Podcasts about Homeland security

John sits down with Dr. Abbie Maroño to discuss imposter syndrome, social media pressure, and finding your personal True North. Dr. Abbie shares her journey from becoming a professor at just 23 to working with organizations including the FBI and U.S. Secret Service. She also talks about her books, Work in Progress: The Road to Empowerment, The Journey Through Shame and The Upper Hand: Mastering Persuasion and Getting What You Want with the Science of Social Engineering, and explains why being open about our mistakes can actually make us more relatable and trustworthy. About Dr. Abbie Maroño: Dr. Abbie Maroño is a keynote speaker, behavioral scientist, and author, specializing in trust, influence, and nonverbal communication. She is known for challenging conventional thinking and translating complex behavioral science into practical insights that audiences can immediately understand and apply. Her interest in human behavior did not begin in a classroom. Growing up in an unstable and traumatic home, she learned early that no one was coming to save her. At 16, she faced a choice no child should have to make: continue down a path of addiction or fight for a different future. She chose the latter. That decision sparked a lifelong fascination with why people make the choices they do and how understanding human behavior can change the course of a life. ​Earning her PhD in Psychology, Dr Abbie became a Professor of Psychology at just 23 years old. She was later recognized by the U.S. Department of State for extraordinary ability in behavioral science and named one of Central Florida's 40 Under 40 by the Orlando Business Journal. She is the creator of The Upper Hand, a proprietary framework focused on trust, influence, communication, and decision-making. Dr Abbie has trained representatives from 29 U.S. federal agencies, including the U.S. Secret Service, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security, as well as senior leadership at INTERPOL. The U.S. Secret Service also recognized her contributions with an award for outstanding contribution to their forensic services. As a bestselling author, TEDx speaker, Forbes contributor, Court TV contributor, and media commentator, her work has been featured on BBC News, Fox News, WIRED, Reuters, Forbes Breaking News, Apple News, and many more outlets. She also provides expert witness services in matters involving behavioral analysis, nonverbal communication, and human behavior, including high-profile civil and criminal cases. Listen to this episode to learn more: [00:00] - Intro [02:17] - Dr. Abbie's bio [03:23] - Two very different books [06:08] - The myth of having it all together [09:25] - We're trained to wear masks [10:11] - Social media's impossible standards [11:50] - Finding your True North [13:08] - Dr. Abbie's personal principles that keep her grounded [16:04] - Don't let praise or criticism define you [19:26] - Pain is a prerequisite for purpose [22:09] - When John realized that he needed to work on himself [26:04] - Growth isn't new year, new me [30:13] - High life is a lie [33:27] - Happiness vs Joy [35:27] - Finding purpose and joy takes discipline [38:43] - How difficult retirement can be for professional athletes [42:37] - Adversity is a gift only when it's healed [45:51] - Dr. Abbie's childhood and addiction NOTABLE QUOTES: "If people can't relate to you, they will stop listening." "There's just some things that nobody should know. People don't need to know every little detail about our lives." "We don't need to hide ourselves, but we don't need to overshare everything." "Each of us has to have a true north, something that we can hold on to, no matter what. So that when those voices get loud, it's like that we can find a way to at least quiet them down a little bit, and then refocus that true north, so that we can continue to head in the direction we need to be heading." "Let people show you who they are and decide if that's enough for you. Stop trying to convince people that you're worth enough and that you deserve to be in their life, and they deserve to be in yours. Just let people be who they are." "We need principles to ground us when the money is coming in, when the work is going well, when everybody's looking at you like you're the best. It's so easy to lose sight of yourself. Money comes and goes so fast, and fame and success come and go so fast. If you don't have something to ground you, you're gonna falter." "Always remember, you're never as good as they say you are, and you're never as sad as they say you are. You're somewhere in the middle." "You can have very little and be so much happier than someone with everything. It's how you live in your head that determines how peaceful your life is." "When you find your bubble of happiness, you build an impenetrable bubble. You don't let outside words come in. You don't let outside perspectives come in. You protect that little bubble of happiness." "Pain is a prerequisite for purpose. You have to go through it. You don't bypass it. You don't ignore it. You don't pretend it doesn't exist, and you don't numb it. You have to work through it. That's how you get to purpose." "If you don't understand how someone can treat another person like that, it's a blessing." "If you can find something that brings you joy, don't let the world tell you you need all this other stuff. You don't need all this other stuff. It's great to have, but you don't need it to feel complete, and you don't need it to feel at peace." USEFUL LINKS: https://www.abbiemarono.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/drabbiemarono/ https://www.instagram.com/doctorabbieofficial/ https://www.facebook.com/DrAbbieofficial TEDx Talk "How to Turn Your Personal Shame Into a Source of Strength" - https://youtu.be/ptvCTuct4GE?si=A8vpm6D5n9UfG0Td  The Upper Hand: Mastering Persuasion and Getting What You Want with the Science of Social Engineering - https://a.co/d/0ctZMkgv Work in Progress: The Road to Empowerment, The Journey Through Shame - https://a.co/d/04nYbXkh The Doctor Abbie Show - https://www.youtube.com/@TheDoctorAbbieShow CONNECT WITH JOHN Website - https://iamjohnhulen.com    LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnhulen Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/johnhulen    Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/johnhulen    X - https://x.com/johnhulen    YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@iamjohnhulen    EPISODE CREDITS Intro and Outro music provided by Jeff Scheetz - https://jeffscheetz.com/ 

────────────────────────────────────────[00:06:14]Palm Beach Commission Rejected a 3.6 Million Square Foot Data Center 16 Miles From Mar-a-Lago — Not in My BackyardFive to one after a 72-hour bipartisan public hearing; Trump tells everyone else to accept these while his own county says no.────────────────────────────────────────[00:13:45]214 Municipal Governments Have Dropped Flock Contracts Since 2021 — 165 Cancellations in the First Eight Months of 2026When cameras in a neighboring town go down, police cancel their own; it is the network, not the camera — take out nodes and the whole system loses value.────────────────────────────────────────[00:14:15]A Man Who Cut Down Flock Cameras Was Not Indicted — Grand Jury Refused to Rubber Stamp the ArrestGrand juries usually indict a ham sandwich; in this case they refused; the guy who loaded them and drove away is a hero.────────────────────────────────────────[00:48:33]Massey's Flock-Off Bill Only Withholds New Federal Funding — Knight: It Doesn't Go Far EnoughThe mechanism that funded COVID lockdowns: comply or lose all your money; Massey should defund federal dollars to any jurisdiction using Flock.────────────────────────────────────────[01:01:16]Lutnik Panicked Over Pasta Tariffs Ahead of Midterms — Proof Tariffs Are Always Paid by ConsumersAgency leaders told not to raise tariffs on groceries; admitted prices were rising; corporations never pay taxes or tariffs — you do.────────────────────────────────────────[01:07:09]Lutnik's Own Firm Cantor Fitzgerald Solicited Clients to Hedge Tariffs He Knew Were IllegalBought liabilities at 20-30% of face value betting SCOTUS would strike them; made money on both sides — the tax and the hedge.────────────────────────────────────────[01:29:56]Bessent Broke the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan — Now Controls the Most Vulnerable Currency on EarthCrashed the rial from 700,000 to 2 million per dollar; beef in Iran up 150%; gas costs Americans $53 billion more; propped Argentina with $40 billion in taxpayer money.────────────────────────────────────────[01:33:38]Bessent Is Driving Countries Away From the Dollar — While the Trump Family Owns the Only Private Digital ReplacementUSD1 is the only federally chartered stable coin; Trump's family takes 75% of profits; Abu Dhabi invested $2 billion; Bessent crashing the dollar they're replacing.────────────────────────────────────────[01:36:16]Trump Signed an EO Banning Government CBDCs After Eliminating the Only Competition for His Family's CoinGenius Act required all stable coins backed by short-term treasury bills; Brookings projects stable coin holdings at $2.3 trillion by 2030.────────────────────────────────────────[00:16:55]Tomorrow: Richard Gage on 9/11's 25th Anniversary — The Reichstag Fire That Built the Police Surveillance StateSee what the government did with 9/11 and never trust them again; 9/11 built Homeland Security; COVID was planned using the same template. ──────────────────────────────────────── Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to https://davidknight.gold/ for great deals on physical gold/silver For 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to https://trendsjournal.com/ and enter the code “KNIGHT” For high quality made in America products go to HomeSteadProducts.shop and use promo code “Knight” for 10% off your purchases Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.com If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @DavidKnightShow@protonmail.comCash App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

────────────────────────────────────────[00:06:14]Palm Beach Commission Rejected a 3.6 Million Square Foot Data Center 16 Miles From Mar-a-Lago — Not in My BackyardFive to one after a 72-hour bipartisan public hearing; Trump tells everyone else to accept these while his own county says no.────────────────────────────────────────[00:13:45]214 Municipal Governments Have Dropped Flock Contracts Since 2021 — 165 Cancellations in the First Eight Months of 2026When cameras in a neighboring town go down, police cancel their own; it is the network, not the camera — take out nodes and the whole system loses value.────────────────────────────────────────[00:14:15]A Man Who Cut Down Flock Cameras Was Not Indicted — Grand Jury Refused to Rubber Stamp the ArrestGrand juries usually indict a ham sandwich; in this case they refused; the guy who loaded them and drove away is a hero.────────────────────────────────────────[00:48:33]Massey's Flock-Off Bill Only Withholds New Federal Funding — Knight: It Doesn't Go Far EnoughThe mechanism that funded COVID lockdowns: comply or lose all your money; Massey should defund federal dollars to any jurisdiction using Flock.────────────────────────────────────────[01:01:16]Lutnik Panicked Over Pasta Tariffs Ahead of Midterms — Proof Tariffs Are Always Paid by ConsumersAgency leaders told not to raise tariffs on groceries; admitted prices were rising; corporations never pay taxes or tariffs — you do.────────────────────────────────────────[01:07:09]Lutnik's Own Firm Cantor Fitzgerald Solicited Clients to Hedge Tariffs He Knew Were IllegalBought liabilities at 20-30% of face value betting SCOTUS would strike them; made money on both sides — the tax and the hedge.────────────────────────────────────────[01:29:56]Bessent Broke the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan — Now Controls the Most Vulnerable Currency on EarthCrashed the rial from 700,000 to 2 million per dollar; beef in Iran up 150%; gas costs Americans $53 billion more; propped Argentina with $40 billion in taxpayer money.────────────────────────────────────────[01:33:38]Bessent Is Driving Countries Away From the Dollar — While the Trump Family Owns the Only Private Digital ReplacementUSD1 is the only federally chartered stable coin; Trump's family takes 75% of profits; Abu Dhabi invested $2 billion; Bessent crashing the dollar they're replacing.────────────────────────────────────────[01:36:16]Trump Signed an EO Banning Government CBDCs After Eliminating the Only Competition for His Family's CoinGenius Act required all stable coins backed by short-term treasury bills; Brookings projects stable coin holdings at $2.3 trillion by 2030.────────────────────────────────────────[00:16:55]Tomorrow: Richard Gage on 9/11's 25th Anniversary — The Reichstag Fire That Built the Police Surveillance StateSee what the government did with 9/11 and never trust them again; 9/11 built Homeland Security; COVID was planned using the same template. ──────────────────────────────────────── Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to https://davidknight.gold/ for great deals on physical gold/silver For 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to https://trendsjournal.com/ and enter the code “KNIGHT” For high quality made in America products go to HomeSteadProducts.shop and use promo code “Knight” for 10% off your purchases Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.com If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @DavidKnightShow@protonmail.comCash App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-real-david-knight-show--5282736/support.

Speaking at a dinner at the Rose Garden on Wednesday, President Trump said communism “never worked” as he gave a renewed warning ahead of the November midterms. The President said that he would defeat what he called the democrat communists.“They were supposed to hit socialism and then go communist,” said President Trump. “But they skipped socialism. They went right down to the bottom, and the bottom is communism, and it's never worked under different names.”Federal immigration authorities arrested nearly 51,000 illegal immigrants throughout the United States in August, a record for a single month, the Department of Homeland Security said Wednesday.The total of 50,925 caps a steady three-month growth in Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests, surpassing June and July totals of 43,900 and 50,208, respectively.U.S. lawmakers are standing with Joshua Wong, a prominent figure in Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement. Wong now faces an additional prison term after his second conviction Wednesday under a draconian Beijing-imposed national security law.Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi responded in a post online, writing: "Beijing's unjust prosecution of Joshua Wong is an appalling abuse of power. Everyone who truly cares about democracy should be proud to stand with him and the people of Hong Kong.”She added, “Advocacy for freedom is not a crime and the international community must immediately demand his release.”In a post on X, the Select Committee on China wrote: “Joshua Wong – already in prison on one baseless charge – was set to be released in 2027. Now, the CCP is keeping him behind bars even longer on yet another baseless charge. Joshua must not be allowed to languish in prison. He must be released immediately.”

New U.S. strikes hit Iran as Trump threatens an even larger attack, Homeland Security intensifies its voter-fraud investigations, Lancaster is named America's best retirement town, and researchers find smartphones are dirtier than toilet seats. Plus, the Message of the Day, Mike Slater reacts to the deadlocked Lindsay Clancy jury and the women wearing pink in solidarity with her, arguing that empathy becomes moral blindness when it overrides truth and justice for the three children she admitted killing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Masters, National Director and CEO of the Secure Community Network, joined us on the Guy Benson Show today with guest host Harry Hurley to discuss lessons learned from the intelligence failures of 9/11. Masters and Hurley reflected on the formation of the Department of Homeland Security after the terrorist attack, the evolution of national security, the emergence of AI in the modern threat environment, and more. Listen to the full interview below! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Wednesday, September 2nd, A.D. 2026. This is The Worldview in 5 Minutes heard on 140 radio stations and at www.TheWorldview.com. I'm Adam McManus. (Adam@TheWorldview.com) By Jonathan Clark Another state in India passed anti-conversion law India's state of Maharashtra became the 13th in the country to enact an “anti-conversion” law last week. It's the country's second-most populous state. This has prompted thousands of churches in the area to have worshippers sign a form. The form simply says the person is attending freely and not under coercion.  India's “anti-conversion” laws are often used to target Christians. Hindu nationalists have attacked churches in Maharashtra 11 times in the last six months. India is ranked 12th on the Open Doors' World Watch List of the most dangerous places to be a Christian.  In John 15:18-19, Jesus said, “If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet, because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” Send a polite, 4-sentence note to Vinay Kwatra, the Indian Ambassador to America, asking that he urge his government not to pass these anti-conversion laws which target Christians. Address it to the Embassy of India, 2107 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20008. You'll find the correct spelling of the ambassador's name and the address in our transcript today at www.TheWorldview.com. Australia's new assisted suicide law ABC News Australia reports Australia's Northern Territory passed a bill legalizing assisted suicide last week. The territory was the first in the world to legalize voluntary euthanasia in the 1990s. Australia's federal government overturned the law within a couple years. But in 2022, the government reversed its decision, allowing the territory to legalize assisted suicide once again.  Now, all states and territories in Australia allow for this form of killing. Over 7,200 people have died this way in the country since 2019. Trump's Venezuelan oil deal gives access to 65 billion barrels The Trump administration announced a major oil deal with Venezuela on Friday.  The deal would give the United States access to 17 oil fields in Venezuela with proven reserves of 65 billion barrels of oil. That's about 20 percent of the country's reserves. By comparison, the U.S. has 46 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.  President Donald Trump hopes the deal will lower gas prices for Americans. However, analysts suggest that the deal will not relieve prices in the short-term.  Homeland Security investigates voter fraud in 9 states CNN reports that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is investigating voter fraud in nine states ahead of the midterm elections in November. These states include California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin. The Trump administration is pushing for states to phase out certain electronic voting systems and move to paper ballots. The administration has threatened to withhold significant homeland security funds from states that do not adopt such election changes.  ICE arrested 51,000 immigration arrests in July U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement made 51,000 immigration arrests in July. That's up from 43,000 arrests in June. Both months set records for the agency.  Nearly 20,000 of July's arrests were in Texas and Florida. Both states have been very cooperative with the Trump administration's mass deportation efforts.  Gallup poll: Americans supportive of marriage if couple has kids A new Gallup poll found that more Americans are supportive of marriage when children are involved. Thirty-nine percent of U.S. adults say it is very important for a couple to be legally married if they have a child together. That's up from 29 percent in 2020. However, it's down from 49 percent in 2006. Gallup noted, “Weekly church attendees show one of the largest increases since 2020 in the belief that couples, who have a child together, should be married, up 24 points, from 41% to 65%.” Bible societies distributed 148 million Scriptures in 2025 And finally, the United Bible Societies distributed over 148 million printed Scriptures in 2025.  The top countries for Bible distribution last year were Brazil, China, India, Nigeria, and the Philippines.  Rev. Dirk Gevers, Secretary General of the United Bibles Societies, said, “While printed Scriptures continue to reach hundreds of millions of people each year, digital engagement is growing, opening new opportunities to connect with the Bible through mobile devices and online platforms.” This year is the organization's 80th anniversary. Since 1946, the Bible society has distributed 25 billion Scriptures, including 1.1 billion complete Bibles.  Malachi 1:11 says, “From the rising of the sun, even to its going down, My name shall be great among the Gentiles; in every place incense shall be offered to My name, and a pure offering; for My name shall be great among the nations.” Close And that's The Worldview on this Wednesday, September 2nd, in the year of our Lord 2026. Subscribe for free by Spotify, Amazon Music, or by iTunes or email to our unique Christian newscast at www.TheWorldview.com. Plus, you can get the Generations app through Google Play or The App Store. I'm Adam McManus (Adam@TheWorldview.com). Seize the day for Jesus Christ.

