News

Summary

A leak allegedly involving 2.87 billion Twitter (X) user profiles has surfaced on Breach Forums, with claims it was stolen by a disgruntled employee during recent layoffs.

The leak, shared by known forum user "ThinkingOne," includes detailed metadata like bios, follower counts, tweet history, and account activity—but not email addresses.

Despite its scale, X has issued no response. The incident raises major privacy concerns amid silence from the company and speculation over the data's true origin.

https://archive.ph/8GaWL

https://archive.ph/yZnHu

Attorney General Pam Bondi has said the Department of Justice will seek a 20-year prison sentence for a man accused of throwing a firebomb at a Tesla dealership.

Bondi said Monday that Cooper Jo Frederick, who is accused of attacking a Tesla dealership in Loveland, Colorado, on March 7, would face federal charges.

Summary

NOAA is facing turmoil as over 1,000 staff have been fired or resigned under Trump’s push to downsize the federal workforce, with 1,000 more cuts expected.

Elon Musk’s DOGE has disrupted weather operations, including halting weather balloon launches and briefly firing hurricane tracking staff.

A faulty, unsecured email server flooded employees with spam, symbolizing the chaos.

Critics warn the cuts threaten public safety, climate research, and marine oversight. Protests have emerged as staff face uncertainty and deteriorating agency operations.

March 31 (Reuters) - Iran complained to the United Nations Security Council on Monday about "reckless and belligerent" remarks by U.S. President Donald Trump, describing them as "a flagrant violation of international law" and the founding United Nations Charter.

Elon Musk has sold social media site X to his own xAI artificial intelligence company in a $33 billion all-stock deal, the billionaire announced on Friday.

Musk said in a post on X that the move will “unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.” He said the deal values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion. Musk, who serves as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX as well as an advisor to President Donald Trump, bought the site then called Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, gutted its staff and changed its policies on hate speech, misinformation and user verification and renamed it X.

He launched xAI a year later.

“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent. This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach,” Musk wrote on X. “The combined company will deliver smarter, more meaningful experiences to billions of people while staying true to our core mission of seeking truth and advancing knowledge.”

It's not clear if the move will change anything for X users — xAI already uses data from X user posts to train its artificial intelligence models and paying X users have access to its AI chatbot, Grok.

It's nice to see the senate opposition functioning.

Summary

The Department of Health and Human Services began laying off 10,000 employees Tuesday as part of a major workforce reduction led by Elon Musk.

The cuts, affecting the CDC, FDA, NIH, and CMS, target divisions focused on HIV, minority health, drug approvals, and vaccine oversight.

Entire teams, like the FDA’s media office, were eliminated. Dr. Peter Marks, a key vaccine regulator, was also ousted.

Critics, including lawmakers, warn the layoffs threaten public health.

Summary

Rightwing groups across the US are driving a wave of legislation to restrict books in school and public libraries, targeting content deemed “sexually explicit” or “obscene,” often affecting LGBTQ+ and race-related titles.

Texas leads with 31 bills and 538 book bans in the 2023–24 school year.

Proposed laws, like Texas Senate Bill 13, shift book selection power from librarians to parent-led advisory boards.

Critics, including librarians and legal scholars, warn these efforts amount to censorship, risk violating First Amendment rights, and reduce access in underserved communities.

Reporting Highlights

• Unexpected Role: Flight attendants were told they would fly rock bands, sports teams and sun-seekers. Then Global Crossing Airlines started expanding into federal deportation flights.
• Human Struggles: Some flight attendants said they ignored orders not to interact with detainees. “I’d say ‘hola’ back,” said one flight attendant. “We’re not jerks.”
• Safety Concerns: Flight attendants received training in how to evacuate passengers but said they weren’t told how to usher out detainees whose hands and legs were bound by shackles.

Disable JavaScript to bypass paywall.

• The USIP is now headed by a 28-year-old, per a federal court filing.
• DOGE named Nate Cavanaugh, a tech entrepreneur and college dropout, as the USIP's acting president.
• Lawyers for the USIP said nearly all of the institute's staff in the US have been fired.

https://archive.ph/fkjbG

Three others also suffered lasting disabilities, according to FDA reports obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request

• Bloomberg.
• The Boston Globe.

Summary

ICE admitted it mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia—despite his legal protection from removal—to El Salvador’s brutal CECOT prison.

A Maryland judge had barred his deportation due to gang threats in El Salvador.

The Trump administration claims it can't intervene since he’s no longer in U.S. custody.

His family is suing to compel his return. The administration also deported over 200 Venezuelans using emergency powers, some without criminal records, sparking legal challenges and criticism of its use of the Alien Enemies Act.

The Center for Public Integrity, a thirty-six-year-old nonprofit newsroom in Washington, DC, that won acclaim for its investigations but has endured financial and organizational turmoil for much of the past decade, has ceased publishing and is in talks to turn over its archives to the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), an anti-corruption watchdog group.

On Friday, an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles was fired without explanation in an terse email from the White House Presidential Personnel Office shortly after a right-wing activist posted about him on social media, according to a person familiar with the matter. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were concerned about potential retribution.

That followed the White House’s firing last week of a longtime career prosecutor who had been serving as acting U.S. attorney in Memphis, Tennessee.

The terminations marked an escalation of norm-shattering moves that have embroiled the Justice Department in turmoil and have raised alarm over a disregard for civil service protections for career lawyers and the erosion of the agency’s independence from the White House. That one of them was fired on the same day a conservative internet personality called for his removal adds to questions about how outside influences may be helping to shape government personnel decisions.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/60051791

A leaked memo from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Research Service division revealed Sunday that the agency has banned some key language from its vocabulary, including the words “climate” and “vulnerable,” as well as the phrase “safe drinking water.”

Other baffling entries on the memo’s banned language list are “greenhouse gas emissions,” “methane emissions,” “sustainable construction,” “solar energy,” and “geothermal,” as well as “nuclear energy,” “diesel,” “affordable housing,” “prefabricated housing,” “runoff,” “microplastics,” “water pollution,” “soil pollution,” “groundwater pollution,” “sediment remediation,” “water collection,” “water treatment,” “rural water,” and “clean water,” among dozens of others.

Many communities marked their driest winters on record, snowpack was nearly nonexistent in some spots, and vegetation remains tinder dry -- all ingredients for elevated wildfire risks.

More than 1,000 firefighters and fire managers recently participated in an annual wildfire academy in Arizona, where training covered everything from air operations to cutting back brush with chain saws and building fire lines. Academy officials say there’s consensus that crews will be busy as forecasts call for more warm and dry weather, particularly for the Southwest.

Experts with NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information reported in early March that total winter precipitation in the U.S. was just shy of 6 inches (15.24 centimeters) — or nearly an inch (2.54 centimeters) below average. The period of December through the end of February — what forecasters consider the meteorological winter — ranked the third driest on record.

I'm not sure if this is the correct community, but I found it interesting/terrifying and was circulating in a local discord. It's made in Tableau.