Why is it always a maggot from Flor-i-daaaaaaaaa?

One of Congress’ Most Scandal-Plagued Republicans May Be About to Lose His Primary

Florida Rep. Cory Mills has been accused of stolen valor, was subject to a restraining order, and is reportedly under investigation by the Justice Department. He also has Trump’s “Complete and Total Endorsement.”

Noah Lanard

On Tuesday, Republican primary voters in central Florida will decide whether Rep. Cory Mills should once again be their party’s nominee for Congress. In doing so, they will weigh the value of the congressman’s “Complete and Total Endorsement” from President Donald Trump versus the reality of voting for a man whose past 18 months look like this:

• February 2025: Washington, DC, police nearly arrest Mills after a girlfriend calls 911 and accuses him of domestic assault; she recants the accusation after reportedly being pressured to do so by the congressman. 
• May 2025: Army veterans accuse Mills of obtaining a Bronze Star through stolen valor.
• August 2025: An ex-girlfriend—whom Mills was cheating on with the partner who accused him of abuse—seeks a restraining order against Mills after the congressman is accused of threatening to potentially share explicit videos recorded during their relationship.
• October 2025: A Florida judge grants the restraining order after finding that a key part of the congressman’s testimony in the “dating violence” case had not been “truthful.”
• November 2025: The House Ethics Committee establishes a subcommittee to investigate allegations against Mills.
• May 2026: The ethics committee reveals that it has authorized more than 20 subpoenas and obtained thousands of documents as part of its investigation into “serious and complex” allegations against Mills.
• July 2026: NBC News reports that Mills is under investigation by the Department of Justice; sources tell ABC News that the investigation is partly about his finances. Mills responds by saying there is no confirmation that he is under investigation.

The full list of Mills’ many controversies is much longer. If Mills wins on Tuesday, it will be a testament not only to the power of a Trump endorsement but also to a Republican Party that has turned the other way when it comes to allegations of egregious misconduct. From there, he will have to win a general election in a Republican-leaning district Democrats hope to flip this year.

If Mills is defeated, he will become the fourth man in Congress this year to lose his job or retire early after being accused of misconduct against women. In April, Reps. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) resigned after facing potential expulsion. Earlier this month, Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.) announced that he was ending his reelection bid after the ethics committee recommended that he be censured. Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) has so far refused to step down in response to groundbreaking reporting from my colleague Abby Vesoulis about allegations of domestic abuse by Miller.

Mills may become the first of these men to lose his job at the ballot box, rather than by resigning or retiring. Ryan Elijah, a former local TV news anchor, is in a strong position to potentially defeat Mills on Tuesday. He outraised Mills last month and received the endorsement of two of Mills’ GOP colleagues in Florida: Reps. Mike Haridopolos and Anna Paulina Luna. Mills, meanwhile, brought in only about $16,000 in July—an abysmal amount for a sitting congressman. (One of Mills’ biggest recent campaign donors is another Florida man who attracted the attention of the ethics committee: former Rep. Matt Gaetz.) 

Public polling in the race remains limited; a recent survey showed Mills leading by 6 points with 41 percent of voters still undecided. The share of undecided voters does not reflect well on Mills, who was first elected in 2022 and has had years to earn the support of his constituents. Trump’s advisers may also be trying to distance themselves; the president did not include Mills in a string of social media posts last week touting candidates he has endorsed in Florida. On Friday, Gov. Ron DeSantis added to Mills’ problems, saying “I have not endorsed Cory Mills, and I do not support Cory Mills.”

As he fights to stay in office, Mills has stuck to a Trumpian playbook of denial and deception. He has said that he was not involved in any criminal or civil proceedings when Trump endorsed him in February 2026. That is true but only barely: The restraining order placed on him in Florida by Judge Fred Koberlein Jr. had recently expired. Mills has also downplayed the restraining order by calling it a “social media injunction.” That is not accurate. Koberlein barred Mills from contacting his ex-girlfriend Lindsey Langston, and going within 500 feet of her home and place of work. As part of the order, the judge also banned him from directly referring to Langston on social media because he felt that doing so was necessary to protect her from additional “dating violence.”

In a similar vein, Mills has claimed that he has “never gone to any proceedings.” It’s true that he has never been criminally charged, but he spent hours in court proceedings during the restraining order case last year. He has also stated that “no one ever claimed” he committed domestic abuse. That is also false. Police body-camera footage obtained by the Washington Post and a police report obtained by NBC4 Washington show Sarah Raviani, the girlfriend who called 911, did accuse him of abuse.

Raviani later told the officer that “he wants me to say” that the bruises and marks on her body “were from our vacation and that I bruise easily.” The officer believed that she was talking to Mills on the phone at that time. Raviani went on to retract her allegations, saying that the bruising came from riding a camel during a trip to Dubai with Mills. 

One aspect of Mills’ biography that has attracted relatively little attention is his pattern of dating young women involved in Republican politics. Langston was in her early twenties and nearly two decades Mills’ junior when the two began dating in 2021. Sarah Raviani was 27 when she called 911 to report alleged abuse by the then-44-year-old congressman. Raviani co-founded a group called “Iranians for Trump”; Langston has served as a state committee member for the Florida GOP.

In 2023, Mills began dating a woman who had graduated from high school in 2022, according to reporting by the independent journalist Roger Sollenberger. The congressman was in his 40s at the time; she would have been 19 or 20 and working in Republican politics, according to public records.

I asked Mills via text message if he disputed dating the woman and whether he dated a 19-year-old while a member of Congress. Mills replied, “Mother Jones’ slanderous and misleading comments, combined with Roger Sollenberger’s continued false accusations from known leftist media, makes your request absurd.” 

