‘The dangerous myth of flexibility’

David Weil at The American Prospect

Schedule flexibility has become the “lynchpin of a well-traveled myth that corporations have spun to their employees, policymakers and the public,” says David Weil. But with AI being “explored as a replacement for many white-collar jobs, and the gig work model continuing its global expansion into new sectors like healthcare, information technology, staffing, hospitality and childcare, the flexibility myth now threatens the hard-won rights and protections afforded to tens of millions of working people.” While companies like “Uber and Lyft insist” that flexibility benefits their drivers, it actually “benefits Uber and Lyft.”

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‘Republicans lean into anti-Asian racism ahead of midterms’

Ja’han Jones at MS NOW

Some conservatives are “resorting to anti-Asian racism and anti-Chinese xenophobia as the Republican Party faces a potential shellacking in this year’s midterms,” says Ja’han Jones. The attacks “underscore the exploitative posture that some in the GOP have taken toward Asian Americans.” Polls have “shown Americans broadly oppose President Donald Trump and the GOP’s agenda,” so it “seems the party is leaning into voter suppression gambits and overt racism as it tries to maintain power.”

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‘Will Iraq’s new prime minister really take on corruption?’

Mina Al-Oraibi at Foreign Policy

Corruption has “continued to grow” in Iraq, and even “wide-ranging arrests do not represent a majority of those who have siphoned money from the Iraqi state,” says Mina Al-Oraibi. Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi is “personally overseeing the anti-corruption cases” and “needs to do this in part because he remains a weak candidate.” But a “wide-ranging and impartial effort to eliminate all corruption would take time,” and al-Zaidi has been in office for “less than two months.”

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‘The tech bro-ification of marketing’

Miranda Shanahan at Time

The “tech bro-ification of marketing is underway,” says Miranda Shanahan. Beneath this “trend lies a broader pattern around how work is named, coded and valued.” The “marketing industry is a broad church, but decades of cultural shorthand have flattened it into something quite specific.” The “first inkling of recalibration came when tech bros suddenly started emphasizing the importance of taste.” It “might not seem that deep, but marketing’s rebrand is part of a bigger pattern.”

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What happened

President Donald Trump Thursday pushed out the remaining three members of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, firing the two Democratic commissioners while allowing the Republican member to resign. The fourth member, a Republican, quit in April to join the Heritage Foundation.

Who said what

The EAC, an independent agency created in 2002, is a “crucial guardrail for ensuring election security across the country,” The New York Times said. Trump’s ouster of its leadership is an “apparent move to assert control over voting ahead of the midterms,” Politico said, and “election officials across the country expressed various degrees of confusion and alarm.” Trump issued executive orders last year to require proof of citizenship on the EAC-maintained national voter registration form and to “block the EAC from distributing funds to states that did not adjust voter forms to have a citizenship check,” but were both “blocked in court.”

What next?

The Supreme Court last month gave Trump “precedence” to “remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring ​every legal vote is counted,” a White House official said Thursday. Without at least three Senate-confirmed “bipartisan replacements,” NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice said, the EAC “cannot lawfully make any decisions that affect how Americans vote.”

What happened

The Department of Homeland Security Thursday said that the ICE agents who killed Houston homebuilder Lorenzo Salgado Araujo on Monday were not wearing body cameras and were searching for different migrants in a white van when they stopped him and three of his work crew.

The fatal shooting of Salgado Araujo, a Mexican father of three who had lived in Houston for 35 years, “has incited outrage in Texas and beyond,” The New York Times said. The Mexican government Thursday said it will request U.S. criminal charges over the deaths of Salgado Araujo and 16 other Mexicans who died in ICE custody or during President Donald Trump’s immigration operations.

Who said what

ICE has provided no evidence to support its initial claim that Salgado Araujo “weaponized his vehicle” and the agent shot him in “self-defense,” and similar previous assertions have been contradicted by video. DHS Thursday said the agents involved had not yet been issued body cameras and “blamed Democrats for holding them up” with a government shutdown, The Texas Tribune said. DHS “has more money than it knows what to do with and still can’t manage basic accountability,” said Rep. Christian Menefee (D-Texas).

What next?

Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said his office is investigating Salgado Araujo’s death, though without access to federal evidence. No clear video or photos of the shooting have emerged. And the three eyewitnesses from the van are in detention and “being pressured to sign self-deportation orders,” League of United Latin American Citizens CEO Juan Proaño told The New Republic.

‘What a viral photo of white supremacists on the Metro reveals’

Theodore R. Johnson at The Washington Post

A photo of “white supremacist group Patriot Front” members inside a “packed Metro subway car” in Washington, D.C., standing alongside a “young Black woman, perfectly alone,” was “evoking imagery from the civil rights era on the day the country marked its 250th anniversary,” says Theodore R. Johnson. Above ground, there were “celebrations of American exceptionalism; beneath the surface, though, there was evidence of a country regressing — or one that hasn’t changed as much as it thought.”

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‘Who wants to tax a billionaire?’

Soumaya Keynes at the Financial Times

Californians will “vote on a 5% tax on billionaires’ wealth,” and in “theory this is a marvelous opportunity for rich economic discussion,” says Soumaya Keynes. But some “worry the choice will be reduced to a grim question: Are you a jealous wealth-basher or a shameless shill for the rich?” Some billionaires themselves are “keeping quiet, perhaps hoping that if California’s version passes, it will at least quieten the demands for them to pay their fair share.”

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‘The World Cup is exposing the contradictions of national identity’

Mohamad Elmasry at Al Jazeera

The 2026 World Cup has “demonstrated, perhaps as clearly as any global event can, that modern national identity is complex, contested and far from straightforward,” says Mohamad Elmasry. Many of the “players on the national teams” come “from immigrant families.” In an “era of increasingly exclusionary nationalist politics in North America and Europe, some of the countries engaged in the most intense debates about national identity are being represented on the world’s biggest sporting stage by multicultural teams.”

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‘How Lebanon continues to confound the US’

Geoffrey Aronson at The American Conservative

The “recent memorandum of understanding between Israel and Lebanon is not the first time the U.S. has placed itself at the center of Lebanese affairs,” says Geoffrey Aronson. These “efforts attest to Lebanon’s outsized ability to engage Washington at the highest level, and highlight the at best limited, short-term effectiveness of that involvement.” Hezbollah’s “expansive role in Lebanon today reflects the political and military mobilization of Lebanon’s historically underserved Shia community, especially in the south.”

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What happened

A federal judge in Manhattan Thursday ordered President Donald Trump to pay writer E. Jean Carroll the $5 million a jury awarded her in 2023 for sexual abuse and defamation. Trump “has been stalling this case for years,” U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said in Thursday’s ruling, and after the Supreme Court last week denied his appeal of the verdict, “it is time ⁠for him to ‘do equity’ and pay the judgment.”

Who said what

Trump’s legal team had asked Kaplan to pause releasing the $5.8 million held in escrow — Trump’s deposit plus interest — until the Supreme Court decided whether to reconsider his appeal. Kaplan denied the request. In the “highly unlikely ​event” the justices accepted his petition and overturned the verdict, he wrote, Trump could sue to “recover any funds erroneously disbursed.” The “American People” stand with Trump and “demand an immediate end to all of the Witch Hunts, including the Democrat-funded travesty of the Carroll Hoaxes,” Trump’s legal team said in a statement.

What next?

The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals Thursday night rejected an emergency motion by Trump to prevent the release of the money. “Carroll has waited more than three years for a jury’s verdict to be paid,” her lawyers wrote in an appellate filing. “She should not have to wait any longer.”

What happened

President Donald Trump Wednesday ended the two-day NATO summit in Turkey with warm words for U.S. allies, a promise to let Ukraine produce Patriot air-defense missiles and renewed fighting with Iran. After declaring the ceasefire “over,” Trump ordered a second night of strikes on Iran, which again fired at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar. Iran’s leaders are “scum” and “sick people,” Trump told reporters. If Iran keeps bombing ships in the Strait of Hormuz, he said on social media, the “retribution” will “get much worse!”

Who said what

Trump began the NATO summit “publicly bashing the alliance and reciting a list of grievances,” Politico said, but “behind closed doors” he “was far more positive” with fellow leaders. “There was a lot of love in that room,” Trump told reporters. “A lot of unity.” The Ankara summit “amounted to a master class in how to manage a mercurial president and minimize damage,” CNN said. “It’s a lesson clearly not absorbed by, or of much interest to, Iran.”

What next?

The reignited battle over the Strait of Hormuz reflects a “divide among Iran’s leadership” between “hard-liners seeking lasting control of the waterway” and “pragmatists” seeking sanctions relief, The Associated Press said. It also leaves Trump back “mired in an unpopular war that he cannot seem to end,” The Washington Post said, “with midterm elections less than four months away.”

What happened

Graham Platner Wednesday suspended his campaign to unseat Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), saying in a video he intended to file “paperwork to withdraw” from the pivotal Senate race. The Maine Democratic Party shortly before had announced that if Platner bowed out, his replacement would be chosen at an expedited party convention.

Platner’s political and financial support evaporated Monday after an ex-girlfriend accused him of rape, and his last major backer, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), urged him to quit the race on Tuesday.

Who said what

“We believe that for the movement to continue, it can’t be me,” Platner said in his 11-minute exit video. “I know that some will think it’s an admission of guilt, and it most certainly is not.” Former state Sen. Troy Jackson, brewery owner Dan Kleban and ex-congressional staffer Jordan Wood jumped in the race Wednesday, and more candidates are expected.

“Platner and his supporters have sought to influence who replaces him,” The Washington Post said, but few potential successors “appear hungry for his endorsement,” and some ruled it out. For all the new uncertainty, Platner’s exit “will be an enormous break for Democrats,” Nate Cohn said at The New York Times. Few of the likely replacements are “especially well known,” but “in this political environment,” Collins “would be in jeopardy against any one of them.”

What next?

The pop-up Democratic convention, to be held before July 27, will include “500 delegates elected proportionally by county committees” and the roughly 100 state party committee members, said the Bangor Daily News.

Democratic socialists are winning Democratic primaries and Republicans see an opportunity. GOP candidates are increasingly tagging their rivals as “communists,” an approach embraced by President Donald Trump. The United States “did not fight communism on battlefields across the world only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America,” Trump said during his Independence Day speech. Democrats say the attacks harken back to discredited “red-baiting” smears of earlier eras. Will the accusations help the GOP in this fall’s midterm elections?

What did the commentators say?

The attacks come as U.S. voters increasingly “take on a positive view of socialism,” said The Washington Post. The longstanding Republican accusation that Democrats are socialists is no longer an “attack that stings as much,” GOP strategist Alex Conant said to the outlet. That leaves conservatives trying a message they hope will work with voters “old enough to remember Soviet-era nuclear drills and spy dramas,” said Axios. Trump himself “came of age” during the Cold War, historian Beverly Gage said to the publication. Whether accusing opponents of being communists resonates with younger voters is an open question, however. “Is the United States actually still susceptible to that kind of political language?"

“It was only a matter of time before Donald Trump went full Joe McCarthy,” Heather Digby Parton said at Salon. Republicans have used “red scare” tactics for nearly a century, and McCarthy’s right-hand man was a lawyer named Roy Cohn who later mentored Trump. The challenge for Republicans is that the policies advocated by upstart Democrats are “standard issue Bernie Sanders-style progressivism” that is popular among young voters and “some of the more populist MAGA types.” That ideology “certainly isn’t communism.”

Despite “media dismissals,” it is actually true that the “majority of the Democratic Socialists of America’s leadership identifies with Marxist ideology,” said Stu Smith at City Journal. The DSA was “not always” aligned with communism, but the organization’s recent “leftward shift” has attracted “members with Communist political tendencies.” Trump is “correct” in linking communism to the DSA’s “toehold in the Democratic Party,” said Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic. But the president’s demand for partial government stakes in companies such as U.S. Steel, Nvidia and OpenAI reveals he has “more in common with Communists than his hostile rhetoric lets on.”

Communist accusations against Democrats are “laughably false,” Sara Pequeño said at USA Today. National Democrats “barely want” DSA members in the party. “Why on earth would they suddenly be welcoming Marxist theory with open arms?”

What next?

Polls show “most Americans disapprove” of Trump’s job performance but there are also “warning signs” for Democrats, said USA Today. A majority of battleground state voters say Democrats are “too far to the left,” a sign Republicans “could find fertile ground” by raising the specter of communism. Democrats could be hurt if the midterms become a “referendum on the craziest ideas” of democratic socialist candidates, Third Way’s Matt Bennett said to the outlet.

‘The end of reading is here’

Rose Horowitch at The Atlantic

“Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to,” says Rose Horowitch. Even “demographics that traditionally read the most — retirees, women and college graduates — have seen a collapse,” and the “books that people do read are simpler than they used to be.” People are “losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension.” America “isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.” The “people who make a living from words are not the only ones who lose out in a postliterate age.”

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‘A tax too far: Don’t punish immigrants sending money to family’

Marcos Cruz at The Hill

Immigrants “want to know how to safely transfer money to relatives” overseas, as these remittances “create a massive flow of capital out of wealthy nations and into lower- and middle-income countries,” says Marcos Cruz. This year, a “new 1% excise tax was added on money sent abroad,” and “although a 1% tax appears small when expressed as a decimal, its implications are strategic.” By “taxing remittances and lowering incomes,” Washington will have “worsened the root cause of the immigration problem.”

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‘The US had the biggest opportunity in the history of American soccer. They wasted it.’

Alexander Abnos at The Guardian

What do people think “about what the U.S. produced on Monday night during their 4-1 defeat against Belgium?” says Alexander Abnos. What “inspiration was there to be found in the team’s disjointed moves forward, of the missed defensive assignments, of the lack of poise the team played with?” Millions were “tuning in on Monday night for their first U.S. men’s national team experience,” and “their first impression was a side that was not up to the task.”

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‘Stop mourning the old NATO. Build the new one.’

Galip Dalay at Time

This “must be the moment Europe stops mourning the alliance it once knew and begins building the one it actually needs,” says Galip Dalay. Europe should “strengthen the collective weight of European NATO members, not the European Union members or EU as an institution alone, within the alliance.” Europe “needs a continent-wide security architecture” and an “honest reckoning with an uncomfortable truth: any post-American security framework cannot simply replicate the existing NATO-centric order.”

