‘11 hantavirus deaths in Argentina were a warning’

Abraar Karan at The Washington Post

The “recent Andes hantavirus outbreak on the Hondius cruise ship has seized international attention after three passengers died” and the incident is a “warning sign of where the world’s pandemic prevention system still has weaknesses,” says Abraar Karan. While “there is no way to avoid outbreaks, proactive approaches could reduce risk.” More “detailed predeparture screening could help shipboard doctors diagnose sick patients better,” although “this approach is only as foolproof as the people who are reporting their exposures.”

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‘The crisis in Sudan is much worse than what is acknowledged’

Zia Salik at Al Jazeera

In the “streets of Sudan’s capital, the destruction was apocalyptic,” says Zia Salik. The “difficulty in accessing many areas, and the sense that this is a complicated war in a faraway place, means the crisis has not received anywhere near the international attention it needs.” For “many people, the greatest fear now is that the unending war in the west of the country will result in Sudan, one of the largest countries in Africa, splitting in two.”

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‘What leaders get wrong about the ROI of AI’

Katy George at Time

“If you ask most executives about AI right now, the conversation quickly turns to one question: where is the return?” says Katy George. That is “not because AI isn’t delivering value. It’s because many organizations are still looking for value in the wrong places.” AI’s impact “shows up in greater insight, more predictive power, in-task skill building and the ability to evaluate more scenarios before acting.” But “those gains don’t fit neatly into traditional metrics.”

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‘States need to come clean on SNAP fraud’

Gov. Larry Rhoden at Newsweek

One “practical example of a resource that should be managed with care is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP),” says Gov. Larry Rhoden (R-S.D.). Americans “should take great pride that such a program exists, but that should inspire diligence in its oversight.” States with “higher error rates — in the double digits in many cases — warrant attention and accountability to ensure program integrity is upheld nationwide.” The “solution starts with bringing greater transparency to the issue.”

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What happened

Food and Drug Administration chief Dr. Marty Makary resigned Tuesday after a tumultuous 13 months leading the agency charged with regulating drugs, medical devices, vaccines and much of the U.S. food supply. The White House and Health and Human Services Department “agreed in recent days on the need to replace” him, The Washington Post said. “Marty is a great guy,” President Donald Trump, who posted Makary’s resignation message on social media, told reporters. But “he was having some difficulty.”

Who said what

“In the end,” Makary “had just about run out of allies,” having upset “rare-disease patients, antiabortion groups and some drug-industry leaders,” The Wall Street Journal said. Makary also “drew criticism from public health leaders who viewed him as pandering to anti-vaccine activists,” The New York Times said. But according to his confidantes, he “ultimately left over concerns about the administration’s decision to authorize fruit-flavored e-cigarettes,” a move Trump insisted on but Makary opposed “over concerns that fruity and candy flavors would lure young people to addictive vapes.”

Makary had some “strong ideas” about streamlining the drug review process, Matthew Herper said at Stat News, but he was the FDA’s “worst commissioner” in at least 25 years. He “offended almost everyone involved in FDA issues, which is not easy to do,” National Center for Health Research president Diana Zuckerman told the Times. “But it would still be a disaster if he is replaced by someone who appeals primarily to tobacco companies, anti-abortion activists” and pharmaceutical lobbyists.

What next?

Trump appointed Kyle Diamantas, the FDA’s top food regulator, as acting commissioner.

Andy Burnham might be the bookmakers’ favourite to replace Keir Starmer as Labour leader, despite his lack of a Westminster seat, but he certainly isn’t the bond market’s favourite.

In fact, gilt traders see the Greater Manchester mayor as the “biggest threat” of all the potential candidates, said the Financial Times. He troubled investors last year when he suggested the country should not be “in hock” to the bond market. Six out of 10 fund managers picked Burnham as the candidate that would “trigger the most negative market reaction”.

Burnham has said his comments on the bond market were misinterpreted, but the political project he espouses and the vision he offers for the country’s future – Manchesterism – remains highly divisive. Critics see it as “mostly vibes and boosterism” that “relies on a bottom-up localism” difficult to scale at a national level, said PoliticsHome. Others see it as our potential economic and political saviour.

What did the commentators say?

Manchesterism is a “horrifically overused phrase” about how my city “does things differently”, said Stephen Topping in the Manchester Evening News. But it’s true. Manchesterism is “‘place-based’ rather than party political”. It involves “public services working closer together, and in partnership with both the private sector and community groups, to ensure the benefits of a stronger economy can be felt by more people”.

The Greater Manchester region has become the UK’s fastest growing economy over the past decade, “at more than double the rate of the national average”. Devolution has been critical: the “trailblazer” deal struck in 2023 has allowed Greater Manchester to “take public control of key services” such as the bus network, which has improved living standards and boosted the local economy. Those who have worked closely with Burnham believe Manchesterism “could work in other parts of the UK”, though it would pose “a radical departure from the UK’s largely centralised economy”.

Burnham’s programme has begun “delivering affordability and economic dynamism” by “regaining public control” of essential services, said Mathew Lawrence, director of progressive think tank Common Wealth, in The New Statesman.

Energy, water, housing, transport and care are “domains of inelastic demand” and “existential need”. So market governance of the supply side “produces rent extraction” and underinvestment. The public “pays twice: through higher bills” and taxes to fund support. But public control of essentials eliminates the privatisation premium. “Rebuilding public provision is not the alternative to fiscal prudence. It is fiscal prudence.”

Manchesterism might be the “buzzword of the day”, but it’s simply people projecting their “pipe dreams” on to Burnham’s “blank canvas of soft-left localism”, said Daniel Johnson in The Telegraph.

“The irony is that 19th-century Manchesterism was more or less the opposite of what the Labour Party now thinks it means.” Manchester was “both the laboratory and the showcase of the Industrial Revolution”, the “citadel of free trade”. It had nothing to do with Burnham’s “municipal socialism”. His proposed solution to Britain’s economic woes is “a muddled melange of municipal meddling, including tax hikes and more borrowing”. What Britain needs is the 19th-century version, which Burnham doesn’t understand.

The vision of Manchesterism Burnham outlined in January is, in practice, an industrial strategy – and there is “nothing new about those”, said Christopher Snowdon in The Critic. Economists have long criticised them for “misallocating resources, crowding out private investment, picking losers, and forcing taxpayers to bail out industries that are only kept on life support for political reasons”. How, exactly, can Manchesterism “stop us being in hock to the bond markets” when Manchester City Council is “one of the most indebted in the country”.

What next?

Burnham is planning to reassure the bond market that his possible election to Labour leader would “not trigger a financial meltdown”, said The Telegraph. Sources say he is planning to endorse a pamphlet outlining a framework for Manchesterism, setting out how it could be rolled out across the UK and “the wider economic theory behind his ideas”.

But the uncertain national landscape, in which voters are moving both further left and further right, could make the success of Manchesterism “a challenge for anybody”, Sarah Longlands, chief executive of the Manchester-based Centre for Local Economic Strategies, told Manchester Evening News.

Manchesterism is still in its early stages, yet for all the benefits devolution has brought, Greater Manchester is still “a tale of two cities”, with a great income and opportunities divide exacerbated by the cost of living crisis. “Growth in Greater Manchester has to be for everybody – otherwise, what’s the point?” Longlands said.

What happened

A Washington, D.C., nonprofit Monday asked a federal court to pause President Donald Trump’s push to paint the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool “American flag blue,” arguing the makeover violates federal historical preservation laws.

Trump last month said he’d chosen a “pool guy” who worked on his golf club swimming pools to coat and paint the leaking landmark, predicting it would cost $1.8 million. The Interior Department last week raised the price of the contractor’s no-bid contract to $13.1 million, The New York Times reported Monday.

Who said what

Monday’s filing by the Cultural Landscape Foundation said the project was “part of a pattern” in which Trump rushes to transform historic public sites without seeking required approval. The Reflecting Pool’s neutral colors are a “fundamental” part of the “design intent” to “create a reflective surface” between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, the foundation president Charles Birnbaum said in a statement. “A blue-tinted basin is more appropriate to a resort or theme park.”

What next?

Workers Monday “began preliminary surveys and testing” of the proposed site of Trump’s massive Triumphal Arch, The Associated Press said. Like many of Trump’s “contentious” projects to “leave his lasting imprint on Washington,” the arch is being challenged in court.

What happened

President Donald Trump Monday said Iran’s response to the latest U.S. proposal for ending the war was a “piece of garbage” and the “ceasefire is on massive life support.” As the breakdown in negotiations sent oil prices higher, Trump proposed suspending the 18.4-cents-per-gallon federal gas tax to ameliorate the $1.50-a-gallon jump in gas prices since the war began.

Who said what

“We’re going to take off the gas tax for a period of time,” until “gas goes down,” Trump told CBS News. Pausing the tax would require approval from Congress, where there is some bipartisan support. But key lawmakers oppose the idea because it would increase the deficit by billions of dollars — or deplete the Highway Trust Fund — and others “mocked the idea as too little, too late,” The New York Times said.

Tehran’s rejected counterproposal sought U.S. recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, war reparations and the lifting of international sanctions, according to Iranian state TV. With the two sides so far apart, “world leaders are confronting the prospect of a long-term energy crisis, with potentially grave economic consequences,” the Times said.

What next?

During his trip to China this week, Trump is “expected to push Beijing to help find an offramp to the stalled diplomatic talks,” The Wall Street Journal said. China “has leverage over Tehran but there could be costs attached to any help from Beijing.”

With the Supreme Court set to rule on President Donald Trump’s challenge to birthright citizenship, an oft-cited practice is at the center of it all. The practice, called birth tourism, has become commonplace for women who want their kids to have U.S. citizenship. But the Supreme Court may further support the Trump administration’s anti-immigration stance by cracking down on it.

‘Side issue into a main argument’

Birth tourism occurs when pregnant women from other nations “travel to the U.S. for the purpose of giving birth, thereby obtaining citizenship for their babies,” said The Philadelphia Inquirer. The practice is regularly mentioned by legal scholars, yet birth tourism is “actually rare, despite the outsized role it’s gained in the debate over citizenship.” There are about 26,000 cases of birth tourism in the U.S. annually, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

While this is just a small fraction of the 3.5 million yearly U.S. births, the White House has “elevated what was once a side issue into a main argument for revocation,” said the Inquirer. It is part of Trump’s “aggressive immigration agenda that includes attempts to restrict birthright citizenship,” said Newsweek. Trump signed an order banning birthright citizenship in 2025, triggering a “series of legal challenges now before the Supreme Court” given that the practice is enshrined in the 14th Amendment.

The Trump administration continues to use birth tourism as a primary point of contention when presenting its case to the court. Immigration laws have “spawned a sprawling industry of birth tourism as uncounted thousands of foreigners from potentially hostile nations have flocked to give birth in the United States in recent decades, creating a whole generation of American citizens abroad with no meaningful ties to the United States,” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said in oral arguments to the Supreme Court.

‘The scale of the problem is marginal’

Even though the White House has positioned birth tourism as a major factor in why birthright citizenship should be overturned, proponents “say that the scale of the problem is marginal,” said The New York Times. They typically “argue that it can be addressed through regulation and law enforcement without eliminating what has long been considered a central tenet of the United States — equality at birth, regardless of race, religion or the immigration status of the parents.”

Republicans have long used birth tourism as a way to highlight criminal enterprises. In 2019, officials in California “arrested three people who operated multimillion-dollar birth tourism companies and had charged as much as $100,000 to Chinese couples” for a luxury bundle that included “housing, nannies and shopping excursions to Gucci,” said the Times. GOP lawmakers have also “cited birth tourism in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory that has looser visa requirements and is closer to China.”