He continued, “There’s nothing illegal about two consenting adults dating. The obsession over a man’s dating life is disturbing at best. I’ve been separated from my now ex-wife years prior to our divorce finalizing. Whether in office or as a private citizen, adults are entitled to date in their attempt to find their person. Sometimes you get lucky and find that immediately, but many are not so blessed. Feel free to run your new and slanderous hit piece.”

When I profiled Mills earlier this year, untangling the congressman’s many dubious claims took months of reporting. I ended up speaking with 18 people who have known Mills from his youth to the present day. The picture they painted was almost universally unflattering. 

As one former associate put it to me, Mills is a “human fucking trainwreck.” Others called him a “little bitch,” “repulsive and vile,” and a “schmuck bordering on being a douchebag.” Adam Ehrhardt, a medic who served under Mills in the Army, called his former sergeant a “pathological liar.”

Mills’ time testifying in the restraining order case last year raised more doubts about the congressman’s honesty. While on the stand, the congressman told Langston’s lawyer that he was not in divorce proceedings. Langston’s attorney then revealed that she was holding the paperwork from Mills’ ongoing divorce in her hand. “He lied in front of a judge,” Langston said in an interview with a Florida news outlet this month. “He lied under oath.” 

Judge Koberlein made a similar suggestion when assessing Mills’ claim that he no longer had access to intimate videos of Langston. As Koberlein put it in his decision granting the restraining order: “The Court, considering the totality of the testimony and circumstances, does not find [Mills’] testimony concerning the intimate videos to be truthful.”

Mills has been similarly deceitful about his military record. He has claimed to have been a member of Joint Special Operations Command, the elite group that oversees much of US special operations forces. Service records for Mills released by the Army provide no evidence that he was part of US special forces. An Army official also told me that Mills “attended Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS) in 2002 but did not complete the course.” Former military contractors who worked with Mills in Iraq and Afghanistan told me he claimed to have been an Army Ranger, an Army sniper, and a special forces qualified medic. None of that is supported by Mills’ service records. 

Most egregiously, Mills has been accused of obtaining a Bronze Star under false pretenses. To justify the Bronze Star, Mills has produced the official form used to nominate him for the award. The document, which was submitted about 18 years or more after the alleged heroic acts it describes, claims that Mills saved the lives of two comrades “while under intense enemy fire” in Iraq in 2003. One of those men, Joe Heit, has told me and NOTUS that Mills did not save his life. Heit said he has no memory of ever seeing Mills in Iraq. The other person whose life Mills supposedly saved is a former medic who was grievously wounded rushing to Heit’s aid. That soldier’s mother has said that he has no memory of the battle.

The Bronze Star form also claims that, during a different battle, Mills saved the life of a third soldier by bounding forward under “murderous enemy fire.” From there, it states that Mills subdued an “enemy insurgent” who had captured Sgt. First Class Joe Ferrand. Ferrand has written in a statement shared with congressional investigators that he “solemnly swear[s]” that the story is entirely made up. “The act never took place,” he wrote. “The event never happened.”

I asked Mills on Sunday if he stands by the claim that he saved Ferrand’s life. In response, he texted me an Army record that shows he received a Bronze Star, and said that there are “confirmed audits” and validation of his awards by the Army and the Department of War. The real question is whether the award was obtained through false claims of heroism. I asked Mills three times if he still claims to have saved Ferrand’s life; he responded to each of those messages without addressing the question.

The full scope of Mills’ misrepresentations is much broader. He first ran for Congress by presenting himself as a successful businessman. Court records I reviewed make clear that his business, Pacem Defense, which specialized in selling grenades to foreign militaries, was falling apart when he first ran for office. Since entering Congress, he claims to have stepped away from Pacem Defense and related businesses by placing those assets in a “blind trust.”

Kedric Payne, vice president and general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, told me earlier this year the set up of Mills’ blind trust does not make sense because his financial disclosure forms list the share he owns in the companies that are in it. As Payne noted, “If you can see what your holdings are, it is not a blind trust.”

Late last year, Pacem indefinitely furloughed many of its workers as it was hounded in court for tens of millions of dollars in unpaid debt. Still, Pacem managed to keep money flowing to at least one company. A filing in another lawsuit filed against Pacem shows that it paid $12,000 per month in rent to a company called Pacem Estate Holdings during the period when its workers were furloughed. Mills owns 100 percent of Pacem Estate Holdings, according to his congressional financial disclosure. In short, Pacem stopped paying workers but apparently kept money flowing to a company wholly owned by Mills. 

Like many of Mills’ former associates, Florida primary voters who take the time to look into the congressman may similarly decide they want nothing to do with him. Or they could pull the lever for a congressman their president called a “Tremendous Champion for the Great People” of his district. 

No... There is no climate change... Says the stupid fucks...

Italy’s scorching summer puts Parmesan producers to the test

The EU and regional authorities are helping cheese producers as dairy herds suffer in heat waves that are becoming the norm.

By Hannah Roberts

In the barns where the milk for Italy’s most famous cheese is produced, the fans have barely stopped whirring for two months. As temperatures across northern Italy push close to 40 degrees Celsius, cows stand almost motionless, tongues lolling, while automated sprinklers soak their backs.

Italy is now enduring its fourth major heat wave of an exceptionally brutal summer. The prolonged heat is piling costs on the €4 billion industry behind Parmigiano Reggiano, forcing farmers to spend heavily on cooling their animals while drought and dwindling water supplies make it harder and more expensive to grow the forage needed to feed them.

Farmers have received support from regional authorities, the EU and a producers' consortium to help them adapt to the heat, but they say the funding falls short of the investment increasingly required.

