People. com - Elon Musk claimed President Donald Trump's name is in the Jeffrey Epstein files in a post on X, as the pair's public spat intensifies. "Time to drop the really big bomb," Musk posted. "@realDonaldTrump is
in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made
public."
"Have a nice day, DJT!," the post continued.
NY Times - When the current Congress was convened in January, there were nearly 120 members who were 70 or older — 86 in the House, including nonvoting delegates, and 33 in the Senate. This number, which is unmatched in modern history, included 14 octogenarians in the House, five in the Senate, and 91-year-old Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa.
The 70-and-older cohort makes up more than a fifth of the members of Congress. By the time the legislative body adjourns in January of 2027, if every current member stays in office, there will be closer to 140 members aged 70 years or older across both chambers.
The contentious matter of age is particularly acute among Democrats in the House, who had nearly double the members 70 or older that the Republicans did at the beginning of this term. The gap between the Democratic and the Republican Parties is smaller when looking at median age, which is around 57 years for both parties. In the Senate, the median age is 64 for Republicans and 66 for Democrats.
Newsweek - Home values have fallen month-over-month in more than 60 percent of U.S. counties in April, according to data from real estate platform Reventure App—a decline so widespread that it can only be compared to those that followed the 2008 housing market crash and the 2022 mortgage rate spike, the company's CEO Nick Gerli said.
"More than half the country is now officially in month-over-month declines, indicating that the housing downturn is spreading," the real estate analyst wrote on X.
"We'll have to see if this lasts into the future, and if it turns into a sustained correction like 2008 or is a blip like 2022. But given the trajectory of listings and inventory, it seems like more value declines are coming," he said.
For years now, home prices have been rising across the U.S, pushed by chronically low levels of inventory and pent-up demand. The homebuying frenzy that characterized the pandemic years, triggered by historically low mortgage rates, accelerated home prices' vertiginous growth, driving the market to new levels of unaffordability for buyers.
Now, the U.S. housing market appears to be at a breaking point: many prospective buyers have been pushed to the sidelines by high mortgage rates and rising housing costs, and while inventory levels are rising, not enough people seem to be able to afford or be willing to venture into the purchase of a home.
Dwindling sales and rising inventory are putting downward pressure on prices, in a move that would certainly benefit prospective homebuyers. Sellers, however, could see the value of their assets drop significantly from their pandemic peaks.
NORML - An estimated seven percent of US adults ages 65 and older acknowledge having consumed cannabis within the past month, according to data published yesterday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. Investigators reported that those with higher incomes and those seniors suffering from chronic health conditions were most likely to report current cannabis use.
NORML - State-level marijuana legalization is associated with declines in prescription drug spending, according to data published last week in the journal Health Economics. Researchers affiliated with Bowling Green State University in Ohio and Illinois State University assessed the impact of marijuana legalization laws on prescription drug expenditures among privately insured working-age adults.
They identified pronounced declines in prescription drug expenditures among enrollees of small group insurance plans (plans typically sold to employers with fewer than 50 employees).
“We find that net prescription drug claims in small group insurance markets are reduced by approximately six percent following recreational cannabis legalization,” they determined. “The reduction in claims in the small group market grows stronger in magnitude over time and gains statistical significance during the second full year of legalized cannabis.”
The Conversation - Several Republican-led states have restricted transgender rights: Iowa has signed a law removing civil rights protection for transgender people; Wyoming has prohibited state agencies from requiring the use of preferred pronouns; and Alabama recently passed a law that only two sexes would be recognized. Hundreds of bills have been introduced in other state legislatures to curtail trans rights.
Earlier in the year, several White House executive orders pushed to deny trans identity. One of them, “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias,” claimed that gender-affirming policies of the Biden administration were “anti-Christian.” It accused the Biden Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of forcing “Christians to affirm radical transgender ideology against their faith.”
To be clear, not all Christians are anti-trans. And in my research of medieval history and literature, I found evidence of a long history in Christianity of what today could be called “transgender” saints. While such a term did not exist in medieval times, the idea of men living as women, or women living as men, was unquestionably present in the medieval period. Many scholars have suggested that using the modern term transgender creates valuable connections to understand the historical parallels.
There are at least 34 documented stories of transgender saints’ lives from the early centuries of Christianity. Originally appearing in Latin or Greek, several stories of transgender saints made their way into vernacular languages.
Of the 34 original saints, at least three gained widespread popularity in medieval Europe: St. Eugenia, St. Euphrosyne and St. Marinos. All three were born as women but cut their hair and put on men’s clothes to live as men and join monasteries.
