US Reduces Presence at Middle East Embassies Amid Rising Tensions
The United States has begun decreasing the number of staffers present at its embassies in the Middle East due to heightened security risk.
The State Department ordered the departure of all nonessential personnel and their families at the U.S.
embassy
in Baghdad—which already has limited staffing—on June 11 after its latest review, citing its commitment 'to keeping Americans safe, both at home and abroad.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
15 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Northwest lawmakers won't attend military parade in D.C. on Army's 250th anniversary, Trump's birthday
Jun. 12—WASHINGTON — Thousands of Americans are expected to descend on the nation's capital on Saturday to see the city's biggest military parade in decades, but members of Congress from the Northwest won't be among the crowds. The parade marks the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, which estimates the total cost of the event will be between $25 million and $45 million. It also coincides with President Donald Trump's 79th birthday, and with Flag Day. Republicans from Washington, Idaho and Oregon said they don't plan to attend the spectacle but appreciated the opportunity to celebrate the Army. More than 6,000 soldiers will participate in the event, along with tanks, armed vehicles, rocket launchers, marching bands, horses, mules and one dog, according to the Army. "It's a great way to honor America's military history; happy birthday to the U.S. Army," said Rep. Michael Baumgartner. The Spokane Republican dismissed the idea that Trump is using the occasion to celebrate himself. Democrats from the Northwest said they celebrate the Army but questioned why the government would spend millions of taxpayer dollars on what they see at least partially as an elaborate birthday bash for the president, at a time when Trump and his GOP allies in Congress are proposing cuts to Medicaid and food assistance for low-income Americans. "It is a huge waste of taxpayer dollars," Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said in an interview. "I appreciate the 250th anniversary, but it should be about the soldiers. It should be about the men and women who serve, not about satisfying President Trump's ego." Rep. Adam Smith of Bellevue, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, called the parade "wildly inappropriate" and said that while he has no problem celebrating the U.S. military, including in parades, the price tag of Saturday's event is unprecedented. "It's clear Trump is doing this as a celebration of his power, not as a celebration of the military," Smith said in a brief interview at the Capitol. "It's obviously going to be very costly and very disruptive, and also, I think, sends the wrong message. As someone said a long time ago, we are not a tanks-in-the-street type of republic, and we should not become one." The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps were also founded in 1775, but in October and November of that year. Smith said neither of those military branches is likely to get the same celebration as the Army, "because their birthday doesn't fall on Donald Trump's birthday." Most members of Congress choose to head home on weekends and during recess periods, but several Republicans have said they plan to stay in D.C. to attend the parade. "While I will not be in attendance at the parade, I sincerely appreciate this meaningful tribute honoring our nation's heroes," Rep. Russ Fulcher, a Republican who represents North Idaho, said in a statement. "This celebration marks a historic milestone in the Army's proud legacy of courage and unity. It is with deep respect and gratitude that we recognize the U.S. Army's 250 years of dedication, service, and sacrifice on behalf of all Americans." Fellow GOP Reps. Dan Newhouse of Sunnyside, Mike Simpson of Idaho Falls and Cliff Bentz of Eastern Oregon will all miss the parade, their spokespeople said. Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch also said they will be out of town. "Happy 250th Birthday to the U.S. Army!" Crapo said in a statement. "For two and a half centuries, the brave men and women of the U.S. Army have stood as a bulwark of freedom, defending our nation and its values at home and abroad. We are eternally grateful for their unwavering courage, sacrifice, and dedication. Thank you for your service." Asked what he thought about the estimated cost of the event, Risch replied, "Don't know anything about it." Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said she routinely goes to Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma for events celebrating the military, but she sees Saturday's event as something else. "We appreciate 250 years of the Army," she said in a brief interview. "I don't know that we had to do this to celebrate that. I'll definitely be thanking the men and women at our Army installations and commemorating them." Orion Donovan Smith's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.
