“HMP greatly encourages one of the most unpopular men in America to campaign with Republicans across the country,” says Katarina Flicker, a national press secretary for the House Majority PAC, a spending group that spends millions each cycle to elect Democrats to Congress. “His efforts will be crucial to Democrats taking back the House in 2026.”
The [Washington] Post wrote that "US officials say Trump is much more upset about the inclusion of a liberal journalist on a confidential group chat than he is about exposing secrets to foreign adversaries. But White House officials have found Waltz's denials increasingly hard to believe."
Where do they find these guys?
But in fulfilling a key campaign promise, he also ignored warnings that targeting key trading partners – from the likes of China, Japan and the European Union – will raise prices at home and risk the eruption of a global trade war.
The guy did own a casino, after all. For a while.
On Friday, Trump issued full and unconditional pardons to four individuals and a related cryptocurrency exchange, BitMEX.
Corporations are.
And Trump, he's just a crypto kinda guy. Multiple millions worth of kinda guy.
“TV interviews aren’t just a forum to test-run your latest thought bubble.”
No baking necessary there.
The center's Veterinary Laboratory Investigation and Response Network tests raw pet food for bird flu. In recent weeks, the FDA has issued several pet food recalls after detecting bird flu contamination.
Guacamole lovers flinched when President Trump threatened a trade fight with Mexico, which accounts for roughly 90% of U.S. avocado imports.
SPOILER: Still working on it.
Wilmore and Williams, the first crew to ride Boeing's faulty Starliner spacecraft last summer, spent days undergoing routine medical checks by NASA's astronaut office after returning to Earth on a SpaceX capsule in March and before they reunited with their families.
They've been working remotely — from, you know, orbit — for nine months. Great to be back, guys!
I hope they got a cake. Or something.
One of the two, Suni Williams, said they have a "very unique perspective" on their recent adventure.
Most Americans know very little about Elon Musk’s team of brainiacs at the Department of Government Efficiency, and may have misconceptions about who they are.It's a fawning op-ed from the New York Post. And yeah, at least some of it's true. But incomplete.
Whiz Kids was a name given to a group of experts from RAND Corporation with which Robert McNamara surrounded himself, in order to turn around the management of the United States Department of Defense (DoD) in the 1960s. The purpose was to shape a modern defense strategy in the Nuclear Age, by bringing in economic analysis, operations research, game theory, computing, as well as implementing modern management systems to coordinate the huge dimension of operations of the DoD, with methods such as the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS). They were called the Whiz Kids, recalling the group at Ford Motor Company that McNamara was part of in the 1940s and 1950s.
That from a stub article in Wikipedia. More here. Sound familiar?
McNamara and his Whiz Kids got us into the Vietnam War. And kept us there.
Just mentioning.
George Washington in 1796 set the precedent for a two-term presidency, a self-imposed limit that was observed by most U.S. presidents for more than 140 years until Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940.
Roosevelt, a Democrat who was president during the Great Depression and World War 2, broke tradition and served a third term, then died months into his fourth term in 1945. This paved the way for the amendment on term limits in 1951.
Trump says "there will be bombing" if Iran does not make nuclear deal
In a telephone interview with NBC News, Trump said U.S. and Iranian officials were talking but did not elaborate.
…about how J.D. gets to go around playing soldier all the time.
[I'm so old I can remember when we had real soldiers in the government (can you spell "Ike"?) and these ain't them.]
A Reuters review of data from two auto research firms found just 16 models with an average sticker price less than $30,000 and only one, Toyota's Corolla, that is assembled in the United States. All others are made in Mexico, South Korea, or Japan.
Amanda Cameron said her family's 2-year-old cat, Mr. Pugsley Addams, has always had a long tail, and the subject even came up during his first visit to the vet.
"We inform you that Executive Order 14173, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-based Opportunities, signed by President Trump, applies to all suppliers and service providers of the U.S. Government, regardless of their nationality and the country in which they operate," reads the letter, according to a copy that French newspaper Le Figaro published on its website.
Forget the bleu.
Lula [Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva] shrugged off the hotel crunch in a recent visit to Belem, suggesting those who cannot find accommodation should sleep "looking at the sky – it will be wonderful."