The Roundtable Panel: a daily open discussion of issues in the news and beyond. Today's panelists are:Robert Griffin - Dean of the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity at the University at Albany.Stephen Haff - is an educator who teaches drama and humanities at Poughkeepsie Day School in Poughkeepsie.Nic Rangel - Executive Director of The Legal Aid Society of Northeastern New York.Kathy Sheehan - Former Mayor of the City of Albany.

Michael C. Shaver and Jack Haxton break down a run of local and national stories, starting with the Department of Homeland Security career expo that was relocated after Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz pressured the Buffalo convention center to cancel it over ICE's involvement. The hosts argue the move cost area residents a shot at federal jobs with pensions, then turn to a proposed Drive Forward initiative that would steer first-time car theft offenders toward job training rather than prosecution, a idea they say rewards the wrong behavior in a region that already ranks near the top of the state for vehicle thefts. From there they cover Canada's renaming of Lake Ontario to Lake America and the reaction to it, Mamdani's reversal on a promised $10,000 bonus for New York City teacher's aides, and Abdul El-Sayed's proposed 7% annual wealth tax in his Michigan Senate run, which Haxton picks apart by pointing out that billionaire net worth sits in shareholdings rather than cash. The conversation closes with a look at how state tax policy shapes where businesses and pro athletes relocate, Joey Chestnut's 241-wing performance at Buffalo's Chicken Wing Fest, and upcoming Financial Guys seminars on tax and estate planning.00:00:00 - Welcome back!00:00:30 - DHS Career Expo Canceled in Buffalo00:04:30 - Drive Forward and Car Theft in WNY00:08:40 - Lake Ontario Becomes Lake America00:12:00 - Mamdani Backs Off Teacher's Aide Bonus00:16:54 - El-Sayed's 7% Wealth Tax Proposal00:21:00 - Tax Policy, Relocation, and Pro Sports00:22:56 - Joey Chestnut at Chicken Wing Fest00:24:00 - Upcoming Seminars and the TFG App

The Army awarded Palantir and Anduril a combined $192 million in delivery orders for the service's Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) program, officials announced Tuesday, pushing the targeting platform into a production phase. Having been in development for several years, officials have touted TITAN as a “game changing” mobile ground station capable of using artificial intelligence to ingest data from a variety of sensors and package it into target recommendations, specifically for long-range fires. The Army awarded Palantir a $178.4 million deal in 2024 to deliver 10 TITAN prototypes after the company beat-out RTX for the rights to build the TITAN. Under the latest delivery announcement, the Army expects to receive eight more over the next 18 months, officials said in a press release. “This effort is the result of soldier feedback we have received over the past four years of prototyping from units utilizing TITAN prototypes in multiple configurations across diverse operating environments,” Col. Jonathan Lipscomb, a project manager for the Army's intelligence systems and analytics portfolio, said in the release. “It drastically reduces sensor-to-shooter timelines through automated target nominations while fusing the common intelligence picture.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement is expecting to allocate between $2 million and $5 million to a contractor that will help it handle and analyze voter data amid increasing fraud detection efforts centered on elections, per an acquisition forecast document published Monday. The firm-fixed-price contract is expected to be awarded in the coming weeks following an estimated solicitation release next week. The work, which is in support of ICE's Homeland Security Investigations unit, will run through the end of the month. The contract forecast planning document follows a request for information that ICE posted last week. The Department of Homeland Security unit began the market research process to gather information about “handling and secure delivery of publicly available voter registration files and voter history files” to support HSI “fraud detection and data segmentation activities.” The comment period lasted just three days, closing Aug. 28. In an attached statement of work draft, ICE said it planned to tap a contractor to acquire and document voter registration and history files from “government-identified U.S. jurisdictions,” which it described as up to all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and any American territory that it chooses. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

John Cohen, former Undersecretary for Intelligence at DHS, joined Arizona's Morning News to talk about the top northern command general sending a warning about the U.S. Military's inability to counter drones stateside, and the U.S. Homeland Security to ramp up voter fraud investigations.

Photos reportedly showing federal Homeland Security agents stationed at or near the Minnesota State Fair have spread on social media. That's caused heightened concern, in the wake of last winter's federal immigration surge. But fair officials say they are not immigration agents.And Minnesota's Supreme Court heard arguments today in a discrimination case weighing whether a Catholic school illegally fired a transgender employee.

"I tend to think taking the Lord's name in vain has less to do with a swear or curse moment, but a lot more with having a human agenda that is not good, unjust... and then using the Lord's name to justify it and make it good." In this episode of We Should Know Better, the guys pour a fresh glass of Michter's and traverse through the absurdity of modern culture. After raising a glass to Dolly Parton and mourning Big Bear's beloved bald eagle, they dissect a Homeland Security recruitment video using Isaiah 6:8 and dig into what "taking the Lord's name in vain" truly means beyond just swearing. The conversation heats up as they examine the bad-faith trolling of Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White entering the WNBA draft, the bizarre world of longevity biohacker Bryan Johnson, and whether optimizing every second of your health means forgetting how to actually live. To wrap things up, the crew compares their late-mid-40s skincare routines and tackles long-winded YouTube comments. 00:59 - Intro & In Memoriam for Dolly Parton 07:14 - Delivering Bad News & The Tragedy of Jackie the Bald Eagle 11:45 - When Job Candidates Discover the Podcast 19:15 - DHS Propaganda, Isaiah 6:8, & Weaponizing Scripture 30:43 - What Does Taking the Lord's Name in Vain Actually Mean? 46:42 - Enes Kanter Freedom, Royce White, & WNBA Controversy 01:16:23 - Bryan Johnson, Longevity Obsessions, & Missing the Point of Life 01:27:43 - Skincare Regimens & Red Light Therapy for Men in Their Late 40s 01:40:28 - Reading YouTube Comments & AI Thumbnail Disasters 01:51:52 - Peacock Discoveries & Wrap-Up SUBSCRIBE & SHARE us this week!Contact Us: brosbiblesbeer@gmail.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Leave Us A VoicemailYouTubeSimpleCastSpotifyApple PodcastsXInstaWe Should Know Better is: Zack Krater & Andy McCraw Find us wherever fine podcasts are distributed. Oh, and share us with a friend this week! Grace. Peace. Cheers! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dawn opens with the breaking news out of Massachusetts as the jury in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy reaches a deadlock on day four of deliberations. We break down the chilling details of the case involving the deaths of her three young children, the prosecution's argument for premeditated murder, and the absurdity of ignoring the young victims in favor of courtroom drama. iHeart talk host Larry Mendte joins the show to react to the trial's outrageous public circus and the failure to center the conversation around the three innocent lives lost. We get local with major stories impacting the Philadelphia region, starting with a shocking heat advisory that forced 52 Philadelphia public schools to dismiss early due to a complete lack of HVAC systems. Dawn questions how local and state leaders allow property taxes to funnel into a system where students are repeatedly shut out of classrooms. We also examine a tragic South Jersey parking lot crash where federal officials at Homeland Security called out local news coverage for omitting that the unlicensed driver charged in a baby's death entered the country illegally. Plus, we look at newly released surveillance video showing a Philadelphia police officer interacting with a man seconds before he was struck and killed in a fatal hit-and-run. Abington Police Chief and President of the Pennsylvania Chiefs Association Pat Malloy joins the program to address the heated debate surrounding automatic license plate readers and flock safety cameras. Chief Malloy breaks down how this technology helped his department dismantle a South American organized theft ring targeting local homes and explains why law enforcement needs these tools to fight modern crime. We examine the thin line between public safety, technology, and protecting constitutional rights while tackling the push in Harrisburg to restrict camera usage across the state.

This is a special joint episode of The Chauncey DeVega Show and The Truth Report. Steve Cash is Executive Director of The Steady State, a nonprofit advocacy organization whose members are former senior national security officials. He previously served as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary for Intelligence & Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security and as Chief of Staff to the Director of Intelligence at the Department of Energy. Cash was deeply involved in drafting much of the legislation that followed the 9/11 attacks, including the USA PATRIOT Act, the Department of Homeland Security Act, and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which created the position of Director of National Intelligence. He also served as an intelligence officer with the CIA. Cash analyzes Trump's recent "election security" speech to the nation and how its allegation that hostile foreign actors stole the 2020 presidential election for Democrats, and other false claims fit into the Big Lie strategy to rig upcoming elections and undermine American democracy. Steve Cash also offers advice about courage and personal responsibility to pro-democracy Americans and others who have already been — or may soon be — targeted by the Trump administration and placed on enemies lists because they have protested or exercised other constitutionally protected rights, including freedom of speech.

BONUS: How AI Took the Boring Out of Agile Coaching—Where Scrum Masters Should Actually Start, With Michael Dougherty Today we speak with Michael Dougherty — "Agile Mike" — about how a 30-year veteran of solution development and product leadership made AI a working part of his Agile coaching practice. Michael walks us through the journey from early ChatGPT curiosity, to documentation as the first real win, to the personal-passion project that built his comfort with the tools, and finally to where every Scrum Master should start: the retrospective. From Curiosity to Toolbox: A Slow Burn That Started With User Stories "I tried, and I thought it sucked at that. I'd rather write this by hand."   Michael's AI journey started in late 2022 with ChatGPT — like most coaches, he tried to make it write user stories and acceptance criteria. It didn't work. The output wasn't usable, and he went back to writing them by hand. What looks like a failure was actually the first lesson: not every coaching task is a good fit for AI, and the way to find out is to try. He kept experimenting in the background through 2023 and 2024 — Claude, Grok, Perplexity — while keeping personal use and business use cleanly separated. The real shift came at the Department of Homeland Security, where he sat alongside ex-Googlers, ex-OpenAI people, and an Anthropic alumnus on the team building DHS's internal chatbot. Watching what AI could do inside a heavily-protected enterprise environment changed his frame: this wasn't a productivity hack anymore, it was infrastructure. The Boring, Tedious, Now Quicker: Documentation as the First Real Win "AI has taken all those boring, tedious tasks and made them quicker, more valuable, and more fun to boot."   The first AI practice that stuck was documentation — the part of Agile coaching nobody enjoys but every client demands. Michael had spent years writing SDLC docs from blank pages, and his co-author on Shift: From Product to People used to look at empty docs and ask for help getting started. AI removed that blank-page problem. He'd give the model the team context, the client's documentation requirements, and a template — and get a draft to edit. He stayed in the loop as the human, bringing context, judgment, and final shape, but he no longer started from zero. The same shift happened with presentations: instead of fighting PowerPoint spacing, he tells the AI to drop content into a template and gets back a formatted deck. Small tasks, but multiplied across a coaching week, they bought back real time. The Personal Project Trick: Find Something You Love First "Find something you have a passion with, something you really enjoy. That made me feel comfortable with AI so I could do more."   Michael's strongest advice for coaches who feel intimidated by AI isn't to start at work — it's to build something for yourself, in a domain you care about. His own example: the Nordic Metal Tour Tracker, a personal AI agent for tracking heavy metal bands across Northern Europe (and Spain and Portugal). It plays music. It maps tours by country. It exists purely because he loves heavy metal. The trick isn't the tool — it's that working on something he actually cared about removed the fear and built the muscle memory. Once the comfort was there, transferring it to work became a small step instead of a leap. He references the rundown AI as a daily input that keeps him aware of how others — even people in their 80s — are using AI for everything from gardening to balanced school lunches. A Week With Preppy Paul: Agents, Connectors, and the End of Inbox Drudgery "Preppy Paul gives me a list of all my meetings today and the top three items I should have on each one — based on my notes, my email, my calendar."   Michael's current weekly routine looks nothing like his Agile coaching week from three years ago. He works at Zion Cloud Solutions as a Tier 1 Google AI partner, splitting time across three roles: about 20–30% traditional Agile project management (coaching a Scrum Master on a state of Illinois project), and the rest as an AI Growth Engineer and AI delivery lead on short 4–6 week projects with 3–5 person teams. The backbone is Google Gemini Enterprise — a platform that lets him run Claude, ChatGPT, or any major model behind enterprise protection (Model Armor, the SAIF framework). Inside it, connectors pull in Gmail, Outlook, Calendar, Confluence, Jira, Slack, Teams, monday.com, and thousands of other tools — each agent inherits only the permissions the user already has. A few practical patterns he runs every week:   Preppy Paul — an agent that prepares him for the day's meetings, pulling top topics per meeting from his notes, email, and calendar. Meeting-to-email — AI records and summarises every meeting, and he asks the agent to draft updates to specific team members directly from the summary. LinkedIn drafts in his voice — hashtags, formatting, and tone all match his style; he edits lightly and posts.   The pattern across all of these: the agent isn't replacing the work. It's removing the friction between the meeting and the next conversation. The Retrospective: The Best Place for Every Scrum Master to Start "Don't have it be the same darn Jira spreadsheet of the same darn three questions every time. Go to AI and eat your heart out with it."   When pushed for one thing a Scrum Master could try tomorrow morning, Michael was clear: the retrospective. It's the one Scrum event where creativity is usually welcome, where format experimentation has a low cost, and where teams are already expecting something new. Ask AI for retrospective formats that fit the team's current situation — review five or ten options, pick one, run it. The signal you watch for within a week is double: how many improvements the team generated, and how many of them actually got done. The simpler signal is the team's reaction. If at the end someone says "that was fun" — and then you tell them you used AI to design the format — you've shown the team what AI is good for without a single slide or framework. It's the smallest possible experiment with the largest possible upside. Experiment Like a Scientist, Not a Spectator "Don't be afraid of it. Try whatever you can with it. Have the viewpoint of a scientist."   The trap Michael sees most coaches falling into is curiosity without commitment — reading about AI, watching demos, talking about it, but never building anything. His framing is the opposite: be a scientist. Run experiments. Some will fail (his user-story attempt did). Some will quietly become essential (documentation did). The way to find out which is which is to keep trying, in low-stakes contexts, with both personal projects and small work experiments. The coaches who'll be useful to their teams in 18 months aren't the ones who can describe AI accurately — they're the ones who've built enough small things to know what AI is bad at, what it's surprisingly good at, and where the human in the loop has to stay.   About Michael Dougherty   "Agile Mike" has over 30 years of experience with solution development and product leadership, working in nearly every IT role that exists and literally hundreds of companies during his career. Michael has taught multiple Agile courses to over 1000 people, spoken at multiple events and podcasts, written dozens of blogs, and has been recently serving the US Government. He is the other co-author of Shift: From Product to People.   You can link with Michael Dougherty on LinkedIn and find more about his work at shiftingpeople.com and AP8XGlobal.com.

