Iran demands cash for peace, presenting a political minefield for Trump

Iran demands cash for peace, presenting a political minefield for Trump

The Wall Street Journal reports: The U.S. and Iran have spent weeks struggling to forge a preliminary deal to end the war. One major reason why they are stuck: Tehran wants early access to cold, hard cash, and it is politically hazardous for President Trump to agree. For Trump, a decision to free Iran’s assets upfront would inevitably generate comparisons to his own attacks on the Obama administration for flying cash into Tehran in the hours after the nuclear accord…

Read More Read More

Hezbollah’s fiber-optic drones expose weakness in Israeli defenses

Hezbollah’s fiber-optic drones expose weakness in Israeli defenses

The New York Times reports: An explosive drone snaked between the hills of southern Lebanon before striking an Israeli armored personnel carrier. Two days later, another slammed into a tank. Three days after that, a third pounded into a missile-defense system. Each day, multiple drones attack Israeli forces, the Israeli military has said, and with lethal effect. In the past week alone, they have killed three soldiers. The relentless drone attacks by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group, have exposed…

Read More Read More

Hasan Piker on being banned from the UK, traveling to Cuba & supporting candidates critical of Israel

Hasan Piker on being banned from the UK, traveling to Cuba & supporting candidates critical of Israel

  The British government earlier this week barred left-wing political commentators Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur from entering the U.K. ahead of several speaking events. The Home Office said it was canceling their travel permits because “their presence in the U.K. may not be conducive to the public good.” Piker and Uygur, who are related, are both outspoken in their criticism of Israel. While the government did not cite a specific reason for the ban, some lawmakers and pro-Israel groups…

Read More Read More

As Trump pushes deportations, huge caseload strains immigration courts and undermines due process

As Trump pushes deportations, huge caseload strains immigration courts and undermines due process

The New York Times reports: Federal officials have quietly begun fast-tracking cases through immigration courts, pushing dozens of additional cases onto the dockets on certain days in an effort to more quickly process asylum and other claims. The fast-tracking, which is also intended to increase the pace of deportations, started without any formal notification or announcement from the Trump administration, according to immigration lawyers and court officials interviewed by The New York Times. But a surge of cases has been…

Read More Read More

American apartheid: Only ‘refugees’ accepted are white South Africans

American apartheid: Only ‘refugees’ accepted are white South Africans

Mother Jones reports: Every single one of the 599 refugees the US admitted last month was a white South African, according to data the State Department’s Bureau of Population released Friday. In fact, so was every other refugee admitted this year. Since October 1, 2025, the US has accepted 6,668 refugees. Of those, 6,665 were white South Africans. Three—admitted last November—were from Afghanistan. No other refugees were admitted. That data is backed up by the US Refugee Admissions Program, a…

Read More Read More

Are memories transferable — or edible?

Are memories transferable — or edible?

Claire L. Evans writes: It was the dead of winter in Boston. The surface of the Charles River was frozen solid. But Zachary Kelso braved the biting cold to finally put to rest a mystery that has haunted neuroscience labs for over half a century. To do that, Kelso, a research assistant in the Harvard lab of the neuroscientist Sam Gershman, needed some worms. Specifically, planarians: arrow-headed flatworms, which are among the simplest creatures to possess a brain and a…

Read More Read More

Whistleblower exposes DOGE plan to declare 2.7 million people dead, pushing immigrants to self-deport

Whistleblower exposes DOGE plan to declare 2.7 million people dead, pushing immigrants to self-deport

The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration had plans to classify 2.7 million living people — including some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents — as dead as part of its immigration enforcement efforts, according to a former senior Social Security executive. The previously unreported plan, which the Social Security Administration said was not carried out, would have used one of the government’s most consequential identity databases to effectively erase people from the financial system, potentially cutting them off from…

Read More Read More

Trump can tear down the Statue of Liberty, DOJ argues in defense of White House ballroom

Trump can tear down the Statue of Liberty, DOJ argues in defense of White House ballroom

Politico reports: A federal appeals court panel expressed skepticism Friday about the Trump administration’s view that courts are powerless to stop the construction of the White House ballroom now that the East Wing had been demolished. Two members of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit repeatedly pressed administration lawyers about its argument that President Donald Trump’s pet project — now well underway — could not be stopped by the courts even…

Read More Read More

Trump sees incoming acting DNI as ‘less shackled.’ Pulte (‘Little Trump’) will fire lots of intel employees

Trump sees incoming acting DNI as ‘less shackled.’ Pulte (‘Little Trump’) will fire lots of intel employees

The Wall Street Journal reports: President Trump said he wants Bill Pulte, his incoming acting director of national intelligence, to begin firing a large number of employees as part of a shake-up of the U.S. intelligence community. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Friday, Trump said he has privately told Pulte that he believes the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, which oversees 18 federal intelligence agencies and units, was “unnecessary and/or too big.”…

Read More Read More

AI Frankenstein: Anthropic urges global pause in AI development, flags ‘self-improvement’ risk

AI Frankenstein: Anthropic urges global pause in AI development, flags ‘self-improvement’ risk

The Wall Street Journal reports: Anthropic is calling for top artificial intelligence labs to weigh slowing the pace of development, suggesting that AI systems are advancing so rapidly that they may soon be able to improve themselves without human intervention in ways that could pose significant societal risks. The ability to slow global AI development would “likely be a good thing,” the company said Thursday in a blog post that disclosed internal data documenting how quickly its most advanced models…

Read More Read More

Starmer accuses U.S. of ‘trying to interfere in our democracy’

Starmer accuses U.S. of ‘trying to interfere in our democracy’

The Guardian reports: Keir Starmer has suggested the US is trying to interfere in British democracy after JD Vance, the US vice-president, blamed the murder of the British teenager Henry Nowak on mass migration. The prime minister’s office responded after the senior Republican politician claimed in a post on X that Nowak would be alive “if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of…

Read More Read More

How Fox News viewership increases belief in the anti‑immigrant ‘great replacement theory’

How Fox News viewership increases belief in the anti‑immigrant ‘great replacement theory’

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaks on Capitol Hill on June 8, 2022, about a resolution condemning the great replacement theory. AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta By Adam Eichen, UMass Amherst; Jesse Rhodes, UMass Amherst, and Tatishe Nteta, UMass Amherst During a Washington Nationals baseball game on May 17, 2026, three people unfurled a large banner from the upper deck of Nationals Park displaying a link to a white nationalist website. The website, warning of the replacement of whites by people of…

Read More Read More

Political anger fuels support for violence mainly when voters feel ignored by the system

Political anger fuels support for violence mainly when voters feel ignored by the system

PsyPost reports: A recent study published in Political Psychology suggests that how political anger influences a person’s support for violence depends heavily on whether they believe the political system actually listens to them. Researchers found that intense anger tends to fuel support for undemocratic practices only when people feel their voices do not matter to politicians. When people believe the government is responsive, this sense of political power acts as a buffer against endorsing political violence. Political discussions in the…

Read More Read More

Oil industry warns Trump administration of price spikes within weeks. White House in denial

Oil industry warns Trump administration of price spikes within weeks. White House in denial

Politico reports: The oil industry is warning the Trump administration that a Hormuz-sized hole in the world’s petroleum market is steadily draining inventories to levels that are likely to send global energy prices surging in the next several weeks, according to four executives. Industry executives have flagged the issue to senior White House officials and Cabinet members in recent weeks as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing dialogue with the U.S. energy industry, the people said. The warnings came as…

Read More Read More