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What happened

An ICE agent fatally shot a Houston man in his car early Tuesday during a “targeted enforcement operation,” the agency said in a statement. “From information we are receiving,” Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, “refused to follow multiple verbal commands and weaponized his vehicle,” causing the agent to fire “in self-defense.” Local officials and civil rights groups demanded that ICE release all video footage as part of an independent investigation.

Who said what

Araujo’s family said the father of three was a construction worker who had been in the U.S. for 35 years and was in the process of getting his work permit. In most of the 20 recent cases where immigration agents have shot people in their cars, The New York Times said, officials said it was justified “because the vehicles had been ‘weaponized’ and the agents’ lives were in danger.”

ICE’s account of Araujo’s killing “echoed many of the statements the agency quickly issued in other shootings,” The Washington Post said. But in the killings of Renee Good in Minneapolis, 23-year-old Ruben Ray Martinez in Texas and “several” other instances, video evidence established that “the officers were not in danger and, in some cases, acted as the aggressors.”

What next?

ICE said the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General is investigating Araujo’s shooting.

What happened

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen Tuesday announced she will run for president in 2027, hours after an appeals court cut short her five-year ban on seeking public office.

The court upheld the 2025 embezzlement conviction that prompted the ban, handing Le Pen a three-year prison sentence for her National Rally party’s misuse of $3.2 million in European Union funds. But the judges suspended two years of her sentence and said she could serve the third wearing an electronic monitor.

Who said what

Tuesday’s “stunning turnaround” in Le Pen’s fortunes makes her the “front-runner” to replace term-limited President Emmanuel Macron, The New York Times said. But running with a criminal conviction is a “remarkable political gamble,” the BBC said.

“As recently as last week,” Politico said, Le Pen “said she would not run for president if wearing an ankle monitor and would cede the role” to 30-year-old protégé Jordan Bardella, who is “slightly more popular” with voters. But Le Pen also announced she was appealing the ruling to France’s highest court, a process that “will suspend her requirement to wear an electronic bracelet” until a decision arrives, likely in January, The Wall Street Journal said.

What next?

If the high court upholds Tuesday’s ruling, the Journal said, “Le Pen would be required to wear the bracelet” while campaigning, limiting her movement before April’s election.

What happened

President Donald Trump arrived in Turkey Tuesday for a two-day NATO summit, and “within hours of landing” he “revived a host of grievances” against America’s closest allies, Politico said. Trump criticized Europe for not helping with his Iran war and threatened to pull U.S. troops from NATO countries if he didn’t gain control of Greenland. His “sour mood” tempered hopes for a “low-key,” constructive summit focused on collective defense.

Who said what

Greenland “should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark,” Trump said during a meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Being refused control of the semiautonomous island is “what hurt my relationship with NATO.” Denmark’s prime minister and other European leaders once more firmly rejected Trump’s demand, but he returned to the idea this morning. “Greenland is very important to the United States,” he said. “We need it for protection of the world.”

NATO “sought to demonstrate that its European members were heeding Trump’s ​calls to spend more on their own defense,” Reuters said. “Announcing billions in arms deals” was “an attempt to appease the mercurial U.S. leader,” The Associated Press said.

What next?

Trump “surprised NATO leaders” by launching airstrikes on Iran Tuesday night, soon after a dinner hosted by Erdogan, the AP said. This morning he told reporters that the ceasefire with Tehran was “over.” Talks can continue, he said, “but I think they’re wasting their time.”

Christopher Donahue was “one of the military’s superstars,” said Max Boot in The Washington Post. The four-star general led Delta Force, the Army’s top special-ops unit, commanded the 18th Airborne Corps, and rose to Army commander in Europe and Africa. Revered by soldiers and fellow officers, he fought ISIS in Iraq and Syria and helped Ukraine beat back the Russians. “Without a doubt,” he’s the Army’s “most experienced warfighter,” said retired Army Gen. Christopher Cavoli. But Donahue, 56, was forced last month into early retirement by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, making him the “latest casualty of the secretary’s insidious purge of the senior ranks.” Hegseth has removed at least two dozen respected admirals and generals and blocked promotions for dozens more, disproportionately targeting women and Black officers. Senior commanders can be relieved for cause, but “what’s unnerving” about these ousters is the lack of any “public explanation.”

Some of Hegseth’s “animus” toward Donahue may stem from the 2021 fall of Kabul, said Aaron MacLean in The Free Press. As 82nd Airborne commander, Donahue was the last U.S. soldier out of Afghanistan, and Hegseth has decreed that heads should roll for our chaotic departure. But blaming Donahue, who arrived to help impose order only after scenes of desperate Afghans swarming military cargo planes “shocked the world,” is “like blaming the fire department for starting the fire.” Canning Donahue defies Hegseth’s own metrics, said Mike Nelson in The Dispatch. He claims to want to rid the Army of “woke” distractions and focus on “lethality,” but is instead removing the battle-hardened commanders who have “the vision, skills, and excellence he claims are a priority.” Perhaps these warfighters are “a threat to his frail ego.”

Hegseth’s critics see an unsettling “agenda” at work, said Michael R. Gordon and Lara Seligman in The Wall Street Journal: “squeezing out officers with valor and command experience for less accomplished political loyalists.” The campaign “has unsettled military officers up and down the ranks who fear retaliation for expressing the wrong political opinion.” All Americans should be alarmed, said David French in The New York Times. The Trump administration is pushing the military to the breaking point with its failed war against Iran, potential war crimes in the Caribbean, and purge of officers. The institution can hold because its commitment to integrity, while not perfect, runs deep. But it “cannot hold forever.”

So it isn’t just a New York thing, said Eliza Collins in The Wall Street Journal. Last week in Colorado, Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), defeated 15-term incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette, 68, in a Democratic primary to represent the deep-blue Denver area. The win by Kiros, who most recently worked as a barista while studying for a Ph.D., is “the latest advance for a socialist groundswell that is forcing a reckoning for Democrats.” DSA candidates swept primary races in New York City last month, and insurgent leftists are now eyeing wins in the upcoming Michigan Senate primary, where progressive Abdul El-Sayed leads the polls, and the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary. The Democratic establishment fears this Tea Party–like rebellion could cost them the midterms, because DSA policies—rent freezes, abolishing ICE, ending U.S. aid to Israel—could repel moderates in November. For now, centrist Democrats are talking tough, said Andrew Howard in Politico. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has downplayed the significance of “a handful of primaries,” while 15 moderate House Democrats and candidates signed a letter reaffirming their commitment to “growth, competition, and broad prosperity.’” But in private they’re “freaking out” that “the Left’s winning streak is potentially just starting.”

Republicans can’t believe their luck, said Jonah Goldberg in The Dispatch. They’ve long caricatured Democrats as anti-American communists. But in a truly “crazy” figure like Darializa Avila Chevalier, one of the New York DSA-ers now headed to Congress, they’ve been gifted that “caricature made flesh.” Avila Chevalier has denounced relationships between minority men and “ugly [white] colonizer women”; attended a pro-Hamas rally the day after Palestinian terrorists massacred Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023; and wants to abolish prisons, preferring to send murderers back to their “community.” Kiros is similarly extreme: She refuses to describe last year’s deadly firebomb attack on pro-Israel protesters in Boulder, Colo., as antisemitic. To call the DSA a “hate group” is not hyperbole, said Noah Rothman in National Review. And while its venom is right now focused on Jews—or “Zionists,” in members’ preferred euphemism—ultimately “what it hates is America.”

Focusing on the DSA misses what’s really going on with Democrats, said Nia-Malika Henderson in Bloomberg. Yes, the party’s voters are “fed up” with its graying leaders, whom they blame for not blocking Trump’s second-term agenda. But that doesn’t mean they want “socialism.” Voters’ overriding hunger is for young, authentic “anti-candidates” willing to fight Trump head-on. In progressive areas like New York City, that translates to wins for the DSA. But in deep-red Texas, voters rejected a progressive and chose young moderate James Talarico as their Senate candidate. The DSA’s rise shows Democrats need to embrace a “bolder, less cautious approach” to politics, not necessarily “move further left.”

Voters aren’t electing socialists because they dislike President Trump, said Harold Meyerson in Prospect. They’re electing socialists because working Americans are being ground down by the cost of gas, housing, and health care, and because they’re tired of watching the “Barons of Silicon Valley” game politics to expand their fortunes and lower their tax bills. Democrats shouldn’t embrace every radical policy of every DSA firebrand. But you’d think a party that’s been fretting for a decade about how to win back the votes of working people would recognize the DSA’s rise as a sign of what needs to happen for Democrats to “return to power and hold it.”

What happened

Overturning a 91-year precedent, the Supreme Court last week handed President Trump sweeping authority to control previously independent agencies—all except the Federal Reserve. In Trump v. Slaughter, the six conservative justices ruled that Trump was empowered to fire Rebecca Slaughter, a federal trade commissioner, last year because her views didn’t align with the White House’s agenda. The decision guts the precedent set by the 1935 Humphrey’s Executor decision, which held that Congress could limit the president’s ability to remove certain federal agency officials without cause. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that because the FTC “unquestionably exercises executive power,” it “must therefore be controlled by the chief executive.” In a scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the ruling gave the president “power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

In a separate case, though, the court made the Federal Reserve exempt from that new presidential power. Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the three liberal justices in Trump v. Cook to rule that Trump overreached when he tried to fire Lisa Cook, a Fed governor, after accusing her of mortgage fraud. Roberts wrote that the Fed was different from other federal agencies because it was “uniquely structured” to maintain independence, and that the president must present legitimate cause before removing a Fed governor. Trump said he would begin that process “immediately” so he could proceed with ousting Cook. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, meanwhile, was skeptical of the Fed carve-out. “The court’s holding is in serious tension with Trump v. Slaughter,” she wrote in her dissent. “Might history sanction other exceptions too?”

What the columnists said

The Roberts court just took a “wrecking ball” to the separation of powers with Slaughter, said Alexis Romero in Slate. Now not just the FTC but dozens of other federal agencies designed by Congress to be insulated from partisan politics are “fully under Trump’s thumb.” You can bet a newly empowered Trump “will begin to make Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre look like a normal weekday.” He’s now free to retaliate against any agency leader who dares to investigate him for a violation of the law, refuses to attack his political rivals, or pushes back against attempts to manipulate elections. “This is the world the Supreme Court has created.”

The ruling “invites presidential abuse,” said Victoria Nourse in The Economist. Trump can now pressure leaders at the SEC or the National Labor Relations Board to ignore wrongdoing by his cronies. He can lean on the National Transportation Safety Board or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to waive safety requirements for his friends’ companies. At the Federal Election Commission, he could replace commissioners with “loyalists who deny that he lost the 2020 election.” He may not even need to fire people: Just “the threat may be enough.”

Yet it “may be premature” to declare the death of agencies’ independence, said Ilya Somin in Reason. That’s because Slaughter and Cook, as Barrett noted, appear completely incompatible. Sure, “central bank independence is a long-standing tradition,” but “the same is true of many other independent agencies.” More exceptions could follow. The two rulings are at odds because Slaughter “is good law and good policy,” said National Review in an editorial, and Cook is a mess. “If the president controls the executive branch, and doesn’t control the Fed, then what is the Fed?” It’s not a legislature and it’s not a court. “The Constitution doesn’t mention a fourth branch. But now we have one.”

It’s no surprise Roberts and Kavanaugh are willing to shield the Fed but not the other agencies, said Elie Mystal in The Nation. They “didn’t feel like crashing the global economy and tanking their 401(k)s.” Most federal agencies are there to protect the little guy the justices don’t care about: The FTC goes to bat for consumers, the NLRB for employees. The Fed, though, “protects the monetary policy that capitalists rely on to make their billions.”

The conservative justices are unruffled by this obvious double standard, said Zack Beauchamp in Vox. They consistently rule that their “own policy preferences are constitutionally mandated” while those they disagree with get extra scrutiny. The result is that the president has “an electoral dictatorship” in areas where the justices agree with him. Everywhere else, “the court sets policy.”

What happened

The Supreme Court last week struck down President Trump’s attempt to radically curtail birthright citizenship, a policy pursued by Trump for more than a decade, but greenlit other major elements of his hard-line immigration agenda. In a 6-3 vote, the court ruled against an executive order signed by Trump on the first day of his second term, which declared that future children born in the U.S. to undocumented migrants and most visa holders would not be considered citizens. Conservative justices John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s three liberals in declaring that the order violates the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, which grants citizenship to nearly all children born on U.S. soil. Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the order was constitutional but violated federal law. In a 91-page dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said the 14th Amendment was intended only to grant equal rights to freed slaves; Justice Samuel Alito called the ruling a “mistake that will seriously affect the country’s future.”

Days earlier, the court ruled the administration could strip Temporary Protected Status from more than 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians, setting the stage for mass deportations. That status lets migrants live and work in the U.S. if their home countries are deemed unsafe due to war or natural disasters. The administration tried to end TPS for both groups last year, drawing lawsuits that argued it had not followed proper procedures and was motivated by racial animus. In a 6-3 vote, the conservative majority said the TPS statute bars courts from reviewing the administration’s actions; on the discrimination issue, Alito wrote there was “insufficient” reason to believe Trump—who has said Haitian migrants are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S.—was driven by racism.

The ruling sowed panic among Haitians and Syrians in the U.S. Many people deported to gang-violence-wracked Haiti “are going to needlessly die,” said Geoff Pipoly, an attorney for the Haitian plaintiffs. Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine urged the Trump administration to reconsider, saying his state would lose valuable workers in manufacturing and especially health care. White House aide Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration crackdown, dismissed such concerns, saying if he had “a loved one in the hospital” he’d want “a licensed American nurse, not the illegal alien from Haiti.”

What the editorials said

The birthright decision was “a welcome, necessary defeat” for Trump, said the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. But the court “could have reached no other logical result.” The 14th Amendment is crystal clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” are U.S. citizens. But that win “doesn’t ease the human tragedy” of the TPS decision, which will allow a president driven by “seething racial bigotry” to uproot people who’ve worked and raised families here—forcing them back to places the State Department deems unsafe.

We oppose ejecting immigrants “who have put down roots and contribute to the country,” said The Wall Street Journal. But this was “an open and shut case.” The TPS law Congress passed in 1990 says there will be “no judicial review” of the administration’s determination of whether a country’s citizens qualify for the program, even if there are “procedural errors.” Justices’ job is “to interpret the law as written, not to impose their policy preferences.”