Support for overturning birthright citizenship remains low. Nearly two-thirds of Americans, 65%, think citizenship “should be granted to all children born on American soil, no matter the circumstances,” according to a recent AP-NORC survey of 2,596 adults. Republicans are less convinced; only 44% are in favor of birthright citizenship. “It’s fundamental to sovereignty, being able to determine who is a citizen,” said Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, to the Times.

Keir Starmer swept to power in July 2024 promising “change”, “national renewal” and a “return of politics to public service”. Less than two years later, his premiership is hanging by a thread as more and more of his own MPs and ministers break cover and call for him to go. At least 81 Labour MPs have so far called for the PM to step down and bring his troubled premiership to an untimely end.

Here are five moments that have brought Starmer to the brink.

Winter fuel U-turn

Labour’s honeymoon was short-lived, with the Stockport riots and “Freebie-gate” dominating its first few months in power. But it was the early decision to introduce means-testing to winter fuel payments for older people that proved particularly toxic with voters still unsure about what Starmer and his party stood for.

Long advocated by the Treasury but opposed by successive chancellors for over a decade, it was “one of Labour’s first acts in power and helped ensure voter disillusionment set in early”, said The Times. Starmer, Chancellor Rachel Reeves and the wider government have never really recovered.

To make matters worse, rather than quickly reverse course, No. 10 doubled down, for months insisting the move was necessary to get the public finances under control. Only after MPs reported it was coming up again and again on the doorstep and was the first, and only, thing people could cite about Labour’s time in office did Starmer finally decide to U-turn.

National insurance rises

In her first Budget in the autumn of 2024, Reeves was accused of breaking a key election manifesto pledge not to increase taxes on working people. Increasing the employers’ rate of NI was meant to raise £24 billion in a bid to balance the books, but the Office for Budget Responsibility said that the move would lead to job losses, a squeeze on pay and lower growth. While technically not a breach of its tax promise to voters, it increased the financial strain on small businesses and left a sour taste in the mouths of many voters who felt they had been deceived.

Welfare U-turn

While Starmer’s most “serious failing was the absence of rigorous preparation for government”, looking back, the “critical moment” in his premiership was last summer’s U-turn on welfare spending, said The Independent’s political editor, John Rentoul.

While many agreed the welfare budget needed reforming, Reeves’ proposed £5 billion in disability cuts angered many Labour MPs while simultaneously failing to address the structural problems of the benefits system. Facing an embarrassing Commons defeat, the government U-turned again. Not only did this make Starmer look weak and in thrall to his backbenchers, it also forced Reeves to find more taxes to raise in her second Budget, after her first had already unravelled.

While other U-turns and errors were “embarrassing”, the “failure to hold the line on restraining disability spending was fundamental”, said Rentoul. “That was when Starmer’s government lost its way.”

The Mandelson affair

If a series of policy missteps and U-turns conveyed a sense of uncertainty about what Labour in government was actually for, the decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as US ambassador, despite his known links to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, raised direct questions about Starmer’s judgement.

After Mandelson’s sacking in September 2025 following new emails revealing the true nature of his relationship with Epstein, the decision to push Mandelson’s appointment through despite widespread concerns within the civil service saw Starmer’s government “embroiled in Britain’s worst political scandal of this century”, said The Economist.

If Starmer “had a purpose, it was stopping things like this”. Presenting himself as a “politician of process rather than conviction” he sought to differentiate himself from recent predecessors such as Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. The Mandelson affair “reveals that process comes a distant second to political convenience”.

Local elections

All of this came to a head in last week’s local and devolved elections. With Starmer’s personal approval rating tanking and Labour squeezed by Reform UK to the right and the Greens on the left, the party lost scores of seats and councils, as well as control of Wales for the first time in a century.

While the campaign was meant to be about local issues, the elections were in many ways a “referendum” on Starmer and his government, Jonathan Tonge, professor of politics at the University of Liverpool, told Al Jazeera. Canvassers reported the PM’s popularity coming up again and again on the doorstep.

After months managing to keep his Cabinet and wider party onside and rivals at bay, the aftermath of these elections was always seen as the moment of maximum danger for Starmer – and so it has proved. He has, for now, vowed to fight on, but his time in No. 10 may be entering its final chapter.

Graham Platner is the “brawler” that many Democrats have been longing for, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. The 41-year-old oyster farmer two weeks ago won Maine’s Democratic Senate primary after the dismally polling Gov. Janet Mills dropped out. It was a remarkable victory, considering the “barrage of devastating opposition” aimed his way. Old social media posts were unearthed in which he declared himself a communist, called all cops “bastards,” and blasted rural whites as “racist” and “stupid.” In October, he revealed that, while drunk on leave as a 20-something Marine, he’d inadvertently gotten a Nazi-linked tattoo. His “insurgent campaign appeared doomed.” But Mainers kept packing his town halls. “A natural on the stump,” Platner won over crowds by speaking about the struggles of working people, the futility of the wars he’d fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the need for “a Democratic Party with New Deal–scale ambitions.” Maine Democrats understand Platner is a flawed candidate, but also understand that such scrappy fighters might be needed to “upend a system that they believe has failed them.”

Platner won because progressives reward antisemitism, said Philip Klein in National Review. It’s not just his now-covered SS skull-and-bones tattoo. He has sat for a friendly interview with an anti-semitic conspiracy theorist, called the U.S.-Israeli relationship “shameful,” and praised the tactics used by Hamas terrorists in a 2014 attack on Israelis. “Any of this would have once been a political death sentence”; now it’s “a ticket to success in the modern Democratic Party.” But the 78-year-old Mills’ “sleepy campaign didn’t offer any compelling alternative” to Platner, said Carine Hajjar in The Washington Post. The last thing voters wanted after watching President Joe Biden flop in 2024 was a septuagenarian freshman in Congress. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer should never have pressured Mills into this race. He failed to realize “the imprimatur of the establishment is on the outs”—as are any moral standards for candidates.

Look, Platner isn’t “even close” to my ideal Senate candidate, said Frank Bruni in The New York Times. But if I lived in Maine, I’d vote for him in November simply because he isn’t Sen. Susan Collins, the self-declared moderate Republican who’s “shown herself to be an undependable check on Trump.” In Senate and House races across the country this year, Democrats and independents will have to decide which they fear more: A Democratic candidate who’s more progressive than they are and who may have a tarnished biography, or two more years of “an unimpeded, full-throttle Trump.” Either way, a “reckoning is at hand.”

The Supreme Court has authorized Republican-run states “to disenfranchise Black voters,” said Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. A 6-3 majority, split along ideological lines, ruled two weeks ago in Louisiana v. Callais that a Louisiana redistricting map that created two majority-Black districts out of six, in a state whose population is one-third Black, was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” The decision effectively gutted Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, “which prohibits racial discrimination in voting.” Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion was steeped in “reactionary color blindness”—pretending to be neutral about race in order to preserve an unjust racial hierarchy. Alito argued that states are only in violation of the VRA if they draw districts to intentionally disadvantage minority voters. If states seek partisan advantage in redistricting, Alito said, that’s constitutional under a 2019 Supreme Court ruling—as if disadvantaging Democrats doesn’t also disadvantage Blacks. In other words, according to Chief Justice John Roberts and his allies, “preventing Louisiana from disenfranchising Black voters is racist.”

As a result of this “mind-boggling piece of judicial overreach,” said The New York Times in an editorial, red states like Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi can “slice minority voters into small and powerless slivers,” so long as they claim race isn’t the reason. Once again, the court obviously “acted more like partisan legislators than like impartial judges”: Its six conservative justices, all nominated by Republicans, “have most likely made it easier for the party that chose them to hold power in Congress.

“The Voting Rights Act was a landmark of American liberty that helped to break Jim Crow,” said The Wall Street Journal, but it’s not 1965 anymore. As Alito noted, “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate.” This ruling will finally help end Democrats’ “partisan abuse of race to carve up congressional districts.” In the name of preventing the “dilution” of Black votes, Louisiana was compelled to draw up a preposterous majority-minority district that snakes 250 miles across the state. In their dissents, said Jason Willick in The Washington Post, the three liberal justices conflated the right to vote with the “right to have the satisfaction of voting for the winner.” Sometimes—say, for Republicans in San Francisco or Democrats in Wyoming—our preferred candidates lose, and we have to “accept the outcome of the legislative process anyway.” In a representative democracy, being “outnumbered” is not the same as being “disenfranchised.”

The reality is that Callais “will be devastating for communities of color,” said Ari Berman in Mother Jones. During the Jim Crow era, Black Americans had essentially no representation in Congress, even in Southern states with large Black populations. But with the forceful support of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, the VRA put an end to decades of “white supremacy and one-party rule” across the South. As Justice Elena Kagan put it in an anguished dissent, the law “was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers.” She pointed out that the VRA has proved so essential in “bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality” that Congress has reauthorized it five times—including in 2006, when the Senate voted 98-0. By rendering the law toothless, the court will likely “trigger the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction.” And legal recourse will be all but impossible, said Erwin Chemerinsky in the Los Angeles Times. In theory, states can still be sued if they draw districts to discriminate by race. But as Kagan put it, without “smoking-gun evidence of a race-based motive”—a prospect she deemed “almost fanciful”— the law is now moot.

The court’s ruling will trigger an all-out redistricting war, said Ian Millhiser in Vox. “Callais is such an effusive love letter to the concept of partisan gerrymandering” that states will have no fear of rigging districts to favor the party in power. Louisiana, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, has already delayed its primaries so it can redraw its map, while Tennessee’s GOP governor called a special session to discuss doing the same. Republican-controlled Alabama may follow suit. Democrats will respond in kind, said Andrew Egger in The Bulwark. Many in the party are “pledging to continue the fight-fire-with-fire approach they’ve carried out successfully over the last year” in California and Virginia. By 2028, both red and blue states may eliminate most or all congressional seats held by the minority party. How is this absurd “gerrymandering tit-for-tat” good for democracy? Will anyone in Congress dare “to find some anti-gerrymandering measures on which there’s an appetite for bipartisan agreement”? If Americans are sick of this partisan race to the bottom, they should demand it.

What happened

In a display of President Trump’s continued grip on the Republican base, at least five of the seven challengers he backed in last week’s Indiana GOP state Senate primaries ousted incumbents who defied a White House redistricting push. The defeated Republicans, branded “RINOS” (Republicans in name only) by Trump, joined Indiana Democrats last December in voting down a new congressional map designed to give the GOP two additional House seats. An irate Trump called for the holdouts to be primaried, and pro-Trump PACs funded an attack-ad blitz, turning what would typically be low-key races into a $13.5 million battle royale. Among the losers were Travis Holdman, the Indiana Senate’s third most powerful Republican, and Jim Buck, who had held his seat since 1994. “There’s a big message here,” said U.S. Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.). “It’s Donald Trump’s Republican Party.”

Trump scored another win in neighboring Ohio, where the gubernatorial candidate he endorsed, Vivek Ramaswamy, trounced his primary competitor to set up a showdown with Democratic nominee Amy Acton in November. Democrat Sherrod Brown also secured a chance to return to the Senate after a 2024 loss. He’ll square off with appointed GOP incumbent Jon Husted in a special election to fill Vice President JD Vance’s vacated seat through 2028. Ohio has established itself as a red state over the past decade, but early polling suggests both races could be competitive. One Republican operative close to Husted called Brown a “tough out,” adding “we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

What the columnists said

“Indiana’s primaries were a referendum on Trumpism,” said James Briggs in The Indianapolis Star, and “Trumpism prevailed.” The president’s challengers not only won, they did so handily, their margins ranging from 18 to 50 percentage points. You “gotta hand it to him.” Despite “the wreckage of his second term,” Trump remains a genius campaigner, “a singular figure who can make it rain on obscure state legislative elections because they happen to be important to him personally.”

