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Experts fear that Trump could interfere with statisticians if economic data disappoints him

Experts fear that Trump could interfere with statisticians if economic data disappoints him

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…

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Half the people who approve of Trump’s performance know little about what he is doing

Half the people who approve of Trump’s performance know little about what he is doing

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…

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Pacific voyagers’ remarkable environmental knowledge allowed for long-distance navigation without Western technology

Pacific voyagers’ remarkable environmental knowledge allowed for long-distance navigation without Western technology

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…

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Trump sees the Constitution as an obstacle to be surmounted

Trump sees the Constitution as an obstacle to be surmounted

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…

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Russell Vought is advancing a radical ideological project decades in the making

Russell Vought is advancing a radical ideological project decades in the making

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…

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DOGE tried assigning a team to the Government Accountability Office. It refused

DOGE tried assigning a team to the Government Accountability Office. It refused

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…

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How Kahanism found its way into the Israeli political mainstream

How Kahanism found its way into the Israeli political mainstream

Natasha Roth-Rowland writes: At the end of January, Israel’s ambassador to the United States arrived in Washington to take up his new role. In some ways, Yechiel Leiter’s resume is typical for someone appointed to perhaps the most prestigious diplomatic posting on offer: A U.S.-born immigrant to Israel, Leiter served in numerous senior government roles, including as chief of staff to then-Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, before working as a senior fellow at the right-wing Kohelet Policy Forum, and then moving…

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Kremlin cites past wars as it threatens long conflict in Ukraine

Kremlin cites past wars as it threatens long conflict in Ukraine

Pjotr Sauer writes: Peter the Great’s long war against Sweden – a grinding conflict that claimed countless Russian lives – is rarely held up as a model for modern diplomacy. Yet behind closed doors on Friday, during the first direct peace talks with Ukraine in three years, Russia’s lead negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, cited it as an explicit warning: Moscow was prepared to fight for as long as it took. Just like when Russian troops rolled into Ukraine in 2022, the…

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My family experienced apartheid. I know Afrikaners aren’t refugees

My family experienced apartheid. I know Afrikaners aren’t refugees

The Rev. Nontombi Naomi Tutu writes: The combination of the Trump administration granting expedited refugee status to white South Africans and the Episcopal Church ending a 40-year partnership with the federal government rather than help resettle fake refugees leaves me with contradictory feelings. As an Episcopal priest and a dual citizen of the United States and South Africa, I am proud of the Episcopal Church for standing up and speaking out about the U.S. government’s lies of a white “genocide”…

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How the universe differs from its mirror image

How the universe differs from its mirror image

Zack Savitsky writes: After her adventures in Wonderland, the fictional Alice stepped through the mirror above her fireplace in Lewis Carroll’s 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass to discover how the reflected realm differed from her own. She found that the books were all written in reverse, and the people were “living backwards,” navigating a world where effects preceded their causes. When objects appear different in the mirror, scientists call them chiral. Hands, for instance, are chiral. Imagine Alice trying to…

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Ethnic cleansing: Trump administration plans to permanently transfer one million Palestinians to Libya

Ethnic cleansing: Trump administration plans to permanently transfer one million Palestinians to Libya

NBC News reports: The Trump administration is working on a plan to permanently relocate up to 1 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya, five people with knowledge of the effort told NBC News. The plan is under serious enough consideration that the administration has discussed it with Libya’s leadership, two people with direct knowledge of the plans and a former U.S. official said. In exchange for the resettling of Palestinians, the administration would potentially release to Libya billions…

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U.S. aid cuts leave food for millions mouldering in storage

U.S. aid cuts leave food for millions mouldering in storage

Reuters reports: Food rations that could supply 3.5 million people for a month are mouldering in warehouses around the world because of U.S. aid cuts and risk becoming unusable, according to five people familiar with the situation. The food stocks have been stuck inside four U.S. government warehouses since the Trump administration’s decision in January to cut global aid programmes, according to three people who previously worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development and two sources from other aid…

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The American legal system may never recover from this

The American legal system may never recover from this

Stephen I. Vladeck writes: It is often difficult to persuade anyone other than lawyers to care about the more technical, procedural minutiae of Supreme Court decisions. But Thursday’s oral argument in three Supreme Court cases challenging President Trump’s efforts to restrict birthright citizenship is a powerful example of how such technicalities can sometimes be even more important than the substantive legal question the justices are purportedly answering. The Trump administration is asking the justices, in effect, to let the president’s…

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Errol Langton’s ‘Afrikaner’ ‘farming’ family trades South Africa for Alabama

Errol Langton’s ‘Afrikaner’ ‘farming’ family trades South Africa for Alabama

The New York Times reports: To Mr. Trump, South Africa is a cautionary tale for the United States. In the 1990s, when one of his advisers mentioned a news item projecting that nonwhite people could become the majority in the United States, Mr. Trump shot back that there would be a revolution should that happen. “This isn’t going to become South Africa,” he said, according to a book about the president, “Confidence Man,” by Maggie Haberman, a New York Times…

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