FAA Halts Flights as Elon Musk’s Rocket Blows Up Yet Again

Yet again, one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets exploded on Thursday night, grounding flights across Florida as fiery debris fell from the sky.

In its eighth test flight, the 400-foot rocket launched from Brownsville, Texas, and exploded shortly after experiencing engine failure upon reaching space and spinning out of control.

The Federal Aviation Administration halted commercial flights at airports in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, and Orlando, a particularly congested airspace.

“During Starship’s ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly and contact was lost. Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses,” SpaceX posted on X.

This is the second consecutive explosion of a SpaceX rocket. On January 16, a rocket failed shortly after launching, also diverting dozens of flights as debris fell from the sky. The incident caused property damage in Turks and Caicos.

“As always, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will offer additional lessons to improve Starship’s reliability.”

It’s a futile statement coming from the company owned by a man who blamed diversity, equity, and inclusion for making America’s airspace unsafe while he launches exploding rockets into that same airspace.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has fired hundreds of crucial FAA employees and a SpaceX engineer turned DOGE staffer is threatening to fire more if employees don’t comply with SpaceX’s directives. Musk’s infiltration of the FAA blurs yet another line between a federal agency and one of Musk’s private business ventures.

There will no doubt be more victims in the billionaire’s relentless pursuit of the colonization of space.

An unvaccinated adult in New Mexico with measles has died, local health department officials reported Thursday. The cause of death has not yet been identified, though this would be the second death so far from the (until recently) rare disease.

The individual—whose name, age, and sex were not released by local authorities—is the second person to die from the virus amid a growing outbreak along the New Mexico-Texas border, sparking widespread concern among doctors that the federal government’s response is simply not enough to halt the spread of measles.

Last week, an unvaccinated 6-year-old child in west Texas died of measles. It was the first instance in which someone has died from the viral illness in the U.S. in a decade. At least 159 infections have been reported in the Lone Star State in the current outbreak, according to data from the Texas Department of State Health Services. The vast majority of those infected—nearly 80 percent—are under the age of 17.

In response, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy has placed an emphasis on treating the disease with vitamin A supplements, rather than encouraging the local unvaccinated population to receive an immunization against the disease.

In an interview with Fox News on Tuesday, Kennedy claimed that local Texas doctors were “getting very, very good results” by treating their measles patients with steroids and cod liver oil.

But while health officials agree that vitamin A and other treatments can add a slight boost to one’s immune system, they stress that it’s not a replacement for a vaccine that has practically erased the highly contagious, incurable disease from public consciousness for more than a half century.

“Mentions of cod liver oil and vitamins [are] just distracting people away from what the single message should be, which is to increase the vaccination rate,” Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told NPR.

Other medical professionals argued that advising children—who, again, are the bulk of those infected—to maintain high doses of vitamin A for extended periods of time isn’t just misguided but also potentially dangerous.

“Vitamin A can accumulate in the body,” Dr. Adam Ratner, a member of the infectious disease committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told NPR. “It can be toxic to the liver. It can have effects that you don’t want for your child.” That could include liver damage, fatigue, hair loss, and headaches.

Before last week, the last person to succumb to the disease died in 2015, during a less severe outbreak in Clallam County, Washington, in which a couple dozen people were infected. Measles was identified as the cause of death for the unidentified woman during an autopsy, which found that she had “several other health conditions and was on medications that contributed to a suppressed immune system,” the state health department said at the time.

It wouldn’t be the first measles response that Kennedy has bungled, however. Children’s Health Defense—under Kennedy’s stewardship—had its own questionable history with the disease. Preceding a deadly measles outbreak on Samoa in 2019, the nonprofit spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines throughout the nation, sending the island’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of 5.

As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat for the average, health-conscious individual.

Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce are getting in the way of his own agenda. 

More than 100 employees at the Executive Office of Immigration Review have either been terminated or opted into the government’s deferred resignation program, creating a new roadblock in the Trump administration’s goal to execute massive deportations, according to ABC News. 

For scale, the U.S. employs roughly 735 immigration judges in the country’s 71 immigration courts, charged with handling a backlog of 3.7 million cases—and the number increases every day. 

The Trump administration’s efforts to cull extraneous workers has led to the departure of 43 immigration judges, as well as 85 essential administrative staff.

Matt Biggs, the president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, told ABC News that the Trump administration’s efforts to dismiss the immigration judges his union represents was “highly hypocritical.”