No room service but plenty of bugs, one imagines. And, hopefully, free. (Currently, rooms are averaging $1,500 per night.)
“A lot of people are interested in it, a lot of people are making a play. We hope that they [Greenlanders] choose to partner with the United States because we’re the only nation on earth that will respect their sovereignty…
No kidding. He said that.
The Vances are making an important State Visit™ to the U.S. Air Force base at the north of the island. They are accompanied by National Security Intern Mike Waltz and miscellaneous other officials.
Usha Vance originally was due to attend Greenland’s annual dog sled race farther south, but that visit was canceled after a hostile reception from local politicians and businesses.
HANOI, March 28 (Reuters) - The Trump Organization and its partner in Vietnam are working on multiple investments worth billions of dollars in golf courses, hotels and real estate projects in the Southeast Asian country, a spokesman for the consortium told Reuters.
Saigon Greens has a nice ring, doesn't it? A little revisionist, perhaps. But it's a new, new world.
How new, we are rapidly finding out.
“There are so many great reasons to be on Signal,” he said on X. “Now including the opportunity for the vice president of the United States of America to randomly add you to a group chat for coordination of sensitive military operations.”
If you're lucky. And then you can be called a sleezebag by the President.
But that's a (rather awkward) joke. Signal offers rock-solid encryption. (Meta's WhatsApp also runs on Signal encryption.) And it's free to use. A lot of people do. For various reasons. (And yes, some are criminal.)
But it's not approved for government-classified information because if the device on either end of the communication is hacked, the communication is too. Which is true of any messaging app.
"He's a cheeky one and had escaped from his field before. He was causing a nuisance on the roads for motorists so my officers had to find him and take him back to his field. He loves mints and once he had chomped down on one he was braying for more and was happy to come back with us," Beards said.
There'll always be an England.
WILMINGTON, Delaware, March 26 (Reuters) - The best-known member of Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service team of technologists once provided support to a cybercrime gang that bragged about trafficking in stolen data and cyberstalking an FBI agent, according to digital records reviewed by Reuters.…things get…messy. Fast.
"He [Coristine] is now working at Musk’s behest inside DOGE and we looked into his background, and so we found, you know, several notable things, Erin. One of which is that this individual has founded multiple companies, including one with another unfortunate name, uh, “Tesla Dot Sexy LLC,” which he established in 2021. He would have been around 16 years old," the reporter said.
[He's 19 now.]
Asked about the research, three intelligence analysts told Reuters the network appeared to be a prime example of how foreign-linked entities are trying to gather intelligence from staff fired or forced into retirement by President Donald Trump and billionaire tech tycoon Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.
Hey, they said they wanted transparency.
This is our national security apparatus looking like two children who just got caught stealing cookies.
CHICAGO (AP) — Hundreds of bicycle advocates were at an annual summit this month in Washington, D.C., when their cellphones lit up over breakfast with an urgent email warning that President Donald Trump’s transportation department had just halted federal grant funding for bike lanes.
Start your engines.
It's a scientific fact that oxygen causes rust. Stop breathing so much of it.
The gift was first mentioned last week by [Trump special envoy Steve] Witkoff in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Witkoff told Carlson that Trump “was clearly touched” by the portrait, which he described as “beautiful.”
When Putin plays it.
Senior Trump administration national-security officials held detailed discussions of highly classified U.S. plans to launch airstrikes against Yemen’s Houthi militants using a commercial messaging service and mistakenly included a journalist in the conversation, U.S. officials said Monday.Brian Hughes, spokescritter for the National Security Council, said — and I am not making this up — “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials."
At stake is the fate of genetic data from the company's 15 million customers. The company has secured enough funding to continue operations while a buyer is found, and even though US law limits how genetic data can be used, the pending sale has raised significant privacy concerns.
Wait. You paid for it?
The way things are going it might not be long before the government does it for free. Think of it as just another benefit.
Then, of course, the privacy concerns might be more than merely "significant."
Sponsorships range from $75,000 to $200,000, with the promise of logo and branding opportunities, a report viewed by CNN found.
Make America Ridiculous Again.
