Read Online  |  April 3, 2026  |  E-Paper  | 🎧 Listen

“A rising tide lifts all the boats.”

— John F. Kennedy

Ivan Pentchoukov
National Editor

Good morning. It’s Good Friday. Here are today’s top stories:

• Pam Bondi is out as attorney general.She will transition to a role in the private sector and will be replaced by her deputy, Todd Blanche, who will serve as acting attorney general, President Donald Trump said yesterday. 
• Trump unveiled 100 percent pharmaceutical tariffs on drugs from countries that don’t reach “most favored nation” deals with the administration. He also adjusted tariffs on steel, aluminum, and copper. 
• The president said he’s signing an order to pay employees of the Department of Homeland Security who have been working without compensation for nearly seven weeks. The action bypasses Congress, which is seeking to advance a two-pronged plan to fund DHS: First, Congress would move to fund most of DHS, except immigration enforcement operations. Republicans will then try to fund ICE and the Border Patrol via party-line spending legislation. 
• 🚀 Artemis II update: Four astronauts on the historic mission have now left Earth’s orbit and are heading toward the moon. In the early hours of April 5, the crew will become the first astronauts in more than 50 years to enter lunar space.
• 🍵 Health: Vitamin D has long been known to help with IBD symptoms. A new study explains why. 

Attorney General Pam Bondi during a news conference in Washington on Dec. 4, 2025. (Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times)

Trump Says Pam Bondi Is Out as His Attorney General

President Donald Trump said yesterday that Pam Bondi will no longer be the U.S. attorney general.

In a social media post, Trump called Bondi “a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend.”

The president said Bondi’s deputy, Todd Blanche, will serve as acting attorney general.

“We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector,” Trump said.

As head of the Justice Department, Bondi faced withering criticism from Republicans and Democrats over the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. The release of millions of documents from the department’s sex trafficking investigations into the late financier was ordered by Congress, but critics accused her of slow-walking or mismanaging the rollout.

The issue caused political problems for Trump and focused attention on his previous connections with Epstein. The president said he ended contact with the financier decades ago.

Bondi defended the release of the Epstein files, saying that the Trump administration had been more transparent than previous administrations, and that the department was only given a short time to review a huge number of documents.

The attorney general confirmed her departure from the Justice Department in a post on X, saying that she would spend the next month working on the transition of “the amazing Todd Blanche” to the position of acting attorney general. (More)

What to Know About Todd Blanche

Blanche, Trump’s personal lawyer, was notably involved in his defense in the 2024 New York criminal trial. 

As deputy attorney general, Blanche led the DOJ’s task force that handled the release of files related to Epstein and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

Last year, he announced the release of more than 3 million pages of documents, including photos and videos, in response to Congress’s passage of the “Epstein Files Transparency Act.”

In several instances earlier this year, Blanche was the DOJ official to confirm that multiple U.S. attorneys who were appointed by courts were terminated just hours after they were named. (More)

IRAN WAR

• U.S. forces destroyed sections of a major bridge that connects Iran’s capital of Tehran to a neighboring city, Karaj. The strike on civilian infrastructure was to eliminate a “military supply route for sustaining Iran’s ballistic missile and attack drone force,” a U.S. official told The Epoch Times. 
• Pakistan said it’s prepared to host talks between the United States and Iran aimed at ending the war in the Middle East, although no timeline has been agreed on. Any negotiations would also depend on both sides being willing to engage.  
• Britain led a virtual meeting with diplomats from more than 40 countries to discuss ways to put pressure on Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The United States did not attend. 

LATEST NEWS

• Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has asked the U.S. Army’s top uniformed leader, Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, to step down from his positionand take immediate retirement.
• A Colorado appeals court ordered the resentencing of Tina Peters, a former county clerk who was convicted of lying to state officials about a tech specialist she brought in to observe changes to election software. Peters maintains she did so to gather evidence of election fraud. Trump said he pardoned Peters in December, but that power lies with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis because Peters was convicted under state law. 
• Federal officials arrested eight people in Los Angeles County who are accused of running hospice fraud schemestotaling more than $50 million. Authorities said the defendants, including three nurses, a chiropractor, and a psychologist, paid people to pose as dying patients so that they could submit fraudulent hospice claims to Medicare. 
• A panel has given the official green light to Trump’s White House ballroom project. But earlier this week, a federal judge halted construction on the project, which the Trump administration is appealing. The panel went ahead with the vote because the judge’s ruling affects only construction work, not planning efforts. 

