A giant banner featuring Donald Trump’s photo just went up at the front of the Department of Agriculture. A military parade is being planned for his birthday, which coincides with the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. His cabinet members shower him with praise every time they have a meeting. These are not the kinds of things that normally happen in the United States. It’s more in line with how autocratic leaders display their power in oppressive nations like…
Anne Applebaum writes: On Saturday, I asked Andriy Sadovyi, the mayor of Lviv, in western Ukraine, whether he expected the Russian-Ukrainian talks in Istanbul to lead to a cease-fire. “No,” he told me. Later, I asked the audience at the Lviv Media Forum whether any of them expected a cease-fire soon. About 200 journalists and editors were in the room. No one raised their hand. Many laughed. Over several days in Lviv I didn’t meet anybody who believed that the…
The Washington Post reports: For two years, New Orleans police secretly relied on facial recognition technology to scan city streets in search of suspects, a surveillance method without a known precedent in any major American city that may violate municipal guardrails around use of the technology, an investigation by The Washington Post has found. Police increasingly use facial recognition software to identify unknown culprits from still images, usually taken by surveillance cameras at or near the scene of a crime….
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: In 2015, a decade before the Assad family’s fifty-three-year rule over Syria ended, the Obama administration was spooked by the advances of a rebel alliance from Idlib, which seemed poised to topple the government in Damascus. The administration reviled Bashar al-Assad’s regime, but since the rise of ISIS in 2014, it had treated Syria as a front in the War on Terror, and it was loath to see Damascus fall to Islamists, some with links to…
The New York Times reports: In late April, the Heritage Foundation dispatched a team to Israel to meet with power players in Israeli politics, including the country’s foreign and defense secretaries and the U.S. ambassador, Mike Huckabee. The conservative Washington-based think tank is best known for spearheading Project 2025, a proposed blueprint for President Trump’s second term that called for reshaping the federal government and an extreme expansion of presidential power. Now the Heritage contingent was in Israel, in part,…
Timothy Snyder, a leading historian of authoritarianism, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, joins Scott Galloway to discuss the threats to American democracy, echoes of 1930s fascism, and what still gives him hope.
Variety reports: Joaquin Phoenix, Juliette Binoche, Pedro Pascal, Riz Ahmed and Guillermo del Toro are among a group of figures to have added their names to a letter condemning the film industry for its “silence” over the ongoing and deadly impact of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. The letter, published on the first day of Cannes and initially signed by more than 370 actors and filmmakers, also condemned Israel’s killing of Fatma Hassona, the protagonist of festival-bound doc “Put Your…
The Washington Post reports: Federal prosecutors across the country may soon be able to indict members of Congress without approval from lawyers in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, according to three people familiar with a proposal attorneys in the section learned about last week. Under the proposal, investigators and prosecutors would also not be required to consult with the section’s attorneys during key steps of probes into public officials, altering a long-standing provision in the Justice Department’s manual that…
The Guardian reports: Summarizing his befuddlement with numbers, Mark Twain observed that there were “lies, damned lies and statistics”. The acerbic phrase later become so deeply embedded in popular consciousness that it once formed the title to an episode of The West Wing, NBC’s portrayal of a fictitious US president played by Martin Sheen. Now professional economists and number-crunchers fear the aphorism could become a White House theme in real life. Buffeted by global markets and public opinion – both…
The New York Times reports: President Trump’s strategy to “flood the zone” may be working to keep his approval rating from sinking even lower. Voters who have not heard much about some of the many major news events from the first 100 days of Mr. Trump’s second term have a higher opinion of the job he is doing, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll. A little under half of the 42 percent of voters who approved of…
An outrigger canoe would typically have several paddlers and one navigator. AP Photo/David Goldman By Richard (Rick) Feinberg, Kent State University Wet and shivering, I rose from the outrigger of a Polynesian voyaging canoe. We’d been at sea all afternoon and most of the night. I’d hoped to get a little rest, but rain, wind and an absence of flat space made sleep impossible. My companions didn’t even try. It was May 1972, and I was three months into doctoral…
Richard Primus writes: President Donald Trump is cagey about whether he might try to stay in office after his current term expires. He frequently says that other people want him to do it, and the Trump Organization is selling Trump 2028 hats. In March, he said that he is “not joking” when he refers to a possible third term. More recently, he said that a third term is “something that, to the best of my knowledge, you’re not allowed to…
McKay Coppins writes: The opening act of Donald Trump’s second term was defined by the theatrical dismantling of much of the federal government by Elon Musk and his group of tech-savvy demolitionists. Everywhere you looked in those first 100 days, it seemed, Musk’s prestidigitation was on display. Look there—it’s Elon in a black MAGA hat waving around a chain saw onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Look here—it’s Elon introducing Fox News viewers to a teenage software engineer nicknamed…
NPR reports: The Department of Government Efficiency is continuing its attempts to expand its reach beyond executive branch agencies, this time seeking to embed in an independent legislative watchdog that finds waste, fraud and abuse in the government. But the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a legislative branch entity that helps audit government spending and suggest ways to make it more efficient, rejected that request on Friday by noting that GAO is not subject to presidential executive orders. The request to…