Now in our 12th year on KPFT!

Going forward, new shows will broadcast on Sundays at 1PM (CT) broadcast and re-run on Wednesdays at 11AM.

AUDIO:

TOPICS:

1. Coalition for the Homeless to conduct annual count of homeless individuals in Houston;
2. Federal prosecutors drop case against doctor accused of leaking trans patient data;
3. Tesla investors want Elon Musk to answer questions about ‘salute,’ role in Trump White House;
4. ‘Not a buyout’: Attorneys and unions urge federal workers not to resign;
5. New DOT Sec/reality TV contestant signs memo to increase US fuel costs by $23B;
6. Trump hits NIH with ‘devastating’ freezes on meetings, travel, communications, and hiring;
7. Undersea infrastructure is Europe’s unexpected Achilles’ heel. What’s going on?;
8. Strong-Arming Latin America Will Work Until It Doesn’t;
9. Google reclassifies U.S. as ‘sensitive country’ alongside China, Russia after Trump’s ‘Gulf of America’ comments;
10. ‘It’s absurd’: Mexicans mock and shrug off Trump’s order to rename Gulf of Mexico;

Welcome to Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig where we discuss local, state, national, and international stories. 

Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio) is now on Wednesdays at 11AM (CT) or Thursdays at 6PM on KPFT 90.1 FM-HD2, Houston’s Community Media. You can also hear the show:

1. Live online at KPFT.org (from anywhere in the world!)
2. Podcast on your phone’s Podcast App
3. Visiting Archive.KPFT.ORG

Except for timely election info, the extensive list of voting resources will now be at the end.

Welcome to Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig on KPFT Houston at 90.1-HD2, Galveston 89.5-HD2, and Huntsville at 91.9-HD2. KPFT is Houston’s Community Media. On this show, we discuss local, state, national, and international stories that may have slipped under your radar.

1. Coalition for the Homeless to conduct annual count of homeless individuals in Houston; By Cassandra Jenkins | COMMUNITYIMPACT.COM | 2:13 PM Jan 28, 2025 CST
   Updated 2:13 PM Jan 28, 2025 CST. TAGS: Coalition for the Homeless of Houston and Harris County, Houston,, Harris County, Fort Bend County, Montgomery County, Annual Point-in-Time Survey,
   1. The Coalition for the Homeless of Houston and Harris County started its annual Point-in-Time Homeless Count and Survey this week to determine the number of people experiencing homelessness across Houston, and throughout Harris, Fort Bend and Montgomery Counties.
   2. … The Coalition is a nonprofit organization that aims to lead the development and implementation of community strategies to prevent and end homelessness in the region, according to its website. The organization’s annual Point-in-Time Survey provides a snapshot of sheltered and unsheltered individuals experiencing homelessness and typically occurs annually in January.
   3. This year, according to a Jan. 28 news release, the organization started the process Jan. 27 by counting the number of people staying in shelters by pulling records electronically from the Homeless Management Information System. The unsheltered count will be conducted Jan. 28-Jan. 30, with more than 400 volunteers and staff of local nonprofits assisting in the count.
   4. According to the release, volunteers will canvass the three-county region by using an app on their mobile devices.
   5. … In 2024, the Point-in-Time count results showed a 33% decrease in unsheltered homelessness since 2020, with an overall 60% reduction since 2011.
   6. Kelly Young, president and CEO of the Coalition, said the progress the region is seeing in addressing homelessness in Houston is a direct result of strategic partnerships and investments, but states that sustainable funding is still a critical need to avoiding a backslide. …
   7. Houston Mayor John Whitmire announced in November his intentions to launch a $70 million program to deal with homelessness in the city, and called on city and county leaders to commit to various funding streams as well as potential help from the Texas Legislature. However, more details have yet to be released.
   8. … The results of the Houston’s 2025 PIT Count will be released by CFTH in the spring, following independent verification by an epidemiologist, representatives said. The findings are also expected to provide insight into how factors such as the end of federal pandemic relief funding has impacted homelessness in the region.
   9. MIKE: Will this survey show that homelessness in metro Houston is up or down? We’ll have to wait a couple of months to find out. Do any of you have an anecdotal sense of which it will be? I’d be interested in hearing from you.
2. Federal prosecutors drop case against doctor accused of leaking trans patient data; By Monroe Trombly | HOUSTONLANDING.ORG | January 24, 2025 @ 5:06 pm. TAGS: Eithan Haim, Texas Children’s Hospital, U.S. District Judge David Hittner, Christopher Rufo,
   1. Federal prosecutors in Houston dropped their criminal case against Eithan Haim on Friday, less than two weeks before the Dallas surgeon was set to stand trial on charges of violating patient privacy laws by sharing information regarding transgender care at Texas Children’s Hospital with a conservative activist.
   2. In court filings, prosecutors provided no explanation for their decision, and a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.
   3. S. District Judge David Hittner on Friday signed a joint motion to dismiss, clearing Haim of four counts of wrongful disclosure of individually identifiable health information. The counts were dismissed with prejudice, meaning the case cannot be refiled.
   4. Prosecutors’ decision to drop the case came two days after Haim and his wife took to social media to criticize what they repeatedly argued was a politically motivated prosecution. 
   5. Andrea Haim had also accused Jennifer Lowery, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, of violating a recent executive order from the Trump administration that instructs the attorney general to identify politically motivated actions by members of the Biden administration. The public comments by the husband-and-wife team came despite a warning from Hittner not to make statements that could interfere with the jury selection process.
   6. Lowery assumed the role of acting U.S. Attorney less than a week ago following the resignation of Alamdar Hamdani. Although Hamdani had not been formally asked to resign, he did so preemptively, as it is customary for new presidents to install new U.S. Attorneys across all 93 districts. Lowery had been Hamdani’s first assistant.
   7. “I think it speaks volumes about what the career staff thought about this case,” said Ryan Patrick, one of Haim’s lawyers. Patrick, the son of Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick, previously served as U.S. Attorney for Texas’ Southern District for three years before being asked to resign in 2021 following Joe Biden’s election.
