North Carolinians just got Medicaid expansion. Now it’s jeopardized. – The Washington Post

Aaron Baptist checks out at the Rural Health Group clinic in Stovall, North Carolina. The clinic relies on Medicaid to serve residents in an area with few health care options. (Matt Ramey / For The Washington Post)

As Medicaid cuts loom, North Carolina shows the stakes

North Carolina was the most recent state to expand Medicaid. Now enrollees face changes demanded by Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.

Yesterday at 6:00 a.m. EDT, 9 min     By Paige Winfield Cunningham

STOVALL, N.C. — Roughly 650,000 people here have signed up for Medicaid since the legislature expanded it 18 months ago — the culmination of a years-long effort in this politically split state. But now they are in danger of losing it under provisions in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

In signing that law, Trump approved more than $900 billion in cuts to Medicaid over the next decade.

Those cuts are colliding with state budget challenges, imperiling the future of Medicaid in states such as North Carolina.

A Rural Health Group clinic serves many patients on Medicaid in Stovall.

Devdutta Sangvai, the state’s top health official, told legislators in a letter last week that North Carolina will slash Medicaid payments to doctors, hospitals and other providers starting Oct. 1. He attributed the cuts to the GOP-led legislature declining to fully fund the program. New administrative costs to restrict eligibility under the federal law are among the long-term factors that risk “a fundamental erosion of the NC Medicaid program,” he wrote.

“Despite careful efforts to minimize harm, the reductions now required carry serious and far-reaching consequences,” Sangvai wrote. He said that reduced rates “could drive providers out of the Medicaid program, threatening access to care for those who need it most.”

Republican leaders have pushed back, suggesting that health officials could have found less disruptive ways to trim Medicaid spending.

Cuts to Medicaid affect more North Carolinians than ever before. The state’s Medicaid rolls swelled nearly 30 percent, to 3 million people, after state Republicans dropped their decade-long opposition to expanding the program under the increasingly popular Affordable Care Act and worked with Democrats to broaden eligibility.

Before that expansion, Medicaid mainly covered people with low incomes who were disabled, had dependent children or were pregnant. But now, in most states, just about anyone earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty threshold ($22,000 for a single person and $44,000 for a family of four) is eligible.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: North Carolinians just got Medicaid expansion. Now it’s jeopardized. – The Washington Post

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #Health #healthCare #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Medicaid #NorthCarolina #Politics #Resistance #Science #Stovall #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpCuts #UnitedStates

Trump administration flips civil rights mission for schools – The Washington Post

Under Trump, the Education Dept. has flipped its civil rights mission

The administration is prioritizing allegations that transgender students and students of color are getting unfair advantages while a backlog of other cases grows.

Today at 6:00 a.m. EDT, 10 min

Workers leave the Department of Education building during a rain storm in Washington on May 21. (Wesley Lapointe/For The Washington Post)

By Laura Meckler

The Trump administration has upended civil rights enforcement at K-12 schools and colleges, prioritizing cases that allege transgender students and students of color are getting unfair advantages, while severe staff cuts have left thousands of other allegations unresolved.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is so short-staffed that some attorneys have as many as 300 cases, making it impossible to devote attention to most of them, current and former employees said. Fewer cases are being closed, and 90 percent of those resolved were dismissed, typically without an investigation, up from 80 percent last year, according to data obtained by The Washington Post.

The office has a backlog of about 25,000 unresolved cases, up from about 20,000 when President Donald Trump took office, department officials said.

At the same time, under Trump, the civil rights office has announced investigations of at least 99 schools, often based on news coverage or complaints from conservative groups. As of early August, the administration had launched 27 directed investigations, probes that are opened without an outside complaint, court filings show.

These changes define the new tone and mission in the civil rights office, which is aggressively pursuing Trump’s agenda. In choosing its targets, the administration is not just picking different priorities than its predecessors; it’s flipping the interpretation of civil rights law in the opposite direction.

The Post interviewed 10 current and former employees of the office about the changes and the backlogs. Several spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

Help us report on the Education Department

The Washington Post wants to hear from anyone with knowledge of the Department of Education and what is changing at the agency. Contact reporter Laura Meckler by email or Signal encrypted message. laura.meckler@washpost.com or laurameckler.11 on Signal. Read more about how to use Signal and other ways to securely contact The Post.

