Public notes from activescott
Five out of the seven Trump-backed candidates defeated Republican state lawmakers in the Hoosier State who dared to block the president’s calls for redistricting. Additionally, Trump’s backed candidates in Ohio, home to what are slated to be competitive Senate and gubernatorial races, won their primaries.
The U.S. has killed more than 180 people in eight months in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. While the headlines have slowed, the Southern Spear strikes on alleged drug runners have not.
The military continues to release virtually no information about who was killed, on what basis, or with what weapons.
"If the administration wants to compete with China — that seems to be central — and wants to maintain this presence in the hemisphere and wants to be involved in a foreign conflict, then you need a bigger Navy," Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Axios.
Trump took aim at seven Republican state senators in Indiana who opposed his plan to redraw congressional district boundaries to help the party gain seats in the U.S. House. His intervention mostly paid off.
Groups allied with the president spent more than $8.3 million on advertising, an extraordinary surge of money into races that are typically low-profile.
Five Trump-backed challengers won. One incumbent won. A seventh contest was too close to call on Tuesday night.
The races were a test of Trump’s enduring grip over his party as Republicans grow increasingly anxious about
For decades now, media consolidation has been on the rise, and as of April 2026, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says about 90% of American media is owned by 50 companies.
Today, six corporations comprise almost all American media: Comcast, Walt Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, Skydance, Sony and Amazon. But that number may drop to five, pending the Justice Department’s approval of a deal between Paramount and WBD.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million. And it’s not just national news.
Local news stations are seeing consolidations as well, most recently with the Tegna-Nexstar merger. The FCC approved that deal in March, allowing one company to now cover 80% of U.S. TV-watching households.
CPJ says that with these corporations and investors purchasing news media organizations comes a threat to press freedoms, noting many have signaled a willingness to comply editorially with U.S. politicians. It says media consolidation “is a threat to democracy that puts press freedom at the mercy of fewer and vastly wealthier owners whose fortunes may depend on government laws and support.”
In a letter obtained by The Washington Post, 29 lawmakers led by Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to provide details on Israel’s capabilities – and how the administration is preparing for the risk of nuclear escalation.
The request challenges a long-standing U.S. policy of avoiding public acknowledgment of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Lawmakers argue that silence creates a double standard, undercutting U.S. credibility when confronting nuclear ambitions in countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The push also reflects broader Democratic frustration with Israel’s conflicts across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and now Iran, deepening divisions inside the party.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, independent estimates suggest Israel holds roughly 90 plutonium-based nuclear warheads. The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation says the country has developed enough material to build between 100 and 200 weapons.
Salesforce integration
CaptivateIQ automates commissions by pulling actual sales data from connected CRM systems, applying custom compensation rules to each deal, and generating real-time payout statements. Commission plans are defined using a visual modeling engine called SmartGrid and stay continuously in sync with closed revenue as data updates. Plans can include: Tiers and accelerators Bonuses and SPIFs Draw structures Eligibility rules SmartGrid handles these structures at scale, so teams can update logic, test scenarios, and maintain accuracy as plans evolve.
Lenders, including JPMorgan and MUFG, have spent more than six months distributing $38bn of construction debt tied to a data centre project leased to Oracle in Texas and Wisconsin, people familiar with the matter said.
Some banks sought to sell the loans at a discount to non-bank lenders to offload the Oracle-linked debt, the people said.
Banks have in recent weeks sounded out investors about structures including a variant of a significant risk transfer, or SRT. SRTs have been commonly used by European banks to reduce their capital requirements by offloading the risk of losses on part of a loan portfolio to investors such as private credit funds and insurers in exchange for a return. North American banks have begun using the instruments more in recent years. Rather than a classic SRT that may be tied to dozens of loans, banks are exploring slicing and dicing large and concentrated data centre loans to shift the riskiest portions off their books, for example.
Companies have already started expanding to new debt markets beyond bank lending by issuing private credit, asset-backed securities, commercial mortgage-backed securities and privately placed bonds. “There’s a nervousness . . . [Banks] are having to find more counterparties in order to achieve for what’s in the market and in the pipeline,” said Carlos Mendez, co-founder at Crayhill Capital.
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The U.S. Dollar Index, which measures the greenback against other major currencies, logged its steepest six-month drop in more than 50 years in the first half of 2025. Though the decline hasn’t deepened, the dollar index is still about 10% lower than the start of Trump’s term.
A strong dollar makes imports cheaper and can help keep inflation in check. A weak one can increase prices on foreign goods but boost American exports.
Trump has suggested a strong dollar puts the U.S. at a disadvantage and that a weak dollar helps American industry. And as with most things with Trump, he’s been blunter in his messaging.
“You make a hell of a lot more money with a weaker dollar,” he said last year, one of a number of public statements showing his preference for seeing the dollar decline.
Trump isn’t alone in seeing benefits of a weaker buck.
In recent months, corporate earnings calls have been peppered with talk of how a weaker dollar has helped companies from Philip Morris to Coca-Cola, with executives pulling out C-suite phrases like “favorable currency impact” to note how the dip brought tailwinds outside the U.S. that added to bottom lines.
Currency values are constantly moving and, while the dollar’s recent fall is notable, it has reached lower levels at points in the presidencies of each of Trump’s predecessors, back through the creation of the Dollar Index in 1973, when Richard Nixon was at the helm.
Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University economist and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, says while “a lot of policies that Trump is doing are something of a cancer for the dollar,” he believes that it was destined to fall no matter who was in charge.
“The dollar had been on a 15-year bull run,” he said. “I would argue the dollar is still wildly overvalued, and over the next maybe five or six years, it might fall 15%.”
What does that mean for American consumers? Rogoff says commodity prices are likely to rise, particularly with the impact of the Iran war on fuel prices.
“They’re just going to go up,” he says, “no matter what the dollar’s at.”
Lebanon’s National News Agency reports Israeli attacks have killed more than 30 people in a single day, in further violations of the U.S.-brokered ceasefire signed by Israel and Lebanon last month. Two children were among those killed in the attacks on southern Lebanon. They came as a Hezbollah drone injured 12 Israeli soldiers in northern Israel. On Thursday, Israel issued new forced evacuation orders for villages north of a strip of occupied territory along the border that Israel is calling a “Yellow Line.” More than 1 million people have been displaced from their homes by Israel’s attacks, about one-fifth of Lebanon’s population.
The Saver's Credit can be used by low- and moderate-income individuals and families to reduce their tax bills.
The Saver's Credit is applied directly to your tax bill to reduce the amount of federal income tax you owe. For instance, if your tax bill is $1,000 and your credit is $400, you'd only owe $600. If your tax bill is $1,000 and your credit is $1,000, it's a wash. You'd owe nothing.
To qualify, you must be 18 or older, not a full-time student, and not claimed as a dependent on someone else's tax return. Then you have to meet the AGI requirements. AGI is your gross income minus adjustments such as deductible retirement contributions, self-employment taxes, educator expenses, and student loan interest.
Of course, the final qualification is that you make a contribution to a retirement account. It's important to note that rollover contributions do not qualify for the credit, and eligible contributions may be reduced by recent retirement account distributions. Contributions to a wide range of retirement accounts qualify for this credit, including:
Traditional IRA Roth IRA Traditional 401(k) Roth 401(k) 403(b) 457 plan SARSEP SEP IRA SIMPLE IRA Thrift Savings Plan ABLE account
What is the Saver's Match, and how is it different from the Saver's Credit?
Beginning in tax year 2027, the Saver's Credit for retirement contributions will be replaced by the Saver's Match. While both incentives are designed to encourage lower‑ and moderate‑income workers to save for retirement, they work in different ways.
The Saver's Credit is a nonrefundable tax credit that reduces the amount of federal income tax you owe. By contrast, the Saver's Match provides a government matching contribution—worth up to 50% of the first $2,000 ($4,000 per person for joint filers) you contribute each year—that is deposited directly into an eligible retirement account.
For most organizations, autoMode.environment is the only field you need to set. It tells the classifier which repos, buckets, and domains are trusted: the classifier uses it to decide what “external” means, so any destination not listed is a potential exfiltration target. The default environment list trusts the working repo and its configured remotes. To add your own entries alongside that default, include the literal string "$defaults" in the array. The default entries are spliced in at that position, so your custom entries can go before or after them.
If it wasn't for the tariffs, would Colossus be solar-powered? It would be much easier to make it solar powered, yeah. The tariffs are nuts, several hundred percent. Don't you know some people? The president has... we don't agree on everything and this administration is not the biggest fan of solar. We also need the land, the permits, and everything. So if you try to move very fast, I do think scaling solar on Earth is a good way to go, but you do need some amount of time to find the land, get the permits, get the solar, pair that with the batteries.
I just repeatedly tackle the limiting factor. Whatever the limiting factor is on speed, I'm going to tackle that. If capital is the limiting factor,
20:52 20 minutes, 52 seconds then I'll solve for capital. If it's not the limiting factor, I'll solve for something else.
If it wasn't for the tariffs, would Colossus be solar-powered? It would be much easier to make it solar powered, yeah. The tariffs are nuts, several hundred percent. Don't you know some people? The president has... we don't agree on everything and this administration is not the biggest fan of solar.
Dwarkesh is pretty annoying. How many times does he say to Jensen "is that true" or some variant of calling him a liar. he can push back without insinuating he's a liar and Jensen definitely does not come off as a liar here. Maybe biased, but not liar.
If we scare this country into thinking that AI is somehow a nuclear bomb, so that everybody hates AI and everybody's afraid of AI, I don't know how you're helping the United States. You're doing it a disservice. If we scare everybody out of doing software engineering jobs because it's going to kill every software engineering job—and we don't have any software engineers as a result of that—we're doing a disservice to the United States. If we scare everybody out of radiology so nobody wants to be a radiologist because computer vision is completely free and no AI is going to do a worse job than a radiologist, we misunderstand the difference between a job and a task. The job of a radiologist is patient care. The task is to read a scan. If we misunderstand that so profoundly and we scare everybody out of going to radiology school, we're not going to have enough radiologists and good enough healthcare. So I'm making the case that when you make a premise that is so extreme, everything goes from zero or infinity, we end up scaring people in a way that's just not true. – Jensen Huang
Venezuela is another possible contender, said market watchers. With output recovering faster than expected and a potentially more U.S.-friendly political environment emerging, Caracas could seek greater flexibility.
“Venezuela could be next off the rank in wake of leadership change there to a more U.S. friendly position,” said Saul Kavonic, energy analyst at MST Marquee.
Kpler’s Smith also said that Venezuela was a potential candidate because it has been ramping up production and exports at a quicker pace than expected. Venezuela’s oil exports rose above a million barrels per day in March for the first time since September.