Brad Reed, Common Dreams

Some Americans on Thursday found themselves expressing envy after seeing elites in both the United Kingdom and South Korea face legal consequences for their actions.

First, former Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of inciting an insurrection with his failed bid in 2024 to seize power by declaring martial law.

According to The Guardian, the court justified sending the 65-year-old Yoon to jail for the rest of his life by noting his lack of contrition for his actions, which were described by Judge Jee Kui-youn as sending the military to the national assembly “to blockade the assembly hall and arrest key figures, including the assembly speaker and party leaders, thereby preventing lawmakers from gathering to deliberate or vote.”

In the UK, law enforcement officials arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the one-time Duke of York, amid scrutiny over his ties to late billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The New York Times reported that the former prince was taken into custody over “suspicions of misconduct in public office after accusations that he shared confidential information with Mr. Epstein while serving as a British trade envoy.”

After seeing legal accountability for foreign elites, American politicians and commentators called for the same to happen in the US.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who along with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) forced the release of the Epstein files last year, said it was time for the US Department of Justice to prosecute powerful people implicated in Epstein’s trafficking of underage girls.

“Prince Andrew was just arrested,” wrote Massie. “This was the metric I established for success of the Epstein Files Transparency Act that Ro Khanna and I got passed. Now we need JUSTICE in the United States. It’s time for Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel to act!”

Massie’s argument was echoed by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who posted a link to news about the Mountbatten-Windsor arrest on social media and commented, “This is exactly the kind of accountability we need from the Department of Justice.”

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) argued the Mountbatten-Windsor arrest showed that “if a prince can be held accountable, so can a president.”

President Donald Trump, who is featured prominently in the Epstein files, was indicted in 2023 on charges related to his attempts to illegally remain in power after losing the 2020 election, but that case was dropped after Trump triumphed in the 2024 presidential election.

MS NOW host Joe Scarborough said the Mountbatten-Windsor arrest showed that European countries at least still have a sense of shame that is currently absent in the US.

“At least they have shame in Europe if somebody was hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein, there are consequences,” he fumed. “No consequences here!”

CNN commentator Bakari Sellers argued that the actions taken in Korea and the UK showed how far the US has fallen in upholding the rule of law.

“Amazing how many other countries get it right,” he observed. “Watching ex-South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol, sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of insurrection and Prince Andrew being arrested for his involvement with Epstein. We counting to ‘preach’ western values but are a laughing stock around the world.”

Journalist Dave Levitan also described the lack of accountability for Trump and other powerful people implicated in the Epstein scandal as a national embarrassment.

“Getting shown up in the arena of elite impunity by the British monarchy is an incredible ‘America at 250!’ achievement,” he wrote.

Writer Julian Sanchez pointed the finger at the US Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling that granted presidents total immunity for official acts related to the office as poisonous to the rule of law.

“So SCOTUS, with its fabricated-out-of-thin-air immunity doctrine,” he wrote, “has actually made American presidents less accountable than LITERAL royalty.”

A large group of agriculture experts warned that US farms are taking a financial beating thanks to President Donald Trump’s global trade war.

In a letter sent to the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees on Tuesday, the experts warned of a potential “widespread collapse of American agriculture and our rural communities” caused in no small part by Trump administration policies.

The letter’s signatories—which include former leaders of American agricultural commodity and biofuels associations, farm leaders, and former USDA officials—pointed to Trump’s tariffs on imported goods and his mass deportation policies as particularly harmful.

“It is clear that the current administration’s actions, along with congressional inaction,” the letter states, “have increased costs for farm inputs, disrupted overseas and domestic markets, denied agriculture its reliable labor pool, and defunded critical [agricultural] research and staffing.”

The letter goes on to describe Trump’s tariffs as “indiscriminate and haphazard,” noting they “have not revitalized American manufacturing and have significantly damaged American farm economy.”

The tariffs have also hurt farmers’ access to overseas markets, the letter continues, as foreign nations have reacted with retaliatory tariffs.

“Consider the impact of the China trade war on soybeans alone,” the letter says. “In 2018, when the China tariffs were initially imposed, whole US soybean exports represented 47% of the world market. Today, whole US soybeans represent just 24.4%—a 50% reduction in market share. Meanwhile, Brazil’s share of the world export market grew by more than 20%.”

