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Rubio Attacks Zelensky, Firmly Defending Trump and Vance
Facing a wave of criticism from his former Senate colleagues, Secretary of State Marco Rubio backed the complaints lobbed by President Trump and Vice President JD Vance against Ukraine’s leader.
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Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 Successfully Lands on the Moon
Firefly Aerospace’s robotic vehicle became the second privately built spacecraft to make a soft landing on the moon. It could soon be joined by two more private lunar landers.
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Vesuvius Erupted, but When Exactly?
Two thousand years on, scholars still don’t agree on the day the destruction of Pompeii began. Two new studies only fan the fire.
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Vesuvius Turned One Victim’s Brain to Glass
Heat from the eruption in A.D. 79 was so intense that it vitrified the brain tissue of one unfortunate Herculaneum resident, a new study confirms.
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DOGE Claims Credit for Killing Contracts That Were Already Dead
Elon Musk’s group claimed credit for canceling procurement agreements that had been completed years earlier, the latest in a string of public errors on its site.
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Horticulturalists, Biologists, Engineers: Federal ‘Bloat’ or Valued Experts?
President Trump’s effort to remake the government is a direct challenge to a decades-long effort to build a civil service stocked with experts. Critics say it will backfire.
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Musk’s Cost-Saving Claims Are Wrong in So Many Ways
We found huge errors in the “wall of receipts” for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, where the group lists what it has saved by canceling federal contracts. After The New York Times and other news organizations pointed out the errors, the team quietly removed all five of the largest savings it originally claimed.…
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Judge Rules Trump Can’t Fire Head of Federal Watchdog Agency Without Cause
A federal judge said that the president’s efforts to remove Hampton Dellinger, who leads the Office of Special Counsel, were unlawful. The agency protects whistle-blowers.
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Trump Signs Order to Designate English as Official Language of the U.S.
The order did not require changes to federal programs but was a victory for America’s English-only movement, which has ties to efforts to restrict immigration and bilingual education.
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National Association of Broadcasters Urges FCC to Accelerate NextGen TV Transition
The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) yesterday filed a Petition for Rulemaking asking the FCC to establish a “clear timeline” to complete the transition to the ATSC 3.0 (a/k/a “NextGen TV”) television transmission standard. The Petition follows last week’s NAB ex parte meeting with Chairman Carr and Acting Chief of the Media Bureau, Erin Boone,…