curated citations to news sources
Atlantic:Trump’s Tirades Aren’t Swaying Putin
… Putin hasn’t changed: He’s pursuing his war as viciously as he has from the start.
What has changed, however, is that Putin’s behavior is now a liability for Trump, who painted himself into a corner with laughable claims that he could end the war before he even took office, or on day one. The Russian president played along with Trump, as he has for years, because it is in Russia’s interest to have an anti-American, anti-democratic force of chaos in the Oval Office, but none of that meant that Putin was going to stop the war.
(Atlantic more…)
WSJ: Time for a GOP Senate Revolt on Sanctions Against Putin
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Mr. Trump may be the only person in the world still surprised by how Mr. Putin is behaving. The Russian is the same man he’s been for two decades, bent on reconstituting as much of the old Soviet empire as he can get away with. Ukraine is his obsession. He’s not going to modify his ambitions merely because Mr. Trump alternates between begging for peace and scolding outbursts on social media.
NY Times: Republican Calls for Russia Sanctions Intensify Amid Escalating Strikes
A group of G.O.P. senators has grown more vocal about urging penalties on Russia for its aggression against Ukraine, offering a counterpoint to President Trump’s hands-off stance.
Daily: Nightmare For Republicans As Trump Admits That He’s Protecting Putin
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What Trump doesn’t realize is that he has implicated himself in the bloodshed in Ukraine. If Trump is protecting Putin, then he is allowing Russia to murder the Ukrainian people.
Trump didn’t have the guts to challenge Putin or even stand up to him directly. Trump seems to be begging Putin by proclaiming that, whether Putin realizes it or not, he needs Trump.
The President Of The United States is admitting that he is weak and there is a certain level of begging in Trump’s post that can be read as containing.
Reuters: US and Russia clash in public as the Ukraine war heats up
- Trump says Putin is playing with fire
- Kremlin says Trump not well informed of the situation
- Zelenskiy says Russia has gathered 50,000 troops near Sumy
- Germany and Ukraine to jointly produce long-range missiles
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Marisa Kabas: FEMA at ‘high risk’ of disrupting ‘life-saving’ disaster relief, per internal memo
The agency in charge of mitigating disasters is in the midst of its own.
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One slide in the memo, which was also shared with approximately 30 members of FEMA senior leadership, pertains to staffing at Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, a critical high security facility in Virginia. (It contains the nuclear bunker where congressional leaders were stashed on 9/11.) The slide states that “staffing was already at a critical low at the beginning of 2025” and because of departures “the facility is at risk of not being fully mission capable.”
(Marisa Kabas more…)
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – May 27, 2025
Political scientist Adam Bonica noted last Friday that Trump and the administration suffered a 96% loss rate in federal courts in the month of May. Those losses were nonpartisan: 72.2% of Republican-appointed judges and 80.4% of Democratic-appointed judges ruled against the administration.
The administration sustained more losses today.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Bulwark: They Are, In Fact, Coming After Obamacare Again
Plus: Billy Joel and the value of medical research.
Politico: RFK Jr. threatens to bar government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals
The health secretary said the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet are in bed with pharma.
Bulwark: RFK Jr.’s War on Vaccines Is Here
Anyone who thinks he’ll stop with COVID shots is deluding themselves. The time to raise hell is now.
…By now it should be clear to everyone, if it somehow wasn’t before, that the secretary of health and human services is gunning for America’s vaccines. Kennedy, who just last year proclaimed that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective,” who has never stopped insisting that vaccines are connected to autism, and who has actively counseled people not to vaccinate their children for years, claimed implausibly after Trump’s reelection that “we’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody.” But since his confirmation, he has been busily laying the groundwork to do exactly that.
(Bulwark more…)
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Politico: Trump team pauses new student visa interviews as it weighs expanding social media vetting
It’s the latest salvo against universities, many of whom rely heavily on foreign students for funds.
France24: Reversing the brain drain: Can Europe successfully woo scientists amid US research cuts?
Snopes: Clarifying claims surrounding Harvard’s free Constitution course
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BBC Mundo: Cómo Trump está militarizando la frontera entre EE.UU. y México
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Pese a la caída de las cifras, que comenzó en los últimos meses del gobierno de Joe Biden y se aceleró con la política de mano dura y de disuasión del de su sucesor, Donald Trump, la frontera está en un proceso progresivo de militarización.
(BBC Mundo more…)TNR: The Laws Propping Up Trump’s Masked Deportation Army
Across the country, unidentifiable law enforcement agents are snatching unsuspecting people off the streets where they live. But just because it’s beyond the pale doesn’t make it illegal.
NBC: Trump administration has ramped up deportations but is still far below pace it wants
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Even deporting more than 17,200 people in a single month does not put President Donald Trump on track to make good on his Inauguration Day promise to deport “millions and millions.” In fact, 17,200 deportations per month is less than half the pace it would take to reach the record number of 430,000 deportations in a single year, set under former President Barack Obama in 2013.
