Latest news with #TheMorningDispatch
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
An Antisemitic Attack in America's Capital
From the The Morning Dispatch on The Dispatch Happy Thursday! Big news: Kermit the Frog will be delivering the University of Maryland commencement address on Thursday. But if you thought the beloved muppet would be a good choice to dodge campus uproar, think again—students are already criticizing administrators for avoiding 'real issues.' A gunman shot and killed two Israeli Embassy staff who were leaving an event at the Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday night. The suspect—a 30-year-old from Chicago who later attempted to breach the museum—yelled 'free, free Palestine' following his arrest, Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela Smith said during a media briefing. 'Harming the Jewish community is crossing a red line,' Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon said Wednesday, calling the shooting a 'depraved act of anti-Semitic terrorism.' U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, meanwhile, said U.S. officials were 'actively investigating' the attack and vowed to bring the 'depraved perpetrator to justice.' The victims—a man and a woman—were planning to get engaged, the Israeli Embassy in Washington confirmed. President Donald Trump on Wednesday had a heated exchange with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa during his visit to the White House, accusing the country of conducting a 'genocide' against white Afrikaners. Trump dimmed the lights in the Oval Office and played a prepared montage of clips to justify his roundly debunked claims, which Ramaphosa—who called for a 'reset' between South Africa and the U.S. in his opening remarks— vehemently denied. In February, the White House suspended all aid to South Africa, citing the country's alleged discrimination against white farmers, and granted refugee status to Afrikaners 'escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination.' The U.S. accepted 59 Afrikaners last week. The Pentagon said on Wednesday that it had officially taken possession of a luxury jet from Qatar, which gave the $400 million aircraft to Trump as a gift. The Air Force said it would award a contract to modify the plane to serve as Air Force One, as White House officials seek to have the jet ready by the end of the year. But both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have expressed concerns about the ethics and safety of accepting the aircraft from Qatar. On Monday, Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, introduced a bill to ban the use of foreign planes as Air Force One, but the measure failed to pass on Wednesday. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Wednesday that the country will not stop enriching uranium, 'with or without an agreement,' as nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran continue. The remarks followed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's Tuesday statement casting doubt on the likelihood of negotiations between the two countries ending in a deal. 'Try not to talk nonsense,' the ayatollah said, addressing American negotiators. U.S. special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff said Sunday that Iranian uranium enrichment is a 'red line' for Washington, though American officials—including Witkoff himself—have wavered on that point in the past. Israel is planning possible military strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities, multiple outlets reported this week. U.S. officials leaked information to CNN on Tuesday stating that Israel was readying strikes despite the Trump administration's pursuit of a deal with Iran, and on Wednesday, Israeli sources told Axios—confirming initial reports—that Israel was preparing to attack if the talks between the U.S. and Iran break down, which they believe is now more likely. In April, Trump said that the U.S. would be a 'leader' in attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities if a deal was not reached. The European Union and the United Kingdom imposed new sanctions on Russia on Tuesday, without the United States. The new penalties target Russia's 'shadow fleet,' which includes more than 200 vessels used to transport and sell Russian oil internationally. The EU is already discussing additional sanctions that would target the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, Russia's financial sector, and additional ships in the shadow fleet. The increased pressure on Russia comes after President Trump backed away from his previous demand that Russia declare an immediate, 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine following a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, instead declaring that Russia and Ukraine would 'immediately start negotiations toward a ceasefire.' House Republican leadership released a new version of its tax cut and spending bill on Wednesday night, including last-minute changes. In its new form, the bill moves up the enforcement of new Medicaid work requirements from 2029 to December 2026, ends certain clean energy tax credits in 2028 instead of 2031, and increases the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap from $30,000 to $40,000 for people making less than $500,000 a year. The amended version is expected to go to the floor on Thursday. Rep. Gerald Connolly of Virginia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, died Wednesday at the age of 75. A nine-term congressman, Connolly in April announced his decision not to seek reelection in 2026 after a battle with esophageal cancer. 'We were fortunate to share Gerry with Northern Virginia for nearly 40 years because that was his joy, his purpose, and his passion,' his family said in a statement. Two young aides from the Israeli Embassy were leaving the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., when they were ambushed by a gunman and fatally shot at close range just after 9 p.m. Wednesday. The suspect, a 30-year-old from Chicago, yelled 'free, free Palestine' after being detained as he attempted to breach the museum. His victims were later identified as Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, a young couple who planned to get engaged in Jerusalem next week. Details of the shocking attack are still emerging. But it comes amid a rising tide of antisemitism in the 19 months since Hamas' October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel, in which terrorists killed more than 1,200 people and abducted 251 others into the Gaza Strip. Israeli and Jewish communities across the West are now bracing for the possibility of further violence, as they continue to stare down the threat of both state-sponsored attacks and homegrown extremism. 'My primary concern — one that is likely shared by law enforcement agencies — is that this heinous act of murder in DC may catalyze additional terrorist attacks targeting Jews,' Foundation for Defense of Democracies analyst Joe Truzman said following the attack. Wednesday's shooting appeared to target an event for young Jewish diplomats hosted by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), law enforcement officials said. 'Prior to the shooting, the suspect was observed pacing back and forth outside of the museum. He approached a group of four people, produced a handgun, and opened fire,' Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela Smith told reporters Wednesday night. 'After the shooting, the suspect then entered the museum and was detained by event security. Once in handcuffs, the suspect identified where he discarded the weapon—and that weapon has been recovered—and he implied that he committed the offense. The suspect chanted 'free, free Palestine' while in custody.' U.S. officials promptly vowed to investigate the shooting and hold the attacker to account. 'We are actively investigating and working to get more information to share,' U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Wednesday. 'We will bring this depraved perpetrator to justice.' FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino said authorities were reviewing evidence but added that 'early indicators' pointed toward 'an act of targeted violence.' In a post on Truth Social, President Donald Trump decried the attack as 'based obviously' on antisemitism. 'Hatred and Radicalism have no place in the USA.' Meanwhile, Tal Naim Cohen, the spokeswoman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said Wednesday that Israel has 'full faith in law enforcement authorities on both the local and federal levels to apprehend the shooter and protect Israel's representatives and Jewish communities throughout the United States.' But the attack followed months of efforts by Jewish and Israeli institutions and communities across the West to bolster their own security—and in some cases conceal their identities—in the absence of a robust governmental response to growing antisemitism. According to an April report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a non-profit group that has tracked antisemitic incidents in the U.S. for 46 years, the number of such incidents reached a record high last year. The organization documented 9,354 examples of anti-Jewish harassment, vandalism, and assault throughout 2024, a 344 percent increase over the past five years and an 893 percent increase over the last decade. The driver, accounting for more than half of the incidents, was ballooning anti-Israel sentiment. 'Out of over 5,000 anti-Israel rallies tracked by ADL in 2024, 2,596 involved antisemitic messaging in the form of signs, chants or speeches,' the report observed. In cities and on college campuses across the country, advocacy on behalf of Palestinians often veered into open calls for violence against Jews and Israelis. One popular chant, 'globalize the intifada,' refers to a series of Palestinian uprisings in the late 1980s and early 2000s, which together left more than 1,200 Israelis—most of them civilians—dead. Another, 'from the river to the sea,' calls for the erasure of the Jewish state. Meanwhile, online antisemitism content continues to surge. A January report by the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel found a 300 percent increase in anti-Jewish posts worldwide last year, with instances of Holocaust denial making up more than 21 percent of the recorded content. The internet has also provided a platform for misinformation and disinformation about Israel to spread unchecked. 'Online spaces are a perfect breeding ground for the dissemination of very, very bad actors, and antisemitism is what unites them,' Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Israel's special envoy for combating antisemitism, told TMD. 'What happens online does not remain online.' And indeed, the incitement has real-world consequences. In the last 19 months a series of arson attacks and vandalism have targeted synagogues, Jewish-owned businesses, and Jewish homes across the U.S. and Europe. Last month, a 38-year-old man set fire to the residence of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro hours after the Democratic governor, a practicing Jew, had gathered for Passover with his family. Speaking to a 911 dispatcher, the arsonist said Shapiro 'needs to know that he will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people,' adding 'he needs to stop having my friends killed.' Last year, 77 percent of Jewish Americans polled said they felt less safe here in the U.S. in the aftermath of Hamas' October 7 attacks, the American Jewish Committee reported in February. More than half said they'd changed their behavior—by avoiding wearing things that identify them as Jewish; avoiding posting content online that identifies them as Jewish; and avoiding certain events, places, or situations—out of fear of antisemitism. As documented by a recent Harvard University-commissioned report, for example, campus protests caused some Jewish students at the Ivy League to hide their backgrounds. Since October 2023, there have been a series of thwarted attacks and close calls across the country. In January, Florida police arrested an armed man who they said had planned an attack at the office of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. In the same month, the FBI detained an Islamic State supporter allegedly planning a mass casualty terrorist attack on the Israeli consulate in New York City. The incidents have also prompted Jewish communities to take their safety into their own hands. Across North America and Europe, synagogues, schools, and community centers have invested heavily in private security since October 7. Following Wednesday's shooting, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to boost security for Israeli embassies worldwide. And Wednesday wasn't the first time Israeli diplomats have been targeted. Just this month, British authorities arrested four Iranian