The American legal system may never recover from this

The American legal system may never recover from this

Stephen I. Vladeck writes: It is often difficult to persuade anyone other than lawyers to care about the more technical, procedural minutiae of Supreme Court decisions. But Thursday’s oral argument in three Supreme Court cases challenging President Trump’s efforts to restrict birthright citizenship is a powerful example of how such technicalities can sometimes be even more important than the substantive legal question the justices are purportedly answering. The Trump administration is asking the justices, in effect, to let the president’s…

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Errol Langton’s ‘Afrikaner’ ‘farming’ family trades South Africa for Alabama

Errol Langton’s ‘Afrikaner’ ‘farming’ family trades South Africa for Alabama

The New York Times reports: To Mr. Trump, South Africa is a cautionary tale for the United States. In the 1990s, when one of his advisers mentioned a news item projecting that nonwhite people could become the majority in the United States, Mr. Trump shot back that there would be a revolution should that happen. “This isn’t going to become South Africa,” he said, according to a book about the president, “Confidence Man,” by Maggie Haberman, a New York Times…

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The day Grok told everyone on X about ‘white genocide’

The day Grok told everyone on X about ‘white genocide’

Ali Breland and Matteo Wong write: Yesterday, a user on X saw a viral post of Timothée Chalamet celebrating courtside at a Knicks game and had a simple question: Who was sitting next to him? The user tapped in Grok, X’s proprietary chatbot, as people often do when they want help answering questions on the platform—the software functions like ChatGPT, except it can be summoned via reply to a post. And for the most part, Grok has performed reasonably well…

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Kristi Noem backs a reality TV show where immigrants compete for fast-tracked citizenship

Kristi Noem backs a reality TV show where immigrants compete for fast-tracked citizenship

The Daily Mail reports: She’s been called ‘ICE Barbie’ for treating her Cabinet position like a TV production, but now Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is pushing for an actual reality show pitting immigrants against each other ‘for the honor of fast-tracking their way to U.S. citizenship’. It may sound like a joke, but the idea is for real and is outlined in a 35-page program pitch put together in coordination with the DHS secretary, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal. Noem…

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UnitedHealth, one of America’s biggest companies, is imploding

UnitedHealth, one of America’s biggest companies, is imploding

CNN reports: UnitedHealth Group, one of America’s biggest corporations and a member of the exclusive Dow Jones Industrial Average, is suddenly unraveling. The crisis engulfing UnitedHealth hit a crescendo this week when CEO Andrew Witty stepped down abruptly for “personal reasons.” UnitedHealth also swiftly abandoned its financial guidance, blaming skyrocketing medical costs. And then The Wall Street Journal dropped the hammer, revealing that UnitedHealth is under federal criminal investigation for possible Medicare fraud. The developments have stunned investors, triggering a…

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Trump’s fake Afrikaners refugees and the politics of distraction

Trump’s fake Afrikaners refugees and the politics of distraction

  Herman Wasserman writes: Amidst the slew of executive orders issued by US President Donald Trump—ranging from reinstating plastic straws, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and proclaiming that only two genders exist—one, in particular, reverberated around braais, brandies-and-cokes, and bakkies from Brackenfell to Benoni: the executive order “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa,” which included the policy that the “United States shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa” and that the “United States shall promote…

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The Trump administration leaned on African countries. The goal: get business for Elon Musk

The Trump administration leaned on African countries. The goal: get business for Elon Musk

By Joshua Kaplan, Brett Murphy, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski This story was originally published by ProPublica In early February, Sharon Cromer, U.S. ambassador to Gambia, went to visit one of the country’s Cabinet ministers at his agency’s headquarters, above a partially abandoned strip mall off a dirt road. It had been two weeks since President Donald Trump took office, and Cromer had pressing business to discuss. She needed the minister to fall in line to help Elon Musk. Starlink,…

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Trump’s sanctions on International Criminal Court prosecutor have halted tribunal’s work

Trump’s sanctions on International Criminal Court prosecutor have halted tribunal’s work

The Associated Press reports: The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor has lost access to his email, and his bank accounts have been frozen. The Hague-based court’s American staffers have been told that if they travel to the U.S. they risk arrest. Some nongovernmental organizations have stopped working with the ICC and the leaders of one won’t even reply to emails from court officials. Those are just some of the hurdles facing court staff since U.S. President Donald Trump in February…

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On the brink of hurricane season, FEMA ‘is not ready,’ internal agency review shows

On the brink of hurricane season, FEMA ‘is not ready,’ internal agency review shows

CNN reports: Hurricane preparations at Federal Emergency Management Agency have slowed to a crawl, and the disaster relief agency “is not ready” for the June 1 start to the season, according to an internal agency review obtained by CNN. Prepared at the direction of new acting Administrator David Richardson as part of a problem-solving exercise at FEMA, the document outlines the agency’s struggles in recent months and raises a number of red flags ahead of hurricane season, including a general…

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White House seeks revenge against owner of Business Insider for report on Don Jr.’s business interests

White House seeks revenge against owner of Business Insider for report on Don Jr.’s business interests

The Bulwark reports: The Trump administration is sending aggressive signals about launching a potential federal investigation into the company that owns Politico and Business Insider as retaliation for an article scrutinizing Donald Trump Jr.’s business interests. In a Tuesday-night story little noticed outside of right-wing media, Breitbart reporter and Trump administration favorite Matthew Boyle wrote that the White House was furious at German media conglomerate Axel Springer. At issue was a Business Insider story titled “Don Jr. is the new…

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Why the Qataris are happy to dump their hard-to-sell 747 on Trump

Why the Qataris are happy to dump their hard-to-sell 747 on Trump

Forbes magazine reports: The royal family of Qatar, owner of one of the largest private jet fleets in the world, has been quietly getting rid of some of its biggest planes. It may have found the perfect taker for one of its Boeing 747 jumbo jets in President Donald Trump, who has been frustrated with the multi-year delays in replacing Air Force One. While many have speculated that the Qataris have offered Trump the luxurious plane to curry favor with…

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An overlooked cell type orchestrates brain rewiring during states of heightened attention

An overlooked cell type orchestrates brain rewiring during states of heightened attention

Washington University in St. Louis: Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have upended the decades-old dogma of how connections between brain cells are rearranged during states of heightened vigilance or attention. The team found that a brain chemical associated with alertness, attention and learning alters brain connectivity and function not by acting directly on neurons, the cells known for their quick transmission of information, but through the work of astrocytes, another, slower-acting type of brain cell…

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Judge Michael Luttig on the end of rule of law in America

Judge Michael Luttig on the end of rule of law in America

J. Michael Luttig writes: The president of the United States appears to have long ago forgotten that Americans fought the Revolutionary War not merely to secure their independence from the British monarchy but to establish a government of laws, not of men, so that they and future generations of Americans would never again be subject to the whims of a tyrannical king. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense in 1776, “For as in absolute governments the king is law,…

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The ‘cruel misuse of power to punish and terrorize noncitizen members of the academic community’

The ‘cruel misuse of power to punish and terrorize noncitizen members of the academic community’

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration announced criminal smuggling charges on Wednesday against Kseniia Petrova, a Harvard scientist who was detained three months ago after failing to declare scientific samples she was carrying in her luggage. In a hearing in federal district court earlier in the day, a government lawyer told a federal judge that the Trump administration intends to deport Ms. Petrova back to Russia, a country she fled in 2022, despite her fear that she will…

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