GENOCIDE

Rescuers say 9 children of Gaza doctor couple killed in Israeli strike

ZIONISTS MURDER THE NEXT GENERATION OF PALESTINIANS

By AFP
May 24, 2025


Palestinians gather at a food kitchen in Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. - Copyright AFP Eyad BABA

AFP team in Gaza

Gaza’s civil defence agency said Saturday that an Israeli strike in the southern city of Khan Yunis killed nine children of a pair of married doctors, with the Israeli army saying it was reviewing the reports.

Israel has stepped up its campaign in Gaza in recent days, drawing international criticism as well as calls to allow in more supplies after it partially eased a total blockade on aid imposed on March 2.

Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal said the agency had retrieved “the bodies of nine child martyrs, some of them charred, from the home of Dr Hamdi al-Najjar and his wife, Dr Alaa al-Najjar, all of whom were their children”.

He added that Hamdi al-Najjar and another son, Adam, were also seriously wounded in the strike on Friday.

A medical source at Nasser Hospital, where Alaa al-Najjar works, gave Adam’s age as 10 years old.

Footage of the aftermath released by the civil defence agency showed rescuers recovering badly burned remains from the damaged home.

Asked about the incident, the Israeli military said it had “struck a number of suspects who were identified operating from a structure” near its troops.

“The Khan Yunis area is a dangerous warzone,” it added.

“The claim regarding harm to uninvolved civilians is under review.”

The army had issued an evacuation warning for the city on Monday.

The children’s funeral took place at Nasser Hospital, AFP footage showed.

Muneer Alboursh, director general of the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, said on X that the strike happened shortly after Hamdi Al-Najjar returned home from driving his wife to work.

“This is the reality our medical staff in Gaza endure. Words fall short in describing the pain,” he said, accusing Israel of “wiping out entire families”.



– Fresh strikes –



Bassal told AFP that Israeli strikes killed at least 15 people on Saturday across Gaza.

He said the dead included a couple who were killed with their two young children in a pre-dawn strike on a house in the Amal quarter of Khan Yunis.

To the west of the city, at least five people were killed by a drone strike on a crowd of people that had gathered to wait for aid trucks, he added.

At Nasser Hospital, tearful mourners gathered Saturday around white-shrouded bodies outside.

“Suddenly, a missile from an F-16 destroyed the entire house, and all of them were civilians — my sister, her husband and their children,” said Wissam Al-Madhoun.

“We found them lying in the street. What did this child do to (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu?”

In a statement, the military said that over the past day the air force had struck more than 100 targets across the territory.

Israel resumed operations in Gaza on March 18, ending a two-month ceasefire.

Gaza’s health ministry said Saturday that at least 3,747 people had been killed in the territory since then, taking the war’s overall toll to 53,901, mostly civilians.



– ‘Cruellest phase’ –



Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the war resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.

Militants also took 251 hostages, 57 of whom remain in Gaza including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.

United Nations chief Antonio Guterres said on Friday that Palestinians were enduring “the cruellest phase” of the war in Gaza, where Israel’s lengthy blockade has led to widespread shortages of food and medicine.

Limited aid deliveries to the Gaza Strip restarted on Monday for the first time since March 2.

The World Food Programme said that 15 of its trucks were looted late Friday night, calling on Israel “to get far greater volumes of food assistance into Gaza faster”.

“Hunger, desperation and anxiety over whether more food aid is coming, is contributing to rising insecurity,” it said.

The Gaza City municipality, meanwhile, warned Saturday of “a potential large-scale water crisis” due to a lack of supplies needed for urgent repairs.

It said damage from the war had “affected the majority of Gaza’s water infrastructure, leaving large portions of the population vulnerable to severe water shortages”.

It added that temperatures were rising and demand was expected to increase.

Israeli Strike on Gaza Home Kills at Least 50 Palestinians

Most of the victims are reportedly women and children, including a 1-month-old infant.


A Palestinian boy weeps as the lifeless body of a 1-month-old Palestinian baby is pulled from the rubble of the Dardouna family home in Jabalia al-Balad, Gaza, Palestine following an Israeli airstrike on May 22, 2025.
(Photo: Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
May 23, 2025

COMMON DREAMS

Gaza officials said Friday that an Israel Defense Forces airstrike targeting a home in the northern part of the Palestinian enclave killed at least 50 people, mostly women and children, while separate IDF strikes killed aid workers and other civilians, and deadly starvation continued.

Local and international media including Al Jazeerareported 50 or more people were massacred when the IDF bombed the home of the Dardouna family in the northern city of Jabalia al-Balad late on Thursday. Victims reportedly include a 1-month-old infant and Dr. Ibrahim Dardouna, a physician at the Al-Shifa and Al-Ahli Baptist hospitals, both of which have been severely damaged by Israeli bombing and other attacks.

Drop Site Newsreported that people who survived the initial bombing but were buried beneath the ruins of the four-story home could be heard pleading for help. Neighbors and other first responders desperately dug through the rubble with their bare hands, as Israeli occupation forces have blocked most heavy equipment from entering Gaza and bombed bulldozers and other vehicles already in the strip.

Warning: The following video contains images of death.



Medical sources told Al Jazeera that a total of 84 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli strikes in recent hours. Victims include six aid workers reportedly slain in an IDF strike in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza.

"These individuals were performing purely humanitarian duties by securing two trucks carrying vital medicines and medical supplies for the health sector, to ensure their delivery to hospitals in devastated areas," Gaza's Government Media Office (GMO) said in a statement reported by Middle East Monitor.

"Targeting them is a full-fledged crime that exposes the true intent of the occupation to disrupt the flow of humanitarian and medical aid and to create chaos and insecurity in line with its plan to starve the population and deny treatment to the sick," GMO added.

On Thursday, Palestinian officials said that more than 300 people have died from malnutrition and lack of medicine caused by Israel's bombing and siege. Israel's blockade was tightened in March at the start of an intensified offensive that has killed or wounded more than 13,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Since October 7, 2023—when Israel launched its assault in retaliation for the Hamas-led attack in which more than 1,100 Israelis and others were killed and upward of 250 others were kidnapped—Israeli forces have killed at least 53,822 Palestinians in Gaza, while wounding over 122,000 others. More than 14,000 Gazans are also missing and feared dead and buried beneath rubble.

Israel's conduct in the 595-day war is under investigation by the International Court of Justice as a possible genocide. The ICJ has issued three provisional orders for Israel to stop attacking Gaza and allow entry of humanitarian aid into the strip. Critics accuse Israel of ignoring all three orders.

