January 25, 2025

US orders halt to virtually all foreign aid except for Israel and Egypt

Internal memo to US state department staff explicitly makes exceptions for military assistance to Israel and Egypt

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/24/foreign-aid-israel-egypt

The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has ordered a halt to virtually all US foreign aid, but made an exception for funding to Israel and Egypt, according to an internal memo to staff at the US state department.

“No new funds shall be obligated for new awards or extensions of existing awards until each proposed new award or extension has been reviewed and approved … as consistent with President Trump’s agenda,” said the memo.

The sweeping order appears to affect everything from development assistance to military aid – including potentially to Ukraine, which received billions of dollars in weapons under Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden as it tries to repel a Russian invasion.

But the memo explicitly made exceptions for military assistance to Israel – whose longstanding major arms packages from the US have expanded further since the Gaza war – and Egypt, which has received generous US defense funding since it signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979.

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January 24, 2025

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January 24, 2025

Why The "Godfather of AI" Now Fears His Own Creation - Geoffrey Hinton

Nothing Much Happens in AI, Then Everything Does All At Once




AI just got memory & learning - Google's breakthrough




How China’s New AI Model DeepSeek Is Threatening U.S. Dominance

January 24, 2025

Putin: war may not have happened if Trump election wasn't 'stolen'

The Russian president said he was ready to speak to his American counterpart, who he described as smart and pragmatic

https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/ukraine-drone-strike-forces-russia-to-close-munitions-factory-qnr2jpbw5

https://archive.ph/gKAN3



President Putin said the war in Ukraine might have been avoided had the US election not been “stolen” from Donald Trump in 2020. Repeating claims long made by the American leader, Putin, talking to a Russian TV reporter, also said that he was ready to meet Trump to discuss the conflict and other issues causing friction between the White House and the Kremlin.

“I cannot but agree with him that if he had been president — if his victory hadn’t been stolen in 2020 — then maybe there would not have been the crisis in Ukraine that emerged in 2022,” Putin said. He added: “It would be better for us to meet, based on the realities of today, to talk calmly on all those areas that are of interest to both the United States and Russia. We are ready.”

The Russian president also described Trump, who this week threatened to hit Moscow with new sanctions and tariffs if it did not negotiate an end to the war, as smart and pragmatic. During his presidential election campaign, and prior to it, Trump asserted that Putin only invaded Ukraine in February 2022 because of a lack of respect for Joe Biden’s leadership, and said it would not have happened if he had remained in the White House.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that he won the 2020 election and was denied the presidency by voter fraud. These claims have never been substantiated. Kyiv immediately responded to the comments from Putin, claiming that any negotiations over Ukraine must include European leaders.

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fuck off Pootie

January 24, 2025

Trump's 'ice maiden' freezes Elon Musk out of West Wing

Susie Wiles, the president’s chief of staff, has denied the billionaire touted as ‘the real vice-president’ a permanent office in the heart of the White House

https://www.thetimes.com/us/american-politics/article/susie-wiles-chief-of-staff-elon-musk-wp0pfkxrx

https://archive.ph/3QWZ7



The “ice maiden” at the heart of the Trump administration has won her first big battle this week — denying Elon Musk a permanent base in the West Wing of the White House.

Susie Wiles, a veteran Florida political fixer and the first female chief of staff, earned her nickname from President Trump for the calm professionalism she brought to his election campaign.

Observers call her job “the toughest in America”: she must bring order to Trump’s White House operation, control access to the president to keep him focused, manage senior staff and liaise with Congress to advance his legislative agenda.



Wiles, 67, wasted no time laying down the law to the new president’s staff, making it clear that “anyone who cannot be counted on to be collaborative and focused on our shared goals isn’t working in the West Wing”. She has warned that she does not welcome “people who want to work solo or be a star”.

