Well yeah, but the only reason Shitter is charging them is because they're not white enough to qualify for the "Afrikaans" package of relentless promotion
Back in February, Elon Musk skewered the Treasury Department for lacking "basic controls" to stop payments to terrorist organizations, boasting at the Oval Office that "any company" has those controls.
Fast-forward three months, and now Musk's social media platform X is suspected of taking payments from sanctioned terrorists and providing premium features that make it easier to raise funds and spread propaganda—including through X's chatbot, Grok. Groups seemingly benefiting from X include Houthi rebels, Hezbollah, and Hamas, as well as groups from Syria, Kuwait, and Iran. Some accounts have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers, paying to boost their reach while X apparently looks the other way.
In a report released Thursday, the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) flagged popular accounts likely linked to US-sanctioned terrorists. Some of the accounts bear "ID verified" badges, suggesting that X may be going against its own policies that ban sanctioned terrorists from benefiting from its platform.
Do you want to increase piracy? Because this is how you increase piracy.
Netflix is joining its streaming rivals in testing the amount and types of advertisements its subscribers are willing to endure for lower prices.
Today, at its second annual upfront to advertisers, the streaming leader announced that it has created interactive mid-roll ads and pause ads that incorporate generative AI. Subscribers can expect to start seeing the new types of ads in 2026, Media Play News reported.
“[Netflix] members pay as much attention to midroll ads as they do to the shows and movies themselves,” Amy Reinhard, president of advertising at Netflix, said, per the publication.
$31k isn't nearly enough. Time to start threatening bar licenses
A California judge slammed a pair of law firms for the undisclosed use of AI after he received a supplemental brief with "numerous false, inaccurate, and misleading legal citations and quotations." From a report: In a ruling submitted last week, Judge Michael Wilner imposed $31,000 in sanctions against the law firms involved, saying "no reasonably competent attorney should out-source research and writing" to AI, as pointed out by law professors Eric Goldman and Blake Reid on Bluesky.
"I read their brief, was persuaded (or at least intrigued) by the authorities that they cited, and looked up the decisions to learn more about them -- only to find that they didn't exist," Judge Milner writes. "That's scary. It almost led to the scarier outcome (from my perspective) of including those bogus materials in a judicial order."
Gilmoure shares a report: U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said. Power inverters, which are predominantly produced in China, are used throughout the world to connect solar panels and wind turbines to electricity grids. They are also found in batteries, heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers.
[...] Using the rogue communication devices to skirt firewalls and switch off inverters remotely, or change their settings, could destabilise power grids, damage energy infrastructure, and trigger widespread blackouts, experts said. "That effectively means there is a built-in way to physically destroy the grid," one of the people said, The two people declined to name the Chinese manufacturers of the inverters and batteries with extra communication devices, nor say how many they had found in total.
President Donald Trump allowed family members of one of the world’s most notorious drug-trafficking cartels to enter the United States, even as the president has promoted himself as tough on crime.
Mexico’s Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch has confirmed that 17 family members related to the heads of the Sinaloa Cartel were allowed into America.
“It is evident that his family is going to the U.S. because of a negotiation or an offer that the Department of Justice is giving him,” García Harfuch said in a radio interview.
Tuesday’s revelation that the Trump administration made this move came on the same day that the Department of Justice charged Sinaloa Cartel members with material support of terrorism, drug trafficking, and narco-terrorism.
Trump has claimed that stopping the spread of fentanyl in the U.S. is a top goal of his in regards to crime. But the Sinaloa Cartel is one of the world’s major traffickers of the substance, and Trump has apparently made a deal with them.
A truck burns on a street in Culiacan, Sinaloa state, in January 2023.
When he’s not reportedly letting in people affiliated with crime families, Trump is warmly welcoming the descendants of the racists who created South Africa’s apartheid regime.
Trump made an exception to his policy suspending refugee admissions, allowing 59 white Afrikaners to the United States on Monday. Trump and his team have lied and said the Afrikaners faced persecution from Black South Africans. The people Trump has welcomed have opposed the South African government’s policies to address how land was stolen from Black people during apartheid.
Trump’s deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, bragged that the white immigrants could “be assimilated easily into our country,” which stands in stark contrast to Trump’s opposition to migrants with Black and brown skin.
At the same time the immigration system is open to cartel family members and Afrikaners, it is being used to detain Americans.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is holding 19-year-old Ximena Arias-Cristobal, a college student in Georgia. Arias-Cristobal, who is undocumented and has lived in America since she was 4, is being held after she was wrongly accused of making a traffic violation. Though the local police department has cleared her of all charges, ICE continues to detain her.
The young woman’s detention echoes Trump’s approach to rounding up migrant families and political dissenters, then holding them in custody.
Under Trump, a criminal connection does not appear to be a roadblock to getting across the border, nor is it a problem if you have the right color of skin and are associated with white-grievance politics. Everyone else, though, is out of luck.