men accused of plotting a terrorist attack on the Israeli Embassy in London. Iran and its proxies have long sought to target Israelis and Jews in diaspora in what some have dubbed Israel's 'eighth front' in its ongoing war. (The others are Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Iran itself, all of which have launched direct attacks on the Jewish State at some point in the last 19 months.) Between homegrown radicalism and state-sponsored violence, 'Jewish communities, Israelis, Zionists around the world are not only alarmed but alarmed for good reason,' Cotler-Wunsh said. October 7 has unleashed a 'tsunami of antisemitism' around the world, she added, 'with a complete failure across institutions, governments, organizations, cities, law enforcement mechanisms to comprehensively identify and combat all strains of this lethal, ever-mutating hate.' David M. Drucker In August 2009, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce attacked President Barack Obama's budding health care overhaul, declaring in a scathing television advertisement the legislation would raise taxes, balloon the deficit, and socialize medicine. Motivating the business lobbying group's aggressive opposition were concerns the eventual Affordable Care Act would stifle economic growth and threaten its members' profitability. Nearly 16 years later, the chamber is again at odds with a president and his prized agenda. But unlike the Obamacare hypothetical, Donald Trump's unilateral implementation of tariffs on foreign imports is doing demonstrable damage to economic growth and business profitability. Yet rather than publicly target the president's trade policies, the group is relying on respectful lobbying to obtain relief for its members. Economics May 21, 2025 Scott Lincicome In some industries, artificial intelligence is creating more jobs than it's killing Politics May 21, 2025 Nick Catoggio Why Trump can't get Putin to bend. Politics May 21, 2025 Jonah Goldberg Figuratively, of course. Politics May 22, 2025 Alex Demas Ethics advisers warn against an unprecedented conflict of interest. Policy May 22, 2025 Grayson Logue Mixed messages about forgiveness and repayments have led to a new wave of delinquent borrowers. Podcast May 22, 2025 Jonah Goldberg and Sarah Isgur I don't wanna play this game anymore! Podcast May 22, 2025 Sarah Isgur and David French Forgive us Father Originalism, for we have sinned. In case you haven't heard, the action horror movie Sinners, directed by Ryan Coogler, is a bona fide box office hit. Writing for Bloomberg, Jason Bailey explores why an exciting, original film was so successful—and why it might represent a turning point for the film industry. 'It's staying in theaters and remains in the top five because people are seeing it repeatedly and telling their friends to watch it. It's hard to overstate how much this is not par for the course in our age of seemingly disposable entertainment (or, as some insist on calling it, 'content'),' Bailey wrote. 'Just as important as the word-of-mouth advertising — and perhaps even an extension of it — was Coogler's savvy online campaign explaining the picture's various exhibition formats (and, consequently, why filmgoers should prioritize seeing it in theaters). This approach is not unprecedented. The most recent efforts from Coogler's contemporaries, Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino, follow a similar filmmaker-forward marketing pattern. Emphasis has been placed on their reputations for quality, their insistence on shooting film versus digital and their pronounced preference for the theatrical viewing experience. In other words, what we're seeing with these success stories are cases of the auteur as the marketable brand instead of a specific genre or IP.' The Hill: Trump Jr. On Possible White House Bid: 'That Calling Is There' Associated Press: New North Korea Warship Is Damaged at Its Launch Ceremony Attended by Kim Jong Un NBC News: Trump Posts Altered Video of Himself Hitting Bruce Springsteen With a Golf Ball in Ongoing Feud Critically acclaimed pop artist Lorde—best known for her 2013 LP Pure Heroine—is releasing her first new album in four years next month. Here's the first single off her upcoming album. Have you personally seen evidence of increased antisemitism?
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Biden's Decline and the Democratic Fallout
From the The Morning Dispatch on The Dispatch Happy Wednesday! A former social worker is currently on an 'I Will Listen' tour of Canada, setting up a table and two chairs in cities and towns across the country to lend strangers a sympathetic ear for free. Finally, someone who will listen to Declan's ruminations on the Cubs. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday recalled to Israel the team that had been in Doha, Qatar, to negotiate a ceasefire and hostage deal with Hamas. The decision came amid what Qatar's prime minister described as 'fundamental differences' between the two sides, as the Israeli military continues airstrikes on terrorist targets and expands its ground operations in Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel gave the United Nations permission to transport 93 aid trucks into the Strip on Tuesday, amid mounting international pressure to ramp up the delivery of food and medical supplies to the besieged enclave. On Monday, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France announced plans to undertake 'concrete actions' against Israel, including the implementation of sanctions, should it continue the renewed offensive. Lawyers for two immigrants from Burma and Vietnam said Tuesday that the Trump administration had deported their clients to South Sudan in defiance of a federal court order. The lawyers made the allegations in an emergency appeal to U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, who on May 7 issued an order barring the administration from deporting immigrants to any country where they are not citizens without due process. Following an emergency hearing on Tuesday, Murphy ruled that the government must 'maintain custody and control' of deportees to South Sudan and other third countries to ensure the 'practical feasibility of return' in the event the court deems the removals unlawful, adding that he expects the immigrants to be 'treated humanely.' A group of 68 illegal immigrants from Honduras and Colombia arrived in their home countries on Monday, the first wave of participants to leave the U.S. under the Trump administration's 'self-deportation' policy. In exchange for self-registering for removal via U.S. Customs and Border Protection's CBP One app, the migrants were given a free flight, a $1,000 debit card, and the opportunity to apply to legally immigrate to the U.S. at a future point. 'If you are here illegally, use the CBP Home App to take control of your departure and receive financial support to return home,' Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said in a press release. A panel of the federal 4th Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday denied the Trump administration's request that an order requiring it to seek the return of a Venezuelan man deported to an El Salvadoran prison be blocked. The original order—from U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher, a Trump appointee—required the administration to facilitate the return of Daniel Lozano-Camargo, ruling that his deportation under the Alien Enemies Act violated a 2024 legal settlement concerning asylum seekers who had entered the U.S. as minors. 'The Government cannot facilitate Cristian's return telepathically — it must express in words to the government of El Salvador that Cristian be released for transport back to the United States,' Judge DeAndrea Benjamin wrote for the court's 2-1 majority, using a pseudonym to refer to Lozano-Camargo. President Donald Trump visited the Capitol on Tuesday in an effort to unite Republicans behind a proposed tax cut and spending bill. He urged swing-district moderates to drop demands to raise the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap and called on conservatives to retreat from their insistence that the bill cut more money from Medicaid than stipulated in its current draft. After a series of closed-door meetings, Trump announced that House Republicans were unified behind the budget plan. However, leaders from both the moderate and conservative factions indicated that the president's advocacy had not yet persuaded them to vote for the bill, which can afford to lose only three Republican votes amid Democratic opposition. Democratic Rep. LaMonica McIver of New Jersey is being charged with assaulting federal agents, the Justice Department announced Monday. McIver, along with Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and fellow Democratic Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman and Rob Menendez, had been visiting a newly opened immigration detention center in Newark when she became involved in an altercation between federal law enforcement agents and protesters. Video released by both sides shows McIver making contact with an officer, possibly deliberately. McIver denounced the charges, calling them an act of 'political intimidation.' The Food and Drug Administration will no longer routinely approve COVID-19 booster vaccinations for healthy individuals under the age of 65, top officials said Tuesday. In an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and top vaccine official Vinay Prasad announced that large-scale randomized control trials with a placebo population, rather than smaller and much faster trials that test for safety and efficacy in creating COVID antibodies, would potentially be required before the approval of yearly booster shots for healthy non-elderly adults. They claimed that a streamlined process would still exist for approving vaccine boosters for those over the age of 65, children, and younger adults with at least one underlying health condition. Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat from Maine, on Tuesday announced plans to run for reelection to the House in 2026. The congressman, who represents Maine's battleground 2nd Congressional District, had been considered a possible contender for either of Maine's statewide races in 2026: an open governor's race or as the Democratic challenger to Republican Sen. Susan Collins. 'I am going to do what it takes to make sure no one like Paul LePage blusters his way into Congress,' he said in a statement announcing the decision, referring to the former governor of Maine from 2011 to 2019, who announced he would run again for Golden's seat earlier this month. Over the weekend, former President Joe Biden's personal office announced that the 82-year-old was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer on Friday. 'Cancer touches us all,' Biden said on X. 'Like so many of you, Jill and I have learned that we are strongest in the broken places. Thank you for lifting us up with love and support.' The difficult news arrived as Biden's health was already in the spotlight. Ahead of Tuesday release of Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, the highly anticipated book by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson, excerpts published in major outlets provided alarming accounts of Biden's cognitive decline while in office—and his inner circle's attempts to conceal it ahead of and during the 2024 election. Those excerpts offered a behind-the-scenes look at Democratic efforts to shield a physically feeble Biden, who forgot longtime acquaintances and appeared 'catatonic' at fundraisers, from public view. And on Friday, Axios released the full audio of Biden's October 2023 interviews with special counsel Robert Hur, confirming the frequent memory lapses, pauses, and confusion that Hur referenced in his 2024 report on the then-president's handling of classified documents. The rapid succession of stories about Biden's health not only cast doubt on his ability to execute the duties of the presidency but also raised serious questions about the White House's transparency about the former president's diminishing health. As concerns mounted last week, a Biden spokesperson announced Tuesday—the same day a roughly 5,000-word excerpt from Original Sin ran in The New Yorker—that doctors had found a small nodule on the former president's prostate during a routine physical. By Sunday, Biden's personal office shared the more sobering news: Biden had been diagnosed with a form of Stage 4 prostate cancer that had already spread to his bones. It received a Gleason Score of 9 out of 10, indicating a high likelihood that the cancer will advance and metastasize further. According to his office, Biden and his family are reviewing treatment options for the cancer, which 'appears to be hormone-sensitive,' allowing for 'effective management.' Most prostate cancers progress slowly, allowing them to generally be caught early and treated. The five-year survival rate is 97 percent, but after the cancer has spread to other parts of the body, that rate drops to 37 percent. Biden's seemingly late diagnosis has raised concerns about how long the cancer went either undetected or unannounced. 