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Oh man. Same old clown show, awash with boondoggles, each more cringey than the last. As the mad man-child deconstructs DC and slaps his hideous face and name everywhere - historic buildings, fascist arches, garish statues, possibly imaginary gold phones - others have taken his lead with their own patriotic spinoffs. Cue "Fuck You" upgrades, a Strait to Hell arcade for a video-game war, and a Trump/Epstein "Memorial Reading Room" packed with 3.5 million pages of files, where "the truth is hard to deny."
Trump's narcissistic vandalizing of D.C. - couldn't his KKK dad have just hugged him now and then? - is "something dictators have done throughout history," noted Bernie Sanders of his proposed SERVE Act, or Stop Executive Renaming for Vanity and Ego. Co-sponsored by six Senate Dems, the bill would bar any sitting president from naming federal properties after themselves, an act both "arrogant" and illegal. At this rate many weary Americans would likely argue, "Let the chiseling off begin," but for now the bill sits in legislative limbo and we're stuck with the resulting atrocities; they continue to multiply like locusts, even as he's proposed a $10-billion fund for more "beautification" projects around "the capital of the greatest Nation in the history of the world."
Though he increasingly nods off in public - or per the White House, blinks - he still clutches at a farcical show of dominance he's leaned on in the endless self-glorification campaign that is his execrable life. There are posts quoting fictional "fans": "Remarkable leadership,” "Master of the Deal,” "THE GREATEST PRESIDENT WE HAVE EVER KNOWN." From the guy who's "confused the country for his living room," there's D.C's re-branding: the plaques, name changes, razed East Wing for a billion-dollar "albatross" nobody wants. There are new massive Stalin-esque banners at construction sites proclaiming, “Thank you, PRESIDENT TRUMP”- "like Michael Scott buying himself a World’s Best Boss coffee mug" we paid for - to which unenthused residents added, "Fuck You Cunt."
Snug in a delusional bubble where his approval is def not in the toilet, he feels free to rant, lie, melt down online without consequence. In one manic night, he posts 55 times in three hours: “Arrest Obama the traitor” and “DEMONIC FORCE,” also Hillary, Brennan, Comey, Kelly. Asked how much he thinks about the cost to Americans of his calamitous war, he blurts, “Not even a little bit.” His lackeys follow suit: Ka$h Patel yells, lies, hustles bourbon, pads his stats and takes a "VIP snorkel" in Pearl Harbor around the tomb of 900 U.S. soldiers as Sean Duffy takes his nine offspring on a "patriotic," seven-month Great American Road Trip filmed for YouTube and complete with "head-spinning" corporate sponsorship, both on the taxpayers' now-rapidly-shrinking dime.
Meanwhile, another project nobody asked for - draining and repainting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, aka "reflective pond," from traditional grey to garish blue - has shockingly veered off course. After boasting his bestest golf course pool painters could easy-peasy do a no-bid, $1.8 million, "smart and beautiful construction" that Dems stupidly opposed - "Dumacrats love sewage" - the cost has soared to $13.1 million, it's now by a contractor he "did not know and have never used before,” staff are worried the job is behind schedule, with "uneven application" leaving bubbles, holes and "mottled shades of blue" in the pool, and a judge has set a May 21 hearing for a lawsuit charging the project wasn't properly vetted, ditto a color "more appropriate to a resort or theme park."
More winning in Miami, where another lawsuit charges three acres of multi-million-dollar waterfront land were illegally grifted by DeSantis to Trump for $10 for his presidential “library,” actually a gaudy hotel with no books but more vitally two gold statues of, you know. They will presumably join in grotesque kinship with the $300,000, crypto-bro-funded, bronze and gold leaf Don Colossus just unveiled at Doral Miami, "where the Republic is currently moldering." Before "a robotic chorus of evangelical functionaries who (have) transformed themselves into the most theologically humiliated cohort in modern memory," the statue was honored as, not an idolatrous golden calf, insisted Pastor Mark Burns, but "a celebration of life" and symbol of "the hand of God over (Trump’s) life." Definitely not a cult.

Despite being heralded as God's second favorite son - one who "understands the Scriptures better than the Pope" - Trump is also widely deemed "an economic serial killer" presiding over an "America First Corporate Graveyard," skyrocketing inflation, national debt, farm bankruptcies, and energy costs, and possibly "the largest single act of grand larceny in American history" with a $10 billion payout by his own DOJ against his own IRS to settle his bullshit lawsuit for their leak of his tax returns, which every other president has released. Still, because grifting chutzpah thy name is, and because there's never enough money to fill the ugly gaping hole where a soul should be, he's still running penny-ante scams. Up next: Trump Mobile, "for the forgotten MAGA man."