Despite being lighter, these new doors can pass the most stringent hurricane testing in the country: Miami Dade’s building codes for hurricane resistance. This involves withstanding air pressure equivalent to a major hurricane, and a two-by-four fired from a cannon at 34 miles an hour…twice.
Unless you live in Miami. Maybe.
But, wherever you live, it might be worth noticing this one observation:
Historically, the biggest reason that energy-efficient technologies get adopted is that building codes require them…. Without explicit regulations that enforce minimum standards, builders often seek deals on materials so that they can maximize profits, and businesses and individuals who rent out properties often have little incentive to reduce tenants’ month-to-month energy bills.
Regulations aren't all bad. Some are very good. For most of us.
Fom a story about Kendall Jenner (why???) in Sports Freaking Illustrated.
Her makeup was minimal yet radiant, enhancing her natural beauty. A luminous, dewy base let her natural skin shine, while a peachy-mauve blush added a soft flush to her cheeks. Her signature feathered brows framed her face, with wispy lashes accentuating her brown eyes. A balmy highlighter added a delicate glow to the tip of her nose, and a glossy taupe-brown lip completed the sultry look.
We are lost.
"Other political foes" include former Biden officials Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Lisa Monaco, Republicans Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
America's fertility rate is now projected to average 1.6 births per woman over the next three decades, according to the Congressional Budget Office's latest forecast released this year. This is well below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman required to maintain a stable population without immigration.Which fascinating fact gave rise to to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's exhorting his minions to favor "communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average" in doling out transportation services — with this masterpiece of beaurcratic obfuscation.
"To the maximum extent permitted by law, DOT-supported or -assisted programs and activities, including without limitation, all DOT grants, loans, contracts, and DOT-supported or -assisted State contracts, shall prioritize projects and goals that ... to the extent practicable, relevant, appropriate, and consistent with law, mitigate the unique impacts of DOT programs, policies, and activities on families and family-specific difficulties, such as the accessibility of transportation to families with young children, and give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average."
And if that doesn't kill your buzz, nothing will.
At most, [it could be] called a World Self-Reported Life Satisfaction Report—and it’s easy to see why such an honest title wouldn’t entice many journalists to write about it.
…yesterday was the International Day of Happiness.
Sorry if you missed it. The rest of the days aren't.
[ADD]
A recent NBC News poll says just seven percent of voters who are registered as Democrats feel "very" positive about the party.
See what I mean?
Tesla is recalling the cars because of the risk of a stainless-steel exterior trim panel detaching from the vehicle, causing a potential road hazard and raising the chances of a crash, it said.This is the eighth recall for the cybertruck — classified as an SUV — in the last 14 months.
Trump’s proposal during a phone call Wednesday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a new twist in peace efforts, which included a still-unsigned deal that would give the U.S. rights to hundreds of billions of dollars of rare-earth minerals.
We're only here to keep you safe.
While the river stays bright for several hours, some trace of color can remain for days.
It's an annual thing. (And St. Patrick's Day was yesterday, of course.)
The U.S. is paying [El Salvador strongman Nayib] Bukele $6 million to handle the 300 gang members, and Mr. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have praised him as if he’s an American hero. “We will not forget!” Mr. Trump declared.
Or, well, we're paying El Salvador to be on our side.
I rarely read editorials in newspapers. I look for straight reporting (here's a starting point) and have opinions of my own.
Here's one: No one needs to shed a tear over violent criminals who have entered the country illegally getting kicked out again. But it is imperative that even they be treated according to the law. Because it's that same law that keeps us safe.
That, to me, is a simple proposition. It does not take a great deal of intelligence to understand.
This latest work focuses less on the chemical changes that occur during the brewing process and more on the mechanical and physical processes. "To a physicist, brewing coffee is a reactive flow through a complex porous medium that undergoes dynamic reconfiguration—a fascinatingly complex phenomenon," Maciej Lisicki, a physicist at the University of Warsaw in Poland, told Ars.
Just drinking a regular old cup of joe, is where we'd be.
The bad news is that Trump still has not won over a majority of Americans, and 54% said they disapprove of his handling of the economy — the first time he’s lost a majority on that issue in NBC’s poll.
Hard times at the New York Post.
