Music: Tocar — ‘Birds of Paradise’
America must reject nationality-based discrimination
Amanda Frost writes: Sixty years ago, the United States abolished immigration restrictions based on nationality alone. By 1965, such discrimination had become an embarrassment. In an emotional ceremony by the Statue of Liberty, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that the legislation he was signing “corrects a cruel and enduring wrong” and makes Americans “truer to ourselves both as a country and as a people.” Now the Trump administration is reviving nationality-based discrimination. After an Afghan refugee was arrested in the…
Minneapolis police chief warns officers: Stop unlawful force by ICE or lose your job
MS Now reports: Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara issued a stern warning to his officers on Thursday: Intervene when you see Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents using unlawful force or lose your job. “If unlawful force is being used by any law enforcement officer against any person in this city and one of our officers is there, absolutely, I expect them to intervene, or they’ll be fired,” O’Hara said when asked how his officers should respond to excessive force by…
Trump wants to recreate a white America that never existed
Rebecca Solnit writes: As Donald Trump deteriorates and his grasp on power fades, he has been lashing out furiously at female journalists and ethnic groups, most recently Somali Americans. His insults land because of their animosity and his power, not their accuracy. Likewise, his administration’s attacks on immigrants are sloppy and driven by lies. It’s strikingly clear that the target is not individuals with criminal records. It’s anyone and everyone guilty of being brown. Native Americans with tribal identification cards,…
Pete Hegseth is seriously testing Trump’s ‘no scalps’ rule
The Atlantic reports: The suspected drug traffickers, the lone survivors of a U.S. airstrike, were sprawled on a table-size piece of floating wreckage in the Caribbean for more than 40 minutes. They were unarmed, incommunicado, and adrift as they repeatedly attempted to right what remained of their boat. At one point, the men raised their arms and seemed to signal to the U.S. aircraft above, a gesture some who watched a video of the incident interpreted as a sign of…
U.S. leader of global neo-Nazi terrorist group signals retribution for arrests in Spain
The Guardian reports: After Spanish police and Europol’s counter-terrorism section arrested three suspected members of the Base – a globally proscribed neo-Nazi terrorist group – in the eastern province of Castellón, its American leader living in Russia was defiant and signaled further actions. In a text message to the Guardian, Rinaldo Nazzaro called the arrests another “example of political persecution” by world governments that are “further justifying our resistance to its hegemonic rule by any means necessary”. The group’s presence…
The end of the Israel exception: A new paradigm for American policy
Andrew P. Miller writes: The bond between the United States and Israel has remained extraordinarily close for three decades. The United States has remained in lockstep with Israel through the heady days of the 1990s peace process with the Palestine Liberation Organization; the second intifada, the five-year Palestinian uprising that began in 2000; and then, over the next two decades, a series of conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon. The bond endured through Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel…
Neuroscientists find evidence that brain plasticity peaks at the end of the day
PsyPost reports: New research provides evidence that the brain’s ability to process signals and adapt to new information fluctuates rhythmically over a 24-hour cycle. A study published in Neuroscience Research reveals that while fatigue appears to suppress immediate neural activity at the end of the active phase, this same period may heighten the brain’s capacity for learning and memory formation. These findings suggest that the brain creates specific temporal windows that are optimized for different types of neural processing. Biological…
Music: Tocar — ‘Angustia del Alma’
Why doesn’t Trump pay a political price for his racism?
Adam Serwer writes: During a White House meeting on Tuesday, surrounded by his Cabinet, President Donald Trump referred to Somali immigrants as “garbage” and said, “We don’t want them in our country.” No one in Trump’s Cabinet stood up to this expression of gutter racism, although Vice President J. D. Vance enthusiastically banged on the table. The president’s remarks were ostensibly in response to real events—in Minnesota, dozens of members of the Somali diaspora have been implicated in fraud related…
Trump threatens European sovereignty by promoting ‘resistance’ and ethnonationalism
The Guardian reports: Donald Trump’s administration has said Europe faces “civilisational erasure” within the next two decades as a result of migration and EU integration, arguing in a policy document that the US must “cultivate resistance” within the continent to “Europe’s current trajectory”. Billed as “a roadmap to ensure America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history and the home of freedom on earth”, the US National Security Strategy makes explicit Washington’s support for Europe’s nationalist far-right…
Trump’s pardons for drug traffickers and fraudsters is upending the justice system
The Financial Times reports: It took dozens of special agents the best part of a decade to bring Juan Orlando Hernández to justice for flooding US cities with cocaine. Then, in a single social media post last week, Donald Trump set the former Honduran president free. “People risked their lives for this investigation,” said a former agent at the US Drug Enforcement Administration, one of several law enforcement officials involved in tracking Hernández who voiced their frustration to the Financial…
Second strike focus obscures larger question about legality of Trump’s boat attacks
The New York Times reports: As Congress parses the details of a follow-on strike that killed shipwrecked survivors of President Trump’s first boat attack on Sept. 2, a much larger issue risks getting lost: whether Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have caused the military to commit crimes in a score of attacks. Adm. Frank M. Bradley, who commanded the Sept. 2 operation, on Thursday showed lawmakers a video of the attack. The briefing was part of a congressional…
Majority of immigrants arrested in city crackdowns have no criminal record
The New York Times reports: The federal deployments that have swept through major cities as part of President Trump’s immigration crackdown have led to thousands of arrests. But they have been less effective at apprehending immigrants with a criminal record than more routine operations elsewhere, new data shows. In high-profile Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Los Angeles; Chicago; Washington, D.C.; and across Massachusetts, more than half of those arrested had no criminal record, compared with a third of immigrants…
FBI’s Bongino no longer claims DC pipe bomb was ‘an inside job’; suspect said to be pro-Trump
USA Today reports: FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino brushed off questions about his past claims that the FBI had covered up the identity of the person who placed pipe bombs outside of political party headquarters on Jan. 5, 2021. In a Dec. 4 interview following the arrest and identification of a man accused of being the would-be bomber, Fox News’ Sean Hannity reminded Bongino, his former colleague, of his past social media and podcast comments. Bongino said the FBI was…
AI labs Meta, Deepseek, and Xai earned some of the worst grades possible on an existential safety index
Fortune reports: The Future of Life Institute’s latest AI safety index found that major AI labs fell short on most measures of AI responsibility, with few letter grades rising above a C. The org graded eight companies across categories like safety frameworks, risk assessment, and current harms. Perhaps most glaring was the “existential safety” line, where companies scored Ds and Fs across the board. While many of these companies are explicitly chasing superintelligence, they lack a plan for safely managing…