A post warns of election interference after the administration reportedly refused OSCE observers for the first time in over two decades, a choice that aligns the U.S. with Russia and Belarus. The Justice Department is reportedly preparing to send its own poll monitors.
Trump administration refuses international election monitors for first time in over 2 decades.
The decision not to invite observers from the OSCE puts the U.S. alongside Russia and Belarus, while the Justice Department prepares to deploy its own poll monitors. ms.now/news/trump-midterms-osce-election-obser…
International Cyber Digest reports that ransomware group BYOD leaked personal data of 3,615 Trump Mobile customers, including names, addresses and order details, and claims continued access to the company's backend. Straight Arrow News reported that people in the data confirmed its accuracy.
‼️ BREAKING: Trump Mobile customers have had their personal data leaked by ransomware gang BYOD. The dump covers 3,615 people and includes names, emails, phone numbers, home addresses and order details.
The gang says the company answered news of the breach with "We have no team to handle this."
The leak includes the Trump Organization's own CIO, who oversees its information security.
People listed in the data confirmed their details are accurate and BYOD claims it still has access to Trump Mobile's backend, Straight Arrow News reports.
Aakash Gupta argues that Purdue Pharma's guilty pleas and fines failed to deter fraud, as the Sackler family extracted $10.7 billion and the conspiracy continued. He uses this to argue against relying on lawsuits to govern AI, responding to Bill Gates's remarks on AI safety.
In 2007, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to lying about OxyContin's addiction risk. The fine was $635 million. Over the next decade, the family that owned Purdue pulled $10.7 billion out of the company.
Bill Gates got asked this week whether lawsuits and corporate self-interest are enough to keep AI safe. He pointed at opioids and called the idea insane. The record backs him up harder than most people realize.
Before the guilty plea, payouts to the Sacklers ran $1.3 billion over twelve years. After it, $10.7 billion in ten. A criminal conviction taught them to move money out of the company faster. OxyContin sales kept growing after the fine.
Here's the detail that should end the debate. When Purdue pleaded guilty a second time in 2020, it admitted the conspiracy to defraud regulators ran from May 2007 to March 2017. May 2007 is the same month as the first guilty plea. The fraud restarted before the ink dried.
The final ledger reads like satire. More than half a million Americans dead from opioid overdoses. Purdue in bankruptcy. The Sacklers settling for $6.5 billion paid out over 15 years, no admission of wrongdoing, nobody in prison.
Liability ran a 20-year live experiment as the safety system for a dangerous product. Every lawsuit happened. Deterrence never showed up, because fines land years after the damage, on whatever shell remains, while the profits moved out long before.
That's why the FDA reviews drugs before they ship, why planes get inspected before takeoff, why cars have to include seat belts.
Gates called AI "the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near." You can argue with him on that. But governing it with lawsuits was already tested once, and the people who ran that test kept most of the money.
Garry Tan recounts an interview with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy about modernizing air traffic management. Duffy cites the SMART tool from Air Space Intelligence, which predicts congestion and helps spread flights, with controllers still making final decisions.
I asked Secretary Duffy what Americans should be able to do, if we get this decade right, that they can't do today.
Sean Duffy is the Secretary of Transportation, and he sat down with me at our Startup Industrial Base event in DC today. He went straight to how our country's air traffic gets managed.
At the command center, people sit in front of six screens with a paper flight chart above them, trying to make the calls on weather and routing.
His example: four planes reach the same runway at the same time and only one can land. See it two hours out, speed up two, slow one down, and each one lands when the runway is open. "Like, not complicated stuff, but we don't do any of this."
Paper and pencil and minimal human augmentation from software looks like this: Say an airport can take 15 planes in a 15 minute window. "Well, the airlines will schedule 32." He says he's handing the airlines that data and asking them to spread out.
The tool is SMART, from Air Space Intelligence, a small company he says competed with the biggest companies and won. It predicts. His stage example: a 2.5 hour ground stop might only need 45 minutes. He's taken heat for supposedly handing air traffic control to AI. Duffy's answer? "it's dumb AI, not smart AI." Controllers still make every call.
