Child....

 

Using AI just makes YOU dumb.....

Apple finally lays out its AI plans with a brand new version of Siri

By Lisa Eadicicco

Apple on Monday announced an all-new version of Siri during its Worldwide Developers Conference, a move that could bring its roughly 15-year-old digital helper up to speed with rivals like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

The tech giant also announced performance improvements for its iPhone, Mac and iPad software and new child safety features. But the new Siri is the biggest indication yet of how Apple is revamping its products as more people use chatbots and AI agents for everyday tasks.

Many will be looking to see whether Apple’s history of turning nascent technologies into popular products will apply to AI, especially after the company’s AI ambitions have faced delays.

“If Apple delivers this well, Siri stops being a feature and becomes a new interaction layer for the iPhone, iPad, Mac and eventually future categories of hardware,” Francisco Jeronimo, a tech analyst for market research firm the International Data Corporation, told CNN over email.

Siri AI

The new Siri, which Apple is calling Siri AI, will be available on Apple devices both in a standalone app and throughout the company’s software. It will be able to analyze what’s on a user’s screen and incorporate information from a person’s Apple devices to better answer questions.

Apple plans to launch Siri AI in beta later this year. The company typically releases new software updates in the fall after giving developers and the public the chance to test them.

The company also says Siri will be able to factor personal information on a user’s iPhone into answers, such as referring to photos on a user’s phone when answering queries.

The new Siri will also have a more conversational chatbot-like interface and will work across Apple devices and apps.

Apple wants users to chat back-and-forth with Siri the way they do with ChatGPT for tasks like brainstorming and event planning, such as asking Siri for the schedule of upcoming World Cup games and then having the assistant plan a watch party. The new Siri app will let users revisit previous conversations.

The camera app will also have a new Siri mode that can answer questions and take actions based on what a user is pointing their camera at. At a restaurant, that could including a customer pointing the camera at the bill, selecting what they ordered and having Siri calculate what they owe. On Mac computers, it will soon be possible to select content on screen and then type to Siri to ask a question about the selected media.

The updates come after Google and OpenAI have launched tools that allow users to incorporate photos and other media into AI queries.

The company also noted that some features, like image generation, may have daily usage limits because they rely on powerful models, which are likely expensive to run.

Siri will also support more accurate dictation and more realistic voice options on certain devices, like the iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro and iPad and Mac models that run on Apple’s latest chips.

Apple also showed how it’s infusing more AI across apps like Messages, its Safari browser and its Home app for managing smart home devices. Apple Intelligence will be able to organize Safari tabs by topic, and users will be able to create new browser extensions with a prompt. The Messages app will suggest actions, like creating a reminder or a note, based on the content of a conversation. And the Home app will be able to analyze clips from connected cameras generate descriptions.

Apple’s AI setbacks

Apple has fallen behind in the AI race; its Siri overhaul has faced delays, and some features shown Monday were initially slated for last year. Its current AI tools for iPhones, iPads and Macs, called Apple Intelligence, aren’t distinctive enough to stand out from the competition.

Apple previously rolled out features for translating speech, helping users search for content displayed on their iPhone’s screen and generating custom emojis. But companies like Google and OpenAI are launching AI agents they say can handle entire tasks on a user’s behalf.

“(Apple hasn’t) done anything that really blows people away,” Gene Munster, cofounder and managing partner of tech investment firm Deepwater Asset Management, told CNN ahead of WWDC.

The upgraded Siri could help Apple catch up.

Apple is partnering with Google on the models that will power its new Siri and other features, the companies announced in January, which could significantly improve the digital assistant’s performance, according to Anurag Rana, senior equity analyst for software and IT services at Bloomberg Intelligence.

“Gemini models have been just on a tear,” Rana said to CNN before WWDC. “They have been doing really well right now.”

Investors and analysts have grilled Apple about its AI strategy on earnings calls over the past year. Although iPhone sales have been thriving, Wall Street wants to know how AI plays into the company’s long-term vision.

It will soon be up to incoming Apple CEO John Ternus, who currently oversees Apple’s hardware engineering and will take over as chief executive in September. Cook will transition into a new role as executive chairman of the board of directors.

Monday’s keynote was likely Cook’s last major event as CEO.

“On a personal note, some of the greatest highlights of my time as CEO have been events like this,” Cook said at the end of Apple’s presentation.

Dan Ives, global head of technology research for Wedbush Securities, called the Siri upgrades a “step in the right direction” for Apple’s AI strategy and said it sets up Cook to pass the baton to Ternus.

Apple’s large market share – more than 2.5 billion Apple devices are in use globally – could give it an edge in AI.

That could be Apple’s big opportunity. More than half of iPhones in use globally, or about 1 billion iPhones, don’t support Apple Intelligence since the technology is only available on the iPhone 15 Pro and later, according to Rana.

“They’re not going to mess it up,” Munster said. “They’ve got too much at stake to drop the ball.”

Just around the corner... A circle is one big never-ending corner.....

How many times has Trump claimed an Iran deal is around the corner?

Analysis by Aaron Blake

It’s been more than two months since President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire with Iran, saying at the time that the two sides were close to a deal.

Trump said on social media on April 7 that they were “very far along” but needed two weeks for “the Agreement to be finalized and consummated.” He concluded by saying that “it is an Honor to have this Longterm problem close to resolution.”

There was no resolution, of course. But Trump has nonetheless spent the two months since then continuing to suggest a deal was right around the corner. A lot.

Including the period before the ceasefire, he’s done it at least 38 times. That’s the number of times he’s said directly — in social media posts, public appearances and phone calls with the media — that a deal was nigh or claimed Iran was desperate to cut one.

There’s no indication that’s any more true today than it was back on April 7. But Trump keeps saying it, either because he’s delusional, trying to calm the financial markets or thinking he can will it into existence.

But it’s clearly not a claim people should take seriously anymore.

It began March 23, less than a month into the war. Trump was telling reporters outside Air Force One about supposed peace talks and cited “major points of agreement, I would ​say — almost all points of agreement.” (In fact, Iran denied negotiations.)

By the next day, he started trotting out what has become a common refrain: that Iran was desperate to cut a deal.

“I think we’re going to end it,” Trump added. “I can’t tell you for sure.”

By March 25, it became that Iran wanted to “make a deal so badly.” On March 26, at a Cabinet meeting, Iran was “begging to make a deal.”

(Despite being so anxious to cut that deal, Iran has somehow resisted for two and a half more months.)

By March 29, during a gaggle with reporters on Air Force One, Trump was asked if he foresaw clinching a deal in the next week, and he responded: “I do see a deal in Iran, yeah.”

Trump’s predictions started to grow more insistent at this point. On April 6, he said they had been “very close to a deal” before a setback.

The next day, he announced the ceasefire, which was originally supposed to last two weeks while the two sides hammered out an agreement.

A week later, on April 15, he told Fox Business, “I think it’s close to over, I view it as very close to over.”

“We’ll see what happens,” he added. “I think they want to make a deal very badly.”

The next few days, Trump practically assured it was over:

• “It’s looking very good that we’re going to make a deal with Iran, and it’s going to be a good deal,” he told reporters on April 16.
• By April 17, he claimed in three separate appearances that Iran had “agreed to everything,” that “I think we will get a deal in the next day or two,” and that, “I don’t think there’s too many significant differences.”
• And on April 20, in a post on Truth Social, he predicted “it will all happen, relatively quickly!”

Despite that not panning out, Iran was still “dying to make a deal” on April 30.

“When the war ends, which shouldn’t be too long …” he wagered to reporters on May 1.

Trump held back on his predictions for a spell, before announcing on May 18 that he was delaying military strikes for “two or three days” at the request of Middle Eastern countries, “because they think that they are getting very close to making a deal.”

At this point, even Trump seemed to acknowledge how often such predictions had gone awry.

“We’ve had periods of time where we had — we thought pretty much getting close to making a deal and it didn’t work out,” Trump said, before adding: “But this is a little bit different.”

It was not different. But he remained undeterred.

“We’re gonna end that war very quickly,” Trump said May 19 at a congressional picnic.

By May 23, he made the rounds much like he had on April 17. He said the administration was “getting a lot closer” to a deal. He said the deal was “largely negotiated, subject to finalization.” And he said the deal would be announced “shortly” and that the “final aspects” were being discussed.

On May 28, in an interview with his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, things were “close to a very good deal.”

And on Sunday, he assured that they were “very close to having a deal,” but that Iran and Israel were jeopardizing it by engaging in a side scuffle.

“We are very close to a final deal with Iran,” he told Axios. “It is going to be a good deal. I don’t want it to blow up because of what is happening now.”

It was at least the third time Trump told Axios that a deal was imminent.

And despite the tensions between Israel and Iran, Trump is still leaning in.

During a tele-rally for Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina on Monday, Trump predicted “total victory” in the next two weeks and said Iran was “willing to give us everything.”

Then, speaking to reporters early Tuesday after attending the NBA Finals in New York City, Trump said the sides were “in final throes of what will be a very, very good deal.”

“The strait will open up right away,” Trump added. “It’ll open up immediately upon signing, which could be in two or three days.”

White Refugees... Helps the whitey only...

US Accepts Only White Refugees For Sixth Consecutive Month

The Trump administration is spending more than $100 million to fight the “emergency” of “white genocide” in South Africa.

Alex Nguyen

Every single one of the 599 refugees the US admitted last month was a white South African, according to data the State Department’s Bureau of Population released Friday.

In fact, so was every other refugee admitted this year. Since October 1, 2025, the US has accepted 6,668 refugees. Of those, 6,665 were white South Africans. Three—admitted last November—were from Afghanistan. No other refugees were admitted.

That data is backed up by the US Refugee Admissions Program, a federal public-private interagency collaboration program that works on refugee resettlement.

In October, the Trump administration announced that it would cut the number of refugees admitted per year to the US to 7,500—practically all of whom will be white.

A country that made its name as a haven for immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, the United States has long accepted refugees in numbers an order of magnitude greater—and from all over the world. The Trump figures mark a precipitous drop from from fiscal years 2022-2024; under Biden, in keeping with tradition, the annual limit was 125,000.

A presidential memo from September announced Trump’s intentions: that the refugees accepted “shall primarily be among Afrikaners from South Africa” and “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands.”

The Trump administration sees Afrikaners, an South African ethnic group descended primarily from European settlers, as victims of white “genocide”—a racist conspiracy theory promoted by many on the far right, notably Elon Musk. 

In May, the US increased the number of white South Africans it planned to admit by 10,000, to 17,500, claiming that “unforeseen developments in South Africa created an emergency refugee situation”—including South African immigration officials raiding a US refugee processing center in the country, arresting seven Kenyan nationals whom they alleged were working at the facility illegally. 

A spokesperson for South Africa’s foreign ministry said to the New York Times that same month that “the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy.” And as my colleague Noah Lanard wrote at the time, the White House “has cut off aid to South Africa based on its specious claim about discrimination against white South Africans.”

The State Department said the estimated cost of resettling those additional 10,000 Afrikaner refugees would be $100 million. 