These results “carry implications well beyond Indianapolis,” said Hunter Woodall and Ebony Davis in MS.now. Other Republican-controlled states are “facing similar redistricting pressure” from the White House, and South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana all seem good bets to redraw their maps. Now any GOP state legislators on the gerrymandering fence “have a fresh example” of what awaits them should they cross Trump.

Democrats also have reason to celebrate, said William Kristol in The Bulwark. Their candidate won a Michigan state Senate seat by 20 points in a working-class district, continuing “a trend of notable Democratic overperformance.” The Republican elections were about “loyalty to Trump,” whose popularity is sinking. Recent polling pegs his approval rating at around 37%. A GOP that’s completely in thrall to him might actually “increase the likelihood of voters turning to Democratic candidates” in the midterms.

‘We’re thinking about mental health diagnoses all wrong’

Awais Aftab at The New York Times

For “decades, the public conversation about mental health has been routed through the categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM,” says Awais Aftab. These “have been convenient for professional communication, insurance billing and conducting clinical trials, but they have given the false impression that each mental disorder is a relatively distinct problem with clear boundaries.” They “can capture something useful and inform treatment options, but none of them do justice” to the “nature of mental illness.”

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‘What Jews can learn from the pope’

Kenneth Seeskin at the Chicago Tribune

Pope Leo XIV is a “distinguished proponent of peace, human dignity and concern for disadvantaged people,” says Kenneth Seeskin. While “there is no one in Judaism who speaks with the authority of a pope, as people of God, Jews also face the question of how to make sense of an ancient and not always consistent tradition.” The “Jewish community is deeply divided over Israel’s actions in Gaza,” and “Jews must ask the same questions of their religion.”

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‘Here comes the slop’

Heather Schwedel at Slate

Many “photos of wedding dresses” have “either been designed or enhanced by AI,” says Heather Schwedel. If “you’re shopping for a wedding dress in 2026, you’re almost guaranteed to encounter at least a little slop.” As AI’s “popularity with everyday consumers has grown over the past few years, it’s taken hold in seemingly every medium,” and “even knitters are having to learn to separate real patterns from the AI-generated ones. Of course wedding dresses aren’t immune.”

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‘Rethinking transitional justice in Bosnia’

Jared O. Bell at Foreign Policy

The U.S. and EU “have treated constitutional reform and war crimes accountability as the primary metrics of progress in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” says Jared O. Bell. If Bosnia “has not unified its narratives of the past or produced visibly contrite leaders, Western logic goes, then it has ‘failed.’” But Bosnia’s “most consequential peace process” is “unfolding in factories, logistics hubs, municipal utilities and cross-entity supply chains — in the daily economic life that keeps the country running.”

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What happened

Democrats scrambled over the weekend to respond to setbacks in the national redistricting fight, most recently the Virginia Supreme Court’s 4-3 decision last week to nullify the state’s voter-approved congressional map. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and other House Democrats “vented anger at their defeat” in Virginia during a private discussion on Saturday, The New York Times said, with “some party leaders discussing an audacious and possibly far-fetched idea” to restore the map, designed to flip four Republican seats.

Who said what

“Just two weeks ago, Democrats had fought to a draw” in the mid-decade gerrymander race started by President Donald Trump and Texas Republicans, The Washington Post said. Now, between the Virginia decision and the expected loss of several additional seats in the South following the U.S. Supreme Court’s neutering of the Voting Rights Act, Democrats are “confronting the reality that Trump succeeded in tilting the playing field to the GOP’s advantage.”

What next?

If the Republicans maintain their current net gain of about a dozen seats, Democrats “could need to win the House combined national popular vote by around 4 percentage points,” Nate Cohn said at the Times. That “structural advantage wouldn’t be enough to make the Republicans favorites,” but it “gives them a real shot” at winning. And if the court rulings help Republicans keep the House despite “badly losing the national vote, it would be yet another blow to the credibility of American institutions during a time of bitter division.”

A new report by Human Rights Watch argues that the compulsory use of Chinese as the primary language in schools in Tibet raises “serious concerns under international human rights law”.

Detailing the effects of the “Children’s Speech Harmonization Plan” five years ago, as well as more recent updates to the “National Common Language Law”, the organisation argues that measures are marginalising Tibetan identity to the point of erasure.

“International concern about these developments has grown,” said Jianli Yang in The Diplomat. These language laws fit into a pattern in recent years of “intensified policies” aimed to “reshape” Tibetan identity through “cultural control”.

‘Eroding’ Tibetan culture

Both politically and legally, “China is steadily narrowing the space for minority autonomy in education, language, and religion”, said The Diplomat. In December last year, the National People’s Congress revised the “National Common Language Law”. It now requires Mandarin to be the “fundamental teaching language” and mandates standardised textbooks throughout the education system. The codification of assimilation policies “marks a new phase” in Beijing’s strategy: it seeks “not merely to manage ethnic diversity but to fundamentally reshape it”.

Videos from Tibet on social media have shown young children “not even able to say their names in Tibetan, pronouncing them as if they were Chinese”, said Kris Cheng in The Guardian. Children, who have been brought up speaking Tibetan stop speaking it within a year of beginning school.

Parents face a “dilemma”: education in Chinese improves employment and career prospects, but it often comes at the cost of associating Tibetan with “social disadvantage”. Some are sending their children to Tibetan language classes in the school holidays, but authorities have been “cracking down” by “banning unsanctioned schools and classes in many places”.

Perhaps the most “profound policy shift” from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Tibet was the 2021 “Children’s Speech Harmonization Plan”, said Human Rights Watch. For the first time, it mandated the use of Chinese language as a “medium of instruction” in all preschools. Though not explicitly banning Tibetan in educational settings, it effectively “downgrades” the freedom for minorities to develop and continue their language.

This law was not a “sudden rupture”, however, but the “near final step in a decades-long process” of “eroding the role of Tibetan as a medium of instruction”. It was a “key acceleration point” in the drive to reshape the “linguistic, cultural, and social foundations of Tibetan society”.

‘Narrowed’ tolerance

China’s stance “turned sharply against expressions of separate ethnic identity among minorities” when Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, said Josh Chin and Niharika Mandhana in the Wall Street Journal. Officials targeted Tibetan alternatives to state schools and expanded the boarding school system. Resistance since the uprising of 1959 has persisted under the current Dalai Lama, a “potent force despite decades of propaganda, political crackdowns and education drives aimed at undermining his authority”, living in exile in India.

During the earlier years of Communist Party rule China “espoused a certain notion of pluralism for non-Han people”, but the space for tolerance has “narrowed”, said Joe Leahy in the Financial Times. Look no further than Xinjiang, where more than a million Uighurs have been “subjected to mass internment”. China denies mass detentions of Uighurs and “blames unrest on terrorists”.

Recent years have seen a gradual transformation from a “first-generation ethnic policy” to the “second-generation ethnic policy”, said The Diplomat. The earlier framework, under Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, “formally emphasised” ethnic and language autonomy. For instance, legislation in 1994 stipulated that all schools should “use Tibetan as the principal medium of instruction”, whilst “improving a bilingual Tibetan-Chinese education system”. Implementation was often “uneven”, but it at least “recognised the legitimacy of cultural pluralism within the Chinese state”.

Second-generation ethnic policy, however, marks a “significant departure” from this philosophy. It seeks to “minimise” the significance of ethnic distinctions, instead of preserving diversity. The Chinese state now sees minority languages as “potential threats” to Xi’s “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. Viewed more broadly, China’s current policies in Tibet represent “more than a shift in language education”, they reflect a “structural transformation” in how China perceives ethnic minorities.

Is Benjamin Netanyahu's time finally up? Is Israel's longest-serving prime minister, in power for almost 15 of the past 17 years, heading for a fall at the forthcoming October general election?

Following the decisive move made by Israel's opposition parties last week, that is now a real possibility, said Ravit Hecht in Haaretz (Tel Aviv). The hardline right-winger Naftali Bennett and the centrist Yair Lapid have announced they will be merging their two parties to form a single party called Yachad (Together). Prior to their announcement, polls had Bennett's party projected to win 21 seats and Lapid's party seven. A total of 28 seats would make Yachad the biggest party in the 120-seat Knesset, ahead of Netanyahu's Likud, on a projected 25.

‘Era of correction’

This pair have teamed up before, said Philissa Cramer on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. After the 2021 election that briefly dislodged Netanyahu from office, before he stormed back in late 2022, they struck an unusual power-sharing deal, agreeing to take it in turns to serve as prime minister. And this time they are presenting their combined party as a more permanent antidote to the polarisation in Israeli society that has deepened under Netanyahu. “Our unity is a message to the entire people of Israel,” declared Bennett on announcing the merger. “The era of division is over. The era of correction has arrived.”

Don't be so sure, said Ori Wertman in The Jerusalem Post. This merger may well backfire. True, the two men have agreed on some significant issues, including the need for an eight-year cap on a PM's time in office and for a full army draft with sanctions on Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) draft evaders. But the fact remains that Bennett is an Orthodox Jew who has called for the annexation of parts of the West Bank: in teaming up with Lapid, a secular Jew who has previously endorsed the two-state solution, he may well prompt some of his supporters to defect to Likud.

Conversely, Lapid's shift to the right – he has agreed to rule out the possibility of a coalition with any of Israel's Arab parties – will alienate much of his moderate base. And indeed, the first post-merger poll projects the new party winning just 26 seats, not the 28 total forecast when the two parties were running separately.

‘Same troubled system’

Still, there is a clear political logic behind the merger, said Aaron T. Walter in The Times of Israel. Lapid's support has crashed since his party won 24 seats in the last election, while Bennett – who is going to lead the new party – has gained in popularity. The trouble is, Yachad has a “core arithmetic problem”.

Without Arab parties, which it has ruled out as potential coalition partners, its only hope of securing the 61 seats needed for a majority is to lure Gadi Eisenkot, former chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces, in to join the party. Eisenkot's military credentials and his moving personal story of having lost a son to the war in Gaza have made him a leading contender of the Right. But for that very reason he'd probably only join if made leader, something Bennett has made plain he won't countenance.

But what would a Yachad victory actually achieve, asked David Issacharoff in Haaretz. Lapid and Bennett are keen to highlight the corruption charges Netanyahu has managed to fend off by staying in power, and to blame him for the security failures that enabled Hamas's October 2023 attack. But on the big questions – how to extricate Israel from the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon; how to prevent settler violence in the West Bank – they've nothing new to say.

Yachad's central weakness, said Hani Hazaimeh in Arab News (Riyadh), is that its focus is simply on removing Netanyahu from office. By refusing to address “the unresolved Palestinian issue” and “the normalisation of military-first policies”, they have missed the chance to redefine Israel's future in any meaningful way. Even if his rivals do displace him, Netanyahu's fall would be less a “political revolution” and more a “reshuffling of power within the same troubled system”.

A series of European leaders have been singled out for criticism by a frustrated Donald Trump over recent months, said The Guardian. Currently, it's Germany's chancellor who “finds himself in Washington's crosshairs”.

Friedrich Merz provoked the president's wrath last week by telling a class of schoolchildren in his home region of Sauerland that America lacked a clear strategy in Iran and was being “humiliated”. Trump swiftly hit back, calling Merz “totally ineffective” and threatening to shrink America's military presence in Germany. Two days later, the Pentagon announced the withdrawal of 5,000 of the more than 36,000 US troops stationed in Germany. Trump subsequently suggested that many more could be pulled out. He has also threatened to raise tariffs on European car imports from 15% to 25%, a step that would hit Germany hardest.

