The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear challenges to gun laws in Delaware and Maryland.

The justices turned away an appeal from a group of gun enthusiasts and firearm advocacy groups in Delaware to block the state’s prohibition on assault-style rifles and large-capacity ammunition magazines after a lower court refused to issue a preliminary injunction against the ban.

Delaware’s gun safety laws were enacted in 2022 and ban various semi-automatic "assault" long guns, including the AR-15 and AK47, though it allows those who owned such weapons prior to the law being enacted to keep the firearms under certain conditions, according to Reuters.

The high court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, also declined to hear a case challenging Maryland's handgun licensing requirements, which requires people to get safety training, submit fingerprints and pass a background check before buying a handgun. 

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The challengers argued that the handgun law violates the Second Amendment by making it too hard for people to get guns. 

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The law was passed following the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, where 20 first-graders and six educators were killed.

A three-judge appeals court panel later struck down the law after a landmark 2022 Supreme Court ruling that expanded gun rights and said firearm laws must have strong roots in the country's historic traditions, though the full 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later revived the law after the majority found that it does fit within historic firearm regulations.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Latin music star Bad Bunny impressed the pro wrestling world when he battled Damian Priest in a San Juan Street Fight at WWE Backlash in 2023 and came out to a raucous crowd in Puerto Rico.

It wasn’t the first time Bad Bunny had been in a WWE ring – he made several appearances for the company in 2021 – and he’s hoping it’s not his last.

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The music star told Rolling Stone he wants to compete in the ring again.

"I want to do it one more time," he told the magazine in an interview published Monday. "I want to put my life at risk in the ring. I felt like I didn’t risk it enough in the ring, and I want to do it. I want to scare my mother. When? I don’t know. 

"We stay in contact with the people at WWE, we’re always paying attention to what’s going on. But when, I don’t know. I hope there’s a time where I can really get ready, like I did the last few times. And I’d love to take more time to get ready physically.

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"But man, just like in music, I do this to get better and to do something different. Sometimes, I say, ‘I’m going to quit everything and just do wrestling full time.’ I feel like in wrestling, I just go sporadically as a celebrity. I’m going to go full time and be a heel. That’s what I’d love. I was always a fan of the villains more than the good guys."

Bad Bunny’s entrance into the 2023 match was one of the more celebrated moments from that year.

It’s unclear where he would fit in any upcoming storylines but with WrestleMania season upon wrestling fans, anything could truly happen.

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The unconventional film has performed slightly better in the UK, making $4.7 million to date

If a ban comes into force, TikTok’s 170 million U.S. users could turn to its sister app Lemon8

A peace deal would put an end to more than a year of fighting, during which tens of thousands of people have been killed

During the two months since Trump won the election, states and Congress have certified the results, a new Congress has convened, and the president-elect has been sentenced in his hush-money case

Neil Cavuto was one of the few dissenting voices against Trump on Fox News airwaves. His time slot will now be inhabited by Will Cain, who has become a MAGA culture warrior.

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“Do you want us to keep him on life support or do you want to pull the plug?” hospital staff asked the wrong family

• My husband has been teaching for 20 years.
• His salary is $19,000 above the poverty level for our family of seven.
• While money is tight, it's worth him keeping his job for our health insurance.

For most of his career as a public school teacher, my husband's paycheck has hovered just above the poverty level for our family. This past summer, my children even qualified for the free lunch program through the schools.

Today, with my husband's 20 years of teaching experience and a Masters degree, his pay is about $19,000 above the poverty level for a family of our size in our state. He has reached the top of the teaching pay scale at our school, which means his income will not increase after this year, but with five children, two of them teens and two on the brink, we are entering one of the most expensive phases of our lives.

Although we have talked about my husband leaving teaching many, many times, the discussion always comes back to one sticking point: health insurance.

Our health insurance is great

We are extremely fortunate the teachers' union that my husband's school works with has always advocated for top-tier healthcare. Part of that is many teachers and teacher's families who have special health needs, but regardless of the catalyst, our family has always enjoyed what I feel is excellent health insurance.

