In a largely symbolic move, President Joe Biden announced he elevated Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns to a Cabinet-level position, an acknowledgment of Burns’ contributions to the White House operation, NBC News reports.

A career diplomat who has served both Democratic and Republican administrations (though not Trump’s), Burns served as ambassador to Russia starting in the latter part of the GW Bush administration before becoming Undersecretary of State under Hillary Clinton.

He flew to Moscow in November 2021 to warn his Russian counterparts that the US saw the signs of a Russian buildup to invade Ukraine, and that the West would institute crippling consequences.  Based on the reaction he got from the Secretary of the Kremlin’s security council, upon his return to the US, he told Biden that Putin had already made up his mind to invade. His insights into Russia persuaded the administration to release intelligence showing the Kremlin’s intent to convince the governments and population of Western nations of the threat.

Standing in front of a roomful of white people, insecure short Florida Man and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis took offense to comments made by Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to hold elected Executive Branch office, about Florida’s new African American studies requirement to teach slavery benefited Black people because they learned job skills.  He demeaned her trip to Jacksonville where she described the realities of slavery, saying she would “try to chirp and try to demagogue” the issue of the state-mandated historical whitewashing.

President Joe Biden named Admiral Lisa Franchetti to be the next Chief of Naval Operations, the first woman to hold that position as well as the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, CNN reports.  Franchetti’s nomination will have to wait, however, until Alabama Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville lifts his hold on the promotions for senior military offices in a hissy fit about the Pentagon policy to pay for the travel expenses for military members and family who need to go to another state for a safe abortion.

Franchetti joins the nominees for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. C.Q. Brown; nominee for Army chief of staff, Gen. Randy George; and nominee for commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Eric Smith.  The national security risks of having scores of senior staff positions unconfirmed is raising concern in the Senate, where Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is considering holding the Senate in session over the August break if Republicans can’t wrangle their obstructionist football coach.

Because they’re most definitely the Party of respecting the law and not weaponizing their government power, the Republicans who control the Alabama government have refused to follow a US Supreme Court order to redraw their Congressional map to flip one of the white-majority districts to one with a Black-majority influence, NBC News reports.

In a surprise 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court ordered the Alabama legislation to submit a new map with two Black-majority districts by Friday.  Instead of following the Court’s order, the Republican-dominated legislature’s new map has one Black-majority district and one with a 40% Black population.

According to Republican state House Speaker Nathan Ledbetter, state GOP legislators were peppered with calls from the state’s GOP Congressional delegation about the Court order, although he did not acknowledge that the Congressmen urged them to maintain their gerrymandered advantages.  Speaker pro tem Kevin McCarthy also called, Ledbetter said, perhaps because he’s scared he’ll lose another seat.  And Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, arguably the dumbest person in the Senate, also called Thursday; his office said he voiced his surprise at the Supreme Court decision, but more likely he was worried he would lose his seat after the maps were redrawn, something that would not impact a state-wide election for US Senator.

Material scientists have for the first time observed nanoparticles of copper, platinum and other metals fixing cracks and malformities in their structures, a discovery that researchers believe could lead to the development of self-healing metals that repair damage automatically, LiveScience reports.

The recovery is not as rapid as the second-generation (in this timeline) Terminator from the Arnold Schwarzenegger franchise, but the fact that some metals will automatically fill in fissures and cracks caused by repeated strain on a microscopic level will lead researchers to push the speed and size of such processes to improve performance on things from airplane wings to automotive parts to mechanical devices.

The lawyers for impeached Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked Lt. Governor Dan Patrick to remove three Democratic senators from the jury pool for his trial because they had made statements critical of Paxton and were therefore too biased to judge fairly.

The Texas Tribune reports the lawyers are attempting to apply criminal jury standards to the administrative issue of impeachment.  “Like numerous courts around the country, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has held for almost a century that potential jurors with a bias or prejudice against the accused are disqualified from serving on his jury as a matter of law,” the motion said. “Jurors José Menendez [of San Antonio], Roland Gutierrez [of San Antonio], and Nathan Johnson [of Dallas] have such a bias and have proclaimed it loudly, time and again.”

