A place were I can write...

My simple blog of pictures of travel, friends, activities and the Universe we live in as we go slowly around the Sun.



May 28, 2025

Crime boss trump lets more criminals out of jail

Trump issues slew of pardons, including to former New York congressman Michael Grimm

By Kristen Holmes, Kaitlan Collins, Kevin Liptak, Paula Reid and Jeff Zeleny

President Donald Trump used his pardon power to grant clemency to a wave of individuals Wednesday who had been convicted of crimes that range from public corruption, guns and even maritime-related offenses, according to multiple officials.

The pardons are the latest in a string of clemency actions taken by Trump, who has largely circumvented the usual process run through the Department of Justice and instead has used his powers to commute or pardon individuals with ties to his political allies.

One notable name was Michael Grimm, the former New York congressman who served seven months in prison for tax evasion a decade ago, according to a White House official. That pardon was first reported by Spectrum News 1.

Aside from his criminal conviction, Grimm may be best remembered for threatening to break a reporter in half “like a boy” when the reporter questioned him about his campaign finances during an incident caught on camera at the Capitol in January 2014. He also threatened to throw the reporter off a balcony.

Grimm, who worked as an on-air personality for Newsmax, was badly injured in a fall from a horse during a polo competition last year.

According to officials, other pardons included:
  • Former Connecticut Gov. John G. Rowland, who was convicted twice in federal criminal cases.
  • Kentrell Gaulden, the rapper who goes by NBA YoungBoy and was convicted in a federal gun crimes case.
  • Kevin Eric Baisden, who was convicted of fraud. An official said he “suffered from substance abuse issues” in his teens and 20s “which led him to be convicted and arrested on a number of nonviolent misdemeanor offenses.” The official said he has been sober for “nearly 14 years” and is “set to graduate from law school, but his criminal record continues to follow him and might not be admitted to state bars.”
  • Mark Bashaw, an officer who formerly served at the Army Public Health Center and was convicted by a special court-martial of violating lawful orders to comply with COVID-19 mitigation measures, per the Army Times.
  • Tanner Mansell and John Moore Jr., who one official said “are cases of government overreach. They were charged with theft of property within special maritime jurisdiction of the United States felony offense and they were convicted in 2022.” Each was sentenced “to one year probation,” the official added.
Trump also on Wednesday commuted the sentences of eight individuals, a White House official said, including Larry Hoover, the notorious co-founder of Chicago’s Gangster Disciples street gang. He was serving six life prison sentences in the federal supermax facility in Florence, Colorado, following a 1997 conviction on dozens of charges that included running a criminal enterprise from jail.

Hoover, who is now 74, had been seeking a commutation for years under the First Step Act, which Trump signed into law in 2018. Three years later, US District Judge Harry Leinenweber denied Hoover’s request, calling him “one of the most notorious criminals in Illinois history.”

His advocates continued to push the Biden administration to consider a commutation, but those efforts were unsuccessful.

“We did what so many said was impossible,” a Hoover attorney, Justin Moore, told the Chicago Sun-Times on Wednesday. “We got Larry Hoover out of federal prison.”

Hoover is also serving a sentence of up to 200 years on state murder charges in Illinois, which are not impacted by Trump’s action on Wednesday. His advocates have pushed Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to commute that sentence as well.

Hoover’s commutation was first reported by NOTUS.

Additionally, the president on Tuesday signed full pardons for imprisoned reality show couple Todd and Julie Chrisley, who were sentenced to lengthy prison terms in 2022 for a conspiracy to defraud banks out of more than $30 million, according to a White House official.

In addition to the bank fraud convictions, they were also found guilty of several tax crimes, including attempting to defraud the Internal Revenue Service.

Trump is expected to issue even more commutations in the coming days. Trump’s newly minted pardon attorney Ed Martin reviewed dozens of commutation applications last week for Trump to review, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Modified gravity

3D velocity analysis of wide binaries supports modified gravity at low acceleration

by Sejong University

Wide binary stars with separation greater than about 2000 astronomical units are interesting natural laboratories that allow a direct probe of gravity at low acceleration weaker than about 1 nanometer per second squared. Astrophysicist Kyu-Hyun Chae at Sejong University (Seoul, South Korea) has developed a new method of measuring gravity with all three components of the velocities (3D velocities) of stars, as a major improvement over existing statistical methods relying on sky-projected 2D velocities.

The new method based on the Bayes theorem derives directly the probability distribution of a gravity parameter (a parameter that measures the extent to which the data departs from standard gravitational dynamics) through the Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation of the relative 3D velocity between the stars in a binary. The work is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Regarding the significance of the new method, Chae says, "The existing methods to infer gravity have the limitation that only the sky-projected velocities are used. Moreover, they have some limitations in accounting for the uncertainties of various factors, including stellar masses, to derive the probability distribution of a gravity parameter.

"The new method overcomes all these limitations. It is a sort of revolutionary and ultimate method for wide binaries whose motions can only be 'snapshot-observed' (that is, observed only at a specific phase of the orbital motion: because of the very long orbital periods of these binaries, a direct consequence of the low accelerations involved, one can only measure the positions and velocities of the stars at one moment, which is far less informative than having, ideally, data on a full orbit or at least a segment of it).

"However, the new method requires accurate and precise values of the third velocity component, that is, the line-of-sight (radial) velocity. In other words, only wide binaries with precisely measured radial velocities can be used."

On the significance of the methodology, Xavier Hernandez, who initiated wide binary gravity tests in 2012, says, "The latest paper by Dr. Chae on wide binaries presents a fully rigorous Bayesian approach which will surely become the standard in the field. Further, this latest paper also presents a proof of concept in going from 2-dimensional projected velocities to full 3D relative velocities between the two components of a wide binary. The level of accuracy reached from making full use of all available information is impressive."

3D velocities versus sky-projected 2D velocities of a wide binary system. The new method uses the 3D velocities while all existing methods use the 2D velocities. Credit: Kyu-Hyun Chae
For the first application of the new method, Chae used about 300 wide binaries with relatively precise radial velocities selected from the European Space Agency's Gaia data release 3. Although the first results are limited by the fact that Gaia's reported radial velocities are not as precise as the sky-projected velocities, the derived probability distributions of gravity agree well with the recent results published by Chae and independently by Hernandez's group as well.

For wide binaries whose stars orbit each other with an internal acceleration greater than about 10 nanometers per second squared, the inferred gravity is precisely Newtonian, but for an internal acceleration lower than about 1 nanometer per second squared (or separation greater than about 2000 au), the inferred gravity is about 40% to 50% stronger than Newton.

The significance of the deviation is 4.2δ meaning that standard gravity is outside the 99.997% probability range. What is striking is that the deviation agrees with the generic prediction of modified gravity theories under the theoretical framework called modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND, sometimes referred to as Milgromian dynamics), introduced about 40 years ago by Mordehai (Moti) Milgrom.

On the first results based on the new method, Chae says, "It is encouraging that a direct inference of the probability distribution of gravity can be obtained for wide binaries that are bound by extremely weak internal gravity. This methodology may play a decisive role in the coming years in measuring gravity at low acceleration. It is nice that the first results agree well with the results for the past 2 years obtained by Hernandez's group and myself with the existing methods."

Pavel Kroupa, professor at the University of Bonn in Germany, says, "This is an impressive study of gravitation using very wide binaries as probes taken to a new level of accuracy and clarity by Prof. Dr. Chae. This work greatly advances this topic, and the data, which will be improving over time, are already showing an increasingly significant deviation from Newtonian gravitation with an impressive consistency with the expectations from Milgromian gravitation. This has a major fundamentally important impact on theoretical physics and cosmology."

Milgrom expresses his thoughts on the general significance of the wide binary results: "This new result by Prof. Chae strengthens in important ways earlier findings by him and others. They demonstrate a departure from the predictions of Newtonian dynamics in low-acceleration binary stars in our galaxy.

"Such a departure from standard dynamics would be existing in itself. But it is even more exciting because it enters and appears in the same way as the departure from Newtonian dynamics appears in galaxies. It appears in the analysis only at or below a certain acceleration scale that is found to agree with the fundamental acceleration of MOND, and the magnitude of the anomaly they find is also consistent with the generic predictions of existing MOND theories.

"In galaxies, the observed (and MOND-predicted) anomaly is much larger, and is established very robustly, but much of the community support the view that it is due to the presence of dark matter; so, to them the galactic anomalies do not bespeak a conflict with standard dynamics. But, an anomaly as found by Prof. Chae, while more modest, cannot be accounted for by dark matter, and thus would indeed necessarily spell a breakdown of standard dynamics."