Donald Trump has made it clear that refugees aren’t welcome in the United States—unless they’re white.
Despite suspending all refugee admissions into the country as soon as he was sworn in this past January, the president and his state department bros made an exception and welcomed a planeload of 59 white Afrikaners Monday, many of whom are farmers of Dutch descent who settled in South Africa. They were greeted by Deputy Secretary of State Christoper Landau and Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar with open arms.
“We respect what you have had to deal with these past few years,” Landau said to the families as they waved small American flags and donned camouflage jackets.
Young Afrikaner refugees from South Africa hold American flags on May 12 at Dulles International Airport in Virginia.
Landau joined Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in boosting the false narrative that white settlers in South Africa have been enduring racial discrimination and even violence from the government and Black South Africans.
“No one should have to fear having their property seized without compensation or becoming the victim of violent attacks because of their ethnicity,” the state department wrote in a Monday press release.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, however, has been quick to give the Trump administration a reality check.
“Those people who have fled are not being persecuted, they are not being hounded, they are not being treated badly,” he said during a panel at the Africa CEO Forum in Cote d’Ivoire on Monday.
“They are leaving ostensibly because they don’t want to embrace the changes that are taking place in our country in accordance with our constitution,” Ramaphosa said.
The South African government is implementing the Expropriation Act, which will redistribute some land owned by white South African farmers to Black South African farmers.
Due to the country’s racist apartheid policy, Black farmers were driven into extreme poverty and were unable to own land as a minority of white settlers grew the country’s crops. Today, just 4% of private land is owned by Black people, even though they make up 81% of the country’s population. The controversial land reform program seeks to balance the scales that created generational poverty among South Africa’s Black citizens.
Because of this and South Africa’s pro-Palestinian stance on the Israel-Hamas war, Trump has also cut funding to the country that provided medical care for patients suffering from HIV and AIDS.
Rubio also gave Emrahim Rasool, South Africa's ambassador to the United States, the boot from the country for his less than favorable statements about his Dear Leader.
"South Africa's Ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome in our great country. Emrahim Rasool is a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS. We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON GRATA," a hysterical Rubio tweeted in March.
Of course, as Trump and his team are celebrating over saving white farmers from “racial discrimination,” they’re also eager to kick out Afghan refugees who came to the U.S. fleeing deadly conditions of Taliban rule.
According to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Afghan citizens are safe to return despite the country still being under the rule of the violent militant group.
“We’ve reviewed the conditions in Afghanistan with our interagency partners, and they do not meet the requirements for a TPS designation,” Noem said in a press release obtained by The Washington Post Monday, referring to Temporary Protected Status. The program allowed people fleeing war-torn countries, natural disasters or other challenges to legally reside in the U.S.
“Afghanistan has had an improved security situation, and its stabilizing economy no longer prevents them from returning to their home country,” Noem said.
Landau was blatant when explaining why white Afrikaners are considered an exception to Trump’s ban on refugees.
“Some of the criteria are making sure [...] that they could be assimilated easily into our country,” he said in response to a reporter’s question.
Q: There are many people who fit the criteria of fleeing persecution. Afghans for example. But they're being denied refugee status. So why such an exception for the Afrikaners?
TRUMP ADMIN OFFICIAL: One of the criteria is making sure they can be assimilated easily into our country [image or embed]
There's no "new ownership" exception to breach of contract lol
The new owners of VPN provider VPNSecure have drawn ire after canceling lifetime subscriptions. From a report: The owners told customers that they didn't know about the lifetime subscriptions when they bought VPNSecure, and they cannot honor the purchases.
No coincidence why Trump suddenly fired the head of the Copyright Office.
Business Insider tells the story in three bullet points:
- Big Tech companies depend on content made by others to train their AI models.
- Some of those creators say using their work to train AI is copyright infringement.
- The U.S. Copyright Office just published a report that indicates it may agree.
The office released on Friday its latest in a series of reports exploring copyright laws and artificial intelligence. The report addresses whether the copyrighted content AI companies use to train their AI models qualifies under the fair use doctrine. AI companies are probably not going to like what they read...
AI execs argue they haven't violated copyright laws because the training falls under fair use. According to the U.S. Copyright Office's new report, however, it's not that simple. "Although it is not possible to prejudge the result in any particular case, precedent supports the following general observations," the office said. "Various uses of copyrighted works in AI training are likely to be transformative. The extent to which they are fair, however, will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs — all of which can affect the market."
The office made a distinction between AI models for research and commercial AI models. "When a model is deployed for purposes such as analysis or research — the types of uses that are critical to international competitiveness — the outputs are unlikely to substitute for expressive works used in training," the office said. "But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries."
The report says outputs "substantially similar to copyrighted works in the dataset" are less likely to be considered transformative than when the purpose "is to deploy it for research, or in a closed system that constrains it to a non-substitutive task."
"A day after the office released the report, President Donald Trump fired its director, Shira Perlmutter, a spokesperson told Business Insider."
Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes:
The new Nintendo Switch 2 is almost here. Next month, eager fans will finally be able to get their hands on the highly anticipated follow-up to the wildly popular hybrid console. But before you line up (or frantically refresh your browser for a preorder), you might want to read the fine print, because Nintendo might be able to kill your console.
Yes, really. That's not just speculation, folks. According to its newly updated user agreement, Nintendo has granted itself the right to make your Switch 2 "permanently unusable" if you break certain rules. Yes, the company might literally brick your device. Buried in the legalese is a clause that says if you try to bypass system protections, modify software, or mess with the console in a way that's not approved, Nintendo can take action. And that action could include completely disabling your system.
The exact wording makes it crystal clear: Nintendo may "render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part...." [T]o be fair, this is probably targeted at people who reverse engineer the system or install unauthorized software — think piracy, modding, cheating, and the like. But the broad and vague nature of the language leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Who decides what qualifies as "unauthorized use"? Nintendo does.
Nintendo's verbiage says users must agree "without limitation" not to...
Publish, copy, modify, reverse engineer, lease, rent, decompile, disassemble, distribute, offer for sale, or create derivative works
Obtain, install or use any unauthorized copies of Nintendo Account Services
Exploit the Nintendo Account Services in any manner other than to use them in accordance with the applicable documentation and intended use [unless "otherwise expressly permitted by applicable law."]
Bypass, modify, decrypt, defeat, tamper with, or otherwise circumvent any of the functions or protections... including through the use of any hardware or software that would cause the Nintendo Account Services to operate other than in accordance with its documentation and intended use
"...if you fail to comply with the foregoing restrictions Nintendo may render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part."
On April 30, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, a case that addresses whether Oklahoma is required to provide public funding to the Catholic Church for operating a religious charter school.
While the case is expected to be decided next month, John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” focused less on the case itself and more on the dodgy organization behind it: the Alliance Defending Freedom. Known as the ADF, it has been certified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group—and for good reason.
Now led by far-right lawyer Kristen Waggoner, the ADF has flooded the court system with so-called “religious freedom” cases. Oliver began his exposé with a focus on the group’s founder, James Dobson, who many would remember for creating the anti-LGBTQ hate group Focus on the Family. Dobson infamously warned that same-sex marriage would lead to “marriage between a man and his donkey.”
Oliver described Dobson as “A man who looks less like a real person and more like AI’s answer to the question, ‘What did they look like without their hoods?’”
As detestable as it is, the ADF has played a significant role in shaping our country’s current legal landscape. This is the same group behind last summer’s legal attack on the abortion pill mifepristone, and the same group of reactionaries that successfully defended a Christian baker’s discriminatory practices against a same-sex couple he refused to make a cake for in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
The group’s most devastating victory was the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and stripped federal protections for abortion rights for millions.
Oliver summed it up with devastating clarity.
“This is a group that will talk winsomely about personal liberty, all while fearmongering about softball players that don't exist, shitty studies that don't apply, and pedophile cakes that no one will ever order,” he said. “And it might be important for everyone to know that at the end of the day, ADF at its core is really a lot like the pews at an imaginary donkey wedding—which is to say, absolutely full of shit.”
So while most people would assume the upcoming charter school case to be a foregone matter of separation between church and state, the ADF’s egregious influence on our judiciary means the outcome is far from certain.
Instagram's AI chatbots are masquerading as licensed therapists, complete with fabricated credentials and license numbers, according to an investigation by 404 Media. When questioned, these user-created bots from Meta's AI Studio platform provide detailed but entirely fictional qualifications, including nonexistent license numbers, accreditations, and practice information.
Unlike Character.AI, which displays clear disclaimers that its therapy bots aren't real professionals, Meta's chatbots feature only a generic notice stating "Messages are generated by AI and may be inaccurate or inappropriate" at the bottom of conversations.
Because Amazon is just an extension of Trump, Inc. now. Burn them to the ground.
This morning, Punchbowl News reported that Amazon was considering listing the cost of tariffs as a separate line item on its site, citing "a person familiar with the plan." Amazon later acknowledged that there had been internal discussions to that effect but only for its import-focused Amazon Haul sub-store and that the company didn't plan to actually list tariff prices for any items.
"This was never approved and is not going to happen," reads Amazon's two-sentence statement.
Amazon issued such a specific and forceful on-the-record denial in part because it had drawn the ire of the Trump administration. In a press briefing early this morning, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked a question about the report, which the administration responded to as though Amazon had made a formal announcement about the policy.
CBS owner Paramount is reportedly nearing a settlement with President Donald Trump over his claim that 60 Minutes "deceptively manipulated" a pre-election interview with Kamala Harris.
Trump's complaint, filed against Paramount and CBS in a federal court in Texas, seeks at least $20 billion in damages. The lawsuit has been widely described as frivolous, but it appears that Paramount is motivated to settle the case while it seeks the Trump administration's approval for a merger with Skydance.
