VFS is the absolute most shit visa processing company in the world. They repeatedly and deliberately messed up my Indian visa for months. The Indian government must immediately cut ties with them for all visa services. This company wrecks peoples lives lighthousereports.com/invest…

Long lines at petrol stations in rural India persist amid fuel supply concerns from ME crisis. Current situation in Kamshet where farmers are preparing for high planting season.

It's been 5 years since the famous "lawyer cat filter" incident during a Zoom court hearing

A burgeoning lithium industry in the American South could provide a blueprint for India as the country seeks to expand its own domestic lithium production. Read my research with @GatewayHouseIND on the Smackover Formation in rural Arkansas @CFR_org gatewayhouse.in/the-smackove…

JUST IN: You do not fire your Army Chief of Staff in the middle of a war for no reason. You fire him because of what comes next. Pete Hegseth called General Randy George on April 2 and told him to retire immediately. The Pentagon confirmed it within hours. No reason was given. Not publicly. Not privately. A senior Army official told Fox News that Hegseth offered George nothing: no misconduct, no operational failure, no policy disagreement on the record. Just a phone call and a career ending in the middle of the most significant American combat operation in two decades. George is the 24th general or admiral Hegseth has removed. But he is not the 24th. He is the one that matters. The Army Chief of Staff. The man whose signature sits between a president’s intent and the order that sends soldiers across a beach or into a tunnel complex. The 82nd Airborne is deploying right now. Marines from the 31st MEU are staged on the USS Tripoli. JSOC operators are at forward bases in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Kharg Island, 90 percent of Iranian oil exports, sits 16 kilometres off a coast that someone will have to decide whether to approach. And the four-star general whose job it was to advise whether that approach should happen was removed 48 hours after Trump told the nation the war would continue for two to three more weeks. The replacement is Vice Chief General Christopher LaNeve. He was Hegseth’s senior military aide before this appointment. The man who carried the Secretary’s briefcase now commands the Army the Secretary is reshaping. The chain of command did not break. It shortened. The distance between a television studio and a combat order just collapsed to zero intermediaries who were not personally selected by the man giving the order. No reason was given. That is the tell. When someone is removed without explanation during a crisis, the explanation is the crisis itself. George either objected to something or was about to. The ground option. The power plant strikes. The Kharg raid. The escalation that turned a highway bridge in Karaj into rubble on the same day he was told to leave. Something in the next two weeks requires a chief who will not push back, and the Pentagon solved that problem by installing one trained as Hegseth’s aide. A former Fox News weekend host just fired a four-star general with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, replaced him with his own former assistant, and did it during a live war in which the next decision could put American soldiers on Iranian soil for the first time in history. No hearing was held. No misconduct cited. The Army woke up on April 3 with a new chief it did not choose, in a war it did not start, preparing for a phase the previous chief apparently could not be trusted to execute. The question is not why George was fired. Every general in the building knows why. The question is what order is coming in the next fourteen days that required removing the one man in the chain of command who might have said no. The war has no perimeter. The chain of command has no objectors. And the next phase has no one left to stop it. open.substack.com/pub/shanak…

BREAKING: Jimmy Kimmel just humiliated Pam Bondi in the best way possible. Wow.

"You're here to terrorize this city" - Vietnam Veteran confronts Federal ICE agents outside Whipple Federal Building in Minnesota

Pastor: I saw ICE agents circling a young woman who appeared to be Hispanic. I said to this ICE agent, 'Take me, stop harassing her.' The agent got in my face, pointed a gun at me, and said, 'Are you afraid now?' To which I said, 'I am not afraid.' The next thing I knew, they were putting handcuffs on me, and they put me in the back of an SUV. I asked them if I was under arrest. They said to me, 'Well, you're white, you won't be any fun anyway.'

Japan has a new stationmaster cat. The Wakayama Electric Railway Kishigawa Line is famous for its feline stationmasters. A new cat, Rokutama, has been appointed trainee stationmaster of 2 stations. Other cats received promotions. This is serious stuff.

Friday’s NY Post cover is pure gold

Abandoning MAGA Ark May Be Trump at His Most Unhinged “One can only wonder what is going through Sanders’s mind. The president she once devoted her career to is now trying to blow an enormous hole in her budget and impoverish the people who elected her. apple.news/AYxJS8H-nTre0ZyOt…

Trees down on houses and fence in Stifft’s Station area of Little Rock #arwx

A tree fell on powerlines onto a car which caused the car to ignite in Hillcrest. Photos from Tony Cooper.... #ARWX @NWSLittleRock

THREAD: Last year, ProPublica started receiving tips from an unusual kind of source: flight attendants. They said they'd worked on deportation flights for ICE, and they could tell us what it was really like on board. 1/

Never before has an hour of Presidential rhetoric cost so many people so much. Markets continue to move after my previous tweet. The best estimate of the loss from tariff policy is now is closer to $30 trillion or $300,000 per family of four.

What we’re watching across North America is a controlled demolition of public health. 1/

Arkansas legislators filed a bill on Wednesday that would reverse hard-fought efforts to reform the state’s youth psychiatric residential treatment facility industry, giving providers free rein to expand. arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2…

The BEST news! Fire victim Casey Colvin, whose home burned down in the Palisades Fire, just found and reunited with his dog, Oreo, who spent 5 nights surviving amidst the rubble ❤️ @NBCNews

Sorry for tweeting so much, but Twitter throttles out-bound links, so I'm trying this again. SoCal animal shelters are overwhelmed with people dropping off injured animals they can't take with them as they flee. Many are in need of volunteers, money, and foster homes 🧵