"The second thing we're going to say to the Americans is: 'if you want to fire your best researchers, if you want to fire all the people who, through their freedom and their sense of innovation, their taste for doubt and research, have made your country the world's leading power, then we're going to welcome them,'" continued Glucksmann.
In 2023 China produced roughly half of the world’s crude steel. China is the world’s largest automobile maker, accounting for a third of the global total. China’s state-backed aerospace company, the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC), threatens to take global market share from America’s Boeing and Europe’s Airbus. China is also the world’s largest commercial shipbuilder, responsible for more than half of all shipbuilding. America’s share of the global shipbuilding market is 0.10 percent. …During the Covid pandemic, Americans were shocked to learn how dependent the U.S. is on medical supplies from China, which provides around 30 percent of active pharmaceutical ingredients used in drugs by value and 78 percent of the vitamins in the U.S. A single Chinese company, DJI, controls 90 percent of the American drone market, including 90 percent of the drones used by American police departments and first responders.
Reuters also viewed three back-to-work memos sent to staff, informing some of them that they won't have a workspace or internet access when they return. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration told staff this week it cannot guarantee desks or parking spots for the roughly 18,000 employees expected to report to offices on Monday.
OK, I confess I didn't see the movie. Not the whole thing. I quit after about 20 minutes. But I take the comment (from the linked Reuters article) to mean pretty messed up.
If that's not what it means, it should.
Teenager Ben Thornbury designed a putt-putt golf course around the potholes in his hometown of Malmesbury, with a sign that read “High Street Crazy Potholes Golf: Now Open.” A month after a British tabloid did a story on the “cheeky” teen, the road was fixed. When more appeared, he set up roadside pothole fishing.
Also there'll always be a teenager, but that's a whole different thing.
“If they take away my access to Pornhub, I’m moving out of the US,” one concerned Manhattan user told The Post.
Fog harvesting is the practice of capturing tiny water droplets from fog with specialized mesh nets.
First-time offenders get a $300 fine—equivalent to roughly 50 dozen U.S. eggs (or 150 in Mexico).
Meanwhile, U.S. is importing eggs from Turkey. But they're not (this is confusing) turkey eggs.
Along the partially built road, lush rainforest towers on either side - a reminder of what was once there. Logs are piled high in the cleared land which stretches more than 13km (8 miles) through the rainforest into Belém.
These guys don't have any, it seems.
By the start of the 20th century, about 500 digits of pi were known. With computation advances, thanks to computers, we now know more than the first six billion digits of pi.
Hershey is trying to boost sales across at least 40% of its convenience store customers with its so-called “gold standard planogram,” which uses data to determine details like the best mix of king- and standard-size candy bars on shelves in a given store. The company is also boosting marketing for core convenience-store brands like Heath, Almond Joy and Mounds, Hershey said.
They may insist on bringing measles back. And, you know, nuclear war. But a world without Twinkies is a horror to great to bear.
“Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” Zeldin said. “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate-change religion.”
Prosecutors ordered him to pay a fine totaling 6,500 francs ($7,390) for a violation of weapons law, arguing that it applied even though the pistols were imitations “because they could be confused for real firearms due to their appearance” — despite the pink color.
In some cases, photos seemed to be flagged for removal simply because their file included the word ”gay,” including service members with that last name and an image of the B-29 aircraft Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II.Authentically stupid is more like it.
“Leave it to Minnesotans to be too stable and even-tempered to deprive us of the early train wrecks that have been so satisfying in previous seasons,” Laura Yuen, a columnist for the Minnesota Star Tribune, wrote last month.
I don't do reality TV. Not even TV news, which is, in the end, still TV. If you've ever been on a TV location shoot, or in a TV editing suite, you know how unreal reality can be.
But I did all my most important growing-up years in Minnesota, so that.
Some train wrecks take a lot longer than others, is all. Maybe it's the cold.
"Anyone can put numbers and words on a website," Gimbel said in an interview. "In order to be transparent, the numbers and words have to be accurate. They've already been shown not to be accurate so why should I trust it?"
Someday this might be funny, maybe material for a Broadway show like The Music Man or a movie like Tin Men. Who knows?
But it's not funny now.
Even Putin’s most hawkish advisers have been surprised by the speed with which the tone coming from the White House has changed in recent weeks, according to people who travel to Moscow and speak with Russian officials.
But otherwise…
At both state and federal levels, the Kennedy-led Make America Healthy Again movement is backing efforts to prevent people from spending food-aid benefits on sugary, carbonated beverages. Now, they are gaining momentum with an administration led by a man who enjoys soda so much that he had a red button installed on his desk for a valet to bring him a Diet Coke.
"Beverage companies are nervous," reports WSJ.
OK, maybe Diet Cokes are only diet poison.
“The president has been clear that he is focused on peace. We need our partners to be committed to that goal as well. We are pausing and reviewing our aid to ensure that it is contributing to a solution,” a White House official said in a statement.
In 1938 then English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich to discuss with Adolph Hitler a plan Adolf had to annex just a little part of Czechoslovakia.
Hey, Hitler said, they already speak German there. They ought to be part of Germany. That's all we want to do, really, just bring them home.
Well, OK, said Chamberlain. If that's all you want to do, we won't stand in your way,
That's all I want to do, Hitler replied. Trust me.
So Chamberlain flew home and, landing in London, announced that he had achieved. "peace in our time"
What followed is what we came to call World War II.
Roughly a third of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's 25-person Office of Space Commerce, a little-known body relied heavily upon by the space industry, were given a few hours' notice of their termination on Thursday by acting NOAA chief Nancy Hann and were forced out of the office by the end of the day, two of the sources said.
Also booted, maintainence people who keep the weather radars running,
When does tornado season start?
DOGE has got its math wrong before. For example, this week it said it had saved $8 billion from slashing a contract with ICE. That contract was actually $8 million.
Counting zeros is a simple skill.
"This is not just a Trump problem. It's a media problem."
When the press covers events by sitting in a stuffy room while the current government spox instructs them the day has been lost and ignorance spreads.
Scenes of destruction suddenly morph into a sunny beach resort destination, as a lively dance track with the lyrics “Donald Trump will set you free, bringing the life for all to see, no more tunnels, no more fear, Trump Gaza is finally here” starts to play.
Dancing in the streets. And more.
It was one of at least 10 heists targeting BNSF trains in remote areas of the Mojave Desert since last March that authorities are investigating, the Los Angeles Timesreported. All but one resulted in the theft of Nike sneakers, according to investigators.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid would be ashamed.
It was a lot more fun to blow the door off the safe in the mail car than to purloin a passel of Air Jordan 11 Retro Legend Blue sneakers.
Moreover, who'd want to watch the movie?
The announcement sent shock waves through the FBI, whose new director Kash Patel had offered Republican senators private assurances that he would name a special agent with bureau experience to be his deputy, rather than a political outsider. Patel was sworn in at the White House on Friday.
The new guy, Bongino, has never worked for the FBI, although he has worked for the NYPD and the Secret Service and is a…wait for it…podcaster. Who once proclaimed, “my entire life right now is about owning the libs.”
"We provide them with an old hens' home, they come here and retire," said Christoforos, surrounded by clucking chickens while emptying bins of food waste donated by schoolchildren.
More than a quarter of the contracts listed by DOGE were actually already paid, the Journal found, saving no money. For instance, DOGE listed $168,000 in savings for terminating a contract with HHS for an Anthony Fauci museum exhibit. It had already been fully paid.Or where not.
Remarkably, all 80 people on board survived. As of Wednesday morning, one passenger remained in the hospital, the airline said. Delta said 21 passengers were brought to hospitals with injuries after the crash.
Or horror movies. I don't crave being scared and I don't see any point in paying for it. There are plenty of scary things that can happen in one's life for free.
Rarely, however, does a scary thing pay you.
Among its esteemed passengers were comedian Bob Hope, actor John Wayne, Princess Grace of Monaco, artist Salvadore Dali, actress Rita Hayworth, former President Harry Truman, jazz composer and pianist Duke Ellington and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
And me. I sailed to Europe on this ship in 1958. Didn't meet any of those guys and never got near the luxury deck but it was still quite an adventure for the teenager I was then.
The SS United States then held — and still holds — the record for fastest passenger ship crossing of the Atlantic ocean, in both directions. Now it'll become the largest artificial reef in the world. So, at the end, still something special.
There's a web site about the ship — with lots of pictures — here.
The appeals court said it was unable to establish any artistic achievement in the wide-strapped sandals with the big buckle.
That buckle is no big deal. Just pointing out.
As the campaign began, about a dozen mosquito hunters showed up at the village office. Miguel Labag, a 64-year-old scavenger, handed a jug with 45 dark mosquito larvas squirming in some water and received a reward of nine pesos (15 U.S. cents).
In Florida, a python brings a bounty of $50 and a feral hog in Texas goes for $5 plus 40 cents per pound. Other bounties in the U.S. include racoons, wolves, coyotes, bears, skunks, and, in the Pacific Northwest, a fish called the Northern Pikeminnow.
The cuts included about 20 people in the FDA’s office of neurological and physical medicine devices, several of whom worked on Neuralink, according to the two sources, who asked not to be identified because of fear of professional repercussions. That division includes reviewers overseeing clinical-trial applications by Neuralink and other companies making so-called brain-computer interface devices, the sources said.
Maybe if you're not planning to get your brain implanted it's no big deal.
FEMA's flood program has been reauthorized 32 times; its current reauthorization expires March 14.
Pi Day, I mean. March 14 is Pi Day.
These layoffs were part of broader reductions at the Department of Energy, but officials allegedly did not seem to realize that this agency oversees the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons, CNN reported.Energy department mouthpiece Ben Dietderich objects, says it's only a handful (50) and they were newbies anyway. But still. Nuclear stockpile?
Inspired by [Elon Musk's] example, we at The Spectator are launching our own war on wasteful spending. We’ve established a search engine to help Spectator readers join us in hunting down areas that are in need of the axe. Where the US has Doge, we can have the Spectator Project Against Frivolous Funding (Spaff).
Americans and British are one people separated by a common language, Churchill famously observed. And united, it appears, by certain wasteful ways.
[H/T Shawn]
Blue is the most popular toothbrush color. Some people don’t brush on weekends. Even though dental hygienists recommend smaller brush heads, Americans usually choose the biggest one. And they’re always after something new.
Everybody has a dream.
Soldiers of fortune were common across Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire to the rise of the modern nation-state around the 1600s.
Itinerant fighters’ ranks shrank in the modern era and were largely replaced by conscripts and career soldiers. But they never disappeared. Some fought for ideology in the Spanish Civil War. Most were ex-soldiers seeking a paycheck during the Cold War. WatchGuard International, among the first private military companies, was formed by British special forces veterans in 1965. Now, proliferating conflicts have stoked demand for hired guns.
Old ways compound new dangers.
Discovered on X (what they call Twitter now):
TRUMP: "We won't let Elon Musk do anything where there is a conflict of interest. I am personally checking to make sure there is no conflict."
Feel better now?
Wrong answers [from AI bots] are known as hallucinations because AI apps like ChatGPT and Gemini express them with total confidence. As AI is integrated into our workplaces, schools and personal lives, they pose increasing risks for the people who use the technology. Researchers who once dismissed hallucinations as a relatively minor problem are now working on numerous potential fixes.
Why? Because the geeks who design them can't admit they don't know.
Believe me. I've spent a lot of years working around geeks — professional geeks, even geekier than I am (I know that's a stretch but hear me out) — and almost (note that ungeeky word) all have an unshakable belief they're right about everything (no backing down on that).
You can see that playing out right now on the national stage. Hallucinations everywhere.
You might see it as kind of cute — precocious — in a six year-old.
Until they figure out a way to fix that it's up to the rest of us to do the knowing.
Known as the Department of Special Tasks, it is based in the Russian military-intelligence headquarters, a sprawling glass-and-steel complex on the outskirts of Moscow known as the aquarium. Its operations, which haven’t been previously reported, have included attempted killings, sabotage and a plot to put incendiary devices on planes.
Who'd stand in line for a movie named DOGE?
Feb 14 (Reuters) - The Trump administration has halted funding for federal programs to reduce wildfire risk in western U.S. states and has frozen hiring of seasonal firefighters as part of broad cuts to government spending, according to organizations impacted by the moves.
The Donald, as you no doubt know, has instructed the mint to quit manufacturing pennies. But not to worry. It appears there are hundreds of billions of them already in circulation. A couple thousand of them, maybe more, are in a bowl on my chest of drawers. And I am willing to sell them, if you are running out, for a mere three cents apiece. They cost 3.75 cents each to mint, apparently, so that's a bargain. You're welcome.
In other cost-saving news, Elon's hit squad has a web site now. Gaze upon it and feel enriched.
(How it winds up with a .gov URL I can not say.
(But I can guess.)
“I thought I was dead,” Adrián told The Associated Press. “I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me.”
Try not to get too tasty.
Security firms shuttle bullion to the airport in London in high-strength vans. Comex contracts require a different size of bar, so traders need to send gold to Swiss refiners to recast it before flying on to the U.S. Sometimes, they cut out the first European leg by handing the refiner gold in London in exchange for the right size of bar, or flying bullion in from Australia instead.
And a few molecules might wind up in your next smartphone.
Parents have taken to wearing noise-cancelling headphones to drown out what they consider nonsense chatter. Others simply wish they could decipher whether they’re being insulted. The bravest among them have taken an “if you can’t beat ’em join ’em” approach, diligently researching the latest vernacular and becoming fluent in young-people speak.
This too shall pass. Groovy, right?
For customers seeking cheaper eats, Dave’s started selling bites of chicken starting around $6.99.
Rising costs for whom?
Musk is leading a team of young high-IQ whiz kids at the new Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE.
…the last time we had whiz kids transfoming the government.
Guess who:
History mostly knows him as the disgraced architect of the Vietnam War, but McNamara first made his mark in the corporate world with his mastery of numbers before it was as fashionable as it is today.
Mihika Nagpal broke up with a boyfriend three months ago because he didn’t want to share his location. They had been dating for four months.
How did it used to be? It used to be you can wear my class ring. Or my letter sweater, if it's really big-time serious.
The first-year passer received Offensive Rookie of the Year honors over fellow contenders including New York Giants wide receiver Malik Nabers, Las Vegas Raiders tight end Brock Bowers, Jacksonville Jaguars receiver Brian Thomas Jr. and Denver Broncos quarterback Bo Nix.
It may (or may not) be worth pointing out that there were no offensive Chicago Bears.
The star of ‘Emilia Pérez’ hasn’t been signaling much virtue.
A search on X.com (formerly Twitter) turned up such eyebrow-raising comments as this one, from 2020, originally written in Spanish: “I’m sorry, is it just my impression or are there more Muslims in Spain? Every time I go to pick up my daughter from school there are more women with their hair covered and their skirts down to their heels. Next year instead of English we’ll have to teach Arabic.”
Given the general tenor of news in the recent week, this red-carpet crisis seems refreshing.
Washington, D.C., February 6, 2025 - In the first two weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term, the administration has begun to scrub critical environmental resources and datasets from federal agency websites. To combat this effort to suppress and censor public data, the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project today publishes a selection of materials on climate change and environmental justice that have been deleted from agency web pages and spotlights the environmental and archivist organizations working to identify, scrape, and preserve these critical data.
“He won, so we needed movement on the momentum on what we have done, and we finally decided to change the name to Arab Americans for Peace,” Bahbah said. “Some in the press tried to tie what the president has said to our changing the name. In fact, it is connected and it’s not.” [Emphasis mine.]
What could be more Trumpian than "maybe it is, maybe it isn't"?
Except maybe today, maybe not tomorrow.
Offensive linemen are typically the largest players in football, but even by those standards, the Eagles are positively ginormous. Their five starting linemen, on average, stand at 6-foot-6 and weigh 338 pounds. By comparison, they’re more than an inch taller, and 26 pounds heavier, than their counterparts on the Kansas City Chiefs.Opposing this fearsome five will be a guy named Steve Spagnuolo, who is the Chiefs' defensive coordinator and reputed to be one of the best in the game. And some other guys who, although a little shorter and a little lighter, are pretty big too.
Enhai successfully took the record with a noodle measuring just .18 millimeters thick.