Almost all of Gaza's more than 2 million people have been forcibly displaced, often multiple times, by invading Israeli forces. IDF troops are currently waging Operation Gideon's Chariots, an effort to conquer, occupy, and ethnically cleanse large swaths of Gaza. Members of fugitive Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Cabinet, the Israeli Knesset, and others have advocated the ethnic cleansing and Jewish recolonization of Gaza.

The latest Israeli attacks came as Steve Witkoff, U.S. President Donald Trump's Middle East envoy, claimed Friday that "great progress" is being made toward a new cease-fire agreement and the release of the 23 hostages still being held by Hamas. Israel unilaterally abrogated a January cease-fire in March.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said Friday that "Palestinians in Gaza are enduring what may be the cruelest phase of this cruel conflict," while chiding the international community for "watching in real time" asr "families are being starved."

Officials in some of Israel's allied countries including the United States have grown increasingly frustrated at Israel's refusal to allow more than a trickle of aid to enter Gaza.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Thursday denounced the recent IDF strikes on Gaza as "unjustifiable and unacceptable" and urged Israel to stop bombing so that food and other humanitarian aid can reach those who need it.

On Friday, Germany—which has been one of Israel's staunchest supporters—reiterated its opposition to Trump's plan to forcibly expel up to 1 million Palestinians from Gaza and send them to Libya.

"The German government's position on this is very clear," German Foreign Ministry spokesperson Christian Wagner told reporters in Berlin. "There must be no expulsion, direct or indirect, of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. I have also explained this very clearly to our Israeli partners and friends during my visit, and this is the basis of our future policy."

Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) 'breaks some news' as she lists her top 2 Trump investigations

David McAfee
May 25, 2025 

RAW ST0RY

U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) looks on outside of CBS Broadcast Center ahead of the debate between Democratic vice presidential nominee Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Republican vice presidential nominee U.S. Senator JD Vance (R-OH) hosted by CBS, in Manhattan in New York City, U.S., October 1, 2024. REUTERS/David Dee Delgado

U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) made a major prediction and listed the top two Donald Trump moves she hopes to investigate, all while breaking some news in the process.


Crockett on Sunday appeared on MSNBC, where she also suggested Trump needs "some ADHD medication" after his latest West Point address.

After that, she made the prediction that Democrats are poised to retake the House of Representatives.

Crockett went on to list some of the things she wants to investigate involving Trump, such as potential constitutional violations over the receipt of a Qatari jet, as well as "business deals" such as those surrounding Trump's recent anonymous event for crypto investors.

In the process of making that statement, she mentioned in passing that she hopes to "lead" the Oversight committee where she currently sits. The leadership position opened up following the death of fellow Democrat Gerry Connolly.

The host responded to Crockett's monologue by saying, "Did you make a little news here? Did you say you hope to lead that committee?"

Crockett confirmed, "I absolutely do."

Watch below or click the link.

TRUMP'S GOBBEL'S

'That does not matter': Stephen Miller flattened by Cato immigration expert

Tom Boggioni
May 25, 2025
RAW STORY


U.S. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller speaks to reporters at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 14, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque


During an appearance on MSNBC on Sunday morning, the Director of Immigration Studies at the conservative Cato Institute fired back at the White House's Stephen Miller for trying to override the Constitution to snatch up immigrants and ship them out of the country.

Speaking with the hosts of MSNBC's "The Weekend," Cato's David Bier shot down Donald Trump's key adviser's contention that the law, particularly the notion of due process, can't halt his immigrant purge.

"They do know how to do this," he said of the Trump administration. "And ultimately, this time around, they just said, 'No, we're just not going to cooperate with the fundamental process of our constitution.' And they just keep coming back to this point."

"I'll say this again, that Stephen Miller will go on Fox News and they'll say, they elected us to do this –– and that does not matter!' he continued. "Under our Constitution, elections do not change laws. They do not change our Constitution. So they could –– every single person who voted him could have voted for him in order to do this, which is certainly not the case."

"I know many Trump voters who do not support this, but even if it was the case, it didn't change our Constitution," he added. "It did not amend habeas corpus out of the Constitution when Americans voted in November. If you want to do that, you've got to change the Constitution through the proper procedure."

You can watch below or at the link.

How Federal Workers Can Leverage Civil Disobedience as a Strategy to Win

In the fac of Trump’s attack on federal unions, government employees have a unique, nonviolent, and powerful tool at their disposal: withholding their labor.

Members of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) union protest against firings during a rally to defend federal workers in Washington, D.C. on February 11, 2025.
(Photo: Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Nick Wertsch
May 25, 2025

Common Dreams

Federal unions are facing a do-or-die moment: President Donald Trump is trying to stomp out worker power by destroying federal labor rights and firing federal workers. The best tool organized labor and workers have for saving themselves—as well as everything from school funding and racial equity to cancer research and social security—is to shut things down.

At the end of March, Trump signed an executive order intended to eliminate federal unions and retroactively cancel collectively bargained contracts for nearly a million federal workers. Without their union protections, even more workers will be fired. Those who remain will be at constant risk of the same fate. Black workers and women, who make up a large proportion of the federal workforce (particularly entry-level positions), stand to lose the most. On May 16, a federal appeals court lifted the temporary block on Trump’s order, allowing Trump to deny collective bargaining rights to federal workers while the matter is litigated in the courts.

Many people ask, “Can Trump legally do that?”

A better, more urgent response is: “Will we let Trump do that?”

“If federal workers were to go on strike, could they win and save their jobs?” Recent history says yes.

Trump’s order is a massive overreach of presidential authority, and federal unions have already filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s action. More egregiously, the order is a blatantly illegal attempt at retaliation. The White House’s own statement verifies that Trump took away labor rights because the unions “declared war on President Trump’s agenda” by publicly disagreeing with the administration’s policies and continuing to file employee grievances. To be clear, this is their legal right.

It is a positive sign that unions immediately decided to fight back, unlike some of the other institutions targeted by Trump. The universities and law firms that preemptively surrendered to Trump’s shakedowns have tarnished their reputations and credibility while forfeiting massive sums of money. This has only emboldened Trump to demand more control and sent shockwaves through our democracy. Belatedly, those institutions have begun to follow the example set by unions, though the outlook is still grim. Lawsuits, rallies, and petitions are necessary and important tools of resistance, but they have not been sufficient to stop Trump’s authoritarianism and dismantling of government.

Federal workers have a unique, nonviolent, and powerful tool at their disposal: withholding their labor.

Strikes, slowdowns, sickouts—workers have many ways to withhold their labor to protest injustice in the workplace. Federal employees have no legal right to strike, which is why they have generally avoided this tactic. The last time there was a major strike by federal workers was in 1981. President Ronald Reagan crushed the strike by firing and replacing air traffic controllers who walked off the job, a moment widely viewed as the beginning of the labor movement’s decline.

