The two were arrested on Friday after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio ended their permanent residency status, according to the State Department.
“Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter are now in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” the State Department said in a statement.
Rubio was only following orders from his boss — Laura Loomer.
Trump: “Over 3,000 years ago, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob delivered the ancient Israelites out of slavery and brought them into the promised land. It was an amazing period of time, just like today we have an amazing period of time.” pic.twitter.com/ark4DtDe7S
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) April 4, 2026
He wanted it big. He wanted lots of gold, lots of marble. He wanted visitors awestruck by his architectural expansion of the country’s symbolic seat of power. “They should sense the strength and grandeur of the German Reich as they walk from the entrance to the reception hall,” Adolf Hitler told his chief architect, Albert Speer, outlining his plans for an extension to the old Reich chancellery, at Wilhelmstrasse 77 in Berlin.
The new annex, connected to the chancellery by a marble corridor hung with crystal chandeliers, was part of Hitler’s ambitious plans to align the Berlin cityscape with his vision for the future of the country. Hitler wanted a Triumphbogen, a triumphal arch, twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He wanted an “Avenue of Splendor” for military parades. “The Champs-Élysées is a hundred meters wide,” Hitler told Speer. “We will make our avenue twenty meters wider.” A planned Volkshalle was to accommodate 180,000. The Eiffel Tower could fit beneath its cupola. This “Hall of the People” was to be topped by the largest swastika on Earth. Berlin itself was to be rechristened as Weltstadt Germania, “Capital of the World.”
Trump on Alcatraz: "It sorta represents something that's both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak — it's got a lot of qualities that are interesting."
Last year Trump decided that we need to open up Alcatraz again for no apparent reason and the speculation at the time as that he’d watched “Escape From Alcatraz” that was playing on a local Palm Beach TV station that night. I don’t know if that’s true but it wouldn’t surprise me.
The Trump administration is asking Congress for $152 million to transform Alcatraz into a “state-of-the-art secure prison facility,” as part of its 2027 budget proposal. That would cover just the first-year costs of the redevelopment, which has been roundly criticized as ill conceived and a poor use of federal funds.
[…]
Donald Trump has seriously floated the possibility for almost a year, and members of his administration—such as former Attorney General Pam Bondi—have claimed that the site could be used to offload pressure from America’s existing prison network, potentially holding the likes of international drug traffickers. The biggest problem with that plan: Alcatraz can only hold a maximum of 336 prisoners.
Some of the most MAGA Senators are all onboard with it including Senator Eric Schmitt and Markwayne Mullin, Stephen Miller’s new puppet. And this brain trust:
Representative Mary E. Miller even got to work itemizing a fantasy list of the most important Alcatraz inductees: “The first person to be sent to Alcatraz should be Anthony Fauci,” she wrote in May…
CNN reports that there is practically zero possibility that they will open the prison. It’s small and super expensive to operate.
Currently, it brings in $60 million a year as a tourist destination. (It really is a great tour.) So this makes even less sense.
But Grandpa saw a movie and they may just give it to him to keep him happy. That’s how our kingdom works.
You may have heard that Trump and Vought have requested to hike the military budget to 1.5 trillion next year. To do that, they’ll be cutting everything else, including the following:
For the second year in a row, US President Donald Trump has proposed significant cuts to the budgets of major US science agencies. Released Friday, the White House’s plan for federal spending next year also includes a ban on using federal funds for subscriptions and publishing fees for some academic journals.
The plan proposes cuts to federal agencies that fund or conduct research on health, space and the environment. Some of the steepest cuts would be made to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): the budgets of both would fall more than 50% in 2027 compared to their current levels (see ‘Budget crunch’). The budget for the US National Institutes of Health would drop 13%.
Science? Who needs it? We’re Murica and we have a military.
It’s unlikely the Congress will go along with these particular numbers. But if this GOP majority has its way it will go in this general direction.
Here’s a cheery item from The Guardian this morning. No really. Or at least it’s good news for our beleaguered friends in Ukraine. They are now not only the world’s foremost experts in the use of cheap drones on the battlefield, but robots as well. Victor Pavlov demonstrated:
The unmanned ground vehicles come in various shapes and sizes. One runs on caterpillar tracks and resembles a roofless milk float. Another has wheels and antennas. A third carries anti-tank mines. Since spring 2024 their use has grown exponentially.