Homeland Security says Milo Yiannopoulos entered the United States legally, missed an immigration hearing, received a final removal order, and was sent back to Britain. Austin traces the political provocateur's rise through Gamergate, Breitbart, and Berkeley, then asks Tennessee Star reporter Tom Pappert whether the fast removal was routine enforcement, political revenge, or both. The episode also examines Hollywood's expensive culture-war hangover, including Disney's Snow White losses and whether audiences—not studios—get the final vote. Follow Wake Up America on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so every new episode lands in your feed. Watch the full video.

We've launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Brightlooks at how the Supreme Court's decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities.Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com.This Day in Legal History: The Neutrality Act of 1935On August 31, 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the first of what would become a series of Neutrality Acts—laws designed to keep the United States out of the wars gathering in Europe and Asia. This first act imposed a mandatory embargo on shipping arms and ammunition to any nation the president declared to be at war, and it put America's armaments industry under a measure of federal control. It was a legal expression of the deep isolationism that gripped the country between the world wars.Here's the constitutional wrinkle that makes it interesting, and that Roosevelt himself chafed against. FDR wanted flexibility—he asked Congress for a law that would let him embargo arms to an aggressor nation while still selling weapons to its victim. Congress refused. Instead, it wrote a rigid, evenhanded rule: once the president declared that a state of war existed, he had to embargo arms to all sides, aggressor and victim alike. That was a deliberate congressional choice to tie the executive's hands in foreign affairs, to prevent a president from drawing the country toward one belligerent or another. Roosevelt signed it reluctantly, believing he could get it revised—and over the next several years, as the threat from fascism grew undeniable, the Neutrality Acts were indeed loosened, culminating in Lend-Lease and, ultimately, American entry into the war.The significance of August 31, 1935 is as a case study in the perennial struggle between Congress and the president over foreign affairs, and in the moral limits of legal neutrality. The mandatory embargo's great flaw was exactly its neutrality: by treating aggressor and victim the same, it arguably aided aggressors, who were already armed, against victims who were not. That's the tension in today's opening quote from Desmond Tutu—the idea that neutrality in the face of injustice is not really neutral at all. It's a fitting backdrop for a day that includes a story about the government's power over foreign companies, and one about whether the state can suppress speech it dislikes.A federal judge has dealt a significant blow to the administration's campaign to deport noncitizen students over pro-Palestinian activism, ruling that the effort is unconstitutional. In a lengthy 90-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Noël Wise in San Jose found that the administration's use of existing immigration law to cancel foreign students' visas and put them into deportation proceedings—based on their campus advocacy and criticism of Israel—violates the First Amendment right to free speech. The ruling traces the policy back to March 2025, when the government began revoking visas and detaining noncitizens for pro-Palestinian advocacy, starting with the high-profile arrest of Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil. The lawsuit was brought, notably, by the Stanford Daily, Stanford's student newspaper. Here's the core legal principle, and it's an important one that surprises people: noncitizens physically present in the United States have First Amendment rights. The government has broad power over immigration, but the judge found it can't use that power as a pretext to punish people for protected speech—that would be viewpoint discrimination, targeting people precisely because of the ideas they express. Judge Wise sharply criticized the State Department and Homeland Security for deploying immigration law to suppress views they didn't like. The significance connects to threads we've followed all summer—the pressure on universities, the Comey prosecution, the fights over dissent. This is a court drawing a hard line: the immigration system is not a loophole around the First Amendment, and the government cannot deport people for saying things it wishes they hadn't. Expect an appeal, but as a statement of principle, it's a forceful one. Judge deals blow to Trump moves to deport pro-Palestinian activists | ReutersAl Jazeera · The HillNow a story about the business of law: U.S. law firm office leasing surged 17% in the first half of 2026, with firms signing leases for nearly 12.2 million square feet, according to Cushman & Wakefield—and the second quarter was up a striking 27% over the same period last year. This is a boom, concentrated in the big legal markets of New York, Chicago, and Washington, and it includes some eye-popping deals, like Simpson Thacher's roughly 916,000-square-foot Manhattan lease—the same firm we discussed back in July over its rare malpractice trial. What's driving it is worth unpacking, because it contains a real paradox. Firms say their caseloads are exploding under a combination of forces: rising regulatory uncertainty, a more litigious business climate, and—here's the twist—the surge in artificial intelligence. AI adoption in law has rocketed, with something like 62% of firms now using it, up from just 17% a few years ago. And here's the paradox worth sitting with: we covered, a few weeks ago, how AI is thinning out entry-level hiring by automating the document review and first drafts that junior associates used to do. So how are firms leasing more space while hiring fewer juniors? The answer seems to be that the high end of legal work is booming—more complex, higher-stakes matters that generate demand for experienced lawyers and premium space—even as the bottom of the pyramid gets automated. The significance is a snapshot of a profession in transition: Big Law is physically expanding and financially thriving at the top, while the traditional on-ramp for young lawyers narrows. The office towers are filling up; it's just less clear who will be sitting in the entry-level offices a decade from now. US law firm leasing jumped 17% in first half, report says | ReutersCushman & Wakefield · Law360And finally, China's largest memory chipmaker, ChangXin Memory Technologies—CXMT—has sued the Pentagon to get itself off a U.S. government blacklist of companies it says are tied to China's military. The list in question is the Defense Department's roster of “Chinese military companies,” maintained under a provision of federal defense law, and landing on it carries real consequences: restrictions on government contracting and significant reputational damage that can spook customers and partners worldwide. CXMT's argument is straightforward—it says it's not affiliated with the Chinese military at all, and that it designs and sells its DRAM memory chips purely for civilian and commercial use. The most interesting piece of the lawsuit, legally, is a procedural one. CXMT alleges that the Pentagon actually published a notice in February saying the company would be removed from the list—then withdrew that notice the very same day, and later relisted the company in June without adequately explaining why it reversed course. That's the heart of an administrative-law claim: under the standards that govern federal agency action, the government generally can't act arbitrarily or capriciously, and a sudden, unexplained reversal is exactly the kind of thing courts scrutinize. And CXMT isn't alone—Alibaba filed a similar suit in June, and Xiaomi actually won removal from the list through U.S. litigation back in 2021. The significance is a reminder that even in the highly deferential arena of national security, designations like this are reviewable in American courts—foreign companies can, and increasingly do, use U.S. administrative law to challenge being branded a security threat, and sometimes they win. CXMT sues Pentagon over inclusion on list of companies tied to China's military | ReutersUS News · Benzinga This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

Monday, August 25th, 2025 The DOJ has released the audio and transcripts of the witness tampering meeting between Todd Blanche and Ghislaine Maxwell; the government has threatened to deport Kilmar Abrego to Uganda if he doesn't plead guilty to the two charges against him; John Bolton's house has been raided in search of classified emails sent on a private server; a federal judge orders the dismantling of the Florida concentration camp; Fort Bliss - where the Japanese were interned during WWII - is operating as an internment camp again; the White House lists Smithsonian exhibits it wants to erase from history; the Justice Department's release of the Epstein files to House Oversight is a joke; the Pentagon plans to deploy the military to Chicago; Homeland Security is violating the law by refusing to retain text messages; Illinois announces a first of its kind legal hotline for the LGBTQ community; residents keep repainting the Pulse nightclub rainbow sidewalk after the city keeps removing it; and Allison and Dana deliver your Good News. Guest: Joyce Vance Preorder Giving Up Is Unforgivable by Joyce Vance - 10/21/2025 Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance | Substack #SistersInLaw - Podcast - Apple Podcasts, The Insider Podcast - CAFE @joycewhitevance.bsky.social on Bluesky Live with Allison Gill and Joyce Vance | Joyce Vance Substack Live with Allison Gill and Joyce Vance | MuellerSheWrote Substack Stories Justice Dept. Sent Congress Epstein Files That Were Already Public, Democrats Say | The New York Times National Security Counselors - Donate Pentagon plans military deployment in Chicago as Trump eyes crackdown | The Washington Post Homeland Security Tells Watchdog It Hasn't Kept Text Message Data Since April | The New York Times Japanese American groups blast use of Fort Bliss, former internment camp site, as ICE detention center | NBC News White House Lists Smithsonian Exhibits It Finds Objectionable | The New York Times Florida ordered to dismantle Alligator Alcatraz over environmental impact | The Washington Post Pritzker announces 'first of its kind' legal hotline for LGBTQ+ Illinoisans | Chicago Sun-Times Rainbow crosswalk repainted outside Pulse; Florida troopers seen standing by | News 6 Orlando Reminder - you can see the pod pics if you become a Patron. The good news pics are at the bottom of the show notes of each Patreon episode! That's just one of the perks of subscribing! patreon.com/muellershewrote Listener Survey:http://survey.podtrac.com/start-survey.aspx?pubid=BffJOlI7qQcF&ver=shortFollow the Podcast on Apple:https://apple.co/3XNx7ckWant to support the show and get it ad-free and early?https://patreon.com/thedailybeanshttps://dailybeans.supercast.com/https://apple.co/3UKzKt0 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What happened to Milo Yiannopoulos?Was this simply the enforcement of existing immigration law, or was Milo specifically targeted because of his political enemies, relationships, and increasingly independent views? Let's discuss it, and pray for Milo's safety.--https://www.youversion.com/bible-app

Ralph speaks with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff for Colin Powell, about the fall of the American Empire and self-proclaimed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth. Then we welcome the CEO and co-founder of the Canadian-based organization Corporate Knights, Toby Heap, to break down Trump's unprecedented trade war with our closest ally. Plus, Ralph has some choice words for Hakeem Jeffries and his meeting with Jared Kushner and for Hillary Clinton and her take on the war with Iran.Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired U.S. Army colonel. Over his 31 years of service, Colonel Wilkerson served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff from 2002 to 2005, and Special Assistant to General Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993. Colonel Wilkerson also served as Deputy Director and Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia, and for fifteen years he was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, senior advisor to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and co-founder of the All-Volunteer Force Forum.Two-thirds of the world now thinks that we are an enemy of their state. Two-thirds of the world. And it happens to be the two-third that has the greatest amount of the GDP in the world.Colonel Lawrence WilkersonI've lived for 81 years, almost 82, and I've watched my country go to hell right in front of my face… And the billionaires who want all of this to happen, they do not want a democracy. A democracy is fallible. A democracy can't beat China. A democracy can't beat Russia. A democracy can't even beat Iran. They want a technocracy that is run by them, armed by them, technical revolution by them. They want all of this, and oh by the way they want to live to 150 while they're doing it too.Colonel Lawrence WilkersonEvery freaking hour they create a series of war crimes in Iran. Every freaking hour they perpetrate war crimes in the Persian Gulf. Every freaking hour they perpetrate war crimes in Lebanon with Israel. “What's new?,” I want to say. We are a criminal state. There is no other way to describe it. We are a criminal state. We pay no attention whatsoever to domestic or international law. Only when it benefits the person who is doing the deed do we pay any attention at all.Colonel Lawrence WilkersonToby Heaps is the CEO and co-founder of Corporate Knights, and Editor-in-Chief of Corporate Knights magazine. He spearheaded the first global ranking of the world's 100 most sustainable corporations in 2005, and in 2007 coined the term “clean capitalism.”What we're seeing is a sort of political physics—for every action is an equal and opposite reaction. Canada has in many ways benefited and rallied around our nationhood. We're often not the most boisterous or loudest type of folks. But this continued disrespect for our statehood and the continued attacks and the unreasonableness and the unfair play, our prime minister said something to the effect of: when the United States signs something, it's in pencil. It's really denigrating the United States' reputation globally and in Canadians' minds.Toby HeapsNews 8/28/26* This week, the left-wing insurgency in the Democratic Party scored several new victories. First, NBC reports that in Oklahoma, N'Kiyla Jasmine Thomas won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Markwayne Mullin, who Trump selected to lead the Department of Homeland Security following the resignation of Secretary Kristi Noem. Thomas will go up against Republican Congressman Kevin Hern in November. Unfortunately, Thomas stands little chance of winning the state, which has not elected a Democratic Senator since 1990. Thomas is a member of the Chickasaw Nation and identifies as a Democratic Socialist, but is “not yet” a member of DSA.* Next, in California, Democracy Now! reports progressive state lawmaker Aisha Wahab has prevailed in the special election to fill the seat vacated by disgraced former Congressman Eric Swalwell. This piece notes that Wahab “overcame a flood of attack ads from pro-Israel groups,” which sought to bolster her Democratic primary rival, Melissa Hernandez. In an interview, Wahab said that she “appreciates” voters in her district for “seeing through” the “lies that were spread by AIPAC.” Wahab will make history as the first Afghan American in Congress and has called for the United States to engage with the Taliban government and attempt to “[steer] them in the right direction” on human rights.* In Georgia, the Hill reports another progressive – Everton Blair – won the special election to fill the seat of Congressman David Scott, who passed away in April during his 12th term in the seat. Blair, the former chair of the Gwinnett County School Board, defeated Scott's daughter Marcye Scott. However, Blair will only represent this seat until the end of the year. Beginning in January, State Rep. Jasmine Clark, who won the May primary, will fill the seat for the 120th Congress.* Meanwhile, in the Cornhusker State, the Nebraska Examiner reports that the “Legal Marijuana NOW U.S. Senate candidate Mike Marvin announced he can't put more ‘energy' into the Senate race because of health issues and endorsed nonpartisan U.S. Senate candidate Dan Osborn.” Marvin will remain on the ballot, but is “urging all who supported [him] to now support…Osborn.” This piece notes that this announcement comes on heels of reporting by Flatwater Free Press showing that two staffers from Osborn's 2024 independent Senate campaign joined the Legal Marijuana NOW executive board and sought to dissolve the party from the inside. This, combined with the fact that former Democratic Senate nominee Cindy Burbank paid Mike Marvin's $1,740 candidate filing fee and dropped out of the race one day after the secretary of state verified Osborn's signatures to be on the fall ballot has fueled speculation that these were coordinated efforts to clear the field for Osborn. Marvin for his part disputes this and says he never planned to leave the race. Osborn is quoted saying “We hope to earn the support of the LMN voters and hope that we can represent their concerns well in the US Senate.”* In more third party news, Trump has launched new broadsides against the emerging ex-MAGA clique – consisting of Tucker Carlson, Congressman Thomas Massie, and former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. According to the Hill, Trump attacked the group, said to be exploring the possibility of founding a new right-wing party, calling Carlson “a loser,” Greene “a highly neurotic woman” and Massie a “real JERK” on Truth Social. The president added, “What a team this would be, THREE LOSERS, and a pocketful of change!...The only chance they have is to join the Radical Left Dumocrats, and try breaking into the Primary System. To all of them I say, PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!” The proximate cause of this latest flare-up between the camps is Trump's decision to allow in 300,000 metric tons of ground beef to be imported in the next 90 days, a move Massie called “worse than socialism.” Greene, who has been perhaps the most vocal defector from the MAGA camp, said “He attacks us with such vitriol because we actually are everything he claimed to be…he has proven as President that he is nothing more than a neocon puppet for Israel, corporations, big donors with special interests, and his dear friends in the Epstein class…We never changed, Trump did.”* Another story from this side of the aisle comes to us from NOTUS, which reports that an “unknown actor” has stolen over $16,000 from the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC). This incident, alternatively characterized as a “theft” from a “foreign country” or simply a “fraud,” occurred in early July, when the NRCC “attempted to pay a bill from Ranger Wi-Fi Consulting, a Texas-based firm that specializes in helping clients ‘optimize their wireless networks while ensuring healthy security measures are in place.'” Seeking to assuage the fears of donors, NRCC spokesman Will Kiley told the press that “Protecting donor funds is a top priority for the NRCC,” and vowed that the committee is “working to recover the funds, and…taken steps to ensure it can't happen again.” Listeners might remember that in July, the DNC admitted that they had fallen prey to a scammer, losing almost $30,000 in the process. It would seem that these committees do not have functional safeguards against such schemes.* Our final stories this week all deal with the Middle East. First up, Axios reports that while AIPAC was gearing up for a major ad blitz in Michigan against Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed and on behalf of Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers, those plans have apparently been iced at the behest of the Rogers campaign. According to this story, Rogers believes that AIPAC spending in the Democratic primary – over $30 million on behalf of El-Syed's rival Haley Stevens – actually helped boost El-Sayed's candidacy, making his opposition to AIPAC a “centerpiece of his…campaign, using the group's spending against him to portray Democratic opponent Haley Stevens as beholden to the pro-Israel lobby.” Rogers fears the same fate, so he has sought to keep his distance from AIPAC while his allies are urging AIPAC to “get involved without putting the group's name front and center.” However, Rogers' attempts to put some daylight between his campaign and AIPAC has resulted in the latter turning cold towards the Republican candidate. Republicans now worry that AIPAC will “sit out the general election entirely.” As for the perception of AIPAC in Michigan, a recent poll found that “55% of Michigan voters oppose continued U.S. aid to Israel.”* On the other end of the Michigan political spectrum, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib has sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio demanding that he “ensure the immediateand permanent release of U.S. citizen Sama Safi, a 20-year-old university student with a severe complex chronic health condition, who the Israeli military has arbitrarily and wrongfully detained since June 2nd.” This letter goes on to describe how “armed Israeli soldiers raided her family's home in the occupied West Bank in the middle of the night and tore her from her family,” and that since then, she has “suffered under appalling conditions in Israeli military detention including “frequent physical assault, shackling, and the throwing of gas and stun grenades into already overcrowded and poorly ventilated cells,” among other horrors. 40 more members of Congress signed this letter, including six senators, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey and Chris Van Hollen among them. 85 civic groups also signed onto this demand, ranging from faith-based groups to human rights organizations and beyond.* In the region itself, a broad coalition of Muslim states – including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt and, perhaps most notably, the United Arab Emirates – have issued a categorical condemnation of Israel's new “E1” settlement plan. This plan relates to new settlement activities east of occupied East Jerusalem and the signatories decry the plan as constituting “a dangerous escalation that further advances settlement expansion and annexation and undermines the geographical contiguity of the Occupied Palestinian Territory…thereby threatening the viability and realization of an independent, contiguous Palestinian State based on the 1967 lines with East Jerusalem as its capital.” The UAE was the most significant state in the region to sign onto the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords in 2020, which sought to normalize relations between Israel and its neighbors at the expense of the Palestinians. Saudi Arabia was said to be on the verge of signing the accords prior to October 7th and Israel's subsequent genocidal military campaign in Gaza. The UAE taking a new stand against Israel on behalf of the Palestinian cause is widely seen as the final death knell of the Abraham Accords and the beginning of a new era of relations in the Middle East.* Finally, the Economist reports that a group of seven top officials within the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is consolidating power in Iran. The man rumored to be leading this junta is Mohsen Rezaei, the new national-security adviser, former presidential candidate and the longest-serving chief of the IRGC, having led the corps though the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. Others include the head of the navy, currently overseeing Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, as well as the IRGC's commander-in-chief and founder of the Quds Force. Notably absent from this group is Mojtaba Khamenei, the new Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic. This piece judiciously avoids making any definite predictions about whether this new clique will rule as hardliners or pragmatists, but emphasizes that the late Ali Khamenei expertly “balanced the competing interests of his realm” while these military men favor action.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

