News

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is reportedly attempting to block four Army officers, two women and two Black men, from a military promotion list to become one-star generals – though his motivations are unclear.

Iran-linked ​hackers have publicly claimed the breach of FBI ‌Director Kash Patel's personal inbox, publishing photographs of the director and other documents to the internet.

On their website, the hacker ​group Handala Hack Team said Patel "will now find ​his name among the list of successfully hacked ⁠victims." A Justice Department official confirmed that Patel's email had ​been breached and said the material published online appeared authentic.

The rate at which the U.S. military has used the Tomahawk missiles in the Iran war has reportedly prompted internal talks about increasing supplies

Some Pentagon officials are concerned about the “alarmingly low” supply of Tomahawk missiles remaining in the U.S. military’s arsenal after firing 850 of the weapons into Iran, according to a report.

The rate at which the U.S. military has used the Tomahawk missiles in President Donald Trump’s war in Iran, now in its fourth week, has prompted internal talks about increasing supplies, according to The Washington Post.

U.S. officials told the newspaper that the number of Tomahawks left in the Middle East was “alarmingly low.” Another official told the outlet that the U.S. supply of Tomahawks was closing in on “Winchester,” military slang that means almost out of ammunition.

Some immigrants with chronic health problems were swept up by ICE in Minnesota, leading to missed medications and, for one man, missed chemotherapy sessions.

ICE stopped paying for medical care months ago, so there are probably a lot more stories like this.

gift link — uses URL shortener because lemmy removes the gift token

More than 3,100 anti-authoritarian protests are scheduled across the US and at least 15 other countries on Saturday. All these events will take place under a single banner: No Kings.

Formally launched in June to fight back against Trump administration policies, the No Kings movement has grown with astonishing speed – its second and most recent mass protest in October drew an estimated 7 million participants. Organizers expect Saturday’s events to be the biggest protest in American history.

But the movement is also leaderless, broad in cause and hasn’t advanced any policy demands. Some social movements experts recognize No Kings’ momentum but question if it needs clearer goals.

“There’s not any one way to get people into a movement. You want to have as many doors open as possible because you have to reach people wherever they are,” said Hahrie Han, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the co-author of Prisms of the People: Power & Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America. “The bigger challenge is, once they’re there, how do you keep them there, and then how do you channel that engagement in collective ways?”

But organizers say they are aware of such critiques and that these choices are all by design.

“The name No Kings is, in and of itself, a demand. It is a direct repudiation of this administration, of this regime, of its unconstitutional, illegal, immoral and frankly profane actions,” said Hunter Dunn, an organizer with the 50501 movement, one of the groups behind No Kings. “It’s a declaration of intent that we are going to return power back to the people.”

Two of the officers targeted by Mr. Hegseth are Black and two are women on a promotion list that consists of about three dozen officers, most of whom are white men, senior military officials said.

Mr. Hegseth had been pressing senior Army leaders, including Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll, for months to remove the officers’ names, military officials said. But Mr. Driscoll, citing the officers’ decades-long records of exemplary service, had repeatedly refused.

Earlier this month, Mr. Hegseth broke the logjam by unilaterally striking the officers’ names from the list, though it is not clear he has the legal authority to do so. The list is currently being reviewed by the White House, which is expected to send it to the Senate for final approval. A few female and Black officers remain on the list, military officials said.

Analysts fear Iran has played a weak hand well and the US has blundered into a defining strategic failure

Four weeks into a war that was going to take four days, and that has so far cost the US about $30-40bn and Israel $300m a day, Washington is further away from a diplomatic agreement with Iran than it was in May 2025.

Not only has the war failed to persuade Iran to agree to dismantle its nuclear programme in the comprehensive and irreversible way the US demanded in a 15-point paper that it tabled on 23 May last year, Washington is now having to negotiate to reopen the strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway that has been open ever since the invention of the dhow, with a short exception of a tanker war in the 1980s between Iran and Iraq.

This regression is proving to be perplexing for the American high command. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defence, recently said that “the only thing prohibiting transit in the strait right now is Iran shooting at shipping”, but this was not quite right. Iran has not been shooting at shipping that much in recent weeks. Instead, it is the fear of Iran shooting at shipping that is scaring off insurers and tanker owners.

A female executive at the top of the modelling industry had a close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and introduced him to women on the agency’s books, a Guardian investigation has found.

Until last November, Faith Kates ran Next Management modelling and talent agency, which has represented the likes of Alexa Chung, Milla Jovovich and Billie Eilish, a position she held for decades as the founder of the business. She stepped down quietly just weeks before the first major Epstein files were released, saying she intended to focus on charity work.

Links between Kates and the late sex offender have previously been reported, but analysis of documents published by the US Department of Justice reveals a much deeper relationship than previously known, with emails showing Kates secretly took business advice from Epstein and discussed multimillion-dollar loans.

Kates appears to have met Epstein regularly, including on one occasion with the then Prince Andrew at a New York department store in December 2010, the week of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s now infamous visit to the city to supposedly call off his friendship with the financier.

cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/211404

The Senate approved a deal early Friday to reopen almost all of the Department of Homeland Security, exempting funding for immigration enforcement under ICE and Customs and Border Protection.

...

Under this deal, which still needs to pass the House and be signed by President Donald Trump, Democrats don’t get the immigration enforcement changes they demanded and Republicans don’t get additional immigration enforcement funding.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260327110500/https://www.semafor.com/article/03/27/2026/senate-agrees-deal-to-fund-most-of-dhs

A recent string of revelations about abuses by the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps presents an opportunity to rein in the military’s presence and power in public schools.

In Thailand, news anchors ditched their jackets on air as the government called on the public to reduce their use of air conditioning to save energy. In the Philippines, many government workers are now operating on a four-day week. In Vietnam, officials have urged employers to allow staff to work from home.

Across south-east Asia, governments are scrambling to find ways to conserve energy and shield the public from soaring costs as war in the Middle East causes what the International Energy Agency has described as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.

The Treasury Department plans to print President Donald Trump’s signature on every new U.S. paper bill. Treasury announced the idea Thursday.

cross-posted from: https://lemmus.org/post/21142283

Distributed Denial of Secrets— Mastodon, Bluesky.

Hackers connected to the Iranian government accessed FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email and posted materials — including photos and documents — taken from his account, a person familiar with the breach confirmed to CNN.

The hackers have published a series of photos of Patel from before he became FBI director that they claim were stolen from his personal email account. A source familiar with the incident confirmed the images’ authenticity.

The stolen emails appear to date from around 2011 to 2022 and appear to include personal, business and travel correspondence that Patel had with various contacts, according to a preliminary CNN review of the files with the help of an independent cybersecurity researcher.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44803221

Because hatred is cheaper to them and simplifies business operations.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons — doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism

The International Olympic Committee will prohibit transgender athletes from participating in women's sports, starting at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

The new policy, approved by the IOC's executive committee Thursday, requires all athletes to undergo a genetic test to compete in women's sporting events at the Olympics.

The Education Department will relocate from its headquarters to a smaller Washington office as part of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the agency, officials said Thursday.

The agency has seen its ranks thinned by mass layoffs since Donald Trump took office, and its headquarters building has been 70% vacant, the Education Department said. In its place, the Energy Department will assume the lease in the building.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon hailed it as a milestone in the administration’s efforts to shutter the agency, which Trump ordered to move toward closure a year ago this month.

My excellent friend and former colleague Steve Walt of the Harvard Kennedy School calls them the predatory hegemons. America, China, and Russia are prowling the world, turning a rule-ordered playing field into a jungle in which the rule of the strongest prevails. The middling powers Prime Minister Mark Carney talked about at Davos are scrambling to escape the jungle. Carney’s travel schedule—Delhi, Tokyo, Sydney—maps the emerging contours of a counter-order of defence and economic partnerships.

Middle powers can seek to protect themselves from the predators, but they can’t keep the predators from ripping each other’s throats. So, the biggest question in international politics is whether the predatory hegemons can cease their depredations and forge a new global order instead. From the hegemons’ point of view, a future in which the only question left is who destroys the other first is not a happy prospect.

Animal predators tend to stay out of each other’s backyards, feast only on prey that other predators won’t touch, and risk a fight to the death only when the survival of their group is at stake. If this is true in the animal kingdom, it might be true in our fragile human world. As in the animal kingdom, a jungle without rules is too dangerous even for predators.

At least once before in history, great powers have drawn back from the fearful implications of a lawless world. We owe the order created in 1945 to the Soviet, American, and British realization at Yalta and Potsdam that armed giants—one possessing nuclear weapons, and another on the brink of doing so—would destroy each other unless they agreed to a basic framework of deconfliction and conflict management. The order was often violated—by the predators themselves—but at least it kept the world free of nuclear war. The question is whether a new order among the three predators is possible.

For much of my career, the stability of the global economic system depended on decisions taken in Washington, DC—and on whether those decisions were bound by rules or by discretion.

Working with American officials for decades, across multiple administrations and institutions, my years living in Washington were part of that experience. In moments of real pressure, I saw first-hand the seriousness with which many approached power—particularly the understanding that power must be constrained if it is to be legitimate and durable.

I was in the United States Treasury Building for the final meetings on the Canada–US Free Trade Agreement. The negotiations were on the brink of collapse. Canada was not prepared to accept a deal without binding judicial review of trade decisions, having seen how easily US agencies could disregard obligations when domestic politics intervened. As the clock approached midnight on the final day, we had largely resigned ourselves to failure.

Moments later, then treasury secretary James Baker informed us that Ronald Reagan, US president at the time, had agreed to independent judicial review—to bind the United States to the rule of law rather than to political discretion. The agreement was struck.

That decision did not weaken American power—it legitimized it. It signalled that the United States was willing to bind itself in order to lead. That was the America many of us worked with. And that is the legacy now being dismantled.