Restructuring, Russia’s Broken Ceasefire, & Robots Running Marathons

April 21, 2025

Hello, readers – happy Monday! Today, we’ll be talking about the State Department, deportations, Russia & Ukraine, more deportations, Hegseth leaking war plans (again), JD Vance & the Pope, & robots running marathons.

Here’s some good news: Kami Rita, 55, will attempt to scale Mt. Everest for the 31st time, breaking his own record for most climbs on the world’s highest peak. Also, Alisa Perales is set to become the youngest graduate at Crafton Hills College – she’ll have two associate degrees at the ripe age of 10.

“If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.” – Mother Teresa

A Dire State Of Affairs

(State Department by Drew Angerer via Getty Images)

A draft executive order that’s been floating around Washington revealed Trump’s plans to restructure the State Department. Under the restructuring plan, the diplomatic agency would shut down the vast majority of its operations in sub-Saharan Africa, slash its budgets for climate, refugees, human rights, democracy, and gender equality-focused operations, and reorganize the rest of its embassies into four regional bureaus.

Bloomberg, the New York Times, and Newsweek have all reported on the draft, though Trump administration officials have called it “fake news.” According to the leaked document, the order is “a disciplined reorganization” of the department, which will “streamline mission delivery” while cutting “waste, fraud and abuse.”

The main restructuring part of the plan would shift all global embassies into four regional bureaus, which will oversee the Indo-Pacific, Latin America, Middle East, and Eurasia regions. An unspecified number of “non-essential” embassies outside those regions – mainly in central and southern Africa as well as Canada – would be shuttered because the Trump administration has deemed them less important than other places.

Turning A Bus Around From 1,500 Miles Away

On Friday, immigration officials were up to their usual ploys – nothing good, as you’d expect – sending buses full of Venezuelan immigrants to a northern Texas airport for deportation. Partway through their journey, ICE agents were forced to literally turn their vehicles around as the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the deportations were illegal. The emergency SCOTUS decision came to a similar conclusion as federal judges in Colorado, New York, and southern Texas about Trump’s deportations. The White House has claimed that the Alien Enemies Act allows ICE agents to deport alleged gang members regardless of their immigration status, but judges and courts say there needs to be some way to appeal the deportation process.

Meanwhile, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was mistakenly sent to a prison in El Salvador, is alive and had the chance to speak to Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen. According to Van Hollen, Abrego Garcia appeared to be “traumatized” by his imprisonment during their brief conversation in a Salvadorian hotel, and was worried about his young son, who was “in the car with him when U.S. agents had stopped them and handcuffed him and then taken him away.” The senator added that El Salvador’s government “tried really hard” to keep him from meeting the man.

Hunting For Peace On Easter

(Zelenskyy by Vladimir Buganko via Getty Images)

On Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced an Easter ceasefire in Russia’s war with Ukraine (both countries are largely Eastern Orthodox, and Easter is the most significant holiday in the Orthodox Church). Despite the fact that Moscow declared the ceasefire, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of breaking the peace “more than two thousand times” with drone and artillery attacks, adding that the Russian military had also made 67 direct assaults on Ukrainian positions. Russia has accused Ukraine of violating the ceasefire over 1,000 times.
Meanwhile, Trump is pushing both countries to agree to a longer-term peace deal this week. “HOPEFULLY RUSSIA AMD [sic] UKRAINE WILL MAKE A DEAL THIS WEEK. BOTH WILL THEN START TO DO BIG BUSINESS WITH THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WHICH IS THRIVING, AND MAKE A FORTUNE!” he wrote on TruthSocial (sorry for shouting).

The Krauts Crack Down Even Harder

Germany is following the U.S.’s lead… by deporting four people for participating in pro-Palestinian protests. The state’s victims are 3 E.U. citizens and one American who have been accused of – but not officially charged with – participating in a protest at Berlin’s Free University that caused “property damage including graffiti,” according to a spokesperson for the Berlin Immigration Office. “We haven’t even seen the files yet,” said one of their lawyers, “so we don’t even know what exactly our individual clients are accused of doing that day.”
If you know anything about Germany’s policy on Israel, this isn’t surprising. Multiple generations of German politicians have described unequivocally defending Israel as their country’s Staatsräson, or “reason of state.” Over the past two years, Germany has violently cracked down on pro-Palestine protests, given schools the right to ban Palestinian headscarves and flags, and even made uttering the pro-Palestinian slogan “From the river to the sea” a criminal offense.

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Vance In The Vatican

Vice President JD Vance, who converted to Roman Catholicism in 2019, met with Pope Francis yesterday at the Vatican. The Vatican said the two men met for a few minutes “to exchange Easter greetings,” and Vance’s office confirmed that they met, but provided no further details. Vance’s motorcade was only on Vatican territory for 17 minutes.
On Saturday, Vance sat down with senior Vatican officials and had “an exchange of opinions” over international conflicts and immigration. The Pope isn’t exactly a fan of Vance (or President Trump) – in February, he said the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts were driving a “major crisis” that “damages the dignity of men and women.”

Someone Get This Guy A Jitterbug

Remember when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accidentally shared war plans with a journalist (that’s simplifying things, but for the sake of our word count, it has to be done)? Well, he did it again. Before strikes launched on Yemen in March, Hegseth sent detailed information about the planned attacks to a private Signal group chat that he created that included his wife, his brother, and about a dozen other people.
The chat also included two senior advisers to Hegseth – Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick – who were fired last week after being accused of leaking unauthorized information. Information shared in the other, more famous group (which was created by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz), like the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets that would strike Houthi rebel targets in Yemen, was also shared with Hegseth’s family.

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So, Do Humanoid Robots Also Brag About Running A Marathon?

Over the weekend, 12,000 people participated in the Yizhuang half-marathon in Beijing. Unfortunately for them, most of the eyes watching the race weren’t actually on its human participants – instead, they were watching the 21 humanoid robots attempting to reach the finish line. We write “attempting” because only six of them were able to complete the race, and the fastest (named Tiangong Ultra) finished the race in 2 hours and 40 minutes – the slowest time allowed for human runners was 3 hours and 10 minutes, and Tiangong Ultra was the only one that beat that threshold.
Every robot that participated in the half-marathon fell at least once, and some even had to be patched together with duct tape. Many were accompanied through the entire race by human operators who provided different types of support for each robot: some teams gave the robots live instructions via control panels, others led their bots by leash, and others had to clear obstacles out of their robot’s path in order to keep it upright. At one point, one robot’s head fell off and its support team had to stick it back on with duct tape. Overall, one robotics professor said the race showed how humanoid robots haven’t made much progress operating in real-world scenarios over the past few years. But at least it was funny to watch.

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