Feed aggregator

Another depressing jobs report came out on the heels of yet another week of Republican scandal, inflation, attacks on healthcare, and President Donald Trump’s never-ending war in Iran. But the good news is, as the midterms approach, progressive candidates are making waves, disrupting a status quo that most voters seem ready to leave behind. And it was all on video.

Source

Early Saturday morning, the Senate voted to confirm Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to the official role after Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) caved and publicly backed President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer the day before. 

Blanche was confirmed on a narrow 50-49 vote, with almost all Republicans aligning with the president. The two exceptions were Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). In other words, Cassidy, who initially withheld his approval over concerns about Blanche helping Trump prosecute political enemies, pushing the $1.8 billion anti-weaponization slush fund, and exempting the president from IRS audits, capitulated—knowing that his was the deciding vote. He did so shortly after Murkowski announced her opposition.

In his Friday remarks on the Senate floor, Cassidy raised several reasonable points on why Blanche should not be confirmed: “approving the anti-weaponization slush fund,” “exempting the president from IRS audits,” and the aforementioned “bringing suits against political enemies.”

But the senator—who recently lost his bid for reelection after being targeted as a “disloyal disaster” by Trump—summoned perplexing arguments from his familiar playbook: “Mr. Blanche has made commitments” to be better, Cassidy noted. “I have spoken to Mr. Blanche five or six times,” he assured his colleagues, and not approving Blanche “puts at risk the progress made fighting violent crime, human and drug trafficking, and fraud.” The Trump administration’s fight on crime and human and drug trafficking has led to significant increases in militarization domestically and abroad, while attacks on so-called widespread fraud have cut essential social programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

This isn’t Cassidy’s first rodeo in backing down from his principled opposition to a controversial or clearly unqualified candidate. He used similar logic to advance Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination as health secretary as the deciding vote, putting naive trust in his “assurances on vaccines.” And the senator did so again earlier this week—although his was not the sole deciding vote—to confirm Erica Schwartz, the physician and attorney who was Trump’s pick for CDC director. Schwartz repeatedly dodged questions on whether she would carry out all of Kennedy’s policies, even if she believed it contradicted scientific evidence.

On Friday, Cassidy said that confirming Blanche would give the Trump loyalist more power. But he also absolved Blanche of any responsibility should Trump ignore any pushback he might offer once he has been confirmed. So why vote in favor? Doing so normalizes and legitimizes the Justice Department and makes no attempt to address the many issues with weaponization that Cassidy and many of his Democratic colleagues have mentioned.

On Saturday morning on X, Blanche thanked Trump, the Senate, and Justice Department staff. Trump, on the other hand, threatened Sen. Lisa Murkowski, one of the two Republican dissenters on the confirmation vote, calling her a “traitor.” He re-posted a 2022 video of former Attorney General Merrick Garland asking for the release of the Mar-a-Lago raid search warrant next to a photo of Murkowski on Truth Social.

“Lisa Murkowski will not vote for Todd Blanche,” the president wrote. “After having no trouble voting for Merrick Garland. Claiming Blanche will weaponize the DOJ and is too political. The same Garland that personally signed off on a raid of President Trump’s home.” He then concluded, “Lisa Murkowski is owned. Traitor.”

X is winding down its existing Revenue Sharing program.

By Kate Wells and Hannah Norman for KFF Say you live in deep-red Louisiana, a state that has effectively banned abortion. It may be easier for you to get abortion pills now than before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Here’s why — and what it means for future battles over abortion access. And as a federal court mulls a case that could result in significant restrictions…

Source

While the device is pretty and lightweight, it’s not something the everyday person needs due to its hefty price tag and size. 

Google recently changed how it refers and assigns names to hacking groups. TechCrunch spoke with one of the world’s foremost experts on tracking hackers to understand why companies give hackers codenames.

It’s been another week of President Donald Trump focusing on the important issues. And no, we’re not talking about his totally real hair. Two of our top stories this week centered around a couple of the president’s pet projects—both of which are embarrassing and stupid—and are costing taxpayers millions of dollars due to shoddy work and the whims of the mad king.

Source

The Watergate scandal began on June 17, 1972, when five Republican operatives connected to President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters with plans to wiretap. After two years of building scandal, Nixon resigned from the presidency on Aug. 8, 1974. Unfortunately, Nixon was then pardoned by his successor…

