#Danube Institute

[allthecanadianpolitics]

A pricey trip for a group of Conservative MPs sponsored by an interest group and a Hungarian think-tank could soon come under the microscope by the House of Commons ethics committee.

NDP ethics critic Matthew Green served notice Monday that he will introduce a motion for the committee to take a closer look at a trip to London last June sponsored by Canadians for Affordable Energy and the Danube Institute. The trip, billed as an opportunity to discuss energy policy, included thousands of dollars in flights, hotels and ground transportation as well as a dinner at the Guinea Grill in London's Mayfair district with $600 bottles of champagne that rung in at an estimated $6,262.

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Katherine Stewart at TNR (08.10.2023):

Earlier this year, nearly 1,000 supporters of “National Conservatism” gathered at the semicircular auditorium of the Emmanuel Centre, an elegant London meeting hall a couple of blocks south of Westminster Abbey, to hear from a range of scholars, commentators, politicians, and public servants. NatCon conferences, as they are often called, have been held in Italy, Belgium, and Florida and are broadly associated with what is increasingly called the “New Right.” In London, speakers denounced “woke politics,” blamed immigration for the rising cost of housing, and said modern ills could be solved with more religion and more (nonimmigrant) babies. The break room was lined with booths from organizations such as the Viktor Orbán–affiliated Danube Institute, the U.K.-based conservative think tank the Bow Group, the Heritage Foundation, and the legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom, which is headquartered in Arizona but has expanded to include offices in nearly a half-dozen European cities. When I attended NatCon London in May, I heard a number of American accents in the crowd, and I was not surprised to see Michael Anton, a former national security official in the Trump administration and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank, on the lineup. These days, Anton and other key representatives of the Claremont Institute seem to be everywhere: onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC); at the epicenter of Ron DeSantis’s “war on woke”; and on speed-dial with GOP allies including Josh Hawley, J.D. Vance, and Donald Trump.

Most of us are familiar with the theocrats of the religious right and the anti-government extremists, groups that overlap a bit but remain distinct. The Claremont Institute folks aren’t quite either of those things, and yet they’re both and more. In embodying a kind of nihilistic yearning to destroy modernity, they have become an indispensable part of right-wing America’s evolution toward authoritarianism. Extremism of the right-wing variety has always figured on the sidelines of American culture, and it has enjoyed a renaissance with the rise of social media. But Claremont represents something new in modern American politics: a group of people, not internet conspiracy freaks but credentialed and influential leaders, who are openly contemptuous of democracy. And they stand a reasonable chance of being seated at the highest levels of government—at the right hand of a President Trump or a President DeSantis, for example.

[...]

Founded in 1979 in the city of Claremont, California (but not associated in an official way with any of the five colleges there), the Claremont Institute provided enthusiastic support for Donald Trump in 2016. Individuals associated with Claremont now fund and help run the National Conservativism gatherings; Claremont Institute chairman and funder Thomas D. Klingenstein also funds the Edmund Burke Foundation, which has held those National Conservatism conferences across the globe. Claremont is deeply involved in DeSantis’s effort to remake Florida’s state universities in the model of Hillsdale College—a private, right-wing, conservative Christian academy in Michigan whose president, Larry Arnn, happens to be one of the institute’s founders and former presidents. Claremont honored DeSantis at an annual gala with its 2021 “Statesmanship Award,” and the governor returned the favor by organizing a discussion with a “brain trust” that included figures associated with the Claremont Institute. If either Trump or DeSantis becomes president in 2024, Claremont and its associates are likely to be integral to the “brain trust” of the new administration. Indeed, some of them are certain to become appointees in the administrative state that they wish (or so they say) to destroy.

The Claremont Institute in the Trump era has become a clearinghouse for far-right and fascistic ideas.  

[sibirsibir]

Archaeologists identified the first known tomb of a Warrior Woman with weapons in Hungary - arkeonews

A team of archaeologists led by Balázs Tihanyi of the Department of Biological Anthropology and the Department of Archaeology at the University of Szeged, and the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Institute of Hungarian Research, dated the first known female burial with weapons in the Sárrétudvari-Hízófóld Cemetery in Hajdú-Bihar County, Hungary, to the 10th century, the period of the Hungarian Conquest.

From the Eurasian steppes, the Maygars (Hungarians) migrated to the Lower Danube region circa 830 AD. By the late 9th or early 10th century, they had arrived in the Carpathian Basin. The Kingdom of Hungary was established at the end of the tenth century after they quickly gained control of the region. In the Carpathian Basin and in battles throughout much of the rest of Europe, Hungarian mounted archers established a formidable reputation during this period. During this time, it is common to find warriors buried with various weapons, such as composite bows, arrows, quivers, bow-cases, axes, spears, sabres, swords, and swords with sabre hilts.

However, the existence of female burials with weapons has always been a topic of great interest and debate for scholars and the general public. These graves are difficult to interpret because finding weapons in a female burial site does not automatically equate that woman with a warrior.

In the study published in Plos One, archaeologists conducted both morphological and genetic analyses to determine whether the individual was female. Despite the skeleton’s poor preservation, the skull and genetic markers from different regions in the body indicated the interred was a female.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

M. Wuerker

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 5, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 06, 2025

Five years ago, on February 5, 2020, Republican senators acquitted then-president Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial. Trump immediately vowed retaliation against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law for his actions. “It’s payback time,” one Republican said. “He has an enemies list that is growing by the day.”

Now Trump is back in office and purging the government of those he perceives to be his enemies. His administration is purging the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the civil service of anyone deemed insufficiently supportive of the president.

But it is not clear that the 78-year-old Trump is the one calling the shots. Although Trump maintained during his campaign that he had no idea what the right-wing Project 2025 was, multiple media outlets have established that most of his flurry of executive orders appear to have been lifted from the 922-page document. That document is the product of a group of far-right organizations led by the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to Viktor Orbán’s Danube Institute.

This week’s threatened tariff war blew up in Trump’s face. After his vow to put tariffs of 25% on most products from Mexico and Canada sent the stock market plunging, he was left declaring victory over Mexico and Canada after they essentially assured him they would do things they are already doing. In the meantime, as Carl Quintanilla noted today, Trump’s tariffs on products from China are increasing prices in the U.S.