When it comes to the administration’s immigration policies, the letter says that “mass deportations, removal of protected status, and failure to reform the H-2A visa program is wreaking havoc with dairy, fruit and produce, and meat processing.”

“Those disruptions are causing food to go to waste and driving up food costs for consumers,” the letter adds. “These disruptions are also financially squeezing food and agriculture businesses and sowing the seeds of division in rural communities. Farmers need these workers.”

The letter offers several policy proposals that the administration and Congress could take to help US farmers, including ending tariffs on farm inputs, repealing tariffs that have blocked access to overseas markets, passing reform to the H-2A visa program to help ensure farmers have sufficient workers, and extending trade agreements with Mexico and Canada for the next 16 years.

The letter also urges Congress to “convene meetings with farmers to discuss challenges that they are facing gather input on additional policy solutions and build momentum to address the farm crisis.”

One of the letter’s signatories, former National Corn Growers Association chief executive Jon Doggett, told the New York Times on Tuesday that he felt he had to speak out because “we’re not having those conversations” about the struggles facing US farmers “in an open and meaningful way.”

The agriculture experts who signed the letter aren’t alone in their concerns about US farmers’ financial condition, as Reuters reported that US Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.), the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said during a Tuesday conference call that he was aware that US farmers are “losing money, lots of money.”

After a US Border Patrol Agent shot two Venezuelan immigrants in Portland, Oregon, in January, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that the two victims were “vicious Tren de Aragua gang members” who “weaponized their vehicle” against federal agents, who had no choice but to open fire in self-defense.

However, court records obtained by the Guardian reveal that a Department of Justice prosecutor subsequently told a judge the government was “not suggesting” that one of the victims, Luis Niño-Moncada, was a gang member.

The Guardian also obtained an FBI affidavit contradicting DHS claims about the second victim, Yorlenys Zambrano-Contreras, being “involved” in a shooting in Portland last year, when in reality she was a “reported victim of sexual assault and robbery.”

Attorneys representing Niño-Moncada and Zambrano-Contreras, who both survived the shooting and were subsequently hospitalized, told the Guardian that neither of them have any prior criminal convictions.

Legal experts who spoke with the Guardian about the shooting said it appeared that DHS was waging a “smear campaign” against the victims.

Sergio Perez, a civil rights lawyer and former US prosecutor, noted in an interview that prosecutors filed criminal charges against Niño-Moncada and Zambrano-Contreras just two days after they were shot, even before it had obtained crucial video evidence of the incident.

“This government needs to go back to the practice of slow and thorough investigations,” he told the Guardian, “rather than what we consistently see in immigration enforcement activities—which is a rush to smear individuals.”

Carley Palmer, a former federal prosecutor, told the Guardian that the court records obtained by the paper don’t show DOJ presenting any of the usual evidence that prosecutors use to establish defendants’ alleged gang membership.

“What’s interesting about the filings is that you don’t see evidence of gang association,” said Palmer. “It just feels like a dirtying up of the defendant.”

DHS in recent months has made a number of claims about people who have been shot or killed by federal immigration officers that have not held up to scrutiny.

Most recently, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that slain Minneapolis intensive care nurse Alex Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” intent on inflicting “maximum damage” on federal agents, when video clearly showed that Pretti was swarmed by multiple federal agents and was disarmed before two agents opened fire and killed him.

Noem also openly lied about the circumstances and actions that resulted in the shooting death of Renee Nicole Good by a federal agent weeks earlier.

In November, federal prosecutors abruptly dropped charges against Marimar Martinez, a woman who was shot multiple times by a US Border Patrol agent in October in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood.

In the indictment filed against Martinez, prosecutors said that the Border Patrol agent who shot her had been acting in self-defense, and that he had only opened fire after Martinez’s car collided with his vehicle.

However, uncovered text messages showed the Border Patrol agent apparently bragging about shooting Martinez, as he boasted that he “fired five rounds and she had seven holes” in a message sent to fellow agents.

An attorney representing Martinez also claimed that he had seen body camera footage that directly undermined DHS claims about how the shooting unfolded.

No explanation was provided for why charges against Martinez were dropped.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is warning that the Trump administration has crossed a “terrifying line” with its use of federal immigration enforcement agents to brutalize and abduct people in his city.

In an interview with the New York Times published Saturday, Frey described operations that have taken place in his city as “marauding gangs of guys just walking down the street indiscriminately picking people up,” likening it to a military “invasion.”

