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A federal receiver is on the hunt to recover $140 million lost in an alleged Ponzi scheme that benefited some Republicans in the top ranks of their party in Georgia and Alabama. He’s looking to claw back funds, including almost 1,000 political donations totaling more than $1 million, that often backed far-right Republican insurgents.

Some of these same politicians say they too lost money, but others left holding the bag for First Liberty Building & Loan are rank-and-file conservatives, swayed by talk show pundits who promoted it as an opportunity for Christians and “America First MAGA patriots.”

First Liberty had promised returns up to 16% by making high-interest loans to businesses. Brant Frost IV, an evangelical powerbroker, touted “Wall Street returns for Main Street investors.” But he skimmed $17 million for himself, his relatives and their affiliated companies, and loaned millions more that borrowers never repaid, a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit claims.

Recent college graduates searching for jobs are finding that practical degrees, work experience and even connections are no match for sluggish hiring.

Four people were killed on Friday in a shooting at a Montana bar, prompting a lockdown in a neighborhood several miles away as authorities searched a wooded area for a suspect in the case.

The shooting brought the number of mass murders so far this year in the US to nine, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a non-partisan resource which defines such cases as killings in which four or more victims are killed.

All those mass murders were shootings, and four have occurred in a 30-day period beginning 2 July. It was the US’s second mass murder since Monday, when a man attacked a New York City skyscraper housing the National Football League’s headquarters and shot four people dead before dying by suicide.

For all of President Donald Trump’s promises of an economic “golden age,” a spate of weak indicators this week told a potentially worrisome story as the impacts of his policies are coming into focus.

Link without paywall: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/maga-attorney-hired-epstein-lawyer-215602325.html

A firm that represents Pete Hegseth and once represented Donald Trump now employs the co-executor of the disgraced financier’s estate.

In the summer of 2022, Donald Trump badly needed criminal-defense lawyers. Tim Parlatore, who was already working for the former president on an unrelated civil matter, joined the team defending Trump after an FBI search found classified government documents stored at his Florida estate. Parlatore had represented prominent Trump allies in their interactions with the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attacks; that was helpful, because Trump also faced charges stemming from the riot. Parlatore was a star lawyer in Trump world, so it’s more than a little surprising that, in the fall of that year, he hired a close associate of one of the most notorious villains in the extended MAGA universe: Jeffrey Epstein.

Before he joined the Parlatore Law Group, Darren Indyke was Epstein’s personal attorney for nearly a quarter century and reportedly among his closest associates and advisers. Parlatore’s decision to hire Indyke appears to have escaped public notice. But Indyke, by his own account, has been working for the firm since October 2022.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/25518527

Sorry about the paywall, but the key facts are all in the beginning:

The Interior Department released a new secretarial order Friday saying it may no longer issue any permits to a solar or wind project on federal lands unless the agency believes it will generate as much energy per acre as a coal, gas, or nuclear power plant.

Hypothetically, this could kill off any solar or wind project going through permitting that is sited on federal lands, because these facilities would technically be less energy dense than coal, gas, and nuclear plants. This is irrespective of the potential benefits solar and wind may have for the environment or reducing carbon emissions – none of which are mentioned in the order.

A federal appeals court on Friday revived part of a lawsuit accusing Elon Musk’s X of becoming a haven for child exploitation, though the court said the platform deserves broad immunity from claims over objectionable content.

While rejecting some claims, the ninth US circuit court of appeals in San Francisco said X, formerly Twitter, must face a claim it was negligent by failing to promptly report a video containing explicit images of two underage boys to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

The federal Bureau of Prisons said Friday that Maxwell had been transferred to Bryan, Texas, but did not explain the circumstances. Her attorney confirmed the move but also declined to discuss the reasons for it.

A new Trump administration report which attempts to justify a mass rollback of environmental regulations is chock-full of climate misinformation, experts say.

On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a proposal to undo the 2009 “endangerment finding”, which allows the agency to limit planet-heating pollution from cars and trucks, power plants and other industrial sources. Hours later, the Department of Energy (DOE) published a 150-page report defending the proposal, claiming scientific concern about the climate crisis is overblown.

Poverty and hunger will rise as a result of the Trump administration’s unprecedented cuts to the US federal “food stamps” program, according to experts. Low-income workers who rely on the aid are braced for dire consequences.

The U.S. stock market had its worst day since May on Friday after the government reported a sharp slowdown in hiring and President Donald Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on imports from a number of U.S. trading partners.

The S&P 500 fell 1.6%, its biggest decline since May 21 and its fourth straight loss. The index also posted a 2.4% loss for the week, marking a sharp shift from last week’s record-setting streak of gains.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1.2%, while the Nasdaq composite fell 2.2%.

Worries on Wall Street about a weakening economy were heavily reinforced by the latest report on job growth in the U.S. Employers added just 73,000 jobs in July. That is sharply lower than economists expected. The Labor Department also reported that revisions shaved a stunning 258,000 jobs off May and June payrolls.

Markets also reacted to the latest tariff news. President Donald Trump announced tariff rates on dozens of countries and pushed back the scheduled effective date to Aug. 7, adding more uncertainty to the global trade picture.

“The market has been felled by a one-two punch of additional tariffs, as well as the weaker-than-expected employment data -— not only for this month, but for the downward revisions to the prior months,” said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA.

President Donald Trump on Friday fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, hours after the agency reported that job growth in the U.S. had slowed to a near-halt.

In a Truth Social post that also directed even more fire at Fed Chair Jerome Powell, Trump accused BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer of being a political appointee who was manipulating jobs data.

“I was just informed that our Country’s “Jobs Numbers” are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s [Harris’] chances of Victory,” Trump wrote.

“We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified,” he added.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the conduit for federal funds to NPR and PBS, announced on Friday that it is beginning to wind down its operations given President Trump has signed a law clawing back $1.1 billion in funding for public broadcasting through fiscal year 2027.

The announcement follows a largely party-line vote last month that approved the cuts to public broadcasting as part of a $9 billion rescissions package that also included cuts to foreign aid that was sent by the White House earlier this year. While public media officials had held a glimmer of hope that lawmakers would restore some of the money in the following year, the Senate Appropriations Committee declined to do that on Thursday.

The money is easy to trace. Scroll back through tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s political donations and you’ll soon hit US$15 million worth of transfers sent to Protect Ohio Values, JD Vance’s campaign fund. The donations, made in 2022, are a staggering contribution to an individual senate race, and helped put Vance (Thiel’s former employee at tech fund Mithril Capital) on a winning trajectory.

But if money matters, so do ideas. Scroll back through Vance’s speeches, and you’ll hear echoes of Thiel’s voice. The decline of US elites (and by extension, the nation) is supposedly a result of technological stagnation: declining innovation, trivial distractions, broken infrastructure. To make the nation great again, Thiel believes, tech should come first, corporates should be unshackled, and the state should resemble the startup. For Vance, who has now risen to the office of US vice-president, a Thiel talk on these topics at Yale Law was “the most significant moment” of his time there.

Thiel’s influence on politics is at once financial, technical and ideological. In the New York Times, he was recently described as the “most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years”. And his potent cocktail of networks, money, strategy and support exerts a rightward force on the political landscape. It establishes a powerful pattern for up-and-coming figures to follow.

To “hedge fund investor” and “tech entrepreneur”, Thiel has recently added a new label: Republican kingmaker.

Well you're going to need CEOs to manage your individual earthly monarchs for you until you can upload your consciousness and head to outer space 🚀