The teens who attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego were latest to cite prior atrocities by GENE JOHNSON

 

In rambling writings full of vitriol against a wide range of people, the teenagers who attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego this week, killing three men and themselves, left little doubt about the models for their violence.

Chief among them: the shooter who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

Researchers who study extremism have long noted the resonance of the Christchurch attack among far-right assailants, attributing it to the extent of the violence, the document the killer posted concerning his views and actions, and — especially — his decision to livestream the massacre. Among those who apparently modeled attacks after Christchurch was a shooter who months later killed 22 people in a Texas Walmart.

 “Part of what we’re seeing in violent extremist communities online is wanting to emulate the attacks that have had the most kills — which is a disgusting thing to say, but it’s the reality,” said Katherine Keneally, director of threat analysis and prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an anti-extremism organization. “There is this obsession and it’s just sort of gamifying of attacks.”

 

Cain Clark, 17, and Caleb Vazquez, 18, stormed the Islamic Center on Monday before being driven back outside by a security guard who exchanged gunfire with them as he initiated a lockdown, helping to protect 140 children, authorities have said.

The pair killed the guard, Amin Abdullah, and two other men before taking their own lives in a vehicle nearby.

Writings heavy on hate and grievance

They left behind a 74-page document — the same length as the one written by Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant. Like Tarrant’s, it cited a range of far-right ideological inspirations, including the notion that white people are being replaced by other populations, and offered self-interviews detailing their motives and goals.

And they called themselves “Sons of Tarrant.”

The writings include hateful rhetoric toward Jewish people, Muslims and Islam, as well as the LGBTQ+ community, Black people, women, and the political left and right. They indicated they were trying to accelerate the collapse of society. In his section, Vazquez wrote of having “some mental health issues” and being rejected by women.

 

Brian Levin, the founding director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University in San Bernardino, noted that while white supremacist writings dating to the 1970s offered a narrative blueprint for decentralized terror attacks, neo-Nazis decades ago favored an approach sometimes called the “propaganda of the deed” — the attack on its own was supposed to inspire copycats, even without written explanations.

The internet has made it easier to spread writings by attackers, and since a far-right attacker killed 77 people in Norway in 2011 and released a 1,500-page document, it has become more common for writings to accompany such atrocities, Levin said. Frequently the writings quote from past white-supremacist texts.

“This strategy of being another chapter in a continuing chain of extremism not only telegraphs that the movement is bigger than it is, but also its resilience — that it is reoccurring with a different set of violent actors, some of whom die in the process,” Levin said.

 

A contagion of mass violence

The shooting was the latest in a series of attacks on houses of worship. Threats and hate crimes targeting the Muslim and Jewish communities have risen since war began in the Middle East, forcing increases in security.

Keneally said she had mixed feelings about the media attention on the attacks: The public needs to understand what happened, but it also risks amplifying the killers’ message and spreading the contagion of mass violence. She said she has struggled with questions she has gotten about whether such attacks are motivated by nihilistic extremism, or accelerationist, neo-Nazi, or white supremacist ideologies.

 

“We’re trying to put people in buckets and we’re asking the why, but we’re not going back and looking at the how,” Keneally said. “How did these kids end up going down this route? How is social media playing a role in that?”

At 17 and 18, she said, healthy teenagers should be excited about graduating high school or entering young adulthood, not engaging with extremist ideologies.

Another form of inspiration

While hateful extremism inspired the teens to attack the Islamic center, it inspired the security guard, Abdullah, in another way: to defend it.

In an interview, his friend Khalid Alexander said Abdullah was increasingly concerned about negative rhetoric toward Muslims, including from politicians.

“He recognized a direct kind of correlation between the threat of the community he was protecting and the types of, really, hate that was being spewed on television in an anti-Muslim, anti-Black, anti-immigrant feeling,” Alexander said. “And so he was keenly aware of the dangers of his job. And that’s exactly why he chose to do it.”

___

Johnson reported from Seattle. Associated Press writers Julie Watson in San Diego and Safiyah Riddle in Montgomery, Alabama, contributed.

Researchers say the Trump administration is finding new ways to punish science by Katia Riddle

 

Standing in his laboratory, Harvard professor Sean Eddy gazes at a row of vacant work stations. More than a year ago, this lab was filled with over a dozen researchers. On a given day they might be working independently on analyzing genomic sequencing or gathered around the group table, drinking coffee and helping each other troubleshoot questions about genomic data from different species.

Now, after his funding was terminated under the Trump administration, the computer screens are gone and the room is silent. He's one of the last people left.

" Seeing these labs empty — this is not the way it's supposed to be," he says. "This was a very vibrant lab."

 

Eddy is a computational biologist. He has devoted his career to one fundamental question. " I'm really interested in the origin of life," he says. "I want to know where it all came from."

He and his colleagues spent years developing software that could be used to seek out an answer. Scientists around the world now use the tools his team created to compare DNA and protein sequences, identify genes, and predict what they do. Their work underpins countless studies, including research related to cancer and neurodevelopmental disorders.

It's hard to quantify how much modern science relies on what his team built. Eddy describes its use as being as ubiquitous as microscopes or pipettes.