   8. From 2018 through 2023, Haim was a resident at Baylor College of Medicine and worked at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, the largest pediatric hospital in the country. At one point during the residency, Haim accessed the private information of patients outside his care and shared a portion of that information with the conservative activist Christopher Rufo.
   9. Rufo published an article in May 2023 claiming that Texas Children’s Hospital had continued to administer puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors despite previously pledging to stop. 
   10. (The hospital has previously said that it briefly stopped providing gender-affirming therapies after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the state’s child welfare agency to investigate reports of gender-affirming care for kids as abuse. It resumed providing such care after confirming it was in compliance with existing law, the hospital said in August).
   11. Shortly after Rufo published the article, Texas passed a law banning transgender minors from getting puberty blockers and hormone therapies. While Haim admitted to sharing the patient information with Rufo, he maintained that he did not break the law because the documents were redacted.
   12. Haim has described himself as a whistleblower who exposed what he saw as Texas Children’s Hospital misleading the public. His story gained significant traction in conservative circles, particularly after Texas Republicans like U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and U.S. Reps Chip Roy and Dan Crenshaw publicly supported his cause.
   13. In several posts and retweets on X (formerly known as Twitter) Haim and his wife celebrated the dismissal of the case. Andrea Haim, a federal prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas, said they would do the same thing they did when federal agents visited their home in June 2023: drink champagne and relax on their balcony.
   14. “Today is for celebrating, tomorrow is for accountability,” she wrote, sharing a photo of her husband and their young daughter.
   15. MIKE: So this case is dismissed with prejudice. That’s almost a backdoor pardon, but it doesn’t require even an implied admission of guilt.
   16. MIKE: With all the talk about politically motivated prosecutions over the last couple of months, maybe we also needed to be discussing politically motivated prosecution dismissals.
   17. MIKE: This is an obvious case of the latter. It’s taken less than two weeks to see that we are now less a nation of law and more a nation of Trump’s legal whims.
   18. MIKE: From a legal standpoint, I don’t think you have to be a lawyer to understand that this was a cut-and-dried case of breech of medical confidentiality.
   19. MIKE: This is what political corruption looks like, and we are seeing the beginning of what four years of criminal rule looks like.
3. Tesla investors want Elon Musk to answer questions about ‘salute,’ role in Trump White House; By Lora Kolodny (@in/lorakolodny/) | CNBC.COM | Published Tue, Jan 28 2025@9:33 PM EST/Updated An Hour Ago. TAGS: Tesla, Fascist Salute, Tesla CEO Elon Musk,
   1. Tesla’s fourth-quarter earnings report lands just over a week after President Donald Trump began his second term in the White House, with Elon Musk right by his side.
   2. Now that the Tesla CEO is firmly planted in Washington, D.C., in a high-profile advisory role, shareholders in the electric vehicle maker have some questions.
   3. On the forumTesla uses to solicit investor inquiries in advance of its earnings calls, more than 100 poured in from shareholders about Musk’spolitics, including his official role at Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and his endorsement of far-right candidates.
   4. “How much time does Elon Musk devote to growing Tesla, solving product issues, and driving shareholder value vs. his public engagements with Trump, DOGE, and political activities?” one retail investor asked, adding, “Do you believe he’s providing Tesla the focus it needs?”
   5. In addition to contributing $270 million to help Trump and other Republican candidates and causes, Musk spent weeks on the campaign trail during the fourth quarter working to propel Trump back into the White House. After Trump’s election victory, Musk then spent considerable time far away from Tesla’s factory floor at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
   6. One of the top-voted questions about Musk asked how much time he intends to spend “at the White House and on government activities vs time and effort dedicated to Tesla.”
   7. Musk and Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. …
   8. According to research and consulting firm Brand Finance, the value of Tesla’s brand fell by 26% last year, with factors including Musk’s “antagonism,” Tesla’s aging lineup of EVs and more. The researchers found that fewer consumers would recommend or consider buying a Tesla now than in previous years.
   9. During public remarks following last week’s inauguration, Musk repeatedly used a gesturethat was viewed by many historians and politicians as a Nazi salute. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, whose scholarship has focused on fascism, described it as “a Nazi salute and a very belligerent one,” while neo-Nazis praised Musk for his antics.
   10. A shareholder … asked, “Will you apologize for the misunderstanding that occurred when you made the hand gesture thanking folks for their support. It would go a long way with your investors and the American public at large. Thanking you in advance Elon!”
   11. In response to the criticism, Musk said anyone calling the salute a hateful gesture was pushing a “hoax.” But after that, he engaged in Nazi-themed word play on X, prompting the Anti-Defamation League to rebuke him, writing it is “inappropriate and offensive to make light” of the “singularly evil” Holocaust. And Musk later appeared via video at a rally for the [ultra-rightwing] AfD in Halle, Germany.
   12. Some investors asked whether Tesla had “sales lost due to political activities of Elon,” how the company plans “to respond to Musk’s now infamous Nazi salute,” and how Tesla “is addressing the negative impacts of Elon’s public views and activities.”
   13. But Tesla is under no obligation to bring any of these topics up on the earnings call. Ahead of the third-quarter call in October, investors had a lot of questions and concerns about similar issues regarding Musk’s involvement in politics, though that was before Trump’s election victory.
   14. Trump was never mentioned on that call.
   15. MIKE: So I have two questions for Tesla shareholders: 1- Will any of their questions to Tesla or Elon make a difference? And, 2- Will the richest man in the world care one way or the other?
4. ‘Not a buyout’: Attorneys and unions urge federal workers not to resign; By Andrea Hsu | NPR.ORG | Updated January 29, 2025@6:22 PM ET. TAGS: Trump, Federal Workers, Resignation, U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM),
   1. Federal employee unions and attorneys are urging government workers not to accept an offer from the Trump administration to resign from their jobs by Feb. 6 and be paid through the end of September.
   2. “This ‘fork’ thing is not a buyout,” said Jim Eisenmann, a partner with Alden Law Group who represents federal employees, referring to the “Fork in the Road” subject line that accompanied an email sent to federal workers Tuesday. “It’s not based on any law or regulation or anything really other than an idea they cooked up to get federal employees out of the government.”
