Quote:The reason for the decision appears linked to a March 2025 federal directive under the Trump administration aimed at reshaping how American history and commentary are presented on federal lands. That directive instructs agencies to remove or revise “negative” content about Americans, and to emphasize the “beauty, grandeur, and abundance” of landscapes and features, potentially displacing works that critically examine environmental degradation or corporate interests. Kaufmann’s book, which examines California’s water crisis and critiques the unlimited‐growth paradigm in a finite ecosystem, seems to have triggered this flagging.

Quote:     Summary

• Law prohibits US agencies from retaliating against whistleblowers
  
• Trump team wants to exclude senior employees from those safeguards
  

President Donald Trump's administration is close to implementing a rule that would end long-standing legal protections for whistleblowers among senior federal employees, according to documents reviewed by Reuters, prompting backlash from lawyers representing government workers.

The rule, if finalized, would follow Trump's April proposal to change employment standards for federal workers and build on a series of actions by the administration to minimize dissent across the government.

Specifically, the documents showed the rule would exclude senior employees from legal protections that prohibit U.S. government agencies from retaliating against whistleblowers who accuse them of wrongdoing, such as violating the law or wasting funds.

Whistleblowers help to uncover fraud, abuse and misconduct inside government agencies that might otherwise remain hidden from Congress and the public.

"This administration is making good on its determination to silence dissent in all forms, creating a culture of fear, silence and intimidation," said Andrew Bakaj, chief legal counsel of Whistleblower Aid, a non-partisan group that represents government whistleblowers, in a statement.

(Nov 16 2025, 9:14 AM)Elsacat No criticizing the fatherland, or motherland, or whichever parent is parenting the US lately.

Quote:On Tuesday, multiple congressional Democrats made a video reminding the members of the military and intelligence community of their duty to the Constitution, not to President Trump. On Thursday, Trump called them “TRAITORS” and shared a post calling for them to be executed. 

Quote:Donald Trump has said he will grand a pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who is serving a 45-year prison sentence in the US on drug trafficking and weapons charges.

“I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly,” Trump said Friday in a post on Truth Social.

In March of last year, Hernández was convicted in US courts of accepting millions of dollars in bribes to protect US-bound cocaine shipments belonging to traffickers he once publicly proclaimed to combat. Speaking during closing arguments at the trial, assistant US attorney Jacob Gutwillig said Hernández had “paved a cocaine superhighway to the United States”.

Hernández was sentenced last June and called his conviction wrongful. He had served served two terms as the leader of the Central American nation of roughly 10 million people, and was considered a top US ally in Central America, particularly by the Trump administration.

Quote:The U.S. military has killed more than 80 people since the campaign began in early September. But it does not know who specifically is being killed, and the strikes were not designed to take out high-ranking cartel leaders.

Instead, the military has killed, at best, low-level people, whose role in the drug trade may have been taking a payment for moving cocaine from one spot to another. (At worst, some of the people killed could have been fishermen, migrants or others who had nothing to do with the drug trade.)

“Traditionally, our counternarcotics efforts have always been targeted at the head of the snake,” said Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “This is obviously the opposite of that. Now we’re going after the tail of the snake. We’re going after some, you know, poor ex-fishermen who took 300 bucks to run a load of cocaine to Trinidad.”

The strikes are also at odds with any effort to understand the cartels moving the drugs. Taking apart a network, experts said, requires capturing people and interrogating them to find out the financiers and leaders. By blowing up the boats, the United States is also destroying the intelligence and evidence.