Trump ignored warnings about Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz

Trump ignored warnings about Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz

The New York Times reports: In mid-February, shortly before President Trump launched the war on Iran, the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps conducted live-fire drills in its coastal waters. Iranian state media publicized the exercise, whose official name made its purpose clear: “Smart Control of the Strait of Hormuz.” The exercise amounted to a flashing red warning light to the Trump administration — one that, for reasons that are still not fully clear, went largely unheeded. Within days of the…

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Judge Michael Luttig: ‘Trump has lost his war on the federal judiciary, the Constitution, and the rule of law’

Judge Michael Luttig: ‘Trump has lost his war on the federal judiciary, the Constitution, and the rule of law’

  Will Judge Williams find that Trump “Defrauded” the Court in his IRS suit and “weaponization fund” case? On a special Legal AF, J. Michael Luttig, retired federal appellate judge and one of the leaders of the 35 judges that got Judge Williams to reopen the case and determine if there has been fraud on the court, and Andres Rivero, local counsel for the judges, joins Michael Popok to brief the audience on what Judge Luttig says is the END…

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Bill Pulte is Trump’s most dangerously sycophantic promotion yet

Bill Pulte is Trump’s most dangerously sycophantic promotion yet

Hayes Brown writes: President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte would become acting director of national intelligence. Pulte is stepping in to replace Tulsi Gabbard, who resigned from her post last month. Though Trump claimed his appointee “has deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America,” he’ll take the position with literally zero relevant experience for coordinating 17 American intelligence agencies’ work. But Pulte’s appointment makes slightly more sense when you consider his…

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Inside Trump’s takeover of the American regulatory machine

Inside Trump’s takeover of the American regulatory machine

The Wall Street Journal reports: The debate over how to respond to Omnicom Group’s $13 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group to create the world’s largest advertising business came down to two people: Federal Trade Commission chairman Andrew Ferguson—and President Trump. Sitting in the Oval Office with Ferguson last August to discuss the deal, once considered a run-of-the-mill review left to FTC staff, Trump invited an interested party to weigh in. He dialed his friend Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy, who had…

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Lawmakers demand answers after the White House initiated a $620 million loan to a firm tied to Donald Trump Jr.

Lawmakers demand answers after the White House initiated a $620 million loan to a firm tied to Donald Trump Jr.

By Robert Faturechi This story was originally published by ProPublica A group of lawmakers demanded answers from the White House this week following a ProPublica investigation revealing that a top aide to the president intervened to secure a $620 million Pentagon loan to a startup linked to the president’s eldest son. ProPublica’s reporting “reveals a staggering level of corruption and influence peddling that superseded this process, enriching the President’s son at the expense of U.S. national security and taxpayer dollars,”…

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Greg Bovino was the star at a European ‘remigration’ conference

Greg Bovino was the star at a European ‘remigration’ conference

Wired reports: On Saturday morning, as hundreds of far-right activists and lawmakers from across Europe gathered outside a conference center in the central Portuguese town of Figueira da Foz, a group of half a dozen men dressed in identical uniforms of khaki chinos, dark blue shirts, and sunglasses marched into the parking lot. On the lapels of their jackets, some wore the red and blue circular emblem of Patriot Front, the US white-supremacist group formed in the wake of the…

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The tightrope of cooperation and competition

The tightrope of cooperation and competition

Jonathan R Goodman writes: Reading classic works in evolutionary biology is unlikely to make you optimistic about human nature. From Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) onwards, there is a fundamental understanding among biologists that organisms, especially humans, evolved to maximise self-interest. We act to promote our own success or that of our family. Niceness, by contrast, is just a mirage, and morality more broadly is just an illusion. Sociobiology – the infamous movement of the second half of…

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Trump’s slush fund gets ditched (verbally), but he may still pocket $600 million by dodging taxes

Trump’s slush fund gets ditched (verbally), but he may still pocket $600 million by dodging taxes

Politico reports: The Trump administration will drop its $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that was widely criticized as a payout for the president’s allies, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a congressional hearing Tuesday. “We’re not moving forward with the fund, period,” said Blanche in remarks before the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees funding for the Department of Justice. Republican blowback from the announcement of the fund has stalled movement on an immigration enforcement bill in the Senate, where GOP…

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The Manhattan Institute helped kill DEI. Now it’s coming for protests

The Manhattan Institute helped kill DEI. Now it’s coming for protests

Wired reports: A right-wing think tank responsible for the emergence of zero-tolerance policing in 1990s New York City and the Trump administration’s scorched-earth campaign against “diversity, equality and inclusion” programs is behind state-level legislative efforts to classify minor protest-related crimes as “civil terrorism.” The Manhattan Institute, cofounded in 1978 by former Central Intelligence Agency director William Casey, is in the midst of a yearlong campaign to pass state-level legislation reclassifying minor crimes like vandalism, blocking a roadway, or trespassing during…

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White House seeks to impose political test on billions in federal grants

White House seeks to impose political test on billions in federal grants

The New York Times reports: The White House is seeking to exert more control over billions of dollars in annual government grants, aiming to restrict a vast swath of funding — in health, housing, science and transportation — so that it primarily serves the purposes and organizations politically aligned with President Trump. While the administration says that its primary goal is to safeguard taxpayer money, its proposal amounts to a major escalation in its attempt to reimagine the nation’s spending,…

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Trump is destroying ‘the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems’

Trump is destroying ‘the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems’

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration is dismantling a $368 million deep-ocean observation system that was put in place a decade ago to monitor coastal environments, marine ecosystems and powerful currents that affect the global climate. The National Science Foundation said it would send ships in June to begin removing more than 900 deep-sea instruments anchored off Oregon, Washington State, Alaska, North Carolina, and an area between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea. Scientists have used…

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Federal judge blocks breakup of National Center for Atmospheric Research

Federal judge blocks breakup of National Center for Atmospheric Research

The Colorado Sun reports: A federal judge in Denver on Monday blocked federal officials from breaking up Boulder’s National Center for Atmospheric Research by handing over a renowned supercomputing center to the University of Wyoming, in a 38-page injunction raking the Trump administration for enacting political revenge on Colorado. Senior U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson issued an injunction because the National Science Foundation divesting the supercomputing center was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance…

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Pentagon hires convicted Jan. 6 rioter for sensitive counterterrorism job

Pentagon hires convicted Jan. 6 rioter for sensitive counterterrorism job

The Washington Post reports: A convicted Jan. 6 rioter who later said that he regretted his participation in the U.S. Capitol attack has been hired by the Trump administration to work inside a Pentagon office that manages highly classified military operations, according to four people familiar with the matter. The appointment of Elias Irizarry, who was 19 at the time of the riot in 2021, to a post in the Defense Department’s Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict office has…

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The chemistry of life is not exclusive to life

The chemistry of life is not exclusive to life

Siddhant Pusdekar writes: For 15 years, Sébastien Fontaine has been trying to kill dirt. The biochemist, who runs a lab at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, wanted to know how much carbon is released by soil — just dirt alone, completely devoid of life. His team sealed dirt into jars and blasted them with sterilizing gamma radiation. Then they waited for the carbon dioxide released by the soil — a sign of ongoing microbial respiration —…

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