May 23 2025

TRUMP V ELITE COLLEGES: Harvard International Student Program Revoked; Feds Find Columbia Violated Civil Rights Law

Supreme Court Deadlocks, Upholds Oklahoma Ban on Public Funds for Religious Charters

At Private Gala, Trump Promises Crypto Backers Presidential Support Amid Protests

Studies Find No Compelling Evidence of Life on Distant Planet K2-18b

Bezos vs. Musk: Amazon Deploys Kuiper Satellites, Intensifying LEO Space Race

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TRUMP V ELITE COLLEGES: Harvard International Student Program Revoked; Feds Find Columbia Violated Civil Rights Law

A. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, had notified Harvard that its permission to enroll international students was revoked. With that, the degrees and futures of thousands of Harvard students — and an integral piece of the university’s identity and culture — were plunged into deep uncertainty. “There are so many students from all over the world who came to Harvard to make it a better place and to change America and change their home countries for the better,” said Karl Molden, a student from Vienna who had just completed his sophomore year.² “Now it’s all at risk of falling apart, which is breaking my heart.” The university has faced rapid-fire aggressions since its president, Alan M. Garber, told the Trump administration in April that Harvard would not give in to demands to change its hiring and admissions practices and its curriculum.³ After the government froze more than $2 billion in grants, Harvard filed suit in federal court in Boston.⁴ Since then, the administration has gutted the university’s research funding, upending budgets and forcing some hard-hit programs to reimagine their scope and mission.⁵ The end of international enrollment would transform a university where 6,800 students, more than a quarter of the total, come from other countries, a number that has grown steadily in recent decades. Graduate programs would be hit especially hard. At the Kennedy School, 59 percent of students come from outside the United States. International students make up 40 percent of the enrollment at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health and 35 percent at the Harvard Business School.⁶ 

Editors note: the international student ban is almost certain to be struck down in court, but Trump is exacting a hefty price from Harvard for fighting him. The politics are hard to gauge, but will probably break 50/50 Republican/Democrat, like every other big issue. Agree or not, its indisputable that the federal government has a lot of ways to hurt schools they deem ‘unfriendly’.

NYT

B. Columbia University violated federal civil-rights law by ignoring the harassment of Jewish students by classmates, a government investigation found.⁷ The school acted with “deliberate indifference towards student-on-student harassment of Jewish students” since the Oct.⁸ 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, the Department of Health and Human Services’ civil-rights office said Thursday.

WSJ

Supreme Court Deadlocks, Upholds Oklahoma Ban on Public Funds for Religious Charters

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a plea to require state charter school programs to fund religious schools, an unexpected setback for social conservatives who had won a string of cases expanding sectarian involvement in public education.⁹ The court divided 4-4 on the case, due to the recusal of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, thereby affirming an Oklahoma Supreme Court decision that found it unconstitutional to require the state to fund religious education through its public charter program.¹⁰ As is typical in such instances, the court provided neither an opinion nor a vote count among the justices.

WSJ

At Private Gala, Trump Promises Crypto Backers Presidential Support Amid Protests

President Trump gathered Thursday evening at his Virginia golf club with the highest-paying customers of his personal cryptocurrency, promising that he would promote the crypto industry from the White House as protesters outside condemned the event as a historic corruption of the presidency.¹¹ The gala dinner held at the Trump National Golf Club in suburban Washington, where Mr. Trump flew from the White House on a military helicopter, turned into an extraordinary spectacle as hundreds of guests arrived, many having flown to the United States from overseas. At the club’s entrance, the guests were greeted by dozens of protesters chanting “shame, shame, shame.”

NYT

Studies Find No Compelling Evidence of Life on Distant Planet K2-18b

In April, a team of astronomers announced that they might — just might — have found signs of life on a planet over 120 light-years from Earth.¹² The mere possibility of extraterrestrial life was enough to attract attention worldwide. It also attracted intense scrutiny from other astronomers. Over the past month, researchers have independently analyzed the data, which suggested that the planet, called K2-18b, has a molecule in its atmosphere that could have been created by living organisms.¹³ Three different analyses have all reached the same conclusion: They see no compelling evidence for life on K2-18b. “The claim just absolutely vanishes,” said Luis Welbanks, an astronomer at Arizona State University and an author of one of the studies. The debate has less to do with the existence of alien life than with the challenge of observing distant planets. We can see a nearby planet like Jupiter because it reflects enough sunlight to become visible to the naked eye. But a planet like K2-18b is so far away that it becomes invisible not just to the naked eye but to conventional telescopes.¹⁴

NYT

April 17 2025

Chip Ban Hits China; Bloggers Fuel Chinese Nationalism; Judge v Trump Deportations; Texas Backs School Vouchers; Alien Life Found?

citizen journalGreg Loving

Bezos vs. Musk: Amazon Deploys Kuiper Satellites, Intensifying LEO Space Race¹⁵

After years of effort and some frustrating delays, Amazon’s dream… got off the ground last month. …United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket roared away from its launch pad at Florida’s Cape Canaveral, carrying the first operational satellites for Project Kuiper, the tech giant’s new broadband network. The successful deployment marked more than the birth of a new internet service provider. It was the opening shot in a battle over the future of global connectivity, one that pits Amazon founder Jeff Bezos against fellow billionaire Elon Musk, owner of the world’s largest satellite broadband network Starlink, a subsidiary of parent company SpaceX.¹⁶ But the two tech titans also face competition from global powers such as China and the EU in a race to control the space-based infrastructure that will influence economic, military and digital power.¹⁷ It is a rivalry that has the potential to determine future digital divides — some countries under western systems, others under tightly controlled Chinese networks. “We are in the midst of a global space race that will have very significant consequences in terms of economic opportunity, connectivity . . . and national security,” says Brendan Carr, chair of the US regulatory agency, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The jostling is taking place in low Earth orbit (LEO), one of the most contested regions of space, located up to 2,000km above the Earth. Ten years ago, this was the preserve of Earth observation, science and military satellites, and satellite phone providers, with around 1,300 active spacecraft in orbit. Today, thanks to SpaceX’s reusable Falcon rockets, there are more than 11,000 active satellites, supporting everything from weather tracking to broadband. Experts forecast that the number of satellites in LEO will balloon to as many as 100,000 over the next decade as companies, governments and militaries rush to exploit the potential of the new space frontier.

FT

May 23, 1783: After predicting he’ll be taken into “eternity” by a flash of lightning, prominent colonial patriot James Otis dies after lightning strikes him in a friend’s doorway.

James Otis Jr. and Elisha Graves Otis both hail from the same well-established Boston-area Otis family that settled in Massachusetts in the 1630s. James Otis Jr. (1725–1783) was one of the most prominent patriots of that clan, and roughly a generation later Elisha Otis (1811–1861) was born into the same lineage and went on to invent the safety elevator and found the Otis Elevator Company.

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Sources

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/us/harvard-international-students-trump.html
2. https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/columbia-investigation-civil-rights-violate-0cc7b7d7?mod=hp_lead_pos4
3. https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/supreme-court-oklahoma-religious-school-ruling-95d8480b?st=SEQbM3
4. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/us/politics/trump-memecoin-dinner.html
5. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/science/astronomy-extraterrestrial-life-k218b.html
6. https://on.ft.com/3ZvZgqX