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For decades, as a leading figure in the Federalist Society and other conservative legal groups,
#Leonard #Leo identified and promoted the careers of lawyers and law clerks who shared his regressive views of the constitution.
He supported the confirmations of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito.
Now, having done so much to influence American jurisprudence, Leo has set his sights on reshaping American culture.
His plans involve the #Teneo #Network, which describes itself as a "talent pipeline" for the conservative movement,
with ambitions to influence Hollywood, Silicon Valley and other cultural power centers that he and fellow conservatives see as dominated by liberals.The proposed technique is similar to Leo's network of judicial nominees:
raising money from conservative donors to help identify, connect and promote the careers of like-minded people.In the language of Teneo's one-page website, the group exists "to Recruit, Connect, and Deploy talented conservatives who lead opinion and shape the industries that shape society"
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/24/nx-s1-5199049/federalist-society-conservative-supreme-courtInskeep: Do you see this as a multi-decade project, rather like the project for the judiciary has been?
Leo: Well, I think these kinds of changes do take time, although I have to say I am impressed by how quickly the Teneo Network has been able to build pipelines of talent in these places.
And I am also very impressed with how quickly you're seeing efforts, for example, in the journalism and entertainment spaces, the standing up of new production studios and news platforms.
Very impressed with the speed with which the debate about ESG [environmental, social and governance] has kind of flipped and changed.
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Electoral reform was on the ballot in several states this election.
-- Why did these measures fail?Americans in several states rejected ballot initiatives to curb extreme partisan gerrymandering and implement open primaries and ranked-choice voting.
Ohio voters decisively rejected a ballot measure that would have stripped lawmakers of their ability to draw electoral districts and given it to a 15-person bipartisan commission of ordinary citizens.
The vote came after Republicans, who control the legislature and redistricting process, ignored the state supreme court seven times to draw districts that heavily favored Republicans.
Voters in seven states – Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and South Dakota – all rejected ballot measures that would have done away with party primaries and replaced them with a non-partisan primary in which the top vote-getters would advance to the general election.
Several of the measures would have implemented ranked-choice voting for the general election.The defeats were somewhat surprising.
Ballot initiatives to curb partisan gerrymandering and implement electoral reforms have been broadly successful in recent years. Bipartisan momentum around them has built, especially after Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.But the failures this year show that momentum may be stalling.
Opposition to ranked-choice voting has grown more organized, led by a network linked to #Leonard #Leo, the influential conservative who has wielded enormous influence in shaping the US supreme court.“In retrospect, it looks like it was always going to be a tough year for these pro-democracy ballot measures,” said Deb Otis,
the director of #FairVote,
a non-profit that supports ranked-choice voting.
“The presidential election was looming heavily over voters and with a large number of ballot measures in some of these states. I think maybe voters defaulted to a no position on new concepts.
“I also think the ranked-choice measures were harmed by an increasingly well-organized national opposition,” she added.
“This opposition is driven by funders and organizations that have sown uncertainty in our elections for years. These are the same forces behind [the] ‘stop the steal’ [movement] and election denialism -
Leonard Leo, an influential conservative lawyer who advised Donald Trump during his first term forcefully pushed back Friday on talk that one or more conservative Supreme Court justices might retire after Trump again takes office in January.
Leo, who helped the president-elect select three Supreme Court picks during his first term, said in a statement that discussions of Justices #Clarence #Thomas, 76, or #Samuel A. #Alito Jr., 74, stepping down are unseemly.
The comment drew a rebuke from #Mike #Davis, a Trump aide who is advising him on potential judicial picks this time around,
while #Leonard #Leo appears to be keeping his distance.
“No one other than Justices Thomas and Alito knows when or if they will retire, and talking about them like meat that has reached its expiration date is unwise, uninformed, and, frankly, just crass,” Leo said in the statement.“Justices Thomas and Alito have given their lives to our country and our Constitution, and should be treated with more dignity and respect than they are getting from some pundits.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/08/trump-supreme-court-leonard-leo-mike-davis/ -
The Maga legal networks that could 💥topple Planned Parenthood 💥and gut women’s healthcare:
In the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency,
a young lawyer with crisply shorn blond hair approached the podium at a gathering for Texas members of the Federalist Society,
a conservative legal group that wields immense power in the US judicial system.As vice-president of the group’s Fort Worth chapter, #Matthew #Kacsmaryk had the honor of presenting the first speaker.
“We are blessed to have Judge #Edith #Jones,” Kacsmaryk announced.
Jones, a longtime judge on the US fifth circuit court of appeals,
stepped on stage to introduce the evening’s guest, her friend,
the supreme court justice #Clarence #Thomas.
