The New York Times reports: Elon Musk and SpaceX are big winners in Donald J. Trump’s 2026 spending plan. President Trump is delivering on Mr. Musk’s wish list at both NASA and the Pentagon to reorient federal spending on space in a way likely to drive billions of dollars in new business to Mr. Musk’s space technology company, if Congress signs off on the budget plan. At the Pentagon, Mr. Trump is calling for a massive jump in spending, an…
Politico reports: Public media executives are pushing back against President Donald Trump’s late Thursday executive order seeking to strike federal funding for NPR and PBS, arguing it is unlawful. Trump’s Thursday order directed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private nonprofit that Congress awards more than $500 million annually to fund public media, to “cancel existing direct funding to the maximum extent allowed by law” to NPR and PBS. But in a statement Friday, Patricia Harris, the president and CEO…
Wired reports: Carr’s background indicates that he might have been a straightforward leader of the agency. After several years as a legal adviser, he became a commissioner in 2017 and Joe Biden reappointed him in 2023. (Three of the five FCC commissioners, including the chair, are to be from the president’s party.) As a lifelong Republican—his father was once one of Nixon’s lawyers—he would be expected to champion conservative stances, like fighting net neutrality and sucking up to big telecom…
Isaac Chotiner writes: In mid-January, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire, putting a temporary stop to the war in Gaza, which began after the attacks of October 7, 2023, and which has killed more than fifty thousand Palestinians. (The combined Israeli death toll from the Hamas attack and the ensuing war is around three thousand people.) Throughout the first fifteen months of the conflict, Israel’s behavior, specifically in refusing to allow sufficient amounts of aid into Gaza, drew international…
Jewish News Syndicate reports: The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labour and Pensions has postponed votes on a pair of measures designed to combat antisemitism after a tense hearing as well as the passage of amendments that threaten to kill the measures if brought to a vote. The Antisemitism Awareness Act would enshrine the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism into law under the Civil Rights Act of 1965. But a testy hearing on Wednesday covered objections to…
The New York Times reports: A federal judge on Thursday permanently barred the Trump administration from invoking the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime law, to deport Venezuelans it has deemed to be criminals from the Southern District of Texas, saying that the White House’s use of the statute was illegal. The decision by the judge, Fernando Rodriguez Jr., was the most expansive ruling yet by any of the numerous jurists who are currently hearing challenges to the White House’s…
The New York Times reports: As they addressed reporters inside the Oval Office in mid-April, President Trump and his Salvadoran counterpart appeared to be operating in lock step. The United States had just deported more than 200 migrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, and President Nayib Bukele said his country was eager to take more. He scoffed at a question from a reporter about whether he would release one of the men who a federal judge said had…
The New York Times reports: A top Trump appointee in the Justice Department ordered an aggressive investigation in the last several months of student protesters at Columbia University, raising anger and alarm among career prosecutors and investigators who saw the demand as politically motivated and lacking legal merit, people familiar with the episode said. The demand for the inquiry into students who protested Israel’s conduct of the conflict in Gaza also prompted pushback from a federal magistrate judge, who believed…
The New York Times reports: Small-ticket items shipped to the United States from China will no longer be exempt from tariffs starting on Friday, when a decision by President Trump to shutter a shipping loophole he calls a “scam” takes effect. The move is expected to send ripples through the economy as American consumers, who have gotten used to buying cheap shoes, Hawaiian shirts, holiday decorations and other products made in China, suddenly find those products much pricier. The fallout…
Rolling Stone reports: Donald Trump’s trade wars with China and other nations are widely expected to cause sharp economic pain, but some experts have warned consumers not to hoard supplies and goods before prices skyrocket, arguing that mass stockpiling could backfire spectacularly. Well, many Americans aren’t listening to that advice, according to survey data this year, instead preparing for the possibility of store shelves being bare amid a Trump-inflicted recession. Funnily enough, this includes a number of government officials and…
Axios reports: Mike Waltz has been a dead man walking in the White House for the past month, and the outgoing national security adviser started to act like it, Trump administration sources tell Axios. Why it matters: “Signalgate” badly damaged Waltz, but it wasn’t his only problem. He got on the wrong side of everyone from conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. After a flood of reports that Waltz was being pushed out, President Trump confirmed the news but…
PsyPost reports: New research published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology suggests that handwriting helps children learn to read more effectively than typing. In an experiment with 5-year-old prereaders, those who practiced writing by hand—either by copying or tracing—outperformed children who typed the same material on a keyboard across a variety of tasks. The findings provide strong support for the idea that the physical act of writing strengthens children’s ability to learn letters and words. The study was conducted…
Greg Sargent writes: President Donald Trump grew angry as a reporter persistently questioned him about his refusal to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia from a prison in El Salvador—and in so doing, Trump accidentally demolished his whole case against the wrongfully deported Salvadoran man. In the interview, ABC News’s Terry Moran pointed out that Trump has the power to pick up the phone, call El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, and with the “power of the presidency” get Bukele to release…
The New York Times reports: Mohsen Mahdawi, an organizer of the pro-Palestinian movement at Columbia University, was freed from federal custody on Wednesday, more than two weeks after immigration officials detained him and sought to rescind his green card as part of a widening crackdown against student protesters. In releasing Mr. Mahdawi on bail, Judge Geoffrey W. Crawford of Federal District Court in Vermont drew parallels between the current political climate and McCarthyism. “This is not the first time…