It’s yet another way the US under Trump continues to ostentatiously demonstrate who it deems worthy of aid, and who it does not. 

Blows the whistle on Bari Weiss’ CBS News

“Can We Make the Protesters Look More Violent?”

60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley blows the whistle on Bari Weiss’ CBS News.

Sophie Hurwitz

Scott Pelley spent 37 years at CBS News, only to be fired last week after coming into conflict with Free Press founder Bari Weiss, who took control of the network last October. In a New York Times sit-down interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro published Sunday, Pelley said Weiss personally interfered with the network’s coverage of the ICE officer who killed Renée Good in Minneapolis.

Pelley told Garcia-Navarro that, hours before an episode of 60 Minutes on the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti was set to air, Weiss sent an email to his boss asking for changes to the episode. “Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”

On June 3, Pelley posted on Instagram that “New management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.” Now, it’s clear that story was about the ICE agent who killed Renée Good: video of Good’s final moments posted by CBS Evening News does not in fact show her driving toward an officer.

A CBS spokesperson told the New York Times that Weiss’ comments “had no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair, and accurate as possible.”

“My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration,” Pelley said. “Constantly looking out for the views of the president.” But that, to him, wasn’t the worst part. “The bigger problem, Lulu, frankly, is not any kind of political influence,” he told Garcia-Navarro. “The problem was the incompetence. You don’t break a deadline. That episode came within 19 minutes of not making it to air.”

CBS has previously pulled 60 Minutes segments, including one in December reporting on the Trump administration deporting people to a maximum security prison in El Salvador.

Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison—a key ally of President Donald Trump—installed Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS shortly after buying her website, The Free Press, for a reported $150 million.

Threat to Us All

ICE at the World Cup Is a Threat to Us All

Civil society groups have warned anyone attending: expect human rights violations.

Alex Nguyen

We’re less than a week away from the first match of the FIFA Men’s World Cup, with tensions mounting over the United States’ role as one of the host countries, and it remains to be seen just how the Department of Homeland Security will respond to what it deems threats—or how active ICE will be at the tournament.

On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News that “every single” agency would be on site. “We’re going to have facial recognition, right. If we have people coming in that’s on the terrorist watchlist, we’re going to collapse on them. That’s not going to [just] be ICE, that could be state police that collapse on them. We’re all working together.”

ICE’s facial recognition systems can misidentify people and generate false matches—and the agency reportedly places smartphone-based facial recognition matches ahead of physical evidence including birth certificates.

Perhaps to counter potential criticisms, Mullin stated that ICE will be there “not for immigration, but for terrorist threats” and that “for years, ICE has been around and no one knew who they were.”

Several cities hosting World Cup matches have announced that they would not cooperate with ICE enforcement, including Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Seattle. On Monday, LA County Sheriff Robert Luna claimed that Mullin personally told him that federal agents would not conduct civil immigration enforcement “at any of the games.” But the federal government has increasingly deployed the criminal legal system against people they allege to have violated immigration law, with little regard for their alleged offenses and despite the fact that unauthorized presence in the US is a civil offense, not a criminal one.

Even giving Mullin the benefit of the doubt—which may not be the best move—his statement leaves ample room for loopholes: will it apply between games? To areas outside the stadiums? That uncertainty impacts fans, visitors, families of players, journalists—all of whom face a heightened risk of human rights violations, according to a joint travel advisory issued by more than 120 civil society groups in April. Among the risks listed in their press release:

• Arbitrary denial of entry and risk of arrest, detention and/or deportation
• Expanded restrictions and limitation on travel and entry to the U.S.
• Invasive social media screening and searches of electronic devices
• Violent and unconstitutional immigration enforcement, including racial profiling
• Suppression of speech and protest and increased surveillance
• Cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment – and even death – while in ICE detention or custody

Given that ominous warning—and the Trump administration’s tendency to label political opponents and immigrants of all stripes as “criminal aliens,” “domestic terrorists,” or otherwise dangerous—a secondhand verbal promise that there will be no civil immigration enforcement is not reassuring.

Farming in Iowa

The “Lobe Rangers” Are Fighting to Make Farming in Iowa More Sustainable

“From my perspective, it’s not radical. It’s common sense.”

Anika Jane Beamer

James Hepp is sick of excuses.

The 36-year-old farmer manages about 1,600 acres of corn, soy, and small grains in northern Iowa. He keeps a close eye on his bottom line and says he wants to build a business that his three young children would be foolish not to join. For Hepp, a first-generation farmer, that means doing things differently from his neighbors.

In an effort to preserve soil health, he tills only narrow strips of land, leaving much of his field undisturbed. Hepp also avoids applying nitrogen fertilizer when he’s not growing crops.

At first, Hepp’s approach to farming focused on cutting costs. It let him make fewer passes with the tractor, saving money by using less diesel, herbicides, and fertilizer. The benefits for soil and water quality were a bonus.

But after more than a decade of hearing government agencies and ag commodity groups in Iowa urge farmers to fall in line with the state’s voluntary Nutrient Reduction Strategy and adopt conservation practices that could limit the nitrogen and phosphorus runoff fouling waterways, Hepp is fed up with inaction.

“You know, the Nutrient Reduction Strategy has been around for what, 13 years now?” said Hepp, often held up as a role model for his runoff-reducing efforts. “If you’re not doing it now, I don’t know what’s going to make you do it besides regulation.” 

Hepp represents one-third of the “Lobe Rangers,” a trio of corn and soy growers in Iowa’s flat and fertile Des Moines Lobe who have taken to social media to highlight the enormous gap between the conservation goals outlined in Iowa’s strategy for nutrient loss and the actual adoption of conservation practices on cropland. Fifth-generation farmers Matthew Bormann and Zack Smith round out the squad.

Bormann, Hepp and Smith are hardly the first Iowans to call for policies that target the environmental footprint of a relatively unregulated industry. Regulation has been a rallying cry in the last year for environmental groups, politicians and citizens who fear the state’s poor water quality could be linked to its rising cancer rates.

But as award-winning farmers and former county Farm Bureau board members who’ve made a living growing thousands of acres of Iowa’s two biggest commodity crops, Bormann, Hepp, and Smith represent a different demographic in the reform camp: industry insiders.

In March, the men began posting short videos to Facebook demonstrating regenerative practices at work on their farms and calling for policy interventions to improve water quality. Their posts quickly gained traction on social media feeds across the state.

As Iowa grapples with a worsening clean-water crisis fueled by agricultural pollution, the Lobe Rangers see themselves as proof that regulation won’t herald the downfall of Iowa farmers. 

“We’re doing this and it works,” Hepp said. “Like, what do you mean that you can’t afford to do it?”

Last year, farmers in Iowa grew nearly 3 billion bushels of corn and 600 million bushels of soybeans. That’s enough grain to fill over 7,000 miles of railcars, a train that could stretch from the US East to West coast twice over. 

But the large amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer that farmers are applying in the state have unwanted consequences, often leaching off fields to fuel algal blooms or unsafe nitrate levels in the state’s waterways before traveling south and harming the Gulf of Mexico.

In 2013, Iowa unveiled its Nutrient Reduction Strategy as a set of guidelines to stem the flow of chemicals from farmland into waterways and public drinking water sources. Since its inception, as in most agricultural states, the strategy has relied strictly on voluntary farm conservation efforts. 

State programs and federal grants through the US Department of Agriculture offer financial incentives and technical support for farmers who adopt conservation practices, like planting cover crops or adding buffer strips along waterways on their farms. 

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and state Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig doubled down on those incentives in a legislative package revealed in early May, which includes an additional $52 million to expand on-farm conservation in central Iowa and $100 million for public water treatment infrastructure.

A large white man in a blue shirt kneels in a green farm field, touching the earth atop one of the rows.

On his northern Iowa farm, James Hepp plants cover crops after each harvest. Anika Jane Beamer/ICN

Critics, including the Lobe Rangers, say the favored voluntary approach has done little to improve Iowa’s water quality.  “People want clean water. If that’s the case, we need to have policy that gives us a mathematical chance of that happening,” said Smith, sheltering in his farm shop before a spring storm. “We don’t have anything close to that right now.”

Scenarios outlined in the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy in 2013 estimated that at least 60 percent of the state’s cropland would need to be planted with cover crops in the off-season to meet the state’s goal of 45 percent less nitrogen and phosphorus in major waterways by 2035. Yet last year, only about 17 percent of the state’s corn and soy fields were planted with cover crops.

“This sort of thing doesn’t get said by Republicans,” Smith said.

That discrepancy isn’t talked about enough, said Bormann, a former president of his county Farm Bureau and winner of a “Young Farmer Achievement Award” from the Iowa Farm Bureau in 2013. 

“Right now, it’s easy to stick your head in the sand, because there’s no consequences, you know,” Bormann said. But Iowans must “start talking about it,” he added. “It’s just going to make agriculture better.”

While the Lobe Rangers’ posts often spark conversations among farmers in the comments, they aren’t trying to win over their peers, Hepp said. 

Instead, the men are running their social media campaign to target politicians, political candidates and the voting public.

The three farmers think they are a valuable resource for lawmakers who fear hurting, or being accused of hurting, Iowa agriculture.

“We’re not tree huggers. We’re…farmers and, you know, we’re actually doing it. We’re actually doing it to scale,” Bormann said. “We can tell you what works, what doesn’t, what it’s actually going to take.”

Meanwhile, many of the organizations that have historically drawn attention to Iowa’s clean water crisis are “left-leaning groups” that get discounted because of their political bent or advocacy history, Smith said. “And that’s really unfortunate, because it doesn’t mean their ideas aren’t good,” he said. 

So when the Lobe Rangers penned an op-ed in the Des Moines Register in April, calling on state legislators to restore funding to a water quality sensor network that’s relied on philanthropic grants since 2023, Smith thought the men needed to note their political affiliations: two Republicans and one independent. 

“We want [politicians] to know that there is a group of farmers that know we have a problem, and that there are solutions,” he said.

In their mission to connect with political candidates, they’ve found common ground with Chris Jones, a career water scientist and Democrat running an underdog campaign for state secretary of agriculture. For years, Jones has been an unflinching advocate of regulatory fixes for nutrient pollution.

His 28-point policy solution for cleaner water includes a ban on fall tillage of cropland, taxation or restrictions on the use of fertilizer and manure, and a requirement that rented farmland be planted with cover crops at the owner’s expense.

“It is very important that we see that mainstream farmers can do it right,” Jones told Inside Climate News. “These guys, they show that you can survive by doing different things.” 

Jones regularly reposts the Lobe Rangers’ videos to his campaign Facebook page. “What they’re doing could be perceived as somewhat radical,” he said. “From my perspective, it’s not radical. It’s common sense.”

Though they now have nearly 3,000 Facebook followers, none of the Lobe Rangers are particularly keen influencers. They’ve sought video-editing help from Smith’s college-aged daughters and developed their logo (a sort of Zorro and Lone Ranger hybrid, standing among stalks of corn with his sword drawn) using AI.

But the men aren’t entirely new to being spokesmen for the agricultural industry.