Included in the evidence they cite to remove the senators is a clip from Gutierrez on MSNBC in which he says the evidence gathered “could not be refuted.”  “No one who has publicly declared the charges against a defendant irrefutable can even play at impartiality, let alone serve in an impartial manner,” they claim.  Paxton is accused of various corrupt acts including bribery and abuse of office; he has been suspended from office since his May 27th impeachment.

Friday was supposed to be a productive day for a certain National Zero editor who didn’t have anything better to do than write articles for a very, very long flight. It was a great plan in theory.

There was a good Robert Burns poem about days like this one. Steinbeck’s remix is pretty dope too. Would talk about it more but LOL the service could cut out again any second and it’s better to use it too explain why this is the third “article” in five hours. Fucking paid $25 for this “wifi pass” too.

Disgraced former President Trump on Friday again moved to disqualify Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis from prosecuting him again. We would have more details but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which we pay $12.95 a month to subscribe to, has this really shitty firewall protocol called “GDPR” which prevents sites from loading in certain low bandwidth situations.

Last week the state Supreme Court tossed the chunky would-be autocrat’s attempt to short-circuit the expected prosecutions against him which the Guardian, a site that isn’t loading either, says includes racketeering charges given the “qualifying statutes” involving witness intimidation.

Shitty MAGA federal judge Aileen Cannon on Friday scheduled disgraced former President Trump’s trial for stealing and hoarding classified documents from the White House for May 2024, disobeying her Orange Master by not delaying it indefinitely until after the election.

A long-lost soil sample taken from beneath the Greenland ice sheet in 1966 but rediscovered in 2017 after being stored in a Danish freezer for five decades, shows that the stability of the ice sheet is far more tenuous and could lead to a far faster increase in sea levels than thought, CNN reports.

The 12-foot core shows that Greenland was essentially ice-free as late as 400,000 years ago, when temperatures were moderately above the norm; scientists previously believed the ice sheet had been stable for millions of years. The discovery means the ice sheet could be lost under far less harsh conditions than previously thought.

With carbon levels in the atmosphere already 1.5 times higher than they were during the last melt, a new melt could be more rapid.  However, when the Greenland ice sheet completely melted away 400 millennia ago, it resulted in a sea level rise of roughly seven meters, a result that would devastate human populations.

Chinese hackers breached the email accounts of the US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Daniel Kritenbrink, CNN reports, efforts that appear to be part of a broader intelligence effort.

Hackers got into the unclassified email system of the two diplomats as well as Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, a breach reported last week.  US officials have frequently warned about Chinese efforts to get into US federal systems, even the public-facing ones, as a way to get deeper into the flow of US information.

Angry about [checks notes] the US Navy deployment of a ballistic missile submarine in a South Korean port, North Korean military leaders said the stationing of nuclear weapons in the South would justify a preemptive nuclear strike, Reuters reports.

Defense minister Kang Sun Nam didn’t refer specifically to the recent arrival of the Ohio-class US nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine USS Kentucky in the Southern city of Busan, the first nuclear-armed sub to visit South Korea since the 1980s, but cited potential deployment of nuclear-armed carriers, cruisers or subs.  “The ever-increasing visibility of the deployment of the strategic nuclear submarine and other strategic assets may fall under the conditions of the use of nuclear weapons specified in the DPRK law,” he said in a statement.

Flailing Florida Governor and Republican candidate for president Ron DeSantis is trying anything to gain positive momentum to overcome the negative inertia he has.  NBC News reports DeSantis is instituting a major reboot of his campaign, but no makeover will ever be able to overcome the fatal flaw of sad, unfriendly clown as a candidate.

More hilariously, the small-government, keep-the-Deep-State-out-of-our-lives DeSantis tells Fox bro Jesse Watters that he’s going to launch an investigation into AB InBev’s marketing outreach to a trans influencer, the result of which caused a conservative boycott of Bud Light to lose market share which DeSantis claims violates the company’s fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.  Because the Republican weaponization of government isn’t just happening at the Congressional level.

A tornado ripped through a Pfizer factory and warehouse in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, destroying equipment and drug stockpile that could cause shortages of the medications manufactured there, the Raleigh News and Observer reports.  But have no fear because your Viagra supplies are fine:  the 1.8 million square foot site only made injectable meds such as neuromuscular blockers, anti-infectives and anesthesia.

The company says the complexity of manufacturing the medications will make finding different suppliers or shifting production difficult.  Pfizer estimates that the plant made a quarter of the injectables it supplies to US hospitals.

Ending a long rant about how his co-host on The Five seems to be irrationally hysterical about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s position on vaccines, claiming that his voicing his false and erroneous statements is his right as he sits before a Republican-led committee exploring seemingly any rumor Marjorie Taylor Greene reads on Gab, Fox bro and mama’s boy Jesse Watters ends with, “It’s actually kind of weird that you’re so upset about what one Democrat thinks about vaccines. You can do whatever you want with your body.  You can do whatever you want with your kid’s body.  Your doctor can decide with you what to do with your body.  What does it have to do with RFK Jr.?”

To which Jessica Tarlov replies, “Thanks for advocating for Roe!”  Jesse apparently didn’t realize he was not just advocating a pro-choice position on abortion, but also on trans care for kids.

Federico Klein, a Donald Trump appointee to the State Department, was found guilty of eight felony counts and four misdemeanors related to his participation in the Republican-led January 6th domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol, WUSA CBS-9 in Washington reports.

Klein requested a bench trial, without a jury, and may have thought he drew the lucky card by getting assigned to Trump-appointed DC federal judge Trevor McFadden, but McFadden determined prosecutors made their case on felony counts for assaulting, resisting or impeding police, civil disorder and obstruction of an official proceeding.

A staffer during Trump’s 2016 campaign, Klein resigned his position in the State Department at the end of Trump’s single term in office.  He was arrested in March 2021 after investigators got a number of tips, including from at least one State Department coworker, who recognized Klein when he was featured on a “wanted” poster.

With the support of a group of Democratic colleagues, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is threatening to hold the Senate in session through the planned August as punishment to Republicans for their Alabama cousin Tommy Tuberville holding up promotions for senior military officers as a protest against a Pentagon medical travel policy, Newsweek reports.

Democratic Senators feel they need to issue a wake-up call to GOP Senate leadership that their nihilistic wing is jeopardizing national security.  It’s also meant to head off an effort led by Kentucky muppet Rand Paul and Ohio fraudster JD Vance blocking dozens of US ambassadors and foreign service staff.

With all ten Republicans on the panel voting against it, the Democratic-led Senate Judiciary Committee advanced a bill that would require to create and implement a code of ethics that would require compliance with income and gift reporting, NBC News reports.

Citing the recent scandals involving Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito accepting lavish gifts from billionaires who had cases they either directly or indirectly benefited from potential decisions and opinions, “This legislation will be a crucial first step in restoring confidence in the court after a steady stream of reports of justices’ ethical failures have been released to the public,” Committee chair Dick Durbin said.

During his Thursday visit to a Philadelphia shipyard to tout his administration’s accomplishments to rebuild and update the nation’s infrastructure and manufacturing capability, President Joe Biden took a moment to help pass out ice cream sandwiches to workers on a day when temperatures neared 90°F.  Though right wing gadflies will attempt to compare it to the previous administration’s similar distribution of emergency supplies to hurricane survivors in Puerto Rico, the action demonstrates Biden’s affection for and support of working-class Americans.

The City of New York will pay more than $13 million to settle a class action suit alleging officers of the New York Police Department violated protestors’ civil rights by beating and detaining them, a First Amendment censorship Jim Jordan won’t investigate because it’s the type of government oppression he supports.

Per the New York Times, the city acknowledges the cops’ wrongdoing and will pay up to 1,380 people up to $9,950 each if they “were arrested and/or subjected to force by N.Y.P.D. officers” at any of eighteen separate sites where police attacked protesters.