A draft of California‘s new congressional districts could be released as early as Friday, a spokesman for California State Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-CA) confirmed on Wednesday.
“We are aiming to release draft maps on Friday,” Nick Miller wrote in an email to the Washington Examiner.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), left, talks with California Attorney General Rob Bonta during the Assembly’s Organizational Session in Sacramento, Monday, Dec. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
The news follows a contentious back-and-forth between California Democrats and President Donald Trump over the map.
FBI Director Kash Patel challenged news media to own who is really “lying” about his discovery of a stash of classified documents connected to the Trump-Russia collusion narrative weaponized against Donald Trump in his first term.
The director’s comments came in the wake of recent reports that “burn bags” filled with thousands of documents dating back to the Trump-Russia probe were discovered in a room in FBI headquarters.
Posting on X Saturday, the director evoked his role as senior counsel for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence during the first Trump term and wrote:
In 2017/18, I proved the Steele Dossier was fictitious intelligence, weaponized by corrupt FBI officials to deceive a federal judge and unlawfully spy on then presidential candidate Trump’s campaign — all paid for by his opponent.
The Secret Service, which once had a reputation for steadfast apolitical professionalism, found itself on the cusp of making an utterly mystifying decision before a Republican senator intervened with some pointed questions. Incredibly, officials were about to rubber-stamp the renewal of former Director Kimberly Cheatle’s top-level security clearance: the very same Cheatle whose disastrous leadership enabled the security meltdown that nearly claimed Donald Trump’s life in Butler, Pa.
It’s only when RealClearPolitics pressed for comment on Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-Wis.) opposition that the agency recoiled and changed course. Johnson indicated that granting Cheatle a renewed security clearance after she resigned in disgrace was unthinkable: “Following the security debacle in Butler, the former director of USSS made the right decision to resign. I see no reason for her security clearance to be reinstated.”
Cheatle’s disastrous tenure ended the only way it could, drowned in a flood of bipartisan outrage. According to insiders, her team repeatedly shot down requests for more resources during Trump’s campaign. After the stunning security failure in Butler, public fury was swift, including from Congress.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), after jointly probing the agency’s failures, asserted that Cheatle would stain the Secret Service forever and that her attempted security clearance renewal compounded the shame. “Kim Cheatle disgraced the Secret Service by failing to prevent a horrifying attempt on President Trump’s life,”
Blackburn said flatly. Her condemnation didn’t end there. Blackburn skewered Cheatle’s stonewalling of oversight and refusal to answer hard questions, recalling how she literally ran away from senators demanding accountability at the GOP convention just days after the shooting.
Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican who chairs the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and previously chaired the full Homeland Security panel, argued that Cheatle should not have her security clearance renewed after her leadership decisions contributed to the agency’s numerous failures surrounding the assassination attempt against Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“Following the security debacle in Butler, the former director of USSS made the right decision to resign,” Johnson told RCP. “I see no reason for her security clearance to be reinstated.”
Asked for comment on Johnson’s opposition, the Secret Service issued a vague statement saying Secret Service Director Sean Curran, a Trump appointee, had decided that “not all former directors” should have their security clearances renewed.
Cheatle called it “the most significant operational failure of the Secret Service in decades,” but she refused to step down until mounting pressure, failed testimony, and threats of contempt finally forced her out. She left quietly, without punishment or accountability.
But the fallout didn’t end with Cheatle’s quiet exit. On the anniversary of the assassination attempt, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) dropped a bombshell report accusing Cheatle of flat-out lying about denied security requests. Meanwhile, a damning GAO report confirmed what many suspected: Secret Service brass were warned about a potential Iranian threat ten days before the rally, then failed to share that intel with agents tasked with protecting the former president.
So far, Congress hasn’t referred criminal charges, but House Oversight Chair James Comer isn’t closing the door. If it turns out Cheatle misled investigators, he says, the committee “will respond.” At the very least, the public deserves answers, something Cheatle has evaded from day one.
Now, with Director Sean Curran at the helm, there’s a sign that the old D.C. playbook may finally be getting tossed. For too long, former officials enjoyed unfettered access to classified materials under the guise of “advisory” roles or smooth transitions. In reality, that access often just meant fatter paychecks, cushier gigs, and a louder megaphone for disgraced bureaucrats who refuse to leave the stage.
