Powderhorn

“When will we see justice?” Republican Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) demanded on the House floor Tuesday in a sharp rebuke of the U.S. Department of Justice over its handling of the government’s files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The DOJ’s release of millions of documents relating to its investigation into Epstein has triggered a wave of high-profile firings and resignations in the U.S. and overseas. However, there has been a glaring contrast between the fallout domestically and abroad — while there have been active criminal investigations overseas, there have yet to be any launched in the U.S.

Massie called attention to the stark difference on Tuesday. “I’ve not seen any arrests from the revelations in the Epstein files, over three million documents describing horrible things — describing unspeakable things, much of it redacted,” he said. “Over two dozen people have resigned, CEOs, members of government worldwide, but I haven’t seen any arrests or investigations here in the United States from this Department of Justice.”

The Republican congressman pointed to former Prince Andrew, Duke of York, and Peter Mandelson, the U.K.’s former ambassador to Washington, who were arrested within days of each other for their alleged ties to Epstein, and are both under investigation for misconduct in public office. Massie also highlighted former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjorn Jagland — who was charged with gross corruption linked to his relationship with Epstein — and how “we don’t see any charges, arrests or investigations in the United States.”

SAN DIEGO, California, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Researchers at ASML Holding say they have found a way to boost the power of the light source in a key chip making machine to turn out up to 50% more chips by decade's end, to help retain the Dutch company's edge over emerging U.S. and Chinese rivals.

ASML is the world's only maker of commercial extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, a critical tool for chipmakers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, Intel and others in producing advanced computing chips.

"It's not a parlor trick or something like this, where we demonstrate for a very short time that it can work," Michael Purvis, ASML's lead technologist for its EUV source light, said in an interview.

"It's a system that can produce 1,000 watts under all the same requirements that you could see at a customer," he added, speaking at the company's California facilities near San Diego.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reportedly mulling whether more prescription drugs should be sold over the counter (OTC) at pharmacies. In an interview on Wednesday, FDA commissioner Martin Makary told CNBC that “everything should be over the counter” except drugs that are deemed unsafe or addictive or that require clinical monitoring.

Makary said the agency is reviewing how it decides which drugs can be sold with or without a prescription from a health care practitioner. He suggested prescription vaginal estrogen or antinausea medications, for example, could become OTC.

It’s unclear exactly how the FDA is reviewing the rules around OTC drugs or what the timing will be, but in the same interview, Makary said the agency is going through “the proper regulatory processes.”

In June 2025, a year-long investigation exposed an illegal trade smuggling timber from protected areas in the Congolese rainforest into neighbouring Burundi.

Award-winning Burundian journalist Arthur Bizimana and his collaborator Martin Leku, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, risked their safety by travelling deep into the rainforest — the world’s second-largest — to gather material for their exclusive story on the impact on this crucial carbon sink.

Their assignment was financially supported by InfoNile, a journalism network focusing on cross-border investigations in the Nile Basin, and Global Forest Watch, a data platform funded by the United Nations Environment Programme and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), among others. It’s the kind of in-depth investigative work that far exceeds the reporting budgets of most research news publications, such as Nature or Science — and that attracts little attention from large media organizations and newspapers. Often, such reporting is made possible only because of grants given to journalists by private philanthropies or government donors.

But with these grants drying up as philanthropic donors tighten their purse strings in the wake of US-led cuts to international development and health budgets, the ability of journalists such as Bizimana and Leku to hold power to account is diminishing.

Marius Dragomir, a Romanian journalist and director of the Media and Journalism Research Center in Tallinn, a think tank and global research hub he founded in 2022, describes the funding threats to science journalism as “a disaster”. He adds: “If you look at the geopolitical situation today, I think science is critical.” There is a need for balanced reporting of science-related topics, but “a lot of that coverage is disappearing” at the exact moment it’s needed, he explains.

One of the oldest known pieces of art on the planet is a figurine of a mammoth that was carved in ivory by a Stone Age artisan some 40,000 years ago. Found in what is now Germany, it is marked with crosses and dots. The meaning of these markings is a mystery—but a new analysis of the object and hundreds of others found in the same region reveal that the markings may have meant something specific to their ancient creators.

Researchers analyzed more than 3,000 markings on 260 objects, including the mammoth, that were found in caves in Germany. They determined that the markings’ patterns are as statistically complex as protocuneiform, an early form of writing that was found on tablets from ancient Mesopotamia that were dated to around 3,500 B.C.E.

For the better part of a decade, conservative politicians—and Texas politicians in particular—have been absolutely apoplectic about the state of free speech on college campuses. You’ve heard the greatest hits: students are coddled snowflakes who can’t handle the real world, trigger warnings are destroying intellectual rigor, safe spaces are turning universities into daycare centers, and the real threat to America is that professors might have opinions that lean left.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott was so concerned about this supposed crisis that he signed a campus free speech bill in 2019. The whole thing was framed as a brave stand for open inquiry and the marketplace of ideas. As state Senator Joan Huffman said at the time:

“Our college students, our future leaders, they should be exposed to all ideas, I don’t care how liberal they are or how conservative they are.”

What a beautiful sentiment. Truly inspiring stuff.

So naturally, the University of Texas System’s Board of Regents just voted unanimously to ensure students can graduate without being exposed to ideas that might make someone uncomfortable.

The University of Texas System’s Board of Regents unanimously approved Thursday a rule requiring its universities to ensure students can graduate without studying “unnecessary controversial subjects,” despite warnings it could leave them less prepared for the real world.

The rule also requires faculty to disclose in their syllabi the topics they plan to cover and adhere to the plan, and says that when courses include controversial issues, instructors must ensure a “broad and balanced approach” to the discussion.

When I arrived at the food distribution center on a weekday afternoon, the line looked like it was a hundred people long. It brought to mind a photo of a bread line from the Great Depression era.

But it was just a normal day at the Campus Pantry, a nonprofit food center in midtown Tucson, Arizona—within the abnormal circumstances of national politics. Several hundred people a day visit this location (a 119 percent jump since 2019), according to data provided by the Pantry—mainly students, but also plenty of low-wage workers on the University of Arizona (UofA) campus.

Although I’ve regularly visited this food center for years—one of several in the area, which range from religious to anarchist to more of a secular nonprofit model like this one—on this particular day, I was anxious about having enough food. On October 24, 2025, I had received a notification that I had been dreading: I was informed that my November food assistance (SNAP) would not be issued, although I had been approved through summer 2026.

Apparently, it's only OK when Trump and his Epstein friends do it.

Pressure is mounting on Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) to resign following the publication of text messages that show the married three-term congressman pressured a staffer to send him “sexy” pics and quizzed her about favorite sexual positions, even as she told him his sexually-charged banter was going “too far.” Several lawmakers from both parties have called for Gonzales to step down, including a number of prominent MAGA women.

Regina Santos-Aviles, who served as the director for Gonzales’ regional district office in Uvalde, Texas, for four years, died in September after lighting herself on fire. Text messages unearthed by the San Antonio Express-News after her death indicate Santos-Aviles, who was married with a young child, eventually acceded to Gonzales’ advances and engaged in an extramarital affair that was discovered by her husband and, ultimately, her co-workers.

Gonzales, who is locked in a competitive Republican primary, previously denied the affair, telling the Express-News the “rumors are completely untruthful.”

But text messages made public on Monday by Adrian Aviles, Santos-Aviles’ estranged husband, show the Republican representative repeatedly pressuring his staffer for photos and intimate details.

I’m not going to watch the State of the Union address on Tuesday night. I urge you not to, either.

I hope Nielsen (or whoever makes such estimates these days) will find that far fewer Americans watched Donald Trump’s State of the Union than have watched any other State of the Union in recent memory. It will drive Trump crazy.

But there are plenty of reasons for not watching other than driving Trump crazy.

First, he doesn’t deserve our attention. He’s abused and defiled the American presidency, even worse than he did in his first term.

He’s blatantly usurped the powers of Congress. He has overtly used the justice department to seek to punish people he considers his enemies and pardon people loyal to him. He has willfully rejected the rule of law, broken treaties, literally destroyed part of the White House, thumbed his nose at our allies (including our closest and heretofore loyal neighbors), and utterly failed his constitutional duty to take care that the laws are faithfully executed.

He lies like most people breathe. He’s a fraud and a traitor.

Shelly Romero has early memories of going to her local supermarket and picking pulp fiction off the shelves. “We were very working class; my mom was working two jobs sometimes,” she recalls. “The appeal of books being cheaper and smaller and able to be carried around was definitely a thing.”

For generations of readers, the gateway to literature was not a hushed library or a polished hardback but a wire spinner rack in a supermarket, pharmacy or railway station. There, amid chewing gum and cigarettes, sat the mass-market paperback: squat, roughly 4in by 7in and cheap enough to be bought on a whim.

But the era of the “pocket book” is drawing to a close. ReaderLink, the biggest book distributor in the US, announced recently that it would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks. The decision follows years of plummeting sales, from 131m units in 2004 to 21m in 2024, and marks the end of a format that once democratised reading for the working class.

Romero, who grew up in the working-class, Latino and industrial city of Hialeah, Florida, says: “I don’t remember a bookstore. I had the library in Miami Springs across the bridge but in Hialeah around us, what was in walking distance because we didn’t have a car, was the Publix [supermarket] and sometimes we would get books from Goodwill [thrift store] as well.

“They had that democratic aspect to them where you can just find them anywhere and it always felt like it was the pick ’n’ mix candy-type store where there is something here for everyone, whether it’s the Harlequin romance novel or something very pulpy like a sci-fi or horror novel that you could quickly get.”

Well, I've seen this fucking movie before. My ex wife had two boys, and the first thing she did was have me shower, then did my laundry, then cooked food ahead of getting me stoned.

Granted, this time, her husband is involved, and I'm not here for sex. I'm only an hour out of Austin because she thought I would be useful for a project she's working on.

So, I meet this guy, sold as an early queer activist in Texas, and, as such, I presume this will be the main focus. I have an hour of audio and still have no idea what my nut graf is.

Dude was a researcher for Molly Ivins. Oh, and worked at 60 Minutes. Oh, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Rachelle is watching this play out and realizes she did connect two people, but she has no understanding of what she's hearing. This is not a slight; when you get two newsmen together, we start speaking in code.

He's got a few fundraisers going, as he's in rehabilitative care, and the core of my role here is to synthesize (I know, I know) his messaging so that they can focus on fewer (ideally one).

Under ordinary circumstances, I'd not touch this with a 10-foot pole; however, he seems to be the real deal, just trying to live out his life after imparting information to many.

It looks like we're going to meet up again tomorrow before Rachelle drives me home.

This could actually be worse than it seems. It's fucking cold tonight, and I have HVAC and comforters.

Mike is a character I can't quite yet pin down. But then again, I generally don't open with "How I Lost My Career."