Music: Chip Wickham — ‘Lost Souls’
The Kremlin pitched the White House on peace through business. Trump and his cronies are on board
The Wall Street Journal reports: Three powerful businessmen—two Americans and a Russian—hunched over a laptop in Miami Beach last month, ostensibly to draw up a plan to end Russia’s long and deadly war with Ukraine. But the full scope of their project went much further, according to people familiar with the talks. They were privately charting a path to bring Russia’s $2 trillion economy in from the cold—with American businesses first in line to beat European competitors to the dividends….
Trump plans to pardon an ex-president who flooded America with cocaine
The New York Times reports: He once boasted that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” He accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo to allow cocaine shipments to pass through Honduras. A man was killed in prison to protect him. At the federal trial of Juan Orlando Hernández in New York, testimony and evidence showed how the former president maintained Honduras as a bastion of the global drug trade. He orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy that…
Trump frees executive who defrauded thousands of investors, just days into seven-year prison sentence
The New York Times reports: President Trump has set free a private equity executive who had served less than two weeks of a seven-year sentence for his role in what prosecutors described as a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded thousands of victims. David Gentile, 59, a onetime resident of Nassau County, N.Y., had reported to prison on Nov. 14, and was released on Wednesday, according to Bureau of Prisons records and a White House official who was not authorized to…
Inside the White House, David Sacks represents the ‘technocratic oligarchy’
The New York Times reports: In July, David Sacks, one of the Trump administration’s top technology officials, beamed as he strode onstage at a neoclassical auditorium just blocks from the White House. He had convened top government officials and Silicon Valley executives for a forum on the booming business of artificial intelligence. The guest of honor was President Trump, who unveiled an “A.I. Action Plan” that was drafted in part by Mr. Sacks, a longtime venture capitalist. In a nearly…
The Trump kleptocracy
Tom Burgis writes: A crusading prosecutor in the Balkans comes under pressure to drop a big case. Vietnamese villagers learn they are to be evicted. A convicted crypto kingpin in the Gulf receives a pardon. All have one thing in common: they appear to be connected to the Trump family’s campaign to amass riches around the world. Since Donald Trump’s re-election a year ago, warnings that his use of presidential power to advance personal interests is corroding American democracy have…
‘The precedent is Flint’: How Oregon’s data center boom is supercharging a water crisis
Rolling Stone reports: In the spring of 2022, Jim Doherty kept having the same conversation with folks at the only grocery store in Boardman, his eastern Oregon hometown, or at the grain depot where he picked up food for his four ranch dogs. Healthy adults that these people knew were coming down with unexplained medical conditions, including diseases and cancers that usually afflicted the elderly. “It was kinda grim,” Doherty says. Sixty years old, broad-chested, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, Doherty…
Colleges are preparing to self destruct by inserting AI into the educational process
Michael Clune writes: After three years of doing essentially nothing to address the rise of generative AI, colleges are now scrambling to do too much. Over the summer, Ohio State University, where I teach, announced a new initiative promising to “embed AI education into the core of every undergraduate curriculum, equipping students with the ability to not only use AI tools, but to understand, question and innovate with them—no matter their major.” Similar initiatives are being rolled out at other…
Music: corto.alto — ‘VANDAL’ ft. Moses Yoofee
Without any authority to do so, Trump declares Venezuelan airspace closed
The New York Times reports: President Trump warned airlines and pilots on Saturday that the airspace near Venezuela was closed, ratcheting up what his administration has characterized as a war against drug cartels. In a post on social media to “all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers,” the president wrote that the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela should be considered “CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.” Mr. Trump did not go into further detail in his post, but it came after…
Under Hegseth’s direction, Special Operations Forces apparently committed murder
Jack Goldsmith, former head of the Office of Legal Counsel, writes: [T]here can be no conceivable legal justification for what the Washington Post reported earlier today: That U.S. Special Operations Forces killed the survivors of a first strike on a drug boat off the coast of Trinidad who, in the Post’s words, “were clinging to the smoldering wreck.” Section 5.4.7 of the DOD Law of War Manual says: Prohibition Against Declaring That No Quarter Be Given. It is forbidden to…
Trump, antidrug crusader, pardons convicted drug trafficker (because presidents always deserve pardons)
The New York Times reports: President Trump and his top aides have said that drug cartels present one of the most pressing dangers to the United States, and have promised to eradicate them from the Western Hemisphere. As part of that effort, Mr. Trump signaled on Saturday that he was ratcheting up his campaign against drug cartels, saying in a social media post that airspace above and surrounding Venezuela should be considered “CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.” Less than 24 hours…
New York’s political shift happened across the state from suburbs to rural areas
Politico reports: Zohran Mamdani’s decisive win in New York City — along with key victories in New Jersey and Virginia — suggested Democrats are headed into the midterms from a position of strength. But they didn’t capture how deep that strength ran. Across suburbs, rural counties and small towns in New York, Democrats posted electoral gains that rival — and in many cases surpass — the party’s 2017 “Blue Wave.” In a state with enough competitive House races to decide…
AI-powered surveillance firms are gunning for a share of the Gaza spoils
Sophia Goodfriend writes: Since mid-October, some 200 U.S. military personnel have been working out of a sprawling warehouse in southern Israel, around 20 kilometers from the northern tip of the Gaza Strip. The Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) was ostensibly set up to facilitate the implementation of President Donald Trump’s 20-point “peace plan” — whose stated aims are to “disarm Hamas,” “rebuild Gaza,” and lay the groundwork for “Palestinian self-determination and statehood” — which last week received the endorsement of the…
Nature can bounce back if we just give it a chance
Emma Marris writes: When the last of four dams on the Klamath River in southern Oregon and Northern California was demolished in October 2024, everyone who knew the river well had a question: How long would it take for salmon to reclaim the upper reaches they’d been cut off from for more than 100 years? About 10 months later, when they began their fall migration, Chinook salmon immediately took advantage of their new river access, looking for places upstream to…
Europeans were dark skinned until just 3,000 years ago
ZME Science reports: The textbook assumption is that when the first modern humans arrived in Europe, around 45,000 years ago, they quickly evolved pale skin to adapt to the region’s dimmer sunlight relative to Africa. The logic seemed straightforward: lighter skin allows more ultraviolet light to penetrate, helping the body produce vitamin D, a nutrient essential for human health. However, a study of ancient DNA challenges this long-held assumption. By analyzing the genomes of 348 individuals who lived between 45,000…