On paper, the Americans are getting what they’ve long demanded. A Europe that spends much more on defense and is much less reliant on Washington for its security. But Donald Trump may not like what American pressure is creating
Leader after leader from Europe took to the podium of the Munich Security Conference on Friday and talked about boosting military budgets […]
Emphasizing what’s on offer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz slipped into English to press home the point. Speaking directly to American delegates in the hall at the summit he said: “Dear friends, being a part of NATO is not only Europe’s competitive advantage, it’s also the United States’ competitive advantage. So let’s repair and revive transatlantic trust together. We, the Europeans, are doing our part.”
But they also underlined that Europe will become a power in its own right, able to stand up both to Russian aggression and to American threats.
[I snipped excerpts from Macron’s speech.]
Americans in Munich underlined that they are happy with increased defense spending as the U.S. refocuses to concentrate on its own hemisphere and the Asia-Pacific.
[…] That’s a marked difference from the tone last year, when U.S. Vice President JD Vance blew up the Munich conference with his no-holds-barred attack on European values and politics.
Now, both sides are saying that they remain committed to NATO. But the last year — from Vance’s speech to Trump’s threat to subsume Canada, his disparagement of allies that fought alongside the U.S. in Afghanistan and especially his repeated calls to annex Greenland — has left its marks. [Understatement]
[…] As leaders gathered in Munich, he [Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson] wrote on X that the Western alliance is far too important to be allowed to fall apart. “The relationship between the U.S. and Europe is wounded, but should be maintained,” he wrote, adding, “We need to be honest about the fact that our relationship has suffered a blow. This does not at all mean we should abandon the transatlantic relation.”
EU Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius also talked in terms of reshaping the Western alliance […]
“We took for granted that transatlantic relations means the U.S. will be in Europe and spend its resources here,” Kubilius said, but he also repeated his call for a European rapid reaction force of up to 100,000 troops able to replace American soldiers if they’re called home.
Europeans also underlined that they will continue backing Ukraine with cash and weapons while American support under Trump trickles to almost nothing. Macron stressed that there can be no agreement to end the war without taking Europe into account.
[…] there are possible flash points ahead, and European leaders drew lines in the sand when it comes to trade tariffs and Make America Great Again efforts to sculpt European politics in a Trumpian image by supporting populist parties.
[…] “The culture war of the MAGA movement is not ours,” Merz said. “Freedom of speech ends here with us when that speech goes against human dignity and the constitution. We do not believe in tariffs and protectionism, but in free trade.”
In his speech, Macron underlined how Europe differs from a Trump-led America on everything from free speech to tech regulation and respect for science. […]
Every Wednesday, deportation flights left for Colombia. Every Wednesday, we waited in fear for our names to be called. Officers unsuccessfully tried to deport us twice. The constant threats took a toll on my health. I began experiencing regular panic attacks […] I also suffer from chronic migraines, which worsened over time because the facility would not provide the medication […]
My daughter’s health deteriorated even faster. […] She contracted a cough, which only got worse. […] she regressed behaviorally, wetting herself after years without accidents and begging to breastfeed again despite being 6 years old. When we sought mental health care, a psychiatrist blamed me for her distress and accused me of poor parenting.
Then my daughter’s eye was injured. A facility staff member accidentally struck her eye with a mop. […] the injury was falsely recorded as a fall. Despite my daughter’s continued complaints of blurred vision, light sensitivity, and hearing problems, doctors dismissed us. After over a month of delays, an ophthalmologist who evaluated my daughter warned that she […] needed further evaluation, as well as a referral to an ENT specialist because the injury could also be affecting her hearing. […] officers insisted that it was not their responsibility—even though the injury had been caused by a staff member.
[…] my husband and daughter began experiencing stomach illnesses. Both suffered from vomiting and diarrhea. My husband was placed in the medical unit. He was pale and visibly unwell. For a moment, I believed that because he was so sick, ICE would not deport us. I was wrong.
[…] My daughter was still coughing and vomiting. When I explained that they were too sick to travel, the agents accused me of inventing my husband’s illness, refused to let me call our lawyers, and denied my request to see a doctor. Despite my daughter’s untreated eye injury and serious cough, the officers insisted she was fine and said her health was not their responsibility.
[…]
The bus ride to Louisiana was over 18 hours. We were not able to use the bathroom […] I fainted and hit my head. After I begged for medical help, the paramedic who evaluated me suggested I go to a medical center. But ICE officers refused, telling me I had no right to see a doctor.
[…]
Today we live in hiding in Colombia. Armed groups still control our region. We cannot safely access medical care. My daughter continues to suffer from serious vision and hearing problems but has not been able to see a specialist. Her stomach issues also have not improved, and a doctor in Colombia has diagnosed her with a severe bacterial infection. I continue to suffer from chronic migraines and anxiety, without medication. My husband and I are terrified every day that we will be murdered and our daughter will be kidnapped by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. My daughter is only 6 years old.
[…]
We don’t know what our future will hold. But we are grateful for the time we had in America, and we will keep fighting for a better future for our daughter.
“The Ukrainian president sat down with POLITICO for an exclusive interview at the Munich Security Conference.”
That’s live coverage that is presented via video. Not yet complete.
Other coverage from a different Politico source:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy implored the Trump administration to apply more pressure on Russia to end the full-scale invasion of his country — and suggested Congress might need to act to bolster any postwar security guarantees.
Zelenskyy, in an interview with POLITICO’s Dasha Burns at the Munich Security Conference, said only the U.S. had the political and financial power to bring a stop to the war.
“Be honest, today only Ukraine [is] defending Europe,” Zelenskyy said at the POLITICO Pub on the summit’s sidelines. “Today, only Europe gives money to Ukraine and helps Ukraine. Today, only [the] United States can stop Putin.”
Zelenskyy, speaking just days before the fourth anniversary of the war, criticized the U.S. for trying to force the Ukrainians to concede territory in the Donbas region without demanding sacrifices from the Kremlin.
“What I see, they give more signals that Ukraine has to make compromises and not Russia,” he said. “This is not [the] right position.” [!]
He also appeared to indicate that Congress would need to backstop security guarantees, either with more money for Ukraine’s postwar military or by sealing a treaty agreement. “Security guarantees will work only after Congress will vote,” he said. [True. Can’t trust Trump. Can’t trust Putin.]
The Ukrainian president pushed back on President Donald Trump’s demand that Kyiv and Moscow wrap up a peace settlement by the summer. He said the Kremlin has strung the U.S. along in talks in an effort to normalize the relationship and ease sanctions. [All too true.]
“Until there is enough pressure,” Zelenskyy said, “they play.”
Putin’s aim, according to Zelenskyy, is to occupy the eastern parts of Ukraine, including parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, where the Kremlin’s war effort has made the most progress.
The peace talks, led by U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, are set to resume in Geneva next week. But they have stalled as Ukraine resists American pressure to give up territory — some of which Russia does not yet control — and the lack of concrete security guarantees for Kyiv in a postwar settlement.
Zelenskyy applauded a NATO initiative to give Ukraine more U.S.-made weapons, but said it hadn’t changed Putin’s impression that Europe was weak. “Putin really doesn’t respect Europe,” Zelenskyy said, adding that the Russian leader’s efforts to divide the continent have not been successful.
Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure have left millions without heat and electricity in subzero temperatures, and more than a million people have been killed or wounded on both sides. But Zelenskyy still seemed confident it was Ukraine that would outlast Putin.
“I’m younger than Putin — this is important,” Zelenskyy said. “He doesn’t have too much time.”
Sky Captain @3, thanks for posting the rest of that Slate article!
In other news, as reported by MS NOW:
The White House spent the week projecting a willingness to negotiate over immigration enforcement policies while drawing a firm line against the central reforms Democrats say are needed to reach a deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security — a posture that all but guarantees a partial government shutdown this weekend.
An Associated Press report, as summarized by Steve Beenen:
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons acknowledged evidence of ICE agents allegedly making “untruthful statements” under oath: “Federal authorities have opened a criminal probe into whether two immigration officers lied under oath about a shooting in Minneapolis last month, as all charges were dropped against two Venezuelan men.
President Donald Trump said Friday that he decided to move a second aircraft carrier into the Middle East as he presses Iran to make a deal over its nuclear program. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, is being sent from the Caribbean Sea to the Mideast to join other warships and military assets the U.S. has built up in the region.
Not good. Looks like Trump is planning another military offensive action.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement expects to spend $38.3 billion on its plan to acquire warehouses across the country and retrofit them into immigrant detention centers that can hold tens of thousands of immigrants, according to agency documents provided to New Hampshire’s governor and published on the state’s website Thursday.
A federal judge in Illinois on Thursday blocked the Trump administration’s plan to claw back $600 million in public health funds from four states led by Democrats, amid a wider effort by the federal government to pull funding from blue states.
President Donald Trump has pardoned five prominent former NFL players, including members of the pro football and college football halls of fame, for a variety of offenses.
[…] Joe Klecko, 72, who spent most of his career playing with the New York Jets and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2023; he was convicted of perjury in 1993 for lying to a grand jury about an insurance fraud scheme and sentenced to three months in prison.
Nate Newton, 64, a former offensive lineman for the Dallas Cowboys and member of the Black College Football Hall of Fame, who pleaded guilty to drug trafficking in 2002 and was sentenced to 30 months in prison and 3 years of supervised release.
Jamal Lewis, 46, an All-Pro running back for the Baltimore Ravens, who was sentenced to four months in prison in 2005 for using a phone to try to set up a drug deal.
Travis Henry, 47, a running back for the Denver Broncos, Tennessee Titans and Buffalo Bills, who was sentenced in 2009 to three years in prison and five years of probation for conspiring to commit drug trafficking.
Billy Cannon, a College Football Hall of Famer who went on to play with the Houston Oilers, Oakland Raiders and Kansas City Chiefs. Cannon, who died in 2018, was sentenced to five years in prison in 1983 for his role in a $6 million counterfeiting scheme. […]
According to a Washington Post analysis, the fastest warming rate on record occurred in the last 30 years. The Post used a dataset from NASA to analyze global average surface temperatures from 1880 to 2025. … Those data — combined with the last few years of record heat — have convinced many researchers that the world is seeing a decisive shift in how temperatures are rising.
SSA recently began shifting new swaths of its workforce to phone answering duty, including those who normally receive and process retirement and disability claims, manage the agency’s technology and work in the agency’s finances unit. Those employees received brief, three-hour training before they began answering calls. As part of that training, they were warned some callers may express suicidal ideation and presented with examples using a theoretical employee named Fiona.
“It’s important for Fiona to keep the caller engaged and to remind her that suicide is only one option,” the animated trainer told employees […] “and that there is no urgency to make any decisions.”
[…] there was “disbelief that it was just said” among those in the room. Caitlin Thompson, a clinical psychologist who spent eight years […] on the Veterans Crisis Line [said] “No. That’s not the thing you say to somebody who might be suicidal.”
Instead, SSA would be better suited telling employees to ask callers if they feel safe in the immediate term and if they say no, to tell the caller that they will work with their supervisor to get them in touch with a crisis line. […] she added, “It can’t just be a ‘sorry to hear that.’'”
[…]
The National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention maintains a best practices framework for suicide crisis lines, which emphasizes that suicide should not be presented as “acceptable.”
StevoRsays
On the new opposition leader of the Aussie reichwing parties – LNP coalition :
Angus Taylor says the Liberal Party will focus on “Australian values” under his leadership.
He has foreshadowed a stricter immigration policy and a focus on deregulation. (In short summary -ed.)
…(snip)..
This rhetoric is similar to comments from One Nation politicians, and in the Newspoll that preceded Sussan Ley’s last days as leader, pollsters found almost a third of responders preferred One Nation’s policies on immigration over the major parties.
Mr Taylor insisted his party was not trying to become One Nation “lite”. (Reckon he’s lying there myself – ed.)
New research suggests the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way is actually a tremendously massive yet compact clump of dark matter.
Scientists say this clump would exert the same gravitational effects currently attributed to the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). That includes the violent and rapid dance of stars taking place at the Galactic Center, in which so-called “S-stars” race around the compact heart of our galaxy at speeds as great as 67 million miles per hour (30,000 kilometers per second). For context, that’s around 10% of the speed of light. This dark matter clump, the team says, would also account for the orbits of the dust-shrouded bodies, or “G-sources” located in the Galactic Center.
However, this substitution of a black hole for dark matter only works if dark matter is composed of ultra-light particles that are part of the “fermion” family. This would grant the dense cluster at the heart of the galaxy the ability to form a cosmic structure that matches those observed characteristics of the Galactic Center.
Nikita and his wife, Oksana, fled Russia in desperation two years ago, believing America was their only hope of giving their three children a life free of fear and oppression. […] After fleeing Russia in 2024 and spending more than a year in Mexico […] Nikita drove his family to the Otay Mesa port of entry and requested asylum, telling an agent that his activism against the Russian government had put them at risk. An asylum officer later found the family had a credible fear of persecution […] But rather than being released into the U.S. while their case moved forward, they were taken […] to Dilley
[…]
Meals are greasy, spicy and repetitive […] the girl had lost her appetite after being “served food that contained worms.”
A week later, the couple said, children were told to gather in the gym for what they believed would be a Thanksgiving celebration. Excitement spread as families saw tables set with turkey, sandwiches, pastries and pies, they said. The children waited expectantly. But when a parent asked when the celebration would begin, Oksana said, staff told them the holiday meal was for employees, not detainees. The children, she said, watched despondently
[…]
Sometimes workers make light of their misery, Nikita said. He recalled showing an officer a piece of moldy cabbage. The guard, he said, put it in his mouth and declared it fine—before gagging and spitting it out.
DHS has pooled confidential data from across the federal government to enable states to mass-verify voters’ citizenship status using SAVE. Many of the nation’s Republican secretaries of state have eagerly embraced the experiment, agreeing to upload all or part of their rolls.
[…]
Even counting people flagged in error, the first bulk searches using SAVE haven’t validated the president’s claims that voting by noncitizens is widespread. At least seven states with a total of about 35 million registered voters have publicly reported the results of running their voter rolls through the system. Those searches have identified roughly 4,200 people—about 0.01% of registered voters—as noncitizens. […]
Brian Broderick leads the verification division of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the DHS branch that oversees SAVE. […] Broderick said that when SAVE flags voters as noncitizens, they are also referred to DHS for possible criminal investigation. (It is a crime to falsely claim citizenship when registering to vote.)
[…]
In March, Trump issued an executive order […] with a 30-day deadline to remake SAVE [from its original purpose into a voter validator.] […] David Jennings, Broderick’s deputy at USCIS, had pressed his team to move quickly […] “We tested it and deployed it to our users in two weeks […] I think that’s remarkable. Kind of proud of it.”
[…]
Jennings added that to get quick access to the Social Security data, which has been tightly guarded, USCIS partnered with DOGE. (In an unrelated matter, DOGE has since been accused of misusing Social Security data.) […] Perhaps because of its accelerated timetable, USCIS expanded the system before meeting legal requirements to inform the public about how the data would be collected, stored and used […] It also blew past concerns from voter advocacy groups about the [in]accuracy of SSA’s citizenship data
[…]
Broderick said […] “Do I think it was reckless? Do I think it wasn’t planned? Do I think it wasn’t tested? Absolutely not,”
[…]
Missouri sent lists of flagged voters to county election administrators in November. […] The Missouri secretary of state’s office told election administrators it would work to verify SAVE’s citizenship determinations. In the meantime, local officials were instructed to change the status of flagged voters, making them temporarily unable to vote. The lists were met with swift pushback from county election officials, who […] spotted people they knew to be citizens and questioned the directive’s legality. […] they recognized neighbors, colleagues and people they’d helped to register at naturalization ceremonies.
* Broderick has a quote saying SAVE’s positive results are accurate, and the negative results mean unknown. Which sounds okay, except that SAVE automatically reports negatives as crimes.
Holy shit. Abbe Lowell’s argument that DOJ is not entitled to presumption of regularity in Don Lemon case consists of:
1) A page on irregularity in this case.
2) A page on irregularity in MN.
3) Other adverse rulings in MN.
4) One page plus TWO PAGE footnote on similar rulings nationally.