 

It's very affirming for me to pick up sort of semi-random papers in the literature in fields that I care about and see them using our software over and over again," he says.

When the lab was designed more than a decade ago, he worked closely with an architect. On the wall are pictures of animals. His daughter, who was 12 at the time, stenciled them for him. Mixed in with pictures of mice and fish are laboratory creatures. "There's a bacterial virus called T4 that I did my thesis on," he says, pointing to the wall.

 

In 2025, Eddy received a letter from the National Institutes of Health, informing him that his work "had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated," he recalls.

Eddy is one of thousands of researchers across the U.S. still grappling with the damage inflicted on science in 2025 under the Trump administration — despite a restoration of funding earlier this year.

Left guessing 

At the time he received the letter, Eddy had more than a dozen people working for him. Over the last year he's had to let almost all of them go. He's worked closely with them to help find jobs elsewhere.

Eddy says he has given up on any dream that his funding would be restored. "I haven't talked to my program officer in years now," he says. "My guess is that he's under instructions not to talk to me. So we're just sort of left guessing what the status of the grant is."

 He estimates the funding loss set him and his lab back by a decade. At 60, Eddy had planned to continue working through the next decade with his team. "For someone of my career stage, this is probably not recoverable," he says.

 

Walking through the empty lab, he looks at the bare desks where his team used to sit. He'd like to see this lab taken over by a younger computational biologist, someone who could pick up where he left off. But with Harvard now on a hiring freeze, he says, he doesn't see that happening anytime soon.

Money on paper — but not in practice

Champions of science celebrated a rare bipartisan victory in the early months of 2026. After the Trump administration tried to cut, freeze or suspend billions of dollars the previous year, a handful of Republicans — at the urging of their constituents — joined Democratic colleagues in an effort to quietly restore significant portions of that funding through the appropriations process.

 

Now, many of those same advocates are warning that money is not reaching scientists at the rate it should be, and that a lack of transparency at the agency is compromising the integrity and reliability of its research.

"In the past you had a pretty good sense of how NIH was gonna behave," says Jeremy Berg, a former high-ranking official at NIH who has become a kind of watchdog for the organization. When the Trump administration started slashing funding for NIH, Berg took it personally. " Now that level of trust is pretty much gone," he says.

In the past, says Berg, there was an ethos in the agency that dictated clear deadlines, funding forecasts, and expectations from researchers. This reliability fostered good science, Berg says. He credits the institution with funding and fostering much of the progress in biomedical research in the past few decades — such as mapping the human genome, major advances in cancer care, or new therapies for HIV and AIDS.

Berg recalls something a Republican senator once told him about the agency. "He used to refer to it not just as the crown jewel in biomedical research, but as the crown jewel in the federal government," he says. "I think that one can make a pretty strong case for that."

 

When the cuts hit, he started tracking their progress, charting the changes over the last year. In 2026, Berg says the budget may look intact on paper. However, he says NIH has switched the strategy to making fewer grants with more money over more years, an accounting shift that means fewer scientists are getting funding.

Berg's analysis showed that at one point earlier this year, NIH had issued roughly 2,300 new grants — about half as many as at the same point the previous year.

"There's a lot of pain and a lot of science that isn't gonna get done," he says.

 Advocacy groups have also been sounding alarm bells about a lack of transparency at NIH. Money approved by Congress this year has been slow to reach researchers, they say. Analysis from the Association of American Universities showed that NIH issued 66 percent fewer grant awards in the first few months of 2026 than they did the previous year.

 

" I'm sadly watching the agency where I worked for so many years be dismantled," says Elizabeth Ginexi, who was a program officer at the agency for 22 years, working on substance use prevention. She left when the Trump administration started making cuts, fearing she would be cut anyway.

She's been looking for a job for over a year.

In the meantime, Ginexi's been analyzing something on the NIH website called forecasts, areas of research the agency would like to fund. Typically these forecasts give direction to scientists who are applying for research money.

Ginexi started tracking them when she observed that they were not being filled as quickly as they had in the past. "There are tons and tons of them — starting from last year — that are still sitting as forecasts and were never published," she explains.

 

Her research shows that of 336 NIH funding forecasts still listed as open, 205 were already past their promised posting date with no full announcement ever published. It's a way, she says, of giving the illusion of funding opportunities, even as they fail to materialize.

Chances of funding? "Basically zero"

Sitting at her lab, cancer researcher Rachael Sirianni scrolls down the website for the NIH, monitoring the grants she's submitted that are waiting for the agency to review. She looks at one application. " The chances of that grant being funded in 2026 are basically zero," she says.

Sirianni had been counting on that grant to continue evaluating a combination of medications for treating children with cancer that had metastasized to the brain. The drugs together offered a "one-two punch," she says, and was showing a lot of promise. She figured with this progress, she'd be able to secure more funding for her work. But she hasn't been able to see it through the normal review process at NIH.

 

Many of the families grappling with this condition have no other options for dealing with this kind of pediatric cancer, which is basically impossible to remove or mitigate.

"It's thin and it's across the soft tissues of the brain and spinal cord," she explains. "There isn't really a consistent neurosurgical solution to that cancer complication."

