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Category: Politics

IRS workers group joins Jan. 6 ‘slush fund’ suit, seeking to block Trump audit carve-out

IRS workers group joins Jan. 6 ‘slush fund’ suit, seeking to block Trump audit carve-out

NBC News reports: An organization representing career Internal Revenue Service employees has joined a lawsuit over the contentious settlement reached in connection with President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS, challenging a carve-out that would give him and members of his family immunity from certain tax audits. A Jan. 6 prosecutor fired by the Trump administration and others previously sued to block a fund that could have gone to Trump allies who said they were victims of weaponization, potentially including…

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How Trump’s petty vengeful Reflecting Pool obsession has harmed the lives of law-abiding Americans

How Trump’s petty vengeful Reflecting Pool obsession has harmed the lives of law-abiding Americans

  The Washington Post reports: Attorneys for the former Olympian who had been accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool are asking a judge to ensure federal prosecutors don’t have a chance to reopen the case against him. In a court filing Tuesday, attorneys for David Hearn pushed back against the Justice Department’s move to dismiss the charge against their client “without prejudice,” which would allow the department to prosecute him later. Lawyers Norm Eisen, Mary Dohrmann and Steve…

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El-Sayed wins Michigan Democratic Senate primary in blow to AIPAC

El-Sayed wins Michigan Democratic Senate primary in blow to AIPAC

The New Republic reports: Abdul El-Sayed has won the Democratic nomination for the Senate in Michigan, narrowly defeating Representative Haley Stevens in a close contest. Decision Desk called the race for El-Sayed Tuesday morning, projecting him as the winner with 48.52 percent of the vote to Stevens’s 47.47 percent. El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and the former Wayne County health director, edged out Stevens despite her receiving heavy financial backing from groups aligned with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. El-Sayed now…

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ICE built a $258 million social media surveillance machine to monitor its online critics

ICE built a $258 million social media surveillance machine to monitor its online critics

Gadget Review reports: A critical Reddit comment about immigration enforcement can, four months later, bring plainclothes agents to a poster’s door carrying a printout of the post — a scenario no longer hypothetical. According to the Wall Street Journal, ICE has built a funded, contractor-powered surveillance operation that monitors social media around the clock — not just for credible violence, but for speech that challenges the agency’s mission. Since early 2025, DHS has fired off hundreds of administrative subpoenas to…

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What Trump can learn from Eisenhower and the Suez crisis

What Trump can learn from Eisenhower and the Suez crisis

Trita Parsi writes: Oman and Iran appear close to a temporary arrangement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, potentially providing both an exit from the current round of fighting and the foundation for a more durable maritime order. Washington should welcome such an agreement—even if it acknowledges a degree of Iranian authority in administering traffic through the strait—because US interest dictates that open and non-discriminatory passage must be given priority over control. The emerging formula would reportedly divide responsibility for…

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Trump announced a peace plan for Gaza. Israel responded with increased bombing

Trump announced a peace plan for Gaza. Israel responded with increased bombing

The New York Times reports: Soon after President Trump announced a new plan last week to deliver peace and security in Gaza, the Palestinian enclave instead experienced a spike in deadly Israeli bombings, which threatened to undermine hopes for long-awaited progress. On Sunday, Israeli strikes killed 18 people, according to the health ministry in Gaza, making it one of the deadliest days there since a troubled cease-fire came into force in October. Gaza health ministry data from the conflict does…

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Ecuadorian prosecutor assassinated while investigating U.S. boat strikes in the eastern Pacific Ocean

Ecuadorian prosecutor assassinated while investigating U.S. boat strikes in the eastern Pacific Ocean

  Camila Lourdes Galarza reports: Alexandra Bravo, the prosecutor assigned to investigate U.S. strikes on three Ecuadorian boats and the 36 survivors’ subsequent accounts of torture and kidnapping, was shot dead in the coastal city of Manta last month. According to police, on June 14 a hitman aboard a black motorcycle opened fire on Bravo as she and her sister were leaving a café at about 11 a.m. Bravo’s sister, who jumped to protect her, was also killed in the…

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An emerging deal with Oman could cement Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz

An emerging deal with Oman could cement Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz

The New York Times reports: Iran and Oman are closing in on an agreement to reopen shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, according to Iranian and American officials, but if the accord goes into effect it could come at a high price — ratifying Tehran’s control over what, before the war, was an open, international waterway. As described by officials familiar with the emerging accord, vessels heading into the Persian Gulf will transit a channel controlled by Iran, and…

