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‘I’m a proud Canerican like Neil Young’: Joni Mitchell on U.S. citizenship and her new book of paintings

‘I’m a proud Canerican like Neil Young’: Joni Mitchell on U.S. citizenship and her new book of paintings

Rolling Stone reports: On Tuesday, Joni Mitchell obtained her dual citizenship in the U.S. and Canada — 62 years after living in the States. “I became a citizen so I could vote,” Mitchell tells Rolling Stone. “I’m a proud Canerican like Neil Young.” (Mitchell’s longtime pal became a U.S. citizen in 2020, 54 years after illegally crossing the U.S. border in a Pontiac hearse.) And now that she’s officially an American, Mitchell says she has some work to do. On…

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Trump keeps showering Putin with gifts as Russia strikes U.S. businesses

Trump keeps showering Putin with gifts as Russia strikes U.S. businesses

Axios reports: President Trump is indulging his fondness for Vladimir Putin at a moment of acute political peril, forcing Republicans in the midterms to take cover as he showers Moscow with one-sided concessions. Why it matters: With just three weeks until the election, Trump is rekindling a decade-long, scandal-scarred relationship with a dictator reviled by most Americans — including his own supporters. Driving the news: Since speaking with Putin on Friday, Trump has embarked on a remarkable five-day campaign of…

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Hegseth’s livestream execution finds tech fans. Trump not sure after learning shooter was paralyzed

Hegseth’s livestream execution finds tech fans. Trump not sure after learning shooter was paralyzed

Mother Jones reports: “I have been outspoken on wanting public executions for over a decade.” So said Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Anduril Industries, a military technology company that sells autonomous drones and software to the Defense Department, Customs and Border Protection, and militaries abroad in a vocal defense of “public and brutal” executions in general, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream the execution of Fort Hood murderer Nidal Malik Hasan in particular. Executions are the “ultimate example…

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‘Tip of the iceberg’: OpenAI bugging suspect has ties to Saudi royal family

‘Tip of the iceberg’: OpenAI bugging suspect has ties to Saudi royal family

CNBC reports: Abdulrahman Alfozan, the Saudi national charged with secretly installing a recording device in an executive conference room at OpenAI, had booked a one-way ticket from San Francisco to Saudi Arabia with his wife and a third family member before his arrest, federal prosecutors told a judge in a newly unsealed court filing. Alfozan “has the means — and will have the incentive — to flee the United States sooner if he learns about this case before he is…

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U.S.-made goods also got more expensive under Trump’s ill-conceived tariffs, new research finds

U.S.-made goods also got more expensive under Trump’s ill-conceived tariffs, new research finds

Fox News reports: Americans aren’t just seeing the price tag increase for imported goods. Thanks to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, they are now paying more for products made in the U.S.A., according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In fact, the research finds that prices for many everyday goods would have fallen last year and into early 2026 without Trump’s tariffs. The findings offer new evidence of how the sweeping tariff policy, a centerpiece of…

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Rising costs push necessities out of reach for nearly half of Americans

Rising costs push necessities out of reach for nearly half of Americans

The New York Times reports: Close to half of Americans are having trouble paying for basic needs, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, as the rising cost of living continues to exact its toll. The financial burden is especially acute for lower-income adults. Nearly three-quarters said they struggled to pay for food, housing, medical care or daily transportation in the past year compared with 13 percent of upper-income adults. About half of those on the lower end…

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Trump’s new press secretary hit with bar complaint for practicing law without a license

Trump’s new press secretary hit with bar complaint for practicing law without a license

The New Republic reports: The new White House press secretary is facing a legal complaint over misrepresenting her credentials as a lawyer. The Campaign for Accountability, a liberal nonprofit organization focusing on ethics, filed a complaint with the State Bar of California Wednesday over whether Katie Zacharia falsely claimed to work as a lawyer. The complaint cited her claims of holding titles such as “outside counsel” to the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation, and “general counsel” to a…

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Call for investigation of raid on Ilan Omar’s home: ‘This is the textbook case’ of violating the Hatch Act

Call for investigation of raid on Ilan Omar’s home: ‘This is the textbook case’ of violating the Hatch Act

The New York Times reports: The president on Tuesday suggested on social media that Ms. Omar had engaged in fraud to make millions of dollars. He also suggested she had engaged in immigration fraud. “America wants answers, and we want them, NOW!” he said. Randall D. Eliason, a former federal prosecutor and retired law professor, said that the Trump Justice Department had so eroded trust that it had “sort of forfeited the right to a presumption of regularity,” a legal…

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Have the Saudis realised they can’t beat the Houthis?

