Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
COL WAR II: Communist China Still Infiltrating Texas. “Communist China is always looking to steal technology from the West through its ‘Thousand Talents’ espionage program, and this week brought two more instances from Texas.”
Abigail Gibson, the police force’s only crypto forensic accountant, spends her days scouring the blockchain for transaction patterns that point to scam activity.
Throughout the first year of Donald Trump’s second administration, Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple has interviewed Wiles amid each moment of crisis. This insider’s account joins a portfolio of portraits for an unflinching, up-close look at power—and peril.
On the morning of November 4, 2025, an off-year Election Day, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was meeting in the Oval Office with the president and his top advisers, men she calls her “core team”: Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff. The agenda was twofold: ending the congressional filibuster and forcing Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power. As she related it later, President Donald Trump was holding forth on the filibuster when Wiles stood up and started for the door. Trump eyed her. “Is this an emergency, that you have to leave?” he demanded. It was nothing of the sort—but Wiles left Trump guessing. She replied: “It’s an emergency. It doesn’t involve you.” With that, according to Wiles, she departed the Oval.
Wiles, wearing dark pants and a plain black leather top, met me in her office with a smile and a handshake. Over sandwiches from the White House Mess, we talked about the challenges Trump faces. Throughout the past year, Wiles and I have spoken regularly about almost everything: the contents, and consequences, of the Epstein files; ICE’s brutal mass deportations; Elon Musk’s evisceration of USAID; the controversial deployment of the National Guard to US cities; the demolition of the East Wing; the lethal strikes on boats allegedly being piloted by drug smugglers—acts many have called war crimes; Trump’s physical and mental health; and whether he will defy the 22nd Amendment and try to stay on for a third term.
Most senior White House officials parse their words and speak only on background. But over many on-the-record conversations, Wiles answered almost every question I put to her.
We often spoke on Sundays after church. Wiles, an Episcopalian, calls herself “Catholic lite.” One time we spoke while she was doing her laundry in her Washington, DC, rental. Trump, she told me, “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vance’s conversion from Never Trumper to MAGA acolyte, she said, has been “sort of political.” The vice president, she added, has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” Russell Vought, architect of the notorious Project 2025 and head of the Office of Management and Budget, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” When I asked her what she thought of Musk reposting a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, she replied: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” (She says she doesn't have first-hand knowledge.)
Wiles is the most powerful person in Trump’s White House other than the president himself; unlike any chief of staff before her, she is a woman.
“So many decisions of great consequence are being made on the whim of the president. And as far as I can tell, the only force that can direct or channel that whim is Susie,” a former Republican chief told me. “In most White Houses, the chief of staff is first among a bunch of equals. She may be first with no equals.”
At the same time, Trump has waged war on his political enemies; pardoned the January 6rioters, firing nearly everyone involved in their investigation and prosecution; sued media companies into multimillion-dollar settlements; indicted multiple government officials he perceives as his foes; and pressured universities to toe his line. He’s redefined the way presidents behave—verbally abusing women, minorities, and almost anyone who offends him.Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September turbocharged Trump’s campaign of revenge and retribution. Critics have compared this moment to a Reichstag fire, a modern version of Hitler’s exploitation of the torching of Berlin’s parliament.
Historically, the White House chief of staff is the president’s gatekeeper, confidant, and executor of his agenda. That often means telling the president hard truths. Upon taking office, Ronald Reagan was hell-bent on reforming Social Security. James A. Baker III explained to him that cutting Social Security benefits was the third rail of American politics. Reagan pivoted to tax cuts—and was ultimately reelected in a landslide. Donald Rumsfeld, Gerald Ford’s chief, explained: “The White House chief of staff is the one person besides his wife…who can look him right in the eye and say, ‘This is not right. You simply can’t go down that road.’ ”
Susie Wiles Talks Epstein Files, Pete Hegseth’s War Tactics, Retribution, and More (Part 2 of 2) Trump’s chief reveals her thoughts on the first year, and on the team she’s built with JD Vance, Karoline Leavitt, Marco Rubio, and 3 more key players. Vanity Fair writer Chris Whipple reports.