* Cheryl Rofer: “The presumption of regularity is that the government has done a competent job of preparing its case and is presenting the case honestly.”
Wheeler linked the document and posted a screenshot of the footnote, which was a wall of citations and quotes like this:
“The Government’s interpretation is, to put it mildly, ‘interpretive jiggery-pokery’ of the highest order. It requires not just reading between the lines, but hallucinating new text that simply is not there.”
birgerjohanssonsays
The Onion: RFK Jr. Mandates All Americans Drink Mysterious Glowing Liquid.
ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES
‘Private cabin’: New scrutiny on Noem, Lewandowski’s ‘close relationship’ amid DHS chaos. This is “one of the most devastating pieces of political reporting I can remember,” says Chris Hayes on the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on the bizarre behavior of DHS head Kristi Noem and her unofficial number two, Corey Lewandowski.
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York told the Munich Security Conference on Friday exactly why the world is seeing a rise in autocrat-friendly populism.
“I think one of the connections and relationships that is underdiscussed, particularly in the security space, is the fact that I believe we’re seeing an economy … around the world—including in the United States—that extreme levels of income inequality lead to social instability and drives in a sense in authoritarianism, right-wing populism, and very dangerous domestic internal politics,” she said. “And that is a direct outcome of not just income inequality, but the failure of democracies over decades to deliver. The failure to deliver higher wages, the failure to rein in corporations.” [video]
Ocasio-Cortez noted that stark economic inequality fundamentally conflicts with the core tenets of democracy. She pointed to the growing consolidation of wealth and power into the hands of a few.
“There is a level of market concentration and corporate consolidation where a massive company can get so big that its consolidated power can rival that of nation states,” she said. “Massive corporations that then begin to consume the public sector gobble up the spending. They start to call the shots, and we’re starting to see this with some of the billionaire class throwing their weight around in domestic politics and in global politics as well.”
Ocasio-Cortez remains one of the shining lights of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, consistently advocating a platform to address what most Americans believe to be a growing wealth-inequality crisis.
“EXCLUSIVE: Researcher skeptical of ‘Havana syndrome’ tested secret weapon on himself.
“In 2024, a Norwegian researcher skeptical that pulsed-energy weapons could do damage to human brains built a device and tested it on himself. It didn’t go well.”
Working in strict secrecy, a government scientist in Norway built a machine capable of emitting powerful pulses of microwave energy and, in an effort to prove such devices are harmless to humans, in 2024 tested it on himself. He suffered neurological symptoms similar to those of “Havana syndrome,” the unexplained malady that has struck hundreds of U.S. spies and diplomats around the world. […]
The secret test in Norway has not been previously reported. The Norwegian government told the CIA about the results, two of the people said, prompting at least two visits in 2024 to Norway by Pentagon and White House officials.
Those aware of the test say it does not prove AHIs are the work of a foreign adversary wielding a secret weapon similar to the prototype tested in Norway. […]
But the events bolstered the case of those who argue that “pulsed-energy devices” — machines that deliver powerful beams of electromagnetic energy such as microwaves in short bursts — can affect human biology and are probably being developed by U.S. adversaries.
[…] The Trump administration took office promising to pursue the AHI issue aggressively. But there has been little apparent movement. A review ordered by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is expected to focus mostly on the Biden administration’s handling of the issue, and its release has been delayed […]
In a separate development that has become public in recent weeks, the U.S. government covertly purchased at the end of the Biden administration a different foreign-made device that produces pulsed radio waves and which some experts suspect could be linked to AHI incidents [!!]
[…] The device is being tested by the Defense Department. It has some Russian-origin components, but the U.S. government still has not determined conclusively who built it, said one of the people.
The U.S. acquisition of the device was first reported last month by independent journalist Sasha Ingber and CNN, which said it had been purchased for millions of dollars by Homeland Security Investigations, part of the Department of Homeland Security.
[…] The Norwegian device was built based on “classified information,” suggesting it was derived from blueprints or other materials stolen from a foreign government [!]
At about the same time the U.S. became aware of the two pulsed-energy machines, two spy agencies altered their previous judgment and concluded that some of the incidents involving AHIs could be the work of a foreign adversary, delivering that verdict in an updated U.S. intelligence assessment issued in January 2025 during the Biden administration’s final weeks.
[…] The majority of U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA and four others, said they continued to judge it “very unlikely” that the attacks were the result of a foreign adversary or that a foreign actor had developed a novel weapon. […]
In subsequent years, U.S. personnel reported hundreds of cases globally, in China, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. A top aide to then-CIA Director William J. Burns reported symptoms while traveling in India in 2021.
At a Foreign Policy Research Institute conference in Philadelphia earlier this month, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Chris Schlagheck, at times his voice breaking, said he was hit five times in 2020 in his home in Northern Virginia, where a Russian family lived across the street. It was not until last year that a doctor told him his symptoms were the same as those reported from Havana a decade earlier.
[…] the Norwegian researcher had earned a reputation as a leading opponent of the theory that directed-energy weapons can cause the type of symptoms associated with AHIs […] Trying to dramatically prove his point, with himself as a human guinea pig, he achieved the opposite. [!]
[…] A delegation of Pentagon officials traveled to Norway in 2024 to examine the device. In December of that year, a group of intelligence and White House officials also went to Norway to discuss the issue, those familiar with the events said.
In January 2022, the CIA produced an interim assessment that concluded a foreign country was probably not behind Havana syndrome. It emerged weeks before a major panel of government and nongovernment experts produced a report commissioned by the director of national intelligence and deputy CIA director that came to a markedly different conclusion. [!]
That panel concluded in February 2022 that pulsed electromagnetic energy, particularly in the radio-frequency range, ‘‘plausibly explains the core characteristics of reported AHIs,” although it acknowledged many unknowns. “Information gaps exist,” it reported.
[…] The IC Experts Panel, as it was known, interviewed several people […] said David Relman, a Stanford University microbiologist who chaired the panel.
But the CIA interim assessment overshadowed the expert panel’s report. […]
U.S. intelligence agencies “essentially ignored” the experts panel’s work […] The agencies, particularly the CIA, “had developed a very firm set of conclusions, world view that caused them I think to become dug in,” he [Relman] said.
[…] After the November 2024 election, White House officials who were working on an AHI brief for the incoming Trump administration invited several victims to a meeting to offer their input. The officials also wanted to reassure the victims that they realized the intelligence community assessment called into question the very real health issues they experienced and what caused them.
At one point, an official turned to the victims who were gathered in the Situation Room and said, “We believe you.” The White House wasn’t yet certain it was a foreign actor but believed it was plausible that the symptoms had been caused by external factors, said the person familiar with the administration’s views.
Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer and AHI victim who attended the unclassified meeting, said, “It was clear to the victims, but also unsaid, that new information had come into the NSC that had caused them to make such a statement.”
Doctors Without Borders has announced the suspension of some operations at one of Gaza ‘s largest functioning hospitals after patients and staff reported seeing armed, masked men roaming parts of the building.
Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis is one of the territory’s few functioning hospitals. Hundreds of patients and war-wounded have been treated there daily, and it was a hub for Palestinian prisoners released by Israel in exchange for Israeli hostages as part of the current ceasefire deal.
The comments by the aid group, which is also known by its acronym MSF, are a rare announcement by an international organization about the presence of armed men in or near medical facilities in Gaza since the war began over two years ago.
[…] MSF said it wasn’t able to indicate the armed men’s affiliation. It said it had expressed concern to the “relevant” authorities, […] stressing that hospitals must remain neutral, civilian spaces. It said its concerns were heightened by previous, deliberate Israeli attacks on health facilities.
[…] Israel has repeatedly struck hospitals, including Nasser, accusing the militant group of operating in or around them. Hamas security men often have been seen inside hospitals, blocking access to some areas.
Some hostages released from Gaza have said they spent time during captivity in a hospital.
While Hamas remains the dominant force in areas not under Israeli control, including Nasser Hospital, other armed groups have mushroomed across Gaza as a result of the war, including groups backed by Israel’s army in the Israeli-controlled part of the strip. [What a mess.]
Nasser Hospital staff say that in recent months it has been repeatedly attacked by masked, armed men and militias, despite police presence there.
[…] The Hamas-run Interior Ministry, which oversees police in Gaza, said officers would be deployed to secure hospitals […]
While international law gives hospitals special protections during war, they can lose this immunity if combatants use them to hide fighters or store weapons, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Still, there must be plenty of warning to allow the evacuation of staff and patients before any operations take place. If harm to civilians from an attack is disproportionate to the military objective, it is illegal under international law.
Aid groups and rights organizations say Israel has decimated Gaza’s health system, forcing most hospitals to shut down while heavily damaging others. During the war, Israeli forces raided a number of hospitals, detaining hundreds of staff.
Israel also has targeted the police in Gaza.
MSF said it will continue supporting critical services at Nasser Hospital, including inpatient and surgical departments for patients with traumatic or burn injuries. However, it is ending support to the pediatrics and maternity wards, including the neonatal intensive care unit. It has also indefinitely suspended its outpatient consultations for 3D burn screening and mental health, as well as other services.
[…] Gaza’s Health Ministry […] would take over maternity patient care, but said burn victims won’t have many options.
[…] While the heaviest fighting has subsided, the fragile ceasefire has been seen almost daily Israeli fire. Israeli forces have carried out repeated airstrikes and frequently fire on Palestinians near military-held zones, killing 591 Palestinians since the ceasefire took effect, according to Gaza health officials.
[…] The ministry, part of the Hamas-led government, maintains detailed casualty records that are seen as generally reliable by U.N. agencies and independent experts. […]
“U.S forces carried out 10 airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria between Feb. 3 and Thursday in retaliation for a December ambush that killed two American soldiers.”
[…] U.S. Central Command said in a statement that American aircraft had conducted 10 strikes against more than 30 IS targets between Feb. 3 and Thursday, hitting weapons storage facilities and other infrastructure.
At least 50 members of IS have been killed or captured, while more than 100 IS targets have been struck since the United States began its strikes after the Dec. 13 ambush, according to Central Command. That attack killed Sgt. Edgar Brian Torres-Tovar, Sgt. William Nathaniel Howard, and Ayad Mansoor Sakat, the civilian interpreter.
[…] The Syrian Defense Ministry said Thursday that government forces took control of a base in the east of the country that was run for years by U.S. troops as part of the fight against IS. The Al-Tanf base played a major role after IS declared a caliphate in large parts of Syria and Iraq in 2014.
The U.S. military on Friday completed the transfer of thousands of IS detainees from Syria to Iraq, where they are expected to stand trial. The prisoners were sent to Iraq at the request of Baghdad, in a move welcomed by the U.S.-led coalition that had for years fought against IS.
JMsays
@20 birgerjohansson:
Putin murdered opposition leader Alexei Navalny with epibatidine poison, from poison dart frogs.
Have to give Putin some style points there. Navalny was already in a Russian prison camp, there are any number of boring ways he could have been killed. But no, Putin went to the lengths of doing something from a murder mystery just to be exotic and interesting.
“I am still in charge of the Department of Homeland Security. That includes all 23 different agencies under our umbrella, including ICE and CBP but also FEMA, TSA, Secret Service, the Coast Guard, many many more,” she said, referring to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Transportation Security Administration.
If you have to publicly announce that you are in control then your losing control.
The Cabinet this week
* RFK Jr. bragged about snorting cocaine off of a toilet seat.
* Lutnick acknowledged taking his family to Epstein island.
* Bondi “The Dow” / refuses to look at victims.
* Noem blanket.
* Hegseth loses to Kelly, tries to tweet through it.
* Bessent “tariffs don’t cause inflation”.
A lot of people are mentioning the party balloons/laser that shut down El Paso airspace for hours, but that appears to involve 3 Departments—DoD, DHS & DOT. Still not entirely clear what happened there. Commerce Chair Ted Cruz left meeting with FAA still not understanding what exactly happened.
RFK Jr. in that moment was bragging about not being afraid of COVID and flouting the restrictions most of us observed to protect others. That moment reveals the personal vanity and arrogance that undergirds his eugenicist agenda—eliminating vaccines, refusing to plan for another pandemic beyond demanding that people “get healthy” to survive.
He sees himself as one of the healthy and deserving and will kill those who aren’t. He does not value the lives of those who do not fit his definition of ‘healthy’ […] people with autism, for example. His comments about cocaine use are getting all the attention, but the context was extremely dark and ugly. His comments amounted to “I survived exposing myself to pathogens in the past; I am therefore ‘healthy’ and do not need to worry *myself* with this pathogen that kills others, nor do I need to participate in protecting others.”
JM @30, I think your conclusion is true. I think Kristi Noem was also making that point about being in charge because she wants to order ICE agents to patrol election sites during the midterm elections.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Chris Hayes quote @24: “Noem and her unofficial number two, Corey Lewandowski”
“What is Corey Lewandowski’s job exactly?”
“Under Secretary.”
—Robert A. George (Comedian)
Army policy prohibits partisan displays, and most service members refrained from cheering.
[…]
Trump used the platform to boost [a GOP Senate candidate who holds no gov position]. “You have to vote for us,” Trump told the troops, citing his restoration of the Fort Bragg name after Congress directed the Pentagon to rename military installations honoring Confederate officers. (The Trump administration avoided the law by renaming the base after Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, rather than the original Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg.) “If we don’t win the midterms, they’ll take it off again,”
[…]
the Hatch Act restricts government employees from campaigning in their official capacity. The law does not apply to the president.
Ian Bassin (Lawyer): “The commander in chief telling troops who they have to vote for is itself a presidency ending impeachable scandal.”
Steve Morrisonsays
Interesting analysis by a military historian of methods of opposing a much more powerful state, with thoughts on the anti-ICE protests here in Minneapolis.
Sen. Thom Tillis shot back at comments made by fellow Republican Lindsey Graham on Saturday, voicing frustration with the South Carolina senator’s dismissal of Greenland’s sovereignty.
The disagreement over President Donald Trump’s threat to seize the Danish territory boiled over at the annual summit here [in Munich], starting with Lindsey Graham’s comment Friday, “who gives a shit who owns Greenland? I don’t.”
Appearing at the conference on Saturday, Tillis, without naming Graham directly, responded, “who gives a shit about who owns Greenland? The 85,000 indigenous people in Greenland give a shit about who owns Greenland. And at the end of the day, we need to show respect.” [video]
[…]
more than $30 million to send migrants to far-flung countries that are not their own, including, in a few instances, paying over $1 million a person, a new report from the Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee says. In other cases, the report alleges, the administration paid to deport the migrants to a third country, only to pay again to return them to their home country.
[…]
the administration has an agreement with or has sent third country nationals to more than 20 countries and is pursuing deals with dozens more. […] Deals with five governments—Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, El Salvador, Eswatini, and Palau—have cost more than $32 million, with much of that funding being provided “as lump sum payments, often before any third country nationals arrived,” […] The five countries […] have collectively only received about 300 third country nationals from the US.
[…] the administration often uses high-cost military aircraft to deport migrants, even for flights with only a small number of people. [“]more than $7.2 million on third country deportation flights as of January 2026 to at least ten countries, with actual costs likely far higher,”
[…]
“as of January 2026, more than eighty percent of the migrants sent to third countries the U.S. paid to take them in have already returned to their country of origin, or are in the process of doing so,” […]
Of the five countries […] El Salvador received the most deported people. Around 250 were sent to that country, which received a $4.76 million grant to imprison the deportees
[…]
only 51 people were sent to the other four countries as of January 2026, according to the report. Rwanda, which allegedly received $7.5 million from the US government, only took seven third country nationals, meaning each deported national cost more than $1 million
[…]
Palau has not received any third country nationals, although the report says they received a payment of $7.5 million […] When it comes to the distant countries of Palau and Eswatini, a US official reportedly told the committee that “the point is that the Administration can threaten people that they will literally be dropped in the middle of nowhere.” “The point is to scare people,” […] the committee heard from US officials in one country that received third country nationals that the administration had instructed them not to follow-up on the treatment of the deportees
* I guess the eighty percent was mostly that El Salvador / Venezuela prisoner swap. Some deportees might’ve traveled on their own. And a few ferried by the US gov.
Every single state: Trump’s approval/ disapproval rate visualised.
It has gone significantly worse the last few weeks.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=9MTEa45FjXY
birgerjohanssonsays
11.000 year old mesolithic bones.
