Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

As Dershowitz claims Epstein wasn’t a pedophile, Marjorie Taylor Greene pushes back against Trump

As Dershowitz claims Epstein wasn’t a pedophile, Marjorie Taylor Greene pushes back against Trump

The Daily Beast reports: Emeritus Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz entered the latest public spat around the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his friendship with President Donald Trump by arguing that Epstein wasn’t all that bad. Speaking with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation on Friday, Dershowitz thought it prudent to clarify the nature of Epstein’s crimes. “The predecessor on your show described Epstein as a convicted pedophile,” Dershowitz complained to Cuomo. “[Epstein] pleaded guilty to one count of having sex…

Read More Read More

Latino U.S. citizens targeted through racial profiling by federal immigration agents in Chicago

Latino U.S. citizens targeted through racial profiling by federal immigration agents in Chicago

Chicago Tribune reports: When a masked man grabbed Ernesto Diaz’s left shoulder and slammed him against a vehicle, he thought he was being robbed. Diaz, 23, had been walking down Archer Avenue on the Southwest Side in late September, heading toward the CTA Orange Line for a trip downtown. Earbuds in, he was listening to music and said he barely registered the vehicle that pulled up near him. That was until he felt the pain in his shoulder. Diaz felt…

Read More Read More

As ICE escalates its tactics, are federal agents truly ‘untouchable’ in the eyes of the law?

As ICE escalates its tactics, are federal agents truly ‘untouchable’ in the eyes of the law?

CNN analysis: Mere hours after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot a suspect last month – wounding a member of the arrest team in the process – the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles effectively exonerated the agent who opened fire. “PSA: A vehicle is a deadly weapon,” First Assistant US Attorney Bill Essayli wrote in a social media post. “Using it against law enforcement justifies their use of deadly force in self-defense.” Essayli alleged the man who was…

Read More Read More

Trump likely to face long military commitment and chaos if he ousts Maduro in Venezuela

Trump likely to face long military commitment and chaos if he ousts Maduro in Venezuela

CNN reports: President Donald Trump has said he believes Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s days are numbered, and that land strikes inside Venezuela are possible. Experts say that the US doesn’t currently have the military assets in place to launch a largescale operation to remove Maduro from power, though Trump has approved covert action within Venezuela, CNN has reported. But if Trump did order strikes inside Venezuela aimed at ousting Maduro, he could face serious challenges with fractured opposition elements and…

Read More Read More

Michael Wolff’s questionable explanation for cozying up to Jeffrey Epstein

Michael Wolff’s questionable explanation for cozying up to Jeffrey Epstein

David A. Graham writes: In her classic book The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm studied how the author Joe McGinniss buttered up the accused killer Jeffrey MacDonald—formally joining his legal-defense team and sending fawningly supportive letters after his conviction—only to turn around and publish a scathing book portraying him as a sociopath. Observing McGinniss’s approach, Malcolm draws a distinction between the reporting phase, when a journalist courts her subject, and the writing phase, when she betrays them. Many reporters…

Read More Read More

He’s called ‘Little Trump’ and he’s making enemies in the White House

He’s called ‘Little Trump’ and he’s making enemies in the White House

The Wall Street Journal reports: Bill Pulte marched into the Oval Office this summer and delivered one of his signature performances. Pulte, who heads the Federal Housing Finance Agency, told the president he had identified leakers who were undermining the administration. He was carrying a “Ghostbusters”-style poster that featured pictures of administration officials and outside allies, outlined by red circles with lines through their faces, according to officials familiar with the meeting. For many in the West Wing, it was…

Read More Read More

Massive new dream database reveals clues about consciousness during sleep

Massive new dream database reveals clues about consciousness during sleep

PsyPost reports: An international collaboration of scientists has created the largest-ever public database of brain activity recordings and accompanying dream reports. In a first analysis of this resource, the researchers confirmed that dreaming is not exclusive to the rapid eye movement stage of sleep, finding that when conscious experiences occur in deeper sleep, the brain exhibits patterns of activity that more closely resemble wakefulness. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications. For millennia, dreams have been a source…