The day I met Wiles at the White House was a watershed for Trump: Voters would choose governors in New Jersey and Virginia and a new mayor in New York City; they would also vote on Proposition 50, California governor Gavin Newsom’s proposal to counter a brazen Republican gerrymander in Texas. Collectively, the contests were a referendum on Trump’s second presidency.
Over lunch in her West Wing corner office, Wiles recounted the morning. Escorting Trump from the White House residence to the Oval Office, she gave the president her election predictions: “I’m on the hook because he thinks I’m a clairvoyant.” Wiles thought the GOP had a chance of electing the governor in New Jersey, but she knew they were in for a tough night. (It would prove to be a Republican disaster, with Democrats running the table on the marquee races, passing Proposition 50, and winning downballot elections in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Mississippi.)
Given voters’ anxiety about the cost of living, Wiles told me she thought Trump should pivot more often from world affairs to kitchen-table issues. “More talks about the domestic economy and less about Saudi Arabia is probably called for,” said Wiles. “They like peace in the world. But that’s not why he was elected.
Is this the moment? No, not yet. When is the moment? Perhaps there is none. Need I persist?
This morning I changed bedding. At lunch I watched someone shake out the cloth, fold and stow it in a side- board. Then, the cigarette moment. Now, this moment flows out of me down the pen and writes.
Global Platform Launches to Combat Authoritarian Censorship and Preserve Independent Journalism
“As authoritarian regimes worldwide escalate their assault on independent media, PEN America and Bard College today announcedthe launch of Kronika, a new digital platform designed to safeguard journalism globally and ensure that the historical record cannot be obliterated by censorship. The initiative is an expansion of the Russian Independent Media Archive (RIMA), which PEN America and Bard College launched in 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
After three years of focusing primarily on Russian-language media, the project is now providing its expertise and technical solutions for the preservation of media in any language. “What began as a response to escalating censorship in one country is evolving into a global institution to protect independent media everywhere,” said Ilia Venyavkin, Kronika’s director of programs. “With Kronika, we’re opening our tools and partnerships beyond Russia—to any newsroom or civic initiative confronting erasure—so facts remain verifiable, stories remain findable, and history remains public.
The project began when independent Russian outlets were shut down or forced into exile, leaving virtually no independent media operating inside the country. Since 2022, the RIMA project team has built an end-to-end digital preservation pipeline that ingests, processes, and makes materials searchable in both Russian and English, enabling rapid discovery and reuse by journalists, researchers, and the public.
It has preserved a total of 149 independent media archives to date. As RIMA began receiving requests from journalists eager to protect archives in other countries, the project expanded, and was renamed Kronika, meaning “chronicle” in Russian, honoring the ground-breaking periodical The Chronicle of Current Events, which documented Soviet human rights abuses from 1968 to 1983 despite immense risks..”
This photographer is documenting old newspaper newsrooms while they’re still around
But the work that’s closer to home reveals something Hermes is skilled at seeking out. It might look like nostalgia, that’s there for sure, but Hermes is really capturing something else — people and places on the brink of change. She photographed the last Morse code station in the United States, a JCPenney Portrait Studio, and, for several years now, small local newspaper newsrooms.
The idea first started percolating around 2016, as we all got painfully familiar with the term “fake news” and claims that journalists were all elitists. “And for me, it was like, have you been in a local newsroom?” Hermes said. “At the local level, that couldn’t be further from the truth.” The photographer, who worked at Christian Science Monitor, started her career in local newsrooms at the Northwest Arkansas Times in Fayetteville and The Eagle-Tribune on the outskirts of Boston. Her idea for documenting local newspapers grew while visiting family in southern Illinois.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch was too thin, her family complained. “And I walked into the newsroom for the first time, and I saw a sea of empty carpet with the outline of where the desks had been,” Hermes said. She thought:
“If I could show my family this scene, they would understand what they’re seeing in the newspaper.” Hermes has visited more than 50 local newspapers since starting her project, which was highlighted last week in The New Yorker.
