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    Senate advances bill to speed up permit reviews for infrastructure projects

    Chamber voted 73-25 to formally take up bill that will shorten timelines to start energy and datacenter projectsThe Senate on Monday advanced bipartisan legislation aimed at speeding up permitting reviews for datacenters and other infrastructure projects, in the first major action since last week’s election that soundly repudiated Donald Trump and congressional Republicans.The Senate voted 73-25 to formally take up the bill, which senators and the president have pushed as a way to meet growing demand for electricity and other forms of energy that now face years-long delays in getting to the grid. Continue reading… More

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    US supreme court clears way for Trump’s border wall in Texas’s Big Bend

    Ruling said law enacted by Congress reflects preference for border control over environmental and recreational harmThe US supreme court has allowed Donald Trump to continue his administration’s construction of a border wall in Texas’s Big Bend region, including parts of Big Bend national park.In an unsigned, five-page ruling, the nation’s highest court granted the Trump administration’s emergency request to suspend a lower court order that had temporarily stopped the project last month. Continue reading… More

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    Stephen Miller is in. Is Pete Hegseth out? With Ben Rhodes – Stateside with Kai and Carter

    Starting today, Stephen Miller is officially Donald Trump’s chief of staff. Now what? Kai Wright speaks with Ben Rhodes, co-host of Crooked Media’s Pod Save the World and a former deputy national security adviser to Barack Obama, about why Trump is handing even more power to Miller after Republicans’ thrashing in the midterms. Will Miller – the architect behind Trump’s mass deportation agenda – lead Trump to meddle even further in Cuba, the Panama canal and elsewhere? Plus, with Thomas Massie and others in Congress now threatening to impeach Pete Hegseth, Rhodes explains how Democrats will have to pull a “reverse Doge” if they want to restore the Department of Defense. (This episode was recorded at Crooked Media’s Crooked Con in DC) Continue reading… More

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    John Oliver on Pete Hegseth’s military plans: ‘Dr Seuss for concussed bigots’

    Late-night host discussed the defense secretary’s attacks on DEI, time as a Fox News host and ties to nationalist groupsOn his HBO show on Sunday night, John Oliver focused on Pete Hegseth, characterizing his actions as secretary of war as “taking a wrecking ball” to the US military.Oliver described Hegseth as “the guy you constantly see trying to show off by publicly exercising with troops and recruits, and to go by fitness experts on the internet, not doing a great job of it”. Continue reading… More

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    Donald Trump ‘kidding’ about making UFC boss Dana White US press secretary – video

    Donald Trump said on Sunday that he was ‘only kidding’ when he announced a day earlier that he had offered the job of White House press secretary to Dana White, the chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)Trump says he was ‘only kidding’ about making UFC’s Dana White next press secretary Continue reading… More

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    Democrats to attend Cop31 climate talks boosted by midterms and eager to make up for Trump-era setbacks

    US government will have no official presence at UN’s annual climate summit, this year’s Cop31 held in Antalya, TurkeyThe US will be absent from key UN climate talks that start on Monday, a further sign of Donald Trump’s scornful dismissal of the climate crisis. But Democrats’ crushing win in the US midterm elections has delivered a timely shot of optimism to countries now looking beyond the Trump era of climate obstruction.For the second year in a row, there will be no official US government presence at the annual climate summit, this year known as Cop31 and held in Antalya, Turkey. While almost every other country in the world sends delegations to the talks, Trump has derided the climate crisis as a “hoax” and “bullshit” and triggered the withdrawal of the US from the entire international climate framework. Continue reading… More