Music: Snarky Puppy & Metropole Orkest — ‘Between Worlds’
Adventure capitalism on the precipice: Climate denying grifters go into fusion
Announcing the planned merger of Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) and fusion power company, TAE Technologies, Michael B. Schwab (son of Charles Schwab, who just launched “Trump Accounts”), who is expected to be the chairman of the new company said: With the infusion of TMTG’s significant capital, TAE is on the precipice of scaling its leading technology to usher in a new era of energy abundance. The world needs energy, and fusion is the clear answer. The New York…
China is pouring vast resources into fusion research
The New York Times reports: China’s government has made fusion a national priority, marshaling resources at daunting speed. Recently, a Shanghai start-up essentially matched an engineering breakthrough by America’s best-funded fusion company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, in much less time. Over the summer, the Chinese government and private investors poured $2.1 billion into a new state-owned fusion company. That investment alone is two and a half times the U.S. Energy Department’s annual fusion budget. The two countries’ progress could soon be…
Who would trust a 22-year-old AI billionaire with the global economy?
Lila Shroff writes: Brendan Foody is 22 years old and runs a company worth billions. This August, I met the young CEO in a glass conference room overlooking the San Francisco Bay. While his peers are searching for their first jobs, Foody is pursuing a “master plan,” as he calls it, to upend the global labor market. His start-up, Mercor, offers an AI-powered hiring platform: Bots weed through résumés, and even conduct interviews. In the next five years, Foody told…
Epstein files: ‘They’re delusional if they think this is going to go away’
Sarah Fitzpatrick writes: Jeffrey Epstein’s victims began the day believing they might finally get something they’d been requesting for years: a direct conversation with the nation’s top law-enforcement official before the Justice Department made public a full trove of long-buried documents and photos. The release of the Epstein files, as the department’s hundreds of thousands of investigative materials have come to be known, might finally provide clarity on what the government knew about Epstein’s sex-trafficking scheme and when it knew…
MAGA infighting over Israel and 2028 erupts at the Turning Point USA conference
NBC News reports: For a second day in a row, a long-brewing internal fight among MAGA influencers spilled onto the stage of Turning Point USA’s first annual conference since the September slaying of Charlie Kirk, the organization’s co-founder. Podcaster Ben Shapiro, speaking on the AmericaFest convention’s opening night Thursday, ripped into right-wing broadcasters Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly, as well as white nationalist Nick Fuentes. At the core of his argument is a case that Owens…
Steve Witkoff’s other backer in his unlikely diplomatic ascent: Vladimir Putin
The Wall Street Journal reports: Steve Witkoff, a billionaire real-estate developer and longtime golfing partner of Donald Trump, was just days into his job as the new president’s special envoy to the Middle East when he received a tantalizing message from the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. Vladimir Putin was interested in meeting Witkoff—so interested that he might consider releasing an American prisoner to him. The invitation came from a Kremlin moneyman named Kirill Dmitriev, using the de facto Saudi…
Trump is so sharp he can spot the difference between a hippopotamus and a giraffe, he claims
The Independent reports: President Donald Trump once again boasted about having “aced” three cognitive tests in wide-ranging remarks. As concerns around the 79-year-old president’s health and mental fitness continue to mount — particularly after his rambling speech earlier this week, apparently falling asleep at several events including a Cabinet meeting, and his controversial Truth Social post about late filmmaker Rob Reiner — Trump reminded a North Carolina crowd on Friday that he’s “aced” several cognitive exams and is in “perfect…
Music: Dhafer Youssef — ‘41 Milestones’
Trump-appointed judge threatens to hold government in contempt over ICE detainee living conditions
The New Republic reports: A Trump-appointed judge was so upset with the living conditions in which ICE detained an immigrant in Long Island, New York, that he threatened to hold the government in contempt. U.S. District Judge Gary Brown, who was appointed by Trump in 2019, issued a 24-page ruling Thursday vehemently castigating the Department of Homeland Security for refusing to provide photos of a holding room that illegally held a noncitizen for multiple nights, calling it “putrid and cramped.”…
Trump’s fraudulent pardons wipe out payments to defrauded victims
The Washington Post reports: By the time a federal judge in 2023 sentenced convicted fraudster Trevor Milton to four years in prison, Salt Lake City businessman Liejo Supoto had long given up hope of recovering the more than $100,000 he had invested in Milton’s hydrogen-powered truck company. Supoto didn’t know that a federal law requires certain criminal offenders to pay what’s called restitution to compensate their victims for losses. In Milton’s case, prosecutors argued that the former CEO of Nikola…
Trump moves to denaturalize American citizens, end birthright citizenship, and halt visa lottery
The Trump administration is ramping up efforts to strip more naturalized immigrants of their U.S. citizenship, with The New York Times reporting that officials are seeking 100 to 200 cases per month. The news comes less than two weeks after the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case to decide the constitutionality of President Trump’s executive order aiming to end birthright citizenship.
The high cost of rolling over on immigration
G. Elliott Morris writes: In March 2025, the Trump administration illegally deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia — a resident of Maryland — to a prison camp for accused gang members and terrorists in El Salvador. The deportation of Abrego Garcia instantly became one of the clearest, most concrete examples of what Trump’s “mass deportations now!” immigration policy would look like in practice. Abrego Garcia was legally protected from removal to El Salvador, had been living in the U.S. without any criminal…
People are getting their news from AI – and it’s altering their views
When a bot brings you the news, who built it and how it presents the information matter. Zentangle/iStock via Getty Images By Adrian Kuenzler, University of Denver; University of Hong Kong Meta’s decision to end its professional fact-checking program sparked a wave of criticism in the tech and media world. Critics warned that dropping expert oversight could erode trust and reliability in the digital information landscape, especially when profit-driven platforms are mostly left to police themselves. What much of this…
Is Israel’s genocide economy on the brink?
+972 Magazine reports: Since October 2023, Israel has faced a convergence of economic shocks. Tens of thousands of residents have been displaced from border regions in the south and north as a result of hostilities with Hamas and Hezbollah, while hundreds of thousands of reservists were pulled out of the workforce for extended periods, leaving key sectors short-staffed and productivity depleted. Public services, education, and healthcare have deteriorated as state spending was diverted to the war, and almost 50,000 businesses…
After ruining a treasured and ancient water resource, Iran is drying up
Yale Environment 360 reports: More than international sanctions, more than its stifling theocracy, more than recent bombardment by Israel and the U.S. — Iran’s greatest current existential crisis is what hydrologists are calling its rapidly approaching “water bankruptcy.” It is a crisis that has a sad origin, they say: the destruction and abandonment of tens of thousands of ancient tunnels for sustainably tapping underground water, known as qanats, that were once the envy of the arid world. But calls for…