On Wednesday evening, one day into her tenure as U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi announced the end of the Kleptocracy Initiative, launched by the Justice Department in 2010 to battle high-level corruption worldwide and return ill-gotten funds to victims of financial crimes. The former Florida attorney general and legal counsel to President Trump during his first impeachment trial, who spent the last several years as a corporate lobbyist, also closed the KleptoCapture task force, created under AG Merrick Garland in 2022 to target Russian oligarchs violating U.S. economic sanctions imposed because of Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine. Through the initiative, the DOJ has prosecuted frauds worth billions, recovering embezzled funds and seizing assets like megayachts and luxury condos.
The irony of this is simply overwhelming:
Bondi’s DOJ is now presumably free to spend a multi-billion dollar forfeiture fund of money seized through these efforts — otherwise repatriated to the nations it was stolen from — however it likes. That could mean anything from expanded contracts with private prisons (Trump has already reversed a Biden administration order that prevented the Justice Department from renewing such contracts) to new mass detention camps for immigrants in Guantánamo Bay and along the border.
Kleptocrats using the kleptocrats’ stolen billions. Sweet.
The word “Orwellian” is overused but this is actually Orwellian. 404 Media reports:
While responding to the most damaging wildfires in the history of California, FEMA employees received an order “for immediate compliance” this week that states they must immediately change their vocabulary to comply with the Trump Administration’s preferred terminology on gender and immigration.
For example, FEMA employees are no longer allowed to call undocumented immigrants “migrants” or “undocumented individuals,” they must instead call them “undocumented aliens or illegal aliens.” FEMA can no longer refer to the idea of “integration,” it must begin to say “assimilation.”
The subject line of the email was “For Immediate Compliance.”
“While the chart presents examples of terminology that should be replaced, it should not be considered to be comprehensive, particularly in the immigration space. Please consult your program counsel for additional language if you are unsure,” the email says.
Last year, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded its Nobel Prize in economic sciences to a trio of researchers based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Chicago. Their work assessed “how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” The team’s 2000 paper, “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation,” for example, argued that the difference in wealth between Europe and Africa is largely a function of the former having more robust institutions.
Were that paper submitted today to the National Science Foundation for funding, however, it likely wouldn’t have been approved. The NSF supports research considering “how social, economic, political, cultural and environmental forces affect people’s lives,” but the introduction to the paper includes the words “inclusion,” “institutional” and “political” — all of which are red flags for reviewers during the second Trump administration.
As The Post reported on Tuesday, NSF staff have been comparing existing grants to a lengthy list of terms to establish whether the work being conducted violates President Donald Trump’s executive orders uprooting “DEI,” a catchall term for programs aimed at addressing historic systems of discrimination.
Staff have been asked to look at the title or abstract of the research proposal, checking whether any of the worrisome terms — like “gender” or “status” — appear. Then staffers consider the project summary and, finally, the project description. If any of the terms — like “advocate” or “trauma” or “women” — appear, the proposal is flagged. There are about 100 terms included in the review. (Also included: “inequities,” “racial,” and “female,” though not “male.”)
You can’t use the word “women” or “female” in a scientific paper. Wow. And that’s not all:
Ugh, the Declaration of Independence includes words that would trigger a review by the NSF. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/int…
He’s been “advising” behind the scenes already so it shouldn’t make too much difference now that he’ll be in the office and anyway Musk has been given the go ahead to wreck whatever he can get away with. The only thing that might stop him are judicial orders but since everything is so secretive we really don’t know if they’re following them.
Still, for all of Vought’s and DOGE’s ability to feverishly slash and burn, they really can’t do it all. But they don’t have to. This week the Senate also confirmed Pam Bondi as the Attorney General of the United States. At the swearing in ceremony, led by Justice Clarence Thomas, (of course)Trump said: “I’m supposed to say she’s going to be totally impartial when it comes to Democrats but I’m just going to say that she’ll be as impartial as a person can be,” so that was reassuring.
