memfree

"President Trump has decided to withdraw the United States from UNESCO – which supports woke, divisive cultural and social causes that are totally out-of-step with the commonsense policies that Americans voted for in November," White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said.

UNESCO was one of several international bodies Trump withdrew from during his first term, along with the World Health Organization, the Paris Agreement global climate change accord and the U.N. Human Rights Council. During his second term, he has largely reinstated those steps.

The techdirt article is NOT neutral. It is full of loaded language and obvious partisanship, but... dammit, its seems more accurate than what I'm seeing elsewhere. Please add better links if/when found.

Excerpt 1:

The Senate Intelligence Committee in 2019 (during the Trump admin when Republicans had the majority in the Senate) confirmed that Russia used social media to “sow societal discord and influence the outcome of the 2016 election.” That was a report led by Senator Richard Burr. A follow-up effort led by current Secretary of State Marco Rubio showed the same thing. There wasn’t “collusion” (a term that has no legal meaning here) but there was plenty to be concerned about. Here’s Rubio’s own quote:

We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election.

What the Committee did find however is very troubling. We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.

The report also noted that:

Paul Manafort’s presence on the Trump Campaign and proximity to then-Candidate Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign.

Remember: this was a bipartisan, Republican-led effort, released during Trump’s presidency, led by Marco Rubio. The conclusion is unambiguous: Russia tried to influence the 2016 election.

Excerpt 2:

All of the evidence shows that Russia absolutely sought to sow discord, including helping Donald Trump in 2016. It was almost certainly less successful than many people believed, and it was clearly unsuccessful in actually changing votes in the infrastructure.

But President Obama being accurately told two separate things in two consecutive months—(1) that the Russians didn’t succeed in hacking votes and (2) that they did want to influence the election through any means they could find—does not, in any way, suggest that Obama cooked up evidence of the latter.

(archive) I'll edit this to include better links once better sources post them.

Raw Story cites and basically just restates a Reuters piece (archive), which is just a blurb (in both posts):

U.S. President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit on Friday against Dow Jones, News Corp (NWSA.O), Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal reporters, raising claims under federal libel law, court records show. A copy of the complaint was not immediately available. The case was filed in Miami federal court.

BBC has a live feed covering this and all sorts of Epstein related news.

Besides the Wall Street Journal's parent company and owner Rupert Murdoch, the two reporters who broke the story yesterday are also listed as defendants: Khadeeja Safdar and Joseph Palazzolo.

According to their staff profile on the paper's website, Safdar is an enterprise reporter based in New York while Palazzolo is an investigative reporter.

Palazzolo has won three Pulitzer Prizes, most recently this year, while Khadeeja Safdar was a finalist in 2020.

Here are a more complete stories and I'll leave it at that: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/18/trump-sues-epstein-murdoch-wsj.html

“To attempt and inextricably link President Trump to Epstein, Defendants Safdar and Palazzolo falsely claim that the salacious language of the letter is contained within a hand-drawn naked woman, which was created with a heavy marker,” the suit alleges.

“Worse, Defendants Safdar and Palazzolo falsely represent as fact that President Trump drew the naked woman’s breasts and signed his name ‘Donald’ below her waist, ‘mimicking pubic hair.’ ”

“Despite the glaring failures in journalistic ethics and standards of accurate reporting, Defendants Dow Jones and News Corp — at the direction of Defendants Murdoch and Thomson—published to the world the false, defamatory, and malignant statements authored by” the reporters, the suit says.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/18/trump-sues-wall-street-journal-over-alleged-epstein-letter-00464191

Trump filed the suit Friday, seeking at least $20 billion, in federal court in Miami, before announcing it in a post on Truth Social.

“This lawsuit is filed not only on behalf of your favorite President, ME, but also in order to continue standing up for ALL Americans who will no longer tolerate the abusive wrongdoings of the Fake News Media,” he wrote.

tl;dr: It's not populism but personalism/cult of personality (note that the article uses the term personalism in a manner that does not align with the normal definition). | Archive - Edit: fixed a mangled link

In the populist worldview, the people have a unified set of common-sense beliefs (“the general will”) that would fix politics if implemented. The only reason it is not happening, for the populist, is that malign elites are preventing the people and their champions from holding power.

In a populist movement like MAGA, the “people” are defined narrowly as only those “good” or “true” Americans — meaning typically, though not exclusively, white rural Christian Republicans. Trump presents himself as their champion....

Instead of telling a populist story about the people versus the elite, he’s now telling a story of conflict between two groups of elites: the evil liberals forced out of power and the good Trumpists who now control it. Now that his movement controls Washington, he wants his followers to abandon their skepticism of power and simply trust that the government has their best interests at heart.

“LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT!” Trump wrote in characteristic all-caps.

This is not the logic of populism, but rather of personalism: a version of authoritarian politics that invests all power and authority in a single individual. This has always been central to Trump’s appeal but has reached new heights after the failed assassination attempt last year.

Roberts made the comments during high-level talks on March 11 at the Judicial Conference of the United State, a 27-member national policymaking body for the federal courts, according to a memorandum obtained by The Federalist, a conservative online publication.

Note that The Federalist titled the same story, "Memo Reveals D.C. Judges Are Predisposed Against Trump Administration".

I linked to The Daily Beast instead of The Federalist because I found the language more netral. A reader may disagree, but I consider the latter to have more loaded language and strained logic, such as this bit on the post hoc ruling that Boasberg's order to bring back the planes was ignoring the law when he so ruled even though it wasn't 'law' until later deemed invalid (because the order should have come from a Texas judge).

And what is both troubling and ironic is that only a few days later, Judge Boasberg, in a case in which he completely lacked jurisdiction, as the Supreme Court would later confirm, entered a lawless order commanding the Trump Administration to halt removals to El Salvador. So, one of the judges concerned about Trump following the law, ignored the law. Nonetheless, Judge Boasberg would later find “the Trump Administration committed criminal contempt of court” by failing to turn the planes around or fly the gang members back to the U.S., even though the court’s written (and unlawful) injunction ordered neither.

That chunk in particular made me feel that those judges worried about Trump overreach were validated by the deportations rather than being biased against the President.

Yesterday Erin in the Morning reported that the term "bisexual" was getting removed from the national park services pages. It was. They had proof -- but now, they've reverted that change so it is NOT TRUE now. Perhaps it will be again, but PLEASE check before saying it is gone.

• Old news: they removed TQ+ from LGBTQ+ -- that happened in February 2025.
• As of today, they still have the 'B'. See for yourself:
• https://www.nps.gov/ston/
• https://www.nps.gov/ston/learn/education/new-index.htm

The source wrote the piece well and linked to an archive so people can see the history. They have a snapshot from July 10th with 'bisexual' erased, but as of July 11th, it is back. As I write, the text they cite for the MAIN page (not History) reads:

Before the 1960s, almost everything about living authentically as a lesbian, a bisexual person or a gay man was illegal.

The History page (current | Jun 4 archive } April 19 archive uses LGB) is obliquely worded and has been for months, saying:

Through the 1960s almost everything about living openly as a member of the Stonewall comunity was a violation of law

It still omits transgendered as it has since the February 'purge'.

A fired Justice Department attorney has provided Congress with a trove of emails and text messages to corroborate his claims that a controversial Trump judicial nominee — top DOJ official Emil Bove — crudely discussed defying court orders.

Reuveni was a career lawyer at DOJ until he was fired this spring after he told a judge that the administration had mistakenly deported an immigrant in violation of a court order. Then, last month, Reuveni sent a 27-page whistleblower letter to the Judiciary Committee accusing Bove of saying that DOJ may need to rebuff court orders that might hinder Trump’s deportation agenda. According to Reuveni, Bove told colleagues that they might have to consider telling the courts “fuck you.”

... Boasberg ordered that planes containing the men, whom Trump deemed “alien enemies” under a wartime law, be turned around, if necessary, and in any event that the men not be handed over to the Salvadoran government.

Just prior to Boasberg’s decision, Justice Department officials worried that the effort might be stopped by a court. That’s when, according to Reuveni, Bove uttered the “fuck you” line.

After Boasberg’s decision, Reuveni sent a text message to an unidentified colleague referring back to Bove’s alleged comment: “Guess we are going to say ‘fuck you’ to the court. Super,” he wrote. The colleague responded: “Well, Pamela Jo Bondi is. Not you.”

The messages show that in the hours after Boasberg’s ruling, Reuveni repeatedly relayed to colleagues that the immigrants covered by the judge’s order should not be turned over to El Salvador. And he later expressed concern that they seemed to have been handed over anyway.

In one of the newly-disclosed emails, the acting head of Justice’s Civil Division, Yaakov Roth, told Reuveni and other officials that the men were unloaded based on legal advice given by Bove. The email indicates Bove said it was OK to do so because the flights had left U.S. airspace before Boasberg, who initially delivered his order orally, followed up with a written order in the court’s electronic docket.

Boasberg, an Obama appointee, has rejected that interpretation of his orders and found probable cause to initiate contempt proceedings over potential defiance of his rulings. That process has been halted for now by an appeals court.

from The Hill:

The three-judge D.C. Circuit panel was split 2-1. The two Trump appointees, Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, ruled for the administration. Judge Cornelia Pillard, an appointee of former President Obama, dissented.

Newswise — Cambridge, MA— A new landmark study has pinpointed the location of the Universe's "missing" matter, and detected the most distant fast radio burst (FRB) on record. Using FRBs as a guide, astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and Caltech have shown that more than three-quarters of the Universe's ordinary matter has been hiding in the thin gas between galaxies, marking a major step forward in understanding how matter interacts and behaves in the Universe. They’ve used the new data to make the first detailed measurement of ordinary matter distribution across the cosmic web.

"The decades-old 'missing baryon problem' was never about whether the matter existed," said Liam Connor, CfA astronomer and lead author of the new study. "It was always: Where is it? Now, thanks to FRBs, we know: three-quarters of it is floating between galaxies in the cosmic web." In other words, scientists now know the home address of the “missing” matter.

And this is just the beginning for FRB cosmology. "We're entering a golden age," said Ravi, who also serves as the co-PI of Caltech’s Deep Synoptic Array-110 (DSA-110). "Next-generation radio telescopes like the DSA-2000 and the Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector will detect thousands of FRBs, allowing us to map the cosmic web in incredible detail."

The study is published today in Nature Astronomy.

Two law enforcement officials told CNN the suspect is 57-year-old Vance Boelter. Officials found a “manifesto” identifying “many lawmakers and other officials” in his vehicle, police said. A law enforcement official told CNN Boelter works for a security company.

I'm aware that I can go out of my way to specialty stores to get superior dried meats, olive oils, and so on, but for cheap and easy pepperoni, I grab Bridgford -- but not without issues. I get these 16oz Old World Pepperoni sticks that are oily, hard to slice, and harder to peel (it has a thin casing), so I was happy to see Hormel's in my local Costco -- until I tried it. Hormel pepperoni has no flavor. It isn't noticeably oily unless you cook it (such as on pizza), but if you do cook it, you get a similar quantity of reddened oil pooling out of it as with Bridgford.

I'd guess that small kids might prefer the mildness and ease of Hormel, but for me, Bridgford's flavor will keep me going back for more every time. Note that I've only tried Hormel's Original Pepperoni, so I can't say if their Cup and Crisp version is any better or not.

I am craving something bready and sloppy for dinner, but I can't think of anything that fits the bill. I could make a giant vegetable pot pie (I've done that before and they are tasty), but for whatever reason, I'm wanting bread dough instead of pie dough and I don't think that would work as well. Focaccia by itself would be too much bread without enough 'stuff'. My better half is vegetarian, so I'd like to keep it meatless (cheese is fine). We have too much tofu right now, so I'm slightly tempted to make an S&B curry stew and then baking it inside bread dough, but would that work? It'd certainly have the sort of savory I desire, but it might be too gloppy. Really, I'm looking for something more like stromboli but I can't think of anyone but Italians that bake lots of filling inside a bread wrap.

Any ideas?

• 6:09PM 200 missiles launched at Israel

Nearly 200 missiles have been launched at Israel from Iran, Israel’s army radio announced.

• 6:06PM IRGC vows ‘crushing attacks’ if Israel responds

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards have threatened “crushing attacks” for Israel if it responds to the missile barrage launched on Tuesday evening.

• 6:04PM Iran says Tel Aviv is target of attack

Iran has launched a missile attack on Israel’s commercial hub Tel Aviv, state media reported, citing officials.

The official IRNA news agency said Iran had launched “a missile attack on Tel Aviv”, without elaborating after staying quiet during the start of the barrage.

• 6:03PM Explosions in Jerusalem

Explosions sounded in Jerusalem on Tuesday evening as air raid sirens rang out, AFP journalists reported, with what appeared to be air defence interceptors echoing over the city.

The explosions came shortly after the military said that Iran had launched a missile attack targeting Israel.

See also BBC and AP coverage:

• https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cg4qx62kkxxt
• https://apnews.com/live/israel-lebanon-ground-operation-updates