White House staffer indicted in Abramoff investigation: David H. Safavian, the former head of procurement policy for the White House budget office was indicted Wednesday on charges of obstructing investigators and lying about his ties to Jack Abramoff, the Washington lobbyist who is at the center of a federal investigation that has brought Representative Tom DeLay under scrutiny.
Pentagon analyst admits giving secrets to Israel: A former U.S. Defense Department analyst pleaded guilty to charges he gave classified military documents to unauthorized individuals.Lawrence A. Franklin, 58, who worked on the Pentagon’s Iran desk, pleaded guilty today in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, to three counts. He faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on the most serious of the charges.
Commerce Dept. clamps down on weather service media contacts: We really are living under a Soviet-style propaganda system. The Department of Commerce has issued a blanket media policy to employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), requiring that all requests for contact from national media be first approved by the Department.
When you’re the king — uh — president, you’ve got it made.
On your birthday you want your might and power displayed.
Hey, you’re turning 79,
So you think it’s just fine
To grift — uh — gift yourself a $100 million military parade.
“Canadians—40 million Canadians—are at a fever pitch right now. They’re willing to sacrifice. They’re patriotic, like patriotism I’ve never seen. We always say how Canadians are so polite. Well, they’re at a fever pitch right now and willing to do anything and sacrifice anything to protect their sovereignty.”
— Ontario Premier Doug Ford, in a conversation with David Frum.
”What distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison (in the modern sense) is that it functions outside of a judicial system. The prisoners are not indicted or convicted of any crime by judicial process.”
“We are living in a moment of extraordinary danger, and how we respond to this moment will not only impact our lives but it will affect the lives of our kids and future generations. We are living in a moment where a handful of billionaires control the economic and political life of our country.”
“Once you grasp Trump as an elected monarch, his full rebuke to the very idea of America comes into clearer view. He is precisely — almost uncannily — what this country was founded to oppose: an arbitrary, corrupt, mendacious, and utterly incompetent king.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) “raised nearly $10 million in the first three months of 2025, a stunning total for a House member and almost two-thirds of what she raised total in 2023 and 2024 combined,” the Daily Beast reports. “These funds came from more than 250,000 individual donors, with an average contribution of $21. Know what that sounds a lot like? The fundraising haul of a presidential candidate.”
Americans’ religious preferences have generally held steady in the past five years, after a sharp increase in the percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation and concurrent declines in Protestant and Catholic identification over the prior two decades, according to Gallup. In 2024, 45% of Americans identified as Protestant or nondenominational Christian, 21% as Catholic and 10% as another religion, with 22% not identifying with any religion. Those figures are each within one percentage point of their 2018-2020 levels.
Bloomberg: “Arrivals of non-citizens to the US by plane dropped almost 10% in March from a year earlier… Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimates in a worst-case scenario, the hit this year from reduced travel and boycotts could total 0.3% of gross domestic product, which would amount to almost $90 billion.”
“Beijing punched back with its own tariffs of 125 percent on all U.S. goods on Friday in response to President Donald Trump’s tariff increases, sharply escalating the spiraling trade tensions between the U.S. and China,” the Washington Post reports.