Adopting the patented Trump/Musk shock and awe technique, she hit the ground running. Working with her two top deputies, former Trump personal defense lawyers Emil Bove and Todd Blanch, she has issued a flurry of orders demonstrating that she is on a mission from Dear Leader. The Washington Post reported that on her first day:
Despite pledging during her confirmation hearing that “politics will not play a part” in her decision-making, Bondi, within hours of taking office,created a “Weaponization Working Group” to review instances of what she described as “politicized justice” — starting with the federal criminal cases brought against Trump by special counsel Jack Smith.
She also ordered an examination of what she alleged was federal cooperation in the criminal and civil investigations of Trump in New York — even though they were carried out by state authorities, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
She wrote, “these steps are required because, as President Trump pointed out following his second inauguration, ‘[t]he prior administration and allies throughout the country engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.'” She added, “No one who has acted with a righteous spirit and just intentions has any cause for concern about our efforts to root out corruption and weaponization.” I’m sure that was very reassuring.
At least one employee almost surely is very happy with this edict. That would be the Acting US Attorney in Washington DC, the former Stop the Steal lawyer, Ed Martin. He’s so committed to ending partisan weaponization that he posted the following letter on X addressed to Musk saying “Dear @elon, Please see this important letter. We will not tolerate threats against DOGE workers or law-breaking by the disgruntled. All the best. Ed Martin”
Martin has a very bright future in the Trump Justice Department.
Chris Geitner at Lawdork reported on another Bondi memo effectively ending any remaining norm that the Department of Justice would operate as an independent arm of the government, answerable only to the law and the Constitution. She demanded “zealous advocacy” of Trump’s agenda and threatened that dissent would not be tolerated:
“Any attorney who because of their personal political views or judgments declines to sign a brief or appear in court, refuses to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the administration, or otherwise delays or impedes the Department’s mission will be subject to discipline and potentially termination, consistent with applicable law”
She issued yet another order titled, “Ending Illegal DEI and DEIA Discrimination and Preferences” and ordered a report from the Civil Rights Division on the private sector’s “illegal” use of DEI for potential criminal investigation. (This tracks with a group of GOP state AGs, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threatening COSTCO for keeping its DEI policies in place.)
Her use of DEIA, which adds “accessibility” to the usual DEI slur indicates they are prepared to challenge the Americans With Disabilities Act as discriminatory which is all the way through the looking glass.
The former Florida attorney general and legal counsel to President Trump during his first impeachment trial, who spent the last several years as a corporate lobbyist, also closed the KleptoCapture task force, created under AG Merrick Garland in 2022 to target Russian oligarchs violating U.S. economic sanctions imposed because of Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine. Through the initiative, the DOJ has prosecuted frauds worth billions, recovering embezzled funds and seizing assets like megayachts and luxury condos.
That’s got to make some of the world’s rich oligarchs very happy. In fact, one might even call it the first legal foreign bribe under the new Trump administration. One only wonders if anyone’s getting something in return.
All in all it’s been a very productive week so far for the new Attorney General. As far as I know she’s yet to weigh in on the anticipated purge of the FBI, but I think we can be assured that she’s for it. After her deputy fired the Jack Smith prosecutors, on Trump’s personal order, and put a number of others on notice that they are to be demoted if they refuse to resign, it’s very clear that Bondi and her henchmen are turning the Justice Department into Trump’s personal law firm. Since all three of the top officials have actually been Trump’s defense attorneys, that makes a lot of sense. He’s finally found his Roy Cohn.
That would be the same Susie Wiles who, when her boss spoke this week of the U.S. ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip to occupy and develop the prime beachfront property, looked like this:
Lahut spoke with MSNBC’s “Way Too Early” this morning on the tensions Elon Musk’s Agents of DOGE are generating inside the White House.
By the kids the South Africa-born boy genius enlisted to take a wrecking ball to the federal government — like 19-year-old hacker “Big Balls” and the racist-eugenecist Marko Elez — Musk means to wreak as much havoc as he can without considering or caring about the consequences for others. Much like the Narcissist-in-Chief who’s letting him trash federal personnel and policy infrastructure unsupervised. This is the plot of a Superman movie.