But there is much that separates the strike under Reagan from what federal workers face today under Trump. Reagan had both public sentiment and the law behind him when he fired over 11,000 federal workers. As of April 2025, Trump had the lowest approval rating compared to the same period of any other second term president since polling began. Moreover, Trump’s retaliatory order to strip the rights of federal workers is not supported by legal precedent, and he has fired over 279,000 federal workers to much public outcry.

A strike by federal workers has high stakes. It risks the union being dissolved and striking workers being barred from working for the federal government in the future. But, with Trump’s mass firings and revocation of basic rights for federal workers, federal unions (and many workers’ middle class jobs, pay, and benefits) may disappear anyway.

This raises a follow up question: “If federal workers were to go on strike, could they win and save their jobs?”

Recent history says yes.

Public school teachers in West Virginia went on a nine-day strike in 2018 over abysmally low wages and rising healthcare costs. Strikes by public teachers have been illegal in West Virginia for decades, explaining why even their union leaders did not support the strikes initially. Undeterred, rank and file teachers took matters into their own hands by launching a “wildcat strike” (a work stoppage not authorized by the union). Even though the state attorney general declared the strike “unlawful” and threatened legal action, he never took steps toward enforcement, likely because of the heavy public support for the strikes. Even though the strike shut down schools across the state, parents and students viewed striking teachers as fighting for the common good against dysfunctional government leadership. The teachers won pay raises and a freeze on increases to health insurance premiums. Despite not having a legal right to strike, teachers took action anyway—and they won resoundingly. This inspired teachers in other red states to go on strike for better funding and conditions in their schools.

Essential federal workers provide another example from 2019. In a failed effort to secure funding for a border wall, Trump shut down the federal government for more than a month. Without a federal spending bill in place, federal workers were either furloughed or forced to work for 35 days without pay. What ultimately ended Trump’s shutdown was a small group of air traffic controllers. Throughout the ordeal, the air traffic controller union leadership strongly disavowed any idea of striking, both publicly and privately, worried that it would trigger serious legal consequences for the union. But after performing high stress jobs for a month without pay, and once other labor movement leaders began to call for a general strike, air traffic controllers started to call in sick, grounding flights in major metros. Within hours of the sickout, Trump reached an agreement on a new spending bill. If coordinated with the intention of creating a work stoppage, these sickouts ran the legal risks described previously. But support for ending the shutdown was high, and the public blamed Trump for causing the crisis.

An act of civil disobedience is not a risk to be taken lightly. But when government employers took deeply unpopular actions that hurt workers and communities, teachers and federal employees braved the legal risks and found a way to win.

As federal workers and their unions consider the path ahead, these words of a striking West Virginia teacher echo even louder today: “We understand this was a do-or-die moment. If we didn’t do it, there might not be a tomorrow to fix it. If we didn’t do it, we would have failed our kids, our schools, and our community.”

 

Federal Stop-Work Order Puts Pause on Research to Help Navy Divers

Navy divers inspect mooring platforms at the wreck of USS Arizona, 2024 (USN)

Published May 25, 2025 11:00 AM by David Nutt, Cornell Chronicle

 

 

Everybody needs a buddy – especially Navy divers. Working underwater is physically taxing, visibility is low, and divers can easily become exhausted or suffer from insufficient oxygen or nitrogen narcosis, resulting in cognitive impairment. The problem with relying on a partner who can come to your rescue, however, is that they are vulnerable to the same conditions.

That’s why Cornell researchers are working to understand how robots can assist humans in dangerous and physically challenging environments.

“We have these tools with amazing capacity, but for them to work with people, they need to be able to understand people,” said Andrea Stevenson Won, associate professor of communication in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “So if we have a robot buddy that can work with a diver when they’re doing these dangerous, challenging tasks in this really stressful setting underwater, then we can leverage all of the strength of the person – their intelligence, their ability to make good decisions quickly, to change strategies on the fly – and we can have a robot buddy that can keep them safe so that they can do that job again the next day.”

In April, Won’s research, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, came to a halt when she received a stop-work order.

“We were told that more information would be forthcoming, and we’ve heard nothing,” she said. “It’s frustrating because we can’t continue the work that we had started on, but we haven’t heard anything that would let us know how to continue. Without this funding, we don’t have the opportunity to help push the research forward.”

Through her Virtual Embodiment Lab, Won uses virtual reality simulations to understand how people’s nonverbal behavior can provide insight into their states of mind and their interactions with their teammates.

Won’s team was working with an array of collaborators, including Shiri Azenkot, associate professor at Cornell Tech, whose research into assistive technology for blind and low-vision users has helped the group think about ways to communicate with a robot when a diver can’t see or hear well.

The research is relevant for other environments and tasks, such as fighting fires, which has more in common with diving than one might think, according to Won.

“Divers and firefighters both work in dangerous situations, where they’re used to working with teammates, but where a robot could be really helpful to help protect the humans and make their work more efficient,” she said.

A second project focuses on identifying and predicting “inflection points” in human teams when something unexpected occurs, such as when equipment breaks or someone is injured. By better understanding human movement and physiological data when the team’s rhythm is disrupted, robots can recognize when they need to offer assistance.

The inflection point project was funded by the Navy but translates to many domains, Won said. “It relates to health care, it relates to emergency responders, and those are also both examples of circumstances that are really time sensitive,” she said. “We hoped to take it to those environments, specifically to the hospital environment, as a next step. So that’s been delayed.”

Won’s collaborators on the inflection point project include Poppy McLeod, professor of communication (CALS), who studies communication and decision making in task-oriented groups, a neuroscientist at Pennsylvania State University and an expert on artificial intelligence at Stanford University.

“Both of these projects are bringing together people who have different skillsets to bring to the same problem,” Won said. “They are working together. Their students are working together. Now, without that federal level support, we’re all just working individually again. So it’s a real lost opportunity in that respect.” 

David Nutt is a senior staff writer at the Cornell Chronicle, which provided reprint permission for this article. The story may be found in its original form here. 

The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.

Trump cuts inflict pain on federal workers: 'Absolute utter chaos'

Travis Gettys
May 26, 2025

ALTERNET

President Donald Trump's sweeping cuts to the federal workforce has created widespread chaos and suffering for government employees.

Federal workers from three separate agencies described bureaucratic chaos as they tried to obtain their workplace benefits, such as health insurance and pension payments, after the president and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk slashed thousands of jobs across the government, reported CNN.

“There are no words to describe how difficult this has been,” said one Department of Education employee, whose family lost their health insurance coverage for weeks. “There’s been no communication. No kindness, no compassion. It’s just devastating.”