'Very few people get diagnosed this advanced,' Dr. Zeke Emanuel, an oncologist and former member of Biden's COVID-19 advisory board, told MSNBC's Morning Joe. 'He's had this for many years, maybe even a decade.' But there may be standard medical explanations for the late diagnosis. A Biden spokesperson said Tuesday that the former president had not undergone a protein-specific antigen (PSA) screening for prostate cancer since 2014. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended in 2018 that PSA testing not be conducted after age 70, given that some men would be treated for cancer that would have never caused symptoms in their lifetimes. Democrats have pointed to this possibility: 'There is a fair amount of literature indicating that older men should not be tested,' Rep. Ron Wyden told TMD. 'So I just urge people to not jump to any conclusions.' But some medical experts have expressed concerns that a sitting president would not have received more thorough exams. 'It is true that a lot of people recommend not doing a prostate-specific antigen after 70, but President Biden has been in public life a very long time. He was vice president and had a lot of exams under 70. So it's a little surprising that they didn't do it, and maybe President Biden decided he didn't want the test,' Emanuel said. Dr. Chris George, medical director of the cancer program at Northwestern Health Network, told Reuters that it was 'hard' to believe that Biden's blood tests in the last year had been normal. The scrutiny around the cancer diagnosis coincided with revelations in Original Sin about the cover-up of Biden's cognitive decline. The titular 'sin'—a phrase Democratic insiders themselves coined—refers to Biden's decision to run for reelection in 2024, a choice that surprised many in the party and sparked efforts by Biden's inner circle to hide his troubling mental state. 'Most of us didn't think he was going to run again,' Jeffrey Forbes, a Democratic lobbyist, told TMD. 'No one could believe it at first. I was like, 'We're dead. We're going to get demolished.'' The anecdotes in Original Sin are startling. In one, Biden failed to recognize George Clooney at a 2024 fundraising event, despite knowing the actor for decades. After Biden's disastrous presidential debate against Donald Trump in June later that year, when Clooney subsequently decided to pen his op-ed in the New York Times calling for Biden to drop out of the race, Democratic operatives close to the president tried to shut down the piece. 'Democrats deceived the country about Biden's abilities and, Clooney said, 'that's how Trump won,'' Tapper and Thompson wrote. And the deception was blatant, as own Steve Hayes wrote in a review of the book on the site today: Top Biden advisers insisted to reporters that the president was fine—as sharp as ever, in command of facts, energetic in meetings, perfectly capable not only of running for reelection but serving another four years. The public gaffes were anomalous, they insisted, indicative of nothing more than the occasional brain fart, and we all have those, right? His literal missteps? Okay, he's getting a little older and he has arthritis in his feet, they would concede, but none of this has any effect on his ability to do the job. If a reporter was imprudent enough to ask about Biden's increasing number of blunders, they'd be quietly threatened with revoked access to White House sources and sometimes attacked in public. Elsewhere in Original Sin, the authors covered deliberations among top aides—who publicly rebuffed concerns about the president's deteriorating health—on whether Biden would need a wheelchair if reelected. 'We were repeatedly lied to by people in the White House who were always saying, 'He's fine, he's fine, he's fine,'' Tapper said in a Tuesday interview with CBS. The campaign even recruited legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg to minimize Biden's struggles in videos. The Jurassic Park director brought in different lighting and special microphones for the president, while staffers used slow-motion videos of Biden to hide how slowly he walked. Tapper and Thompson report that first lady Jill Biden, Hunter Biden, and an inner circle nicknamed 'the Politburo,' including senior advisers Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, circled the wagon to protect Biden. According to the book, those close to the former president convinced themselves that he was the right person to beat Trump—after all, he had done it once before. Biden, for his part, still seems to think he could have prevented Trump's ascendency. In an interview with The View in early May, he said he 'wasn't surprised' that former Vice President Kamala Harris lost the election, saying sexist and racist attacks prevented her from winning. But he doesn't believe his delayed decision to drop out of the running doomed her odds. Speaking to BBC this month, Biden said he didn't think leaving the race earlier 'would have mattered.' But many in the Democratic Party, particularly those close to Harris, see Biden's decision to run again as the reason Trump is now in office. 'It's all Biden,' David Plouffe, who worked on Harris' campaign, told Tapper and Thompson. 'He totally f—ked us.' Other Democrats are beginning to come to similar conclusions. When asked about whether the Democratic Party would have been better off without Biden as the nominee, Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said, 'Maybe, you know, right now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think most people would agree that is the case.' Rep. Ro Khanna was even more straightforward in an interview with ABC last week: 'It's painfully obvious President Biden should not have run,' he said. And elected officials aren't the only ones speaking out. Democratic strategists are also disavowing Biden, with Jon Favreau, a former Obama speechwriter and host of the podcast Pod Save America, saying that 'every Democratic politician' needs to 'rip the f—ing Band-Aid off' and admit that Biden should not have run. 'I think everyone is like, 'We all f—king knew, and we all got rolled.' It was the power of the people around him that rolled us,' a Democratic operative told TMD. 'With no data at all—they convinced themselves that he was the only one who could beat Trump.' But more than just regretting choosing Biden as their nominee, some Democrats seem to be tacitly acknowledging their silence around Biden's declining mental acuity in light of the book and Hur audio. When asked whether Biden had suffered cognitive decline, Sen. Chris Murphy told Politico, 'There's no doubt about it'—despite standing by Biden after his poor debate performance in 2024. Other Democrats seem to concur. 'I do think that the advisers and people close to Joe Biden owe an explanation,' Khanna said, citing the 'Zoom calls' in which Biden staffers promised the former president was capable. 'I do, again, believe that some of us should have pushed back more,' Khanna added. Tommy Vietor, a co-host of Pod Save America and a former Obama spokesman, admitted on X that his and others' attacks on Hur 'weren't totally fair.' It isn't yet clear what long-term effects Democrats' efforts to distance themselves from Biden might have on the party. 'I think the scrutiny of the candidates in '28 is where you'll see the fallout,' Forbes said. 'I don't know that there's an electoral fallout, I don't know that there's a fallout with leadership. … But I do think that the scrutiny of the backgrounds of the candidates in '28 is going to be a big piece of it.' For governors with their eyes on 2028, explanations for the revelations about the former president's health varied. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker denied ever seeing cognitive decline in Biden, while Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has avoided discussing the topic altogether. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, on the other hand, said that he raised concerns with Biden privately after the debate. Time will tell whether accusations of a cover-up will sink Democratic candidates. 'If that's the case,' the Democratic operative said, 'then we have no one that can run.' In the meantime, some Democrats have turned to deflection. When asked whether Democrats should have been more open about Biden's age in 2024, Sen. John Hickenlooper declined to answer, citing Biden's cancer diagnosis. 'There's no point in asking that question,' he told TMD. 'You're going too far.' House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries toed a similar line on Monday when questioned by our own Charles Hilu, criticizing Republicans for 'peddling conspiracy theories' as Biden faces a health crisis. Forbes, the Democratic lobbyist, suggests that party leaders and officials might be singing a different tune privately. 'I think they feel like dog s—t because they kept it quiet when they felt that way last year,' he said. 'People knew, everyone just couldn't say it. Also, you get to a point where, 'If I say it, is it worth it? What do I get from that?'' Steve Hayes President Joe Biden's staff imposed tight limits on his daily schedule, often restricting his meetings and activities to midday hours when Biden was thought to be at his best. As his gait became more unsteady, and after some embarrassing falls, his team sought to shorten distances he'd walk and recommended changes to his footwear that would provide the president with additional stability. Biden's fundraisers were reprogrammed with strict limits on the number of questions Biden took from his audiences and little time for spontaneous interaction with those funding his reelection. All the while, top Biden advisers insisted to reporters that the president was fine—as sharp as ever, in command of facts, energetic in meetings, perfectly capable not only of running for reelection but serving another four years. Politics May 20, 2025 Nick Catoggio How will conspiracy theorists cope with a government they trust? Politics May 21, 2025 Kevin D. Williamson Donald Trump runs his mouth, not the economy. Politics May 21, 2025 Jonah Goldberg History shows presidents have a knack for hiding their health problems. Policy May 21, 2025 Bill Drexel Will Washington be able to successfully navigate India's evolving outlook? Podcast May 21, 2025 Jonah Goldberg Nuts and borscht. Some people view the proliferation of artificial intelligence as a doomsday event for education. But in Miami, the nation's third-largest public school district, educators are embracing the new technology, Natasha Singer reported for the New York Times. 'Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation's third-largest school district, is at the forefront of a fast-moving national experiment to embed generative A.I. technologies into teaching and learning. Over the last year, the district has trained more than 1,000 educators on new AI tools and is now introducing Google chatbots for more than 105,000 high schoolers — the largest U.S. school district deployment of its kind to date. It is a sharp turnabout from two years ago, when districts like Miami blocked A.I. chatbots over fears of mass cheating and misinformation,' she wrote. 'If the classroom A.I. crusade succeeds, it could remake teaching and learning, in part by casting chatbots as the intermediaries that students turn to first for tutoring and feedback—before teachers see their work. The A.I. gambit could also end up eroding important skills like critical thinking, researchers say, or lead students to over-rely on chatbots.' The New York Times: Noem Incorrectly Defines Habeas Corpus as the President's Right to Deport People Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, bungled answers on Tuesday about habeas corpus, incorrectly asserting that the legal right of people to challenge their detention by the government was actually the president's 'constitutional right' to deport people. … At a Senate hearing, Senator Maggie Hassan, [a] Democrat of New Hampshire, asked Ms. Noem about the issue. 'Secretary Noem,' she asked, 'what is habeas corpus?' 'Well,' Ms. Noem said, 'habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their right to—' 'No,' Ms. Hassan interjected. 'Let me stop you, ma'am. Excuse me, that's incorrect.' Politico: Musk to Step Back From Political Spending: 'I Think I've Done Enough.' George Wendt, the award-winning actor best known for playing Norm Peterson on Cheers, died Tuesday at the age of 73. Here's a compilation of every time he entered the Bull & Finch Pub. NOOORM!! Do you think Democrats' delayed reckoning with Biden's apparent decline could have consequences at the ballot box?
