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Columbia shakedown sets precedent for Trump regime to extract massive payments from other universities

Columbia shakedown sets precedent for Trump regime to extract massive payments from other universities

The Wall Street Journal reports: The White House is seeking fines from several universities it says failed to stop antisemitism on campus, including hundreds of millions of dollars from Harvard University, in exchange for allowing the schools to access federal funding, according to a person familiar with the matter. The deal that the Trump administration struck with Columbia University on Wednesday is now a blueprint for negotiations with other universities, a White House official said. Columbia agreed to pay $200…

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DOJ whistleblower, Erez Reuveni, speaks out

DOJ whistleblower, Erez Reuveni, speaks out

  An explosive whistle-blower report claims that the Justice Department is asking government lawyers to lie to the courts, and that this has forced career officials to chose between upholding the Constitution and pledging loyalty to the president. Rachel Abrams speaks to the whistle-blower about his career in the Justice Department and his complaint saying he was fired for telling the truth.

Emperor Trump gets disrobed by ‘South Park’

Emperor Trump gets disrobed by ‘South Park’

  Calder McHugh writes: They said last year they were done with Donald Trump. They didn’t know what more they could say about him. But in the return to the airwaves of Comedy Central stalwart South Park — the first episode since March 2023 — the creators of the irreverent, long-running cartoon series just couldn’t resist. Trump is skewered for his connections to Jeffrey Epstein, and he is depicted as a man who has lined the walls of the White…

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Hurricane Helene and subsequent cleanup efforts have decimated North America’s most biodiverse waters

Hurricane Helene and subsequent cleanup efforts have decimated North America’s most biodiverse waters

Inside Climate Change reports: In Knoxville, Tennessee, there’s a minuscule warehouse tucked off the side of the road. Its tiny gravel parking lot is full. In the back of the cramped, wood-paneled building are dozens of aquarium tanks filled with endangered, threatened, imperiled, and at-risk fish species. This is Conservation Fisheries Incorporated (CFI), a nonprofit dedicated to preserving Appalachian freshwater diversity. It began as a graduate school project in the 1980s and has grown into a conservation powerhouse. One of…

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How to see the cosmic web here on Earth

How to see the cosmic web here on Earth

Mark Neyrinck writes: The most familiar celestial objects, like Earth, the Moon and the Sun, are spheres. The solar system’s planets have orbits that are roughly circular, and zooming out a hundred-millionfold, the Milky Way is a flattened disk. But zooming out by a further factor of 1,000 from the Milky Way, to encompass our nearest non-satellite galaxy Andromeda, and dozens of others, the shapes look different. The arrangement may look haphazard, but it’s ordered in its own way, in…

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Israeli minister says his government is ‘rushing toward Gaza being wiped out’

Israeli minister says his government is ‘rushing toward Gaza being wiped out’

The New York Times reports: Amid rising starvation in the Gaza Strip, an Israeli government minister said on Thursday that Israel had no duty to alleviate hunger in the territory and was seeking to expel its population. Amichay Eliyahu, a far-right lawmaker who leads Israel’s Heritage Ministry, said in a radio interview that “there is no nation that feeds its enemies,” adding that “the British didn’t feed the Nazis, nor did the Americans feed the Japanese, nor do the Russians…

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Laura Loomer and Jewish MAGA’s dance with antisemitism

Laura Loomer and Jewish MAGA’s dance with antisemitism

Shane Burley writes: Joshua Shanes, the director of the Center for Israel Studies at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, says that while the rightward shift among American Jews (Orthodox Jews in particular) began in the 1980s, it has been supercharged under Trump. Yet he notes that there is a voluntary blindness within the community to the obvious antisemitism of the conspiratorial right. “American Jews don’t understand what actually threatens their lives,” Shanes told New Lines, adding that many…

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Columbia ‘deal’ with Trump regime amounts to a legally formulated extortion scheme

Columbia ‘deal’ with Trump regime amounts to a legally formulated extortion scheme

David Pozen writes: Earlier this evening, Columbia University announced an agreement with the Trump administration in which Columbia makes a host of concessions in order to restore its eligibility for federal funding. The agreement is already being described as “unprecedented,” “the first of its kind.” These descriptions are true but ambiguous, because the agreement breaks new ground on any number of levels. For instance, the agreement marks the first time that antisemitism and DEI have been invoked as the basis…

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The Supreme Court is now asking lower courts to do the impossible

The Supreme Court is now asking lower courts to do the impossible

Mark Joseph Stern writes: The Supreme Court expanded Donald Trump’s power yet again on Wednesday, granting him the authority to fire Democratic members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission in direct violation of federal law. Over the liberal justices’ dissent, the conservative supermajority greenlit the first step of Trump’s systematic destruction of the agency—a plan that collides with many other federal statutes. The court’s action imperils the CPSC’s ability to ban products that may maim or kill consumers, including children,…

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Trump’s AI strategy is set to benefit American tech companies and investors

Trump’s AI strategy is set to benefit American tech companies and investors

The Washington Post reports: Silicon Valley’s risky bet on President Donald Trump is starting to pay dividends. Trump on Wednesday revealed the White House’s plan to help the United States lead a global race to develop artificial intelligence. He also signed three executive orders that will facilitate exports of U.S. technologies and boost the build-out of data centers — advancing the agenda of executives and investors seeking to cash in on an AI gold rush. Trump delivered the plan at…

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An EPA rule change would eliminate the government’s ability to fight climate change

An EPA rule change would eliminate the government’s ability to fight climate change

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration has drafted a plan to repeal a fundamental scientific finding that gives the United States government its authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions and fight climate change, according to two people familiar with the plan. The proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule rescinds a 2009 declaration known as the “endangerment finding,” which scientifically established that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endanger human lives. That finding is the foundation of the federal government’s…

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Governments are legally required to address climate change, top global court says

Governments are legally required to address climate change, top global court says

Inside Climate News reports: Tuesday’s landmark advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on climate change came as residents of some island nations are already “scraping barnacles off our grandfathers’ graves” as sea-level rise accelerates, said Julian Aguon, an Indigenous human rights lawyer and writer from Guam, in a poem he recited outside the Peace Palace as the judges started their two-hour presentation. That sense of urgency for action also came through in the 15-judge panel’s unanimous opinion. The…

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As starvation grips Gaza, skeletal children fill hospital wards

As starvation grips Gaza, skeletal children fill hospital wards

The Guardian reports: Mohammed’s skeletal arms stick out of a romper with a grinning emoji-face and the slogan “smiley boy”, which in a Gaza hospital reads as a cruel joke. He spends much of the day crying from hunger, or gnawing at his own emaciated fingers. At seven months old, he weighs barely 4kg (9lbs) and this is the second time he has been admitted for treatment. His face is gaunt, his limbs little more than bones covered in baggy…

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Albuquerque takes the lead in standing up for immigrants

Albuquerque takes the lead in standing up for immigrants

City Desk ABQ reports: Mayor Tim Keller signed an executive order July 21 reaffirming Albuquerque as a city of refuge, directing police to help residents identify immigration agents and limiting city cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Unveiled at City Hall with immigrant advocates, city councilors and state leaders, the order puts new limits on how the city works with federal immigration enforcement. It tells police to clarify when immigration agents are in the area and bars city departments from helping…

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