Michael Earley to be retained as Aggies' head baseball coach
May 31 - Texas A&M Director of Athletics Trev Alberts announced today that first-year head baseball coach Michael Earley would return to College Station for the 2025-26 academic year.
"Earlier today, I met with Coach Earley to discuss the state of our baseball program. I appreciate Mike's work in taking a holistic view of what changes need to be made so that we have a baseball program that meets our high standards," Alberts said. "Baseball success is critically important to Texas A&M. I am confident in Mike's ability to execute the needed change and fully support his vision going forward."
Earley took over for Jim Schlossnagle, who guided the Aggies to a pair of College World Series appearances in his three seasons at the helm. In 2024, Texas A&M made it to the championship finals, but fell in three games (2-1) to national champion Tennessee.
Schlossnagle took the University of Texas head coaching position one day after the decisive third game and Earley, the program's hitting coach, was elevated to the top spot in the dugout.
Texas A&M was the consensus No. 1 pick in the preseason, but struggled to a 30-26 record, which included a 11-19 mark and 14th place finish in the SEC. The Aggies failed to earn an NCAA Tournament bid for just the second time since 2007.
The nucleus of the team is expected to return, but Alberts did not address the statuses of hitting coach Caleb Longley and pitching coach Jason Kelly.
--Field Level Media
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The Independent
27 minutes ago
- The Independent
India appeals to Donald Trump for a ‘big, beautiful trade pact'
Indian finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said India would love to have a 'big, beautiful' trade deal with the US, as Washington and New Delhi race to clinch an agreement before the 9 July deadline when punitive tariffs are set to kick in. However, the minister also laid out India's red lines as she expressed hopes for an interim Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) between the two 'strong economies.' Her remarks came after US president Donald Trump last week said a 'very big' deal with India was 'coming up' soon, even though negotiators on both sides appeared to have hit a deadlock over key issues. The US is India's largest trading partner, with the value of their bilateral trade reaching $190bn recently. But after taking office for his second term in January, Mr Trump branded India a "tariff king" and a "big abuser" of trade ties. He has threatened to impose an additional tariff of up to 26 per cent on Indian goods. Although steep, the levy is still lower than the total 104 per cent imposed on China, 49 per cent on Cambodia, and 46 per cent on Vietnam. The additional duties are due to kick back in after a 90-day pause, targeting products like machinery, pearls, mineral fuels, and more. 'I'd love to have an agreement, a big, good, beautiful one; why not?" Ms Sitharam said in an interview with The Financial Express. "The US is one of our leading trade partners, topmost if anything. At the junction we are in, and given our growth goals and ambition to reach Viksit Bharat [developed India] by 2047, the sooner we have such agreements with strong economies, the better they will serve us. So, I'd rather put my own statement on (Trump's)," she added. She nonetheless noted that protecting India's agriculture and dairy industries have been among the 'major red lines' in the BTA talks with the US. "The negotiating team ensured that the industry's concerns were all taken on board before they sat at the table. Agriculture and dairy have been among the very big red lines, where a high degree of caution has been exercised," she said in the interview. The finance minister pushed back against Mr Trump's accusations that India was a 'tariff king', saying the label is 'unjustified' and that India's tariffs against the US were modest and within the World Trade Organisation 's guidelines. "We have only eight duties, inclusive of zero tariffs. There have been drastic cuts in both the July and February budgets. The effective tariff rates are far below the WTO thresholds. So, for India to be called a 'tariff king' is absolutely unjustified," she said. A major sticking point in the India–US trade deal is agriculture, where deep structural differences persist. The US wants greater access for its big-ticket farm exports like wheat, corn, cotton, and genetically modified (GM) crops to narrow its trade deficit, but India has resisted, citing the need to protect food security and the livelihoods of millions of small farmers. Unlike the US, where large-scale, heavily subsidised farming is the norm, India's agriculture is dominated by small landholdings and low productivity. High tariffs – up to 150 per cent – are used by India to shield its farmers from cheaper imports. The US argues these barriers are unfair, while India sees them as essential for survival. After Mr Trump unveiled his Liberation Day tariffs, India acted swiftly by reducing tariffs on select US goods, including motorcycles and whiskey, and offered concessions in the agricultural and defence sectors in an effort to ease tensions with Washington. The two countries have engaged in a series of high-level negotiations aimed at finalising a trade deal before the full impact of Trump's new tariffs takes effect. But progress has been slowed by political sensitivities in India, particularly around the farming and auto industries, which remain key domestic concerns. According to Bloomberg, Indian negotiators in Washington have extended their stay to resolve these differences and reach a deal before the deadline. People familiar with the matter said the negotiations that were supposed to run until 27 June were extended by a day, raising hopes of a timely trade deal.