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Hamas said on Sunday (August 3) it was prepared to coordinate with the Red Cross to deliver aid to hostages it holds in Gaza, if Israel meets certain conditions, after a video it released showing an emaciated captive drew sharp criticism from Western powers. Hamas said it would allow the ICRC access to the hostages but only if “humanitarian corridors” for food and aid were opened “across all areas of the Gaza Strip”. FRANCE 24’s Douglas Herbert gives us his analysis about the situation.
A federal appeals court ruled the Los Angeles Unified School District and other government agencies could force workers to receive a COVID-19 jab as a condition of employment.
“On July 31, a full panel of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned an earlier ruling from their colleagues, declaring now that the L.A. Unified School District (LAUSD) didn’t violate the constitutional rights of workers who were fired after they refused to get Covid shots,” Legal Newsline reports.
“So basically, the courts are now saying that gov’t is strong enough to constitutionally strip rights of citizens and force injection of gene altering serum, but it is not strong enough to have the authority to remove invaders,” said The Blaze Senior Editor Daniel Horowitz.
So basically, the courts are now saying that gov’t is strong enough to constitutionally strip rights of citizens and force injection of gene altering serum, but it is not strong enough to have the authority to remove invaders. Anarcho-tyranny at its finest https://t.co/HCIKqn5uFw
A federal appeals court on Friday paused a lower court injunction that had blocked the Trump administration from ending union bargaining rights for thousands of federal workers at 21 agencies.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit granted an emergency stay sought by the administration, putting on hold a preliminary injunction issued by District Judge James Donato in June in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and five other unions representing federal employees.
The unions sought to challenge President Donald Trump’s March 27 executive order, which aimed to eliminate collective bargaining rights for employees of government agencies with national security missions.
In a 15-page decision, the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit panel stated that the government is likely to succeed on the merits of the plaintiffs’ retaliation claim, finding that Trump’s order does not, on its face, “express any retaliatory animus.”
“Even assuming that plaintiffs have made out a prima facie claim of retaliation, on this record the government has shown that the president would have taken the same action even in the absence of the protected conduct,” the judges stated.
The US Senate has confirmed Jeanine Pirro – a former Fox News host and staunch Donald Trump ally who boosted lies that he lost the 2020 presidential race because of electoral fraudsters – as the top federal prosecutor for the nation’s capital.
Pirro – a former New York state district attorney and county judge who joined Fox News in 2011 – was confirmed on Saturday in a 50-45 vote along party lines.
In a statement issued by Pirro after the vote, the Republican said she was “blessed” to have been confirmed as the US attorney for Washington DC. “Get ready for a real crime fighter,” said Pirro’s statement, which called the US attorney’s office she had been confirmed to lead the largest in the country.
Congresswoman Nancy Mace has officially entered the 2026 Republican gubernatorial race, unveiling a campaign video titled “Huge MAGA Announcement” on her campaign website and publicly declaring her intention to succeed term‑limited governor Henry McMaster.
“Nancy Mace launches her run for Governor of South Carolina!” according to the video posted on her website.
The firebrand congresswoman has already updated her X header to feature a photo with President Trump.
Screenshot: @NancyMace/X
Mace is expected to officially enter the South Carolina governor’s race with a major announcement set for 7:30 a.m. Monday at The Citadel, according to ABC.
In a social media post, Mace said, “Something is broken in South Carolina. They said stay quiet, I spoke up. They said play nice. I fought back. They said sit down, and I stood up. Corruption, chaos, cowardess — I’ve seen it all. Get ready, South Carolina. This isn’t just a campaign, it’s a calling. You and me. God’s not done with South Carolina, and neither am I.”
After the Supreme Court signaled on Oct. 1 that it would seek to probe whether or not states violate the Constitution when they attempt to remedy violations of the Voting Rights Act by adding an additional majority-minority district to make sure that Black voters and voters of color have an equal chance to elect the candidate of their choice, election law experts began to sound the alarm regarding what the Supreme Court could do to bring about the end of the Voting Rights Act.
As one expert, Rick Hasen, of the UCLA School of Law, wrote in his blog, he believes that the Supreme Court is taking “a big, and dangerous, step toward knocking down” a key component of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
According to CNN, the case, which will test whether or not the State of Louisiana’s “intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution,” is regarded as one of the most important appeals the court will issue rulings on over the back half of the judiciary calendar.
The case has been decided differently by two federal courts; one ruled that the state violated the Constitution by drawing only one majority-Black district out of the six that currently comprise the state. When it tried to remedy that problem by drawing another majority-Black district, another federal court said that it violated the Constitution by relying too much on race to meet that court’s demands, which seems to directly contradict language in Section 2 of the VRA.