Each has been the subject of glowing profiles about their use of regenerative practices, written and shared by trade groups such as the Iowa Corn Growers Association and the Iowa Farm Bureau.

When industry leaders highlight the conservation efforts of just one or two farmers, it sends the wrong message about the reality of Iowa agriculture, Bormann said. 

“It’s a PR thing where it makes it sound like Iowa farmers are doing such practices,” Bormann said. “And the truth is, they’re not.”

Just last year, Hepp received the Iowa Farm Bureau’s Young Farmer Leadership award. Now, his relationship with the group, which favors the current voluntary nutrient-pollution efforts, has cooled off. “We’ve kind of got our heads on the chopping block,” he said. 

In an email to Inside Climate News, the Iowa Farm Bureau affirmed its ongoing support for Hepp.

The group invited him to upcoming farm bureau meetings and a July economic summit, a spokesperson wrote. And last summer, farm bureau staff attended a conservation field day on Hepp’s farm “in support of his efforts.” 

“We value the opportunity to share a range of perspectives and practices that help farmers learn from one another,” the organization wrote.

Many farmers in Iowa’s aging agricultural economy are fearful of change, Hepp said. Adopting conservation practices is tantamount to admitting you were wrong.

NGC 2359

Thor not only has his own day (Thursday), but a helmet in the heavens. Popularly called Thor's Helmet, NGC 2359 is a hat-shaped cosmic cloud with wing-like appendages. Heroically sized even for a Norse god, Thor's Helmet is about 30 light-years across. In fact, the cosmic head-covering is more like an interstellar bubble, blown by a fast wind from the bright, massive star near the bubble's center. Known as a Wolf-Rayet star, the central star is an extremely hot giant thought to be in a brief, pre-supernova stage of evolution. NGC 2359 is located about 15,000 light-years away toward the constellation of the Great Overdog. This sharp image is a combination of deep images taken in light emitted by hydrogen (red) and oxygen (blue). The star in the center of Thor's Helmet is expected to explode in a spectacular supernova sometime within the next few thousand years.

OK... Does this NOW prove he is fucking insane????????

Trump says he never promised ‘no new wars’

“I didn't promise anything,” President Donald Trump said in an interview with NBC's Kristen Welker.

By Cheyanne M. Daniels

Amid ongoing scrutiny over the U.S. war with Iran, President Donald Trump on Sunday defended his foreign policy stance — and denied that he ever campaigned on the promise of “no new wars.”

In a wide-ranging interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker that aired on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Trump said he built a “tremendous military.”

“First of all, I didn’t guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?” Trump said. “I built our military. I inherited a terrible military. We had no equipment. We had nothing. I built a tremendous military. When you say I promised, I didn’t promise anything.”

Trump said he doesn’t like “endless wars” but added that the current conflict with Iran “is not an endless war,” asserting that the Vietnam War lasted for 19 years “because of stupid people.”

“We’re there for a few months and the threat is largely over,” Trump said. “Soon, it will be over. But you cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon, or they will blow you up. There will be no Kristen. There will be no NBC. There will be no ‘Meet the Press.’”

Throughout his campaigns for president, Trump has repeatedly criticized the U.S.’s involvement in lengthy military action in Middle Eastern countries, including lambasting former President George W. Bush for the war in Iraq during a 2016 GOP debate.

While campaigning in Pennsylvania in 2024, Trump told rallygoers: “I will not send you to fight and die in stupid foreign wars that never end.” He reiterated the promise in his 2024 victory speech, stating at the time: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

And Trump’s official White House biography also states that one of the president’s top priorities is “putting a stop to endless wars.”

Trump on Sunday denied that the U.S. is at war with Iran, telling Welker he does not “consider” the current situation a war.

“I don’t define it at all. I don’t think about it. I just do what I have to do,” he said.

Little puss-boy runs away....

Trump ends NBC interview over discussion of ‘crooked’ elections

He scolded host Kristen Welker: “You're a one-sided crooked network."

By Cheyanne M. Daniels

President Donald Trump stormed out of an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker after a heated exchange over “crooked” elections.

Orange fucking turd... Stupid orange turd...

During the pre-recorded interview, which aired Sunday on “Meet the Press,” Trump also attacked the integrity of the press, including the show he was appearing on.

He claimed the Biden administration had “sent people to jail who did nothing wrong.” Welker pushed back, stating that there has been no evidence to substantiate the president’s allegations, before attempting to steer the conversation toward acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Trump, however, doubled down.

“There’s a lot of evidence,” he said. “There’s tremendous evidence. There’s nothing but evidence.”

“Well, it’s not been presented in a court of law,” Welker replied. Trump then argued the 2020 election was rigged — a common refrain of the president’s — as he alleged rigged elections are currently taking place in California.

Republicans, he said, are “dropping fast because it’s a rigged election.” Welker questioned what evidence the president had to back up his claims of “cheating” in California’s elections.

“They’re crooked just like you’re crooked, your press is crooked. And ‘Meet the Press’ is crooked,” Trump replied.

“To be fair, I’m not crooked,” Welker said. “But let’s continue.”

Trump then accused Welker of playing “right into their hands then.”

“You play right into their hands with this stuff. You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged,” he said before attacking her credibility. “You’re a one-sided crooked network. Sorry. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough.”

Welker pleaded for Trump to continue the interview, pointing out she and her team had traveled all the way to Wisconsin for the interview, but Trump declined.

“You ought to straighten out your press, because you know what? A country can never be great with a dishonest press,” he said.

After the interview aired, Welker said she spoke with Trump on Saturday and he has agreed to return for a follow-up interview. She did not specify where or when that interview would take place.

Face progressive challenger

Bass will face progressive challenger in LA mayor runoff

Incumbent Karen Bass will compete with City Councilmember Nithya Raman in November after Spencer Pratt failed to advance from the primary.

By Liam Dillon

Karen Bass, the embattled Los Angeles mayor, has been forced into a runoff against progressive challenger Nithya Raman, after Spencer Pratt failed to advance from the primary in the nation’s second-largest city.

Pratt, the former reality television personality whose mayoral campaign attracted wall-to-wall tabloid coverage, was in third place on Monday. Bass will instead contend with a challenge from Raman, a Democratic city council member and her former ally, who has built a campaign around what she has cast as the incumbent’s management failings, including during and after the January 2025 wildfire in the Pacific Palisades.

“For too long, City Hall has prioritized giving political advantage to powerful interests that fund elections. Meanwhile, working people pay the price in higher rents, depleted services, and a city that has stopped working for them,” Raman said in a statement Monday after the Associated Press race call.

“If you’re as frustrated by the broken status quo as I am, I hope you’ll join our movement to build a city that works for everyone.”

Raman, 44, has argued that Los Angeles needs a stronger hand to address its housing and homelessness crises, emergency response times and struggles in Hollywood production. She’s released detailed housing, small business, transportation and climate plans with an eye toward overhauling the city’s bureaucracy.

Pratt, a 42-year-old Republican, became Bass’ chief antagonist after his home and thousands of others burned down in the massive wildfires. A political novice, Pratt declared his candidacy on the fire’s one-year anniversary at a “They Let Us Burn” rally.

Pratt’s relentless social media posting and viral AI videos created by supporters that feature the candidate as an avenging superhero turned him into a serious contender to make the runoff. He raised $3.3 million through mid-May, more than Bass and Raman.

But Pratt’s inexperience, dystopian description of life in the city and, most significantly, his party affiliation doomed him. While Pratt emphasized that the race is nonpartisan, just 15 percent of city voters are registered Republican, and he attracted support from President Donald Trump and numerous other conservative figures.

Pratt’s demise hardly clears the way for Bass’ reelection. A recent poll from UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies found Raman with an edge over Bass in a head-to-head general election matchup, with 32 percent saying they’d vote for Raman and 28 percent supporting Bass.

Bass, 72, is the first mayoral incumbent to be pushed to a runoff since 2005. She was on a diplomatic trip to Ghana when the wildfire erupted and has had a wavering response to the crisis. Her approval ratings have not recovered since the blazes, with 57 percent of voters viewing her unfavorably, according to the IGS survey. By contrast, about 35 percent of voters surveyed had an unfavorable view of Raman.

After better-known potential candidates decided not to run against Bass, Raman entered the race hours before the deadline in February.

Raman was the first in what’s become a wave of progressive LA city leaders elected since 2020. In that year’s race, she defeated an incumbent councilmember for the first time in nearly two decades and was the first candidate endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America to win public office in Los Angeles. She won more votes than any other councilmember in the city’s history.

Raman was reelected two years ago despite a redistricting effort that changed many of the neighborhoods she represented and getting outspent by challengers who argued she was too progressive.

Bass has retained the support of the city’s political establishment, including other city councilmembers and key labor and business groups. But Raman’s showing and Bass’ low favorability numbers sets up the councilmember as a formidable threat.

They nickel and dime the projects... But the contractors are corrupt...

NASA quietly talking to Congress about more moon money

The agency has begun reaching out to lawmakers as it pushes to meet President Trump’s moon landing timeline.

By Audrey Decker

NASA has begun quietly lobbying Congress for a major cash infusion — perhaps as much as several billion dollars — as the agency pushes to meet President Donald Trump’s ambitious order to land astronauts on the moon in 2028.

The exact details of the request are in flux and the discussions are still preliminary, according to two congressional staffers and one industry representative. But the agency needs the money to pay for redesigning a moon landing spacecraft, and after a disastrous explosion on Blue Origin’s launchpad in Cape Canaveral jeopardized key lunar missions.

Final costs also haven’t been nailed down.

But one congressional staffer, who, like others, was granted anonymity to discuss the tentative plans, put the request at “a few billion dollars.” The money could be tacked on to a future reconciliation bill, or possibly hitch a ride on a standalone supplemental spending measure, although GOP leaders have expressed doubts about a third party-line spending package.

The agency faces a huge time and spending crunch to meet Trump’s goals to land American astronauts on the moon and start building a lunar base. Without an influx of new cash, NASA could pull money from other programs, but it’s not clear what initiatives the agency would be able to cut.

The extra money would help NASA pay for a redesigned lunar lander — which would be simplified to meet agency deadlines — that would ferry astronauts down to the moon’s surface, according to the two congressional staffers. The agency aims to test new lunar landers in 2027 ahead of a crewed landing on the moon in 2028.

The push also comes after a huge explosion on Blue Origin’s only launchpad. The agency was banking on using the company’s New Glenn rocket to land cargo and crew on the moon, but with the launchpad out of commission for the foreseeable future, NASA is exploring new lander spacecraft designs and alternative launch vehicles.

Finding a legislative vehicle will be tricky, particularly given that even GOP lawmakers are skeptical they can pull off another partisan budget bill ahead of August recess. Republicans are trying to pass a second reconciliation bill this week to fund immigration enforcement, while readying a third package within the next few weeks — following last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“After the immense success of Artemis II, NASA has routinely fielded inbounds on how Congress can be most helpful in achieving President Trump’s national space policy which directs the agency to return to the Moon, build the Base, and prepare for where we go next,” the agency said in a statement. “As a result, NASA is in constant communication with lawmakers.”