Four federal-government IT professionals The Atlantic spoke with are “terrified” about incursions into federal computer systems by Musk’s Agents of DOGE wannabe supervillains:
“This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known,” one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week. “You can’t un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want.”
There is a level of danger in the untrained tinkering with complex systems built up over years.
The four experts laid out the implications of giving untrained individuals access to the technological infrastructure that controls the country. Their message is unambiguous: These are not systems you tamper with lightly. Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors. Or they may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo. As one administrator for a federal agency with deep knowledge about the government’s IT operations told us, “I don’t think the public quite understands the level of danger.”
The National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) told FLYING it would welcome any serious initiative to modernize the ATC system, but not without a seat at the table.
“It is critical that the experts who know and understand the intricacies and have detailed knowledge of the very complex system—the dedicated aviation safety professionals represented by NATCA—are involved in the process from design to testing and to implementation,” the union said in a statement.
Musk is trying to reimagine the federal government they way he mismanages a software company. The approach echoes the “move fast and break things” culture of Silicon Valley (elsewhere in The Atlantic):
Here’s the problem: The federal government is not a software company. “The stakes are wildly different,” a former senior Twitter executive told me recently. This person, who requested anonymity because they worked closely with Musk during his takeover and fear retribution, argued that Musk seems incapable of recognizing the limits of his own knowledge. When I asked them to describe Musk’s managerial strategy, they borrowed a term of art from SpaceX’s own rocket mishaps: “This is a rapid unscheduled disassembly of government services.”
Listen. I am/was a mechanical engineer. The ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code books I used fill 4-5 ft of shelf space. There is a lot of materials science in them. But also a lot of trial and error. The code has built up over a century-plus. A lot of it, like airline design, comes from forensic analysis of boilers, etc., that failed or blew up. Some killed people. Oh, let’s not build them THAT way again. Better update the code.
Like a friend’s observations about legacy computer code — cuneiform by 21st-century standards — deep below the surface of programming Big Balls and Marko take for granted, there’s stuff in the boiler code that no one alive knows why it’s in there. That doesn’t mean it’s useless and that ripping it out will do no harm. It means the reason it’s in there has been lost to time, but there was a damn good reason for it. And likely still is.
Musk and his brigands haven’t a clue about that. Even while Musk is having to learn through trial and error how to fly his rockets, he’s standing on the backs of government-funded research with rockets that blew up for years before they got the science and engineering right. (There are 20 min. reels on YouTube.) But he’s having too much fun breaking things.
The Musk-Trump administration is not looking to reduction-in-force its way to cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget. That’s a smokescreen. What they’re attempting, says Paul Krugman, is an autogolpe, a self-coup. And with “the full support of every Republican in the House and the Senate.”
“The federal work force is no larger now than it was under Dwight Eisenhower,” writes the economist. Laying off federal workers doesn’t even put a dent in $2 trillion. So why do it?
It’s an attempt to capture the government wholesale. It’s a purge. Pure and simple. Throw out the old. Indescriminately. Bring in the newer, truer believers. Even if some Trump babies get tossed out with the bathwater. Republicans have long been willing to scarifice their own so long as they believe far more on the left will die a swift political death. *
Musk-Trumpocracy’s illegal shutdown of USAID should be seen through this lens. Musk clearly hates the idea of helping people in need: just look at the rage he has expressed over the philanthropy of MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife. While he may believe that the agency is “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America”, it also serves the purpose of purging civil servants while demagoguing to Trump’s base. The same can be said of the confected furor over DEI.
It hardly needs pointing out that the attempted purge at the FBI, targeting anyone who investigated Jan. 6 rioters or Trump himself, is an integral part of the autogolpe. And so, obviously, is the terrifying attempt of Musk and his acolytes to seize control of the Treasury payments system and give crucial power to rewrite the code to a 25-year-old who turns out (surprise!) to be a racist and eugenicist.
