In the past few months, Trump has managed to turn the White House, its grounds, and nearby areas into a giant mess. Is it possible for the damage the South lawn caused by the cage matches to be repaired by July 4–the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence? And what about the reflecting pool? What a boondoggle that turned out to be! And it looks like the East Wing mess is going to be there for a long time, as Trump battles in court to build his imitation-Versailles ballroom.
Trump is obsessed with remaking Washington DC to resemble the Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower aesthetic, with gold plating and marble everywhere. And of course, every project will involve heavy duty corruption as Trump hands all the jobs to old cronies and political donors.
Of all the memes circulated about the American President, the toddler in diapers or giant baby playing with toy bombers in the Iranian LEGO videos probably comes closest to the spectacle inside the gilded bunker. But Trump thinks of himself as a Builder not a warrior. He has spent his life trying to live up to the unmet expectations of Fred Trump, a man who knew foundations and concrete and actually had put hammer to nail. Donald grew up at that man’s side, costumed in hard hat but with hands destined to remain forever soft. He learned the profane patois of New York and New Jersey contractors but farmed out the rest of it.
Trump’s second term is remarkable for more aberrances than we can track. But chief among them are the mysterious, unnecessary projects to demolish East Wing, re-coat the Reflecting Pool, affix gold decorations to the Oval Office with super glue and until stopped, tear down and re-do the Kennedy Center. An arc-de-Trump waits on the drawing board.
The only reasonable explanation for this orgy of wasteful brick and mortar is that the handlers need toys and games to keep the old man from disrupting the serious business of making war, destroying the sciences, defunding humanitarians, filling concentration camps, and wrecking alliances – matters attended to with great devotion by Vought, Miller, Kegseth, Kennedy and Wiles – and nameless administration elves whose allegiances are most definitely not to the American people.
One sure sign that the Bob the Builder projects exist to placate and distract the Old Man is the near total lack of transparency around the contracting processes. Normally, federal agencies like the National Park Service would oversee the reflecting pool, and the National Capital Planning Commission would sign off on the East Wing project. Contracts normally overseen by the federal General Services Administration (GSA) were presented directly by the Executive Residence of the White House. There is no known evidence of GSA oversight.
These baffling, expensive boondoggles seem to serve two purposes. They keep the old man occupied and open the spigot on taxpayer funds for the claque in New York, Jersey and Florida who have either done business with the old man over the years or ponied up for a Mar a Lago membership.
Susie and the Cats,, by Angela Thomson
The peeling algae-choked disaster of the $14 million Reflecting Pool improvement made news this weekend. The White House gave a no-bid $6.9 million contract to a company, Atlantic Industrial Coating….
Atlantic then brought on a subcontractor from Oklahoma, Mid-America Industrial Coatings whose truck was seen at the pool. Reporter Gabe Sanchez tweeted in May that he called Atlantic to inquire about the subcontract. The owner “became evasive and shut down the conversation,” Sanchez reported, stating “That’s none of your business.” And it wouldn’t be the Epstein class-infested administration if a former chief operating officer of the Mid-America didn’t also have multiple felony convictions for child sex abuse.
There there’s the man hired to keep the reflecting pool clear and free of algae: John J. Cafaro, a Taftian cigar chomping dandy with a Hitler haircut and ‘stache, another in a long line of individuals and events that suggest America passed through a wormhole into a Marvel Comic alternative universe around 2016.
Cafaro owns the aptly named Green Water Solutions. He bagged the no-bid $1.6 million contract despite – or because of? – a record of pleading guilty to bribing public officials. There is now more algae on the pool than there was before the project.
President Donald Trump’s makeover of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ahead of America’s 250th anniversary celebrations is not going according to plan.
Then, the new Trump-branded “American flag blue” color was short-lived as algae turned the pool green, causing the administration to send crews to dump hydrogen peroxide into the expansive pool to deal with the problem.
In recent days, NBC News spotted some blue paint chipping off the surface, with strips of it peeling away and floating atop the pool for visitors and passers-by to see as the busy summer tourist season in the nation’s capital gets underway.
On the west side of the pool Thursday, a small section of the blue painted surface appeared to be lifting away, exposing the darker unpainted layer underneath. A strip of detached paint could be seen floating beneath the water’s surface.
Algae still remain visible along the edges of the pool despite ongoing cleaning efforts. The developing deterioration drew the attention of onlookers who stopped to take a closer look.
The Trump administration is hardly the first to struggle to clean up the Reflecting Pool. But the algae-infused green color has drawn significant attention in recent days after the president slammed the pool earlier this year as “filthy” and “dirty,” promising to make it “beautiful” and blue at minimal expense.
For days, workers have been trying to rid the Reflecting Pool of algae after a more than $14 million renovation that President Donald Trump said was “done properly” and “could last for 100 years.”
But now workers have another problem to contend with: peeling paint. On Thursday, a sheet of the pool’s surface — painted in “American Flag Blue,” a color selected by the president — was seen floating in the water on the north side of the pool. It undulated in the water as curious tourists gathered, some of whom had come to see the green algae.
Pause, by Rosie Phillips
At 5:35 p.m. on Thursday, a worker came to remove the sheet of pool surface, telling a Washington Post photographer not to photograph it, despite being on public land.
The Interior Department did not immediately respond to questions about the paint and why the pool surface is separating. The agency said in a statement on Wednesday that it is treating the pool with hydrogen peroxide and “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology” to effectively cut off the algae’s food supply.
Steve Goodale, a swimming pool expert who viewed footage of the peeled sheet of paint, believes the pool’s surface may have been improperly prepared for the treatment.
“If there are any deficiencies with the surface prep, the surface can fail just like you see here,” he said, via email, “sheets and chunks peeling off.” Another culprit, he added, could be groundwater or pool water seeping underneath the lining.
Hydrogen peroxide can affect a pool’s surface, too, but not in the same way: “Less of a sheet peeling off and more like fading, hazing or breakdown of the material,” he said.
A bit more from the article:
On Thursday, the Interior Department press office posted on X that “the Reflecting Pool water is crystal clear, and our National Park Service team is now vacuuming up the dead algae resting on the bottom of some parts of the Reflecting Pool — just like the destroyed Iranian Navy resting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf.”
Indeed, some areas of the Reflecting Pool were looking cleaner compared with earlier in the week. Workers in chest-high waders stood in the middle of the pool and vacuumed the algae. The neon green-tinted water could be seen pouring out of tubes into nearby drainage grates. The center of the pool, though, was still neon green, and residual algae remained in the cleaned portions of the pool.
$14.6 million for this mess, and now the taxpayers will have to foot the bill for the efforts fix it. Trump has handed out another no-bid contract to another crony for the clean-up.
The federal government awarded a company owned by a Trump donor a $1.7 million contract to install a new water cleaning system for the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, federal records show, as President Trump pushes to overhaul the pool — and struggles with a bout of algae and a peeling paint job.
The no-bid contract to install a “Nano Bubble” filtration system went to Green Water Solutions, an Ohio-based company whose owner is listed on federal contracting documents as “JJ Cafaro Investment Trust.” The president and CEO of that trust is identified as John J. Cafaro on Federal Election Commission filings.
Prisac Nicholai, Self portrait with my cat
Cafaro has donated to several GOP candidates and conservative causes in recent years. He has donated extensively to Mr. Trump’s campaign and to Trump-linked groups, giving $250,000 to the Trump Victory fundraising committee at one point in 2020. FEC records show he also made donations to Democrats at various points.
A businessman and real estate developer, Cafaro pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations in 2010 over donations to his daughter’s congressional campaign. Nearly a decade earlier, he pleaded guiltyto conspiring to bribe Democratic Rep. James Traficant, and cooperated with prosecutors.
Cafaro and his wife own a home in Palm Beach, Florida, less than a mile from the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Green Water Solutions is also known as Greenwater Services. Inquiries to Cafaro did not yield a response, and the company referred CBS News to the National Park Service, a division of the Department of the Interior. The New York Times was first to report on Cafaro’s involvement in the Reflecting Pool project.
On its website, Green Water Solutions describes its specialty as purifying water to remove algae, bacteria and other contaminants using a system that injects ozone-infused “nano bubbles” into the water.
Lets hope it works.
Last night, Trump decided to blame his reflecting pool on “vandals.”
“It’s called ‘New Pond Syndrome,'” says Steve Goodale, a Canadian swimming pool specialist known online as “Swimming Pool Steve.” “It’s a known thing that happens when you take a natural, clear body of water like this that sits in an open air environment and you try to start it up, very often you end up with green water almost immediately.”
Goodale says the process took longer — a matter of days — to unfold in this case likely due to the sheer size of the pool, which measures 2,030 feet long and has a surface area of approximately 338,000 square feet….
Rosalina Stancheva Christova, a professor of aquatic ecology at George Mason University in Virginia, took water samples from the pool on Tuesday. She confirmed the algae belongs to the genus Desmodesmus, which she said is “growing in excessive amounts” but is not toxic or harmful.
Christova says this kind of common green algae is found all over the region, especially this time of year. The reflecting pool in particular provides “excellent conditions” for algae growth, she said: shallow, stagnant water, strong sunlight and no shade.
“It could happen every single summer,” she added. “But it seems that the disturbance of the pond during the renovations [is] accelerating this process.”
Christova said last month’s renovations may have affected the balance of nutrients in the pool, potentially accelerating the algae blooms. Goodale similarly views the resurfacing as one of several contributing factors.
“The new, darker interior surface is going to absorb more sunlight,” Goodale says. “It is going to result in water that’s warmer, and that ultimately is going to lead to more prolific algae growth.”
As National Park Service workers poured gallons of hydrogen peroxide into Donald Trump’s newly overhauled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, observers worried about the families of nonvoters that actually use the water: ducks and their ducklings.
It’s a “bad day to be a duck,” remarked a NOTUS reporter on X this week while watching the desperate bid to control blooming algae with chemicals. Some people on social media claim to have seen dead ducks in the pool….
A little girl in peasant dress, playing with a cat by Danish-Norwegian artist Peder Severin Krøyer.