Source

Despite the popularity of Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and OpenAI Codex, developers have plenty of complaints about AI coding tools. So researchers affiliated with York University and the University of Calgary in Canada decided to sift through developers' concerns about LLM-based integrated development environments (LIDEs) by analyzing Reddit discussions for common themes. Their findings suggest that the builders of such tools failed to prioritize security and privacy, leaving developers to defend themselves. Gias Uddin, associate professor at York University and a co-author of the research, told The Register that these tools are still relatively new and are evolving rapidly, which creates pressure to add new capabilities. "Our study cannot say whether that pressure caused any particular problem, but it does show that many reported issues come from how these tools are designed and what access they are given, not simply from the underlying models," Uddin said. "In that sense, we believe prevention is better than cure; that is, security and privacy mechanisms should be built into the design before a tool is given broad access to a developer’s files, data, or systems." Uddin and co-authors Mostafijur Rahman Akhond, Md Afif Al Mamun, and Song Wang say they wanted to look beyond the known issues with AI-generated code at LLM-based tooling and how developers interact with it. They describe their findings in a preprint paper titled "'Impossible to hide secret …': Uncovering Security and Privacy Issues in LLM-native IDEs," accepted at the 41st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2026. Starting from a set of 1.1 million Reddit posts, they identified 446 posts and more than 6,000 comments to develop a taxonomy of security and privacy issues associated with using these LIDEs for AI-assisted coding. "Our taxonomy reveals a broad range of developer-reported concerns, including unauthorized file operations, unsafe or unexpected code execution, triggering of destructive actions, opaque data flows, telemetry collection, and potential leakage of sensitive information through expanded context access," the authors state. Some 43.1 percent of the posts covering security-related issues involved unauthorized file operations. These involved LIDEs removing project directories or files without authorization (28.3 percent). Users also described AI tooling modifying files without explicit user consent (8.8 percent), as well as accessing content beyond the active workspace (5.7 percent). "In one severe case (1npqf2f), Claude Code executed chmod +x on scripts without consent (File Permission Changes 0.6%)," the paper recounts. "Although rare, such actions pose disproportionate security risks." Another set of posts describes operational safety issues arising from LIDE use, including impacts on production services. These accounted for 23.9 percent of security-related posts. Examples cited include reports of Replit removing a SaaS production database and Cursor deploying code to production despite an explicit directive not to do so. A third category of woes covers unsafe code generation (18.2 percent). This involves incidents like nine VirusTotal detections reported for Cursor-generated software and hallucination-driven code changes: "When using Cursor, I noticed that after more than 10 rounds of dialogue, it starts to hallucinate and secretly modify code outside the requirements…" Then there are the instances where these LIDEs ignored user instructions, allow lists, gates, permission settings, or .ignore files, which account for 16.5 percent of the security-related posts, as well as third-party tool integration risks (4.7 percent). As for privacy problems, these were mentioned in 194 posts and cover issues like lack of transparency (45.9 percent) – the absence of clear information about what data an LIDE collects, retains, transmits, uses for training, or exposes to administrators – and unauthorized data access (23.7 percent). Other privacy categories include privacy leakage violations (15.5 percent), unauthorized data collection and transmission (11.9 percent), and context integrity failures (8.8 percent), which refer to situations where "for example, a user of Claude Desktop reported receiving messages originating from another user’s session." Uddin said, "We don’t think developers are completely unaware of these issues, as we found ongoing discussions about security and privacy concerns across many of these tools. Still, people continue to adopt them because they can make development faster and easier. They are also making programming more accessible to a wider group of people, including those with little formal programming experience or limited knowledge of software security." Uddin said users cannot be expected to thoroughly understand which permissions are risky, which files need to be protected, or whether a tool is doing something it shouldn't. "That makes it even more important for tool makers to build security into the tools themselves, with safer defaults and safeguards that do not depend on the user being a security expert," he said. Even so, users of LIDEs are trying to manage the risks. The authors enumerate 13 mitigation strategies that developers have employed to get by. These fall into five general approaches: configuration management (33 percent); code governance (31 percent); data protection and privacy control (13 percent); isolation (13 percent); and external guidance (9 percent). Based on their findings, the authors offer six recommendations. They advise: directing LIDE makers to implement proper security and privacy controls; enforcing security and privacy guardrails at an architectural level; incorporating a verification layer in LIDEs to validate generated code against security and privacy standards; establishing a formal protocol for assessing the trustworthiness of third-party tools; integrating sensitive file protection; and implementing strict security as a default. "We believe secure defaults would be one of the most important improvements these tools could make," said Uddin. "Developers should not have to discover after something goes wrong that a tool had more access or freedom than they expected. "Our findings point to practical measures such as limiting access to sensitive files by default, requiring clear approval before consequential actions, isolating projects and conversations, and making it easier to see and review what the tool is doing. "Users should still have flexibility, but the safer option should be the starting point rather than something they have to configure themselves. In fact, developers from the Reddit posts in our study were already using many of these safeguards in ad hoc ways; we think several of them should be built into the tools and enabled by default." ®

A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Max Miller’s abuse scandal takes its darkest turn yet…

Source

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Recently, millions of Americans have faced orange skies and air-quality alerts. The struggles many people had with the smoke are a sad reminder of the importance air quality has for our health. Yet the Trump administration has done everything in its power to make our air less clean. Now it is adopting new, stealthier strategies to weaken clean-air standards.

During its first year, the second Trump administration used a “shock and awe” approach to environmental deregulation. In an effort to erase climate policies, the Environmental Protection Agency claimed that climate change was not a serious problem, pointing to a report by hand-picked climate skeptics. The criticisms of the National Academy of Sciences and other prominent scientific organizations were so devastating that the EPA abandoned its reliance on the report when it eliminated key greenhouse gas standards, instead basing its decision primarily on shaky legal arguments.

The agency is now routinely determining that the benefits of reducing air pollution are too uncertain to quantify or value at all.

In the second year of this term, the Trump administration has shifted gears, taking another legally indefensible approach that is less visible but even more pernicious because it extends to all pollutants, not just greenhouse gases. The EPA is now routinely determining that the benefits of reducing air pollution—that is, life-saving health benefits for Americans—are too uncertain to quantify or value at all in regulatory decisionmaking.

The administration is doing this without any analysis or citation to scientific studies. Extensive peer-reviewed science has used sophisticated techniques to quantify the impacts of pollution reductions and account for related uncertainty. And the EPA has relied on these findings for decades, including during the first Trump administration and other Republican administrations. But, beginning this year, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has decided that every health benefit from air pollution reductions is too uncertain to count—and every regulatory cost dispositive.

The EPA announced its new approach in January in a rule on emissions from gas turbines, stating that it would no longer value public-health benefits from reducing fine particulate matter and ozone—two of the most prevalent and damaging air pollutants. The agency referenced uncertainties in how different concentrations of pollutants translate into negative health impacts like premature deaths; uncertainties in mortality valuations, which assign a dollar value to these deaths; and uncertainties in growth and discount rates, which are used to translate future impacts to present values. But the EPA’s longstanding techniques already accounted for these uncertainties.