None of this needs a breakthrough. It needs the will of the people to know they need to use software and be ok with AI augmentation instead of insisting on a paper chart and copper wire.
Kathleen Tyson condemns reported targeting of a school in Minab, Iran, citing a Bloomberg investigation that says AI systems and stale Pentagon data contributed to a strike that killed 156 people, at least 123 of them children.
Palantir and Anthropic targeted Minab school, aided by Pentagon stale data and Hegseth psychopathy stripping target review staff.
And it was a triple tap, not a double tap. Children killed on first strike. Parents killed by second strike getting surviving children. Rescue workers killed by third strike rushing in after second strike.
Bloomberg just dropped the most disturbing investigation I have read this year, and every AI builder should read it and take it seriously.
On February 28, two Tomahawk missiles hit an elementary school in Minab, a small town in southern Iran. 156 people died. At least 123 were children. The Pentagon knew within hours that it had bombed a school.
The school had its own website. It was labeled on Google Maps. You could see the soccer pitch from a satellite view. You could see the brightly painted walls. Any 12-year-old with a browser could tell what the building was.
Abhishek Basumallick argues that the corporatization of Indian hospitals should be stopped, criticizes the U.S. healthcare model, and proposes regulating hospitals as public utilities with fixed returns like power companies.
Dr. Joseph Younis responds to claims of H-1B fraud among residency programs, arguing that international medical graduates fill primary care and rural positions because U.S. medical schools produce far fewer graduates than available residency slots. He contends the root problem lies in medical school admissions, not in the programs or the IMGs themselves.
Again, the vast majority of this is not H1B fraud.
What you’re looking at is a cherry-picked list of community programs that are forced to accept IMGs because U.S. medical schools train 15,000 less medical graduates compared to available residency spots. In 2025, for example, there was 52,577 American college students who applied to medical school and only 22,262 were accepted. BUT, in 2025 there was also ~40,993 residency slots. When you add U.S. MDs and U.S. DOs applying to residency in 2025 you got roughly 27,498. That’s 13,495 short.
Who fills them? Two: U.S. IMGs (American international medical graduates) and non-U.S. IMGs (those are the “foreign” doctors you’re referring to).
Now, where do these IMGs match? Overwhelmingly in primary care and rural-suburban programs, which historically are areas US MDs don’t prefer. However, AND THIS IS IMPORTANT: JUST BECAUSE US MDs DONT PREFER IT DOES NOT MEAN THEY WOULDNT DO IT IF THAT WAS THEIR ONLY OPTION. Check charts below.
The evidence shows that 67-85% of US MDs would rather take ANY specialty and program over waiting just one more year to try again.
So what does this all mean? 1. The problem is not IMGs 2. The problem is not residency programs 3. The problem is upstream, at the medical school level. Why do we have ~52,000 Americans trying to get into med school and we turn away 58% of them? 4. IMGs are filling a need in a vacuum we created. Getting rid of IMGs would collapse healthcare in its current state 5. No, it’s not true that “Americans wouldn’t take those jobs anyway.” This is a scapegoat that lacks nuance. The match data is evidence against it. We shouldn’t invent arguments to mask bad policy 6. Bad policy persists only when incentives are involved. So who’s involved is the question you should be asking instead of racially targeting doctors. 7. The truth is we do need a diverse workforce, data shows patient-physician congruence is an important aspect of care management 8. We need to stop screwing over American students
It can all be true. This is a complex issue that’s cemented for 100 years now.
Look at this chart. These are American residency programs.
Red = foreign resident doctors. Grey = Americans.
Some hospitals are almost 100% foreign. A lot of these doctors came in on visas. Some have been tied to fake credentials and USMLE cheating scandals.
I pay the premiums. I wait months to be seen. Taxpayer-funded Medicare GME money(over $21 billion a year) is training these foreign doctors instead of Americans.
Renu Mukherjee shares research by Michael Hartney finding that only 28% of white Republicans and 26% of white Democrats worry about campuses becoming mostly Asian, and argues the political positions taken on social media may cost candidates support.