“How do you deport people without immigration judges?” Biggs said. “It’s highly hypocritical. It runs contrary to what he campaigned on. He’s making it more difficult to deport people from this country. It makes no sense at all.”

Cutting roughly six percent of the U.S. stock of judges certainly won’t prevent the Trump administration’s efforts to enact massive deportations; it will likely just make them even more slow and painful for those subjected to detainment by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which on Thursday officially revived the policy of detaining migrant families with children. The practice had been banned under President Joe Biden.  

It’s also possible that some judges are being dismissed for political reasons. Kerry Doyle, a longtime immigration attorney, was one of 13 in a class of newly hired immigration judges who was dismissed last month. She had previously been flagged on the American Accountability Foundation’s “DHS Bureaucrat Watchlist.” 

The website described Doyle as an “immigration activist lawyer” with a “known history as a critic of DHS” and a “lifelong commitment to open borders and mass migration,” according to Mother Jones. Now, she’s out of a job. 

In a post on LinkedIn, Doyle wrote that her dismissal was “political.”

“The reality is that you’ve got a really broken system, and firing judges is not the way to fix it,” Doyle told ABC News. 

Donald Trump’s tariffs plan has caused a lot of confusion with his repeated reversals, carve-outs, and threats to raise them. So, in an interview that aired Friday, Fox Business’s Maria Baritromo asked the president to clear things up.

“Can you give us a sense of whether or not we are going to get clarity for the business community?” Baritromo asked the president, noting that business leaders need predictability for planning purposes.

Trump’s answer was anything but reassuring.

“Well, I think so. But you know, the tariffs could go up as time goes by, and they may go up, and you know, I don’t know if it’s predictability—” Trump meandered before Baritromo cut him off.

“So that’s not clarity,” Baritromo said. Trump responded by casting doubt on the business leaders and whether they actually want predictability.

“You know I think that they say that. You know it sounds good to say. But, for years, the globalists, the big globalists, have been ripping off the United States, they’ve been taking money away from the United States, and all we’re doing is getting some of it back,” Trump said.

When Trump instituted his tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China on Tuesday, the stock market plummeted, with leaders in U.S. industries ranging from automobiles to agriculture expressing fears about how they would be affected. On Wednesday, Trump announced a carve-out for U.S. automakers, and on Thursday announced Mexico and Canada would not pay tariffs on products that comply with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, until April 2.

The real goal of the tariffs against Canada, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt admitted Wednesday, is to decimate the country’s economy to force it to become the U.S. fifty-first state. Such an effort would further cause extreme economic confusion and ruin, and if Trump is serious, this tariff fight won’t end anytime soon.

Amid a flurry of lawsuits against his administration, Trump is trying to make it a whole lot harder to sue him.

According to a memo sent to agency heads on Thursday, the White House is encouraging the use of a rarely used rule that would force anyone who sues the federal government to pay an upfront fee.

“It is the policy of the United States to demand that parties seeking injunctions against the Federal Government must cover the costs and damages incurred if the Government is ultimately found to have been wrongfully enjoined or restrained,” the memo obtained by CNN reads.

More than 100 lawsuits have been filed against the president since he took office in January. The cases range from challenging his immigration policies and funding cuts, to disputes against the Department of Government Efficiency’s attack on federal agencies. Many of the cases have been successful early on, and they are all ongoing.

In the memo, the White House framed the cases as a waste of “substantial resources to fighting frivolous suits instead of defending public safety.”

“Taxpayers are forced not only to cover the costs of their antics when funding and hiring decisions are enjoined, but must needlessly wait for Government policies they voted for,” the memo reads.

The rule the White House is attempting to invoke is rarely used in the courts, and the financial barrier could prevent individuals, organizations, unions, and agencies from taking action against the president.

It’s unclear exactly who would decide how much the plaintiff would have to pay, but the Justice Department would probably ask judges to set the amount, legal expert Mark Zaid told CNN.

That means the fee could be as little as $1, and as high as … who knows? It’s yet another sly move from Trump to dodge accountability for his relentless attack on the Constitution.

The president has decided to throw some weight behind one of his closest advisers when it comes to dealing with South Africa.

Despite tariff-induced tumult at home, Donald Trump took the time Friday morning to lambast South Africa for how it treats its farmers, threatening aggressive foreign policy toward the continent’s strongest economy by announcing that the United States would stop all federal funding to the African nation.

“South Africa is being terrible, plus, to long time Farmers in the country,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “They are confiscating their LAND and FARMS, and MUCH WORSE THAN THAT. A bad place to be right now, and we are stopping all Federal Funding. To go a step further, any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship. This process will begin immediately!”

The missive came hand in hand with a complaint from Elon Musk, who whined on X mere hours before that South Africa would not allow his international internet project to get off the ground, due to a lack of diversity at the billionaire’s company.

“Starlink is not allowed to operate in South Africa, because I’m not black,” Musk posted on X Friday morning.

But that wasn’t exactly an accurate reflection of why Musk’s home country has refused to approve SpaceX’s Starlink service.

The South African government’s Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment policy stipulates that all companies that do business in the nation must have at least 30 percent of their ownership or economic involvement owned by Black South Africans.

The mandate is a part of the country’s efforts to correct inequalities left in the wake of apartheid, striving to “advance economic transformation and enhance the economic participation of black people in the South African economy,” per the South African Department of Trade, Industry, and Competition.

Musk has practically made the notion of diversity his enemy as he works—via the Department of Government Efficiency—to strip and defund federal agencies whose missions make mention of inclusivity efforts.

“DEI is just another word for racism,” Musk wrote in January. “Shame on anyone who uses it.”

The world’s richest man’s affinity for Nazi salutes have also called into question his racial ideology, especially as a descendant of Nazi sympathizers. That is according to his father, Errol Musk, who told the Podcast and Chill Network in November that the billionaire’s maternal grandparents supported Adolf Hitler and were members of the German Nazi Party in Canada before moving to South Africa in support of apartheid.

Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense has marked an image of the USAAF B29 bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima for deletion—and its reason may be the perfect illustration of why right now really isn’t a good time to be closing the Department of Education.

That historical image was among 26,000 that were marked for deletion as part of the  DOD’s rushed efforts to weed out any traces of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion by Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. The photograph was marked for removal because it prominently features the name of the aircraft: Enola Gay, named for the pilot Colonel Paul Tibbetts’s mother. 

The Associated Press published a database Thursday of thousands of images marked for deletion. While some of the photographs were still visible Thursday, it’s not clear if they will remain so. One official told the AP that close to 100,000 files could be deleted as part of the Pentagon’s latest purge. 

It’s not surprising that the sweep for DEI has consequently targeted the records and achievements of women and minorities in the military, removing mentions of Women’s History Month and Black History Month. One collection of images titled “Women’s History Month: All-female crew supports warfighters” saw its main page removed, though one photograph of an all-female C-17 crew remained. Another photograph titled “Engineering pioneer remembered during Black History Month” was deleted, as well. 

Other photographs swept up in the purge included those of service members with the last name Gay, war heroes such as Marine Corps World War II Medal of Honor recipient Private First Class Harold Gonsalves, and a photograph of a group of Army Corps biologists, who appeared to have earned their spot on the chopping block because they were collecting data about fish including, among other things, their gender.

Online, people weren’t at all impressed by the Pentagon’s thoughtless CTRL-F style of searching for woke.

Former Pentagon spokesperson Chris Meagher called the report “bonkers” in a post on X Thursday. 

Rick Pearson, a political reporter for the Chicago Tribune, called the Pentagon’s purge “complete lunacy and literally an attempt to whitewash history” in a post on X.

“Republicans spent years complaining about cancel culture and then took office and banned photos of the Enola Gay because it has the word gay in it,” posted Skyler Johnson, a candidate for New York State Senate. 

“These fuckers are bigots and fucking idiots too,” wrote Army veteran Fred Wellman, who hosts the podcast On Democracy. 

“What a piece of shit you are @SecDef,” he added in a second post. 

The president’s ruthless back-and-forth on enforcing sweeping tariffs against Canada and Mexico is starting to frustrate his MAGA allies.

Last month, Trump announced he would impose a 25 percent tariff on goods from America’s closest neighbors. Two days later, he backtracked, giving Canada and Mexico a one-month delay. On March 4, the tariffs went into effect, sparking retaliatory tariffs from Canada, as well as outcry from America’s Big Three automakers.

Two days later, Trump directed another one-month pause for goods that met his 2020 trade deal, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which a White House official told CNBC covered roughly 50 percent of Mexican imports and 38 percent of Canadian imports. And then, in an interview that aired Friday, Trump said the tariffs could go higher than 25 percent.

As a result, the last week saw drastic market fluctuations, with the stock market tumbling as the tariffs went into effect. The Dow dropped 670 points, and by the end of the week, Republican lawmakers were fed up.

“Almost every industry in Kentucky has come to me and said, ‘It will hurt our industry and push up prices of homes, cars,’ and so, I’m gonna continue to argue against tariffs,” Senator Rand Paul told CNN on Thursday.

Senator Thom Tillis agreed that the administration should back off the tariffs if they were hurting constituents.

“When we start losing, you back off. There’s such a thing as strategic retreat,” Tillis told the network. “At the end of the day, I think we have more leverage than any other nation. But we gotta be smart. And we don’t have all the leverage.”

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy told Fox Business he was “worried” about the tariffs, adding that the president should “recalibrate” if the levies start to cause inflation—while insisting that he’s not doubting Trump’s leadership.

“I’m not saying that tariffs are going to cause inflation. President Trump did them in his first term and they didn’t,” Kennedy said. “I’m saying that we just don’t know. We’re in very obscure territory. We’re in uncharted waters. I think if the tariffs do start to cause inflation, I think the president will back away from them.”

Among other tariff proposals, Trump has enforced a 10 percent tariff hike on Chinese goods. That momentarily caused a panic in February for online retailers as the postal service placed a ban on Chinese packages, which it lifted days later. Casting China as a “bulwark of stability” against a backdrop of Trump-induced chaos, the Asian nation’s top diplomat Wang Yi said that China would “definitely, resolutely counter” America’s tariffs.

Donald Trump’s attempt to take over the National Labor Relations Board hit a snag from a federal judge Thursday.

Trump’s firing of Democratic board member Gwynne A. Wilcox was ruled unlawful by U.S. District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell, who ordered Wilcox’s immediate reinstatement and for her to serve out the remainder of her five-year term on the board, which began on September 6, 2023.

In her ruling, Howell wrote that the Constitution “made clear that no one in our system of government was meant to be king—the President included—and not just in name only.

“The President does not have the authority to terminate members of the National Labor Relations Board at will, and his attempt to fire plaintiff from her position on the Board was a blatant violation of the law,” Howell said.

“A president who touts an image of himself as a ‘king’ or a ‘dictator,’ perhaps as his vision of effective leadership, fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article II of the U.S. Constitution,” Howell added.

Wilcox filed the lawsuit last month after Trump fired her and the board’s general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, a fellow Biden appointee, leaving the board unable to function without a quorum. In a speech after the hearing Thursday, Wilcox said, “I’m ready to get back to work.”

“It’s not just about me, but I’m glad to be the face of this fight,” Wilcox said.

Trump, Elon Musk, and the rest of the right have long targeted the NLRB, and are in fact trying to get the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional and dismantle it with backing from corporations including Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s. For now, at least, the NLRB is still around, with long legal fights ahead to save it as well as Wilcox’s position.

Just hours after he rolled back tariffs on Mexico, the president announced Canada will also not pay tariffs on any products that comply with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, until April 2. It’s Trump’s third flip on tariffs in 72 hours.

He signed an executive order Thursday solidifying the one-month tariff delay on products from both countries.

On Tuesday, Trump implemented 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada, a disastrous move that plummeted financial markets and prompted retaliatory actions from both U.S. trading partners.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded aggressively, immediately implementing retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods and condemning Trump’s betrayal of a longtime ally.

“Every country is very aware that if the American government is willing to do this to their own closest ally, neighbor, and friend, everyone is vulnerable to a trade war,” Trudeau said in a press conference on Tuesday, bypassing Trump and instead speaking directly to the American people.

“Your government has chosen to put American jobs at risk at the thousands of workplaces that succeed because of materials from Canada, or because of consumers in Canada, or both.”

Trump reacted to Trudeau’s address with hostility, and yet again suggested all of Canada’s problems could be solved by becoming the fifty-first American state. His dislike for Trudeau seemingly influenced his decision-making Thursday morning, when he initially retracted tariffs only on Mexico “out of respect” for Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, but not for Canada. Trump on Wednesday also granted a one-month exemption to U.S. automobile companies.

Unsurprisingly, the president has changed his mind yet again, drawing out a trade war that will have disastrous economic consequences.