Will Bunch writes: You’ve probably seen something like this before — but only in a movie, and only in a film that was seeking to capture the horrors of daily life under Joseph Stalin at the peak of his 1930s purges across the USSR, or maybe a Gestapo thriller set in Nazi Germany. At 5:30 p.m. on a spring day on an urban residential street, a young woman in a bright white coat, hijab, and sneakers, engrossed in her mobile…
Wired reports: The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system—and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely—at risk. The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell…
The New York Times reports: A top Senate Republican on Thursday accused President Trump of illegally refusing to spend $2.9 billion approved by Congress, teaming with Democrats in an early salvo in the simmering struggle between Congress and the White House over which has the ultimate power over federal spending. Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, initiated a letter to the White House, signed by Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the panel’s senior…
CNN reports: In the world of electric vehicles, there’s a Chinese company outdoing Elon Musk’s Tesla. And it’s just getting started. BYD, the Shenzhen-based Chinese EV champion, eclipsed Tesla in annual sales last year. Last week, it unveiled a revolutionary battery charging technology that it says adds 250 miles of range in five minutes, outpacing Tesla’s Superchargers, which take 15 minutes to add 200 miles. And last month, BYD launched “God’s Eye,” an advanced driver-assistance system rivaling Tesla’s Full Self-Driving…
Live Science reports: Current approaches to artificial intelligence (AI) are unlikely to create models that can match human intelligence, according to a recent survey of industry experts. Out of the 475 AI researchers queried for the survey, 76% said the scaling up of large language models (LLMs) was “unlikely” or “very unlikely” to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), the hypothetical milestone where machine learning systems can learn as effectively, or better, than humans. This is a noteworthy dismissal of tech…
The New Republic reports: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney officially broke things off with the United States Thursday, marking a seismic shift in relations between the longtime allies. “The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over,” Carney said during a press conference, following a meeting in Ottawa with his ministers to “discuss trade options” in response to Donald Trump’s “permanent” 25 percent tariffs on…
Bloomberg reports: The US is pushing to control all major future infrastructure and mineral investments in Ukraine, potentially gaining a veto over any role for Kyiv’s other allies and undermining its bid for European Union membership. President Donald Trump’s administration is demanding the “right of first offer” on investments in all infrastructure and natural resources projects under a revised partnership deal with Ukraine, according to a draft of the document obtained by Bloomberg News. If accepted, the partnership agreement would…
Garrett Graff asks: Who holds the power in the Trump administration? The full Signal chat provides some of the most “real” indications of where power lies in the Trump administration and how decision-making happens—and none of it is pretty. The answer is shocking, but perhaps not surprising: Donald Trump isn’t that engaged in the policy of his administration, JD Vance is weak and powerless, and the only one that matters is Stephen Miller. I wrote earlier this week about how fascinating it was…
Mohammed Ali Kalfood writes: On his third day back in the White House, President Donald Trump issued an executive order re-designating Houthi rebels in Yemen as a foreign terrorist organization. He ordered the Pentagon to start preparing military plans against the militant group and imposed sanctions on Houthi leaders, along with their main backer, Iran. Then, on March 15, Trump announced a new U.S. bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen that has now continued for 10 days. “YOUR TIME…
The Guardian reports: A Yale professor who studies fascism is leaving the US to work at a Canadian university because of the current US political climate, which he worries is putting the US at risk of becoming a “fascist dictatorship”. Jason Stanley, who wrote the 2018 book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, has accepted a position at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Stanley told the Daily Nous, a philosophy…
NBC News reports: A federal worker accidentally includes a journalist on a detailed message in advance of a government operation. While that sounds like the case of The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief being added to a group Signal chat by Trump’s national security adviser Michael Waltz, in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed military attack plans in Yemen, it’s not. It’s what happened to a longtime Department of Homeland Security employee who told colleagues she inadvertently sent unclassified details of an…
Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and raised in a wealthy family under the country’s racist apartheid laws. Musk’s family history reveals ties to apartheid and neo-Nazi politics. We speak with Chris McGreal, reporter for The Guardian, to understand how Musk’s upbringing shaped his worldview, as well as that of his South African-raised colleague Peter Thiel, a right-wing billionaire who co-founded PayPal alongside Musk. “Musk lived what can only be described as a neocolonial life,”…
Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris write: So, about that Signal chat. On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.” At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the…
Der Spiegel reports: Private contact details of the most important security advisers to U.S. President Donald Trump can be found on the internet. DER SPIEGEL reporters were able to find mobile phone numbers, email addresses and even some passwords belonging to the top officials. To do so, the reporters used commercial people search engines along with hacked customer data that has been published on the web. Those affected by the leaks include National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National…