A nameless socialist who isn't online nearly enough.
Member of at least two alphabet mafias.
Reform, protest, activism, elections big and small. It all helps.
Conservatives and "Leninists" sabotage the world using the exact same talking points.
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Doctors in Gaza observed a disturbing pattern: children with a single gunshot wound to the head or chest, a sign that they had been deliberately targeted. This emerges from research by de Volkskrant, which spoke with the doctors who are among the last international eyewitnesses.
Some doctors have been left numb. But others have chosen to speak out.
These physicians are among the last international eyewitnesses, as Israel does not allow foreign journalists into Gaza.
They can speak from firsthand experience about the consequences of the genocidal violence, which, with the leveling of Gaza City, has entered its next pitch-black phase.
That role comes with a heavy dilemma. Nearly all of them want to return to Gaza. But going public with what they’ve seen increases the risk that Israel will deny them reentry. According to the United Nations, more than one hundred foreign medical workers have been turned away since March 2025 — often without any official explanation.
Many doctors have come to accept this threat. Being silent is not an option.
Over the past few months, de Volkskrant spoke with seventeen doctors and one nurse from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands. Since October 2023, they have worked in six hospitals and four clinics across Gaza, often returning once or even twice. Most of them have extensive experience working in crisis zones such as Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, and Ukraine.
At the paper’s request, they handed over hundreds of photos and videos of patients, X-rays, medical notes, and diary entries. They talked for hours. They laid bare what they saw in their operating rooms. And they all faced the same question: what are the wounds telling us about the war?
Trump Administration Lifts Ban on ‘Cyanide Bombs’ on Public Lands
The Trump administration is lifting a ban on the use of “cyanide bombs” on public lands, reversing course over the objections of environmentalists and animal-rights activists.
The Bureau of Land Management will once again allow the use of the devices, which are spring-loaded traps intended to kill coyotes, foxes and other animals that prey on livestock, according to an internal April memorandum reviewed by The New York Times.
The Biden administration had banned the devices in 2023, saying they were too dangerous to people and wildlife. Public Domain, a Substack newsletter focused on public lands, first reported on the internal April memo.
Cyanide bombs, also known as M-44 devices, spray a lethal dose of sodium cyanide, a highly toxic pesticide, when triggered by a biting animal. They are meant to kill predators that threaten cattle, sheep, goats and other livestock on farms and ranches across the West.
But the devices can also kill or injure people, pets and endangered species. In one 2017 incident that gained national notoriety, the 14-year-old Canyon Mansfield and his dog were sprayed by a cyanide bomb near their Idaho home. The dog, Kasey, collapsed and died. Canyon was rushed to a hospital, where he was treated for temporary blindness.
Alyse Sharpe, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, which includes the Bureau of Land Management, said in an email that the memo classified M-44s “as tools that may be considered under existing law and environmental review.”
Capitalist propaganda: "Monthly food rations per Polish citizen in the early to mid 1980s. But next time socialism will work."
Michael: "Can someone please explain why so many people still take socialism seriously? It has always failed badly, every sing time."
Comrade Jake: "This kind of propaganda completely falls apart when you understand that ration cards were not a limit on how much food you could have. They were a guarantee of your basic necessities. You could still buy surplus food in addition to your rations."
Based on my mom's experience living in Poland in the 70s and 80s, the ration cards were kind of a guarantee that people would get the basics. Often people could have afforded to buy more beyond that, but it just wasn't available. My mom often talks about how store shelves were empty except for vinegar. People knew what day food was delivered to the store and lined up to be able to get some before it ran out and shelves were empty again. That's part of why my mom was so awed when she first came to the US, and why she worked so hard to try and find a way to stay here and raise her kids here. Grocery stores with shelves and shelves of food you could just get any time? It was like a wonderland to her.
It's also part of why I have such a hard time talking to her about anything socialist. Because her experience of it is living under an oppressive Soviet puppet state. It is frustrating but also understandable, because even though I consider myself a socialist, it's hard to argue with someone who grew up and escaped a very fucked up version of it.
"People could have afforded more, but there was nothing on the store shelves" vs "The shelves are laden with unimaginable abundance, but no one can afford to buy it."
