Chuck Darwin

Social and economic justice, technology and tennis.  I'll have what @jbf1755 is having. 
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Last Notes

2026-06-29 02:44:16 UTC

When Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met with Kazakhstan’s president at the St. Regis Hotel last September in New York,
Donald Trump jumped in by phone as the men sealed a deal on a top priority for Washington.
During the call, Mr. Trump and his team won an agreement from the Kazakh leader to give a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten,
a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips and other critical goods.
Ahead of the deal, the Trump administration approved preliminary applications for as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing for the American company, now called Kaz Resources,
which plans to break ground on the project in rural Kazakhstan.
It was not only Mr. Trump and Mr. Lutnick who saw an opportunity.
Their sons were soon doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating,
continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history
The Kazakh deal was ultimately signed on Nov. 6,
six days after the investment involving the Trump sons and their partners,
which was not publicly disclosed at the time.
The arrangement is hardly an outlier.
One or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals,
including the Kazakhstan project,
according to federal filings examined by The New York Times.
All 14 of these companies have either benefited directly from offers of financial assistance from the Trump administration,
or have pending permit applications before the Commerce Department,
which Mr. Lutnick oversees,
The Times found.
The total amount of federal funding that the Trump administration has provided or is considering providing to the companies exceeds
$8.9 billion,
according to public statements by the companies and federal government.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/28/world/europe/trump-lutnick-sons-kazakhstan.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

2026-06-26 17:32:44 UTC

Taxpayers paid $850 million for a new Buffalo Bills stadium.
The cheapest price for a home ticket this coming season?
$700.
https://nypost.com/2026/06/26/business/buffalo-bills-fans-enraged-by-outrageous-ticket-costs-at-new-stadium-where-cheapest-seats-are-700/

2026-04-28 01:20:45 UTC

Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds
— backups zapped, after Cursor tool powered by Anthropic's Claude goes rogue
The founder of PocketOS has penned a social media post to warn others about the “systemic failures” of flagship AI and digital services providers.
Jer Crane was inspired to write a public response after an AI coding agent deleted his firm’s entire production database.
The AI agent’s misdemeanors were then hugely amplified by a cloud infrastructure provider’s API wiping all backups after the main database was zapped.
This tag team of digital trouble has wiped out months of consumer data essential to the firm’s, and its customers, businesses.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/claude-powered-ai-coding-agent-deletes-entire-company-database-in-9-seconds-backups-zapped-after-cursor-tool-powered-by-anthropics-claude-goes-rogue

2026-04-27 17:18:23 UTC

The race to secure electricity for AI models has reached new heights:
Meta has signed an agreement with the startup Overview Energy that could see a thousand satellites beam infrared light to solar farms that power data centers at night.
(Haven't they seen RoboCop?)
In 2024, Meta’s data centers used more than 18,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity
— roughly enough to power more than 1.7 million American homesfor a year
— and its need for compute power is only increasing.
The company has committed to building 30 gigawatts of renewable power sources, with a focus on industrial-scale solar power plants.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/27/meta-inks-deal-for-solar-power-at-night-beamed-from-space/

2026-04-26 02:53:34 UTC

Trump said one officer was shot before authorities stopped an unidentified gunman at the White House Correspondents Assn. dinner,
“from very close distance, with a very powerful gun, and the vest did the job.”
“I just spoke to the officer, and he’s doing great,” Trump said at a press conference. “He has very high spirits, and we told him we love him and respect him.”
After thanking the officer Trump, pivoted the conversation to the ballroom,
the planned “East Wing,” would be “much more secure, it’s got drone proof and it’s bullet proof.”
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/live/trump-evacuated-after-reports-of-gunfire-at-white-house-correspondents-dinner#p=trump-says-one-officer-shot-pivots-to-his-ballroom-that-will-have-bulletproof-glass

2026-04-22 18:32:28 UTC

A group of unauthorized users has reportedly gained access to #Mythos, the cybersecurity tool recently announced by #Anthropic.
Much has been made of Mythos and its purported power — an AI product designed for enterprise security that,
in the wrong hands, could become a potent hacking tool, according to the company.
Now Bloomberg has reported that a “private online forum,” the members of which have not been publicly identified, has managed to gain access to the tool through a third-party vendor.
Members of the group are part of a Discord channel that seeks out information about unreleased AI models, the outlet reported.
Bloomberg reports that the group, which supposedly gained access to the tool on the same day it was publicly announced,
“made an educated guess about the model’s online location based on knowledge about the format Anthropic has used for other models.”
The group in question is “interested in playing around with new models,
not wreaking havoc with them,” the source told the outlet.
Mythos was released to a select number of vendors, including big names like Apple,
as part of an initiative called
"Project Glasswing".
The limited release of the model was designed to prevent its use by bad actors.
The tool could be weaponized against corporate security instead of bolstering it, Anthropic said.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/21/unauthorized-group-has-gained-access-to-anthropics-exclusive-cyber-tool-mythos-report-claims/

2026-04-22 04:21:10 UTC

A group of Ecuadorian fishers have described how they were attacked in a double drone strike
and then detained at gunpoint by soldiers on a US-flagged patrol vessel,
in a rare first-hand account by victims of Donald Trump’s militarized campaign against alleged drug-trafficking boats off South America.
“We were just working, waiting for the last trawler to return,”
said Jhonny Sebastián Palacios, one of the fishers.
“Everything was perfectly fine.”
From nowhere, an explosion ripped through the boat.
“There was a sudden crash – boom!
It came from a drone,” he said.
The blast tore through the vessel, shattering glass, and injuring several crew members.
“I ran upstairs and saw the boat destroyed … The whole ship was stripped bare,” he said.
At least 178 people have been killed in US military airstrikes in the Caribbean and Pacific since the offensive began in September,
according to a tally by the Washington Office on Latin America (Wola).
The US has provided no evidence that any of the vessels were involved in drug trafficking,
and legal experts and rights groups say the attacks amount to extrajudicial killings
as they apparently target civilians who do not pose any immediate threat.
The White House insists the killings are lawful.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/apr/21/ecuador-us-boat-strike-survivors?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-04-22 02:47:52 UTC

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet.
It infected 3.5 million people in 1986.
Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page
https://www.resetera.com/threads/guinea-worm-is-close-to-being-the-second-disease-eradicated-in-history-following-smallpox.1496311/

2026-04-19 22:20:45 UTC

Experts say 2026 will serve as an unprecedented stress test of the integrity of American elections.
“Our election system withstood” Trump’s “attacks following the 2020 election,”
said Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat who has led the pushback to the administration’s actions on elections,
“but this will be an even tougher test,
with more election deniers having access to federal power than ever before.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-midterm-elections-takeover

2026-04-19 14:46:31 UTC

A married couple who met over a dissected brain and went on to create the first approved gene therapy for blindness have been awarded one of the most lucrative prizes in science.
Molecular biologist Jean Bennett and ophthalmologist Albert Maguire share the $3m (£2.2m) Breakthrough prize for life sciences with physician Katherine High for the 25-year-long project, during which the couple adopted a pair of dogs they had treated for blindness.
The therapy, named Luxturna, was approved in the US in 2017 and has transformed the lives of people born with Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), a genetic disorder that typically causes total blindness by early adulthood.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/apr/19/the-oscar-of-science-awarded-to-scientists-behind-genetic-treatment-that-restores-lost-vision-win?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-04-18 22:48:28 UTC

In a dramatic middle-of-the-night stand off, a bipartisan set of lawmakers pushing for true reform and privacy protections for Americans bought us some more time to fight!
They are holding out for, at a minimum,
the requirement of an actual probable cause warrant for FBI access to information collected under the mass spying program known as 702.
 A reauthorization with virtually no changes was defeated because a core group of lawmakers held strong;
they know that people are hungry for real reform that protects the privacy of our communications. We now have a 10-day extension to continue to push Congress to pass a real reform bill.
 The Lawmakers rallied late Thursday night to reject a proposed amendment that made gestures at privacy protections, but it would not have improved on the status quo and would have reauthorized Section 702 for five more years to boot.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/keep-pushing-we-get-10-more-days-reform-section-702

2026-04-17 18:00:20 UTC

Q: "Now that you've met with [Trump], you've spoken with him multiple times, do you still think he's a fascist?"
Zohran Mamdani: "Yes"
Q: "And do you tell him that?"
Zohran Mamdani: "Yes"
https://s3.c.im/media_attachments/files/116/421/346/570/544/429/original/84b230f7f3188896.mp4

2026-04-17 01:03:52 UTC

Following California implementing a law raising its minimum wage to $20 for more than 500,000 fast-food workers in the state in 2024,
Christopher Thornberg, founding partner of research firm Beacon Economics, offered a warning about the state raising its minimum wage.
“California’s well-intended push to reduce income inequality via wage floors is beginning to have a significant negative impact on some of our most vulnerable workers
—our youth, particularly those from lower-income households,”
he wrote earlier this year.
His concerns echoed those of fast-food franchise owners, one of whom told Fortunein 2024 that higher wages would be unsustainable for smaller chains with slim margins.
But nearly two years after the law’s passage, economists are seeing very different results than what was initially feared.
A working paper from University of California at Berkeley released this month found the policy increased average weekly wages for eligible workers by 11% and did not reduce employment.
Prices increased modestly, about 1.5%, or the equivalent of about six cents for a $4 item.
“The results are nowhere as dire as predicted,”
Michael Reich, the study author and chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at UC Berkeley, told Fortune
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/economists-warned-california-not-raise-110500084.html?guccounter=1

2026-04-16 09:55:10 UTC

I am a proud Jewish American.
My father fled Poland in 1921 to escape poverty and antisemitism.
Those in his family who stayed were murdered by the Nazis.
Since childhood, I have known very well where antisemitism, racism, fanaticism and demagoguery lead.
So let me be clear.
Speaking out against the horrific and inhumane actions of Israel, and its extremist leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, is notantisemitic.
Speaking out about the dangerous and destructive role that Israel plays in shaping US foreign and military policy is notantisemitic.
It is, in fact, what every member of Congress and every American should be doing
-- Bernie Sanders
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/15/no-more-us-military-aid-to-israel?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-04-16 04:55:53 UTC

Mastodon announced it will add five much-needed features and improvements
thanks to funding from the German government’s Sovereign Tech Agency.
The five deliverables include:
🔸Blocklist synchronisation
To improve moderation and safety, Mastodon servers will be able to subscribe to shared blocklists to block offending servers or suggest servers to block automatically.
🔸Remote media storage
Mastodon will add support for the Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider (FASP) specification
— a proposed standard for connecting fediverse servers to external service providers
— to enable cost-saving media processing between servers.
🔸Automated content detection
Using FASP, Mastodon will allow server owners to use external or self-hosted tools to scan for and process spam and illegal content automatically.
🔸End-to-end encryption for private messages
Mastodon will work with the Social Web Foundation
— a nonprofit dedicated to growing the fediverse through ActivityPub
— and its E2EE messaging project to implement support for ActivityPub E2EE extensions for private messages.
🔸Documentation improvements
Mastodon will create a new documentation site, provide more detailed installation and upgrade instructions, and make it easier for server owners to have the correct software dependencies.
https://coywolf.com/news/social-media/mastodon-to-get-end-to-end-encryption-and-other-features-thanks-to-sovereign-tech-agency/

2026-04-16 03:28:37 UTC

The French government is pressing the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to
release the 86-year-old French widow of a military veteran from immigration custody after she was detained earlier this month.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained
Marie-Therese Ross in Alabama on 1 April after she overstayed her 90-day visa, according to DHS.
Ross is now being held at a federal immigration detention facility in Louisiana.
She is among the thousands of people targeted by the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda that has resulted in the spouses of US soldiers and military veterans detained,
who previously received greater leniency under policies since scrapped by Donald Trump in his second term in office.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/15/french-widow-detained-ice-marie-therese-ross?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-04-13 20:05:47 UTC

