A naval aircraft carrier under construction is slated to bear the name of an enlisted sailor, the first for an African-American. Or was.

The Navy is planning to replace Doris Miller’s name on the ship, possibly with that of president Donald Trump, CNN reports. No carrier in the US Navy has ever been named for a sitting president.

A 21-year-old recent college graduate was behind an anonymous website that put out widely shared fake election polling in Wisconsin, Nevada and California…

The website, Median Strategies, abruptly shut down and withdrew its polling earlier this week following questions from a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. In an unsigned statement, it described a “short-term social experiment” to examine how fake polling “could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification”.

“I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily,” Rahil Prakash [said] on Thursday when reached by phone. “And as it turned out, it could.”

A new book by longtime Bay Area journalist Gil Durán investigates “tech fascism” and its mounting influence on U.S. politics. The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy follows the rise of Vice President JD Vance, the former venture capitalist whose “outsider” campaign for Senate was bankrolled by the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, Peter Thiel. Durán traces the ideological lineage of the current Trump administration back from Vance to Thiel and the far-right-wing monarchist Curtis Yarvin, whose “right-libertarian” political theory has long made the rounds among Silicon Valley elite. “These guys were never libertarians,” says Durán. “Now that they are the government, we see their true face: They’re fascists, and they’re authoritarians.”

The Trump administration’s plans to stymie and defund bike lane plans in the US, on the unusual basis that they are DEI tools, will hurt efforts to improve roadway safety, non-motorized transportation advocates say.

The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, posted on X this month that he had redirected $1.73bn allocated for “Biden-era DEI pet projects” to “America’s actual backbone: ROADS, BRIDGES, AND SHIPPING PORTS”.

Duffy did not explain how the transportation department would determine which bike lanes support diversity, equity and inclusion. The administration also recently removed bike lanes and speed cameras from the Federal Highway Administration’s list of proven safety countermeasures.