Chae and his collaborators, including Dongwook Lim and Young-Wook Lee at Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea) and Byeong-Cheol Lee at Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (Daejeon, South Korea) are now obtaining precise radial velocities from their new measurements using observation facilities such as GEMINI North Observatory (with the instrument MAROON-X) and Las Cumbres Observatory, and from archival data outside Gaia as well.

Hernandez and his collaborators are carrying out the speckle photometry of target wide binaries to identify any systems with a hidden third star.

Hernandez comments on this point: "This methodology requires using pure binaries that are free of any hidden companion stars. This highlights the relevance of upcoming results from dedicated ground-based follow-up studies which will unambiguously rule out dubious systems containing hidden third components and hence permit to reach the full potential of the new method."

When all these observation results are combined, decisive results on the low-acceleration anomaly are expected.

On the near future prospect, Chae says, "With new data on radial velocities, most of which have already been obtained, and results from speckle photometric observations, the Bayesian inference is expected to measure gravity sufficiently precisely, not only to distinguish between Newton and MOND well above 5δ, but also to narrow theoretical possibilities of gravitational dynamics. I expect exciting opportunities for theoretical physics with new results in the coming years."

Pardons of people convicted for Whitmer’s 2020 kidnapping plot??

Trump weighs pardons of people convicted for Whitmer’s 2020 kidnapping plot

“It looked to me like somewhat of a railroad job,” the president said Wednesday.

By Amanda Friedman

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he is considering pardons for the people involved in a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020.

Trump insinuated that the trial had not been handled correctly by the legal system while taking questions from reporters in the Oval Office, describing it as potentially being a “railroad job.”

“I will look at it — take a look at it,” he said when asked if he is considering pardons. “It’s been brought to my attention, I did watch the trial. It looked to me like somewhat of a railroad job, I’ll be honest with you. It looked to me like some people said some stupid things.”

“They were drinking and I think they said stupid things but I’ll take a look at that, and a lot of people are asking me that question from both sides actually,” he continued. “A lot of people think they got railroaded.”

The kidnapping plot against the Michigan Democrat rattled the final weeks of the 2020 election and marked an incident of anti-government extremism that prosecutors said was intended to ignite a civil war. The leaders, Barry Croft Jr. and Adam Fox, were convicted in 2022 of conspiring to abduct the Democratic governor from her vacation home.

Croft, a former truck driver from Delaware, also faced weapons charges and received a nearly 20-year prison sentence. Fox, from Grand Rapids, was sentenced to 16 years.

A spokesperson for Whitmer declined to comment on Trump’s remarks.

The president was not the first member of his administration to question the charges. Ed Martin, who was tapped to serve as the pardon attorney at the Justice Department after Trump pulled his nomination to be the top federal prosecutor for Washington, compared Croft’s and Fox’s cases to the January 6 pardons last week.

“In my opinion these are victims just like January 6,” Martin said during an interview on “The Breanna Morello Show,” referencing the roughly 1,600 people either pardoned by Trump for crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol or who saw their cases dropped.

Trump’s remarks also come as he builds a working relationship with Whitmer. The two have shared several cordial moments in recent months, with Whitmer defending her appearances alongside Trump as key to scoring major wins for her home state, while underscoring their sharp policy differences.

“This is one of those moments where as a public servant, you’re reminded your job is to put service above self, and that’s what it was all about,” she said in a recent “Pod Save America” interview.

I chicken out?

Trump was just asked about the ‘TACO trade’ for the first time. He called it the ‘nastiest question’

By Elisabeth Buchwald

Wall Street has been riding a historic roller coaster the past few months due to President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff threats. Now, investors are learning to take his words with a grain of salt — and a bit of salsa, too.

That’s because there’s a new type of trade taking hold: TACO, short for Trump Always Chickens Out. In other words, don’t fret too much about Trump’s latest tariff threat and go on a selling spree, because eventually he’ll back down and a relief rally will ensue.

Trump said he first learned of the term, coined by Financial Times commentator Robert Armstrong, on Wednesday when a reporter sought his reaction to it.

“I chicken out? Oh, I’ve never heard that. You mean because I reduced China from 145% that I set down to 100 and then to another number?” Trump said Wednesday, referring to tariff rates he imposed on imported Chinese goods. (The rate is now 30%, after Trump raised it as high as 145% last month, much to investors’ dismay, only to reduce it a few weeks later.)

Last week, Trump threatened to impose 50% tariffs on goods from the European Union come June 1. Stocks turned lower after his threat, which he doubled down on later in the day, claiming there was no room to negotiate. Two days later, he said he’d wait until July 9 to levy a 50% tariff on EU goods following promising talks. When US markets reopened after Memorial Day, stocks closed well in the green.

Trump said he was willing to delay the move because EU counterparts called him up saying, “Please, let’s meet right now.”

“You call that chickening out?” Trump responded to a reporter at an Oval Office event Wednesday, referring to his recent announcements on EU and Chinese tariff rates.

“It’s called negotiation,” Trump added, saying that part of his tactic can include setting “a ridiculous high number” for tariff rates and going down if he gets other nations to give in to his demands.

“Don’t ever say what you said,” Trump told the reporter, calling it “the nastiest question.”

The China and EU about-faces are hardly the only ones Trump has made on tariffs.

On April 2, he announced sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of countries that were set to take effect on April 9. Hours after they took effect, he announced a 90-day pause for all impacted countries but China, saying investors were getting “yippy yappy.”

Translation: US financial markets, particularly the bond market, weren’t taking his tariff changes well.

Indeed, before he announced the pause, markets had slumped and the S&P 500 had been on the precipice of bear market territory, while bond yields spiked as investors sold off US debt.

After the pause was announced, the S&P 500 posted its best day since October 2008.

Stupid is as Stupid does..............


 

7 million new jobs will evaporate.......

7 million new jobs will evaporate this year because of trade war, UN predicts

By Anna Cooban

The United Nations expects that millions of potential jobs will vanish this year because of an economic slowdown triggered by US President Donald Trump’s trade war.

The International Labour Organization (ILO), a UN agency, predicts in a report released Wednesday that 53 million jobs will be created worldwide in 2025 — 7 million fewer than previously thought — owing to a shakier economic outlook caused by trade disruptions and geopolitical tensions.

As Trump reignites a trade war and faces a bond market revolt, the economy is about to go through the wringer this week

The agency based its analysis on the International Monetary Fund’s downgraded expectations for the global economy. In April, the IMF said global GDP would rise by 2.8% this year, down from a previous estimate of 3.2%, citing the uncertainty unleashed by Trump’s barrage of new tariffs on America’s trading partners.

The ILO, which promotes labor rights worldwide, also said that almost 84 million jobs across 71 countries “are directly or indirectly tied to US consumer demand” and thus vulnerable to the impact of these tariffs. Nearly 56 million of these at-risk roles are in the Asia-Pacific region, it added, with more than 13 million spanning Canada and Mexico.

“Workers tied to US consumption and investment demand… now face elevated risks of partial or total income loss due to higher tariffs and the unpredictability of future trade measures,” the agency said.

Since Trump re-took office in January, he has hiked import duties on America’s trading partners and on key goods, including cars and steel. The president has set July 9 as the date he plans to impose punishingly high “reciprocal tariffs” on other countries unless those nations are able to strike a trade deal with Washington.

The tariffs, their erratic implementation and the unpredictability both have injected into the global economy are weighing on many businesses and consumers. The ILO noted that employers may be “more cautious” about hiring new workers in such an uncertain landscape.

“We know that the global economy is growing at a slower pace than we had anticipated it would,” Gilbert Houngbo, the ILO’s director general, said in a statement. “If geopolitical tensions and trade disruptions continue… then they will most certainly have negative ripple effects on labor markets worldwide.”

Growing consumer boycotts

Walmart, Target and other companies warn about growing consumer boycotts

By Nathaniel Meyersohn

Companies are warning investors about the risks of becoming the next target of angry customers.

Corporate America is required to disclose risks to their businesses in their annual regulatory filings. This year, Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Corona-parent Constellation Brands join an increasing number of companies advising investors about customer and legal backlash to their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies and environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives. They’re also giving notice of the risks of rolling back these programs.

Businesses typically warn shareholders about economic downturns, data breaches, natural disasters, and tax code changes. But companies are adding new risk disclosures in response to the intense political divide over corporate efforts to increase diversity in the workplace, promote LGBTQ rights and slow down climate change, corporate governance and risk management researchers say.

