Posts by Kim Browne
Trump Press Sec Tries Bizarre Argument on DOGE to Avoid Legal Trouble
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and the entire Trump administration are trying very hard to convince the public that Elon Musk—the man who has used the Department of Government Efficiency to fire tens of thousands of federal workers—is actually just a normal adviser with no real power. “DOGE does not have statutory authority,” said…
Read MoreTrump Press Secretary Hit With Embarrassing Fact-Check on Fraud Claim
“We had that a couple months ago, long before this other discussion. So, I don’t think that had anything to do with that,” Homan insisted. “As a matter of fact, the meeting was very well. It’s the same meeting we had a few weeks ago, and the reason we had the follow-up meeting was because…
Read MoreTrump Saved Eric Adams’s Bacon—and Put the Country Up for Sale
Given that Adams is hardly guaranteed reelection as New York mayor, his likelihood of someday ascending to the presidency seems a stretch. But you can see the logic of Adams’s Turkish contacts at play: For pennies on the dollar, they could pocket a rising political star, getting in on the ground floor with someone who,…
Read MoreKathy Hochul Sure Sounds Ready to Fire Eric Adams Over Trump Deal
“We had that a couple months ago, long before this other discussion. So, I don’t think that had anything to do with that,” Homan insisted. “As a matter of fact, the meeting was very well. It’s the same meeting we had a few weeks ago, and the reason we had the follow-up meeting was because…
Read MoreMira Murati, OpenAI’s Former Chief Technology Officer, Starts Her Own Company
Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI who unexpectedly left the company in September, has helped found a new artificial intelligence start-up called Thinking Machines Lab, adding to the wave of young companies that have been formed in the race to lead A.I. Thinking Machines Lab aims to “make A.I. systems more widely…
Read MoreTop Justice Department Official Quits After Trump Order on Biden
“We had that a couple months ago, long before this other discussion. So, I don’t think that had anything to do with that,” Homan insisted. “As a matter of fact, the meeting was very well. It’s the same meeting we had a few weeks ago, and the reason we had the follow-up meeting was because…
Read MoreDOJ Lawyers Admit Trump’s DOGE Purges Are Too Chaotic Even for Them
These employees included people working on improving health care, regulating food packaging, or responding to infectious-disease outbreaks. Many of them even had to tell their own bosses that they had lost their jobs, and their termination notices claimed they had poor job performance, according to The Washington Post, which obtained several such letters and spoke…
Read MoreTrump’s Rift With Europe Adds Fuel to a Rally in Defense Stocks
European defense stocks continued their rally on Tuesday, as President Trump’s threats to reduce American military support to the continent and NATO raised the prospect that Europe’s governments will increase military spending. The flurry of trading helped push the Pan-European Stoxx 600 index to a record high; the Stoxx Europe Total Market Aerospace & Defense…
Read MoreThey’ve Been Waiting Years to Go Public. They’re Still Waiting.
Turo, a car rental start-up in San Francisco, has been trying to go public since 2021. But a volatile stock market in early 2022 delayed its listing. Since then, the company has waited for the right moment. Last week, Turo pulled its listing entirely. “Now is not the right time,” Andre Haddad, the company’s chief…
Read MoreElon Musk Zeroes In on the I.R.S.
The fire hose of Elon Musk news continues: We’ve got more on the controversy over the access to sensitive I.R.S. data that Musk’s cost-cutting team is seeking and the resignation of a senior official at the Social Security Administration over a similar issue. And in case you missed it, there were two revealing long reads…
Read MoreTranscript: Musk’s Threats Darken as Trump Declares Himself Above Law
Sargent: The key thing you draw out in your piece, Steve, is this concept called “competitive authoritarianism.” In this phenomenon, people get elected by democratic means then use state power across the board to make future elections less competitive. We sometimes hear this specious idea, including from mainstream reporters and commentators who really should know…
Read MoreThe Underestimated Alliance That Could Beat Back Trumpism
State and local races matter, too. Sarah Ganong, the WFP’s Connecticut state director, was part of a similarly successful effort to flip a number of state legislative seats in Connecticut from red to blue in 2024, even as the Democratic Party was losing support throughout the country and Trump was gaining ground in Connecticut. Despite…
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