Music: Verneri Pohjola — ‘Monograph’
As U.S. and Putin negotiate, intel shows Russian’s lack of interest ‘in a real peace deal,’ sources say
NBC News reports: As the Trump administration begins preliminary talks with Russian officials about ending the war in Ukraine, intelligence from the United States and close allies shows that Russian President Vladimir Putin still wants to control all of Ukraine, according to four Western intelligence officials and two U.S. congressional officials. “We have zero intelligence that Putin is interested in a real peace deal right now,” one of the congressional officials said. Putin is sending representatives to Saudi Arabia for…
Turkey should be included in Russia-Ukraine war talks, Zelensky says
Middle East Eye reports: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Turkey and European countries must be involved in negotiations and security guarantees to end the war with Russia, during a visit to Ankara on Tuesday. “Turkey, the UK and the European Union, along with the US, should be included in the talks, as well as in the security guarantees,” Zelensky said during a press briefing with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “The negotiations must be fair, and this can only…
U.S. and Russia to explore closer cooperation after Ukraine talks in Riyadh
The Guardian reports: Top US and Russian officials have agreed to continue planning an end to the Ukraine war and to pursue closer cooperation amid concerns in Kyiv and across Europe that Donald Trump could push for a settlement favouring Vladimir Putin. After the talks at Diriyah Palace in Riyadh, the most extensive negotiations between the two countries in three years, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the two sides had agreed to create a high-level team to…
Egypt says Trump backs its Gaza plan, convinced by Jordan’s King Abdullah
Middle East Eye reports: Egypt and Jordan believe they have successfully dissuaded US President Donald Trump from backing a forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza and that the US has gotten behind an Egyptian post-war plan for the enclave, a senior Egyptian official told Middle East Eye. “This will be an Egyptian plan adopted and supported by the Arabs,” the official said. “That is what Trump has agreed to.” The Egyptian official, speaking to MEE on the condition of anonymity…
The many ways Trump could trigger a global collapse
George Monbiot writes: Because there is little public understanding of how complex systems operate, collapse tends to take almost everyone by surprise. Complex systems (such as economies and human societies) have characteristics that make them either resilient or fragile. A system that loses its diversity, redundancy, modularity (the degree of compartmentalisation), its “circuit breakers” (such as government regulations) and backup strategies (alternative means of achieving a goal) is less resilient than one which retains these features. So is a system whose…
How Trump’s federal funding and hiring freezes increase risk of catastrophic wildfires
By Mark Olalde This story was originally published by ProPublica President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s efforts to shrink the federal government, launched as the deadly Palisades and Eaton fires burned across Los Angeles, have left the country’s wildland firefighting force unprepared for the rapidly approaching wildfire season. The administration has frozen funds, including money appropriated by Congress, and issued a deluge of orders eliminating federal employees, which has thrown agencies tasked with battling blazes into disarray as individual offices…
Not even its employees know who is legally running DOGE
Wired reports: President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have repeatedly affirmed Musk’s leadership of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But according to a new court filing from the White House, the administrator of DOGE isn’t Elon Musk after all. Who is? No one knows. The White House won’t tell the public, an administration lawyer has reportedly said he had no idea, and even people who work for the US DOGE Service can’t get a straight answer. On Monday…
Music: Lars Danielsson, Verneri Pohjola & John Parricelli — ‘Cattusella’
Musk and his DOGE jackasses are providing a real-time case study on mismanagement
Don Moynihan writes: Sam Rayburn, the Texan who served as House Speaker for 17 years was fond of saying: Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one. Rayburn was talking about policymaking, but the point extends to more broadly to governing. Trashing government agencies is easy. Making them work is hard. DOGE, and the husk of the Office of Personnel Management that has become a DOGE zombie, are a good example. Elon…
Trump admin tries to rehire nuclear weapons employees fired by Musk’s ignorant DOGE operatives
The Associated Press reports: The Trump administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that DOGE’s blind cost cutting will put communities at risk. Three U.S. officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration were abruptly laid off late Thursday, with some losing access to email…
Elon Musk is an outlaw
Mother Jones reports: According to Elon Musk’s posts on X, the social media platform he acquired through allegedly illegal tactics, Musk is discovering lawbreaking everywhere as he rampages through government. “Career Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour of every day,” he claimed. USAID, the agency that has saved millions of lives under its mandate from Congress? “A criminal organization.” The federal bureaucracy? “Unconstitutional.” But as elementary school kids have known for time immemorial, whoever smelt it, dealt it….
Judge Tanya Chutkan needs more evidence to justify a temporary restraining order on Musk
Politico reports: U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Monday appeared poised to reject an effort to immediately bar Elon Musk and his allies from accessing data or causing firings across a broad swath of the federal government. The judge said an effort by Democrat-led states lacked enough concrete evidence to justify that extraordinary restriction. Chutkan, a Washington-based appointee of former President Barack Obama, agreed that Musk’s operations through the “Department of Government Efficiency” were taking place in troubling secrecy. And…
Trump administration wants to help get ‘king of toxic masculinity’ Andrew Tate out of Romania
Gizmodo reports: Off in the depths of the QAnon and PizzaGate corners of the internet, conspiracists swear Donald Trump is quietly preparing charges to bring down notorious sex trafficking circles operated by celebrities. Back in reality, the Financial Times reports the Trump administration is pressuring Romanian authorities to let Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan Tate travel freely despite facing charges of sexual misconduct and human trafficking. Per the report, Trump officials have been pushing for Romania to return the Tates’ passports and lift…
Trump wants to ‘punish universities’ in every way possible
Michelle Goldberg writes: In 2021, JD Vance gave a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, a gathering of Trumpist thinkers and politicians, titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” It contained the usual complaints about critical race theory and gender ideology, but it went much further, arguing for a frontal attack on the power and prestige of higher education writ large. Comparing universities to the sci-fi totalitarianism of “The Matrix,” in which parasitic machines have seized control of reality itself, he…
How humanity moved from eternal to finite time
Thomas Moynihan writes: Do you recall the first time you knew you would die? It’s a milestone, realising your time is limited. That things happened before you, and will happen afterward, in your absence. As we grow up, the understanding of death comes in stages, but it culminates in acknowledgment of one’s own – unavoidable yet unpredictable – mortality. Sometime between the ages of six and 10, children become aware that their time is inescapably bounded. Roughly the same might be said…