A 3 percent concentration is generally considered safe. Containers of hydrogen peroxide being poured into the Reflecting Pool were marked as a “12 percent” solution, Common Dreams reported. A 12 percent solution is strong enough to “cause problems if inhaled and burns if the chemical touches the skin,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has detailed warnings and suggestions for “medical management” of the chemical.
Hydrogen peroxide is “not absorbed by the skin, but can cause systemic toxicity when inhaled or ingested,” notes the CDC. It’s also a “powerful” oxidizing agent; when it comes in contact with organic material, spontaneous combustion can occur,” the agency warns.
It’s not known how much of the bleaching chemical is being dumped into the Reflecting Pool that many ducks use as a pond. In addition, at this time of year several tiny ducklings are trailing their moms in the water. Their size could make them more vulnerable to toxins.
President Donald Trump on Friday claimed the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was intentionally vandalized and said law enforcement is actively investigating, as the administration has scrambled to fix the pool’s recent deterioration just days after Trump’s nearly $15 million renovation.
“We’ve had some real problems with Vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool,” Trump said in a late night post on Truth Social without providing evidence. “The algae is 75% gone, and the condition will soon be completely remedied, and the area that was vandalized, fortunately, is just a small area of damage, and will be fixed early next week.”
The post comes one day after blue material at the bottom of the pool began peeling off. The Reflecting Pool was painted blue and refilled in recent weeks as part of the pricey renovation ordered by Trump.
The president linked the alleged vandalism at the Reflecting Pool to the mysterious etching of “8647” into the grass on the National Mall days prior.
Johannes Albert Neuhuys, A girl playing with the cat 1877
“Just like three days ago, they destroyed the grass outside of the Pool, they’ve also done everything possible to hurt the inside surface that was just installed. No different than the chemicals that were used on the National Mall, they used something similar in the Reflecting Pool to try to destroy and demean our beautiful work,” Trump claimed.
When used as slang, the number 86 can refer to getting rid of or tossing something out. Trump is currently the 47th president. The phrase has recently been used to signal opposition to Trump.
A new image shows the numbers appearing even bolder than when they were originally discovered etched in the grass on the National Mall in Washington, DC more than a week ago.
Keep telling yourself that, you demented old geezer. Don the Builder has created this tremendous mess with a relatively small project. Can you imagine how bad it could get when when he really gets going with the ballroom and his idiotic arch?
Yesterday Trump held an event to display another renovation project: his new Airforce One plane, which he somehow grifted from the government of Qatar.
President Donald Trump on Friday officially unveiled his new Air Force One jet that was contentiously given to him by the Qatari government, declaring it would be used during a ceremonial flyover in Washington on July 4 to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States.
Trump welcomed the delivery of the luxurious Boeing 747 in an appearance at Joint Base Andrews just outside Washington that began with him exiting the aircraft and walking down the steps.
Decked out in a red, white and dark-blue blue color scheme — a departure from the lighter blue on the previous model — the jet is set to be used by Trump during events marking the nation’s landmark anniversary.
“Nobody tops this one, and that’s the way we have to have it for our country. Nobody even comes close,” Trump said.
The jet will lead a flyover — “the likes of which we’ve never seen before,” Trump said — involving various other military planes on July 4.
He repeatedly praised the plane, calling it “the largest and the greatest in every aspect.” It will be a “flying White House at a level of luxury no one has ever seen before,” he added.
The plane is estimated to be worth $400 million, but the U.S. government has likely spent substantially more to make it ready for use.
Meanwhile, Americans are struggling to pay for gas, groceries and health care.
And what is going on with the Kennedy Center? Trump was ordered by a judge to remove his name from the building and cancel his plans to shut it down for 2 years. Workmen came and did something, but no one can tell if the Trump name has really been removed, because he is hiding the front of the building with huge tarps.
In the early hours of June 13, in an action that turned out to be news around the world, workers hung massive tarps from scaffolding across the front of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and under court order removed President Trump’s name from the marble facade.
Or did they?
Natalie and Persik, by Daniel Pagán
True, the center’s operations chief, Matt Floca, filed a sworn declaration with a federal court later that day saying that Mr. Trump’s name had been removed. And true, a New York Times photographer captured evidence through an opening in the tarp that the letter “A” came off. Another photographer recorded evidence of the demise of a “D.”
But in a downer denouement for Mr. Trump’s critics, a week later the tarps are still there, prompting some to wonder whether at least some of the letters are, too. As of Friday evening, there was no visual evidence that the letters splashed across the building had been restored to “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
Peering behind the tarps is impossible because they now lie tight against the building’s front.
“I don’t know if they took down the sign, because I can’t see it,” said Luna Woo, a violinist visiting from Portland, Ore., as part of the National Symphony Orchestra’s Summer Music Institute. She and other young musicians in the program have been trying to see behind the tarps from a practice room overlooking them. No luck.
So when will the tarps come down?
A Kennedy Center spokeswoman, Roma Daravi, emailed a terse response:
“The scaffolding and tarp will remain up as crews address maintenance needs of the marble and soffit panels. Best, Public Relations.”
I know this seems like a lightweight post, but these are the issues that our “president” is focused on. I’m not sure if the country can survive 2-1/2 more years of this chaos–not to mention the grifting and outright corruption.
Anyway, I hope you are all enjoying the weekend, despite the insanity in Washington DC.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
Trump has been trying to keep the memorandum of understanding with Iran secret as long as possible. The obvious reason for that is that Iran is getting by far the best of the deal. But both Bloomberg and CNN have gotten the 14 point “draft agreement.” Here is the full text from CNN:
1 — The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States, together with their allies in the current war, declare upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding an immediate and permanent end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon, and undertake that from now on they will not launch any hostile action against each other, and will refrain from the threat or use of force against each other. The final agreement will confirm the provisions of this Article and the remaining Articles.
2 — The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States undertake to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.
3—The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States undertake to negotiate and reach a final agreement within a maximum period of 60 days, extendable by mutual consent.
4 — Immediately upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding, the United States lift the naval blockade and prevent any interference or obstruction against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and restore traffic within a maximum of 30 days to its full capacity; the traffic of ships shall be proportional to the pre-war volume of traffic on the part of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States also undertakes to withdraw its forces from the surrounding areas within 30 days after the final agreement.
5 — Upon signing this Memorandum of Understanding, the Islamic Republic of Iran will immediately take steps to ensure that the movement of merchant ships from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa is resumed within 30 days to the pre-war volume, taking into account the need for the removal of technical obstacles and the neutralization of mines by Iran.
6 — The United States undertakes, together with its regional partners, to create a comprehensive plan agreed upon by both parties for the rehabilitation and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran, while ensuring financing of at least $300 billion. The implementation mechanism of this plan, as part of the final agreement, will be formulated within 60 days.
7 — The United States commits to ending, on a schedule to be agreed upon as part of the final agreement, all types of sanctions currently facing the Islamic Republic of Iran, including resolutions of the United Nations Security Council and the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and all unilateral U.S. sanctions, both primary and secondary.
8 — The Islamic Republic of Iran reiterates that it will never produce nuclear weapons. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States have agreed that the fate of enriched material and the fate of all other mutually agreed nuclear-related issues, including Iran’s nuclear needs, will be adequately addressed in a final agreement; the final agreement will confirm the provisions of this Article.
9 — The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States agree that, pending a final agreement, they will maintain the status quo: Iran will maintain the status quo on its nuclear program, and the United States will not impose new sanctions on Iran or strengthen its forces in the region.
10 — The United States undertakes that immediately after the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding, and until the date of the lifting of sanctions, the United States Treasury Department will issue waivers for exports of Iranian crude oil, petrochemical products and their derivatives, and all related services, including banking, insurance, transportation, and the like.
11 — The United States undertakes that, in light of the progress of negotiations towards a final agreement, frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran will be released and made fully available. These funds, whether held in the master account or transferred, will be used for any final beneficiary payment determined by the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran and will be fully available for use. The United States undertakes to issue all necessary permits and licenses on this basis.
12 — The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States agree that an implementation mechanism will be established to oversee the successful implementation of and future commitment to the Final Agreement.
13 — Following the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding, and upon receipt of assurances regarding the commencement of implementation of Articles 4, 5, 10, and 11 of this Memorandum of Understanding, and the continued implementation of these steps, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States will enter into negotiations for a Final Agreement solely with respect to the remaining Articles.
14 — The final agreement will be approved through a binding resolution of the UN Security Council.
I don’t see anything there about inspections of Iran’s nuclear programs. But this isn’t a final agreement. That will supposedly be worked out in the next 60 days after this one is signed.
Trump shakes hands with French preident Emmanuel Macron. G7 leaders are supposedly backing Trump’s agreement with Iran.
DUBAI, June 17 (Reuters) – A $300 billion private fund designed to trigger investment into Iran is outlined in the U.S.-Iran framework agreement and more than half that sum has already been committed, a source with direct knowledge of the deal told Reuters.
The fund is designed to give both sides an economic incentive to conclude a final deal to end the war, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan has not yet been announced as Washington and Tehran prepare to sign on Friday.
The fund’s existence has been previously reported but Reuters is revealing for the first time that more than half of the amount has already been committed and that it will be comprised entirely of private-sector funds.
U.S. and Iranian officials said on Sunday they had agreed on a framework to end their war, which began when U.S. and Israeli forces attacked Iran on February 28, halt the U.S. blockade of Iran and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a key supply route for global oil and gas.
The new fund is a private investment vehicle, not a reconstruction or reparations programme and will not include any government money or grants, the source said, adding that companies based in the U.S., the Gulf Arab states, Asia, South America and Africa have agreed to commit financing. Investments pledged span energy, logistics, manufacturing and transport, the source said.
U.S. President Donald Trump pushed back on Wednesday against any characterisation of the fund as a U.S. investment. “We’re not investing, we’re not putting up 10 cents,” he said, adding that he was not asking Gulf countries to invest either.
I’ll believe that when I see it. The ballroom was supposed to be built with private funds too.