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
A Pro-West Reformer Wins in Romania
From the The Morning Dispatch on The Dispatch Happy Tuesday! Attention prospective homebuyers: The Chicago childhood home of Robert Prevost, who now goes by Pope Leo XIV, will be sold at auction in June. We can't promise you'll get a good price-per-square-foot for the new pontiff's former digs, but the dinner party lore would be heavenly. President Donald Trump held a two-hour phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, after which Trump said on social media that Russia and Ukraine would 'immediately start negotiations toward a Ceasefire.' Putin confirmed after the phone call that the Kremlin 'will propose and is ready to work with' Ukraine to reach a 'possible future peace accord.' After also conferring with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump said that both sides would negotiate conditions for such a deal. The Vatican offered to host the talks, the president added. It remains unclear when the negotiations would take place, after Putin opted to skip a scheduled face-to-face meeting with Zelensky in Istanbul last week. Israel announced Monday that five United Nations trucks carrying humanitarian aid had entered the Gaza Strip from Israel's Kerem Shalom border crossing, bringing Palestinian civilians flour, baby food, medical supplies, and fuel supplies. Israel 'will continue to facilitate humanitarian assistance in the Gaza Strip,' Israeli officials said in a statement, 'while making every effort to ensure that the aid does not reach Hamas.' Israel had blocked the Gaza Strip from receiving aid deliveries since early March, citing the vast amounts of supplies seized by Hamas. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the trucks will provide a 'minimal, basic bridge' to bring critical resources into Gaza temporarily until Israeli-constructed aid distribution centers are completed. The European Union and United Kingdom agreed to a new trade deal on Monday that establishes a defensive security pact and eliminates trade restrictions erected in the aftermath of Brexit, though the full terms have yet to be disclosed. Reported details of the deal include expedited border checks on certain imports, including food; reduced tariffs on imports of British steel; providing European fishing boats access to British waters through 2038; and allowing British travelers access to electronic gates when crossing European borders. Additionally, the EU and U.K. will coordinate on issuing economic sanctions and collaborate in military development projects. The U.K. and Iran summoned each other's diplomatic envoys on Monday, two days after three Iranian nationals—charged with spying in the U.K. on behalf of Tehran—appeared before a London court. British prosecutors allege that the trio conducted surveillance on journalists associated with Iran International, a U.K.-based Persian news outlet often critical of the Islamic Republic. U.K. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said on Monday that the government will draft new laws to 'restrict the activity and operations of foreign state-backed' groups in the U.K., including Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Supreme Court on Monday paused a federal district judge's order that had barred the Trump administration from immediately canceling the temporary protected status (TPS) designation for more than 300,000 Venezuelans that allowed them to legally reside in the United States. In February, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ordered that TPS status be revoked for Venezuelan nationals—a move U.S. District Judge Edward Chen blocked, citing its 'unprecedented' nature. The Trump administration appealed the decision, but a federal appeals court left Chen's ruling in place until it ruled on the appeal. The Supreme Court, in a one-page unsigned order, reversed that decision on Monday, allowing the Trump administration to move forward with removing TPS status from Venezuelan nationals until the federal appeals court rules on the administration's appeal. The House Budget Committee late on Sunday night advanced the GOP's reconciliation bill in a 17-16 vote after four House Republicans—who voted against advancing the bill on Friday—switched their votes to 'present.' Speaker Mike Johnson will work this week to win over the support of GOP holdouts as he seeks to pass the bill before the chamber's Memorial Day recess. Republican opponents of the bill have cited reasons from front-loaded spending provisions to delayed work requirements for Medicaid recipients. Other sticking points include the potential elimination of tax credits created in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap. President Trump on Monday signed into law a bipartisan bill, the 'Take it Down Act,' which makes it a federal crime to disseminate sexually explicit imagery, including AI deepfakes, without the subject's consent. The statute requires that social media companies take down such explicit content within 48 hours of receiving a removal request from a victim, and instills criminal penalties on both companies that fail to abide by the law and individuals who share the content without consent. The bill—publicly championed by first lady Melania Trump—passed the Senate in February unanimously unanimously and was approved in a 409-2 House vote in late April. The Federal Trade Commission is tasked with enforcing the law. Following the shocking annulment of Romania's presidential election last year amid allegations of Russian interference, the eastern European nation and NATO ally undertook a do-over on Sunday. The result was another upset, but this time, it will count. As Romanians went to the polls this weekend, they faced the same ideological choice as before: a nationalist, conservative demagogue who's a fierce critic of the European Union or a pro-West reformer who supports Ukraine. This time, instead of disqualified far-right candidate Cǎlin Georgescu being on the ballot, they were choosing between Georgescu ally George Simion, a nationalist member of parliament, and Nicușor Dan, the independent mayor of Bucharest. Simion led by double digits after the first round of voting on May 4, but as the results came in for Sunday night's runoff, Dan was the clear winner, finishing with 54 percent of the vote. Europeans opposed to the rise of the populist right in their countries breathed a sigh of relief. But the election was also yet another example of how, across the developed world, political outsiders continue to perform better than establishment candidates. Although Dan and Simion ran on starkly different platforms, they shared one important similarity: Both were relative political outsiders, allowing them to distance themselves from the corrupt establishment that has long dominated Romanian politics. 'The people are mad at the establishment and the establishment parties,' Iulia Joja, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and former Romanian presidential adviser, told TMD. 'Part of the reason why people are voting for the far right is not necessarily because they're far right, but because they are the most credible opposition party.' But Dan was ultimately able to present his own convincing alternative to the establishment.'It's your victory!' Dan told supporters in Romania's capital of Bucharest on Sunday night as they chanted his name and waved EU flags. For many Romanians, the mayor represented a refreshing change from the status quo. He wasn't associated with either of the two main parties, the Social Democrats and the National Liberals. Instead, the former mathematician—a two-time gold medalist at the International Math Olympiad, no less—rose to political fame after founding an architectural preservation group, campaigning against corruption in Bucharest, and becoming the city's first independent mayor in 2020. He announced his intention to campaign for the presidency as an independent in December, following the annulment of the previous presidential election, and dislodged the Save Romania Union candidate, Elena Lasconi, as the torch bearer for pro-EU Romanians. Dan's campaign also drew on many of the same themes as previous opponents of the nationalist right. 'Our task is to convince Romanians that Romania needs to take a pro-Western direction,' he said earlier this month, after finishing with 21 percent of the vote to Simion's 40.6 percent in the first round of the presidential election. But Dan managed to present pro-Western policies as part of a reforming, rather than an establishment, message. He campaigned under the slogan 'Honest Romania,' arguing that the previous 'political era and way of doing politics' was over. Dan's personality and lifestyle helped reinforce his image as a fresh face in a tired political system: He lives with his partner and two children in a small rented apartment in a modest Bucharest neighborhood and lacks much of the polish and charisma of more professional politicians. He had also gained credibility as a defender of the average Romanian through his long track record of opposing high-rise housing projects, linked to corruption and wealthy developers, in middle-class Bucharest neighborhoods. Dan's campaign married that biography to a clear argument that a vote for Simion would be a vote against Europe, the West, and economic development. The country was faced with two 'opposed options,' he declared. 'A pro-Western direction versus an anti-Western direction; a path of economic freedom and prosperity versus economic isolationism; and a vote between a culture of wisdom and dialogue versus a culture of hatred promoted by the isolationist candidate.' The 38-year-old Simion also ran against the Romanian political establishment, but with a markedly different tone than the mild-mannered Dan. The fourth-place finisher in the 2024 presidential election, Simion led protests against the annulment of that election's results. But when it became apparent that Georgescu would not be running again, Simion became the chosen candidate of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians with Georgescu's blessing. Simion campaigned as a firebrand, focused on a perennial issue in central European politics: endless wrangling over the political rights of diaspora populations. Roughly 5 million Romanians live abroad, and substantial populations of ethnic Romanians reside in Ukraine, Hungary, and Moldova, many of whom hold Romanian citizenship and voting rights. Simion advocated for the unification of Romania and Moldova and argued that Romanian speakers in Ukraine are systematically oppressed. He has been banned from entering both Moldova and Ukraine. He also sought to position himself as part of an international populist coalition. 