August 29, 2026; 8am: ICE arrested nearly 50,000 people in July, a 15% jump from the previous month and the highest single monthly arrest total since the start of President Trump's second term. Just this week, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the wife of an active-duty soldier was deported back to Honduras. She is at least the 7th spouse or parent of an active-duty service member to be deported as part of Trump's immigration crackdown. The administration is reportedly preparing to cancel up to 200,000 immigrant visas nationwide, a move that would mark the largest revocation effort in U.S. history. Dara Lind, Senior Fellow for the American Immigration Council, and Rosa Flores, MS NOW National Reporter, join “The Weekend” to discuss. For more, follow us on social media: Bluesky: @theweekendmsnow.bsky.social Instagram: @theweekendmsnow TikTok: @theweekendmsnow To listen to this show and other MS podcasts without ads, sign up for MS NOW Premium on Apple Podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Ray Cochrane digs into Anthropic’s Model Hardware Standard. It is a shared driver that lets an AI agent run real lab equipment, from pipetting robots to the lasers inside a quantum computer. He also covers OpenAI’s builder’s guide to GPT-5.6, Google’s new Expert Intelligence book feature, Apple’s M5 Ultra Mac Studio, and a judge’s order forcing Google to stop hiding rival app stores. Finally, he weighs in on Apple’s proposed 15 percent link-out fee, Meta’s Australia numbers, the White House deputizing private hackers, and why rivers obey a 1957 math rule. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens with a quick personal update. He is hunting for tickets to Michigan for his dad’s anniversary, and he has been learning Blender and Godot on the side, mostly modeling and blocking out levels. Consequently, he asks listeners for advice on starting a big game project, and he plans to record his progress, maybe as a time lapse. Then it is straight into the featured story. Anthropic’s Model Hardware Standard: A Driver for the Physical World The featured story comes from Anthropic, which opened a research preview of the Model Hardware Standard, or MHS. Cochrane frames it as the other side of the question NVIDIA’s world models raised two weeks ago: when do AI agents start touching actual machines? A typical lab runs a microscope, a liquid handler, a robotic arm, and a plate reader, each from a different vendor with its own control software. One Janelia researcher in the post launches seven programs in three languages just to start an experiment. Anthropic says wiring a setup like that takes weeks or months of specialist work. MHS is a driver, the same kind of translation layer a printer uses, except every device gets described with a tiny set of commands like read and write. Devices announce themselves on the network. A plain-English reference file then records what each machine measures, what can be adjusted, and which safety limits get enforced no matter what the agent asks. Agents then reach the hardware through the Model Context Protocol, the command line, or plain code. Cochrane sees the same move the industry keeps making, from coding harnesses to RSS and JSON: agree on a standard and let everyone build against it. In fact, he calls MHS the hardware version of MCP. The partner results carry the segment. QuEra builds quantum computers from individual atoms held by lasers that must hold their frequency to about one part in a trillion. A four-person team spent months on a relock script that worked 58 percent of the time. However, four copies of Claude iterating overnight through MHS produced a decision-tree script that recovers the laser in about six seconds, and it passed 99.3 percent of 700 blind trials. Carnegie Mellon wrote MHS drivers for four instruments across three incompatible computers in about eight hours, then ran dose-response experiments three times faster and blocked all six deliberately induced faults. Genentech, meanwhile, showed the limits. Claude used the same pump speed for water, a foamy protein solution, and a human had to explain that the bubbles were a physics problem. That gap in physical intuition is what sticks with Cochrane. He doubts it will change soon, and he suspects the fix will arrive as sub-agents or sub-models that judge a request against an expected outcome. He also connects MHS to a video of racing robots that never learned to stop at the finish line. What happens, he wonders, once they can read a distance sensor through a shared standard? Still, he calls the announcement a fantastic read and points listeners to the full article. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. GPT-5.6 Does the Same Work for a Fraction of the Cost OpenAI’s builder’s guide to GPT-5.6 leads the headlines. Cochrane recaps the three tiers from episode 1870, Sol, Terra, and Luna, plus the separate dial for reasoning effort. On BrowseComp, a benchmark for digging up obscure facts on the web, the old GPT-5.5 flagship scored about 84 percent on a run that cost 33 dollars three months ago. Luna now matches that score for a dollar thirty-three, and OpenAI has since cut Luna’s price another 80 percent. Browser Use reports Luna finishing 78 percent of its hardest browser tasks for about 14 dollars, against 80 percent for roughly 235 dollars from the best available model. The guide’s other big addition is a multi-agent beta flag. It lets the model handling a request spawn parallel helper agents that report back to a root agent inside a single API call. However, Cochrane is unimpressed by the timing. He has been running that pattern in Claude Code for months, so he sees OpenAI copying a workflow other companies already ship rather than inventing its own. Along the way, he plugs Claude Code’s remote-control sessions, which let him send prompts from his phone to a terminal session at home. Google Lets Gemini Read the Books You Actually Bought Google launched Expert Intelligence, a name Cochrane calls quite the reach. The feature lets you drop a book you bought on Google Play Books into Gemini Notebook, formerly NotebookLM, and ask questions answered only from that book, with citations. Cochrane sees real power here for students, since he once used NotebookLM to organize scattered course PDFs. Additionally, publishers get a cut, which he calls a far better deal than the wholesale scraping of books that trained earlier models. Nevertheless, he asks who loses out, because a paid publisher does not automatically mean a paid author. He floats the same idea for artists, even a penny per use, then admits that may be too idealistic. Apple’s M5 Ultra Mac Studio Is Built to Run Big Models at Home Back in episode 1861, when Apple killed the Mac Pro, an M5 Ultra Mac Studio was expected later this year. Now it is here. The M5 Ultra brings up to a 36-core CPU, an 80-core GPU, and 512GB of unified memory moving 1.2 terabytes per second. Apple claims up to 4.3 times the AI performance of the M3 Ultra. Thunderbolt 5 can also cluster four machines into one memory pool for up to three times faster inference. The M5 Max model starts at $2,499 and the Ultra at $5,499, with shipping on September 22 and the 512GB configuration arriving in late October. Cochrane finds the clustering pitch ridiculous at that price, but he invites anyone who spends the money to report back. Apple Opens a Manufacturing School in Houston Apple also opened a 20,000-square-foot Advanced Manufacturing Center in Houston. It offers free classes for small and midsize manufacturers, from circuit board design to hands-on time on a scaled-down production line, with college students joining later. Cochrane calls it a solid step in the bring-manufacturing-home movement. The bigger story is the campus itself, which builds Apple’s AI servers and will add the first US-assembled Mac mini line later this year. That ties back to the Mac mini shortage that followed the OpenClaw rush, when Tim Cook warned of months-long waits. Cult of Mac was still reporting four-month waits in late July. However, Cook blamed chip supply rather than assembly, so Cochrane is not counting on relief just yet. Amazon EC2 Turns Twenty Amazon EC2 turned twenty this week, which Cochrane admits makes him feel old. The 2006 beta offered one server size in one region for ten cents an hour. Each came with a 1.7 gigahertz Xeon and under two gigabytes of memory, and accounts were capped at twenty servers. Today AWS offers more than 1,200 instance types across 39 regions. Consequently, Cochrane credits the company with turning that tiny product into the backbone of cloud and AI computing. Intel Gamer Days: Two Free Games, With Fine Print Intel Gamer Days runs through September 13. Buy a qualifying Core Ultra Series 2 or 14th Gen desktop chip, a Core Ultra Series 3 laptop, or an Arc graphics card. In return you get Star Wars: Galactic Racer plus the Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis remake. GamesRadar values the pair at about 120 dollars. However, neither game is out yet, and codes must be redeemed by October 31 even though the Tomb Raider remake ships in February. Cochrane calls that awful, but he still tells qualifying buyers to claim the deal early. Note that 13th Gen chips do not qualify. Judge Orders Google to Stop Hiding Rival App Stores A jury found Google’s Android app monopoly illegal in late 2023, and Judge James Donato ordered rival stores into the Play Store in 2024. On August 13, Epic’s lawyer demonstrated that searching Play for “store for apps” returned Walmart instead of any app store. Donato called that “not acceptable” and ordered three fixes within a week. Searches must surface third-party stores, listings need a plain install button, and the “are you looking for” interstitial has to go. Cochrane welcomes the monopoly being chipped away, but he notes that a controlling entity still sits atop every app store. In his view, community hubs like app stores and social media need a public infrastructure layer. He suspects governments skip that investment because companies already run the services, while selling your data. Apple Wants 15 Percent of Purchases Outside Its Store The other half of the Epic saga is Apple’s proposed link-out commission. After the 2021 anti-steering injunction, Apple charged 27 percent on purchases made through external links. A judge held it in contempt last year, and the Ninth Circuit then allowed a fee limited to the cost of running the system. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers refused to wait for the Supreme Court, writing that “further delay is unwarranted.” Apple filed 15 percent for standard apps, 10 percent for subscription renewals and partner programs, and 5 percent for small businesses. It also conceded the rate would be “essentially zero” under the appeals court’s cost yardstick. Since Apple has charged nothing on link-outs since the contempt ruling, Cochrane sees this as a raise. He calls a cut on purchases made on a developer’s own website disturbing. He also recalls reading about the size of Uber’s payments to Apple, and he questions whether that kind of percentage is sustainable for companies without funding. Meta Says It Has Cut Off 750,000 Australian Kids Meta reported locking out more than 750,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts in Australia by the end of June under the country’s under-16 social media law. Over 500,000 of those were removed before the law even took effect. Detection relies mostly on AI scanning posts and bios for tells like birthday messages, plus user reports and blocks on re-registration. However, the post gives no count of mistaken removals or appeals, and the regulator’s early data shows under-16 usage falling only from about 86 to 81 percent. Meta wants a single age signal at the operating system or app store level, and Cochrane agrees completely. He connects it to the MHS idea from the top of the show: platforms need a standard flag to reference instead of guessing. The White House Deputizes Private Hackers Earlier this month the White House signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum that lets vetted private security firms run surveillance and disruption operations against overseas criminal groups. The Justice Department and Homeland Security hold the contracts and oversee the work. Firms need a proven track record, vetted staff, and a bond of at least $1 million, and must submit operating procedures within 60 days. Cochrane finds the measure aggressive in a good way and hopes it deters attacks on innocents. Still, he takes Kevin Beaumont’s warning seriously that the private security industry profits from ransomware existing. He compares it to the old Head and Shoulders myth: why solve the problem that drives your revenue? A Weather Satellite Watched the Eclipse Shadow Cross Europe Cochrane skips the readout on this one and simply sends listeners to ESA’s site. The MTG-I1 weather satellite captured the Moon’s shadow sweeping across Europe during the August 12 eclipse. Watching a shadow cross an entire continent, he says, was a first for him. Additionally, it leaves him excited about the research happening beyond the planet. Rivers, Deltas, and the Number 0.6 Quanta Magazine explains Hack’s law, which John Hack discovered in 1957 while measuring streams in Virginia and Maryland. A stream’s length tracks its drainage area raised to the power of 0.6, regardless of the rock underneath, and satellite data later confirmed it worldwide. Computer models in the 1990s showed why. Channels that capture extra runoff cut deeper and steal from their neighbors until the network settles into the arrangement that wastes the least energy. Now a University of Texas Rio Grande Valley team has found the same 0.6 exponent in river deltas, which spread water out rather than gathering it. Nobody knows why yet, and Cochrane calls it a really cool read. Sugar Helped Grow the Human Brain, Too A new paper in Science, co-authored by Jennie Brand-Miller at the University of Sydney, adds a third ingredient to the story of early human brain growth. Alongside meat and cooking, natural sugars from ripe fruit and honey may have fueled it too. The brain is about two percent of body weight but burns twenty percent of resting energy. It runs on glucose, which meat and marrow barely supply and raw starch cannot release without fire. The team modeled ancestral diets from a chimp-like baseline through Homo erectus and concluded that the earliest hominins may have drawn over 65 percent of their energy from natural sugars. Cochrane stresses that it is a model, not fossils, and notes that paleoanthropologist Marina Lozano thinks the authors place widespread cooking too early. Still, he loves this kind of deep research. Retracing the steps to our own intelligence, he suggests, could hint at what it takes for intelligent life to develop at all. A Brain Rhythm That Tells Doctors Where to Aim Finally, Science Daily covered a University of Cologne study on deep brain stimulation. That is the implanted-electrode treatment that eases Parkinson’s tremors for some patients but not others. Andreas Horn’s team recorded from 50 patients using both the implanted electrodes and an external magnetic scanner. They identified a circuit between the electrode’s target and the frontal cortex that oscillates at 20 to 35 cycles per second. Stronger coupling there predicted bigger improvement after surgery, though the study, published in Brain, shows correlation rather than cause. First author Bahne Bahners hopes the finding helps tune DBS more precisely, especially for patients who have not responded well. Cochrane half-jokingly asks whether MHS might one day drive those electrodes, and he calls brain disorders the hardest thing in the body to treat. Cochrane wraps with housekeeping: become a GNC Insider at geeknewscentral.com/insider, email geeknews@gmail.com with questions or comments, subscribe to the newsletter, and grab a modern podcast app at podcastapps.com. He thanks GoDaddy for over twenty years of keeping the show on the air, promises to catch everyone next Monday, and wishes listeners a great night. The post Eyes, Hands, and a Sense of Timing #1874 appeared first on Geek News Central.