Under the Biden administration, the Office for Civil Rights focused on ensuring equal opportunity for students of color. Now, the office has opened several investigations into whether programs aimed at addressing inequities amount to illegal discrimination in favor of those students. Forty-five colleges, for instance, are being investigated for working with the PhD Project, a program that has tried to boost the number of Black, Hispanic and Native American students who earn doctorates in business.

In another example, last year the civil rights office required a New York school district to stop using its “Redskins” mascot, saying the moniker may have created a hostile environment for Native American students. This year, the same office found it is against the law to ban the mascots, calling it an attempt to erase the history of Native American tribes.

End of carouselUnder the Biden administration, the Office for Civil Rights focused on ensuring equal opportunity for students of color. Now, the office has opened several investigations into whether programs aimed at addressing inequities amount to illegal discrimination in favor of those students. Forty-five colleges, for instance, are being investigated for working with the PhD Project, a program that has tried to boost the number of Black, Hispanic and Native American students who earn doctorates in business.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump administration flips civil rights mission for schools – The Washington Post

#2025 #America #BidenAdministration #CivilRights #DepartmentOfEducation #DonaldTrump #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Resistance #Schools #Science #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Why the origin of the word ‘dog’ remains a mystery : NPR

Why the origin of the word ‘dog’ remains a mystery

August 13, 2025, 5:00 AM ET Heard on All Things Considered

By Juliana Kim, 2-Minute Listen Transcript

A dog poses for a photo on Sept. 6, 2023 in Straffan, Ireland. Oisin Keniry/Getty Images

They’re known as man’s best friends, fur babies, pooches.

But the most widely used word for these beloved animals — “dog” — is also a great linguistic mystery.

“The most everyday, commonplace words are often the most mysterious,” said Colin Gorrie, a linguist who has written about the origin of “dog.”

Descended from wolves, dogs were among the first animals to be domesticated, and their close bond with humans can be traced back thousands of years. Much like the animal itself, the word used to describe canines has evolved over time; “dog” only became the standard term within the past 500 years or so, according to Gorrie.

“This is a process that we see over and over again,” he said. “I think what the source of it is — is the fact that dogs live with us so much and we have such an emotional association with dogs, they become parts of our family and they attract these kinds of pet names.”

From insult to standard pet name

Centuries ago, dogs were more commonly called “hounds” — a term derived from the Old English word “hund.” Today, “hound” typically refers to a specific breed of dog, but back then, it referred to all domestic canines, according to Gorrie.

Early forms of the word “dog” did appear in land charters and place names over a millennia ago. But most notably, during the Middle English period from roughly 1100 to 1450, “dog” was often used as an insult directed at people.

“ The use of terms for dog to insult people are pretty common historically and across cultures and we see it all over the place,” Gorrie said. “So not just in the history of English but in related languages of Europe and Asia.”

Over time, the positive emotions people felt toward the four-legged creature eclipsed some of the word’s negative, derogatory charge, he said. Around the 1500s, “dog” replaced “hound” as the standard term we use for the pet today.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Why the origin of the word ‘dog’ remains a mystery : NPR

#2025 #AllThingsConsidered #America #DogWord #Dogs #Education #Etymology #History #JulianaKim #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #NationalPublicRadio #NPR #Science #UnitedStates

Seeing Things – Trump’s Adoration Of Putin – by Liza Donnelly

 

The above drawing was bought by The New Yorker during the Iraq war, I think, but they never ran it.

Trump said after the meeting with Putin in Alaska last week that Ukraine would have to make concessions because Russia was a more “powerful” country. He obviously does not understand the importance, and power, of a free, fairly elected democracy.

He is obsessed with what he preceives as power, and he wants it.

Today, following the disastrous “summit” in Alaska last Friday, Ukrainian President Zelensky came to the White House to meet with Trump, and he was accompanied by many European leaders: French President Macron; Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz; Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain; Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister; President Alexander Stubb of Finland; NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte; and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive arm. Solidarity in support of Ukraine.

Russia attacked Ukraine hours before Zelinsky’s meeting with Trump. Ten people killed, including a child.