Read More Read More

Judges whose careers were all forged in the embers of Watergate have had it with Trump

Judges whose careers were all forged in the embers of Watergate have had it with Trump

Politico reports: When Donald Trump moved on his first day back in office to strip birthright citizenship from children born in the U.S. to some immigrant parents, U.S. District Judge John Coughenour called the newly inaugurated president a threat to the rule of law. Days after Trump mass-pardoned Jan. 6 defendants who attacked the Capitol, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth warned that for the first time in his career, “meritless justifications of criminal activity have gone mainstream.” And in September,…

Read More Read More

In the Epstein emails, no one is named more often than Trump himself

In the Epstein emails, no one is named more often than Trump himself

Miami Herald reports: Donald Trump is mentioned in Jeffrey Epstein’s emails over 1,000 times — the most cited person in the tranche released this week by the House Oversight Committee. Despite all the questions the emails have raised about his relationship with Epstein, Trump on Friday continued to fan the flames of the scandal. On his social media platform “Truth Social,” Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate some of the influential figures named in the emails. “I will…

Read More Read More

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene blasts Trump’s Epstein focus

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene blasts Trump’s Epstein focus

Politico reports: Donald Trump says Marjorie Taylor Greene has lost her way. Greene disagrees. The Republican firebrand, once one of the president’s strongest Capitol Hill allies, says it’s the president who is off course. He shouldn’t be trying to stop the release of the Epstein files, when so many of his most ardent followers are struggling to pay the bills. “It’s insanely the wrong direction to go,” Greene told POLITICO. “The five-alarm fire is health care and affordability for Americans….

Read More Read More

U.S. Catholic bishops take stand against Trump immigration policy, winning praise at churches

U.S. Catholic bishops take stand against Trump immigration policy, winning praise at churches

The Los Angeles Times reports: For the first time in 12 years, U.S. Catholic bishops have issued a unified statement to support the country’s immigrants and oppose the Trump administration’s “indiscriminate mass deportations of people.” The move solidified their support for immigrants — long a vital part of the U.S. Catholic Church — amid a year of unprecedented upheaval. It also continues a long tradition of the church as an institution of support for those in the country illegally that…

Read More Read More

Firm tied to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem secretly got money from $220 million DHS ad contracts

Firm tied to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem secretly got money from $220 million DHS ad contracts

By Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski This story was originally published by ProPublica On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.”  Noem has hailed the more than $200 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign as a crucial tool to…

Read More Read More

‘Big Short’ investor betting $1 billion against the AI bubble says Meta and Oracle’s accounting is hiding the brutal truth

‘Big Short’ investor betting $1 billion against the AI bubble says Meta and Oracle’s accounting is hiding the brutal truth

Fortune reports: “It’ll happen slowly, and then all at once.” That’s how Jim Morrow, founder and chief investment officer of Callodine Capital, describes the eventual – inevitable – unwinding of what he calls “the most crowded trade in history.” Of course, he isn’t just paraphrasing Ernest Hemingway—he’s talking about the AI race, and the trillion-dollar deals so overstretched they’re better described as knots than trades. And he’s not alone in sounding alarms. Michael Burry—the investor of Big Short fame who…

Read More Read More

‘I lost everything’: Venezuelans were rounded up in a dramatic midnight raid but never charged with a crime

‘I lost everything’: Venezuelans were rounded up in a dramatic midnight raid but never charged with a crime

By Melissa Sanchez, Jodi S. Cohen, T. Christian Miller, Sebastian Rotella and Mariam Elba This story was originally published by ProPublica On the night of the raid, heavily armed federal agents zip-tied Jhonny Manuel Caicedo Fereira’s hands behind his back, marched him out of his Chicago apartment building and put him against a wall to question him. As a Black Hawk helicopter roared overhead, the slender, 28-year-old immigrant from Venezuela answered softly, his eyes darting to a television crew invited…

Read More Read More