Music: Hvalfugl — ‘Svævende Lys’
Tesla sales are crashing in Europe and the UK even as EV sales grow
Ars Technica reports: Early car sales data for January is starting to arrive from countries across the pond, and they paint an alarming picture for Tesla. Sales are crashing in France, Germany, and the UK—all affluent countries that are key markets for Tesla’s electric vehicles. Coming on the heels of a large financial miss, it’s just one more problem for the automaker. Tesla sales dropped around 13 percent across Europe in 2024, but so far this year, the scale of…
Musk poses a threat both to democratic governance and to the foundations of our market economy
Mike Brock writes: Consider what we’re being asked to believe about Elon Musk. That he is simultaneously managing Tesla, a global automotive manufacturer facing fierce competition and complex production challenges. That he is overseeing SpaceX, a company conducting human spaceflight and handling critical national security contracts. That he is running X/Twitter through a tumultuous transformation affecting global discourse. That he is developing experimental brain implants at Neuralink under federal investigation. That he is competing in the most sophisticated artificial intelligence…
Trump’s inner circle concerned Musk ‘getting too big for his breeches’
Wired reports: Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, publicly at least, are on good terms. Yet when it comes to the staff in and around the new administration, it’s a different story. Just two-and-a-half weeks into Trump’s second term in office, a fissure has begun to emerge following Musk’s DOGE takeover of the US government, according to a half-dozen Trump loyalist Republican aides and advisers inside and around the administration who spoke with WIRED. “I think it’s more the staff…
Sen. Whitehouse warns: The DOJ and FBI are turning into Trump’s ‘political enforcement weapons’
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) delivers remarks on the Senate floor on the dangerous nominations of Pam Bondi and Kash Patel to serve as Attorney General and FBI Director.
DOGE staffers enter NOAA headquarters and incite reports of cuts and threats
The Guardian reports: Staffers with Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) reportedly entered the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the Department of Commerce in Washington DC today, inciting concerns of downsizing at the agency. “They apparently just sort of walked past security and said: ‘Get out of my way,’ and they’re looking for access for the IT systems, as they have in other agencies,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former Noaa…
The chaos being unleashed by Trump is impacting almost everyone
Arwa Mahdawi writes: Almost nobody in the US has escaped the chaos that Trump and Musk have already unleashed in such an incredibly short time. My wife works in international development and has friends who have already lost their jobs because of Trump dismantling USAid and throwing all its contractors into disarray. I have friends in the education sector who have been scrambling to deal with the panic caused by Trump’s plans to freeze federal loans and grants: students have been freaking out that…
Five Arab nations reject Trump’s plan to remove Palestinians from Gaza, urge two-state solution
The Times of Israel reports: Five Arab foreign ministers and a senior Palestinian official sent a joint letter to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday, urging the Trump administration to back a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and rejecting recent suggestions by US President Donald Trump that residents of the Gaza Strip be resettled, either temporarily or permanently, elsewhere in the Middle East. “Palestinians do not want to leave their land. We support their position unequivocally,” wrote…
Music: Hvalfugl — ‘Iturevet Almanak’
Speaking out in solidarity with FBI and other federal workers who are defending democracy
Yesterday, in response to my own sense of powerlessness while watching the ongoing assault on democracy led by Elon Musk and Donald Trump, I engaged in a quixotic gesture: I went down to my local FBI field office to offer a small token of public support. Not surprisingly, it isn’t possible to walk into an FBI office. Since the Oklahoma bombing, all such offices are well fortified. This office did have a kiosk in front of the main entrance where…
Elon Musk’s ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ of government services that almost no one can control
Charlie Warzel writes: Two days before the 2024 election, I wrote that Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter was going to be the blueprint for his potential tenure at DOGE. Unfortunately, I was right—he’s running the exact same playbook. But it’s worth keeping in mind that there are two ways of measuring success for Musk’s projects: first, whether the organizations themselves benefit under his leadership, and second, whether Musk himself gets something out of the arrangement. Musk’s stewardship of X has…
A 25-year-old Musk operative has direct access to the federal payment system posing ‘apocalyptic’ risk
Wired reports: A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government, three sources tell WIRED. Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: The Payment Automation Manager (PAM) and Secure Payment System (SPS) at the Bureau…
‘Accidental’ FBI director gains a following as agency’s defender
The New York Times reports: Brian Driscoll, the acting director of the F.B.I., has become an improbable symbol of quiet resistance toward the Justice Department’s campaign to single out F.B.I. employees who investigated the Jan. 6 riot. To start, Mr. Driscoll’s appointment was an accident. Shortly after President Trump’s inauguration, the White House identified the wrong agent as acting director on its website and never corrected the mistake. Even if he was not meant to be leading the agency, he…
FBI agents sue to block DOJ from compiling list of officials who worked on Jan. 6 or Trump cases
Politico reports: FBI agents who worked on cases stemming from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — or the criminal investigations of President Donald Trump — have filed a class action lawsuit to block Justice Department leadership from assembling lists of agents they say will be used as part of a retaliation campaign. The agents, who brought the federal suit anonymously, included screenshots of a three-page survey they say DOJ leadership intends to use to identify thousands of agents…
Federal workers sue to disconnect DOGE server at OPM
Wired reports: Federal employees are seeking a temporary restraining order as part of a class action lawsuit accusing a group of Elon Musk’s associates of allegedly operating an illegally connected server from the fifth floor of the US Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) headquarters in Washington, DC. An attorney representing two federal workers—Jane Does 1 and 2—filed a motion this morning arguing that the server’s continued operation not only violates federal law but is potentially exposing vast quantities of government…
Jewish leaders call out Elon Musk’s antisemitism and push for X boycott
A group of rabbis, leaders of Jewish organizations, artists, activists, and academics with diverse ideologies and beliefs, have come together to address the danger Elon Musk and X represent to Jews and others: Almost a year and a half ago, we came together to send two important messages: Elon Musk is one of the leading purveyors of antisemitism in the world and presents an urgent danger to Jews and many other groups the world over. The dangers of antisemitism on…