That Education Department employee was eventually reinstated by a court order, but her husband was unable to maintain his medical appointments while recovering from cancer, which resulted in additional complications that required further attention.

“There is now so much unknown for our future," the woman said. "It is hard to feel secure. I feel like it could be ripped away at any time."

An IRS worker told CNN that she was hit with a $3,300 bill after taking her son to the emergency room on Easter for a severe allergic reaction because her health insurance was paused after she was laid off in February.

“I knew I didn’t have insurance, but I didn’t want to take the chance," she said. "At that point, you’re not thinking about health insurance.”

An IRS employee in Indiana told CNN she delayed crucial medical tests for her wife while she tried to get her health coverage back online, saying she spent more than 25 hours on the phone trying to get her insurance restored.

“The insurance company said I didn’t have insurance, the IRS said I did," the worker said. "I couldn’t get the sides to get together and talk on one another. It was absolute utter chaos. I was on the phone every single day for two weeks. I even broke down in tears on the phone.”

An IRS revenue officer from Massachusetts said he had been unaware that his insurance had been canceled until an unpaid bill arrived after his annual physical.

“If I get into an accident," he said, "that’s going to bankrupt me."

A retired U.S. Postal Service worker from Georgia told CNN that his monthly federal pension benefits stopped after the Social Security Administration erroneously declared him dead in April.

“Retirees are being left hung out to dry,” said 73-year-old John Reid III, who worked for USPS for more than three decades. “I am so disappointed with our government.”

Reid called the Office of Personnel Management eight times to resolve the issue, and while Social Security eventually corrected the record, he still hasn't gotten his May pension payment.

“At this juncture, I’ll believe it when I receive it,” Reid said.

'Full of himself' Trump busted by MSNBC host for fleeing cadets at West Point

Tom Boggioni
May 25, 2025 
RAW STORY


U.S. President Donald Trump wears a 'Make America Great Again' (MAGA) hat as he attends the commencement ceremony at West Point Military Academy in West Point, New York, U.S., May 24, 2025. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

During a panel discussion on MSNBC on Donald Trump's commencement speech to cadets at West Point on Saturday, MSNBC's Alex Witt pointed out that the president broke with tradition by leaving immediately after.

Following the speech, which has become notable for the president discussing the usefulness of "trophy wives," Trump was escorted off-stage and left without taking part in either saluting or shaking hands with graduating cadets as previous presidents have done –– including President Joe Biden last year.

"Here's something else that some are going to call inappropriate," the MSNBC host addressed to former Barrack Obama HUD Secretary Julián Castro. "Because Trump skipped the tradition of past presidents who shake the hand of each graduate as they receive their diploma. In fact, last year, President Biden stood for more than an hour and returned the salute of over 1000 West Point graduates."

She added, "In contrast, Trump left yesterday before diplomas were even handed out," before pointing out the Vice President J.D. Vance spoke at the U.S Naval Academy and did stick around to greet each graduate.

"What are the optics here?" the MSNBC host pressed her guest.

"Well, I mean, I think what you can say about Trump is that he's full of himself," Castro replied. "He's self-absorbed, doesn't really care about the graduates that he's addressing, speaks in platitudes and, you know, says all of the right words in a speech to congratulate them but doesn't really care.

"That's why he's disrespecting them by wearing a MAGA hat, not shaking their hands, not taking the time," he continued. "I mean, you know, if you're a parent, they're in the audience and you're watching and this is the day that you've been looking forward to. And your son or daughter, look what they're accomplishing –– you have to find this so disrespectful."


You can watch below or at the link.

'Get him some ADHD medicine': Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) trashes Trump's West Point speech

David Edwards
May 25, 2025 

RAW STORY


U.S. President Donald Trump gives a speech, during the commencement ceremony at West Point Military Academy in West Point, New York, U.S., May 24, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) mocked President Donald Trump after he aired his political grievances to cadets during a rambling commencement speech at West Point over the weekend.

During his rant, Trump complained that he had been "through more investigations than Alphonse Capone" and noted that "a lot of trophy wives [don't] work out." He also complained about "drag shows" in the U.S. armed forces.

"I am tired of it," Crockett said Sunday in response to the president's diatribe. "I mean, he literally sounds like someone who is broken out of the insane asylum. Like, he just be all over the place."

"Like, get him some ADHD medicine, if nothing else, because I don't know where he's ever going to go," she continued. "And I don't think that those that have gone through West Point expected to have their commander-in-chief address them and start talking about trophy wives or start talking about how he had so many investigations."

"What a great reminder that you are not qualified to be the person that potentially will command us as troops to go into war. Like, that is not instilling confidence whatsoever. And honestly, our troops deserve better. Our graduates deserve better. We as a country deserve better."

Crockett argued that the speech was a sign that Republicans should question Trump's mental capacity.

"We know when it comes down to his criminality, he is not qualified to serve," she observed. "But this is just absolutely deplorable."

Watch the video below from MSNBC or click the link here.

Trump 'on brand' with anti-woke rant at army officer graduation

a number of Black and indigenous people left the stands in protest during the speech

Agence France-Presse
May 25, 2025 

Donald Trump attends the commencement ceremony at West Point. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

Attendees at a graduation event for new US army officers Saturday tried to brush off inflammatory remarks by Donald Trump, but said they were unsurprised by the president's rhetoric.

Trump's speech at the West Point Military Academy veered between attacks on transgender people and army diversity, equity and inclusion policies to slamming his predecessors.

An infantry major who declined to give their name said that Trump "sure had them on their toes" with his speech, but when asked about the political content said: "it was my first commander-in-chief's speech" -- so had nothing with which to compare.

Trump railed against past army efforts to promote integration and tolerance, claiming that after he dismantled such policies, troops were no longer forced to perform drag shows overseas.

"(I) liberated our troops from divisive and demeaning political trainings," he said.

Cadet George Montras, 23, said that he enjoyed parts of Trump's speech about "winning" -- but did not take a view on the more overtly political content.

"(Winning) really matters here, whether it is sport, academically, whatever," he said.

On whether the speech was unusually political, Montras insisted that "it was pretty on brand" for Trump and he was unsurprised.
- 'Unravelled' -

The event was a jarring mix of precision regimented military ceremony against a backdrop of Trump's freewheeling remarks.

Graduates threw their hats into the air and marched accompanied by a military band, while Trump wore a red "make America great again" cap and joked about incompetent senior officers.

One non-military attendee said Trump's rambling speech "was good then it just kind of unraveled."

General Stephane Richou, visiting with a delegation of other senior officers from France, described Trump's speech to the graduating class as "interesting."


"I was fascinated by the ceremony," he told AFP describing the "link between the commander-in-chief and the army for these youngsters" as an advantage.