Trump and Zelinsky had a press conference in the Oval Office before their meeting. Because Trump has stacked the WH press pool with pro-Trump reporters, the whole thing was a sham. Trump answered softball, flattering questions and talked about whatever he wanted to. He meandered around a lot of topics from “crime” in DC and how “even Democrats are calling me to thank me,” supposedly they had dinner out in the city and it felt safe. One reported asked about voting in the US and how Trump wants to get rid of mail-in ballots and machine voting; Trump said, “a little off-topic, but…” and then continued to rant about his plan to change how we vote in the US (he can’t do that). What he did say about the war was vague. He blamed the war on Biden, whom he said was stupid even 20 years ago. Trump said he’s ended six wars. It was nauseating to listen to.

I really hope something comes of this, but I’m not holding my breath. Putin will not agree to give back all the territory he has stolen. Zelinsky should not have to give anything to Russia, they are a sovereign nation. They were invaded. Trump will only do what Putin wants.

It’s rather amazing how we are seeing Trump’s complete adoration with Putin. The “summit” last week, which I did not write about, was full of clear body language from Trump as to his worship of Putin, beginning with clapping on a red carpet (!) as Putin arrived. His social media posts today about “leading a movement” to get rid of mail in voting came after he met with Putin. From the NY Times:

“Trump’s latest comments came after he said that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had discussed the issue during their summit on Friday in Alaska. Mr. Trump said in an interview with Fox News that the Russian leader had agreed with him that the 2020 election had been rigged in favor of Mr. Biden. “He said, ‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting,’” Trump quoted Mr. Putin as saying.”

The Constitution vests the power to set the “times, places and manner” of elections with states, and it gives only Congress the ability to override state laws on voting.

Anyway, my guess is that this is another distraction to stop the press from talking about Epstein. However, I am happy to see the NY Times has an article today:

Republican’s Bid To Help Trump Move Past Epstein Falls Flat.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s Adoration Of Putin – by Liza Donnelly

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #LizaDonnelly #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #SeeingThings #Substack #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Gene Collier: Fear and loathing at the Library of Congress | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Framalicious / Shutterstock

1

Gene Collier: Fear and loathing at the Library of Congress

By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, gcollier@post-gazette.com

Aug 17, 2025, 1:00 AM

Within the broader American consciousness, the Library of Congress comfortably occupies a position of towering anonymity, effortlessly and still purposefully avoiding the news cycle, sometimes for decades at a stretch.

Though it profiles as the staggeringly vast national deposit of knowledge, history, culture, and raw data, the Library’s habitual users tend to regard it with an esteem bordering on romance. With physical coordinates adjacent to the nation’s halls of power, the scholars and researchers and everyday Americans who visit frequently feel the intellectual weight of the place in the Thomas Jefferson Building’s main reading room, where you sit among some 70,000 volumes below the soaring coffered dome designed by sculptor Albert Weinert.

In the lantern of the dome is the mural known as Human Understanding, depicted as a female lifting from her eyes the veil of ignorance.

Yeah, well.

Not a great year for thinking institutions

It’s not been a great year for the Library of Congress, just as it hasn’t been a great year for the Kennedy Center, just as it’s about to become a dreary year for the Smithsonian, three institutions targeted by the Trump administration on what you might call suspicion of discomfiting ideology.

Carla Hayden, the 14th Librarian of Congress, the first woman and first African American to attain the position, was fired in May in a two-sentence email from the White House. It did not include the courtesy of an explanation, perhaps as her dismissal was simply inexplicable.

“We felt she did not fit the needs of the American people,” was the way White House press jouster Karoline Leavitt presented it to reporters. “There were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.”

Oh please. The Library of Congress is essentially a research facility. Kids who aren’t 16 can’t do research on site. The argument over what kind of material does and doesn’t belong there was settled in the 1800s, centuries before diversity, equity, and inclusion became a ubiquitous MAGA boogeyman.

“It’s puzzling,” the fired Hayden said charitably to CBS Sunday Morning, “how things like inclusion are seen as a negative.”

But she knew what’s behind all this. Knows what the point is: “I think it’s to diminish opportunities for the general public to have free access to information and inspiration.”

Two months after Hayden walked the plank, things started disappearing from the Library’s web site, specifically the portion that contained the Constitution of the United States. A coding error was blamed, and the missing portions were restored, so there’s no point in identifying the parts that temporarily vanished.

Like that would stop me.