What the columnists said

Haitian communities “from Florida to Ohio” are bracing for what comes next, said Maria Sacchetti and Lauren Kaori Gurley in The Washington Post. Distraught immigrants “began making plans to sell or rent their homes, secure bank accounts, and figure out thorny issues like child-custody arrangements.” Factory and nursing-home owners steeled for the loss of key workers, and longtime residents reeled at the thought of being forced back to “conflict-ridden homelands they barely know.” It’s “the sickest and most evil thing somebody could do,” said Harlaine, a 38-year-old Florida nurse who left Haiti at age 7.

It’s also rank racism, said Adam Serwer in The Atlantic, and it’s astounding Alito would claim otherwise. Administration officials “have made no secret of their desire to purge the United States of nonwhite immigrants.” In her forceful dissent, Justice Elena Kagan cited Trump’s own words: that immigrants have “bad genes,” that Haitians “all have AIDS” and eat household pets, that America doesn’t take in enough “people from Norway and Sweden.” All this damning evidence was presented to the court, “yet the right-wing majority shrugged it off.”

While he’s faced the occasional setback, Trump is “winning the immigration wars,” said Adrian Carrasquillo in The Bulwark. In a second ruling last week, the court ruled that the administration can block asylum applications from outside the U.S., further limiting the ways people fleeing violence and repression can enter the country. And now it has “license to take away in an instant” the legal status of 1.3 million people living under TPS, all of whom “followed the rules to get here.”

The birthright decision was “a relief,” said Mark Joseph Stern in Slate. But the fact that the ruling was 5-4 and not 9-0 is “nothing short of stunning.” To judge Trump’s order unconstitutional “is the only remotely plausible reading of the 14th Amendment and its historical record.” Yet four justices ruled otherwise. That “shocking development” should “upend all expectations that this court can be trusted” to protect “the most basic constitutional guarantees.” If Trump came within a single vote of rolling back a constitutional amendment, then “everything is on the table.”

‘When law enforcement takes on immigration, our safety is the cost’

Amy L. Solomon at USA Today

The White House is “using federal money and incentives to push state and local agencies more deeply into immigration enforcement,” says Amy L. Solomon. The “question is not whether immigration laws should be enforced, but whether federal dollars are now driving police, sheriffs, prosecutors and other justice agencies toward a mission that could pull them away from their core responsibilities: preventing crime, solving serious cases, protecting victims and maintaining public trust.” This is a “distortion of mission.”

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‘Lessons from the Graham Platner disaster’

Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times

Graham Platner’s Senate campaign has “become a shameful catastrophe,” says Michelle Goldberg. What’s “left — besides finding a Democrat to run in his place — is figuring out what, if anything, can be learned.” Platner’s campaign “represented an electoral insurgency against the Democratic Party; now, there are going to be furious recriminations against those who launched it.” Democrats “went out on a limb for him, and he had every reason to know it was going to be sawed off.”

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‘Sam Altman offers a Trojan Horse to American taxpayers’

Gautam Mukunda at Bloomberg

Sam Altman believes “giving the government a 5% stake in the company he runs, OpenAI, is the best way to ensure that Americans shared in the promised bounty from artificial intelligence,” says Gautam Mukunda. But the White House “should organize a group trip to see Christopher Nolan’s new movie ‘The Odyssey,’ whose opening act is the most famous gift in Western literature: a giant wooden horse, wheeled through the gates of Troy.” The “lesson translates. Beware of CEOs bearing gifts.”

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‘Is the FCC’s investigation having a chilling effect on “The View”?’

Tom Jones at the Poynter Institute

Maybe “intimidation and threats work after all — even when it comes to important topics like a free press,” says Tom Jones. “Whether or not the show qualifies as a news program, the FCC investigation appears to have had a chilling effect on ‘The View,’” even as “newscasts, news interviews, news documentaries and on-the-spot news coverage are exempt from the equal-time rule.” But the “bar for having a political candidate on the show is high.”

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Anti-abortion politics helped make the modern GOP. Activists supplied energy and votes to the conservative movement for nearly a half-century after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973. That energy has dissipated a bit in recent years, but justices may have handed the right a new rallying cause: birthright citizenship.

‘A new bloody shirt’

The Supreme Court’s narrow ruling last week upholding birthright citizenship “just handed right-wingers a new bloody shirt to wave in every single political campaign,” Georgetown University’s Aderson Francois said to The Atlantic. The topic “will become the new Roe v. Wade” for Republican politicians trying to appeal to anti-immigration voters who want to keep the American-born children of migrants from automatically becoming citizens. The issue will be more salient because the court voted 5-4 in the case. Conservative activists “now know they are only one vote away from eliminating birthright citizenship by judicial fiat,” said The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer.

“The conservative legal movement is far better equipped today” than the antiabortion movement was in 1973, Rachel Bovard of the Conservative Partnership Institute said at First Things. The right overturned Roe through “decades of activism, thought leadership, strategic litigation and judicial appointments.” That model “should now be aimed” at birthright citizenship and must “act as a litmus test for every future conservative nominee.” Granting unquestioned citizenship to the children of migrants “incentivizes illegal entry, rewards birth tourism and erodes the meaning of citizenship for generations to come.”

The debate about birthright citizenship is “about to get worse,” Jonah Goldberg said at The Dispatch. We have seen this story before. Rather than settling the issue, Roe v. Wade failed to spare the country an “ugly debate over abortion.” The same will be true of citizenship. The court has “more than likely turbocharged” the debate over immigration.

‘Just getting started’

Justices actually gave the country a “reverse Roe v. Wade” in the birthright case, Thomas G. Moukawsher said at Newsweek. The court in Roe created a “privacy right to abortion that was previously unknown” while in the citizenship ruling it refused to “take away a birth-based citizenship right that was universally known.” The Trump administration’s attempt to overturn that right via executive order “contradicted a bedrock assumption about who was an American” that a majority of the court could not abide.

The conservative movement “turned Roe into its jurisprudential white whale,” said Jay Willis at Balls and Strikes. The right “spent five decades organizing around the goal of someday killing” that ruling, and did so in 2022 even though the legal arguments had not really changed. The only difference across 50 years was that conservatives “at last marshaled the five votes they needed to do it.” The crusade against birthright citizenship is “just getting started.”

Republican voters are “sounding more and more” like President Donald Trump on the issue, said Sarah Longwell at The Bulwark. Birthright citizenship is going to be a policy touchstone for any “GOP presidential aspirant in 2028 and beyond.”

What happened

A man in Rochester, New York, Monday sued the Department of Homeland Security and ICE after two agents tracked him down last month to deliver a “warning notice” over an email he sent in January. In it, David Streever called acting ICE Director Todd Lyons a “monstrous human being” who “will never know peace” due to his “shame” over “protecting the obvious execution” of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., accuses DHS of violating Streever’s First Amendment rights and requests that the court prohibit similar investigations into lawful criticism of government officials.

Who said what

The Homeland Security Investigations agents who tried to confront Streever at home, then at his New York City hotel when he returned from Finland two days later, warned that the email to Lyons may have constituted an illegal threat. The same HSI agents issued a “similar warning the same day to a poll worker in Syracuse,” Paigelynne Gonyea, over a January Instagram post about the ICE agent who killed Good, The New York Times said. After Gonyea went public, The Washington Post said, “she heard from six other people around the country — including Streever — who say they also received similar visits from federal agents in recent months.”

What next?

“Any allegation DHS and its components are attempting to ‘squash’ free speech is categorically FALSE,” DHS said in a statement Monday. But “anyone who assaults or threatens our law enforcement officers will face the consequences.”

What happened

Maine and national Democrats and a growing number of high-profile progressive Graham Platner endorsers Monday called for the Democratic Senate nominee to drop out of the race to unseat Sen. Susan Collins (R) due to a rape accusation from a former girlfriend.

“Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically false,” Platner said in a video after Politico published the allegation. “Regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting but mindful of the political reality it will inflict, we’re taking the time to reflect on the best path forward.”

Who said what

Maine resident Jenny Racicot told Politico that Platner, whom she had dated on and off, came over drunk and uninvited one night in 2021 and forced her into unwanted sex. She provided corroborative evidence. “He violated multiple layers of consent that night,” she told CNN Monday night.

Platner “has long been controversial,” The Associated Press said, but the “sexual allegation sparked a flight away from the candidate.” The “three biggest Democratic groups trying to flip the Senate” all “dropped their nominee in a must-win race,” Politico said, and support from “key outside groups” also “immediately dried up.”

What next?

If Platner withdraws from the race by next Monday, the state Democratic Party can still replace him up to July 27. Top Maine Democratic Party officials have discussed a “pop-up convention” or a “statewide caucus” to pick Platner’s potential replacement, but have “ruled out having the state party’s committee” make the choice, The New York Times said.

Nigel Farage has said he will resign as an MP to fight a by-election in his constituency of Clacton that he says will be a “chance to stick two fingers up to the establishment”.

Farage's decision comes amid a row over his finances, after The Sunday Times reported he had not declared benefits, including staff and security, received from his long-time adviser George Cottrell.

Known as “Posh George”, the 32-year-old “babyfaced British aristocrat and former US federal inmate”, holds no official role in Reform UK, but he has been “Farage’s closest adviser for more than a decade and travels with him in Westminster and around the country”, said The Sunday Times. Farage denies that the benefits he received from Cottrell required registration under the rules governing MPs.

“In a party with little fondness for strictures, Reform UK insiders maintain that there is one rule,” said UnHerd’s Rob Lownie. “Don’t ask what Posh George does.”

‘Family soap empire’

George Swinfen Cottrell was born into the heart of the British establishment.

His father, Mark Cottrell, went to school with Prince Andrew. His mother, the Honourable Fiona Watson, daughter of Rupert Watson, 3rd Baron Manton and heir to a “family soap empire”, is a former girlfriend of King Charles. His uncle is Alexander Fermor-Hesketh, 3rd Baron Hesketh, a hereditary peer, former Conservative chief whip and treasurer, and later Ukip politician.

Having been expelled from school due to a reported gambling addiction, Cottrell became a “fixer-cum-financier to the ultra-rich in Mayfair”, said The Times. According to a 2017 Telegraph profile, he worked in offshore banking before being made Ukip’s head of fundraising in 2015 at the age of just 22.

Inner circle member but no official position

Just to be clear, said The Independent's political editor David Maddox, Cottrell is “not some fringe figure or mere acquaintance in Farage’s political life” but “one of the tightest members of the Reform leader’s inner circle”.

He was by Farage's side on the day of the Brexit referendum in June 2016, but only a month later was arrested in the US as he and Farage prepared to fly back to the UK after the Republican National Convention. Caught agreeing to launder drug money in an undercover FBI sting operation, Cottrell faced 20 years in jail, but he struck a plea deal in which he admitted guilt to a wire fraud charge and served just eight months.

In the years since, he dated reality TV star Georgia Toffolo and moved to Montenegro. It was here that he became a key player in Tether.bet, an online cryptocurrency bookmaker and casino, part-owned by Christopher Harborne, the billionaire who gave Farage a £5 million gift in early 2024. He also co-authored a book “How to Launder Money”.

And he has remained close to Farage and the various iterations of the political party that eventually became Reform UK.

He “holds no official position” and “is not employed by the party”, yet he has become one of Farage’s “closest political confidants”, said Politics UK. Farage has previously described Cottrell as being “like a son”, with him calling Nigel “daddy“.

‘As fatal as Mandelson was for Starmer’

Until the Sunday Times expose, we knew little about the exact relationship between Farage and Cottrell, said George Wright on the BBC. Now, “the aristocrat is at the centre of the latest controversy” surrounding the Reform UK leader’s murky personal finances.

The Sunday Times says Cottrell provided Farage with a series of benefits in kind, including security, made up of elite former soldiers and drivers, staff to “transform” his social media presence, and accommodation, including the use of a five-storey house near Buckingham Palace.

Farage is now facing scrutiny for failing to declare any of this when he became an MP, except for £9,523.60 – the estimated costs of flights for him and a staff member to travel to a conference in Belgium.

Opinions are split over how much this could harm Farage in the long-term, but “with Reform on the slide and other questions” about his personal finances, Cottrell’s “presence in his inner circle could prove as fatal as Mandelson was for Starmer and Pincher was for Johnson”, said Maddox.

As Iran’s religious, political and military elite turned out to say farewell to the country’s former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, one figure was conspicuously absent.

Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who succeeded his father as the de facto head of the Islamic Republic, has not been seen in public since the joint US-Israeli air strikes that killed many of his close family members and decapitated the regime on the first day of the war.

Khamenei, who is said to have been seriously injured in the attack, is believed to be in hiding due to Israeli threats to his life, but his absence has “raised questions about who is really running the country, and allowed extraordinary open divisions to fester”, said Farnaz Fassihi in The New York Times.

What did the commentators say?

For 36 years, “the question of who ultimately ruled Iran had one answer”, said Joshua Keating for Vox. While the country has an elected president and legislature, “whenever the US confronted Iran, American policymakers knew it was Khamenei who would make the final decision.”

But now “they’re no longer so sure”. With the sheer number of senior figures who have been killed over the past four months, “there’s something of a power vacuum in Tehran right now”.

In the void left by the killing of a supreme leader “who exerted absolute power over all important decisions”, the conservatives have “split” and generals in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have “consolidated power, effectively running the country”, said Fassihi.

With the power of the new supreme leader greatly diminished, and various factions and facets of the state jockeying for influence, the question now is just who is actually in charge of the Iranian system.

“The system is in control of the system,” Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East program at Chatham House, told Vox. “I know we all want to think that there’s one individual that has power or authority. There’s no one commander in chief. It is a system that is commanding collectively for the time being.”

If the week-long funeral for Ali Khamenei represents a “calculated projection of strength by a regime determined to demonstrate continuity and resilience despite an extraordinary crisis”, it has done little to quell questions “over the country’s political succession”, said France24.

What next?

Amid the jostling for power, Khamenei’s funeral is undoubtedly a “big moment”, said BBC diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams: a “grand reminder that the old guard has given way to the new. And with the new faces comes a new approach with its own implications.”

The new leadership is not made up of ageing ideologues who emerged in opposition to the Shah and subsequently the US, “but of generally post-revolutionary leaders ruthlessly focussed on preserving the state and willing to act more decisively than their predecessors”, said Vali Nasr, professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

“A whole new generation has taken over. They have a very clear agenda. They managed the war and now they’re going to manage the peace as well.”

