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Netanyahu and Zelenskyy to arrive in Washington for Graham funeral – with hopes of winning Trump’s ear

4 hours agoCenter Left

Both men scheduled to meet Trump at time where US policy towards wars in Iran and Ukraine in state of fluxBenjamin Netanyahu and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are set to arrive in Washington simultaneously with the goal of winning the ear of Donald Trump at pivotal moments in wars affecting their respective countries.Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, and Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, will attend Tuesday’s funeral of Lindsey Graham, the former Republican senator for South Carolina, who died suddenly on 11 July and was a close ally of both leaders. Continue reading...

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Jim Acosta erupts over media ‘cowardice’ in kowtowing to Trump: ‘My friends blew it!’

Raw Story

18 minutes ago

Jim Acosta erupts over media ‘cowardice’ in kowtowing to Trump: ‘My friends blew it!’

Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta issued his “friends in the press” a blistering rebuke Monday for having missed a “golden opportunity” to stand up to President Donald Trump, one he attributed to “cowardice.”In a video published on his Substack, Acosta chastised journalists who attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Friday, most of whom sat quietly as Trump hurled broad attacks on the media and individual journalists.“What we saw at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner the other night was an absolute monstrosity. Donald Trump got up on stage, and he went after the free press,” Acosta said.“He targeted individual journalists as political enemies. He celebrated the fact that the oligarchs are taking over the networks. And the people in the audience just sat there in this stunned silence.”Among the many targets of Trump’s attacks on the press during his WHCD speech was Acosta’s former CNN colleague Kaitlan Collins. After having just won an award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure, Collins was attacked by Trump for not smiling enough. Trump also said Collins shouldn’t have won the award and called her reporting “fake.”“A depressed, distraught, despondent, whatever you want to call it, but it was not at all an adequate reaction to what he was saying,” Acosta said. “This was a golden opportunity for people in that room to stand up to a wannabe dictator and walk out of that room! And I hate to say it, but I just think that my friends in the press, they just blew it!"Acosta continued, “The American people could see it and it crystallized what is, I think, a real problem that we have in this country right now. And that is that the legacy and corporate media in this country, it’s just broken.”'They Just Blew It!' Jim Acosta Destroys Trump WHCD Rant — Rips Press Corps For Sitting There And Taking It by Jim Acosta'An Absolute Monstrosity!'Read on Substack

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Alarm as Trump appears ‘one mood swing away’ from indulging ‘nuclear fantasies’: expert

Raw Story

33 minutes ago

Alarm as Trump appears ‘one mood swing away’ from indulging ‘nuclear fantasies’: expert

Miles Taylor, who served as a senior Homeland Security official under the first Trump administration, warned Monday that President Donald Trump has spent years indulging in "nuclear fantasies," and that recent developments suggest Trump may be edging closer to acting on them.“Between Trump’s unchecked brinksmanship, possible nuclear proliferation to new countries, and broken treaties, you have a radioactive cocktail being stirred on the international stage,” Taylor wrote in an analysis published Monday on his Substack. “Add in the unresolved war with Iran, and you get the picture of a president who’s just one mood swing away from putting his finger on the proverbial red button.”Taylor recalled that during Trump's first term, the president "fantasized quite openly to advisers about wanting to blow up bombs," prompting then-Defense Secretary James Mattis to order Homeland Security officials to prepare contingency plans for a potential nuclear strike on American soil.Taylor pointed to Trump's recent comments to Axios, in which the president said he was "close" to ordering a "massive attack" on Iran – rhetoric Taylor compared to Trump's April warning that "a whole civilization will die tonight."Compounding the concern, Taylor noted, was the administration's new nuclear energy deal with Saudi Arabia, which omits standard safeguards giving international inspectors expanded access to nuclear sites. A former International Atomic Energy Agency official said “the U.S. should never have agreed to enrichment without a really strong inspections regime,” Taylor noted.Taylor also cited the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which in January set its Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest to midnight it has ever been in its 79-year history.“So why does he keep doing this? Why does the president of the United States keep circling back to the most dangerous machinery humans have ever built?” Taylor mused. “I can’t tell you his answer for sure. But based on close study of the man, I can give you my best guess. Donald Trump has spent his entire presidency on a power quest, always hunting for the next most powerful thing he can do. And nuclear weapons are at the top of that list.”Why does Trump keep toying with nuclear bombs? I think I know why. by Miles TaylorThe president has terrified close advisers with the prospect of nuclear escalation. Now, he's spreading his radioactive dreams overseas.Read on Substack

