‘Our longing for inconvenience’

Hanif Abdurraqib at The New Yorker

Longing for “Walkmans and VCRs is, of course, an offshoot of a larger obsession with the not-so-distant past,” says Hanif Abdurraqib. There is a “longing for some previous era, if not actually a desire to return to it.” The “yearning for the past often lands us on the somewhat hollow nostalgia of ephemera: if we can’t have the nineties back, we can build a life of things that might feel transportative,” and “convenience and inaction are often bedfellows.”

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‘History is running backwards’

David Brooks at The Atlantic

Many “thought that the world would get more democratic as it modernized, but for the past quarter century, we have seen a reversion to authoritarian strongmen,” says David Brooks. People “used to have a clear idea of where modernity was heading — toward greater autonomy and equality, secularism, stronger individual rights, cultural openness and liberal democracy.” Science and reason “would prosper while superstition and conspiracy-mongering would wither away.” But it “turns out that was yesterday’s vision of the future.”

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‘Yes, of course war settles things’

Rich Lowry at the National Review

There are “many things that can be said about the tragedy of warfare without crediting the blatantly ahistorical cliché that it is never the answer, or doesn’t solve disputed questions, often with a terrible finality,” says Rich Lowry. War can “determine international boundaries and the nature of governments.” It “might be pointless, or fought for prestige, revenge or territorial aggrandizement. That’s all true, but it doesn’t change the fact that military conflict is, at times, necessary.”

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‘Polio has no cure. The vaccine is the only way to save lives.’

Simone Blaser at USA Today

Making polio vaccines “optional is a bad idea. It’s also a dangerous one,” says Simone Blaser. There is “no cure for polio, but there is a way to prevent this terrible illness.” If the “polio vaccine becomes optional,” it “becomes a mathematical certainty that we will see a resurgence.” You “may believe your choice doesn’t affect others, but there is no way to know who in a community is unvaccinated, whose immune system is shoddy, or who is particularly vulnerable.”

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What happened

The House early Friday morning approved a 10-day extension of a controversial surveillance law after a rebellion by libertarian-leaning Republicans. President Donald Trump had urged Republicans to “UNIFY” and pass an 18-month extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act without any changes. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) called an overnight session to pass either that bill or a five-year extension with some changes to win over GOP holdouts. Some 20 Republicans joined all but four Democrats to vote both down, and the 10-day extension was passed by voice vote.

Who said what

Section 702 allows the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies to surveil foreigners overseas — and any Americans they are communicating with — without a warrant. Debate over its reauthorization “has scrambled the usual polarized party lines,” The New York Times said. “Privacy and civil liberties-focused lawmakers in both parties have allied to press for greater limits, while centrists and national security hawks” want it renewed without changes.

What next?

Section 702 expires on Monday, and the Senate is “gaveling for a rare Friday session, as Congress races to keep the surveillance program running,” The Associated Press said.

What happened

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty on Thursday announced criminal charges against an ICE agent for allegedly pointing his gun at two people in another car in a road rage incident during President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. She said a nationwide arrest warrant had been issued for the agent, Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr., on two felony counts of second-degree assault.

Who said what

Minnesota has “no such thing as absolute immunity for federal agents who violate the law,” Moriarty said at a news conference. This is a “rare instance” of local law enforcement charging a federal official for “on-duty actions,” The New York Times said. It’s also the “first criminal charge to be levied against a federal agent” from Operation Metro Surge, The Minnesota Star Tribune said. Moriarty said the charges were filed before more high-profile ongoing investigations, like the killing of Renée Good, because this case was straightforward, with ICE cooperation and ample evidence.

What next?

If convicted, Morgan “faces up to seven years in prison for each assault charge,” The Associated Press said.

More than a quarter of women under 25 hold a negative view of men, according to a recent poll for The New Statesman, revealing what the magazine calls a “new radicalism”. This is seen as a challenge to the “prevailing narrative” that it is radicalised young men who are driving the so-called gender wars.

A “growing army” of female influencers broadly referred to as the femosphere is “urging” women to adopt a more cynical mindset when it comes to the opposite sex, “ditch their romantic delusions” and “be more aggressive in the dating game”, said Sarah Ditum in The Times.

What is the femosphere?

The term comes from the concept of the manosphere – a loose, online-based community of social media accounts, forums, blogs and podcasts that promote a view of “traditional masculinity”, with men in a dominant role and women subservient. “United in a belief that men are victims in a society that is designed for the benefit of women”, many of these spaces are “overflowing with rage”, said James Bloodworth in The Times.

The femosphere is a reaction to this with a message that “men are inherently selfish” and “only interested in one thing”, said Ditum. Manosphere terminology is gender-flipped: instead of “taking the red pill” (embracing the belief that society does not value men), the “pink-pill philosophy” encourages women to break with the egalitarian conventions of liberal feminism and see men as the “problem sex”.

What does that mean in practice?

Femosphere philosophy urges women to avoid casual relationships with men and to “adopt a more emotionally distant, calculated approach” to dating, said NBC News. Some of its content “frames” relationships as something to “win,” and advises followers to be “selective, guarded, and, at times, intentionally aloof”.

Mirroring the “pick-up artists” of the manosphere – those who offer manipulative strategies to persuade women to engage in sexual relationships – the femosphere has its “female dating strategists”, said The Guardian. Among them are the so-called “dark feminine” influencers who “encourage women to find men to support them financially” by cynically deploying behaviours associated with traditional femininity.

The appeal is understandable, feminist theorist Dr Sophie Lewis told the newspaper. The promise of liberal feminism that women could “have it all” has left many “saddled with both productive and reproductive labour”. The femosphere offers liberation from the “double shift”.

Is it a bad thing?

Femosphere influencers claim the movement is about “empowerment” of women rather than hatred of men, said NBC News. They see themselves as “pushing back against dating norms that have historically disadvantaged women” with a mindset that “encourages self-worth, boundaries, and higher standards in relationships”. But critics say it risks “turning dating into a transactional or manipulative experience”, where “authenticity” takes a “back seat to strategy”.

The “overarching belief” of the femosphere is the same as that of the manosphere, said The Guardian: “life is about survival of the fittest”. Men “will always hurt women and that will never change”, so “strategies are needed to conquer the opposite gender”.

President Donald Trump has nothing if not an active imagination. Since taking office, he has pitched multiple ostensibly revolutionary products and plans to the nation. Some are material planks of his America First agenda, while others are seemingly speculative flights of questionable feasibility. Whether touting settlements on Mars or “freedom cities” at home, Trump has never been at a loss for ideas about the next big thing.

Aliens

In February 2026, Trump said in a post on Truth Social that he had directed his administration to identify and release government files containing “any and all other information” about the “highly complex but extremely interesting and important” matter of aliens, UFOs and other extraterrestrial phenomena. Trump should “peel back the layers of that onion, let America decide if we can handle it,” Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett said in a Fox News interview two months later. “I think we can handle it.”

Even with Trump’s “presidential intent,” federal bureaucracy and legal safeguards will determine “whether the files are ever fully revealed,” said CNN. Those hoping for immediate bombshells may want to “temper expectations a bit,” said Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, to the outlet. UFO hunters should expect, at minimum, a “fairly long, and probably a bit of a slow process.”

Golden Dome

As one of the first executive orders of his second term, Trump in January 2025 directed the implementation of a “next-generation missile defense shield for the United States against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles and other next-generation aerial attacks,” said The White House. Dubbed the “Iron Dome for America” at the time, there has been “little progress” made on the since-renamed Golden Dome system, with “internal misalignment on the administration’s plans for the architecture causing delays,” National Defense said.

At the “heart” of the networked satellite defense system would be “space-based interceptors” designed to “find and destroy enemy missiles and drones in the early stages,” said Gizmodo. That technology, however, “does not exist yet and is deemed theoretically ineffective and impractical.” Nevertheless, Golden Dome will demonstrate “operational capability by the summer” of 2028, said project director Gen. Michael Guetlein to lawmakers earlier this month, per The Washington Examiner. He also admitted that pace-based interceptors may not be part of the “final architecture as originally envisioned” if the tech is shown to be “prohibitively costly,” said Breaking Defense.

Boots on Mars

While speaking remotely with NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson in 2017, the president said he would like to see a manned mission to Mars “during my first term or at worst during my second term.” The United States will “lead the world in space and reach Mars before the end of my term,” Trump said in the closing days of his 2024 reelection campaign, reiterating the promise of historic planetary exploration alongside major donor, SpaceX CEO and future-DOGE chief Elon Musk. Under his leadership, Trump said at his second inaugural address in 2025, America will “pursue our Manifest Destiny” by sending astronauts to “plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars,” a message he returned to in his address to Congress that year.

In a memo to NASA in late 2025, Trump “confirmed that he wants to send astronauts back to the moon” instead, thereby “putting eventual Mars missions on the back burner,” Le Monde said. A manned Mars mission would “likely cost hundreds of billions of dollars spread over a number of years,” said Nature. NASA, however, spends “$25 billion a year on all of its programs,” and faces further potential budget cuts from the administration.

Freedom Cities

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Trump campaigned on establishing “Freedom Cities,” tracts of federal land where businesses could “focus on technological innovation” and potential homeowners would revel in futuristic patriotism, said Politifact. At the time, Trump’s campaign advisers framed the proposal as comparable to “Abraham Lincoln’s campaign for the transcontinental railroad, Teddy Roosevelt’s vision for a national park service and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System,” said Politico. By March 2025, multiple interest groups had begun “drafting Congressional legislation” to advance the development of Freedom Cities “where anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear reactor startups and building construction can proceed without having to get prior approval” from the associated federal agencies, Wired said.

Concurrently, Trump’s efforts to acquire Greenland have been met with interest from “some Silicon Valley tech investors” envisioning their own “libertarian utopia with minimal corporate regulation” on an American-controlled Island, Reuters said. The notion has been “taken seriously” by U.S. Ambassador to Denmark Ken Howery, although Greenland remains, for now, in Denmark’s control. Despite his utopian campaign promises, Trump “hasn’t lent any rhetorical weight to the idea recently,” Politifact said in February. It is possible that “preliminary work undertaken by outside groups will eventually be reflected in tangible developments.”

Medbed

In September 2025, the president shared a since-deleted video to Truth Social promoting “access to new medical technology” in the form of a “cure-all bed” with roots in “conspiratorial corners of the internet,” said CNN. “Every American” will have “their own medbed card” granting access to medbed hospitals, an AI-generated Trump said in footage “intended to resemble a Fox News segment” hosted by daughter-in-law Lara Trump. Why was the footage AI? Because “no one has an actual photo” of a medbed, said McGill University’s Office for Science and Society. “Let’s be clear, they don’t exist.”

Trump is “transparent,” said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt when asked about why the president shared a doctored video of a nonexistent technology on Fox News. “He likes to share memes and videos,” she said, calling it “refreshing” that Trump is “so open and honest.”

‘Congress has a rare chance to stop warrantless searches’

Noah Feldman at Bloomberg

As Americans “worry about total government surveillance in the age of AI and ICE, Congress has a rare opportunity to protect them from warrantless government searches,” says Noah Feldman. FISA Section 702 is “set to expire,” and the law “effectively permits the government to collect the private information of Americans indirectly.” A bipartisan bill “would close the most important loopholes in the current law.” Congress “can turn the public’s distrust of government surveillance” into “something productive.”

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‘Jackie Robinson’s legacy is more than a symbol. It’s a responsibility.’

Scott Reich at the San Francisco Chronicle

Jackie Robinson Day is “one of the most powerful traditions in American sports,” says Scott Reich. For “one day, the number is the same.” Jackie Robinson’s number, 42, “becomes everyone’s number.” But “while it’s easy to honor a number, it’s harder to fully appreciate what it signifies.” Robinson “did not simply break baseball’s color barrier,” he also “stepped into a country that had not yet decided whether it was ready for him.” His uniform “gave him a platform; he chose to use it.”

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‘Massachusetts health reform at 20: a model for what government can do’

Maura Healey and Mitt Romney at The Boston Globe

In 2006, Massachusetts politicians “came together to answer a question that long seemed unthinkable in Washington: Could we make health care coverage a reality for all?” say Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D) and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R). Massachusetts “proved to the nation that the answer was a resounding yes.” The “lessons of that day went well beyond the policy.” It was a “demonstration of what is possible when leaders of all perspectives come together, set aside partisanship and focus on solving real problems.”

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‘GOP food stamp work requirements hit just as jobs dry up’

Whitney Curry Wimbish at The American Prospect

Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill, trade wars and actual wars are coming together to maximize hunger in America,” says Whitney Curry Wimbish. The GOP’s “new work requirements for food stamps began in February, forcing more people to work at least 80 hours a month to get the benefit.” At the “same time, jobs are harder to find,” especially “low-wage jobs that food stamp beneficiaries should be able to turn to for the new requirement.”

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The world is reeling from a war-induced oil shock, and China is poised to take advantage. The country builds nearly every component of the 21st-century electrical grid that will be needed to replace the oil currently bottled up in the Strait of Hormuz.

European and Asian countries facing oil shortages are realizing that “all paths to renewable power run through China and its exporters,” said The New York Times. Beijing has for decades “poured hundreds of billions of dollars into green energy” in its drive for energy independence, and its companies lead the world in producing solar panels, batteries and other equipment. The U.S. war against Iran will “catalyze even more investment and interest in renewables,” said Cory Combs, of analysis firm Trivium China, to the outlet. If Russia and Middle Eastern countries that produce the world’s oil are known as petrostates, China might be the world’s first electrostate.