For producers of the protected cheese, there is no possibility of escaping somewhere cooler. Under the strict rules governing Parmigiano Reggiano's EU Protected Designation of Origin — that secures its added value on the market — the cows, their milk and the cheese must remain tied to a defined area of northern Italy. At least 75 percent of their forage must also be grown locally.

Dairy cows can begin suffering from heat stress at around 25C, depending on humidity, according to Giovanni Buonaiuto, a vet with the Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium, which defends producers' interests. Their digestive system generates considerable heat as they break down food, while cows have relatively few sweat glands with which to disperse it. “It’s as if the cow has a radiator inside her,” Buonaiuto told POLITICO.

As temperatures rise, cows eat less and stand for longer to expose themselves to moving air. They rest and ruminate less, milk production falls and prolonged heat can also affect fertility.

Buonaiuto said milk production has fallen by about 10 percent on average during the summer, although the impact varies sharply between farms depending on their cooling systems.

Overheating herds

Federica Dall’Aglio, who raises 400 cattle on the plains near the city of Parma, said each cow was producing five to six kilograms less milk a day, a fall of roughly 20 percent, despite fans and water sprays installed to protect her herd.

The cows now spend much of their time beneath the fans and water sprays, she added, as they're reluctant to move away from the cooling systems.

Outside the barns, farmers are reorganizing their working days around the heat too. Some now cut and collect hay at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., Buonaiuto said, before the morning heat causes the hay to crumble. By 8 a.m. or 9 a.m., it can already be too hot.

Keeping the cows cool comes at a high cost.

Luca Cotti, a sixth-generation dairy farmer and president of farmers’ association Coldiretti in the northern Emilia-Romagna region, said electricity consumption in barns can double or even triple during extreme heat as cooling systems run almost continuously.

He recalled worrying about winter 20 years ago, with the weather freezing drinking water and other systems in the barn. Now investment is directed toward surviving summer.

The new normal

Extreme summer heat was once exceptional and might last a week before temperatures eased, Cotti said. Now, he said, “it's normal.” This year, “since June, it has never let up.”

For some smaller producers with older facilities, the question is whether the investment is still worthwhile.

Dall’Aglio’s family has been investing in cooling systems for around 15 years, recently adding solar panels to help offset their growing electricity needs.

Across the Parmigiano Reggiano supply chain, such technology is becoming commonplace. Around half of its dairy farms, responsible for 70 percent of its milk, have invested in advanced cooling systems, including fans, motion-sensitive water sprays and automated temperature monitoring, according to the consortium president, Nicola Bertinelli.

The remaining 30 percent of milk comes largely from farms in the cooler hills and mountains, he said.

Parmigiano Reggiano cheese is pictured at a stand at the Slow Food Salone del Gusto in Turin, Italy on Sept, 26, 2024. | Marco Bertorello/AFP via Getty Images

With persistently high temperatures, insufficient rainfall and water levels in major Alpine lakes approaching historic lows, authorities in the Po River basin, which supports agriculture across northern Italy through a network of tributaries and canals, have declared a high level of drought severity.

Alfalfa, an important source of forage for the cows, is relatively resistant to drought because of its deep roots. But Dall’Aglio said her family had already been irrigating heavily to ensure a good hay crop this year.

When rivers run too low for irrigation, some farmers have to pump groundwater instead, which can make irrigation around five times more expensive because of the energy required to extract it, according to Lorenzo Catellani of farmers' association CIA Agricoltori Emilia-Romagna.

Coldiretti is calling on politicians to treat water storage as infrastructure rather than emergency relief.

Cotti said regional and national authorities need to invest in reservoirs and other water-storage infrastructure, arguing that individual farms cannot solve the growing problem of water scarcity alone.

Paradoxically, Parmesan producers normally worry about producing too much, not too little — and had sought to curb output this year. “We always have the brake on,” Cotti said, adding that high prices mean farmers have little difficulty increasing production when needed.

Despite the strain, producers insist there is no danger of Italy running short of Parmesan.

The cheese’s strong global market gives farmers greater scope to invest than producers in more fragile agricultural sectors.

For now, those investments are keeping Parmigiano production stable, although smaller farmers with aging barns may eventually choose to close rather than spend the money needed to adapt. For now, there is little to do but wait for the temperatures to fall. “We keep going like this,” Cotti said. “We hope it ends as soon as possible.”

They should hold it under ground.... Where putin hides...

Russia cancels major Red Square military jamboree amid drone attacks

“The event has been postponed until 2027 due to circumstances beyond the organizers’ control,” said festival bosses.

By Daria Zakharova

A major military music festival in Moscow has been canceled four days before it was due to start, the organizers said on Telegram.

The lavish parade, known as the Spasskaya Tower International Military Music Festival, attracts thousands of visitors and brings together dozens of military bands in the heart of Moscow on Red Square near the Kremlin.

The event, which began in 2007 at President Vladimir Putin’s orders, is one of Russia’s most prominent military-themed events, alongside the May 9 Victory Day parade in Moscow and the Navy Day show in St. Petersburg. Spasskaya “Tower was only canceled once before — in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

In its early years, military bands from EU countries, Australia and Canada took part in Spasskaya Tower, though the number of international participants has declined since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

According to the festival’s Telegram channel, “the event has been postponed until 2027 due to circumstances beyond the organizers’ control.”

The move comes amid an increase in Ukrainian drone attacks on the Russian capital.

Overnight, Kyiv’s forces launched one of the largest assaults on Moscow in recent months, with more than 600 drones directed toward the Russian capital and surrounding region. The strikes, which, according to Russian media, targeted the facilities of Wildberries, a major Russian online marketplace, as well as logistics warehouses, sparked massive fires and killed one person.