If no Iranian oil gets through the strait, prices could keep rising over time
— some companies say they are planning for $175 a barrel.
The Iranians understand the potential political effects of continued inflation in the United States less than seven months before midterm elections.
“Soon you’ll be nostalgic for $4 to $5 gas,” Iran’s top negotiator and the speaker of its Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, warned American consumers after the failure of the talks he led with J.D.Vance.
Trump could be overestimating how effective the economic pain of a blockade would be in changing Iran’s position,
said Ahmet Kasim Han,
a professor of international relations at TED University in Ankara, Turkey.
“Iran is already hurting, and they have shown that they are willing to take more than a couple of hits,” he said.
“The Iranian regime is not one that cares for the well-being of its citizens, and there is no civil society that can raise its voice against the regime in the face of economic calamity.”
Mr. Han added that Mr. Trump’s message was undermined by his announcement that other countries would help impose the blockade without saying which ones.
“This habit of saying that people are on board with him while not naming them diminishes his credibility,
and that does not work well for U.S. standing internationally,” he said
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/us/politics/iran-war-strait-of-hormuz-blockade-economy.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

2026-04-13 03:01:19 UTC

The former Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan has added his name to growing calls for the president to be ousted on grounds that he is unfit for the job,
arguing that the US constitution’s 25th amendment addressing involuntary removal from office was
“written with Donald Trump in mind”.
Brennan, who served as head of the spy agency during Barack Obama’s presidency, told MS Now on Saturday that
Trump’s recent volatile remarks about destroying Iranian civilization
and the danger he posed to so many lives
merited his removal from the Oval Office.
“This person is clearly unhinged,”
he said.
“I think the 25th amendment was written with Donald Trump in mind.”
Brennan added that Trump was too much of a liability to be allowed to continue to be commander-in-chief, with immense firepower at his disposal, including the US nuclear arsenal.
#JohnBrennan #A25
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/12/ex-cia-director-oust-trump-25th-amendment?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-04-12 17:11:03 UTC

EpsteinWiki is a collaborative research archive dedicated to documenting the evidence surrounding the Jeffrey Epsteintrafficking network.
Critical records remain scattered across court filings, depositions,
FOIA releases, investigative reporting, and government archives.
Our goal is to bring this material together in one organized, searchable knowledge base.
Every page is built on verifiable sources such as court records,
law-enforcement documents, and established investigative journalism.
By organizing and cross-referencing this evidence, EpsteinWiki helps researchers, journalists, and the public better understand the people, institutions, and systems connected to one of the most significant unresolved criminal networks in modern history.
https://epsteinwiki.com/

2026-04-12 03:48:26 UTC

Brian Morales, a U.S. citizen,
has been deported to Mexico despite telling arresting officers that he had proof of citizenship at home, according to a new report.
According to Univision’s Lidia Terrazas, 25-year-old Denver-born Brian Morales was threatened with either deportation or prison time following a traffic stop in Texas by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents.
This is the latest in a string of incidents involving U.S. citizens and Department of Homeland Security agents during the first 18 months of Trump’s second term in office.
In addition several American children have been deported alongside their parents, including a child undergoing cancer treatment in the U.S.
Meanwhile, three U.S. citizens have been killed by federal immigration officers this year.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/bryan-morales-us-citizen-deport-mexico-b2955205.html

2026-04-11 23:39:29 UTC

The first US-born pope said:
“Even the holy Name of God, the God of life, is being dragged into discourses of death.”
Addressing world leaders who decide to go to war, Leo said:
“To them we cry out: stop!
It is time for peace!
Sit at the table of dialogue and mediation
– not at the table where rearmament is planned and deadly actions are decided.”
“Enough of the idolatry of self and money!
Enough of the display of power!
Enough of war!
True strength is shown in serving life,” he added.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/11/pope-leo-us-israel-iran-war?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-04-10 13:41:49 UTC

- reply

DONALD TRUMP
— a man convicted of 34 felony counts, currently in political freefall, his name reportedly appearing thousands of times in the Jeffrey Epstein files
— posted graphic surveillance footage of Easmin’s murder,
amplifying a video package assembled and branded by his own Department of Homeland Security.
The footage shows the suspect, 40-year-old Rolbert Joachin, a Haitian national, striking her in the head with a hammer,
knocking her to the ground, and continuing to beat her as she lay there.
DHS and its conservative media partners have packaged this killing as proof that Biden’s immigration policies are responsible for Easmin’s death.
Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said the suspect “barbarically hit this woman in the head multiple times with a hammer,”
adding that “their reckless immigration policies cost this woman her life.”
Never mind that Easmin herself was an immigrant.
Never mind that the Bangladeshi community in Fort Myers
— the community that employed her, that is laying flowers at the gas station where she died
— is also a community of immigrants,
of mothers and fathers and cashiers and store managers who came to this country and are now watching the president weaponize their grief.
THE TIMING tells you everything about why Trump reached for this video now.
His presidency is in historic collapse. The Iran war
— prosecuted with the hapless Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon
— has become a signature debacle.
The mass deportation campaign, the crown jewel of his coalition’s fever dreams,
has failed so thoroughly that the American public has swung back toward immigrants with a warmth not seen in years, and ICE
— once the cudgel of choice
— has become politically toxic.

2026-04-10 13:38:11 UTC

Her name, according to the Bangladeshi press outlets that bothered to cover her murder, was Nilufar Easmin.
She had come to this country from Gorarbag village, in the Kushakhali Union of Lakshmipur District, in southeastern Bangladesh
— a place most Americans couldn’t find on a map even if the fate of the republic depended on it.
She had two daughters. She had been working the register at the D&D Convenience Store, a Bangladeshi-owned shop bolted to a Chevron station on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Fort Myers, Florida, for roughly three months.
On the morning of April 2, she heard her car being vandalized in the parking lot. She walked outside to find out why.
She was beaten to death with a hammer.
That is the whole of what we know for certain about the last minutes of Nilufar Easmin’s life.
Everything else
— her exact age, conflicting in various accounts as 42, 48, or 51; the full arc of how she came to Florida; what she wanted for those two daughters
— remains unresolved in the public record,
a void that will take time and care and reporting to fill.
What we know with equal certainty is what happened next:
the President of the United States turned her death into content.
https://migrantinsider.com/p/her-name-was-nilufar-yasmin

2026-04-09 06:46:43 UTC

One hundred and ninety-three million acres of your national forests. An area larger than Texas. The largest public land agency in the country. Just handed, on a silver platter, to the people who’ve spent their entire careers trying to destroy it.
And they did it with a press release on a Tuesday
https://www.hatchmag.com/articles/trump-administration-orders-dismantling-us-forest-service/7716263

2026-04-09 01:30:42 UTC

In a rare public criticism of a fellow member of the Supreme Court,
Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized Justice Brett Kavanaugh
for his justification of racial profiling
in immigration-based stops of U.S. citizens.
“I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops,”
Sotomayor said at a University of Kansas School of Law event on Tuesday.
She was referring to the case of
"Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo",
in which Kavanaugh wrote an opinion framed as a concurrence to the unsigned majority ruling.
“This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”
“Those hours that they took you away, nobody’s paying that person,”
she added.
“And that makes a difference between a meal for him and his kids that night and maybe just cold supper.”
In his concurrence, Kavanaugh said that race or ethnicity can be a “relevant factor” when combined with other factors
like “day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction”
or speaking Spanish instead of English.
He added that the burden of racial profiling on citizens or legal non-citizens would be minimal.
“If the person is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter,” Kavanaugh wrote.
“Only if the person is illegally in the United States may the stop lead to further immigration proceedings.”
As Sotomayor’s critique shows, these encounters are anything but brief or friendly.
Citizens profiled by immigration agents have been manhandled, hit, zip-tied, kidnapped off the street and held for days in detention,
-- sometimes without access to a lawyer.
Agents also routinely refused to accept documents proving their citizenship.
Citizens who have been detained include at least 20 children.
These encounters have come to be known as
“Kavanaugh Stops,”
after the justice’s concurrence authorizing them.
In her dissent in
"Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo" Sotomayor criticized Kavanaugh’s concurrence as
“all but declared that all Latinos, U. S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time,
taken away from work,
and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.”
Kavanaugh’s insistence that these stops would be just a “brief encounter” for citizens “blinks reality,” Sotomayor wrote.
“Two plaintiffs in this very case tried to explain that they are U. S. citizens;
one was then pushed against a fence with his arms twisted behind his back,
and the other was taken.”
Despite Kavanaugh’s concurrence seemingly authorizing these Kavanaugh Stops,
the Supreme Court has not officially ruled on the use of racial profiling in roving mass deportation operations.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sonia-sotomayor-brett-kavanaugh-racial-profiling-immigration_n_69d6ae34e4b0ccb589eaa377

2026-04-08 02:03:33 UTC

NYT reporting that under this ceasefire each ship will pay $2M to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.
It was $0 before Trump launched this illegal war.
100-130 ships pass the Strait daily.
Trump just gave Iran an extra $100M-$130M per day.
Masterful gambit, sir.
Impeach and remove this fascist—NOW.
https://bsky.app/profile/qasimrashid.com/post/3miwzcvkabs2k

2026-04-08 00:25:44 UTC

- reply

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:5o6k7jvowuyaquloafzn3cfw/post/3miwrlmdie22n

2026-04-06 11:03:46 UTC

Workers’ pay is increasingly shaped by opaque algorithms and artificial intelligence systems,
shifting compensation decisions away from human managers, clear legal standards, and collective bargaining.
This phenomenon
—known as algorithmic wage discrimination1 or surveillance pay
—was first documented in app-controlled ride-hail and food-delivery work.
Now, it is spreading to a range of other industries and services.
Surveillance wages are being offered in sectors as diverse as "healthcare, customer service, logistics and retail."
Customers for surveillance wage tools include "Intuit, Salesforce,
Colgate-Palmolive, Amwell and Healthcare Services Group":
https://equitablegrowth.org/how-artificial-intelligence-uncouples-hard-work-from-fair-wages-through-surveillance-pay-practices-and-how-to-fix-it/

2026-04-06 10:44:51 UTC

The Trump administration has spent the better part of a year quietly negotiating agreements with poorer nations
as it seeks to scale back and reimagine U.S. foreign assistance for efforts like HIV and tuberculosis prevention through a new “America First” global health strategy.
 To date, 28 deals have been negotiated with foreign governments, mostly throughout Africa.
But in a break with precedent, the administration has refused to disclose their full terms publicly.
 The veil of secrecy has frustrated partner countries and angered transparency advocates,
who worry that billions of dollars in U.S. funding
— money that’s intended to help combat disease
— is being leveraged by the Trump administration as it seeks controversial concessions on unrelated policies in return.  Public Citizen, a government watchdog group, has brought a lawsuit demanding access to some of the administration’s global health agreements,
-- arguing that the State Department’s failure to produce the records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request is unlawful
In Zimbabwe, for instance,
President Emmerson Mnangagwa halted his country’s negotiations with the Trump administration late last year
after the government determined that the “lop-sided” talks risked undermining Zimbabwe’s sovereignty,
according to correspondence reviewed by The Washington Post.
 The U.S. Embassy in Harare confirmed in February that Zimbabwe had withdrawn from negotiations
and that the United States would begin
“winding down our health assistance in Zimbabwe.”
 In neighboring Zambia,
where a deal was expected to be signed in December,
talks have become a political pressure point for the government amid reports that the Trump administration is seeking to leverage the aid money
as it seeks concessions on a separate agreement related to the mining of critical minerals.
The Trump administration is pushing for greater access to critical minerals in Africa,
such as copper in Zambia,
to challenge Chinese dominance of a resource that is vital for building modern technology like electric vehicles and data centers
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/04/06/trump-global-health-deals/