“Consumers and governments around the world” are realizing their energy supplies are at the “mercy of wars and chokepoints,” said The Wall Street Journal. South Korea’s future “will be at serious risk if we continue to rely on fossil fuels,” President Lee Jae-Myung said to a town hall in March. Many are finding the answer in turning to China’s wind and solar power production, “even if that means more dependence on a single country.”

What did the commentators say?

The U.S. is pushing an “energy-hungry world” into China’s arms, Paul Krugman said on his Substack. President Donald Trump has been attempting to “stop the renewable energy revolution,” but he cannot because the “economics and the science are compelling.” What he can do is “ensure that the revolution passes us by.” His “debacle in Iran” may bring that future ahead of schedule, led by China. The U.S. may someday escape “Trump’s fossil fuel obsession,” but by that time “China’s lead in the manufacture of renewables will probably be insurmountable.”

There will be a “long-term psychological impact” from the Iran war, economist Andy Xie said at The South China Morning Post. The United States and Israel have been in conflict with Iran for nearly half a century, and a ceasefire now will not change the underlying dynamic. Other countries will expect more oil shocks in the future, which will “shape national policies for many years.” The upside: Reducing reliance on oil will take away incentive to wage war against countries like Iran. “Renewable energy makes the world safer.”

What next?

China is inaugurating the “electrostate era,” said Foreign Policy. Beijing spent recent decades plotting an energy strategy “designed precisely for moments like this.” Nearly a third of the country’s energy consumption comes from electricity, and “more than half of the cars sold in China are electric.” That has been the result of policies concerned less with reducing carbon emissions and more with energy independence. Beijing will not entirely avoid the consequences of the current oil shock, but the “push to become an electrostate” will reduce the pain.

What happened

The California Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered lawyer John Eastman, a key architect of President Donald Trump’s failed effort to overturn his 2020 election loss, to be stripped of his law license and “stricken from the roll of attorneys.” The ruling upheld a 2024 State Bar Court decision to disbar Eastman for concocting strategies to submit fake Trump electors and push Vice President Mike Pence to block Joe Biden’s victory in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.

Who said what

Eastman “remains one of the highest-profile figures in Trump’s orbit to face enduring consequences” for participating in his 2020 election schemes, culminating in the Jan. 6 attack, Politico said. Although he only lost his license to practice law in California, disbarment decisions are “typically adopted by authorities in other jurisdictions.” State bars “across the country have been trying to seek accountability” against Eastman and other lawyers involved in trying to subvert the election, The New York Times said. Rudy Giuliani was disbarred in New York and Washington, D.C., in 2024, and Jeffrey Clark’s D.C. 2025 disbarment is tied up in appeals.

What next?

Eastman’s legal team said they would appeal his disbarment to the U.S. Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds.

What happened

The Senate on Wednesday rejected a fourth attempt by Democrats to limit President Donald Trump’s authority to wage war on Iran, in a mostly party-line 52-47 vote. The “repeated defeats underscore the durability of Republican backing” for Trump, The New York Times said. But “some GOP lawmakers suggested that their patience was wearing thin as the conflict drags on, its economic fallout reverberates among their constituents and the president’s bellicose statements intensify.”

Who said what

Republicans “say they will keep faith in Trump’s wartime leadership, for now,” The Associated Press said. But they “are anxious for the conflict to end, and some are eyeing future votes,” notably a statutory deadline at the end of the month. Under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, if Congress doesn’t declare war or authorize the use of force within 60 days, or grant a 30-day extension, U.S. forces must be withdrawn.

Trump originally predicted the Iran war would be over within four or five weeks, but with the 60-day deadline “rapidly approaching,” he’s sending “mixed signals,” The Washington Post said. Trump keeps insisting the war is almost over, but he just “imposed a naval blockade on Iran and sent thousands more troops to the Middle East.”

What next?

The House is expected to vote Wednesday “on its own resolution to block Trump from ordering more strikes on Iran,” the Post said. The outcome of the vote “is uncertain,” said the AP.

Confusion reigns over whether there will be further direct talks between Lebanon and Israel.

Galia Gamliel, a member of Israel’s security cabinet, announced that Benjamin Netanyahu would be speaking to Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun today, following historic talks earlier this week.

However, a spokesperson for Aoun said they were “not aware of any call” taking place between Aoun and the Israeli prime minister. Aoun did confirm that a ceasefire is the “natural starting point for direct negotiations”, and called the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the country an “essential step towards consolidating” such a ceasefire.

As Israeli air strikes destroyed the last remaining bridge connecting southern Lebanon to the rest of the country, and civilians continue to flee their homes, diplomatic talks appear somewhat hopeless as Israel’s aims remain unclear.

What did the commentators say?

It is “hard to imagine much change resulting from the meeting” between Israeli and Lebanese officials in Washington on Tuesday, said The Economist. As things stand, Israel has an “overwhelming military advantage”, and Netanyahu has demanded Lebanon presents a “comprehensive plan for disarming Hezbollah” and “establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries”.

But the Lebanese government is “too weak” to disarm the militant group and has faced “thinly veiled threats of a violent coup” should it try. Even if Beirut were able to strive for “political consensus” in its “deeply fractured society”, it is “unlikely” Netanyahu would “give them the necessary time” to capitalise on it.

For most countries affected by war, ceasefires are a “welcome development”, but for Israel’s “maximalist” leaders, they are often “seen as getting in the way of efforts to finish the job”, said Mairav Zonszein in The New York Times. Just as the ceasefire was announced, the Israel Defense Forces hit 100 Lebanese targets in 10 minutes, killing 350 and wounding “well over 1,000, many of them civilians”. War, as seen in Gaza and now Lebanon, is “increasingly the state’s go-to response to geopolitical challenges – not just the strategy but the norm”.

Israelis’ problem is that their “definition of victory” is “framed by a distorted reality” that threats “can and must be eliminated through invasion and occupation”. The media rarely provides an insight into civilian casualties, and practically no one in the domestic political landscape is challenging the country’s tendency to “treat war as a tool of first resort in statecraft”. This could end badly for all sides involved: “when war becomes the norm, everyone loses”.

“Israel’s primary goal is simple: weaken Hezbollah,” said Daniel Byman from the Center for Strategic & International Studies. Its ongoing campaign against the group displays a “familiar but intensified strategic objective”: that of “mowing the grass”; so “not the elimination of Hezbollah, but its sustained degradation”.

Yet there are “enduring risks” with this strategy. Even a wounded Hezbollah can disrupt life in northern Israel and “escalate unpredictably”. “Ultimately, Israel appears to accept that the conflict with Hezbollah will persist as a recurring feature of the region’s security landscape.”

For Netanyahu himself, the “rhetoric about the war on Lebanon is simple”, said Ori Goldberg on Al Jazeera. He wants to be the leader who “emerged as clearly and absolutely triumphant” from the “longest war in Israeli history”.

After alienating much of the Western world – except for his closest ally Donald Trump – it seems removing Hezbollah is his “only remaining opportunity to claim victory” on the world stage and secure a legacy. In the region, and on the domestic front, tackling the “fictitious invasion” by Hezbollah is the “only political promise Netanyahu hopes he can fulfil for future voters” in the elections expected this autumn.

What next?

Though these talks should be welcomed, “significant hurdles remain”, said Bilal Y. Saab from Chatham House. Given the “deeply rooted” Hezbollah problem, both sides need to take “more concrete action”.

In order to preserve ties with the Lebanese government, Israel must “avoid further attacks on state infrastructure”, particularly in Beirut, to destroy Hezbollah’s “narrative of resistance”. The Lebanese government’s focus, however, is internal. It should consider “expelling Hezbollah ministers from the cabinet”, confiscate arms, “outlaw all of Hezbollah’s financial activities” and “arrest anyone endangering civil peace”.

There are hopes this would lead to a formal peace deal. “It’s a long and winding road, but there’s no better alternative.”

The field of Democratic hopefuls for the 2028 presidential campaign is expected to be massive, and candidates have a wide variety of voter issues to address. But they will likely focus on the cost-of-living crisis and questions related to the strengthening of American democracy. Plus, Democrats will be campaigning without President Donald Trump on the other side of the ballot for the first time in 12 years.

What are the issues?

Many Democrats who have been named as possible 2028 contenders, including the 2024 nominee, former Vice President Kamala Harris, have “sought to hammer the issue of affordability, almost exclusively, as they seek to win back power in Washington,” said The Washington Post. But these candidates have also been “challenged to couple that with a more full-throated description of their civil rights agenda,” especially in an era when many in the party say democratic principles are under threat.

Some of these contenders have “shifted their views on border security, DEI, crime, climate change, Covid-era lockdowns and more,” said Axios. Party pundits believe they lost to Trump in 2024 largely because voters “didn't like some of their left-leaning policies, not just how they were communicated,” and some have been arguing for a push back to the center. Others in the party have “openly questioned whether anyone other than a straight, white man can win the White House,” said Politico.

Lowering the cost of living will likely be the number one concern for voters heading to the polls. Several Democrats, including Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), have proposed tax plan changes that would raise taxes for the ultra-wealthy, but “as actual solutions to the forces pinching Americans’ pocketbooks,” these plans “largely misread the problem,” said Slate. If Democrats “really want to allay the country’s anxieties about the cost of living, tinkering with the tax code probably isn’t the way to do it.”

How will candidates approach them?

Even with affordability at the forefront, Democratic bigwigs have largely agreed that the “restoration of civil rights should be central in the next presidential election,” said the Post. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore has “warned that Republicans are promoting voter suppression,” while Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) has “linked Trump’s aggressive immigration tactics to overall persecution of racial minorities.”

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg “accused the Trump administration of a ‘seek and destroy’ effort to harm disadvantaged communities,” said the Post, and Harris has “argued that the United States is losing its moral authority to stand up for human rights around the globe.” Many have also noted that Democrats are pushing to reengage with Black and Latino voters the party lost in 2024, and some see Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker as a solution to this problem, as he would “likely do well among Black voters,” said Bloomberg. He has the “brawn, the billions and the blue-collar affect to make him a contender.”

To communicate with voters, any good candidate will need to “speak directly and honestly to the electorate with tangible political platforms” and “tangible messages that are simply about what we’re going to do for you,” Maya Handa, the campaign manager for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D), said at a Dartmouth University event. Democrats “should be recruiting candidates who are generationally talented communicators. But if we can’t, then I think we have to get more creative about it.”

‘Battle Creek, a Rust Belt icon, battles back as American manufacturing jobs decline’

Chicago Tribune editorial board

For “generations, the Kellogg food company and Battle Creek, Michigan, went together like corn flakes and milk,” but “after decades as an independent public company, Kellogg split in two,” says the Chicago Tribune editorial board. Like “many other small industrial cities across the Midwest, Battle Creek is diversifying beyond its roots,” and its “resilience in the face of change shows that, under pressure, the Rust Belt’s factory towns can carve out a future based on their long-time strengths.”

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‘Universities must reinvent themselves for the intelligent age’

Klaus Schwab at Time

For “more than a century, universities have been among humanity’s most transformative institutions,” but the “world they helped create is now changing at unprecedented speed,” says Klaus Schwab. In the “‘Intelligent Age’ defined by the rise of artificial intelligence and quantum computing, education cannot remain preparation for life.” It “must become a continuous condition of life,” as “our culture is moving irreversibly from learning for life to lifelong learning.” This “demands systemic change across national education systems.”

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‘Why aren’t Republicans thrilled by the fall in teen pregnancies?’

Arwa Mahdawi at The Guardian

The “teenage birth rate in the U.S. fell by 7% in 2025,” and “while this might seem like a positive development, it has been a cause of dismay among the MAGA-adjacent crowd,” says Arwa Mahdawi. Republicans “aren’t just content with overturning the right to a safe and legal abortion; they’re also quietly undercutting access to contraception.” What’s “next? The party of ‘family values’ rallying behind child marriage? Oh, wait, they’ve already ticked that one off.”

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‘The ever-shrinking JD Vance’

Edward Luce at the Financial Times

The vice presidency “was not designed to be fun,” says Edward Luce. But “being Trump’s number two brings unique discomfort.” Defending “policies that often turn 180 degrees overnight — from vowing to destroy a civilization, say, to announcing a new golden age — requires pure acrobatics.” JD Vance “is flailing,” and “he is thus no longer Trump’s obvious successor.” Even “were Vance to regain his place in the Trumpian firmament, there is no such thing as a Vance base.”

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What happened

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office on Tuesday asked the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., to erase the seditious conspiracy convictions of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leaders found guilty of playing key roles in the 2021 U.S. Capitol attack to keep President Donald Trump in power. The Trump administration has “determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice,” Pirro’s office said. Trump pardoned most of the Jan. 6 rioters but commuted the lengthy prison sentences of the 12 covered by the new filing.

Who said what

The motion to expunge the convictions of ringleaders including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes is the “latest effort by the Trump administration to erase the stain of Jan. 6,” Politico said. Asking the appeals court to “toss out the guilty verdicts” also lets the Justice Department avoid the “awkward situation of having to defend the convictions,” The New York Times said. That would “likely have required administration officials to assert that the far-right groups were acting on behalf” of Trump.

What next?

The request to vacate the last remaining Jan. 6 convictions is “likely to be granted because prosecutors have broad discretion to pursue or drop criminal charges,” The Washington Post said.

What happened

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on Tuesday unveiled a bill to set up a bipartisan panel that could help remove a mentally or physically incapacitated president under the 25th Amendment. The legislation, which had 50 Democratic cosponsors, is a “matter of national security,” Raskin said in a statement. “Public trust in Donald Trump’s ability to meet the duties of his office has dropped to unprecedented lows” as he “threatens to destroy entire civilizations” and “aggressively insults the pope,” among other erratic behavior.

Who said what

The 25th Amendment empowers the vice president, plus the Cabinet or “such other body as Congress” provides, to declare the president unfit for office. “This body should have been set up” when the amendment was ratified in 1967, Raskin said. A White House spokesperson called Raskin a “lightweight” and praised Trump’s “sharpness” and “unmatched energy.”

The Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate would each pick four of the panel’s 16 members — physicians, psychiatrists and former top Cabinet officials — and the panel would pick a 17th member as chair. If a medical examination found the president unfit, a majority of the panel could vote to suspend the president with the assent of the vice president.

What next?

The legislation “is a long shot,” Axios said, as “Republicans control Congress, and Trump could simply veto it.”

Democrats are ready to be done with Donald Trump’s presidency. Trump’s critics are starting to talk more openly about removing him from office, using impeachment or the 25th Amendment. They assert that his recent social media tirades against Iran and Pope Leo reveal he is unfit for office.

Democrats in Congress mostly “steered clear of threatening impeachment” since Trump’s return to the White House, said The New York Times. The president’s threat last week to wipe out Iranian civilization “dramatically” shifted their calculations, spurring dozens of “formerly hesitant” House Democrats to back articles of impeachment. Trump “seems to be taking us on a path to mass war crimes,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said on X. The president’s recent “erratic behavior and extreme comments” have “turbocharged” discussion of his mental fitness, said the Times. The challenge: Removal efforts are “doomed to fail so long as Republicans control Congress,” said The Associated Press.

What did the commentators say?

The “fate of the Earth depends” on Trump’s removal from office, Will Bunch said at The Philadelphia Inquirer. The president’s growing list of “embarrassingly profane and unspeakably evil” social media posts demonstrates that he is “mentally and physically deteriorating,” a danger given his command of the “planet’s largest air force and a large cache of nuclear weapons.” The threat is too urgent to wait for Democrats to win control of Congress in November. Americans should join a May 1 general strike called for by the organizers of the “No Kings” protests to make their feelings clear. “It is a time for action.”

Democrats’ talk of impeachment “plays into Iran’s hand,” Peter Lucas said at The Boston Herald. Despite his words, Trump “will not end civilization in Iran.” But he will end Iran’s attempt to develop its own nuclear weapon. Democrats are looking for an excuse to “impeach him anyway if they gain control of the House in November.” They should instead acknowledge that Trump “saved the day” by taking action against Iran.

The 25th Amendment is “having a moment,” Ian Millhiser said at Vox, but it is unlikely to be used against this president. The constitutional provision would allow the White House cabinet to “temporarily prevent Trump from acting as president,” but the process is designed to replace an executive who is “physically or mentally incapacitated” rather than one who is “merely bad at being president.” Other democracies make it easier to remove an “incompetent, unfit or unpopular leader.” The United States should join their ranks.

What next?

Democratic leaders are trying to “shut down” impeachment talk, said Axios. That is not the “best use of our time” given that the effort would inevitably fall short, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) said to the outlet. Dean and other senior Democrats want the party’s focus to be on “concrete issues like the war in Iran and affordability” as midterm elections approach, said Axios. An impeachment that fails to remove Trump, said Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), “is worse than no impeachment at all.”

‘Have these people learned nothing?’

Michelle Cottle at The New York Times

Eric Swalwell “had his political career blown up by allegations of degeneracy and abject stupidity,” says Michelle Cottle. Many lawmakers “fail to learn from the ruined careers of the past in part because those around them too often shrug off the whispers, red flags and glaringly bad behavior until some line gets crossed.” The “problem is less a ‘boys will be boys’ tolerance than a sense of resignation among politicians, staff and other members of official Washington.”

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‘Deportations are putting US disaster response at risk’

Yvette D. Clarke and Michael Shank at Newsweek

This year the U.S. “will be less equipped than in previous years to prevent, prepare for and respond to increasingly extreme weather,” say Yvette D. Clark and Michael Shank. The Trump administration made FEMA “less effective, less funded and less capable of helping Americans before, during and after a storm.” At the “same time, the administration’s immigration policies are shrinking the very workforce we rely on for disaster preparation, response and recovery.” The government “cannot operate in silos.”

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‘Debating busting the filibuster’

Dan McLaughlin at the National Review

Some are “not against the idea of using the levers of the congressional rules to create theatrical confrontations that can move the public to apply pressure to members of Congress,” says Dan McLaughlin. But this is “undermined by senators believing that their votes are not necessary to passage.” The Senate “is dysfunctional, and it should debate and engage publicly more.” The filibuster is “more destructive than the benefits to be gained by any particular public debate.”

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‘Lebanon’s resilience is celebrated, as if survival were admirable rather than imposed’

Tayma Saliba at Le Monde

In Lebanon, “staying informed is both a dependency and a necessity,” says Tayma Saliba. Between “international media, local journalists, rumors and content generated by artificial intelligence, young people become informal analysts, cross-referencing sources and explaining the situation to relatives abroad.” A “recurring discourse celebrates Lebanese resilience, as if survival were admirable rather than imposed.” This is “meant to recognize endurance but ends up normalizing suffering, suggesting that the situation is manageable.” But “survival is not acceptance.”

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What happened

President Donald Trump on Monday deleted from his social media account an apparently AI-generated image showing him dressed like Jesus and healing a man with orbs of light in his hands amid a panoply of religious and patriotic imagery. Following sharp condemnation, including from conservative Christian supporters, Trump told reporters he had posted the image but “thought it was me as a doctor,” and “only the fake news” would claim he was depicting himself as Jesus.

Who said what

The post’s removal was a “rare retreat” for Trump, who as a rule “does not apologize for doing and saying things that hurt or offend people,” The New York Times said. But the “image depicting himself as a Christ-like figure sparked outrage on the religious right,” angering a group that has “rallied behind Trump” through “two impeachments and three elections,” The Wall Street Journal said.

The image was “OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy,” and Trump needed to “ask for forgiveness from the American people and then from God,” Megan Basham, an evangelical Christian writer at The Daily Wire, said on X. Conservative Christian commentator Rod Dreher told the Journal that Trump is “radiating the spirit of Antichrist, no question.”

What next?

The “consternation over Trump’s social-media posts,” including his “pointed criticism of Pope Leo XIV,” could “turn into a political liability for Republicans,” the Journal said. Catholics “are America’s largest swing religious vote,” Axios said, “and Trump’s support among them was already sliding” before his posts.

What happened

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal Party secured a majority in Parliament on Monday after winning three special elections to fill vacant seats. The party last year fell short of the 172 seats needed for a majority in the House of Commons. But following five defections from opposition parties in the past five months and last night’s victories, the Liberals now hold 174 seats, allowing them to legislate without other parties and keeping Carney in office through at least 2029.

Who said what

Carney’s election win last year was “fueled by public anger over President Donald Trump’s annexation threats” and trade war, The Associated Press said. With his new majority, Carney will have “broader latitude with his legislative agenda, which is focused on reducing Canada’s dependency on the United States,” The New York Times said. “No modern majority government in Ottawa has ever been built” through defections before, Politico said, and while opposition parties keep “hammering Carney over high grocery prices” and a “nationwide housing shortage, ‘Carneymania’ continues to sweep the nation.”

What next?

Now that he has a majority, it’s “important for Carney to actually deliver,” McGill University politics professor Daniel Béland told The Wall Street Journal. The “first move of Carney’s majority government,” Politico said, will “be to announce relief for Canadian consumers facing skyrocketing gas and diesel prices” from Trump’s Iran war.

What happened

Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif) and Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) separately said Monday they will resign from Congress as both face House investigations into alleged sexual misconduct and growing calls to quit or face expulsion. Swalwell ended his campaign for California governor over the weekend after an unidentified former aide accused him of sexual assault and three other women said he had sexually harassed them. Gonzales dropped his reelection bid in March after admitting to a coercive relationship with a staffer who later died by suicide.

Who said what

The House Ethics Committee, which was already investigating Gonzales for violating rules prohibiting sexual relationships with subordinates, announced Monday it had opened an investigation into Swalwell. The Manhattan district attorney is also investigating the assault allegation, which Swalwell denied while apologizing for other past “mistakes in judgment.”

Ethics Committee investigations can take months, and House leaders had been “facing loud demands to hold votes to kick out Swalwell and Gonzales” after the House returned from recess Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal said. “Lawmakers had coalesced around the idea of an even trade — one Democrat for one Republican — to spread the ignominy across both parties and preserve the fragile balance of power” in the GOP-led House.

“Expelling anyone in Congress without due process, within days of an allegation being made, is wrong,” Swalwell said on X. “But it’s also wrong for my constituents to have me distracted,” so “I plan to resign my seat.” About an hour later, Gonzales announced that “when Congress returns tomorrow, I will file my retirement from office.”

What next?

Neither lawmaker gave a time frame for his departure. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-N.M.) said she would file a motion to expel Gonzales unless he resigned “effective immediately” by 2 p.m. Tuesday.

Should Democrats shun Hasan Piker? asked Lauren Egan in The Bulwark. The irreverent, far-left livestreamer, who has nearly 5 million subscribers between his YouTube and Twitch channels, has become a “litmus test” for the party. Some progressives view Piker, a 34-year-old video gamer and gym bro, as a “liberal Joe Rogan” who can reach “tuned out” young white men. “Operatives have hustled to get their candidates booked on his stream,” which runs eight hours a day, seven days a week. Recent Democratic guests include Tom Steyer, who’s running for governor of California, and Abdul El-Sayed, a U.S. Senate candidate in Michigan who invited Piker to campaign with him on college campuses.

But many Democrats say Piker’s extremism should be disqualifying: A self-described Marxist, he has said that it didn’t matter “if rape happened on Oct. 7,” and that “Hamas is a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state” of Israel. Piker has also used the C-word and other misogynistic slurs.

Piker’s language sometimes is unfortunate, said Aaron Regunberg in The New Republic. But moderate “Third Way” Democrats have, “in bad faith” and without context, seized on a few moments from “almost 20,000 hours of entirely unscripted, off-the-cuff streaming.” The son of Turkish Muslim immigrants, he is an anti-Zionist but not an antisemite, and in fact has warned that antisemitism is “a canary in the coal mine of fascism.” Piker didn’t condone Hamas’ sexual violence against Israeli women, but argued that the attacks didn’t justify Israel’s subsequent bombing and killing in Gaza.

Why any Democrat would want to associate with Piker “is baffling,” said Michael A. Cohen in MS.now. A recent poll found that just 55% of Democrats have ever heard of him, and of those, “only 13% view him favorably.” Given his history of toxic comments, going on his livestream show is “a potential liability.” Sure, Piker can be “an insufferable jerk,” said Jesse Singal in his Substack newsletter, but Democrats he interviews don’t need to endorse his views. Piker appeals primarily to young, disillusioned males “who are looking to rebel.” In 2020, many in this cohort voted for Donald Trump. “It’s unfortunate” that young dudes are drawn to transgressive loudmouths, but to win back power, Democrats must “go to war with the potential voters they have, not the potential voters they want.”

Pam Bondi has discovered that “loyalty can get you a job with President Trump,” said Lindsey Granger in The Hill, “but it certainly won’t help you keep it.” The attorney general was fired earlier this month despite trying to do everything the president wanted. Over her 14-month tenure she purged scores of career prosecutors perceived as insufficiently MAGA, shuttered Justice Department offices that had probed Trump and his pals, and conducted lawfare against his political opponents. “But in the end, that just wasn’t enough.” Sources said the president was especially frustrated that Bondi hadn’t been more successful in prosecuting foes like former FBI boss James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Never mind that those cases “didn’t fail for lack of effort—they failed because they were weak.”

With Bondi ousted just weeks after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, other top administration officials are now wondering if they’ll be next to hear “You’re fired,” said Matt Dixon and Peter Nicholas in NBCNews.com. Trump advisers say National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are all at risk of being booted.

Bondi’s real sin in Trump’s eyes was that “she couldn’t make ‘it’ go away,” said LZ Granderson in the Los Angeles Times. “And you know what I mean about ‘it.’” She fueled the public obsession with Jeffrey Epstein by telling Fox News in early 2025 that the sex trafficker’s “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now.” There was no client list, and the resulting furor led to a bipartisan law that forced the release of the DOJ’s Epstein files—which contain hundreds of references to the financier’s former friend, Donald Trump. Bondi was an incompetent lackey, said the New York Daily News in an editorial. But “her firing bodes ill for the state of our democracy” because whoever comes next could be even worse. Acting DOJ boss and former Trump lawyer Todd Blanche has already declared his hostility to the rule of law, saying that it’s the president’s “duty” to influence investigations against his political opponents.

Can anyone succeed at the Justice Department “given Trump’s expectations?” asked The Wall Street Journal. The president wants an AG who’ll twist the law to his whims, but judges and juries will still refuse to play along. Trump needs an attorney general who will give sound legal advice, and—as then-AG Bill Barr did in 2020 when Trump demanded the Justice Department unearth nonexistent evidence of election fraud—say no. But that’s a word the “boss doesn’t want to hear.”

The Department of Justice has opened a probe into the National Football League, exploring whether the sports juggernaut engaged in anticompetitive practices through the various streaming packages it offers viewers. While the league’s increasingly complex subscription structures may represent a legally actionable transgression, the DOJ’s investigation does not exist in a bubble. It follows years of hostility between the president and the NFL.

‘Fragmented viewing experience’

The Justice Department is investigating whether the NFL’s “deals with streaming services are leading fans to pay too much to watch pro football on TV,” said NPR. The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 permitted the league to let teams “negotiate for the media rights together,” but critics argue that more regulation may be necessary, as “this isn’t the same marketplace anymore.”

The rising costs of airing high-profile events are being “propelled in part” by demand from “deep-pocketed tech companies hoping to woo subscribers and advertisers,” said The Wall Street Journal. To meet that demand, the NFL has “increasingly sliced off smaller packages of games” for individual streaming services, resulting in a “more fragmented viewing experience” for consumers.

Within the NFL, there’s a sense that the Murdoch family, which owns Fox Corporation, is the “key driver behind the DOJ probe,” said ESPN. Murdoch’s media empire has “turned the cost of streaming into a hobby horse issue,” said league insiders to the outlet. This comes amid a “growing bipartisan anti-streaming sentiment in Washington” and during a Trump administration that has “at times targeted the league.”

‘Revenge tour’

Trump has a “long history” of “weighing in on the fortunes of football,” said The Independent. He condemned former quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem and demanded the Washington Commanders return to their racially insensitive original name. But Trump’s “grievance” with the league “stretches back further, to at least 1984,” when he unsuccessfully attempted to launch a new franchise for the sport.

Trump has “tried to get into the NFL a couple times since then” — defeats that now fuel the president’s “revenge tour for the league humiliating him and permanently barring him from the cool kids’ table,” said Above the Law. “If they screw me over, I’m gonna show them,” Trump allegedly said in 2014, broadcaster Stephen A. Smith told ESPN. “I’m gonna get them all back. I’m going to run for president of the United States.”

The NFL is “absolutely using its power to squeeze the media,” and the media, in turn, is “passing that on to the consumer,” said Above the Law. But this administration let Ticketmaster’s monopoly “walk” and put itself behind a “consumer-crushing media merger” on behalf of Paramount’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery. In that context, Trump and his administration “don’t care about sports fans getting gouged.”

The difference between federal officials moving against the Sports Broadcasting Act now and Trump’s other tangles with the NFL is that there are Democrats “aligned" with the Department of Justice in this instance, said ESPN. Congress could repeal and pass new laws to further regulate NFL viewing options, but the lengthy legislative and legal process means fans “might not notice any significant difference to the way they watch games anytime soon.”

‘Hardly anyone checks this little box on their tax return. Why keep it?’

Adam Lashinsky at The Washington Post

There “was a time when nearly a third of U.S. taxpayers checked that little box on their income-tax returns authorizing the Internal Revenue Service to allocate $3 of their taxes” to “help pay for presidential campaigns,” says Adam Lashinsky. But now Americans “are — quite rationally — unwilling to fork over the cost of a Snickers bar to help elect the leader of their country.” Congress “ought to simply junk the checkoff as the relic it is.”

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‘Democrats need to start planning now for a return to power’

Symone D. Sanders Townsend at MS NOW

Democrats “are already talking about a wave election,” and “people are starting to ask: What would Democrats do with that power?” says Symone D. Sanders Townsend. It’s a “more important question now than ever because, this time, winning will come with more risk and more responsibility.” A Democratic win “will not just be a rejection of President Donald Trump. It will be an expectation that they can use power in a way that actually changes people’s lives.”

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‘Kalshi is half right about prediction markets and gambling’

Aaron Brown at Bloomberg

Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour “has an argument why prediction markets shouldn't be regulated as gambling,” says Aaron Brown. Sportsbooks “profit from customer losses, making them structurally predatory. Kalshi, by contrast, operates as a peer-to-peer exchange.” He is “right about the business model distinction. He’s wrong that it answers the regulatory question.” What Mansour is “describing — a balanced book, fees on both sides, no house risk on outcomes — has been the operating model of sports betting, both legal and illegal.”

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‘Women’s brains are a $1 trillion opportunity’

Lisa Mosconi and George Vradenburg at Time

Nowhere is the “cost of ignoring women’s health more visible or more correctable than in the brain,” say Lisa Mosconi and George Vradenburg. Closing the “women’s health gap could add $1 trillion in annual incremental GDP to the global economy.” This should “reframe how every boardroom and budget office thinks about women’s health.” Researchers “need to mandate sex-disaggregated data and fund women-focused trials for brain disease,” and policymakers “need to recognize women’s brain health as a core input to labor force productivity.”

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A chorus of high-profile right-wing figureheads including Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Alex Jones recently criticized President Donald Trump’s ongoing Iran war. The president responded by denouncing them as “NUT JOBS” and “TROUBLEMAKERS” in a lengthy social media statement, essentially making them persona non-MAGA. But as the president struggles to contain blowback from his Middle Eastern adventurism, the MAGA fault lines are only growing.

The ‘biggest break thus far’

After several MAGA figures denounced the president’s actions in the Middle East and, in some cases, his presidency overall, Trump responded with a “blistering” 482-word Truth Social post that insulted them in “starkly personal terms,” The New York Times said. Trump’s missive came after “weeks of criticism” from the consortium of conservative figureheads, which he had “largely ignored” before this latest outburst. Jones, Kelly, Carlson and former Charlie Kirk collaborator Candace Owens are the “opposite of MAGA,” Trump said, before he began “insulting the pundits personally,” said The Hill.

Trump has “repeatedly dismissed suggestions” of an alleged “fissure in his MAGA coalition,” Forbes said. But criticism from MAGA notables “intensified” after Trump “threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization,” NBC News said. There is now a “growing schism within Trump’s base” over the Iran war, “particularly” given his campaign pledge of “no new wars.”

While Carlson in particular has been “highly critical” of the Iran conflict and “somewhat more gently critical of Trump the man, at least publicly,” the “gloves were off” this week “like never before,” said CNN. The result is “perhaps the biggest break thus far” between Trump and a “leading conservative influencer,” even as the GOP has “done its best to forestall these kinds of splits.” Carlson’s critiques won’t “suddenly equally divide Trump’s base,” but they are an “inauspicious sign” and “not helpful” for the party.

‘Deep anger’ and ‘quick rebukes’

Trump’s attacks on this batch of newly minted detractors reflect what seems to be a “deep anger” at once-loyal supporters, said Politico. The opprobrium runs both ways, as the targets of his ire offered “quick rebukes” to Trump’s attacks. “It may be time to put Grandpa up in a home,” Owens said in a “one-line quip” on X, said Forbes. “I’m just so sad that whatever’s happened to him has totally changed the man he once was,” said Jones in a video response on the same platform.

Iran has clearly “emerged as a growing weakness” for Trump, said CNN. While some MAGA supporters are “overwhelmingly on board,” the president’s wider base is “increasingly on a different page.” For Trump, the danger in rebukes by Carlson and other media figures is that it gives Republicans “skeptical of the war license to tilt into outright opposition to him.”

‘I’m a WNBA player. Don’t use athletes like me to exclude trans women.’

Brianna Turner at USA Today

The IOC “recently announced a binding policy requiring every woman who seeks to compete in the Olympics to undergo sex verification testing,” but the “final hurdle to represent your country should not be proving to a panel of strangers that you are the woman you say you are,” says Brianna Turner. This mandate “ignores established medical and human-rights guidance, and rejects the science that says physical appearance, chromosomes or individual traits do not determine athletic performance.”

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‘New England considers the nuclear option’

Andrew Fowler at The Wall Street Journal

A “bipartisan coalition of all six New England governors has reached a conclusion that until recently would have been politically unthinkable: renewable energy alone can’t deliver the affordable, reliable power the region needs,” says Andrew Fowler. Against “this backdrop, nuclear energy is re-emerging as a practical solution.” New England’s “nuclear facilities such as Connecticut’s Millstone Power Station help maintain grid stability,” but “regulatory barriers have long limited the development of new nuclear capacity.” That is “beginning to change.”

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‘Power, minerals and the AI race — America must win in Africa’

John Giordano at Newsweek

The United States “must secure the critical mineral and energy supply chains that advance economic prosperity,” says John Giordano. One “such jurisdiction, and potentially one of the most consequential on the African continent, is Namibia.” The country is a “model for governance and stability on the continent, operating with regulatory frameworks capable of supporting large-scale development.” It “holds an outsized position on the global minerals and energy map,” but “supply security ultimately rests on infrastructure.”

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‘The ethics of using AI in newsrooms: a work in progress’

Jim Boren at The Seattle Times

The public is “looking for clear guidance on how newsrooms are using AI to report the news,” but “most news organizations are still developing their policies, and few have fully resolved these complex questions,” says Jim Boren. AI “can free journalists to focus more on investigation, verification and storytelling,” but “most newsrooms draw a firm line: AI should not be used to write stories.” This “reflects a broader concern that AI systems can produce convincing but inaccurate or misleading information.”

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What happened

First lady Melania Trump on Thursday denounced “unfounded and baseless lies” connecting her with “the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein,” calling unspecified reports and online images “mean-spirited attempts to defame my reputation.” Addressing reporters at the White House, she also called on Congress to hold a “public hearing specifically centered around the survivors,” allowing those who wish to have their sworn testimony “permanently entered into the congressional record.”

Who said what

The first lady’s “seemingly out-of-the-blue” remarks caught “the White House — and indeed, all of Washington’s political world — by surprise,” The Associated Press said. It was “not clear why she chose to speak out now,” The New York Times said, but her comments are “sure to supercharge” a “scandal” her husband “has been struggling to make go away since last summer.”

The Epstein controversy had been “fading from public discourse amid the war with Iran,” CNN said, and some White House officials were “stunned by the timing of the remarks, which sparked rumors that the first lady was trying to get out ahead of something.” Sources close to Trump insisted she was just “increasingly frustrated by the online chatter.”

What next?

Congressional Democrats and some Republicans welcomed the call to let Epstein’s survivors speak. “We encourage” GOP leaders to “respond to the first lady’s request and schedule a public hearing immediately,” said Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) on social media.

What happened

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Thursday threw out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s revised effort to restrict press access at the Pentagon, saying the Defense Department “cannot simply reinstate an unlawful policy under the guise of taking ‘new’ action.” Suppression of “political speech is the mark of an autocracy, not a democracy,” U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman wrote in his opinion, siding with The New York Times for the second time in a month in its challenge to Hegseth’s restrictions on reporters’ access to Pentagon sources and information.

Who said what

Almost all reporters in the Pentagon press corps walked out in October after Hegseth tied their credentials to an agreement to “publish only information preapproved by Department of Defense channels,” Politico said. Friedman found that unconstitutional in a March 20 ruling, and on Thursday he “voided the key parts of the revised policy,” including banning all unescorted movement through the Pentagon and evicting reporters from their longtime Correspondents’ Corridor offices to an “annex that has yet to be opened.”

“The curtailment of First Amendment rights is dangerous at any time, and even more so in a time of war,” Friedman said. Hegseth is trying to “dictate the information received by the American people” and “control the message” they “hear and see,” he added. “The Constitution demands better. The American public demands better, too.”

What next?

Frieman ordered the Pentagon to “fully restore Times reporters’ access,” The Washington Post said, and to “file a sworn declaration from a department official by April 16 detailing compliance.” A Pentagon spokesperson said the department will appeal the ruling.

‘What the verdict against Meta and Google says about the way we live now’

Jeannie Suk Gersen at The New Yorker

For “decades, the understanding was that social media companies were essentially immune from legal liability,” says Jeannie Suk Gersen. If parents “have in the past felt they were competing with bad influences on children — questionable friends, shady neighbors or profanity-laced music among them — the core anxiety in this era is that algorithms have made it so that there is no competition at all, undermining parents’ opportunity to steer their children right.”

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‘In Texas and beyond, a political impulse: If you don’t like it, leave.’

Mark Z. Barabak at the Los Angeles Times

There is “no end of hurdles” that “would have to be surmounted for a partial Texas-New Mexico merger to occur,” says Mark Z. Barabak. But the “impulse to bust up, break away and move on is as old as America itself and, at the same time, as fresh as the latest provocation to pass the lips of the nation’s frothing commander-in-chief.” Secession “has long been the dream of dissenters, of the discontented and those who feel put upon.”

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‘Freedom itself is at stake in Hungary’

Martin Wolf at the Financial Times

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is “not a man of small influence,” and “for many so-called ‘national conservatives,’ notably in the U.S., he defines a successful and admirable form of right-wing politics,” says Martin Wolf. That “makes the parliamentary elections on Sunday far more important than the modest size of Hungary would suggest.” The “defeat of the man who embraced the notion of ‘illiberal democracy’ might mean a great deal for the survival of the threatened ‘liberal’ version.”

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‘Less than 10% now smoke, but we’re still far from finished’

Mario Danek at The Hill

The U.S. “crossed a milestone that sounds like the beginning of the end for cigarette smoking: Fewer than 10% of American adults now smoke,” says Mario Danek. But “percentages can obscure as much as they reveal.” Even at “9.9%, that still represents tens of millions of Americans who continue to smoke.” The “progress is real and should be applauded. But the harder question is what it will take to reach those still smoking and whether we’re ready for that.”

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President Donald Trump loves raging against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, regularly chiding the military partnership for alleged financial delinquencies while at the same time boosting the interests of NATO’s primary antagonist, Russia. Now, as the U.S.’s war on Iran continues, NATO’s ostensible neutrality in that conflict has prompted him to renew his threat of leaving the organization altogether. Trump often tries to dictate reality by presidential fiat, but the legal process for leaving NATO is largely out of his hands and in Congress.’ The result is a Trump who’s more constrained on paper but not without a toolbox of other, less absolute options.

Why can’t Trump just leave NATO?

Trump has often threatened to leave the military alliance, but he has his own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, to thank for the legal inability to do so. In 2023, Congress enacted what “appears to be the first statute prohibiting the president from unilaterally withdrawing from a treaty (specifically, the North Atlantic Treaty),” said the government’s Congressional Research Service in a February 2026 report. This “might be understood as a rejection” of the position that presidents possess “exclusive power over treaty withdrawal.”

The bill ensures presidents cannot exit NATO “without rigorous debate and consideration by the U.S. Congress with the input of the American people,” said co-sponsor Rubio in a statement on Senator Tim Kaine’s site; Kaine (D-Va.) was the amendment’s other sponsor. Before this, any member nation could exit the treaty one year after notifying the U.S., which would then “inform the governments of the other parties of the deposit of each notice of denunciation,” said the NATO charter.

Per the bill, a bipartisan effort for which Rubio partnered with Kaine and others from across the aisle, a president may only exit NATO “by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, provided that two-thirds of the senators present concur or pursuant to an Act of Congress.” This is a virtual impossibility, given the Democrats’ current holdings in the upper chamber.

The 2023 effort was “spurred by worries that Trump, if he returned to power, might try to quit the alliance,” said The Washington Post. Fast forward three years, and Trump “insists he would be able to do it anyway,” said Deutsche Welle.

What can he do then?

While it’s possible a constitutional challenge to Rubio’s 2023 bill would “likely favor the power of a president,” there are still “plenty of ways” Trump could “kneecap” the treaty “without leaving” or complying with the congressional restrictions, said DW. Even without an “official exit,” Trump’s “increasingly hostile stance toward the alliance may leave it weakened,” said CBS News.

If other member nations “can’t trust” that the U.S. will honor the treaty’s Article 5 mutual defense pact, then the alliance is “already broken in the way that matters most,” said political scientist Ian Bremmer on X. As soon as the group’s mutual defense pact is “questioned,” NATO “loses its potency” as a Russian deterrent, said Politico. Trump has, in that respect, “turned doubting NATO into official policy.”

The president is also “considering a plan to punish” some NATO member nations he deemed “unhelpful” during the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, said The Wall Street Journal. This would involve relocating some of the 84,000 American troops stationed in Europe and deploying them to “countries that were more supportive,” including Greece, Lithuania, Poland and Romania.

Trump could also withdraw American military assets entirely and shut off funding for NATO operations. Or if he wants to be “very dramatic,” he might even “decide not to staff the position of Supreme Allied Commander Europe,” a post traditionally reserved for American officers, said DW.

The president could “just downgrade our participation,” said Jim Townsend, a former Pentagon official who oversaw Europe and NATO policy, to Politico. He could skip summits, and the secretary of defense “won’t go to defense ministerials.”

With the “language” of its 2023 bill, Congress has “prevented” a “total” and “formal withdrawal from NATO,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) to Politico. But the U.S. could “still be in NATO” with a president grasping “many different levers” so that the country’s impact would nevertheless be “diminished significantly.”

What happened

The Justice Department on Wednesday told the House Oversight Committee that ousted Attorney General Pam Bondi will not honor its bipartisan subpoena to sit for a deposition on her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, citing her firing last week. The notification “set off frustration” among lawmakers “clamoring for answers” about why she had not, “in their view, fully complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act,” USA Today said.

Who said what

Bondi “cannot escape accountability,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) said on social media. The subpoena “was for Bondi by name, not by title.” If Bondi “defies the subpoena, we will begin contempt charges,” Rep. Robert Garcia (Calif.), the committee’s top Democrat, said in a statement. “The survivors deserve justice.”

Mace and four other Republicans “joined Democrats to force the subpoena” over the objection of committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), and lawmakers were “concerned” Bondi “would try to avoid the deposition” even before President Donald Trump fired her, The New York Times said. Comer last month promised to honor the subpoena, but according to sources, he and Bondi “had been quietly working together to avoid the deposition.”

What next?

The committee will contact Bondi’s “personal counsel” about “scheduling her deposition,” a spokesperson said.

Donald Trump’s political rivals have denounced him as an “unhinged madman” and a “dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual” after he directed a string of expletives at the Iranian regime. “Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell!” the US president said on his Truth Social platform .

But Trump is far from the only potty-mouthed politician, and trends suggest that swearing in politics is increasingly going from taboo to mainstream.

‘Profanity seal’

Woodrow Wilson “broke the profanity seal” in 1919, when the then president recalled a time he made a “conspicuous ass of himself”, said Joseph Phillips, a politics lecturer at Cardiff University. “Since then, presidents, their seconds-in-command, and presidential hopefuls have used profanity at least 692 times” – but the vast majority of curse words, 87%, occurred in the last 10 years.

We’ve “come a long way from our shock” at John Major, not knowing he was being recorded, using the word “bastards” while prime minister in 1993, said Robert Crampton in The Times. Although “tough talk is nothing new in politics”, leaders “long avoided flaunting it”, said The Independent. But now, public vulgarity is “in vogue”. During a political rally in 2025, Trump “used profanity at least four times”. J.D. Vance has also sworn publicly, and former vice president Kamala Harris “earned a roar of approval from her audience” last October when she said of the Trump administration that “these mother******* are crazy”.

Members of Congress and the Senate have also sworn as a “volley of vulgarities underscores an ever-coarsening political environment” on social media. Posts that “evoke the strongest emotions are rewarded with the most engagement”.

‘Anti-intellectualism’

There’s a “misguided belief” that “profanity is more ‘honest’ or ‘authentic’ than polite speech”, said Solomon D. Stevens in the Illinois paper the Journal-Courier. This suggests that politicians who swear are “telling it like it is” or “being real”, while those who don’t must be “holding back and not telling the truth”. But “politicians who swear are just politicians who swear. They can lie just as easily as those who don’t swear.”

There’s also “an anti-intellectualism at work”, as politicians who swear imply that those who don’t are “putting on airs”. While some intellectuals can “certainly be pretentious”, “refraining from coarse language” is not in itself a sign of that.

Trump’s “disinhibited language” sounded like a “tantrum”, said Melanie Phillips in The Times. It “suggested that he’d lost self-control because Iran wouldn’t do what he wanted”. Swearing points to an “emotional release and thus a loss of reason”.

The president’s recent profanity also distracted from “the message itself”, said the Deseret News. A “rousing and well-crafted argument” could have “built a compelling case for ousting the country’s ruling regime”, because “when it comes to war, calm self-assurance speaks louder than ranting expletives”.

Politicians aren’t “bawling swear words because they can’t contain their outrage”, said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. They do it because, “like preteen boys trying to sound tough”, they believe “the odd public expletive enhances their authenticity” and gives them “an air of pugnacity apropos to the moment”. But they are mistaken. “Most Americans still prefer their leaders to talk like grown-ups.”

Nevertheless, Democrats are pushing back against the right, using bad language themselves and embracing more confrontational and crass tactics. They see it as a way to beat Maga at its own game, attempting to “step outside the bounds of the political correctness that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing”, said The New York Times.

Endorsements are designed to help a candidate win. But President Trump’s endorsement this week of California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton may have the paradoxical effect of keeping Golden State power in Democratic hands.

Trump’s decision to back Hilton could keep Democrats “from an embarrassing lockout” in the June primary election, said Politico. Candidates from both parties compete together in the primary election, with the top two — regardless of party — advancing to the November general election. Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco had a chance of creating a “Republican-on-Republican general election,” but Trump’s endorsement seems likely to send GOP voter support mostly to Hilton, away from Bianco, and give Democrats an opening for the second slot. It is “weird to feel thankful for a Trump action,” said the anonymous head of a Democrat-aligned group to Politico.

The Hilton backing is the latest twist in an “unusually messy” campaign to replace outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom, said The New York Times. Aside from Hilton and Bianco, the slate includes “eight prominent Democrats” who created a field “so fractured that no clear front-runner has emerged.” The result: Democrats were “increasingly panicked” about the possibility of a GOP-only November election. Trump “may have solved their problem.”

What did the commentators say?

GOP voters are “badly outnumbered in California” Matthew Hennessey said at The Wall Street Journal. Democrats have twice the number of registered voters as Republicans in the state. The key to pulling off a Democratic lockout, then, was “keeping the split between the two Republicans relatively even” while letting their opponents divvy up voters eight ways. The president’s endorsement means the “dream of a complete Democratic lockout is probably over.”

Trump forgot that one should “never interrupt your opponent while he’s making a mistake,” Noah Rothman said at the National Review. Two Republicans facing off to win the governorship of a famously Democratic state would have produced the “funniest of all possible results” for conservatives. That was an “unlikely” outcome, but the prospect might have forced Democrats to spend millions to avoid it. The president’s intervention means the California campaign is much “less interesting” than it might have been. “It was funny while it lasted.”

California is already in the midst of the “weirdest campaign for governor in recent history,” Dan Waters said at CalMatters. But Trump’s support for Hilton “does not absolutely close the door” to an all-GOP general election. The “top tier” of Democrats includes Rep. Eric Swalwell, former Rep. Katie Porter and billionaire Tom Steyer. Without a breakthrough by one of them, Republicans could still win both slots despite “Trump’s tactically foolish intervention.” Time is running short. “The clock is ticking.”

What next?

Trump’s endorsement will help Hilton “coalesce conservative support” in the primary but could “become a liability” in a general election campaign against a Democrat, said The Associated Press. Hilton remains a long shot anyway: GOP candidates have “not won a statewide election in California in two decades.”

‘The ripple effects of NASA’s Artemis mission could be bigger than you think’

Scott Solomon at The Washington Post

“As influential” as Apollo’s “developments were for the second half of the 20th century, NASA’s Artemis program could eventually be more consequential,” says Scott Solomon. A “major objective” is to “develop and test technologies enabling a sustained presence in space that is less reliant on resupply missions from Earth,” and the “ripple effects of these plans will echo long into the future.” If “subsequent generations are born on other worlds,” they “could evolve into new human species.”

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‘Deepfake nudes are haunting America’s teens’

Jessica Grose at The New York Times

The “creation of deepfake nudes of minors” is “arguably much worse now that AI image generation tools are ubiquitous, and the images they create are even more realistic,” says Jessica Grose. Social media companies “could be doing a far better job of prioritizing the problem.” Parents can “have a conversation with your children about the fact that AI with nudifying capabilities exists,” but it “should not be the responsibility of individual parents to patrol the entire internet.”

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‘Are Native Americans birthright citizens? It’s no April Fool’s joke.’

Paul Rosier at The Philadelphia Inquirer

Pending “court decisions loom large in the debate over Native people’s ability to exercise their American citizenship to protect their Indigenous citizenship,” says Paul Rosier. Native Americans “have fought hard throughout the 20th century and into the 21st to first gain, and then defend, those dual citizenship rights.” At stake “for Native people is their ability to challenge threats to long-standing treaty rights, which preserve their ancestral homelands, cultural identity and religious freedom, their ability to be both Native and American.”

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‘The disillusioned college grads turning to the labor movement’

Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein at The New Republic

The “story of a highly educated yet disillusioned generation has been told repeatedly since roughly 2011,” says Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein. Why “are unions now appealing to the college-educated?” Many “college grads assumed they would work in jobs that harnessed their passions.” One “appeal of unions for the college-educated is the crumbling of the narrative that pushed people into universities: Upon close inspection, the story about college being an unimpeded good begins to look more like a fairy tale.”

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What happened

Republican Clay Fuller on Tuesday night won the special election to fill former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R) seat in Georgia’s heavily Republican 14th Congressional District. But he beat Democrat Shawn Harris by only about 12 percentage points, far short of President Donald Trump’s 37-point margin in 2024. That 25-point shift was the “largest leftward swing in a special election since the start of 2025,” The New York Times said. In Wisconsin, Democratic-backed Judge Chris Taylor won a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and Democrat Alicia Halvensleben narrowly won the mayoral race in Waukesha, a GOP-leaning Milwaukee suburb.

Who said what

Republicans were relieved to bolster their narrow House majority in Georgia’s “deep red” 14th District, The Associated Press said, while Democrats were hopeful this latest in their string of better-than-expected electoral results “will create momentum toward November’s midterm elections.” Democrats “notched their best Trump-era overperformance” even after “national Republicans made the remarkable decision to actually spend money on the race,” said CNN.

What next?

Taylor’s victory over Republican-backed Judge Maria Lazar means “liberals will have a 5-2 edge on the swing state’s highest court, putting the majority out of reach for conservatives until at least 2030,” NBC News said.

“In the end, cooler heads prevailed – at least for now,” said North America Correspondent Anthony Zurcher on BBC News. After Donald Trump’s threats to launch attacks on Iran that would wipe out the “whole civilisation” in the country, both countries agreed a two-week ceasefire.

The President has since claimed that this could lead to a “Golden Age of the Middle East!!!”, while Vice-President J. D. Vance called the ceasefire a “fragile truce”.

As peace talks are expected to take place in Pakistan, both sides have claimed the ascendancy, though uncertainty surrounding key elements of the agreement, such as the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian nuclear capabilities, have left many sceptical of continued peace.

What did the commentators say?

This ceasefire move is “check, not checkmate”, said Jonathan Sacerdoti in The Spectator. In fact, we shouldn’t even consider this a proper ceasefire; it is merely a “fragile” and “conditional” “pause” in the conflict, which is “already under strain”.

“Beneath the surface, fundamental disagreements persist” in a logistical sense. There has been “no clearly defined start time” and “key uncertainties” remain. The proposed 10-point plan issued by Iran contains “discrepancies” between its Farsi and English versions, “most notably” over the state of uranium enrichment, as well as ambiguity surrounding movement through the Strait of Hormuz. “If this is the Third World War, it is not over.”

“It’s TACO Tuesday!”, said David Charter in The Times, using the Trump Always Chickens Out acronym coined last year during Trump’s “on-off tariff threats”. Even if the ceasefire holds, the US has “left in place a cadre of battle-scarred leaders, no doubt harbouring thoughts of revenge”.

As “king of the ultimatum”, Trump has “played fast and loose in pursuit of his goals”, isolating himself from “shocked” allies, who are now “on their guard” more than ever before. The “reckless” flip-flopping could have “far-reaching consequences for America’s standing in the world”. On the world stage, countries may come to fear America’s “increasingly unpredictable behaviour” more than its “terrifying” military might.

“Both sides have good reason to hope the talks succeed, despite the obstacles,” said The Economist. For the US, the war is “deeply unpopular at home”, and Trump is “keen to have it finished” before his mid-May summit with Xi Jinping in China. “For Iran, renewed fighting would be catastrophic,” with America and Israel expected to continue striking key economic assets. The only outlier may be Israel, which maintained that the ceasefire does not include Lebanon.

“Diplomatic jujitsu” will be required to bridge the gap between the views of a final peace agreement held by Iran and the US, said David E. Sanger in The New York Times. It is hard to imagine that a settlement between the nations could be reached in “two years, much less two weeks”. Neither Trump’s “tactic of escalating his rhetoric to astronomical levels” or the “down-to-the-wire” negotiations have resolved the “fundamental issues that led to the war”. It took the Obama administration two-and-a-half years to negotiate the 2015 nuclear accord – which Trump tore up in 2018 – “and that was in peacetime”. Notwithstanding, “this negotiation will be held under the sword of a possible resumption of hostilities.”

The last-minute ceasefire is “in theory, a victory for real-estate geopolitics”, said Senior Foreign Correspondent Adrian Blomfield in The Telegraph. However, “as any real estate agent knows”, the devil is in the detail, and “closer inspection suggests Mr Trump’s triumph may not be quite as unalloyed as he claims”. Iran’s position is stronger than before the war, and has now “agreed to allow shipping through the chokepoint”, but “on its own terms and has not relinquished its claim to control it”. The country may have agreed to a ceasefire, but its negotiating position, “rhetorically at least, is now more hardline than before the war began”.

What next?

“What is certain is that the clock has been reset yet again,” said Sacerdoti in The Spectator. Providing the ceasefire holds, the “decisive moment” will come in two weeks’ time, when the “temporary pause” ends and the “question of whether it can be extended, or gives way to renewed fighting, will be answered”.

“The talks in Islamabad will be complicated, to say the least,” said The Economist. Significant work needs to be done, as the positions of both sides “could not be further apart”. “If both sides stick to their current positions, the talks could end up at the same impasse they reached just before the war in February.”

If talks were to fail, we would likely see an “uneasy return to the status quo”. Iran would face American sanctions and the continued “threat of further American strikes”, as well as remaining a “menace” in the Gulf region, and have “strong motivation to build a bomb”. “That would be a bad outcome for everyone: a weakened, hostile regime; an impoverished Iran; and a lingering threat to the global economy.”

‘Why Latinos join ICE’

Geraldo L. Cadava at The Atlantic

People have “treated the phenomenon of Latino border agents as something of a puzzle,” says Geraldo L. Cadava. Some have “argued that these Latinos come to embrace the mission of the Border Patrol through the process of socialization during training,” but a “simpler explanation is that Latinos who join ICE believe in the enforcement of immigration laws and that they are protecting, not antagonizing, their communities.” But this “of course doesn’t mean that other Latinos accept their logic.”

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‘The mall was an American experience. Not anymore.’

Blake Fontenay at USA Today

There was a “time, not so long ago, when malls felt like the centers of the cultural and social universe in American towns across the country,” says Blake Fontenay. Malls “used to be like watering holes on the Serengeti, where all sorts of creatures would gather and learn to coexist.” Time “has moved on. Consumer habits have changed,” but as “progress marches forward, we need to take stock of what we may be leaving behind.”

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‘To save lives in nursing homes, make inspections random’

Margaret Morganroth Gullette at The Boston Globe

Nursing homes “tend to increase staffing levels and expend more effort on patient care as a government inspection looms and cut back afterward,” says Margaret Morganroth Gullette. But the “predictability of inspections influences the homes’ timing: they’ll do what they need to do to clean up and then go back to business as usual.” Sending out “inspectors randomly would be a simple fix.” Another solution “could be to focus the surprise inspections on the homes with the most complaints.”

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‘Trump’s new cyber strategy is catnip for Beijing’

Ahana Datta Fasel at Foreign Policy

Even “best-in-class cyber capabilities rarely stay contained, and once exposed, they move rapidly,” says Ahana Datta Fasel. But Donald Trump’s “new six-pillar national cyber strategy” doubles down “on this risk, elevating offensive cyber operations as Washington’s primary instrument of deterrence.” This is a “dangerous gamble — one that Beijing, which has emerged as the prime cyber adversary to the United States, will see not just as an escalation but also as a legitimization of its own destabilizing posture.”

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Traditionally seen as occupying a more staid, straight-laced and “conservative” end of the American political spectrum, the modern Republican party has, under President Donald Trump, become a hub for many of the theories formerly relegated to the fringes of national discourse. Over the past decade, the conservative movement has elevated adherents to claims of demonic possession, extraterrestrial infiltration and, most recently, instantaneous transportation.

Just months after being nominated to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s core Office of Response and Recovery in late 2025, top FEMA official Gregg Phillips became the subject of an investigation into his “rise to prominence” as a “far-right activist” who “spread conspiracy theories,” said CNN. Phillips’ claim that he’d spontaneously teleported to a Waffle House restaurant in the city of Rome, Georgia, has “generated numerous headlines and at least one biting late-night comedy segment,” The New York Times said.

Rep. Tim Burchett: UFO disclosures the country would ‘come unglued’ over

“We need full disclosure,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn) said to Newsmax in April. “The public has a right to know, dadgummit, it’s your tax dollars. Let’s get it out there.” Asked by host Rob Finnerty about the aliens-exist claims from former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, Burchett, who sits on both the House Oversight and Foreign Affairs Committees, said he’d been “briefed by just about every alphabet agency there is.” If the national security apparatus were to “release the things that I’ve seen, you’d be up at night worrying about or thinking about it.”

One of Burchett’s recent classified briefings “would have set the earth” on fire and cause the country to “come unglued,” the Tennessee lawmaker said. Outer space revelations are “getting covered up, and the people that know are dying or disappearing.”

Tucker Carlson: demonic origins of atomic weaponry

Onetime Fox News juggernaut Tucker Carlson insists a nocturnal attack from supernatural forces once left him bloody and scarred while his family slept unmolested. The claim, made in footage from the unreleased “Christianities?” documentary, was accompanied by “creepy music, reenactments of Carlson firing a gun and dogs running through the woods in slow motion,” The Seattle Times said.

Nuclear weaponry is also “demonic,” Carlson said on the Bannons War Room podcast to former White House advisor Steve Bannon. Anyone who “claims otherwise” is “either ignorant or doing the bidding of the forces that created nuclear technology in the first place, which were not human forces obviously.”

Matt Gaetz: alien hybrid breeding program

Once a front-runner to lead the Trump administration’s Justice Department, former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz claimed on The Benny Show podcast in late March that the U.S. government is engaged in a human-extraterrestrial breeding program, with eyes on making inroads to the broader galactic community.

“An actual uniformed member of the United States Army briefed me,” Gaetz said to right-wing political commentator and podcaster Benny Johnson. Despite taking place in a “non-classified setting,” Gaetz said the soldier showed him “locations of hybrid breeding programs where captured aliens were breeding with humans to create some hybrid race that could engage in intergalactic communication.” During the interview, Gaetz “admitted he didn’t verify the whistleblower’s claims,” HuffPost said, but added he was told there were “between six and 12 breeding facilities around the country.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Jewish space lasers

Perhaps the most infamous Trump-era Republican flight of sci-fi fancy is that of former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who in 2018 claimed in a since-deleted Facebook note that a series of catastrophic California wildfires were potentially started by a beam from “space solar generators” under the nebulous control of the Rothschild banking firm — itself a longstanding shibboleth for antisemitic conspiracy theories. In a 2025 interview on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Greene said she “didn’t even know the Rothschilds were Jewish” and also claimed UFOs “could be fallen angels.”

Roger Stone: demon portal above White House

In 2022, longtime Trump ally and conservative operator Roger Stone claimed on the Eric Metaxas Radio Show that a “demonic portal” had appeared above the White House “around the time that the Bidens moved in.” Insisting he’d been initially skeptical, Stone said he was convinced, in part, by a friend’s sending him a “bunch of documents and also a bunch of notations from the Bible about portals,” adding that he had seen the alleged 1600 Pennsylvania Ave vortex “swirling like a cauldron.” Asked why the apparent rift in space-time hadn’t been reported on by mainstream news outlets, Stone said simply that the media “doesn’t cover a lot of things that are true.”

JD Vance: UFOs as demons

Asked during a recent interview with Benny Johnson about federal tracking of UFOs and other potentially extraterrestrial phenomena, Vice President JD Vance offered a slightly different take on whether or not advanced civilizations were visiting Earth: “I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons,” Vance said. Pressed to expand on his assertion about “celestial beings who fly around, who do weird things to people,” Vance said there is a “desire to describe everything celestial, everything otherworldly” as “aliens.” Put simply, said Slate, Vance “appears to believe that aliens visit Earth” and that those aliens “are actually demons.”

What happened

Minneapolis officials on Monday released footage from a city-owned security camera that seemingly contradicted the federal government’s initial account of an ICE agent’s nonfatal shooting of Venezuelan immigrant Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. The Justice Department dropped its felony charges against Sosa-Celis and his roommate Alfredo Aljorna in mid-February. But the “federal government had access to that video within hours of the shooting,” said The New York Times, which first obtained the footage, raising “questions about why it took weeks for the government’s case to fall apart.”

Who said what

The Department of Homeland Security’s initial statement said Sosa-Celis and Aljorna beat the ICE agent “with a shovel or broom” for about three minutes before the officer “fired a defensive shot to save his life.” But the video initially shows Sosa-Celis tossing the shovel aside as the encounter begins. The video then appears to show the agent tackling Aljorna outside their home, scuffling with him for 12 seconds, then firing through the front door after the migrants escape inside, wounding Sosa-Celis in the thigh.

When U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen moved to drop all charges, DHS said that “sworn testimony” from two officers appeared to contain “untruthful statements.” Federal prosecutors had “felt urgency to file charges” and didn’t watch the video until “almost three weeks” after charging Sosa-Celis and Aljorna, the Times said, citing a Justice Department official. Both spent weeks in jail and their girlfriends were sent to a detention center in Texas.

What next?

ICE said Monday that federal prosecutors are “actively investigating” the “false statements” made by the agents, who “may face termination of employment, as well as potential criminal prosecution.”

What happened

The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for the dismissal of Steve Bannon’s 2022 contempt of Congress conviction for defying a subpoena from the House’s Jan. 6 committee. After President Donald Trump returned to office, the Justice Department had asked the courts to dismiss the conviction of his longtime ally and former adviser “in the interests of justice.” Monday’s two-sentence ruling vacated a D.C. appellate court ruling upholding Bannon’s conviction and sent the case back to a lower court, with the expectation it will be tossed.

Who said what

Dismissing the case “would effectively wipe out” the conviction, The New York Times said, but it would “have little practical effect” since Bannon already served his four-month sentence. Trump’s Justice Department has “sought to undo a number of criminal cases” involving his allies, The Washington Post said. But it’s unlikely the Supreme Court acted “out of particular sympathy or ideological alignment” with Bannon, Stanford criminal law professor Robert Weisberg told the Post. “It’s simply saying as a kind of supervisory matter: let’s clean the court of cases the prosecution doesn’t want to pursue.”

What next?

Trump previously pardoned Bannon for criminal charges tied to defrauding donors to a charity, but Bannon “pleaded guilty in a New York state court” to similar charges, under a “deal that allowed him to avoid jail time,” The Associated Press said. “That conviction is unaffected by the Supreme Court action.”

The No Kings rallies held on March 28 “may be the turning point we desperately need,” said David Rothkopf in The Daily Beast. Over 8 million people attended the third wave of nationwide anti-Trump demonstrations, marking “the largest public protest in American history.” At 3,300 marches in both major cities and rural areas like Flatwoods, W.Va.; Port Huron, Mich.; and Lander, Wyo., seas of people expressed their disgust with the fact that “we now have a corrupt, racist, misogynist, mentally defective would-be king living in our White House.”

The show of political force “could reverberate in the 2026 midterms and beyond,” said Susan Page in USA Today. Since No Kings rallies began in June 2025, Republicans have suffered a string of stunning electoral defeats in special elections. “The record-setting protests” in big cities and small towns in all 50 states are fueling the Democrats’ optimism they’ll take control of the House and perhaps even the Senate in the November midterm elections.

The massive No Kings crowds were impressive because they included not just activists “but also people who rarely protest—or have never protested before in their lives,” said Zeeshan Aleem in MS.now. Still, these one-day rallies are “not enough.” If the grassroots organizers want genuine change, they need to engage in “some type of refusal to cooperate with unjust policy,” as civil rights protesters did in the 1960s and activists did in Minneapolis during ICE’s brutal immigration crackdown. Economic boycotts and “a general strike,” with nationwide workplace stoppages, would more effectively show business and political leaders that Americans are emphatically rejecting Trumpism.

In their current form, these rallies “resemble bad group therapy,” said Jonathan Alpert in The Wall Street Journal. They provide “validation, solidarity, and emotional release” for progressives who already hate Trump. Marching and chanting slogans “feels good in the moment—and accomplishes almost nothing.”

What the cynics don’t understand, said Will Bunch in The Philadelphia Inquirer, is that No Kings’ real value “is psychological.” These demonstrations admittedly are broad and unfocused in the injustices they are targeting, but they function as a “hope-building exercise” that reminds us that most Americans still want to live in a democracy. “All these people coming out,” one protester outside Philadelphia said. “It gives you hope.” Seeing such loud and tangible proof of Trump’s unpopularity makes a very real difference, because “dictatorship only succeeds with a demoralized public.”

What happened

In a remarkable break with centuries of tradition, President Trump personally attended Supreme Court arguments this week, listening in as his administration asked the justices to overturn birthright citizenship. During the questioning in Trump v. Barbara, Chief Justice John Roberts and most other justices cast doubt on the constitutionality of an executive order Trump issued in his first week in office, which requires proof of parental citizenship or permanent residency for a newborn to become a U.S. citizen. If upheld, the order could deny citizenship to some 250,000 babies a year.

Solicitor General John Sauer said the new trend of “birth tourism” required new restrictions, but the justices pushed back. “It’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution,” Roberts said, adding, “The examples you give to support strike me as very quirky.” Most justices were skeptical of Sauer’s arguments. But Justice Samuel Alito said an 1898 precedent—the Wong Kim Ark case, which concerned the U.S.-born son of Chinese immigrants—was not the last word on interpretations of the 14th Amendment, which grants birthright citizenship. We’re dealing with “something that was basically unknown at the time,” said Alito: “illegal immigration.”

The landmark hearing occurred days after the court considered arguments for a separate Trump priority: limiting mail-in balloting. In Watson v. RNC, the Republican National Committee argued that a 2020 Mississippi law allowing the counting of votes postmarked by Election Day but received up to five days later violates the federal law designating a single day for voting. The court’s conservative majority appeared skeptical of the Mississippi law and poised to strike it down, although the three liberal justices expressed fears that such a move could invalidate all early voting and override states’ constitutional powers to organize elections. Decisions on both cases are expected by July.

What the columnists said

For well over a century, said Maureen Groppe in USA Today, presidents, justices, and lawmakers agreed that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship “to nearly everyone.” The text is clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” The exceptions arise from the “jurisdiction” clause, which has always been read to exclude only those children born to diplomats or to invading soldiers. But on the very first day of his second term, Trump effectively gave himself the power to “redefine who is an American” by issuing an executive order aimed at the children of undocumented immigrants. Every lower court that has reviewed that order has ruled against it. Still, some of the conservative Supreme Court justices seemed to take the administration’s arguments seriously.

The outcome could hinge on what “domiciled” means, said Adam Liptak and Ann E. Marimow in The New York Times. In the Wong Kim Ark case, Wong’s parents were legal U.S. residents domiciled in California. Sauer argued that illegal immigrants and temporary visitors are not “domiciled” here, and therefore their babies are not citizens—“meaning the court could side with him and not overturn the precedent.” Trump’s presence “added to the drama” of an “emotionally charged” session, said Abbie VanSickle, also in the Times. Conservative justices asked tough questions of Cecillia Wang, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who is herself the recipient of birthright citizenship: Her Taiwanese parents were in the U.S. on student visas when she was born.

If the court were to find for the administration, the damage would “ripple far beyond undocumented immigrants,” said Scott Titshaw and Stephen Yale-Loehr in The Hill. Junking birthright citizenship would leave millions of children without legal status, many of them of Latino or Asian heritage. And because the executive order defines parents as “immediate biological progenitors,” it could deny citizenship to “children of same-sex couples” and those relying on surrogates. “The stakes could not be higher.”

Yet “Trump’s relationship with the Supreme Court has never been more toxic,” said James Romoser in The Wall Street Journal. Since the court ruled against his tariffs in February, “he has repeatedly disparaged the patriotism and loyalty of the justices who ruled against him.” Though birthright citizenship may be “a closer case than expected,” the administration “appears on shaky ground.” Trump seemed to realize that in the courtroom. After he left, he posted—inaccurately—on Truth Social: “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s effort to purge the Pentagon of so-called woke ideologies has earned him plaudits from the White House. But his “highly unusual” decision to strike four officers — two women and two Black men — from a recent promotions list has some asking whether the officers were “being singled out because of their race or gender,” said The New York Times. The incident has resurrected a question that has dogged the secretary since his confirmation: Is the Defense Department still the microcosmic American melting pot it once was?

Implying lack of talent

It’s “exceedingly rare” for one-star general promotion lists like the one recently edited by Hegseth to receive “intense scrutiny from a defense secretary,” said the Times. The secretary’s sentiments dovetail with the “broader Trump administration’s attacks” on federal government programs designed to “support and promote the concerns of minority populations,” said Military Times.

Having “honed his communication skills at Fox News,” where talent regularly says “outrageous things as a way of showing their viewers how eager they are to own the libs,” Hegseth has “long stewed” about women in military leadership, said The Atlantic. He has also “hammered on the idea of ‘merit’” to imply that minority officers have been “promoted because of their race rather than their talent.”

“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” said Hegseth on The Shawn Ryan Show podcast during his cabinet nomination process in late 2024. Anyone, no matter if they are a “general, admiral or whatever,” who was “involved in any of that DEI woke sh-t” has “got to go.” The secretary acted on those inclinations “almost immediately upon arriving at the Pentagon,” firing multiple senior officers, all Black or women, who were “then replaced with white men,” said The Atlantic.

As secretary, Hegseth has “moved quickly to remake the military as more white and more male,” said historian and journalist Garrett Graff at his Doomsday Scenario newsletter. In firing, among others, the “first Black man to lead a service branch, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. C.Q. Brown, and the first woman to serve as the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Lisa Franchetti,” Hegseth has “left the U.S. military without a single woman at a four-star rank.” In Hegseth’s Pentagon, an all-white, all-male Joint Chiefs of Staff is tasked with “overseeing a roughly 1.3 million-strong military that is about 20% female and 43% people of color.”

Erasing history

Hegseth’s recent promotion interference is “just the latest of numerous attacks on women,” said the Congressional Black Caucus and Democratic Women’s Caucus in a joint statement. Hegseth is “trying to erase Black and women’s leadership and history.” In that context, his effort “isn’t an anomaly” but rather part of a “coordinated and sustained strategy.”

To deny promotions “based on their race or gender” would “betray every principle of merit-based service that military officers uphold,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) on X. Such a move would “also violate federal law.”

It’s an age-old question in politics: guns or butter? Government resources are limited, so leaders have to prioritize military spending or social welfare programs or try to strike an uneasy balance between the two. President Donald Trump is choosing guns.

The federal government is “fighting wars,” said Trump at a private luncheon last week, per NBC News. “We can’t take care of day care.” The job of the federal government is to “guard the country.” But it’s “not possible” for it to “take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare” and similar social programs.

Trump’s 2027 budget proposal, released last week, reflects these priorities, said The Associated Press. The document advocates “boosting defense spending to $1.5 trillion” — an increase Trump “telegraphed” even before the war with Iran — while cutting nondefense programs by 10% by “shifting some responsibilities to state and local governments.”

Trump’s speech “clarifies” that military spending is a higher priority for him than the social spending that “many of his working-class supporters increasingly rely upon,” said The New York Times. Democrats seized on the comments, saying the president’s priorities are misplaced. Trump is “choosing to cut Medicaid and Medicare for more money for war,” said Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) on X.

What did the commentators say?

Republicans have the “worst budgeting idea possibly ever,” said Charles P. Pierce at Esquire. Voters are unlikely to reward a party “seeking to cut health care” while backing an “unpopular war launched by an extremely unpopular president.” It’s a politically “suicidal maneuver” that must have “every alarm bell ringing” in the heads of GOP incumbents fighting an uphill battle to keep control of Congress in this year’s midterm elections.

Health expenses are indeed a “major budgetary problem” for the federal government, said Aaron Blake at CNN. At $2 trillion a year, they are the “largest portion of federal spending” and growing. The president’s “biggest political problem” with the Iran war is “how much it’s costing,” according to a new CNN poll. There’s “precious little appetite” among voters to make sacrifices for the conflict. Trump chose perhaps the “most politically unhelpful terms imaginable” by pitting defense spending against child care.

Washington’s preference for “spending on butter over guns” has resulted in a “shrunken military industrial base” that has weakened U.S. defense capabilities, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. The proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget is thus a “credit” to Trump, doubling military spending from its 2021 levels. There are “savings to be had by cutting fraud in Medicaid and other welfare programs,” a necessary step in the face of the “multiplying threats America faces.”

What next?

Trump’s proposed budget faces tough sledding in Congress. “Supersizing” the military budget while “slashing” domestic spending “could cost Republicans in the coming midterms,” especially if voters hold the GOP responsible for “economic consequences of the Iran war,” said Politico. Trump may struggle to “build enough political will” among Republicans to “fulfill his defense goals.”

‘Second chances cannot be reserved for the privileged few’

Ken Oliver at Newsweek

Americans “see themselves as believers in second chances,” but for “millions of ordinary people with arrest or conviction records, there is no comparable second chance,” says Ken Oliver. Every “April, Second Chance Month asks Americans to consider a simple question: What should happen after justice has been served?” In “theory, the answer is straightforward: a person is held accountable, pays their debt to society and then has the opportunity to move forward.” In “practice, that’s rarely how it works.”

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‘The embarrassing lesson of Pam Bondi’s confirmation hearing’

Mary McCord at MS NOW

Maybe “now that Pam Bondi is gone, she will reflect on where and why she went astray,” says Mary McCord. Having “seen Bondi promote Donald Trump’s fraudulent election claims on Fox TV and elsewhere,” many were “dubious about her ability to uphold the ideals of the Department of Justice.” Some have “wondered whether Bondi’s supporters at that hearing have had regrets as they’ve watched her actions over the past 14 months stray far from their predictions.”

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‘Why the next era of growth must be built around humans’

Piyachart (Arm) Isarabhakdee at Time

While “seeds might be healthy and sunlight is abundant, without the conditions for roots to take hold, growth can never happen,” and the “same goes for today’s economy,” says Piyachart (Arm) Isarabhakdee. Capitalism’s “initial objective was productivity expansion,” but “today growth, modeled by GDP, often driven by manufacturing output, does not automatically translate into better living conditions, well-being or happiness.” Too “often, it has, in fact, widened inequality and accelerated environmental degradation.”

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‘How the German right sees Iran’

Filip Gaspar at The American Conservative

The Iran war “has become a test for Germany’s strategic independence and economic resilience,” and “Germany, so far, appears to be failing the test,” says Filip Gaspar. As Germans “debate the issue and reconsider past policy choices, no party has seized the moment more deliberately than the Alternative for Germany, now one of the strongest political forces and the clearest nationalist challenge to Berlin’s governing consensus.” This is “yet another sign of deeper disorder within the Western alliance.”

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What happened

Pope Leo XIV on Sunday celebrated his first Easter as pontiff by urging leaders “who have the power to unleash wars” to instead “choose peace!” President Donald Trump invoked God in obscenity-laced social media posts threatening to bomb all of Iran’s power plants and bridges unless it agreed to open the Strait of Hormuz by Monday evening. Indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets constitutes a war crime.

Who said what

“Time is running out — 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!” Trump posted over the weekend. “Open the F--kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH!” the president wrote, adding: “Praise be to Allah.” Trump’s post was “notable” for both its “vulgar language” and “somewhat desperate-sounding tone,” said The New York Times. It “would have stood out on any day, much less on what most Christians consider the holiest day of the year.”

The Vatican has become “alarmed” at the Trump administration’s “invocations of God” to “defend” the Iran war, The Washington Post said. Pope Leo has generally been “careful in his language,” leaving “more overt criticism” to U.S. bishops and “other senior proxies,” but he has “grown blunter in pushing back against suggestions that divine providence supports the use of force or violence.” In his traditional Urbi et Orbi blessing, Leo prayed that “those who have weapons lay them down” and choose a peace not “imposed by force” or the “desire to dominate others,” but through “dialogue.”

Some critics were more direct. Trump “is not a Christian,” former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a former Trump ally, said on social media over a screenshot of his Easter post. “Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness.”

What next?

Before Trump, no “other recent American president has talked so openly about committing potential war crimes,” the Times said, and his “language and actions could have far-reaching consequences” for the U.S., Iran and the world. A “defiant Iran” responded to Trump’s threats by striking “infrastructure targets in neighboring Gulf Arab countries” and threatening to “restrict another heavily used waterway,” The Associated Press said.

The EU’s longest-serving current head of government has turned his country from a liberal democracy into something quite different. Orbán has been variously described as a populist strongman, an authoritarian capitalist, a “soft autocrat” and a “21st-century dictator”.

He himself announced in 2014 that he was building an “illiberal state”, parting from “Western European dogmas” and learning from Turkey, Russia and China. By then his Fidesz party had already rewritten Hungary’s constitution, modified its electoral system, and packed the courts and other institutions with party loyalists. Orbán's Hungary is seen as an inspiration to the populist Right across Europe and in the US, particularly to Donald Trump.

What is Orbán’s background?

Born in 1963, in a village some 35 miles west of Budapest where his father worked on a collective farm, he went on to study law in Budapest, and political philosophy at Oxford, on a scholarship. A former member of the Young Communists, he became a fierce critic of communist rule, co-founding Fidesz – originally a liberal centre-left youth movement – which demanded free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

In 1998, he led Fidesz to electoral victory, becoming Europe's youngest prime minister. A year later, Hungary joined Nato. By then, Orbán had already set about transforming Fidesz into a conservative nationalist party; but in 2002, he lost his re-election campaign to a Socialist coalition. According to his biographer, he resolved to return to power and change “the rules of the game” so that he’d never lose again.

How did he do that?

Fidesz was elected in 2010 with 53% of the vote, but quirks of seat distribution gave it a two-thirds majority – giving Orbán, as PM, considerable power to reshape the country. Ahead of the 2014 election, Fidesz passed a new electoral law that cut the number of seats from 386 to 199; districts were redrawn behind closed doors to favour Fidesz's rural strongholds. Voting rights were granted to ethnic Hungarians living in neighbouring countries, who voted over 95% for Fidesz.

He quickly muzzled the free press. In 2010, a new law created a media council with the power to levy heavy fines on outlets for “unbalanced” anti-government reporting. The biggest opposition newspaper, Népszabadság, was bought then shuttered in 2016 by a company linked to one of the PM's allies; TV and radio stations and websites also came under the control of friendly oligarchs. It’s estimated that today, Fidesz directly or indirectly controls 80% to 90% of the media.

Did Hungarians approve of this?

To a large extent, yes. Elections are free, if not fair, in the sense that opposition politicians are allowed to run, and ballots are counted correctly. And Fidesz has won three more general elections since 2010, never gaining less than 49% of the vote. Orbán has tried to unite the nation against perceived enemies, external and internal: refugees, particularly during the 2015 migrant crisis; the EU, with its “oppressive”, “imperial” system; gay people; “globalists” such as George Soros, the Hungarian-born US financier who has funded liberal causes across the world (and who paid for Orbán’s Oxford scholarship); and, more recently, Ukraine.

Orbán portrays Hungary as a “Christian democracy” under continual, existential threat – a canny policy in a country with a long history of foreign domination at the hands of Ottomans, Habsburgs and Soviets. Fidesz ideology is based on the pillars of “God, Nation and Family”: LGBTQ+ rights have been curtailed, and pro-natal tax breaks have been given to incentivise women to have children.

How are his relations with the EU?

Orbán's flouting of democratic norms has meant constant conflict with Brussels. In 2022, the EU parliament passed a symbolic resolution declaring Hungary to be a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy”. Brussels has frozen billions of euros in EU funding, and has launched legal challenges against laws passed by Fidesz; but has so far stopped short of invoking the “nuclear option” of suspending its voting rights in the European Council. Orbán has continually sought to hobble EU action against Russia, a close ally that provides nuclear technology, and low-priced oil and gas to Hungary.

In February, Orbán used veto powers to block a €90 billion EU aid package to Ukraine, which he blames for disrupting oil supplies, and also claims to view as a military threat. He said this month that Hungarians should “fear the EU more than Russia”.

Why is his rule under threat now?

In the elections on 12 April, Orbán faces a challenge from Tisza, the centre-right opposition party led by Péter Magyar, formerly of Fidesz.

The “Orbán model” relied on delivering rising living standards in return for political dominance; but the economy has stagnated and living standards have declined. Magyar’s politics are not dissimilar to Orbán's, but he paints the PM’s rule as corrupt and “feudalistic” – with some justification. Hungary is often described as a kleptocracy. A circle of oligarchs tied to Orbán dominates the economy and lucrative public contracts. Orbán’s son-in-law is one of Hungary's richest men. A recent scandal concerns György Matolcsy, the former national bank chief, who spent €210 million renovating the bank, and had a deluxe bathroom made for himself, complete with a golden toilet brush. The golden toilet brush has become a symbol of Orbán’s elite.

Will Orbán lose?

Tisza is leading by at least 10 percentage points in independent polls, probably enough to offset Fidesz’s structural advantages. However, while Orbán and Fidesz retain control of much of the media and the machinery of state, the outcome, and the PM’s willingness to accept defeat, are far from certain.

From his podium at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Donald Trump reminded his base how he differed from past presidents. “It turned out that I was able to stop wars from happening,” he said.

That was in 2024, said Natalie Allison at The Washington Post. A year later, the newly installed president was back at CPAC, boasting about being “a peacemaker, not a conqueror”.

Notable absences

This year, Trump skipped the jamboree for the first time in a decade: he was too busy managing the war with Iran he’d launched a month earlier. And he wasn’t the only high-profile no show, said Katy Balls in The Sunday Times. At the last event, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio spoke, and Elon Musk ramped up the carnival atmosphere by brandishing a chainsaw on stage; this time, one attendee noted that there were more journalists present than politicians. That the event was rather more subdued than usual was due to several factors – including its relocation from DC to Texas; but the lack of buzz was indicative of the troubled state of the GOP as it gears up for the midterms.

A little over a year into his second term, Trump is discovering that for all his efforts to extend his authority, there are still constraints on what he can do, said Gerard Baker in The Times. Public revulsion has forced him to temper his migrant deportation policy; the Supreme Court has struck out his signature tariffs policy; the markets are squealing about the war in Iran. And even in his own backyard, the voters are restive: in late March, a Florida Democrat seized a red seat that takes in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

Base betrayal

The die-hards remain intensely loyal, said Elaine Godfrey in The Atlantic, but polls show that Trump is losing support among the coalition of younger Americans and Latinos that gave him his victory in 2024. Many already felt betrayed by his attempt to block the Epstein files and by the impact of his Big Beautiful Bill on the deficit. Now, they’re furious that he has taken the US into a war that is costing billions and further driving up the cost of living.

In the manosphere, prominent voices who rallied behind his “anti-woke” rhetoric in 2024 are complaining that Americans were duped. The podcaster Joe Rogan has called the war “insane, based on what [Trump] ran on”. There is dissent within Maga too, some of which has veered into antisemitism: Tucker Carlson and others have been peddling the line that Israel manipulated Trump into the war. Disenchanted Trump fans are unlikely to vote Democrat in November; but they might easily just tune out of the election – and so inadvertently deliver a “blue wave”.

As Donald Trump’s war wears on, it becomes increasingly clear that he has no “overarching strategy” and is now fighting a war of attrition, said The Guardian.

America is still striking at Iranian targets while building up troops in the region. Iran, in turn, keeps attacking Israel and the Gulf states. Last week, it hit a US airbase in Saudi Arabia, injuring 12 US personnel and causing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of damage. Tehran’s allies in Yemen have now entered the fray. The Strait of Hormuz remains shut. And while his officials talk about peace being “weeks, not months” away, Trump is still warning of far worse to come as he “searches for leverage”.

This week, the president said that the US could capture or “obliterate” Iran’s oil export hub, Kharg Island, and possibly even target Iran's energy and water systems – “war crimes by another name”.

Miles apart

Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s energy infrastructure last month, said Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail, only to row back, saying there would be no strikes for ten days to allow time for talks. That deadline elapses on Monday, but all the evidence suggests that he had no plan and was simply “playing for time”. And while he claims that Tehran is “begging for a deal”, the Iranians seem to think they have him “on the run”, and deny talks are even taking place.

Even if meaningful negotiations were on the horizon, the two sides are miles apart, said Richard Spencer in The Times. Iran is demanding not only an end to sanctions, but “an end to all attacks, including Israel’s, on Hamas, Hezbollah and other arms of the ‘resistance’”. It also wants reparations, and “sovereignty” over the Strait of Hormuz – a hint that it plans to charge for access, as Egypt does with the Suez Canal. The US, in turn, insists that Iran end its nuclear programme; give up its enriched uranium; and cut off support to its proxies.

When it comes to Trump’s rhetoric, a pattern is emerging, said Emily Maitlis in The i Paper. He reserves his most bellicose threats for the weekend, when the financial markets are closed, then starts talking up the possibility of peace so that the outlook seems more positive by the time traders are back at their desks. The markets, though, are getting wise to this tactic.

‘Escalate or talk’

As for Tehran, it seems unmoved by Trump’s threats. The fact is, Iran is far more capable than the US of both withstanding and inflicting pain, said The Economist. While the world counts the economic costs of this war, the regime is “making a mint” from sanctions-busting oil sales. Domestically, its hardline Revolutionary Guards remain in control. And overseas, its proxies continue to do its bidding: last Saturday, the Houthis provided a stark reminder of their capacity to ramp up the chaos when they fired missiles at Israel.

Trump, by contrast, is flailing. “Despite operational successes and his nonsensical claim of having already changed the regime in Tehran, he has yet to win any substantive gains from the fighting.” His choice now is to “escalate or talk”.

Given the risks of escalation, Trump will probably seek a deal to reopen Hormuz, said Gideon Rachman in the FT. But any outcome that leaves Iran with practical control over Gulf energy exports would be deeply unpopular with those states. It has even been suggested that the UAE and Saudi Arabia could “join the conflict rather than accept that outcome”.

‘The regime is hurting’

Trump will find the Iranians to be very tough negotiators, said Matthew Gould in The Times. The regime has shown its capacity before to withstand “repeated blows”, and is determined to stay in power no matter how much pain it causes its people. By contrast, Trump will be worrying about popular opinion ahead of the midterms. He is reportedly already “bored” with the conflict. And if it chooses, Tehran can use its trigger-happy proxies to derail the talks at any moment. That said, Iran has a habit of overplaying its hand and, “for all its bravado, the regime is hurting”.

Pakistan, in its role as mediator, has intensified its diplomatic efforts over the past week, said Saeed Shah in The Guardian; but Tehran is so far refusing to engage in face-to-face talks with US officials. Trump began the war confident that it wouldn’t take long to topple the Iranian regime, said Steve Bloomfield in The Observer. Its nuclear programme had been weakened, its allies had been hobbled, so the US and Israel seized the moment. Yet in the past five weeks, the mullahs have actually tightened their grip on power; and it’s the ordinary Iranians, who Trump promised to save, who will pay the price for this war. If it ends soon, other economies will bounce back. Iran could feel the impact for generations to come.

‘Why Lebanon should join the International Criminal Court’

Mark Kersten at Al Jazeera

What “will international law have to say about the violence and atrocities being waged against the Lebanese people?” says Mark Kersten. The “answer will depend in large part on whether Lebanon finally decides, as Palestine did, to join the International Criminal Court (ICC).” The ICC can “offer a modicum of accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Lebanon.” This “would also provide Lebanese citizens with an independent, impartial and international forum.”

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‘How Giorgia Meloni fell to Earth’

Anna Momigliano at The New York Times

For “three years, Giorgia Meloni’s leadership of Italy has seemed unshakable,” says Anna Momigliano. Since the “beginning of Mr. Trump’s second term, she has positioned herself as someone who can curry his favor and avoid his retaliations.” But as Trump’s “popularity craters to new lows in Europe, and the continent begins to find a backbone in its dealings with him, Ms. Meloni is discovering that being a favorite of the U.S. president can be a liability, too.”

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‘We should stop trying to copy unhappy America’

Linda McQuaig at the Toronto Star

Canada has “declined all the way down to the 25th spot when it comes to something that’s really important — happiness,” says Linda McQuaid. In “many ways, happiness is a more meaningful measure of our overall national success than the always-highlighted economic measure of GDP per capita.” Debate is “dominated by talk of how Canada measures up economically, whether we’re as rich as the United States.” The “focus is rarely on whether” Canada’s “social supports are strong enough.”

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‘Like journalists, prosecutors shaped a distorted view of crime. They can help fix it, too.’

Kelly McBride at the Poynter Institute

Journalists “have misled the public about crime and are now trying to correct the problem,” and “prosecuting attorneys have been guilty of many of the same sins,” says Kelly McBride. Both “talk about crime mostly when a crime has occurred.” These “journalists and prosecutors (and police, too) inadvertently reinforce the public perception that crime is a constant, growing threat — even though we know the opposite is true.” This “shapes how people understand their own safety and the policies they support.”

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What happened

Environmental Protection Agency chief Lee Zeldin on Thursday said his agency has added microplastics and pharmaceuticals to a draft list of contaminants in drinking water, describing it as a “historic step” for the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a MAHA champion, joined Zeldin at Thursday’s briefing to announce a $144 million initiative to study and measure microplastics in drinking water.

Who said what

“This is a direct response to the concern of millions of Americans, who have long demanded answers about what they and their families are drinking every day,” said Zeldin at the briefing. The EPA is required to update the Contaminant Candidate List every five years under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Adding microplastics and pharmaceuticals to the list “gives local regulators a tool to evaluate risks in their water supply,” NPR said, but it “doesn’t actually guarantee” research or contaminant limits. In fact, the EPA “rarely moves pollutants off the list” and into regulatory action, The Associated Press said. “I think it’s fair to call this theater,” Katherine O’Brien, an attorney with nonprofit Earthjustice, told NPR, especially as “these very same agencies” are doing “real harm” by “undermining actual legal protections” against toxic chemicals in drinking water and food. “This is an important first step,” Gannon University plastic pollution researcher Sherri Mason told NPR, “and I think we should recognize that.”

What next?

The draft Contaminant Candidate List will be open for public comment for 60 days and is expected to be finalized by mid-November.