Sirianni is a biomedical engineer. Earlier in her career, while working at a research institute, she met a family who lost a child to a type of cancer considered unsurvivable. "Being exposed to that family's pain, especially when I had become a parent myself," she says, "was pretty personally transformative."

In 2022, she moved her young family from Texas to Worcester, Mass., a city of a little over 200,000 an hour outside Boston, to build a lab at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School and run pediatric cancer studies.

For this particular grant, Sirianni worked with a colleague for several years before they submitted their proposal for funding, carefully tracking compliance requirements and watching deadlines. In the last year, these deadlines have been repeatedly moved, making it now impossible for the grant to even be reviewed in time for funding.

 

Sirianni looks at one laboratory bench that is full of equipment — reagent bottles and pipettes. She's had to lay off the researcher who was working here. "I can't bring myself to clear his bench," she says. "It makes me sad."

In response to her concerns and those laid out by other researchers in this story, a spokesperson from Health and Human Services, Andrew Nixon, acknowledged the slowdown in funding and attributed the delays to the government shutdown and congressional Democrats.

"Timelines have returned to typical funding patterns," he wrote in an email to NPR.

Both Sirianni and Eddy say for them, it's too late to restart their research. "That means that the therapeutic development work that taxpayers previously invested in is now hitting a brick wall," says Sirianni.

 Even as just a citizen of the country, this frustrates me," she says. "It's a loss of investment. It's a loss of momentum for the families that have children that are affected by these tumors. Every month, every week — that matters to them."

 

When times are hard, we eat more beans. And it's happening again now by Joe Hernandez

 

A hill of beans isn't so trivial anymore.

In fact, it sounds pretty good.

Interest is surging in the tiny, bulbous legumes sometimes met with a shrug, as more Americans increasingly seek out cheap, healthy and inventive food.

Bean-centric recipes are abundant on social media — yep, there are bean-fluencers on BeanTok. Consumers can now buy trendier bean-based products, and one heirloom-bean service is so popular that it has a waitlist of tens of thousands of people. (Some bean lovers have taken to referring to themselves as the "leguminati.") The children's show Bluey is even being used to market beans to kids.

 

"There definitely is a renaissance," said Tim McGreevy, CEO of USA Pulses, the trade group for the pulse crop industry, which includes dry beans, lentils, chickpeas and dry peas. "Beans can help you feel good. That's their power."

Of course, there's nothing new about Phaseolus vulgaris and other members of the legume family. The primitive crops were critical to early agriculture and, in more recent times, have been a cheaper alternative to animal proteins. Legumes have long been a central feature of many cuisines, from dal in India and other South Asian countries to the beans-and-rice dishes common across Latin America and beyond.

 

But backers say the bean has been cast aside by some for too long and is an ideal solution to some of our modern problems. For one, Americans don't get enough fiber, which is abundant in beans. And as food prices continue to rise, beans offer a low-cost, nutritious protein source that can keep you as full as beef, one study published in The Journal of Nutrition found.

"Here's a food that's affordable. We don't take advantage of it. It's clear that it has health benefits," said Henry J. Thompson, a Colorado State University professor who has studied the effects of beans on human health. "Hey, America, wake up!"

 

What you eat when you can't get your hands on meat"

Beans not only are an ancient crop but were one of the things that made ancient agriculture possible at all, according to Joël Broekaert, author of A History of the World in Twelve Beans.

That's because beans are nitrogen-fixing plants, which means they contain bacteria that replenish nitrogen in the soil. Bean plants help keep soil healthy when grown alongside crops that absorb a lot of nitrogen, such as grains.

"You cannot sustain agriculture on growing grains alone, because they will deplete the soil. You get soil fatigue. They take up all the nutrients," Broekaert said.

 

Bean cultivation dates back thousands of years, and the plants have been a critical part of the human diet throughout history. But at some point in the last century, the increased availability of meat due to large-scale food production shoved beans aside, Broekaert said.

"When we started industrializing meat production, [meat] became much cheaper and much more readily, widely available," he said. "And then beans are, like, that's what you eat when you can't get your hands on meat."

McGreevy said that U.S. consumption of beans, peas and lentils was higher during the first half of the 20th century — particularly during the Great Depression — than it is today and that pulse popularity tends to increase during periods of economic uncertainty.

"We had this big spike in consumption during COVID, because people were cooking from home and it was a shelf-stable food that was affordable," he said.

Beef prices have surged in recent years, and sales of beans have increased. One can of beans, which is typically about 3.5 servings, can cost less than $1.

 

Another reason for beans' growing popularity is their many health benefits. They keep you full, keep you regular, help maintain your blood sugar, lower cholesterol and are associated with a lower risk of cancer.

Beans are well known for being packed with fiber, a nutrient lacking in the typical American diet. One study published in Current Developments in Nutrition found that just 7.4% of American adults are getting the recommended daily amount of fiber.

Thompson said pulse crops such as beans are believed to have a positive effect on the microbes that live in our gut. "What we and others have found is the types of microbes that like to eat pulse fiber are beneficial microbes, and the microbes that tend to be associated with diseases are suppressed by pulse consumption," he said. "There's your benefit, and it's pretty simple."

 What's less known is that some beans also contain a roughly 1-to-1 ratio of fiber and protein, Thompson said. There are around 8 grams of protein in half a cup of cooked kidney, navy, cannellini or black beans.

 

When the Trump administration updated the Dietary Guidelines for Americans in January, beans, peas and lentils were moved from the vegetable category to the protein category. A group of more than 130 physicians said in a joint letter to the administration last year that prioritizing beans, peas and lentils as protein sources was "long overdue" and would help "dispel the myth that plant-based proteins are 'incomplete' or inadequate sources of protein."

(The 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee also recommended emphasizing the consumption of beans, peas and lentils and reducing the amount of red and processed meat that people eat.)

Of course, there is no getting around beans' reputation as the musical fruit. Passing gas can be a side effect of eating beans, thanks to the complex sugar raffinose, which is plentiful in the legumes. But nutrition experts say slowly increasing your fiber intake allows your body to adjust to the nutrient and can help reduce gas.

It's hip to be fabiform (aka bean shaped)

Beans are healthy and cheap, but bean champions are also talking up their tastiness too.

"You should eat beans because they're delicious and you've taken them for granted," said Steve Sando, owner and operator of the heirloom-bean company Rancho Gordo.

Sando founded the company in 2001, when he said there wasn't much interest in heirloom beans — traditional nonhybrid varieties that aren't grown at large scales. But demand has steadily grown since then, and the company has become a darling of the bean world. (Sando said he lovingly refers to the company's devotees as "bean freaks" and the "leguminati.") Rancho Gordo now sells about 2.5 million pounds of beans each year.

 

In 2013, the company, which is based in Napa, Calif., started operating a bean club because Sando thought it would be a humorous play on the wine clubs in the region. Today, the Rancho Gordo Bean Club has 30,000 active members who pay $49.95 plus tax every three months for a box of six 1-pound bags of beans and another Rancho Gordo product. Another 32,000 people are on the waiting list, he said.

Sando said people have responded to the idea that beans themselves are worth eating and that cooking them from dry may prove a fun and rewarding experience (if you've got the time).

"There's a victory in making a pot of beans," he said. "You cooked it for two hours or so, and you turned it into something creamy and delicious."

For Madeline Schapiro, her love of legumes began after she decided to increase the amount of beans in her diet in 2017 in an attempt to deal with undiagnosed health problems she was experiencing.

 

"I started eating a bunch of beans in my college dining hall, and that was nine years ago," Schapiro said. "Beans changed my life. That's an understatement. Beans gave me my life back."

Now a social media "bean-fluencer" who posts under the name Bean Supporter to her tens of thousands of followers, Schapiro extols the health benefits of beans in her videos while showcasing their (often unexpected) versatility in the kitchen. Some of her recipes include lentil granola, bean-ana bread and a mung bean scallion pancake. She has even started hosting potluck-style bean meetups in Berkeley, Calif., which have drawn dozens of attendees who've brought dishes like pinto bean yogurt.

"Beans are truly one of the biggest superfoods there is," she said. "I just hope people can realize that, because I think one of the most common misconceptions in our food system is that, to eat healthy, you have to spend a lot of money."

 

The global plot to get you to eat more beans

Last year, USA Pulses announced that it aims to double both the American production and consumption of pulses by 2030. (The United Nations kicked off a similar campaign in 2015 to double global pulse consumption by 2028.)

McGreevy, of USA Pulses, who also owns a Washington state farm where he grows chickpeas and lentils as well as other crops, said the health and environmental effects of growing and eating pulses are unambiguous.

"The science is very clear, and it's been clear for decades and decades and thousands of years, actually," he said.

To achieve those goals, McGreevy said USA Pulses is working to effect public policy changes such as the new dietary guidelines and also collaborate with food manufacturers on ready-to-eat products incorporating pulses, such as lentil and chickpea pastas.

The group is also running a public awareness campaign to urge Americans to eat a half cup of pulses each day. (The U.S. Agriculture Department recommends three to four servings of protein per day for a 2,000-calorie diet. One-half cup of beans, peas or lentils is one serving of protein.)

Thompson, of Colorado State University, said people who want to reap the benefits of pulses should eat a "therapeutic amount" of 1.5 cups per day, which is equal to about one 14.5-ounce can, and ensure they are getting a variety.

"You go to Qdoba, and [they say] 'Black beans or pinto?'" he said. "What do I always say? I'd like both, please."

The Iran war reminds us: we’ll never be energy-independent with fossil fuels by Lloyd Doggett and Michael Shank

 Energy security comes from using local, renewable resources to power, heat and cool communities, as Ukraine is doing

 Donald Trump’s unjustified war on Iran and the resulting global fuel crisis is a continuing reminder that true energy security and independence will continue to elude us so long as we remain dependent on fossil fuels.

Whether it’s wars over oil and gas resource access or attacks on fossil fuel power plants and energy grids, this reliance on finite resources only worsens a country’s threat profile. News this month of Russia’s deadly attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Russian drones swarming Ukrainian power stations, and Kyiv running out of time to prepare for another winter of attacks on its energy grid illustrates this urgency.