Historically unpopular and facing potentially catastrophic midterm elections in November, President Donald Trump has thrown an electoral hand grenade into the campaign calendar. “For the first time ever, the Republican Party will hold a midterm convention” in Dallas, Texas, Sept. 9-10 — a “rally like none other,” said Trump on Truth Social last week. And as the president tries to consolidate GOP strength ahead of a make-or-break election, Democrats see signs of desperation and political opportunities.

What did the commentators say?

Party officials have been “planning the logistics of the event for months,” after Trump became “enamored with the idea of a splashy midterm convention last year,” said The New York Times. Given that the party in power has “historically lost ground in midterm elections, Republicans see a convention so close to election day as “offering the party a large platform to make the case to stay in power.” Democrats had “briefly considered” holding their own midterm convention, but ultimately “decided against such a pricey event.”

The “Trumpapalooza” gathering will offer Republicans a “chance to highlight all the wonderful things this president has done,” said Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters to Fox News. GOP officials also hope the convention will “energize MAGA voters who don’t always vote when Trump isn’t on the ballot,” said the outlet. Despite being “designed to showcase Republican achievements,” however, the planned convention is “likely to have detractors, even among party officials,” said Al Jazeera. Critics fear the event could “draw resources away from key battlegrounds in the final stretch of the race,” and will “shine a spotlight on Trump himself at a moment when his poll numbers are drooping.”

Although the convention “comes at a politically vulnerable time” for Republicans, its “location in Texas is also significant,” said Time. “No further proof is needed” that the GOP is “freaking the f*** out” over their midterms standing, said Texas State Rep. Cassandra Garcia Hernandez (D) on X. While Texas has “not elected a Democrat statewide in decades,” Democratic State Rep. James Talarico is currently neck and neck with Attorney General Ken Paxton for outgoing Sen. John Cornyn’s (R) U.S. Senate seat, and has become “one of his party’s top fundraisers,” said the Times.

Whether GOP officials “appreciate it or not,” there are “two main problems they should probably keep in mind,” said MS NOW. First, “holding a national convention is extremely expensive.” Second, and “just as important,” is the fact that the goal of a national convention is “nationalizing an election cycle.” Given how unpopular Trump is, the GOP should be “going out of its way to localize the midterms,” rather than the opposite.

What next?

It is likely that “many Democratic officials are looking forward” to Trump’s event, said MS NOW. The convention will “give the minority party an opportunity to do what it wants to do anyway: connect Republican candidates and officeholders to Trump.”

While much of the event’s programming remains under wraps, officials have begun to “fill in some of the details,” said The Dallas Morning News. The convention will “blend elements of a traditional political convention” with a “Trump-centered program designed to energize Republican voters.” The event will also “include delegates from across the country,” but it will feature “no official party business.” Organizers have also not clarified “whether members of the public will be able to attend” or how ticketing might work.

Trump’s scheduled convention will also be “clashing with a pair of NFL matchups that will kick off the 2026 season,” forcing both events to “potentially compete for viewership,” said Forbes. In the past, NFL kickoff games have been rescheduled to avoid overlap with political conventions during presidential election years. It is “not immediately clear if the same will happen to this year’s season opener.”

‘Telling time is a complicated business’

Nishant Sahdev at The Wall Street Journal

Modern economies “depend on everyone not only knowing the correct time but agreeing to it,” says Nishant Sahdev. About 450 atomic clocks are “continuously compared and averaged into a single international standard known as Coordinated Universal Time,” a “surprisingly thin thread on which much of the global economy depends.” A “difference of a fraction of a second can cause a breakdown,” and the “private sector could move faster by treating precise time as an essential service that needs protection.”

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‘“Dignity” is a poor excuse for blocking press access to state executions’

Austin Sarat at The Hill

Indiana law says that the press has “no right to be present when the state carries out executions,” and the state “defends its limitations on access to executions by advancing the dignity argument,” says Austin Sarat. But there is “something odd about using the word ‘dignity’ to describe what happens when the state kills one of its citizens, and about allowing the state that seeks to do that deed to speak for a condemned person.”

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‘The Founding Father you’ve probably never heard of’

Abdallah Fayyad at The Boston Globe

Americans “all know the broad strokes of the story of America’s founding,” says Abdallah Fayyad. But “despite the well-documented record of the American Revolution, one of the Founders — arguably one of the most influential — has been almost lost to history.” James Wilson was a Scottish immigrant who “quickly became one of the most learned and successful men of his time, advocating for radical ideas about democracy and political equality,” and he “helped shape America’s founding principles.”

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‘S.F.’s recovery is missing one of the hardest things to bring back’

Allison Arieff at the San Francisco Chronicle

Everyone “thinks that San Francisco was perfect the day they arrived,” but many “can’t help but be nostalgic for a time when the arts felt core to the identity of the city,” says Allison Arieff. San Francisco “may be flush with private capital, but the culture of tech is largely one of metrics and results; few in this community seem inclined to support something with a hard-to-measure return on investment,” and “federal funding has, of course, all but dried up.”

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What happened

President Donald Trump’s Domestic Policy Council late Saturday issued a report criticizing the leadership of the Smithsonian Institution, and especially the National Museum of American History, for allegedly painting an insufficiently positive and “patriotic” view of the U.S. and its founding.

The Smithsonian leaders “cannot be trusted to tell America’s story honestly and in a way that is inspiring, unifying and worthy of our great republic,” the report said.

Who said what

The Smithsonian “has long been regarded as independent of the executive branch,” The New York Times said, but Trump has tried to exert control over the world’s largest museum institution for more than a year. The report “comes in the midst of Trump’s aggressive campaign to overhaul some of Washington’s most sacred cultural and historic institutions,” The Associated Press said, and it indicates he “may be preparing to install his own team.”

Lonnie Bunch, the Smithsonian’s first Black leader, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday he was motivated by the “notion of being a more perfect union, not the perfect union,” and by the “responsibility to continue to make those aspirations available, accessible, meaningful to a whole range of people.”

What next?

“For more than 180 years, the Smithsonian has served the American public with nonpartisan and independent scholarship, and we remain committed to doing so,” a Smithsonian spokesperson said in a statement.

Spain’s socialist PM is “clinging to a punctured life raft”, said Josep Ramoneda in Ara (Barcelona). Pedro Sánchez’s reputation had already taken a battering from the corruption cases brought against his wife and brother. Now the jailing of his former right-hand man for embezzlement and bribery leaves him more “compromised” than ever.

José Luis Ábalos, who was Spain’s transport minister between 2018 and 2021, was last week handed a 24-year sentence for rigging public contracts for face masks and other medical supplies during the Covid-19 pandemic. His reward for doing so was €10,000 a month, a flat for his mistress and various other kickbacks. The PM has not himself been implicated in the Ábalos case – or in any of the others for that matter – but it all leaves a bad smell and there’s growing pressure on him to resign. Yet Sánchez stubbornly insists he will remain in post until next year’s elections.

The buck stops

Sánchez’s claim he had no idea what Ábalos was up to is downright outrageous, said Neus Tomàs in El Diario (Madrid). Ábalos and his aide Koldo García, who has also been jailed for his role in the scandal, used to sit at the heart of Sánchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE). So the PM’s excuse that they were just rogue actors won’t wash: he bears responsibility for crimes committed under his watch.

And don’t forget, Sánchez came to power in 2018 by condemning the then-PM, Mariano Rajoy, for the corruption exposed in the ranks of Rajoy’s People’s Party (PP), and winning a vote of no-confidence against him, said La Razón (Madrid). So he clearly has to resign.

The greatest irony is that the man who delivered the most scathing speech ahead of the vote on the conservative People Party’s corrupt ways was Ábalos himself, said Bruno Pardo Porto on ABC (Madrid). That he has now received the longest jail sentence ever given to a modern Spanish minister shows just what a sham the PSOE’s pledge to clean up Spanish democracy actually has been.

Comeback king

There’s still a slim chance Sánchez could survive, said Jason Horowitz in The New York Times. He has an uncanny ability to outrun scandals – hence his nickname: “the greyhound”. And he was offered an unlikely lifeline last month when a judge ordered his wife, Begoña Gómez, to hand in her passport and stand trial for influence-peddling linked to her job at a university in Madrid.

In his 84-page ruling, the judge likened the government to an “absolutist regime”, opining that the last similar case of such magnitude was in the early 19th century during the reign of Ferdinand VII. This has made it easy for Sánchez’s supporters to dismiss the trial as a “deeply flawed hit job by an obsessed judge”. And that it was the right-wing group Manos Limpias (Clean Hands) that filed the cases against his wife and his brother David (who allegedly leveraged his connections to land a job in a city council) adds support to that narrative.

Sánchez is no stranger to epic comebacks, said Irene Lozano in El País (Madrid), so don’t write him off yet. His PSOE rivals removed him as leader in 2016: two years later he had become PM. The fact that he has presided over one of the EU’s faster-growing economies may come to his rescue this time.

Fresh scandal

I’m not so sure, said Guy Hedgecoe on Politico (Brussels). His party is already languishing behind the PP in the polls, and there’s another scandal brewing that could well see him off. It involves his mentor and “ideological soul mate”, the former socialist PM José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who is accused of influence-peddling in connection with the €53 million bailout of the airline Plus Ultra. Prosecutors say he received up to €2 million for pushing the package through.

Sánchez still maintains Zapatero is innocent, but has yet to explain why the bailout of a firm that only has four planes should have been so generous, said The Economist. This kind of behaviour is the reason anti-democratic sentiment is on the rise, and the situation is worsening. “The sooner the country holds an election, the better.”

So much for post-election talk of the Democrats moving towards the centre, said National Review. The party is now careering in the opposite direction. In the last year, both New York City and Seattle have elected mayors that are affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA); Washington DC is on course to join them.

And in three New York congressional primaries last week, the socialist candidates backed by New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, all trounced establishment Democrats. Even by DSA standards, these are “wild-eyed radicals”. The most extreme is Darializa Avila Chevalier. Her greatest hits include demanding “No more police at all – ever”; claiming that a world without borders or prisons is “possible, necessary, and the only moral way forward”; and insisting that “Israel doesn’t exist!”.

The triumph of Mamdani’s candidates was a “rout for the far-left over the Left”, said The Wall Street Journal – one that could have major knock-on effects for the Democratic Party and US politics as a whole.

‘Sewer socialism’

The lesson of these primaries, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times, is that Democratic voters are exasperated by the “cautious, compromising establishment”. With good reason. A candidate as “flawed” as Chevalier could only have won against a “complacent political machine that’s lost touch with the people it’s supposed to represent”.

This is basically a Democratic version of the Tea Party, the fiscally conservative political movement that pushed the Republican Party sharply to the right during the Obama administration. We saw something like this in Trump’s first term, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and some other outspoken DSA members won political office; but that movement petered out during Biden’s presidency amid sectarian infighting.

Progressives now have a fresh opportunity to advance their agenda. They could succeed if they steer away from Chevalier’s rigid form of “academic Leftism” and embrace the more pragmatic, optimistic, community-based politics pursued by Mamdani: a “sewer socialism” tightly focused on voters’ everyday material concerns.

‘Dismal’ reality

Americans are certainly open to that type of politics at the moment, said Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. Many voters are unhappy with the status quo and are feeling the pinch as a result of higher interest rates and inflation. In a 2025 poll, 39% of respondents viewed socialism favourably (66% of them Democrats); 54% said the same of capitalism.

The problem for these socialist politicians, though, is that the same “dismal fiscal realities” fuelling discontent also constrain their ability to deliver dramatic change. Mayors can’t squeeze rich residents too much because cities are much easier to leave than states or countries.

Socialism has a hopeless track record, said Aubrey Harris in The American Spectator, but Republican politicians shouldn’t assume that they’re going to benefit from what one dismissed as the Democrats’ “Bolshevik revolution”. To win over voters, the GOP is going to have to come up with some creative solutions of its own to the affordability crisis. If and when it manages that, “the sudden rise of nouveau socialism will come to an end as swiftly as it began”.

“Hailed as a political genius by some”, Morgan McSweeney was seen as a “Machiavellian puppeteer manipulating a compliant” Keir Starmer on his journey from Labour Party leader in 2020 to prime minister in 2024, said Patrick Cockburn in The i Paper.

Yet in his first interviews since appearing before the Foreign Affairs Committee in April, two months after quitting as Starmer’s chief of staff, McSweeney claimed the party failed to prepare adequately for office, and that one of the hardest tasks in opposition was trying to “persuade people that we could win”.

Emerging from the shadows to speak to the Financial Times and the BBC, McSweeney is presumably trying to “establish a public profile in his post-political life”, said Ian Dunt in The i Paper. “His way of achieving this is to admit to rudimentary errors in political operations as if they were startling insights available only to those with the requisite experience.”

What did he say?

McSweeney was “surprisingly candid” with the BBC’s Nick Robinson on his “Political Thinking” podcast about the Labour Party’s failure to lay the groundwork for government while in opposition, said Ethan Croft in The New Statesman.

“We didn’t prepare enough for what kind of world we were going to,” said McSweeney, and the party didn’t grasp that it was in a “very different era” to when it was last in office. “We didn’t have enough conversations at the top of the party about what that meant, how to prepare for it, what that meant for the state.”

What mistakes were made?

McSweeney believes the “first self-inflicted wound” of the Starmer government was the Treasury’s decision to cut winter fuel payments for “10 million better-off pensioners”, said the FT. This was then “compounded” by the donations scandal involving McSweeney and the Labour Together think tank, and the first budget, which prioritised long-term financial reforms over immediate help for the electorate who voted them into power.

The former chief-of-staff admitted that the government should have been “laser focused on the cost of living from day one”. Voters were “really angry with the state of the country. They thought we promised change and we got distracted.”

Labour quickly lost popular support. Its approval ratings fell from 37.5% in July 2024 to 23.3% in June 2025 – the steepest drop for any government in its first year since 1983, said Shea Ferguson on UnHerd.

Ultimately, it was his role in the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador to the US that forced McSweeney to resign. McSweeney had recommended Mandelson for the role, and admitted that “I failed in my job and failed in my duty”. But he denied it was his fault that Mandelson was offered the position. “I hope that one day Mandelson recognises the damage he has done to a Labour government that carried the hopes of millions of people.”

What can Andy Burnham learn?

