In an 11th-hour reprieve, the US government last night agreed to continue funding the globally used Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program.

This comes after the Feds decided not to renew their long-standing contract with nonprofit research hub MITRE to operate the CVE database. That arrangement was due to expire today, but now the money's coming through to continue the crucial service.

"The CVE program is invaluable to the cyber community and a priority of CISA," a spokesperson for the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, aka CISA, told The Register Wednesday.

"Last night, CISA executed the option period on the contract to ensure there will be no lapse in critical CVE services. We appreciate our partners' and stakeholders' patience."

Also in response to long-standing concerns and fresh uncertainty triggered by MITRE yesterday disclosing that federal support was about to end, CVE board members today announced the formation of a nonprofit foundation.

A man, about 80, goes to his doctor for a checkup because he is planning to get married.

After congratulations and a clean bill of health, the doctor asks about his fiancée. The old man shows him a photo of a very beautiful, mid-twenties young lady.

Thinking his patient might not be able to keep up with the physical stress of married life, he says, "I think you should consider getting a paying guest to keep your wife company while you have your regular naps." The patient agrees.

Months later, the doctor bumps into the old man and asks, "How is married life?"

The patient says, "Congratulate me, doctor. My wife is pregnant."

The doctor congratulates him, and asks, "And did you take my advice about the paying guest?"

"I certainly did, doctor. Thank you for that advice."

"I see it worked out then," said the doctor, trying hard to hide his smile.

"Oh yes, it did. She's pregnant too."

AmeriCorps, the US federal agency that oversees volunteerism and service work, abruptly pulled teams of young people out of a variety of community service projects across the country on Tuesday. The work stoppage was due to cuts attributed to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, volunteers were informed Tuesday afternoon.

WIRED spoke with seven workers with the National Civilian Community Corps, better known as AmeriCorps NCCC, who say that they were told to stop working on projects ranging from rebuilding homes destroyed in storms, to readying a summer camp for kids, to distributing supplies for hurricane recovery, and prepare to immediately travel back to their homes.

Aadharsh Jeyasakthivel, a 23-year-old from Boston, was serving at a county food bank in rural Pennsylvania when he and his fellow volunteers were suddenly pulled from service.

“Non Americorps ppl are still distributing,” he wrote to WIRED in a Signal message, sending a photo of yellow-vested volunteers working on a line in a parking lot.

The AmeriCorps NCCC program was established under the Clinton administration by the National and Community Service Trust Act, signed in 1993. Each year, it recruits 2,200 people between the ages of 18 to 26 to serve in teams working across the country on different projects. Some volunteers also work directly alongside staff from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Forest Service, as part of smaller programs that are run within the NCCC. Graduates of the program get access to an award to help pay off federal student loans.

That morning was warm and cloudy, and as I passed my local Metro station on the way to the grocery store, I was surprised to see that the station was as busy as on a pre-pandemic weekday morning. A stream of cars dropped people off at the Kiss & Ride; from all directions, Virginians approached on foot, carrying placards and backpacks and folding stools.

Intrigued, I rode my bike into downtown D.C. that afternoon to see what was happening. By that time, the protest had been going on for a while, and people were starting to disperse. As soon as I crossed the Potomac, I passed little clots of protesters walking away from the Mall, looking tired but happy, rolled-up signs tucked under their arms. The closer I got, the more the sidewalks filled with people. Eventually the throngs became so thick that I chained my bike to a lamppost and walked down 15th Street, against the tide of hundreds of protestors. If there were this many on this one street at this one moment, I thought, what enormous number of people had actually shown up for this thing? (Estimates of the D.C. crowd later ranged from tens of thousands to more than 100,000, and organizers said that nationwide turnout numbered in the millions.) At the Washington Monument itself, the masses had thinned enough that I could sit comfortably on a patch of grass, but all around me were still uncountable numbers of Americans, chanting, clapping, buzzing with dissent, high on hope.