Also a lot of the time making / distributing more food in exchange for money was illegal because that would have been capitalism. Farmers were allowed to raise livestock for their own purposes but not sell the meat to shops, so when I was an anemic toddler, my mother had to conduct a legit espionage operation to find out who was already illegally buying meat from a farmer, so that our apartment was added to the weekly rounds of a middle-aged woman who toted around like half a calf in her bags, freshly slaughtered meat wrapped in old newspapers. I remember how the fresh blood smelled.
(I also have my old health card with a prescription written by a doctor. The prescription was for extra cheese and butter beyond the ration cards. I was two years old.)
If someone reads all of it and wonders why communism was considered giant success by many: the lacking piece is life of average peasant before communism.
My grandpa remembered until his death young lord who didn't want a boiled egg. On one side of a ridge, local noble's garden, few years old lordling running and screaming he doesn't want to, and governess chasing after him with egg on a spoon, or maybe in a bowl; on the other side peasant children, hungry, watching over geese on a pasture, absolutely sure they would eat that egg with the eggshell if given a chance.
Grandpa was over 70 and still couldn't get over it. How hungry they all were, next to a lordling who didn't want a boiled egg, who never knew hunger.
It is about the tamest image one can get for how commonplace hunger was. History sources say that in Warsaw between WW1 and WW2, where poor flocked in hope for work, at some point street prostitutes took 2 kilograms of onions as a payment.
In same Warsaw, rents were so high and evictions so frequent, that newspapers only informed of those that were somehow special, like widowed father jumping from 6th story window with two small daughters due to eviction; or bed-bound elderly evicted with the bed. Those, on themselves, filled weekly newspaper column.
It was also common practice for middle-class to fire their all-chores housemaid in June, before traveling to countryside or spa for summer, and hiring again in September. About 30% of women in Warsaw were domestic servants. No all-chores housemaid earned enough to survive two months from savings. Starving servants were seasonal occurence.
I'm not even starting on life of a peasant in tsarist Russia.
And yet, everything told above about hardships of living under communism is true. Soviet communism was both a success and a failure.
There are a bunch of paintings like this, of Russian soldiers in 1917 and 1918 who had been suffering for years, finding the opulence of the tsar's palace
The latest revelations have left Maine's voters in an unenviable position.
From the June 5, 2026 opinion piece:
The question is now whether Mainers believe that someone who has been openly contemptuous of women—and possibly worse—in the very recent past can be a reliable leader of the majority-woman Democratic Party, the only major party concerned with defending women’s rights from a movement in power hellbent on destroying them. The infuriating thing about this political moment is that, on this front and every other one that matters, Platner is still the correct pick over Collins, who played a pivotal role in the overturning of Roe v. Wade and has repeatedly empowered Trump to do his worst. Maine voters will be stuck deciding between a candidate with a pattern of mistreating women in his personal life and one who set back women’s rights by half a century in her political one.
You cannot defeat misogyny by behaving like a misogynist.
[...]Klippenstein isn’t satisfied with his tawdry defense of Platner nor his faintly homophobic discussion of Buttigieg’s modesty. In the post, he includes side-by-side pictures of Susan Collins and Janet Mills captioned with a joke he copied over from his social media: “Susan Collins and Janet Mills would never be embroiled in a sexting scandal (too much integrity?)” One has to assume Klippenstein finds these women too ugly to have ever received a sexual advance. Hilarious isn’t it? And Klippenstein’s specific contempt for Mills radiates through the piece. He opens the piece by stating that she got “her clock cleaned by Platner so badly she’s probably still shitting pieces of her dentures out.”
Klippenstein protests that he isn’t actually a fan of Platner. I’ll take him at his word on that. So it’s difficult not to conclude that what’s animating him, aside from sheer misogyny and ego, is a kind of anti-fandom against liberals akin the pro-Platner fervor Kulinski has expressed. Klippenstein hates Mills, Buttigieg, Schumer, and other mainstream Democrats. And he loves any opportunity to demean them, especially if it gives him a chance to bro out.
