Artificial Intelligence

The Hill - A recent poll shows AI’s increasing role in how students decide on college majors, creating a rapidly developing situation for universities that are still struggling to determine how the technology will shape higher education. The Lumina Foundation-Gallup 2026 State of Higher Education survey found 47 percent of currently enrolled college students have thought about switching majors “a great deal” or a “fair amount” over AI concerns.  

Around 16 percent pointed to AI as the reason they changed their field of study. “We’re getting to a point where it’s almost unacceptable, right, that we’re having all of these conferences and all of these roundtable discussions, and we are failing to provide students with some just meaningful advice and helping them to feel like they’re prepared,” said Alex Kotran, CEO of the AI Education Project.  

“If students were adequately prepared, you wouldn’t see as many of them change their major, or you would see that happening in a way that schools are driving, but they’re not doing that,” he added. 

The survey found men and those going for associate degrees were more likely to consider a field change due to AI, along with those in technology, vocational and humanities majors. Those least likely to have considered switching majors include students in fields such as health care and natural sciences.  

The fright of how AI will impact jobs students are looking for is not unfounded as messages of job declines due to the technology have only ramped up since its increased use in the past few years. In February, the AI chief for Microsoft told the Financial Times he believes AI will take over all white-collar work in the next 18 months.  

The Guardian -  When blue-collar Trump voters and Maga-friendly midwest states join the same cause as Bernie Sanders and liberal California teachers, something novel is afoot. Last month it was the turn of the Republican party in Texas to express forthright opposition to the construction of datacentres for artificial intelligence, pending adequate environmental safeguards for local communities. Across the United States, similar campaigns are being waged, as voters from across the political spectrum rail against the outsize influence and power of big tech.

For the White House, which has made the rapid rollout of datacentres a priority in its AI action plan, the scale of the protests is an unwelcome surprise. One of Donald Trump’s first acts on returning to office was to authorise the deregulated “build, baby, build” approach demanded by the Silicon Valley backers who helped to fund his campaign. Industry giants such Amazon and Microsoft are driving an estimated $710bn worth of investment in datacentres this year, as they stake their future on staying ahead in the AI race.

The boom is also coming at a political price for states which have courted that capital through tax breaks and other subsidies. Local downsides come in the form of higher electricity bills for consumers and intense pressure on local water systems and grids, as a result of the centres’ voracious energy requirements. Alarmingly for Mr Trump, a sense that big tech’s needs are being prioritised over those of hard-pressed voters appears to be cutting through among the Maga rank and file ahead of midterm elections in November.

Donald Trump

People - Donald Trump wants to use “magic paint” to make the Eisenhower Executive Office Building bright white. Experts warn the paint could damage the historic granite exterior, and preservationist groups have filed a lawsuit to stop the renovation.

Independent UK - The Department of Justice has reportedly opened an investigation into the NFL over accusations it engaged in anticompetitive tactics in selling broadcasting rights, the latest installment in President Donald Trump’s long-running feud with the franchise.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the DOJ will pursue the probe amid growing discontent over the ever-rising cost of watching sports as the marketplace becomes more fragmented, requiring fans to pay for multiple subscriptions to different streaming services just to follow the league.

President Donald Trump has a long history of weighing in on the NFL and is said to hold a grudge over his exclusion from the league in the mid-1980s.

Millitary draft list to be automated

Deep State Tribunal - Federal bureaucrats will begin automatically enrolling American men into the military draft registry this December, bypassing individual consent through a new government database system that raises serious questions about privacy and expanding federal power.

Automatic draft registration starts December 2026, replacing the self-registration system that has existed since 1980. President Trump signed the mandate into law through the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act in December 2025. Federal agencies will share data to automatically register men aged 18-25 without their direct involvement. The Selective Service System claims the change streamlines compliance, but specific data sources remain undisclosed

A kid outlines his parent problem

Cost of cars

Headline USA - New vehicles now sell for an average of nearly $50,000, up 30% in six years, and average monthly payments — based on 10% down and a 6-year note — recently hit $775. Looking for something on the cheap end? The share of vehicles listing for less than $30,000 is about 13% — down from 40% five years ago, per the car review site CarGurus.

Polls

CBS POLL: Trump Approval 
InteractivePolls

Approve: 39%

Disapprove: 61%

Forward BLue - 52% of voters back Trump being impeached– including ONE IN SEVEN Republican voters. That's a majority of Americans who want this President removed from office.

