Music: Pat Metheny — ‘Don’t Look Down’
The case against Don Lemon is bogus, and dangerous
The Associated Press reports: Journalist Don Lemon, who dared the Trump administration to come after him after he covered an anti-immigration enforcement protest that disrupted a service at a Minnesota church, was indicted for civil rights crimes. Lemon was arrested Thursday by federal agents in Los Angeles, while another independent journalist and two protest participants were arrested in Minnesota. The arrests brought sharp criticism from news media advocates and civil rights activists including the Rev. Al Sharpton, who said the…
ICE’s surveillance app is a techno-authoritarian nightmare
Moustafa Bayoumi writes: The lethal force Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is meting out on American streets is rightly drawing loud condemnations from politicians and editorial boards across the nation and around the world. Now is the time we must start paying attention to another highly damaging part of ICE’s arsenal: the agency’s deployment of mass surveillance. I’m referring specifically to Mobile Fortify, a specialized app ICE has been using at least since May 2025. (Usage of the app was…
ICE deportation flights are getting longer and crueler
Mother Jones reports: Just before being put on board her deportation flight, Melissa Tran’s wrists and ankles were shackled to a chain around her waist. It had been more than 10 hours since she’d been given any food or water; for the last seven she had been sitting on a bus on the tarmac. There was no company name or logo on the Boeing 767, but she soon learned the airline was called Omni Air International. She’d never heard of…
Atlanta FBI boss ousted after balking at 2020 election probe
MS Now reports: The special agent in charge of the FBI’s Atlanta field office was forced out this month after questioning the Justice Department’s renewed push to probe Fulton County’s role in the 2020 election, two people familiar with the matter told MS NOW. Paul Brown was ousted after expressing concerns about the FBI’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s longstanding and unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in the county anchored by Atlanta, and for refusing to carry out the searches…
No, Kevin Warsh isn’t qualified to become Fed chair
Paul Krugman writes: So Kevin Warsh will be the next Fed chair. The silver lining to his appointment is that he shouldn’t be able to do much damage, although with one big caveat (see below). The Fed is a republic, not a dictatorship; key decisions are made by a committee in which the chairperson has only one vote. Fed chairs can only drive policy through persuasion — and Warsh lacks the intellectual and moral credibility to be effective on that…
The AI bubble will burst. It’s up to us to replace it responsibly
Mark Surman writes: It was December 1999. Tech investors were riding high, convinced that a website and a Super Bowl ad were all it took to get rich quick. Spending was mistaken for growth; marketing was mistaken for a business model. In just a few months, the dot-com boom would go bust: $1.7tn in market value vanished, and the broader economy took a $5tn hit. Yet something remarkable emerged from the wreckage. The post-crash internet wasn’t defined by speculation, but…
Once thought to support neurons, astrocytes turn out to be in charge
Ingrid Wickelgren writes: The human brain is a vast network of billions of neurons. By exchanging signals to depress or excite each other, they generate patterns that ripple across the brain up to 1,000 times per second. For more than a century, that dizzyingly complex neuronal code was thought to be the sole arbiter of perception, thought, emotion, and behavior, as well as related health conditions. If you wanted to understand the brain, you turned to the study of neurons:…
Music: Studnitzky — ‘Egis’
Profile in courage: Nearest witness of Alex Pretti’s murder describes everything she saw
CNN’s Anderson Cooper speaks with Stella Carlson, the witness who captured crucial video showing exactly what happened when Alex Pretti was shot and killed by DHS officers: “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Like, what? What? And I knew he was gone, because I watched it. And then they come over to try to perform some type of medical aid by ripping his clothes open with scissors and then maneuvering his body around like a rag doll, only…
Instead of focusing on national security, DNI Tulsi Gabbard is hunting for 2020 election fraud
The Wall Street Journal reports: Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has spent months investigating the results of the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost, according to White House officials, a role that took her to a related FBI search of an election center in Georgia on Wednesday. Gabbard is leading the administration’s effort to re-examine the election and look for potential crimes, a priority for the president, the officials said. The national intelligence director is usually focused on…
FBI’s search of Georgia election center is ‘dangerous,’ experts warn
By Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield This story was originally published by ProPublica When the FBI executed a warrant on Wednesday to seize records from the 2020 presidential vote in Fulton County, Georgia, it marked both an extraordinary event in the history of American elections and a significant escalation in President Donald Trump’s breaking of democratic norms, several legal experts said. Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen from him and blamed Georgia, in…
Chief federal judge in Minnesota says ICE has violated nearly 100 court orders this month
The New York Times reports: The chief federal judge in Minnesota excoriated Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Wednesday, saying it had violated nearly 100 court orders stemming from its aggressive crackdown in the state and had disobeyed more judicial directives in January alone than “some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.” The extraordinary broadside by the judge, Patrick J. Schiltz, came in a ruling in which he temporarily rescinded an order he had issued on Tuesday, summoning Todd…
ICE pretends it’s a military force, but its tactics would get real soldiers killed
John Publius (a pseudonym) writes: As a veteran of the war on terror, I have spent the past year watching Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers expand their operations across the country on a heretofore unprecedented scale and with a new faux-military bearing. From equipment to weapons to tactics, ICE and other immigration enforcement bodies want to be seen as combat forces carrying out their missions. Witness on Thursday, when White House border czar Tom Homan talked about Minneapolis as a…
India’s tech workers in crisis amid suicides, layoffs, and AI
Rest of World reports: On a warm night last May, Nikhil Somwanshi sent his roommate a WhatsApp message asking him to tell his family that what was about to happen next was an accident. The message triggered a frantic search for the 24-year-old machine-learning engineer in southeast Bengaluru, the city of 13 million known as India’s Silicon Valley. Somwanshi was a star student from a small village in the farm-dotted countryside. Nine months prior, he’d landed a coveted job at…
Is time a fundamental part of reality? A quiet revolution in physics suggests not
Pack-Shot/Shutterstock By Florian Neukart, Leiden University Time feels like the most basic feature of reality. Seconds tick, days pass and everything from planetary motion to human memory seems to unfold along a single, irreversible direction. We are born and we die, in exactly that order. We plan our lives around time, measure it obsessively and experience it as an unbroken flow from past to future. It feels so obvious that time moves forward that questioning it can seem almost pointless….