   3. He said the offer may appear like a soft landing for those who don’t want to comply with the Trump administration’s requirement to return to the office full-time.
   4. “But[, Eisenmann added,] “there’s no guarantee other things won’t happen to them between now and then, like they won’t get fired for some other reason or they won’t get laid off pursuant to a reduction in force.”
   5. The email told employees that they have until Feb. 6 to accept the deal, calling it a “deferred resignation program.” Anyone wishing to resign was instructed to reply to the email with the word “Resign” and hit “Send.”
   6. Almost immediately after the memo hit inboxes, federal workers began sharing their confusion, anger and disbelief on Reddit and elsewhere.
   7. … Some of the confusion arose from mixed messaging coming from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
   8. The original OPM memo was unclear on whether employees who choose to resign would be expected to work between now and Sept. 30.
   9. Language included in the memo states: “I understand my employing agency will likely make adjustments in response to my resignation including moving, eliminating, consolidating, reassigning my position and tasks, reducing my official duties, and/or placing me on paid administrative leave until my resignation date.”
   10. One part of the letter that was clear was that employees who accepted the offer would not have to comply with return-to-office requirements.
   11. Many employees took that to mean that if they accepted the offer, they would still be expected to work through Sept. 30 but could continue teleworking.
   12. Later, the agency posted an FAQ stating: “Except in rare cases determined by your agency, you are not expected to work.”
   13. An OPM spokesperson confirmed to NPR on Tuesday night that the expectation was that employees would be put on paid administrative leave soon after they replied to the memo.
   14. … Another red flag for many employees was the fact that the email came directly from OPM, not from their agency heads, which is standard protocol.
   15. Several federal employees told NPR that before last week, they had never received any communications directly from OPM. Some even questioned whether the email was real.
   16. Federal employee unions have condemned the email and are telling their employees not to resign.
   17. Matthew Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers (IFPTE), went as far as to call the email a “resignation threat.”
   18. [Said Biggs,] “It’s written pretty clearly that if you don’t take this thing, this so-called offer, you may not have a job,” … pointing to a part of the memo that informs employees who wish to remain in their jobs that “the certainty of your position or agency” is not assured.
   19. IFPTE represents roughly 30,000 federal employees, including employees at NASA, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice.
   20. Biggs says members who work in areas the memo excludes from the resignation offer, including immigration enforcement and national security, nevertheless received the memo.
   21. [Biggs said,] “We represent people that do cybersecurity at NASA and other places. We represent scientists, engineers. At the Navy yards, we represent folks that prepare these submarines and these aircraft carriers to go out to sea to support our Navy personnel. What if all these people accepted the offer? What would that do to our national security?”
   22. Early Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the resignation offer, rejecting another union’s characterization of it as an attempt to purge the government.
   23. “That’s absolutely false,” she told reporters outside the White House. “This is a suggestion to federal workers that — they have to return to work. And if they don’t, then they have the option to resign, and this administration is very generously offering to pay them for eight months.”
   24. MIKE: You can tell when this administration is lying one of two ways: Either their lips are moving, or they wrote something.
   25. MIKE: The Trump kakistocracy has only been in power less than two weeks and they’re already lying, screwing things up, and lying about screwing things up.
   26. MIKE: As things for this country go from bad to worse, both domestically and internationally, remember it’s not just Trump that’s to blame. It’s the entire Republican Party that has rolled over and given him everything and pretty much everybody he wants.
   27. MIKE: Remember that in 2026 when the House and a third of the Senate are up for re-election.
5. New DOT Sec/reality TV contestant signs memo to increase US fuel costs by $23B; By Jameson Dow| ELECTREK.CO | Jan 29 2025 – 12:12 pm PT. TAGS: US Dept. of Transportation Sec. Sean Duffy, Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard (CAFE), Fuel Economy Standards,
   1. Sean Duffy, who was just confirmed as Secretary of Transportation on the back of the transportation “expertise” he showed as a contestant on Road Rules: All Stars, a reality TV travel game show, wasted no time in promising to raise your fuel costs by at least $23 billion on his first day.
   2. The memo, signed yesterday, promises a review of all existing fuel economy standards, which require manufacturers to make more efficient vehicles which save you money on fuel.
   3. Specifically, the memo targets the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard (CAFE), which was just improved last year by President Biden’s DOT, saving American drivers $23 billion in fuel costs by meaning they need to buy less fuel overall. The savings could have been higher, but were softened from the original proposal due to automaker lobbying.
   4. However, the new DOT memo says it targets all similar standards, rather than just the improvements made last year – so in fact, our headline likely underestimates how much higher fuel costs would go if the DOT follows through on this memo.
   5. A recent analysis by Consumer Reports shows that fuel economy standards are enormously popular with Americans, and that maintaining the current standards could result in lifetime savings of $6,000 per vehicle, compared to current costs, by 2029. And that fuel economy standards implemented since 2001 have already saved $9,000 per vehicle. Now, imagine the net effect of removing all of those standards, which Duffy has directed the DOT to examine doing.
   6. The Sierra Club responded to the decision with this statement: “These common-sense, popular fuel economy standards save drivers money at the pump and reduce dangerous pollution from vehicles. Drivers spend excessive amounts of money to fuel their cars, and it’s often a large part of household expenses. Wasting no time at all as the new Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy is selling American families out to Big Oil, burdening us with higher fuel prices and more polluting gas-guzzlers that harm our health.” 
   7. Trump signaled he intended to raise your fuel costs during the 2024 US Presidential campaign, when he asked oil executives for $1 billion in bribes in return for killing off more efficient vehicles. Now, after he finally received more votes than his opponent for the first time (after three tries, and despite committing treason in 2021 for which there is a clear legal remedy), he’s already following through on causing the inflation he promised during the campaign.
   8. As we’ve already seen to be the case often with Trump’s allies, the DOT memo lies about its intentions. Just like his EPA nominee, who said he wants to make the air cleaner by making it dirtier, Duffy, known for being a former reality TV contestant, says he wants to make fuel costs lower by making them higher. The memo attempts to argue that your car will be cheaper if it has lower fuel economy, even though it won’t, because buying more fuel will mean you spend more on fuel, not less.
