White House senses political risk on healthcare despite Trump’s shutdown bravado

White House senses political risk on healthcare despite Trump’s shutdown bravado

The Wall Street Journal reports: President Trump has projected unwavering confidence that he is winning the messaging war over the government shutdown. But behind the scenes, his team is increasingly concerned that the issue at the center of the debate will create political vulnerabilities for Republicans. Advisers are worried that the GOP will take the blame for allowing healthcare subsidies to expire, raising costs for millions of Americans ahead of next year’s midterm elections, according to administration officials. Inside the…

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University of Southern California sold dead human bodies to the U.S. military to train IDF medical personnel

University of Southern California sold dead human bodies to the U.S. military to train IDF medical personnel

USC Annenberg Media reports: Near the end of 2017, the United States Navy filed a notice of intent to begin purchasing human cadavers from the University of Southern California. The purpose: Use dead bodies in trauma surgery training for the Israeli Defense Forces. Since that notice, the Navy has paid USC more than $860,000 for at least 89 “fresh cadaver bodies,” 32 of which were used specifically for IDF training at Los Angeles General Medical Center. One contract is still…

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The destruction of Gaza City is a crime against history

The destruction of Gaza City is a crime against history

Baker Zoubi writes: Palestinians in Gaza City are facing an impossible choice, as the Israeli army works to annihilate what remains of northern Gaza’s last bastion from the air and the ground. Hundreds of thousands of residents have already fled in recent days amid the intensification of Israel’s assault, forced to pay up to $5,000 to relocate in the knowledge that they will likely never see their homes again. Others are staying put, unable or unwilling to flee to areas…

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AI-generated social media has arrived ‘where seeing is not believing’

AI-generated social media has arrived ‘where seeing is not believing’

NPR reports: A fascist SpongeBob SquarePants, a dog driving a car and Jesus playing Minecraft – these are just a few of the things you can see as you flip through OpenAI’s new app populated exclusively with short-form videos generated using artificial intelligence. And if you can’t find what you’re looking for, don’t worry: you can make it with ease using a small text-based prompt window in the app. The result is a highly addictive stream of sometimes funny and…

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State terrorism: Massive immigration raid on Chicago apartment building leaves residents reeling

State terrorism: Massive immigration raid on Chicago apartment building leaves residents reeling

In a ruling he issued this week, William G. Young, a senior U.S. district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, wrote: “ICE goes masked for a single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence.” Terrorize — not my word, but that of a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1985. In U.S. law (22 U.S.C. 2656f(d)(2)) terrorism is defined as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine…

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Leaked document justifies boat strikes as ‘non-international armed conflict’

Leaked document justifies boat strikes as ‘non-international armed conflict’

The Intercept reports: The Trump administration is waging a secret war against undisclosed enemies without the consent of Congress, according to a confidential notice that was sent to several congressional committees this week and obtained by The Intercept. It marks the most detailed explanation of the legal underpinnings offered by the administration for a series of lethal attacks on boats in the Caribbean that began last month. President Donald Trump has decided that the United States is engaged in a…

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World’s biggest stars unite to revive the McCarthy-era Committee for the First Amendment

World’s biggest stars unite to revive the McCarthy-era Committee for the First Amendment

Rolling Stone reports: More than 550 actors, directors, writers and musicians — including Jane Fonda, Billie Eilish, Pedro Pascal, Gracie Abrams, Spike Lee, Viola Davis, Barbra Streisand, Ben Stiller, John Legend, Janelle Monae, and Natalie Portman — have teamed up to relaunch the Committee for the First Amendment, a group originally formed in 1947 during the Red Scare. In its original incarnation, the group stood in opposition to the House Un-American Activities Committee’s Joseph McCarthy-era interrogations of Hollywood figures suspected…

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Newsom threatens to cut state funding to universities that sign Trump’s coercive political ‘compact’

Newsom threatens to cut state funding to universities that sign Trump’s coercive political ‘compact’

The Los Angeles Times reports: Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday threatened to cut “billions” in state funding, including to USC, from any California campus that signs a Trump administration compact and agrees to sweeping and largely conservative campus policies in exchange for priority access to federal funding. “If any California University signs this radical agreement, they’ll lose billions in state funding — including Cal Grants — instantly,” Newsom said. “California will not bankroll schools that sell out their students, professors,…

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Trump openly embraces Project 2025 after pretending to disavow it during 2024 campaign

Trump openly embraces Project 2025 after pretending to disavow it during 2024 campaign

Axios reports: President Trump referenced Project 2025 Thursday despite distancing himself from it during his 2024 campaign. Why it matters: Project 2025 became a political flashpoint during last year’s presidential campaign because of its controversial outline for reshaping American life. Project 2025, never an official Trump platform, was built by some Trump allies and echoes moves from the early days of Trump’s second presidency. Some of Trump’s MAGA allies called Project 2025 the next-term agenda after Trump’s win. Driving the news: Trump said Tuesday he planned to meet with Russ…

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How to end a war

How to end a war

Megan K. Stack writes: On a steel-skied summer day I dropped by the Northern Ireland Assembly to watch legislators discuss anti-immigrant riots, each speaker straining to upstage the last in outrage and fervor. To my eyes, though, the drama of the day’s debate was utterly eclipsed by the improbable scene itself: such a collection of people in such a place as this. There was First Minister Michelle O’Neill, the daughter of an Irish Republican Army member and the first Catholic…

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Jane Goodall (1934–2025): primatologist, conservationist, and messenger of hope

Jane Goodall (1934–2025): primatologist, conservationist, and messenger of hope

Rhett Ayers Butler writes: Jane Goodall, who revealed the intimate lives of chimpanzees and gave the modern world a language of hope, has died at the age of 91. Over the course of six decades, she moved from an unlikely young researcher in the forests of East Africa to one of the most recognizable scientists and conservationists of her time. Her patient fieldwork at Gombe transformed primatology, overturning entrenched beliefs about the uniqueness of humans and forcing science to reckon…

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Pope Leo denounces people, like Trump, who deny climate change

Pope Leo denounces people, like Trump, who deny climate change

Politico reports: Pope Leo XIV denounced people who deny climate change on Wednesday, arguing that they are contributing to the destruction of God’s creation. “Some have chosen to deride the increasingly evident science of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them the most,” Leo said. The pope’s comments come just a week after U.S. President Donald Trump, in a speech at the United Nations,…

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Pete Hegseth’s hatred of Americans

Pete Hegseth’s hatred of Americans

Cathy Young writes: The image of Hegseth that emerges from The War on Warriors (2024), Battle for the American Mind (2022), and American Crusade (2020), is of a militant Christian extremist who is obsessed with the Crusades and whose highest aspiration is redesigning the U.S. military into his ideological mold. The central idea of American Crusade is that the survival of the United States as a “free” country requires a “holy war” to achieve “a single paramount objective: the categorical…

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Howard Lutnick undercuts Kash Patel’s most unbelievable Jeffrey Epstein claim

Howard Lutnick undercuts Kash Patel’s most unbelievable Jeffrey Epstein claim

The New York Post reports: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, in a notable break with the Department of Justice, claimed late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was “the greatest blackmailer ever” — and may have traded the feds video of his rich and well-connected associates getting massages from young women in exchange for a controversial 2008 plea deal. Lutnick made the shocking allegations to The Post’s Miranda Devine on the latest episode of “Pod Force One,” out now. The 64-year-old cabinet secretary said…

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