As a result of its new approach, the EPA no longer estimates the number of lives saved or diseases and hospitalizations averted. It is assigning no value whatsoever to these environmental benefits, thereby ignoring the very health concerns the agency was created to address.

Later, the EPA doubled down on its new approach when it repealed one vehicle emission rule and delayed another one. It similarly did not consider these adverse health consequences in an air pollution regulation for coal and oil power plants, another air pollution regulation for wood products, and, earlier this month, in relaxing emissions test procedures for heavy-duty vehicles.

When the EPA first announced its new approach in January, Zeldin insisted that even though the agency would not assign a dollar value to averted deaths, it would “still be considering lives saved when setting pollution limits.” The subsequent regulatory proceedings confirmed that Zeldin’s statement was false.

The EPA, whose actions here are plainly illegal, is basing some of its cost analyses on disputed industry claims.

Moreover, the EPA did not restrict its approach to particulate matter and ozone. The agency also refused to assign any benefits to the reduction of pollutants like nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide. And, similarly, in multiple proceedings, it ignored the benefits of reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrofluorocarbons.

On the cost side of its regulatory analysis, the EPA’s approach is entirely different. The EPA is continuing to fully quantify and consider the compliance costs for affected industries, even though those costs are subject to many of the same uncertainties as the benefits. For instance, like health benefits, compliance costs are borne at different times and must be translated into present value (using the same discount rates that the EPA had found too uncertain to use for benefits).

The EPA is basing some of its cost analyses on disputed industry claims, as long as they align with the administration’s favored deregulatory narrative. To justify weakening requirements to reduce hydrofluorocarbons and other potent greenhouse gases in new refrigeration equipment, the agency relied on unverified assertions about costs from certain supermarkets and other regulated entities, even though major refrigeration trade associations opposed these claims and explained that the EPA action would in fact raise compliance costs.

Without any empirical evidence, Zeldin claimed that the EPA’s action “will be felt directly by American families in lower grocery prices.” But the refrigeration rule did not impose any costs on regulated entities until future replacements of refrigeration equipment may be needed. Recent increases in grocery prices have been driven largely by supply-chain disruptions and rising energy costs arising from the war in Iran. Any cost savings from this rule, therefore, were unlikely to be felt in the near term.

The EPA’s actions are plainly illegal. Agencies cannot put a thumb on the scale by taking account of a rule’s costs but not its benefits, particularly when there are established techniques for valuing the benefits.

Because there is no “big ticket” action like last year’s questioning of climate change, the EPA’s approach has largely gone under the radar. Zeldin appears to be following John Oliver’s adage that if you want to do something harmful, “put it inside something boring” to avoid public scrutiny. But the American people will suffer greatly as a result of these illegal actions, in the form of additional premature deaths, asthma attacks, hospitalizations, and other serious health consequences.

The White House appears to think that it can ignore a Supreme Court ruling by lying about its previous defeat and trying to achieve the same goal another way.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Thursday that purported to narrow the scope of birthright citizenship, two months after suffering a major defeat on the subject at the high court. The order’s text claims that it targets “certain categories of children of aliens who do not fall within the rule of birthright citizenship as announced by the Supreme Court” in Trump v. Barbara in June.

The Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause says that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” For the last 150 years, the overwhelming judicial and scholarly consensus has been that anyone born on U.S. soil is a U.S. citizen, except for the children of foreign diplomats and other moribund exceptions. The Supreme Court confirmed this interpretation in the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark.

Trump issued an executive order last January that purported not to recognize the citizenship of children born on U.S. soil to temporary visa holders and/or undocumented immigrants. In Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court struck down the executive order as unconstitutional. The targeted children “satisfy both elements of the Citizenship Clause: they are ‘born … in the United States’ and ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. “Under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth.”

Every person currently living inside the United States falls into one of four categories. They are either a U.S. citizen by birth or naturalization, a lawful permanent resident (better known as a green card holder), they’ve gained entry with a temporary visa, or they unlawfully entered the U.S. Nobody disputes that the citizenship clause applies to the children of U.S. citizens. The Supreme Court ruled that the citizenship clause covers the last two groups, except for a few narrow exceptions: If the clause covers the children of temporary visa holders, it must logically cover the children of permanent residents, as well. “Permanent” is just a lifelong version of “temporary,” after all.

Trump’s new executive order saw things differently. It claimed that the court merely held that the citizenship clause “extends the privilege of citizenship to children born to parents in the United States ‘for whom no extraterritorial fiction applies.’” This language, from Roberts’s opinion, referred to the medieval understanding of diplomatic immunity. English kings could not expect the allegiance of foreign ambassadors on English soil because the common law “considered [them]—by a fiction of extraterritoriality—to remain on foreign soil and thus ‘under the ligeance’ of their home country.”

The White House somehow took this description as an invitation to invent new purported exceptions to the citizenship clause. “This order identifies, non-exhaustively, and prescribes action concerning certain categories of children of aliens who do not fall within the rule of birthright citizenship as announced by the Supreme Court,” the order claimed. There is no evidence that Roberts and the majority intended for the executive branch to identify new exceptions, and plenty of reasons to believe that they intended to foreclose them.

To the contrary, the chief justice emphasized how limited the existing exceptions were at multiple points throughout the decision. “The ordinary legal meaning of the text of the Clause thus neatly captures the common law rule, with its broad reach and narrow exceptions,” he observed at one point. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who only partially concurred with Roberts’s opinion, also wrote separately to make a similar argument about new exceptions to the one now advanced by the White House. If that had been the actual ruling, Kavanaugh would not have needed to write his own opinion at all.