Awkward timing

This row arrives at a terrible time for Merz, who is struggling in the polls, said The Economist. However, it remains to be seen whether the troop withdrawals actually happen. Trump threatened to pull out 12,000 troops in his first term, but that plan was later cancelled. German bases such as Ramstein are “crucial hubs for American power projection, not least in the Middle East”. German officials are more concerned by the decision to cancel the deployment of a US intermediate-range missile unit to Germany.

This deployment, agreed in 2024 by President Biden, was “explicitly intended to send a message of strength to the Kremlin, a tangible signal of deterrence”, said Hubert Wetzel in Süddeutsche Zeitung. Trump's cancellation of the plan last week, after yet another long phone call with Vladimir Putin, could “almost be interpreted as an invitation to the Kremlin”. Nato's credibility ultimately depends on the belief that the US would come to Europe's aid in a crisis, but how sure can anyone be of that now?

Political misstep

Given how much Europe depends on America, its leaders really need to stop provoking Trump, said Wolfgang Munchau on UnHerd. Merz was of course right that the president entered the Iran war without a strategy, but it was foolish of him to talk of America being “humiliated”. More careful language is required. For all the talk of creating strategic autonomy, the reality is that Europe is miles away from being able safely to decouple from the US. It hasn't even agreed a joint defence strategy. The Europeans are in “dangerous denial”, always quick to criticise the US while persistently failing to address their own powerlessness. “Now Trump has called their bluff. No wonder they hate him.”

‘Congress must secure the future of college sports’

Charlie Baker at The Hill

College sports “represent a way for talented high school athletes to reach a new level of athletic competition, while also pursuing a degree,” says NCAA President Charlie Baker. But “no internal reform — no matter how fast it moves — can on its own provide the permanent legal foundation required to stabilize the student-athlete experience.” The SCORE Act “would address the most pressing legal challenges in a narrow manner, while also securing essential student-athlete protections into federal law.”

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‘When children’s rights become revenue for profiteers’

Jim Sandman and Michael Lukens at The Philadelphia Inquirer

For-profit companies “have already turned immigrant detention into a profit center despite public outrage,” say Jim Sandman and Michael Lukens. Now “they’re setting their sights on a new way to fatten their wallets: immigrant children.” Companies “are eyeing this” as a “source of enrichment for themselves. If we allow the ‘profitization’ of legal aid, the outcome is clear: children will be harmed.” The “implications of letting profit drive how legal services are delivered to kids will ripple for many years.”

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‘The Guardian view on ceasefires that aren’t: Israel never stopped killing in Gaza — allies must reject any escalation’

The Guardian editorial board

“In Gaza, the Israeli military has killed more than 800 people since the truce there was declared in October,” so this is “not a true ceasefire but a de-escalation,” says The Guardian editorial board. There is a “bizarre and chilling contrast between Israel’s swift investigation and punishment of soldiers who showed disrespect to statues of Jesus in Lebanon and the lack of even basic accountability — never mind justice — when Palestinians are abused, killed or disappear.”

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‘Will Planned Parenthood stay defunded?’ 

John Gerardi at the National Review

On July 4, the “one-year provision that defunded Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is set to expire,” and Republicans will “need to answer some difficult questions about their political and policy priorities as they face a stark choice: fight to extend this defunding, or abandon the issue for the foreseeable future,” says John Gerardi. But “continuing to defund abortion providers might be stuck behind other GOP legislative priorities.”

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Fresh off a world tour, Vice President JD Vance was in Iowa this week to boost GOP Rep. Zach Nunn in his reelection bid, as Republicans scramble to defend their congressional majorities by November. But no political visit there can escape speculation stemming from Iowa’s role as the nation’s first presidential caucus state. Vance’s Iowa excursion may have been an example of a vice president dutifully doing what the party requires of him. It might also have been a soft launch of a much bigger effort from the veep’s camp.

What did the commentators say?

Vance’s trip to Iowa was “billed as a White House message to American workers” on top of being an “effort to promote Nunn,” NBC News said. But Vance’s appearance, his “first to the state as vice president,” had “added political weight” and an “expectation that the visit would be the first of many for him.” Although most of Vance’s remarks in Iowa “traced back to the midterm elections and, specifically, Nunn’s race,” he also “carefully recognized each of the high-ranking Republicans in the room” in a speech “loaded with personal touches, including biographical details” from his “Hillbilly Elegy” memoir.

Not only do Iowan Republicans see a “high-profile” visit like Vance’s as helping “build momentum” for Republicans ahead of the midterms, Iowans are also “constantly gauging national figures as potential presidential candidates,” said Iowa Public Radio. Iowa Republicans see someone who comes to help in the midterms “as a team player,” State GOP Chair Jeff Kaufmann said to the outlet. That, in turn, “helps” if they “choose later to run for president.”

In a state “more freighted with presidential expectations than any other,” Vance used his time to “woo influential Iowans,” including “Kaufmann, evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats and conservative talk show host Steve Deace,” said The New York Times. “I’ve never supported Trump in a primary,” Deace said to the outlet. Vance, however, is the “leader in the clubhouse for me” in 2028.

Vance’s “association” with Trump’s agenda presents a “high-risk, high-reward proposition” that could “make or break his political future,” Politico said. “That’s the risk of being part of an administration,” Iowa GOP strategist David Kochel, who has advised multiple presidential campaigns in the state, said to the outlet. “This is the Kamala Harris problem.” With Trump not on the ballot this year, Vance “keeping his supporters engaged” in November could be “critical” for holding Nunn’s seat, said Iowa’s KTIV. But Trump himself is “underwater in districts that he won in 2024,” Puck said, including in Nunn’s, where Republicans are “just one point” ahead of Democrats.

During his speech, Vance attempted to “project loyalty” to Trump, despite the administration’s push for a war in Iran that Vance “privately signaled he was not eager to see the United States enter,” The Washington Post said. Vance had also been “slow to return” to Iowa as veep, “even as other ambitious Republicans,” including Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, “trekked here for widely attended conservative summits and dinners in 2025.”

What next?

Vance is currently the “overwhelming front-runner” for the GOP presidential nomination in 2028, even as he “remains unpopular with the broader electorate,” the Times said. And “unlike other cabinet officials” serving at the pleasure of the president, Vance can campaign for the future “while keeping his day job.”

Still, despite speculation over Vance’s Iowa visit, there was “no special reason the vice president came here this week, as opposed to closer to the general election,” the Post said, citing multiple sources with knowledge of Vance’s schedule. Iowa was “merely next on the White House’s list of swing-state House districts for Vance to visit.” Said one source, simply: “Gotta go to Iowa eventually.”

What happened

The FBI is investigating the reporter for The Atlantic who wrote an unflattering profile of Director Kash Patel and “more than two dozen former and current members” of Patel’s security detail to “find leakers among his team,” MS NOW reported Thursday. Patel “ordered the polygraphing” of the FBI staff and “has been described as being in panic mode to save his job,” MS NOW said, citing people briefed on the developments.

Patel sued The Atlantic and journalist Sarah Fitzpatrick for reporting last month that FBI personnel were concerned about his erratic behavior and excessive drinking. Fitzpatrick reported Wednesday that Patel travels with and hands out bourbon bottles engraved with “KASH PATEL FBI DIRECTOR” and the FBI shield.

Who said what

FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson declined to comment on the polygraph report but told MS NOW there was no such criminal leak investigation and Fitzpatrick “is not being investigated at all.” The personalized bourbon bottles “are part of a common practice in the FBI” of exchanging “commemorative items in formal gift settings,” he said. A former longtime senior FBI official “burst out laughing” when asked if previous FBI directors had distributed “personally branded liquor bottles,” Fitzpatrick reported.

What next?

If the FBI criminal leak investigation is “confirmed to be true,” Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg said in a statement, “we will defend The Atlantic and its staff vigorously.”

What happened

The federal Court of International Trade on Thursday ruled against the 10% global tariffs President Donald Trump imposed in February after the Supreme Court struck down steep import taxes he had enacted under a different legal authority. Trump’s tariffs under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 are “invalid” and “unauthorized by law,” the trade court said in its 2-1 decision.

Who said what

Thursday’s ruling dealt “yet another legal setback” to Trump’s “efforts to wage a trade war without the express permission of Congress,” The New York Times said. But the court “only explicitly blocked” collecting the tariff from two small businesses and Washington state, finding that the other 23 states in the lawsuit hadn’t paid any relevant tariffs. Another reason the ruling’s “immediate impact might be limited,” The Wall Street Journal said, is that the tariff expires July 24, at “which point the administration plans to pivot to different tariffs” that are “more routinely used and seen as legally durable.”

What next?

The ruling “weakens” Trump on his “core economic initiative” a week before he meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss bilateral trade, The Washington Post said. It also “sets the stage for another protracted legal battle” over refunding the billions collected under another illegal tariff regime, Reuters said.

What happened

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) on Thursday signed into law a new congressional map that slices up Memphis to disperse its Black voters into Republican-leaning districts, seeking to eliminate the state’s last Democratic-held and majority-Black district. The General Assembly’s Republican supermajority approved the gerrymander earlier in the day amid raucous protests.

Who said what

Tennessee is the first state to draw a new map since the Supreme Court last week neutered the last remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act. That ruling “opened a new front, particularly in the South, in a bitter, coast-to-coast redistricting battle” launched by President Donald Trump to protect the GOP’s slim House majority, The New York Times said.

Tennessee Republicans “defended the new map,” saying their “partisan” goal was sending “an all-Republican delegation” to Congress, NPR said. “You cannot take a majority Black city, fracture its voting power and then tell us race has nothing to do with it,” said state Sen. London Lamar (D). The new map is “Jim Crow on steroids,” political scientist Norm Ornstein said on social media. The new map likely “would never have withstood scrutiny under the Voting Rights Act under the last several decades,” said David Becker at the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research. “Now, the Supreme Court almost seems to invite” these gerrymanders.

What next?

The NAACP on Thursday evening challenged Tennessee’s map in state court. Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina are taking steps to eliminate majority-Black districts in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling.

“Labour has gone from its loveless landslide to having no political heartland in the UK to call its own,” said Adam Boulton in The i Paper.

Reform UK has made sweeping gains across England in the local elections, while the SNP is likely to be the largest party in Scotland. Labour has already admitted it is not going to form the next government in Wales.

Keir Starmer has declared he is “not going to walk away and plunge the country into chaos”. However, amid rumours of challenges from former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham, Labour’s poor performance in the local elections could prove the tipping point for the PM.

What did the commentators say?

“Kingmaker” Ed Miliband has reportedly privately suggested to Starmer he should set out a “timeline for his departure” after the results, said Steven Swinford in The Times. Though the former party leader is “supportive” of Starmer, he is worried that Labour may “descend into a bitter and damaging leadership contest”.

Both Rayner and Streeting are thought to have the support of the 81 Labour MPs needed to “trigger a contest”. Rayner reportedly does not see the ongoing HMRC investigation into her tax affairs as a “barrier to putting herself forward”. Burnham has also “emerged as the preferred candidate of powerbrokers on Labour’s soft left”. They believe an “orderly transition to his leadership over a period of months is the only way to avert a bloody civil war”, with reports of a backbench MP standing down to accommodate his return to Westminster.

Indeed, it may appear an “obvious conclusion” – that changing the leader would make its problems “go away”, said Boulton. “Obvious but wrong.” Inexperienced Labour MPs – “more than half” of whom were first elected in 2024 – had “supped full on the bloodshed” of five axed Conservative leaders before the general election. But they “failed to notice that such a butcher’s bill did not ultimately improve the Tories’ fortunes”. The reality is they have a “poor leader who has led them into an electoral catastrophe, but without him, things could always get worse”.

Starmer may be on the end of one of the party’s “worst set of election results in history”, but he may “take solace” in his potential challengers also “facing heavy losses in their own patch”, said Kiran Stacey in The Guardian. Labour lost control of Tameside in Greater Manchester, Rayner’s local council, and “struggled” across the northwest, impacting Burnham. Experts also expect Labour to “do badly” in Streeting’s home council of Redbridge in northeast London.

Labour MPs will have a “terrible sinking feeling”, said political strategist James Frayne in The Telegraph. They won’t know which way to turn, but the “great risk” for them is “looking like they’re part of the problem”. Staying silent implies a weakened party is becoming more divided, but appearing to “trot” out excuses for Starmer “risks downplaying the prospect of a straightforward Farage majority at the next election. That’s not a risk that anyone with any hope of a future in the Labour Party can take.”

It is “hard to deny” that Starmer’s days are “numbered”, said Simon Walters in The Independent. But the question remains: “how is any replacement going to make things better for Labour?” Starmer “may not set the pulse racing” but he is “decent and honest”, as well as making the right calls over Iran, and “standing up to Donald Trump with courage and quiet dignity”. Until someone raises “convincing solutions” to current issues, those who are “indulging in a petty blame game” in Westminster “should be careful what they wish for”.

What next?

Votes were still being counted, but the Labour “post-mortem” had already begun, said Ethan Croft in The New Statesman. Amid the “necessary evasions and sugar-coating of damage control”, there are “hard-headed calculations” about which direction the party should turn. Over the next few days expect everyone on the Labour left and right to use the results to “validate what they already believed”, and to “argue for policies and strategies they were already advocating for the party’s future”.

Those on Labour’s right are “confident” the results “vindicate” Shabana Mahmood’s “hardline” stance on immigration, believing the party must do more to “neutralise” Reform on Labour’s own terms. Those on the left of the party, however, think this is “precisely the consequence of pursuing that brand of politics”, and is also why they are being “walloped” by the Greens.

The Trump administration has lofty expectations about the state of the pharmaceutical industry, but not everyone appears to be a believer. Recent data from the White House predicted that the administration’s deals with drug companies could save the economy more than half a trillion dollars over the next decade. While Republicans are lauding this estimate, many Democrats are taking it with a grain of salt.

‘Touted his drug pricing deals as transformative’

The White House predicts that Trump’s deals could save $529 billion over the next 10 years, according to an analysis of data obtained by The Associated Press. The administration also estimated that federal and state governments could “save a combined $64.3 billion on Medicaid during the next decade” because of Trump’s agreements, Josh Doak said at the AP.

Trump administration officials have touted the president’s “drug pricing deals as transformative and urged Congress to codify their principles into law” as part of “most favored nation” (MFN) pricing, said Doak. The White House has “reached voluntary agreements with 17 pharmaceutical companies,” and it appears the administration’s “goal is to bring manufacturers of sole-source brand-name drugs and biologics into comparable arrangements,” Colleen Cabili said at Quartz. Details on the deal specifics remain unclear.

The president has “sought to position his pharmaceutical pricing push as a winning issue with voters,” said Cabili. Given his plummeting poll numbers over affordability, Trump has been “focusing on his efforts to cut deals with companies so that the cost of prescription drugs in the U.S. would no longer be dramatically higher than in other affluent nations,” said Doak.

The mechanism ‘remains a black box’

Despite the White House’s optimism, many across the aisle are skeptical of the Trump administration’s potential cost savings. Just prior to the White House’s analysis, 17 Democratic senators introduced legislation that would force Trump to provide details of the drug deals. If “these deals are actually lowering costs for patients, show us,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), one of the co-sponsors of the legislation, said in a statement. “Americans deserve transparency.”

If “these deals are so great, why is the Trump administration afraid of showing them to the public? Because Trump is a giant fraud when it comes to lower drug prices,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a parallel statement. The “scope of the savings claimed by the Trump administration are likely to intensify the scrutiny by Democrats,” said Doak at the AP. One of their primary concerns is that “pharmaceutical companies have increased their profit margins while working with the administration.”

The “exact mechanism” for these savings “remains a black box,” said Angus Liu at the biopharma news website Fierce Pharma. Beyond the price of the drugs themselves, the White House “has yet to define how commercial markets, such as employer-sponsored insurance, will access those discounted rates.” The “math for these massive savings only adds up if the administration can expand its circle of agreements beyond the 17 Big Pharma firms initially targeted” by Trump. Many biotech companies are also wary of “MFN’s impact on their business models” and “argue that they lack the diverse portfolios of pharma companies that can absorb revenue hits from pricing pressure.”

‘Why so few babies? We might have overlooked the biggest reason of all.’

Anna Louie Sussman at The New York Times

Having kids is “not simply a matter of affordability, the buzzword so often invoked to explain why people are choosing to have smaller families,” says Anna Louie Sussman. Overall, people are “having fewer children both in countries that offer very little and in those renowned for their generous family benefits.” What “unites these disparate cultures, policy environments and demographics” is people’s “inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood.”

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‘Nothing to fear, much to gain from Flock cameras’

Jason Riggs at The Minnesota Star Tribune

A “common misconception when discussing license plate reader cameras is that ‘each camera records passing vehicles and compiles the license plates into a time-stamped database,’” says Jason Riggs. Police “are not here to monitor your every move.” The cameras “are designed to notify law enforcement only when a license plate connected with a crime crosses their path.” Using them “can make all the difference when searching for a vehicle,” and “throughout the country, this technology has proven to be lifesaving.”

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‘The immeasurable endurance of the women of Gaza’

Huda Skaik at The Nation

“Even in the face of such brutality, Gazan women persist,” says Huda Skaik. They “carry their communities, serving as pillars of endurance amid the ruins of a society that has been all but erased.” Women in Gaza “have become both the primary caretakers and providers, responsible for securing food, water and shelter, caring for the injured, and sustaining their families.” Their “suffering is both physical and psychological, yet they continue to care for the next generation.”

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‘I’m not a pundit, I just play one on TV’

Christian Schneider at the National Review

When “physicians get political, they damage the medical profession’s reputation,” says Christian Schneider. In “recent years, the medical profession has endured a thorough battering, with doctors exposing themselves as just as misinformed and politically motivated as the general public.” Nowhere “has this provided more comedy than in President Donald Trump’s attempt to fill the spot of U.S. surgeon general in his administration.” The “diminishment of the medical profession by a wannabe political physician class has real-world consequences.”

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What happened

A federal judge in New York on Wednesday released a jail suicide note purportedly written by Jeffrey Epstein. The handwritten note had been sealed for years in an unrelated case involving Epstein’s one-time cellmate Nicholas Tartaglione.

Who said what

“They investigated me for month — Found nothing!!!” the note said. “It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye. Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!! NO FUN — NOT WORTH IT!!” Tartaglione said he found the note in a graphic novel after Epstein was moved from their cell after a first suicide attempt. Epstein’s death weeks later was ruled a suicide but spawned murder conspiracy theories. Federal prosecutors approved the note’s release, citing “a strong public interest in the circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death.”

What next?

Tartaglione’s lawyers “said they authenticated the note,” The Washington Post said, but “no court or investigative agency has vouched for” its authenticity. The note does use phrases Epstein “used in emails, as well as in a separate note found in his jail cell at the time of his death,” The New York Times said. That final note “appeared to be a list of grievances about conditions at the jail,” The Associated Press said.

Zack Polanski has reason to be pleased with his ­leadership of the Green Party so far.

Membership has ­tripled since he took over last September, and the party has made “great electoral strides”, said The Times. It is polling strongly and is forecast to “make gains in Labour’s London strongholds” in today’s local elections.

But “there is a darker side”. Polanski, himself Jewish, “appears intent on exploiting” anger on the left over Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. As he works to cultivate a new, populist base, he “seems not to recognise”, or is unwilling to confront, antisemitism within his party – although it is “staring him in the face”.

What did the commentators say?

Greens are “often lionised as nicer and kinder than other parties”, said The Telegraph. But how do voters square the party’s “‘anti-racist’ credentials” with “the revolting online behaviour of many” of its candidates?

Two standing in Lambeth, Sabine Mairey and Saiqa Ali, were arrested last week on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred online. One shared a post suggesting an attack on a synagogue “isn’t antisemitism” but “revenge” for Israel “murdering people”. Other candidates have defended the 7 October massacres, questioned whether “Zionism is a mental illness” and “implied that antisemitism is justified”.

Polanski provoked outrage when he suggested police tackling the armed suspect in the Golders Green terror attack had used excessive force. Antisemitism “appears to have become normalised on the left, a dog-whistle used to win votes”, said The Telegraph.

No one is suggesting that Polanski himself is “some frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Semite”, said Tom Slater in The Spectator. But the accusation that the party “has become a magnet for anti-Semites”, and “a key voice” in downplaying the growing threat” to Britain’s Jews, is “hardly unfounded”.

Polanski, when asked about the spate of arson attacks on synagogues and the torching of four Hatzola ambulances, came out with “the already-infamous lines”: “Now, there’s a conversation to be had about whether it’s a perception of unsafety or whether it’s actual unsafety, but neither are acceptable.”

But those comments to Haaretz have been widely “misrepresented”, said Owen Jones in The Guardian. What Polanski said was that he feels pro-Palestine marches “have been perceived as unsafe by some Jewish people and safe by others, including himself”. Other journalists have accused Polanski of using his Jewish identity as “a political shield”. How does their treatment of Polanski square with his party’s “repeated, explicit condemnations of antisemitism?” Yes, there have been “allegations of vile antisemitism” by party candidates, and “a small number of examples” from a party that has nearly quadrupled in size since September – but “to extrapolate from these” and “smear an entire party” is “cynical”.

Polanski has condemned any antisemitic remarks, saying this was “not an abstract idea” for him. “As a Jewish person, those comments disgust me,” he told the BBC on Sunday. But, he added, “I don’t believe we have a particular problem compared [with] wider society and other political parties”.

What next?

Polanski’s vocal support for Palestine and his “consistent condemnation of Israeli crimes and excesses undoubtedly contributed to the party’s surge in support”, said Tony Greenstein, from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, on Al Jazeera.

But it has also triggered an antisemitism smear campaign “almost identical to the one that eventually saw Jeremy Corbyn and his leftist, pro-Palestine supporters ousted from the Labour Party”. How the Green leader responds “will determine not only the future of his party, but potentially the direction of British politics”.

In effect, Polanski “still has a real shot at carrying his party to power”, but he could lose it all “if he repeats Corbyn’s mistakes and tries to appease his bad-faith critics”.

The Green Party is “facing a test on antisemitism”, said Ailbhe Rea in The New Statesman. In a “quite extraordinary development”, the deputy leader Mothin Ali encouraged some of the suspended candidates to “take legal action against the party”.

Polanski said the main lesson he needs to learn from Corbyn is to “navigate antisemitism allegations better”. He is “absolutely correct”. But how and when he plans to do so have “not yet become clear”.

Plans for a summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping were underway before America went to war with Iran. That war delayed the meeting, now set for next week, and will overshadow other issues the two leaders planned to discuss.

The war has “significantly altered” the agenda for the Trump-Xi summit and could be a “major obstacle” to resolving trade issues between the two countries, Lyle J. Goldstein said at Responsible Statecraft. The “tensions are palpable” in part because China has reportedly shared weapons and intelligence with Tehran, but both countries want to keep the world economy “from careening off the looming cliff.” Trump and Xi may be forced to work on “pragmatic compromise in order to keep their rivalry under control.”

Trump “may want to temper his expectations” for the summit, Jacob Dreyer said at The New York Times. China once saw presidential visits as “global validation” for its rise but now has “begun to chart its own course” as its leaders realize their country has “learned all it can from America.” Trump wants to improve the U.S.-China relationship but “maintaining a tense stability is about all he can hope for.”