Our annual family deductible is $2,000, and we have a PPO, which means I've never had to deal with referrals or even prior authorization. I've never had to fight an insurance company, and we've never had a denial.

There was a time in my life when we were first married and still in college when I used Medicaid for my pregnancy. I felt so ashamed every time I went to the doctor, although I was incredibly grateful that I never paid a dime during my pregnancy, and it allowed me to graduate from college as a nurse exactly one week before delivering my baby.

Despite my shame in using Medicaid, the experience also opened our eyes to how important health insurance is because I had postpartum complications that led me to have two hospitalizations after giving birth.

The statements were mailed to our house after I had recovered, and when I saw how high the statements were for those bills and then realized they had been fully covered, I wept in relief. At that time in our lives, as brand-new parents and new college graduates, a $20,000 hospital bill would have ruined our lives. Instead, we were able to start our adult lives fresh and immediately started working, paying back into the system that saved us.

We don't have crippling medical bills

With those memories in hand and five children we are responsible for, we have always felt that any potential lower income as a public school teacher has been worth it for access to high-quality health insurance. We've been fortunate not to have any true medical emergencies, but even with seemingly "normal" medical events, like a premature baby and a weeklong NICU stay, we have still not experienced any of the crippling medical bills that haunt many American families.

I do wish that teachers were paid just a little higher, especially considering how highly valued they were during the pandemic, but for us, health insurance alone has made it worth it.

I don't know what will happen in the future, especially with education and healthcare, but I do hope that we can continue to prioritize the health insurance that has made our lives possible to this point because it provides us with a lot of peace of mind. But even more so, it might be nice to get to a point in society when employer-tied health insurance doesn't rule our decision-making.

• Microsoft formed a new engineering group led by Jay Parikh to build AI tools.
• Microsoft anticipates AI agents will fundamentally change application development.
• The new CoreAI Platform and Tools group will combine various AI teams and build out GitHub Copilot.

Microsoft has created a new engineering organization responsible for building its artificial intelligence platform and tools, according to an email CEO Satya Nadella sent to employees Monday morning.

The new group will be led by Jay Parikh, Facebook's former head of engineering who Nadella added to Microsoft's senior leadership team in October.

Microsoft is forming the new group as it anticipates AI, and particularly AI agents, will present a fundamental shift in how applications are built and used.

"2025 will be about model-forward applications that reshape all application categories," Nadella wrote in the email, which was also posted to Microsoft's blog. "More so than any previous platform shift, every layer of the application stack will be impacted. It's akin to GUI, internet servers, and cloud-native databases all being introduced into the app stack simultaneously. Thirty years of change is being compressed into three years!"

The new group is called CoreAI Platform and Tools. It will include Microsoft's developer division and AI platform team, and will be responsible for building out GitHub Copilot. AI-related teams from CTO Kevin Scott's office, such as AI Supercomputer, AI Agentic Runtimes, and Engineering Thrive, will also be part of the new group.

Parikh worked at Facebook for more than a decade. He helped the company build out and maintain its massive technical infrastructure, a network of expensive data centers stocked with thousands of computers and spanning multiple continents.

As one of Mark Zuckerberg's top lieutenants, Parikh also spearheaded various ambitious initiatives such as internet connectivity and an internet drone project that was eventually abandoned.

At Microsoft, Parikh's new reports include AI Platform Corporate Vice President Eric Boyd; Deputy CTO, AI Infrastructure Jason Taylor; Developer Division President Julia Liuson; and Developer Infrastructure Corporate Vice President Tim Bozarth.

Parikh will also work closely with Cloud + AI chief Scott Guthrie, Experiences and Devices leader Rajesh Jha, Security boss Charlie Bell, consumer AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, and Scott, the CTO, according to the email.

Are you a Microsoft employee or someone else with insight to share?

Contact Ashley Stewart via email ([email protected]), or send a secure message from a non-work device via Signal (+1-425-344-8242).