No country will be energy-secure or independent as long as its fuel supply remains finite and fossilized and its power plants and energy grids centralized and fossil fuel-dependent. Those are sitting ducks, targets very vulnerable to attack by adversaries.

 There is another way to bolster energy security and independence: decarbonized and decentralized energy. Using local, renewable resources to power, heat and cool a community, with battery storage for backup, provides immediate relief from being precariously power plant-dependent or grid-dependent.

That’s what Ukrainian communities are increasingly doing in response to Russian attacks on their fossil-fueled power plants and energy grids. In direct response to Russia’s war, municipalities all across Ukraine are making the switch fast.

With the Iran war accelerating the transition to renewable energy, the gains from energy transition are obvious: countries like Spain are rapidly transitioning to renewables – better insulating themselves from gas price shocks and better protecting themselves from future grid-wide blackouts.

In this global rush to get off fossil fuels, however, we can’t leave those on the frontlines behind. With no end in sight for Russian aggression, more Ukrainian power plants and energy grids will be bombed, leaving more without power, heat and water. Many Ukrainians who were fortunate enough to have heat this past winter had already made the switch to solar power, heat pumps and battery storage backup, thanks to the help of local non-profit organizations like EcoAction and Ecoclub, and donors abroad.

Efforts like the Hromada Project, which is named after the Ukrainian term for “community”, will be essential in helping Ukrainians weather the war by connecting local nongovernmental organizations in Ukraine to public- and private-sector support from around the world

 

That’s exactly what our government should be doing: helping communities around the world be more energy secure and independent, sourcing their power locally with renewables, storing energy in batteries for backup, and electrifying everything to make the transition seamless. That’s certainly what is happening in China, which has dominated the global wind, solar, battery and electric vehicle markets as a result.

Instead, Trump and his Republican followers seek to keep the US addicted to fossilized thinking. Weaponizing the Department of Defense to stall onshore wind development, repealing tax incentives for renewable energy development and using taxpayer dollars to bribe clean energy developers to abandon projects endangers our ability to adopt secure, affordable and clean energy technologies now. Forcing Americans to remain dependent on ageing fossil fuel infrastructure exposes us to increasing residential electricity rates and riskier grid conditions.

Before another war is waged, and American defense budgets doubled, now is the time to double down on what will make us truly secure and independent. Transitioning off the fuels that start wars, and transitioning on to the energies that are decentralized, infinite and available in every community and country on this planet: that’s what real freedom looks like – and it’s all within our grasp.

The Late-Night Truth Social Storms That Offer a Window Into the President's Mind; A WSJ analysis of thousands of posts found that the president uses the social-media platform to spread conspiracy theories and attack his adversaries by DeBarros, Anthony ; Linskey, Annie

 

WASHINGTON—Monday was a typical day for President Trump. He took questions in the Oval Office. He met with members of Indiana University's football team. And he had dinner with law-enforcement officers in the White House Rose Garden.

After the sun went down, another familiar ritual began: late-night social-media posting. The president's Truth Social account posted 55 messages between 10:14 p.m. and 1:12 a.m.

The messages, mostly reposts from other accounts, falsely claimed that the 2020 election was stolen , aired frustrations from anonymous social-media users that Democrats hadn't been indicted by the Justice Department and called for the arrest of former President Barack Obama.

The activity is emblematic of Trump's account, which operates as a nearly round-the-clock, high-volume amplification system that blends his own voice with a network of partisan and fringe content. Since the start of his second term, Trump's Truth Social account has ballooned to 12.6 million followers, up from about 8.6 million. Trump—with the help of staff—has posted at least 8,800 times, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

Late-night bursts and high-frequency binges

Monday was one of 44 similar spates of a dozen or more Truth Social posts published from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. since Trump returned to the White House. On Dec. 1, from 8:17 p.m. until just before midnight, the president's account posted nearly 160 times—more posts than on any other day in his second term.

The bursts of social-media activity feature content from other accounts—including images, videos and text—that appeal to the president and his team. The nighttime missives often include some of the president's sharpest and most divisive messaging, amplifying conspiracy theories, describing migrants as a threat to the country, threatening to punish his adversaries and mocking his opponents—all while giving a platform to obscure, anonymous accounts.

The account's most active nights have been driven by posts featuring videos and screengrabs from users on X and other social-media platforms. For example, in the early-morning hours of Jan. 5, days after a successful military operation in Venezuela, Trump's account posted nearly 90 times in the span of an hour.

The posts included a video clip of Trump saying that Somalia isn't a nation , "it's just people walking around killing each other." Since January 2025, the account has published more than 120 posts critical of the country or its people, including posts disparaging Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, a prominent member of Minnesota's Somali community.

The posts leave the public with a stew of presidential musings and reposts, many of which are published while Americans are asleep. Most of the messages get little scrutiny, disappearing into the cascade of posts on his account.

The engine behind the posts

Natalie Harp, Trump's executive assistant, plays an integral role in Trump's Truth Social activity. She brings the president stacks of printed-out draft social-media posts for his approval. The proposed posts often recycle content from other accounts that Harp or advisers think would appeal to Trump, according to people familiar with the matter.