“Companies face a Catch-22 situation,” said Kristen Jaconi, director of the Peter Arkley Institute for Risk Management at USC. “Consumers may be dissatisfied if a company takes a particular position on a social issue or if a company takes no position at all.”

Consumer brands are trying to avoid damaging boycotts like those against Bud Light, Tesla, and Target. They are also reacting to opposition to DEI on the right, including the Trump administration’s threats to investigate companies with “illegal” DEI programs, conservative lawsuits and activist shareholder proposals against companies, and right-wing activists like Robby Starbuck targeting companies with DEI programs.

“The heightened debate on DEI and climate, in particular, has driven the inclusion of these disclosures in the last few months,” said Matteo Tonello, the head of benchmarking and analytics at The Conference Board.

‘Conflicting expectations’

Many companies are warning about consumer boycotts from both the political right and left, stoked on social media platforms.

“Strong opinions continue to be publicly expressed both for and against diversity, equity and inclusion and ESG initiatives,” Walmart said in its annual report released in March.

Walmart, which ended some of its diversity programs earlier this year, said it and other companies’ positions are “subject to heightened scrutiny from consumers, investors, advocacy groups and public figures, potentially leading to consumer boycotts, negative publicity campaigns, litigation and reputational harm.”

Target said in its annual report in March that expectations from shareholders, customers and employees over whether it should offer certain products or pursue ESG and DEI goals are varied, and at times conflicting.

“We have previously been unable to meet some of those conflicting expectations, which has led to negative publicity and adversely affected our reputation,” Target said.

Target noted backlash to its merchandise selection during Pride Month in 2023. That year, a boycott from the right over some of Target’s LGBTQ-themed merchandise led to a drop in sales and lawsuits from Republican-aligned legal groups.

Conversely, Target also noted “adverse reactions from some of our shareholders, guests, team members, and others” over its decision to end some of its diversity programs this year. Target’s sales fell last quarter, driven in part by customer backlash to Target’s retreat on DEI.

Target said any future changes to its policies could result in a negative reaction from some customers. The company also warned that it could face litigation and investigations from states and federal agencies that assert diversity programs violate the law, but said its initiatives were legal.

Anti-ESG backlash

Target is not alone in signaling that the Republican legal assault and right-leaning consumer backlash against diversity policies, in particular, could pose a big risk to business.

Abercrombie & Fitch, Kroger, PVH Corp. and other companies warn they could be hurt by the Trump administration’s anti-DEI and anti-ESG crackdown.

“There is some indication that sustainability goals are becoming more controversial,” Kroger said in its annual filing last month. “The recent change to the United States administration and changes in investor perspectives could also affect our ability to pursue our sustainability goals and could lead to increased criticism and associated reputational harm.”

PVH, the owner of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, said in its annual filing last month that it could be “subjected to negative responses by governmental actors (such as anti-ESG legislation or retaliatory legislative treatment) or customers (such as boycotts or negative publicity campaigns) that could adversely affect our reputation.”

It’s notable that companies are now anticipating boycotts, said Lawrence Glickman, a historian at Cornell University who studies consumer activism.

“Often, boycotts catch companies by surprise,” he said. “Recent boycotts have been successful enough that (companies) are worried about them.”

Nixon took a little puppy, Checkers...

Trump took a $400,000,000 jet...

Who is the crook?

Debt....

 US has $36 trillion in debt.

15 countries hold a combined approximately $6.5 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities.

Who holds the rest? Rich Americans and corporations.

Who holds US debt??? It is not foreign countries, but US companies and rich people...


 

Boom! Bang!

Here's what went right — and wrong — on today's test flight

SpaceX’s Starship soared through some signficant milestones. But it also failed to hit some key test objectives. 

By Jackie Wattles

SpaceX
  • Liftoff was a win. The Super Heavy rocket booster, which had been flown on one prior mission, successfully lit up all 33 of its engines. It marked the first time SpaceX has reused a Super Heavy booster.
  • Super Heavy crash-landed, and SpaceX lost contact with the booster after it fired its engines for a landing burn. The vehicle did safely separate from the Starship spacecraft, and SpaceX never expected to bring it back to a safe landing on dry ground. The company was testing several risky tweaks, hoping to figure out how the booster can make a safe landing using less fuel.
  • Starship, the upper spacecraft often referred to as the “ship,” was not able to deploy eight dummy satellites as hoped. The vehicle’s side hatch did not open all the way, preventing SpaceX from testing out how Starship might one day release cargo into orbit.
  • Starship made it much farther into its flight path than the two prior test flights, during which it was destroyed minutes after takeoff. But the spacecraft did not make it all the way to a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
  • Mission controllers lost contact with Starship, and the vehicle began flying out of control because of a leak in the vehicle’s fuel tank, according to SpaceX’s Dan Huot. It’s likely that the ship was torn apart as it slammed back into Earth’s thick inner atmosphere.
  • SpaceX did not attempt to relight Starship’s engines while in space. That was another testing milestone SpaceX had to forgo because of the loss of control.

Failure......

SpaceX signs off: This was "a hell of a moment"

By Jackie Wattles

SpaceX just wrapped up the live coverage of today’s Starship test flight.

Spokesperson Dan Huot signed off with remarks reminiscent of how SpaceX frames every test flight that does not go exactly according to plan — emphasizing that engineers aim to learn from failure.

“We are trying to do something that is impossibly hard, and it’s not always not going to reach it in a straight line,” Huot said. “We said there’s going to be bumps. There’s going to be turns. But seeing that ship in space today was a hell of a moment for us.”

It’s not clear where Starship landed or how the vehicle fared during the jarring process of reentering Earth’s atmosphere.

The FAA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how the spacecraft’s uncontrolled return to Earth may have affected commercial air travel.

The bottom 40% will lose, the Top 1% will win... You are not in the the top 1%.....

How the government makes a $3.8 trillion educated guess

Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf

Rather than justify sticker shock at the trillions of dollars President Donald Trump’s tax bill would add to deficits and the national debt, some Republican lawmakers and conservative economists are trying out some mind tricks.

This isn’t REALLY $3.8 trillion in deficit spending.

“Dramatically overestimated,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” Sunday, days after the proposal squeaked through the House. Johnson hopes budget-conscious senators don’t tinker with the legislation too much. Any changes will lead to new projections.

“A Ouija board could turn out more accurate prognostications,” wrote Stephen Moore, a Trump ally at the Heritage Foundation, in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal: “Save us from the CBO.”

He was talking about the budget scoring process, which involves both the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation.

These types of complaints about CBO and JCT appear whenever there is a big bill likely to add to the national debt.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has long criticized the CBO. He called for it to be abolished back in 2019, arguing in a Fox News op-ed that its math does not appropriately assume tax cuts will spur economic growth.

“The CBO consistently underestimates the positive impact from supply-side, market-oriented reforms while giving Keynesian, big government policies the benefit of the doubt,” Gingrich wrote.

The CBO, however, is definitely nonpartisan. Both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill have a say in who leads the organization. The CBO has also evolved its calculations in recent years to account for economic activity, something known as “dynamic scoring.”

Importantly, there are plenty of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who agree to accept CBO’s scores.

The fiscal hawk Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, told Tapper he opposes the House bill because it adds so much deficit spending.

“You have these independent analysts saying it’s $3.3 trillion to $4 trillion. I agree with that,” Johnson said. “We have to reduce the deficit. And so we need to focus on spending, spending, spending.”

Complaining about the CBO and its scoring may be part of the political argument. If you don’t like the numbers, attack the numbers. But it’s interesting to consider how CBO runs the numbers to predict how a trillion-dollar tax cut might affect the deficit.

I went to Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former CBO director who also worked on the Council of Economic Advisers during both Bush presidencies. Today he’s president of the American Action Forum, an independent organization that classifies itself as center-right on economic policy.

Our conversation, conducted by phone and edited for length, is below.

How, briefly, does CBO work?

Holtz-Eakin: CBO’s primary job is to score pieces of legislation. Scoring is calculating the change in the amount of money flowing into the Treasury, the amount of money flowing out of the Treasury in response to a piece of legislation.

The Joint Committee on Taxation does the tax piece of it. CBO does the rest. They both operate the same way to do that.

To do that — and this is sort of nerdy, but very important — the first thing CBO does — and the Joint Committee shares it — is CBO calculates a projection for the economy in January, and then layers on top of that the current tax and spending laws to show what would happen to the federal budget if left on autopilot. And that’s known as the baseline.

Then it starts scoring various bills by looking at how they would change the money coming in and going out versus that baseline. It’s important they use the same baseline for all the scores so that you can compare them.

