March 19 2025

Chief Justice Roberts Criticizes Trump’s Call to Impeach Judges

Elon Musk’s X Valued at $44b, In Rebound To Acquisition Value

NASA Astronauts Return After Nine-Month Space Odyssey

New JFK Files Released, No Assassination Bombshells, Alternate Explanations Will Remain

Turkish Police Detain Istanbul Mayor in Crackdown, Main Political Rival to President

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1. Chief Justice Roberts Criticizes Trump’s Call to Impeach Judges

US Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare public rebuke to Donald Trump over the president’s threat to impeach federal judges, saying such remarks were “not an appropriate response” to disagreements over their rulings. The chief justice’s intervention came shortly after the president attacked a judge on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday, in an apparent response to a ruling that had attempted to block deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members. “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.” On Saturday, the Trump administration sent hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador under an executive order that invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to accelerate deportations.
Source: FT

2. Elon Musk’s X Valued at $44b, In Rebound To Acquisition Value

Social media site X’s valuation has soared back to $44bn, underscoring the sharp turnaround in the company’s fortunes since its owner Elon Musk assumed the role of staunch ally to President Donald Trump. I Since taking over the group, Musk has loosened the platform’s moderation policies, something that prompted many advertisers to leave. Disclosures from Fidelity Investments in late September implied a valuation for the company that was below $10bn. Musk purchased Twitter for $44bn.
Source: FT

3. NASA Astronauts Return After Nine-Month Space Odyssey

They set off to spend eight days at the space station. The trip lasted nine months. On Tuesday, two NASA astronauts who had been in orbit since June, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, splashed down in calm, azure waters off the coast of the Florida Panhandle, concluding a saga that had captivated the country since last summer. Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore blasted off in June for the International Space Station on their test flight of Starliner, a Boeing spacecraft that was to provide NASA with another option, outside of SpaceX, to carry astronauts to and from orbit. But the Starliner experienced problems with its propulsion system, prompting NASA to send it back to Earth with no crew aboard. It was a SpaceX capsule, the Crew Dragon, that brought them back from space on Tuesday. The spacecraft detached from the space station just after 1 a.m. Eastern time and then traveled back to Earth, slowing from more than 17,000 miles an hour before deploying four large parachutes that gently plopped the spacecraft into the water just before 6 p.m.
Source: NYT

4. New JFK Files Released, No Assassination Bombshells, Alternate Explanations Will Remain

A new trove of government files about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was released to the public late Tuesday under an order from President Trump. Scholars hope the flood of papers will resolve — or at least shed light on — the final questions about an event that traumatized a nation and remains the subject of conspiracy theories six decades later. The release, which came in the early evening, consisted of 1,123 PDF documents, according to the National Archives, including typewritten reports and handwritten notes. Most of them were shorter than 10 pages. Mr. Trump, in teasing the release on Monday, said there would be no redactions — but an early review found that some information appeared to have been blocked out. Historians have said they do not expect major new revelations, and no information that would contradict the basic circumstances of the case: that Kennedy was killed as he traveled in an open-car motorcade through Dallas by a single gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, on Nov. 22, 1963. Scholars said it would take time to go through all the documents in search of any new historical revelations. Tim Naftali, an adjunct professor at the school of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, said what he found on Tuesday night convinced him that the information had been kept secret all these decades not because it included inflammatory information about the assassination, but rather to mask highly sensitive details about C.I.A. intelligence-gathering. “I’ve always been wary that there was a smoking gun in this collection because Trump would have released it in 2017,” he said. “What they were protecting was sources and methods.”

Editors note: this is an interesting passage going around X/Twitter:

"The day after the assassination, Gary Underhill left Washington in a hurry. Late in the evening he showed up at the home of friends in New Jersey. He was very agitated. A small clique within the CIA was responsible for the assassination, he confided, and he was afraid for his life and probably would have to leave the country. Less than six months later Underhill was found shot to death in his Washington apartment. The coroner ruled it suicide. "J. Garrett Underhill had been an intelligence agent during World War Il and was a recognized authority on limited warfare and small arms. A researcher and writer on military affairs, he was on a first-name basis with many of the top brass in the Pentagon. He was also on intimate terms with a number of high-ranking CLA officials--he was one of the Agency's 'un-people' who perform special assignments. At one time he had been a friend of Samuel Cummings of Interarmco, the arms broker that numbers among its customers the CIA and, ironically, Klein's Sporting Goods of Chicago, from whence the mail-order Carcano allegedly was purchased by Oswald.

Editors note: for the record, the official position of citizen journal is that there's probably more to the government's story...
Sources: NYT, National Archives

5. Turkish Police Detain Istanbul Mayor in Crackdown, Main Political Rival to President

Turkish police have detained Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the main political challenger to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in an intensifying crackdown against the opposition to the country’s longtime ruler. State media said İmamoğlu’s detention on Wednesday was part of an investigation into alleged terrorism links, but the opposition described the move as a “coup attempt” and the arrest sent the Turkish currency and markets tumbling. The opposition Republican People’s party (CHP) had been set to name İmamoğlu, one of the country’s most popular political figures, as its presidential candidate on Sunday ahead of elections due by 2028.
Source: FT

March 19, 2003: War in Iraq begins

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Sources

1. https://www.ft.com/content/86b3b77a-2986-4f0f-9475-886c846dfd68
2. https://www.ft.com/content/d4616dec-c4c7-417f-8549-134710bbc5b1
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/science/nasa-astronauts-return-splashdown.html
4. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/03/18/us/jfk-mlk-rfk-assassination-files/jfk-assassination-documents-trump?smid=url-share
5. https://www.ft.com/content/c1a2b2fb-aede-42dc-8776-69446c242c0a