Harp then logs onto the president's account—at times outside of normal work hours—and posts batches of Trump-approved messages, the people said. Trump personally signs off on all of the content posted to his account. While Harp often posts content on Trump's behalf, the president posts some messages himself, White House officials said.

Earlier this year, at Trump's direction, Harp posted a video that included racist imagery depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, and an AI-generated image of Trump as a Christ-like figure , people familiar with the matter said.

Trump later deleted both posts after facing bipartisan criticism. The president told reporters that he didn't see the portion of the video that included the imagery of the Obamas before he signed off on the post. A White House official blamed the episode on an editing error.

Harp has frustrated some White House officials because she typically doesn't share draft posts with the chief of staff's office, communications aides or national-security officials. Harp has told others she works for Trump and only listens to him.

"Truth Social has never been hotter, and it's because President Trump offers his unfiltered and direct thoughts to the American people, without the biased media taking him out of context," White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said in a statement. "We don't discuss internal deliberations of how the process works, but no other social-media tool has been more effective than Truth."

Praise, venting and foreign policy

Across thousands of posts, the president's account toggles through various modes: It celebrates and praises Trump, it savages his enemies, and it amplifies his frustrations about immigration, crime, culture and the 2020 election.

Trump's account often shares AI images that cast his opponents as cartoonish and himself as powerful.

Sometimes Trump's attacks are aimed at named opponents: Democrats, governors, mayors, federal judges, journalists, Republicans who cross him. Other posts target groups the president is at odds with: criminals, "woke" universities, transgender students, cartels. Roughly 1 in 10 of the account's text-based posts call a person or group a name, such as "crooked," "sleazebag," "loser" or "low IQ." The phrase "Fake News" appears nearly 140 times.

And then there is the presidency itself, broadcast in real time. Foreign-policy announcements, endorsements and official acts have made up nearly a fifth of his feed. Since fighting with Iran began on Feb. 28, the account has posted at least 240 texts, videos and other messages about the war and the Middle East.

The rest of the account's content consists of shares: screengrabs, videos and memes lifted from elsewhere. A few come from named figures, such as conservative commentators Marc Thiessen and Eric Daugherty, Utah Sen. Mike Lee and billionaire Elon Musk. But much of the content can be traced to anonymous accounts including @TheSCIF, @WallStreetApes and @NathanielSami, a user whose X profile says they are based in South Asia.

Why Obama’s Presidential ‘Library’ May Be the Last Normal One by Philip Elliott

 Barack Obama is back to making headlines with long magazine profiles and going viral with carefully choreographed made-for-social-media videos. He’s urging Democrats to stand up to an unpopular wartime President and raising boatloads of cash that outpace the GDP of some nations. He’s encouraging his base to believe in big hope and change, while peddling must-have merch and tickets to his big events.

No, you did not get in a time machine back to 2008. It’s all happening. Again.

The 44th President is about to open his presidential campus—yes, it’s more than just a library—and its dean is about to be ubiquitous as if he were back on the ballot. But what is remarkable about the Return of Obama is not just the price tag—$850 million and counting for a conference center, a vegetable garden, and, yes, an NBA-regulation basketball court—or the physical size of his 19-acre complex on the South Side of Chicago. (It’s not that big for a presidential center, Obama allies argue; George W. Bush’s $250 million complex in Dallas clocks in at 23 acres, including 15 acres of wildflowers.) It’s that Obama’s perch might be the last one to manifest in a way Americans have come to expect in a post-presidency footprint. Obama may be back again, but that does not mean there’s necessarily going to be another such again for his successors, either by design or misstep.

 

President Donald Trump is already promoting a skyscraper in Miami that will house his post-White House presence. An AI-feeling sizzle reel drew gasps and mockery when it was published. It’s got the gold escalators, a decommissioned Air Force One, Mar a Lago-style terraces that make it all seem more look like a glitzy gathering spot for galas than a research hub for future scholars looking for primary-source documents scarred by Sharpie notes in the margins. 

Fundraising is underway for that project, as his inner circle understands that Trump’s ability to raise cash might be at its peak as he sits in the Oval Office and ready to do deals. Meta and ABC News have already ponied up a combined $40 million to settle complaints of unfairness from the President himself that were decried by critics as thinly-veiled shakedowns. The money, after legal fees, will seed Trump’s library ambitions, which could end up topping $1 billion and may end up housing a Trump Hotel outpost.

 

"I don't believe in building libraries or museums," Trump recently told reporters. "Could be [an] office, but it's most likely going to be a hotel with a beautiful building underneath and a 747 Air Force One in the lobby."

Meanwhile, former President Joe Biden remains in the very early stages of planting his sapling of a post-presidency in Delaware. (A city has yet to even be announced, let alone a site.) To say fundraising has been slow to come together would be generous; Biden’s advisers have aimed for $200 million for his building but ended last year with just $4 million, all of it transferred from a surplus Inauguration fund from 2020. Planners say they are gunning for an $11 million target by the end of next year but around Washington, the thinking is that Biden might end up having to settle for a piece of planned University of Delaware classroom project already named Biden Hall.