Disappearing the Constitution

Away from the Constitution went the part about foreign emoluments, which prohibits the president from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatsoever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State,” so I’m sure that had nothing to do with fact that in May, Trump accepted a $400 million airplane from the Qatari government.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Gene Collier: Fear and loathing at the Library of Congress | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

#2025 #America #Books #DonaldTrump #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #PittsburghPostGazette #Politics #Reading #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Trump’s D.C. crackdown: Hundreds protest outside White House : NPR

National

Hundreds march to White House to protest Trump’s D.C. crackdown

August 16, 2025 9:03 PM ET

By Brian Mann

,

Chandelis Duster

Hundreds of protesters march to White House on Aug. 16, 2025. Brian Mann/NPR

WASHINGTON — Hundreds gathered peacefully in the nation’s capital on Saturday afternoon to protest President Trump’s attempted takeover of the city’s police department and deployment of  National Guard units alongside federal agents.

National

Three Republican-led states to send hundreds of National Guard troops to Washington

Starting with a rally in the northwest neighborhood of DuPont Circle, protesters chanted, “Shame” and “Trump must go now!” while demanding an end to the “crime emergency” that Trump declared in an executive order on Monday.

Protesters later marched to the White House, continuing to chant, as D.C. Metropolitan Police officers and National Park Service police looked on from a distance.

Law

Teenagers in Washington, D.C., say the federal police takeover makes them feel unsafe

Mason Weber of Maryland told NPR he attended the march because he was concerned that the deployment of troops is a “serious ethical and legal breach.”

“The most concerning thing about it is there’s been no check and balance of the systems of power,” Weber said. “Congress, if it comes to it, we expect to authorize it for longer.”

A protester stands in front of Metropolitan Police Department officers and National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 16, 2025. Brian/Mann

The demonstration took place two days after Attorney General Pam Bondi attempted to appoint Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Terry Cole as an “emergency police commissioner” who would assume full operational control over D.C. police. Trump officials backed off that effort on Friday after D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb filed a lawsuit in federal court.

“The hostile takeover of our police force is not going to happen — a very important win for home rule today,” Schwalb told reporters late Friday.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s D.C. crackdown: Hundreds protest outside White House : NPR

#2025 #America #DCCrackdown #DonaldTrump #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #NationalPublicRadio #NPR #Politics #Protests #Resistance #Science #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #WhiteHouse

Military Powers & the Senate Parliamentarian – GovTrack.us

1. News From Us
2. Analysis and Commentary

Military Powers & the Senate Parliamentarian

Aug. 15, 2025 · by Amy West

Hi all,

So we still have your questions and have not forgotten about them!

In fact, a post that we’d originally intended to post last week or possibly the week before is still in limbo because of a disagreement in-house about how to approach the question. So if you ever feel like you should already understand everything about Congress, be assured that even folks who think about Congress all the time don’t necessarily agree on what they understand or how to say it.

In the meantime, we’re going to take two other questions that are a little bit simpler.

When can the military be used domestically?

If you thought this had a cut and dried answer, you would not be alone. One thing that this administration is making clear is that, if it can be litigated, then the answer is not cut and dried. We addressed this in The law President Trump used to deploy the National Guard, and what might happen next. For what it’s worth, the trial in Los Angeles over whether the administration’s deployment of military in June violated the Posse Comitatus Act is ongoing. Both sides rested this week, but the judge hasn’t issued a ruling yet.

What’s the deal with the Senate Parlimentarian?

Conveniently, the Bipartisan Policy Center has already answered this question.

In their post What is the Role of the Senate Parliamentarian? they note that

• the position is relatively new, having only been formalized in the early 20th century
• the position is advisory only, meaning that Senators can ignore the recommendations from the Parliamentarian and
• that because the Senate is an ongoing body, in which rules carry over from Congress to Congress, most of the change to rules comes in changes to precedents, of which the Parliamentarian keeps track.

With respect to item two above, Senators mostly follow the Parliamentarian’s advice. This has generally been most likely when reconciliation bills are in process. However, this year, the Senate Republican majority chose to ignore the Parliamentarian’s advice or bypass her role in two different ways that may mean new precedents in the Senate if Democrats act similarly when they next have control of the chamber.

Regulatory Waivers

The first case was about regulatory waivers issued to the state of California during the Biden administration. The Government Accountability Office and the Parliamentarian both agreed that the waivers did not fall under the Congressional Review Act rules for overturning regulations.

If the Senate had followed the Parliamentarian’s advice, then they could not have voted to overturn the waivers because such a vote would need a 60 vote passage for one or more procedural votes. The only way to overturn those waivers was to rely on a simple majority, which the Senate Republicans have.

So, Senate Republicans voted instead on a slightly different question about whether the waivers fall under the Congressional Review Act. That vote passed and the waivers were overturned. Technically they didn’t ignore the Parliamentarian, but functionally they definitely did.

How to count deficit effects

The bulk of the reconciliation bill passed this year focused on making the tax cuts in a 2017 bill permanent. But reconciliation bills are not supposed to add to the federal deficit. So, to make the tax cuts permanent and meet reconciliation requirements, the bill would have to raise lots of revenue in some other way or the Senate majority could change how they count.

The Senate majority decided to change how they count. There is the “current law baseline” which estimates about a $4 trillion dollar increase to the federal deficit versus the “current policy baseline” which estimates little or no increase to the deficit. The difference between the two approaches is that under current law, the tax cuts expire and estimates are created accordingly while under current policy the tax cuts are assumed to be extended in which case they make no difference to future deficits.

If the Senate Budget Committee had stuck to the current law baseline, then the tax cuts would be subject to review under the Byrd rule by the Parliamentarian and probably most would have been ruled as ineligible because of how much they’d add to the deficit. By deciding in committee that the analysis would based on current policy though, Senate Republicans bypassed an otherwise thorny situation in which they might have to jettison provisions because of cost or ignore the Parliamentarian repeatedly.

Like with the regulatory waivers, the Senate majority didn’t directly challenge the Parliamentarian. Instead, they used other procedural maneuvers to bypass having to go to the Parliamentarian at all.

That said, for the remaining provisions in the reconciliation bill, the Parliamentarian did do a review and items she advised violated the rules were ultimately pulled. So the Senate majority didn’t completely ignore the Parliamentarian; just on the things they cared about the most: overturning regulatory waivers promoting electric vehicles and retaining tax cuts.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Military Powers & the Senate Parliamentarian – GovTrack.us

#2025 #America #Domestic #DonaldTrump #GovTrack #GovTrackUs #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Parliamentarian #Politics #Resistance #Science #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USSenate #UnitedStates

Trump-Putin summit starts on red carpet, ends in confusion

• Newsletters

• Axios Live

Axios 12 hours ago – World

Trump-Putin summit starts on red carpet, ends in confusion

By Dave Lawler

Caption: Trump and Putin kick off the summit. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Friday’s summit in Alaska began as a superpower spectacle, then abruptly ended without any indication of what was achieved or where things go from here.

Why it matters: President Trump didn’t get the ceasefire he came for, or the public commitment he wanted from Vladimir Putin to meet next with Volodymyr Zelensky. The leaders scrapped a planned lunch and departed early — but not before both declared the meeting a success.

Between the lines: It’s not hard to see why Putin likely left Anchorage satisfied. Images of Trump applauding as he walked down the red carpet were beamed back to Russia, and around the world.

• “They spent three years telling everyone Russia was isolated, and today they saw the beautiful red carpet laid out for the Russian president in the U.S.,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova noted.
• For now at least, Putin seems to have reset a relationship with Trump that had been splintering. Their brief joint press conference was short on substance but long on mutual praise.
• And Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that new oil sanctions for Russia — which were imminent until Putin proposed the meeting — were now probably off the table for a few weeks.

The other side: Trump insisted that progress was made on a number of issues, though not on the “biggest” one, without offering any specifics.

• En route to Alaska, Trump told Fox “I won’t be happy” if Putin doesn’t agree to a ceasefire.
• But afterwards, Trump said he was happy. “I think the meeting was a ten,” he told Hannity.
• Still, Trump was somewhat downbeat during the joint appearance. While Putin claimed an unspecified “agreement” had been reached, Trump brushed that off and said “we didn’t get there.”

Friction point: The inconclusive outcome might be most vexing to the party that was not in the room.

• While Trump warned of “very severe consequences” for Putin ahead of the summit if clear progress was not made, he pivoted to pressuring Ukraine once it was over.