2026-04-06 04:45:32 UTC

Peter Thiel’s Antichrist lectures have been rejected by theologians and mocked by comedians,
but he still cannot stop talking about the Antichrist.
This week, the billionaire delivered his trademark four-part Antichrist lecture at a private venue within sight of the Vatican.
At the height of his power
—with his companies and allies embedded in Trump’s fascist regime and his protégé, JD Vance, a heartbeat from the presidency
—Thiel has launched a campaign to herald the Antichrist.
He is on an Antichrist world tour, having given his talks in Austin, San Francisco, England, Austria and, now, Rome.
The Vatican was in no mood to play games with the would-be prophet from Palantir.
Paolo Benanti, a priest who has advised Pope Francis and Pope Leo on AI and tech ethics, called out Thiel as a “political theologian operating at the very heart of the Silicon Valley ecosystem” and delivered a scathing rebuke of Thiel’s religious delusions:
"Thiel’s entire action can thus be read as a prolonged act of heresy against the liberal consensus:
a challenge to the very foundations of civil coexistence, which he now considers outdated."
Benanti hit Thiel where it hurts, zooming in on his persistent efforts to pervert religious ideas into justifications for greed, monopoly, and authoritarianism.
He exposes Thiel’s obsessive focus on achieving
“the pathological radicalization” of “competition, technology, the individual”
to argue against democratic society itself.
It’s clear that Benanti has done a deep study of Thiel and knows exactly what the billionaire is up to with all of this Antichrist talk.
The priest hits Thiel for weaponizing René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire
—the theory that people learn desire by imitating other people
—in a demented search for
the “perfect algorithmic implementation” of its destructive force.
Benanti points to Thiel’s early investment in Facebook as an effort to create “a device designed to amplify and monetize mimetic desire on a planetary scale.”   He also calls out Thiel’s love for The Sovereign Individual,
a 1997 book that taught Thiel
“to view technology not only as an instrument of profit, but as a tool for managing the decline of liberal democratic institutions.”
Benanti further connects Thiel’s ideas to the TESCREAL movement
—“philosophies, championed notably by Elon Musk,
see technology as the instrument for transcending the biological and social limitations of humanity.”
TESCREAL ideologies like transhumanism and longtermism are Silicon Valley’s true religion.
Thiel’s Antichrist meditations attempt to put a Christian mask on these ideas, but Benanti argues that Thiel’s vision is structurally pagan
https://www.thenerdreich.com/peter-thiels-antichrist-circus-smacked-down-in-rome/

2026-04-05 23:17:22 UTC

Doctor John Gartner,
the co-founder of “Duty To Warn”
noted Trump went to war on “impulse.”
He continued, Trump “didn’t bring along any allies, he didn’t prevent any evidence, he didn’t prepare the American people. He didn’t do anything.”
And the reason—per Dr. Gartner—is more alarming than you think.
It’s not just because Trump views himself as a king who doesn’t need to get his “subjects” (you and I) on board.
Rather, as Dr. Gartner opined, “He’s not thinking it through because he’s not capable of actually processing what’s even happening.”
He added, Trump “just had an angry impulse” –perhaps to distract from the Epstein files—so he started this horrific war.
From a psychological point of view, Gartner described Trump as “a raging id with no frontal lobes.”
(In other words, Trump is ruled only by his whims at that moment with no regard for the consequences.)
Then came perhaps Dr. Gartner’s most frightening warning about Trump.
He noted that that Trump is increasingly becoming
a “sadistic animal” who is
“becoming more and more cruel and animal-like as his frontal lobes deteriorate.”
Frontal lobe deterioration is often seen n people with dementia and is manifested by loss of impulse control, impaired judgment, easy to be distracted, loss of empathy and more that we all see with Trump.
https://deanobeidallah.substack.com/p/trumps-dementia-is-a-threat-to-the?r=1uo829&triedRedirect=true

2026-04-05 15:30:46 UTC

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering plans by the start-up 💥Reflect Orbital
to illuminate parts of the Earth at night using reflective satellites,
as well as applications from 💥SpaceX that could dramatically expand satellite numbers in low Earth orbit.
“The proposed scale of orbital deployment would represent a significant alteration of the natural night-time light environment at a planetary scale,”
said the presidents of the European Biological Rhythms Society (EBRS),
the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms,
the Japanese Society for Chronobiology
and the Canadian Society for Chronobiology.
They said altering the light-dark cycle could disrupt biological clocks that regulate sleep and hormone secretion in humans and animals,
migration in nocturnal species,
seasonal cycles in plants
and the rhythms of marine phytoplankton that underpin ocean food webs.
They urged regulators to conduct a full environmental review
and set limits on satellite reflectivity and cumulative night sky brightness.
Prof Charalambos Kyriacou, a geneticist at the University of Leicester and president of the EBRS, said:
“We’re saying, please think before you go through with this, because this could have global implications for things like food security. Plants need the night. You can’t just get rid of it.”
⚠️Reflect Orbital hopes to use satellites equipped with large reflective mirrors to redirect sunlight on to areas roughly 5km to 6km wide “on demand”,
with brightness adjustable “from full moon to full noon”.
The company says the system could extend solar energy production into the evening
and provide lighting for construction projects, disaster response and agriculture,
with illumination delivered only to locations approved by local authorities.
Meanwhile, ⚠️SpaceX has proposed launching up to 1m satellites
to create a giant solar-powered computing network in orbit
designed to run artificial-intelligence workloads.
The company says the system could reduce the energy and cooling demands of terrestrial datacentres.
Ruskin Hartley, the chief executive and executive director of DarkSky International,
a non-profit focused on protecting natural night skies, which has also written to the FCC, said:
“While ideas like mirrors on satellites beaming ‘sunlight on demand’ to Earth or mega-constellations of up to 1m satellites for AI datacentres may sound like science fiction, these proposals are very real.”
He added: “Scientific studies have already shown that the existing number of satellites in orbit has increased diffuse night sky brightness, or sky glow, by roughly 10%.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/apr/05/satellite-mirror-plans-could-disrupt-sleep-and-ecosystems-worldwide-scientists-say?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-04-05 12:09:34 UTC

"The amount of untaxed wealth hidden offshore by the richest 0.1 percent exceeds the entire wealth of the poorest half of humanity (4.1 billion people), according to a new Oxfam analysis published on April 2, 2026, ahead of the 10th anniversary of the Panama Papers."
The consequences are as predictable as they are devastating:
we see our public hospitals and schools starved of funds,
our social fabric shredded by rising inequality,
and ordinary people forced to shoulder the costs of a system rigged to enrich a tiny few.
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/governance/untaxed-wealth-hidden-offshore-by-richest-01-surpasses-entire-wealth-of-the-poorest-half-of-humanity-oxfam

2026-04-05 05:43:28 UTC

More than 40 million borrowers are saddled with federal student debt,
and a record number
— 7.7 million
— have defaulted on their loans,
For some borrowers, moving abroad and out of reach of debt collectors can be tempting.
In interviews, people who made this decision cited relieving the psychological burden of student debt as a motivator,
as well as having a higher quality of life,
even on a lower salary,
outside the United States.
Many who fled abroad said they had no plans of ever returning.
Figures on the number of borrowers who abandon their loans in this manner are unknown,
but many debtors have shared their experiences on forums like Reddit.
Credit reporting agencies like Experian, aware of the issue,
have advised borrowers who have moved abroad to
“resist the temptation to stop making payments.”
Borrowers in delinquency and default will likely see their credit scores plummet,
raising their borrowing costs and making it difficult for them to access credit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/04/business/student-loans-abroad-default.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

2026-04-03 14:25:32 UTC

German bargain grocer Aldi plans to open more than 180 U.S. stores this year.
The chain, which has been rapidly expanding since inflation surged in 2021, has set a goal of 3,200 stores globally by the end of 2028.
Trader Joe’s has been on an expansion spree.
Many Dollar General stores have begun selling fresh produce.
“Discounters are in this really tricky spot, where price is paramount, but they’re up against the likes of Walmart,” Moran said.
Walmart and Amazon have expanded grocery offerings and are scooping up wealthier consumers.
Their massive size and efficient supply chains allow them to have lower prices than competitors.
Lower-income consumers, facing tough economic pressure, are increasingly turning to food banks, Moran said.
A November Pew Research Center study estimated that more than 40 million people in 22 million households receive monthly Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits.
Grocery Outlet will be scaling back in California
In the latest earnings announcement, Potter said Grocery Outlet left its shoppers disappointed
— and their baskets mostly empty
— because stores didn’t offer enough “wow” deals on name-brand products.
The company has since expanded its distribution capacity and is reducing slow-selling stock to make more room for “opportunistic products” from name brands.
https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?guid=95a40f0d-11f8-4d00-b54a-a6885fe141f3&v=sdk

2026-04-03 02:05:02 UTC

Hegseth's purge of Black and women officers larger than previously reported
"Hegseth has taken steps to block or delay promotions for MORE THAN A DOZEN Black and female senior officers across all four branches of the military."
“There is not a single service that has been immune to this level of involvement by Hegseth,” one of the U.S. officials said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/hegseth-intervened-military-promotions-dozen-senior-officers-rcna266062

2026-04-02 19:20:47 UTC

The death of a nearly blind refugee from Myanmar who was found on a Buffalo street in February
— five days after Border Patrol agents left him at a doughnut shop
— has been ruled a #homicide, authorities said Wednesday.
The Erie County Medical Examiner's Office didn't reach any conclusions about responsibility for
Nurul Amin Shah Alam's death,
which the agency said was caused by complications of a perforated duodenal ulcer, precipitated by hypothermia and dehydration.
Ruling a death a homicide means it resulted from another person's actions — or inaction — but doesn't necessarily mean that a crime was committed.
"This should not have happened," Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz, a Democrat, said at a news conference Wednesday, expressing condolences to Shah Alam's family
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/death-of-a-refugee-left-at-a-buffalo-doughnut-shop-by-border-patrol-is-ruled-a-homicide

2026-04-02 00:04:19 UTC

I’ll be talking about the very serious helium shortage that is looming
(actually, it’s already upon us)
and risks crippling semiconductor chip production and diagnostic instruments like MRI scanners,
not to mention low temperature science..
It’s maddening because we’ve known that helium is very limited but it’s cheap
so no one recovers it.
It’ll be on BBC World Service Newshour around 13:45 BST.
#elements #chemistry #economics #profligacy
https://mastodon.social/@sellathechemist/116312371974222785

2026-04-01 16:29:31 UTC

At Luigi Mangione's hearing this AM,
the feds indicated they were eager to show their evidence to people who think he's a hero
“Your honor need only look out the window to see the people who follow this defendant and believe that what he did was right,” AUSA Dominic Gentile said
https://bsky.app/profile/mollycranenewman.bsky.social/post/3mih3sobxyc24

2026-04-01 13:32:54 UTC

Ten years ago today, Donald Trump said he would pay off the national debt in the span of just eight years.
That did not happen.
Instead, the gross national debt has doubled since that day
—from about $19 trillion to over $39 trillion.
Much of that additional borrowing has taken place during Trump's five-plus years in the White House.
The gap between Trump's outlandish promise and the brutal fiscal reality of the past decade is not just a political gotcha.
It's also an apt illustration of how far and how fast the debt has spiraled.
And it's a painful reminder of a missed opportunity that Americans will be facing for a long, long time.
The bill for these 10 years of fiscal profligacy will be coming due long after Trump has finally departed from the political scene.
https://reason.com/2026/03/31/10-years-ago-today-trump-promised-to-eliminate-the-national-debt-instead-it-has-doubled/

