Yesterday trump said there were backchannel talks being conducted with Iran........
Trump confirms IRGC backchannel, but calls for Iran's 'white flag of surrender'
"They should put up the white flag of surrender," Trump said in a phone interview, confirming reports of the IRGC backchannel talks that bypass mediators and Iranian political officials.
So if these talks don't include "mediators and Iranian political officials" who the hell is he negotiating with? What the hell does that even mean?
So today he said that...............
U.S.-Iran Updates: Trump says no talks with Iran taking place as standoff over Strait of Hormuz continues.
President Trump said Tuesday that there is no ongoing dialogue with Iran to end the war, and no discussions scheduled. His son-in-law and envoy Jared Kushner told Fox News on Monday that Iran is "not showing any interest" in striking a deal that "makes sense" for the United States. Nearly six months into the conflict, the U.S. and Iran remain locked in a standoff over control of the Strait of Hormuz.
And how could Oman be getting in the way of ending the war with Iran when they are the only ones trying to help negotiate an end to the stand off in the strait of Hormuz?
Yet another commercial ship was struck again yesterday.
And while trump claims the strait is once again open and under our control, only three ships passed through the strait on Sunday......
Hormuz traffic grinds to a halt
The president’s latest remarks came after shipping traffic through the strait slowed nearly to a halt over the weekend.
Only three ships passed through the critical oil passage Sunday, according to data from Kpler. The five-day average for transits stands at 12. Around 130 vessels crossed Hormuz daily before the war started on Feb. 28.
Kplr is the largest AIS network that monitor and analyse global vessel data with tools and analytics providing real-time positions, customisable map layers, notifications, vessel ownership, particulars and more in real time.
Health data appears to be most affected by administration’s attempt to wipe findings that don’t align with its priorities, tracker shows
A database of federal law enforcement officer misconduct records. A survey measuring physical, sexual and emotional violence against children and youth. Real-time pollution readings collected by air quality monitors from US embassies around the world.
These are among the hundreds of federal datasets that the Trump administration has taken down or altered as part of its aggressive campaign to wipe all mentions of data findings that do not align with the administration’s priorities.
Over the past year and a half, at least 28 federal datasets have been deleted and another 338 data collections have been modified, according to an online tracker released last week from dataindex.us, a group of data policy experts, researchers and developers that formed last year to monitor changes to government data.
“We’re at a very vulnerable point as a nation,” said Denice Ross, former US chief data scientist under the Biden administration and a co-founder of dataindex.us. “We’re facing a future where we are not going to have the information that we need to make decisions that will save lives and benefit American communities.”
The tracker includes detailed information about deleted or altered datasets from more than 60 federal agencies that span the environment, labor, law enforcement and other topics. But datasets on health appear to be the most affected by the Trump administration’s crackdown, comprising about 40% of the total number of terminated or altered data collections tracked by dataindex.us.
One of the main changes to these health datasets is that they no longer collect information on queer and trans people – as part of Donald Trump’s executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”.
Multiple Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) surveys, for example, have removed questions about respondents’ gender identity. These include the National HIV Surveillance System, the primary source of case data for HIV infections, the National Violent Death Reporting System, the CDC Diabetes Prevention Recognition Program, the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey and specific surveys evaluating Prep uptake among gay men and in communities of color.
In addition, there are at least four health datasets that are no longer being updated at all, including the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration’s (Samhsa) Drug Abuse Warning Network, a surveillance system that doctors and public health researchers used to track drug-related emergency room visits in near real-time to spot emerging overdose trends.
“These data are critical for identifying emerging epidemics and what parts of the population are most vulnerable to different types of health conditions,” said Thomas Babor, a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut who specializes in public health and addiction.
“We need to know what direction the trend is going, whether it’s the beginning of an end; we need to learn from prior episodes of epidemics and how they were responded to and what impact the responses had,” Babor said. “Taking down, even temporarily, some of the most important surveys that we have, especially for comparative purposes, is like we’re erasing our institutional memory for public health.”
Other deleted datasets include the US Department of Agriculture’s twice-annual survey of farm employers that counted the number of farm workers employed and their wages that informed the minimum pay rates for H-2A visa workers and a National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) survey of the pay and working conditions of teachers and principals at public and private schools across the country.
Christopher Dick, a co-founder of dataindex.us and former chief of the population evaluation, analysis and projections branch at the Census Bureau said they launched the online tracker because it was difficult to know exactly how many federal datasets had actually been deleted.
