Notices by Chuck Darwin (cdarwin@c.im), page 22

Catalina “Xochitl” Santiago had already made it past the security line at the El Paso airport
when two border patrol agents called her in for questioning
and whisked her away to an immigration detention center.

Nearly a month after her arrest, she and her family still aren’t clear why she is detained.
Santiago is a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program
– which has allowed her to legally live and work in the US.

“They have no legal basis for why they detained her or why they’re holding her or why they’re trying to deport her,”
said her spouse, Desiree Miller.
And immigration officials have yet to provide her or her family any clear answers, she added.

Since her arrest on 3 August, Santiago’s case has alarmed immigration advocates across the US,
as it illustrates the increasing vulnerability of hundreds of thousands of young people
who arrived in the US as children and were granted temporary protections from deportation through the Obama-era Daca program.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/27/daca-recipient-detention-immigration?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Trump said on Tuesday that his administration
“wants nothing less than $500m from Harvard”
as a condition for restoring billions of dollars in federal funding to the Ivy League university.

“Don’t negotiate with them, they’ve been very bad,”
Trump told his education secretary, Linda McMahon, in a cabinet meeting.

Trump’s comments came amid reports that his administration and Harvard are moving toward a potential settlement
that could bring an end to their months-long battle over the government’s allegations that Harvard has not done enough to crack down on "antisemitism"
tied to pro-Palestinian protests.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/aug/26/trump-harvard-feud?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

More than 80 years after it was looted by the Nazis from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam,
a portrait by an Italian master has been spotted on the website of an estate agent advertising a house for sale in Argentina.

A photo shows the painting,
Portrait of a Lady (Contessa Colleoni)
by the late-baroque portraitist Giuseppe Ghislandi,
also known as Fra’ Galgario,
hanging above a sofa in the living room of the property,
in a seaside town near Buenos Aires.

The Dutch newspaper AD said it had traced the work,
which features in a database of lost artand is listed by the Dutch culture ministry
as “unreturned” after the second world war,
after a long investigation
– and with the unwitting help of the estate agent.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/26/old-master-painting-giuseppe-ghislandi-looted-by-nazis-argentina-property-listing?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

The 50-year-old gymnast determined to make her ninth Olympics

Oksana Chusovitina made her international debut more than three decades ago for the Soviet Union.

She’s still hoping to compete in three years in Los Angeles.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2025/08/23/oksana-chusovitina-olympic-gymnast/

“Most people spend 10% of their income on food and for poorer people, it might be 15%.”

“But for everyone it’s still less than they pay on rent,
and how much do we talk about ‘rent poverty’?” he says.

“The reason people are poor is because they’re not paid enough
and because housing is too expensive in this country.
All the research suggests that most people, even people on lower incomes, want to feed their families better
and they are prepared to pay a bit more for it.”

“And what about the supermarkets?
Why aren’t we talking about what they are sucking out of the food chain?” he asks.
“Vegetables prices are typically multiplied four times between leaving the field and arriving on the supermarket shelf.
We’re talking about the wrong thing.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/24/how-riverfords-guy-singh-watson-became-the-most-brutally-honest-farmer-in-britain?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

By engineering yeast to produce six essential sterols found in pollen, researchers provided bees with a nutritionally complete diet that boosted reproduction up to 15-fold.

Unlike commercial substitutes that lack key nutrients, this supplement mimics natural pollen’s sterol profile, giving bees the equivalent of a balanced diet.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/08/250822073807.htm

Homeowner shoots, kills 2 men in ski masks claiming to be officers, Houston Police Department says
"It was just two people and they're masked up and no police cars, no lights or anything like that," said Lt. Khan with HPD.

https://www.khou.com/article/news/crime/men-impersonating-police-shot-bellnole-drive/285-931f39d1-2f01-4654-b56a-cc11abaaaf72

Mussolini had his “years of humiliation,”

Hitler his fabricated Jewish conspiracies,

and Trump has his “phony crime stats.”

Reality is always bent into whatever shape makes the leader look like a savior.
https://mastodon.world/@BrianJopek/115078774526591227#.

When Trump federalized the D.C. police, he clobbered the idea that the people of the city govern themselves.

That’s what Mussolini did when he centralized Italy’s municipalities.

That’s what fascists do:
crush local authority under the weight of a single man’s will.

https://www.closertotheedge.net/p/trumps-fascism-isnt-coming-its-here

Polling shows that Democratic voters are not divided on the issue of Israel.