Arts

Arts Journal - The biggest institutions are building like the future belongs to them. LACMA opened its $724 million reinvention (Los Angeles Times). London’s National Gallery chose Kengo Kuma to design a $464 million modern-art wing (The Guardian). The Dallas Symphony closed a $50 million endowment campaign (The Dallas Morning News). And Lyric Opera of Chicago expanded its season and signed Sondra Radvanovsky for five years (Chicago Tribune).

But the culture’s software looks a bit less permanent. The Hirshhorn’s director is the fourth to leave the Smithsonian in two years (The New York Times). The Salzburg Festival fired its artistic director and named a replacement in under two weeks (Moto Perpetuo). The U.S. Holocaust Museum softened its own content preemptively, before the administration even asked (Politico). And the Trump administration dropped its legal fight to dismantle IMLS — then zeroed out its funding in the next budget (Publishers Weekly). Why litigate when you can starve the beast?

The sector is investing in buildings at historic scale. The institutional infrastructure underneath — leadership stability, regulatory protection, the willingness to hold ground — is thinning fast. What could go wrong?

Women

 NPR - Women in the U.S. are landing most of the new jobs being created. It's highlighting a growing need to support men in the workforce. It follows a decades-long push to get more women into male-dominated fields. Out of the 369,000 jobs created since the beginning of Trump's second term, 348,000 went to women, according to the Labor Department. That's nearly 17 times as many jobs filled by women as by men. Richard Reeves, president of the nonpartisan think tank American Institute for Boys and Men, says we are now seeing the consequences of not paying enough attention to the scarcity of men in certain professions. 

Mobile homes

NPR  - More than 22 million Americans live in mobile home parks and rely on these communities for affordable housing. But affordability isn't guaranteed. Residents typically own their homes but not the land underneath, leaving them vulnerable to displacement if the land is sold. One community in Colorado found a way to combat this issue: they mobilized to raise the money to match or even surpass a corporate sale offer.

Middle East

The Hill - President Trump on Sunday announced that the U.S. military will begin blockading ships seeking to enter the Strait of Hormuz after weekend talks with Iran did not bring about a deal. “Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump wrote in a Sunday morning Truth Social post, adding that he instructed the Navy to “seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran.

War to Resume as Iran and US Leave Peace Talks w/ No Deal

The Guardian  - The US vice-president, JD Vance, has blamed the failure of marathon negotiations with Iran on the country’s refusal to abandon its nuclear weapons programme, while Iranian sources have hit back at “excessive” demands from Washington.

Vance, who left Islamabad on Sunday morning after 21 hours of talks with Iranian officials in the Pakistani capital, said his team had been very clear on its red lines, as hopes faded of a quick end to the conflict that began on 28 February.

The vice-president said he spoke with Donald Trump at least half a dozen times during the talks, and one of the most significant points of difference between the two sides was on Iran’s nuclear programme.

“We need to see an affirmative commitment that [Iran] will not seek a nuclear weapon, and they will not seek the tools that would enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon,” he said. “That is the core goal of the president of the United States, and that’s what we’ve tried to achieve through these negotiations.”...

Iran’s foreign ministry downplayed the apparent breakdown, saying no one had held any expectation that the talks with the US would reach an agreement within one session.

The Guardian - The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims.

The demolitions came after Israel’s minister of defence, Israel Katz, called for the destruction of “all houses” in border villages “in accordance with the model used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza” to stop threats to communities in northern Israel. The Israeli military destroyed 90% of homes in Rafah, in south Gaza.

Kanye West

MS NOW - Kanye West suffered a setback when the U.K.’s Home Office announced on Tuesday that it would block him from traveling to the country for a summer music festival. That’s not surprising, given that in the last few years he has said he loved Nazis, sold T-shirts with a swastika and released a song called “Heil Hitler,” argues author and culture writer Mychal Denzel Smith. And yet, his latest album debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard charts and celebrity guests, such as CeeLo Green and Lauryn Hill, have appeared with him at sold-out shows in Los Angeles — a disappointing endorsement of his horrifying behavior. Read more.

Moon trip didn't save NASA

MS NOW - Friday’s splashdown of the Artemis II crew was a moment of celebration for the entire planet. But it comes as the Trump administration is proposing troubling budget cuts that would all but dismantle much of NASA, argues Bill Nye the Science Guy. These cuts would be an insult to our astronauts and the entire NASA workforce, even as there is a growing consensus in Washington that we are in a new space race, this time with the China National Space Administration, which is planning to have taikonauts walk on the moon in 2030. Read more.

