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Category: Politics

Pentagon accused of cover-up over U.S. military casualties in Iran war

Pentagon accused of cover-up over U.S. military casualties in Iran war

The Guardian reports: The Pentagon is taking a “shameful approach” to releasing information about US casualties in the Iran war, Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and CIA director, has told the Guardian. The defence department has not held a press briefing for two-and-a-half months. Officials have faced accusations that they are engaged in a cover-up designed to hide the true cost of Donald Trump’s war of choice in Iran, fearing a public backlash before November’s midterm elections. Panetta, who…

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Trump holds off on major escalation against Iran as advisers raise concerns

Trump holds off on major escalation against Iran as advisers raise concerns

The New York Times reports: President Trump has set aside, at least for now, plans to sharply escalate the American military assault against Iran, with particular concern that intensifying the war could dangerously drain the Pentagon’s already diminished stockpile of Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air defense munitions in the Middle East. The threat to interceptor stockpiles is one of many considerations that have made a return to major combat operations a hugely risky endeavor, administration officials say. Mr. Trump…

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How the Iran war is highlighting data center vulnerabilities

How the Iran war is highlighting data center vulnerabilities

  DW News: A new chapter of warfare is opening. The US-Israel war against Iran has included strikes from both sides against an increasingly important target: commercial data centers. Facilities in the UAE, Bahrain and Iran were hit across the Persian Gulf As military operations increasingly rely on AI, how long will it take adversaries to target them? What kind of attack, including in the US, is likely? They’re already central to many people’s everyday digital lives and their online…

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War has turned Trump’s social media posts into nothing more than noise

War has turned Trump’s social media posts into nothing more than noise

Charlie Warzel writes: If President Trump has one true skill, it is conjuring up alternate realities and getting his supporters to accept them. The examples are everywhere: dismissing stories he doesn’t like as “fake news” from corrupt media, casting the January 6 rioters as victims, election denial. After he baselessly insisted that there had been rampant mail-in voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, 11 states made mail-voting access more restrictive. His repeated false claims in 2024 that Haitians in…

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Fired ‘60 Minutes’ journalist says she was pressured to report on events that ‘never happened’

Fired ‘60 Minutes’ journalist says she was pressured to report on events that ‘never happened’

MS Now reports: Former CBS News “60 Minutes” correspondent Cecilia Vega, one of several prominent journalists fired from the network’s signature broadcast this spring, said she was pressured by the news division’s editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, and other executives to include misinformation and political bias in reporting that aired this year. Vega’s account of Weiss interfering with independent reporting is similar to those of two other veteran “60 Minutes” correspondents, Scott Pelley and Sharyn Alfonsi, who were fired after David Ellison,…

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Trump’s anti-mail voting order gets blocked again, this time by federal appeals court

Trump’s anti-mail voting order gets blocked again, this time by federal appeals court

Democracy Docket reports: The U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals denied the Trump administration’s request to pause a lower court order that blocks the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) from executing the president’s March executive order attacking mail voting. The decision means President Donald Trump’s sweeping assault on mail voting won’t be carried out in 23 states and the District of Columbia. The three-judge panel ruled 2-1 against the Trump administration’s motion, with one – Judge Joshua D. Dunlap, a Trump…

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Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ of American science starts with dismantling it, while funneling billions into AI

Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ of American science starts with dismantling it, while funneling billions into AI

The Verge reports: The Trump administration unveiled the first “Genesis Mission” grants on Thursday, directing $5 billion toward hundreds of AI-driven science projects in an effort the White House has described as “comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project.” At roughly the same time, Trump’s science adviser Michael Kratsios was on Capitol Hill selling lawmakers on an equally grandiose promise: “A New Golden Age” of American science, one that would prioritize artificial intelligence, robotics, and nuclear energy and…

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Why Trump is facing his biggest danger from rising oil prices since the war began

Why Trump is facing his biggest danger from rising oil prices since the war began

Politico reports: The expanding conflict in the Middle East is thwarting the Trump administration’s bid to lower gasoline prices ahead of the looming midterm elections. It’s not just the Strait of Hormuz — oil tankers are now facing attacks on three major shipping routes as of this week. Global crude oil inventories are reaching critically low levels, with little hope of refilling them soon. And the temporary measures that have kept markets afloat since the war in Iran began, such…

