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Ballroom ‘donors’ won $50 billion in contracts after giving to Trump project, watchdog group finds

Ballroom ‘donors’ won $50 billion in contracts after giving to Trump project, watchdog group finds

The Washington Post reports: More than half of the publicly identified donors to President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project have won new or expanded federal contracts worth more than $50 billion during the past six months, according to a report released Thursday by a government watchdog group. Fourteen of the 27 known corporate donors to the $400 million project, which would replace the East Wing that Trump demolished in October, have seen their government business grow in that window,…

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Russia’s elite is souring on the war, but Putin doesn’t seem to care

Russia’s elite is souring on the war, but Putin doesn’t seem to care

The Wall Street Journal reports: Russia’s inability to break through the stalemate in Ukraine is becoming so evident that significant voices in the Russian establishment have publicly started to call for an end to the conflict. The big question is whether President Vladimir Putin will acknowledge this reality and abandon his aspiration to extinguish Ukrainian independence. So far, there is no sign that, in the fifth year of Europe’s bloodiest conflict in generations, he is ready to climb down from…

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60 Minutes hatchet man: ‘Nick’s politics are consistent with a lot of the tech people he’s covered’

60 Minutes hatchet man: ‘Nick’s politics are consistent with a lot of the tech people he’s covered’

Page Six Hollywood reports: Like [Bari] Weiss, it is hard to pin down exactly where [Nick] Bilton falls on the political spectrum. The central tension is that Bilton, who regularly criticized Donald Trump during his first term in the pages of Vanity Fair, now finds himself inside a company that many see as friendly, if not subservient to the Trump Administration. Interviews with friends and former colleagues suggest any political shift within Bilton has been subtle. Sources paint a picture…

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Women take majority of cabinet seats in first for Denmark

Women take majority of cabinet seats in first for Denmark

Bloomberg reports: Denmark’s new cabinet reached a record level of female representation, with women outnumbering men for the first time in the Nordic country. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, the first woman to win a third term in her homeland, unveiled a ministerial lineup of 11 women and 10 men, bringing female representation to 52%. “For the first time in Denmark’s history, there are more female ministers than male ministers,” Frederiksen told media on Wednesday as she presented her new cabinet…

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How Thomas Paine spelled out astronomical expectations for a new nation

How Thomas Paine spelled out astronomical expectations for a new nation

Jo Marchant writes: In politics, as in nature, tensions can take years to build, but it takes just one stone to unleash an avalanche, one spark to ignite a wildfire. For many historians of the American Revolution, that spark was a pamphlet of fewer than 100 pages written by a newly arrived English immigrant named Thomas Paine. Throughout 1775, violent clashes between British troops and colonist rebels protesting onerous taxes inspired little talk of outright revolution. Most rebels aimed to…

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Trump ignored warnings about Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz

Trump ignored warnings about Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz

The New York Times reports: In mid-February, shortly before President Trump launched the war on Iran, the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps conducted live-fire drills in its coastal waters. Iranian state media publicized the exercise, whose official name made its purpose clear: “Smart Control of the Strait of Hormuz.” The exercise amounted to a flashing red warning light to the Trump administration — one that, for reasons that are still not fully clear, went largely unheeded. Within days of the…

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Judge Michael Luttig: ‘Trump has lost his war on the federal judiciary, the Constitution, and the rule of law’

Judge Michael Luttig: ‘Trump has lost his war on the federal judiciary, the Constitution, and the rule of law’

  Will Judge Williams find that Trump “Defrauded” the Court in his IRS suit and “weaponization fund” case? On a special Legal AF, J. Michael Luttig, retired federal appellate judge and one of the leaders of the 35 judges that got Judge Williams to reopen the case and determine if there has been fraud on the court, and Andres Rivero, local counsel for the judges, joins Michael Popok to brief the audience on what Judge Luttig says is the END…

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Bill Pulte is Trump’s most dangerously sycophantic promotion yet

Bill Pulte is Trump’s most dangerously sycophantic promotion yet

Hayes Brown writes: President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte would become acting director of national intelligence. Pulte is stepping in to replace Tulsi Gabbard, who resigned from her post last month. Though Trump claimed his appointee “has deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America,” he’ll take the position with literally zero relevant experience for coordinating 17 American intelligence agencies’ work. But Pulte’s appointment makes slightly more sense when you consider his…

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Inside Trump’s takeover of the American regulatory machine

Inside Trump’s takeover of the American regulatory machine

The Wall Street Journal reports: The debate over how to respond to Omnicom Group’s $13 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group to create the world’s largest advertising business came down to two people: Federal Trade Commission chairman Andrew Ferguson—and President Trump. Sitting in the Oval Office with Ferguson last August to discuss the deal, once considered a run-of-the-mill review left to FTC staff, Trump invited an interested party to weigh in. He dialed his friend Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy, who had…

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Lawmakers demand answers after the White House initiated a $620 million loan to a firm tied to Donald Trump Jr.

Lawmakers demand answers after the White House initiated a $620 million loan to a firm tied to Donald Trump Jr.

By Robert Faturechi This story was originally published by ProPublica A group of lawmakers demanded answers from the White House this week following a ProPublica investigation revealing that a top aide to the president intervened to secure a $620 million Pentagon loan to a startup linked to the president’s eldest son. ProPublica’s reporting “reveals a staggering level of corruption and influence peddling that superseded this process, enriching the President’s son at the expense of U.S. national security and taxpayer dollars,”…

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Greg Bovino was the star at a European ‘remigration’ conference

Greg Bovino was the star at a European ‘remigration’ conference

Wired reports: On Saturday morning, as hundreds of far-right activists and lawmakers from across Europe gathered outside a conference center in the central Portuguese town of Figueira da Foz, a group of half a dozen men dressed in identical uniforms of khaki chinos, dark blue shirts, and sunglasses marched into the parking lot. On the lapels of their jackets, some wore the red and blue circular emblem of Patriot Front, the US white-supremacist group formed in the wake of the…

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The tightrope of cooperation and competition

The tightrope of cooperation and competition

Jonathan R Goodman writes: Reading classic works in evolutionary biology is unlikely to make you optimistic about human nature. From Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) onwards, there is a fundamental understanding among biologists that organisms, especially humans, evolved to maximise self-interest. We act to promote our own success or that of our family. Niceness, by contrast, is just a mirage, and morality more broadly is just an illusion. Sociobiology – the infamous movement of the second half of…

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Trump’s slush fund gets ditched (verbally), but he may still pocket $600 million by dodging taxes

Trump’s slush fund gets ditched (verbally), but he may still pocket $600 million by dodging taxes

Politico reports: The Trump administration will drop its $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that was widely criticized as a payout for the president’s allies, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a congressional hearing Tuesday. “We’re not moving forward with the fund, period,” said Blanche in remarks before the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees funding for the Department of Justice. Republican blowback from the announcement of the fund has stalled movement on an immigration enforcement bill in the Senate, where GOP…

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The Manhattan Institute helped kill DEI. Now it’s coming for protests

The Manhattan Institute helped kill DEI. Now it’s coming for protests

Wired reports: A right-wing think tank responsible for the emergence of zero-tolerance policing in 1990s New York City and the Trump administration’s scorched-earth campaign against “diversity, equality and inclusion” programs is behind state-level legislative efforts to classify minor protest-related crimes as “civil terrorism.” The Manhattan Institute, cofounded in 1978 by former Central Intelligence Agency director William Casey, is in the midst of a yearlong campaign to pass state-level legislation reclassifying minor crimes like vandalism, blocking a roadway, or trespassing during…

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