The Department of Homeland Security is preparing to welcome Kyle Schutt to its ranks as chief information officer. The news comes after FedScoop reported Wednesday that DHS CIO Antoine McCord was planning his exit. Similar to his predecessor, Schutt has little digital footprint of his own making. He even deleted his LinkedIn profile more than a year ago. Before moving to the federal government, Schutt was CTO at an online fundraising platform and led the development of another, which helped raise $1.8 billion for the Republican Party in the 2024 election cycle, according to ProPublica. On behalf of the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency, Schutt worked at a number of agencies, including the General Services Administration, per NPR reporting. Wired has tied his work at DOGE to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, as well as the Department of Health and Human Services. At DHS, he was responsible, in part, for the closing of the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, ProPublica reported. Schutt also has been linked to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Technology Modernization Fund may “experiment” with its own artificial intelligence model in the next fiscal year, acting Director Jessie Posilkin said Thursday. TMF's “tiny team” of eight within the General Services Administration is already all-hands-on-deck in managing and supporting the investments and proposals they have, she said. While the team has been using USAi, “there's a ton of playing around we can do,” she said at GovExec's Infrastructure and Modernization Forum in Reston, Va. Posilkin said she “flirted with this idea of … building some sort of model based on all of the TMF proposals that we've ever gotten and what's happened with them. I think, like any other agency team, I see a ton of opportunity for experimentation, and my goal for ‘27 is to get the capacity to start experimenting.” Posilkin also hinted at upcoming announcements: savings and value return numbers for fiscal 2025 and news of four new members of the TMF's board will come in the next month or so, she said. However, she does not know who will replace the board's chief, outgoing federal Chief Information Officer Greg Barbaccia. Also coming soon: the announcement of TMF's new investments at the end of September, she said. Posilkin didn't share details of those projects but said the TMF team has “been really excited both by the investments that the board is making decisions on right now, and what's in our pipeline.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

(The Center Square) – Following a U.S. Supreme Court decision Monday, Illinois elected officials are urging residents to send any mail-in ballots to be cast in the midterms ahead of election day. The highest court temporarily allowed the Trump administration to maintain an executive order placing restrictions on mail-in voting across the country, requiring the U.S. Postal Service to cross reference Homeland Security lists of legal citizen eligible voters. Ed Yohnka, spokesman for Illinois ACLU, said the ruling was disappointing but would allow the group's case to be ruled on to potentially block the executive order's rule based on its merits. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A Department of Homeland Security memo lays out a legal strategy that could place federalized National Guard troops under Title 10 authority and grant them immigration enforcement powers. Legal experts dispute the theory, while American Oversight warns it could have broader implications for domestic military enforcement. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed with the latest news from a leading Black-owned & controlled media company: https://aurn.com/newsletter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You're listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for August 27, 2026. We open by tearing into Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner's comments about wanting a "paperweight" from the wreckage of Trump's planned White House ballroom, walking through why that rhetoric crosses the line from political disagreement into celebrating the destruction of federal property, and how the broader culture of "blow it up, burn it down" language is fueling real threats against the president. We get to our Top 3 things you need to know: President Trump's executive order renaming Lake Ontario "Lake America" amid the trade standoff with Canada, the Third Circuit's ruling that the assault case against Congresswoman LaMonica McIver can proceed, and the release of ICE agent Christian Castro from a Texas jail after Minnesota's extradition lawsuit was tossed as premature. Our American Mama Teri Netterville joining us to reflect to reflect on the life and legend of Dolly Parton including a moving story about her music showing up at a family funeral and a look at how she became one of the few truly unifying figures in American life, right down to turning down the Presidential Medal of Freedom three times so it wouldn't look political. We dig deep on two fronts: the Trump administration's new requirement that states conduct random manual audits of paper ballots to keep their Homeland Security election funding, which we frame as basic quality control rather than an attack on election integrity, and a close read of Texas Senate candidate James Tallarico's campaign theology, where we lay out chapter and verse why his claims about a non-binary God, abortion, and religious pluralism don't square with scripture. We also weigh in on New York Mayor Mamdani mourning a Rikers Island inmate's death without a word for the man he's accused of murdering, before landing on a Bright Spot: General Mills announcing its U.S. cereal lineup is now free of certified synthetic dyes, a shift we credit to RFK Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again push merging with MAGA consumer pressure. We close things out with a Say What on a Georgia teacher's classroom "gas station" for second graders, and a Moment of Whoa honoring Mandy Patinkin's new gig as honorary team captain for the U.S. fencing team heading into the 2028 LA Olympics. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode 5622: Homeland Security Goes After Voting Machines

In this episode, host Sylvie Legere sits down with Ashley Davis, author of The Power Pivot: With Grit, Grace, and Growth, political strategist, and Partner at S-3 Group, for a conversation about how to lead when life, business, or circumstances stop following the plan.Drawing from a career that has taken her from serving as Employee #1 at the White House Office of Homeland Security after 9/11 to advising major organizations in Washington, Ashley shares why a meaningful pivot isn't about reacting to change—it's about preparing for it with intention. Together, Sylvie and Ashley unpack her framework of Intentional Planning, Intentional Purpose, and Intentional Change, the "Pivot Penalty" that comes from waiting too long to act, and the power of making small, deliberate adjustments before a crisis forces your hand.They also explore decision-making under pressure, why progress rarely follows a perfectly imagined script, and how Ashley applies the same principles to an unpredictable political and business landscape. The conversation even goes behind the scenes of lobbying and advocacy, using sports and technology as examples to demystify how organizations navigate policy, influence, and change.Act after listening:Identify the pivot you've been putting off. Ask yourself what waiting may be costing you and whether an inflection point is already signaling that it's time to move.Use the three Intentionals. Look at your next decision through the lens of Intentional Planning, Intentional Purpose, and Intentional Change instead of reacting in the moment.Start with a tiny pivot. You don't always need one dramatic move. Choose one small, intentional adjustment that can create momentum in the direction you want to go.Share this episode. Send this conversation to someone navigating a career change, leadership challenge, business decision, or unexpected turn of events.Guest BioAshley Davis is a Partner at S-3 Group, political strategist, Fortune 500 lobbyist, and author of The Power Pivot: With Grit, Grace, and Growth. She co-founded West Front Strategies, which became part of S-3 Group in 2025, and previously served as Employee #1 at the White House Office of Homeland Security following 9/11, helping establish the new office during a period of national crisis.Ashley holds an MBA from Georgetown University and has contributed political and policy commentary to Bloomberg, NBC, CNN, and FOX. Her leadership experience also includes board involvement with organizations including the Kennedy Center's National Symphony Orchestra and the USA Gymnastics Foundation.Resources & LinksThe Power Pivot: With Grit, Grace, and Growth by Ashley DavisLearn more about Ashley DavisFollow Ashley's insights on leadership, business, policy, and navigating change

The Office of Management and Budget is circulating a new draft policy that would enforce the use of Login-dot-gov, the federal government's single sign-on service, “for most public facing services,” including websites and digital platforms that require authentication. According to a draft version of a memo sent Monday to agencies for review, agencies would have 60 days to provide OMB with an inventory of existing public-facing websites with authentication, and six months to develop a broader digital identity risk management review as part of the mandatory shift to Login. In the draft memo viewed by FedScoop, OMB Director Russell Vought cited the lack of a governmentwide strategy for managing digital identity and President Donald Trump's executive order on improving digital design in government as justifications for the new policy. It argues the current patchwork of digital-identity solutions used by federal agencies results in increased costs and is a hassle to Americans seeking to get government information. “As the use of Login.gov for identity verification increases, the government realizes cost efficiencies from economies of scale and a reduction in duplicative verification costs,” the draft memo said. “Increased use…also supports the government's security posture, enabling deployment at scale of leading technologies and security practices to prevent and respond to emerging threats.” The Department of Homeland Security's top technology leader is set to depart the agency, per two sources familiar with the matter. Antoine McCord joined DHS as chief information officer in March 2025. McCord also oversaw the Office of Biometrics and Identity Management and served as the acting CISO. The official kept a low profile while overseeing the law enforcement agency's multibillion-dollar budget, forgoing media interviews and events. He was in the initial wave of CIO hires under the second Trump administration following the reclassification of the chief information officer position. The Office of Personnel Management moved the role from “career reserved” to “general,” easing restrictions on who could get tapped —though the DHS CIO role has historically been political. Prior to DHS, McCord held positions at defense technology company Anduril and within the U.S. Marine Corps and intelligence community. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Aircraft carrier catapult systems, Peraton's performance as the Prime Integrator for the FAA’s Brand New Air Traffic Control System, the Department of Homeland Security's luxury jets, Google's purchase of Spirit Airlines' data for AI training, American Airlines economy seatback screens, and a Li-ion laptop battery that caught fire in flight. Also, Micah's first flight, Delta's requirements for portable chargers, and the real reason they are called bear straps. Aviation News Trump orders Pentagon to redesign US aircraft carrier to use steam catapults to launch jets President Trump signed a national security memorandum directing the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the acting Navy secretary, Hung Cao, to come up with a plan to replace the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) and Advanced Weapons Elevators with steam and hydraulic systems for the construction of the Ford-class aircraft carrier USS Doris Miller. Critics of the change point to the major redesign and expense required. Aircraft Carrier Catapult Technology by Era: Era Technology Key navies 1910s–30s Compressed-air/flywheel catapults (mostly floatplanes) US, UK WWII Hydraulic catapults US, UK 1950s–2010s Steam catapults UK (pioneer), US, France 2010s–present Electromagnetic (EMALS) US, China Throughout No catapults (ski-jump/STOVL) USSR/Russia, Italy, Spain, India, UK (post-1978), current China (Liaoning/Shandong), US Navy Amphibious Assault Ships Arrangement of a hydro-pneumatic catapult in an aircraft carrier. Naval Marine Archive. See also: Why The Ford Class Carrier's Island Superstructure Is Located So Far Back and Navy considers major aircraft carrier revamp to better suit Trump's aesthetic. Trump's FAA picked an unlikely contractor to lead its air traffic overhaul. The agency is having second thoughts. In December 2025, DOT/FAA selected Peraton as Prime Integrator for the FAA’s Brand New Air Traffic Control System (BNATCS), a $1.5 billion contract. Peraton, which had little direct experience working with the FAA, was chosen over Parsons Corp., which has extensive experience with FAA contracts. Peraton is a national-security and government-services contractor owned by Veritas Capital, and is known for its defense, intelligence, and IT/communications work. (Veritas also owns Peraton Labs, the former Bell Labs). Some reports indicate that the FAA is frustrated with Peraton. A source notes that “Peraton has basically not done any work since they got in” and admits that the FAA was partially at fault because it “stonewalled Peraton's efforts to work seamlessly with FAA counterparts.” The FAA has micromanaged the project, and Peraton has failed to manage the project. An In-House Private Jet Service, Senators Say The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) purchased two Gulfstream G650s, two G700s, and eight Boeing 737s to be used by the Trump Administration. U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee vice chair Patty Murray (D-Washington) and ranking homeland security subcommittee member Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) are calling for an investigation. In a letter to both DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and the DHS inspector general requesting the investigation, the purchases are characterized as a “gross misuse” of tax dollars. Spirit Data Sale to Google Prompts Flight Attendants' Objection After 34 years of operations, Spirit Airlines ceased all flight operations on May 2, 2026. Spirit's Chapter 11 reorganization failed, and the airline went into full liquidation. The bankruptcy court entered a Wind-Down Order covering the sale of LaGuardia slots, the corporate campus, the loyalty program, and operating equipment. For $10 million, Google won the auction for Spirit’s approximately 100 million emails, calendar data, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, documents, spreadsheets, and software code. Google will use them to improve its products and AI models. The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, voiced a limited objection to the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, raising privacy concerns. The union is concerned about the confidentiality of disciplinary records, payroll history, and internal communications, noting that the deal’s privacy provisions are designed to protect consumers, not employees. The union also raised concerns about links between payroll, timekeeping, and communications data; whether there will be an independent screen for employee confidentiality; and provisions on later transfers to third parties. The AFA asked the court to reject the sale unless changes are made to exclude all flight attendant information, including training records, time cards, and payroll, as well as any Microsoft 365 content containing flight attendant data. Alternatively, the court should require a review protocol for labor or disciplinary records and communications, and prohibit using the data to profile any identifiable group of flight attendants, the AFA said. See also: Flight attendants freaked out that Google is buying tons of Spirit employee data American Airlines U-turn: Seatback screens coming to all classes in 2028 American Airlines plans to start rolling out personal inflight entertainment displays on its narrowbody fleet in 2028, and complete the upgrade by the early 2030s. American will begin offering Starlink inflight connectivity on 500 planes beginning in 2027.  The lack of screens in economy cabins dates back to the US Airways merger in 2014. Doug Parker argued that the cost of screens was not worth the investment since most fliers brought their own portable device. United and Delta followed a different path. Laptop catches fire on American Airlines flight, passenger suffers minor burns Injuries occurred on American Airlines flight 2398 between Atlanta (ATL) and Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) on August 21, 2026, after a laptop battery caught fire. The pilots reported smoke in the cabin to ATC. The cabin crew extinguished the fire (reportedly using a thermal containment bag). The A321 landed without further incident. Mentioned Airplanes and Water Can Mix in the Stories about Flying podcast. The Wreck of the U. S. S. “Memphis” Up Against the Rocks: The Wreck of the Memphis Lynch Drone Photography LLC, 2026 EAA AirVenture. Photos by Logan Lynch. Hosts this Episode Max Flight, our Main(e) Man Micah, Rob Mark, and David Vanderhoof.

This episode of Dangerous Dogma features a conversation between Word&Way Editor Brian Kaylor, Lutheran minister and journalist Angela Denker, and Disciples pastor and author Beau Underwood. The conversation includes discussion about revelations that the Department of Homeland Security has been spying in churches, a controversial golf ad, and a White Sox night celebrating Pope Leo. You can watch a video version of the conversation here. Here are a few pieces related to the episode: - Brian reported at A Public Witness about DHS spying on churches. - Brian reported on a federal judge criticizing the "ICE pastor" for violating court orders. - Dan Miller talked in the Axis Daily Brief about what the DHS spying case shows about the Trump administration's limited view of religious liberty. - Brian reported on Doug Wilson claiming Zohran Mamdani voters should lose their citizenship. - Good Good Golf and Callaway Golf posted and then deleted a controversial ad. - Beau wrote at A Public Witness about Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion by Sarah Stankorb. - Karen Elizabeth Park wrote at Ex Voto about the Pope Leo night at a recent White Sox game. Also, check out the most recent books by the three panelists: Brian Kaylor, The Bible According to Christian Nationalists: Exploiting Scripture for Political Power Angela Denker, Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood Beau Underwood (with Brian Kaylor), Baptizing America How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism

The General Services Administration is seeking to combat identity fraud by adding more device fingerprinting to Login-dot-gov, the government's unified account manager, according to contracting documents posted Tuesday. The “sophistication and volume” of fraud attempts have grown as the service's user base and agency adoption have expanded, the request for information said. While Login-dot-gov already uses fingerprinting within its identity verification flow, “there is an opportunity to enhance the platform's comprehensive fraud prevention strategy,” documents said. “This capability is essential for detecting sophisticated fraud attacks including account takeover, synthetic identity fraud, automated bot activity, residential proxy abuse, and emerging agentic [artificial intelligence] threats,” they said. Device fingerprinting identifies visitors through browser, device and network signals rather than just traditional identifiers like IP addresses or cookies, the request said. The solution GSA is exploring would integrate fingerprinting into account creation and sign-in, provide real-time risk signals for fraud detection and identify returning devices, “even when users attempt to evade detection through VPNs, residential proxies, incognito browsing, cookie clearing, or browser tampering,” the documents said. Homeland Security Investigations is failing to provide its agents with the tech toolbelt needed to address fentanyl entering the U.S., according to an inspector general report published last week. The watchdog found that HSI, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division, spent millions to develop data analysis and information-sharing tools that underperformed and went unused. The primary technology in question is the HSI-built Repository for Analytics in a Virtualized Environment platform, referred to as RAVEn. The platform was created to host a suite of data-analysis tools that were designed to support criminal investigations. DHS poured more than $150 million into the endeavor and deployed the technology in November 2022. Just three years later, HSI began decommissioning it. “One officer described RAVEn as ‘atrocious,' and another stated the platform hindered drug investigations instead of helping them,” the inspector general office said in the report. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

A Supreme Court ruling that could inject turmoil into the midterm elections, just over two months from now. Today's emergency ruling says President Trump can go forward with his recent executive order directing the Postal Service and Department of Homeland Security to take part in deciding who can or cannot vote by mail. Plus, the president's latest argument that he needs the ballroom for the new bunker that will go beneath it, and some new reporting from The Washington Post about a bunker that already exists under the White House.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If Jesus is real and His Word is true, everything about life changes.Today, we continue our sermon series from the archives on Hebrews 11, the Bible's great “Hall of Faith.” In this message, Paul shows how faith in God transforms four things - vision, identity, desire, and relationship.To hear more sermons from Paul, visit PaulTripp.com/Sermons.

