We are really talking here about corruption on a world-historical scale, the kind generally only found in tinpot dictatorships:

President Donald Trump’s reported income soared to more than $2.2 billion in 2025, as the president took in more than $1.4 billion from cryptocurrency, digital tokens and related partnerships, according to his latest financial disclosure forms.

The 927 pages of disclosures, released Tuesday, indicated that Trump’s income substantially increased after he reentered the White House last year.

Overall, Trump reported assets worth at least $2.4 billion and income of over $2.2 billion. His assets are almost certainly worth more, since the federal disclosure forms require only that asset values be reported in ranges that top out at“over $50 million,” which leaves the full value of the president’s holdings unclear.

In his 2024 financial disclosure, filed a year ago, Trump reported assets worth more than $1.6 billion and income of over $600 million.

In addition to income from crypto ventures, Trump reported over $620 million in real estate, hotel and golf-related income.

The president also reported receiving $86.5 million from settlements in five separate lawsuits against ABC, CBS, YouTube, Meta and the social media platform X.

The 2025 disclosure includes $635 million in royalties from a license agreement with Celebration Coins; at least $525 million in proceeds from token sales by World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency project founded by Trump and his sons; $65 million inproceeds from World Liberty Financial’s equity sale; and $196 million in net proceeds from a stablecoin transaction.

Trump also saw increased income from his golf clubs and resorts. He reported $121 million fromTrump National Doral in 2025, up from $110 million a year earlier, and $77 million from Mar-a-Lago, up from $56 million.

In retrospect, I’m not sure enough attention was paid to the fact that Hillary Clinton preferred not to use two BlackBerries in the 2016 campaign.

The post The two billion dollar man appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

A new state law limits Florida communities’ aims to offset greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the global climate and intensifying disasters such as hurricanes.

Specifically, HB 1217 prohibits local governments from pursuing net-zero emissions goals. At least 10 cities and counties have implemented such policies, including Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Orlando, and Leon County, where Tallahassee, the state capital, is located. But the new law will not necessarily upend these policies, said Bradley Marshall, senior attorney at Earthjustice, an advocacy group.

“It’s certainly meant to scare municipalities and local governments from trying to do things to further net-zero policies,” he said. “Now, its exact impact and what it exactly prohibits is probably up for some debate. Things that are adjacent to it—emissions reductions and even climate change reduction policies—on their face will not run afoul at all of a ban on adopting a net zero policy.” 

The measure requires local governments to submit an affidavit annually to the state Department of Revenue verifying compliance. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed the measure on April 22, Earth Day, and the law will take effect July 1. It states that “net zero policies, carbon taxes and assessments, and emission trading programs are detrimental to this state’s energy security and economic interests and inconsistent with the energy policy and the environmental policy of this state.” 

“I proudly sponsored HB 1217 to fight for jobs and affordability in Florida,” according to a statement provided by the office of Rep. Berny Jacques (R-Clearwater). “This bill protects our residents and businesses from additional costs by ridding our state of Green New Deal policies. Carbon taxes and fees are not welcome in the Free State of Florida.”

DeSantis implemented a law in 2024 erasing several instances of the words “climate change” from the state code and restructuring the state’s fossil fuel-based energy policy around reducing reliance on foreign sources and strengthening the energy infrastructure against “natural and manmade threats.” The measure also nullified goals aimed at enhancing renewable energy use. The goals were initiated in 2022 after 200 Floridians, all under the age of 25, filed a petition for rulemaking calling on the state to move toward 100 percent clean energy by 2050, a benchmark scientists say is necessary to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

“This bill is definitely part of a larger coordinated push by the political enablers of the fossil fuel industry to obstruct any tools—legal or legislative tools—to hold the industry accountable for its contributions to climate change,” said Laura Peterson, senior analyst at the Union for Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group. “Florida is really on the front lines. So I imagine the governor is taking this step because he sees what’s coming down the pike. It’s not getting better. So I can only assume that this is an effort to satisfy some of the pressures that he’s getting from donors and from his party to protect the industry. And he’s doing it at the expense of his constituents.”