She ruled out metro newspapers pretty quickly because of the response from corporate, and has mostly focused on family-owned papers, with a few online newsrooms in the project, too. She uses news desert reports from Medill and the University of North Carolina to find the spots she should visit. And the locally-owned places welcome her. “I did not have to explain what I was doing to them,” Hermes said. “They immediately opened up their doors.” In the newsrooms she’s photographed, Hermes often sees familiar echoes: a police scanner, maps, newspaper morgues that no one has had time to digitize yet, tucked away in corners or basements.
There’s often a stapler and the place where it belongs — editorial, photo desk, advertising — written and affixed on it in big bold letters. People who read The New Yorker, and for sure people who read Poynter, will not be surprised by what they see. But Hermes doesn’t just mean for her project to be one about nostalgia.
“The communities that really need to see this work are the communities that haven’t thought about their local paper in a long time and what it would mean to lose their local paper,” she said.
She’d like to work with local institutions, maybe libraries, to display her images in the places where they were made and spark discussions about the newspapers and what they’re facing. “This is for me a love letter to journalism,” Hermes said. “But I do want it to do more than that.”
One two three: up: and between the metal ramp and the wooden bed of the truck, as we shifted grips, my filing cabinet separated just enough from the dolly, in air, for me to slip my right thumb into the gap.
When it hit, I felt: grandes oeuvres, play, lay, epic, sequences epistolary, meditative, meta-narrative, and essayistic, essay, film script, everything, crank correspondence, refutations of rejections, every word, I felt land full force on my thumb.
My thumbnail has retained for months the shape of crimped and beaten-open pipe. Francois Villon said in his shortest and to me most memorable poem that from a fathom of rope his neck would learn the weight of his ass.
Border Patrol Agent Recorded Raid with Meta’s Ray-Ban Smart Glasses
404 Media: “We’ve got new photos and videos showing a Border Patrol agent using Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses during an immigration raid. When we’ve covered CBP’s use of the tech before, the recording light on the glasses was not on. That’s different this time: the glasses are clearly in use. This matters because DHS bans employees from using personal recording devices. So, where is this footage going and why are individual agents recording? On a recent immigration raid, a Border Patrol agent wore a pair of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, with the privacy light clearly on signaling he was recording the encounter, which agents are not permitted to do, according to photos and videos of the incident shared with 404 Media. Previously when 404 Media covered Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officials’ use of Meta’s Ray-Bans, it wasn’t clear if the officials were using them to record raids because the recording lights were not on in any of the photos seen by 404 Media. In the new material from Charlotte, North Carolina, during the recent wave of immigration enforcement, the recording light is visibly illuminated…”
Staff at Treasury are among the best-paid and happiest in the public service, compared with counterparts earning tens of thousands of dollars
The Canberra Times has analysed base salaries for Australian Public Service 6 (APS6) and Executive Level 2 (EL2) employees at each department, along with the two largest agencies, Services Australia and the Australian Taxation Office.
The Department of Education, at which Tony Cook is the secretary, has the highest base salary rate for APS6 employees. Picture by Gary Ramage
In case you need a refresher on public service responsibilities, APS6 staff are expected to work on complex tasks with limited supervision. They generally have a lot of technical knowledge and can apply policy well, but they do not have anyone reporting to them.
EL2 employees hold key leadership roles and generally have quite a few staff reporting to them. They are responsible for developing strategies and policies, along with providing advice to senior management.
There is one level - Executive Level 1 - between APS6 and EL2.
Each department sets out minimum salaries slightly differently. Our analysis works off the base rate recorded in 2024-027 enterprise bargaining agreements.
Best and worst pay for APS6
There are four departments at which APS6 staff are paid a six-figure base rate this year.
Employees at the Department of Education have the highest base rate of $101,833, up from $98,105 in 2024.
That is closely followed by Treasury, where an APS6 earns at least $101,799. At Veterans' Affairs, APS 6 staff earn a base salary of $101,449, and at Finance, the base rate is $100,392.
There is almost a $2000 difference between the fourth and fifth best-paid departments - APS6 staff at Department of Industry earn $98,716 minimum.
The lowest-paid department is Home Affairs, at $94,563, followed by Services Australia at $94,711.