Last June, his huckster spawn announced the launch of "a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance.” The T1 Phone, "proudly designed and built in the United States,” would be available in August at $499. For almost a year, they urged followers to make $100 "deposits" to "pre-order" the beauties; over half a million did, ponying up about $59 million. Then, the bait and switch. The terms of service quietly changed: The "deposit" provided "a conditional opportunity" to buy if Trump Mobile chose to sell. Pricing, production schedules, shipping costs were "non-binding." "Made in the USA" became "Proudly American Designed." "Delivery" dates got pushed back. Unexplained charges appeared. A reporter who called "Customer Service" got “Omega Auto Care." To date, no fantasy Trump phones have shipped. Cheap Crooks 'R Us.

Also, liars. With even neo-cons now deeming the Iran War potentially more of a debacle than Vietnam, the good folks at Secret Handshake, creators of the Trump/Epstein bestie statues, decided that with the regime hyping war like a video game, they might as well turn it into one. Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell , which is also online, features three working, arcade video games set up inside DC's War Memorial; they promise "high-octane, flag-waving, boots-on-the-ground...pure pixelated patriotism," or, per Hegseth, "laser-focused maximum reps annihilation mission crushing (with) sustained unrelenting pressure." Battles - by tweet, not gun - pit US forces against ”Iranian schoolgirl,“ "DEIyatollah,“ low-flow shower heads, the Pope and other "threats to American freedom."
Games open with Trump declaring, “Another big, beautiful day as the best President ever.” Options for the prompt, “Ready to ROCK Iran back to the Stone Ages?” are “Not Yet...” “Yes” and “Hell Yes.” Yells Pete, “Let’s liberate some oil!” Trump can order a Diet Coke or bomb Iran; search for barrels of oil, ideas for Truth Social posts, or endless threats that lead nowhere; he vows to “fight this war and win it by hamburger o’clock.” Melania: “I WAS NEVER ON THE EPSTEIN JET...Did you burn the files yet?” JD, fat-faced: “I love couch.” The only way you can lose is by trying to hold Melania’s hand, which abruptly ends the game; otherwise, it’s impossible to end or win it. Irony never dies: Images have surfaced of bored National Guardsmen - a $1 million a day deployment - playing.
Another piece of protest art brings the truth of "one of the most horrific crimes in American history” to Trump's hometown. "The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room,” in New York's Tribeca, is a first-of-its-kind, 5,000-square-foot installation containing all the unsealed Epstein files - 3.5 million pages printed and bound into 3,437 volumes weighing 17,000 pounds, "a physical, undeniable record of corruption, cover-ups, and crime." The pop-up project in the Mriya Gallery was created by the non-profit Primary Facts; it took them about a month to print the files. The exhibit is on view through May 21; admission to groups for a one-hour session is free; organizers are raising funds to cover the New York premiere and bring it to other cities.
The Trumpsonian installation is built around a candlelit tribute to Epstein's more than 1,200 victims and survivors, whose names are all redacted here in closed binders - unlike at the DOJ, where they were badly, only partly redacted, a failure adding insult to injury along with an ongoing, multi-pronged cover-up. The Trump and Epstein Reading Room also includes a timeline documenting the decades-long crimes, legal proceedings and intersections between the two men's lives, all underlining the criminal absurdity of federal claims "there's nothing left to investigate." The vast trove of information, organizers say, is "what 3.5 million pages of evidence looks like." Trump, as deeply complicit as he is narcissistic, "wanted his name on stuff." Now, here it is.

A study published Monday warns that New Orleans must immediately begin planning and gradually implementing its permanent evacuation to avert a dangerously rushed exodus later, because it has passed a "point of no return" as climate-driven sea-level rise slowly swallows the storied city.
"With global temperatures poised to exceed the 1.5°C Paris Agreement threshold—a level that triggered substantial ice sheet collapse during the Last Interglacial—low-elevation coastal zones face sea-level commitments far beyond current planning horizons," says the study, which was published by the journal Nature Sustainability.
"With this geological frame of reference, we examine the impact of sea-level rise on what may be the most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world using prehistoric and contemporary patterns of human mobility," the publication continues. "We highlight the positive aspects of the recently commenced out-migration in this region and argue that the fate of communities landwards of this coastal zone will be decided in the next few decades."
"While climate mitigation should remain the first step to prevent the worst outcomes, coastal Louisiana has evidently already crossed the point of no return,” the paper adds.
That's because rising waters are slowly eroding Louisiana's coast, including New Orleans, which “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century," according to the study's authors.