Blue Origin and SpaceX have contracts to develop lunar landers, and last year NASA instructed both companies to see how they can simplify their offerings to speed up the delivery of the cutting-edge spacecraft. NASA originally had planned to go with a moon lander from SpaceX for its first crewed moon landing, but agency officials grew concerned that Elon Musk’s company won’t have its Starship rocket ready in time, and asked Blue Origin if it could deliver something faster.

Blue Origin has since been working on modifying its Mark 1 lander, intended as an uncrewed cargo vehicle, to develop a new lander that would carry human beings. The company’s new lander wouldn’t require in-space refueling — a complex engineering feat that Blue Origin and SpaceX have been working on, but that neither company has pulled off yet.

The company’s plans were disrupted after the May 28 explosion destroyed the company’s only launchpad. Blue Origin is still assessing the damage, but CEO Dave Limp said they’ll be able to fly again “before the end of the year” — a very aggressive timeline as most experts have estimated it will take at least a year for the company to rebuild.

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman confirmed last week that the space agency is looking at other ways to launch Blue Origin’s lunar lander to keep the moon campaign on track.

“We are decoupling the lander from the launch vehicle and the pad itself,” Isaacman told FOX. “We’re going to be able to keep that lander in development, progressing, so it’s available for our test mission in 2027, which is Artemis III, and potentially available to meet our landing objectives in 2028.”

It’s conceivable that lawmakers would agree to give NASA more funds, given the history of bipartisan support for the agency. Congress handed NASA nearly $10 billion in last year’s mega-reconciliation package.

But NASA’s latest request has been met with some initial skepticism on the Hill.

“There will be lots of questions about whether the taxpayer should pay for Blue’s redesign and lots of questions about whether a redesign could be completed before Blue’s return to flight. This event is only a few weeks old. There’s a lot more of this story to play out before Congress writes NASA a blank check,” one of the congressional staffers said.

Democratic veterans running

More women, Democratic veterans running for Congress this year

The number of veterans running for federal office this cycle is up 47 percent from 2024.

By Leo Shane III

The number of Democratic and women veterans running for federal office this year is at record levels as the overall number of congressional candidates with military backgrounds has surged from 2024, according to a new analysis ahead of the midterm elections.

The numbers, compiled by the non-partisan veterans advocacy group With Honor, show broader engagement by younger veterans in national politics and a significant shift in campaign dynamics, where previously veteran candidates have skewed heavily Republican.

The increased involvement comes as Congress wrestles with a series of national security issues that could decide the November midterm elections, including President Donald Trump’s war against Iran, the continued U.S. military assault on suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean, and the administration’s increasingly fraught relationship with NATO allies.

“Both parties have emphasized recruiting veterans in recent cycles, but it’s really showing this year,” said Rye Barcott, co-founder and CEO of With Honor. “And as the country faces significant division and challenges, veterans are hearing that call to service again.”

Foreign policy issues typically don’t move voters as significantly as domestic and economic topics in midterm elections. But the connection between some of Trump’s overseas moves — particularly the impact of the conflict with Iran on energy prices — could change that sentiment this cycle.

With Honor is tracking 752 veterans registered to run for the House and Senate this year, the highest number since they began tracking in 2018. That total is up 47 percent from 2024 and up 20 percent from 2018, midway through Trump’s first term in office.

Democratic leaders during that 2018 cycle made a concerted effort to highlight veterans and national security voices on the campaign trail, including individuals like former New Jersey Rep. Mikie Sherrill, a one-time Navy helicopter pilot.

But they are seeing even higher numbers this year. At least 294 veterans are running for Congress as party members, up nearly 30 percent from the 2018 cycle. Roughly 39 percent of candidates running in midterm contests are registered Democrats, the highest percentage since With Honor began tracking the numbers.

A Democratic strategist who has advised the party on veterans issues, granted anonymity to discuss the party’s strategy, said the effort to bring more left-leaning veterans’ voices onto the campaign trail has been stepped up in recent months amid President Donald Trump’s military moves.

“No one understands the cost of war better than veterans, and so I think you’re seeing them get off the sidelines now,” the strategist said. Party leaders hope to use that veteran clout to help emphasize the long-term costs of the war with Iran and the uncertainty of future conflicts in locations like Cuba, South America and even Greenland.

Another reason for the jump in Democratic veteran candidates is the emergence of more women with military backgrounds running for office.

With Honor researchers identified 95 women with military backgrounds who are running for House and Senate seats this year, up from 40 in 2024. Of those, 56 percent are Democrats, and only 28 percent Republicans.

Only eight women veterans are serving in Congress today: three Democrats and five Republicans. The surge in female candidates could push that number to a new record high next year.

Republicans still make up almost half of all veteran candidates, at 48 percent. At the start of the current session of Congress, only 72 of the 100 veterans in the House and Senate were members of the GOP.

The veterans included among the 752 names are a mix of well-known incumbents running for reelection — individuals like Reps. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) and Jason Crow (D-Colo.) — and congressional hopefuls like Marine Corps veteran Graham Platner, running as a Democrat for Senate in Maine.

Barcott, who recently authored the book “Courage Can Save US” profiling veterans serving in national office today, said he believes the emergence of more post-9/11 veterans in prominent political roles is also driving the rise in veteran engagement.

“You look at veterans like [Maryland Gov.] Wes Moore and Vice President JD Vance, that shows folks what you can achieve,” he said.

About 41 percent of the 752 veterans running for office this year served after September 2001, making them the largest generation of veterans on the campaign trail. About one third of veterans serving in Congress now were in the military during that period.

The larger number of veterans running for office doesn’t guarantee an increase in the number of candidates with military backgrounds who are elected to office.

The number of veterans in Congress peaked in 1969, following years of mandatory military service for young American men in the Vietnam War. That year 402 veterans — 75 percent of the House and Senate membership — boasted some prior military service.

The number has slowly decreased since then, according to congressional records. The total hasn’t been above 20 percent since 2009. But that number still is over-represented for the American public, where about 6 percent of the adult population has served.

The stupidity of the fucking retarditans..... (You take Republican and put retard in the middle...)

Europe pours money into ocean research as Trump guts science funding

U.S. withdrawal means Europe is a lifeline for ocean research, although a poorer one.

By Marianne Gros

The European Union wants to plug a gaping hole in ocean research left behind by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.

The trouble is, it has a lot less cash to splash. 

Last week, the European Commission launched the “OceanEye” program, which aims to make the EU “a global leader in ocean intelligence” by investing in critical ocean observation technologies and data collection on how oceans evolve.

It came two weeks after the U.S. National Science Foundation — a government agency that funds science in the U.S. —  said it would dismantle its own $368 million ocean observation network and remove “all in-water infrastructure” on parts of its coastline. These machines provide crucial data on oceanic systems and how they react to climate change. 

Three weeks before that, the Trump administration had fired the NSF's independent board, continuing a trend of withdrawing science funding and canceling environmental programs.

U.S. funding withdrawal comes at a critical time, when accelerating global warming is posing new risks to ocean systems, the highest-profile of which is to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC — the ocean conveyor belt that keeps Europe warm.

The U.S. decision to take some of its data collection infrastructure offline is "a point of concern," because Europe's ocean monitoring and simulation systems partly rely on it to understand how the AMOC current is evolving, said Pierre Bahurel, general director of Mercator Ocean International, the ocean monitoring and data provider currently running the EU’s Copernicus Marine Service.

Europe's announcement that it would step up its funding, just as the U.S. withdrew its own, prompted praise. However, Brussels is hoping to make it happen with a much smaller budget than the U.S. To kickstart the program, the Commission will use €92 million from its €95 billion cash pot for research called Horizon Europe — a quarter of the size of the U.S. ocean observation network's funding.

“We should accept good news when it comes," said Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, French Ambassador for the Arctic and Antarctic poles and maritime issues. "The resources dedicated by the European Commission must seriously increase, and at least now there is a line of credit that exists."

The EU itself is calling on other countries and regions to step up observation.

“Due to the complicated nature of ocean observation, no single country or region can observe the ocean alone. This must be a global effort with diplomacy at its forefront,” said the European Commissioner for Oceans Costas Kadis at the Neptune Forum, an event on ocean exploration and diplomacy held in Paris on Monday. 

OceanEye is part of the EU’s Ocean Pact, a plan to improve the ocean’s health and boost the bloc’s maritime economic and security interests as human-caused climate change continues to disrupt oceanic currents, water temperatures and fish stocks.

In June 2025 the Commission had said that a third of the €1 billion budget for the Ocean Pact would go towards scientific projects.

Some point to the technological overlap between ocean monitoring systems and more tech-savvy sectors, such as space innovation, as a way to explore other funding avenues. "There is a lot of money in the space sector right now [and] in digital technology,” said Bahurel.

In depth, scientific ocean observation relies on “a system for monitoring, describing, and observing the ocean, where we use satellites, measurements at sea, and digital systems,” he added. “We absolutely have an interest, if we want to access the necessary level of funding, to view things holistically.” 

Mercator Ocean International is also working to build a European “digital twin” of the ocean to help both the private and public sectors understand how the ocean responds to various events, from plastic pollution to rising temperatures. 

Smart glasses are not smart....

New privacy frontier: Europe eyes crackdown on smart glasses

Cameras in spectacles have lawmakers and regulators alarmed of surveillance risks.

By Ellen O'Regan

Europe is ramping up its warnings over the surveillance risks of smart glasses, in what is seen as the next big fight over people's physical privacy.

The technology, which integrates cameras into glasses, is facing increased scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators, who are ramping up discussions on whether it goes against Europe's privacy regulations. Privacy activists are warning the glasses violate key principles like consent, since people captured in the built-in cameras can't really object to their data being processed.

Concerns peaked when Swedish media reported earlier this year that subcontractors for Meta in Kenya were reviewing “deeply private” footage captured by the firm's smart glasses to help annotate the content to train artificial intelligence models. It included recordings of people's bathroom visits, banking details, or even them having sex.

“They are selling more and more of these glasses. I think it was Mark Zuckerberg who said that they are some of the fastest-growing consumer electronics in history ... this is when we need to act," said Liberal European Parliament lawmaker Veronika Cifrová Ostrihoňová.

She said there needs to be "some kind of stop" to technology that could breach people's privacy or "target women in a way that is not wanted and that is not welcome on the European market." Her political group, Renew, has written to the Commission asking what could be done at a European level about the rapidly evolving tech.

“The risks are high,” Eric Leijonram, director general of Sweden’s data protection authority, told POLITICO. “We need a discussion, and we need to ensure that this is acceptable in our society, that others can really understand when people are using these to film them or record them,” he said.

Europe's privacy concerns risk spoiling the rollout of Meta's eye-catching flagship product in the region. That could annoy the U.S. administration, which has long complained that EU laws and regulations unfairly target U.S. technology companies.

The European Data Protection Board, which gathers privacy regulators across Europe, has ordered a report into smart glasses which should be finalized this summer, chair Anu Talus told POLITICO. She added that the board will look at actions from there.

Others say things are not moving fast enough and are launching their own actions to curb the technology.

