Author: nick

[ad_1] Photo by Lianhao Qu There is a chapter in Edward Snowden’s memoir Permanent Record that receives less attention than it deserves—not the chapter about PRISM or XKeyscore or the Hong Kong hotel room, but the chapter describing what his colleagues actually did with all that power when nobody was watching, which, in a surveillance state, nobody ever is. The program called XKeyscore is best understood as a search engine for the entirety of a person’s digital life. Type in a phone number, an email address, or an IP address, and you can read the emails, listen to the calls,…

[ad_1] In December, the Denver City Council voted against letting charter airline Key Lime Air lease space at the airport because it transports immigration detainees for the federal government. That decision risked losing $90 million in federal funding since airlines are supposed to be treated equally. In a January 2026 meeting, City Attorney Miko Brown reportedly told airport officials to investigate the airline’s safety record—not for real safety reasons, but to create a legal justification for the council’s vote after the fact. Brown and the mayor’s office called these claims false and said there was no push for a fake…

[ad_1] Trump announcing his Trump Accounts for kids. (Screen capture from Fox News.) I’m serious, and this is not just my disgust with everything Trump. There is no good reason for the overwhelming majority of people in the country to ever put a dollar in a Trump account for their kids. To be clear, I’m not in favor of tax-sheltered accounts in general. They strike me mostly as a very inefficient way to accomplish public goals, in this case making education more affordable. The more efficient route would be to have more public funds go to support public colleges and…

[ad_1] Morocco and Norway are now my favorites. Oldest quasars in the universe discovered by the Euclid space telescope. A 400-Year-Old Graveyard Was Designed to Keep the Dead from Coming Back to Life. The smartest guy in the room is first to the grave. Meta is building its first big Canadian data center as AI expansion crosses the border. A little town in Tasmania has adopted their own mini-kaiju: Neal the seal. Tangentially Speaking talks to Jan MacKell Collins  about the wild women of the wild west. Mysterious metal spheres found on Australian beach may have come from space. Baseline…

[ad_1] The China hawks are an industrious bunch. Full of ideas and financing, they are never short of time and fill it with lengthy publications from their comfy sinecures arguing about what Washington “needs” to do to confront the “China Threat.” One of the most notable of these comes curtesy of life-long government employee, Robert D. Blackwill. A creature of the swamp through and through, having served in every capacity imaginable from diplomat to ambassador, Harvard professor to NSC staffer, lobbyist and CFR member, none are more qualified to articulate an option about what Washington should do to win its…

[ad_1] A 2026 FIFA World Cup group stage match between Belgium and Egypt, at Lumen Field in Seattle, Washington. Photo Wikipedia. The football has been brilliant, because football is brilliant. But the 2026 World Cup—hosted across the US, Canada, and Mexico—mainly in America—is the most corrupt, polluted tournament in the tournament’s 96-year history. Let’s start with discrimination: Omar Artan, the first Somali referee ever invited to officiate at a World Cup, was refused entry at Miami airport—having been issued a US visa—based on spurious claims of “terrorist connections.” He flew home to a hero’s welcome, celebrated for his dignified response…

[ad_1] After more than a year of sweeping deregulation at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) aimed at paving the way for accelerated deployment of so-called “advanced” reactors, the agency has released one of its most consequential rules yet: a sweeping rewrite of its regulations implementing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), known as Part 51. Released on July 7, 2026, the proposed rule would fundamentally change what environmental impacts the NRC must consider before licensing nuclear facilities. This sweeping rewrite of the NRC’s NEPA regulations comes in direct response to President Trump’s January 20, 2025, Executive Order 14154, which required…

[ad_1] The recent memorandum of understanding between Israel and Lebanon is not the first time the U.S. has placed itself at the center of Lebanese affairs. Serial interventions, both military and diplomatic, have been undertaken by Democrats and Republicans alike in Washington over close to a century. These efforts attest to Lebanon’s outsized ability to engage Washington at the highest level, and highlight the at best limited, short-term effectiveness of that involvement. The story of American engagement is a long one.  On July 14, 1958 Iraqi army officers overthrew Iraq’s pro-Western Hashemite monarchy. Fearing Lebanon would also join an anti-American…

[ad_1] Actress Sharon Stone has opened up about a near-death experience (NDE) she had in September 2001, in which she saw the archetypal ‘white light’ and was greeted by friends who had previously passed away. In an interview with Anderson Cooper, Stone – who shot to fame after her role as a murderous seductress in the 1992 film Basic Instinct – was prompted to discuss her brush with death due to a vertebral artery dissection. “Some would say I did die,” Stone clarified, “and was defibrillated and  brought back.” She went on to note that she had “that white light experience”,…

[ad_1] There was a time when the arms dealer waited in the corridor. He financed the campaign, endowed the think tank, took the general to dinner, and hoped the man inside the office would remember him when the contract came up. The wall between the money and the decision was thin, often corrupt, but it was […] [ad_2] Source link