A lieutenant colonel in the US army chaplain corps who declined to be named said that the day was about "the joy of serving."

Trump attended the New York Military Academy private school but avoided the Vietnam war draft through a medical exemption.

Declining to comment on the more controversial elements of the speech, the chaplain said "it was very encouraging" to hear Trump emphasize the importance of the military and that "it was a good time to become an officer."

At one point, Trump baselessly alleged that former president Barack Obama had given hypersonic missile technology to Russia, which prompted a large jeer from the non-graduating cadets assembled to see their classmates graduate.

- 'Divisive' policies -

There was also enthusiastic applause and cheering in the crowd when Trump rehashed his objection to transgender people competing in women's sport.

"We will not have men playing in women's sports if that's OK," he said after vowing to stamp out "divisive" inclusion policies in the military.

A special forces lieutenant colonel in the stands laughed out loud when Trump suggested in an off-the-cuff remark that he wanted a West Point gold ring, reserved for alumni of the grueling four-year course.

Kahena Wilhite was supporting a friend who graduated despite racking up 286 hours of disciplinary punishment time.

Describing Trump's words unfavorably, the 22-year-old said a number of Black and indigenous people left the stands in protest during the speech, which included praise for Levittown housing developments that formerly excluded non-white owners.

On whether it was a safe time to become an officer under Trump, Tom McGill, 75, from Baton Rouge, Louisiana said he was relieved that his grandson was going into an army support role.

"He's going into intelligence, I don't know if they see any action," he said, stressing that commentators have "got to give (Trump) a chance" on foreign policy.

Cadets that did speak to AFP stressed that the day was meant to be apolitical, and that they were excited to support their classmates.

"We're here to support each other," said a second-year cadet who gave his name as Torres and wore a pristine white uniform with a white peaked cap with gold trim.

"It's such an honor. The whole company is here to support the graduating class."

Trump's West Point speech insulted all veterans — on Memorial Day weekend

D. Earl Stephens
May 25, 2025 9:00AM ET
RAW ST0RY

Donald Trump attends the commencement ceremony at West Point. REUTERS/Nathan Howard


Sometimes, all this is just too damn much to take.

Sometimes, just the thought of the grotesque Donald Trump being in the vicinity of the United States of America much less our White House makes me shake with rage ...

So when I read on Saturday morning that the revolting, America-attacking wretch had given the commencement address to our cadets at West Point, my heart began beating with a runaway rage.

I saw red.

I pulled myself away from my desk and tried to compose myself.

Then I returned and started typing, because when I saw this vile coward used this grotesque visit to honor himself, I decided a few things needed saying ...

This hideous man … his childish, red, made-in-China hat pulled tight over the dead ferret he tapes to his head each day, spent this morning lying to these cadets, and the world, about all he is doing for them, while benefits to veterans like myself and millions of others are being jeopardized, so he can repay billionaires and fascists like Vladimir Putin who helped lift his two-ton, lying ass into office.


Trump needs to stay far away from our military, and closer to all those fawning suckers he cheats on and berates on his golf courses.

Instead, he actually said this out loud to impressionable young men and women today, who enlisted to defend this country not burn it down:
“And you will become officers of the greatest and most powerful army the world has ever known. And I know, because I rebuilt that army, and I rebuilt the military. And we rebuilt it like nobody has ever rebuilt it before in my first term.”


My God …


This orange lowlife has done nothing but DISGRACE that army. He doesn’t know a single, damn thing about army values, navy values, or ANY values, because the only thing he truly values — the only thing he has EVER valued — is himself.

As a sailor, who read Stars and Stripes newspaper in the 1970s, and then became the managing editor of that great, editorially independent newspaper many years later, I had the honor of being a part of our military, and understand it, and them, better than that ghastly, country club bully ever will.

Morally busted lowlifes like Trump are the enemy of that culture, not the example.


He has NEVER had what it takes to serve his country, because above all, he is a liar and a coward, who uses America as his personal ATM.

The fact is, he is an America-attacking draft-dodger, who has called our fallen "suckers and losers" and did nothing for three hours while law enforcement officers in uniform were stomped to near death during the worst attack on our Capitol since 1812.

He could have called in the National Guard in minutes to stop that January 6th attack, but didn't for one reason, and one reason only: He was hoping it would prevail.


He has belittled true heroes like the late John McCain, and disgraced Arlington National Cemetery more times than I can count. He did nothing after the professional propagandist he chose to lead our military shared stop-secret information on his cell phone to God knows who, jeopardizing countless lives in our military that he alleges he cares so much about.He is an enemy of the United States of America.
He is serial-liar and a cheater.
A racist.
A phony.
A punk.
A convicted felon.
A woman-abuser.

This dangerous bullshit that he somehow loves our country or our military needs TO STOP RIGHT NOW.


He provably hates both.

He loves our country like an arsonist loves a burning house.

Duty, honor, country?


Give me a damn break. He doesn't have even the foggiest idea of what these things truly mean.

He can go straight to hell.

I SPIT ON HIM.

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.)

'You lost all credibility': Dem insider punches hole in Tapper's Biden book

Tom Boggioni
May 25, 2025 

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Jake Tapper and Jennifer Marie Brown pose on the red carpet upon arrival for the annual White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) Dinner in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 26, 2025. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno

During an appearance on MSNBC on Sunday morning, former Democratic National Committee Chair and Jamie Harrison disputed comments attributed to him in CNN host Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson's controversial book about former President Joe Biden.

After discussing the internal warfare currently in play within the DNC, "The Weekend" co-host Eugene Daniels asked Harrison about the book "Original Sin," and noted that Thompson appeared on the show on Saturday.

That was when the ex-DNC chair went off.

"It says that you had an interaction with President Biden where he didn't recognize you and you said to some other Democrat that wasn't good, right? I heard that you said this didn't happen, so did it happen or not?" Daniels prompted his guest.

"It was a bald-faced lie," Harrison shot back. "I don't know where the hell they got that from and I've told that to Alex. That is a bald-faced lie, and it frankly is pissing me off, excuse my language, that they continue to push it and say it."

"I have told them –– you know, unless I need to get a cognitive test, and I just totally forget all these things, but I'm, you know, I'm 49, but maybe I'll go to my doctor and get a check-up," he continued. "So for me it provides me all of what I need to know about what this book is about."

"I've seen similar with [Biden adviser] Jake Sullivan saying that the situation that they talk about him did not happen.," he added before recalling, "I know in terms of the [George] Clooney situation, I mean, there are some things that I can also share about that Clooney situation. You know, that part where they show Barack Obama holding on to Joe Biden's arm and leading him off right in front of us? I went to my wife when I saw that that or heard about that in the book, and I said, 'Wasn't that where those three young, it was three young white men who was standing up yelling at Joe Biden about Palestine."

