Comments

  2. whheydt says

    Re: John Morales @ #500…
    Correct. A “ball-bearing mousetrap” is a tom cat. As you cite, terriers are the usual solution for rats, however the Chartreux breed of cats were specifically bred to hunt rats.

  4. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    LATimes – Trump’s top federal prosecutor in L.A. struggles to secure indictments in protest cases

    To bystanders at the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, it sounded as though U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli would not take no for an answer. A prosecutor had the irate Trump administration appointee on speakerphone outside the grand jury room, and his screaming was audible […] [Essayli] told a subordinate to disregard the federal government’s “Justice Manual,” which directs prosecutors to bring only cases they can win at trial.
    […]
    Court records show the reason for Essayli’s frustration. Although his office filed felony cases against at least 38 people for alleged misconduct that either took place during last month’s protests or near the sites of immigration raids, many have been dismissed or reduced to misdemeanor charges [which do not require a grand jury and its need for probable cause of a crime to move forward]. In total, he has secured only seven indictments […] the cases are faltering in part because of unreliable information provided by immigration agents claiming to be victims.
    […]
    a U.S. Border Patrol officer claimed a man was screaming in his face that he was going to “shoot him,” then punched him. The officer said he and other agents started chasing the man, but were “stopped by two other males,” [Defense council for one of the latter males] obtained social media videos showing no such chase took place and […] charges were soon dropped.

    Quinta Jurecic:

    I cannot overemphasize how rare it is for both a) a grand jury to return no true bill [no prob cause] and b) a reporter to get around grand jury secrecy rules to confirm it. [Old Lawfare article]

    It may not be quite accurate that, as the saying goes, a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, but the sentiment gets at something real. The Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that between October 2013 and September 2014 […] the department investigated almost 200,000 cases and declined to prosecute roughly 31,500. Of the latter category, just five of those cases were declined because a grand jury returned no true bill […] Between October 2010 and September 2011, and October 2011 and September 2012, the proportion […] is a momentous 0.1 percent.

    […] It is WILD that the LA Times was able to report this

    Quinta Jurecic: “Yelling in a public place definitely makes the reporter’s job easier.”

    Eric Columbus: “As does pissing off your line attorneys!”

    Dara Lind: “Bless that AUSA who one assumes knew exactly what they were doing.”

  5. StevoR says

    Conservative lobby group Advance is under fire for repurposing footage of identifiable children without obtaining consent in a new ad attacking Welcome to Country ceremonies.

    When contacted by ABC NEWS Verify, many of the schools, child education centres and organisations that had videos taken for use in the ad said permission was not granted to use the footage, and they want the ad taken down.

    Advance started advertising with the ad, titled “Welcome To Your Own Country”, on June 15 on Meta platforms. It uploaded the video on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube — where, combined, it has been viewed more than 230,000 times.The ad shows minors taking part in Acknowledgement of Country activities at education facilities — with some of the children clearly identifiable.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-26/advance-australia-used-child-footage-without-consent/105574632

  6. StevoR says

    Laura Tingle – the author here – is a good joumo and person I reckon.

    The question, therefore, is whether the push by other countries to ramp up the pressure on Israel will provoke him ( Trump -ed) to act, lest he be perceived to not be directing events.

    Whatever now happens, Israel’s actions not only risk it appearing to be a pariah, but potentially a rogue state. And if that is correct, it implies a very different treatment by the rest of the world than the one it has received until now.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-26/israel-starvation-aid-global-pressure-gaza/105555092

  7. StevoR says

    Mammals these days have hair, birds have feathers and reptiles have neither. But the relative nakedness of today’s reptiles may not have been the case 247 million years ago, when at least one reptile species appeared to be quite experimental with its embellishments. That is according to fossils of a creature that lived at the beginning of the Triassic period and sported a curious crest running down its spine.The crest, while feather-like, pre-dates feathers by millions of years.

    A new study published in Nature has described the crested reptile, which is dubbed Mirasaura grauvogeli.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-07-24/triassic-reptile-crest-feathers-mirasaura-evolution-discovery/105560422

  9. StevoR says

    NASA is about to lose a lot of people.

    Nearly 4,000 agency employees have chosen to accept the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation” option, reducing the agency’s workforce by more than 20%.

    Those numbers come courtesy of NASA News Chief Cheryl Warner, who shared them in an email to reporters on Friday evening (July 25)

    Source : https://www.space.com/space-exploration/nasa-losing-nearly-4-000-employees-to-trump-administrations-deferred-resignation-program

  11. says

    Links back to the previous set of 500 comments on The Infinite Thread.

    https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/02/infinite-thread-xxxvi/comment-page-2/#comment-2273022
    Doctors, aid groups and Palestinians say the long-running hunger crisis has reached a tipping point, with deaths from malnutrition surging.

    https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/02/infinite-thread-xxxvi/comment-page-2/#comment-2273037
    Kennedy considering firing members of preventive services task force

    https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/02/infinite-thread-xxxvi/comment-page-2/#comment-2273020
    Third court blocks Trump birthright citizenship order nationwide after Supreme Court decision

    https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/02/infinite-thread-xxxvi/comment-page-2/#comment-2273019
    Scottish newspaper ‘welcomes’ “Convicted US Felon” Trump to Scotland

    https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/02/infinite-thread-xxxvi/comment-page-2/#comment-2273018
    Merz and Starmer weigh Israel action after Macron turns up heat

  13. says

    Trump wastes $10M on Scotland golf course visit—and they hate him there

    Donald Trump is set to spend at least $10 million in taxpayer funds to travel to Scotland to promote his golf resort—and residents of the country are already gearing up to protest the unpopular president.

    Trump is traveling to Aberdeen, Scotland, to promote his course, using the attention generated by the presidency to generate publicity and personal income.

    HuffPost analyzed the projected expenses for Trump’s trip, based on previous data provided by the General Accounting Office for such presidential travel. The outlet determined that $10 million is a conservative estimate for what Trump is costing taxpayers, and after accounting for inflation the cost could top $12.8 million.

    Trump, who used to frequently criticize former President Barack Obama for occasionally golfing while president, is obsessed with using his time in office to play the sport. [Calendar]

    According to an analysis of his public schedule, Trump has gone on golf outings for 43 days of the 187 days he has been in office during his current term—meaning that 23% of his presidency has been spent on the golf course.

    “We’ve reached a point where the Oval Office is an extension of the Trump Organization, and American taxpayers are footing the bill,”Jordan Libowitz of the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington told HuffPost.

    Not only is Trump’s trip going to cost Americans millions, but he is visiting a country where many don’t welcome him.

    Scottish officials are expecting multiple groups will be present to protest Trump, including climate action campaigners as Trump has given a green light to polluters, along with trade unionists.

    Many are members of the “Stop Trump Coalition,” who criticize Trump for undermining reproductive rights and attacking the middle class while promoting racism, nationalism, and authoritarianism.

    The anti-Trump attitude was reflected by the front page of The National newspaper published on Friday, with a banner headline reading, “Convicted U.S. Felon To Arrive In Scotland.” The paper accurately added that “Republican leader, who was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, will visit golf courses.”

    Support for the United States has significantly dropped since Trump took office. In a June survey published by Pew, 19 of the 24 countries surveyed had a lower opinion of America under Trump that they held under former President Joe Biden.

    An expensive vanity trip for Trump bookended by corruption and protest is unlikely to do much to improve those numbers.

  14. says

    […] Trump has seemingly reignited his feud with California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) over proceeds from the California FireAid concert, arguing that $100 million in donations intended for Los Angeles residents who were affected by the January fires is “missing.”

    “‘FIREAID’ IS A TOTAL DISASTER. LOOKS LIKE ANOTHER DEMOCRAT INSPIRED SCAM. 100 MILLION DOLLARS IS MISSING. WAS SUPPOSED TO GO TO THE LOS ANGELES FIRE VICTIMS, FIRES THAT, WITH PROPER MANAGEMENT, WOULD NEVER HAVE EVEN HAPPENED. GOVERNOR NEWSCUM REFUSED TO RELEASE BILLIONS OF GALLONS OF WATER FROM NORTHERN CALIFORNIA, AND THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST,” Trump wrote Friday evening on Truth Social.

    “WHAT A DIFFERENCE IT WOULD HAVE MADE,” he added.

    FireAid was a one-night concert described as an event to raise money for residents that lost their homes during the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles earlier this year. The fundraising concert featured stars such as Olivia Rodrigo, Katy Perry and Lady Gaga, along with some victims of the Palisades and Altadena blazes.

    The distribution of the funds has come under scrutiny.

    FireAid raised around $100 million so far, according to the event’s website.

    In a statement to the city’s Fox affiliate, the charity said it does not “have the capability to make direct payments to individuals and that was never the plan. We partnered directly with trusted local non-profits…to reach communities in need.”

    […]

    Link

    More at the link.

  15. says

    Washington Post link

    “EXCLUSIVE:DOGE builds AI tool to cut 50 percent of federal regulations”

    The U.S. DOGE Service is using a new artificial intelligence tool to slash federal regulations, with the goal of eliminating half of Washington’s regulatory mandates by the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post and four government officials familiar with the plans.

    The tool, called the “DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool,” is supposed to analyze roughly 200,000 federal regulations to determine which can be eliminated because they are no longer required by law, according to a PowerPoint presentation obtained by The Post that is dated July 1 and outlines DOGE’s plans. Roughly 100,000 of those rules would be deemed worthy of trimming, the PowerPoint estimates — mostly through the automated tool with some staff feedback. The PowerPoint also suggests the AI tool will save the United States trillions of dollars by reducing compliance requirements, slashing the federal budget and unlocking unspecified “external investment.”

    The tool has already been used to complete “decisions on 1,083 regulatory sections” at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in under two weeks, according to the PowerPoint, and to write “100% of deregulations” at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Three HUD employees — as well as documents obtained by The Post — confirmed that an AI tool was recently used to review hundreds, if not more than 1,000, lines of regulations at that agency and suggest edits or deletions.

    […] The proposed use of AI to accomplish swift, massive deregulation expands upon the Trump administration’s work to embed AI across the government — using it for everything from fighting wars to reviewing taxes. And it dovetails with the administration’s aim to unwind regulations government-wide, even without AI. But it’s unclear whether a new, untested technology could make mistakes in its attempts to analyze federal regulations typically put in place for a reason.

    On Jan. 31, Trump issued an executive order to “unleash prosperity through deregulation,” which required agencies to repeal 10 rules for every new rule issued. Since then, some departments have engaged in what almost appears to be a competition to cut. In May, the Transportation Department declared it had deleted 52 regulations and more than 73,000 words from the Federal Register. This month, the Labor Department announced plans to nix more than 60 regulations.

    […] It is unclear if courts will allow the administration to void rules. Meanwhile, private-sector companies tend to be uncomfortable ignoring a rule that was illegally repealed, said Nicholas Bagley, an administrative law expert at the University of Michigan.

    “There’s been some flashy sideshow efforts to avoid the legal strictures, but in general, they don’t stick,” Bagley said of Trump’s unilateral efforts to cut regulations.

    […] After its tryout at HUD, the AI deregulation tool is supposed to deploy across the rest of government in coming months, according to the DOGE PowerPoint.

    Over the next five months, agencies will work with the AI tool to identify regulations to kill, respond to public comments about the proposed deletions and submit formal deregulation proposals, the PowerPoint says. The goal is to wrap everything up and “Relaunch America on Jan. 20, 2026,” the PowerPoint states.

    More at the link.

  16. says

    No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say

    For nearly two years, Israel has accused Hamas of stealing aid provided by the United Nations and other international organizations. The government has used that claim as its main rationale for restricting food from entering Gaza.

    But the Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter.

    In fact, the Israeli military officials said, the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population.

    Now, with hunger at crisis levels in the territory, Israel is coming under increased international pressure over its conduct of the war in Gaza and the humanitarian suffering it has brought. Doctors in the territory say that an increasing number of their patients are suffering from — and dying of — starvation.

    More than 100 aid agencies and rights groups warned this past week of “mass starvation” and implored Israel to lift restrictions on humanitarian assistance. The European Union and at least 28 governments, including Israeli allies like Britain, France and Canada, issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s “drip-feeding of aid” to Gaza’s two million Palestinian residents.

    Israel has largely brushed off the criticism.

    David Mencer, a government spokesman, said this week that there was “no famine caused by Israel.” Instead, he blamed Hamas and poor coordination by the United Nations for any food shortages.

    Israel moved in May toward replacing the U.N.-led aid system that had been in place for most of the 21-month Gaza war, opting instead to back a private, American-run operation guarded by armed U.S. contractors in areas controlled by Israeli military forces. Some aid still comes into Gaza through the United Nations and other organizations.

    The new system has proved to be much deadlier for Palestinians trying to obtain food handouts. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, almost 1,100 people have been killed by gunfire on their way to get food handouts under the new system, in many cases by Israeli soldiers who opened fired on hungry crowds. Israeli officials have said they fired shots in the air in some instances because the crowds came too close or endangered their forces.

    The military officials who spoke to The New York Times said that the original U.N. aid operation was relatively reliable and less vulnerable to Hamas interference than the operations of many of the other groups bringing aid into Gaza. That’s largely because the United Nations managed its own supply chain and handled distribution directly inside Gaza.

    Hamas did steal from some of the smaller organizations that donated aid, as those groups were not always on the ground to oversee distribution, according to the senior Israeli officials and others involved in the matter. But, they say, there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole from the United Nations, which provided the largest chunk of the aid.

    […] Hamas did steal from some of the smaller organizations that donated aid, as those groups were not always on the ground to oversee distribution, according to the senior Israeli officials and others involved in the matter. But, they say, there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole from the United Nations, which provided the largest chunk of the aid.

    […] Israel used the rationale that Hamas steals aid when it cut off all food and other supplies to Gaza between March and May. In March, after a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel collapsed, Mr. Netanyahu said: “Hamas is currently taking control of all supplies and goods entering Gaza,” and he declared that Israel would prevent anything from entering the territory.

    That blockade, and problems with a new aid system that launched in May, brought hunger and starvation in Gaza to the current crisis levels.

    […] Since May 19, when Israel allowed emergency supplies to resume entering Gaza after its two-month blockade, half of the aid has been distributed by the United Nations and international organizations, with the other half coming through the G.H.F., the Israeli military says.

    […] Israel has accused the United Nations of failing to collect truckloads of aid sitting idle near a border crossing into northern Gaza.

    The United Nations, in turn, says the Israeli military has not provided enough secure routes to send those trucks in. It accuses Israel of destroying Gaza and blocking critical aid. […]

  17. says

    WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Millions of Americans support renaming the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after the writer E. Jean Carroll, according to a poll released on Wednesday.

    Conversely, poll respondents opposed naming the venue after First Lady Melania Trump, strongly agreeing with the statement, “An arts center should not be named after someone who finds blood-red Christmas trees aesthetically pleasing.”

    At the White House, press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the decision to rename the Kennedy Center after Mrs. Trump, stating, “Since President Trump took it over, the Kennedy Center has been just like the First Lady: renovated and vacant.”

    Americans Support Renaming Kennedy Center After E. Jean Carroll

  18. says

    “Jesus! Get off of him!” TX-18 Candidate Isaiah Martin Arrested After Speaking Out At Hearing

    Isaiah Martin, one of 12 candidates vying for the TX-18 district seat, attended the Texas State House’s public meeting over the GOP plan to redraw congressional districts. It’s widely seen as a power grab by Governor Greg Abbott, the Texas GOP, and Donald Trump.

    The nation’s top Republican, Donald Trump, had the Department of Justice send Greg Abbott a letter that stated race was illegally used as a factor in the makeup of at least four majority-minority districts represented by Democrats, and so they need to be redrawn. The aim is clear: redraw all the Congressional districts in Texas, carving up the Democratic districts in particular, and whittle at least an additional five Republican districts to ensure the GOP’s death-grip on the state gets tighter and that Congress stays in Republican hands after the 2026 midterm elections.

    Martin is a Houston Democrat. He worked for the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who represented the predominantly Black 18th District until her death in 2024. Her successor, Sylvester Turner, also died in March 2025. Martin decided that, in light of how redrawing congressional districts would likely affect the 18th, he would attend the public hearing on Thursday, July 24th, and give testimony.

    He ended up going over his time. Martin was asked to yield, and refused.

    At that point, he was thrown to the floor and arrested: [video]

    As reported by the Houston Chron site, Martin had this to say as he was tackled:

    “You need to have shame. History will not remember you for what you have done. It is a shame,” Martin yelled out as he was shoved to the ground. “It’s horrific for what you have done. You should all be ashamed. America will rise up against you!

    Someone certainly disagreed with the way Martin was manhandled — “Jesus! Get off of him!” can be heard as two men force Martin to the ground.

    he story was carried in several papers, mostly because Martin was jailed for misdemeanor charges and then held for a staggering 24 hours.

    The Texas Department of Public Safety has charged Martin with criminal trespassing, resisting arrest, and disrupting a public meeting. There were many other lawmakers and candidates—Reps. Greg Casar, Sylvia Garcia, and Joaquin Castro, and candidate Amanda Edwards—who testified at the hearing. All were critical and pointed to the damage such redistricting would do to the Black and Brown populations in Texas. Martin, however, was the only one arrested.

    Concern grew when Martin remained in custody 14 hours later, with his family reporting that they had had no word from him or the authorities regarding his release. His brother Josh posted a recording to X(itter) at 11:49 a.m., in which he gave an update on Martin’s situation: [video]

    “I don’t know of anybody who’s been in jail for this long for using your First Amendment rights at a public testimony,” Martin’s brother said in the video post. “This is what happens in Donald Trump’s America.”

    ::snip::

    “What’s happening right now is that these people are trying to make an example out of my brother that whenever you go and speak out against the craziness that they’re doing that they will go out of their way to silence anyone who dare [speak out] against them.”

    The video post and the clip of Martin being tackled in the hearing went viral, particularly on Bluesky, with supporters of Martin calling for both information and his release: [examples at the link]

    […]

    Martin was released at around 9:30 p.m. —tired, frustrated, but proudly defiant. He spoke exclusively with CBS Austin. [video]

    One wonders what the Texas Department of Public Safety might have done if Martin wasn’t a Congressional candidate. Worse, if there had been members of ICE in the room.

  20. JM says

    Independent: Dr. Phil launching new media network of ‘citizen journalists’ after his first one goes bankrupt

    Celebrity psychologist Dr Phil McGraw is launching a new media network that will provide opportunities for “citizen journalists” to share their stories, less than two weeks after a similar venture went bankrupt.
    Envoy Media Co. will include “live, balanced news, original entertainment programming, and immersive viewer experiences,” according to a press release shared by The Hollywood Reporter.

    Not a lot of details but this one is planning to include some liberal sources also instead of just conservative. I expect it will start out with a more realistic low budget setup and linger around for a while without achieving anything.
    I find it amusing that he is launching a new one less then a month after the last one went bankrupt. He really places on the blame on the problems with Trinity screwing up carrying the network. On the other hand, by doing it quickly he can probably rehire some of the organization from his previous venture, saving a lot of time and trouble setting up a new one.

  21. says

    Tribal health officials work to fill vaccination gaps as measles outbreak spreads

    Cassandra Palmier had been meaning to get her son the second and final dose of the measles vaccine. But car problems made it difficult to get to the doctor.

    So she pounced on the opportunity to get him vaccinated after learning that a mobile clinic would be visiting her neighborhood.

    “I was definitely concerned about the epidemic and the measles,” Palmier, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, said at the June event. “I wanted to do my part.”

    So did her son, Makaito Cuny.

    “I’m not going to be scared,” the 5-year-old announced as he walked onto the bus containing the clinic and hopped into an exam chair.

    Makaito sat still as a nurse gave him the shot in his arm. “I did it!” he said while smiling at his mother.

    The vaccine clinic was hosted by the Great Plains Tribal Leaders’ Health Board, which serves tribes across Iowa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. It’s one way Native American tribes and organizations are responding to concerns about low measles vaccination rates and patients’ difficulty accessing health care as the disease spreads across the country.

    […] Elsewhere, tribal health organizations have launched social media campaigns, are making sure health providers are vaccinated, and are reaching out to the parents of unvaccinated children.

    This spring, Project ECHO at the University of New Mexico hosted an online video series about measles aimed at health care professionals and organizations that serve Native American communities. The presenters outlined the basics of measles diagnosis and treatment, discussed culturally relevant communication strategies, and shared how tribes are responding to the outbreak.

    […] “It’s a pretty hot topic right now in Indian Country and I think a lot of people are being proactive,” he said.

    Measles can survive for up to two hours in the air in a space where an infected person has been, sickening up to 90% of people who aren’t vaccinated […]

    The U.S. has had 1,319 confirmed cases of measles this year as of July 23, according to the CDC. It’s the largest outbreak in the U.S. since 1992. Ninety-two percent of the 2025 cases involve unvaccinated patients or people with an unknown vaccination status. Three people had died in the U.S. and 165 had been hospitalized as of July 23.

    O’Connell said data on Native Americans’ vaccination rates is imperfect but that it suggests a lower percentage of them have received measles shots than the overall U.S. population.

    […] The national measles vaccination rate is significantly lower for Native Americans who use the mostly rural Indian Health Service. About 76% of children 16 to 27 months old had gotten the first shot, according to data collected by the agency during recent patient visits at 156 clinics. That’s a 10-percentage-point drop from 10 years ago.

    But the IHS data shows that its patients are at least as likely as other children to have received both recommended measles shots by the time they’re 17. […]

    The immunization rate is probably higher for older children since schools require students to get vaccinated unless they have an exemption, Brown said. He said it’s important that parents get their children vaccinated on time, when they’re young and more at risk of being hospitalized or dying from the disease.

    Native Americans may have lower vaccination rates due to the challenges they face in accessing shots and other health care, O’Connell said. Those on rural reservations may be an hour or more from a clinic. Or, like Palmier, they may not have reliable transportation.

    […] vaccine skepticism and mistrust of the entire health care system are growing in Native American communities, as has occurred elsewhere nationwide.

    […] American Indians have a long history of being severely impacted by infectious disease […] [I snipped historical details]

    The Great Plains Tribal Leaders’ Health Board reacted quickly when measles cases began showing up near its headquarters in South Dakota this year. Nebraska health officials announced in late May that a child had measles in a rural part of the state, close to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Then, four people from the Rapid City area got sick later that month and into the middle of June.

    […] the health board ordered extra masks, created a measles command team that meets daily, and called parents when its online database showed their children needed a shot.

    […] Most people agree to immunize their children when presented with helpful information in a nonjudgmental way […]

  22. says

    The unexplained removal of the first female head of the U.S. Naval Academy last week is the latest in a string of top military women who have either been fired or redelegated to largely invisible roles under the Trump administration.

    The ousting of Vice Adm. Yvette Davids from her post as the first female superintendent of the academy in Annapolis, Md., makes her one of at least five senior female service members who have been moved out of their roles since January.

    That trend, coupled with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s well-documented antipathy toward women in combat roles prior to becoming Pentagon chief, could have a chilling effect on women enlisting in the armed forces, experts say.

    “It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that it’s going to weaken our military force by undermining the role of women who have become, I believe, an intrinsic part of our military capability,” said Leon Panetta, a former defense secretary in the Obama administration.

    […] The purge of top female officers began the day President Trump was inaugurated, with Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Linda Lee Fagan fired only hours after he was sworn in. She had been in the role since June 2022 and was the first uniformed woman to lead the military branch.

    […] That was followed by the February ouster of Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first female chief of naval operations, and Air Force Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short, who served as the senior military assistant to the secretary of Defense. Both of those came without explanation, though Hegseth has called Franchetti, who boasted a four-decade career that included numerous command posts, a “DEI hire.”

    And in April, Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield, the sole female flag officer on NATO’s Military Committee, was fired reportedly due to her long-time advocacy for DEI within the armed forces, including a Women’s Equality Day presentation she gave in 2015.

    All women have now been purged from the military’s top jobs, with no female four-star officers on active duty and none in pending appointments for four- or three-star roles. […]

    [I snipped Pete Hegeth’s past stupid, misogynistic comments.]

    Link

    More at the link.

  23. birgerjohansson says

    Facebook.
    “The House will take a short recess” says Mike Johnson, dousing the floor with gasoline.

  25. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    RollingStone – Israel seizes aid flotilla en route to Gaza

    A civilian ship carrying aid to Palestinians in Gaza was intercepted by the Israeli military in international waters on Saturday, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition confirmed. The Handala flotilla was carrying baby formula, diapers, food, and medicine. The passengers were detained and the cargo was seized. The coalition said the boat was intercepted “in international waters outside Palestinian territorial waters off Gaza, in violation of international maritime law.”
    […]
    There were 21 civilians from 12 countries on the flotilla, including Christian Smalls, the former president of the Amazon Labor Union; European Union Parliament member Emma Fourreau; human rights attorney Huwaida Arraf; and two Al Jazeera journalists. The crew members said they would go on hunger strike if they were to be abducted.
    […]
    In June, the Israeli military intercepted another humanitarian aid ship from the Freedom Flotilla Coalition. Among those captured were climate activist Greta Thunberg and European Parliament member Rima Hassan. Thunberg was deported the next day. Hassan spent three days in Israeli custody, including time in solitary confinement.

    [Arraf said, “]In 2010, a flotilla that… I was on, Israel killed 10 of our volunteers. But that did not stop us. And it’s not going to stop us now.”

  26. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    After DOGE wrecked the US Institute for Peace, and USIP staff regained control, an appeals court took it away again last month.

    Wikipedia – USIP

    on May 19, [Judge Howell ruled] “because the removal of the board by the administration was illegal, all subsequent actions are null and void, including the firing of the staff and the transfer of the headquarters to the General Services Administration.”

    On June 27, 2025, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Trump administration, arguing that the Institute wields substantial executive power in foreign policy decisions, and that “[t]he president’s inability to control the Institute’s exercise of these ‘significant executive power[s]’ undermines his ability to set and pursue his foreign policy objective.”

    Trump’s objective is undermining foreign policy.
     
    So there’s a new goon in charge.
    Politico – Academic with history of incendiary remarks to lead US Institute of Peace

    Marisa Kabas: “That is one way to describe a white supremacist, Politico!!!”

    Rando 1: “Not an ‘academic.’ He was given a two semester contract with the CV enhancing title of ‘visiting professor’ after receiving his degree at Duke. He was an adjunct for nine months.”

    Here’s how Duke described him earlier this year.
    Jan. 6 conspiracy theorist Darren Beattie appointed to top State Department position (Feb 4)

    the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs
    […]
    While pursuing his doctorate at the University […] Beattie wrote his thesis on modernity from the perspective of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was also a member of the Nazi Party.
    […]
    Following his stint at Duke, Beattie became a speechwriter for the first Trump administration, where he worked on a number of speeches for Stephen Miller […] he was fired in 2018, when a CNN report revealed that he spoke to […] a conference attended by well-known white nationalists […] figures such as Richard Spencer […] In 2019, Beattie made his entrance back into the political limelight after being hired by then-Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., to serve as his senior adviser.

    A year later in 2020, Beattie was again appointed by Trump, this time to serve in the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad—assigned with preserving a number of historical sights in Europe, including Holocaust sites

    Rando 2: “Does this mean he will be working two jobs (similar to what his boss Rubio is doing)?”
    Marisa Kabas: “Yep.”

  27. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    BarbedWire – Author of Texas abortion ban denies he paid for abortions amid bombshell allegations from former exotic dancer

    She said she met Capriglione around 2004 when [he was ~31] she was 18 and a young mother and was starting out as an exotic dancer. She said their intimate relationship began to crumble after [17 years, circa the 2021 Texas abortion ban, which] caused her “to question him as a man.” […] Grace did not specify whom the alleged abortions were for—herself or others.
    […]
    [Capriglione non-specifically admitted an affair but denied the abortion claim.] “After much reflection, prayer, and conversation with my family, I’ve decided that I will not seek re-election to the Texas House of Representatives,” Capriglione posted

     
    RollingStone – Oklahoma’s Trump Bible–mandating superintendent unapologetic after a video of naked women played in his office during a state meeting

    As you might expect, Walters has led a crusade against “pornography” in school libraries.

     
    38yo Florida City Commissioner arrested after exploitation of 12yo girl, now 14
    ^ Weirdly I couldn’t find articles saying he was a Republican, but I dug up his photo on the county GOP executive board a few years back.

  28. StevoR says

    What the?! Ten more years of war in Gaza?

    As the war in Gaza approaches its second anniversary, there is a sobering prediction from former members of Israel’s military.

    Gabi Siboni is a colonel in the Israel Defense Forces reserves and an expert in military strategy at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security. He told the ABC he believed fighting would continue for another decade. “What’s the alternative? We need to clean Gaza. This is a task for years,” he said.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-27/israeli-military-expert-predicts-gaza-war-to-last-10-more-years/105569040

    “Clean” sure seems a funny – not comical – way of putting it too..

  29. birgerjohansson says

    The Guardian
    The key to understanding Trump? It’s not what you think. 

    .https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/jul/27/trump-deals-trade-economy

    “In the hands of someone like Trump, deals are ways to evade, postpone or subvert the efficient work of markets. Trump does not like markets, precisely because they are impersonal and invisible. Their results – for corporations, entrepreneurs, investors and shareholders – are subject to clear measures of success and failure.

    Because deals are personal, adversarial and incomplete, they are perfect grist for Trump’s relentless publicity machine, and allow him to polish his brand, massage his ego
    and signal his prowess to opponents – without the regulations and measurable consequences of regular market risks.”

  31. Akira MacKenzie says

    @27

    I’m sure his excuse will be that this was before he found the Lawrd and that’s he said he’s super sorry to JEZus.Therefore we should never bring this up again.

  33. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    @21 Akira MacKenzie: Close.

    He told her that his wife was aware of the relationship, and even encouraged him to go to the Red Light District in Amsterdam every year
    […]
    In his statement, Capriglione acknowledged that he had, years ago, “selfishly had an affair,” […] He said his wife and family forgave him. “We moved past it and have the strong marriage we do today,” he said. “Their grace, and God’s, is something for which I am grateful every day. I’m a different man than I was because of it.” He denied ever going to Amsterdam.
    […]
    Grace said that as Capriglione moved into politics [2012] they began to drift apart and she began to see him more clearly. She said in 2019 or 2020, they had one phone call where she expressed her anger at his political stances and encouraged him to “stick to who you are.” He hung up, cut all their lines of communication and they never spoke again […] “I wanted him to stand for what he truly believed,” she said in the interview. “If you are using abortions for your personal gain, if you are using women for your personal gain, why announce to the world that this isn’t who you are?”

    Capriglione said he was “not above scrutiny,” but threatened legal action

  34. says

    In another attempt to pivot from the Jeffrey Epstein story, President Trump calls for Kamala Harris, Beyonce and Rev. Al Sharpton to be prosecuted. Senior Writer for the Wired, Jake Lahut tells Weekend Primetime “Trump doesn’t have the juice anymore…. And people around him are trying to keep him above water.”

    Video is 10:14 minutes.

    Link

  35. says

    There might be a new opportunity for states to apply for some Federal Emergency Management Agency funding.

    In a recent announcement, FEMA said that it will be distributing $608 million in grant money. Sure, states can only use those funds to incarcerate immigrants, which obviously doesn’t help when natural disasters strike, but nothing is perfect.

    States have until August 8 to apply for the funding, which is a clear giveaway to red states that are chomping at the bit to lock up immigrants. But the joke might end up being on them, as $608 million is a comically small amount.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ torture chamber in the Everglades cost more than $200 million to build and is expected to cost $450 million annually to operate.

    The recently passed budget allocated a staggering amount of money to Trump’s immigration crackdown. Over the next 3 years, $51.6 billion will go toward the construction and maintenance of Trump’s border wall and Customs and Border Protection facilities, and $45 billion for expanding detention capacity.

    You might have been wondering what prisons for immigrants have to do with disaster aid and why FEMA money is being tapped, but that’s just because you haven’t spent enough time in the MAGA fever swamps. In 2024, Congress allocated $650 million to the Department of Homeland Security for its Shelter and Services Program.

    That money is intended to help states, municipalities, and nonprofits provide food, shelter, medical care, clothing, and outreach services to noncitizen immigrants when they’re released from DHS custody. This helps alleviate crowding in CBP facilities while also housing immigrants. No money goes directly to immigrants, and entities can only be reimbursed for immigrants who are released by DHS, not all undocumented immigrants. The funding stream is also entirely separate from FEMA’s disaster aid funding.

    But MAGA invented a world where President Joe Biden used this money to put up Tren de Aragua gang members in New York’s swankiest hotels. So of course, because the Trump administration is full of the dumbest, most vicious people imaginable, that money has to be taken away. [!]

    Now, FEMA funding will be used for the “detention support program.” In any other administration, this would be an impermissible warping of congressional intent and a wild overreach by the executive branch […]

    Meanwhile, the disaster aid funding typically associated with FEMA is now being provided based on sheer whimsy and partisanship. So Maryland doesn’t get money for floods, but Texas does. […] no one is stopping the Trump administration from using taxpayer money as a treat or a cudgel based purely on Trump’s feelings […]

    But cutting FEMA to the bone hurts its overall capacity and infrastructure, so it doesn’t even work well as a treat for red states. This week’s departure of Ken Pagurek, FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue chief, lays this bare. Pagurek resigned in the wake of the Texas floods and in the face of the Trump administration’s cuts to agency funding and personnel.

    Even in a most-favored state like Texas, the administration’s response was abysmal. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sat on approving Urban Search and Rescue teams for 72 hours and laid off hundreds of call center contract employees who fielded disaster assistance calls.

    If Trump doesn’t manage to entirely close FEMA, which is one of his goals, there will be even more of this. Disaster aid isn’t the sort of thing where you can just keep a few skeleton crew members around to spin things up when disaster strikes. You need infrastructure and personnel—two things the Trump administration doesn’t care about.

    But, hey, at least red states can crawl over each other for a pittance of grant money to partially build immigrant prisons.

    Link

  37. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/canada-tells-missionary-maga-minstrel

    “Canada Tells Missionary MAGA Minstrel To Get Feucht”

    An 18th century Canadian military base was successfully defended from being overtaken by Christian nationalists last Wednesday without a single shot being fired.

    York Redoubt, a national historic site that overlooks the entrance to Halifax Harbour, was built to deal with uninvited warships, not worshippers, but it somehow found itself booked as the first stop for musical MAGA guru Sean Fuecht’s “Revive in 25” cross-country mission to save our cold northern souls through the power of song and weak sauce.

    But the holy rollers hit an early bump in the road after their permit was revoked by Parks Canada “due to heightened public safety concerns” after locals got wind of the planned sermon on the bluff by the poodle-haired hatemonger […]

    They say the Lord works in mysterious ways, hence perhaps the short notice for the cancellation, but Fuecht — sadly pronounced foyt instead of the funnier way — didn’t take it as a sign from above and managed to find a last-minute spot on a farmer’s field an hour’s drive away. […]

    “This is not the hour to cower,” he posted. “This is not the hour to bow down to the mob. No, we need to rise up. And so tonight, we are going to gather. The show’s going on, baby!”

    The small town of Shubenacadie — the home of Shubenacadie Sam, Canada’s statistically more reliable answer to Punxsutawney Phil — is actually a more obvious choice for a gathering of wingnuts as the name comes from the Mi’kmak word Sipekne’katik, meaning “place abounding in nuts.” [LOL] The town is also accustomed to welcoming bores through daily incoming tidal bores from the Bay of Fundy up the otherwise placid Shubenacadie River, a phenomenon my father and I found out about the hard way on a cross-province canoe trip when I was a teenager.

    […] Permits for other picturesque public locales in Charlottetown, Moncton, Gatineau, Quebec City, and at last count a church in downtown Montreal have since been yanked over protest concerns and general Canadian reluctance to hosting the barbarians inside the gate at this moment in history. Let alone have to foot the bill for it or provide them footage to use against us showing how mean Canadians are to good Christian soldiers.

    […] “Freedom of expression is one of our fundamental values, but hateful and discriminatory speech is not accepted in Montreal and, as in other Canadian cities, the show will not be tolerated,” Montreal mayor spox Catherine Cadotte told CBC News, which tried tracking Fuecht down for comment but were told he is too busy trying to find alternative venues for an interview. Maybe Fox News will have better luck reaching him. But at least we don’t have to worry about Leonard Cohen rolling in his grave through “Hallelujah” being butchered in his home town by this frickin guy: [Photo of doofus]

    The manic tweet preacher since testified on X about the very different reception he’s getting compared to the one Americans got in the musical Come From Away:

    Here’s the hard truth: If I had shown up with purple hair and a dress, claiming to be a woman, the government wouldn’t have said a thing. But to publicly profess deeply held Christian beliefs is to be labelled an extremist and to have free worship events classified as “public safety risks.”

    That truly is a hard truth to accept but he might actually be on to something as a suspicious number of other musicians with devoted followers such as Megan Thee Stallion, Cardi B, Lady Gaga, and Katy Perry — all of them women known for occasionally wearing purple hair and dresses — have put on wildly successful concerts in Canada with nary a peep from government officials. Elton John never had a problem either even before being knighted. […]

    His Dee Snider ‘do would look fantastic with a mauve tint and he could maybe try baby steps starting with a kilt. Surely nobody at any prairie stops would have a problem with it so long as there’s a cowboy hat involved.

  38. says

    Washington Post link

    “Gazans are dying of hunger. Here’s what happens to a starving human body.”

    [Trigger warning for photos of starving children.]

    Under near-total Israeli siege, the more than 2 million people in Gaza — including some 1 million children — face desperate and worsening hunger. Nearly 1 in 3 people are going multiple days without eating, according to the United Nations, and Gaza’s few remaining hospitals are reporting rising deaths from malnutrition and starvation. Photos and videos from the territory show emaciated children with skin stretched tightly over bones and distended bellies.

    For months, aid groups had warned of the impending risk of famine as Israel heavily restricted the flow of U.N. supplies into Gaza. More than 100 humanitarian organizations issued a statement Wednesday describing “mass starvation” in the territory. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, which is controlled by Hamas, more than 100 people have died of starvation since the beginning of the war. New fatalities are tallied each day.

    “I don’t know what you would call it other than mass starvation, and it’s man-made, and that’s very clear,” World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news conference Wednesday.

    Some 6,000 trucks carrying food, water and supplies from the U.N. sit outside Gaza. According to the U.N., Israel has barred the convoy from entering the enclave.

    In a briefing with reporters Wednesday, an Israeli military official said there was a “lack of food security inside Gaza,” but said the U.N. was failing to deliver aid. “There is no limit. The crossings are open — just bring the trucks and take the aid,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, in line with the rules of the briefing.

    “The Israeli authorities are the sole decision-makers on who, how and how much aid enters the Gaza Strip, and the type of supplies that are allowed in,” U.N. spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said in a briefing Wednesday, adding that drivers need multiple access approvals from Israeli forces and must wait for a pause in the bombing. [Israel is in charge. Israel is responsible.]

    As hunger sets in, the toll on the human body is evident. The younger the person, the greater the impact. [Illustrations and interactive content]

    Although Gazans have struggled with hunger throughout much of the war, conditions have been particularly dire since March, when Israel ended a six-week ceasefire, during which more aid was allowed into the territory, and reimposed a blockade.

    Beginning in late May, U.N. humanitarian efforts were replaced by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an Israeli- and U.S.-backed aid distribution system. Critics have warned that the foundation — which is registered as a nonprofit but is backed by entities hoping to profit from the relief effort — transports inadequate aid to Palestinians under a flawed setup that forces them to risk their lives for provisions.

    In the military zones where the GHF operates, stampedes regularly break out among Palestinians scrambling for aid, and Israeli forces have repeatedly opened fire near GHF distribution warehouses. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, Israeli troops have killed more than 1,000 people scrambling for aid from the GHF.

    The GHF has also been plagued by financial difficulties, limiting the number of supplies it has brought into the enclave. An average of 28 aid trucks enter Gaza each day, according to Amnesty International, down from 500 to 600 before the war. [!]

    Around 80 percent of those who have died of starvation since the beginning of the war were children, according to UNICEF.

    Five thousand children were treated for malnutrition during a two-week period in July, UNICEF official Edouard Beigbeder said in a statement Thursday. By mid-August, Gaza could run out of the specialized medicine used to treat severely malnourished children, Reuters reported.

    Doctors and nutrition experts say the children who survive the lack of nourishment — and the ongoing bombing, infectious diseases and psychological trauma — are often condemned to face a lifetime of health woes. Malnutrition can rob them of the ability to fully develop their brains and bodies. Many will be shorter and physically weaker as a result. [Illustrations and interactive content]

    […] “Unlike shooting or bombing, if killing stops, the dying won’t stop. It’ll still continue for some time,” de Waal said. “Starvation in war like this is a massacre in slow motion.”

  39. says

    Washington Post link

    “Denied federal flood relief, a Maryland town is left on its own”

    “The residents of Westernport, Maryland, overwhelmingly voted for Trump. But after FEMA denied its aid request, the town feels like the president has turned his back on them.”

    [I snipped personal stories]

    […] More than two months after the devastating flood swept through Westernport, its mark remains on the small town of about 1,800 residents.

    Cars inundated with water during the flood sit abandoned along Maryland Avenue, their doors and trunks left open to reveal interiors splattered with mud. One of the town’s emergency access roads is blocked by piles of gravel at both ends of the street, placed there after a resident’s truck fell into a crater under the pavement. Many residents lost their washers, dryers, water heaters and furnaces when their basements filled with water, and they can’t afford to replace the expensive appliances — especially not all at once.

    Westernport town administrator Laura Freeman Legge said she estimated the town’s damages at $10 million, not including the damage to peoples’ homes and personal property. For a town with an annual budget of about $2 million, many repairs will need to be put on hold, potentially for years.

    On Wednesday, the town suffered another hit. The Federal Emergency Management Agency denied a request for $15.8 million to make repairs across Allegany and Garrett counties. The decision came as a shock to local leaders, who said that even after the agency disqualified millions of dollars in damage from the request, the county and state still met thresholds to qualify for assistance.

    “We met the criteria,” Westernport Mayor Judy Hamilton said. “So, we’re confused, and we don’t understand why we were not given the FEMA assistance.”

    Many people in the area affected by the flood said they felt like the FEMA denial was politically motivated, because Maryland is a Democratic-run state. But Allegany County, which sustained the lion’s share of damage from the Georges Creek flood in May, is one of Maryland’s most conservative communities. Republican voters outnumber Democrats more than 2 to 1 in the county, and the region’s elected representatives in state government — Sen. Mike McKay and Del. Jim Hinebaugh Jr. — are both members of the GOP.

    […] Federal funds from FEMA would have helped pay for repairs to critical infrastructure. Since the flood the Allegany County-managed sewage system has been leaking into Georges Creek, which feeds into the Potomac River. Asphalt roads in Lonaconing and Westernport were washed away, gas lines ripped up and storm drains blocked by debris.

    In Westernport, the town’s fire station, town hall, elementary school and library were all severely damaged. The town hall has reopened and fire station repairs are underway, but the library, which lost all of its books when a wave of water buckled a door and window, is still boarded up.

    […] Hamilton said the town has secured some funding from the state thanks to Gov. Wes Moore (D), who made just under $1.5 million available for recovery efforts. About 24 households in Allegany County also received help from a nonprofit to replace water heaters, which are especially important to replace before temperatures drop. But it’s not nearly enough.

    […] crucial work won’t be done before winter without FEMA’s assistance.

    […] Last week, FEMA granted requests for disaster relief in West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana and Michigan, all states where voters supported Trump in the 2024 election. […]

  40. says

    https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/07/27/us/trump-news

    “United States and European Union Reach Trade Deal After Month of Tense Talks”

    […] E.U. trade: President Trump announced that the United States had reached a trade deal with the European Union. Speaking to reporters, Mr. Trump said the details included 15 percent tariffs across automobiles and other products. That’s in line with the other deal the president struck recently, with Japan, but more than the European Union was pushing for. It’s also a big increase from tariffs that have been in place on products on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. […]

    It’s notable that Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union, is emphasizing that this deal will “rebalance” the American and European trading relationship. Until a few weeks ago, Europeans would have argued that the relationship was not out of balance in the first place.

    […] it’s more than the E.U. was pushing for, and more than what’s being imposed on the United Kingdom. It’s also worth remembering that it’s a big increase from tariffs that have been in place on products on both sides of the Atlantic.

    […] Trump was asked about starvation in Gaza. He said the U.S. has contributed tens of millions to help starving children in Gaza and would provide more, but suggested the aid is being stolen and complained he hasn’t received a thank you. “People are stealing the food, they’re stealing the money, they’re stealing the money for the food, they’re stealing weapons, they’re stealing everything. It’s a mess. That whole place is a mess.”

    […] Trump suggested that pharmaceuticals will be treated separately from this deal with the European Union. That would be a big blow for Europe, which was hoping to cap the tariff rate on medicines, which are their number one export to the United States. […]

  41. says

    Europe’s big trash-burning experiment has become a dirty headache

    “Waste-to-energy was sold as a greener option to landfill, but evidence is mounting that burning garbage is far from clean.”

    The little Basque village of Zubieta has an unlikely talent for a place its size: This community of 300 souls can make the trash of half a million people vanish into thin air.

    Each year, as much as 200,000 metric tons of waste from across northwestern Spain is trucked to the Gipuzkoa treatment plant on the edge of the village. There it is sorted and fed into a giant incinerator, generating enough electricity to power 45,000 homes.

    The Gipuzkoa plant was meant to be an eco-friendly alternative to landfill, but it’s backfiring. Locals have accused the plant’s owners and the regional government of violating European Union environmental laws and releasing hazardous levels of pollution into the surrounding water, air and soil. It’s even spurred a criminal court case.

    […] Gipuzkoa is not a one-off. Across Europe, hundreds of waste-to-energy facilities have mushroomed over the years, built on the promise that burning trash to generate electricity is better for the environment than burying it in a landfill.

    But studies increasingly find that the pollution generated by these facilities also harms the environment and people’s health. The EU, meanwhile, has massively reduced funding for such projects, while municipalities are still repaying the debt they accrued to fund them.

    At best, critics say, waste-to-energy plants risk becoming unpopular relics of a misguided waste policy. At worst the existing debt-funded plants could become “stranded assets” that struggle to find enough trash to burn to ensure they remain commercially viable.

    […] Belaustegi Cuesta complains that the incinerator now imports “residues that [are] not even household residues” to feed itself.

    […] Some 500 waste-to-energy plants operate on EU soil today and burn around a quarter of Europe’s everyday trash […] In 2022 Europeans generated roughly 190 million metric tons of household waste […]

    Despite recycling roughly 40 percent — more than any other region — the EU still buries a big chunk of its trash. More than 50 million metric tons of municipal waste were sent to landfills in the EU in 2023, enough to cover central Paris with a 20-meter pile of garbage. [!]

    Waste-to-energy is considered a slightly cleaner alternative: About 58 million metric tons were incinerated in 2023, nearly all of which was used to make energy, EU data shows. EU laws on waste require companies to prioritize reuse and recycling over waste incineration and landfilling.

    […] green groups say it’s a mistake to think waste-to-energy is a cleaner source of energy than fossil fuels. Poorly sorted municipal waste often means that a lot of fossil fuel-based plastic gets burnt, releasing planet-warming CO₂ in the process. […]

    Scientists, meanwhile, warn that insufficient research has been conducted on the dangers faced by people living near incinerators. Plant operators insist that technological solutions and proper sorting can keep that pollution under control. […] popular backlash against waste incinerators is growing.

    In Rome, for example, tens of thousands of people signed a petition to stop the mayor from greenlighting a waste incineration project in Santa Palomba. And last March, French senators proposed to ban the construction of new waste incinerators in the country.

    The pollution concerns have led the EU to reduce its financial support for waste-to-energy plants and to introduce policy obligations meant to steer EU countries toward recycling. […] “Many of these installation plans would turn out to be obsolete,” says Anelia Stefanova, energy transformation area leader for CEE Bankwatch, since EU countries are expected to meet waste reduction and recycling targets enforced by EU laws.

    Stranded assets
    As countries move toward greener waste management systems, the risk is that these large infrastructure projects could become useless.

    Many waste-to-energy plants already require more trash than tends to be available in the surrounding area. In Copenhagen, for example, the city’s infamous ski slope incinerator — itself financed through a 30-year loan — imports tens of thousands of tons of waste from abroad annually to feed its furnaces.

    Denmark has an “overcapacity in the incineration sector of up to 700,000” metric tons, according to its climate and energy ministry. The country is already budgeting to cover the costs of unnecessary waste incinerators. […]

    Still, new waste-to-energy plants are in the works.

    “When there are no incineration facilities then there [are] bigger landfills,” insists Hanna Zdanowska, mayor of the Polish city of Łódź. […]

    The EU’s Modernisation Fund is one of the last funding programs that still pays for waste-to-energy; it aims to help lower-income EU member countries transition their energy sectors away from fossil fuels. The €19 billion cash pot has poured just shy of €2 billion into waste-to-energy projects since its inception in 2021, all of them in Czechia and Poland.
    […]

    “When the amount of waste goes down in the future and recycling goes up, then probably only a couple of plants will be left in the area and they will not limit themselves to collecting waste only from the city but they will expand their area for the whole region.”

    More at the link.

  42. Rob Grigjanis says

    Euros final. One of the best finals I’ve ever seen. Could’ve gone either way, but the Lionesses come through. England!

  43. birgerjohansson says

    “Kelly the hero again”
    England 1-1 Spain (England win 3-1 on pens): Women’s Euro 2025 soccer final

  47. birgerjohansson says

    Evo Inception: “The Uralic Problem – Genetics of Finland”

    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZEWfTt2llS4
    Many different groups, but a big contribution from Yakutia in Siberia. The proto-Sami and the proto-Finns separated approx. 3300 years ago. The demographic chrisis ca. 2500 BC coincides with the putative yersina pestis epidemic elsewhere in Europe [which may have eased the Yamnaya population replacement].
    Fun little detail: the oldest literary source in Finland is a letter by my namesake king Birger.

  48. says

    ICE Agents Invade a Manhattan Little League Field, by Zach Holland

    Youman Wilder has coached local kids for twenty-one years—including four who have gone pro. When masked agents tried to interrogate his players, he told them, “You don’t have more rights than they do.”

    Excerpts from the New Yorker article:

    Since President Trump took office, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement have swarmed areas with immigrant populations, questioning people and making arrests. They’ve patrolled near schools and raided a homeless shelter. They arrested a four-year-old, two students of New York City public schools, and an Army veteran who happened to be Latino. Recently, masked and armed ice agents descended on a baseball field in Riverside Park. They questioned a dozen or so eleven- to fourteen-­year-olds who’d just finished batting practice, and left only after a confrontation with their coach, Youman Wilder, whom they threatened with arrest. He said, “I’m willing to die to make sure these kids can get home,” he recounted afterward.

    […] “I hold the city record in batting average to this very day,” he said recently. [I snipped details]

    Wilder has run a youth baseball program called the Harlem Baseball Hitting Academy for the past twenty-one years. There are about twenty-five kids, no tryouts (“We don’t take the best players. We take the guys that got cut”), and no minimum fee. “I’ll tell our kids, ‘Can your mom make us some rice and beans this week?’ ” Wilder said. He has produced four hundred college-scholarship baseball players, who have gone to Stanford, Princeton, and Columbia, and are now doctors and cops, or work on Wall Street. Four have made the major leagues.

    […] Wilder views baseball as a tool to teach important lessons. He also just loves it. “Baseball is life,” he said. “You start at home, and we’re going to send you out. And it’s going to be hard for you out there. But you could make it easier for yourself swinging at strikes to get to first base. And how can we get you to second and third? You can do things quicker, sharper, crisper. All those things get you around. Same thing in life. We deal with a lot of gangs. Our kids could get stopped and beaten up. I tell the kids, you have to use your baseball. How do you get from first base to third base without getting thrown out?”

    The program sometimes practices at a field in Riverside Park, off West Seventy-­second Street. The sand is lumpy. A foul pop-up off the third-base line lands in the Hudson River. You can bounce a longish home run off the elegant, arched steel superstructure of the Joe DiMaggio Highway, which is painted the color of the Statue of Liberty. Last month, Wilder had just concluded a session in the batting cages with a group of new kids. He saw six ice agents approach. “I thought they were speaking about baseball,” he said. “And then I heard, ‘Where are you from? Where are your parents from?’ ” Four had face masks. All had guns and tasers.

    Why were they questioned? “Our kids are from Washington Heights and Dyckman and the South Bronx and parts of Queens,” Wilder said. “They are Black and Latino. They come from the projects. Kids who love baseball who can’t afford baseball.” He went on, “We also have Milo. Milo is a white kid who actually is from Harlem and is proud of it, too.” All were American citizens. […]

    Wilder told his kids to get behind him. He told the ice officers they were invoking their Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. […]

    One officer said, “Oh, another YouTube lawyer.” They threatened to arrest Wilder for obstruction. But, after a few minutes, they left. The kids hurried home. The next practice, only one showed up. [Intimidation!]

    In the days afterward, Wilder met with his congressman, Adriano Espaillat. An immigration attorney volunteered to sit and watch practice. “We are not victims,” Wilder said. “Our kids will do well in life.” Wilder had to leave town a few days later. He was driving four players on college tours in a rented minivan. But he received word that, last Wednesday, when his colleague Pedro came to pitch batting practice, seven players were there to take swings.

  49. birgerjohansson says

    Geoff Thew/Mother’s Basement, 2018
    “MMO Junkie’s Racist Director – Should We Hate the Work, or the Jerk?”

    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=kP2KATrNlbE
    [The manga the anime is based on is created by Rin Kokuyou, not the director ]

    I put it here, as similar topics are bound to pop up.

  50. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Commentary on the 15% EU tariffs on automobiles @40.

    Joey Politano (Economist): “Worth remembering that in any other administration, a 15% tariff on our largest trade partner & some of our closest allies would be considered the worst trade war in more than a generation.”

    Joey Politano:

    Rando: I have to restate how insane this “deal” is from the US perspective, it’s 5% more from the baseline, and it makes importing European cars cheaper than producing American cars.

    Giving UK cars reduced tariff rates basically forced the US to give Japanese/EU (and likely Korean) cars a similar deal to get “negotiations” done, but the Trump admin is too stupid to 1) talk to Mexico/Canada or 2) not tariff parts for US cars. Play stupid tariff games win stupid tariff prizes.

    They’re calling it the first recorded case of de-industrial policy.

    Joey Politano:

    It’s very funny that Trump just randomly stopped sending the tariff threat letters after a week… but it presumably means we’re gonna get like 140 letters in the next 5 days?

    It’s also just an insane collection of countries we’ve sent letters to so far. Iraq and Kazakhstan for some reason. Brazil but nobody else in South America. The top and bottom of Africa but no countries in the middle. [World Map]

  52. whheydt says

    There is supposed to be a clip from his current trip to Scotland of his caddy dropping a ball in a convenient spot for him.

  56. birgerjohansson says

    CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @ 53
    Thank you.

    chigau @54
    At his age, it was to be expected, but – like with Jimmy Carter – still painful.

  60. birgerjohansson says

    Weyland-Yutani manufactured the android Thia in the new Predator film.

  61. says

    These business leaders praise Trump. Their corporate filings sing a different tune.

    “Publicly traded businesses are legally required to tell investors the truth.”

    To hear Jensen Huang tell it, President Donald Trump is a bold visionary leading America to triumph in business.

    The CEO of major tech company Nvidia has been on a charm offensive recently, giving an interview praising Trump and downplaying concerns about tariffs to USA Today and sitting front row at a major artificial intelligence summit in Washington where the president signed executive orders aimed at boosting AI development.

    “America’s unique advantage that no country could possibly have is President Trump,” Huang said. The comments were later posted by an official White House social media account keen to amplify a fresh testimonial on Trump’s leadership from a business executive now nearly as rich as Warren Buffett.

    But in corporate filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Huang’s company struck a different tone.

    A review of Nvidia’s latest quarterly filing with the SEC from April doesn’t sugarcoat the rugged business environment ahead for the $4 trillion company, the first publicly traded firm to reach that titanic market value thanks to the use of its computer chips to power all those AI programs.

    Corporate leaders are just as guilty as our political ones when it comes to making bold statements they can’t quite back up. But the difference is that they are legally required to lay out an honest accounting of where things stand in SEC filings so that shareholders can make an informed decision.

    In its filings, Nvidia’s immediate outlook is more volatile than Huang lets on. The filing mentions tariffs seven times and lists them under specific “risk factors” that could dent Nvidia’s revenue. The previous quarterly filing, from late 2024, only mentioned tariffs three times, and it didn’t single them out as an obstacle big enough to threaten the firm’s bottom line.

    Other company filings show similarities. Ford CEO Jim Farley went on Fox News just as Trump was kicking off his global trade war in early April, saying the tariffs were an opportunity to “gain some business.” But its filings disclosed a $1.5 billion hit from the tariffs just over a month later. Harley Davidson, once a punching bag for Trump, disclosed to the government in May that the tariffs could cost it between $130 million and $175 million this year. [video]

    At one point earlier this year, Nvidia disclosed in another securities filing that it was taking a $5.5 billion hit due to new limits on H20 AI chip exports designed for the Chinese market. Those restrictions tipped Huang into action. He reportedly lobbied Trump to restart chip sales and argued the announcement strengthened Chinese competitors like Huawei. Huang got the result he wanted: The administration reversed course this month.

    For a company like Nvidia looking to expand its footprint in Italy, Spain, the United Arab Emirates and beyond, Huang’s “first-buddy” diplomacy showcases the soft-touch maneuvering of chief executives desperate to avoid provoking Trump. Carlyle co-chair David Rubenstein said in April that Trump’s aggressiveness toward his critics was making business leaders afraid to speak out against his economic policies.

    Instead, more of them are busy touting their “Made in America” credentials in earnings calls.

    The business community is grappling with the reality that Trump isn’t anchored by small-government principles. He’s been zealous in broadening his personal power with little thought to institutional guardrails. In fact, Trump acknowledged he toyed with breaking up Nvidia, briefly channeling a Bernie Sanders-like appetite to curb monopolies.

    “I figured we could go in and we could sort of break them up a little bit, get them a little competition, and I found out it’s not easy in that business,” the president said at the AI summit this week. He did commend Huang’s meteoric success. “What a job you’ve done,” Trump said.

    There is at least one red line that major business executives don’t want Trump to cross. The Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday rode to the defense of the Federal Reserve, now up against an unprecedented scorched-earth campaign from Trump over its decision to hold steady on interest rates so far this year. “The independence of the Fed has a long tradition, that has served the country well for 250 years,” the Chamber said in a little-noticed statement. “There is no reason to change it now.”

    Nvidia is just one prominent example of a firm pulled in different directions. The cutting-edge Silicon Valley company is plowing ahead with its vision of dominating the AI industry. But its success is also at the mercy of a president who treats tariffs as a 19th century tool of personal pique.

    For Huang, the only way to square that circle may be to say one thing to Trump in public and another thing to investors — and hope no one notices the disconnect.

  62. says

    An Existential Threat to NGOs

    As President Trump continues his onslaught on centers of power he can’t directly control — higher education, media, and law firms — I want to zero in for a moment on NGOs. We don’t usually think of nongovernmental organizations as having much overt political power, but collectively they form a safety net of sorts for democracy.

    NGOs collect and analyze data, advocate for and against public policy, provide crucial social services, and, perhaps most importantly in the current moment, they litigate in defense of democracy and the rule of law. Collectively, they serve as a bulwark of civil society.

    Trump targeted NGOs in one of his early anti-DEI executive orders, but we’ve seen the administration use the pretense of “anti-discrimination” to root around in all manner of internal operations and functions of universities and other targets, so the threat is broad and existential. No NGO is safe, whether they’re legal advocacy groups fighting the important court battles of the Trump II era or aid organizations dependent on USAID funding to fulfill their civic missions.

    In one especially glaring example, the administration has brought Media Matters to its knees, helped by serial civil lawsuits against it by Elon Musk, as the NYT reported in detail over the weekend. A liberal advocacy group with a two-decade track record of pillorying outlets that traffic in right-wing propaganda and steadily raising substantial funds from donors is now facing an existential threat from the ongoing attacks, including from the White House and Federal Trade Commission.

    Vanita Gupta, a civil rights attorney who comes from the legal advocacy NGO world and served as the No. 3 in the Biden DOJ, wrote in a NYT op-ed over the weekend:

    All of this suggests a bigger, more fundamental goal: to shut down debate, cut off services to disfavored communities and dismantle civil society. These actions are unconstitutional, un-American and harm us all.

    The history of the first six months of the Trump II presidency will be written with a heavy emphasis on the role of NGOs. The ACLU, labor unions, and other legal advocacy NGOs have won decisive victories in courts against lawless mass deportation, funding freezes, and the dismantling of government agencies. Even when they’ve lost in court, they’ve exposed new information, forced courts to draw lines, and mitigated some of the worst Trump impulses.

    I’m often been asked since Jan. 20, Why isn’t anyone doing anything? I gently point to NGOs. These are real people doing important things with minimal resources and a lot of guts.

    Link

  64. birgerjohansson says

    Suggestion found at Facebook.

    “THE LEFT is using fake hornet nests to hide face recognition cameras.
    If you see one, beat it with a stick to destroy their camera!”

  65. says

    Followup to Sky Captain in comment 50.

    […] “It’s a very powerful deal, it’s a very big deal, it’s the biggest of all the deals,” Trump said, attempting to spin the announcement as a victory for his unpopular administration.

    Tariff costs historically have been passed on to consumers, which is a concept that economic experts—and political leaders like former Vice President Kamala Harris—have warned about. Trump has disregarded these concerns and pursued economically harmful policies.

    Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at accounting-firm network RSM, told CNN after the latest announcement, “You’re going to pay more for your European imports. That’s what this means.”

    “These trade deals are all underwhelming for one simple reason: While trade barriers were a big deal in Trump’s youth, they’ve been tiny for decades. When tariffs are 1-2%, there’s not much to gain from a trade war,” Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan economics professor, wrote on social media. “But you can do a lot of harm by charging Americans a 15% (or higher) import tax.”

    Despite his victory proclamation, Trump failed to secure an agreement from the E.U. to eliminate value-added taxes and digital taxes.

    Trump’s approach to trade runs contrary to the economic improvements experienced under the Biden administration. The tariffs he has imposed and negotiated increase prices for American consumers. The agreements have also been slammed by major American-based industries, like auto manufacturers, for giving foreign competitors a leg up over U.S. companies.

    Trump is desperate for wins after the bulk of his campaign promises have failed to materialize. His “big” tariff deal is more of the same and not a victory.

    Link

  66. birgerjohansson says

    Ridley Scott is making a film adaptation of Heller’s The Dog Stars, a novel I have read and can recommend. He will be moving the plot into space.

  69. says

    Trump memo allows federal workers to persuade coworkers their religion is ‘correct’

    The Trump administration released a memo Monday that aims to protect religious expression among federal workers, outlining that employees can attempt to persuade co-workers about why their religious beliefs are “correct.”

    The memo outlined conduct that should not result in disciplinary or corrective action, including displaying in the office bibles, religious artwork, jewelry, posters displaying religious messages and other indicia of religion “such as crosses, crucifixes and mezuzah.” [A work place is not a church. This is a bad idea.]

    The memo also said one or more employees should be allowed to engage in individual or communal religious expressions and that employees can engage in conversations on religious topics “including attempting to persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views, provided that such efforts are not harassing in nature.” [Such conversations are inherently harassing in nature.]

    Federal workers can also “encourage their coworkers to participate in religious expressions of faith, such as prayer, to the same extent that they would be permitted to encourage coworkers participate in other personal activities,” the memo said.

    Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor sent the memo to heads of departments and agencies with guidance on how to allow personal religious expression by federal employees “to the greatest extent possible unless such expression would impose an undue hardship on business operations.”

    The OPM worked with the White House Faith Office to produce the memo, a spokesperson told The Hill. President Trump established the office in February.

    The memo included details about how federal workers can engage with others about why they think their personal faith is “correct” and why others should “re-think” their own beliefs. [That’s harassment.]

    “During a break, an employee may engage another in polite discussion of why his faith is correct and why the non-adherent should re-think his religious beliefs. However, if the nonadherent requests such attempts to stop, the employee should honor the request,” the memo added. “An employee may invite another to worship at her church despite being belonging to a different faith.”

    The memo outlined specific examples of permissible religious expression in the workplace, like having a Bible on a desk or a Star of David and forming a prayer group with employees while not on duty hours. It also gave the example of a park ranger joining her tour group in prayer or a doctor at a Veterans Affairs hospital praying over a patient.

    “The Federal workforce should be a welcoming place for Federal employees who practice a religious faith. Allowing religious discrimination in the Federal workplace violates the law. It also threatens to adversely impact recruitment and retention of highly-qualified employees of faith,” the memo said.

    The memo, first reported on by Fox News Digital, follows Trump’s executive order on anti-Christian bias, which aims to protect Christians from religious discrimination.

  70. says

    President Trump told reporters he plans to shorten the timeline for Russia to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine to within the next two weeks based on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s continued attacks on Ukrainian cities.

    Trump had said July 14 that Russia would face additional sanctions and tariffs if it did not stop fighting in Ukraine within 50 days, putting the deadline at Sept. 2. But Monday, the president indicated he would push up that time frame to early August. […]

    Link

    I’ll believe it when I see it. Will there be enforcement or just more blather and delay?

  71. says

    Followup to comments 50 and 65.

    France denounces US-EU trade deal: ‘Submission’

    French Prime Minister François Bayrou is criticizing the trade deal struck by President Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as an act of “submission” by the European Union (EU).

    “It is a dark day when an alliance of free peoples, united to affirm their values and defend their interests, resolves to submission,” Bayrou said in a post on social platform X early Monday.

    The agreement sets tariffs at 15 percent for European imports, including automobiles. That’s lower than the 30 percent tariff Trump had threatened to impose on the EU but higher than some European officials would have liked to see — especially after decades of enjoying low single-digit tariffs for most exports to the U.S.

    As part of the deal, the EU pledged to purchase $750 billion worth of energy from the U.S. and agreed to invest in the U.S. by $600 billion more than the current investments for other goods.

    French President Emmanuel Macron has not commented publicly on the deal, but other French officials have joined Bayrou in attacking it as unbalanced.

    France’s deputy minister for European Affairs, Benjamin Haddad, said Europeans must “fight to continue seeking trade balance with the United States” and called for Europe to activate anti-coercion mechanism to tax U.S. digital services or exclude them from public agreements.

    “The current situation is not satisfactory and cannot be sustainable. The free trade that has brought shared prosperity to both sides of the Atlantic since the end of the Second World War is now rejected by the United States, which is choosing economic coercion and complete disregard for WTO rules. […]” Haddad wrote in a post on X, referring to the World Trade Organization.

    “This is both an economic and political challenge,” he continued. “Believing that concessions can address it will only encourage predation abroad and the rejection of Europe within our borders by our citizens.” […]

  72. says

    New York Times:

    Tehran Is at Risk of Running Out of Water Within Weeks

    Some of Iran’s deepest reservoirs have shrunk to shallow ponds. Water pressure is so low in some cities that taps in apartment buildings run dry for hours on end. People desperately search for water tanks, and hoard every drop they can find.

    Temperatures are so high that one day last month a part of Iran saw a heat index of 149 degrees Fahrenheit, according to sites that track extreme weather, making it one of the hottest places on Earth.

    Iran is in the throes of an acute water crisis, on top of a monthslong energy shortage that has prompted daily scheduled power cuts across the country. Iranians still recovering from a 12-day war with Israel and the United States last month must now confront life without the basics.

    The government announced this week that many reservoirs, particularly those that supply the capital, Tehran, with drinking water, were drying out. Water supplies for Tehran are predicted to run out in just a few weeks, officials said, pleading with the public to reduce water consumption.

    […] Climate change, too, has played a role; the country has weathered five consecutive years of drought.

    Now, the crisis has grown so extreme that the government shut down all government offices and services in Tehran and more than two dozen other cities across the country on Wednesday, creating a three-day weekend in an attempt to lower water and electricity usage. Fatemeh Mohajerani, a government spokeswoman, said cities could have similar closures once or twice a week going forward, and suggested people “go on holiday.”

    The Tehran Province Water and Wastewater Company announced this week it had reduced water pressure to such low levels that in Tehran — a city of 10 million people, many living and working in high-rise buildings — water could not flow above the second floor of apartment buildings.

    […] Many people and buildings are scrambling to buy water tanks, hoping to stockpile what little water there is to make it through future disruptions. The manager of one high-rise in the upscale neighborhood of Elahiyeh said the building was in its third day without water service.

    When that building finally secured a water tank, the supply lasted for just two hours. It then procured water from a freelance water truck, the manager said, only to realize it was polluted seawater, not suitable for drinking or bathing.

    […] The water shortage comes on top of scheduled daily power cuts across the country. Since December, Iran, which has one of the biggest supplies of natural gas and crude oil in the world, has struggled with a full-blown energy crisis, forcing schools, universities and government offices to close or reduce their hours and power to be rationed at industrial factories.

    The cumulative effect of crises on top of crises — from war, to daily explosions suspected to be sabotage, to skyrocketing inflation, to water and power cuts — has many Iranians reeling. In interviews and social media posts, they say that it feels as if their country is in free-fall, and question the government’s ability to reverse the situation.

    […] Environmental experts say that the water crisis stems from decades of mismanaging water resources and other misguided policies, including the overdevelopment of urban areas, draining of ground water for farming and excessive construction of dams. Iran has also piped water to the central desert regions to feed water-intensive industries, such as steel-making, owned by the government.

    […] Lush wetlands have crusted into beds of sand and dust storms, and wells have gone dry. Crops and livestock are dying. Parts of the country are sinking at alarming rates after water aquifers have been sucked up — in Tehran, parts of the city are sinking over 12 inches a year, officials said. Lakes and water reservoirs where boating, fishing and swimming were once summer staples have dried or shrunk. [I snipped some personal stories.]

    […] “What worries me most is the inequity. Wealthier urban residents can afford water storage, tanker deliveries, or other solutions, while the poor will bear the brunt of the suffering.” […]

  74. JM says

    ABC News: Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted Jeffrey Epstein associate, makes pitch to Supreme Court

    The U.S. Supreme Court should hear Ghislaine Maxwell’s appeal of her 2021 sex trafficking conviction because the government has an “obligation to honor” a non-prosecution agreement with Jeffrey Epstein that inoculated Maxwell from any criminal charges, her lawyers argued in a brief to the Supreme Court Monday.

    Mistake on the part of Epstein’s lawyer. For somebody guilty of as serious, widespread and well known of crimes as Epstein he should have had the head of the Department of Justice sign the agreement. Otherwise it was just a matter of time until somebody was trying to find something not covered by the agreement.

    “No one is above the law—not even the Southern District of New York. Our government made a deal, and it must honor it. The United States cannot promise immunity with one hand in Florida and prosecute with the other in New York. President Trump built his legacy in part on the power of a deal—and surely he would agree that when the United States gives its word, it must stand by it. We are appealing not only to the Supreme Court but to the President himself to recognize how profoundly unjust it is to scapegoat Ghislaine Maxwell for Epstein’s crimes, especially when the government promised she would not be prosecuted,” Maxwell’s attorney David Oscar Markus said in a statement.

    Maxwell’s appeal setups up an appeal to Trump for a pardon. The bit in the middle about standing by it’s word is actually funny. Trump constantly breaks agreements the US has previously made. His entire trade war is based on violating trade agreements that the US has previously signed.

  75. says

    European countries to borrow billions from EU to rearm Ukraine

    “Governments can decide to ask for cheap loans from the EU before Tuesday’s deadline.”

    Ukraine’s top allies in Europe are set to ask for tens of billions of euros in European Union loans to jointly buy weapons for the war-battered country, as well as to boost their own defenses.

    Ahead of Tuesday’s deadline to apply for the new €150 billion Security Assistance Facility for Europe loans-for-weapons scheme, several EU countries told POLITICO they are considering using that money to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia’s full-scale invasion.

    The loan scheme was proposed by the Commission in March as part of its broader ReArm Europe program and aims to boost Europe’s defense industry and reduce decades-old military dependence on the United States.

    Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania and Slovakia are considering taking up the loans, several diplomats told POLITICO, while Poland, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Bulgaria and Greece confirmed they will do so.

    By jointly buying weapons through the scheme, countries can secure a lower price than they would obtain by going it alone and deliver the armaments to Ukraine.

    France is also likely to apply for the loans, while Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands are expected to decline, according to people familiar with the governments’ plans.

    However, even countries not taking loans are still able to cut the cost of arms deliveries by taking part in joint procurements.

    European countries are facing growing pressure to increase their own weapons stocks and to boost military aid to Ukraine, after U.S. President Donald Trump signaled unwillingness to continue funding Kyiv’s war effort.

    Countries are also exploring directly buying weapons from Ukrainian companies, which is encouraged under SAFE. This would allow Kyiv to “increase the scale of defense production and technological integration with the EU,” a Ukrainian diplomat told POLITICO.

    EU Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius wrote on Thursday that at least 20 countries will demand up to €100 billion under the scheme. The final figure will be clearer on Tuesday, the deadline to apply for loans, although Brussels has indicated that even latecomers won’t be cut off.

    Brussels has offered a 45-year timeframe to pay back the loans and advance payments of up to 15 percent. The cheap, long-term loans would be funded by EU-level debt, taking advantage of the bloc’s triple-A credit rating.

    The program initially appealed to 20-odd countries for whom the EU loans came at a more favorable interest rate than the market would offer if they borrowed in their own name.

    However, the offer initially seemed unpalatable for affluent Nordic countries leery of common borrowing schemes and with strong credit ratings such as Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

    In an effort to lure those Ukraine allies into the scheme, Kubilius and Economy Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis urged EU countries to use SAFE to buy arms for Ukraine.

    […] Denmark and Finland now look likely to take up the offer.

    Countries with high debts and deficits, like Austria and Italy, are more reluctant to take the loans over worries of adding to their existing debt, as that might delay their exit from the EU’s punitive procedure for overspenders […]

    France, a long-time supporter of more EU defense spending, is likely to take up the loans despite its domestic budget constraints. Belgium, which is also saddled by a high debt, will demand from €7 billion to €11 billion under the scheme, according to an official with knowledge of the matter.

    Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Monday that his country will request €1.2 billion in loans under the scheme.

    Countries further from Russia, such as Malta and Spain, are unlikely to request the loans.

  76. says

    Trump announces plan to lift Argentina visa restrictions in support of right-wing Milei

    “President Javier Milei is the Trump administration’s staunchest ally in South America and the announcement coincided with a visit by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.”

    BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — The United States and Argentina on Monday announced that they are working on a plan to allow Argentine tourists to again travel to the U.S. without a visa.

    It will likely take two to three years before visa-free travel becomes a reality for Argentine passport holders, but the Trump administration’s move to kickstart the process marked a show of support for President Javier Milei, […] a darling of conservatives around the world.

    The gesture coincided with a visit by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to Buenos Aires for closed-door meetings with Milei and his officials. […]

    […] The removal of rigorous U.S. visa requirements — particularly at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump is tightening restrictions for foreign nationals — would offer a symbolic victory to Milei, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who rose to power as a far-right outsider mimicking Trump’s war-on-woke rhetoric and skillful use of social media.

    When he became the first world leader to visit Trump after the U.S. election, Milei pranced around Mar-a-Lago like an excited school boy.

    At the Conservative Political Action Committee convention in Washington last February, he gifted billionaire Elon Musk a bureaucracy-slashing chainsaw to support his DOGE campaign to eliminate government waste.

    […] The last time Argentines didn’t require a visa to enter the U.S. was in the 1990s under another free-market devotee, the late former President Carlos Menem.

    Menem’s neo-liberal reforms and pegging of the peso 1-to-1 to the U.S. dollar destroyed Argentina’s industry, exacerbating poverty in what a century ago was one of the world’s wealthiest countries.

    In the crisis that followed, the U.S. reimposed visa restrictions in 2002 as young Argentines seeking to flee misery lined up at European embassies and began to migrate illegally to the U.S.

    […] Over 40 mostly European and wealthy Asian countries belong to the exclusive club that allows their citizens to travel to the U.S. without a visa for up to three months. However, border officers have the power to turn anyone away.

    About 20 million tourists use the program each year. […]

    In addition to clamping down on the southern border, Trump has put up additional obstacles for students, tourists and others looking to travel to the U.S.

    His recently passed “big, beautiful” bill of domestic priorities calls for the enactment of a new “visa integrity fee” of $250 to be charged in addition to the cost of the visa itself.

    Travel industry executives have expressed concern that the charge could drive away tourists who contribute more than $2 trillion annually and 9 million jobs to the U.S. economy, according to the International Trade Administration.

    About a quarter of all travelers to the U.S. come from Latin America and the Caribbean, the agency says.

    Arrivals from Argentina have jumped 25% this year — a bigger increase than from any other country.

  77. says

    EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump revealed on Monday that JD Vance has agreed to serve the remainder of Ghislaine Maxwell’s prison sentence for her.

    “JD wasn’t thrilled about it, quite frankly,” Trump told reporters. “He was crying like a dog.”

    “I told him to be a man,” he said. “It’s only 20 years.”

    As for Maxwell, Trump said, “I wish her well,” adding that he that he expects her to be “a terrific vice president.”

    https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/jd-vance-to-serve-rest-of-ghislaine

  78. JM says

    Legal AF: Trump Gets CLOBBERED as SCHEME Already BACKFIRES
    As often happens on Youtube the title is a bit of clickbait. Complex legal maneuvering over Alina Habba’s appointment has begun but it’s too early to say it’s backfired. Somebody being tried in NJ is challenging the legality of the charges on the grounds that Habba’s backdoor appointment is invalid. Previous case law is thin and doesn’t really help anybody.

  79. birgerjohansson says

    If Sipetnekatik means ‘place abounding in nuts’ it should be the new name for DC. Also, Fox News.
    .
    Medias Touch 
    “Ghislaine runs to SCOTUS and demands urgent hearing.”

    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=1FQ6ZAUTQCo
    I know Meidas Touch is a bit Meh, but this is a summary of remarkable asteroid-impact strength corruption.

  80. John Morales says

    Yeah, well, Meidas touch is NOTHING but TRIUMPHANT headlines that never amount to ANYTHING.

    No surprise, JM.

  81. birgerjohansson says

    John Morales @ 80

    I will give you a more uplifting link. European media are not as [looks for English term for ‘Sucking up in a disgusting manner’] as their American siblings, so Leader-with-talking-cartoon-penis keeps getting questions he absolutely does not want.
    And he contradicts himself. 😄
    .
    Jesse Dollemore:

    Dollemore is also a fan of ALL CAPS, so I skipped the headline.

  83. birgerjohansson says

    You know, I think I will look for more wholesome not-getting-suicidally-depressed stories as a beningn distraction.

    Also, fan-based cartoon parodies.
    I would rather enjoy seeing Perfect Cell blast annoying characters like Team Rocket, it is a more harmless way to deal with anger than doing The Purge.

    Also, cute animal videos.

  84. John Morales says

    [looks for English term for ‘Sucking up in a disgusting manner’]

    I’m pretty good with words: some candidates are [oleaginous, sycophantic, unctuous, obsequious, toadying, lickspittle, brown-nosing, bootlicker].

  91. says

    New Yorker link

    “Amid national euphoria over the bombing of Iran—and the largely ignored devastation in Gaza—a question lurks: What is the country becoming?”, by David Remnick

    One night, not long after a ceasefire between Israel and Iran took hold, I was sitting at the bar of a crowded restaurant north of Tel Aviv, a place buzzing with high-spirited talk and laughter, jokes shouted over bottles of wine. All at once, every phone in the room lit up with alerts. One read:

    BREAKING: The I.D.F. has identified a ballistic missile launch from Yemen toward Israeli territory. The Israeli Air Force is operating to intercept the threat, the I.D.F. said.

    The news came with a map scarred with a blob of angry red, covering nearly all of central Israel—including, as far as I could tell, the bar where I sat with a burger and a beer. For a moment, everything seemed to pause.

    Starting on June 13th, with the onset of Israel’s prolonged bombardment of Iran’s nuclear facilities and the aerial assassinations of many of its military and intelligence chiefs and nuclear scientists, Israelis had regularly been warned by wailing sirens and bulletins on their phones that ballistic missiles and drones of retaliation were headed their way. They had just a few minutes to clamber out of bed, wake the kids, and get to municipal bomb shelters or to a mamad, a safe room equipped with steel doors, reinforced concrete, and blast-resistant windows. Through twelve days of war, schools and most businesses closed. The streets were nearly abandoned.

    In the early days of the war, the Israel Defense Forces estimated that between eight hundred and four thousand Israelis would be killed. In the end, the number of dead was twenty-eight. Physical damage, to be sure, was widespread. [I snipped details of physical damage.] The damage in Israel, however, was modest compared with that in Iran, where the death toll was more than a thousand people, around half of them civilians.

    […] That Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, not much more than an hour down the coastal highways, was still raging, the body count among Palestinians rising by the dozens nearly every day, seemed not to dampen the mood […] That war, which had begun some six hundred days earlier, was the moral nightmare that everyone tried to ignore, aside from the shared hope of bringing home the twenty living hostages presumed to remain in the airless tunnels of the Strip.

    […] Despite Trump’s morning-after declaration that the nuclear sites had all been destroyed, Oren [Michael Oren, a former Knesset member and Israeli Ambassador to Washington] conceded that the true damage report could easily be more complicated and many things could still go wrong. Yet he couldn’t shake the sense of history unfolding. “There is a very good chance,” Oren said, “that you won’t be able to understand the twenty-first century without understanding the Twelve-Day War.”

    Oren, like many I spoke with in government and the security establishment, allowed himself to imagine that what had begun nearly two years ago in horror might end in a sweeping transformation of the Middle East. In the “optimistic scenario,” as he described it, the region would settle into a new era of stability and Israel would finally enjoy a far less embattled existence. […]

    The possibilities didn’t end there. With Hezbollah, Iran’s most formidable proxy, crushed as a military force, Lebanon could become more stable and independent. Maybe the new leader of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, would shed his jihadi past and guide the country toward a pacific future. And maybe, this line of thought continued, the Islamic Republic of Iran—its main clients hobbled, its economy failing, and its theocratic leadership losing support—would finally cut a nuclear deal with the United States, or implode altogether. […]

    In earlier periods of crisis, Israeli writers stood at the moral center of the nation, whether forging its myths or exposing its delusions. In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the poet Natan Alterman, famous for “The Silver Platter,” a poem about the founding of the state, described a people “drunk with joy” as they celebrated the lightning victory and marched into the Old City of Jerusalem, which for two decades had been under Jordanian rule. The messianic fervor was such that General Shlomo Goren, the chief rabbi of the I.D.F., implored his commanding officer, Uzi Narkis, to blow up the Dome of the Rock, a Muslim holy place situated on the Temple Mount. “Tomorrow might be too late,” Goren said. Fortunately, Narkis rejected the plea. […]

    In those same intoxicated days, Amos Oz—a young novelist who was raised in Jerusalem under British rule and served in a tank unit during the Six-Day War—emerged from the fighting wary of expansionism and the abuse of power. He divined the cost of victory. In a newspaper article, he urged Israel to avoid the role of occupier and to begin peace negotiations with the Palestinians of the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. Zionism, he said, was about the redemption of a persecuted people, not about clinging to “dust and stone,” sanctified bones and ancient ruins. […] If Alterman’s ecstatic nationalism prevailed, Oz warned, the Middle East would become an unending “battleground of two peoples, both fighting a fundamentally just war.” [Well, that’s more realistic!]

    Years later, when I came to know Amos Oz, those memories still haunted him, as settlements kept spreading unchecked. “I couldn’t help thinking of my own childhood under the British in Jerusalem,” he once recalled at his home in Arad, a desert town near the border with Jordan. “As a child, I had nightmares—genetic, family nightmares—of uniformed aliens coming to our little street to kill us: the British, the Arabs, the Romans, tsarist soldiers, anyone from the long Jewish martyrology. […]”

    Oz died in 2018. Today, the only novelist with comparable moral authority is David Grossman, now in his seventies. Since October 7, 2023, Grossman has spoken out occasionally, and always with anguish. He has described the country’s tenuous sense of security and the global surge in antisemitism. “Only when it comes to Israel,” he has written, “is it acceptable to publicly demand the elimination of a state.” Grossman has also written, as he has for decades, about the government’s cruelty toward Palestinians, and the nation’s collective guilt “for the thousands of children we have killed.”

    Such gestures, however, carry little moral weight for most Israelis now. Since the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the rise of the second intifada, the activist left has almost vanished. Labor, the party of Yitzhak Rabin, is a shell of what it was, holding just four seats of the Knesset’s hundred and twenty. The other left-leaning parties barely register. Public debate, especially on television, is often marked by racist and reactionary rhetoric. After October 7th, no leading politician outside the Arab parties has dared propose anything concrete for the Palestinians. Yair Golan, a former I.D.F. deputy chief of staff and the leader of the left-leaning Democrats Party, told me, “We are fucked. We have two million Palestinians in Gaza and three million in the West Bank. Are we headed toward separation or annexation?”

    Gestures toward universalism invite sanction and worse. [I snipped details.]

    In the seventeen years that Netanyahu has been Prime Minister, he has waged a culture war against those to his left and transformed Israel’s political climate. Backed by secular conservatives, Russian émigrés, settlers, religious nationalists, and the ultra-Orthodox, he has been the main force behind the creation of right-wing media outlets. […] Netanyahu and his circle speak MAGA fluently—“deep state,” “wokeness,” and “fake news” have all made their way into political Hebrew—while his son Yair, an Israeli version of Donald Trump, Jr., rails against “post-national, globalist” leftists and lauds Viktor Orbán, Nigel Farage, and Jair Bolsonaro. Netanyahu’s outlandish obeisance to Trump, from posing with a “Trump Was Right About Everything!” cap to nominating him for a Nobel Prize, underscores the alignment.

    In such an atmosphere, Etgar Keret just might be the emblematic writer of today’s Israel. [I snipped examples.] When Keret turns to politics, he does so without the high-mindedness of Oz or Grossman, instead offering an allusive, prismatic relationship to current events. […]

    Keret, for all his twitchy volubility, seemed exhausted. He and his wife, Shira, hadn’t been sleeping much. The sirens still rang in their ears. They do not have a mamad in their apartment, and so, in the middle of the night, they had to respond to the alarms by running a hundred yards down the road to a kindergarten. Soon, Keret gave up the midnight dashes and took his chances. “I studied math,” he said. “If I am in the mamad and there is a direct hit, I am dead anyway. […]

    As we ate, gulls stopped by to inspect our orders, and Keret’s talk came in bursts: “The sense of continuity, of any agreed-upon set of facts or story, is gone. […] “The genius of Trump is that he has internalized social media and how it works. He knows that saying something is no different than doing something, that it’s just one damn thing after another and nothing matters. […] it’s all wrapped in one big burrito of dream and fantasy.”

    […] Most Saturday nights, Keret and his wife join demonstrations in downtown Tel Aviv. Some protesters hold up pictures of the hostages and call on the government to end the war and bring them home. Others, including Etgar and Shira, hold photographs of Palestinian children killed in Gaza.

    “You can’t cut yourself off,” Keret said. “When we go to the beach, you can hear the booms from Gaza. When you eat a lollipop or an ice cream, you hear things being blown up.”

    One outcome of the Twelve-Day War, Keret said, is that Israel is now a proxy of the United States. […] Now we have Trump telling Israel to drop Netanyahu’s corruption trial. What could be a more internal issue? When Macron says something about Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, our leaders tell him, ‘Fuck off! It’s an internal issue!’ But when President Trump gets involved in our legal system that’s fine!”

    […] “We are doing horrible things, and it’s important for me that people know I oppose this,” Keret said. But he knows his own limits and how much Israel has changed. As for his tribe of liberals, he said, “it feels like it’s nonexistent.” He does the best he can, all the while knowing that he can do only so much. […]

    We listened to the waves for a while. Then Keret said, “Not only is reality horrible, you also don’t know what the real story is.”

    In the early-morning hours of October 7th, as Hamas fighters streamed into southern Israel, the group’s top leaders—Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, Marwan Issa—dispatched a secret communiqué to Beirut and Tehran. Their message, which was eventually discovered by Israeli intelligence and published in the newspaper Maariv, was intended for Hassan Nasrallah, of Hezbollah, and Mohammed Saeed Izadi, of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. It was both an apology and a desperate plea: Forgive our secrecy, but now is the time to join the fight. The hope in Gaza was that, with Israel reeling, Hezbollah’s élite Radwan force would strike from the north, transforming a Hamas raid into a regional war.

    That hope was swiftly dashed. Nasrallah hesitated; the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, held back. In the days that followed, Hezbollah’s military volleys amounted to symbolic support—enough to empty towns along Israel’s northern border, but a far cry from the full-blown, two-front assault that Hamas had imagined. The “axis of resistance” proved, at the critical hour, to be anything but a unified war machine.

    For Israelis, the sense of betrayal and exposure came from the failure to anticipate and respond to the October 7th attack. […] For many hours, in some places a day or more, civilians were left to fend for themselves.

    In a country created to vouchsafe the safety and liberty of a people persecuted for centuries, the security collapse remains a source of trauma and shame. […]

    The one official who has refused to acknowledge responsibility, or display a sense of fellow-feeling, is the Prime Minister. Even many of his supporters find this hard to stomach. [I snipped examples.]

    Netanyahu’s lack of evident remorse contrasts with the behavior of earlier Israeli leaders. […]

    In some quarters, this cynicism has bred its own theology. Aryeh Deri, who leads the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, went so far as to declare that October 7th had “saved the nation.” He said, “I see in this what the Prophet Isaiah said in his prophecy: ‘For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with greater compassion will I gather thee.’ ” In Deri’s view, the Hamas attack was a day when God forsook Israel briefly, only to gather it back with greater compassion. By forcing Israel’s hand, Sinwar had delivered an unlooked-for blessing: the chance to destroy Hamas, decimate Hezbollah, and expose Iran.

    […] the horrific scale of suffering among Gazans is nearly invisible in the Israeli media, aside from the liberal paper Haaretz and a few smaller outlets. […] hospital officials in Gaza report dozens of Palestinians—sometimes more than a hundred—killed on most days. They’re killed in their homes or in the streets. They’re killed lining up for a sack of flour or a jerrican of water at aid stations. They perish of starvation. Or as “collateral damage” during targeted strikes. Often enough, the “targets” surpass understanding. While I was in Israel, the country’s Air Force dropped a five-hundred-pound bomb on the Al-Baqa café, a two-story seaside refuge with cool drinks and internet access. Saher al-Baqa, the owner, was killed. So were forty others, many of them women and children. Among the dead were Mustafa Abu Umeira, a celebrated soccer player; Malak Musleh, known as the most promising female prizefighter in the Strip; and Ismail Abu Hatab, a photojournalist and a creator of an exhibition that appeared in Los Angeles, Chicago, and elsewhere. An I.D.F. spokesman promised to review the bombing but maintained that “prior to the strike, steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians using aerial surveillance.” [WTF?]

    In periods of conflict, it is exceedingly rare for people to acknowledge the humanity of the other side or the inhumanities perpetrated by their own side. […]

    A precise death toll is elusive. In late June, Gaza’s Health Ministry distributed an updated list of the dead, a thousand pages complete with names and family records: more than fifty-five thousand killed, seventeen thousand of them children—nine hundred and thirty-seven less than a year old. Israeli officials, and many citizens, reject these numbers out of hand, because the Health Ministry is under the control of Hamas. In fact, the Health Ministry’s numbers are based mainly on bodies that have been brought to hospital morgues, and researchers say that many more dead might be found later under the rubble.

    […] “The Strip is a pile of rubble,” Mohammed Mhawish, a Gazan journalist who has lost family and friends, told me. “Every sector of life has been destroyed. Schools are now shelters, hospitals are nearly inoperable. Every day is a fight for survival: children go hungry, parents risk their lives just looking for food.”

    In June, Haaretz published an investigation reporting that Israeli soldiers stationed around aid-distribution sites had been ordered to shoot at Palestinians “to drive them away or disperse them, even though it was clear they posed no threat.” The sources for the story were Israeli officers and soldiers. […] They’re treated like a hostile force—no crowd-control measures, no tear gas—just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. . . . Our form of communication is gunfire.” […]

    Some commentators were quick to dismiss the investigation or shift the blame, saying that Hamas fighters had been stealing aid shipments and selling the food and medicine at wildly inflated prices, or claiming that Hamas had been firing on Palestinians. And yet one former security official I spoke to didn’t dispute the substance of the report; rather, he compared it to other instances in history of soldiers who were enraged, vengeful, afraid, exhausted, trapped in an aimless war. “They say Israel has ‘the most moral military in the world,’ ” he told me. “Bullshit. The way young soldiers and commanders sometimes use their weapons is terrible. They don’t care about the rules. They think, Kill them all! They deserve it after what they did to us, they are not human beings, don’t ask your commander.”

    […] Two hundred and fifty former officers in the intelligence establishment, including three ex-chiefs of Mossad, signed an open letter of protest. In another open letter, almost a thousand Air Force veterans and reservists stated that the continuation of the war is risking the lives of hostages, soldiers, and innocent civilians “without advancing any of the declared goals of the war” and “serves primarily political and personal interests.” Moshe Ya’alon, a former Defense Minister under Netanyahu, said that the government was carrying out a policy of “ethnic cleansing.” Omer Bartov, a leading historian of the Holocaust and a veteran of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, said that it was a “misnomer” to call Israel’s operation in Gaza a “war”; instead, he writes of “genocide” and of Israel’s attempt to “wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza.”

    […] “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians,” Ehud Olmert, a former Prime Minister, wrote in Haaretz. […]

    Hamas launched its October 7th attack with the knowledge that it would provoke an immense Israeli reprisal. To regain control of historical Palestine for the Palestinians and to eliminate the Zionist state, Sinwar once remarked, “we are ready to sacrifice twenty thousand, thirty thousand, a hundred thousand.” He knew that the war could bring horrifying casualties; he had helped construct, with Iranian and Qatari money and the cynical complicity of the Israeli government, a militarized landscape of tunnels and outposts embedded in schools, homes, hospitals, and U.N. sites. The suffering of Palestinian civilians wasn’t merely a foreseeable consequence; it was an integral part of the strategy. […]

    “Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence,” George Orwell wrote after fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. […]

    Before October 7th, Netanyahu, like much of the Israeli security establishment, regarded Hamas as a problem to be managed, not as an existential threat. […]

    […] Today, Israel has a substantial stockpile of nuclear bombs but does not acknowledge it. Instead, Israeli officials maintain a policy of amimut, or strategic ambiguity. […]

    At the same time, Israel—which has been threatened since its inception—has taken pains to deny its adversaries such “strategic advantages,” backing vigilance with force. In 1980, Menachem Begin and his intelligence services had to reckon with the fact that the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, was building Osirak, a reactor in an isolated outpost near Baghdad. […] Begin won support in the Cabinet and, in June, 1981, dispatched eight U.S.-made fighter jets to drop sixteen bombs on the Osirak reactor. Israel was condemned in the United Nations, including by the United States.

    Begin, ordinarily protective of Israel’s relationship with its American patron, believed that he was duty bound to strike Iraq. […] The attack on Osirak became the foundation of the Begin doctrine, which held that no adversary in the region would be permitted to obtain a nuclear weapon. […]

    In 2007, Mossad agents broke into the Vienna apartment of Ibrahim Othman, the head of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission. According to a comprehensive account by David Makovsky in The New Yorker, the agents extracted conclusive evidence from Othman’s computer: Syria was secretly building a plutonium reactor, Al Kibar, with help from North Korea. […] Olmert didn’t ask for a green light, and George W. Bush didn’t give one—but he didn’t flash red, either.

    Around midnight on September 5, 2007, eight Israeli jets crossed into Syria and dropped seventeen tons of explosives on Al Kibar. […] Olmert called Bush and said, “I just want to report to you that something that existed doesn’t exist anymore.” […] This “zone of denial,” as security officials called it, allowed Assad to avoid public humiliation and kept him from retaliating.

    […] There are many reasons to distrust Netanyahu: his habitual lying; his willingness to prop up his coalition with religious zealots and racists; his brutal, protracted prosecution of the war in Gaza, a strategy that seems motivated in no small measure by a desire to cling to power. It seems clear that he has sometimes exaggerated the speed of Iran’s progress toward becoming a nuclear-threshold state. But the reality of Iran’s ambitions can’t be dismissed. [I snipped details.]

    Israel’s anxieties cannot be easily dismissed, either. It is, after all, rare for one member state of the United Nations to threaten another with elimination. [I snipped details.]

    No matter how much American Presidents have come to resent Netanyahu […] none have doubted the presence or the peril of the Iranian nuclear program. And none have protested loudly as Israel has carried out a series of clandestine missions, including, […]

    The last time Netanyahu seriously threatened to send bombers to Iran was during the Obama Administration. [I snipped details and historical references.]

    […] Netanyahu faced determined resistance from Barack Obama, who had won the Presidency in 2008 […] Obama’s hope was to use diplomacy to stave off yet another bloody confrontation in the Middle East. […] Obama told me in 2013. “And although it would not solve the entire problem, if we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion—not funding terrorist organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other countries, and not developing a nuclear weapon—you could see an equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.”

    Netanyahu dismissed this kind of thinking as naïve […]

    Obama pursued the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—a multilateral agreement with Iran that offered sanctions relief in exchange for more scrupulous inspections and limiting its nuclear program to civilian purposes. […] Donald Trump two years into his Presidency, scrapped the deal—leaving nothing in its place.

    This year, when Netanyahu again pressed his case for striking Iran’s nuclear facilities, he did so in the language of imminence: thresholds, red lines, breakaway points. In reality, he was exploiting a series of openings. […]. Partly, it was political calculation: changing the subject from Gaza to a crisis abroad. But it was also about timing: Iran’s defenses were unusually weak. [I snipped details.]

    […] While Israel was conducting its war in Gaza with a merciless bludgeon and no conception of an ending, its tactics against Hezbollah—setting off the beeper bombs, wiping out its missile stocks and weapons depots, killing its military and political leaders—proved far better targeted. As a fighting force, Hezbollah, the most powerful of Tehran’s proxy forces since 1982, was defeated.

    […] This year, Netanyahu caught three further breaks. For one thing, the Presidential election in the U.S. had gone his way: Kamala Harris would never have matched the uncritical support offered by Trump. […] on June 12th, the International Atomic Energy Agency, for the first time in two decades, declared that Iran was out of compliance with its nuclear obligations. Iran had amassed four hundred kilograms of uranium enriched to sixty per cent.

    […] On June 13th, Netanyahu launched an attack that his military and intelligence establishments had been preparing, on and off, for more than a decade. With Iran’s air defenses and missile launchers already degraded, the Israelis had an “open highway” to Tehran; not a single Israeli fighter pilot was lost. At first, Trump refrained from blessing the war publicly. But as Israeli successes mounted he quickly shifted to using “we” and made it clear that he was more than willing to be a partner in the campaign. […]

    One evening after the fighting, I visited the studios of Channel 13, one of Israel’s main television stations. After a panel discussion on the war, Alon Ben David, the channel’s chief defense analyst, stood in the parking lot, basking in the moment. His sense of victory was unalloyed. […]

    Brigadier General Amir Avivi, a retired officer and the founder of HaBithonistim, a group of several thousand conservative reserve officers, had also appeared on the panel. […] As for the Palestinians, he foresaw their “voluntary relocation,” claiming that “Gazans are interested, even excited about that.” […]

    […] When I met Segal [Amit Segal, journalist] for coffee, in Jerusalem, he was clearly delighted by the results of Netanyahu’s war with Iran. “I don’t live under the illusion that peace will come to the Middle East, but I do think that what ended was the second era of big wars,” he said. […] now we sort of ended the war against Iran and its proxies.”

    Segal reserves particular disdain for the denunciations of Israel’s campaign in Gaza. He opposes any talk of a ceasefire or an armistice. The Army, he says, needs just a few more months to finally defeat Hamas. The compounding misery in Gaza hardly registers. “I don’t know of any precedent on earth in war when one side provides the other side with constant humanitarian aid,” he said. “Such aid only prolongs the war, and more people are killed.” [Yikes!]

    […] Even as most Israelis exulted in the aftermath of the Twelve-Day War, I found skeptics […]

    Nahum Barnea, a columnist at Yedioth Ahronoth who is widely considered the dean of Israeli journalism, detects “a big smell of hubris.” He supported the attacks against Iran, but, he told me, “when it comes to the lessons we should learn from it, the danger of celebration is much bigger than the benefits.”

    […] There’s a persistent illusion in Israeli and American circles that the Iranian people would somehow welcome regime change imposed from abroad. […]

    Rob Malley, a lead negotiator for the J.C.P.O.A. who later served as Biden’s special envoy to Iran, was cautious, too, when I spoke to him. “The day of reckoning for the regime is approaching,” he told me. “Every investment they made—in nukes, in ballistic missiles, in relations with China—it all amounted to a hill of beans. They lost everything. Their nuclear program is in shambles. And Russia, which was prepared to give them drones? Russia gave them nothing! Every bet they made turned out to be the wrong bet. […] And yet, Malley warned, “[…] this is a long movie. We are not even done with the opening credits.”

    […] As for the Palestinians, he said, the war in Gaza has produced a people “who have lost everything and feel only humiliation and abandonment—and despise hypocritical Western moralism. This will feed future militants, and how they behave will be shaped by old grievances and new technologies—which Israel masters today, but they could master, too.” […]

    For all the triumphalism, for all the talk about an imminent golden age, Israel’s future is still shadowed by the ugly persistence of occupation, the long and bitter memory of its enemies, and the deepening moral cost of Gaza. […]

    Meanwhile, the cafés and bars of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are packed and noisy, as if the country could celebrate its way to safety. […] Israel has shown, time and again, that it is better at winning wars than at winning what comes after. The celebrations are real, but so is the dread—about the next missile, the next front, the next generation raised amid the rubble and the rage. ♦

  92. says

    NBC News:

    The leaders of Cambodia and Thailand agreed to a ceasefire on Monday effective midnight, in a bid to bring an end to their deadliest conflict in more than a decade after five days of fierce fighting. Amid an international effort to quell the conflict, the Thai and Cambodian leaders held talks in Malaysia hosted by its Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, the current chair of the ASEAN regional bloc, where both sides agreed to halt hostilities and resume direct communications.

  93. says

    Associated Press:

    A federal judge on Monday ruled Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide must continue to be reimbursed for Medicaid funding as the nation’s largest abortion provider fights President Donald Trump’s administration over efforts to defund the organization in his signature tax legislation.

  94. says

    NBC News:

    A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit on Friday by the Trump administration that sought to block the enforcement of several ‘sanctuary policies’ in Illinois that restrict the ability of local officials to aid federal immigration authorities in detainment operations.

  95. says

    New York Times:

    After a team of talented teenage baseball players from Venezuela swept through a qualifying tournament in Mexico last month, it seemed they were bound for the Senior League World Series in the United States, ready to take on some of the world’s best youth ball clubs. But when the championship round begins in Easley, S.C., on Saturday, the undefeated squad from Venezuela will not be there. The team, Cacique Mara, has been denied the visas necessary to attend, Little League Baseball International said Friday.

  97. birgerjohansson says

    Lynna @ 95
    Brown kids are as unwelcome in USA as Black people in SA during Apartheid.

  98. John Morales says

    [heh. where I lived, SA meant South Australia. But, sure, Abos were deprecated]

  100. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    EFF – You went to a drag show—Now the state of Florida wants your name

    the Florida Attorney General’s office has subpoenaed a local restaurant, The Kilted Mermaid, demanding surveillance video, guest lists, reservation logs, and contracts of performers and other staff—all because the venue hosted an LGBTQ+ Pride event.

    To be clear: no one has been charged with a crime, and the law Florida is likely leaning on here—the so-called “Protection of Children Act” (which was designed to be a drag show ban)—has already been blocked by federal courts as likely unconstitutional. But that didn’t stop Attorney General James Uthmeier from pushing forward anyway. Without naming a specific law that was violated, the AG’s press release used pointed and accusatory language, stating that “In Florida, we don’t sacrifice the innocence of children for the perversions of some demented adults.” [sic]
    […]
    Even if the courts strike down this subpoena—and they should—the damage will already be done. A restaurant owner (who also happens to be the town’s vice mayor) is being dragged into a state investigation. Performers’ identities are potentially being exposed—whether to state surveillance, inclusion in law enforcement databases, or future targeting by anti-LGBTQ+ groups. Guests […] are now caught up […] that will discourage Floridians from hosting or attending drag shows

    /Police raids, of course, have no negative effect on children’s innocence. /s

  107. birgerjohansson says

    MSNBC
    “Trump skims nuclear safety funds to spruce up vanity gift plane from Qatar” 
    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=NhwpYiA7Q0w

    Naah, it’s just a mere billion $, who cares? Not congress, that’s obvious. And I am sure those “nuclear weapons” are not important.

  108. StevoR says

    A gruesome milestone and almost certainly amassive undercount :

    The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza says the death toll from Israel’s assault in the territory has passed 60,000 people.The ministry says 113 people were confirmed killed in the 24 hours from midday on Monday to midday on Tuesday, bringing the total number of deaths attributed to the Israeli bombardment and invasion to 60,034. It did not say how many were civilians or militants, but noted that women and children make up around half the dead.

    Israel’s government and military allege the ministry is controlled by the militant group Hamas and that its figures are inaccurate. But international experts and agencies say the figures are reliable and likely undercount the number of people killed in Gaza.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-29/gaza-death-toll-surpasses-60000/105588296

  111. says

    Worse than we thought:

    […] It would be an overstatement to say that Trump’s trip [to Scotland] — a five-day excursion, with an estimated price tag of nearly $10 million — was entirely recreational, given the president met with key foreign officials in between hitting the links. But as The Washington Post noted, even those interactions blurred ethical lines to a point they practically no longer exist.

    British Prime Minister Keir Starmer met Monday morning with the president near the fairway to hash out a trade deal and discuss the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. On Sunday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the contours of a trade deal at the private club. The meetings provide the latest example of how Trump uses his presidential power not only to govern, but also to help his family businesses. The engagements provide publicity for the courses and funnel taxpayer funds to the Trump Organization, as the U.S. government pays to lodge staff and security details at the properties.

    American presidents have traditionally held meetings such as these at diplomatic residences, not at private, for-profit enterprises. […]

    The same article quoted Taylor Rogers, an official White House spokesperson, who said, “Donald J. Trump has built the best and most beautiful world-class golf courses anywhere in the world, which is why they continue to be used for prestigious tournaments and by the most elite players in the sport.”

    But even that quote is itself ethically messy: It’s not the job of public officials working at the White House, whose salaries are paid by taxpayers, to tout private businesses that put money in their boss’ pocket.

    As Trump’s trip neared its end, the president got to the apparent point of his sojourn: a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Scottish golf club that bears his name. (Naturally, he used a pair of golden scissors.) [video]

    The White House’s website treated this like an official event, indifferent to appearances of ethical conflicts.

    Throughout Joe Biden’s presidency, Republicans were hysterical about allegations that the Democrat’s relatives were able to leverage the office for private gain. In 2025, it’s the incumbent Republican president who’s leveraging the office for his own private gain — with nary a word from GOP officials who claimed to take this issue so seriously between 2021 and 2024.

    Link

  112. says

    The cost of medication is about to skyrocket thanks to Trump

    […] Trump’s crap sandwich of a trade “deal” with Europe is about to make the cost of some of the most popular and lifesaving drugs skyrocket—the latest negative consequence of Trump’s nonsensical tariff policy.

    The “deal” Trump announced with Europe on Sunday puts a 15% tariff on pharmaceuticals imported into the United States from the European Union, which Reuters reported could cost pharmaceutical companies as much as $19 billion.

    Those tariffs will cut into drugmakers’ profits, which experts say will cause those same drug manufacturers to pass those costs on to Americans. And that will lead insurance companies to either raise prices for everyone in the form of higher insurance premiums, or for individuals who purchase the affected drugs when they pick them up from the pharmacy.

    Medicare and Medicaid—already facing pressure amid draconian Republican cuts—will also be hit, as the millions of Americans covered by those government health insurance programs also use the drugs that now face new and destructive tariffs.

    “The big picture is: The cost of imported drugs is about to become more expensive for all Americans,” Joe Brusuelas, principal and chief economist for the management consulting firm RSM US, told Axios.

    That’s the antithesis of Trump’s idiotic claim that he was going to lower drug prices by more than 1,000% […]

    Reuters reported that 60% of the drugs imported to the United States come from the EU—including many popular and lifesaving medications.

    For example, the diabetes and weight-loss drugs Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound are all manufactured in the EU. So are biologics like Humira and Stelara, which treat everything from Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, arthritis, to psoriasis. Keytruda—a miracle cancer drug that helps the body’s own immune system fight a number of deadly cancers like melanoma, lung, and lymphoma—is also manufactured in the EU and will be impacted by Trump’s tariffs.

    Even more concerning for the MAGA crowd is that Botox is also manufactured in Ireland, which could spike the cost of the cosmetic injectable that Mar-a-Lago members load their faces with. Viagra is also made in Ireland, but we don’t want to speculate who in the MAGA-sphere uses that drug to avoid losing our lunch.

    Drug makers, for their part, warned the Trump administration not to put tariffs on drug imports for this very reason. […] But Trump didn’t listen, and now all Americans are going to pay the price.

    Ultimately, this is just the latest attack on Americans’ health by the Trump administration, which has cut funding for research to cure cancer and other devastating illnesses, attacked vaccines and fluoride, and signed legislation that will kick millions off their health insurance.

  113. says

    Would You Believe A Bunch Of Immigration Agents Lied About Protestors Assaulting Them?

    […] The Guardian reports they have reviewed records revealing that charges have been dropped in at least five cases — a total of eight felonies dropped — owing to the fact that agents straight up lied about having been assaulted by protestors.

    They found that:

    – Out of nine “assault” and “impeding” felony cases the Justice Department filed immediately after the start of the Los Angeles protests and promoted by the attorney general, Pam Bondi, prosecutors dismissed seven of them soon after filing the charges.
    – In reports that led to the detention and prosecution of at least five demonstrators, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents made false statements about the sequence of events and misrepresented incidents captured on video.
    – One DHS agent accused a protester of shoving an officer, when footage appeared to show the opposite: the officer forcefully pushed the protester.
    – One indictment named the wrong defendant, a stunning error that has jeopardized one of the government’s most high-profile cases.

    That doesn’t sound very good at all!

    The incident in which the agent somehow confused a protester shoving an officer with an officer shoving a protester was particularly egregious — and yet that agent refused to back down despite the actual footage showing that the protester was the one assaulted.

    Via The Guardian:

    In an investigative file, the DHS suggested that “in response” to the sisters’ arrest, Christian Cerna-Camacho, another protester, began to “verbally harass” agents, making threatening remarks. Demonstrator Brayan Ramos-Brito, then “pushed [an] agent in the chest”, the DHS claimed, at which point, a fifth protester, Jose Mojica, “used his body to physically shield” Ramos-Brito and then “elbowed and pushed” agents. Agents then “subdued” and arrested Mojica and Ramos-Brito, the complaint said. […]

    The footage, seen by the Guardian, appeared to show an agent pushing Ramos-Brito, not the other way around, before he was taken to the ground along with Mojica, who was also not seen in the footage shoving or assaulting agents.

    The agent acknowledged the officer’s shoving and said the subsequent “fight” was “hard to decipher”. The agent also claimed Ramos-Brito’s behavior before he was pushed included “pre-assault indicators”, such as “clenching fists” and “getting in [the agent’s] face”.

    “Pre-assault indicators,” may we note, are not assault. We do not send people to prison for clenching their fists if they do not use those fists to punch someone.

    Former California prosecutor Cristine Soto DeBerry, director of Prosecutors Alliance Action, told The Guardian that her experience tells her that when prosecutors drop cases like this it’s because someone’s been lying or the evidence “doesn’t support the charges.” She suspects that the large number of dismissed cases suggests that something suspicious is going on.

    “It seems this is a way to detain people, hold them in custody, instill fear and discourage people from exercising their First Amendment rights,” DeBerry said. This is especially scary because of the sheer severity of the sentences people accused of assaulting these agents are getting.

    “You spit on a federal law enforcement officer no more,” Bondi said in June. “As President Trump said, you spit, we hit. Get ready. If you spit on a federal law enforcement officer, we are going to charge you with a crime federally. You are looking at up to five years maximum in prison.”

    Five years for a non-violent crime that, let us note, is pretty difficult to prove outside of an officer or agent simply saying that it happened, is just a little bit outrageous. It’s also, let us note, very expensive! It costs $50,000 to house a federal prisoner for a year — so such a sentence would cost the American people a quarter of a million dollars. A quarter of a million dollars to “protect” us all from a person who, in anger, spat on a DHS or ICE agent. Doesn’t seem like an especially good or necessary deal.

    And, I’m sorry, but you cannot trust officers in that situation as far as you can throw them, which is not very far, because riot gear is pretty heavy. Any of us who have ever been to a protest where law enforcement has been especially het up has seen what kind of people that turns them into, either because A) The power has gone to their heads or B) They are annoyed and want to go home, and therefore are very eager to arrest people and have it all be done with.

    This administration is not scared that the protestors in these cases are chronically and intrinsically violent individuals who are a danger to society. They just want to be able to scare people out of protesting so that they can make it look like everyone is just fine with what they are doing. […]

  114. says

    UK to recognize Palestinian statehood in September — unless Israel backs off in Gaza

    “British announcement follows the same commitment made by French President Emmanuel Macron last week.”

    Keir Starmer has committed to recognizing a Palestinian state ahead of September’s United Nations General Assembly, Downing Street announced Tuesday.

    The British prime minister told a special meeting of his Cabinet that “now was the right time to move this position forward” because of the worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza and the diminishing prospects of a peace process.

    He said that the U.K. will recognize a Palestinian state in September unless the Israeli government takes “substantive steps” to end the crisis in Gaza and commits to a long-term peace process that delivers a two-state solution.

    Starmer repeated that Hamas must release all remaining hostages, accept that they will play no role in the government of Gaza, and disarm.

    The PM said in an address at Downing Street that with the peace process “under threat” he had determined that “now is the moment to act.” He referred to “a catastrophic failure” to deliver aid. “We see starving babies, children too weak to stand, images that will stay with us for a lifetime,” Starmer added.

    Addressing a UN conference in New York, Foreign Secretary David Lammy said that Britain bears a “special burden of responsibility to support a two-state solution” because of its historic role in the region.

    Lammy said it was “with the hand of history on its shoulder” that the U.K. intends to recognize Palestine at the UN General Assembly — a statement greeted with applause. […]

  115. says

    Russia rages at Norway over fishing sanctions

    “The rules for Norwegian ports are determined by Norwegian authorities,” Oslo says as Moscow summons a diplomat for a scolding.

    The Kremlin summoned Norway’s chargé d’affaires in Moscow on Tuesday to protest what it described as “unlawful restrictive measures” imposed by Oslo on Russian fishing vessels operating in Norwegian waters.

    According to a statement from the Russian foreign ministry, the protest was lodged in response to restrictions by Norway targeting vessels belonging to the Russian firms Norebo and Murman Seafood, which operate in Norway’s exclusive economic zone under a 1976 bilateral agreement on fisheries cooperation.

    On July 7 the Norwegian government announced it would join EU sanctions adopted in May and place both companies on its national sanctions list, citing concerns over espionage and the risk of future sabotage. The move in effect superseded the 1976 deal and removed the firms’ vessels from Norwegian waters, drawing swift condemnation from Moscow that it was “politically motivated.”

    […] The Kremlin warned that Norway’s actions could jeopardize broader fisheries cooperation and threaten the sustainable exploitation of marine resources in the North Atlantic.

    “If Oslo is not ready to return to fulfilling the conditions prescribed by the 1976 agreement,” the ministry said, “the Russian side will take the necessary measures to protect the interests of domestic fisheries.”

    Norway’s foreign ministry confirmed to POLITICO that a meeting had taken place Tuesday between the Russian foreign ministry and Oslo’s Moscow embassy.

    “The Russian side expressed dissatisfaction with Norway’s decision to list the Russian companies Nordebo JSC and Murman Seafood,” a Norwegian spokesperson said.

    “From the Norwegian side, we wish to continue our cooperation on fisheries management in the Barents Sea. At the same time, we stand together with our allies in Europe in responding to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and its behavior toward NATO countries. The rules for Norwegian ports are determined by Norwegian authorities.”

  117. says

    New York Times: “E.P.A. Plans to Revoke the Legal Basis for Tackling Climate Change”

    The agency’s administrator said in a podcast that the move would be “the largest deregulatory action in the history of America.”

    Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said on Tuesday the Trump administration would revoke the scientific determination that underpins the government’s legal authority to combat climate change.

    Speaking on a conservative podcast called “Ruthless,” Mr. Zeldin said the E.P.A. planned to rescind the 2009 declaration, known as the “endangerment finding,” which concluded that planet-warming greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health. The Obama and Biden administrations used that determination to set strict limits on greenhouse gas emissions from cars, power plants and other industrial sources of pollution.

    “Repealing it will be the largest deregulatory action in the history of America,” Mr. Zeldin said. He said the finding and the regulations that stemmed from it “cost Americans a lot of money.”

    The formal announcement will come on Tuesday at a truck dealership in Indianapolis […]

    […] Without the endangerment finding, the E.P.A. would be left with no authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate the greenhouse gas emissions that are accumulating in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, leading to rising seas, fiercer storms, more deadly heat waves and other extreme weather events.

    The proposal would be President Trump’s most significant step yet to derail federal climate efforts. It marks a notable shift in the administration’s position from one that had downplayed the threat of global warming to one that essentially flatly denies the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change.

    In recent weeks, the Trump administration has also moved to scrap restrictions on pollution from power plants, halt key measurements of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and delay approvals of wind and solar energy projects on federal lands. […]

    More at the link.

  118. says

    As Amir Tibon at Haaretz writes:

    Five months ago, in the first week of February, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a surprising ultimatum to Hamas: they must release all Israeli hostages, or Israel should “let all hell break out.”

    As of mid-2025, 26 Israeli citizens and five Thai citizens have been released. Yet five months after Trump’s threat, 50 hostages remain in captivity in Gaza. Of these, 20 are believed to be alive, while 30 are presumed dead. All could have been returned to their families long ago if Israel had followed through on phase two of the Gaza ceasefire agreement signed in January 2025. […}

    Under this deal, brokered by U.S. Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, Hamas was to release all remaining hostages at once, while Israel would withdraw its forces from Gaza and officially end the war.

    But instead of adhering to the terms, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose to break it. Then, with support from Trump and Witkoff, he imposed new conditions of surrender on Hamas. Rather than trading all hostages for a permanent ceasefire, Netanyahu introduced a new plan: release some hostages in exchange for a temporary ceasefire, after which Israel could renew its war in Gaza. Hamas rejected this and insisted on fulfilling Witkoff’s previous, signed outline.

    This breakdown led to Netanyahu’s decision in mid-March to restart the war in Gaza. More importantly, he also imposed a total blockade on humanitarian aid entering the enclave. For more than two months, as fighting escalated, Israel permitted no food, medicine, or other essential supplies into Gaza. This was the “hell” Trump had promised – an intensified war zone with severe shortages, with no relief for the wretched local population.

    Commentary:

    […] it was the Trump-backed Netanyahu decision to redo the January agreement that pushed Hamas to reject the new deal, giving the Israeli prime minister the excuse he needed to continue the slaughter.

    Gaza is flattened. Three of its major cities were already little more than ruins before the January-March ceasefire ended. Vast damage to infrastructure is everywhere. Most of Gaza’s hospitals and all of its universities are not operating. 60,000 or more Palestinians are dead. Israel says a third of them were combatants. The rest are mostly women and children. Nobody knows how many bodies remain to be counted beneath mountains of rubble.

    The architects of Oct. 7 are also dead. Of the 15 members of Hamas’s politburo, only three have survived and they are abroad. Only two of the top Hamas military leaders are alive … somewhere. In Gaza itself, Hamas has, according to The Economist and other sources, ceased to govern. The clan gangs and looters that Hamas once suppressed are filling the gaps to nobody’s benefit but their own. And, following an old path of his, Netanyahu says he has armed the clans, some of which are now in daily skirmishes with Hamas. Hmmmmm. How did that work out, Bibi, when you sabotaged the Palestinian Authority’s attempt to govern Gaza as well as the West Bank by backing Hamas back in the day?

    Worst of all, in Gaza, there’s little clean water, and not nearly enough food. There’s a reason for this. On July 24, Haaretz, Israel’s oldest newspaper, told us what it is in an editorial titled Israel Is Starving Gaza: [Details at the link]

    […] In the most Trumpian way possible, the man occupying the Oval Office complained Sunday about supposed ungratefulness about U.S. aid and took another dig at the EU:

    “We gave $60 million two weeks ago for food for Gaza, and nobody acknowledged it. Nobody talks about it. And it makes you feel a little bad when you do that. And, you know, you have other countries not giving anything. None of the European countries, by the way, gave — I mean, nobody gave but us and nobody said, gee, thank you very much. And it would be nice to have at least a thank you.”

    Who exactly does he think should be expressing thanks? Netanyahu? The Palestinians who have had to dodge American-supplied bombs and IDF bullets to get to that food aid?

    Not surprisingly, Trump ignored the €120 million the European Commission approved for Gaza aid in January, and the €450 million in aid it has provided since 2023.

    […] As usual with Trump, there’s some duplicity involved. Soon after lying the oath of office, he pulled U.S. support for UNRWA, which has been supplying aid to Palestinians for decades. Israel frequently asserts that Hamas systematically steals much U.N.-delivered aid. But The New York Times recently reported that was not the case. Two unnamed Israeli military officials said the U.N. aid delivery system had been “largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population,” according to reporter Natan Odenheimer. And claims that Hamas had infiltrated UNRWA were refuted by an USAID report.

    In UNRWA’s place, Trump supported an Israeli-backed group called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The GHF uses U.S. security contractors and has been slammed for deadly incidents. At the four GHF stations set up for the whole of Gaza, hundreds of Palestinians seeking assistance have reportedly been killed by the IDF, GHF security or from being trampled in surges of desperate people.

    On CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen — the lead author of a letter urging a resumption of U.S. funding for UNRWA and other UN aid programs signed by 20 Senate Democrats — said of the situation: “American taxpayers should not be spending one penny to fund this private organization backed by mercenaries and by the IDF that has become a death trap.” He also called Trump’s and Israel’s claims that much of the U.N. aid has been systematically stolen by Hamas “a big lie.”

    […] TWO ISRAELI HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATION CALL WHAT’S HAPPENING “GENOCIDE” [Details t the link]

    Link

  121. says

    EXCLUSIVE:There was no “missing minute” in the original Epstein jail video, government source says

    The “missing minute” from the surveillance video at the Manhattan Metropolitan Correctional Center where Jeffrey Epstein died in 2019 may not be missing after all, CBS News has learned.

    When the Justice Department and FBI released nearly 11 hours of footage earlier this month, the time code on the screen jumped forward one minute just before midnight, prompting questions about the one-minute gap. The video shows part of the area near the cell where Epstein was being held the night he died in what the medical examiner ruled a suicide.

    A government source familiar with the investigation says the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons and the Department of Justice inspector general are all in possession of a copy of the video that does not cut from just before 11:59 p.m. to midnight of the night Epstein died by suicide in his cell.

    What is unclear is why that section was missing when the FBI released what it said was raw footage from inside the Special Housing Unit the night Epstein died, Aug. 9-10, 2019. The recording came from what officials said was the only relevant video camera that was recording its footage in the unit. This video has been cited by multiple government officials as a key piece of evidence in the determination that Epstein died by suicide.

    Epstein’s death, as with many aspects of his high-profile sex trafficking case, has become fodder for conspiracy theories. The missing minute added to the conjecture after the release of the video, when news organizations and amateur sleuths who reviewed the video quickly noticed that onscreen jump in the time stamp.

    Attorney General Pam Bondi was questioned about the gap during a July 8 Cabinet meeting with President Trump. She said the missing minute was the result of a nightly reset of the video that caused the recording system to miss one recording minute every night, and attributed that information to the Bureau of Prisons.

    […] Experts in surveillance video, including video forensic professionals, told CBS News that a nightly reset would have been unusual and was not something they encountered in most video systems.

    One thing that is clear, forensic experts say, is that the version of the recording released by the FBI was edited and not raw, as the government stated. Bondi, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino and others have said publicly that the video would be released unaltered. […]

  122. says

    Followup to comment 69.

    […] Who doesn’t love the idea of going to work at a shattered, decimated government agency only to be buttonholed by an evangelical weirdo telling them their religious beliefs, or lack thereof, are wrong? Totally what everyone wants from their job, and not at all entangling church and state.

    Bosses can get in on the action too. A supervisor can post a message inviting “each of his employees to attend an Easter service at his church.” Supervisors are also welcome to do the whole bit about telling employees their views are wrong and why they should “re-think” their religious beliefs. Surely no non-Christian employee will feel at all coerced by having their boss tell them they should convert.

    What other cool things can happen in Donald Trump’s brave new world? A park ranger can pray with a tour group. Veterans’ Affairs doctors can pray over patients. Security guards and other front-facing employees can cover their desks with crucifixes, a Bible, or rosary beads. It’s unclear how this doesn’t look, to a member of the public, like official government endorsement of Christianity.

    And it really is just Christianity. There’s no mention of, say, having the Quran or a Tibetan prayer bowl on that imaginary security guard’s desk.

    Somehow, all of this is actually about “restoring constitutional freedoms,” per OPM director Scott Kupor, who is making it his mission to smash the remaining barriers between church (Christian only, thanks!) and state. This isn’t even the first religious liberty memo Kupor has issued since taking the reins at the OPM two weeks ago. On his first day on the job, he issued a memo all about how federal employers have to allow religious people—but only religious people—to telework, get comp time, have flexible schedules, and time off for travel in order to adhere to their religious beliefs. Anyone else who wants to telework is a lazy sod who should be fired, however.

    […] The Trump administration is committed to reframing religious freedom as the freedom to impose religion on others, not the right to be free of religious coercion by the government. So we have Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth leading prayer services at the Pentagon and Trump’s “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias,” which the Baptist News even characterized as “an exercise in airing conservative evangelical grievances.”

    […] Somehow, there’s no religious freedom to oppose violent immigration raids, but the hypothetical boss who wants to corner you in the break room to tell you the good news about Jesus Christ is the pinnacle of that freedom. […]

    Link

  125. says

    TrumpEU admits it can’t guarantee $600B promise to Trump

    “The extra investments pledged under the trade deal would come from private companies, which Brussels conceded it has no power to control.”

    The European Union has admitted it doesn’t have the power to deliver on a promise to invest $600 billion in the United States economy, only hours after making the pledge at landmark trade talks in Scotland.

    That’s because the cash would come entirely from private sector investment over which Brussels has no authority, two EU officials said.

    On Sunday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen struck a deal with U.S. President Donald Trump to avoid an all-out EU-U.S. trade war. The deal included a pledge to invest an extra $600 billion of EU money into the U.S. over the coming years.

    But speaking Monday, two senior European Commission officials clarified that money would come exclusively from private European companies, with public investment contributing nothing.

    “It is not something that the EU as a public authority can guarantee. It is something which is based on the intentions of the private companies,” said one of the senior Commission officials. The Commission has not said it will introduce any incentives to ensure the private sector meets that $600 billion target, nor given a precise timeframe for the investment.

    However, the first official said that the $600 billion figure was “based on detailed discussions with different business associations and companies in order to see what their investment intentions are.” […]

    The Commission pointed out that the figure would come from private companies, not European taxpayers, contrasting with Japan’s promise to mobilize $550 billion of both public and private investments in the U.S. as part of a recently agreed trade deal.

    But the idea that the private sector can be relied upon to provide that level of investment was met with skepticism.

    “This part of the deal is largely performative,” Nils Redeker from the Jacques Delors Centre think tank told POLITICO. “[The EU] is not China, right? So nobody can tell private companies how much they invest in the U.S.”

    The EU officials said that the estimated $600 billion will add to the EU’s current $2.8 trillion private investments in the U.S. that accounts for approximately 3.4 million jobs.

  126. says

    Watch Buttigieg break down Trump’s massive Epstein problem

    Despite […] Trump’s delusions about the Epstein scandal, Pete Buttigieg says that his refusal to release the Epstein files poses a political risk greater than that of his Medicaid-slashing “One Big, Beautiful Bill.”

    “He made this big deal about, ‘I’m going to come in, and we’re going to release these on Day 1,’” Buttigieg said on “The People’s Cabinet” podcast Tuesday. “I think [his supporters] believed him because he said he would. And that whole worldview is based on this idea that there are powerful people who were involved with Jeffrey Epstein, and he was going to fight them. But we all know for a fact that there were powerful people who were involved with Jeffrey Epstein, and he was one of them.”

    He went on to point out how Trump’s handling of the Epstein files isn’t just a sticking point with the left but also among his own supporters.

    “So you add all of that together, and I think—and then his response to the response has revealed how gullible he wants to think his own base is,” Buttigieg continued. “And I think a lot of people look at that and say, ‘Wait a minute, this is not just, like, you insulting the libs,’ which, you know, some of the supporters thrill to. It’s his supporters saying, ‘Wait a minute, you’re insulting me.’ And that’s a whole different thing.” [video]

    Trump’s evasiveness combined with his bizarre and circuitous explanations regarding his relationship with Epstein, the GOP’s panicked responses, and his administration’s almost cartoonish deflection tactics have only fueled the public’s demand for transparency.

    Buttigieg’s eloquence and command of long-form media remain one of the Democratic Party’s most potent super powers. Hopefully others will take note.

  127. John Morales says

    “Buttigieg’s eloquence and command of long-form media remain one of the Democratic Party’s most potent super powers. Hopefully others will take note.”

    Second sentence vitiates the first.

    (A super-power only the writer has noticed!)

  128. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Smithsonian – Athens is reviving a 2,000-year-old Roman aqueduct to deliver water to the city amid prolonged droughts

    Hadrian’s Aqueduct, commissioned by Emperor Hadrian in 125 C.E. and completed in 140 […] Sloping underground channels collect water from rivers and streams and rain via a network of several hundred wells that were drilled along its length, likely by enslaved workers.

    The gravity-fed waterway snakes its way throughout the capital, extending for 15 miles. For 1,300 years, the system operated flawlessly, falling out of use only when Ottomans occupied the city in the 15th century. Though it was briefly used again during a water shortage in the 19th century, the aqueduct hasn’t been functional in many years. The central reservoir, to which the aqueduct’s waters flow, sits abandoned beneath a public square […] a cafe and outdoor cinema. “Ninety-five percent of customers don’t know the aqueduct exists,” [said] the cafe’s owner
    […]
    Athens’ residents will soon be reacquainted […] The plan is expected to begin in the coming weeks

  130. John Morales says

    “MAJOR TSUNAMI ALERT after whopping 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Russia :”

    Ah well. So it goes.

  131. John Morales says

    [fun with bots]

    Me: ‘Had Russia prioritized disaster preparedness over military expenditure, the impact of the recent tsunami might have been significantly mitigated.’ Blurb it up, as for an enticing article

    BB:
    Title: Tsunami Fallout: Russia’s Costly Miscalculations

    Blurb:
    As towering waves battered Russia’s eastern coast, the devastation exposed more than just geological vulnerability—it revealed a systemic imbalance. With billions funneled into military ventures, the nation’s disaster readiness lagged fatally behind. Analysts now ask: had strategic foresight trumped wartime ambition, could lives and infrastructure have been spared? This exposé examines the consequences of misplaced priorities and the urgent need to recalibrate national resilience.

  132. John Morales says

    Me to bot: I played ‘risk’ for a fair while, in my youth. Summarise the strategiic and other significance of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula in that gaem

    Bot to me: In Risk, Kamchatka is a deceptively pivotal territory—often underestimated, yet tactically potent.

    🎯 Strategic Significance

    Gateway Between Continents: Kamchatka links Asia to North America via Alaska. This dotted-line connection allows surprise invasions or troop movements across hemispheres, bypassing traditional land routes.
    Choke Point Potential: Controlling Kamchatka lets you pressure North America while defending Asia’s flank. It forces opponents to spread defenses across Japan, Mongolia, Irkutsk, and Yakutsk.
    Buffer Zone: For players holding Asia (the most lucrative continent at +7 reinforcements), Kamchatka becomes a critical buffer against North American aggression.

    🧠 Psychological & Gameplay Dynamics

    Tension Magnet: The Alaska–Kamchatka link often becomes a buildup zone, with players amassing troops in anticipation of cross-continental strikes.
    Diplomatic Leverage: Its position makes it a bargaining chip in alliances or deterrence strategies—threatening Kamchatka can provoke defensive overreactions.

    🗺️ Other Considerations

    Isolation & Defense: Kamchatka is relatively isolated, making it easier to fortify without immediate multi-directional threats.
    Cultural Echo: Its name alone—exotic and remote—has become a meme among players, often invoked in jest or dramatic flair during gameplay.

    In short, Kamchatka isn’t just a corner piece—it’s a hinge. Control it, and you control the tempo between two continents.

  133. StevoR says

    Plus tsunami live news coverage via AJ :

    Japan’s meteorological agency issued a tsunami advisory for much of its east coast, warning of waves of up to 3 metres (9.8 ft) high. Tsunami warnings were also issued for Taiwan, Hawaii and Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, with advisories issued for much of the US West Coast.

    Source :
    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2025/7/30/live-tsunami-warning-after-magnitude-8-6-earthquake-off-russian-east-coast

    Worjkesr have been evacuated from Fukushima’s nuclear plant.

  134. StevoR says

    Be intresting and possibly important to see what the ruling here is

    A legal row between a former SBS television newsreader and a prominent Israeli Australian over tweets during the Israel–Gaza war has been described by one camp as a case of free speech, and the other as a case of hate speech.

    The lawsuit against Mary Kostakidis was launched earlier this year by Alon Cassuto, chief executive of the Zionist Federation of Australia, over comments and posts Ms Kostakidis shared on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

    The matter returned to the Federal Court in Adelaide today, where Ms Kostakidis’s legal team sought to have an amended claim, which forms the basis of the case, struck out — a move that was strongly opposed by lawyers for Mr Cassuto, an Australian-Israeli dual citizen.

    …(Snip)..

    Federal Court justice Stephen McDonald reserved his judgement, and said it would not “necessarily be a quick turnaround”.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-29/mary-kostakidis-hezbollah-tweets-not-antisemitism-lawyers-say/105585030

  135. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Follow-up on the DMSP weather satellites.

    Department of Defense makes 11th hour decision to maintain hurricane satellites

    It’s a surprising reversal from officials who confirmed with me this week that they would terminate no later than Thursday […] Although the three weather satellites are expected to reach the end of their lifespan in the next year or two, the sudden announcement in June that the satellite data streams would be cut early and only weeks before the hurricane season peak caught forecasters flatfooted. The lack of notice sent scientists scrambling
    […]
    scientists responsible […] won’t suffer any hiccups this hurricane season

  136. StevoR says

    Would nevere have guessed that Kalgoorlie was a hail hot spot!

    The frequency of “giant” hail and the number of hail days in a season could increase substantially for multiple Australian cities as the climate warms, a new study has found.

    The University of New South Wales study modelled the severity of hailstorms for the current and future climate across Australia’s most hail-prone major cities, including Brisbane, the Sydney/Canberra area, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.

    It is one of the first studies to simulate how hailstorm frequency and severity — one of the most costly natural perils in Australia — may change in the future.

    It also looked at the WA Goldfields town of Kalgoorlie, which the researchers said was a hotspot for hail.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-29/hail-size-and-frequency-to-increase-with-climate-change/105584822

  140. birgerjohansson says

    I stand corrected.
    I gave up on learning German because of the gendered nouns I could not recall. Das horse but die cat? No system.
    (And the French have a completely different set of gendered nouns)

  142. birgerjohansson says

    Happy Birthday Arnold Schwarzenegger, 78 today. An Austrian who is comitted to democracy, and never was rejected from any art school.

  143. says

    https://www.msnbc.com/all
    Chris Hayes

    Trump says Epstein ‘stole’ underage victim from him when she worked at Mar-a-Lago spa
    Video is 9:31 minutes

    ‘Praying for it to end’: Vermont superintendent speaks out after ICE interrogation
    Video is 6:56 minutes

  144. says

    Trump plays a radical game by personally screening nominees for four-star generals

    “Trump is steadily poisoning the nonpartisan apolitical nature of the military’s leadership,” one historian noted.

    Ordinarily, when U.S. military leaders are being considered for a fourth star, they meet with the defense secretary at the Pentagon discuss their future and possible promotion. But with growing questions about Secretary Pete Hegseth and the degree to which he’s calling the shots at the DOD, The New York Times reported on a different model in the current administration.

    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has begun requiring that nominees for four-star-general positions meet with President Trump before their nominations are finalized, in a departure from past practice, said three current and former U.S. officials. The move, though within Mr. Trump’s remit as commander in chief, has raised worries about the possible politicization of the military’s top ranks by a president who has regularly flouted norms intended to insulate the military from partisan disputes.

    […] the White House effectively confirmed the story. “President Trump wants to ensure our military is the greatest and most lethal fighting force in history, which is why he meets with four-star-general nominees directly to ensure they are war fighters first — not bureaucrats,” a White House spokesperson told the Times.

    We were warned that steps like these were coming.

    About a month before Election Day 2024, Trump said during an interview, “The military is bad. We have generals that do such a bad job.” A week earlier, the Republican explicitly said he intended to create a system that would help keep “woke generals” out of the Defense Department.

    He’d lashed out at U.S. generals before, but this was new: Trump sketched out a system in which military leaders would be subjected to some kind of ideological review.

    That was nine months ago. Now, the president is apparently […] personally screening generals before they can earn their fourth stars.

    Journalist and historian Garrett Graff noted in response to the reporting, “Trump is steadily poisoning the nonpartisan apolitical nature of the military’s leadership—which will be a bell hard for future presidents to unring once it’s happened.”
    […]

  146. says

    Inside a Christian Nationalist Compound in Tennessee

    Phil Williams of Nashville’s News Channel 5 digs deep into the Christian nationalist utopia that far right activists are building 90 miles from the city’s downtown. New Founding, LLC boasts investment from tech billionaire Marc Andreesen and connections to Vice President JD Vance, the Claremont Institute, and far-right podcaster Tucker Carlson.

    The group rejects democracy, wants a “national divorce,” and anticipates a “system collapse” so it can restore “order” with a “Protestant Franco.” Its backers also are members of the Society for American Civic Renewal, the secretive, men-only, Christian nationalist organization that TPM’s Josh Kovensky reported on last year.

    Link. The link leads to TPM’s “Morning Memo,” which presents several disparate news reports.

    From Nashville’s News Channel 5:

    For the politically connected investors behind the project, our NewsChannel 5 investigation has now discovered, it’s about business, power and creating an alternative view of America.

    […] investors who are now trying to turn Jackson County into a Christian nationalist haven and, ultimately, to redefine what it means to be an American.

    […] Sitting in the home that once belonged to his parents, Dudney imagined pulling up a chair alongside his dad to break the news.

    Dr. E.M. Dudney was an Air Force flight surgeon who served as an aide to President Dwight Eisenhower.

    “You remember how you and mom taught us words like love, forgiveness, and compassion?” he would ask.

    Then, the son would continue. “Well, they use words like dominion and national divorce and multi-generational spiritual warfare. And, lucky us, they’ve decided to grow their political base out of right here in Jackson County.“

    […] the people funding the Christian nationalist effort have said they are targeting the area not only because of its natural beauty and rustic charm, but also because of their ability to exercise political power here.

    This comes eight months after NewsChannel 5 Investigates first revealed the plans, focusing on the right-wing podcasters selected as ambassadors for the project.

    Andrew Isker and Cjay Engel want to go back to an America before the civil rights movement “ruined everything.” They want to kick out legal immigrants even if they became U.S. citizens decades ago. They have hosted antisemitic voices on their podcast. And, if necessary to achieve their goals, they are prepared to accept a Protestant dictator.

    Earlier this year, after Tucker Carlson embraced the project, Dudney released a video on social media objecting to the Christian nationalist effort. (Watch below.) [video]

    […] Since then, signs have sprung up around the area declaring: “Hate has no place in Jackson County.”

    […] Dallas-based investor Nate Fischer heads the company financing the so-called “Highland Rim Project,” a multimillion-dollar effort in the Upper Cumberland region about 90 minutes northeast of Nashville.

    His company, New Founding LLC, promises you can “build the America you want to live in.” A sister company, Ridgerunner USA, is also involved in the project.

    New Founding appears to have some deep political connections, including to the far-right Claremont Institute. Among its investors is tech billionaire Marc Andreesen. Last year, a New Founding executive also posted a pic of the team with now-Vice President J.D. Vance, referring to him as “our guy.” (Fischer originally posted the photo in April 2023.) [Photo]

    […] “Our goal is something where we actually have, where we actually have the concentration where we can control the town – or, in this case of the people there, it’s a town that’s already values aligned,” Fischer said in a February 2024 podcast interview.

    The company’s managing partner, Josh Abbotoy, moved to Gainesboro to lead the real estate effort. He claimed in a March 2025 interview, “ We currently have thousands of acres and, you know, ultimately aspire to get up to tens of thousands of acres.”

    Like Fischer, Abbotoy sees a chance for their buyers to gain political power.

    “It’s more attainable to get into civic and cultural leadership in a small town. It’s more attainable to change the local market to make your presence felt,” […]

    what appears to unite the various players in the Christian nationalist project is a belief that society, as we know it, is heading for a collapse and that they need to prepare for it.

    […] podcaster and right-wing pastor Andrew Isker published a book titled “Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide to Taking Dominion & Discipling Nations.”

    […] Their book calls for building “a parallel Christian society, economy and infrastructure” ready to replace the “failed secular state.”

    In that new society, “leadership and influential positions must be reserved exclusively for those who call Jesus Christ King.”

    No Jews or other religions would be allowed.

    […] they call for taking control of townships, school boards, and counties as a first step and exiting what they call “the beast system completely… lying in wait for their system to collapse.” [Echoes of fundamentalist mormonism]

    […] he argued that “accelerating the collapse of a destructive regime … may be productive even if it causes some collateral costs to broader society.”

    […] Not only do the developers behind the Jackson County project share a political ideology, they are also members of a secretive men-only society, designed to train a generation of far-right Christian leaders to take control when the time comes.

    The Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR) has a website that touts the notion of seeking a “civilizational renaissance.” […]

  147. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/senate-republicans-just-made-trumps

    “Senate Republicans Just Made Trump’s Personal Lawyer Emil Bove An Appeals Court Judge Till He Dies”

    Well, the Republicans of the Senate actually went and did it, they hurriedly voted to confirm President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, Emil Joseph Bove III, as judge for life on the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which presides over Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and, for some weird reason, the Virgin Islands. […]

    Bove has never been a judge anywhere, not even parking-ticket court, and is in no way qualified to be the judge of other judges. But every criminal cartel needs protection against truth and consequences! And Bove has proved his loyalty, defending Trump while he snoozed through his stolen-documents and porner-peener-payoff cases […]

    Would you believe it all gets even dirtier? A second whistleblower after Erez Reuveni apparently came forward all the way back in May, with more evidence corroborating that Bove told prosecutors to violate court orders and say “fuck you” to any judges who ruled against the administration’s immigrant-disappearing plan. But that evidence went missing from the Office of the Inspector General until yesterday, and was “refound only after Whistleblower Aid presented proof of submission and receipt.” None of the Republicans were interested in looking at it anyway.

    And it gets dirtier still! Apparently there was also yet another, third whistleblower complaint about Bove, this one reportedly with audio proving Bove lied to the Senate when he claimed he didn’t threaten or coerce prosecutors in the Public Integrity Section into signing off on a DOJ request to dismiss bribery charges for New York Mayor Eric Adams. Must have been bad, because the Senate pushed the vote on Bove through within hours after its existence became known.

    You remember that episode, the DOJ Valentine’s Day Massacre that led to seven prosecutors resigning in disgust rather than put their names on a filing that was a balls-out quid pro quo. Then Adams got on Fox News and chirped that he was happily “collaborating” with the administration to give ICE more access to city facilities. And then the prosecutor who signed the filing got a promotion! […]

    Anyway, mere hours after the new evidence that Republicans refused to look at or hear dropped, they hurried up and voted YAY on Bove […]

    Not a single one of those senators should have needed any more evidence anyway. They already knew how NOT QUALIFIED Bove is, and that he’s Trump’s personal lawyer, holy conflict of interest. Remember, lawyer/client privilege never expires!

    And two weeks ago more than 900 (900! Nine hundred! Nine zero zero!) former DOJ lawyers sent a letter to Chuck Grassley pointing out Bove’s lack of impartiality, ethics, and the balls-out hypocrisy of him witch-hunting people in the DOJ who prosecuted January 6 rioters, though Bove himself had prosecuted January 6 rioters when he was at the DOJ. […]

    It’s a new low for corruption, which is something we sure do say a lot around here!

    Last word to Senator Cory Booker calling bullshit on all this: [video]
    […]

  150. says

    Washington Post link

    “Waves reach Hawaii, California after 8.8-magnitude Russia quake”

    […] Initial waves reached the West Coast six hours after an 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck off Russia’s eastern Kamchatka region. In Hawaii, there were reports of flooding on the Big Island but no reports of widespread damage. “So far, we have not seen a wave of consequence, which is of great relief to us,” Hawaii Gov. Josh Green (D) told reporters. In Japan, tsunami warnings were downgraded after four-foot waves were recorded, but alerts remain in place across its Pacific Coast. The earthquake ranks among the top six strongest ever recorded.

    […] – Hawaii: The state’s tsunami warning was downgraded to an advisory Tuesday evening, after the first waves reached Kauai around 7:30 p.m. local time.
    – California: Officials upgraded a tsunami alert to a warning for the northern coast, where waves as high as 3.6 feet were recorded in Crescent City, near the Oregon border. A tsunami advisory for all coastal regions in the Bay Area and Central Coast remains in effect, with waves expected to last for 10 to 36 hours, the National Weather Service said.
    – Alaska: A tsunami advisory was extended along the Aleutian Islands and Alaska Peninsula from Attu Island to Chignik Bay.
    – Chile: On Wednesday morning, the National Disaster Prevention and Response Service declared a red tsunami alert for areas along its Pacific coastline, kickstarting an evacuation process of its residents as the country braces to be hit by the same tsunami waves sweeping throughout the Pacific.

    […] So far, there have been some reports of flooding on the Big Island but no sign of widespread damage. According to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, waves reached 5.7 feet above normal height in Maui.

    […] The Klyuchevskoy volcano on the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia’s far east began erupting after the earthquake, according to a Telegram post by a Russian geophysical research organization. A glow was visible above the volcano and lava could be seen flowing down its western slope at 3 p.m. local time, according to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. […]

  151. says

    Washington Post link

    “Texas map would add five safe Republican seats. What it means for the midterms.”

    “The newly proposed Republican map, at President Donald Trump’s urging, would give the party a potential backstop for keeping control of the House even if it performs poorly elsewhere in the 2026 elections.”

    With control of the narrowly divided U.S. House hanging in the balance in the 2026 midterm elections, Republicans in Texas on Wednesday unveiled their opening proposal to redraw new district boundaries that would give Republicans five more safely red seats […]

    […] Under the current maps, Republicans hold 25 of the state’s 38 congressional districts. Under the new plan, they would be likely to win 30 seats in the state.

    […] Democrats in Texas have maligned the GOP move as a power grab that they contend violates the Voting Rights Act. “Know this — that Trump will not stop in Texas,” said Rep. Marc Veasey. “He will go after minority voters across the nation. […]

    Republicans have only a couple of weeks to act because special sessions in Texas last just 30 days. If they don’t approve the maps in time because of a Democratic walkout or another reason, [Governor] Abbott could call a new special session and restart the 30-day clock. […]

  153. says

    Trump hits India with 25% tariff

    “The president also reiterated that a Friday deadline for trade deals would not be extended. Dozens of countries face a new baseline rate of as much as 20%.”

    Imports from India will now face a 25% tariff, […] Trump announced Wednesday, his latest trade-war declaration […]

    He also said India would face an additional penalty for its reliance on Russian energy and military equipment.

    The announcement comes ahead of a Friday trade negotiation deadline that Trump said Wednesday “stands strong” and “will not be extended.” The president has signaled dozens of other countries will face a new baseline tariff level of as much as 20% — higher than the already-elevated 10% he announced in April.

    Taken together, those tariff levels are at or near the historic highs that Trump initially threatened on “Liberation Day” on April 2, a move that shocked the global economy and sent stock markets tumbling. [!]

    Trump initially backed down, but has since steadily been reintroducing elevated tariffs at levels not seen since the 1930s, when a protectionist U.S. trade policy meant to boost the economy ended up worsening the Great Depression.

    The Yale University Budget Lab said Monday that U.S. consumers face an effective tariff rate of 18.2%, the highest since 1934, translating to an equivalent loss of as much as $2,400 per household in 2025. That analysis came before Wednesday’s announcement of tariffs on India.

    While India’s 25% rate would be slightly lower than the 26% that Trump threatened on April 2, it is still a sharp increase from 2.4%, which is the average tariff rate applied to Indian imports in recent years. India is one of the top sources of imports for American consumers and companies, with nearly $90 billion of goods flowing in from India last year.

    India recently became the top source of smartphone imports, after Apple shifted production away from China to avoid high tariffs and geopolitical conflicts, according to data reported by Bloomberg. Apple alone exported $17 billion of iPhones from India last year.

    […] Other top U.S. imports from India include chemicals, plastics, leather goods, agricultural products, and metals.

    In 2022, India applied an effective average tariff rate of 5.2% on U.S. goods. Oils, cement, stone, glass and machinery rank as India’s top purchases from the U.S.

    […] Over the past two weeks, Trump has announced new agreements with a host of other countries designed to clarify trade terms with the U.S., but which critics say are beset by vague details and unworkable promises. […]

  156. says

    SCOTLAND (The Borowitz Report)—Massive celebrations erupted across Scotland on Wednesday to celebrate what Scots called “the glorious departure of Donald Trump.”

    According to Scottish historian Hamish McDorrinson, the spontaneous festivities were the largest since the nation’s triumph in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314.

    In the hours since Air Force One carried Trump out of their country’s air space, Scots are estimated to have drunk 3.7 million gallons of whisky, besting the record set by Pete Hegseth.

    https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/scotland-celebrates-departure-of

  157. says

    Trump’s FDA chief proves he’s absolutely clueless about public health

    Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Martin Makary appeared on CNBC on Wednesday, where host Joe Kernen asked him about Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin’s announcement on greenhouse gases. Zeldin stated that the Trump administration will rescind the 2009 scientific findings on the harmful effects of greenhouse gases on human health.

    That led to this infuriating exchange:

    Kernen: They’re going to do this. Is that a danger to public health? If the EPA and Lee Zeldin are able to do this, in your view?

    Makary: You know, to be honest, I don’t know enough about that issue.

    Kernen: You’re in charge of our public health. Can you look into it for us?

    Makary: So it’s really an EPA issue. But look, there’s a lot of things where we may just need better research. We have never talked about environmental exposures that may, say, cause cancer. We only talk about the chemo to treat it.

    [video]

    So much dumb in a minute.

    Makary came to prominence as one of the ignoramouses who offered loud criticisms of COVID-19 mandates and skepticism over the deadliness of the pandemic, and he appears to be less of a public health expert and more an expert in public misinformation.

    His claim that “we have never talked about environmental exposures that may, say, cause cancer,” is so absurd, it is difficult to even grasp the lie he’s promoting. The official EPA website devotes a significant part of its mission to identifying cancer-causing agents. The FDA has similarly worked for decades in this area—while also being responsible for approving treatments for cancer patients.

    In May, Zeldin announced the administration’s plans to rescind rules that limited “forever chemicals” in drinking water. The chemicals in question have been linked to cancers, reproductive and neurological problems, and low birth weights.

    But I’m sure Makary doesn’t “know enough about that issue,” either.

  159. says

    🛳️🇪🇺🇺🇸 In the three years since the start of the war in Ukraine, the EU and the US have included 587 vessels linked to Russia in the sanctions lists, – Le Monde

    As of mid-June 2025, 80% of these tankers continued to openly transport oil, without turning off GPS and indicating the destination.

    […] Less than 18% hid their location, but continued to transport Russian oil products.

    Over the three years, only five of 587 tankers were stopped, and another 5-6 ceased operations due to sanctions. In three years of expanding sanctions list, only 2% of the vessels stopped transporting Russian oil.

    https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:sey7sepxyhnke3h5aa6ttbon/post/3lv4tbozp4s2j

  160. says

    Hungarian Company Aids Russian Arms Makers in Evading Sanctions

    https://militarnyi.com/en/news/hungarian-company-aids-russian-arms-makers-in-evading-sanctions/

    The Hungarian company Milspace Kft is helping Russian Helicopters to sign contracts for the repair of foreign helicopters to circumvent sanctions.

    This is stated in documents obtained by researchers […]

    In the document, Milspace explicitly admits that helicopter repairs at the Russian “plant in Kazan” are impossible, as Russian companies and the Mil Design Bureau are under sanctions because of the war in Ukraine.

    But at the same time, it offers a ready-made “gray” scheme that allows to conclude a contract bypassing international sanctions:
    – Milspace Kft acts as a formal contractor;
    – Repairs are carried out at a plant in Kazakhstan licensed by the Russian Mil Design Bureau;
    – Spare parts come from Moscow – from Mi-INTER Ltd;
    – All work is coordinated with Mil Design Bureau and Russian Helicopters, which are part of the Rostec state corporation.

    The Hungarian company has announced its readiness to send a team to diagnose and assess the condition of the helicopters under a separate contract worth $92,000. [screengrab]

    Despite its formal affiliation with the European Union and the North Atlantic Alliance, Hungary, through its companies, is actually contributing to the circumvention of the sanctions regime by helping Russia.

    The mechanism for circumventing sanctions proposed above is typical and resembles the scheme previously organized by Russian companies to service fighter jets in Kazakhstan using French equipment from Thales and Safran. […]

  161. says

    Russia’s new mobilization law yet another sign Kremlin is preparing for war with NATO, analysts say.

    https://kyivindependent.com/russias-new-mobilization-law-yet-another-sign-kremlin-is-preparing-for-war-with-nato-experts-say/

    Increased spending on defense and a new Russian conscription law are signs of the Kremlin’s increasingly aggressive posture and preparations for future conflict with Europe and NATO states, according to analysts.

    As Ukraine and its Western allies continue to sound the alarm about Moscow’s long-term intentions, Russian lawmakers introduced a bill on July 22 that would allow year-round conscription.

    If passed, the new system would replace the traditional bi-annual draft, enabling continuous replenishment of military personnel.

    The development comes after recent Ukrainian warnings of a massive increase in Russian rearmament spending, and the creation last year of new military districts which experts say are potential preparations for future wars outside of Ukraine.

    […] Russia effectively has two armies — a conscript army and a contract army.

    Russia’s conscript army is the country’s standing armed forces that are required to defend Russia itself. To maintain this force, the Kremlin currently conducts conscription twice a year, in spring and fall, requiring eligible men to serve for one year.

    But conscripts by law are not allowed to be sent abroad to fight wars in foreign countries.

    Instead, the Kremlin has simply paid people to fight in Ukraine, offering huge sign-up bonuses to encourage people to volunteer and sign contracts, a method which, up to now, has managed to replenish the huge losses the army has incurred, but which many experts say is unsustainable.

    […] And in the latest move, Russian lawmakers introduced a bill on July 22 to allow continuous, year-round conscription on July 22.

    “If this law is passed, it can be considered a stealth mobilization,” Ukrainian defense expert, Denys Popovych, told the Kyiv Independent.

    “There is a 99% chance that this law will be passed, because it was submitted by (Andriy) Kartopolov, who is (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s man, his mouthpiece. What he submits will largely be approved, and is agreed with Putin,” he added.

    […] According to Ukraine’s intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, Moscow plans to spend $1.1 trillion on rearmament by 2036, an unprecedented investment since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

    “There is a total mobilization of politics, economy, and society of the Russian Federation to be ready for the upcoming large-scale war,” Budanov said during the annual meeting of Ukrainian ambassadors on July 22.

    As part of this reform, Russia has already created two new military districts — Moscow and Leningrad — and is preparing to form additional divisions and military units. Budanov said the Kremlin’s goal is not just regional domination but a reshaping of the global order.

    Asked why Budanov specifically mentioned the year 2036, Stepanenko believes that this date aligns with the Kremlin’s tendency to avoid abrupt or sudden decisions, understanding that a rapid and general mobilization of the population or a sudden pivot to increase defense spending could “upset the Russian people.”

    […] Another factor in Russia’s desire to increase mobilization is simply that it might not be able to afford to pay the huge sums necessary to sign contracts for much longer.

    […] “Many industries and transport sectors have collapsed due to sanctions. Therefore, they will obviously not have enough money to recruit people for the war, as they are doing now.”

    […] In 2024, its military budget surged by 42% to $462 billion, surpassing Europe’s collective defense expenditure of $457 billion, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

    […] According to Stepanenko, the Kremlin is pursuing a strategy of deeper nationalization and centralization to sustain and scale military production.

    “The Kremlin is currently trying to prepare Russians to embrace more economic setbacks and more economic sacrifices in favor of this kind of long-term defense spending,” Stepanenko said.

    Some regional governments are beginning to prioritize defense spending and military contracts, even if it means reducing civilian programs.

    “Russia will save money by cutting social spending to develop its military-industrial sector. We know from the history of wars that whenever the military sector develops, social spending is cut,” Popovych said. […]

  162. says

    Trump and his favorite white supremacist beg people to join ICE

    […] Trump and one of his administration’s best-known bigots have turned to social media to recruit people to join up with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

    The ICE recruitment drive is occurring as the agency faces harsh criticism for its thuggish approach to immigration enforcement, including abducting people and intimidating law-abiding citizens.

    “We need MORE courageous men and women to, MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday night. “Join ICE now. We will take GREAT care of you, just like you take care of us!”

    The message was echoed by infamous bigot Stephen Miller, who serves as the White House deputy chief of staff.

    “Do you want to deport criminal invaders from the United States? The newly-passed Big Beautiful Bill provides extraordinary incentives for new ICE hires,” Miller wrote on X.

    […] The agency has deployed masked agents to harass people around the country, in some instances lying to get access to targets. ICE raids even have students afraid of being swept up while attending classes.

    […] The thuggish behavior from the agency has emboldened racists to dress up and impersonate ICE agents, and criminals are doing the same around the country.

    ICE is the most visible way in which the public is being faced with the Trump deportation agenda. And they don’t appear to like what they see—so is it any wonder that Trump and his team now have to troll social media to scrape up new recruits?

  164. says

    Trump’s treasury secretary says he sees ‘a backdoor for privatizing Social Security’

    “Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent just said the quiet part out loud: The administration is scheming to privatize Social Security,” the DNC said.

    When the Republican Party’s domestic policy megabill — the inaptly named One Big Beautiful Bill Act — was still taking shape in May, GOP officials were determined to include a provision about investing $1,000 on behalf of every American baby born over the next four years.

    They just weren’t sure what to call the policy.

    The original plan said the funds would put into a “money account for growth and advancement,” which naturally led to a politically convenient acronym: “MAGA” accounts. But the party ultimately decided that was too subtle, so Republicans settled on a more direct approach and said money would go into “Trump accounts.”

    The underlying idea has been around for many years — policymakers, including Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, have traditionally called them “baby bonds” — though the GOP alternative is a little different. As The Washington Monthly recently explained, “[J]ust as the shuttered Trump University was a poor facsimile of a real school, Trump Accounts are a poor copycat of the ambitious ‘baby bonds’ idea championed for decades by Republican and Democratic lawmakers. … Far from revolutionary, Trump Accounts are ineffectual, inefficient, and of little benefit to the lower-income families who most need a boost.”

    As Politico reported, the White House Cabinet apparently likes them anyway:

    Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday framed the president’s new ‘Trump accounts’ as a transformative tool for long-term wealth building and a ‘backdoor for privatizing Social Security.’ Bessent said the new tax-deferred investment accounts, which were created by President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax law earlier this month, could be a way to boost financial literacy and young voters’ engagement in the economy.

    The logic of Bessent’s perspective was difficult to follow. According to his pitch at a Brietbart event in Washington, D.C., the treasury secretary believes young people will be less likely to “want to bring down the system” — and vote for candidates such as Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee in New York City’s mayoral race — if they’re literally invested in the market.

    Bessent added, “In a way, it is a backdoor for privatizing Social Security. If, all of a sudden, these accounts grow and you have in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for your retirement, that’s a game-changer, too.”

    The Cabinet secretary didn’t elaborate on why, exactly, he thinks this is a “backdoor” for privatizing Social Security, or why the Trump administration sees privatizing Social Security as a worthwhile policy goal — though I’m certainly looking forward to his future comments on the subject. (The accounts included in the megabill won’t have any direct impact on Social Security benefits.)

    But the quote has raised eyebrows anyway.

    “Calling this a five-alarm fire is an understatement, and between Bessent’s comments and the harm DOGE has already done to the agency, it’s clear Trump was lying all along about protecting Social Security,” [!] Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon said.

    The Democratic National Committee’s Tim Hogan added, “Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent just said the quiet part out loud: The administration is scheming to privatize Social Security. It wasn’t enough to kick millions of people off their health care and take food away from hungry kids. Trump is now coming after American seniors with a ‘backdoor’ scam to take away the benefits they earned. Democrats won’t stand by as Trump screws over working families in order to give more handouts to billionaires.”

    Brandon Weathersby, a spokesperson for American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC aligned with Democratic politics, pushed a similar line: “Republicans think if they make the SSA inoperable by firing critical staffers and make it nearly impossible to get the help you need, they can deem it all beyond repair and privatize the entire program, so their billionaire friends can make a fortune off the backs of some of the most vulnerable Americans. … Scott Bessent just admitted what Trump and Republicans have been hiding all along: Their plan was never to protect and strengthen Social Security; it was to dismantle it, take benefits away from seniors and the working-class, and turn the program into a cash cow for the ultra-rich.”

    I have a hunch the public hasn’t heard the last of Bessent’s quote.

  165. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    CBS news investigation of Jeffrey Epstein jail video reveals new discrepancies

    The FBI claimed “anyone entering or attempting to enter the tier where Epstein’s cell was located from the [Special Housing Unit] common area would have been captured by this footage.” The video, cross-referenced with diagrams of the Epstein holding area, does not appear to support that finding.
    […]
    When federal officials released the jail video, they attested that it was “raw footage,” but the presence of a cursor and onscreen menu […] indicate the video was likely a screen recording rather than an export directly from a DVR system. […] metadata showed that the file was first created on May 23 of this year […] In addition, the analysts said, a shift in the frame aspect ratio (that is, the ratio of the width to the height of an image) indicated that it was two clips edited together, not a continuous run of footage.
    […]
    officials have said no one could have entered Epstein’s tier without being seen because (1) the staircase was visible on the tape, and (2) access to the SHU was only possible by passing through two locked doors, which are both off camera.

    One door is remotely operated and one requires a physical key, which Noel told investigators only she and Thomas possessed. However, the video shows several individuals entering and exiting while Thomas and Noel are seen nowhere near the door, or not present at all, contradicting her statement. As a result, there is no way to know from the video if it indeed was possible for someone to enter the unit and climb the stairs to Epstein’s cell without being seen.
    […]
    the inspector general’s report states there were two additional cameras recording events in the vicinity […] Neither of those videos has been released

    More at the link, including a reconstructed floor plan.

  166. says

    New Yorker link

    “No Tax on Tips” Is an Industry Plant

    Hearings before the Commerce Committee of the Arizona House of Representatives normally draw a modest crowd of lobbyists in suits. On March 19, 2024, a throng of people in more casual attire appeared. They wore matching green T-shirts adorned with the message “Save Our Tips.” The slogan caught the eye of Analise Ortiz, a Democrat on the committee. She assumed that the visitors were bartenders and waitstaff who had come to voice opposition to a bill that could lower their salaries.

    The bill was called the Tipped Workers Protection Act, a name that disguised its true purpose. The legislation, if approved, would place an initiative on that November’s ballot to amend the Arizona constitution so that employers could pay tipped workers twenty-five per cent less than the state minimum wage, then $14.35 an hour. In Arizona, the minimum wage for such workers was already $11.35 an hour. The formula being proposed would allow employers to pay tipped workers just $10.76 an hour—a pay cut that would reduce a full-time server’s annual salary by twelve hundred dollars.

    […] the chief supporter of the Tipped Workers Protection Act was the Arizona Restaurant Association, an industry lobby that represents the interests of owners. It had persuaded Republicans to introduce the measure as a way of blocking another ballot initiative, the One Fair Wage Act, which called for raising Arizona’s minimum wage to eighteen dollars an hour and insuring that by 2028 tipped workers would be paid that amount (without relinquishing their gratuities)

    As the hearing progressed, Ortiz expected the workers in the green T-shirts to explain why they deserved a raise or, at the very least, did not want their salaries lowered. But, when three members of the group came forward to testify, all expressed support for the Tipped Workers Protection Act and opposition to the One Fair Wage Act, which they portrayed as an effort to steal their tips. A waitress named Jaime Sarli said, “If restaurants had to pay us more money and eliminated tips, why would I want to do this?” She explained that she made such “great money” as a server that she’d turned down salaried managerial positions. “I don’t want to work a minimum-wage job,” she said.

    Ortiz, who is now a state senator, told me that, as she listened, she “became confused.” The One Fair Wage Act proposed guaranteeing servers a full minimum wage that would still be supplemented by tips. She found it odd that workers would instead promote a bill that cut their base salaries, especially at a time when the price of virtually everything—food, gas, rent—was rising.

    […] The Save Our Tips activists all had ties to the Arizona Restaurant Association, […] and none were entry-level servers. Sarli, the waitress who’d testified about her fantastic tips, was an assistant manager at Streets of New York, a pizza chain whose owner, Lorrie Glaeser, was the vice-chair of the Arizona Restaurant Association’s board. Beth Cochran, who testified after Sarli, was the vice-president of Snooze A.M. Eatery, a breakfast chain, and served on the same board. “These people were management and were advocating for a bill that would allow them to undercut their own workforce,” […] [Sneaky, lying doofuses.]

    Some workers at the hearing did speak against the Tipped Workers Protection Act. Meschelle Hornstein, a waitress at a restaurant in the Phoenix airport and a member of the trade union Unite Here, said that the measure “would harm the working-class people that make up the majority of tip positions.” Her testimony didn’t persuade the Republicans on the committee. One of them said, “Except for some of the unions, it’s clear the employees are happy with the situation as it is.” [gaslighting was successful, … and planned.]

    This message was echoed by Dan Bogert, the chief operating officer of the Arizona Restaurant Association, who urged the committee to “really just listen to the workers who are here.” He didn’t mention that the slogan on the green T-shirts matched the name of a new political-action committee, Save Our Tips AZ, that his organization was funding. […]

    [I snipped the reporting on Trump’s claims about eliminating tips. (He abandoned this pledge after winning Nevada and the general election.) The reporting includes a “Sir” story in which a beautiful waitress approaches Trump. Yuck.]

    […] According to Yale’s Budget Lab, thirty-seven per cent of tipped workers don’t make enough money to pay any federal income taxes. Under the new law, casino dealers earning six-figure salaries with tips will receive large tax breaks, whereas busboys making poverty wages will get no benefit. And, though ending taxes on tips has a populist veneer, it won’t cost the owners of hotels and restaurants a penny. (This may be why Trump—himself a member of this class—embraced the idea.) The policy could even encourage employers to shift more kinds of work to tipped, subminimum-wage positions—thus reducing labor costs.

    […] Currently, the poverty rate among tipped workers is more than double the rate of other employees. Tipped workers are also more likely to rely on food stamps and other federal assistance. [I snipped a broader discussion of the minimum wage.]

    […] a corporate giveaway shifted the cost of paying restaurant workers from employers to customers and taxpayers: “American taxpayers are subsidizing the biggest restaurant chains in the country with food stamps and other benefits that go to their tipped workers, because these workers can’t afford to make it any other way.”

    [I snipped a discussion of President Biden’s attempt to phase out the sub minimum wage for tipped workers. Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, and Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona voted against it.]

    […] a study revealing that, in New York, Black women at dining establishments earn eight dollars an hour less than their white male peers, in part because customers tip them less.

    […] “Every business economist has said that, if you raise the minimum wage, there’s going to be a reduction in jobs that’s going to be particularly intense in labor-intensive industries.” For much of the twentieth century, this was indeed the prevailing view among economists. But in 1994 the American Economic Review published an article that challenged this belief. Its authors—David Card, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize for his research on labor markets, and Alan Krueger, then a professor at Princeton—tracked the employment levels at fast-food restaurants in New Jersey before and after the state raised its minimum wage, then compared these data with the situation in neighboring Pennsylvania, where the minimum wage hadn’t changed. They found “no indication that the rise in the minimum wage reduced employment.” [I snipped further details.]

    […] Countries that have never expected servers to rely on tips, including Italy and France, are full of family-owned restaurants. “Why are we the only country in the world doing this?” Allegretto asked. “The model we have is very unfair, and it’s not necessary.” [I snipped a bartender’s personal story. And I snipped more details confirming additional gaslighting and unethical tactics employed by lobbyists for the restaurant industry.]

    […] Kjersten Forseth, the legislative consultant for the Colorado A.F.L.-C.I.O., told me that she’d struggled to contain her fury as she watched the leaders of Colorado—a blue state where Democrats control all branches of government—advance a bill to cut the wages of servers, especially after an election in which many working-class voters left the Democratic Party because they felt that it didn’t care about them. [More Colorado details at the link.]

    Commentary from the author of the New Yorker report, Eyal Press:

    You might think, as I once did, that the point of tipping is to compensate servers, bartenders, and other workers for their labor. But the real function of tipping, as the economist Robert Reich explained to me this year, is to subsidize employers—including some of the largest restaurant chains in the country—for the poverty wages they pay their workers, who in many states receive just $2.13 an hour rather than the regular minimum wage.

    If you weren’t aware of this, you can thank the National Restaurant Association, a powerful industry lobby and the subject of a story I’ve written for this week’s issue. Known to many labor advocates as “the other N.R.A.,” the lobby, which represents restaurant owners and has partner organizations in all fifty states, insists that forcing workers to rely on tips benefits both restaurant proprietors and their employees. Servers can “bring home a really impressive paycheck,” Sean Kennedy, the lobby’s executive vice-president of public affairs, told me.

    But as I discovered in my reporting, the data that the lobby disseminates about what tipped workers earn sometimes doesn’t match what economists and the Bureau of Labor Statistics have found. […]

    Restaurant employees have been in the news a lot lately, owing to Donald Trump’s proposal to eliminate federal taxes on tips. As I note in my article, the President’s plan, though often described as “populist,” won’t help the lowest paid tipped workers, nearly forty per cent of whom don’t make enough money to pay federal income taxes. And it won’t cost the owners of restaurants and hotels a penny, which is perhaps why Trump, himself a member of this ownership class, has embraced the idea—and why the N.R.A. supports it as well.

  168. says

    NBC News:

    The Federal Reserve on Wednesday left its key interest rate unchanged, a widely expected move that comes despite enormous pressure from the Trump administration to lower it. The Fed, in a statement announcing the decision, said that economic growth had moderated in the first half of the year but that inflation remained ‘somewhat elevated.’

  169. says

    Associated Press:

    The Trump administration is pushing an initiative for millions of Americans to upload personal health data and medical records on new apps and systems run by private tech companies, promising that will make it easier to access health records and monitor wellness.

    Scoff.

  170. says

    NBC News:

    The Senate [on Tuesday night] confirmed Susan Monarez to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a party-line vote. Monarez is the first CDC director without a medical degree in more than 70 years. She is also the first CDC director subject to Senate confirmation, following a new requirement from a 2023 law.

  171. says

    New York Times:

    The Trump administration has frozen $108 million in federal funds for Duke University’s medical school and health care system, according to two administration officials, after the government accused the university of ‘systemic racial discrimination.’

  172. says

    NBC News:

    Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, strongly denounced the Israeli government in a statement yesterday amid international calls to respond to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. ‘I cannot defend the indefensible,’ he said. ‘Israel’s actions in the conduct of the war in Gaza, especially its failure to address the unimaginable humanitarian crisis now unfolding, is an affront to human decency.’

  173. says

    Another crook cashes in on his Trump ties

    Rich criminals sure are enjoying a heyday in […] Trump’s second term. The latest person to benefit from the Trump administration’s approach of rewarding big donors—who also happen to be major criminals—is Andrew Wiederhorn, chair of FAT Brands.

    On Wednesday, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles dropped 2 criminal cases against the fast food mogul. Was it newly discovered evidence that accounted for Wiederhorn’s good fortune? Heavens, no. It was what gets people off the hook these days: being a Trump donor.

    Acting U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli is overseeing this particular travesty. Essayli has been on somewhat of the same employment journey as his equally unqualified compatriot on the East Coast, Alina Habba. And just like Habba, Essayli is clinging to his gig by appeasing Trump—which means treating his donors favorably.

    Wiederhorn had been charged under the Biden administration for concealing $47 million in income and, in a separate case, possessing a gun despite being a convicted felon. He also allegedly forgave himself about $65 million in loans. The Internal Revenue Service spent 15 years trying to collect back taxes from Wiederhorn, who owed more than $7 million by March 2021.

    […] Trump’s corruption is benefiting Essayli, who has used his office to charge politicians and judges who are perceived to be thwarting Trump’s agenda. […]

  174. says

    Bible-thumping Republican suggests his porn scandal is a conspiracy

    Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s far-right superintendent of public instruction, responded to a pornography scandal by suggesting he was the victim of a massive Republican-led conspiracy to remove him from office.

    Two members of the state board of education accused Walters of displaying sexually explicit images of women on a TV screen connected to his computer during an executive meeting this past Thursday.

    “These board members have a lot to answer for, and so does the governor of the state of Oklahoma. Did he direct these board members to lie about me?” Walters said of Gov. Kevin Stitt, a fellow Republican, during a press conference on Tuesday. “What exactly directives were they given?”

    “We have had our name cleared by both [Oklahoma Office of Management and Enterprise Services] and the sheriff’s office,” Walters added, though the sheriff’s office leading the investigation says that’s a lie.

    “There is nothing scandalous that I was a part of whatsoever,” Walters claimed, before threatening the witnesses and the media outlets reporting on the matter. [video]

    The allegations against Walters came from board members Ryan Deatherage and Becky Carson, who attended the meeting in question […]

    On Friday, Senate Pro Tem Lonnie Paxton and Senate Education Chairman Adam Pugh, both Republicans, announced that the Office of Management and Enterprise Services will lead an investigation into the “bizarre and troubling” incident.

    “The accounts made public by board members paint a strange, unsettling scene that demands clarity and transparency,” Paxton said. “Senator Pugh and I appreciate the quick action by OMES to help coordinate through this situation to get details on exactly what happened. More transparency is essential before strong conclusions can be drawn.”

    Walters’ rise in the GOP has been fueled by his religious extremism and his efforts to manipulate Oklahoma’s public education system into a vehicle for election denialism. [!] All of his moves have come at the expense of public school safety and education in Oklahoma, which ranks 48th in the nation in education, according to U.S. News & World Report.

  176. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Tim Onion:

    Holy shit, they did it. They wrote the headline.

    NYT: “N.Y.C. Mass shooting was nearly impossible to prevent, experts say.”
    12 years earlier.
    The Onion: “‘No way to prevent this,’ says only nation where this regularly happens.”

    Rando:

    lol nevermind editor said ‘not anti-gun-control enough’.

    NYT (edited): “Even New York’s strict gun laws couldn’t prevent the midtown shooting.”

     
    The Onion – Study finds refreshingly low amount of shovel violence

    “Despite high levels of shovel ownership in the United States, what we are seeing is an encouragingly low number of violent incidents involving spades or round-point shovels,” […] reports of the tool’s use in smackings, wallopings, and bonkings remained rare.

     
    The Onion YT
    Shocking video captures calm police officers handling situation nonviolently
    ^ Warning: Flashing lights.

    FEMA head under fire after accidentally playing porn on Emergency Alert System

    I dunno how they let something like that happen, or why they had to turn it off.

    ^ A month before the Oklahoma superintendent story.

  177. John Morales says

    CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain, your onion-carrying is duly noted.

    (Shock! ‘Shocking’ Video does not Shock!!)

  178. John Morales says

    [Onions!]

    “Grampa: We can’t bust heads like we used to. But we have our ways. One trick is to tell stories that don’t go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for m’shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt. Which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ’em. Gimme five bees for a quarter, you’d say. Now where was I… oh yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion tied to my belt, which was the style at the time. You couldn’t get white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones…”

  182. StevoR says

    Important and promising update on K2-18 b the “Hycean” (hydrogen ocean) waterworld here – confirmed to be water-rich in a paradoxical seeming way :

    Ironically, one of the most positive signs of such an ocean is the fact that the atmosphere of this super-Earth appears to lack water vapor.

    “The spectrum we obtained does not show signs of water vapor. If the atmosphere truly lacks water, this suggests that water has been depleted — most likely through condensation,” Hu said. “On Earth, this process is known as the ‘cold trap,’ and geoscientists consider it essential for retaining water over billions of years by preventing it from escaping to space.

    “Observing a similar process on an exoplanet would be very exciting. Rigorously confirming the absence of water can by itself be a scientifically important goal for future observations,” Hu said.

    However, Hu cautioned that the spectrum detected by the JWST could also be explained by an alternative model in which the atmosphere actually contains abundant water vapor.

    Source : https://www.space.com/space-exploration/search-for-life/nearby-super-earth-k2-18-b-may-be-a-water-rich-ocean-planet-this-has-certainly-increased-the-chances-of-habitability

    Plus a stronger signal for (we think?) biosignatures, dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide too..

  184. says

    ‘Not how science is supposed to work’: Trump admin. accused of pushing faulty research

    “Two months ago, the Trump administration was accused of releasing a report filled with misrepresented research. Now, it’s happened again.”

    For those who recognize the reality of the climate crisis, it’s been a difficult week. On Tuesday, for example, Lee Zeldin, the head of Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, appeared on a conservative podcast and announced that the Republican administration is moving ahead with a radical anti-climate plan.

    As NBC News reported, Team Trump and its EPA wants to revoke “a scientific finding that has long been the central basis for U.S. action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change,” rescinding a 2009 endangerment finding “that determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.”

    The New York Times added, “Without the endangerment finding, the E.P.A. would be left with no authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate the greenhouse gas emissions that are accumulating in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels.”

    This move came on the heels of Trump’s Department of Energy releasing a related report that not only downplayed the threats posed by the planetary emergency, it also suggested, incorrectly, that efforts to address the crisis would be counterproductive. [!]

    On the surface, the obvious problem with the Energy Department’s report was its radical rejection of the scientific consensus, which is bolstered by overwhelming evidence from scholars and researchers from around the world. The less-obvious problem is that the document appears to have misrepresented the scientific research is relied on to draw its conclusions. NOTUS reported that “at least 10” of the scientists referenced in the report said their work had been distorted.

    ‘This is a serious misuse of my research,’ said James Rae, a climate researcher at the University of St. Andrews, about the report’s interpretation of his work. ‘As I hope you can see, it was taken out of context,’ said Sukyoung Lee, an atmospheric scientist at Pennsylvania State University, about the report’s use of her research. Another researcher said the report included ‘erroneous’ fire data. The ‘chart and text are highly misleading and includes data that should not be plotted in a scientific report,’ said Jennifer Marlon, climate science researcher at Yale University about the section of the review that included her research. ‘To do so is manipulative and goes against all standard scientific norms and practice.’

    Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia University, called the agency’s work “shoddy,” adding, “This is not how science is supposed to work.”

    If this sounds at all familiar, it’s because this isn’t the first incident of its kind. In fact, it was just two months ago when Trump’s White House and Department of Health and Human Services unveiled “The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again,” which, as NOTUS also discovered, was filled with faulty references to scientific research, in some cases even citing studies that don’t exist. [!]

    After the incident, it stood to reason that administration officials might want to take greater care. Evidently, the Department of Energy failed to learn the lesson.

    As for why this matters, the problem is not just that Team Trump obviously can’t be trusted to present accurate information to the public. NOTUS’ new report added:

    These mischaracterizations could have far-reaching implications should this report be finalized on the Federal Register. The administration’s review could eventually be used as the evidentiary basis for undoing the last 15 years of federal climate policy. The Trump administration’s efforts to take apart every rule that sets limits on greenhouse gas emissions are expected to face court challenges. Should it reach that point, the administration will likely need to show that it seriously considered the scientific evidence.

    It’s a safe bet we haven’t heard the last of this one.

  186. says

    […] The onslaught of invective from Trump [this morning] began with a tired rehash of his hatred for Stephen Colbert. Trump complained that…

    “Everybody is saying that I was solely responsible for the firing of Stephen Colbert from CBS, Late Night. That is not true! The reason he was fired was a pure lack of TALENT. […] Next up will be an even less talented Jimmy Kimmel, and then, a weak, and very insecure, Jimmy Fallon.”

    Actually, it was Trump and his cronies who were giving him credit for the cancelation of Colbert’s show. [And Trump’s followup threats to Kimmel and Fallon also give away the game.] Trump is the last person who should be assessing the talent of others. For the record, Colbert’s show is number one in its time period. The cancelation, which isn’t effective until May of 2026, is due only to the cowardly compliance of the network’s corporate masters.

    The majority of Trump’s posts expressed his tyrannical demand that Republicans in the Senate rush to confirm his judicial nominees. He singled out Sen. Chuck Grassley for failing to overcome Democratic opposition via use of the “blue slip” that allows members of both parties to invoke a virtual veto of a nominee. But Trump resorted to his standard viciousness, saying “Democrats like Schumer, Warner, Kaine, Booker, Schiff, and others, SLEAZEBAGS ALL.” He called the process “unconstitutional” and a “hoax” (of course), and lied that it would prevent him from ever getting a nominee confirmed…

    “…in California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Virginia, and other places, where there is, coincidentally, the highest level of crime and corruption.”

    [So tired of Trump’s tsunami of nonsense.]

    For the record, the highest levels of crime and corruption are almost entirely in red states.

    [I snipped the “time to indict Obama” nonsense.]

    Link

  187. says

    Washington Post link

    “EXCLUSIVE: The federal government is paying more than 154,000 people not to work.”

    The government is paying more than 154,000 federal employees not to work as part of the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program [..,]

    The number, which has not been previously reported, accounts for workers at dozens of agencies who took offers from the government as of June to get paid through Sept. 30 — the end of the fiscal year — or the end of 2025 and then voluntarily leave government, significantly reducing the size of several major agencies, according to two Office of Personnel Management officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose details of the administration’s plans to scale down government.

    The buyouts have rapidly sped up the process of slashing the federal workforce at an unprecedented rate, the officials said. But critics have argued the administration’s tactics of using buyouts and administrative leave have been wasteful because the public is paying tens of thousands of employees not to work for months.

    […] Democrats on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations have separately estimated that the government has spent billions of dollars paying workers who are on leave either through the voluntary departure program or because of ongoing litigation over mass firings, according to a report released Thursday. The Democrats, led by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut), argue that the U.S. DOGE Service’s race to slim government this spring led to mistakes and waste, estimating that the whole enterprise cost the government $21.7 billion.

    In letters to agencies’ inspectors general Thursday, Democrats requested a review of the costs of DOGE cuts, including how much agencies spent paying workers who were sidelined or resigned.

    […] the government has spent about the same amount of money this year as it did last year to this point. Daily Treasury statements, which show the government’s ongoing expenses, are slightly higher now than last year. Expenditures on federal salaries are up about 5 percent this year compared to last year, according to federal spending trackers kept by the nonpartisan Brookings Institution and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

    […] Blumenthal’s investigators estimated that the government has spent $14.7 billion paying workers who took buyouts, but the figure is based on multiplying the average federal salary against a rough estimate of 200,000 employees who left.

    The report also calculated that the government has spent another $6.1 billion paying workers who were placed on leave during litigation over attempts to fire them, and $611 million for workers at the Education Department, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, USAID and U.S. Agency for Global Media, which have also seen prolonged legal battles over plans to dramatically shrink or shutter these agencies.

    “This report is a searing indictment of DOGE’s false claims. At the very same time that the Trump Administration is cutting health care, nutrition assistance, and emergency services in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘savings,’ they have enabled DOGE’s reckless waste of at least $21.7 billion dollars,” Blumenthal said in a statement. “As my PSI investigation has shown, DOGE was clearly never about efficiency or saving the American taxpayer money. I urge Inspectors General to take up our investigation’s findings and initiate a comprehensive review of DOGE’s careless actions.” […]

  188. JM says

    IGN: Sony Is Suing Tencent Over Shameless Horizon Knock-off Game Light of Motiram

    Sony is suing Tencent, alleging its upcoming game Light of Motiram is “a slavish clone of SIE’s…Horizon series of video games.”

    The complaint, which was filed in a California court last week, alleges that Tencent’s upcoming adventure game Light of Motiram is illegally similar to Horizon: Forbidden West and Horizon: Zero Dawn in everything from creature design to protagonist to marketing materials. The complaint outlines numerous similarities, comparing various marketing screenshots from both games as well as the game descriptions.

    This sort of suit is hard to win in the computer gaming industry. Even more then movies the gaming industry is one where anything popular is copied to various degrees by other companies. Sony has a better chance then most, the game seems to be a painfully detailed copy. Copying the post-apocalyptic setting where human tribes have to deal with robotic dinosaurs, which is awfully specific. Plus, Tencent began development of the game with the plan of doing a licensed game for Horizion but when they failed to get the license they continued with the project. Starting a project before getting the license is not that uncommon, companies produce a demo that can show they can do it and give an idea what they are planning. If the license falls through the project is canceled or the art and story are entirely redone. Here they just seem to have renamed things and changed a few bits of art.

  189. says

    Lightning bolt stretched 515 miles, crossed three states

    The 2017 “megaflash” was more than 50 times the length of the average bolt.

    An enormous, 515-mile-long flash of lightning that crossed at least three states has been named the longest in recorded history in the world.

    The 2017 “megaflash” stretched from eastern Texas to near Kansas City — a distance that would take at least eight hours by car or 90 minutes by commercial plane, according to the World Meteorological Organization. In comparison, the average bolt of lightning usually measures less than 10 miles, according to the National Weather Service.

    The WMO, an agency within the United Nations, announced Thursday that it certified the megaflash as the longest lightning flash on record. It struck Oct. 22, 2017, during a severe storm that hit much of the Great Plains.

    A megaflash is a giant bolt of lightning that travels huge distances from its origin point, said Randall Cerveny, a professor of geographical sciences at Arizona State University and a member of the WMO committee that confirmed the new record. [Visualization of a megaflash that extended 515 miles created from data provided by NASA and NOAA.]

    “It’s an incredibly strange phenomenon,” he said. “We only discovered them 10 years ago, when we could use a particular set of technologies to detect the start and end locations of the of lightning events.”

    Megaflashes are not altogether uncommon, but they typically only occur in parts of the world where specific geographical and atmospheric conditions can produce the most severe thunderstorms, Cerveny said. In the Great Plains and across the Midwest, for instance, warm and humid air from the Gulf of Mexico collides with drier, colder air from the north, creating strong atmospheric instability.

    When these conditions mix and produce severe storms, megaflashes of lightning can occur. These extra-long bolts of lightning have been observed before in the United States, Argentina and southern France, and scientists think they can also occur in parts of China and Australia, according to Cerveny.

    The 2017 megaflash was produced by an immense storm that blanketed a huge swath of the U.S., from Texas up into Iowa and Missouri. Though megaflashes can extend across multiple states, they form high up in the atmosphere and so rarely cause damage on the ground, Cerveny said.

    “They are upwards of 10,000 to 18,000 feet high, in the upper to middle layers of a thunderstorm,” he said. [Composite satellite imagery mapping of the record lightning megaflash.]

    The 515-mile-long lightning bolt was described in a study published Thursday in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

    “These new findings highlight important public safety concerns about electrified clouds which can produce flashes which travel extremely large distances and have a major impact on the aviation sector and can spark wildfires,” WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said in an accompanying statement.

    […] With the classification Thursday, the 2017 lightning flash now surpasses the previous world record set five years ago by about 38 miles, according to the WMO. That bolt of lightning was unleashed April 29, 2020, and spanned 477.2 miles across parts of the southern U.S.

    The 2017 megaflash was identified after scientists re-examined archival measurements taken when the storm occurred.

    “When the original studies were done, we didn’t have the technology that we have today,” Cerveny said. “Now we have this instrument on a weather satellite that very accurately detects lightning and can precisely pinpoint where, how far and how long a lightning flash event takes place.”

    Experts said it’s likely there will be even longer megaflashes found in the coming years, particularly as satellite technologies improve the ability to detect them. […]

  190. says

    Sweden urges EU to suspend trade ties with Israel over Gaza

    Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson says the humanitarian situation in Gaza is “utterly deplorable.”

    Sweden on Thursday became the latest EU member country to publicly call for the suspension of the trade component of the bloc’s association agreement with Israel, as humanitarian conditions in Gaza continue to deteriorate.

    “The situation in Gaza is utterly deplorable, and Israel is not fulfilling its most basic obligations and agreed-upon commitments regarding humanitarian aid,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said.

    “Sweden therefore demands that the EU, as soon as possible, freezes the trade component of the association agreement,” Kristersson added. “Economic pressure on Israel must increase. The Israeli government must allow unrestricted humanitarian aid in Gaza.”

    […] On Monday, the European Commission proposed suspending parts of the EU-Israel Association Agreement involving a flagship research project, citing a “humanitarian catastrophe” that it said threatens “virtually the entire Gaza population.” The initiative was ultimately blocked at a meeting of envoys on Tuesday by Germany and three other member countries.

    On Wednesday, the Netherlands also announced it advocated suspending the trade chapter of the agreement.
    Commenting on Sweden’s announcement, a spokesperson for Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp said “the minister welcomes that Sweden joins the Netherlands in our call.”

    “We need to increase pressure on the Israeli government because they must do more to facilitate humanitarian aid. The agreement between the EU and Israel on humanitarian aid and access must be fully honored,” the spokesperson added.

    The EU-Israel Association Agreement, in effect since 2000, forms the legal basis for EU-Israel relations, including preferential trade. Trade measures can be modified with a qualified majority vote among all 27 EU member states. […]

  191. says

    Justice Department dismisses case against a Trump donor, adding to credibility crisis

    Related video at the link.

    In early April, Donald Trump’s White House took a highly unusual step, firing a career federal prosecutor in California because a right-wing influencer told the president he should. A former veteran of the local U.S. Attorney’s Office said it was “bizarre” and “insane” for the White House to take such a step.

    Nearly four months later, Trump’s Justice Department dropped a case against restaurant group Fat Brands and its chairman, Andy Wiederhorn — which was a case the fired prosecutor was working on at the time of his ouster. NBC News reported:

    The government filed an unopposed motion Tuesday to dismiss a case against Wiederhorn, as well as William Amon, Rebecca Hershinger and Fat Brands Inc., which alleged a scheme to conceal $47 million paid to Wiederhorn. The government also filed a separate motion to dismiss a case in which Wiederhorn was charged with possessing a firearm and ammunition despite his previous felony convictions.

    Wiederhorn, who pleaded not guilty and has denied any wrongdoing, was originally accused of using Fat Brands, a prominent restaurant chain owner, “as his personal slush fund.” A related IRS investigation alleged that Wiederhorn was also a “serial tax cheat.”

    Now those allegations are gone. The Justice Department has wiped the slate clean.

    As a matter of optics, the available facts don’t look great. Wiederhorn, for example, was a Trump campaign donor last year. This year, the White House took the highly unusual step of firing the prosecutor overseeing the case, only to have Trump’s Justice Department abandon the charges altogether soon after. [!]

    […] In recent months, Americans have seen Trump’s Justice Department purge employees who worked on cases the president didn’t like. We’ve seen Attorney General Pam Bondi play the role of a hyperpartisan activist aligned with the White House’s political agenda. We’ve even seen Bondi fire her personal ethics adviser.

    Patty Hartman, a 17-year former Justice Department official who was fired after having worked on Jan. 6 cases, recently told CBS News, “The rules don’t exist anymore.” She added, “There used to be a line, used to be a very distinct separation between the White House and the Department of Justice, because one should not interfere with the work of the other. That line is very definitely gone.” […]

  193. says

    Trump prefers to play make-believe amid discouraging news on inflation

    “As inflation inches higher and consumer prices climb, the president is resorting to a familiar tactic: He’s making stuff up.”

    For Americans concerned about inflation and consumer costs, recent developments have been discouraging. Two weeks ago, for example, the public learned that the Consumer Price Index climbed unexpectedly in June, amid signs that Donald Trump’s trade tariffs were pushing prices higher.

    This week, the disappointing news continued as the Commerce Department reported the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index — a metric that’s closely watched by the Federal Reserve for evidence of inflation — is also climbing, and as The New York Times reported, the data represented “the latest sign that President Trump’s tariffs are starting to bleed through into consumer prices.”

    Then Trump sat down with New York Post columnist Miranda Devine and made a rather specific claim, not only about the key economic issue, but about his perceived successes. [video]

    “You know, if you think, inflation, I’ve already taken care of,” the president claimed. “Prices are way down for everything — groceries, everything.”

    Certainly this is the official White House line, with a variety of administration officials pushing nearly identical rhetoric.

    But reality won’t budge. As the Trump administration’s own data shows, grocery costs have gone up since the president returned to the Oval Office, not down.

    A couple of weeks ago at a White House event for a Republican audience, Trump said Democrats “lie” when they say the prices of food and groceries have gone up, but as a CNN report noted soon after, “Nonsense. It’s correct, not a lie, to say overall prices, grocery prices and food prices in general are up during this presidency.”

    […] As prices climb, the president could acknowledge the facts and perhaps even accept some responsibility, but he prefers to play make-believe.

    Trump is a bullshitter and a liar.

  194. says

    The closer one looks at the White House’s efforts to derail a foreign criminal case against Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, the worse it appears.

    Related video at the link.

    A few years ago, then-Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro narrowly lost his bid for a second term. In circumstances that might sound familiar to American audiences, the far-right leader responded to the defeat by allegedly plotting what was effectively a coup that would’ve allowed him to remain in office.

    Bolsonaro now wants to return to power in South America’s largest country, but he’s currently facing criminal charges for allegedly trying to illegally overturn the results of his 2022 loss.

    In keeping with his usual pattern, Donald Trump has rallied behind his controversial ally, dismissed the criminal allegations as a “witch hunt,” and demanded that the charges against the former president be dropped — but that’s not all the American president did. Three weeks ago,Trump also announced plans to impose steep new trade tariffs on Brazil, in part because the Brazilian prosecutors brought a case that Trump didn’t like.

    Evidently, he wasn’t bluffing. The New York Times reported:

    The United States on Wednesday made good on its threats to apply 50 percent tariffs on Brazil two days ahead of schedule and slapped sanctions on the Supreme Court justice overseeing the criminal case against former President Jair Bolsonaro. The dual measures showed that, just as Brazilian officials sought dialogue, the White House sharply escalated the growing diplomatic crisis between the Western Hemisphere’s two most populous nations.

    The tariffs against Brazil, the Times added, are the highest of any levy Trump has imposed this year. The move comes on the heels of Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcing steps to revoke the visa of a Brazilian judge who imposed restrictions on Bolsonaro as the accused criminal’s case proceeds. The Treasury Department soon followed by sanctioning the judge.

    It might not be immediately obvious how bonkers all of this is, so let’s recap.

    1. The White House’s offensive might not be legal. As Dan Drezner, a political scientist at Tufts University, recently explained, the administration’s move appears to be at odds with a recent ruling from the U.S. Court for International Trade. [additional embedded links to sources are available at the main link]

    2. Trump seems to have lost the plot. According to the White House, the president can unilaterally impose arbitrary tariffs on U.S. trade partners because he’s declared an economic emergency resulting from trade deficits. The trouble in this instance, however, is that the United States has a $7.4 billion trade surplus with Brazil, adding a legally dubious twist to the Republican’s radical gambit.

    3. The administration can’t think of a defense. Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, was recently asked to justify trade tariffs on a country the United States has a trade surplus with. He struggled mightily. A couple of days later, the president himself was asked a similar question, and he told reporters, “Because I’m able to do it.” [Scoff] That wasn’t exactly persuasive, either.

    4. This is a diplomatic fiasco of historic proportions. There is no precedent for a U.S. administration trying to leverage trade policy to derail a criminal case in a sovereign nation.

    5. Trump’s move will hurt consumers in his own country. Hillary Clinton summarized the problem nicely: “You’re about to pay more for beef not just because Trump wants to protect his corrupt friend, but also because Republicans in Congress have decided to cede their power over trade policy to him.” It might sound outlandish to argue that an American president would punish American consumers because he hopes to shield an attempted coup leader from legal accountability, but that’s pretty much what’s happening here. [!]

    6. This sure does look like another power grab. Paul Krugman argued, “If we still had a functioning democracy, this Brazil gambit would by itself be grounds for impeachment.” That’s not as outlandish as it might seem: Trump is trying to exercise a power he doesn’t have, in pursuit of unjust ends, despite the Constitution giving Congress authority over international trade policy. [!]

    […] 9. This probably won’t work. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — the one who actually won in 2022 — has already said he has no intention of letting one foreign president dictate his own country’s judicial process against a suspected felon.

    Other than all of this, though, Trump’s plan is perfectly sound. [LOL]

  195. says

    […] With more than 170,000 subscribers, Cooper [Darryl Cooper, amateur historian] has the most popular history newsletter on Substack—beating out Adam Tooze, the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University. On X, he has nearly 350,000 followers; one is Vice President JD Vance. Cooper has been profiled by the New York Times (“The Podcaster Asking You to Side With History’s Villains”) and held up as an author for understanding the modern right by a guest on The Ezra Klein Show. Tucker Carlson has claimed that Cooper is the “most important popular historian working in the United States today.”

    Cooper is most famous for his ongoing project titled “The Martyr Made Podcast.” The first podcast in the series was a critical history of Zionism. The slant of his current series, which purports to tell World War II from the perspective of the Germans, is not hard to discern. The trailer Cooper is using to promote the series has clips of a thundering Hitler speech, delivered in English, as metal music plays in the background. It depicts regular Germans suffering while Weimar cosmopolitans enjoy their cabarets, and Nazi soldiers marching triumphantly down the Champs-Élysées in occupied Paris. There’s barbed wire, but German prisoners of war are the ones behind it.

    […] His references often require research. Cooper, for example, wrote “Guten morgen” to a user on X last August, along with a picture of himself holding a coffee mug. It might take a moment to realize the user is a self-identified Nazi, and the mug Cooper holds is sold on a website where you can buy a T-shirt in which a Nazi SS sword plunges through the Star of David. […]

    […] One of his greatest talents as a podcaster is coming across like an earnest nerd who just wants to share some indisputable facts. As Cooper put it earlier this year in the introduction to his Nazi Germany series, “My audience trusts me to be honest with them. And even when they disagree or get uncomfortable, they will give me the benefit of the doubt that I am coming from a place of empathy and a desire to genuinely understand people at the extremes of human experience.”

    This self-presentation has been shockingly successful. In March, Rogan, a committed fan, told his audience that there is “no fucking way” Cooper is an antisemite “in any way, shape, or form” and that he is as “charitable as possible” to his subjects. They could see for themselves, Rogan said, by listening to the first hour of Cooper’s Zionism series, which opens with harrowing accounts of the violence Jews faced in turn-of-the-century Europe.

    But previously unreported information found by Mother Jones, including posts under a username affiliated with Cooper, cast doubt on this narrative. It raises a more sinister possibility about his attempts at even-handedness: That Cooper may have deliberately downplayed his extremism as part of a carefully plotted effort to bring his hard-right ideology into the mainstream.

    [I snipped a lot of details, including Cooper’s other appearances online as “Juggernaut Nihilism,” and including Cooper’s background of “no formal credentials as a historian.”]

    Last year, one of Cooper’s claims garnered national headlines. During the appearance on Carlson’s show, he said that the Nazis were “completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war” and “local political prisoners” they captured after invading the Soviet Union in 1941. As a result, Cooper continued, the Nazis “just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there.” Cooper’s remarks implied that the killing of millions of Soviet prisoners of war and Jews was, in essence, a logistical oversight.

    In doing so, he ignored countless massacres of Jews and other enemies of the Nazi regime, as well as the extensive record showing that the Nazis intended to starve millions of people to death after invading the Soviet Union in 1941. As University of Toronto Professor Timothy Snyder makes clear in Bloodlands—a book Cooper has cited—the Nazis’ initial plan was to kill about 25 million people by starvation.

    Evans made a similar point to Mother Jones after reviewing Cooper’s comments about Soviet prisoners of war. “The Nazis regarded ‘Slavs’ as racially inferior and deliberately killed 3,300,000 prisoners taken from the Red Army by starvation, neglect and untended disease,” he wrote. “The Nazi ‘Hunger Plan’ was based on a conscious choice to use the large food supplies present in Eastern Europe to feed their own troops.”

    Cooper’s suggestion that many Jewish deaths during the Holocaust had been unintentional ended up provoking the largest backlash of his career. Then-President Joe Biden’s White House called the interview a “disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans.” Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, said that Carlson and Cooper had “engaged in one of the most repugnant forms of Holocaust denial of recent years.”

    […] Cooper provides not a single detail in the episode about the horrors that American soldiers encountered at Dachau, or what the victims they liberated endured.[…]

    Nazis in all of the rotten woodwork. Approved by Vice President J.D. Vance.

    Link

  198. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    The fantasies of a man who can bring down the world economy

    There are agreements. There are treaties. There are memoranda of understanding. Donald Trump has “deals.” Donald Trump has not told us what “deals” consist of […] They are not any of the first three things […] After he announces a “deal,” the White House issues a “fact sheet.” The country on the other side of the “deal” then details how the “fact sheet” differs from their understanding. Usually there are differences throughout. There seems to be no other documentation of the “deals,” […] Promises to invest in the US and to buy fossil fuels figure prominently. Paul Krugman has shown that this is nonsense.

    European governments aren’t like China, which can tell companies where to put their money. And the European Commission, which made the trade deal, isn’t even a government—it can negotiate tariffs but otherwise has little power. On Sunday Politico spoke with Commission officials, who effectively confirmed that the investment pledge was meaningless

    […] This seems to be the whole what Trump wants: I am powerful, you will accede. He doesn’t have a clear idea of what acceding means, though

  200. says

    Washington Post:

    Russian forces launched drones and missiles across the Ukrainian capital overnight, killing at least 16 people and injuring more than 150 others, according to Ukraine’s State Emergency Service. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said a 6-year-old boy was among those killed in the strikes, which he said also injured at least 12 children. Earlier Thursday, Klitschko said the strikes had injured the highest number of children in Kyiv in one night since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

  201. says

    NBC News:

    Trump said this morning that the U.S. and Mexico agreed to delay their deadline for a trade deal by another 90 days. The announcement came the day before higher, so-called reciprocal tariffs on dozens of countries’ imports were set to go into effect.

    JFC. Yet another tariff change.

    Related news, as reported by The New York Times:

    President Trump said early Thursday that it would be ‘very hard’ to make a trade deal with Canada after its prime minister said he planned to recognize Palestine as a state. It was Mr. Trump’s latest threat against an ally on the eve of a deadline to impose tariffs.

  202. says

    NBC News:

    Two failed votes [Wednesday night] in the Senate to block offensive arm sales to Israel in response to the killings of civilians in Gaza and the ongoing humanitarian crisis there marked a notable shift in the Democratic caucus on the issue of supporting the Israeli military campaign, with 12 additional Senate Democrats voting in support of a resolution similar to one they had not backed in April.

  203. says

    New York Times:

    A dozen House Democrats who were barred from visiting immigration detention facilities sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, arguing that a new policy imposed by the Department of Homeland Security to limit lawmakers’ access was an illegal infringement on their ability to conduct congressional oversight.

  204. says

    New York Times:

    A legal watchdog group accused three Justice Department lawyers of professional misconduct on Thursday, saying they had made false statements to a federal judge in a high-profile case challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

  205. says

    New York Times:

    A federal judge said Wednesday that it was likely that the Trump administration had violated his April order mandating a restoration of news programming at Voice of America, a federally funded news organization that provided independent reporting to countries with limited press freedom.

  207. says

    Fresh off announcing plans to accelerate climate change by deregulating carbon dioxide emissions, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin appeared on Fox Business Thursday to boast about the Trump administration speeding up the flow of gas.

    Yes, really.

    “We just sent a letter last week to the portable gas-can manufacturers, encouraging them strongly to vent the can. There’s a lot of frustration from Americans across the country because what should take 45 seconds takes 5 minutes. People feel like they need 3 hands or 6 hands to pour a gas can. Those vents should be added back in,” he said. [video]

    […] Zeldin sent a letter last week begging gas-can manufacturers to redesign their spouts. […]

    Let’s all point and laugh at EPA chief’s weird obsession because WTF

    Posted by readers of the article:

    For my personal landscape chores, I’ve almost converted all my power tools to battery-power. So far, my mower, string trimmer, and leaf blower are battery-powered. Next purchase will be battery-powered pressure washer, chain saw and hedge trimmer. That’s where the trend is going, even with the professional landscapers. I still have a gasoline-powered pressure washer. But I store the gasoline in a 2.5-gallon safety can, which is safer and easier to use than those plastic ones. Worth the price. Obviously, we have bigger environmental concerns than restoring vented plastic gas cans, though. What a joke. This whole administration is a joke.
    ——————————
    Today’s typical non-vented plastic gas container is unsafe because it is prone to pressurization and spewing gas when it gets hot. I carefully keep those things in the shade in the coolest place I can find, but there’s still an occasional spewing event.

    The speed of pouring is a very minor issue that can be dealt with. The spewing is dangerous.

    The $125 dollar can you use is much safer, but damn it’s pricey. It’s not going to set you on fire, however, and that’s most important.
    ———————–
    Siphon pump. Problem solved.

  208. StevoR says

    paceX is poised to launch its next astronaut mission Friday (Aug. 1), and you can watch the action live.

    A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch the four-person Crew-11 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA from Kennedy Space Center in Florida Friday at 11:43 a.m. EDT (1543 GMT). That’s a day later than originally planned; SpaceX tried to launch the mission Thursday (July 31) but was thwarted by bad weather.

    You can watch the liftoff live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA. The agency’s coverage will begin at 7:35 a.m. EDT (1135 GMT).

    Source : https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/watch-spacex-launch-crew-11-astronauts-to-the-iss-for-nasa-today

  211. says

    https://www.msnbc.com/all
    Chris Hayes

    ‘Say it with your chest’: 2028 Dem hopefuls face early tests of bravery
    Video is 8:59 minutes

    ‘Pure evil’: Trump urged not to pardon Maxwell by Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre’s attorney
    Video is 8:47 Minutes

    Sigrid McCawley, longtime attorney for Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre on the possibility of Trump granting Ghislaine Maxwell some sort of clemency: “It just simply cannot happen. The American public has to rise up and do what’s right and say, ‘We will not allow this.’”

  212. says

    Republicans block effort to keep ‘free’ Qatari plane out of Trump’s post-presidency hands

    “Democrats want to stop Trump from keeping Qatar’s “gift” after he leaves office, but Republicans are standing in the way of the safeguards.”

    When Donald Trump accepted a superluxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar, there was a long list of questions about the arrangement, and by any fair measure, the president created a legal, ethical and political mess. But hanging overhead was a related question: What happens to the plane after the Republican exits the White House?

    The administration’s official line has long been the Qatari aircraft should be seen as a “gift,” not to Trump personally, but to the United States. The same administration’s official line has also been that the not-at-all-free jet will apparently head to his future presidential library.

    How does the White House resolve the conflict between the first talking point and the second? So far, by ignoring it.

    Some Senate Democrats, however, came up with a more straightforward idea. The Washington Post reported:

    A Senate panel narrowly voted down an amendment Thursday that would prevent the military from transferring a Qatari jet to be used as Air Force One to President Donald Trump’s future library. The amendment, introduced by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Delaware), failed on a 14-15 party-line vote before the chamber’s appropriations committee.

    As the Connecticut Democrat explained in items published to Bluesky, the amendment wouldn’t have changed much in terms of the status quo: The Trump administration could still accept the plane from Qatar; it could still take steps to refurbish the jet; it could still move money around to try to pay for it; etc.

    What Murphy’s proposal would instead do is prevent the Republican from taking the plane with him at the end of his second term.

    “This is an extraordinary amount of money to be used on a plane retrofit that will likely only be in service for a short period of time. Well, the administration has essentially refused to brief us on the full cost,” the senator told his colleagues. “Reports are that this number could be easily $1 billion.”

    Murphy added, “To most Americans, that’s a lot of their money to be spent on a plane that is not going to be in the service of the United States military, in the United States Air Force, for perhaps any longer than a few months, because the president has, in fact, stated his intention to take this plane with him when he leaves office.”

    […] By way of an explanation, Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, questioned the premise behind the effort, saying, “The president has never came out and said he’s putting this in the library. He said it in a joke one time.” [FFS]

    To the extent that reality matters, that wasn’t true. The administration’s position about the plane and the library has been repeated for months, and there’s never been any indication that the president was kidding about his intentions. [!]

    For that matter, if Trump was just joking around, then what would be the harm in having Congress impose some restrictions to ensure the plane remains in the public’s hands after January 2029?

  213. says

    Jeffrey Clark, former Trump administration lawyer, faces possible disbarment in D.C.

    Many of the lawyers who used to work for Donald Trump have been richly rewarded for their service. Pam Bondi, for example, was part of one of the president’s legal teams, and she’s the attorney general. Todd Blanche was one of his criminal defense attorneys, and he’s now also helping lead the Justice Department. D. John Sauer was also a Trump lawyer, and the president tapped him to serve as the solicitor general. Emil Bove represented Trump, and as of a few days ago, he’s a federal appellate judge.

    Even Alina Habba, who was serving as counselor to the president, was recently named an acting U.S. attorney in New Jersey.

    Some of the other lawyers who grew close to Trump, however, have fared far less well. Take Jeffrey Clark, for example. The Associated Press reported:

    Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department official who aided President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, should be stripped of his law license, a Washington disciplinary panel ruled on Thursday. Clark, who is now overseeing a federal regulatory office, played a key role in Trump’s efforts to challenge his election loss to Joe Biden and clashed with Justice Department superiors who refused to back his false claims of fraud.

    […] Shortly after Trump’s 2020 election defeat, the then-outgoing president considered a ridiculous plan in which he’d fire acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and replace him with Clark, a relatively low-profile environmental lawyer within the administration. The motivation for the change was obvious: Clark, unlike Rosen, was telling Trump what he wanted to hear about keeping him in power, despite his defeat.

    In fact, Clark sketched out a map for Republican legislators to follow as part of a partisan plot, even as he quietly pressed Trump to put him in charge of the Justice Department.

    […] The then-president ultimately backed away from the plan to make Clark the acting A.G., not because the plan was stark raving mad — though it certainly was — but because the Justice Department’s senior leadership team threatened to resign en masse if Rosen was ousted.

    It was around the same time when there was a high-level meeting at which a White House lawyer said that if Trump remained in office despite his defeat, there would be riots nationwide. According to a federal criminal indictment, Clark allegedly responded, “Well … that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

    In other words, if Trump claimed illegitimate power and Americans took to the streets, the Republican White House, from Clark’s perspective, could use the Insurrection Act to deploy the U.S. military against American civilians.

    […] he became “a rising legal star” in Republican circles — even after Clark’s indictment in Fulton County, Georgia — and when Trump headlined a fundraiser for Jan. 6 criminal defendants, Clark appeared alongside the president.

    The attorney also became directly involved in the Project 2025 initiative, and even attended a Mar-a-Lago screening of a conspiratorial movie about the “persecution” of Jan. 6 rioters. [head/desk]

    […] It’s against this backdrop that the D.C. Board of Professional Responsibility concluded that Clark should be disbarred, a recommendation that will now go to the D.C. Court of Appeals for a final decision.

    A Politico report added that Clark is not without company: “Rudy Giuliani was similarly sanctioned by the D.C. Bar, as well as bar authorities in New York, and ultimately disbarred. Conservative attorney John Eastman has been suspended from practicing law while he fights a disbarment recommendation made by a California judge. Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis agreed to a three-year suspension of her law license in Colorado after acknowledging she made false claims about the 2020 election — and after pleading guilty to her role in the effort in a criminal case in Georgia. And Kenneth Chesebro, an architect of Trump’s last-ditch bid to remain in power, lost his law license in New York.”

    For his part, Clark responded to the latest developments with a social media message that read, “The fight continues.” Watch this space.

  214. says

    U.S. job growth turns cold as Trump’s agenda takes its toll on the economy

    The question for the White House is simple: “If Trump has created a ‘hot’ economy, why has American job growth slowed to a 16-year low?”

    Related video at the link.

    Expectations heading into this week showed projections of about 100,000 new jobs having been added in the United States in July. As it turns out, according to the new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the totals fell short of those expectations. CNBC News reported:

    Nonfarm payroll growth was slower than expected in July and the unemployment rate ticked higher, raising potential trouble signs for the U.S. labor market. Job growth totaled 73,000 for the month, above the June total of 14,000 but below even the meager Dow Jones estimate for a gain of 100,000.

    While the data from July was discouraging, far more important were the drastic revisions from May and June — which were down by a combined 258,000 jobs, compared with earlier, preliminary reporting.

    […] the U.S. economy created just 33,000 jobs combined over May and June, which is a woeful total for an economy that Donald Trump and his Republican cohorts have incessantly described as “hot” in recent weeks.

    Over the first seven months of 2025, the latest data suggests the economy has added 597,000 jobs. That might sound like a decent number, but over the first seven months of 2024 — when Trump said the economy was terrible — the total was over 1 million jobs, and over the first seven months of 2023, the U.S. economy added nearly 1.7 million jobs.

    In fact, if we exclude 2020, when the pandemic wreaked havoc on the economy, the first seven months of this year show the slowest job growth in the United States since 2009, when the economy was still hemorrhaging jobs from the Great Recession.

    [Yes, Trump is crashing the U.S. economy. Sort of in slow motion, but still crashing.]

    When trying to boast about the economy, the White House routinely references what it calls the “Trump Effect.” The latest job data, coupled with sluggish growth and stubborn inflation, suggests this “effect” isn’t working.

    Indeed, the question the president and his team ought to face is simple: “If Trump has created a ‘hot’ economy, why has American job growth slowed to a 16-year low?”

  215. says

    Smithsonian removes Trump references from exhibit on presidential impeachments

    “[Trump] targeted the Smithsonian with an executive order. Its American history museum changed its impeachment exhibit soon after.”

    One of the foundational reasons Donald Trump’s presidency is so alarming to those who study authoritarian regimes is the scope of Trump’s intended reach. Over the course of roughly six months, the president has tried to exert influence over everything from the economy to higher education, the judiciary to the media, labor unions to law enforcement, cultural institutions to nonprofit organizations, the legal profession to the entertainment industry.

    And let’s not forget that museums are on the list, too. The Washington Post reported:

    The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in July removed references to President Donald Trump’s two impeachments from an exhibit display. A person familiar with the exhibit plans, who was not authorized to discuss them publicly, said the change came about as part of a content review that the Smithsonian agreed to undertake following pressure from the White House to remove an art museum director.

    […] I couldn’t help but marvel at such a brazen example of an institution succumbing to presidential pressure and altering a historical display about events Americans already saw with their own eyes.

    As NBC News reported, a spokesperson for the Smithsonian confirmed the removal of references to Trump in an exhibit that details presidential impeachments, and tried to offer a benign explanation.

    As the story goes, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History had an “The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden” exhibit, which included a section on impeachments. It was created in 2000 and included Bill Clinton’s impeachment from a couple of years earlier.

    In 2021, he museum added a temporary label to the exhibit, noting Trump’s two impeachments. Last month, the temporary label was removed.

    Eventually, the Smithsonian spokesperson said, there will be a new exhibit, which will “include all impeachments.” When might visitors see it? The spokesperson added that such efforts require a “significant amount of time and funding to update and renew.”

    Perhaps the public should look for an overhauled exhibit in early 2029. [smile]

    […] museum exhibits are often changed in cities across the country for entirely anodyne reasons, and they hardly ever generate national headlines.

    […] In late March, Trump signed an executive order that directly took aim at the Smithsonian and its museums, directing officials to eliminate “improper, divisive, or anti-American” ideology from the institution. The same order accused the Biden administration of, among other things, using the Smithsonian to advance what Trump described as a “corrosive” ideology.

    How did the White House define words such as “improper,” “divisive,” “anti-American” and “corrosive” in an ideological context? The order didn’t say. […] Was there any proof of the Biden administration misusing the Smithsonian? No.

    Trump nevertheless went on to characterize the Smithsonian as an institution that was “once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement” — before it fell victim to a nefarious ideology that Trump considers “divisive.”

    A few months later, the president announced that he’d fired the director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, despite questions about whether he had the legal authority to do so. [not good]

    The following month, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History decided to alter its exhibit that referenced Trump’s impeachment.

    The title of the White House’s order from March said the directive is intended to restore “sanity to American history.” Given the circumstances, “sanity” is not the word that comes to mind.

  216. says

    GOP critics of renewable energy claim that solar and wind are useless at night and during calm skies. That’s not even close to being true.

    Donald Trump has railed against clean energy technology for years, and when targeting solar and wind power, the president has routinely repeated a familiar mistake: After sundown or when the wind isn’t blowing, those energy sources are practically useless.

    He’s not, however, the only Republican who’s expressed confusion about this. The Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen, George W. Bush’s former chief speechwriter and a Fox News contributor, told a national television audience last week, “Just so people understand, wind and solar only work when there is wind and sun. We don’t have technology to store the energy from wind and solar.”

    A week later, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum pushed similar rhetoric during an on-air Fox Business interview. [video]

    “Of course, when the sun goes down, you have a catastrophic failure called ‘sunset’ and there’s no solar energy produced,” the Cabinet secretary claimed, “and yet we’re subsidizing these things that are intermittent, unreliable and expensive.”

    For casual viewers watching these interviews, that rhetoric might seem compelling. […]

    There’s just one problem: Battery technology exists. As MSNBC host Catherine Rampell explained in a Washington Post column last year:

    Growth in clean-electricity generation is a longer-term trend driven largely by technological improvements that have improved solar’s and wind’s cost-competitiveness. But recent policy changes, such Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, have also accelerated development. The same forces are boosting battery development, which is helping solve intermittency problems caused by relying on wind or solar when the weather doesn’t cooperate. The Energy Information Administration recently forecast that U.S. battery storage capacity will nearly double [in 2024] alone.

    If the GOP response is that battery storage technology is still in the process of advancing, that’s fine. I’ll gladly concede the point.

    But as some Republicans seem inclined to pretend that batteries don’t exist at all, I came across an FAQ that the right should find interesting.

    The U.S. power grid consists of a huge number of interconnected transmission lines that connect a variety of generation sources to loads. The wind does not always blow, and the sun does not always shine, which creates additional variability and uncertainty (as nobody can perfectly forecast wind or solar output). But power grid operators have always had to deal with variability. Many forms of power generation can unexpectedly trip offline without notice and some only produce power at certain times. There is also uncertainty due to ever-changing loads (energy demand) that cannot be perfectly predicted.

    The same online document added, “Grid operators use the interconnected power system to access other forms of generation when contingencies occur and continually turn generators on and off when needed to meet the overall grid demand. Integrating variable renewable power to the grid does not change how this process of balancing electricity supply and demand works.”

    Who published this? The Trump administration’s Department of Energy.

  218. says

    […] While guest-hosting “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” on Thursday, Jonathan Capehart alluded to Post owner Jeff Bezos’ February directive that the editorial section stop publishing pieces critical of traditionally conservative principles like “free markets.” Capehart also cited the paper’s new editorial head’s edict that the section “communicate with optimism about the country in particular and the future in general.”

    “How can we communicate with optimism about the future in general when we’re living in the here and now, where American democracy is in peril?” Capehart said. “Unapologetic patriotism is incomplete if it doesn’t allow for a mirror to be held up to America, her people, and her president—to hold them all accountable when they have strayed from her founding principles.”

    After detailing the Trump administration’s various abuses of power—such as deploying troops in Los Angeles—Capehart continued, “And we’re supposed to ignore it, leave it to others to wrestle with on their news pages and websites? No, no, no, no, no. The Constitution gives us the inherent, unapologetically patriotic right to rail against such affronts to democracy and the rule of law, and the First Amendment demands it.” [video]

    Capehart joins at least 100 journalists and staffers who have resigned or taken buyouts since November, according to a list compiled by Politico. Shortly before the 2024 presidential election, Bezos killed the Post’s endorsement of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

    The Post continues to bleed both subscribers and talent as Bezos further prostrates himself before Trump, revealing his utter lack of principles.

    Link

  219. says

    White House lobbying for a Nobel prize for Trump takes a farcical turn

    “The White House called for the president to receive one Nobel prize in the morning and a different Nobel prize in the afternoon. But why stop there?”

    Donald Trump’s desperate and yearslong desire for a Nobel prize is well documented. In fact, after his defeat in 2020, Trump released a weird, campaign-style video that suggested he’d already received a Nobel prize.

    But as pitiful as this has become, Trump isn’t lobbying by himself. Congressional Republicans have tried to please the president by nominating Trump for a Nobel prize, and foreign leaders eager to curry favor with the American leader have done the same thing.

    And then, of course, there’s the White House. The Hill reported:

    White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said Thursday that President Trump deserves a Nobel Prize for his commitment to ‘restructuring’ global trade rates. ‘I’m thinking that since he’s basically taught the world trade economics, he might be up for the Nobel on economics…,’ Navarro said during an appearance on Fox Business Network.

    He didn’t appear to be kidding. [video]

    Just so we’re all clear, when economists receive Nobel prizes, it’s because of their academic work and the impressiveness of their scholarship. Navarro seemed to suggest that the president should get the same honor for imposing trade tariffs — which as University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers explained, Trump appears to have settled on by “scribbling numbers with a Sharpie.”

    Roughly six hours later, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, reading from prepared notes, told reporters that Trump “has brokered on average about one peace deal or ceasefire per month during his six months in office.” She added, “It’s well past time that President Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” [video]

    She seemed to overlook Trump’s vow to end the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza — a promise he apparently doesn’t know how to keep.

    Nevertheless, to recap, the White House called for the president to receive one Nobel prize in the morning and a different Nobel prize in the afternoon.

    But why stop there? Every year, the Nobel committee awards a prize for medicine — and Trump has presented some groundbreaking ideas about injecting disinfectants into people. Sure, the medical “establishment” frowns on these sorts of treatments, but that’s all the more reason to reward the president’s “outside the box” creativity.

    There’s also a Nobel Prize in literature that could theoretically go to Trump. Has the Nobel committee seen his weird letters to foreign leaders? How about his hysterical tweets filled with misspellings, weird capitalization and enough exclamation points to make an ill-tempered tween blush?

    Or maybe everyone involved can just cut to the chase and simply rename Nobel prizes and agree to call them “Trump Prizes”? Given recent events, it seems inevitable that some GOP lawmaker will introduce a resolution along those lines sometime soon.

  220. says

    Trump Relocates Ghislaine to Texas Club Fed as Negotiations Continue

    Trump has now moved her from her Florida prison to a Texas “club Fed” prison camp (Camp Bryan) near Houston, a low-security facility which currently houses prisoners like disgraced Theranos chief Elizabeth Holmes and Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Star Jen Shah.

    Maxwell’s relocation came two days after her meetings with Deputy Attorney General and Trump personal lawyer Todd Blanche. The Bureau of Prisons gave no explanation for the relocation.

    (Miami Herald article here but it’s paywalled; free for all is this piece in the New York Post.)

  221. says

    Sigh. Not good news.

    Corporation for Public Broadcasting says it is beginning to shut down

    The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) on Friday said it will begin “an orderly wind-down of its operations” after seeing its budget cut through GOP-led legislation.

    “Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations,” CPB President Patricia Harrison said in a statement.

    […] CPB cited legislation passed by Republicans last month that yanked back two years’ of advanced funding at the request of President Trump, amounting to a clawback of more than $1 billion for fiscal years 2026 and 2027.

    It also pointed to a lack of funding for CPB in an annual funding bill advanced by the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday, saying it was the first time in more than five decades the funding had been left out.

    CPB said most of its employees jobs would conclude at the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, while a small transition team would work through January “to ensure a responsible and orderly closeout of operations.”

    “This team will focus on compliance, final distributions, and resolution of long-term financial obligations, including ensuring continuity for music rights and royalties that remain essential to the public media system,” it added.

    […] fees from member stations, which rely on a larger share of CPB funding on average, make up about 30 percent of NPR’s funding. PBS says it also receives annual programming dues from stations to carry national programming.

    Less than 5 percent of the nonprofit’s funding goes toward its operations, while more than 70 percent “goes directly to local public media stations,” CPB states on its website. And almost half of its “total 544 radio and TV grantees are considered rural.”

    “I did vote to move the Labor-HHS bill out of the committee today, even though I have deep concerns about where we are right now,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), a spending cardinal, said Thursday, while pointing to recent tsunami travel advisories Sitka, Alaska, in the aftermath of an 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Russia earlier this week. Murkowski was one of two Republicans to vote against the package clawing back public media funding last month.

    “KCAW, the public radio station there, was the first and only to report on this in Sitka,” she said. “They did not receive any notification from NOAA via the EAS, the Emergency Alert System. Our reporters discovered the warning because they talked to public radio down in the Aleutians.”

    Some members are hopeful of Congress approving some funding for local media ahead of a looming Sept. 30 deadline to fund the government for fiscal 2026.

  222. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/trump-to-build-yugest-tackiest-ballroom

    “Trump To Build Yugest, Tackiest Ballroom At White House Like You Wouldn’t Believe”

    “Fulfilling his lifelong dream of making everything look worse.”

    Fifteen years ago, David Axelrod, who was then a senior adviser to President Obama, got a call from Donald Trump. The cotton-candy-haired real estate developer was offering to build a big, fancy ballroom for the White House, where the largest event space only holds about 200 people for dinner. Bigger events such as state dinners with hundreds of guests require the White House staff to erect tents with flooring on the South Lawn.

    Trump supposedly tried to sell Axelrod on the idea that he was the man for the job by pointing to the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, which from every picture we have ever seen looks like an events room at an airport Hilton. But Axelrod was busy at the time, because he worked for a president who took his job seriously and an administration that had much more important things to do than indulge a billionaire with aesthetic taste that would make a Central Asian dictator blanche.

    Axelrod passed off the project to someone else and never revisited it. The ballroom never happened, and Trump has been stewing about the slight for a decade and a half. Which seems about right, as the man is made up of nothing but […] old resentments.

    Now that Trump is — sigh — living in the White House, he is in a position to build that big, fancy ballroom and, if the renderings of it released on Thursday are to be believed, decorate it to look like a Gilded Age bordello: [Image]

    Seriously, look at that crap. It looks like a Chechen warlord threw up.

    The White House rolled out the announcement of the building of the ballroom on Thursday with a press release and the usual sycophancy from Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt during the daily press briefing:

    “The White House State Ballroom will be a much-needed and exquisite addition of approximately 90,000 total square feet of ornately designed and carefully crafted space, with a seated capacity of 650 people — a significant increase from the 200-person seated capacity in the East Room of the White House.”

    Ninety thousand square feet is waaaaay bigger than one needs to seat 650 people, unless each one is getting his or her own table. […]

    We’ve been to the White House, and the grounds are not huge. Where will the president and convicted felon find the space for this monstrosity? The National Mall? The Capitol? Toronto?

    “The site of the new ballroom will be where the small, heavily changed, and reconstructed East Wing currently sits. The East Wing was constructed in 1902 and has been renovated and changed many times, with a second story added in 1942.”

    This is the White House’s way of telling us they are going to demolish the East Wing [!], which is where the First Lady has her offices. […]

    Ninety. Thousand. Square. Feet. A football field is only 57,600 square feet. The square footage of the ground, state, and residence floors of the White House combined are only 55,000 square feet. (This does not include the West Wing or the apparently-soon-to-be-demolished East Wing, but those are not huge.) The Taj Mahal is less than half the size of this ballroom […]

    “President Trump, and other patriot donors, have generously committed to donating the funds necessary to build this approximately $200 million dollar structure.”

    Here is the White House trying to get out ahead of the deserved criticism that apparently America cannot afford stuff like Medicaid, SNAP, disease research, environmental research, scientific research, peanut butter paste for famine-ravaged countries in Africa and other foreign aid, housing, space exploration, clean energy, Americorps, teachers, new schools, robustly funded world-class universities, emergency aid for any part of the country that gets wrecked by a natural disaster, weather data, hurricane monitoring satellites, enforcement of laws against ripping off consumers and poisoning the environment, and NATO.

    But America can afford to blow $200 million on a giant room that might get used a few times a year, and for which the visual design is what you might get if you wrote a prompt for an AI along the lines of draw a gold ballroom that looks like Elton John exploded.

    Claiming the ballroom will be funded by private donors also gets out ahead of the tiny detail that Congress has not appropriated $200 million to be put towards a ballroom as it would be legally required to do. […]

    Boy, between the ballroom and the $1 billion the taxpayers are spending to upgrade the giant donated Air Force One that Trump gets to take with him when he leaves office, there is a strong “let them eat cake” vibe emanating from this administration […]

    […] Trump has already made some changes. He paved over the Rose Garden so it will look more like the patio at Mar-a-Lago. He cut down a tree planted by Andrew Jackson, supposedly for safety reasons, and put in two giant 88-foot flagpoles — oh, no reason — on the North and South Lawns.

    […] a president has never put his stamp on the White House by building an addition such as this: a big, tacky, unnecessary add-on […]

    technically the White House belongs to the American people. […]

    The White House is not a palace. If anything, it should be the opposite of a palace, in keeping with America’s historic belief in itself as a place that is governed by the people and not a king. […]

  223. says

    […] Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, a man who was briefly in charge of dismantling our entire government, got involved in an explicitly racist and misogynistic conversation, which culminated in his sharing a post about how women were “built” to be traded and “captured” by men.

    This all started when Morgonn McMichael, a baby Phyllis Schlafly from Turning Point USA, asked, “Why do liberal white women hate white people so much?” Musk responded, “They’ve been programmed to do so by their teachers and the media.”

    It really is quite bold of these folks to assume that what anyone “hates” is “white people” in general and not them in particular. I, for one, have many white friends.

    Thousands of people responded to McMichael’s post and to Musk’s comment — practically all of them in vehement support of this truly batshit idea. Dissenting voices were few and far between. Imagine being that repugnant, as a person, and actually believing that people have be brainwashed to not like you.

    And yet, it gets worse. Somehow. Because someone decided to get real sciencey about it, in a post that Musk decided to actually share.

    Insightful. Women are built to be traded to another tribe (or captured) and slide seamlessly into their new culture. That keeps them safe, even though they are physically weak.

    20 years after they are captured, they are the matriarchs who enforce that culture. That is why women conform to the dominant culture, and thereby amplify that culture. IMO, that is why Western women, raised in anti-white culture, are now amplifying anti-white culture, even though they are white. They think that keeps them safe, and they are correct, but only in the sort [sic] term. In the long term, they will be forced to remember they are white. Better they are reminded of that by white men, because the alternative is not so gentle.

    This also got thousands of likes and hundreds of mostly positive responses from people who were very excited to agree with the idea that women are born to be property and are best off being controlled by white men.

    This was the top reply.

    “For a heck of a long time kidnapping was seen as a legitimate relationship strategy. From the historical accounts that I read some of those turned out to be very successful partnerships (and others led to husbands meeting early and violent ends).”

    I think we can be relatively certain that this person has not read a single “historical account” of this, or of anything else.

    But just so we’re clear, liberals are “crazy” for suggesting that anything might be a reference to the kind of creepy, outdated “race science” regularly espoused by the majority of X users, while the richest man in the world and his legions of followers are chatting about how “it’s just science” that liberal women hate white people because women are biologically programmed to be treated like property and we’re just going along with the dominant forces that brainwashed us into not liking racists.

    Not only that, […] but conservatives actually claiming that white people are genetically superior or that women are “built” to be kidnapped is not something that will reflect poorly on Republicans. […] [social media post]

    Charlie Kirk can promote Steve Sailer, a white supremacist who dabbles in the fine art of scientific racism and who just published a book about “noticing” that Jewish people control the world. (In case you were not aware, “noticing” is an anti-Semitic dog whistle — one which Kirk freely uses in the post below.) [social media post]

    Oh! And you can also have conservatives responding to the Sydney Sweeney ad by expressing relief and gratitude that they have been liberated from years of brutal oppression in the form of ads that do not feature pretty, thin white blonde girls with large breasts (although I’m really going to need to point out that, despite making up only 59 percent of the country, white people account for 72 percent of those featured in advertisements). […]

    Though, to be fair, there are still those who are complaining that Sweeney is an ancient and haggard 27 years old instead of 15 like Brooke Shields was when she was in a Calvin Klein ad that bordered on child pornography.

    […] They want to be on team “White people are genetically superior/Women are biologically predispositioned to be submissive to men […]!” without it being a reflection on them and who they are as people. […]

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/elon-agrees-women-are-built-to-be

  224. says

    Ever since 46-year-old Rodney Taylor was taken into custody by ICE agents this past January, the Georgia barber’s friends, fiancée, and even the immigration judge who was given no say in whether Taylor would be detained have been begging for his release.

    It was a bad enough situation to begin with, as Taylor has been in the United States since the age of two and was being deported to Liberia over a crime he was convicted of when he was 16 and for which he was later pardoned by the state of Georgia, and because he is a double amputee who requires medical attention the detention facility is not capable of providing. And now it’s worse.

    Taylor has now been placed in solitary confinement — a practice which violates international law regarding the humane treatment of prisoners — for refusing to go into his cell after it flooded, on account of the fact that it could have destroyed his electronic prosthetic legs. The legs, which are powered by a rechargeable battery, are microprocessor-controlled and therefore cannot get wet. If they get wet, they’ll be ruined, and Taylor will not be able to walk.

    According to Taylor’s fiancée, Mildred Pierre, when Taylor refused to go into his flooded cell on Sunday, he was handcuffed by guards and brought to solitary, where he stayed until Tuesday without water to drink or any ability to recharge the batteries for his legs.

    Naturally, Georgia’s Stewart detention facility says that this cannot possibly be true, because they don’t even have solitary confinement and will not stand for it being called that. Brian Todd, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, the private prison company [!] that operates Stewart, told The Guardian that what they have are “restrictive housing units,” in which prisoners are confined to windowless cells, by themselves, for 23 hours a day, denied access to a radio or television and only allowed to shower three times a week. This is very different from solitary confinement, where prisoners are confined to windowless cells, by themselves, for 23 hours a day, denied access to a radio or television and only allowed to shower three times a week. […]

    Todd also claimed that Taylor “is being regularly monitored by facility medical staff, with all known medical issues are being addressed, and our staff continuing to accommodate his needs.” Given that this has not been the case in the many months Taylor has been in detention, it seems unlikely that it is the case now.

    Taylor was meant to have been fitted for a new set of prosthetics just days after he was detained in January, and was not able to even begin that process until late May, after multiple outlets had reported on his poor treatment at the facility.

    Via The Guardian:

    Pierre had gotten Taylor’s clinic in Lawrenceville, Georgia, to send the new prosthetics to a clinic in Albany, Georgia, about 75 miles from Stewart – in February. Nonetheless, when guards took him, shackled, to the rural clinic on 23 May, no one from Stewart or the clinic had ensured that the battery would be charged.

    Not only that, when he returned in late July, the clinic could not calibrate the legs to his body, since staff was unfamiliar with his model of prosthetics. Using the new prosthetics for months without them being calibrated means he suffers severe pain on his left knee, Taylor told the Guardian.

    […] If officers at these facilities are putting nice, double amputee barbers in solitary confinement for refusing to destroy the prosthetic legs they’d been working to get for months, and which cost about $50,000 per leg — what the hell are they doing to everyone else?

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/ice-detainee-wouldnt-let-guards-break

  225. says

    Followup to comment 214.

    […] Trump on Friday said he had ordered the firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, hours after the agency had reported the large revisions to May and June jobs data that cast doubt on the strength of the jobs market.

    Trump took to social media to announce he was firing Erika McEntarfer, who was appointed by then-president Joe Biden and who has run the BLS since the beginning of 2024 […]

    Washington Post link

  226. says

    Followup to comment 225.

    Trump fires labor statistics boss hours after weak jobs report

    “[Trump] implied that the BLS commissioner, longtime federal employee Erika McEntarfer, manipulated the data'”for political purposes.’ ”

    […] “We need accurate Jobs Numbers,” Trump wrote. “She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.”

    An administration official told NBC News shortly after the post that McEntarfer had indeed been fired.

    […] The BLS on Friday morning reported that the U.S. economy added just 73,000 jobs in July, well below estimates. It also said it had revised the May and June numbers lower by more than 200,000 jobs combined.

    […] resident Joe Biden nominated McEntarfer in July 2023 and was confirmed by the Senate in an 86-to-8 vote (with six members not voting) in January 2024. She received overwhelming bipartisan support in the vote.

    […] Trump claimed without evidence that the commissioner “faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory.”

    The BLS routinely revises economic data such as the jobs report, GDP figures and inflation data. Due to the scale of the U.S. economy and response rates to surveys where BLS collects this data, there can often be lags in data collection. But that lag does not imply any wrongdoing or manipulation. [Correct]

    […] Any erosion of trustworthy data can impact businesses, consumers, lending and policy makers. […]

    [I snipped details concerning a related issue: Trump threatening to fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell.]

  227. says

    The biggest flaw in Trump’s letters to drugmakers on prescription drug costs

    “On the surface, the president appears to be working on lowering the costs of medications. Just below the surface, his efforts are largely meaningless.”

    Related video at the link.

    As much as Donald Trump talked about lowering the costs of prescription medications in his first term, the president’s underwhelming efforts fell short, and drug costs continued to climb. Trump’s second term, however, was supposed to be different.

    In fact, just a couple of months ago Trump appeared on Fox News to claim he’d been “studying” the pharmaceutical industry, and he declared, “I figured it out.” Around the same time, the president signed an executive order ostensibly about lowering drug costs, although the directive didn’t do much.

    […] he even talked about lowering prices by up to 1,500%, which was literally and mathematically impossible. The bad news is that the president still doesn’t have an effective plan. NBC News reported on new letters the White House has sent to more than a dozen major pharmaceutical companies, demanding that they lower consumer prices within 60 days.

    In the letters — which Trump published on his social media platform Truth Social — the drugmakers were told to offer the ‘full portfolio’ of their existing medications to Medicaid patients at the same prices paid abroad, also known as the ‘most favored nation’ rule. He also told drugmakers to ‘guarantee’ that patients on Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance get the same lower prices that are paid abroad for all newly approved drugs ‘both upon launch and moving forward.’

    While it’s likely the companies and their legal teams read the presidential correspondence with great interest, consumers shouldn’t get their hopes up. As The New York Times explained, “Despite the strong language in the letters … Mr. Trump’s demands amount to a request that drug companies act voluntarily: His administration has not put forward a clear legal authority to compel them to lower their prices.”

    […] In his first term, Trump even accused the drug industry of corruption, arguing that pharmaceutical companies contributed “massive amounts of money” to politicians as part of a scheme to keep the cost of medicines higher.

    That posture didn’t last. Trump ultimately put a pharmaceutical company executive in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, and just as importantly, he tapped a top lobbyist for a pharmaceutical company to serve as one of the key architects of his first-term drug pricing plan.

    With this in mind, around this time seven years ago, Trump unveiled a policy he seemed quite excited about, boasting to Americans that “in two weeks” (it’s always “two weeks”) the public would see “massive drops in prices” thanks entirely to a presidential directive he’d signed.

    There were no massive price drops. Trump’s entire policy proved to be a bust that was rejected in the courts, and his bold promises went unfulfilled.

    It fell to Joe Biden to make progress on an issue where Trump had failed.

    Years later, the incumbent president nevertheless returned to the issue with unnerving hype, and he declared on his social media platform in May, “DRUG PRICES TO BE CUT BY 59%, PLUS!”

    No such cut followed.

    Complicating matters, when it comes to his administration’s and his party’s approach to the issue, Trump continues to conveniently overlook some relevant details. The New York Times reported about a month ago:

    The sweeping Republican policy bill that awaits President Trump’s signature on Friday includes a little-noticed victory for the drug industry. The legislation allows more medications to be exempt from Medicare’s price negotiation program, which was created to lower the government’s drug spending. Now, manufacturers will be able to keep those prices higher.

    The Times cited an estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that found the Republican-imposed change will save the industry — the one the president claims to have “studied” — nearly $5 billion over the next decade. [!]

    Consumers aren’t catching a break, but the drug industry appears to be benefiting quite a bit from Trump’s and his party’s efforts. [!]

  230. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Expanding on 220.

    Someone waived Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex offender status to move her to a minimum security camp in Texas

    she has been moved to FPC Bryan, about 100 miles northwest of Houston. The reason for the move is listed as a “lesser security transfer” […] which is completely inappropriate of for inmates who are in the early stages of serving their sentences, according to another source. “This is such obvious corruption. I have never seen this before,” said another person at BOP familiar with the situation.

  231. KG says

    birgerjohansson@228,
    The article at your link has a distinct whiff of creationism about it.

  232. KG says

    Someone waived Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex offender status to move her to a minimum security camp in Texas CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain quoting Allison Gill

    Headline from the near future: Ghislaine Maxwell dead, “shot trying to ecape”.

  233. KG says

    Lynna, OM, sorry if #232 is over the line. I’m (really) not hoping for Maxwell to be shot – just suggesting that the move could be in order to make an “escape bid” more credible.

  234. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Kyle Cheney (Politico):

    A federal judge has blocked Secretary Noem’s move to terminate temporary status for Nicaragua, Honduran and Nepali immigrants, finding the cancellation was likely rooted in “racial animus.”

    Judge Trina Thompson cited comments from Noem and others comparing TPS holders—who have lawful status—to criminals and people in the country illegally. She said Noem’s comments seemed to espouse replacement theory. “Color is neither a poison nor a crime”

  235. John Morales says

    “What Were the Chances of Abiogenesis? – Universe Today”

    100%, given life exists. Duh.

    (What are the chances of my having been born?)

  236. says

    Foreign Governments Are ‘Playing Trump’ on Tariffs

    […] Trump on Thursday night signed an executive order applying blanket tariffs to scores of countries. In announcing tariffs ranging from 10% to 41% levied against around 70 countries, Trump began a new chapter in a volatile, months-long saga that reached a fever pitch over the last couple weeks, during which he also announced hundreds of billions of dollars worth of so-called trade deals with the United Kingdom, Japan, Indonesia, the European Union, and South Korea, among others.

    The unprecedented process has restructured how the U.S. does global trade. But it’s what Trump hasn’t been able to do which reveals the cracks in his economic agenda.

    Large parts of Trump’s so-called trade agreements amount to nothing, economists and foreign trade experts told TPM. The more than $1 trillion in foreign investments the White House has touted have quickly revealed themselves to be aspirational apparitions at best, and expensive vehicles for increasing the ballooning federal debt at worse. Trump’s whims and the volatility they create means companies can’t securely take the chance to bring production back to the U.S. — the stated reason for imposing such heavy tariffs in the first place. And these agreements are only frameworks with non-binding language. Much of what nations are agreeing to is merely keeping conversations open.

    “The agreement quote unquote,” said William Reinsch, former president of the National Foreign Trade Council, “is a promise for a further discussion, so there’s less there than meets the eye to these things.”

    […] Judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington D.C., hearing an appeal of that case, on Thursday expressed doubt about the government’s justification for using a national security-related measure to enact global trade policy. The case is expected to make its way to the Supreme Court, which could declare most of Trump’s tariffs a violation of the law and void them.

    […] the president, and by extension the American people, is being hoodwinked by foreign governments protecting their domestic interests by appeasing Trump with empty words.

    […] In recent days, Trump has trumpeted multibillion-dollar investments that foreign governments have pledged to put into the U.S. economy, including wo separate $750 billion and $600 billion pledges from the EU, a $550 executive account funded by Japan, $350 billion from South Korea. These flashy numbers don’t tell the whole story.

    […] In a late July release, the White House claimed the 27 member states that make up the EU “will purchase $750 billion in U.S. energy” over the next three years, along with $600 billion in additional investments. Almost immediately, the European Commission contradicted that alleged commitment. Euronews itemized a list of conflicting accounts, ranging from the tariff rate on pharmaceuticals to the pledges to purchase U.S. military equipment, a pledge Euronews reported the EU “resolutely denied.” [!]

    A commitment to spend $250 billion per year on U.S. energy products would also require Europe to triple their annual American energy imports. “Question one is if they need that much, can afford that much,” Reinsch said. “Question two is if we can even supply that much.”

    The EU has no power to give the U.S. the more than $1 trillion the Trump administration announced. Such investments are wholly up to “thousands of private companies in the 27 member states,” said Jared Bernstein, the former chair of the United States Council of Economic Advisers and a fellow at the Center for American Progress.

    […] The $550 billion “investment vehicle” from Japan will only amount to about $5.5 billion to $11 billion in actual cash investments, a top Japanese official told Bloomberg, while the Asian nation stands to save $68 billion in lower tariffs. The remaining portion of the Japanese investment will come in the form of loans, adding to the growing federal deficit.

    […] “I think he knows that these things are not going to be fulfilled,” Bergsten said. “I think he knows that these things are not operational. He’s been told that by his own people.”

    With proclivities that DeHaven likened to a child flipping a light switch, Trump’s inconsistency around his favored economic policy tool is eroding trust in the American economic system.

    Confusion abounded up until the moment the full spread of levies was rolled out Thursday night, with White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt saying earlier that day that, ““[Y]es, tomorrow, August 1st, the reciprocal rates will be going into effect.” As of now, most of the tariffs won’t actually go into effect until Aug. 7. Goods loaded onto shipping vessels by then won’t be subject to the blanket tariff rates until Oct. 5, per a White House announcement.

    […] nations aren’t taking the Trump administration seriously, according to statements from key foreign officials.

    […] They also likely know the tariffs, which Trump levied under a statute called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act or IEEPA, face legal challenges that could eliminate them altogether.

    […] Democrats pounced on the perpetual uncertainty created by Trump’s new world order. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Thursday, “Our businesses, our small businesses, our medium-sized businesses, our large businesses need some degree of certainty and all they’re getting is chaos and inflation… So the Trump tariff trade war is a trade war on the American people.”

    Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday pointed to the trade issues as a reason not to cut interest rates during a press conference, saying, in part, “we’re still a ways away from seeing where things settle down.”

    And data released by the Commerce Department Thursday showed core inflation increased by 2.8% in June, over the 2% benchmark the Federal Reserve is aiming for. Prices for home goods and durable household goods rose by 1.3%, while prices for clothing and shoes rose by 0.4%. […]

  237. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    CBS – DoJ fired official whose husband operated controversial ICEBlock app

    The ICEBlock app [for iOS], which carries the moniker, “see something; tap something”, bills itself as an “innovative, completely anonymous crowdsourced platform that allows users to report Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity with just two taps on their phone.”
    […]
    the ICEBlock app was publicized in reporting by CNN and later by […] Laura Loomer, Feinstein said she notified her employers about threats she and her husband had been receiving from critics. Feinstein said she was fired days after

    Allison Gill (Mueller, She Wrote):

    You have to go through the MSPB first before you can get permission to sue. Trump fired me because of my podcast in 2019 and my case languished at MSPB for years. I finally got permission to sue, and my case doesn’t go to trial until 2026.

  238. says

    Stephen Miran, who chairs […] Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, took a break from stoking racial resentment to appear on CNN Friday and dismiss increasingly troubling jobs reports. When asked about struggling small businesses like Detroit Axle, which recently announced that it will close a warehouse and lay off more than 100 employees due to Trump’s chaotic tariff policies, Miran blamed the company itself for failing under Trump’s ill-conceived trade wars.

    “I don’t know the story of that business, but it’s always convenient to blame political changes when your business fails,” Miran told CNN’s Kate Bolduan before clumsily trying to change the subject. “So I don’t know what to make of that particular story. But economically, as I said before, there’s just zero evidence of increased prices for consumers as a result of the tariffs.” [video]

    As for “zero evidence” of price increases on consumers, big box retail behemoth Walmart announced in May that it would be raising its prices as a result of the administration’s tariffs. More recently, an analysis by The Wall Street Journal found that since January, despite public proclamations saying otherwise, Amazon has steadily increased prices on a variety of consumer goods.

    At the grocery store, beef prices are soaring and Nestle said Halloween candy will be more expensive, thanks to tariffs increasing in the price of cocoa.

    Link

  239. says

    Followup to comment 238:

    Shortly after Miran’s appearance on CNN, video-gaming giant Nintendo announced it will further increase the price of its popular Switch console and many accessories in the United States “based on market conditions.”

    Trump’s trade wars have led to dubious deals, all of which end with rising costs for Americans—and no relief in sight.

    Same link.

  240. says

    Fun to watch:

    […] the minute long, real commercial from Sweden says it all. In it, Samuel L. Jackson talks about windmills and their benefits in his typical way. That is to say, there’s a lot of swearing in it. Swedish windmill manufacturer Vattenfall is the company behind it. I only wish we could talk this frankly in America, at least on regular TV. It says a ton in 60 seconds, and it’s pretty much what most all of us feel. Enjoy!

    Link

  241. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Rando: “New COVID horror just dropped. Mask up, punks!!”

    Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez (Rehab Med):

    study finds that respiratory viruses like flu & COVID can wake up dormant breast cancer cells in the lungs, triggering metastatic growth within days.

    Here we demonstrate, in mice […] these experimental findings align with human observational data. Analyses of cancer survivors from the UK Biobank (all cancers) and Flatiron Health (breast cancer) databases reveal that SARS-CoV-2 infection substantially increases the risk of cancer-related mortality and lung metastasis compared with uninfected cancer survivors. These discoveries underscore the huge impact of respiratory viral infections on metastatic cancer resurgence

    Rando:

    This is, quite literally, what lead to my mum’s death. She was in remission from stage 4 BC. She got the flu. She was gone three months later. The BC reactivated, metastasised to her liver, and that was it. […] We lost her in 2014, and I still miss her, but I also have the distance now to be able to read something like this and feel like it’s filling in the blanks.

  244. birgerjohansson says

    Fwd: ‘Ukraine’s Swedish “Bonus” artillery shells wipe out Russian tank convoys – Russia’s armor cannot hide.’


    (Erratum: should be 2000 m/s, NOT  2000km/s)
    I wish the audio was not so goddamn shouty.

  245. John Morales says

    That’s pure clickbait; a nothing-burger always being triumphant.

    Here is exactly the opposite of that channel: https://www.youtube.com/@timesofindia

    That one has Russia winning every single thing, just like the one you like has Ukraine winning every single thing.

    Kinda cute people get sucked in by those; in one set, Putin is beaming and Zelensky despairing, in the other the exact opposite. But I suppose content is not what is sought by those people, any more than factuality.

  246. JM says

    The Moscow Times: Russia Moves to Nationalize Country’s Third-Largest Gold Mining Firm

    The case targets Yuzhnouralzoloto (South Ural Gold), the country’s third-largest gold mining company, which is controlled by billionaire Konstantin Strukov, the deputy chairman of the Chelyabinsk regional legislative assembly and a member of the ruling, pro-Kremlin United Russia party.

    They are bringing a case against Strukov but I doubt that anybody thinks it matters. This is about undercutting the oligarchs and supporting the war effort.

    In a March report to President Vladimir Putin, Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov said companies already nationalized were valued at 2.4 trillion rubles ($30 billion).
    In 2024, the state assumed control of nearly 70 companies with total revenues exceeding 807.6 billion rubles ($10.2 billion) and assets valued at more than 544.7 billion rubles ($6.9 billion), according to The Moscow Times’ calculations.

    The government in Moscow is slowly moving the country to being entirely on a war time basis and under direct control from Moscow.

  247. says

    NBC News:

    “Stocks tumbled on Friday to kick off August trading as investors weighed stark signs of a weakening economy and President Donald Trump’s modified tariff rates. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 542.40 points, or 1.23%, closing at 43,588.58. The S&P 500 shed 1.60% to end at 6,238.01, while the Nasdaq Composite dipped 2.24% and settled at 20,650.13.

  248. says

    NBC News:

    President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, made an extremely rare visit to Gaza on Friday amid the spiraling hunger crisis in the enclave under Israel’s deadly offensive and aid restrictions.

  250. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    CNBC – Fed Governor Kugler is resigning, giving Trump a nominee on committee that sets interest rates

    In a letter addressed to Trump, Kugler, 55, did not state a reason for her decision to leave […] Kugler’s term was set to expire at the end of January 2026. A Biden nominee, she joined the Board of Governors in September 2023 […] Trump alleged without proof that Kugler resigned over a disagreement with Powell on interest rates. […] Kugler of late has expressed […] support for holding rates steady until the impact Trump’s tariffs are having on inflation becomes clearer.

  251. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    AP – Radioactive wasp nest found at site where US once made nuclear bombs

    Stephen Schwartz (Nuclear weapons expert):

    near tanks where liquid nuclear waste is stored, […] The nest had a radiation level 10 times what is allowed by federal regulations […] The workers sprayed the nest with insect killer, removed it and disposed of it as radioactive waste. No wasps were found, officials said.

    Sure, perfectly fine!

    Geoff Brumfiel (NPR):

    Savannah River workers found FOUR radioactive wasps nests, not just one…

    “[…] nests with very low levels of radioactive contamination […] The nests do not pose a health risk to SRS workers, the community, or the environment. […]”

    Martin Pfeiffer: “*sickos meme* YES YES YES!”

    Popehat: “OK I have played all four Fallouts and I know exactly how this goes.”

    PopSci

    generating blowback from local watchdogs. Tom Clements, executive director of Savannah River Watch, […] was “mad as a hornet” about the situation. […] the official report […] didn’t provide adequate details on the source of contamination […] The report also didn’t include the species of wasp. […] useful for searching out other nests, as some wasps build their homes in the dirt while others construct them from other materials.

     
    Martin Pfeiffer (Nuclear Anthropologist):

    Honestly, I’d expect most wasps nests in that area to be radioactive if not enough to breach reportable limits.
    […]
    As I wrote […] Biological movement of radioactive materials is almost certainly way not sufficiently understood & vastly underestimated. SR & Hanford are contaminated as hell, radioactive wasp nests is a result.

    This put me in mind of Hanford’s radioactive tumbleweeds […] there is extensive ground contamination from liquid wastes being purposefully, and accidentally, released to the environment. […] tumbleweed (apparently), has extended root systems that bioaccumulate radionuclides from the soil. […] they are difficult to control, manage, and get rid of.
    […]
    A glorious thing I learned about in researching this post! In 1959, in an episode all too reminiscent of Absolution from the Southern Reach Series, a badger cleared the way for bunnies to access one of the many waste pits at Hanford. These bunnies then dumped over 200 curies of radioactive crap around the Hanford site.
    […]
    a similar report from 2017 but involving… bird crap! ON THE ROOF! Of a building at Hanford Site so once again, not a huge surprise that the shit was radioactive.

  252. JM says

    Reuters: Exclusive: Indian state refiners pause Russian oil purchases, sources say

    Indian state refiners have stopped buying Russian oil in the past week as discounts narrowed this month and U.S. President Donald Trump warned against purchasing oil from Moscow, industry sources said.
    India, the world’s third-largest oil importer, is the biggest buyer of seaborne Russian crude.

    This would be a blow to Russia if India really cuts off from Russian oil. This is only state refiners but they are the big buyers and isn’t a formal stated policy, they have just stopped buying.
    Russian oil’s price advantage has done down. The EU has cut into trade routes and oil prices have dropped. India is likely willing to lay off the oil now to ease trade negotiations but leaving itself the option of picking it up again later if the situation changes.

  255. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    GOP celebrates the return of the great American car with a picture of a Lada

    I had to double check and triple check to see if it was a joke, but nope—that really is a picture of President Trump, doing his favorite weird dance that looks like a baby who has just discovered his hands, in front of a Lada. And not even a relatively new Lada either […] the 1970s and ’80s. What the hell?

    […] image bears the watermark of The Daily Signal […] It’s a full blown post by the official GOP account, a tweet that proudly proclaims “The One Big Beautiful bill will drive the return of the great American car.”
    […]
    Ladas are, most notably, not American-made cars. […] But even as a mistake, using this Lada image makes no sense. It even looks like a crappy old car. […] the future of the auto industry this tweet is selling strikes me as pretty grim, even besides the fact that is an old Soviet-made car in the background.

  258. birgerjohansson says

    Fun fact: the town Rjukan in Norway is literally in shadow from September to March as it sits in a valley between high mountains.

    It is also famous because of a WWII sabotage of a facility that produced heavy water the Germans intended to use for their nuclear program. You may have seen the film with Kirk Douglas.

  265. says

    https://www.msnbc.com/all
    Chris Hayes

    ‘Absolutely insane’: Bernie slams Trump for threatening Canada over Palestine move
    Video is 7:34 minutes

    Trump moves Ghislaine Maxwell to ‘cushy’ prison with Elizabeth Holmes, Real Housewives star
    Video is 5:08 minutes

    Trump will try to ‘cook the books’ after firing labor stats chief, experts warn
    Video is 10:02 minutes

  267. says

    Followup to comments 225 and 226.

    […] Three years ago, when Turkey’s economic statistics agency released a report showing that the country’s inflation rate was at 36 percent, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fired the head of the agency and replaced him with a loyal ally. When it rains too much, true leaders fire the meteorologists.

    For now, the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] is still staffed by the sort of professionals who would sooner file for unemployment themselves than fudge the unemployment numbers. But the impulsive firing seems to herald a new chapter in the president’s often delusional second term. Trump is officially in his Mad King era, demanding the impossible, lashing out at those who can’t provide it, and seeing vast conspiracies behind every setback. It is the heir to Caligula appointing his horse as consul, […] It is Britain banning productions of King Lear, in the twilight of George III’s reign.

    But also, BLS aside, a lot of modern conservatism is kind of premised on this kind of cooking of the books (or banning them as the case may be). Trump’s attempt to intimidate the Bureau of Labor Statistics was a fitting end to a week in which his Environmental Protection Agency sought to walk back its landmark finding that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health. They are rejecting a scientific consensus, in other words, to accommodate Trump’s economic agenda. For years, Republican legislatures and administrations have worked to prohibit accurate climate science from informing environmental planning. The first seven months of his term have been defined by a purge of government health data and the people who produce it. At this point, it might as well be the ruling party’s mantra: Hear no evil, see no evil…profit?

    Link

  268. says

    Trump administration halted civil rights lawsuits targeting abuses of prisoners and the mentally ill, by ProPublica

    The Trump administration has halted litigation aimed at stopping civil rights abuses of prisoners in Louisiana and mentally ill people living in South Carolina group homes.

    The Biden administration filed lawsuits against the two states in December after Department of Justice investigations concluded that they had failed to fix violations despite years of warnings.

    Louisiana’s prison system has kept thousands of incarcerated people behind bars for weeks, months or sometimes more than a year after they were supposed to be released, records show. And the DOJ accused South Carolina of institutionalizing thousands of people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses — sometimes for decades — rather than provide services that would allow them to live in less restricted settings, as is their right under federal law. [Yep, those are civil rights abuses.]

    Federal judges temporarily suspended the lawsuits in February at the request of the states and with the support of the DOJ.

    Civil rights lawyers who have monitored the cases said the move is another sign of the Trump administration’s retreat from the department’s mission of protecting the rights of vulnerable groups. Since January, President Donald Trump’s DOJ has dropped racial discrimination lawsuits, abandoned investigations of police misconduct and canceled oversight of troubled law enforcement agencies.

    […] The unit, the Special Litigation Section, has seen a dramatic reduction in lawyers since Trump took office in January. Court records show at least seven attorneys working on the lawsuits against Louisiana and South Carolina are no longer with the DOJ.

    The section had more than 90 employees at the start of the year, including about 60 front-line attorneys. By June, it had about 25, including around 15 front-line lawyers, according to a source familiar with its operation. […]

    Similar departures have been seen throughout the DOJ.

    […] The federal government has used settlement talks in the past to hammer out consent decrees, agreements that set a list of requirements to fix civil rights violations and are overseen by an outside monitor and federal judge to ensure compliance. But Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump’s appointee to run the DOJ’s civil rights division, has made no secret of her distaste for such measures.

    In May, Dhillon announced she was moving to dismiss efforts to impose consent decrees on the Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis police departments. […]

    Noureldin, now a senior vice president at the government watchdog group Common Cause, said consent decrees provide an important level of oversight by an independent judge. By contrast, out-of-court settlements can be subject to the political whims of a new administration, which can decide to drop a case or end an agreement despite evidence of continuing constitutional violations.

    “When you have a consent decree or a court-enforced settlement, the Justice Department can’t unilaterally just withdraw from the agreement,” Noureldin said. “A federal judge would have to agree that the public interest is served by terminating that settlement.”

    “I Lost Everything”

    In the case of Louisiana, the Justice Department issued a scathing report in January 2023 about the state confining prisoners beyond their sentences. […]

    Among those held longer than they should have been was Robert Parker, a disc jockey known as “DJ Rob” in New Orleans, where he played R&B and hip-hop music at weddings and private parties. Parker, 55, was arrested in late 2016 after violating a restraining order brought by a former girlfriend.

    He was supposed to be released in October 2017, but a prison staffer mistakenly classified him as a sex offender. That meant he was required to provide prison authorities with two addresses where he could stay that complied with sex offender registry rules.

    Prison documents show Parker repeatedly told authorities that he wasn’t a sex offender and pleaded to speak to the warden to clear up the mistake. But nobody acted until a deputy public defender contacted state officials months later to complain. By the time he walked out, Parker had spent 337 extra days behind bars. During that period, he said, his car was repossessed, his mother died and his reputation was ruined.

    “I lost everything,” he told ProPublica […]

    Unlike other jurisdictions, where the convicted are housed in state facilities, inmates in Louisiana can be held in local jails overseen by sheriffs. A major contributor to the so-called over-detentions was poor communication among Louisiana’s court clerks, sheriff’s offices and the state department of corrections […]

    Until recently, the agencies shared prisoner sentencing information by shuttling stacks of paperwork by van or truck from the court to the sheriff’s office for the parish holding the prisoner, then to corrections officials. The document transfers, which often crisscrossed the state, typically happened only once a week. When the records finally arrived, it could take staff a month or longer to enter the data into computers, creating more delays. In addition, staff made data errors when calculating release dates. [Wow. That is a really cumbersome system.]

    […]correction officials have been working with local officials to ensure prisoner releases are computed in a “timely and correct fashion.” Louisiana officials point to a new website that allows electronic sharing of information among the various agencies.

    […] Local attorneys who are handling lawsuits against the state expressed skepticism […]

    William Most, an attorney who filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of incarcerated people who had been detained past their release dates, noted that as late as May 2024, 141 people who were released that month had been kept longer than they should have been, 120 of them for more than 30 days.

    “I have seen no evidence suggesting the problem in Louisiana is fixed,” Most said. “And it seems unwise to dismiss any cases while that’s the situation.”

    Trapped in Group Homes

    South Carolina’s mentally ill population is grappling with similar challenges.

    After years of lawsuits and complaints, a DOJ investigation determined that officials illegally denied community-based services — required by the Americans with Disabilities Act and a 1999 Supreme Court decision — to over 1,000 people diagnosed as seriously mentally ill. Instead, the state placed them in group homes that failed to provide adequate care and were overly restrictive, the department alleged.

    The DOJ report didn’t address why the state relied so heavily on group homes. […]

    Kimberly Tissot, president of the disability rights group Able South Carolina, said it was common for disabled adults who were living successfully on their own to be involuntarily committed to an adult group home simply because they visited a hospital to pick up medicine.

    Tissot, who has inspected hundreds of the adult facilities, said they often are roach-infested, soaked in urine, lacking in adequate medicine and staffed by untrained employees. Her description mirrors the findings of several state and independent investigations. […]

    “We have had people die in these facilities because of the conditions,” said Tissot, who worked closely with the DOJ investigators. Scores of sexual abuse incidents, assaults and deaths in such group homes have been reported to the state […]

    After two years of failed attempts, state lawmakers passed a law in April that consolidated services for disabled people into a new agency responsible for expanding access to home and community-based treatments and for ensuring compliance with federal laws. […]

    Tissot credits the federal attention with creating a sense of urgency among state lawmakers to make improvements. While she said she is pleased with the latest progress, she warned that if the DOJ dropped the case, it would undermine the enforcement of disabled people’s civil rights and allow state abuses to continue.

    […] “Most importantly, it abandons the people directly impacted.”

  269. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/hey-hows-the-groceries

    Back in ‘24, 77 millions voters chose a man convicted of 34 felonies, who bankrupted six companies (including two casinos) and was found liable for financial fraud because they thought that guy would be good for the prices of The Groceries. How’s it going?

    Welp, on Friday the stock market plummeted after the regime announced new, insane tariffs against allies Canada and Switzerland. Tariffs on goods coming in to the US are now the highest in a century, and will cost the average American household $2,400 a year, hurting poorer people the most, of course. The dollar is sinking, Treasury yields dropped, indicating pessimism, and the VIX, AKA the OH SHIT market-volatility index, went up. The unemployment rate has been going up, and the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics revised (downward) its payroll count for May and June by a combined 258,000 jobs. And July’s report, well… [video]

    Consumer prices are up, up, up like a rocket since Trump took office, and spending is down. […]

    By every indicator, the economy is slowing down […]

    If Trump was actively trying to wreck it by injecting as much uncertainty as possible, it would not look any different.

    But somebody’s got to get blamed for anything that makes Dim Jong Un look bad. So, he decreed YER FIRED to the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, by TruthSocial post […]

    I was just informed that our Country’s “Jobs Numbers” are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory. This is the same Bureau of Labor Statistics that overstated the Jobs Growth in March 2024 by approximately 818,000 and, then again, right before the 2024 Presidential Election, in August and September, by 112,000. These were Records — No one can be that wrong? We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes. McEntarfer said there were only 73,000 Jobs added (a shock!) but, more importantly, that a major mistake was made by them, 258,000 Jobs downward, in the prior two months. Similar things happened in the first part of the year, always to the negative. The Economy is BOOMING under “TRUMP” despite a Fed that also plays games, this time with Interest Rates, where they lowered them twice, and substantially, just before the Presidential Election, I assume in the hopes of getting “Kamala” elected – How did that work out? Jerome “Too Late” Powell should also be put “out to pasture.” Thank you for your attention to this matter!

    McEntarfer has been in government for 20 years — including under Trump I — and re-adjusted numbers under Biden too, because the estimates and the final numbers are always different. […]

    He continued on:

    In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad — Just like when they had three great days around the 2024 Presidential Election, and then, those numbers were “taken away” on November 15, 2024, right after the Election, when the Jobs Numbers were massively revised DOWNWARD, making a correction of over 818,000 Jobs — A TOTAL SCAM. Jerome “Too Late” Powell is no better! But, the good news is, our Country is doing GREAT!

    The numbers, the numbers, who can trust them? [video]

    Alternative facts, alternative science, and now alternative math! Firing the person who brings the bad news, no bueno. Only six months in and we’re at the Stalin 1937 census stage! […]

    And the news gets worse, for investors who like stability. Friday Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Adriana Kugler abruptly resigned months before her term is officially up, leaving a spot for Trump to plug in whatever under-qualified loyalist goober on the seven-member board that sets interest rates.

    Then Thursday night, hey, it’s new tariffs! Once again showing the world that the administration and the US economy are being run on the whimsy of a man with delusions of grandeur and fifth-grade logic skills. [over estimating Trump’s logic skills]

    On Wednesday, Swiss trade negotiators were savoring their evening Toblerone, thinking they were all set with a trade deal, because that’s what Trump’s little negotiators Scott Bessent and Jamieson Greer had assured them. But then 10 hours before the new rates were supposed to take effect, the Swiss trade reps found out that Trump wouldn’t sign off on the deal. Because, “For Trump, a goods trade imbalance of nearly $40 billion is akin to stealing from the US.” [FFS]

    Exchanging goods and services for money is the literal opposite of stealing, but Trump wanted to extort the Swiss into buying some $40 billion worth of whatever from the US to get the deal done. […]

    And now US consumers will have the privilege of paying 35 percent more on goods from Canada, seemingly because Trump is mad that they are preparing to recognize a Palestinian state […] Goods from Mexico got a reprieve from another hike, and will stay at 25 percent for 90 days after Trump and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum had a phone call where she blew smoke up his ass in whatever just-right way.

    As his former best friend Jeffrey Epstein once put it, “With respect to real estate deals, he’s brilliant. He’s a salesman. He knows real estate really well. Anything else but that, he knows nothing. No history, no strategy … he can’t read a spreadsheet, which is funny.”

    Sounds like that old pedophile had his number. Except for the brilliant real estate deals part, no points awarded for fraud!

    […] Better news for the price of Toblerone, though, they’re mostly made in Slovakia now, so they are only 10 percent more expensive.

    Stock up, you’re gonna need it!

  270. Pierce R. Butler says

    AP News recently released a follow-up story about the Irish maternity home/orphanage in the town of Tuam where the bones of ~800 babies were found in a septic tank. (“[F]orensic scientists and archaeologists” have begun a systematic dig there, expected to last two years, to sort and identify what they can with DNA testing, etc.)

    Two lines from the article struck me:

    From one of the “orphans”:

    Mulryan, who lived in the home until he was 4½, spoke about being abused as a foster child working on a farm, shoeless for much of the year, barely schooled, underfed and starved for kindness.

    “We were afraid to open our mouths, you know, we were told to mind our own business,” Mulryan said. “It’s a disgrace. This church and the state had so much power, they could do what they liked …”

    Indeed, and precisely: for decades, the Church abused thousands of women and children – and continued to, because they liked it.

    And from the order of nuns who ran what the story names only as “St Mary’s home for unmarried mothers and their children”:

    The Bon Secours sisters offered a profound apology and acknowledged children were disrespectfully buried.

    “We failed to respect the inherent dignity of the women and children,” Sister Eileen O’Connor said. “We failed to offer them the compassion that they so badly needed.”

    No, Sister Eileen, you did not fail. Your order should hang up a big “Mission Accomplished” banner for having carried out the will of the Holy Father and his whole hierarchy, in that providing “dignity” (i.e., adequate food and warmth, for starters) might have required fewer or smaller rubies in the papal tiara – and that would surely make Baby Jesus cry.

  271. says

    Helsinki just went a full year without a single traffic death

    “The capital city is Finnish’ed with car-related fatalities.”

    Helsinki hasn’t registered a single traffic-related fatality in the past year, municipal officials revealed this week.

    Although road deaths are on the decline across the EU, with a 3 percent decrease in 2024, accidents with tragic outcomes are still commonplace in metropolitan areas. To go a full year without one is a remarkable feat for most cities — let alone a European capital.

    In 2023, 7,807 Europeans lost their lives in traffic accidents in EU cities. Fifty-five people died in traffic accidents in Berlin last year, and nine individuals lost their lives in collisions in the Brussels region over the past 12 months.

    While Helsinki is among the smallest EU capitals, with a little under 690,000 residents, some 1.5 million people live in and commute throughout the metropolitan area.

    Roni Utriainen, a traffic engineer with the city’s Urban Environment Division, told the Finnish press that the achievement was attributable to “a lot of factors … but speed limits are one of the most important.”

    Citing data that shows the risk of pedestrian fatality is cut in half by reducing a car’s speed of impact from 40 to 30 kilometers per hour, city officials imposed the lower limit in most of Helsinki’s residential areas and city center in 2021.

    The limits were enforced with 70 new speed cameras and a policing strategy based on the national “Vision Zero” policy, with the goal of achieving zero traffic injuries or deaths. Data collected by Liikenneturva, Finland’s traffic safety entity, shows Helsinki’s traffic fatalities have been declining ever since. [graph]

    European model
    Helsinki’s authorities have spent the past five years trying to replicate the miracle they first achieved in 2019, when no pedestrians or cyclists were killed in automotive collisions.

    Utriainen stressed the mission’s success is based on data-driven, long-term mobility policies and urban development strategies that have transformed the once car-centric capital. In many parts of the city, roads have been narrowed and trees have been planted with the deliberate goal of making drivers uncomfortable — the rationale being that complex urban landscapes force drivers to move more cautiously through populated areas.

    The city has also invested in new pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, including a comprehensive network of cycling paths that span over 1,500 kilometers. It has boosted its public transportation network with decarbonized and self-driving buses, and received European Investment Bank funding for a new tram line.

    Utriainen said the upgrades helped “reduce car use and, with it, the number of serious accidents.” And statistics show that between 2003 and 2023, the number of traffic-related injuries in the city dropped from 727 to just 14.

    Helsinki’s success is being noted in Brussels, where the European Commission is pressing to curb road fatalities. Earlier this year, Transport Commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas noted most member countries weren’t on track to meet the EU’s 2018 goal of halving traffic-related fatalities by 2030.

  273. says

    Israeli fire again kills Gaza aid-seekers as U.S. envoy meets with hostages’ families

    “At least 10 Palestinians were killed near Israeli-supported aid locations in Gaza, witnesses say, as families of hostages urge action.”

    DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip— Israeli forces opened fire near two aid distribution sites run by the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation as crowds of hungry Palestinians again sought food, killing at least 10 people, witnesses and health workers said Saturday — a day after U.S. officials visited a GHF site and the U.S. ambassador called the troubled system “an incredible feat.”

    Nearly a week has passed since Israel, under international pressure amid growing scenes of starving children, announced limited humanitarian pauses and airdrops meant to get more food to Gaza’s over 2 million people, who now largely rely on aid after almost 22 months of war.

    But the United Nations, partners and Palestinians say far too little aid is still coming in, with months’ worth of supplies piled up outside Gaza waiting for Israeli approval. Trucks that enter are mostly stripped of supplies by desperate people and criminal groups before reaching warehouses for distribution.

    Experts this week said a “worst-case scenario of famine” was occurring in the besieged enclave. On Saturday, Gaza’s health ministry said seven more Palestinians had died of malnutrition-related causes over the past 24 hours, including a child.

    Aid is “far from sufficient,” Germany’s government said via spokesman Stefan Kornelius.

    Families of the 50 hostages still in Gaza fear they are going hungry too, and blame Hamas, after the militants released images of an emaciated hostage, Evyatar David.

    More deaths near U.S.-supported GHF sites

    Near the northernmost GHF distribution site near the Netzarim corridor, Yahia Youssef, who had come to seek aid Saturday morning, described a panicked and grimly familiar scene. After helping carry three people wounded by gunshots, he said he saw others on the ground, bleeding.

    “It’s the same daily episode,” Youssef said. Health workers said at least eight people were killed. Israel’s military said it fired warning shots at a gathering approaching its forces.

    […]

    Israel’s military said it was not aware of any fire by its forces in the area. The GHF said nothing happened near its sites.

    GHF says its armed contractors have only used pepper spray or fired warning shots to prevent deadly crowding. Israel ‘s military on Friday said it was working to make the routes under its control safer. Israel and GHF have claimed the toll has been exaggerated.

    […] From May 27 to July 31, 859 people were killed near GHF sites, according to a United Nations report published Thursday. Hundreds more have been killed along the routes of U.N.-led food convoys. Hamas-led police once guarded those convoys and went after suspected looters, but Israeli fire targeted the officers.

    Airdrops by a Jordan-led coalition — Israel, the UAE, Egypt, France, and Germany — are another approach, though experts say the strategy remains deeply inadequate and even dangerous for people on the ground.

    “Let’s go back to what works & let us do our job,” Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, wrote Saturday on social media, calling for more and safer truck deliveries.

    Airstrikes continue

    An Israeli strike hit a group of Palestinians trying to secure aid trucks entering northern Gaza from the Israeli-controlled Zikim crossing, killing at least three people, said Fares Awad, head of the health ministry’s ambulance and emergency service.

    Nasser Hospital said it received five bodies after two separate strikes on tents sheltering displaced people in Gaza’s south.

    The health ministry’s ambulance and emergency service said an Israeli strike hit a house between the towns of Zawaida and Deir al-Balah, killing two parents and their three children. Another strike hit a tent near a closed prison where the displaced have sheltered in Khan Younis, killing a mother and her daughter.

    Israel’s top general Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir warned that “combat will continue without rest” if hostages aren’t freed.

    Hostage families push Israel to cut deal

    U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, met with hostages’ families Saturday, a week after quitting ceasefire talks, blaming Hamas’s intransigence.

    “I didn’t hear anything new from him. I heard that there was pressure from the Americans to end this operation, but we didn’t hear anything practical,” said Michel Illouz, father of Israeli hostage Guy Illouz, whose body was taken into Gaza.

    He said he asked Witkoff to exert pressure and set a time frame but got “no answers.” […]

    Coming home to ruins

    In part of Gaza City, displaced people who managed to return home found rubble-strewn neighborhoods unrecognizable. Most Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced, often multiple times, and are crowded into ever-shrinking areas considered safe. […]

    The ministry says 93 children have died from malnutrition-related causes in Gaza since the war began. It said 76 adults have died of malnutrition-related causes since late June, when it started counting adult deaths.

  274. says

    Eric Tung is the perfect example of a second-term Trump judicial pick, and that’s not a compliment

    Trump has tapped Eric Tung for a lifetime seat on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Tung brings the qualifications we’ve come to expect from a Trump judicial nomination, which is to say that he has never been a judge, has never served as lead counsel on a case, has never tried a case to verdict, and has spent about 10% of his time on criminal cases. Well, it’s not like the Ninth Circuit hears a lot of criminal cases. Oh, wait.

    Tung wasn’t selected for having any relevant experience, though. He was selected for his worldview. Tung clerked for Justices Antonin Scalia and Brett Kavanaugh, then took a job at Jones Day, the law firm that is a breeding ground for hard-right lawyers. He hates unions, doesn’t believe there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, and thinks striving for racial equity is bad.

    He has a history of misogynistic remarks complaining about “radical feminists try[ing] to blur gender roles, but refused to answer questions about that during his confirmation hearing. His logic? Because things like gender roles are “the subject of wide debate,” and therefore as a nominee, “I cannot answer under judicial canons.” He also wouldn’t answer questions about whether a minor who is sexually assaulted or the victim of incest should be forced to give birth.

    Given that the Senate Republicans confirmed Emil Bove, the former Trump criminal defense lawyer who told DOJ attorneys they should disobey court orders, Tung is a shoo-in. […]

    Link

  276. birgerjohansson says

    CDawgVA
    “I Tried Japan’s Weirdest Place Ft. Shibuya Kaho”

    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=v5PRHTbKHi8

    Snake museum, an even weirder place, ice fishing, eating bread with spaghetti inside as you do.
    The Obaa-san tour guide was 80 years old and managed to make Connor embarassed. Lots of images that had to be blurred at that place.

  279. StevoR says

    I think the Streisland effect has well and truly hit with the Palestine protest in Sydney. Trying to ban it has raised more awareness of it and this issue than any advertising could have done. Now I hope it is peaceful, goes smoothly and huge :

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-03/pro-palestinian-march-sydney-melbourne-august-3/105605280

    There’s also rallies in other major Aussie cities today including Adelaide starting 2 pm today, from Peace Park
    Ao16 Sir Edwin Smith Ave – North West Side, 24 Sir Edwin Smith Ave, North Adelaide SA 5006, Australia near Adelaide Oval.

  281. StevoR says

    Ninety thousand people walked over the Sydney Harbour Bridge for Palestine today. Others marched elsewhere in Oz incl in Melbourne and, including me FWIW, in Adelaide.

    An estimated 90,000 pro-Palestinian protesters have marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge before police stopped the event “due to public safety”. A sea of people attended the rally, many holding Palestinian flags and protest signs in one hand and umbrellas in the other due to the blustery and wet conditions.

    There were similar scenes in central Melbourne, where police said 3,000 people turned out to raise awareness about the humanitarian emergency in Gaza.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-03/nsw-march-across-sydney-harbour-bridge-for-pro-palestine-gaza/105605596

  285. says

    Outrage over the Tea dating app highlights the indifference to women’s victimization

    “Studies across the United States and Australia consistently show that approximately 10% of reported incidents of rape are attributable to dating apps.”

    Calls to ban Tea Dating Advice, a women-only online dating safety app where users can share stories and information about men they dated, have exploded in recent weeks, driven by fears that reputations, especially of young men, could be damaged by anonymous and potentially false allegations of sexual misconduct. But what does it say about our cultural priorities when the potential for reputational harm against men sparks more outrage than the prevalence of sexual violence against women that online dating has facilitated for years?

    The Tea app was designed to help women avoid harmful dating partners, and it recently became the most downloaded free app on Apple’s App Store. With that increase in popularity came a public outcry, especially from among men — who cannot access the app. They argue that Tea encourages doxxing (the unwanted release of personal information) and enables the spread of intentionally false and defamatory stories that can ruin men’s reputations and dating prospects. Criticism of Tea has led to security breaches of the app and doxxing of the women who use it.

    The potential for Tea to be misused for reputational damage has led to calls on social media for the app to be shut down entirely. Yet by this logic dating apps themselves shouldn’t exist. [social media post]

    Unwarranted reputational damage associated with the Tea app is largely speculative at this point, but dating apps have long been associated with very real incidents of rape and other forms of sexual violence. Studies across the United States and Australia consistently show that approximately 10% of reported incidents of rape are attributable to dating apps. This is likely an underestimate given the propensity for sexual violence to go unreported and the potential for online daters to cause sexual harm unintentionally due to misunderstandings regarding consent.

    The majority of victims of sexual violence are women. Despite this knowledge, we seldom hear calls for dating apps to be shut down because of the role they play in sexual harm against women. We’ve certainly not heard any such calls expressed with the fervor that Tea’s opponents have expressed.

    Not only are dating apps still as popular as ever, safety-oriented improvements in their design have been superficial at best. Almost every safety feature built into dating apps is reactive — such as user blocking and reporting features— meaning they require women to first be harmed before the feature can be used. It’s telling that Tea is a standalone app and not a feature built into any existing dating platform where users actually discover and chat with dating partners.

    Tea is the first real advancement in online dating safety since…ever. It is certainly the most popular tool for women to avoid, rather than react to, online dating harm.

    The Tea app should be controversial, but for very different reasons. Why is Tea the only dating safety technology for women to get mass attention in recent years? [social media post]
    […]

  286. says

    He was asked about tattoos and TikTok video in court. Five days later, he was in Salvadoran prison.
    by Pro Publica

    In the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term, I spent a few weeks observing Chicago’s immigration court to get a sense of how things were changing. One afternoon in March, the case of a 27-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker caught my attention.

    Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra stared into the camera at his virtual bond hearing. He wore the orange shirt given to inmates at a jail in Laredo, Texas, and headphones to listen to the proceedings through an interpreter.

    More than a year earlier, Rodríguez had been convicted of shoplifting in the Chicago suburbs. But since then he had seemed to get his life on track. He found a job at Wrigley Field, sent money home to his mom in Venezuela and went to the gym and church with his girlfriend. Then, in November, federal authorities detained him at his apartment on Chicago’s South Side and accused him of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

    “Are any of your tattoos gang related?” his attorney asked at the hearing, going through the evidence laid out against him in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement report. “No,” said Rodríguez, whose tattoos include an angel holding a gun, a wolf and a rose. At one point, he lifted his shirt to show his parents’ names inked across his chest.

    He was asked about a TikTok video that shows him dancing to an audio clip of someone shouting, “Te va agarrar el Tren de Aragua,” which means, “The Tren de Aragua is going to get you,” followed by a dance beat. That audio clip has been shared some 60,000 times on TikTok — it’s popular among Venezuelans ridiculing the stereotype that everyone from their country is a gangster. Rodríguez looked incredulous at the thought that this was the evidence against him.

    That day, the judge didn’t address the gang allegations. But she denied Rodríguez bond, citing the misdemeanor shoplifting conviction. She reminded him that his final hearing was on March 20, just 10 days away. If she granted him asylum, he’d be a free man and could continue his life in the U.S.

    I told my editors and colleagues about what I’d heard and made plans to attend the next hearing. I saw the potential for the kind of complicated narrative story that I like: Here was a young immigrant who, yes, had come into the country illegally, but he had turned himself in to border authorities to seek asylum. Yes, he had a criminal record, but it was for a nonviolent offense. And, yes, he had tattoos, but so do the nice, white American moms in my book club. I was certain there are members of Tren de Aragua in the U.S., but if this was the kind of evidence the government had, I found it hard to believe it was an “invasion” as Trump claimed. I asked Rodríguez’s attorney for an interview and began requesting police and court records.

    Five days later, on March 15, the Trump administration expelled more than 230 Venezuelan men to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, a country many of them had never even set foot in. Trump called them all terrorists and gang members. It would be a few days before the men’s names would be made public. Perhaps naively, it didn’t occur to me that Rodríguez might be in that group. Then I logged into his final hearing and heard his attorney say he didn’t know where the government had taken him. The lawyer sounded tired and defeated. Later, he would tell me he had barely slept, afraid that Rodríguez might turn up dead. At the hearing, he begged a government lawyer for information: “For his family’s sake, would you happen to know what country he was sent to?” She told him she didn’t know, either.

    I was astonished. I am familiar with the history of authoritarian leaders disappearing people they don’t like in Latin America, the part of the world that my family comes from. I wanted to think that doesn’t happen in this country. But what I had just witnessed felt uncomfortably similar.

    As soon as the hearing ended, I got on a call with my colleagues Mica Rosenberg and Perla Trevizo, both of whom cover immigration and had recently written about how the U.S. government had sent other Venezuelan men to Guantanamo. We talked about what we should do with what I’d just heard. Mica contacted a source in the federal government who confirmed, almost immediately, that Rodríguez was among the men that our country had sent to El Salvador.

    The news suddenly felt more real and intimate to me. One of the men sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador now had a name and a face and a story that I had heard from his own mouth. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

    As a news organization, we decided to put significant resources into investigating who these men really are and what happened to them, bringing in many talented ProPublica journalists to help pull records, sift through social media accounts, analyze court data and find the men’s families. We teamed up with a group of Venezuelan journalists from the outlets Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News who were also starting to track down information about the men.

    We spoke to the relatives and attorneys of more than 100 of the men and obtained internal government records that undercut the Trump administration’s claims that all the men are “monsters,” “sick criminals” and the “worst of the worst.” We also published a story about how, by and large, the men were not hiding from federal immigration authorities. They were in the system; many had open asylum cases like Rodríguez and were waiting for their day in court before they were taken away and imprisoned in Central America.

    On July 18 — after I’d written the first draft of this note to you — we began to hear some chatter about a potential prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Venezuela. Later that same day, the men had been released. We’d been in the middle of working on a case-by-case accounting of the Venezuelan men who’d been held in El Salvador. Though they’d been released, documenting who they are and how they got caught up in this dragnet was still important, essential even, as was the impact of their incarceration.

    The result is a database we published last week including profiles of 238 of the men Trump deported to a Salvadoran prison.

    From the moment I heard about the men’s return to Venezuela, I thought about Rodríguez. He’d been on my mind since embarking on this project. I messaged with his mother for days as we waited for the men to be processed by the government of Nicolás Maduro and released to their families.

    Finally, one morning last week, he went home. We spoke later that afternoon. He said he was relieved to be home with his family but felt traumatized. He told me he wants the world to know what happened to him in the Salvadoran prison — daily beatings, humiliation, psychological abuse. “There is no reason for what I went through,” he said. “I didn’t deserve that.”

    The Salvadoran government has denied mistreating the Venezuelan prisoners.

    We asked the Trump administration about its evidence against Rodríguez. This is the entirety of its statement: “Albert Jesús Rodriguez Parra is an illegal alien from Venezuela and Tren de Aragua gang member. He illegally crossed the border on April 22, 2023, under the Biden Administration.”

    While Rodríguez was incarcerated in El Salvador and no one knew what would happen to him, the court kept delaying hearings for his asylum case. But after months of continuances, on Monday, Rodríguez logged into a virtual hearing from Venezuela. “Oh my gosh, I am so happy to see that,” said Judge Samia Naseem, clearly remembering what had happened in his case.

    Rodríguez’s attorney said that his client had been tortured and abused in El Salvador. “I can’t even describe to this court what he went through,” he said. “He’s getting psychological help, and that’s my priority.”

    It was a brief hearing, perhaps five minutes. Rodríguez’s lawyer mentioned his involvement in an ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration over its use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans. The government lawyer said little, except to question whether Rodríguez was even allowed to appear virtually due to “security issues” in Venezuela.

    Finally, the judge said she would administratively close the case while the litigation plays out. “If he should hopefully be able to come back to the U.S., we’ll calendar the case,” she said.

    Naseem turned to Rodríguez, who was muted and looked serious. “You don’t have to worry about reappearing until this gets sorted out,” she told him. He nodded and soon logged off.

    We plan to keep reporting on what happened and have another story coming soon about Rodríguez and the other men’s experiences inside the prison. Please reach out if you have information to share.

  288. says

    The White House does not plan to require health insurers to provide coverage for in vitro fertilization services, two people with knowledge of internal discussions said, even though the idea was one of President Donald Trump’s key campaign pledges.

    Last year, Trump said that if he returned to office, the government would either pay for IVF services or issue rules requiring insurance companies to cover treatment for it. The pledge came as Trump faced political blowback over abortion rights after his appointees to the Supreme Court helped overturn Roe v. Wade.

    “The government is going to pay for it, or we’re going to get — we’ll mandate your insurance company to pay for it, which is going to be great. We’re going to do that,” Trump said in August 2024. “We want to produce babies in this country, right?”

    More than six months into his second term, however, the Trump administration has not publicly proposed new federal subsidies to make IVF free or more affordable. In addition, White House officials are backing away from proposals discussed internally to mandate IVF coverage for the roughly 50 million people on the Obamacare exchanges, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

    […] Kaylen Silverberg, an outside adviser to the administration who has been pushing for more IVF access, also said in an interview that the White House has most recently asked him about a fertility approach that prioritizes holistic health over tools like IVF. Implementing that alone would fall “very short” of Trump’s initial promises, Silverberg said.

    […] Restorative reproductive medicine suggests women should treat infertility by attempting to improve their overall health and has been promoted by the Heritage Foundation. When used as the only or primary method to treat infertility, RRM can unnecessarily delay access to IVF because lifestyle changes are already a part of most fertility treatment plans, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

    […] Liberal critics point out that Trump’s tax legislation included approximately $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and hundreds of billions of additional cuts to food stamps relied on by millions of low-income families.

    “You can’t seriously claim you’re pursuing pro-natalist policy when you’re kicking moms off Medicaid and when you’re leaving kids with less food,” said Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress […]

    Washington Post link

  290. StevoR says

    Wood, who is himself a researcher in the field, was obviously joking about this “solution” to mitigating the risks of artificial general intelligence (AGI). But buried in his sardonic response was a kernel of truth: The risks a superintelligent AI poses are terrifying to many people because they seem unavoidable. Most scientists predict that AGI will be achieved by 2040 — but some believe it may happen as soon as next year.

    Source : https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/ai-is-entering-an-unprecedented-regime-should-we-stop-it-and-can-we-before-it-destroys-us

  291. StevoR says

    Ahra: A captured rogue exoplanet? Ten minuts long. Orbiting a white dwarf – a captured rogue world. Remarkable odds given space is .. space .. and very, very very, uh, spacious .. as usual lot we still don’t know for sure. But fascinating. Well, I reckon it is anyhow.

    The probabilities here..

    Yet also given enough stars and rogue worlds .. I guess also ..inevitable? Maybe?

  292. says

    New York Times link

    “A Voyage to Bring Norway’s Lighthouses Into the 21st Century”

    “More than 2,000 navigational beacons, big and small, oversee the nation’s 60,000-mile-long coast. Now they need an upgrade.”

    […] The lighthouse hit its peak in the mid-20th century, before radio, radar and global-positioning satellites made ship navigation nearly inch-precise. In Norway today, all the lighthouses are now unmanned and automated.

    But they remain essential to mariners as a visual backup — in case the fancy electronics fail or are scrambled by Russia’s military — and to small boats that lack the proper technology.

    Norway is undertaking a grand renovation of its lighthouses in accordance with the International Association of Marine Aids to Navigation and Lighthouse Authorities, which sets the standards for maritime signaling. The effort coincides roughly with the 200th anniversary of the Fresnel lens, a marvel of glassmaking artistry and optical science that revolutionized seafaring and global commerce.

    […] Early lighthouses were lit by open wood fires; later ones with lamps fueled by pitch, tar, coal and, starting in 1780, oil. This light, in turn, was cast outward by ever more elaborate mirrors that sat behind the lamp. But even the best light was scattered and feeble, visible from no more than a few miles away. A ship could founder on sandbars by the time it saw the warning.

    In 1823, a French engineer, Augustin-Jean Fresnel, unveiled the Fresnel lens: concentric rings of glass prisms that, meticulously aligned, bent the light into a unified beam. Much less light was lost and much fuel was saved. Stationed high enough, the light could be seen by ships 50 miles away.

    At the time, scientists insisted that light was composed of particles. Fresnel championed the new “undulationist” theory, that light acts as a wave, and his lens proved its utility beyond doubt. (Physicists today recognize that, improbably, light is both a wave and a particle.)

    Lighthouses equipped with Fresnel lenses soon lined the French coast. Other nations quickly adopted the technology, starting with Norway in 1832. The number of shipwrecks around the world plummeted.

    “For the sailor who steers by the stars, it was as if another heaven had descended to earth,” the French historian Jules Michelet wrote in 1861.

    The Fresnel lens focused the aspirations of the Industrial Age. It made shipping safer, projected global ambition and catalyzed international trade.

    “The moment a Fresnel lens appeared at a location was the moment that region became linked into the world economy,” Theresa Levitt wrote in “A Short Bright Flash,” her history of the invention.

    Today, small Fresnel lenses are everywhere, from traffic lights to stage lights. But the production of lighthouse-scale glass lenses ceased in the 1960s. Those that remain are fragile, expensive to maintain and hard to repair, for lack of parts.

    Many of Norway’s Fresnel lenses were destroyed in World War II by retreating German forces. Only 80 or so are still in use.

    […] Technicians with the Norwegian Coastal Administration have been visiting the lighthouses one by one, upgrading older lamps and replacing diesel generators with solar arrays. Some Fresnel lenses are moved to museums; some are dismantled, to serve as spare parts elsewhere. Where Fresnel lenses remain, they are delicately cleaned and repaired.

    Naturally, this work is best done in summer, when daylight lasts for weeks and most lighthouses are turned off. The lenses are kept shrouded under curtains or cozies to prevent the sun, focused as if through a magnifying glass, from starting fires. […]

    Many compelling photos are available at the link.

  293. says

    How is starvation treated?

    “As starvation spreads in Gaza, experts say reversing the crisis is far more complicated than simply increasing the amount of food.”

    As deaths from starvation in the Gaza Strip continue to rise, experts say there’s no easy way out of the crisis due to the medical complexity of treating severe malnutrition.

    More than 160 people — at least 90 of them children — have died of malnutrition since the war began, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

    The world’s leading body on hunger, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), says that nearly all of Gaza is suffering a food security crisis or worse, and more than half of the population is in the “emergency” or “catastrophe” phase of starvation — which means recovering isn’t as simple as giving starving people food.

    Rather, giving food to people experiencing such an extreme degree of starvation could kill them, experts say. [video]

    If you do what the body wants to do, which is to just drink and eat as much as possible the minute you see food, you can actually create these permanent imbalances that can cause things like heart failure or organ damage, because the body had to adapt to get to that starvation mode,” NBC News medical contributor Dr. Kavita Patel, an internal medicine doctor, said.

    At the most severe stages of starvation, even giving a person water can push their body into failure, Patel said.

    What happens to the body when it’s starving?

    Humans can generally go without any food or water for several days because the body finds a way to adapt in order to survive. First by feeding off of so-called glycogen stores — a starchy substance from carbohydrates that’s stored in the liver and muscles. The body stores about 1,700 to 2,200 calories’ worth of energy as glycogen.

    […] Once those glycogen stores are depleted, the body starts to break down fat for energy, but when that’s gone, it turns to muscle. This is what causes the body to shrink and the starving person to assume a gaunt, hollow-cheeked look.Eventually the brain doesn’t have the energy it needs to function, leading to irritability, mood swings and trouble concentrating.

    […] Most starving people die from infections as their immune system shuts down. Eventually, the heart will be affected, causing a person’s blood pressure and pulse to drop. If they don’t die from infection, the heart will shut down, doctors said. […]

    How is starvation treated?

    Patel said a good analogy to giving food to a starving person is a downpour after a drought. The land desperately needs water, but because it’s so dry it repels water instead of absorbing it, leading to flash flooding. “Refeeding” after starvation needs to be managed clinically and by medical professionals.

    “When a person has reached a state of starvation, the body undergoes extreme metabolic changes,” she said. “Giving too much food — or the wrong kind — too quickly can trigger a dangerous shift in fluids and electrolytes known as refeeding syndrome, which can be fatal if not carefully managed.”

    “A bag of flour — some of the only food aid that has gotten in recently — won’t save anyone because it has none of the essential nutrients,” said Dr. Nour Alamassi, a doctor and the medical team lead for Project HOPE, an international nongovernmental organization focused on global health and humanitarian aid.

    “Too many carbs can actually be life-threatening for anyone with Severe Acute Malnourishment (SAM), and even for the average person in Gaza who has not had a regular diet in many months, it is very difficult to digest,” Alamassi, who is caring for children and pregnant women in Gaza, wrote in an email.

    Ideally, doctors told NBC News, there would be enough medical staff to monitor the refeeding process for each person for a period stretching from weeks to even months. Children would be stabilized with fortified milks, which contain the nutrients that a malnourished child needs, and something called ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTF), which are energy-dense, easy to digest and carefully balanced in the nutrients children need to start to recover. Doctors would draw blood to monitor sodium and potassium levels — if these electrolytes are too low or too high, it can be deadly.

    […] “The aid blockade has prevented us from accessing the medications and nutrition supplies that are necessary to treat these people,” Alamassi said. “We recently ran out of High Energy Biscuits (HEB) in our clinics, which really limits our ability to help patients. We hope to get more in the coming days, but each day without these supplies can make a major difference for a patient’s outcome.”

    What are the long-term effects of starvation?

    Even if refeeding is successful, people who survive starvation can experience physical and psychological effects for the rest of their lives, experts said. The damage, especially for young and very old victims, is permanent. [!]

    In children, malnutrition can cause delays in both physical and cognitive development. Physically, they’re more likely to have weakened immune systems, leading to a harder time recovering from infections. Malnourished children are also more likely to experience stunted growth, which can affect their height, muscle mass and bone density and even delay puberty, experts said.

    Cognitively, children can suffer from permanent brain damage due to iron and zinc deficiencies, affecting their ability to learn and problem solve.

    Alamassi said the hunger crisis in Gaza is affecting “an entire generation of children who will suffer lifelong consequences.”The recovery of adults from very severe malnutrition is not only possible, but likely, Redlener said.

    “If it’s done right, most adults, unless they’re really at a terminal stage of undernutrition, the refeeding will result in restoration of everything — a far different story than the ability for a young child with prolonged malnutrition, where it’s often impossible to get a full recovery,” he said.

    Patel said even people with a history of malnutrition are monitored over years to make sure their bodies are functioning properly.

    “As they age and develop, different parts of the body pull on memories of that nutrition depletion,” she said. “So the question we all have to ask ourselves is, how long are we going to be able to do this without having adequate support on the ground?”

  294. says

    Cuts to food benefits stand in the way of RFK Jr.’s goals for a healthier national diet

    Belinda McLoyd has been thinking about peanut butter.

    McLoyd, 64, receives a small monthly payment through the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, previously known as food stamps.

    “They don’t give you that much to work with,” she said. To fit her tight budget, she eats ramen noodles — high on sodium and low on nutrition — multiple times a week.

    If she had more money, said McLoyd, who has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and heart problems, she’d buy more grapes, melons, chuck roast, ground turkey, cabbage, and turnip greens. That’s what she did when lawmakers nearly doubled her SNAP benefit during the pandemic.

    But now that a GOP-led Congress has approved $186 billion in cuts to the food assistance program through 2034, McLoyd, who worked in retail until she retired in 2016, isn’t sure how she will be able to eat any healthy food if her benefits get reduced again.

    McLoyd said her only hope for healthy eating might be to resort to peanut butter, which she heard “has everything” in it.

    “I get whatever I can get,” said McLoyd, who uses a walker to get around her senior community in southwestern Georgia. “I try to eat healthy, but some things I can’t, because I don’t have enough money to take care of that.”

    The second Trump administration has said that healthy eating is a priority. It released a “Make America Healthy Again” report citing poor diet as a cause of childhood illnesses and chronic diseases. And it’s allowing states — including Arkansas, Idaho, and Utah — to limit purchases of unhealthy food with federal SNAP benefits for the first time in the history of the century-old anti-hunger program.

    President Donald Trump also signed a tax and spending law on July 4 that will shift costs to states and make it harder for people to qualify for SNAP by expanding existing work requirements. The bill cuts about 20% of SNAP’s budget, the deepest cut the program has faced. About 40 million people now receive SNAP payments, but 3 million of them will lose their nutrition assistance completely, and millions more will see their benefits reduced, according to an analysis of an earlier version of the bill by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

    Researchers say SNAP cuts run counter to efforts to help people prevent chronic illness through healthy food.

    “People are going to have to rely on cheaper food, which we know is more likely to be processed, less healthy,” said Kate Bauer, an associate professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

    “It’s, ‘Oh, we care about health — but for the rich people,’” she said.

    About 47 million people lived in households with limited or uncertain access to food in 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency’s research shows that people living in food-insecure households are more likely to develop hypertension, arthritis, diabetes, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

    Making rich people healthier and making poor people sicker.

  296. Rob Grigjanis says

    StevoR @291: Interesting. It got me thinking how a rogue planet might be captured. Seems to me the most likely scenario is a rogue approaching a star with a small relative velocity. It would still be in a hyperbolic orbit; normally, it would just enter the system, and leave again, at the same speed, though in a different direction.

    But if it interacted with another body in the system (e.g. for our system, maybe Jupiter or Saturn), it could get a gravitational assist which might drop its orbital energy enough to render its orbit elliptical (albeit most likely with a high eccentricity (just less than 1)).

    Comments or corrections from local astronomers welcome.

  297. birgerjohansson says

    80 people have died in the Dolomite Alps last month. If you go wandering, check the difficulty of the terrain first! This is not like Penine hills, or even the Catskills! (what Mel Brooks called ‘the Jewish Catskills).

  298. lumipuna says

    (Crosspost from Affinity)

    I just saw this amusing story (in Finnish):

    https://yle.fi/a/74-20175084

    Around July, Finnish people living or holidaying in rural areas often seek ways to avoid being attacked by horseflies (which are less ubiquitous but more annoying than mosquitoes). This year, some Finns on social media have promoted the idea of crafting a dragonfly decoy and planting it on your hat, to scare off horseflies. This method is not scientifically tested, there’s only some anecdotes and common sense reasoning suggesting that it might work. The visual effect is hilarious.

    The story includes three short video clips — the second one shows how to make the dragonfly decoy, while the first and last one are reporters lightheartedly testing the method (quite literally) in the field.

    In the first video, reporter Anna-Mari Vuolle reports no horsefly bites (only some sightings) while harvesting wild berries, but notes that the results are still inconclusive. She then goes on to joke that the decoy seems more effective in scaring off other (competing) berry-pickers.

    In the last video, reporter Ari Hursti hangs out at a bucolic location — but it turns out he somehow chose a place that has hundreds of actual dragonflies hovering around. Therefore, the fact that he encounters only one horsefly is also inconclusive. He mentions appreciating the sight of so many dragonflies, though.

    There’s also quotes from two Finnish insect experts. One of them is Jukka Salmela, from the regional museum of Lappi in northern Finland. He reportedly answered his phone for the interview while being gathering cloudberries at a bog. That’s some extreme “Summer in northern Finland” energy.

  302. JM says

    NBC News: Texas Democrats head to Illinois to deny Republicans a quorum on redistricting

    The roughly 30 Democrats are expected to stay for the week in a plan brokered with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who had met with the Texas caucus late last month and has directed staff to provide logistical support for their stay. A news conference with the governor and Texas Democrats is expected later Sunday.

    This is intended to block the attempt by the Republicans to gerrymander the state against Democrats. One party or another trying to block quorum happens every so often. A politician from another state openly helping to organize it is unusual.

  304. says

    Americans don’t buy Netanyahu’s lie about Gaza hunger crisis

    A man-made famine in Gaza

    On Tuesday, a United Nations-affiliated organization released a damning report about the “worst-case scenario for famine” occurring in the Gaza Strip. Over 20,000 children have been treated for severe malnutrition, and at least 16 child deaths have been tied to starvation. Israel’s blockade of aid is the primary cause of the crisis, with the director-general of the World Health Organization referring to the mass starvation as “man-made.”

    And yet, last Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu falsely claimed, “There is no starvation in Gaza”—a lie too brazen for even noted liar President Donald Trump.

    “Some of those kids are—that’s real starvation stuff,” Trump said on Monday. “I see it, and you can’t fake that.”

    And the vast majority of America sees it too. New polling from YouGov finds that 68% of Americans agree there is a hunger crisis in Gaza. That includes majorities of Democrats (84%), independents (65%), and Republicans (55%). Just 5% of Americans say there isn’t a crisis. [graph]

    Pluralities of Americans also think Israel (46%) and the U.S. (43%) should be doing more to end the mass starvation.

    All of this hits as fewer Americans than ever before support Israel’s military actions in Gaza […]

  305. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/south-park-teases-blaming-canada

    “South Park Teases Blaming Canada Again”

    There wasn’t a new episode of “South Park” last Wednesday, quite possibly because the show’s creators were expecting to be sued to hell and back by the president of the United States for his unflattering portrayal in the cartoon’s season 27 premiere two weeks ago and thought there’d be new material. […]

    You’ve probably seen the footage by now of a dehydrated, undiapered Dear Leader lumbering through the desert for America, but if not, voila. (Disclaimer: The clip contains fictional AI imagery generated poorly of a sentient mushroom peen and due to its content should not be viewed by anyone.)

    That’s the scene that got everyone talking, including White House spox Taylor Rogers upset the show didn’t respect their boss’s authoritah:

    “This show hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention. President Trump has delivered on more promises in just six months than any other president in our country’s history, and no fourth-rate show can derail President Trump’s hot streak.”

    But what caught this Canadian viewer’s eye was the adjudicated rapist’s surprise casting as Satan’s new sex partner, taking dictator Saddam Hussein’s place in bed from two decades ago and complete with the flapping-head animation style the show typically uses to denote a character is one of us.

    The easy shortcut has been used before for famous non-citizens such as the Butcher of Baghdad, but they also gave him the trim, box-shaped body northerners typically receive instead of the more accurate Cartmanesque physique on full display in the live animation scene. Plus he suspiciously called Beelzebub “buddy” while begging for a bone and clearly mispronounced the word “about” as aboot, which seems like weapons-grade foreshadowing of a storyline where the mad bastard ends up with some sort of Canuckistan heritage. His grandfather did once run the best little whorehouse in the Arctic.

    Further fuel to the fire can be found in the teaser for the upcoming season, which features a mob of Canucks marching into battle with an unspecified enemy that seems unlikely to be neighboring Denmark.

    The trailer closes with a spooky voice intoning “Blaaaame Canada” in a callback to the ancient film South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut and its plot involving the US doing its northern NATO ally dirty for reasons just as dumb as pretending we’re somehow to blame for the nation’s fentanyl crisis. [video]

    […] while The Simpsons’ writers room is better known for being surprisingly prophetic — including foreseeing the invention of smartphones, a global pandemic from Asia, Lady Gaga’s superb Super Bowl show, and even Donald J. Trump becoming president way back in 2000 — South Park has its own bonafides as accidental oracles.

    Including also predicting the awful con man would someday become president, albeit of a different country. [image]

    In the 2015 episode “Where My Country Gone” released just a few months after the snake slid down the escalator, the Colorado town finds itself with an influx of Canadian immigrants after a Trump cut-out was somehow put in charge of our constitutional monarchy. As one of them explains:

    “Nobody really thought he’d ever be president. It was a joke! But we just let the joke go on for too long. He kept gaining momentum. By the time we were ready to say, ‘OK, let’s get serious now, who should really be president,’ he was already being sworn into office. We weren’t paying attention. We weren’t paying attention!”

    Sound familiar? […]

    The next episode drops August 6 on Paramount+. If you don’t want to give the craven corporate cowards one red cent, you can sign up for a free subscription for a week before canceling and telling them why. I personally went with a tribute to the immortal Kenny McCormick and wrote: “OMG you killed Stephen Colbert! You bastards!”

  306. says

    Air dropping emergency food into the Gaza enclave is ludicrous, for many reasons spelled out in the July 27 front-page article “In frayed Gaza, aid airdrops take hold.” From my experience as a director of the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, I can confirm that such operations are inefficient, extremely costly and dangerous.

    Pushing parachutes out of aircraft is the most inequitable technique to deliver humanitarian supplies. As was proved in numerous war zones, it is the young, the strong, the fleet of foot and the heavily armed who end up with the supplies, either by getting to the pallets first or by later forced requisition. Without skilled cadres of relief workers on the ground to collect and fairly disseminate food supplies to children, schools, hospitals, the elderly, the wounded and other target populations, the latter groups lose out and continue to starve. Moreover, by thinning out aid experts on the ground, a reliance on airdrops all but guarantees Israel’s worst-feared result: more diversion to militants.

    In a major study on airdrops I co-authored at the Institute for Defense Analyses, researchers pointed out perhaps the main benefit of airdropping supplies: Beyond making donor countries feel good, the benefit is that the grotesque costs and inefficiencies of air operations might help get the trucks rolling again.

    Jim Kunder, Alexandria
    The writer is a former deputy administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

    Washington Post link

  307. says

    lumipuna @298, We have horse-flies and deer-flies (not sure what the difference is, if any) where I live.

    Those flies will take a bite out of you rather than stinging like a mosquito. I applaud anyone who may have a found a way to deter them.

  308. birgerjohansson says

    I don’t know where you can download this in USA. Netflix?
    .
    With You And the Rain
    “Crunchyroll’s New Slice-of-Life Anime Is the Lighthearted Watch We All Need Right Now”

    .https://www.cbr.com/with-you-and-the-rain-crunchyroll-best-new-slife-of-life-anime/
    This is an Iyashikei, or “healing” cartoon, (intended to help the viewers to unwind and recover a sense of peace). The category was invented after the 1994 earthquake when people felt crushed under all bad news. Definitely a media category Americans might benefit from.

  309. birgerjohansson says

    Dandadan- A ridicilous and funny cartoon with tropes from Japanese horror and SF.
    Two teenagers go to disprove each other’s beliefs in spirits and aliens.

    The boy promptly gets possessed by a malign spirit of urban legend called Turbogranny, the girl runs into aliens from Serpio who are into harvesting reproductive organs.

    Dandadan Abridged Ep. 1!
    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=50VVLHpf9Ys
    A fan-made parody by Altered Anime

    DANDADAN ABRIDGED – Episode 01
    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=XtvN629Leko
    A fan-made parody by Anime JoyRide  

  311. johnson catman says

    re Lynna @305: from White House spox Taylor Rogers:

    This show hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention.

    Sure. Exactly why Paramount paid Trey Parker and Matt Stone $1.5 BILLION to continue the series. Desperate liar is stupid.

  312. says

    johnson catman @311: “Sure. Exactly why Paramount paid Trey Parker and Matt Stone $1.5 BILLION to continue the series.”

    So True. And, yes, White House spox Taylor Rogers sounds laughably desperate.

  313. says

    Trump comforts himself with new bonkers theory to explain his economy

    Trump is doubling down on his conspiracy theory that the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ jobs reports are being rigged, rather than dealing with the damage his tariff policies are causing.

    “Last weeks Job’s Report was RIGGED, just like the numbers prior to the Presidential Election were Rigged,” Trump wrote on Monday on his Truth Social platform. “That’s why, in both cases, there was massive, record setting revisions, in favor of the Radical Left Democrats. Those big adjustments were made to cover up, and level out, the FAKE political numbers that were CONCOCTED in order to make a great Republican Success look less stellar!!!”

    Friday’s jobs report showed that following the implementation of Trump’s haphazard tariff policy, only 73,000 jobs were added in July—far below the expected 110,000. The BLS also revised the previous two jobs reports down by 253,000 jobs total. The report has increased fears of a recession and a repeat of Trump’s failed economic policies from his first term.

    Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman noted that the jobs data is now confirming earlier warnings about the tariff policies.

    “The thing is, official economic data are basically starting to confirm what mainstream economists have been saying all along. Erratic policy that creates uncertainty depresses growth and job creation; tariffs raise prices,” Krugman wrote. [!]

    Following the dismal jobs report, Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer on Friday. Over the weekend, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and tried to justify the purge, baselessly claiming there “have been a bunch of patterns that could make people wonder.”

    But this is nonsense.

    As statistician and election analyst Nate Silver noted, “Each monthly payrolls figure is actually revised three times: once in each of the first two months after initial publication (so July’s 73,000 figure will be re-reported in August and then again in September) and then again each January as part of the BLS’s annual benchmark revisions.” [!}

    Similarly, Politifact noted that “revisions are a standard part of the BLS process.”

    In other words, Trump just doesn’t like the way the wind is blowing.

    William Beach, who served as the BLS commissioner during Trump’s first term, signed on to a letter with Obama-era commissioner Erica Groshen, calling Trump’s firing decision “baseless.”

    “To politicize the work of the agency and its workers does a great disservice not only to BLS but to the entire federal statistical system which this country has relied on for almost 150 years,” they wrote.

    Trump’s lies about the jobs report echo his long-debunked falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election, which he decisively lost against former President Joe Biden. And like with Trump’s election denialism, congressional Republicans and right-wing media like Fox News and Fox Business are amplifying and repeating Trump’s conspiracy. This has been standard operating procedure for the right for decades—promoting and escalating nonsensical conspiracies, leading to the eventual rise of a conspiracy theorist like Trump leading the party.

    Trump’s tariffs are hurting the recovering economy he inherited from Biden. He has nobody to blame but himself, and he is just trying to lie his way out of another mess.

    Trump wraps himself up in his conspiracy theories so that he can ignore how unrelentingly wrong and stupid he is.

  314. says

    Texas governor threatens the unthinkable to force through rigged map

    On Sunday, Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to expel Democratic lawmakers from the state legislature and replace them with Republican yes-men who will rubber stamp his plan to rig the 2026 midterms by re-gerrymandering Texas’ congressional map.

    Abbott made the threat after most of the state’s 62 Democratic lawmakers left Texas to deny Republicans a quorum—a move that would block GOP lawmakers from passing a new gerrymandered congressional map that will steal as many as five U.S. House seats. Abbott called a special session to get the Republican-controlled legislature to redraw congressional districts at the demand of Dear Leader Donald Trump, who is so terrified of losing the midterm elections that he’s trying to cheat and rig them instead.

    “My Democratic colleagues and I just left the state of Texas to break quorum and stop Trump’s redistricting power grab,” Texas Democratic state Rep. James Talarico said in a post on social media on Sunday. “Trump is trying to rig the midterm elections right before our eyes. But first he’ll have to come through us. It’s time to fight back.” [social media post, with video]

    State Rep. Gene Wu, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said the move is a difficult one for Democrats—who now face a $500 per day fine. [Yikes!] But he said it was the right thing to do.

    “Republicans are counting on us to quietly accept Trump’s demands, but we refuse to put Abbott’s political ambitions before the needs of our communities,” Wu said. “By breaking quorum, we’re putting an end to this corrupt special session. Texans deserve leaders who fight for them, not politicians chasing power.”

    The ingenious move has enraged Abbott, who without a quorum cannot carry out the will of Dear Leader.

    [I snipped Abbott’s statement about Democrats not abdicating the duties of their office.]

    […] Attorney General Ken Paxton claims that “through a quo warranto action, a district court may determine that a legislator has forfeited his or her office due to abandonment and can remove the legislator from office, thereby creating a vacancy.” [Paxton is an unethical doofus.]

    “That empowers me to swiftly fill vacancies under Article III, Section 13 of the Texas Constitution,” Abbott wrote.

    Of course, none of that is actually true. [!]

    An opinion from the state attorney general is not a legally binding doctrine. And Article III, Section 13 of the Texas Constitution does NOT state that Abbott can fill a vacancy in the legislature without an election. The Constitution says Abbott would have to issue “writs of election to fill such vacancies.”

    But Abbott went further than lying about his ability to expel lawmakers and replace them himself. Abbott also threatened to charge the Democratic lawmakers with felonies, accusing them of “soliciting funds to evade the fines they will incur under House rules.” [!]

    “Any Democrat who ‘solicits, accepts, or agrees to accept’ such funds to assist in the violation of legislative duties or for purposes of skipping a vote may have violated bribery laws,” Abbott wrote. [Abbott is really stretching there.]

    The Democratic lawmakers who fled Texas are now in Illinois, where Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker said he will “do everything we can to protect every single one of them.”

    “We know they’re doing the right thing,” Pritzker said. “We know they’re following the law. It’s Ken Paxton who doesn’t follow the law. It’s the leaders of Texas who aren’t following the law.”

    The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is also standing by the Texas Democratic lawmakers. [I snipped DCCC statement.]

  315. says

    Why Europe’s train Wi-Fi never works

    “Railway internet sucks — and despite some bright plans, even getting decent 5G will remain hit and miss for a while.”

    […] The high speed of a train makes it predictably difficult for Wi-Fi antennas in a carriage — or your smartphone — to keep a steady connection between changing mobile towers.

    “If a train is going at 200km an hour, the device could be crossing a cell site every 45 or 60 seconds, which is a rapid turnover,” Kehoe said. “What that introduces is a technical challenge called the Doppler effect.”

    That is when moving fast changes the signal’s frequency — like when a siren shifts pitch — and it can mess with the ability to hold onto a stable connection.

    French SNCF trains, travelers logging onto the Wi-Fi receive a pop-up warning: “Due to the lack of coverage and our speed, the quality of the Wi-Fi may differ from that in your home.” It also advises against watching online videos, which “contributes to limiting the bandwidth.”

    […] But bad train Wi-Fi isn’t just about pace or tower count. Many cabins aren’t actually designed to let radio frequencies in.” A lot of trains would have historically used windows that have metalized or [low-emissivity] glass coatings that are inherently not conducive to signal propagation,” Kehoe said.

    That setup would make the cabin similar to a sort of Faraday cage — an electromagnetic armor that blocks wireless signals, much like what causes your phone to drop calls in an elevator or keeps microwave radiation from escaping. […]

    More at the link.

  316. says

    Nunes defamation lawsuit over Rachel Maddow comment dismissed

    A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif) against MSNBC personality Rachel Maddow nearly five years ago.

    U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel ruled this week that Nunes failed to prove Maddow and her team at the network acted with actual malice during a discussion about a package Nunes received addressed to him from Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian legislator with ties to Russian officials and intelligence services, while he was the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

    “The Court concludes that no reasonable jury could find that NBCU made the statement with constitutionally-defined actual malice,” Castel wrote.

    MSNBC is owned by NBC Universal as part of the Comcast corporate umbrella.

    Nunes, a longtime ally of President Trump, sued Maddow in 2021 alleging she and the network “harbor an institutional hostility, hatred, extreme bias, spite and ill-will” toward the Republican.

    […] After leaving Congress, Nunes joined Trump as CEO of Truth Social.

    Five years of courtroom battles … that must have cost a lot of money and time.

  317. says

    Where the summer COVID-19 infections are hitting hardest

    The number of people with COVID-19 in the U.S. is low but increasing, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released Friday.

    COVID-19 is trending up in many Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, Southern, and West Coast states. The agency said infections are “growing or likely growing” in 40 states, based on emergency department visit data as of July 29. Infections were unchanged in nine states.

    The weekly percentage of emergency department visits among people diagnosed with COVID-19 is low, but growing, CDC said. Visits were highest for children younger than 4 years old, which experts said makes sense because many remain unvaccinated.

    WastewaterSCAN, which monitors infectious diseases through municipal wastewater systems, categorized national coronavirus levels as “high” and trending upward since mid-July.

    According to CDC, the wastewater viral activity level for coronavirus is currently low, and only Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, California, Alaska and Texas reported “high” or “very high” levels.

    Experts say a lack of data is making it harder to track COVID-19 in real time, but the available information indicates the expected seasonal wave is happening.

    […] While other respiratory viruses remain at low levels until the winter, experts have said COVID-19’s ability to mutate sets it apart and contributes to a much higher baseline infection rate. More cases circulating year-round means more opportunities for the virus to mutate.

    The vaccine being updated for the coming fall season is targeted to the JN.1 variant, as it was last year. But Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has significantly narrowed recommendations on who should get the vaccine, raising significant questions about the availability and affordability come the fall.

    In May, Kennedy said the shots would no longer be recommended for healthy kids, a decision that health experts have said lacks scientific basis. [!] A coalition of medical groups subsequently sued over the move.

    In addition, a new policy requires all updated COVID-19 vaccines to undergo extensive placebo-controlled clinical trials, as if it were a new shot rather than an update to one that already exists.

    The updated Covid shots are expected to be available in the fall to adults 65 and up and kids and adults with at least one medical condition that puts them at risk for severe illness — the groups exempt from the clinical trial requirement.

  318. johnson catman says

    re Lynna @316:

    Nunes, a longtime ally of President Trump, sued Maddow in 2021 alleging she and the network “harbor an institutional hostility, hatred, extreme bias, spite and ill-will” toward the Republican.

    That may be true, as it is for a great many of us, but that did not interfere with the accurate reporting of the incident.

  319. JM says

    Mediatie: Alex Jones Claims Top Trump Admin Officials Offered Him a Quid Pro Quo to Get Him to Stop Criticizing the President

    Conspiracy theorist and radio host Alex Jones claimed he’s received “a bunch of calls” from people at “the top of the [Trump] administration” asking him what he wants in exchange for backing off his criticism of President Donald Trump.

    It was already known that this was happening but Alex Jones is a much more significant figure the Charlie Kirk, the only other person confirmed to be involved. It shows that Trump is losing some of his popularity with the far right.

  322. says

    Asked about a possible pardon for Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, Trump says the quiet part loud

    “Does the president base his pardon decisions on whether criminals are aligned with him personally? It was weird to see him effectively concede the point.”

    Traditionally, Americans presidents have issued pardons to right a wrong or to protect those who have been falsely accused of wrongdoing. In 2025, however, if Donald Trump sees a convicted criminal as a political ally, that’s apparently all the president needs to know.

    What often goes overlooked, however, is the degree to which the inverse is true, too: If the Republican doesn’t see a convicted criminal as a political ally, that’s also all the president needs to know.

    Take Sean “Diddy” Combs, for example.

    The hip-hop titan was recently acquitted of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking at his federal trial but was convicted on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. It’s against this backdrop that there’s been considerable speculation of late about whether Combs might receive a presidential pardon. With this in mind, NBC News reported:

    Trump said during tonight’s [Friday’s] Newsmax interview that he was unlikely to pardon Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, saying that the musician who was convicted on two counts during his federal sexual abuse trial was ‘very hostile’ during Trump’s presidential campaign. ‘I was very friendly with him. I got along with him great, and he seemed like a nice guy. I didn’t know him well, but when I ran for office, he was very hostile,’ Trump said during the interview.

    Asked if he was probably a “no” on pardoning Combs, the Republican president replied: “I would say so, yeah.”

    As the interview progressed, Trump focused not on the case, the allegations or the factual details, but rather on his personal feelings about his own ego.

    “We don’t like to have things cloud our judgment, right? But when you knew someone, and you were fine, and then you run for office, and he made some terrible statements,” Trump told Newsmax. “So I don’t know, it’s more difficult. It makes it more — I’m being honest, it makes it more difficult to do.” [video]

    But as part of the same on-air interview, Trump was also asked about a possible pardon for George Santos, a disgraced former Republican congressman who recently reported to prison.

    “You know, he lied like hell … but he was 100% for Trump,” the president said, before saying that Democrats and journalists should share the “blame” for not uncovering the former GOP lawmaker’s lies sooner. [video]

    He added, in reference to Santos, “He was a congressman and his vote was solid.” After noting more than once that he didn’t know Santos personally, Trump concluded about a possible pardon: “With him, I have the right to do it. Nobody’s asked me, but it’s interesting.”

    To recap, over the course of a single interview, the president said a pardon for Combs probably won’t happen because the entertainment mogul was “hostile” during his campaign for president, while a pardon for Santos is on the table because the disgraced former congressman “was 100% for Trump” and a “solid” partisan vote for the White House.

    Trump’s critics have long argued that the president is basing his pardon decisions on whether convicted criminals are aligned with him personally, and this was a rare instance in which Trump all but admitted to a national television audience that his critics are correct.

    […] In Trump’s first term, the Republican effectively wielded his pardon power as a corrupt weapon, rewarding loyalists, completing cover-ups, undermining federal law enforcement and doling out favors to the politically connected […]

    in his second term, it appears Trump is no longer concerned about appearances or the pretense of propriety. He’s corrupting the pardon process; he knows that he’s corrupting the pardon process; he knows that we know that he’s corrupting the pardon process; and he’s doing it anyway.

    The president seems eager to act with impunity, confident in the knowledge that a Republican-led Congress will shrug its shoulders with indifference; […] and news organizations have to divide their coverage between this and a wide variety of other presidential abuses.

    The result is a dynamic in which Trump is effectively declaring, “I’m handing out pardons like party favors to my political allies, because they’re my political allies, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  323. says

    The White House’s war on data is being fought on four fronts

    “As Donald Trump and his team target government statistics in a variety of ways, it’s important to remember: What we don’t know can hurt us.”

    Donald Trump’s discomfort with facts has become the stuff of legend. But given recent events, it’s worth dwelling on a specific part of the president’s rejection of reality — specifically, the war on data that he and his White House team have been waging with unnerving vigor.

    The political combat is being fought on four fronts:
    1. Hiding data: Throughout Trump’s second term, his administration has gone to outlandish lengths to keep important data away from the public. As The Washington Post reported in the spring, “The Trump administration is deleting taxpayer-funded data — information that Americans use to make sense of the world. In its absence, the president can paint the world as he pleases.” The same report added, “Curating reality is an old political game, but Trump’s sweeping statistical purges are part of a broader attempt to reinvent ‘truth.’”

    It’s difficult to do a full accounting of what has gone missing, but we know the list includes everything from climate data to education data, economic data to crime data […]

    2. Firing those who collect the data: The White House’s layoffs, buyouts and hiring freezes have already undermined federal economic statistics collection, leading to a Reuters report two weeks ago noting that many economic experts were increasingly worried about the quality of official U.S. economic data.

    And it’s not just the economy: ProPublica reported in April, “The data collection efforts that have been shut down or are at risk of being curtailed are staggering in their breadth. In some cases, datasets from past years now sit orphaned, their caretakers banished and their future uncertain; in others, past data has vanished for the time being, and it’s unclear if and when it will reappear.”

    3. Firing those who release the data: The broader concerns about data integrity reached new levels late last week when Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the then-head of the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics who had committed the grievous crime of releasing accurate information that the White House didn’t want to see. […]

    4. Making up data: The same president who condemned his own administration’s jobs data as “rigged,” “ridiculous,” “phony” and a “scam” boasted a few days later that he has successfully lowered the costs of prescription drugs by up to “1,500%” — which remains a literal impossibility.

    But this happens practically every day. Trump keeps claiming that gas prices have fallen below $2 per gallon in several states, which is demonstrably false. […] Trump also has a habit of making up imaginary approval ratings for himself.

    He makes up inflation data. And figures related to construction costs. And tax data. And trade data. And crime data.

    How is this different from the White House’s routine lying? As MSNBC’s Catherine Rampell recently explained in a column for The Washington Post, “For months, President Donald Trump has waged war on objective, reliable federal statistics.[…] These figures help families decide where to live, physicians how to treat their patients, and businesses what to sell or whether to hire.”

    Data, in other words, matters. And as recent events have made clear, what we don’t know can hurt us.

  324. says

    As a general rule, celebrating the misfortunes of someone is unseemly. But when that person is billionaire Elon Musk, let’s do this. The past week has not been terrific for both Tesla and X […]

    Last Friday, a Florida jury slapped Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, with a $243 million verdict in a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of a woman killed due partly to Tesla’s glitchy Autopilot self-driving software. The Tesla driver dropped his cell phone and reached down to grab it, letting Autopilot take over. The Tesla promptly blew through an intersection at over 60 miles per hour and crashed into an SUV, killing Naibel Benavides and severely injuring her boyfriend.

    Of course, Tesla is being exceedingly dramatic about the verdict, saying that it “works to set back automotive safety and jeopardize Tesla’s and the entire industry’s efforts to develop and implement lifesaving technology.” Of course, that’s a weird statement to make when your “lifesaving technology” appears to have been involved in someone’s death.

    Normally, the government plays a regulatory role here, investigating the safety of cars. However, once Trump took office and Musk burrowed in as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, most of those investigations were expected to just go away. [!]

    […] Last month, Trump said he wanted Musk’s businesses to “thrive.” However, Tesla’s launch of self-driving taxis in Austin, Texas, went so poorly that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is looking into the taxis’ myriad problems, including a penchant for reportedly veering into oncoming traffic. Seems bad!

    Generally, Tesla has dodged these sorts of lawsuits or prevailed in court. But now there’s a template for future settlements to be more expensive. In other words, the company may have to up the amount it is willing to pay to settle or face a nine-figure jury verdict.

    […] while this hurts Tesla, the board still wants to shower Musk with money for … what exactly? He just got 96 million new shares, worth roughly $29 billion.

    It’s not just Tesla having a dark day, though let’s all take a moment to engage in some pointing and laughing about how the jury verdict caused Tesla’s stock to fall. Meanwhile, over at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, things are not going great for Musk’s social media platform, X. The court ruled that while X cannot be held liable if it fails to remove child sex abuse material immediately, the company could face negligence claims going forward for not reporting such material to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and for not having an easy way for users to flag posts. Basically, once X is aware of that material on the platform, it has a legal duty to report it to NCMEC […]

    […] For Musk, posting CSAM [child sex abuse material] isn’t really a dealbreaker. He reinstated the account of right-wing conspiracy theorist Dominick McGee after McGee’s account had posted an image taken from one of the worst, most violent child abuse videos out there. But hey, McGee claims he did it to raise awareness! Musk tried to wave this away by saying only people on X’s safety team saw McGee’s post, but it actually got 3 million views and 8,000 reposts, according to The Washington Post.

    Of course, McGee now gets to go to White House press briefings, and we can all thank Musk for that. [!]

    There should be consequences for turning X into a Nazi bar that aids the exploitation of children […] There should also be consequences for Tesla’s apparent refusal to make its cars safer. That Florida jury verdict might get reduced on appeal, but it still puts Tesla on notice that going to trial may not be the greatest idea.

    And anything that makes Musk’s life harder and more expensive, we’re here for it.

    Link

  326. says

    Senate GOP says yes to another former Fox News wack job

    Senate Republicans on Friday voted to confirm former Fox News host and conspiracy theorist Jeanine Pirro to serve as the United States Attorney for Washington, D.C. Pirro only received support from the GOP, while all members of the Democratic caucus who cast a vote opposed her nomination. The nomination passed with a vote of 50-45.

    Pirro is yet another former Fox News talking head to join the Trump administration. During her time at the network, Pirro frequently interviewed Donald Trump and sung his praises. She joins figures like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, among others, who worked for the right-wing propaganda network before being brought on to the Republican administration.

    During her time at Fox News, Pirro distinguished herself by being one of the network’s most notable promoters of thoroughly debunked election conspiracies. Following Trump’s loss in the 2020 race against former President Joe Biden, Pirro repeatedly argued that the election was stolen from him. These were all lies.

    Pirro’s decision to push election myths, particularly fake stories about Dominion Voting Systems purportedly “flipping” votes to Biden, were part of the trigger for that company’s lawsuit against Fox News. An internal email that surfaced in the suit revealed that a Pirro producer told Fox executives her broadcasts were “rife” with conspiracy theories and “completely crazy.” Even after some within Fox made clear to Pirro that her assertions were made up, she refused to make changes to the monologues that opened her program.

    This is the person that Trump and Senate Republicans have put in charge of prosecuting federal crimes in D.C.

    […] Pirro also promoted other conspiracy theories outside of the 2020 election while at Fox News, including the baseless claim that the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas was the work of more than one person. She even claimed in 2018 that attempts to investigate Trump for his role in subverting the 2016 election were “an attempt at a coup.”

    Pirro’s conspiratorial ranting ventured into racism when she promoted the bigoted “great replacement” theory. Pirro said in a 2019 Fox Nation radio appearance that immigration is “a plot to remake America, to replace American citizens with illegals who will vote for the Democrats.”

    When promoting a book in 2023, Pirro also appeared on a podcast openly supportive of the debunked QAnon conspiracy, which alleges liberals and celebrities drink babies’ blood, among other insane theories.

    Trump has spent much of his time in the public eye promoting and supporting all manner of conspiracy theories, from racist birtherism to ludicrous claims that China made up global warming. In appointing Pirro to such an important position, he has rewarded a fellow traveler—and Senate Republicans have given her their stamp of approval.

  327. says

    With so much bad in the news, let us gawk at the wackjob that is GOP Rep. Nancy Mace […] Now with South Carolina Republican Governor Henry McMaster’s term expiring, the Palmetto state’s most attention-craving representative […] has officially launched her campaign for governor, making an announcement Monday morning at her alma mater, The Citadel.

    Yep, as she likes to remind everyone, Mace was the first woman to graduate from that famously formerly all-male South Carolina military academy. Shannon Faulkner was the first to attend in 1995, following an epic court battle […], but Faulkner dropped out after someone threatened to kill her parents, leaving a place for Mace to vault to the distinction. Won’t somebody think of the poor men who got their sacred safe gender space invaded, and the man whose spot Nancy Mace took? […]

    Now, irony, Mace has grown up to be the House’s most victim-status-claiming snowflake. She’s bragged that she fought off mobs of trans people trying to KILL her, and filed charges against a trans activist for injuring her by shaking her hand […] And the bathrooms, oh the bathrooms, she is obsessed with the idea of trans people in bathrooms, and with bullying trans Rep. Sarah McBride.

    And THEN there’s how, according to a deposition from a former aide of Mace’s, she tried to blackmail her former fiancé, Patrick Bryant, into giving her his share of properties worth $5.5 million that they had bought together in happier times, with what Bryant and others say is a fake-victim story.

    After Bryant refused to sign the properties over to her, she took to the House floor and accused him and three other men — Brian Musgrave, Eric Bowman and John Osbourne — of “incapacitating women,” rape, voyeurism, sex trafficking, witness intimidation, and “premeditated, calculated exploitation of innocent women and girls in my district.” Serious shit!

    She claimed in the House and on X that she had evidence from Bryant’s phone, including photos and videos, showing he filmed and participated in dozens of rapes. And she showed [on the House floor] a blurry silhouette that she claimed was an image of her naked body, filmed without her knowledge […]

    The men deny it, and Musgrave and Bryant are suing her. And surprise, surprise, now Mace refuses to sit for a deposition, and will not produce any of that evidence she claimed to have, or any names or evidence about anyone else she claimed the men had victimized.

    South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson also said that The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division opened an investigation of Mace’s accusations back in December of 2023, and conducted multiple interviews and got search warrants, but has not yet found any evidence to back up any of Mace’s claims. Mace says […] that the speech and debate clause lets her say whatever she wants, true or not! […]

    Mace’s gubernatorial platform shall, of course, be culture-warring, especially against the 0.87 percent of South Carolina residents who identify as trans. She spent practically half of her announcement speech ranting about MEN IN WOMEN’S SPORTS and wanting to get CHILD PORN out of libraries, and BAN PRONOUNS from schools, which is going to make it mighty difficult for children to learn grammar. [video]

    “I don’t want to see any glitter parties!” Well, fair, that shit gets everywhere.

    Just last Tuesday saw her denying she was going to give up her House seat to run, but she still made sure to get her hate flag flapping in. [social media post: “Proud transphobic.”]

    […] There’s more to her platform than culture war, but not much more, other than Trump was chosen by God. […] And she wants ICE patrols on every block, of course. […]

    And Mace has a decent chance of winning. In July, before she even announced, she was polling with 16 percent, putting her in the lead of a pack of candidates as inspiring as warm mayonnaise, and with 52 percent of voters undecided. But between now and November of 2026, anything could happen!

    Is it a winning formula in South Carolina to make your whole personality a raging obsession with the genitals of the person in the bathroom stall next to you? Is that enough to make voters forget how the economy is ravaged, the state’s manufacturing plants are closing left and right, and its beaches are eroding away? It sure would seem like South Carolina voters would have bigger worries on their minds.

    But Nancy Mace is betting that they don’t, and that she can MAGA culture-warrior all the way to the governor’s mansion. We shall see.

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/nancy-mace-wants-to-inspect-bathrooms

  330. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Commentary on 324.

    Mike Masnick (Techdirt) on Aug 3:

    Two days ago: Tesla has to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for deceptively marketing Autopilot in a way that falsely made people think it could drive the car by itself.

    Today: Elon Musk “Teslas can drive themselves!”

    Rando 1: “(Into other vehicles)”
    Rando 2: “Let us not forget that one of those vehicles was a parked fully-fueled jet.”

  331. John Morales says

    Tesla share price:
    309.26 USD +6.63 (2.19%) ↑ today
    Closed: 4 Aug, 5:36 pm GMT-4

  332. says

    Followup to comments 151 and 314.

    Washington Post link

    “Texas House Republicans vote to issue civil arrest warrants for fleeing Democrats”

    Texas state House Republicans voted Monday to issue civil arrest warrants for Democrats who fled the state to try to stop GOP leaders from redrawing the congressional map, stepping up pressure on them to return.

    Addressing a partially empty chamber Monday afternoon, state House Speaker Dustin Burrows (R) said he was prepared to sign such warrants as he accused Democrats of shirking their responsibilities.

    “To those who are absent, return now,” he said. After the chamber voted, it quickly adjourned until Tuesday.
    Officials will have difficulty arresting the Democrats, however, because most of them are in suburban Chicago and beyond the jurisdiction of Texas authorities.

    […] Late Sunday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) threatened to try to expel absent Democrats from their posts.
    “This truancy ends now. The derelict Democrat House members must return to Texas and be in attendance when the House reconvenes at 3:00 PM [Central time] on Monday,” Abbott said in a letter to Democrats released late Sunday.

    Some legal scholars questioned whether courts would go along with any attempt to eject the absent lawmakers from office. The showdown over the past 24 hours was latest turn in an highly-charged partisan battle that has attracted national attention.

    Democrats said Abbott’s warnings were bluster and said they were committed to staying away for two weeks, when the 30-day special session is expected to end. Republicans hold the upper hand because Abbott could call more special sessions, and Democrats have not said whether they have the wherewithal to repeatedly leave the state for months.

    […] Abbott could not remove lawmakers on his own and would need the courts to go along with his plan, according to University of Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller. While Abbott and other Republicans could argue that the Democrats had abandoned their duties, those lawmakers would have a chance to make the case that they were representing their constituents by denying the majority the quorum it needs to operate, he added.

    “This is not a unilateral action of the governor,” Muller said. “Even if you go to a court, you’re going to have to make a showing that I think it’s going be tough to make.”

    […] How states draw districts helps determine which party has an advantage, and now Texas Republicans want five more seats to bolster the 25 they have. Republicans hope a new map could protect their narrow 219-212 House majority next year in the midterm elections, which typically are tough for the president’s party.

    By leaving, Texas Democrats have thwarted the plan for now. At least two-thirds of the members of the Texas House — 100 of 150 — must be present for lawmakers to take action. That means 51 of the 62 Democrats can block the Republicans from advancing their plans, and 57 have left the state, Democrats said. Most are in Chicago, but some are in Boston and Albany, New York, they said.

    Each absent Democrat faces a $500 daily fine — an amount that in two weeks would nearly match the annual $7,200 salary that Texas lawmakers are paid. […]

  333. says

    Washington Post link

    “Locals beg for Putin’s help as Russian-occupied Ukraine runs out of water”

    “Acute water shortages in occupied areas of eastern Ukraine, and angry residents’ appeals for help, contradict propaganda suggesting life is pleasant under Russian control.”

    Russian influencers and propagandists portray life in Ukraine’s occupied regions as heavenly after Moscow’s invasion and illegal annexations, but water shortages in the region have gotten so bad lately that local children recorded a video pleading for help from “Uncle Vova” — President Vladimir Putin — in an appeal reminiscent of peasants’ supplication to the czar in centuries past.

    […] By contrast, an idyllic video posted last week on Russian social media depicted children playing in a fountain in the occupied port city of Mariupol — a set piece designed to show off Russia’s reconstruction of the city it invaded and destroyed. But residents complain that they have no tap water for washing or drinking.

    Videos published by pro-Kremlin influencers extol sunny beach resorts, but people in the background are seen carting heavy water bottles.

    To claim its annexation of four eastern Ukrainian regions, Russia amended its constitution and staged sham elections, which were condemned by the United Nations and many governments because some residents were forced to vote at gunpoint. Moscow is insisting the regions are now part of Russia, like Crimea, which it invaded and illegally annexed in 2014, even though Russia forces still do not fully control them.

    The failure to resolve water and electricity problems in the Donetsk region is an embarrassment amid Moscow’s massive propaganda and construction effort designed to prevent the regions’ restoration to Ukraine.

    Moscow effectively has also forced many Ukrainians in the occupied regions to adopt Russian passports, a condition for receiving administrative assistance, obtaining a driver’s license or accessing other benefits.

    […] In Mariupol, Pushilin said, water was delivered for several hours every two days, but in other areas it was delivered for several hours only every three or four days. Putin earlier ordered 50 emergency teams and 88 water tankers to be sent from Moscow and the surrounding region. Pushilin said another 60 tankers would be sent from other Russian regions.

    The water crisis in Donetsk is among a slew of other war-related problems that have brought the impact of the war home to ordinary Russians, including long queues at airports in the peak vacation season and flight delays caused by Ukrainian drone activity near airports. In recent days, a major attack on Aeroflot’s computer systems by Belarusian anti-Kremlin hackers caused dozens of flights to be canceled on two consecutive days.

    Across the country, Russians have faced outages as authorities have shut down internet services to prevent drone attacks, disrupting daily life, including ride-hailing apps, delivery services and car sharing.

    […] Russia’s 2022 invasion led to heavy fighting in the vicinity of the Siverskyi Donets-Donbas Canal, which delivered water to the Donetsk region, leading to the destruction of water mains, pipelines, dams and other water infrastructure. [not true]

    In June, the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based policy group, blamed Russia’s invasion for the water crisis, adding that it had been exacerbated by “mismanagement and resource misallocation.”

    […] Russian propaganda outlets are trying to manage public discontent over the water crisis as part of a broader operation using bots to foster opposition to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and to promote Russian authorities in occupied Ukraine, according to a July 16 report by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and OpenMinds.

    The report tracked 3,634 automated accounts that posted pro-Russian comments on Telegram channels between January 2024 and April of this year targeting occupied Ukraine. More than 48,000 comments attacked Zelensky, while more than 9,500 comments focused on the restoration of water supplies.

    […] In mid-July, an official installed by Moscow, Andrey Chertkov, the acting head of the Russian-appointed Donetsk government, met local residents to hear what he called “emotional and frank” complaints about the lack of water. Chertkov has instituted price controls on bottled water in supermarkets.

    Andryushchenko wrote on Telegram that many districts of Mariupol lacked running water. And in the Torez region, water was promised once every six days but had not been turned on in 10 days, he reported.

    “All the ‘officials’ of Donetsk with their wells, boilers and pumps,” he wrote, referring to the authorities installed by the Kremlin, “are unlikely to understand those who cannot wash or do laundry for weeks.”

  334. says

    NBC News:

    The Israeli Cabinet on Monday voted unanimously to fire the attorney general, escalating a long-running standoff between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the judiciary that critics see as a threat to the country’s democratic institutions. The Supreme Court froze the move while it considers the legality.

  335. says

    Tampa Bay news:

    A culture of fear has persisted at a Florida nuclear power plant owned and operated by the state’s largest utility, according to a federal inspection report completed last fall. Workers were hesitant to report safety concerns to upper management lest they face retaliation. Inspectors came to this conclusion after interviewing more than 75 employees at the St. Lucie plant, located on a barrier island an hour north of West Palm Beach.

  336. says

    WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In one of the most stunning political comebacks in American history, on Monday Donald J. Trump picked the disgraced former congressman George Santos to lead the Department of Labor Statistics.

    “This is such an honor,” Santos told reporters. “I really didn’t think I’d get pardoned before Ghislaine.”

    The new DLS chief hit the ground running, revising upward the job figures from every month of Trump’s presidency.

    “The American economy added a million new jobs in May and a billion new jobs in June,” Santos declared. “President Trump is creating jobs like crazy—he even gave one to Pete Hegseth.”

    The unprecedented job growth has boosted Trump’s approval rating, which Santos said currently stands at 140 percent.

    https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/trump-taps-george-santos-to-head

  337. birgerjohansson says

    Ground Zero for the Black Death located at site near the Altai mountains.

    “Ancient DNA Finally Reveals the REAL Origin of the Black Death”

    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=fjLNxIf2lXk

    Neither Dr Fauci or the Jews were involved? Sounds made-up, just like the labor “report”!

  338. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    MuskWatch – Starlink turbocharges lethal jihadist group in Africa

    Before Starlink [Salafi jihadist group and al-Qaeda affiliate operating around Mali] JNIM often had to rely “on couriers, on paper maps, or sporadic access to cyber miles away from their bases, and this made them slow to respond to shifting battlefield dynamics.”

    “But now, with technologies like Starlink, they can log onto a stable, high-speed satellite connection from anywhere, even live in the desert or forest […] using real-time maps, encrypted messaging platforms, and even live streams to plan and secure attacks with incredible coordination. This has radically shifted the balance of power between insurgent groups and state actors.” […] Regulators have been unable to contain the lucrative black market […] Starlink terminals, the hardware required to connect to the network, are frequently smuggled across the porous borders
    […]
    Last year, in Northeast Nigeria, government forces recovered a Starlink kit from members of Boko Haram, a jihadist group […] And in Sudan, the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary force at war with the Sudanese Armed Forces, uploaded a propaganda video last year featuring a Starlink terminal. On the other side of the world, in war-torn Myanmar, criminal groups have used Starlink to run massive internet scam compounds that utilize enslaved workforces.
    […]
    “Starlink is supposed to help you in the remotest of villages, right? And if you’re a terrorist and you rely on mobile logistics, you attack government structures, and then you retreat back into the forest […] you couldn’t find a better satellite network.”

  339. JM says

    Reuters: Russia’s Medvedev warns of further steps after Moscow abandons missile moratorium

    Russian former President Dmitry Medvedev blamed NATO countries on Monday for the abandonment of a moratorium on short- and medium-range nuclear missiles and said Moscow would take further steps in response.
    Medvedev, who has been engaging in a exchange of acerbic barbs on social media with U.S. President Donald Trump, made his comments after Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Moscow no longer considered itself bound by the moratorium on the deployment of short- and medium-range nuclear missiles.

    Trump last Friday said he had ordered two nuclear submarines to be moved to “the appropriate regions” in response to remarks from Medvedev about the risk of war between the nuclear-armed adversaries.

    Nuclear saber rattling. Given the people involved I can’t even say it’s impossible that somebody might launch one. I could see a desperate Putin trying to shut down the ground engagement with a tactical nuke and who knows how Trump would respond to something like that.

  340. StevoR says

    Seems the massive protests for Palestine in Oz last weekend have had an impact and worked on our pollies – suddenly Albo is phoning Palestinian President Abbas and Penny Wong is noting the urgency of recognising his state :

    We’ve just received word Prime Minister Anthony Albanese held a phone call with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas overnight. It’s understood Albanese reiterated Australia’s call for the immediate entry of aid to Gaza, a permanent ceasefire and the release of all the Israeli hostages still held by Hamas.

    He also reiterated Australia’s commitment to a two-state solution between Palestine and Israel. According to a readout from the prime minister’s office, Abbas thanked Australia for its economic and humanitarian support. Over the weekend, Australia pledged a further $20m to aid to Gaza. The two leaders also discussed deepening cooperation across several areas and agreed to meet on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, to be held in New York in September.

    Plus

    Foreign Minister Penny Wong has been out and about this morning, and dialed into ABC’s Radio National Breakfast where she was asked about Sunday’s pro-Palestinian rally on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The government is under renewed pressure to indicate it will recognise Palestinian statehood. Wong says she wasn’t surprised by the protests turnout. She said she anticipated we would see marches “of this scale”, reflecting the “broad Australian community horror of what is going on in the Middle East and the desire for peace and a ceasefire”.

    On recognition, she reiterated it was a “matter of when, not if”.

    “There is a risk there will be no Palestine left to recognise if the international community don’t move to create that pathway to a two-state solution,” she said.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-05/federal-politics-live-blog-august-5/105613380

  341. beholder says

    @340 StevoR

    I heard Assange was out marching with them. It’s heartening to hear that he’s recovered enough to protest again.

  342. StevoR says

    The Grand Canyon has been ablaze for over a month now :

    After lightning ignited the wildfire on July 4, officials allowed it to burn for forest health – a common practice in the West. But a week later, it exploded, burning the iconic Grand Canyon Lodge. Arizona’s governor and U.S. senators have called for an independent investigation. The National Park Service reviews every wildfire. Grand Canyon Park spokesperson Joelle Baird says, for now, the agency is focused on fighting this one.

    JOELLE BAIRD: Right now, we are documenting all of the decision-making. And really, we support the firefighters who are out there and actually doing the work on the ground.

    HEINSIUS: There’s little doubt that parts of the landscape will be forever changed. Taylor McKinnon is the Southwest director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

    TAYLOR MCKINNON: In the high forests there, we’ve had species isolated for a long time that have become their own unique form, like the Kaibab squirrel. It’s also got a lot of old growth up there, especially the ponderosa pine old growth.

    HEINSIUS: McKinnon says the North Rim contains some of the last standing ancient forest in the region and a population of Apache trout, Arizona’s state fish. …

    Source : https://www.npr.org/2025/08/01/nx-s1-5484018-e1/the-wildfire-that-destroyed-the-grand-canyon-lodge-a-month-ago-is-still-growing

  343. StevoR says

    @ ^ Plus also :

    A wildfire that has closed the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park raged out of control over the weekend and is now the largest currently burning in the country. The Dragon Bravo fire has burned more than 123,000 acres and was only 13 percent contained as of Monday afternoon, according to a federal interagency website that tracks wildfires.

    The blaze, which was sparked by a lightning strike on July 4, has destroyed about 70 structures, according to the National Park Service, including the historic Grand Canyon Lodge and North Rim Visitor Center. The damage was bad enough to prompt the service to close the North Rim of the park for the rest of the 2025 season.

    Source : https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04082025/grand-canyon-fire-largest-in-nation/

    NB. Source there demands an eml address to read their material rather annoyingly.

  344. John Morales says

    StevoR, headlines vs. content.

    “The Grand Canyon has been ablaze for over a month now :”
    vs
    “The’re been a blaze in the Grand Canyon for over a month now :”

    The former is the headline, the latter is the reality.
    But then, I’m not paid for clickbaity headlines.

    —

    Checking with BB:
    \text{Maximum proportion affected} = \frac{A_F}{A_{GC}} = \frac{123{,}000}{1{,}217{,}262} \approx 0.101 \approx 10.1\%

    \displaystyle A_F = 123{,}000 \quad \text{(acres burned by Dragon Bravo Fire)} \\ A_{GC} = 1{,}217{,}262 \quad \text{(total acres of Grand Canyon National Park)} \\ C_F = 0.13 \quad \text{(containment proportion)} \\ B_{GC}(F) \leq A_F \quad \text{(acres of Grand Canyon burned by Dragon Bravo Fire)}

  348. StevoR says

    On Tuesday, Aug. 5, Earth’s solar day will be ever so slightly shorter than usual 24 hours, according to Timeanddate.com, making it not only one of the shortest days of 2025, but also since records began.

    At just 1.25 milliseconds under the 86,400-second mark, it won’t be noticeable, but it’s part of a puzzling trend that’s baffling scientists: Earth is spinning faster. After decades of slowing down, our planet’s rotation has been speeding up in recent years — and timekeepers have no definitive explanation.

    Source : https://www.space.com/astronomy/earth/mysterious-boost-to-earths-spin-will-make-aug-5-one-of-the-shortest-days-on-record

  350. says

    Trump suggests undocumented farm workers are ‘naturally’ designed for field work

    “The president’s preoccupation with immigrants and genetics seems to be getting worse.”

    There was an odd point in June when the Trump administration curtailed immigration raids on farms, then reversed course, only to reverse course again, leaving many to wonder exactly what the policy was. As Politico reported, the president is apparently moving toward some kind of resolution, and he sketched out something akin to a policy during his latest CNBC interview.

    Trump said his administration will continue to deport criminals, but that he wants to ‘work with’ farmers to find a solution for their workers, oftentimes immigrants who have lived in the country illegally for decades and are paying taxes. He suggested the White House was working on a touchback program for some workers, requiring them to leave the U.S. and reenter through a legal pathway, an idea that faces strong opposition among immigration hawks who view exceptions for one industry as a slippery slope.”

    “We can’t let our farmers not have anybody,” the president added.

    But during the same interview, Trump went quite a bit further by sharing some thoughts on what he believes makes immigrant farm workers unique. [video]

    After claiming that Americans who “live in the inner city” won’t do farm work, Trump argued, “They’ve tried. We’ve tried. Everybody’s tried. They don’t do it. These people do it naturally. Naturally. I said, ‘What happens’ — to a farmer the other day — ‘What happens if they get a bad back?’ He said, ‘They don’t get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back, they die.’ I said, ‘That’s interesting.’ … In many ways, they’re very, very special people.” [Trump used a “Sir” story in his racist fantasy.]

    For now, let’s not dwell on the fact that the president, who has an unfortunate habit of sharing the details of conversations that never occurred, probably didn’t have this conversation with a farmer “the other day.” It’s far easier to believe that Trump just made all of this up. (The “sir” is a tell.)

    Let’s instead dwell on the fact that Trump seemed to suggest that immigrants are “naturally” designed for farm work.

    If that rhetoric sounds at all familiar, it is not your imagination. The New York Times reported last fall, about a month before Election Day 2024:

    With the presidential race in its closing weeks, Donald J. Trump’s language has grown increasingly strident on the issue of immigration. But as he continues to demonize undocumented migrants as violent criminals, the former president is also reviving another old habit: invoking his long-held fascination with genes and genetics. For decades, including long before he became a political figure, Mr. Trump has been publicly obsessed with bloodlines and his stated belief that genetics are the best predictor of a person’s success.

    Indeed, this was a staple of the Republican’s 2024 messaging, complaining about undocumented immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” and the degree to which the U.S. was dealing with those with “bad genes.”

    Months later, as NBC News reported, Trump appeared on Fox Noticias. “Hispanic people have been supportive of me like no other candidate,” the Republican claimed, adding, “They’re great people. They work so hard. They are very, very entrepreneurial, always have been, always will be. See, that’s genetics, too. You know, we talked about genetics before. That’s genetics, too.”

    The president’s perspective on the issue appears to be getting worse.

  351. says

    […] over the weekend, as part of the larger gaslighting campaign, Trump insisted online that he’s responsible for “creating the greatest economy, where prices and Inflation have come way down,” despite the economy being demonstrably and quantifiably worse than when he took office, and neither prices nor inflation have “come way down.”

    In other words, as Trump confronts facts he does not like, he’s left with a few choices. He can change direction and abandon a misguided agenda that is not working; he can ask the public to be patient while to tries a regressive and ineffectual experiment; or he can fire statisticians and brazenly lie to the public.

    Take a wild guess which path Trump prefers.

    Link

  352. JM says

    Business Insider: Russia’s rumored jet-powered versions of the Iranian Shahed are appearing in Ukraine’s air defense reports

    Ukraine’s Air Force Command reported on Wednesday that it had encountered jet-powered attack drones while defending its airspace the night before.
    “A notable feature of the night attack was the use of up to eight jet-powered UAVs in the northern direction,” it wrote in a regular update.

    The Russians have developed a cheap jet and begun mounting it in a version of the Shahed drone. They are significantly faster then propeller drones and thus a much bigger problem for Ukrainian air defense. They would also be harder and more expensive to built but I have no idea how much capacity Russia has to make them.
    I found one source that said the design was based on the Czech PBS TJ-100. An old turbojet that has been built in large numbers and distributed widely. Which would make it easy for the Russians to get information and examples.

  353. JM says

    Kyiv Independent: Ukraine raises issue of alleged Indian parts in Russian drones amid growing scrutiny of Moscow ties

    Ukraine has detected Indian-made components in Russian Shahed-type attack drones, Presidential Office head Andriy Yermak confirmed on Aug. 5, adding Moscow must be denied access to supplies that “enable the killing of Ukrainians.”
    “Unfortunately, we are detecting Indian-made components in Russian attack drones — including the Shahed/Geran models,” Yermak said on X.
    President Volodymyr Zelensky’s top aide shared a story by the Hindustan Times, which reported that, according to its sources, Ukrainian diplomats have formally raised the issue of Indian parts in Russian drones with the Indian government and the EU.

    I would be curious about the scale here. Russia is buying parts second hand and on the black market so some parts could turn up from anyplace. Selling these parts to Russia is apparently not illegal under Indian law but they are trying to stay neutral and have cut off anything obviously for the war.
    Given the industrial flexibility and interconnected trade of the modern world it becomes harder and harder to remain neutral without cutting off all trade.

  354. birgerjohansson says

    An early warning from God Awful Movies
    ‘This week, we welcome in a new guest masochist and introduce them to the genre of “Part One of Rapture Trilogies That Never Got Part Twos.”

  355. says

    EXCLUSIVE: Duffy to announce nuclear reactor on the moon

    Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy will announce expedited plans this week to build a nuclear reactor on the moon, the first major action by the former Fox News host as the interim NASA administrator.

    NASA has discussed building a reactor on the lunar surface, but this would set a more definitive timeline — according to documents obtained by POLITICO — and come just as the agency faces a massive budget cut. […]

    […] Duffy also offered a directive to more quickly replace the International Space Station, another NASA goal. The two moves could help accelerate U.S. efforts to reach the moon and Mars — a goal that China is also pursuing.

    The plans align with the Trump administration’s focus on crewed spaceflight. The White House has proposed a budget that would increase human spaceflight funds for 2026, even as it advocates for major slashes to other programs — including a nearly 50 percent cut for science missions.

    The reactor directive orders the agency to solicit industry proposals for a 100 kilowatt nuclear reactor to launch by 2030, a key consideration for astronauts’ return to the lunar surface. NASA previously funded research into a 40 kilowatt reactor for use on the moon […]

    The first country to have a reactor could “declare a keep-out zone which would significantly inhibit the United States,” the directive states, a sign of the agency’s concern about a joint project China and Russia have launched.

    The directive also orders NASA to designate a leader for the effort and to get industry input within 60 days. The agency is seeking companies able to launch a reactor by 2030 since that’s around the time China intends to land its first astronaut on the moon.

    The nuclear initiative means that NASA will continue to have a hand in nuclear development even after the Pentagon’s recent cancellation of a joint program on nuclear-powered rocket engines. […]

    The space station directive aims to replace the aging, leaky International Space Station with commercially run ones by changing how the agency awards contracts.

    NASA plans to award at least two companies a contract within six months of the agency’s request for proposals. Officials hope to put a new station in space by 2030. Otherwise, only China would have a permanently crewed space station in orbit.

    Several companies have risen to meet the space station demand, including Axiom Space, Vast, and Blue Origin. But lawmakers have expressed concern in recent months that the agency is not moving fast enough to give them the funds they need.

  356. says

    President Donald Trump was inexplicably spotted wandering around on the White House roof on Tuesday, shouting at reporters who wanted to know what the fuck he was doing up there that he was “just taking a little walk.”

    Trump, who does not believe in exercise, was strolling on the roof making bizarre hand gestures for roughly 20 minutes.

    He later told reporters that he was looking for “more ways to spend my money”—a sign he could be looking into more ways to ruin the historic White House complex. [video]

    Already, Trump has paved over the Rose Garden, installing a hideous concrete monstrosity over the lush grass that was previously there. Trump also erected a gigantic flagpole on the White House lawn, making it look more like a used-car lot than a historic building.

    The tasteless fool is also set to build a massive gilded abomination of a ballroom on the White House grounds—an attempt to make the building better resemble his tacky Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. Trump claims he and private donors will finance the ballroom, though given his history of spending other people’s money, we have our doubts any of his own grifted wealth will go into it. Instead, the ballroom will likely be yet another way for rich people to bribe Trump for personal gain.

    Ultimately, when former President Barack Obama was in office, he made a joke at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that if Trump ever became president he’d put a giant “TRUMP” sign on the building. [video]

    However, it appears that this is exactly what the idiot in chief is doing.

    Scariest of all is that completely remaking the White House in his own hideous personal style is not something one usually does if they plan to stay only a few more years. Indeed, on Tuesday, Trump said in a batshit crazy and lie-filled interview with CNBC that he’d “like to run” for a third term, claiming that he has the “best poll numbers I’ve ever had.” (That’s a lie, to say the least.)

    Lord have mercy.

    Link

  357. says

    https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3w75iygkvtcrqvu4x4ux2hzv/post/3lvm44cknss2m

    1/ A senior Russian officer was reportedly killed by his own men after boasting that he would be promoted for sending them to die in assaults, and declaring that he would bring funeral notices to their families and “fuck their wives”. He allegedly planned who would die for his financial profit.

    2/ In November 2024, the Russian army announced that Colonel Yevgeny Borisovich Ladnov had “died near Luhansk near Kreminna as a result of artillery shelling on 10 November 2024.” He was the commander of the 19th Tank Regiment (military unit 12322).

    3/ A man who served under Ladnov, Junior Sergeant Andrey Mikhailovich Perevoshchikov, has given an account of what he says happened to the colonel. According to Perevoshchikov, Ladnov was deliberately sending his men to their deaths en masse and told them so in blunt terms:

    / “He [Ladnov] gathered the stormtroopers and said: What the fuck, you fucking stormtroopers, why are you still alive, you fucking bastards? The more of you there are, the more stars I get on my epaulettes and medals. You are not meat to me, you are just a number…

    5/ “I have destroyed two assault regiments and by autumn I will destroy you, and I will deliver the death notices to your wives, and I will fuck your wives.”

    A similar account was given by a female military doctor in May 2024.
    1/ A military doctor who has deserted from the Russian army says she was forced to be a commander’s ‘field wife’, had to rate crippled men as fit, saw ‘undesirable’ soldiers being shot by their officers, and others being “sold for slaughter” for their commanders’ profit

    6/ She says that while she was serving with the regiment, she saw that the commanders “simply got rid of unwanted servicemen: they took off their armor and threw grenades at them in the dugout.”

    / The regiment commander shot them himself, his henchmen shot them … The regiment commander and his henchmen, of course, had already destroyed two regiments before mine, so to speak, the one I was in, the 19th regiment.”

    8/ She says that the senior officers stole the salaries of the men they were sending to their deaths and worked out in advance who was worth the most money if they died:

    9/ “I saw documents in the office of ‘Tobol’, the chief of staff, about, God forgive me, how much each serviceman costs. That is, the guys were simply sold, like football players were sold, simply for slaughter.”

    10/ “They didn’t take the wounded from the battlefield, they rotted and died there so that they wouldn’t have to pay, again, for the wounds. The guys were listed as missing in action, and the [payroll] was distributed between the command, between Ladnov and, again, his lackeys.”

    […] 13/ According to a senior intelligence officer in the regiment, on Ladnov’s orders the men were taken by his subordinates “into the neighboring forest belt without armour, without weapons, and gave each of them a burst in the chest, point-blank.”

    14/ A few weeks later, Ladnov was killed, allegedly by his men according to Perevoshchikov’s account. […]

  358. says

    https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3w75iygkvtcrqvu4x4ux2hzv/post/3lvm44cknss2m

    1/ A senior Russian officer was reportedly killed by his own men after boasting that he would be promoted for sending them to die in assaults, and declaring that he would bring funeral notices to their families and “fuck their wives”. He allegedly planned who would die for his financial profit.

    2/ In November 2024, the Russian army announced that Colonel Yevgeny Borisovich Ladnov had “died near Luhansk near Kreminna as a result of artillery shelling on 10 November 2024.” He was the commander of the 19th Tank Regiment (military unit 12322).

    3/ A man who served under Ladnov, Junior Sergeant Andrey Mikhailovich Perevoshchikov, has given an account of what he says happened to the colonel. According to Perevoshchikov, Ladnov was deliberately sending his men to their deaths en masse and told them so in blunt terms:

    / “He [Ladnov] gathered the stormtroopers and said: What the fuck, you fucking stormtroopers, why are you still alive, you fucking bastards? The more of you there are, the more stars I get on my epaulettes and medals. You are not meat to me, you are just a number…

    5/ “I have destroyed two assault regiments and by autumn I will destroy you, and I will deliver the death notices to your wives, and I will fuck your wives.”

    A similar account was given by a female military doctor in May 2024.
    1/ A military doctor who has deserted from the Russian army says she was forced to be a commander’s ‘field wife’, had to rate crippled men as fit, saw ‘undesirable’ soldiers being shot by their officers, and others being “sold for slaughter” for their commanders’ profit

    6/ She says that while she was serving with the regiment, she saw that the commanders “simply got rid of unwanted servicemen: they took off their armor and threw grenades at them in the dugout.”

    / The regiment commander shot them himself, his henchmen shot them … The regiment commander and his henchmen, of course, had already destroyed two regiments before mine, so to speak, the one I was in, the 19th regiment.”

    8/ She says that the senior officers stole the salaries of the men they were sending to their deaths and worked out in advance who was worth the most money if they died:

    9/ “I saw documents in the office of ‘Tobol’, the chief of staff, about, God forgive me, how much each serviceman costs. That is, the guys were simply sold, like football players were sold, simply for slaughter.”

    10/ “They didn’t take the wounded from the battlefield, they rotted and died there so that they wouldn’t have to pay, again, for the wounds. The guys were listed as missing in action, and the [payroll] was distributed between the command, between Ladnov and, again, his lackeys.”

    […] 13/ According to a senior intelligence officer in the regiment, on Ladnov’s orders the men were taken by his subordinates “into the neighboring forest belt without armour, without weapons, and gave each of them a burst in the chest, point-blank.”

    14/ A few weeks later, Ladnov was killed, allegedly by his men according to Perevoshchikov’s account. […]

  359. birgerjohansson says

    The owner of Trump Burgers is being deported.
    His green card was revoked.

  360. says

    Trump administration to curtail veterans’ abortion rights at Veterans Affairs hospitals

    “The Biden administration expanded reproductive rights options at VA hospitals. Now, the Trump administration is now trying to roll back the clock.”

    After Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices overturned Roe v. Wade, the Biden administration had limited options, but the Democratic White House made a difference where it could. In fact, soon after the high court’s Dobbs ruling, the Biden administration created a policy to allow veterans to get abortions at Veterans Affairs hospitals — even in red states where reproductive rights had been dramatically curtailed, if not eliminated altogether.

    At the time, VA officials said those abortion bans had created “urgent risks” to pregnant veterans, necessitating an “essential” policy change.

    As The Washington Post reported, Donald Trump and his team are undoing what Joe Biden and his team did for veterans.

    Pregnant veterans would no longer be allowed to receive abortions at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals in cases of rape, incest or when the pregnancy threatens their health under a proposed rule from the Trump administration that would revoke a Biden-era policy expanding abortion access. … In its filing Friday, the Trump administration called the 2022 rule change ‘inappropriate’ and ‘legally questionable.’

    The Post spoke to Lindsay Church, executive director of Minority Veterans of America, which opposes the change, who expressed concern about the implications of the newly proposed policy.

    “If you were a veteran, what would you choose?” Church said. “I wouldn’t choose the institution that told me that I absolutely have to be dying. I would go anywhere else.”

    Obviously, this is a story about abortion rights and who’ll have an opportunity to terminate unwanted or dangerous pregnancies; but stepping back, it’s just as important to acknowledge what else this is: an example of the Trump administration cutting a health care benefit for veterans.

    In fairness, it’s worth noting that veterans who are undergoing miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies would still be able to receive care at VA facilities — but that’s it.

    “Our servicewomen risk everything to serve our country. We must in turn provide them the health care and services they earned throughout their lifetime — including comprehensive reproductive health care,” Democratic Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico said in a statement. The chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus added, “The Trump administration’s latest push to take away abortion care for veterans is wrong and a betrayal of that service and dedication.”

    Looking ahead, the Republican administration’s proposed policy change has not yet taken effect, and the public comment period will be open until early September. Watch this space.

  361. says

    As Big Law cowers, small firms are stepping up to take on Trump, by Rachel Maddow.

    “Smaller law firms and new purpose-driven legal organizations are challenging the administration where Big Law has given up.”

    Related video at the link.

    As Donald Trump continues to push around the nation’s universities — suspending their federal funding and then shaking them down to comply with his demands — some colleges have decided to do deals with the White House. In recent weeks, Brown University coughed up $50 million and Columbia University paid more than $200 million.

    Last week, there was reporting that an even bigger deal was in the works. The New York Times reported that Harvard University was preparing to fork over $500 million to appease Trump. However, according to the school’s student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, the university’s president told the faculty he is absolutely not considering such a deal.

    The paper reports: “The University is seriously considering resolving its dispute with the White House through the courts rather than a negotiated settlement.”

    Then there are the law firms that Trump has been pushing around. Nine big law firms struck deals with the president after he began issuing executive orders targeting certain firms. Four firms refused to make deals with Trump; they fought back and all four firms won in court.

    Despite their success, new reporting from Reuters found that Trump’s assault on law firms has nevertheless had what is presumably the desired effect: Some big law firms are scaling back their pro bono work for the kinds of people or organizations the Trump administration is trying to victimize or persecute.

    At the same time, smaller law firms and new purpose-driven legal organizations are being formed to make up the moral difference, to do the work that these big law firms are too cowardly to do and to stand up for people being fired by Trump when they’ve done nothing wrong.

    On Monday, The New York Times reported on a new firm of just four lawyers — including two who were fired from the Justice Department this year by Trump — that is focused on challenging the administration in court, specifically with the aim of getting precedent-setting cases before the Supreme Court that could curtail the president’s power.

    There are also those fighting against the administration who are using the standards of the legal profession, its internal ethics and rules, as a way to stand up and push back. The Freedom of the Press Foundation has taken on Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chairman by filing a disciplinary complaint against him with the D.C. Bar Association. The complaint accused the FCC chair of, among other things, intimidating media outlets in violation of professional conduct rules he is bound to follow as a lawyer.

    Meanwhile, the D.C. Bar’s disciplinary board has just recommended that former Trump lawyer Jeffrey Clark be disbarred for his role in trying to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. The board said Clark should be disbarred “to send a message to the rest of the Bar and to the public that this behavior will not be tolerated.”

    On top of these efforts, a legal watchdog group has filed professional ethics complaints against three lawyers who currently work for Trump’s Justice Department. The Legal Accountability Center has accused the attorneys of making false statements to a federal judge while defending the Trump administration in court.

    “The rule of law is under direct assault right now, and its greatest threat comes when those within the legal system fail to do their duties and stand up against the attack,” Michael Teter, the group’s executive director, told The New York Times. “The message that needs to be heard by all attorneys representing the government is that even though the Trump administration isn’t interested in following the rules, we are watching.”

  362. says

    Trump Finally Weighs in on Redistricting Mess He Started

    In mid-July, President Trump asked Texas to redraw their congressional maps to give the GOP more seats, kicking off the redistricting mess now unfolding in states across the country. But he’s stayed uncharacteristically quiet on this issue in the days since. On Tuesday, though, he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that it’s actually the Democrats’ fault.

    “They did it to us first,” Trump said. “I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know. And we are entitled to five more seats.”

    Link

  364. says

    There Is an Information Blackout at Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Migrant Detention Camp

    Public records related to Florida’s so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” migrant detention camp have essentially disappeared into what one expert called a “black hole.” Over 90 pages of contracts reviewed by TPM were removed from an online transparency database operated by the state; in other cases, public records requests have been met with what an academic called “ghosting” and outright denials. Multiple experts told TPM the handling of documents related to the project is “disturbing” and may be a violation of state law.

    “What’s happening in that camp is of national interest and national concern,” Barbara Petersen, the executive director of the Florida Center for Government Accountability, told TPM in a conversation last week. “And the fact that the state is hiding information about the contractors, it’s just — it’s unbelievable and it’s inexcusable.”

    […] The governor and his allies have spearheaded the development of the “Alligator Alcatraz” facility in the swampy Everglades. Since the site was officially opened last month, attorneys and other advocates have raised alarms about brutal conditions and lack of legal access. […]

    “[…] There are allegations of extreme humanitarian concerns. There’s allegations of constitutional violations, due process violations. […]”

    In the weeks since the camp was established, there has been a spate of lawsuits, political outcry, and even a diplomatic dispute over some of its detainees. There has also been extensive reporting on the hundreds of millions spent to quickly build the facility. TPM covered some of the contracts DeSantis’ office and the Florida Department of Emergency Management entered into to construct the site, which involve significant amounts of money and, in at least one case, disaster preparedness resources being diverted in the rush to set up the camp. During the course of producing that story, between July 15 and 16, PDF files of contracts related to the project that we had questioned DeSantis’ office about were removed from the Florida Accountability Contract Tracking System (FACTS). TPM was first to report on the removal of “Alligator Alcatraz” contracts from that public database.

    Single-page summaries of those contracts were later uploaded to the site. In total, TPM noted that 94 pages of material were removed from about a dozen contracts that TPM had been tracking, all of which had been associated with the project based on information that originally appeared in FACTS.

    The disappearing documents have since been noted by multiple other news outlets that have covered the camp. [social media post]

    State Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat who has been a prominent critic of the conditions and costs associated with the camp, also highlighted the removal of the contracts from FACTS as it was happening. In a conversation with TPM late last month, Eskamani did not mince words when asked about the situation.

    “It’s clearly illegal,” Eskamani said. […]

    Florida officials have pointed to an exemption in the state’s public records law related to “trade secrets held by an agency” as the reason the pages of the contracts were taken offline. Florida Statutes section 119.0715 specifies that “trade secrets” are “confidential and exempt” from the state transparency’s laws and the section of the state constitution that requires access to public records. The brief summaries of the dozen contracts reviewed by TPM that were uploaded to FACTS after the initial documents were removed all included language noting that they, “do not contain information identified as confidential and exempt … as provided by section 119.0715, Florida Stuates.”

    […] Trade Secrets
    Experts who discussed the situation with us said the handling of the contracts does not comply with the law or with the state’s past practice. Specifically, they noted the law requires exempt material to be redacted rather than removed wholesale.

    “If there is information in a record that is exempt under the applicable public record statute, the general rule is that you can only redact that specific information,” Adam Marshall, the senior staff attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, explained to TPM. “You cannot withhold other information that is not exempt.”

    Marshall further said, “It’s hard for me to see how every detail in a contract could be a trade secret.”

    […] He also suggested the move was clearly tied to the reporting on the camp as well as criticism from its opponents.

    “Not every state requires this information to be posted online proactively. … It’s a great system and it’s bad when they pull something and clearly it’s tied to the reporting that went on, and the politics,” Cuillier said.

    […] “I think all of it’s bullshit,” Eskamani said. “They only pulled it down because they realized that it was bad for them. It was a PR disaster for them.”

    Eskamani pointed to a thread on the social media site “X” where investigative reporter Jason Garcia cited specific passages in the Florida statutes that require officials to post “a properly redacted copy of the contract or procurement document” rather than a “summary sheet.” [social media post]

    Petersen had a similar take.

    “I think it’s horseshit,” Petersen declared.

    “They’re required by law to post contracts. It’s section 215.985 Transparency, Florida Act,” Petersen later added. “215 is very specific about what information must be included on those contracts and my understanding is that they’re not including that information in the summaries.” […]

    ‘Ghosting’
    The disappearing contracts are just one aspect of the apparent secrecy surrounding records from “Alligator Alcatraz” that Petersen and other experts suggested violates the law.

    […] TPM has filed multiple public records requests as part of our reporting on the facility pursuant to Florida law. Those requests have, thus far, not yielded any documents. That silence is part of what the experts we spoke to described as a broader trend in Florida.

    Cuillier, the leader of the institutions dedicated to free speech and freedom of information at the University of Florida, said the practices of ignoring requests entirely and implausibly denying the existence of responsive records are a growing problem both in the state and nationally.

    “Theyre breaking the law. Unfortunately, that’s becoming more common everywhere. We’re seeing ghosting of requesters left and right, not just at the federal level, but also at the state level,” Cuillier said.

    […] “I made like seven requests,” Eskamani said, with a laugh. “Florida under DeSantis takes months to fulfill requests. You basically have to get an attorney to threaten to sue.”

    Petersen described a similar experience.

    “This is the way they operate,” Petersen said of the DeSantis administration. “They’ve got unlimited pockets right? So, we can sue them and they can drag it out, paying their high priced lawyers,”

    […] Marshall, the senior staff attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, tied the situation to an “incredibly unfortunate” larger trend at both the state and federal level where officials are resisting public records requests.

    “It shouldn’t be the case that you have to file a lawsuit just to get a basic response,” Marshall said. “At the end of the day, it has the effect of inhibiting the ability of the public to know what their government is doing and that’s not good for anyone.” […]

  366. says

    ICE Nazis Kidnap Episcopal Priest’s Daughter, Release Her, Probably Are Mad She Didn’t Say ‘Thank You’

    Wow, Kristi Noem and Tom Homan’s roided-out […] Gestapo just keeps outdoing itself. What do we have today? …]

    Oh! An Episcopal priest’s daughter! We haven’t done that one yet! That’s a new one!

    To skip to the spoiler alert, the person we’re about to talk about, the Trump Nazis’ latest victim, was actually released in a relatively short amount of time compared to other ICE victims, though not so short that they couldn’t kidnap the girl and disappear her to Trump’s Nazi […] Gulag in the “Baja Arkansas” section of Louisiana. (That’d be the part that’s more associated with “Duck Dynasty,” meth, and Southern Baptist perverts like Speaker Mike Johnson, less with food and culture.)

    But oh, this is some fucked up shit.

    […] it went down at a totally legal immigrant person’s immigration check-in […]

    Go Yeon-soo (stylized in American media as Yeonsoo Go, but regardless, her friends and family call her “Soo”) is a 20-year-old Korean student at Purdue University in Indiana, but she was in New York going to a visa hearing when she was forcibly kidnapped by evil men.

    You see, Soo had what’s called an R-2 visa, which is for people who are here as dependents of religious workers. That’s because Soo’s mom is the Reverend Kim Ky-rie — in American media as “Kyrie Kim” — the first woman to be ordained as a priest by the Seoul Diocese of the Anglican Church of Korea. So she’s kind of a big deal. (She’s here on on an R-1 visa, which is for the religious workers themselves.) The reverend had been recruited to the US to work in Asian ministries with the Episcopal Diocese of New York in 2021, bringing her then-high-school-aged daughter along with her, as parents often do when they move across the world. Soo graduated from high school with honors in Scarsdale. Then she went to Purdue’s College of Pharmacy. Now it was time to get that R-2 visa switched to a student visa.

    Tricia McLaughlin, the vile, reprobate DHS Nazi Barbie who always gets trotted out to lie about shit like this, explained that “Yeonsoo Go, an illegal alien from South Korea, overstayed her visa that expired more than two years ago,” The Episcopal Diocese’s lawyers likewise explained that fuck you, asshole, her visa was and is good until December, and add that DHS hasn’t shown them anything that suggests that reality is any different.

    Who to believe? The interchangeable Nazi blonde or literally everyone else?

    […] So why did they release Soo after five days? They aren’t saying, but it could have something to do with the fact that it was just another monumental fuckup from the dumpster fire of fuckups that make up the Trump regime’s […]

    Soo had been nervous about going to her hearing, because these Nazis have been in the news. She was correct to feel that way. But it turns out when you kidnap the innocent daughter of a respected Episcopal Priest in New York City who’s also loved and respected in her home diocese and country of South Korea, people get fucking pissed.

    And they did. People in New York protested, people in Korea protested, both dioceses were raising hell. “Supporters from the Episcopal Diocese of New York, the Interfaith Center of New York and the New York Immigration Coalition called for Go’s release during a gathering in Manhattan’s Federal Plaza Saturday.” Reports suggest that at that very moment, the masked invaders were in the process of transporting their latest captive across state lines to [Louisiana].

    Notably, this is not the first time the Episcopal church has had to lose its shit at the Trump administration, just the first time the regime has personally kidnapped one of their clergy’s children.

    Even the South Korean government was raising hell. Here’s a statement they made publicly:

    “We urge the prompt release of Ms. Go and call for a fair and transparent review of her immigration status in a manner that upholds human dignity and the values our nations share,” the Rev. Dongshin Park, Primate of the Anglican Church of Korea, said in the statement, noting the US “has long been a symbol of liberty, justice, and opportunity, and a trusted partner of Korea.”

    […] It sounds like Soo was able to stay in contact with her parents somewhat, but they didn’t find out until yesterday that she had been kidnapped to Louisiana, by looking at ICE records online.

    Regardless, Soo was brought back and released last night, and you can watch the video of her reunion with her mom below. (Independent journalist Sandi Bachom, who took the video below, says that according to her reporting, Soo was never actually removed to Louisiana. However Mary Rothwell Davis, the Episcopal Diocese attorney, says she was, and so do all other major stories we’ve read. […].) [video]

    Rachel Maddow shared this statement from the Bishop of New York, the Rt. Rev. Matthew Heyd, after Soo was released: [Social media post]

    There is indeed more work to do.

    And part of that work is screaming at and humiliating and shaming every move these Nazis make. Not only is it the right thing to do, and what we have to do to save our country, but as we see over and over again, when you scream at these people long enough, eventually, it works. […]

  367. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/welcome-to-trumps-teenybopper-model

    Look over there, we’re going to put a nuclear reactor on the moon! Hey, maybe Barron Trump will marry Sydney Sweeney, and make a dynasty of white babies who will rule the land forever! The regime and Fox News are gaggingly desperate to talk about anything but the Epstein files that Trump’s name is all over, or show any kind of empathy for the child-sex-trafficking victims of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Over the past week Fox has rolled 28 times more Sydney Sweeney coverage than any of that stuff that Dear Leader has decreed SO BORING and something only stupids care about.

    Loyalists don’t want to talk about Trump’s ever-changing stories of why he and Epstein broke up, or Todd Blanche pulverizing the law to give Trump’s friend and convicted pimp of underaged girls a spot at a “Club Fed” prison. […]

    And oh, those grand jury transcripts that judges did not let the DOJ release […] They now admit in a court filing that everything but witnesses’ names was already public information:

    “The enclosed, annotated transcripts show that much of the information provided during the course of the grand jury testimony—with the exception of the identities of certain victims and witnesses—was made publicly available at trial or has otherwise been publicly reported through the public statements of victims and witnesses.”

    Nope, Fox does not want to talk about it! But over here at the Wonkette words factory, we can talk about Epstein all day. We have barely even touched yet on the part where Trump ran Trump Model Management, which may have directly inspired Epstein’s own investment in a modeling (or “modeling”) company. Both smorgasbords for dirty old predators! Yes, correction, Trump’s agency came first, after he was a teen-model judge for John Casablancas. And according to financial and immigration records reviewed by Mother Jones, and a filing from a lawsuit, like everything else Trump has ever touched, TMM was a big fat scam, too, recruiting girls as young as 14 from overseas, many arriving without a chaperone, with promises that they might get lucrative modeling contracts.

    And it was a requirement of the girls’ employment to go to parties where they danced while old men ogled them, and were told by Trump’s company, “You’ll meet rich guys who will help you.” At Trump’s parties at the Plaza Hotel, a male witness, a photographer, claimed:

    Trump would “go from room to room […] I was there to party myself. It was guys with younger girls, sex, a lot of sex, a lot of cocaine, top-shelf liquor” but no smoking. Trump didn’t approve of cigarettes.

    Those men at these parties often knew each other. “It’s a small community,” the photographer says. “They exchanged information, facilitated each other. Trump was in and out. He’d wander off with a couple girls. I saw him. He was getting laid like crazy. Trump was at the heart of it. He loved the attention and in private, he was a total fucking beast.”

    Trump’s partying with naked underage girls (with no music playing!) even skeeved out Luther Campbell, AKA Uncle Luke of 2 Live Crew, self-proclaimed dog in heat and freak without warnin’: [video]

    And about that “employment,” holy scam! According to a court filing in a lawsuit (which was tossed because the alleged victim, Alexia Palmer, filed in state court instead of complaining to the Department of Labor), models were recruited by Trump Model Management and brought to the United States using the H1-B Program. According to federal law, an employer must pay their employees the amount they put on the H1-B application, in this case $75,000 a year. And would you even believe, Trump, the guy who has spent his entire career bragging about stiffing contractors, stiffed the little girls too, deducting their “expenses” until they were left with nearly nothing: Palmer said the agency only found her 21 days of work, which after fees and expenses were deducted came to a grand total of $3,880, along with some modest cash advances.

    Other models say that Trump Management never obtained any visas for them at all. And,

    “Two of the former Trump models said Trump’s agency encouraged them to deceive customs officials about why they were visiting the United States and told them to lie on customs forms about where they intended to live. Anna said she received a specific instruction from a Trump agency representative: “If they ask you any questions, you’re just here for meetings.”

    There’s a term for bringing workers overseas to work for pay that’s illegally low, it’s human trafficking. Lying on an application is visa fraud (ahem, Melania). Introducing underage girls to men for the purposes of the men having sex with them is child sex trafficking. And a crime is still a crime, even if nobody is charged for it, JUST SAYING.

    And if Todd Blanche actually wanted to know more about who was on the Epstein client list, he could have simply talked to the victims, or reviewed camera footage from Epstein’s house (where did that go?). If he wanted to know who was paying Epstein, there’s years of bank records (how did Peter Thiel come to invest millions with him?). But instead, he made some kind of a deal with Ghislaine Maxwell, the felon convicted of sex trafficking who was charged with perjury, even though Maxwell’s word would be worthless in court. Maxwell’s offender status being re-classified so she could move to minimum-security Federal Prison Camp Bryan could only have come from the top. What did Maxwell give Blanche as a quid pro quo for such a cushy setup? […]

    Victims and their families, who in some cases have spent decades battling Epstein, Maxwell, and the Epstein estate in court, are blasting the administration for the lack of transparency, and speaking out in pain and disgust, publicly and in letters. [videos]

    Maxwell is now reportedly the pariah of her new digs, though, as the only sex offender in the place, and a snitch. The rest of the women are there for white-collar crimes, like Elizabeth Holmes and telemarketing scammer/Real Housewife Jen Shah. FPC Bryan has a dormitory-like setting, and it’s cushy: Inmates play with puppies and train service dogs, do arts and crafts, put on shows in their theater, have access to email, and trot around the sports field playing softball and soccer. […]

    The Supreme Court is set to hear Maxwell’s petition to get out of jail on September 29, Trump says he can pardon her (and P. Diddy, and George Santos, if he wants to!) and we’ll just have to see who wins his get-a-pardon gameshow.

    In other Maxwell news, was she the source for a new stash of Epstein’s birthday letters and new photos of Epstein’s freaky-deaky lair that the New York Times just got its hands on? Well-wishers included Ehud Barak, and Woody Allen, who wrote that Epstein’s dinner parties reminded him of Dracula’s castle, “where Lugosi has three young female vampires who service the place.” Also media mogul Mortimer Zuckerman, who “suggested ingredients for a meal that would reflect the culture of the mansion: a simple salad and whatever else ‘would enhance Jeffrey’s sexual performance.’” BARF EMOJI. […]

    And oh, one more thing, video forensics experts still have questions about the edited video that Attorney General Pam Bondi released, with some, including Conor McCourt, a retired sergeant for the New York City Police Department and forensic video expert, claiming that it shows a person in an orange jumpsuit in the hall. Maybe?

    […] We really could do this all day, as there’s more than a decade’s worth of materials tying Trump to Epstein and Maxwell, and more comes out all the time. Every day new creepy videos keep resurfacing, too. [Video of Trump judging Elite Models girls.]

    But look, if you haven’t already picked up on the fact that the guy is a creeper and a grifter by now … […]

  368. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/trump-orders-nasa-to-crash-perfectly

    “Trump Orders NASA To Crash Perfectly Good CO2 Satellite For No Reason At All”

    “Never mind that farmers and even his oil/gas buddies rely on the data.”

    In yet another example of how the Trump administration is working to make sure his fossil-fuel donors can eke out a decade or two more of profits at the expense of human health and welfare, the White House has told NASA to make plans to end America’s only two space missions that focus on measuring carbon dioxide emissions on Earth. The target this time is the Orbiting Carbon Observatories mission (OCO, get it?), which uses two nearly identical instruments, one mounted on the International Space Station (OCO-3), and the other on its own satellite (OCO-2, launched in 2014).

    If NASA terminates the mission as it’s been told to, the satellite, which was designed to operate well into coming decades, would be deliberately crashed, burning up in the atmosphere, so that no sneaky future Democratic administration could start it up again and collect CO2 emissions data that might make oil companies sad. […]

    As NPR points out, the data from the two orbiting carbon observatories isn’t solely used by climate scientists; its detailed measurements are also used by farmers, since CO2 levels impact crop health, and by the oil and gas industry worldwide, to help them comply with limits on CO2 emissions in countries that haven’t outlawed science.

    […] In the case of the OCO mission, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab openly admitted back in 2014 that OCO-2 was all about better understanding how carbon emissions make it into the atmosphere and how it’s absorbed by plants and by the ocean. OCO-2 was launched during the illegal term of Unperson Barack HUSSEIN Obama, so they openly talked about climate change being a real thing, and about how the mission might help humanity “change its behavior” to reduce the threat. […] [video]

    Trivia fact: OCO-2 was a nearly identical replacement of a satellite that was lost in 2009 when its launch vehicle blew up. So Trump would be throwing away a completely operational replacement whose instruments are still state-of-the art. [!] Then again, it costs $15 million a year for the twin observatories to gather and analyze data, and we need that for a big new White House ballroom and tax giveaways to billionaires.

    A 2023 NASA assessment found that OCO-2’s “data are of exceptionally high quality,” and that no other current or planned mission will provide similarly granular CO2 measurements. The report also found that the “instrument is in excellent condition. There is enough propellant to allow for operations until 2040.” […] The nearly identical OCO-3 instrument on the ISS went up in 2019 (yes, during Trump 1, not that he knew or cared), built literally from “spare materials from OCO-2,” […]

    Here’s some good news, at least: Thanks to the OCO missions so far, we have a far better understanding of how CO2 moves around the atmosphere and how it impacts plants on the earth and the oceans’ absorption of CO2. And as NPR notes, OCO even collects data nobody really expected to have immediate, real-world applications:

    Basically, when plants are growing, photosynthesis is happening in their cells. And that photosynthesis gives off a very specific wavelength of light. The OCO instruments in space measure that light all over the planet.

    “NASA and others have turned this happy accident into an incredibly valuable set of maps of plant photosynthesis around the world,” [smile] explains Scott Denning, a longtime climate scientist at Colorado State University who worked on the OCO missions and is now retired. “Lo and behold, we also get these lovely, high resolution maps of plant growth,” he says.

    But we’re constantly getting new data, and big new discoveries keep being made, including a major study published just last month into how CO2 uptake works in Africa, solving one previously unclear puzzle: Some years, the African continent emits about 2 billion tons more CO2 than it absorbs. Other years, its plant life absorbs about 2 billion tons more than the continent emits. Scientists had thought the deciding factor in those variations was temperature, but the study, using data from OCO-2, tracked CO2 emissions from various ecosystems in Africa and found that the real determining factor was rainfall:

    In shrublands and grasslands, plants take full advantage of water when it becomes available by increasing their mass with little energy expenditure. That reaction means that in wet years, shrublands and grasslands take up a lot of carbon and expel very little, substantially shifting the continent’s carbon flux. In contrast, forests and savannas emit and take up about the same amount of carbon in wet conditions; their overall impact on the continent’s carbon flux is therefore smaller.

    These findings suggest an explanation for the long-standing question of why Africa was such a weak carbon sink during the El Niño event of 2015–2016. The continent was unusually dry during that time, leading to stalled plant growth and carbon uptake.

    Yes, that has huge implications for planetary estimates of future warming and natural carbon uptake by plant life, too. If you’re not an oil company executive, it’s the kind of thing you’d want to keep monitoring instead of steering the satellite into the atmosphere and burning it up.

    NPR reports that David Crisp, a veteran NASA engineer who designed the systems and headed the OCO missions until he retired in 2022, has been hearing from NASA employees who have been ordered to start winding down the missions, although they “weren’t allowed to tell me that that’s what they were told to do.” Instead, since they were allowed to ask him questions, he figured out what was up: “They were asking me very sharp questions. The only thing that would have motivated those questions was [that] somebody told them to come up with a termination plan.”

    […] The threats are entirely upfront, too:

    Two current NASA employees also confirmed that NASA mission leaders were told to make termination plans for projects that would lose funding under President Trump’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year, or FY 2026, which begins Oct. 1. The employees asked to remain anonymous, because they were told they would be fired if they revealed the request. [!]

    […] Last month, congressional Democrats sent (acting) NASA chief Sean Duffy a letter reminding him that in the real world of constitutional authority, NASA cannot cancel any programs that have been funded by Congress, and that’s not just a good idea, it’s the Law.

    “Congress has the power of the purse, not Trump or Vought,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., one of the authors of the letter and the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology in an email to NPR. “Eliminating funds or scaling down the operations of Earth-observing satellites would be catastrophic and would severely impair our ability to forecast, manage, and respond to severe weather and climate disasters. The Trump administration is forcing the proposed cuts in its FY26 budget request on already appropriated FY25 funds. This is illegal.”

    What’s not clear yet is whether enough pushback can be organized to keep the OCO-2 satellite operating. […] And when it comes to raising a ruckus about blowing up science, “This will hurt hurricane forecasting” probably has more media appeal than “we fucking need this climate data,” even if both are a matter of survival. Maybe Rs in agricultural and forestry-dependent states will make a stink about losing all that plant-growth data, too.

    NASA has also invited proposals from universities and corporations to take over the cost of collecting and analyzing the data from OCO-3, aboard the ISS, so there’s that, too. No such outreach appears to have been sought for the OCO-2 satellite, however.

    […] Write and call your congresscritters, and if you’re not sure about the stakes, this NASA video, also from 2014, makes clear exactly why we need the CO2 data provided by the OCO missions. It even has a nice ‘splainer of how CO2 causes global warming, for folks who need a refresher, like everyone in Trump’s White House. [video]

    In conclusion, this is really not good, and we need to fight. […]

  369. birgerjohansson says

    A pleasant video to unwind to.

    (this is the closest I can come to finding a complete iyashikei video for you)

    “Maine Coon Cat Louis kayaking in snowfall”

    Louis looks at his human servant, thinking “if you die before we reach shore I am totally eating you”.

  370. birgerjohansson says

    Fuuu…
    OK, I will do better next time. BTW is it true DJT was seen walking around on the White House roof, or is that just more internet bs?

  371. John Morales says

    “The target this time is the Orbiting Carbon Observatories mission (OCO, get it?)”

    Took me a moment, but heh. I do like that little titbit.

  372. John Morales says

    Birger, the point is not to put YouTube URLs as the first part of a line; have you noticed my current lazy approach? Easier than remembering to put a full stop in front, as you’ve been doing.

    As an example, for yours, I’d have written:

    A pleasant video to unwind to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKqrvUon7C0

    No need for that full stop in front, or any messing about.

    Just don’t put the YouTube link as the first thing in a line.

    —

    Re your query, I put it to the bubblebot:

    Me: someone asked ‘BTW is it true DJT was seen walking around on the White House roof, or is that just more internet bs?’ — critique and adjudicate

    BB: Claim: Donald J. Trump was seen walking around on the White House roof.

    Adjudication

    ✅ Verified. Multiple credible news outlets confirm that on August 5, 2025, President Trump made an unannounced appearance on the roof of the White House’s West Wing, above the press briefing room. He was accompanied by architect James McCrery and Secret Service personnel, reportedly surveying the grounds in relation to a proposed $200 million ballroom addition.

    He responded to reporters below with remarks such as:
    – “Taking a little walk.”
    – “Just more ways to spend my money for the country.”
    – “Nuclear missiles.” (widely interpreted as a joke)

    Critique of the Query

    Ambiguity: The phrase “internet bs” implies skepticism but lacks specificity. Is the concern about fabrication, satire, or misinterpretation?
    Tone: “BTW” and “just more internet bs” suggest casual dismissal, which may obscure the need for factual adjudication.
    Improvement: A more precise formulation would be:
    “Was Donald Trump actually seen on the White House roof recently, or is this a misreported or satirical claim?”

    Conclusion

    The event occurred and is documented by multiple mainstream sources. The claim is true, though the context—Trump inspecting renovation plans—may differ from the tone implied by the original query.

  373. says

    NBC News:

    The State Department is set to launch a new pilot program later this month that will require foreign visitors planning travel to the U.S. from certain countries to post bonds of up to $15,000, according to a temporary final rule published in the Federal Register Tuesday.

    I guess Trump has not yet wrecked the tourism industry enough.

  374. says

    NBC News:

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to push to ‘occupy all of the Gaza Strip’ as ceasefire talks with Hamas founder and the hunger crisis in the besieged Palestinian enclave spirals. A bid by Netanyahu to occupy all of Gaza would follow similar calls from members of his far-right government upon whom his fragile coalition relies, and could mark a significant shift in policy since Israel withdrew from the territory in 2005.

  375. says

    NBC News:

    Former Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev has warned that the country’s rivals now faced a ‘new reality’ as the Kremlin formally announced it was no longer bound by a treaty limiting the use of short- and medium-range nuclear missiles.

  376. John Morales says

    To be fair, I am reluctantly impressed; Trump has dominated the news cycle every single day without fail since his ascension to king. Every single day, as evinced by this very thread.

  377. says

    Washington Post link

    The party at John R. Davis Elementary School was in full swing, but at the snow cone station, the school’s librarian was in tears.

    In the cafeteria, alumni marveled at old photographs on display and shook their heads. On a wall of the library, visitors posted sticky notes to describe their feelings: “Angry,” read a purple square. “Anxious,” said a pink one. “Annoyed.” “Heart broken.” “Bummed.” And more than any other word: “Sad.”

    Ten days later, John R. Davis Elementary School would close — not just for the summer, but for good.
    Now, as the new school year begins, the Roosevelt Elementary School District opens with just 13 schools. That’s almost a third fewer than it had last spring, a response to enrollment declines as the state offers unprecedented taxpayer funding for alternatives to public school.

    […] Perhaps more than any other state, Arizona has embraced market competition as a central tenet of its K-12 education system, offering parents an extraordinary opportunity to choose and shape their children’s education using tax dollars, and developing a national reputation as the Wild West of schooling.

    The state has supported a robust charter school system, tax money for home schooling and expansive private school vouchers, which are available to all families regardless of income. Nearly 89,000 students receive Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, a form of vouchers, state data show; a second voucher program awarded nearly 62,000 tax-supported private school scholarships in 2024, though some students received more than one. More than 232,000 students attend charter schools.

    […] Critics complain that vouchers eat up state funding, benefit families who can afford private school on their own, disrupt communities and send tax dollars to schools that face little accountability. Unlike public schools, private schools don’t have to administer state tests. They can pick and choose their students, while public schools must educate everyone.

    […] in July, President Donald Trump signed into law the first federal voucher program, which will require states to opt in, at an estimated cost of $26 billion over the next decade.

    […] In Ohio, the legislature agreed to increase voucher spending to $1.3 billion by 2027, up from just over $1 billion in 2025, while traditional public schools, which serve far more children, were given a smaller increase — and less than what public education advocates say had been promised under a multiyear agreement to ramp up school spending. In Florida, which has a $4 billion voucher program, public schools districts are seeing enrollment declines, meaning less money from the state and, in many cases, budget cuts.

    The ramifications for public education have been particularly clear in Arizona, offering an early picture of K-12 education under the Republican vision of maximum school choice, or what proponents call education freedom. Here, public schools are starting to close.

    […] In the late 1800s, heavy flooding and the arrival of unsightly railroad tracks along the Salt River prompted White families to flee to the northern parts of town. Housing covenants prohibited Mexican and Black families from doing the same, and they remained or were pushed into what’s now called south Phoenix. In the 1930s, the area was designated “hazardous” by federal redlining maps, warning banks away from investment.

    Like many areas with similar stories, south Phoenix suffered from poverty, joblessness and disinvestment. About two in three district students came from families with incomes low enough to qualify for free lunches in 2023-24, federal data show. About eight in 10 enrolled students are Hispanic, and 13 percent are Black.

    […] “They’re putting us against each other. You have this beautiful community of Roosevelt fighting for the scraps,” said one woman, who said she had twins in the public schools. “This is not by accident. This is a coordinated attack to privatize our schools, and I’m sorry that the board has to make these tough decisions.”

    All the teachers will transfer with their students to other schools in the district, the superintendent promised, which helped calm some concerns, she said later.

    […] The system is affecting traditional public schools in two major ways.

    First, these programs are drawing some students away from public schools, fueling enrollment declines in school districts across the Phoenix area. As vouchers draw away students, state funding — which is based on enrollment — has fallen, too. That’s left districts to cut staff, close schools or anticipate that they will need to do so in coming years.

    “Nobody wants that but the state has put our public schools in this dire predicament,” said Patti Serrano, president of the governing board of the Chandler Unified School District, which is losing students and reducing staff.

    The expansive voucher program also has strained the state budget, with costs projected to top $1 billion this year, far more than originally projected. Because many voucher students were already attending private schools, including many from wealthy families, funding them is a new expense for the state. [That does not sound like it will be sustainable.] That’s drained dollars, critics say, that could and should go to public education in a state that ranks 47th in spending on K-12 per-pupil spending. […]

    More at the link.

  378. says

    Washington Post:

    Michael Abramowitz, the director of Voice of America, has been fired after refusing to accept what he called an ‘illegal’ reassignment to run a broadcasting station in North Carolina, according to a new court filing on Monday.

  379. says

    This GOP senator thinks God chose Trump as president—yes, really

    On Monday, GOP Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina appeared on “Fox & Friends,” taking time away from denying the existence of racism to promote his new book and offer a watered down theological take on President Donald Trump’s disastrous second term.

    “When ordinary people stand up and respond to the call of God, extraordinary things happen. Think about President Trump. Two assassination attempts. We must believe Daniel II talks about, ‘he chooses the leaders,’” Scott said, referring to the Bible’s Book of Daniel. “We must believe that there is something unique and specific that God wants to accomplish, and he chooses the people. They have to say, ‘yes, of course,’ free will still matters, but there’s no way you can look at the last 2 years of this country’s history and not come to one conclusion: God is still at work in America, and he’s not finished.” [JFC] [video]

    Scott’s misogynistic brand of morality has been on full display for some time. He has repeatedly allowed the biblically compromised Trump to humiliate him in exchange for political proximity to a man whose Christian credentials are laughable at best.

    As Trump’s chaotic stewardship of the United States sends his already waning popularity to new lows, Scott and other Christian nationalists appear even more dedicated to their cult leader—who plays golf on Easter.

  380. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    @308, 369 birgerjohansson: Here’s that tanuki show.

    With You And the Rain (eng dub)
    Other shows can be found by clicking the “Slice of Life” genre tag.
    Wikipedia says a 4th episode aired Jul 27th that isn’t included here yet.

  382. birgerjohansson says

    John Morales @ 372
    With all the things happening after the Inauguration I expect any unusual news about DJT to be weird. To use a fictional example, a Family Guy episode containing Mr. Herbert is probably not going to be family-friendly.
    In old Chinese tradition a sacrifice was buried under the founding stone of important buildings. Watch out for transient people going missing.

  383. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Chinese government has ‘final say’ in Dalai Lama reincarnation, Tibetan official says

    At his 90th birthday celebration last month, [the Dalai Lama] assured followers that he would be reincarnated, and a non-profit institution he has set up will have the sole authority to identify his reincarnation.

    But […] the deputy secretary of the Chinese Communist Party committee in Tibet, said the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation would be found using a domestic search and approval by the central government. “The central government has the indisputable final say in the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama,”
    […]
    China installed a Tibetan Buddhist monk picked by Beijing as the faith’s No. 2 leader, the Panchen Lama, three decades ago after a six-year-old chosen by the Dalai Lama for the position disappeared in 1995.

    Rando:

    The Panchen Lama named the Dalai Lama; the Dalai Lama named the Panchen Lama. The Dalai Lama named a Panchen Lama, the state disappeared him and “found” a replacement, and are ready for the replacement to name a new Dalai Lama.

    A review of the Dalai Lama’s recent book

    The rule of the Dalai Lama in Tibet (who was previously a purely spiritual role since the 15th century) began in 1637 when Gushri Khan (1582-1655), the leader of the Khoshot Mongols, invaded Tibet. He deposed the secular ruler of Tibet, the Tsangpa King, and installed the 5th Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso (1642–1682), as a symbolic religious leader. […] the 5th Dalai Lama slowly consolidated temporal power. He eventually built the system of government […] that governed Tibet until 1959 when the current Dalai Lama escaped to India.

    After the death of the 5th Dalai Lama, disputes over succession lasted for more than 30 years. In 1720, […] the 6th Dalai Lama [was installed by] the Qing Dynasty. While the Dalai Lamas became associated with ruling Tibet, only the 5th and 13th Dalai Lamas effectively governed the country. The others either did not reach maturity to assume political power, or that power was ceded to the rule of lama regents.
    […]
    The [present day] Chinese state asserts ultimate authority over all matters within its territory, including religion. This mirrors Beijing’s position with the Vatican, as it refuses to recognize any Catholic bishops not appointed by the state. […] the Qing Emperor was regarded as the principal patron of the Dalai Lamas. Though the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 ended this relationship

  384. StevoR says

    @348. Also seems we have a few more of these shorter days to look forward to.. Yeesh. Time goes far too fast already if y’ask me!

    The Earth is set to have three remarkably shorter than average days in the coming weeks as the Earth’s rotation unexpectedly accelerates, according to scientists.

    Our pale blue dot’s daily rotation is normally equivalent to about 86,400 seconds — or 24 hours — but three days this summer will see as much as 1.51 milliseconds shaved off the clock, according to a report from Popular Mechanics.

    Source : https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/summer-2025-will-have-three-of-the-shortest-days-on-record/news-story/74c8bcbbf59dfc57572a453e9c4afe4c

  386. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    @382 birgerjohansson:

    In old Chinese tradition a sacrifice was buried under the founding stone of important buildings.

    Folklore. China, Japan, Burma. Southeast Europe, too.
    Wikipedia – Immurement, Sacrificial, Construction
    The Hitobashira article about SE Asia has an awful lot of “[Citation Needed]”, “legend”, “story”, and “rumor”. One citation of a bronze age archeological find.

    Conversely, medieval Britain did have eaves-drip burials for dense clusters of the very young near existing church foundations, seemingly so rain would become holy water as it ran off the roof onto them. The building blessed the people.

  387. birgerjohansson says

    Oops. ICE used a frame from South Park on their web presence.
    The reaction was imminent.

    “So we ARE relevant?”
    Hashtag ‘eatabagofdicks’

  388. John Morales says

    “With all the things happening after the Inauguration I expect any unusual news about DJT to be weird.”

    In other words, you are primed to ignore reality in favour of your expectations.

    He walks on roof, waves hands: weird shit.
    He walks on roof, waves hands: rich shit. Planning how to spend $$$ from taxpayers to doll up his place.

    Renovations; gotta give him credit for actually scoping it out for himself, no?

    ;)

  389. birgerjohansson says

    I do not follow the microgranular details of US politics – if the Dem governors carry through their threats of retaliatory gerrymandering, will that be enough to negate Greg Abbot’s planned re-districting of Texas?

    And if the answer is yes, has the Republicans never heard of game theory?

  391. John Morales says

    “And if the answer is yes, has the Republicans never heard of game theory?”

    Um, they are in ascendance and basically in control, they got elected.

    Game-theoretic expertise is suppose to get one on top of the opponent(s), and they’ve done that.

    So.

    (Also, game theory is rather low level; realpolitik is the go, and propaganda the means)

  392. John Morales says

    Bit like Putin’s war, is Trump’s tariffing.

    Sorta kinda sustainable in the short term, in the medium term with loss of juicyness, but defs not in the long term.

    Chickens are going back to roost; it shall be interesting as his policies begin to bite, and the damage becomes apparent.

    But yeah, he’s basically destroyed USA’s soft power worldwide, the USA’s humint abilities, its influence worldwide, he’s put stress on NATO to the degree that USA is being pushed out ASAP (5-10 years in a burning hurry), and he definitely has destroyed the expectations that one regime’s (oops, sorry, one administration’s) policies would last for their duration even under a new regime.

    And he got voted in. Remarkable.

  393. John Morales says

    I mean, nobody now expects any deals with the USA to be upheld by the USA.

    That’s half his legacy.

    —

    The other half is that norms and honour, adherence to tradition, respect for office, symbolic integrity, strategic foresight, crisis leadership, coalition building, rhetorical precision, ceremonial stewardship, transparency, civic humility, ethical consistency are clearly not needful for a President.

    (Or, Nixon was an upstanding honourable person, compared to Trump)

  394. John Morales says

    TL;DR: Trump has caused the USA to lose ‘face’.

    Like any rep, it’s easy to lose, but hard to build up.

    (The future impoverishment of its populace, other than the very very rich, is less important for the rest of the world)

  395. John Morales says

    [sorry, Lynna, I get into a mood and ruminate, sometimes. Again, thanks for tolerating me]

  396. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Justin Baragona (The Independent):

    Heckuva time for Trump to declare that 14-year-olds are now adults.

    Trump: Crime in Washington, D.C., is totally out of control. Local “youths” and gang members, some only 14, 15, and 16-years-old, are randomly attacking […] The Law in D.C. must be changed to prosecute these “minors” as adults, and lock them up for a long time, starting at age 14

  397. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    RFK Jr. cancels $500 million in funding for respiratory mRNA vaccine development

    “I don’t think I’ve seen a more dangerous decision in public health in my 50 years in the business,” said Mike Osterholm, a University of Minnesota expert on infectious diseases and pandemic preparations.
    […]
    In a statement Tuesday, HHS said “other uses of mRNA technology within the department are not impacted by this announcement.”

    Kennedy alluded to switching to a traditional vaccine platform, prevously announced.

    a beta-propiolactone (BPL)-inactivated, whole-virus platform. […] NIH’s in-house development of universal influenza and coronavirus vaccines, including candidates BPL-1357 and BPL-2491. That means that H5N1 avian influenza and coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV-1, and MERS-CoV, could all be targeted by a universal vaccine that doesn’t need to be updated seasonally or when variants change. The BPL platform is fully government-owned […] Clinical trials for universal influenza vaccines are scheduled to begin in 2026, with Food and Drug Administration approval targeted for 2029.
    […]
    the quest for a universal flu vaccine is not a new idea, and has so far been a failure.

  398. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    The Onion – Australia admits all those animals made up

    [Bilbies,] wallabies, numbats, quokkas, and bandicoots were completely made up. […] Australians were shocked that the rest of the world could be so gullible as to think there was actually an animal called a wombat whose poop came out in cubes. “I mean, come on—kultarrs, bettongs, wambengers? Their names sound like something out of Dr. Seuss. Once we realized people actually believed in kangaroos and koalas, we started making up even crazier stuff, just to see if they’d fall for it. Like the echidna, a spiny egg-laying mammal with a four-headed penis. […] In reality, our wildlife here is pretty boring: squirrels, some deer, a few bears. All pretty normal stuff.”

  403. says

    Trump said he feels “entitled” to a partisan reward, and he expects Texas Republicans to give it to him. That’s not how democracy is supposed to work.

    As Texas Republicans move forward with a radical redistricting scheme, opening a new chapter in “unconstrained partisan warfare,” it’s worth remembering that the partisan gambit wasn’t their idea. Rather, it was Donald Trump and his White House team that directed GOP officials in the Lone Star State to rig — or more to the point, rig even more — their district lines.

    The president elaborated on his vision during his latest appearance on CNBC. Appearing via phone, the Republican told viewers:

    We have a really good governor [Republican Greg Abbott], and we have good people in Texas. And I won Texas. I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know, and we are entitled to five more seats.

    When host Joe Kernan hedged on whether Trump actually broke the record for the best electoral performance in Texas’ 180-year history, the president was insistent. “Check it. Check it,” the president said, adding, “I’d like you to. I got the highest vote in the history of Texas. Okay? By a lot.” [video]

    We’re obviously well past the point where factual details matter to the White House, but since Trump invited the scrutiny, it’s worth noting that his 2024 performance in Texas was quite underwhelming. Yes, he easily carried the state with 56% of the vote, and yes, it’d be foolish to downplay a 14-point margin of victory, but in terms of political history, 56% is hardly record-breaking.

    Mitt Romney did better in Texas in 2012. [!] George W. Bush did better in his adopted home state in 2004 and 2000. [!] Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman also all topped 56% in the Lone Star State. [!] [Adding phrases like “as you probably know” is one of Trump’s tells. He does that when he wants to make the audience complicit in the lie.]

    I suppose it’s possible that Trump was referring to his raw popular vote totals, but that’s a rather silly metric given population growth. It’d be like saying Michael Dukakis was a more impressive candidate than FDR because Dukakis received 41 million votes, while Roosevelt only received 27 million votes. Those tallies are technically accurate, but given that the nation was much smaller in the 1930s than in the 1980s, the figures are also irrelevant.

    In other words, Trump said he’d put up the best performance in Texas of any presidential candidate in 180 years, and he was off by 168 years.

    But just as importantly (if not more so) was Trump’s other claim. “[W]e are entitled to five more seats,” the president said, as a result of the electoral triumph that happened only in his imagination.

    As the Texas scheme unfolds, GOP partisans aren’t running around explicitly saying, “We’re indifferent to democracy, so we’re trying to rig elections so that voters’ choices are largely irrelevant,” because that would be impolitic. Instead, they tend to peddle insincere talking points about the value of “competitive” races.

    Trump didn’t bother with the pretense. On the contrary, he again said the quiet part loud: He feels “entitled” to a partisan reward, and he expects Texas Republicans to give it to him. […]

  405. says

    The text of the “Katie Johnson” v Donald Trump / Jeffery Epstein lawsuit

    Trigger warning for extremely graphic sexual assault content.

    Excerpt:

    […] 18 8. The Plaintiff, Katie Johnson, alleges she was enticed by promises of money and a modeling career to attend a series of underage sex parties held at the New York City residence of Defendant Jeffrey E. Epstein and attended by Defendant Donald J. Trump.21 9. On the first occasion involving the Defendant, Donald J. Trump, the Plaintiff, Katie Johnson, was forced to manually stimulate Defendant Trump with the use of her hand upon Defendant Trump’s erect penis until he reached sexual orgasm.

    24 10. On the second occasion involving the Defendant, Donald J. Trump, the Plaintiff, Katie Johnson, was forced to orally copulate Defendant Trump by placing her mouth upon Defendant Trump’s erect penis until he reached sexual orgasm.1 11. On the third occasion involving the Defendant, Donald J. Trump, the Plaintiff, Katie Johnson was forced to engage in an unnatural lesbian sex act with her fellow minor and sex slave, Maria Doe age 12, for the sexual enjoyment of Defendant Trump. After this sex act, both minors were forced to orally copulate Defendant Trump by placing their mouths simultaneously on his erect penis until he achieved sexual orgasm. After zipping up his pants, Defendant Trump physically pushed both minors away while angrily berating them for the “poor” quality of their sexual performance.

    7 12. On the fourth and final sexual encounter with the Defendant, Donald J. Trump, the Plaintiff, Katie Johnson, was tied to a bed by Defendant Trump who then proceeded to forcibly rape Plaintiff Johnson. During the course of this savage sexual attack, Plaintiff Johnson loudly pleaded with Defendant Trump to “please wear a condom”. Defendant Trump responded by violently striking Plaintiff Johnson in the face with his open hand and screaming that “he would do whatever he wanted” as he refused to wear protection. After achieving sexual orgasm, the Defendant, Donald J.Trump put his suit back on and when the Plaintiff, Katie Johnson, in tears asked Defendant Trump what would happen if he had impregnated her, Defendant Trump grabbed his wallet and threw some money at her and screamed that she should use the money “to get a fucking abortion”. […]

  406. says

    The Nation’s Landmark Voting Rights Law Just Turned 60. It May Not Survive Trump.

    “The long-term game is to repeal the Voting Rights Act.”

    […] “They are thumbing their noses at the Voting Rights Act,” former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder told me. [A reference to what is currently going on in Texas.]

    The VRA, which turns 60 on Wednesday, is widely regarded as the country’s most important civil rights law. It played a pivotal role in ending Jim Crow by eliminating the suppressive tactics, like literacy tests and poll taxes, that disenfranchised Black Americans in the segregated South. When he signed the law at the US Capitol on August 6, 1965, Lyndon Johnson called it “a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield.”

    The results were almost unimaginable in 1965. Because of the law, the number of Black registered voters in the South increased from 31 percent to 73 percent; the number of Black elected officials rose from fewer than 500 to 10,500 nationwide; and the number of Black members of Congress grew from 5 to 60. The four congressional reauthorizations of the VRA lowered the voting age to 18, eliminated literacy tests nationwide, and expanded protections for language-minority groups like Hispanics in Texas, Asian-Americans in New York, and Native Americans in Arizona. The VRA became the prime vehicle for expanding voting rights for all Americans.

    But today the law is a “shadow of its former self,” says Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. It is being attacked from every angle, gravely weakened by a series of hostile court decisions and under sustained fire from Republicans at the state and federal level. […]

    Honoring the Voting Rights Act: Our work is far from over, Southern Poverty Law Center, author

    Ten years before passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, a young Black lawyer returned to his home state of Alabama after graduating law school. His mission, as he often says, was to “tear down segregation everywhere” he found it. He was 23 years old.

    His name is not widely known, but it should be. Fred Gray is a civil rights giant. […] I read case after case from that era. Mr. Gray had filed nearly every one.

    Our democracy today is at a similar inflection point as that faced by civil rights activists in the 1950s and ‘60s. Many of those who have a seat in the halls of power are hell-bent on denying Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities a voice in shaping our future. Like then, this moment requires courageous resistance by multiracial coalitions.

    When I look back at history, what strikes me about Mr. Gray and his contemporaries is how progress has long been driven by determined young people. Mr. Gray’s first client in 1955 was Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus. After Rosa Parks made her own refusal nine months later at age 42, Mr. Gray also took up her case and went on to become the legal mind behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott. […]

    The persistence of those young organizers — and legions of others fighting for freedom in the Deep South and across the nation — eventually resulted in passage of a series of civil rights laws that changed history. The most transformative was the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In Mississippi, for example, only 6.7 percent of eligible Black people were registered to vote in 1965. Within two years after its passage, that number increased to nearly 60 percent. By 1972, more than 1 million new Black voters were registered across the South, and the gap between white and Black voter registration in the region dropped from an estimated 44 percent to 11 percent.

    […] the VRA was severely weakened by a 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, and its protections have been further eroded by subsequent attacks. Without the VRA’s shield, states have been able to pass more than 100 anti-voter laws. These changes make it easier to purge voter rolls, shutter polling places, and create onerous ID requirements. Last year, Alabama even enacted a law criminalizing people for helping their friends, family, and neighbors cast a ballot.

    Moreover, some elected officials are peddling lies about our election system and trying to override the will of the people with their own extremist agenda. […] what we are fighting for is far more powerful than these moments of defeat. In coalition, we can, and will, move the nation ever closer to a multiracial, inclusive democracy.

    It is time for a new Voting Rights Act — one that meets the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. We need a modern bill that prohibits simple-minded and sophisticated voter suppression devices. […] My law students are hungry for justice. They are eager to study the lessons of history and use the law as a tool to ensure everyone has an equal voice and vote in our democracy.

    As we commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act this week, we must heed the words of Mr. Gray, who said, “Let’s not assume for one moment that our work is done; the struggle for equal justice continues.” On the shoulders of the giants who risked everything for the right to vote, we march on.

  407. says

    Texas Democrats who fled to Illinois forced to evacuate hotel after bomb threat

    Texas state House Democrats who left their state to prevent Republicans from passing a new congressional district map were forced to evacuate their hotel after a bomb threat, but officials say everyone is safe.

    The St. Charles Police Department in Illinois said officers responded to a report of a bomb threat at about 7:15 a.m. local time Wednesday at a hotel where the Democrats were staying. The department’s officers, along with those from the fire department and the Kane County Sheriff’s Office, conducted a “thorough” search and did not find any device, according to a release.

    The release said 400 people were evacuated as bomb squad units conducted their search, and everyone has been able to return to the hotel.

    Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) said he’s “aware” of the threats and instructed the Illinois State Police to ensure that public safety is maintained.

    “Threats of violence will be investigated and those responsible will be held accountable,” he said in a post on X.

    ]…] State Rep. Ann Johnson (D), a member of the group who traveled to Illinois, said the threat is what happens as a result of “reckless rhetoric,” pointing to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s (R) vow to “hunt down” those who left.

  408. says

    ICE ending age limit for prospective officers

    U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is eliminating the age cap on new hires, allowing people older than 40 to join its deportation force.

    The move will end the limitations on the physically demanding job at a time when the Trump administration is pressed for personnel to carry out its mass deportation agenda.

    […] The department on Wednesday also touted an up to $50,000 signing bonus and up to $60,000 in student loan repayment. […]

    In an interview on Fox News on Wednesday, Noem said efforts to recruit 10,000 new ICE officers have been “extremely successful.” […]

  409. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/idaho-has-lost-a-third-of-its-ob

    “Idaho Has Lost A Third Of Its Ob-Gyns Since Banning Abortion”

    “And more women than ever are nearly bleeding to death from miscarriages in Texas.”

    After Roe v. Wade was overturned, the state of Idaho decided, like many other like-minded states, that they just loved babies so very much that they wanted to force people to give birth to them against their will. So they outlawed all abortions and even pushed to make it so that doctors couldn’t perform abortions in emergencies.

    Unfortunately, there have been some rather predictable side-effects, starting with the fact that they now have significantly fewer doctors available to deliver those babies they love so much.

    A recently released peer-reviewed study has confirmed that the state has lost a third of its ob-gyns. Between 2022 and 2004, 114 of the 268 obstetricians (43 percent) practicing in Idaho at the time of the Dobbs decision either stopped practicing or moved away to continue practicing not-there. Since then, about 20 new ob-gyns have started practicing in the state, bringing the total to a net loss of 35 percent. That’s not good, especially for those babies we’re told they care so much about. […]

    But wait, there’s more — according to the study, of “Idaho’s 44 counties, 151 of the state’s OB/GYN physicians practicing obstetrics (85%) are concentrated in the 7 most populated. In the remaining 37 counties, by the study’s conclusion, 23 OB/GYN practicing obstetricians served a population of 569,000 Idahoans.”

    What could possibly go wrong?

    But How Is The Abortion Ban In Texas Going?

    A recent data analysis from ProPublica has determined that blood transfusions resulting from miscarriages have gone up 54 percent in the state since Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade. Why? Well, it’s because doctors used to be able to prevent excessive bleeding by doing a D&C on someone experiencing a miscarriage, but now they’re too afraid of going to prison or being sued for lots of money to risk it. […]

    Last year, a woman died of a hemorrhage because a hospital in Houston refused to perform the procedure. […]

    The analysis also found that people seeking treatment for miscarriage in hospitals has shot up 25 percent, likely because they were initially turned away and it got worse.

    Another report from ProPublica from earlier this year found that sepsis rates had increased by 50 percent, which is also quite fucking horrifying.

    [I snipped news from Colorado, Oklahoma, and Veterans Affairs hospitals.]

  411. Akira MacKenzie says

    @ 410

    That’s what you get when you have “freedom of speech” and don’t criminally punish people for lying about reality.

  412. birgerjohansson says

    Britain has appointed the first female Astronomer Royal since the institution wss created 350 years ago.

  413. says

    Washington Post link

    “Trump raises tariffs on India to 50 percent, citing Russian oil purchases”

    “Import taxes on Indian goods were set to hit 25 percent after midnight Thursday. The rate would double in three weeks under a White House order.”

    […] Trump will raise tariffs on imports from India to 50 percent, targeting one of the United States’ largest trading partners over its purchases of Russian oil, he announced Wednesday.
    Imports from India were set to face a 25 percent duty starting after midnight Thursday as part of the White House’s sweeping attempt to overhaul the international trade order. The additional 25 percent tax will begin in three weeks, according to an executive order Trump issued Wednesday, which accused India of “directly or indirectly importing Russian Federation oil.” The order said the tariff was a response to Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine.

    The president had signaled the move in advance.

    “India is not only buying massive amounts of Russian Oil, they are then, for much of the Oil purchased, selling it on the Open Market for big profits,” he posted on his social media platform on Monday. “They don’t care how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian War Machine. Because of this, I will be substantially raising the Tariff paid by India to the USA.”

    Randhir Jaiswal, a spokesman for India’s Ministry of External Affairs, wrote in a social media post Wednesday that it was “extremely unfortunate that the US should choose to impose additional tariffs on India for actions that several other countries are also taking in their own national interest.” He added that India believes “these actions are unfair, unjustified and unreasonable,” and that purchases of Russian oil were “based on market factors.”

    Randhir Jaiswal, a spokesman for India’s Ministry of External Affairs, wrote in a social media post Wednesday that it was “extremely unfortunate that the US should choose to impose additional tariffs on India for actions that several other countries are also taking in their own national interest.” He added that India believes “these actions are unfair, unjustified and unreasonable,” and that purchases of Russian oil were “based on market factors.”

    India is the United States’ 12th-largest trading partner; the two countries have exchanged $78.4 billion in goods from Jan. 1 through June, according to federal data.

    India also has an informal economic alliance with Russia as part of the BRICS bloc of nations, a group that also includes Brazil, China and South Africa. […]

  414. says

    New York Times link

    “China Turns to A.I. in Information Warfare”

    “Documents examined by researchers show how one company in China has collected data on members of Congress and other influential Americans.”

    The Chinese government is using companies with expertise in artificial intelligence to monitor and manipulate public opinion, giving it a new weapon in information warfare, according to current and former U.S. officials and documents unearthed by researchers.

    One company’s internal documents show how it has undertaken influence campaigns in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and collected data on members of Congress and other influential Americans.

    While the firm has not mounted a campaign in the United States, American spy agencies have monitored its activity for signs that it might try to influence American elections or political debates, former U.S. officials said.

    Artificial intelligence is increasingly the new frontier of espionage and malign influence operations, allowing intelligence services to conduct campaigns far faster, more efficiently and on a larger scale than ever before.

    U.S. spy agencies still collect information about foreign manipulation, but the Trump administration has dismantled the teams at the State Department, the F.B.I. and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that warned the public about potential threats. In the last presidential election, the campaigns included Russian videos denigrating Vice President Kamala Harris and falsely claiming that ballots had been destroyed.

    The new technology allows the Chinese company GoLaxy, to go beyond the election influence campaigns undertaken by Russia in recent years, according to the documents. […]

  415. says

    Fox News viewers were briefly pulled away from segments about actor Sydney Sweeney’s jeans when Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin appeared on screen to detail his party’s fight against Texas Republicans’ attempts to steal five congressional seats ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

    When Fox host Dana Perino asked if Democrats would change their policies in the face of low public approval for the party, Martin used the moment to remind viewers that the Republican Party is trying to steal elections.

    “We have to do a better job there, for sure. But remember, Dana, that the ’26 elections and ’25 elections will be a referendum on Donald Trump, and his numbers are actually in the toilet right now,” Martin said. “He’s sitting at 37% approval rating. He’s one of the most unpopular politicians—or presidents—in recent memory. And so, listen, if I was [in the] Republican Party right now, I would be worried too. Which is why they’re trying to cheat and steal these elections in Texas.” [video]
    […]

    Link

  416. JM says

    Axios: Library of Congress blames “coding error” for missing sections of online Constitution

    The Library of Congress on Wednesday pointed to an unspecified “coding error” that led to key parts of the U.S. Constitution being deleted from the Constitution Annotated website.

    The excuse is weird and unlikely. The parts removed just happen to be ones that Trump would prefer didn’t exist. The whole thing feels to me like some disgruntled person at the Library of Congress took them out when they realized they were about to be fired. If Trump had done this he would have ordered it done across all of the copies of the constitution found on various US government sites.

  417. says

    Allegations surrounding GOP’s Cory Mills go from bad to worse

    “House Republican leaders didn’t need another controversy surrounding one of their members, but they apparently have one anyway.”

    All things considered, House Republican leaders didn’t need another controversy surrounding one of their members, but they apparently have one anyway. Politico reported on a police report that suggests Rep. Cory Mills not only had a mistress, but the married Florida Republican also allegedly threatened to release nude videos of her after she broke off their relationship.

    From Politico’s report:

    Lindsey Langston, a Florida Republican state committee member and 2024 winner of the Miss United States beauty pageant, told authorities on July 14 that Mills also threatened to harm any of her future romantic partners, according to a report she made to the Columbia County Sheriff’s Department that was obtained Tuesday by Politico. Her allegations were sent to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for review, said Steven Khachigan, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s department.

    Some caveats[…] the GOP congressman has not been charged, and Mills’ office said in a written statement: “We have not been made aware of any report or allegations from law enforcement or the alleged complainant. These claims are false and misrepresent the nature of my interactions. I have always conducted myself with integrity, both personally and in service to Florida’s 7th District.”

    That said, the allegations add a new chapter to a story about a politician who has faced a series of difficulties of late.

    It was in February, for example, when Mills first generated national headlines after NBC News reported that the local police department in Washington, D.C., had begun an investigation into the congressman, following a report of an alleged assault. NBC News went on to report soon after that the Metropolitan Police Department in the nation’s capital “sent an arrest warrant” on Mills to then-interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin’s office, but the warrant went unsigned by the hyperpartisan Trump-appointed prosecutor. [!]

    The GOP congressman issued a statement “vehemently” denying any wrongdoing, claiming that law enforcement “was asked to resolve a private matter” at Mills’ residence. (Both Mills and the woman denied that any assault took place, and Mills wasn’t charged in the incident.)

    The story soon faded, though according to Politico’s latest report, Langston told the sheriff’s department that she ended her relationship with the Republican lawmaker after seeing media reports in February.

    It was at that point when Mills, according to Langston, started threatening her.

    Complicating matters, these aren’t the only accusations he has confronted in recent months. In May, NOTUS reported on questions surrounding an award Mills received as part of his military service, and two months earlier, the House Ethics Committee disclosed its investigation into Mills, examining whether he might’ve omitted or misrepresented information in financial disclosure reports. (That investigation is ongoing; a spokesperson for Mills has denied any wrongdoing.)

    Meanwhile, in mid-July, NBC News reported that Mills is facing a lawsuit seeking his eviction over alleged failure to pay thousands of dollars in rent at a property in in the nation’s capital. […]

  418. birgerjohansson says

    “Lithium loss ignites Alzheimer’s, but lithium compound can reverse disease in mice”   
    https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-08-lithium-loss-ignites-alzheimer-compound.html#
    .
    This is very silly, but it might get your thoughts off DJT fo awhile.

    Reaction video by Airier.
    “Goblin Slayer Abridged Ep 7 Part 1; Meanwhile at the Ranch”


    I love that the adventure guild clerk   advocates the quest because the threathened place is their only reliable source of food:  “Last time you all got food poisoning and I had to clean it up. Mama ain’t cleaning shit no more!!”

  419. says

    What Trump doesn’t (but should) understand about his own trade deals

    “To hear the president tell it, foreign counties are responding to tariff threats by giving him massive amounts of cash. Reality suggests otherwise.”

    At a White House event last week, Donald Trump appeared eager to boast about the incredible investments he’s securing thanks to his negotiating prowess. “We have a deal with Japan where they’re going to pay us $550 billion,” the president claimed. “We have a deal with Europe where they’re doing $750 billion plus $400 billion plus $300 billion, and many other countries.”

    Around the same time, he declared that South Korea had to pay a 25% tariff, which he unilaterally agreed to lower to 15% after it agreed to make $350 billion in investments.

    This week, during the Republican’s latest appearance on CNBC, he peddled a related claim when asked about a reported trade deal between the U.S. and the European Union. To hear Trump tell it, he unilaterally agreed to lower tariff rates on the EU after it agreed to “give” him $600 billion. He added:

    And that’s a gift. That’s not like, you know, a loan, by the way. That’s not a loan that, ‘Oh, gee, three years comes up. We have to pay it back.’ There’s nothing to pay back. They gave us $600 billion that we can invest in anything we want. … [T]here are no details. The details are $600 billion to invest in anything I want. Anything. I can do anything I want.

    The clip of the exchange suggested the president was quite animated on the subject. [video]

    At face value, Trump appeared to be describing what was effectively a slush fund: Foreign officials will write massive checks, at which point the White House can spend the money however the president sees fit. [Lie]

    […] those who believe the president’s claims on the subject are making a mistake.

    Trump seems to have embraced a negotiating model with great enthusiasm. He begins by threatening longtime U.S. allies and trading partners. That’s followed by a shake-down of sorts: The White House lets these allies and trading partners know that their punishments might be less severe if they agree to give the Republican administration a bunch of cash.

    At face value, this dynamic might sound more like the actions of mobster than an American president. But complicating matters are the details that Trump either hasn’t acknowledged or doesn’t understand. The New York Times reported:

    The European Union, for instance, does not have the authority to dictate the type of investments that it has promised, and much of Japan’s pledged investments are coming in the form of loans. The investment announcements have also spurred confusion and lacked the usual detail that would accompany such pacts to avoid future disputes.

    The $350 billion from South Korea, for example, will apparently take the form of loans and loan guarantees — and when the Trump administration said 90% of the profits would go to the American public, officials in Seoul had no idea what U.S. officials were talking about. [!]

    […] there is a related angle to this that might not be immediately obvious: The president might see himself engaging in a series of shakedowns, but what if he’s the one who’s losing?

    Daniel Ames, a professor at Columbia Business School reminded the Times that negotiating partners like Japan, South Korea and the EU might also be exploiting Trump’s weaknesses when they make dubious promises that probably won’t be kept.

    […] “If you’re negotiating with a narcissist, you look for ways to make them feel like they’ve won.”

  421. birgerjohansson says

    Lynna, OM @ 419

    As some Fox News ass-kissers are suggedting having DJT;s face on Mount Rushmore, maybe you can distract him from important matters by having a giant portrait chiseled into a mountain (preferably so far out in the boondocks that no one will go there unless they are travelling with the presidential helicopter).

    Of course if the minerals happen to be ones that erode very quickly like, say, red granite, it would be sad.

  423. says

    birger @421, limestone that erodes quickly and easily would be a good choice.

    In other news: DNI Gabbard reportedly overrode CIA officials’ concerns to push conspiratorial claims

    “Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s latest claims already looked bad. New reporting on a behind-the-scenes struggle make them look worse.”

    It’s been nearly three weeks since Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard unveiled a report with a title that read, “Declassified Evidence of Obama Administration Conspiracy to Subvert President Trump’s 2016 Victory and Presidency.” [JFC!] In an accompanying press release, the beleaguered DNI added, “The information we are releasing today clearly shows there was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government.” [JFC again]

    In reality, the report showed no such thing, and independent analyses characterized Gabbard’s report as “ludicrous.” An analysis from The Bulwark explained, “[E]ven a cursory look at the actual substance of Gabbard’s dramatic claims shows … a nothingburger. There is no actual substance.” Officials from Democratic and Republican administrations urged the public to recognize Gabbard’s conspiracy theories as obvious nonsense.

    But according to new reporting from The Washington Post, the controversial intelligence director hasn’t just faced widespread pushback after making her highly dubious allegations, she also reportedly faced pushback before making her highly dubious allegations. From the Post’s article:

    The Trump administration pushed to unveil a highly classified document on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election after an intense behind-the-scenes struggle over secrecy, which ended in late July when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a minimally redacted version of the report, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

    The Post’s report, […] added that when the CIA and other intelligence agencies argued internally that more of the document should remain classified to obscure U.S. spy agencies’ sources and methods, Gabbard overrode them — “with the blessing of President Donald Trump.” (How the president gave his approval is not altogether clear.)

    […] it’s worth emphasizing that Gabbard’s discredited conclusion — that Russia never targeted the U.S. political system during the 2016 campaign and made no effort to help Trump win — doesn’t just contradict the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and a parallel investigation from the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee.

    Her findings were also at odds with the findings of the CIA. Indeed, literally the week before Gabbard brought her claims to the public, Trump’s handpicked CIA director, John Ratcliffe, released the results of an investigation that endorsed the agency’s earlier conclusions about Russia targeting the U.S. elections in 2016. (That said, the Post’s report noted that Ratcliffe endorsed Gabbard’s efforts. For its part, the White House did not respond to requests for comment.)

    What is surprising, however, is that U.S. intelligence officials urged the intelligence director not to move forward with her political plans, and Gabbard decided to ignore them, reinforcing concerns that the DNI is prioritizing a political vendetta over the nation’s intelligence needs. [no doubt]

    Just as notably, some of the intelligence officials whose concerns were rejected apparently reached out to the Washington Post — suggesting they want the world to know about Gabbard’s recklessness. [good]

    Nevertheless, as the DNI’s efforts start to look even worse, Attorney General Pam Bondi has directed Justice Department prosecutors to launch a grand jury investigation based on Gabbard’s claims.

    NBC News spoke to a former senior Justice Department official who condemned the move as “a dangerous political stunt.” A former senior national security official pointed out that multiple past reviews, including ones conducted by Republicans, found no wrongdoing.

    “There’s no logical, rational basis for this,” the official added.

  424. says

    Congressional Watchdog Publishes Aptly Timed Reminder That WH Budget-Slashing Scheme is Illegal

    A congressional watchdog agency, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), published a post Wednesday morning reaffirming that “pocket rescissions” — a supposed loophole that the Trump White House thinks it can use to seize Congress’ power of the purse — are illegal.

    “A pocket rescission is illegal as we explained in our most recent decision on pocket rescissions,” GAO wrote in its WatchBlog, referring to a 2018 report the agency put out that states, “amounts proposed for rescission must be made available for prudent obligation before the amounts expire, even where the 45-day period for congressional consideration provided in the ICA approaches or spans the date on which funds would expire.”

    The timing of the blog post by GAO — the nonpartisan legislative branch agency tasked, in part, with determining if the executive branch and the president is impounding funds in violation of the Impoundment Control Act (ICA) — is, of course, significant.

    TPM has previously reported on the Trump White House and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought’s repeated threats to challenge the ICA in court and try out so-called “pocket rescissions,” to rescind congressionally approved funds without permission from Congress.

    Vought and his allies believe they have found a loophole in the budgeting process that, they claim, allows them to declare congressionally approved funding rescinded if a rescissions package is sent to Congress close to the end of the fiscal year when funds will expire.

    Normally, a formal rescissions request starts a 45-day clock in which the executive branch is allowed to withhold the cash in question that it is asking to claw back. But if the request comes in 45 days before the new fiscal year is set to begin on Oct. 1, Vought contends, the White House could withhold the money for that timeframe, regardless of whether Congress takes action on the package, and then claim that the funding is expired when the fiscal year ends.

    Now GAO has weighed in again amid indications that Vought may try to utilize the illegal pocket recissions method.

    “A pocket rescission could allow a president to avoid spending the money regardless of whether Congress approves the rescission request. This would cede Congress’s power of the purse by allowing a president to, in effect, change the law by shortening the period of availability for fixed-period funds,” GAO wrote. “The Impoundment Control Act (ICA) does not provide that authority. If Congress wanted a president to have that authority, it would need to change the law.”

    The fact that GAO decided to put out this post at a time where officials in the Trump administration has been publicly weighing using it is “important and meaningful,” Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, told TPM.

    “The organization tasked with determining and adjudicating impoundments very unequivocally said pocket rescissions are super duper illegal,” Kogan told TPM. […]

    “As we approach the end of the fiscal year, we have received more frequent questions about pocket rescissions and our prior legal work on this topic,” the agency said. “We have also explained the issues related to pocket rescissions in our recent impoundment decisions. Today’s WatchBlog post answers some of the more common questions we get.”

  426. says

    Weather Service is now hiring back hundreds of positions that got cut in the DOGE chaos

    The National Weather Service has received permission to hire 450 meteorologists, hydrologists and radar technicians just months after being hit hard by Department of Government Efficiency-related cuts and early retirement incentives.

    The new hiring number includes 126 new positions that were previously approved and will apply to “front-line mission critical” personnel, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official told CNN.

    The NWS cuts have spurred concerns over how well-prepared the country is to withstand hurricane season, which is just starting to heat up in the Atlantic. The staff reductions also have been scrutinized in the wake of the deadly Texas floods in July, with vacancies at weather service forecast offices there.

    The cuts to probationary employees, as well as early retirement incentives, meant the nation’s front-line weather forecasting agency’s staffing levels fell by more than 550 people since the second Trump administration began, to below 4,000 total employees. […]

    Agency employees are greeting the news, unveiled at an all hands meeting on Monday, with guarded optimism and relief. Current employees have been working additional hours with additional responsibilities since the layoffs and retirements earlier this year, trying to maintain the 24/7 posture US extreme weather requires. The agency has also been functioning with less data from fewer, less frequent weather balloon launches.

    “How much time/money is it going to cost to train a bunch of new people when we had already-trained people in place?” asked another NOAA official, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. It is possible that some of the new hires will have been previously trained employees who were let go in the DOGE cuts. [Yep. DOGE introduced waste into the system.]

    […] The NWS, aided by lawmakers on Capitol Hill, had been arguing for months for a public safety exemption from the federal hiring freeze. That exemption has been granted, and the agency now has direct hiring authority under the Office of Personnel Management, the official told CNN.

    Direct hiring authority, according to OPM’s website, can be given to federal agencies “for filling vacancies when a critical hiring need or severe shortage of candidates exists.” It can help speed up the hiring process, the NOAA official said.

  427. says

    Followup to comments 356, 370 372 and 388.

    […] Elsewhere on the right-wing network [Fox News], host Jesse Watters said the walk was evidence that Trump is a “political giant.” Watters gushed over the spectacle of Trump “walking on the roof of the White House, gazing down at the Democrats, who look very small.” [video]

    […]

    Link

  429. says

    The man suspected of shooting five of his fellow soldiers at Fort Stewart, Ga., on Wednesday morning has been identified as 28-year-old Army Sergeant Quornelius Radford, service officials revealed at a press conference.

    Radford, an automated logistics sergeant assigned to 2nd Brigade Combat Team, used a personal handgun to open fire on other troops before he was subdued by service members, according to Brig. Gen. John Lubas, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division.

    “Soldiers in the area that witnessed the shooting immediately and without hesitation tackled the soldier, subdued him. That allowed law enforcement to then take him into custody,” Lubas told reporters.

    The incident, which took place in the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team area, caused a base-wide lockdown that lasted just more than an hour. Law enforcement agents were able to apprehend the shooter at 11:35 a.m. shortly after they were dispatched for a possible shooting at 10:56 a.m., officials said.

    The shooting injured Radford’s co-workers, with three requiring surgery and two others transported to Memorial Hospital in Savannah for additional care. All five are in stable condition and expected to recover, according to Lubas.

    […] Military officials are now looking into the motives of Radford, which remain unknown, as well as how he was able to bring a personal weapon onto the base. […]

    Link

  430. John Morales says

    Those mooted nuclear reactors for space are “The most recent effort came in 2023 with the completion of three $5 million industry study contracts that focused on generating 40 kilowatts of power, enough to continuously run 30 households for ten years.”

    Basically, a diesel generator-sized output.
    The general punter will hear nuclear reactor and think gigawatt scale power output, and thus be misled.

    BTW, if 30 households can run continuously on 40KW, then each household is using 1.33KW.
    Not the most realistic number there.

    —

    Trouble with thermal power plants is they need cooling, and in space one can’t use convection, so is restricted to radiative cooling. That means a rather large radiative surface.

  431. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/sure-texas-could-require-less-drowny

    “Sure, Texas Could Require Less-Drowny Summer Camps. But Would Jesus Approve?”

    “What Would Jesus Regulate?”

    In the aftermath of the flash floods in Texas Hill Country that killed 137 people, including 27 girls and staff at a summer camp where several cabins were built in the flood plain, Gov. Greg Abbott called the Texas Lege into a special session so it could take care of the important work of gerrymandering five new Republican-leaning congressional seats at the request of Donald Trump. Oh, yes, and to pass additional recovery funding for the towns and people hit by the floods, that too.

    In addition, while it wasn’t among the governor’s list of priorities for the special session, lawmakers have introduced at least nine bills aimed at improving the safety of youth camps. The proposed bills “would address everything from emergency plans and camper disaster drills, to better communication systems and life jackets inside every cabin.”

    But as the Texas Tribune reported Friday, it’s not terribly likely that any of those camp safety bills will pass in time for the end of the special session on August 19 — and that’s without the Democrats fleeing the state to deny the governor’s mapfuckery a quorum. Rather, the camp safety bills are likely to take a backseat to other flood-related proposals […]

    The Tribune piece was published before most of the Democrats in the state House skedaddled for the safety of blue states to prevent a quorum, shutting down not only the gerrymander but also everything else. Abbott is likely to keep calling special sessions until either the gerrymander passes or Republicans suffer an unaccustomed fit of sanity and agree to a special session focusing only on flood-related matters. Nobody’s betting on that.

    Following the floods, several spokespeople for summer camps emphasized that they too are grieving the terrible losses and want to work with the Lege to make sure camps are safe for Texas’s precious children. In reality, the summer camp industry in Texas is surprisingly powerful, and has a history of resisting regulation […]

    Two weeks after the flooding, the Associated Press reported that Camp Mystic had in recent years successfully appealed to FEMA to have several of its buildings removed from federal flood zone maps, which could have lowered Mystic’s insurance cost and made expansion of the camp easier to do.

    [Ah, concerns about money, and not safety.]

    So even if additional special sessions are called, as seems likely, the summer camp bidness seems well-prepared to push back against Big Government Interference.

    The God Of Small Government

    And as we’ve noted several times in our coverage of the floods, many Republicans in Texas haven’t been too hot on stuff like emergency warning sirens or flood alert systems, because they cost money. At a meeting in Kerr County in 2021, several residents vehemently opposed federal funding from the Biden administration, since it might come with strings attached, like communism or mask mandates. Even when local governments have tried to get the systems built, the state Lege has just as often sidelined the budget requests.

    Besides, the mood in Republicanland since Reagan is that government is a bad thing in general, so government help will only make things worse. That’s basically been the message from Department of Homeland Security head cosplayer Kristi Noem, who explained shortly after the disaster that states are supposed to run disaster response, and the federal government should only have a secondary backup role. Besides, the really great thing we see in disasters, Noem emphasized, is that “God created us to take care of each other,” which was demonstrated by how volunteers did so much of the heavy lifting when government was nowhere to be seen.

    But wait, said several smart Wonkette readers in the comments yesterday, don’t Republicans recognize that government is one way that We The People take care of each other, what with promoting the general welfare, including providing emergency resources that individuals and communities can’t all pay for on their own, or using regulations to help keep children as safe as possible? That’s the whole social compact thing right there, isn’t it?

    […] for a lot of fundagelical Christians, taking care of each other is something people should only do on their own, because God wants government to be very, very limited.

    […]Here’s a pretty typical take, from something calling itself the “Foundation for Economic Education”:

    Government welfare programs, even those providing temporary relief, are in complete opposition to, and destructive of, acts of Christian charity and are totally inconsistent with Christian tra­dition.

    One of the fundamental tenets of the Christian church is that the human is a creature possessing free will. It is because of the Christian recognition that man has control over his actions by means of his own will, that he is considered responsible for all of his actions. […] It is also held that for a Christian to perform an act of charity and to gain the spiritual rewards for this act, it must be performed by the deliberate intent of the individual. An act of char­ity—an act of helping those in need—can only be a Christian act when it involves the application of free will.

    [That’s some very convoluted thinking.]

    Since taxation is coercive, it takes the choice of helping others out of people’s hands, and governments can’t do that! You wouldn’t rob your neighbor to give to charity, so you aren’t allow to tax your neighbor either, because “True charity, without choice, is an im­possibility, and when attempted, negates the concept of Christian love.”

    Worse, government spending — COERCION AND THEFT, you mean! — will destroy America by making recipients of government support parasitic degenerates, and by enslaving “the productive members of society.” Other arguments insist that God commands us to work for a living, so welfare encourages idleness and offends Him.

    We should note that this particular screed doesn’t address disaster preparedness or assistance, but it would seem to follow that since people are responsible for themselves, government has no business telling Christian summer camp operators where they can put cabins or how to plan for emergencies. Similarly, it would be wrong to tax anyone to warn of flooding, to rescue victims, or to help them rebuild, because all of those get in the way of people protecting their own families and communities and rob them of the free will to donate food or construction supplies. […]

    Presumably this does not hold true for emergency relief for businesses. Why? Shut up.

    Following Hurricane Helene last fall, the “Standing for Freedom Center” explained that the death and destruction of a natural disaster must be understood through “sound Christian doctrine,” which is why no one should think that the hurricane had anything to do with “climate change,” which isn’t real, and is in fact “a fabricated crisis that is weaponized by the global elites.” […]

    The piece also mildly chided Christians who said Asheville was hit because of all the sin and homosexuality there, but mostly because mere humans shouldn’t presume they know God’s thinking, and besides lots of less sinful parts of the South were hit, too.

    The main point, says the editorial, is that natural disasters “are a result of living in a fallen and sinful world,” and that humans and the natural world itself are both cursed by original sin, so you’d better focus on getting right with Jesus. Also that extreme weather, like the rain, fall on both “the just and the unjust,” and God’s will is inscrutable (and of course human activity like burning fossil fuels can’t affect the atmosphere). But most importantly, natural disasters are a reminder to “repent or perish,” because see point #1 about living in a fallen world.

    The piece is surprisingly silent on whether government is allowed to tax people to cover weather forecasts, emergency preparedness, or rebuilding assistance, but presumably such worldly matters are a mere distraction from salvation.

    Of course, not all Christians are quite so extreme in their views, but we should remember that if they aren’t, they’ll burn in Hell […].

  432. says

    Niece says Montana bar shooting suspect was turned away from mental health treatment

    “Michael Paul Brown is wanted in the fatal shootings of four people at the Owl Bar in Anaconda last week.”

    The suspect accused of fatally shooting four people at a Montana bar and who remains at large struggled with mental health issues, but was denied services from agencies that were supposed to help, according to his niece.

    […] “My uncle is a very mentally ill veteran,” Clare Boyle said in a statement to NBC affiliate KNDU of Kennewick, Washington. “He had developed schizophrenia during his time in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then he joined the National Guard, where he was not allowed to be deployed again due to his mental illness.”

    […] The Army said Brown had served as an armor crewman from January 2001 to May 2005, and in the Montana National Guard from April 2006 to March 2009. He had been deployed to Iraq from February 2004 to March 2005, and ultimately left the Army with the rank of sergeant. […]

    Boyle said her uncle’s condition worsened with the death of both of his parents, especially his mother.

    “The VA turned us away stating that they weren’t able to help. The Montana state Hospital turned us away because they only accept patients who are court ordered which could not happen unless ‘He becomes a harm to self or others.’”

    “The system failed,” Boyle said. “We as people failed.”

    […] Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte was asked during a news conference Tuesday about whether Brown had been denied help from Veteran Affairs.

    “Under federal law we can’t comment on an individual patient,” he said, adding, “we’re not at liberty to release that.” Attorney General Austen Knudsen said his office doesn’t have that information.

    Boyle said that her uncle “frequently suffers from delusions and ‘tall tales’” but “99% of the time Mikee is harmless.” She said that patrons of the bar would urinate on his porch and mock his delusions to get a rise out of him.

    “He mostly believes he is John Wick. Only he is sent here from the future to save the world and his family. My uncle doesn’t drink anymore or use drugs because ‘They block my wizard powers,'” she said. “I just want him to be found safely and receive the help we’ve been screaming for.” […]

    Authorities say Brown opened fire using a personal rifle around 10:30 a.m. and then fled the Owl Bar. Bartender Nancy Lauretta Kelley, 64, and patrons Daniel Edwin Baillie, 59; David Allen Leach, 70; and Tony Wayne Palm, 74, were killed in the shooting.

    “I don’t know what happened Thursday night to provoke this and I don’t know what happened Friday morning to push this,” Boyle said. “What I do know is no amount of words or apologies will ever be enough to express the remorse and heartbreak I personally feel for these families effected. 5 families were destroyed on Friday morning.”

    In the statement, Boyle said that the shooting is indefensible but that it could have been prevented if her uncle had been given better care.

    “Mental illness does not excuse these acts and I can’t say it enough,” she said. “But these acts could have been prevented with proper reporting and a healthcare system that gave a damn about its veterans and citizens.”

    She described her uncle as a loving relative who taught her how to ride a bike, fish, swim and play football and baseball.

    Brown “drove an hour and a half to have lunch with me when I was away at college because I was home sick and didn’t want to be there anymore,” she said.

    “He’s a human being. A very sick one at that,” she added.

    The manhunt for Brown is ongoing. […] A $10,000 reward is being offered for information on Brown’s whereabouts. Officials believe he’s armed and dangerous as he has access to numerous firearms.

  433. says

    New York Times:

    President Trump intends to meet in person with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as soon as next week, and he plans to follow up shortly afterward with a meeting between himself, Mr. Putin and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, according to two people familiar with the plan.

    As Steve Benen noted: “Skepticism is warranted.”

  434. says

    Followup to comment 407.

    NBC News:

    Gov. JB Pritzker [Governor of Illinois] authorized State Police to become involved in protecting the lawmakers [Democratic state legislators from Texas].

  435. says

    Washington Post:

    The Department of Homeland Security has reassigned dozens of Federal Emergency Management Agency employees over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help vet and process new hires for the government’s mass deportation initiative.

    Not FEMA’s job.

  436. says

    LA Times:

    In past Olympic Games held on American soil, sitting presidents have served in passive, ceremonial roles. President Trump may have other plans. An executive order signed by Trump on Tuesday names him chair of a White House task force on the 2028 Games in Los Angeles.

    As Steve Benen said: “What could possibly go wrong?”

  437. says

    Washington Post link

    “The economy is cracking. This trend is most alarming: < The U.S. economy is growing ever more reliant on top earners. It’s risky — and tough for the middle class.”

    I think the article raises important points, and it presents a good analysis of the current economic situation. Meanwhile, Trump declared a “100% tariff” on semiconductors. More chaos. More uncertainty.

    As the dust settles on a wild few days for the U.S. economy, it’s worth remembering this: Big downward revisions to job data typically occur during recessions (or on the precipice of one). In a downturn, the models basically can’t keep up with how quickly the situation is deteriorating.

    The United States isn’t in a recession, but last Friday shattered the image of a resilient economy that can withstand the tariff uncertainty. Hiring has been anemic for months outside of health care, social assistance and hospitality. Now, pretty much the only industry still adding workers is health care.

    The economy is increasingly dependent on a small sliver of superstar companies and wealthy consumers to stay afloat because these are the only firms and families able to withstand the tariff onslaught. A highly concentrated economy increases the risk of a downturn — and will leave many middle-class Americans frustrated and strained.

    For months, I had been referring to this as a “frozen” labor market with little hiring and little firing. But the shift exposed on Friday is that a growing number of industries have transitioned from weak hiring to layoffs. In the past three months, manufacturing, professional and business services, mining, residential construction, warehouses, K-12 education, the federal government, and even retailers have been cutting jobs. The labor market is going from frozen to cracking.

    The narrowness in the job market is echoed elsewhere in the economy. The record-high stock market is almost exclusively propelled now by a handful of big tech and bank stocks including Apple, Meta, Microsoft, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, because of optimism about artificial intelligence and financial deregulation. Meanwhile, the rest of the S&P 500 is barely plodding along. [True]

    Then there’s the heart of the U.S. economy: consumption. It has clearly been slowing this year. Last year, consumer spending grew almost 3 percent (after adjusting for inflation). That fell to 1.4 percent in the second quarter of this year and is expected to remain tepid.

    Even more alarming is how reliant the economy has become on spending binges by the richest Americans.

    The top 10 percent of earners now drive about half of spending, according to Moody’s, up from 36 percent three decades ago. These people will determine if the U.S. economy avoids a recession. These are households earning about $250,000 or above, and they are largely doing just fine, buoyed by strong stock market gains, mansions and rental properties that have shot up in value in recent years, and a rebound in business dealmaking. The wealthy continue to spend on lavish vacations, parties and events, and that masks the strain that many middle-class and moderate-income families are experiencing.

    […] there’s a clear divergence between how the top and the bottom are faring. Businesses understand this. It’s why credit card companies have introduced even more exclusive credit cards this summer with higher fees, all-inclusive resorts are debuting $1,000-a-night experiences, and luxury car brands such as Porsche and Aston Martin have been among the first automakers to raise prices, because their clientele is less likely to push back. Any company that can is trying to go “upmarket” as much as possible in this environment.

    […] the top 20 percent of households continue to grow their spending, though they have pulled back somewhat amid so much uncertainty. Meanwhile, the bottom 80 percent of households are basically just keeping their spending growth in line with inflation. This is a notable shift from the “revenge spending” era from 2022 to 2024, when people of all income levels were splurging somewhat after the end of pandemic lockdowns.

    […] Credit card and auto loan delinquencies are above pre-pandemic levels, Federal Reserve and Fitch Ratings data show. And millions of Americans have missed student loan repayments, triggering detrimental credit score drops.

    The middle class is basically tapped out financially. Any further rise in costs from tariffs or decline in income from job losses would be tough to absorb, especially as government aid programs decline. […]

  438. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Electrek – Tesla withheld data, lied, and misdirected police and plaintiffs to avoid blame in Autopilot crash

    Last week, a jury found Tesla partially liable for a wrongful death […] we now have access to the trial transcripts […] Within about three minutes of the crash, the Model S uploaded a “collision snapshot” [data] to Tesla’s servers […] and received an acknowledgement. The vehicle then deleted its local copy, resulting in Tesla being the only entity having access.
    […]
    The police repeatedly attempted to obtain the data from the collision snapshot, but Tesla led the authorities and the plaintiffs on a lengthy journey of deception and misdirection that spanned years. Here, in chronological order, is what happened

  440. birgerjohansson says

    Me @ 439

    One of the Demorats : “we’re at war”.
    Comment.
    The Republicans declared war on you when they stopped the recount that would have made Al Gore president but you were too lazy and yellow to stand up to them, dipshit!

    You let W ignore the warnings about Al Quaeda and you voted for his torture & surveillance bill. You voted for the Republican wars.
    When Obama won, you did not hold the crooks to account.
    When you had majority, you did not do what was needed to restore the standard of living but just put band-aids on Reaganism.
    You did not take Trump seriously … twice! You kept folding and cut bad bipartisan deals because you had the same corporate donors as the Republicans. Your senators did the same kind of insider trading the Republicans did. You stayed quiet when Biden said he was not going to increase the seats of the supreme court.

    And now, after a quarter century, you realise the Republicans are at war with democracy…

  441. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    NBC – Texas prison camp where Ghislaine Maxwell was moved steps up security

    Attributing the enhanced security to Maxwell’s presence, the official could not say whether there have been any direct threats to her […] Members of the federal Bureau of Prisons’ Special Operations Response Team have been positioned outside the front entrance to FPC Bryan since the weekend to check IDs and wave people through
    […]
    The security measures are “not like ones at the penitentiary or medium [security],” an employee [said.]

    Rando 1: “They increased security so that protesters cannot get into the prison, not so that it’s harder for inmates to escape.”

    Rando 2: “So let me get this straight… we’re spending MORE taxes to protect a child predator after she was moved from a higher security prison?”
     
    Kyle Griffin (MSNBC):

    NBC News confirms: JD Vance will meet tonight at his residence with Susie Wiles, Pam Bondi, Deputy AG Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, and other top Trump officials to discuss the Epstein scandal.

    CNN

    The meeting comes as Trump’s administration is considering releasing the contents of Blanche’s interview last month with Maxwell. […] There have also been internal discussions about Blanche holding a press conference or doing a high-profile interview, possibly with popular podcaster Joe Rogan, according to three people familiar with the discussions

    Eric Columbus (Obama DHS/DoJ): “No reason to believe such a transcript would be complete, accurate, or unedited—nor, of course, is there any reason to believe Maxwell told the truth.”

    Reuters – VP Vance meeting to discuss Epstein fallout canceled, after news leaked
     
    Fox – Tulsi Gabbard tells podcaster aliens may be real

    Gabbard leads President Donald Trump’s intelligence community […] “in this role, I have to be careful with what I share.” […] Gabbard noted she was not prepared to talk further […] “We’re continuing to look for the truth and share that truth with the American people.”

  442. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Guardian – JD Vance’s team had water level of Ohio river raised for family’s boating trip

    he was seen canoeing on the river, a tributary that Caesar Creek Lake feeds into. One source […] alleged that the outflow request for the Caesar Creek Lake was not just to support the vice-president’s Secret Service detail, but also to create “ideal kayaking conditions”. The Guardian could not independently confirm this specific claim.

    Commentary

    Hillbilly Hydrology.

    Is this… draining the swamp?

    Who amongst us hasn’t asked the Army Corps of Engineers to change the outflow of a lake?

    One of the worst abuses of power since the last Vance abuse of power, when the Colosseum was shut down so his family could visit.

    Listen dude, if you are going to redirect a navigable river, the least you can do is clean out some stables with it.

     
    Last month.
    Independent – Hundreds turned out to protest JD Vance’s family vacation to Disneyland. The next day the park shut down rides for his visit

  443. StevoR says

    Australia’s Pacific neighbour, Nauru, has sold its first passports as part of a program raising funds for the relocation of residents affected by rising sea levels.

    The tiny island nation launched the scheme in February but it only approved its first six applicants this week, nearly half a year after it started.

    Selling for at least $US105,000 ($160,000), Nauru’s “golden passports” offer citizenship by investment and the country claims it would enable visa-free entry into 89 countries.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-07/nauru-sells-first-passports-to-fund-climate-action/105624728

  444. StevoR says

    Ancient humans lived on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi at least a million years ago — 800,000 years earlier than previously known — according to stone tools found under a corn field. The artefacts, which were unveiled today in the journal Nature, may even be up to 1.48 million years old. But exactly which ancient human species left the tools, or even how they managed to get there in the first place, is a mystery.

    Griffith University archaeologist and study co-author Adam Brumm said the previous oldest evidence of humans in Sulawesi was 194,000-year-old stone tools, also found by his team.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-08-07/stone-tools-sulawesi-million-years-ancient-humans-fossils/105618842

  445. StevoR says

    Ancient humans lived on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi at least a million years ago — 800,000 years earlier than previously known — according to stone tools found under a corn field. The artefacts, which were unveiled today in the journal Nature, may even be up to 1.48 million years old. But exactly which ancient human species left the tools, or even how they managed to get there in the first place, is a mystery.

    Griffith University archaeologist and study co-author Adam Brumm said the previous oldest evidence of humans in Sulawesi was 194,000-year-old stone tools, also found by his team.

    Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-08-07/stone-tools-sulawesi-million-years-ancient-humans-fossils/105618842

  447. says

    https://www.msnbc.com/all
    Ali Velshi hosting for Chris Hayes

    Trump shrugs at plan for total Gaza occupation: ‘Pretty much up to Israel’
    Video is 7:05 minutes

    Epstein ‘strategy dinner’ at JD Vance’s home? Trump’s inner circle plans meeting
    Video is 11:42 minutes

  448. says

    Trump’s ICE goons get even more […] heinous—with kidnappings

    Early Wednesday morning, masked ICE agents barrelled out of a Penske truck to raid a Los Angeles Home Depot for immigrants.

    […] A federal judge issued an order last month halting racial profiling and the use of roving patrols to target immigrants, but now that seems to be thrown to the wayside. […]

    The Penske truck attack was dubbed “Operation Trojan Horse” by Bovino [U.S. Border Patrol El Centro Sector Chief Greg Bovino] and resulted in the arrest of 16 immigrants.

    “For those who thought immigration enforcement had stopped in Southern California, think again,” Bill Essayli, acting U.S. attorney for Central California, posted on X. […]

    But Penske decried the use of their vehicles after videos began to go viral.

    “Penske Truck Rental is aware of recent reports and videos regarding a Department of Homeland Security in Los Angeles,” the company shared in a statement. “Penske strictly prohibits the transportation of people in the cargo area of its vehicles under any circumstances. The company was not made aware that its trucks would be used in today’s operation and did not authorize this. Penske will reach out to DHS and reinforce its policy to avoid improper use of its vehicle in the future.”

    The raid is reminiscent of past attacks in Los Angeles, when ICE infiltrated workplaces, taco stands, Home Depots, and areas with a significant Latino population. And while the Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that it’s targeting the “worst of the worst,” reports show that people with no criminal records are being detained. […]

  449. says

    “South Park” on Wednesday night continued its satirical attacks on the Trump administration, with its latest episode taking aim at figures including the president, Vice President Vance and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem.

    The episode, dubbed “Got a Nut,” depicts the school counselor, Mr. Mackey, who is terminated from his job at an elementary school, eventually joining Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

    Mackey watches a recruitment video where Noem refers to shooting her dog, then shows her shooting multiple dogs. Later in the episode, Noem is shown leading an immigration raid on a “Dora the Explorer live concert, where she shoots a dog, and then a raid in heaven, where she tells agents to “only detain the brown ones.”

    Mackey is later invited to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where the president offers to make him Noem’s replacement, then invites the former school counselor into his bed with satan.

    Vance is depicted as a mini-sized Trump servant. After Trump gets annoyed with Vance in the episode, the president kicks him.

    “Well, I’ve finally made it,” Vance said in a Thursday morning post on social media platform X, commenting on an image of his portrayal in the episode.

    “South Park” and the administration have gone back-and-forth recently, with the sitcom jabbing DHS for using an image from the cartoon to help their ICE recruiting efforts.

    “Wait, so we ARE relevant,” the show wrote on Tuesday on X […]

    “We want to thank South Park for drawing attention to ICE law enforcement recruitment: We are calling on patriotic Americans to help us remove murderers, gang members, pedophiles, and other violent criminals from our country,” DHS said in a statement earlier this week.

    Link

  450. says

    Followup to comment 436.

    Trump is thinking of deploying the military! To attack we mean protect the Olympics! […]

    Trump announced Tuesday that he might deploy the military in order to keep LA “safe” during the Olympics. Because that’s what elite athletes want the biggest moments of their lives to look like! They just can’t wait to be surrounded by Pete Hegseth’s Gestapo-ized military […] all with their itchy fingers on their triggers because they’re scared they’re gonna see a non-white person.

    A reporter asked Trump about making sure LA was safe from fires during the Olympics:

    “We’ll do anything necessary to keep the Olympics safe, including using our National Guard or military,” he said.

    Um, OK, unhinged power-mad [person].

    He made the remark during an event announcing his handpicked task force of […] fuckups responsible for overseeing the Olympics. He is of course naming himself the chair of this task force. Hopefully he will have time for it, what with his duties picking people to sing “Memory” from CATS at the Kennedy Center and overseeing the construction of a ballroom addition to the White House so ugly and trashy, no world leader will ever be able to visit it again without making jokes under their breath.

    We wouldn’t want Old Man Cankles to overextend himself. Maybe he can borrow some of the time he would normally spend trying to end the war in Ukraine, since Vladimir Putin is making it abundantly clear these days that Trump was always his [lackey] and never the other way around.

    But really, though, is Trump up to such a job? Here’s Trump introducing the task force. His brain glitches as he tries to say ICE Glamour Shots Barbie Kristi Noem. Listen to him slurring his speech and accidentally calling her “Cristie Kerr,” like the famous golfer Cristie Kerr is in the room with him right now: [video]

    […] more embarrassing moments!

    Here is Donald Trump babbling about water in California, at the Olympics event: [video]

    In this clip, Trump thanks Gene Sykes, chair of the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee board of directors, for […] banning trans women from women’s sports, and slurs in frustration that nobody is clapping for that. He then declares that “The United States will not let men steal trophies from women at the 2028 Olympics.” […]

    Here is an absolutely unhinged question about whether Pam Bondi is going to prosecute any men who dress up as women and come to the Olympics to beat up American woman athletes: [video]

    And here is Trump being presented a full set of Olympic medals from 1984 by Casey Wasserman, the chair of LA28. Trump asks if he is allowed to “say that I won them athletically.” [video]

    […] here is the White House’s tweet on that: “President Donald Trump has been awarded a full set of 1984 Olympic medals.”

    “Awarded,” not given as a gift. As if he did something to earn them.

    If you want to watch the entire senile display, all the slurring of speech, all the embarrassing moments we skipped, and all the handpicked blondes laughing at his jokes and praising him, which is actually their only job besides Epstein files coverups, here’s the full video: [video]

    As we have argued here, it is entirely untenable for the United States under the thumb of this pissbaby dictator to be hosting the Olympics in 2028, and the World Cup next year. Because of Trump’s Nazi immigration policies, no country can be guaranteed that its athletes, support staffs, families, or fans will be safe, especially if they aren’t white. […]

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/donald-trumps-olympics-will-be-the

  451. says

    […] You want racism and violence, you can’t get much better than this Confederate dude, Gen. Albert Pike, who wrote in 1868, “the white race, and that race alone, shall govern this country. It is the only one that is fit to govern, and it is the only one that shall” — and whose statue is currently being lovingly burnished and restored, so it can be re-placed in our nation’s capital. (The Nation / Paul Waldman) […]

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/miss-united-states-vs-this-dck-tabs

  452. says

    A pair of American volunteer doctors described to NBC News a barely coping hospital in Gaza, with bodies spread across the blood-smeared floors as medical staff struggled to treat hundreds of people who had been injured as they tried to access humanitarian aid.

    “We have children who are dead on the floor, and we are unable to move these patients just due to the sheer volume that we received,” Ahmed Farhat, an emergency physician from California, said in a video message Tuesday, talking about the situation at the Nasser Medical Complex in the city of Khan Younis.

    “We have patients who are intubated on the floor with no sedation. We have patients who have chest tubes on the floor, patients who are bleeding out,” added Farhat, who is just under two weeks into a medical mission run by the Michigan-based Rahma Worldwide, a charity founded in 2014 that operates emergency response and humanitarian relief programs across the Middle East and Africa.

    His comments echo those of other doctors working in Gaza who in recent interviews have lamented the lack of food and medicine being allowed into the enclave, amid international outrage over widespread starvation and deaths from malnutrition. Others have described aid distribution points as death traps, as a growing number of people have been killed or injured while seeking desperately needed food.

    Three short videos taken by Farhat in the Nasser Medical Complex on Tuesday showed dozens of people waiting for treatment on the hospital’s floors. Some had tubes inserted to help them breathe, others were motionless. [Video and photos at the link]

    Citing hospital administration data, Farhat said in a text message Wednesday that the Nasser Complex received 453 patients within a number of hours Tuesday and that 48 of them had died.

    He added that his patients told him they had come under fire by Israeli forces while trying to collect aid from two sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the U.S. and Israel-backed organization that has been mired in controversy since replacing most United Nations-run relief operations in Gaza in May. [I snipped GHF denials.]

    Farhat said other patients had told him they had been fired upon in another incident near Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah while seeking aid from a United Nations aid convoy that was passing through.

    […] Travis Melin, an anesthesiologist from Oregon who also volunteers at the Nasser Hospital, said the number of patients Tuesday had been “huge.” In a text message Wednesday, he added that he had seen the highest number of casualties at the hospital during his monthlong tenure there.

    “We’re still doing emergency surgery on people who should have gone to the OR yesterday,” he said. […]

    Link

  453. says

    Dean Cain, the actor best known for portraying Superman on the TV series “Lois & Clark,” announced on Wednesday that he will be joining Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The decision runs in direct contrast to the ethics of the character he portrayed: an immigrant who defended other immigrants against abuse and oppression.

    “I will be sworn in as an ICE agent ASAP,” Cain told Fox News after sharing a recruitment video for the agency.

    Cain described himself as a “patriot” for backing President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda and praised him for delivering on his campaign promises to attack immigrants.

    […] ICE’s heavy-handed tactics and brutal procedures have even led to criminals adopting ICE garb as a pretext to committing crimes. Racists have also been donning ICE uniforms to get away with harassing Latino people. [embedded links to additional sources are available at the main link]

    Superman was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, both children of Jewish immigrants, and debuted in 1938 as “the champion of the oppressed” who “had sworn to devote his existence to helping those in need.”

    […] Cain has not done much high-profile work since “Lois & Clark” ended its 4-season run on ABC in 1997. He followed up the show with a slew of basic cable and direct-to-video movies, and has appeared in several right-wing propaganda films like “ObamaGate: The Movie,” and “God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust.”

    In recent years, Cain has become a fixture on Fox News, where he has used his Superman fame to promote far-right politics and COVID-19 conspiracies.

    Cain was most recently in the news for badmouthing the latest “Superman” movie released in July. After director James Gunn accurately noted that Superman is an immigrant, Cain was among the chorus of right-wing voices panning the statement. He derided the film as “woke” and said that Gunn’s comments would “hurt” the film at the box office. [JFC]

    So far, “Superman” has earned more than $550 million worldwide and is the third-highest grossing film of 2025 in the United States.

    Link

  454. says

    Oh no. Not a good development:

    Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn on Thursday said the FBI will hunt down the Texas Democratic lawmakers who fled the Lone Star State to prevent Republicans from passing an undemocratic gerrymander of Texas’ congressional districts.

    “I am proud to announce that Director Kash Patel has approved my request for the F.B.I. to assist state and local law enforcement in locating runaway Texas House Democrats,” Cornyn said in a statement, referring to a letter he sent to Patel on Tuesday asking for the FBI to get involved in returning the Democratic lawmakers. “I thank President Trump and Director Patel for supporting and swiftly acting on my call for the federal government to hold these supposed lawmakers accountable.”

    Of course, Texas Democratic lawmakers are not committing a federal crime by leaving the state to deny Republicans a quorum, which effectively blocks the GOP’s attempt to rig the state’s congressional districts to give Republicans an additional five seats at Dear Leader Donald Trump’s behest.

    “The key question here is on what grounds would the FBI be doing this. What is the crime they are investigating? The FBI can’t just use its vast surveillance powers to locate random citizens.[…]” MSNBC justice correspondent Ken Dilanian wrote in a post on X.

    […] “There literally is no federal law applicable to this situation, none they can say that they’re sending F.B.I.,” Pritzker [Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker] said, adding that Republicans are “grandstanding.”

    Yet that hasn’t stopped Cornyn and other Republicans from trying to threaten the Democratic lawmakers with everything from arrest to expulsion from office.

    Cornyn clearly has ulterior motives here. He is facing an existential threat to his political future in next year’s U.S. Senate primary, with polls showing him currently in a close battle with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

    Paxton is running against Cornyn by saying he is not sufficiently conservative or loyal to Trump […] That makes Cornyn’s request to sic the FBI on Democratic lawmakers even more abhorrent, as he is weaponizing federal law enforcement for his own political gain.

    Democrats lambasted the weaponization of the FBI.

    “This isn’t about ‘locating’ anyone—they’re not hiding. [!] It’s about silencing dissent and weaponizing law enforcement,” former Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX), who is running for Senate in 2026, wrote in a post on X. “Cornyn is deputizing the FBI and Paxton is trying to expel lawmakers because they’re both too weak and corrupt to stand up to Washington. Enough is enough—Texans deserve better.”

    […] “Shouldn’t the F.B.I. be tracking down terrorists, drug traffickers and child predators?” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a post on X. “The Trump administration continues to weaponize law enforcement to target political adversaries. […] We will not be intimidated.”

    Link

  455. says

    AUSTIN, TX (The Borowitz Report)—In what they called “an administrative error,” Republican lawmakers on Thursday accidentally redrew the map of Texas so that it rejoined Mexico.

    Minutes after the GOP legislators’ colossal error was revealed, their Democratic counterparts issued a statement from their hiding place in Illinois, commenting, “We leave the state for two days and this is what happens.”

    As millions of Americans celebrated the departure of the Lone Star State, Mexico offered this response to the Republicans’ unexpected gift of Texas: “No thank you.”

    https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/republicans-accidentally-redraw-map

  458. birgerjohansson says

    Trigger warning.

    A Youtuber has posted a long (and in my opinion valid) comment to an anime that stirred up controversy.

    While the show brings up the R-word, it also takes time to talk about it, and it brings up important points. 

    If more people talked  about about it, we would not keep hearing about “why did she not say it years ago?” as they do about a victim of a very powerful American.

    “Goblin Slayer: The Most Controversial Element of the Show”
    .https://youtube.com/watch?v=712aw_78cVI

    Spoiler; In the second season, one of the victims later overcomes the trauma enough to lead an army wiping out the culprits
    (And if you want to avoid the dark aspects, fans have created abriged Youtube parodies of Goblinslayer where he is more Deadpool than Punisher. The best are by Grimmjack).

  462. beholder says

    @459 StevoR

    I know you called it “obviously a very bad idea”, but a nuclear reactor on the Moon sounds like a pretty good idea. Done well, of course, but I’m not foreclosed to the idea just because nuclear == bad.

  463. John Morales says

    beholder, “I know you called it “obviously a very bad idea”, but a nuclear reactor on the Moon sounds like a pretty good idea. Done well, of course, but I’m not foreclosed to the idea just because nuclear == bad.”

    Heh. You wrote that 3 hours and 11 minutes after I noted the (in)significance of that.

    (Solar arrays and storage would do better)

    —

    And hey, it sounds like a good idea to Donald Trump, not just to you.

  466. JM says

    Economist: How loyalty programmes are keeping America’s airlines aloft

    You might expect America’s most valuable airline to earn its keep flying passengers. But you would be mistaken. In the second quarter of the year Delta Air Lines notched up an operating profit of $2.1bn, comfortably ahead of its domestic rivals. Buried in the financial statements, however, was a more revealing figure. Had it relied solely on revenue from passengers, it would have operated at a loss.
    Delta is hardly unique in this regard. Last year American, Southwest and United—America’s other big airlines—also lost money from flying passengers, even as the four jointly made around $14bn in operating profits (see chart). To be sure, airlines earn revenue from other sources such as cargo. But what keeps them aloft is a vast loyalty business that binds together consumers, airlines and credit-card issuers.

    This is one of the reasons airlines are so bad. They are not trying to make money by selling air travel. They are trying to develop more convoluted loyalty programs while keeping the cost of the flights they do have to make as low as possible.

  467. says

    https://www.msnbc.com/all
    Chris Hayes show with guest host Ali Velshi

    ‘Our democracy is being stolen right before our very eyes’: Texas lawmaker warns about the state’s redistricting fight
    Video is 7:38 minutes

    Trump’s ICE is ‘the most dangerous manifestation’ of ‘militarized security’: Former deputy NSA
    Video is 10:44 minutes

  468. says

    Justice Dept. decides not to indict Florida Republican lawmaker accused of Covid theft

    “A rising star in Florida GOP politics faced a serious criminal complaint. Her attorney, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s brother, got her case dropped.”

    It was just a few years ago when Carolina Amesty was elected to Florida’s state legislature and quickly earned a reputation as a rising star in the state Republican Party. That, however, was before she ran into serious legal trouble.

    According to federal investigators, Amesty allegedly engaged in fraud while obtaining Covid relief funds. According to a criminal complaint, Amesty sought funds through a foundation and a car dealership that might not have existed and used the money for personal expenses. Federal investigators also said they believe some of the money she received went to a private Christian college she helped run. [That’s an impressive roster of fraudulent scams.] Amesty has long insisted that she did nothing wrong.

    Now, however, the former GOP state legislator no longer has to worry about these allegations. The Tampa Bay Times reported:

    The federal government is no longer seeking an indictment against Carolina Amesty, attorneys for the former lawmaker say, citing ‘significant exculpatory material’ her defense has provided in the case. The criminal investigation into Amesty, who was accused of fraudulently obtaining COVID-19 relief loans in 2020 while working as an administrator for her family’s university, has ended, her attorney Brad Bondi wrote in a motion filed in federal court Wednesday.

    Take another look at that last line of the excerpt and you might notice a familiar name: Amesty was represented by Brad Bondi, who happens to be Attorney General Pam Bondi’s brother. (Amesty hired her lawyer a few weeks after his sister was tapped to serve as the nation’s chief law enforcement official.)

    In other words, federal investigators filed a criminal complaint against Amesty, and later Pam Bondi’s Justice Department decided not to pursue charges against Brad Bondi’s client.

    […] consider the larger context to all of this.

    Donald Trump’s Justice Department has a serious credibility problem. In recent months, Americans have seen the DOJ purge employees who worked on cases the president didn’t like. We’ve seen Bondi play the role of a hyperpartisan activist aligned with the White House’s political agenda. We’ve seen Bondi fire her personal ethics adviser. We’ve even seen Bondi’s DOJ drop other cases against defendants with political ties to the White House.

    Patty Hartman, a 17-year former Justice Department official who was fired after having worked on Jan. 6 cases, recently told CBS News, “The rules don’t exist anymore.” She added, “There used to be a line, used to be a very distinct separation between the White House and the Department of Justice, because one should not interfere with the work of the other. That line is very definitely gone.”

    In a social media post, Hartman went on to write, “We appear to be driving straight into an abyss that holds no memory of what democracy is, was, or should be.”

    […] Have Bondi and the Justice Department earned the benefit of the doubt?

    Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor, recently wrote in The New York Times about the Justice Department suffering a “credibility crisis” inside courtrooms and out. If administration officials expect that crisis to fade anytime soon, they should probably lower their expectations.

  469. says

    BREAKING: Appeals Court Clears Trump Admin of Contempt of Court in Alien Enemies Act Case

    After sitting on the case for months, a federal appeals court Friday shut down the contempt of court proceeding against the Trump administration in the original Alien Enemies Act case.

    Both of the Trump appointees on the three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of appeals concurred that no contempt of court had occurred. The third judge, an Obama appointee, dissented from the ruling.

    More to come …

    Read the opinion: [Text available at the link]

  470. birgerjohansson says

    As the administration of Donald Joffrey Trump comes up with increasingly ludicrious attempts to distract the public I am indulging in a gedankenexperiment.

    -If we had someone on the inside, feeding DJT really ridicilous ideas for accusations against Obama, Biden and others, what would the most funny accusations be?
    Keep in mind neither DJT nor his sycophantic entourage have good knowledge of recent history, geography et cetera.

    Blaming Obama for receiving money from China delivered by a certain Fu Manchu?

    They do not keep up with European politicians, they would believe claims Bill Clinton frequented the sex dungeon of an elitisty European named Michael Hazeltine (the villains in the Left Behind films are always European).

    Sinister links between Chuck Shumer and the militant atheist Iain Paisley.

    These names are from Britain but feel free to make up other associations. Like Franz Josef Strauss, the boss of the Bilderberg Group manipulating the value of currencies to bring down the dollar.
    Mexico stealing rain from Texas by spraying silver iodine over rain clouds coming in the direction from Hawai.
    Anything that DJT might say on live television before his minions fact-check it.

    But my imagination is really too poor, please find better examples.

  471. birgerjohansson says

    Myself @ 470
    Brad Pitt is an undercover muslim. Like the Pope.
    -Since Taylor Swift is not Republican, her successful career can only be the result of nepotism from her biological father… George Soros!

  472. says

    New York Times link

    “Trump Directs Military to Target Foreign Drug Cartels”

    “The president has ordered the Pentagon to use the armed forces to carry out what in the past was considered law enforcement.”

    […] Trump has secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels that his administration has deemed terrorist organizations, according to people familiar with the matter.

    The decision to bring the American military into the fight is the most aggressive step so far in the administration’s escalating campaign against the cartels. It signals Mr. Trump’s continued willingness to use military forces to carry out what has primarily been considered a law enforcement responsibility to curb the flow of fentanyl and other illegal drugs.

    The order provides an official basis for the possibility of direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against cartels.

    […] directing the military to crack down on the illicit trade also raises legal issues, including whether it would count as “murder” if U.S. forces acting outside of a congressionally authorized armed conflict were to kill civilians — even criminal suspects — who pose no imminent threat.

    […] Already this year Mr. Trump has deployed National Guard and active duty troops to the southwest border to choke off the flow of drugs as well as immigrants, and has increased surveillance and drug interdiction efforts.

    When he returned to office in January, Mr. Trump signed an order directing the State Department to start labeling drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

    In February, the State Department designated Tren de Aragua, Mara Salvatrucha (known as MS-13) and several other groups as foreign terrorist organizations […]

    Two weeks ago, the Trump administration added the Venezuelan Cartel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns, to a list of specially designated global terrorist groups […]

    On Thursday, the Justice and State Departments announced that the United States government is doubling a reward — to $50 million — for information leading to the arrest of Mr. Maduro [President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela], who has been indicted on drug trafficking charges. The administration again described him as a cartel head, and Attorney General Pam Bondi said he “will not escape justice and he will be held accountable for his despicable crimes.”

    […] Past U.S. military involvement in countering drug operations in Latin America have sometimes pushed at legal limits. But those operations were framed as providing support for law enforcement authorities.

    In 1989, President George H.W. Bush sent more than 20,000 troops into Panama to arrest its strongman leader, Manuel Noriega, who had been indicted in the United States on charges of drug trafficking.

    Ahead of the operation, William P. Barr, who then led the Office of Legal Counsel and was the attorney general in Mr. Trump’s first term, wrote a disputed memo saying it was within Mr. Bush’s authority to direct law-enforcement arrests of fugitives overseas without the consent of foreign states. The United Nations General Assembly condemned the Panama action as a “flagrant violation of international law.”

    In the 1990s, the U.S. military assisted Colombian and Peruvian antidrug law enforcement activities by sharing information about civilian flights suspected of carrying drugs — like radar data and communications intercepts. But after those governments started shooting down such planes, the Clinton administration in 1994 halted the assistance for months.

    […] Congress eventually modified U.S. law to permit such assistance.

    And the Navy has long participated in intercepting vessels in international waters that are suspected of smuggling drugs toward the United States. But naval ships typically do so as a law enforcement operation, working under the command of a U.S. Coast Guard officer. Under an 1878 law called the Posse Comitatus Act, it is generally illegal to use the military to perform law enforcement functions.

    The U.S. military has also conducted joint antidrug training exercises with other countries, including with Colombian and Mexican troops. The military also provided equipment and aircraft to former Drug Enforcement Administration squads that mentored and deployed with — and sometimes got into firefights alongside — local antidrug officers in countries like Honduras. The program ended in 2017.

    But Mr. Trump’s new directive appears to envision a different approach, focused on U.S. forces directly capturing or killing people involved in the drug trade.

    […] In his first term, Mr. Trump became captivated by the idea of bombing drug labs in Mexico, an idea his defense secretary at the time, Mark T. Esper, later portrayed as ludicrous in his memoir, and which provoked outrage from Mexican officials.

    […] became a talking point in the 2024 election cycle. Mr. Trump vowed on the campaign trail to deploy Special Operations troops and naval forces to, as he put it, declare war on the cartels.

    The retired Rear Adm. James E. McPherson, who served as the top uniformed lawyer for the navy in the early 2000s, said it would be “a major breach of international law” to use military force in another country’s territory and without its government’s consent unless certain exceptions were met, but that such limits do not apply to unflagged vessels in international waters.

    […] military action against cartels would apparently have to rely on a claim about Mr. Trump’s constitutional authority to act in national self-defense, perhaps against fentanyl overdoses. Admiral McPherson noted that the administration has pushed aggressively broad understandings of Mr. Trump’s unilateral power.

    It is not clear what rules of engagement would govern military action against cartels. But any operation that set out to kill people based on their suspected status as members of a sanctioned cartel, and outside the context of an armed conflict, would raise legal issues involving laws against murder and a longstanding executive order banning assassinations […]

    Alternatively, the military could carry out capture operations, reserving lethal force for self-defense if troops met resistance.

    But captures could raise other tricky legal issues, Mr. Finucane added, including about the scope of the military’s ability to hold prisoners as wartime-style detainees without congressional authorization. Or the military could instead transfer any prisoners to the Justice Department for prosecution in civilian court.

    In February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the top lawyers for the military services, or judge advocates general. The three-star uniformed lawyers are supposed to give independent and nonpolitical advice about international laws of war and domestic legal constraints on the armed forces.

    […] The push to label cartels as terrorist organizations has extended to several that are based in Mexico, as well as a coalition of Haitian gangs that have helped plunge their country into chaos.

    In April, Mr. Trump proposed to President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico that she allow the U.S. military to fight drug cartels on her nation’s soil, but she rejected the idea.

    […] The C.I.A. has not been authorized to use drones to take lethal action, and officials do not envision employing that option. For now, C.I.A. officers in Mexico pass information collected by the drones to Mexican officials.

    In addition to the C.I.A.’s efforts, the U.S. military’s Northern Command has also expanded its surveillance of the border. But the U.S. military, unlike the spy agency, is not entering Mexican airspace. The Northern Command has conducted about 330 surveillance flights over the U.S. border with Mexico using a variety of surveillance aircraft including U-2s, RC-135 Rivet Joints, P-8s and drones, according to military officials.

  473. says

    Veterans face new health care crisis thanks to Trump

    […] Trump’s policies are causing doctors to turn down job offers in Veterans Affairs hospitals, a new report has revealed. Simultaneously, the administration is engaging in anti-union actions in the veterans health care system and Democratic lawmakers say veterans will ultimately suffer.

    ProPublica reported on Friday that a new analysis of hiring at VA hospitals since Trump took office shows that doctors are rejecting job offers. Of the roughly 2,000 doctors who were offered jobs between January and March, nearly 40% turned down the offer. That turndown rate is a 400% increase from a year ago when former President Joe Biden was in office.

    ProPublica also revealed that doctors and nurses already in the system are leaving. Every month that Trump has been in office has seen a decline in doctors employed by the VA. Between January and June, twice as many nurses left the VA system as have been hired.

    The brain drain is occurring at the same time that the administration is focused on slashing the agency’s workforce.

    […] The agency announced on Thursday that it is on pace to cut 30,000 jobs by the end of the 2025 fiscal year.

    […] ProPublica noted in its report that wait times have increased for patients seeking primary and specialty care, along with wait times for outpatient surgery and appointments.

    Collins also announced this week that the agency is terminating collective bargaining agreements for more than 350,000 unionized employees. […]

    Trump has long expressed hostility to service members and infamously referred to them as “suckers” and “losers.” While he’s more than happy to use a military anniversary as an excuse for a birthday parade for himself, he has been happy to attack and degrade the health care they desperately need.

  474. says

    While the Trump administration is still fighting a court battle in California over the Posse Comitatus Act, some red state governors don’t believe it should be so damn hard to have active-duty troops help terrorize immigrants. So they’re stepping up by sending their own National Guard members.

    […] when a governor volunteers their guard members, there’s a fiction that the state retains power and therefore does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act.

    More than a dozen red states have answered the Trump administration’s call, agreeing to deploy their National Guards to help staff Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities and process arrests.

    This allows the Trump administration to avoid the issue it faced in California, when President Donald Trump federalized the National Guard over the objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom. The state sued, and the administration is still dealing with the court challenge—though it isn’t like that’s stopped anything.

    Per a July Pentagon announcement, about 1,700 National Guard troops are being tapped to provide “case management, transportation and logistical support, and clerical support for the in- and out-processing” of ICE arrests.

    […] This looks a lot like the Trump administration is staffing non-agent ICE roles by basically conscripting military personnel instead of hiring administrative staff.

    […] But no matter what, it doesn’t seem to be enough to achieve the staffing level needed to turn the United States into an immigrant concentration camp from sea to shining sea.

    […] It’s grim to see red state governors so eager to throw their lot in with Trump, pulling National Guard members from their actual duties. That’s what happened in California, where many of the guard members were specially trained to help fight fires but were unavailable as fire season kicked off because they were on the streets of Los Angeles, fighting residents.

    Trump has made it very clear that he wants to treat the military as an extension of his will […]

    Link

  475. says

    […] bullet list for July’s COVID developments:

    Current Covid scenario: The country is experiencing another summer wave with some estimates at ~1 in 95 Americans infected (Texas as high as 1 in 38), building momentum as air conditioning increases and back-to-school approaches.

    Wastewater surveillance: Despite funding uncertainties, monitoring remains effective at predicting Covid cases one week in advance, confirmed by studies of 215 samples and 6,800+ cases

    Variant tracking challenges: CDC surveillance lagging to June data, though XFG and NB.1.8.1 (Nimbus) variants appear most common, both remaining within JN.1 family without major evolutionary changes

    Fall vaccination plans: Updated shots are hopefully on the way, but lots of uncertainties remain. It’s sad when even primary care docs are not sure what’s coming this late in the summer. If I can I’m going to try out Novavax or mNexspike, as specialty boards provide guidance while FDA/CDC leadership remains degraded

    Ivermectin controversy: States like Tennessee and Arkansas made ivermectin available over-the-counter despite studies showing ineffectiveness against Covid, creating an “upside-down world” prioritizing unproven treatments over prevention

    Cancer risks from Covid: New research suggests Covid might awaken dormant breast cancer cells, with survivors facing double cancer death risk in one database studied, yet boosters reduce hospitalization risk by 29%. Don’t panic here, as other studies and surveillance have not shown ballooning recurrence rates

    Cardiovascular impacts: Studies of 9 million people show Covid can increase heart disease risk by 62% for 18+ months, though vaccination reduces risk by 30%. And the best part? At this point in the pandemic the absolute heart risks are small (2.12% vs 1.31%)

    Political interference: Our attorney general dismissed charges against a plastic surgeon who gave children saline instead of vaccines, a dangerous precedent undermining public health protections and medical ethics

    Vaccine safety data: Danish study of 1.5 million people found no increased serious adverse events from updated mRNA vaccines across 29 potential side effects

    FDA leadership turbulence: Dr. Vinay Prasad’s 84-day tenure ended amid political pressure, showing how contrarian positions create impossible political contradictions in practice

    Pandemic preparedness collapse: Key biosecurity offices now unstaffed after resignations, with WHO withdrawal and canceled contracts leaving US vulnerable to future threats

    Long Covid treatments: Rapamycin trials showing 72% improvement rates in ME/CFS patients, though responses vary and benefits may not be permanent

    Vaccine syndrome acknowledgment: Rare Post-Covid Vaccine Syndrome cases documented with Long Covid-like symptoms deserve study without policy-driven silence […]

    Link

  476. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/seems-like-the-raw-milk-isnt-making

    “Seems Like The Raw Milk Isn’t Making People So Healthy After All”

    “21 people in Florida have gotten sick with e. coli, seven ended up in the hospital.”

    […] Unfortunately for [conservatives], the things they think will do that [Make America Healthy Again] … are completely fucking insane. They want food without seed oils, which are actually entirely fine and kind of good for you, they want to give up vegetables and become “carnivores,” they don’t want fluoride in the water because they want the freedom for their teeth rot, they don’t want to take vaccines, they want to take horse dewormer for everything that ails them, and they want to drink raw milk.

    That last one did not work out so well recently for 21 people — adults and six children under the age of 10 — in Florida who were poisoned by e. coli after drinking it. You know, because pasteurization is what keeps bacteria from forming and prevents you from getting food poisoning. Out of those 21, seven people ended up getting hospitalized, and health officials in the state are now recommending that people stop drinking dangerous milk.

    […] For all these types who worry about “toxins” they never seem to know the actual name of, e. coli actually does produce shiga toxin, which can cause kidney failure.

    “STEC bacteria in its most severe form can result in hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) which is characterized by hemolysis and kidney failure, which is of particular concern for children,” a bulletin from the Florida Department of Health stated. “Groups at higher risk for severe illness include infants and young children, pregnant women, elderly individuals, and those with weakened immune systems.”

    Raw milk has also been known to cause a bunch of Oregon Trail-ass illnesses, including “listeriosis, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria, Q fever, and brucellosis.” This is according to information that is still available on the FDA website, though we can probably expect to see it taken down soon enough.

    You can get salmonella from it as well, which is exactly what happened to 171 people — 70 percent of whom were under the age of 18 — in California and four other states in 2023, a recent report from the CDC has confirmed.

    One of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s big promises was to stop the “aggressive suppression” of raw milk production and allow people to gulp it down to their heart’s content. A raw milk drinker himself, Kennedy has long touted its entirely unproven health benefits.

    It would be one thing if it were just adults taking a dangerous substance that could possibly make them very, very sick. […]

    The real problem is that raw milk enthusiasts tend to be most excited about what they think it can do for children. Specifically, they think it will keep them from developing allergies and asthma and will just generally boost their immune system — and there are some small scale studies from Europe that suggest there could be some benefit. But that’s where the problem is, because not only can kids not meaningfully consent to taking on this kind of risk, they are more likely to suffer severe reactions to food poisoning than are adults. And allergies, as annoying as they may be, are not worse than kidney failure.

  477. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/hey-woman-cant-you-take-a-trumpy

    For the past couple weeks, green dildos (and one purple dildo) have been thrust upon the court at multiple WNBA games across the country, and the reason why is no longer a mystery. As it turns out, it was a bunch of douchebag cryptobros who were trying to promote their memecoin cryptocurrency, for some of the most annoying reasons ever cited for doing anything in the history of the world.

    A spokesperson for the group (seriously?) has reached out to the media, explaining that the dildos were a protest. Not a protest of the WNBA, but a protest of what they consider a “toxic” cryptocurrency culture, in favor of the wholesome whimsy of throwing dicks at women who are trying to do their jobs.

    Despite the fact that one of their dildos actually hit Indiana Fever player Sophie Cunningham, who had just posted recently on social media asking them to stop doing this because they could hurt one of the players, they want to be clear that they’re not doing this out of disrespect for women or women’s sports.

    Via USA Today:

    “We didn’t do this because like we dislike women’s sports or, like, some of the narratives that are trending right now are ridiculous,” he said. “Creating disruption at games is like, it happens in every single sport, right? We’ve seen it in the NFL, we’ve seen it in hockey, you know . . . fans doing random things to more or less create attention.

    “We knew that in order to get a voice in the space … we had to go out and do some viral stunts to save us from having to pay that influencer cabal, sacrifice our souls and the fate of the project.”

    Aw, they wanted a voice! They felt silenced. “Influencers” wouldn’t promote their product for free and expected to be paid for such services, denying them the free advertisement they are entitled to as Americans. So they decided, instead of paying someone to promote their product, they’d get attention off the backs of people they clearly think are less deserving.

    The spokesman explained that catapulting sex objects (with drawn-on sunglasses and the name of their coin) is to spread awareness about a culture they want to perpetuate, cultivated around jokes, pranks and various stunts. The green sex toy is supposed to mirror a green candle, and if the price of the candle goes up, it represents volatility, which the spokesman for the meme coin group claims is a trader’s dream. The bright color of the object was intentional, he said, to be disruptive and create curiosity.

    I admit that I know pretty much nothing about cryptocurrency beyond the fact that it is bad for the environment and a popular hobby for those who happen to be the last person you’d ever want to get stuck talking to at a party — also, sometimes they kidnap and torture other people, which they also say is a prank, to get their crypto passwords — but I feel confident in saying that all of this just sounds really, really, deeply stupid.

    “Moving forward, we have a lot more pranks, but they’re a lot lighter. They’re a lot more tasteful,” the spokesman said. “They’re with a lot of different branded merch, and it’s more or less to keep the dildo being spotted in different places that are high-traffic areas with cameras.” […]

    So, these guys just want to have a “voice” and yet they won’t listen to women who use their voices to ask them to please stop throwing dildos at them. […] The group has already spawned copycats, two of whom have been arrested, because now people think that throwing dildos at female basketball players is a super cool fun trend.

    If you haven’t guessed by now, these folks are clearly pretty Trump-y, and were very excited to share an image shared by Donald Trump Jr. of Trump throwing a green dildo at WNBA players from the White House roof […] [offensive social media post]

    […]

    More at the link, including details regarding dildos hitting children, and details showing the campaign increased the meme coin value.

  478. says

    https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-emperors-new-trade-deal

    “The Emperor’s New Trade Deal”

    “Tariffs are bad. A deluded president is worse.”

    On Tuesday Donald Trump went on CNBC to explain why the European Union is facing a tariff of “only” 15 percent. But what he said was simply delusional — and the delusion should be even more concerning than the tariffs.

    The Europeans, Trump asserted, had agreed to cough up $600 billion, which he described as a “gift,” not a loan. And he emphasized that this is “$600 billion to invest in anything I want. Anything. I can do anything I want with it.”

    So Trump apparently believes that the European Union has agreed to provide him with a personal $600 billion slush fund.

    In fact, as I pointed out after the “deal” was announced, the EU agreed to no such thing. In fact, it literally couldn’t have made such an agreement. European nations aren’t command economies in which government can tell the private sector where to invest, and in any case the European Commission, which negotiated with Trump, can’t tell the governments of member states what to do.

    So think of it as the emperor’s new trade deal: Trump is strutting around, feeling very impressed with himself, but in substantive terms he’s stark naked.

    […] he’s lost touch with reality across the board.

    What will happen if and when Trump realizes that Europe hasn’t actually promised what he thinks it has — or, as he’s likely to see it, that the EU has gone back on its promise? He’s already given us an answer: He’s going to put the tariff on Europe back up to 35 percent.

    He may not be able to carry out that threat. In fact, there’s a very real possibility that the courts will rule many of the tariffs Trump has already imposed illegal (which they surely are) and order the administration to refund the money it has already collected.

    But assume that the Supreme Court does its usual thing and decides that the Constitution allows Trump to do whatever he wants. How afraid should Europe be of the possibility that Trump will put the tariffs back up, higher than before?

    Well, I’ve been trying to do the math, and as far as I can tell putting U.S. tariffs up from 15 to 35 percent would do less damage to Europe than many people imagine. Yes, it would hurt, but not all that much. By making a 15 percent tariff the baseline — what countries pay even if they do make “deals” — Trump has used up a lot of his trade war ammunition, greatly reducing the effectiveness of any further threats.

    After all, Europe has never been all that dependent on access to U.S. markets. In 2024 the EU’s exports of goods to the United States were slightly less than 3 percent of its GDP — not a trivial sum, but not enough to make European prosperity dependent on U.S. goodwill. [!]

    Trump’s tariffs will make the EU even less dependent on the U.S. market. In Sunday’s primer I explained that the crucial number is the “Armington elasticity,” which measures how sensitive trade flows are to tariffs, and that a reasonable estimate of that elasticity is 3. If we go with that number, we would expect the 15 percent tariff currently in place to cut EU exports to America by roughly a third, to around 2 percent of GDP.

    That’s a palpable hit, but not a huge one. Writing in the Financial Times, Richard Milne tells us that reports from European companies are showing surprising resilience. Furthermore, the loss of U.S. business will be partially offset by higher government expenditure in Europe, with Germany in particular boosting spending on both infrastructure and defense.

    That’s with a 15 percent tariff. But what happens if Trump pushes tariffs up to 35 percent? My back-of-the envelope calculations say that this would reduce Europe’s exports to the United States by another 0.7 percent of GDP. That is, the hit to Europe if Trump makes good on his threats would be smaller than the hit he has already imposed with the tariffs he plans to keep in place regardless.

    This makes sense if you think about it. The higher the tariffs Trump imposes on imports, the less other countries sell to America. And the less they sell to us, the less they have to lose if we push the tariffs even higher.

    And that argument doesn’t even take into account the strong possibility that another round of Trump tariffs would provoke retaliation from Europe and other trading partners. The EU has so far chosen not to retaliate against Trump’s tariffs because its officials decided that making a deal, or at least seeming to make a deal, was better than getting into a tit-for-tat trade war. But if it turns out that Trump sees a deal not as the end of the story but simply as the jumping-off point for new demands, I suspect that even the timid bureaucrats in Brussels will eventually decide that enough is enough.

    But again, at this point the math of the trade war matters less than the madness that lies behind it.

    There has always been a whiff of megalomania about Trump’s tariff policy — a belief that he can use the threat of tariffs to compel other countries to do his bidding on multiple fronts, from promising not to move away from the dollar as a reserve currency to abandoning the prosecution of wannabe dictators who tried to overthrow democracy.

    […] Trump will be the last person to recognize that there are limits to his ability to bully the world, on trade or anything else. And that lack of awareness should worry us all.

  479. says

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/a-prank-tabs-fri-aug-8-2025

    […] Sen. Jon Ossoff has compiled a report showing more than 500 credible allegations of human rights violations by ICE, particularly of pregnant women and children. Pro-woman! Pro-life! For instance, “a partner of a woman in DHS custody reported the woman was pregnant and bled for days before DHS staff took her to a hospital, where she was left in a room alone to miscarry without water or medical assistance.” (Guardian / report) […]

    See also: ‘Horrific’: report reveals abuse of pregnant women and children at US Ice facilities

  480. says

    Washington Post link

    “Germany, long opposed to E.U. pressure on Israel, suspends arms shipments”

    Germany, a staunch supporter of Israel and its second-largest weapons supplier after the United States, said Friday that it would not approve new weapons exports to Israel “that could be used in the Gaza Strip until further notice.”

    […] It was not immediately clear which weapons exports would stop or if any shipments were imminent. But even if it stops short of a full arms embargo, Friday’s decision is a big policy shift for Germany, given its relationship with Israel, which is shaped by historical guilt over the Holocaust.

    Since the European Union announced a deal with Israel in July to let more food into Gaza, aid groups say dozens of people have starved to death in the Palestinian enclave. Still, the E.U. as a bloc has refrained from imposing penalties on Israel, even as Brussels says famine is stalking “virtually the entire Gaza population,” and after a recent review warned of an Israeli siege weaponizing starvation.

    […] The 27-nation E.U. — Israel’s biggest trading partner — has threatened action since May. The E.U.’s diplomatic service launched a review that found Israel breached human rights obligations, and officials drafted options from suspending trade ties to sanctioning ministers.

    That debate took a back seat when E.U. officials said last month that Israel had agreed to allow more aid shipments. But while the deal delayed action in Brussels, it has failed to get more food to the hungry people in Gaza, according to current and former E.U. diplomats, as well as aid agencies.

    […] Merz’s announcement on Friday began by reiterating that “Israel has right to defend itself” against Hamas. Yet, he said, the latest Israeli plans to reoccupy Gaza make it “increasingly difficult” to achieve the release of hostages held by Hamas or promote negotiations on a ceasefire. Merz also noted Israel’s obligations to provide food and basic needs to Palestinians in Gaza. […]

    More at the link.

  481. says

    A fast-moving wildfire in Southern California has prompted mandatory evacuations and a local emergency proclamation in Los Angeles County after growing to nearly 5,000 acres in less than a day.

    The Canyon Fire began at 1:25 p.m. Thursday local time, with flames spotted to the north of Highway 126 and the west of the unincorporated community of Castaic in Los Angeles County, near the border of Ventura County, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. […]

    Washington Post link

  482. says

    With Zelenskyy sidelined from Ukraine war talks, Trump appears to hand Putin a diplomatic win

    “Analysis: Ukraine has long sought to be part of talks about its future but plans for a Trump-Putin summit raise the specter that its leader will be frozen out of key negotiations.”

    Related video at the link.

    Just when Ukraine and its European allies thought President Donald Trump was coming round to their view of the war, he appeared to give a huge win to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

    For Kyiv, this was Trump’s deadline to Putin: stop the fighting by Friday or face tough new economic sanctions. Instead, Trump has handed Moscow a diplomatic coup by agreeing to meet Putin face-to-face in a matter of days, their first encounter since the invasion of Ukraine.

    Trump had initially suggested that such a summit would only go ahead if Putin agreed to meet with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, something the Ukrainian president’s administration has long called for but has been resisted by Russia. On Thursday, Trump dispelled the idea that they would have to get together — raising the specter of a bilateral negotiation that freezes out Kyiv.

    […] For Eyal [Jonathan Eyal, international director at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank] and others, Ukraine’s nightmare is now one step closer to reality: “Trump will be so pleased by what he perceives as the great achievement of getting Putin to the negotiating table, that he grabs any kind of offer that is made,”, Eyal said. “The danger of half-baked compromise, which Trump can claim as his main achievement, is very high.”

    That compromise could be a temporary ceasefire that would allow Russia to restock its army and give its economy a break from international sanctions […]

    Even if there is no truce agreement, “a meeting with Trump — no matter the outcome — would be a big diplomatic victory for Putin,” Gabriella Ramirez, Hope for Ukraine’s executive assistant, said in an email. “Putin wants to break his diplomatic isolation” and such a meeting “will stroke his ego.”

    The “meeting with Putin is a trap […]

    “Nothing has changed since, frankly, December 2021, when Putin offered his ultimatum and said, ‘Give me what I want or else Ukraine gets it,” said James Nixey, a U.K.-based consultant specializing on Russia.

    “Trump […] made all sorts of pronouncements, threats and Truth Social posts, but not actually undertaken any specific act which harms Russia.”

    In 2021, Russia’s eight-point draft treaty looks much the same as today : a ban on Ukraine ever joining NATO and a withdrawal of NATO forces on Russia’s eastern flank. Today, Russia has merely added the additional demand of even more Ukrainian territory. [!]

    Ukraine has rejected the idea of a ceasefire that would have Russia maintain control over Ukrainian territory in its control, and insisted that any agreement must include “security guarantees” from its allies so that Moscow is not able to launch future aggression. […]

  483. says

    Keir Starmer on Friday led international condemnation of Israel over a major military escalation in the Gaza Strip in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plans to take over Gaza City.

    […] “The Israeli government’s decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza is wrong, and we urge it to reconsider immediately,” the British prime minister said in a statement early Friday. “This action will do nothing to bring an end to this conflict or to help secure the release of the hostages. It will only bring more bloodshed,” he said.

    Britain and its allies are working on a long-term plan to secure peace in the region as part of a two-state solution, but “without both sides engaging in good faith in negotiations, that prospect is vanishing before our eyes,” the U.K. leader said.

    Turkey also lambasted Netanyahu’s decision, which was approved by Israel’s security cabinet early Friday. Ankara called on Israel to stop its plans.

    “Every step taken by the fundamentalist Netanyahu government to continue the genocide against the Palestinians and expand the occupation deals a heavy blow to international peace and security; increasing regional instability and deepening the humanitarian crisis,” Turkey’s Foreign Ministry said.

    United Nations human rights chief Volker Türk said Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip “must be immediately halted.” Any further escalation of the conflict “will result in more massive forced displacement, more killing, more unbearable suffering, senseless destruction and atrocity crimes,” he said.

    German Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced on Friday that Berlin will suspend arms shipments to Israel that could be used in the Gaza Strip, marking his government’s clearest shift yet in response to Israel’s escalating military campaign. […]

    Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares said in a post on X: “We strongly condemn the Israeli government’s decision to escalate its military occupation of Gaza. It would only lead to further destruction and suffering.” […]

    Link

  484. says

    Even Trump’s former surgeon general says RFK Jr.’s cuts to mRNA research will ‘cost lives’

    “Dr. Jerome Adams, the president’s first surgeon general, was quick to condemn the administration’s cuts to mRNA vaccine research.”

    Related video at the link.

    “To scientists who study it, mRNA is a miracle molecule,” The New York Times reported in May. “The vaccines that harnessed it against Covid saved an estimated 20 million lives, a rapid development that was recognized with a Nobel Prize.”

    The report added that mRNA research has raised hopes of possible treatments — and perhaps even cures — for deadly cancers and a host of genetic and chronic diseases.

    Nevertheless, this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that he and the Trump administration are terminating a series of federal contracts focused on developing mRNA vaccines. The conspiracy theorist, who has a lengthy record of promoting bizarre and unscientific ideas, also said he’s winding down additional federal investments in mRNA technology.

    The reactions from those who take science, medicine and public health seriously have bordered on apocalyptic. Mike Osterholm, a University of Minnesota expert on infectious diseases and pandemic preparations, told The Associated Press, “I don’t think I’ve seen a more dangerous decision in public health in my 50 years in the business.” USA Today’s Rex Huppke added that Kennedy’s policies “are almost certainly going to kill people.”

    Even Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who put aside everything he had learned about Kennedy and voted to confirm him, eventually issued a public statement this week describing this week’s move as “unfortunate.” (Don’t strain yourself, senator.)

    But perhaps most notably, Trump’s own former surgeon general stepped up, too. NBC News reported:

    Dr. Jerome Adams, who served as the surgeon general during Trump’s first term, criticized the current administration’s move to cut about $500 million in mRNA vaccine development contracts. ‘I’ve tried to be objective & non-alarmist in response to current HHS actions — but quite frankly this move is going to cost lives,’ Adams said in a post to X [published on Wednesday night]. ‘mRNA technology has uses that go far beyond vaccines … and the vaccine they helped develop in record time is credited with saving millions.’

    Adams, it’s worth noting, also condemned Kennedy in June after the secretary gutted the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Months earlier, Adams also encouraged Senate Republicans to think twice before voting to confirm Kennedy. (Soon after, 52 Republicans — including alleged “moderates” such as Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski — ignored his advice.)

    […] As for Trump’s perspective on this week’s developments, a reporter reminded the president at an Oval Office event this week that he used to celebrate mRNA vaccines — the president explicitly referred to them as a “modern-day miracle” — before he put the nation’s public health infrastructure in the hands of a guy who has claimed, among other things, that Wi-Fi causes “leaky brain.” [social media post]

    Asked for some kind of explanation, the president told reporters, “Well, we’re going to look at that. We’re talking about it and they’re doing a very good job. … We are speaking about it. We have meetings about it — tomorrow, actually, tomorrow at 12:00, and we’ll determine. We’re looking for other answers to other problems, to other sicknesses and diseases.”

    I haven’t the foggiest idea what this was supposed to mean, but given how radical and dangerous Kennedy’s decision is, Trump’s meandering assurances do not inspire confidence.

  485. says

    House Republican tries to defend Medicaid cuts—and it goes poorly

    New York Rep. Mike Lawler, a swing-district Republican, struggled to defend his party’s vicious Medicaid cuts during a media appearance on Friday.

    MSNBC host Joe Scarborough noted that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” would result in Medicaid cuts between $900 billion to $1 trillion over the next decade, then raised concerns from Lawler’s own district.

    Host Joe Scarborough: If you look at the hospitals in your own district, Montefiore Nyack Hospital is already saying because of that vote, because of these cuts, they’re going to have to cut back services. They’re going to have to cut staff. They’re going to have to cut care. Same thing with Westchester Hospital. Hospitals across your district are going to have to cut services and care and staff members and budgets because of your vote and because of this bill that passed. That’s what they’re saying. It’s not some left-wing focus groups—

    Rep. Mike Lawler: Respectfully, I’ve met with—

    Scarborough: Well, I’m just telling you what they’ve said. And so—

    Lawler: No, what they’re parroting is the same talking points being put out by the state and by the hospital association—

    Scarborough: So, they’re parroting—wait! You know their business better than [cross talk]. You know their business better than they know their business? Congressman, you can keep talking if you want to, but are you saying … that you know their business, you know doctors’ business, you know hospital administrators’ business better than they know their own business? Is that what you’re telling us here?

    [video]

    “When it comes to Medicaid, I have been very clear: I am not cutting benefits for any eligible recipient,” Lawler told a group of prescreened constituents at a town hall in April, despite already having voted for an earlier draft of the budget blueprint to cut Medicaid.

    Alongside his Republican colleagues, Lawler voted for a tax giveaway to the rich that adds trillions to the deficit while gutting Medicaid partly by imposing bureaucratic work requirements on recipients, most of whom are employed.

    Lawler […] is facing a tough challenge this fall—and he’s earned it.

  486. says

    Second bomb threat reported at Illinois hotel housing Texas Democrats

    A second bomb threat was reported at the Illinois hotel housing Texas Democrats who fled their state over the weekend, local police reported Friday.

    The St. Charles Police Department said in a press release that they had responded to a report of a possible bomb threat at 8:32 a.m. on Friday at the Q-Center.

    “The St. Charles Police Department, in coordination with the Kane County Sheriff’s Office Bomb Squad and the Explosive Detection K-9 Unit, conducted a thorough search of the area. No explosive device was found. The area has been secured by authorities, and all 70 hotel guests are safe,” the department said.

    “This morning’s secondary threat occurred two days after the initial bomb threat was reported to police by the Q-Center on Aug. 6,” the department continued. “In both instances, no explosive devices were found, and the designated areas were deemed safe. As a continued precaution, the St. Charles Police Department has increased patrols in the area since the initial report.” […]

  487. Akira MacKenzie says

    @486

    Who BRILLIANT idea was it to tell the mefia where they were going in the first place?

  488. Akira MacKenzie says

    Let me try that again…

    @486

    Who’s BRILLIANT idea was it to tell the media where they were going in the first place?!

  489. johnson catman says

    re Lynna @486: In a scoop by a tech-savvy reporter for the St. Charles Chronicle newspaper, the bomb threats were found to be coming from the office of Kash Patel, the current director of the FBI. Public inquiries made to Patel’s office were referred to Kristi Noem’s office for comment. Noem was described by her assistant as “out of touch at this time”. (/s)

  490. says

    Akira @488, those Democrats were not trying to hide. Their whereabouts were public knowledge.

    In other news:

    Pam Bondi finds a new job for Ed Martin: ‘special attorney’ pursuing some Trump foes

    “Team Trump keeps finding new jobs for the ‘Stop the Steal’ activist who was too radical to be confirmed by the Republican-led Senate.”

    Related video at the link,

    As if Donald Trump and his team hadn’t already targeted enough of the president’s perceived political foes, the Republican’s Justice Department has recently added to the list, launching an investigation into New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office — the same office that a brought a successful civil case against Trump and his family business.

    That the president and his team appear to be brazenly weaponizing federal law enforcement is a scandal unto itself, but in case the developments weren’t quite provocative enough, NBC News also reported:

    U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has tapped Ed Martin, the ex-interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., as ‘special attorney’ probing New York Attorney General Letitia James, two administration officials told NBC News. … [Martin] will also be involved in a Justice Department probe against Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., over alleged mortgage fraud related to his ownership of homes in California and Maryland, the administration officials said.

    There’s good reason Martin’s name might sound familiar.

    During his astonishing tenure as the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., the Trump loyalist was effectively a caricature of himself. Before taking office, Martin was a conservative activist who supported Jan. 6 criminal defendants and was a prominent member of the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement. While in office, he put that background to predictable use.

    Over the course of roughly 16 weeks, Martin repeatedly proved his critics right, acting as a hyper-partisan prosecutor who appeared eager to abuse the powers of his office. The Republican-led Senate tends to act as a rubber stamp for White House nominees, but Martin was so extreme that his nomination failed in the face of bipartisan opposition.

    It was at that point that the president and the attorney general rewarded the activist with a new job — or more to the point, a few new jobs.

    In May, Trump said the Missouri Republican would lead the Justice Department’s new “Weaponization Working Group” — tackling a problem that exists only in the minds of Republican conspiracy theorists — and serve as the DOJ’s new pardon attorney, succeeding Elizabeth Oyer, who was fired in March allegedly after she refused to sign off on a plan to restore actor Mel Gibson’s gun rights.

    A few days later, Martin announced at a press conference that he intended to use his new platform to “name” and “shame” individuals the Justice Department determines it cannot charge with crimes. In other words, federal law enforcement officials might investigate suspects, only to discover that their targets didn’t break any laws.

    According to Martin, his working group will take steps to smear these Americans publicly anyway — which, as an NBC News report noted, “would amount to a major departure from longstanding Justice Department protocols.”

    A month later, Martin declared that he’s also investigating Joe Biden’s clemency actions, pursuing a different Republican conspiracy theory.

    Now, evidently, Bondi has made Martin a “special attorney” (not to be confused with a special counsel) who’ll investigate at least two of the Democrats who’ve been repeatedly singled out by Trump.

    A couple of weeks after joining his party’s national ticket, then-Sen. JD Vance was eager to ease the minds of voters concerned about Trump and his threats of retaliation. Trump, the future vice president said at the time, is “not a vengeful guy.” [Still funny.]

    Shortly after the election, Trump appeared on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” and suggested vengeance wasn’t part of his plans for a second term. “I’m not looking to go back into the past,” he said, adding, “Retribution will be through success.” The Republican president echoed the point during his second inaugural address, declaring, “Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.”

    I have some bad news for anybody who believed any of these claims.

  491. says

    He’s not lovin’ it: Co-owner of Trump Burger could get deported

    Apparently not even creating a Trump-themed burger joint can keep you from the president’s mass deportation efforts.

    Roland Beainy, the co-owner of Trump Burger restaurant in Texas, has been detained by ICE and faces potential deportation.

    The 28-year-old Lebanese immigrant came to the United States in 2019 but overstayed his visa, ultimately catching the eye of the Trump administration. And despite selling burgers with […] Trump’s name toasted on the bun, Beainy spent a hefty 7 weeks in an ICE detention center.

    According to the Fayette County Record, Beainy had a handful of legal troubles brewing long before ICE came knocking—including alleged green card issues regarding his marriage, in which records claim he never actually lived with his wife, to shady business dealings.

    And not only that, but soon after Beainy’s MAGA-themed restaurant gained popularity, Trump sent a cease and desist letter.

    “… we were surprised to learn that you have been flagrantly infringing upon the Trump Organization’s valuable and well-established intellectual property right by operating at least three restaurants under the Trump name and brand,” the letter read.

    Trump’s team also requested Beainy and his co-owner to stop using Trump’s likeness to sell burgers because it “risks misleading the public into falsely believing that your business is affiliated with the Trump Organization or endorsed by our clients.”

    Whether Trump was upset because Beainy beat him to selling Trump-themed burgers or because the burgers received mid reviews is unclear. But either way, it ended with the MAGA-supporting immigrant potentially being shown the door.

    Photo of the burger joint is available at the link.

  492. says

    Texas Republicans are increasing pressure on Democratic lawmakers who fled the state to block a GOP redistricting plan. In interviews and a podcast appearance, Gov. Greg Abbott threatened not only to call endless special sessions until his map passes but to add more right-wing seats if Democrats don’t give in.

    “What I’m thinking now is that if they don’t start showing up, I may start expanding,” Abbott said on the “Ruthless” podcast Friday. “We may make it six or seven or eight new seats we’re going to be adding on the Republican side.”

    Earlier in the week, more than 50 Democrats left Texas to prevent the passage of a GOP-drawn congressional map that would increase the number of GOP-held seats from 25 to 30 ahead of the 2026 midterms.

    […] “We are in the process, as we speak right now, of searching for, preparing to arrest Democrats who may be in Texas, may be elsewhere,” Abbott said Thursday evening. “Democrats act like they’re not going to come back as long as this is an issue. That means they’re not going to come back until like 2027 or 2028.”

    The GOP-controlled state House has approved civil arrest warrants for the absent lawmakers, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has threatened legal action to remove them from office. Abbott has already filed a lawsuit seeking to oust Texas House Democratic Leader Gene Wu, calling his departure “an intentional abandonment of his constitutional duty.” Wu must respond to Abbott’s lawsuit by Friday, though it’s unclear when the justices will decide.

    […]Trump remains a central force behind Texas’ redistricting push. Concerned his party will lose House seats in 2026, he’s demanded that the state carve out five more red seats, even declaring that he’s “entitled” to them.

    But it’s not just Texas. Trump has signaled support for similar efforts in other GOP-led states. And on Thursday, he floated the idea of conducting a new census that excludes undocumented residents—an unprecedented move likely to trigger legal challenges.

    […] The outcome in Texas could reshape the balance of power in Congress, where Republicans currently hold a narrow 219-212 edge. Adding a few new seats could secure Trump’s control of the House for the rest of his second term.

    If Democrats continue their boycott, Abbott has hinted that Republicans might push for an even more skewed map. However, this plan isn’t foolproof, as it may involve weakening the partisan advantage in existing GOP districts, potentially risking backlash from incumbents.

    If the Texas Supreme Court approves Abbott’s request to remove Wu, he could call a special election to replace him and possibly repeat the process for other Democrats. With six of the nine justices appointed by Abbott, the odds may be in his favor.

    Paxton, for his part, said he would go to court on Friday if Democrats don’t return. He admitted it won’t be easy, as lawsuits must be filed in the lawmakers’ home districts—many of which lean Democratic.

    […] Republicans are pursuing similar redistricting efforts in Florida, Ohio, and Missouri. Also, Vice President JD Vance met with Indiana Gov. Mike Braun and state lawmakers on Thursday to explore options. [!]

    Meanwhile, Democrats are preparing to respond in blue states. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced plans for a proposal that would redraw the state’s maps in favor of Democrats if Texas proceeds with its strategy. The measure is expected to appear on the ballot in November.

    Newsom is set to appear with some Texas Democrats, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and other California leaders in a joint press conference on Friday to outline their plan. […]

    Link

  493. birgerjohansson says

    In other words, the Trump gang (and his minions on Texas) are doing their worst. If he ruins the economy in the coming year even gerrymandering may not be enough for them.
    Unfortunately, triggering a worldwide recession is a high price, paid by the most vulnerable all over the world.

  494. Akira MacKenzie says

    @490

    That’s the whole problem. If the object is to keep the legislature from having a quorum, you SHOULD be trying to hide. Otherwise you leave yourself open to any law enforcement, Texas or Federal, to try to pick you up and drag you back!

    They should have told no one where they were going, made no stupid media appearances, and laid low until the situation changed. Hell, they should never announced the plan to leave in the first place. They should have just left.

  497. KG says

    Akira Mackenzie@490,

    My guess is that they want publicity more than anything else. They want to keep the issue of Republican gerrymandering in the news, and every story about a bomb hoax, or a possible attempt to arrest the legislators, serves that purpose. They can’t really expect to deny the quorum indefinitely.

  498. Pierce R. Butler says

    Lynna… quoting NBC News @ # 482: … Trump has handed Moscow a diplomatic coup by agreeing to meet Putin face-to-face in a matter of days, their first encounter since the invasion of Ukraine.

    Trump hasn’t met with Putin since 2014?

    Goddamn professional amnesiacs.

  499. JM says

    NBC News: Trump removes IRS boss, Treasury Secretary Bessent takes over for now

    President Donald Trump on Friday removed Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Billy Long and is replacing him temporarily with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, three sources with knowledge of the matter told NBC News.

    “It is a honor to serve my friend President Trump, and I am excited to take on my new role as the ambassador to Iceland. I am thrilled to answer his call to service and deeply committed to advancing his bold agenda. Exciting times ahead!” Long said in a text message to NBC News.

    Not clear why. Ambassador to Iceland is the sort of job you give as a gift to a backer or to get somebody out of Washington. It could be as simple as Long not wanting the job, he could have not been aggressive enough for Trump or he could have messed up in some non-obvious way.
    Bessent is way too busy to actually do the job, being involved with trade negotiations with multiple countries along with his normal job. It’s hard to say what happens next. If Trump wants to move his tax agenda forward he needs somebody running the show but Bessent may have taken the job just to keep anything interesting from happening.

  500. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Adding to 499.
    MSNBC – Trump ousts Billy Long, his handpicked IRS director

    Between January and May, the tax agency went through five different chiefs in five months. […] [Trump] picked Long despite his complete lack of qualifications […] Republicans confirmed Long on June 12, and he formally took the office on June 16, which means he lasted just 53 days—or in the parlance, roughly five Scaramuccis.

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