Mike Waltz left his Venmo friends list public exposing hundreds of associates

Mike Waltz left his Venmo friends list public exposing hundreds of associates

Wired reports: A Venmo account under the name “Michael Waltz,” carrying a profile photo of the national security adviser and connected to accounts bearing the names of people closely associated with him, was left open to the public until Wednesday afternoon. A WIRED analysis shows that the account revealed the names of hundreds of Waltz’s personal and professional associates, including journalists, military officers, lobbyists, and others—information a foreign intelligence service or other actors could exploit for any number of ends,…

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Trump administration claims it has power to send anyone to a foreign prison — without hearings or evidence

Trump administration claims it has power to send anyone to a foreign prison — without hearings or evidence

HuffPost reports: The Trump administration is building a case in court for its ability to send people in the United States to an overseas detention camp — and then refuse to bring them home even if they’re innocent. In a new court filing Tuesday night, the administration referred to a group of Venezuelan migrants and asylum seekers it moved from the U.S. to an infamous Salvadoran prison — a gay makeup artist and a professional soccer player reportedly among them…

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DOGE staffer, ‘Big Balls’, provided tech support to cybercrime ring, records show

DOGE staffer, ‘Big Balls’, provided tech support to cybercrime ring, records show

Reuters reports: The best-known member of Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service team of technologists once provided support to a cybercrime gang that bragged about trafficking in stolen data and cyberstalking an FBI agent, according to digital records reviewed by Reuters. Edward Coristine is among the most visible members of the DOGE effort that has been given sweeping access to official networks as it attempts to radically downsize the U.S. government. Past reporting had focused on his youth – he is…

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Trade war explodes across world as it did in the 1930s

Trade war explodes across world as it did in the 1930s

The Wall Street Journal reports: Barriers to open trade are rising across the world at a pace unseen in decades, a cascade of protectionism that harks back to the isolationist fervor that swept the globe in the 1930s and worsened the Great Depression. It isn’t just President Trump’s extensive new tariffs, which have set off a barrage of retaliatory measures across Europe, China and Canada targeting hundreds of U.S. goods. Even before Trump retook the White House, many countries were…

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Consumer confidence sinks to 4-year low and it’s no secret why: Trump tariffs and trade wars

Consumer confidence sinks to 4-year low and it’s no secret why: Trump tariffs and trade wars

MarketWatch reports: Consumers and businesses have grown very anxious about President Donald Trump’s trade wars — and they have increasing doubts about the future of the economy if the White House stays on the current path. The latest signal of angst: The long-running survey of consumer confidence fell to a more than four-year low of 92.9 this month, from 100.1 in February, the Conference Board said Tuesday. That’s the fourth decline in a row and the lowest reading since January…

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Trump aides sent texts on Signal as member of the group chat was in Russia which has ties to the Houthis

Trump aides sent texts on Signal as member of the group chat was in Russia which has ties to the Houthis

CBS News reports: President Trump’s Ukraine and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff was in Moscow, where he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, when he was included in a group chat with more than a dozen other top administration officials — and inadvertently, one journalist — on the messaging app Signal, a CBS News analysis of open-source flight information and Russian media reporting has revealed. Russia has repeatedly tried to compromise Signal, a popular commercial messaging platform that many were…

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Days after the Signal leak, the Pentagon warned the app was the target of hackers

Days after the Signal leak, the Pentagon warned the app was the target of hackers

NPR reports: Several days after top national security officials accidentally included a reporter in a Signal chat about bombing Houthi sites in Yemen, a Pentagon-wide advisory warned against using the messaging app, even for unclassified information. “A vulnerability has been identified in the Signal Messenger Application,” begins the department-wide email, dated March 18 and obtained by NPR. The memo continues, “Russian professional hacking groups are employing the ‘linked devices’ features to spy on encrypted conversations.” It notes that Google has…

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NSA warned of Signal vulnerabilities a month before Houthi strike chat

NSA warned of Signal vulnerabilities a month before Houthi strike chat

CBS News reports: The National Security Agency sent out an operational security special bulletin to its employees in February 2025 warning them of vulnerabilities in using the encrypted messaging application Signal, according to internal NSA documents obtained by CBS News. News of the NSA bulletin comes amid the continued fallout from an explosive article published Monday in The Atlantic. The publication’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, detailed how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth inadvertently disclosed war plans to him in an encrypted Signal…

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The masquerade of ‘America First’

The masquerade of ‘America First’

Danny Postel writes: The term “America First” is just as confusing and misleading as [Walter] Lippmann [in 1952] argued “isolationism” had become. Its advocates would have us believe that they are merely pursuing a realist foreign policy, one of neutrality and restraint, while in actuality they have dogs in various fights, both between warring countries and inside them. In one breath, they profess indifference about “what’s going on” in faraway lands, and in the next breath, they let slip their…

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Tesla’s European sales collapse as anti-Musk backlash grows

Tesla’s European sales collapse as anti-Musk backlash grows

Politico reports: Tesla’s downward spiral is turning into a rout, with its share of European electric car sales falling by 58 percent in the first two months of this year, dropping from 18.4 percent in 2024 to 7.7 percent for the same period this year, according to data from JATO Dynamics, an auto consulting firm. To add insult to injury, Chinese EV brands sold nearly 20,000 vehicles in Europe last month, far outpacing Tesla’s 15,700 units. The American EV company…

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How Musk’s DOGE cuts leave a vacuum that China can fill

How Musk’s DOGE cuts leave a vacuum that China can fill

David Sanger writes: When President Trump announced on Friday that the United States would move ahead with a long-debated project to build a stealthy next-generation fighter jet, the message to China was clear: The United States plans to spend tens of billions of dollars over the next decade, probably far longer, to contain Beijing’s ability to dominate the skies over the Pacific. But here on earth, the reality has been very different. As the Department of Government Efficiency roars through…

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Silent X chromosome genes ‘reawaken’ in older females, potentially boosting brain power, study finds

Silent X chromosome genes ‘reawaken’ in older females, potentially boosting brain power, study finds

Live Science reports: Dormant genes on the X chromosome may reawaken in old age, potentially giving the aging female brain a boost that the male brain doesn’t receive. This phenomenon may help to explain why, on many measures, females show a higher level of cognitive resilience in old age than males do. The findings come from a new study in lab mice, and the researchers also backed up the results with genetic data from humans. More research is still needed…

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During stunning operational security failure, Hegseth wrote, ‘I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC,’

During stunning operational security failure, Hegseth wrote, ‘I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC,’

Jeffrey Goldberg writes: The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen. I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing. This is going to require…

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Texts reveal a team of amateurs in charge of national security

Texts reveal a team of amateurs in charge of national security

Following Jeffrey Goldberg’s revelation that he was inadvertently added to a group chat for discussing classified war plans, Garrett Graff writes: Lost amid the headline-grabbing insanity of the classified details is what the principals were discussing on the group chat. It doesn’t take reading too deeply between the lines to see that the principals weren’t entirely clear on what Trump had ordered — someone, apparently Stephen Miller, says, “as I heard it, the president was clear: green light” — which…

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