Yahoo
15 minutes ago
- Yahoo
What to know about claims Palantir is creating a national database of US citizens
In late May 2025, a New York Times article detailed a supposed combined effort between the U.S. federal government and the data analysis software company Palantir to centralize data on American citizens. Palantir rebutted the allegations in a statement on X and in a blog post, arguing that the New York Times story overstated Palantir's ties to the Trump administration — particularly to the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative — and that the company does not collect data to "unlawfully surveil" Americans. Using USASpending, the publicly available database for federal government spending, Snopes found that Palantir received between $228 million and $542 million in government contracts per year between 2020 and 2024, mostly with the Defense Department. While we were not able to confirm the details of all of these contracts, some departments and agencies reportedly use Palantir's Foundry product for data management. Comments from former DOGE figurehead Elon Musk implied that one of the initiative's goals is to compile and centralize data on American citizens. DOGE could easily use Palantir's powerful data tools to construct such a database or create connections between existing government data. A March executive order and two June Supreme Court rulings would also help facilitate that work. We found no evidence that Palantir itself was compiling any master database, as social media posts claimed. On May 30, 2025, The New York Times published an article titled "Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans," detailing a supposed combined effort between the U.S. federal government and the data software company Palantir to centralize data on American citizens. Data privacy advocates did not take the news well, calling it "dystopian" and a massive invasion of privacy. Four days later, Palantir posted a statement to X responding to the article, calling the reporting "blatantly untrue" because "Palantir never collects data to unlawfully surveil Americans, and our Foundry platform employs granular security protections." On June 9, 2025, the company followed up with a long blog post on X titled "Correcting the Record: Responses to the May 30, 2025 New York Times Article on Palantir," which aimed to fact-check the article. (Snopes began researching this story before this blog post was released. We reached out to Palantir for comment but have not yet heard back; if we do, we will update this story.) Since the May 30 article came out, a claim based on the reporting began circulating on social media — namely, that U.S. President Donald Trump or someone in his administration contracted Palantir to create a master database of all U.S. citizens. In this article, we aim to check the accuracy of both the New York Times article and Palantir's response to it. In doing so, we will also address the claim spreading on social media. When two sides of a story publish conflicting accounts, the truth of the matter generally lies somewhere in the middle. Snopes' research suggested that was the case in this situation. Both the New York Times' reporting and Palantir's response omitted details relevant to the story at hand. Snopes found the social media claim that Palantir was creating a master database of all U.S. citizens was an exaggerated version of the New York Times article's headline, which oversimplified the situation. Here's what we found: Palantir is a company that lies at the crossroads of Silicon Valley and the Pentagon. Founded by Peter Thiel, Alexander Karp, Stephen Cohen and Joe Lonsdale in 2003, the company's website describes its mission as making "products for human-driven analysis of real-world data." The company's founders and data tools are very Silicon Valley — Thiel co-founded PayPal alongside Elon Musk (until recently the figurehead of the Trump administration's cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency initiative) and was also the first big investor in Facebook, for instance. But Palantir's customer base is based around Washington, D.C. Public spending data showed the company has held government contracts since at least July 2008. The left-leaning newsroom More Perfect Union quoted Palantir CTO Shyam Shankar in 2021 saying that the company's goal was to become "the U.S. government's central operating system." Different versions of the claim on social media listed the Palantir products Gotham and Foundry as the main ways the company was supposedly consolidating government data. Palantir's website describes Foundry as "Ontology-Powered Operating System for the Modern Enterprise" (it's an internet-based data management system) and Gotham as an "Operating system for global decision making." (It's designed for the military.) Based on those product descriptions, Foundry is the product of interest. Palantir's response to the New York Times story acknowledged the company's extensive work with the U.S. federal government. However, it also aimed to distance itself from one of the most talked-about groups in the early months of Trump's second term — the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which the tech billionaire Elon Musk spearheaded until late May. The New York Times and WIRED previously reported that several DOGE staffers worked at Palantir before joining the initiative. More Perfect Union found other former Palantir employees working within Trump's administration as "foreign policy advisers" and "high-level technology appointees." On June 5, 2025, WIRED published an article claiming that Palantir's head of strategic engagement, Eliano Younes, retaliated in reaction to WIRED's reporting on connections to the Trump administration by threatening to