Earlier in June, the Kremlin canceled another event in Moscow’s Red Square — a gala concert marking Russia Day. The Victory Day parade on May 9 was held on a limited scale and, for the first time in nearly 20 years, without heavy military equipment.

Because he is a fucking liar..........

Trump’s rosy Hormuz claims collide with tanker data

The Trump administration has said the Strait of Hormuz is open for business and oil is flowing. Market trackers suggest a less rosy picture.

By Scott Waldman

Energy Secretary Chris Wright says about 9 million barrels of oil are moving through the Strait of Hormuz every day.

But nonpartisan oil tanker trackers say it’s likely 7 million barrels at best, or more likely, closer to 5 million.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that the oil is flowing freely through the strait, which even before the war was a global energy chokepoint. On Monday, he told reporters at the White House that the U.S. has total control over the strait and that “we’re taking out millions of barrels of oil a week.”

“The strait is open and the oil prices are coming down, and they will continue to come down unless we decide to do something more drastic than what we’ve been doing,” Trump said.

But experts say the Trump administration’s figures cannot be trusted because there’s no data that shows that volume of oil is actually moving through the strait.

It appears as if Wright was “just pulling a number out of the air,” said Matt Smith, director of Commodity Research at Kpler, a leading firm tracking tanker movements.

“The reality is that Iran has the leverage, Iran has the control,” he said. “The only tankers that are really passing through the Strait of Hormuz are those that are operating through Iranian waters.”

The recent peak might be as much as 7 million barrels a day, said Rory Johnston, founder of Commodity Context, a Canada-based oil markets analytics firm. He questioned Wright’s claims about 20 million barrels leaving the region, however, and said the administration has not “earned the benefit of the doubt on oil market estimates.”

On Monday, Wright told Fox News that more oil is escaping the Strait of Hormuz than data trackers realize, claiming that only the Trump administration has the accurate count of tankers leaving the region because “ours aren’t estimates, we have the actual data.”

The White House referred questions to the Energy Department. An agency spokesperson referred to Wright’s X post that stated “Many private businesses undercount the number of ships leaving the Strait of Hormuz due to ships moving covertly through the waterway.”

The total volume of global crude that is available on any given day sets oil prices, which in turn shapes grocery costs, transportation expenses, consumer spending and much more. In short, the more crude that moves, the better it is for affordability everywhere, which is a boon for politicians running on that message in November’s elections.

Before the war, an average of almost 140 ships a day crossed through the strait, transporting fertilizer, aluminum, helium liquefied natural gas and about 20 million barrels a day of crude. On Sunday, just 3 ships crossed the strait, according to data from commodities tracking firm Kpler. Last week, only 95 ships total crossed the strait, Kpler found.

And oil markets are showing signs of growing weary of the administration’s promises that a return to normal is just around the corner. Global oil prices – which have repeatedly dropped on optimistic projections from Trump and other administration officials many times in the last five months – actually increased after Wright’s post about covert ship movements.

Global Crude prices approached around $90 a barrel on Monday. Meanwhile, the national average price for a gallon of gas in the U.S. is creeping back up, hitting $4.067 on Monday, according to AAA, the highest it has ever been this late in the season.

To be sure, tracking the amount of tankers leaving the strait is challenging. Ships are turning off their transponders to avoid detection, satellite imaging has been compromised in some areas and the U.S. military is moving tankers under secretive conditions. But Smith said organizations like Kpler have now had months to adapt to the new operating environment and have adjusted accordingly with new methodology.

Though 9 million barrels seems like a stretch, there has been an uptick in the amount of crude escaping the strait in recent months, according to Michelle Bockmann, an analyst at Windward, a maritime intelligence firm. In July, data shows that up to 5 million barrels a day moved through the strait, compared to 4 million in June and 1.6 million in July, she said.

Still, Bockmann said, tracking the exact number of ships transiting the strait is getting harder because there are a growing number of “dark transits.”

Last week, Mason Hamilton, vice president of economics and research at the American Petroleum Institute, summed up the current state of affairs for people tracking oil flows through the strait.

“Might as well just rename it Schrödinger’s Strait…” he wrote on X, referring to the theory in quantum mechanics which holds that something can exist in multiple possible states until it is observed or measured.

He can read and write???

Trump votes by mail again in his home state of Florida

Voting records from Palm Beach County show the president requested his ballot in late July and it was returned on Aug. 13.

By Gary Fineout

President Donald Trump voted by mail in Florida’s Republican primary, according to local voting records, even as he continues to rail against mail-in voting with wide-ranging allegations of fraud.

Voting records from Palm Beach County show the president requested his ballot in late July and it was returned on Aug. 13.

This is not the first time that Trump has voted by mail in his adopted home state. He voted by mail in a special election in Palm Beach County earlier this year.

Florida’s GOP primary features a crowded ballot for governor that includes Trump-endorsed Rep. Byron Donalds, who is seen as the frontrunner. But he is being challenged by Lt. Gov. Jay Collins, former state House speaker Paul Renner and James Fishback, an investor and harsh critic of Donalds who has embraced far-right rhetoric on Israel and other topics.

Trump, who has falsely claimed he won the 2020 election, has repeatedly pushed Congress this year to adopt the SAVE America Act, a measure that mandates the use of photo IDs in federal elections as well as documentary proof of citizenship.

“As President Trump has said, the SAVE America Act has commonsense exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, disability, military, or travel — but universal mail-in voting should not be allowed because it’s highly susceptible to fraud,” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said. “As everyone knows, the President is a resident of Palm Beach and participates in Florida elections, but he obviously primarily lives at the White House in Washington, D.C. This is a non-story.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is trying to get the Supreme Court to allow a presidential executive order on mail-in voting to take effect ahead of the midterms. That order was blocked by a federal appeals court earlier this year.

Trump continues to rail at the use of mail-in voting and says the current practice should be limited to those who in the military, are traveling or have a disability or illness.

“Mail-in ballots are inherently corrupt,” Trump said during a July speech on elections.

Republicans hold a supermajority in the Florida Legislature but they have not bowed to Trump’s demands to severely limit who can vote by mail. Florida has a long-standing law that allows every eligible registered voter to request a vote-by-mail ballot.

Gov. Ron DeSantis and legislators have put in restrictions in recent years to crack down on what they call “ballot harvesting” that limits who can pick up someone’s ballot and deliver it to election officials. The state has also put in place a requirement that voters must re-up their ballot request every two years and have added additional ID requirements for the use of mail-in ballots.

Message discipline

Dems bank on Ossoff’s message discipline

The Georgia Democrat is heavily involved in cultivating his viral moments on the campaign trail.

Calen Razor

One of the marquee midterm races for Senate Democrats dreaming of a party takeover is between two candidates who are no strangers to cultivating viral moments.

But Democrats are banking on Sen. Jon Ossoff, with his tightly-choreographed campaign, ultimately prevailing over Rep. Mike Collins in the Georgia Senate race.

Democrats are looking to defend a state President Donald Trump won by just over two percentage points in 2024. Two years later, any misstep could carry enormous consequences.

However, Georgia Democrats and others who have worked with Ossoff — or seen him behind-the-scenes — say he is meticulous about how he communicates and oversees all the details of his campaign’s work. Michael Vainisi, a content strategist who has worked with Democratic presidents and senators in the past, described Ossoff’s speeches as “optimized for clipping.”

Ossoff’s speech over the weekend was no exception: From a Midtown Atlanta rally stage, he quipped of Trump, “He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar.” He was referencing Natalie Harp, the president’s executive assistant.

The one-liner has since drawn backlash from Republicans — but also over 5 million views on X.

“He’s very, very involved in almost anything that kind of has his name on it or comes out of him,” said Seth Clark, a Georgia Democrat who has worked with Ossoff on statewide legislative priorities.

One Democratic operative close to the campaign said, “there are no decisions that get made that he doesn’t sign off on.”

Collins is also known for doing his own messaging and using social media to develop a personal brand. During the 2023 GOP speakers’ race, he gained national attention for peppering his social media feed with memes of his party’s chaotic sprint to replace Kevin McCarthy.

His X posts have also gotten him into trouble. In May 2024, for instance, Collins captioned a video of white students at the University of Mississippi taunting a black pro-Palestine protester with: “Ole Miss taking care of business.” He later had to issue a statement clarifying he did not condone “any form of discrimination — racism or otherwise.”

Public polling shows Ossoff currently leading Collins in the Georgia Senate race.

Unnecessary escalation

Trump’s Syria envoy calls Israeli air strikes on base ‘unnecessary escalation’

It’s the Trump administration’s latest condemnation of an Israeli military operation since the two countries launched a joint attack on Iran in February.

By Gregory Svirnovskiy

The top U.S. envoy to Syria on Tuesday accused Israel of striking an airbase in the country, less than a day after White House envoy Jared Kushner met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for high-profile talks on disarmament in Gaza.

“We are deeply concerned that the confirmed Israeli airstrikes on Abu al-Duhur Airbase constitute an unnecessary escalation that does not advance regional stability,” wrote Tom Barrack, the special presidential envoy for Syria who is also the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, in a post on X.

It’s the Trump administration’s latest condemnation of an Israeli military operation since the two countries launched a joint attack on Iran in February. Netanyahu’s plans have often clashed with a White House strategy that has oscillated between emphasizing war and peace.

President Donald Trump has struggled to exert influence over Israel since returning to the White House, with his attention split between a war in Iran, the drug trade in South America and Russia’s four-year-long incursion into Ukraine.

Just last week, Netanyahu rejected a White House-backed peace plan in which Hamas would relinquish the reins in Gaza and Israeli troops would withdraw from the strip.

In Syria, Israeli troops have hit a country governed by one of the president’s favored world leaders. Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa visited the White House last November, and Trump has described al-Sharaa as a “young, attractive guy, tough guy.”

“The Al-Sharra government has neither adopted a predatory posture nor maintained proxy forces,” Barrack wrote in his post criticizing the strike. “It has, in fact, repeatedly indicated a preference for de-escalation with Israel. The United States has in the past, and will continue in the future, to host discussions to encourage diplomatic cadence over kinetic frustration for both nations.”

In a statement Tuesday, the Syrian foreign ministry called the attack “an unjustified act of aggression, a flagrant violation of Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and a dangerous escalation that threatens security and stability in the region.”

It’s far from the first time the Trump administration has broken with Netanyahu’s government in recent months. Trump shared a fiery phone call with the Israeli prime minister in June after his country struck Lebanon and complicated U.S. ceasefire talks with Iran.

“We have a little dispute over Lebanon,” he said at a G7 press conference later that month in France. “I say, ‘You can do a little softer touch, Bibi. You don’t have to knock down a building every time somebody walks into it that’s from Hezbollah.’”

The Israeli Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Brain drain of scientists

Greece sabotages its own plans to reverse the brain drain of scientists

Athens is trying to lure back researchers after an exodus during the financial crisis, but a major EU-backed scheme has fallen apart.

