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After a recent change by the Trump administration, the federal government no longer explicitly prohibits contractors from having segregated restaurants, waiting rooms and drinking fountains.The segregation clause is one of several identified in a public memo issued by the General Services Administration last month, affecting all civil federal agencies. The memo explains that it is making changes prompted by President Trump's executive order on diversity, equity and inclusion, which repealed an executive order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 regarding federal contractors and nondiscrimination. The memo also addresses Trump's executive order on gender identity.While there are still state...

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Your job as Democrats is to lead the opposition to Trump, which means making Trump unpopular. Right now there are only two engine governors on Trumpism: The courts and his popularity. You can’t influence the courts, but you do have input on public opinion. Stop wasting it. First rule of fight club: Pick your opponent. Ultimately you need to drag Trump’s numbers down, but right now he’s riding high. Elon Musk is a softer target.

President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social on Thursday that he has uncovered what he says “could be the biggest scandal of them all, perhaps the biggest in history!” He alleged (in capital letters) that “billions of dollars have been stollen [sic] at USAID, and other agencies, much of it going to the fake news media as a ‘payoff’ for creating good stories about the Democrats.” The president went on to claim Politico had received $8 million from the federal government, and questioned if The New York Times and other media outlets had also received payments. Even for a man...

Former Rep. Liz Cheney emphatically acknowledged her past work for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) when responding to a tweet by Elon Musk. Musk, who is spearheading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) effort to slash government waste and fraud, has the agency in his crosshairs. "Interesting," Musk wrote in response to a post in which Mike Benz, founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said Cheney had been "spawned out of USAID." Benz shared a screenshot from an article that said Cheney had worked at the agency. "Damn right, @Elon. I’m proud of what...

Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde’s sermon to President Trump during an inaugural prayer service, coupled with her church’s advocacy for humanitarian immigration programs, reveals a striking hypocrisy — one that could be seen as self-serving and even a conflict of interest. That’s because the federal contracting arm of the church, Episcopal Migration Ministry (EMM), is paid to bring in people on resettlement programs that Trump has temporarily paused and targeted for re-evaluation. EMM budget figures for 2024 are not available yet, but in 2023 it earned $53 million from various taxpayer-funded government programs to resettle 3,600 individuals. Unlike everyday immigrants, these...

The European Space Agency revealed that the earth is now 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than before, and recent assessments have deduced that this change risks crossing delicate climate tipping points. Even minor fluctuations in the planet’s temperature are felt at Earth's extreme poles—the North and South poles. While the drastic implications of global warming in Greenland and the Arctic are not new information, a new study predicted that the latter will be ice-free in three years’ time. By summer 2027, the Arctic Ocean will witness its first ice-free day at the current pace of greenhouse gas emissions. According to the...

'There’s been an uptick in that imbalance and that has led to an uptick in the rate of ocean warming.' Credit: DepositPhotos Earth’s oceans caught a fever in March 2023 that has yet to break. Since then, the bathwater-like conditions have killed corals in a record-breaking mass bleaching event, fueled hurricanes, and collapsed entire fisheries. The two years of heat have created a scientific mystery, with 450 straight days of record high global sea surface temperatures from April 2023 to July 2024 — a streak that exceeded climate scientists’ predictions even when accounting for climate change and the natural...

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission indicating that he may pursue another independent bid for the U.S. Senate when his current term expires in 2030. Sanders, born in 1941, would be 89 years old at the time of the election. Sanders filed an amended Statement of Candidacy with the Federal Election Commission on Monday. According to the document, he would run once more as an independent candidate. This is a shift from past remarks Sanders has made about running for another term, as he previously said that his current term would likely be...

As is often the case, the Wall Street Journal editorial board is straying from its lane to admonish Republicans and Trump supporters in a way that demonstrates the paper’s impressive capacity for shallowness.The Journal on Tuesday joined the New York Times and the Washington Post in running editorials attacking President Trump for his sweeping pardons of Jan. 6 defendants and convicts. The paper called the pardons “a rotten message from a President about political violence done on his behalf” and decried them as a “stain” on his legacy. That’s more or less exactly what the Times and the Post said,...

Arms crossed, scowl set, President-elect Donald J. Trump avoided jail, but became a felon. Mr. Trump appeared virtually at his criminal sentencing on Friday from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, more than 1,000 miles away from the chilly Manhattan courtroom where his case was called for a final time. Projected on a 60-inch screen, his image loomed over the gallery as a prosecutor recounted his crimes and a judge imposed his sentence. Mr. Trump once faced up to four years in prison for falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal, but on Friday, he received only a so-called...

California has focused on fortifying communities against wildfires. But with growing threats, that may not be enough. This week’s fires around Los Angeles present a puzzle: Why is California, the state best equipped to deal with wildfires, seemingly unable to prevent blazes from consuming entire chunks of the country’s second-largest city?California’s building code for wildfires is among the most protective in the nation. Its local fire departments are backed up by CalFire, the state fire agency, which has a $4 billion budget and some of the best trained firefighters in the world. The state’s huge tax base generates effectively unlimited...

NEW YORK — President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced Friday in his felony hush money case, but the judge declined to impose any punishment, an outcome that cements his conviction but frees him to return to the White House unencumbered by the threat of a jail term or a fine.Trump’s sentence of an unconditional discharge caps a norm-smashing case that saw the former and future president charged with 34 felonies, put on trial for almost two months and convicted on every count. Yet, the legal detour — and sordid details aired in court of a plot to bury affair allegations —...

2000 Mules, a 90-minute documentary produced by Dinesh D’Souza, is the visual tip of the ballot trafficking iceberg based on the digital evidence collected by True the Vote (TTV) and OPSEC. Utilizing geospatial technology to ping cellphones using data from apps, Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of TTV, coordinated with Gregg Phillips’ OPSEC team of cyber analysts to establish a “pattern of life.” They then corroborated those anonymous cellphone data trails with publicly available dropbox surveillance videos. Phillips has been doing highly specialized work on elections globally for forty years but the technology used in this project has only been around for...

The right-wing cable network One America News Network on Monday ran a pre-recorded 30-second segment acknowledging that there was “no widespread voter fraud” by Georgia election workers in the 2020 presidential election. The segment appears to be part of a recent settlement relating to a defamation lawsuit brought against the network by two such workers.The segment notes that an investigation by state officials into unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud made by ex-President Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani turned up nothing. “The results of this investigation indicate that Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ‘Shaye’ Moss did not engage in ballot fraud...

The Chicago police chief who arrested Jussie Smollett for staging a race-baiting attack on himself said Friday that he would have let the actor go free if he’d just apologized and admitted that he was lying early on. Eddie Johnson, head of the Chicago Police Department in 2019, wouldn’t have pursued charges against the “Empire” actor if he’d simply admitted he’d made it all up, he told “Morning in America.”

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Death threats from angry Trump supporters forced Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman, a 62-year-old grandmother, to flee her home of 20 years. Some messages called for her hanging; one urged people to “hunt” her. Freeman showed hundreds of menacing messages to police and called 911 three times. But a year after Donald Trump and his allies falsely accused Freeman - along with her daughter and co-worker Wandrea “Shaye” Moss - of election fraud, the threats have not been investigated by local police or state authorities, according to a Reuters review of Georgia law enforcement records. Federal agents...

National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins said the new Omicron variant of COVID-19 was a “great reason” for people in the United States to get their booster shot. Collins said, “The booster basically enlarges the capacity of your immune system to recognize all kinds of different spike proteins it’s never seen. This is a great day to go and get boosted or find out how to do so.”

Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he was “concerned” former President Donald Trump had not yet been indicted. Anchor Dana Bash said, “I want to ask you about something a federal judge said, overseeing some of the January 6 cases. He said in a court hearing this month that the rioters that day were ‘Called to Washington, D.C., by an elected official prompted to walk to the Capitol by an elected official, those who created the conditions that led to their conduct have in no meaningful measure been held accountable.’ He appears to...

Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist and chairman of the Public Health Collaboration, a charity, noted how in war zones heart attacks and strokes often increased among civilians after the conflict had ended. He suggested that the impact of the pandemic might be creating a similar phenomenon, helping to explain a surge in heart attacks caused by partially blocked arteries in the west of Scotland, after lockdowns this year.