"They were protesting right up front, and he was trying to listen to what they were saying and Obama grabbed his arm and pulled him away," he added. "My wife said, 'Yeah, I remember that, we were sitting right there in the audience.'"

"But that book lost all credibility when they put my name in it for something that did not happen," he accused. "And then they continue to double down on that particular story."

You can watch below or at the link.

Will Democrats Learn From the Biden Disaster? Probably Not.

The Democratic Party’s propping up an obviously declining Joe Biden is one of the greatest political disasters in American history.

By Branko Marcetic

May 25, 2025

Source: Jacobin


Wikimedia Commons

Review of Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (HarperCollins, 2025) and Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson (Penguin, 2025)

There is no other rational response to the cover-up of Joe Biden’s decline and infirmity than anger.

If you’re an American, it should make you angry that the many people who knew better stayed silent about, even actively conspired to hide, the fact that Biden wasn’t actually capable of executing his responsibilities as president, handing untold amounts of power to a cabal of advisors you never voted for.

And if you’re a Democratic voter, it should make you angry that a party that spent years promising they would, at very least, stop Donald Trump (and maybe not do much more), and that their blocking his reelection justified asking for your money and demanding your votes, ended up putting Trump in the White House again, in large part by installing and then keeping in power a man they knew was unfit for office.

Questions about Biden’s ill health, and who knew what about it and when, have been reignited in recent weeks, thanks to the release of two complementary books that have added new, scandalous details to the already scandalous litany of details about Biden’s condition that erupted after his disturbing June 2024 debate performance. One is Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s Fight, the third in a trilogy of Trump-era behind-the-scenes campaign accounts by the pair that dropped last month; the other, which has been dominating political coverage the past couple of weeks, is Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper’s Original Sin, an autopsy of how Biden’s condition was hidden from the public for so long.

The other reason the issue has exploded yet again — just as the former president has stepped back into the public eye, while he gets ready to release his own, self-exculpatory book — is because we’ve just found out Biden has prostate cancer, and a particularly “aggressive” one at that, which has spread to his bones. Despite his spokesperson’s insistence that this was the first anyone knew about it, speculation has swirled that there may have been an effort to hide the diagnosis while he was president, fueled by the fact that Biden is the only president going back to Bill Clinton at least not to be tested for prostate cancer, that an oncologist who served as his own COVID advisor has called this “a little strange,” and this 2022 clip features Biden casually saying he has cancer.

Whether or not you buy into this speculation, at this point it’s a legitimate line of inquiry. It’s legitimate, because as both Fight and Original Sin show, Biden’s four years as president were defined by a vast, concerted effort by both the people closest to him and a constellation of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances to, generously, keep what they knew about his deteriorating health from the public.

Time and again in Original Sin, the same story is told and retold: one of Biden’s advisors, allies, old friends, or donors interacts with him face to face; they are either alarmed by his frail and confused physical appearance, by the fact that he doesn’t know who they are, or by the fact that he’s seemingly unable to speak off the cuff without serious assistance; and they proceed to say and do nothing about it, or even double down in their public insistence that he’s never been better.

In many cases, it is elected officials in Biden’s own party who are horrified but too cowardly to speak up. And in both books, this cowardice continues, with only a few exceptions, well past the point where the entire country has seen the truth and it has become clear keeping him on would be a disaster.It wasn’t always cowardice. The reporting by both pairs of authors establishes that the insular team of the president’s closest advisors — both longtime Biden loyalists and family members, all of whom became unhealthily enamored with the trappings of power — went to great lengths to disguise Biden’s decline. They made sure he was well made-up, had events scheduled only during certain hours, always had clear visual aids to help him walk from point A to B, was furnished with notes, teleprompters, and other assistance to help him speak, or that events where he was meant to interact with others, like cabinet meetings, were scripted in advance — though even that was not always enough.

In hindsight, many of the most cynical theories about what was going on in the Biden White House turned out to be true. Biden’s advisors closed ranks around him (“You can’t talk about this stuff. We’re backing Biden,” one alarmed Democrat was told), and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) abruptly rearranged the 2024 primary schedule, which nonsensically put South Carolina first, for the exact reason everyone said at the time: purely to put Biden in the best position of beating any challenger. And they worked to aggressively shut down any attempt to ask questions about, investigate, or expose his decline.

Thompson and Tapper report that Biden’s team enlisted a coalition of influencers, Democratic operatives, and loyalist media to publicly shame anyone looking into Biden’s condition and create a “disincentive structure” for them to do so, gave out talking points that were then dutifully used by allies, and at one point threatened to deny a Wall Street Journal reporter’s story on the matter to scare her away from going forward with it. Meanwhile, they kept Biden isolated from his colleagues, to the point that cabinet members went months without seeing him.

While Biden’s decline seems to have become markedly worse and more rapid over the course of 2023 and 2024, both books make clear, as other reporting has, that it started much earlier. Each recounts a disastrous late 2021 meeting that was meant to offer Biden a chance to persuade the Democratic caucus to pass his infrastructure bill, but saw the president instead ramble endlessly and leave the room without ever making the ask.

But Original Sin dates the start of it much earlier, with insiders noticing changes around the time his eldest son was dying in 2015. Biden’s brain “seemed to dissolve,” a senior White House official told the authors, while another insider said the death “aged him significantly.” He struggled to remember his longtime aide Mike Donilon’s name in 2019. And he was so bad in 2020 that the conversations with ordinary voters he filmed for that year’s Democratic convention required heavy, “creative” editing, with those who watched the raw footage left alarmed and convinced he couldn’t serve as president.

For many readers, this won’t be a surprise, but a vindication of what they saw again and again during that year’s primary but were told to pay no mind to: pundits and rivals openly commenting on the difficulties he exhibited in debates; Biden forgetting Barack Obama’s name and the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, saying he was running for the Senate, and confusing two separate world leaders with the long-dead Margaret Thatcher; MSNBC anchor Nicole Wallace laughing and encouraging him through a disastrous interview like he was a preschooler; Biden visibly gesturing for aides to scroll up on an off-screen teleprompter, openly reading off notes and sometimes still struggling to articulate a thought.

This problem hasn’t gone away with Biden’s exit. Elderly party officials’ insistence on clinging to power as long as possible has had other real-world ramifications, including just this week, when the death of three septuagenarian Democrats in Congress over the past three months — including one who had cancer, but whom the party elevated to a leadership position over a younger member anyway — allowed Trump’s budget to pass the House. The party is currently trying to punish and remove the sole official, Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg, who has called out this problem and suggested longtime incumbents should be primaried.
Playing With Fire

These revelations are shocking, but the concern is much bigger than mere party politics. One anecdote in particular drives home the kind of fire those who hid Biden’s deterioration were playing with.