McSweeney believes Labour MPs were motivated to oust Starmer because they concluded he could not win the next election, “not because they want to scratch some ideological itch”, said the FT. The former adviser also welcomed the idea of Burnham as Starmer’s successor, and approves of the plan to split No. 10 between London and Manchester.

If McSweeney can “serve any function” now, said Dunt, it is to “provide a moral warning to Andy Burnham’s team”. When Labour was elected in 2024, McSweeney and Starmer had a “historic responsibility” to dispel populism and show that mainstream politics could operate effectively. They had spent years attacking Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak for “governing like drunken clowns in a restaurant kitchen”.

But in office, Labour had “no project, no set of beliefs, no plan for what they wanted to do”, and crucially failed to deliver “quick change” to earn the electorate’s trust. Barring a substantial shock, Burnham will become the next prime minister, and he “must not make the same mistake”.

‘The vultures arrived before the rescue teams’

Gisela Salim-Peyer at The Atlantic

Following two earthquakes, Venezuela’s “man-made disasters didn’t take long to exacerbate the natural one,” says Gisela Salim-Peyer. For “28 years and counting, Venezuela’s rulers have stolen or squandered much of the oil revenue of the most oil-rich country in the world” as “oligarchs pocketed the petrodollars.” The “humanitarian consequences of this wastefulness were well documented,” but “now they have acquired a fresh urgency.” In the “crucial first 24 hours following the quakes, the government response was practically nonexistent.”

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‘250 years later, we must recommit to the ideals in the Declaration of Independence’

Willie Wilson at the Chicago Tribune

As Americans “celebrate 250 years of representative democracy, independence and freedom, consider recommitting to the ideals found in the Declaration of Independence,” says Willie Wilson. The declaration was “written by imperfect men. However, the message of freedom has endured and inspired others around the world.” Within, there are “suggestions to strengthen our democracy.” Congress “should amend the Constitution to establish for all Americans an affirmative right to vote,” and “every citizen should read the Declaration of Independence.”

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‘Iran has zero chance of honoring the MOU’

Mike Evans at The Jerusalem Post

There are “people in Washington who still believe the Iranian regime can be persuaded to change through diplomacy,” says Mike Evans. They “believe another agreement,” another version of the Memorandum of Understanding or “another round of negotiations will somehow convince the ayatollahs to abandon their nuclear ambitions.” But Iran has “repeatedly shown that it views negotiations as a strategic tool.” Every “concession allows Tehran to strengthen its military, rebuild its economy and continue pursuing the very objectives it promised to abandon.”

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‘How Trump plans to crush fast food workers’

Timothy Noah at The New Republic

Corporate America has “systematically shed low-wage workers, either by offshoring them, contracting out their work or designating them as independent contractors,” says Timothy Noah. The “consumer welfare standard is on its way out, but that transition is not happening quickly.” Today “fast food employees are mostly grown-ups, often with families, and their best recourse, if they can’t make ends meet, is to go on welfare.” President Donald Trump’s “proposed joint-employer rule will impoverish these workers even more.”

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Keir Starmer promised to give his successor as prime minister his “full and unequivocal support” but Andy Burnham must be wondering what Starmer’s definition of “full and unequivocal” is, following this week’s defence announcement.

Starmer announced a £15 billion increase in spending in his £298 billion Defence Investment Plan (DIP). Of the £15 billion, around two thirds will be raised from “efficiency savings” of quangos, and “cutting capital budgets across Whitehall by 1%”, said The Guardian.

However, £4.7 billion remains unfunded, with the Treasury saying it will be allocated in the next budget, creating a defence black hole for the next prime minister and chancellor.

As presumptive prime minister, Andy Burnham will “somehow need to find more money”, said the Financial Times’ editorial board, likely through a series of unpopular savings. Whether he can succeed where Starmer has failed on defence spending “will be a defining test” of Burnham’s premiership.

‘Dirty rotten trick’

Starmer has left the prime-minister-in-waiting a “series of unexploded bombs” in the DIP to resolve in the first months of his expected term, said political editor Steven Swinford in The Times. Numbers aside, there was an “even bigger bombshell”: no date was set for when a Starmer’s pledge to spend 3% of GDP on defence would be met, “or indeed 3.5% for that matter”.

It is “highly unclear” how reforming the civil service – which has “only got bigger” – and “breaking down operational barriers” will be achieved. Even if Burnham navigates Starmer’s legacy safely, it will have “significant fiscal implications for his own plans”.

This isn’t about Starmer acquiescing on defence, said John Rentoul in The Independent. It is about him “trying to blow up Andy Burnham before he’s started”. Starmer had promised in his resignation to work “dutifully” in the interests of the nation and oversee an “orderly transition”: “he didn’t mean a word of it”. This “dirty rotten trick” shows us in public what he has been feeling in private. He feels “betrayed” by Burnham, Wes Streeting and Shabana Mahmood, and has “no intention of making life easy for them”.

“Sir Keir Starmer hasn’t actually sewn raw prawns into the hems of the Downing Street curtains, but he might as well have,” said former Labour MP Tom Harris in The Telegraph. His “two-faced” and “spiteful” actions look “all the more distasteful” considering his upset over inheriting his own £22 billion black hole from Rishi Sunak’s government. “We expected more of Starmer.”

Burnham’s ‘call to arms’

If Burnham is “fazed” by this situation, he “isn’t fit to be PM”, said James Lyons, former Downing Street Director of Strategic Communications, in The i Paper. The near-£5 billion deficit he needs to fill is “peanuts” compared to the £1 trillion-plus that the Government spends. The problem could just “disappear” “at a stroke” with improved forecasts, much like the recent Spring Statement, where estimates for the figure needed to achieve it were reduced from £20 billion to £8 billion. “The bad news is that they could also go the other way.” For any chance of success, Burnham needs to “pick a small number of issues” and “stick to them through thick and thin”.

Now this is a “ding-dong political row”, said James Heale in The Spectator. The DIP’s financial commitments were listed in “vague, euphemistic terms”, meaning Burnham’s selection of a chancellor to resolve the £4.7 billion gap is “the most important decision he makes in the next few months”. Burnham has previously shown “little interest” in defence, but it is likely to be a “staple theme of his in-tray”. “He will need an experienced and effective chancellor by his side.”

The MP for Makerfield should see the DIP as a “call to arms” on public finances, said The Times’ editorial board. By arguing that his hands are tied, Burnham could use Starmer’s “political sleight of hand” to “spur him to take radical action on pensions and welfare” to make up the shortfall. Public spending is “out of control”, and if Burnham is to “break free he must attack the root causes”: high borrowing costs, welfare “profligacy” and the “triple lock”. No one will “challenge the edicts of the messiah”.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has delivered the rent freeze he promised voters last year. The measure approved last week will cover more than 2 million tenants across the city — and the movement is spreading beyond the Big Apple. Activists in Massachusetts, in California and elsewhere are pushing for rent control while getting stiff pushback from landlord groups.

‘Grassroots support’

A “national rent-control movement is rising up,” said Patrick Range McDonald at The Progressive. Mamdani’s movement “succeeded in raising nationwide awareness” of the issue amid an affordable housing crisis that has revealed the need to help millions of Americans who “pay unfair, excessive rents month after month.” Others disagree. Advocates who want to rein in rents should ask “how to build more housing, not how to ration the housing” that already exists, Jonah Karafiol and Jeffrey Miron said at The Boston Globe.

A proposed November referendum to allow rent control in Massachusetts gained a “swell of grassroots support,” said the New England News Collaborative. One poll found two-thirds of voters backed the idea. But the measure will not come to fruition for now: The Massachusetts Supreme Court struck down the initiative over religious liberty issues. Advocates say their campaign will continue. The movement has the “momentum of hundreds of thousands of everyday people on our side,” Carolyn Chou of Homes for All Massachusetts said to the outlet.

Rent control advocates in Redwood City, California, are pushing for a November rent control referendum, said The Daily Journal in San Mateo. A similar measure failed to get enough petition signatures in 2024, but the “need is greater than ever,” said organizer Clara Jaeckel to the outlet. A similar effort down the coast in Santa Barbara would limit annual rent increases to 3% or less, said KEYT. That cap “doesn't allow the landlords to get a fair rate of return,” Betty Jeppesen of the Santa Barbara Rental Property Association said to the outlet.

Are such measures effective? A report on the 2021 “rent stabilization policy” in St. Paul, Minnesota, found the measure led to a “sharp drop in large apartment construction permits,” said MPR News. Rents have nonetheless dropped 10% since 2020 despite the “shrinking supply of housing.” Rents are also dropping in Las Vegas, which has no rent control ordinance. That is the “result of companies building more apartments,” said the Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial board. They build in hopes of profit fed by future rent increases. The city’s experience “shows why rent control isn’t needed.”

‘Hiding economic reality’

Rent control is a “provably dumb policy” consistently opposed by economists, said Jonah Goldberg at the Los Angeles Times. Prices “reveal where supply and demand are” while controls are “lies” in the service of “hiding economic reality.”

“Politicians and real estate moguls” should take note of a rising rent-control movement, Sara Pequeño said at USA Today. New York is a “special case,” but it also “shows the rest of the country what is possible when renters combine their power.”

‘Most people are thinking about aging all wrong’

Leana S. Wen at The Washington Post

Many people “believe that aging is synonymous with steadily losing cognitive and physical abilities,” but a recent study “offers a far more optimistic picture: Nearly half of older adults actually improve in later life,” says Leana S. Wen. A “strong predictor of such improvement is something everyone has control over: their own beliefs about aging.” Someone who “believes their best years are still ahead of them is more likely to engage in health-promoting behaviors.”

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‘Europe’s big bewildering AC debate’

Chas Danner at Intelligencer

Europe’s heat wave is “finally ending after the extreme weather broke temperature records and upended daily life for nearly two weeks across the continent,” says Chas Danner. While “you’d think Europe’s governments and people would be rushing to fully integrate ACs into their cooling arsenal, that’s no simple task for a variety of reasons.” The “latest heat wave has fueled a raging political debate, not to mention a feeding frenzy by bewildered critics here in the U.S.”

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‘India should stop panicking about Trump’

C. Raja Mohan at Foreign Policy

India’s “post-Cold War ties with the United States have been pronounced to be in crisis with remarkable regularity,” says C. Raja Mohan. Donald Trump has “created a sense in New Delhi that the relationship is now at a crossroads.” The “mood is in stark contrast to 2024, when Indian public opinion was broadly rooting for Trump’s return.” But even as “India’s irritation with Trump has grown, it has gone out of its way to deepen engagement with the U.S. government.”

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‘Undoing Stalin’s crime: Romania and Moldova should reunite’

John Gustavsson at the National Review

Romania has “adopted a bill authorizing its government to begin talks with neighboring Moldova with the aim of unifying the two countries,” and “while unification would of course require consent from both countries, there are good reasons for the West to support such a move,” says John Gustavsson. “Like Romania already is, unification would embed Moldova in the West.” While Moldova “has made progress in recent years, it is a small, poor country incessantly targeted by Russian information warfare.”

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What happened

The European Union’s prosecutor’s office Tuesday said it was conducting raids “in France and other European countries” as part of an “investigation into the use of EU funds by a former political group of the European Parliament.”

France’s Le Monde said the raids in France, Belgium, Spain and Italy were a significant advance in a “judicial investigation into possible embezzlement” of $5 million in EU funds by Identity and Democracy (ID), a bloc of right-wing parties that was disbanded in 2024 and replaced by the Patriots for Europe group.

Who said what

Jordan Bardella, the president of France’s far-right National Rally party and head of the Patriots group, said on social media Tuesday night that “searches have been underway at the offices and private homes” of contractors who “have worked with us.” When the European Public Prosecutor’s Office announced the investigation into ID last July, Bardella had called it a “new harassment operation by the European Parliament.” Along with National Rally, ID and its successor group include Italy’s League (Lega) and Germany’s AfD.

What next?

Bardella’s party is “eyeing its best chance yet of winning the presidency in France next year,” Euronews said. Polls suggest the far-right party “will have a commanding lead in the first round of voting.”

What happened

President Donald Trump took in at least $2.2 billion in revenue last year, including $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency ventures, according to a mandatory annual filing released Tuesday.

Trump’s “traditional businesses — in particular golf courses and resorts — continued to bring in millions,” Reuters said, but he “now derives most of his income from ​digital assets that have benefited from his policies.” Trump’s reported 2024 income was $622 million.

Who said what

Trump’s new disclosure lists $635 million in royalties from $TRUMP memecoins and $799 million from token sales and other income from World Liberty Financial. “Both the tokens and the coins have plunged in value since the sales,” The Associated Press said. A Reuters analysis last month found that Trump’s family crypto ventures raked in at least $2.3 billion in profits during his second term, while their investors lost $2.3 billion.

Trump’s open pursuit of profit in office is “completely unprecedented,” presidential wealth historian Megan Gorman told The New York Times. It’s a “betrayal of the American social contract: that those who lead the country prioritize country over self.” Trump has never “engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement.

What next?

Presidents are exempt from the conflict-of-interest laws governing most federal workers, former federal ethics office chief Dan Fox told Reuters. But Trump “makes the case better than anyone that it’s time for additional ethics reforms.”

What happened

The Supreme Court Tuesday ruled that President Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship violated the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, upholding the long-established principle that most people born on U.S. soil are automatically citizens. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred with the five-justice majority but said he would have struck down Trump’s order as a narrower legislative violation. Justice Samuel Alito said, in one of three dissents, that the ruling was a “serious mistake” in “one of the most important decisions in the history of the court.”

Who said what

Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, handed Trump a “huge loss on one of his top priorities” on the final day of the Supreme Court’s term, CNN said. Trump’s executive order “would have applied to people who are legally in the United States” and affected “more than one-quarter of a million babies,” The Associated Press said. But it “never went into effect,” The New York Times said, “and there were few signs the administration had been preparing the dramatic overhaul of the citizenship system” that would have been needed.

Trump might have fared better if he had “tried to end birthright citizenship for transients alone,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. But “he took the advice of those who recommended an expansive constitutional challenge because he thought the issue was a political winner, and his defeat is all the greater for it.”

What next?

Trump claimed on Truth Social that Congress could “easily” enact his birthright ban without a “long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment.” That “appeared at odds with the court’s ruling,” the Times said. But “any measure, whether proposed as a bill or a constitutional amendment, would face long-shot odds.”