Hartmann Report- Let’s not forget:
— When Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in 2020, the political class gasped. Now it’s barely discussed.
— When he orchestrated an attempted coup on January 6th, 2021, it was the top story in the world. Today, most Republicans call it “a protest” or a “tour.”
— Had any previous president invited an immigrant billionaire who promotes fascist memes to rip the guts out of the Social Security Administration and shut down USAID (handing our soft power to the Russians and Chinese) there would have been hell to pay. Now Musk’s extraordinary damage to our government is barely discussed.
— When Trump began calling undocumented immigrants “animals” and labeling judges and prosecutors as “scum,” it horrified the media. Now it’s part of the daily churn.
— When a federal judge’s son was murdered by a Trump campaign volunteer it shocked America; now judges are routinely threatened and Republicans won’t even give the judiciary control over the US Marshall’s Service to protect them.
— When Trump praised Putin and Viktor Orbán and suggested suspending the Constitution, the headlines flared, but then faded fast.
— When he arrested a Tufts University student for having written an op-ed in the student paper critical of Netanyahu and threw her into prison for months, the country was appalled. Now he’s rolling out loyalty tests for civil servants and investigating the social media posts of American citizens returning to the country and nobody’s even discussing it any more.
— When ICE agents showed up in Portland in 2020 in unmarked vans without uniforms and their ID missing, kidnapping people off the streets without warrants, Americans and the media were shocked. Now seeing jackbooted thugs with masks covering their faces and refusing to identify themselves has become “normal.”
This is the playbook. Fascism doesn’t arrive with jackboots; it arrives with media and voter fatigue. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt warned, the very banality and ordinariness of evil is its greatest weapon.
People - Tom Hanks is speaking out for the first time following the release of his daughter E.A. Hanks' memoir, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, which alleges that her mom was emotionally and physically abusive "I’m not surprised that my daughter had the wherewithal as well as the curiosity to examine this thing," he explained to Access Hollywood recently. E.A. Hanks' memoir was released on April 8 and examines her childhood
In March, the Trump administration raided what they called a Tren de Arauga gang gathering in Texas, arresting dozens of people at five in the morning. Two months later, The Texas Tribune reports that none of the people they arrested had any gang ties or even criminal records, and that the “Tren de Aragua gathering” they busted was in fact a birthday party. Forty-seven people were arrested in total, including nine children, although it’s unclear if every person taken in was at the birthday party.
ICE made the most immigration arrests in a single day in its history on Tuesday, detaining more than 2,200 people, as the agency responds to pressure to rapidly and dramatically increase arrests.
Roll Call- The new travel ban echoes a proclamation Trump signed during his first term that prohibited travel from majority Muslim countries, which was later expanded to include other nations deemed a risk to security. After a series of legal challenges, the Supreme Court ended up ruling the last version of the travel ban was constitutional and within Trump’s authority as president.
CBS - The U.S. Navy plans to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, a fleet replenishment oiler named after the slain gay rights leader and Navy veteran, and is considering renaming multiple naval ships named after civil rights leaders and prominent American voices, CBS News has learned.
U.S. Navy documents obtained by CBS News and used to brief the secretary of the Navy and his chief of staff show proposed timelines for rolling out the name change of the USNS Harvey Milk to the public. While the documents do not say what the ship's new name would be, the proposal comes during Pride Month, the monthlong observance of the LGBTQ+ community that also coincides with the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising of 1969. WorldPride celebrations are being held in Washington, D.C., this year.
Daily Beast - President Donald Trump’s National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, was hit with a whopping 18 health violations and the lowest grade in the county after an inspection last month. An online report from a May 6 health inspection visit reveals that the club—one of three clubs the Republican president owns in the state—received a 32 out of 100 from the Somerset County Department of Health.
Axios - House Republicans are trying to talk Elon Musk down from the ledge as he continues to heap criticism on President Trump's "One Big, Beautiful Bill." House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said he called Musk yesterday — but Musk didn't answer, Axios' Andrew Solender reports.
Market Watch - Privately run businesses created just 37,000 new jobs in May — the smallest increase in more than two years — as the worst global trade wars since the 1930s spurred many firms to put a pause on hiring.
Former “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” husband Tom Girardi has been sentenced to seven years and three months in prison for stealing millions of dollars from his clients. The 86-year-old disbarred attorney and estranged husband of “RHOBH” star Erika Jayne was also ordered to pay over $2 million in restitution.
