Just what the world needs... Another Epstein diversion.... The child rapist is throwing a tantrum...

US military attack on Cuba would trigger ‘bloodbath,’ says Cuban president

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez said Cuba is aware of the threats of military aggression from the U.S.

By Cheyanne M. Daniels

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez on Monday issued a sharp warning to the U.S., saying any military action taken against the country from its northern neighbor would result in a “bloodbath” in response.

“The threats of military aggression against Cuba from the biggest military power on the planet are already known,” Díaz-Canel said in a post to social media. “The threat alone is an international crime. To make good on it would provoke a bloodbath of incalculable consequences, along with the destruction of peace and stability.”

Tensions between the U.S. and Cuba have escalated under the second Trump administration, which had employed a “maximum pressure” campaign against the island in an effort to force a regime change.

Following the U.S. capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the U.S. took control of Venezuela’s oil production — which Cuba relied heavily upon — and began blocking shipments of oil from other countries to Cuba.

As a result, Cuba’s already fragile energy grid began rapidly failing.

Trump has repeatedly hinted at taking total control of the island, telling reporters in March that Venezuela was just the first step.

“Taking Cuba, I mean, whether I free it, take it, I think I could do anything I want with it, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said. “I do believe I’ll have the honor of having the honor of taking Cuba. That’d be good. That’s a big honor.”

When asked for comment, a White House official reiterated statements from Trump saying the country will fail “and we will be there to help them out.”

Axios reported Sunday that some intelligence officials believed that the island has acquired more than 300 military drones and is discussing launching attacks on the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay, military vessels and possibly even Key West, Florida, and that the intelligence could be used as a pretext for a U.S. strike.

POLITICO has not verified the details of the report, and the Cuban Embassy in the U.S. suggested in a Sunday statement it was a false pretext to target the island.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe last week traveled to Havana to meet with top officials.

New threat...

An asteroid discovered days ago will narrowly miss Earth

By Jacopo Prisco

An asteroid roughly the size of one to two school buses will fly by Earth Monday, coming as close as 91,593 kilometers (56,913 miles), according to the European Space Agency — equivalent to about one quarter of the distance between Earth and the moon.

Astronomers at the Mount Lemmon Survey in Tucson, Arizona, discovered the asteroid on May 10 and named it 2026JH2. The object belongs to a class of asteroids called Apollo, which orbit the sun on trajectories that intersect with Earth’s own orbit around the sun.

At its closest pass, 2026JH2 will be about 24% of the average distance between Earth and the moon, and about two and a half times the distance at which hundreds of geosynchronous satellites orbit, providing services such as telecommunications and weather forecasts. The close pass is expected to occur on Monday just before 6 p.m. ET, according to NASA’s JPL Small-Body Database.

Despite the proximity, the space rock poses no danger, according to Richard Binzel, a professor of planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the inventor of the Torino Scale, a tool for categorizing potential collisions of space objects with Earth.

“2026JH2 will pass safely by the Earth,” he said in an email. “This is actually a rather normal occurrence, car-sized objects pass between the Earth and the Moon every week. At the size of a school bus, these pass through our neighborhood several times per year. We are only recently developing surveys that are sensitive enough to see them,” he added, noting that before these surveys, objects of this kind would simply zoom by completely unnoticed.

Exact size unknown

The asteroid originates from the asteroid belt, an area between Mars and Jupiter, Binzel explained. “Occasional collisions in the asteroid belt, plus gravitational tugs by Jupiter, can send small asteroids into Earth’s vicinity. This fact has been known for many decades and many thousands of asteroids that can pass near the Earth are already known.”

Even though astronomers have directly observed the object hurtling toward Earth, its exact size is unknown. The uncertainty is due to the fact that when an optical telescope sees a new object, the only information it gathers is the object’s luminosity in visible light. There is no way to know how much light the object absorbs or reflects, according to Patrick Michel, an astrophysicist and director of research at the National Centre for Scientific Research in France.

“Thus, at the same luminosity, an object can be bigger and darker, or smaller and more reflective,” he said in an email. “To know the size, we would need observations in the infrared, because the luminosity in the infrared is directly proportional to the size. But such observations are more difficult to do from the Earth and are not used to discover new objects.”

Based on assumptions about how much light is reflected, 2026JH2 is currently estimated to be between 15 and 30 meters (49 and 98 feet) in diameter. At the smaller end of that range, Michel said, it would be similar in size to a bolide, or fireball, that exploded in the atmosphere over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, shattering windows and injuring 1,000 people. At the highest end of the range, it would be closer in size to an object that exploded near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia in 1908, which pulverized large swaths of forest. Unlike both of these objects, however, 2026JH2 will not even enter the atmosphere, so there is no risk it will explode.