   9. Unequivocally, over here in the real world, dirtier air is actually dirtier, and higher fuel costs are actually higher.
   10. The result of this increased fuel usage also inevitably means more reliance on foreign sources of energy. The more oil America uses, the more it will have to import from elsewhere. Other countries looking to exercise power over the US could certainly choose to raise prices as they recognize that the US has just become more reliant on them.
   11. And, as we know from the most basic understanding of economics, adding more demand means prices will go up, not down. Reducing demand for a product in fact forces prices down, and EVs are already displacing oil demand which depresses oil prices.
   12. Meanwhile, Biden’s higher fuel economy standards would mean that automakers need to provide a higher mix of EVs, which inherently get all of their energy to run not just domestically, but regionally as well. Most electricity generation happens regionally or locally based on what resources are available in your area, so when you charge a car, you’re typically supporting jobs at your local power plant, rather than in some overseas oil country.
   13. Biden’s standards would have stood to benefit US-based EV makers, the most prominent of which is Tesla. However, Tesla CEO Elon Musk gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Mr. Trump, despite it being very clear during the campaign that he intends to harm EVs, which his DOT is now following through on.
   14. Musk has also thrown his support behind policies that will harm Tesla’s business (and Tesla recognizes this to be the case overseas), and thus its shareholders’ pocketbooks (though the shareholders are also doing that on their own, by pledging an illegal $55B payday to a bad CEO). …
   15. Also, whiplash changes in regulatory regimes are typically seen as bad for business. Above all, businesses desire regulatory certainty so they can plan products into the future, and there are few businesses with longer planning timelines than automakers.
   16. This is why automakers want the EPA to retain Biden’s emissions rules, because they’re already planning new models for the EV transition. They went through this once before, in the chaos of 2017-2021, where they originally asked for rollbacks but then realized their mistake, and now still complain about the broken regulatory regime caused by the last time a former reality TV host squatted in the White House.
   17. Further, if American manufacturing turns away from the EV transition, or continues to make tepid movement towards it, this will only hand more of a manufacturing lead to China, meaning more decline of American manufacturing (compared to the huge manufacturing boom seen under President Biden). …
   18. … [T]he most important problem with this memo is that it will increase emissions, which harms your health and increases climate change. Much like the other trends we’ve seen here, this administration doesn’t know much about the basics of climate science, which is already costing America $150 billion a year in increased infrastructure costs related to damage from natural disasters. Just yesterday, a new study came out showing how climate change created conditions that made the LA wildfires, which will be the costliest in US history by far at $20B, more likely.
   19. MIKE: As most of you may know, there was a terrible air accident at Reagan International Airport in Washington, DC last night. New DOT Secretary Duffy made an appearance at the news conference. Having had the job for only about a day, he handled himself reasonably well without saying much of anything, which was really all he could do within just a few hours of the crash.
   20. MIKE: Having said that, I can’t add much to this story. Duffy is acting as Trump’s tool here. It’s just another example that Trump’s policies couldn’t do more damage to the USA if they actually intended to. Of course, that assumes that they are not intending to, and that still remains to be seen.
6. You may have heard that Trump’s order of a government spending freeze has been rescinded, but I’ve heard nothing similar about this order — Trump hits NIH with ‘devastating’ freezes on meetings, travel, communications, and hiring; Researchers facing “a lot of uncertainty, fear, and panic”. By Meredith Wadman, Jocelyn Kaiser | SCIENCE.ORG | 22 Jan 2025@5:45 pm ET. TAGS: Science and Policy, Trump Administration, U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), Government-Wide Hiring Freeze, Department Of Health And Human Services (HHS),
   1. President Donald Trump’s return to the White House is already having a big impact at the $47.4 billion U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), with the new administration imposing a wide range of restrictions, including the abrupt cancellation of meetings such as grant review panels. Officials have also ordered a communications pause, a freeze on hiring, and an indefinite ban on travel.
   2. The moves have generated extensive confusion and uncertainty at the nation’s largest research agency, which has become a target for Trump’s political allies. “The impact of the collective executive orders and directives appears devastating,” one senior NIH employee says.
   3. Today, for example, officials halted midstream a training workshop for junior scientists, called off a workshop on adolescent learning minutes before it was to begin, and canceled meetings of two advisory councils. Panels that were scheduled to review grant proposals also received eleventh-hour word that they wouldn’t be meeting.
   4. “This kind of disruption could have long ripple effects,” says Jane Liebschutz, an opioid addiction researcher at the University of Pittsburgh who posted on Bluesky about the canceled study sections. “Even short delays will put the United States behind in research.” She and colleagues are feeling “a lot of uncertainty, fear, and panic,” Liebschutz says.
   5. The hiring freezeis governmentwide, whereas a pause on communications and travel appears to be limited to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent agency. Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in. But some NIH staff suggested these measures, which include pulling job ads and rescinding offers, are more extreme than any previously.
   6. NIH travel chief Glenda Conroy sent an email to senior agency officials early today notifying them of an “immediate and indefinite” suspension of all travel throughout HHS with few exceptions, such as currently traveling employees returning home. Researchers who planned to present their work at meetings must cancel their trips, as must NIH officials promoting agency programs off site or visiting distant branches of the agency. “Future travel requests for any reason are not authorized and should not be approved,” the memo said.
   7. The travel ban has left many researchers, especially younger scientists, bewildered, says a senior NIH scientist who asked to remain anonymous. Today, the scientist encountered one group of early-career researchers who were scheduled to attend and present at a distant conference next week—presentations that are now impossible. “People are just at a loss because they also don’t know what’s coming next. I have never seen this level of confusion and concern in people that are extremely dedicated to their mission,” the scientist says.
   8. Separately, HHS announced a communications ban through 1 February in a memo issued yesterday. (The Washington Post and Associated Press first reported the memo’s existence.) It orders a stop on the publishing of regulations, guidance documents, grant announcements, social media posts, press releases, and other “communications,” and the canceling of speaking engagements. Any exceptions must be applied for and approved through the president’s appointees.
   9. “This is a short pause to allow the new team to set up a process for review and prioritization,” an NIH spokesperson says.