Is there anything left to hope for? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself, that maybe you’ve been asking yourself too. What good does hope do? As the Earth cooks, as species die out, as the long American century ends, is hope a frivolity, or—worse—a capitulation? “Hope is for weaklings,” an environmentalist snapped at the author Alan Weisman as he was reporting his new book, Hope Dies Last. “What we need now is courage.”

Weisman is the author of The World Without Us, a sui generis masterpiece, speculative nonfiction about how the Earth would persist and recover if every human being disappeared. Back in 2007, its conceit seemed fanciful, or overly pessimistic, but these days—.64 of a Celsius degree later—it seems downright oracular. Weisman’s new book sees him traveling the globe to meet individuals and organizations who are still, despite everything, fighting to avert a world without us: seaweed farmers, wetlands revivers, pipeline protestors, fusion engineers.

In a thundering opinion on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg announced that he had found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for defiance of his orders. It is “obvious,” Boasberg wrote, that government officials “deliberately flouted” his commands by deporting Venezuelan migrants to a Salvadoran prison on March 15 under President Donald Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. And now they must answer for their unlawful conduct. “The Constitution,” he declared, “does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders—especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it.”

Wednesday’s order constitutes the first real step toward accountability for the lawless behavior of the Trump administration. Crucially, it also offers the possibility of redress for the migrants who have been imprisoned in El Salvador without due process. Boasberg gave the government one last off-ramp: It could, he wrote, “purge” the contempt by “asserting custody” over these individuals and giving them a chance to contest their treatment. If the government accepts this offer, it would have to concede that it does exercise ongoing custody over migrants locked up in El Salvador. (This concession would corroborate arguments raised by Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father wrongly detained there, that the government has the power to bring him home.) If the government refuses this offer, Boasberg held, it must swiftly identify the officials who violated his orders so they may be criminally prosecuted, facing fines and potential jail time. Critically, Boasberg notes that if the Department of Justice doesn’t appoint a prosecutor to take the case, he will do so on his own.

Boasberg’s opinion marks the culmination of his meticulous, weekslong effort to discover what happened on March 15, when the Trump administration sent two planes carrying Venezuelan migrants to the notorious CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador. The president accused these migrants, without any credible evidence, of membership in the Tren de Aragua gang, which he designated a “foreign terrorist organization.” He then invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—a wartime law that applies only to invading armies of a foreign nation—to justify deporting them without due process. By that point, Boasberg wrote, the government was already “hustling” migrants onto planes, “betray[ing] a desire to outrun the equitable reach of the judiciary.”

The ACLU promptly filed suit on behalf of five migrants subject to the order, and on the morning of March 15, Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order barring their removal. He held an emergency hearing at 5 p.m. that day, at which point Justice Department attorney Drew Ensign revealed that the administration was planning to begin the deportations immediately. Boasberg adjourned the hearing so Ensign could gather more information—and the government evidently exploited this adjournment to dispatch the two planes. When the hearing resumed, Ensign allegedly concealed this fact from Boasberg, refusing to say more on the grounds that any details “raised potential national security issues.” This obfuscation, the judge wrote on Wednesday, prompted “the growing realization” that the government “might be rapidly dispatching removal flights in an apparent effort to evade judicial review while also refusing to provide any helpful information.”

Let’s go back to June 2, 2024. That morning, Fox & Friends Weekend aired an interview with Donald Trump conducted by the show’s hosts—Pete Hegseth, Rachel Campos-Duffy, and Will Cain. Three days earlier, Trump was found guilty in his porn-star/hush-money case. (Remember, he’s a convicted felon!) And Campos-Duffy brought up a subject that’s long been of great interest to Trump: revenge. As I’ve written many times, Trump’s three most powerful psychological motivations are revenge, revenge, and revenge. (Last month in this newsletter, I traced some of his history as a “revenge junkie.”) In the aftermath of the verdict that found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide his $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels, Campos-Duffy gently prodded him: “You [previously] said, ‘My revenge will be success for America.’ You just had this verdict. Do you still feel the same?”

