Source: San Diego Union-Tribune
“Russian and U.S. diplomats held talks in Istanbul on Thursday to discuss normalizing the operation of their respective embassies after years expelling each others’ diplomats. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the talks in Istanbul followed an understanding reached during President Donald Trump’s call with Russian President Vladimir Putin and talks between top Russian and U.S. diplomats and other senior officials in Saudi Arabia. Last week’s U.S.-Russian talks in Riyadh marked an extraordinary shift in Washington’s foreign policy under Trump and a clear departure from U.S.-led efforts to isolate Russia over its war in Ukraine.” (02/27/25)
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/02/27/us-russia-talks-istanbul-embassies/
Source: The Hill
“Jeff Bezos upends opinion page; Promotes ‘personal liberties, free markets’ — Yay!” (02/27/25)
https://thehill.com/hilltv/5166933-rising-february-27-2025/
Source: Washington Monthly
by David H Gans
“In his second term, Donald Trump has launched a full-scale attack on the Fourteenth Amendment. Rightfully, much of the attention has focused on Trump’s executive order purporting to limit the guarantee of birthright citizenship, roll back civil rights gains, and attack racial diversity. One development that has gone largely unnoticed is the administration’s effort to strip marginalized populations of legal protections in defiance of the amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws.” (02/27/25)
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/02/27/what-you-should-know-about-the-right-to-protection-in-the-trump-era/
Source: Roll Call
“‘Yeah, I don’t love that,’ or how the House learned to start jamming the Senate.” (02/27/25)
https://chrt.fm/track/D3F8DG/traffic.megaphone.fm/FISCAL2561543820.mp3?updated=1740689356
Source: BBC News [UK State Media]
“Leaked audio instructions by Greek rescue co-ordinators have cast further doubt on Greece’s official version of events in the hours before a migrant boat sank along with up to 650 people onboard. The Adriana went down in the early hours of 14 June 2023 …. Survivors later told the BBC that coastguards had caused their overcrowded fishing boat to capsize in a botched attempt to tow it and then forced witnesses to stay silent. The Greek coastguard denied these claims and maintains it did not try to rescue those onboard because they were not in danger and said they had voluntarily wanted to reach Italy, not Greece. But in a phone call that’s now emerged an unnamed man speaking from inside a Greek rescue coordination centre is heard instructing the captain of the migrant boat to tell an approaching ship that those onboard do not want to reach Greece.” (02/27/25)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c17qe11wy52o
Source: CounterPunch
by Joshua Sperber
“Musk, an awkward rich try-hard who’s the supposed paragon of human brilliance or something, has in fact become so ridiculous that it is easy to imagine a scenario in which Trump generates great fanfare by publicly firing him. This would of course change little, although it would be a useful reminder that much of the absurdity and brutality on display today is neither new nor original, phenomena Machiavelli identified five centuries ago as keystones of the modern state …” (02/27/25)
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/02/27/musks-machiavellian-moment/
Source: CNBC
“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s new leadership on Thursday dismissed at least four enforcement lawsuits undertaken by the previous administration’s director. In legal filings, the CFPB issued a notice of voluntary dismissal for cases involving Capital One; Berkshire Hathaway-owned Vanderbilt Mortgage & Finance; a Rocket Cos. unit called Rocket Homes Real Estate; and a loan servicer named Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency. … In conjunction with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the CFPB has shuttered its Washington headquarters, fired about 200 employees and told those who remain to stop nearly all work.” (02/27/25)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/27/cfpb-drops-capital-one-rocket-mortgage-affiliate-lawsuits.html
Source: The New Republic
“‘Terrifying’: Trump’s Ominous Moment with RFK on First Measles Death.” (02/27/25)
https://newrepublic.com/article/192052/terrifying-trumps-ominous-moment-rfk-first-measles-death
Source: The Contrarian
“President in Name Only (PINO) Donald Trump and acting president Elon Musk might be able to bamboozle some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot bamboozle all of the people all of the time (to paraphrase Lincoln). And, hard as they may try, not even Fox News or the rest of the captive MAGA media can hide inflation, layoffs, and consistently bad economic news. That is a problem for a president who misled the voters by campaigning on how easily he would ‘bring down’ prices. … Unfortunately for the American economy and all of us who rely on it functioning, Trump’s illiteracy on tariffs, lack of management acumen in running the executive branch, and his utter greed (for himself and for his oligarchs, who are all licking their chops over another round of taxes) may well propel our economy into a ditch.” (02/27/25)
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/reality-counts
Source: United Press International
“Rose Girone, the oldest known Holocaust survivor and someone who suffered at the hands of Germany and Japan during World War II, has died at the age 113, her daughter, Reha Bennicasa, confirmed Thursday. Bennicasa said her mother died on February 24th at a nursing home in New York state. … Girone moved with her husband and daughter to the U.S. in 1947 where she opened a pair of knitting shops in Queens and continued to knit until she was 102, according to local media reports. The marriage ended in divorce. She later married Jack Girone.” (02/27/25)
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2025/02/27/rose-girone-holocaust-survivor-dies-at-113/1401740701559/
