How aggressive immigration tactics swept up American citizens
A video analysis of one early morning raid in Los Angeles revealed the vast web of consequences brought by new aggressive Border Patrol tactics.
Inside CECOT: The 60 Minutes story the Trump administration doesn’t want you to see
Sen. Cory Booker: “This is a 60 Minutes Story about how the Trump administration violated our constitution and people’s basic human dignity. Acting like this does nothing to make us safer, and in fact only makes it more likely that American citizens are put at risk.”
Trump regime rewards tech fascists with travel bans on European tech regulators and researchers
The New York Times reports: The Trump administration is barring five prominent Europeans from the United States, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Tuesday, accusing them of being involved in online censorship of Americans, a claim they have disputed. The action sharply escalated the administration’s fight against European efforts to monitor content on major social media platforms, including Elon Musk’s X as well as Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Meta. The five include Thierry Breton, a former member…
DOGE isn’t dead
Wired reports: Since the beginning of the Trump administration, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the brainchild of billionaire Elon Musk, has gone through several iterations, leading periodically to claims—most recently from the director of the Office of Personnel Management—that the group doesn’t exist, or has vanished altogether. But DOGE isn’t dead. Many of its original members are in full-time roles at various government agencies, and the new National Design Studio (NDS) is headed by Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia,…
Charlie Kirk’s memory is the only thing uniting Turning Point USA
Joe Lowndes writes: The first time I came across TPUSA was at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where I met a pair of bespectacled college students wearing matching light blue T-shirts that read “Socialism Sucks.” When I asked them about the shirts, the Turning Point representatives told me that their main concern was limited government and the free market. They did not have many allies in what was, at that time, a right-wing populist revolt in the party,…
Music: Snarky Puppy & Metropole Orkest — ‘Recurrent’
JD Vance pretends almost no Americans are antisemitic
The Times of Israel reports: US Vice President JD Vance claimed in an interview on Sunday that almost no Americans are antisemitic and that concerns about antisemitic voices are raised as a way to avoid discussing “a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy” on Israel. In the interview with the publication Unherd, Vance also downplayed concerns about Nick Fuentes, the popular far-right antisemitic podcaster, and said that Christianity is “very much at the heart” of America’s…
Neo-Nazi terror group, the Base, steps up U.S. operations as FBI pulls back
The Guardian reports: Amid high-profile arrests in its Spanish cell, the American-born and designated neo-Nazi terrorist group the Base – once a major preoccupation of FBI counter-terrorism efforts – has all but faded from US headlines. But a flurry of online activities shows the group is still active stateside and considers the US an operational nerve center. Headed by Rinaldo Nazzaro, an ex-Pentagon contractor turned alleged Russian intelligence asset, the Base has been busy of late pursuing European expansion: besides…
In Congress and at home, Ilhan Omar faces Trump’s anti-Somali racist attacks
The New York Times reports: When Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, became an American citizen in 2000, she viewed her U.S. passport with pride. But ever since President Trump was first elected in 2016, she said, she has come to view it as a “document of safety.” “I have carried my passport with me since he first became president,” Ms. Omar, a Somali-born refugee who emigrated to the United States when she was 12, said in an interview on…
Trump’s shuttering of the National Center for Atmospheric Research is Stalinist
Michael Mann and Bob Ward write: The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin would no doubt have understood and even appreciated the latest attack by the Trump administration on climate researchers and their work. The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, is to be dismantled after more than 50 years at the forefront of global research on climate science and monitoring. This is the latest step in the administration’s climate Lysenkoism and its relentless purge of climate researchers who…
CBS and CNN are being sacrificed to Trump
Franklin Foer writes: The fate of Warner Bros. Discovery is no longer a regulatory matter. It is a medieval tournament, in which the king invites rival bidders to compete for his approval. To acquire the media company, the aspirants—Paramount and Netflix—will have to offer a sacrifice: Whoever can damage CNN the most stands to walk away with the prize. This is one of those moments in Donald Trump’s presidency when an event that would otherwise be recognized as a death…
The genocides The New York Times forgot
Zachary Jablow writes: In the winter of 1981, six years into Indonesia’s occupation of the island nation East Timor, The New York Times Magazine published a report about the island that may as well have been written about Gaza any time since October 7th, 2023. Referring to the relatively small groups in the United States protesting their government’s role in the occupation, correspondent Henry Kamm wrote, “There is substance to these protests, even if, at their most extreme, they degenerate into hyperbole—accusations of ‘genocide’ rather…
The universe may be lopsided – new research
By Subir Sarkar, University of Oxford The shape of the universe is not something we often think about. But my colleagues and I have published a new study suggests it could be asymmetric or lopsided, meaning not the same in every direction. Should we care about this? Well, today’s “standard cosmological model” – which describes the dynamics and structure of the entire cosmos – rests squarely on the assumption that it is isotropic (looks the same in all directions), and…
Music: Snarky Puppy & Metropole Orkest — ‘It Stays With You’
U.S. oil blockade of Venezuela is pushing Cuba toward economic collapse
The Wall Street Journal reports: Cubans are going hungry, suffering from spreading disease and sleeping outdoors with no electricity to power fans through the sweltering nights. A quarter of the population has fled during the island’s most prolonged economic crisis. And it’s about to get worse. The U.S. is ratcheting up pressure on Havana’s key benefactor, Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro’s regime, which has kept the Communist-ruled nation afloat with cheap oil. Now Venezuelan oil exports are at risk thanks to…
Tucker Carlson at center of raging battle for MAGA’s future
The Washington Post reports: Tucker Carlson had some concerns. So he called President Donald Trump. The right-wing podcaster and provocateur wanted to understand why the U.S. was attacking alleged drug smuggling boats off the coast of Venezuela, and he warned against pursuing regime change there — a prospect that has alarmed the more isolationist “America First” Republicans in Trump’s movement. The conversations last weekend, which Carlson recalled in an interview, show how the Fox News castoff is at the center…