From Trump to Musk to Republican lawmakers, we are getting a crash course in what happens when conservatives get the keys to our economy. The level of chaos, mismanagement, and self-inflicted harm is stunning. It’s no surprise Americans are feeling buyer’s remorse. Public approval of Trump’s handling of the economy is at just 37 percent.

When do we finally stop calling GOP talking points "conservative"? Teddy Roosevelt was conservative, and, oh, shit, we ended up with national parks. Trump and his ilk are destructive.

These are diametrically opposed concepts.

Like giant bones planted in the earth, clusters of tree trunks, stripped clean of bark, are appearing along the Chesapeake Bay on the United States’ mid-Atlantic coast. They are ghost forests: the haunting remains of what were once stands of cedar and pine. Since the late 19th century, an ever-widening swath of these trees have died along the shore. And they won’t be growing back.

These arboreal graveyards are showing up in places where the land slopes gently into the ocean and where salty water increasingly encroaches. Along the United States’ east coast, in pockets of the west coast and elsewhere, saltier soils have killed hundreds of thousands of acres of trees, leaving behind woody skeletons typically surrounded by marsh.

What happens next? That depends. As these dead forests transition, some will become marshes that maintain vital ecosystem services, such as buffering against storms and storing carbon. Others may become home to invasive plants or support no plant life

The first impression America gave me was gentle carelessness. We were driving down from Canada to visit family friends in Texas sometime in the mid- to late 1980s, and a young border patrol agent at a booth, crouched over a newspaper, leaning back in his chair, carelessly waved my family’s station wagon across without looking up. You didn’t even need a passport to enter the United States until I was 33.

You need clear eyes at the border today. Europe and Canada have issued travel advisories after a series of arbitrary detentions, deportations to foreign jails without due process and hundreds of valid visas pulled or voided amid a sense of general impunity. While I have crossed the border a hundred times at least, sometimes once a month when I lived there, I cannot say when I will see America again, and I am quite sure I will never return to the country I once visited.

The America I knew, the America I loved, has closed.

And so I find myself like a man who has been admi

GUANGZHOU, China — From blenders to bicycles, it could get tough for Americans to buy made-in-China products soon.

That's the message from manufacturers and exporters this week at China's oldest and biggest trade fair — the Canton Expo. Soaring U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods have sown chaos in China's manufacturing heartland. Exporters told NPR that orders to America had been halted, and many are scrambling to find revenue elsewhere.

Mini-oven maker Foshan Zero Point Intelligent Electrical Appliance Co., Ltd., got hit hard. It sells 90% of its products in America, according to sales manager Steven Zhang. Escalating tit-for-tat tariffs this month brought everything to a screeching halt.

"We told our suppliers not to deliver raw materials. Our workers were put on leave," Zhang said. "There was nothing else we could do."

I don't remember any time in my life that "brought ... to a screeching halt" has been so prevalent across industries. The billionaires will be fine; the

Of all the things wasted in our throwaway times, the greatest is wasted talent. There are millions of people around the world who could help make the world a better place, but don’t. I’m talking about the ones who have got the power to shape their own careers, though you would never know it from their utterly unsurprising résumés. About the talented folks with the world at their feet who nonetheless get stuck in mind-numbing, pointless or just plain harmful jobs.

There’s an antidote to that kind of waste, and it’s called moral ambition. Moral ambition is the will to make the world a wildly better place. To devote your working life to the great challenges of our time, whether that’s the climate crisis or corruption, gross inequality or the next pandemic. It’s a longing to make a difference – and to build a legacy that truly matters.

Moral ambition begins with a simple realisation: you’ve only got one life. The time you have left on this Earth is your most precious possession

Rice, the world’s most consumed grain, will become increasingly toxic as the atmosphere heats and as carbon dioxide emissions rise, potentially putting billions of people at risk of cancers and other diseases, according to new research published Wednesday in The Lancet.

Eaten every day by billions of people and grown across the globe, rice is arguably the planet’s most important staple crop, with half the world’s population relying on it for the majority of its food needs, especially in developing countries.

But the way rice is grown—mostly submerged in paddies—and its highly porous texture mean it can absorb unusually high levels of arsenic, a potent carcinogenic toxin that is especially dangerous for babies.

Quelle surprise ...

A federal judge has ruled that there is “probable cause” to hold the Trump administration in contempt over its removal of hundreds of migrants from the United States to a notorious prison in El Salvador despite an order to halt their deportation.

On Wednesday, D.C. U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg ruled that the Trump administration’s “willful and knowing” actions — and their stonewalling during subsequent hearings — constitute “probable cause for a finding of contempt.”

Age: Fairly new.

Appearance: Either sensible or boring, depending on your point of view.

If this is about influencers wearing shoes made of glass, I swear to God … No, calm down. This isn’t quite as reckless as that. It’s primarily about bedtimes.

I don’t follow. It’s been reported that more and more young British women who go out drinking prefer to be back home and tucked up in bed by midnight.

They do? Yes. According to research by skincare brand No7, 51% of women like to go to bed early after a night out, 65% would rather have an evening at home and just 5% claimed that their perfect night involves going dancing with friends.

You young people are such wimps. There’s probably more to it than that. Over the past five years, 400 nightclubs have closed around the country due to rising costs, a reduction in people’s disposable income and a marked generational decrease in drinking culture that is led, in part, by a growing awareness of al

There's admittedly not a lot new here, but it's a decently concise lens through which to view all the crises we currently face.

Arch asked her insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana, for approval to go to the center for her care, and the company granted it, a process known as prior authorization. Then, a week or so before her surgery, Arch was wrangling child care and meal plans when she got a call from the insurer. The representative on the line was trying to persuade her to have the surgery elsewhere. She urged Arch to seek a hospital that, unlike the center, was in network and charged less. “Do you realize how much this is going to cost?” Arch remembered the agent asking. Arch did not need more stress, but here it was — from her own health plan. “I feel very comfortable with my decision,” she replied. “My doctor teaches other doctors around the world how to do this.” Over the next year, Arch underwent five operations to rid herself of cancer and reconstruct her breasts.

It's unnecessary to point out the glaring issues with U.S. health insurance.

The president of El Salvador said in a meeting with Donald Trump in the White House on Monday that he would not order the return of a Maryland man who was deported in error to a Salvadoran mega-prison.

“The question is preposterous,” Nayib Bukele said in the Oval Office on Monday, where he was welcomed by Trump and spoke with the president and members of his cabinet. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I’m not going to do it.”

He added: “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” and said he would not release the man, Kilmar Abrego García, into El Salvador either. “I’m not very fond of releasing terrorists into the country.”

The comments came a day after the Trump administration claimed it is not legally obligated to secure the return of the Abrego García, despite the US supreme court ruling that the administration should “facilitate” bringing him back.

Well, fuck. This is such petty bullshit when these two guys could easily get him

Federal scientists responsible for monitoring the health of West Coast fisheries are cleaning office bathrooms and reconsidering critical experiments after the Department of Commerce failed to renew their lab’s contracts for hazardous waste disposal, janitorial services, IT and building maintenance.

Trash is piling up at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, staffers told ProPublica. Ecologists, chemists and biologists at Montlake Laboratory, the center’s headquarters in Seattle, are taking turns hauling garbage to the dumpster and discussing whether they should create a sign-up sheet to scrub toilets.

The scientists — who conduct genetic sampling of endangered salmon to check the species’ stock status and survival — routinely work with chemicals that can burn skin, erupt into flames and cause cancer. At least one said they’d have to delay mission-critical research if hazardous waste removal isn’t restored.

The Federal Trade Commission's blockbuster antitrust case against Meta kicks off on Monday in a courtroom in Washington. It's the culmination of a nearly six-year investigation into whether the social media giant broke competition laws in acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp.