There is overwhelming scientific consensus that fossil fuel emissions have accelerated the planet’s warming since the industrial age, leading to more extreme disasters such as hurricanes. One study concluded it now is scientifically feasible to link individual emitters with specific harms, for the sake of litigation.

HB 1217 also prevents local governments from purchasing items such as vehicles or appliances based on the fuels they use or production of the items. Local governments may not participate in carbon-trading programs or use public funds to support other organizations with net-zero policies. Cities and counties also may not charge a tax or fee tied with carbon emissions.

When the Orlando Utilities Commission (OUC) announced in 2020 its commitment to net zero emissions by 2050, the municipal utility and city were recognized as leaders in a state where most local governments at the time were more focused on climate impacts such as sea level rise and flooding. The commitment set in motion one of the biggest evolutions at the utility in its nearly century-long history, utility leaders said at the time. OUC is the second-largest municipal utility in the state, serving more than 288,000 customers in Orange and Osceola counties.

“We are aware of the legislation regarding net-zero emissions policies,” a statement OUC provided to Inside Climate News says. “Our focus remains on delivering reliable, affordable energy while continuing to reduce our carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in a responsible and balanced way. Since 2020, we have made meaningful progress in lowering CO₂ emissions and remain committed to further reductions including a 50 percent reduction by 2030 and 75 percent by 2040.”

Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale, and Broward and Miami-Dade counties also have been pursuing goals of net-zero emissions by 2050. Miami, Miramar, Pinellas County, and Sarasota have similar goals.

But in Leon County, leaders have taken several steps back in response to HB 1217. They rescinded a 2023 resolution declaring a climate emergency. They also rolled back plans to phase out fossil fuel-powered vehicles and amended a policy to remove a mandate for recycled paper. The Paul Russell Road facility, which the county bills as the nation’s first government retrofit building to achieve net-zero certification, will lose that certification, although the building’s solar and energy efficiency systems will continue operating unchanged.

Susan Glickman, vice president for policy and partnerships at The CLEO Institute, an advocacy group, worried the law could have a chilling effect on other local policies aimed at moving Florida to cleaner energy.

“It means that everyone is going to pay more money on their power bills, and there are plenty of people who can absorb a higher energy bill,” she said. “But there are a lot of people who cannot, and this is coming at a time when housing prices are up, groceries are up, and insurance prices are high. And so there are people who are suffering out there.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Amy Green covers the environment and climate change from Orlando, Florida. She is a mid-career journalist and author whose extensive reporting on the Everglades is featured in the book MOVING WATER, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, and podcast DRAINED, available wherever you get your podcasts. Amy’s work has been recognized with many awards, including a prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award and Public Media Journalists Association award.

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Formula E is in its final year for the current technical regulations, with a new single-seater EV set to be introduced at the start of next season, which begins in December in Saudi Arabia. The new car, known as GEN4, is a big upgrade—at times more powerful than a Formula 1 car, although heavier and with much less downforce. As speeds rise with the GEN4 car, we knew the sport would become too fast for some of its current venues.

With the release of the season 12 calendar for 2026–2027, that limitation has become clear: a 21-race lineup across 13 cities that now includes several traditional race tracks.

The Saudi double-header is scheduled for December 18 and 19 and is the only season 12 round this year. Then the series starts 2027 off with a string of Formula 1 venues in North America: Mexico on January 16, the Circuit of the Americas in Texas on February 7, and the Miami International Autodrome on February 20. The addition of COTA to Formula E's calendar makes it the seventh US location for the sport since 2015, including the American Airlines Arena in actual Miami; Long Beach, California; Brooklyn, New York; Portland, Oregon; Homestead-Miami, and the Hard Rock Stadium on the outskirts of Miami.

The race at COTA will use the shorter version of that circuit, as used by NASCAR for its visits, rather than the full F1 configuration. This spares the inevitable lap-time comparisons between the two series, but the new calendar marks a clear departure from one of the series' original selling points: racing in city centers where no other series could come visit.

