speaking out

“When the President of the United States orders military action against foreign countries absent an emergency scenario where American interests are under imminent dire threat, as was done with Venezuela, Cuba and Iran, that’s an unconstitutional usurpation of Congress’s authority and a violation of the War Powers Clause,” he continued.

Watson said that the violations caused the death of 13 service members and injuries of hundreds more, and for that, Trump and Vance should be impeached, convicted and removed from office.

In June, the Trump administration abandoned an effort to try to halt all wind projects and leases across the US, giving up a challenge in court to a judge tossing Trump’s executive order to freeze all permitting and leasing for wind projects.

While many will discuss the corruption and abuses at the Justice Department under Blanche’s leadership — and rightly so — this letter highlights the dangerous degradation of DOJ’s apolitical career workforce.

Under Blanche’s watch, over 16,000 employees have left the department, including more than a quarter of its attorneys. Agents, analysts, attorneys, immigration judges, and professional staff have been fired for declining to initiate vindictive prosecutions, refusing to lie in court, or for pursuing assigned cases the President didn’t like. Many more have resigned, often for fear of being asked to carry out unethical actions. Still others have been made to abandon their mission-critical work to patrol the streets of Washington, D.C. and other cities, or defend habeas cases in the wake of unprecedented immigration enforcement surges.

Standing in front of the most powerful and well-known people in the television news business on Wednesday night, in a glitzy New York City ballroom, 18-year-old high school student Santiago Campos shocked – but also delighted – many in attendance when he called out the network that funded the scholarship he received: CBS News.

Campos, a graduating senior at the District of Columbia international school who had traveled to New York for the 47th annual news and documentary Emmy awards with his mother and teacher, was awarded the Mike Wallace memorial scholarship, honoring the legendary television interviewer. Campos was given the award by veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley, who said: “Mike would see something of himself in this year’s recipient.”

While Campos thanked CBS News for funding the $10,000 grant, he launched into a critique of the network’s direction under editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and owner David Ellison. “I want to also acknowledge how the recent direction of the outlet stains the legacy of Mike Wallace, the namesake of this scholarship,” he told the crowd.

“As corporate elites take hold over the very pipes through which our information flows, journalism that serves the people becomes increasingly harder to come by, yet ever more crucial. And what the people want is the truth. So if at any time you hesitate to utter the word ‘genocide’, or remain silent in the face of blatant lies, remember to ask yourself: ‘Who is this for?’ I hope you choose us.”

A Kentucky student denounced homophobia and racism during a speech at his 8th-grade graduation. The words rapidly went viral as he left behind the campus he called an oppressive environment.

“Apparently, this school doesn’t know better than to give an angry gay kid a microphone,” Daniel Mattingly said in a short speech at Stuart Academy in Louisville.

For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.

At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to “keep up the good fight.” Most of the men and women of CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.

WASHINGTON ‒ A bipartisan group of 35 federal judges asked a federal court in Florida to reopen the legal case between President Donald Trump and the IRS and investigate whether the two parties' out-of-court settlement was an act of fraud against the court.

In a May 27 court filing, the ex-judges contend Trump and coplaintiffs failed to mention a planned settlement in their motion to withdraw the lawsuit against the IRS. In exchange for Trump voluntarily withdrawing the lawsuit, the Department of Justice last week agreed to create a much-criticized $1.766 billion "anti-weaponization" fund that could funnel payments to Trump's political allies.

"The Court was deceived," the 24-page motion reads, adding that the settlement "commandeers the contrived sum of $1.776 billion from the United States Treasury, to be handed out to recipients chosen by a commission effectively controlled by the President."

Accoladed director Andrey Zvyagintsev has sent a direct message to Vladimir Putin urging him to start listening to the Russian people and end the “senseless” war in Ukraine, continuing a war of words between Russia’s most revered living film-maker and the Kremlin that started at the Cannes film festival awards ceremony over the weekend.

Accepting the Grand Prix for his new film Minotaur on the French Riviera on Saturday night, Zvyagintsev had appealed to Putin to “stop this butchery […] the whole world is waiting for this.”

Speaking on Monday after a meeting with Landry, who is also governor of Louisiana, and the US ambassador to Denmark, Kenneth Howery, the Greenlandic prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, also criticised the doctor’s presence.

He said: “If you want to learn about health conditions in Greenland, you have to contact Greenland through the right channels,” he said.

Griffin’s presence in Greenland appears to be the latest US attempt to intervene in the island’s healthcare system after Trump said in February that a hospital ship was “on its way” – an offer refused by Nuuk. The ship never arrived.