Hard Pass

This is actually beginning to scare this koala while I'm listening to it. https://youtu.be/K-99jdtQHEQ

What’s behind the AI doomerism?

What’s up with Trump’s obsession with the Kennedy Center?

And what does the Macklemore story tell us about power in America?

I’m back to discuss all of this, and much more, on a new Coffee Klatch.

To see our new film, visit: https://www.theworkinprogressfilm.com/

Full title: EU’s new social media child protection rules to require all social media accounts to produce state ID - Leaked documents suggest that some existing accounts will also be subject to identification checks

President Emmanuel Macron embarked Saturday on a symbolic visit to Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a French territory off Canada's Newfoundland, where he hosts Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. The first-ever visit by a Canadian prime minister to the French archipelago in the North Atlantic comes as Carney marks a shift in Ottawa's foreign policy toward Europe amid growing tensions with the US.

…”there is no certainty that deported young people end up reunited with family and safe in their home countries, as many of them left in the first place because of threats to their wellbeing, including from their own family, or in order to reunite with parents in the US.

One source said: “This administration has shown time and again that it has no plan for children other than to disrupt their lives and endanger them … they have no credibility to claim that they are acting with children’s safety as their priority.”

Stephen Miller is leading an unprecedented and intense White House drive across a host of government departments to accelerate the removal of undocumented immigrant children from the US, using tactics that critics say are cruel and racist and, in some cases, flout federal law, the Guardian has learned.

As deputy chief of staff at the White House, focused on immigration policy, Miller is seen as the mastermind and enforcer behind Donald Trump’s hardline anti-immigration agenda.

He is directing a whole-of-government approach that has been ramping up throughout Trump’s second term and is targeting a vulnerable population of undocumented children. Many abruptly find themselves denied access to legal immigration pathways in the US, with their applications fast-tracked and then rejected before being forced out of the country.

Almost 200,000 children have been ordered removed from the US by immigration judges since Trump returned to the White House, a doubling of such court orders since January 2025, according to analysis of data from the Department of Justice’s executive office for immigration review (EOIR) conducted by the California-based advocacy Mobile Pathways and shared with the Guardian. The advocacy group has focused its numbers on children appearing in immigration court, regardless of whether they arrived in the US alone or with family, and believes the total to be an undercount.

Miller has harnessed personnel and power for his task from at least five cabinet-level government departments, as described to the Guardian by several sources briefed on various initiatives, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The departments include Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the care of migrant children who are in the country without a parent or guardian; the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) are based; and the Department of Justice (DoJ), which houses the immigration courts – with the state department and the Department of Defense playing more subsidiary roles.

Miller frequently confers with subordinates, daily at times, pressing them to maximize removals of immigrant children from the US, according to a number of sources familiar with the White House plans.

“The folks that have to do the implementation are told, ‘These instructions came directly from the White House,’ or ‘These instructions came directly from Stephen Miller,’ as a way of conveying, you know, the importance of implementing them in a timely fashion and doing it in the way that they were instructed to do it,” one source said.

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As alarm grows across Europe about growing Russian aggression towards NATO countries, Canada’s ambassador-designate to the European Union says Canada is right to be concerned because of its stake in the continent’s defence and security.

“Canada is an ally through NATO and increasingly working with the European Union, and obviously we have a strong stake in this as well,” Jonathan Wilkinson said in an interview with CTV Question Period airing Sunday. “We have soldiers in Latvia and a commitment under NATO to be part of the response if in fact there was a challenge.”

“So, I mean, we’re all concerned, and it’s important for us to act together to deter the Russians,” Wilkinson also told host Vassy Kapelos.

NATO’s Article 5 outlines the principle of collective defence and asserts that an attack on one member is considered an attack on all members.

Worry about Russia’s actions have been growing amongst Canada’s allies in Europe.

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“I think we should all be concerned,” Wilkinson said, when asked by Kapelos about his level of worry at the prospect of potentially imminent Russian action. “I mean, some of the recent activities in Leipzig and elsewhere have shown the Russians are willing to actually do things that previously we would not have thought they would have done.”

“Europeans take this very, very seriously, and they should,” Wilkinson added. “It’s on their doorstep.”

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The episode shows the risks of using this new, relatively poorly understood technology in the middle of the Iran war

Last week, President Donald Trump announced that if Republicans prevail in this year’s midterm elections, he would provide everybody with a $5,000 dividend check. People reacted as if he’d said something crazy, like “Barack Obama was born in Kenya and is ineligible to be president of the United States”—by which I mean they dismissed his ravings as one more Trumpian oddity and not what it really was: the disqualifying lunacy of a corrupt jackass. A few brave souls gently raised concerns that this was tantamount to a bribe. Those who wanted to add something substantive to the conversation pointed out just how much this idea would cause inflation to spike. I don’t recall anyone saying the obvious thing: A $5,000 payoff would be an implicit admission that he and his party’s reckless policies wrecked the economy and spawned a nationwide affordability crisis.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, whose flock of lawmakers would ostensibly be the people who would find this money—more than $1 trillion—and appropriate it, told Kristen Welker in an interview that the so-called “Trump dividend” would be something lawmakers would “process through Congress and talk through and debate and discuss.” That said, nothing is happening anytime soon, because Johnson is sending lawmakers home until the midterm elections so as to avoid having to vote on GOP Representative Thomas Massie’s proposed impeachment of Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth, who, between psychosexual panic attacks about the masculinity of the soldiers in his presence, is currently getting the belt-to-ass treatment from Iran.

So you might have to wait a while for your $5,000 check. But that doesn’t mean that the Trump dividend hasn’t already been paid out. To the contrary, the president and his congressional enablers have been handing out money left and right. They’ve made people very rich, in fact. It’s something that they’re quite good at doing—at least for a few.

Some US lawmakers have objected to the deal, reasoning that Chinese telecommunications equipment in Saudi Arabia could be used to study the aircraft and compromise its stealth features.

The post Trump Administration Approves F-35 Sale to Saudi Arabia, Despite Concerns appeared first on The National Interest.