PBS / PolitiFact: Comparing the mood of America’s 250th anniversary with its 200th in 1976
As the US approaches its 250th anniversary, historians compare the national mood with the bicentennial of 1976 and see eerie parallels — international conflict, high inflation and gas prices, culture wars and low presidential approval. The key difference: society is far more polarised today, and Trump’s loud, self-centred approach (cage fights on the White House lawn) stands in sharp contrast to Gerald Ford’s modest, founders-focused tone back then.
Financial Times: Alternative for Germany revives Nazi-era attacks on Bauhaus
The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation warns that the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is reviving Nazi-era attacks on modernism ahead of September’s election in Saxony-Anhalt, where the party is polling at 41%. The foundation’s head has taken out directors’ liability insurance for the first time in preparation for a possible legal battle; the AfD promises a “patriotic cultural policy” and calls Bauhaus “the wrong path of modernity.” If the party came to power, the famous design school could be closed again — just as it was under Nazi pressure in 1932–33.
Financial Times: Nigel Farage’s Brexit rallies were funded from the EU budget
Ten years after the Brexit referendum, the FT has obtained documents showing that EU money controlled by Nigel Farage’s former European Parliament group (the EFDD) — around €1.8mn — financed the 2015–16 “Say No to EU” anti-EU campaign: venue hire, posters, livestreams and leaflets depicting immigrants as a threat. Both UK and EU rules bar foreign and group funds from being used this way in a domestic campaign, and experts are calling for an investigation.
Ukrainian drone strikes on oil refineries are gradually dragging Russia into a fuel crisis, and restrictions on petrol sales have spread across most of the country’s regions. Meduza collected readers’ letters, and the picture is uneven: Crimea, border areas and the south already face acute shortages, queues and limits (20 litres per customer), while elsewhere — Siberia, Moscow — there is still enough petrol for now. Readers overwhelmingly blame the war Putin started.
The New York Times: The Science That Turned Lizard Venom Into GLP-1s Is Under Attack
Jeff Coller of Johns Hopkins University recalls that GLP-1 drugs (Ozempic, Wegovy) grew out of a modestly funded 1990s study of the venom of the Gila monster, a desert lizard. The system that lets science chase such strange questions is being dismantled: in 2025 the Trump administration froze or cancelled billions of dollars in research grants and is proposing a rule that grants be approved by political appointees. The author warns that it is precisely curiosity-driven “weird science” that drives medicine forward.
404 Media: Scientists Propose Black Holes Don’t Exist, Are Something Much Stranger
In 404 Media’s weekly science roundup, physicists in Germany present, for the first time, a model for how a “gravastar” might form — a hypothetical alternative to a black hole with no singularity and no event horizon. Instead, a star’s collapse would yield an object dominated by dark energy, inside which a kind of mini-universe could be born, yet from the outside it would be virtually indistinguishable from a black hole.
Axios: New global order: AI CEOs as heads of nation-states
Axios captures a striking scene at this week’s G7 summit in the French Alps (Évian): the CEOs of America’s leading AI companies — Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), Dario Amodei (Anthropic) and others — were treated almost like heads of state, holding bilateral meetings with national leaders. All three urged Western democracies not to “splinter” but to cooperate so that democracies, not authoritarian regimes, keep leading on AI, and called for a US-led international standards body.
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