal technical error at the DMV or related to the department's use of AI. Many d

This week, the department issued a follow-up statement refuting both of those claims. "These irregularities are test taker related and not the result of an internal DMV technical issue, or involvement of artificial intelligence," a department spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday.

—Los Angeles Times

Boundary Waters wildfires could smolder until snow falls

MINNEAPOLIS — You don’t just put out a forest fire. Or at least, humans don’t. Once forest fires reach the scale of those burning in and around the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness — reaching temperatures of up to 1,500 degrees — the only fire extinguisher is Mother Nature.

And experts say Mother Nature might not be up to this task until the snow smothers the blazes.

“It’s way beyond the ability of firefighting crews to suppress,” said Lee Frelich, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Forest Ecology and an expert on the fire ecology of northern Minnesota forests.

Frelich said the swaths of woods that are burning are mostly evergreen, specifically fir and spruce that form the backbone of the boreal forest. They’ve been baked to a tinder by the dry heat wave, creating “just the right or just the wrong configuration, depending on your point of view,” he said.

—The Minnesota Star Tribune

Netanyahu’s main challenger is ex-general who lost son in Gaza war

Gadi Eisenkot, a former head of Israel’s armed forces, has emerged as the main challenger to Benjamin Netanyahu in upcoming elections that could end the premiership of the country’s longest-serving leader.

Polls indicate that Eisenkot’s new party Yashar — Hebrew for straightforward or honest — will get slightly more seats than Netanyahu’s Likud in the Oct. 27 vote, which would give him the right to try and form a coalition government. Stocky and somber, untested in domestic politics and a stranger to foreign-policy circles, the 66-year-old ex-general represents a stark contrast to the articulate and telegenic Netanyahu, in style if not so much in policy.

The ballot will double as a verdict on Netanyahu, 76, whose most recent term has been punctuated by near constant war, corruption cases, constitutional feuding and the growing isolation of Israel on the global stage.

Eisenkot is “almost the antithesis of what Netanyahu represents,” said Amotz Asa-El, research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. “After a whole era in which Israel was, for better or worse, led by a politician who embodied charisma, people are happy now to veer from charisma to anti-charisma.”

—Bloomberg News