'Together, we will oppose illegal immigration and anti-American sentiments in Europe!' he said onstage in Poland, campaigning with the presidential candidate for that country's populist party, Law and Justice. Known for sporting a MAGA hat, Simion has told reporters that he's aligned with Donald Trump because they both oppose 'politically correct people who undermine our freedom and opinions.' In Simion's case, those 'politically correct people' include prominent European politicians like French President Emmanuel Macron, whose government he compared to Iran's. Simion once accused elites in Romania of conspiring with the 'new Soviet Union, with its commissars from Brussels' to impose a 'new order' of political correctness and neo-Marxism on Romanians. 'With God's help, we will stop everyone from [Jean-Claude] Juncker to Ursula von der Leyen to Dr. [Anthony] Fauci and all those who are trying to impose the new global order,' he declared in February 2024. During the recent campaign, however, he sought to strike a more moderate tone. 'We are a Eurorealist group, not Eurosceptic,' he said to Politico last week. He cast himself in the mold of more mainstream European conservatives, telling reporters that his party was in the 'same political family' as Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a nationalist conservative who has been pro-NATO and anti-Russia. Simion also advocated for the continued U.S. leadership of NATO earlier this month. But many Romanian voters saw these statements as mixed messaging rather than a true change of heart. Simion consistently opposed military aid to Ukraine throughout the campaign, implicitly backing a less confrontational policy toward Russia. Romanians know 'perfectly well' that Ukraine's defeat would leave a dangerous nation directly on their doorstep, Daniel Fried, the former assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs and a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council, told TMD. Simion also received public support from Alexander Dugin, the Russian-nationalist intellectual with a strong ideological influence on Russian President Vladimir Putin. Romanians, with recent memories of Soviet domination, are generally wary of any perceived Russian influence. Yet Simion was able to capitalize on public anger over Georgescu's disqualification. More than 60 percent of Romanians disagreed with the Constitutional Court's decision to annul the 2024 election, which sparked protests and condemnation from across the Romanian political spectrum (as well as from U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and Elon Musk). Simion called the decision a betrayal of democracy, saying that the judges responsible should be 'publicly skinned alive' and promising to appoint Georgescu as his prime minister if he won. Despite such rhetoric, Simion consolidated the votes of nationalists, cultural conservatives, and many Romanians who were fed up with the country's persistent corruption and recent economic stagnation. He exited the first round leading Dan by more than 20 percentage points. But in the contest between Dan's cerebral-verging-on-awkward style and Simion's rhetorical bomb-throwing, the former mayor won out. Dan was widely considered to have won a televised debate on May 9, and Simion's globetrotting campaigning among the diaspora in countries like Austria, Germany, and Poland in the days before the election didn't pay off: Dan won strong majorities in urban areas, in the large Moldovan diaspora, and among ethnic Hungarians afraid of nationalist leadership, with turnout reaching its highest level in over a decade. Many Romanians, especially the educated middle class, were deeply alarmed by the prospect of Simion and his party gaining power. 'The perception is that among many, of fear that there is a risk of Romania turning hard [right] and having a regime change,' Joja said, pointing to Georgescu's comments last year promising to abolish political parties and quoting prominent Romanian fascists. On Sunday, it briefly appeared that Simion would attempt to contest the results of the elections, as he wrote 'I won!!!' on Facebook after voting ended Sunday. But by Monday morning, he had conceded. Dan cast his win as a victory for Romanians seeking to reform a failing political system. But there was also a clear international dimension. As the mayor's victory became clear, crowds in Bucharest began chanting: 'Russia, Russia, don't forget: Romania is not yours!' For its part, the Russian government was clearly displeased with the result. 'The elections were strange, to say the least,' said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. 'We know the story of the candidate who had the best chance and who was simply removed from the race.' European leaders, meanwhile, welcomed the news. 'They have chosen the promise of an open, prosperous Romania in a strong Europe,' European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on social media. For Europe, Dan's victory ensures Romania's continued cooperation in getting aid to Ukraine and checks the expansion of Russian influence along Europe's border. 'It shows Romania is not as vulnerable, that their politics are not as susceptible to Russian manipulation,' Fried said. But the country still faces deep problems: a large budget deficit, persistent brain drain, and high levels of corruption. Dan also faces an uphill battle in forming a governing coalition, as he does not lead his own party. Following his victory, he said he would move to form a government made up of the four 'democratic parties' in the Parliament: the Social Democrats; the National Liberals, his former party; the Union to Save Romania; and the Hungarian minority Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania. At his victory speech, Dan seemed to understand that merely winning would not be enough: he would have to deliver results, quickly. 'Let us continue to believe in Romania,' he said. 'And get to work tomorrow!' Adam White Since Michigan v. EPA, the fight over how courts should act at the beginning of major lawsuits has become a central feature of anti-administration litigation. When plaintiffs file lawsuits against executive orders or agency regulations, they increasingly ask the trial judge to issue a 'temporary restraining order' or 'preliminary injunction' blocking the administration's action. Then the parties quickly appeal up the judicial chain to higher courts, eventually the Supreme Court. In the federal trial courts, these orders are known as 'nationwide injunctions' or 'universal injunctions,' because they block an administration from imposing its policy against not only the challenger in that given case, but against people everywhere. … These universal injunctions have become a central feature of constitutional and regulatory litigation. Politics May 19, 2025 Nick Catoggio How will Democrats handle the Joe Biden cover-up? Society & Culture May 19, 2025 Kevin D. Williamson On family, finances, and black mobility. Society & Culture May 20, 2025 Emily Oster When the lines between expert and huckster are increasingly blurry, how do we determine what's authoritative? Politics May 20, 2025 Charles Hilu By wrapping a debt ceiling increase into the reconciliation bill, the GOP faces a time crunch. Politics May 20, 2025 Michael Warren Robert Hur was right about Biden's decline. Will Democrats finally listen? In the New York Times, Richard Sandomir reflected on the life of Walter Frankenstein, a Jewish survivor of Nazi Germany who died at the age of 100 last month. 'For more than two years, Walter Frankenstein and his small family were among the estimated 6,500 human U-boats in Berlin—Jews trying to elude Nazis by figuratively hiding like submarines. They took refuge in bombed-out buildings, cars, forests, craters, brothels or wherever they could survive for another day or week,' he wrote. 'In the days before the war ended, the four Frankensteins lived in a subway station that had been converted into a bunker. 'I lay on a plank bed with a straw mattress on it, put the children on it, and there we stayed until liberation,' Mr. Frankenstein told the historian Barbara Schieb for an essay included in the 2009 book 'Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation,' edited by Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon and Chana Schütz. 'We had no water, no food, nothing.'' President Donald Trump is optimistic that he can broker a peace deal in Ukraine, but are Ukrainians? Not quite, Anne Applebaum reported for The Atlantic. 'On Saturday, I asked Andriy Sadovyi, the mayor of Lviv, in western Ukraine, whether he expected the Russian-Ukrainian talks in Istanbul to lead to a cease-fire. 'No,' he told me. Later, I asked the audience at the Lviv Media Forum whether any of them expected a cease-fire soon. About 200 journalists and editors were in the room. No one raised their hand. Many laughed. Over several days in Lviv I didn't meet anybody who believed that the Russian president wants to end the war, or that he will negotiate to do so in Istanbul,' she wrote. 'Ukrainian reasoning is straightforward: Vladimir Putin has never said he wants to end the war. The propagandists on Russian state television have never said they want to end the war. The Russian negotiating team in Istanbul did not say it wanted to end the war.' Washington Post: U.S. To Pay Nearly $5 Million to Family of Jan. 6 Rioter Ashli Babbitt President Donald Trump's administration is set to pay nearly $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt to settle a lawsuit brought by the estate of the Trump supporter who was fatally shot by police when she tried to storm the House Speaker's Lobby during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, according to two people familiar with the matter. … No final deal had been signed and terms had not been disclosed at the May 2 hearing. New York Times: Russia Beefs Up Bases Near Finland's Border Longtime Hollywood makeup and prosthetics artist Greg Cannom died this month at age 73. You might not recognize his face, but you've likely seen the faces he's created on the big screen. He won Academy Awards for best makeup in Mrs. Doubtfire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Vice. Do you think recent elections results in Poland and Romania will reinforce European resolve against Russia?