   10. Another consequence of the communications pause is a freeze on meetings of federal advisory committees and study sections. NIH today canceled meetings of advisory councils at its dental and bioengineering institutes.
   11. The council meetings include a closed-door session where grant proposals from extramural researchers that have already been approved by peer-review panels undergo a final review before the awards are made. It is not clear what will happen to those grants if the council meeting to finalize the review is canceled. Many more councils for NIH’s 24 grantmaking institutes and centers are scheduled to meet in the coming weeks.
   12. Even more troubling to many researchers is a pause on study sections that many received word of today. Without such meetings, NIH cannot make research awards.
   13. Previous administrations have imposed communications pauses in their first days. And the administration of former President Barack Obama continued a cap on attendance at scientific meetings first imposed by former President George W. Bush’s administration, which in some cases meant staff canceled trips to meetings.
   14. But an immediate, blanket ban on travel is unusual, says one longtime researcher in NIH’s intramural program. “I don’t think we’ve ever had this and it’s pretty devastating for a postdoc or graduate student” who needs to present their work and network to move ahead in their career, the researcher says.
   15. Another consequence of the communications pause, according to an NIH staffer involved with clinical trials at NIH’s Clinical Center, is that agency staff cannot meet with patient groups or release newsletters or other information to recruit patients into trials. Another unknown is whether NIH researchers will still be allowed to submit papers to peer-reviewed journals.
   16. Hiring is also affected. No staff vacancies can be filled; in fact, before Trump’s first day in office was over, NIH’s Office of Human Resources had rescinded existing job offers to anyone whose start date was slated for 8 February or later. It also pulled down currently posted job vacancies on USA Jobs. “Please note, these tasks had to be completed in under 90 minutes and we were unable to notify you in advance,” the 21 January email noted, asking NIH’s institutes and centers to pull down any job vacancies remaining on their own websites.
   17. The various directives have shaken the vast community of extramural scientists NIH supports. “[We] have not seen anything concrete from NIH yet,” said one scientist at a major academic medical center. “But just like about everyone in science, we are worried and waiting.”
   18. MIKE: My wife is in health research, so I hear about this directly, and there is a lot of concern among the faculty at Texas A&M over this new policy, and I’m sure that those concerns are shared around the country at every health research institution.
   19. MIKE: Research money is always very tight and very competitive, and there’s no faster way to chase promising scientists — especially young ones — out of health research than by cutting off research funding.
   20. MIKE: Just another example of Trump and his kakistocrats.
7. Undersea infrastructure is Europe’s unexpected Achilles’ heel. What’s going on?; By Anna Cooban, CNN | CNN.COM | Published 12:00 AM EST, Wed January 29, 2025. TAGS: Sweden, Latvia, Undersea Cables, European Infrastructure, Baltic Sea,
   1. On Sunday, an undersea cable ferrying data between Sweden and Latvia was damaged, most likely as a result of an external force, Latvia said.
   2. This is just the latest in a string of incidents since late 2022 leading to damage to Europe’s infrastructure that crisscrosses the bottom of the Baltic Sea — pipes carrying natural gas, and cables transporting electricity and data.
   3. Such incidents have become more frequent over the past couple of years, raising suspicions they are the result of sabotage and triggering a flurry of investigations by European officials — with some openly pointing fingers at Moscow.
   4. Russia has denied allegations of any
   5. So far, the impact on Europe’s natural gas, electricity and data flows has been fairly limited. But a concerted attack on data cables could paralyze many nations’ communications networks, jeopardizing hospital surgeries, police responses and more.
   6. If Russia is indeed to blame for some of the incidents, they are Moscow’s way of showing its power to disrupt European infrastructure, said Sophia Besch, senior fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
   7. [Besch told CNN,] It’s “about intimidation, undermining resolve, creating a general sense of fear and instability in populations, and showing that they could do something.”.
   8. Last week, the Russian embassy in London said NATO — a defensive alliance between North American and European countries — was using the “fictitious pretext of the ‘Russian threat’” to beef up its naval and air force presence in the Baltic.
   9. The statement followed an announcement by NATO of a new mission to strengthen the protection of critical infrastructure in the Baltic. As part of that mission, the alliance has deployed sub-sea drones.
   10. Whether the damage has been accidental or intentional, the incidents have exposed one of Europe’s vulnerabilities, signaling, in the words of one expert, “a new frontier” in its security. Europe is “to a significant degree, dependent on this type of infrastructure,” said Georg Zachmann, a senior fellow at Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, adding that he finds the current situation “very worrying.”
   11. … The first major incident occurred in late 2022, months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A series of explosions rocked the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline delivering Russian gas to Europe, as well as Nord Stream 2. Neither of the pipelines was transporting gas at the time of the blasts, though they still held the fuel under pressure.
   12. Investigators found evidence of explosives at the sites, leading Swedish prosecutors to conclude that the blasts were caused by an act of sabotage. And last August, German authorities issued an international arrest warrant for a Ukrainian man suspected of carrying out the explosions.
   13. Whoever was behind the blasts, Besch at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said they were a “wake-up call” for Europe. [She noted that,] “Ever since then we have seen Europeans invest in their own security underseas.”
   14. The second incident took place in October 2023 when a natural gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia, called the Balticconnector, began to leak.
   15. Then, in November last year, two undersea internet cables — one connecting Sweden and Lithuania, and the other Finland and Germany — were cut. In a joint statement, the foreign ministers of Finland and Germany said the incident “immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage,” adding that European security was under threat from “hybrid warfare by malicious actors.”
   16. A few weeks later, on Christmas Day, a power cable connecting Finland and Estonia failed. The following day, Finnish authorities boarded and detained the Eagle S — a tanker carrying oil from Russia to Turkey — on suspicion it had damaged the cable by dragging its anchor.
   17. … Assigning blame for each incident is a tricky, diplomatically fraught task.
   18. In September, two US officials told CNN that the United States had detected increased Russian military activity around key undersea cables.
   19. But hard evidence implicating Moscow is difficult to come by, and US officials familiar with an initial assessment of November’s incident in the Baltic told CNN at the time that there were “no indications of nefarious activity” involving the two cut internet cables.
   20. [Said Nick Childs, a senior fellow for naval forces and maritime security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies,] “The challenge is (that) a lot of this can be wrapped up in what one might describe as plausible deniability — some people would call it implausible deniability.”
   21. He added that the Baltic was a “very congested, very crowded waterway,” making it difficult to both spot and prove suspicious activity. Still, he said, “a lot of fingers are pointing at Russia” for some of the incidents.
   22. Some are pointing specifically at Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet” — aging tankers, many with opaque ownership structures, transporting Russian oil for export to avoid Western sanctions.
   23. Dovilė Šakalienė [PRON: doe-VEE-lay sahk-ah-LYAY-nay], Lithuania’s defense minister, told CNN in an interview last week that this shadow fleet was “cutting our power cables… cutting our data cables… cutting our pipelines” and that the damage was likely deliberate.
   24. [She said,] “If something happens once, it’s an accident. If something happens twice, it’s a coincidence. But, if it’s three times or more, I think all our common sense screams at us: Hello, really?”
   25. … Besch, at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, notes that Europe’s cable infrastructure has high levels of “redundancy,” meaning that, when one cable fails, whatever it is transporting can be re-routed through another.
   26. However, some islands close to Scotland and Norway are more vulnerable, she said. “There are only one or two cables — if you cut them, you have a problem.”
   27. Repairs to undersea networks can also be costly and take months.
   28. Even small outages could impact online shopping and home deliveries, and deny tens of thousands access to their favorite shows and movies.
   29. [NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said earlier this month,] “Safeguarding our infrastructure is of utmost importance.”
   30. This is “crucial” for both energy supply — whether from power cables or pipelines — and internet traffic, he said, noting that more than 95% of that traffic globally is carried via undersea cables.
   31. MIKE: This is a story that this show has been coming back to for the last couple of years. It’s become a matter of Europe’s strategic urgency and among its vital security concerns. And of course, Europe’s and NATO’s vital security concerns are also ours.
   32. MIKE: A related APNEWS story preceded this one by two days: A Bulgarian shipping company denies its vessel sabotaged a Baltic Sea cable. “Swedish prosecutors announced … that they had launched a preliminary investigation on suspicion of sabotage, after the ship was detained in the Baltic Sea” on suspicion of intentionally damaging “an underwater fiber optic cable connecting Latvia and the Swedish island of Gotland.”
   33. MIKE: The Bulgarian ship may have caused the damage deliberately or accidentally. The investigation may be able to determine that, but in any case, they will be liable for whatever costly repairs to the cable that are necessary. That’s something, at least.
   34. MIKE: There may be some irony to the Russian assertion cited in the story that, “…NATO … was using the “fictitious pretext of the ‘Russian threat’” to beef up its naval and air force presence in the Baltic.
   35. MIKE: On the slim possibility that the Russians aren’t responsible for these damages, they have my sympathies. But given the likelihood that a large, if not overwhelming, fraction of these assaults on Baltic infrastructure are being conducted at the direction of — or in cooperation with — Russia, they may have instigated a thing they very much did not want: NATO reinforcement of the Baltic Sea. A sea that has effectively become a NATO lake with the ascendency of Sweden and Finland to NATO.
   36. This reinforcement by NATO of the Baltic Sea might have been seen as a provocation under other circumstances, but now can be argued is necessary self-defense. As in the case of NATO’s expansion, Putin probably has only himself to blame.
8. Strong-Arming Latin America Will Work Until It Doesn’t; Trump’s mass-deportation plans could come back to hurt the U.S. By Will Freeman | THEATLANTIC.COM | January 29, 2025 @ 2:49 PM ET. TAGS: Colombia, Donald Trump, Mexico,
   1. For a moment on Sunday, the government of Colombia’s Gustavo Petro looked like it might be the first in Latin America to take a meaningful stand against President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation plans. Instead, Petro gave Trump the perfect opportunity to show how far he would go to enforce compliance. Latin American leaders came out worse off.
   2. On Sunday afternoon, Petro, a leftist who has held office since 2022, announced on X that he would not allow two U.S. military aircraft carrying Colombian deportees to land. He forced them to turn back mid-flight and demanded that Trump establish a protocol for treating deportees with dignity.
   3. Colombia had quietly accepted military deportation flights before Trump’s inauguration, according to the Financial Times. But the Trump administration began flaunting these flights publicly, and some deportees sent to Brazil claimed that they were shackled, denied water, and beaten.
   4. Petro saw all of this as a step too far, and reacted. He clarified that he would still accept deportations carried out via “civilian aircraft,” without treating migrants “like criminals” (more than 120 such flights landed in Colombia last year).
   5. Trump responded by threatening to impose 25 percent tariffs on all Colombian goods (to be raised to 50 percent within a week), impose emergency banking sanctions, and bar entry to all Colombian-government officials and even their “allies.” The message was clear: To get his way on deportations, he would stop at nothing, even if this meant blowing up relations with one of the United States’ closest Latin American partners.
   6. Petro almost immediately backed down. He seemed to have taken the stand on a whim, possibly in part to distract from a flare-up in violence among armed criminal groups inside his country. The White House announced that Colombia had agreed to accept deportation flights, including on military aircraft. Petro gave a tepid repost, then deleted it.
   7. For Trump, the incident was a perfect PR stunt, allowing him to showcase the maximum-pressure strategy he might use against any Latin American government that openly challenges his mass-deportation plans and offering a test case for whether tariffs can work to coerce cooperation from U.S. allies. For Latin America, the ordeal could not have come at a worse time.
   8. Across the region, leaders are bracing for the impact of deportations — not only of their own citizens, but of “third-country nationals” such as Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans, whose governments often refuse to take them back. They are rightfully worried about what a sudden influx of newcomers and a decline in remittance payments from the United States will mean for their generally slow-growing economies, weak formal labor markets, and strained social services, not to mention public safety, given the tendency of criminal gangs to kidnap and forcibly recruit vulnerable recent deportees.
