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Category: Politics

Trump cut a billion-dollar mining deal. His and Lutnick’s family stand to profit

Trump cut a billion-dollar mining deal. His and Lutnick’s family stand to profit

The New York Times reports: When Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met with Kazakhstan’s president at the St. Regis Hotel last September in New York, President Trump jumped in by phone as the men sealed a deal on a top priority for Washington. During the call, Mr. Trump and his team won an agreement from the Kazakh leader to give a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States…

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The National Design Studio, staffed by DOGE veterans, installed visitor-tracking software on vital federal websites

The National Design Studio, staffed by DOGE veterans, installed visitor-tracking software on vital federal websites

The Guardian reports: An opaque White House office staffed largely by veterans of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has quietly rebuilt some of the federal government’s most sensitive websites – for passport applications, voter registration, prescription-drug pricing and children’s savings – in ways critics say appear to violate federal law. The National Design Studio (NDS) was established by a Donald Trump executive order last August, and is led by Trump-aligned Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and staffed by Doge…

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Pope Leo all but rules out war’s legitimacy

Pope Leo all but rules out war’s legitimacy

James V. Grimaldi writes: It isn’t every day that a pope calls for an overhaul of a more than 1,000-year-old teaching of the Catholic Church, but that’s exactly what Pope Leo XIV did last month. In his inaugural encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” which was mainly an exploration of how to protect human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence, Leo devoted a brief but critical passage to just war theory. In a break with a foundational principle of Catholic thought on…

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Unease deepens in Russia as Ukraine steps up long-range strikes

Unease deepens in Russia as Ukraine steps up long-range strikes

The Washington Post reports: The Kremlin is scrambling to respond to an intensifying campaign of Ukrainian drone attacks reaching ever deeper into Russia, hitting key arms production facilities, destroying an ever-greater share of oil-refining capacity, and causing fuel shortages across the country. This week alone, swarms of Ukrainian drones hit oil facilities across Russia as well as the VZPP-S semiconductor devices plant, a major producer of components for Russian ballistic missiles in Voronezh, the Dubna Satellite Communications Center near Moscow,…

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Sanctioned ICC judges sue Trump over ‘attack on judicial independence’

Sanctioned ICC judges sue Trump over ‘attack on judicial independence’

Middle East Eye reports: A federal court in New York has summoned US President Donald Trump to respond to a lawsuit brought by three sitting judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC), who accuse his administration of punishing them with sweeping sanctions for their work on investigations involving Israel and the United States. The summons, issued on Thursday by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, requires the government to respond within 60 days to a…

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What is Peter Thiel up to in Argentina?

What is Peter Thiel up to in Argentina?

Pablo Alabarces writes: Javier Milei’s rise to power in Argentina has transformed the country into a laboratory for the global far right and tech capital. At the center of this convergence stands Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, who has been living in Buenos Aires for just over a month. Some commentators in the press and on social media have claimed that Thiel’s relocation represents a new flight of defeated Nazis to South America (though Thiel is…

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Zuckerberg looks for new way to profit from addiction: a prediction markets app

Zuckerberg looks for new way to profit from addiction: a prediction markets app

The New York Times reports: Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has urged his lieutenants to explore partnerships with the popular prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi as his company builds a similar app, three employees with knowledge of the matter said. The app that Meta is creating, called Arena, could allow people to make bets on practically anything, aiming to capitalize on how prediction markets have become an increasingly big business. Internally, Meta’s executives have said Arena is different from Polymarket…

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‘The decision is sickening’: MAHA leaders feel betrayed by Supreme Court ruling on Roundup weed killer

‘The decision is sickening’: MAHA leaders feel betrayed by Supreme Court ruling on Roundup weed killer

NBC News reports: Many prominent figures in the “Make America Healthy Again” movement said they felt betrayed Thursday after the Supreme Court ruled that Bayer, the manufacturer of Roundup, did not need to warn consumers of a potential cancer risk associated with its weed killer. The ruling is likely to prevent thousands of lawsuits from arguing in state courts that Roundup should come with a cancer warning. Worries about chemicals in the food supply have long animated a subset of…

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How Iran devastated an American naval base — and caused a U.S. recalculation