Last night, Trump horrified even his own advisors by saying that the United States would take over Gaza and turn it into a resort area. Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported today that Trump’s team “had not done even the most basic planning to examine the feasibility of the idea” when Trump blurted it out. “[T]here had been no meetings with the State Department or Pentagon, as would normally occur for any serious foreign policy proposal,” Swan and Haberman wrote, “let alone one of such magnitude. There had been no working groups. The Defense Department had produced no estimates of the troop numbers required, or cost estimates, or even an outline of how it might work. There was little beyond an idea inside the president’s head,” an idea his own officials considered “fantastical even for Mr. Trump.”

Trump’s comments were so badly received in the Middle East that Matthew Gertz of Media Matters wondered if Secretary of State Marco Rubio had ordered additional security for the U.S. diplomatic facilities there.

Today, Trump praised Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) for coaching Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes in college, although Mahomes arrived at Texas Tech after Tuberville had already left.

In his important piece “The Logic of Destruction and How to Resist It,” published February 2 in his Thinking about…, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder reflected on the president’s multiple photo ops signing executive orders to, for example, blame former Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for a plane crash that happened during Trump’s term. Snyder referred to the president as “a befuddled Trump signing ever larger pieces of paper for the cameras.”

Today journalist Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich noted that a thinker popular with the technological elite in 2022 laid out a plan to gut the U.S. government and replace it with a dictatorship. This would be a “reboot” of the country, Curtis Yarvin wrote, and it would require a “full power start,” a reference to restarting a stalled starship by jumping to full power, which risks destroying the ship.

Yarvin called for “giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization,” headed by the equivalent of the rogue chief executive officer of a corporation who would destroy the public institutions of the democratic government. Trump—whom Yarvin dismissed as weak—would give power to that CEO, who would “run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts.” “Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems.” Once loyalists have replaced civil servants in a new ideological “army,” the CEO “will throw it directly against the administrative state—not bothering with confirmed appointments, just using temporary appointments as needed. The job of this landing force is not to govern.” The new regime must take over the country and “perform the real functions of the old, and ideally perform them much better.” It must “seize all points of power, without respect for paper protections.”

Duran noted that Vice President J.D. Vance has echoed Yarvin’s prescriptions and that Trump sidekick billionaire Elon Musk appears to be putting Yarvin’s blueprint into action. “Musk is taking a systematic approach,” Duran wrote, “one that has been outlined in public forums for years.”

This morning, Anna Wilde Mathews and Liz Essley Whyte of the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk’s team has accessed payment and contracting systems at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Mathews and Whyte note that CMS sits at the center of the country’s healthcare economy. In 2024, it disbursed about $1.5 trillion, or about 22% of the total amount of the federal total.

On X, Musk said “this is where the big money fraud is happening.” But, in fact, CMS is not operating without oversight. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which operates out of the Department of Justice, investigates healthcare fraud. In June 2024 it announced criminal charges against 193 defendants across 32 federal districts who allegedly participated in healthcare fraud schemes that involved about $2.75 billion in intended losses and $1.6 billion in actual losses.

Indeed, as Eric Levitz of Vox pointed out, “DOGE has not presented evidence of ‘fraud’; they have highlighted millions of dollars worth of spending that Musk considers wasteful. By contrast, the [General Accountability Office] identified $233 billion of fraud in 2024. We don’t need to let a billionaire ignore federal law to do government oversight[.]”

“It is extraordinary how much access Elon Musk and his sort of creepy 22-year-old henchmen have to all of our data,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told MSNBC today. “They have information that would allow them to shut down your tax refund, your Medicare payment…. Potentially, they know everything about you and your family, and the reality is that this could get dystopian very quickly…. If you were to start speaking ill of Elon Musk on social media, Elon Musk might be able to stop or delay your tax refund, or your mom's Social Security benefit, in part because we have no window into what's happening inside the Department of [the] Treasury right now."

While Murphy didn’t say it explicitly, control over such information also gives Musk power over business rivals and political leaders. When Musk’s team went into the Department of Labor today, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) noted that “[h]e could manipulate quarterly job numbers and much more. We are talking about MARKET MOVING INFORMATION! Do employers want Musk to have access to any of their confidential data?”

Today, when asked about Musk’s conflicts of interest as he reviews federal spending while also receiving more than $15 billion in federal contracts, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump had already promised that “if Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, that Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.” Donald Kettl, a scholar of public policy, told Dana Hull of Bloomberg: “I don’t know of any other case, anywhere, in which an individual could determine for himself whether he had a conflict of interest. In fact, self-determination of a conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest.”

In a shocking attack on the intelligence personnel who collect information around the world to keep Americans safe, today the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sent a list of all employees the agency hired in the past two years to the White House, sending the list by unclassified email. Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that a former CIA agent called the reporting of the names “a counterintelligence disaster.” Lowell also reported that Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that he understands that the White House “insisted” on the list coming through unclassified email.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, posted: “Exposing the identities of officials who do extremely sensitive work would put a direct target on their backs for China. A disastrous national security development.”

Today, protesters gathered across the country to protest the takeover of the U.S. government by Musk and his cronies, and Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) noted on Facebook that the U.S. Senate phone system has been overwhelmed with around 1,600 calls a minute, in contrast to the 40 calls a minute it usually receives. Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI) announced he would introduce the ELON MUSK Act—the Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy Act—which would ban federal contracts for Special Government Employees, similar to the bans for members of Congress and other federal employees.

Opposition might well continue to grow, as the bite of the cuts the Trump administration and Musk are making to the federal government is only beginning to be felt at home (the collapse of USAID is already an international crisis). Those cuts are poised to hurt Trump’s own rural voters worse than they hurt Democratic areas. In Virginia, about 400,000 people in rural areas receive healthcare from federally qualified health centers; half of these centers have lost their federal grants and are stopping some services or closing. Trump is currently planning to eliminate the Department of Education; the top six states that receive grants under the department—Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Nevada—all voted for Trump in 2024.

