Author: rpnadmin

On a recent Friday, Mark Wasser, an eminent-domain lawyer from Sacramento, embarked on a one-day road trip of more than 500 miles. It is one that he has taken often over the past decade.A tall and trim man in his 70s, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, Mr. Wasser folded himself into the driver’s seat of his car and aimed south. He drove toward dozens of California’s high-speed rail construction projects scattered across the vast farmland of the Central Valley.No one has represented more eminent domain cases involving the rail project than Mr. Wasser. In the long distances between…

President Trump on Sunday announced movies as the latest target for tariffs because the U.S. movie industry “is DYING a very fast death.”In a Truth Social post, the president said he’s authorizing the Department of Commerce and  the United States Trade Representative to begin the process of imposing a 100% tariffs “on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”It wasn’t immediately clear how the tariffs would be applied.Mr. Trump said the incentives that other countries are offering filmmakers and studios constitute a national security threat.”Other Countries are offering all sorts of incentives to…

Attorney General Merrick Garland looks at an exhibit titled the Faces of Gun Violence while on a tour led by Steve Dettelbach, director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, at ATF headquarters on April 23, 2024, in Washington, D.C. The display has now been taken down. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images An exhibit showing victims of gun violence has been taken down at the headquarters of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the Department of Justice has confirmed. The exhibit showed the portraits of 120 people killed in gun…

President Trump confirmed on Sunday that he had pressed Mexico’s president to let U.S. troops into the country to help fight drug cartels, an idea she summarily rejected.Mr. Trump told reporters traveling with him aboard Air Force One from Palm Beach, Fla., to Washington that it was “true” he had made the push with President Claudia Sheinbaum. The proposal, first reported by The Wall Street Journal last week, came at the end of a lengthy phone call between the two leaders on April 16, The Journal said.Ms. Sheinbaum has also confirmed that Mr. Trump made the suggestion, and that she…

After more than a week of oil shooting vertically out of an unused well off the coast of Louisiana, the U.S. Coast Guard announced Sunday evening that the offshore well blowout — first reported on April 26 — has been controlled. The well had been leaking oil and natural gas in a 30 to 40-foot-high “geyser of oil,” as one witness described, contaminating nearby marshland and protected Gulf Coast habitats, and prompting a large-scale emergency response. “Gaining control of the discharge is a vital milestone, but it marks only the beginning of our work. The Unified Command is fully committed to an…

Books & the Arts / April 28, 2025 In Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism, he attempts to diagnose the apocalyptic nature of conservatism around the world. Ad Policy A woman wearing a sweatshirt for the QAnon conspiracy theory gestures during a pro-Trump rally on October 11, 2020, in Ronkonkoma, New York. (Stephanie Keith / Getty Images) I’ve never known quite what to do when a conspiracy theory is shared with me. Having grown up in a conservative-talk-radio family, I confess that a mild paranoia about the liberal world is a given for me. The ravings included things like the death of…

President Trump said on Sunday that he wanted federal law enforcement agencies to work on restoring Alcatraz, now a museum, to a functioning maximum-security prison.Repeating one of his constant refrains that the United States had become a dangerous, lawless place, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that he wanted Alcatraz, an island in San Francisco Bay, to be enlarged and rebuilt “to house America’s most ruthless and violent offenders. We will no longer be held hostage to criminals, thugs, and judges that are afraid to do their job and allow us to remove criminals, who came into our country illegally.”It…

President Trump said he doesn’t know if everyone in the U.S., citizens or non-citizens, is entitled to due process — the constitutional command stated in both the Fifth and the Fourteenth Amendment. “I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Mr. Trump told NBC News’ Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” after she asked him whether he agreed that everyone on U.S. soil is entitled to due process in the court of law.When asked by Welker in the interview aired Sunday if he thinks he has to uphold the Constitution as president, Mr. Trump also said, “I…

The head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division said on Saturday that she was investigating a new policy in Minnesota’s largest county to determine whether it illegally considers race as a factor in plea deals.Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, announced the investigation on social media Saturday night. A letter to the county attorney’s office in Hennepin County, which include Minneapolis, will seek to determine if it engages “in the illegal consideration of race in its prosecutorial decision-making.”The inquiry stems from a policy memo the office issued days earlier, in which prosecutors were told to…

Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, said he personally thanked President Trump on Saturday night for issuing a pardon that cut short the 22-year prison term he was serving in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Mr. Tarrio’s expression of gratitude came during a brief but extraordinary encounter with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla. Mr. Tarrio and his mother, Zuny Duarte, were invited to have dinner at the property by one of its members.According to a senior administration official who was not authorized to discuss…