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The plan to turn Ukraine into a Trump-Putin Inc joint venture

The plan to turn Ukraine into a Trump-Putin Inc joint venture

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes: Donald Trump is holding a gun to the head of Volodymyr Zelensky, demanding huge reparations payments and laying claim to half of Ukraine’s oil, gas, and hydrocarbon resources as well as almost all its metals and much of its infrastructure. The latest version of his “minerals deal”, obtained by The Telegraph, is unprecedented in the history of modern diplomacy and state relations. “It is an expropriation document,” said Alan Riley, an expert on energy law at the…

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How American colleges are suppressing political dissent

How American colleges are suppressing political dissent

The New York Times reports: At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, someone splattered red paint on a statue honoring Benjamin Franklin, the school’s founder. Within hours, campus workers washed it off. But the university was eager to find the culprit. A pro-Palestinian group had claimed responsibility on social media. The university examined footage and identified a student’s cellphone number using data from the campus Wi-Fi near the statue at the time it was vandalized. Campus police obtained a search…

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No ‘winner’ in Trump tariffs: Expect ‘pure chaos’ in the auto industry, analyst warns

No ‘winner’ in Trump tariffs: Expect ‘pure chaos’ in the auto industry, analyst warns

Investor’s Business Daily reports: A day after auto stocks broadly declined, the sector lost more ground Friday. The threat that President Donald Trump’s 25% tariffs on all foreign-made vehicles could “send the auto industry into pure chaos,” and boost the average price of cars between $5,000 and $15,500, according to an analyst. Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives on Friday said, after talking to auto industry players from around the world over the prior 24 hours, that the tariffs will add…

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So is the U.S. actually taking over Greenland? Vance doesn’t seem too sure

So is the U.S. actually taking over Greenland? Vance doesn’t seem too sure

Aaron Blake writes: When it comes to taking control of Greenland, we should apparently take President Donald Trump seriously, not literally. That seemed to be the message Vice President JD Vance suggested during his visit to the island. Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of Greenland somehow becoming part of the United States. It’s an idea that has drawn derision not just from U.S. allies and members of Congress, but also from the populations of both the United States and…

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Hegseth brought his wife to sensitive meetings with foreign military officials

Hegseth brought his wife to sensitive meetings with foreign military officials

The Wall Street Journal reports: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is facing scrutiny over his handling of details of a military strike, brought his wife, a former Fox News producer, to two meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed, according to multiple people who were present or had knowledge of the discussions. One of the meetings, a high-level discussion at the Pentagon on March 6 between Hegseth and U.K. Secretary of Defense John Healey, took place at…

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For Trump, Waltz’s worst offense was that Jeffrey Goldberg was one of his contacts

For Trump, Waltz’s worst offense was that Jeffrey Goldberg was one of his contacts

The New York Times reports: For much of this week, President Trump was consumed by a single question. What should he do about his national security adviser, Michael Waltz? “Should I fire him?” he asked aides and allies as the fallout continued over the stunning leak of a Signal group chat set up by Mr. Waltz, who had inadvertently added a journalist to the thread about an upcoming military strike in Yemen. In public, Mr. Trump’s default position has been…

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British Quakers condemn police raid on Westminster Meeting House

British Quakers condemn police raid on Westminster Meeting House

Quakers in Britain: Quakers in Britain strongly condemned the violation of their place of worship which they say is a direct result of stricter protest laws removing virtually all routes to challenge the status quo. Just before 7.15pm more than 20 uniformed police, some equipped with tasers, forced their way into Westminster Meeting House. They broke open the front door without warning or ringing the bell first, searching the whole building and arresting six women attending the meeting in a…

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‘We want to live’: Rage at Israel fuses with ire at Hamas as protests rock Gaza

‘We want to live’: Rage at Israel fuses with ire at Hamas as protests rock Gaza

Ruwaida Amer reports: For the past two days, Palestinians across the Gaza Strip have taken to the streets to demand an end to Israel’s genocidal onslaught and to Hamas’ rule of the territory. Beginning in the northern city of Beit Lahiya, demonstrations quickly spread to other parts of the enclave including Shuja’iyya in the north, Nuseirat and Deir Al-Balah in the center, and Khan Younis in the south. The protests are the largest since the war began, and the most…

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The gleeful cruelty of the White House X account. Welcome to the 4chan administration

The gleeful cruelty of the White House X account. Welcome to the 4chan administration

Charlie Warzel writes: On March 18, the official White House account on X posted two photographs of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a woman who was arrested earlier this month by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The post described her as a “previously deported alien felon convicted of fentanyl trafficking,” and celebrated her capture as a win for the administration. In one photograph, Basora-Gonzalez is shown handcuffed and weeping in a public parking lot. The White House account posted about Basora-Gonzalez again yesterday—this…

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The disappearing of Rumeysa Ozturk is state-sponsored terrorism

The disappearing of Rumeysa Ozturk is state-sponsored terrorism

Will Bunch writes: You’ve probably seen something like this before — but only in a movie, and only in a film that was seeking to capture the horrors of daily life under Joseph Stalin at the peak of his 1930s purges across the USSR, or maybe a Gestapo thriller set in Nazi Germany. At 5:30 p.m. on a spring day on an urban residential street, a young woman in a bright white coat, hijab, and sneakers, engrossed in her mobile…

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DOGE plans to rebuild SSA codebase in months, risking benefits and even system collapse

DOGE plans to rebuild SSA codebase in months, risking benefits and even system collapse

Wired reports: The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system—and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely—at risk. The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell…

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Top Senate Republican challenges Trump’s bid to withhold spending

Top Senate Republican challenges Trump’s bid to withhold spending

The New York Times reports: A top Senate Republican on Thursday accused President Trump of illegally refusing to spend $2.9 billion approved by Congress, teaming with Democrats in an early salvo in the simmering struggle between Congress and the White House over which has the ultimate power over federal spending. Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, initiated a letter to the White House, signed by Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the panel’s senior…

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BYD is the world’s hottest car company, while for Tesla things go from bad to worse

BYD is the world’s hottest car company, while for Tesla things go from bad to worse

CNN reports: In the world of electric vehicles, there’s a Chinese company outdoing Elon Musk’s Tesla. And it’s just getting started. BYD, the Shenzhen-based Chinese EV champion, eclipsed Tesla in annual sales last year. Last week, it unveiled a revolutionary battery charging technology that it says adds 250 miles of range in five minutes, outpacing Tesla’s Superchargers, which take 15 minutes to add 200 miles. And last month, BYD launched “God’s Eye,” an advanced driver-assistance system rivaling Tesla’s Full Self-Driving…

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Current AI large language models a ‘dead end’ for human-level intelligence, scientists agree

Current AI large language models a ‘dead end’ for human-level intelligence, scientists agree

Live Science reports: Current approaches to artificial intelligence (AI) are unlikely to create models that can match human intelligence, according to a recent survey of industry experts. Out of the 475 AI researchers queried for the survey, 76% said the scaling up of large language models (LLMs) was “unlikely” or “very unlikely” to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), the hypothetical milestone where machine learning systems can learn as effectively, or better, than humans. This is a noteworthy dismissal of tech…

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