Politics

Last week, the US Department of Agriculture announced sweeping plans to increase slaughter line speeds at pork and poultry plants — a move that could further endanger workers who already process animals at a breakneck pace and suffer high levels of injury.

The drama behind the bill’s passage runs deep. For a very long time, Delaware has been home to a majority of American corporations due to its lenient business laws. Recently, the state’s status as the corporate capital of the country was threatened by pressures—from Musk, but also by other major companies and business personalities—to encourage businesses to leave the state. It appears that, in an effort to stop companies from fleeing, the state legislature has acquiesced to businesses’ priorities.

The bill would revoke disclosure requirements for shareholder requests for all kinds of company documents, records, and internal communications. All plaintiffs would be entitled to would be minutes from board meetings, which reveal very little. These alterations would make it almost impossible for shareholders to build any viable lawsuits that could even reach the discovery fact-finding stage of a court case.

The cuts include 3,500 full-time employees at the FDA, 2,400 at the CDC, 1,200 at NIH, and 300 at CMS, according to an HHS fact sheet. It states that the new job cuts at the FDA will not affect drug, medical device, or food reviewers or inspectors. The reorganization will not impact Medicare or Medicaid.

HHS states that the job cuts will save $1.8 billion. The agency currently has a budget of nearly $2 trillion, the majority of which pays for benefits for Americans covered by Medicaid and Medicare.

In 2021, New York City adopted Local Law 154, which sets an air emissions limit for indoor combustion of fuels within new buildings. Under the law, the burning of “any substance that emits 25 kilograms or more of carbon dioxide per million British thermal units of energy” is prohibited. That standard effectively bans gas-burning stoves, furnaces, and water heaters, and any other fossil-fuel powered appliances. Instead, real estate developers have to install electric appliances like induction stoves and heat pumps. The policy went into effect in 2024 for buildings under seven stories, and will apply to taller buildings starting in 2027.

The US Supreme Court has upheld a major gun control policy enacted by the Biden administration to regulate so-called ghost guns - largely untraceable firearms that can be assembled at home using kits.

The rules require manufacturers to include serial numbers on the kits and to perform background checks on those who purchased them.

Advocacy groups have called ghost guns the fastest-growing gun safety problem in America, with the numbers of such guns recovered from crime scenes rising by more than 1,000% since 2017.

Elon Musk’s aerospace giant SpaceX allows investors from China to buy stakes in the company as long as the funds are routed through the Cayman Islands or other offshore secrecy hubs, according to previously unreported court records.

The rare picture of SpaceX’s approach recently emerged in an under-the-radar corporate dispute in Delaware. Both SpaceX’s chief financial officer and Iqbaljit Kahlon, a major investor, were forced to testify in the case.

In December, Kahlon testified that SpaceX prefers to avoid investors from China because it is a defense contractor. There is a major exception though, he said: SpaceX finds it “acceptable” for Chinese investors to buy into the company through offshore vehicles.

The Social Security Administration is revising proposed changes that would have required some beneficiaries to prove their identity in-person when seeking services.

Officials said in a statement Wednesday that they are exempting people who apply for Medicare and disability benefits, as well as supplemental income help for the poor, from having to prove their identity in-person at a social security office if they are unable to use the agency's online system.

They also announced they are pushing back the start of the new policy by two weeks, to April 14.

The new rules, which were first announced last week, were met with concerns from advocates for seniors and people with disabilities, as well as lawmakers. Dozens of Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to agency leaders last week asking them to reconsider the change because it would "create additional barriers" for people seeking services — "particularly for those who live far from an office."

TL;DR:

Reporters at Der Spiegel claim to have found phone numbers, email addresses, and social media login credentials for multiple top White House officials, including National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

~~They also claim to have "revealed an additional grave, previously unknown security breach at the highest levels in Washington." Though the article does not divulge details.~~

Edit: Reading comprehension failure on my part.

The crux of it can basically be summarized from two paragraphs:

The reason for the resurgence of ad sales appears to be tied to Musk’s prominent position in the Trump administration—a fact that can really cut both ways for companies. On one hand, the Trump administration has always come off as quite transactional, so if you put some money in the right coffers, you just might gain some benefit. On the other hand, it can be severely vindictive (particularly Musk, who seems to cast aside anyone over the slightest criticism) and unafraid to use its levers of power to punish.

