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(First column, 5th story, link)
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The ship's crew lost access last month to drinkable water, running toilets and air conditioning, as the fleet sees heavy use by the Trump administration.
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A new book by longtime Bay Area journalist Gil Durán investigates "tech fascism" and its mounting influence on U.S. politics. The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy follows the rise of Vice President JD Vance, the former venture capitalist whose "outsider" campaign for Senate was bankrolled by the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, Peter Thiel. Durán traces the ideological lineage of the current Trump administration back from Vance to Thiel and the far-right-wing monarchist Curtis Yarvin, whose "right-libertarian" political theory has long made the rounds among Silicon Valley elite. "These guys were never libertarians," says Durán. "Now that they are the government, we see their true face: They're fascists, and they're authoritarians."
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Andrew and Tristan Tate have been arrested in Miami after British authorities issued new rape and sex trafficking charges against them. The brothers, dual British-U.S. citizens, are prominent in the far-right, hypermasculine online community known as the "manosphere." They previously lived in Romania, where in 2023 prosecutors filed a criminal indictment against them for human trafficking, while Andrew faces a rape charge. Despite the charges, they were freed from travel restrictions in Romania early last year after White House officials reportedly took an interest in their case.
"Andrew Tate has become a really important political force for the MAGA movement," explains Heidi Blake, a reporter for The New Yorker. Despite the Tate brothers' popularity with prominent figures in the U.S. right wing, including Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk, Blake says the fact that the extradition request has been greenlit by the State Department suggests the Trump administration won't be protecting the Tates.
Blake's recent investigation, "Andrew Tate's Empire of Abuse," documents the Tate brothers' systematic exploitation of women over the past decade.
"What I was hearing from women I spoke to was an incredibly similar description of the way Andrew Tate would assault them, by choking them either 'til they passed out or 'til they couldn't breathe, raping them," says Blake. "Often they describe being beaten over the head, as well, during these assaults."
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The Trump administration has introduced a new interpretation of the Endangered Species Act, a bedrock of successful U.S. wildlife conservation for more than 50 years, dramatically weakening its power to protect natural habitats and opening vulnerable lands to real estate development, oil drilling and other extractive industries. A coalition of conservation groups is suing the Trump administration over the rule change. They are represented by the environmental law group Earthjustice and senior attorney Ben Levitan, who calls this latest Trump administration attack on the environment "a total repudiation of the premise that endangered species need places to have shelter, to have food, to raise their young."
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A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration's providing federal data to states to check and purge their voter rolls violated several laws prohibiting the disclosure.
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