• PR pros and lawyers see the Lively-Baldoni fight as part of a larger trend.
• They say public figures often file lawsuits to try to influence the popular narrative.
• Media outlets can sometimes become collateral damage in this strategy.

As Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni hurl competing accusations in court, some media lawyers and PR pros see their battle as part of a bigger trend of prominent figures using lawsuits to change public opinion.

"They're done primarily as a PR play," Juda Engelmayer, a veteran crisis PR pro, said of lawsuits like Lively's and Baldoni's.

Lively accused her "It Ends With Us" costar Baldoni of sexually harassing her and engaging in a smear campaign against her. The New York Times detailed her allegations in an article published December 21.

Baldoni and his camp fired back in a libel lawsuit against the Times in California Superior Court. Baldoni's lawyer, Bryan Freedman, also said last week that his client planned to sue Lively.

Several media lawyers told BI they saw a calculated PR strategy at work on both sides.

Lively's initial complaint, filed with the California Civil Rights Department, coincided with the Times article on the allegations, which was based on the complaint and supporting documents. Filing a legal complaint gives cover to the plaintiff to make accusations and to the news outlet to freely report on it because it's shielded by fair reporting privileges.

And the complaint was filed right before the holidays, which could have made it harder for the Baldoni camp to respond. Lively later filed a federal lawsuit making similar claims against Baldoni and others.

Lively's claims and Baldoni's subsequent suit made huge splashes with widespread media coverage. Media lawyers told BI they saw Baldoni's suit as weak from a libel standpoint, but the details helped him publicize his side of the story.

Other examples of narrative-shaping lawsuits include actor Sophie Turner's 2023 "wrongful retention" legal complaint against her now ex-husband, which was later dismissed, and Drake's recent petitions against Universal Music Group and Spotify over Kendrick Lamar's song "Not Like Us."

"It happens quite often that people and companies with lots of resources use multi-tiered litigation" to get advantages outside the legal system, said Sean Andrade of Los Angeles law firm Andrade Gonzalez, who's represented plaintiffs in libel cases.

"It doesn't matter that you're going to lose because the goal was to publicize your side of the story and create some doubt in Blake Lively's," he said of Baldoni's libel suit against the Times.

Media caught in the crossfire

Lawyers and PR pros told BI that defamation cases often have a PR motive — and media outlets are a common target.

Before Johnny Depp won a US defamation case against his ex-wife Amber Heard in 2019, he sued the UK's Sun for libel.

Engelmayer said that though Depp lost that first case, it still served a purpose.

"Any time anyone sues a major publication, even if they lose in court, it's a win for those who support him. And for those sitting on the fence, it makes them think twice," he said.

There are some legal safeguards to prevent the unfair weaponizing of defamation suits.

Many US states now have anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) laws. These laws are meant to protect news outlets or other entities from frivolous lawsuits that can be costly to defend. Thirty-four states and DC have such laws, which typically let defendants who win anti-SLAPP motions recover legal fees, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

These laws have helped news outlets fight many meritless cases, said George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center, which provides legal resources to media outlets.

Still, the laws aren't always effective at preventing lawsuits from being filed. Deep-pocketed plaintiffs can weather big legal fees if they lose a case. Press advocates said that anecdotally, they'd seen an uptick in anti-media rhetoric or baseless cases against the media. PEN America said that lately, courts have been letting more cases go forward, financially burdening media outlets and threatening to require them to reveal confidential sources.

"There seem to be more cases than we've seen, including some against media," Freeman said of defamation suits more broadly. "So deterrents don't seem to be working. Media isn't as well off as it once was. So they're a target."

These lawsuits can be costly and distracting for media organizations, even if they win.

"Even in situations where a news organization is able to get a defamation case dismissed, there is a time and resource cost that is significant," said Jennifer Nelson, senior staff attorney for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. She recalled one case she handled where the news outlet eventually won, but only after years of litigation.

"Particularly for smaller outlets, it can be a challenge and have a chilling effect on reporting," she said.