Donald Trump arrived in France yesterday for this morning’s G7 summit and promptly confirmed America’s capitulation to Iran. Instead of merely repeating the outlines of what looks to be a terrible peace deal, however, Trump made a series of statements so bizarre, even by his usual standards, that they raise the question of whether the president still understands the words that come out of his own mouth.
The president began with a classic Trumpian move, daring his listeners to forget today what they knew yesterday. Just this winter, Trump had promised the Iranian people that the tyrants who ruled them would be gone. But now? “I never cared about regime change,” he told reporters, waving away his failure to achieve a primary strategic goal by denying that it had ever been a goal at all.
Things got a little weirder, however, when he described the Iranians who have stepped in to replace the regime leaders killed in U.S. strikes: “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. And they were nice to deal with.”
“They were strong people, smart people,” he added. And then he dropped this remarkable claim: “They’re not radicalized, and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.”
This definitely not-radicalized group that Trump seems to like includes the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei (whose father, wife, and son were killed by U.S. strikes), and the still-standing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, all of whom have shown no compunction about lashing out in any direction during Trump’s “cease-fire,” the make-believe pause in the war during which no one actually ceased firing.
Trump’s description of the current regime in Tehran as a bunch of swell guys was brewed in a heavy-duty vat of wishful thinking. It’s an extreme version of Trump’s tendency, when he’s been outplayed by powerful enemies, to describe his opponents as basically reasonable people. (He has done the same over the years with dictators and autocrats in North Korea, Russia, and China, among other countries.) This is his way of assuring the public that he did not get taken to the cleaners—because, of course, his affable partners would never do that.
A bit more:
Trump fared no better talking about the Iranian nuclear program. Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium exists largely because Trump unilaterally called off U.S. participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 agreement that was meant to prevent Iran from enriching uranium beyond minimal levels for civilian uses. After the U.S. and Israeli attacks last year, and yet more pounding during Operation Epic Fury, that uranium remains underground, either hidden in storage or buried beneath tons of rubble; some of it can likely be recovered and enriched for military uses. Trump has said, repeatedly, that Iran must hand it over.
Until today.
“I call it the nuclear dust, their enriched material, right?” Trump said. (Why he calls it this remains a mystery.) Does America still insist on its removal from Iran? Well, maybe.
“The whole mountain has collapsed on top. We have cameras on it,” Trump said. “You could make the case ‘Why are you even bothering?’ ’cause it’s not really valuable. It’s, you know, it’s probably half a million dollars’ worth. It’s not very valuable stuff, but I think psychologically we wanna get it.”
As many people have said over the years, Trump is a fucking moron. Read the rest of the piece at The Atlantic.
The framework deal between the United States and Iran sets the stage for an end to the bursts of violence and debilitating disruption of energy deliveries and trade in the Persian Gulf. But don’t expect economies around the globe to simply pick up where they left off before the United States and Israel began bombing Iran on Feb. 28.
The war has set in motion changes that will be hard to reverse….
The near shutdown in oil and gas deliveries from the Middle East and the leap in prices are causing a shift in power. Energy producers from the Gulf to the Americas are jockeying to maintain or increase their dominance, and customers are struggling to reduce their dependency and shore up their supply.
As a result, the energy market is changing, the energy mix is changing and the energy players are changing.
Wind farm in Xinjiang, China
The profound vulnerability of countries throughout Asia, Europe and elsewhere that depend on imported energy is supercharging the hunt for alternatives. In some places, like South Korea and Japan, that has led to an increased use of dirtier fuels like coal.
But over the longer term, this energy shock — the second in just four years — is likely to accelerate a transition to renewables like solar and wind as well as nuclear power.
Improvements in electric battery technology and efficiency make the shift more feasible than it was when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted a global energy shock in 2022, said Daan Walter at Ember, an energy research group in London.
In many places, for instance, electric vehicles are increasingly affordable. And in April, wind and solar generated more electricity globally than gas for the first time.
“This is a big turnaround,” Mr. Walter said. “So what was five years ago maybe barely competitive, now is almost already clearly cheaper.”
Investments in renewables have also become a better bet, promising returns in closer to two years instead of 30, he said.
Meanwhile, Trump is doing everything he can to end clean energy initiatives and make the US more dependent on oil and gas–and even coal! More from the NYT article:
Relations among producers are also changing. The war heightened tensions between the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and prompted the Emirates to leave the OPEC Plus oil cartel. The impact of that departure will be fully felt only when oil production in the region picks up. But a weakened Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries could add to volatility in oil markets.
The split has also encouraged the Saudis to move closer to Russia. Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, featured Saudi Arabia this month as the “guest of honor” at an economic forum in St. Petersburg….
The push to build out and diversify energy networks is going to continue long after the war ends. And China is poised to benefit most from the expected boon in renewables.
It is leagues ahead of the rest of the world in producing wind turbines, high-voltage cables, transformers, solar panels, batteries, software to manage energy flows and more.
China’s increasing role ensuring that other countries have a dependable supply of energy amplifies its strategic influence and importance.
“China looks to be an out-and-out winner,” analysts from Wood Mackenzie, a global energy consulting firm, concluded.
Fortunately, Trump has been unable to stop wind energy in the US.
As soon as President Trump started his second term, he declared war on the U.S. wind energy industry. On his very first day in office, he ordered federal agencies to halt permitting and leasing for wind projects—the first in a series of sweeping policy moves aimed at stymieing one of the nation’s fastest-growing sources of renewable energy. Now, it appears he’s waving the white flag.
The Trump administration has dropped its appeal to the court ruling that overturned the permitting and leasing freeze in December 2025, meaning the indefinite nationwide pause on wind energy projects is no longer enforceable.
That ruling was the result of a lawsuit filed in May 2025 by a coalition of attorneys general from 17 states and Washington, D.C., led by New York Attorney General Letitia James. The district court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, finding Trump’s January 2025 executive order to be “arbitrary and capricious and contrary to law.” The Department of Justice appealed the decision in February, then filed a motion for its voluntary dismissal on June 10.
States that challenged the administration’s “wind directive” are claiming victory. “New York’s wind projects will create jobs, strengthen our economy, and bring down New Yorkers’ electric bills,” Attorney General James said in a statement. “My office will continue to fight any attempt to undermine that progress.”
Secret Service officials are angered that FBI Director Kash Patel prematurely announced on Tuesday the details of a largely sealed and ongoing criminal investigation into an alleged plot to attack Sunday’s White House UFC event with drones, according to three people familiar with the incident.
Secret Service and FBI agents had been partnered on the investigation into a group of individuals discussing plans for a drone attack at the White House in the last week, and had discussed unsealing the case and making a joint announcement Tuesday afternoon, according to sources.
Kash Patel
The problem with Patel’s social media announcement, the sources say, was that the case had been sealed in court and roughly 10 suspects had not yet been arrested and placed in custody at the time Patel shared his post. The people said Secret Service and FBI officials were surprised by Patel “jumping the gun.” [….]
The threat to the UFC event became known to the Secret Service and FBI in the last week when a relative of one of the suspects contacted local police in the Cincinnati area, according to two people briefed on the probe, and reported that their relative was talking about engaging in a vague plot in Washington.
An advanced threat interdiction team at the Secret Service, with the help of the FBI, began seeking a subpoena for an encrypted Signal chat thread and was able to identify the plot being planned and some of the people discussing using drones and possible snipers to attack the UFC fight event at the White House’s South Lawn.
Authorities then arrested one suspect, 19-year-old Tycen Proper of Ohio, on June 13 and moved immediately to seal the case so the FBI and Secret Service could continue investigating, identifying and arresting additional suspects.
Tuesday afternoon, the Justice Department announced the arrests of five men, including Proper, for an “alleged plot to carry out an attack to kill government officials and others” attending the Sunday event, according to a DOJ press release.
The FBI thwarted a plot targeting Sunday’s UFC event at the White House and has arrested five men, the US justice department said on Tuesday.
Part of the plan involved striking nearby buildings with explosive-laden drones and firing on “high value targets”, prosecutors alleged.
One suspect was arrested in Ohio last week, where investigators reviewed encrypted messages involving other alleged conspirators. Prosecutors said in charging documents.
they had allegedly “expressed ultra-religious and antigovernment sentiments”….
Tyron C. Proper
The suspects were identified as Tycen C Proper, 19, the suspect arrested in Ohio, along with Bryan Omar Roa, 24, and Michael Alan Thomas, 32, of California, Daniel K Eskridge, 32, of Missouri and Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez, 31, of Nebraska. They were arrested across the four US states and each have been charged with conspiracy to commit murder, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a statement.
By using the drones, the plotters aimed to spark panic and draw the fleeing crowd toward a sniper team, according to the court documents. A “second wave” of attackers was then allegedly supposed to storm the White House gate….
Court filings related to Alvarez said the group allegedly eyed potential targets that included US President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Elon Musk, as well as several elected officials – though not all attended the UFC event.
The plot was discovered through Proper. His mother called local authorities late on 10 June – just days before the high-profile event – because she was concerned about his large firearms purchases and what she had seen of his online communication with a group that claimed to be made up of former military members and Christian-based.
The group allegedly wanted to “jumpstart” a revolution by shooting “high-value targets” – identified as wealthy people and politicians – attending the UFC fight. They had specifically discussed “grievances about government corruption, the handling of the Epstein files, data centers taking up all the water in communities, and other government actions,” prosecutors said.
This is starting to sound like one of those trumped up FBI conspiracy investigations, but we’ll see, I guess.
Bryan Omar Roa, 24, of Calimesa, and Michael Alan Thomas, 32, of Pinon Hills were arrested on Saturday, the day before the fight.
Bryan Omar Roa, 24, of Calimesa, and Michael Alan Thomas, 32, of Pinon Hills were arrested on Saturday, the day before the fight, and have since made their initial court appearances.
The FBI searched both of their homes and recovered multiple firearms and large quantities of ammunition. According to the complaint, law enforcement seized a handgun, rifle, tactical vest, a two-way radio and a laser target pointer from Roa’s home….
