Politics

The billionaire got away with it last time. Why not now?

Wisconsin voters will go to the polls next week to choose between candidates for the state’s Supreme Court. Elon Musk has spent $17 million so far to support the Republican-aligned candidate, according to the Associated Press. And the billionaire oligarch is really spreading the money around this weekend before Tuesday’s vote, offering up $1 million each to two people who attend his rally in Wisconsin on Sunday

On Tuesday afternoon, a federal judge in New York’s Northern District heard opening arguments in the case of Momodou Taal v. Trump. Neither party was present in the courtroom—in large part because Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has been trying to find Taal for days, reportedly staking out his home and entering his university’s campus.

Taal, a British-Gambian doctoral student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, sued the administration on February 15 to challenge Trump’s executive orders curtailing free speech and seeking to deport pro-Palestinian activists, which have been paired with a wave of attacks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers—in some cases masked and hooded—on graduate and undergraduate students.

A nonprofit watchdog, American Oversight, requested the order. A government attorney said the administration already was taking steps to collect and save the messages.

On the chat, Hegseth provided the exact timings of warplane launches and when bombs would drop before the attacks against Yemen's Houthis began earlier this month. Hegseth laid out when a "strike window" would open, where a "target terrorist" was located and when weapons and aircraft would be used.

The images of the text chain posted by The Atlantic show that the messages were set to disappear in one week.

The temporary injunction from Judge Amy Berman Jackson at the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., also prevents the administration from firing any more CFPB workers or from deleting any of the agency's data or records, as part of a sweeping ruling to protect the agency.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Thursday that the U.S. has revoked over 300 visas amid a government crackdown against immigrants expressing their political views.

Rubio said the visas revoked are primarily for students, but some visitor visas have also been revoked in recent weeks. He said some visas have been revoked due to criminal activity and not due to protests.

Rubio's acknowledgment of the visa revocations comes after the detainment of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student who expressed support for Palestinian causes. She is subject to removal from the U.S. after attending Tufts University as a doctoral student.

This provision has traditionally applied to certain employees at agencies such as the CIA, the FBI or the National Security Agency.

But Trump's order, signed late Thursday, is more far-reaching, and includes employees whose jobs touch on national defense, border security, foreign relations, energy security, pandemic preparedness, the economy, public safety and cybersecurity.

It notably excludes law enforcement. "Police and firefighters will continue to collectively bargain," the White House fact sheet states.

Unions are roundly condemning the move.

"This administration's latest executive order is union busting, pure and simple," said Irma Westmoreland, a registered nurse at a veterans hospital in Augusta, Ga., who spoke in her capacity as chair of Veterans Affairs for National Nurses United.

The events at the Human Trafficking Commission are part of a pattern by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature and judiciary to deprive elected Democrats of resources and powers. Shortly after Democrat Roy Cooper was elected governor in 2016, lawmakers passed sweeping legislation that stripped him of various powers, including removing his ability to hire and fire over 1,000 key government positions. (Many of these changes were contested in court, and some were reversed.) Shortly after Democrat Josh Stein was elected to succeed Cooper last fall, the Legislature passed another law that stripped him and other Democratic officials of numerous powers, including control of the board that manages the state’s elections, which is now the subject of multiple lawsuits.

When lawmakers created the budget that redirected funds to the Human Trafficking Commission, they specifically set aside additional money for political allies. One particular faith-based group was prioritized in the budget bill to receive the most funding — $640,000. That group had been created by the former head of the state GOP about two months before its name showed up in the budget bill in 2021. By October 2024, the group had reported to the Human Trafficking Commission that it had helped only four victims, and its executive director said that at least three of those women had been given just food and gas and no long-term services. (The executive director told ProPublica that as of March 2025 the group had helped about two dozen victims.)

President Donald Trump's administration is terminating grants for two clean energy projects and roughly 300 others funded by the Department of Energy are in jeopardy as the president prioritizes fossil fuels.

The DOE is canceling two awards to a nonprofit climate think tank, RMI in Colorado, according to a document from the agency confirming the cancellations that was reviewed by The Associated Press on Friday. One was for nearly $5.3 million to retrofit low-income multifamily buildings in Massachusetts and California to demonstrate ways to reduce the use of energy and lower planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. The other was for $1.5 million to assess business models for electric vehicle carsharing in U.S. cities.

As Wisconsin voters head to the polls next week to choose a new state Supreme Court justice, Cowles stands by his assessment. Voters have been hit with a barrage of attack ads from special interest groups, and record-setting sums of money have been spent to sway residents. What’s more, Cowles said, there’s been little discussion of major issues. The candidates debated only once.

“I definitely think that that piece of legislation made things worse,” Cowles said in an interview. “Our public discourse is basically who can inflame things in the most clever way with some terrible TV ad that’s probably not even true.”

More than $80 million has been funneled into the race as of March 25, according to two groups that have been tracking spending in the contest — the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy group that follows judicial races, and the news outlet WisPolitics. That surpasses the previous costliest judicial race in the country’s history, approximately $56 million spent two years ago on the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin.

The drama behind the bill’s passage runs deep. For a very long time, Delaware has been home to a majority of American corporations due to its lenient business laws. Recently, the state’s status as the corporate capital of the country was threatened by pressures—from Musk, but also by other major companies and business personalities—to encourage businesses to leave the state. It appears that, in an effort to stop companies from fleeing, the state legislature has acquiesced to businesses’ priorities.

The bill would revoke disclosure requirements for shareholder requests for all kinds of company documents, records, and internal communications. All plaintiffs would be entitled to would be minutes from board meetings, which reveal very little. These alterations would make it almost impossible for shareholders to build any viable lawsuits that could even reach the discovery fact-finding stage of a court case.

In 2021, New York City adopted Local Law 154, which sets an air emissions limit for indoor combustion of fuels within new buildings. Under the law, the burning of “any substance that emits 25 kilograms or more of carbon dioxide per million British thermal units of energy” is prohibited. That standard effectively bans gas-burning stoves, furnaces, and water heaters, and any other fossil-fuel powered appliances. Instead, real estate developers have to install electric appliances like induction stoves and heat pumps. The policy went into effect in 2024 for buildings under seven stories, and will apply to taller buildings starting in 2027.

The cuts include 3,500 full-time employees at the FDA, 2,400 at the CDC, 1,200 at NIH, and 300 at CMS, according to an HHS fact sheet. It states that the new job cuts at the FDA will not affect drug, medical device, or food reviewers or inspectors. The reorganization will not impact Medicare or Medicaid.

HHS states that the job cuts will save $1.8 billion. The agency currently has a budget of nearly $2 trillion, the majority of which pays for benefits for Americans covered by Medicaid and Medicare.

The US Supreme Court has upheld a major gun control policy enacted by the Biden administration to regulate so-called ghost guns - largely untraceable firearms that can be assembled at home using kits.

The rules require manufacturers to include serial numbers on the kits and to perform background checks on those who purchased them.

Advocacy groups have called ghost guns the fastest-growing gun safety problem in America, with the numbers of such guns recovered from crime scenes rising by more than 1,000% since 2017.

Elon Musk’s aerospace giant SpaceX allows investors from China to buy stakes in the company as long as the funds are routed through the Cayman Islands or other offshore secrecy hubs, according to previously unreported court records.

The rare picture of SpaceX’s approach recently emerged in an under-the-radar corporate dispute in Delaware. Both SpaceX’s chief financial officer and Iqbaljit Kahlon, a major investor, were forced to testify in the case.

In December, Kahlon testified that SpaceX prefers to avoid investors from China because it is a defense contractor. There is a major exception though, he said: SpaceX finds it “acceptable” for Chinese investors to buy into the company through offshore vehicles.

NASA has awarded SpaceX of Starbase, Texas, a modification under the NASA Launch Services (NLS) II contract to add Starship to their existing Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch service offerings.

TL;DR:

Reporters at Der Spiegel claim to have found phone numbers, email addresses, and social media login credentials for multiple top White House officials, including National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

~~They also claim to have "revealed an additional grave, previously unknown security breach at the highest levels in Washington." Though the article does not divulge details.~~

Edit: Reading comprehension failure on my part.

Last week, the US Department of Agriculture announced sweeping plans to increase slaughter line speeds at pork and poultry plants — a move that could further endanger workers who already process animals at a breakneck pace and suffer high levels of injury.

The Social Security Administration is revising proposed changes that would have required some beneficiaries to prove their identity in-person when seeking services.

Officials said in a statement Wednesday that they are exempting people who apply for Medicare and disability benefits, as well as supplemental income help for the poor, from having to prove their identity in-person at a social security office if they are unable to use the agency's online system.

They also announced they are pushing back the start of the new policy by two weeks, to April 14.

The new rules, which were first announced last week, were met with concerns from advocates for seniors and people with disabilities, as well as lawmakers. Dozens of Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to agency leaders last week asking them to reconsider the change because it would "create additional barriers" for people seeking services — "particularly for those who live far from an office."

The crux of it can basically be summarized from two paragraphs:

The reason for the resurgence of ad sales appears to be tied to Musk’s prominent position in the Trump administration—a fact that can really cut both ways for companies. On one hand, the Trump administration has always come off as quite transactional, so if you put some money in the right coffers, you just might gain some benefit. On the other hand, it can be severely vindictive (particularly Musk, who seems to cast aside anyone over the slightest criticism) and unafraid to use its levers of power to punish.

...

It’s difficult attribute the uptick in ad spends to anything other than favor trading. It’s not as though platform has gotten better since advertisers first started boycotting it. A recent study published in PLOS One found that hate speech increased by 50% following Musk’s takeover, with no meaningful reduction in bots or other inauthentic accounts that Musk once railed against as the platform’s biggest problem. Meanwhile, the site is losing users, seeing activity drop 22% since Election Day while rivals Threads and Bluesky have seen a jump in activity.

U.S. President Donald Trump's campaign to eliminate diversity efforts and language from government organizations has officially reached the moon, with NASA erasing references to its promise to land the first woman and first person of colour on the lunar surface from several of its web pages, citing Trump.

A U.S. House subcommittee has called the chief executives of the nation's two largest public broadcasters to Capitol Hill to testify on Wednesday, with an eye to wiping out the federal funding their institutions receive.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has initiated an investigation into a possible collusion among the country’s biggest egg producers to keep prices high amidst the current bird flu outbreak. This has caused grocery stores to put limits on how many eggs customers can buy in a single visit. According to sources close to the investigation, the probe is focused on major egg producers, including Cal-Maine and Rose Acre Farms.

Race and politics were front and center at the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday as the justices took up a voting rights case involving Louisiana's congressional redistricting after the 2020 Census. The case is nearly identical to a case the Supreme Court ruled on two years ago from Alabama, though the outcome could make it more difficult for minorities to prevail in redistricting cases.