MicroWave

Across immigration, voting, and LGBTQ+ rights, overlapping systems are quietly redefining identity, access, and belonging in America, writes Joshua Ackley.

Project 2025 is not a future scenario. It is already unfolding, visible in the quiet failures and the louder substitutions that are beginning to define daily life.

What we are watching is not the collapse of government, but its reconfiguration, as the systems meant to serve people weaken while the systems built to monitor, track, and control them become more visible, more coordinated, and more difficult to question.

That shift has moved into airports, one of the most routine and widely shared spaces in American life. A recent case at San Francisco International Airport made that visible in a way that is difficult to dismiss. A woman and her nine-year-old daughter were identified before they ever reached their gate, flagged through passenger data, and located by federal agents inside the terminal. She was detained in public, in front of her child, and deported within days.

KEY POINTS

In its periodic update of economic conditions, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development forecast all-items inflation in the U.S. to be at 4.2% for 2026.

The forecast is a sharp step up from the prior projection of 2.8%. Moreover, it is much higher than the 2.7% Fed officials estimated when they updated their own forecasts last week.

The organization cautioned that the Fed and its global counterparts “need to remain vigilant” against inflation threats.

A federal judge in California has indefinitely blocked the Pentagon’s effort to “punish” Anthropic by labeling it a supply chain risk and attempting to sever government ties with the AI company, ruling that those measures ran roughshod over its constitutional rights.

“Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government,” US District Judge Rita Lin wrote in a stinging 43-page ruling.

Lin, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, said she would delay implementation of her ruling for one week to allow the government to appeal.

But in her ruling, she made it clear she disapproved of the government’s actions, which she said violated the company’s First Amendment and due process rights.

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.

Air superiority is supposed to deliver a quick triumph. But history has shown that promise to be written on the wind

To explore the roots of Donald Trump’s Iran military strategy and the pugnacious rhetoric of his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, means looking back 105 years. In 1921, a year before Benito Mussolini and his blackshirts marched on Rome to launch the Fascist era, an Italian general named Giulio Douhet published The Command of the Air, proposing a revolution in warfare.

Victory in the future, he said, would no longer come from the grinding trench combat of the great war. Instead it meant large-scale aerial bombardments, targeting not just combatants but civilians and civilian infrastructure and logistics.

“[It] is much more important to destroy a railroad station, a bakery, a war plant, or to machine-gun a supply column, moving trains, or any other behind-the-lines objective, than to strafe or bomb a trench.

Meta and YouTube must pay millions in damages to a 20-year-old woman after a jury decided the social media giant and video streamer designed their platforms to hook young users without concern for their well being.

The California jury’s decision Wednesday in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit could influence the outcome of thousands of similar lawsuits accusing social media companies of deliberately causing harm.

The plaintiff, known by her initials KGM, testified at trial that she became addicted to social media as a child and that this addiction exacerbated her mental health struggles. After more than 40 hours of deliberations, a majority of jurors agreed and awarded her $3 million in damages.

The federal government has not yet replaced the bullet-pocked windows that serve as a grim reminder of an attack at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention more than seven months ago, the agency’s acting chief acknowledged Wednesday.

CDC employees asked Dr. Jay Bhattacharya about the broken windows during a staff meeting, noting that the panes were papered over.

“We’re working on that,” Bhattacharya said, adding that it’s a priority. Another CDC official said permanent window replacement work is underway. (The Associated Press heard a recording of the meeting.)

After casting her vote for Donald Trump in 2024 in hopes that he would bring transparency around the Jeffrey Epstein case, Epstein survivor Jena Lisa Jones said in an interview this week that she now fears “we’re not going to get justice in all of this”.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency on Wednesday opened applications for a major resilience grant program that the agency canceled last year, less than three weeks after a federal judge ordered FEMA to make the funding available.

FEMA will make $1 billion available for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which helps states, local governments, territories and tribes take on preparedness projects to harden against natural hazards like fires, floods, earthquakes and hurricanes.

“When done correctly, mitigation activities save lives and reduce the cost of future disasters,” Karen S. Evans, FEMA’s acting leader, said in a statement announcing the resumption.

Billionaire Elon Musk’s offer to pay TSA personnel during the partial government shutdown poses “great legal challenges,” according to the White House.

The world’s richest man recently shared a social media post offering to pay TSA employees amid the Department of Homeland Security shutdown, which began in mid-February after lawmakers failed to reach a deal on funding the agency. TSA employees are working without pay which has led to staffing shortages and long security lines at airports nationwide.

Iran has been laying traps and moving additional military personnel and air defenses to Kharg Island in recent weeks in preparation for a possible US operation to take control of the island, according to multiple people familiar with US intelligence reporting on the issue.

The Trump administration has been weighing using US troops to seize the tiny island in the northeastern Persian Gulf — an economic lifeline for Iran that handles roughly 90% of the country’s crude exports — as leverage over the Iranians to coerce them to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, CNN has reported.

But US officials and military experts say there would be significant risks involved in such a ground operation, including a large number of US casualties. The island has layered defenses, and the Iranians have moved additional shoulder-fired, surface-to-air guided missile systems known as MANPADs there in recent weeks, the sources said.