Category: 2025

404 Media: The Signal Clone the Trump Admin Uses Was Hacked

A hacker has breached and stolen customer data from TeleMessage, an obscure Israeli company that sells modified versions of Signal and other messaging apps to the U.S. government to archive messages, 404 Media has learned. The data stolen by the hacker contains the contents of some direct messages and group chats sent using its Signal clone, as well as modified versions of WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat. …

The hack shows that an app gathering messages of the highest ranking officials in the government—Waltz’s chats on the app include recipients that appear to be Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, and JD Vance—contained serious vulnerabilities that allowed a hacker to trivially access the archived chats of some people who used the same tool. The hacker has not obtained the messages of cabinet members, Waltz, and people he spoke to, but the hack shows that the archived chat logs are not end-to-end encrypted between the modified version of the messaging app and the ultimate archive destination controlled by the TeleMessage customer.
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NewsNation: Putin says he hopes there will be no need to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine

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In comments aired Sunday in a film by Russian state television about his quarter of a century in power, Putin said Russia has the strength and the means to bring the conflict in Ukraine to a “logical conclusion.”

Responding to a question about Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory, Putin said: “There has been no need to use those (nuclear) weapons … and I hope they will not be required.”
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Yahoo Finance: Warren Buffett: ‘Trade should not be a weapon’

The first question for Warren Buffett at the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting involved world trade as President Trump’s tariff policy disrupts the status quo.

“Trade should not be a weapon,” Buffett said at the end of a detailed answer about the history of the United States and how global trade developed.
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David Lat: Lawyers Rally For The Rule Of Law: A Photo Essay

I’ve never seen a protest with this many people in suits.

Yesterday was Law Day—and this year, it took on added meaning for many lawyers.¹ Thousands participated in a National Law Day of Action, centered around public events to express support for the rule of law, which were held in more than 50 cities across the country.

In New York City, an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 demonstrators gathered in Foley Square, across the street from federal and state courthouses, to rally for the rule of law—and to protest recent attacks upon it. The event was sponsored by the New York City Bar Association, the New York County Lawyers Association, the New York Council of Defense Lawyers, and the New York Civil Liberties Union.
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NPR: The U.S. economy shrinks as Trump’s tariffs spark recession fears

As President Trump marks his 100th day in office this week, there’s not much to celebrate about the U.S. economy.
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NY Times: Trump budget draft ends Narcan program and other addiction measures.

The opioid overdose reversal medication commercially known as Narcan saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year and is routinely praised by public health experts for contributing to the continuing drop in opioid-related deaths. But the Trump administration plans to terminate a $56 million annual grant program that distributes doses and trains emergency responders in communities across the country to administer them, according to a draft budget proposal.
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The federal health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has long shown a passionate interest in addressing the drug crisis and has been outspoken about his own recovery from heroin addiction. The proposed elimination of addiction programs seems at odds with that goal. Last year, Mr. Kennedy’s presidential campaign produced a documentary that outlined federally supported pathways out of addiction.
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Steward Beckham: The Unhealed Nation

Why Immigration Couldn’t Save America’s Conscience

Immigrants in America, no matter how they came, are one of those beautiful traits of our nation that you can reflect on—like a cool spring in the desert—and let cleanse your heart from the hypocrisies and outright lies studying American history often reveals.

Yet even this instinct, sincere and vital as it is, can be manipulated. It can become another way we shield ourselves from reckoning with the full story of America, and from building a political imagination that refuses to revert to comfort and false innocence.
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Daily Beast: RFK Jr.’s Wish Is Coming True: Everybody’s Getting Measles

RFK Jr.’s vision for America is rapidly becoming reality, with the number of measles cases skyrocketing across the country, bringing the number of confirmed cases to a total of 884.

Just last month, the Health and Human Services Secretary appeared to argue in an interview with Sean Hannity that natural immunity was the best defense against the highly infectious disease. In other words, Kennedy believes that it would be great if everyone got measles.
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Rebecca Solnit: We Are Firefighters: A Talk About the Climate and the Trees

… Breath by breath from our first to the last we take this atmosphere, this sky into where our lungs separate out the oxygen and our hearts send it coursing through our bodies and we exhale the rest, the nitrogen and the carbon dioxide. We think we are solids, but we are two thirds liquid, and survive through taking these sips of sky into our lungs.

Trees on the other hand, take in the carbon dioxide, making their bodies of it or sending it into the ground, and excrete oxygen, so the breaths each and all of us are taking in at this very moment are full of oxygen released into the atmosphere by plants, dating back to the origins of life and the blue-green algae that radically changed the composition of the atmosphere by giving it this oxygen. Then came billions of years in which plants pulled carbon dioxide out of the earth and buried it in the ground, where some of over the ages became coal, became petroleum, became the methane marketed as natural gas.
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – April 25, 2025

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These actions to seize power and to hammer into place extremist MAGA immigration policies are dramatic demonstrations of the Trump administration’s attempt to destroy democracy. Indeed, the attempt to attack the judges could well be a reaction to the major losses the administration took from the courts this week.

As Jacob Knutson of Democracy Docket wrote, Trump suffered at least 11 legal setbacks this week as judges blocked Trump from gutting the Voice of America media outlet, blocked the administration from removing people in Colorado and New York under the Alien Enemies Act, ordered the administration to comply with discovery requests from Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, told the Department of Education not to implement anti-DEI measures, blocked Trump’s executive order about elections, stopped the administration from impounding money from cities that don’t comply with its mass deportation orders, and blocked the administration from ending collective bargaining rights for federal workers.

The dramatic actions against ActBlue and immigrants are also signs of weakness as administration officials attempt to distract supporters not only from the disastrous tariffs, but also from the growing evidence that Trump is not functioning as a president should.
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