Browsed by
Category: Politics

Trump’s D.C. U.S. attorney pick, Ed Martin, appeared on Russian state media over 150 times

Trump’s D.C. U.S. attorney pick, Ed Martin, appeared on Russian state media over 150 times

The Washington Post reports: Hours before President Donald Trump announced U.S. missile strikes on Syria in response to a chemical attack that killed 90 civilians in April 2017, Ed Martin said on the Russian state television network RT America that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad might not be to blame. Instead, Martin told viewers, the situation was “engineered” in Washington “by the people that want war in Syria.” In early 2022, Martin told an interviewer on the same arm of RT’s…

Read More Read More

Members of leading British Jewish body condemn Israel’s latest actions in Gaza

Members of leading British Jewish body condemn Israel’s latest actions in Gaza

The Guardian reports: Members of the Board of Deputies, the largest body representing British Jews, have said they can no longer “turn a blind eye or remain silent” over the war in Gaza. In a significant break with the board’s customary support for the Israeli government, the 36 signatories to an open letter published in the FT say “Israel’s soul is being ripped out”. Since the war began after the terrorist atrocities committed by Hamas against Israelis on 7 October…

Read More Read More

The flimsy basis of Abrego Garcia’s alleged ties to MS-13

The flimsy basis of Abrego Garcia’s alleged ties to MS-13

Roger Parloff reports: In multiple filings, the government has conceded that it wrongfully removed Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from the United States to a notorious prison for terrorists in El Salvador on March 15. On April 7, accordingly, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered—with no recorded dissents—that the government “facilitate” his return. But rather than try to right its wrong, the Trump administration has, for weeks, been resisting bringing him back and downplaying the gravity of its error. Both strategies have hinged on the administration’s dubious…

Read More Read More

Trump claims Abrego Garcia’s fate is outside his control. The case of Muneer Subaihani proves otherwise

Trump claims Abrego Garcia’s fate is outside his control. The case of Muneer Subaihani proves otherwise

The New York Times reports: In August 2018, during President Trump’s first term, an Iraqi immigrant named Muneer Subaihani went missing. A refugee who had been living in the United States for nearly 25 years, Mr. Subaihani was among hundreds of Iraqis who had been protected from deportation under a federal court order. His lawyers figured he was still in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he had been placed after he was swept up in an ICE…

Read More Read More

Do emerging cracks in the dissident right presage more substantial defections?

Do emerging cracks in the dissident right presage more substantial defections?

Michelle Goldberg writes: Alex Kaschuta’s podcast, “Subversive,” used to be a node in the network between weird right-wing internet subcultures and mainstream conservatism. She hosted men’s rights activists and purveyors of “scientific” racism, neo-reactionary online personalities with handles like “Raw Egg Nationalist” and the Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters. Curtis Yarvin, a court philosopher of the MAGA movement who wants to replace democracy with techno-monarchy, appeared on the show twice. In 2022, Kaschuta spoke at the same National Conservatism conference…

Read More Read More

A whistleblower’s disclosure details how DOGE operatives may have taken sensitive labor data

A whistleblower’s disclosure details how DOGE operatives may have taken sensitive labor data

NPR reports: In the first days of March, a team of advisers from President Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency initiative arrived at the Southeast Washington, D.C., headquarters of the National Labor Relations Board. The small, independent federal agency investigates and adjudicates complaints about unfair labor practices. It stores reams of potentially sensitive data, from confidential information about employees who want to form unions to proprietary business information. The DOGE employees, who are effectively led by White House adviser and…

Read More Read More

Canadian academics warned to halt non-essential travel to the U.S.

Canadian academics warned to halt non-essential travel to the U.S.

Toronto Star reports: Canadian academics are being urged to avoid all non-essential travel to the U.S. amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on research and education along with heightened fears of being turned away at the border. On Tuesday, the Canadian Association of University Teachers issued a travel advisory to its members that “strongly recommends” Canadian academic staff travel to the United States only if necessary. The CAUT represents 72,000 teachers, librarians, researchers, general staff and other academic professionals at some…

Read More Read More

U.S. economy to lose billions as foreign tourists stay away

U.S. economy to lose billions as foreign tourists stay away

Bloomberg reports: The US economy is set to lose billions of dollars in revenue in 2025 from a pullback in foreign tourism and boycotts of American products, adding to a growing list of headwinds keeping recession risk elevated. Arrivals of non-citizens to the US by plane dropped almost 10 per cent in March from a year earlier, according to data published Monday by the International Trade Administration. Goldman Sachs estimates in a worst-case scenario, the hit this year from reduced…

Read More Read More

Chinese manufacturing is superior — tariffs won’t be enough to shift production to the U.S.