Some traditional Formula E tracks remain. Berlin-Templehof takes place in May, as does the Monaco e-Prix. But the indoor-outdoor ExCel Arena in London has been outgrown; instead, Formula E will race at the Brands Hatch circuit in Kent, just outside London, in late May. It is believed that rather than use either the Indy or GP configurations of this historic circuit, the sport will use a unique layout, similar to the way Formula E's Monaco is ever so slightly changed from the F1 layout used a couple of weeks later.

Zandvoort in the Netherlands—another F1 venue—takes place in mid-June, followed by Jarama in Spain at the end of that month, then Shanghai at another F1 track in early July, and the season finale in Japan in late July.

"We are incredibly proud to unveil our biggest and most ambitious calendar to date. Expanding to 21 races across 13 iconic cities is a huge milestone, and welcoming world-renowned tracks like COTA in Austin, Zandvoort, and Brands Hatch provides the ultimate stage to showcase our new GEN4 era," Alberto Longo, Formula E cofounder and chief championship officer, said in a statement.

"Every stop on this calendar has been chosen to deliver maximum sporting drama. Launching the season with our first-ever opener under the lights in Jeddah to demonstrate the speed of these GEN4 cars sets a spectacular tone, while grouping our races into distinct continental clusters ensures we do so as sustainably as possible. The tracks are faster, the competition is fiercer, and we cannot wait to get this historic season underway,” Longo said.

There's also a new format for weekends with double-header events, which is most of them. On the first day, the cars will race for 30 minutes with high downforce bodywork. This is a true sprint race, where the aim is just to go flat-out. The second day will feature a more traditional 45-minute e-prix, where the drivers will need to stay on top of energy management, as they do currently.

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I finally got around to starting 007 First Light last week–so far it’s been pretty fun, and even though my PC sits in a nebulous area regarding the game’s recommended specs, it runs fine with most settings on high. I began playing on keyboard and mouse, my default way to play games, but the keyboard layout is a bit clunky: The hand-to-hand combat involves a lot of keys, and having to activate Bond’s watch by holding down the Alt key is uncomfortable. So I decided to switch to controller, and now the game barely runs at all. 

On Sunday morning I started First Light over so that I could go through the tutorials again with the controller prompts, because I have a very humiliating disease where I need controls shown to me instead of just looking at a layout. The Iceland mission ran the way it had when I played it previously, and things certainly felt a bit more intuitive on my Xbox One controller. But while following Moneypenny around the MI6 office, I noticed that this time around Bond was subtly rubberbanding, lagging behind her and then rushing forward. By the time I got to Malta, the whole game was dragging.

Literally nothing had changed since I’d last played the game with keyboard and mouse, so I found this very weird. I checked to see if there’d been an update that might’ve broken things, but there wasn’t. I spent a good half hour tweaking all my graphics settings–reducing things back to medium, cranking down lighting and shadow effects, fiddling with DLSS–but nothing made the game run the way it had barely a week ago.

Worried something was going wrong with my hardware, I grabbed my mouse to start poking around my system. When I moved my mouse, the game stopped lagging. Shocked, I tried steering Bond with my keyboard. He moved smoothly, and the game played smoothly around him.

I picked up my controller and moved Bond up and down the Malta street. He jerked along, and the game flailed and stuttered. I switched to keyboard and mouse; I was playing a normal video game again.

I am known, when faced with PC problems, for not quite thinking through the way a computer actually works, inventing narratives to explain a situation that run counter to the cold, logical bounds of the machine. My first thought was “my controller is breaking this specific video game,” but even I knew this was an absurd assumption. I closed First Light, updated my graphics driver, and tried again with my controller, only to find the problem persisting. But when I played with my mouse and keyboard, everything worked. 

This all gave credence to the “my controller is breaking the game” theory, but it still made no sense. For months I’ve had no problems with this controller, a wireless Multiversus-themed Xbox One controller that got tossed my way when we were cleaning out our desks at The Washington Post. It connects to my PC via Bluetooth because Xbox doesn’t seem to sell a wireless adapter anymore, and while I sometimes have to pull out and reseat the Bluetooth dongle to get it to pair if I’ve left a game sitting on pause too long, it generally does what controllers do, and has never once fully broken a video game just by existing.

Incredulous at my own thought process, I googled “xbox controller causing lag pc.” And I could not believe it when results actually came up: a thread on the Microsoft forums from 2025, some Reddit posts, complaints on the EA and Steam sites going back years. Some people pinned it to dual instances of Microsoft’s GameInput program–I only had one installed but did find multiple instances of it running in my Task Manager, though closing them did nothing. Others pinned it to the controller batteries dying, but swapping them out for fresh ones did nothing either. Others suggested it was a Bluetooth problem solvable by wiring the controller up, my preferred method of attaching everything to everything but which would require a trip to the Microcenter for a USB data cable, and I couldn’t let the mystery sit half-solved while I left the house. 

I took to Bluesky with my discovery, where multiple people said they’d had the same problem. The Video Game History Foundation’s Frank Cifaldi even helped me narrow the mystery further, sharing that he’d had this problem when using a controller with games through the Epic store, and this was in fact my first time using my controller with an Epic store game. 

Here’s how I’m currently dealing: I play for about 20 minutes until the game stops working. Then I disconnect and reconnect my Bluetooth dongle, resetting the whole situation. I play until the game breaks again, then repeat.

Besides being a deeply unpleasant way to experience First Light, this entire situation is also ridiculous. Is this how computers work? I’ve made my peace with all the tweaks and fiddling required to be a PC gamer, but I’m not willing to accept that performing my gaming computer’s essential function–playing games–could require deleting processes and messing with my registry, or just playing a game in 20 minute increments. I’d be willing to accept a problem with the controller or with Bluetooth that caused input to lag, but the whole game? I imagine it doesn’t help matters that I’m still on Windows 10, which I can no longer update, but shit like this is one more reason why I’ve been dragging my heels on getting Windows 11. Why would I go deeper into an ecosystem that appears to have a known bug with using a controller to play video games? 

I’m even more baffled that this isn’t just a me problem, which I could chalk up to my shoddy, aging PC build and my own stupid luck. So many of you have experienced this, living in this absurd status quo, that I am extra furious on your behalf. It’s not even due to all the new enshittification being shoved down our throats–this is just how the fucking PC works. This problem goes back nearly a decade at least, and it seems like if we want to use the computer, we just have to accept it as a thing.

This is some first rate bullshit, and I refuse to go quietly. Of course none of my raging is actually fixing the problem, which will most likely be sorted when it stops raining here so I can go up to the store and buy a cable to wire my expressly wireless controller to my PC. In the meantime, playing First Light like I’m binge-watching episodes of a sitcom is annoying as hell, though the game is pretty good. I just wish I didn’t have to deal with the computer to play it.  

I recently learned of the passing of someone whose work nearly everybody knows, but nobody knows his name.

Tony Krueger is remembered in Wikipedia as the person who ported the game Chip’s Challenge to Windows for the Windows Entertainment Pack.¹ But that’s probably not the code he wrote that touched the most people.

Tony worked on Word 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, then on Word for OS/2 and Word for Mac, then returned to Word 6.0 and several versions beyond that. He probably holds the record for “most versions of Word shipped.”

In early versions of Word, the Spell Check feature was something that you explicitly invoked, and then you had to sit and wait while the program looked for all your potentially-misspelled words, and then showed them to you one at a time for a decision on what to do for each one. Word did introduce an Auto Spell Check feature to run spell check when the user was idle, so that when you hit the Spell Check button, the results were ready to go. However, the Auto Spell Check was still a blocking operation. As a result, a lot of users turned it off because it always seemed to decide “Now would be a good time to spell-check the document” just as you wanted to do something, forcing you to wait for the spell check pass to complete before you could, say, save and exit.

Tony made the spell checker much more unobtrusive so that it didn’t interfere with your foreground work. And when it found a problem, instead of waiting for you to trigger a spell check, it immediately drew red squiggles under potentially-misspelled words (and later green squiggles under potential grammatical errors).