In a similar vein, David Sirota wrote an essay at Jacobin dismissing the idea that private behavior should ever matter more than a candidate’s policy positions. But, again, it feels mostly like a proxy for Sirota’s own animosities. And, again, it comes off as casually misogynistic in its indifference to Platner’s infidelity or his past online comments about women. Here’s Sirota:
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What struck me about these defenses of Platner is that they are yearning for a more masculine aesthetic in their politics. They desperately want the left to return to the old hammer and sickle days of the early Soviet Union when propaganda depicted communism with a blonde haired blue eyed fit man toiling in the fields or the factory.
The combination of Platner's gravelly voice, blonde hair, and Downeast Maine oysterman appearance makes these guys wet. The candidate had them in the first frame of he his slickly produced ad announcing his candidacy.
This is the common through line of so much of Platner's media support, from Kulinski to the Pod Save guys singing his praises.
These guys want you to know they're through with the soft, feminine, effete, Democratic party, and they think Platner is the way back to the politics of rough and tumble unionism and sex appeal. To hell with supporting trans rights or bothering about with abortion access, we need a left that puts the man first baby.
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I miss when political scandals actually caused shitty politicians to drop out and be replaced. It's fucking wild we're still having to talk about a guy whose Nazi tattoo made headlines months ago.
It's like Pete Hegseth gets to have a government job with his Nazi tattoos, so now having Nazi tattoos and lying about the fact that they are Nazi tattoos is normal and people are supporting a Democrat candidate with a NAZI TATTOO and I am just so fucking exhausted.
Several female Navy officers say they see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's recent intervention in a promotions list as a sign their careers
WASHINGTON (AP) — After Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cut nine Navy officers, including all the women, from a promotion list, several female officers say they see the unusual intervention as a sign that their careers now have a ceiling and worry for the future generation of female military leaders.
The Navy had selected 31 sailors to promote from the rank of captain to one-star admiral, but Hegseth recently intervened to strike nine people from the list, including three women and two Black men, according to a defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss information not permitted to be released publicly.
As a result, the Navy is not promoting a single woman to the one-star admiral rank this year even though women make up about one-quarter of all Navy officers and nearly one-third of the sea service’s midgrade ranks, according to military data from 2024.
The counterintelligence threat level was raised by the Defense Intelligence Agency in recent weeks after growing concerns that Israeli espio
The counterintelligence threat level was raised by the Defense Intelligence Agency in recent weeks after growing concerns that Israeli espionage had become more aggressive than usual, sources say.
June 5, 2026, 7:13 PM MST
By Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube and Dan De Luce
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is increasingly concerned about Israel ramping up its spying on the U.S., recently raising the counterintelligence threat level from America’s top ally in the Middle East to the highest level, according to two U.S. officials and one former U.S. official.
The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency in recent weeks issued the new counterintelligence threat assessment amid rising tensions between Israel and the U.S. over the way forward in the war with Iran, the officials said. They said the DIA posted an internal message, viewed by one of the current officials, that raised the level for Israel to “critical.”
The designation stems from concerns within the Pentagon that Israel is making a particular effort to surveil top U.S. officials to get information on the Trump administration’s internal deliberations and decision-making on the conflicts in the Middle East, the officials said.
The DIA assessment includes a seven-page document and features a chart, according to one of the current U.S. officials. The document says the assessment of Israel is that its ability to conduct human espionage and technical collection is at a “critical level,” according to the official.
It also identifies a series of specific incidents that heightened U.S. concerns, the official said.
A spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., said in a statement that it is “completely false” that Israel spies on the U.S. “Israel does not gather intelligence on American entities, let alone US government officials,” the spokesperson said. “Israel intelligence collection efforts are aimed at its enemies, not its allies. Any claims to the contrary are either misinformed or politically motivated.”
The court’s conservatives ripped the mask off the institution in a brief, unsigned decision allowing Alabama to use a racially discriminator
Paul Blumenthal at HuffPost:
Whatever meager shred of legitimacy the U.S. Supreme Court had went up in flames with its shadow docket decision on Tuesday allowing Alabama to move forward with a racially discriminatory congressional map with no time for election administrators to prepare.