“Northern Britain’s oldest human remains are of a young female child, DNA analysis reveals”
Trump used the platform to boost [a GOP Senate candidate who holds no gov position]. “You have to vote for us,” Trump told the troops, citing his restoration of the Fort Bragg name after Congress directed the Pentagon to rename military installations honoring Confederate officers. (The Trump administration avoided the law by renaming the base after Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, rather than the original Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg.) “If we don’t win the midterms, they’ll take it off again,”
Notice also how bad his argument is. Fort Bragg isn’t some local reserve base or training facility where the soldiers will have some local and historical sympathy with the name. Fort Bragg is a huge facility with soldiers from all over the US, most of which are indifferent and some of which won’t like being at a base name for a Confederate general.
He can’t think of a better way to appeal to them because he has no empthy for them and went with the name because he is obsessed with naming places. The soldiers are aware that he has worked to cut funding to the VA and otherwise tried to cut their support and money so even though soldiers lean right wing they probably are not big fans.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
birgerjohansson @20, JM @29.
Dan Kaszeta (CBRN expert): “Russia does not actually need a rare tree frog from Ecuador to get the toxin that killed Navalny.”
Rando: “dart frogs in captivity stop producing their toxins due to their different diet (millions of fruit flies). So synthesis of epibatidine does seem far more likely. […] Dart frogs are whole niche hobby within herpetoculture (reptile & amphibian keeping). Some hobbyists create incredibly beautiful mini-rainforests in terraria, with rare plants, and automated systems for misting etc.”
I almost imagined a Trump CIA op screwing up an assassination with harmless frogs… before remembering the oafs just smash-and-grabbed a head of state. They can’t even spell subtle.
The lawyer was working in a in Interview room 10 minutes after the courthouse closed. She was charged with trespassing.
The Durham Regional Police Service has referred the assault case involving Aitken Roberston lawyer Sudine Riley to the York Regional Police for criminal investigation.
Per a statement from Riley’s lawyer Neha Chugh, Riley, a Black female criminal defence lawyer, was working in an interview room at Oshawa’s Superior Court of Justice on January 23 when she was reportedly assaulted by two uniformed DRPS officers who “challenged her presence.” The officers allegedly slammed Riley’s head into a desk, causing her to bleed, dragged her from the room to cells in the courthouse’s basement, and tore off her headscarf before arresting her for a Trespass to Property Act-related offence.
The DRPS said last week that it had reassigned the officers and informed two civilian oversight agencies – the Law Enforcement Complaints Agency and the Special Investigations Unit – of the claims. SIU had refused to investigate the matter.
In a statement released on January 30, the DRPS said claims related to Riley’s arrest went beyond misconduct and were “criminal in nature”; thus, it would formally be referring the case to the York Regional Police for a criminal investigation. The DRPS said it had previously informed the York Regional Police that its investigative services might be needed.
The DRPS said it had communicated updates on the situation to the inspector general.
Riley’s incident was met with outcry from the legal profession. The group Women In Canadian Criminal Defence told the executive legal officers of the Ontario Court of Justice, Ontario Superior Court of Justice, and Ontario Court of Appeal that its members had become afraid for their safety; thus, requests from them to attend hearings virtually should not be questioned.
The Criminal Lawyers’ Association said it was supporting Riley through courthouse advocacy headed by its Durham representative. It also urged the chief of police to name an expert in human rights and anti-Black racism as an independent external investigator pursuant to section 198(3) of the Community Safety and Policing Act, 2019, S.O. 2019 – a call echoed by the Canadian Bar Association and the Advocates’ Society.
Moreover, defence bar members held a sit-in at the courthouse to support Riley.
Cassandra DeMelo, a practicing defence lawyer in London, Ont., and president of WICCD, called the situation “bizzare,” and said she took the “extraordinary step” to write a letter to the justice because her group felt it was urgent.
“It’s jarring. It’s put us all on edge,” DeMelo told CBC News in an interview on Tuesday.
Woman in blue suit stands with hands folded
Cassandra DeMelo, president of Women in Canadian Criminal Defence, said her members are scared to work at the Oshawa courthouse after the alleged assault on Jan. 23. (DeMelo HeathCote)
DeMelo said her request for increased safety measures has been passed off to legal counsel for the Ontario Court of Justice (OCJ) and the Superior Court of Justice (SCJ).
She said the courts are taking the situation seriously, but that WICCD’s request for answers have so far “gone unanswered.”
While an investigation is still ongoing, DeMelo said the incident prompts concerns around lawyers needing to stay late, and what situations they may encounter with security.
Oshawa’s courthouse is open from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
However, DeMelo said, it’s not uncommon for lawyers to stay behind after courthouses close to wrap up work, with it sometimes even being requested by court justices.
She questions whether lawyers will feel comfortable to do that in Oshawa’s courthouse going forward.
StevoRsays
…(snip)…
…Before Christmas, the Icelandic government classified the potential collapse of the Amoc as a national security risk, demonstrating a belief that climate stability is fundamental to a nation’s survival. The message is clear: climate change should be prioritised as a security crisis, not just an environmental one.
On that, the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee, on which heads of MI5 and MI6 sit, would surely agree. Last month, a partial version of its national security assessment of global biodiversity loss was published, and it came with a stark warning: some ecosystems will start to collapse “by 2030 or sooner”, posing an immediate threat to national security, prosperity, food systems and public health. There won’t be enough water for people to drink or food to eat; livelihoods will be lost; displacement and migration will accelerate, and geopolitical competition for resources will intensify. In short, environmental breakdown isn’t a distant possibility or a theoretical scenario; it’s a strategic threat that intelligence agencies now factor into their calculations, and it requires strategic planning, preparation and action. “Nature”, say the chiefs in the report, “is the foundation of national security.”
A PwC analysis found that 55 per cent of the world’s GDP, $58 trillion (€49.2 trillion) is reliant on nature. “Nature’s decline poses significant risks to the global economy and society at large if organisations do not transform their practices now.”
We’re in a race to hold on to the nature we have, to restore what we have lost, to limit our carbon emissions and suck as much carbon out of the atmosphere as we can.
In that, we need “no-regret strategies” – actions that work well across the board, regardless of how the future unfolds, that act as a kind of insurance policy against ecological collapse. Obvious examples are reducing carbon emissions, diversifying crops, slashing pollution and restoring our wetlands.
In Ireland, despite the grim reports of our failing habitats and emissions, there’s still a lot to play for. Take our bogs, which, if fully restored, could pull down carbon while supporting a significant number of species (they’re our Amazon rainforests) and helping reduce flood risk by soaking up vast quantities of excess rainwater during extreme weather.
WA goes repressive authoritarian and erodes the right toprotest too, sigh :
The WA premier has flagged the introduction of new legislation on hate speech and protests in a bid to protect “social cohesion” in the wake of “multiple threats across Australia” over the summer.
Roger Cook said the new laws are partly in response to the Bondi antisemitic terror attack on December 14, in which 15 people were killed while celebrating a Jewish holiday, and the alleged attempted terror attack at a Perth Invasion Day protest in Forrest Place on January 26.
Well, this surprises me esp given the existence of the Greenland Shark which I’d always presumed had southern counterparts & thought Great Whites might’ve roamed pretty close to that far too..
A deep-sea camera from an Australian expedition to Antarctic waters has captured an unknown species of sleeper shark on video.
Researchers believe it is the first time a shark has been videoed in the Southern Ocean in a natural setting.
Vale Kudelka. Respect. Bloody good cartoonist and good human being. Rest in power. :
The award-winning cartoonist died in Hobart on Sunday, aged 53. Alongside the cartoons, he had a flourishing creative career evident to anyone who wandered into the Kudelka Gallery in Salamanca Place .. (snip)..
..If cartoonists are the persistent voice of the national conscience, then Kudelka’s was superficially quizzical but often searing in its conviction.
He turned his attention to hypocrisy, political grandstanding and manipulation; or to deep-seated social and political inequality in cartoons as beautiful as they were powerful.
…(snip).. For the first time in its 29-year history, One Nation is polling above 20 per cent nationally and is ahead of the combined vote of the Liberal and National parties.
People who are paid to obsess over poll data in Australia have never seen anything like it.
“I am shocked [by] every poll I see — and I do this for a living,” says ANU political scientist Jill Sheppard. “The sheer numbers of people who are telling pollsters they will vote for One Nation is tremendous.”
If the current level of One Nation support — or anything close to it — actually translates to the ballot box, it will wildly reshape Australian politics.
Let us take a look at the latest polling data and see just how different it is from past election results.
They wwere afringe far reichwing party but they are bing normalised and the Overton window ia pushed outta the house , down the streetand right to teh rubish dump and the furthest end of our politics sadly.
But then that’s a really disturbing, awful, all too common trend these days.
Reform in UK, Trump kult in the USA..
(Plentiful loud expletives.)
StevoRsays
@ ^They = One Neuron party & Pauline Hanson obvs.
Needless to say is needless to say but so many needlessly say it – coz is it so needless or needs must we say for is it so needless to say it?
“The Trump administration has claimed “great success” in a city that actually put Donald Trump on his back foot.”
Related video at the link.
The Trump administration’s border czar Tom Homan announced Thursday that Operation Metro Surge, the huge deployment of federal immigrant agents across Minnesota that began in December, is coming to an end. He heralded the operation as a “great success” and he said that the Twin Cities and Minnesota will “continue to be much safer for the communities here because of what we have accomplished.”
Homan is an immigration enforcement veteran who has worked under presidents of both parties and is sometimes seen as one of the rare competent operators in Trump’s second administration. But what he said during his announcement was a classic example of Trumpian “alternative facts.” The reality is Metro Surge was a total failure — and achieved the opposite of its purported goal of making Minnesota “safer.”
[…] in a review of Department of Homeland Security data in mid-January, a local Fox affiliate found that out of 2,000 people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, just 5.2% were violent convicted criminals. That tracks broadly with other assessments of national data that finds that only a small fraction of the people swept up in ICE raids have violent records, and that the “worst of the worst” narrative is a fig leaf for far broader mass deportations.
Along the way, Operation Metro Surge wreaked havoc on Minneapolis.
[…] The Minnesota Reformer has a summary of how that went:
Since the beginning of the year, immigration agents have shot three people, killing two; racially profiled people, asking them to produce proof of legal residency; detained legal immigrants and shipped them across state lines, including young children; caused numerous car crashes; deployed chemical irritants on public school property; smashed the car windows of observers and arrested them before releasing them without charges; charged journalists and activists while stymieing investigations of federal agents, leading to an exodus of prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, among other high-profile incidents.
In a statement on the conclusion of the operation, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., said, “Businesses are reeling from the economic devastation. Families are shattered. Children will carry the trauma of federal agents descending on their neighborhoods for the rest of their lives. The pain inflicted on this community will not fade — it will remain etched in their memory as the moment their own government turned against them.”
Immigration agents could one day come to your town. Do you feel “safer” yet?
Now to the extent that ICE operations in Minneapolis served as a potential test drive for Trump to morph the agency into a secret police force, one could argue that causing chaos, fear and pain was part of the point. So in a perverse way, if the terror was by design, then did Trump succeed at his goal of wrestling a city into submission?
The Justice Department (DOJ) sent a letter to Congress on Saturday outlining its justification for redactions made in the released Jeffrey Epstein files, according to Politico.
The six-page letter to the leaders of the Senate and House Judiciary committees also included a list of “all government officials and politically exposed persons” named in the files for any reason. Several high-profile names were on the list, including President Trump.
The DOJ was required to provide this by the law that forced them to make redacted Epstein files public. It seems to be a pile of legalese that is as intentionally obscure as possible.
The lack of clarity surrounding which individuals fit into which contexts drew criticism from Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who accused the DOJ of “purposefully muddying the waters on who was a predator and who was mentioned in an email.”
The list of officials and “politically exposed” people appears to be everybody named in the file other then victems and Epstein himself. Elvis turns up on the list because he was mentioned once in a conversation.
Lawmakers who reviewed the unredacted Epstein files at a DOJ office this week reported heavy, “unnecessary” redactions in the documents. Trump officials have maintained the redactions are meant to ensure victims’ identities are kept private.
This is DOJ officials making absurd claims that are difficult to disprove because only the redacted files are public.
Attorney General Pam Bondi (Amy Poehler) testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee (Mikey Day, James Austin Johnson, Andrew Dismukes, Ashley Padilla, Jeremy Culhane, Tommy Brennan).
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem suggested on Friday that her department has a broad role in election security, claiming she has the authority to identify “vulnerabilities” in the election system and implement “mitigation measures” to make sure local and state elections are “run correctly.”
Noem argued during a press conference in Arizona, where she was pushing for passage of a national voter ID law, that elections fell within the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) mission of “maintaining critical infrastructure.”
“I would say that many people believe that it may be one of the most important things that we need to make sure we trust, is reliable, and that when it gets to Election Day, that we’ve been proactive to make sure that we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country through the days that we have, knowing that people can trust it,” she said.
A clip of those comments began circulating on social media Saturday morning, drawing swift criticism from Democratic lawmakers and political commentators.
[…] The House passed the SAVE America Act on Wednesday, a bill that would require Americans to show photo ID when voting in federal elections and proof of U.S. citizenship to register. If enacted, the legislation also mandate that states remove non-citizens from its voter rolls.
Its passage tees up debate in the Senate, where similar legislation has stalled in past years over Democratic opposition. At least one Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), has indicated she does not support the effort.
With prospects murky, President Trump on Friday floated the idea of issuing an executive order that would accomplish the same goal.
“There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Critics have slammed the proposal as an attack on voting rights and warned it could disenfranchise millions of legal voters, including women whose married names do not match their passports or birth certificates.
“Each of the arguments laid out to criticize this bill are baseless speculation from the radical left because they want illegal aliens to vote in our elections,” Noem said.
Trump has so far defended Noem and resisted bipartisan pressure for her resignation or firing. Former Obama adviser David Axelrod suggested in a post on X that Noem’s comments on election security could help explain why.
“THIS is why @KristiNoem will remain in place, despite her flagrant, corrupt mismanagement of the @DHS, at least through the midterm elections,” he wrote. “@POTUS wants a loyal apparatchik in place who will do whatever is necessary to ensure ‘the right leaders’ win.”
“Deep in China’s Mountains, a Nuclear Revival Takes Shape”
“Satellite imagery of secretive nuclear facilities reveals Beijing’s efforts to expand its arsenal, just as the last global guardrails on nuclear weapons vanish.”
Satellite imagery is available at the link.
In the lush, misty valleys of southwest China, satellite imagery reveals the country’s accelerating nuclear buildup, a force designed for a new age of superpower rivalry.
One such valley is known as Zitong, in Sichuan Province, where engineers have been building new bunkers and ramparts. A new complex bristles with pipes, suggesting the facility handles highly hazardous materials.
Another valley is home to a double-fenced facility known as Pingtong, where experts believe China is making plutonium-packed cores of nuclear warheads. The main structure, dominated by a 360-foot-high ventilation stack, has been refurbished in recent years with new vents and heat dispersers. More construction is underway next to it.
Above the Pingtong facility entrance, a hallmark exhortation of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, appears in characters so large they are visible from space: “Stay true to the founding cause and always remember our mission.”
These are among several secretive nuclear-related sites in Sichuan Province that have expanded and undergone upgrades in recent years.
China’s buildup complicates efforts to revive global arms controls after the expiration of the final remaining nuclear arms treaty between the United States and Russia. Washington argues that any successor agreements must also bind China, but Beijing has shown no interest.
“The changes we see on the ground at these sites align with China’s broader goals of becoming a global superpower. Nuclear weapons are an integral part of that,” said Renny Babiarz, a geospatial intelligence expert who has analyzed satellite images and other visual evidence of the sites and shared his findings with The New York Times.
He likened each nuclear location across China to a piece of a mosaic that, seen as a whole, shows a pattern of rapid growth. “There’s been evolution at all of these sites, but broadly speaking, that change accelerated starting from 2019,” he said. [annotated map]
[…] China had more than 600 nuclear warheads by the end of 2024 and is on track to have 1,000 by 2030, according to the Pentagon’s latest annual estimate. China’s stockpile is much smaller than the many thousands held by the United States and Russia, but its growth is still troublesome […]
“18 Days, 20 Lives: New Yorkers Who Didn’t Survive the Cold”
“Freezing days and nights claimed the lives of a grandmother, a dancer, a dispatcher […].”