During the interview, Frey was asked what he made of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s recent offer to withdraw immigration enforcement forces from his city if Minnesota handed over its voter registration records to the federal government.

“That is wildly unconstitutional,” Frey replied. “We should all be standing up and saying that’s not OK. Literally, listen to what they’re saying. Active threats like, Turn over the voter rolls or else, or we will continue to do what we’re doing. That’s something you can do in America now.”

Frey was also asked about Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s comments from earlier in the week where he likened the administration’s invasion of Minneapolis to the first battle that took place during the US Civil War in Fort Sumter.

“I don’t think he’s saying that the Civil War is going to happen,” said Frey. “I think what he’s saying is that a significant and terrifying line is being crossed. And I would agree with that.”

As Frey issued warnings about the federal government’s actions in Minneapolis, more horror stories have emerged involving US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minnesota.

The Associated Press reported on Saturday that staff at the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis have been raising red flags over ICE agents’ claims about Alberto Castañeda Mondragón, a Mexican immigrant whom they treated after he suffered a shattered skull earlier this month.

ICE agents who brought Castañeda Mondragón to the hospital told staffers that he had injured himself after he “purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall” while trying to escape their custody.

Nurses who treated Castañeda Mondragón, however, said that there is no way that running headfirst into a wall could produce the sheer number of skull fractures he suffered, let alone the internal bleeding found throughout his brain.

“It was laughable, if there was something to laugh about,” one nurse at the hospital told the Associated Press. “There was no way this person ran headfirst into a wall.”

According to a Saturday report in the New York Times, concern over ICE’s brutality has grown to such an extent that many Minnesota residents, including both documented immigrants and US citizens, have started wearing passports around their necks to avoid being potentially targeted.

Joua Tsu Thao, a 75-year-old US citizen who came to the country after aiding the American military during the Vietnam War, said the aggressive actions of immigration officers have left him with little choice but to display his passport whenever he walks outside his house.

“We need to be ready before they point a gun to us,” Thao explained to the Times.

CNN on Friday reported that ICE has been rounding up refugees living in Minnesota who were allowed to enter the US after undergoing “a rigorous, years-long vetting process,” and sending them to a facility in Texas where they are being prepared for deportation.

Lawyers representing the abducted refugees told CNN that their clients have been “forced to recount painful asylum claims with limited or no contact with family members or attorneys.”

Some of the refugees taken to Texas have been released from custody. But instead of being flown back home, they were released in Texas “without money, identification, or phones,” CNN reported.

Laurie Ball Cooper, vice president for US legal programs at the International Refugee Assistance Project, told CNN that government agents abducting refugees who had previously been allowed into the US is part of “a campaign of terror” that “is designed to scare people.”

Critics have weighed in on Amazon MGM Studios’ documentary about first lady Melania Trump, and their verdicts are overwhelmingly negative.

According to review aggregation website Metacritic, Melania—which Amazon paid $40 million to acquire and $35 million to market—so far has received a collective score of just 6 out of 100 from critics, which indicates “overwhelming dislike.”

Similarly, Melania scores a mere 6% on Rotten Tomatoes’ “Tomameter,” indicating that 94% of reviews for the movie so far have been negative.

One particularly brutal review came from Nick Hilton, film critic for the Independent, who said that the first lady came off in the film as “a preening, scowling void of pure nothingness” who leads a “vulgar, gilded lifestyle.”

Hilton added that the film is so terrible that it fails even at being effective propaganda and is likely to be remembered as “a striking artifact... of a time when Americans willingly subordinated themselves to a political and economic oligopoly.”

The Guardian’s Xan Brooks delivered a similarly scathing assessment, declaring the film “dispiriting, deadly and unrevealing.”

“It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality,” Brooks elaborated. “I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.”

Donald Clarke of the Irish Times also discussed the film’s failure as a piece of propaganda, and he compared it unfavorably to the work of Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.

“Melania... appears keener on inducing narcolepsy in its viewers than energizing them into massed marching,” he wrote. “Triumph of the Dull, perhaps.”

Variety’s Owen Gleiberman argued that the Melania documentary is utterly devoid of anything approaching dramatic stakes, which results in the film suffering from “staggering inertia.”

“Mostly it’s inert,” Gleiberman wrote of the film. “It feels like it’s been stitched together out of the most innocuous outtakes from a reality show. There’s no drama to it. It should have been called ‘Day of the Living Tradwife.’”