Tonight, Democratic senators, led by Chuck Schumer (NY), Jeff Merkley (OR), Patty Murray (WA), Gary Peters (MI), and Brian Schatz (HI), will hold the Senate floor all night in a filibuster to stop the confirmation of Russell Vought, a key right-wing author of Project 2025, to direct the Office of Management and Budget. “Vought’s proposals to slash federal funding will threaten Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security,” the senators said. “Vought will also continue to carry out President Donald Trump’s illegal federal funding cuts, stopping taxpayer dollars from supporting local schools, police departments, community health centers, food pantries, firefighters, and other vital programs.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[zerogate]

I am sure that many readers can relate if I say that learning about Byzantium feels like discovering the sunken civilization of Atlantis. You can read a thousand books about the “Middle Ages”, even do a Ph.D. in “Medieval Studies” (as I did), and hardly ever hear about Byzantium. And then, one day, when you thought you knew your basics about the turn of the first millennium AD, you read something like this:

At the turn of the first millennium the empire of New Rome was the oldest and most dynamic state in the world and comprised the most civilized portions of the Christian world. Its borders, long defended by native frontier troops, were being expanded by the most disciplined and technologically advanced army of its time. The unity of Byzantine society was grounded in the equality of Roman law and a deep sense of a common and ancient Roman identity; cemented by the efficiency of a complex bureaucracy; nourished and strengthened by the institutions and principles of the Christian Church; sublimated by Greek rhetoric; and confirmed by the passage of ten centuries. At the end of the reign of Basileios II (976-1025), the longest in Roman history, its territory included Asia Minor and Armenia, the Balkan peninsula south of the Danube, and the southern regions of both Italy and the Crimea. Serbia, Croatia, Georgia, and some Arab emirates in Syria and Mesopotamia had accepted a dependent status.

[...]

Byzantine revisionism starts by putting Constantinople back on the map. Throughout the Middle Ages, it was by far the largest city in the Christian world. According to Runciman, its population reached one million in the twelfth century, counting the suburbs. Its wealth deeply impressed all newcomers. In the twelfth-century French roman Partonopeu de Blois, Constantinople is the name of Paradise, a city of gold, ivory and precious stones. Robert de Clari, who was among the crusaders who sacked it in 1204, marveled: “Since the creation of this world, such great wealth had neither been seen nor conquered.” Up to that point, Constantinople was the greatest international trade center, linking China, India, Arabia, Europe and Africa.

Constantinople must also be restored to its proper place in the timeline. Anthony Kaldellis writes:

Byzantine civilization began when there were still some people who could read and write in Egyptian hieroglyphics; the oracle of Delphi and the Olympic games were still in existence; and the main god of worship in the east was Zeus. When Byzantium ended, the world had cannons and printing presses, and some people who witnessed the fall of Constantinople in 1453 lived to hear about Columbus’s journey to the New World. Chronologically, Byzantium spans the entire arc from antiquity to the early modern period, and its story is intertwined with that of all the major players in world history on this side of the Indus river.

-- Laurent Guyénot, Byzantine Revisionism Unlocks World History

[mariacallous]

As Project 2025 becomes more and more of a detriment to Donald Trump’s campaign, the fingerprints of people close to the Orbán-government are becoming increasingly apparent. Recently, the project’s training videos for internal use were leaked, featuring several people cooperating with the Hungarian PM’s political network.

Since replacing Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris’s campaign positioned Project 2025, the roadmap created by a potential second Donald Trump presidency as a central issue of this year’s presidential election. Most recently, the Heritage Foundation’s project was bought up extensively during the August Democratic convention.

One speaker, Michigan state Senator Mallory McMorrow even brought a giant copy of the 900-page document, calling it the playbook of Trump’s prospective term and comparing its content to a dictator’s policies.

Trump for his part has been ambiguous about his relationship with the project. While reportedly endorsing it earlier, he denounced the project after it was targeted by the Democrats, claiming he knows nothing about it and doesn’t know who is behind them, while calling some of its content „ridiculous and abysmal”. In truth, many of Project 2025’s authors are former members of Trump’s administration.

Trump also did not help his case by appointing J.D. Vance as his running mate, a man close to Heritage Foundation’s president Kevin Roberts. Vance also attempted to distance himself from the project and claimed that he and Roberts were merely personal friends. In the Heritage Foundation, these denouncments led to the resignation of Project 2025 director Paul Dans.

A shift to illiberalism

Among other goals, Project 2025 envisions a massive purge of federal civil servants, replacing them with political appointees ready to further the agenda of „the next conservative administration”, removing many of the checks and balances that limit the executive branch’s power. Critics compared the roadmap to the strategies employed by autocratic leaders often praised by Trump, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

Orbán’s political network likely had direct influence on Project 2025: Heritage Foundation and many of Project 2025’s authors have a history of working with organizations funded and controlled by the Hungarian government.

Originally a proponent of Reaganite Neoconservatism, the Heritage Foundation in recent years has become influenced by Trump’s brand of populism, and shifted towards isolationist foreign policy, especially when it comes to responding to the actions of Putin’s Russia. This transformation was finalized with Kevin Roberts becoming the think-tank’s president in 2021.

Roberts saw Orbán’s „illiberal state” as an example to follow. In 2022, Orbán welcomed Roberts in Budapest, and Heritage signed a cooperation agreement with the Danube Institute. The so-called educational institute is a branch of the Lajos Batthyány Foundation, a lobbying and network-building organization funded directly by Orbán’s government.

In December 2023, the Heritage Foundation hosted an international conference where people affiliated with the Orbán government (including officials of the Hungarian Embassy in Washington) lobbied US Congressmen to vote against the Biden administration’s planned military aid to Ukraine.

A direct influence of Orbán allies

More recently the investigative organization ProPublica published hours of training videos, made for internal use by the Heritage Foundation, instructing would-be political appointees in furthering the aims of Project 2025. Several of the people appearing in these videos have previously worked with the Danube Institute or other similar pro-Orbán organizations.

In one of the training videos, Spencer Chretien, co-director of Project 2025, offers advice regarding political appointees. He says that in a new conservative administration „loyalty and ideology are more important than professional experience”.

Chretien was previously involved in building ties between the Heritage Foundation and Hungary. In May 2024, the (Hungarian) Center for Fundamental Rights – another state-funded organisation that exists mainly to praise Orbán’s government – hosted representatives from the Heritage Foundation, including Chretien.

In this event entitled “We Win, They Lose – America’s Choice”, Chretien presented Project 2025.

The project was also showcased in Hungary at another event in February 2024, this time organized by the Danube Institute. There, the Heritage Foundation was represented by Troup Hemenway, Senior Advisor to the Foundation and Co-Director of Staff Placement for the 2025 project.

In another leaked educational video, Roger Severino, a former Trump administration official, spoke about the role of political appointees in the legislature.

Severino last visited Hungary last year: according to Mathias Corvinus Collegium, he was invited by the entire Heritage management team to Budapest for a discussion on education, including Severino and Heritage President Kevin Roberts.