There are six departments at which the APS6 base rate is $95,000-odd, including Defence, Infrastructure and Climate Change.
Best and worst pay for EL2
The best-paid EL2 staff are at Treasury, earning a minimum salary of $162,193, up from $156,255 in 2024.
At the Department of Finance, they are earning at least $157,419, followed by $153,912 at Veterans' Affairs and $150,784 at the Australian Taxation Office.
All other analysed agencies have a base salary in the region of $140,000, with the exception of Defence, where the base is $139,681, and Services Australia, at which it is $137,090.
The departments with the biggest difference
Upwardly moving public servants may find Treasury the most lucrative department to stay in. There, the EL2 base salary is 59 per cent higher than that of an APS6.
The second-largest gap, 57 per cent, is at Finance, followed by the Australian Taxation Office and Department of Agriculture, both of which have a 54 per cent gap.
The smallest growth is at the Department of Education, where there is a 45 per cent difference between the base salaries.
How pay compares to census results
There is limited correlation between rates of pay and the likelihood of staff recommending their workplace, an analysis of the 2025 public service census results against base salaries shows.
While the Department of Education has the highest APS6 salary, it ranked fifth for staff likely to recommend it, with 83 per cent saying they would.
Veterans' Affairs is third on the ladder for both APS6 and EL2 salaries, but only 67 per cent of staff said they would recommend their workplace. It was the lowest score of any department in the category.
Notably, Treasury was one of the best-paid departments across the board, and 89 per cent of staff there said they would recommend their workplace - the highest score in the category. It also had the highest wellbeing score at 96 per cent.
Ahmed al Ahmed, the hero bystander who tackled and disarmed one of the Bondi shooters on Sunday, has said that despite the immense pain he is in, he does not regret lunging at the gunman. In fact, he would do it again.
“He doesn’t regret what he did. He said he’d do it again. But the pain has started to take a toll on him,” Sam Issa, Ahmed’s migration lawyer, said on Monday night after visiting him.
Father of two Ahmed al Ahmed in St George Hospital recovering from his bullet wounds after tackling the alleged gunman in Bondi on Sunday night.
“He’s not well at all. He’s riddled with bullets. Our hero is struggling at the moment.”
As Ahmed recovers from his first round of surgery at St George Hospital in Kogarah, Issa fears he will lose his left arm.
Ahmed, according to Issa, sustained about five bullet wounds that were sprayed across his left arm, but one that plunged into the back of his left shoulder blade, which he called “weird”, has yet to be extracted.
A hero bystander wrestled a rifle off a gunman in a moment of bravery that may have saved lives, footage from the scene at Bondi Beach shows.
“He’s a lot worse than expected. When you think of a bullet in the arm, you don’t think of serious injuries, but he has lost a lot of blood,” he said.
After being granted citizenship in 2022, Ahmed feels “indebted” to the Australian community, Issa said.
“Ahmed’s a humble man, he’s not interested in coverage, he just did what he was compelled to do as a human being on that day,” he said. “He gets that gratitude from being in Australia. This is his way of conveying his gratitude for staying in Australia, for being granted citizenship.
“He has really appreciated this community, and he felt that as a member of the community, he had to act that way and contribute.”
Earlier on Monday, Ahmed’s father Fateh and mother Malaka said their son was in “good spirits”.
“He said he thanks God that he was able to do this, to help innocent people and to save people from these monsters, these killers,” his father said.
Ahmed’s mother said she could not stop crying when she found out her son saved lives.
“In Australia, as you’ve probably read, there’s been a very, very brave person who went and attacked frontally one of the shooters,” Trump said. “[He] saved a lot of lives, a very brave person who is right now in the hospital, pretty seriously wounded.
“I have great respect for the man who did that.”
Ahmed, a Muslim, arrived in Australia in 2006 from Syria. The 44-year-old tobacco shop owner is the father of two daughters aged five and six.
Ahmed al Ahmed’s father after visiting his son in hospital.CREDIT: JAMES BRICKWOOD
Mostafa, Ahmed’s cousin, who did not provide a last name, said he had not slept since he arrived at the hospital on Sunday night. He said his cousin was undoubtedly a hero, but was still in some pain.
