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Category: Politics

Trump is turning the White House into Mar-a-Lago with a private $200 million ballroom

Trump is turning the White House into Mar-a-Lago with a private $200 million ballroom

The New Republic reports: Donald Trump is finally getting his wish to turn the White House into the gaudy resort he calls home by adding a $200 million ballroom. The White House announced that it would begin construction in September on a 90,000 square foot ballroom that can seat 650 people. Yes, Trump is laser focused on the issues that matter most to Americans: Replacing the “large and unsightly” tent that typically hosts guests just 100 yards away from the…

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For Israel’s warfare-based economy, peace isn’t an option

For Israel’s warfare-based economy, peace isn’t an option

The Financial Times reports: Since the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, the best-performing major stock market in the world is … Israel. After taking an initial hit, the market recovered fully in four weeks, and since then is up around 80 per cent in dollar terms. This ascent continued through the recent 12-day war with Iran, when most geopolitical experts thought their worst fears of a wider conflict were coming to pass. The stock market, in contrast, kept signalling…

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Emil Bove’s confirmation was only possible because of the cowardice of Democrats

Emil Bove’s confirmation was only possible because of the cowardice of Democrats

Jay Willis writes: On Tuesday evening, the Senate voted to confirm Emil Bove, President Donald Trump’s criminal defense attorney-turned-Justice Department hatchetman, to a life-tenured judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Bove first made headlines for firing dozens of January 6 prosecutors shortly after Trump took office, parroting the president’s description of these cases as a “grave national injustice.” According to multiple whistleblowers, in March, Bove told his Justice Department subordinates that they might need to say “fuck you” to judges who were…

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Venezuelan men sent to CECOT on what they endured and reuniting with their families

Venezuelan men sent to CECOT on what they endured and reuniting with their families

By Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, Melissa Sanchez and Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica, Ronna Rísquez, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Adrián González, Cazadores de Fake News, photography and additional reporting by Adriana Loureiro Fernández for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune This story was originally published by ProPublica Now that he’s free, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison. He said guards stomped on his…

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Senate Democrats are using a 1928 law to pressure Trump to release the Epstein files

Senate Democrats are using a 1928 law to pressure Trump to release the Epstein files

Greg Sargent writes: Desperate times may call for desperate measures, but they also call for creative ones. Faced with a criminal president and a GOP congressional majority that’s wholly devoted to shutting down any and all transparency and accountability for him, Democrats will have to get increasingly resourceful in their efforts to crack through that facade. The very tentative good news is: They actually have options to do just that. This is why you should pay attention to the news…

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The clowns leading the FBI ‘have no idea what they’re doing’

The clowns leading the FBI ‘have no idea what they’re doing’

Quinta Jurecic writes: Michael Feinberg had not been planning to leave the FBI. But on May 31, he received a phone call from his boss asking him about a personal friendship with a former FBI agent who was known for criticizing President Donald Trump. Feinberg, an assistant special agent in charge at the FBI’s field office in Norfolk, Virginia, realized right away that he was in the crosshairs of the bureau’s leadership at an unusually chaotic time. If his 15-year…

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Peter Beinart: Why do some American Jews believe equality is good for us but not for Israelis and Palestinians?

Peter Beinart: Why do some American Jews believe equality is good for us but not for Israelis and Palestinians?

  Editor-at-large of “Jewish Currents,” who writes “The Beinart Notebook” on Substack, Peter Beinart sits down with Jon Stewart to discuss his book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning,” and speaking out against Israel. They talk about learning from Jewish history to be the saviors rather than the oppressors, America and the U.N.’s failure to hold Benjamin Netanyahu accountable, the urgency of engaging in critical discourse with other Jews, and how listening to Palestinian stories can illuminate…

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Gallup: Twice as many Americans oppose Israel’s destruction of Gaza as those who approve of it

Gallup: Twice as many Americans oppose Israel’s destruction of Gaza as those who approve of it

Gallop reports: Americans’ approval of Israel’s military action in Gaza has fallen 10 percentage points since the prior measurement in September, and it is now at 32%, the lowest reading since Gallup first asked the question in November 2023. Disapproval of the military action has now reached 60%. These findings are from a July 7-21, 2025, Gallup poll, as Israel’s campaign against Hamas stretched into its 21st month. Americans supported Israel’s actions in Gaza in its initial reading in 2023,…