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LAWdork: DOJ rushes to SCOTUS in dispute over people it is trying to send to South Sudan
On Tuesday afternoon, the Justice Department went to the U.S. Supreme Court to ask the justices to stop a district court from ordering the administration to implement the steps DOJ told the district court that the administration could take.The absurd request came in the case where U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy held multiple hearings this past week to address the administration’s effort to send people to South Sudan — a country from which the Trump administration has removed all “non-emergency U.S. government personnel” due to the dangerous conditions.
After the flight had already left the U.S. in then-apparent violation of a prior preliminary injunction issued by Murphy, he ordered the administration to keep the men it had sent out of the country within their “custody and control.” Later, after the flight landed at a U.S. military base in Djibouti, Murphy found the administration had violated the preliminary injunction. …
(LAWdork more…)
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EEAGLI: Data centre power demand rival countries
(EEAGLI more…)
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arsTECHNICA: Trump signs executive orders meant to resurrect US nuclear power
Currently, there are no nuclear power plants scheduled for construction in the US. Everybody with plans to build one hasn’t had a reactor design approved, while nobody is planning to use any of the approved designs. This follows a period in which only three new reactors have entered service since 1990. Despite its extremely low carbon footprint, nuclear power appears to be dead in the water.On Friday, the Trump administration issued a series of executive orders intended to revive the US nuclear industry. These include plans to streamline the reactor approval process and boost the construction of experimental reactors by the Department of Energy. But they also contain language that’s inconsistent with other administration priorities and fundamentally misunderstands the use of nuclear power. Plus, some timelines might be, shall we say, unrealistic: three new experimental reactors reaching criticality in just over a year.
(arsTECHNICA more…)
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Financial Times: Donald Trump offers Canada free ‘Golden Dome’ defence protection if it gives up sovereignty
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A spokesperson for Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, said: “The prime minister has been clear at every opportunity, including in his conversations with president Trump, that Canada is an independent, sovereign nation, and it will remain one.”The US and Canada already have a defence agreement, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad), which includes ballistic missile attack detection. Canada’s responsibilities in Norad have come under the spotlight as the Arctic Circle emerges as the new frontline in a geopolitical contest with Russia and China.
…“The idea is extremely technically risky, it’s inexact in details too. There’s huge risks involved in this, this system is akin to a moonshot with very shaky political and financial support within the US,” he said.
Trump last week claimed the project would cost $175bn, vowing to make it “operational” by the end of his presidential term. Using interceptors in space, the shield would protect against sophisticated threats such as hypersonic missiles, advanced cruise missiles and intercontinental ballistic missiles launched by US adversaries.
However, the envisioned web of space-based interceptors requires technology that does not exist, meaning the Golden Dome faces considerable development hurdles. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office also estimated that developing and launching space-based interceptors could cost up to $542bn over 20 years.
(Financial Times more…)
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NY Times: Trump to Pardon Reality-Show Couple Convicted of $36 Million Fraud
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Crooks & Liars: Shareholders Revolt Against CBS ‘Deal’ With Trump
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Ken Klippenstein: Elias Rodriguez’s Leaked Chats
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Decoding Fox News: Ignore Trump’s Obvious Insanity Biden Got Old
A condensed overview of 15 hours of Fox News for the week ending 5/25/25
Last week started with the announcement that former president Joe Biden had an aggressive form of prostate cancer that had metastasized to his bone. The folks at Fox used the former president’s diagnosis as even more proof that the entire Democratic Party was complicit in hiding his declining health to the American public.
Meanwhile Trump continues to show signs of his own cognitive decline along with a severe personality disorder. During a commencement speech at West Point Trump claimed there were ‘no wars and no problems’ during his first administration.
During Trump’s first term in office the U.S. was still at war in Afghanistan, Neo Nazis terrorized Charlottesville, Virginia, a global pandemic caused the death of millions, international supply chains fell apart, Americans faced shortages of food, medical equipment and other necessities, and entire industries were shutdown.
The same summer that COVID-19 ravaged the country Americans participated in over 10,600 demonstrations after a Black man, George Floyd, was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
In the final month of Trump’s presidency, a violent mob of his supporters tried to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power and broke into the Capitol building by tearing down barricades and smashing windows and doors. Over 140 members of law enforcement were injured, while Trump sat in the White House dining room watching the melee on Fox News.
Within 36 hours of the riot five people had died and millions of dollars of government property had been damaged. Like any other U.S. president Trump also had his share of mass shootings, school shootings, natural disasters and terrorist attacks.
For Trump to say he had ‘no problems” during his first administration isn’t just an understatement it’s a profound sign of a deeply deluded man who lives in his own reality. His self-aggrandizing fantasies are only amplified by his personal propaganda machine – Fox News.
Fox News will twist itself into knots to defend their glorious leader’s late-night rants on social media, his erratic trade policies that rattle markets and his obvious fabrications about nearly every subject.
(Decoding Fox News more…)
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
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