Reading the executive order reminds me of CDOs, otherwise known as collateralized debt obligations. Before the financial crisis in 2008, banks would gather large numbers of risky subprime mortgage bonds and repackage them into CDOs before selling them to other banks. Credit ratings companies would give CDOs high marks because the bonds were considered less risky in the aggregate than on an individual basis. This was more or less true until it very suddenly and dramatically wasn’t.

In the 2015 film The Big Short, the late great Anthony Bourdain explained CDOs to the audience by comparing them to a fish stew. An unscrupulous chef in this metaphor would use a mixture of day-old fish and fresher ingredients to make a more palatable dish. “You see, it’s not old fish,” Bourdain sardonically tells the audience, “it’s a whole new thing. And the best part is, they don’t even realize they’re eating day-old halibut.”

Trump’s latest executive orders work along the same lines. We’ll start with the freshest cuts of fish, so to speak, and work toward the most spoiled ones. First, the order refuses to recognize U.S. citizenship for children if “either parent of that person is a foreign government employee.” This includes “ambassadors,” as well as foreign nationals “employed by [their country’s] embassy,” “employed by a foreign government in an official capacity,” or “employed by an international organization that possess international-organization immunity.” All of these people are either temporary visa holders or green card holders.

At least one of these categories is indisputably ineligible under the citizenship clause. Children of foreign ambassadors have been categorically excluded from U.S. citizenship since the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1868. By definition, their parents are not “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” because they possess diplomatic immunity, which is an ancient and well-defined principle in foreign relations. The executive order tries to widen this exception by including a range of foreign nationals who work in diplomatic roles but do not actually have diplomatic immunity.

Trump’s order does not use this term, but more than a few of the targeted personnel would likely have what is known as “consular immunity.” This principle in international law extends immunity to certain foreign government employees for their official acts, but not in their private capacity. If Britain’s ambassador to the United States and one of the Embassy’s aides jointly murdered someone in the middle of the National Mall in D.C., the ambassador could not be prosecuted in U.S. courts (unless London revoked their immunity). The aide, on the other hand, could be indicted and tried right away.

Justice Clarence Thomas even addressed the difference in passing in his Barbara dissent when discussing Roberts’s invocation of diplomatic immunity. He observed that “diplomatic immunity extends to ‘only a narrow set’ of ‘diplomatic official[s],’ not to all foreign representatives,” quoting from a friend-of-the-court brief filed by Texas Senator Ted Cruz and some of his colleagues. “Most foreign officials receive a partial immunity, such as immunity for their official acts,” Thomas continued. “But, partial immunity cannot render a person not ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States for Fourteenth Amendment purposes.”

Cases on the foreign-diplomat exception itself are vanishingly rare, but Thomas’s distinction appears to have been official practice before now, as well. The U.S. government recently denied birthright citizenship to a 75-year-old man who was born in New York while his father was a Nicaraguan diplomatic official. The State Department had granted the man a passport for decades, only to revoke it in 2018 after learning that the man’s father actually had diplomatic immunity at the time of his birth. A Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel sided with the government last August.

It is even less likely that the foreign-diplomat exception could extend to anyone who is merely “employed by a foreign government in an official capacity.” A French civil servant who happens to give premature birth on U.S. soil while visiting this country on vacation, for example, is undoubtedly “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. She would possess no form of legal immunity and would thus be indistinguishable from any other temporary visa holder under Barbara. (I’m also curious how someone could be “employed by a foreign government” in anything but an “official capacity.”) The same would logically be true for United Nations or European Union employees. It could even apply to the children of representatives of the Holy See, though they tend to not have them.

From here, the fish in the stew reek a little more notably. The next category of people targeted by the order would not be recognized as U.S. citizens if at least one parent is “engaged in a commercial transaction to purchase or access birthright citizenship for [child], or engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship.” This appears at first glance to be targeted at birth tourists, but its reach may turn out to be more complicated than that.

One of the subcategories, for example, would target children whose parents “engage in a commercial transaction to ensure that the person’s mother is present in the United States, or a territory of the United States, to give birth.” Again, this would run counter to Barbara, which concluded that birthright citizenship applies to temporary visa holders. It would also produce some bizarre and perhaps unintended circumstances.

Suppose, for example, that a green card holder from Australia is married to an H-1B visa recipient from Ireland. The Irish visa holder flies to Dublin for her sister’s wedding. While there, she takes a pregnancy test that gives a positive result. She buys a new plane ticket—which would certainly be a “commercial transaction”—to return home ahead of schedule to share the exciting news with her Australian husband. Does that render them no longer “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States?

I count at least eight justices in Barbara who would likely say “no.” For Roberts and the other four justices who joined his majority opinion in full, the child would be a U.S. citizen under Barbara’s terms. Kavanaugh’s bizarre statutory argument would almost certainly lead to the same conclusion by a different road. So would the Thomas-Gorsuch stance that the citizenship clause only applied to parents who are domiciled in the United States, which would cover the Australian father. Alito did not address permanent residents since that executive order did not apply to them.

The Trump administration explained that it hopes to specifically tackle the phenomenon of “birth tourism,” where foreign nationals lawfully enter the U.S. to give birth and ensure that their children are U.S. citizens by birth. A separate executive order on the subject aims to prevent the entry of commercial birth-tourism customers into the U.S. altogether. Since these people are by definition temporary visa holders, the U.S. government could simply deny them visas.