“Absolutely, he is a hero,” he said. “He would’ve lost his life to save other people.
“I hope everyone in Australia wishes [that everything goes well for] Ahmed and that he can get back to his family.”
Ahmed told Mostafa he did not know what came over him in the moment, but that God had given him “power that he never gave me before”.
When Laurie Antoniadis realised the man who tackled the shooter was his local tobacconist, he headed to Ahmed’s store.
“I thought I would come over and say thank you to him,” Antoniadis said. “He is a wonderful man.”
Ahmed’s shop was closed on Monday. “I thought it was a very brave act that he did,” Antoniadis said.
Ahmed was in Bondi on Sunday, having a coffee with his cousin, Jozay Alkanj.
Jozay Alkanj, a cousin of father of two Ahmed al Ahmed, who has been hailed a hero. CREDIT: JAMES BRICKWOOD
“He said, ‘I’m going to die – please see my family [and tell them] that I went down to save people’s lives’,” Alkanj recounted, before Ahmed tackled the shooter, taking his rifle.
Issa recounted the struggles his client had in gaining Australian citizenship after escaping the civil war in Syria.
“They weren’t going to give it to him, but we appealed all the way to the Federal Circuit Court. He’s a very good man,” Issa said.
“Not all immigrants are bad. He makes a great citizen, and he has worked very hard.”
Issa said Ahmed’s elderly parents were in Australia and could not return to Syria because of the situation there. He said he would push for them to be granted citizenship “as a reward for their son’s service to the community, saving scores of lives”.
“This is an opportunity for the PM to do something good as a reward for his bravery,” he said.
In 2019, Home Affairs had refused his bid for citizenship after NSW Police had earlier charged him with possession of goods suspected of being stolen, which he denied.
He appealed the citizenship refusal, but the Administrative Appeals Tribunal dismissed his application for a merits review on the basis that he had no reasonable chance of success.
However, court records show the charges relating to possession of suspected stolen goods were later dropped in August 2019. He was eventually granted citizenship in 2022.
Records also show that in 2022 he pleaded guilty to a number of minor tobacco offences, including displaying an ice pipe in a shop. He was sentenced to a conditional release order for 12 months.
Ahmed was also found guilty of possessing a prohibited weapon – namely a knife – a year later, but no conviction was recorded.
On Monday morning, outside St George Hospital, Alkanj recalled the incident that left his cousin with two gunshot wounds in the upper left shoulder.
The cousins passed by the Hanukkah event and were offered food. They declined the offer.
“We needed a coffee,” Alkanj said. “It was then just 10 minutes before this happened like that. It was very crazy – we went behind the cars, we were seeing that people were shooting very near to us.”
More than 5700 people have raised more than $570,000 for Ahmed on crowdfunding site GoFundMe set up by CarHub Australia. Among donors is US billionaire Bill Ackman, who gave $100,000.
The footage from the scene at Bondi Beach shows one of the gunmen, dressed in a black shirt and white pants, holding a black bag and standing beside two bins next to the Campbell Parade car park as he fires into the crowd gathered on the lawn nearby.
Ahmed moved towards the gunman through the car park, tackling him and disarming him.
The shooter then backs away, walking towards the car park overpass, where the other shooter was still stationed.
Ahmed places the rifle against a tree and backs away. Another bystander can be seen chasing after the gunman, throwing something at him as he walks towards the bridge.
Other footage from the scene shows the gunman then rejoins the other assailant at the bridge. Having entered the line of fire at great personal risk to save lives, Ahmed was then shot twice.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and NSW Premier Chris Minns commended his bravery.
“We have seen Australians today run towards danger in order to help others. These Australians are heroes and their bravery has saved lives,” Albanese said at a press conference.
In a separate press conference, Minns remarked on the “extraordinary acts of personal courage and bravery from individuals in our community”.
“I think it’s worth remembering that in all of this evil, in all of this sadness, there are still wonderful, brave Australians that are prepared to risk their lives to help a complete stranger.”
More coverage on the Bondi terror attack
Updates: Sydney on high alert for further terrorist acts as multiple people killed