Chinese manufacturing is superior — tariffs won’t be enough to shift production to the U.S.

Wired reports: Dallas-based small business owner Allen Walton says he just sold out of one of his products, a surveillance camera used by law enforcement and private detectives. That would normally be great news for Walton’s electronics company, SpyGuy, which specializes in gadgets like GPS trackers and hidden camera detectors. But thanks to the Trump administration’s ever-shifting tariff policies, Walton says he doesn’t know if he should replenish his stock. His products are mostly manufactured in southern China, and the…

Read More Read More

This is a constitutional crisis

This is a constitutional crisis

Adam Serwer writes: Like most of the men rendered to CECOT, Abrego Garcia has fewer criminal convictions than the current president of the United States. Even the Trump administration acknowledged in federal court that it had deported Abrego Garcia “in error.” This morning, however, Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller claimed on Fox News that the acknowledgment that Abrego Garcia was wrongly deported had been made by a “saboteur” in the Department of Justice and that “he was not mistakenly sent to…

Read More Read More

Military contractors pitch unprecedented prison plan for detained immigrants

Military contractors pitch unprecedented prison plan for detained immigrants

Politico reports: Former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince and a team of defense contractors are pitching the White House on a plan to vastly expand deportations to El Salvador — transporting thousands of immigrants from U.S. holding facilities to a sprawling maximum security prison in Central America. The proposal, exclusively obtained by POLITICO, says it would target “criminal illegal aliens” and would attempt to avoid legal challenges by designating part of the prison — which has drawn accusations of violence and…

Read More Read More

American rendition: Rümeysa Öztürk’s journey from Ph.D. scholar to Trump target languishing in Louisiana cell

American rendition: Rümeysa Öztürk’s journey from Ph.D. scholar to Trump target languishing in Louisiana cell

By Hannah Allam This story was originally published by ProPublica With a line of cars waiting behind them at the train station, the two women hugged tightly as they said goodbye at the end of a spring break that hadn’t turned out to be the relaxing vacation they’d imagined. Their girls trip had transformed into endless conversations about security precautions as one of the friends, 30-year-old Turkish national Rümeysa Öztürk, grew increasingly worried she would become a target of the…

Read More Read More

No evidence linking Tufts student, Rümeysa Öztürk, to antisemitism or terrorism, State Dept. found

No evidence linking Tufts student, Rümeysa Öztürk, to antisemitism or terrorism, State Dept. found

The Washington Post reports: Days before masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk to deport her, the State Department determined that the Trump administration had not produced any evidence showing that she engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization, as the government has alleged. The finding, contained in a March memo that was described to The Washington Post, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not have sufficient grounds for…

Read More Read More

Harvard will fight against Trump’s demands

Harvard will fight against Trump’s demands

The Harvard Crimson reports: Harvard will not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to dismantle its diversity programming, limit student protests, and submit to far-reaching federal audits in exchange for its federal funding, University President Alan M. Garber ’76 announced in a message to affiliates Monday afternoon. “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can…

Read More Read More

Cornell sues DOE for ‘unlawful’ cuts to indirect costs for research grants

Cornell sues DOE for ‘unlawful’ cuts to indirect costs for research grants

The Cornell Daily Sun reports: The University joined litigation against the U.S. Department of Energy and DOE Secretary Chris Wright, according to a Monday email from President Michael Kotlikoff and Provost Kavita Bala. The plaintiffs of the case are alleging that proposed immediate cuts to indirect costs for University research grants are unlawful by violating federal regulations. This is the second time this semester that the University has had to take “the unprecedented step of seeking emergency judicial intervention after…

Read More Read More

China halts critical exports as trade war intensifies

China halts critical exports as trade war intensifies

The New York Times reports: China has suspended exports of a wide range of critical minerals and magnets, threatening to choke off supplies of components central to automakers, aerospace manufacturers, semiconductor companies and military contractors around the world. Shipments of the magnets, essential for assembling everything from cars and drones to robots and missiles, have been halted at many Chinese ports while the Chinese government drafts a new regulatory system. Once in place, the new system could permanently prevent supplies…

Read More Read More