Excerpt: America250 and the White House insist they are planning nonpartisan festivities for all Americans, rather than creating a slush fund to throw the president militarized birthday parties and advance hard-right ideology. But in reality, American history is being subordinated to Trump’s cult of personality. The president’s face is suddenly ­everywhere—next to George Washington on America250-themed National Parks passes; alongside Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt on giant banners hanging from federal buildings; on a $1 coin under consideration by the US Treasury…

Excerpt: The Factbook wasn’t just a nice-to-have reference for academics. Lawyers have noted that it was regularly used in asylum cases as a trusted, objective source for country conditions (maybe that’s why they killed it?). When you’re trying to establish that a country is dangerous enough to warrant asylum, citing the CIA’s own publicly available data tends to carry some weight. That resource is now just… gone. With no replacement.

Excerpt: Here’s a scenario: Minnesota shares a border with Canada. Let’s say a stream of undocumented people decided to make a run for Sprague, Manitoba. Let’s say they somehow end up on the other side. ICE isn’t happy about it, and, on this day, agents decide to ignore the fact there’s a border.

It would be an invasion of Canadian sovereignty if they’re coming onto our soil and snatching people. The other thing I think Canadians should know is something I have called American extra-legalism. It’s what appears to have happened with Ryan Wedding, where they go and they snatch someone from a foreign country—arrest him and extradite him without any judicial process, extra judicially, as it were. The US Supreme Court said that’s perfectly legal under American law. The law authorizes extra-legal arrests and extradition, and a snatching victim cannot even sue. A Canadian or a British court would have a big problem exercising jurisdiction over that person; American courts don’t, and that was long before President Donald Trump stacked the US Supreme Court.

And say they did snatch someone? What happens next? Again, I think the American courts would have no problem with it.

Excerpt: It’s hard to say for sure whether the rich noblemen who died in the Erfurt latrine disaster had been killed by the fall itself or by being suffocated by the pool of filth they fell into. Pastor Leitzmann believes it may have been the latter.