Incredible new research from @MichaelTHartney: The Heritage American/Bo French/Woke Right’s position on college admissions is a political loser—even among white Republicans.
ONLY 28% of white Republicans said they were worried about campuses becoming “mostly Asian.” Similarly, only 26% of white Democrats expressed concern. Black Americans were the group most worried about a majority-Asian campus, albeit still under 50% were troubled by the prospect.
X isn’t real life. And if political candidates treat it like it is, then they’re probably going to lose—and they deserve to.
Bobby Kogan argues that Paul Ryan voted for tax cuts that worsened debt repeatedly across his career, and notes he retired at 55. He is responding to a post suggesting Ryan could return to politics in 2028.
Paul Ryan took debt so seriously that he voted for the tax cuts that did this at only 31 years old, and again at 33 years old, and again at 40 years old, and again at 42 years old, and again at 47 years old.
He retired before he could do it yet again at 55 years old.
FWIW, Paul Ryan is only 56 years old. In our age of absolute fiscal irresponsibility, what if the man who took tackling the debt seriously pulls a Winston Churchill and suddenly comes back onto the scene with serious momentum in 2028?
A post recounts that Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger came to the US on an F-1 visa, moved through OPT to an H-1B, and later self-deported amid delays. It argues that a proposed $100,000 H-1B fee would have prevented Instagram's creation.
Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger came to the US on an F-1 visa and then used OPT to get an H-1B. He later decided to self-deport and told Kevin to find a replacement because his H-1B transfer kept getting delayed.
If this administration was in 2010 they would've abused Mike for stealing an American's job, coming on F-1 and using OPT to get H-1B. If the $100k order was passed, Mike would've returned back to Brazil and we wouldn't have Instagram.
Politico reports that F-35 components, including a classified radar-absorbing canopy, were diverted from Australia toward Hong Kong during a repair shipment handled by a Lockheed Martin logistics intermediary. The post questions why a Chinese front company was involved and notes the Pentagon says some parts are missing.
Apparently Lockheed hired a Chinese front company to handle its logistics of the most advanced and classified airplane modules to Australia that ended up rerouted to China instead!
F-35 stealth parts, including a classified radar-absorbing canopy, were rerouted from Australia to Hong Kong this summer. The Pentagon says some components are missing.
Politico reports the shipment was traveling from Australia to the US for repair when an intermediary handling logistics for Lockheed Martin diverted it across the Pacific to Hong Kong instead. Nobody has publicly explained why. Nobody knows who currently has the parts.
The canopy matters specifically. It's coated with a classified radar-absorbent material that makes the F-35 invisible to radar. That coating is available only …
Dr. Joseph Younis argues that international medical graduates are legitimate applicants filling a shortfall of about 15,000 residency slots. He attributes the gap to LCME de-accreditation decades ago and a bottleneck in American medical school admissions.
This is not H1B fraud... These are legitimate applicants from international medical schools who have put in the effort to match into American residencies. Do not displace real problems onto scapegoats.
The real problems are clear in the 3 attachments below, and the summary is: 1. There is a mismatch between how many American students are trained in American medical schools and how many residents we need to train annually (about a 15,000 gap) 2. The mismatch is a consequence of the significant de-accreditation by LCME in the mid 1900s. Since then, we now have the same number of medical schools as we did 100 years ago 3. That led to structural bottleneck in matriculating American premed students into medical schools; we are rejecting over half of many hard working American college students
So, what are IMGs (some are American FYI) doing? Filling in a need that we created to begin with... You need to be asking why we create and maintain these self-inflicted wounds...
How does this happen? There are 300 million Americans. How can it be that we have no young men and women who want to be doctors? Something is fishy. twitter.com/jobsnowpaper/status/21039790559725…
Daniel Di Martino says a new rule charging $70,000 for OPT and $30,000 for STEP OPT rests on an unrealistic 44% demand drop assumption, and warns it will harm innovation and cost taxpayers.
It assumes demand drops by 44%, which is an arbitrary and incredibly optimistic scenario. There is no indication that universities will pay this, demand will drop 99%.
