Music: Lars Danielsson — ‘Party on the Planet’
Anti-voting activists co-ordinate with White House on illegal draft emergency order to control elections
Democracy Docket reports: A draft emergency executive order to declare a national emergency to allow President Donald Trump to take unprecedented control over voting is being circulated by anti-voting activists who said they are in coordination with the White House. Voting rights experts, democracy advocates, and at least one state election chief said Trump doesn’t have the authority to claim such powers — and any attempt would be blatantly unconstitutional. The draft order — which is said to be based…
DHS claim that ICE recruits are getting adequate training ‘is a lie,’ says whistleblower
The Los Angeles Times reports: Earlier this month, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons testified to Congress that while the agency had reduced the number of training days to 42 from 75, “We went from five days a week to six days a week. Five days a week was five eight-hour days and we’ve gone to six 12-hour days.” But the documents appear to contradict Lyons’ testimony. “The schedules reflected on these documents indicate that current ICE recruits receive nearly…
Jailed for ‘standing up’: DHS assault victim Aliya Rahman arrested at State of the Union address
We speak with Minneapolis resident Aliya Rahman, who attended Tuesday’s State of the Union address as a guest of Congressmember Ilhan Omar. Rahman was removed from the chamber Tuesday and spent several hours in jail following what she describes as an aggressive arrest by Capitol Police — all for silently challenging Trump during the speech. “There are only two things you can do at the State of the Union, and they are sit down and stand up,” says Rahman….
Hegseth’s ‘incoherent’ Anthropic ultimatum confounds AI policymakers
Politico reports: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ultimatum to the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is sparking shock and confusion among lawyers and AI policymakers, who accuse the Pentagon of making contradictory threats as it pressures the company to lift restrictions on the use of its powerful AI model. Hegseth met with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Tuesday to deliver a warning — give the military unfettered access to its Claude AI model by Friday evening or else have the government label…
Calls for the U.S. to be included in a probe into foreign interference in UK politics
The Guardian reports: The hosting of Tommy Robinson by the Trump administration has been condemned by British MPs amid calls for the US to be included in a probe into foreign interference in UK politics. The far-right activist, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is being feted in the US, where he met figures including a political appointee at the Department of State in Washington DC and a congressman. The visit has prompted questions about how Robinson – a former…
Americans are leaving the U.S. in record numbers
The Wall Street Journal reports: In its 250th year, is America, land of immigration, becoming a country of emigration? Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus—negative net migration—as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America’s own citizens are leaving…
Largest image of its kind shows hidden chemistry at the heart of the Milky Way
European Southern Observatory (ESO): Astronomers have captured the central region of our Milky Way in a striking new image, unveiling a complex network of filaments of cosmic gas in unprecedented detail. Obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), this rich dataset — the largest ALMA image to date — will allow astronomers to probe the lives of stars in the most extreme region of our galaxy, next to the supermassive black hole at its centre. “It’s a place of…
Music: Lars Danielsson — ‘Svensk Låt’
Trump DOJ’s own goals could stymie its efforts to undermine midterms
Democracy Docket reports: Among other steps that President Donald Trump will take to undermine a fair election this fall, he’ll likely use the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to bring a flood of litigation aiming to challenge Democratic wins and shape the rules in the GOP’s favor. But election law experts say those efforts may stumble over the administration’s many legal missteps: the likely weakness of the claims themselves, the lack of experienced and competent voting lawyers in DOJ’s ranks,…
The Epstein scandal suggests that everything awful we’ve ever believed is true
Joshua Rothman writes: It was odd, for many reasons, to be a journalist in 2016 and 2017, just after the election of Donald Trump. Part of the oddness was that seemingly every story had to include him. If a reporter travelled somewhere to gather material on something apparently unrelated—a natural disaster, a sporting event, a scientific discovery—it felt important to explore whether the people who lived there had voted for Trump, and why. Writing about individuals, one found it crucial…
ICE and CPB are acquiring a vast cache of weapons from private contractors
Greg Sargent writes: The “forever wars” abroad and the global war on terror after the September 11 attacks left behind a long trail of failure, disillusionment, and death—but they also funneled huge sums of taxpayer money to companies that supplied the equipment that made all that destruction possible. That resulted in windfalls for GOP-connected companies, and fueled a massive public-private bureaucracy that grew harder to rein in as it metastasized to monstrous proportions. Something like this is happening again in…
A White House staffer appears to run a massive anonymous pro-Trump X account
Wired reports: Hours after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, the Trump administration was already working to shape the narrative. Official White House accounts flooded social media with clips of burning flags and clashes between locals and federal immigration agents, casting protestors—not the killing—as the story. Among the accounts amplifying that message was Johnny MAGA, a pro-Trump X account with nearly 300,000 followers. “They’re burning the American flag right now in Minneapolis,” the anonymous account claimed,…
DHS assault victim Aliya Rahman arrested at State of the Union address
We speak with Minneapolis resident Aliya Rahman, who attended Tuesday’s State of the Union address as a guest of Congressmember Ilhan Omar. Rahman was removed from the chamber Tuesday and spent several hours in jail following what she describes as an aggressive arrest by Capitol Police — all for silently challenging Trump during the speech. “There are only two things you can do at the State of the Union, and they are sit down and stand up,” says Rahman….
Federal judge rejects government’s request to search Washington Post reporter’s devices
Politico reports: A federal judge rejected the Department of Justice’s demand to continue its search of a Washington Post reporter’s phone and other electronic devices for information that might help an FBI investigation into the leaking of classified information. U.S. Magistrate Judge William Porter declined in his Thursday ruling to require the DOJ to return equipment seized from the home of reporter Hannah Natanson in January, saying the court would review her devices for any material relevant to the government’s…
Your car’s tire sensors could be used to track you
TechXplore reports: Researchers at IMDEA Networks Institute, together with European partners, have found that tire pressure sensors in modern cars can unintentionally expose drivers to tracking. Over a ten-week study, they collected signals from more than 20,000 vehicles, revealing a hidden privacy risk and highlighting the need for stronger security measures in future vehicle sensor systems. Most modern cars are equipped with a Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS), mandatory since the late 2000s in many countries for their contribution to…