In her introduction, Jones also hailed the four new conservative judges Trump had appointed to join her on the appeals court.“They’ve raised the bar for the fifth circuit since I got on,” she said. “And that’s thanks to the #Federalist #Society, to Leonard.”
#Leonard #Leo needed no last name in his introduction to this crowd
as he took his seat in a black leather chair across from Thomas.The justice was the featured speaker
but Leo may have been the most important person in the American legal system in that room
– a conservative activist who had built the Federalist Society into a political powerhouse
and helped Trump create the supreme court majority that,
in 2022, erased federal protections for abortion.His influence continues to be on display now in one of the most consequential cases moving through the American legal system
– one that seeks to strike another blow to abortion rights
💥and could possibly bankrupt Planned Parenthood,
one of the nation’s leading providers of healthcare for women.It’s a lawsuit that has been filed by an anti-abortion activist tied to Leo and heard by judges
– from the lower courts to the fifth circuit appeals court
– who are also linked to LeoThree of the people on the stage at the Federalist Society event in Fort Worth in 2018
– Kacsmaryk, Jones and Leo
– have all played key roles in the case.Though the stakes in this case couldn’t be higher for one of the nation’s oldest healthcare providers,
it is about more than abortion or healthcare.The lawsuit is a parable about Leo’s power amid a presidential election season
whose outcome will probably determine to what extent Leo will continue to reshape the makeup and ideology of the nation’s courts.The case was filed in February 2021 by an anti-abortion activist
who had conducted what he described as an
“extensive undercover investigation” of the organization.He accuses Planned Parenthood of fraud
– claiming that it owes $1.8bn in fines, fees and reimbursements to the Medicaid program.It’s an amount that could force the 108-year-old nonprofit healthcare provider to shutter clinics across the country.
The lawsuit is titled
"USA v Planned Parenthood"
because it was filed under a federal whistleblower law
that allows citizens to sue on behalf of the US government
over allegations that federal programs have been defrauded.It is the latest in a series of legal actions that started in 2015
after Texas’s health officials used footage from the activist’s hidden-camera recordings as a basis to expel Planned Parenthood from the state’s Medicaid program.The activist and his allies claimed the videos showed Planned Parenthood was illegally selling fetal tissue and endangering pregnant people’s health.
Planned Parenthood repeatedly denied wrongdoing.
Investigations in multiple states triggered by the video resulted in no disciplinary action against the healthcare provider.
The US government
– the source of 90% of the Medicaid funds paid to Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas
– disputes that Planned Parenthood owes the federal government money.Federal officials say in a court filing that they found no evidence that Planned Parenthood had improperly billed for its services
and that they found no reason Planned Parenthood should have been removed from Medicaid.Experts in healthcare law expected the case to be dismissed quickly.
Yet none of these facts are as important to understanding the significance of this case as knowing where it was filed:
in the federal courthouse in Amarillo, Texas
– home to zero Planned Parenthood clinics.This wasn’t an accident.
The US district court in Amarillo is under the purview of the US fifth circuit court of appeals,
making it likely that any upward appeals in Planned Parenthood’s case would be heard in the hard-right appeals court,
including by judges appointed by Trump or other conservative stalwarts like Jones.And by the time the Planned Parenthood case was filed, Kacsmaryk
– that young attorney on stage making introductions at the Federalist Society event in Texas
– had been serving as the federal district court judge for Amarillo for nearly two years. -
"Bush v. Gore" was supposed to be a one-off
because it saw the Supreme Court step out of its usual lane to overturn a state court decision on state election administration,
which is generally left up to the states.But last year,
in "Moore v. Harper",
🔸the Supreme Court opened the door to similar interventions
whenever it decides a state court has “transgress[ed] the ordinary bounds of judicial review” at the expense of state legislative power.With voting underway for 2024, this vague and untested standard provides a new opening for the court to meddle in state election matters.
“The size of this loophole is unknown at this point,” warns Jessica Marsden, an attorney at Protect Democracy.
“But there are cases percolating up that will raise this issue and test the size.”As Marsden explained during a Supreme Court preview hosted by the Center for American Progress,
➡️ such cases could affect “either how voting happens in November or even which ballots get counted.”In the critical battleground of #Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court is currently deciding whether to ❇️count mail-in ballots that, while valid, do not conform to every rule, such as missing a handwritten date on the envelope.
If the state Supreme Court allows such ballots to be counted, under the new rationale of "Moore v. Harper", the US Supreme Court could find justification to intervene
and ❌toss out tens of thousands of ballots in the most contested state in the nation.Marsden also pointed to #Nevada, another battleground, where the Republican National Committee has tried to roll back a policy of ❇️accepting mail ballots that arrive after Election Day.