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U.S. has used ‘virtually all’ of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war, sources say

U.S. has used ‘virtually all’ of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war, sources say

Reuters reports: The U.S. Army has used up much of its global stockpile of highly accurate long-range missiles during its five-month war with Iran, ​according to three people familiar with the data, raising concerns about the military’s readiness for future conflicts. The missiles are principally the Army’s surface-to-surface weapons, known as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM). The U.S. ‌has used “virtually all” of these weapons, according to two of the sources. The degree to which…

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Jordan convenes emergency meeting over Israel’s potential to ‘trigger religious conflict’

Jordan convenes emergency meeting over Israel’s potential to ‘trigger religious conflict’

The Guardian reports: Jordan is convening an emergency meeting of foreign ministers from the Arab and Islamic world over what it says is an “imminent” threat of an Israeli takeover of the most important religious site in Jerusalem, with the potential to “trigger a religious conflict”. The meeting on Wednesday – and the Jordanian warning – follow an escalating pattern of government-backed incursions by Jewish religious extremists on the compound around the al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock, in…

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The AI data center backlash is a classic story about dark money in politics

The AI data center backlash is a classic story about dark money in politics

Jasmine Sun writes: Back in San Francisco, it is striking how little the AI industry understands its own unpopularity—the reasons that people resist. They ask if it’s a problem of benefits not being generous enough, or else a big misinformation campaign. (By the end of the trip, my friends and I felt slightly ashamed of the caricatures we originally believed in. In general, one should be cautious about assuming your opponents are just reading fake news.) When I visited DC…

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China is pursuing an ‘all-hands-on-deck approach to national innovation’

China is pursuing an ‘all-hands-on-deck approach to national innovation’

Evan Osnos writes: Kai-Fu Lee, the C.E.O. of the artificial-intelligence company 01.AI, lives in a mirrored high-rise in Beijing, near a procession of landmarks that emperors considered the center of the cosmos. Lee takes early meetings at a nearby hotel that could be in any country, except that the room service is delivered by robots painted in the livery of butlers and maids. State propaganda hails these robots as emblems of China’s ascent; in the hallway, most people sidestep them…

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China is claiming the right to punish its critics anywhere on Earth

China is claiming the right to punish its critics anywhere on Earth

By Reza Hasmath, University of Alberta On July 1, China brought into force its Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, converting a decade of Xi Jinping’s doctrine of “forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation” into binding law. Most attention has gone to its domestic machinery: entrenching Mandarin over minority languages, unified state textbooks and “inter-embedded” neighbourhoods engineered to dilute concentrations of Uyghurs and Tibetans among the Han majority. In other words, this is an assimilationist…

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Trump vowed to ‘bring free speech back.’ Judges in 75 cases ruled that he has stifled it

Trump vowed to ‘bring free speech back.’ Judges in 75 cases ruled that he has stifled it

Reuters reports: U.S. President Donald Trump repeatedly campaigned for his second term as a champion of free expression, vowing in his January 2025 inaugural address to stop what he described as years of “government censorship.” Since then, a wave of court rulings has concluded his administration has done the opposite. Reuters identified 75 federal-judge rulings finding Trump’s government infringed on ​First-Amendment rights including freedoms of speech, religion, and the press. The unprecedented pushback on constitutional grounds has included repeated findings…

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Europe’s summer of reckoning is ‘just the beginning’

Europe’s summer of reckoning is ‘just the beginning’

The New York Times reports: A dense, yellow-orange pall hung over Bordeaux on Sunday, blotting out the sun and blurring the spires of the cathedral in this French city. A swirl of tiny ash particles stung eyes and stuck in throats. Twenty miles west of town, a mammoth forest fire burned so ferociously that it generated its own weather system. “We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Roger Peuron, 89, a retired engineer born before World War II, who was…

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Iranians remain convinced that Trump, not them, has the most to lose in a widening war

Iranians remain convinced that Trump, not them, has the most to lose in a widening war

The New York Times reports: When President Trump appeared to back down once again from a threatened military escalation against Tehran, he offered fresh fodder to the narrative Iranian officials are eager to promote: They are not the ones who fear war — Mr. Trump is. Iran’s leadership believes it has found the world’s Achilles’ heel. With the help of regional militia allies, Tehran spent the past week underscoring its ability to threaten several of the world’s most critical energy…

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