Yesterday, in an emergency opinion, the Supreme Court decided that the Trump Administration can go forward with an executive order that would fundamentally change the way elections are conducted in the U.S.   Under the order, the Department of Homeland Security would create lists of U.S. citizens eligible to vote that it would send to states, and the U.S. Postal Service would decide who can get mail-in ballots. Though this isn’t the final legal word, the ruling creates a new level of uncertainty just ten weeks from the midterm elections.   Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read joins us for a discussion.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested three people during a traffic stop within the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona earlier this month. As KJZZ's Gabriel Pietrorazio reports, the Valley tribe's leader says the encounter stoked fear. Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis claims the tribe made a deal allowing federal agents to conduct activities on their sovereign lands – so long as they first notify the Gila River Police Department. But tribal officers will not assist. “Now with this recent incursion, that agreement clearly broke down and needed to be urgently and directly and clearly addressed.” In a video message on social media, Lewis revealed he has contacted the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “And to their credit, they understood immediately that this was a genuine problem, and arranged that same day to put our new chief of police in touch with the local regional ICE leadership.” None of the apprehended men are reportedly tribal members. Three cubs belonging to Osso in the Anan Wildlife Observatory at Tongass National Forest. (Courtesy U.S. Forest Service / Facebook) A proposed logging project in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest is facing opposition over concerns it could affect wildlife and subsistence hunting in Southeast Alaska. The U.S. Forest Service plans to log thousands of acres of old-growth forest near Ketchikan, Alaska, as Mark Moran reports. Conservationists are pushing back on a massive old growth logging plan by USFS that would carve new roads through thousands of acres of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. The agency says it will revitalize the logging industry and improve habitat and ecosystems for native species. The Revilla Integrated Research Project aims to log 4,000 acres of old growth trees in the Tongass near Ketchikan, harvest 83 million board feet of timber, and build more than 40 miles of roadway. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council’s Nathan Newcomber says the development plan threatens the habitat of a number of animals. He says even the Forest Service has acknowledged the risk. “Deer, bears, wolves, birds like the Queen Charlie Goshawk. They also state that they acknowledge the significant likelihood of impact to subsistence, including on deer harvest.” There were at least 120 objections to the plan during a public comment period, but the Forest Service says it intends to begin the work and address legal challenges later. Southeast Alaska has been transitioning away from clear cutting old tree stands in favor of what is known as young growth logging, which Newcomber and other environmental advocates support, even though the practice now comprises only about 1% of the region’s economy. “To go back to this bygone era from the 1970s where you just clear-cut landscapes, it makes absolutely no sense. Nobody supports it apart from extractive industry and politicians. But local communities in Southeast Alaska, they wanna protect what we have. It’s our cultural way of life. It’s the way that people live up here.” Southeast Alaska is also highly dependent on tourism to support local economies. Driven largely by cruise ship traffic, the region sees as many as two million visitors a year, according to Alaska’s Southeast Conference. Fort Howard along the Fox River in what would become known as Green Bay, Wisc. is where the treaty was signed on Aug. 25, 1828. And on this day in 1828, Ho-Chunk, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Ottawa leaders signed a treaty with the United States at Green Bay. The Native leaders had declined a U.S. request to cede additional land. Instead, the agreement established a temporary boundary amid conflicts over white settlers occupying Native lands for mining. The United States also agreed to provide $20,000 in goods as compensation for damages caused by the occupation. Get National Native News delivered to your inbox daily. Sign up for our daily newsletter today. Download our NV1 Android or iOs App for breaking news alerts. Check out today’s Native America Calling episode Tuesday, August 25, 2026 — How to make relationships work

SHOW NOTES What Really Happened to Princess Diana? Investigator Rich Staropoli Examines the Evidence Nearly three decades after Princess Diana's death, questions and theories surrounding the fatal Paris crash continue to fascinate people around the world. In this episode of The Sisterhood of S.W.E.A.T., Linda Mitchell sits down with former U.S. Secret Service Special Agent Rich Staropoli, one of the investigators featured in FOX's new special, Celebrity Crime Scene: Princess Diana. Staropoli spent approximately 25 years with the U.S. Secret Service, holding supervisory positions within the New York Field Office, Presidential Protective Division, Counter Assault Teams, and Secret Service headquarters. He has conducted approximately 500 polygraph examinations and managed the Protective Intelligence Division in New York following 9/11. In 2016, he was nominated by President Donald Trump to become the first presidentially appointed Chief Information Officer for the Department of Homeland Security. Now, he brings that investigative and protective-security experience to one of history's most scrutinized tragedies. Linda and Rich discuss how professional investigators separate evidence from speculation, what a virtual reconstruction can reveal about the crash, the questions that have fueled decades of theories, and how someone trained to protect high-profile individuals evaluates the events surrounding Diana's final night. They also dive into human behavior, deception, protective intelligence, threat assessment, and what Rich believes viewers should pay attention to when they watch the special. In this episode: How a Secret Service veteran approaches the Diana investigation Evidence versus speculation and conspiracy theories What the virtual crash reconstruction reveals Questions surrounding vehicles reportedly in the tunnel How investigators evaluate competing theories Diana's security through the eyes of a protection professional What 500 polygraph examinations taught Rich about human behavior Protective intelligence and threat assessment Whether the investigation changed Rich's own perspective What viewers should watch for in the new special Celebrity Crime Scene: Princess Diana premieres Thursday, August 20 at 8/7c on FOX and streams the next day on Hulu. Takeaways AI technology can provide unprecedented detail in crime scene analysis Common misconceptions about Henri Paul's intoxication are incorrect Objective evidence should override popular theories and speculation Security around high-profile individuals is often inadequate and poorly managed Critical thinking and behavioral analysis are vital in deception detection Sound Bites "Henri Paul was not drunk, the tests do not hold water." "AI tech reveals details never before seen in crash analysis." "The scene was hose down and the vehicle disappeared." Chapters 00:00Introduction to Rich Staropoli and the Princess Diana case 01:52Rich's background in Secret Service and investigative experience 03:52Debunking myths about Henri Paul's sobriety 06:11Using AI to reconstruct the crash scene in detail 07:57Examining the handling of the crime scene and potential cover-up 09:21Security lapses and protection failures for Princess Diana 11:06Lessons on deception detection and behavioral cues 11:49Final thoughts and upcoming documentary release

Here's a question I want you to think about before you hit play. When was the last time you felt like the work you were doing actually mattered? Not mattered as in the numbers went up or the boss was happy. Mattered in that way where you finished a day and felt genuinely full rather than just done. Most of us have forgotten what that feels like. Or maybe we never had it to begin with. This conversation goes deep on that. My guest Joe Fusco and I got into what actually makes a company great, why people don't fit in a spreadsheet no matter how hard we try to make them, and what it really means to lead in a way that brings out the best in the people around you. We talked about AI coming for the people business, why capitalism is at an inflection point, and an analogy involving Newtonian versus quantum physics that completely reframed the way I think about connection and networking. And then we got into retirement, which in Joe's world looks nothing like what most people picture. It's less about slowing down and more about finally having the freedom to point everything you've built toward something that actually matters to you. This one's a slow burn in the best possible way. Stay with it. More About the Guest For 28 years until his retirement in 2022, Joe Fusco was a senior executive with a publicly-traded mid-cap company, where he served as an advisor to the chairman and CEO. Joe has spoken frequently to companies and organizations on leadership, organizational culture, business and cultural trends, and business strategy and sustainability. He's been engaged as a speaker by groups and companies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Credit Union National Association, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the Telecommunications Association of the Southeast. He is currently the co-host of "Retirement Unscripted," a regular series of conversations exploring the design of that next stage of life through a lens of freedom, creativity, wisdom, and identity. Joe is on the board of Internality, a non-profit corporation dedicated to engaging an expanding coalition of business leaders, academics, and other key stakeholders in catalyzing a systemic rework of how business is conducted and how the economy works. He is also an advisor and teacher in the University of Vermont's top-ranked Sustainable Innovation MBA program, and advises senior executives on leadership, culture, and strategy in an array of industries from hospitality to clean energy. Joe lives in Chittenden, Vermont with his wife, Renae. They are the parents of five grown children. Ripple with Joe Fusco LinkedIn Tune in to Retirement Unscripted Catch Joe Fusco's Graduation Ripple sessions in The Pond community. More About the Host Steve Harper is the founder of Ripple Central and host of The Ripple Effect Podcast, where he explores what it really takes to build authentic, meaningful relationships. He also owns Owner Insite, a construction project management software company. Steve runs The Pond, a community built around intentional connection and 8-Minute Ripple events. Ripple with Steve Harper: Instagram Facebook X

Throughout 2026, you cast your nominations for the FedScoop 50, and the results are in. Hundreds of top executives from across the government tech landscape are now up for vote to see who will be honored among this year's FedScoop 50. Voting is open now and runs through September 25. Make your voice heard to help us select who will be recognized on this year's list. One of those nominees in the prestigious Golden Gov category for this year is VA Deputy Secretary and currently acting CIO Paul Lawrence. Lawrence joined the Daily Scoop Podcast to discuss his top priorities in both roles, namely the continued rollout of the department's modernized electronic health record with Oracle. Sam Corcos, the Treasury Department's chief information officer who entered the federal government as a member of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, has taken on three roles within the General Services Administration. Corcos now serves as acting director of Technology Transformation Services, acting deputy commissioner for the Federal Acquisition Service, and acting assistant commissioner of Login-dot-gov, according to the GSA. “As a current federal agency CIO, Sam Corcos has led complex technology operations and worked across government to advance the President's technology priorities,” a GSA spokesperson told FedScoop. Before Corcos was made Treasury CIO in May 2025, he was co-founder of Levels, a health tech company. Since joining Treasury as a special adviser in March 2025, Corcos has sought access to government data and, according to Wired, made efforts to unify the API at the IRS. “The Trump Administration is focused on making government more effective, efficient, and responsive, and TTS will continue to be an important part of that effort. We are confident that Sam will help advance that mission,” the spokesperson said. Outgoing federal CIO Greg Barbaccia has led TTS since February and Greg Hogan has overseen Login-dot-gov since April. Lawmakers are pushing back on Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to equip in-the-field agents with gloves that deliver electric shocks. Members of the House Committee on Homeland Security sent a letter last week to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, urging him to intervene and halt the procurement. The signatories included Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the committee's top Democrat, as well as Reps. Luis Correa of California and Shri Thanedar of Michigan, ranking members of the Border Security and Enforcement, and Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability subcommittees, respectively. The representatives warned of the technology being “incorrectly used or abused by officers resulting in injury or death,” per the letter. In acquisition planning documents published earlier this month, DHS said it intends to invest up to $20 million into Compliant Technologies' Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter devices for Homeland Security Investigations officers and Enforcement Removal Operations agents. The contract is expected to be awarded later this year. “ICE is constantly assessing the needs of our officers in the field to ensure they have the tools and equipment necessary to safely arrest and remove criminal illegal aliens from our country,” a DHS spokesperson said in an email. “Every decision is made with careful consideration and appropriately reviewed to ensure that any technology ICE utilizes is consistent with all applicable law enforcement policies and standards.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Image: Anti-ICE call center press conference – Nashville District 30 Councilwoman Sandra Sepulveda speaking Image Credit: Nashville Noticas / FacebookTennessee Conservative News [By Olivia Lupia] –Nashville city leaders and leftist activists are looking to oppose a planned ICE call center after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security changed the contract's location from Adams in Montgomery County to Nashville, claiming the facility will bring more harm to immigrant communities and saying they will attempt to legislatively hamstring the project.A federal contract database shows that initially, the $63 million contract for the ICE immigration enforcement support center to Alaska-based company Koniag Government Services listed Adams, TN as the potential location, a rural town along the Kentucky border with a population of about 600. But towards the end of last week, an update to the database listed Nashville as the new location, showing a ZIP code covering the Donelson neighborhood near the Nashville International Airport. DHS has confirmed it is establishing a Public Safety Coordination Center designed to support ICE's 287(g) program not just for the over 100 Tennessee agencies currently enrolled in the program, but nationwide. Through 24/7 operation organized around 8-hour shifts, ICE has said the center is intended to “strengthen coordination” with state and local law enforcement partners across the country.“The center will provide 287(g) partners with real-time operational support, case-related guidance, and direct access to ICE resources, improving response times and ensuring law enforcement has the support needed to protect communities and enforce federal immigration law,” read a department statement.ICE did decline to confirm the specific location, citing a “coordinated campaign of violence” against its officers, a comment corroborated by DHS reports stating officers are facing “an 8,000% increase in death threats and a 1,300% increase in assaults against them,” as of June 2026.However, the liberal sect of Nashville does not appear pleased with the news, with immigrant advocates and city leadership claiming the center conflicts with the city's values and will “spread fear” in immigrant communities.Several Metro City Council members recently hosted a press conference alongside representatives from the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC), Tennessee Justice for Our Neighbors (TJFON), and other “community and faith leaders”, expressing their displeasure with a possible facility and pledging to oppose the center however they can.“This call center is not Nashville, and we will make sure that we do everything in our power so that it is not here, ever. Because we have a responsibility to all Nashvillians, whether they were born here or raised here. They are Nashville,” District 30 Council Member Sandra Sepulveda said. Sepulveda also said they are “currently looking at legislation that would look at any zoning and permitting at this time. So we are in the process of talking to community partners and different Metro officials to see what our path will be. Know that we are here, and we will be fighting with every breath we have until we find solutions.”TJFON Executive Director Tessa Lemos Del Pino said, “The government is required by law to protect children living in this country without a guardian. This is to protect them from abuse, exploitation, or being trafficked. Instead, our government is funding a call center that extensively puts a target on their backs.”But while Del Pino calls it “targeting”, ICE has previously said the national call center will help to locate these vulnerable unaccompanied migrant minors, a task the Trump Administration has taken very seriously. According to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, over 150,000 of 450,000 missing children have been recovered since the beginning of Trump's second term, thanks to a special task force dedicated to the job.A spokesperson from Mayor Freddie O'Connell's office said his office is “still in the process of getting a consistent depiction of what is planned”, though it is likely he will ultimately stand in opposition should the project plans move forward.