“It’s a really tough question in one way because these are bad people,” Trump replied, referring to his critics and those who had brought criminal cases against him. “These people are sick.” He rambled about how tough he was and bragged about how during his first term he had fired FBI Director Jim Comey. He then returned to the issue of retribution: “Look it’s a very interesting question. I say it, and it sounds beautiful: ‘My revenge will be success.’ I mean that. But it’s awfully hard when you see what they’ve done. These people are so evil.”

A far-too-sympathetic Cain tried to push Trump toward a clearer answer. “I hear you struggling with it. I hear you say it’s a tough question—a bit unsure. You famously said, regarding Hillary Clinton, ‘Lock her up.’ You declined to do that as president.”

Trump responded: “I beat her. It’s easier when you win. They all said lock her up and I could’ve done it. But I thought that would have been a terrible thing. And then this [verdict] happened to me. So, I may feel differently about it. I can’t tell you. I’m not sure I can answer the question.”

Antiabortion crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) across the United States receive state and federal funds but have operated with little or no government oversight. CPCs use unsterilized transvaginal ultrasounds wands inside of patients, delay access to lifesaving care by misdiagnosing serious medical conditions and steal patient data from real medical clinics, according to investigative reporting and lawsuits filed against them. Advocates have been stymied in their efforts to obtain any sort of CPC accountability. But that may be changing.

Last year, a Massachusetts woman brought a first-of-its-kind class-action lawsuit against a CPC for deceptive trade practices and failure to operate under medical standards of care, resulting in misdiagnosis of her ectopic pregnancy and a life-threatening emergency. After the woman won a favorable lower court decision, the CPC, Clearway Clinic, settled the case.

“These unregulated pregnancy centers claim to offer reproductive healthcare, but they operate with almost no medical oversight and a mission that puts personal ideology above patient well-being,” said Jenifer McKenna, senior advisor at Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch. “This chilling case against Clearway Clinic revealed that CPCs may limit access to lifesaving health treatments that don’t align with their views.”

In the wake of the case, Massachusetts legislators passed a first-of-its-kind law requiring licensed medical professionals who provide medical care for pregnant patients as part of their scope of practice to supervise the provision of pregnancy ultrasound services in the state. These strategies offer new promise for holding the CPC industry accountable for some of the ways they threaten the health of people seeking reproductive care.

The saving grace of the first Trump administration was its administrative incompetence: for every terrible thing Trump I and his henchmen pulled off, ten more awful plots were thwarted because they were so bad at being evil.

Remember the Muslim Ban? It died because Trump repeatedly, publicly said he was banning people from his disfavored "shithole" countries because of their religion. The courts took one look at that and said, "Nope, you can't discriminate against people on the basis of their religion, it's right here in the First Amendment." In court, Trump's lawyers insisted that they were banning people due to something something security something mumble mumble, but then the other side's lawyers would just play back the tape of Trump gleefully celebrating the move as a way to keep Muslims out of America.

Trump's most effective henchmen understood this. Mitch McConnell, for example, played the senate's procedures like a virtuoso in order to deny Obama a Supreme Court pick, preserving a seat for Trump to fill with a credibly accused rapist.

Then there was Ajit Pai, Trump's loathsome FCC chair. When Pai wanted to kill Net Neutrality on behalf of the telco monopolists who had funneled millions into the GOP, he didn't just declare the Net Neutrality rule to be dead. Instead, he worked with the telcoms cartel operatives who flooded the docket with millions of fake comments opposing Net Neutrality, plausibly crossing all his tees and crossing his eyes so that the whole plan had at least the a superficial appearance of legitimacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/06/boogeration/#pais-lies

But for every Pai and McConnell in the Trump menagerie, there were a dozen Sloppy Steve Bannons, shooting their mouths off in between ads for prepper chow, gold bars, and contaminated testosterone supplements, loudly trumpeting their mens rea into every microphone they could find. And of all the people whose big dumb fucking mouths screwed up Trump's plans, Trump's big dumb fucking mouth was the biggest, the dumbest, and the fuckingest.

