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Trump regime halts Harvard’s ability to enroll international students

Trump regime halts Harvard’s ability to enroll international students

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration on Thursday halted Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, taking aim at a crucial funding source for the nation’s oldest and wealthiest college in a major escalation in the administration’s efforts to pressure the elite school to fall in line with the president’s agenda. The administration notified Harvard about the decision after a back-and-forth in recent days over the legality of a sprawling records request as part of the Department of…

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Federal judge blocks Trump regime from revoking international students’ legal status

Federal judge blocks Trump regime from revoking international students’ legal status

NBC News reports: A federal judge in California has blocked the Trump administration from terminating the legal statuses of international students at universities across the U.S. In the injunction, District Judge Jeffrey S. White in Oakland also prohibited the administration from arresting or detaining any foreign-born students on the basis of their immigration status while a case challenging previous terminations moves through the courts. In his decision, White said that the Trump administration has “wreaked havoc” on the lives of…

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Bond market shudders as tax bill deepens deficit worries

Bond market shudders as tax bill deepens deficit worries

The New York Times reports: The market for U.S. government bonds, the bedrock of the global financial system, continued to shudder on Thursday, as President Trump’s bill to extend expensive tax cuts and create new ones without significantly slashing spending passed through the House of Representatives. The bill has unnerved investors, deepening worries that the country’s debt is becoming unmanageable. Yields on U.S. bonds, which underpin consumer and business interest rates around the world, from mortgages to corporate loans, have…

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European officials say Trump tells their leaders Putin isn’t ready to end war

European officials say Trump tells their leaders Putin isn’t ready to end war

The Wall Street Journal reports: On a call Monday, President Trump told European leaders that Russian President Vladimir Putin isn’t ready to end the war in Ukraine because he thinks he is winning, according to four senior European officials familiar with the conversation. In what the officials characterized as a rambling and at-times contradictory call, Trump also said he believed Putin ultimately desired peace, albeit on Russia’s terms, they said. The Europeans’ takeaway was that Trump didn’t believe that a…

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Tesla reputation now even worse than scandal-hit UnitedHealth Group

Tesla reputation now even worse than scandal-hit UnitedHealth Group

Fortune reports: Evidence is mounting that Elon Musk, widely viewed as the most successful entrepreneur of his generation, is inflicting serious damage on the image of his companies. On Tuesday, a new Axios Harris annual reputation poll showed that Tesla has continued to fall in the eyes of Americans ever since Musk waded full-on into the nation’s hyper-partisan political debate with the acquisition of Twitter. Prior to the $44 billion deal, the electric vehicle manufacturer came in eighth place in…

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Bluesky is plotting a total takeover of the social internet

Bluesky is plotting a total takeover of the social internet

Kate Knibbs writes: As I waited to meet with Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, on the 25th floor of an office building in downtown Seattle, I stared out at the city’s waterfront and thought: God fucking damn it. Stretching in every direction was a wall of dense, gray, tragically boring fog. And here I was about to interview the head of a social platform named after good weather. On camera, no less. Then something miraculous happened. Moments before Graber…

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The human brain is like a murmuration of starlings

The human brain is like a murmuration of starlings

Luiz Pessoa writes: When thousands of starlings swoop and swirl in the evening sky, creating patterns called murmurations, no single bird is choreographing this aerial ballet. Each bird follows simple rules of interaction with its closest neighbours, yet out of these local interactions emerges a complex, coordinated dance that can respond swiftly to predators and environmental changes. This same principle of emergence – where sophisticated behaviours arise not from central control but from the interactions themselves – appears across nature…

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Trump’s evidence of ‘white genocide’ in South Africa: victims of fighting in Congo

Trump’s evidence of ‘white genocide’ in South Africa: victims of fighting in Congo

AFP reports: US President Donald Trump brandished a stack of printed articles at the White House Wednesday that he claimed documented a genocide taking place against white people in South Africa. Mixed into the deck of papers he unveiled before South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa, however, was a months-old blog post featuring a photo from the Democratic Republic of Congo. “Death of people, death, death, death, horrible death, death,” Trump said as he flipped through the headlines, which he said…

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Judge dismisses charges against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka while reprimanding federal prosecutors

Judge dismisses charges against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka while reprimanding federal prosecutors

New Jersey Globe reports: A federal judge on Wednesday scolded federal prosecutors and announced he will dismiss trespassing charges against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka related to a standoff at a migrant detention center. Interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba announced earlier this week she would drop charges against Baraka (but at the same time announced new charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver stemming from a scuffle during Baraka’s arrest). Federal magistrate judge Andre Espinosa reprimanded the federal prosecutors for…

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Judge finds U.S. violated court order with sudden deportation flight to Africa

Judge finds U.S. violated court order with sudden deportation flight to Africa

The New York Times reports: A federal judge in Boston said on Wednesday that the Trump administration had violated an order he issued last month barring officials from deporting people to countries not their own without first giving them sufficient time to object. The finding by the judge, Brian E. Murphy, was one of the strongest judicial rebukes the administration has faced so far in a series of contentious cases arising from its sprawling deportation agenda. It was not immediately…

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Trump administration asks Supreme Court to shield DOGE from Freedom of Information Act

Trump administration asks Supreme Court to shield DOGE from Freedom of Information Act

Politico reports: The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to block an effort to open the inner workings of the secretive DOGE cost-cutting effort to public scrutiny. The Justice Department filed an emergency appeal Wednesday urging the high court to put a hold on a judge’s orders giving a watchdog group access to documents detailing firings, grant terminations and other actions proposed by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which was overseen by Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk….

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The Trump-supporting Christians accusing Jews of antisemitism

The Trump-supporting Christians accusing Jews of antisemitism

Michelle Goldberg writes: In The New York Times this weekend, Katie J.M. Baker described a fund-raising pitch that the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank that gave us Project 2025, made for a campaign to crush a subversive movement that threatens “America itself.” The pitch, she wrote, “presented an illustration of a pyramid topped by ‘progressive “elites” leading the way,’ which included Jewish billionaires such as the philanthropist George Soros and Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois.” Whether intentionally or not,…

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U.S. debt is on track to set a record high, going all the way back to 1790

U.S. debt is on track to set a record high, going all the way back to 1790

The New York Times reports: The United States hit its record debt level at the end of 1945, after a world war and the Great Depression. That record, in which the debt was briefly larger than the size of the entire economy, is almost certain to be broken in the next several years. Estimates from the Congressional Budget Office published in January showed that the country was on track to overtake it in 2032 — and that was before the…

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Fossils reveal secrets about the ancient Denisovans

Fossils reveal secrets about the ancient Denisovans

Nature reports: It was the finger seen around the world. In 2008, archaeologists working in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, Russia, uncovered a tiny bone: the tip of the little finger of an ancient human that lived there tens of thousands of years ago. The fragment didn’t seem remarkable, but it was well preserved, giving researchers hope that it harboured intact DNA. A team of geneticists led by Johannes Krause at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig,…

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