2026-03-31 23:24:29 UTC

If you studied CS or math at any point,
you’ve probably run into this one.
The Four Color Theorem says: any map (or equivalently, any planar graph)
can be colored with at most four colors such that no two adjacent regions share the same color.
It’s simple to state, maddening to prove,
and has a wild history.
Francis Guthrie noticed the pattern in 1852 while coloring a map of English counties.
Alfred Kempe published a flawed “proof” in 1879.
Percy Heawood found the bug 11 years later. The conjecture then sat open for nearly a century.
In 1976, Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken finally proved it by exhaustive computer verification of 1,476 reducible configurations.
-- It was the first major theorem proved by computer,
and mathematicians spent decades arguing over whether it counted as a real proof.
In 1996, Robertson, Sanders, Seymour, and Thomas simplified the proof (down to 633 configurations)
and produced a quadratic-time coloring algorithm:
-- given a planar graph with n vertices, it finds a valid 4-coloring in O(n²) time.
That algorithm has been the state of the art ever since.
Until last week.
A new paper by Kawarabayashi, Thorup, Mohar, and Thomassen gives an O(n log n) algorithm for 4-coloring planar graphs,
breaking a 30-year quadratic barrier.
https://www.danilchenko.dev/posts/2026-03-30-four-color-theorem-near-linear-time-algorithm/

2026-03-30 11:45:10 UTC

RE: https://sfba.social/@skykiss/116292481490760012
The expectation of insider trading by Trump regime cronies is now baked into the system
#corruption #grift #trump
#note1nrf…u7s9

2026-03-30 04:43:03 UTC

What happens on Tuesday is a matter of life and death.
The Endangered Species Committee
—composed of the heads of the Interior, Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Army, and the Council of Economic Advisors
—can decide that the very presence of an endangered species is an unacceptable obstacle to the oil and gas industry’s balance sheet.
When the "God Squad" grants an exemption, the species in question is put at risk of extinction.
The principal species in question is the Rice’s whale,
a majestic creature that has navigated the Gulf since long before humans named it,
but was only identified as a distinct species in 2021.
As the only baleen whale to live exclusively in American waters, it has earned the nickname “America’s whale”
—and there are only around 50 of them left in our world.
There is a certain irony to the fact that a species so closely identified with America now faces existential risk from policies advanced in the name of putting America first.
https://newrepublic.com/article/208313/trump-god-squad-endangered-rices-whale-extinction-gulf-mexico

2026-03-29 20:01:40 UTC

Anti-war activists in the '60s and early '70s did not just organize headline-grabbing mass marches.
They patiently worked together to build a vast anti-war infrastructure
– legal groups, GI coffeehouses, alternative newspapers and national anti-war coalitions
– that could sustain a wide range of future actions.
In working towards that goal,
anti-war activists benefited from the rich social fabric of associational life in the US
– a fabric that has significantly frayed.
Anti-war initiatives were buoyed up by unions, social clubs, book stores, civic groups, movement organizations, professional societies, immigrant community centers and religious institutions.
They also drew upon a network of informal organization,
whether born of the working-class neighborhood, the intensity of student life, or the collaborative relationships of the workplace.
This ecosystem helped activists fundraise, recruit members, secure meeting spaces, and reach wider communities.
They ensured that when the anti-war call was sounded, there was an audience available to respond.
Since the 70s, however, social life has been dramatically reconfigured:
associational life has steadily declined,
working-class institutions have been hollowed out,
and Americans have become more atomized than ever before.
In the absence of a sturdy associational matrix, Americans have now turned to the internet as a sort of surrogate social community,
replacing the hard work of in-person organizing with consuming news, sharing posts or debating anonymous opponents on platforms owned by the very warmongers they oppose.
Moreover, we live in a different international context.
The anti-war movements of the 60s emerged at a time when emancipatory struggles were erupting everywhere
– not just in Vietnam, but also in Cuba, Algeria, China, Palestine, South Africa, Guinea-Bissau.
These struggles were winning.
In Cuba, a tiny band of guerrillas worked in tandem with militant workers to overthrow Fulgencio Batista,
then resist US invasion.
In Algeria, anticolonial fighters expelled the French settlers.
In Vietnam, revolutionaries held their own against the most powerful military in history.
These miraculous victories, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre explained,
expanded “the field of the possible”.
They convinced millions that it was possible to unite across borders to create a new world.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/mar/29/how-to-end-the-iran-war?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-03-29 15:52:55 UTC

"We’re not just talking about potential spikes in food prices …
but also potentially key shortages in the commodities that are necessary to produce food, like fertilizers,”
says Adam Hanieh, director of the SOAS Middle East Institute at the University of London.
“Many of the countries that are going to be most potentially impacted by this are already in conditions of famine or near famine.”
https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3/26/hanieh_iran_hormuz_oil_war

2026-03-29 11:17:50 UTC

Many ICE detention facilities are run by large private companies,
such as CoreCivic and the GEO Group,
that also operate many prisons.
The companies say that they provide round-the-clock medical care and proper diets
and that they are subject to government oversight.
But a federal lawsuit and more than two dozen interviews with lawyers, detainees and their family members and elected officials
depict acute deficiencies that they believe contributed to the deaths.
They describe some of the country’s largest immigrant detention facilities as places where disease and illness are rampant
and detainees are often denied sufficient food, clean drinking water, medications and medical care.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/us/ice-detention-deaths-immigrants.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

2026-03-28 18:37:24 UTC

The shipment of about 12 tons, or 413,793 KitKat candy bars made of waffles covered with chocolate,
disappeared last week while en route between production in Italy and distribution locations in Poland.
The chocolate bars were to be distributed throughout Europe.
The Nestlé company, based in Vevey, Switzerland, said in a statement Friday that “the vehicle and its load are still nowhere to be found.”
https://apnews.com/article/nestle-switzerland-candy-bar-stolen-kitkat-51073cce27a0e193651aa7f31aaa506e

2026-03-28 07:09:07 UTC

We call on European governments to:
Stop signing new contracts with Palantir.
Review and phase out existing contracts with the company.
Invest in transparent, publicly accountable European alternatives.
https://action.wemove.eu/sign/2026-03-palantir-petition-EN?akid=s7155930..xIUPA9

2026-03-28 03:00:58 UTC

MS NOW reported on Friday that White House sources believe that Trump is
“getting a little bored” with the Iran war
and “wants to move on” to other initiatives.
MS NOW’s report on Trump’s feelings about the war was echoed by The Wall Street Journal,
which on Thursday reported that the president has told associates that he wants to wrap up the war in the coming weeks and avoid a protracted conflict.
The problem, sources told both MS NOW and the Journal, is that there is no simple way to wrap up the conflict
given that Iran is continuing to block passage through the Strait of Hormuz, which is sending global energy costs spiking.
And while Trump has shown the ability to simply lie about his achievements in the past and have his supporters believe them,
one former Trump official told MS NOW that just won’t work if Americans keep paying $4 per gallon of gas.
In a social media post, Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) called the president
“beyond despicable”
for feeling “bored” after starting a war that has killed thousands of people,
created chaos across the Middle East,
and raised prices for US consumers.
“Donald Trump is now ‘a little bored’ with his ‘little excursion’ in Iran,
as if war is nothing more than passing amusement to him,” said Beyer.
“War is not a game. It’s not a spectacle. It’s not something you pick up and drop when it stops entertaining you.”
Beyer then highlighted the human costs of Trump’s war, which he launched at 4 a.m. on a Saturday morning without any authorization from Congress.
“Real people have paid the price of this war,” he wrote.
“We’ve already lost 13 Americans killed in action, with many more seriously wounded.
Civilians have been killed throughout the Middle East, including the US missile strike that killed more than 150 schoolchildren.”
Trump and allies such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have signaled that after the US is finished with Iran,
they will next attempt to topple the government of Cuba,
where the White House has caused a catastrophic fuel shortage in recent weeks
with its ramp-up of the blockade that’s been in place for decades.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this month that “the embargo is tied to political change on the island.”
https://therealnews.com/trump-bored-with-iran-war

2026-03-27 15:56:51 UTC

The U.S. military has fired more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles in four weeks of war with Iran,
burning through the precision weapons at a rate that has alarmed some Pentagon officials
and prompted internal discussions about how to make more available,
said people familiar with the matter.
 The missiles, which can be launched from Navy surface warships and submarines, have been a staple of U.S. military attacks since they were first used in combat in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War.
But only a few hundred are manufactured each year,
meaning the global supply is limited.
The Pentagon does not publicly disclose how many missiles are in its inventory at any one time.
 Tomahawks are prized in part because they can travel more than 1,000 miles,
reducing the need to send American pilots into well-defended airspace.
The heavy reliance on them in the Iran conflict will require urgent discussions about whether to relocate some from other parts of the world,
including the Indo-Pacific,
and a concerted long-term effort to build more, said several U.S. officials,
speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military planning.  The dilemma has laid bare broader concerns in both the Pentagon and Congress about the Trump administration’s war in Iran,
its shifting explanations for why the conflict is necessary,
and the risks a shortage could pose to the United States
as it balances the potential for future conflict in other parts of the world.
It comes as the White House deliberates over a possible major escalation in Iran,
to include the use of ground troops,
while pursuing negotiations to end hostilities.
The most recent versions of the missile can cost as much as $3.6 million a piece
and require up to two years to build,
according to Navy documents.
In recent years, they have been purchased in small batches,
with just 57 included in last year’s defense budget.
 Many of the 850-plus expended Tomahawks were fired in the opening days of Operation Epic Fury,
the Trump administration’s name for the war in Iran,
people familiar with the matter said.
They include at least one that struck in the vicinity of an elementary school in the Iranian city of Minab early in the operation.
U.S. officials have since opened an investigation into the incident, which Iranian officials have said killed scores of children.
The U.S. military also has fired more than 1,000 air-defense interceptor missiles
in response to Iranian counterattacks across the region,
-- including from the Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems,
which are considered the world’s most advanced, two other officials familiar with the issue said.
The inventory of those weapons also is limited and not publicly disclose
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/27/iran-war-tomahawk-missiles/

2026-03-27 12:44:29 UTC

Mathematicians are threatening to boycott the field’s largest, most prestigious gathering this summer
if it takes place in the U.S., as currently planned.
Every four years since the turn of the twentieth century,
the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) has brought together mathematicians from all over the world to share the latest breakthroughs and plot the field’s future.
Famous speeches delivered at the congress have gone on to redefine entire subfields of math.
The ICM is also where math’s most hallowed prize, the Fields Medal, is awarded.
This July, the ICM is slated to take place in Philadelphia
—the first time in 40 years that it’s been held in the U.S.
Now a petition to move the event elsewhere is circulating among mathematicians.
It cites the recent American military actions in Venezuela and Iran,
the suspension of visas from 75 countries
and the continued presence of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents across major U.S. cities
as contrary to the ICM’s goal of fostering “a sense of international unity amongst mathematicians.”
As of this writing, more than 1,500 mathematicians have signed the petition,
which states that they plan to boycott the event if it isn’t moved outside the U.S.
The list of signatories includes many of the field’s most prominent names,
more than 50 of whom have spoken at previous congresses.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-mathematicians-are-boycotting-their-biggest-conference/