Importantly, CBO is still scoring against the outlook for the economy they saw when they put out the January baseline. Nobody thinks the economy looks the same now as it did in January. If you were just interested in predicting the right number, then you would update your jumping-off point. But CBO doesn’t get to do that. They have to provide Congress with consistent scores, and they will do that throughout the year, regardless of what happens to the economy.

It’s trying to give Congress good information about the decisions it’s making.

How is CBO kept nonpartisan?

Holtz-Eakin: It is nonpartisan by law and, more importantly, by DNA. I was the first, and to this day, the only CBO director to come directly from the White House, which most people think was a fairly partisan organization. Many Democrats were extraordinarily skeptical of my ability to lead CBO in a nonpartisan fashion, and I was able to do so successfully because the organization is nonpartisan. I just had to give a good direction and it took care of itself.

People don’t like CBO because they don’t get the answer they want, and they blame it on partisan grounds, but that’s not what’s going on. They’re just disappointed.

The other thing that’s worth mentioning here, because it’s really, really wrong, and (Moore) has said it now for 20 years: CBO regularly updates its models. It is not using the same models it used back in 1978.

It builds its estimates off the consensus of the research literature. There’s a lot of economic research every year. A lot of empirical evidence gives you guidance on tax and spending programs, on environmental programs, health programs, all of that.

CBO is a regular participant in research conferences. It is using the latest estimates from the literature. So the models aren’t the same, because the research keeps progressing.

What should people know about dynamic scoring?

Holtz-Eakin: The difference between a dynamic score and a traditional score is that in a dynamic score, you allow the size of the economy to change. And for some policies, that’s appropriate, like certainly the 2017 (Tax Cuts and Jobs Act) … a whole point was to make the economy grow better, so the size of the economy would change from the baseline.

CBO regularly incorporates behavioral responses to tax incentives. If you put a draconian tax on stock buybacks, you’re going to see changes in firms’ financial behavior. CBO will capture that. In (the case of this bill), if you don’t tax tips, you’re going to see more tipped income. It might not be dramatic, but they’ll take all those things into account.

Does CBO usually get things about right?

Holtz-Eakin: CBO usually gets it wrong because of two things.

You can’t predict the future, and the economy is always different than one would have been able to forecast. They can’t change their forecast every month, so the jumping-off points are often not what they would prefer. There’s going to be changes in the environment around them.

And more importantly, administrations do executive actions, Congress passes laws — they change everything in the budget around CBO, and they turn out to be off.

The right question is, had those things not changed, how close would they have been? And that’s a much harder question to answer. You’d have to rerun history with a counterfactual where the executive didn’t take actions, Congress sat on its hands, and the economy progressed as we thought. Then you’d have a real answer.

How did budget battles of the 1960s and ’70s lead to the CBO?

Holtz-Eakin: The roots of the CBO are in a fight between then-President Richard Nixon and the Congress on Nixon impounding funds. There was a lawsuit that went to the Supreme Court. But Congress came to the realization that they could not rely on the budgetary information that was solely available from the Bureau of the Budget, now the Office of Management and Budget, the executive branch.

Congress wanted their own. So with the 1974 Budget Act, they created the Congressional Budget Office and also the entire apparatus for budgeting — House Budget Committee, Senate Budget Committee, budget resolutions — all of that came out of the ‘74 act.

CBO’s role in that was twofold.
  1. To do the scoring that I described, and
  2. To do special studies, as Congress asked them to, on particular topics that they might have future legislation on.
You see a lot of CBO studies at the request of members of Congress, but their bread and butter is using what they’ve learned from those studies to do the scoring.

If CBO’s predictions are imperfect, what can we take away from its report that a bill adds $3.8 trillion to deficits over a decade?

Holtz-Eakin: It’s important in two ways.
  1. There’s going to be more, not less, debt. They’re unquestionably right about that.
  2. The magnitude. It’s single digits, below $5 trillion. It’s not double digits. It’s not triple digits, God forbid. You get the magnitude of the legislation. This is measured in the trillions. That’s important. It’s big and relative to already having $37 trillion in debt, it’s going to be something that looks like 10% more over 10 years. That’s the ballpark.
What should change at CBO?

Holtz-Eakin: I think CBO still could write more clearly about the key parts of important scores. When I was director, we did a score of the Medicare Modernization Act, which created the Part D program. I had them write up the score as a separate CBO study — a complete, finished book, almost: How did we do it? How did we think about it? What judgments had to be made?

Models inform that judgment. Models can be very useful. But when you’re doing something that involves judgment, you should explain how you made your judgments, and they’re often not clear enough about that.

Herbig-Haro 24


This might look like a double-bladed lightsaber, but these two cosmic jets actually beam outward from a newborn star in a galaxy near you. Constructed from Hubble Space Telescope image data, the stunning scene spans about half a light-year across Herbig-Haro 24 (HH 24), some 1,300 light-years or 400 parsecs away in the stellar nurseries of the Orion B molecular cloud complex. Hidden from direct view, HH 24's central protostar is surrounded by cold dust and gas flattened into a rotating accretion disk. As material from the disk falls toward the young stellar object, it heats up. Opposing jets are blasted out along the system's rotation axis. Cutting through the region's interstellar matter, the narrow, energetic jets produce a series of glowing shock fronts along their path.

The retard is upset...

Elon Musk criticizes Trump's 'big beautiful bill,' a fracture in a key relationship

By CHRIS MEGERIAN

Elon Musk is criticizing the centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, a significant fracture in a partnership that was forged during last year's campaign and was poised to reshape American politics and the federal government.

The billionaire entrepreneur, who supported Trump’s candidacy with at least $250 million and has worked for his administration as a senior adviser, said he was “disappointed” by what the president calls his “big beautiful bill.”

The legislation includes a mix of tax cuts and enhanced immigration enforcement. While speaking to CBS, Musk described it as a “massive spending bill” that increases the federal deficit and “undermines the work” of his Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE.

“I think a bill can be big or it could be beautiful,” Musk said. “But I don’t know if it could be both.”

His CBS interview came out Tuesday night. White House officials did not immediately respond to questions. Republicans recently pushed the legislation through the House and are debating it in the Senate.

Musk’s comments come as he steps back from his government work, rededicating himself to companies like the electric automaker Tesla and rocket manufacturer SpaceX. He's also said he'll reduce his political spending, because "I think I’ve done enough.”

At times, he's seemed chastened by his experience working in government. Although he hoped that DOGE would generate $1 trillion in spending cuts, he's fallen far short of that target.

“The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” he told The Washington Post. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.”

Musk had previously been effusive about the opportunity to reshape Washington. He wore campaign hats in the White House, held his own campaign rallies and talked about excessive spending as an existential crisis.

He was also effusive in his praise of Trump.

“The more I’ve gotten to know President Trump, the more I like the guy," Musk said at one point. "Frankly, I love him.”

Trump repaid the favor, describing Musk as "a truly great American.” When Tesla faced declining sales, he turned the White House driveway into a makeshift showroom to illustrate his support.

It's unclear what, if any, impact that Musk's comments about the bill would have on the legislative debate. During the transition period, he helped whip up opposition to a spending measure as the country stood on the brink of a federal government shutdown.

But Trump remains the dominant figure within the Republican Party, and many lawmakers have been unwilling to cross the president when he applies pressure for his agenda.

The Congressional Budget Office, in a preliminary estimate, said the tax provisions would increase federal deficits by $3.8 trillion over the decade, while the changes to Medicaid, food stamps and other services would reduce spending by slightly more than $1 trillion over the same period.

House Republican leaders say increased economic growth would allow the bill to be deficit neutral or reducing, but outside watchdogs are skeptical. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the bill would add $3 trillion to the debt, including interest, over the next decade.

At what point do they say, "Yea, he's crazy..."

Trump Has Nothing to Do Today. So, of Course, He Posted.

Unpacking an especially brusque Tuesday on the president’s feed.

Inae Oh

Nothing is listed on President Donald Trump’s public schedule today. In theory, that could mean it will be a relatively calm day from our commander-in-chief.

But, no. On Tuesday, Trump awoke and grabbed hold of his Truth Social account for a special string of posts. First, he went after a “transitioned Male athlete” in California, threatening to pull federal funding “maybe permanently” if the state did not adhere to his executive order banning trans women from women’s sports. Then, perhaps most alarmingly, Trump continued by ordering local law enforcement officials to block the trans athlete, whom he did not identify, from participating in the state finals. (As CNBC reports, a trans high school student has been the source of media attention in recent weeks; state finals for track and field are slated for next weekend.)