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One of Trump’s biggest reelection promises is still a complete failure

Alternet.org

56 minutes ago

One of Trump’s biggest reelection promises is still a complete failure

President Donald Trump made numerous promises to voters on the 2024 campaign trail, and according to a new report from The Hill, one of his biggest is still a complete flop, over a year and a half into his second term.As the Monday morning report noted, Trump repeatedly pledged to bring down costs during his reelection bid, at a time when the rising cost of living was, as it still is, the top issue on voters' minds. At one point, he claimed that he would be able to make significant cuts to the cost of energy prices, adding that he could accomplish the goal in 18 months at the most."Under my leadership, the United States will commit to the ambitious goal of slashing energy and electricity prices by half, at least,” Trump said at a campaign rally. “We intend to slash prices by half within 12 months, at a maximum, 18 months."Now, a few days past the 18-month mark of his second term, The Hill's report explained that he has not just failed to lower energy prices, but they are now getting worse under his watch."However, average household electricity prices for the first five months of 2026 were about 12 percent higher than the same period in 2024, significantly outpacing inflation," the report detailed. "While gasoline fluctuated during the Biden administration, prices are now about 60 cents higher than they were at this time in 2024, averaging $4.11 per gallon on Friday, according to AAA."Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, spoke to The Hill about these trends and explained that energy costs are having a notable impact on the overall cost of living for Americans. Giving one example, he noted that oil remaining at around $100 per barrel for a year could cost the average family an extra $800 annually. Energy prices are also unique in their ability to raise prices across a number of other critical industries."They have higher costs of gasoline to run their car," Wolfe said. "Food costs will increase on the margin because trucks need to deliver groceries. If you use heating oil to heat your home, the cost will be higher ... On heating oil and gasoline, it’s a direct result of the war. It’s pushing up prices and creating this instability in the market."Rising electricity costs, the outlet noted, are a more "complicated" situation, with Thomas Rowlands-Rees, head of Global Power Markets Analysis at BloombergNEF, saying that “we’re getting to a point where the bill is coming” for power grid upgrades, which cannot be pinned on any presidential administration in particular. Wolfe, meanwhile, was critical of Trump for creating major roadblocks for renewable energy, which could help stabilize electricity prices at a historically volatile time."It’s a problem for any incumbent,” GOP strategist Keith Naughton told The Hill, offering a forecast for the party's fate in the midterms. “Anything that’s raising prices is going to be a challenge for whoever’s in office."

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'Absolutely devastating numbers for Trump': CNN analyst startled by new economy polling

Raw Story

1 hour ago

'Absolutely devastating numbers for Trump': CNN analyst startled by new economy polling

President Donald Trump is facing a dramatic reversal on the issue that helped secure his 2024 win, according to CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten.In October 2024, a plurality of voters, 44 percent, believed Trump would improve their financial situation, compared with 38 percent who expected to be worse off, but that dynamic has flipped sharply. Current polling shows 58 percent of voters, nearly three in five, now say Trump is making them financially worse off, while the share saying he's made them better off has collapsed from 44 percent down to just 13 percent."These are absolutely devastating numbers," Enten said. "The issue that got Trump re-elected, now the voters absolutely turn against him."The shift extends to broader perceptions of the economy. In November 2024, just 42 percent of Americans, well under half, said the economy was getting worse. That figure has since jumped to 59 percent, while only about one in five now say conditions are improving. With inflation and the economy widely expected to be the top issue in the midterms, Enten said, those numbers present a serious problem for Republicans heading into the fall."That's an equation that does not work out to success," he said.Historically, Trump's standing looks especially weak. According to a CBS poll, his net economic approval rating is 30 points underwater at this point in his second term — worse than George W. Bush's numbers heading into the 2006 midterms, a comparison Enten noted has not historically boded well for the president's party.The economic anxiety comes as Trump pushes for interest rate cuts and has installed a new Federal Reserve chair. But prediction markets aren't betting on it happening soon. According to Kalshi, there's less than a 1 percent chance the Fed cuts rates at its meeting this week, and only about a 19 percent chance of a cut at all this year.The bottom line, Enten said, is that the public and financial markets alike currently see little reason to expect the economic relief Trump has promised. - YouTube youtu.be