(Please note that it was the Wall Street Journal that outed the racist-eugenicist.)
So, now what? Is it stoppable by people who still believe in our democratic republic?
The resistance to this attempted coup is still expanding. But so is the coup itself. Trump’ AG Pam Bondi just disbanded the task force that targets Russian oligarchs.
It’s a race to save the republic and we in the resistance are playing catch-up.
Krugman suggests:
The good news is that there are many ways in which an autogolpe delayed can become an autogolpe denied. The alliance between Musk and Trump, two men with giant but obviously fragile egos, could break down. Musk’s meddling at Treasury and the assault on federal workers may lead to some highly visible disasters. Voters may eventually realize that Trump’s claims of success are smoke and mirrors and wonder what happened to his promise to make groceries cheaper.
But waiting around for Musk-Trump to fail is whistling past the graveyard. Politics, it’s said, is not a spectator sport.
Anat Shenkler-Osorio tells Anand Giridharadas that if 3.5% of the population can change the course of a nation, then we’d best get to it:
“It turns out that no autocracy in the world has withstood that sliver of a population, engaged in active, ongoing, IRL resistance, refusal and ridicule.” (IRL= in real life, for the initiated)
That means you can do everything from learning and spreading Know Your Rights to stop ICE in their tracks, calling Dem lawmakers with concrete and specific demands to grind Congress to a halt, organizing very localized actions (think about your next school board or city council meeting) to beat down bad bills and demand good ones, just to name a few. This current administration of the bullies for the billionaires is hellbent on sweeping shock and awe — but what actually happens in our country comes down to what we do together in the places where we live.
Most politicians do not care what you think, she believes, but they pay close attention to what you do. MSNBC Thursday night reported that a large crowd of protesters rushed to where Musk’s DOGE goons where scheduled to visit the Department of Labor. Musk’s brigands for some reason never arrived. And a judge blocked access.
It’s going to take more than clicktivism. Visible protests matter. But so do small actions. In bulk. Flooding phone lines and clogging in-boxes matter. Like Anat said, they may not care what you think, but they watch what you do. Volume and numbers are persuasive.
* In North Carolina as we speak, Judge Jefferson Griffin, the Republican loser in last fall’s state Supreme Court race, is asking courts to throw out 60,000+ ballots in his contest — Ds, Rs and UNAs — because he believes on balance that the revised vote count will erase his 734-vote loss.
Armed with new polling showing Musk’s popularity in the toilet, key Democratic leaders are going after the top adviser to President Donald Trump who is dismantling the federal government. They are attempting to subpoena him and introducing legislation to block him from receiving federal contracts while he holds a “special” role leading Trump’s cost-cutting crusade…
“If you oppose Donald Trump, making Elon Musk the face of his administration is the smart way to go,” said Democratic pollster Geoff Garin. “Where the rubber really hits the road on all of this is for people who are inclined to be supportive of Donald Trump and they, for whatever reason, think Donald Trump is on their side. But many of them have a different view of Elon Musk.”
[…]
New internal polling, conducted on behalf of House Majority Forward, a nonprofit aligned with House Democratic leadership, found Musk is viewed negatively among 1,000 registered voters in battleground districts. Just 43 percent approve of him and 51 percent view him unfavorably. The poll, conducted by the Democratic firm Impact Research and completed between Jan. 19 to 25, also found that Musk evoked strong negative feelings. Of the 51 percent who disapproved of him, 43 percent did so strongly.
The survey isn’t a one-off, either. An Economist/YouGov poll published on Wednesday also found Musk’s approval rating underwater, 43 percent favorable to 49 percent unfavorable.
A poll by Garin’s Hart Research of 1,735 voters taken between Jan. 24 and Jan. 30 found that a majority — including 56 percent of independents — have a negative view of Musk.
In House Majority Forward’s internal polling, pollsters asked respondents for their thoughts on “the creation of a government of the rich for the rich by appointing up to nine different billionaires to the administration,” and found 70 percent opposed with only 19 percent in support — a stat that suggests Democrats have landed on a message that could gain traction with swing voters.