2026-03-25 14:53:52 UTC

On a hazy afternoon in the Persian Gulf nearly 40 years ago,
the captain of a U.S. Navy frigate summoned Lt. Gordan Van Hook to the bridge and handed him a pair of binoculars.
Through them, Lieutenant Van Hook, the ship’s chief engineer, saw the danger that lay ahead
— three Iranian mines.
The frigate, part of an American force sent to escort oil tankers, came to a stop well ahead of the mines.
But some 10 minutes later, an undetected mine exploded under the ship.
“You could feel it lift,” he said in a recent interview. “It was a huge explosion.”
The mine tore a 21-foot-wide hole in the vessel, which nearly sank it, and seriously injured 10 members of its crew.
The hit on the frigate, the Samuel B. Roberts, on April 14, 1988,
is a reminder of the dangers facing any attempt to provide a naval escort in the gulf today
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/business/iran-mines-gulf-hormuz-strike-naval-escort-history-1988.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

2026-03-21 17:03:17 UTC

The devastating toll of Iran’s counterattack on U.S. service members after Donald Trump’s surprise strikes on Iran is even more severe than previously known.
A deadly attack that killed six U.S. service members has also left dozens of others suffering from traumatic brain injuries,
memory loss,
and other “urgent” health issues
at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany,
the largest U.S. military hospital abroad,
CBS News reported Wednesday.
As of Tuesday night, more than 30 military personnel remained hospitalized at Landstuhl and other military hospitals
following the strike on a tactical operations center at the Shuaiba port outside Kuwait City on March 1.
The 20 who arrived at Landstuhl on Tuesday have injuries designated “urgent” by the military, according to CBS.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/military-hospital-flooded-with-injured-troops-from-trumps-iran-war/

2026-03-19 03:13:35 UTC

Police officers raided the
rapper Afroman's Ohio home,
... then sued him after he ridiculed them on social media
— but a jury just sided with the rapper.
In an unusual lawsuit members of an Ohio county sheriff’s department sued over songs and social media posts by Afroman
(Joseph Foreman)
that criticized the guns-drawn 2022 raid on his property, which yielded no charges.
The case claimed the videos were false and caused the officers "severe emotional distress".
But Afroman,
known for his 2000 hit “Because I Got High,”
testified at trial that he had a First Amendment right to mock the officers,
-- particularly after they smashed down his door for ultimately no reason:
“All of this is their fault, and they have the audacity to sue me"
https://www.billboard.com/pro/afroman-trial-verdict-rapper-wins-lawsuit-cops-music-videos/

2026-03-18 17:54:34 UTC

Donald Trump is dismantling U.S. democracy at an “unprecedented” rate,
downgrading the U.S.’s democratic rating on a global scale
and plunging the country toward autocracy at a faster rate than autocratic leaders of other countries in the 21st century,
the latest report by an international democracy watchdog finds.
Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Sweden’s Gothenburg University finds in its annual report that
Trump’s second term has been characterized by a swift concentration of power in the executive branch
that ignores the rule of law,
suppresses dissent,
and targets civil rights.
Many countries are falling further into autocracy, the report finds.
But the U.S. stands out as “an exceptional new autocratizer due to both far-reaching changes in 2025 and their implications for the rest of the world,” the group writes.
“The extensive damage already done to American democracy under the second Trump presidency
— in just one year
— stands out on the world map.”
https://truthout.org/articles/trump-is-destroying-us-democracy-at-unprecedented-rate-global-watchdog-finds/

2026-03-18 05:32:19 UTC

National Academies of Sciences says no to demands it remove climate info
State attorneys general won’t get climate chapter removed from a legal manual
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/national-academies-of-sciences-resisting-pressure-to-pull-climate-info/

2026-03-17 02:21:32 UTC

Jared Kushner,
arched with the swagger of the world’s most confident mediocre white man,
walked into the most sensitive nuclear negotiation of the decade on behalf of the United States
— representing governments that had paid him $157 million
— carrying a pager given to him by the intelligence service of the country that wanted war most,
without a single technical expert,
and delivered a conflict so catastrophic and convenient that it is impossible to explain as an accident
https://open.substack.com/pub/thecause/p/jared-kushners-corruption-is-a-national?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

2026-03-17 00:32:59 UTC

RE: https://c.im/@cdarwin/113946648601251220
Here’s what you need to know about the documentary proof of citizenship requirements of the SAVE America Act:
🔸Citizenship is already a requirement to vote, and instances of noncitizen voting are rare.
🔸Many eligible citizens don’t have access to documentary proof of citizenship.
🔸There are better ways to verify citizenship that put the responsibility on government, not voters.
🔸The SAVE America Act could have unintended consequences for election officials and election administration.
🔸The SAVE America Act needs more time and resources to be implemented well
The Senate votes on Tuesday (it has already passed the House)
Call your Senators and urge them to vote NO
#note1tks…cg7j

2026-03-16 01:36:08 UTC

After Russia invaded Ukraine, his school changed almost overnight– teachers ordered to deliver government scripts and students marched through military drills. Talankin was required to film it all as the school videographer, and what he witnessed made him want to walk away from his job entirely. Instead, he connected with documentary director David Borenstein, and together they turned his footage into a feature film.
Borenstein said Talankin “wanted to show how quickly totalitarianism can take over a school, a workplace, a government, and how our complicity becomes fuel in that fire.”
It’s a message Talankin originally hoped to share with fellow Russians. But he now believes the film speaks to a far wider audience than he could ever have anticipated when he began filming.
He points to a joke circulating in Eastern Europe: the Belarusians say they and the Russians are watching the same TV series- only Russia is a few episodes behind.
“I am sorry to tell you,” he says, “that America has begun watching this series, too.”
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/03/this-oscar-nominated-doc-says-nows-the-time-to-resist/

2026-03-14 21:34:31 UTC

We’ve been saying this for years now, and we’re going to keep saying it until the message finally sinks in:
mandatory age verification creates massive, centralized honeypots of sensitive biometric data that will inevitably be breached.
Every single time.
And every single time it happens,
the politicians who mandated these systems and the companies that built them act shocked—shocked!
—that collecting enormous databases of government IDs, facial scans, and biometric data from millions of people turns out to be a security nightmare
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/25/hackers-expose-the-massive-surveillance-stack-hiding-inside-your-age-verification-check/

2026-03-14 17:05:33 UTC

The corruption of the Trump Administration remains so massive
while also being so obvious
that people just don’t know what to do.
If Kushner was merely shaking someone down for $5,000 using his government role, there’d be an outcry.
But do it for $5,000,000,000 and mostly there’s 🤷‍♂️
#TrumpCorruptionWatch
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/jared-kushner-affinity-mideast-funds.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

2026-03-14 02:17:55 UTC

The Trump administration ordered the restart of a Santa Barbara oil pipeline shut since the 2015 Refugio spill -- invoking emergency powers under the Defense Production Act.
California officials say the move defies court orders and state oversight.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state will sue.
The order escalates a fight over whether federal authority can override California regulators blocking Sable Offshore’s plan to restart the pipeline.
https://calmatters.org/environment/2026/03/trump-emergency-sable-santa-barbara/

2026-03-12 17:27:19 UTC

The hardest thing for the media to wrap its hands around over the last year is that
⭐️Donald Trump has no plan
— for anything, ever.
Time and again, national pundits and the White House press corps invent a logical Donald Trump who sets, announces, and later “changes” real “policies” or “plans,”
failing to convey what is clear to anyone who is actually following events closely:
⚠️In each public appearance and social media post, the Mad King Donald Trump spouts a string of words,
devoid of meaning or purpose,
that may or may not represent anything at all.
🔥Every single thing he says may, at any given time, be taken as an official hard-line policy of the US government,
the opening gambit to a long flexible negotiation,
-- or a random pronouncement that will be never be mentioned again.
It’s impossible to know in real-time which is which — especially so if you’re actually in the US government and in charge of translating his words into actions and plans
https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/trump-surprised-to-find-he-s-at-war-in-iran

2026-03-11 17:23:07 UTC

Mining the strait would mean a protracted closure of at least a month, because finding and removing mines is a difficult and time-consuming process.
This would create a global economic disturbance well beyond what we are already seeing.
Laying mines is comparatively easy and can be done from both modern fishing boats and dhows.
In the area of the strait, both of these number in the thousands.
Iran used this strategy for conducting the clandestine mining of the Persian Gulf in the 1980s as part of the “tanker wars,”
the name for the series of military attacks by Iran and Iraq against merchant vessels in the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz from 1981 to 1988, and later U.S. intervention to protect maritime traffic.
Stopping these boats would require constant surveillance of a large area, a difficult task even with the vast array of forces in the area.
Indeed, during the Persian Gulf War, Iraq managed to lay 1,300 sea mines right “under the noses” of the coalition.
Iran also has the capability to flood the zone with dozens or hundreds of civilian boats at the same time.
It can be difficult or impossible for the U.S. to tell which ones have mines and which don’t.
Exacerbating the problem is that the munitions used to sink these boats would likely be more expensive than the boats themselves.
The mines themselves are potentially very cheap and easy to produce, and can be deployed in large numbers.
Simple contact mines with a design dating back to World War I can cost as little as $1,500 each.
More advanced magnetic influence mines are still remarkably cheap, as low as $25,000 apiece.
The relatively shallow waters of the Persian Gulf are an ideal place for using mines against shipping,
and this creates many of the same cost-imposing problems as the Iranian Shahed-136 drones that have been employed in vast numbers against U.S. and Gulf State air defenses.
Mines, like Shaheds, are cheap, plentiful, relatively easy to produce, and easy to deploy.
They can disable or destroy vessels worth hundreds of millions of dollars, or even a billion dollars (such as an Arleigh-Burke-class guided missile destroyer).
Countering them requires expensive, rare, specialized equipment, highly trained personnel, and a lot of time to carry out the mission.
https://newrepublic.com/article/207631/iran-mining-strait-hormuz-implications?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_source=Bluesky

2026-03-11 17:10:36 UTC

In a sensational turn of events in the fight against Chat Control,
a majority in the European Parliament voted today to end the untargeted mass scanning of private communications.
In doing so, the Parliament firmly rejected the error-prone and unconstitutional surveillance practices of recent years.
Pressure is now mounting on EU governments to respect the MEPs’ vote and bury untargeted mass surveillance in Europe once and for all.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/historic-chat-control-vote-in-the-eu-parliament-meps-vote-to-end-untargeted-mass-scanning-of-private-chats/

2026-03-11 01:00:42 UTC

DHS Ousts CBP Privacy Officers Who Questioned ‘Illegal’ Orders
Department of Homeland Security leaders removed top privacy officers who objected to mislabeling government records to block their public release, WIRED has learned
https://www.wired.com/story/cbp-privacy-threshold-analysis-foia/

2026-03-10 21:01:32 UTC

Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools.
The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterized by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.
Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.”
“Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,” Dave Treadwell, a senior vice-president at the group, told employees in an email, also seen by the FT.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/03/after-outages-amazon-to-make-senior-engineers-sign-off-on-ai-assisted-changes/

2026-03-09 05:41:21 UTC

James Fallows:
This week I realized that over the past 45 years I’d been preparing for the news of the past nine days.
I’ll list the reporting steps I’ve taken, because they set up the questions and reactions I have now.
-In 1981 I published a book called "National Defense", which was serialized in the Atlantic.
Its purpose was to interview people who’d spent their lives waging war, or studying warfare,
and ask what realities of combat they think the rest of us misunderstand.
One of its messages was that the ability to think many steps ahead of the adversary
—if we do this, they’ll probably do that, and then we’d have to imagine something else
—distinguished the victors from the defeated.
This applied on the battlefield and in other arenas of competition.
So did the related-but-different ability to re-orient and change plans more quickly than the adversary,
when circumstances inevitably changed.
These points may seem obvious,
but you’ll see why I’m returning to them now.
Another message involved “quantity vs quality.”
The historians, combat veterans, and technologists I spoke with also emphasized that in warfare,
having more weapons, could sometimes matter more than having “better” weapons.
One gruesome example from Vietnam was the cheap but reliable AK47 rifle used by the Vietcong, versus the more “advanced” American M16, prone to deadly jams in the arms of US troops.
Drones did not exist in those days.
But since 2022 Ukraine has shown how a $2,000 “first-person-view” drone can destroy a $5 million Russian tank.
Right now, Iran can buy at least 150 of its Shahed “suicide missiles” for the cost of a single US-made Patriot missile to defend against them.
https://fallows.substack.com/p/the-arrogance-of-ignorance

2026-03-08 14:59:21 UTC

Pete Hegseth, 45, a former Fox News TV host who now commands the world’s most powerful military, has this week become the face of Donald Trump’s war in Iran.
That has set off for alarm bells for critics who warn that the Secretary of Defense – pointedly rebranded “Secretary of War” – has rapidly transformed the Pentagon into the staging ground for an ideological and religious crusade.
With machismo, Christian nationalism and callousness toward the lives of US troops, they say,
Hegseth’s puerile displays on TV are aimed at sating Trump’s desire for a warmonger worthy of the manosphere.
This was reinforced by a lurid social media video that intersperses clips from Hollywood blockbusters such as Braveheart, Gladiator, Superman and Top Gun with Hegseth and real kill-shot footage of the attacks in Iran.
Janessa Goldbeck, chief executive of Vet Voice Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy organisation, said:
“Pete Hegseth is a very dangerous person.
He’s a white Christian nationalist
and has the arsenal of the United States government at his disposal
and a permission slip from President Trump to deploy carnage wherever he wishes against whomever he wishes.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/08/pete-hegseth-pentagon-trump-iran?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-03-07 05:19:23 UTC

- reply

As for the media takeover:
What I didn’t foresee in 2024 was the aggressiveness of Trump patsy David Ellison,
the CEO of Paramount Skydance,
in trying to take over both CBS and CNN.
But he wouldn’t stop.
Netflix bid $83 billion.
Ellison topped that this week with a bid of $111 billion,
and Netflix dropped out.
And somewhere in there,
Ellison attended Trump’s State of the Union address,
and Trump took to social media to “urge” Netflix to remove Obama and Biden administration official Susan Rice from its board.
I once would have written that this is how things go in tinpot dictatorships,
or in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
But today, it’s how things go in the United States of America.
So picture this.
It’s October.
The mystery Trump accuser,
the one about whom those FBI files have strangely gone missing,
has come forward.
Her allegations against the president of the United States are lurid and,
to most of the country,
credible.
Trump is down to 29 percent in the polls.
The economy is still limping.
The polls all indicate that the GOP is in for a historic thrashing.
Democrats are favored to win the House
and, by now, are odds-on to maybe take the Senate too
—their candidates in Alaska and Texas have now pulled slightly ahead.
And Trump declares a state of emergency and postpones the election.
The Supreme Court issues an emergency stay,
saying he can’t do that.
But the court has no army, and Trump does,
along with a handful of lickspittle governors who just might follow him down whatever dark path he plows.
That, not to mince words,
is a coup d’état.
Will he get away with it?
I don’t know,
but having effective control over how it is presented to viewers of CBS and CNN,
and readers of the Bezos-owned Washington Post,
to say nothing of the already vast pro-Trump propaganda empire of Fox News and the rest,
will certainly make it easier.
That’s how fascism descends.
And it’s becoming less and less hypothetical by the week.
https://newrepublic.com/post/207138/trump-coup-detat-midterm-elections

2026-03-07 05:13:51 UTC

- reply

Trump has no power to “decree” that voters must present ID
or to end mail-in balloting.
But that doesn’t mean he can’t at least try both
With respect to those measures, he has no power whatsoever to impose them.
As anti-Trump legal expert Norm Eisen put it on Morning Joe Friday:
“Just as the Supreme Court struck his supposed emergency powers over tariffs,
he has even less here.”
That is true.
But remember:
Between tariff “Liberation Day”
(April 2, 2025)
and the day the Supremes finally ruled against Trump on tariffs
(February 20, 2026),
more than 10 months passed.
Under the Insurrection Act or some other dusty statute,
Trump can declare a state of emergency.
-- Then he can decide that said state permits,
nay requires,
him to take extraordinary measures.
On October 5, say, that might mean outlawing early voting.
By October 13, it might mean no mail-in voting.
By October 29, a reminder that all voters must present ID to vote.
And by Sunday, November 1, two days before the election
—an announcement that all these “reasonable” measures have alas failed,
and he is now forced,
against his will,
to postpone the election.
Have trouble seeing that happen? I didn’t think so.

2026-03-07 04:53:46 UTC

It Can Now Be Plainly Said:
Trump Is Planning a November Coup d’État
During the campaign, it was kind of hard to picture the specifics of how Trump might pull such a thing off.
Alas, it’s getting less hypothetical by the week.
Back in 2024, Kamala Harris and the Democrats struggled to convince voters that a second Donald Trump term would constitute a serious threat to democracy.
We can debate the effectiveness of her, and their, rhetoric.
But on a certain level, it was a hard argument to make
because it was hypothetical.
Voters aren’t very interested in wrapping their heads around hypotheticals,
or at least vague ones.
And Harris’s hypotheticals were mostly vague,
so if she or any Democrat tried to say,
for example,
that there was a very real threat that once in office,
Trump might try to cancel elections,
most people kind of tuned that out.
Well, we’re now beginning to see it.
Let’s start with elections.
The Washington Post
—and yes, there’s still good reporting going on there
—reported Thursday that pro-Trump “activists”
(a rather generous and perverse use of that word, I think)
who say they’re working with the Trump administration
🔥“are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.”
The plan would mandate voter ID and ban mail-in balloting,
and calls on Trump to issue an executive order announcing both measures.
The premise, it almost goes without saying,
is a total lie.
China did not interfere in the 2020 election.
Trump and his people often said so,
the implication being that China interfered on behalf of its old friend Joe Biden and his son Hunter,
whose alleged business dealings in China left his father hopelessly compromised.
None of it was true.
Hunter Biden did have some business interests in China,
but nothing that reached his father.
The U.S. intelligence services studied foreign influence in the 2020 election,
and in March 2021, the government released an intelligence report concluding that China
“considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.”
In fact, the report found
—and isn’t this a surprise?
—the biggest foreign actor in 2020 was Russia,
trying to help Trump:
“The primary effort the IC [intelligence community] uncovered revolved around a narrative
—that Russian actors began spreading as early as 2014
—alleging corrupt ties between President Biden,
his family, and other U.S. officials and Ukraine.”
⚠️ But Trump administration officials
—including Attorney General Bill Barr
—pushed the China lie aggressively.
💥So it’s very easy for Trump today to invoke China again
and lie that the threat of even greater Chinese interference in 2026 demands that he take emergency measures.
https://newrepublic.com/post/207138/trump-coup-detat-midterm-elections?utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_medium=social&utm_source=Threads

2026-03-07 01:12:36 UTC

Elon Musk’s new AI data center has turned a formerly quiet Mississippi town into a noisy nightmare.
The $20 billion facility, run by Musk’s AI firm xAI, is powered by ⚠️27 methane gas turbines that run day and night,
belching fumes and emitting a constant noise like jet engines, NBC News reports.
The turbines were trucked in because Southaven, the unsuspecting rural community that Musk chose to build the data center in, can’t provide the electricity the facility needs.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/musks-ai-power-plant-generates-sound-fury-mississippi-rcna258594

2026-03-05 19:09:56 UTC

- reply

We are entering a new era of American imperialism.
Trump Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller recently told CNN’s Jake Tapper,
“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.
These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
As Jonathan Last wrote in The Bulwark,
in both Venezuela and in Minneapolis,
“What we are seeing is a worldview for which the only value is the domination of enemies.
There is a name for that.
It is fascism.”
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/renee-good-ashli-babbitt-fascism

2026-03-05 19:07:03 UTC

- reply

Trump campaigned on the promise that the United States would stop policing the world,
that the era of regime change and open‑ended intervention was over.
Now we have invaded Venezuela, kidnapped their president, and Trump tells us we “are going to run the country for a long time,”
as if Venezuela were a failed subsidiary being placed into receivership.
Next up was Iran, with a New York Times banner headline proclaiming, “Trump Calls for Overthrow of Government.”
The idea that the United States will “run” or administer another sovereign nation,
even “temporarily,”
ought to trigger every alarm that still works in Washington.

2026-03-05 19:03:48 UTC

It was outside the United States that the dissonance struck most deeply.
I remember sitting on high-speed trains that glided so fast and silently they seemed to erase distance itself,
watching wind farms cross the horizon like silent fleets.
In country after country
— places far smaller and, on paper, far poorer than ours
— I kept asking the same question:
how could they manage to build what we could not?
Why did the richest nation on earth feel like it was living off the leftovers of its mid-twentieth century optimism?
Conversations in Europe added another layer.
People spoke casually of health care as a right, not a privilege;
of sending their children to university without dread or debt;
of a shared obligation to slow the warming planet.
It was not utopia
— just an older, steadier faith in the public good.
The idea that freedom and mutual responsibility might coexist had not yet been driven out of their political imagination.
Back home, the contrast was impossible to ignore.
We stumble on crumbling bridges and argue about the price of insulin
yet never question why nearly two-thirds of what Washington calls “discretionary spending” is locked inside the machinery of the National Security State.
In the 2026 budget,
-- 59.6 percent is marked for the Pentagon
(even more if Trump succeeds in getting an additional $600 billion),
-- another 6.4 percent for Homeland Security.
No other democracy has made such choices
— or lived so comfortably with their consequences.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-america-military-industrial-iran-war-1235524970/

2026-03-03 20:07:08 UTC

Tillis to Noem:
"A 14 month old dog is basically a teenager in dog years.
You decided to kill that dog because you hadn't invested the appropriate training,
then you have the audacity to write a book & say it's a leadership lesson! ...
Those are bad decisions not unlike what happened in Minneapolis"
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mg6do2dx3f2a

2026-03-03 16:29:39 UTC

While pursuing regime change in Iran, Trump is desperately attempting to stop regime change through the midterm elections.
He needs a swift victory in Iran to avoid a quagmire, but he needs a long war to attempt the assertion of unconstitutional emergency authority over the electoral process.
Plunging into war followed Trump’s signature style:
he negotiated in bad faith,
turned to bombing when the sides were making “significant progress”, according to Oman’s foreign minister,
was heedless of international law,
and shut out congressional consultation.
He offered as his imperative Iranian “imminent threats”, which the Pentagon briefed congressional staffers after Operation Epic Fury began was simply without basis in fact.
There was no intelligence suggesting an “imminent threat”. Where’s the WMD?
Trump has created a scenario in which he has cornered himself, so he has declared he has a series of supposed “off-ramps”.
“I can go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days and tell the Iranians:
see you again in a few years if you start rebuilding [your nuclear and missile programs].
In any case, it will take them several years to recover from this attack.”
His fantasizing, however, reveals the absence of any strategy.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/03/trump-iran-war-emergency-powers?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-03-03 05:10:26 UTC

A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that
⚠️ the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was
💥“anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.
From Saturday morning through Monday night,
👉more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).
The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.
The MRFF is keeping the complainants anonymous to prevent retribution by the Defense Department.
https://jonathanlarsen.substack.com/p/us-troops-were-told-iran-war-is-for

2026-03-02 20:55:36 UTC

Katherine Abughazaleh
—pronounced /ah-buu-gə-ZAH-lay/
—is a progressive Democratic candidate for Illinois' 9th congressional district, located to the northwest of Chicago.
The seat had been held by retiring Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky since 1999.
Abughazaleh, known as Kat Abu online, is turning a familiar campaign tactic on its head by launching an attack ad against herself.
The ad uses popular voice actor Matt Mercer, known for his roles in animation, video games
With the appropriate level of alarm for an attack ad, Mercer says:
"Kat Abughazaleh is the kind of radical Democrat Fox News warned you about."
"Kat believes you deserve universal health care, groceries, and housing. Where does she think we are? The richest country on Earth?"
In a nod to the Citizens United SCOTUS ruling that declared corporations "people," the ad continues:
"Kat isn't a millionaire. She doesn't take PAC money. She can't even afford health insurance herself. How can she possibly relate to normal, hardworking corporations like you and me?"
"And it gets worse. As a journalist, Kat's reporting helped lead to Tucker Carlson's departure from Fox News. Is that who you want fighting extremists in Washington?"
As a senior video producer for Media Matters for America, Abughazaleh used to cover Fox News content with the tagline,
"I watch Tucker Carlson so you don't have to."
The unique campaign ad goes on to state:
"Kat claims the Democratic Party should not bow down to Trump or his billionaire friends. Does she think strongly worded letters count as bowing?"
Abughazaleh has been critical of Democratic veterans in Congress for playing too nicely with MAGA Republican President Donald Trump instead of taking decisive action
https://www.comicsands.com/abughazaleh-viral-campaign-ad

2026-03-02 20:45:59 UTC

- reply

Submit a public comment to the FCC
DarkSky International is urging the public to weigh in now,
before these projects move forward without the testing, research,
and environmental review such sweeping changes to the night sky and nighttime environment demand.
https://darksky.org/news/two-satellite-proposals-threaten-the-night-sky-the-window-to-act-is-now/

2026-03-02 20:42:55 UTC

How to Submit Comments on Satellite Applications to the FCC
Any member of the public can provide input to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as it considers satellite applications.
The AAS believes that its individual members (in addition to the Society as a whole) should be able to voice concerns about any proposed satellite system that might be harmful to astronomy and the night sky.
This process is also open to those outside the United States who may be impacted by a proposed system.
In this step-by-step guide, we'll walk you through how to submit comments on applications.
https://aas.org/posts/advocacy/2026/02/how-submit-comments-satellite-applications-fcc

2026-03-02 01:50:20 UTC

The Trumpocalypse metastasizes:
Lebanon’s #Hezbollah has claimed responsibility for projectiles launched from Lebanon to Israel.
The militant group said it launched missiles and drones towards Israel in retaliation for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, news agencies are reporting.
Israel’s military said it had begun striking Hezbollah across Lebanon.
The Israel Defence Forces said on X that it would “respond forcefully” to Hezbollah’s decision “to join the campaign”.
It also said:
IDF forces prepared for this scenario
as part of the orderly combat procedure within
Operation “Roar of the Lion”
and are ready for a "multi-arena scenario" and to confront any threat to the State of Israel
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2026/mar/01/us-israel-war-on-iran-ayatollah-ali-khamenei-i-dead-latest-reports?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-02-27 18:55:26 UTC

The Department of Homeland Security was caught lying Thursday about ⚠️ abandoning a blind refugee who was later found dead on the street.
The Department of Homeland Security claimed that the Tim Hortons in Buffalo
where federal agents left Nurul Amin Shah Alam,
a 56-year-old Burmese refugee who was blind and spoke no English,
was “determined to be a warm, safe location near his last known address.”
Video footage reviewed by The Washington Post, however, showed that the location had already closed, except for the drive-thru.
In video footage released by IP, Shah Alam could be seen walking past the drive-thru window,
then pacing by the locked front doors,
before he eventually wandered across the parking lot toward a Dollar Tree.
The Border Patrol agents drove away after one minute.
Shah Alam was blind and spoke no English.
He was found dead on Tuesday
https://newrepublic.com/post/207151/dhs-caught-lying-blind-refugee-agents-left-die-buffalo

2026-02-27 11:33:24 UTC

Neanderthal DNA is largely missing from the human X chromosome.
“We found a pattern indicating a sex bias: gene flow occurred predominantly between Neanderthal males and anatomically modern human females,”
said Dr Alexander Platt, a senior research scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and first author of the research.
The ancestors of modern humans and the closest related species, the Neanderthals, diverged, forming two distinct groups, about 600,000 years ago.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/feb/26/male-neanderthals-human-females-mating-research-dna-genetics?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-02-23 19:37:59 UTC

Donald Trump has agreed to comply with court orders to partially fund the "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program".
The food benefit, commonly called SNAP, goes back-nearly a century in the U.S.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/society-culture-and-history/social-issues/the-history-of-food-stamps-and-where-it-goes-from-here/ar-AA1PKcjp
https://s3.c.im/media_attachments/files/116/121/627/199/589/504/original/682150bbcabb5c04.jpeg

2026-02-23 02:44:08 UTC

In Los Angeles, where more than two-thirds of residents identify as Hispanic, Black or Asian,
a vast majority of schools were found to have extraordinarily diverse student bodies.
And in an effort to combat segregation, the school district has afforded those diverse schools with smaller class sizes and other benefits.
But last month, a conservative group sued the school district, saying the decades-old program has become a mechanism of
“overt discrimination against a new minority:
white students”.
That group, called the
"1776 Project Foundation",
hopes to end the program
and “vindicate the American ideal of racial equality”.
“These policies are not just unfair
– they’re unconstitutional,” Aiden Buzzetti, the president of the 1776 Project Foundation, said in a statement in January.
“What began as a temporary measure to address segregation has become a rigid system of racial favoritism that excludes thousands of students from equal opportunity.”
And on Wednesday, the case was bolstered by the Trump administration.
The Department of Justice, under attorney general Pam Bondi, said this week it agreed.
The agency’s civil rights division filed to intervene in the case,
saying students in LA
“should never be classified or treated differently because of their race”.
“Treating Americans equally is not a suggestion – it is a core constitutional guarantee that educational institutions must follow,”
Bondi said in a statement.
“This Department of Justice will never stop fighting to make that guarantee a reality, including for public-school students in Los Angeles.”
The LAUSD educates nearly 377,000 students.
Nearly 73% of those identify as Latino,
7% Black,
3.5% Asian
and 10% white.
If a school has a student body population that is
more than 70% non-white, it is given a designation known as #PHBAO,
or "predominantly Hispanic, Black, Asian or other" non-white.
The lawsuit says more than 600 schools in the LAUSD are classified as PHBAO schools, while 100 are not.
Schools with a PHBAO designation are eligible for programs to provide additional support to minority students,
including smaller class sizes
and at least two parent-teacher conferences per year.
The difference in class sizes, according to the lawsuit, is a maximum of 25 students per teacher in a PHBAO school
compared to an average of 34.5 at a school without the designation.
“In PHBAO schools, parents have a greater opportunity for involvement in their child’s education,” the lawsuit reads.
“The LAUSD channels opportunities, preferences, funding, and outreach primarily to specific racial groups,
while systematically excluding or failing to allow other students who similarly could benefit from the same favorable academic support.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/la-school-district-lawsuit?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-02-22 22:15:18 UTC

You might think switching to an electric vehicle is the best step.
In fact, for short trips, an electric bike or moped might be better for you, and for the planet.
That’s because these forms of transport – collectively known as electric micromobility – are cheaper to buy and run.
But it’s more than that – they are actually 💥displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present,
due to their staggering uptake in China and other nations where mopeds are a common form of transport.
https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-280-million-electric-bikes-and-mopeds-are-cutting-demand-for-oil-far-more-than-electric-cars-213870

2026-02-21 23:15:46 UTC

A woman adopted as a toddler by an American war veteran,
who he found in the 1970s in an Iranian orphanage and raised as a Christian,
is being threatened with deportation to Iran, a country notoriously dangerous for Christians and now on the brink of war with the United States.
She is one of thousands adopted from abroad who were never granted citizenship because of a fracture at the intersection of adoption and immigration law.
The woman, who The Associated Press is not naming because of her legal situation,
received a letter from the Department of Homeland Security earlier this month ordering her to appear for removal proceedings before an immigration judge in California.
She has no criminal record.
The letter says she is eligible for deportation because she overstayed her visa in March 1974 -- at 4 years old.
https://apnews.com/article/iran-adoptee-deportation-4a68978053c29bfd6df152392ab73211

2026-02-19 21:49:26 UTC

Increasing amounts of metal, such as lithium, as a byproduct of the modern-day space race, are beginning to alter the chemical composition of Earth’s atmosphere.
Robin Wing, and his colleagues at the Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Rostock in Germany, measured a 10-fold concentration of lithium atoms in the upper atmosphere around 20 hours after the uncontrolled re-entry of a Falcon 9 rocket.
The findings are detailed in a new studypublished Thursday in Nature.
As spacecraft reenter through the atmosphere, they slowly disintegrate into smaller fragments that burn up and release metals into the upper atmosphere.
Lithium, as well as aluminum and other metals used to construct spacecraft, vaporizes during atmospheric re-entry.
The researchers behind the new study chose to measure lithium because it’s an effective tracer of space debris pollution and is commonly used in spacecraft.
“We discussed several materials, and lithium gave a good compromise of expected signal and challenges in the lidar setup,” Wing said.
“We know that lithium is present in the aerospace-grade lithium-aluminum alloys used in spacecraft construction.”
Although the risks of space debris falling onto the ground are well-studied, there is very little known about the effects of falling spacecraft on Earth’s upper atmosphere.
Using lidar—a laser-based remote sensing instrument used to measure atmospheric conditions—the team of scientists behind the new study detected a sudden increase in the concentration of lithium atoms,
around 10 times the baseline value found in the atmosphere, on February 20, 2025.
This lithium plume stretched from around 58 to 60 miles (94 to 97 kilometers) above sea level.
The researchers observed the plume for 27 minutes until data recording stopped.
They then traced the plume of pollution to the Falcon 9 reentry, linking its area of origin to the uncontrolled path taken by the rocket on its way down.
https://gizmodo.com/study-confirms-reentering-spacex-rockets-are-peppering-the-upper-atmosphere-with-metal-pollution-2000723932

2026-02-16 21:59:28 UTC

- reply

⭐️Blocking ICE’s attempts to convert warehouses into jails
As part of the Trump administration’s plan for mass deportations,
ICE has been attempting to buy a slew of warehouses across the US that it can transform into detention centers.
Those warehouses have become the target of intense pushback.
Communities and city officials have protested – and successfully blocked – some of these purchases.
In Ashland, Virginia, more than 100 protesters braved freezing temperatures to successfully lobby the local board of commissioners against an offer from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to buy a warehouse.
Not long after, the warehouse’s billionaire Canadian owner announced he was rejecting the DHS’s offer.
In January, residents of Oklahoma City packed a city council meeting to express their displeasure that the DHS was interested in buying a local warehouse to turn into a detention center.
The Republican mayor of Oklahoma City, David Holt, met with the owners of the facility and later announced that they had decided not to sell to the DHS.
A few hours away in Durant, Oklahoma, the Choctaw Nation issued an ordinance banning the sale of an empty distribution center near tribal lands to the DHS.
And in Kansas City, Missouri, the port authority moved to cut ties with a local company to discourage the city’s plans to sell a warehouse to the DHS.
Joining the efforts to protest against the purchase, the city council passed a years-long moratorium on the creation of any new detention centers.
⭐️Targeting the contracts that provide ICE’s rental cars and parking
One common strategy for organizers over the past year has been to identify local contracts with ICE
– and to push elected officials and institutions to cut them.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car has been a common target for its partnership with ICE.
After the federal immigration enforcement agency swept into Los Angeles last summer,
a local congregation of nuns heard that the agents were renting cars from the company,
then canceled their own reservations for 18 cars
(the nuns have taken a vow of poverty and do not own their own cars).
City and state officials are starting to pay attention to the company’s relationship with ICE as well.
In December, after ICE agents were reported to be illegally swapping license plates on their rental cars to make tracking them more difficult,
the Illinois secretary of state, Alexi Giannoulias,
revoked an Enterprise license plate registered in the state.
Local officials are also targeting contracts for ICE’s office spaces and parking garages.
In January, Josh Siegel, county executive of Lehigh county, Pennsylvania, canceled the county-owned lease on ICE’s office in Allentown, citing over $115,000 in unpaid rent.
“The department’s failure to pay rent, combined with DHS’s national reputation for recklessness, chaos and public disorder, warrants ending any relationship with the county,”
Siegel said in a statement.
“We will not accept their blood money.”
In New York City, elected officials are calling on a local park trust to immediately cancel a contract allowing ICE agents to park their cars in a Manhattan garage,
after the trust stated it would not renew the contract when it expires this summer.
And Philadelphia, city councilors are pushing to end or restrict collaboration with the DHS in what they are calling their “ICE Out” package.
The proposed legislation would prohibit the city from entering into those contracts with the DHS, as well as prohibit agents from entering into city-owned spaces, similar to several cities’ creation of “ICE-free zones”.
“The ICE Out legislation is bold and comprehensive, and that’s exactly the type of action we need in this moment,”
said Aniqa Raihan, an organizer with the local No ICE Philly coalition.
“It’s going to take all of us being brave and thinking creatively to keep ICE out of our city.”
The fight over ICE contracts has even come right to agents’ doors in Minneapolis, where the city council is withholding liquor license renewals to hotels that house ICE agents.

