Music: Arve Henriksen | Eivind Aarset | Terje Isungset — ‘The Drowned Beat’
Judge fears ‘Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values’
In a ruling he issued today, William G Young, a federal judge in Massachusetts, wrote: “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.” President Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address as Governor of the State of California (January 5, 1967). I first heard these words of President Reagan’s…
Top Trump aides push for regime change in Venezuela
The New York Times reports: The push by top aides to President Trump to remove Nicolás Maduro as the leader of Venezuela has intensified in recent days, with administration officials discussing a broad campaign that would escalate military pressure to try to force him out, U.S. officials say. It is being led by Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser. Mr. Rubio argues that Mr. Maduro is an illegitimate leader who oversees the export of drugs to…
At Quantico, Hegseth delivered ‘an inane message of little merit.’ It ‘could have been an email’
Politico reports: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s speech to top generals was supposed to serve as a rallying cry for military exceptionalism — but it didn’t land that way with many of the people it was targeting. Numerous defense officials — who watched senior brass scramble to Washington and then sit through a partisan speech from President Donald Trump and a return to old-school military standards by Hegseth — were left wondering why the event had occurred at all. “More like…
Adelita Grijalva says Mike Johnson is delaying her swearing-in to prevent Epstein floor vote
Rolling Stone reports: Adelita Grijalva made history last week, becoming the first Latina woman elected to represent Arizona in the U.S. House of Representatives. She won a special election for the seat previously occupied by her father, Democratic Rep. Raúl Grijalva, who died in March after serving over two decades in office. Despite a blowout, uncontested victory — and a precedent of swearing in the winners of special elections almost immediately after their elections — Grijalva still has no idea…
Britain may already be at war with Russia, says former head of MI5
The Guardian reports: Britain may already be at war with Russia because of the depth and intensity of cyber-attacks, sabotage and other hostile activity orchestrated by Moscow against the UK, according to a former head of MI5. Eliza Manningham-Buller, who led the domestic spy agency two decades ago, said she agreed with comments made by the Russia expert Fiona Hill, who argued in a Guardian interview earlier this year that Moscow was at war with the west. Lady Manningham-Buller argued…
AI data centers are sending electric bills soaring
AI needs a lot of energy — and a new Bloomberg investigation has found that those soaring costs are being passed on to consumers who live near data centers. On today’s Big Take podcast, host David Gura talks to Bloomberg reporters Josh Saul and Leonardo Nicoletti about the AI boom’s impact on power bills, how utility companies are handling surging demand and the implications for communities with centers in their backyards.
How the brain maintains a harmonious balance between excitation and inhibition
Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: From Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s hand came branches and whorls, spines and webs. Now-famous drawings by the neuroanatomist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries showed, for the first time, the distinctiveness and diversity of the fundamental building blocks of the mammalian brain that we call neurons. In the century or so since, his successors have painstakingly worked to count, track, identify, label and categorize these cells. There is now a dizzying number of ways to…
Music: Arve Henriksen | Eivind Aarset | Terje Isungset — ‘Letters in the Sand’
An entire generation of Americans is turning against Israel
Felicia Schwartz writes: President Donald Trump is often at his most frank when he plays pundit, and so it went with his recent musings about Israel’s war with Hamas and the political fallout. “They had total control over Congress, and now they don’t,” Trump told the Daily Caller in an interview published earlier this month, referring to Israel. “They’re gonna have to get that war over with. … They may be winning the war, but they’re not winning the world…
Majority of American voters oppose sending additional economic and military aid to Israel, poll finds
The New York Times reports: Nearly two years into the war in Gaza, American support for Israel has undergone a seismic reversal, with large shares of voters expressing starkly negative views about the Israeli government’s management of the conflict, a new poll from The New York Times and Siena University found. Disapproval of the war appears to have prompted a striking reassessment by American voters of their broader sympathies in the decades-old conflict in the region, with slightly more voters…
U.S. citizens are ending up in Trump’s dragnet because of the color of their skin
A man was just arrested outside of the Broadview ICE facility in Chicago. When legal observers from the National Lawyers Guild asked why, an agent threatened to arrest them too. pic.twitter.com/uvs7p5t3sX — amanda moore 🐢 (@noturtlesoup17) September 27, 2025 The New York Times reports: U.S. citizens, many of them Latino men, have been stopped and in some cases taken into custody by law enforcement officers who are carrying out President Trump’s immigration crackdown and who suspect the men are living…
How Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, wound up ensnared in an FBI contracts-for-cash sting
MSNBC reports: Tom Homan, the White House border czar, became entangled in an FBI sting last year after an associate of his suggested to undercover FBI agents that Homan could facilitate future government contracts in exchange for big money, according to four sources familiar with the investigation and a government document. Julian “Jace” Calderas, a former U.S. immigration official who worked under Homan in the Obama administration, allegedly proposed to the agents — who were posing as businessmen — that…
The war on science being led by the Republican Party
Ars Technica reports: We’re about a quarter of the way through the 21st century. Summers across the global north are now defined by flash floods, droughts, heat waves, uncontainable wildfires, and intensifying named storms, exactly as predicted by Exxon scientists back in the 1970s. The United States secretary of health and human services advocates against using the most effective tool we have to fight the infectious diseases that have ravaged humanity for millennia. People are eagerly lapping up the misinformation…
Trump’s TikTok deal looks like crony capitalism
John Cassidy writes: Donald Trump is a compulsive issuer of executive orders: since January, there have been more than two hundred of them. Some are glorified press releases; others are more significant. “Saving TikTok While Protecting National Security” falls decidedly into the second category. Signed last week, on the same day that the Department of Justice indicted James Comey, it is designed to facilitate the transfer of a social-media platform with a hundred and seventy million American users to a…
Mediterranean diet may mitigate inherited risk of Alzheimer’s disease
PsyPost reports: A new study has revealed that a person’s genetic makeup can alter how small molecules in their blood, known as metabolites, are linked to their risk of developing dementia. The research, published in Nature Medicine, also suggests that following a Mediterranean diet may be particularly effective at lowering dementia risk for individuals who carry the highest genetic predisposition for Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative condition that causes a progressive decline in memory and other cognitive abilities….