A second subcategory in the executive order would also exclude children born to parents who “engage in a commercial transaction with a surrogate present in the United States, or a territory of the United States, to give birth.” This is the first time that surrogacy has come up in the Trump administration’s birthright citizenship discussions. It apparently refers to a practice whereby some foreign billionaires allegedly pay surrogates to have their children on U.S. soil, then return them to China without ever setting foot in the United States themselves. It is unclear whether the order would only apply to children born to U.S. citizen parents or only a foreign national surrogate.

At last, we come to the parts of the order pulled from the darkest, dankest parts of the walk-in freezer. The most unusual carve-out is for children “born in a territory or territorial waters of the United States where citizenship is not conferred by federal statute.” The “territorial waters” part may be a reference to an archaic exception in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the 1898 case where the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship. Among the handful of exceptions it listed was children “born on foreign public ships.”

The court linked this exception to an existing premise that a child “born on the ocean is a subject of the prince to whom his parents then owe allegiance; for he is still deemed under the protection of his sovereign, and born in a place where he has dominion in common with all other sovereigns.” Roberts did not discuss it in Barbara and it is only mentioned in passing by the concurring and dissenting opinions. Either way, the advent of commercial aviation in the mid-twentieth century rendered it all but moribund.

The “territory” exception is a different matter. Children born in U.S. territories and overseas possessions are U.S. citizens at birth under federal law, with one notable exception: American Samoa, a set of islands in the South Pacific that is home to roughly 43,000 people. The United States peacefully acquired the islands in 1900, but at the Samoans’ request, Congress has refused to extend features of U.S. sovereignty to the islands that exist everywhere else. Its inhabitants are considered “U.S. nationals” instead of “U.S. citizens.”

In 2022, three American Samoans asked the Supreme Court to recognize them as birthright citizens—a rare instance where the clause’s modern interpretation did not revolve around immigrants. They argued that the Insular Cases, a set of Supreme Court rulings that generally held that the Constitution does not apply with full force in territories acquired since the Spanish-American War, should be overturned. At least two justices, Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor, have echoed that sentiment. But the court ultimately declined to hear their case. It would be hard to square Barbara’s understanding of “subject to the jurisdiction” with the practice in American Samoa, but it is unclear if the high court wants to overturn the Insular Cases along the way.

The last category is the children born to parents who are an “alien enemy,” which the order “defined to include any member of a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization … or Specially Designated Global Terrorist.” In layman’s terms, this means any members of a terrorist group as designated by the State Department. Federal law generally allows the executive branch to seize assets and impose financial restrictions on members of those groups.

This provision appears mainly intended to “own the libs” by allowing the administration and its allies to criticize the order’s challengers for trying to give U.S. citizenship to terrorists. Josh Blackman, a conservative law professor at the South Texas College of Law, gave credence to that reading in a blog post at Reason magazine on Thursday. “The order explains that the child of an alien enemy is not a citizen at birth,” Blackman wrote. “I welcome a lawsuit from the ACLU demanding citizenship for the children of members of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.”

One need not be a member of the ACLU to spot the constitutional problems here. Designating a group as a “foreign terrorist organization” flows from an act of Congress and the executive branch’s discretion. Members of those groups are undoubtedly “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States; they are routinely prosecuted in U.S. courts for crimes against U.S. citizens. Describing someone as a terrorist does not supersede the Constitution, and depriving U.S. citizenship to otherwise eligible children based on their parents’ alleged or proven crimes would be manifestly unconstitutional and morally reprehensible.

For what it’s worth, this provision also appears to be based on a misconception about the September 11 hijackers. Trump publicly claimed in 2015 that the hijackers’ wives “knew exactly what was going to happen,” returned to Saudi Arabia before the attacks, and thus didn’t warn anyone in the United States. One small problem with this claim is that none of the hijackers were married or had wives in the United States at any point.

Finally, Trump cites no actual legal authority to justify the executive order. The text of the order does not cite the U.S. Code or any acts of Congress beyond the terrorist-designation law, which does not mention citizenship. The White House also pointed to no statutory provisions that allow the executive branch to refuse to recognize U.S. citizenship on these grounds. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy aide, gave a justification of his own during an Oval Office appearance with Trump on Thursday evening.

“The president is using his authority as commander in chief to sign first an executive order using the new rule the Supreme Court issued to expand the definitions of people who are ineligible for birthright citizenship,” Miller claimed. “That includes, for example, members of foreign terrorist organizations and large categories of people who lobby and act on behalf of foreign governments.”

To describe the president’s authority in these terms is to admit that it doesn’t exist. There is no “commander in chief” power to ignore the citizenship clause or the Supreme Court’s ruling on it. On the contrary, it is Congress to which the Constitution gives the power to set “rules for naturalization.” If Congress had given the power to invent new exceptions to birthright citizenship to the president, the White House would have said so. If Congress had done so, it would have been unconstitutional, as well. And if the Trump administration wants to serve a day-old fish stew to the justices, it shouldn’t be surprised when they spit it out.

The race for the first before-and-after images of the spent SpaceX rocket on the Moon has been won by the South Korean space agency. The Korean Aerospace Administration (KASA) posted imagery from its Danuri lunar orbiter showing the impact site on the Moon on August 6. The impact was predicted to occur on August 5, and marked a landing on the Moon for SpaceX several years ahead of schedule, just without humans onboard and traveling a good deal faster than planned. The words "crater" and "SpaceX" are not something investors nervously tracking the company's stock price following the weeks since its IPO will want to think about. The impact came on the fourth anniversary of Danuri's launch, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. It took a few months for the probe to reach the Moon, and its initial one-year mission has since been extended twice – most recently through 2027. The plan is currently for Danuri to intentionally make its own impact crater in March 2028. The upper stage of the Falcon 9 is expendable, and this one was used to send Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 1 and ispace's RESILIENCE to the Moon in 2025. On most Falcon 9 missions, the upper stage burns up in Earth's atmosphere, but a lunar transfer orbit like this one made that impossible. In a post, SpaceX stated, "Impacts like this are rare, but they can happen with objects in these types of orbits, and we worked with NASA on the optimal disposal solution," and wrote, "a controlled disposal maneuver is not always possible." NASA boss, Jared Isaacman, noted that NASA intentionally crashed spent stages into the Moon in the name of seismic research, and commented, "The reality is that meteoroids strike the lunar surface hourly, with impacts comparable to this upper stage occurring roughly every six days." Humanity has not done a great job of managing space junk around the Earth. While the SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage did not pose any risk to humans, it highlights the need to devise rules for the use of lunar space rather than risk an uncontrolled buildup of debris. In June, The Register spoke to Neuraspace boss Chiara Manfletti about how things might be done differently as lunar traffic increases. Neuraspace is all about satellite collision avoidance, and Manfletti's ideas included requirements from stakeholders to designating dumping grounds on the Moon. NASA's veteran Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was also attempting to capture the impact, and more images are likely to be released over the coming week. Now to name the impact site. Elon Crater, anyone? ®

Patricia Bailey’s four-bedroom home sits high among the trees in lush Edisto Island, South Carolina. It’s a peaceful place where her body healed from multiple sclerosis. It’s also the source of her generational wealth.

jQuery(document).ready(function(){prx("https:\/\/play.prx.org\/e?ge=prx_149_fb594c13-6093-4f40-a86b-6d099e2a4fa3&uf=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.revealradio.org%2Frevealpodcast", "prx-1", "embed")});Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.

Bailey built this house on land that was passed down by her great-great-grandfather, Jim Hutchinson, who was enslaved on Edisto before he was freed and became a landowner. 

“I know this is sacred land here,” Bailey says, “’cause it’s my ancestors and I feel it.” 

Union General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 15—better known as 40 acres and a mule—implied a better life in the waning days of the Civil War. Hutchinson is among the formerly enslaved people who received land through the field orders, which are often thought of as a promise that was never kept. But 40 acres and a mule was more than that. 

It was real.

Over a more than two-year investigation, our partners at the Center for Public Integrity unearthed thousands of records once buried in the National Archives. In them, they found more than 1,200 formerly enslaved people who were given land by the federal government through the field orders—and then saw that land taken away. 

None of the land Bailey lives on today is part of Hutchinson’s 40 acres. Instead, her family’s wealth is built on her ancestor’s determination to get and keep land of his own, after losing what he thought he had gained through the field orders.

This week on Reveal, with the Center for Public Integrity, we’re revisiting our three-part series in which we tell the history of an often-misunderstood government program. We explore a reparation that wasn’t—and the wealth gap that remains.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in June 2024. 

In the November general election, voters in Scotts Valley, Capitola and Watsonville are set to choose new city council members. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local)

SANTA CRUZ COUNTY >> More than 100 seats are up for grabs in the Nov. 3 general election in Santa Cruz County, but as few as 14 of them may appear on ballots. Most seats will go to unopposed candidates or, in some cases, have no candidates.

Meanwhile, battles are brewing for Capitola City Council, Watsonville City Council, and Pajaro Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees. 

Filing ends today for most seats. In races where the incumbent has not filed, the deadline is extended to Aug. 12. 

(function() { window.mc4wp = window.mc4wp || { listeners: [], forms: { on: function(evt, cb) { window.mc4wp.listeners.push( { event : evt, callback: cb } ); } } } })(); Stay informed on Santa Cruz County’s biggest issues. Santa Cruz Local’s newsletter breaks down complex local topics and shows residents how to get involved. Email address:
mc4wp.forms.on('subscribed', function(form) { // gtag.js if(form.id == '6954') { gtag('event', 'subscribe', {'event_category': 'newsletter_prompt', 'event_label':'top_of_story'}); } }); Leave this field empty if you're human: Competitive races

The Capitola City Council has three seats up for election. This is the last at-large election before the city switches to district-based elections in 2028. Incumbent Councilmember Joe Clarke has filed for reelection. Incumbents Margeaux Morgan and Susan Westman have not filed. The other candidates are:

• Cami Corvin, who has been endorsed by Santa Cruz County Supervisors Kim De Serpa and Manu Koenig.
• Tory Del Favero, a former trustee of the Soquel Union Elementary School District.
• Peter Wilk, a former Capitola Planning Commissioner and city treasurer. 
• TJ Welch, a Capitola Planning Commissioner.

In Watsonville, Mayor and District 4 Councilmember Kristal Salcido and District 3 Councilmember Maria Orozco have filed for reelection unopposed.

• District 5 Councilmember Casey Clark is challenged by Watsonville Personnel Commissioner Angel Zuniga.
• As District 7 Councilmember Ari Parker terms out, former Watsonville Planning Commissioner Ed Acosta and former councilmember Nancy Bilicich are vying to take her place.

Two at-large seats of the Scotts Valley City Council are up for reelection. 

• Councilmember Greg Wimp has filed for reelection. Councilmember Derek Timm has not. 
• Michael Zeller and Danny Reber are also vying for the two open seats.

Four of seven seats on the Pajaro Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees are up for election.

