The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has fired a general whose agency’s initial intelligence assessment of damage to Iranian nuclear sites from US strikes angered Donald Trump, according to two people familiar with the decision and a White House official.

Lt Gen Jeffrey Kruse will no longer serve as head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.

The firing is the latest upheaval in the US military and intelligence agencies, and comes a few months after details of the preliminary assessment leaked to the media. It found that Iran’s nuclear program has been set back only a few months by the US strikes, contradicting assertions from Trump and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Graham Platner wants to oust Sen. Susan Collins — and disrupt national Dems’ plans to unite around Gov. Janet Mills.

By Holly Otterbein
08/19/2025

Platner is running on several progressive tenets — though he rejects the label “liberal” — and his announcement sets up the possibility of a clash between Democratic Party factions over generational change, Israel and other issues. In an interview with POLITICO, Platner said he would not support Chuck Schumer as Senate Majority Leader if Democrats managed to take back control in the 2026 midterm elections.

Platner embraced a number of progressive causes in his announcement video, calling for universal health care, saying “the enemy is the oligarchy,” and asking, “Why are we funding endless wars and bombing children?” He also zeroed in on high prices, a top concern of voters and one that helped fuel Mamdani’s rise in New York City.

The FBI raided the home of Donald Trump’s former national security adviser turned critic John Bolton on Friday morning.

The federal search of Bolton’s house in the Washington DC area was part of an investigation involving the handling of classified documents, the Associated Press reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.

The FBI director, Kash Patel, posted a cryptic message on X on Friday morning, saying: “NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission.”

The State Department is offering monetary bonuses to diplomats who demonstrate fidelity to the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, according to a diplomatic cable I obtained.

The previously unreported cable, dated August 15, invites supervisors to nominate diplomats and support personnel for cash bonuses when they have “demonstrated fidelity to the Secretary” under the “Meritorious Service Increase” (MSI) program.

The department’s official manual describing the MSI program makes no mention of “fidelity to the Secretary.” The Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “It’s completely novel,” one diplomat told me, that sucking up to Rubio and Trump is what will be officially rewarded.

An Israeli government cybersecurity official was reportedly arrested recently by Las Vegas police and other authorities in Nevada who were conducting an undercover investigation aimed at online users seeking to sexually prey on children.

Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, 38, faces felony charges of luring a child with a computer for a sex act, alongside several other suspects who were apprehended during the two-week sting operation, the Las Vegas metropolitan police department said in a statement published on Friday. He has since been released from custody on $10,000 bail after an initial court appearance, records show, and returned to Israel.

As first reported by the news site Mediaite, a publicly posted screenshot of Alexandrovich’s page on the LinkedIn professional networking platform described him as the executive director of the Israel Cyber Directorate, an Israeli government agency under the purview of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office. Other information online attributes the same position to Alexandrovich.

Brad Reed
Aug 15, 2025

The only way to avoid these cuts, said the CBO, would be for Congress to pass "subsequent legislation that would offset the deficit increase, waive the recordation of the bill's effects on the scorecard, or otherwise mitigate or eliminate the statutory requirements."

The CBO said that these cuts could take as much as $45 billion out of Medicare for fiscal year 2026. What's more, the amount cut from Medicare would increase in every subsequent year, resulting in total cuts of as much as $536 billion between 2026 and 2034.

• Invidious
• Youtube

• Invidious
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• Invidious
• Youtube

Ritchie Torres is threading a needle after emphatic defense of Israel for most of the war.

from Politico
08/04/2025 05:55 AM EDT

[It's disgusting how feeble and late this is, but it is an indication of how popular sentiment continues to shift against Israel. 👍 ]

In recent days, a majority of Democratic senators voted for a resolution to bar the sale of assault rifles to Israeli police, a marked change in the party since the start of the military conflict. Their unprecedented rebuke comes as polling shows slipping support for Israel among Democratic voters, signaling the prolonged war has potentially caused permanent damage to the country’s relationship with the Democratic Party.

By Michelle Goldberg
July 30, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET

The widespread raids that have upended life in Los Angeles may soon spread to other cities, especially now that Republicans in Congress have increased ICE’s budget to $27.7 billion, up from about $8 billion. (That’s more than that of most militaries.) “We are a petri dish,” Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles told me. “They’re experimenting with us. If they come and make this stand in Los Angeles, then they can scare all the other cities, just like the universities have been scared, just like the legal firms have been scared.”

Yet if Los Angeles is a testing ground for mass deportation, it’s also a place to see how the resistance is evolving. Though there have been some big anti-Trump marches this year, many of those most horrified by this administration are looking for more immediate, tangible ways to thwart it. The movement against ICE in Los Angeles — one that is starting to take root, in different forms, in cities like New York — is part of a growing shift from symbolic protest to direct action.

https://archive.ph/91twe

On Tuesday, a reporter asked Trump: “The workers that were taken from you – were some of them young women?”

Trump replied: “The answer is yes, they were. People that worked in the spa.”

Another reporter then asked Trump if one of the people he was referring to was Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers who said in a lawsuit that she was hired away from the Mar-a-Lago spa by Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell in 2000, when she was 16.

Giuffre, who died this year, alleged in her complaint that she was first abused by Epstein and Maxwell together, and then “lent out to other powerful men”, including Prince Andrew.

“I think she worked at the spa,” Trump replied. “I think so. I think that was one of the people, yeah. He stole her. And by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know. None whatsoever.”

A gunman killed four people at a Manhattan skyscraper that houses the headquarters of the NFL and the offices of several major financial firms before turning the gun on himself, New York officials have said.

An NYPD officer identified as Didarul Islam, an immigrant from Bangladesh and a father of two whose wife is pregnant, was among those killed. He was working off-hours as a security guard at the time, New York mayor Eric Adams told reporters, describing him as a “true blue hero”.

Authorities offered few details about the three other victims killed by the suspect – two men and a woman. A third male was gravely wounded by the gunfire and was “fighting for his life” in a nearby hospital, the mayor said.

Jessica Tisch, the New York City police commissioner, confirmed that “the lone shooter has been neutralized”. New York police also said the shooter acted alone and was dead.