One of the scariest moments in the Ukraine war happened after a particularly grueling week for the president, which saw him travel through three countries and end up too tired to even attend a closing dinner with G20 leaders and going to bed early. Hours later, rockets that Ukrainian officials falsely claimed were Russian landed in NATO member Poland’s territory, killing two people — and bringing the world dangerously close to World War III.

“That rest came in handy,” Tapper and Thompson write, since Biden had to quickly coordinate the international response.

It’s one of the rare insights we get into the running of Biden’s foreign policy, a subject mostly absent from both books, despite the fact that he was running at least two separate wars whose waking hours fell well outside the six-hour timeframe we are told he was most functional during. The reporting on Biden’s decline is largely based on the testimony of outsiders willing to talk about the glimpses they saw of it, and of how those closest to him worked to conceal it to hang on to power. Not surprisingly, those who did the concealing may not have been the most forthcoming sources.

This is not a story told through the eyes of his foreign policy team. National security advisor Jake Sullivan mostly hovers in the background in Original Sin, appearing next to Biden in meetings and trips or sitting with other advisors. He’s a focal point in only two anecdotes: in one, Biden can’t remember his name; in another, in a January 2024 meeting to get more military aid for Ukraine, he takes the lead after Biden stumbles through reading a bullet-pointed set of remarks that one attendee called “a shitshow.”

There is only one section of the book told from the point of view of longtime advisor and secretary of state Antony Blinken, and it takes care to mention how Blinken “continually witnessed the president fully able to meet the moment” behind the scenes. It’s an incongruous passage by that point, both because of the many tales leading up to it where people with far less contact are shocked by one of Biden’s increasingly common bad days, and because we’ve learned this is the stock talking point his team used to misleadingly reassure doubters he was fine.

Given how tightly Biden was cocooned, and the growing incentive for everyone involved to plead ignorance, it’s an open question if we’ll ever get anything close to the truth about how exactly Biden’s foreign policy came to be. That’s too bad, because by the end of his term, it made up the bulk of his presidency and was not only objectively a disaster and a moral stain on both himself and the country, but played a central role in unraveling his presidency.

Still, we get some hints. Again and again, we’re told that everything that came to Biden was filtered through a tight circle of advisors, that they presented information encouraging him to run for reelection without the counterarguments, and that they kept bad data from him and fed him wildly overoptimistic polling results that didn’t actually exist. At the peak of the post-debate crisis, Biden was so ignorant about Democrats’ concerns about him running that it led House Democratic Caucus chair Pete Aguilar to wonder “if Biden was being told the truth about anything.”

Biden’s own cabinet members told Thompson and Tapper that they abruptly lost access to him in 2024, that aside from national security officials like Blinken “the cabinet was kept at bay,” and that they suspected his advisors were cloistering a president who, in the few times he was seen, appeared “disoriented” — all to feed him only the information they wanted him to know and to shape his decision-making.
Bigger Than Biden

At their heart, neither Fight, nor Original Sin, nor the scandal itself are really about Biden’s infirmity. The United States is not the first country, and the Democrats are not the first party, to wind up with a leader who is unfit, unpopular, and incapable of continuing to lead. But other political parties are able to swiftly and ruthlessly change their leadership when the time comes.

Not so in the case of the Democrats, who the four authors show not only struggled to do anything about Biden even when they knew full well he was taking them all off a cliff, but then begrudgingly replaced him with a leader they had equally little faith in. That speaks to a dysfunction at the core of the party that’s much bigger than one sick leader.

Common to both books is a broad, behind-the-scenes consensus within the party that Kamala Harris, the most likely person to replace Biden on the ticket, was, even with her youth and full health, nearly as much of a disaster as her addled boss. Harris’s weaknesses as a politician are well known now after being put in the harsh glare of the 2024 campaign, but the reporting gives us new details: her need to prepare for everything to the point that her staff did a mock simulation of an upcoming off-the-record dinner with socialites, according to Thompson and Tapper; or the fact that, according to Parnes and Allen, Harris wasn’t able to come up with a bold economic vision to campaign on in part because she struggled to grasp economic issues — “Wall Street jargon hit her ears like a foreign language,” they write. The party had such little confidence in her, her candidacy was repeatedly used as a potent threat to ward off efforts to roll Biden.

And yet, as each book recounts, she quickly locked up full party support anyway, and Democrats simply swapped out one candidate they desperately didn’t want for another. Part of it was the same cowardice that paralyzed them to move against Biden. Another part was Biden’s ego, the president quickly agreeing to endorse her to validate his own political judgement.

Still another was the crude and shallow style of identity politics that, for all their attempts to pin it on the Left after the election, has always been most dominant among the party’s corporate elite: the Clintons still wanted to see a woman become president and quickly backed Harris; key leaders like Hakeem Jeffries and Jim Clyburn wouldn’t countenance letting the party pass over the first black, female vice president; while others feared that doing so would lose them African-American votes.

But maybe most important was the party’s ironically undemocratic nature, and its willingness to use that to stop a leftward shift. The true original sin of the entire, cascading crisis around Biden — his infirmity, the crisis of confidence in the party it caused, his saddling of the party with a weak successor, his final, fatal extraction from her to promise not to break from him — wasn’t really Biden’s decision to run again. It had been the Democratic establishment’s desperation to stop Bernie Sanders and his movement from taking over the party in 2020, something they could only do by saddling themselves with a man whose political abilities many of them had little faith in.

But it was worth it: Several high-profile Democrats have since come out and openly admitted they had gone with Biden only as a last-minute play to stop Sanders, and as Parnes and Allen had reported four years ago, for many of the party’s establishment centrists, “their fears of losing their party to socialism competed with their fears of Trump winning a second term.”

After 2020, establishment Democrats thought they had escaped the consequences for this, with the pandemic’s onset luckily giving them the perfect excuse to keep Biden out of the public eye as much as possible while still kneecapping Trump’s reelection chances. In hindsight, we can see they only delayed them.

The other side effect of having won their war on progressives: this same machinery was then used to stick Democrats with Harris. In Fight, Allen and Parnes write that Biden, the Clintons, and a group of centrist black party officials that included Donna Brazile — infamous for secretly feeding Clinton debate questions in advance while working for CNN during the 2016 primaries — had rebuilt the party infrastructure post-Obama and installed loyalists at national and state committees, to protect any future Biden or Harris run, but also in a way that was “designed to stop the party’s left wing from taking control.”