“If Nevada were the decisive state and they hadn’t resolved this issue ahead of the election,” Marsden said,
“I don’t know that I’m optimistic that in that situation that the Supreme Court would decline to reach in and decide.”Still, Marsden sounded a note of cautious optimism about the slim chances of another Bush v. Gore. “It’s actually very hard to tee up an issue for the Supreme Court that would be outcome determinative,” she said.
Indeed, the best way for the Harris campaign to keep the Supreme Court out of the race is to 👍win by enough that their interventions would be futile.
It may be hard to create the conditions where the court’s Republican-appointed justices are in a position to decide
—but the Trump campaign and its allies are certainly trying.Four years ago, the courts acted as a bulwark against Trump’s attempts to overturn the election, including the Supreme Court, which rebuffed his challenges.
And for good reason: the cases were extremely weak.“The challenges to the election outcome last time were last ditch efforts by a few #fringe actors like John Eastman,”
says Alex Aronson, executive director of Court Accountability, a progressive group pushing Supreme Court reform.Trump’s rag-tag team was clearly going to lose, and even allies like Bill Barr, his own attorney general, jumped ship.
🔥But this time, Aronson notes, there is a “more serious cohort of lawyers and funders behind these challenges.”
💥Barr, for example, is on the board of a group involved in voter suppression lawsuits,
including one of the challenges to Pennsylvania mail ballots.👉Attorneys in the funding orbit of #Leonard #Leo, the dark money patriarch of the conservative judicial movement who helped select and confirm the GOP-appointed justices,
are behind uits to ♦️purge voter rolls and ♦️change voting rules.⚠️And the Republican National Committee itself is strategically litigating around the country to make it harder to vote and to invite courts to throw out ballots.
When the Supreme Court allowed Arizona’s requirement that new voters show proof of citizenship,
they handed a win to the RNC and a law firm backed by Leo.The people and groups behind the legal attacks on the 2024 election are in the #mainstream of the conservative movement,
which could induce the justices to take up the opportunities those lawyers will bring to the courtshttps://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/10/supreme-court-2024-election-donald-trump/
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Two men recognized and exploited the anti-democratic loopholes within America’s rickety democracy
-- in order to deliver Republicans victories that they could never win at the ballot box.Now their willfully minoritarian creations threaten the very essence of a representative democracy:
if Donald #Trump, rightwing courts, #gerrymandered state legislatures and an extreme Republican #caucus in the US House of Representatives create constitutional #chaos over the certification of this presidential election, 👉two men cleared the path.
The single-minded determination of #Leonard #Leo built a conservative supermajority on the US #supreme #court and ♦️stacked lower and state courts with Republican #ideologues that have pushed the nation to the right via the least accountable branch of government.
#Chris #Jankowski masterminded the partisan #gerrymanders that ♦️tilted state legislatures and congressional delegations across the south and the purple midwest toward extreme Republicans,
♦️ended Barack Obama’s second term before it started, and ♦️rendered elections in Wisconsinand North Carolina all but meaningless over the last decade and a half.Leo and Jankowski understood, separately, that the courts and state legislatures were undervalued and often undefended targets for a deliberate strategy aimed at capturing important levers of power that sometimes float under the radar.
They could be Moneyball-ed, to borrow the term Michael Lewis used in his book about how the Oakland A’s made an end-run around large-market teams by understanding value that their opponents overlooked.
What Leo and Jankowski built separately would soon reinforce the other’s creation (with, of course, crucial assists from chief justice #John #Roberts), tightening the knots around meaningful elections, pushing policy to the extreme right and 💥making it nearly impossible for voters to do anything about it
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#Leonard #Leo and his ilk would soon become a bridge connecting the prelature with important people on Capitol Hill
— and the world of dark money populated by secretive billionaires with a deeply conservative agenda.Together, they would form a coalition
— unified by their political connections, religious fervor, and money
— that would reshape American society and destroy many hard-won civil rights.In Father Arne’s view, his successful renewal of the apostolic mission of the bookshop and chapel on K Street was all part of a
“Great Awakening” that was about to wash over the United States
— and the world.In the wake of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement and the general disgruntlement of young people following the financial crisis,
he saw this “Great Awakening” starting on university campuses,
where Opus Dei had again begun to plant its flag with what he called
“counter-institutions” such as the Catholic Information Center’s #Leonine #Forum and the #Witherspoon #Institute at Princeton.“It isn’t only a spiritual awakening that’s coming,” Arne Panula explained.
“Students leave these schools with no jobs, no intellectual sustenance of worth, and a huge financial debt . . . students are being duped.
There will be a utilitarian reaction to that chasm between what they’re promised and what they’re actually taught
— market correction, of sorts, in education.But the deeper reaction is more personal.
It’s about betrayal.
Some of these students come to realize that there’s a world out there that they never knew existed.
They’ve been purposefully sealed off from it by their teachers and other authorities.
That begs for reaction.
They’ve been sold a bill of secular progressive goods!”
Opus Dei would help guide them toward this new world.
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Through his role in securing the nominations of Clarence #Thomas, John #Roberts, and Samuel #Alito to the Supreme Court,
#Leonard #Leo’s political cachet began to grow.An avid networker, he cultivated friendships with other members of the court,
spending a weekend in Colorado hunting with Judge Antonin #Scalia
— himself a devout Catholic and, like the Corkerys, close to #Opus #Dei.Surrounded by such religious zeal, it didn’t take long for their example to reawaken his own Catholic faith, and Leo soon began tapping his network of #darkmoney #backers to support religious causes.
He twice bailed out the #Becket #Fund, a nonprofit named after a twelfth-century English martyr, that officially worked to protect religious freedoms,
especially those that were important to conservative Catholics.He reveled in his reputation as the financial savior of this important community.
Soon afterwards, President Bush picked Leo as his representative to the "United States Commission on International Religious Freedom,"
a federal agency set up to police religious freedom around the world.Despite its lofty aims, the commission had a tiny budget and its commissioners were unpaid.
Within Washington circles, many saw it as nothing more than an office for amateurs who meddled in foreign policy.
Undeterred by the skeptics, Leo made the most of his time at the commission to push his own Catholic agenda
— traveling to places like Iraq, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Sudan, and Vietnam to investigate allegations of religious persecution.His own faith seemed to grow during that time,
with Leo occasionally reprimanding his staff for putting him in a hotel too far from a church,
making it difficult for him to attend Mass.Some colleagues began to note a particular bias in the way he carried out a role that conflicted with the commission’s stated aim of championing the freedom of all religions.
He became embroiled in a lawsuit after one former colleague accused him of ❌firing her because she was Muslim.
Several staff members resigned because of the controversy,
and Leo was fired not long after.Despite the scandal, his time at the commission deepened Leo’s faith and helped him cultivate his image as a serious political figure.
By the time of the #Federalist #Society’s twenty-fifth anniversary dinner in November 2007,
his influence was clear.Leo shared the stage with the president and three sitting Supreme Court Justices
— Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.Chief Justice John Roberts sent a video message.
“Thanks in part to your efforts, a new generation of lawyers is rising,” President Bush told the assembled members.
At the time of this dinner, Leo was still recovering from the sudden death of his daughter Margaret just a few weeks before her fifteenth birthday
— an event that had a profound impact on him.Margaret had been born with spina bifida and used a wheelchair.
Events around her death had reinforced Leo’s faith.
The previous summer, during a family vacation, Leo had promised Margaret that he would try to go to Mass more regularly.
Over the years, Margaret had developed an obsession with anything religious, and would nag her parents to take her to Mass.
She especially loved angels
— and priests, insisting on a hug every time she saw one.The day after they returned from vacation, Leo got up early to go to Mass
— as promised — and looked in on Margaret.As he was walking down the hall, she started gasping for breath and died shortly afterward.
“I will always think that she did her job,” he later said. “She did her job.”
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#Leonard #Leo was born on Long Island in the mid-sixties.
When he was only a toddler, he lost his father — a pastry chef — to cancer.
At the age of five, his mother remarried, and the Leos moved to New Jersey, where he attended Monroe Township High School.
Leo was chosen as the “Most Likely to Succeed”
a distinction he shared with classmate #Sally #Schroeder, his future wife.
In the yearbook, the two were shown sitting next to each other, holding wads of cash and with dollar signs painted on their glasses.
He was so effective at raising money for his senior prom that his classmates nicknamed him the “Moneybags Kid.”
Throughout his life, he remained steeped in the deep Catholicism of his grandfather, who had emigrated to the United States from Italy as a teenager;
his grandparents attended Mass daily, and encouraged the young Leonard to follow their lead.
After high school, Leo went to Cornell University, studying under a group of conservative academics in the university’s department of government
and with the wider national backdrop of iconoclastic scholars led by Yale University’s #Robert #Bork and the University of Chicago’s #Antonin #Scalia, who were building the case for a novel legal doctrine known as #originalism.
He got a series of internships in Washington, D.C., during the final years of the Reagan administration,
then returned to Cornell to join the law school, where in 1989 he founded the local chapter of a student organization called the #Federalist #Society.
That group had been set up by three conservative-leaning students from Yale, Harvard, and Chicago seven years earlier as a way of challenging what they saw as the dominance of liberal ideology at the country’s law schools.After graduating, Leo married Sally, who had been raised as a Protestant but who used to go to Catholic Mass five times every weekend because she played the organ.
She decided to convert not long before her marriage.
The couple moved back to Washington, where Leo clerked for a judge on the court of appeals and became close with another appellate judge who had recently been appointed to the D.C. circuit
— a man from Georgia called #Clarence #Thomas,
who had toyed with becoming a Catholic priest.Despite being ten years older and from much more humble origins,
Thomas shared Leo’s conservative outlook, and the two soon developed a deep friendship that would endure for many years.During this period, Leo was asked by the Federalist Society to become its first employee
— although he delayed his start date so that he could help his good friend Thomas through his contentious confirmation process for the Supreme Court.Despite accusations of sexual harassment hanging over him, Thomas won Senate confirmation by a slim margin.
It would be the first in a series of fights in which Leo would have to put aside the teachings of his Christian faith as he focused on the greater goal of pushing through a conservative revolution of the courts and of society at large.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/opus-dei-leonard-leo-supreme-court-moneybags-kid-1235115538/ -
The stars of the conservative media movement have been duking it out
– in extremely personal terms
– over Donald Trump’s decision to enter the United States into a conflict with Iran.While it can be hard to cleanly group the warring factions,
much of the fighting has centered on disagreements about whether the US is too deferential to Israeli interests.Those arguing that position most prominently include former Fox News hosts Tucker #Carlson and Megyn #Kelly,
while conservative media personalities like Mark #Levin (a current Fox News host) and Ben #Shapiro have strongly supported both the American intervention in Iran and collaboration with Israel.
“There are the classic neocons,
there is the populist right,
and there are the anti-anti neocons,” said Curt Mills, executive director of the American Conservative magazine.On Tuesday, Shapiro defended Levin, called Kelly an “unbelievable coward” and accused her of eliding her criticism of President Trump. “You don’t like President Trump? You don’t like what he’s saying? Just say his name, you coward,” Shapiro said. “You unbelievable coward. Tucker and Megyn both – unbelievable cowardice.”
The tension between Carlson and Levin traces back to at least June 2025,
when Carlson accused Levin of
“lobbying for war with Iran” during a private lunch with Trump at the White House.Levin called Carlson a “maggot”,
and Carlson referred to Levin as a “warmonger”.He used the same label for another former Fox News colleague,
Sean Hannity.(This week, Kelly called her former colleague Hannity “a supplicant to Donald Trump”
and said
“he would never say anything other than to puff Donald Trump up”.)
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/mar/06/conservative-media-open-warfare-over-iran?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other -
Donald Trump shared a slew of videos online attacking Vice President Kamala Harris,
after a favorability poll aired on Fox News found ⭐️she was leading him in key swing states. ⭐️The new poll, conducted July 22–24 and released Sunday, found that Harris’s approval rating had surpassed Trump’s in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Michigan.
In Michigan, Harris was leading Trump in favorability by a whopping 57 percent to 47 percent.
Many online predicted that Trump would be incensed over the results.
“The ketchup is going to hit the wall in Mar-a-Lago after this new Fox News poll,” remarked former Clinton White House aide Keith Boykin on X (formerly Twitter).
Within hours, Trump posted five separate videos on Truth Social of one of his longtime favorite Fox News hosts, #Mark #Levin,
whom Rolling Stone once called a
🔸“bomb-throwing Trump sycophant,” 🔸
attacking Harris.In one of the videos from Life, Liberty & Levin,
Levin labeled Harris as a🤣 “rabid Marxist scholar,” 🤣specifically decrying her past statements about the need for equity
—the idea that every person should be given access to the resources needed to be successful
—so that, as Harris put it, every citizen could “end up in the same place.”“‘So we all end up in the same place’? Doesn’t this sound like we’re all going to end up in a gulag?” Levin said.
He called equity a “prescription for tyranny and totalitarianism,”
ranting that it was
🔹“not the government’s job” to improve the quality of life of American citizens. 🔹In another video posted to Trump’s account, Levin criticized Harris for comparing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the Ku Klux Klan
for causing fear and intimidation in immigrant communities.“The combination of stupidity and arrogance is on full display, right here,” said Levin.
Levin continued to incorrectly call her the “border czar,”
-- although she was never responsible for border security.Unfortunately for Trump, arguments like Levin’s don’t seem to be nearly as convincing to the rest of America.
In just one week,
🔥Harris’s overall favorability jumped from 35 percent to 43 percent 🔥
and her unfavorability fell from 46 percent to 42 percent, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted on Friday and Saturday.https://newrepublic.com/post/184330/trump-loses-mind-devastating-fox-news-poll-kamala-harris
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Donald Trump threatened to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine
unless European countries joined a U.S. military effor to open the Strait of Hormuz,
the Financial Times (FT) reported on April 1,
citing people familiar with the discussions.The report comes a month into the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran,
which has escalated across the Middle East.Following the attacks, Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway through which roughly one-fifth of the world's oil supply transits.
Trump sought help from NATO allies in reopening the strait as fuel prices surged worldwide,
but European nations showed little interest in joining the U.S. war in Iran.In response, Trump threatened to stop the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List ( #PURL ) program, whereby NATO nations buy U.S. arms for Ukraine, three sources told the FT.
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Donald Trump threatened to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine
unless European countries joined a U.S. military effor to open the Strait of Hormuz,
the Financial Times (FT) reported on April 1,
citing people familiar with the discussions.The report comes a month into the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran,
which has escalated across the Middle East.Following the attacks, Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway through which roughly one-fifth of the world's oil supply transits.
Trump sought help from NATO allies in reopening the strait as fuel prices surged worldwide,
but European nations showed little interest in joining the U.S. war in Iran.In response, Trump threatened to stop the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List ( #PURL ) program, whereby NATO nations buy U.S. arms for Ukraine, three sources told the FT.
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Donald Trump threatened to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine
unless European countries joined a U.S. military effor to open the Strait of Hormuz,
the Financial Times (FT) reported on April 1,
citing people familiar with the discussions.The report comes a month into the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran,
which has escalated across the Middle East.Following the attacks, Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway through which roughly one-fifth of the world's oil supply transits.
Trump sought help from NATO allies in reopening the strait as fuel prices surged worldwide,
but European nations showed little interest in joining the U.S. war in Iran.In response, Trump threatened to stop the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List ( #PURL ) program, whereby NATO nations buy U.S. arms for Ukraine, three sources told the FT.
-
Donald Trump threatened to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine
unless European countries joined a U.S. military effor to open the Strait of Hormuz,
the Financial Times (FT) reported on April 1,
citing people familiar with the discussions.The report comes a month into the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran,
which has escalated across the Middle East.Following the attacks, Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway through which roughly one-fifth of the world's oil supply transits.
Trump sought help from NATO allies in reopening the strait as fuel prices surged worldwide,
but European nations showed little interest in joining the U.S. war in Iran.In response, Trump threatened to stop the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List ( #PURL ) program, whereby NATO nations buy U.S. arms for Ukraine, three sources told the FT.
-
Donald Trump threatened to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine
unless European countries joined a U.S. military effor to open the Strait of Hormuz,
the Financial Times (FT) reported on April 1,
citing people familiar with the discussions.The report comes a month into the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran,
which has escalated across the Middle East.Following the attacks, Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway through which roughly one-fifth of the world's oil supply transits.
Trump sought help from NATO allies in reopening the strait as fuel prices surged worldwide,
but European nations showed little interest in joining the U.S. war in Iran.In response, Trump threatened to stop the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List ( #PURL ) program, whereby NATO nations buy U.S. arms for Ukraine, three sources told the FT.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has acquired Talen Energy’s data center campus at a nuclear power station in Pennsylvania.
#Talen #Energy #Corporation this week announced it has sold its 960MW #Cumulus #data #center campus in Pennsylvania to a ‘major cloud service provider’ – listed as #Amazon in a Talen investor presentation. Amazon is yet to comment on the news.
The 1,200-acre campus draws power from Talen Energy’s neighboring 2.5GW #nuclear #power station in Luzerne County, the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station ( #SSES ).
The company broke ground in 2021 and completed the first 48MW, 300,000 square foot (28,870 sqm) hyperscale facility early last year, along with a separate #cryptomine facility.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has acquired Talen Energy’s data center campus at a nuclear power station in Pennsylvania.
#Talen #Energy #Corporation this week announced it has sold its 960MW #Cumulus #data #center campus in Pennsylvania to a ‘major cloud service provider’ – listed as #Amazon in a Talen investor presentation. Amazon is yet to comment on the news.
The 1,200-acre campus draws power from Talen Energy’s neighboring 2.5GW #nuclear #power station in Luzerne County, the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station ( #SSES ).
The company broke ground in 2021 and completed the first 48MW, 300,000 square foot (28,870 sqm) hyperscale facility early last year, along with a separate #cryptomine facility.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has acquired Talen Energy’s data center campus at a nuclear power station in Pennsylvania.
#Talen #Energy #Corporation this week announced it has sold its 960MW #Cumulus #data #center campus in Pennsylvania to a ‘major cloud service provider’ – listed as #Amazon in a Talen investor presentation. Amazon is yet to comment on the news.
The 1,200-acre campus draws power from Talen Energy’s neighboring 2.5GW #nuclear #power station in Luzerne County, the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station ( #SSES ).
The company broke ground in 2021 and completed the first 48MW, 300,000 square foot (28,870 sqm) hyperscale facility early last year, along with a separate #cryptomine facility.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has acquired Talen Energy’s data center campus at a nuclear power station in Pennsylvania.
#Talen #Energy #Corporation this week announced it has sold its 960MW #Cumulus #data #center campus in Pennsylvania to a ‘major cloud service provider’ – listed as #Amazon in a Talen investor presentation. Amazon is yet to comment on the news.
The 1,200-acre campus draws power from Talen Energy’s neighboring 2.5GW #nuclear #power station in Luzerne County, the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station ( #SSES ).
The company broke ground in 2021 and completed the first 48MW, 300,000 square foot (28,870 sqm) hyperscale facility early last year, along with a separate #cryptomine facility.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has acquired Talen Energy’s data center campus at a nuclear power station in Pennsylvania.
#Talen #Energy #Corporation this week announced it has sold its 960MW #Cumulus #data #center campus in Pennsylvania to a ‘major cloud service provider’ – listed as #Amazon in a Talen investor presentation. Amazon is yet to comment on the news.
The 1,200-acre campus draws power from Talen Energy’s neighboring 2.5GW #nuclear #power station in Luzerne County, the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station ( #SSES ).
The company broke ground in 2021 and completed the first 48MW, 300,000 square foot (28,870 sqm) hyperscale facility early last year, along with a separate #cryptomine facility.
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#Jeff #Bezos was in the Vatican this week to accept an award praising him as a “Prophet of Philanthropy”
– even as his ex-wife #MacKenzie #Scott has given away more wealth, more quickly, than the Amazon billionaire
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/jeff-bezos-mackenzie-scott-charity-b2207440.html
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The #Washington #Post has consistently produced high-quality, news cycle-leading reporting over the first year of Donald Trump’s chaotic and unpredictable second administration.
But that work has been produced under a cloud of uncertainty and rumors of widespread #job #cuts.
🔥Those long-rumored cuts now appear to be close, with staffers expecting the ax to drop in early February
– though nothing is certain.
Inside the Post, staffers have tossed around estimates of potential cuts, with most exceeding 100,
which would represent more than 10% of the newsroom
– but no one really knows how widespread the cuts will be
– or in fact if they will happen at all.The sections most likely to be affected by the cuts include sports, metro and foreign, according to staffers who spoke with the Guardian.
On Sunday morning, members of the foreign staff, concerned that the section could be decimated by cuts, sent a letter to the Post’s billionaire owner, #Jeff #Bezos, urging him to change course and conveying the significance of international reporting for the institution
– and for the public interest.
Approximately 60 people signed the letter.“We urge you to consider how the proposed layoffs will certainly lead us first to irrelevance
– not the shared success that remains attainable,”
the staffers wrote in the letter,
reviewed by the Guardian but first reported by the New York Times.The signatories, which included many of the paper’s most prominent international journalists,
said they were open to
“finding ways to reduce our costs even further” in discussion with management
– “while retaining as many jobs as we can”.
“We know what happens when newspapers slash their international sections:
💥they lose reach and they lose relevance,” the staffers wrote. -
@cdarwin
New Wikipedia article; please update if you can add value🤘
2025 dismissals of inspectors general
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_general
#InspectorsGeneral #CIGIE -
As the Trump administration intensifies its war on elite universities, one Ivy League school is lawyering up with a Trump ally.
#Dartmouth College announced this week that it has tapped #Matt #Raymer, the former chief counsel at the Republican National Committee, to serve as the college’s top lawyer and senior vice president.
Raymer will not only run the general counsel’s office, but also serve on Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock’s leadership team and advise the college on “legal and strategic matters.”
⚠️Raymer, who in January publicly backed President Donald Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship, will also oversee the school’s Office of Visa and Immigration Services.
Raymer’s selection comes as Republicans dramatically escalate their attacks on higher education
— training their ire on Ivy League institutions they’ve long accused of fostering liberalism and censoring conservatives.It’s left university leaders balancing a series of competing demands:
preserving their relationships with an administration on which most rely for funding,
defending free speech on campus and protecting non-citizen student activists Trump campaigned on deporting.“There is a need to be able to communicate across the political spectrum. I think every university is trying to find people from the moderate to right — and even more right — in the political spectrum to help deliver messages and help protect them from unfair and problematic attacks,” said Lee Bollinger, the former president of Columbia University. “I’m seeing it more and more.”
Columbia is at the center of the fight, facing a $400 million funding freeze as federal immigration agents moved to deport a former student with a green card and are combing campus looking for other non-citizen students who, the White House claims, supported Hamas during last spring’s pro-Palestinian student protests. Beilock, Dartmouth’s president, previously served as president of Barnard College, a Columbia affiliate institution and the current center of continuing protest activity at the university.The Trump administration on Wednesday froze $175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania over its transgender athlete policies. Cornell and Yale are under investigation for allegedly prioritizing doctoral applicants from underrepresented backgrounds. And the administration has launched probes into alleged antisemitism at Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton and Yale.
Dartmouth — the smallest Ivy League college, tucked away in rural New Hampshire and known for being less progressive than many of its peers — is the only school in the conference that appears to so far have escaped the administration’s wrath.
“We’ve done a good job in the past of permitting free expression and respecting others’ voices,” said Phil Hanlon, who served as Dartmouth’s president before Beilock. “We’ve worked hard at that over many decades.”
Raymer’s history on immigration could be where he faces the greatest opposition on campus, as his hiring appears to prioritize the political realities over universities’ long-held values. Universities have faced increasing pressure from students and advocates to answer questions about how they will protect students amid the president’s immigration crackdown, as Trump has changed policy to allow immigration enforcement at schools and fears percolate about data protection for undocumented students, as well those who have parents living in the country illegally. -
Trouble is brewing in the North Atlantic.
'We don't really consider it low probability anymore':
Collapse of key Atlantic current could have catastrophic impacts, says oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf
The Atlantic Ocean's most vital ocean current is showing troubling signs of reaching a disastrous tipping point.
Oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf tells Live Science what the impacts could be.
Beneath the waves, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation ( #AMOC ),
which includes the Gulf Stream,
acts as a planetary conveyor belt bringing nutrients, oxygen and heat north from tropical waters,
while moving colder water south
— a balancing act that keeps the Northern Hemisphere warm.But research into Earth's climate history shows that the current has switched off in the past,
and a growing number of studies suggest that climate change is causing the AMOC to slow, possibly leading it toward a disastrous collapse.On Monday (Oct. 21), 44 oceanographers from 15 countries published an open letter calling for urgent action in the face of the weakening circulation.
They warn that the risk of collapse has been "greatly underestimated" and will have "devastating and irreversible impacts" for the world.Live Science sat down with the letter's lead organizer, #Stefan #Rahmstorf, an oceanographer who runs the Earth system analysis department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, to discuss the AMOC developments and their potential global effects.
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On Thursday, the January 6 committee released two more transcripts of #Cassidy #Hutchinson’s testimony, which was given September 14, 2022 and September 15, 2022.
Former Trump staffer and important Jan. 6 witness #Cassidy #Hutchinson testified her Trump-paid lawyer #Stefan #Passantino took a call from New York Times correspondent #Maggie #Haberman above her objections, reassuring her
👉 “Maggie’s friendly to us.” -
#CPAC #Schlapp #Rasmussen #Cove #Strategies
The "Conservative Political Action Conference"
( #CPAC ) has become much more of a #MAGA event in recent years, with Donald Trump himself scheduled on Saturday to address the event of conservative activists, media figures and supportersBut the event has been covered on the right and the left, save for perhaps this year.
Matt #Schlapp, the chair of the conference, said that he was👉 not going to credential those in the left.
“CPAC has a new rule. If you are a propagandist, you can buy a ticket like everyone else, but you are not in the media, and we are not going to credential you by saying you are in the media,” Schlapp said on Steve #Bannon’s podcast
He singled out #MSNBC, saying it was “100% anti Trump, anti-America, anti-conservative, every moment of every day. They never have any kind of honest treatment of anything.”
https://deadline.com/2024/02/cpac-msnbc-matt-schlapp-1235833339/
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An official at #CPAC chief Matt #Schlapp’s organization allegedly oversaw the shredding of documents conducted by interns after Schlapp was accused of sexual assault.
According to the Daily Beast, which cited three familiar sources, the 🔹American Conservative Union’s🔹 manager of strategic initiatives, Lynne #Rasmussen, “directly oversaw interns shredding documents in or near her office shortly after” the Daily Beast published allegations of sexual assault against Schlapp in 2023.
The shredded documents allegedly included “personal documents belonging to Schlapp” and “business records related to Schlapp’s private lobbying outfit, #Cove #Strategies.”