How Iran devastated an American naval base — and caused a U.S. recalculation

The Wall Street Journal reports: When the Iranian missiles and drones came for the nerve center of America’s naval operations in the Middle East, some of them hit their mark. The U.S. Navy base in Bahrain was repeatedly targeted between late February and June. Strikes that got through caused extensive damage, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of satellite imagery, social-media footage and interviews with current and former servicemembers—damage that the Pentagon hasn’t publicly acknowledged. Hit hard were the…

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Ukraine’s growing drone armada is overwhelming Russia’s air defenses

Ukraine’s growing drone armada is overwhelming Russia’s air defenses

The Wall Street Journal reports: Denys Shtylerman was surprised how many of his company’s drones were getting through as he watched footage of them slamming into an oil refinery on the edge of Moscow last week, sending plumes of black smoke billowing over the Russian capital. “We just used a big bunch of drones and they overwhelmed the Russian air-defense systems,” Shtylerman, the head designer at Fire Point, one of Ukraine’s largest defense manufacturers, said in an interview. Ukraine is…

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Israeli former leaders and security chiefs threaten legal action over ‘Jewish terrorism’

Israeli former leaders and security chiefs threaten legal action over ‘Jewish terrorism’

The Guardian reports: Dozens of Israelis from the country’s security, political and cultural elite have threatened legal action against their government over support for Jewish terrorism and an “ideology of ethnic cleansing” in the occupied West Bank, according to a leaked letter. Two former prime ministers, former heads of all the Israeli security services, former judges, a Nobel laureate and the country’s most revered living novelist were among the signatories to a “final warning” over violence against Palestinians. They demanded…

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Supporters of Palestine are winning inside the Democratic Party

Supporters of Palestine are winning inside the Democratic Party

Peter Beinart writes: To grasp how profoundly the debate inside the Democratic Party over Israel has changed, it’s worth remembering how Dan Goldman—who lost his congressional seat on Tuesday night by more than 30 percentage points—won it a mere four years ago. A few weeks before the Democratic primary in 2022, Goldman faced off against his top opponent, State Assemblymember Yuh-Line Niou, and other candidates, at a debate at Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim. When the conversation turned to boycotts of…

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Why J.D. Vance is wrong about Watergate

Why J.D. Vance is wrong about Watergate

The New York Times reports: Vice President JD Vance downplayed the significance of the Watergate scandal during a speech on Thursday, saying that the controversy that toppled President Richard M. Nixon would be “like a 12-hour news story” if it happened today. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” Mr. Vance added, saying he had been joking backstage about the scandal before his appearance at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda,…

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Samuel Alito wrote one of the cruelest opinions in recent memory

Samuel Alito wrote one of the cruelest opinions in recent memory

Alexis Romero writes: On Thursday, the Supreme Court blessed the Trump administration’s efforts to kick hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians out of the United States. This was one of three unspeakably wrong opinions released on the same day, all by a 6–3 ideological divide, and all written by Justice Samuel Alito. Alito’s opinion pulls off a nearly unfathomable one-two punch of white racial apology: simultaneously backing all of the Trump administration’s claims of crime and filth across Black…

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Money once used for crucial national-park repairs is now financing Trump’s vanity projects

Money once used for crucial national-park repairs is now financing Trump’s vanity projects

Michael Scherer writes: The pathway that connects the White House residence to the Oval Office has long been paved in Tennessee flagstone. Every president since Harry Truman made the 45-second commute, and made it without complaint, until Donald Trump. The dun rock would not do. Instead, Trump wanted polished African granite, carved in Italy, with a flamed-finish stripe—slightly raised, to prevent slips—running down the middle. As workers tore up the flagstone in March, a reporter asked Trump who was paying…

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Supreme Court decision penalizes immigrants who followed the law but white South Africans are welcomed

Supreme Court decision penalizes immigrants who followed the law but white South Africans are welcomed

Elora Mukherjee writes: On Thursday morning, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration sweeping power to remove the legal right to live in America for Haitians and Syrians who are here under a program known as Temporary Protected Status. For more than three decades, T.P.S. enabled highly vetted immigrants from countries ravaged by war or natural disaster to remain in America. In 2010, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano granted Haitians the right to apply for T.P.S. after a devastating earthquake….

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