More in Europe no longer regard US as a reliable ally

Washington Post - Amanda Sloat is a professor at IE University in Madrid. 

More and more Europeans no longer view the United States as a reliable ally. ..... One recent survey found that one-quarter or more of respondents in some countries — including France, Germany and Spain — see the United States as a rival or adversary. Another found that an absolute majority view Trump as an “enemy” of Europe and U.S. foreign policy as “recolonization.” Polls also reflect a growing belief that China is a more dependable partner.

But the damage goes far beyond public opinion. Across multiple domains, the practical foundations of the transatlantic relationship are eroding.

The U.S. is losing access to European bases and intelligence....

The U.S. is also losing European business....

There is growing support for “Buy European” movements. In the Nordic countries, new apps scan a product’s barcode, view its origin and identify local alternatives....The E.U. is also expediting new trade deals with partners like India and Mercosur.

Do You Really Need to Wash New Clothes Before Wearing Them?

Decline of marriage

NY Times - As of 2023, the last data available from Pew Research Center, there were about 111 million single adults ages 18 and up in the United States. That was a sizable increase from 70 million in 1990. There is now consensus among researchers that after years of a steady decline in marriage rates the institution has lost its luster for many....

According to Pew, the U.S. marriage rate hit a 140-year low in 2019 and has never fully rebounded. A slight rise in the overall marriage rate in the past few years may be attributable to a dip in the divorce rate and longer life spans. “Men are living longer,” Dr. Fry said, which means fewer widows are being pooled into the singles population.

Trump vs. Forest Service

New Yorker - For more than a century, the Forest Service has been a fairly stable fact of life across vast swaths of the American landscape. Which is why last week, though in the big cities it was barely noticed amid the noisy horror of the war in the Middle East, there was much talk in rural America about the Trump Administration’s sweeping changes to—really, a gutting of—the Service, which operates under the purview of the Department of Agriculture. The Service’s regional headquarters will vanish, along with most of its research facilities and experimental forests—and also quite likely the sense of mission that has animated the agency for more than a century.

Trump vs. military standards

The New Republic - During his first term, Trump pardoned a pair of Army officers convicted of war crimes and ordered the promotion of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, who was acquitted despite posing with the body of a teen he had killed. Gallagher’s own teammates accused him of sniping women and children in Iraq. Trump celebrated all of them, seeing nothing wrong in what they had done. This was indicative of how he would approach his second term in office.

One of the first acts of the Trump-Hegseth Pentagon was to purge the military of its top lawyers (also known as JAGs, or judge advocate generals). JAGs perform the critical function of assessing the legality of anything done within the military. One piece at The Atlantic correctly described them as the “conscience” of the military.

They also dismissed the Joint Chiefs chairman, the chief of naval operations, and Air Force vice chief. At the time, Hegseth told reporters that all these senior military officers were removed because he didn’t want them to pose any “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” The clear goal was to remove anyone who might raise ethical objections to anything the military was ordered to do by the administration.

Supreme Court

Washington Post 

Polls

Democratic Coalition A new Harvard CAPS/Harris survey found more than half of U.S. voters think the economy is worse under Trump than it was under Biden.  And 62% blame the current state of the economy on Trump, not Biden.

Pew Research - Around six-in-ten Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Israel (60%) and lack confidence in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to do the right thing regarding world affairs (59%). In both political parties, majorities of adults under 50 now rate Israel and Netanyahu negatively.

How AI Is Transforming the Global Scam Industry

Time - For the past few years, it’s escaped no one that levels of Internet and telephone fraud have skyrocketed. One in four adults worldwide lost money to scams last year, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance NGO, while 13% encountered an attempted scam at least once a day. Globally, over $1 trillion is lost to online fraud annually in what the U.N. has dubbed a “scamdemic.” 

The vast majority originates from Southeast Asia, where some 300,000 people from over 65 countries have been trafficked into fortified compounds predominantly in Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. From these “scam prisons,” victims are forced to orchestrate romance-investment cons, crypto fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling. In Cambodia alone, online fraud is estimated to generate $12.5 billion annually, or half the country’s formal GDP, according to a 2024 estimate by the U.S. Institute of Peace. It’s little wonder the war-ravaged nation of 18 million has earned a snide moniker: “Scambodia.”

Iran

Washington Post - Direct U.S.-Iranian talks stretched into early Sunday here, as the two sides began to delve into technical details in the highest level of face-to-face engagement between leaders of the United States and Iran in decades.

The negotiations, led on the U.S. side by Vice President JD Vance, continued for more than six hours and were largely positive but went through “mood swings,” according to a Pakistani official briefed on the progress of the talks.

After the two sides took their first break of the night, the talks resumed at the technical level, signaling progress in the initial phase, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive closed-door deliberations.

Washington Post - The negotiations between the U.S. and Iran in Islamabad, Pakistan, on ending the six-week conflict are the first face-to-face talks between the two nations since 1979, the White House confirmed on Saturday.

Donald Trump

The Guardian - Donald Trump has reportedly said he will issue pardons en masse to his closest advisers at the end of his second presidency, promising them in casual conversations over the last year. “I’ll pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval [Office],” the president reportedly said in a recent meeting, garnering laughs from the room, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing amp used the line in an earlier conversation, but with a smaller radius: he said he would pardon anyone who came within 10ft of the presidential office. Other sources claim Trump has floated hosting a news conference at the end of his term where he will announce mass pardons.

In response to the report, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said: “The Wall Street Journal should learn to take a joke. However, the president’s pardon power is absolute.”

Since starting his second presidency, Trump has granted clemency to more than 1,800 people. On his first day in office, Trump gave unconditional pardons to 1,500 people who had participated in the 6 January 2021 US Capitol attack carried out by his supporters, including those charged or convicted with assaulting or resisting law enforcement during the riot.

Furkan Gozukara - Prominent journalist Max Blumenthal reveals Lara Trump and Don Jr. own a 30 percent stake in Salem Media, a registered Israeli foreign agent! The Trump family is literally taking millions from the Israeli government to propagandize the American public.

Occupy Democrats  -  A former White House doctor calls for Trump to undergo an immediate "medical evaluation" after a disturbing new Truth Social post supercharged concerns about his mental collapse....

"Earlier in the week the president threatened to kill an entire civilization. Now he posts a video of a woman being beaten to death," Dr. Jonathan Reiner, who was Vice President Dick Cheney's cardiologist, wrote on X.

"To put it mildly, that’s concerning behavior. If he was a member of your family you would urge him to see a doctor. He should have a medical evaluation," he added.

Education Department nullifies previous agreements over gender identity

The Hill - The Education Department took an unprecedented step this week to nullify Title IX agreements previous administrations had made with school districts over gender identity, laying the groundwork for an environment that turns such settlements into political ping-pong. 

The department rescinded six agreements made during the Obama and Biden administrations that required districts to implement policies such as gender discrimination trainings or instructions on preferred names and pronoun usage for transgender students.

The Trump administration said Title IX is based on sex, therefore the enforcement by past administrations was “illegal and burdensome.” 

Ecology

The budgets of the EPA, NOAA and FEMA would all be slashed, as would incentives for renewable energy, under President Trump’s annual budget request to Congress.
Seven Senate Democrats have launched a probe into a $370 million “alternative fuel” payout to the LNG export company Cheniere Energy.

Rising temperatures and overfishing have seen the U.K.’s iconic cod decline for over a decade. Now, consumers are warned to “completely avoid” eating the fish.

National Poetry Month

Melissa Kirsch, NY Times -   It’s the 30th anniversary of National Poetry Month, begun in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. I’m celebrating it in my own fashion, reading favorite poems about April. T.S. Eliot dubbed it “the cruellest month.” Edna St. Vincent Millay was equally suspicious: “It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, / April / Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” An idiot! When I read those lines, spring fever beginning to throb in my veins, I feel like Millay is mocking me for being so awed, again, by the magnolia blossoms flinging open their floppy petals for a brief window of delirium.

To Ogden Nash, April was “Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy.” There’s the cruelty again, but he ends having come to appreciate the month’s contradictions: “I love April, I love you.” Langston Hughes’s “April Rain Song” concludes similarly: “The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night / And I love the rain.”

April has, in the Northeast, been inconstant as always. A perfect spring bike ride there; a windy, rainy hustle back. The poems tend to capture this fickle quality. As Robert Frost put it: “The sun was warm but the wind was chill. / You know how it is with an April day.”

Meanwhile....

How Zohran Mamdani in doing in NYC 

People - Automatic registration for the U.S. military draft pool will begin in December Eligible men between the ages of 18-25 were previously required to self-register into the Selective Service System, but registration will now be automatic The U.S. hasn't had a military draft since 1973, however, questions about the draft have been posed to Trump's White House amid the ongoing conflict in Iran.

Impeachment

The Hill - Democratic leaders are walking a delicate line as liberals clamor for President Trump’s removal over the Iran war.  On one hand, the minority Democrats are well aware that they have virtually no power to boot Trump from office — an effort that’s opposed by even some in their own party — and they don’t want to distract from the issues of rising costs and inflation, where they see Republicans as most vulnerable heading into the midterms. 