A vast majority of them now oppose the country’s actions in Gaza and want the U.S. government to stop supporting the genocide.

A June Quinnipiac poll found that just 12% of Democratic voters sympathize more with Israelis than Palestinians.

A July Gallup surveyfound that just 8% of Democratic voters support Israel’s military actions in Gaza,
while only 9% of Democrats have a favorable view of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
https://mondoweiss.net/2025/08/dnc-vote-on-israel-arms-embargo-will-be-the-next-democratic-party-showdown-over-palestine/

Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon explicitly declared the other day that ICE officers will be employed during the 2026 midterm elections in large numbers to monitor voting booths,
again floating undocumented voters as the bullshit pretext to justify it.

Bannon is not in a position to compel this, of course, but it’s clear the MAGA movement now sees Trump’s militarization of cities as a precursor to the use of law enforcement and/or the military to intimidate voters in large numbers,
or foment a crisis atmosphere designed to help the GOP,
or both.

https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-says-ice-agents-will-be-near-polling-places-if-you-dont-have-id-if-youre

Curtis Yarvin wears racial hatred as a badge of honor
—and clearly doesn't come into contact with people of color on a regular basis.

Yarvin, who hides behind a screen, wouldn't have the guts to utter these slurs on the street. -- In the real world, that kind of talk tends to carry consequences.

Instead, he flings epithets from the safety of his tony Craftsman home in ultra-liberal Berkeley, performing racism online for an audience of anonymous far-right Twitter users who pay $8 a month for a blue check.

Unfortunately, the anonymous Twitter racists aren’t the only ones following Yarvin.

Billionaire Peter Thiel funded Yarvin for years and considers him an important philosopher.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen invested in Yarvin’s tech startup and has been known to accompany him to brunch.

JD Vance has named Yarvin as one of his influences and recently followed him on Twitter.

Elon Musk consulted Yarvin last month when he was thinking about starting a new political party.

These powerful, influential men have gone out of their way to elevate Yarvin and force us to take his ideas seriously.

This reveals something deeply troubling about our political moment. -- Yarvin's compulsive racism isn't a bug in the system—it’s a feature.

He wraps white supremacist ideas in faux-intellectual packaging, playing the jester who says what powerful white men won’t say out loud.

But their support for him is an unmistakable endorsement of the hate he spreads.

Not exactly surprising. But since when can someone openly praised by the vice president of the United States publicly spew racist slurs without a word of condemnation?

https://www.thenerdreich.com/curtis-yarvins-racist-slurs-havent-scared-off-jd-vance/

The international courier DHL on Friday joined other European mail carriers that have put temporary restrictions on sending packages to the United States
-- because of Trump’s executive order that eliminates an exemption on duties on cheap imported goods.
The temporary halt by DHL’s German parcel service, and its domestic mail service, Deutsche Post, covers commercial shipments originating in Germany to consumers in the United States.
The company will continue to send private packages as long as the content is worth no more than $100 and labeled a gift

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/business/dhl-us-shipments-suspended-de-minimis.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

The Trump administration said Thursday it is reviewing more than
55 million people who have valid U.S. visas for any violations that could lead to deportation,
part of a growing crackdown on foreigners who are permitted to be in the United States.

In a written answer to a question from The Associated Press, the State Department said
all U.S. visa holders, which can include tourists from many countries,
are subject to “continuous vetting,”
with an eye toward any indication they could be ineligible for permission to enter or stay in the United States.
Should such information be found, the visa will be revoked,
and if the visa holder is in the United States, he or she would be subject to deportation.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-visas-deportations-068ad6cd5724e7248577f17592327ca4

Donald Trump observed a few tents on public land and some garbage under an overpass.

Perturbed by the imagery, he issued a sweeping demand via his social media site, Truth Social:
“The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY.”
“We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital,” Trump continued in his Sunday post. “Be prepared!”

The command came as he made plans to deploy 800 National Guard members to DC and temporarily federalize the city’s police department,
which he announced in a rambling 79-minute press conference the next day.

Advocates for homeless people immediately pointed to a fundamental problem (one of many) with Trump’s order:
There aren’t enough shelter beds in the nation’s capital.
Accordingly, how can homeless people prepare if they have nowhere to go?

“We really don’t know what that looks like,” Andy Wassenich,
the policy director of the local nonprofit Miriam’s Kitchen, which provides free food and social services in DC, tells me.

