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Category: Politics

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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Censorship enforced in Texas universities goes beyond even the repression of the McCarthy era

Censorship enforced in Texas universities goes beyond even the repression of the McCarthy era

Adam Serwer writes: Sara Spurgeon, an English professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, has been teaching literature for 20 years. But preparing for the spring 2026 semester was the first time she was forced to submit her course materials through a portal to be evaluated by an artificial-intelligence program. It flags anything that might violate new rules laid out by the university chancellor, including a prohibition on the “advocacy/promotion of race or sex-based prejudice,” and a requirement—now Texas state…

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DHS secretary says livestreaming Hasan execution is part of ‘restoring American values’

DHS secretary says livestreaming Hasan execution is part of ‘restoring American values’

The Hill reports: Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin stood behind the Trump administration’s decision to livestream the military execution of convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, despite growing bipartisan criticism over the plan. In an interview with CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Mullin dismissed concerns coming from across party lines that publicizing Hasan’s death by firing squad could inspire extremists or turn the convicted mass murderer into a martyr. “First of all, no one has…

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As Trump’s wall closes in, DHS intimidates a border tribe with surveillance, masked agents and drones

As Trump’s wall closes in, DHS intimidates a border tribe with surveillance, masked agents and drones

ProPublica reports: At 4:59 a.m. on Aug. 25, Verlon Jose, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation in Southern Arizona, received an email from the head of the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector. Government contractors were en route to conduct soil tests for construction of a 62-mile wall along the Nation’s southern boundary, wrote acting chief patrol agent Henry N. Laxdal. If the tribe wished to have cultural monitors observe the work, they were welcome to, but they could not…

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How a series of miscalculations restarted Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen

How a series of miscalculations restarted Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen

CNN reports: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman wanted to make his kingdom a magnet for investment, tourism and the world’s biggest sporting events. Now drones and missiles launched from Yemen are slamming into Saudi cities, drawing the kingdom deeper into the regional turmoil he hoped to leave behind. The civil war in Yemen erupted once again this summer and significantly intensified last month, breaking years of relative calm. Saudi Arabia has for 11 years tried to contain the conflict…

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Africa has become the testing ground for an intrusive eye that never blinks

Africa has become the testing ground for an intrusive eye that never blinks

Reporting from Kampala, Uganda, Megan K. Stack writes: Plainclothes thugs frog-marching a radio commentator from the microphone mid-broadcast. An opposition activist dying after reportedly being barricaded in his house, which was then set on fire. Security forces raiding a powerful independent media company, cutting electricity and imposing a monthlong closure. A reign of terror grips Uganda. Specifically, the reign of Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the country’s belligerent and erratic military chief, who also happens to be the only son of Yoweri…

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A Florida local newspaper ran an op-ed. It was an Iranian fake using OpenAI

A Florida local newspaper ran an op-ed. It was an Iranian fake using OpenAI

The Washington Post reports: “The bill will follow Americans beyond the fighting itself,” an opinion piece in the Port St. Joe Star, a tiny Florida weekly newspaper, warned of the Iran war last month. The article ran under the byline Ervin Hoskins, which has also appeared on articles critical of the war in larger publications including Daily Kos and Middle East Monitor, which together have more than 3 million followers on Facebook. But ChatGPT maker OpenAI said Thursday that Hoskins’s…

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