Mathias Corvinus Collegium is a private educational institute which received vast sums of public funds and was transformed into a trainig ground for young pro-Orbán elites.

In the video titled “Presidential Transitions”, Ed Corrigan and Rick Dearborn discuss how to apply for a political appointment during a presidential transition. Dearborn was Deputy White House Chief of Staff in the Trump administration, Corrigan was a member of Trump’s transition team and is currently President and CEO of the Conservative Partnership Institute.

In January 2023, the Center for Fundamental Rights hosted a joint event with the Conservative Partnership Institute in Washington, D.C. In February 2024, the Liszt Institute, part of the Hungarian Department of Culture and Innovation, hosted a joint event with the Conservative Partnership Institute in Washington, D.C. At this event, Ed Corrigan presented a book written by Balázs Orbán, a member of Viktor Orbán’s cabinet, together with the politician.

[subdee]

Yesterday the National Institutes of Health under the Trump administration announced a new policy that will dramatically change the way the United States funds medical research... Every dollar of NIH funding generated about $2.46 in economic activity. For every $100 million of funding, research supported by NIH generates 76 patents, which produce 20% more economic value than other U.S. patents and create opportunities for about $600 million in future research and development.

As Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times explained, the authors of Project 2025 called for the cuts outlined in the new policy, claiming those cuts would “reduce federal taxpayer subsidization of leftist agendas.” Dr. David A. Baltrus of the University of Arizona told Jewett and Stolberg that the new policy is “going to destroy research universities in the short term, and I don’t know after that. They rely on the money. They budget for the money. The universities were making decisions expecting the money to be there.”

Although Baltrus works in agricultural research, focusing on keeping E. coli bacteria out of crops like sprouts and lettuce, cancer research is the top area in which NIH grants are awarded....

Sorry to keep posting Heather Cox Richardson but this is just ghoulish. Once those labs go dark because they aren't being funded they are not coming back online in four or even two years. The researchers can't wait around that long to get paid, new grads will stop going into those fields. It's just wholesale destruction with destruction as the stated aim.

Lawmakers from Republican-dominated states are now acknowledging what those of us who study the federal budget have pointed out for decades: the same Republican-dominated states that complain bitterly about the government’s tax policies are also the same states that take most federal tax money.

I never thought the Leopards would eat MY face, say the members of the Face Eating Leopards Party.

But hey, this is something I can 100% call my senators and Reps about, because it will definitely affect us locally as well. So there is a chance to slow-roll or delay this just as has already happened with the dismantling of USAID.

....

If this is bad for the US in the short and long term - bad for Republican states, bad for health outcomes, bad for the economy - why are we doing it?

A reminder that the Heritage Foundation has ties to Victor Orban's Danube Institute:

Why are we doing it? Because destroying research universities helps to drive the US voter base permanently to the right which helps consolidate the power of right-wing politicians. Ask Victor Orban. Hungary saw 10% of the population LEAVE the country after he took power. The Florida strategy writ large.

[misfitwashere]

January 28, 2025

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 29

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump distanced himself from Project 2025, a plan for a second Trump term prepared by a number of right-wing institutions led by the Heritage Foundation. The plan called for dismantling the nonpartisan civil service and replacing it with officers loyal to an extraordinarily strong executive. It called for that strong executive to take control of the Department of Justice and the military and then, once firmly in power, to impose Christian nationalism on the country.

The members of the Heritage Foundation who wrote Project 2025 are closely aligned with Hungarian president Victor Orbán’s Danube Institute, and their plan looks much like his erosion of democracy to create a dictatorship that enforces white male Christian patriarchy. On Monday, Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times reflected on the influence of Hungary on the American right wing, posting: “it has always been wild to me that the model these guys have for the united states is a country that would rival mississippi for poorest state if it became part of this country.”

Once people heard about Project 2025, they came out strongly against it. Trump then maintained he knew nothing about the plan, although many of the people involved in it had been part of his first administration.

On January 24, Nik Popli noted in Time magazine that a number of the people who wrote Project 2025 have been tapped to serve in Trump’s second administration and that nearly two thirds of the executive orders Trump has signed either mirror or partly mirror the plans in that nearly 900-page document. “The real shame is that on the campaign trail, Trump did not level with Americans,” Skye Perryman of the legal organization Democracy Forward told Popli. “He didn't seek to try to convince Americans that this was his agenda. He acted as if he didn't have anything to do with Project 2025, when we know and have seen that he's really seeking to accelerate that agenda.”

On Monday, January 27, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued to agency heads guidance for how to implement what was, in Trump’s first term, known as “Schedule F,” a plan to replace the nonpartisan civil servant system established in 1883 with people loyal to Trump. As soon as he took office, former president Joe Biden rescinded Schedule F, but it has come back in Trump’s second term as “Schedule Policy/Career.”

The plan strips tens of thousands of federal workers of their civil service protections. Don Kettl of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy told Erich Wagner of Government Executive that the new rules say “the responsibility of people in the executive branch is to do what the president says, as he decides it should be done, and anyone who doesn't is subject to firing…. It’s a flat-out assertion of presidential authority under Article II [of the Constitution] that I’ve never seen put quite so broadly.”

Today, the Trump administration sent an email blast titled “Fork in the Road” to federal workers offering to let them resign and keep their pay until September, a transparent attempt to clear places for loyalists. Judd Legum of Popular Information noted that this sure looked like Elon Musk was “spiking the ball,” as this was the same subject line he sent to Twitter employees when he bought the company. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo looked at the buyout proposal and noted that “zero legal authority exists to do this.”

Last night, legal commentator Joyce White Vance detailed the Trump administration’s attacks on the independence of the Department of Justice. On Monday, Trump’s acting attorney general fired more than a dozen lawyers who worked on the criminal prosecutions of now-president Trump, after reassigning many more. In a statement, an official for the department said that the acting attorney general “does not trust these officials to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda.” In a masterpiece of gaslighting, the statement added: “This action is consistent with the mission of ending the weaponization of government.”

Vance points out that “[a]n administration can’t fire career federal prosecutors based on their perceived political loyalties.” She continues: “The real witch hunt is here. And it’s a warning to all other federal employees to mind their loyalty if they want to keep their jobs. That’s the point. Trump knows he can’t lawfully fire these people in this manner. He wants to make the point that he’s willing to do it, in hopes others will stay in line.”

