Months of distrust inside Trump legal team led to top lawyer’s departure

Months of distrust inside Trump legal team led to top lawyer’s departure

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump’s legal team for months has weathered deep distrust and interpersonal conflict that could undermine its defense of the former president as the criminal investigation into his handling of classified documents and obstruction of justice at Mar-a-Lago nears its conclusion. The turmoil inside the legal team only exploded into public view when one of the top lawyers, Tim Parlatore, abruptly resigned two weeks ago from the representation citing irreconcilable differences with Trump’s senior adviser and in-house…

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Biden shows growing appetite to cross Putin’s red lines

Biden shows growing appetite to cross Putin’s red lines

The Washington Post reports: President Biden’s decision last month to help Ukraine obtain F-16 fighter jets marked another crossing of a Russian red line that Vladimir Putin has said would transform the war and draw Washington and Moscow into direct conflict. Despite the Russian leader’s apocalyptic warnings, the United States has gradually agreed to expand Ukraine’s arsenal with Javelin and Stinger missiles, HIMARS rocket launchers, advanced missile defense systems, drones, helicopters, M1 Abrams tanks and, soon, fourth-generation fighter jets. A…

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‘War on woke? More like war on your children’s future’

‘War on woke? More like war on your children’s future’

Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman write: By now, it’s obvious that the reactionary culture warriors who want to reshape American education are inspiring a serious liberal counter-mobilization in response. Remarkably, this backlash to the backlash is gaining momentum in some of the reddest parts of the country. A raucous school board meeting in Hernando County, Fla., on Tuesday night captured what’s striking about this new phenomenon. The scene featured teachers pointedly declaring that right-wing attacks are driving them to quit,…

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Segregationists in the Supreme Court

Segregationists in the Supreme Court

Richard L. Hasen and Dahlia Lithwick write: It was impossible to listen to oral arguments this past Supreme Court term without being struck by the way this court’s conservative supermajority views the 14th Amendment. According to these justices, the key Reconstruction-era amendment was intended merely to promote a theory of “color blindness”—in which race is simply ignored—not to actively lift Black people from a previously subjugated status following the end of slavery. Indeed, the newest justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, made headlines…

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Brazilian Amazon at risk of being taken over by mafia, ex-police chief warns

Brazilian Amazon at risk of being taken over by mafia, ex-police chief warns

The Guardian reports: The rapid advance of organised crime groups in the Brazilian Amazon risks turning the region into a vast, conflict-stricken hinterland plagued by heavily armed “criminal insurgents”, a former senior federal police chief has warned. Alexandre Saraiva, who worked in the Amazon from 2011 to 2021, said he feared the growing footprint of drug-trafficking mafias in the region could spawn a situation similar to the decades-long drug conflict in Rio de Janeiro, where the police’s battle with drug…

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Intelligent brains take longer to solve difficult problems, shows simulation study

Intelligent brains take longer to solve difficult problems, shows simulation study

Medical Xpress reports: Do intelligent people think faster? Researchers at the BIH and Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin, together with a colleague from Barcelona, made the surprising finding that participants with higher intelligence scores were only quicker when tackling simple tasks, while they took longer to solve difficult problems than subjects with lower IQ scores. In personalized brain simulations of the 650 participants, the researchers could determine that brains with reduced synchrony between brain areas literally “jump to conclusions” when making decisions, rather…

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State Farm stops offering insurance in California because of ‘rapidly growing catastrophe exposure’

State Farm stops offering insurance in California because of ‘rapidly growing catastrophe exposure’

The New York Times reports: The climate crisis is becoming a financial crisis. This month, the largest homeowner insurance company in California, State Farm, announced that it would stop selling coverage to homeowners. That’s not just in wildfire zones, but everywhere in the state. Insurance companies, tired of losing money, are raising rates, restricting coverage or pulling out of some areas altogether — making it more expensive for people to live in their homes. “Risk has a price,” said Roy…

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Trump captured on tape talking about classified document he kept after leaving the White House

Trump captured on tape talking about classified document he kept after leaving the White House

CNN reports: Federal prosecutors have obtained an audio recording of a summer 2021 meeting in which former President Donald Trump acknowledges he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran, multiple sources told CNN, undercutting his argument that he declassified everything. The recording indicates Trump understood he retained classified material after leaving the White House, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation. On the recording, Trump’s comments suggest he would like to share the information…

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Mar-a-Lago prosecutors eye July episode with Trump surveillance cameras

Mar-a-Lago prosecutors eye July episode with Trump surveillance cameras

The Washington Post reports: A Mar-a-Lago employee who helped move boxes of documents last June has been questioned about his conduct weeks later related to a government demand for surveillance footage from Donald Trump’s property, according to a person familiar with the federal probe of the former president’s handling of classified material. The employee’s actions in June and July have caught the attention of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigators as they try to determine whether Trump or people close to…

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Elon Musk has been a disaster for Twitter

Elon Musk has been a disaster for Twitter

Vanity Fair reports: When Tesla chief executive Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion back in October, the deal was thought to be a massive overpay, and Musk himself admitted as much at the time. But since then, the billionaire’s financial position on the company has only grown worse, according to a Fidelity valuation Tuesday, which found Twitter to be worth just one third of what Musk originally paid for it. While it is unclear how Fidelity—which recently marked down the value of its stake in…

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Jack Teixeira should have been stopped again and again

Jack Teixeira should have been stopped again and again

David A. Graham writes: An old truism says that logistics wins wars—a recognition that outcomes on the battlefield are a result of the systems that underpin the military. Similarly, the still-mushrooming fiasco of Jack Teixeira’s disclosure of national secrets is not just about a single service member or incident, but a cascading failure of systems within the armed services. Teixeira, who was arrested in April, is accused of using his position in the Massachusetts Air National Guard to share top-secret…

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EU’s Breton wants to ‘stress test’ Silicon Valley giants

EU’s Breton wants to ‘stress test’ Silicon Valley giants

Politico reports: The European Union’s Thierry Breton wants Big Tech to know that he’s “the enforcer.” The internal market commissioner will travel to California next month to carry out “stress tests” to see how social media companies are preparing for new content rules, known as the Digital Services Act (DSA). The French politician told POLITICO that he and European Commission officials would meet with Google, Twitter and Meta Platforms during his trip to the United States, most likely during the…

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We need quantum physics to see

We need quantum physics to see

Frank Wilczek writes: Many people, when they encounter the words “quantum mechanics,” go on the alert for esoteric paradoxes. And there are certainly plenty of those on offer. But sometimes, as my brilliant friend the physicist Sidney Coleman put it in a famous lecture at Harvard, quantum physics is “in your face.” To hear, we sense pressure waves, commonly called sound waves, which impinge on our eardrums. Channeled through some impressive natural mechanical engineering, sound waves set off vibrations on…

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AI poses as great a threat to humanity as nuclear war and pandemics, industry leaders warn

AI poses as great a threat to humanity as nuclear war and pandemics, industry leaders warn

The New York Times reports: A group of industry leaders warned on Tuesday that the artificial intelligence technology they were building might one day pose an existential threat to humanity and should be considered a societal risk on a par with pandemics and nuclear wars. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” reads a one-sentence statement released by the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit…

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AI desperately needs global oversight

AI desperately needs global oversight

Rumman Chowdhury writes: Every time you post a photo, respond on social media, make a website, or possibly even send an email, your data is scraped, stored, and used to train generative AI technology that can create text, audio, video, and images with just a few words. This has real consequences: OpenAI researchers studying the labor market impact of their language models estimated that approximately 80 percent of the US workforce could have at least 10 percent of their work…

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