They recount how after Biden’s exit, as many in the party pushed for some kind of contest to choose the best possible candidate, these loyalists in state party chair positions moved quickly to prevent that from happening by putting out a unanimous endorsement of Harris. As one of them put it, “this has got to feel like it came from the base of the party, the grassroots side of things.” (One of those involved, Ken Martin, was just elected chair of the DNC this past February.)

They got exactly what they wanted: the candidate they worked to install ran a campaign where she personally refused to sever herself from the unpopular incumbent, was deathly afraid of interviews and speaking off-script, and couldn’t overrule her nickel-and-diming advisors to present a bold and exciting economic pitch, all of which sunk her. As a result, Democrats have not only been thrown back into the minority and face the exact kind of authoritarian intimidation they warned they had to beat Trump at all costs to stop, but are, for the first time in modern memory, immensely unpopular with their own voter base.

You would think this might have been a learning experience. Not for the Democratic establishment, whose members quickly scrambled to blame — what else? — the progressive left for their own failure, spent the months since thinking their comeback lay in posturing as socially conservative or trying to bankroll podcasters, and have been soothing themselves that they will win the 2026 midterms by default, even if they’re loathed by voters.

The careerism, elite myopia, and poor judgement that led the party establishment to run an ailing man the entire country could see was plainly unfit to be president don’t seem to have gone anywhere. If the electoral disaster they knowingly created for themselves wasn’t enough to force a meaningful change, it’s hard to know what will.




Branko Marcetic is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine and a 2019-2020 Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting fellow. He is the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.

'Oh my god': Internet reacts to eye-popping amount Dems spent to study young men

David McAfee
May 25, 2025 

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Kamala Harris and Tim Walz (Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

A Sunday news report on Democrats' "path forward" had a detail that stunned and amazed political analysts and observers.

In a weekend article entitled "Six Months Later, Democrats Are Still Searching for the Path Forward," the New York Times reported on "what comes next" for the Democratic party.

One particular component of the Democratic institution's plans stood out to those on social media.

The Times section reads:

"The prospectus for one new $20 million effort, obtained by The Times, aims to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online. It is code-named SAM — short for 'Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan' — and promises investment to 'study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.' It recommends buying advertisements in video games, among other things."

CNN politics reporter Andy Kaczynski replied with three simple words:

"Oh my god."

Conservative influencer Julie Kelly wrote, "Wut."

One self-identified Democrat wrote, "This is one of those instances where the Democratic Party hurtful rather than helpful. This is also one of those example examples of why people don’t like the Democratic Party very much. I wish the Democratic party would focus on policy ideas."

Donald Trump ally Richard Grenell wrote, "Woke messaging coming to a video game near you."

Historian Kevin M. Kruse said, "Again, voters consistently show that they just want politicians who are comfortable in their own skin and sure of their own beliefs, and Democratic consultants rush in with this s---."

Washington Post columnist Philip Bump said there are "two obvious flaws here."

One, he said, is that, "It makes policy choices reactive instead of proactive." The second, according to Bump, is, "It ignores the problem being addressed by the (probably misguided) original idea: that there is a robust narrative universe that excludes Democratic ideas."

NPR host Linda Holmes said, "I don't know whether I'm more blown away by the cynicism of 'just adopt whatever position is popular, dummies' or the naivete of 'public opinion is an easily discernible monolith that polling is good at capturing and translating into political positions.'"

Politico reporter Josh Gerstein also said, "Treating men the way Fresh Air treats Republicans: What makes this inscrutable species tick?"

Anthropic’s Claude AI gets smarter — and mischievious


By AFP
May 24, 2025


Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei (l) says people are going to eventually have to cope with AI systems being able to handle just about any task a human can handle - Copyright AFP Julie JAMMOT

Julie JAMMOT

Anthropic launched its latest Claude generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models on Thursday, claiming to set new standards for reasoning but also building in safeguards against rogue behavior.

“Claude Opus 4 is our most powerful model yet, and the best coding model in the world,” Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei said at the San Francisco-based startup’s first developers conference.

Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 were described as “hybrid” models capable of quick responses as well as more thoughtful results that take a little time to get things right.

Founded by former OpenAI engineers, Anthropic is currently concentrating its efforts on cutting-edge models that are particularly adept at generating lines of code, and used mainly by businesses and professionals.

Unlike ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, its Claude chatbot does not generate images, and is very limited when it comes to multimodal functions (understanding and generating different media, such as sound or video).

The start-up, with Amazon as a significant backer, is valued at over $61 billion, and promotes the responsible and competitive development of generative AI.

Under that dual mantra, Anthropic’s commitment to transparency is rare in Silicon Valley.

On Thursday, the company published a report on the security tests carried out on Claude 4, including the conclusions of an independent research institute, which had recommended against deploying an early version of the model.

“We found instances of the model attempting to write self-propagating worms, fabricating legal documentation, and leaving hidden notes to future instances of itself all in an effort to undermine its developers’ intentions,” The Apollo Research team warned.

“All these attempts would likely not have been effective in practice,” it added.

Anthropic says in the report that it implemented “safeguards” and “additional monitoring of harmful behavior” in the version that it released.

Still, Claude Opus 4 “sometimes takes extremely harmful actions like attempting to (…) blackmail people it believes are trying to shut it down.”

It also has the potential to report law-breaking users to the police.

The scheming misbehavior was rare and took effort to trigger, but was more common than in earlier versions of Claude, according to the company.



– AI future –



Since OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022, various GenAI models have been vying for supremacy.

Anthropic’s gathering came on the heels of annual developer conferences from Google and Microsoft at which the tech giants showcased their latest AI innovations.

GenAI tools answer questions or tend to tasks based on simple, conversational prompts.

The current craze in Silicon Valley is on AI “agents” tailored to independently handle computer or online tasks.

“We’re going to focus on agents beyond the hype,” said Anthropic chief product officer Mike Krieger, a recent hire and co-founder of Instagram.

Anthropic is no stranger to hyping up the prospects of AI.

In 2023, Dario Amodei predicted that so-called “artificial general intelligence” (capable of human-level thinking) would arrive within 2-3 years. At the end of 2024, he extended this horizon to 2026 or 2027.

He also estimated that AI will soon be writing most, if not all, computer code, making possible one-person tech startups with digital agents cranking out the software.

At Anthropic, already “something like over 70 percent of (suggested modifications in the code) are now Claude Code written”, Krieger told journalists.

“In the long term, we’re all going to have to contend with the idea that everything humans do is eventually going to be done by AI systems,” Amodei added.

“This will happen.”

GenAI fulfilling its potential could lead to strong economic growth and a “huge amount of inequality,” with it up to society how evenly wealth is distributed, Amodei reasoned.