FlashMobOfOne

If you're a fan of Aaron Rodgers, understand that I do make fun of him for the various QAnon-adjacent things he's said publicly over the years.

A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer was jailed on Friday on allegations of breaking into a woman’s apartment.

Thomas Bailey, 58, faces a charge of unauthorized entry of an inhabited dwelling after his arrest by the sheriff’s office of St Tammany parish, Louisiana, the agency said in a statement.

The sheriff’s office said Bailey entered his ex-girlfriend’s apartment near the community of Covington, a New Orleans suburb on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, without her permission. She was not in the apartment at the time, and the sheriff’s office said investigators booked him with a crime defined as the “intentional entry without authorization into any inhabited dwelling … used … as a home or place of abode by another person”.

Bailey is employed by an ICE office in the Louisiana community of Oakdale, which by car is about three hours to the west of Covington, the St Tammany sheriff’s office said. The agency’s statement noted that he was a resident of Lecompte, which is about a half-hour’s drive to the north-east of Oakdale.

Nearing the six-month mark of the Iran war and facing diminishing stockpiles of key weapons, the Trump administration is touting a crushing financial campaign against Tehran, promising an “economic D-Day” against a country that has so far withstood nearly five decades of punishing American sanctions.

President Donald Trump’s closest aide, Natalie Harp, declined multiple times over more than a year to seek a routine security clearance normally obtained by West Wing staffers to work at the White House, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Both people said Harp’s reasoning for declining to complete the process was unknown. After concerns mounted among the White House counsel’s office and security officials, the president himself intervened, and Harp in recent months filled out the forms to launch a formal federal background investigation and received the clearance, one of the people said.

The lack of a security clearance is one of several red flags raised about Harp internally by Trump’s top aides since he returned to the White House in January 2025. Harp operates unusually close to the president and filters much of the information Trump sees on a daily basis, and that proximity has spurred frustration inside the West Wing, according to those two people and two other people granted anonymity to speak candidly about internal and sensitive dynamics.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The national debt surpassed a record $40 trillion on Wednesday, a staggering milestone as defense costs, social programs like Social Security and Medicare and interest on the burgeoning deficit make up an enormous share of federal spending.

The milestone figure was recorded just five months after the U.S. hit a record $39 trillion debt in March. It reached $38 trillion five months before that, in October.

The unprecedented $40 trillion figure highlights competing administration priorities, from boosting defense spending that the U.S. relies on to carry out President Donald Trump’s almost-6-month-old war in Iran to lowering the cost of gas and groceries.

Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said the Trump administration “has been focused on slashing waste, fraud, and abuse in federal spending while accelerating economic growth to get America’s debt-to-GDP ratio trending in the right direction.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Trump administration task force created to combat antisemitism pushed for settlements with Ivy League universities despite government investigations that were rushed and incomplete or that failed to establish legal violations by the schools, a former Justice Department lawyer alleged in a whistleblower disclosure obtained by The Associated Press.

The complaint alleges that the investigations into some of the nation's most prestigious academic institutions were designed to strong-arm the schools into cutting deals for political purposes. Outcomes of the investigations were "predetermined, without regard to the evidence" in a "politically mandated effort" to extract money from schools through settlement demands and funding freezes under the pretext of rooting out antisemitism, the complaint alleges.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/50818812

Aaron Rodgers, then quarterback for the New York Jets, reportedly lived in Cedar Grove, New Jersey when the alleged 2024 donation was made. Drivers passing through Cedar Grove, New Jersey on a routine errand in 2024 may not have noticed the cameras. According to an investigation by FOIAball, every time a car passed certain intersections, a camera was logging its plate, location, and time of arrival into a searchable police database. The person allegedly funding that network was, at roughly the same moment, publicly complaining about surveillance drones over his own property.

Aaron Rodgers, then quarterback for the New York Jets, reportedly lived in Cedar Grove, New Jersey when the alleged 2024 donation was made. Drivers passing through Cedar Grove, New Jersey on a routine errand in 2024 may not have noticed the cameras. According to an investigation by FOIAball, every time a car passed certain intersections, a camera was logging its plate, location, and time of arrival into a searchable police database. The person allegedly funding that network was, at roughly the same moment, publicly complaining about surveillance drones over his own property.

At least one Kansas district is projecting $150,000 to $180,000 just to equip secondary students with individual phone lockers, according to the Wichita Eagle. The state provided zero dedicated funding. Every dollar comes from local budgets.

Districts choosing fabric locking pouches — think Yondr, the magnetic-lock system concert venues use to keep audiences present — face an estimated $30 per unit. Statewide, the Kansas Division of the Budget put that figure at roughly $13.4 million if every student received one, according to the Lawrence KS Times. Lockers require a steeper upfront investment. Neither option came with a state check attached.

Legislators passed the policy. The price tag was someone else’s problem.

TAMARAC, Fla. (AP) — Sporting red-white-and-blue sneakers and a matching bedazzled manicure ahead of Florida’s primaries on Tuesday, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz smiles and tells voters she is “running for reelection to Congress.”

That’s true — with a caveat. Wasserman Schultz is seeking her 12th term by running in a new district after Republicans scrambled the state’s congressional map earlier this year.

The fallout pushed Wasserman Schultz, a former national party chair with powerful ties in Washington, to cross district lines from her Fort Lauderdale exurb and be the only white candidate against four Black candidates in an area of Broward County that has helped send Black Democrats to Congress since 1992. That’s yielded an uncomfortable fight following the U.S. Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act provisions undergirding minority voting strength and effectively cleared Old Confederacy states, including Florida, to reshape House districts.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Friday downplayed the toll on American sailors enduring nearly nine months at sea on the USS Abraham Lincoln as concerns escalated about mental health and supply issues aboard the aircraft carrier supporting U.S. operations against Iran.

In a brief exchange with reporters before flying to New York for an event to highlight falling violent crime rates across the U.S., Trump refuted that family members have raised concerns about the deployment’s length and even said that the deployment — which includes a record-setting uninterrupted time at sea of more than 240 days — is “not nearly long enough.”

“That ship is moving right now, or very shortly, and it’s being replaced with another very similar ship,” Trump said when asked about the lengthy deployment. The acting navy secretary, Hung Cao, said the Lincoln “will return home soon” in a social media post on Friday.