The brief, unsigned decision to allow Alabama to implement a never-before-used congressional map repeatedly found to be racially discriminatory by a district court panel and a previous Supreme Court ruling is so shoddy and partisan that it is hard to take the court’s conservative supermajority seriously anymore.
In April, the Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that to challenge racial vote dilution under the Voting Rights Act, plaintiffs must prove intentional racial discrimination, rather than merely discriminatory effects. At the same time, it allowed legislators to immunize themselves by claiming partisanship as a pretext for eliminating majority-minority districts — an easy task in Southern states with high levels of racial polarization.
Alabama Republicans seized on this not to further bury the Voting Rights Act, but to defang the Reconstruction Amendments that gave the law its constitutional life. The resulting decision is as monumental as it is brief, and it reveals a court untethered from a semblance of duty to explain itself.
The case, Allen v. Milligan, originated in 2021, when Alabama drew congressional district lines with just one Black-opportunity district — as it has since the 1990s. In a lawsuit, Black Alabamians alleged that the Voting Rights Act required the state to draw an additional Black-opportunity district and that the redistricting process was tainted by intentional racial discrimination. And they won, before a district court panel in 2022 and the Supreme Court in 2023.
A curious thing happened next: Alabama refused to abide by the Supreme Court’s decision and draw district lines with a second Black-opportunity district. The same district court panel found this map to be the product of intentional racial discrimination because of both the manner in which the legislature drew the map, including discussing creating communities for those with European heritage and the placement of Black voters, and because Alabama refused to draw a second Black-opportunity district after being explicitly ordered to do so. This led the district court panel to impose its own map for the 2024 election.
But then came Callais.
While Callais claims not to undo the Voting Rights Act, it does just that by making it all but impossible to win a Voting Rights Act case regarding redistricting. In a state like Alabama, where Black voters are overwhelmingly Democrats and white voters are overwhelmingly Republicans, all Republicans need to do is claim they are diluting Black voters because they are Democrats. The result has been a mad dash reminiscent of the onset of Jim Crow by Southern states controlled by white Republicans to eliminate congressional and state legislative seats held by Black Democrats.
But the decision in Callais also stated that it said nothing about challenges of racial discrimination brought under the 14th Amendment, as the Black Alabamians had done and the district court panel had ruled had happened in Allen v. Milligan. It also explicitly stated that Callais did not overturn the decision in Allen. “We have not overruled Allen,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority.
Alabama Republicans responded by asking the Supreme Court to lift the district court panel’s injunction imposing the map with two Black-opportunity districts, and in the meantime passed a law to postpone its congressional primaries to impose the racially discriminatory map in case this happened. The Supreme Court approved Alabama’s request and ordered the panel to lift the injunction and reconsider the case in light of Callais — which the panel did, finding that the map was still racially discriminatory, even under Callais. Alabama then petitioned the Supreme Court to overrule the panel.
And the court did. Despite the district court panel finding that Alabama had met the high bar proscribed by Callais and engaged in intentional racial discrimination, and basing its ruling on the 14th Amendment as well as the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court’s conservatives expanded on Callais.
It took Callais’ requirement that partisanship trump race from Voting Rights Act racial vote dilution cases and broadened it to 14th Amendment racial discrimination cases. And it raised the bar for proving intentional discrimination even further, requiring courts to presume “legislative good faith” whenever judging the legislature’s actions.
And so, Callais did overturn Allen, even though Alito and the five Republican-appointed justices who joined his opinion claimed it did not.
SCOTUS under the MAGA 6 led by John Roberts is a wholly illegitimate institution that needs major reforms.
Since the 2020 election, local law enforcement has increasingly been playing a bigger role in helping local officials secure elections.
When Chris Davis first started working in law enforcement over 30 years ago, elections would come and go relatively unnoticed.
"Election Day was something, as a police officer, you may not even realize was happening," he said. "It wouldn't even come up on roll calls."
Davis is now chief of police in Green Bay, Wis. And elections have rapidly become a big part of his job, something he plans for year-round.
"I think a lot of that is just because we're right in the middle of the Wisconsin battleground," Davis said. "I remember really being struck when I came here at just how, almost, nervous a lot of city staff were about elections."
Davis' experience reflects a trend experts have noticed across the country: Since the 2020 election, local law enforcement has increasingly been playing a bigger role in helping local officials secure elections.
"The number of threats that election officials face, that jurisdictions face, that election workers face all mean that law enforcement does have a heightened role to play and a longer-term role to play," said Katie Reisner with the nonpartisan States United Democracy Center. "It's not a matter of just tapping in for Election Day and tapping back out."
According to a survey of local election officials conducted earlier this year by the Brennan Center for Justice, 32% of local election officials reported experiencing "threats, harassment, or abuse because of their job."
Americans are split on wanting the National Guard to monitor voting, a new poll finds
Voting officials are leaving their jobs at the highest rate in decades
Threats and harassment increased notably for election officials after President Trump's unfounded claims that the 2020 election was rife with fraud. The last few years have also seen historic rates of turnover among voting officials.
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A very loose acquaintance posted on Facebook, "we shouldn't judge Platner by his character, we should judge him by how well he will stand up to the oligarchy"
I guess some people have a dream, of a world where a man is judged, not by the content of his character nor the nazi tatoo on their chest, but by the fanfictions written to preemptively define his political action.
A year ago, the Ukrainian government decided to take the fight directly to Russia. It hasn’t looked back since.
A year ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky articulated a strategy of “bringing the war back to Russia.” “The war was brought from Russia, and it is to Russia that the war must be pushed back. They must be the ones forced into peace. They are the ones who must be pressured to ensure security,” Zelensky said in March 2025.
Since then, and ever more intensely this year, Ukraine has been pursuing a “strategic neutralization” of assets in Russia. This means scaling back the hard-fought, casualty-intensive thrusts to claw back occupied territory that have cost Ukraine so much in terms of blood and treasure, and instead embracing long-range, asymmetric warfare to degrade Russia’s economy, rupture its military manufacturing, and deflate civilian morale. This spring, there’s every sign that this strategy is bearing fruit—and perhaps even shifting the battlefield calculus in the war’s fifth, grinding year.
Almost daily, Ukraine’s new weaponry capabilities, in particular its own long-range missiles and high-precision drones, are wreaking havoc where they hit energy infrastructure, arms and explosives factories, and military command and logistics centers. On the home front, Ukraine is playing defense, killing or wounding about 35,000 Russians a month, according to Ukrainian sources, bringing some estimates of the war’s total death toll to 352,000 Russian service members.
According to Ulf Brunnbauer, a historian at the University of Regensburg, Ukraine’s object is to show its Western supporters that “they have not only staying power but can really harm Russia, thus helping their case for continuous support. This puts Kyiv in a better position for eventual peace talks by increasing the incentives for Russia to settle for a compromise.”
The battered oil refineries smoldering across Russia underscore Ukraine’s success in choking Russia’s economic lifeline. In April and thus this month, the Ukrainian armed forces have hit 20 oil refineries and export terminals. The dramatic images of Ukrainian drone strikes on the Tuapse oil refinery on Russia’s Black Sea coast on April 28 displayed a Russia at war and reeling: For weeks, thick black smoke spewed out of the site and blanketed more than 300 kilometers of southern Russia, including three cities.
The strikes, some hitting as far as 1,750 km from Ukraine—that’s 2.5 times farther than the range possible four years ago—have rendered Russia unable to fully capitalize on the high petroleum prices caused by the Iran war.
According to Al Jazeera, Ukraine has deterred Russia from reaping the gigantic windfall profits that it was counting on from oil exports, some of which the United States made possible by lifting individual sanctions in the context of the Iran war and energy crisis. Ukraine’s long-range strike campaign against Russian port and energy infrastructure in “a calculated bid to prevent Russia from offloading oil onto tankers,” Al Jazeera reports. In other words: Ukraine found a way to check the effects of a U.S. policy that had originally looked devastating for Ukraine. In March, Russia’s seaborne oil shipments dropped by roughly 300,000 barrels per day, partly as a result of Ukrainian drone strikes on refineries. According to Bloomberg, average output at Russian oil refineries fell to 4.69 million barrels per day in April, a record low since December 2009.