President Donald Trump spent the last few months of his 2024 campaign promising to force taxpayers to foot the bill for a procedure that routinely destroys human life. His plans to pave the way for Americans to make “more babies” by subsidizing in vitro fertilization, however, are allegedly on hold.
The Washington Post reported that as of Sunday, Trump’s White House is allegedly “backing away from proposals discussed internally to mandate IVF coverage for the roughly 50 million people on the Obamacare exchanges.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told WaPo that Trump “pledged to expand access to fertility treatments for Americans who are struggling to start families” and is still “committed like none before it to using its authorities to deliver on this pledge.” As of now, however, that goal reportedly does not include taxpayer-funded IVF.
WaPo’s chief economics reporter Jeff Stein painted the decision as “another apparent L from this admin for the conservative natalists.”
China is developing a powerful new weapon that could transform long-range warfare. Using a radical design capable of extreme speeds and distances, this technology could outmatch traditional missiles and defenses.
China’s military scientists have unveiled a new electromagnetic railgun concept that could dramatically alter the balance of long-range weaponry. Detailed in a paper from the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Army Engineering University and reported by multiple outlets, including the South China Morning Post and Asia Times, the system is designed to fire heavy projectiles at speeds reaching Mach 7. If proven viable, the weapon could deliver devastating firepower at far lower costs than conventional missile systems.
A New Design Tackling Old Railgun Problems
Railguns useelectromagnetic force instead of gunpowder or explosives to propel a projectile at extreme speeds. While the technology has been explored for decades by major powers, including the U.S., Japan, and China, progress has been slowed by persistent engineering challenges.
China’s latest design addresses those obstacles with an unconventional x-shaped configuration. The concept, described by lead researcher Professor Lyu Qingao, stacks two railguns inside a single barrel at right angles, each with its own power circuit. This dual-circuit setup allows the two sets of electromagnetic fields to work independently without interfering with one another.
According to the team’s estimates, the system could fire a 60-kilogram projectile more than 400 kilometers in under six minutes, with impact speeds exceeding Mach 4. Previous Chinese naval prototypes, first seen on the ship Haiyangshan in 2018, were limited to firing 15-kilogram projectiles because of the destructive effects of extreme currents on the weapon’s rails.
A Myanmar junta air strike on a rebel-occupied ruby mining hub killed 13 people on Saturday, according to a resident and a spokesperson for an armed opposition group.
Civil war has consumed Myanmar since the military seized power in a 2021 coup, sparking resistance from pro-democracy guerillas who found common cause with long-active ethnic armed groups.
Their scattered forces initially struggled to make headway, but a combined offensive starting in late 2023 seized swathes of territory, including the town of Mogok – the centre of the ruby trade.
Myanmar is rich in precious stones and rare earth elements coveted by all factions and sold, mostly to neighbouring China, to boost war chests.
A junta spokesperson could not be reached for comment.
Skydance Media on Monday rolled out the new executive leadership team ahead of this week’s long-stalled $8 billion merger with Paramount Global.
Skydance CEO David Ellison, the son of billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, will assume the helm of the new publicly traded company, to be called Paramount Skydance Corp., when it debuts Thursday.
The media giant — whose properties include CBS, MTV, the Paramount Pictures studio and the Paramount+ streaming service — will be structured into three primary business segments: Studios, Direct to Consumer, and TV Media, the tech scion said.
Poland is set to have more tanks by 2030 than the U.K., Germany, France and Italy combined, after Warsaw signed another multi-billion-euro deal with a South Korean defense company to procure additional K2 tanks.
On Friday, Poland signed an agreement worth over $6 billion with Hyundai Rotem for 180 K2 battle tanks. This is the country’s second major deal with the South Korean company after the first was struck in 2022, also for 180 K2 tanks.
The new agreement will take Poland’s total number of tanks to 1,100 tanks by 2030, including 61 produced domestically.
This would give Warsaw more tanks than the combined total of the U.K., Germany, France and Italy, who are expected to field around 950 tanks by 2030.
Only two NATO member states—Turkey and Greece—will have more tanks than Poland, with 2,238 and 1,344 respectively.
The new Polish-South Korean deal comes as Warsaw and its NATO allies continue to bolster their defenses in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
A recent YouGov poll sent a jolt through American politics: Zohran Mamdani, a 32-year-old Democratic Socialist from Queens, outperformed both former Governor Andrew Cuomo and incumbent Mayor Eric Adams in a hypothetical general election for New York City mayor. Nationally, 24 percent of Americans say they’d vote for Mamdani—more than Cuomo (9 percent) and Adams (8 percent) combined.