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Live updates: US, Iran back off attacks; Trump heads to Michigan to tout manufacturing

The Hill News

1 hour ago

Live updates: US, Iran back off attacks; Trump heads to Michigan to tout manufacturing

The U.S. pulled back on its daily strikes on Iran over the weekend to both give more time for negotiations and conserve munitions. President Trump is “giving it a little bit of room,” Mike Waltz, United Nations ambassador, said Sunday. Reports also bubbled up over the weekend that the U.S. campaign in the Strait of Hormuz…

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Trump DHS accused of scanning peaceful protesters' faces, then revoking their Global Entry

Raw Story

1 hour ago

Trump DHS accused of scanning peaceful protesters' faces, then revoking their Global Entry

Three people who observed federal immigration enforcement during the Trump administration’s sometimes-violent surge said in a federal lawsuit filed Friday the Department of Homeland Security illegally recorded them and revoked their status in the department’s trusted traveler programs.The suit, filed in the Southern District of California, says the administration violated a federal privacy law, administrative law and the First Amendment by targeting people who observed and protested aggressive immigration enforcement, including during the deadly operation in Minneapolis in January.The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a legal group that advocates for privacy issues related to technology, is also a plaintiff in the case.Amid a nationwide surge of immigration enforcement that has included federal agents shooting and killing protesters, observers and immigrants, opponents “did what anyone is supposed to do when they disagree with government action: They exercised their First Amendment rights” by assembling, protesting and recording DHS agents’ activity in public, the suit says.“In response, DHS decided to record the Americans who were peacefully observing its agents,” the suit says.Officers with the DHS agencies Immigration and Customs Protection and Border Patrol killed two observers, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis in incidents 17 days apart in January.‘Driven home by ICE’ICE and Border Patrol agents used facial recognition technology, license plate readers and other technology to identify protesters and observers. The agents would then use that information in efforts to intimidate and retaliate against protesters, the suit says.Federal immigration officers addressed many legal observers by name, despite having never spoken to them. In Minnesota, legal observers tailing DHS agents in a car would commonly be led back to their own home addresses, according to the suit.“The experience … is so widespread that Minnesota residents have coined a term for it: being ‘driven home by ICE,’” the suit said.The practice shows that DHS is no longer following its own 2023 policy on facial recognition, the suit says. The department quietly removed the policy from its website — omitting it even from a set of archived pages — during President Donald Trump’s first month back in office, the suit says.The complaint argues that amounted to a policy change, which DHS did not conduct through the process agencies must follow under the Administrative Procedure Act.The department also retaliated against protesters and observers by revoking their status in DHS trusted traveler programs TSA Precheck and Global Entry, the suit says.Nicole Cleland, a Minnesota woman who is one of the individual plaintiffs in the suit, said Global Entry status was revoked three days after an encounter with a Border Patrol agent whom she was following at a safe distance, according to the suit.Chilling rightsThe suit alleges DHS’ actions have had a chilling effect on First Amendment-protected activity.Cleland has stopped observing DHS operations for fear of further retaliation, according to the suit.The two other individuals who brought the suit, Jacquelyn Ivey of South Carolina and Anna Walker of California, said they experienced “fear, anxiety and emotional distress” following their interactions with DHS officers.The suit also mentions activity in Maine, North Carolina and Chicago.DHS responseIn response to a request to DHS for comment, a spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, which administers Global Entry, said trusted traveler status can be denied for “inability to demonstrate low-risk traveler status.”“Global Entry or other CBP Trusted Traveler Program memberships are not revoked because someone exercises their First Amendment rights,” the spokesperson wrote. “Membership may be denied or revoked for reasons such as criminal activity (including pending charges or warrants), violations of customs or immigration laws, or inability to demonstrate low-risk traveler status.”The spokesperson added that travelers whose Global Entry is denied or revoked can ask for additional review. A Global Entry ombudsman provides “additional oversight” of some cases, the spokesperson said.A denial of Global Entry is not an impediment to travel, they wrote.DHS did not respond to questions about its policies for recording or using facial recognition on observers.