And the strikes on military installations such as air defense systems, airfields, and armament plants appear to be thrwarting Russia’s ground war in Ukraine, too—Kyiv’s most immediate priority. Russia’s forward momentum on the battlefield in Ukraine has ground to a virtual halt. Its armed forces even suffered a net loss of territory in April, for the first time since August 2024, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a U.S.-based think tank. Russia’s anticipated spring offensive is thus far a washout.
Just this weekend, Ukraine’s long-range strike capabilities reached deep into the Russian heartland, hammering its military tech industry in locations previously considered untouchable due to their closeness to the capital. Long-range attack drones struck Angstrem Microelectronics in Zelenograd, a main cog in Russia’s semiconductor industry. And drones also damaged MKB Raduga, the nerve center for Russia’s cruise missile program, in Dubna, just 80 miles north of Moscow.
“This strategy is all about the battlefield in Ukraine. It’s about stopping Russia from taking the Donbas and forcing it into negotiations that Ukraine can control,” said ISW analyst George Barros. “That should be the basis for a settlement.”
Until now, Barros argued, Russian President Vladimir Putin has operated “as if it doesn’t matter how high costs run as long as Russia keeps making gains and the West’s will dwindles. The idea was that Russia will simply outlast them and win in long run.” But Russia is obviously now wavering in a way that it hasn’t before, Barros said.
There are signs everywhere that Russia is panicking but perhaps none greater than Putin’s call for a cease-fire on May 9, Russia’s Victory Day national holiday, when it commemorates the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, usually with plenty of pomp and bluster. Putin pleaded with Ukraine not to disrupt the celebrations, and the usually uber-martial parade burnished no military hardware at all this year—a stinging admission that Ukraine has the capability of striking a top-tier public event in the middle of Moscow in the middle of the day.
According to the Moscow Times, an independent Russian media outlet, the Kremlin is rethinking its war goals and the narrative that it tells Russians about the “special military operation,” as it calls the war, downplaying its significance. Russian officials are apparently preparing to frame a peace deal with Ukraine as a “victory.” The Kremlin wants to shift public messaging away from its previous goal of capturing all of Ukraine, and in particular Kyiv, and toward holding what Russia already has—occupied territories in eastern and southern Ukraine—firmly in its hand.
And there’s even evidence of discontent among Russian political strategists regarding the war’s high cost. High-ranking officials have begun to question aloud the war’s continuation, according to the Moscow Times. Reportedly, they believe that taking the entire Donbas requires a full-fledged wartime economy and countrywide mass mobilization. This, they warned, would dangerously exhaust Russia’s resources, break the economy, and accelerate already dire population decline.
These setbacks for Russia are increasingly reflected in public opinion, which has largely supported the war until now. Although Russian polling shows that 73 percent of Russians approve of Putin’s performance—a robust number, were this applied to Western politicos—it is the lowest figure recorded since February 2022, according to the Public Opinion Foundation.
Most Russia experts doubt that Ukraine pins any hope on Russians rising up to overthrow Putin. The authoritarian state’s controls are too muscular, and just to make sure that this occurs to no one, Putin has clamped down on social media, such as the widely used Telegram channels, which are a widely accessed media source for many Russians.
“Public opinion,” said Barros of ISW, “is important to the Kremlin today in a way it wasn’t during the Cold War. Our team has been astonished about the extent to which Putin has made militarily questionable decisions in order to maximize regime stability and minimize discontent at home.”
And the deep-strike capabilities aren’t the “only cards that Ukraine has now,” said Fedir Serdiuk, a Ukrainian Defense Ministry advisor, in reference to U.S. President Donald Trump’s contention that Ukraine “doesn’t have the cards” to win the war.
“Ukraine relies on state-of-the-art unmanned surface vehicles and sensors to navigate and control the Black Sea,” Serdiuk said. “Millions of first-person-view drones, surveillance platforms, and much improved intelligence tech has helped sustain defense on the ground.” Serdiuk also pointed to ever more effective special operations such as Operation Spiderweb, a covert drone attack deep inside Russia in June 2025 that took out a significant portion of Russia’s strategic aviation capabilities, including Tu-95 and Tu-22M bombers.