We've launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Brightlooks at how the Supreme Court's decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities.Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com.This Day in Legal History: The National Park Service Is CreatedOn August 25, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act, creating a new federal bureau inside the Department of the Interior to manage the country's national parks and monuments. Before this, the roughly 35 parks and monuments the government had accumulated were administered in a haphazard, piecemeal way—some by the Army, some by scattered Interior officials—with no unified mission and no consistent protection.The genius of the Organic Act is compressed into a single, oft-quoted sentence that has generated a century of law and litigation. It directed the new Park Service to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein” and to “leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” That phrasing contains a built-in tension that lawyers and the courts have wrestled with ever since: the Park Service is told both to provide for the public's enjoyment of the parks and to leave them unimpaired—two goals that can pull hard against each other when you're deciding whether to build a road, permit a concession, or limit the number of visitors. That “dual mandate” is the central puzzle of public-lands law.The significance of August 25, 1916 is that it enshrined in law a genuinely radical idea: that some places belong to the whole public, in perpetuity, held in trust by the government for people who haven't been born yet. Today the Park Service manages more than 400 sites across all fifty states and welcomes hundreds of millions of visitors a year. The writer Wallace Stegner, who gave us today's opening line, called the national parks “the best idea we ever had”—absolutely American, absolutely democratic. On a day whose news is heavy with contested executive power, it's a nice reminder that the law is also the instrument through which a society decides to preserve something for the common good.The Supreme Court has handed the Trump administration an interim victory on mail-in voting—but it's important to be precise about what the Court did and didn't do. In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the justices lifted an injunction that a Massachusetts federal judge imposed in June, which had blocked key parts of Trump's executive order restricting mail-in voting in California and 22 other states that sued. That order aims to create a federal list of eligible voters and, controversially, to have the Postal Service deliver ballots only to people on that list. Here's the crucial nuance. This is a stay, not a ruling on the merits—the Court did not decide whether the president actually has the authority to reshape how states run their elections. It merely paused the lower court's block while the litigation continues. And it's partial: the Postal Service's role in the scheme remains blocked nationwide. Justice Sotomayor, in dissent, made the point sharply—she wrote that the decision doesn't suggest the executive branch has any constitutional or statutory authority to do this, it just postpones the day of reckoning. This is the shadow docket in action, a theme we keep returning to: the Court altering the rules for a national election months before that election, through an emergency order, without a full merits decision or a written explanation of its reasoning. The significance is that, for now, parts of Trump's order can take effect for the November midterms—a real-world consequence—even as the fundamental question of whether any of it is lawful remains formally undecided. The status quo the courts had maintained all summer just shifted, at least temporarily, and it shifted on the emergency docket.US Supreme Court lifts judicial hurdle to Trump's mail-in ballot curbs | Reuters Washington Post · NPRThe administration is preparing what would be the largest mass visa revocation in U.S. history: according to the Associated Press, the State Department plans to revoke the tourist and business visas of up to 200,000 foreigners who have applied for or are seeking asylum. The targets are holders of so-called B1 and B2 visas—the standard business and tourism visas—issued between 2016 and 2026, whose holders later sought asylum, with the action coordinated between the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security. The legal logic is worth understanding. A visitor visa rests on a premise: that you intend to come temporarily and then go home. When someone on a tourist visa applies for asylum, the government's position is that they've revealed an intent inconsistent with that temporary-visitor status—so it's moving to strip the visitor visa. Importantly, officials say this wouldn't necessarily mean immediate deportation; most people with pending asylum cases would be recategorized, losing their visitor status but not instantly removed. Still, the scale is staggering and unprecedented, and it raises hard questions. Seeking asylum is a legal right, protected by statute and international obligation, and there's a real tension in penalizing people's immigration status precisely because they used the lawful asylum process. There are also due-process concerns lurking in any mass action that recategorizes 200,000 people, and a potential chilling effect on those weighing whether to come forward and claim protection. The significance is that this fits the aggressive immigration-enforcement pattern we've tracked all summer—but at a scale that's genuinely new, using visa revocation as a lever against the asylum system itself.US plans to revoke up to 200,000 tourism, business visas, AP reports | ReutersWTOP · Houston Public Media / NPRAnd a story close to home for everyone in this profession: Google has launched a version of its Gemini AI built specifically for lawyers. Google Cloud unveiled “Gemini Enterprise for Legal,” an agentic AI platform purpose-built for legal workflows—with specialized skills, connectors to legal research and document systems, and an ecosystem of partner tools. And its launch customers are not fringe experimenters; they're elite firms: Cleary Gottlieb, Freshfields, Weil, and Williams & Connolly. When firms of that caliber sign on as launch partners, it's a signal that AI in legal practice has moved from novelty to infrastructure. Here's the significance, and the tension. On one hand, this is the mainstreaming of AI in law—the same shift that, as we discussed a few weeks ago, is thinning out entry-level hiring at big firms as software absorbs the document review and first-draft work once done by junior associates. Google is now competing directly with the specialized legal-AI companies for that market, and its entry accelerates everything. On the other hand, this collides with a problem we've covered again and again: the fake, hallucinated citations, the AI-generated errors, even the litigant hiding prompt injections in his filings. A more powerful, more deeply integrated AI tool doesn't dissolve a lawyer's duties of competence, confidentiality, and candor—it raises the stakes on them. The significance is that the profession is being reshaped in real time. The tools are getting better and more embedded, the biggest firms are adopting them, and the hard questions—about verification, about who's accountable when the machine is wrong, about what happens to the training pipeline for young lawyers—are all arriving at once.Google expands Gemini AI platform for law firms, lawyers | ReutersArtificial Lawyer · Google CloudAnd finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I dig into a big loss for Maryland—and a valuable lesson for every other state eyeing the digital economy for revenue. Maryland's first-in-the-nation digital advertising tax just took a potentially fatal blow, with the state tax court siding with Google, Apple, and Peacock in their challenges. My argument is that this doesn't prove you can't tax digital advertising—it proves Maryland went about it the wrong way, by designing a tax around the companies it wanted to pay rather than the activity it wanted to tax.Two design choices doomed it. First, Maryland taxed digital advertising while leaving comparable non-digital advertising—billboards, print, radio, television—completely alone. Second, the tax only kicks in for companies above a huge global revenue threshold, and the rate actually climbs, from 2.5% up to 10%, based on a company's worldwide revenue, not its Maryland activity. The court saw that for what it was: a structure that, in practice, hits big out-of-state tech companies while sparing basically every in-state business, which runs into both the dormant Commerce Clause and the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act. As I put it, using worldwide corporate revenue to set the rate on identical in-state transactions is just a backward way of making big companies pay more—two companies doing the exact same amount of business in Maryland can end up with wildly different bills.There's also a cautionary detail I love, because it says everything: Maryland passed this tax in 2021, but by 2025 the state comptroller had to hire an outside expert just to figure out what “digital advertising services” even means—introducing terms like “programmatic” and “visual” that weren't in the statute at all. If you need to hire an expert four years after enactment to ascertain what your own tax taxes, maybe the problem isn't that taxpayers are being difficult. And the fiscal stakes are real: the tax pulled in about $535 million earmarked for education, but now the challengers may be owed refunds with interest, right as Maryland stares down a multibillion-dollar budget gap. A tax that collects hundreds of millions for a few years and then has to hand it all back, with interest, is quantifiably worse than no tax at all. So my takeaway for states is that the durable path is the boring one—broad tax bases, treat economically similar transactions the same, scale liability to in-state activity. A neutral tax on all advertising would have reached less convenient targets too, including local businesses, and that's exactly the point: a tax principle that only applies when it lands on the politically preferred target isn't much of a principle.Maryland's Digital Ad Tax Defeat Is Teachable Moment for States | Bloomberg Tax This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is coming under scrutiny for workforce cuts as cyber and physical threats to critical infrastructure rise. A group of Democratic lawmakers are pushing for a Government Accountability Office report on the impact of recent workforce reductions and program cuts on CISA's ability to fulfill its mission. The lawmakers, from the House Committee on Homeland Security and Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection, pointed to CISA's loss of nearly 1,000 employees, or about a third of its workforce, in the first half of 2025. Though CISA has announced plans to hire 300 employees to rebuild, the Trump administration's fiscal 2027 budget proposal proposes removing another 900 positions from the agency. CISA has also experienced leadership turnover during the second Trump administration.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ralph welcomes Dr. Mimi Syed to discuss the recent report from Brown University's Costs of War Project: “Lethal Precision Without Accountability: Israeli Government ‘Quadcopter' Use in Gaza.” Then, Ralph speaks to Joel McCleary (former Deputy Assistant to President Jimmy Carter and international consultant) about his “Dancing in the Dark” essay series on the strategies that Trump is using to hold onto power at almost any cost.Dr. Mimi Syed is an emergency medicine physician and assistant clinical professor at University of Washington and Washington State University, and a fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians. Dr. Syed served in Gaza at both al-Aqsa Hospital and Nasser Hospital, where she documented severe injuries from drone strikes and she has firsthand experience treating civilians targeted by the IDF. She is co-author of the Costs of War Project's new report: Lethal Precision Without Accountability: Israeli Government “Quadcopter” Use in Gaza.A lot of the attention has essentially fallen off from Gaza because of this so-called ceasefire…And the media (Western media) unfortunately is complicit in this—has no interest in covering Gaza, has no interest in covering the ongoing slaughter that's happening in Gaza.Dr. Mimi SyedThe irony of all of this is that the drones and the capabilities that these drones have to shoot and to distinguish between a civilian and a combatant—the whole purpose of this is to mitigate civilian harm. And instead, perversely, they're being used for the opposite. They're being used to target civilians and children. And in the U.N. report, they specifically talk about a soldier describing the experience, saying that it's like a video game. He can be sitting somewhere far away, away from the dangers of a military zone, away from the dangers of combatants, and essentially target whoever he wants, and shoot. And these drones have the capability of distinguishing between a child, an adult, a combatant. And most of these cases that I documented, the child was by themselves. There was no other adult harmed.Dr. Mimi SyedJoel McCleary served as Deputy Assistant to the President during the Carter Administration. As president of the Sawyer-Miller Group he oversaw international strategic advisory work for fourteen prime ministers and presidents. Currently, he is Managing Partner of Four Seasons Ventures, which has conducted in-depth studies for the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security on biodefense. These studies reviewed the emergency powers of the President in the event of a pandemic or major biological weapons attack. He is co-founder of the nonpartisan nonprofit Keep Our Republic.November 3rd is just the prelude to January 3rd—the game (so to speak) is who controls the Speakership. And that is determined by the certified members who are certified by the current House—they will determine who meets on January 3rd. So obviously what Trump does not want (or any President does not want) is there to be an opposing party's Speaker.Joel McClearyWe're not saying that anything is inevitable. We're just saying what is possible if you look at what they're saying and if you look at where they might go if they feel compelled to do so. So NSPM-7 is probably the most frightening aspect of this whole thing. And what's most frightening is how few people have focused on it. All of us need to read these documents at the ACLU (the Brennan Center has done fantastic work). And Mark Medish and I just are appalled that still, in Democratic circles or other circles, we are not yet comprehending the meaning of NSPM-7 and how it threatens each one of us in reality.Joel McClearyNews 8/21/26* This week, another round of primaries were held, most notably in Florida. For progressives, the biggest victory is that of Angie Nixon, a DSA-backed member of the Florida House of Representatives, representing Jacksonville. Nixon trounced her opponent – Alex Vindman, who testified against Trump during the 2019 impeachment effort – winning 56% of the vote to his 44% despite being outspent by a margin of 16 to 1. Forbes reports that in her victory speech, Nixon said “We have proved that everyday people are more powerful than corporations and billionaires…We went up against the political establishment, against millions of dollars of outside spending…and we won. This win was for the little guys and girls…We, the hardworking everyday people of Florida, sent a shock wave to the Washington, D.C., establishment.” Unfortunately, Nixon's candidacy, like that of any statewide Democratic campaign in the Sunshine State, remains a long shot. The last Democrat to win a U.S. Senate seat in Florida was former astronaut Bill Nelson in 2012.* More disappointing were the down-ballot results in these primaries. In the 20th congressional district, a majority-minority district centered on Broward County, Debbie Wasserman Schultz won with 45% of the vote, according to NBC. She defeated four Black candidates, including young progressive Elijah Manley. Wasserman Schultz previously represented the 25th district, but following the Republican-led mid-decade redistricting program carried out in Florida, she opted to seek reelection in this heavily Democratic seat. The Black candidates had tried and failed to consolidate behind a single choice.* And in Florida's 25th congressional district, ultra-zionist incumbent Congressman Jared Moskowitz “warded off” a challenge from his left in the form of Oliver Larkin, a DSA-backed union organizer. Larkin drew substantial media attention, first when he appeared on Fox and, asked about immigration and crime, he demanded accountability for “this pedophile president Donald Trump” and others implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and again during an interview with WPLG Local 10 when Larkin was “faced with genocide denial.” According to the Middle East Eye, Larkin “raised the topic of Israel's genocide in Gaza, pointing to statements and findings from institutions such as the United Nations, Amnesty International and Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem,” which the interviewer, Glenna Milberg incorrectly dismissed as “factually incorrect.” Larkin “outlined Israel's deliberate targeting of civilians, restrictions on humanitarian aid and attacks on churches, schools and other places of worship,” and Milberg again “interrupted and said his account was ‘factually not correct.'” The Middle East Eye writes that the exchange was then “cut short when Milberg said she was being told they had to wrap up the interview.”* Turning to Texas, NOTUS reports Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico – capitalizing on the acrimonious primary battle between sitting Republican Senator John Cornyn and his victorious primary opponent Texas AG Ken Paxton – has taken the extraordinary step of bringing a Cornyn aide onto his campaign. According to this piece, “Jacob Smith, who worked for Cornyn for five years as a deputy legislative director and policy adviser, is taking on the role of deputy policy director for Talarico's campaign.” In a statement, Smith said that he is “proud” to join Talarico's campaign and that “Instead of playing partisan politics, Talarico speaks to the needs of everyday people who day in and day out work too hard for too little.” Smith also laid into Paxton, calling him “the most corrupt, self-dealing politician in Texas who would sell their futures to the highest contributor just to hold onto power,” and urging “fellow Republicans who know Ken Paxton is unfit to serve in the Senate to finally hold him accountable at the ballot box.” This piece quotes an anonymous “Republican operative” who characterized this kind of “cross-party hire” as “unheard of.” He added that Talarico has a “better chance than any Democrat has had in the state in a very long time.”* In more primary news, last week we discussed the victory of former Hartford, Connecticut Mayor Luke Bronin over 14-term incumbent Congressman John Larson. That same day, the Lever published an exposé of Stephen Mandel, a Connecticut-based billionaire hedge fund manager and Democratic mega-donor who is the “largest bankroller of a nascent political machine promising to ‘redefine' the Democratic Party.” Via two organizations – Majority Democrats and the Bench – Mandel and his wife have funneled tens of millions of dollars to candidates of their choosing in an attempt to form a “new [political] center.” According to this report, Bronin amassed a “sizable war chest,” during his primary challenge against Larson, much of which traces back to Mandel. Not only that, apparently, Bronin “used to be on the payroll of a nonprofit funded by the billionaire,” and his campaign's policy stances reflect the network's preferences and priorities. The Lever notes that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Mandels did not return their requests for comment.* In more Connecticut news, in the wake of Larson's defeat, local media is beginning to question whether Senator Richard Blumenthal should run for another term in 2028, with WTNH noting that he will be 82 at the end of his current term. While Blumenthal has not formally announced that he will run for a fourth senate term, he did confirm that he has a campaign committee and it is raising money. This piece notes that Blumenthal is the second oldest member of Connecticut's congressional delegation, behind only Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, 83, who represents the state's third congressional district. With the increased scrutiny on aging Democrats, and donors like Stephen Mandel bankrolling primary challenges by younger candidates, Blumenthal's decision of whether or not to run or anoint a successor could prove critical. For his part, Blumenthal is quoted saying “Age is a state of mind…and I am very, very happy doing my job right now, as energetically as I feel is appropriate.”* Senator Blumenthal features prominently in another story this week from a different part of Washington. NOTUS reports that on K Street, lobbyists for the defense industry – literally the military industrial complex – are “girding for aggressive investigations of President Donald Trump's Pentagon and the companies that do business with it,” if the Democrats retake one or both houses of Congress in the midterm elections. This piece emphasizes that Democrats have “spent two years seething that the Trump administration shut Congress out of decisions about the Pentagon, from the Iran war to politically connected contractors and a defense budget that's ballooned to $1.5 trillion.” Lobbyists are reported to be particularly wary of their clients being caught between outraged congressional Democrats and an uncooperative White House for the next two years. Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Senate Investigations Subcommittee, is already zeroing in on 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is an investor, and American Ventures, where Eric Trump is an investor, both of which received billions of dollars in government awards. He is quoted saying “We need to look into whether Trump's sons are profiting from investments in defense contractors that involve insider information or contracts awarded in ways that compromise defense interests.” Other investigations he signaled they might pursue include a probe of “the administration's growing reliance on single-source contracts and whether the administration has given preferential treatment to companies with political ties, particularly those that donated to Trump's White House ballroom project.” In the House, Democrats on the Armed Services Committee will likely focus on “military strategy, acquisition decisions and the Pentagon's rapidly growing budget,” while the Oversight Committee, is more focused on “corruption, conflicts of interest, companies connected to Trump allies such as SpaceX and other ethics issues.” When Republicans won control of the House, Senate, and presidency in 2024, many lobbying firms axed their Democratic staff. It seems they are beginning to regret that decision.* Our next two stories have to do with the AI boom. First, in Wisconsin, the politics of AI data centers have come to in large part define the ongoing race to succeed Democrat Tony Evers as Governor. DSA-backed candidate Francesca Hong rode her vow of a moratorium on new data center construction to front-runner status in the primary, only to lose by a hair to Evers' last minute chosen successor, David Crowley. Since becoming the nominee, Crowley has refused to adopt Hong's signature issue and his opponent, Republican Congressman Tom Tiffany is taking full advantage. According to Wisconsin Public Radio, Tiffany's campaign has released a new TV ad labeling his opponent “data center David Crowley.” In the ad, Crowley is “seen saying Wisconsin has the opportunity to be ‘an AI and a data hub not only for the entire country, but for the entire globe.'” Ironically, Tiffany himself has cast “pro-data center votes in Congress” and Crowley's campaign argues that Tiffany “wouldn't be as hard on developers as his campaign claims,” though he is now campaigning on “ending state subsidies for data centers and creating additional protections for ratepayers and the state's farmland and water.”* Next, a stunning feat of reporting by 404 Media exposed how “Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.“ To investigate this, the outlet placed a tracking device in a rare book that they suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data. Then, when indeed it was, they followed the book around the country to its final destination – an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada – where employees say that “all [they] do is scan books..Some are assigned to cut books, and others go to receive where they get books and scan the bar codes.” The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands. The piece notes that the AI company Anthropic has previously been sued for engaging in the practice of destroying rare books in order to feed them into their large language models, or LLMs, on copyright grounds, but the “judge in the lawsuit ruled it was fair use and not a copyright violation for Anthropic to scan a book for training data in part because it destroyed the original, printed copy.” The author of this piece notes that these rare books are not necessarily monetarily valuable – they could be rare because “not many copies of them were ever printed,” or “they are in a foreign language not many people speak.” Still, as one bookseller said “There are different types of value…[besides monetary value] There's historical value, intellectual value, sentimental value. All sorts of things, and all of those the AI companies don't care about. They just want the content as a bunch of words strung together.”* Finally, we turn to the Vatican, where, Drop Site reports, Pope Leo XIV is using his pulpit to call for the opening of humanitarian corridors for civilians in Sudan. In his weekly Angelus address, the first American Pope highlighted “the plight of civilians in the besieged city of el-Obeid.” In addition to his call for humanitarian corridors, the pontiff called for both sides to “cease attacks on civilian targets.” Drop Site explains that El-Obeid, the largest city in Kordofan – the region comprising central Sudan – has faced intense drone attacks as the rebels of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) battle the Sudanese army for supremacy in the region. An RSF siege has “left over 500,000 people in famine conditions for months and without supplies.” The United Nations warns that if El-Obeid falls, it could follow in the mold of el-Fasher, which fell to the RSF last year and resulted in “mass ethnic cleansing massacres by the RSF that killed an estimated 60,000 people.” We can only hope that the world will heed the Pope's plea for peace and humanitarian assistance to the civilian population of Sudan.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

