Iran’s Revolutionary Guard seizes wartime power, weakening Supreme Leader’s role

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard seizes wartime power, weakening Supreme Leader’s role

Reuters reports: Two months into a war with the U.S. and Israel, Iran no longer has a single, undisputed clerical arbiter at the pinnacle of power — an abrupt break with the past that may be hardening Tehran’s stance as it weighs renewed talks with ​Washington. Since its creation in 1979, the Islamic Republic has revolved around a supreme leader with final authority on all key matters of state. But the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first day…

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Trump administration will pay more energy firms to abandon wind farms

Trump administration will pay more energy firms to abandon wind farms

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration will pay energy companies hundreds of millions of dollars to abandon their plans to build two wind farms off the U.S. coast, the Interior Department said Monday, in a repeat of a tactic the government used to cancel other offshore wind leases last month. The firms will forfeit their leases in federal waters for the two wind farms, one of which would have been built off New York and New Jersey and…

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The Supreme Court’s conservatives just issued the worst ruling in a century

The Supreme Court’s conservatives just issued the worst ruling in a century

Richard L. Hasen writes: Wednesday’s 6–3 party-line decision in Louisiana v. Callais will go down in history as one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century. All six Republican-appointed justices on the court signed onto Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters, while pretending they were merely making technical tweaks to the act. This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local…

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Tom Steyer could be California’s next governor — and he wants to arrest Stephen Miller

Tom Steyer could be California’s next governor — and he wants to arrest Stephen Miller

Zack Beauchamp interviewed California gubernatorial candidate, Tom Steyer: In the plan you have on your website, there’s a very interesting line about not just arresting ICE agents but imposing criminal liability on “their leaders.” So do you think if you were governor and your policy were enacted that it would be right for California state agents to arrest, say, Stephen Miller if he showed up there and was shown to be responsible for some of these things that you believe…

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Fear and opportunity: Immigration scams surged as Trump’s sweeps lured desperate people to eager defrauders

Fear and opportunity: Immigration scams surged as Trump’s sweeps lured desperate people to eager defrauders

By Naisha Roy, Northwestern University, and Francesca D’Annunzio and J. David McSwane, ProPublica This story was originally published by ProPublica As an asylum-seeker living in the U.S., Jasmir Urbina worried as she watched violence break out amid the military-style immigration sweeps across the country. Then she read about legal residents being arrested at immigration court and wondered when federal agents would set their sights on her city. Urbina had fled Nicaragua in 2022 and legally resided with her husband, a…

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Shared music listening synchronizes brain activity

Shared music listening synchronizes brain activity

PsyPost reports: While sharing a musical experience with a friend might not drastically alter your overall enjoyment of a song, it tends to synchronize your brain activity and emotional responses. A recent study published in the journal Cortex has found that listening to music with another person increases the moment-to-moment similarity of subjective pleasure and enhances neural alignment. These findings help explain how music acts as a powerful tool for social bonding and collective emotional experiences. Human beings naturally use…

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‘There’s a day of reckoning coming’: Energy experts expect another spike at the pump

‘There’s a day of reckoning coming’: Energy experts expect another spike at the pump

Politico reports: Energy experts say another oil price spike is coming — and it may be made worse by the president’s social media posts. President Donald Trump has repeatedly spurred temporary dips in oil prices by claiming on Truth Social that the Iran war is near an end and that U.S. oil production would ensure sky high gas prices would soon retreat. The jawboning has mostly worked. Even as the global price of oil has crept up over $100 per…

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Middle East crisis could cost world $1 trillion while oil firms make ‘obscene’ profit, analysis finds

Middle East crisis could cost world $1 trillion while oil firms make ‘obscene’ profit, analysis finds

The Guardian reports: The Middle East oil and gas crunch will impose as much as a trillion dollars of additional costs on the global economy while petroleum companies rake in spectacular profits from elevated fuel prices, analysis has revealed. The uneven distribution of risk and reward comes amid rising concern that the US-Israeli attack on Iran is worsening inequality, poverty and hunger across a world that has become dangerously dependent on fossil fuels. Even if the strait of Hormuz swiftly…

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How the UAE’s decision to leave OPEC could recast the Middle East

How the UAE’s decision to leave OPEC could recast the Middle East

Patrick Wintour writes: The United Arab Emirates’ decision to walk out of Opec is a political as much as business decision, and will reignite the simmering rows between the UAE and Saudi Arabia – which had been covered up by their shared anger with Iran over its attacks on the Gulf states since the start of the US-Israel war on Tehran. In the short term, leaving the oil producing cartel it joined in 1967 gives the UAE the freedom to…

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How the Trump administration ended independent science at the EPA

How the Trump administration ended independent science at the EPA

The New York Times reports: For more than a half-century, a prestigious scientific arm of the federal government did groundbreaking research aimed at saving American lives. It studied fertility, asthma, wildfires, drinking water, climate change and myriad other health threats. In just one year, it has been almost completely dismantled. One scientist, a doctor and expert in lung health, has recently been reassigned to a finance office. Another, an epidemiologist, has been told she has a new job issuing permits…

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The hidden messages in King Charles’ speech to Congress

The hidden messages in King Charles’ speech to Congress

Politico reports: King Charles III deployed the first royal address to the U.S. Congress in 35 years today — and he had plenty to say to Washington’s gathered political leadership. His speech to a bipartisan crowd of elected officials, Supreme Court justices and U.S. military officials was delivered with trademark British understatement but was strong on subtext. POLITICO decodes some of the key passages of the biggest public speech of the British monarch’s four-day U.S. state visit. What he said: “In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when NATO invoked Article 5 for the first…

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Appeals court rules against ICE’s mandatory detention policy

Appeals court rules against ICE’s mandatory detention policy

Politico reports: A federal appeals court has rejected the Trump administration’s bid to lock up the majority of people it is seeking to deport without an opportunity for release on bond — even if they have no criminal records and have resided in the country for decades. In a 3-0 ruling, a panel of the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals found that ICE’s policy was based on a flawed, implausible and unprecedented interpretation of decades-old laws. But more…

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Why ‘Man the Hunter’ continues to die and return

Why ‘Man the Hunter’ continues to die and return

Vivek V Venkataraman writes: The most iconic image of human evolution comes not from science, but from cinema. In the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), apes shuffle across a desolate, windswept plain, scrounging for meagre pickings. One is mauled by a leopard. Then a large black monolith appears, whipping the apes into a frenzy and bestowing upon them a new form of intelligence. As Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra swells, one ape takes up a…

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Vance doubts Pentagon’s depiction of war in Iran. Germany’s chancellor says U.S. is being ‘humiliated’

Vance doubts Pentagon’s depiction of war in Iran. Germany’s chancellor says U.S. is being ‘humiliated’

The Atlantic reports: In closed-door meetings, J. D. Vance has repeatedly questioned the Defense Department’s depiction of the war in Iran and whether the Pentagon has understated what appears to be the drastic depletion of U.S. missile stockpiles. Two senior administration officials told us that the vice president has queried the accuracy of the information the Pentagon has provided about the war. He has also expressed his concerns about the availability of certain missile systems in discussions with President Trump,…

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