Brunnbauer, the historian, doubted that Ukraine believes that it can push the Russians back, at least in the short or medium term. “But what they are showing to the world, to themselves, and to the Russians who care to know” he said, “is that time is not necessarily on Russia’s side—and that they can survive without much American help.”
The president told The Wall Street Journal he wants staffing cuts at the office that coordinates intergovernmental intelligence sharing.
Aaron Pellish at Politico:
President Donald Trump has outlined his mandate for incoming acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte: He wants to gut the office.
Trump said in a Wall Street Journal interview published Friday he believes the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is too bloated, and has tasked Pulte, who will take over for Tulsi Gabbard, with overseeing staffing cuts.
“I’d like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there,” he told the Journal.
The Journal reported Trump suggested Pulte prioritize firing staff who served during the Biden and Obama administrations.
Trump told reporters on Friday he “wouldn’t mind” staffing cuts at ODNI.
“I’ve heard that’s way too high for way too long,” he said on Air Force One of the staff levels at the agency. “If he cut, I wouldn’t mind that.”
Trump’s vision for ODNI could further alienate Republicans on Capitol Hill, some of whom expressed dismay following the announcement that Trump had tapped a close ally with zero national security experience to lead the government’s intelligence-sharing operation.
Trump downplayed Pulte’s lack of national security experience while speaking to reporters at the White House on Thursday.
“Bill is a guy that will be able to figure it out very quickly,” he said.
Pulte earned a reputation as a staunch Trump loyalist during his stint as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency — a role he continues to serve in, in addition to his intelligence community responsibilities — when he recommended that the Department of Justice launch mortgage fraud investigations into some of Trump’s political enemies.
The president stressed that Pulte’s appointment will be temporary and that he is considering other candidates to fill the role permanently. He told the Journal that serving on an acting basis “gives you more power” to enact the sweeping changes he hopes to impose.
Trump said he expects the person he nominates to permanently succeed Gabbard to continue the staffing cuts he’s asked Pulte to start.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Donald Trump told acting DNI head Bill Pulte to make cuts to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Such a move would weaken national intelligence.
Acting director David Venturella rescinds Biden-era policy that required agency to report and investigate such deaths
Edward Helmore at The Guardian:
A memo issued by the acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director, David Venturella, has ordered the federal agency to cease reporting the deaths of newly released detainees, in a change that could obscure the full human cost of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration mass detention policies.
The move, first reported by the Washington Post, rescinds a 2021 policy implemented by the Biden administration that required ICE to report to Congress and investigate deaths of detainees that occur within 30 days of their release.
The goal of the 2021 policy was to ensure that ICE could not avoid accountability for deaths by releasing severely ill people from custody. Detainees with brain damage or suffering from infection, for instance, have died shortly after ICE released them.
[...]
Deborah Fleischaker, acting chief of staff at the time, said that the policy was “changed to make clear that ICE should not release people simply to avoid deaths in custody”.
In the latest memo, Venturella wrote: “ICE is returning to the standard practice of reporting deaths that occur while an individual is in agency custody.”
Cruelty and insanity from ICE: A newly-issued memo by acting director David Venturella orders the agency to stop reporting on the deaths of newly released detainees.
See Also:
LGBTQ Nation: ICE is going to stop reporting when detainees die soon after being released
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Nithya Raman within 1% of Spencer Pratt in L.A. mayor’s race
After slowly gaining on Pratt for several days, Raman, a Democrat, is still sitting in third with 26.21% of the vote, Saturday night’s latest election numbers show. Pratt, a reality TV star, is now clinging to second with 27.32% of the vote.
Incumbent Karen Bass has already advanced to the general election with 34.81% of the vote. The second-place candidate will compete with Bass in a November runoff.
On Saturday morning, Pratt held 28.24% of the vote in the June primary, while Raman trailed by multiple points at 24.89%. She has since gained significant ground in the race.
Pratt responded to the latest election numbers on social media with a meme of a complex math equation from the movie “A Beautiful Mind,” starring Russell Crowe.
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