Most Presidents save the legacy-building cash grab for their second term, waiting a few months so as to give re-election donors a reprieve. Up until summer of 2024, Biden thought he was heading into a re-election campaign that would give him plenty of time to hoover up dollars after his second Inauguration in 2025. Instead, Biden became an annoyance to the Democratic Party that found itself scrambling to assemble a 100-day sprint for Kamala Harris. Donors are not rushing to help the 83-year-old great grandfather at this point.

“Presidents and their supporters have a finite time in which to raise enough money to ensure they can write their own history and control their legacy for decades to come, and they do everything they can to take advantage of that time,” writes Anthony Clark, a former Hill aide who wrote a fascinating history of presidential libraries, The Last Campaign. “This isn’t history, and it’s not education. It’s a sales pitch.”

He isn’t wrong. 

Why do we have presidential libraries?

Every President dating back to Herbert Hoover has gotten their own government-funded library to house—and protect—their archives when they leave office. But where people can actually visit them in the way we usually think of them—museums with exhibits, replicas of the Oval Office as decorated by the boss, dresses worn by First Ladies—is actually a private enterprise, especially when it comes to the gobs of cash needed to fund the construction. The National Archives and Records Administration takes control over the state papers and official records from the government helmed by the President for his terms and can pitch on some maintenance costs and research staff, but the shiny monuments to the Commander in Chief are actually privately funded and run. So, no, your tax dollars aren’t funding the dozens of works of art commissioned for Obama’s campus and aren’t expected to be used to build that hulking, gold-hued statue of Trump in his promotional video. 

Put in plain speak: the Archives protects the historical record and the fun part is out of the former President’s pocket. Under the Presidential Records Act, all government material remains the government’s when a President leaves office. The librarians regulate the record and work with the President’s people to decide what to display—but not what to sell in the gift shops.

That’s how John F. Kennedy’s handwritten edits to “Ask Not” inaugural address and Jacqueline Kennedy’s letters arranging the funeral after her husband’s assassination live alongside a 3 billion-year-old lunar rock in the display about the space program in that library in Boston. Or how Richard Nixon’s Yorba Linda, Calif., library puts a signed 1972 SALT I nuclear treaty signed by both the U.S. leader and Soviet chief Leonid Brezhnev on the same campus as his version of The Beast limo and Marine One. Or how Jimmy Carter’s notes on the Iranian hostage crisis, his memos on the Panama Canal’s transfer, and his notes from the Camp David Accords are under the same roof as his Nobel Peace Prize and the infamous “Red Phone” he took as a souvenir. 

Right now, the contents of Biden’s presidential library are actually in a government storage site in College Park, Maryland. Biden will have access to them when he decides where he will host visitors looking to see his narrative about his leadership during Covid, his domestic agenda like the energy and infrastructure laws, and major foreign policy moments like supporting Ukraine and leaving Afghanistan. 

The bulk of Trump’s records from his first term also went to a government warehouse in the D.C. region, although their provenance is sure to be a matter of debate. During Trump’s first term, there was a team of staffers tasked with reassembling documents that, despite a law requiring them to be sent to the Archives, had been torn up or shredded. And Trump denied reports included in Maggie Habermann’s must-read book on the President that White House toilets were clogged with documents Trump wanted to dump.

And then, of course, there were the boxes and boxes of material Trump hoarded in Mar a Lago, including matters that were highly classified and considered sensitive. (Biden, too, discovered he had secrets in his garage and cooperated with investigators. Unlike Trump, Biden did not go to court to argue to keep the material.)

How Obama is shaping his own legacy

Neither Trump’s nor Biden’s post-presidency projects, at least right now, are going to look like what has come before. Obama’s is by far the most expensive of the nation’s presidential libraries, but is otherwise much in the mold of those of Presidents George W. Bush in Texas or Bill Clinton in Arkansas. Those still-impressive temples to the former Presidents are full of documents and photographs on display from their terms, plus behind-the-scenes stories about key positive moments of their presidencies. The other stuff? Well, let’s just say when I last stopped at the Bush library on the campus of Southern Methodist University, the whole tale of Hurricane Katrina and the Wall Street meltdown of 2008 took up little more than a 12-foot putt. And when I stopped in the Clinton library at the start of Hillary Clinton’s second run for President, it was full of partisan whitewashing, including a dig at independent counsel Kenneth Starr (“a conservative activist who had never before prosecuted a case”) and Clinton’s resulting impeachment (“no constitutional or legal basis”).

None of this is particularly egregious given the mythmaking role of these operations, which force the professionals from the archives to co-exist with the partisan allies of the President in question. At least in normal situations. 

The Obama operation does not plan on housing the paper archives on-site and instead will leave those in the Archives’ warehouses. Instead, Obama says the entire collection will be digitized and available for scholars to look from anywhere. So, no, it actually isn’t the Obama Library, although the City of Chicago is building a new branch of the local library on the site for neighbors.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt kicked off the whole enterprise as we know it today with 13 presidential libraries around the nation. FDR built a presidential library in New York’s Hudson River Valley near his home to house his papers close and then donated it to the government. “To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men living in the future, a nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgement for the creation of the future,” he said at the library’s Hyde Park dedication in 1941.