Trump appears to be trying to gain control over the military and turn it into a political instrument. In his inaugural address he said he would free the U.S. military “to focus on their sole mission: defeating America’s enemies.” But, in fact, the stated mission of the U.S. military is “to deter war and ensure our nation's security.” Those two statements are not the same thing.

As Michael T. Klare wrote today in The Nation, the focus of Trump’s pick for Defense Secretary, former Fox News Channel host Pete Hegseth, is not to ensure the nation’s security, but to fight “the ‘Marxists’ in government, the media, and civil society who, he claims, have instilled ‘wokism’ in the US military—that is, a commitment to racial and gender diversity.” When Republican senators balked at confirming Hegseth, Trump’s allies forced him through by a vote of 50–50, with Vice President J.D. Vance, who shares Hegseth’s right-wing religious extremism, casting the deciding vote.

Today, Dan Lamothe, Missy Ryan, and Alex Horton of the Washington Postreported that Hegseth has stripped retired former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair General Mark Milley of his security detail, revoked his security clearance, and ordered an inspector general to investigate his behavior. Trump appointed Milley but came to despise him because he stood against Trump’s unconstitutional orders.

While strafing the independent civil service, the Justice Department, and the military, the administration is also working to strengthen the hand of the president. Over the weekend, Trump openly broke a law passed by Congress in 2022 to limit his ability to fire inspectors general, and when met with shrugs by Republican enablers, the administration moved to bigger power grabs.

It is ignoring a 1974 law that says the president must disburse monies appropriated by Congress, passed after President Richard Nixon tried to override the power of Congress by “impounding” the money it appropriated for things lawmakers thought would benefit their constituents. Federal money, after all, belongs to the American people. The authors of Project 2025 insist that the 1974 Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional and that the president can decide simply to stop funding the things Congress deems important, thus reducing Congress from the lawmaking body the Constitution established to a sort of advisory body.

When Trump tried this in 2019, impounding money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s fight against Russian incursions in order to force Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Trump’s political rival Joe Biden, the House of Representatives impeached him. Although Republican senators agreed Trump was guilty, they acquitted him, fearing that convicting him would hurt their party in the 2020 elections.

On Friday the Trump administration froze all foreign aid appropriated by Congress. “We get tired of giving massive amounts of money to countries that hate us, don't we?" Trump said on Monday, but the truth is that American soft power has been crucial in maintaining U.S. global influence since World War II. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) called it “dumb and murderous,” adding: “Tons of kids are just going to die needlessly” as U.S.-funded food supplies for famine-stricken Sudan stop. “The terrorists will benefit” as U.S. money for prisons holding ISIS members dries up. “The point of all this is to destroy U.S. power in the world,” Murphy wrote. “That primarily helps China, who is INCREASING its aid programs as we disappear. China—the place where all of Trump’s billionaires make their products and want deals to open markets. Think there’s a connection?”

International aid groups that depend on U.S. funding appeared shocked. "The recent stop-work cable from the State Department suspends programs that support America's global leadership and creates dangerous vacuums that China and our adversaries will quickly fill," said InterAction, the largest alliance of international aid organizations. "This halt interrupts critical life-saving work including clean water to infants, basic education for kids, ending the trafficking of girls, and providing medications to children and others suffering from disease. It stops assistance in countries critical to U.S. interests, including Taiwan, Syria, and Pakistan. And, it halts decades of life-saving work through PEPFAR [the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a global health program started by President George W. Bush] that helps babies to be born HIV-free.”

International aid organizations hoped the decision would be reversed, but on Monday night the Trump administration accused the leadership of USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, of trying to get around its order to freeze all foreign aid, and it placed dozens of career officials on administrative leave. Still, after an outcry, newly confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio today announced a temporary waiver for certain “lifesaving humanitarian assistance,” although what that means is unclear.

On Monday, Trump’s White House budget office went even further in strengthening Trump. It ordered a pause on all federal government grants and loans, requiring them all to guarantee that they ban diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and stop spending for clean energy initiatives. According to Jeff Stein, Jacob Bogage, and Emily Davies of the Washington Post, the memo sent to government agencies said programs affected are “including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”

Georgetown University Law Center professor Josh Chafetz wrote: “There is simply no plausible argument that the president has the constitutional authority to refuse to spend appropriated funds because he doesn’t like how the money is being spent…. And it's hard to think of anything more destructive of our constitutional order than a claim that a president can either spend funds that have not been appropriated or refuse to spend funds that have.”

Today, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters: “Last night President Trump plunged the country into chaos…. The Trump administration announced a halt to virtually all federal funds across the country. In an instant, Donald Trump has shut off billions, perhaps trillions of dollars that directly support states, cities, towns, schools, hospitals, small businesses, and, most of all, American families. This is a dagger at the heart of the average American family in red states, in blue states, in cities, in suburbs, in rural areas…. Funds for things like disaster assistance, local law enforcement, rural hospitals, aid to the elderly, food for people in need, all are on the chopping block.” “Congress approved these investments and they are not optional,” Schumer said; “they are the law.”

While it is unclear what this freeze covers, Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post says there is general agreement that it includes discretionary spending, including the Head Start early childhood development program and WIC, the nutrition program for mothers and infants. Representative Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) wrote that Trump’s order is “illegal & dictatorial & Americans will die as a result.”

Senator Angus King (I-ME) called Trump’s impoundment of all federal grants and loans “blatantly unconstitutional.” “This is a profound constitutional issue,” he continued. “What happened last night is the most direct assault on the authority of Congress…in the history of the United States.”

This evening a federal judge issued a stay to stop the Trump administration’s freeze on the disbursement of federal monies. Judge Loren L. AliKahn of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has paused the measure until Monday evening while she hears arguments concerning it.

Today, CNN host Jim Acosta, a Trump critic, announced on air he was leaving the channel after its management tried to move him to a middle-of-the-night slot. “People often ask me if the highlight of my career at CNN was at the White House covering Donald Trump,” Acosta said. “Actually, no. That moment came…when I covered…President Barack Obama’s trip to Cuba in 2016 and had the chance to question the dictator there, Raul Castro, about the island’s political prisoners. As the son of a Cuban refugee I took home this lesson: It is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant. I’ve always believed it is the job of the press to hold power to account. I’ve always tried to do that here at CNN and I plan on…doing…that in the future. One final message: Don’t give into the lies. Don’t give into the fear. Hold onto the truth and to hope. Even if you have to get out your phone, record that message: I will not give in to the lies. I will not give into the fear. Post it on your social media.”