It could be the worst case yet in President Trump’s abuse of prosecutorial power to “bully his political rivals,” said Kim Wehle in The Bulwark. California Gov. Gavin Newsom revealed recently that he and his wife are being investigated by the Department of Justice. The investigations into a Trump foil and possible 2028 Democratic presidential candidate reveal “how bad things have gotten”—but Newsom is showing Americans “how to resist” Trump’s assault on the rule of law. He put the DOJ “on the defensive” by announcing its investigations himself and has filed a Freedom of Information request for documents related to two ongoing probes. “He’s coming after me because I am considering running for president,” Newsom said, adding that he is proud to join Trump’s “hit list.”

The governor’s claim of political persecution shows “savvy political skill,” but it may be misleading, said Nicole Russell in USA Today. According to the Los Angeles Times, federal prosecutors in California launched two investigations a year ago based on whistleblower tips. One investigation focused on Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, who recently pleaded guilty to fraud and false statements to the FBI; that case may now be expanded beyond her. The other probe apparently is focused on Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s finances and taxes. Her nonprofits have drawn public criticism for accepting donations from corporations that lobby her husband for favorable policies, and the governor has solicited $4.3 million in donations for a nonprofit she co-founded. But “martyrdom at the hands of a Republican plays well” in a Democratic presidential primary. In fact, Newsom “seemed almost happy to drop the news,” said Kimberley A. Strassel in The Wall Street Journal. California permits elected officials to solicit donations for nonprofits, called behested payments, and Newsom has approached many people and companies—some with business before the state—on his wife’s behalf. “Ethically ugly isn’t the same as illegal,” but “the Newsoms shouldn’t be allowed to pretend that there’s nothing to see here.”

California’s First Couple is now bracing for months of intense scrutiny, said Melanie Mason and Jeremy B. White in Politico. Law enforcement is questioning their acquaintances, and Siebel Newsom has become “a recurring target in the conservative social media ecosystem,” which villainizes her as a woke elitist. Fairly or not, the DOJ’s investigations have “opened a new front in the governor’s battle with the White House.”

What festivities are planned?

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is being celebrated with a series of MAGA-fied gatherings, concerts, and competitions. Many of them have an overtly partisan component. The first event was a night of Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts staged on the White House lawn specifically to coincide with Trump’s 80th birthday. The next, the “Great American State Fair,” which runs on the National Mall for two weeks, was supposed to include stands from every U.S. state and territory. But at least seven states (six of them with Democratic governors) pulled out, citing costs and politics, after it became clear that the event would feature Republican themes like Make America Healthy Again Monday and the participation of conservative groups such as Moms for America. This event is “a more partisan affair than originally presented,” said Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek through a spokesman. The pro-Trump vibe also caused the cancellation of a planned June 25 kickoff concert, after country singer Martina McBride, rapper Young MC, and bands including Morris Day and the Time and the Commodores all bowed out for political reasons. Trump said he would open the State Fair with one of his political rallies instead, adding that he’d make July 4 “the most spectacular Trump rally of them all.”

Was this the original plan?

No. In 2016, Congress authorized a bipartisan nonprofit known as America250 to organize America’s milestone birthday. Inspired by the 1976 bicentennial—a widely praised extravaganza featuring 12 weeks of festivals on the Mall, events in every state, and the opening of the Air and Space Museum—the group said then it hoped to “educate, engage, and unite” Americans with programs across the country that would present and celebrate our history. So far, it has organized events such as a July 4 benefit concert in Los Angeles featuring Smashing Pumpkins and Queen Latifah; a succession of ball drops in New York City’s Times Square for each U.S. time zone on July 3; and the burying in Philadelphia of a huge time capsule to be opened in 2276. But it’s not very well funded. For the bicentennial, Congress had spent the equivalent of $900 million in today’s dollars. For this celebration, it has given less: some $80 million total between 2019 and 2025. While another $150 million was allocated in last year’s giant budget bill to top up the funds, the bulk of that money doesn’t go to America250 but to a rival group, Freedom 250.

What is Freedom 250?

It’s the Trump-chaired White House task force behind the UFC fight and the fair. Created by one of Trump’s early executive orders specifically to take the place of the bipartisan America250, Freedom 250 consists entirely of Republicans, nearly all white men. Vice President JD Vance serves as vice chair, and most Cabinet members are on the task force. Over a quarter of the partners listed on Freedom 250’s website are Christian groups or have Christian affiliations, although it also has connections with firms such as John Deere and Northrop Grumman. Freedom 250 says its mission includes inviting Americans “to pray for our country and our people and rededicate ourselves as One Nation Under God.” Both groups are running events.

How do the two groups differ?

Democrats call Freedom 250 a “Trump vanity” project, saying it promotes a revisionist, overly sanitized version of American history. Freedom 250 materials for a student art contest, for instance, describe Martin Luther King Jr. as having a “can-do” attitude but don’t mention that he fought segregation. But the Trump administration said it had to create its own task force because America250 placed too much emphasis on the darker aspects of American history, like slavery and discrimination. Chris LaCivita, a former Trump campaign manager, even accused the commission of wanting “to apologize” for the past 250 years. Meanwhile, the two sides are now squabbling over funding. America250 was supposed to get $50 million of the celebration money Congress allocated last year. As of June, though, the Interior Department had transferred only half of that.

Why the holdup? 

The administration says America250 has overspent “on frivolous, poorly attended events.” It points to the America’s Field Trip initiative, an essay contest whose winners get trips to historic sites, which is costing an estimated $10.4 million. Yet the White House has also raised eyebrows with its spending. The Interior Department has splashed out $98 million to spruce up Washington, D.C., for the celebrations, gilding horse statues and repainting the Reflecting Pool. The huge triumphal arch that Trump wants to build will cost another $100 million, at least. Plus, there are allegations of corruption: Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) launched a probe into whether the White House was running a “pay-to-play” scheme by giving wealthy Freedom 250 donors access to Trump.

Are Americans excited to turn 250?

Some are. Major concerts, festivals, and parades are expected to draw big crowds in Boston; New York; Philadelphia; Richmond, Va.; and Charleston, S.C. But Gallup found that while 84% of Americans over 65 plan to celebrate, the number drops to 66% for those ages 40 to 64, and just 54% for those 18 to 39. An NBC News poll found the number of respondents who were “extremely” proud to be an American is at a record low of 33%, and 38% told Reuters/ Ipsos they don’t believe the U.S. will be around for its 500th birthday. Some historians blame the apathy on the president. “The carnival atmosphere of cage fights on the White House lawn and a concert that everyone seems to be backing out of tells you all you need to know,” says historian James Robenalt. “There is no serious look at the nation or its complicated history.”

What happened

Far-left candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept Democratic House primary races in the city last week, a sign that the party’s momentum has lurched sharply left. Two of the three Mamdani-backed primary winners are fellow members of the Democratic Socialists of America, a political organization that favors universal health care and higher taxes on the rich and calls Israel an “apartheid regime.” Darializa Avila Chevalier pulled off the evening’s biggest stunner, unseating Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Another DSA member, Claire Valdez, beat a candidate endorsed by retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez, while Brad Lander, a Mamdani ally who’s a former DSA member, trounced incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman. Much like Mamdani’s grassroots mayoral campaign last year, the upstarts relied on thousands of DSA volunteers, who knocked on doors and made phone calls to turn out votes. The DSA has also had success outside of New York, with its candidates advancing in mayoral primaries in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles earlier this month. “The Democratic establishment better wake up,” Usamah Andrabi of the progressive group Justice Democrats told Politico. “Because the Left is winning.”

Moderate Democrats fared better outside of New York City. In Utah, former representative Ben McAdams staved off progressive challengers to win his primary in a redrawn district that now favors Democrats. In Maryland, Adrian Boafo earned a chance to succeed his old boss, Rep. Steny Hoyer, a staunch supporter of Israel. Among Republicans, several candidates endorsed by President Trump pulled off upsets: In upstate New York, Anthony Constantino defeated an assemblyman backed by the N.Y. GOP, while in the race for Republican nominee for South Carolina governor, Alan Wilson, the attorney general Trump endorsed at the last minute, won in a landslide

What the columnists said

Mamdani’s “audacious gamble” paid off, said Nicholas Fandos in The New York Times. He’s now “the unquestioned political kingmaker of the nation’s cultural and financial capital,” and the DSA, after years on the margins, is “a formidable force.” But it’s too early to tell if this movement has expanded beyond the bluest parts of the state. After all, New York held primaries for all 26 of its congressional districts, 13 of which are housed, at least in part, in the city. Mamdani got involved in only three.

Those were the races in which criticism of Israel played a major role, said Lisa Kashinsky in Politico. Lander, who is Jewish and a self-described “liberal Zionist,” upbraided his opponent for failing to endorse an arms embargo on Israel “and for refusing to call its war in Gaza a genocide.” Avila Chevalier “relentlessly attacked” Espaillat for taking AIPAC money. And the crowd at several of the victory parties chanted “Free, free Palestine.” Criticizing Israel “is now not only politically survivable” for a Democrat but actually “advantageous.”

It’s not mere criticism—some of these people openly side with the terrorists who murdered Israelis on Oct. 7, said Jeffrey Blehar in National Review. Avila Chevalier, a Muslim convert, is adamant “that Hamas Did Nothing Wrong.” But that’s not the only reason she is set to become “the single craziest member of Congress.” She’s also a “prison abolitionist who authentically believes murderers should not be behind bars.” In her now-deleted social media posts, she calls for abolishing national borders and nationalizing private companies and rages against mainstream Democrats. In one post, she calls former president Joe Biden a “rapist.” In another, she declares, “F--- Kamala Harris.”

In endorsing such extreme leftists, Mamdani is trying to “remake the national Democratic Party,” said Perry Bacon in The New Republic. Mayors “don’t usually interject themselves into congressional races.” Unable to run for president since he wasn’t born a U.S. citizen, this is how he can leave his mark nationally.

The charge he has led against the Democratic Party establishment is “reminiscent of the Tea Party that once shook Republicans,” said David Smith in The Guardian. That grassroots movement remade the Republican Party in the 2010s, turning it into a hotbed of anti-incumbent fury and contempt toward elites. Will the DSA surge do the same? Democratic primary voters clearly want their candidates to “stand for something, rather than nothing, because writing strongly worded letters to Trump is not enough.”

What happened

The U.S. last week removed sanctions on Iranian oil even as peace talks between Washington and Tehran appeared to descend into confusion, with the two sides issuing conflicting accounts of discussions on nuclear inspections and the unfreezing of billions in Iranian funds. An initial round of talks in Switzerland “laid a very good foundation” for a final peace deal, said Vice President JD Vance, who led the U.S. delegation. But the two sides soon sparred publicly over Iran’s nuclear program, with Vance and President Trump saying Tehran had agreed to U.N. inspections of its damaged nuclear sites while Iranians insisted they hadn’t. “They know they’re wrong,” Trump said. “They told us inside.” The two sides also disagreed over the fate of Iran’s highly enriched uranium, which the preliminary agreement states will be diluted. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said his country will “never back down from the right to enrich uranium”; Trump shot back that “he better watch his mouth” or “we’ll take over the rest of the country.”

Citing “productive” talks, the U.S. waived long-standing sanctions on Iranian oil through August and cleared the way for Tehran to be paid in dollars, including by U.S. buyers. Iranian officials said steps had been taken toward the release of $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets. Vance said if assets were released, Iran would have to spend them on U.S. exports, but Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei insisted Iran can spend any released funds “freely.” There were also sharp divisions over the Strait of Hormuz, where hundreds of ships were stranded during the conflict. Iran said it will charge “fees” to ships using the strait in exchange for unspecified services; Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that no country can charge fees for transiting an international waterway.

In Washington, the Senate passed a resolution barring Trump from resuming the Iran war without congressional authorization, with four Republicans joining Democrats in a rare rebuke of the president. The vote came amid broad GOP skepticism about Trump’s ceasefire deal, which has been widely criticized for ceding too much to Iran while achieving none of Trump’s war aims. “The administration acts like they want a deal much more than the ayatollah regime,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.). It “looks like weakness.”

What the columnists said

The “sweeping rollback” of U.S. oil sanctions reverses “years of pressure designed to cripple Iran’s economy,” said Anniek Bao in CNBC.com. The 60-day license issued by the Treasury Department will unlock the sale of 67 million barrels of Iranian crude floating in the strait, yielding a “windfall” of up to $9 billion for Tehran. And it reopens “Iran’s most important revenue stream.” Sanctions are unlikely to return after 60 days, said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. “Once Iranian oil is in the international supply line, they have Trump over a barrel,” because he won’t be able to impose curbs on Iranian exports without “pushing oil prices up again.”

This is quite the turnaround for the Trump team, said Andrew Kaczynski and Jennifer Hansler in CNN.com. For years, Trump, Rubio, and Vance assailed deals that provided financial concessions to Iran, saying they would enrich a dangerous foe that “fuels terror.” That was their “central indictment” of former president Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, which granted Iran sanctions relief and “access to frozen assets.” Now they’re poised to hand the regime piles of dollar bills.

And for what? asked The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Tehran has “made no serious concession on nuclear matters.” Lifting oil sanctions now will “gut” U.S. leverage and send cash flowing to the coffers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran claims some of its frozen assets have already been released, possibly $6 billion that was being held in Qatar. Even if Tehran complies with a U.S. dictate that such cash be spent only on food and medicine, “it frees up other funds for military purposes.”

Meanwhile, the preliminary deal signed by Trump treats our ally Israel as if it were a U.S. “puppet” with “no sovereignty beyond that which America grants it,” said Noah Rothman in National Review. By demanding a ceasefire in southern Lebanon, Iran has compelled America to tacitly take the side of the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists who use the region to strike at northern Israel. “And all in the craven pursuit of a ‘peace’ unworthy of the word.”

“Negotiating with Iran has always been an extraordinary challenge,” said David E. Sanger and Yeganeh Torbati in The New York Times, but it’s even more complex under Trump. Instead of letting negotiators quietly work toward a full agreement, he likes to trumpet “his preferred outcomes as fully negotiated side deals,” in a bid to force Iran’s hand. The Iranians have their own “spin strategy”: Deny every claim, even if it contains “an element of truth.” Some “posturing” is par for the course, but at this level it raises the question of whether the sniping “will ultimately sink the whole venture.”