   9. If Latin American governments are trying to negotiate the scope or scale of deportation behind closed doors, they do not appear to be having much success. Several leaders seem to be losing their nerve. Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, went from expressing hope for an agreement with the Trump administration to receive only Mexicans to accepting the continued deportation of noncitizens — perhaps because Trump threatened to place 25 percent tariffs on all Mexican goods as soon as February 1.
   10. Honduras threatened to expel a U.S. Air Force base on January 3 if the United States carried on with its deportation plans. By January 27, Honduras folded, saying that it would accept military deportation flights, but requesting that deportees not be shackled. Guatemala is trying to draw the line at taking in only fellow Central Americans.
   11. Most Latin American leaders will bend to Trump’s wishes on mass deportation rather than invite the strong-arm tactics he threatened to use on Colombia. One reason is that tariffs can really hurt the countries whose cooperation Trump needs most on deportations.
   12. Unlike most of South America, Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador still trade more with the United States than with China. Only with Mexico, the United States’ largest trade partner, does the leverage go both ways, but even there it is sharply asymmetrical (more than 80 percent of Mexican exports go to the U.S., accounting for nearly a fifth of the country’s GDP).
   13. Latin American countries could improve their bargaining position by taking a unified stand and negotiating with Trump as a bloc. But the chances that they will do so are slim, and getting slimmer. [On Wednesday, faulting a “lack of consensus,”] Honduran President Xiomara Castro called off a planned meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, a left-leaning regional bloc, to discuss migration …
   14. Latin American presidents have relatively weak incentives to fight Trump on migration. The region is home to more than 20 million displaced people, millions of whom reside as migrants or refugees in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and elsewhere — and yet, migration is simply not that big of a political issue in most countries. That could change if deportations reach a scale sufficient to rattle economies, but Latin American leaders are focused on the short term, much as Trump is.
   15. Presidential approval ratings tend to rise and fall based on crime and the economy more than immigration, and at least for now, anti-U.S. nationalism is not the political force it has been in the past.
   16. So Trump will likely get his way in more cases than not. But he shouldn’t celebrate just yet, because the short-term payoff of strong-arming Latin America will come at the long-term cost of accelerating the region’s shift toward China and increasing its instability. The latter tends, sooner or later, to boomerang back into the United States.
   17. [Oliver Stuenkel, a Brazilian international-relations analyst, posted on X in the middle of the Colombia standoff that,] “Every South American leader, even pro-American ones, will look at Trump’s strategy vis-à-vis Panama, Colombia, and Mexico, and understand the risks of being overly dependent on the U.S. right now. The majority will seek to diversify their partnerships to limit their exposure to Trump.”
   18. He’s right. Latin American leaders, even several conservative ones, moved closer to China during Trump’s first term, which is not what Trump wants. Reducing China’s presence in Latin America seems to be his No. 2 priority in the region (see his threats to Panama over the Hong Kong company operating near its canal).
   19. Chinese investments in dual-use infrastructure and 5G technology pose long-term national-security risks to the United States. But Trump’s tariff threats and coercion could rattle Latin America and help China make its sales pitch to the region: We’re the reliable ones. The long-standing lament that Latin American conservatives, centrists, and leftists share is that whereas the United States comes to the region to punish and lecture, China comes to trade. Trump’s current approach gives that complaint extra credence.
   20. Trump’s deportation plans threaten to destabilize parts of Latin America, which will have repercussions for the United States. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of people to countries without the economic or logistical capacity to absorb them could leave the region reeling. Consider that the Trump administration is negotiating an asylum agreement with El Salvador — a country with one of the weakest and smallest economies, and highest rates of labor informality, in all of Central America. If Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans are sent there, they are almost guaranteed not to find jobs.
   21. People deported to Honduras and Guatemala will also likely struggle to find work and face recruitment by gangs. And because remittances make up about a fifth of GDP in Guatemala and about a quarter in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, large-scale deportations threaten to deliver a brutal shock to their economies.
   22. Mexico’s economy is bigger and sturdier, but economists have shown that large influxes of deportees there, too, tend to depress formal-sector wages and increase The inflow of workers might still benefit economies like Mexico’s in the long run. But in the short to medium term, Trump’s mass-deportation plans are a recipe for instability.
   23. The lesson of the past several decades — Trump’s first term included — is that Latin American instability never remains contained within the region. It inevitably comes boomeranging back to the United States. Mexican cartels didn’t gain far-reaching influence just in their country. They fueled a fentanyl epidemic that has killed more than a quarter million Americans since 2018. Venezuela’s economic collapse under authoritarian rule didn’t bring misery only upon that country; it produced one of the world’s biggest refugee crises, with more than half a million Venezuelans fleeing to the United States. [Nowhere else in the world does instability affect] the United States more directly, or profoundly, than … in Latin America.
   24. In the 1980s and ’90s, internal armed conflicts raged in Colombia and Central America, and Mexico confronted serial economic crises. Since then, the United States’ immediate neighbors have become relatively more stable, democratic, and prosperous. But slow growth, fiscal imbalances, and, above all, the growing power of organized crime have tested that stability in recent years. Trump is adding to the pressure with mass deportations [and] then hoping to contain whatever erupts by simply hardening the southern border. That’s quite the gamble.
   25. MIKE: The United States is at least a hundred years past its ability to strong-arm Latin America with Teddy Roosevelt-style military tactics, and even Teddy was an advocate of at least speaking softly while carrying a big stick.
   26. MIKE: The “speaking softly” part is always helpful in diplomacy, since no leader or nation wants to appear weak to their public during diplomatic discussions.
   27. MIKE: The world is a different place now. By trying to intimidate Latin American countries with economic and military threats, Trump is playing into the hands of China and increasing Chinese economic influence there. And as the US has long known and employed, economic power easily translates into diplomatic power.
   28. MIKE: This is another example of the long-term damage that Trump is doing to the economic and diplomatic power of the US. If Central and South American countries begin to feel that is in their vital national interest to diversify their trade and subsequent vulnerability to China, that is not something that will be easily reversed in the future by a more reasonable and agreeable administration than the one that rules us now.
   29. MIKE: Trump may think he’s playing American hardball, but those pitches are likely to boomerang as beanballs in the future.
9. I have two more stories that dovetail with the last one. First, from CNBC — Google reclassifies U.S. as ‘sensitive country’ alongside China, Russia after Trump’s ‘Gulf of America’ comments; By Jennifer Elias (@jenn_elias) | CNBC.COM | Published Tue, Jan 28 20256:21 PM EST. TAGS: Google Maps,
   1. Google’s maps division on Monday reclassified the U.S. as a “sensitive country,” a designation it reserves for states with strict governments and border disputes, CNBC has learned.   
   2. The new classification for the U.S. came after President Donald Trump said his administration would make name changes on official maps and federal communications. Those changes include renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” and renaming Mount Denali as Mount McKinley. 
   3. Google’s order to stop designating the U.S. as a “non-sensitive” country came on Monday, according to internal correspondence viewed by CNBC. That’s when the company announced it would change the name of the body of water between the Yucatan and Florida peninsulas to the “Gulf of America” in Google Maps after the Trump administration updates its “official government sources.”
   4. The decision to elevate the U.S. to its list of sensitive countries illustrates the challenges that tech companies face as they try to navigate the early days of a second Trump presidency. Since the start of the year, Meta, TikTok, Amazon, and others have adjusted their products and policies to reflect Trump’s political views, policies, and executive orders.
   5. Trump had a rocky relationship with Silicon Valley throughout his first presidency and didn’t shy away from criticizing the sector throughout his 2024 campaign. More recently, tech executives, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, have pursued closer ties with Trump, with several standing behind the president during his inauguration.
   6. Google’s list of sensitive countries includes China, Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, among others. The label is also used for countries that have “unique geometry or unique labeling,” according to internal correspondence reviewed by CNBC.
   7. The U.S. and Mexico are new additions.
   8. The “sensitive” classification is a technical configuration that signifies some labels within a given country are different from other countries, a company spokesperson told CNBC.
   9. It’s unclear if Google’s reclassification of the U.S. extends beyond its “Geo” division.
   10. With more than 2 billion monthly users, Google Maps is the world’s top navigation app. 
   11. Some team members within the maps division were ordered to urgently make changes to the location name and recategorize the U.S. from “non-sensitive” to “sensitive,” according to the internal correspondence. The changes were given a rare “P0” order, meaning it had the highest priority level and employees were immediately notified and instructed to drop what they were doing to work on it.
   12. Google’s order states that the Gulf of America title change should be treated similar to the Persian Gulf, which in Arab countries is displayed on Google Maps as Arabian Gulf.  
   13. [The company said in an X post,] “We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps. We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”
   14. Google added that the name Gulf of Mexico will remain displayed for users in Mexico. Users in other countries will see both names, the company said.
   15. When the Obama administration changed the name of the Alaska mountain from Mount McKinley to Denali in August 2015, Google updated Maps to reflect the name change, a Google spokesperson told CNBC.
10. I’ve only got about 30-45 seconds left, so I’ll just start reading the second story and you can finish reading it at ThinkwingRadio[dot]Com. The second story is from CNN and makes a good companion piece to the previous one — ‘It’s absurd’: Mexicans mock and shrug off Trump’s order to rename Gulf of Mexico; By Michael Rios, CNN, and Verónica Calderón and Fidel Gutierrez, |CNN en Español | Published 6:26 PM EST, Tue January 28, 2025. TAGS: President Donald Trump, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of America, Google Maps,
    1. When Google announced it was complying with US President Donald Trump’s executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, many Mexicans responded with a laugh and a long, exhausted sigh.
    2. At her daily press briefing on Tuesday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum largely shrugged off Google’s move, noting that Trump’s order only applies to the US continental shelf, suggesting that her country would not abide by it.
    3. “The Gulf of Mexico is still the Gulf of Mexico,” she said.
    4. Many of her fellow Mexicans have been similarly dismissive.
    5. On social media, users shared images poking fun at what some called Trump’s “obsession” with their country and the unorthodox nature of his decision. Some soccer fans suggested sarcastically that Trump was paying tribute to the popular Mexican football team, Club América.
    6. But not everyone is laughing. In an editorial for the Mexican newspaper El Universal, legal expert Mario Melgar-Adalid advised the country to push back.
    7. “Mexico must firmly oppose this interference, otherwise the next step could be that instead of the United Mexican States (Mexico’s formal name), as established in our Constitution, they will begin to call us Old Mexico,” he wrote.
    8. In the Mexican coastal state of Veracruz, which borders the gulf, Governor Rocío Nahle rejected Trump’s move. …
    9. Juan Cobos, a former resident of Veracruz who now lives in Mexico City, called it “absurd,” [saying in part,] “… hundreds of years of history could not be erased by a pen stroke … You can’t be so authoritarian that you can change it from one day to the next.”
    10. Another resident told CNN that “many Veracruzanos express annoyance, others confusion, and for many it is amusing … because people do not care that the name of the Gulf of Mexico will soon change, and they find it fun to play with the name change.”
    11. Another Mexico City resident called Trump’s order “so childish,” telling CNN, “Obviously it is not right.”
    12. Google said on Monday its move was in line with its “practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.” The company noted that the change would be applied only in the United States. Users in Mexico will continue to see the “Gulf of Mexico” on Google Maps. The rest of the world will see both names.
    13. Trump, in his executive order last week, said he directed that the body of water be renamed the Gulf of America “in recognition of this flourishing economic resource and its critical importance to our nation’s economy and its people.” The order calls for all federal government maps and documents to reflect the change. …
    14. Sheinbaum responded with ridicule at the time. At a press conference, she presented a 1607 map that labeled parts of North America as “Mexican America,” and dryly proposed that the gulf should be renamed as such.
    15. She said: “It sounds nice, no?”
    16. MIKE: The Mexico City resident who labeled this new Trump edict “childish” picked just the right word. Only a narcissistic egotist like Trump can think that the Gulf of Mexico can be renamed like one of his buildings.
    17. MIKE: Or maybe us and the Mexicans should consider ourselves at least a little lucky that he didn’t rename it Trump’s Sea, with an oil derrick including a putting green and a giant, backlit gold sign on it saying “TRUMP”.

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