And if Trump’s plan for removing homeless people from the District is hazy, so is his rationale.
In his zig-zagging speech from the briefing-room podium,
Trump described an anarchistic hellscape home to “violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals,
roving mobs of wild youth, [and] drugged out maniacs and homeless people.”
The description perhaps conjured visuals of sprawling tent encampments where rape and assault problems run rampant,
but the depiction doesn’t match the reality:
US Park Police have already removed 70 DC tent encampments in response to an an executive order Trump signed in March,
and violent crime in the city is actually at a 30-year low.

To the extent that unhoused people still live outside in DC, most sleep alone or in small clusters.
This subgroup of the unhoused surely isn’t welcoming crime, of which they are disproportionately victims.
They too want law enforcement to arrest dangerous criminals in DC
—homeless or not.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/08/donald-trump-homeless-crackdown-dc-national-guard/

Trump emerged today from his summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin without a deal and without much to say.

Trump rarely misses a chance to take advantage of a global stage.

But when he stood next to Putin at the conclusion of their three-hour meeting,
Trump offered few details about what the men had discussed.

Stunningly, for a president who loves a press conference,
he took no questions from the reporters assembled at a military base in Alaska.

In his brief remarks, Trump conceded that he and Putin had not reached a deal to end the war in Ukraine
or even pause the fighting.

“There’s no deal until there’s a deal,”
the president said.

He characterized their three-hour meeting
—vaguely
—as “very productive.”

Of the outstanding issues between the two sides,
he admitted that
“one is probably significant,”
but he didn’t say what that was.

“We didn’t get there but we have a very good chance of getting there,”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/08/trump-putin-alaska-summit/683897/

Trump has been meddling with Intel,
which now apparently includes mulling
⭐️"the possibility of the US government taking a financial stake in the troubled chip maker,"
the Wall Street Journal reported.

Trump and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan weighed the option during a meeting on Monday at the White House

These talks have only just begun
—with Intel branding them a rumor
—and sources told the WSJ that Trump has yet to iron out how the potential arrangement might work.

The WSJ's report comes after Trump called for Tan to
"resign immediately" last week.

Trump's demand was seemingly spurred by a letter that Republican senator Tom Cotton sent to Intel,
accusing Tan of having "concerning" ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

However, Trump was seemingly impressed by Tan
after some face-time this week.

Trump came out of their meeting professing that Tan has an
"amazing story," Bloomberg reported,
noting that any agreement between Trump and Tan
"would likely help Intel build out"
its planned $28 billion chip complex in Ohio.

Those chip fabs
—boosted by CHIPS Act funding
—were supposed to put Intel on track to launch operations by 2030,
but delays have set that back by five years,
Bloomberg reported.

That almost certainly scrambles another timeline that Biden's Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo had suggested would ensure that
"20 percent of the world’s most advanced chips are made in the US by the end of the decade."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/us-may-purchase-stake-in-intel-after-trump-attacked-ceo/

Fired DOJ employee could face prison for throwing sandwich at officer

After his arrest, Charles Dunn allegedly told one of the officers: “I did it. I threw a sandwich.”

“If you touch any law enforcement officer, we will come after you,” Bondi posted on X Thursday.
“This is an example of the Deep State we have been up against for seven months as we work to refocus DOJ.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/14/sandwich-thrown-federal-enforcement-doj/

A gunman shot at the CDC, killing an officer.

Trump hasn’t said a word.

Things Donald Trump talked about publicly this week:

Sylvester Stallone’s body,
the $200 million ballroom he wants to build at the White House,
receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,
not receiving a Kennedy Center lifetime achievement award
and taking over the police force in the nation’s capital.

Something Trump hasn’t talked about:
a gunman, upset by coronavirus vaccines,
who on Aug. 8 killed a police officer while firing hundreds of bullets at the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/08/15/trump-cdc-police-officer-silence/

“Public reports indicate that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is pushing senior Department of Defense (DoD) officials to increase operational coordination in law enforcement activities,”
reads the letter, which TNR obtained.
It warns that this “continues to erode the line between defense activities and law enforcement.”

The defense secretary surely will throw this letter in the garbage.
But, as hopeless as the prospects for real congressional oversight look right now,
Democrats should make it absolutely clear that if they capture the House (and the Senate) in next year’s midterm elections,
it will mean relentless scrutiny of every aspect of Trump’s corrupt abuses of the military toward domestic political ends.
https://newrepublic.com/article/199083/trump-dc-takeover-troops-cities-alarming