Frank Scheck of the Hollywood Reporter found that the movie mostly exposes Melania Trump is an empty vessel without a single original thought or insight, instead deploying “an endless number of inspirational phrases seemingly cribbed from self-help books.”

Kevin Fallon of the Daily Beast described Melania as “an unbelievable abomination of filmmaking” that reaches “a level of insipid propaganda that almost resists review.”

“It’s so expected,” Fallon added, “and utterly pointless.”

President Donald Trump in recent weeks has vowed to make living in the US more affordable, as polls have consistently shown voters are giving him low marks on both his handling of the economy and inflation.

However, Trump undercut this pledge during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday in which he said he wanted—despite a nationwide housing crisis—to actively make housing even more expensive than it is today.

“Existing housing, people that own their home, we’re going to keep them wealthy, we’re going to keep those prices up,” Trump said. “We’re not going to destroy the value of their homes so that somebody that didn’t work very hard can buy a home.”

Trump added that his administration wanted to “make it easier to buy” a house by lowering interest rates, but then reiterated that he wanted to make houses themselves more expensive.

“There’s so much talk of, ‘Oh, we’re going to drive housing prices down,’” Trump said. “I don’t want to drive housing prices down, I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes. And they can be assured that’s what’s going to happen.”

The implications of the president’s remarks were obvious to those concerned about the nation’s affordable housing crisis and the struggle of working people trying to get by.

As Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director for the Campaign for New York Health, put it: “54% of Americans struggle to afford housing, and over 770,000 Americans are homeless—and Trump doesn’t think those numbers are high enough.”

A Fox News poll released on Wednesday found that 54% of Americans think the US is worse off now than it was a year ago, while just 31% say the country is in better shape. Just 25% of voters surveyed said they are better off now than they were a year ago, and more than 40% said that Trump’s economic policies have personally hurt them.

Given Trump’s already low numbers on economic performance, many observers were quick to ridicule him for his pledge to make existing houses less affordable for prospective buyers.

“Hello Donald this is your political strategist speaking,” George Pearkes, global macro strategist for Bespoke Investment Group, sarcastically wrote. “I am advising you today to please keep saying this stuff.”

Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) argued that Trump’s views on housing prices put him well out of touch with most US voters.

“Trump only sees the world as a rich developer,” she wrote in a social media post. “He has never, and will never, care about creating affordable homeownership for working and middle class Americans.”

Vox writer Eric Levitz posted a not-so-subtle dig at Trump for straying so easily off message.

Polling analyst G. Elliott Morris, meanwhile, said that Trump’s inability to stay on message was entirely predictable given his notorious unpredictability.

“Trump launched an affordability-focused midterm campaign for Republicans this week, traveling to Iowa to give a speech about how good his presidency has been for the cost of living,” he wrote. “That’s going about as well as you’d think. Here POTUS is saying he is going to keep housing prices high.”

White House border czar Tom Homan on Thursday sparked alarm when he used terminology associated with overseas war to describe federal immigration operations taking place in Minnesota.

During a press briefing, Homan was asked about the number of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents operating in Minnesota.

Undeterred by Freezing Temps, Statewide Minnesota Strikes Demand ‘ICE Out Now’

“3,000,” Homan replied. “There’s been some rotations. Another thing I witnessed when I came here, I’ll share this with you, I’ve met a lot of people, they’ve been in theater, some of them have been in theater for eight months. So there’s going to be rotations of personnel.”

Typically terms such as “rotations” and “theater” are not used to describe domestic law enforcement operations, but overseas military deployments.

Many critics were quick to notice Homan’s use of war jargon to describe actions being taken in a US city and said it was reflective of how the Trump administration sees itself as an occupying force in its own country.

“'In theater’ like they’re landing marines at Guadalcanal or something,” wrote Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff for Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), in a post on X. “This stuff is happening in suburban American communities, that’s where they’re sending violent, masked invaders.”

Northwestern University historian Kathleen Belew also expressed shock at Homan’s rhetoric.

“'In theater’ is an expression that has no place anywhere within the United States,” she wrote on Bluesky. “'In theater’ means in a war.”

Andrew Lawrence, deputy director of rapid response as Media Matters, said Homan’s war talk was “a crazy way to describe Minneapolis,” while documentary filmmaker John Darwin Kurc described it as a “frightening characterization.”

Shelby Edwards, a retired US Army major, also recognized the violent implications of Homan’s words.

“Incredibly damaging how military language has infiltrated these agencies,” she observed. “'In theater’ is used for deployments into foreign nations, when we deploy soldiers we say things like this. This is America. This is an American agency assigned to an American city.”

The FBI’s Wednesday raid on an elections center in Fulton County, Georgia is raising alarms about President Donald Trump’s plans to disrupt the 2026 midterm elections.

Shortly after FBI agents executed a search warrant at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operations center to search for materials related to the 2020 presidential election, Fulton County Commissioner Mo Ivory warned that this kind of operation would likely be spreading to other counties and states.

“Fulton County is right now the target, the only county right now fighting over an election that already happened,” she said, referring to Trump’s election loss that he has refused to concede more than five years after it happened. “But it is coming to a place near you. This is the beginning of the chaos of 2026 that is about to ensue.”

In a Wednesday interview on MSNOW, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) described the raid on the elections center as a “seismic event” that should be a flashing red light for US voters.

“This should have people across the country absolutely shook,” Ossoff said. “This is a huge deal. This is an FBI raid on the Fulton County Elections office. [Trump’s] conspiracy theories about the 2020 election have been based in Georgia from the very start... this is a shot across the bow at the midterm elections. He tried to steal power when he lost it in 2020. We have to be prepared for all kinds of schemes and shenanigans.”

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) noted that US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was spotted at the elections center during the FBI raid, which he said was wholly unprecedented given that her job is supposed to be focused on foreign national security threats.

Warner then posited two explanations for her presence on the ground in Fulton County.

“Director Gabbard believes there was a legitimate foreign intelligence nexus,” Warner wrote in a social media post, “in which case she is in clear violation of her obligation under the law to keep the intelligence committees ‘fully and currently informed’ of relevant national security concerns.”

The other option, said Warner, is that Gabbard “is once again demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for the office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.”

ProPublica published a report on Thursday that dove into the specifics of the search warrant executed at the Fulton County election center that allowed federal agents to seize 2020 election ballots, tabulator tapes, digital data, and voter rolls.

Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told ProPublica that he has never seen a search warrant of this nature.

“The idea that federal officials would seize ballots in an attempt to prove fraud is especially dangerous in this context,” said Hasen, “when we know there is no fraud because the Georgia 2020 election has been extensively counted, recounted, and investigated.”

Derek Clinger, a senior counsel at the State Democracy Research Initiative, an institute at the University of Wisconsin Law School, told ProPublica that the sweeping search warrant marked “a dramatic escalation in the Trump administration’s efforts to expand federal control over our country’s historically state-run election infrastructure.”

Rock icon Bruce Springsteen on Wednesday released a song called “Streets of Minneapolis,” a tribute to activists who have been leading the uprising against federal immigration enforcement operations in the Twin Cities.

In a statement posted on social media, Springsteen explained his inspiration for the song, which he wrote in the wake of intensive care nurse Alex Pretti being gunned down by federal agents on Saturday, just weeks after the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three.

“I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis,” Springsteen said. “It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors, and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.”

The lyrics to the song can be found below.

Two prominent critics warned on Monday that the US corporate media is not being aggressive enough in calling out the Trump administration’s lies about Alex Pretti, the Minneapolis resident who was slain by federal immigration agents over the weekend.

Writing on her Substack page, former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan expressed concern that many mainstream media publications were taking a wait-and-see approach in the wake of Pretti’s shooting, even as the Trump administration, Fox News, and other right-wing media websites were pumping out false claims about Pretti brandishing a weapon at federal officials and being a “domestic terrorist.”

Sullivan did praise many outlets, including the Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, for doing detailed and accurate breakdowns of videos showing Pretti’s fatal encounter with federal agents.

However, she was dismayed that these outlets frequently hedged their language by saying that video evidence of the Pretti killing merely “appears to” contradict the administration’s claims.

“If the analyses do indeed ‘directly contradict’ the government’s claims, then say so—without fear or favor, as the motto goes,” Sullivan emphasized. “With what amounts to civil war raging in the United States, we desperately need clear, fearless truth-telling that doesn’t pull its punches and doesn’t hand a megaphone to lies and propaganda in the name of supposed fairness.”

Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta similarly criticized US media outlets for being too timid in contradicting the administration’s lies about the Pretti killing.

On his own Substack page, Acosta argued that “the truth immediately came under assault” after federal agents fatally shot Pretti.

Despite possessing video evidence that showed the administration was lying about Pretti’s death, Acosta wrote, too many mainstream news outlets “tiptoed around the truth” rather than stating it plainly.

“There were lies,” Acosta said of the administration’s response. “Lie after lie after lie. The videos from the scene did more than just ‘contradict’ the government account of what occurred, as the [Wall Street Journal] described it. The reality is that the eyewitness footage revealed that the administration was flat out lying to the public. Our eyes and ears told us what happened. Too many news reports simply chose not to reflect that."

Acosta reserved particular scorn for Politico, which ran a headline stating that “a battle over the truth erupts after deadly Minneapolis shooting,” even though multiple videos of the incident had already been published showing exactly what the truth was.

“Federal officials, like [Stephen] Miller, were lying,” Acosta said, referring to Trump’s deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser. “Full stop. Politico needed to say that.”

Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz on Wednesday said that one of the ultimate goals of President Donald Trump’s healthcare plan is to get Americans healthy enough so that they’re able to work for at least one more year during their lives.

During an interview on Fox Business to tout Trump’s recently unveiled and widely derided healthcare plan, Oz explained why it was important for Americans to be healthy so that they could be productive workers and contribute to the US gross domestic product (GDP).

“A lot of people watching this segment are thinking we’re talking about healthcare expenses,” he said. “This is about the value to the US economy if we can get this right. If we can get the average person watching... to work one more year in their whole lifetime, just stay in your workplace for one more year, that is worth about $3 trillion to the US GDP.”

“Wow!” exclaimed Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.

“That’s the productivity we would unleash of people feeling they have agency over their future, like they’ve got stuff they want to accomplish with their lives,” Oz continued. “If you’re sick, you can’t work. So keep people healthy, they’ll want to work, they’ll want to produce, not just for one year but for many more... It’s worth the investment to get that return.”

“I love it,” replied Bartiromo.

Oz’s statement about getting Americans to work longer to improve national GDP was met with immediate criticism.

Journalist Brian Goldstone, who last year published a book focusing on Americans who are homeless despite having jobs, argued that Oz was simply clueless about the realities of working-class Americans.

“I recently met a widowed 71-year-old woman still working two jobs and living at an extended-stay hotel because even two jobs don’t pay her enough to afford rent,” he wrote in a post on Bluesky. “This is what ‘one more year of work’ looks like in America.”

Economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted that Oz doesn’t seem to understand that most Americans don’t have the kinds of cushy gigs he’s enjoyed for decades.

“I’m sure everyone would be happy to work another year if work meant getting paid millions of dollars to spout utter nonsense on Fox, CBS, and other right-wing outlets,” Baker remarked on X.

Baker also questioned the arithmetic behind Oz’s claim about the vast benefits to the US economy of having everyone work for an extra year.

“I’m also curious where the hell he got the $3 trillion (10% of GDP)?” he wrote. “I gather it is a Trump number, came straight out of his rear end.”

Democratic political strategist Dan Kanninen said that Oz came off as utterly tone deaf about Americans’ lives, and sarcastically encouraged the Trump administration to “put Dr. Oz and his ‘Matrix’ vision of the future where we all batteries for capital on the airwaves as much as possible.”

Dell Cameron, a senior writer at Wired, argued that Oz’s remarks were a damning indictment of former talkshow host Oprah Winfrey, who regularly featured purported experts of dubious credibility, including Oz, Phil McGraw, and João Teixeira de Faria, a Brazilian “faith healer” and convicted rapist currently serving a lifetime prison sentence.

“Hard to pin down which of the medical hacks platformed by Oprah’s network has gone on to do the most harm, which is saying a lot since one is a cult leader who raped hundreds of women,” he mused. “Then again, [Oz] is one of the most influential quacks of all time.”

President Donald Trump’s shuttering of USAID last year will have a long-term negative impact on children throughout the world, according to a report released on Thursday by Oxfam.

In its analysis, Oxfam estimates that a child under the age of five could die every 40 seconds by 2030 thanks to the Trump administration’s dismantling of American foreign aid programs.

Oxfam says it’s basing its projections on “calculations in [the] Lancet’s impact evaluation and forecasting analysis from last July, which projected ”4,537,157 child deaths by 2030.“

The report also pointed to estimates from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and Gates Foundation, which calculates “an additional 200,000 child deaths” for children under five last year. This lines up with data published by the Boston University School of Public Health last year estimating over 250,000 child deaths caused by the drastic slashing of foreign aid funding under the Trump administration.

Abby Maxman, president and CEO of Oxfam America, said that “we have run out of words to describe the depths of suffering” caused by Trump’s destruction of “the entire global aid system.”

“We are seeing years of progress unravel, and more children suffer and die preventable deaths because of these cuts,” Maxman added.

The report also highlighted the specific impacts cuts have had in Sudan, the Philippines, and Syria.

Mayfourth Luneta, deputy executive director of the Center for Disaster Preparedness Foundation, an Oxfam partner in the Philippines, said that due to the Trump aid cuts, her organization had to cancel programs across eight communities that were impacted by floods and earthquakes last year.

“The Philippines was hit with the most powerful storms on Earth recorded last year,” Luneta said. “Communities were devastated, families were left with nothing.”

Shabnam Baloch, country director for Oxfam in South Sudan, described the impact that aid cuts have had on a country that is undergoing a horrific civil war.

“Water borne illnesses are spreading rapidly, starvation is imminent for many, and while needs are rising, lifesaving organizations are working with a fraction of the resources we had in previous years,” said Baloch. “Oxfam, along with many other vital organizations, will be forced to scale down our programs without immediate intervention.”

Sara Savva, deputy director-general the alliance of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East and the Department of Ecumenical Relations and Development (GOPA-DERD), an Oxfam partner in Syria, said her organization had “to drastically reduce the scale and scope of our programs for Syrian families and Iraqi refugees residing in Syria” in the wake of the Trump administration’s cuts.

“We were notified we will no longer receive funding from the US government, and thousands of people are left without crucial services necessary to rebuild their lives after a catastrophic civil war,” Savva said.

Elon Musk is facing calls for legal ramifications after Grok, the AI chatbot used on his X social media platform, produced sexually suggestive images of children.

Politico reported on Friday that the Paris prosecutor’s office in France is opening an investigation into X after Grok, following prompts from users, created deepfake photographs of both adult women and underage girls that removed their clothes and replaced them with bikinis.

Politico added that the investigation into X over the images will “bolster” an ongoing investigation launched by French prosecutors last year into Grok’s dissemination of Holocaust denial propaganda.

France is not the only government putting pressure on Musk, as TechCrunch reported on Friday that India’s information technology ministry has given X 72 hours to restrict users’ ability to generate content deemed “obscene, pornographic, vulgar, indecent, sexually explicit, pedophilic, or otherwise prohibited under law.”

Failure to comply with this order, the ministry warned, could lead to the government ending X’s legal immunity from being sued over user-generated content.

In an interview with Indian cable news network CNBC TV18, cybersecurity expert Ritesh Bhatia argued that legal liability for the images generated by Grok should not just lie with the users whose prompts generated them, but with the creators of the chatbot itself.

“When a platform like Grok even allows such prompts to be executed, the responsibility squarely lies with the intermediary,” said Bhatia. “Technology is not neutral when it follows harmful commands. If a system can be instructed to violate dignity, the failure is not human behavior alone—it is design, governance, and ethical neglect. Creators of Grok need to take immediate action.”

Corey Rayburn Yung, a professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, argued on Bluesky that it was “unprecedented” for a digital platform to give “users a tool to actively create” child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

“There are no other instances of a major company affirmatively facilitating the production of child pornography,” Yung emphasized. “Treating this as the inevitable result of generative AI and social media is a harrowing mistake.”

Andy Craig, a fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies, said that US states should use their powers to investigate X over Grok’s generation of CSAM, given that it is unlikely the federal government under President Donald Trump will do so.

“Every state has its equivalent laws about this stuff,” Craig explained. “Musk is not cloaked in some federal immunity just because he’s off-again/on-again buddies with Trump.”

Grok first gained the ability to generate sexual content this past summer when Musk introduced a new “spicy mode” for the chatbot that was immediately used to generate deepfake nude photos of celebrities.

Weeks before this, Grok began calling itself “MechaHitler” after Musk ordered his team to make tweaks to the chatbot to make it more “politically incorrect.”

An in-depth report published by the Washington Post on Tuesday offers new details about the damage being done to the Social Security Administration during President Donald Trump’s second term.

The Post, citing both internal documents and interviews with insiders, reported that the Social Security Administration (SSA) is “in turmoil” one year into Trump’s second term, resulting in a customer service system that has “deteriorated.”