“Louisiana is a canary in the coal mine. It is one of the rare places where we’re already clearly seeing climate-motivated depopulation combined with other social and economic factors,” said Yale School of the Environment professor and study co-author Brianna Castro.
The authors argued that by acknowledging the inevitability of New Orleans' underwater future, government and residents can avert a fraught rushed retreat by planning and executing a managed multigenerational relocation and set an example for other threatened coastal communities.
According to one widely cited study published a decade ago, around 13 million Americans living in coastal areas could be forced to relocate to higher ground by the end of the century due climate-driven sea-level rise, with the Gulf Coast and Florida expected lose the most livable land. Globally, hundreds of millions of people are expected to be displaced by 2100 due to rising seas.
After Hurricane Katrina—which inundated the city and killed nearly 1,000 people in the New Orleans metro area—billions of dollars were spent fortifying the city's levee system, which failed catastrophically during the 2005 storm. However, experts warn that in the long term, levees won't be able to stop the rising waters any longer.
That's why the study's authors said officials must begin the city's orderly depopulation as soon as possible.
"What kind of retreat do you want?" asked Castro. "Do you want to incentivize it and then people go naturally for jobs, housing, and lifestyle amenities—or do you want people to wait and then have to leave abruptly in crisis?”
Labor unions are feeling betrayed after Virginia's Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger vetoed a bill on Thursday that would have restored collective bargaining rights for half a million public sector workers.
Virginia is one of the most restrictive states in the country for public sector bargaining, a holdover from the Jim Crow era when the General Assembly and other state legislatures across the South sought to crush the power of a public workforce with many Black employees.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, Virginia has one of the largest public sector pay gaps in the country, with state and local government employees making about 27% less on average than their private-sector peers, and it is similarly stratified in other states with weak collective bargaining rights.
Spanberger, a former US representative who was elected governor this past November, made pro-union messaging central to her affordability-focused platform. She decried President Donald Trump's executive order stripping federal workers of collective bargaining rights last year and said that as governor, she'd "look forward to working with members of our General Assembly to make sure more Virginians can negotiate for the benefits and fair treatment that they earn.”
But since taking office, Spanberger's support for restoring public sector union rights has been more tepid as she's gotten an earful from fiscally conservative Right-to-Work and taxpayer advocacy groups who claimed higher salaries for public employees would drain state funds and raise the cost of services.
When a bill to immediately mandate collective bargaining rights to 500,000 workers was proposed in the Democratic-controlled General Assembly, she introduced amendments aimed at watering down the bill—making it optional for employers to recognize unions, delaying the full implementation until 2030, and introducing what unions called a "kill-switch" that would have allowed future governors to revoke collective bargaining power.
The legislature shot Spanberger's amendments down and passed the bill in its original form. On Thursday, the governor vetoed it altogether.
In her veto message, Spanberger said she wanted the bill's other collective bargaining provisions for state employees, home care workers, and higher education employees to go into effect first "in order to demonstrate the efficacy of this new system" before it was opened up to all public employees.
But the unions that advocated for the bill say Spanberger led workers on with false promises.
"This veto is a devastating betrayal to the hundreds of thousands of public employees who have spent years, and in many cases decades, fighting for a seat at the table," said Doris Crouse-Mays, the president of the Virginia AFL-CIO. "Spanberger campaigned publicly and privately on promises [of] affordability, to support working families and respect workers' rights... Instead, when presented with the opportunity to make history and deliver on those promises, she chose to side with fear, political calculation, business, and the same anti-worker arguments that have been used for generations to deny workers power in Virginia."
LaNoral Thomas, the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Virginia 512—a union which helped lead the charge to pass the bill—told the Virginia news site Dogwood that her union had "high hopes" for Spanberger when she was elected.
“We believed that she was being authentic and honest with us," Thomas said. "She just flat-out flipped. It is shocking.”
"Public employees are not a special interest. They are our neighbors. They are the educators, bus drivers, social workers, librarians, custodians, and first responders who hold our communities together," said a joint statement from Carol Bauer, president of the Virginia Education Association, and Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association.
They emphasized that the veto also carried "a deep racial and gender impact," noting that "Virginia’s public sector bargaining ban is rooted in a Jim Crow era effort to silence Black workers at the University of Virginia Hospital who organized for fair pay and dignity." They said, "Preserving that legacy today disproportionately harms women and workers of color, who make up so much of the public-service workforce and who have the most to gain from fair wages, safer workplaces, and a real voice on the job."
Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)—the largest national union of public sector workers in the US, with more than 1.4 million members—said that Spanberger had caved to "anti-worker extremists [who] have sidelined working people while starving the public services Virginia families rely on, earning the state a reputation as one of the most anti-worker in the country."
"While the governor has broken her word," Saunders said, "AFSCME members are deeply grateful to the bill’s sponsors and the leadership of both chambers, who kept theirs. Their commitment to working people stands in stark contrast to the governor and will not be forgotten."
"Gov. Spanberger made a choice today," he added. "Working people will remember it."
As predicted in early 2025, when US President Donald Trump unleashed the world's richest man Elon Musk to enact ill-informed and devastating cuts to key federal agencies and programs, those decisions would have real and deadly consequences for the nation and the world.
With a new outbreak of the Ebola virus already claiming over a 131 lives as it sweeps through the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, and with World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus hosting an emergency media Tuesday to stem the global threat, videos of Musk bragging about how Trump's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) targeted programs related to Ebola prevention efforts are resurfacing this week.
In February of 2025, for example, this clip shows Musk telling Trump's cabinet that DOGE "accidentally" cancelled Ebola prevention funding.
Elon Musk: "We will make mistakes. We won't be perfect ... so for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was ebola prevention." pic.twitter.com/bq4Ipp4Zvj
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 26, 2025
While Musk claims in his remarks that the mistake was quickly identified—"I think we all want Ebola prevention," he said—and that the funding was restored "immediately" and that there were "no interruptions" in the prevention efforts or program, later reporting found this was not the case.
As the Washington Post later reported, "current and former USAID officials said that Musk was wrong: USAID’s Ebola prevention efforts have been largely halted since Musk and his DOGE allies moved [...] to gut the global-assistance agency and freeze its outgoing payments."
Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency physician and professor at Brown University School of Public Health who worked on Ebola for more than a decade and responded to Ebola outbreaks in Africa, spoke about the issue with NPR at the time.
"I disagree fully, completely, wholly, that they recognized the mistake and put it back," Spencer told NPR.
Spencer described how officials with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) were no longer "allowed to go to meetings with the [WHO], something they would have done in every single outbreak of Ebola—or other viral hemorrhagic fever disease–to date," Spencer says. "From top to bottom, none of the things that they have canceled have been put back in place."
Elon Musk says DOGE accidentally cut USAID's Ebola prevention efforts but then they were restored with "no interruption."
That's an outright LIE.
The state of USAID plainly shows that any disease prevention efforts supported by the U.S. at this point are merely symbolic. pic.twitter.com/cOKk6wWGFK
— Senator Patty Murray (@PattyMurray) March 1, 2025
Jeremy Konyndyk, the former lead of USAID's Ebola response team that handled an outbreak of the disease in 2024, said the same.
Konyndyk, now president of Refugees International, explained last year to NPR that nearly every member of highly-trained team focused on high risk outbreaks was "pushed out of the agency, and they have not been brought back."
"The whole disaster response capability at USAID no longer exists," he said. "All of those people are gone. The operation centers that they worked out of are shut down. They can't even access the Ronald Reagan Building where those operation centers sit. That lease has been handed over to Customs and Border Protection."
HealthDay News reported in March of 2025 that while USAID previously "had more than 50 staffers dedicated to outbreak response," the cuts enforced by DOGE "left just six people to handle Ebola, Marburg virus, mpox and bird flu" preparedness operations.
As Bloomberg reported Monday, the impacts of Trump's attack on foreign assistance and outbreak prevention likely had devastating consequences:
The Trump administration’s withdrawal of health funding that once helped support outbreak detection across parts of Africa represents the kind of cuts that contribute to the erosion of disease-surveillance systems.
Health officials say the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola may have circulated undetected for six to eight weeks in northeastern Congo before lab testing confirmed the virus.
By the time Ebola was identified, suspected cases and unexplained deaths had already spread across multiple health zones near the Ugandan border.
Such systems built with international aid often serve multiple purposes: tracking outbreaks, transporting laboratory samples and monitoring unexplained illnesses in remote regions. When funding disappears, those networks weaken quickly.
According to Leslie Dach, founder and chair of Protect Our Care and who served in the Obama administration as the Health and Human Services global Ebola coordinator, said Trump's failures are already plain to see and that the ongoing public health threat, whether abroad or in the United States, is dire.
“If history is any guide, the administration must be fully vigilant and prepared to deal with the potential of this deadly disease reaching America’s shores, or the situation could get ugly fast,” said Dach in a statement on Monday.
“Without proper procedures and guardrails in place, people could get very sick and die," Dach continued. "But Donald Trump has deliberately left us the opposite of prepared by gutting Ebola and pandemic-preparedness infrastructure at home and abroad. The CDC is now flying blind after Trump and Republicans shuttered USAID and cut themselves off from WHO’s global resources—destroying our disease surveillance and response capability just so billionaires could have another tax break."
"Whether it’s measles, Hantavirus, or Ebola," he said, "the deep Trump cuts to research, public health staff and infrastructure have left the nation ten steps behind–always putting out public health fires rather than preventing them.”
As Sen. Patty Murray said back in February of 2025: "If Ebola, Margurg, or any other infectious disease makes it to our shores, it will be thanks to Elon and Trump—two billionaires without a clue, who are positively smug about their own ignorance."
Minnesota state prosecutors on Monday charged and issued a nationwide arrest warrant for a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in connection with the shooting of a Venezuelan man during the Trump administration's deadly anti-immigrant crackdown in the Twin Cities area.
The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office charged 52-year-old ICE agent Christian Castro with four counts of second-degree assault with a deadly weapon and one count of falsely reporting a crime after Venezuelan national Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis was shot in the leg on January 14.
“Mr. Castro is an ICE agent, but his federal badge does not make him immune from state charges for his criminal conduct in Minnesota,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in a video announcing the move. “There is no such thing as absolute immunity for federal officers who commit crimes in this state or any other.”
Federal authorities initially charged Sosa-Celis and his roommate, Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, with assaulting an officer with a broom handle and a snow shovel that day.
Then-US Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin claimed that Sosa-Celis and Aljorna “began to resist and violently assault" Castro, who fired his gun while on the ground out of fear for his life. Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused Sosa-Celis and Aljorna of “attempted murder."
However, US District Judge Paul Magnuson subsequently dropped the charges after video evidence directly contradicted the administration's claims, prompting Democratic Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey to assert that "bare due diligence would have shown that the agents were lying.”
Moriarty said Monday that Castro's "narrative about what he said happened before, like he was hit with a shovel and broom and all of that, in the head multiple times," was disproven by "a thorough examination, including X-rays."
“There’s no demonstrable trauma to his body, except for an abrasion to his left hand at the base of the thumb," she added.
As The Minnesota Star Tribune reported:
Last month, the city of Minneapolis released surveillance footage that its cameras captured near the duplex where Sosa-Celis and Aljorna live with their partners.
Aljorna, who was making a DoorDash delivery, called home in the middle of a car chase after he fled a traffic stop by Castro and another ICE agent in an unmarked vehicle. The federal agents believed they were stopping an immigration enforcement target, but it ended up being a case of mistaken identity. One of the adults in the duplex called 911 to report what was happening and Moriarty said an emergency dispatcher turned the camera to face the duplex.
The video evidence showed Aljorna racing to the house after he crashed his car into a light pole. Castro pursued him. Sosa-Celis was waiting outside. There was a brief scramble in the yard as the three men were entangled. A shovel and broom were present near the area, but there was no indication they were used as weapons.
A Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigation showed that the shot Castro fired passed through Sosa-Celis' leg and then penetrated a nearby home, lodging in the wall of a bedroom where several small children sleep.
ICE agents then broke down the home's door and arrested Sosa-Celis, Aljorna, and three other people. Gabriel Alejandro Hernandez-Ledezma, who had nothing to do with the incident, was accused of attacking Castro and jailed for two weeks without charges in Texas. Two women—who had no criminal records and were also not involved in the incident—were separated from their young children and also detained in Texas for two weeks before being released without charge.
Castro is the second ICE agent that Moriarty's office has charged in connection with Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration's 70-day Twin Cities blitz. Last month, Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr. was charged with two counts of felony second-degree assault after he allegedly pulled a gun on two local residents during a February traffic dispute.
On Monday, Moriarty also addressed public concerns about why her office hasn't yet charged ICE officer Jonathan Ross, who fatally shot Minneapolis mother Renee Good in January, or Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez in connection with the deadly shooting of Department of Veteran Affairs nurse Alexi Pretti later that month.
“I have really a lot of empathy for everybody who has said, ‘You have the videos, why haven’t you charged?’ We get that,” she said. “From the inside, we are doing a lot of work. These are unusual cases. It’s just a very unique scenario."
“We obviously are trying to be very thoughtful and intentional," Moriarty added. "While I understand people really want accountability, and they saw what they saw in the videos, this is incredibly complex. The last thing we want to do is make a mistake if we feel something is appropriately charged and get dismissed out of federal court.”
In March, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison sued the Trump administration over its refusal to cooperate with state probes into the shooting of Good, Pretti, and Sosa-Celis.
Moriarty's announcement was hailed by immigrant rights advocates and opponents of Trump's sweeping crackdown, with one popular progressive account on Bluesky welcoming the prosecution of what it called a "lying ICE goon."
"This is BIG," attorney and American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick said on X. "These are the first charges relating to an incident that occurred during an enforcement operation. The officers involved lied under oath about this shooting, as the Trump [administration] admitted."
