Music: Marcin Wasilewski Trio — ‘The Cat’
Steve Bannon encouraged Epstein to join his effort to ‘take down’ Pope Francis
CNN reports: Steve Bannon, a former White House adviser to US President Donald Trump, discussed opposition strategies with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein against Pope Francis, with Bannon saying he hoped to “take down” the pontiff, according to newly released files from the US Department of Justice. Messages sent between the pair in 2019, released in the massive document dump last month, reveal Bannon courted the late financier in his attempts to undermine the former pontiff after leaving the first…
UK confirms Russia poisoned Navalny in prison with the rare toxin, epibatidine
GOV.UK: The UK is today exposing the brutal and barbaric circumstances surrounding the death of Alexei Navalny in a Russian prison. Two years after the Munich Security Conference was shocked by the news of the leading Russian opposition figure’s death, consistent, collaborative work has confirmed through laboratory testing that the deadly toxin found in the skin of Ecuador dart frogs (epibatidine) was found in samples from Alexei Navalny’s body and highly likely resulted in his death. Only the Russian state had…
Courts have ruled 4,400 times that ICE jailed people illegally. It continues to do so
Reuters reports: Hundreds of judges around the country have ruled more than 4,400 times since October that President Donald Trump’s administration is detaining immigrants unlawfully, a Reuters review of court records found. The decisions amount to a sweeping legal rebuke of Trump’s immigration crackdown. Yet the administration has continued jailing people indefinitely even after courts ruled the policy was illegal. “It is appalling that the Government insists that this Court should redefine or completely disregard the current law as it…
Beyond the major cities, ICE is rattling small-town and exurban America
The New York Times reports: President Trump may be ending the surge of immigration agents in the Twin Cities, but his mass deportation effort has already extended well past large, liberal cities like Minneapolis, to small communities where the national spotlight does not exist but the impact can be at least as acute. In places like Cornelius, Ore., Danbury, Conn., Biddeford, Maine, and Coon Rapids, Minn., where moderation, not partisanship, might predominate, the arrival of Immigration and Customs Enforcement —…
ICE tried to justify a Minneapolis shooting. Then its story unraveled
The New York Times reports: When an immigration agent shot Julio C. Sosa-Celis in the leg last month in Minneapolis, touching off hours of tense protests, the Trump administration rushed to sell a version of events that demonized the wounded man and defended the agent. About two hours after the gunfire, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman claimed that three people had attacked an agent with a broom and snow shovel. She said the agent “fired a defensive shot to…
Daniel Dennett was right: We URGENTLY need a federal law forbidding AI from impersonating humans
Gary Marcus writes: The night before I testified in the US Senate in May, 2023, the late philosopher Daniel Dennett sent me a manuscript that he called “counterfeit people”. It was published a few days later in The Atlantic. Here the first paragraph. Money has existed for several thousand years, and from the outset counterfeiting was recognized to be a very serious crime, one that in many cases calls for capital punishment because it undermines the trust on which society…
Institutions are how we scale up cooperation among millions
Julien Lie-Panis writes: Every human society, from the smallest village to the largest nation, faces the same fundamental challenge: how to get people to act in the interests of the collective rather than their own. Fishermen must limit their catch so fish stocks don’t collapse. People must respect others’ property and safety. Citizens must pay taxes to fund roads, schools and hospitals. Left to pure self-interest, no community could endure; the bonds of collective life would quickly unravel. The solutions…
Music: Marcin Wasilewski Trio — ‘Riders On The Storm’
ICE operations increasingly resemble Israeli occupation. That’s no coincidence
Sophia Goodfriend writes: As U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have swarmed cities across the United States, American politics has appeared to enter a new phase, one in which armed federal forces turn civilian neighborhoods into active conflict zones. Part of what is driving this political shift is a potent technical infrastructure: ICE operations are now expedited by mobile surveillance and targeting systems, where agents’ most powerful weapon can fit in the palm of their hands. Recent reporting has…
ICE plans to spend $38.3 billion turning warehouses into concentration camps
The Washington Post reports: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement expects to spend $38.3 billion on its plan to acquire warehouses across the country and retrofit them into immigrant detention centers that can hold tens of thousands of immigrants, according to documents the agency provided to New Hampshire’s governor and published on the state’s website Thursday. ICE plans to buy and convert 16 buildings across the country to serve as regional processing centers, each holding 1,000 to 1,500 immigrant detainees at…
DHS sending hundreds of administrative subpoenas to social media companies to suppress political dissent
The New York Times reports: The Department of Homeland Security is expanding its efforts to identify Americans who oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement by sending tech companies legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency. In recent months, Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have received hundreds of administrative subpoenas from the Department of Homeland Security, according to four government officials…
Funds appropriated to feed starving children now being spent on Russell Vought’s security detail
Reuters reports: The White House budget office is using millions of dollars from the former U.S. foreign aid agency to pay for the security detail of Russell Vought, President Donald Trump’s budget chief and an architect of the government overhaul that has cut thousands of federal jobs, according to three documents seen by Reuters. The White House Office of Management and Budget, which Vought leads, is allocating $15 million of what remains of USAID operating expenses to cover the costs…
In the Kristi & Corey Show, she gets to become president and he gets a gun — or at least a badge
The Wall Street Journal reports: Kristi Noem knew she needed a reset. It was two days after federal agents had shot and killed Alex Pretti, and Noem was facing fire from all sides. Even some inside the administration were pushing President Trump to remove her from her position for her handling of the chaotic immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis and comments she’d made saying Pretti committed an act of domestic terrorism. So Noem’s top adviser, Corey Lewandowski, messaged Trump’s pollster…
UK ban on Palestine Action unlawful, high court judges rule
The Guardian reports: The co-founder of Palestine Action has won a legal challenge to the home secretary’s decision to ban the group under anti-terrorism laws. The proscription of Palestine Action, which categorised it alongside the likes of Islamic State, was the first of a direct action protest group and attracted widespread condemnation as well as a civil disobedience campaign defying the ban, during which more than 2,000 people have been arrested. From 5 July last year, being a member of…
Are the mysteries of quantum mechanics beginning to dissolve?
Philip Ball writes: None of the leading interpretations of quantum theory are very convincing. They ask us to believe, for example, that the world we experience is fundamentally divided from the subatomic realm it’s built from. Or that there is a wild proliferation of parallel universes, or that a mysterious process causes quantumness to spontaneously collapse. This unsatisfying state was a key element of Beyond Weird, my 2018 book on the meaning of quantum mechanics. It’s no wonder experts are…