In the U.S., a class action lawsuit against Meta over its smart glasses is already gathering steam (and looking to recruit European users) while in the EU one coder has developed an app to alert people when smart glasses are nearby.

“I didn't want to wait for the EU or national regulators, because it takes a long time,” said Yves Jeanrenaud who developed the Nearby Glasses app, which has been downloaded more than 120,000 times since he launched it in February.

“I'm pretty sure there are some valid use cases for smart glasses, but what we see online is a misuse of them. That's not something that we, society as a whole, should just stand by and watch happen,” he said. He had read reports of women being secretly filmed by men wearing the smart glasses.

Lawmaker Cifrová Ostrihoňová said that, from a gender-based violence perspective, it is "simply unacceptable for any woman to worry about being filmed in public secretly and then worry about those images being shared online.”

A Meta spokesperson told POLITICO that its AI glasses include important built-in privacy safeguards, and the company has "teams dedicated to evolving these measures so that we can continue to deliver safe, secure products that enhance people’s lives." 

“Unlike smartphones, our glasses have an LED light that activates when someone prompts the glasses to take a photo or video that will be saved to their gallery. The glasses feature tamper detection technology to prevent people from covering that light. Unless users choose to share media they've captured with Meta, that media also stays on the device," they said. 

Regulators on the move

Regulators are charging ahead despite Meta's defenses. In Brussels, lawmakers asked the European Commission whether it will take “concrete action” to ensure Meta’s smart glasses and AI training are in line with privacy rules. More lawmakers made a renewed call this month for the Commission to look at whether AI-powered glasses are in line with EU privacy rules.

European Justice Commissioner Michael McGrath previously responded to lawmakers saying GDPR enforcement “lies with the national data protection authorities and courts.”

At the national level, France's privacy regulator (CNIL) issued a stark warning about smart glasses in May, saying they pose a “significant risk” of ushering in and normalizing surveillance that is “almost invisible and omnipresent” and “could lead to a profound transformation of our societies.”

Europe’s board of privacy regulators (the EDPB), has commissioned a report on the “social acceptability of smart glasses,” board chair Talus said, which should be ready this summer. The glasses "really bring the filming, collecting information from people, into a new level if you compare it with smartphones,” she said.

Meta is also reportedly considering rolling out facial recognition capabilities for its smart glasses. A recent investigation found that Meta has quietly written face recognition code into its mobile app, which smart glasses owners use to connect their device to their phones.

Business facilitators

When Meta launched the first iteration of its RayBan smart glasses in Europe in 2021, the product immediately sparked concerns with Irish and Italian privacy watchdogs over whether the specs made it obvious enough to people that they are being filmed. 

Two years later Meta announced a new version of the glasses with extra privacy measures recommended by the Irish regulator, including a bigger, blinking light to alert people to recording.

Apart from Meta, Samsung and Google have also recently announced they're collaborating on a new line of "intelligent eyewear" set to launch later this year, and Apple is reportedly aiming to hit the market with its own smart glasses by the end of 2027. 

European consumers are still warming to the idea of the glasses. First-quarter results from the French-Italian eyewear company EssilorLuxottica that owns the RayBan brand noted that smart glasses sales are ramping up "exponentially" in the U.S., but the distribution rollout is still slow in the EMEA region, with "more than half" of sales points still not served. More than 7 million pairs of Meta smart glasses were sold worldwide in 2025.

U.S. Ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder praised the “wonderful, wonderful glasses" at a recent Meta event in Brussels, and urged Europe’s regulators to be more like “business facilitators." "This doesn't mean you don't regulate," he said. "It just means you have to focus on allowing businesses to grow and allowing businesses to innovate."

Beyond the privacy concerns, the EU also has an environmental law on the books that is holding Meta’s smart glasses back in Europe. The EU Batteries Regulation requires all mobile devices to have removable batteries by 2027, and Meta’s smart glasses with built-in display don’t.

The battery law is "so broad and so restrictive that it prevents the sale of this wonderful, jointly developed, U.S.-European product from being sold in the European Union. These are the kinds of things that need to be addressed on a very systemic basis,” said Puzder. 

Hitting privacy law limits

While regulators plot their move, privacy activists are already challenging Meta's rollout of smart glasses, arguing they violate key privacy principles like consent.

“In principle, the law is clear. There's no way that people can, in a meaningful way, consent and understand what they consent to if they're being filmed," said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, director of digital policy at the Norwegian Consumer Council.    

European authorities have “not been bold enough yet to use all the tools at their disposal” against the tech, Myrstad said, if only to test "whether the law is fit for this purpose.”

In the U.S., Meta is facing a consumer class action suit over its glasses. Filed by public interest firm Clarkson Law, the case argues that Meta made false privacy promises to sell its smart glasses.  

“These products are essentially surveillance products, and they were marketed as tech products centered on user privacy and user control. Those promises turned out to be false,” managing partner Ryan Clarkson said in an interview, pointing to the reports on data annotators in Kenya.  

Clarkson said he is looking for consumers in the EU who have bought Meta smart glasses to join his action, and has “already been in touch” with lawyers in the EU who are thinking about how to frame a similar class action suit.

Just what we need... Another ass-sucking shit-head.....

White House sends Blanche’s attorney general nomination to Congress

The acting attorney general’s fate now lies in the hands of a Senate Republican caucus that has locked horns with Trump recently.

Aaron Pellish

President Donald Trump officially nominated acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to hold the role on a permanent basis Monday.

The White House notified the Senate of the nomination days after Trump said he would tap Blanche for the job at a private Rose Garden dinner last week.

Blanche’s path to confirmation remains uncertain. Republican senators, fresh off their opposition to the administration’s proposed Justice Department “anti-weaponization” fund, appear to be hesitant to offer their wholehearted support for Trump’s pick.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee who Trump has repeatedly attacked, previously told POLITICO he would weigh the anti-weaponization fund when considering attorney general nominees.

Opposition from any single Republican on the committee could bring Blanche’s nomination to a halt.

And Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who also sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee and who lost a primary to a Trump-endorsed opponent last month, told POLITICO last week his support for Blanche “depends on his answers to questions that I intend to ask him at the Judiciary Committee.”

Senate Judiciary Chair Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) signaled his support for the president’s pick, saying in a statement Monday that Blanche is “well-qualified and has shown his dedication to restoring law and order across our country.”

If confirmed, Blanche would succeed former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was forced out of the administration following the botched handling of the Epstein files and Trump’s frustrations that she wasn’t prosecuting his political rivals.

Bondi told Congress in a closed-door interview last month that Blanche was responsible for the Justice Department’s handling of the files, according to a transcript of the interview released last week.

Funding action stalled

Senate funding action stalled amid partisan stalemate on totals

Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins said Democrats “are not willing to work with us.”

Jennifer Scholtes

Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins is accusing Democrats of refusing to negotiate government funding bills ahead of the September shutdown deadline and called off markups Monday night for the second week in a row.

Collins and the Senate’s top Democratic appropriator, Washington Sen. Patty Murray, have been trading offers on overall totals for funding the military and non-defense programs for the fiscal year that kicks off Oct. 1. But an agreement has yet to be reached, and Democrats don’t want to forge ahead until there is an understanding on the balance between defense and domestic spending in the face of President Donald Trump‘s request for $1.5 trillion for the military.

Collins said in a statement Monday night that top Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee “have made clear they are not willing to work with us to pass” government funding bills, adding that “their insistence that it is not possible to move forward without a topline agreement is not accurate.”

Murray said Republicans are simply insisting on too much defense spending and not enough cash for programs that fund domestic priorities, including infrastructure improvements, child care, education and nutrition assistance for low-income babies and pregnant mothers.

“We are not close,” Murray told reporters Monday night. “They have a very high defense number. We’re just not going to agree to that.”

Refuting Collins’ accusations, the Washington Democrat said in a statement that “at every turn, I’ve worked in good faith to advance a bipartisan process.”

Murray said Republicans also want to block Democrats from offering amendments to the funding bills, including to bar the Trump administration from carrying out the $1.8 billion “Anti-Weoponization Fund” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told lawmakers the administration won’t pursue.

“It’s also critical that Congress uses its immense power to put a check on the corruption we are seeing every day,” Murray said in a statement. “And for our members, that means taking action in our bills to do things like permanently block Trump’s slush fund, which I believe is a bipartisan goal we all share.”

Senate Republican appropriators met privately Monday night to discuss whether to proceed without the assurance that Democrats will support approving the funding bills in committee.

Leaving the meeting, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said Democratic leaders have instructed their appropriators to oppose the government funding bills no matter what.

“I have received information off the record from one of my Democratic colleagues that they have instructions to vote no on any appropriations bill,” Kennedy told reporters. “So even if we did agree to everything they wanted, they would still vote no.”

Block new TSA fee

House Republicans seek to block new TSA fee for those without REAL ID

Annual appropriations legislation for the Department of Homeland Security aims to halt collection of the $45 fee.

By Oriana Pawlyk and Sam Ogozalek

House Republican appropriators are taking aim at TSA’s new $45 fee for air travelers who don’t have a REAL ID or other accepted form of identification, inserting language into their annual Homeland Security spending bill seeking to stop its collection.

The fiscal 2027 legislation, which is poised for an Appropriations Committee markup Tuesday, includes a prohibition on TSA charging or collecting any fee for “a program vetting travelers arriving without acceptable identification for admission through security screenings at airports.”

In an accompanying report released Monday offering details about the bill, the House GOP said there’s “no valid statutory authority for TSA to collect” the new fee, known as ConfirmID, which launched in February.

“Previously, identity verification was a function that TSA performed for free when passengers were unable to present acceptable IDs, which frequently happens after natural disasters or personal property theft,” the report says. “ConfirmID is over an order of magnitude more expensive than the system it replaced on a per passenger basis.”

The bill would require a TSA congressional briefing on the program.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its fee collection process. The agency had initially proposed an $18 fee.

Adam Stahl, TSA’s acting deputy administrator, said in a December announcement: “The vast majority of travelers present acceptable identification like REAL IDs and passports, but we must ensure everyone who flies is who they say they are,” adding: “This fee ensures the cost to cover verification of an insufficient ID will come from the traveler, not the taxpayer.” The agency said at the time that more than 94 percent of passengers have REAL ID or other acceptable forms of identification.

Separately, Republican appropriators note in the report that TSA would be required to conduct an agency-wide review to “identify spending reductions and savings achievable through expanded use of public-private partnerships.” In doing so, the agency, among other things, would need to consider “increasing the use of private sector security screening and remote screening.”

That’s far from what the Trump administration was seeking: mandating the Screening Partnership Program, or SPP, at smaller airports. Through the program, private companies staff security checkpoints under TSA oversight.

By the numbers: The House GOP wants to give TSA $11.2 billion total in discretionary spending — a $347 million cut year-over-year. (This amount would be offset by $3.6 billion in revenue from the 9/11 passenger fee and vetting fees, like for PreCheck.)

Additionally, TSA would receive $255.3 million in mandatory spending, which is similar to what it got in fiscal 2026.

The bill would boost the SPP, with an increase of $41 million for the program year-over-year.

At the same time, Republicans aim to reduce spending on screening personnel, compensation and benefits by $32.9 million compared to fiscal 2026.

Screening technology maintenance would experience an increase, meanwhile, of $192 million.

Federal Air Marshals would see a year-over-year reduction of $290.4 million.

In the committee report, when listing vetting fees, the House GOP doesn’t account for any dollars from ConfirmID — illustrating how they want to stop it from being imposed.

A geographical oddity... Just 2 or 3 days away!

Trump says peace deal with Iran could come in ‘two or three days’

The U.S. president said the agreement will prohibit Iran from having nuclear weapons and result in the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

By Ferdinand Knapp

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday said that, despite the exchange of strikes between Iran and Israel, a deal to end the war in the Middle East could be reached “in two or three days.”

“They were going back and forth [with strikes], and now they both agreed, through me, to stop, and now we’re in the final throes of what will be a very, very good deal,” Trump told reporters in New York, where he was attending the NBA finals in Madison Square Garden.

Trump said the deal would stop Iran from having nuclear weapons and result in the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. “The strait will open up right away,” he insisted. “It’ll open up immediately upon signing.”

It is not the first time that the U.S. president has promised an imminent end to the war in Iran, which has been raging since February. Weeks have passed since Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that negotiating a deal to end the war in Iran could “take a few days.”

Trump on Monday said he had a “very good conversation” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and downplayed talks of a rift between the two leaders.

Last week Trump was reported to have called Netanyahu “crazy” for his renewed attacks on Lebanon, and over the weekend he told the Financial Times that the Israeli prime minister had “no choice” but to accept a deal with Iran.

The U.S. president on Sunday urged his Israeli counterpart not to retaliate after Iran launched several missiles at Israel. After Netanyahu seemingly ignored the request and struck several Iranian cities, Trump demanded both countries “immediately stop shooting” and respect the U.S.-brokered ceasefire that has been in effect since April.

Both sides suspended military operations on Monday afternoon, but Iran warned that it would respond to any attacks targeting its territory or Lebanon. An Israeli army spokesperson warned residents of the Lebanese city of Tyre to evacuate on Tuesday, suggesting strikes on Hezbollah targets were imminent.

Trump on Monday insisted that Netanyahu had not defied him by retaliating against Iran. “If I tell him to do something, he does it,” he told the BBC, explaining Israel had fired its missiles at Iran before the two leaders had spoken.

According to the Times of Israel, Netanyahu called off a major strike on Iran following the conversation with the U.S. president.

The seemingly brief breakdown of the U.S.-brokered ceasefire began after Israel struck Iran-backed Hezbollah targets in Beirut on Sunday, violating a separate ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon. Iran responded with missile attacks on Israel, calling them retaliation for the strikes on Lebanon. Israel then launched attacks on what it said were military targets in Iran.

The Financial Times reported on Tuesday that the United States was not directly involved in the latest attacks, although U.S. forces launched interceptors to protect American troops stationed in Israel.

$166 billion it illegally collected

The White House is digging in on tariff refunds

The administration has processed more than half the $166 billion it illegally collected but is resisting paying back billions more.

By Ari Hawkins

President Donald Trump is launching a new effort to try to avoid paying back billions of dollars worth of tariffs he illegally collected. Legal watchers say there’s a chance the White House effort could succeed.

The Trump administration will be back in court Tuesday to make the case that, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling invalidating tariffs the president imposed under a 1977 law, they are not required to pay all of those duties back. Though they are processing refunds for thousands of importers, they are arguing they are doing so voluntarily. And they are digging in on other tariff payments that have already been finalized by the government, which legal experts say could add up to tens of billions of dollars.

“The message from the government is pretty straightforward: we don’t have the authority to issue these refunds, and unless a court orders us to repay a specific company, we’re not going to do it,” said a former Trump administration official and trade lawyer close to the White House. “They’re ready to claw back what they know they legally can.” The person was granted anonymity to candidly discuss the Trump administration’s strategy.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Importers are preparing to fight back, including with a class action lawsuit. It sets up another messy chapter in what has already been a protracted legal fight over the president’s signature tariff policies — one that could wind its way back up to the Supreme Court.

Part of the issue is that the high court’s February ruling striking down Trump’s tariffs did not weigh in on what the administration should do with the money it had already collected from the duties. So the question fell to the U.S. Court of International Trade, an obscure New York-based federal court that focuses exclusively on trade issues.

In an April order, CIT Judge Richard Eaton directed the Trump administration to issue refunds to all the companies that paid the now-defunct tariffs. The White House initially signaled it would comply, setting up a repayment system overseen by Customs and Border Protection for companies to submit requests for refunds and receive payments from the government. As of May 22, they have approved more than $85 billion in repayments, according to the government’s court filings. But it is limiting eligibility to specific types of tariff payments, despite growing impatience from the judge.

After weeks of increasingly contentious court filings, the Justice Department officially appealed Eaton’s April order last week, arguing the CIT exceeded its authority when it ordered universal refunds, and that the government cannot refund payments that have already been finalized by CBP.

The fight over how many importers are entitled to relief now sits with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and legal experts say the government has some reasons for optimism. Among other things, they point to a Supreme Court ruling last year that federal courts generally cannot issue nationwide injunctions that apply to people who are not parties to a lawsuit — as Eaton did in his April order.

“That issue could really go both ways,” said James Kim, an international trade partner at ArentFox Schiff, adding that “the DOJ has good arguments” that the Supreme Court decision regarding federal court injunctions also applies to the CIT. “Despite what Judge Eaton has said on that — it’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out.”

Matthew Seligman, founder of the firm Grayhawk Law and a lawyer representing importers seeking tariff refunds, offered a starker verdict: “It was inevitable that the government would appeal [Eaton’s April order requiring universal tariffs] and win.”

In Seligman’s opinion, Eaton’s argument violated the Supreme Court’s precedent and “simply ignored” a federal law that says CIT generally has the same powers and limitations as district courts.

“The lasting effect of the universal refund order will be that importers have needlessly been kept in the dark for months about what exactly they need to do to get the refunds to which they are legally entitled,” he said.

A decision by the Federal Circuit to intervene in Eaton’s April refund order could potentially change the current repayment process as the appeal proceeds. Such a move could create further uncertainty for importers whose claims remain unresolved, potentially delaying repayment for companies still waiting on refunds.

For now, Eaton’s refund orders remain in effect, and the judge is continuing to press the administration for details on how and when it plans to repay the rest of the affected importers.

That makes Tuesday’s hearing significant. Eaton has indicated he wants answers even as the broader legal fight plays out, sending a letter after the government appealed last week warning that more litigation challenging repayments “would discourage continuing progress.”

Sara Albrecht, chair and CEO of the Liberty Justice Center, a public policy legal advocacy group that represents companies at the center of the refund and tariff litigation, praised Eaton for being “very proactive in directing this case.”

Tuesday’s hearing “will explain a lot … on what the government is thinking and their positions,” Albrecht added. “We’ve got plans A, B, C and D for June 9th … We’re ready.”

In a motion Thursday, the plaintiffs — a group of small importers including a wine seller, a bike company and a fishing retailer — asked the CIT to certify a class action on behalf of all importers locked out of the refund system — a move that could open a path for smaller businesses that cannot afford their own litigation.

If the Trump administration prevails in its effort to restrict broad repayments, companies could be forced to sue individually to try and get paid back, a process that lawyers say could be prohibitively expensive for many small businesses and lead many to abandon their claims, altogether.

The government’s appeal, however, raises the same underlying question: whether the court has authority to order repayment for anyone beyond the handful of companies that actually sued the administration in the original case.

Jay Foreman, CEO of Basic Fun!, a Florida toy company behind Tonka trucks and Care Bears, said the government’s posture amounts to a deliberate strategy of attrition. His company has received about $450,000 of an estimated $7.5 million it says it is owed from paying the illegal tariffs.

“It’s almost like the insurance companies — they just deny your claim, and it’s only the people that are willing to fight through four or five, six denials that get paid,” Foreman said. “They figure a bunch of people will drop out.”

Up against the wall.....

They Went to Jared

How Donald Trump’s son-in-law used his position to hop in bed with autocrats—and sell out America.

Casey Michel

The pitch deck from a new investment fund called Affinity Partners was one of the most laughable presentations the potential investors had ever seen. Consisting of 20 black-and-white slides, the PowerPoint resembled something an undergraduate would have put together. It verged on satire—drenched in corporate pabulum, it touted “accelerating transformation through connectivity” and “aligned economic interests” that could “create previously unrealized value.” Specifics were minimal at best, but the opportunities—whatever they were—were apparently endless. The would-be investors “said they’d never seen such a joke of a deck,” one source told the Intercept.

Despite its startling amateurishness, the gist of the pitch, proffered in 2021, was clear enough. Affinity sought to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from both American investors and the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. The kingdom, eager to diversify its economy and launder its image as a repressive kleptostate, had already bankrolled professional golf, tennis, and soccer leagues; commercial real estate and luxury properties; video games and celebrity influencers; PR agencies and consultancy firms—even corporate giants like Boeing, Citigroup, and Disney. And much of that investment flowed to Westerners willing to overlook Saudi human rights abuses.

The Affinity pitch, though, was so vapid, so vacuous, so devoid of content that even Saudi officials blanched. A due diligence report conducted on behalf of the kingdom found Affinity’s operations “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” But there was one element that would get its pitch over the finish line: Taking up two full slides at the end of the presentation was a 1,200-word biography of Affinity’s founder, Jared Kushner.

By this time, Kushner was out of the White House, where he’d served as a top adviser to his father-in-law, Donald Trump. The disgraced former president was back in Florida, licking his wounds after losing to Joe Biden, railing about election fraud as he plotted his return to power. Kushner took a different tack. Instead of, say, spending more time with his young children or turning back to the New York real estate scene that had chewed him up and spit him out, he would try something new—something that didn’t require too much talent and hinged almost entirely on his proximity to power and wealth. He would be a private equity fund manager. And Affinity—which he launched the day after Biden was sworn in—would be Kushner’s vehicle to greater riches than he’d ever known before.

But again, this was 2021. The world viewed Trump as little more than a twice-impeached former president who’d attempted a coup to remain in power. Kushner was tainted by association with his father-in-law, whose circle of contacts was increasingly worthless. Moreover, doing business with Kushner came with all sorts of hazards—not least the potential blowback from a Biden administration watching out for any foreign governments partnering with the Trump family.

The Saudi officials tasked with screening investments had their answer. Affinity’s lack of clarity or strategy, the absence of other major investors, the “inexperience” of its managers, and “public relations risks,” as their report put it, all pointed to an unequivocal no. They would not back Affinity. They would not fund Kushner.

But only one vote mattered. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—architect of the grisly assassination of Saudi Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, lord of the Saudi kleptocracy, a leader opposed to extending women or minorities or gay people anything resembling equal rights—would have the final say. And as MBS saw it, Affinity wasn’t just some panhandling, fly-by-night investment group looking for a handout. It was a fund overseen by a fellow princeling whom the Saudi dictator had already befriended.