David Waldman packs our heads and sends us off for the weekend. Donald K. Trump's imperial push has found a bit of a sticky wicket in Iran, yet his war with the US Navy is going splendidly, with their surrendering the naming of an aircraft carrier to him. What were the chances of Pete Hegseth ever allowing some unknown DEI hire with a CRT name like Doris Miller making some boat woke anyhow? Trump's war on Washington DC is scheduled to make the rubble bounce this weekend with his Grand Prix. Sure, some delicate old stuff might get broken during the celebration, but that's because it wasn't made in America. The event will be followed by the first annual Running of the Bulls through the Smithsonian. Those smarties in Silicon Valley invented AI to destroy our way of life along with the economy but really, any dope with a rifle could do that in 5 minutes. There's fake polling, and there's fake vote.gov, but you really need to beware real government websites, because they're really out to get you. The Department of Homeland Security discovered 16,000 non-citizen voters in Nevada, or maybe 185 "potential" ones. Counting isn't their strong suit, and usually just gets in the way. Trump needs quick money for his projects because if they are slow, someone usually makes him give it back. Trump only stumps in states that clap for him.

As America approaches the 25th anniversary of September 11, retired NYPD Detective Sergeant Mike Codella joins Tudor Dixon to share his extraordinary firsthand account of surviving the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Codella was off duty when the first plane struck, but after realizing America was under attack, he raced to Lower Manhattan and ran into the South Tower to help evacuate people. Moments later, the building began to collapse around him. Codella recalls being thrown by the force of the collapse, waking up surrounded by complete darkness and silence, and eventually finding his way to safety. He also remembers returning home that night to discover his family believed he had died at Ground Zero—and reflects on the remarkable unity, courage, and patriotism Americans showed in the days after 9/11. Tudor and Codella discuss why younger generations must be taught what happened on September 11, the importance of remembering the first responders and ordinary Americans who became heroes, and whether America has forgotten some of the lessons learned after the attacks. They also examine Codella's decades fighting crime in New York City, Rudy Giuliani's approach to policing, the consequences of soft-on-crime policies, and Codella's upcoming book, The Evil That Walked New York, which explores some of the darkest criminal cases and mysteries he encountered during his career.Never forget September 11, 2001—and never stop telling the stories of the people who lived it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Who finishes your film if you can't?This episode is about how to make a documentary with no film school. Andre N. Jackson had never made a film. He had twenty years in technology and security, an idea that arrived while he was sitting in a barber's chair, and no way into the industry. He finished the film anyway, and he came on the show with three lessons for other filmmakers. Two more came out while we were talking.In Episode 285, Christian sits down with first-time filmmaker Andre N. Jackson to talk about "Beyond Banners," his film about the basketball program at Gwynn Park High School in Prince George's County, Maryland. Over a twenty-year run the team reached twelve state championships and won more than any high school in the state. The film starts there and ends up somewhere else entirely.Andre puts it plainly: "I actually learned about filmmaking through making a film." The spine of the conversation is what it takes to make a documentary when nothing is set up in your favor. Andre leaned on the research and analysis skills he built as an intelligence analyst, cold-called a Hall of Fame coach, funded it through a fiscal sponsor, used AI as a second brain, and kept going through two heart attacks that put him in an emergency room twice in three days. Along the way the film became a story about stewardship, about the people who stayed, and about what the commercialization of youth sports is doing to community public schools.In this episode, you'll learn:How an idea that arrived in a barber's chair became a finished film with no film school behind itWhy twenty years as an intelligence analyst turned out to be a filmmaking advantageWhy Andre deliberately hired a crew who knew nothing about Gwynn Park, the region, or basketballThe cold call that landed Hall of Fame coach Tubby SmithWhat a fiscal sponsor is, and how the Southern Documentary Fund made donors want to giveHow a three-hour conversation in a Brooklyn coffee shop with writer-director Marquis Smalls became his production blueprintWhat two heart attacks in three days taught him about succession, and what he changed the week he got outHow AI reenacted a co-protagonist who had died and left almost no footage behindWhy announcing the film on Instagram is the thing that made him finish itWhat NIL deals, unrestricted transfers, and year-round travel ball are doing to community public schoolsTHE FIVE LESSONSLean into your superpowersGet comfortable taking calculated risksGet creative about filling gapsPlan for your absenceUse AI as a second brainCHAPTERS0:00 No Film School, No Connections3:16 How Do You Fund a First Documentary?6:09 When a Team Becomes a Town11:53 The Cost of Commercializing Youth Sports18:58 Planning for Your Own Absence24:37 AI as a Second Brain29:16 Cold Calling a Hall of Fame Coach33:45 Why the Collective Should MatterFREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONSHow do you make a documentary with no film school?Lean into the skills you already have and hire for the ones you do not. Andre N. Jackson spent twenty years as an intelligence analyst, so he built his film on research and relationship building, the two things he was already good at. Then he deliberately recruited crew members who covered his gaps in craft and experience. He learned filmmaking by making a film, not before making one.How do you fund a documentary with no industry money?A fiscal sponsor is the most common route. It is a 501(c)(3) that sits between your project and your donors, so contributions become tax deductible and donors have a reason to say yes. Andre used the Southern Documentary Fund. You apply, you are accepted, you onboard, and then you can offer donors a tax break for backing your film. He combined that with personal funds and direct fundraising.How do you get well-known people to be in your documentary?Cold call them, and be specific about who you both know. Andre landed Hall of Fame coach Tubby Smith by reaching out directly and naming a mutual connection to establish trust. He got Wake Forest star Randolph Childress through a warm introduction from a Gwynn Park alumnus. The pattern is the same either way: ask, and use the relationships your relationships already have.What happens to your documentary if you cannot finish it?Plan for your absence before you need to. After two heart attacks during production, Andre started documenting what had only ever lived in his head and briefed his executive producer and his producer on the next steps, so the film could be completed whether or not he was there. Contingency planning in film usually means backup drives. It should also mean succession.Can AI help you make your first documentary?Andre used it three ways: to learn the end-to-end production process he never went to film school for, to generate an animated reenactment of a co-protagonist who had died and left almost no footage behind, and as a second brain that challenged his assumptions and pressure-tested his interview questions. He was clear it supplemented human mentorship rather than replacing it, and credits Brooklyn writer-director Marquis Smalls, who drew him a blueprint over three hours. DOCUVIEW DÉJÀ VU PICKS"Undefeated" (2011), directed by Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Andre's direct inspiration for making "Beyond Banners.""The Last Dance" (2020), ESPN and Netflix. Andre is a Michael Jordan fan and names it as the film that came before Undefeated for him.SPONSORED BYThis episode is brought to you by Virgil Films Entertainment. With over 25 years of distribution experience, Virgil has released Super Size Me, the Oscar-nominated Restrepo, Forks Over Knives, To Die For, Seven Yards, and Speed is Expensive. If you are a filmmaker having trouble with distribution, talk to Virgil. https://virgilfilms.comABOUT THE GUESTAndre N. Jackson is a first-time documentary filmmaker based in Fairfax, Virginia. He wrote and directed "Beyond Banners." He spent twenty years in the private sector in technology and security, including work at Capital One and Amazon and a brief stint at the Department of Homeland Security, and he worked as an intelligence analyst on cybersecurity and terrorism issues related to national security. He is a 1998 graduate of Gwynn Park High School, the subject of his film. He came to filmmaking with no film school and no industry connections.ABOUT THE FILM"Beyond Banners" is directed by Andre N. Jackson and follows the basketball program at Gwynn Park High School in Prince George's County, Maryland. In the words of the film's own logline: a son returns to his alma mater to carry his father's coaching legacy, only to discover that the winning tradition he grew up in was built for a world that no longer exists.The film follows an intertwined father-and-son story, Howard Matthews and Steve Matthews, and widens into a portrait of what community-based youth sports used to be and what the commercialization of high school athletics is doing to it. Produced and edited by Daniel Bowie, with animation and motion design by Henry Gretzinger. Historian Ida E. Jones of Morgan State University asks the question Andre names as his favorite line in the film: "What is it about community that makes us community?" It also features Hall of Fame coach Tubby Smith, Wake Forest star Randolph Childress, who broke ACC records, sportswriter Neil Greenberger, who spent twenty years at The Washington Post and led its local sports section, and archival footage The film is headed to the festival circuit.Website: https://beyondbannersdocumentary.comInstagram: @beyondbannersdocumentaryABOUT DOCUMENTARY FIRSTDocumentary First is a weekly podcast about the craft, the business, and the truth of filmmaking. Host Christian Taylor is an award-winning documentary filmmaker,...

We spend years building a career, following a path that looks impressive, the one everyone tells you matters. Then one day you stop and ask yourself: is this actually my life, or the life that was assigned to me? Joe Wearmouth spent almost 20 years as a federal attorney, including work for the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department, before walking away to research and write about the American Revolution. He joins host Sreemedha to talk about the quiet signals he ignored for years, what it actually took to leave, and why chasing external validation rarely leads anywhere good. About the Guest: Joe Wearmouth practiced law for nearly two decades, including as a federal prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice and an attorney for the Department of Homeland Security. He now writes historical fiction set during the American Revolution, including his novel Rising Sons, and works as a freelance attorney in El Paso, Texas. Key Takeaways: You can build an impressive career on external validation and still feel miserable doing it, every single day. The feeling that something isn't right rarely goes away on its own, most people know deep down and simply fight against it. Change doesn't require jumping off a ledge, start by figuring out what you want to spend your day doing, then figure out how to make that profitable. Doubt doesn't mean you made the wrong call, it's often a sign you're doing something that actually matters to you. A stable job you leave will likely still be there in some form if things don't work out, so the risk is often smaller than it feels. Connect With the Guest: Website: https://www.joewearmouth.com Book: Rising Sons (Amazon and other major retailers) Instagram & TikTok: @JoeWritesHistory  Episode Chapters: [00:00] Is This Actually My Life? — the real question behind this episode [01:07] From Law School to Federal Prosecutor, and Why It Never Fit [03:00] Redefining Success Beyond External Validation [06:33] Recognizing You're Living a Life That Was Assigned to You [08:52] Taking Baby Steps Instead of Jumping Off the Ledge [10:15] What Helped Joe Figure Out His First Real Action Step [12:03] Staying Committed to an Unconventional Path (approx.)   Want to be a guest on Healthy Mind, Healthy Life? DM on PM - Send me a message on PodMatch DM Me Here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/avik Disclaimer: This episode is produced for educational and informational purposes only. All views expressed by the guest are their personal opinions alone and do not represent the views of the host or Healthy Mind by Avik™. The Network does not verify, endorse, or assume responsibility for any guest statements. Nothing in this episode constitutes medical, legal, financial, or professional advice, please consult a qualified professional before making any decisions. Listeners are encouraged to engage critically and independently with all content do not consume blindly. Use this content as a starting point for your own reflection and research, not as a substitute for professional guidance. Third-party content is referenced under fair use for informational purposes only. Guest speakers are solely responsible for their own statements. If you have concerns about any content, please contact us here By listening, you acknowledge and accept this disclaimer in full. Read detailed disclaimer here. Healthy Mind By Avik™️is a global platform redefining mental health as a necessity, not a luxury. Born during the pandemic, it's become a sanctuary for healing, growth, and mindful living. Hosted by Avik Chakraborty, storyteller, survivor, and wellness advocate. With over 6500+ episodes and 200K+ global listeners, we unite voices, break stigma, and build a world where every story matters.

Haitians that used to have Temporary Protected Status are facing a new reality in the United States. Immigration operations targeting members of this community are currently underway at the direction of the Department of Homeland Security.White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced this week she would be leaving her post within the Trump administration.And new reporting indicates that members of Congress are relying on AI chatbots to legislate more than ever before.And, in global news, despite President Donald Trump promising to keep the Strait of Hormuz open for boat traffic, the number of ships traversing the waterway has fallen to a new three-month low.As his country's October elections approach, Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to find the balance between appeasing Trump as he pushes for a solution in Gaza and keeping the Israeli right-wing happy.And this Saturday marks the five-year anniversary of the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan.We cover the most important stories from around the world in the News Roundup.Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy