Cabinet Appointments, Controversial Car Purchases, & Canine Robotics

February 14, 2025

Hello, readers – happy Friday! Today, we’ll be talking about Trump’s Cabinet, India’s foreign relationships, an automaker merger, a Russia military base, book bans, armored Teslas, and robot animals.

Here’s some good news: Worcester, Massachusetts, voted this week to become a sanctuary city for members of the trans community, with hundreds of residents coming out to show support for the decision. Also, researchers at the University of Cambridge have developed a reactor that pulls carbon dioxide directly from the air and converts it into sustainable fuel, using sunlight as the power source.

“Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.” – Haile Selassie

It’s All Love In The Legislature

(Trump & RFK by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds via Getty Images)

It was a Trumpy Thursday as two (and a half) Trump cabinet nominees were confirmed by the Senate. RFK Jr. was given the green light to head up the Department of Health and Human Services, longtime Trump ally Brooke Rollins was confirmed as the Department of Agriculture head, and Kash Patel was half-confirmed when the Senate Judiciary Committee approved his bid to be appointed FBI head.

RFK’s confirmation comes despite his long history of questionable takes on medicine. His track record on vaccines in particular is so bad that Senator (and polio survivor) Mitch McConnell voted against his party, saying, “I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”

RFK’s confirmation could spell trouble for a variety of important government health programs, including Medicare and Medicaid. Republicans aren’t too big on social spending programs – especially those that provide aid to lower-income populations – and the GOP has argued that Medicaid has grown too large since the Covid pandemic. Also in the crosshairs are federal vaccine policies, federal information resources that doctors use to treat patients, and even federal grants for medical research.

New Delhi’s Old Friend

Yesterday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid his first visit to the second Trump White House. The three-term leader is apparently a big fan of Trump, saying he wants to “Make India Great Again,” or “MIGA.” Following the meeting, the leaders announced that the U.S. would be increasing its arms sales to India by “many millions of dollars,” and that India would eventually be allowed to buy U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets, which its military has been drooling over for some time.

Less exciting for Modi, though, was Trump’s promise to create “a certain level playing field” with the South Asian power. After the meeting, the president said he would be implementing tariffs on Indian goods equal to the tariffs that New Delhi has set on certain American imports. “Whatever India charges, we charge them,” Trump said. “So frankly, it no longer matters to us that much what they charge.” India has already announced that it plans to lift tariffs on some U.S. imports, and is also willing to buy more American oil in the future.

Nixing Nissan

(Nissan headquarters by Tomohiro Ohsumi via Getty Images)

One of the biggest mergers in the automotive industry has broken down. Yesterday, executives from Nissan and Honda announced that a planned $60 billion merger between the two Japanese automakers was officially off the table. The merger, which also involved Mitsubishi Motors as a minor partner, would have created the fourth-biggest automaker in the world behind Toyota, the Volkswagen group, and Hyundai-Kia.
“Going forward, the three companies will collaborate within the framework of a strategic partnership aimed at the era of intelligence and electrified vehicles,” said the carmakers in a joint statement. Nissan will also go ahead with a restructuring plan which will cut over 9,000 jobs.

Putin Russia On The African Map

Russia has extended its reach to the Red Sea. Yesterday, during a visit to Moscow by Sudanese foreign minister Ali Youssef Ahmed al-Sharif, Sudan and Russia announced finalized plans to build a Russian military base on the African nation’s eastern coast following years of delays.
The agreement marks Russia’s first military base on the continent, and will grant the Kremlin some degree of influence over the Red Sea off of Sudan’s coast. The Red Sea is a major trade artery connecting Europe to Asia, and roughly 12% of global trade flows through the body of water.
Negotiations over the military base have been held since 2019, but the two sides haggled over small details for years. Then, the current Sudanese civil war broke out in 2023, complicating negotiations even further as Russia tried to play both sides of the war for a better deal. With the Sudanese army’s string of victories against the paramilitary RSF, negotiations were simplified.

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Pentagon Learning’s In Bad Shape

This week, Pentagon schools – which serve U.S. military families – suspended access to library books while officials completed a “compliance review” under President Trump’s crackdown on DEI and gender equality. Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called it “naked content and viewpoint censorship of books” during a hearing on the “censorship-industrial complex.”
The policy will affect up to 67,000 children in Pentagon schools worldwide – all 160 schools, located in seven U.S. states and 11 countries, are subject to the lockdown. The memo sent to parents said that a “small number of items” had been identified and were being kept for “further review.” Among the books that have been marked as concerning are “No Truth Without Ruth,” a book about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and “Freckleface Strawberry,” about a little girl coming to terms with her freckles. Dangerous!

Talk About A Conflict Of Interest

Yesterday, the State Department said it will no longer move forward with a plan to purchase $400 million worth of armored Tesla vehicles – presumably Cybertrucks, though it wasn’t specified. The potential purchase earned some backlash considering Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s role at DOGE.
Negotiations for the purchase began during the Biden administration, when Musk was merely a billionaire and not a key voice in the White House. Reports of the purchase first started to circulate Wednesday night, but the document was edited that evening to say “armored electric vehicles,” with the word “Tesla” removed.

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Computer-Brained K-9s

You know those drug dogs that look like they’ll bite your leg off if you smell the wrong way? If this tech startup accomplishes its mission, they’ll be getting a cybernetic upgrade sometime soon. Canaery, a Florida-based neurotechnology startup, is looking to leverage the power of dogs’ noses, turning them into computer-enhanced surveillance animals that might one day sniff out bombs, drugs, human diseases, and toxins.
The company is developing a brain implant that attaches to animals’ olfactory bulb, which is where the brain processes the smells taken in by the nose. That tiny computer chip can send the neural signals that occur whenever the animal smells something to a wireless computer unit nearby, which can connect to a phone app. In the real world, this process takes just a few seconds, and can give the cops a phone notification that Fido can smell that kilo of fentanyl you’re hiding in your backpack.
So far, Canary has successfully tested one of these nose-computer interfaces on rats, implanting chips into their brains and showing that the neurotech can, indeed, detect smells like fire accelerants, smokeless powder from bullets, and a variety of drugs. The company is now focused on using AI to train its algorithms to detect new smells, and is also figuring out how to implant the chip into dogs.

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