By Nektaria Stamouli

Greece’s attempt to lure top scientists back to their homeland after the trauma of the financial crisis has stalled after an ambitious program to reverse the brain drain descended into fiasco.

A group of professors who hoped to bring back young researchers through a much-advertised program financed with EU funds are now feeling betrayed, having been left waiting for years only to find out the program won’t happen.

To rub salt into the wound, no one from the government bothered to inform them that the scheme was dead, they said.

“All this ‘brain gain’ talk isn’t just a joke; it’s a massive step backward,” Aristides Hatzis, a professor at the University of Athens, said. “During the financial crisis, there was only one area where there was money invested: research, as the EU prioritized this. Now there’s nothing; it’s at the very bottom of the list of priorities — a complete abandonment.”

An estimated 500,000 people moved abroad during Greece’s financial crisis, which began in 2008, shrinking the country’s economy by a quarter and driving unemployment to 28 percent. Greece had experienced mass migration before, including in the decades after World War II, but this time it was many citizens with high levels of education and skills who emigrated.

“Brain Regain,” an initiative by the ruling conservative New Democracy government to reverse the mass exodus of scientists and professionals, comprises several schemes, such as offering a 50 percent income tax exemption for seven years, and is expanding to include high-skilled public sector roles.

And overall, the situation has improved since the crisis era.

According to the survey OECD Diaspora Review Greece, from 2021 onward, there has been a steady increase in the number of citizens returning to Greece, with 2023 marking a milestone year when — for the first time since the start of the crisis — more people returned than left. Specifically, during the two-year period of 2023–2024, 69,000 Greeks left their country while 98,000 returned.

But when it comes to scientists, there is still a major problem.

Star-crossed project

The current fury of many researchers and scientists hinges on a Greek government project called “Trust your Stars” — an €80 million research funding program backed by funds from EU’s post-Covid recovery fund, the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).

Research teams were called to submit their proposals, with 145 out of a total 1,241 submissions selected. Thirteen months later, after several complaints regarding the delay, the selected list of projects was finally published on July 22, 2025.

Then, it all started to unravel.

Those not selected for funding reacted fiercely, with some 203 submitted objections and calls for reevaluation. Scientists raised their concerns over the evaluation process itself, and some even submitted complaints to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office.

In January 2026, Greece’s development ministry then issued a statement, saying payments of some €40 million had already been made, and that the remaining half of the program’s budget was earmarked for completion by Dec. 31, 2029. But complaints only escalated, with some of those selected for funding sending formal legal notices to the education ministry, seeking details about where the money had been spent since the program had not yet started.

Then, the final bombshell dropped: Trust your Stars was not going to receive the EU funds anymore.

In a statement published in May, Greece’s education ministry said the country’s finance ministry had decided to “remove the project during the review of Greece’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan.” It was later revealed that on the day the list of selected proposals was officially published, the government also delisted the program — but no one informed the applicants for 10 months.

“It was ultimately not possible to implement the project ‘Trust your Stars’ within the time frame set out by the RRF,” said an official from the education ministry. “For this reason, the project was removed, as part of a review of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan by the Council of the European Union.”

“As regards the funds linked to the actions in question, these were redirected to finance other actions undertaken by the RRF and the Education Ministry. Consequently, under no circumstances was there any loss of resources from the RRF,” added the official.

Shattered hopes

On July 15, Greece’s finance ministry issued a statement, saying it was trying to secure funds “to settle any outstanding financial obligations arising from legal commitments entered into at the time of the revocation of the program.”

While the statement rekindled hopes that a solution would be found, Hatzis argues that it was just a legal trick and that the education ministry has no legal commitment since no contracts were signed following the initial announcement of accepted proposals.

“What happened violates a fundamental principle, one that is sacrosanct in states governed by the rule of law: ‘reliance,’ the citizen’s legitimate trust in the state,” he said. “There may be no contractual liability, since we did not sign an agreement, but there is a political, moral and even legal obligation. Many young people turned down other offers or did not take up jobs elsewhere because they hoped they would be paid through the program.”

Hatzis added that with its handling of the situation, the government had managed to turn the entire scientific community against it — both those who had been successful and those who had not.

“If you’re a young scientist and you’re abroad, stay there! If you’re a young scientist and you’re thinking of moving abroad, go for it. Don’t wait a minute!” he wrote in a lengthy social media post.

Pantelis Kammas, an associate professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business who was co-leading one of the teams that had a successful proposal, said the program was a chronicle of a death foretold.

“The perception within the scientific community was that this was EU money and that it could be handed out hastily through nontransparent procedures. There was a sense of mistrust because this was a one-off emergency program,” said Kammas. “The ministry lacked an organized framework for evaluation, the academic community’s objections were based on these well-known shortcomings, and media that seek to oppose the government jumped on that. This was the perfect storm, so the government decided to backtrack and cancel the program.”

Petros Bouras-Vallianatos, an associate professor of the history of science at the University of Athens, said he had gathered a team of 25 young scientists to come to Greece from countries like the U.K. and Germany for a study of medicines used during the Byzantine period, which could serve as inspiration for new pharmaceutical formulations. Fortunately, they had not already traveled by the time the project was canceled.

“The most offensive thing is that the government never bothered to meet us or give us a reasonable explanation about what happened,” he said, noting the government’s handling created even greater problems with the scientific community than those that already existed.

Bouras-Vallianatos himself returned to Greece in 2022 after a 15-year career in Edinburgh, and has not regretted the decision, as he wanted to raise his children in his homeland. However, he added that while many others wanted to return to Greece, the conditions for doing so were not in place. Some of them do but only for sentimental, personal reasons, he said.