“This is what modern warfare looks like. Armies everywhere will have to robotise,” said Pavlov, a lieutenant with Ukraine’s 3rd army corps.
The U.S. goes all in on expensive weaponry as if cost is no object. In the Iran theater, the U.S. is firing million-dollar missiles to stop Iranian drones that cost between $20,000 and $50,000 each. Forbes details how high-dollar U.S. gatling guns are failing to stop waves of cheap Iranian drones. They can miss a lot and run out of ammunition before the attack is over. “For that task, the sort of small interceptor drones developed by Ukraine, costing a few thousand dollars each and integrated with radar and other sensors may be a far better bet” when Shaheds “may keep coming night after night.”
Lacking our appetite or GDP, Ukraine has to get creative, innovate, and do more with less. (If only I could convince Democrats to try that.) Ukraine is developing a marketable export in the process.
Ukraine’s drone expertise is now highly sought after amid the US-Israeli war against Iran. Last week Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed 10-year defence agreements with several Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to provide them with low-cost Ukrainian interceptors. They can shoot down long-range kamikaze Shahed drones, used by Tehran in its attacks on its neighbours, and by Moscow.
The Kremlin’s war has transformed Kyiv into a centre for the development of modern unmanned weapons. There is a unique ecosystem, where engineers design new products and frontline soldiers give instant feedback. Manufacturers then scale up supplies, building ground vehicles, anti-Shahed interceptors and pioneering sea drones.
One operator comments:
“It’s not Star Wars, where there are lots of lasers. The frontline is more like Terminator. A land robot arrives at your position and there is nothing you can do about it,” said Bambi, a drone operator with the 25th airborne brigade. He added: “You can shoot a person in the chest and they stop firing. If you shoot a ground robot it doesn’t feel pain. There is a guy looking at a screen who is going to fire back.”
So far none of these robotic systems are reported to be autonomous, AI-controlled systems of the kind U.S. tech bros and Pentagon “warfighters” want developed. So we’re not at Skynet just yet. But is that really good news?
CNN’s Harry Enten finds that Donald Trump’s net approval rating among independents is less that Richard Nixon’s ahead of his resignation. Behold:
ABSOLUTE BOMBSHELL on CNN: Donald Trump now has the worst net approval rating among independents of ANY president ever. He is literally polling 10 points worse than Richard Nixon right before he resigned. The American public has abandoned him entirely! pic.twitter.com/cAJFmv7BzS
I’m fixated on this coming November’s independent vote here in N.C. because they are now 39 percent of the state’s voter registration with Ds and Rs tied at 30 percent. Statewide, independents (registered “unaffiliated” here) voted 54 percent for Donald Trump in 2024. BUT, they voted 6 precent less than Democrats.
Reuters reported back in November on the aggregate vote share based on exit polling:
The independent share stood at 34% in the latest update of Edison’s exit poll, compared with 34% for Republicans and 32% for Democrats.
Nationally, independents accounted for more votes quantitatively, but I don’t find their national turnout percent this morning. Gallup found in January that a new high of 45 percent of Americans identify as independents. But many states do not register voters as independents, so percent turnout among self-identified independents is harder to pin down.
So while it’s significant that Enten finds Trump’s support among independents in the tank, what matters in November is how big that tank is and what percent turn out to vote.
And it’s a long seven months to Election Day. Anything could happen.
An orphaned grizzly cub and an older polar bear have just become best friends at the Detroit Zoo 🐻✨
Grizzly cub Jebbie was found wandering alone in Alaska, unable to survive on his own. He was transported to the Detroit Zoo in July, where he met Laerke, a lonely polar bear cub… pic.twitter.com/j81AjJ3Iac
— Beauty of music and nature 🌺🌺 (@Axaxia88) March 20, 2026
An orphaned grizzly cub and an older polar bear have just become best friends at the Detroit Zoo.
Grizzly cub Jebbie was found wandering alone in Alaska, unable to survive on his own. He was transported to the Detroit Zoo in July, where he met Laerke, a lonely polar bear cub who was also growing up without a mother bear. The two quickly became close companions, and the zoo says they do everything together, including ‘running, chasing each other, wrestling, rolling around, and lots of typical bear play.