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's Syria Reset
From the The Morning Dispatch on The Dispatch Happy Monday! Almost exactly one year after he was inadvertently arrested trying to enter the tournament, Scottie Scheffler on Sunday won the PGA Championship by five strokes. 'Got out of jail, turned his life around, and hasn't reoffended,' Mike Beauvais joked yesterday. 'The system works.' Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Sunday that 'all the indications' show Mohammed Sinwar, Hamas' leader in Gaza, had been killed in Israeli airstrikes last week. Sinwar became the leader of Hamas in Gaza after Israeli soldiers killed his brother, Yahya Sinwar—a key architect of the October 7, 2023, attacks—last fall. Meanwhile, Israeli and Hamas officials resumed ceasefire and hostage talks in Qatar on Saturday, hours after Israel launched a new offensive in the Gaza Strip. A statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said the country's negotiating team is exhausting 'every possibility for a deal,' including a proposal that would secure the release of all remaining hostages and 'the exile of Hamas terrorists, and the disarmament of the Gaza Strip.' Bucharest Mayor Nicușor Dan—who campaigned for president of Romania on a centrist, pro-European Union platform—defeated his nationalist rival George Simion on Sunday by a margin of nearly 8 percentage points with 99 percent of the vote in. Despite initially declaring victory, Simion, who has denied accusations of supporting Russia, later conceded the race in a social media post. On the campaign trail, Dan expressed support for Romania's continued membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and aid to its neighboring country of Ukraine. 'Russia, don't forget, Romania isn't yours,' supporters of Dan chanted as they celebrated his victory. Russia on Sunday launched its biggest drone attack on Ukraine since the war began, Ukrainian officials said. The barrage, which targeted multiple regions, came one day after the two sides concluded their first in-person negotiations in Turkey and agreed to exchange 1,000 prisoners of war. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky held meetings on Sunday with U.S. officials—including Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—and European leaders while in Rome to attend Pope Leo XIV's inaugural Mass. Also on Saturday, Trump shared on social media that he plans to hold separate phone calls on Monday with Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin to push for a ceasefire. Former President Joe Biden was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer on Friday, his office shared in a statement on Sunday. His diagnosis includes 'metastasis to the bone,' the statement said, adding that doctors gave it a Gleason score—a grading metric used to evaluate the aggressiveness of prostate cancer—of nine out of 10. Biden and his family are currently reviewing treatment plans, and the office shared that 'the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management.' President Donald Trump said that he was 'saddened' by Biden's diagnosis and that he and First Lady Melania Trump wish him a 'fast and successful recovery.' Axios on Saturday published audio recordings of former special counsel Robert Hur's interview with Biden, which was conducted in 2023 as Hur investigated the then-president's handling of classified documents. During the conversation, the transcript of which was released in March 2024, Biden needed help from his attorneys to recall the years in which his son died and Trump was first elected president. Hur ultimately declined to charge Biden, concluding that a jury would likely view him as a 'sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.' Moody's Rating credit agency on Friday downgraded the U.S. government's credit rating to Aa1—one notch below Aaa—citing in a press release that 'government debt and interest payment ratios to levels that are significantly higher than similarly rated sovereigns.' Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called Moody's credit rating a 'lagging indicator' on NBC News' 'Meet the Press' on Sunday, claiming that the change was related to Biden administration-era spending. At the same time, Moody's also changed its economic outlook for the U.S. from 'negative' to 'stable.' The Supreme Court on Friday once again temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelan nationals—currently detained in northern Texas for alleged gang ties—under the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act (AEA). In the 7-2 order, the majority ruled that a federal appeals court must answer 'the question of what notice is due' to the detainees before their deportation, and that their removal may not advance until the court rules on that question. In his dissent, which was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the Supreme Court has 'no authority' to temporarily block the deportations. Importantly, the Supreme Court did not rule on whether Trump could deport detainees under the AEA. The House Judiciary Committee informed the pharmaceutical company Pfizer on Thursday that it is investigating an allegation that the company intentionally delayed sharing the COVID-19 vaccine's trial testing results until five days after the 2020 election. The British-based drugmaker GSK told U.S. federal prosecutors last year that one of its employees—Philip Dormitzer, a former Pfizer scientific researcher—informed fellow GSK employees that senior Pfizer executives had been 'involved in a decision to deliberately slow down clinical testing' of the vaccine until after the election. Dormitzer, who no longer works at GSK, has denied making the alleged comments. Meanwhile, a Pfizer spokeswoman said the vaccine's development process was 'driven by science' and followed FDA protocols, adding, 'Theories to the contrary are simply untrue and being manufactured.' A Mexican naval vessel collided with New York City's Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday night, killing two of the ship's crew members—a male Marine and a female cadet—and injuring 22 others aboard. The 277-crew ship, the Cuauhtémoc, was on an international goodwill mission and departing New York for Iceland when its masts struck the bridge and snapped. Local officials say the ship's captain lost control of the vessel and, according to New York City Mayor Eric Adams, the ship lost power. The Brooklyn Bridge sustained no structural damage in the incident, authorities said. A car exploded outside of a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California, on Saturday, injuring four people and killing one—the suspected bomber—in what the FBI has deemed an 'intentional act of terrorism.' Law enforcement officials said the 25-year-old suspect, a Southern California native who was in the car at the time of the explosion, had attempted to livestream the bombing and had a history of expressing anti-natalist views online. No clinic employees were injured in the attack, a clinic physician said, and its IVF lab and embryos were unharmed. Syrian security forces ambushed Islamic State sleeper cells in the northwest city of Aleppo over the weekend, killing three terrorists in surprise attacks on multiple safe houses. The raids, the only public operation of its kind since the fall of the Assad regime to rebel forces in December, came as the new government in Damascus seeks to convince the international community—and in particular the United States—that it's ready and willing to combat jihadist violence in Syria despite its own extremist origins. Such was the objective of Syria's interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa's meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump last week—the first direct talks between leaders of the two countries in a quarter-century. Hailing his Syrian counterpart, a former al-Qaeda member, as a 'young attractive guy' with a 'very strong past,' Trump announced an effective reset with the country after decades of frosty diplomatic relations. But ongoing sectarian violence in Syria—and its leader's own militant past—threatens to derail the American president's plans for a country still reeling from 14 years of civil war. 'It's their time to shine,' Trump said in a speech delivered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, last week, unveiling plans to waive longtime U.S. sanctions on Damascus. 'Good luck, Syria. Show us something very special, like they've done, frankly, in Saudi Arabia, ok? They're going to show us something special. Very good people.' The administration had been considering lifting some of its longtime sanctions on the country, some of the most crippling in the world, for months. But government agencies are now scrambling to implement their wholesale reversal using sanctions waivers, CNN reported Saturday, a move that could transform Syria from a pariah state to a key regional player. The White House's swift reversal of longstanding U.S. Syria policy appeared to come at the behest of America's Sunni allies in the Middle East. Turkey, a key backer of the former rebel groups now in charge in Damascus, welcomed the move. Leaders of the Gulf Arab states likewise hailed Trump's Syria embrace as a step toward prosperity and stability in the region, showering him with a lengthy round of applause in Riyadh as he announced the pivot. On Friday, the World Bank revealed that Syria's outstanding debt of more than $15.5 million had been paid off by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The cleared balance will allow the country to take out new loans and, in theory, begin the reconstruction process following more than a decade of unrest. 'We are pleased that the clearance of Syria's arrears will allow the World Bank Group to re-engage with the country and address the development needs of the Syrian people,' the bank said in a statement. 'After years of conflict, Syria is on a path to recovery and development.' More than 90 percent of Syrians live below the poverty line, according to the United Nations, creating an environment ripe for jihadist violence. But the task of rebuilding now falls to a man with an extremist past; until December, al-Sharaa had a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head. The former militant leader joined al-Qaeda after America's 2003 invasion of Iraq and eventually spent more than five years in various U.S.-run detention centers. After being released and returned to Syria, he went on to found an al-Qaeda offshoot that would eventually become the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)—the rebel faction that led the charge against dictator Bashar al-Assad. Al-Sharaa has since made public efforts to moderate. As the HTS and other rebel factions swept Syrian cities in December, he urged his fighters to respect the country's ethnic and religious minorities, including Kurds, Alawites, and Christians. Upon becoming the interim president in late January, he called for a unified government that reflects 'Syria's diversity in its men, women, and youth.' On that, however, the new government has a spotty record. In March, for example, pro-Damascus fighters carried out a massacre in Alawite communities that left well over 1,000 people—mostly civilians—dead in the span of 72 hours. But working with the country's imperfect leadership to stabilize the country is better than the alternative, some analysts argue. In addition to enlisting Damascus' help in combating the Islamic State, the Trump administration is also looking to the new government to prevent Iran from regaining a foothold in Syria. Tehran propped up the Assad regime for years, using Syria as a conduit through which to export regional terrorism. That shared adversary may serve as the basis for greater cooperation between al-Sharaa's government and Israel. During their meeting last week, Trump urged the Syrian leader to normalize ties with the Jewish state. And according to Israeli media reports, behind-the-scenes talks to expand the Abraham Accords have already begun. But in order to proceed, the two sides will need to overcome some rocky first impressions. 'They were jihadists and remain jihadists, even if some of their leaders have donned suits,' Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar said of Syria's new leaders in March. Israel has conducted regular airstrikes in the country since Assad's ouster, fearing that the former regime's weapons could fall into terrorist hands, and it still runs some 10 bases in Syrian territory after pushing into a buffer zone between the two countries in December. The Israeli military has also carried out operations in Syria on behalf of the Druze, a minority religious sect that in recent weeks has been targeted by pro-government fighters. Clashes between Islamists and Druze in communities near Damascus earlier this month left more than 100 people dead, prompting Druze leaders to request Israel's intervention. Following the attacks, Israeli fighter jets conducted a series of airstrikes aimed at sending what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as a 'clear message to the Syrian regime' that Israel would not allow 'any threat to the Druze community.' Now, as the White House looks to al-Sharaa as a potential partner in peace, the specter of ethnic violence looms. 'The Druze have tried to be part of the new government and to get their basic civil rights,' Muafak Tarif, the head of the Druze community in Israel, said at a conference this month. But they instead face 'a thousand foreign soldiers who belong to ISIS who are saying the Druze are not part of Syria.' Charles Fain Lehman In the 21st century, a whole array of temptations has quietly emerged from the economic shadows. It goes beyond the burrito—products like pot, gambling, and pornography are widely available and widely consumed. The potency of these temptations, moreover, has steadily risen, making them harder and harder to resist. That's a problem, because while temptation goods have gotten better, our ability to control ourselves hasn't. The uncomfortable reality of human variation in self-control has meant a growing share of the population is unable to stop itself from clicking that 'buy now, pay later' button. World Events May 16, 2025 Jonah Goldberg If it's not a deal he made himself, Donald Trump doesn't want it. Religion May 18, 2025 Michael Reneau and Brad Edwards How new systems of meaning-making are making meaning impossible. Society & Culture May 17, 2025 Joey Hiles Having kids is difficult in ways easy to talk about and great in ways difficult to talk about. Society & Culture May 17, 2025 Christopher J. Scalia The apex form of the English language has something to teach everyone. Politics May 17, 2025 Frederic J. Frommer How baseball 'reshored' the team that became the Nationals 20 years ago. Policy May 19, 2025 Jonathan Ruhe Shoring up American credibility would go a long way. Writing in Quillette, Ellie Avishai, executive director of the Mill Institute, questioned whether the recently founded University of Austin (UATX) is betraying its founding purpose of creating a space for free discourse. 'On 8 November 2021, the founders of the University of Austin (UATX) announced the launch of their new project—a school where students would receive 'an education rooted in the pursuit of truth,'' she wrote. 'On a web page titled, Our Principles, UATX pledges that it will 'renew the mission of the university, and serve as a model for institutions of higher education by safeguarding academic freedom and promoting intellectual pluralism.'' The Mill Institute was 'an obvious fit,' and it joined UATX as an affiliated institute in 2022. 'Even while we were gathering momentum, however, there were concerning indicators,' Avishai wrote. 'Early in our tenure, the administration grew noncommittal about our advisory role. It seemed to us that while the university appreciated the way we were holding a mirror up to educators at other schools, there was little appetite for examining the culture at UATX itself. … It turned out that what I was observing was symptomatic of the larger ideological tension developing within UATX between two camps—those specifically championing an unabashedly 'anti-woke' conservative agenda, and those (such as myself) prioritising academic freedom more generally.' In a piece for the Detroit Free Press, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Bridget Brink, explained her recent decision to step down from her role. 'I have proudly served five presidents―Republicans and Democrats—to make sure the United States is the strongest, greatest country that the world has ever known. I respect the president's right and responsibility to determine U.S. foreign policy—with proper checks and balances by U.S. Congress. Unfortunately, the policy since the beginning of the Trump administration has been to put pressure on the victim, Ukraine, rather than on the aggressor, Russia,' she wrote. 'I cannot stand by while a country is invaded, a democracy bombarded, and children killed with impunity. I believe that the only way to secure U.S. interests is to stand up for democracies and to stand against autocrats. Peace at any price is not peace at all—it is appeasement. And history has taught us time and again that appeasement does not lead to safety, security or prosperity. It leads to more war and suffering.' New York Times: Trump Appointee Pressed Analyst to Redo Intelligence on Venezuelan Gang A top adviser to the director of national intelligence ordered a senior analyst to redo an assessment of the relationship between Venezuela's government and a gang after intelligence findings undercut the White House's justification for deporting migrants, according to officials. Donald Trump Jr. on X: 'What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another coverup???' CBS News: Trump's DHS Considers Reality Show Where Immigrants Compete for Citizenship, Producer Says On October 7, 2023, Yuval Raphael was attending the Nova music festival when Hamas terrorists crossed the border to massacre more than 1,200 Israelis. She miraculously survived that day by playing dead. But she's not just a survivor—she's also an accomplished singer who, this weekend, finished in second place in the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest, and won the public vote. The 24-year-old musician represented Israel with a ballad called 'New Day Will Rise.' Do you think the Trump administration's Syrian reset is worth the risks?
Yahoo
16-05-2025
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Spending Skirmishes
From the The Morning Dispatch on The Dispatch Happy Friday! Chicagoans have been making hay out of their city's connection to Pope Leo XIV, but it appears that Philadelphians, where the pontiff attended college, have swung the other way by electing their own anti-Pope: the Philadelphia Phillies' mascot, Phillie Phanatic. Eat your heart out, Avignon. Russian President Vladimir Putin failed to appear in Istanbul on Thursday for negotiations with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, despite initially proposing the talks. Zelensky landed Thursday in Ankara for a meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, but declined to travel to Istanbul after the Russian government confirmed that it would only be sending a delegation of lower-level officials. The talks between Ukrainian and Russian officials have been pushed to Friday. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio plans to meet with the Ukrainian delegation and Turkish officials separately. President Donald Trump noted Thursday that 'nothing's going to happen' until he personally meets with Putin. President Trump said Thursday in Doha that Iran had 'sort of' agreed to terms on a nuclear deal with the United States. 'Iran has sort of agreed to the terms: They're not going to make, I call it, in a friendly way, nuclear dust. We're not going to be making any nuclear dust in Iran,' he said at a business roundtable, crediting the supposed progress to his administration's 'maximum pressure' sanctions regime. (It's unclear what he means by 'nuclear dust.') Following talks in Oman last week, a top Iranian official said Wednesday that his government was willing to give up its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Iran has not yet publicly commented on Trump's latest statement. The Department of Homeland Security has requested more than 20,000 National Guard members to help enforce the administration's immigration enforcement efforts, the New York Times reported Thursday. If approved by the Defense Department, the call-up would mark the first time National Guard troops have been deployed to directly enforce immigration law, although they have been used to support immigration enforcement operations in the past. The request follows attempts by the Trump administration to crack down on illegal immigration by pulling in personnel from federal agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as working with state and local law enforcement. The medical team that delivered the first custom gene-editing treatment ever, curing the rare genetic disorder of an infant, presented their work on Thursday at the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy. The group of researchers, several of them at the Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania, used an innovative technique known as base editing to change a single mutation in the genetics of their patient, KJ Muldoon, who was born with the rare CPS1 genetic disorder. The breakthrough could open the door to treating the tens of millions of Americans suffering from rare genetic disorders. The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase announced Thursday that criminals had obtained the personal data of a 'small subset' of customers and were demanding $20 million for not making the information public. CEO Brian Armstrong said on X that the criminals had bribed overseas customer service agents for the information, but had not obtained passwords, private keys, or funds. He added that criminals were using the information to impersonate customer service agents and attempt to access customers' funds. The company estimates that the costs of the attack and reimbursing customers would be between $180 and $400 million. The Supreme Court on Thursday heard oral arguments in the Trump administration's challenge to the blocking, by nationwide injunction, of the president's executive order seeking to abrogate birthright citizenship. The justices seemed divided on the Trump administration's arguments that lower courts should not have the power to issue nationwide injunctions, with multiple opponents of the White House arguing that restricting injunctions' scope to only the parties affected by the case would be administratively unworkable. Some justices also seemed to cast doubt on the constitutionality of the executive order itself. Bill markups aren't anyone's idea of a fun all-nighter, so who can blame at least two members of Congress who appeared to fall asleep during a marathon markup for the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Wednesday? The hearing ran for more than 24 hours as Democrats tried to either delay or force messaging votes on proposed amendments to Republicans' 'one big, beautiful' reconciliation bill. Dealing with such antics from the opposing party is tiring, but Republicans in the House of Representatives have more difficult problems within their own conference. Various disagreements have emerged as GOP lawmakers haggle over the final details of their bill to put in place President Donald Trump's key legislative priorities, bypassing the Senate filibuster through the budget reconciliation process and enabling the legislation to pass with no Democratic support. All the relevant committees have released the text of their portions of the bill and advanced them to the next step in the process. And of course, not everyone is happy. 'We're working around the clock to build that consensus to get 218 votes and deliver on President Trump's America First agenda so the American people can really begin to feel relieved,' Speaker Mike Johnson said at a Wednesday press conference. He insisted that his chamber was on track to meet its self-imposed deadline and pass the bill before Congress takes a week off for Memorial Day—effectively by May 22. But whether that will happen is unclear. With the text released, enough members have said they won't support the bill that it probably would not pass in its current form. It's a familiar story for the House in the 119th Congress; Republicans' three-vote majority is so slim—and their conference so fractious—that the consensus Johnson seeks is extremely difficult to find. Two main issues are at play. Spending hawks want to ensure deep spending reductions, but more moderate members want to ensure those cuts did not severely affect Medicaid coverage. Meanwhile, Republicans from New York, New Jersey, and California want to raise the cap on the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, but that's not much of a priority for GOP House members generally—plus, a higher SALT cap would jeopardize other parts of the legislation. After its 26-hour bill markup session that started Tuesday, the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicaid, advanced the text of its piece of the bill. The committee's heavy lifting enabled the House to reach its goal of $1.5 trillion in spending reductions that got fiscal hardliners on board for the budget resolution last month. But now the spending hawks are dissatisfied because some of the cost reductions won't kick in right away. 'That math is dependent on a whole lot of variables, and you're talking about back-loaded savings, front-loaded taxes, so I'm not sure that math is right,' Rep. Chip Roy of Texas told reporters Wednesday. But he added that the $1.5 trillion in cuts was a minimum 'to even get in the door of having a conversation.' One of the cost-saving measures Republicans included was work requirements for entitlement programs, but those do not take effect until 2029. 'We didn't come here to claim that we're going to reform things and then not do it,' Roy said. 'Again, the work requirement thing that doesn't actually take place for four years, 'til after the Trump presidency—that is facially absurd. It's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard of, actually.' While Roy and his fellow spending hawks already have serious misgivings about the bill, there is a faction of Republicans whose demands could alienate them further. GOP members such as New York Reps. Mike Lawler and Nick LaLota have coalesced around their goal to raise the SALT cap. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act set it at $10,000, and the Ways and Means Committee text would increase it to $30,000 for households making $400,000 a year or less. Still, SALT-y Republicans are not satisfied. 'You can look at a district like mine, where three of the four counties I represent are in the top 16 highest property tax counties in America, so when you start talking about income caps at $400,000, you're screwing a whole host of people who are getting hammered by property taxes,' Lawler told reporters Wednesday. 'So this, as it stands—I've been very clear—does not have my support.' To this point, that handful of Republicans have not said publicly what their floor for the cap would be in order to vote for the bill. 'We're New Yorkers. We know that the first person in a negotiation who says a number essentially gives themselves a ceiling towards the other party,' LaLota said last week. But raising the bill's current SALT cap would mean lost revenue that would likely necessitate more cuts elsewhere. Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri has said that the cost of the tax plan is just over $3.9 trillion, a little below the cap of $4 trillion set by the rules of last month's resolution. Per those rules, any revenue the federal government loses in the reconciliation bill's tax portion above $4 trillion must be met dollar-for-dollar in spending reductions above the $1.5 trillion target level. 'If SALT goes up, then there's going to have to be some adjustments elsewhere,' said Freedom Caucus member Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida. Members of the different factions—Freedom Caucus types, SALT Republicans, moderates, and rank-and-file Republicans—met in Johnson's office on Thursday to iron out their differences. No agreement materialized, but Johnson said it was 'a very thoughtful discussion' and insisted the conference was still on track to pass the bill by Memorial Day. 'Not everybody's going to be delighted with every provision in a bill this large, but everyone can be satisfied, and we're very, very close to that,' he told reporters after emerging from it. 'So I've committed to work throughout the weekend on it. Others are as well, and I am convinced that we'll be able to adjust the dial, so to speak, so that we can come to an agreement that will meet the criteria that everybody has.' The next step is for the Budget Committee to hold a markup of the entire One Big Beautiful Bill Act (yes, that's what congressional Republicans have actually named it) on Friday and advance it, allowing the House to vote on it next week. Still, there are numerous obstacles. Roy and fellow Freedom Caucus members Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia all sit on the committee and have said they will vote against it. Because Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas is on paternity leave, just two 'no' votes would result in a tie and see the bill fail in committee. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Thursday afternoon that the Medicaid work requirements would likely be implemented earlier than 2029, though there is no text for an amendment yet. And then there's the Senate. There are no SALT Republicans in the upper chamber, but that body will see a similar fight over spending cuts. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, for example, has raised concerns about other measures in the section of the bill dealing with Medicaid. 'I'm not going to support this bill from the House in this form,' he said on CNN Wednesday. 'I think that's clear—it's got to change before it can pass the Senate. And I continue to stand by my line in the sand, which is no Medicaid benefit cuts. Listen, if you want to do work requirements, I'm all for that. I bet every Republican—and I bet most Americans—would agree with that. But we're not talking here about just work requirements. The House goes much, much, much further than that.' On the other side of the issue is Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who wants drastically more cuts than the House version currently includes. He has called for a return to pre-pandemic levels of spending—which would be a net reduction of about $2.5 trillion. 'It's easy to cut taxes, it's easy to increase spending. What's hard to do is address the whole spending equation,' he told reporters. Thomas Dichter Humanitarian aid and development aid are not the same thing. It's the difference between providing temporary shelter for a homeless person and tackling the underlying structural, political, and economic conditions that made that person homeless in the first place. It's the difference between fixing the problem right in front of you and fixing the cause that led to it. Over USAID's 60-plus years, development has become a barely visible thread connecting the agency to its original purpose. Gradually and inexorably, as an aid-industrial complex grew, USAID went from being a thoughtful, experimenting, exciting venturer into the complexities of human development to being a largely bureaucratic and technocratic delivery agency—a humanitarian FedEx. Politics May 15, 2025 Nick Catoggio The vices, and possible virtue, of tribalism. Policy May 16, 2025 Alex Demas The Trump Organization has deals with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. Politics May 16, 2025 David M. Drucker White House tells congressional Republicans tariffs aren't permanent. Policy May 16, 2025 Jared Walczak As home values have spiked, Florida and other states are weighing elimination of property taxes. Policy May 16, 2025 Kevin D. Williamson Alas, the pretense of knowledge. Podcast May 15, 2025 Sarah Isgur and David French 'This doesn't cut easily along partisan lines.' Podcast May 16, 2025 Jonah Goldberg, Grayson Logue, and Michael Warren As long as the checks clear. In the Washington Post, Gary Winslett wrote about the biggest culprit in the decline of Rust Belt manufacturing: the South. 'The Rust Belt's manufacturing decline isn't primarily about jobs going to Mexico. It's about jobs going to Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee. To put it in college football terms, the traditional Big Ten has been losing out to the Southeastern Conference. In 1970, the Rust Belt was responsible for nearly half of all manufacturing exports while the South produced less than a quarter,' he wrote. 'Today, the roles are reversed, it is the Rust Belt that hosts less than one-fourth of all manufactured exports and the South that exports twice what the Rust Belt does. This migration didn't happen by accident. It was driven by specific policy choices. States such as Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina and Texas have aggressively courted manufacturers by promising business-friendly policy environments.' Writing for Noema Magazine, Thor Hanson reflected on the biological mysteries awaiting us in our own backyards. 'It started with a thump, the grim sound of a bird hitting the window of my little office shack. When I ran outside to check, I found the first hermit thrush that I had ever seen in our yard, lying dead in the grass. As I lay those few feathered ounces to rest beneath a rose bush, my sorrow was tinged with something like embarrassment. Here I was, studying nature and writing books about it, and I'd had no idea that this celebrated bird was wintering in the shrubs just a few feet from my desk,' he wrote. 'As a biologist and a writer, failing to notice a species so famous in both of my chosen trades begged an obvious question: What else was I overlooking in my own backyard? Finding answers would occupy years. I climbed trees, I dug holes, I crawled on my hands and knees, and I sat inside a pile of sticks, listening and watching. I saw an incredible array of species doing things that I had never imagined, from yellowjackets sipping honeydew in the treetops to woodpeckers dropping branches on a saw-whet owl.' Los Angeles Times: L.A. Vietnamese Man Came for Annual ICE Check-In, Then Nearly Got Deported to Libya Politico: Biden's Former Natsec Adviser Says Ex-President's Debate Performance Was 'A Shock to Me' Washington Post: Price Tag for Trump's Military Parade Could Reach $45 Million The inimitable Stanley Tucci returns to Italy on Monday to explore its culture and cuisine in a new National Geographic series, Tucci in Italy. Mamma Mia! Are you concerned about the prospect of cuts to Medicaid?