Although the distance at which the asteroid will pass seems very close, it is still “far enough that there is absolutely nothing to worry about,” Michel said. But he noted that predicting 2026JH2’s future trajectory is difficult, and we can’t rule out that it might eventually be on a collision course with Earth. “The good news is that so far, no asteroid that we know of poses a risk for the timescale of our predictions, which is about a century on average,” he added.

Waiting for Apophis

An object at least 10 times bigger than 2026JH2, called Apophis, will pass much closer to Earth, at a projected 32,000 kilometers (19,883 miles), on April 13, 2029, “Yet, we are not worried at all, and on the contrary very excited,” Michel said. “Such a close approach of such a big object occurs only once in a few thousands of years and its light will even be visible with the naked eye in the night sky across Europe, Africa and part of the middle East.”

By contrast, during its closest approach, 2026JH2 will only be detectable with small telescopes at dark sites, but it will remain 100 times too faint to be seen by the human eye, according to Jean-Luc Margot, a professor of Earth, planetary and space sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Part of the reason we don’t have more detailed information about the asteroid, he added in an email, is that our planetary radar capabilities are currently degraded. “The Arecibo telescope collapsed in 2020 and NASA’s Goldstone antenna is down for major repairs for an extended period of time. Without radar data, we are less capable of assessing the impact risk and we are more vulnerable to the impact hazard.”

A partial livestream of the close pass will be provided by the Virtual Telescope Project using telescopes in Italy, starting at 3:45 p.m. ET, and lasting until the object is no longer visible from that location.

So far, astronomers have observed only about 1% of the near-Earth asteroids in the same size range as 2026JH2, Margot said, and therefore “it’s not surprising that this object was discovered only a few days before its closest approach to Earth, when it became bright enough to be picked up by asteroid detection surveys.”

He added that it’s concerning that we do not have complete knowledge about the population of near-Earth objects but noted that space agencies are now actively funding discovery surveys to improve our inventory of potentially hazardous asteroids.

And why do we need the CDC???

Global scramble to contain new Ebola outbreak as US moves to limit entry from virus-hit region

By Helen Regan, Brenda Goodman

An international effort is underway to contain an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Uganda that has infected hundreds of people and caused dozens of suspected deaths, with the United States triggering a public health law to limit entry from the affected region.

On Sunday, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Ebola epidemic a “public health emergency of international concern.” The latest outbreak does not yet meet the criteria of a “pandemic emergency,” but WHO warned the high positivity rate and increasing number of cases and deaths across health zones point toward “a potentially much larger outbreak than what is currently being detected and reported.”

More than 100 suspected deaths have been linked to the outbreak in the DRC, the director-general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), Jean Kaseya, told CNN on Monday.

Health workers at Bunia’s Universelle Clinic in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo are taking preventative measures as concern grows over Ebola in the region. CNN

That same day the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention invoked Title 42 – a public health law that restricts entry into the US during outbreaks of communicable diseases – for at least 30 days starting Monday.

Title 42 has been on the books since 1944, but has only been used twice in the modern era. The first time was from March 2020 to May 2023 during Covid-19. Monday’s action on Ebola marks the second.

Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, chief executive officer of the Infectious Disease Society of America, says restricting immigration can stem the spread of an infection, but only if measures are coupled with exit screening from affected countries and with attention to human rights.

“Singling out non-US passport holders singles out non-US citizens,” she said. “Pathogens don’t recognize passports.”

The CDC assessed the immediate risk to the US public as “low,” but added that officials would track the “evolving situation,” in a statement on Monday.

There have been 10 confirmed cases and 336 suspected cases in the DRC, the US CDC reported Sunday. WHO said the outbreak is affecting the country’s remote northeastern Ituri province. In neighboring Uganda, two laboratory-confirmed cases, including one death, have so far been reported in the country’s capital Kampala, WHO reported.

The latest outbreak is being driven by the Bundibugyo strain, one of several viruses that can cause Ebola disease, WHO said. The organizaton has called the outbreak “extraordinary” as there are currently no approved treatments or vaccines specific to the Bundibugyo virus.

Ebola symptoms include fever, muscle pain, rash and sometimes bleeding. The virus is transmitted through direct contact with bodily fluids, including the handling of contaminated materials or someone who has died from the disease.

Americans to be relocated

From Monday, US health officials will enforce a range of mechanisms to try and curb the Ebola outbreak, including enhancing public health screenings for those arriving from impacted regions and placing restrictions on non-US passport holders if they have traveled to Uganda, the DRC or South Sudan in the past three weeks.

The sweeping measures came after the CDC announced it was supporting interagency partners with efforts to relocate “a small number of Americans who are directly affected” by the outbreak. Several Americans in the DRC are believed to have been exposed to the virus, including some deemed high risk, health news outlet STAT reported Sunday.

CNN could not independently verify the reports and has reached out to the CDC for comment.

Dr. Satish Pillai, the CDC’s Ebola response incident manager, declined on Sunday to say whether any Americans were among those who had been infected. At a press briefing, he said the CDC was “actively assessing the situation on the ground and we aren’t going to comment on individual disposition.”

The US State Department did not confirm whether any Americans had been exposed to the virus in response to a CNN request for comment, but said the US government was “working with the governments of the DRC and Uganda to rapidly contain the virus.” On Sunday, the State Department issued new advisories warning against travel to the DRC and Uganda due to the outbreak.

The CDC said it was deploying resources from the agency’s offices — who were already in the country — to help with efforts including surveillance, contact tracing and laboratory testing, and would mobilize additional support from the agency’s headquarters in Atlanta.

Pillai said the CDC was unaware of any exposure on international flights and noted that both countries have exit screening measures in place to prevent spread of the virus through travel.

International coordination is being ramped up to prevent the epidemic’s spread as experts warn of “extremely concerning” conditions. The DRC’s health minister, Samuel Roger Kamba, said Sunday that three treatment centres were being opened in the affected region to increase capacity amid the outbreak.

About seven metric tons of emergency medical supplies, including protective equipment, tents and beds, arrived in the Ituri capital Bunia on Sunday to “help scale up frontline response efforts,” according to WHO.

And non-governmental organizations like MSF are also preparing to launch large-scale responses as quickly as possible.

Complicating the response is that the outbreak is occurring on top of a humanitarian crisis, where conflict in the DRC’s eastern provinces has displaced millions of people and weakened health systems.

In Uganda, the two confirmed cases in Kampala have no known connection to each other, which is “often a warning sign that the outbreak in the DRC is larger than health authorities can currently see,” Adrian Esterman, professor and chair of Biostatistics at Adelaide University, said in a statement.

As a result, the US embassy in Kampala announced Monday it had temporarily paused all visa services in light of the ongoing Ebola outbreak.

What we know about the latest Ebola outbreak after WHO declares global health emergency

Dr. Matt Mason, senior lecturer for the School of Health at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, said this “raises serious concerns about gaps in infection prevention and control and the potential for amplification within health facilities, leading to the wider community.”

This is the 17th Ebola outbreak in the DRC since the virus was first identified in 1976, according to WHO. The country is particularly prone to Ebola outbreaks in part because the virus’ “natural reservoir” is the fruit bat, which are found within the DRC’s forested areas, public health expert Ahmed Ogwell, former deputy director-general of Africa CDC, told CNN. Locals in those areas are closely engaged with the forest, meaning they are very exposed to the bats and with them the virus, Ogwell said.

$1 Billion of your tax dollars....... :But i's... Free....:

GOP Push for $1 Billion to Fund Trump’s Ballroom Hits Roadblock

A Senate official determined that a budgeting bill runs afoul of rules.

Alex Nguyen

A GOP bill aiming to use $1 billion of taxpayer money to finance required security for President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom was denied in a Saturday night ruling on technical grounds.

Senate Republicans attempted to include the ballroom project in a budget reconciliation bill—which also includes roughly $38 billion for ICE and $26 billion for US Border Patrol, among other immigration and law enforcement spending—to bypass the 60-vote filibuster threshold and only require a simple majority for passage. But all funding in such bills must be directly related to federal spending and revenue, which prevents “extraneous” provisions under the Byrd Rule.

“A project as complex and large in scale as Trump’s proposed ballroom necessarily involves the coordination of many government agencies which span the jurisdiction of many Senate committees,” said Senate Democrats, after meeting with the chamber’s parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, whose ruling stopped the bill. “As drafted, the provision inappropriately funds activities outside the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee.”

The GOP appears poised to seek a workaround. Ryan Wrasse, the communications director for Senate Majority Leader John Thune posted on X that the decision is not “abnormal” and that the next step is to, “Redraft. Refine. Resubmit.” 

The GOP push to fund the security infrastructure conflicts in its own right with Trump’s stated plans for the construction. Trump has repeatedly said that his ballroom would cost no government funds. “These are all private individuals that put up a lot of money to build the ballroom,” he said last November at the White House. “Not one penny is being used from the federal government.”

Some Republican lawmakers are concerned about apportioning $1 billion for the ballroom. “I think the timing and the optics are really bad,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said last week. “This time last year, roughly, maybe a little bit before, we were all impressed with the fact that this $400 million building was going to be paid for out of the generosity of donors, and now we’re hearing 2½ times that is necessary for some other aspect of the project.”

According to a memo shared with senators and obtained by PBS NewsHour, $220 million would be used to toughen the White House complex, $180 million would be used for visitor screenings, $175 million for training, and an additional $175 million to boost security for those under protection by the Secret Service.

$1.8 Billion

Trump Just Gave Himself a $1.8 Billion Slush Fund to Reward His Friends

And the public may never know who their money was spent on.

Alex Nguyen

President Donald Trump dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service on Monday in exchange for a settlement deal to launch a $1.8 billion fund to pay claims made by his friends for purported unfair prosecution.

“The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in his department’s Monday press release, announcing “The Anti-Weaponization Fund.” “As part of this settlement, we are setting up a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.”

“The Fund will consist of a Commission of five members appointed by the Attorney General. One Member will be chosen in consultation with congressional leadership,” the Justice Department’s press release states. “The President can remove any member, but a replacement must be chosen the same way as the replaced member was selected.”

According to the Justice Department, “on a quarterly basis, the Fund shall send a report to the Attorney General outlining who has received relief and what form of relief was awarded.” If Blanche’s previous decisions to protect Trump and go after his alleged enemies are anything to go by, there will therefore be little to no oversight beyond Trump loyalists.

The president has long claimed that he and his allies have been targeted by the Biden administration—including, as Mother Jones’ Michael Mechanic pointed out on Saturday, defendants who were charged for involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Trump, his two eldest sons, and the Trump Organization filed the $10 billion lawsuit this past January after IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn leaked the president’s tax returns to ProPublica and the New York Times. 

In a Monday amicus brief shared with MS NOW, House Democrats said Trump’s lawsuit “undermine[d] the Constitution” and the potential “Truth and Justice Commission” was a “slush fund.”

“Never in the history of the United States has a sitting President sought a monetary settlement from the government he leads—let alone sought many billions of dollars in taxpayer funds,” the Democrats wrote, arguing that Trump was “filing a collusive lawsuit only to immediately dismiss it in order to produce a collusive settlement.” 

And this is a pattern. Just think about the ABC lawsuit, where the process of the Trump administration’s pressure and subsequent settlement resulted in a form of extortion. As for the IRS settlement, the president now has a $1.8 billion compensation fund to support future attacks against anyone who opposes him.

“It’s a comprehensive approach to creating Jim Crow 2.0.”

Alito Said Racism Was Over. Southern States Are Now Rushing to Revive Jim Crow.

Republicans are set to dismantle at least five majority-Black districts in the South.

Ari Berman

Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) is the first Black member of Congress elected from South Carolina since Reconstruction, and the only Black Democrat ever elected from the state. He has been elected seventeen times during his thirty-two year career and rose to become the third-ranking Democrat in the US House.

His seat was drawn in 1992 to give Black voters a chance to elect the first Black member of Congress in that state in 100 years. Its last Black member of Congress elected during Reconstruction, George Washington Murray, was ousted from the US House in 1897 after South Carolina passed a new state constitution designed to disenfranchise Black voters.

But if South Carolina Republicans get their way and pass a 7-0 map eliminating Clyburn’s seat, the state’s lone Democratic US House district, and the only one in which Black voters can elect their preferred candidate, will no longer functionally exist. If Clyburn loses his seat, a state that is one-quarter Black will have no Black representation in the US House.

As Clyburn told reporters last Tuesday before state Republicans redrew the map, “It’s a comprehensive approach to creating Jim Crow 2.0.”

The Palmetto State is not alone. The revival of Jim Crow is happening with alarming speed across the South, following the Supreme Court’s destruction of the Voting Rights Act, with Southern Republicans set to dismantle at least five majority-Black districts in South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

Their efforts began in Tennessee, where Republicans passed a 9-0 map on May 7, eliminating the state’s lone majority-Black district and last Democratic seat. They split the city of Memphis, which is 63 percent Black, into three different districts to dilute Black voting power. They even connected it to one rural county that happened to be the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and another that still has the Confederate flag on its county seal.

Next came Alabama, where the Roberts Court issued an eleventh-hour decision allowing the state to redraw its voting maps to eliminate one of its majority Black districts. Though the Supreme Court has repeatedly told courts not to change voting laws in the middle of an election, blocking a lower court ruling in 2025 that invalidated a Texas gerrymander 15 weeks before the primary, it allowed Alabama to change its district lines with the primary just a week away. The state quickly put in place a map for the midterms that a federal court panel with two Trump appointees had previously found to be intentionally discriminatory against Black voters.

In Louisiana, which supported the challenge to the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, Gov. Jeff Landry suspended his state’s US House primary, even though 45,000 people had already voted by mail. That allowed GOP lawmakers to pass a new map eliminating one of the state’s majority-Black districts. Much as in Alabama, that map was very similar to one the federal courts previously found violated the Voting Rights Act. Black voters comprise a third of Louisiana’s population, but now they will only be able to elect their preferred candidate in just 1 of the state’s 6 districts. (The map passed the state senate last week and is set to pass the state house this week.)

Initially, South Carolina’s Republican-controlled Senate rejected an attempt to eliminate Clyburn’s seat. “We are the most gerrymandered Republican state in the country already,” South Carolina Senate GOP Leader Shane Massey said in an impassioned speech last week. But Republican Gov. Henry McMaster caved to pressure from Trump and his MAGA allies and called the legislature back for a special session to revive the all-Republican map.

Mississippi has already held its US House primary. Still, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves has called on the legislature to pass a new map between now and 2027 to oust Rep. Bennie Thompson, the only Democrat and the only Black member of Congress from the state. Thompson earned national prominence as chair of the US House committee investigating the January 6 attacks. Echoing the racist rhetoric white segregationists used to attack Black voting power during Reconstruction, Reeves announced that Thompson’s “reign of terror” would now be over. If Thompson does lose his seat next year, the state with the largest Black population in the country would have no Black representatives in Congress.

In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp called a special session of the legislature next month to redraw the US House and state legislative maps for the 2028 election. In what essentially amounts to a lame-duck power grab, the governor’s demand for new maps will likely eliminate multiple majority-Black districts before a Democratic governor could veto them if elected in November. “The special session to redraw Georgia’s legislative districts is a blatant scheme to undermine Black representation in Congress and the state legislature by exploiting the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act,” Democratic US Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is up for reelection this year, said in a statement after Kemp announced his plan.

Overall, a third of the Congressional Black Caucus could lose their seats as a result of this new attack on Black political power. Even before the Supreme Court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, Republicans had targeted the districts of Black members of Congress, including Al Green and Marc Veasey in Texas, Emanuel Cleaver in Missouri, and Don Davis in North Carolina. This was all part of the unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering push that began when President Donald Trump pressured Texas lawmakers last year to redraw their maps.

The gerrymandering onslaught following the Callais decision has often been described in partisan terms, with the Supreme Court’s ruling giving Republicans a 10-seat advantage in the redistricting wars. But the impact is broader than just partisan politics. The Voting Rights Act made America a truly multiracial democracy, and with the law now in tatters, the politics of white supremacy, where Black officeholders are wiped off the map with stunning velocity, is once again ascendant.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote in Callais that “the Nation had faced nearly a century of ‘entrenched racial discrimination in voting,’” when the Voting Rights Act was passed, but claimed those days were now over. However, the rush to eliminate Black representation in the wake of his decision shows that just the opposite is true.

NGC 1300

Across the center of this spiral galaxy is a bar. And at the center of this bar is smaller spiral. And at the center of that spiral is a supermassive black hole. This all happens in the big, beautiful, barred spiral galaxy cataloged as NGC 1300, a galaxy that lies some 70 million light-years away toward the constellation of the river Eridanus. This Hubble Space Telescope composite view of the gorgeous island universe is one of the most detailed Hubble images ever made of a complete galaxy. NGC 1300 spans over 100,000 light-years and the Hubble image reveals striking details of the galaxy's dominant central bar and majestic spiral arms. How the giant bar formed, how it remains, and how it affects star formation remains an active topic of research.

NGC 3169

Spiral galaxy NGC 3169 looks to be unraveling like a ball of cosmic yarn. It lies some 70 million light-years away, south of bright star Regulus toward the faint constellation Sextans. Wound up spiral arms are pulled out into sweeping tidal tails as NGC 3169 (left) and neighboring NGC 3166 interact gravitationally. Eventually the galaxies will merge into one, a common fate even for bright galaxies in the local universe. Drawn out stellar arcs and plumes are clear indications of the ongoing gravitational interactions across the deep and colorful galaxy group photo. The telescopic frame spans about 20 arc minutes or about 400,000 light-years at the group's estimated distance, and includes smaller, bluish NGC 3165 to the right. NGC 3169 is also known to shine across the spectrum from radio to X-rays, harboring an active galactic nucleus that is the site of a supermassive black hole.

A work day

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