call the police on a WIRED reporter watching software demonstrations at Palantir's booth at the AI+ expo, a free and public event open to journalists. In its response to the New York Times article, Palantir claimed that the New York Times and WIRED's reporting was misleading because "Palantir does not control where its employees go after leaving the company" and that attempts to draw connections between Palantir and the Trump administration "lend credence to a conspiracy to surveil the American public." It is true that former employees of Palantir joining an administration isn't a sign of conspiracy. However, it is also true that at least one co-founder and co-owner of Palantir, Peter Thiel, is a man who has a business history with Musk and who helped bankroll the campaigns of both Vice President JD Vance and Trump. The New York Times story found that since Trump took office, Palantir has received over $113 million in government contracts. Using USASpending, the publicly available database for federal government spending, Snopes found that Palantir received between $228 million and $542 million in government contracts per year between 2020 and 2024, mostly with the Defense Department. Palantir's response noted that many of those contracts dated back to previous administrations. In 2025, however, the company earned its first billion-dollar contract with the Defense Department for a military surveillance system. In short, Palantir does have connections with the Trump administration, although it has attempted to downplay them. The federal government has a lot of data. An April 2025 story from the New York Times counted 314 different pieces of information various U.S. government agencies have on file for each citizen, and suggested the total was likely even higher. On March 20, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled "Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos." The May 30 New York Times story marked this executive order as a starting point for the consolidation of information. But Palantir's response to this idea left out the most important stipulation in the order: A close reading of the Executive Order is merited to better assess the intent and to observe the Order's language that specifically directs any data sharing efforts to align with existing legal authorities and procedural standards, and for the express purpose of addressing inefficiencies in government programs. Inefficiency, waste, fraud, and abuse reduction initiatives have been nonpartisan and regular focuses of multiple administrations. The statement draws on a vague rhetorical maneuver ("raising questions") to extrapolate from a common sense government initiative — that of IT modernization — to the presumption of nefarious and dystopian intent. Describing the executive order as solely an "IT modernization" initiative is highly misleading, even when acknowledging the fact that information technology systems are listed in the executive order. The executive order's "purpose" section reads: Removing unnecessary barriers to Federal employees accessing Government data and promoting inter‑agency data sharing are important steps toward eliminating bureaucratic duplication and inefficiency while enhancing the Government's ability to detect overpayments and fraud. It instructed all federal agencies to ensure that "Federal officials designated by the President or Agency Heads (or their designees) [had] full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, data, software systems, and information technology systems." In simple words, the executive order stated that if the president, or anyone authorized by the president (say, a member of an initiative explicitly created by that president to reduce government waste and fraud), asked for unclassified data, agencies had to provide it. It is true, as Palantir's response noted, that programs targeting "inefficiency, waste, fraud and abuse" have been non-partisan, and that the executive order includes wording about the legal framework. It is also true that the executive order does not explicitly mention DOGE by name. But the executive order, without naming DOGE, still gives the agency enormous power. DOGE's employees are federal employees. According to an interview then-DOGE figurehead Musk gave Fox News, the government is defrauded when "the computer systems don't talk to each other." Using Musk's own rationale, DOGE would therefore need to make the computer systems talk to each other (read: allow one computer system to access data from another system) in order to combat fraud. The agency's strategy of "move fast and break things" seems to ignore whether the actions it takes are legal, based on the dozens of lawsuits filed against the initiative. (DOGE supporters, of course, can claim those lawsuits are without merit, but that argument is outside the scope of this story.) Indeed, DOGE has attempted to interlink the various government systems, according to previous reporting from WIRED and CNN. Palantir's response to the New York Times story claimed those WIRED and CNN reports were also misleading because they helped "propagate similar inaccuracies about Palantir's actual work with U.S. government federal agencies," noting that the company has "no contracts with DOGE." So, let's discuss that question. USASpending listed every federal contract with Palantir dating back to 2008 as follows. The following five departments or agencies all had contracts with Palantir totaling over $100 million: Department of Defense Department of Health and Human Services Department of Homeland Security Department of Justice Department of Treasury Five federal entities had contracts totaling between $10 and $100 million: Department of Veterans Affairs Department of Energy Securities and Exchange