• Trump told Hannity it was now “up to President Zelensky to get it done,” and later said “Russia is a very big power, and they’re not.”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump-Putin summit starts on red carpet, ends in confusion

#2025 #Alaska #America #Axios #DonaldTrump #EuropeanNations #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Putin #Resistance #Science #Summit #Travel #Trump #TrumpAdministration #Ukraine #UnitedStates

Opinion | Trump Is Squandering the Greatest Gift of the Manhattan Project – The New York Times

Opinion,

Guest Essay

How Trump Is Undoing 80 Years of American Greatness

Aug. 12, 2025 A Manhattan Project development site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., in 1944. Credit…Chicago History Museum/Getty Images Listen to this article · 7:42 min Learn more

By Garrett M. Graff

Mr. Graff is a journalist, a historian and the author, most recently, of “The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb.”

阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版

The 80th anniversary last week of the atomic bombings that helped end World War II came at a most peculiar time. That is in part because we can’t mark that anniversary without also noting the astonishing Manhattan Project that built atomic weapons.

The Manhattan Project was a towering achievement, one of the great stories of human effort and accomplishment. Yet the Trump administration has been systematically dismantling the culture of research that the Manhattan Project and World War II bequeathed us, a culture that propelled American prosperity.

At no other time in modern history has a country so thoroughly turned its back on its core national strengths. The very elements that made the Manhattan Project such a success are today under assault. With devastating cuts to science and health research, the administration is turning its back on a history of being powered and renewed by the innovation and vision of immigrants. What America may find is that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project — which, in the end, wasn’t the bomb but a new way of looking at how science and government can work together.

That the Manhattan Project happened is itself a minor miracle. For nearly two years, the U.S. military seemed to want nothing to do with the effort of inventing an atomic bomb.

From 1939 to 1941, a ragtag group of mostly Jewish refugee scientists from Hitler’s Europe, including Albert Einstein, approached the government and met with military officials. The scientists educated them on the discovery of nuclear fission, its implications for war and their fears that Hitler would develop an atomic bomb first.

The military brushed them off. “The colonels kept rather aloof,” the physicist Eugene Wigner recalled after one such meeting in October 1939, as Hitler took Poland. “They were friendly, they smiled, but they never expected to see a working atomic bomb in this world.”

One of those colonels told Wigner and Edward Teller, dismissively, that he would award $10,000 to whoever could develop a death ray and prove it by killing a goat — the implication being he imagined that project more likely than a bomb that unlocked the power of the fundamental building block of the universe.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Opinion | Trump Is Squandering the Greatest Gift of the Manhattan Project – The New York Times

#2025 #America #Books #DonaldTrump #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #ManhattanProject #Movies #OakRidge #Oppenheimer #Politics #Reading #Resistance #Science #Technology #TheNewYorkTimes #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Trump-Putin documents left on hotel printer : NPR

Exclusive , Investigations

Government papers found in an Alaskan hotel reveal new details of Trump-Putin summit

Updated August 16, 20251:56 PM ET

By Chiara Eisner

President Donald Trump, right, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin arrive for a joint press conference at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, Friday, Aug. 15, 2025. (AP Photo / Jae C. Hong)

Papers with U.S. State Department markings, found Friday morning in the business center of an Alaskan hotel, revealed previously undisclosed and potentially sensitive details about the Aug. 15 meetings between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in Anchorage.

Eight pages, that appear to have been produced by U.S. staff and left behind accidentally, shared precise locations and meeting times of the summit and phone numbers of U.S. government employees.

At around 9 a.m. on Friday, three guests at Hotel Captain Cook, a four-star hotel located 20 minutes from the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage where leaders from the U.S. and Russia convened, found the documents left behind in one of the hotel’s public printers. NPR reviewed photos of the documents taken by one of the guests, who NPR agreed not to identify because the guest said they feared retaliation.

Pictures of two documents about the Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska that were found in a public hotel printer in Anchorage. NPR

The first page in the printed packet disclosed the sequence of meetings for August 15, including the specific names of the rooms inside the base in Anchorage where they would take place. It also revealed that Trump intended to give Putin a ceremonial present.

“POTUS to President Putin,” the document states, “American Bald Eagle Desk Statue.”

On Saturday, White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly dismissed the papers as a “multi-page lunch menu” and suggested leaving the information on a public printer was not a security breach. The U.S. Department of State did not respond to requests for comment.

Pages 2 through 5 of the documents listed the names and phone numbers of three U.S. staff members as well as the names of 13 U.S. and Russian state leaders. The list provided phonetic pronouncers for all the Russian men expected at the summit, including “Mr. President POO-tihn.”

