Lizette Alvarez

Contributing columnist for @washingtonpost. A 22-year veteran of the NYT. Travel addict. Theater and ballet junkie.

[Super 70s Sports @Super70sSports]

Kids today fart around on their phones on road trips. We had these.

[ESPN PR @ESPNPR]

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Don Van Natta Jr. (@DVNJr) has re-signed with ESPN in new multi-year deal

📝Continues his role in ESPN's Investigative, Enterprise and Digital Journalism Unit
📝Reflecting ESPN’s continued commitment to journalism

More: https://t.co/NWSzXz6ZdO

[Amity @amitylee13]

Byron Donalds speaks about the importance of education in front of a misspelled sign. You can’t make this shit up.

[Lizette Alvarez @LizetteScribe]

Congrats to Knicks fans everywhere.

[Don Van Natta Jr. @DVNJr]

Good morning. So it wasn’t just a dream.

[Team Ossoff @TeamOssoff]

Ossoff: Last September, the President of Kazakhstan calls Donald Trump and says he wants to grant tungsten mining rights to an American company. And the very next month, Eric and Don Jr. get a stake in the American company pursuing the mining deal.

Six days later, six days after Prince Eric and Prince Don get their stake, Kazakhstan announces this company will get, “The largest known undeveloped tungsten resource in the world.” A few more weeks go by, and then the U.S. government, run by their father, sets aside 1.6 billion of your tax dollars to fund and finance their mining project. In Kazakhstan.

All this while you pay more for gas, for groceries, for health care, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

[Jason Garcia @Jason_Garcia]

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis just signed a bill making it harder to sue mining giant Mosaic Co. over claims related to radiation exposure on redeveloped phosphate mines.

Mosaic lobbyists wrote the bill.

And Mosaic recently made a $50,000 donation to DeSantis-supporting Super PAC.

[Jake Justice @jakecobb]

Keep posting this so people don’t forget how truly bad this event was.

Don’t let people gaslight you into thinking it was peaceful and worthy of 1500+ pardons and slush fund payoffs.

[Sarrah Bellus @sarrah_bellus]

Reporter: The DOJ has this new fund — $1.7 billion. Why should taxpayers pay for the January 6ers?

Trump: Because in my world, loyalty outranks law. They broke the rules for me, so you pay the bill for them. That’s the transaction.

[Lizette Alvarez @LizetteScribe]

@LivCaputo @jaketapper So sorry, Marc. He sounds like a phenomenal man.

[Alliance for Justice @AFJustice]

John Marck refused to answer Senator @ChrisCoons's question of whether President Trump is eligible to run for president in 2028.

This isn’t a trick question – it's in the Constitution. If you can’t say a president can’t serve a third term, you shouldn’t be a federal judge. 🚩

[Peter Baker @peterbakernyt]

When Trump pulled out of the international nuclear agreement with Tehran in 2018, Iran lacked even a single bomb's worth of uranium. Since then, it accumulated 22,000 pounds of enriched uranium. @BlackiLi @WilliamJBroad https://t.co/r8pPDoXqgh

[Richard Stengel @stengel]

The US national debt now exceeds 100% of the gross domestic product, a once unthinkable threshold that only happened once before, at the end of WWII. This admin is spending $1.33 for every dollar it collects in revenue. The one year budget deficit this year is projected at $1.9 trillion. Didn't they say they would reduce federal spending?

[Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin]

This should be on the front page of every newspaper in America.

A Syrian billionaire needed U.S. sanctions lifted so he could cash in on $12 billion in reconstruction contracts.

In an attempt to influence American foreign policy, he proposed a Trump-branded golf course, cut Jared Kushner & Ivanka Trump into a multibillion-dollar real estate deal for a resort in Albania, and had someone physically deliver a stone engraved with the Trump family crest to a Republican Member of Congress with instructions to take it to the White House to get the President's attention.

Trump threw his weight behind repealing the sanctions. They were lifted. The contracts are moving, the Trump family’s deals are expanding, and not a single Washington Republican is willing to say a word about any of it.

This is a corruption of everything the office of the presidency is supposed to stand for, and the American people deserve to know about it.
https://t.co/A4lQE3ktoG

[LongTime🤓FirstTime👨‍💻 @LongTimeHistory]

ICE detain immigration court interpreter—whose son serves in U.S. Military.

She is Texas' only licensed Hindi legal interpreter.

Detention center staff recognized her—agents took photos with her handcuffed for "social media."

Son filed military parole application for mother under USCIS military family provisions.

Meenu Batra said the people who arrested her did not have visible badges—nor were they wearing uniforms.

Job requires her to fly all across the country wherever South Asian immigrants need language access.

Her attorneys argue that in the 35 years that she’s had legal protection in the U.S.—the government never told her that it was planning to deport her—and that her detention violates her right to due process.

She is now locked up inside one of the ICE facilities where she used to work—the El Valle Detention Center in Raymondville, Texas.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the VP of Workforce Economics at Oracle. We are worth $420 billion.

On Tuesday, we sent 30,000 employees a termination email at 6 AM.

Not 9. Not business hours. Six in the morning. They woke up to the word "eliminated."

The email came from "Oracle Leadership." Not a manager. Not a name. Oracle Leadership.

It said: "We are grateful for your dedication, hard work, and the impact you have made."

By the time they read the word "grateful," their access to email, files, and Slack had already been revoked. The gratitude was the last Oracle communication they received.

We did not eliminate the roles. We eliminated the salaries.

In the same fiscal year, we filed 3,126 H-1B petitions to hire foreign workers. 436 this year alone. The roles are identical. The pay is not.

An H-1B software engineer earns $87,000. The domestic median for the same work is $106,000. Eighty-three percent of H-1B workers are classified at entry-level wages for senior positions.

The industry calls this a skills gap. It is a pay cut that requires a passport.

The visa is tied to the employer. If the worker leaves, they lose their legal right to remain in the country. If they negotiate, they risk the same. If they organize, the sponsor declines to renew.

That is retention.

Our revenue this quarter is $17.2 billion. Up 22%. Net income up 95%. We have $553 billion in committed future contracts. Up 325%.

These are not the numbers of a company that needs to lay anyone off.

We took a $2.1 billion restructuring charge. That is the cost of the gratitude. It frees up $8 to $10 billion in annual cash flow. That cash services $156 billion in AI data centers we are building. Starting 2028, OpenAI pays us $82 million per day.

Larry Ellison is worth $189 billion. He pledged $51 billion in Oracle shares as collateral for the Stargate AI venture. Announced at the White House.

The stock rose 4% on Tuesday. The day of the 6 AM emails. Wall Street did not see 30,000 people. They saw the margin.

Amazon laid off 30,000 since October. Filed thousands of H-1B petitions in the same window. This is not one company. This is the operating model.

Fire the salary. Keep the role. Fill it with someone whose legal right to remain in the country depends on your continued sponsorship. Pay them less. They will not complain. They cannot.

One employee's father worked at Oracle for 20 years. No phone call. No meeting. An email at 6 AM and a locked laptop.

The role is still open.

The people we fired are free. The people we hired are not.

[Steve Lookner @lookner]

Bloomberg: "the energy industry is warning that the crisis is only beginning. In conversations with more than three dozen oil and gas traders, executives, brokers, shippers and advisers over the last week, one message was repeated over and over: The world still hasn’t grasped the severity of the situation.
...If the strait stays closed, the world will have to significantly reduce its oil and gas consumption — but not before prices spike to a level that forces consumers and businesses to fly, drive and spend much less."
https://t.co/q2ZBEfhhAf

[Shawn VanDiver @shawnjvandiver]

This man was 41 years old and had 6 kids, the youngest of which is an 18-month-old American citizen.

He fought our war for us.

Now he is dead, less than 24 hours after being taken into custody by ICE.

We need investigations NOW.

[LongTime🤓FirstTime👨‍💻 @LongTimeHistory]

ICE detain husband of Democratic congressional candidate—who is also a disabled U.S. Army veteran.

He is wheelchair bound—after suffering severe injury during training for deployment in Iraq.

Agents arrested him one interview and a ceremony away from becoming a U.S. citizen.

Zahid Chaudhry has been awarded multiple medals for his service:
▪︎Army Service Ribbon
▪︎Global War on Terrorism Service Medal
▪︎Armed Forces Reserve Medal
▪︎Reserve Achievement Medal
▪︎National Defense Service Medal
▪︎Recruitment Achievement Medal
▪︎Army Strength Management Award

After 124 days in detention a federal judge finally ruled he had been wrongfully detained.

Zahid Chaudhry is currently waiting for his new hearing—living back at home with his wife and 2 U.S. citizen children in Tacoma, Washington.

[Lizette Alvarez @LizetteScribe]

@Chris_Montz @ribarcodi Brillante!

[James Surowiecki @JamesSurowiecki]

There's no question someone in the White House told Trump to call the war in Iran an "incursion," but he heard it as "excursion" and now he keeps calling it that - making the war sound like a holiday getaway - because no one around him ever corrects him when he makes a mistake.