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Thwarted Plot to Attack White House Fight Involved Drones and Snipers, Officials Say
Multiple people were arrested in connection with an alleged plan to target the UFC match with thousands in attendance, including Trump.
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The Hill News
Explosive-drone threat to White House UFC event stopped, Patel says
Center
Federal authorities stopped a potential attack targeting the UFC Freedom 250 event held on the White House lawn, with a multi-state law enforcement operation leading to multiple arrests, FBI Director Kash Patel said Tuesday. The FBI and law enforcement first became aware of the possible threat on June 10 through Signal chats, just days before…
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Truthout
“Without Me, There Would Be No Israel,” Trump Says as Israel Remains in Lebanon
Critics say it’s not the first time a president has vented their anger with Netanyahu with no resulting material change.
Far Left
Raw Story
Susan Collins says she has no regrets over Kavanaugh vote despite Roe reversal
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) was confronted by reporters on Tuesday about her role in confirming Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh at the height of controversy over his allegations of sexual misconduct, with the hindsight of his role in overturning abortion rights for millions of women around the country — and she was unrepentant.The reason, she explained, is that she also voted to confirm a number of justices who opposed that opinion."This is the first reelection campaign that you're run since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade," asked a reporter from News Center Maine. "I was hoping you could talk to me a little bit about your vote to confirm Kavanaugh and whether you regret that?""I do not regret that vote," said Collins. "I do disagree with Justice Kavanaugh's vote. I would point out that in that decision, several Supreme Court justices whom I supported voted the other way. That includes Justice Sotomayor, Justice Elena Kagan, Justice Jackson. So I have supported a great number of Supreme Court justices.""When I look at a justice, I look at their qualifications, their integrity, their background, their experience in reaching a decision," she added. "Obviously I'm disappointed in that decision, which turned abortion issues back to the states. It has not had an impact on the state of Maine, in that Maine actually expanded its law."Collins is facing a closely-watched re-election battle, with Democrats having nominated oyster farmer and harbormaster Graham Platner, who is touring the state on a progressive platform while facing questions about his drama-filled past.
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The Federalist
Court Docs: Alleged UFC Terror Attack Planner Parroted Democrats’ Trump-Epstein Conspiracies
An individual allegedly involved in a thwarted terrorist attack aimed at Sunday’s UFC Freedom 250 event at the White House parroted Democrat conspiracy theories about President Trump protecting child predators connected to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to federal court documents. The revelation came on Tuesday, when Fox News reported on how the FBI and […]
Far Right
Raw Story
Secret Service furious at Kash Patel for rushing to announce arrests in UFC plot
Secret Service officials were angry after FBI Director Kash Patel blindsided them and publicly announced details of a sealed, ongoing investigation into an alleged plot to attack a UFC fight event at the White House.Patel's announcement Tuesday morning potentially compromised roughly 10 arrests that had not yet been made, according to three people familiar with the matter, and his social media post disrupted plans by Secret Service and FBI officials to unseal the case later that afternoon and issue a joint public statement, reported NBC News correspondent Ken Dilanian."We all woke up this morning to see this on Twitter," one administration official said, speaking anonymously to discuss sensitive matters.The investigation began last week when a relative of one of the suspects contacted local police in the Cincinnati area to report that their family member was discussing a vague plot in Washington. A Secret Service advanced threat interdiction team, working with the FBI, obtained a subpoena for an encrypted Signal chat thread that revealed plans for the drone attack. One suspect was arrested June 13, and the case was immediately sealed to allow investigators to identify and arrest additional suspects.Secret Service Deputy Director Matt Quinn publicly rebuked the premature disclosure at a news conference Tuesday without naming Patel directly. "Don't choke on your own smoke," Quinn said, invoking a phrase learned early in his career. "The Secret Service led that investigation from the beginning. In order to maintain the integrity of the investigation and the security plan, we chose not to leak it."Quinn declined to discuss further details, noting the case remained sealed and active.The Secret Service has since dramatically expanded security around the weekend event and issued alerts to law enforcement partners to watch for drones in downtown Washington.
Far Left
Reason.com
Trump Sees World Cup Visitors as a Threat, But America Sees a Chance for Hospitality
Plus: How the UFC and MMA went from outsiders to the sporting and political establishment—to the point where they’re being used for “diplomacy.”
Center Right
Raw Story
Economist warns Musk's trillionaire fortune is a 'grave threat' to democracy worldwide
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire last week, and now a prominent economist is warning that his unprecedented wealth poses a grave threat to human freedom in the US and across the globe.In a column published by The Guardian on Tuesday, Paris School of Economics professor Gabriel Zucman argued that Musk’s enormous fortune is fundamentally at odds with a democratic system of governance because it gives him “the power to stifle competition, the power to shape public discourse, the power to influence policymaking, the power to buy elections, the power to stall social progress,” and much else.Zucman noted that wealth concentration is even greater now than it was during the original Gilded Age, as the top 0.00001% now have fortunes large enough to “buy 14% of everything produced in a given year in the US.”The economist added that while Musk—whose infamous destruction of the US Agency for International Development is projected to kill millions of people in the coming years—makes a particularly compelling villain, trillionaires would be a major problem for democracy even if they were of a more benevolent variety.“No one should want to live in a society where one single individual can be worth $1 trillion, no matter their personal virtues,” Zucman emphasized. “Such levels invariably skew power, distort markets, and sap our democratic ideals.”The best solution to this crisis, Zucman said, is to “create an unavoidable minimum tax on their wealth” that will “make it impossible for the super-rich to pay less tax than middle-class workers—a matter of basic equality before the law.”“It is time to break decisively with the perverse logic in which retirees, the poor, or immigrants are expected to balance the budget,” Zucman concluded, “while the rich are to be allowed to live tax-free in their own parallel society. There cannot be a law more lenient for the rich and powerful than for the rest of us. If ever there was a time to act, it is now.”Zucman’s thoughts on extreme wealth and democracy were echoed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who on Tuesday published an essay on his Substack page where he likened President Donald Trump’s White House cage-fighting matches to the kinds of spectacles put on by Roman emperors before noting ominous similarities between the US today and the Roman Empire.“While the causes of the decline of republican government and Rome’s eventual transition to one-man rule were doubtless complex,” Krugman wrote, “there is broad consensus among historians that a key factor was the emergence of extreme inequality. A handful of men became incredibly wealthy from the spoils of Rome’s eastern conquests, and their wealth and power eventually became too great for the rules of constitutional, republican government to contain. Sound uncomfortably familiar?”Gautam Mukunda, a professor at the Yale School of Management, similarly warned that Musk’s newly minted trillionaire status was bad news for American self-governance.In a Monday column published by Bloomberg, Mukunda pointed to the vast sums of money being spent by billionaires in US elections, which he noted “dwarf what candidates can raise themselves.”And like Krugman, Mukunda saw disturbing parallels between the US today and Ancient Rome.“Marcus Crassus was the richest man in ancient Rome,” he explained. “So rich that, by Plutarch’s account, he thought no man truly wealthy unless he could pay an army from his own purse. He spent that fortune bankrolling Julius Caesar and building the triumvirate that sidelined the Senate and, in fact if not in name, overthrew the republic.”
Far Left
Washington Examiner
Vance says changing his tune on Trump was a sign of ‘humility’
Vice President JD Vance insisted his evolving views on President Donald Trump over the past decade were a sign of “humility” during his first interview with ABC’s The View. Vance spoke with the show’s co-hosts on Tuesday morning to promote his newly released book Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, but was grilled on […]
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