The numbers are more than symbolic. They reveal just how far trust in establishment leadership has collapsed—and how eager younger Americans around the nation are to embrace ideological clarity over managerial competence, charisma over experience, and revolutionary rhetoric over cautious reform.
Mamdani is not, by any traditional measure, a mainstream figure. His base includes young progressives, housing activists, and online socialist media. But the poll captures something deeper than his personal popularity: a profound disillusionment with a political class seen as ethically compromised, strategically adrift, and emotionally disconnected from the public it claims to serve.
This disaffection has real roots. Adams is mired in FBI investigations, plagued by ethical lapses, and widely criticized for inconsistent messaging and underperformance on housing and safety. Cuomo, meanwhile, carries the weight of pandemic-era mismanagement and personal scandal. These aren’t just flawed politicians—they’ve become cautionary tales for a generation fed up with failure.
Thanks to the new federal law defunding America’s biggest abortion business, Planned Parenthood has announced it will close two abortion centers in Ohio.
And the closings will take place even though a Democrat-appointed judge has blocked the federal defunding law.
In July, Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio Region announced the upcoming closure of its abortion centers in Springfield and Hamilton, which the abortion giant said was “a direct result” of the One Big Beautiful Bill that Congress passed and President Trump signed into law.
“Make no mistake: this was not a decision made by Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio Region,” said Nan Whaley, President & CEO of the abortion giant. “We took every possible step to keep these centers open, but the devastating impact of state and federal political attacks has forced us into this very difficult position.”
Planned Parenthood will close the centers this week.
Officials with the abortion business confirmed the centers are still closing despite the judge’s ruling because an appeal is expected and the law and its defunding components are expected to be upheld. Thus, if Planned Parenthood gets the tax dollars, there is a possibility it would have to repay them.
President Trump’s growing use of military force in immigration enforcement is a dangerous erosion of the line between civilian and military authority—one that threatens the constitutional balance and civil liberties at the heart of American democracy.
The memo urges senior Pentagon leaders to deepen cooperation with DHS on immigration operations—not just at the southern border, but in cities like Los Angeles. It calls for military personnel to be detailed inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection to support planning and operational logistics. It praises recent military-style raids in Los Angeles as a model for future deployments and likens threats from Central and South American street gangs to those posed by Al Qaeda or ISIS.
The document reveals a July 21 meeting between top DHS and Department of Defense officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine, and NORTHCOM Commander Gregory Guillot. The aim of the meeting was to secure high-level buy-in from Pentagon leadership to increase the role of the military in domestic immigration enforcement.
A universal deepfake detector has achieved the best accuracy yet in spotting multiple types of videos manipulated or completely generated by artificial intelligence. The technology may help flag non-consensual AI-generated pornography, deepfake scams or election misinformation videos.
The widespread availability of cheap AI-powered deepfake creation tools has fuelled the out-of-control online spread of synthetic videos. Many depict women – including celebrities and even schoolgirls – in nonconsensual pornography. And deepfakes have also been used to influence political elections, as well as to enhance financial scams targeting both ordinary consumers and company executives.
But most AI models trained to detect synthetic video focus on faces – which means they are most effective at spotting one specific type of deepfake, where a real person’s face is swapped into an existing video. “We need one model that will be able to detect face-manipulated videos as well as background-manipulated or fully AI-generated videos,” says Rohit Kundu at the University of California, Riverside. “Our model addresses exactly that concern – we assume that the entire video may be generated synthetically.”
Kundu and his colleagues trained their AI-powered universal detector to monitor multiple background elements of videos, as well as people’s faces. It can spot subtle signs of spatial and temporal inconsistencies in deepfakes. As a result, it can detect inconsistent lighting conditions on people who were artificially inserted into face-swap videos, discrepancies in the background details of completely AI-generated videos and even signs of AI manipulation in synthetic videos that don’t contain any human faces. The detector also flags realistic-looking scenes from video games, such as Grand Theft Auto V, that are not necessarily generated by AI.
CNN anchor Erin Burnett is under fire after describing the gunman involved in a deadly shooting spree in Midtown Manhattan as “possibly white” despite evidence to the contrary.
On Monday night, Burnett angered viewers during a live broadcast when she and her co-anchor discussed surveillance footage showing the shooter, later identified as 27-year-old Shane Tamura, holding a rifle.