“There has been no serious policy by the Greek state to get its scientists back.”

According to preliminary statistics, research spending in Greece has declined, dropping to €1.27 billion — or 0.51 percent of GDP — in 2025, from €1.30 billion in 2024.

“Funding and low salaries is a big issue,” continued Bouras-Vallianatos. “An independent body should be set up, which would allocate funds for research and adheres to international standards in terms of evaluation. We are a small country; we all know each other, so a large proportion of the evaluators should be foreigners.”

She should be one of the first up against the wall...

Jeanine Pirro pushes hard to keep alleged memorial vandal in jail

The chief prosecutor for D.C. is taking an aggressive tack against a woman accused of spray-painting the World War II memorial.

By Josh Gerstein

Weeks after being rebuked by President Donald Trump for dropping cases related to alleged damage to the Reflecting Pool, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro is going to unusual lengths to try to keep behind bars a woman accused of vandalizing a memorial elsewhere on the National Mall.

On Monday, a magistrate judge in Washington ordered Melissa Farris, 41, released from custody, rejecting prosecutors’ request that she be kept in jail while she awaits trial on two felony charges. Pirro’s office alleges that the Kentucky woman spray-painted and dumped a foaming substance into the World War II memorial last week.

Pirro’s lawyers asked Magistrate Judge Matthew Sharbaugh to delay Farris’ release, but he declined to do so, according to court records.

Less than three hours after that hearing concluded, prosecutors from Pirro’s office filed a 30-page appeal, asking Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to overrule the decision. The filing portrays Farris’ alleged actions as grave and contends she poses an “exceptionally high risk of flight.”

“This was a brazen attack on one of the Nation’s most sacred monuments—an enduring symbol of freedom and a solemn tribute to the sacrifice of so many,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Charles Klug and Samuel Deau wrote in a brief that also carries Pirro’s name in the signature block.

“Rather than honoring the courage and selflessness of the World War II Veterans, Defendant chose to assault that symbol of sacrifice for her own gain and to make a public spectacle,” prosecutors added. “Defendant’s actions are not just criminal, they violate the American values that the Memorial represents.”

Pirro’s tough stance in the vandalism case comes just weeks after she drew intense ire from Trump over her decision to drop the prosecution of former Olympian David Hearn, whom her office had accused of damaging the recently installed lining of the Reflecting Pool.

Pirro said she had to drop the case, and several other prosecutions, because the Interior Department was slow to acknowledge to her office the extent of problems with installation of the lining, which was carried out under extreme time pressure because Trump wanted it ready for celebrations of America’s 250th anniversary on July 4.

On social media and in exchanges with reporters, Trump has repeatedly rejected Pirro’s explanation. Pirro traveled to the White House to make her case to the president in person, but it doesn’t seem he was persuaded by her presentation. He’s continued to suggest that prosecutions are justified, while last week acknowledging “some contractor error.”

On Sunday night, Trump seemed to again needle Pirro publicly over the Reflecting Pool cases, posting an aerial photo on social media that he said showed vandals had caused widespread damage to grass on the National Mall.

“Anybody who thinks the Reflecting Pool wasn’t vandalized should go back to Law School!” Trump wrote. Others said the worn and brown patches of grass in the photo were likely due to wear and tear related to July 4th-related festivities.

Trump has also denounced the vandalism of the World War II memorial and suggested a link to the damage at the Reflecting Pool. “First the Reflecting Pool, now this. We are on their trail! Where do these animals come from???” he wrote on Truth Social Friday.

While prosecutors repeatedly referred to Farris livestreaming and soliciting donations as she spraypainted the memorial, they also acknowledge that when she turned herself in Friday at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, she said she was homeless and that an encounter with police in Washington earlier last week resulted in her being cited for stringing up her hammock in a public park.

The videos Farris streamed online contain rambling grievances against the federal government. Prosecutors say signs she appears to have left at the World War II memorial urged others to call their state and federal representatives about the “Ford green energy grant.”

In one video, she makes a vague complaint about infrastructure, lowers her shorts and appears to urinate on a wall. “I’m pissing on your city,” she says.

While most vandalism cases get little attention from U.S. attorneys, Pirro postedtwice on social media about Farris’ arrest. The prosecutor also said she was personally aggrieved by Farris’ actions.

“Vandalizing our World War II Memorial is a despicable attack on a sacred monument honoring the Americans who fought and died for our freedom. Those Americans include my father and grandfather,” Pirro wrote on X. She also noted that the felony charges in the case carry potential punishment “of up to ten years in prison.”

Pirro’s language echoed earlier comments by Trump, promising maximum time for monument vandals.

“If you so much as touch, or even think about destroying, a statue or a monument in Washington, D.C., you go to jail for 10 years with no probation, no anything,” Trump said last year as he announced an attempted takeover of the Washington police force and the deployment of National Guard troops. “You get jailed 10 years, no curtailed sentence—10 years.”

While a conviction on such charges could theoretically result in a 10-year prison sentence, people convicted of defacing memorials typically get far shorter sentences. One man accused of spray painting the Lincoln Memorial during Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 was initially hit with a felony charge, but eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. Last year, Pirro’s office agreed to probation into the case.

To continue to pursue the felony charges against Farris — depredation of federal property in excess of $1,000 and causing injury to a veterans’ memorial — Pirro will need to get an indictment from a grand jury. That has proven difficult for her office in some high-profile cases critics have said were over-charged, like that of Sean Dunn, accused last year of throwing a submarine sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent.

After a grand jury refused to indict Dunn, Pirro’s team pursued a misdemeanor assault case against him. After a trial, a jury acquitted Dunn.