‘A creditor-debtor dynamic’

The president has “fewer cards to play” at the summit, Brahma Chellaney said at The Hill. His choice to go to war against Iran has “boomeranged” into a “global energy shock,” with the result that a meeting intended as a “show of strength” for the U.S. president may end up being more about “damage control.”

The war has depleted American munitions and weakened the economy, accelerating a shift in the U.S.-China relationship from a “rivalry of near-peers” to “something closer to a creditor-debtor dynamic.” Trump’s question in Beijing is “not whether he can strike a deal,” but rather “what he will give up to get one.”

Trade issues “will take center stage at the summit,” Patricia M. Kim said at Brookings. Trump and Xi likely will continue the “trade truce” between their countries, with the U.S. getting Chinese exports of rare earth minerals and sales of American farm products, while China gets tariff and regulatory relief from Washington. A summit “focused on stability” could lead to more cooperation on security and trade or could turn the Washington-Beijing relationship more frosty if “Trump walks away dissatisfied with the results of the trip.”

Breakthroughs unlikely

The number of Americans with favorable views about China has “ticked up,” said Pew Research Center, nearly doubling since 2023 to 27%. Fewer Americans say China is an enemy, but most “still see it as a competitor.”

The summit is “unlikely to deliver decisive breakthroughs” between the U.S. and China, Yingfan Chen and Dingding Chen said at The Diplomat. Its significance will not be a “transforming” of the dynamic between the two countries but instead “maintaining a minimum level of predictability” in the relationship so the competition between China and America can continue “within constraints the system can absorb.”

‘Asian budget carriers need help to avoid Spirit’s fate’

Juliana Liu at Bloomberg

The “jet fuel crunch is hitting Asia’s low-cost airlines much harder than their full-service counterparts,” says Juliana Liu. Asian governments “should be preparing financial or operational support to avoid further flight cancellations during the busy summer travel season — as well as outright shutdowns like the collapse of America’s Spirit Airlines.” Policymakers “must consider targeted measures in the form of loans, grants or fuel price relief,” and they “should differ by country and reflect conditions on the ground.”

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‘The rush to point fingers at the Secret Service’

Mitch Price at The Wall Street Journal

After an “incident involving presidential security, a predictable cycle begins,” says Mitch Price. Media outlets “elevate instant analysis from so-called ‘experts’ eager to diagnose Secret Service failures.” In the “immediate aftermath, there’s rarely enough verified information to support meaningful conclusions,” but “confident claims emerge anyway, often from people with little experience in presidential protection.” Risk “can’t be eliminated, only managed.” Safety plans “must balance threats, resources, public access and the president’s need to remain visible.”

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‘Iran’s survival is not victory’

Menahem Merhavy at Foreign Policy

Iran previously “defined victory in expansive terms: exporting revolution, rolling back U.S. power and ultimately eliminating Israel,” says Menahem Merhavy. But “today, under sustained military pressure, its leaders are advancing a far narrower claim,” as “survival itself — withstanding strikes, avoiding surrender, remaining intact — is increasingly presented as victory.” This is “more than mere wartime rhetoric. It marks a shift in how the regime understands power, success and its own purpose.” The “language of Iran’s leadership reflects this shift.”

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‘Miami’s drought wake-up call: Everglades restoration is our water insurance’

Michael Berkowitz and Meenakshi Chabba at the Miami Herald

For a “region that receives nearly 60 inches of rain annually, scarcity” in Miami “felt like someone else’s problem,” say Michael Berkowitz and Meenakshi Chabba. But a “drought has shattered that sense of abundance and revealed the vulnerability of South Florida’s water supply.” Most Miami residents “think of resilience mainly as flood adaptation, leaving water security as an under-acknowledged pillar.” Florida “cannot build a truly resilient Miami without bringing its most consequential resilience plan to the finish line.”

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What happened

Senate Republicans faced an uproar Tuesday for including $1 billion for President Donald Trump’s “East Wing Modernization Project” in their $72 billion party-line bill to fund immigration enforcement through September 2029. The East Wing project is what the White House calls Trump’s $400 million ballroom, which he has repeatedly claimed will be built only with private funds.

Who said what

Democrats “pounced” on the “surprise addition” to the GOP’s reconciliation package, The New York Times said. “Republicans looked at families drowning in bills and decided what they really needed was more raids and a Trump ballroom,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on X.

The bill, released late Monday, allocates $1 billion for Secret Service “enhancements” related to the East Wing project, including “above-ground and below-ground security features.” A spokesperson for Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said the bill “does not fund ballroom construction.” But “security costs would seem to be a significant portion” of the ballroom project, said CNN, and “no other project is mentioned in that section of the bill.”

What next?

Republicans hope to pass the filibuster-proof $72 billion package by the end of the month.

What happened

A slate of Midwestern elections on Tuesday set up a key U.S. Senate race in Ohio, assured Michigan Democrats control of the state senate and ousted at least five Indiana Republicans targeted by President Donald Trump for voting against a mid-decade gerrymander. In Ohio, Trump-backed entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy won the GOP gubernatorial primary and will face Democratic former state public health director Amy Acton in what’s expected to be a competitive race.

Who said what

Former Sen. Sherrod Brown won Ohio’s Democratic Senate primary and will face Sen. Jon Husted (R), appointed last year to fill the seat vacated by Vice President JD Vance. Democrats face an “uphill climb” to flip the Senate in November’s midterms, Reuters said. But “they think they have momentum nationally,” and Brown’s race is one of four they “plan to pour resources into.”

In Michigan, firefighter Chedrick Greene (D) handily won a vacant state Senate seat in a closely divided district, giving Democrats a 20-18 majority. In Indiana, Trump’s “loyal and energized supporters turned out to punish” five of the seven state Senate incumbents he sought to oust, Politico said. One incumbent won and the other race was too close to call. The “stunning” results showed Trump’s “continuing ability to exact political revenge,” The New York Times said, even as his “poll numbers sag.”

What next?

Tuesday’s elections “reinforced a picture that’s becoming increasingly clear,” The Associated Press said: Trump “still dominates the Republican Party,” but “Democrats seem to have the momentum” heading into the midterms.

Donald Trump has paused the US operation shepherding ships through the Strait of Hormuz to see if a lasting peace deal with Iran can be agreed. But there remains scepticism on both sides that a permanent end to the conflict is near.

The ceasefire, which was extended indefinitely by Trump on 21 April, “opened up a chance for diplomacy that looked for a short time as if it might make progress”, said BBC international editor Jeremy Bowen. A first round of talks in Pakistan ended without agreement, but while both America and Iran “want to have a deal” they have “different deals in mind and are sticking to their red lines”.

Trump is demanding the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of global oil and gas exports pass, and cast-iron restrictions on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Tehran wants an end to the war, guarantees against future attacks, a withdrawal of US forces from around Iran, the release of frozen Iranian assets worth billions of dollars and the lifting of sanctions.

What did the commentators say?

Iran has “slightly softened” its proposal around the US blockade of the Strait, but on the two biggest issues – enrichment of uranium and transferring its highly enriched uranium – both sides remain “far apart”, Paul Musgrave, from Georgetown University in Qatar, told Al Jazeera.

Kenneth Katzman, from the New York-based nonprofit Soufan Center, said Iran’s mistrust of Trump remains a bigger obstacle.

This is partly driven by the president’s “increasingly contradictory statements about the United States’ strategy” and the administration’s “shifting timeline for the war’s end”, which has been “one of the clearest examples of its flip-flopping messaging”, said Julia Ledur in The Washington Post.

Trump “clearly wants to end the war in Iran”, said Katrin Bennhold in The New York Times. At first, “he tried scare tactics” but his ultimatums “proved flexible and his threats to wipe out a civilisation empty (at least so far)”. He is now trying “to inflict financial pain on the Iranian leadership” but his blockade isn’t “faring much better”.

Trump’s “conviction that more economic or even military pressure will bring about Iran’s capitulation is deeply flawed”, said Steven Erlanger in the NYT. Officials and analysts say it is a “misreading of the Islamic republic’s strategy, psychology and capability for adaptation”.

What next?

For now, “diplomacy is not entirely frozen”, said Barak Ravid and Marc Caputo on Axios, as Trump’s envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are still in contact with Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi.

But things could still go either way. One senior US official said: “There are talks. There are offers. We don’t like theirs. They don’t like ours. We still don’t know the status of the [Supreme Leader]. And they’re carrying messages by hand to caves or wherever he or whoever is hiding. It slows the process down.

“It’s either we’re looking at the real contours of an achievable deal soon, or he’s going to bomb the hell out of them.”

“But if history is any guide, there’s a real chance the war continues to drag on,” said Will Walldorf, from the Defense Priorities think tank, in Foreign Policy.

This is because a “few core elements that have turned past conflicts into forever wars are present in this one, too”. These include “high resolve by the weak, erosion of cost-benefit thinking by the strong, and weak institutional constraints to war-fighting on at least one side”. Combined, they mean that “resisting the expansion of the Iran conflict into a forever war won’t be easy”.

Restore Britain received its latest high-profile endorsement last week when former Chelsea captain John Terry replied “100% yes” to an Instagram post by party founder Rupert Lowe wanting to “ban foreigners from claiming benefits”, “remove migrants who are incapable of financially supporting themselves” and “put our own people first”.

Lowe, the Great Yarmouth MP, set up Restore Britain last year as what he called a “political movement” after he was suspended by Reform UK. It was then formally launched as a political party in February. Despite being just a few months old, the party is polling at 4%, according to YouGov.

It might have been “conceived as a pressure group”, said LBC, but Lowe has since “stepped up his ambitions and appears willing to challenge his old party for the space on the right”.

What are its policies?

Curbing immigration is a key Restore policy. Its official website says: “Mass immigration has been a disaster for Britain. It has left us poorer, less safe, and less culturally and socially cohesive.”

It plans to “reverse mass immigration” by deporting all illegal migrants and introducing a “red list” of countries that “face far stricter security checks, limited visa categories, and higher barriers to entry”. Restore would use tents, not hotels, to house “so-called asylum seekers” before abolishing the asylum system altogether. It would end benefits for those on indefinite leave to remain, “deport rape gang collaborators” and foreign criminals, and end election campaigning in foreign languages.

On tax and benefits, it promises to “reward the nation’s grafters” by scrapping IR35 for freelancers, abolishing inheritance tax, establishing the lowest corporation tax in Europe, and getting “able-bodied Britons on benefits back to work”.

It proposes a “Britain First energy security strategy”, which would mean repealing net zero goals, requiring developers to fund local infrastructure before building housing, ending hosepipe bans for good and automating the London Tube.

Restore wants to scrap foreign aid, rearm Britain by spending more on defence and end diversity and inclusivity programmes within the Armed Forces.

It would “defund the rotten BBC”, “strengthen the teaching of our Christian heritage” within national curriculum history modules, ban the burqa, restrict halal and kosher slaughter, and repeal the Online Safety Act.

Perhaps most controversially, Restore would hold a binding referendum on restoring the death penalty in a bid to “make Britain safe again”.

What impact could it have on Reform UK?

While it shares many of the same policies as Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, Lowe’s party has sought to present itself as the true voice of the right.

Despite lacking the name recognition of a leader like Farage, Restore has successfully used social media to amplify its anti-immigration rhetoric. Helped in no small part by the backing of X owner Elon Musk, Lowe is now one of the most followed UK politicians on social media.

By adopting a decentralised structure, effectively serving as an umbrella for local far-right political partners, Restore hopes to show up the top-down approach of Reform. Other far-right figures such as former EDL leader Tommy Robinson and former Reform deputy leader Ben Habib have also rallied behind the new party.

Such a force “could cost Reform a number of seats – and potentially even power, in a wafer-thin general election result – by splitting support among those drawn to hard-right anti-immigration populism”, said The Guardian.

Is it just a flash in the pan?

