Rising: August 1, 2025
Classified Russiagate Docs Drop ; Hillary Clinton, Open Society Name-Dropped | RISING
Niall Stanage and Amber Duke discuss the latest bombshell in the Russiagate scandal after Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) declassified an appendix to the Durham Report.
Kamala Harris Tells Colbert She's Taking A Break, Blasts Congress Yielding Power | RISING
Niall Stanage and Amber Duke discuss former Vice President Kamala Harris' new book detailing the approximately 100 days of her presidential campaign, and what's next for the former vice president.
Trump Greenlights Massive, $200M 'Top of the Line' Ballroom Addition to White House | RISING
Niall Stanage and Amber Duke discuss President Trump's plans to expand The White House with a 90,000 square-foot, $200M ballroom.
DOGE Alum Slams USAID On NYT Podcast, Reveals Future Of American Foreign Aid | RISING
Niall Stanage and Amber Duke discuss the future of American soft power after DOGE the shuttered USAID, and a former staffer laid out a new vision for foreign aid.
Bondi, DOJ Slap Judge Boasberg With Ethics Complaint; Claim 'Improper' Comments About Trump | RISING
Niall Stanage and Amber Duke discuss Attorney General Pam Bondi's ethics complaint against Judge James Boasberg, who ruled against the Trump Administration's deportations to El Salvador.
Dunkin Donuts Releases 'Genetics'-Themed Ad After Sydney Sweeney, American Eagle Outrage| RISING
Niall Stanage and Amber Duke discuss Dunkin Donuts' decision to release an ad that mentions actor Gavin Casalegno's genetics after the controversial Syndey Sweeney-American Eagle ad received blowback this week.
Bill Burr Torches CNN, Fox News, Calls Them A, 'Disease' | RISING
Niall Stanage and Amber Duke discuss Comedian Bill Burr's recent interview with Vulture, where he responds to criticism that he's, 'gone woke.'
Niall Stanage and Amber Duke discuss Trump reinstating the Presidential Fitness Test, A Curriculum That was Widely Dreaded by Students.
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Vox
39 minutes ago
- Vox
Some countries still want to save the world
is a fellow for Future Perfect , Vox's section on making the world a better place. She writes about global health, philanthropy, labor, and social movements. If the world has had enough of helping others, then somebody forgot to tell Spain. Yes, Spain. The same country that, a little more than a decade ago, desperately accepted billions in bailout money from its European neighbors to keep its economy afloat. That Spain is now doing something almost unthinkable. It's ramping up aid spending just as the United States notoriously retreats. And in the process, Spain is trying to remind the world why we give back in the first place. The crisis is steep. The pot of money going to global development is set to shrink by 17 percent, or $35 billion, in 2025, on top of a $21 billion drop the year before, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That's a $56 billion funding vacuum where global aid for mosquito nets, vaccine research, and food assistance used to be. And the declines are likely to become even steeper in the years ahead, as cuts in the US take full effect. Future Perfect Explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. It's far from enough to fill the foreign aid gap, however. And while the pain will fall primarily on impoverished recipient countries, foreign aid doesn't just help the countries that receive it. It helps everyone. Diseases and conflict don't recognize legal borders and aid helps keep these deadly problems at bay. Every $100 million spent on preventing tuberculosis, HIV, and malaria helps prevent about 2.2 million new infections total. And global cuts are already expected to exacerbate the spread of diseases; former USAID officials anticipate cuts from the US alone could cause 28,000 new cases of infectious diseases like Ebola and Marburg each year. 'Even if you're in this isolationist mindset, you can't actually isolate yourself from the rest of the world,' said Rachael Calleja, a research fellow at the Center for Global Development. The fact that some countries have managed to fight the impulse to isolate — convincing their citizens that problems abroad are interconnected with our problems at home — could help reshape the future of aid for the better. Their decisions point to the possibility of a new future for foreign aid that could be more collaborative and less paternalistic than before. Ready or not, the old club's grip on global influence is now breaking down. 'Nobody who works in development sat around saying, 'The system is great. We're awesome. Let's just spend more money to do more of the same,'' said Dean Karlan, who was, until recently, the chief economist at USAID. 'There is a blank slate. Let's put in place a better system.' Why are some countries bucking the trend? Spain, Ireland, Italy, and South Korea are all increasing aid — but most have a lot of room for growth. The United Nations set a lofty goal in the 1970s for wealthy countries to give away 0.7 percent of their gross national income (GNI) as development assistance. Half a century later, almost none do. That includes this year's overachievers. Ireland spent 0.57 percent of its GNI — $2.47 billion — on development aid last year. Spain spent 0.25 percent or $4.35 billion, and Italy, 0.28 percent or $6.67 billion. South Korea spent 0.21 percent or $3.94 billion. It's not a lot, especially compared to the $63.3 billion the US spent in 2024, although that only added up to 0.22 percent of its GNI. But these countries are moving forward at a time when everyone else seems to be moving backward. According to the global development consultancy SEEK Development's donor tracker, the US is now projected to spend just 0.13 percent of its GNI on overseas aid this year. There is a growing recognition that someone has to fill the gaps left by the US, but everybody balks at the price tag, Arturo Angulo Urarte, a Madrid-based development expert, said in Spanish. 'It's like, 'Yes, but gosh, and how much does that mean? Oh, it means money? Well, then no.'' Spain's aid increase, however, has been a long time coming. Spanish activists launched a kind of Occupy Wall Street in favor of overseas aid back in the 1990s. A group of global development workers and grassroots activists staged hunger strikes and protest encampments, chaining themselves to government buildings to demand that Spain give at least 0.7 percent of its GNI to aid. At the time, Spain was giving around 0.24 percent of its GNI to aid, but the protests helped propel the country to double its commitment to a high of nearly 0.5 percent in 2008. Then the 2008 economic turmoil left Spain once again with a wisp of an foreign aid budget. By the time its economy crawled closer to pre-crisis levels in 2015, its development spending had cratered to 0.12 percent of GNI. But the idea of Spain becoming a bigger player in global development never really left the public consciousness, remaining broadly popular even during the country's worst financial straits. In 2023 the country passed a law promising to rebuild its aid agency and bump up spending to 0.7 percent of GNI by 2030 — effectively tripling its current rate. Spain has since increased its aid budget to about 0.25 percent of its GNI, or $4.4 billion last year — roughly $490 million more than it spent the year prior at 0.24 percent of its GNI — and says it will continue to give more in the year ahead. That's more money for climate resilience projects in Morocco and Algeria, LGBTQ rights in Paraguay, and HPV vaccine campaigns across Latin America and the Caribbean. A mother living with HIV since 2017 visits Kuoyo Sub-county Hospital with her child to collect their medications, on April 24, 2025 in Kisumu, dismantling of USAID has destroyed longstanding and hard-won infrastructure for implementing aid programs, especially in critical areas like HIV prevention. There's little that anyone can do to bring that infrastructure back, but countries like Spain, Ireland, or South Korea have been able to uplift and increase funding to the initiatives most affected by the cuts, like Gavi, the international vaccine alliance, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Ireland also aims to increase its aid spending to 0.7 percent of GNI by 2030. It inched closer to that goal this year by boosting its development budget by about $40 million to $925 million. 'We wouldn't expect Ireland to be able to fill the USAID gap in any shape or form,' Jane-Ann McKenna, who heads Dóchas, an umbrella group for Irish development organizations, said. 'But that's where our positioning and our voice becomes more important.' That said, foreign aid has always been about more than just charity. It's a geopolitical tool that countries have used for decades to win friends and influence people. It's no coincidence that, according to a 2006 study, US aid increased about 59 percent to nations when they temporarily joined the UN Security Council. The birth of PEPFAR — the HIV/AIDS program that saves around a million lives per year, which makes it perhaps America's most effective ever form of foreign aid — helped boost public opinion of the US across sub-Saharan Africa. Much of Italy's recent aid budget has gone to its $6 billion Mattei Plan in Africa, which aims to collaboratively influence the continent's energy development and migration flows, but which some critics contend recreates old colonial patterns by relying too heavily on European priorities — not local expertise — to decide where the money ought to go and how its vision should take shape. But if you take countries like Ireland and Spain at their word, their approach to foreign aid is not just about soft power anymore. These countries also have something in common that can differentiate them from other larger donors: recent histories of underdevelopment. Some of the newcomers might have been aid recipients rather than donors just a few decades ago. South Korea received billions in foreign aid in the decades after the Korean War, which helped it grow to the point where it became the first former recipient to join OECD's forum for major aid providers in 2010. Spain's wealthier neighbors offered the country major financial support when it began integrating with Europe in the 1980s in the aftermath of the Franco dictatorship. That dynamic can make it easier, Calleja says, to empathize with others who need aid today. (Though let's not forget that Spain once colonized much of Latin America and the Caribbean — places that now receive the bulk of Spanish foreign aid — and therefore laid the groundwork for many patterns of exploitation and inequality there that its aid now seeks to resolve.) Ireland was never a colonizer, but was once colonized itself by Britain. That legacy, McKenna said, means that many Irish people are passionate about human rights abroad and highly supportive of overseas aid. 'We have the history of the famine and we've had conflict on the island and we've had to engage in a whole peace process ourselves,' McKenna explained. 'That's there in the background of all of our psyches.' As these smaller players like to say, it's about 'solidarity.' Spain's own development agency's four-year plan mentions the word solidarity 84 times. It explicitly calls for a move away from the old model, where wealthy nations dictated terms to grateful recipients, and toward a more equitable and collaborative model built on shared priorities and mutual respect. Crisis as catalyst? Of course, not everybody is buying it. Henry Morales is an economist and director of the Movimiento Tzuk Kim-Pop, a Guatemalan human rights group. He let out a little laugh when I asked him about Spain's solidarity plan. After all, he's seen foreign funders renege on their promises before. He's seen European powers pledge numerous times to do more to promote climate resilience in low-income countries before watching them give up when the politics become too difficult. Spain's plan for development stresses that it aims to approach its funding priorities — like combating climate change and promoting gender equality — from a place of consistency and genuine partnership, the kind that can't be abandoned on a whim when a new government takes power. Whether Spain's plan represents a form of global reparations or just colonialism with better PR remains to be seen, he said, but regardless, the old top-down model is clearly cracking. Countries who receive aid now want 'a voice and a vote, so that the decisions are no longer made by a private club of the big donors, the big traditional financiers,' he said. 'But by debates and global agreements that are much more transparent and much more democratic.' Fifty countries in the Global South now have their own agencies to exchange ideas, technical advice, and reciprocal funds for solving poverty, fighting climate change, and improving education. Ensuring that recipients have a big say in how aid gets around is not only good for building a better, more democratic system — it can also make it much more efficient. According to Vox's previous reporting in 2022, aid programs tend to work better when people from the countries they're targeting play a big role in directing how and where the money's used. Morales thinks that kind of collaboration is the real future of aid, which he prefers to see not as charity but as 'simply the fair distribution of wealth.' He's not the only one who thinks so. The director-general of the World Trade Organization, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, called foreign aid 'a thing of the past' at a meeting with African leaders in February. For his part, Karlan, the former USAID economist, doesn't think USAID will ever come back as the acronym or institution it once was, and although that's mostly a very bad thing, he sees a flicker of opportunity. Still, he isn't sure if he believes that a real change to the aid paradigm is afoot. 'Solidarity strikes me as a little bit of a softer way of saying soft power,' he mused, even if countries like Spain or Ireland aren't necessarily 'looking for flyover rights for the military.' What he is sure of is that the US is moving in a very different direction. If Spain's soft power is softening, then the United States' is calcifying into something more toxic, more transactional, and — as Karlan likes to add — less efficient than before. 'Imagine a marriage in which you never did something considerate for your partner just because you cared about them,' he said. Instead, everything is a negotiation. 'That isn't a healthy relationship. What we're risking is losing these long-term relationships, those long-term friendships.' By the time the US is ready to reopen the door on them, it may find a world that has already moved on.
Politico
39 minutes ago
- Politico
Judges are scrutinizing the latest mismatch between White House deportation rhetoric and DOJ's position in court
Homeland Security officials did not respond to requests for comment. A White House spokesperson, Abigail Jackson, did not directly respond to questions about the discrepancy between Miller's comments and the administration's position in court. 'The Trump Administration is committed to carrying out the largest mass deportation operation in history by enforcing federal immigration law and removing the countless violent, criminal illegal aliens that Joe Biden let flood into American communities,' Jackson said. A Justice Department spokesperson said there is no disconnect between the DOJ's court filings and the White House's public statements. 'The entire Trump Administration is united in fully enforcing our nation's immigration laws and the DOJ continues to play an important role in vigorously defending the President's deportation agenda in court,' the DOJ spokesperson said. Immigration advocates have pointed to reports about the daily 3,000-arrest quota as proof that the administration's most extreme tactics — ones they contend violate due process and other constitutional or legal principles — are the result of a single-minded drive to hit numerical targets. Judges have pointed to those reports as well, figuring them into the analysis of whether the administration's tactics are legal. The existence of the target has created particular complications in the case challenging the immigration sweeps in Los Angeles. The administration is fighting an order that a federal judge issued last month prohibiting ICE from conducting 'roving' immigration arrests based on broad criteria such as presence at a home improvement store or car wash. The claim of a quota featured prominently in oral arguments at the 9th Circuit last week on the administration's bid to overturn that order. And when the 9th Circuit ruled Friday night, leaving the order largely intact, the judges seemed to highlight the contradiction by quoting the entirety of DOJ's denial and then taking note of Miller's statement to Fox about a 'goal.' The three Democratic-appointed judges assigned to the case said the vague factors ICE appeared to be relying on 'impermissibly cast suspicion on large segments of the law-abiding population, including anyone in the District who appears Hispanic, speaks Spanish or English with an accent, wears work clothes, and stands near a carwash, in front of a Home Depot, or at a bus stop.' During the arguments Monday, the appeals judges assigned to the case pressed the Justice Department for an answer on whether ICE officers were under pressure to meet some numerical target that might encourage them to detain people based on grounds that fall short of the 'reasonable suspicion' the law required.
The Hill
2 hours ago
- The Hill
Experts, school leaders excited about Presidential Fitness Test but urge reforms
Health experts and school leaders are thrilled with President Trump's revival of the Presidential Fitness Test, but they are hoping for substantial revisions to program, which was first deployed nearly 60 years ago. Advocates say the test, which hasn't been used since 2012, will need a makeover to shift its focus away from competition and more toward sustaining healthy lifestyles for youth. The move comes amid Trump's increased interest in the sports world during his second term and is propelled by the 'Make America Healthy Again' movement led by the Department of Health and Human Services. Trump appointed professional athletes to the President's Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, which will be guiding and working on standards for the revived test. Experts are urging the council to ensure the goals of the test are updated as well. Kayce Solari Williams, past president of the American School Health Association and a professor at Purdue University, hopes the council will go from the old standard to really considering 'overall health and performance' and linking expectations to certain age groups. Williams stressed she has to see 'what the format' and 'requirements' will be as we 'know more about taking better care of the body and doing some prevention, along with strengthening and increasing endurance and flexibility' than we did in the past. The prior test had five core activities: a 1-mile run; pullups or pushups; situps; a shuttle run; and the sit-and-reach. It was originally created to compare with Europeans students in physical strength, and the top 15 percent of U.S. students who completed the test would get a presidential award. The physical exam was ended during the Obama administration over concerns it focused more on competition than healthy lifestyles. 'The good news is that we are going to be looking, I hope, at curriculum to enhance how much activity is happening at schools. As for the testing itself, I mean, it's just a number … I'm hoping that a team or expert is really going to look at: How do we help improve baseline data?' said Laura Richardson, a kinesiology professor at the University of Michigan. 'My hope is that the Presidential Fitness testing is going to evolve, maybe rewards to them, where it's going to incentivize students individually and not based on groups,' Richardson added. The test was previously taken by middle and high schoolers across the country, but only 10 to 17-year-olds were eligible for the presidential award. School leaders are ecstatic over the change, pointing to concerns about sedentary lifestyles among their students. Tori Snitker, principal of Rolla Junior High School in Missouri, said her district has worked to create more room for physical activity for all students, including those with disabilities. 'I am seeing students have a more sedentary lifestyle due to technology,' Snitker said. 'We have to focus on the physical health of our students.' Other principals are so concerned about this phenomenon they suggested school fitness standards tied to a national goal or even military service. 'I'm hoping for some standards that are maybe even aligned with what military service is required because I think as a country, we need to be able to be prepared, and our young people need to be able to have a standard of fitness,' said Pierre Orbe, principal of DeWitt Clinton High School in New York, adding there is a difference between students who are medically unable to do certain tasks versus those who are 'not fulfilling their current potential.' Orbe believes some national standard is needed because physical education teachers feel 'hamstrung' by an 'enabling society' where there are more notes 'to say that my child can't do things' than can. Concerns about reliance on technology among students have mounted as many states and districts have started to ban cell phones in schools. Steven Kelder, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas, Houston, and co-director of Coordinated Approach to Child Health, stressed that just one test will not help the situation, unlike a 'combination of programs' that focus on physical fitness for a variety of individuals, not just those good at particular sports. According to 2024 data from the Centers for Control and Disease Prevention (CDC), one in five U.S. children are affected by obesity. 'There is an obesity crisis in America. It's not getting a whole lot better, and now, over time last 25 years, it's resulting in a diabetes crisis amongst kids. And I think that partly was the result of video games and what I call indoor electronic entertainment,' Kelder said. Schools and states also worry about students' mental health with the increased use of technology, though the Trump administration recently cut $1 billion to mental health programs for schools due to concerns the money was going to diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Leaders also stress the need for federal resources, especially if the presidential council creates awards and inventive structures for students in the revived test. 'We would love to see some resources to come our way to help with the motivation, with the rewards,' said Dennis Willingham, superintendent at the Walker County Board of Education in Alabama. 'We do have creative people who work with our children.' 'We're thankful for that, and we know that they provide rewards and motivation on their own, but to have resources to come from the national level and to make this a big deal for everyone nationwide, it makes it even bigger and even more appealing to our children,' he added.