Following a hearing Monday, Sharbaugh ordered Farris released on her own recognizance, but ordered her to report to probation officers in Ohio and to stay away from Washington, including the memorial she’s accused of vandalizing last week.

Prosecutors’ appeal of the release order makes a fall-back request to Boasberg if he is unwilling to order Farris’ detention: that she be put on electronic monitoring, such as an ankle bracelet that will indicate her location. However, the same prosecutors argue that she “cannot be reliably supervised” via that technology because she is currently homeless.

Kids’ safety trial

Meta faces pivotal kids’ safety trial

A case brought by red and blue states raises the stakes for the maker of Instagram and Facebook.

By Tyler Katzenberger

Social media giant Meta is heading to federal court in Oakland on Tuesday for opening arguments in a high-stakes child safety trial that, more than any previous case, poses potentially massive risks for its future.

The challenge from 29 states, including California, argues that the company designed its flagship platforms Instagram and Facebook to hook kids and teens — despite knowing it would lead to health concerns like anxiety, depression and eating disorders — and then downplayed those harms in public. Their case is one of hundreds of ongoing lawsuits accusing Meta, Google, Snap and TikTok of intentionally crafting platforms to get kids addicted.

But unlike previous cases, the bipartisan state prosecutors are seeking penalties of potentially hundreds of billions of dollars, which far exceeds the $942 million total Meta was ordered to pay in a recent New Mexico trial, and the $6 million in damages Meta and Google were ordered to pay in March after a Los Angeles jury found them liable in a landmark personal injury trial. Meta claims the prosecutors have eyed an even higher sum of $1.4 trillion that would dwarf blockbuster settlements in tobacco and opioid addiction cases, though California Attorney General Rob Bonta refutes that number.

If the states win, they’ll have a rare chance to force sweeping design changes to Instagram and Facebook that could decrease kids’ time spent on social media — and, by extension, eat into Meta’s lucrative advertising revenue.

“We’re playing with some live ammo here,” said Kyle Jacobs-Morse, deputy executive director of the Tech Oversight Project.

State prosecutors claim that Meta violated multiple federal laws, including the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which prohibits companies from harvesting data from users they know to be under 13. Bonta told CNN Monday that prosecutors haven’t advocated for a specific amount in penalties, insisting that the $1.4 trillion figure is something Meta “is putting out there.”

“Meta designed Facebook and Instagram to keep kids on the platforms longer and longer — to the point of physical and mental harm,” Bonta said Monday in a statement. “We head into trial ready to hold Meta accountable.”

Colorado Democrat Phil Weiser, Kentucky Republican Russell Coleman and New Jersey Democrat Jennifer Davenport are the other state attorneys general co-leading the case with Bonta.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who presided over a trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI earlier this year, is overseeing the Oakland trial. Jury selection for the six-week trial happened last week.

Meta contends prosecutors are relying on “unsubstantiated” claims to transform a thin case into a public referendum on social media and teen mental health. It claims that the damages sought are “vastly disproportionate” to the alleged harms. And it argues this case is different from the personal injury lawsuits, like the landmark case in March, because prosecutors aren’t representing a single client who can speak to specific instances of personal harm.

“The AGs offer no proof anyone in their states was misled, claim benign features like having an additional Instagram account somehow harmed their residents, and attempt to penalize Meta for industry-wide challenges,” Meta spokesperson Liza Crenshaw said in a statement. “Rather than sticking to the facts or the law, the states have instead decided to chase an outlandish payout.”

Even if Meta wins, it’s not likely to stop the mounting, bipartisan momentum to impose stricter kids’ safety guardrails on social media platforms. Lawmakers in Congress are weighing a number of proposals that would impose new teen privacy and use restrictions.

And from Europe to Asia to Meta’s home state of California, politicians are pushing to ban kids from platforms altogether — or at least prevent them from accessing allegedly addictive features.

“I don’t see any backing down whatsoever,” said Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal, who authored a California bill that would bar platforms from offering engagement-maximizing features to teens under 16.

Already, the lawsuits appear to be taking a financial toll on Meta even though most haven’t gone to trial yet. The company reported a 13 percent decline in profits between April and June of this year compared to the same time period in 2025, partly due to $2.4 billion in legal expenses.

Prosecutors, though, have signaled they’re looking beyond the payout. If they win the trial, they’ll have an opportunity to demand youth design changes that Congress and state lawmakers have tried to enact for years. They could force Meta to age-gate personalized feeds, limit notifications during certain hours or restrict engagement-maximizing features like infinite scroll and autoplay.

“If you look back in history and you look at the tobacco fights and such, these attorney general cases are really important,” said Laura Marquez-Garrett, a plaintiff attorney in related private cases. “They have the ability that private plaintiffs typically do not have to actually force these companies, through the court system, to change their business model, their design decisions, all of that.”

There’s precedent for those changes now thanks to a recent case in New Mexico where the state’s attorney general, Raúl Torrez, convinced a federal court that Meta’s platforms posed dangers to kids and constituted a “public nuisance.”

The New Mexico court ordered Meta to follow stricter age verification standards, eliminate nighttime push notifications for kids and enforce mandatory limits on how long kids can use Instagram or Facebook for the next five years.

But Ashkhen Kazaryan, a senior legal fellow at the Future of Free Speech think tank at Vanderbilt University, cautioned against what she called a “product meeting in the courtroom.”

“Giving courts and juries’ power to design and shape the form of communication online feels very problematic to me,” Kazaryan said. She argued that it would further “balkanize” the internet and force companies to choose between navigating a complex international legal minefield or deactivating certain features for all users, just because of one decision from “a judge in Oakland.”