That data and focus groups held by House Majority Forward helped bring attacks on the administration into focus: Democrats “shouldn’t chide Musk, Trump, and others for being rich,” the group wrote in a memo, but point out Musk’s conflicts of interests as head of DOGE and note that he could undermine key safety net programs to enrich himself at the expense of American taxpayers.
That makes sense. Musk is way too public and way too weird and there’s already one weirdo at the top,
People have to be wondering why the richest man in the world is doing all this even as he’s running his companies. It’s bizarre, even by Trump standards. Dems are smart to push this and they should aim at Republicans who are looking for an off-ramp. Blame Elon, get him out. Nothing is more important right now.
Trump at the National Prayer Breakfast: "The water comes down from the northwest parts of Canada, I guess, but the Pacific Northwest. And it comes down by millions and millions of barrels a day and uh, I opened it up. It wasn't that easy to do. But I opened it up and it's pouring… pic.twitter.com/UcHiv8uZRe
Trump at the National Prayer Breakfast: “The water comes down from the northwest parts of Canada, I guess, but the Pacific Northwest. And it comes down by millions and millions of barrels a day and uh, I opened it up. It wasn’t that easy to do. But I opened it up and it’s pouring down.”
It’s actually raining right now so I guess he’s turned the valve on and pointed it up at the sky?
Agriculture is a form of legalized gambling here in California, our land is prone to deluge or drought. Our farmers, relentlessly adapting, are as innovative as any set of suits in Silicon Valley, learning new ways to grow more food with less water. As sure as the sun, our farmers have always shared their views of California politics as they relentlessly pursue the water necessary to grow much of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.
Yet now, an eerie silence has begun descending over California farming. A candidate many of them undoubtedly supported for president, Donald Trump, has shockingly wasted some of their water in a downright dangerous stunt unlike anything in memory.
When I spoke last week before two water conferences in two different states filled with Central Valley farmers, the first question I confronted in Sacramento was basically how to make all this Trump stuff go away. When I theorized at the second conference in Reno that Trump may not know what he’s doing out here, I got no eye contact from more than half the room as we all exited.
They haven’t said a word. Dear Leader cares about them. They know that. If he sounds like a moron and wastes their water it’s got to be for a good reason. He’s a genius.
Is your brain hurting, just from reading that? If Politico was, in fact, being bribed in exchange for slanted coverage, that would be noteworthy. It is, of course, not.
November 18, 2024We’ve all gotten familiar with the absurdity of a lot of anti-media rhetoric the past decade or so. What’s different in this go-round is the speed with which nonsense spirals up from social media to policymakers to actual governmental action. Brendan Carr really does want to kill public broadcasting. Trump really is going to go after Politico’s revenues because he doesn’t like some of its stories. The lawsuits will keep coming, and they’ll keep getting settled by nervous corporate executives. Where it ends is entirely unclear.
I think POlitico can take care of itself but the point of this is to intimidate the media into going easy on the administration — and it works.
For instance, CBS is in settlement talks with Trump over his completely bogus accusation that they engaged in election interference by editing Kamala Harris’ interview with 60 Minutes. They are doing this even though they released all the unedited tapes and transcripts yesterday which prove that this did not happen.
Shortly before Election Day, Trump sued CBS in federal court alleging that the interview was deceptively “doctored.” Legal experts said the suit was frivolous and CBS said “we will vigorously defend against it.”
But the suit became a problem for the news division’s parent company, Paramount Global, once Trump won the election. Paramount is awaiting government approval of its pending merger with Skydance Media. Outside analysts, citing Trump’s transactional nature, predicted that Paramount may have a hard time getting the necessary federal approvals. Last week The New York Times reported that Paramount is now trying to settle the suit, despite having a strong legal case.
The complaint to the FCC moved along on a parallel track. The Center for American Rights alleged that “60 Minutes” violated the FCC’s “news distortion” policy. According to the agency’s website, “news distortion” must “involve a significant event,” not a minor part of a news report, and must require proof that a broadcaster “deliberately distorted a factual news report.”
Carr’s predecessor atop the FCC, Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, dismissed the complaint in one of her last acts as FCC chair. But Carr, who Trump appointed in 2017 and promoted to chair last month, brought it back to life. Carr acknowledged in interviews that the bar for proving “news distortion” was very high – for instance, it would apply if someone said “no” in an interview, but a TV station edited the segment to appear like the person said “yes.”
But he argued that he had to send a letter to CBS asking for the transcript and tapes from the interview. “I don’t see how the FCC can reasonably adjudicate this claim of news distortion without seeing what was actually said,” Carr told CNN.
Now he has.
The material supplied by CBS showed debatable but normal editing practices, not deliberate distortion.
There was nothing material in the edit, no contradiction and nothing that one could say helped Kamala Harris in some way. The question was about Israel and why Netanyahu was “not listening” to the US. Harris defended the administration:
It was not a particularly newsworthy exchange. But CBS aired two different parts of Harris’s answer on different broadcasts.
In a preview clip that aired on “Face the Nation,” Harris was shown saying that “the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.”
During the actual “60 Minutes” program, in response to the same question, she was shown saying “we are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States, to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”
The comments were from the same answer, CBS just aired different parts of it. And it was meaningless in any case. It’s just Trump trolling that’s going to end up putting millions in his pockets now that he’s found out how to leverage his trolling against media companies and, presumably, anyone else over whom he has power. It’s graft, pure and simple.
Elon Musk’s entrepreneurial philosophy when he acquires a company is to immediately shut down everything and then restore a few once they get the lay of the land and determine what he thinks is necessary. We saw that at Twitter when he came in and fired everyone, determined that any kind of moderation was unnecessary and it’s now overrun with bots, disinformation, foreign propaganda and Nazis. He likes that. He fired the disaster team that made Twitter an important resource during those times, getting out information you could rely on as real. As we found out during the LA fires, it’s completely useless for that purpose now.
He thinks the United States federal government is just like twitter. For instance he said this just the other night:
“Regulations, basically, should be default gone,” Musk said. “Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”
“These regulations are added willy-nilly all the time. So we’ve just got to do a wholesale, spring cleaning of regulation and get the government off the backs of everyday Americans so people can get things done,” Musk said, adding later: “If the government has millions of regulations holding everyone back, well, it’s not freedom. We’ve got to restore freedom.”
As we’ve seen with USAID, he’s also willing to completely shut down agencies he says have engaged in fraud with no notice. I’ve heard some fatuous Republicans on television saying that they can always “restore” the functions that are really important. Sure. Republicans love helping foreigners.
Two weeks into President Trump’s sweeping freeze on foreign aid, H.I.V. groups abroad have not received any funding, jeopardizing the health of more than 20 million people, including 500,000 children. Subsequent waivers from the State Department have clarified that the work can continue, but the funds and legal paperwork to do so are still missing.
With the near closure of the American aid agency known as U.S.A.I.D. and its recall of officers posted abroad, there is little hope that the situation will resolve quickly, experts warned.
H.I.V. treatment and services were funded through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, a $7.5 billion program that was frozen along with all foreign aid on Mr. Trump’s first day in office.
[…]
Without treatment, millions of people with H.I.V. would be at risk of severe illness and premature death. The loss of treatment also threatens to reverse the dramatic progress made against H.I.V. in recent years and could spur the emergence of drug-resistant strains of H.I.V.; both outcomes could have a global impact, including in the United States.
There are very serious consequences for the impulsive, wrecking ball mode of government that Project 2025 and Elon Musk are carrying out. They don’t care. Musk is a sociopath and Russell Vought (who is clearly guiding this behind the scenes as well) is a racist white nationalist religious fanatic who no doubt thinks that people with HIV were asking for it. Neither they, nor Trump, care at all if 20 million people die. In fact, I suspect they think it’s probably a good thing since the sick are a burden on the rich people (producers) who are responsible for everything good in this world.