For now, Restore remains “really very small fry”, Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University, told Politics Home. “They’re gnats, not mosquitoes” at the moment, but the party’s impact will be determined in large part by how Farage reacts. “On the one hand, it’s always helpful for Farage to be able to point to outfits on his right that he can differentiate himself from and suggest that because they’re more extreme than he is, he’s therefore not far right and actually quite mainstream”.

But political parties can be encouraged to talk about policies promoted by parties further to the fringes, which runs the risk of Farage “moving too far out of the kind of what is sometimes called the zone of acceptability, as far as most voters are concerned”.

‘How Everest has changed since “Into Thin Air”’

Jon Krakauer at The Atlantic

When the “first edition of ‘Into Thin Air’ was published not long after the 1996 Mount Everest calamity,” many “assumed that the disturbing events I described in my book would convince amateur climbers that paying a lot of money to be guided up the highest mountain on Earth was a bad idea,” says Jon Krakauer. But Nepali workers “deserve much of the credit for making Everest a less dangerous mountain than it used to be.”

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‘Amsterdam’s ban on advertising hamburgers won’t stop climate change’

The Washington Post editorial board

Amsterdam “just banned all advertisements for meat in public spaces. Its justification: Eating meat contributes to climate change,” says The Washington Post editorial board. But “censoring ads for beef, pork, chicken and even fish won’t reduce carbon emissions. Nor will it make people less hungry for protein and other nutrients essential to a healthy diet.” Humanity “will have an easier time innovating out of the challenges posed by climate change if it’s not working on an empty stomach.”

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‘The fight over data centers is a distraction’

Abdallah Fayyad at The Boston Globe

Despite the “threats posed by AI — ranging from environmental to economic to privacy concerns — there’s little to no appetite in Washington to meaningfully regulate the industry,” says Abdallah Fayyad. America has “fixated on the one part of the story it can’t ignore, the part that is having a tangible impact on community after community: the proliferation of data centers.” While “opposing data center construction may make for good politics, it isn’t moving the needle when it comes to regulating AI.”

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‘How inequality killed the affordable American car’

Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect

For “middle-class and working-class Americans, most new cars” are “now out of reach,” says Harold Meyerson. The “economists at GM and virtually every corporation clearly believe” that “focusing on selling more costly goods and services to the investment-enriched sector of the public will net their companies more money than the kind of ‘product for every purse’ marketing that thrived in that long-ago postwar economy.” The “gaps between the wealthy and everyone else are widening and accelerating.”

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President Donald Trump signed an executive order last week creating a new pathway for working-class Americans to save for retirement. But what will the “Trump IRAs” actually accomplish?

About 56 million Americans “lack access to an employer-sponsored retirement plan at work,” said CNBC. The president’s order in 2027 will create a new website, TrumpIRA.gov, where those workers can “research, compare and enroll in private-sector individual retirement accounts” on their own. Low-income working Americans may even be eligible for a yearly matching contribution of $1,000 from the federal government.

The program could amount to the “largest potential expansion of retirement coverage since Social Security,” Teresa Ghilarducci, the director of the Wealth Equity Center at the New School for Social Research, said to MarketWatch. Other experts say the new effort needs a “more robust match and automatic enrollment” to truly help more workers secure their retirement, said Axios. But “that requires legislation” to pass through Congress.

What did the commentators say?

Trump’s new retirement plan “carries big political risks,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. There is “nothing to stop Americans” from setting up and contributing to their own IRA accounts without the government acting as a “broker and quasi-sponsor” of private retirement efforts. But IRAs that come with a “government imprimatur” might “squeeze out other private savings options.” Helping Americans save for their senior years is a “worthwhile goal” better achieved by “easing fiduciary regulations” for employer-sponsored plans while “bringing down inflation and growing real wages.”

The president’s proposal requires Congress’ backing to “have teeth,” Elizabeth O’Brien said at Barron’s. Legislation is needed to expand income eligibility for the matching contribution and to “make participation in Trump IRAs automatic.” Workers can already open their own IRAs but often do not “due to lack of knowledge, time to navigate the process or money to contribute.” Without new laws to back Trump’s plan, the new executive order will end up a “well-intentioned effort aimed at a real problem that doesn’t break new ground or live up to the hype.”

Legislation to automatically enroll workers in retirement funds would “create more problems than it solves,” the Cato Institute’s Romina Boccia said at The Washington Post. Such efforts also do “little to solve” the broader issue of “Social Security’s deteriorating finances.” The program faces “long-term shortfalls” of up to $28 billion that could result in benefit cuts starting in 2032. If the president and Congress really want to help Americans have a secure retirement, “they could instead focus on fixing Social Security” and help the seniors “who rely on the program as their primary source of retirement income.”

What next?

Workers making less than $35,000 a year will be eligible for the $1,000 matching contribution, said NBC News. The Trump administration will work with Congress to “significantly expand this program,” and it is “looking forward to legislation this year,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said at the executive order signing.

What happened

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is in critical condition in a Florida hospital as he recovers from pneumonia, but he “is now breathing on his own” after requiring a ventilator, spokesperson Ted Goodman said in a statement Monday. Giuliani, 81, is the “ultimate fighter” and “he is winning this battle.”

Who said what

Giuliani, once hailed as “America’s Mayor” for his response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City, has “struggled with legal and financial problems in recent years,” The New York Times said. Last year, he “suffered a fractured vertebra” from a car crash in New Hampshire, and he “made at least one public appearance in a wheelchair.” On his podcast last week, Giuliani said his voice was “a little under the weather.” Goodman said Giuliani had been diagnosed with restrictive airway disease stemming from his proximity to Ground Zero on 9/11, and “this condition adds complications to any respiratory illness.”

What next?

Giuliani’s health had “concerned those around him” recently, People said, citing a source close to the Trump administration. He “isn’t in good shape,” the source said.

What happened

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to put last week’s ruling overturning Louisiana’s congressional map into immediate effect, waiving its customary 32-day waiting period. The unsigned order removed a legal obstacle to Louisiana Republicans redrawing districts for the 2026 midterms to eliminate one or both of the state’s majority Black districts. Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a pointed dissent, prompting pushback from conservative Justice Samuel Alito and exposing “tension” that was “more notable” than the “technical decision itself,” CNN said.

Who said what

Gov. Jeff Landry (R) moved to pause Louisiana’s May 16 U.S. House primaries right after the court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling at the end of April, but early voting began May 2 and thousands of voters have already cast ballots. Under the Supreme Court’s “Purcell principle,” federal courts aren’t supposed to interfere with voting rules too close to an election. But this court has shown an “inconsistency” in applying that rule that “has the remarkably coincidental effect of benefitting Republicans,” Georgetown Law Professor Steve Vladeck said on his Substack page One First.

By helping Louisiana “​​rush to pause the ongoing election” to pass a new map, the court’s conservative wing discarded “principles” for “power,” Jackson wrote. “Not content to have decided the law, it now takes steps to influence its implementation.” Jackson’s quibbles are “trivial at best,” Alito said in a concurrence joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, and her charge of “an unprincipled use of power” is “ground­less and utterly irresponsible.”

What next?

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Monday signed a GOP-boosting gerrymander and Alabama’s GOP legislature began a special session to redraw its 2026 maps; Tennessee is following suit.

For more than a century, British politics has been a contest between two parties. That could end with Thursday’s local and devolved elections.

Reform UK is currently leading on 25%, said Politico’s poll of polls on 30 April, with the Conservatives and Greens tied on 18%, and Labour on 17%. The Liberal Democrats are just a few points behind. In Scotland, the Scottish National Party is hoping to secure an overall majority in Holyrood, while Plaid Cymru is on course to lead the devolved government in Wales.

“We’re going to see records tumble. We are living in unprecedented circumstances,” the UK’s leading polling expert, John Curtice, told The Times. “The basic assumptions of British politics – there isn’t enough space for a party to the right of the Tories or the left of Labour – have gone.”

What did the commentators say?

The fracturing of the electorate was already evident at the last general election, but has been turbo-charged over the past two years as “binary tribalism has been replaced by retail politics”, said The Times in an editorial. Voters are “more promiscuous in their favours” and, following a decade and a half of stagnant living standards, “they are prepared to take a punt on insurgent parties without kicking the tyres”.

The result is that a “nation that has long prided itself on moderation and stability” is now experiencing an “anti-establishment revolt of the sort that has gripped countries from the US and Argentina to Germany”, said Irina Anghel for Bloomberg. Reform and the Greens look set to pick up hundreds of former Labour and Conservative seats. This represents a “power shift” that would “reinforce insurgents’ local networks and party organisations across the country, helping to forestall any restoration of the two-party system by the next general election”.

“It’s the Dutch-ification of British politics,” said Simon Hix, a politics professor at the European University Institute. “Everyone used to make fun of the Netherlands, where 17 parties get elected to parliament, but this trend is happening everywhere in the world.”

“Of course, the popularity or otherwise of all parties ebbs and flows over time” and as recently as the 2017 general election Labour and the Conservatives won a massive 82.4% of the vote between them, said BBC political editor Chris Mason. “But the longer-term trend is clear”: in recent years, the “palette of popular political parties has widened” beyond the Tory-Labour duopoly.

What next?

The dawn of genuine five-party politics – or seven-way if you include nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales – in Britain “spells problems for the political system” beyond the immediate aftermath of Thursday’s vote, said Sky News data journalist Alicja Hagopian.

In the short term, electoral fragmentation “brings governability into question”, said the Financial Times. Voters are “largely moving from one left-leaning party to another, or from one right-leaning party to another, but coalitions of left and right can be hard to build”. Britain’s first-past-the-post system also “creates particular problems of democratic legitimacy”. It means that as voting fragments, candidates are elected with an ever-smaller share of votes cast. In January, Reform won a council seat from Labour in Wales with a vote share of just 22%.

“Choice is good for democracy. It gives a fairer representation of what people actually want,” said Rob Ford, professor of political science at the University of Manchester. “But this puts our electoral system for local elections under pressure, because first-past-the-post is not designed for fragmented competition between five strong parties.”

What happened

A California man accused of trying to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with an arsenal of guns and knives was charged last week with attempting to assassinate President Trump, as investigators dug through writings and social media posts that showed his increasing fury at the administration. Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old high school tutor from Torrance, checked in to the Washington Hilton ahead of the black-tie dinner there. As waiters cleared salad plates in the ballroom—packed with more than 2,000 journalists and Beltway insiders—Allen sprinted past a security checkpoint carrying a shotgun and .38-caliber handgun. One federal agent opened fire and another in a bulletproof vest was shot in the chest but was unharmed; ballistics experts are investigating whether he was shot by Allen or by the other officer. Allen tripped and was jumped on by agents, who stripped him of his weapons. In the ballroom, attendees crouched under dinner tables as the president and first lady Melania Trump were rushed out along with Vice President JD Vance and Cabinet members. “It scared all of us,” said CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer. “We had no idea what was going on.”

Before the attempted attack, Allen wrote a note detailing his plan to target Trump administration officials “prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.” He referenced abuse in ICE detention camps, the U.S. bombing of a girls’ school in Iran, and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” he wrote, in apparent reference to Trump. Neighbors and acquaintances described Allen, a leader of his college’s Christian Fellowship, as quiet and respectful. But on social media he raged against Trump. “Everyone already knows trump is a f---ing awful person in multiple dimensions and no one has done shit,” read one April 2025 post on the Bluesky platform.

Trump called for unity at a press conference following the incident. But the tone soon shifted, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed the assassination attempt on the “deranged lies” of Democrats who “falsely label and slander the president as a fascist and threat to democracy.” Trump, who has survived two previous assassination attempts, called this one a marker of his success. “The most impactful people,” he said, “are the ones they go after.”