Government agencies aren’t required to notify the public when data collections are terminated, and some datasets have simply stopped updating because of a lack of staffing while others have been quietly pulled from federal websites with little notice. Some federal datasets also change or update on a regular basis, so it can be hard to figure out what is actually permanently deleted compared with a regular update.
“The question we’re trying to answer is: are certain datasets being taken away that have an impact on the American people?” Dick said.
The group identified important deleted or altered datasets through a combination of research about how the dataset was used, crowdsourcing from media reports, government employees, and people who used the datasets, monitoring social media, and tracking notices posted about proposed regulations from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
The dataindex.us tracker is not a complete list, and is probably still an undercount of all the deleted or altered datasets there are, said Ross. But the hope is the tracker is just a starting point.
“We want people who depend on different datasets, some of which might be sort of obscure, to let us know what corners to look in because we don’t have full visibility,” Ross said.
Probably very few ... and the sad part is the Fanboys won't care. They would rather talk about that small democratic party that is espousing communist ideals and try to pretend somehow they represent the Democratic Party.
Of course once again he and others keep ignoring trump's own words. I guess wherever they get their news from isn't reporting that to them.................
Trump’s South Korea move rattles foreign policy world
President Trump’s decision to reduce joint military exercises with South Korea is being met with derision from Democrats and fears from other allies who are already worried over the president’s past willingness to toss aside longtime defense commitments.
Trump said it was too late to fully cancel what he called expensive and provocative joint exercises known as Ulchi Freedom Shield but directed the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” the drills on Sunday — just a day before they were set to start.
The war games are a major part of a mutual defense treaty between the U.S. and South Korea, meant to protect Seoul from possible North Korean aggression.
The announcement, made in a Truth Social post, further added insult to injury by excoriating Seoul for refusing to help the U.S. in its war against Iran.
This is not the first time Trump has criticized the exercise. In 2018, he said he was suspending the drills after meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
But in curtailing the planned 10-day war game, Trump risks further alienating vital allies and partners, making the U.S. less safe in the process, analysts say.
Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said that “watering down U.S.-South Korea military exercises is a risky move that lowers coalition readiness and puts U.S. forces at risk with no real tangible benefit to the United States.”
He said Trump “does not seem to understand that North Korea is part of the ‘bad guys’ team.”
“North Korea threatens key American allies and trade partners — South Korea and Japan — daily,” he added. “Kim Jong Un is not America’s friend, he cannot be reasoned with, and he won’t give up his nuclear weapons. There is no Nobel Prize in Pyongyang.”
The president has said the exercises come across as unnecessarily hostile toward North Korea and has touted his “very good relationship” with Kim.
“Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea,”[/b] he wrote on social media.
“These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful,” the president added.
Trump noted Seoul’s decision not to get involved with the Iran war.
“While somewhat unrelated, I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, ‘No thanks!’” the president wrote on social media.
On Monday, Trump said he was turned off by South Korea not agreeing to help the U.S. denuclearize Iran even though the U.S. has troops in South Korea to deter aggression from North Korea.
He told reporters he recently spoke on the phone with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and asked if the South Korean leader would give the U.S. “a little hand” with Iran.
“I called him. I said, ‘Would you like to give us a little hand? We don’t need help with Iran, but if you’d like, give us a hand with Iran.’ He said, ‘No thanks.’ And I said, ‘Wait a minute. We have 39,000 soldiers over there, guarding you from Kim Jong Un, your next-door neighbor, and you’re not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran. That’s strange,’” Trump told reporters Monday in the Oval Office.
“We can’t go around and protect all of these countries, especially when they’re not there to help us,” he added.
Outside observers said it was obvious Trump was frustrated with the lack of support from key U.S. allies on the Iran front.
“Trump obviously he’s got his mind fixed on Iran right now, and it’s pretty clear that he still holds some frustration toward American partners and allies whom he asked for help and rebuffed him, and South Korea is on that list,” said Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Sobolik also said Trump has long held the perspective that South Korea is not doing enough in housing some 28,500 troops on the peninsula — most notably trying in his first term to pull American forces out of the country.
“I think he has locked in this distrust not just of the Koreans but of the value that America being there actually has,” he told The Hill.
That leaves the relationship between the two, “not in a great place,” Sobolik said. “This definitely feeds into preexisting doubt that the Koreans have had about the United States and Trump specifically.”
Lawmakers have also weighed in with their frustration over the scaled back exercises.
“China and Russia are watching how easily this President abandons America’s allies, and they will remember it the next time they test us,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement Monday.
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) called Trump’s decision “shortsighted” and a “mistake.”