Commission Department of Transportation Department of Agriculture Finally, the following five had contracts totaling less than $10 million: Department of Commerce ($4.5 million) Department of State (just under $2 million) General Services Administration ($750,000) Department of Labor ($80,000) Department of the Interior ($5,000) Snopes reached out to all of those departments for comment. We received a response from the Department of Defense directing us to publicly available information on Palantir contracts we had already found. We also received a response from a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official saying, "Like other law enforcement agencies, ICE employs various forms of technology while respecting civil liberties and privacy interests." The May 30 New York Times story claiming that Palantir had been tapped to consolidate data named the three biggest departments — Defense (DOD), Health and Human Services (HHS) and Homeland Security (DHS), as having Palantir contracts. (It did not specify when those contracts started.) That story also claimed that new contracts with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Social Security Administration (SSA) might be coming soon. Palantir confirmed its work with the IRS in its response — since 2018, it has helped support "the agency's criminal investigative workflows." A June story from the New York Times clarified that the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, all within HHS, use Palantir Foundry for data management. So, no — Palantir does not have a direct contract with DOGE. However, the existence of a direct contract does not change the facts of WIRED's reporting about DOGE employees using Palantir's technology to centralize and connect government data sources. The April 2025 reporting from WIRED and CNN claimed that DOGE was combining Homeland Security databases with information from the Social Security Administration (SSA) and voting records to create "a master database for immigration enforcement." That WIRED story also noted that DOGE leaders at the IRS were attempting to create a system that would allow "privileged users to view all agency data from a central access point" using Foundry. The article stated that the Treasury Department denied having a contract for this work, but that "IRS engineers were invited to another three-day 'training and building session' on the project located at Palantir's Georgetown offices in Washington, DC." Several government IT personnel told WIRED that it would be "easy to connect the IRS's Palantir system with the ICE system at DHS." In total, Palantir software certainly isn't used throughout the federal government, as noted in the company's response to the New York Times story. However, Foundry is reportedly used in the department that maintains databases on health, and if DOGE's work at the IRS is fully implemented, it could also be used to connect tax data and immigration data. As for social security, in June, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two unsigned rulings allowing DOGE to access Social Security data and shield records from a watchdog organization. Whether or not Social Security data has been moved to Foundry is unknown. Palantir's initial response claimed the company never "collects data to unlawfully surveil Americans." The New York Times article never accused Palantir of breaking the law. Social media users replied to the company's statement pointing out that the word "unlawfully" could be doing a lot of heavy lifting, implying that Palantir was collecting data to surveil Americans legally. Based on our research, this claim isn't true, because Palantir isn't the one collecting or storing the data — rather, the U.S. government is doing so. Furthermore, Palantir isn't the one attempting to compile or centralize that data — that's DOGE. Palantir's response described their role as follows: "Our business is to provide our customers with the software capabilities to use their data effectively and in accordance to their legitimate mandates." Assuming this is true, Palantir itself is not building any master database, as social media posts claimed. However, its powerful data tools could easily be used to construct such a database. The company acknowledged as much in its response: As a company that focuses on building privacy and civil liberties protective technologies, as well as one that fosters a culture of open dialogue on controversial topics impacting our business, we consider many types of risks associated with our customer engagements and products in order to help avoid or mitigate concerns. There likely may still be residual risks of misuse for any product or tool, technical or otherwise. But our efforts to discuss, understand, and address such risks are one of the reasons that some of the most critical institutions in the world spanning public, private, and non-profit sectors trust Palantir and our products. Furthermore, there is some evidence — based on Trump's executive order, statements from Elon Musk speaking about data consolidation, previous reporting from WIRED and CNN on how Homeland Security and ICE has created an immigrant database from multiple data sources and a recent decision by the Supreme Court that allows DOGE to access SSA data — that the administration is undertaking such an initiative. Palantir's Foundry, a tool to access government data, would only be a part of such an initiative. Paraphrasing what a source within the SSA told WIRED in April, creating a network of computers and databases that DOGE can connect to is "more feasible and quicker than putting all the data in a single place, which is probably what they really want." - YouTube. Accessed 9 June 2025. ---. Accessed 9 June 2025. "About Palantir." Palantir, Accessed 9 June 