Burnett’s initial comment, which was made in reference to Tamura’s appearance, included a description of him as a “possibly white” male with sunglasses and a mustache.
This assessment was supposedly based on the first images that emerged of the gunman.
However, those images, which were obtained from the surveillance footage, clearly showed Tamura with a darker complexion that conflicts with Burnett’s description.
Nevertheless, Burnett and her colleagues continued to repeatedly push the false narrative.
The FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and the Department of Justice inspector general are all allegedly in possession of a copy of the now-infamous surveillance video from the Manhattan Metropolitan Correctional Center, where Jeffrey Epstein died in 2019, without the missing minute of footage.
The claim comes amid a massive scandal regarding nearly 11 hours of footage released earlier this month by the Justice Department and FBI, which included a one-minute jump in the time code just before midnight on August 9-10, 2019.
CBS News reported, citing an unnamed “government source,” that the agencies have video “that does not cut from just before 11:59 p.m. to midnight of the night Epstein died by suicide in his cell.”
What is unclear is why that section was missing when the FBI released what it said was raw footage from inside the Special Housing Unit the night Epstein died, Aug. 9-10, 2019. The recording came from what officials said was the only relevant video camera that was recording its footage in the unit. This video has been cited by multiple government officials as a key piece of evidence in the determination that Epstein died by suicide.
Epstein’s death, as with many aspects of his high-profile sex trafficking case, has become fodder for conspiracy theories. The missing minute added to the conjecture after the release of the video, when news organizations and amateur sleuths who reviewed the video quickly noticed that onscreen jump in the time stamp.
Four Cincinnati police officers—Captain Robert Wilson and Lieutenants Patrick Caton, Gerald Hodges, and Andrew Mitchell—filed a federal lawsuit on May 19, 2025, against the city and Police Chief Teresa Theetge, alleging workplace discrimination against white male officers. The lawsuit claims that Chief Theetge and the city favored women and minority officers for preferred assignments, which offer career advancement and benefits.
It further alleges that since Theetge became chief, the department has used race and sex-based criteria for promotions and assignments, disproportionately excluding white male lieutenants. This comes as the woke Police Chief has entered the national spotlight after scolding social media and the media for daring to report on the recent viral video of multiple innocent white people being beaten senseless by multiple black suspects under her watch in Ohio.
In the wake of Columbia’s settlement for $220 million, Harvard has indicated a willingness to settle as well: Harvard University has signaled a willingness to meet the Trump administration’s demand to spend as much as $500 million to end its dispute with the White House as talks between the two sides intensify, four people familiar with the negotiations said. According to one of the people, Harvard is reluctant to directly pay the federal government, but negotiators are still discussing the exact financial terms. The sum sought by the government, which recently accused Harvard of civil rights violations, is more than twice as much as the $200 million fine that Columbia University said it would pay when it settled antisemitism claims with the White House last week. Neither Harvard nor the government has publicly detailed potential terms for a settlement and what allegations the money would be intended to resolve (New York Times).
It’s not enough, Not nearly. Harvard must be purged of the poison that has infected the institution, faculty in every department, every policy decision ……
“Going after an unelected official who said something back in 2020 when many people were—I mean, come on, give me a break,” said Hochul.
Democrat New York Governor Kathy Hochul defended Zohran Mamdani, a socialist candidate for NYC mayor, after he came under fire this week from Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik over resurfaced anti-police social media posts.
Hochul, who has not yet endorsed Mamdani, appeared on CNN’s “Inside Politics” on Monday to respond to Stefanik’s call for New Yorkers to vote against Mamdani, describing the controversial candidate as a “disgrace” after he referred to NYPD officers as “racist” and a “major threat to public safety” back in 2020.
After the recent Israeli war against the Iranian regime and the American attack on the Fordo nuclear site, the mullahs in Tehran are feeling the heat. This is the most fragile the regime has been over the past 46 years, and talk of regime change is spreading. For the past year and a half, some in the regime have been preparing for a plan B, in case they need to flee urgently. While that does not mean that the regime is about to fall, it is still a valid indicator of the nervousness of the leadership.
After Hamas, one of Iran’s proxies, attacked Israel by surprise on October 7, 2023, the Iranian regime and its allies have sustained major military and strategic losses at the hands of Israel. For instance, Hezbollah, from far its most powerful proxy, is just a shadow of itself after the elimination of most of its leadership, including its long-time ruthless chief Hassan Nasrallah. Therefore, apparatchiks of the regime started panicking, deciding that it was time to either turn against the regime by defecting and/or working for the Israelis or the Americans to build a life abroad.
Gilbert Achcar, author of “Gaza Catastrophe: The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective”, speaks to FRANCE 24 about the slow shift of public opinion in the United States and Europe against Israel’s devastating military campaign in the besieged Palestinian territory.
Arguably, the most alarming consequence that comes from the increasingly popular practice of renting wombs, however, is that surrogacy can be easily exploited by pedophiles and abusers to gain proximity to children.
One such example surfaced this week after internet sleuths discovered that one of the two men seen in a viral video celebrating a baby’s monthly milestones by kissing the boy’s face is a convicted pedophile.
Less than 10 years before Brandon Mitchell bought his son via surrogacy, the then-high school chemistry teacher earned himself several criminal charges for attempting to solicit images from a male teenage student. Subsequent investigation by law enforcement yielded more than 12,000 texts between the teacher and child as well as several pieces of sexually explicit media.
Dr. Vinay Prasad — a radical left-wing ideologue who wormed his way into one of the most powerful regulatory roles in the federal government — has officially resigned from the Food and Drug Administration following a explosive exposé led by investigative journalist Laura Loomer.
For weeks, Loomer publicly exposed Prasad’s shocking anti-Trump rhetoric, far-left allegiances, and dangerous abuse of regulatory power.
“We have a crisis at the FDA! A wolf in sheep’s clothing is sabotaging President Trump’s bold “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda!” Loomer wrote on X.
Loomer continued, “This is no mere bureaucratic misstep. It’s a catastrophic vetting failure that threatens to derail the America First healthcare revolution. Prasad’s anti-Trump rhetoric, radical left-wing ideology, and deliberate actions to obstruct our President’s deregulatory mission prove he’s a dangerous misfit. The time to act is NOW—Prasad must be REMOVED before he destroys Trump’s vision for a healthier America!”
In 2021, Prasad described himself as a “political liberal, closest to Elizabeth Warren” and a “Sanders/Warren liberal,” proudly embracing a progressive identity. He voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary, and FEC records reveal he donated to Sanders’ campaign, signaling his support for radical left-wing policies.
In 2020, Prasad declared on X that he wanted “Biden to win more than anything” and confirmed he voted against Trump, solidifying his opposition to the President.
Prasad’s policy positions are a direct affront to the conservative principles underpinning Trump’s agenda. He advocates for universal basic income, student loan forgiveness, open borders, and Roe v. Wade abortion standards. He supports a 50% marginal tax rate for high earners, a wealth tax, single-payer healthcare, universally funded pre-K and community college, and expansive parental leave policies.
The Trump administration has dropped federal scrutiny of several corporate mergers in recent months, according to an analysis by Public Citizen—waving through multibillion-dollar deals for companies, including many that made large donations to the Trump-Vance inauguration.
The watchdog Public Citizen examines the Trump administration’s blessing of the mergers in its updated tracker of 165 corporate enforcement actions that have been halted, dropped, or withdrawn as of July 25. The tally includes cases that were dismissed by federal agencies instead of being brought to trial, as well as investigations that were closed favorably for corporations.
Since the start of April, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) have advanced the mergers of T-Mobile and UScellular, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and rival Juniper Networks, and others that faced charges of being anti-competitive. Under President Trump, the agencies have also intervened in antitrust cases on the completed mergers of Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, Capital One and Discover, and others.
“Trump’s unshackling of a rogues gallery of corporate villains and lawbreakers shows how little this president cares about the victims of corporate crime,” said Rick Claypool, research director for Public Citizen. “This is no ‘law and order’ administration—this is an administration that views cheated consumers with contempt, and workers’ hard-earned wages as fair game for corporate con artists.”
I didn’t expect myself to suggest emulating Elon Musk this week, but X has a possible solution for age verification that Xbox should copy. One of the ways X verifies age is checking the age of an account. If an account was created before 2012, the site assumes you’re an adult now.
It’s not a perfect solution, since someone could have lied about their age back in 2012 and still be under 18 today. But I doubt any reasonable verification method will be perfect.
X has run into some issues with age verification, which Musk says are being addressed. “We are working on this,” said Musk in a post replying to a UK user who cannot verify their age on X. The Xbox team may want to copy Musk’s general idea but execute it better.
Where Microsoft and the Xbox team draw their line could be different than what X decided. Since a five-year-old is more likely to have played Xbox in the past, it’s probably worth having different rules.
But any account old enough to legally drink in the UK should be verified automatically.