Meanwhile, two rifles, about 180 rounds of ammo and a pistol were seized by authorities from Thomas’ home, according to the complaint….
Court documents allege one suspect admitted to helping plan the attack and encouraging others to participate. The complaint says Thomas was planning the attack but said he wasn’t going to take part.
The FBI said the alleged terror plot involved at least 19 people and included plans for explosions and gunfire. According to an unsealed FBI affidavit, the plan involved setting off explosions using drones near the event and then shooting guests as they evacuated.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced that it would move two key functions of the Department of Education—disability education oversight and the department’s Office for Civil Rights—to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice, respectively, in a move that would give HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. oversight over the nation’s disability education system.
In a press release, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who is overseeing the Project 2025–mandated dismantling of the department, said without elaborating that the decision was made after “careful deliberation and collaboration with stakeholders.” Many disability and other equity-focused organizations have been afraid since President Trump resumed office that he would go through with threats to eliminate the department, long a target of right-wing institutions like the Heritage Foundation.
Even setting aside who runs them—Kennedy at HHS, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche at the Justice Department—the new agencies aren’t appropriate choices to oversee those functions, experts say. “HHS and DOJ have important roles, but they weren’t built to replace the Department of Education’s school-specific expertise,” said Robyn Linscott, The Arc’s director of education and family policy, in a statement. “Moving [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] oversight into HHS pushes students with disabilities toward a medical model, where disability is treated as a diagnosis to manage instead of a natural part of human life.”
The National Down Syndrome Congress also called for Congress to halt the changes. “For decades, IDEA, vocational rehabilitation, and the Office of Civil Rights have helped expand educational opportunities, employment, and community inclusion for people with disabilities,” roles that would now be under threat, said Stephanie Smith Lee, the group’s policy and advocacy co-director and former director of the Office of Special Education Programs under George W. Bush, in a press release opposing the plan.
At HHS, disability education would fall under the oversight of an agency head, Kennedy, who has spent decades spreading disinformation about autism and villainizing autistic people.
That is horrifying. I can’t begin to imagine the damage Kennedy could do to treatment of and research on autism and other disabilities.
That’s all I have for today. Have a nice, peaceful Wednesday, everyone.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
We, the people who never wanted Trump as president, have been forced to deal with his lies, his clownish nonsense, and his rage-filled public behavior since he came down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy on June 16, 2015–nearly 11 years ago.
There really wasn’t a break in the madness after he lost the 2020 election. He constantly found ways to make himself the center of attention, and then we had our hopes raised with all the prosecutions, most of which ended up failing because–incredibly–he was elected for a second time.
Speaking for myself, it has been a long hard road. Even if he actually leaves the White House in January, 2029, he will likely still find ways to keep himself in the news. I wonder if I will live to see the day when he is really gone.
For the past few days, we have waited for his name to be removed from the Kennedy Center building, while he fought repeatedly in the courts to keep it there. I think it has finally been taken down now, but I’m not really sure, because the huge tarp covering the front of the building is still in place.
The curtain started to come down for President Donald Trump at the Kennedy Center on Saturday.
After a day of legal maneuvers and thunderstorms, workers began the process in the early morning hours of removing the letters spelling out the Republican president’s name from the facade of the iconic performing arts venue. They were a few hours past a court-ordered deadline and did their work shrouded by a tarp, much to the frustration of onlookers who had gathered for hours hoping to witness a dramatic moment symbolizing the limits of Trump’s power.
As the sun rose over Washington, the tarp remained in place, leaving it impossible to determine whether all the letters had been removed. Shortly after midnight, the Kennedy Center asked a judge to extend the deadline until noon EDT, citing the storms for delaying the work. The court agreed to that request Saturday morning.
The removal of Trump’s name closes one of the more unusual chapters in the history of the Kennedy Center, which began construction in 1964 and was dedicated to the memory of the slain president, Democrat John F. Kennedy. At what is typically one of the few relatively nonpartisan spaces in Washington, Trump has wielded tremendous influence over the venue during his second term.
Though he rarely discussed the Kennedy Center during his 2024 campaign, Trump moved quickly to oust the institution’s leadership when he returned to office in January 2025 and replaced it with a board of trustees that named him chairman. His name was quickly added to the building.
Why did Trump want his name on a memorial created by Congress for a president who was assassinated? Trump is a year older than I am. He was alive when Kennedy was murdered and the nation mourned. Did he know what happened? Did it have any effect on him? Apparently not.
The Washington National Opera, which recently severed its longstanding relationship with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, has filed a lawsuit that demands more than $17 million from the center that the opera company estimates it is owed.
The suit, filed Thursday, says that since the opera company struck out on its own this year, Kennedy Center officials have refused to release the money, which the court papers say includes endowment funds, other donations and income that was collected for the company’s benefit.
“W.N.O. reluctantly files this case to preserve its future and to protect its donors and artists,” lawyers for the opera said in court papers, which identify the funds as donor gifts received over years that are “critical” to its operations.
In a statement responding to the lawsuit, Roma Daravi, a spokeswoman for the center, said that the relationship with the opera company “financially burdened” the center for more than a decade. The statement noted that taking into account the company’s endowment, an external accounting firm had calculated that the company had “accumulated a $72 million deficit to the center” between 2011 and 2026, the years it was an affiliate of the institution….
The opera left the center in January, nearly a year after President Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center led to an exodus of audiences, artists and donors. Officials at the center said then that they had decided to part ways with the opera, which had played there since 1971, “due to a financially challenging relationship.”
The opera’s lawsuit, filed in the United States Court of Federal Claims, details the tensions that arose before the company’s departure. It lists the federal government as the defendant because the center was established by Congress….
The lawsuit says that the day before the separation announcement, Donna Arduin, the Kennedy Center’s chief financial officer, told leaders of the opera company that money in a fund containing bequests and other contributions to the opera had been used as collateral for a line of credit.
The suit says Ms. Arduin asserted that those funds belonged to the center, but the opera company contends they were expressly reserved for its benefit. The suit did not specify how much money was said to have been used as collateral.
Unbelievable. They took funds that were donated specifically for the opera company and spent it on something else–just like Trump is stealing money that Congress has allocated for specific purposes and using it for his ballroom, his arch, and who knows what else. For Trump, taxpayer money is nothing more than an ATM for him to withdraw funds from.
By Suzanne Valadon, 1920
Trump is so self-centered that he probably doesn’t know the names of all of his grandchildren. Nothing seems to matter to him except for his personal desires and his rapidly changing attitudes toward people and institutions, based whether they praise him and bend to whatever his wishes are at any moment in time.
He covered the Oval Office in gold, paved over the Rose Garden (Melania had already wrecked it in his first term), and turned the West Colonnade into a “Presidential Walk of Fame,” with gold-framed photos and gold-lettered plaques, with insulting descriptions of the presidents he dislikes. He even put up idiotic gold signs to designate these places–as if no one knows where the Oval Office or Rose Garden are.
Then he tore down the East Wing of the White House with no warning, and began building an illegal “ballroom.”
Tomorrow, Trump is going to force the country to deal with a UFC fight on the White House lawn. We’ve already had to watch him turn the White House into an embarrassment worthy of the Beverly Hillbillies. The White House grounds looks like a junk yard, as he prepares for a public UFC fight on his birthday.
A commercial airline pilot that spoke to MeidasTouch this evening has filed aviation safety reports after powerful lighting used during the construction and testing of the UFC octagon on the White House grounds allegedly shone directly into their cockpit during a nighttime approach into Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA), creating what the pilot described as one of the most severe visibility disruptions they have experienced in their career.
The pilot, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the incident, was flying into Reagan National on a recent flight when aircraft on approach encountered intense white light associated with the UFC event held on the White House South Lawn.
According to the pilot, the lights illuminated the cockpit during the final stages of landing, a critical phase of flight when pilots rely heavily on visual references. The pilot described the incident as “10 times worse than any laser illumination event” the pilot ever experienced.
While laser strikes on aircraft are a known aviation hazard, the pilot emphasized that this incident did not involve lasers. Instead, it involved powerful white event lighting that they said created a similar, and potentially more dangerous, effect by overwhelming pilots’ vision during approach.
Following the incident, the pilot filed reports with both the Federal Aviation Administration and NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), a confidential reporting program used by aviation professionals to document safety concerns and hazards.
We are supposed to be celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but Trump has ruined that by turning the anniversary into a celebration of himself. I hope there are thunderstorms tomorrow. And bugs.
AccuWeather warns that on Sunday, Washington looks like it will be hit with a “a heavy thunderstorm late in the afternoon,” in which “downpours and lightning could impact the events at the White House.”
By Indira Baldano
The temporary stadium built on the White House lawn includes a roof arching over the UFC’s famous Octagon arena itself, but guests watching from the stands will not be fully covered.
Making matters worse, the hot and humid conditions, paired with the bright lights of a UFC fight, could attract swarms of bugs.
“This event is going to draw a big crowd,” University of Maryland entomologist Michael Raupp told Axios. “But guess what? There are going to be even more bugs joining.”
And the bugs will attract bats.
“If you have this banquet of small flying insects,” Raupp added, “the bats are going to say, ‘Oh, baby!'”
UFC boss Dana White has acknowledged that weather (and wildlife) could be an issue.
“The three big problems, as far as I am seeing right now, are rain, lightning and a ton of bugs,” White told TheHollywood Reporter last week, recalling a recent White House dinner where guests were bothered with “clusters” of gnats.
He added that’s he’s worked with his production team to prepare for these potential issues.
The biggest threat to Donald Trump’s lavish UFC birthday bash may not be a lawsuit, a heatwave, or Americans outraged by the spectacle at the White House.
It might be the bugs.
As crews put the finishing touches to the sprawling outdoor arena erected for UFC Freedom 250, organizers are grappling with a problem that every Washingtonian knows all too well: summer insects descending on bright lights in the nation’s swampiest city.
The latest weather forecast has Washington, D.C. at a temperature high of 91 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday, with “hot with intervals of clouds and sun; a thunderstorm in spots late in the afternoon.”