This is bad for innovation, and will cost taxpayers.
Noah Smith criticizes Christopher Rufo for defending meritocracy when it concerned Black versus White outcomes, yet denouncing it when Indian Americans succeeded. He shares a quoted post from The Atlantic thread on the topic with photos.
Rightists will scream "Colorblind meritocracy!" right up until the point where Indian people start doing well, at which point every rightist turns into Ibram Kendi twitter.com/TheAtlantic/status/210637374192397…
A post cites Reuters reporting that Houthi drones hit jet fuel tanks at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, with a critical commentary on Saudi military capability and leadership.
For people wondering why the Saudi “military” is so pathetic and embarrassing, Saudi arabia intentionally keeps its army dogshit because it’s deathly scared of a coup. Important positions are all held by royal family members/loyalists, who are almost all incompetent and careless
BREAKING: For the first time in four years, Yemen's Houthis have struck Saudi Arabia's King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh with drones, hitting the main jet fuel tanks, with flames and a massive plume of black smoke over the airport, per Reuters.
Saudi Arabia lost its most advanced fighter jet to the Houthis on Wednesday, flew no strikes as Mocha fell, and bombed its own allies on the Bab el-Mandeb coast Monday.
Aaron Rupar shares a video of Karl Rove listing allegations against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, including home improvements from a businessman, an Uber account used for alleged meetings, and records now part of impeachment proceedings.
amazing -- Karl Rove lists Ken Paxton's scandals: "You've got a guy who has multiple girlfriends and $200,000 worth of home improvements from a corrupt business guy for whom he does favors. My personal favorite is the Uber account in the name of David P. Since he drives around in a car that has [state] license plates, it made it a little difficult to have assignations with one of his mistresses, so the corrupt business guy gives him a fake Uber account and the records of that are now in his impeachment proceedings, so we know how often he went to have sex with Laura Olsen. I mean, can you make this shit up?"
Jeni Farnsworth shares a quoted post from The Newsground reporting leaked Russian banking records showing founders of a tech firm whose code is in an official White House app kept accounts at Alfa Bank and Tinkoff Bank after sanctions. The post adds only a reaction to the report.
Leaked Russian banking records show that the founders of a tech firm whose code is inside the official White House app kept accounts at Alfa Bank and Tinkoff Bank after the US and EU imposed sanctions. (link below)
Ben Norton claims the US government has taken $11 billion of Venezuela's oil revenue since January with only $3.5 billion returned, citing a quoted post by Leah Files on Treasury Secretary Bessent's congressional testimony and a January executive order.
The US government has taken $11 billion of Venezuela's oil revenue since January. Only $3.5 billion has gone to Venezuela. $7.5 billion is unaccounted for.
Good summary of the imperial pillage here: The US took Venezuela's "primary revenue stream at gunpoint, routed it through a bank in Qatar, then a Citibank account, handed the sales to two Swiss traders with federal bribery cases, put the Pentagon in business with a man the Justice Department once named in a $1.2 billion PDVSA laundering case, and declared the whole thing immune from American courts by decree".
Scott Bessent sat in front of Congress on Tuesday and either lied or is clueless about how to do his real job. There is no third option. But based on Bessent's testimony and what I found, it looks like we could be stealing ~$11 billion from Venezuela.
Bessent told the committee Venezuela's oil money is "one of the largest assets ever to go on the US balance sheet."
The executive order the president signed on January 9 states that the money is "property of the Government of Venezuela," held by the United States "solely in a custodial and governmental capacity." You cannot hold another country…
Developer @levelsio argues that easier business formation and lighter regulation correlate with higher wealth, citing Switzerland and Ireland versus Spain and Hungary within the EU, and links to an interactive chart.
It's really crazy how strongly wealth inverse correlates with regulatory burden
If you make it easy for people to start and run businesses and don't get in their way too much, everyone gets wealthier
If you make it hard for people to start and run businesses and get in their way constantly, everyone gets poorer
You can see the effect clearly within the EU:
Countries with low regulatory burden like Switzerland and Ireland have much higher incomes than places like Spain or Hungary where its regulatory burden is high
ABC News reports the Trump administration continues to downplay the US war with Iran as new images appear to show damage and destruction to US military assets, shared in a video.