Hanging over the negotiations is “an uncomfortable question,” said Aviva Klompas in USA Today. What exactly has the U.S. accomplished? The hardliners remain in power in Tehran. The fate of Iran’s highly enriched uranium is unsettled. The Strait of Hormuz, where oil shipping was uncontested before the war, is now a “bargaining chip.” Iran has “suffered enormous losses” to its military and nuclear infrastructure. But if it is financially rewarded and retains its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, it’s fair to ask “whether Tehran has once again accomplished a tactic it has spent decades perfecting: losing the war while winning the negotiation.”

While some people may grow up dreaming of a career in public office, politicians sometimes come from a less conventional source: Hollywood. There’s a long list of film and television actors who have gone on to roles in politics, including President Donald Trump, who expanded his standing in the public eye as the host of “The Apprentice.”

Al Franken

Al Franken took perhaps the most ironic leap in U.S. politics: going from parodying a U.S. senator on television to actually getting elected as one. Franken was widely known for his time on “Saturday Night Live,” during which he often portrayed former Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) during the show’s cold open sketches. But it turns out he wasn’t satisfied with merely pretending to be a politician.

In 2009, Franken became a Democratic senator for Minnesota in a contest that saw “more than 2.9 million Minnesotans cast votes in the state’s U.S. Senate race — one of the most expensive in the country,” said PBS News. After a judicial review, the election ended when Franken “won by 312 votes,” one of the closest Senate races ever. However, Franken’s political career abruptly concluded in 2018 when he resigned after several women said he “groped or tried to forcibly kiss them,” said Politico.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Action star Arnold Schwarzenegger dominated the 1980s in projects like “The Terminator,” “Predator” and “Conan the Barbarian.” But the Austrian-born actor became an “increasingly politically active Republican during the 1990s,” and he “ran for the California governorship and won when Gray Davis was recalled in 2003,” said Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial biography.

Thus, the Terminator became the “Governator,” and despite initial skepticism, proved to be a popular leader of the Golden State. In 2006, despite a “poor year nationally for the GOP, he was re-elected with 56% of the vote” and a “margin of well over 1 million votes,” said Politico. But after this, Schwarzenegger’s popularity waned, and he left office in 2011 “with a record-low 23%” approval rating, only “1% higher than that of Davis when he was recalled.” Schwarzenegger has since taken on an active role in denouncing MAGA and the Trump wing of the GOP.

Clint Eastwood

After getting his start as a major Western star, Clint Eastwood publicly espoused a wide variety of political views, supporting both Democrats and Republicans. “Politics are evidently always simmering with Eastwood,” said The Guardian, though in his later years he became much more associated with the GOP. But even then, his views often remained fluid.

This became even more evident in 1986, when Eastwood was elected the nonpartisan mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. Though associated with conservative values, during his time as mayor Eastwood was “sympathetic to environmental concerns and less sympathetic to big business,” said The Guardian, bucking traditional GOP tenets. After leaving office, Eastwood remained in the political sphere, most notably the bizarre moment when he “spoke to that empty chair at the 2012 Republican National Convention,” said The Washington Post.

Jerry Springer

While Jerry Springer made several film and television appearances over the years, it was his eponymous television show that made him a household name, often featuring “controversial subjects like adultery, occasional nudity and even physical violence,” said Biography. But the show was a second career for Springer, who started in the Democratic political arena.

After working as a campaign adviser for Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.) in the 1960s, Springer made his way to Ohio and was “elected to Cincinnati City Council in 1971 but unexpectedly resigned in 1974,” said Biography. The hiatus didn’t last long, as Springer was re-elected to the city council in 1975 and “became Cincinnati mayor in 1977.” Though he only served as mayor for one year before his political career largely fizzled out, Springer “considered runs for the U.S. Senate and a second attempt as Ohio governor in 2018.”

Ronald Reagan

When thinking of actors who turned to politics, there is one name everyone probably recalls instantly: While other Hollywood stars have held important positions, former President Ronald Reagan is the only one to have occupied the nation’s highest office. Before moving into the White House, Reagan’s career started on screen in 1937, when a contest “won him a contract with Warner Brothers in Hollywood,” said the White House Historical Association (WHHA).

Over the next 20 years, Reagan “appeared in 53 films, including ‘Kings Row’ and ‘Knute Rockne, All American.’” He later turned to politics with a staunch Republican platform, and in 1966 “defeated incumbent Pat Brown to become governor of California, and was reelected in 1970,” said the WHHA. From there, Reagan looked to the national stage, and amid the Democratic Party’s rising unpopularity, he defeated sitting President Jimmy Carter in a landslide during the 1980 election.

Sean Duffy

Several television personalities occupy spaces in President Donald Trump’s White House, most notably Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Before earning his law degree, Duffy “got his TV start in his 20s on ‘The Real World,’ appearing on the Boston edition of the show's sixth season,” said People. This version of the show, as with the other seasons of “The Real World,” followed Duffy and six other strangers who lived together in a converted firehouse in Boston.

After his reality television debut, Duffy “moved into law in his home state of Wisconsin, serving as the district attorney of Ashland County for a decade,” said People. He went on to serve Wisconsin in Congress, “representing the state’s 7th Congressional District, from 2011 to 2019.” After winning the 2024 election, Trump nominated Duffy to lead the Transportation Department. Several controversies have marked his tenure.

Sonny Bono

Sonny Bono remains best known for the singing duo he formed with his wife Cher, which made the pair two of the most iconic celebrities of the 1960s. But Bono was also a longstanding member of the Republican Party and was active in GOP politics throughout his life. His entrance into the political sphere came after he “fell almost completely out of the public eye following the cancellation of ‘The Sonny and Cher Show’ in 1977,” said History.

Soon after the show was axed, though, Bono began to make a new name for himself in politics, and he was elected mayor of Palm Springs, California, in 1988. After serving as mayor for four years, Bono “set his sights on national office,” and in 1994 he was “elected to Congress as a representative from California’s 44th Congressional District,” said Biography. While in Congress, Bono became known for his “wit and his deeply conservative views,” and he remains the only member of Congress to have scored a number one single on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Strong showings from the Democrats’ left flank in recent elections have spooked some in the party’s leadership. Criticism of Israel, once deemed outside the bounds of mainstream political discourse, has become an increasingly common feature of progressive campaigns. Victories in New York City by candidates who “ran hard against the war in Gaza” are now “turbocharging” Democrats’ “yearslong shift away from Israel,” said Politico. While progressives begin flexing their newfound electoral muscles, party centrists are feeling anxious. These growing pains for the party, combined with an appetite for sharper Israel criticism, could reflect a national electoral risk in November.

What did the commentators say?

Progressive primary victories by strident Israel critics in New York “paint a picture of a Democratic Party rapidly shifting” on an issue once considered a ”bipartisan prerequisite for success in the Big Apple and beyond,” said Politico. The victories of candidates like self-described “liberal Zionist” Brad Lander over the more conservative Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman demonstrated that “harsh criticism” of Israel is “not only politically survivable” but can even be “advantageous in New York City’s dominant party.”

Primary wins in the “deep-blue districts of Brad Lander, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier” signaled a “new era of skepticism” among some Democrats “toward the Jewish state and its actions,” said The New York Times. Do those wins “mark the end for Democratic politicians who hold traditional pro-Israel views?” asked Forward. Or do they “represent something more narrow” and specific to New York?

Democrats’ shifting relationship with Israel “looms in Michigan,” where the party will defend outgoing Sen. Gary Peters’ seat, and “may continue” to be felt in Colorado, where challenger Melat Kiros has accused Rep. Diana DeGette of “being too supportive of Israel,” said The Guardian. The ongoing focus on Israel has become a “bigger issue” that Democrats need to “deal with more comprehensively than, like, ‘If I don’t talk about it, it doesn’t happen,’” said Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) to The Hill. The debate has become a “corporate issue with all these PACs pouring in a lot of money,” which is “giving people a really bad taste in their mouth.”

In previous elections, Democrats’ Israel-focused policies have been “confined largely to niche foreign policy considerations for most voters,” said Haaretz. This year, voters are “considering Israel at the ballot box more than ever before.” Establishment Democratic leaders “still very much believe that being a Zionist and a Democrat are not mutually exclusive.” But it’s become “abundantly clear” that aspirants “within the party structure” are “participating in a real-time vibe shift” that prioritizes a “willingness to hold Israel to account” over “pro-Israel bona fides.”

“More and more Democrats” are “making it clear” they want to end “U.S. taxpayer support to the government of Israel,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) to the Times. Next session, Congress should eschew “reflexive unconditional support to the government of Israel.”

What next?

Incumbent losses in New York’s recent primaries show that the debate over Democrats’ relationship with Israel has “already left a lasting mark on the midterms,” said the Times. No matter what “other issues were at play in the individual races,” said JTA, the success of candidates with an “outsized focus” on criticizing Israel “sends the message that their approach is a winning strategy.” Republicans, meanwhile, “believe that Democrats reap what they sow” ahead of the midterms, said Fox Business. Conservatives “plan to use this” in November, as Democrats contend with a trend that works in “urban areas, but not swing districts.”

Leftist critics of Israel are having a moment,” said former Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) to Politico. “That doesn’t mean they represent a majority of congressional Democrats in the country.” Pro-Israel Democrats must develop a “better strategy before a handful of primaries approach a tipping point.”

The effects will likely be felt beyond November. Every Democratic presidential candidate “will be required to declare himself or herself on the matter of the United States’ stance toward Israel,” said Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Bill Galston to The Guardian. “The question was largely evaded in 2024. That strategy is no longer possible.”

‘The case against fireworks’

Char Miller at Time

“This year’s Fourth of July fireworks promise to be especially explosive,” but they have “negative consequences for our environment and our health,” says Char Miller. Climate change is “making landscapes more vulnerable to fire,” and fireworks also “pose other life-threatening challenges.” They “can degrade air quality for hours or even days.” For “people with asthma, cardiovascular disease, or other respiratory conditions, the toxic air presents genuine health risks.” Drone displays “are an innovative alternative with far fewer risks.”

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‘Assailed by right and left, the Peace Corps continues to make an apolitical difference’

Jonathan Zimmerman at The Philadelphia Inquirer

Republicans have “proposed to eliminate funding for the Peace Corps,” but the organization “has also been the target of left-wing attacks,” says Jonathan Zimmerman. Neither side “believes that Americans can be a force for good in the world,” and that is “why the Peace Corps matters.” It is “based on the simple proposition that bringing different people together can help them thrive. And it’s a standing rebuke to cynics on the right and the left.”

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‘Why the Arab League could not stop Israel’s genocide’

Rami G. Khouri at Al Jazeera

“Arabs are perplexed by why their governments and the Arab League have been so docile in the face of the Israeli genocide in Gaza,” says Rami G. Khouri. But Arab states “have never been able to harness their natural, human and geographic resources to become powerful, confident states that are not constantly manipulated.” They “rely heavily on non-Arab powers for financial, military, technological and other assistance that is vital for their survival; this deep dependence has diluted their sovereignty.”

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‘The obesity curve finally bent. Now comes the hard part.’

Ashish K. Jha at The Boston Globe

GLP-1s “appear to have done what no public health effort could” for obesity, but “having a treatment is not the same as getting it to the people who need it,” says Ashish K. Jha. Obesity drugs “should be covered by health insurance.” Coverage “should be broad and clinically grounded. It currently is not.” Insurance companies can “build in lower-cost maintenance once a patient stabilizes, so the choice is not a $1,000 injection forever or watching the weight return.”

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What happened

Venezuela Monday raised the death toll from last week’s powerful earthquakes to 1,719 people, with another 5,034 injured and 15,866 displaced. The numbers are expected to keep rising.

Among the missing are more than 100 Venezuelans who arrived in La Guaira on a U.S. deportation flight hours before the back-to-back quakes struck, The Associated Press said. The government-run hotel where they were brought for medical screenings and ID cards collapsed.

Who said what

The 146 Venezuelans on the deportation flight from Miami included 19 women and seven children, according to Human Rights First’s ICE Flight Monitor. Venezuela’s repatriation agency showed one family a list of 32 survivors from the flight, but most are believed to have died, Reuters said. Relatives “have questioned why deportees were taken there and why their phones and documents were withheld, complicating efforts to find and identify them.”

What next?

The search for survivors “was growing increasingly desperate” Monday, five days after the quakes, The New York Times said. “Frustration is growing” with Venezuela’s “U.S.-backed government” and what critics call its “slow and inept” response, NPR said. Venezuela’s “thousands of police and army troops” have been “slow to arrive” and hindered rescue efforts by “demanding government permits from doctors and rescue workers.”

What happened

A pair of landmark Supreme Court decisions Monday gave presidents broad authority to fire the heads of previously independent federal agencies while appearing to carve out an exception for the Federal Reserve. Both rulings were written by Chief Justice John Roberts.

In the “more significant decision,” CNN said, the court’s 6-3 conservative majority allowed President Donald Trump to fire Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Kelly Slaughter at will “despite a federal law that requires presidents to show cause — such as malfeasance.” In the other, a 5-4 court said Trump can’t fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook, for now.

Who said what

Monday’s rulings “took a sledgehammer to much of the federal government’s regulatory structure,” Nina Totenberg said at NPR, with the court’s conservatives “striking down almost all the limits that Congress — and the courts — had previously established to protect the independence” of regulatory agencies. Slaughter said the decision allowed Trump to “fire watchdogs who won’t put politics over principle” and “replace them with lap dogs.”

Cook celebrated her narrow victory as a win for the “American people, whose economic well-being depends on a central bank that answers to its mission, not political intimidation.” But the ruling gave Trump “an opening to keep fighting,” and he signaled he would, The New York Times said. The decision was “procedural,” Trump said, and he would “take appropriate action immediately.”

What next?

The court’s massive “expansion of presidential power” could “open the door to allowing presidents to fire at will not just agency leaders, but potentially lower-level government experts who have been protected by the Civil Service Reform Act since 1883,” Totenberg said.

In his first speech as prime minister in waiting, Andy Burnham promised he would achieve “good growth in every postcode” and spearhead the “biggest rebalancing of power” in political history.

Keir Starmer announced his own “devolution revolution” in 2024, but Burnham aims to move even more influence away from Westminster towards other regions of the UK to drive more balanced economic growth.

His speech at the People’s ­History Museum in Manchester was “­important in shedding light on a Burnham Britain”, said The Times. As he was championing a “devolution first” attitude, the support of his audience was “not in doubt”. But the “viability of his proposals was”.