“Downpours and lightning could impact the events at the White House,” says the ominous warning from AccuWeather, a global weather tracking service that boasts “superior accuracy”.
But AccuWeather’s bug tracking may be even more concerning for the president as he celebrates his 80th birthday watching burly men ground-and-pound in a cage fight.
“Warm weather and the metabolic rate of insects increases causing bugs to invade homes and gardens in search of food. With a rise in rain, notice an increase in mosquitoes, stink bugs, roaches and termites,” the site says, warning of “extreme” risk on Sunday.
All this could be somewhat unpleasant for the fighters gasping for air in an already slippery octagon splattered with sweat and blood, as well as UFC boss Dana White, who has made it clear over the years how much he dislikes outdoor fight cards because you can’t control the elements.
Dublin recalls the Bicentennial celebration in 1976. She was 7 years old, but she still recalls that everyone was excited. To her “it felt like something out of a movie.” The main thing I remember from the Bicentennial is that someone in government made Boston put up more street signs so tourists could tell where they were.
On the 250the anniversary, Dublin writes:
And here we are again, on the brink of celebrating America’s 250th birthday, and it’s going to yet again be like something out of a movie.
The White House is currently obscured by a giant UFC Octagon ahead of Toddler Trump’s 80th birthday party on Sunday. Of all the mortifying things Trump has done, this has brought the kind of global embarrassment that can’t be calibrated by even the most advanced of scientific instruments. Shirtless men are going to beat the crap out of each other in front of what’s supposed to be a symbol of leadership.
Now, it’s the White Trash House.
It looks like the three-ring circus it is. It breaks my heart every time I look at it. Because, despite everyone joking about it and making clever memes about it, Trump has deliberately destroyed the People’s House because he hates America….
None of this destruction should have been allowed. He could’ve built it on his own property, and it would even be on brand for Florida. But instead, he used who-knows-whose money (not his) and turned the South Lawn into a Carny Paradise. The attendees will revel in the spectacle of shirtless men beating the crap out of each other as a birthday present for an 80-year-old criminal fraud at the center of the biggest political cover-up in American history.
We’re still learning even more about the Epstein Files cover-up, something our Founders never could have imagined when they created this non-Christian nation conceived in liberty. While Trump was fixating on turning DC into Mar-A-Lago on the Potomac, his entire staff was meeting in the Situation Room to figure out how to keep protecting him, instead of giving the victims the justice they all deserve. They’ve all known for far too long what’s in those files, and they’ve done nothing about any of it.
Marcel Leprin, Suzanne Valadon and her Cat
You can read more at the link, but here’s what Dublin is hoping for tomorrow:
There’s been terrible weather in Washington all week, with thunderstorms predicted on Sunday to make Trump’s party a literal washout. You can almost believe in divine intervention when the weather seems this targeted….
If you’re lucky enough to live somewhere with great weather on Sunday, No Kings protest marches are scheduled all across the country to make sure Trump has the most miserable birthday of his entire life. It’s going to be 92 degrees here in Portland, and along with the main march downtown, there’s going to be a more family-friendly carnival-type thing in a park with A LOT of trees providing shade. I think I might opt in for that instead of baking in the streets and feeling mad.
Speaking of Portland, I’m extra proud to be an Oregonian after learning that our state was the first to drop out of Trump’s dumb “America 250” State Fair. I’m sure Oregon won’t be the last Blue state to drop out. It’ll be just like when all of the artists dropped out of Trump’s dumb “America 250” concert, which is now just him and Vanilla Ice. The “State Fair” will probably just be Alabama by the time July 4th rolls around.
One last bit of good news: Democrats now have an 82% chance of taking back the House in November!
Trump’s next big project is the giant arch he wants to build in his own honor that critics say will block views of Arlington Cemetery. But that’s not the only problem.
Construction crews building the massive triumphal arch proposed by President Donald Trump would work in two 10-hour shifts daily until the monument celebrating the nation’s military history is complete, according to a new assessment released by the National Park Service.
Erecting the 250-foot-tall arch in a traffic circle at the head of the Memorial Bridge over the Potomac River would take two to three years on the proposed schedule, according to the documents released earlier this month. The plan suggests a sizable disruption along a major thoroughfare in the nation’s capital.
Girl with Cat, by Merle Keller
The year-round construction schedule emerged from the NPS’s initial review of the arch’s impacts required under the National Historic Preservation Act. The Trump administration has fast-tracked the review process, which examines how historic properties and the Washington landscape would be reshaped by the towering project. The administration is aiming to commission the monument in honor of the nation’s 250th birthday this year.
According to the NPS review, construction would begin with several months of site excavation. Drilling rigs would be deployed to construct a foundation system, and caissons would be installed to 75-foot depths to reach bedrock.
“Continuous heavy equipment operations would occur during this period,” the agency said.
After the foundation is completed, crews are expected to take nearly one year building the concrete body of the arch, deploying 320-foot cranes. In the final phases, granite cladding would be fixed to the concrete exterior and golden statues would be installed on the arch’s roof, including a 60-foot-tall winged figure resembling Lady Liberty. Landscaping would complete the exterior design.
The White House claims to have a solution to any traffic problems.
A White House spokesperson Friday said the NPS worked with the Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration to develop traffic plans for the circle.
“In an effort to increase pedestrian and vehicle safety as well as efficient movement for both, we have conducted detailed traffic modeling and simulations to better understand the impacts of different contemplated traffic flows,” the official said in a statement. “After construction of the Arch, traffic delays will be minimized to the time needed to safely accommodate pedestrian crossings and the flow of traffic.”
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) whose district includes Arlington National Cemetery near the arch’s proposed location, said Friday the construction outlook is a “nightmare in the making.”
“The Trump administration is pursuing an aggressive construction schedule that would require years of lane closures and major disruptions along one of the most heavily traveled transportation corridors connecting D.C. and Northern Virginia,” Beyer said in a statement to POLITICO’s E&E News. Beyer last month asked the Interior Department to disclose any traffic and transportation research it has completed.
“The public deserves a full and transparent accounting of its impacts on traffic, parking, recreation, and access to existing sites like Arlington National Cemetery,” he said Friday. “The disruption this project would cause is only compounded by this rushed process and these unanswered questions.”
There’s more at the link.
Is Trump satisfied with all these self-aggrandizing projects? Probably not. He’s always coming up with new ways to make everything about him.
I suppose I should include some serious news in this post, but there isn’t much happening except that Trump is still claiming a deal with Iran is on the verge of happening. This time the Iranians sound a bit more interested, but we’ll have to wait and see.
I hope you all are having a nice weekend.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
There’s lots of news today, so this post will be a mixed bag with stories on the Iran war, Trump’s boat strikes, last night’s primaries, the CBS/60 Minutes controversy, and more.
Trump’s war on Iran is getting stupider by the day. For several weeks now, Trump has been saying that a deal to end the war was just days away. A short time ago, he told Netanyahu not to respond to strikes by Iran in Israel. Netanyahu quickly proceeded to bomb Iran anyway. Then a U.S. helicopter went down in the Strait of Hormuz, and Trump responded even though it’s not clear that the helicopter was deliberately shot down. It may have just collided with a Iranian drone.
The US says it has carried out a series of strikes on Iranian military and surveillance sites in response to the downing of an American helicopter in the Gulf.
Air defence systems, ground control stations and radar sites were targeted near the Strait of Hormuz, the US military Central Command (Centcom) said.
In response, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said it launched strikes on 21 targets at US bases in the region, one in Bahrain and the other in Jordan, while Kuwait’s army said it was also intercepting an attack.
Boeing AH-64 Apache
The US has described its strikes as “a proportional response” for the Apache helicopter downing on Monday, while the IRGC described the attacks as “vicious”.
US President Donald Trump had earlier accused Iran of shooting down the helicopter and said the US “must, of necessity” respond. The two crew members survived and were rescued by an American sea drone.
According to US officials, Iran used a drone to launch the attack on the helicopter. But it is not clear whether the Iranian drone had deliberately attacked, an unnamed US official told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner. The semi-official Mehr News Agency reported that Iran had not claimed responsibility for the downed aircraft.
So now the war is back on, after months of Trump promising the end was near. This morning, Trump threatened Iran with more attacks.
US President Donald Trump and Iran’s senior officials have traded new threats of further action, after the two sides exchanged strikes.
Trump said Tehran had taken “too long to negotiate a deal” and would now “have to pay the price”, without giving specific details. He said Iran had been “completely defeated” and was “all talk and no action”.
It came after Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi earlier warned his country would “leave no attack or threat unanswered”, saying that the US had suffered “defeats on the battlefield”.
The US said it struck Iranian sites on Tuesday in response to the downing of a US army helicopter in the Gulf. Iran then launched strikes at US bases in the region.
Iranian defence systems, ground control stations and radar sites were targeted near the Strait of Hormuz, the US military Central Command (Centcom) said.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said it launched strikes on 21 targets at US bases in the region, one in Bahrain and the other in Jordan, while Kuwait’s army said it was also intercepting an attack.
Writing on his social media platform Truth Social on Wednesday, Trump said: “Iran’s Military is a complete and total mess. Much of it, like their Navy and Air Force, doesn’t even exist anymore – They have been completely defeated.”
He added: “They’ve taken too long to negotiate a deal that would have been great for them, now they will have to pay the price!!!”
Trump’s comments were in contrast to Tuesday, when he told journalists the US and Iran were “in the final throes of what will be a very, very good deal”.
Also on Wednesday, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqai accused the US of “damaging this diplomatic process through the contradictory messages it sends, its repeated shifts in positions and demands, and, worst of all, through repeated violations of the ceasefire”.
I have to agree with Iran here. Trump behaves like a 6-year old child–issuing threats while claiming an agreement is close–and using posts on Truth Social to communicate threats that he probably hasn’t discussed with any of his military advisers. And where are the negotiators anyway? Jared Kushner was a the New York Knicks game on Monday night. All this because Trump cancelled Obama’s Iran agreement.