2025. "Alexander Karp." Forbes, Accessed 9 June 2025. Alexander, Sophie, and Jamie Tarabay. "Peter Thiel's Deep Ties to Trump's Top Ranks." Bloomberg, 7 Mar. 2025, Alvarez, Alayna. "Palantir's Partnership with ICE Deepens." Axios Denver, 1 May 2025, Badger, Emily, and Sheera Frenkel. "Trump Wants to Merge Government Data. Here Are 314 Things It Might Know About You." The New York Times, 9 Apr. 2025, Bajwa, Arsheeya. "Palantir Defies Tech Gloom as Trump Momentum Powers Stellar Share Gains." Reuters, 3 June 2025. Elliott, Vittoria. "The Recruitment Effort That Helped Build Elon Musk's DOGE Army." Wired. Accessed 9 June 2025. Enabling Granular Access Control for All Data Connection Types. Accessed 10 June 2025. Frenkel, Sheera, and Aaron Krolik. "Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans." The New York Times, 30 May 2025, Haskins, Caroline. "Palantir Is Going on Defense." Wired. Accessed 9 June 2025. "Joe Lonsdale." Forbes, Accessed 9 June 2025. Kelly, Makena. "DOGE Is Building a Master Database to Surveil and Track Immigrants." Wired. Accessed 9 June 2025. Lemonides, Alex, et al. "Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump's Agenda." The New York Times, 12 Feb. 2025. Liptak, Adam, and Abbie VanSickle. "Justices Grant DOGE Access to Social Security Data and Let the Team Shield Records." The New York Times, 6 June 2025, Luhby, Priscilla Alvarez, Sunlen Serfaty, Marshall Cohen, Tami. "Elon Musk's DOGE Team Is Building a Master Database for Immigration Enforcement, Sources Say | CNN Politics." CNN, 25 Apr. 2025, Mandavilli, Apoorva. "Palantir's Collection of Disease Data at C.D.C. Stirs Privacy Concerns." The New York Times, 6 June 2025, Natanson, Hannah, et al. "Move Fast, Break Things, Rebuild: Elon Musk's Strategy for U.S. Government." The Washington Post, 24 Feb. 2025, Palantir. "Palantir Is Still Not a Data Company (Palantir Explained, #7)." Medium, 9 June 2025, Palantir IR. Accessed 9 June 2025. "Palantir Privacy and Civil Liberties." Palantir, Accessed 10 June 2025. "Peter Thiel." Forbes, Accessed 9 June 2025. "Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos." The White House, 21 Mar. 2025, Times, The New York. "The People Carrying Out Musk's Plans at DOGE." The New York Times, 27 Feb. 2025. Vincent, Brandi. "'Growing Demand' Sparks DOD to Raise Palantir's Maven Contract to More than $1B." DefenseScoop, 23 May 2025,
Yahoo
15 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Padilla is latest Democrat to mix it up with federal authorities over immigration
Sen. Alex Padilla isn't the first prominent Democrat to mix it up with federal authorities over President Donald Trump's mass deportations. In fact, it's kind of a trend. The California senior was following in the recent footsteps of three other Democratic officials when he was wrestled to the ground Thursday and handcuffed as he tried to question Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at a news conference inside a federal building in Los Angeles. The Trump administration sees a pattern. 'Democrat officials and their staffers are growing increasingly radical and extreme,' White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said. Democrats counter that they are standing up for civil rights, but the heated encounters make one thing clear: The politics of immigration are becoming increasingly tense as the Trump effort to deport noncitizens picks up pace. Padilla argued that his treatment at the hands of federal agents shows the risk to ordinary Americans. 'If this is how the Department of Homeland Security responds to a senator with a question, you can only imagine what they're doing to farmworkers, to cooks, to day laborers out in the Los Angeles community and throughout California and throughout the country,' he said. Since last month, at least four Democratic officials, including Padilla, have run into conflict with federal officers in clashes related to the administration's campaign. Padilla's handcuffing took place at a press briefing Noem held to tout the administration's efforts to arrest people without legal immigration status around Southern California in a series of actions that sparked raucous protests — and prompted the Trump administration to deploy National Guard troops and Marines over the objections of local authorities. Federal agents bustled the senator out of the room and forced him to the ground in a scene captured on video that caused outrage among Democratic members of Congress. DHS defended the response and said that Noem met with Padilla later for about 15 minutes. The incident came after Democratic officials got into a scuffle with federal officers outside an immigration detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, in May, resulting in the arrest of the city's mayor, Ras Baraka, followed by the indictment of Rep. LaMonica McIver. Also in May, DHS officers briefly detained an aide to New York Rep. Jerry Nadler inside the Congressmember's office amid protests against immigration detentions at a federal courthouse in the same building. The agency at the time said that officers only entered the space to 'conduct a security check' on the representative's office because of reports of protests nearby. An officer can be heard in a video of the incident accusing Nadler's staff of 'harboring rioters,' and requesting to search the space, prompting staff members to attempt to block their entry into private areas of the office. No arrests were ultimately made, but the incident drew outcry from Nadler and other Democrats, who said the incident was a reflection of the Trump administration's approach to immigration enforcement. Nadler cautioned in a statement at the time that 'if this can happen in a Member of Congress's office, it can happen to anyone — and it is happening.'