The chaos at the SSA started in February when the Trump administration announced plans to lay off 7,000 SSA employees, or roughly 12% of the total workforce.

This set off a cascade of events that the Post writes has left the agency with “record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers,” as the remaining SSA workforce has “struggled to respond to up to 6 million pending cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions in its field offices.”

The most immediate consequence of the staffing cuts was that call wait times for Social Security beneficiaries surged to an average of roughly two-and-a-half hours, which forced the agency to pull workers employed in other divisions in the department off their jobs.

However, the Post‘s sources said these employees “were thrown in with minimal training... and found themselves unable to answer much beyond basic questions.”

One longtime SSA employee told the Post that management at the agency “offered minimal training and basically threw [transferred employees] in to sink or swim.”

Although the administration has succeeded in getting call hold times down from their peaks, shuffling so many employees out of their original positions has damaged the SSA in other areas, the Post revealed.

Jordan Harwell, a Montana field office employee who is president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 4012, said that workers in his office no longer have the same time they used to have to process pay stubs, disability claims, and appointment requests because they are constantly manning the phones.

An anonymous employee in an Indiana field office told the Post that she has similarly had to let other work pile up as the administration has emphasized answering phones over everything else.

Among other things, reported the Post, she now has less time to handle “calls from people asking about decisions in their cases, claims filed online, and anyone who tries to submit forms to Social Security—like proof of marriage—through snail mail.”

Also hampering the SSA’s work have been new regulations put in place by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency that bar beneficiaries from making changes to their direct deposit information over the phone, instead requiring them to either appear in person at a field office or go online.

The Indiana SSA worker told the Post of a recent case involving a 75-year-old man who recently suffered a major stroke that left him unable to drive to the local field office to verify information needed to change his banking information. The man also said he did not have access to a computer to help him change the information online.

“I had to sit there on the phone and tell this guy, ‘You have to find someone to come in... or, do you have a relative with a computer who can help you or something like that?’” the employee said. “He was just like, ‘No, no, no.’”

Social Security was a regular target for Musk during his tenure working for the Trump administration, and he repeatedly made baseless claims that the entire program was riddled with fraud, even referring to it as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

A new poll shows US voters’ approval of President Donald Trump’s handling of the economy has hit an all-time low, even as the president and his officials insist the economy is the best in the world.

The latest Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released Thursday found that only 31% of voters approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, the lowest figure in that survey throughout either of his two terms in office. Overall, 68% of voters said that the current state of the economy was “poor.”

What’s more, Trump’s approval rating on the economy among Republican voters now stands at just 69%, a strikingly low figure for a president who has consistently commanded loyalty from the GOP base.

Despite the grim numbers, the president and his administration have continued to say that the US is now in the middle of an economic boom.

During a Thursday morning interview on CNBC, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that the US now has “the greatest $30 trillion economy in the world.”

“We are doing great,” Lutnick said. “Nothing bad is happening. Greatness is happening. We grew at 4% GDP! Come on!”

Lutnick’s message echoes the one Trump delivered earlier this week during a rally in Pennsylvania, where he said that voters’ concerns about being able to afford basics such as groceries, electricity, and healthcare were a “hoax” concocted by Democrats.

“Prices are coming down very substantially,” Trump falsely claimed during his speech. “But they have a new word. You know, they always have a hoax. The new word is affordability.”

As NPR reported on Thursday, data shows that the prices of groceries and electricity have continued to rise throughout Trump’s second term, directly contradicting his claims that prices are “coming down.”

University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson told NPR that Trump is playing with fire by making false claims about prices when US consumers can see costs persistently going up.

“Trump’s claims about inflation are false, and you can go to the grocery store and see it yourself,” Stevenson said.

Even some members of Trump’s own party are growing wary of him insisting that America is experiencing an unprecedented economic boom when voters feel otherwise.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told The Hill that Trump’s insistence on making happy talk about the economy would not fly with voters.

“You can’t call it a hoax and suggest that people are going to believe it,” she said. “What you say matters.”

An anonymous Republican senator also told The Hill that they were concerned about the optics of Trump building a massive luxury ballroom in the White House at a time when Americans say they are struggling financially.

“The cost of living just makes life very difficult on people,” the senator stressed.

And Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) gently pushed back on Trump’s messaging by telling CNN that “a lot of people are still having trouble making ends meet” in her state.