As with most things related to instructions abruptly cast from the Oval Office, it wasn’t immediately clear how the president wanted law enforcement officials to intervene. The post marked a dramatic escalation of the administration’s anti-trans policies, as well as Trump’s willingness to single out vulnerable individuals in his attacks.

But just before noon, the president appeared to move onto a different issue: Russia’s intensified military operations in Ukraine. “What Vladimir Putin doesn’t realize is that if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He’s playing with fire!”

The post, which appeared to show Trump openly admitting that he has protected Putin from serious repercussions over Russia’s war in Ukraine, could stand alone in the power of its unmatched absurdity. It also hinted that Trump, who has yet to impose any punishments against Russia after its recent assaults in Ukraine, is unlikely to go beyond Truth Social to call out Putin after the two engaged in strange name-calling over the weekend.

So there you have it: the president appears to be reading the news and then wildly posting new, radical positions our government will take, with little thought. Fun!

Big Fail

Trump’s Big Fail: Making America the 1980s Again

Tax cuts for the rich, program cuts for low-income Americans, Star Wars 2.o, and allying with white South Africans.

David Corn

Gargantuan tax cuts for the well-heeled, draconian cuts in programs for low-income Americans, boondoggle spending for iffy missile defense, and siding with the whites of South Africa: Donald Trump is making America the 1980s again. Last week, he shoved the nation into a time machine and transported it to the Age of Reagan, embracing the worst excesses of the era. In several instances, he has surpassed the outrages and extreme measures of our first made-on-TV president. Trump is putting the failed policies of the past on steroids in his relentless crusade to derail and damage the nation.

On Thursday, House Republicans passed a megabill covering taxes, government spending, and much else that Trump has called for. The tax cuts are obscene—the typical Republican fare, throwing piles of money at the upper crust and crumbs (at best) to the rest. According to the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model, the top one-tenth of a percent—people with incomes greater than $4.3 million—will receive on average a $389,000 annual boost from the tax provisions, if the GOP-controlled Senate accepts this plan. Many Americans who make less than $51,000 could lose about $700 a year in after-tax income. It’s truly a rob-the-poor-to-pay-the-rich scheme.

The true beneficiaries of the Trump-GOP measure ain’t a secret. Look at this chart from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy:

One quarter of the entire tax cut ends up in the pockets of the 1 percent. It’s a good time to be an oligarch. The bill proves that the purported populism of Trump and MAGA is a big con.

It also illustrates that Republicans—surprise, surprise—are huge hypocrites when it comes to the deficit. They don’t give a damn about red ink, if the green flows to the wealthy. The conservative Manhattan Institute estimates this tax bill will cost more than Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, the Covid stimulus act, Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill plan, and his Inflation Reduction Act combined, adding $6 trillion to the deficit over 10 years. (One GOP House member claimed it would add $20 trillion!) Still, party on, dude. (Okay, Wayne’s World was a 1990s film.)

And why only screw hard-pressed Americans on taxes, when you can screw them by ripping apart social programs they rely upon? To cover a slice of the costs of this tax-cut orgy for oligarchs, the House Republicans included historic slashes of the safety net. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the measure’s assorted reductions and changes in Medicaid and other programs would decrease federal spending on health care by more than $700 billion and leave 8.6 million Americans uninsured by 2030.

It would also shrink the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—a.k.a. food stamps. Ty Jones Cox, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told CNBC this is the “biggest cut in the program’s history.” It would be the first time since SNAP began that the federal government would not ensure children in every state have access to food benefits. 

This is so Reaganesque. Remember ketchup as a vegetable?

Trump and his minions on Capitol Hill are trying to revive trickle-down Reaganomics, claiming these tax cuts for plutocrats will juice the economy for all. But supply-side economics has long been discredited. Reagan’s embrace of it led to a recession and such large deficits in the early 1980s that even Republicans voted to raise taxes, and President George H.W. Bush, his successor, accepted the reality that taxes had to be hiked up for fiscal sanity, despite his “read my lips” campaign vow not to increase them.

In addition to bringing back the trickle-down catastrophe, Trump rebooted another old show: Star Wars. Reagan, enamored with the idea of preventing nuclear war, launched the Strategic Defense Initiative that was supposed to deliver a system for shooting down nuclear missiles lobbed at the United States. The military spent up to $100 billion and perhaps as much as $400 billion—no one seems to know for sure how much was wasted—and no such system was ever built. Top scientists at the time said the whole thing was not technically feasible, and many nuclear strategists feared it would destabilize the nuclear balance and incentivize a Russian first strike on the United States. Eventually—after much money went down the drain—SDI withered.

But it’s back. Last week, Trump announced Golden Dome, a supposedly “next generation” missile defense shield that would go beyond the aspirations of SDI and protect the nation from not only ballistic missiles but cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, and drones. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the initial down payment would be $25 billion. Once again, scientific experts are calling this a pipe dream. In March, the American Physical Society released a report that concluded:

Creating a reliable and effective defense against the threat posed by even the small number of relatively unsophisticated nuclear-armed ICBMs…remains a daunting challenge. The difficulties are numerous, ranging from the unresolved countermeasures problem for midcourse-intercept to the severe reach-versus-time challenge of boost-phase intercept. Few of the main challenges have been solved, and many of the hard problems are likely to remain formidable over the 15-year time horizon the study considered.

Sound familiar? The report added, “The costs and benefits of such an effort therefore need to be weighed carefully.” It doesn’t seem like such a weighing is underway.

A Carnegie Endowment paper reached a similar conclusion, noting “the challenge of developing a space-based missile defense shield remains formidable.” It cited a National Research Council study from 2012 that estimated the total cost of a space-based missile defense system could be as much as $831 billion (in 2025 dollars).

It added that this program will likely prompt Russia to build more and better nukes: “Russia will…need to respond. That will entail accelerating existing efforts to modernize each leg of the nuclear triad by replacing Soviet-era delivery systems with newer Russian designs. We can also expect renewed emphasis on exotic weapons that promise to evade all conceivable missile defense systems.” The latter includes the Poseidon, a nuclear-powered torpedo that can hit coastal targets in the United States. Say, New York City. “Golden Dome,” this paper noted, “will therefore press Russia into a new arms race.”

Hundreds of billions of dollars, a system that might not work, more weapons, more global instability—what a deal.

As for South Africa, Trump hosted a visit from that nation’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, on May 21. In front of his guest in the Oval Office, Trump pushed the fraudulent notion that Afrikaner farmers have been the victims of a white genocide. That’s why he said he had to take in 59 of them recently as refugees—because they are victims of persecution. (Trump’s administration is not accepting persecuted refugees from other African nations for some reason.) With all this, Trump was promoting a phony narrative that has also been championed by Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, as well as by white nationalists.

A recent analysis by PolitiFact cast this story of white genocide as rubbish: “White farmers have been murdered in South Africa. But those murders account for less than 1% of more than 27,000 annual murders nationwide. Experts said the deaths do not amount to genocide, and Trump misleads about land confiscation.” It quotes Gareth Newham, who heads a justice and violence prevention program at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, who said, “The idea of a ‘white genocide’ taking place in South Africa is completely false. As an independent institute tracking violence and violent crime in South Africa, if there was any evidence of either a genocide or targeted violence taking place against any group based on their ethnicity this, we would be amongst the first to raise (the) alarm and provide the evidence to the world.”

In the White House, Trump was peddling a racist fairy tale promulgated by bigots—in what was yet another throwback to the decade of Reagan. Throughout his presidency, Reagan and the right fought the anti-apartheid movement, voicing support and sympathy for the racist regime of Pretoria. They opposed calls for divesting from South Africa. They denigrated Nelson Mandela and his freedom movement as commies. Some right-wingers went so far as to buy Krugerrands, gold coins minted in South Africa that were boycotted around the world, to express solidarity with the repressive white ruling class.

Decades later—after the liberation of South Africa—it might be tough for Trump to call for reinstating apartheid. (Make Apartheid Great Again?) But he has found another way to exploit that country for his racism-fueled politics. With this unfounded conspiracy theory, he depicts a Black-ruled nation as a place of savagery. Thus, he signals to white nationalists he’s on their side and characterizes Blacks as a threat to white people.

It’s back to the future. (That movie came out in 1985!) We’ve dumped big hair and tacky leg warmers, but Trump is emulating policy disasters of the past, and he’s poised to do far more damage than Reagan. The nation has not learned from the past. We are reliving it with another show-biz president—as both farce and tragedy.

Threatens to bar government scientists from publishing...

RFK Jr. threatens to bar government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals

The health secretary said the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet are in bed with pharma.

