Author: nick

Last month, I wrote about the Office of Legal Counsel’s opinion finding that the Presidential Records Act was inconsistent with Trump v. Mazars. Somewhat remarkably, several writers have attacked the opinion, but minimize, or even ignore, Mazars. The American Historical Association filed suit, arguing that it is injured because at some point in the future, it will not be able to access certain presidential documents. Federal district court Judge Bates has found the new policy is likely unconstitutional. You know things are going south when the first sentence is a quote from 1984. Again, even more remarkably, the court finds…

Freddie Ponton21st Century Wire In February, under the white light of a Bavarian assembly hall, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and German Defense Minister, Boris Pistorius, walked past rows of unfinished drones. The joint venture hosting them, linking Germany’s Quantum Systems with Ukraine’s Frontline Robotics, is already producing aircraft for Ukraine, plans to scale toward 10,000 units a year, and has already sent its first batch east. This is what Berlin now calls support for Ukraine, not crates on a runway, not old equipment hauled out of Bundeswehr depots, but German soil giving Ukrainian war design an industrial home. For years, German officials sold their Ukraine policy in the language of…

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos responded to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent comment that “you can’t earn a billion dollars” without abusing workers or breaking the law, and NYC Mayor Mamdani singling out Ken Griffin as someone who should pay more taxes, during an appearance this morning on “Squawk Box.””Ken Griffin isn’t a villain. He hasn’t hurt anybody. He’s not hurting New York. In fact, quite the opposite,” Bezos told CNBC. “Policy debates don’t have to be finger-pointing.””Unfortunately, it is an effective political technique. It’s as old as the hills. So when you don’t know how to solve a problem, create a…

Cuba Is Dark, Desperate and Still Deluded Source link

On taste, art, AI, and a clever viral social experiment. Source link

Donald Trump saw the decay early and chose to fight it. In 1945, the United States stood alone in its strength, industrial supremacy, nuclear monopoly, and no peer competitor. It chose not empire, but order. Through Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, and a durable security architecture, Washington did not merely defend the free world – it rebuilt it. War-torn economies were revived, trade was re-anchored, currencies stabilized, and former enemies turned into productive allies. At the height of its power, the United States exercised restraint. That restraint gave the system its legitimacy and made possible decades of shared growth under…

As the national debt rises ever higher, Congress is gearing up to pass an enormous infrastructure spending bill. Earlier this week, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee released the BUILD America 250 Act. The sprawling 1000-page bill combines some hits—including provisions to streamline environmental reviews of infrastructure projects—with some obvious misses. Lawmakers claim that the bill would strengthen the Highway Trust Fund, which pays for both road maintenance and mass transit investments, by levying a new registration fee on electric vehicles (E.V.) and plug-in hybrids. But Marc Scribner, senior transportation policy analyst at Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this…

U.S. officials announced federal charges May 20 against former Cuban President Raúl Castro for the 1996 shootdown of two civilian planes that killed four people, including three Americans. Officials made the announcement on Cuban Independence Day at Freedom Tower, a downtown Miami skyscraper known for processing thousands of Cuban refugees in the 1960s and ’70s. Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, Sen. Ashley Moody, R-Fla., Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier and other officials said the charges were the result of decades of investigative work and intelligence gathering.  “President Trump is committed to restoring a very simple but important principle,” Blanche…

The history of the 20th century, and especially the history of the Holocaust, is replete with bureaucratic heroes like Raoul Wallenberg, Chiune Sugihara, Frank Foley, and Aristides de Sousa Mendes, diplomats who combined to save hundreds of thousands of lives by bending the rules and issuing unauthorized passports or visas to people fleeing persecution. Now, in the 21st century, as we stand ever closer to repeating the horrors of the past century, these rule-bending insiders are nowhere to be found. It isn’t that people aren’t capable of morally taking a stand. It’s that they physically can’t do so. I would…

Conservatives have been slamming Call Her Daddy podcast host Alex Cooper for getting married and embracing motherhood after creating a podcast that failed to shame women for having premarital sex. Their criticisms ring ridiculously out of touch. Many center on the supposed unlikelihood of a woman being able to snag a husband after hooking up with others in her 20s, while some simply seem angry at an openly promiscuous woman not being punished for it. You are reading Sex & Tech, from Elizabeth Nolan Brown. Get more of Elizabeth’s sex, tech, bodily autonomy, law, and online culture coverage. Cooper “has…