Reports published yesterday by the Los Angeles Times and New York Times say that Paramount is ready to settle. "In an April 18 meeting, the Paramount board outlined acceptable financial terms for a potential settlement with the president, according to three people with knowledge of the internal discussions," the NYT wrote. "The exact dollar amounts remain unclear, but the board's move clears a path for an out-of-court resolution."
There are never any limits when it comes to this court granting the wishlist of the bigots on the right wing
A man carries a large wooden cross in front of the US Supreme Court. | Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images via AFP/Getty Images
During an oral argument on Wednesday, the Supreme Court appeared all but certain to divide along party lines in a case that seeks to fundamentally expand the role religion plays in American public schools.
This isn’t surprising: Almost immediately after Republicans gained a supermajority on the Supreme Court, they started rewriting the Court’s religion decisions to make them more favorable to the religious right. One month after Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation gave the GOP their sixth vote on the Court, Roman Catholic Diocese v. Cuomo (2020) revolutionized the Court’s approach to religious objectors who seek exemptions from obeying the law — overruling a decision that was only a few months old in the process.
Since then, the Court has handed down case after case overruling previous religion decisions, usually to the benefit of the Christian right. The Court’s new decisions give religious conservatives far more ability both to ignore laws they do not like, and to demand that the government fund their religious institutions. After less than five years in power, the Court’s new majority has rendered the country’s religion jurisprudence unrecognizable, even to a lawyer who would have been considered an expert in the Constitution’s approach to religion less than a decade ago.
On the surface, Wednesday’s argument in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond merely signaled that the Court’s Republican majority will very likely take the next incremental step in its seemingly inexorable march toward integration of church and state.
Upon closer inspection, however, the Oklahoma argument was unlike some of this Court’s early forays into religion because some of the Republicans explicitly acknowledged that they are rewriting the Constitution’s approach to religion, and a few of them even appeared to signal where they want this revolution to end.
As Justice Brett Kavanaugh said late in the Oklahoma argument, the Court now has a “different constitutional understanding” of whether separation of church and state is even permitted. That new understanding, Kavanaugh suggested, is this: So long as an American can choose not to participate in a state-backed religious operation, church and state do not need to be separate — indeed, separation of church and state is often unconstitutional under this framework.
In Oklahoma, which is about whether states must pay for religious charter schools using taxpayers’ money, Kavanaugh’s new regime would mandate a great deal of state funding for religious schools, so long as parents retain a “choice” about where to send their child. Under Kavanaugh’s approach, if “no student is compelled to go to a religious charter school,” state charter school programs like the Oklahoma program at issue in this case must fund religious instruction.
Again, this approach to religion is fundamentally different from how previous generations of justices viewed the Constitution — in Everson v. Board of Education(1947), for example, the Court said that “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.” But, at the very least, the Court’s new majority now appears to have settled on the rule it will apply in future cases seeking to mandate government funding of religious faith.
What is the Oklahoma case about?
Oklahoma is the culmination of a series of decisions that not only reject Everson, but also seek to turn it on its head. The rule is no longer that church and state must be separated. The Court’s current majority mandates that they must be entangled with each other.
In fairness, the right of citizens to choose whether to participate in religious institutions has animated the Court’s religion cases for quite a while. In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), a 5-4 Court ruled that states may voluntarily include religious schools in a private school voucher program, so long as parents ultimately got to decide whether to send their child to a religious school. But Zelman merely established that government funding of religious private schools is permissible, not that it is required.
That changed in a trio of cases that culminated in Carson v. Makin (2022). Carson held that, once a state sets up a private school voucher program, “it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.” So, once a voucher program exists, state funding of religion is now mandatory.
That said, Carson also held that states are still allowed to “provide a strictly secular education in its public schools.” The question in Oklahoma is whether state charter school programs — charter schools are classified as nonreligious public schools under both federal law and the laws of 46 different states, even though they are often run in partnership with a private entity — are allowed to provide the strictly secular education the Court spoke of in Carson.
After Wednesday’s oral argument, there appeared to be broad willingness among the Court’s Republicans (minus Barrett, who is recused from this case) to expand religious schools’ access to public money once again. Those justices seemed ready to rule that Oklahoma’s public charter schools are actually private schools, and therefore, the state must fund religious charter schools. The specific school at issue in Oklahoma, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, would be the first religious charter school in the nation.
If you accept Carson as legitimate, it’s not that much of a stretch to conclude that religious charter schools are mandatory.
The state’s best argument that Carson does not apply to charter schools is that the Court held, in Biden v. Nebraska (2023), that an entity which “was created by the State to further a public purpose, is governed by state officials and state appointees, reports to the State, and may be dissolved by the State” is a public institution, unlike the private schools at issue in Carson. Oklahoma law provides that charter schools cannot exist without state sponsorship, and the state exerts considerable control over charter schools — including approving their curriculum and requiring them to be audited by the state.