Pages 6 and 7 in the packet described how lunch at the summit would be served, and for whom. A menu included in the documents indicated that the luncheon was to be held “in honor of his excellency Vladimir Putin.”

A seating chart shows that Putin and Trump were supposed to sit across from each other during the luncheon. Trump would be flanked by six officials: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to his right, and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and Special Envoy for Peace Missions Steve Witkoff to his left. Putin would be seated immediately next to his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, and his Aide to the President for Foreign Policy, Yuri Ushakov.

During the summit Friday, lunch was apparently cancelled. But it was intended to be a simple, three-course meal, the documents showed. After a green salad, the world leaders would dine on filet mignon and halibut olympia. Crème brûlée would be served for dessert.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump-Putin documents left on hotel printer : NPR

#2025 #Alaska #America #DonaldTrump #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #NationalPublicRadio #NPR #Politics #Putin #Resistance #Science #Summit #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Opinion | Trump’s Attempt to Make Museums Submit Feels Familiar – The New York Times

Opinion, Michelle Goldberg

Trump’s Attempt to Make Museums Submit Feels Familiar

Aug. 15, 2025

The National Museum of African American History and Culture, with the Washington Monument in the background.Credit…Jared Soares for The New York Times

Listen to this article · 5:32 min Learn more

By Michelle Goldberg, Opinion Columnist

Before Poland’s illiberal Law and Justice party came to power in 2015, the country had been deep in a reckoning over its role in the Holocaust. In 2000, the historian Jan Gross published an explosive book, “Neighbors,” about a 1941 massacre in the Nazi-occupied Polish town of Jedwabne, where Poles enthusiastically tortured and murdered up to 1,600 Jews. The book punctured a national myth in which Poles were only either heroes or victims in World War II.

After “Neighbors” came out, Poland’s president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, went to Jedwabne for a ceremony broadcast on Polish television. “For this crime, we should beg the souls of the dead and their families for forgiveness,” he said.

The notion of Polish historical guilt made many conservative Poles furious. Law and Justice capitalized on their anger, running against what its leader called the “pedagogy of shame.” After the party’s 2015 victory, one of its first targets was the Museum of the Second World War, then being built in Gdansk.

The museum was supposed to explore the war’s global context and to emphasize the toll it took on civilians. Among its collection were keys to the homes of Jews murdered in Jedwabne. Before it ever opened, Law and Justice wanted to shut it down for being insufficiently patriotic.

Today in America, this history has an eerie familiarity. Five years ago, many institutions in the United States tried, with varying degrees of seriousness and skill, to come to terms with our country’s legacy of racism. A backlash to this reckoning helped propel Donald Trump back into the White House, where he has taken a whole-of-government approach to wiping out the idea that America has anything to apologize for. As part of this campaign, the administration seeks to force our national museums to conform to its triumphalist version of history.

In March, Trump signed an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” criticizing versions of history that foster “a sense of national shame.” Museums and monuments, it said, should celebrate America’s “extraordinary heritage” and inculcate national pride. This week, the administration announced that it was reviewing displays at eight national museums — including the Museum of American History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Smithsonian American Art Museum — and giving them 120 days to bring their content in line with Trump’s vision.

We’re already seeing glimpses of what that looks like. Last month, the National Museum of American History removed references to Trump’s impeachments from an exhibit on the American presidency. Those references were restored last week, but with changes: The exhibit no longer says that Trump made “false statements” about the 2020 election or that he encouraged the mob on Jan. 6.

Amy Sherald, the artist who painted Michelle Obama’s official portrait, canceled an upcoming solo show at the National Portrait Gallery after being told the museum was considering removing her painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty to avoid angering Trump.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Opinion | Trump’s Attempt to Make Museums Submit Feels Familiar – The New York Times

#2025 #America #AmericanHistory #Books #ContentCensorship #DonaldTrump #Education #ExecutiveOrder #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #MAGA #NationalMuseums #Opinion #Politics #Racism #Reading #Resistance #Science #Smithsonian #TheNewYorkTimes #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

More and more books are being banned. SoCal libraries find a solution – Los Angeles Times

California

More and more books are being banned. SoCal libraries find a solution

A worker shelves books at the Billie Jean King Main Library in Long Beach. The Long Beach Public Library is participating in Books Unbanned, a nationwide effort to provide access to books for young people. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times) By Annie Goodykoontz

Aug. 14, 2025 3 AM PT

There were 10,000 instances of book bans at public schools in the 2023-24 school year, according to PEN America. In 2024, 5,813 titles were challenged in public libraries and schools nationwide, says the American Library Assn.

“So many books for young people are being taken off the shelf,” said Fritzi Bodenheimer, spokesperson for the Brooklyn Public Library in New York. “If you’re a young person, you know, you’re 14 or 15 years old and you’re just discovering yourself and maybe you think that you might be a member of the LGBTQ community and all those books are taken off the shelf. What message does that send to you? That you’re a bad person? That you’re dangerous?”

To combat book censorship, some Southern California public libraries, including Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego, are joining libraries nationwide to provide access to online library cards. Children as young as 13 can get a free e-card to access the libraries’ catalog of e-books and audiobooks, without parental permission and without any challenges they may face to get a book in their local library.

Long Beach is the latest public library to join this effort, a project known as Books Unbanned that was started by the Brooklyn Public Library. The project’s website calls it a response to “support the freedom to read.”

Public schools and libraries in Texas, Tennessee and Florida faced the most challenges to book titles in 2024. In the American Library Assn.’s Top 10 Most Challenged Books report from that year, all titles mentioned were challenged for sexually explicit material; some were also cited for featuring LGBTQ+ content, depictions of drug use and sexual assault, and profanity.

Some parents filing complaints believe early access to content featuring these topics can confuse children, and they believe they should have more of a say in what their children read.

According to a national library survey conducted in 2023, 60% of respondents said that certain books should require either an age limit or parental permission to check out, while 57% of respondents believed parents should be notified when their child checks out a book. Also, 76% of respondents said that parents should be the ones to decide whether their children can check out books that focus on sexual education and racism.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: More and more books are being banned. SoCal libraries find a solution – Los Angeles Times

#2025 #America #Audiobooks #BanningBooks #BookBans #Books #California #DonaldTrump #eBooks #FreedomToRead #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Reading #Resistance #Science #SouthernCalifornia #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Letters from an American – August 13, 2025 -Heather Cox Richardson

August 13, 2025, By Heather Cox Richardson

On August 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. While he had already put in place new measures to regulate business and banking and had provided temporary work relief to combat the Depression, this law permanently changed the nature of the American government.

The Social Security Act established a federal system of old-age benefits; unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship between the government and its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.

The driving force behind the law was FDR’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins. She was the first woman to hold a position in the U.S. Cabinet and still holds the record for having the longest tenure in that job: she served from 1933 to 1945.

Perkins brought to the position a vision of government very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had embraced the idea of a “rugged individualism” in which men provided for their families on their own, Perkins recognized that the vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality: her own husband suffered from bipolar disorder, making her the family’s primary support. She understood that Americans had always supported each other.

As a child, Perkins spent summers with her grandmother, with whom she was very close, in the small town of Newcastle, Maine, surrounded by a supportive community. In college, at Mount Holyoke, she majored in chemistry and physics, but after a professor required students to tour a factory to observe working conditions, Perkins became committed to improving the lives of those trapped in industrial jobs. After college, Perkins became a social worker and, in 1910, earned a masters degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University. She became the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for the workers who made the products they were buying.

The next year, in 1911, she witnessed a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in which 146 workers, mostly women and girls, died. They were trapped in the building when the fire broke out because the factory owner had ordered the doors to the stairwells and exits locked to make sure no one slipped outside for a break. Unable to escape the smoke and fire in the factory, the workers—some of them on fire—leaped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the building, dying on the pavement.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire proved to Perkins that voluntary organizations would never be enough to improve workers’ lives. She turned toward using the government to adjust the harsh conditions of industrialization. She began to work with the Democratic politicians at Tammany Hall, who presided over communities in the city that mirrored rural towns and who exercised a form of social welfare for their voters, making sure they had jobs, food, and shelter and that wives and children had a support network if a husband and father died. In that system the voices of women like Perkins were valuable, for their work in the immigrant wards of the city meant that they were the ones who knew what working families needed to survive.

The overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering during the Great Depression convinced Perkins that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people. She came to believe that, as she said: “The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: August 13, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #FDR #FrancisPerkins #Health #HeatherCoxRichardson #History #LettersFromAnAmerican #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Resistance #Science #SecretaryOfLabor #Substack #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates