Gabbard fires leaders of intelligence group that wrote Venezuela assessment that contradicted Trump

Gabbard fires leaders of intelligence group that wrote Venezuela assessment that contradicted Trump

The Washington Post reports: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has fired the top two officials at the National Intelligence Council, weeks after the council wrote an assessment that contradicted President Donald Trump’s rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act and deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process. Gabbard removed Michael Collins, the acting chair of the National Intelligence Council, as well as his deputy, Maria Langan-Riekhof, according to a spokesperson for Gabbard’s office. The actions are the latest…

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Multiple Trump White House officials have personal ties to antisemitic extremists

Multiple Trump White House officials have personal ties to antisemitic extremists

NPR reports: President Trump campaigned on a pledge to fight antisemitism. “Antisemitic bigotry has no place in a civilized society,” Trump said at an event in 2024. However, the president’s critics question whether antisemitism may have found a place within his administration. NPR has identified three Trump officials with close ties to antisemitic extremists, including a man described by federal prosecutors as a “Nazi sympathizer,” and a prominent Holocaust denier. The White House did not respond to multiple requests for…

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Orbán’s party proposes Russia-style crackdown on Hungary’s civil society

Orbán’s party proposes Russia-style crackdown on Hungary’s civil society

Politico reports: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party submitted a controversial bill to parliament Wednesday in what critics see as an attack on civil society. The bill, entitled On the Transparency of Public Life, would allow the Sovereignty Protection Office to blacklist organizations receiving foreign funding, including from EU grants, if it deems them a “threat” to national sovereignty. The Sovereignty Protection Office is a government authority established in December 2023 with the power to investigate any groups or…

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AI therapy is a surveillance machine in a police state

AI therapy is a surveillance machine in a police state

Adi Robertson writes: Mark Zuckerberg wants you to be understood by the machine. The Meta CEO has recently been pitching a future where his AI tools give people something that “knows them well,” not just as pals, but as professional help. “For people who don’t have a person who’s a therapist,” he told Stratechery’s Ben Thompson, “I think everyone will have an AI.” The jury is out on whether AI systems can make good therapists, but this future is already…

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Humans are killing helpful insects in hundreds of ways − simple steps can reduce the harm

Humans are killing helpful insects in hundreds of ways − simple steps can reduce the harm

Dragonflies, just like bees and butterflies, face threats that humans can help prevent. Christopher Halsch By Christopher Halsch, Binghamton University, State University of New York and Eliza Grames, Binghamton University, State University of New York Insects are all around us – an ant on the sidewalk, a bee buzzing by, a butterfly floating on the breeze – and they shape the world we experience. They pollinate flowering plants, decompose waste, control pests, and are critical links in food chains. Despite…

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Silicon Valley is bracing for chaos

Silicon Valley is bracing for chaos

Matteo Wong writes: On a Wednesday morning last month, I thought, just for a second, that AI was going to kill me. I had hailed a self-driving Waymo to bring me to a hacker house in Nob Hill, San Francisco. Just a few blocks from arrival, the car lurched toward the other lane—which was, thankfully, empty—and immediately jerked back. That sense of peril felt right for the moment. As I stepped into the cab, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was…

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By trying to take control of the Library of Congress, Trump is attacking Congress itself

By trying to take control of the Library of Congress, Trump is attacking Congress itself

Rolling Stone reports: Donald Trump’s administration is attempting a hostile takeover of the Library of Congress — an agency that is part of the legislative branch and functions as its research arm in addition to maintaining the world’s largest collection of books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and recordings. While the takeover has been framed as part of Trump’s broader purge of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) content, it is the latest effort by the president and his team to subsume the…

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Palestinians in Gaza face widespread starvation, some Israeli officials admit in private

Palestinians in Gaza face widespread starvation, some Israeli officials admit in private

The New York Times reports: Some Israeli military officials have privately concluded that Palestinians in Gaza face widespread starvation unless aid deliveries are restored within weeks, according to three Israeli defense officials familiar with conditions in the enclave. For months, Israel has maintained that its blockade on food and fuel to Gaza did not pose a major threat to civilian life in the territory, even as the United Nations and other aid agencies have said a famine was looming. But…

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Trump’s family is rapidly striking business deals across the Middle East

Trump’s family is rapidly striking business deals across the Middle East

The Wall Street Journal reports: When President Trump tours the Middle East this week, he will be looking to secure investments in the U.S. from the world’s richest petrostates. His family businesses and close associates already have been striking deals in the region at a rapid clip. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, the three countries on the president’s itinerary, stand out for their warm embrace of Trump Inc. In the past year, Trump-branded residential towers have been…

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As U.S. popularity collapses worldwide, foreign tourists stay away

As U.S. popularity collapses worldwide, foreign tourists stay away

The New York Times reports: The U.S. welcome mat is rolling up — at least that’s how some international travelers see it, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council, a global organization representing the travel and tourism industry. And the cost for that hospitality lapse will be high. The United States is on track to lose $12.5 billion in international travel spending this year, falling to less than $169 billion from $181 billion in 2024, according to the latest…

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Biden ‘stole an election from the Democratic Party. He stole it from the American people’

Biden ‘stole an election from the Democratic Party. He stole it from the American people’

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson write: President Joe Biden got out of bed the day after the 2024 election convinced that he had been wronged. The élites, the Democratic officials, the media, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama—they shouldn’t have pushed him out of the race. If he had stayed in, he would have beaten Donald Trump. That’s what the polls suggested, he would say again and again. His pollsters told us that no such polls existed. There was no credible data,…

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Chimpanzees’ rhythmic drumming and complex calls hint at origins of human language

Chimpanzees’ rhythmic drumming and complex calls hint at origins of human language

  NPR reports: Researchers have found two important building blocks of human speech in wild chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives. A pair of studies finds that chimp communication includes both rhythmic structures and call combinations, two key elements of spoken language. Taken together, the studies add to an emerging “early footprint” indicating how human language may have evolved, says Catherine Crockford, an author of one of the studies and a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific…

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Americans are losing interest in Gaza at the worst possible moment

Americans are losing interest in Gaza at the worst possible moment

Zack Beauchamp writes: Israel’s war in Gaza, which has long been a moral atrocity, is on the brink of becoming unimaginably worse. Earlier this month, Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as “the concluding moves” of the war in Gaza. Called “Gideon’s Chariots,” the operation’s plan calls for the mass destruction of remaining buildings in Gaza and the “conquest” of much of the Strip by Israel. The more than 2 million Palestinian civilians would…

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Pope Leo calls on journalists to use communication as a tool for peace

Pope Leo calls on journalists to use communication as a tool for peace

  NPR reports: “The way we communicate is of fundamental importance: We must say ‘no’ to the war of words and images; we must reject the paradigm of war,” Pope Leo XIV said in an address to journalists Monday morning. He implored them to use communication as a tool for peace. Referencing Pope Francis’ message from the World Day of Social Communications in January, Leo said, “Let us disarm communication of all prejudice and resentment, fanaticism and even hatred; let…

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