• Educator and Santa Cruz Community Health board member Andrew Goldenkranz and general contractor and alternate representative on the Santa Cruz County Republican Central Committee Robin Sukow have filed for candidacy to represent Trustee Area 1. The seat is currently held by Joy Flynn, who was appointed by the board last year after former trustee De Serpa was elected county supervisor. Flynn is not running for election in November.
• District Area 4 Trustee Daniel Dodge Jr. is challenged by Eriberto Estrada, a Pajaro Valley High School alum who is running for the seat just after finishing high school.
• Former trustee Jennifer Schacher is running against Curt Wilcox to represent District Area 5. As of 8 p.m. Friday, the County Clerk website did not indicate that Flores had filed for reelection.
• District parent and frequent meeting attendee Mads Realmuto is running to unseat District Area 7 Trustee Misty Navarro.

In the Felton Fire Protection District, appointed Director Craig Winter is running for a full term, meaning he would vacate the remaining three years of his appointed term. 

• Winter is running alongside Bill Finlayson, Board Chair Norman Crandell and Director Jim Anderson for two at-large seats. 
• Rich Alter is running to finish Winter’s appointed term.

In Cabrillo Community College District Trustee Area 6, incumbent J Dan Rothwell has not filed for reelection. Milissa Ales-Barnicoat, Benjamin Finke and Karen Cogswell are running to take his place.

Candidates for Santa Cruz mayor Ami Chen Mills and Ryan Coonerty will face a runoff after finishing as the top two contenders in the June primary election. 

Open seats

Twenty-eight seats do not yet have any candidates. They include:

• Pajaro Valley Healthcare District Zone 1, now held by Marcus Pimentel.
• Cabrillo Community College District Trustee Area 1, now held by Donna Ziel.
• School board seats in Bonny Doon Elementary School District , Lakeside Joint Unified School District, Mountain Elementary School District and more. 

Candidates can still file for empty seats until Wednesday, Aug. 12. Learn how to run for office.

The post Santa Cruz County election preview: tax proposals, city council fights, empty seats appeared first on Santa Cruz Local.

After acknowledging last month that unreleased AI models committed what for human perpetrators would be computer crimes, OpenAI now says it cannot rule out the possibility that Astra, a pending model release not involved in its Hugging Face hack, might possess critical cyber capabilities. OpenAI in its Preparedness Framework [PDF] defines that term to mean "capabilities that present a meaningful risk of a qualitatively new threat vector for severe harm with no ready precedent," and notes that such capabilities "require safeguards even during the development of the covered system, irrespective of deployment plans." Noting, or perhaps boasting, that internal evaluations of Astra "indicate significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity," OpenAI insists that this time, there will be security – something that also eluded Anthropic, Meta, and the UK's AI Security Institute during model testing. "We are implementing stricter security controls for higher-capability models and associated activities, including isolated testing environments, restricted network and tool access, enhanced model weight protections and encryption, additional monitoring and detection capabilities, and sandboxed execution," the AI biz declared on Friday. That may surprise those who expected such safeguards would already be in place. This comes with a promise to pause Astra testing internally where these security controls are absent and to provide recommendations to third-party testing partners about how to run high risk evaluations and workloads safely – knowledge that OpenAI itself might have found useful when its models pillaged Hugging Face. What's more, OpenAI intends to implement thought policing for Astra, at least in the pre-release stage. "We have implemented universal monitoring for risky actions and misalignment across all agentic applications of Astra, including training and evaluation," the company explained in its post. "Monitors evaluate the model's Chain of Thought and trigger a security response to review and interrupt high risk activity." We're told that OpenAI's commitment applies to internal usage and isn't necessarily an indication that chain-of-thought monitoring will be conducted during commercial operation. But other frontier models like Anthropic's Fable and Mythos have implemented stronger classifiers to reject interactions deemed risky and retain data even for commercial customers expecting zero data retention. Moving in the opposite direction, Anthropic on Friday said it is relaxing Fable refusals, or "fallbacks," to use the company's euphemism, so they don't happen as frequently for prompts involving biology. The concern has been that some vibe terrorist using the company's cash-burning, water squandering, grid taxing, content laundering service might do harm by convincing the model to emit chemical warfare instructions. To avoid that possibility, the Claudefather made the initial release of Fable all but useless for security researchers and biologists. Now that China-based AI firms have shown they can field competitive open-weight AI models for less than their US rivals, the need to remain competitive in the market appears to be tempering Anthropic's willingness to alienate potential customers by hobbling its best models. OpenAI isn't quite there yet. The ChatGPT maker argues, "We believe advanced cyber-capable models should help defenders identify and address vulnerabilities before attackers do." Believing that, however, won't make it so. Adversaries, whoever they may be, already have access to encryption and all sorts of weapons. OpenAI may believe that it can give favored nations and organizations exclusive access to its most capable models, but history suggests any such advantage cannot be maintained. Better to focus on building defenses than playing keepaway forever. ®

A proposed senior living facility on Soquel and Seabright avenues could be six stories tall. (Workbench)

Community Meeting for 1501 Mission St. housing proposal

• Attend 6 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 18 on Zoom, or call 669-444-9171, meeting ID 831 6735 0628. 
• To watch a recording of the meeting or submit a question, visit the city’s website.

Santa Cruz City Council meeting for 900 High St. housing

• Attend 2 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 11 at 809 Center St, by Zoom or call 833-548-0276, meeting ID 946 8440 1344.
• To submit comments ahead of the meeting, email bbush@santacruzca.gov by 5 p.m. Monday.

SANTA CRUZ >> A proposal for as many as 281 apartments at Seabright and Soquel avenues was recently submitted to Santa Cruz city staff from local developer Workbench. 

The pre-application included two potential designs, one for 281 below-market-rate units and another for 173 homes for seniors. A community meeting is required and is not yet scheduled.

An updated version of another Workbench project, proposed housing behind Peace United Church, is set for a vote by the Santa Cruz City Council Tuesday.

A separate project that proposes a 46-unit building at Mission and Trescony streets is scheduled for discussion in a community meeting this month.

State housing laws severely restrict the city’s ability to change or block new developments. However, city leaders and residents can request voluntary design changes, and the final details of developments often differ from initial proposals.

The approval process for each project depends on which state laws developers invoke in their final applications.

(function() { window.mc4wp = window.mc4wp || { listeners: [], forms: { on: function(evt, cb) { window.mc4wp.listeners.push( { event : evt, callback: cb } ); } } } })(); Stay informed on Santa Cruz County’s biggest issues. Santa Cruz Local’s newsletter breaks down complex local topics and shows residents how to get involved. Email address:
mc4wp.forms.on('subscribed', function(form) { // gtag.js if(form.id == '6954') { gtag('event', 'subscribe', {'event_category': 'newsletter_prompt', 'event_label':'top_of_story'}); } }); Leave this field empty if you're human: Six-stories on Seabright Avenue

Workbench has put forth two proposals for a six-story housing complex on the corner of Soquel and Seabright avenues: a 173-unit senior living facility and 281 units of below-market-rate housing.

Either complex would take the place of a shopping center that includes Ace Hardware, The Bagelrey and the Santa Cruz Roller Palladium.

The development at 1214 Soquel Ave., named in pre-application plans as Bright Plaza, would also include an adjacent property across Gault Avenue. 

The project will require a full application with more detailed information about the design, unit size, and other details.

The proposal will require a community meeting, which has not been scheduled.

See more details and sign up for updates on the city’s webpage.

47 homes on High Street

An updated proposal for new housing behind Peace United Church is five stories. (Workbench)

Tuesday, the Santa Cruz City Council is set to consider an expanded version of a housing proposal approved in 2024 for 900 High St. The new proposal includes 47 units, up from 40. It includes studios, one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments, plus four- and five-bedroom “co-living units” that share common space. 

Four studios would be priced for very-low-income renters and four would be priced for moderate-income renters. Additionally, 10 bedrooms in the co-living units would be priced for low-income renters. Income cutoffs are set annually by the state.

• Attend the city council meeting 2 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 11 at 809 Center St. or by Zoom.
• To submit comments ahead of the meeting, email bbush@santacruzca.gov by 5 p.m. Monday.

See full details of the new project and sign up for updates. 

Five stories on Mission and Trescony

A proposed five-story building on Mission Street would include space for shops on the ground floor, plus a courtyard and rooftop deck. (Anderson Architects Inc.)

Later this month, developers will present a proposal for a five-story building with ground-floor shops and 46 homes on the corner of Mission and Trescony streets.

The building at 1501-1511 Mission St. would replace a single-family home, the building housing Namaste Indian Cuisine and Falafel of Santa Cruz, and the building of Donnelly Chocolates. Preliminary plans include 42 parking spaces.

A community meeting with developers and city staff is scheduled for 6 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 18 on Zoom. 

See more details and sign up for updates on the city’s webpage for the project.

21 homes next to Mission Hill Middle

A proposal for 21 homes next to Mission Hill Middle School. (Workbench)

A proposal from Santa Cruz-based developer Workbench would replace two homes next to Mission Hill Middle School with 21 homes and space for shops. The proposed building is legally considered three stories, but has a partial fourth story described as a “loft”. It would have 18 parking spaces and a mix of one- two-, three- and four-bedroom units.

In the pre-application plans, Santa Cruz-based developer Workbench wrote that 20% of homes will be offered for low-income renters.

In project plans and a May 11 community meeting, developers said they intend to preserve a large redwood tree on an adjacent property. 

Watch a recording of the meeting, see more plan details and sign up for updates on the city’s webpage.

Four stories near Water and Market streets

The preliminary proposal for a development on Water Street includes in-unit laundry and private open space. (Workbench)

Another pre-application proposes a 13-unit housing project at 617 Water St., near Market Street. It would replace two existing buildings with a four-story building. The part of the building closest to the street would be three stories. 

The proposed development from Workbench would include room for stores on the ground floor and 10 parking spaces. It would have mostly two- and three-bedroom units, along with two studios and a four-bedroom unit.

A community meeting with developers and city staff was held April 20. Watch a recording, see more project details and sign up for updates on the city’s webpage.

Confused about housing jargon?

Read Santa Cruz Local’s housing glossary to learn common words, phrases and laws.

Questions or comments? Email info@santacruzlocal.org. Santa Cruz Local is supported by members, major donors, sponsors and grants for the general support of our newsroom. Our news judgments are made independently and not on the basis of donor support. Learn more about Santa Cruz Local and how we are funded.

Learn about membership Santa Cruz Local’s news is free. We believe that high-quality local news is crucial to democracy. We depend on locals like you to make a meaningful contribution so everyone can access our news. Learn about membership

The post Up to 281 apartments proposed on Seabright Avenue in Santa Cruz appeared first on Santa Cruz Local.

The GOP’s odds of maintaining control of both chambers of Congress dimmed this past week. Scandals are threatening to cost the GOP winnable House races, the economy continues its tailspin, and a spate of new polling shows Democrats ahead in red states like Texas, Ohio, and Iowa—leading analysts to move a number of races toward Democrats. In fact, things are looking so bad for Republicans…

Source

Enter for a chance to win tickets to Fences by Santa Cruz Shakespeare on Tuesday, August 25. Drawing Date is August 17, 2026.

A cartoon by Brian McFadden. Support my Patreon for early access and exclusives. Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, or at my website. Related | Trump privately fumes over missile shortages—while lying in public…

Source