When the first Trump admin lost the election, Trump found himself repeatedly dragged into court, where his big dumb fucking mouth became a perennial liability, as his own words were used as Prosecution Exhibits A-Z. It seemed like Trump might be getting a lesson in why other people don't lie, bullshit, and continuously admit their own guilt in public.

No one believed Trump when he disavowed Project 2025 on the campaign trail. I mean, obviously he didn't read it (Trump doesn't read anything more challenging than a Fox News chyron) but he definitely was aware of some of its broader contours and was absolutely planning to elevate its architects to positions of real power. The question wasn't whether Trump supported Project 2025 – it was whether he would have the executive function to implement it in his second term, keeping his big, dumb fucking mouth shut as he did, so that he didn't create the basis for more court losses.

Of course, Trump has not kept his big, dumb fucking mouth closed. He has vomited up an endless stream of confessions, like when he livestreamed the fact that he'd tipped off his billionaire buddies ahead of a tariff U-turn so they could make billions insider trading:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/officials-explosive-allegations-trump-brags-195506345.html

Trump and his cronies have not acquired even a smidgen of administrative competence. Instead, they've embarked on a frenzy of out-of-control, chaotic motion, literally snatching random people off the streets and shipping them to forced-labor camps. Trump isn't just running a purge on America at large: he's also busily purging the conservative movement and the GOP of anyone with a hint of administrative capacity.

Far from than figuring out how to do terrible things without technically violating the law, Trump II is a lawless administration, prepared to violate laws, procedures, norms, and the US Constitution.

There are plenty of people of all political persuasions who respect the law, institutions, procedures, courts, and yes, even norms. Many of these people identify as conservatives – a movement with a long history of insisting that it is the home of rule-followers. Trump is the enemy of anyone who values these intangibles.

For Trump, these things are stupid games played by the weak.

In a withering 46-page opinion on Wednesday, D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg laid out how he came to believe that the Trump administration was acting in bad faith during its Alien Enemies Act removals.

Boasberg set the stage for potential contempt prosecutions in the order. He also detailed what he came to see as the Trump administration’s scheme to shield its plan to use rarely invoked wartime powers to remove more than 100 Venezuelans to a Salvadoran detention facility, depriving them of due process and the courts of the ability to review what was taking place.

Below are five points on Boasberg’s opinion.

1
Hiding the ball
The Trump administration planned the Alien Enemies Act removals to minimize the chances that a judge might intervene.

It was partly baked into the idea from the start: the Venezuelans on whom the law was invoked would not receive due process before being sent to El Salvador. But the Trump administration, Boasberg found, structured the entire process so as to avoid the possibility of judicial scrutiny, staging people near the airport from which flights would depart and launching planes after a hearing into the removals began.

In 1966, at the height of the labor movement’s postwar power, Walter Reuther, then president of the United Auto Workers, helped establish the first four “World Auto Councils.” Workers at General Motors, Volkswagen-Daimler-Benz, Fiat, and Chrysler (now Stellantis) could now meet across borders and, it was hoped, establish common international contract expiration dates.

The plan fell short of an international bargaining agreement, but the unions hoped it would “strengthen the hand of each union in the contract negotiations of its own country,” said World Auto Councils coordinator Burton Bendiner in 1978.

In 1971, French GM workers who supplied gearboxes and transmissions for the company’s European operations went on strike. They coordinated with their counterparts in Germany’s IG Metall and the UAW to pressure GM management. They refused work that management had diverted from a struck plant and created a common strike fund. The French union, said Bendiner, was able to draw strength from the more powerful UAW.

Similarly, when Ford workers in Britain went on strike in 1971, their counterparts in West Germany refused to pick up the slack with overtime. This increased striking workers’ leverage at the table while avoiding the legal challenges a sympathy strike would have provoked.