ICE raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar shows how dangerous two years of flailing Trump could get

ICE raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar shows how dangerous two years of flailing Trump could get

Natasha Lennard writes: In the mode of historic fascist regimes, President Donald Trump’s administration sent federal agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to raid the home of a political opponent, singled out for her race and religion, in a transparent effort to strip her of her citizenship. On Monday, agents with Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s investigative wing, conducted a search of the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., with federal officials describing the incursion as part of…

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Admiral McRaven: Public execution is shameless and ignoble

Admiral McRaven: Public execution is shameless and ignoble

William H. McRaven, a retired United States Navy four-star admiral, writes: A 62-grain, 5.56-mm round leaves the barrel of a standard-issue M4 rifle at approximately 2,900 feet per second. When it strikes a human being, the results are violent, traumatic, and unpredictable. If Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has his way, such images will soon be broadcast to the American people. The Pentagon has announced that the execution of Nidal Hasan, the Army officer convicted of killing 13 fellow service members…

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Trump’s actions over the past 72 hours look like an effort to force Kyiv to surrender

Trump’s actions over the past 72 hours look like an effort to force Kyiv to surrender

Anne Applebaum writes: In the past 72 hours, Donald Trump has dropped all pretense, torched a couple decades of American policy, and undermined 18 months of his own diplomacy. He lifted sanctions on the import of Russian diesel fuel, in violation of the letter and spirit of laws that he himself signed. He has threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, unless Ukraine agrees not to target Russian refineries, thus demanding that Kyiv give up its most effective weapon while…

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They came to Washington to dismantle government. Now, they’re profiting from it

They came to Washington to dismantle government. Now, they’re profiting from it

The Washington Post reports: Last year, billionaire Elon Musk unleashed a small army of Silicon Valley techies to drain what he called the “swamp” of Washington — wielding the U.S. DOGE Service to slash at a bureaucracy they argued was bloated and corrupt. But today, many of his former DOGE foot soldiers have leveraged their government stints to fuel private-sector ambitions: building companies that tap government largesse or that deploy knowledge they garnered during their brief tenures in Washington. A…

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Musk has spent $366 million to try and avoid facing Congressional investigations

Musk has spent $366 million to try and avoid facing Congressional investigations

Reuters reports: Elon Musk has spent roughly $366 million on the 2026 midterm elections so far, $276 million just since July, trying to help Republicans retain control of ​Congress, even as Democrats’ chances of retaking the US House and Senate ‌have improved. Musk’s largess, which was reported earlier by the New York Times, makes the world’s richest person likely the single-biggest political donor in this year’s races, according to campaign finance records. There is a ​lot at stake for Musk…

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Solar panels that plug into your wall are about to take off

Solar panels that plug into your wall are about to take off

National Geographic reports: On a quiet street in suburban South Salt Lake City, Utah, the stirring of an energy revolution is taking shape. There, outside the spare bedroom of an unassuming, thousand-square-foot midcentury home sit three angled solar panels plugged into a nearby outlet. Unlike the highly technical and expensive hurdles required to install a large rooftop solar system, the setup on Andrew Leon and Victoria Mauro’s lawn is small, portable, and cheap. The unit generates enough electricity to run…

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‘I didn’t want to write about this’: The primatologist who first saw chimps waging civil war

‘I didn’t want to write about this’: The primatologist who first saw chimps waging civil war

The Guardian reports: [John] Mitani [a primatologist from northern California] estimates he has spent 85 months of his life hiking the forests of Ngogo [in Uganda’s Kibale national park], or approximately seven years. What began as a few basic structures and tents has grown into a large – albeit rustic – research camp that has housed the nearly 90 researchers who have worked with the Ngogo project over three decades. The findings that have emerged from Ngogo over the years…

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David Krakauer: ‘What we have to cultivate is amazing question-askers’

David Krakauer: ‘What we have to cultivate is amazing question-askers’

  Why did intelligence evolve in the universe? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, and Gary O’Reilly explore the nature of intelligence, information theory, consciousness, and whether AI is actually intelligent at all with David Krakauer, evolutionary biologist and president of the Santa Fe Institute. Can you conceive of life without intelligence, or intelligence without life? We parse the difference between intelligence and being alive and whether you can be one without the other. What does it mean for something to…

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Censorship enforced in Texas universities goes beyond even the repression of the McCarthy era

Censorship enforced in Texas universities goes beyond even the repression of the McCarthy era

Adam Serwer writes: Sara Spurgeon, an English professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, has been teaching literature for 20 years. But preparing for the spring 2026 semester was the first time she was forced to submit her course materials through a portal to be evaluated by an artificial-intelligence program. It flags anything that might violate new rules laid out by the university chancellor, including a prohibition on the “advocacy/promotion of race or sex-based prejudice,” and a requirement—now Texas state…

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DHS secretary says livestreaming Hasan execution is part of ‘restoring American values’

DHS secretary says livestreaming Hasan execution is part of ‘restoring American values’

The Hill reports: Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin stood behind the Trump administration’s decision to livestream the military execution of convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, despite growing bipartisan criticism over the plan. In an interview with CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Mullin dismissed concerns coming from across party lines that publicizing Hasan’s death by firing squad could inspire extremists or turn the convicted mass murderer into a martyr. “First of all, no one has…

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As Trump’s wall closes in, DHS intimidates a border tribe with surveillance, masked agents and drones

As Trump’s wall closes in, DHS intimidates a border tribe with surveillance, masked agents and drones

ProPublica reports: At 4:59 a.m. on Aug. 25, Verlon Jose, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation in Southern Arizona, received an email from the head of the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector. Government contractors were en route to conduct soil tests for construction of a 62-mile wall along the Nation’s southern boundary, wrote acting chief patrol agent Henry N. Laxdal. If the tribe wished to have cultural monitors observe the work, they were welcome to, but they could not…

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How a series of miscalculations restarted Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen

How a series of miscalculations restarted Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen

CNN reports: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman wanted to make his kingdom a magnet for investment, tourism and the world’s biggest sporting events. Now drones and missiles launched from Yemen are slamming into Saudi cities, drawing the kingdom deeper into the regional turmoil he hoped to leave behind. The civil war in Yemen erupted once again this summer and significantly intensified last month, breaking years of relative calm. Saudi Arabia has for 11 years tried to contain the conflict…

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Africa has become the testing ground for an intrusive eye that never blinks

Africa has become the testing ground for an intrusive eye that never blinks

Reporting from Kampala, Uganda, Megan K. Stack writes: Plainclothes thugs frog-marching a radio commentator from the microphone mid-broadcast. An opposition activist dying after reportedly being barricaded in his house, which was then set on fire. Security forces raiding a powerful independent media company, cutting electricity and imposing a monthlong closure. A reign of terror grips Uganda. Specifically, the reign of Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the country’s belligerent and erratic military chief, who also happens to be the only son of Yoweri…

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A Florida local newspaper ran an op-ed. It was an Iranian fake using OpenAI

A Florida local newspaper ran an op-ed. It was an Iranian fake using OpenAI

The Washington Post reports: “The bill will follow Americans beyond the fighting itself,” an opinion piece in the Port St. Joe Star, a tiny Florida weekly newspaper, warned of the Iran war last month. The article ran under the byline Ervin Hoskins, which has also appeared on articles critical of the war in larger publications including Daily Kos and Middle East Monitor, which together have more than 3 million followers on Facebook. But ChatGPT maker OpenAI said Thursday that Hoskins’s…

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