NBC News - The Trump administration's largest immigration crackdown yet is underway, but the reallocation of personnel from other federal law enforcement agencies in order to carry out "Operation At Large" is causing tension among some officials who feel they've been taken off core national security missions.
The new ICE-led initiative is a response to frustration from White House chief of staff Stephen Miller over what he saw as numbers of arrests and deportations of unauthorized immigrants that were too low. Miller is so frustrated, two sources said, that he has berated and threatened to fire senior ICE officials if they did not begin detaining 3,000 migrants a day. He also threatened to fire leaders of field offices posting the bottom 10% of arrest numbers monthly.
According to the operation plan, the initiative calls on help from thousands of personnel, including:
→ 3,000 ICE agents, including 1,800 from Homeland Security Investigations, which generally investigates transnational crimes;
→ 2,000 Justice Department employees from the FBI, U.S. Marshals Service and the DEA;
→ 500 employees from Customs and Border Protection; and
→ 250 IRS agents, some of whom may be used to provide tax information on the whereabouts of immigrants using tax information, and others who would have the authority to make arrests.
The operation is the latest example of how President Donald Trump's push for mass deportations is reshaping federal law enforcement, leaving less time and attention for other types of criminal investigations.
Now, FBI agents are joining in on immigration-related law enforcement operations, and DOJ teams focused on other issues are being disbanded so members can dedicate their time to immigration and other administration priorities. Federal courts are regularly seeing misdemeanor cases for border crossings, a rarity in recent years. And federal cases without immigration components have stalled or are moving more slowly.
"There is such a priority on making immigration arrests that it takes longer to get answers on anything else," a law enforcement official said. "Something that used to be resolved in a matter of days now takes weeks."
EcoWatch - The United Kingdom has recorded its warmest spring since records began in 1884, prompting warnings for needed action on climate change. The season was also the sunniest on record overall for the UK, with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland recording their sunniest springs, and England experiencing its second sunniest since record keeping began in 1910, according to a new Met Office report.
The UK had 653.3 hours of sunshine this spring — 43 percent above the seasonal average. It outshone the 2020 record by more than 27 hours and has been the sunniest season since 1995.
...The UK has had eight of its 10 warmest springs since 2000, with the three hottest occurring since 2017, the Met Office said.
EcoWatch - A village in the Swiss Alps was buried by an enormous chunk of rock and ice that broke off of the Birch Glacier on Wednesday.
Mud and plumes of dust covered roughly 90 percent of the alpine village of Blatten, which had been evacuated on May 19 as a precaution.
“We have lost our village,” said Mayor of Blatten Matthias Bellwald during a news conference Wednesday evening, as The Washington Post reported.
Bellwald described the destruction as extensive and appealed for help with rebuilding.
Robert Reich - Trump’s personal money-making schemes haven’t elicited the outrage that would once have generated huge political blowback, televised hearings, official investigations, and damage control.
Does the dearth (if not death) of outrage illustrate how far Trump has moved the norms of acceptable presidential behavior?
Or is outrage still there, but the American public has no means of calling him out because Trump has dismantled the system of accountability?
Here’s my list of his dismantling:
1. He’s disabled all institutions in the executive branch that constrained his predecessors — especially professionals in the Justice Department, inspectors general, ethics watchdogs, and FBI. So there will be no special counsels or investigations by the department to push back against his illegal and unethical behavior.
2. He has neutered Congress’s ability to hold him accountable. By dominating the Republican-controlled Congress and threatening to run primary opponents against any Republican who opposes him, Trump has made it impossible for Congress to hold public hearings about his unethical and arguably illegal actions.
3. He has gained control of the Supreme Court, which has now given him wide rein. He’s installed three Supreme Court justices who, joined by the three Republican appointees already on the court, have conferred immunity on him for official acts — making it less likely that his unethical and illegal behavior will be challenged.
The Guardian - In person, Sanders’ 83 years read differently than in photograph, perhaps because of how conversational he is. His voice is magnetic – a Brooklyn accent that feels both warm and tough. “But what I have been aware of, and I’ve talked about it for years, is that in America, the very richest people are doing phenomenally well, while 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck.”
Later, he will say the same thing to an audience in London – only with more emphasis and passion. “Sixty per cent. Six-zero. Do you know what paycheck to paycheck means?” It’s exhilarating to hear Sanders speak to a crowd: his zeal is reflected back in their faces, his moral clarity is such a relief, set against the cynicism and resignation of most of the Democratic party’s opposition to Trump and his administration. Class war is as old as time, but it’s a peculiarity of this age that you rarely hear a politician name it. “I do,” he tells me. “There is a class war going on. The people on top are waging that war.”