But none of the five Republican justices who heard the Oklahoma case appeared persuaded that charter schools count as public entities that are allowed to be strictly secular. Chief Justice John Roberts, the closest thing this Court has to a moderate Republican, compared Oklahoma’s charter schools to government contractors — he pointed to the Court’s decision in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia (2021) a government contracting case which held that a city could not exclude religious adoption agencies that refuse to place children with same-sex couples from its broader adoption program.
Meanwhile, many of the justices appeared genuinely angry that religious schools have been excluded from state and federal charter school programs for as long as those programs have existed. Justice Samuel Alito went on a rant about how current law permits charter schools that teach that being LGBTQ is a “perfectly legitimate lifestyle,” but doesn’t permit the government to fund religious viewpoints. Kavanaugh, at one point, suggested that the longstanding rule establishing that charter schools must be secular is “rank discrimination against religion.”
In fairness, Kavanaugh at least acknowledged that his Court recently changed the rules. When Gregory Garre, the lawyer defending Oklahoma’s ability to have a nonsectarian charter school program, pointed out that both federal law and every relevant state’s law provides for secular charter schools, Kavanaugh responded that “at that point it was considered constitutional to discriminate against religious entities.”
Based on Wednesday’s argument, it appears likely that the Court will adopt the rule Kavanuagh articulated shortly thereafter — that government funding of religious schools is required so long as individual citizens retain the choice to send their children to a non-religious school.
Will there be any limits on the Court’s new rule?
Democratic Justice Elena Kagan, for her part, spent much of the argument trying to draw out the implications of her Court’s new approach to religion. What if a religious charter school refused to educate children who do not share the school’s faith? Or suppose that a religious charter school wanted to toss out state curricular standards altogether? She brought up the example of an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva where instruction would focus almost entirely on the Talmud, to the exclusion of topics like math and English. Would taxpayers be required to fund this school as well?
Indeed, the implications of the Court’s new rules could be quite significant if they are applied outside of the public school context. If a religious individual believes it is a sin to ride a bus with people of another faith, does that mean that the state must now provide faith-segregated buses? If a city council puts out cookies and potato chips for attendees to snack on, do they violate the Constitution if these snacks are not kosher or halal? What if they are both kosher and halal, but they cannot be eaten by someone who holds the idiosyncratic religious belief that it is a sin to eat unhealthy food? Is the government required by the Constitution to give this person carrot sticks?
Kavanaugh’s view, at the very least, suggests that it is unconstitutional discrimination for the government to provide a benefit of any kind without also providing religious versions of that same benefit.
It’s worth noting that Oklahoma is the second oral argument in the last several days where the Republican justices appeared eager to reshape public schools in a Christian conservative image. Last week, in Mahmoud v. Taylor, most of the justices sounded extremely sympathetic to religious parents who objected to books being taught in public schools that have LGBTQ characters. Depending on how the Court rules in Mahmoud, it could impose such high burdens on schools that want to teach such books that public school districts will have little choice but to exclude them — effectively imposing a “Don’t Say Gay” rule on every public school in the country.
The Court’s rulings in both cases will come in the next few months. But for now, it appears the Republican justices’ religious conservative revolution is likely to march onward, remaking public schools, and potentially many other public institutions.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who has been floated as a possible 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, may have ended that speculation by embracing President Donald Trump on Tuesday.
Whitmer greeted and hugged Trump as he arrived in Michigan to commemorate the 100th day of his term. The two also stood on stage together during the event at the Selfridge Air National Guard Base, with Trump praising Whitmer for doing a “very good job.”
This follows Whitmer’s mid-April trip to the White House, when she stood in the Oval Office while Trump signed executive orders targeting former Trump officials who criticized him for lying about the 2020 election being stolen.
The turnaround by Whitmer will likely generate whiplash among the governor’s strongest supporters. Back in 2020 as the country was being ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic, Whitmer was the target of verbal attacks from Trump as she sought medical equipment for her state.
Gov. Whitmer joins Donald Trump on stage during his event celebrating his 100th day as president on April 29.
On Fox News, Trump complained of a “big problem with the young, a woman governor” and later referred to her as “Gretchen ‘Half’ Whitmer” who “doesn’t have a clue.”
“Every time the president ramps up this violent rhetoric, every time he fires up Twitter to launch another broadside against me, my family and I see a surge of vicious attacks sent our way” Whitmer wrote in 2020.
Trump minimized the terrorist plot to kidnap Whitmer, arguing that “maybe it was a problem, maybe it wasn’t.”
In the 2024 election, Trump won Michigan by less than 2% after losing to President Joe Biden in 2020 by nearly 3%.
But Trump is the same person he has always been. Cozying up to him enables his attacks on the values Whitmer has claimed to support, including policies that directly hurt Michigan residents.
Democrats have had enormous trouble adapting to opposing Trump again. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has also been floated as a 2028 candidate, has spent the last few months courting right-wing figures on his podcast and even pushing harmful anti-trans rhetoric.