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Poll: New York Democrats support Mamdani and want to see Netanyahu arrested

Poll: New York Democrats support Mamdani and want to see Netanyahu arrested

Semafor reports: New York City’s Democratic primary voters overwhelmingly believe that Israel is “committing genocide” in Gaza and that the United States should stop arming the Jewish state, according to new polling from a pro-Palestinian group and shared first with Semafor. Asked if the city should “enforce the arrest warrant” against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani supports, 63% of primary voters said yes. “The dam has broken,” said Margaret DeReus, the executive director of…

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EPA plans to drive ‘a dagger into the heart of the climate change’ regulations

EPA plans to drive ‘a dagger into the heart of the climate change’ regulations

Axios reports: EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said Tuesday he’s issuing draft plans to overturn the agency’s 2009 scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten human health and welfare — a move guaranteed to spark litigation. Why it matters: It’s President Trump’s most direct effort to rip out climate regulations root and branch — and make it harder for a successor to impose new ones. The “endangerment finding” provides a key legal underpinning for regulating heat-trapping gases from cars, power plants and more under the Clean…

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Delusions are getting crafted into legislation that’s designed to obscure the reality of climate change

Delusions are getting crafted into legislation that’s designed to obscure the reality of climate change

NBC News reports: For years, outlandish theories about the U.S. government using airplanes to spray harmful chemicals over U.S. homes or powerful elites controlling the weather were relegated to the fringes of society. Not anymore. As the internet has provided rocket fuel for such claims, Republican lawmakers across the country are introducing, passing and enacting laws to ban “weather modification” and environmental geoengineering and allude to the use of “chemtrails,” a longtime theory that planes are spreading chemical agents on…

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Epstein ‘stole’ young women from Trump

Epstein ‘stole’ young women from Trump

Politico reports: President Donald Trump said Tuesday that Jeffrey Epstein “stole” young women from his Mar-a-Lago beach club spa decades ago. “People were taken out of the spa, hired by him. In other words, gone,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “When I heard about it, I told him, I said, listen, we don’t want you taking our people, whether it’s spa or not spa … And he was fine. And not too long after he did it again….

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Israel is committing genocide, says Israeli human rights group

Israel is committing genocide, says Israeli human rights group

B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, reports: Since October 2023, Israel has shifted its policy toward the Palestinians. Its military onslaught on Gaza, underway for more than 21 months, has included mass killing, both directly and through creating unlivable conditions, serious bodily or mental harm to an entire population, decimation of basic infrastructure throughout the Strip, and forcible displacement on a huge scale, with ethnic cleansing added to the list of official war objectives….

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Trump’s full-scale war on science

Trump’s full-scale war on science

Micah Altman and Philip N. Cohen write: The Trump administration has unleashed a tsunami of budget cuts to federal science programs. Mass firings have taken place at both the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education, part of a deliberate decimation of research staff across the federal government. Since January, the administration has systematically cut science funding to its lowest level in decades and issued a flood of budget plans and executive orders that are reshaping how the government uses and supports science. Some outcomes have been…

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This construction project was on time and on budget. Then ICE attacked

This construction project was on time and on budget. Then ICE attacked

Reuters reports: Under a broiling Alabama sky a frustrated Robby Robertson, a construction site superintendent, surveys an 84,000 square foot, mostly built recreation center close to the Gulf coast port city of Mobile. The site is eerily quiet. Last month, the $20 million project was on track for on-time completion by November 1. Now Robertson says he is looking at a three-week delay after about half of his workers – scared by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on a…

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Mamdani gets modern messaging in ways other Democrats just don’t

Mamdani gets modern messaging in ways other Democrats just don’t

Greg Sargent writes: Despite being mired in a cutthroat New York mayoral campaign, Zohran Mamdani recently released a video announcing that he was taking a vacation. A vacation, that is, in his childhood home of Uganda. In the video, he mocked right-wing trolls for telling him to go back to Africa and joked that his return there showed that he’s “listening” to those “critics.” He offered New York tabloids suggestions for headlines mocking his African heritage—one read “MIA? MAMDANI IN…

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