ICYMI: July 16, 2025

An occasional post in which I highlight some of the day’s most outrageous news. Today’s post includes Trump senility watch; on waste, fraud, and abuse; water, water, and AI; and more.

Trump Senility Watch: 

1) Trump on Fed Chair Jerome Powell: “I was surprised he was appointed. I was surprised, frankly, that Biden put him in and extended him. Fact: Trump nominated Powell in 2017, and Biden renominated him in 2021. [NBC]

2) In a speech in Pittsburgh on July 15, as reported in the Independent (and ignored by the New York Times and the Washington Post): “At one point, Trump invoked his late paternal uncle, Dr. John Trump, who he often describes as the “longest-serving professor” to ever teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology even though the noted physicist did not achieve that distinction despite teaching there for 37 years as a professor and another 12 as a senior lecturer after mandatory retirement. John Trump died in 1985. 

“President Trump … claimed that one of his students was Theodore Kaczynski, a mathematics professor who became widely known as the Unabomber when he was arrested in 1996 for a decades-long string of letter bomb attacks on figures in higher education and other industries. 

“”Kaczynski was one of his students. Do you know who Kaczynski was? There’s very little difference between a madman and a genius,’ he said.

“Trump then claimed to have asked his uncle about the murderous ex-academic. 

“’What kind of a student was he Uncle John? He said: ‘What kind of a student — seriously, good … he’d go around correcting everybody. But it didn’t work out too well for him. Didn’t work out too well, but it’s interesting in life,’ Trump said.”

Kaczynski—the Unabomber—never attended MIT, so he could not have been a student of Trump’s uncle. Moreover, Dr. John Trump died in 1985, more than a decade before Kaczynski was identified as the Unabomber, so the conversation that Trump recounted would have taken place … at least 10 years after his death.  

On waste, fraud, and abuse: 

Eric Schnabel, Trump-appointed Chief Operating Officer of NIH was abruptly fired after the discovery that a $3.3 million contract was awarded to his wife’s company. 

[Washington Post] “A $3.3 million NIH contract to a Louisiana company, Argo Chasing, named Trish Duffy Schnabel, the wife of the NIH’s chief operating officer on its list of staff, according to the officials. The award, made in early July, supports work on several matters including autism, a topic that is a priority of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”

Water, Water, and AI

Big AI installations suck up water, to the detriment of individuals, companies, and municipalities. 

[New York Times] “After Meta broke ground on a $750 million data center on the edge of Newton County, Ga., the water taps in Beverly and Jeff Morris’s home went dry. …

“The Morrises’ experience is one of a growing number of water-related issues around Newton County, which is a one-and-a-half-hour drive east of Atlanta and has a population of about 120,000 people. As tech giants like Meta build data centers in the area, local wells have been damaged, the cost of municipal water has soared and the county’s water commission may face a shortage of the vital resource.” 

And also: 

Israeli settlers attacked CNN journalists reporting on the death of 20-year-old Palestinian American Sayfollah Musallet, a U.S. citizen who was beaten to death by settlers last week. 

[TruthOut] “‘The masked men smashed the rear windshield of our car, but we managed to speed off unharmed. It is just a small window into the reality here,’ Diamond went on.

“Israeli settlers beat Musallet to death and shot another Palestinian, 23-year-old Mohammad al-Shalabi, in the town of Sinjil, where their families own land, on Friday. Witnesses say that Israeli settlers and soldiers prevented ambulances from reaching the two for hours. …

“Musallet’s family has demanded that the U.S. investigate his killing and hold Israeli settlers responsible. The Trump administration has lifted sanctions on Israeli settler groups and has sent assault rifles to Israel that were previously withheld due to concerns over settler violence.” 

Trump’s first confirmed judicial appointment has little legal experience for a lifetime appointment to an appellate court position. 

[New York Times] “Senators voted 46 to 42 along party lines to confirm Whitney D. Hermandorfer of Tennessee to a seat on the Cincinnati-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.  …

“‘She has less than 10 years of legal experience,’ Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said on Monday. ‘She has never served as the sole or chief counsel on any single case. She made a career of going after people’s reproductive rights, transgender rights and anti-discrimination policies.’ …

“Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, also suggested that Ms. Hermandorfer had a ‘shocking’ lack of experience for such a powerful appeals court post and noted that she ducked questions on whether Mr. Trump had lost the 2020 election.” 

A right-wing U.S. terrorist organization is connected to recent assassinations in Ukraine, carried out in support of the Russian war on Ukraine.

[The Guardian] “Late last week, a masked assailant shot and killed Col Ivan Voronych of the Ukraine security service (SBU) as he walked through a Kyiv parking lot in broad daylight. Shocking footage of the assassination circulated in Ukrainian media and caused a stir among residents in the capital.

“For months, the Base, born in the US and with a web of cells all over the world, has been offering money to supporters or willing participants for targeted assassinations and attacks on the critical infrastructure of Ukraine, coinciding with allegations that its American founder, Rinaldo Nazzaro, was a Kremlin spy. Ukrainian authorities have also been warning in recent weeks of similar Russian intelligence operations covertly paying unknowing citizens to carry out sabotage inside their country. …

“In April, the Base started waging what it described as an insurgency to establish an all-white ethnostate in the western Ukrainian oblast of Zakarpattia. So far, videos of arson attacks against what appear to be police and military vehicles, electric boxes and other targets have been uploaded to its accounts on Telegram, along with dozens of other geolocated videos inside Ukraine.

“Nazzaro, who is a former Pentagon contractor with the US special forces, declined to comment on the Ukraine cell of the Base and the killing when reached on his Telegram account.”