The Trump administration continues to downplay the U.S. war with Iran, as new images obtained appear to show the damage and destruction to U.S. military assets.
A short post by Andreas Steno Larsen asserts that the United States has essentially won the Hormuz confrontation, accompanied by a photo. The post offers no supporting detail.
Anish Koka, MD, argues that the U.S. needs outpatient doctors and says Medicare-funded residency programs have produced hospitalists while displacing family physicians. He ties the issue to foreign graduate pipelines and medical school admission policy.
Apologies to hospitalists. Many do amazing things, work hard etc.
My point is that the acute need for patients now and as long as I can remember in America is doctors who will see outpatients 5 days of the week.
And yet the taxpayer has been paying for residency programs that are hospitalist factories.
So in the last 30 years “ progress “ is creating a whole separate class of doctors that see inpatients only. In order to make way for the hospitalists, the prior group that was doing this work (your family practice doctor) had to be displaced (at times forcibly).
The non profit hospital then turns around and complains about the rising cost of care and sends you a $10,000 bill for your one night stay.
And at the end of the day, the end result is a pipeline built for Aga Khan University students to come to America and make a top 1% American income with zero medical debt. This is in the context of 2/3 American applicants being rejected from medical school. Cherry on top is affirmative action policies that make the bar for white / Asian U.S. citizens to get into medical school very high.
So circling back to where this all started : do I think there are lots of qualified American citizens that could do the job trainees at these small programs are doing? 100% yes.
The current state of affairs is a policy choice that works against American citizens, not for American citizens. And American tax payer dollars fund all of it.
There’s no guild interest in importing foreign labor.
This is a function of Medicare funding residency training spots.. lots of hospitals get paid to have a very cheap labor pool so they create these “training programs”
If you ended Medicare GME funding, a lot of these programs that primarily serve as an entry point to the U.S. market for developing labor would disappear.
The vast majority of these programs produce hospitalists — an invented “specialty “ that came into being to shorten length of hospital stays.
Julius Chapiro, an immigrant doctor, argues that top international medical graduates should be admitted to U.S. residencies while Americans also get fair access. He says programs vary in quality and cites a quoted post on a residency shortfall of about 15,000.
I am an immigrant doctor who came to the U.S. System. I worked my tail off to get in. I believe I add value. I believe I provide good patient care. I love this country more than words can tell. I pay lots of taxes. I am more patriotic than probably 90% of the people around me, including some of those born here. But when I interview, I still expect far more from an IMG and prefer U.S. grads simply because I do not believe the U.S. system should disadvantage Americans. I will say that we can probably do both. Make sure Americans have full access to jobs and education but also accept excellent foreigners. Some programs go too far with IMGs and others can’t fill their spots from the U.S. applicant pool. Not all IMGs are equal. Is the top scoring candidate from the Sorbonne, Heidelberg, Teheran U, AIIMS, Tel Aviv University, etc the same like someone from a provincial hospital in a very below average med school somewhere in Central South East Asia or rural Eastern Europe? Probably not. But even there, each applicant should be fitted on a Gaussian curve. If you are 99th percentile, no matter where you are from, America should bring you in. Top humans exist everywhere. The beauty of America is that everyone can come here and become American. President Reagan said it and I live it.
This is not H1B fraud... These are legitimate applicants from international medical schools who have put in the effort to match into American residencies. Do not displace real problems onto scapegoats.
The real problems are clear in the 3 attachments below, and the summary is: 1. There is a mismatch between how many American students are trained in American medical schools and how many residents we need to train annually (about a 15,000 gap) 2. The mismatch is a consequence of the significant de-accreditation by LCME in the mid 1900s. Since then, we now have the same number of medical schools…
9to5Mac reports that users can now claim payouts from Apple's $250 million class action settlement over Siri and Apple Intelligence delays. The post links to the full article.
