Maine’s Graham Platner was seen as a potent populist challenger to incumbent GOP Sen. Susan Collins. But revelations about the Democrat’s Nazi-linked tattoo, charged social media posts, and past treatment of women now have his party’s leaders debating whether to pull their support. And either choice might cost them a shot at winning the Senate in November.

Democrats should “cut Platner loose,” said David Frum at The Atlantic. Republicans in 2017 ditched Alabama’s Roy Moore over revelations about his pursuit of underage girls. GOP leaders then had to “choose between character and power.” It’s time for Democrats to “muster equal shrewdness and toughness.” 

Other observers disagree. The party should stick with the candidate unless there are revelations “involving murder, rape or a taste for child pornography,” said Michael Tomasky at The New Republic. That’s a “low bar,” but Collins has spent her public career helping Republicans “pick the pockets of working-class people.”

‘Scandal fatigue’
The party is “betraying its own values” if it doesn’t denounce Platner, said Michael A. Cohen at MS NOW. The latest revelations include reporting that he has been “volatile, unfaithful and physically threatening” to the women in his life. So supporting Platner “opens up Democrats to charges of hypocrisy” in their criticisms of Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton and risks “losing the Maine Senate race.”

Democrats’ chances of retaking the Senate now depend on a “baggage-laden candidate with clear character issues and a sketchy past,” said Nia-Malika Henderson at Bloomberg. “Scandal fatigue” could dampen enthusiasm for Platner, but the U.S.’s “ultrapolarized” politics could also “work the other way, hardening support for Platner.” It’s a dynamic that has worked for GOP candidates like President Donald Trump and Paxton. 

‘Fed up with rolling revelations’
Platner “needs women on his side to win,” said Steve Collins at the Portland Press Herald. Independent and Democratic women voters in Maine are “increasingly fed up with rolling revelations” about the candidate’s past, and social media is “full of Maine women who say they are no longer buying what Platner’s selling.” Maine Gov. Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign in April, could pick up votes in tomorrow’s primary as a result.

The goal of the first son-in-law to open a luxury resort on Albania’s coast has hit a speed bump. Albanian investigators have begun digging into the private equity firm spearheading the project, Kushner’s Affinity Partners. And mass public protests over the resort have become a flashpoint for broader civic frustrations. What began as a “local land dispute on Albania’s southern coast,” said France 24, has now become a forum for “wider grievances” over “corruption, arrogance of power, and disgruntlement with the ruling government.”

‘Flamingo revolution’
The proposed luxury resort project is slated for construction on the “uninhabited Adriatic island of Sazan” and hundreds of acres of the Vjosa-Narta protected site, a “sensitive coastal wetland area home to flamingos, seals and sea turtle nesting sites,” said Politico. So protesters gathered outside Prime Minister Edi Rama’s office this week “using a pink flamingo as their emblem,” said the BBC.

The symbol “echoes the deployment of a yellow duck” used in Serbian civic protests but here “reflects the protesters’ very specific concerns” about the project’s environmental impact, which is why the movement has “now been nicknamed Albania’s flamingo revolution,” said France 24. But Asher Abehsera, Kushner’s business partner on the project, claims the development will focus on “responsible stewardship” and “enhancing the environment,” said the BBC.

‘Total lack of transparency’
Initially a local development dispute, the project has spiraled into a “national political crisis,” said the Tirana Times, “triggering mass protests” and calls for Rama’s resignation. “From start to finish, there has been a total lack of transparency,” said leading Albanian conservationist Aleksander Trajce to The Guardian. “We have seen no public consultation or public documentation regarding permits.” 

Broader frustrations
“No longer only about a resort,” the growing protests are now a “vehicle for wider anger” over Albanian civic society, said the Tirana Times. “It’s more or less everything” at the protests, said Taulant Bino, the president of the Albanian Ornithological Society,  to The New York Times. “You find people from the left, people from the right, people from different religious beliefs.”

Farmers spray water on the scorched earth surrounding a downed and partially buried Iranian ballistic missile near the village of Najha in Syria after overnight exchanges of fire between Israel and Iran.
Ghaith Alsayed / AP Photo

You would think there would be endless words for breadcrumbs. In “All That Crumbs Allow,” authors Michelle Marek and Camilla Wynne creep toward that goal. Across 45 recipes, each its own kind of breadcrumb-naming treatise, the duo celebrates the kitchen staple’s versatility.

Prayer to pulverization
Marek and Wynne have backgrounds in pastry, and it shows. Wynne, in a recipe for bread and jam twice-baked croissants, eschews the nut filling and crafts a breadcrumb frangipane, which is then slathered on bisected day-old croissants along with the jam of your choosing and baked until crackly.

Marek reminisces about the sweet cheese dumplings of her childhood visits to the Czech Republic. Soft bread cubes are beaten with butter, sugar, flour, egg and farmer's cheese before a poaching turn in sweetened boiling water. The pillowy dumplings are then added to hot, crisped breadcrumbs and served with fruit.

Other recipes for sweets include such zingers as breadcrumb-glazed doughnuts, rhubarb cardamom breadcrumb cake and witches’ froth, a fluffy cloud of whipped apple served with clattering toasted breadcrumbs.

In the beginning, there was bread
The book’s centerpiece chapters on starters, mains and sweets are bookended on one side by a treatise on how to make and store breadcrumbs of various sizes, with an under-duress subsection about how to buy breadcrumbs.

A pantry chapter closes the tome. It’s a collection of six recipes that swerves from the book’s much-used and dead-simple Crunchy Topping to Fairy Rocks, with a sparkling blend of freeze-dried raspberries, sesame seeds, ground rose petals, sugar and, yes, breadcrumbs.