Tony was an early fan of the magic/comedy team Penn and Teller. A friend and colleague attended a show and hung out afterward to ask the duo to sign a photo for his friend Tony. “He was on the team that did the red and green squiggles in Word.”

Upon hearing this, Penn Jillette announced in his stentorian voice which filled the entire theater: “The red and green squiggles!? I love the red and green squiggles!” Teller silently concurred.

Tony received that autographed photo for his birthday, and it wasn’t clear which he was more happy about, the autographed photo or the fact that Penn and Teller loved his feature.

Many years later, “Weird Al” Yankovic recorded a parody video titled Word Crimes, in which the Word red squiggles make a brief appearance. That same friend got “Weird Al” to autograph the screen shot.

Today, there are red (and even green and blue) squiggles in nearly every word processor, and often outside word processors. Tony did it first. The next time a red squiggle catches one of your mistakes, say thanks to Tony. I think he’d appreciate it.

¹ Probably not as widely documented is that he accomplished this without the source code: He reverse-engineered the MS-DOS version and then reimplemented it for Windows.

The post In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I think if any of us has any hopes for the unchosen series of alphanumeric characters that appear on a state-issued license plate, that hope would be that, somehow, that string of characters would combine in such a way that whoever reads them would feel an urge to use their hands to grip and clench our buttocks, “squeezing” our “ass” as it were. I had long assumed this was a universal desire when it came to car license plates, but I just learned that there are some people who do not, in fact, appreciate a license plate that suggests such an activity. One such person is almost 77-year-old Pompano Beach resident Nancy Dello Stritto.

The Florida DMV saw fit to bestow upon Dello Stritto a license plate bearing the characters SQZ A55, which most people would glance at and read as “SQUEEZE ASS.” Florida’s typographic choices do provide a 5 that really does read like an “S.” Dello Stritto somehow was not delighted with the license plate, saying of the plate

“I don’t think a woman that a woman that lives in a senior community, that’s going to be 77 next month, will be driving around with what this plate has to say.”

I guess some people don’t want a blanket invitation to ass squeezing? Strange, but everyone is different, I suppose, and I have to respect that.

(Here’s a link if the video embed above gives you trouble)

In talking with other members of her retirement community and her sons, there actually seems to be a lot of support for the SQZ A55 license plate, enough that Dello Stritto is at least considering giving the plate a try. She acknowledges that it may cause some perhaps unwanted attention, but notes

“I can handle it if I get a few honks here and there. Actually, being over 70, I might like a few honks.”

I know I’m being flippant here, but I hope everyone realizes there are no circumstances where a license plate should give anyone permission to touch another person’s body, in any context. We all get that, right? Good.

Interestingly, this is not the first time that Florida’s 5s looking like S-es and conspiring with As to form the word “ASS” has become a source of national tittering. Remember the ASS ORGY license plate from around 2005 or so?

Go Florida!
by
u/Chief_Beef_ATL in
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That was a real, officially-generated Florida license plate as well. In that case, the actual series of characters, A55 RGY, was assisted by the large orange in the center of the plate that resembled an “O,” making the whole plate read like a sexually-charged party that focused on the pleasures of the buttocks. That license plate was issued to a Lincoln owned by a software company, and aside from becoming an early internet meme, seems to have been in normal use otherwise.

I bring this up to encourage Ms.Dello Stritto to keep and use the SQZ A55 license plate with pride, knowing that she is continuing a Floridian tradition of accidentally comically ass-centric license plates, and in this day and age, I believe that is something worth celebrating.

Remember, any actual ass-squeezing are entirely at the discretion of Ms.Dello Stritto, at least on the receiving side. Any that she chooses to provide would require the full consent of both parties.

Top graphic images: Screen capture, YouTube, 10 Tampa Bay News

The post An Elderly Florida Woman Was Issued A License Plate That Reads SQZ A55 And Somehow She’s Not Thrilled appeared first on The Autopian.