—

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Rivers in Europe Burst Their Banks

A slow-moving storm triggered days of intense rainfall across central and eastern Europe in September 2024. The deluge submerged entire neighborhoods and forced tens of thousands to evacuate flooded towns and cities.

Between September 11 and 18, a low-pressure storm system battered parts of Austria, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic (Czechia) with torrential rainfall. The storm formed when a wave of cold Arctic air plunged into southern Europe and met with warm, moist air from the Mediterranean. The low-pressure system became cut off from the prevailing jet stream (known as a cut-off low), allowing it to linger in the region for several days.

Named Storm Boris by the UK Met Office, the system hit hardest in the Czech Republic and Austria, which in one week saw up to three times the amount of rainfall typical for the entire month of September, according to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. In eastern Austria, near Vienna, 215 millimeters (8.5 inches) of rain fell during that week. All of this rainfall, however, had consequences beyond the hardest-hit areas.

On September 18, water levels along the Oder River in southeastern Poland surpassed the highest alert category set by the country’s institute of meteorology. The river originates in the Oder Mountains in the Czech Republic and runs north through Poland to Germany. Water overtopped the banks of the river near Wrocław and flooded the surrounding farmland, visible in the image second image above , acquired on September 20, 2024. The top image shows the same region on September 4, before the storm. Both images were acquired by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 and are false color to emphasize the presence of water (dark blue).

The Danube River overtopped its banks in Slovakia, sending floodwaters into the capital, Bratislava. The false-color image below, acquired by the OLI-2 on Landsat 9, shows inundated areas along the Danube on September 21. According to news reports, the relentless rain forced dozens of people from their homes.

In Poland’s mountain town of Stronie Slaskie, near the border with the Czech Republic, a dam burst and caused deadly flooding. As of September 20, flooding across central and eastern Europe and into Italy has contributed to the displacement of over 25,000 people, according to the European Union.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Emily Cassidy.

[unilifeabroadcareersolution]

Study in Romania

Romania is an open invitation for business students, international and foreign affairs students, and the next generation of global economic market experts. Romania, once ruled by an oppressive government, is fresh out of the gate, and as a new member of the European Union, it is finally enticing foreign investors. Romania is a beautiful country with a diverse population that has a rich academic history. Romania, with its fantastic natural landscapes, fusion of European cultures, and mediaeval castles, is widely regarded as the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel. Universities in Romania can provide international students with a one-of-a-kind educational experience. Romanian higher education and living expenses are among the lowest in the European Union.

Life in Romania

Romania is home to over 19.6 million people and is located at the crossroads of Central, Southeastern, and Eastern Europe. It is bordered by five countries: Bulgaria, Ukraine, Hungary, Serbia, and Moldova. Its coastline runs along the Black Sea, and the Danube River, Europe’s second-longest river, ends in Romania’s Danube Delta. The Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia were united to form the country in 1859. Romania has had a turbulent history since then, but it has been a democracy since the 1989 Revolution. It joined the European Union in 2007 and is classified as a developing country.

Benefits of Study in Romania

High Education System

The Romanian higher education system is now a model of excellence. Every year, thousands of students from all over the world come to Romania to study and discover a unique blend of tradition and modernity. Furthermore, international students have the opportunity to study at a variety of institutions (universities, colleges, etc.).

Cost of Study

Tuition fees range from 14,000 RON (3,000 EUR) to 30,000 RON (6,300 EUR) per academic year, depending on the programme and institution. Depending on the study domain or your citizenship, some programmes may even be less expensive than others.

Scholarships

The Romanian government provides generous student grants, including full fee waivers. These are frequently awarded before you begin your degree, but it is common practise in Romana for universities to cover the following year’s fees for the top-performing students in each year group.

UniLife Abroad Services

Guides in choosing the right University or College.

Help to select the right study programs based on the candidate’s academic profile and career interest.

Help students with admission to the College or University as per their decisions.

Help to prepare the complete application for Student Visas.

Helps with the extensions of the Study Permit.

Help to find a job while studying or after completing the study.

Help to prepare the application package for Multiple Entry Visa.

Help students with Permanent Residency.

Contact us : 8428440444 , 8428999090

Mail id : anagha@unilifeabroad.com

[zvetenze]

Savić Farmhouse

Neštin, Vojvodina

Neštin is a small village on the southern bank of the Danube in Vojvodina. The Savić house was constructed in the 18th century during the Austrian control of this area. The house is constructed of 'naboj' (rammed earth bricks) covered with a plaster, a wooden porch and a thatched roof. The house also has a 'podrum' (cellar), where food and casks were stored, that is entered from the end facade that faces the street. The house has been protected by the Provincial Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of Vojvodina since 1968, with major restoration in the 1990's, and now functions as a museum. (photo 1991)

[dannyfoley]

Tamás Kaszás

The art presented in the Bourne Vincent Gallery focus on the themes of defining the role of the artist in society, going beyond the field of art into other areas of knowledge and work, as well as abolishing the boundaries between art and everyday life.

Agro-Culture, 2011, Neo-Agro (posters), 2011

A constellation of sculptural works composed of farming utensils, found materials, and posters. The works reference the artist’s interests in folk science, fictional anthropology, and self-sustainability.

Tamás Kaszás, an artist-anarchist, imagines the society of the future functioning in a post-fossil fuel economy. Using simple found materials, he practises art as a lifestyle and a form of survival and lives in a house he built on the island of Szentendrei-sziget on the Danube. His references include: folk wisdom, crafts, climate movements, permaculture, as well as proposals of historical communal movements, for example Temporary Autonomous Zones (T.A.Z.) introduced by Hakim Bey. Posters from the Neo-Agro series are displayed in various public buildings in Limerick.

Tamás Kaszás artist and activist who lives outside of Budapest (HU). Recent presentations have taken place at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg (CA), Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna (AT) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest (HU).

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 28, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jan 29, 2025

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump distanced himself from Project 2025, a plan for a second Trump term prepared by a number of right-wing institutions led by the Heritage Foundation. The plan called for dismantling the nonpartisan civil service and replacing it with officers loyal to an extraordinarily strong executive. It called for that strong executive to take control of the Department of Justice and the military and then, once firmly in power, to impose Christian nationalism on the country.

The members of the Heritage Foundation who wrote Project 2025 are closely aligned with Hungarian president Victor Orbán’s Danube Institute, and their plan looks much like his erosion of democracy to create a dictatorship that enforces white male Christian patriarchy. On Monday, Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times reflected on the influence of Hungary on the American right wing, posting: “it has always been wild to me that the model these guys have for the united states is a country that would rival mississippi for poorest state if it became part of this country.”

Once people heard about Project 2025, they came out strongly against it. Trump then maintained he knew nothing about the plan, although many of the people involved in it had been part of his first administration.

On January 24, Nik Popli noted in Time magazine that a number of the people who wrote Project 2025 have been tapped to serve in Trump’s second administration and that nearly two thirds of the executive orders Trump has signed either mirror or partly mirror the plans in that nearly 900-page document. “The real shame is that on the campaign trail, Trump did not level with Americans,” Skye Perryman of the legal organization Democracy Forward told Popli. “He didn't seek to try to convince Americans that this was his agenda. He acted as if he didn't have anything to do with Project 2025, when we know and have seen that he's really seeking to accelerate that agenda.”

On Monday, January 27, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued to agency heads guidance for how to implement what was, in Trump’s first term, known as “Schedule F,” a plan to replace the nonpartisan civil servant system established in 1883 with people loyal to Trump. As soon as he took office, former president Joe Biden rescinded Schedule F, but it has come back in Trump’s second term as “Schedule Policy/Career.”

The plan strips tens of thousands of federal workers of their civil service protections. Don Kettl of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy told Erich Wagner of Government Executive that the new rules say “the responsibility of people in the executive branch is to do what the president says, as he decides it should be done, and anyone who doesn't is subject to firing…. It’s a flat-out assertion of presidential authority under Article II [of the Constitution] that I’ve never seen put quite so broadly.”

Today, the Trump administration sent an email blast titled “Fork in the Road” to federal workers offering to let them resign and keep their pay until September, a transparent attempt to clear places for loyalists. Judd Legum of Popular Information noted that this sure looked like Elon Musk was “spiking the ball,” as this was the same subject line he sent to Twitter employees when he bought the company. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo looked at the buyout proposal and noted that “zero legal authority exists to do this.”

Last night, legal commentator Joyce White Vance detailed the Trump administration’s attacks on the independence of the Department of Justice. On Monday, Trump’s acting attorney general fired more than a dozen lawyers who worked on the criminal prosecutions of now-president Trump, after reassigning many more. In a statement, an official for the department said that the acting attorney general “does not trust these officials to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda.” In a masterpiece of gaslighting, the statement added: “This action is consistent with the mission of ending the weaponization of government.”

Vance points out that “[a]n administration can’t fire career federal prosecutors based on their perceived political loyalties.” She continues: “The real witch hunt is here. And it’s a warning to all other federal employees to mind their loyalty if they want to keep their jobs. That’s the point. Trump knows he can’t lawfully fire these people in this manner. He wants to make the point that he’s willing to do it, in hopes others will stay in line.”

Trump appears to be trying to gain control over the military and turn it into a political instrument. In his inaugural address he said he would free the U.S. military “to focus on their sole mission: defeating America’s enemies.” But, in fact, the stated mission of the U.S. military is “to deter war and ensure our nation's security.” Those two statements are not the same thing.

As Michael T. Klare wrote today in The Nation, the focus of Trump’s pick for Defense Secretary, former Fox News Channel host Pete Hegseth, is not to ensure the nation’s security, but to fight “the ‘Marxists’ in government, the media, and civil society who, he claims, have instilled ‘wokism’ in the US military—that is, a commitment to racial and gender diversity.” When Republican senators balked at confirming Hegseth, Trump’s allies forced him through by a vote of 50–50, with Vice President J.D. Vance, who shares Hegseth’s right-wing religious extremism, casting the deciding vote.

Today, Dan Lamothe, Missy Ryan, and Alex Horton of the Washington Post reported that Hegseth has stripped retired former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair General Mark Milley of his security detail, revoked his security clearance, and ordered an inspector general to investigate his behavior. Trump appointed Milley but came to despise him because he stood against Trump’s unconstitutional orders.

While strafing the independent civil service, the Justice Department, and the military, the administration is also working to strengthen the hand of the president. Over the weekend, Trump openly broke a law passed by Congress in 2022 to limit his ability to fire inspectors general, and when met with shrugs by Republican enablers, the administration moved to bigger power grabs.

It is ignoring a 1974 law that says the president must disburse monies appropriated by Congress, passed after President Richard Nixon tried to override the power of Congress by “impounding” the money it appropriated for things lawmakers thought would benefit their constituents. Federal money, after all, belongs to the American people. The authors of Project 2025 insist that the 1974 Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional and that the president can decide simply to stop funding the things Congress deems important, thus reducing Congress from the lawmaking body the Constitution established to a sort of advisory body.

When Trump tried this in 2019, impounding money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s fight against Russian incursions in order to force Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Trump’s political rival Joe Biden, the House of Representatives impeached him. Although Republican senators agreed Trump was guilty, they acquitted him, fearing that convicting him would hurt their party in the 2020 elections.

On Friday the Trump administration froze all foreign aid appropriated by Congress. “We get tired of giving massive amounts of money to countries that hate us, don't we?" Trump said on Monday, but the truth is that American soft power has been crucial in maintaining U.S. global influence since World War II. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) called it “dumb and murderous,” adding: “Tons of kids are just going to die needlessly” as U.S.-funded food supplies for famine-stricken Sudan stop. “The terrorists will benefit” as U.S. money for prisons holding ISIS members dries up. “The point of all this is to destroy U.S. power in the world,” Murphy wrote. “That primarily helps China, who is INCREASING its aid programs as we disappear. China—the place where all of Trump’s billionaires make their products and want deals to open markets. Think there’s a connection?”

International aid groups that depend on U.S. funding appeared shocked. "The recent stop-work cable from the State Department suspends programs that support America's global leadership and creates dangerous vacuums that China and our adversaries will quickly fill," said InterAction, the largest alliance of international aid organizations. "This halt interrupts critical life-saving work including clean water to infants, basic education for kids, ending the trafficking of girls, and providing medications to children and others suffering from disease. It stops assistance in countries critical to U.S. interests, including Taiwan, Syria, and Pakistan. And, it halts decades of life-saving work through PEPFAR [the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a global health program started by President George W. Bush] that helps babies to be born HIV-free.”