What do bear cubs do to pass the time? Apparently dance and play a friendly game of Ring Around the Rosie.
A family of baby brown bears was spotted in eastern Finland holding hands and dancing around in a circle, just like schoolchildren do while singing the Ring Around the Rosie rhyme on the playground.
Valtteri Mulkahainen, a 52-year-old gym teacher, reportedly witnessed the adorable moment unfold in the animal kingdom in a forest in Suomussalmi, Finland, according to the Solent News Agency, which obtained the pictures.
Paul Krugman this morning offers some TGIF news. Batteries work and are getting cheaper. Drastically so:
The decline in battery prices has been incredible. It’s like nothing anyone has ever seen before. Big, strong men with tears in their eyes come up to me and say, “Sir, have you seen the progress in batteries?”:
Why does this matter?
First, cheap battery storage of electricity greatly mitigates the problem of intermittency — the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow. This was a major concern early in the renewable revolution. Some energy economists scolded me for my naïve optimism when I first wrote about solar technology way back in 2011. But solar + batteries provides round-the-clock power.
Here’s a graph of California’s electricity supply generated by renewables and batteries over the course of 24 hours on April 1 that illustrates my point:
During the middle of the day, California generates lots of electricity from solar. Much of it is poured into batteries, which provide electricity when the sun sets. Californians don’t even notice the switch.
In engineering school I heard one professor casually mention to another that students were not considering power density in their mechanical designs. I never heard another word about it in any class. But Krugman references it:
Second, battery performance has soared as prices have plunged. Crucially, there has been a huge increase in batteries’ volumetric energy density: the amount of electricity that can be stored in a given space. Until a few years ago the energy density of gasoline gave internal combustion a huge advantage over electric vehicles. But no longer.
For any geeks out there, follow the link in the paragraph above.
While Trump fiddles in Iran, he’s burning more fossil fuels at home while surrendering the renewables market to China. (So much winning.) But he cannot stop the renewables future, Krugman writes.
The first drop was by far the sharpest. In the couple of weeks after Trump took office and started signing a barrage of executive orders, his net approval cratered at a pace of about 15 points per month. That was the fastest decline of his whole presidency — basically, whatever political “honeymoon” Trump enjoyed after his 2024 victory collapsed almost immediately.
From early February through early April 2025, that decline slowed to around 2 points per month. Then came his “Liberation Day” tariffs announcement, a year ago as of this Thursday, April 2, and the press coverage around the Kilmar Abrego Garcia deportation. That caused Trump’s approval to drop another 5 points in just a month.
After that, things eased off a bit more. The National Guard deployment to Los Angeles in June 2025 coincided with a slower rate of decline, closer to 2 points per month. And from June through October, Trump’s numbers were almost flat, falling by less than a point a month. If there was ever a moment when things looked like they might be leveling off, that was it.
But it didn’t last. The government shutdown and the No Kings protests in October 2025 pushed the trend downward again, roughly doubling the pace of decline. The president lost support after the 2025 statewide elections across the country, then recovered a couple of points of ground.
The trend snapped back to the negative with the first round of the Epstein files release in December. And now the war with Iran has sped things up again, with Trump’s net approval falling at about 2 points per month again — the fastest sustained slide since spring 2025.
Surprisingly, one set of events the model doesn’t pick up is the murder of Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January. There looks to be a slight decline in Trump’s rating after these events, but the model does not pick it up as a “change point” — maybe because of the noise in the trend in early Feb. This is good point to stop and remind ourselves that analyzing aggregatge trends in observational polling data often leaves information on the table and cannot provide for causal analysis. For example, there was a big dip in Trump’s immigration issue approval after Good and Pretti were killed, suggesting it did break through to the average American when they thought about immigration in particular, even if there wasn’t an obvious hit to Trump’s overall rating.
And now there’s Iran…
Morris says that this is mostly attributed to economic anxiety and a strong majority is holding his responsible for it. But every once in a while something else breaks through that send his rating even lower. He is on a negative trajectory and nothing seems to change it. And as Morris notes, Trump doesn’t appear to give a damn about it.
As I have written, he’s playing for history and believes that he will end up being the big winner because he has always been right about everything.