Asanda Zondi received a startling phone call last Thursday, with orders to make her way to a health clinic in Vulindlela, South Africa, where she was participating in a research study that was testing a new device to prevent pregnancy and H.IV. infection.
The trial was shutting down, a nurse told her. The device, a silicone ring inserted into her vagina, needed to be removed right away.
When Ms. Zondi, 22, arrived at the clinic, she learned why: The U.S. Agency for International Development, which funded the study, had withdrawn financial support and had issued a stop-work order to all organizations around the globe that receive its money. The abrupt move followed an executive order by President Trump freezing all foreign aid for at least 90 days. Since then, the Trump administration has taken steps to dismantle the agency entirely.
Ms. Zondi’s trial is one of dozens that have been abruptly frozen, leaving people around the world with experimental drugs and medical products in their bodies, cut off from the researchers who were monitoring them, and generating waves of suspicion and fear.
They are firing around 5,000 people leaving less that 300 to do the clean up. People are definitely going to die.
He really thinks the Palestinians are pets who can be rehomed to a “farm in the country.” He’s doubling down. (I wonder if everyone is aware that Trump’s new Ambassador to Israel,Mike Huckabee, has said that there’s no such thing as a Palestinian? Yeah…)
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz on Thursday proposed offering residents the right to resettle in any country that will have them after U.S. President Donald Trump‘s plan to take over Gaza and relocate Palestinians to neighboring countries.
Saying the people of Gaza should have the same right to freedom of movement and migration that was the norm around the world, Katz announced on X that the plan would provide a range of exit options, including via land crossings, as well as special arrangements to depart by sea and air.
He singled out Canada as a top potential destination due to what he said was its “structured immigration program” and previously stated willingness to accept migrants from Gaza.
“I have instructed the IDF to prepare a plan that will allow any resident of Gaza who wishes to leave to do so, to any country willing to receive them,” he said in his proposal in which he also threw down the gauntlet to countries critical of the way Israel had conducted its military offensive in Gaza,” wrote Katz.
“Countries such as Spain, Ireland, Norway and others, which have falsely accused Israel over its actions in Gaza, are legally obligated to allow Gazans to enter their territory. Their hypocrisy will be exposed if they refuse.”
“I welcome President Trump’s bold initiative, which can create extensive opportunities for those in Gaza who wish to leave, assist them in resettling in host countries, and support long-term reconstruction efforts in a demilitarized, threat-free Gaza after Hamas — an effort that will take many years,” he added.
Why not the US??? I think people in the Palm Beach area would be thrilled to welcome them. Or Arkansas, Mike Huckabee’s state. Think of all the jobs it would create building the fancy new homes for them. Why should Canada get all that money?
Marco Rubio and his Press Secretary Barbie both said that he meant that the ethnic cleansing would be temporary. Trump seems to have a different plan in mind, though. It’s clear that he means for them to be “resettled” in “the region.” But don’t worry their homes will be modern. And maybe, if they’re very good boys and girls, they’ll be allowed to visit Trump Gaza Golf Resort, maybe even work there a janitors some day.
When President Trump announced his proposal for the United States to take ownership of Gaza on Tuesday, he shocked even senior members of his own White House and government.
While his announcement looked formal and thought-out — he read the plan from a sheet of paper — his administration had not done even the most basic planning to examine the feasibility of the idea, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
It wasn’t only the Americans who were scrambling; the announcement came as just as much of a surprise to Mr. Trump’s Israeli visitors. Soon before they walked out for their joint news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Trump surprised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel by telling him he planned to announce the Gaza ownership idea, according to two people briefed on their interactions.
Inside the U.S. government, there had been no meetings with the State Department or Pentagon, as would normally occur for any serious foreign policy proposal, let alone one of such magnitude. There had been no working groups. The Defense Department had produced no estimates of the troop numbers required, or cost estimates, or even an outline of how it might work.
There was little beyond an idea inside the president’s head.
Nobody knew about it before he rolled it out. He is unstable and I mean that literally. His impulsivity is more childlike every day. Like this kid:
