Powderhorn

US supreme court justice Samuel Alito was reportedly taken to a hospital after becoming sick at a Federalist Society dinner in Philadelphia in March, further fueling speculation that Donald Trump could have more chances to shape the land’s highest court through new appointments.

A CNN report said Alito was checked by medical staff and given fluids due to dehydration. He later returned to his home in Virginia that same night with his security detail. In the weeks since, Alito has resumed his duties, including participating in oral arguments.

The supreme court’s public information officer, Patricia McCabe, confirmed the incident and shared a statement with the Guardian that said, “On the evening of Friday, [20 March], Justice Alito felt ill during an event in Philadelphia. Out of an abundance of caution, he agreed with his security detail’s recommendation to see a physician before the three-hour drive home.”

The statement said: “After that examination and the administration of fluids for dehydration, he returned home that night, as previously planned. Justice Alito was thoroughly checked by his own physician, and he returned to work the following Monday for oral argument.”

Thank god ... what we really need is ~~The Heritage Foundation~~ Trump appointing another younger justice who can fuck things up for decades!

With the unveiling of the prospective Trump presidential library, which, in its timing and substance looked for all the world like an April fool, the old adage that you can’t gild a turd but you can roll it in glitter has become bleakly redundant. It turns out that you can most definitely gild a turd.

At the heart of the proposed 47-storey skyscraper on Miami’s waterfront – 47 floors for the 47th President – is a giant golden statue of Trump giving off dictator-for-life vibes, his gilded fist triumphantly raised. Such an aureate monstrosity would not look out of place in Pyongyang or Ashgabat, though Turkmenistan’s former president Saparmurat Niyazov – another despot with a suspiciously luxuriant coiffure – went one better and had his $12m gold statue installed on a rotating pedestal so it would always face the sun.

The unveiling coincided with Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis renaming Palm Beach international airport, near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago bolt-hole, as the President Donald J Trump international airport. After a sticky month in the Strait of Hormuz and the recent No Kings protests, not to mention plummeting approval ratings, Trump clearly felt the need for some self-glorifying pushback.

A fascinating look at the Late Bronze Age Collapse.

It appears I've used this hed before. But there's a reason for that.

Look, I like to spend most of my day letting everyone know things they need to know. That's why I basically told the admins to just hand it to me when U.S. News was created.

Thing is, informing people never gets old. So I'm going to keep doing it.

"There was no quid pro quo" was, I'm sure, claimed at some point.

The US has lifted sanctions on Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, in the latest step towards normalising relations between the two countries after US forces abducted her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.

The couple were taken to New York after their abduction in January to face charges of alleged drug trafficking, to which both have pleaded not guilty.

The lifting of the sanctions on Rodríguez, which was announced by the Treasury department on Wednesday, allows her to work more freely with US companies and investors. Without explicitly mentioning the sanctions targeting her, Rodríguez, in a statement, expressed hope for US-Venezuelan relations.

“We value President Donald Trump’s decision as a step toward normalising and strengthening relations between our countries,” she said on her Telegram channel after the Treasury’s announcement. “We trust that this progress will allow for the lifting of current sanctions against our country, enabling us to build and guarantee an effective bilateral cooperation agenda for the benefit of our people.”

This is something that has been so well hidden from doomscrollers that when the switch finally flips, they will plead ignorance. Which is accurate, but aren't these the same people who "do their own research"?

The US-Israel war on Iran is expensive. It’s expensive in terms of human lives, first of all. It’s expensive too, in pure currency – about $12bn a week for the US. And it’s expensive in how it’s causing the tectonic structures that underpin our global economy to shift. De-dollarization, the name given to the process countries undertake in unwinding their reliance on the dollar, promises to reorder the world, reducing American power globally. Its impact will be felt domestically in what we pay to borrow and whether we can afford to borrow at all.