It’s a far cry from the current approach to these libraries that now come with hype reels but in practice are really, really nice community centers. On Monday, to mark Star Wars Day—”May the Fourth Be With You”—Obama released a video promoting the opening of his library with Luke Skywalker himself, actor Mark Hamill. 

“Mark, I am glad you are here. I want to tell you about someone,” Obama says in the video. “A young person born into ordinary circumstances but restless, unsatisfied. A kid with big dreams. A bit of a rebel. They join a scrappy group of underdogs and set out to change things,” the former president continues.

Hamill gets the nod to the Star Wars origin story: “By blowing up a giant space laser?”

Obama, now 64, leans into the dad-joke vibe, saying it’s a campus for the next generation, “a place to come together, get inspired, and become a Force—for change.”

The public is going to get its first in-person look on June 19. The sales window opened on Wednesday is already sold out into late July. Tickets are $30 to visit what could be the last traditional presidential library in a while.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Russian ship that sank near Spain may have been carrying nuclear reactors to North Korea Sam Jones in Madrid

 North Korea

Western military may have targeted the Ursa Major, which went down after mysterious explosions, reports suggest

 

A Russian cargo ship that suffered a series of mysterious explosions before eventually sinking off the south-east coast of Spain 17 months ago may have been carrying nuclear submarine reactors destined for North Korea, according to reports.

The Ursa Major, a 142-metre-long, Russian-flagged ship owned by the state-linked Oboronlogistics company, was purportedly sailing from St Petersburg to Vladivostok in the far east of Russia when it sank 62 nautical miles off the coast of Murcia a little before midnight on 23 December 2024.

Eleven hours earlier, Spain’s maritime rescue and security service, Sasemar, had dispatched a helicopter, a fast rescue boat, and a tugboat to the Ursa Major, which put out a distress call at 12.53pm.

Other vessels in the area noted that the Russian vessel, which had slowed dramatically over the previous 24 hours, was listing badly and saw its crew abandoning ship. The crew members told rescuers that there had been three explosions in the ship’s engine room.

 

Spanish attempts to assist the Ursa Major were curtailed at 8.07pm that evening when a Russian warship arrived, took over operations and ordered the two Sasemar boats to withdraw to a distance of two nautical miles.

According to a Spanish government document that was released three months ago in response to parliamentary questions over the incident, the Russian warship then launched flares over the Ursa Major. A report in the Murcia newspaper La Verdad said the flares could have been deployed to blind the infrared channels of the intelligence satellites that were monitoring the incident.

A CNN investigation into the sinking of the vessel noted that “four similar seismic signatures … the pattern of which resembled underwater mines or overground quarry blasts” were heard just after the flares were fired. By 11.20pm, the Ursa Major had sunk and now lies at a depth of 2,500 metres. Two crew members are thought to have died in the initial explosions, while 14 were rescued.

Although the vessel was officially transporting “non-dangerous merchandise” – including 129 shipping containers, two cranes, and two large maintenance hole covers – its route and sinking raised the suspicions of the Spanish authorities.

Under questioning, the captain of the Ursa Major eventually told Spanish investigators that the “manhole covers” onboard his ship were “nuclear reactor components similar to those used by submarines”, but that no nuclear fuel was being transported.

 

Investigators had also noticed two huge blue containers – each estimated to weigh about 65 tonnes – on the stern of the ship in satellite photographs.

“These would therefore be two loads almost impossible to transport along the winding roads of Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan between the two cities served by the Ursa Major,” said the report in La Verdad.

“That mysterious undeclared cargo would certainly justify a voyage of more than 15,000km by sea between St Petersburg and Vladivostok.”

 

A source familiar with the investigation told CNN that the Russian captain believed he would be diverted to the North Korean port of Rason to deliver the two reactors.

While the incident remains a mystery, CNN suggested the sinking of the Ursa Major “may mark a rare and high-stakes intervention by a western military to prevent Russia from sending an upgrade in nuclear technology to a key ally, North Korea”. The network noted that the Russian ship set sail just two months after the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, had sent troops to assist with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

CNN and La Verdad reported that a 50cm by 50cm hole found in the vessel’s hull – with the damaged metal facing inwards – could have been made by a super-fast weapon known as a supercavitating torpedo.

“Only the United States, a few Nato allies, Russia and Iran are believed to have this kind of high-speed torpedo, which fires air ahead of the weapon to reduce the drag of the water,” said CNN.

“The source familiar with the [Spanish] investigation said it concluded the use of such a device would fit with the size of the hole in the Ursa Major’s hull, and that it could have made a noiseless impact resulting in the sudden slowing of the boat on 22 December.”

CNN said there had been a “flurry of recent military activity” around the ship’s remains, with US nuclear “sniffer” aircraft overflying the scene twice in the past year, and a Russian spy ship setting off four further explosions in the wreckage a week after it sank.

A report by Oboronlogistics claimed that the Ursa Major fell prey to what it termed “a targeted terrorist attack”.

Spain’s interior, foreign and defence ministries have been contacted for comment.