Nine months into the Trump administration’s deadly campaign against so-called drug boats, there is a pattern to the strikes. And a glaring anomaly.
The U.S. military has conducted more than 60 attacks, resulting in over 200 extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. In almost all the strikes, between one and four people lost their lives. In only one strike did the death toll of a single boat reach double digits: the first attack on September 2, 2025.
Since then, experts, lawmakers, and even military officials behind the scenes have been asking a simple but haunting question: Why was that boat packed with 11 people?
“Why would 11 people be on board a boat carrying drugs?” said a government source who attended a classified briefing where the large crew on the first boat attacked was discussed. “It’s a high risk for the cartels. That always stood out.”
One top military officer provided a plausible explanation, behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, The Intercept has learned. His admission raises even more questions about a strike that a high-ranking Pentagon official called a criminal attack on civilians and resulted in a firestorm in Congress last year.
In the briefing, the high-ranking officer on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff stated that some of the people killed by the U.S. military may have been the victims of human trafficking.
Read all the details at The Intercept.
Several states held primaries yesterday. The most watched ones were in Maine and California. In Maine, Graham Platner won the Democratic Senate primary and will face long-time Senator Susan Collins in November.
It’s official: Republican Sen. Susan Collins will face Democrat Graham Platner this fall, NBC News projects, in what will be a marquee election in the fight for control of the Senate.
Collins and Platner both won their primaries Tuesday in a predictable result. Collins, first elected to the Senate in 1996, ran unopposed for renomination as she seeks a sixth six-year term.
And Platner, a veteran and oyster farmer running in his first political race, faced little Democratic competition as two-term Gov. Janet Mills suspended her campaign after she failed to gain traction. She still appeared on the primary ballot.
Graham Platner and Susan Collins
While the primary results were foreseeable, what happens next is anything but. The Senate election has already become a battleground over the future of the Democratic Party and what voters think is most important, as Platner faces numerous controversies about his past conduct.
And that’s before the real campaigning between the resilient incumbent and the brash outsider has even kicked off, though Platner started the general election with a series of stinging attacks on Collins at a victory speech in Blue Hill, Maine. The Democrat cast her as the “deciding vote” on Republican priorities including Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation
“Susan Collins may have started her career decades ago in Washington with good intentions, but she has become just as spineless and corrupt as the establishment she now serves,” Platner said. “She got elected promising to protect Roe versus Wade, only to turn around and put on a justice, but a justice of Supreme Court who overturned it. She lied to us.”
In a statement, Collins’ campaign said, “Mainers aren’t looking for bitter campaigns, grand promises, or angry speeches riddled with lies. They’re looking for results. They want affordable health care, safe communities, good-paying jobs, strong schools, and someone who will show up and do the work.”
Steve Hilton, a Republican former Fox News host who was endorsed by President Trump, has secured the second spot in the November general election for California governor, The Associated Press determined on Tuesday. He will face Xavier Becerra, a Democrat who served in the Biden administration.
The candidates survived an unprecedented barrage of spending for a California governor’s race. Tom Steyer, a billionaire who ran as a progressive Democrat, devoted more than $216 million of his personal fortune toward his primary campaign, finishing third.
Under California rules, the top two finishers in the primary election, regardless of party, advance to the general election. There had been a chance that Mr. Steyer would face Mr. Becerra in an intraparty battle in November, but Tuesday’s outcome instead sets up a lopsided contest in a state where a Republican has not won the governor’s office in two decades.
The winner will replace Gov. Gavin Newsom, who cannot run again because of term limits and is considered a potential Democratic presidential candidate for 2028.
This sets up a likely win for Democrats, since California is one of the bluest states in the country.
Mr. Hilton’s top-two finish seems to run counter to Mr. Trump’s claims in recent days that California elections are “rigged” to benefit Democrats. Mr. Hilton said on Tuesday that he takes the concern seriously, but that he has had lawyers monitoring the voting process and they have not seen signs of fraud.
Xavier Becerra and Steve Hilton
The November matchup is one that Mr. Becerra and many Democrats had hoped for, knowing that Mr. Hilton was not just a Republican, but one endorsed by Mr. Trump, who remains deeply unpopular in California.
Days before the election, Mr. Becerra released an ad that highlighted the differences between him and Mr. Hilton, whom the ad called “Trump’s favorite.” While the ad ostensibly bolstered Mr. Becerra’s anti-Trump credentials, it also seemed designed to encourage Republicans to coalesce behind Mr. Hilton and give him enough support to finish second and prevent Mr. Steyer from reaching the general election.
Republican firebrand Rep. Nancy Mace lost her GOP primary for South Carolina governor, potentially ending her rollercoaster political career.
Mace failed to advance to a runoff Tuesday. She was considered a top contender in the race until a series of scandals cut into her in-state support and she bucked President Donald Trump to help release the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Trump’s preferred candidate, South Carolina Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, and Attorney General Alan Wilson advanced to a runoff June 23.
The Palmetto State primary was for months defined by Trump’s absence from the race, despite the six Republicans candidates vying for his attention and support. Trump only endorsed Evette in the final two weeks, touting her closeness with his ally and early backer, outgoing GOP Gov. Henry McMaster.
In an interview ahead of the primary, Mace acknowledged that she likely forfeited her chance at the president’s support after her role in releasing the Epstein files late last year. She nevertheless pushed ahead, even in the face of several million dollars of negative ads from her opponents.
It’s the latest victory for Trump on the heels of his success ousting Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Mace’s ally on the Epstein files, and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), among other GOP defectors.
Inflation surged in May to the highest level since early 2023, as Iran war-related fuel costs worked their way through the broader economy.
Overall, the yearly inflation rate rose to 4.2% in May from a year ago, up 0.5% from April.
“Inflation remains the major economic pain point regardless of who has to absorb it,” said Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at One Point BFG Wealth.
Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union said, “the frustration for many Americans is that so many of the basics are up in price right now — gas, food, electricity, and medical care are all clear pain points that are above 3% inflation.”
“This isn’t just ‘bad vibes’ about the economy,” she added.
Rising inflation comes as wage growth is falling.
For the second month in a row, inflation surpassed wage growth, which was tracking at 3.4% in the most recent jobs report. That pace has slowed since late last year, when average hourly earnings were growing consistently at nearly 4%.
On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced separately that real average weekly earnings decreased 0.2 % during May and 0.7% from a year ago.
That’s the biggest year-over-year decline in real earnings since February 2023, according to federal data.
“The index for energy rose 3.9 percent in May, after rising 3.8 percent in April and 10.9 percent in March,” BLS said. “The energy index accounted for over sixty percent” of the overall number’s rise, it added.
Core inflation, which excludes food and energy, rose 2.9%, as expected. From the month before, it rose just 0.2%.
The disparity between the core inflation figure and the overall 4.2% rate was due largely to the impact of energy costs. According to BLS, energy accounted for more than 60% of the total increase in prices over the month.
And what does Trump think about this?
Q: Are you concerned about the latest inflation numbers that came out this morning?TRUMP: No, I love it. I love the inflation. You know why? Because as soon as this war is over — do you know we've been taking out millions of barrels of oil? You know who doesn't know? Iran until right now.
Bari Weiss could be taking over the editorial leadership of another news network.
Paramount has begun preliminary conversations with several top media executives about a business-side counterpart to Weiss, the CBS News editor-in-chief, as the company awaits regulatory approval of its proposed merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, two sources familiar with the matter told Axios.
“The search implies that if Paramount Skydance’s deal with Warner Bros. Discovery goes through, Weiss would oversee all news editorial across both CBS News and CNN,” Axios reported. “Her potential counterpart would manage business operations across both companies.”
Bari Weiss
Among the candidates under consideration are NBCUniversal News Group chairman Cesar Conde, CNN Worldwide CEO Mark Thompson and former NBC News president Noah Oppenheim. Paramount had also weighed Ben Sherwood, CEO of the Daily Beast and former ABC News president, and David Rhodes, former CBS News president and current Sky News executive chairman, according to a source familiar with the search.
One candidate faces a procedural hurdle. Because Paramount is still awaiting regulatory clearance to acquire WBD, company executives are barred from holding conversations with any WBD personnel — which would include Thompson.
Currently, CBS News president Tom Cibrowski serves alongside Weiss, reporting to George Cheeks, chair of TV media at Paramount. Weiss reports directly to Paramount chairman and CEO David Ellison….
“The Paramount brass loves Bari Weiss,” the source said. “She has the full confidence of David Ellison, who believes Bari has done a fantastic job as editor-in-chief.”
David Ellison, the chief executive of Paramount, promised to respect the editorial independence of “60 Minutes” in a call with Lesley Stahl, one of the show’s correspondents, she told The New York Times on Tuesday.
The call to Ms. Stahl, made on Sunday, was one of the first signs that Mr. Ellison was personally taking steps to calm the turmoil at the news network after the firing of the show’s leadership and several of its star correspondents. The overhaul, overseen by Bari Weiss, the network’s editor in chief, was met with a rebuke from Scott Pelley, a star correspondent at “60 Minutes” who has since been fired.
Ms. Stahl told the news program’s staff about Mr. Ellison’s call during a champagne toast she held at the “60 Minutes” offices in Midtown Manhattan on Monday in an attempt to shore up morale at the program.
She, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim, the remaining stars of the program, had agonized about whether to stay in the aftermath of the staff changes and Mr. Pelley’s firing. But in a letter to the show’s staff Friday, they concluded that they had to remain at the show because they didn’t “want to see ‘60 Minutes’ die.”
“My toast was, ‘to us,’ meaning the survivors,” Ms. Stahl said in a text message on Tuesday. “Maybe ‘us’ with a twinge of survivor’s guilt.”
Mr. Ellison’s takeover of Paramount last year raised questions about the kind of steward he would be for CBS News. Mr. Ellison has been friendly with President Trump as his company, Paramount, seeks federal sign-off on a $111 billion deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. He has said he wants CBS News to appeal to what he describes as the 70 percent of Americans who consider themselves center-right or center-left.