International aid organizations hoped the decision would be reversed, but on Monday night the Trump administration accused the leadership of USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, of trying to get around its order to freeze all foreign aid, and it placed dozens of career officials on administrative leave. Still, after an outcry, newly confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio today announced a temporary waiver for certain “lifesaving humanitarian assistance,” although what that means is unclear.

On Monday, Trump’s White House budget office went even further in strengthening Trump. It ordered a pause on all federal government grants and loans, requiring them all to guarantee that they ban diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and stop spending for clean energy initiatives. According to Jeff Stein, Jacob Bogage, and Emily Davies of the Washington Post, the memo sent to government agencies said programs affected are “including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”

Georgetown University Law Center professor Josh Chafetz wrote: “There is simply no plausible argument that the president has the constitutional authority to refuse to spend appropriated funds because he doesn’t like how the money is being spent…. And it's hard to think of anything more destructive of our constitutional order than a claim that a president can either spend funds that have not been appropriated or refuse to spend funds that have.”

Today, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters: “Last night President Trump plunged the country into chaos…. The Trump administration announced a halt to virtually all federal funds across the country. In an instant, Donald Trump has shut off billions, perhaps trillions of dollars that directly support states, cities, towns, schools, hospitals, small businesses, and, most of all, American families. This is a dagger at the heart of the average American family in red states, in blue states, in cities, in suburbs, in rural areas…. Funds for things like disaster assistance, local law enforcement, rural hospitals, aid to the elderly, food for people in need, all are on the chopping block.” “Congress approved these investments and they are not optional,” Schumer said; “they are the law.”

While it is unclear what this freeze covers, Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post says there is general agreement that it includes discretionary spending, including the Head Start early childhood development program and WIC, the nutrition program for mothers and infants. Representative Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) wrote that Trump’s order is “illegal & dictatorial & Americans will die as a result.”

Senator Angus King (I-ME) called Trump’s impoundment of all federal grants and loans “blatantly unconstitutional.” “This is a profound constitutional issue,” he continued. “What happened last night is the most direct assault on the authority of Congress…in the history of the United States.”

This evening a federal judge issued a stay to stop the Trump administration’s freeze on the disbursement of federal monies. Judge Loren L. AliKahn of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has paused the measure until Monday evening while she hears arguments concerning it.

Today, CNN host Jim Acosta, a Trump critic, announced on air he was leaving the channel after its management tried to move him to a middle-of-the-night slot. “People often ask me if the highlight of my career at CNN was at the White House covering Donald Trump,” Acosta said. “Actually, no. That moment came…when I covered…President Barack Obama’s trip to Cuba in 2016 and had the chance to question the dictator there, Raul Castro, about the island’s political prisoners. As the son of a Cuban refugee I took home this lesson: It is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant. I’ve always believed it is the job of the press to hold power to account. I’ve always tried to do that here at CNN and I plan on…doing…that in the future. One final message: Don’t give into the lies. Don’t give into the fear. Hold onto the truth and to hope. Even if you have to get out your phone, record that message: I will not give in to the lies. I will not give into the fear. Post it on your social media.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[sanctamater]

𝐆𝐄𝐓 𝐓𝐎 𝐊𝐍𝐎𝐖 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐌𝐔𝐍.

— BASICS! ♡

NAME: claire PRONOUNS: they/them/theirs ZODIAC SIGN: aries, insane edition TAKEN OR SINGLE: wouldn't you like to know, weather boy?

— THREE FACTS! ♡

i am a weird little bilingual canadian but not the useful sort - i grew up speaking a really weird dialect of german that isn't really spoken any more. it's the danube swabian dialect and is a whole mishmash of things. i'm currently enrolled in a goethe institute to get a hang of standardized german as aside from speaking it with my family i am completely illiterate in my second language and would like to be able to speak, read, and write in the language when i go visit my cousins in germany.

i once accidentally climbed half a mountain and only stopped when we hit the snow line and realised we were WOEFULLY underprepared to hike a mountain pass. in our defence the park's maps were not the best and signage left. a lot to be desired... and it was unseasonably cool that year. we also almost hit a moose driving back from winnipeg to southern ontario in one go. would not recommend. we almost saw jesus.

erm... i make historical clothing in my spare time. not right now tho bc my flat is too small to house my fabric, machine, and dress form. :( i also collect antique textiles and have a decent collection! most of what i collect is from 1901 - 1922. :)

— EXPERIENCE! ♡

PLATFORMS USED: youtube. proboards. do not ask me how we roleplayed on youtube. it is a long and convoluted story. but that is life.

PLOTTING / WINGING IT / MEMES:  i have a hard time with plotting because i have no braincells at any given moment.... i like seeing where things go but having slightly set beats in the plotline we hit at some points or having a vague idea of a timeline. but i like things growing on their own. as for memes.... lmao. i'm so sorry to everyone still waiting on a meme reply. it will happen. eventually. i swear.

— MUSE PREFERENCE! ♡

GENDER: doesn't matter. i gravitate towards more feminine muses but i had a really fun time writing media who i interpreted to be genderfluid and writing them as a more masculine character and figure was amazingly fun.

MULTI OR SINGLE MUSE: i am not strong enough for a multi muse. god i wish i was. i have tried.

LEAST FAVOURITE FACECLAIM(S): i am so sorry everyone but i do not like natalie do.rmer.

— FLUFF / ANGST / SMUT! ♡

FLUFF: depends? it's all about the dynamic and the characters - i wouldn't call it fluff so much as i would call it domesticity. small things, intimate things that are... mundane. i like doing that. i like writing that with amelia since she yearns for it but doesn't often get that intimacy and normalcy.

ANGST: i love angst so much.... i love it. i love inner turmoil, i love conflict, i love crying, i love yelling, i love screaming, crying - and with amelia it's just delicious (but also oh my god so tiring i do love angst with her but also I WANT HER TO REST) given her own flaws and the way she interacts with others. i love forcing her to come to terms with things and others in her life. it's just. so...... mwah.

SMUT:  i love smut but only on discord. i will be sacrilegious and horny on main in a fade to black here tho LMAO. but in all serious i don't mind writing it and i think it is a very interesting way to explore compatibility for muses, further their relationships, change dynamics, and to just have fun and be silly lmao.