Shortly before dawn on a Saturday, a retired woman in the quiet residential neighborhood of St. Albans, Queens, got up to use the bathroom. She happened to glance out the front window of her house and saw something alarming: a stranger lying face up on the sidewalk.
The temperature was 10 degrees, and the wind chill was five below. The woman called 911. Paramedics arrived quickly, but the man on the ground, Headley Evans, 71, was soon pronounced dead.
That was Jan. 24.
The next two and a half weeks were the coldest stretch that New York City had seen in years. Despite an increasingly frantic campaign by the fledgling administration of Mayor Zohran Mamdani to persuade people to shelter indoors, frozen bodies kept turning up across the city.
The deaths came in a wave — six dead or dying people were found that first morning — and then a steady succession of one or two a day, in doorways and alleys, at remote campsites and along well-traveled thoroughfares.
By Tuesday, at least 20 people had died after exposure to the frigid air and snow.
The youngest was 27 years old; the oldest was 90 […]
“Trump tells soldiers to vote GOP in campaign-style rally at Fort Bragg”
“Army policy prohibits partisan displays, and most service members refrained from cheering.”
[…] Trump’s rally on Friday followed a familiar plan: He entered to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” promoted GOP candidates, bashed his predecessor and implored the audience to vote Republican in the midterm elections. The speech ended to the thump of the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.”
The setting, however, was an Army base, and the audience was in uniform.
It was not the first time Trump gave an overtly political speech in a military setting, breaking the tradition of keeping the armed forces separate from partisan politics. He told assembled generals and admirals in September the country was “under invasion from within,” and his visit here in June to mark the Army’s 250th birthday featured a booth selling partisan paraphernalia.
On Friday, Trump shared the stage with Michael Whatley, a former Republican National Committee chairman now running for Senate who holds no government position. Trump used the platform to boost Whatley, attack Democrats and repeat previously announced military spending plans.
“You have to vote for us,” Trump told the troops, citing his restoration of the Fort Bragg name after Congress directed the Pentagon to rename military installations honoring Confederate officers. (The Trump administration avoided the law by renaming the base after Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, rather than the original Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg.)
“If we don’t win the midterms, they’ll take it off again,” Trump said. “They’ll take it off again. You can’t let that happen.”
Most of the uniformed service members refrained from reacting during Trump’s speech other than raising phones to take photos or videos. They mostly left the applause and cheers to his staff and the assembled Republican politicians, including the home state’s Sen. Ted Budd and Reps. Richard Hudson, Brad Knott and David Rouzer. A few service members responded enthusiastically when Trump asked who had received the $1,776 bonus checks he approved in December.
Defense Department policy prohibits partisan political activity by active-duty service members. “The Army as an institution must be nonpartisan and appear so too,” the Army field manual reads. “Nonpartisanship assures the public that our Army will always serve the Constitution and our people loyally and responsively.”
A federal law known as the Hatch Act restricts government employees from campaigning in their official capacity. The law does not apply to the president. […]
Trump criticized Democrats including former president Joe Biden and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, and he touched on nonmilitary campaign themes such as the economy and immigration. The speech also mentioned existing plans to increase defense spending to $1 trillion next year, build new battleships reminiscent of World War II and improve on-base housing.
After the speech, Trump met privately for almost two hours with service members who participated in the raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Trump praised the troops and told reporters that one of them would be receiving the Medal of Honor. […]
johnson catmansays
re Lynna @66:
Trump praised the troops and told reporters that one of them would be receiving the Medal of Honor. […]
The Medal of honor is awarded only for conspicuous gallantry and risk of life above and beyond the call of duty during combat against an enemy force. I have doubts that anything that happened in that dubious raid meets the criteria. The Orange Turd just loves receiving and giving out awards.
she was arrested by federal immigration agents during a green card interview and detained for nine days without critical medical care. […] Engan, who has Type 1 diabetes and relies on daily insulin, said she did not receive medication during the first four days […] “Every single day, I told them I couldn’t eat without my medication. They didn’t care.” […] a credit card inside her purse was used while she was still in custody […] she currently has legal status to remain in the United States, though she is not yet a citizen.
For a country to survive, there has to be a common culture. Nobody dies to defend a ‘multicultural economic zone’! American culture, with its English-Scotts-Irish origin, is great and worth fighting for. Some may not realize it, but that’s why people come here.”
Commentary
He’s literally just doing this [Family Guy] bit except actually serious.
Yes, the English, Scots, and Irish who famously have gotten along so well with each other.
Isn’t ‘English-Scotts-Irish’ (sic) a multicultural economic zone?
In Minnesota, two people just died to defend a multicultural community and to keep their immigrant neighbors from being abducted. So I question his premise.
I just know that he’s one of those men who fetishises Ancient Rome. Yet he apparently knows naff all about the Roman Empire.
“Scots Irish” is also often a dog whistle way of saying “our kind of white people” among racist folks.
“Scots-Irish” refers to only some Irish, Scottish Protestants who settled in Ulster, and excludes the mass of Irish who were “Papist” and thus alien.
This is giving him way too much credit […] I have no doubt that in talking to other racist people nonstop he’s heard the term ‘scots-irish,’ […] he doesn’t know what it means, since all he does is drugs and post. Hence mangling it into “English-Scotts-Irish”.
He definitely doesn’t know this (“Scotts” lol), but yeah […] Hillbillies, not Catholics.
He’s not fucking American! He’s Canadian/S African and Dutch if you want to go back further. He’s not even part of this fucking “culture” he’s lauding. Which is to say he is really just saying white power in thinly veiled code here.
Vance self-identifies as Scots-Irish.
There is not a thing in the world that this numpty would die to defend, including his own children.
Someone please ask Musk if he knows the name of the first person to die in the American Revolution. Hint: it wasn’t someone of English, Scottish, nor Irish descent. [Christopher Seider (German) then Crispus Attucks (African, Native American)]
Frank Capra, from the grave: [Goose meme: Why did we fight WWII? Why’d we fight, Elon!?]
Looking forward to Musk explaining the importance of sub Saharan African cultures, before the white faces, like his immigrant ancestors, turned up.
[Mean Girls meme: Stop trying to make Rhodesia happen. It’s not going to happen.]
WTF does this doofus think an empire is if not a “multicultural economic zone”? […] I always find it so hard to understand why ethnonationalists and neoimperialists are political allies in the US. How do annexing Greenland and homogenizing the US coexist in the same platform?
I think he believes the people in Greenland are white and European, so they’re fine.
cockroach-infested apartments, walking miles to the grocery store for food, and eating just one meal a day to save money. This is life in America for some newly arrived Afrikaner refugees from South Africa. […] [A February executive order] announced that Afrikaners, an ethnic minority of white South Africans who are descendants of 17th-century Dutch and French Huguenot settlers, would be prioritized for resettlement in the U.S. […] As of this week, 1,647 Afrikaners have arrived
In a move that has delighted fans of classic science fiction, Warner Bros. Discovery has begun uploading full episodes of the iconic series Babylon 5 to YouTube, providing free access to the show just as it departs from the ad-supported streaming platform Tubi.
The plan is to upload one per week and only the initial episode is uploaded right now. If they stick with uploading it I will binge watch the whole thing at some point.
The video quality does not appear to be the best. Babylon 5 is early computer special effects and the visual effects are not the best at times. The quality of transfer does not appear great, a common problem with early digital cameras. They didn’t record at super high resolution so moving the video to a different resolution or re-encoding it causes video effects. It will still be great to see the whole thing in order when/if it all gets uploaded.
JMsays
Forgotten Weapons: The AI Paradox: Results of My Thumbnail Experiment
Forgotten weapons is a long running Youtube channel dedicated to fire arms. This video has nothing to do with that. It is about a test the author did using an AI generated thumbnail for one of his videos. Turns out that the results were consistent, the AI thumbnail attracted more viewers that watched more of the video but comments from fans was universally negative. Interesting short discussion of what is involved and how it effects people generating video.
My opinion is I don’t care if they use AI to generate a thumbnail as long as it’s actually related to the video. For regular content creators generating an interesting thumbnail is an annoying bit of drudge work and may be click bait. I would rather a quick AI pic then a hand composed pic that isn’t really connected to the video.
Community organizers in Los Angeles are rallying in opposition to a Trump administration rule that they say will displace and fracture immigrant families, increase homelessness and potentially throttle rent collections to the point that local housing authorities might be forced to shutter some of their stock.
[…] Put simply, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to begin denying federal rent subsidies to any household where even one occupant lacks legal immigration status. That’s according to multiple accounts of the draft of the proposal leaked to ProPublica last fall. The national rule is expected to be published sometime this month […]
If implemented, the rule would most directly affect mixed-status families, where most in a household are documented but one or more may not be. It would almost certainly put those households in the position of either losing the subsidies, which they need in order to make their rent, or splitting up their families — even if multiple members of the household are legally eligible for the assistance. [!]
The proposal marks a sharp departure from longstanding government policy on such subsidies, but it’s right in line with […] Trump’s ongoing attacks on immigrants and their families. The nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that nearly 80,000 people nationally could lose assistance under the rule, including upward of 30,000 in California. About 11,000 of those are in the Los Angeles area alone.
The policy would affect nearly 37,000 children across the country, the center’s analysis found. Almost all of those children are U.S. citizens. [!]
The federal program of housing subsidies for low-income tenants is multilayered, but it generally works in a couple of ways. Those who qualify either receive a voucher to pay part of their rent, live in buildings where the government pays the subsidy directly to the landlord or live in housing that’s owned outright by the government — public housing, as it’s known.
For more than 40 years, Housing and Urban Development has made such assistance available based on financial need. In most cases, those who qualify pay a percentage of the rent that is tied to their income — usually 30% of what they earn after deductions — with the government picking up the rest.
If a household includes someone who isn’t eligible for the program because of their immigration status, that person’s share of the rent is higher. But the other eligible people living there continue to receive their subsidies, and the family is allowed to remain together under one roof. [Important]
The new HUD proposal blows up that model. It’s part of a broader effort by Trump to roll back federal housing programs in a number of ways: placing time limits on living in public housing; attaching work requirements to the subsidies; and defunding the programs in general. Taken together, these moves could cause 4 million people to lose housing assistance, experts told ProPublica last year.
[…] One potential result […] is actually a reduction in total rents paid. Having an undocumented person in the house pushes a family’s monthly rent higher, since that person doesn’t get a subsidy. Many housing programs rely on those higher rent payments to fund some of their operations. They may have to cut back on their housing stock if their budgets decline. [So this is not a financially responsible move. Instead, it will waste taxpayer money, hurt immigrants and damage programs that are currently working fairly well.]
A 2019 HUD estimate, put together when a similar rule was being considered during Trump’s first term, found that driving undocumented residents out of subsidized housing arrangements would increase HUD costs by $200 million because of the lost higher payments. [!]
[…] Forcing families to choose between splitting up or losing their rent help has the potential to put many of them in almost immediate housing emergencies, facing evictions or the prospect of homelessness.
“These are all low-income earners,” Yelos said. “Certainly a lot of them are going to end up on the streets.”
[…] There are ways to oppose the rule, or find longer-term workarounds to it, activists say. One is to appeal directly to local housing authorities, like HACLA in Los Angeles, to slow-walk its implementation by allowing, for example, an extended period of time in which families could appeal their cases before facing eviction.
On a broader level, state lawmakers could consider investing in state-funded public housing. Yelos pointed to Massachusetts as a potential model for California. That state’s program does not rely on HUD money, so it isn’t bound by the kinds of federal rule changes the Trump administration is pushing.
Nationally, it would take an act of Congress to prevent the rule from ultimately taking effect — an unlikely event before the midterms. In the meantime, […] urging citizens to write to HUD in protest. The agency is required by law to allow a period of public comment and to consider all comments made before finalizing a rule.
“It’s crazy,” Yelos said of the rule. “Of all the models that we need to solve the housing crisis, the subsidized model is the most sought-after. It is exactly the type of housing we need.”
It is also under direct threat, the latest in a seemingly unending series of assaults on the immigrant community under this president.
“Troubling,” Rubio says of European revelations that Navalny was killed with a neurotoxin. “Doesn’t mean we disagree with the outcome. We just… it wasn’t, our endeavour. Sometimes countries go out and do their thing based on the intelligence they’ve gathered.”
See also: Reuters link to an article that is better because it adds context:
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday called “troubling” a report by five European allies blaming Russia for killing late Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny using toxin from poison dart frogs, adding that Washington had no reason to question it.
“We obviously are aware of the report. It’s a troubling report. We’re aware of that case of Mr. Navalny and certainly… we don’t have any reason to question it,” Rubio told reporters at a news conference in Bratislava during a visit to Slovakia.
In a joint statement, Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands on Saturday said analyses of samples from Navalny’s body “conclusively” confirmed the presence of epibatidine, a toxin found in poison dart frogs in South America and not found naturally in Russia.
The Russian government, which has repeatedly denied any responsibility for Navalny’s death while he was held in an Arctic penal colony two years ago, dismissed the latest allegations as “a Western propaganda hoax,” according to Russia’s state news agency TASS.
When asked why the United States did not join the statement, Rubio said this was an endeavour by them.
“Those countries came to that conclusion. They coordinated that. We chose – Doesn’t mean we disagree with the outcome. We just, it wasn’t, our endeavour. Sometimes countries go out and do their thing with based on the intelligence they’ve gathered.” Rubio said.
“We’re not disputing or getting into a fight with these countries over it. But it was their report, and they put that out there,” he added.
Russian opposition leader Navalny died in an Arctic prison colony in February 2024, after being convicted of extremism and other charges, all of which he denied.
[…] The flagged voters’ registration paperwork confirmed Lennon’s [county clerk Brianna Lennon’s] suspicions. The form for the second person on the list bore the initials of a member of her staff, who’d helped the man register — at his naturalization ceremony. It later turned out more than half the Boone County voters identified as noncitizens were actually citizens.
The source of the bad data was a Department of Homeland Security tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.</b?
Once used mostly to check immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits, SAVE has undergone a dramatic expansion over the last year at the behest of President Donald Trump, who has long falsely claimed that millions of noncitizens lurk on state voter rolls, tainting American elections.
At Trump’s direction, DHS has pooled confidential data from across the federal government to enable states to mass-verify voters’ citizenship status using SAVE. […]
But an examination of SAVE’s rollout by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reveals that DHS rushed the revamped tool into use while it was still adding data and before it could discern voters’ most up-to-date citizenship information.
As a result, SAVE has made persistent mistakes […] SAVE misidentified some voters as noncitizens.
[…] In Missouri, state officials acted on SAVE’s findings before attempting to confirm them, directing county election administrators to make voters flagged as potential noncitizens temporarily unable to vote. But in hundreds of cases, the tool’s determinations were wrong, our review found. […]
In Texas, news reports began emerging about voters being mistakenly flagged as noncitizens soon after state officials announced the results of running the state’s voter roll through SAVE in October.
Our reporting showed these errors were more widespread than previously known […] Confusion took hold when the Texas secretary of state’s office sent counties lists of flagged voters and directed clerks to start demanding proof of citizenship and to remove people from the rolls if they didn’t respond.
[…] Even counting people flagged in error, the first bulk searches using SAVE haven’t validated the president’s claims that voting by noncitizens is widespread. [!] […]
While 27 states have agreed to use SAVE, others have hesitated, concerned not only about inaccuracies, but also about privacy and the data’s potential to be used in immigration enforcement. […] when SAVE flags voters as noncitizens, they are also referred to DHS for possible criminal investigation. [!]
[…] States don’t typically require people to provide proof of citizenship when they sign up to vote, only to attest to it under penalty of perjury. Previous efforts to use state data to catch noncitizens on voter rolls have gone poorly. Texas officials had to abandon a 2019 push after it became clear their methodology misidentified thousands of citizens, many of them naturalized, as ineligible voters.
[…] Trump issued an executive order that required DHS to give states free access to federal citizenship data and partner with the Department of Government Efficiency to comb voter rolls.
The order triggered a series of meetings at USCIS designed to comply with a 30-day deadline to remake SAVE, a document obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and reviewed by ProPublica shows.
The system’s main addition was confidential Social Security Administration data […]
David Jennings, Broderick’s deputy at USCIS, had pressed his team to move quickly, he said on a June video call with members of former Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, which has spread false claims about noncitizen voting. […]
Jennings added that to get quick access to the Social Security data, which has been tightly guarded, USCIS partnered with DOGE. (In an unrelated matter, DOGE has since been accused of misusing Social Security data.) […]
USCIS expanded the system before meeting legal requirements to inform the public about how the data would be collected, stored and used […] It also blew past concerns from voter advocacy groups about the accuracy of SSA’s citizenship data, which multiple audits and analyses have shown is often outdated or incomplete. […]
Broderick said in the interview that Trump’s executive order dramatically accelerated the timetable for launching SAVE, getting agencies to cooperate and move quickly. […]
By September, Texas had uploaded its entire list of more than 18 million registered voters into SAVE. Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, Utah and Wyoming put voter data into the system, too.
[…] One of the first out of the gate was Texas. In late October, with early voting underway in state and local elections, Nelson, the secretary of state, announced SAVE had identified 2,724 potential noncitizens on the rolls.
But as Nelson delegated the task of investigating those voters’ statuses to local election officials, confusion took hold.
At a meeting, Nelson’s staff told county clerks’ offices to investigate flagged voters and then send notices to those for whom they were unable to confirm citizenship. […] Travis County voter registration director Christopher Davis said he hadn’t been contacted and had just learned the county had 97 flagged voters. Marsha Barbee, in Wharton County near Houston, shared that she talked to a Nelson staffer who said she’d been directed not to tell local officials about their lists […]
In the absence of clear state guidance, clerks proceeded inconsistently. Some said they didn’t act on their lists, waiting for more direction. Others, unsure how to investigate flagged voters’ status, said they simply sent notices asking for proof of citizenship, though some opted not to remove nonresponsive voters from the rolls. [I snipped more examples of confusion.]
One way to check SAVE’s findings would have been to get information from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which requires proof of citizenship if residents register to vote when obtaining a driver’s license. The secretary of state’s office didn’t do this and didn’t direct counties to either.
Several county officials said they hadn’t thought to ask DPS for information; those who did often found the agency had documentation showing some of the voters who SAVE identified as noncitizens were in fact citizens. [I snipped examples.]
To be sure, SAVE also identified some people who weren’t eligible to vote, clerks said. Several came across instances in which voters marked on registration forms that they weren’t citizens, but were registered by election office staffers in error. […] (It’s not clear if any of those registered in error voted; overall, noncitizens rarely vote.)
[…] more than 5% of the voters SAVE identified as noncitizens proved to be citizens. […] But some of those who didn’t respond to notices also might be citizens.
[…] At least initially, Missouri took a more targeted approach to SAVE than Texas did. State officials used the system to search for information on a subset of about 6,000 voters they had reason to think might not be citizens, according to emails between federal and state officials.
The state had results by October, but in early November, a USCIS official wrote to Missouri and four other states to say some people flagged by SAVE as noncitizens were actually citizens […]
ProPublica and the Tribune obtained these lists for seven of 10 most populous counties in the state, which show SAVE initially identified more than 1,200 people as noncitizens just in these areas.
The Missouri secretary of state’s office told election administrators it would work to verify SAVE’s citizenship determinations. In the meantime, local officials were instructed to change the status of flagged voters, making them temporarily unable to vote. [!]
The lists were met with swift pushback from county election officials […] In St. Louis, the Board of Election Commissioners didn’t alter the eligibility of anyone on its flagged voter list after being advised not to by its attorney.
[…] In early December, some 70 clerks, Republicans and Democrats, wrote a letter to Missouri House Speaker Jonathan Patterson saying there were better ways than SAVE to keep noncitizens off voter rolls.
[…] After the January revision, St. Louis County’s initial list of 691 potential noncitizens dropped to 133.
[…] “Overall, it seems like this process has done more to worry people who can vote than to identify actual registered voters who don’t qualify,” she [Zuzana Kocsisova, who lives in St. Louis] said. “It’s just a waste of resources. I don’t think it makes the elections any more safe.”
[…] “This is not ready for prime time,” Lennon said. “And I’m not going to risk the security and the constitutional rights of my voters for bad data.”
BTW the Cristian apologist David Wood is useful for skeptics as his faith gives him the energy to dig through boring islamic writings (my mind would melt after ten pages) to find contradictions in a rival religion.
And unlike some Christians I know he is intellectually honest, and does not misrepresent what he finds.
.
Tragically, he has fallen in the same “Islam is the great enemy” cognitive cul-de-sac as so many other Christians and seems to accept what media like Fox News says.
Rupert Murdoch has a lot to answer for.
“The more the president delivers highly partisan messages to active-duty troops, the more he targets a bedrock principle of the United States.”
Related video at the link.
Most of Donald Trump’s public events are similar: The president airs grievances, peddles self-indulgent lies, shares assorted conspiracy theories, condemns his perceived political foes and presents himself as a conquering hero who has single-handedly created an American utopia.
But the audiences aren’t always the same. When Trump meanders his way through partisan red meat when speaking at a political rally, it’s tiresome but predictable. When he delivers the same message to active-duty military personnel, it’s a qualitatively different kind of story. [snipped Washington Post excerpt, which is in comment 66]
The president, speaking at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, seemed especially focused on the state’s U.S. Senate race, condemning the leading Democratic candidate, former Gov. Roy Cooper, while touting the likely GOP nominee, former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley, who shared the stage with Trump during the on-base political rally.
“You have to vote for us,” Trump told the troops, referring to his party and the 2026 midterm elections.
There is no modern precedent for any American president engaging in such radical politicking with active-duty servicemembers, though over the last several months, it’s become a more common sight. In June, for example, Trump also spoke at Fort Bragg and treated U.S. troops like they were just another MAGA audience, even goading troops to boo Joe Biden, the free press and American elected officials whom the president doesn’t like. (A report in The Bulwark described the display as “grotesque.”)
Three months later, he did it again, summoning the nation’s generals and admirals to listen to him ramble about tariffs, the Nobel Peace Prize, his hatred for Democrats, his contempt for independent news organizations and his belief that his 2020 election defeat was “rigged.”
A week after that, speaking at an event honoring the U.S. Navy’s 250th anniversary, Trump appeared determined to turn military personnel against the parts of the country he doesn’t like. “We have to take care of this little gnat that’s on our shoulder called the Democrats,” he said.
In October, speaking to U.S. soldiers aboard the USS George Washington in Yokosuka, Japan, Trump did it once again. […]
A Politico report noted at the time, “[…] The report added that the Republican’s brazen efforts were “making some members of the military — privately — very nervous indeed.”
[…] Just as notably, acknowledging the frequency with which the incumbent president takes these steps, Politico added that this is becoming “the new normal” when it comes to Trump and civil-military affairs.
The problem, however, is that this can’t become our “new normal.” An apolitical military is a foundational, bedrock principle of the United States. […]
It is nevertheless a principle for which Trump appears to have no use, creating an untenable dynamic. The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols recently highlighted what he described as an ongoing “civil-military crisis,” arguing, “Trump and his valet at the Defense Department, Secretary of Physical Training Pete Hegseth, are now making a dedicated run at turning the men and women of the armed forces into Trump’s personal and partisan army.” [all too true]
On Friday, the president offered fresh evidence to bolster that point.
“Trump’s first elections power-grab was a ridiculous move that failed in the courts. His second will arguably be even worse.”
Just two months into his second term, Donald Trump signed a radical executive order intended to impose sweeping changes to the nation’s system of elections. Congress hadn’t approved anything of the kind, but Trump decided that he could just create the policy anyway through presidential fiat.
NBC News reported at the time that the changes “could risk disenfranchising tens of millions of Americans.” Trump, exercising a legal authority he decided to bestow on himself, did it anyway.
Predictably, the order faced a great many court challenges. Also predictably, the president’s policy was rejected throughout the judiciary as a power-grab at odds with how policymaking is supposed to happen in the United States.
Nearly a year later, he apparently wants to give it another try. In an oddly worded missive published to his social media platform, Trump published an item that read in part:
The Democrats … want to continue to cheat in Elections. This was not what our Founders desired. I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!
First, Trump has had many years to substantiate his claims about Democrats “cheating” in elections, and so far, he’s come up with literally nothing [!]
Second, the idea that he’s “searched the depths” of anything, much less “Legal Arguments,” is genuinely hilarious. [LOL]
Third, while the president is apparently fixated on voter-ID policies, he’s never gotten around to explaining why he thinks this is a good idea, or why the nation needs a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
[…] pay particular attention to the last six words of the aforementioned excerpt: Trump is apparently under the impression that he can unilaterally put new hurdles between American voters and their own democracy with or without legislation from Congress. [!]
In a follow-up item also published on Friday afternoon, the president, after peddling a variety of tiresome and baseless conspiracy theories, wrote another screed. “This is an issue that must be fought, and must be fought, NOW! If we can’t get it through Congress, there are Legal reasons why this SCAM is not permitted. I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order,” he added.
[…] But there’s a larger context to all of this. Trump isn’t just vowing to impose new voting restrictions, he’s also floating the idea of canceling future elections and nationalizing the nation’s electoral system. [!]
What’s more, we’re not just talking about rhetoric. The president and his team have also deployed FBI agents to raid an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, seized voting equipment in Puerto Rico, waged an aggressive campaign to acquire voter rolls from states that Democrats won, organized an unnecessary FBI elections “briefing” for state officials and provided one of Trump’s highly controversial former campaign lawyers with classified information as he tries to advance election conspiracy theories.
It’s against this backdrop that Trump also wants to sign an executive order imposing new voting restrictions, without Congress, in order to solve a problem that does not exist. Given these circumstances, shrugging with indifference seems like a mistake.
“You said that the Iranian nuclear sites have been totally obliterated,” a reporter told the president. “What’s left to go after?” His answer fell short.
Despite assuring voters about his vision rooted in foreign policy restraint, Donald Trump has spent the last year launching military strikes in Venezuela, Yemen, Syria, Nigeria and Somalia, as well as dozens of attacks against civilian boats in international waters. [all too true]
And then, of course, there’s Iran.
Last summer, the American president also launched preemptive military strikes on targets in Iran, and according to the White House, the operation “totally obliterated” Tehran’s unclear program.
Eight months later, there are ongoing talks between U.S. and Iranian officials about the future of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, though Trump’s Plan B isn’t exactly subtle. NBC News reported late last week:
The USS Ford Carrier Strike Group has been notified that they are leaving the Caribbean and headed to the Middle East, [!] according to two U.S. officials familiar with the decision.
The Ford will join the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group already in the region. The decision comes as tensions with Iran remain high.
Note, the ships were headed to Europe last fall before Trump redirected them ahead of the operation in Venezuela, only to redirect them again to the Middle East ahead of a possible new offensive in Iran, which would risk touching off a new crisis in the region.
To date, there’s been no robust public conversation in the United States about a looming U.S. military confrontation with Iran, and it’s likely that many Americans aren’t fully aware of why this is happening.
Indeed, Trump, who had Iran’s nuclear program stifled before abandoning an effective international program in his first term, was asked a question on Friday that I’ve been eager to hear him answer.
“You said … that the Iranian nuclear sites have been totally obliterated,” a reporter reminded the president. “What’s left to go after?”
Trump replied, “You could get whatever the dust is down there.”
That was a difficult answer to take seriously, though it was probably less embarrassing than the truth: The U.S. military strikes in June did great damage, but the “totally obliterated” claims were wildly overstated, despite the Republican administration’s constant repetition.
As part of the same brief Q&A, Trump added that he believes regime change in Iran “would be the best thing that could happen.”
[…] In effect, Trump is telling Iranian leaders, “Yes, I’m the one who allowed your nuclear program to flourish by abandoning a good policy for reasons I’ve been unable to explain. And yes, I’ve already lied about obliterating your nuclear capabilities. But I’m hoping we can work out a new deal now, and if you disagree, I’ll start bombing you, and even if you do agree, my hope is to bring down your government anyway.”
After the disastrous reign of CBP border idiot Greg Bovino in Minneapolis, Donald Trump put a different idiot, Tom Homan, in charge. But replacing Bovino with the a corrupt loser like Homan wasn’t exactly a vast improvement.
Let us show you his appearances on the Sunday shows this weekend:
CNN’s State Of The Union
We begin with Homan speaking to Jake Tapper on CNN. [video]
Part of the reason they moved Homan to be in charge of DHS’s operation in Minneapolis was so they could blame all previous problems on Kristi Noem and […] Bovino. [Good analysis]
You could see this when Tapper asked about the investigation into the murder of Renee Good.
TAPPER: [T]here were prosecutors in Minnesota that were going to investigate that shooting, and then the word came down from the Justice Department in Washington to stop, to stop that investigation.
HOMAN: That’s a question for DOJ. That happened before I had my feet on the ground in Minnesota. So I will leave that — that’s a question for Pam Bondi or Todd Blanche. I’m not involved in those decisions. I’m not involved with investigations.
[…] Homan is just better at using passive language to mask corruption and lawbreaking, like when Tapper asked about Kristi Noem’s recent statement about making sure “the right people are voting” on Election Day.
TAPPER: So, what does she mean when she says electing the right leaders? That’s not really immigration enforcement or DHS’s responsibility.
HOMAN: I don’t know. […] If I had to guess, probably that only those legally eligible to vote would vote. But I have not talked to the secretary about those statements. That would be something she’d have to answer.
Tapper, like most in the news media, seems to have fallen for the scam of Trump’s Bovino/Homan switcheroo, as at one point he said Homan sounded “like an adult” and “like an official who should be in charge of things because you work with local officials and seek to de-escalate and have targeted operations.” [Oh FFS]
[…] CBS’s Face The Nation
Homan followed his more subdued appearance on CNN with a more pointed interview with Ed O’Keefe on CBS.
O’Keefe asked why DHS is the only agency where its agents cover their faces and their officers don’t wear name plates/tags in order for there to be accountability. Homan lied:
HOMAN: I don’t like the masks either, but because threats against ICE officers, you know, are up over 1500 percent, actual assaults, and threats are up over 8000 percent, these men and women have to protect themselves.
Just gonna stop Homan right there because everything he’s saying is a lie. [!]
O’Keefe asked what should have been a simpler question:
O’KEEFE: What’s so wrong about obtaining a judicial warrant to enter private property?
HOMAN: That’s not what the federal law requires.
It is exactly what federal law requires, and O’Keefe was ready for Homan’s bullshit:
O’KEEFE: Well, as I recall, you have previously said that you thought judicial warrants were necessary for searches. There’s been this change in policy in that now ICE can go with these administrative warrants that are issued by ICE personnel. Why your change of heart? I mean, clearly there — at one point, at least you agreed that was necessary.
HOMAN: No, I don’t have a changed heart. What I understand, and I wasn’t part of those discussions, is that DOJ interpret that law saying in certain — in certain circumstances …
This answer is like a dumber version of Obi-Wan Kenobi explaining he didn’t lie to Luke Skywalker about who Darth Vader was. “So what I told you was truth … from certain point of view.”
O’Keefe asked Homan when ICE thugs are actually leaving Minnesota. Homan, sounding like a guy who wanted to be a wartime general but was too dumb to pass the ASVAB, answered:
HOMAN: [W]e already removed well over 1,000 people, and […] we’ll remove several hundred more. We’ll get back to the original footprint, with the exception of the agents there to do the fraud investigation will stay there and continue their work until they’re done.
This “were only leaving a small footprint, but we are done” thing sounds very familiar. [Bush in “Mission Accomplished” moment]
Fox & Friends Weekend
Speaking of ole Dubya, let’s see how Homan concluded his Sunday on the network that Bush-era propaganda built. [video]
By this point, Homan was annoyed and ready to let loose unfiltered bullshit on Fox News.
Like this questionable math, which received zero pushback […]:
HOMAN: President Trump has already found 145,000 children. In Minnesota alone, over 33,000 missing children we found that the last administration wasn’t even looking for.
[The enormity of the lies!]
Suuuuuure, and he also ended eight wars, you betcha. (Trump has ended no wars.)
When the Fox News sockpuppet asked Homan about Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s intention to ask the federal government to reimburse their city/state for the damage they caused, Homan used the rape-y line JD Vance and other likeminded MAGA characters are so fond of:
Real life for schools in Minneapolis: what it is like when Trump’s administration surges ICE personnel into a city:
[…] The impact of the surge had saturated every aspect of the school day in Columbia Heights’ district of fewer than 3,400 students — half of them English-language learners — and seeped deeply into the hours beyond it. Seven students had been detained, including Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old whose photo became a global symbol of the crackdown’s sweep. Dozens of parents across the district were in custody. Hundreds more had decided school was too risky and enrolled their children in online classes. One was Liam’s older brother, a Columbia Academy student.
Over the weeks, Columbia Academy, like the district’s four other schools, had taken on an entirely new identity. It was still a place of learning, even if 210 of its 700 students were now studying at home. But now it was also a food bank, a counseling hotline, a missing persons task force, an immigration resource center and a refuge.
“We are the first call,” said Sherk [Leslee Sherk, Columbia Academy’s principal], a first-year principal who has worked in the district for two decades. “They don’t call the police. They don’t even sometimes call their neighbors or different organizations. They call the school.”
The district had prepared for the moment, but only to a degree. Following President Donald Trump’s 2024 election, it held know-your-rights presentations for staff and families, said Superintendent Zena Stenvik. It created protocols for the possibility of ICE officers showing up at a school with a warrant, she said. But they did not anticipate a surge that would bring teams of masked agents to the streets outside, raids to their neighborhood and ICE vehicles to their parking lots.
As stories mounted of parents and students with pending immigration cases being detained, district employees worked to track down missing students — in some cases, to a detention center in Texas. Staff were trained to drive vans to transport children to school, and in one case to drive two students to their mother, who was being held at the Whipple Federal Building south of Minneapolis.
For a while, the district did these things quietly, adopting the low-profile approach most schools have taken. Families were fearful, and Stenvik did not want Columbia Heights schools to become a target.
[…] That changed the morning of Jan. 20, when a car peeled into the high school parking lot outside Stenvik’s office and two teens jumped out and ran inside. […]
Stenvik was patrolling in her car — she had heard that ICE was targeting bus stops — when she got an urgent phone call. Liam’s mother, panicking, had called Columbia Academy as officers were detaining the boy and his father outside their house. She needed to make sure someone would care for the boy’s older brother if she were also taken.
Stenvik and Sherk rushed over, as did the school board president and Liam’s elementary school principal. The district spokeswoman dropped off the older brother once the officers were gone.
“I was there when they told him what happened, that dad was taken and Liam was taken, and then I sat there with him on his bunk bed while we both just cried,” Sherk said. “And that was probably the worst day of my career.”
For Stenvik, it was galvanizing. A community ICE monitor had provided the district with the now-famous photo of Liam, standing in his bunny hat next to a federal officer. Liam’s mother pleaded that his story be shared, which the district did at a news conference the next day.
“We couldn’t have any bigger of a target on our backs at that point,” Stenvik said. […] anxiety had not abated in the week since Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, announced a partial drawdown […] Homan’s Thursday announcement that the surge was ending would also not quell the sense of emergency. Families were still too scared — and too scarred — to celebrate, Sherk said.
School officials knew of two students and many parents still in immigration custody.
[…] By the time Columbia Academy’s 3:15 p.m. bell approached, the ICE vehicles had moved on, and Sherk set about making sure no student left the building alone. For weeks, the 25 or so kids who walk home had been escorted by adults. But the week before, the walking groups had encountered ICE vehicles. So the school had organized carpools.
[…] A squad of volunteers loaded paper bags full of food and supplies into cars outside. The bags were labeled with numbers, part of a detailed system to keep recipients’ identities secret if drivers were pulled over by ICE. […]
[…] Whose reputation and/or career’s gotten newly or further destroyed by the Epstein files recently? A no-way-complete list includes former Norwegian Prime Minister Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland; now-former Goldman Sachs top lawyer Kathryn Ruemmler; Tommy Mottola; Naomi Campbell; talent agent Casey Wasserman; Les Wexner (some more); Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem; Canadian physicist Lee Smolin; New York Giants owner Steve Tisch; Brad Karp (CEO of that law firm Paul, Weiss, which pledged to do $40m of free work for Trump); former culture minister of France Jack Lang; Norwegian Crown Princess Mette-Marit; deceased banking heir Matthew Mellon. […]
[…] What’s obscene, indecent or profane can be highly subjective, on the airwaves and in real life. And so Brendan Carr plugged Bad Bunny lyrics into Google translate, and oh my!
Young ladies, young ladies
I like ‘em underage, see
Some say that’s statutory
But I say it’s mandatory
Just kidding, that’s Kid Rock. The Bad Bunny lyrics are relatively wholesome! There is a lyric in the song “Safaera” that goes “Si tu novio no te mama el culo,” which translates to “if your boyfriend doesn’t lick your ass,” which Rep. Ogles said was a reference to analingus. And there’s the line “el perico es blanco,” which Fine thought a reference to cocaine. […]
And hey wait, wasn’t MAGA just [complaining] at the very same time that their problem was they couldn’t understand the lyrics? How did Andy Ogles even hear analingus in Spanish from all of that? And just how many different languages can Randy Fine say cocaine in?
That guy’s sure been on a real tear lately, speaking of. [“If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” in a social media post]
So, the Super Bowl is over, and the anti-woke lost. Between that and the Epstein Files, they’re having a rough go. MAGA faithful have settled for making Bad Bunny Halftime show shorthand for whatever they’re snarling and whining in the corner about while the rest of America goes off and experiences joy […]
the shuttered Augusta Correctional Center property in Craigsville will not become a detention facility for ICE.
[…]
All of this news comes as a handful of bills aiming to limit ICE’s activity in the commonwealth are also seeing legislative success. Increased penalties for impersonating federal law-enforcement, mask bans for law enforcement, and limits on civil immigration arrests in schools, polling places, courthouses and hospitals all sailed through the House this week on party line votes. Similar bills in the Senate have also seen success.
The FBI formally notified Minnesota officials on Friday that it would not grant them access […]
“While this lack of cooperation is concerning and unprecedented, the [state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension] is committed to thorough, independent and transparent investigations of these incidents, even if hampered by a lack of access to key information and evidence,”
The site is hosted on the official website of the […] Attorney General and allows individuals to upload videos, photos, and detailed reports about encounters
[…]
The portal is part of a broader set of actions—including a “Know Your Rights” website and an executive order restricting ICE from using non-public state property for operations without a judicial warrant
At home the USA is sweating about ICE kidnapping people and executing them in cold blood in the street, and RFK Jr.’s health chatbot is advising the public on the ‘“best foods to insert into rectum.” Meanwhile, the rest of the world waits for no one, and the hegemony of the United States of America is over. We’ve still got the largest economy and arsenal, sure, but economics-wise, security-wise, vibes-wise, the USA is a gun-toting toddler […] throwing a tantrum […]
So this past weekend at the Munich security conference, not many Valentines for the current regime. But there was some real talk from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Senator Mark Kelly, and The [Woman] Who Warned You her very own self until she was blue in the face.
Yes, Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, in the flesh, in Chanel. The whole thing is worth a watch! [Video]
[…] it is an important idea to ponder, as Republicans openly push a version of The West as white culture, its only pertinent shared interest and value being whiteness, from the shores of Hyannis Port to the swamps of Duck Dynasty.
Western culture used to be united by values. Ones like individual rights, liberty, civilization itself and keeping one’s word. So much for that, what with the US backing out of agreements it once endorsed and abided by, and Donald Trump humping and pumping to take over Greenland until the markets started to freefall.
As JD Vance was too busy being even more unpopular than he was last year, it was on […] Marco Rubio to go present the regime’s version of Western civilized. It involved going as a guest into Europe’s own house to accuse them again of “civilizational erasure,” as if Russia is not trying to erase Ukraine’s civilization and identity this very minute. Then Rubio skipped a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (other than a few seconds of sideline chat), French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, so he could trot off and meet with Hungarian dictator Vikor Orbán [!], who’s up for re-election and sinking in the polls. Rubio told him, “your success is our success,” then he followed him home to Hungary. Yes, Viktor, you may keep him, but if that rude little beast shits in your house, you clean it up.
[…] Hillary Clinton persisted. She appeared on a panel to talk about the ideological battles that conservatives have been fighting since the beginning of time, how Trump has betrayed the West, and nobody wants to live under a Putin-style regime.
The entire thing up there is whoa — the gal could always cook, and she’s still got it […]
To summarize: fuck the false premise to begin with that liberals in the US or Europe have ever supported open borders. People once called Barack Obama the deporter-in-chief, and he and Joe Biden and Bill Clinton all deported more people than Trump ever did, without even wantonly killing people. Biden even deported more people in ‘24 than Trump did in ‘25, for all of Trump’s bluster and terrorist tactics. And weirdly, before Trump, conservatives like Ronald Reagan were known for supporting open immigration for people whose cheap labor they could exploit.
Conservatives’ schtick is […] selling made-up nostalgia for an imaginary once-upon-a-time they will make great again, a time when white men were at the top of capitalist enterprise and everybody else was chattel. […]
Of course, the rights of Black people to be treated better, women getting more rights, gay people being able to create a family, those are good things, most people (other than conservatives) agree.
Woman who Knows Of What She Speaks also correctly called the administration’s treatment of Ukraine disgraceful, a “historic error,” and “corrupt to the nth degree.” [True, and well said.]
Do not miss around the 16-minute mark when she [countered] Czech deputy prime minister Petr Macinka: [video]
Can half of us have rights, then? Does “woke” justify selling out the two genders fighting for freedom in Ukraine?
“I’m sorry that makes you nervous,” Macinka sputtered, nervously, to a chorus of boos.
Nervous, conservatives should be, as their morally bankrupt ideology falls apart like a house of cards at the tiniest poke.
Hillary may be the former generation of leadership, but New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar were there too. AOC: [video]
To summarize that clip: Are we in a new world order? The US has been carving out exceptions to its rules and values for a long time, to the point the exceptions have become the rules. Are we in a post-rules based order? Only if you think we ever had one to begin with. Maybe in the future the US and Europe ought to consider looking into something like rules and order more fully.
And Arizona Senator Mark Kelly was there also, not mincing any bratwurst. Donald Trump blew up the world order. As a nation we need friends, and now we have none. It will take generations to repair our international relationships, even if Democrats win the House and Senate and White House again. We should all be pretty freaked out about this! [video]
After the conference, Kelly posted some stark words:
It took a World War and eight decades to build the strongest alliance that this world had ever seen. It took less than a year to practically destroy it. When Secretary Rubio said the “old world order was dead” during his speech in Munich he was right. It’s dead because Donald Trump blew it up.
It wasn’t perfect, and there were opportunities missed to improve it, but Donald Trump only knows how to break things, not fix them.
He thinks this somehow benefits us. He is wrong. Our allies no longer trust us. It was obvious in the more than a dozen meetings I had with Presidents, Prime Ministers and Defense and Foreign Ministers. And if you’re Denmark and Greenland, a “loss of trust” is a generous characterization of our new relationship. China is now more popular in Denmark than the United States. In Poland, the U.S. is 21 percent less popular than it used to be.
This means these countries are looking elsewhere for trade and security — that makes you poorer and less safe.
It will be incredibly hard to build what comes next, but we have to figure out a better path forward. Make no mistake, China is rising. Our ability to keep up with them and prevent a conflict depends on trusted, reliable alliances. So does ending the war in Ukraine in a way that keeps Putin from moving on to his next target. And so does growing our economy and protecting American workers in the age of AI.
I know there was celebration at the end of the Munich Security Conference. Unfortunately the champagne corks were popping in Beijing and Moscow.
At least some people seem to understand the stakes and the assignment. It will take our lifetimes to fix, but if we ever get Trump and his fascist bums out, we can at least get started. [!]
“Judge Orders Slavery Displays Restored at George Washington’s Philadelphia Home”
A federal judge on Monday ordered the Trump administration to temporarily restore displays about George Washington’s ownership of enslaved people at a monument on the site of his former house in Philadelphia. The judge said the government’s claim to have the power to erase and alter historical accounts at the country’s monuments echoed George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”
In a 40-page opinion, Judge Cynthia M. Rufe granted a preliminary injunction to the City of Philadelphia, which had sued the Interior Department and the National Park Service over their decision to remove the displays. The order means the government must put the materials back up while the underlying lawsuit proceeds in court.
Last month, National Park Service workers arrived unannounced at the President’s House Site, a monument on the spot of a home used by Washington and President John Adams in the early days of the nation, and took down panels, displays and video exhibits describing the local history of slavery and commemorating the nine enslaved people Washington kept there while he was president.
The Park Service has said that the displays were taken down to ensure “accuracy, honesty and alignment with shared national values.” The move was part of a far-reaching effort by the Trump administration to rewrite American history along ideological lines at national monuments and parks across the country.
“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s ‘1984’ now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance Is Strength,’ this court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts,” Judge Rufe wrote. “It does not.”
“Each person who visits the President’s House and does not learn of the realities of founding-era slavery, receives a false account of this country’s history,” added Judge Rufe, who was appointed by President George W. Bush.
The order bars further alterations to the President’s House Site but does not set a deadline for restoring the displays. Unless stayed by a higher court, the injunction will remain in effect until Judge Rufe enters her final ruling. The preliminary injunction signals that she believes the city has a strong case and is likely to prevail. […]
Newly hired CBS News contributor Peter Attia is reportedly secure in his position, despite recent revelations that Attia was close to and had exchanged lewd messages with accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
The Guardian reported on Monday that CBS insiders believe the messages between Attia and Epstein that have surfaced haven’t dissuaded CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss from keeping the self-described longevity expert on board, even if it creates a bad look for the increasingly right-wing network.
Attia was one of 19 newly hired contributors announced by Weiss in January, even as longtime journalists left the network while protesting the shift to Trump-friendly content.
In one 2015 email to Epstein, Attia wrote, “You [know] the biggest problem with becoming friends with you? The life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul…”
Attia also told one of Epstein’s assistants, “I go into JE withdrawal when I don’t see him.”
In 2016—eight years after Epstein had been jailed for soliciting a minor for sex—Attia wrote to him, “[P-word] is, indeed, low carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.”
Epstein also seemingly allowed Attia to stay at one of his apartments, and Attia wrote a 2016 email thanking Epstein for the favor.
As part of the trove of Epstein-related documents that the Justice Department has released, several email exchanges were found between Epstein and Weiss’ wife, Nellie Bowles. In one strange exchange, Epstein joked with Bowles about Bill Cosby, who was convicted of sexual assault.
Attia’s hiring and the new disclosures are another stain on Weiss’ short tenure leading CBS News. Just last week, network producer Alicia Hastey quit her job and revealed that, under Weiss, stories are being “evaluated not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations.” […]
[…] In what is a nakedly transparent move, even for the Trump administration, the State Department announced that it is just straight-up making it harder to get a passport. Nonprofit libraries were just informed that they can no longer process passport applications.
Though the administration teed this up last November when it began sending cease-and-desist letters to nonprofit libraries, it didn’t bring the hammer down nationwide until last week.
Oh, and it’s already in effect as of February 13, 2026.
It sure looks a lot like this is being done with the hopes that either the SAVE Act passes or Trump’s big cool conservative friends on the Supreme Court bless Trump’s assertion that he can just singlehandedly impose a voter ID requirement nationwide.
How is the administration justifying this? Well, like so many things—birthright citizenship, sending the military into cities, firing everyone at independent agencies—the administration has decided that decades of settled law and regulations have simply been interpreted by the courts and Congress wrongly all this time. According to the State Department, they’ve suddenly discovered that an obscure 1920 law forms the basis for prohibiting nonprofit libraries from issuing passports.
There’s no explanation as to why, even if the State Department’s novel interpretation had any merit, this had to be rushed through. There’s also no explanation as to why the State Department has repeatedly reviewed, approved, and reauthorized nonprofit libraries to process passport applications in the past […]
Government-run libraries are not affected by this announcement, so if your library is run by the county or the city, for example, you’re in luck. Nonprofit libraries are independently run and, gosh, whaddya know? They are most common in Northeastern states: Connecticut, Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. [States that usually vote for Democratic Party candidates.]
Huh. It’s probably just a coincidence that this would disproportionately affect blue states, right?
Roughly 21 million people lack access to the additional documents required to comply with SAVE’s requirements. Driver’s licenses aren’t enough, so people need an additional document like a birth certificate or, you guessed it, a passport. No surprise the administration thus wants to make passports harder to obtain.
You also won’t be surprised that the State Department is lying about the scope of this, saying it only affects “less than one percent of our total network” of 7,500 passport processing facilities. However, the American Library Association—which, let’s face it, is going to be far more reliable here than the administration—says it affects about 1,400 nonprofit libraries, a good deal more than 1%.
While this move is no doubt part of an overall voter suppression plan, it’s also part of the administration’s overall attack on libraries. A public service open to everyone? With books about everything? That provides additional support and services to a community? Well, we can’t have that.
At the start of his second term. Trump tried to kill the Institute of Museum and Library Services, firing the board members, placing nearly all staff on administrative leave, and cutting off grants for libraries nationwide. States had to sue to restore the funding, and a court ordered the administration to reinstate the grants last November. IMLS grants are the primary source of federal funding for state libraries, providing about $160 million each year, representing about one-third to one-half of library budgets.
Barring nonprofit libraries from offering passport services is also a financial hit. In Connecticut, for example, one library processed almost 8,000 applications in the last year and received just under $200,000 for those services.
[…] given that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been given the authority to racially profile people and detain them if ICE decides their proof of citizenship just isn’t valid, based on vibes, it’s likely that plenty of people will just choose not to get a passport at a government-run office.
Nonprofit libraries, on the other hand, often have longer hours, have a space for children to stay occupied during a parent or caregiver’s application process, and assist with language barriers. In short, they make it much safer and easier for people with less means to get a passport, and that’s exactly what the administration seeks to prevent.
It’s tempting to fall back on saying this is a nonstarter because elections are run by the states, and the Supreme Court will not agree that a random executive order is suddenly the law nationwide, but the Supreme Court has been asleep at the wheel when it comes to curbing Trump’s excesses. And of course, the court’s conservatives are also extremely into voter suppression. […]
[…] In a wide-ranging interview Sunday at Technische Universität Berlin with German Bundestag member Isabel Cademartori, Ocasio-Cortez took aim at the architects of MAGA’s “anti-cancel culture” movement who are now trying to dodge accountability over the Epstein files—and slammed attorney general Pam Bondi’s pathetic performance before Congress. [video]
Ocasio-Cortez described the “cancel culture” narrative as a politicization of decency.
“That’s the erosion in culture [and] morality that is being hinted at here when Pam Bondi says there’s no more work here to be done,” she said. “Really? You are the Attorney General of the United States of America and you don’t want to hold any one of these pedophiles accountable. Resign or be impeached.” […]
“Trump Nominee Is Huge Racist, If You Can Believe It”
And yet, Jeremy Carl is up for a high-level State Department post.
If you missed it, at the end of last week the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a confirmation hearing for one Jeremy Carl, an outright racist Donald Trump nominee […] for a high-level position at the State Department.
[…] what’s pathetic is watching Carl fumble around for answers to simple questions like an undergrad who didn’t do the reading. Good God, man, at least be erudite enough to back up your mealy-mouthed racist bullshit!
Overwhelming your questioners with a flood of garbage is pretty much the only way through. Look at Stephen Miller or Chris Rufo. Those guys simply throw out racist statement after racist statement so fast that by the time your brain processes one point to push back on, they have thrown out four more points for which there is no rational answer.
Carl has been a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute. So by wingnut standards, he’s an intellectual.
Anyway, watch him squirm when Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut asks him a pretty simple question, which comes out of Murphy’s mouth as, “Tell me how you define white identity and what you think is being erased,” but could easily translate to What in the actual fuck are you babbling about […] [social media post, with video]
This is such an unbelievably hilarious load of offal [referring to the content shown in the video]. It’s bad, nonsensical ‘90s stand-up comedy: Black people worship like this, but white people worship like this! You ever notice how Asian people like Asian food, but white people put raisins in their carrot salad?
[…] After the hearing was over, Carl tried to correct the record by tweeting at Murphy. It didn’t help: [social media post]
[…] Do we even need to get into the history of how the “white ethnic groups” Carl name-checks were actually treated when they first came to America?
Calling oneself a “civic nationalist” is such a cheap-ass cop-out. It’s one more way of degrading America’s multicultural fabric that has been around as long as the rest of the country. Never once does it occur to Carl that maybe way too many Americans felt left out back in the days when “Anglo-derived culture” as he imagines it was pretty much the only thing one saw when one turned on the TV or picked up a book.
As the writer Christopher Mathias pointed out, Carl is mad about the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 overturning the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924. The earlier law had nationality quotas and prioritized immigrants from North and Western Europe. Or white people, not to put too fine a point on it. [!!] The Hart-Celler Act overturned that regime, and prioritized immigration based on skilled immigrants and relatives of people already here. Yes, this led to a lot more immigration from Latin America and Asia.
What Carl imagines here is that he can separate the idea of the dominant culture of pre-Hart-Celler Act America from whiteness. Or he’d like the senators to think he can do that. Unfortunately for him, he also published a book two years ago entitled The Un-Protected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart. There is nothing subtle about that.
Luckily at least one Republican, John Curtis of the ethnically diverse state of (checks notes) Utah said he’ll vote against Carl’s nomination, which means it will die in committee. Unless the Trump administration feels like putting a full-court press on and spending political capital to get Carl confirmed. […]
Three people are dead, including a suspected shooter, and three people are injured after a shooting at an ice rink in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, on Monday afternoon, according to the Pawtucket mayor’s office.
A U.S. military strike killed three people and blew up a boat in the Caribbean Sea on Friday, the U.S. Southern Command said, raising the death toll in the Trump administration’s five-month-old campaign against suspected drug smugglers at sea to 133. The attack was the first known strike in the Caribbean Sea since early November and the 39th disclosed by the U.S. government in the campaign, according to a tracker maintained by The New York Times.
New York Times, reporting on the effect of vaccine research being curtailed:
In Massachusetts, Moderna is pulling back on vaccine studies. In Texas, a small company canceled plans to build a factory that would have created new jobs manufacturing a technology used in vaccines. In San Diego, another manufacturing company laid off workers.
More:
Federal policies under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that are hostile to vaccines have “sent a chill through the entire industry,” one scientist said.
[…] At conferences and in interviews, they described the emerging consequences of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the longstanding federal support for vaccines. […]
[…] In a secret deportation arrangement, the Trump administration flew nine people, nearly all of whom had been granted U.S. court protections from being sent back to their home countries, to the African nation of Cameroon in January.
None of them are from Cameroon, according to government documents obtained by The New York Times and lawyers for the deportees, and the United States has not made any public deal with Cameroon to accept deportees who hail from other nations.
Several of the men and women deported — whose cases have not been previously reported — told The Times they did not know they were being sent to Cameroon until they were handcuffed and chained on a Department of Homeland Security flight leaving Alexandria, La., on Jan. 14.
Cameroon’s Ministry of External Affairs declined to comment when reached by phone, and the State Department said it would not comment on its “diplomatic communications with other governments” when asked about the terms of an agreement.
Most of those migrants and their lawyers say they have been detained since then at a state-owned compound in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital. They say they’ve been told by local authorities that they cannot leave the facility unless they agree to return to their home countries, from which they fled to escape war or persecution.
As far as is known, the deportations are the first such expulsions to Cameroon. They highlight the extraordinary secrecy that surrounds President Trump’s global deportation effort. Through murky deals forged with willing governments — often in exchange for cash — the U.S. has deported hundreds of people to foreign countries that may not respect the removal protections they have been granted in U.S. courts, returning them to the dangers they fled.
The Times pieced together an account of the secret deportations to Cameroon through phone interviews with four people on the flight and their lawyers, and verified their deportations and protection statuses through government documents that showed most had removal protections. The migrants spoke on condition of anonymity, for fear of reprisals. […]
“When the president can’t abuse his own pardon power to reward an ally, he demands that others abuse their pardon power in order to make him happy.”
As a rule, Donald Trump exercises caution before condemning Israeli leaders, but in recent days, the American president apparently couldn’t help himself. The New York Times reported:
President Trump’s public excoriation of Israel’s president because he has not yet pardoned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his long-running corruption trial has touched a nerve in Israel.
Mr. Trump called President Isaac Herzog ‘disgraceful’ while speaking to reporters at the White House on Thursday.
“The people of Israel should really shame him” for not letting Netanyahu off the hook, Trump said, referring to Israel’s president, whose responsibilities are largely ceremonial.
The trouble began in earnest in June, when Trump published a rant to his social media platform, insisting that the case against the prime minister “should be CANCELLED, IMMEDIATELY, or a Pardon given to a Great Hero.” He added, “THIS TRAVESTY OF ‘JUSTICE’ CAN NOT BE ALLOWED!”
Netanyahu, who’s insisted he’s done nothing wrong, is facing charges of fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes. Trump condemned the cases, not because of evidence pointing to Netanyahu’s innocence, but because the American president believes the Israeli prime minister is an ally and “a WARRIOR.” In fact, at no point in his harangue did Trump even question the charges against the prime minister on the merits.
His argument followed a child-like logic: He likes Netanyahu, so Netanyahu’s alleged crimes must go unexamined.
[…] Trump continued his lobbying campaign, publicly and privately demanding a pardon for Netanyahu, without regard for the evidence or concerns about diplomatic propriety.
Complicating matters, it’s not just Israel. When Marine Le Pen, a prominent far-right politician in France, was caught up in an embezzlement scheme involving E.U. funds, Trump threw an online tantrum and condemned the case against her as a “witch hunt.” When former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was headed to prison, Trump imposed harsh new trade tariffs on the country as a punishment for not letting Bolsonaro get away with his crimes. [!]
Closer to home, Trump appears to have taken steps to punish Colorado because the state’s Democratic governor hasn’t freed a convicted felon the president likes.
What we’re dealing with, in other words, is a dynamic in which an American president abuses his pardon power to reward his allies, regardless of their crimes, and when he can’t issue pardons of his own, he lashes out and demands that others abuse their pardon power in order to make him happy.
As for developments in Israel, the Times’ report noted that the American president’s public condemnation “clearly stung” Herzog, who issued a statement late last week that clarified that the matter was still under review by the Ministry of Justice.
“Only upon completion of that process will President Herzog consider the request in accordance with the law, the best interests of the State of Israel, guided by his conscience, and without any influence from external or internal pressures of any kind,” the statement said.
Herzog added pointedly, “Israel is a sovereign state governed by the rule of law.”
By all appearances, that was precisely the opposite of what Trump wanted to hear.
“The more desperate Trumpt becomes, the more he starts throwing out ideas he thinks people might like […]”
As Election Day 2024 approached, Donald Trump started throwing around weird promises at a frantic pace. The list of random, poorly thought-out gimmicks offered in the final weeks of the contest included offering free IVF treatments, defraying the costs of child care expenses with imaginary tariff money, cutting consumers’ car insurance bills in half and even eliminating the Department of the Interior for reasons that didn’t make any sense.
But among the deluge of panic-stricken proposals, one stood out for me: In September 2024, the then-candidate declared that he wanted to see a temporary 10% cap on credit card interest rates — an idea he appeared to take seriously for a day or two before quietly dropping it.
About a month ago, the president brought it back, declaring in a message posted to his social media platform, “Effective January 20, 2026, I, as President of the United States, am calling for a one year cap on Credit Card Interest Rates of 10%.”
For a few days, this caused quite a stir. Trump said financial giants would have no choice but comply — he said credit card companies that failed to lower their rates to 10% would be “in violation of the law,” as if he could unilaterally create new laws without Congress — and White House officials even floated the possibility of banks issuing new “Trump Cards” with 10% interest rates.
Whatever happened to this apparent presidential priority? Politico reported:
Trump said in early January that he’d cap credit card rates at 10 percent, a move that would have upended the banking industry, only to change his mind and ask Congress for legislation.
[…] Whatever one thinks about the rapid rise, fall, reemergence and collapse of the proposal, it’s tough not to notice how often other proposals follow a similar trajectory. Indeed, in this White House, rapid-fire policy gimmicks come and go at breakneck speeds.
Chatter about tariff rebate checks was briefly a big deal, before it quietly vanished, following the same path as the vaunted DOGE rebate checks from a year earlier. [!]Trump’s pitiful health care plan was in the news for about a day, before it disappeared, too. [!]
Remember 50-year mortgages? No wants to talk about them anymore. How about the White House’s plan to allow people to use 401(k) funds to make down payments on a home? That evaporated, too.
Remember when Trump was going to impose steep economic penalties on any country that does business with Iran? He quietly changed his mind soon after. How about his plan to decertify aircrafts made in Canada? That also soon collapsed.
[…] I’m also struck by the underlying White House mania. […] a degree of desperation appears to have set in for Trump, leading him to start throwing out ideas he thinks people might like as if he were a casino dealer, tossing cards at poker players, only to throw out new ones soon after.
The difference, however, is that casino dealers tend to know what they’re doing.
if a publicly owned airport were to adopt the name, would it need to license that name from Trump’s private company? In most licensing arrangements, the trademark owner must charge a licensing fee
[…]
For now, we can only sit back and ponder the significance of a sitting President filing a trademark application with his own intellectual property office to protect the name of an airport he is pressuring politicians to rename.
How about his plan to decertify aircraft made in Canada
He will wait until wildfire season to ground all the De Havilland Canadair 515 and CL 415 water bombers.
Militant Agnosticsays
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @105
if a publicly owned airport were to adopt the name, would it need to license that name from Trump’s private company? In most licensing arrangements, the trademark owner must charge a licensing fee
A good reason to not name an airport after him.
Are you now or have you ever been an actual Sky Captain
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Militant Agnostic @108: A tongue-in-cheek honorary title bestowed by someone for often coming to their aid, and other’s. We watched a lot of movies too. The Jude Law film wasn’t among them, but I imagine that was the nym’s inspiration.
Trump’s creation: A Europe that spends more on defense — and can stand up to the US
For the convenience of readers, here are some links back to the previous set of 500 comments on The Infinite Thread.
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/12/30/infinite-thread-xxxviii/comment-page-4/#comment-2293238
Key US infectious-diseases centre to drop pandemic preparation
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/12/30/infinite-thread-xxxviii/comment-page-4/#comment-2293237
Has ICE Debuted New ‘No Lying’ Policy?, by Josh Marshall
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/12/30/infinite-thread-xxxviii/comment-page-4/#comment-2293236
Trump falsely claims that the U.S. is ‘the only country that has mail-in ballots’
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/12/30/infinite-thread-xxxviii/comment-page-4/#comment-2293235
“My Daughter Lived the Liam Ramos Nightmare. It Turned Out Worse for Us.”
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/12/30/infinite-thread-xxxviii/comment-page-4/#comment-2293233
“A stay is not permission for the loser of a case to hijack the property of the winning party.” A report from WIRED
Lynna @496 in the last 500: Here’s the second half.
Slate – My daughter lived the Liam Ramos nightmare. It turned out worse for us.
Zelenskyy to Trump: Here’s how to pile pressure on Putin
“The Ukrainian president sat down with POLITICO for an exclusive interview at the Munich Security Conference.”
That’s live coverage that is presented via video. Not yet complete.
Other coverage from a different Politico source:
Link
Sky Captain @3, thanks for posting the rest of that Slate article!
In other news, as reported by MS NOW:
An Associated Press report, as summarized by Steve Beenen:
See also:
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/12/30/infinite-thread-xxxviii/comment-page-4/#comment-2293237
Has ICE Debuted New ‘No Lying’ Policy?, by Josh Marshall
Associated Press:
Not good. Looks like Trump is planning another military offensive action.