In an interview with The Times, Mr. Pelley also said that Ms. Weiss had put her “thumb on the scale” for Mr. Trump during the last season of “60 Minutes,” a charge the network has denied. That assertion echoed a complaint from Sharyn Alfonsi, another correspondent, who said Ms. Weiss’s editorial guidance on one of her stories was “political.”
Last week, scores of prominent journalists, including well-known veterans of CBS News, signed an open letter to Mr. Ellison, who took over Paramount’s CBS last year, asking him to commit to the show’s independence. He has not yet weighed in publicly.
I’ll believe it when I see it, especially if Bari Weiss is still running CBS.
Scott Pelley warns CBS News is “on fire”youtu.be/Az8KobdJ84g?…
On July 17, 2025, at around 6 o’clock in the evening, President Trump’s top officials filed into the White House Situation Room — the secure bunker where classified and high-stakes national security matters are discussed and decided. This was where President Barack Obama, along with Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president’s national security team, watched the raid that ended with the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011.
Now, however, Trump’s most senior advisers had gathered — without him — to figure out how to gain some measure of control over a very different kind of crisis threatening to engulf the presidency: the Epstein files.
Ten days earlier, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. had jointly released a memo that bluntly stated that their review had found no “client list” of powerful men for whom the notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein had allegedly procured underage girls and young women. Intended to put to rest years of speculation and end the pressure campaign to release the voluminous material in the department’s possession, the memo instead had the opposite effect, setting off a backlash that was notably loud among the MAGA base.
And it was about to get worse: The Wall Street Journal was preparing a damaging article about Trump’s relationship with Epstein. The president’s desperate attempts to kill the story had failed. His team now had to get everyone onto the same page about how to counter the growing swarm of attention. They needed a gesture of transparency to appease an increasingly angry base, but also a way to convey the message that the president was sympathetic to his supporters’ concerns. Which itself was a problem, because he clearly wasn’t.
Vice President JD Vance took a seat at the head of the table in the John F. Kennedy Conference Room of the Situation Room complex. “This is a huge problem,” he told the group. Arrayed around him were the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles; the White House counsel, David Warrington; the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt; the deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich; the communications director, Steven Cheung; the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche; the associate attorney general, Stanley Woodward Jr.; and the deputy chief of staff James Blair. Attorney General Pam Bondi and the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, joined on speakerphone.
The vice president appeared panicked to others in the room about the way the subject of Epstein was already dividing the MAGA coalition. Some senior officials had the impression that Vance had bought into the darkest theories about Epstein and a cabal of predators hidden within the country’s ruling class. Wiles would tell others that the vice president had proved himself to be a major conspiracy theorist. Another top official said later that Vance had been pounding on the Epstein issue since the release of the memo. He was privately pressing for the administration to release all the Epstein files, everything in the Justice Department’s possession, even encouraging a congressional investigation.
Vance had also floated to colleagues an extraordinary P.R. gambit — that the White House enlist Tucker Carlson to interview Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison. It might help the president if Maxwell was willing to state that Trump had not been part of any wrongdoing with Epstein.
Vance told the group he believed all the files should be released as soon as possible. He argued that Congress was going to force the release of the files eventually. It was already clear that a bipartisan coalition in favor of such action was forming on Capitol Hill, and the momentum was going in one direction. If the administration got out ahead of this and released everything voluntarily — including whatever material existed about the president — it would at least get credit for transparency. The alternative was to let the story drag on for months as information dripped out, each new revelation renewing the cycle of suspicion and fury. Better to rip the bandage off and move on.
That’s a taste of it. You can use the gift link to read the rest.
Those are the stories that caught my attention today. What’s on your mind?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
Today is the 82nd anniversary of D-Day. On that long-ago day, Americans fought beside soldiers from many allied countries to save the world from fascism. Very few of those heroes are still alive today.
Joe Picard perched atop a precarious mound of 300-plus-pound high-explosive shells as his ship churned toward Normandy’s beaches. The teenager had been at sea only once before, to cross the Atlantic, and now he was sailing across the English Channel to pile into the breach that Allied forces had opened in Hitler’s defenses weeks earlier, on D-Day. Smoke from the fighting still rose on the horizon, but Picard’s eyes scanned the gray water below for signs of German U-boats. “You know,” he told the soldier next to him, “if we ever get hit with a torpedo here, they won’t ever find a trace of us.”
More than 80 years later, few men like Picard remain: those who participated in the boldest military operation of the 20th century and can lay claim to membership in the “greatest generation.” Less than 0.5 percent of the more than 16 million Americans who served in World War II are still alive. Before long, the great invasion of France that began on June 6, 1944—and the Second World War itself—will be recounted only in documentaries and books alongside other historic conflicts such as the First World War and the American Civil War. The immediacy of personal experience will vanish. But Picard, now 100 years old, can still recall the feel of the straw he stuffed into his mattress, the blast of a mine soon after he landed on Utah Beach, negotiations in French for the use of a château, and a friend’s death in a cold forest in Germany.
“A lot of people have said to me, God, how do you remember all that stuff?” Picard told me when we spoke at his retirement community in Rhode Island, near where he grew up. “I don’t remember what happened yesterday, but I remember what happened 80 years ago.” The memories have “always been vivid ever since the day they happened.”
Picard is still doing his part to maintain D-Day as living history. He has become, in his later years, the narrator of his own war experience. He speaks with classes of schoolchildren, constantly amazed that they care enough to listen. He has revisited and reminisced on the battlefields of Europe with the Best Defense Foundation, a nonprofit that returns veterans to the places where they served. His repetition of war stories across the years has also become a marker against which to measure how much he, and the country, has changed.
Back then, he and millions of others joined the military as volunteers or draftees. Most viewed fighting as a duty to be discharged before real adulthood began. The experience of war may have defined their lives but did not determine them. And the veterans were lauded for their service by grateful citizens, whether in France, in Germany, or at home.
Today’s service members are professionals, many of them dedicated to a career in uniform, separated to some degree from civilian life. The rancor and fissures in society run so deep that Picard finds it hard to imagine the national unity and resolve that would be required to risk millions of conscripts’ lives in pursuit of the liberation of others. “I hope that this type of situation won’t happen again,” Picard told me, with New England understatement, “because here in the U.S., I think our attitude is off a bit.”
The article is fascinating and well worth reading.
As an example of the current official attitude toward the D-Day anniversary, our so-called president chose to mark the day by posting an AI video of himself behaving like the childish idiot he is. I won’t share it here, but you can find it on Bluesky.
On the blood-soaked morning of June 6, 1944, the fate of World War II hinged not only on generals but also on thousands of ordinary people who fought their way onto the beaches and into the skies over Normandy, France, or otherwise joined in what became the largest seaborne invasion in history.
Over the years, the ranks of those who witnessed D-Day have thinned, and the event has receded from living memory into the realm of archives — and obituaries.
Here are the stories of some of those The New York Times has commemorated in recent years. They serve as a poignant reminder that the liberation of Europe required courage that transcended race, class and gender.
1921-2014
Walter Ehlers
Mr. Ehlers was the last survivor of 12 soldiers who were awarded the Medal of Honor — the highest American military decoration — for their actions during the Normandy campaign. (Nine of the medals were given posthumously.) On the 50th anniversary of the invasion, in 1994, he gave an address and walked along Omaha Beach with President Bill Clinton. Read his obituary.
1923-2023
Maureen Flavin Sweeney….
On her 21st birthday, June 3, 1944, Maureen Flavin, who worked in a post office recording weather data, unwittingly helped determine the outcome of World War II. Though she was unaware of it at the time, her weather reports were noticed by Allied military leaders. While working a late shift that day, she registered the likelihood of stormy weather on June 5, causing General Dwight D. Eisenhower to delay the invasion of Normandy by another day. Some say the effort would have failed if she hadn’t noticed the potential for disaster. Read her obituary.
1924-2025
Charles Norman Shay
“I saw there were many wounded men who were floundering in the water, who could not help themselves, and I knew that if nobody went to help them, they were doomed to die,” Mr. Shay recalled of his experience as a 19-year-old medic on Omaha Beach. One of about 175 Native Americans fighting for the Allied troops there, he repeatedly saved soldiers from drowning by turning them on their backs, dragging them ashore and tending to their wounds. Read his obituary.
1908-1998
Martha Gellhorn….
One of the first female war correspondents, Ms. Gellhorn hid on a hospital ship on D-Day and then sneaked ashore. She later accompanied British pilots on nighttime bombing raids over Germany. When the Allies liberated the concentration camp Dachau, she wrote of what she saw: “Behind the barbed wire and the electric fence, the skeletons sat in the sun and searched themselves for lice. They have no age and no faces; they all look alike and like nothing you will ever see if you are lucky.” Read her obituary.
1922-2023
Léon Gautier….
Mr. Gautier was the last surviving member of France’s elite Kieffer Commando unit, which was among the first wave of Allied troops to storm the heavily defended beaches in the northern part of the country. As they sprinted up the beach, they cut through barbed wire under a hail of bullets. They spent 78 days on the front lines, and of the 177 who waded ashore, only two dozen escaped death or injury. Read his obituary.
Trump sent Pete Hegseth to France for the D-Day anniversary. His message to our allies was that they are letting too many immigrants into their countries.
PARIS, June 6 (Reuters) – U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned on Saturday that Europe faced what he called an invasion of dangerous ideologies arriving by sea, linking immigration to the legacy of the D-Day landings in remarks in Normandy.
His remarks echo criticisms often made by the administration of President Donald Trump about Europe, a region Washington argues is hampered by weak defences, inability to tackle immigration, needless red tape and “censorship” of far-right and nationalist voices to keep them from power.
“Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive,” Hegseth said in a speech at the Normandy American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer.
“When will European capitals do something about that invasion or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not,” he said.
Hegseth was speaking during commemorations for the 82nd anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy, when U.S. and Allied forces crossed the English Channel to launch the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi occupation.
U.S. officials, including Trump — and Vice President JD Vance as recently as Friday — have often criticized European countries for failing to control immigration.
Other than Native Americans, everyone in the U.S., including our “founding fathers,” either came here as an immigrant or descended from immigrants. Trump married two immigrants. This anti-immigrant attitude is just plain sick.
This is a shocking story that demonstrates how the Trump administration’s anti-science policies are affecting U. S. scientific research.
Five diabetes researchers, including the editor of a leading journal, were removed from the field’s premier conference in New Orleans on Friday morning, after handing out copies of an editorial criticizing the TrumpNI administration’s “dismantling” of the biomedical research enterprise.
The incident occurred outside a conference hall where a keynote address had originally been scheduled to be given by Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, at a gathering organized by the American Diabetes Association. A group of about 10 researchers, including some of the field’s leaders, were quietly handing out printouts of an editorial published in Diabetes Care, a journal the association publishes, according to three of the participants. Security and police told them to leave at the direction of event organizers and confiscated some of their lanyards and ability to attend the conference.
One of those ejected from the meeting was Steven Kahn, a University of Washington professor of medicine who is the editor in chief of Diabetes Care and the director of a federally funded diabetes research center. Kahn said in an interview that he had 1,000 copies made of an editorial that he had co-authored that called scientists to action to oppose changes to federal biomedical research funding that endangered diabetes research.
“A number of people who come to this meeting are scientists, who feel their livelihoods are threatened by what NIH is doing to science,” Kahn said.
Bhattacharya had been scheduled to give the keynote address, but it was instead given by Richard Woychik, a senior adviser to the NIH director for the agency’s Make America Healthy Again strategy. A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the incident.
Kahn said he was set to present a poster, give a talk and chair a session at the ADA Scientific Sessions meeting, which runs from Friday until Monday — but has since been informed by the scientific society’s leaders that he has been relieved of those duties.
Irl Hirsch, a University of Washington endocrinologist who was among the group handing out the editorials but did not have his badge confiscated, said that the group was peaceful and that there were no signs or chants. Hirsch described the situation as “censorship” by the scientific society — of leaders in the diabetes field who were sharing an editorial that pointed out that the NIH’s stewardship of biomedical research was having a destructive effect on diabetes research.
“It’s going to take generations to fix where we are now,” Hirsch said.
NEW ORLEANS — Members of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) were escorted by police out of the convention center in New Orleans during the organization’s annual meeting on Friday as they handed out copies of an editorial criticizing Trump administration changes to U.S. biomedical research.
Among them was Steven Kahn, MBChB, the lead author of the editorial, which published online in late April in the organization’s flagship journal, Diabetes Care. Kahn is also the editor in chief of the journal.
Kahn, Aaron Kelly, PhD, past ADA president Desmond Schatz, MD, Justin Ryder, PhD, Irl Hirsch, MD, and at least one other member were handing out printed copies of the editorial outside of a keynote speech given by an NIH official. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, was supposed to give the talk, but pulled out at the last minute, Kahn told MedPage Today.
Kahn said ADA leadership had inserted a statement in the editorial that the organization “had nothing to do with the writing of this manuscript. That is their insert.”
ADA’s media team confirmed that five registrants were removed for violating code of conduct rules that they agreed to when registering for the meeting.
“These attendees were escorted out by our onsite event security because they demonstrated behavior not consistent with this code of conduct,” the media team said in a statement. “They were respectfully given the opportunity to cease this behavior and chose not to which is why they were escorted out.”
I don’t even know how to react to this–professional organization so fearful of Trump that it won’t stand up for its more prestigious scientists. We may never recover from the cowardly actions of organization that are bending to the will of an ignorant, bigoted “president.”
There’s some good news from California, where the primary votes are slowly but surely being counted.
Xavier Becerra, a Democrat who was practically an afterthought until the final weeks of the California governor campaign, will advance to the November election after a top-two finish in this week’s primary, The Associated Press determined on Friday.
Steve Hilton, a Republican former Fox News host, and Tom Steyer, a Democrat and former hedge fund manager, remain locked in a close race for the second spot as election officials continue counting millions of ballots. In California’s nonpartisan primary, the top two finishers, regardless of party, advance to the November election.
Mr. Becerra’s primary performance caps his extraordinary come-from-behind surge in the tumultuous race and positions him to become California’s first Latino governor in the modern era if he wins in November. In interviews, voters said they appreciated his long career in government, which distinguished him from a sprawling field of less experienced competitors.
Mr. Hilton led in initial returns this week, but he was the beneficiary of Republican voters who turned in their ballots early. Many Democrats said they waited until the final week of voting because they found it difficult to choose among their party’s candidates and wanted to see how the race evolved up to Election Day.
The race was called on Friday when Mr. Becerra passed Mr. Hilton and moved into first place in returns. It remained to be seen whether Mr. Hilton could stave off Mr. Steyer, who has gained ground since Election Day but may remain stuck in third.
On what could happen next:
Mr. Becerra, 68, would be an overwhelming favorite if he were to face Mr. Hilton in the general election. No Republican has won a statewide office in California since 2006, and Mr. Hilton would be further hamstrung by his endorsement from President Trump, who remains deeply unpopular in California.
If Mr. Becerra were to face Mr. Steyer, he would endure a blistering intraparty fight over the next few months. Mr. Steyer, a billionaire who ran a hedge fund, spent $216 million of his personal fortune in the primary, and he has shown no indication that he would slow down in a general election. His spending helped make California’s primary the most expensive governor’s race in American history, according to an analysis by AdImpact, an ad tracking firm.
In the final stretch of the primary, Mr. Steyer attacked Mr. Becerra with negative ads. One suggested that Mr. Becerra could be indicted by the Trump administration because two of his aides pleaded guilty in the past year to corruption charges for siphoning off Mr. Becerra’s own campaign funds. Mr. Becerra has said he was unaware of the transfers, and federal prosecutors described him as the victim of his aides’ crimes.
Other attacks portrayed Mr. Becerra as beholden to special interests because the California Chamber of Commerce and other business interests put about $54 million into campaigns opposing Mr. Steyer and supporting Mr. Becerra.
I hope Steyer loses. He’s just another entitled billionaire.
In Maine, Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner is facing a storm of controversy. I don’t know if you’ve been following the story, but Platner has been accused of troubling behavior with women, and his controversial Nazi tattoo is back in the news.
Democrats are at each other’s throats about Graham Platner after his latest scandal. They don’t know what to do about it.
The New York Times released a report Thursday with disturbing accounts from several of Platner’s ex-girlfriends, just days before he is set to win the Democratic nomination to face GOP Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, a critical Senate battleground. One woman described Platner grabbing her in ways that left marks and once locking her in a room. She also claimed he knew that his tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol when he got it — something he has repeatedly denied.
The report — on the heels of last week’s news that Platner had sexted other women while married — left Democrats torn. Some view Platner, whose campaign has persisted despite a series of scandals, as their only chance to take down Collins. He continuously led Democratic Gov. Janet Mills in primary polling before she suspended her campaign in April, and has led the Republican senator in public head-to-head polls.
“Several donors I know are still all-in for Platner because he’s not Susan Collins and he’s a Democrat,” said Alex Hoffman, a Democratic strategist and donor adviser. “The line that keeps being thrown around is the double standard that exists between Republicans and Democrats, where if this was a Republican, they’d all be getting behind him.”
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who is scheduled to campaign with Platner on Friday, reiterated his support. And some Democrats online were quick to cast the ex-girlfriend of Platner who spoke on record to The Times, Lyndsey Fifield, as a partisan activist because she has worked in Republican politics.
Still, others warned that he’s a loose cannon and there’s no predicting what other information about his past will spill into public view. What has already come to light, they argued, might already be enough to sink his candidacy, not to mention undermine the party’s core values.
Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, moved to quell mounting Democratic anxieties about his candidacy on Friday, telling supporters in a defiant speech that his past behavior was being “weaponized” by his political opponents.
A day after The New York Times reported that three women — a conservative and two Democrats — who had been romantically involved with Mr. Platner described volatile and “toxic” relationships, Mr. Platner addressed a crowd at a theater in Bar Harbor, expressing confidence that Maine voters would stick by him.
“When politically motivated, serious and false accusations are made against me, Maine, you have my back,” Mr. Platner said. “The state of Maine raised me, and the state of Maine saved me, and to all of you out there, Maine, I will always have your back.”
Mr. Platner’s appearance came at a tense moment in one of the year’s premier Senate races. With just days left before Maine’s primary on Tuesday, revelations about Mr. Platner’s personal history have caused escalating discomfort within his party, while drawing intensifying attacks from Republicans.
The rally also took place less than a week after The Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, had sought to warn his campaign last year that her husband had been exchanging sexual messages with multiple other women.
Onstage, Mr. Platner referred to Ms. Gertner by name, drawing chants of “Amy!” It was one of the strongest responses from a supportive but relatively sedate crowd that included attendees who said they were anxious about Mr. Platner’s candidacy and still getting to know the candidate.
Mr. Platner said from the stage that he had gone through a period of “darkness” after his military service.
“Now, as every single piece of that past and journey gets dug up, litigated and weaponized, you have my back,” he said.
When Platner first threw his hat in the ring last year, there was a reasonable argument for his candidacy — here was a political outsider with a fresh perspective who represented a new generation of political talent for Democrats.
But everything we have learned about Platner over the past several months suggests that he is a moral and political trainwreck, with enough skeletons in his closet to fill a graveyard.
Indeed, since Platner announced his candidacy last year, there has been an unceasing drumbeat of scandals about him. He filled a Reddit message board with sexist, racist and off-color comments. He has exaggerated his working-class background and appears to have spent most of his life living off handouts from his parents. But above all, there was the revelation last fall that he had gotten a Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on his chest two decades ago — and by his account only realized it was a Nazi tattoo in the fall of 2025, as he began his campaign for the U.S. Senate.
In recent days, the stories about Platner have taken on a darker, more troubling hue. Last week, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times revealed that soon after his marriage in 2023, Platner was caught by his wife sexting as many as a dozen women. His profile page on Kik, an anonymous social media site often used for dating, was still active.
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
jjlo
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments