Author: potus

At the stroke of noon on December 31, 1999, the Panamanian flag was raised over the Panama Canal, signaling the final transfer of the 51-mile, man-made waterway from the United States to Panama. The ceremony brought an end to nearly a century of strained relations and violent protest over America’s ownership and management of a key economic resource in the heart of Latin America.The low point in U.S.-Panamanian relations came in 1964 when clashes began in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone over the flying of a Panama flag alongside a U.S. flag at a local high school. The country erupted…

Is the United States currently experiencing a national emergency? No matter when you read this, the answer is “yes.”Technically, the United States has been in a constant state of emergency since November 1979, when Jimmy Carter responded to the Iran hostage crisis by issuing an executive order declaring a national emergency and blocking Iranian government property. Even though Iran released the hostages on Ronald Reagan’s inauguration day in 1981, Reagan renewed Carter’s emergency declaration every year during his presidency. Since then, every president has continued to renew the 1979 emergency—while also declaring many emergencies of their own.When Donald Trump started…

U.S. President Donald Trump’s strident demand that the semi-autonomous island territory of Greenland come under U.S. “ownership” has set off a firestorm of consternation across the Atlantic. Although geographically part of the North American continent, the frozen island nation—more than three times Texas’s size, with 60,000 inhabitants—has been under European control for centuries. Europe has progressively loosened its control of Greenland over time. And there’s no reason to think that it wouldn’t further loosen that hold to allow the United States to pursue policies of mutual trans-Atlantic interest, including the expansion of mining and the U.S. military presence. The greatest…

If you only listened to the Trump administration’s pronouncements or only read the deer-in-the-headlights accounts provided by assorted legacy journalists, you might conclude that the new administration has already built up an irresistible head of steam. Given Trump’s monarchical pretensions, he’d undoubtedly like us all to think he is unbound by limits and that resistance is futile. That is not the case, however, and we should not mistake Trump’s bombastic return and far-reaching early initiatives for unstoppable momentum. On the contrary, we are more likely to look back on this period as the highwater mark of Trumpian hubris. Making lavish…

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday left in place Mississippi’s Jim Crow-era practice of removing voting rights from people convicted of certain felonies, including nonviolent crimes such as forgery and timber theft.The justices, without comment, turned away an appeal from Mississippi residents who have completed their sentences, but who have been unable to regain their right to vote. The court’s action let stand a ruling by the full 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that rejected the claim that permanent loss of voting rights amounted to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Constitution. Mississippi legislators, not…

Military families protesting the Defense Department’s anti-DEI push heckled Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on his arrival at United States European Command headquarters in Germany on Tuesday.On a visit to the U.S. military’s key European military hub in Stuttgart, Hegseth was booed by around two dozen people who live at the base in an apparent demonstration against the policies currently being implemented by the Trump administration. The demonstrators at the short protest repeatedly chanted “DEI,” apparently in a reference to the recent ban Hegseth has placed on some books in defense department schools. Hegseth last week ordered the restriction of learning…

Bird flu, or avian influenza, might seem like a relatively new phenomenon to the general public. But the disease, technically called Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), has been sickening birds since the 1800s, and likely much longer. And in humans, cases date at least as back to the 1918 flu pandemic. If scientists could have surveyed wastewater hundreds of years ago, they might have found it had been circulating for much longer.Understanding the history of bird flu can help reveal potential risks for a future pandemic, says Catharine Paules, an infectious diseases physician at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey…

Thomas Jefferson was many things during his long and accomplished life: Founding Father, U.S. president, ambassador to France, architect, author, farmer, inventor, violinist and all-around renaissance man. Through it all, he was also something else: an incorrigible shopaholic, saddled with debt.Jefferson inherited not one but two large estates, his father’s and his father-in-law’s, and earned a respectable income of his own from a variety of ventures. Even so, when he died at age 83 in 1826, he left behind debts in excess of $100,000—well over $1 million in today’s dollars, according to historian and biographer Jon Meacham.Where did all the…

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court agreed Friday to take on a new culture war dispute: whether the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school should be allowed to open in Oklahoma.The justices said they would review an Oklahoma Supreme Court decision that invalidated a state board’s approval of an application by the Catholic Church in Oklahoma to open a charter school.The conservative-dominated high court has issued several decisions in recent years signaling a willingness to allow public funds to flow to religious entities. At the same time, conservative-led states have sought to insert religion into public schools, including Louisiana’s…

WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans see the federal government as rife with corruption, inefficiency and red tape — but they’re less sure about whether Elon Musk is the right person to fix it. A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that only about 3 in 10 U.S. adults strongly or somewhat approve of President Trump’s creation of an advisory body on government efficiency, which Musk is helming. About 4 in 10 disapprove, while the rest were neutral or didn’t know enough to say. (The poll was conducted before Vivek Ramaswamy announced he would no longer…