“Cártel de los Soles “is actually a slang term, invented by the Venezuelan media in the 1990s, for officials who are corrupted by drug money.” As Savage explained in November, citing “a range of specialists in Latin American criminal and narcotics issues,” Cártel de los Soles “is not a literal organization” but rather “a figure of speech in Venezuela.”
In 2020, in other words, the Justice Department made a pretty embarrassing mistake, which it has sought to rectify in the revised indictment. Yet the Treasury Department and the State Department are still listing Cártel de los Soles, which federal prosecutors now say refers to “a patronage system” created by a bunch of corrupt government officials, as an FTO, which under federal law means “a foreign organization” that “engages in terrorist activity” threatening “the security of United States nationals or the national security of the United States.””
“Large institutional investors have gone from buying effectively zero single-family homes before the Great Recession to being responsible for a small but non-negligible percentage of home purchasers in recent years.
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any real federal effort to squeeze institutional investors out of the single-family housing market is bound to make shelter more expensive and less plentiful.
For all the political attention paid to larger institutional investors, they make up a small percentage of home purchasers and own an even smaller share of the country’s single-family homes.
According to The Wall Street Journal’s parsing of the data, investors were responsible for about 25 percent of single-family home purchases in the first quarter of 2024. That is up from 20 percent in 2016, and the increase is almost totally driven by larger investors who own upward of 100 homes.
Over the past few years, companies owning 1,000 or more homes have accounted for only about 1 percent of all single-family purchases, but in 2024, their purchases appear to have dropped to effectively zero.
Purchases by entities that own more than 10 homes have ranged from 2 percent to 6 percent in recent years. That means that the 20 percent or so of homes being bought by investors are predominantly being sold to smaller landlords who own 10 or fewer homes.
And the bulk of home sales (some 75–80 percent) continue to be owner-occupiers.
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An owner-occupier doesn’t need to argue with a landlord about replacing an old appliance. They don’t need to worry about a tenant not paying rent, damaging the property, or moving and leaving them with a vacancy to fill.
As such, owner-occupiers are willing to pay a higher purchase price for a home. Landlords who do have to absorb all the risks and costs of their business demand a higher offsetting yield from owning a home, says Erdmann, which means demanding a lower purchase price.
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The only growth in home production to be squeezed is from expanding build-to-rent construction. While politicians are interpreting this activity as homes taken from homeowners, they are, in fact new supply that would go away under any ban on institutional investors.”
“here’s the most important thing about free trade that Trump fails to grasp: It is voluntary and consensual.
Rolling into Greenland with guns blazing—or making enough threats that Denmark eventually hands the island over to avoid that possibility—is the exact opposite of that. Trump’s centralized, nationalistic view of the world has no room for individuals or their consent. What do the people of Greenland want? What do the people of Denmark want? Heck, most Americans are not very keen on the idea of their government seizing Greenland. It’s not quite accurate to say that no one wants this—some very powerful people unfortunately do—but this would be something that the U.S. government would be doing against the will of most of the individuals involved in the transaction. That should matter—a lot.
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it is encouraging to see that the Trump administration is putting together an offer that will reportedly be presented directly to the semiautonomous government of Greenland. The Economist reports that the deal includes giving Greenland the same status as the Marshall Islands and some other small Pacific islands.
The people of Greenland have the right to vote on their own future. If Trump’s deal is accepted, then Denmark (and others) should stand aside. But it certainly seems like that deal would have had a better chance of being accepted without all the bellicosity that has gone along with it.
Again, one of the glorious things about free trade is that no one points a gun (or the whole U.S. military’s terrifying arsenal) at you to make a deal happen. Individuals buy and sell things when and how it makes sense for them to do it. Yes, it is impossible to apply that logic to every aspect of international geopolitics, but presidents ought to nudge the world toward more trade and less war whenever possible. Trump is doing the opposite.”
It’s not clear how long Venezuela will remain stable. There is a careful political balance to maintain stability. It’s also not clear how long the powers in Venezuela will put up with the US domineering over them. The US can destroy shit, but the Venezuelans can release chaos within Venezuela. Gangs in Venezuela are very powerful. The Venezuelan military doesn’t fully control the country.
Oil companies don’t want to invest in a country that requires huge investment and may not be stable, so their investment will likely need to be subsidized by the taxpayer.
The US is in its weakest position compared to China. The US’s global trade war makes it less able to threaten China with a coalition of countries working together to counter it economically, and the US’s trade war with China revealed America’s severe weaknesses, which is why the US keeps backing down when the bilateral trade war reaches extremes. China was starting to understand and respond to a more coalitional strategy when that got blown up with a change of president.
The uncertainty of Trump’s tariffs have hurt small businesses and people who buy from them. If people can’t be sure how much something will cost, sometimes they just hold off on that economic activity.
“It’s not hard to find examples of this rotten agency culture in practice. In late October 2025, ICE officers broke out the window of a U.S. citizen’s car and detained her for seven hours after she followed and photographed their unmarked vehicles. DHS accused her of reckless driving, attempting to block in officers with her car, and resisting arrest—all claims that she and her lawyer deny. Prosecutors did not charge the woman with a crime.
Recording government agents is one of the few tools citizens have to hold state power accountable. Any attempt to redefine observation as “violence” is not only unconstitutional—it’s authoritarian gaslighting. When a government fears cameras more than crimes, it isn’t protecting the rule of law. It’s protecting itself.”
“The 1992 UNFCCC serves as the international structure for efforts by 198 countries to slow the rate of rising climate pollution. It has universal participation. The U.S. was the first industrialized nation to join the treaty following its ratification under former President George H.W. Bush — and it will be the only nation ever to leave it.
The move marks an intensifying effort by Trump to topple climate efforts compared to his first term, when he decided against quitting the treaty.
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Since taking office for a second time a year ago, the Trump administration has tried to undermine U.S. and international climate efforts by shuttering offices throughout the federal government and threatening to unleash tariffs on countries that support carbon taxes on shipping emissions.
He has overseen a wide-ranging campaign to erase regulations governing climate pollution at power plants and in cars, and his administration recruited high-profile climate contrarians to write a report that promoted misinformation about the tenets of climate science.
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The U.S. Senate ratified the U.N. framework 34 years ago, making it a rare environmental pact that was supported unanimously. That could complicate any future president’s efforts to rejoin the treaty.
Some legal experts say the Senate’s consent does not operate in perpetuity after the U.S. leaves a treaty. Others argue that if a president can unilaterally leave a treaty, a future president could rejoin it without a new vote.”
Legally…”Under the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment precedents, the crucial question is not whether Good was actually trying to run Ross down but whether his avowed belief that she posed a threat to him was “objectively reasonable” given “the totality of the circumstances.”
The 1985 case Tennessee v. Garner involved a suspected burglar who was shot while fleeing police. The Supreme Court held that the use of deadly force is unconstitutional in such circumstances “unless it is necessary to prevent the escape and the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”
To assess whether a use of force is “objectively reasonable” under the Fourth Amendment, the Court explained four years later in Graham v. Connor, judges should consider “the totality of the circumstances,” paying “careful attention to the facts and circumstances of each particular case.” The Court said relevant factors include “the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.”
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The Justice Department’s policy on the use of force jibes with what the Supreme Court has said. “Deadly force may not be used solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing suspect,” it notes, and “firearms may not be discharged solely to disable moving vehicles.”
The Justice Department explains that “firearms may not be discharged at a moving vehicle unless: (1) a person in the vehicle is threatening the officer or another person with deadly force by means other than the vehicle; or (2) the vehicle is operated in a manner that threatens to cause death or serious physical injury to the officer or others, and no other objectively reasonable means of defense appear to exist, which includes moving out of the path of the vehicle.” The circumstances of the Minneapolis shooting suggest that Ross may have violated that policy.”
The reason so many Trump prosecutions are failing to get indictments is because he is charging people with weak evidence and for political reasons.
“Grand juries have emerged as a major stumbling block for Trump’s drive to use the criminal courts to exact retribution on his perceived political foes.
Federal grand juries operate in near-total secrecy and decide whether prosecutors can bring a criminal indictment in the first place. Unlike trial juries, they don’t need to be unanimous; rather, a majority of their 16 to 23 members must agree to return an indictment. And their only job is to determine if the Justice Department has brought a plausible case — a relatively low standard which led to the cliche that prosecutors could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
But in the Trump era, grand juries are no longer a rubber stamp. Instead, they’ve become a headache for prosecutors trying to advance controversial Trump policies like mass deportations and militarizing law enforcement. Dozens of recent cases in Washington, D.C., have been met with so-called “no bills” — the shorthand for a grand jury declining to return a bill of indictment. And grand juries in other jurisdictions have turned down high-profile cases that Trump has prioritized.
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The administration also seems to be losing because it’s pushing for indictments in cases with weak evidence, and due to the unpopularity in some parts of the country of tough tactics against protesters and of policies like Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. and
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan recently marveled at the “apparent prosecutorial machinations” at work, emphasizing the “unprecedented” actions prosecutors have taken to bring cases — even when grand juries have rebuffed them.
“Most troubling, prosecutors have rushed to charge cases before properly investigating them,” the Washington-based Biden appointee lamented.
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The Constitution’s requirement that a grand jury approve serious criminal cases was adopted as a safeguard against executive power and political prosecutions. The move stemmed from what many revolutionaries regarded as political trials instituted by British authorities.”
“Trump may have pardoned Cole last year as part of the sweeping clemency that he gave to Jan. 6 offenders on his first day back in office.
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Trump’s proclamation commuted the sentences of 14 individuals and also granted “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” This immediately covered roughly 1,500 people, including hundreds of defendants who were charged with assaulting or resisting law enforcement officers.
Lawyers for Cole did not respond to a question about whether they intend to argue that Cole is entitled to a pardon if convicted. But there are several legal and factual points that are worth zeroing in on if they pursue that strategy.
For starters, it does not matter whether Trump specifically intended to pardon the person who planted the pipe bombs. Under the law, it is the text of the pardon that matters — not the subjective intention of the president or the DOJ’s interpretation of it.
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Cheerleaders of the sweeping Jan. 6 pardon did not bat an eye when Trump knowingly freed people like Stewart Rhodes and Enrique Tarrio — leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, respectively, who were convicted at trial of a seditious conspiracy to prevent the transfer of power to Joe Biden. And they have remained silent as some of the people that Trump pardoned have gone on to commit more alleged crimes — a predictable development given the empirical evidence on recidivism rates among convicted felons. Some of these crimes have been explicitly political in nature, including threatening to kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
For all that’s happened in the last year, Trump’s Jan. 6 pardon remains one of his most stunning acts since he returned to office.”