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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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Canada’s old relationship with the U.S. ‘is over,’ says Prime Minister Mark Carney

Canada’s old relationship with the U.S. ‘is over,’ says Prime Minister Mark Carney

The New Republic reports: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney officially broke things off with the United States Thursday, marking a seismic shift in relations between the longtime allies. “The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over,” Carney said during a press conference, following a meeting in Ottawa with his ministers to “discuss trade options” in response to Donald Trump’s “permanent” 25 percent tariffs on…

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Trump administration wants to turn Ukraine into an American colony

Trump administration wants to turn Ukraine into an American colony

Bloomberg reports: The US is pushing to control all major future infrastructure and mineral investments in Ukraine, potentially gaining a veto over any role for Kyiv’s other allies and undermining its bid for European Union membership. President Donald Trump’s administration is demanding the “right of first offer” on investments in all infrastructure and natural resources projects under a revised partnership deal with Ukraine, according to a draft of the document obtained by Bloomberg News. If accepted, the partnership agreement would…

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Who literally calls the shots in this White House? Stephen Miller

Who literally calls the shots in this White House? Stephen Miller

Garrett Graff asks: Who holds the power in the Trump administration? The full Signal chat provides some of the most “real” indications of where power lies in the Trump administration and how decision-making happens—and none of it is pretty. The answer is shocking, but perhaps not surprising: Donald Trump isn’t that engaged in the policy of his administration, JD Vance is weak and powerless, and the only one that matters is Stephen Miller. I wrote earlier this week about how fascinating it was…

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‘Trump doesn’t have a Yemen policy.’ The folly of U.S. airstrikes on the Houthis

‘Trump doesn’t have a Yemen policy.’ The folly of U.S. airstrikes on the Houthis

Mohammed Ali Kalfood writes: On his third day back in the White House, President Donald Trump issued an executive order re-designating Houthi rebels in Yemen as a foreign terrorist organization. He ordered the Pentagon to start preparing military plans against the militant group and imposed sanctions on Houthi leaders, along with their main backer, Iran. Then, on March 15, Trump announced a new U.S. bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen that has now continued for 10 days. “YOUR TIME…

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Yale expert on fascism joins exodus of academics escaping from authoritarianism

Yale expert on fascism joins exodus of academics escaping from authoritarianism

The Guardian reports: A Yale professor who studies fascism is leaving the US to work at a Canadian university because of the current US political climate, which he worries is putting the US at risk of becoming a “fascist dictatorship”. Jason Stanley, who wrote the 2018 book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, has accepted a position at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Stanley told the Daily Nous, a philosophy…

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Double standards: DHS staffer faces serious punishment for accidentally adding reporter to group email

Double standards: DHS staffer faces serious punishment for accidentally adding reporter to group email

NBC News reports: A federal worker accidentally includes a journalist on a detailed message in advance of a government operation. While that sounds like the case of The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief being added to a group Signal chat by Trump’s national security adviser Michael Waltz, in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed military attack plans in Yemen, it’s not. It’s what happened to a longtime Department of Homeland Security employee who told colleagues she inadvertently sent unclassified details of an…

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Elon Musk’s family history in South Africa reveals ties to apartheid and neo-Nazi movements

Elon Musk’s family history in South Africa reveals ties to apartheid and neo-Nazi movements

  Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and raised in a wealthy family under the country’s racist apartheid laws. Musk’s family history reveals ties to apartheid and neo-Nazi politics. We speak with Chris McGreal, reporter for The Guardian, to understand how Musk’s upbringing shaped his worldview, as well as that of his South African-raised colleague Peter Thiel, a right-wing billionaire who co-founded PayPal alongside Musk. “Musk lived what can only be described as a neocolonial life,”…

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While powerful institutions bow to Trump, The Atlantic just backed him into a corner

While powerful institutions bow to Trump, The Atlantic just backed him into a corner

Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris write: So, about that Signal chat. On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.” At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the…

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Private data and passwords of senior security officials including Gabbard, Waltz and Hegseth found online

Private data and passwords of senior security officials including Gabbard, Waltz and Hegseth found online

Der Spiegel reports: Private contact details of the most important security advisers to U.S. President Donald Trump can be found on the internet. DER SPIEGEL reporters were able to find mobile phone numbers, email addresses and even some passwords belonging to the top officials. To do so, the reporters used commercial people search engines along with hacked customer data that has been published on the web. Those affected by the leaks include National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National…

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Mike Waltz left his Venmo friends list public exposing hundreds of associates

Mike Waltz left his Venmo friends list public exposing hundreds of associates

Wired reports: A Venmo account under the name “Michael Waltz,” carrying a profile photo of the national security adviser and connected to accounts bearing the names of people closely associated with him, was left open to the public until Wednesday afternoon. A WIRED analysis shows that the account revealed the names of hundreds of Waltz’s personal and professional associates, including journalists, military officers, lobbyists, and others—information a foreign intelligence service or other actors could exploit for any number of ends,…

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Trump administration claims it has power to send anyone to a foreign prison — without hearings or evidence

Trump administration claims it has power to send anyone to a foreign prison — without hearings or evidence

HuffPost reports: The Trump administration is building a case in court for its ability to send people in the United States to an overseas detention camp — and then refuse to bring them home even if they’re innocent. In a new court filing Tuesday night, the administration referred to a group of Venezuelan migrants and asylum seekers it moved from the U.S. to an infamous Salvadoran prison — a gay makeup artist and a professional soccer player reportedly among them…

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