OpEd: Thousands of miles from the Persian Gulf, economic and political shrapnel from the Iran war has left longtime American allies nervous about the staying power and stability of their partnerships with the United States. read more
Four protesters are suing to stop the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from seizing DNA samples from Americans arrested while peacefully protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity.
North Korea has significantly tamped down its hostility toward South Korea in its recently revised constitution ... read more
The agency's top official told lawmakers that the "vast majority" of calls were answered. New data indicates most people couldn't get through. read more
A senior Trump official has boasted that Americans' credit card spending is "through the roof" as millions across the country grapple with soaring costs of living including high gas prices, a slow job market and inflation. read more
Ignorance in Action
thepreachersword.com
... I opened my Franklin planner is this morning to this quote of the day by the 18th century German novelist and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "There is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action." ...
@#3 ... it is better than losing jobs ...
I agree.
But it is necessary to look at the areas that are gaining jobs vs areas that are losing jobs, instead of just looking at the headline number.
With that in mind ...
Pres Trump had promised to bring manufacturing back to the US.
But there was a multi-thousand job loss in the manufacturing area in this report.
The gains in jobs were mostly health-care and education.
Not the manufacturing increase that Pres Trump had hoped for.
Trump Effect: American Manufacturing Is Roaring Back as Factory Activity Hits Four-Year High (April 2026)
www.whitehouse.gov
Another view ...
Russia holds scaled-back WW2 victory parade as worries over war in Ukraine deepen
www.reuters.com
... Russia holds its most scaled-back Victory Day parade in years on Saturday due to the threat of attack from Ukraine, where victory for Moscow's forces has proven elusive more than four years into the deadliest European conflict since World War Two.
The May 9 parade on Red Square marks Russia's most revered national holiday - a time to celebrate the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany and to pay homage to the 27 million Soviet citizens, including many from Ukraine, who perished.
Once used to show off Russia's vast military, including its nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles, this year's parade will have no tanks or other military equipment rolling over the cobbles of Red Square.
Soldiers will still march and cheer in the shadow of Vladimir Lenin's Mausoleum, fighter planes will fly above the towers of the Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin will make a speech before laying flowers at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
"In general, everything is as usual, except for the demonstration of military equipment," Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters. ...
@#11 ... The new districts would have prevented half of the state that is rural from having any voice in elections. ...
So, doing exactly what the Southern states have been doing (or trying to do) with respect to Blacks for decades?
Now, suddenly, your alias has an issue with this practice?
U.S. Appeals Court Strikes Down North Carolina's Voter ID Law (2016)
www.npr.org
...The appeals court noted that the North Carolina Legislature "requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices" -- then, data in hand, "enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans."[emphasis mine]
The changes to the voting process "target African Americans with almost surgical precision," the circuit court wrote, and "impose cures for problems that did not exist."
The appeals court suggested that the motivation was fundamentally political -- a Republican legislature attempting to secure its power by blocking votes from a population likely to vote for Democrats....
Trump thinks he's the most powerful person to ever live' (May 1, 2026)
www.aol.com
... Donald Trump has not been coy about his desire to be remembered as the most powerful person to ever live. The 79-year-old president has been privately and publicly musing about his place in history as he serves his final term in the world's most powerful office, a longtime confidant and senior administration officials told The Atlantic.
"He's been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live," the Trump confidant told The Atlantic. "He wants to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldn't do, because of his sheer power and force of will." The Atlantics in-depth investigation drew on multiple White House insiders who spoke anonymously to candidly detail their private conversations with the president.
No longer competing with Lincoln or Washington
This internal rhetoric marks a shift in the president's self-perception as he seeks to leave a permanent mark on the global order. Trump no longer views himself as a peer to American icons like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. Instead, he has allegedly set his sights on the world-historical status occupied by figures such as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte.
The philosophical framework the president's allies invoke is rooted in the 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who argued that history is shaped by rare "world-historical individuals" -- men like Caesar, Alexander and Napoleon -- who redirected the course of civilization through force of will, often in ways that were condemned as norm-breaking in their own time. ...
Meanwhile ...
Need a new hard drive? Well, the price has gone up ...
The 2026 storage crisis: Why AI data centers are hoarding every hard drive on the market
www.howtogeek.com
... HDDs were, until not too long ago, seen as the premier option for escaping price hikes as SSDs began being affected by the ongoing global RAM shortage.
The problem is that these price hikes are starting to catch up to hard drives as well. ...
The problem now, however, is that hard drives are currently experiencing their own massive supply crisis. The exact same artificial intelligence boom that caused the memory shortage is simultaneously driving an unprecedented surge in demand for high-capacity hard drives within hyperscale data centers. While artificial intelligence operations require blazing-fast memory for active processing, the underlying foundation of these large language models relies on storing tens of thousands of petabytes of training data, images, and video.
SSDs are far too expensive for this bulk archiving, meaning the world's largest cloud service providers and artificial intelligence laboratories are aggressively buying up every available hard drive on the market. The situation has reached such an extreme that major storage manufacturers like Western Digital have publicly confirmed their entire hard drive production capacity is completely sold out for the entirety of calendar 2026. Data center giants have even locked in firm purchase orders for hard drives extending well into 2027 and 2028, effectively draining the supply pool for everyone else. ...
... The Institute for Primary Facts has compiled more than 3.5 million pages of the Epstein files for public display ...
Yeah, but most of the files have still to be released.
What is the problem with the Trump administration, that they do not seem to want to release the Epstein files?
Release the Epstein files!
Prosecute those who may be guilty.
Give the victims of Epstein some closure.