“North and South Korea are still technically at war,” Kelly wrote on social media Sunday. “Our ability to help defend our ally against the North Koreans is because our forces are well trained and able to coordinate with the South Koreans.”
“Hollowing out these joint exercises is shortsighted and a mistake,” the Arizona senator added.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) wrote on social media that the reduction “does nothing more than free up thousands of North Korea’s troops to support Putin’s systematic kidnapping, torture, rape, and murder of innocent Ukrainian citizens.”
Dan Blumenthal, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said there is precedent for Trump to look at canceling or scoping down exercises with South Korea “in hopes of making progress on talks with North Korea in his first term, which didn’t … pan out.”
He added: “So … it’s something that is at the front of his mind, you know, on a fairly constant basis when he thinks about the Korean Peninsula.”
Blumenthal also told The Hill the reduction of exercises “hurts us. It hurts the alliance. It hurts deterrence.”
Still, South Korea seems to want to improve relations with North Korea and hopes that Trump has the ability to do that. South Korea’s Lee has pushed for Trump to facilitate direct talks with Kim to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
Trump, during his first term, met with Kim three times.
Blumenthal said the way to foster dialogue with Kim is not through reduced exercises.
“We get nothing out of reducing our exercise program with South Korea,” he said, adding that it “certainly will appear like a concession … even if that wasn’t the main purpose behind them in the action.”
Some, though, have called the move to reduce the exercises as strategic.
Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, called it “both a necessary and strategically wise one aligned with U.S. interests.”
“For decades, the Pentagon has argued that U.S. military exercises with South Korea advance several objectives, including deterring aggression by North Korea and China; encouraging regional stability; and preparing U.S. and South Korean soldiers to operate together in a contingency,” she said in a statement. “The reality is that there is little evidence bilateral exercises support any of these aims. In fact, they seem to work in the other direction.”
She added that the exercises “unnecessarily burn U.S. resources and readiness at a time when the United States is running low on both.”
Others have said not to panic just yet, as U.S.-South Korea relations have appeared pretty stable up until this point.
“He had a good meeting with President Lee in Busan in October, and he also agreed to give technology to South Korea to allow them to build nuclear short submarines, so it’s possible that something suddenly changed regarding Iran. But I also think there’s a possibility something is going on behind the scenes that we haven’t seen yet,” said Evan Sankey, policy analyst at the Cato Institute.
“If this were to go so far as to withdraw troops from South Korea, then we’re talking about long- term damage,” he added.
Another treaty agreement trump has broken we can now add to the list. Nobody can trust the word of the U.S. anymore because whether we honor an agreement with them can hinge on a single election.
And trump, in his own words said he likes and doesn't want to upset Kim Jong Un. That Kim Jong Un is.......
Whistleblower says probes into antisemitism at colleges were ploys to harass and strip millions
A former Justice Department lawyer says the Trump investigations squeezed Ivy League universities for millions before they were even concluded. A top Democrat is demanding answers
The Trump administration’s findings that three Ivy League schools violated civil rights law by tolerating antisemitism were predetermined by political priorities that blew past the evidence and cast aside standard investigative procedures, according to a whistleblower account provided to Congress.
The disclosure, by Haley Van Erem, a veteran Justice Department civil rights attorney, involves investigations into whether Harvard, Brown and Columbia universities broke the law by allowing antisemitism to flourish on their campuses.
The whistleblower account comes just days after a federal judge dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit against Harvard that was based on the investigation, which was conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services and lawyers detailed from the DOJ.
Both Brown and Columbia reached settlements, with Columbia agreeing to pay $200 million over three years and Brown agreeing to spend $50 million on Rhode Island workforce development, with no admission of wrongdoing.
Harvard fought and won.
U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns ruled in that case that the Trump administration’s allegations relied on incidents that occurred more than a full academic year before it filed its lawsuit — incidents he said were “too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference” that Harvard was violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Van Erem’s whistleblower account, reviewed by MS NOW, says the findings “overrode knowing deviation from investigative procedures, statutory noncompliance, and potential constitutional violations.”
“Hundreds of millions of dollars were suspended from these universities prior to the completion of Title VI investigations and the investigative team’s conclusions were frequently disregarded,” the complaint says.
In a letter to Harmeet Dhillon, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee said the whistleblower findings exposed a “large scale fraud.”
“Antisemitism at American universities and medical schools is real,” Rep. Jamie Raskin wrote.
“But your ‘investigation’ into antisemitism was fake, a pre-baked frame-up operation thoroughly political in nature. Before an actual investigation took place and regardless of what you actually found, the whole project was designed to harass professors and administrators at major universities, to curtail their freedom of speech and academic freedom, and to strip targeted institutions of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants that they had already been awarded on the merits of their applications.”
The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.
The whistleblower complaint says the investigation was launched based on a single article in the New York Post that described antisemitic activities at medical school graduations.
“The article described protests that included protected expression such as students shouting ‘Free Palestine’ and students wearing Palestinian flags or keffiyehs,” the complaint says, adding: “It was not unheard of for news reporting coupled with additional evidence to lead the DOJ to initiate further scrutiny of potential statutory violations, but opening an investigation based on a single article was highly unusual.”
The complaint said that after being informed that there was no evidence to support a finding of a Title VI violation based on antisemitism at Brown, a senior Trump administration official at HHS, Daniel Shieh, agreed that there was “not a Title VI violation,” but told Van Erem and other DOJ team members at the meeting that “there’s no way we’re going to get a letter of no violation cleared.”
He pushed instead to obtain a settlement from Brown, and that ultimately happened.
The whistleblower complaint also accused Trump officials of telling investigators to interview Middle East studies professors, particularly focusing on Muslims, noting that one such interview of a Muslim professor was not to “get information,” but instead to see “what he will say.”
Raskin called that “a craven willingness to racially and ethnically profile faculty members while ostensibly investigating racial and ethnic discrimination.”
HHS did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.
According to her complaint, Van Erem left the Justice Department in May 2025, “unwilling to be made vulnerable to further participation in politically motivated investigations unsupported by facts and contrary to law.”
Her complaint asks for an investigation by the HHS inspector general, the DOJ inspector general and the Office of Special Counsel.
“The full extent of your misconduct remains unclear,” Raskin wrote to Dhillon. “At the very least, you have shown gross negligence in supervising the activities of your office. It is also a distinct possibility that you deliberately orchestrated a scheme to attack universities and their faculties and administrators while defrauding the American people and the courts.”
...and what do Republicans have to say about Trump and the GOPs support for communist NKorea/Kim Jong Un...NOTHING-not a word.
You can spin it that way mac, but the reality is it is more a dart thrown at S Korea over support for N Korea.
Peen..whenever the Repubs spout their claim that Dems are communists, I have to laugh at those who actually believe those lies.
It's actually Trump and his GOP followers who are cozy with the communist countries and the communist dictators ..for example, NKorea/KimJong Un...Russia/Putin...China/Xi Jinping...
After Trump and Israel started their (go it alone) Iran War, they realized that Iran was not the "push over" they envisioned, Trump started asking for help from NATO counties and S.Korea and they refused to get drawn into a War they had nothing to do with. Trumps refusal to participate in S.Korea War Games is a sort of 'pay-back' for S. Korea turning Trump down.
Except Berry didn’t have a choice in trading for Watson. That decision was made by Haslam, and Haslam alone. Berry would have been out of a job if he didn’t try. I don’t care what his job title is he didn’t have control in this situation. Fate is right in this.
I would certainly like to know what it is you're basing that on other than your thoughts and feelings.
I don't go along with that idea in a general sense but if a man hadn't eaten in a couple of days or someone had hungry children I wouldn't try to prosecute them or paint him as a criminal if they were stealing some food. I would actually be willing to pay for it myself.
I can agree with you in that limited example. That said I don't think many face prosecution over stealing a few loafs of bread and pack of salami. If you were the store owner, you probably won't press charges. On the other hand if it was happening a hundred time a week by 100 different people you would get tired of the losses as that adds up to real money. At minimum you would seek to have them trespassed from your store.
And then we're getting away from the point, and this crackhead's proposal, making theft LEGAL if you need the product.
The Browns are still going to be last in the division again. They have the worst QB's in the AFC North. Hopefully they can get Manning or Moore in the draft.
I don't go along with that idea in a general sense but if a man hadn't eaten in a couple of days or someone had hungry children I wouldn't try to prosecute them or paint him as a criminal if they were stealing some food. I would actually be willing to pay for it myself.
I can agree with you in that limited example. That said I don't think many face prosecution over stealing a few loafs of bread and pack of salami. If you were the store owner, you probably won't press charges. On the other hand if it was happening a hundred time a week by 100 different people you would get tired of the losses as that adds up to real money. At minimum you would seek to have them trespassed from your store.
Three years we weren't in position to draft a franchise QB because those draft picks were traded away by Andrew Berry. That's something he was in control of.
Nobody said that Berry "didn't try". Every NFL GM who doesn't have a franchise QB does everything they can to get a legitimate starting QB. They all try to do that. But as is the case here, many of them fail as well. And that's their #1 job as an NFL GM.
You point out that watson "was" a franchise QB. What you failed to mention was he quit on his team by not playing in Houston his last season there and that at least some of these sexual allegations were known before Berry brought him to Cleveland. Sometimes the answer isn't as simple as what someone "was".
If you try and still fail, is that an accomplishment? All I've done is point out what the mission was and how it failed. I'm not sure what the debate beyond that is?
It’s well documented how I feel about Watson pre-Browns. That hasn’t changed since he became a member of the Browns. I stated clearly “what he did on the field”.
Here’s the thing, you can’t take a giant leap for a franchise QB and then reset and do it again the next year and the next year after that. You take a swing and get a giant miss-Jimmy Haslem, you take the lumps that go with that decision and have to wait for it to run its course.
You can argue all you want about Berry’s responsibility for Watson. Haslem’s actions(or lack there of) show just how heavy his part was in that transaction. If Berry initiated that move, championed for it, etc., he would no longer be the GM. Instead, the organization has moved on from other pieces of the front office and coaching staff and Berry is hitting his stride.
Was there an opportunity to change the stars in the QB room in 2026? Absolutely not, no chance. We have one more year of purgatory in the Watson debacle and then it can go down in 30 for 30 on ESPN as the worst trade in NFL history.
We can only focus on what can be controlled. The moment that trade was made, we all knew we were on a 5 year trip.
Originally Posted by bonefish
We don't have any control.
I know you read "I am not trying to define their careers."
The Giants passed on Dart and SS. But they traded back to get Dart.
Schuck was there in the second. I love Carson.
If Carson and Graham are perennial pro bowlers. And Schuck and Dart are pro bowlers or win a Super Bowl.
We made the wrong choice.
I am all about moving forward. In fact I have since we won it all in 1964 when I was in 11th grade.
I want to win a Super Bowl before my last day. I want the quarterback who can do that. It has only been 62 years of moving forward.
OK, I concede.. let’s wait the 3 more years to see where all these players are going in their first veteran contract.
My money is on None of them having a Super Bowl ring yet, however, my money is also on the Browns being closer to the ring than the Giants and Saints. The Rams might get another one, but Simpson won’t be the starter in that game.
BTW, you keep repeating it over and over. If you are going to shine a light on the Saints QB, his name is Shough, not Shuck. It’s pronounced Shuck, but it isn’t spelled that way. It took me a second early on to figure out who you were talking about.
Thanks for keeping this place going, I hope you realize the appreciation we have for you and your efforts. Dayum, 20 yrs. We've gotten old together despite the crap show of a team that's been on the field most of those seasons. I'll never forget the sense of joy I felt when I got an email from Jules telling me that you were starting this board, after the Browns decided to do away with the original one. I even still use the orange on black theme. Thanks again.
There are three quarterbacks that have been drafted that we should pay attention to.
Jaxson Dart, Tyler Schuck, and Ty Simpson. We could have drafted any of these three.
Dart and Schuck are starters. Simpson completed 21 of 25 passes for 190 yards, throwing two touchdowns in his first opportunity.
We can go on and on about how good the last two drafts were.
Our quarterbacks are DW and SS.
I can't say I was on the Schuck train to any degree but was all over Dart and Simpson. If we had we wouldn't have to have all these stupid conversation over Watson and Shedufus.
It looks great. I doubt I will still hold season tickets at that point, but with health cooperating am sure I will find my way inside a few times a season.
Oh and don't forget about all the lies about the Iran war, and listen to this (fromJon Ossoff, the next PoTUS)
.... “Remember, last year, they claimed Iran’s nuclear program had been obliterated? Then, this year, they claimed it posed an imminent nuclear threat? Both times, lies. On day one of the war, listen to this, day one, the president said the war was quote, ‘Ahead of schedule.’ Ahead of schedule. On day four, he declared victory. Today is day 170,” said Ossoff, who is running for reelection this year.
.... “Listen to this, on day nine of the war, the incompetent Pete Hegseth guaranteed Iranian surrender. On day 14, he claimed Iran’s military had been destroyed. On day 40, he said every single objective had been achieved. That was four months ago,” Ossoff added.
So instead of paying attention to the real time incompetence, lies and corruption in the White House - the right wing spin machine is full overdrive about a fringe group of hardcore crazy communists who aren't part of the Democratic party, but with every post they make they try to make it seem like they are.
