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Agents of foreign powers may gain major positions in Trump administration

Agents of foreign powers may gain major positions in Trump administration

The New York Times reports: A memo circulating among at least half a dozen advisers to former President Donald J. Trump recommends that if he is elected, he bypass traditional background checks by law enforcement officials and immediately grant security clearances to a large number of his appointees after being sworn in, according to three people briefed on the matter. The proposal is being promoted by a small group including Boris Epshteyn, a top legal adviser to Mr. Trump who…

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Republican battleground-state legal blitz falters ahead of election

Republican battleground-state legal blitz falters ahead of election

Reuters reports: Donald Trump’s Republican allies have suffered a string of courtroom setbacks in battleground U.S. presidential election states as Election Day draws closer, losses which could boost voter turnout and speed certification of the eventual winner. In the past three weeks, Trump’s allies have been dealt at least 10 court losses in battleground states that could decide the outcome of the Nov. 5 contest between Republican former President Trump and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris. On Friday,…

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Microsoft fires employees who organized vigil for Palestinians killed in Gaza

Microsoft fires employees who organized vigil for Palestinians killed in Gaza

The Associated Press reports: Microsoft has fired two employees who organized an unauthorized vigil at the company’s headquarters for Palestinians killed in Gaza during Israel’s war with Hamas. The two employees told The Associated Press they were fired by phone call late Thursday, several hours after a lunchtime event they organized at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington. Both workers were members of a coalition of employees called “No Azure for Apartheid” that has opposed Microsoft’s sale of its cloud-computing technology…

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Relying on AI could reshape your entire identity without you realizing

Relying on AI could reshape your entire identity without you realizing

Muriel Leuenberger writes: Your phone and its apps know a lot about you. Who you are talking to and spending time with, where you go, what music, games, and movies you like, how you look, which news articles you read, who you find attractive, what you buy with your credit card, and how many steps you take. This information is already being exploited to sell us products, services, or politicians. Online traces allow companies like Google or Facebook to infer…

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Trump has a ‘For Sale’ sign around his neck

Trump has a ‘For Sale’ sign around his neck

The New York Times reports: On a Friday in late September, Donald J. Trump took time off the campaign trail for a closed-door meeting at Mar-a-Lago with officials representing the vaping industry. The vaping emissaries talked about loosening regulations and told the former president he had “saved” the industry in the past. The group — including Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, and another 2016 campaign aide, Michael Rubino — showed him mock-ups of mailers they were sending out…

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Jeff Bezos overrode his own publisher to kill Washington Post’s Kamala Harris endorsement

Jeff Bezos overrode his own publisher to kill Washington Post’s Kamala Harris endorsement

The Daily Beast reports: Multibillionaire Jeff Bezos alone made the decision to block The Washington Post, the newspaper he owns, from endorsing a presidential candidate. The Daily Beast has learned that even Will Lewis, Bezos’ hand-picked publisher, fought Bezos “tooth and nail” to prevent him from squelching the prepared editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for president. It’s a surprising twist, given that it was Lewis who announced the paper’s decision. The news organization’s most senior opinion columnists Friday night fired back…

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Harris earns an eleventh-hour show of support from Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim community leaders

Harris earns an eleventh-hour show of support from Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim community leaders

The New Republic reports: More than 100 Arizona Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and progressive Democrats and community leaders have signed a letter making the case for those reluctant to support Kamala Harris against Donald Trump. “We know that many in our communities are resistant to vote for Kamala Harris because of the Biden administration’s complicity in the genocide,” the letter, published Thursday night, reads. “Some of us have lost many family members in Gaza and Lebanon. We respect those who feel…

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Elon Musk, enemy of ‘open borders,’ launched his career working illegally

Elon Musk, enemy of ‘open borders,’ launched his career working illegally

The Washington Post reports: Long before he became one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors and campaign surrogates, South African-born Elon Musk worked illegally in the United States as he launched his entrepreneurial career after ditching a graduate studies program in California, according to former business associates, court records and company documents obtained by The Washington Post. Musk in recent months has amplified the Republican presidential candidate’s claims that “open borders” and undocumented immigrants are destroying America, broadcasting those views to…

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The ‘Black Insurrectionist’ was actually white. The deception did not stop there

The ‘Black Insurrectionist’ was actually white. The deception did not stop there

The Associated Press reports: “Black Insurrectionist,” the anonymous social media persona behind some of the most widely circulated conspiracy theories about the 2024 election, can be traced to a man from upstate New York. He’s also white. With a profile photo of a Black soldier and the tagline “I FOLLOW BACK TRUE PATRIOTS,” the account on the platform X amassed more than 300,000 followers while posting dubious claims about Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim…

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Iran mocks Israel’s ‘weak’ attacks as hardliners call for reprisal

Iran mocks Israel’s ‘weak’ attacks as hardliners call for reprisal

Patrick Wintour writes: The Iranian government has belittled the scale and effectiveness of the Israeli attack on its military sites, but hardliners in the parliament insisted the strikes breached Iranian red lines and required a swift response, preferably at a time when Israel is already enmeshed in Lebanon and Gaza. The internal Iranian debate on how to respond to the long-awaited Israeli attack turns on whether to treat Israel’s breach of Iranian national sovereignty as too grave to be ignored,…

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Polar bears are getting horrific injuries because of climate change, researchers say

Polar bears are getting horrific injuries because of climate change, researchers say

Live Science reports: Polar bears are developing horrific wounds on their paws due to changing ice conditions in the Arctic, a new study reports. In the most severe cases, researchers describe two bears with crippling, dinner plate-size balls of ice stuck to their feet. Beneath the ice balls, the bears’ paw pads were covered in deep, bleeding cuts. “I’d never seen that before,” study lead author Kristin Laidre, a marine ecologist and associate professor at the University of Washington, said…

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Regular secret contacts between Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin since 2022 raise security concerns

Regular secret contacts between Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin since 2022 raise security concerns

The Wall Street Journal reports: Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a linchpin of U.S. space efforts, has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since late 2022. The discussions, confirmed by several current and former U.S., European and Russian officials, touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions. At one point, Putin asked the billionaire to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, said two people…

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Satellite images show major expansion at Russian site with secret bioweapons past

Satellite images show major expansion at Russian site with secret bioweapons past

The Washington Post reports: A few months after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, satellite imagery captured unusual activity at a restricted military research facility nestled among the birch forests northeast of Moscow. The Russian site, called Sergiev Posad-6, had been quiet for decades, but it had a notorious Cold War past: It had once been a major research center for biological weapons, with a history of experiments with the viruses that cause smallpox, Ebola and hemorrhagic…

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Trump is gaining ‘anticipatory obedience’ from media owners who bow to tyranny

Trump is gaining ‘anticipatory obedience’ from media owners who bow to tyranny

Parker Molloy writes: I woke up this morning thinking about authoritarianism. In his 2017 book On Tyranny, historian Timothy Snyder introduced the concept of “anticipatory obedience,” warning that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” He argued that in uncertain times, individuals and institutions might preemptively adjust their actions to align with what they believe a more repressive regime would want—often without being asked. Forward to the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, and Snyder’s warning feels…

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