How is the UK already devolved?

Manchester has benefited from some of the “most extensive” powers devolved to English cities, said the BBC. It has significant control over local transport, housing and strategic planning decisions.

Northern Ireland and the Welsh Senedd have similar autonomy over health, education and housing policies among others, with the latter also managing local government. In Scotland, Holyrood controls health, education, local government, environment, justice and policing. It can set most income tax rates and has some control over welfare policy, too.

What has Burnham proposed?

Burnham said he would create a “No 10. North”, a new prime minister’s office based in Manchester and acting as the “nerve centre of a rewired Britain”. It would support regional powers in delivering a nationwide agenda of reindustrialisation, regeneration and reform of essential services.

Local authorities would be offered greater control over key utilities such as water, energy and transport. Burnham’s advisers have also “floated ideas” about allowing local authorities to introduce local income tax, and to set and retain business rates to mirror policies in Denmark, Sweden and Canada, said Matthew Brooker on Bloomberg.

The dispersal of power has already begun. The MP for Makerfield has appointed Caroline Simpson as his deputy chief of staff to lead No. 10 North should he become prime minister, said The Guardian. Previously described as Burnham’s “right-hand woman”, the career civil servant has overseen Greater Manchester’s £3 billion-a-year budget since 2024.

What is the aim?

The UK is one of the most centralised economies among developed countries, said Brooker. In 2023, the share of UK tax revenue generated at a subnational level – essentially by regions below the central government – was less than 5%, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. This is compared with 14% for France, 24% for Spain and nearly a third for Germany. “Regions tend to do better when they raise more of their own revenue.”

If Burnham’s devolution policies prove successful, the “big prize” would be a rise in nationwide GDP, said Bloomberg. If the rest of the UK came even halfway to matching London’s productivity levels, the economy would be “at least 4% larger”, according to PwC analysis from 2019.

There has been no indication how Burnham will split his time between London and Manchester, but the decision felt “more significant than the relocation of staff”, said the BBC’s chief political correspondent Henry Zeffman. With a tailored agenda, it could signify a “wider shake-up of the machinery of government is in the offing”.

“Rethinking and reshaping No. 10 is long overdue,” said the Institute for Government. But Burnham’s plans for No. 10 North will only succeed if “he knows – and spells out in public – what a split operation is for”.

‘We're eating too much sugar. There are ways to change that.’

Priya Fielding-Singh at USA Today

Added sugar “isn't just in candy and soda,” says Priya Fielding-Singh. It is “pervasive, hiding in everyday staples families depend on — from bread and yogurt to tomato sauce.” The government “should set stricter standards around added sugar in the places where children learn and play, from childcare and schools to aftercare programs.” The USDA “should further reduce how much added sugar is allowed, while investing in kitchen infrastructure so schools can prepare more food on site.”

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‘Once, cyber attacks required great skill. AI is changing that.’

Bruce Schneier at The Guardian

“Cyber attacks — both large and small — have been a significant issue since long before the current crop of generative AI models,” says Bruce Schneier. What has been “changing over the decades, and what AI is changing even faster, is the gap between skill and ability.” These “models can, with little detailed direction, autonomously hack into networks, steal data, deploy ransomware and destroy systems.” To the “extent there is a solution, it’s going to involve harnessing AI for the defense.”

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‘What's really driving Latin America’s rightward elections’

Orlando J. Pérez at The Dallas Morning News

Latin American voters are “not embracing a coherent right-wing program any more than voters in 2018 and 2019 embraced a coherent left-wing one,” says Orlando J. Pérez. They are “doing what Latin American electorates have done for decades: punishing whoever holds office when crime rises and the economy stalls, and backing whoever promises to fix both.” Latin Americans are “exhausted with their governments and quick to replace them.” When “citizens feel unsafe, they back almost anyone who promises order.”

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‘The threat of force was a far more effective deterrent than Trump’s show of force in Iran’

Gilles Paris at Le Monde

Donald Trump “pledged to deliver results that would last for at least the next half-century, but the outcome was disappointing,” says Gilles Paris. The Iran memorandum’s “positions are especially difficult to hold today, notably the belief that Washington’s ‘trustworthiness’ will ‘continue to make us the global partner of first choice.’” The “war, which caught U.S. allies off guard and resulted in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, triggering a systemic global crisis, demonstrated the exact opposite.”

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Giorgia Meloni is suffering from a “splitting political headache”, said Hannah Roberts on Politico (Brussels). Italy’s first female PM has enjoyed remarkable success since her election in October 2022. She has kept her Brothers of Italy party dominant in the polls; she has held together her coalition formed with two other right-wing parties – Lega (the League) led by Matteo Salvini, and Forza Italia (the party created by Silvio Berlusconi). Come September, she will be Italy’s longest-serving post-war leader. And she’s achieved all this by skilfully “pushing Italy’s post-fascist Right towards the political mainstream”.

This month, though, a figure has emerged who threatens to undo it all and drag the Right back the other way. Roberto Vannacci, a highly decorated retired general, formally launched a new hard-right, fiercely anti-immigrant party, National Future, in Rome last week.

It is rapidly gaining support: it already has 100,000 registered members; boasts eight MPs after a string of defections from the League and Forza Italia; and is polling at over 5%. Meloni’s headache is whether to keep him at arm’s length or bring him into her political orbit. So far she’s picked the first option, but if Vannacci’s popularity keeps rising in the run-up to next year’s general election, she may have to reconsider.

‘Incandescent’ and ‘disturbing’

Since the fall of Mussolini, Italy has produced a long line of populists, said Antonio Preiti on Linkiesta (Milan). But none has been “more incandescent, more aggressive, more disturbing” than Vannacci, nicknamed “Il Generale” by his legion of fans and hailed as a modern-day Julius Caesar by his colleagues.

The Afghanistan and Iraq War veteran’s controversial demand for “remigration” – the forced deportation of immigrants to their countries of origin – should come as no surprise. This is the man, after all, who made a name for himself in 2023 with his outlandish book “The World Upside Down”, in which he hit out at the “dictatorship of minorities”; claimed that black immigrants could never be Italian; and derided gay people as “not normal”.

That made him hugely popular, and prompted Salvini, the deputy PM, to ask him to join his Lega party to help revive its fortunes. But that gamble “backfired in a spectacular fashion”, said Nick Squires in The Daily Telegraph. Elected as an MEP for the League in 2024, he proved not a “pliant acolyte” but a thorn in its side. His new party is now wooing Salvini’s supporters.

‘Extremist passions’

The old soldier may have learnt to “move shrewdly” in politics, said Stefano Folli in La Repubblica (Rome), and he sure knows how to grab people’s attention. But can he keep up the momentum? Doubtful, said Lisa Di Giuseppe in Domani (Rome). He’s been conspicuously short on economic and foreign policy ideas, for a start. At his party’s inaugural congress this month, the 57-year-old gave little indication of strategy “beyond resentment, revenge and remigration”.

Vannacci is a man known for “extremist passions masquerading as common sense”, said David Allegranti in Quotidiano Nazionale (Bologna). Such policies as he has are designed to lure disgruntled right-wingers: plans to build more jails and to pay mothers to stay at home to free up jobs that “men can’t find”. His pitch at the conference was abundantly clear. “We represent the rejects and the scum, and we are proud of it,” he told party delegates.

Meloni must “behave like a statesman”, erect a “cordon sanitaire” around National Future, and ostracise this “latest adventurer” in Italian politics, said Mario Lavia on Linkiesta. It may result in her losing office to the centre-left, but for the good of the nation she needs to do it. Vannacci is no Mussolini, it’s true, but given half a chance he’ll corrode democracy with his pro-Russia and anti-EU rhetoric.

But would that isolation strategy actually work, asked Roberto Gressi in Corriere della Sera (Rome). It certainly hasn’t in the case of the National Rally in France or the AfD in Germany, both now trending in the polls. Sad to say there’s no easy way to slay the populist far-right crocodile.

Iran has become a “lose-lose issue” for Donald Trump, which is alienating his entire political base, said Zeeshan Aleem on MS Now. When he attacked Iran, he infuriated the isolationist wing of his coalition, who believed his promise that he’d start “no new wars”. Now, his scramble to end the conflict “is alienating the hawkish sector of his party”, who believe it amounts to a humiliating surrender.

One Republican senator described the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Trump last week as “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades”. Texas senator Ted Cruz said Trump must be getting “very poor advice”. Critics are particularly outraged by the potential creation of a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran. Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen called the provision a “disaster”, likening it to offering the “Marshall Plan to rebuild Germany while the Nazis were still in power”.

Vance under fire

Furious as they are, many Republican hawks are still reluctant to criticise Trump directly, said Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. So they’re turning their fire instead on the vice-president, J.D. Vance. “Trump effectively won the war and at the 11th hour Vance is negotiating his way to a loss,” raged one unnamed congressman to a Washington correspondent.

The president has done nothing to discourage such talk. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” he said, half-jokingly, of the peace deal. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J.D.” The irony, said Jim Geraghty in The Washington Post, is that Vance opposed starting this war. Now it has fallen to him to sell the peace deal and serve as the fall guy when it goes sour. “You almost have to feel sorry for Vance. Almost.”

Face of peace

“Playing the part of Trump’s surrender monkey” will hurt Vance’s image in the short term, said Jonathan V. Last on The Bulwark, but few Republican voters are likely to remember any of this stuff in two years’ time if petrol prices are back to normal and Iran hasn’t tested a nuclear device. Vance will just be the guy who helped bring an unpopular war to an end.

He has certainly been happy to serve as the face of this peace agreement, said Adam Cancryn on CNN. He asked to play a leading role in the talks, rather than being pushed into it. Vance may get the blame if the deal blows up, but he has no doubt concluded that if the two sides return to an intractable conflict, his hopes of becoming president are probably scuppered in any case.

Reports of President Donald Trump’s total capture of the Republican Party may be premature. Faced with plummeting popularity and whack-a-mole crises, the president has clashed with some of the most powerful members of his own coalition: Senate Republicans.

Whether this conservative revolt becomes a logjam for the White House remains to be seen. As Republicans face midterm headwinds to keep their congressional majorities, is the nascent push for senatorial independence for real, or will Republicans once more adopt the MAGA party line?

‘Relationship appears to be fraying’

Trump has “enjoyed unbending loyalty” from GOP lawmakers for years, said NPR. But the “strength of that relationship appears to be fraying,” particularly as some “departing members feel more uninhibited to push back” and others begin to imagine a post-Trump Washington.

Senators whom Trump had “written off, alienated or even helped defeat” are now opting to support “Senate traditions over his political demands,” said Axios. And the president’s decision this week to cancel the planned signing of bipartisan housing legislation “further inflamed weeks of tumult” that have marked an “increasingly bitter relationship between” him and high-profile Republican senators, said The New York Times. While “lawmakers from both parties were shocked by the president’s decision,” many of them saw Trump’s canceled signing as an effort to “undermine the efforts of his own party to protect its congressional majorities” before the midterms.

Trump’s push for harsh voting restrictions, which he demanded as a prerequisite before signing the housing bill, is “colliding with a newly defiant Republican Senate” and sets up a “multifront battle” ahead of the midterms, said The Wall Street Journal. GOP lawmakers “have been deferential to the president to a point,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R - Texas), to the outlet. But that deference “doesn’t seem to have done any good.” Simply having endorsed Trump’s point of view in the past “doesn’t mean he’s going to support you,” added Cornyn, whose own reelection bid was scuttled by a Trump-backed challenger.

During a closed-door lunch on Wednesday, which Republican senators hoped would “clear the air” between them and Trump, the president instead “vented his frustrations with the senators for more than an hour, leaving them no closer to detente,” said Politico. Trump “said something negative about me,” in an attempt to “bully me from asking a question that I think the American people need to know,” said outgoing Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy to the outlet, after reports of an intense argument between him and the president during the meeting. “I’m not going to be bullied.”

Sacrificing principles at the ‘altar of Trump’

Senate Republicans that same day “proved yet again that their spines are made of pudding,” said The New Republic, after both Cassidy and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul bowed to White House pressure and flipped previous votes to kill a resolution limiting Trump’s Iran war powers. The waffling shows conservative lawmakers who “claim to have principles” will “gladly sacrifice them at the altar of Trump.”

It is unclear whether the vote will be “enough to appease Trump,” said The Associated Press. But blocking efforts to restrict the president’s war powers “was a clear signal” to Trump from senators who “still want to placate him.”

‘Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific name change hurts the US and India’

James Stavridis at Bloomberg

The Pentagon will “change the name of its Indo-Pacific Command” by “reverting to its historical appellation of simply Pacific Command,” which “will ultimately be damaging to U.S. security,” says James Stavridis. The change “feels like a direct shot at India,” which is “sensitive to names and titles — this change will not sit well in New Delhi.” It will also “be unpopular with the other members” of the region who “may see the name change as devaluing the entire concept.”

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‘One-party rule is hiding in plain sight’

David French at The New York Times

If the “two parties aren’t equally corrupt, they do have a different common characteristic: They’re equally repulsive to the public,” says David French. But “many voters are voting against incumbents more than they’re endorsing their challengers,” so “what if our nation actually has two one-party systems, instead?” If the U.S. has “two one-party systems, then that means that each way they turn, voters are confronted with the arrogance, stagnation and corruption that almost always disfigures single-party rule.”

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‘Our clients fled dangerous regimes ― only to see similar tactics here’

Sonya Funna Evelyn at The Minnesota Star-Tribune

By 2025, asylum seekers “were already warning clinicians that what they were seeing with federal immigration enforcement — masked and armed agents taking people off the streets in unmarked vehicles — were the conditions they had seen back in the countries they fled,” says Sonya Funna Evelyn. The “tactics of the most dangerous regimes on Earth are being used on the streets in the U.S.” But there was “an extraordinary response from our communities across the country.”

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‘This summer’s heat is only the beginning’

Mark Hertsgaard at The Nation

A “brutal heat wave is shattering heat records in Europe,” but it’s “worth recalling that last summer the same thing happened in Asia,” says Mark Hertsgaard. As “global warming driven mainly by burning fossil fuels continues to intensify, scientists say that record-breaking heat will become increasingly frequent throughout the world.” Journalists “can help limit the suffering — by alerting the public to impending extreme weather and sharing tips for how to be safe.”

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