Telegraph
30 minutes ago
- Telegraph
At 41, I found out I was the child of a sperm donor, not my dad
All names have been changed I have a vivid memory of myself at eight, sitting on the riverbank and fishing with my dad. It's a moment that always made me feel safe – the security that comes from being with a parent who loved you and made you who you are. But last year I stared at an email from a stranger, read the words ' sperm donor ', and that memory, along with so many others, shattered. If what she had written was true, then he wasn't my biological father at all. At 41, the foundation of my world seemed to crumble away. I had always idolised my dad, an engineer who taught me how to canoe and camp. I knew he spoilt me more than my younger brother, Adam, and sister, Sophie, but I ignored their teasing that I was a 'daddy's girl'. I wore the label with pride. My relationship with Mum was more complicated. I never felt her unconditional love, and after their acrimonious divorce when I was 17, her attempt to forbid me to see Dad hurt. 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I will never know how he felt about my conception, or how he would react to my knowing about it now. But I can finally think of that little girl fishing with her dad and smile. I've found peace in the knowledge that love can be based on something stronger than biology. Whatever my DNA results page says, he will always be my dad.
The Guardian
32 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Peter Thiel's Palantir poses a grave threat to Americans
Draw a circle around all the assets in the US now devoted to artificial intelligence. Draw a second circle around all the assets devoted to the US military. A third around all assets being devoted to helping the Trump regime collect and compile personal information on millions of Americans. And a fourth circle around the parts of Silicon Valley dedicated to turning the US away from a democracy into a dictatorship led by tech bros. Where do the four circles intersect? At a corporation called Palantir Technologies and a man named Peter Thiel. In JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, a 'palantír' is a seeing stone that can be used to distort truth and present selective visions of reality. During the War of the Ring, a palantír falls under the control of Sauron, who uses it to manipulate and deceive. Palantir Technologies bears a striking similarity. It sells an AI-based platform that allows its users – among them, military and law enforcement agencies – to analyze personal data, including social media profiles, personal information and physical characteristics. These are used to identify and surveil individuals. In March, Trump signed an executive order requiring all agencies and departments of the federal government to share data on Americans. To get the job done, Trump chose Palantir Technologies. Palantir is now poised to combine data gleaned from the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service. Meanwhile, the administration wants access to citizens' and others' bank account numbers and medical claims. Will the Trump regime use an emerging super-database to advance Trump's political agenda, find and detain immigrants, and punish critics? Will it make it easier for Trump to spy on and target his ever-growing list of enemies and other Americans? We'll soon find out. Thirteen former Palantir employees signed a letter this month urging the corporation to stop its work with Trump. Linda Xia, who was a Palantir engineer until last year, said the problem was not with the company's technology but with how the Trump administration intended to use it. 'Combining all that data, even with the noblest of intentions, significantly increases the risk of misuse,' she told the New York Times. Even some Republicans are concerned. Representative Warren Davidson, a Republican of Ohio, told Semafor such work could be 'dangerous': 'When you start combining all those data points on an individual into one database, it really essentially creates a digital ID. And it's a power that history says will eventually be abused.' Last week, a group of Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Palantir, asking for answers about huge government contracts the company got. The lawmakers are worried that Palantir is helping make a super-database of Americans' private information. Behind their worry lie several people who are behind Palantir's selection for the project, starting with Elon Musk. Musk's so-called 'department of government efficiency' (Doge) was behind Palantir's selection. At least three Doge members had worked at Palantir, the Times reported, while others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir, who still holds a major stake in it. Thiel has worked closely with Musk, who devoted a quarter of a billion dollars to getting Trump re-elected and then, as head of Doge, helped eviscerate swaths of the government without congressional authority. Thiel also mentored JD Vance, who worked for Thiel at one of his venture funds. Thiel subsequently bankrolled Vance's 2022 senatorial campaign. Thiel introduced Vance to Trump and later helped Vance become his vice-presidential pick. Thiel also mentored the billionaire David Sacks, who also worked with Thiel at PayPal. As a student at Stanford University, Sacks wrote for the Stanford Review, the rightwing student newspaper Thiel founded as an undergraduate there in 1987. Sacks is now Trump's 'AI and crypto czar'. The CEO of Palantir is Alex Karp, who said on an earnings call earlier this year that the company wants 'to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it's necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them'. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion Palantir recently disclosed that Karp received $6.8bn in 'compensation actually paid' in 2024 (you read that right) – making him the highest-paid chief executive of a publicly traded company in the United States. A former generation of wealthy US conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater because they wanted to conserve American institutions. But this group – Thiel, Musk, Sacks, Karp and Vance, among others – doesn't seem to want to conserve much of anything, at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, including social security, civil rights and even women's right to vote. As Thiel has written: The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron. Hello? If 'capitalist democracy' is becoming an oxymoron, it's not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It's because billionaire capitalists like Musk and Thiel are intent on killing democracy. Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America's robber barons ripped off so much of the nation's wealth that the rest of the US had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced. When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler then emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed. If the US learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that grew like a cancer in the 1930s, it should have been that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel abuses of political power – as Trump, Musk, Thiel, Karp and other oligarchs have put on full display – which in turn generate strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom. The danger inherent in Palantir's AI-powered super-database on all Americans is connected to the vast wealth and power of those associated with the corporation, and their apparent disdain for democratic institutions. Had you walked to the end of Trump's military-birthday parade and gazed above the president's reviewing stand, you'd have seen on a giant video board an advertisement for Palantir – one of the chief sponsors of the event. Tolkien's palantír fell under the control of Sauron. Thiel's Palantir is falling under the control of Trump. How this story ends is up to all of us. Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at