Have the Saudis realised they can’t beat the Houthis?

  A dramatic escalation in Yemen has plunged the Middle East into a fresh geopolitical crisis, after a series of deadly Houthi missile attacks on Saudi Arabia’s airports and oil and gas infrastructure. The long running civil war is one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. But why are the Houthis at war with Saudi Arabia? And how does it fit into the wider Middle East conflicts? In this episode of The Fourcast, Krishnan Guru-Murthy is joined by Middle East…

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Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, claims she’s a lawyer but there’s no evidence she’s licensed

Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, claims she’s a lawyer but there’s no evidence she’s licensed

The Hill reports: President Trump’s new press secretary Katie Zacharia raised eyebrows on Tuesday when she was asked where she passed the bar exam, telling reporters that she did so when she moved to China. Zacharia made the remarks on the White House South Lawn alongside Trump before heading to Alaska with him for a campaign rally. “Where did she pass the bar exam? Which state?” a reporter asked Trump, who turned to Zacharia to ask her, “which state?” “When…

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Drone strikes didn’t take out a Russian bot farm, but we were primed to believe it

Drone strikes didn’t take out a Russian bot farm, but we were primed to believe it

Mother Jones reports: On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed that a Ukrainian bombing strike on Yandex’s data centers, a large Russian technology company, had led to a sudden decrease in bot activity online. “When our strikes reached Yandex’s data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” Zelenskyy declared, speaking at the opening of the Warsaw Security Forum. There was, he added, “less hate, less division, and fewer provocations because there were fewer…

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ICE raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar shows how dangerous two years of flailing Trump could get

ICE raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar shows how dangerous two years of flailing Trump could get

Natasha Lennard writes: In the mode of historic fascist regimes, President Donald Trump’s administration sent federal agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to raid the home of a political opponent, singled out for her race and religion, in a transparent effort to strip her of her citizenship. On Monday, agents with Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s investigative wing, conducted a search of the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., with federal officials describing the incursion as part of…

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Admiral McRaven: Public execution is shameless and ignoble

Admiral McRaven: Public execution is shameless and ignoble

William H. McRaven, a retired United States Navy four-star admiral, writes: A 62-grain, 5.56-mm round leaves the barrel of a standard-issue M4 rifle at approximately 2,900 feet per second. When it strikes a human being, the results are violent, traumatic, and unpredictable. If Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has his way, such images will soon be broadcast to the American people. The Pentagon has announced that the execution of Nidal Hasan, the Army officer convicted of killing 13 fellow service members…

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Trump’s actions over the past 72 hours look like an effort to force Kyiv to surrender

Trump’s actions over the past 72 hours look like an effort to force Kyiv to surrender

Anne Applebaum writes: In the past 72 hours, Donald Trump has dropped all pretense, torched a couple decades of American policy, and undermined 18 months of his own diplomacy. He lifted sanctions on the import of Russian diesel fuel, in violation of the letter and spirit of laws that he himself signed. He has threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, unless Ukraine agrees not to target Russian refineries, thus demanding that Kyiv give up its most effective weapon while…

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They came to Washington to dismantle government. Now, they’re profiting from it

They came to Washington to dismantle government. Now, they’re profiting from it

The Washington Post reports: Last year, billionaire Elon Musk unleashed a small army of Silicon Valley techies to drain what he called the “swamp” of Washington — wielding the U.S. DOGE Service to slash at a bureaucracy they argued was bloated and corrupt. But today, many of his former DOGE foot soldiers have leveraged their government stints to fuel private-sector ambitions: building companies that tap government largesse or that deploy knowledge they garnered during their brief tenures in Washington. A…

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Musk has spent $366 million to try and avoid facing Congressional investigations

Musk has spent $366 million to try and avoid facing Congressional investigations

Reuters reports: Elon Musk has spent roughly $366 million on the 2026 midterm elections so far, $276 million just since July, trying to help Republicans retain control of ​Congress, even as Democrats’ chances of retaking the US House and Senate ‌have improved. Musk’s largess, which was reported earlier by the New York Times, makes the world’s richest person likely the single-biggest political donor in this year’s races, according to campaign finance records. There is a ​lot at stake for Musk…

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