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Glenn Kirschner & Lev Parnas: Trump is losing power and becoming more desperate to distract from Epstein

Glenn Kirschner & Lev Parnas: Trump is losing power and becoming more desperate to distract from Epstein

  Donald Trump is abusing the Department of Justice as his personal police to extract revenge against his enemies, silence his critics, and distract from the Epstein scandal. It’s not working. Wajahat Ali invited former federal prosecutor and Justice Matters host Glenn Kirschner to break down how utterly abnormal, inappropriate, and dangerous Trump’s abuse of the DOJ is, and why we cannot normalize his active steps towards authoritarianism. Later on, they were joined by former Trump fixer Lev Parnas, who…

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The FBI as we knew it is gone

The FBI as we knew it is gone

Asha Rangappa writes: In February, I wrote a piece for Substack called “A Battle for the Soul of the FBI.” That battle is (pretty much) over, and I’m sad to say that the FBI — at least the one we knew — lost. Weirdly, I’m writing this on the same evening that William Webster, the FBI’s third director, died at the age of 101, a little more than a century after the FBI’s first and longest-serving director, J. Edgar Hoover,…

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The Supreme Court has played a leading role in undermining democracy

The Supreme Court has played a leading role in undermining democracy

The New York Times reports: If Republicans succeed in pulling off an aggressively partisan gerrymander of congressional districts in Texas, they will owe the Supreme Court a debt of gratitude. In the two decades Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has led the Supreme Court, the justices have reshaped American elections not just by letting state lawmakers like those in Texas draw voting maps warped by politics, but also by gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and amplifying the…

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Palantir and other companies aiding Trump’s immigration crackdown see ‘extraordinary’ revenues

Palantir and other companies aiding Trump’s immigration crackdown see ‘extraordinary’ revenues

The Guardian reports: The tech, surveillance and private prison providers arming Donald Trump’s massive expansion and weaponization of immigration enforcement are running a victory lap after reporting their latest financial results. Palantir, the tech firm, and Geo Group and CoreCivic, the private prison and surveillance companies, said this week that they brought in more money than Wall Street expected them to, thanks to the administration’s crackdown on immigrants. “Well, as usual, I’ve been cautioned to be a little modest about…

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The secret tactics behind Stop the Steal and other right-wing disinformation campaigns

The secret tactics behind Stop the Steal and other right-wing disinformation campaigns

Caroline Orr Bueno writes: A sophisticated strategy is playing out in plain sight that few outside of digital war rooms truly understand or even notice. It doesn’t require hacking servers or bribing tech executives. It doesn’t even break any rules. It simply requires understanding exactly how algorithms work — and turning them into accomplices. I call this tactic the Feedback Loop Coup. Last week, I introduced the concept of Reverse Algorithmic Capture — a tactic used to force platforms to rewrite their…

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Intellectual humility is linked to less political and religious polarization across the board

Intellectual humility is linked to less political and religious polarization across the board

PsyPost reports: A new study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology indicates that people who score higher in intellectual humility tend to show less political and religious polarization — regardless of whether they are Republican, Democrat, Christian, or atheist. This link held across different measures, including both self-reported attitudes and behavioral indicators of hostility toward ideological outgroups, and often remained significant even after accounting for the strength of a person’s beliefs. Intellectual humility refers to the recognition that one’s…

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This is what the British government calls ‘terrorism’

This is what the British government calls ‘terrorism’

The Guardian reports: More than 450 people have been arrested in central London at the largest demonstration relating to Palestine Action since the group was proscribed as a terrorist organisation. The Metropolitan police said they had drawn officers from other forces to help form a “significant policing presence” in the capital before the planned event, which was anticipated to result in large numbers of people being detained. By Saturday afternoon, hundreds of people had gathered in Parliament Square for a…

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The uncomfortable fact about the stock market’s historic run is that no one is sure why it’s happening

The uncomfortable fact about the stock market’s historic run is that no one is sure why it’s happening

Rogé Karma writes: Can anything stop the stock market? The U.S. economy recently weathered the worst pandemic in 100 years, the worst inflation in 40 years, and the highest interest rates in 20 years. Yet from 2019 through 2024, the S&P 500 grew by an average of nearly 20 percent a year, about double its historical average rate. Despite President Donald Trump’s erratic economic policies, which include the highest tariffs since the 19th century, the market is already up by…

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Hegseth promotes abolition of women’s voting rights

Hegseth promotes abolition of women’s voting rights

The Associated Press reports: The man who oversees the nation’s military reposted a video about a Christian nationalist church that included various pastors saying women should no longer be allowed to vote. The extraordinary repost on X from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, made Thursday night, illustrates his deep and personal connection to a Christian nationalist pastor with extreme views on the role of religion and women. In the post, Hegseth commented on an almost seven-minute-long report by CNN examining Doug…

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Crypto’s richest man, Changpeng Zhao, campaigns for a pardon

Crypto’s richest man, Changpeng Zhao, campaigns for a pardon

The New York Times reports: In 2023, as Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the giant cryptocurrency exchange Binance, prepared to plead guilty to U.S. money-laundering violations, he fashioned a crash course for himself on clemency politics, reading books about business tycoons who had received pardons, including Marc Rich and Michael Milken. Two years later, Mr. Zhao, a Chinese-born billionaire, is out of prison and mounting a pardon campaign of his own, backed by a sophisticated influence operation worthy of those…

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As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame

As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame

The Associated Press reports: Amid rising electric bills, states are under pressure to insulate regular household and business ratepayers from the costs of feeding Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centers. It’s not clear that any state has a solution and the actual effect of data centers on electricity bills is difficult to pin down. Some critics question whether states have the spine to take a hard line against tech behemoths like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta. But more than a dozen…

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On controlling fire, new lessons from a deep indigenous past

On controlling fire, new lessons from a deep indigenous past

Yale Environment 360 reports: Climate change is extending the season during which hot and dry weather encourages fire across North America. At the same time, a long post-settlement history of stamping out wildfires has changed much of the continent’s landscape: Forests are thicker, which allows fires to spread up into the canopy, and more uniform, with fewer bare patches that might otherwise slow a fire’s progress. As a result, wildfires now tend to grow hotter and bigger: Some say we…

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How animals heal themselves

How animals heal themselves

Emory University: In 2010, Emory biologist Jaap de Roode published the discovery that monarch butterflies use medicine to cure their offspring of disease. His lab revealed how, if infected with a parasite, the female butterflies prefer to lay their eggs on a species of milkweed containing higher levels of a toxic chemical. The caterpillars eat the milkweed, ingest the toxin, and reduce the parasite load in their bodies. With that finding, de Roode joined the vanguard of scientists uncovering how…

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Will the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, Norway’s, divest from Israel?

Will the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, Norway’s, divest from Israel?

+972 reports: In 1990, Norway established the Oil Fund, a long-term investment vehicle to manage the country’s growing oil and gas revenues. Formally known as the Government Pension Fund Global, its primary aims were to safeguard these revenues for future generations and to protect the Norwegian economy, increasingly reliant on oil, from global market volatility. Managed by Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) with operational independence under the central bank, the Oil Fund invests globally in equities, real estate, government bonds,…

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