Iran’s near-total blockade of the strait of Hormuz has had a dramatic impact on the prices of oil and natural gas, which puts major inflationary pressure on the economy of every country in the world. Practically, inflation makes people and businesses poorer, a process that reinforces itself if it’s not stopped (which is partly why central banks exist).

But not all boats are blockaded. In March, about 100 vessels passed through the strait, roughly the number that passed through the waterway each day before the Americans and Israelis started the war. According to the Guardian, the Iranian government is requiring some ships to pay a toll of roughly $2m. But it’s the currency in which the toll has been collected – Chinese yuan – which may suggest a concrete challenge to American power in the world.

For those who came in late, Church Night is exactly the opposite of what you'd expect.

And this week? Well ... this is the week where we're finishing the effigy. I wrote my own piece on one of the pieces of wood, and I have to say, some of the others were just this side of heartbreaking. But I have no art of it because as I was trying to grab one to send to my ex, the project lead came up to me and asked if I'd received permission to take that photo.

Burners, amirite?

Now that I've completely confused you, this is a warehouse where burners create things. The meeting room was full of people turning aluminum cans into art, while the effigy itself was being worked on in the main space.

Out in the parking lot, I was initially being lazy. A couple of chicks (let's not play that game when they refer to themselves as such) seem to be spending entirely too much time on a painted wooden board.

As one does, I asked what the fuck they were doing. And upon getting closer, the issue was self-evident. These are message boards used annually at the regional burn, and, well, they've accrued a lot of staples.

And there are seven of them. And they're double-sided.

I worked on three sides before another participant asked me to tend to her burn-barrel fire while she was feeding the people working on the art in the conference room.

I get that this sounds weird if you're still clinging to corporate America, but the person who asked me to watch the fire actively hated me only two months ago. When we work together, it's amazing what we can overcome.

Also, I'd misgendered them and their partner and was a bit of an asshole about it. Not my finest hour.

Tonight, she provided food and weed. I gave her shit for "stealing" one of my beers from the communal fridge where once you put it in there, it's fair game. Like, she literally used the burn barrel to do veggie hot dogs, crappy hot dogs, chicken and pork.

This, my friends, is what a resilient mutual-aid community looks like.

"Hey, I really didn't like you, but can you do me a favour?"

"Sure."

"Thanks. Would you like some weed?"

Oracle is cutting thousands of jobs as the US technology company seeks to reassure investors that its bet on AI infrastructure will pay off.

The $420bn (£315bn) company, which is headquartered in Austin, Texas, started making employees redundant on Tuesday, with thousands of its 162,000-strong workforce expected to leave.

About 10,000 people have lost their jobs so far, the BBC reported, citing an unnamed employee at the company, which is chaired by Larry Ellison, the billionaire ally of Donald Trump. Ellison is worth $189bn and is the world’s sixth richest person, Forbes estimates.

Michael Shepherd, a senior manager at Oracle, who was not affected by the cuts, posted on the social media site LinkedIn that there had been a “significant reduction in force” at the business.

Shepherd said the decision had affected “senior engineers, architects, operations leaders, program managers, and technical specialists with deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, government and sovereign cloud environments, and enterprise-scale systems”.

That's just what we need. More senior tech workers out of work in Austin. Thank god we now have a fresh supply!

There will no doubt be shenanigans as this proposal eventually moves forward. Must be nice to get a paid two-week Easter break in a secular country.

An end to the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may be in sight, after Congress’s Republican leaders on Wednesday agreed to advance legislation that would fund most of the agency’s operations, with the exception of those involved in immigration enforcement.

The pact may conclude the longest such funding lapse in US history, which last month caused security lines to stretch for hours at some airports as employees of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), a subagency of DHS, quit their jobs or called out of work after going weeks without pay.

Wait times eased earlier this week, after Donald Trump signed an order for TSA employees to receive paychecks.

Let's just pause here and remember that Trump does not have the power to rule by diktat, but here we are. If that word looks foreign, change the "k" to a "c," and ... er, it looks awfully familiar.

In a joint statement, Mike Johnson, House speaker, and John Thune, Senate majority leader, said they would move to pass a measure, approved by the Senate unanimously last week, which would fund DHS while excluding money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and parts of Customs and Border Protection.

They would also abandon an attempt pushed by House Republicans to fund all of the DHS for 60 days, which Senate Democrats vowed to block with a filibuster.

I never thought I'd be posting a Prince Harry story in Technology, but it's 2026, and all bets are off.

The Duke of Sussex has welcomed two landmark lawsuits against major tech companies, declaring: “Finally, some truth and accountability has arrived.”

In a speech in Washington DC to the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) global summit on privacy, AI governance and cybersecurity law, Prince Harry said he had done a “deep dive into the tech-fuelled world in which my children – all our children – are growing up”.

He spoke of “harrowing stories” of how time spent on the big tech companies’ platforms had led to “grave and irreversible harm”.

Referring to the two cases last week, in which a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375m (£280m) in civil penalties and a Los Angeles jury ordered Meta and YouTube to pay $6m damages to a 20-year-old woman, Harry said: “About bloody time!”

I am lead counsel in the challenge to Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. As I and my team help the ACLU legal director, Cecillia Wang, prepare for the supreme court argument in this case on Wednesday, we are poring over legal minutiae and sharpening our arguments. But the larger questions that loom over the whole case are simple: What does it mean to be an American? Will we adhere to the best of American history and protect the values of equal citizenship and opportunity?

In early America, like today, people born on US soil were citizens, even if their parents were immigrants. That’s a principle we inherited from England as part of a body of rules known as the “common law”. In England, that rule was originally about monarchical power; but in our young republic it found new life as a principle of equal citizenship. As waves of immigrants arrived, the birthright rule ensured that the child of Irish or German immigrants would be no less citizens than those who traced their lineage back to the Mayflower.

Before the American civil war, this principle of equal citizenship was woefully incomplete. The founders declared that “all men are created equal”, yet the original constitution tacitly accepted the sin of slavery and counted enslaved human beings as “three-fifths” of a person.

These two contradictory ideas – equal citizenship of everyone born in this country, and the exclusion and subordination of a large part of our nation – came to a head in the supreme court’s shameful decision in Dred Scott. The court rejected the traditional birthright rule when it came to Black Americans, claiming that they could never be US citizens even if they were born free on US soil. The decision helped precipitate the civil war.

After the war, Congress drafted the constitutional provision at issue in Trump v Barbara – the citizenship clause of the fourteenth amendment – to eliminate Dred Scott’s mistake and instead enshrine birthright citizenship into the text of the constitution. That clause guarantees that “all persons born” in the US are citizens, except for people such as ambassadors’ children who are immune from “the jurisdiction” of the United States. Congress secured the birthright principle in the constitution to head off future denial of birthright citizenship by any branch of government.

I'll say this for Bernie: You always know what you're in for.

Never before in American history have so few had so much wealth and power. Today, the top one per cent owns more wealth than the bottom 93%. One man, Elon Musk, worth $805bn, owns more wealth than the bottom 53% of American households.

And that inequality is getting worse. Last year alone, after receiving the largest tax break in history from Donald Trump, 938 billionaires in America became $1.5tn richer. Since he was elected, President Trump and his family have become $4bn richer.

Never before in American history have we had such concentration of ownership. While profits soar, a handful of giant corporations dominate virtually every sector of our economy, charging higher and higher prices for the products they sell. Four Wall Street firms combined – BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity and State Street – are the major stockholders of more than 95% of American corporations.

Never before in American history have so few billionaires controlled what we see, hear, and read in the media – both legacy media and social media. Never before in American history have we seen a ruling class, within a corrupt campaign finance system, wield the kind of political power it has today. In the 2026 midterm elections, just 50 billionaires have already spent over $433m to influence political campaigns and buy candidates who represent their interests.