2026-02-16 21:54:23 UTC

From Philadelphia to Oklahoma City and Oakland, California, many cities are developing new
– and creative
– tactics to prepare for and push back against ICE.
Here’s a look at a few.
⭐️Creating ‘ICE-free’ zones
Several cities, counties and states across the country are creating “ICE-free zones” by restricting immigration agents’ access to government-owned and public spaces.
Local officials say this makes it safer for residents to visit hospitals, courthouses, public parks and other critical spaces without fear of ICE.
While these restrictions are unable to completely bar immigration agents from operating on government property, they make it easier for officials to potentially sue agents who do enter.
This strategy harkens back to the 1980s, when some cities designated themselves “sanctuary cities”
to affirm that they would protect newly arrived migrants and refugees
and not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
These sanctuary cities later played a key role during the first Trump administration in the movement against family separation and pushing back against ICE raids.
In October last year, amid the Department of Homeland Security’s “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago,
Brandon Johnson, the city’s mayor, created an “ICE-free zone” through an executive order.
This year, similar actions have been taken in Oakland,
San Jose and Richmond, California;
Los Angeles county;
Washtenaw county, Michigan;
Providence, Rhode Island;
New York City; and New Jersey.
⭐️Making it easier to sue ICE agents over misconduct
After an ICE agent shot and killed the Minneapolis resident Renee Good last month,
JD Vance claimed that ICE agents have “absolute immunity”.
While some legal experts have said this is not true, accountability has remained difficult to achieve.
(Good’s killer has not been arrested, nor have the federal agents who shot and killed Alex Pretti, another Minneapolis resident, last month.)
To make it easier, officials in cities including Chicago and Philadelphia are proposing new ways to facilitate lawsuits against ICE agents.
In January, Chicago’s mayor commanded city police to document federal immigration agents “to set the groundwork to prosecute ICE and border patrol agents for criminal misconduct”.
This kind of evidence could be used in cases when residents are injured or charged with a crime by immigration agents.
The case of Marimar Martinez,
a teacher who was shot five times by ICE agents in Chicago, shows how this evidence could be useful.
While agents claimed she drove into them and the Department of Justice pursued charges against her,
body-camera footage contradicted the administration’s story.
The charges were ultimately dropped, and Martinez successfully sued in federal court to have other evidence released.
Meanwhile in Philadelphia, the district attorney, Larry Krasner, and a group of prosecutors from across the US have formed a coalition called the
"Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach" ( #Fafo ) to “share strategies and best practices” for prosecuting federal agents when they break state laws.
Members of the Fafo coalition include district attorneys from cities such as Minneapolis;
Austin and Dallas, Texas;
Arlington, Virginia;
and Pima county, Arizona.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/16/cities-anti-ice-tactics?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-02-15 17:03:59 UTC

From claims that Jews kill children to make matzo, to accusations that immigrants in Ohio are devouring neighbors’ pets,
the myth of the blood libel is a nightmare that never ends
https://www.openmindmag.org/articles/the-worst-story-ever-told

2026-02-15 04:59:53 UTC

Meta is putting a "Name Tag" feature in Ray-Bans
- facial recognition through the glasses' camera.
You look at someone, AI tells you who they are.
In an internal document, the company wrote that the timing is good
because civil society groups are busy with politics
and won't cause problems.
https://bsky.app/profile/lukaszolejnik.bsky.social/post/3metjqikqps2n

2026-02-15 04:43:14 UTC

In a secret deportation arrangement,
the Trump administration flew nine people, nearly all of whom had been granted U.S. court protections from being sent back to their home countries,
to the African nation of Cameroon in January.
None of them are from Cameroon, according to government documents obtained by The New York Times and lawyers for the deportees,
and the United States has not made any public deal with Cameroon to accept deportees who hail from other nations.
Several of the men and women deported
— whose cases have not been previously reported
— told The Times they did not know they were being sent to Cameroon until they were handcuffed and chained on a Department of Homeland Security flight leaving Alexandria, La., on Jan. 14.
Cameroon’s Ministry of External Affairs declined to comment when reached by phone, and the State Department said it would not comment on its “diplomatic communications with other governments” when asked about the terms of an agreement.
Most of those migrants and their lawyers say they have been detained since then
at a state-owned compound in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital.
They say they’ve been told by local authorities that they cannot leave the facility unless they agree to return to their home countries, from which they fled to escape war or persecution.
As far as is known, the deportations are the first such expulsions to Cameroon.
They highlight the extraordinary secrecy that surrounds Trump’s global deportation effort.
Through murky deals forged with willing governments
— often in exchange for cash
— the U.S. has deported hundreds of people to foreign countries that may not respect the removal protections they have been granted in U.S. courts,
returning them to the dangers they fled.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/14/world/africa/us-secret-deportation-cameroon.html?unlocked_article_code=1.MVA.jHqR.KJcoPMA1-P89&smid=nytcore-ios-share

2026-02-15 00:26:52 UTC

Minnesota is an anathema to the Trump administration.
“He’s attacking Minnesota because of Minnesota’s virtue,” said Keith Ellison, the state’s attorney general
It’s a midwestern state that hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972,
including the three times it voted against Donald Trump.
A strong and growing
Scandinavian-style social safety net
and welcoming culture to immigrants
has attracted populations from around the world over the last few generations, including the largest Somali population outside Somalia.
The state is a refuge for trans people and abortion access.
It has high levels of civic engagement,
regularly ranking at or near the top for voter turnout.
It is a donor state, sending more money to the federal government than it receives.
It has higher organized labor participation rates than the national average.
Minneapolis, its largest city, ignited the nationwide 2020 protests over police brutality and racism after a police officer killed George Floyd.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/14/why-minnesota-ice-crackdown-trump?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

2026-02-14 23:49:12 UTC

Office of Budget and Management Director Russell Vought killed USAID, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths,
and is now using the money he “saved” to bankroll his security detail.
A Reuters report Friday states that the Project 2025 architect who promised to put federal employees “in trauma”
is spending $15 million of former USAID funding
—money that would have gone toward fighting HIV, polio, malaria, and other diseases
—to pay his U.S. Marshal security through the end of the year.
One source told Reuters that Vought has more than a dozen U.S. marshals in his security detail.
While Vought allegedly faced a threat on his life last month,
the irony of the man who ripped disease-fighting funding away from some of the most at-risk people in the world only to use it to beef up his personal bodyguard staff is impossible to ignore.
This is yet another example of Trump officials’ questionable personal spending habits.
On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Homeland Security
is leasing a $70 million jet that Secretary Kristi Noem and her alleged boyfriend Corey Lewandowski use to travel in luxury.
And what’s up with that $400 million White House ballroom?
https://newrepublic.com/post/206559/russ-vought-usaid-funds-security

2026-02-13 03:55:01 UTC

A photograph taken during U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s combative appearance before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday
suggests that the Justice Department has been tracking the search history of lawmakers who are combing through the unredacted Epstein files.
As Bondi launched into various tirades against lawmakers, photojournalists managed to snag a picture of her notes,
showcasing that her paperwork included the search history of Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington).
Jayapal was one of many lawmakers who visited the Department of Justice (DOJ) this week to determine the motivation behind the agency’s numerous alarming redaction errors in the rollout of the Epstein files,
which improperly revealed the identities of dozens of Epstein’s victims while concealing the names of many of his associates.
The paper in Bondi’s binder included a list of at least eight documents that Jaypal had examined from the Epstein files, including file numbers and descriptions.
https://truthout.org/articles/bondis-paperwork-at-epstein-hearing-suggests-trumps-doj-is-spying-on-congress/

2026-02-12 03:32:11 UTC

Pam Bondi lashes out as lawmakers press her on Epstein, cases against Trump foes
Attorney General Pam Bondi combatively defended her leadership at the Justice Department to House lawmakers on Wednesday
amid sharp criticism that she botched the release of the Epstein files and has wielded the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency to heed Donald Trump’s calls to prosecute his political foes. 
In exchange after exchange,
Bondi lobbed brash insults when Democratic lawmakers questioned her decisions
and repeatedly portrayed the expansive Justice Department as unfairly maligned by Democrats and those who dislike Trump.
 In her opening remarks before the House Judiciary Committee,
Bondi — highlighting her allegiance to the president — thanked Trump for his investment in fighting violent crime
and said the Justice Department is working to advance the president’s priorities.
The attorney general blamed the Biden administration for politicizing the department and, echoing claims from conservative activists, said it is fighting against “liberal activist judges” working to stymie the president’s agenda.  “America has never seen this level of coordinated judicial opposition to a presidential administration,” Bondi said.  Wednesday’s hearing played out at a pivotal moment for the Justice Department,
which in recent months has drawn criticism from Democrats and others over its handling of the congressionally compelled release of millions of documents from its investigation of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein,
its deployment of thousands of agents across the country to assist in immigration enforcement
and its continued efforts to prosecute Trump’s perceived political adversaries.
 The attorney general did not buckle in her defense of the department and frequently attempted to shift attention to its efforts to reduce violent crime, a topic that earned her praise from Republicans.
 Bondi came armed with scripted insults for Democrats.
 “I’m not going to get in the gutter with these people,” Bondi said repeatedly
in response to pointed questions.
She lashed out when the committee’s top Democrat,
Rep. Jamie Raskin, directed her to respond to the panel’s inquiries.
 “You don’t tell me anything,
you washed-up loser lawyer,” she said.
“You’re not even a lawyer.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/02/11/bondi-house-hearing-epstein-crime/

2026-02-11 16:28:32 UTC

Pam Bondi has accused the Democrats of “theatrics.”
-- But the attorney general has been, by far, the loudest voice in the hearing room.
She has insulted several Democrats and has been repeatedly, if gently,
blocked by Jim Jordan, a Republican and the chairman of the judiciary committee, from shouting over her questioners.
Under pressure from Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat,
Bondi refuses to apologize over her actions in the case to victims of Jeffrey Epstein who are in the hearing room.
Bondi, who appeared caught off guard, pivoted to attack Jayapal for trying to drag her “into the gutter.”
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02/11/us/trump-news?smid=nytcore-ios-share