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Ben Folds to Congress on Trump’s Kennedy Center Takeover: “When You Politicize Art, You’ve Got Propaganda”
Ben Folds, the former artistic advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra at Washington’s Kennedy Center, testified before a bicameral congressional forum on Tuesday 21 July, warning that Donald Trump’s takeover of the venue had turned it into a “hyper-politicized environment”. Folds argued that the Kennedy Center had long functioned as a neutral, apolitical institution until…
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Mike Tapp leaves role as migration minister weeks after Mahmood row
Mike Tapp has left his post as Home Office minister for migration and citizenship, weeks after a public row with Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood over her proposed reforms to indefinite leave to remain rules. The MP for Dover and Deal had reportedly pushed for care workers to be exempted from the changes, prompting a dispute…
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Homan blasts Dem hypocrisy on deportations, recalls past when ‘Obama gave me an award’ for enforcing border
Border czar Tom Homan used an appearance on “The Katie Miller Podcast” to accuse Democrats of hypocrisy on immigration enforcement, pointing out that he once received an award from former President Barack Obama for carrying out deportations. His argument was that policies and enforcement practices he continues to champion under the Trump administration are largely…
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Support for Iran war among MAGA Trump voters plummets: Poll
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Kemi Badenoch blasts Andy Burnham over his unravelling policies, asking the new Prime Minister: ‘Is that it?’
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch launched a sharp attack on Andy Burnham, challenging the new Prime Minister over what she characterised as a string of unravelling policies since he took office. Her intervention, delivered with the pointed question “Is that it?”, signals an early and combative start to the opposition’s scrutiny of Burnham’s government as it…
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Al Carns declines offer to return to government as defence funding ‘has not been settled’
Al Carns, the former defence minister who resigned last month over inadequate defence funding, has turned down an offer from new prime minister Andy Burnham to return to government, saying the funding dispute that prompted his departure remains unresolved. He stated that accepting a new role now would imply the issue had been settled, when…
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Dozens of House Democrats reject bill fusing congressional stock ban with federal voter ID
The US House of Representatives passed legislation combining a ban on lawmakers trading individual stocks with a federal voter ID requirement, a pairing that split House Democrats when the measure came to a vote on Wednesday. While the stock trading restriction has attracted bipartisan support in principle, tying it to voter identification rules proved contentious,…
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Treasury threatens sanctions after White House claims Moonshot distilled Anthropic’s Fable
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has reiterated that sanctions remain possible against Chinese AI firms, after a White House official accused Moonshot of improperly using distillation to copy Anthropic’s Fable model. Model distillation, in which a smaller model learns from a larger one’s outputs, is a widely used training technique that can be legitimate but…
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White House expands data center electricity cost pledge to utilities, states
The White House has expanded its voluntary “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” to include state governors, electricity utilities and data-centre developers. It is intended to prevent the rapid growth of AI data centres from increasing household power bills, a politically sensitive issue as electricity demand and grid-upgrade costs rise. Twenty-three governors and 187 utilities and developers have…