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January 24, 2025

'The Gloves Are Off': The Republican Plan to Attack Abortion Now That Trump Is in Office

“It’s not about just making abortion illegal. It’s about making it unthinkable,” one GOP House member said.

https://www.notus.org/policy/republicans-abortion-march-for-life



To mark last year’s March for Life, House Republicans voted on two anti-abortion bills. But those bills didn’t restrict abortion on a federal level, and Speaker Mike Johnson avoided saying the word “abortion” altogether at the 2024 march — to avoid political backlash ahead of a tight election.

But Democrats’ hoped-for backlash to anti-abortion legislation never came. And as the first March for Life under President Donald Trump’s second term gets underway, Republicans are ready to talk about their anti-abortion beliefs and legislation as loudly and as often as they want to. “The gloves are off,” Rep. Tim Burchett told NOTUS. “I think we know what the truth is.”

Rep. Mike Kelly, who has introduced a bill multiple times that would federally ban abortion at six weeks, said that abortion is no longer a winning issue for Democrats. “They’re still trying to hang on that. They think that’s an issue and it’s like, you guys don’t get it, you know, people don’t listen to you anymore,” he said.

This week, House Republicans — along with one Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar — passed the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, a bill that would require health care providers to provide care to infants born after an attempted abortion. The House previously passed the bill in 2023, making it the first anti-abortion bill to pass the chamber after Roe v. Wade was overturned the year before.

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January 24, 2025

Aileen Cannon's Ruling Blocking Jack Smith's Report Is Factually Wrong

The Trump-appointed judge said the DOJ has never before released a report prior to the end of criminal proceedings. It has.

https://www.notus.org/courts/aileen-cannon-jack-smith-report



U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon blocked the Justice Department from allowing a small, bipartisan group of legislators to review Jack Smith’s findings on Donald Trump’s stash of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago by claiming such a disclosure was unprecedented.

“Never before has the Department of Justice, prior to the conclusion of criminal proceedings against a defendant — and absent a litigation-specific reason as appropriate in the case itself — sought to disclose outside the Department a report prepared by a Special Counsel containing substantive and voluminous case information. Until now,” Cannon wrote in her order on Tuesday.

She is wrong. The Department of Justice did exactly that with one of its most recent special counsels — during an investigation of Trump. Former FBI director Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation lasted two years and ended when he closed the office in late May 2019. But the DOJ released his 448-page report, which carefully laid out the many threads they investigated and hurdles they encountered, more than a month earlier on April 18.

At the time the Mueller report was released publicly, the Justice Department was still in the midst of pursuing a case against Republican adviser Roger Stone for lying to investigators and prosecuting the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency over its role in meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And while Trump associate Paul Manafort had just been sentenced to prison, the feds were still trying to seize his New York apartment.

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January 24, 2025

Undaunted: Al Gore, a champion for truth, science, and responsible stewardship

Each week, The Contrarian will feature a standout figure for democracy. For this week, we honor our former Vice President, Al Gore.

https://contrarian.substack.com/p/undaunted-4aa

https://archive.ph/JR8wd



Climate change deniers have derided Vice President Al Gore for decades. And yet with each new climate change-enhanced disaster, his warnings about global warming seem more prescient. Many Trump regime critics have focused (understandably) on executive decrees making a mockery of the Constitution, paving the way for cronyism and corruption, and demonizing disfavored groups; Gore meanwhile kept his eye firmly on the fate of the planet.

Slamming President Trump’s climate denial and “phony” energy emergence, he declared, “These performative acts show the pervasive influence that the fossil fuel industry will have in the United States over the next four years. But make no mistake, the global Sustainability Revolution is unstoppable.” He slammed withdrawal from the Paris Accords as “shortsighted abdication of leadership that will only serve to put our nation at a disadvantage.” And he documented the other policy travesties.

Again, Gore hits the mark. Former car czar Steven Rattner points out: “The problem with that pronouncement is that it is a solution in search of a problem. American energy companies have been drilling robustly and production of oil and natural gas continues to notch record after record.” The U.S. is the largest oil and gas producer on the planet.