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WORLD

• China has set its lowest growth target in decades—4.5 percent. Analysts told The Epoch Times that the lower expectations point to a deeper problem: The economy may be much weaker than headline GDP numbers suggest.
• Brazilian presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, in an interview with The Epoch Times, decried what he described as a prevailing culture of “political persecution” within the nation’s government, which he said was particularly directed against conservatives.
• Former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who has been largely absent from public view for more than a decade, made a rare public appearance in Beijing last week. This has fueled fresh speculation about power dynamics inside the Chinese Communist Party.

 

OPINION

• Good Friday, Resurrection Sunday, and the Search for Peace in a Troubled World—by Armstrong Williams (Read)
• Why Aren’t We Self-Correcting?—by Mollie Engelhart (Read)
• The Measure of Success—by Jeffrey A. Tucker (Read)
• In yet Another Sign of Economic Weakness: Sales of EVs in China Plummet—by Milton Ezrati (Read)
• Trump Has the Law and Military Strategy on His Side in US-Iran War—by Victor Davis Hanson (Read)

NASA’s Artemis II Space Launch System rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft lifts off from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on April 1, 2026. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

📸 Day in Photos: Artemis II Launch (Look)

🎙️ Podcast: New COVID Variant Emerges in 25 States; FDA Launches New Side-Effect Reporting System—Facts Matter (Listen)

🇺🇲 American Thought Leaders: The government recently settled a landmark case on Biden-era social media censorship. Mark Chenoweth, a lawyer involved in the case, explains what it means. (Watch)

❓ Explainer: How did the Supreme Court justices view arguments for and against Trump’s order to limit birthright citizenship? Our politics editor, Sam Dorman, breaks down the hearing. (Watch)

🎵 Music: Mozart – Quartet No. 22 (Listen)

🧬 (Sponsored) The Real Reason Skin Starts To Thin After 50 (It’s Not What You Think) — New research points to a common deficiency linked to fragile, thinning skin and dark spots. Most people miss it. Discover what may really be causing it—and what you can do to support healthier-looking skin.*

HEALTH

(New Africa/Shutterstock)

Vitamin D Can Train the Immune System to Lower IBD Symptoms: Study 

Scientists have long known that vitamin D helps people with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and now they finally know why. A new Mayo Clinic-led study shows how vitamin D essentially reprograms the immune system to stop attacking the beneficial bacteria living in the gut.

The findings, published in Cell Reports Medicine, build on years of clinical observation linking vitamin D deficiency to worse IBD outcomes. However, unlike previous research, the new study maps the precise immune mechanism at work—a detail that could reshape how doctors approach treatment.

Researchers gave vitamin D to 48 patients with inflammatory bowel disease over 12 weeks. Despite being a small study without a control group—limitations the authors acknowledge—it was unique in the depth of testing for each patient.

The team tracked changes in gut bacteria, antibodies, immune cells, and immune cell receptors for each participant, creating a detailed before-and-after picture of how vitamin D was altering the relationship between the immune system and the microbiome.

At the end of the study period, participants showed higher levels of immunoglobulin A (IgA), an antibody that shields bacteria from immune attack, and lower levels of immunoglobulin G (IgG), indicating broader shifts in immune activity. Stool inflammation markers dropped significantly, and disease activity scores improved.

“This study suggests vitamin D may help rebalance how the immune system sees gut bacteria,” lead author Dr. John Mark Gubatan, a gastroenterologist at Mayo Clinic in Florida, said in a news release. “That’s an important step toward understanding how we might restore immune tolerance in IBD.” (More)

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Thanks for reading 🙏

Have a wonderful day!

—Ivan Pentchoukov, Madalina Hubert, and Kenzi Li.

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