By Chelsea Cirruzzo

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threatened to stop government scientists from publishing their work in major medical journals on a podcast Tuesday as part of his escalating war on institutions he says are influenced by pharmaceutical companies.

Speaking on the “Ultimate Human” podcast, Kennedy said the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet, three of the most influential medical journals in the world, were “corrupt” and publish studies funded and approved by pharmaceutical companies.

“Unless those journals change dramatically, we are going to stop NIH scientists from publishing in them and we’re going to create our own journals in-house,” he said, referring to the National Institutes of Health, an HHS agency that is the world’s largest funder of health research.

His comments come days after the White House released a major report, spearheaded by Kennedy, that says overprescribed medications could be driving a rise in chronic disease in children. The report suggests that influence from the pharmaceutical industry and a culture of fear around speaking out has drawn doctors and scientists away from studying the causes of chronic disease. It also comes after both JAMA and the NEJM received letters from the Department of Justice probing them for partisanship.

Kennedy’s stance, however, conflicts with that of his NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, who recently told a reporter with POLITICO sister publication WELT he supports academic freedom, which “means I can send my paper out even if my bosses disagree with me.”

On the podcast, Kennedy claimed the heads of the leading journals, including The Lancet Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton and the former editor-in-chief of the NEJM, Marcia Angell, also no longer consider their publications reputable.

Kennedy was referring to 2009 and 2015 statements, respectively, by Angell and Horton: Angell wrote it “is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published” due to financial ties with pharmaceutical companies while Horton wrote about concerns about the replicability of scientific research.

Kennedy went on to say Horton “really disgraced himself” during the Covid-19 pandemic. Horton was at the center of a 2020 controversy when The Lancet retracted a study linking the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine to increased Covid-19 deaths. Horton said the publication would change its peer review process.

The London-based journal also published a letter from prominent scientists including EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak that said questioning whether Covid had a natural origin amounted to a conspiracy theory. A Trump administration website says that EcoHealth facilitated “dangerous gain-of-function” research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology that President Donald Trump believes caused the pandemic. The Biden administration barred Daszak and EcoHealth from receiving further government funding, citing their failure to follow grant protocols.

A JAMA spokesperson said the journal had nothing to add when asked about Kennedy’s remarks, while NEJM and The Lancet did not respond to requests for comment. HHS also did not respond to requests for comment.

Bhattacharya and FDA chief Marty Makary recently launched their own journal, the Journal of the Academy of Public Health, which they say will promote open discourse. Both are on leave from its editorial board.

What can go wrong?????

Judge approves Treasury DOGE team’s access to sensitive data systems

The ruling found that the Trump administration had shown it set up a process to appropriately vet and train the employees.

By Michael Stratford

A federal judge in New York on Tuesday cleared the way for the Treasury Department’s entire DOGE team to access the federal government’s sensitive data systems that manage trillions of dollars in payments each year.

U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas lifted the final legal restriction barring four Treasury DOGE staffers from accessing Treasury’s payments infrastructure. Vargas relaxed her earlier order, finding the Trump administration had shown it set up a process to appropriately vet and train the employees.

The ruling marks a win for the Trump administration, which set off a political and legal firestorm earlier this year for granting access to the payment systems to Elon Musk’s DOGE operation. The payment systems contain sensitive financial data on tens of millions of American citizens and businesses.

New York Attorney General Letitia James and 18 other Democratic attorneys general had sued to block DOGE’s access to the systems.

In February, Vargas, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, largely sided with the states and prohibited DOGE staffers from accessing the system. At the time, she ruled that Treasury’s process for granting access to the sensitive data was so rushed and haphazard that it likely violated the law.

But the latest ruling on Tuesday significantly relaxes those restrictions, allowing Treasury DOGE team leader Tom Krause and DOGE members Linda Whitridge, Samuel Corcos, and Todd Newnam to access the agency’s payment and data systems.

Another DOGE staffer, Ryan Wunderly, had already been granted access to the data as part of a separate ruling by Vargas in April.

The decision came after the Trump administration submitted dozens of pages of declarations over the past several weeks from top Treasury officials that explained the steps the administration was taking to make sure that Treasury DOGE staffers are vetted, properly trained on data privacy and cybersecurity laws, and subject to guardrails to mitigate the risk that sensitive data will be exposed.

Still, Vargas did not go as far as the Trump administration had hoped in relaxing the restrictions.

She ordered Treasury to adhere to the protocols it promised for vetting and training DOGE employees. But Vargas said she wouldn’t require the agency to seek permission each time it wants to add new members to the DOGE team. She wrote in her order that “there is little utility in having this Court function as Treasury’s de facto human resources officer each time a new team member is onboarded.”

€5B deal on long-range weapons cooperation

Germany and Ukraine sign €5B deal on long-range weapons cooperation

The agreement signals a deepening of German-Ukrainian defense ties, with Berlin committing to co-develop weapons systems and finance critical battlefield infrastructure.

By Chris Lunday

Germany will deepen its military cooperation with Ukraine by supporting the purchase of long-range missiles produced in the war-ravaged nation, Chancellor Friedrich Merz said.

“Our defense ministers will sign a letter of intent today on procuring long-range weapon systems produced in Ukraine — so-called Long Range Fires,” Merz said Wednesday during a joint press conference with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Berlin. “There will be no restrictions on range.”

That builds on a broader €5 billion military aid package unveiled the same day by the German defense ministry. It includes German financing for the production of long-range weapons in Ukraine which are already in service with Ukrainian forces and can be deployed within weeks.

The package also covers new contracts for air defense systems, munitions, and logistical support, including maintenance infrastructure and satellite communications.

Wednesday's announcement comes just two days after Merz reignited Germany’s long-running Taurus missile debate by publicly lifting range restrictions on all Western-supplied weapons. 

Speaking on Monday at the WDR Europaforum, Merz said: “There are no more range limitations for weapons delivered to Ukraine. Neither from the Brits, nor the French, nor from us. Not from the Americans either.” He emphasized Ukraine’s right to hit military infrastructure on Russian territory.

The change could pave the way for Berlin to deliver the long-requested Taurus cruise missiles, a step repeatedly blocked by the previous government led by former Chancellor Olaf Scholz, over fears it would lead to escalation of the war. The Taurus system, with a range of over 500 kilometers, would enable high-precision strikes deep behind Russian lines.

Germany also confirmed it will finance a significant portion of Starlink satellite coverage in Ukraine, helping secure communications as Kyiv braces for increased Russian assaults.

“This marks the beginning of a new form of military-industrial cooperation between our countries,” Merz said, calling the partnership one with “great potential.” He refused to comment on specific weapons systems.

Dream on!

A big, beautiful EU trade deal with Trump? Dream on!

European politicians have no appetite to give the White House big concessions and revisit the inflammatory topics that dominated the TTIP talks a decade ago.

By Camille Gijs

Don't expect Europe and the United States to strike a far-reaching trade deal just because U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening to impose tariffs of as much as 50 percent on EU goods by July 9.

Europe has no political appetite to revisit the nightmare of its last attempt to forge a sweeping EU-U.S. trade pact — the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Hailed back in 2013 as an attempt to forge a Western trade bloc against China, the TTIP talks buckled three years later as European politicians found it an impossible sell.

Little has changed.

A rushed deal to satisfy America's core trade interests nearly a decade later would prove equally traumatic and toxic. France and Germany know their electorates have not tempered their hostility to chemically rinsed chicken and still fear U.S. corporates would use international arbitration clauses to undermine EU health and environmental standards.

So how can a full-blown trade war be averted by July 9? At most, a cosmetic mini-truce could be in the offing to give Trump a symbolic political win.

Trump is already celebrating that his tariff threat has forced the EU to stop "slow walking" and make a deal. While this mini deal may identify some low-hanging fruit, it is many miles from the vaulting ambition of TTIP, which envisioned regulatory alignment across the Atlantic.

Diplomats and officials say two separate tracks are now in play. EU trade chief Maroš Šefčovič and U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick will seek to cool tensions over metals, cars, pharmaceuticals and other sectors targeted by Washington’s trade investigations. A separate, more technical track will negotiate the baseline tariff, which is currently at 10 percent although Trump is threatening to lift it to 50 percent.

This isn't exactly new. Brussels has already offered to drop its (relatively low) tariffs on industrial goods and to team up on tackling the glut in Chinese exports.

To sweeten the deal, other potential tidbits include recognizing U.S. safety standards on cars and dropping duties on American ethanol, although both face political headwinds in the EU.

But it's all a far cry from discussing major agricultural concessions, the alignment of standards, or how multinationals can sue European governments — topics that proved fatal 10 years ago. In 2025, Paris and Berlin are being very clear on the limits of what can be agreed.

No TTIP redux

Germany’s new Chancellor Friedrich Merz, a convinced transatlanticist on a mission to save his country’s ailing car industry, has toned down his campaign claims that sealing a TTIP 2.0 “in the medium term” was a good idea.

“Today we know how valuable that could have been,” Merz said in early May after a call with Trump. “Sadly, that’s spilt milk.” 

French Finance Minister Éric Lombard dared to revive the ghost of TTIP — only to be put back in his box a day later by the office of French President Emmanuel Macron. The French don't want their restive farmers covering the Champs-Élysées with straw and manure.

Jean-Luc Demarty, head of the European Commission’s trade department during the TTIP negotiations, also shivered at the idea of a return to that kind of wide-ranging diplomacy. “That would be a very serious mistake. It would get us nowhere ... I led them for [several years] and I've seen that it was an impossible negotiation,” he told POLITICO. 

An added disincentive to making concessions to Trump is that he has shown he will happily tear up any deal that he strikes — as the Mexicans and Canadians have discovered. Even if a tariff-free TTIP structure had been in place, Trump would presumably have pushed for more.

“Being part of a free-trade agreement is no guarantee that you will not be subject to these tariffs. Even if TTIP existed, I don't know that that would certainly have prevented what's happening right now,” said Josh Lipsky, senior director at the Washington-based Atlantic Council think tank.

Fraying trust

Since taking office Jan. 20, Trump has antagonized the EU more than ever — slamming the bloc as “nastier” than China and insisting it was created to “screw” the United States. 

Brussels has meanwhile been frustrated as its appeals for universal tariff disarmament have fallen on deaf ears.

Its negotiating partner in Washington is also highly erratic.

“This is a different Trump administration: Under TTIP and under what happened straight afterward, there were still very experienced people on the U.S. side, even if one didn't like what [former U.S. Trade Representative] Robert Lighthizer said. He was still a very experienced trade negotiator,” said David Henig of the European Centre for International Political Economy. 

Today, “they don't know what they're looking for, but it doesn't seem like what they are looking for is likely to be any kind of an orthodox deal,” he added. 

So, in a bid to salvage what’s left of the €1.6 trillion transatlantic trade relationship, the EU is placing its bet on modest progress. If TTIP wasn't possible when negotiators were more or less pulling in the same direction 10 years ago, it's even less viable now.

“TTIP was already very hard to do at the time when we were actually negotiating it, even if at that point both sides shared common objectives,” said Ignacio García Bercero, who was then the EU’s chief negotiator for the deal. 

“It became very clear that it was going to become extremely hard to find a way to reach an agreement that the European Union would have been able to present as being balanced. And that was in totally different circumstances than the ones that we are having today,” he said.

Doomed deal

Puffed by its proponents as the biggest bilateral trade agreement ever, TTIP initially seemed straightforward, such were the huge potential economic benefits for both sides. Then-trade commissioner Karel De Gucht said it would put up to an additional €545 in the pockets of European families every year. 

But a political backlash over the secrecy of the talks as well as worries over environmental, health and labor standards eventually doomed the agreement. 

An obscure arbitration scheme, known as the investor-to-state dispute settlement mechanism, heightened tensions because it was seen as giving disproportionate power to multinationals in challenging European rules. 

“It was a mistake. We should never have negotiated about that issue with the United States,” García Bercero said. 

Bad deal then. Bad deal now.

Trump had originally set an impossible June 1 deadline to do a deal before 50 percent tariffs kicked in. After a “very nice call” with von der Leyen, however, the two sides pushed the deadline to July 9. 

But the EU’s own red lines, such as respect for global trade rules, suggest a bona fide deal won't be in reach. 

“If you are the EU and you wish to guard all your regulatory space, you wish to guard your agricultural sector, but you also wish to [get rid of the] 10 percent tariffs, or his tariffs on steel or anything … You've got big demands there if you're the EU,” said Henig from the European Centre for International Political Economy.

An agreement recognizing U.S. standards on car safety — something that also sank the TTIP talks — could help bring more American cars to the EU, although it’s a long shot and has been under fire from safety groups. 

Brussels could also take a page from the U.K.’s agreement with Trump and allow U.S. ethanol into the EU duty-free, but the European industry is already warning of adverse consequences. 

“A similar deal with the EU would mean the same threat for the industry in Europe, where farmers are subject to stricter regulations and without [genetically modified] crops,” said a spokesperson for ePURE, the European renewable ethanol association. 

All in all, even if the EU is determined to make some kind of deal work this time around to appease Trump, the mood is one of pervasive fatalism that the U.S. will not prove an honest broker.

“It was a bad deal the first time around. They rolled over us and they would do it again,” an EU diplomat said.  

China hacking Czech foreign ministry

Prague accuses China of hacking Czech foreign ministry

EU also slams Beijing for “malicious cyber campaign.”

By Antoaneta Roussi

The Czech government on Wednesday condemned China for carrying out a cyberattack against its foreign ministry exposing thousands of unclassified emails.

Czechia said that the Chinese state-sponsored group Advanced Persistent Threat 31 (APT31) targeted the foreign ministry from 2022 — the year the country held the rotating EU presidency — and was able to read unclassified emails sent between embassies and EU institutions. 

The Czech foreign minister, Jan Lipavský, said he would summon the Chinese ambassador immediately to explain the findings and tell him this would damage the countries' bilateral relations.

 "With today’s move, we have exposed China, which has long been working to undermine our resilience and democracy,” Lipavský said. “Through cyberattacks, information manipulation, and propaganda, it interferes in our society — and we must defend ourselves against that.” 

It is the first time the Czech government has attributed a national cyberattack to a state-backed actor.

An investigation conducted by the Security Information Service, Military Intelligence, Office for Foreign Relations and Information, and National Cyber and Information Security Agency (NUKIB) provided Czech authorities with a high degree of certainty about who was behind the targeting of the ministry.

APT31 is run by China’s ministry of state security from the city of Wuhan, according to the U.S. justice department.

The group has been accused of high-profile attacks in the past, including targeting the personal emails of campaign staff working for U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden in 2020. In 2024, the U.K. and U.S. imposed sanctions on individuals tied to APT31.

The alleged Chinese hack sparked outrage in Brussels, among the EU's top brass and at NATO headquarters.

“The European Union and its Member States, together with international partners, stand in solidarity with Czechia regarding the malicious cyber campaign that targeted its Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” the EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said in a statement.

“We call upon all states, including China, to refrain from such behavior, to respect international law and to adhere to the UN norms and principles, including those related to critical infrastructure," Kallas added.

"Cyber threat actors persistently seek to destabilize the Alliance. We remain committed to expose and counter the substantial, continuous and increasing cyber threat, including to our democratic systems and critical infrastructure. We are determined to further improve our capabilities and resilience and to employ the necessary capabilities in order to deter, defend against and counter the full spectrum of cyber threats to support each other," the NATO military alliance said in a statement Wednesday.

Irritates

Zelenskyy: Putin irritates Trump more than I do

“I may say unpleasant things, but I tell the truth […] And he may sometimes say very nice things, but those things are lies,” says Ukrainian leader.

By Veronika Melkozerova and Yurii Stasiuk

Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that despite his rocky relationship with Donald Trump, he thinks the White House is still more irritated by Vladimir Putin than him.

“I may say unpleasant things, but I tell the truth. And I say what I think. And he [Putin] may sometimes say very nice things, but those things are lies. And I think that for intelligent people, those who lie are more concerning,” the Ukrainian president told a group of journalists in Kyiv on Tuesday.

“In a partnership, you can be very uncomfortable, but be partners. I think the issue with Putin is that if you think you are in a dialogue, you are really alone,” added Zelenskyy.

Zelenskyy said he thinks that President Trump and his administration — looking for a quick cessation of hostilities — have now understood that Putin does not want to end his full-scale invasion of Ukraine the way the White House wants it to.

While he has continued to scold Zelenskyy, Trump warned Putin on Tuesday that he is “playing with fire” as the Kremlin continues to bombard Ukraine with a record number of drones.

 “What Vladimir Putin doesn’t realize is that if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He’s playing with fire!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

Zelenskyy — who had an infamous blow-up with Trump in the Oval Office in late February — still wants the U.S. to impose further sanctions on Russia, as only intensifying pressure can force Moscow to think about peace, he told the assembled journalists.

While the EU approved a 17th round of sanctions following Russia’s refusal of Ukraine’s 30-day ceasefire offer, the U.S. has not imposed new penalties since. Following his meeting with Trump at the Vatican in late April, however, the Ukrainian president became more confident the White House would impose sanctions on Russia if Putin refuses to agree to a ceasefire. 

Zelenskyy reiterated his willingness to engage in dialogue with the Russians “in any format,” including direct talks with Putin or with Trump’s mediation. Still, he would prefer Americans were present at talks about a ceasefire and Europeans at talks about postwar security guarantees, since they will be the ones providing those commitments. 

Zelenskyy said he is also ready to talk “almost anywhere in the civilized world.” While Russia has floated Belarus as a possible venue, Zelenskyy called it an “unserious” proposal, given the country’s support for Moscow’s invasion. He considers Turkey, Switzerland and the Vatican to be the most likely locations for negotiations.

By the summer of 2026, the Russian economy will feel the impact of sanctions, and military production will start shrinking, Zelensky said, expressing hope that by June 2026 the war will end. 

An end to the war, however, requires Russian political will. In early May, Moscow refused Ukraine’s offer to cease all hostilities for 30 days and has dramatically escalated drone and rocket attacks in recent weeks. And if the world stops putting pressure on Russia, it will simply go on with its war effort, Zelensky said.

For now, Russian forces are preparing for a major new offensive, Zelenskyy warned, and have gathered more than 50,000 troops next to the border with Ukraine’s northeastern region of Sumy.

On Tuesday, American special envoy to Ukraine Keith Kellogg said that Kyiv has provided the U.S. with a list of conditions for a peace deal with Russia.

Moscow is working on its own peace memorandum, the country’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Wednesday, and will make an announcement about the next round of negotiations with Ukraine soon.

Pardon a reality TV couple convicted in $36M fraud... Do you feel cheated???

Trump to pardon a reality TV couple convicted in $36M fraud

Todd and Julie Chrisley’s daughter, Savannah, spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2024.

By Gregory Svirnovskiy

President Donald Trump plans to pardon the stars of a reality TV show who were convicted of bank and tax fraud.

The pending pardons of Todd and Julie Chrisley, whose extravagant lifestyle was chronicled in a show that ran for 10 seasons on the USA Network, were announced Tuesday in a video released by the White House of Trump calling their daughter, a conservative influencer, to give them the news.

“It’s a great thing because your parents are going to be free and clean and I hope we can do it by tomorrow,” Trump said in the call to Savannah Chrisley. “Is that OK? We’ll try getting it done tomorrow. So I don’t know them but give them my regards and wish them a good 

The act of clemency is just the latest example of Trump’s unusual use of his pardon powers, which in recent days has been used to clear the slate for a Virginia sheriff convicted of bribery and a former nursing home executive convicted of tax offenses and days away from starting his prison sentence.

In November 2022, Todd and Julie Chrisley were sentenced to prison terms of 12 and seven years, respectively, for conspiring to defraud banks in Atlanta of more than $36 million and evading taxes.

“As this sentencing proves, when you lie, cheat, and steal, justice is blind to your fame, fortune, and position,” Keri Farley, FBI Atlanta Special Agent in Charge, said in a statement after the Chrisleys’ sentencing. “The FBI is proud to work with our law enforcement partners at the IRS and the U.S. Attorney’s office to pursue and prosecute individuals that are driven by greed to evade the law.”.

Savannah Chrisley has long used the public domain to fight for her parents’ release. She has billed herself as an advocate for prison reform, and spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2024.

She continued to plead her parents’ case in a May interview with Fox News host Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law.

“When I saw obviously what the president was going through, what my family has gone through, it was eerily similar,” Chrisley said. “And I knew I just had to speak up. And that’s why I chose to speak at the RNC.”

Trump concurred.

“They were given a pretty harsh treatment, based on what I’m hearing,” he told Chrisley in the video.

On Monday, the president announced he was pardoning former Sheriff Scott Jenkins, who was convicted of federal bribery charges, in a post on his social media platform. Jenkins was sentenced to serve 10 years in prison. But Trump intervened, calling the sheriff a victim of a “corrupt and weaponized Biden DOJ.”

Fire warning shots as Palestinians

Israeli troops fire warning shots as Palestinians overwhelm new Gaza food center

The distribution hub outside Gaza’s southernmost city had been opened the day before by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

By Associated Press

Chaos erupted on the second day of aid operations by a new U.S.-backed group in Gaza as desperate Palestinians overwhelmed a center distributing food on Tuesday, breaking through fences. Nearby Israeli troops fired warning shots, sending people fleeing in panic.

An AP journalist heard Israeli tank and gunfire and saw a military helicopter firing flares. The Israeli military said its troops fired the warning shots in the area outside the center and that “control over the situation was established.”

At least three injured Palestinians were seen by The Associated Press being brought from the scene, one of them bleeding from his leg.

The distribution hub outside Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah had been opened the day before by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has been slated by Israel to take over aid operations. The U.N. and other humanitarian organizations have rejected the new system, saying it won’t be able to meet the needs of Gaza’s 2.3 million people and allows Israel to use food as a weapon to control the population. They have also warned of the risk of friction between Israeli troops and people seeking supplies.

Palestinians have become desperate for food after nearly three months of Israeli blockade pushed Gaza to the brink of famine.

Palestinians at the scene told AP that small numbers of people made their way to the GHF center Tuesday morning and received food boxes. As word spread, large numbers of men, women and children walked for several miles from the sprawling tent camps along Gaza’s Mediterranean coast. To reach the hub, they had to pass through nearby Israeli military positions.

By the afternoon, hundreds of thousands were massed at the hub. Videos show the crowds funneled in long lines through chain-link fence passages. Two people said each person was searched and had their faces scanned for identification before being allowed to receive the boxes. Crowds swelled and turmoil erupted, with people tearing down fences and grabbing boxes. The staff at the site were forced to flee, they said.

The AP journalist positioned some distance away heard gunfire and rounds of tank fire. Smoke could be seen rising from where one round impacted. He saw a military helicopter overhead firing flares.

“There was no order, the people rushed to take, there was shooting, and we fled,” said Hosni Abu Amra, who had been waiting to receive aid. “We fled without taking anything that would help us get through this hunger.”

“It was chaos,” said Ahmed Abu Taha, who said he heard gunfire and saw Israeli military aircraft overhead. “People were panicked.”

Crowds were seen running from the site. A few managed to secure aid boxes — containing basic items like sugar, flour, pasta and tahini — but the vast majority left empty-handed.

In a statement, GHF said that because of the large number of Palestinians seeking aid, staff at the hub followed the group’s safety protocols and “fell back” to allow them to dissipate, then later resumed operations.

A spokesperson for the group told the AP that no shots were fired from GHF. Speaking on condition of anonymity in line with the group’s rules, the spokesperson said the protocols aim at “avoiding loss of life, which is exactly what happened.”

GHF uses armed private contractors to guard the hubs and the transportation of supplies. The hub is also close to Israeli military positions in the Morag Corridor, a band of territory across the breadth of Gaza that divides Rafah from the rest of the territory.

GHF has set up four hubs around Gaza to distribute food, two of which began operating on Monday — both of them in the Rafah area.

The U.N. and other humanitarian groups have refused to participate in GHF’s system, saying it violates humanitarian principles. They say it can be used by Israel to forcibly displace the population by requiring them to move near the few distribution hubs or else face starvation, which is a violation of international law. They have also opposed the use of facial recognition to vet recipients.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday commented on the turmoil at the Rafah center, saying, “There was some loss of control momentarily … happily we brought it under control.”

He repeated that Israel plans to move Gaza’s entire population to a “sterile zone” at the southern end of the territory while troops fight Hamas elsewhere.

Israel has said the new system is necessary because it claims Hamas has been siphoning off supplies that reach Gaza. The U.N. has denied that any significant diversion takes place.

Throughout the war, the U.N. and other aid groups have conducted a massive operation distributing food, medicine and other supplies to wherever Palestinians are located. Israel says GHF will replace that network, but the past week has allowed a trickle of aid to enter Gaza for the U.N. to distribute.

COGAT, the Israeli military agency in charge of coordinating aid, said on Tuesday that 400 trucks of supplies, mainly food, was waiting on the Gaza side of the main crossing from Israel, but that the U.N. had not collected them. It said Israel has extended the times for collection and expanded the routes that the U.N. can use inside Gaza.

Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the U.N. humanitarian office OCHA, told reporters in Geneva that agencies have struggled to pick up the supplies “because of the insecure routes that are being assigned to us by the Israeli authorities to use.” He said the amount of aid allowed the past week was “vastly insufficient.”