As the Trump administration seeks to justify a war with Cuba using what Cuban officials have called “increasingly implausible accusations” that it poses a danger to national security, President Miguel Díaz-Canel warned on Monday that an American assault would trigger a "bloodbath with incalculable consequences."
US President Donald Trump has imposed a punishing fuel blockade on Cuba for months that has devastated the island's civilian population with the explicit goal of forcing its government from power and has, on many occasions, threatened to use military force, including to outright "take" the island.
The densely populated island of nearly 11 million people is already in the midst of a humanitarian crisis as a result of "energy starvation" from the blockade, which has left the country's renowned healthcare system struggling to function, with 100,000 patients awaiting surgery, according to a recent United Nations report.
"The threats of military aggression against Cuba from the world's greatest power are well-known," Díaz-Canel said in a post to social media on Monday. "The threat itself already constitutes an international crime. If it were to materialize, it would trigger a bloodbath with incalculable consequences, plus the destructive impact on regional peace and stability."
His comments came after Axios reported Sunday on "classified intelligence" shared by unnamed senior US officials stating that Cuba possesses around 300 drones acquired from Russia and Iran and had been considering plans to attack the US military base at Guantánamo Bay, various US military vessels, and Key West, Florida.
Reporter Marc Caputo described the intelligence as a possible "pretext for US military action" against the island and quoted an unnamed senior official as saying it was "a growing threat."
Republican legislators, particularly those in South Florida, have seized on the report to argue for even harsher action against Cuba. US Reps. Mario Díaz-Balart and Elvira Salazar both said it was further evidence that Cuba poses a "threat to national security." Rep. Carlos Gimenez said it must be "dealt with accordingly."
However, buried deep within the report was the acknowledgment that "US officials don't believe Cuba is an imminent threat, or actively planning to attack American interests." Rather, the drones would be reserved for a scenario in which "hostilities erupt" in the event of a US military attack, which has been telegraphed for weeks by the Trump administration.
Cuba has not denied having drones, with its embassy saying on Sunday that it "has the right to defend itself against external aggression." But Cuba denied any intent to attack the US preemptively, saying that US officials were "distorting as extraordinary the logical preparation required to face a potential aggression."
Díaz-Canel reiterated on Monday that Cuba "poses no threat, nor does it have aggressive plans or intentions against any country."
"It has none against the US, nor has it ever had any—something the government of that nation knows full well, particularly its defense and national security agencies," the Cuban president continued.
"Cuba, which already endures a multidimensional aggression from the US, does have the absolute and legitimate right to defend itself against a military onslaught," he added. "Yet that cannot be wielded, either logically or honestly, as an excuse for imposing war on the noble Cuban people."
"Never in American history has a president pursued corruption this brazenly or on such a colossal scale," wrote Reps. Jamie Raskin and Richard Neal.
Top Democrats on a pair of panels in the US House of Representatives on Wednesday demanded that Justice and Treasury department leaders answer for how they settled President Donald Trump's $10 billion "sham" lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax records.
In their letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and IRS CEO Frank Bisignano, House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Ways and Means Committee Ranking Member Richard Neal (D-Mass.) slammed the settlement as "one of the most brazen acts of public corruption and self-dealing in American history."
"Rather than protect the public fisc from obvious plunder, this DOJ and IRS caved," the lawmakers argued, condemning the creation of a $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" as a "taxpayer shakedown" intended to line the pockets of the president's allies, including pro-Trump rioters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
"This massive slush fund will be governed by a sham commission of the president's cronies," Raskin and Neal noted—and due to the terms of the agreement, "the public and members of Congress may never know who received payments."
CNN reported Tuesday that longtime Trump adviser and former administration official Michael Caputo has filed the first known claim, describing his family as "survivors of the illegal Russiagate investigations" and seeking $2.7 million.
"Congress and Congress alone has the power of the purse under the appropriations clause of the Constitution. But Congress never authorized or appropriated funds for a $1.776 billion political slush fund," the House Democrats stressed. "This settlement is a transparent attempt to circumvent the separation of powers and use the judgment fund for a scam Congress never contemplated: rewarding the president’s political allies at the expense of American taxpayers."
Additionally, under the settlement, the IRS is "forever barred" from pursuing any other actions against Trump and his relatives.
"Essentially, the federal government threw in a super-pardon for the president, his family, and related and affiliated entities, freeing them not only from any accountability for any taxes they may have dodged, but other pending federal criminal or civil investigations like insider trading, antitrust violations, false statements, or even sexual harassment," the lawmakers wrote.
Raskin and Neal called on the federal departments to "retain all documents, including both hard copies and electronically stored information (ESI), related to the settlement and establishment of the fund," including messages sent via "private email addresses, text messages, mobile applications (e.g., Signal), or other forms of electronic communications."
They also directed the agency leaders to send over the IRS memorandum on the settlement, other related records, and answers to their list of questions by next week, before Bessent’s scheduled appearance before the Ways and Means Committee.
Blanche was on Capitol Hill Tuesday to testify about the DOJ budget request. However, he faced various other questions, and attempted to counter Democrats' framing that, as Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Patty Murray (Wash.) put it, Trump is using "tax dollars to set up a slush fund to enrich his own friends."
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) questioned Blanche about public disclosures of payouts and measures to ensure Trump family members don't get any fund money, while Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) asked about the eligibility of January 6 rioters, including those who assaulted Capitol Hill police or committed sex crimes against children.
A pair of Capitol Police officers who helped defend the building during the 2021 attack filed a lawsuit in federal court on Wednesday with the aim of dissolving the fund, arguing that "no statute authorizes its creation, the settlement on which it is premised is a corrupt sham, and its design violates the Constitution and federal law."
After the House Democrats' letter was released Wednesday morning, Raskin moved to subpoena Blanche, Bisignano, Bessent, and other individuals involved in creating the fund: Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and Treasury Department General Counsel Brian Morrissey.
"Mr. Blanche orchestrated this outrageous slush fund as part of the settlement with Donald Trump, which was also signed by Mr. Woodward, and Mr. Bessent will oversee the payout of these funds. Mr. Bisignano signed off on this settlement for the IRS, and Brian Morrissey remarkably resigned as this deal was being announced," Raskin said. "These individuals all possess critical insights into Trump's self-dealing scheme with his own agencies to create this fund and reward his supporters and friends."
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said a vote on that effort would be held at the end of Wednesday's hearing.
"AI is a freight train, but the future is not a foregone conclusion," said one engineer, urging his colleagues to sign a petition to stop Meta's use of an AI tracking program. "It’s not too late to pump the brakes."
Meta employees reported Wednesday that in the company's offices on the day mass layoffs hit thousands of their colleagues, fliers were taped to walls urging workers to sign a petition in support of stopping the company's new artificial intelligence data tracking program—which CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted late last month as a way for its new AI models to "learn from watching really smart people do things."
A day before about 8,000 Meta employees began receiving emails notifying them that they were being laid off—a process that began in Singapore at 4:00 am local time Wednesday and continued in European and US offices in their respective time zones—the labor-focused media organization More Perfect Union shared a leaked audio file in which Zuckerberg was heard explaining how the AI training program worked.
"The average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks," said Zuckerberg. "So if we're trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally build tools or solve tasks that help teach the model how to code, we think is going to dramatically increase our model's coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do, who don't have thousands and thousands of extremely strong engineers at their company."
LEAKED AUDIO: In an all-hands meeting on April 30, Mark Zuckerberg tells employees that he's training AI on them ahead of mass layoffs.
"The AI models learn from watching really smart people do things... The average intelligence of the people who are at this company is… pic.twitter.com/lt9eeJ3cwh
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) May 19, 2026
He assured the company's 78,000 employees that "no human is looking at or watching what people are doing on their computers... None of the data is being used for looking at what people are doing or surveillance or performance tracking or anything like that. It's purely just that we are using this to feed a very large amount of content into the AI model so that way it can learn how smart people use computers to accomplish tasks."
Zuckerberg explained how the employees have been used to train the model that could potentially replace many of them days after Meta announced it was planning to lay off about 10% of its workforce as the company invests heavily in AI, spending $125 billion to $145 billion on the technology—more than double what it spent last year.
The New York Times reported earlier this month that employees "revolted" when they learned about the AI tracking program, and expressed fears that they had unknowingly been training a model that would ultimately replace them.
An engineering manager asked on the company's internal communication platform how workers can opt out of having their computer activity monitored to train the AI model, only to be told by chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, "There is no option to opt out on your corporate laptop."
Another employee told Bosworth, “Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning."
On Monday, The New York Times reported, employees learned that in addition to the layoffs, another 7,000 workers will be reassigned to help develop AI tools.
About 2,000 employees began working this month on a new Applied AI and Engineering team, which is set to use the data gathered by the AI tracking program Zuckerberg described to build AI tools. Those who volunteered to join the group would not be included in this week's layoffs, the Times reported.
"Every company is training AI on their employees," said Chen Avnery, an independent adviser on AI governance and data platforms. "Meta just said it out loud. The question stopped being, 'Will AI replace you?' a year ago. Now it's whether you're building the agents or generating their training data."
More than 1,000 people in the company have signed the petition calling to halt the AI data program, according to the newspaper.
Software engineer Mack Ward urged his colleagues to sign on earlier this month, telling them in an internal post that "AI is a freight train, but the future is not a foregone conclusion."
"It’s not too late to pump the brakes and consider how we, society, want to go about this,” Ward said. “Speaking up is never easy, but ‘easy’ isn’t what you were hired to do.”
"This is a major blow for the disastrous, backfiring war and sends a clear signal to President Trump: End the war, do not escalate it," said NIAC. "The hard work of pro-peace Americans is paying off."
After months of failed votes on Democratic war powers resolutions intended to end President Donald Trump's illegal assault on Iran, the US Senate finally advanced legislation to a final vote on Tuesday, when a fourth Republican broke ranks.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) joined three other Republicans and all Democrats but one for the 50-47 vote on a motion to discharge Sen. Tim Kaine's (D-Va.) bill from committee. Cassidy's move notably came just days after he lost a primary race in which Trump backed one of his challengers—apparent retribution for the senator voting to convict Trump following his historic second impeachment.
"While I support the administration's efforts to dismantle Iran's nuclear program, the White House and Pentagon have left Congress in the dark on Operation Epic Fury," Cassidy said on social media Tuesday. "In Louisiana, I've heard from people, including President Trump's supporters, who are concerned about this war. Until the administration provides clarity, no congressional authorization or extension can be justified."
The US and Israel launched the operation on February 28, without authorization from Congress and in violation of the United Nations Charter. Faced with a key deadline under the War Powers Act earlier this month, the White House claimed the conflict had been "terminated" due to a ceasefire agreement reached hours after Trump's genocidal threat against Iran on April 7. However, the president has maintained a naval blockade, and Iran has continued to limit ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
As with last week's vote on a war powers resolution from Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) backed the new motion, while Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) voted with the GOP. A potential tie was avoided on Tuesday when Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) did not participate.
The Associated Press noted that Kaine's bill "will get a vote on final passage, but the timing was not immediately clear," and if the three Republicans who were absent Tuesday maintain their stances on the war, the resolution could still ultimately be defeated.
Despite that uncertainty, congressional Democrats and other critics of the illegal assault welcomed the Tuesday vote that followed seven unsuccessful votes in the Senate and many more in the House of Representatives, where Republicans also have a narrow majority.
"This is a major blow for the disastrous, backfiring war and sends a clear signal to President Trump: End the war, do not escalate it," the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) declared on social media. "The hard work of pro-peace Americans is paying off."
NIAC president Jamal Abdi said that "it has taken 10 weeks and a dozen votes but Congress is finally coming in line with the vast majority of Americans who oppose the senseless war on Iran... There are strong odds it will pass in the Republican-controlled House later this week."
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement that "vote by vote, Democrats are breaking through Republicans' wall of silence on Trump’s illegal war."
"For more than 80 days, Trump has dragged America into a costly, chaotic conflict with no plan, no objective, and no legal authority," he continued. "Today proved our pressure is working: Republicans are starting to crack, and momentum is building to check him. We are not letting up."
According to The New York Times, Kaine similarly said that "the momentum is moving our way slowly."
While Trump would be able to veto a war powers resolution that reached his desk, Democrats have argued that passing one would make clear to him that his assault on Iran is unpopular. Kaine said that "what the president cares about is his own popularity, and when Congress, even including members of his own party, start to vote against him."
Kaine expects a final vote to come after the Memorial Day recess, and expressed hope that lawmakers returning to their state or districts will hear from frustrated constituents. He predicted that "people are going to hear an earful when they get home about gas prices," which have soared due to the Strait of Hormuz closure.
Alix Fraser, vice president of advocacy at the pro-democracy group Issue One, called Tuesday's vote "a significant step in the effort to reestablish one of Congress' most sacred roles—the constitutional right to send American men and women to war."
Fraser applauded "the senators who voted to reaffirm Congress's constitutional role in decisions of war and peace," recognizing by name the Republicans who had the "for having the courage to stand up for the American service members being asked to risk their lives, as well as for the American families already struggling with rising costs at home."
He also urged the House "to follow suit," emphasizing that "this is a pivotal moment for our democracy. We must decide whether future generations will inherit a system in which the representatives of the American people debate and authorize the most consequential decisions, like going to war—or whether we normalize a system where presidents can unilaterally lead the country into ill-defined and open-ended conflicts."
“Americans should remain concerned about the broader structural weaknesses that allowed the country to reach this point without meaningful congressional involvement from the outset," Fraser added. "The current war powers framework needs to be reformed to empower the legislative branch and follow the constitutional process that the framers intended."