Yesterday was Groundhog Day, at least as far as my calendar is concerned. And I haven't seen a word about it in the news. Maybe you have…but just in case:
It is 6.4287 weeks until Spring.
The employees working for Mr. Musk’s task force who clashed with Mr. Voorhees were seeking to enter a secure area of the agency’s offices to get at classified material, two U.S. officials with knowledge of the incident said.
The U.S. agency involved was USAID. I don't know much about USAID but I do know something about handling classified information and this incident as reported by NYTimes, above, and Reuters, here, is way beyond the pale.
And here we're marking the beginning of this one with ice.
All. Over. Everything.
And because we have a clear sky today and it's sunny, it's wet ice too.
But not to worry. It's going to warm some by midweek. And rain. And then snow again.
It's a short month. But it already seems long.
More than five times the $853 cost of a one-way first class ticket on American Airlines from El Paso, Texas, the departure point for the flight, according to a review of publicly available airfares.But it's so.much more fun to play with the big toys.
Trump isn’t the first U.S. president to express an interest in Greenland. During World War II, when Denmark was invaded by the Nazis, Greenland became a de facto U.S. protectorate. President Harry S. Truman offered to buy the island from Denmark for $100 million in 1946. The Danes declined the U.S. offer but signed the security pact that gives the U.S. the right to build military installations there.
It's also critical to defending the Atlantic, explains this piece from the Wall Street Journal.
*It's also the world's biggest island. Australia, about triple Greenland's size and also seemingly an island is classified, instead, as a continental landmass.
However, critics swiftly condemned the executive orders as being an attack on LGBTQ students and on the accurate teaching of U.S. history, specifically concerning slavery and racial injustice.
The Donald is doing a lot of sweeping these days. Hard to tell how swept things will remain. Some have been unswept already. (Unswopen?)
This sort of procedure is also known as flailing around.
Just remember, it's only been ten days.
COPENHAGEN, Jan 30 (Reuters) - In 2023, Mads Petersen, owner of Greenland-based startup Arctic Unmanned, sat in a car to keep warm while he tested a small drone at minus 43 degrees Celsius (minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit).…Or warm drones at least. Warmish.
"The battery only lasted for three minutes," he said.
The 67% of eighth-graders who scored at a basic or better reading level in 2024 was the lowest share since testing began in 1992, results from a closely watched federal exam show. Only 60% of fourth-graders hit that benchmark, nearing record lows.
In summary, while U.S. students rank relatively well in international assessments like PISA regarding reading skills, domestic assessments such as NAEP reveal alarming declines in proficiency levels. The disparities among different demographic groups further complicate the picture, underscoring the need for targeted interventions to improve literacy rates across the nation. As educational authorities work to address these challenges, ongoing monitoring and reform will be essential to ensure that all students can achieve their full potential in reading and literacy.
Friedi Kühne and Lukas Irmler took to the skies over Riedering and walked across a slackline 8,202 feet over the ground, breaking the Guinness World Record for highest slackline walk in the process.
Last week, the nominees for the 2025 Academy Awards were announced. The leading contender with 13 total nominations? Emilia Pérez, a French-produced Spanish-language musical about a transgender Mexican drug lord and her underappreciated girlboss defense attorney. The film lost around $15 million at the box office on a relatively modest $26 million budget, so if you haven’t seen it, you likely aren’t alone and shouldn’t feel bad—it wasn’t made for you anyway.
Power and communications cables and gas pipelines stitch together the nine countries with shores on the Baltic, a relatively shallow and nearly landlocked sea. A few examples are the 152-kilometer (94-mile) Balticconnector pipeline that carries gas between Finland and Estonia, the high-voltage Baltic Cable connecting the power grids of Sweden and Germany[*]. and the 1,173-kilometer (729-mile) C-Lion1 telecommunications cable between Finland and Germany.
*I hope they have a really good fuse panel on that one.
I used to have a chunk of an undersea telephone cable (but not from the Baltic). I didn't cut it out myself; I got it from the factory where it was made. I lost it somewhere along the way, But, as this story notes, it was about the size of a garden hose. Six or eight inches of garden hose, to be precise.
…you get your sardines in or maybe, if you're lucky, packed in…
Today we are being served.