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Federal officials: Grants were cancelled ‘solely’ because states did not vote for Trump

Federal officials: Grants were cancelled ‘solely’ because states did not vote for Trump

The New York Times reports: When the Trump administration canceled more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era federal grants for clean energy projects in October, it framed the move as an urgent corrective to protect taxpayer funds from waste. But it wasn’t true. In little-noticed court documents, federal officials acknowledged this month that they had terminated the funding “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential…

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should run for president

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should run for president

Bhaskar Sunkara writes: After Donald Trump’s victory in 2024, AOC went to dozens of her constituents who had voted for both her and Trump and asked them why. She wanted to understand them rather than lecture them. Their answers – that she and Trump both read as outsiders, that both sounded like they were on the side of working people – informed her politics in the months to come. Some of the people who once formed the base of the…

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Meet Anton Jäger, whose groundbreaking book is being devoured by the left

Meet Anton Jäger, whose groundbreaking book is being devoured by the left

Zoe Williams writes: ‘I am acutely conscious,” said Andy Burnham outside 10 Downing Street on Monday, “that I am the sixth person in the last 10 years to walk up this street.” It was good to hear him say it because, beneath all the cabinet gossip and rune-reading, there is a feeling of terror about the immediate future and also about ourselves, the electorate. Is this who we are now? Wildly enthusiastic one minute, seething the next; as passionate about…

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U.S. intelligence says military action unlikely to change Iran’s negotiating position

U.S. intelligence says military action unlikely to change Iran’s negotiating position

Asharq Al Awsat reports: Iran’s government is unlikely to soften its negotiating position as a result of the ongoing US military strikes, according to a new intelligence assessment described by current and former US officials. Analysts at US spy agencies have also concluded that Tehran and Washington are, for now, stuck in an indefinite limbo between peace and war, the officials told The Washington Post — an uneasy dynamic given the increasingly deadly nature of the tit-for-tat hostilities between the…

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Israeli security minister joins Jewish extremists as they storm al-Aqsa mosque compound

Israeli security minister joins Jewish extremists as they storm al-Aqsa mosque compound

The Guardian reports: Israel’s far-right minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, joined thousands of Jewish extremists who stormed Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site on Thursday. Escorted by armed police, they prayed, waved the Israeli flag and sang the national anthem in a provocative display of political power. Under a fragile, decades-old agreement known as the status quo, non-Muslim prayer is banned at the site, known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif compound and to Jews as the Temple Mount. Ben-Gvir has…

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MAGA rallies around Andrew Tate

MAGA rallies around Andrew Tate

Will Sommer writes: Prominent manosphere influencers and accused sex traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate were arrested by U.S. marshals in Miami last weekend, as they were set to host—what else?—a bare-knuckle boxing match. Video of their arrest, which quickly went viral, showed Andrew Tate dressed in clamdigger pants and an unusual purple shirt unbuttoned down almost to his navel. But maybe the most surprising thing is that it happened on American soil at all. That’s because, despite years of accusations…

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False claims, chaos and cover-ups behind Trump administration’s killing of two American citizens

False claims, chaos and cover-ups behind Trump administration’s killing of two American citizens

Jake Tapper reports: “Someone’s going to get killed.” The warning, from an agent of the federal Homeland Security Investigations division, sent a chill through the other officials in the room. It was early January 2026.  The HSI agent explained how the team was afraid about what was coming, about what seemed preordained as the Trump administration sent Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, Customs and Border Protection officers, Border Patrol agents and controversial Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino into Minneapolis for…

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‘This is what a quagmire looks like’

‘This is what a quagmire looks like’

Politico reports: The war in Iran has entered a bleak new phase. After weeks of fragile peace and stalled negotiations, the weekend deaths of multiple U.S. service members — coupled with new reporting showing there may be more previously undisclosed injuries — have left White House allies afraid the president is rapidly running out of ways to extricate the U.S. from an unpopular, expensive conflict ahead of the midterms. “This is what a quagmire looks like,” said one person close…

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