It’s a look at what could have been. Sanders ran, of course, to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, and again in 2020. The first time, there was a real sense, in the US and abroad, that something incredible might happen: that someone with “almost no name recognition,” he says, a senator from the small state of Vermont, might successfully challenge Hillary Clinton, whom the party had already anointed. We all know how that worked out. Was it the greatest disappointment of his political life? “Well, you’re too busy to feel things,” he says. “You’re just working very hard.”
What is absolutely unequivocal is his criticism of the Democrats. The party, he thinks, lacks any real progressive promise. “What they say is, ‘The status quo is working pretty good, and we will tinker around the edges’, and that is not a message that resonates with working people”. He refuses to indulge in any personal ill-will towards Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. The most he’ll voice is a weary resignation about 2020, when his campaign “won the first three states, primary states, in terms of popular votes. Then the Democratic establishment made sure the other candidates dropped out, and they rallied around Joe Biden. You know, that’s the world that we live in. We are taking on not just the Republican leadership, we are taking on a Democratic establishment which is tied to elements of corporate America.”]
The Guardian - Musk’s online outburst could embolden fiscally conservative Republican senators – some of whom have already spoken out – to defy Trump as they continue crucial negotiations on Capitol Hill over the so-called “one big, beautiful bill”.
“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Musk wrote on his X social media platform on Tuesday. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”
Musk, who had previously voiced criticism of the proposed legislation, quipping that it could be big or beautiful but not both, added on X: “It will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden America citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.”
He continued: “Congress is making America bankrupt.”
The Guardian - Senior US immigration officials over the weekend instructed rank-and-file officers to “turn the creative knob up to 11” when it comes to enforcement, including by interviewing and potentially arresting people they called “collaterals”, according to internal agency emails viewed by the Guardian.
Officers were also urged to increase apprehensions and think up tactics to “push the envelope” one email said, with staff encouraged to come up with new ways of increasing arrests and suggesting them to superiors...
The instructions not only mark a further harshening of attitude and language by the Trump administration in its efforts to fulfill election promises of “mass deportation” but also indicate another escalation in efforts, by being on the lookout for undocumented people whom officials may happen to encounter – here termed “collaterals” – while serving arrest warrants for others.
The emails, sent by two top Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials this past Saturday, instructed officers around the country to increase arrest numbers over the weekend. This followed the Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, and the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, pressing immigration officials last month to jack up immigration-related arrests to at least 3,000 people per day.
New York Times - Edmund White, who became a pioneer in gay literature by mining his own varied catalog of sexual experiences in more than 30 books and hundreds of articles and essays, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.
... Mr. White had been H.I.V. positive since the 1980s and survived two major strokes in 2012 and a heart attack in 2014. Many of Mr. White’s novels, short story collections and works of nonfiction were critical successes, and several were best-sellers.
The New York Times called “Forgetting Elena” (1973), about the rituals of gay life on a fictionalized Fire Island, “an astonishing first novel, obsessively fussy, and yet uncannily beautiful.” His second novel, “Nocturnes for the King of Naples” (1978), took the form of letters from a young gay man to his deceased ex-lover.
The Guardian - A federal prosecutor who helped lead the US Department of Justice’s investigation into the January 6 attack on Congress has resigned – and, in a new interview, he criticized Donald Trump’s decision to pardon or commute the sentences of about 1,500 people charged in connection with the Capitol attack, saying that it “sends a terrible message to the American people”.
Longtime assistant US attorney Greg Rosen, the former chief of the justice department’s Capitol siege section, sat down with CBS News after resigning over the weekend. In the interview, Rosen said that he was “shocked, if not stunned” by the breadth of the pardons Trump issued to those involved in the 6 January 2021 attack just hours after his second presidential inauguration.
Paul Waldman, MSNBC - During an interview last June, then-candidate Donald Trump was asked what he thought about foreign students attending American universities.
“What I want to do and what I will do is you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country,” he said.
It was an idea he’d borrowed from Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, saying foreign students who want to stay after graduation “should not be thrown out of our country.”
As you might have guessed by now, Trump didn’t follow through on that pledge. But he didn’t just renege on his promise; he’s doing its exact opposite. The Trump administration is moving quickly to try to deport foreign students studying here and halting the interviews necessary for foreign students who want to study here in the future.