At stake is the future Meta's $1.4 trillion advertising business and the prospect of having to spin off its hugely popular services into separate companies — a corporate breakup the likes of which has not been seen since AT&T's telephone monopoly was forced to split apart more than 40 years ago.

The challenge is technical and psychological. It is difficult to imagine a post-American world because America crafted that world. When the US becomes a volatile actor, the very architecture of the global financial order starts to wobble. We saw this in the crisis of confidence in the dollar in the aftermath of Trump’s “liberation-day” tariffs. The robustness of the rule of law and separation of powers – cornerstones of confidence in an economy – are also now in doubt, as the administration goes to war with its own judiciary and the president himself boasts about how many people in the room with him made a killing out of his stock market crash. Is it insider trading if your source is the president?

Revealing Reality created multiple Roblox accounts, registering them to fictional users aged five, nine, 10, 13 and 40-plus. The accounts interacted only with one another, and not with users outside the experiment, to ensure their avatars’ behaviours were not influenced in any way.

Despite new tools launched last week aimed at giving parents more control over their children’s accounts, the researchers concluded: “Safety controls that exist are limited in their effectiveness and there are still significant risks for children on the platform.”

The report found that children as young as five were able to communicate with adults while playing games on the platform, and found examples of adults and children interacting with no effective age verification. This was despite Roblox changing its settings last November so that accounts listed as belonging to under-13s can no longer directly message others outside of games or experiences, instead having access only to public broadcast

On the surface, following a TikTok account might seem like a minor infraction for a young private in the 1st Infantry Division. But not only has that private followed the Base, a violent neo-Nazi terrorist organization once the target of an FBI investigation, there are directives issued under Joe Biden that discourages that kind of social media activity.

But in February, the DoD issued a memo halting a major counter-extremism initiative rooting out white nationalists and far-right influences among servicemen, citing that it was not in line with Donald Trump’s executive orders. Since, the efficacy of rooting out the far right within the ranks remains unclear.

As the AI scholars Timnit Gebru and Émile P Torres have written, though the methods may be new, this “bundle” of ideological fads “are direct descendants of first-wave eugenics”, which also saw a small subset of humanity making decisions about which parts of the whole were worth continuing and which needed to be phased out, cleared out, or terminated. Until recently, few paid attention. Much like Próspera, where members can already experiment with human-machine mergers such as having their Tesla keys implanted into their hands, these intellectual fads seemed to be the marginal hobby horses of a few Bay Area dilettantes with money and caution to burn. No longer.

Now, as the government races to carry out President Donald Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations, Deployed is shifting its business once more — from holding people who are trying to enter the country to detaining those the government is seeking to ship out.

In Trump’s second term in office, the government is poised to spend tens of billions of dollars on immigration detention, including unprecedented plans to hold immigrants arrested in the U.S. in massive tent camps on military bases. One recently published request for contract proposals said the Department of Homeland Security could spend up to $45 billion over the next several years on immigrant detention. The plans have set off a gold rush among contractors. All this spending is unfolding at the same time the government has made sweeping cuts to federal agencies and shed other contracts.

Among those seeking a windfall is Deployed Resources, which, along with its sister company, Deployed Services, has adapted to

The fired Noaa employees were among the roughly 16,000 people terminated across the federal workforce in a sweeping move by the Trump administration that targeted workers in “probationary” status. Some were categorized that way because they were new in their careers, but others had recently received promotions or been added full-time to agencies after years of contract or temporary work.

“The majority of probationary employees in my office have been with the agency for 10+ years and just got new positions,” said one worker who still had their job, and who spoke to the Guardian under the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal in February, when the firings first happened.

“If we lose them, we’re losing not just the world-class work they do day-to-day, but also decades of expertise and institutional knowledge.”

Looks like we're going to need more Sharpies.

Does Trump really believe that all NOAA does is prattle on about climate change? Or is this the more obvious first