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Inside the dangerous DOJ move that could supercharge Trump’s abuses

Alternet.org

1 hour ago

Inside the dangerous DOJ move that could supercharge Trump’s abuses

Warning in a new piece for The Hill about the potential to supercharge President Donald Trump's abuses and fraud, a former federal director urged Congress to oppose the nomination of Todd Blanche, due to his aiding of "the most corrupt president in the nation’s history."Previously serving as Trump's personal attorney prior to his White House return, Blanche was first appointed to serve as Deputy Attorney General before being elevated to acting Attorney General after the exit of Pam Bondi. His time in the administration has been marked by scandal and controversy, from his involvement in the botched release of the Epstein files to his support of Trump's "slush fund" lawsuit settlement, but he has managed to impress the president, who nominated him to lead the Department of Justice as the proper Attorney General.William S. Becker is a climate action activist who previously served for over a decade as the Department of Energy's central regional director, as well as a special assistant to the department’s assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy. On Monday morning, he published a new piece for The Hill sounding the alarm about Blanche, warning that he has aided in corruption by Trump that would make Richard Nixon's misdeeds look like "child's play" and strongly urged Congress to reject his nomination."As deputy attorney general, Blanche proved that he will not only tolerate Trump’s lawlessness but also participate in it," Becker wrote. "He has openly violated Congress’s bipartisan law requiring the release of all Epstein files. He has collaborated with Trump’s scheme to reward Jan. 6 rioters with millions of dollars in compensation for their prosecution and convictions related to Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election."He continued: "Blanche has collaborated to make the department Trump’s personal weapon of retribution with specious and malicious charges against the president’s perceived enemies. The Brennan Center for Justice says grand juries have refused to indict Trump’s targets at least 18 times. Courts or prosecutors have aborted 16 grand jury subpoenas, along with nearly half the cases against protesters and immigrants for alleged assaults of law enforcement officers. Courts have dismissed 16 lawsuits that sought state voter data and thousands of misdemeanor charges against migrants, quashed nine subpoenas that tried to force hospitals to turn over records on gender-affirming care, and dropped at least 79 cases related to ICE protests."Becker also noted that Blanche has had a hand, alongside Bondi, in the massive purge of talent from the DOJ, with around 5,000 staffers being fired or pushed out under their watch, creating a "toxic and ethically challenged" environment. Blanche's push for the charges against former FBI Director James Comey, which accuse him of threatening Trump's life by sharing the "86 47" seashell photo on social media, has also been criticized as an effort to chill dissent that is right out of "the authoritarian playbook.""Those who most covet the job of attorney general may not be worthy to have it," Becker concluded. "The best candidates are willing to resign from the department in its defense. The best outcome would be for Blanche’s nomination to die in committee."

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Trump tells Thune to cancel August recess unless SAVE America Act passes

Washington Examiner

1 hour ago

Trump tells Thune to cancel August recess unless SAVE America Act passes

President Donald Trump is joining the growing chorus of Republicans calling on Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to forgo an August recess to pass the SAVE America Act in a recent social media post. “John Thune should not allow the United States Senate to ‘leave town’ until it passes The Save America Act or, […]

Center Right

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Netanyahu and Zelenskyy to arrive in Washington for Graham funeral – with hopes of winning Trump’s ear

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Netanyahu and Zelenskyy to arrive in Washington for Graham funeral – with hopes of winning Trump’s ear

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