Trump’s gusher of gifts to the fossil fuel industry included the expansion of drilling on public lands; revoking the imaginary “mandate” on electric vehicles; and blocking efforts to expand wind energy production. However, the emergency is not so pressing as to include all energy sources. As for wind: “Trump officially barred new offshore wind leases and will review federal permitting of wind projects, making good on a promise to ‘end leasing to massive wind farms that degrade our natural landscapes and fail to serve American energy consumers,’” Vox reported. Even his own party members may dissent. (“The top four states for wind generation — Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas — are solidly red, and unlikely to acquiesce. Even Trump’s pick for Interior secretary, Doug Burgum, refused to disavow wind power during a hearing last week, saying he would pursue an ‘all of the above’ energy strategy.”)

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January 24, 2025

Hungary: Safe Haven for Poland's Corrupt Officials?

Fugitive Polish officials accused of corruption find asylum in Hungary, raising concerns about EU rule of law.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/hungary-safe-haven-for-polands-corrupt-officials



Marcin Romanowski, a former deputy justice minister under Poland’s ousted Law and Justice (PiS) government, allegedly embezzled more than zł100 million ($24.5 million) while in office. The evidence for the crime is incontrovertible: His closest associate, Tomasz Mraz, has been cooperating with prosecutors, turning over recorded phone calls in which Romanowski and he discussed siphoning money from a public fund intended for crime victims.

When a parliamentary committee and the prosecutor’s office summoned Romanowski for questioning, he pretended that he was hospitalized, before disappearing without a trace. It soon became clear where he had gone. After the Polish prosecutor’s office issued a Europe-wide arrest warrant and an Interpol Red Notice for him, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán announced that his government would offer asylum to any politicians suffering persecution in Poland. By then, Romanowski apparently had already been in Hungary for a few days.

Romanowski is not the first PiS official to flee to Hungary. After being summoned by another parliamentary committee, Daniel Obajtek, the former head of Orlen, Poland’s largest state-owned company, also sought Orbán’s protection. He cynically “ran” for a seat in the European Parliament from Hungarian territory, and only set foot in Poland again after he had won and received parliamentary immunity (the Polish prosecutor has since applied to have this status revoked).

Protecting corrupt politicians is nothing new for Orbán. He has already granted asylum to former North Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, who fled to Hungary to escape a prison sentence on corruption charges. And he allowed former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to hide in the Hungarian embassy during the investigation into his failed coup attempt following his 2022 electoral defeat.

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January 24, 2025

Trump's Trade Tariffs: Economic Weapon or Self-Inflicted Wound?

Trump’s sweeping tariffs promise to reshape global trade, but will they spark economic renewal or wreak havoc?

https://www.socialeurope.eu/trumps-trade-tariffs-economic-weapon-or-self-inflicted-wound



The world economy awaits with dread the arrival of Donald Trump’s trade tariffs. Trump clearly loves import duties and has promised to raise them for goods from China, Europe, Mexico, and even Canada. How much havoc this will wreak depends not just on the tariffs’ scope and magnitude, but also on the purpose to which they are put.

Economists dislike tariffs for a variety of reasons. Like all barriers to market exchanges, they create inefficiency: they prevent you from selling me something I value more than you do, leaving both of us worse off in principle. Economic theory does recognize that this inefficiency can be offset by gains elsewhere. For example, tariffs can do some good in the presence of infant industries, knowledge spillovers, monopoly power, or national-security concerns.

Even then, economists will argue, tariffs are a very blunt instrument. After all, an import tariff is a specific combination of two different policies: a tax on consumption of the imported good and a production subsidy for its domestic supply, at equal rates. Any economic or non-economic objective can be met more effectively by deploying these policies separately and at customized rates, targeting them at desired outcomes more directly. To economists, tariffs are a pistol aimed at one’s own foot.

Trump’s view could not be more different. In his imagination, tariffs are like a Swiss Army knife – a tool that can simultaneously fix America’s trade deficit, enhance its competitiveness, foster domestic investment and innovation, shore up the middle class, and create jobs at home.

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