Trump taps his own former criminal defense attorney, Emil Bove, for federal appeals judge

Trump taps his own former criminal defense attorney, Emil Bove, for federal appeals judge

HuffPost reports: In a pathetic act of cowardice last year, a handful of Democrats tanked one of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees, Adeel Mangi. Mangi, who was a veteran civil litigator in New Jersey, was an objectively impressive and qualified pick. He also happened to be Muslim, so Republicans subjected him to a disgusting monthslong smear campaign aimed at baselessly casting him as an antisemitic terrorist sympathizer. Despite his horrific treatment, Mangi hung in there, racking up endorsements from major…

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Musk, Tesla blast GOP plans to end clean energy tax credits in megabill

Musk, Tesla blast GOP plans to end clean energy tax credits in megabill

Politico reports: Tesla late Wednesday criticized the Republican megabill for gutting clean energy tax credits, a message amplified by CEO Elon Musk hours after he announced he was leaving the Trump administration. “Abruptly ending the energy tax credits would threaten America’s energy independence and the reliability of our grid,” Tesla Energy, the company’s solar and battery division, wrote on X. The House-passed reconciliation package would repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s residential solar credit at the end of the year and…

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MAHA report fabrications dismissed by White House as ‘formatting issues’

MAHA report fabrications dismissed by White House as ‘formatting issues’

USA Today reports: Citation errors and phantom research used as scientific evidence to bolster Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s landmark “Make America Healthy Again” commission report were apparently due to “formatting issues,” according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to establish a commission that was tasked with investigating chronic illnesses and childhood diseases, which culminated in the “Make Our Children Healthy Again” assessment that was published May 22. However, researchers listed…

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Microsoft bans the word ‘Palestine’ in internal emails

Microsoft bans the word ‘Palestine’ in internal emails

Waqas Ahmed and Murtaza Hussain report: Microsoft has quietly implemented a policy blocking employee emails containing the words “Palestine,” “Gaza,” or “genocide” on its internal Exchange servers, according to No Azure for Apartheid, a group of pro-Palestine Microsoft employees. The automated filter, which silently prevents such emails from reaching recipients was first detected on Wednesday—just after Microsoft’s Build developer conference faced repeated disruptions by the activist group. Microsoft has been rocked by internal dissent over its collaboration with the Israeli…

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Google AI Overviews appears to be trapped in a time warp

Google AI Overviews appears to be trapped in a time warp

Reece Rogers reports: I’ve covered Google’s AI Overviews since its messy rollout last year, when screenshots of absurdly wrong answers started popping up at the top of search results and going viral on social media. Still, when I first saw images of AI Overviews confidently saying that it’s still 2024 in Reddit posts today, I thought they might be altered screenshots. I mean, over a billion Google users currently see the AI-generated results every month. Surely, such an obvious error…

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The Trump regime has launched an attack on knowledge itself

The Trump regime has launched an attack on knowledge itself

Adam Serwer writes: The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall. Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and…

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Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem tell ICE to supercharge immigrant arrests

Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem tell ICE to supercharge immigrant arrests

Axios reports: In a tense meeting last week, top Trump aide Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanded that immigration agents seek to arrest 3,000 people a day, according to two sources familiar with the meeting. Why it matters: The new target is triple the number of daily arrests that agents were making in the early days of Trump’s term — and suggests the president’s top immigration officials are full-steam ahead in pushing for mass deportations. The increased pressure on agents comes as…

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Trump has no plan for who will grow food: ‘There is just flat out nobody to work’

Trump has no plan for who will grow food: ‘There is just flat out nobody to work’

The Guardian reports: Last spring, Carmelo Mendez was pruning peach trees in Colorado on a temporary visa, missing his children and wife back home, but excited about how his $17.70 hourly wage would improve their lives. This spring, he’s back in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala frantically searching Facebook for a job on one of the thousands of farms across the US that primarily employ guest workers like him. Mendez is one of the more than 300,000 foreign agricultural workers…

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Immigration courts are dismissing cases of those sent to El Salvador, potentially cutting off their return

Immigration courts are dismissing cases of those sent to El Salvador, potentially cutting off their return

NBC News reports: Before he was sent to an infamous supermax prison in El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, Andry Hernandez Romero was waiting for an immigration judge to decide whether he would be granted asylum in the United States. And even after his deportation, Hernandez’s lawyers fought to keep his asylum claim open as a way of ensuring he didn’t disappear from the American legal system. But an immigration judge in San Diego dismissed Hernandez’s asylum claim on…

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Judge says government should release Russian scientist

Judge says government should release Russian scientist

The New York Times reports: A federal judge on Wednesday said she would grant bail to Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist employed by Harvard University, in an immigration case stemming from Ms. Petrova’s failure to declare scientific samples she was carrying into the country. “There does not seem to be either a factual or legal basis for the immigration officer’s actions” in stripping Ms. Petrova of her visa on Feb. 16, Christina Reiss, chief judge of the U.S. District Court…

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Trump doesn’t like this taco

Trump doesn’t like this taco

Politico reports: Wall Street has a new shorthand about President Donald Trump — and he’s not happy about it. Traders have reportedly come up with the acronym TACO, which stands for “Trump always chickens out,” to take advantage of the trade environment created by the president’s habit of threatening to impose tariffs on countries, and then backing off at the last moment. He bristled when asked about it Wednesday in an Oval Office press conference. “Don’t ever say what you…

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An ancient skull, a disputed femur and a bitter feud over human origins

An ancient skull, a disputed femur and a bitter feud over human origins

Scott Sayare writes: On a late-summer day in 2001, at the University of Poitiers in west-central France, the palaeontologist Michel Brunet summoned his colleagues into a classroom to examine an unusual skull. Brunet had just returned from Chad, and brought with him an extremely ancient cranium. It had been distorted by the aeons spent beneath what is now the Djurab desert; a crust of black mineral deposits left it looking charred and slightly malevolent. It sat on a table. “What…

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Dramatic rise in threats against federal judges since Trump took office

Dramatic rise in threats against federal judges since Trump took office

The New York Times reports: Threats against federal judges have risen drastically since President Trump took office, according to internal data compiled by the U.S. Marshals Service. In the five-month period leading up to March 1 of this year, 80 individual judges had received threats, the data shows. Then, over the next six weeks, an additional 162 judges received threats, a dramatic increase. That spike in threats coincided with a flood of harsh rhetoric — often from Mr. Trump himself…

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As Trump’s tariffs incentivize fraud, trade crime is soaring, U.S. firms say

As Trump’s tariffs incentivize fraud, trade crime is soaring, U.S. firms say

The New York Times reports: As President Trump’s tariffs have ratcheted up in recent months, so have the mysterious solicitations some U.S. companies have received, offering them ways to avoid the taxes. Shipping companies, many of them based in China, have reached out to U.S. firms that import apparel, auto parts and jewelry, offering solutions that they say can make the tariffs go away. “We can avoid high duties from China, which we have already done many in the past,”…

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