“The Virginia Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a U.S. Marine and his wife will keep an Afghan orphan they brought home in defiance of a U.S. government decision to reunite her with her Afghan family. The decision likely ends a bitter, yearslong legal battle over the girl’s fate. In 2020, a judge in Fluvanna County, Virginia, granted Joshua and Stephanie Mast an adoption of the child, who was then 7,000 miles away in Afghanistan living with a family the Afghan government decided were her relatives. Four justices on the Virginia Supreme Court on Thursday signed onto an opinion reversing two lower courts’ rulings that found the adoption was so flawed it was void from the moment it was issued. The justices wrote that a Virginia law that cements adoption orders after six months bars the child’s Afghan relatives from challenging the court, no matter how flawed its orders and even if the adoption was obtained by fraud.” (02/12/25)
“Ding dong, the climate hoax is dead. Twenty years after Al Gore’s apocalyptic movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ the Trump administration has put the final nail in the coffin of the lie that scared a generation into believing the planet was about to explode in flames if they kept using fossil fuels. In what the White House calls ‘the largest deregulatory action in American history,’ the EPA on Thursday will repeal an Obama-era proclamation that has mandated greenhouse-gas regulations for 17 years. The 2009 ‘endangerment finding’ has been the primary climate handbrake on American industry, forming the legal justification for increasingly punitive greenhouse-gas regulations. Rescinding it ‘would save the American people $1.3 trillion in crushing regulations,’ White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this week, with the EPA projecting an average saving of $2,400 per vehicle and further savings on farm machinery, soon to be freed from the complex extra circuitry required to restrict emissions.” (02/11/25)
“North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has selected his daughter as his heir, South Korea’s spy agency told lawmakers on Thursday. Kim Ju Ae — who is believed to be 13 — has in recent months been pictured beside her father in high-profile events like a visit to Beijing in September, her first known trip abroad. The National Intelligence Service (NIS) said it took ‘a range of circumstances’ into account including her ‘increasingly prominent public presence at official events’ in making this assessment. The NIS also said it would keep close tabs on whether she will attend the North’s party congress later this month — its largest political event that is held once every five years. The party Congress is where Pyongyang is expected to give more details about priorities like foreign policy, war planning and nuclear ambitions for the next five years.” (02/12/25)
“Bangladesh on Thursday held its first election since 2024 mass protests toppled Sheikh Hasina’s government with balloting being largely peaceful in a vote seen as a test of the country’s democracy after years of political turmoil. A projection showed that an alliance led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, or BNP, took the lead with 127 seats, while its main challenger, an 11-party alliance led by the Jamaat-e-Islami party, garnered 32 seats and three seats by others, according to Dhaka-based Jamuna TV. Official results were expected on Friday.” (02/12/25)
“After President Trump’s shocking, illegal attack on Caracas and seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in the early-morning hours of January 3, celebratory Latin America hawks didn’t wait long to turn their attention to Cuba. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, famously of Cuban descent and the nation’s Cuba hawk-in-chief, stood at the White House’s impromptu Mar-a-Lago dais and said: ‘If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned.’ Trump himself approvingly shared a Truth Social post proposing Rubio as Cuba’s next president, made various proclamations that Cuba’s socialist government is set to collapse, and most significantly, announced a national emergency over the island of nine million’s ‘unusual and extraordinary threat … to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,’ threatening tariffs on any country that provides oil to Cuba—a measure targeted squarely at Mexico, which has become Cuba’s largest supplier.” (02/12/25)
Source: The American Prospect
by Olivia Webb Kosloff & Emma Freer
“During back-to-back congressional hearings last month, lawmakers grilled the CEOs of five major health insurers about their vertically integrated business models. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) called for breakup legislation modeled on the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which structurally separated commercial and investment banking. The idea of bank-style regulation for health insurers isn’t as far off as it sounds. As Rep. Cliff Bentz (R-OR) pointed out, insurance companies take in premiums and invest that money (known as ‘float’) before having to pay it out in claims. ‘That, of course, is what leads to people calling insurers banks, doing a side business as health care,’ Bentz explained. ‘[Y]ou charge the premium, you collect the money, you put the money in the bank, it earns interest, and then you pay it out.'” (02/11/25)
“As the Trump economy begins to boom even as inflation moderates, Democrats and the anti-Trump media are desperate for a spin that might discredit Trumponomics. Their latest Hail Mary: pushing a counterfactual narrative that President Trump’s tariffs are hurting, rather than stimulating, a manufacturing revival for blue-collar America. The latest manufacturing data obliterates that lie. In January, the ISM Manufacturing Index jumped 4.7 points to 52.6. That wasn’t just an estimate beat; it was a blowout, and an important one. The ISM Manufacturing Index is the most widely followed survey of factory activity worldwide. When it moves above 50, the manufacturing economy is expanding. When it jumps nearly 5 points in a single month to decisively push past 50, something fundamental has changed. That ‘something’ is Trumponomics finally overpowering the wreckage left behind by Bidenomics.” [editor’s note: Hooray! It’s only five points lower than it was a year into Biden’s term — and smidge higher than it was three years into Trump’s first term! Outside of COVID lows, it’s about average for the last five years – TLK] (02/10/25)
“On February 4, former FOX News host Tucker Carlson delivered what, in other times, would be a shocking assessment: that the future of the Republican Party is a 31-year-old, long-shot candidate in Florida’s gubernatorial race with a string of financial and sexual misconduct allegations but a marked talent for attention-getting provocations. Over the course of James Fishback’s still-young candidacy, he has ostentatiously courted the followers of extreme far-right commentator Nick Fuentes and referred to his Black primary opponent, frontrunner Rep. Byron Donalds, as a ’slave’ (to his donors) who would make Florida ‘a Section 8 ghetto.’ He called for raising tuition for foreign university students to $1 million per year, pledged to expel ‘“every illegal immigrant child’ from the state’s K-12 schools and told a white supremacist social media influencer that ’the great replacement and white genocide’ were the most important political issues other Republicans ignore.” (02/10/25)
“Mayor Zohran Mamdani told state lawmakers on Wednesday that the only way out of the city’s $12 billion budget gap is to raise taxes on the wealthy. Hizzoner, during his first Tin Cup Day in Albany, formally called on the state Legislature to raise income taxes on people making more than $1 million by 2%. ‘I’m asking for a 2% raise in personal income taxes on the most affluent New Yorkers, someone earning $1 million a year. The top 1% of New York City can afford to contribute $20,000 more in taxes,’ the young mayor said. ‘That 2% tax alone would resolve nearly half of our budget deficit. I will continue to advocate for these policies not only because they offer the most direct route out of this budget crisis, but because they will also transform what is possible in our state.'” (02/11/25)
“In a post on Bluesky, [Jamelle] Bouie mocked the addiction of the mother of Vice President JD Vance, saying that she should have sold her son for drugs. Bouie used Bluesky — a digital safe zone for viewpoint intolerance on the left — to post one of the most reprehensible attacks on Vance, [writing] that ‘this is a wicked man who knows he is being wicked and does it anyway.’ That is hardly notable on today’s rage scale. However, he then decided to use the painful addiction history of Vance’s mother, Beverly Aikins, against her son: ‘No wonder his mom tried to sell him for Percocets. I can’t imagine a parent who wouldn’t sell little JD for Percocet if they knew he would turn out like this.'” [editor’s note: Not a very nice thing to say about Vance’s mom, but he certainly described Vance accurately – TLK] (02/11/25)