In Congress, Democrats have again and again voted to confirm Trump’s nominees, including just this week with the confirmation of Tilman Fertitta as ambassador to Italy. These votes continue, even though some Democratic officials have admitted that they regret voting for other Trump nominees.
When it comes to opposing Trump, the Democrats are truly in disarray. And Whitmer didn’t hesitate to join their ranks—with a hug, no less.
For more than two months, the Trump administration has been subject to a federal court order stopping it from cutting funding related to gender identity and the provision of gender-affirming care in response to President Donald Trump’s executive orders.
Lawyers for the federal government have repeatedly claimed in court filings that the administration has been complying with the order.
But new whistleblower records submitted in a lawsuit led by the Washington state attorney general appear to contradict the claim.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is aggressively promoting a future where AI becomes the dominant form of social interaction, claiming that AI friends, therapists, and business agents will soon outnumber human relationships. During a recent media blitz across multiple podcasts and a Stripe conference appearance, Zuckerberg cited statistics suggesting "the average American has fewer than three friends" while claiming people desire "meaningfully more, like 15 friends" -- positioning AI companions as the solution to this gap.
The Meta founder's vision extends beyond casual interaction to therapeutic and commercial relationships, with personalized AI that "has a deep understanding of what's going on in this person's life." Meta has already deployed its AI across Instagram, Facebook, and Ray-Ban smart glasses, reaching nearly a billion monthly users.
Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates ratcheted up his feud with Elon Musk, accusing the world’s richest man of “killing the world’s poorest children” through what he said were misguided cuts to US development assistance.
Gates, who is announcing a plan to accelerate his philanthropic giving over the next 20 years and close down the Gates Foundation altogether in 2045, said in an interview that the Tesla chief had acted through ignorance.
In February, Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) in effect shut down the US Agency for International Development, the main conduit for US aid, saying it was “time for it to die.”
Blatant racism as US foreign policy. What could possibly go wrong? ugh.
President Donald Trump is looking to additional faraway countries to deport immigrants — another escalation of his immigration crackdown.
He has already sent immigrants to an El Salvador megaprison that is notorious for human rights abuses. Those deported include Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the government admits it wrongfully sent to El Salvador and has so far refused to return to the US.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that, as part of negotiations to end Russia’s war on Ukraine, Trump also pressured Ukraine to take US deportees. It has yet to do so, and it’s not clear that the proposal remains under consideration.
The US is reportedly in talks with Rwanda to deport immigrants to the country, which has a poor record on human rights under its current president, Paul Kagame.
That’s despite Libya’s record of human rights abuses in its immigrant detention centers and exploitation of migrants by human traffickers.
For those reasons, sending immigrants to Libya would be, according to legal experts, a clear violation of US and international law.
“I have the same concerns that I think we all have about all the disappearances, which is that they’re just rounding up people kind of willy-nilly, without regard for who they are, whether they have cancer, whether they’re US citizens, whether they can’t remove them,” said Becca Heller, co-founder and director of the International Refugee Assistance Project. “They’re sending them to these black sites overseas, and then claiming that they can’t get them back.”
What we know about Trump’s plans
Trump administration officials said on Tuesday that deportation flights to Libya could begin as soon as Wednesday, multipleoutlets reported.
It’s not clear how many, what nationalities they may represent, or whether they have been afforded any kind of process to challenge their deportations in the US. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for further information on Wednesday.
Lawyers for immigrants from Laos, Vietnam, and the Philippines asked a federal judge this week to prevent their clients from being sent to Libya before they had a chance to challenge their deportations in court. The attorneys claimed that, based on what their clients had told them, the immigrants were at risk of being sent to Libya in apparent violation of an earlier court order.
US District Judge Brian Murphy ruled Wednesday that, if the media reports about the planned Libya deportations are correct, the plan “blatantly defies” the court order, which requires that immigrants be granted written notice of their deportation and a “meaningful” opportunity to appeal.
Neither of Libya’s warring government factions appears to be in on Trump’s plans, either. Both the internationally recognized government in Libya’s capital of Tripoli and warlord Khalifa Hiftar’s authorities in the eastern part of the country denied striking any agreements with the US to accept its deportees on Wednesday.
It’s also not clear what legal authority, if any, Trump might be invoking to deport immigrants to Libya. Federal courts have temporarily blocked the administration from invoking an 18th-century wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act to find people eligible for deportation without a final removal order from an immigration judge. Trump, however, has already ignored a court order and could do so again.
But even if Trump has the authority to deport certain migrants, sending them to Libya, with its horrific record of abuse, is illegal.
Sending immigrants to Libya would violate US and international law
It’s illegal to forcibly send immigrants to places where they will face persecution and danger. Under both US and international law — including the Convention Against Torture and a 1967 protocol implementing the Refugee Convention — this is what’s called the principle of “non-refoulement.”