MBS also knew that if America’s political tides were to turn, Kushner could prove an indispensable asset. So he overruled his experts. Kushner and Affinity would have their funding—$2 billion to start, with potentially much more down the road. And MBS would again have an American partner he could steer in whichever way he wanted.

The Saudi investment proved fruitful. Despite Kushner’s insistence during the 2024 campaign that he would have little involvement in a second Trump term, he is once more at the center of almost every major geopolitical event. In the occupied Palestinian territories, he’s point man for what should supposedly emerge from the rubble—a “New Gaza” that promises to restore jobs, prosperity, and peace. He was dispatched to Moscow with special envoy Steve Witkoff to seek a diplomatic solution to Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine. In January, he and Witkoff were appointed executive board members of Trump’s new Board of Peace, itself a breathtaking attempt to monetize foreign relations. The following month, Trump named Kushner his “special envoy for peace,” shortly before dispatching him and Witkoff to lead the administration’s disastrous negotiations with Iran. To each of these assignments, Kushner has brought a mind-boggling array of ethical conflicts. His financial entanglements span the globe, touching on the diplomatic hotspots where he is supposed to be negotiating on America’s behalf. He has made an art of cashing in on his foreign relationships, which, for those partners, are also paying off as never before.

It’s worth pausing to reflect on just how unprecedented this entire play has been. True, Kushner is hardly the first family member to profit from their presidential connections. Billy Carter moonlighted as a lobbyist for Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and hawked “Billy Beer” to make a buck off his brother’s presidency. Hunter Biden’s attempts to cash in on the family name—via crooked networks out of Ukraine and Romania and the sale of overpriced artwork—helped derail his father’s presidency.

But in scale and audacity, what Kushner has attempted—and achieved—is on another level entirely. He asked foreign regimes to trust him with billions of dollars even though he’d never managed an investment fund. One former Republican official, as the New York Times noted in April 2024, “could recall no precedent for a government official leaving office and starting an investment firm that would immediately receive billions of dollars from foreign governments with which the official had been working while serving in government.” And that was before Trump placed Kushner—who had zero diplomatic or foreign affairs expertise until his father-in-law rose to power—at the center of every international crisis, elevating him to the role, arguably, of the nation’s leading diplomat. 

Even Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican who led the charge against Hunter Biden, was taken aback: Kushner’s Saudi funding arrangements, he said, “crossed the line of ethics,” and when a consultant close to Kushner called and asked him to tone down his criticism, Comer said he instructed the intermediary “to tell Kushner to fuck off.”

Kushner was denied top-secret clearance until Trump overruled intelligence officials. “There was a risk the Saudis were playing him,” said a former White House official.

Of course, it wasn’t just Saudi Arabia that saw Kushner as a pliable source of influence. The United Arab Emirates, whose own despot had cultivated Kushner years before, began tossing money at Affinity Partners around the same time. So did the Qatari regime, which slipped back into America’s good graces as it was helping bail out Kushner’s family company. To date, firms linked to the UAE and Qatar have invested at least $1.5 billion in Kushner’s fund. With more modest infusions from smaller investors, nearly all foreign, Affinity’s asset pool grew and grew, topping $6 billion and generating more than $100 million in management fees for Kushner and his partners. (Affinity’s fee structure, the Saudi investment officials wrote in their analysis, seemed “excessive.”)

If the investments themselves weren’t enough of an ethical hornet’s nest, the contracts Affinity signed give the regimes troubling leverage over Kushner. They allow investors to pull out after a five-year window, which means Saudi Arabia and Qatar have the power to implode Affinity in the middle of Trump’s second term, decimating Kushner’s standing—a financial sword of Damocles that, by extension, dangles over the federal government.

A brief history of Jared Kushner profiting from his proximity to power.

This situation was entirely foreseeable, and yet Kushner’s foreign dealings were largely ignored by Democratic lawmakers until Biden was headed for the door. There were no formal investigations or high-level hearings into his doings, even after Trump announced in November 2022 that he would run again. Democrats appeared reluctant, with Hunter Biden under investigation, to draw attention to the issue of family members profiting off a presidency. Kushner, after all, seemed unlikely to have a future in US politics. Ignore him and he’d go away. The Trump era was over—right?

One of the few Democrats to raise the alarm was Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, then-chair of the Senate Finance Committee, who attempted to pierce Affinity’s veil of secrecy once it became clear that Trump would be the Republican nominee. In June 2024 and again that September, he wrote to the company seeking information. Affinity resisted, withholding key financial details and refusing to fully reveal its foreign investors. Wyden’s request rested on two unknowns: how much Kushner profited personally from his foreign dealings and what he was doing, precisely, for those clients. Kushner “has some experience in real estate, but no experience running hedge funds and private equity,” a source familiar with the back-and-forth told me. If anything, his affairs gave the appearance of a simple playbook: selling access, influence, and even policy.

In October 2024, with less than two weeks left until the election, Wyden and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland accusing Kushner of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act and asking Garland to name a special counsel to investigate. “The scale of these undisclosed foreign payments to Mr. Kushner coupled with the national security implications of his apparent ongoing efforts to sell political influence to the highest foreign bidder are unprecedented and demand action from DOJ,” they wrote.

Soon after, Garland was on the way out, Trump was incoming, and the Republicans were poised to run Congress. There would be no special counsel, just a vastly more lucrative fundraising landscape for Affinity Partners.

Kushner’s deep ties to foreign despots are a remarkable breach of ethical norms. But they also are of a piece with his personal and professional histories—and perhaps especially his attitude. Kushner, much like his father-in-law, behaves as though rules and restrictions don’t necessarily apply to him and as though private-sector dealmaking somehow suits him for high-stakes international diplomacy. “A lot of the people who do this are history professors, because they have a lot of experience, or diplomats,” he conceded late last year. “It’s just different being ‘deal guys’—just a different sport.”

Hints of this pay-to-play worldview—this notion that there’s a deal to be cut wherever one looks, ethics be damned—were first evident decades ago, when Kushner was a high schooler in New Jersey. Despite reportedly being a “less than stellar” student, he was accepted at Harvard—a move preceded by the pledge of a $2.5 million donation to the college from Charles Kushner, Jared’s father. For good measure, the payment was structured to begin only “after Jared matriculated,” journalist Andrea Bernstein wrote in her 2020 book, American Oligarchs.

In March 2005, less than two years after Jared graduated from Harvard, Charles was sentenced to 24 months in prison (and served 14) after pleading guilty to 18 counts of tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, and witness tampering—he had hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, filmed their tryst, and sent the tape to his sister. (Trump would pardon Charles in December 2020 and appointed him ambassador to France four years later.) But the younger Kushner continued his unqualified ascent.

At age 25, he purchased a majority stake in the New York Observer, once a staple of the city’s media and real estate landscapes, for $10 million—his own money, he claimed, from real estate deals he’d closed during college. He evinced little interest in good reportage or journalistic ethics. To the contrary, multiple editors later asserted that Kushner ordered the paper to run “hit jobs” on people he felt had wronged him or his family. “I came to believe that Kushner wanted the Observer to succeed not because he believed in what it was, but because he needed it as a bullhorn for his own business interests,” former editor Kyle Pope remembered. The paper, already losing money, failed to thrive on Kushner’s watch. By the mid-2010s, less than a decade into his ownership, the “once-proud” Observer was a “Potemkin village” of a publication, limping along with clickbaity articles and little impact.

On September 16, 2025, a UN commission declared Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. That same day, Forbes declared Kushner a billionaire.

The Observer was hardly Kushner’s biggest financial fiasco. That honor belongs to a high-rise building at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Constructed in 1957, the 39-story, glass-and-steel office tower had been a Midtown staple for decades, with tenants ranging from Citigroup to Warner Brothers and Xerox. It would become an albatross around the Kushners’ neck. In 2007, their commercial real estate firm, Kushner Companies, with Jared at the helm, purchased the tower for nearly $2 billion—a staggering markup from its $518 million sale price seven years prior. The family invested $50 million and borrowed $1.75 billion to cover the remainder­—a remarkable risk at the best of times, which these were not.

A few months later, the subprime mortgage crisis sent the global economy into a freefall. Jared’s acquisition became, as the New York Times put it, a “classic example of reckless underwriting.” Vacancy rates spiked as interest on the family’s 10-figure debt accumulated. To cover costs, Jared sold off nearly half of the family’s stake in the building’s retail space and subsequently had to restructure the loan. Even as Trump ran for president in 2016, the family was still scrambling for funding. (“Is Jared Kushner the World’s Worst Real-­Estate Investor?” asked Vanity Fair.)

There was a moment just before the election when Kushner, who was helping run his father-in-law’s campaign, thought he’d found a lifeline. Together with Charles Kushner, he solicited a personal investment from former Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, who also had previously overseen Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.

The sheikh, who goes by HBJ, agreed to put up $500 million to help refinance 666 Fifth Avenue if the family could raise the rest elsewhere. Negotiations bled into 2017, as Kushner, by then a White House official and diplomat, was charged with brokering Middle East peace. But after a controversy arose in relation to other potential investors, HBJ pulled out, leaving the Kushners again on the hook for their spiraling debt payments. At that point, the Intercept reported, Charles went directly to Qatar’s finance minister seeking an investment from the nation’s sovereign wealth fund. He failed to land a deal.

A regional blockade of Qatar began two months later, in June 2017. The Saudis, Emiratis, and other Middle East regimes severed ties with Doha as part of broader jockeying for regional supremacy between Gulf rivals—all US partners. The scent of invasion hung in the air. It was a tinderbox primed to explode.

Remarkably, rather than act as a neutral arbiter, the Trump administration immediately threw its weight behind the Saudis and Emiratis—and Kushner, according to investigative journalist Vicky Ward, “greenlit” the entire operation. “The Saudis would not have risked moving forward without permission from somebody,” an aide to then–Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told her. “That person must have been Jared.”

While there’s no direct evidence linking the blockade to Kushner’s investments, his family’s financial entanglements raise legitimate questions about his motivations. He had already “reamed the Qatari ruling family for not doing the deal” on 666 Fifth Avenue, Ward wrote on social media. Would the Qataris view the administration’s support of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, she added, “as Kushner saying, ‘If you don’t pay my father, the Americans are going to sanction an invasion of your country’”?

Put another way: Lovely country you have there. Shame if something bad were to happen to it.

The blockade persisted for years, as did the ever-present threat of invasion. But the Trump administration began changing its tune in April 2018 after an intensive Qatari lobbying campaign culminated in the first of several Oval Office meetings between Trump and the emir. The following month, the New York Times reported that Charles Kushner was in “advanced talks” about 666 Fifth Avenue with a company partly owned by Qatar. Jared then flew to Doha, where he met with the emir to discuss “increasing cooperation.” Early that August, Kushner Companies inked a deal with the Qatar-backed company, eliminating what the Times called “the family’s biggest financial headache.” Trump’s new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, pushed for a resolution in the meantime, and just before Trump left office, the Saudis and Qataris reached a deal to end the blockade.

Everyone involved denied that the deal had any relation to Kushner’s White House role, but the timing was intriguing. Either way, it was a remarkable turnabout for the family—and a complete dissolution of the traditional separation of public and private interests.

The Qatar affair set the tone for Kushner’s second stint as a public official. He’d struck up a friendship with MBS during Trump’s first term, engaging in text­ing sessions and jetting off to Riyadh for unannounced talks. The Saudi regime “cultivated the relationship with Mr. Kushner,” whom it saw as someone with “scant knowledge about” the Middle East and, specifically, “ignorance of Saudi Arabia,” the New York Times wrote. At one point, MBS reportedly bragged he had Kushner “in his pocket.”

It was difficult to conclude otherwise. US intelligence officials grew increasingly alarmed by Kushner’s private communications with MBS even as the prince sought retribution against regime critics like Khashoggi. “There was a risk the Saudis were playing him,” said a former White House official. The concerns reached such a breaking point that Kushner’s application for a top-secret security clearance was initially rejected over fears “about potential foreign influence,” NBC reported. But Trump overruled his intelligence officials, granting Kushner access to America’s most closely held secrets.  

As MBS tucked Kushner further into his pocket, other regimes tried to replicate the Saudi success. One year into Trump’s first term, US intelligence analysts reported that officials from a range of foreign countries had “privately discussed ways they can manipulate Jared Kushner,” the Washington Post noted, “by taking advantage of his complex business arrangements, financial difficulties, and lack of foreign policy experience.” They’d hit on the same conclusion as MBS: Kushner was tractable, and perhaps the best vector for influencing Trump.

“I was very surprised that the United States would send two negotiators who clearly had done almost no research into Iran’s negotiating history or even the basic facts surrounding the nuclear program.”

One of those countries was Israel. For years, Kushner and his family had supported Israeli imperialism in the Palestinian territories, helping bankroll the settler organizations stealing Palestinian lands in the West Bank. Kushner also had a decades-long personal relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Their ties stretched back to the 1990s, when Charles Kushner supported Netanyahu’s political rise and invited “Bibi” to their sprawling home in New Jersey. Young Jared even gave up his bedroom to Netanyahu and, according to Andrea Bernstein’s book, played basketball with him in the driveway. That familiarity has paid dividends for Netanyahu and Israel. With Kushner ensconced in the White House, the Israelis had their Trump whisperer. (He would broker the Abraham Accords, which brought Israel closer to the Gulf states but sidestepped the Palestinians. Al Jazeera and others cited Arab–Israeli normalization as a key factor in Hamas’ brutal October 7 attacks and the retaliatory razing of Gaza.)

Russia had a similar epiphany. Once Trump was sworn in, Kushner became a Kremlin target second only to Trump himself. President Vladimir Putin, federal documents show, tasked businessman Kirill Dmitriev with courting top White House officials, and Dmitriev took a particular interest in Kushner. Now head of a Russian sovereign wealth fund, Dmitriev—who was personally sanctioned by the US in 2022, along with the fund itself—controls a massive trove of Kremlin assets. He also studied at Stanford and Harvard and once worked at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. “It was with Kushner that Dmitriev established the closest and most trusting relationship,” the Russian outlet Novaya Gazeta noted. And that relationship would flourish again during Trump’s second term, as Kushner’s foreign ties came full circle.

Kushner’s assertion that he would play no role in a second administration crumbled as soon as Trump returned to power, and foreign regimes were quick to recapitalize on his proximity to the throne.

Dmitriev is now steeped in negotiations to end the fighting in Ukraine on Russia’s terms, with his old pal Kushner representing the United States. The Kremlin is dangling potential deals for US invest­ors that are reportedly worth trillions of dollars, if only America would lift its sanctions and welcome Russia back in from the cold. Kushner, meanwhile, has proved willing to peddle pro-Kremlin talking points time and again. In late 2025, he and special envoy Witkoff—whose family and the Trumps co-founded World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm in which a top UAE official would later purchase a 49 percent stake—publicized a “peace plan” for Ukraine. But its provisions, from capping Ukraine’s military to forcing Kyiv to cede territory that Russia hadn’t even conquered, were conspicuously pro-Moscow.

A Kremlin-friendly push by a US president with a mysterious Putin affinity might be unsurprising, but the details are galling. As investigative journalism site the Insider revealed, Kushner’s peace plan was in no way original. “Many of its most controversial conditions were contained” in a months-old Kremlin document the outlet had obtained. The plan was “at its core a recycled Russian document,” the Insider wrote, with “specific language that appeared almost exactly word-for-word in an earlier text—one drafted solely by Dmitriev.”

Israel also redoubled its relations with Kushner, whom Trump reappointed, with Witkoff, as a key interlocutor for the administration’s Palestinian efforts. Left unacknowledged was the fact that Affinity Partners had secured financial deals in Israel and was therefore in a position to profit from the ongoing theft of Palestinian lands. In 2025, the Israelis approved Affinity’s purchase of nearly 10 percent of an insurance and financing behemoth called Phoenix Financial Ltd., making Kushner’s fund the largest shareholder. Phoenix is a bulwark for Israeli expansion in the Palestinian territories and Syria, enabling more building, construction, and imperialism.

All of this has fattened Kushner’s wallet, and by extension Ivanka Trump’s. And yet the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are no closer to a conclusion. On September 16, 2025, a UN commission officially declared Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide.

That same day, Forbes declared Kushner a billionaire.

“Can you imagine, like, a normal, sitting US ambassador just hitting up Saudi grand Prince Mohammed bin Salman for billions of dollars?”

While still juggling Ukraine and Gaza, Kushner added Iran to his remit. If his Israeli investments made him a bad choice to broker peace with the Palestinians, the billions Affinity has received from Iran’s geopolitical rivals make his involvement in those negotiations just as shocking. His glaring conflicts of interest, combined with his lack of the knowledge and experience to lead such dicey negotiations, have resulted in what may be the greatest strategic failure of Trump’s presidency. Those conflicts perhaps might be easier to overlook were Kushner a nuclear policy whiz or an Iran expert. Instead, life-and-death decisions, and the fate of world affairs, have been left to a naive oligarch who seems to believe his ascent to ­billionaire-dom qualifies him to thread this difficult diplomatic needle.

The Guardian reported in March that Kushner claimed he and Witkoff both have “a pretty deep understanding of the issues that matter” in the Iran negotiations. But if Kushner has any nuclear know-how or useful knowledge of Iranian history and policy, it wasn’t evident during the failed negotiations that preceded the attacks Israel and the Trump administration unleashed in February without consulting Congress or America’s other allies. “I was very surprised that the United States would send two negotiators who clearly had done almost no research into Iran’s negotiating history or even the basic facts surrounding the nuclear program,” Kelsey Davenport, director of nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, told me. “You don’t have to be a nuclear physicist to negotiate an effective nuclear agreement, but you should be surrounded by nuclear experts.”

Kushner and Witkoff, by all appearances, misunderstood Iran’s recent diplomatic history with the United States, not least the nuclear deal struck under President Barack Obama, which Trump scuttled during his first term. For instance, when Iranian negotiators turned down Kushner’s offer of free nuclear fuel in return for ending the regime’s nuclear fuel enrichment, Kushner apparently took it as a sign that Iran would never abandon its bomb-building efforts. He can be heard complaining, in an early March recording obtained by Mother Jones, that Tehran was not taking the US position seriously and was responding simply with “games and tricks and denials.”

“Iran’s response should not have been a surprise,” said Davenport, whose organization has laid out perhaps the most thorough criticism of the US–Iran communication breakdown. “Iran had been burned in the past on fuel supplies, and it views uranium enrichment, the production of fuel, as not only a source of pride, but also as a sovereign right.” She added: “Witkoff and Kushner fundamentally misread the Iranian position and jumped to conclusions about Iranian intentions that just aren’t supported by the evidence.”

Yet despite the US contingent’s technical ignorance and general obtuseness, the Iran­ians appeared willing to keep talking. The Omani foreign minister, who was helping mediate, cited “substantial progress” between Washington and Tehran. And British mediators saw “no compelling evidence” of any imminent nuclear threat from Iran. That, too, appears to have been the conclusion of Trump’s White House predecessors. But Kushner, parroting Netanyahu’s rhetoric, claimed the Iranians “basically could have been days or weeks away from a weapon if they would have put the effort into it, and they had all the capability to accomplish that.”

That’s the conclusion he took to Trump, resulting in a war that has destabilized the region, alienated US allies, and bled Americans’ wallets. “All the reporting suggests that a strong deal was on offer had there been the patience and expertise from the US negotiating team—and it appears Mr. Kushner was not interested in that level of patience, and investing the time and effort needed for intensive negotiations on nuclear policy,” Jonathan Guyer, program director at Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs, told me. 

Kushner was, however, interested in soliciting new investments. The New York Times reported in March that, even as US bombs rained down on Tehran, he was meeting with foreign regimes, including the Saudis, to raise additional billions for Affinity. “Other Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds that invested earlier in Affinity, including those in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, are also expected to be asked for more,” the Times noted.

And how could they say no?

Back in DC, now that Kushner has his official title of special peace envoy, the law requires that he produce a financial disclosure. He hasn’t, but a Republican-­controlled Congress doesn’t seem inclined to haul him in for a grilling. That could change if the Democrats retake either chamber in the midterms. “Can you imagine, like, a normal, sitting US ambassador just hitting up Saudi grand Prince Mohammed bin Salman for billions of dollars?” Democratic Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, looking very much like a 2028 presidential candidate, asked a crowd of supporters in a clip posted on TikTok in mid-April. “No!” a man yells. “But he’s a Trump!” Ossoff adds perkily. “A royal. A princeling!”

This past spring, Raskin, along with Wyden and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-­Calif.), announced separate committee investigations into Kushner’s conflicts of interest. “Kushner makes up for his flaws as an investor by being a wildly corrupt appendage of his father-in-law’s wildly corrupt administration,” Wyden said in a press release. “The guy is literally on the payroll of the Saudi government and trying to take even more of their money while simultaneously hijacking US foreign policy with his shadow State Department.”

Kushner, whose companies did not respond to questions for this story, may not be directly responsible for the Iran war—the thousands of deaths, billions in damages, shortages of fuel and fertilizer and key metals, economic disruption, and, by some estimates, expenditure of nearly $50 billion in US military resources. That was Trump’s call. But Kushner’s leading role in the bungled negotiations makes him complicit in what, by most accounts, has been a costly and humiliating defeat for the administration—and for the nation, whose alliances and global standing may never recover.

In many ways, the Iran mess is a fitting capstone to Kushner’s career to date. Rather than a seasoned diplomat with a deep understanding of Middle East policy and history, a person of integrity with no financial stake in the outcome, we got a feckless wheeler-dealer—and a global quagmire. For Kushner, none of this appears to matter. He and his partners are traveling the world, gleefully raking in cash as they cultivate relationships with sordid regimes and kleptocratic leaders in the interest of making a buck. The world burns and Jared Kushner gets richer.

It seems he was right when he said it’s just different being a “deal guy.” Never mind what that means for the rest of us.