Washington Post:
Good news, as reported by The New York Times:
MS NOW:
Washington Post:
GovExec – ‘Suicide is only one option’: Social Security staff newly assigned to phone duties raise concerns over training
On the new opposition leader of the Aussie reichwing parties – LNP coalition :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-14/what-we-know-about-angus-taylor-policies/106342170
Source : https://www.space.com/astronomy/dark-universe/could-the-milky-way-galaxys-supermassive-black-hole-actually-be-a-clump-of-dark-matter
NBC – ‘Even in Russia, they don’t treat children like this’: A family’s nightmare in ICE detention
ProPublica – A federal tool to check voter citizenship keeps making mistakes
* Broderick has a quote saying SAVE’s positive results are accurate, and the negative results mean unknown. Which sounds okay, except that SAVE automatically reports negatives as crimes.
Marcy Wheeler (EmptyWheel):
* Cheryl Rofer: “The presumption of regularity is that the government has done a competent job of preparing its case and is presenting the case honestly.”
Wheeler linked the document and posted a screenshot of the footnote, which was a wall of citations and quotes like this:
The Onion: RFK Jr. Mandates All Americans Drink Mysterious Glowing Liquid.
.https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/alexei-navalny-killing-russia-latest-5HjdSM8_2/
^ sorry, posted too soon.
Putin murdered opposition leader Alexei Navalny with epibatidine poison, from poison dart frogs.
.https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/alexei-navalny-killing-russia-latest-5HjdSM8_2/
Predator: Badlands (2025) | Sisters Torn Apart — Ya Seeks Revenge For Her Mother.
.https://youtube.com/shorts/mQ76teWJ6TM
Trump Forced to Abandon Blanket Tariffs on Steel Now
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mj-rL0nBv3Y
Trump Faces Sudden Catastroph at Midterms…IN FLORIDA!! Alex Vindman is running for the senate and expleains the situation.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=FSgQ3s327T4
https://www.ms.now/all-in/watch/private-cabin-new-scrutiny-on-noem-lewandowski-s-close-relationship-amid-dhs-chaos-2487243843848
Video is 8:02 minutes
Link
Washington Post link
“EXCLUSIVE: Researcher skeptical of ‘Havana syndrome’ tested secret weapon on himself.
“In 2024, a Norwegian researcher skeptical that pulsed-energy weapons could do damage to human brains built a device and tested it on himself. It didn’t go well.”
Doctors Without Borders suspends some work at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital due to presence of armed men
U.S. military reports a series of airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria
“U.S forces carried out 10 airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria between Feb. 3 and Thursday in retaliation for a December ambush that killed two American soldiers.”
@20 birgerjohansson:
Have to give Putin some style points there. Navalny was already in a Russian prison camp, there are any number of boring ways he could have been killed. But no, Putin went to the lengths of doing something from a murder mystery just to be exotic and interesting.
The Hill: Noem says she’s ‘still in charge’ of DHS
If you have to publicly announce that you are in control then your losing control.
Steven Dennis (Bloomberg):
Rando:
JM @30, I think your conclusion is true. I think Kristi Noem was also making that point about being in charge because she wants to order ICE agents to patrol election sites during the midterm elections.
Chris Hayes quote @24: “Noem and her unofficial number two, Corey Lewandowski”
“What is Corey Lewandowski’s job exactly?”
“Under Secretary.”
—Robert A. George (Comedian)
WaPo – Trump tells soldiers to vote GOP in campaign-style rally at Fort Bragg
Ian Bassin (Lawyer): “The commander in chief telling troops who they have to vote for is itself a presidency ending impeachable scandal.”
Interesting analysis by a military historian of methods of opposing a much more powerful state, with thoughts on the anti-ICE protests here in Minneapolis.
Link
CNN – Trump administration deported some migrants at a cost of $1 million each
* I guess the eighty percent was mostly that El Salvador / Venezuela prisoner swap. Some deportees might’ve traveled on their own. And a few ferried by the US gov.
(Testing if the link works)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=9MTEa45FjXY
Every single state: Trump’s approval/ disapproval rate visualised.
It has gone significantly worse the last few weeks.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=9MTEa45FjXY
11.000 year old mesolithic bones.
“Northern Britain’s oldest human remains are of a young female child, DNA analysis reveals”
.https://phys.org/news/2026-02-northern-britain-oldest-human-young.html
When this girl lived, people in Anatolia were already building temples.
@34 CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain
Notice also how bad his argument is. Fort Bragg isn’t some local reserve base or training facility where the soldiers will have some local and historical sympathy with the name. Fort Bragg is a huge facility with soldiers from all over the US, most of which are indifferent and some of which won’t like being at a base name for a Confederate general.
He can’t think of a better way to appeal to them because he has no empthy for them and went with the name because he is obsessed with naming places. The soldiers are aware that he has worked to cut funding to the VA and otherwise tried to cut their support and money so even though soldiers lean right wing they probably are not big fans.
birgerjohansson @20, JM @29.
Dan Kaszeta (CBRN expert): “Russia does not actually need a rare tree frog from Ecuador to get the toxin that killed Navalny.”
Rando: “dart frogs in captivity stop producing their toxins due to their different diet (millions of fruit flies). So synthesis of epibatidine does seem far more likely. […] Dart frogs are whole niche hobby within herpetoculture (reptile & amphibian keeping). Some hobbyists create incredibly beautiful mini-rainforests in terraria, with rare plants, and automated systems for misting etc.”
Toxin used to poison Alexei Navalny was synthesized at the same institute that created the Novichok nerve agent
* Novichok of course was used in another of Putin’s poisonings.
I almost imagined a Trump CIA op screwing up an assassination with harmless frogs… before remembering the oafs just smash-and-grabbed a head of state. They can’t even spell subtle.
A black female lawyer was reportedly assaulted by two uniformed police officers in Oshawa Ontario.
The lawyer was working in a in Interview room 10 minutes after the courthouse closed. She was charged with trespassing.
Source : https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/2026/02/07/environmental-breakdown-isnt-a-distant-possibility-its-a-threat-to-world-stability/
Palate Cleanser Coral Pink Sand Dunes Tiger Beetle a critically endangered Coelopteran found in just a tiny area on the Utah-Arizona border.
The dunes are pink not the tiger beetle BTW.
See :
https://beetlesinthebush.com/2011/11/03/cicindela-albissima%E2%80%94the-coral-pink-sand-dunes-tiger-beetle/
Plus : https://azleader.wordpress.com/2012/09/07/coral-pink-sand-dunes/
WA goes repressive authoritarian and erodes the right toprotest too, sigh :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-15/wa-government-introduce-new-protest-hate-speech-laws/106347042
Latest epsiode of If you are Listening here – How QAnon and Epstein blew up the justice system – under 25 mins long & on the Epstein files.
22 mins long
How Spiders Survive Winter is Cooler Than You Think
Well, this surprises me esp given the existence of the Greenland Shark which I’d always presumed had southern counterparts & thought Great Whites might’ve roamed pretty close to that far too..
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2026-02-11/shark-filmed-in-deep-antarctic-waters/106222014
Emphasis added.
Social media censorship latest YouTube BANS Pro-Palestine Activist Guy Christensen – ten mins long.
Vale Kudelka. Respect. Bloody good cartoonist and good human being. Rest in power. :
Source: https://theconversation.com/as-beautiful-as-they-were-powerful-jon-kudelkas-political-cartoons-were-made-with-true-conviction-275538
Pauline Pantsdwon and that song plus more discussed here –
I Don’t Like It: The Pauline Pantsdown Story – under 15 mins long. So many memories.
Wish they were’t relevant now – but they are.
Referencing this song – Pauline Pantsdown – I Don’t Like It! – 3 mins 20 secs. Old 1990’s classic satirical song that got a racist Aussie polly really riled up. See above.
(Full of Aussie politics refs from the 90’s so ..yeah.)
Also Sammy J’s poem The Girl From Ipswich Town – 3mins 15 secs again lotsa old Aussie poliical refs here. Still FWIW.
Oh and so wish this was too outdated to be relavent these days in Aussie politics.
See wikipage here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Hanson
Plus or the horrifying modern truth :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-15/story-lab-one-nation-polling/106322978
They wwere afringe far reichwing party but they are bing normalised and the Overton window ia pushed outta the house , down the streetand right to teh rubish dump and the furthest end of our politics sadly.
But then that’s a really disturbing, awful, all too common trend these days.
Reform in UK, Trump kult in the USA..
(Plentiful loud expletives.)
@ ^They = One Neuron party & Pauline Hanson obvs.
Needless to say is needless to say but so many needlessly say it – coz is it so needless or needs must we say for is it so needless to say it?
https://www.ms.now/opinion/trump-minnesota-ice-tom-homan-metro-surge“>Trump’s Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota was a failure by every metric
“The Trump administration has claimed “great success” in a city that actually put Donald Trump on his back foot.”
Related video at the link.
The Hill: DOJ sends letter to Congress with list of people named in Epstein files, including Trump: Report
The DOJ was required to provide this by the law that forced them to make redacted Epstein files public. It seems to be a pile of legalese that is as intentionally obscure as possible.
The list of officials and “politically exposed” people appears to be everybody named in the file other then victems and Epstein himself. Elvis turns up on the list because he was mentioned once in a conversation.
This is DOJ officials making absurd claims that are difficult to disprove because only the redacted files are public.
YouTube link
Pam Bondi Hearing, the SNL cold open.
Followup to comment 32.
Noem boasts of Trump administration ensuring ‘we have the right people voting’ ahead of midterms
New York Times link
“Deep in China’s Mountains, a Nuclear Revival Takes Shape”
“Satellite imagery of secretive nuclear facilities reveals Beijing’s efforts to expand its arsenal, just as the last global guardrails on nuclear weapons vanish.”
Satellite imagery is available at the link.
More at the link.
New York Times link
“18 Days, 20 Lives: New Yorkers Who Didn’t Survive the Cold”
“Freezing days and nights claimed the lives of a grandmother, a dancer, a dispatcher […].”
Individual stories are included at the link.
Washington Post link
“Trump tells soldiers to vote GOP in campaign-style rally at Fort Bragg”
“Army policy prohibits partisan displays, and most service members refrained from cheering.”
re Lynna @66:
The Medal of honor is awarded only for conspicuous gallantry and risk of life above and beyond the call of duty during combat against an enemy force. I have doubts that anything that happened in that dubious raid meets the criteria. The Orange Turd just loves receiving and giving out awards.
“Shut Up About The BLOODY Emu War : A Full History of Australia’s Worst Defeat ”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=n76hbNOO6z4
Woman detained by ICE after Hawai’i visit
Elon Musk:
Commentary
South African refugees are left to fend for themselves
Cord Cutters news: Babylon 5 Is Now Free to Watch On YouTube
The plan is to upload one per week and only the initial episode is uploaded right now. If they stick with uploading it I will binge watch the whole thing at some point.
The video quality does not appear to be the best. Babylon 5 is early computer special effects and the visual effects are not the best at times. The quality of transfer does not appear great, a common problem with early digital cameras. They didn’t record at super high resolution so moving the video to a different resolution or re-encoding it causes video effects. It will still be great to see the whole thing in order when/if it all gets uploaded.
Forgotten Weapons: The AI Paradox: Results of My Thumbnail Experiment
Forgotten weapons is a long running Youtube channel dedicated to fire arms. This video has nothing to do with that. It is about a test the author did using an AI generated thumbnail for one of his videos. Turns out that the results were consistent, the AI thumbnail attracted more viewers that watched more of the video but comments from fans was universally negative. Interesting short discussion of what is involved and how it effects people generating video.
My opinion is I don’t care if they use AI to generate a thumbnail as long as it’s actually related to the video. For regular content creators generating an interesting thumbnail is an annoying bit of drudge work and may be click bait. I would rather a quick AI pic then a hand composed pic that isn’t really connected to the video.
Link
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ty42uz67qbam52si5yduwwaa/post/3mevugl5gqc2l
See also: Reuters link to an article that is better because it adds context:
Rubio is clumsy when it comes to diplomacy.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:dsssax6ne5ghruk6velxnbp4/post/3metkrirmia2u
Good photo at the link.
See also: EUROMAIDAN Press link
‘Not ready for prime time’: A federal tool to check voter citizenship keeps making mistakes, by ProPublica
Link
Unfortunately Lennon may be the exception. County clerk Brianna Lennon ran elections in Boone County, Missouri.
Lynna @ 74
Someone clumsy ar diplomacy being appointed to this position in the government? That is very on brand for The Idiot (TM)
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
S13 E01: Olympics, ICE & DHS: 2/15/26:
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=NpPWFsONyiM
“John Wilkes Woof” indeed.
Britain:
“Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain [far right party]: REAL Threat to Nigel Farage & Reform UK in 2026?”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=njbb0EFK_TA
Bart Ehrman
Was Jesus a CopyCat? The Role of John the Baptist in the Ministry of Jesus.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=il9D90R4Myk
BTW the Cristian apologist David Wood is useful for skeptics as his faith gives him the energy to dig through boring islamic writings (my mind would melt after ten pages) to find contradictions in a rival religion.
And unlike some Christians I know he is intellectually honest, and does not misrepresent what he finds.
.
Tragically, he has fallen in the same “Islam is the great enemy” cognitive cul-de-sac as so many other Christians and seems to accept what media like Fox News says.
Rupert Murdoch has a lot to answer for.
Follow-up to comment 66.
Trump’s efforts to politicize the U.S. military become even more brazen and radical
“The more the president delivers highly partisan messages to active-duty troops, the more he targets a bedrock principle of the United States.”
Related video at the link.
Ignoring reality, Trump eyes elections changes ‘whether approved by Congress or not’
“Trump’s first elections power-grab was a ridiculous move that failed in the courts. His second will arguably be even worse.”
Trump struggles to explain the point of his team’s nuclear talks with Iran
“You said that the Iranian nuclear sites have been totally obliterated,” a reporter told the president. “What’s left to go after?” His answer fell short.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/tom-homan-gets-big-mad-on-the-sunday
“Tom Homan Gets Big Mad On The Sunday Shows”
Real life for schools in Minneapolis: what it is like when Trump’s administration surges ICE personnel into a city:
Washington Post link
More at the link.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/i-didnt-come-here-for-art-tabs-mon
https://www.wonkette.com/p/fcc-finishes-copypasting-bad-bunny
Owner of North Texas warehouse says it won’t sell or lease to feds for ICE facility
[Virginia] With state backing, Augusta County says no to ICE facility
MN Reformer – FBI won’t provide evidence in Alex Pretti killing
New Jersey launches ICE reporting website
* Like Minnesota’s form.
It’s The Munich Security Conference, Starring AOC, An Astronaut, And The Woman Who Warned Everybody!
https://www.wonkette.com/p/its-the-munich-security-conference
New York Times link
“Judge Orders Slavery Displays Restored at George Washington’s Philadelphia Home”
Epstein pal will reportedly keep cushy new gig at CBS News
You may soon need a passport to vote. Trump is making it harder to get one.
Link
https://www.wonkette.com/p/trump-nominee-is-huge-racist-if-you
“Trump Nominee Is Huge Racist, If You Can Believe It”
And yet, Jeremy Carl is up for a high-level State Department post.
Robert Duvall R.I.P.
He was 95 years old.
MS NOW:
Link
Related video art the link.
New York Times:
New York Times, reporting on the effect of vaccine research being curtailed:
More:
New York Times:
Trump publicly condemns Israel’s president for the Trumpiest of reasons
“When the president can’t abuse his own pardon power to reward an ally, he demands that others abuse their pardon power in order to make him happy.”
For Trump, rapid-fire policy gimmicks come and go at breakneck speeds
“The more desperate Trumpt becomes, the more he starts throwing out ideas he thinks people might like […]”
Trump’s private company files trademark for ‘President Donald J. Trump International Airport’
A man was detained by ICE when agents pretended to be stranded motorists.
Lynna @104
He will wait until wildfire season to ground all the De Havilland Canadair 515 and CL 415 water bombers.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @105
A good reason to not name an airport after him.
Are you now or have you ever been an actual Sky Captain
Militant Agnostic @108: A tongue-in-cheek honorary title bestowed by someone for often coming to their aid, and other’s. We watched a lot of movies too. The Jude Law film wasn’t among them, but I imagine that was the nym’s inspiration.
* others’
Mary Trump shares her insights
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=tJB4Jd1h_oY
A nice, refreshingly normal lady from a family of grifters and predators.
Comparison EU and USA
.https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1C7HoFDWZi/
-Remember, EU also contains several former east bloc nations who started from a very liv level 1992.