Sending immigrants to Libya would violate this cornerstone of human rights law because the country, a major transit hub for migrants trying to reach Europe from Africa and the Middle East, is by no means safe. The country has been embroiled in conflict since the country’s authoritarian leader Muammar Gaddafi was killed in 2011 as part of a NATO-backed revolution.
“Libya doesn’t even have a national government,” Heller said. “It has two competing [government] entities and a very clearly documented history of torturing and abusing migrants and refugees whom it detains.”
Libya has long been part of a migrant corridor to Europe, providing access via the Mediterranean Sea. As of 2022, the United Nations estimated that there were almost 700,000 migrants stranded in Libya as Europe strengthened its border controls.
Human traffickers have subjected immigrants in Libya to beatings, rape, torture, forced labor, and extortion. Those intercepted on their way to Europe have been held in Libyan detention centers where they have suffered similar abuses.
Trump tried something like this before during his first administration. He brokered what he called “safe third country” agreements under which the US could send asylum seekers to countries including Guatemala. As is the case with Libya, immigrant advocates argued at the time that none of those countries could be considered safe and that in attempting to remove immigrants to those countries, the US was violating the principle of non-refoulement.
“They’re all just ways to have a reign of terror over migrants for an end that I don’t completely understand,” Heller said. “It doesn’t appear to have anything to do, actually, with border security or with law enforcement.”
Broadcom has been sending cease-and-desist letters to owners of VMware perpetual licenses with expired support contracts, Ars Technica has confirmed.
Following its November 2023 acquisition of VMware, Broadcom ended VMware perpetual license sales. Users with perpetual licenses can still use the software they bought, but they are unable to renew support services unless they had a pre-existing contract enabling them to do so. The controversial move aims to push VMware users to buy subscriptions to VMware product bundles, with associated costs that have increased by 300 percent or, in some cases, more.
Some customers have opted to continue using VMware unsupported, often as they research alternatives, such as VMware rivals or devirtualization.
The Drug Enforcement Administration has quietly ended its body camera program barely four years after it began, ProPublica reports, citing an internal email. From the report: On April 2, DEA headquarters emailed employees announcing that the program had been terminated effective the day before. The DEA has not publicly announced the policy change, but by early April, links to pages about body camera policies on the DEA's website were broken.
The email said the agency made the change to be "consistent" with a Trump executive order rescinding the 2022 requirement that all federal law enforcement agents use body cameras. But at least two other federal law enforcement agencies within the Justice Department -- the U.S. Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives -- are still requiring body cameras, according to their spokespeople.
Well-deserved. She's a phenomenal cartoonist and has been doing great work for decades
Cartoonist Ann Telnaes won the Pulitzer Prize for illustrated reporting and commentary on Monday, shortly after she resigned from The Washington Post over it reportedly censoring a cartoon critical of Post owner Jeff Bezos’ relationship with President Donald Trump.
The Pulitzer Prizes are considered the highest award in journalism. In its citation, the Pulitzer committee credited Telnaes for “delivering piercing commentary on powerful people and institutions with deftness, creativity—and a fearlessness that led to her departure from the news organization after 17 years.” Telnaes previously won the award in 2001.
“In a time when the free press is under attack by autocrats in their quest to silence dissent, editorial cartoons and satire are essential for a democracy to survive and thrive,” Telnaes said in a statement. “I’m honored to receive this award and encourage everyone to support their local cartoonist.”
Telnaes left the paper in January after a cartoon she drew was declined for publication by the Post’s editorial page. The sketch depicted Bezos, Mickey Mouse (Disney owns ABC), Meta head Mark Zuckerberg, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, and Sam Altman of OpenAI bowing to Trump and offering him money.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post
Days after the incident, Bezos was among those with front row seats to Trump’s inauguration—an event that he reportedly donated funds to.
Telnaes’ departure was part of a steady stream of figures leaving the paper at the end of 2024 and early this year. Staffers quit after Bezos spiked an endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, and columnists Ruth Marcus and Jennifer Rubin also quit over the Post’s capitulations to Trump.
Bezos has not publicly opposed Trump’s policies like tariffs, even while arguing that the newspaper’s editorial line would openly support “free markets and personal liberties.”
Trump has expressed delight that Bezos is now in his corner. In a March interview, Trump hailed Bezos for “trying to do a real job” in changing the editorial tone at the paper.
As the Trump administration has made a concerted effort to warp press access at the White House in favor of outlets willing to regurgitate right-wing propaganda—or, in the case of the Post, not push back too hard against it—figures like Telnaes have continued to speak out.
Telnaes now operates a Substack for her cartoons, with over 98,000 subscribers. Thousands of people will still see the award-winning work that didn’t bow to Trump—they just won’t see it in The Washington Post anymore.
I can't wait til we're no longer all held hostage to the whims of this petty tyrant and his spineless enablers
Because President Donald Trump loves a good distraction while ignoring far more pressing problems, he reportedly plans to announce that Washington, D.C., will host the 2027 NFL draft—likely on the National Mall.