...

It’s difficult attribute the uptick in ad spends to anything other than favor trading. It’s not as though platform has gotten better since advertisers first started boycotting it. A recent study published in PLOS One found that hate speech increased by 50% following Musk’s takeover, with no meaningful reduction in bots or other inauthentic accounts that Musk once railed against as the platform’s biggest problem. Meanwhile, the site is losing users, seeing activity drop 22% since Election Day while rivals Threads and Bluesky have seen a jump in activity.

U.S. President Donald Trump's campaign to eliminate diversity efforts and language from government organizations has officially reached the moon, with NASA erasing references to its promise to land the first woman and first person of colour on the lunar surface from several of its web pages, citing Trump.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has initiated an investigation into a possible collusion among the country’s biggest egg producers to keep prices high amidst the current bird flu outbreak. This has caused grocery stores to put limits on how many eggs customers can buy in a single visit. According to sources close to the investigation, the probe is focused on major egg producers, including Cal-Maine and Rose Acre Farms.

A U.S. House subcommittee has called the chief executives of the nation's two largest public broadcasters to Capitol Hill to testify on Wednesday, with an eye to wiping out the federal funding their institutions receive.

Race and politics were front and center at the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday as the justices took up a voting rights case involving Louisiana's congressional redistricting after the 2020 Census. The case is nearly identical to a case the Supreme Court ruled on two years ago from Alabama, though the outcome could make it more difficult for minorities to prevail in redistricting cases.

US President Donald Trump has taken away security clearances for former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others in his latest move against his Democratic opponents.

The Republican president, who has also revoked the security clearance for former President Joe Biden, defeated Ms Clinton in the 2016 presidential election and Ms Harris in last year's election.

Late Friday night, the White House released the latest tranche of Trump executive actions and directives aimed at further kneecapping some of the nation’s most famous lawyers and law firms the president believes are obstructing his agenda or have tangled with him in the past.

of Donald Trump’s executive order targeting several top law firms over ties to the president’s perceived enemies and decisions he opposes, Trump on Thursday announced that he had reached an agreement to drop his attack against one of the firms, Paul, Weiss. The deal, according to a Truth Social post, will renege Trump’s threat to suspend the security clearances of the firm’s attorneys in exchange for Paul, Weiss to dedicate $40 million in pro-bono services throughout his term.

The deal was widely seen as a remarkable act of capitulation by one of the most powerful law firms in the country. And now, an associate at Skadden Arps, another top firm, is speaking out.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered immigration officials not to deport a Georgetown scholar who was detained by the Trump Administration and accused of spreading Hamas propaganda in the latest battle over speech on U.S. college campuses.

U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles in Alexandria, Virginia, ordered that Indian national Badar Khan Suri "shall not be removed from the United States unless and until the Court issues a contrary order."

President Trump has announced that Boeing will build the U.S. Air Force's next generation of fighter jets.

The Trump administration is escalating its crackdown on foreign students whom it accuses of supporting terrorism, detaining Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow and Indian citizen Badar Khan Suri Monday night.

The directive, issued by the US General Services Administration on 15 February, removed a ban on “segregated facilities”, such as waiting rooms and restaurants, for federal contractors.

Republicans in Congress are refusing to hold town halls in their districts out of fear of criticism, and now Democrats are swooping in.

When ABC shut down FiveThirtyEight early this month, the site’s publicly available polling databases — like a presidential approval rating tracker — shut down, too. Many news outlets, including The New York Times and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, had relied on the data for election coverage, and people worried about its disappearance.

While Ben & Jerry’s has decades of activism as part of its corporate tradition, Unilever appears to have tried to stamp that out starting in 2025. The parent company refused to allow B&J to issue corporate statements criticizing the Trump administration on matters of politics. This resulted in a lawsuit against Unilever, with B&J claiming that Unilever is contractually obligated to allow for B&J’s independent ability to make those statements as part of the acquisition. This ramped up even further more recently with the news that Unilever terminated B&J CEO David Stever as a result of his activism.