On the other hand, Trump’s threat to use the military to attack civilian infrastructure and destroy “a whole civilization” has infuriated base progressives, who say the president crossed a line that demands his removal, either through impeachment or the 25th Amendment. Liberals in the Capitol are advancing the cause.

Time - Congressman Jamie Raskin knows as well as anyone in Washington the promise and perils of impeachment. As the lead manager in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, the Maryland Democrat spent days prosecuting a case that ultimately collapsed against the hard arithmetic of a Senate acquittal. 

Now, with Democrats once again confronting calls to try to remove Trump from office after his recent threat to wipe out the Iranian civilization, Raskin was asked by party leaders to talk the caucus through the range of options available to address presidential conduct before they reach a consensus position.

In an interview with TIME...Raskin says he plans to walk colleagues through the constitutional pathways available in moments of presidential crisis, including impeachment and the 25th Amendment, while underscoring the political constraints around both options.

“There’s obviously tremendous anxiety in the country about the deranged conduct and behavior of the President,” Raskin says, while stressing that Democrats remain in the minority. “For people to say we should just go ahead and impeach him simply denies this political reality. There is not a single Republican who has called for impeachment or indicated to us interest in impeachment at this point.”

Labor unions

In These Times - The 2024 election made one thing unmistakably clear: organized labor is no longer the unshakable pillar of the Democratic Party coalition that it once was. According to a new report from the Center for Working-Class Politics, Arizona State University’s Center for Work and Democracy, and Jacobin, titled ?“Can Unions Make a Difference?,” more than 40% of union members voted for Trump in 2024. The Democratic coalition has been fracturing across class lines for the last decade — a process known as class dealignment — and that divide is only growing.

The issue isn’t that workers don’t trust unions — 70% of Americans approve of them, the highest approval rating in over 50 years. It’s that they don’t trust politicians. Rather than rebranding, the solution for Democrats is clear: embrace the party’s roots in a concrete way by putting union leaders on the ballot.

At a time when trust in all kinds of institutions — political, business, economic — is collapsing, labor unions stand out with a singular kind of public approval that could be leveraged into real electoral influence. To the American people, unions are a counteragent to the political machine — an institution, yes, but one of the few that people can actually get behind. Despite this, most unions vastly underuse their electoral position, opting to simply donate to incumbents or candidates whose victories look inevitable.

The study found that candidates with union backgrounds use 159% more pro-worker language and 66% more progressive economic language, prioritizing a pro-worker, economic populist agenda. Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.), a former industrial electrician, has experience catching language in bills that could hurt workers’ needs:

Postal Service financial crisis

Time - The U.S. Postal Service announced on Thursday that it’s pausing its payments to a federal pension plan and moving to increase stamp prices in the midst of its “severe financial crisis.”

USPS said that it has informed federal budget officials of its plan to temporarily halt its employer contributions for the defined benefit portion of the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS). That same day, the Postal Service also said it filed notice with regulators to raise postage rates, including increasing the price of a First-Class Mail Forever stamp by 4 cents.

The agency attributed both changes to the financial challenges it’s currently facing. Last month, Postmaster General David Steiner said that, if no significant changes are made, USPS is set to run out of cash in 2027.

Trump losing support in MAGA

Jon Passantino - This week, some of Donald Trump’s most loyal right-wing media personalities who helped carry him back to the White House sounded a lot like the liberals they’ve spent years mocking.

"The 25th Amendment needs to be invoked. He is a genocidal lunatic. Our Congress and military need to intervene. We are beyond madness," wrote far-right extremist Candace Owens.

“How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracy theorist and ardent Trump supporter, asked on his Infowars show.

And Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host turned podcaster, denounced Trump for his expletive-laced Easter message, calling it “vile” and suggesting he might be the Antichrist. Still others, including Megyn Kelly and Matt Walsh, turned on Trump in strikingly harsh terms after he threatened to wipe out the entire Iranian civilization.

Even by the standards of the recent feuds that have rattled the MAGA movement, the rhetoric from some of its biggest stars amounted to a scorched-earth assault on a figure they had long elevated and defended. During the 2024 campaign, those same personalities amplified Trump’s claims with little scrutiny, casting him as America’s savior from a “communist” Kamala Harris.

In a 482-word tirade on Truth Social, Trump unloaded on his now-former allies as “stupid people” and “nut jobs.”