According to Axios, Trump will make the announcement flanked by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris. Soon after the report, the White House confirmed the president would make an unspecified sports-related announcement at 1 PM ET.
The NFL Draft was held in New York from 1965 to 2014 but has rotated cities since, most recently landing in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Now Trump, a terrible United States Football League team owner and wannabe NFL franchise owner, seems hopeful that the NFL’s massive popularity will rub off on him as his own poll numbers slide.
But one has to ask—why now? Americans are struggling under his erratic trade policies, and inflation remains stubborn. If Trump needs something to do, he could try fixing any of that rather than staging photo ops with football executives.
RFK Stadium is visible from Air Force One as it takes off from Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, on Nov. 29, 2017.
Axios’ report comes just days after D.C. officials and the Commanders announced plans to bring the team back into city limits with a new multibillion-dollar domed stadium on the old site of Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium. That venue, backed in part by taxpayer dollars, is expected to open in 2030, well after Trump is out of office (hopefully).
Axios noted that Trump may have a personal stake in making sure the stadium deal goes through. If the D.C. Council rejects it—which is possible, given concerns about public funding—the Trump administration could step in. After all, Congress only recently gave D.C. long-term control over the RFK Stadium’s land, but Trump could easily push to take it back if it suits him.
The double standard here is hard to ignore. In 2015, some conservatives melted down when then-President Barack Obama dared to fill out a March Madness bracket during a global crisis. One Commentary writer accused him of showing a “defiant unwillingness” to lead.
Trump, meanwhile, announces a football-themed press conference in the middle of economic and political chaos—and gets crickets from his party.
Some may find it absurd that Trump, who’s feuded with the NFL for decades, is now trying to pivot. He showed up at the Super Bowl and got booed, and just last week, he hosted some of the Super Bowl-winning Philadelphia Eagles at the White House.
And in typical fashion, Trump can’t help but make even the NFL draft about himself. After ranting on Truth Social that NFL teams were “STUPID” for passing on college football quarterback Shedeur Sanders, the Cleveland Browns picked Sanders a few rounds later. The White House then floated the idea that Trump helped make that happen.
“Does the president think he deserves credit for Sanders getting picked?” Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
“All I will say is the president put out a statement and a few rounds later he was drafted,” Leavitt replied. “So I think the facts speak for themselves on that one.”
While the economy sputters and real crises go unaddressed, Trump is busy trying to weasel himself into the NFL. If it gets him applause, he’s more than willing to let everything else go up in smoke.
From the department of head scratches comes this counterintuitive news: Microsoft says it has no plans to change a remote login protocol in Windows that allows people to log in to machines using passwords that have been revoked.
Password changes are among the first steps people should take in the event that a password has been leaked or an account has been compromised. People expect that once they've taken this step, none of the devices that relied on the password can be accessed.
Not just a bug
The Remote Desktop Protocol—the proprietary mechanism built into Windows for allowing a remote user to log in to and control a machine as if they were directly in front of it—however, will in many cases continue trusting a password even after a user has changed it. Microsoft says the behavior is a design decision to ensure users never get locked out.
Well that helps explain the dismal performance and security
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 20%-30% of code inside the company's repositories was "written by software" -- meaning AI -- during a fireside chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Meta's LlamaCon conference on Tuesday. From a report: Nadella gave the figure after Zuckerberg asked roughly how much of Microsoft's code is AI-generated today. The Microsoft CEO said the company was seeing mixed results in AI-generated code across different languages, with more progress in Python and less in C++.
On Tuesday, the blue lab coat-clad Bondi toured a Drug Enforcement Administration facility that analyzes chemical modifications made by drug traffickers. During the tour, Bondi revealed a pill press capable of producing 15,000 pills per hour.
“That’s how easy it is to kill Americans,” she told reporters.
Unlike the Food and Drug Administration’s Moffett Center Proficiency Testing Laboratory, which conducts rigorous food safety testing, the DEA lab Bondi visited appears to be one of the few government-run labs not yet shuttered by the Trump administration.
The event marked a new public relations stunt for Bondi, whose main job as President Donald Trump's top cop has largely been to attack political enemies and run shoddy interference for Trump’s actions, such as the illegal deportations of U.S. citizens and immigrants.
Bondi adds a mixture simulating the ingredients of fentanyl pills into a tablet press machine while cosplaying as a scientist at a DEA lab on April 29.
Throughout Trump’s first 100 days, Bondi has spent most of her time defending Musk from criticism and protests against Tesla. She has repeatedly issued threats and pursued oversized penalties for people perceived to detract from the work of Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
But when it comes to actual safety threats, Bondi has seemingly barely lifted a finger—like when Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania’s home was set on fire, an arson attack that she has barely acknowledged.
Republicans have always preferred playing dress up to doing meaningful government work. But the Trump administration has taken the pursuit of optics over substance to an entirely new level of absurdity.