What the columnists said

This was a “security fiasco,” said Hugh Dougherty in the Daily Beast. How was Allen able to stroll into the Hilton with a shotgun in his luggage, check into a room, and roam freely? After I checked in, I was never asked for ID, and I walked into the dinner with a ticket that could easily “have been a photo-copy.” Actually, the Secret Service did its job, said Garrett Graff in his Substack newsletter. Securing a hotel with some 1,100 rooms isn’t their responsibility, nor is it “to prevent any incident at a high-profile event.” Their task is to set up a security perimeter and keep the president safe—which is exactly what they did.

Allen presents a puzzle, said Odette Yousef in NPR.org. A well-liked young man with a master’s degree in computer science, he was incensed by Trump administration policies. But his online history displays none of the extremist or conspiratorial views that typically drive would-be political assassins. His writings express “pretty moderate left-wing” views, said extremism researcher Jared Holt. It’s left him and other experts unclear as to what tipped Allen over the edge.

There’s no mystery here, said Jeffrey Blehar in National Review. Allen hung out on lefty-dominated Bluesky, and “seems to have been radicalized into committing violence by the panic and apocalypticism common in such spaces.” In his “manifesto,” he accused Trump of being a pedophile—a “wild, reckless lie” that is commonly bandied about by Trump haters, and one that “is intended to inflame.” Now “we see where that line of rhetoric can lead.”

The Right’s attempt to pin this attack on Democrats is cynical and bogus, said Peter Hamby in Puck. But progressives can’t shy away from the fact that “a rising miasma of conspiratorial thinking, dangerous fact-denying, and dehumanizing language has taken hold on the American left.” Before a trans-rights supporter shot dead conservative activist Charlie Kirk and Luigi Mangione allegedly murdered a health-care CEO “in a fit of anti-corporate rage,” it was easier for liberals to claim “the nutjobs and wackos were mostly on the other side.” That’s no longer the case.

Trump is the primary cause of our “culture of political violence,” said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. At the start of his political project in 2016, he urged his supporters to punch people they disliked. Since then, Trump has unleashed a mob on the U.S. Capitol, referred to anti-ICE protesters “murdered by his regime as ‘domestic terrorists,’” called his political opponents “enemies of the people,” and cheered the deaths of his critics. Now he and his supporters are shocked that the violent world he willed into being is coming for him.

We’re watching “the best democracy on earth destroyed by madness,” said Will Bunch in The Philadelphia Inquirer. In a nation where firearms outnumber people, we’ve reached the stage where attempted assassination sites are “getting recycled”—President Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded outside the same Hilton in 1981. Last month, we collectively shrugged when a disturbed father killed eight children in Shreveport, La., and a mall in Baton Rouge “erupted in a Wild West shoot-out.” We’ll no doubt soon move on from this latest grim spectacle, in an “unserious America” where “appalling forms of violence” feel increasingly like business as usual.

‘Tens of millions of Americans will never own a home — consequences will be severe’

John Mac Ghlionn at The Hill

Real estate “has been crushed for a second consecutive year — this time by a war in Iran that has sent mortgage rates soaring,” says John Mac Ghlionn. The market has “become a staring contest where nobody blinks, nobody moves, and the country suffers.” Homeownership has “long been the primary vehicle through which middle class Americans build wealth.” Take it “away, and you remove the single largest source of generational stability for tens of millions of households.”

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‘We lend military our loved ones. Least they can do is feed them.’

Rebekah Gleaves Sanderlin at USA Today

There’s an “unspoken contract the U.S. military makes with military families: Lend us your loved ones, and we’ll meet their basic needs,” says Rebekah Gleaves Sanderlin. But upon seeing photos of “meager and unappetizing meals purportedly being served to sailors deployed to the Middle East, people took notice.” The “mere fact that military family members suspect their loved ones’ basic needs aren’t being met is an indicator.” It “tells us they don’t trust leadership to care for their people.”

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‘The dark side of Gaza’s new fancy cafes and restaurants’

Eman Abu Zayed at Al Jazeera

Social media is “full of posts showing off photos and videos of fancy-looking cafes and restaurants in Gaza” but “these new establishments do not prove that normality is coming back to Gaza,” says Eman Abu Zayed. They are a “testament to its continuing genocidal abnormality.” The war “made some people in Gaza rich, especially those who engaged in illicit activities,” and “this wealth is now coming out in various forms, including luxury cafes and restaurants.”

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‘Trump’s ridiculous ballroom is no place for journalists’

Ana Marie Cox at The Nation

Trump has “been pushing for future White House Correspondents’ Association dinners to be held on his turf, at the still-mythical ballroom that the president tore down part of the White House to build,” says Ana Marie Cox. But “this is a solution to a problem that does not exist.” The “metaphor of watchful hospitality should be on everyone’s mind every time Trump or his cronies bleat about moving the correspondents’ dinner to his metastasizing monstrosity.”

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What happened

Two drugmakers on Saturday asked the Supreme Court to pause a federal appellate court’s decision to ban mail-order access to the abortion medication mifepristone nationwide. A panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled the day before that women seeking mifepristone had to get the drug in person from a doctor.

Who said what

The Fifth Circuit agreed that Louisiana was “irreparably harmed without a stay,” because out-of-state mifepristone shipments circumvent the state’s near-total ban on abortions. Mifepristone makers Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro asked the Supreme Court to step in, arguing that overriding an FDA decision on a drug long proved safe and effective was unprecedented and upended the established U.S. drug-approval framework.

The ruling “puts the Trump administration in a politically difficult spot, especially ahead of the midterms,” The New York Times said. The White House “does not want to take a high-profile anti-abortion action” that “might antagonize some voters who support abortion rights.” But antiabortion groups are already furious with President Donald Trump over the continued “ubiquity of abortion pills,” The Wall Street Journal said, and they plan to campaign heavily for national abortion bans.

What next?

Mifepristone and its less-regulated partner drug misoprostol are used in about two-thirds of all U.S. abortions. If the mifepristone ruling stands, the Times said, many “abortion providers are prepared to prescribe only misoprostol, which can be used on its own for abortions.”

Nine weeks since the start of Donald Trump’s Middle East war, the US and Iran “have entered a precarious standoff”, said the Financial Times. Trump says he won’t lift the blockade of Iranian ports unless Iran agrees to a deal. The Islamic regime insists it won’t resume talks or reopen the Strait of Hormuz as long as the blockade is in place. This “intransigence” caused the cancellation of a second round of talks in Islamabad – and “Trump is now stuck”.

Midterms looming

He’s “trying to look relaxed”, said James Ball in The i Paper, but it’s not very convincing. The president promised voters a strong economy, with low inflation and cheap fuel; it’s becoming obvious he will deliver on none of these things. The midterm elections are looming, and there is an even more pressing deadline ahead of him: on 1 May, it will be 60 days since Trump notified Congress of his action against Iran, at which point, on paper at least, he needs congressional approval to continue military action. So far, most Republicans have not openly criticised his unpopular war. But they would prefer to avoid voting in favour of it.

Trump’s critics believe he has “worked himself into a trap”, said Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal, but the situation is “sustainable”, for now. True, the war has gone on longer than hoped, but financial markets have stabilised. Trump remains popular with his base. Without taking casualties, the US navy has “consolidated a crushing blockade of Iran”; and with a third aircraft carrier in the region, military options are expanding.

The pressure on Iran is great, said Jonathan Spyer in The Spectator, but the US has made the mistake of believing its leaders think “like us”. They are not remotely pragmatic: they have “mortgaged” Iran’s economy to its project of “resistance” for decades. There appears to be no appetite now for accepting anything they “regard as surrender”.

‘This can’t go on’

Trump could cut a deal, said Paul Krugman on Substack, but it wouldn’t look like a victory. In the meantime, oil markets are pessimistic. The oil price drop that followed the 8 April ceasefire has been near reversed. The world is coping by taking oil out of storage. “Since there’s only so much oil in the tanks, this can’t go on.”

The war has removed an estimated 650 million barrels of oil from the international market, said Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail. This could soon reach one billion. The effects are already all too visible in the Asia-Pacific region, which receives 80% of exports from the Gulf. Asian jet fuel has doubled in price. China has suspended exports of refined oil. The Indian rag trade is facing nylon and polyester shortages, because they’re made from Gulf petrochemicals. We’ve been shielded, because at the start of the war a record amount of oil was at sea, heading for Europe. It won’t last.

It’s not just Trump who has “no idea what to do”. Much of the world, including our government, is “sticking its fingers in its ears, shutting its eyes tight and loudly singing ‘la la la’”.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long held himself as a champion of nature and the outdoors, first through his decades of conservation work and now as part of President Donald Trump’s MAGA administration. At times, however, Kennedy’s fascination with the natural world has resulted in eye-opening episodes that blur for many observers the line between respectful curiosity and bizarre desecration of the very fauna he claims to revere. From ursine carcass pranks to whale-oriented road trips, these are Robert F. Kennedy’s most notable animal experiences.

Bear

The 2014 appearance of a bear carcass in Manhattan’s Central Park had remained a mystery for more than a decade until 2024, when Kennedy, then an independent candidate for president, admitted in a campaign video with comedian Roseanne Barr that he was behind the bizarre episode. In the video, Kennedy claimed he’d watched a driver ahead of him hit and kill a small bear on the roadside and decided to put the carcass “in his own vehicle, intending to skin it and eat the meat,” The Associated Press said. “But the day got away from him.”

Kennedy had preexisting travel plans and “did not want to leave the dead bear in his car,” Politico said. Instead, he “planted it in the park with an old bicycle” because it would “fit a narrative about a series of bike accidents in the city.” The incident ultimately “died after a while, and it stayed dead for a decade,” Kennedy said in the clip, until The New Yorker “somehow found out about it” during the 2024 race.

Dog (?)

Allegations that RFK had eaten dog stemmed from a text to a friend featuring a photograph that “showed him pantomiming eating a cooked animal carcass,” said CNN. In the message, Kennedy allegedly “recommended the friend try eating dog while traveling in Korea,” although he has since denied eating one himself.

The picture is “me in a campfire in Patagonia on the Futaleufu River eating a goat,” Kennedy said in a Fox News interview in 2024, “which is what we eat down there.” Kennedy “sent me the picture with a recommendation to visit the best dog restaurant in Seoul,” the text’s initial recipient said to Vanity Fair. He was “certainly representing that this was a dog and not a goat,” they added, calling the whole affair “grotesque.”

Mice

RFK Jr. is a “predator” about whom the previous generation of storied Kennedys “would be disgusted,” said former First Daughter and onetime U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy in a scathing letter to Congress denouncing her cousin’s then-nomination process in early 2025. While largely focused on RFK’s potential impact on national health, Kennedy, in a shocking paragraph, said her cousin, in his younger years, “enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks.”

The effect, Kennedy said, was often a “perverse scene of despair and violence.” The allegations describe a “power play to those forced to watch” and show signs of RFK being a “terrible bird handler,” said The Independent. “Who feeds a hawk puréed food?”

Raccoon

In her “RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise” biography of the secretary, investigative journalist Isabel Vincent drew on “dozens of sources, both new and old, including journals updated daily by Kennedy between 1999 and 2001,” said People. In one such entry, Kennedy “boasts of cutting the penis from a dead raccoon he found on the side of a highway, while his kids waited in the car,” The New York Times said.

“I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road-killed raccoon,” Kennedy said, “thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be.” Kennedy “wanted to be a veterinarian as a kid,” said Vincent to People. He has a “great love and interest in animals” and a “freezer full of roadkill, I'm sure, where he studies it.”

Whale

When RFK’s daughter Kick Kennedy was six years old, “word got out that a dead whale had washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port,” said Town & Country in a 2012 feature on Kennedy and her infamous family. The elder Kennedy drove to the site, “cut off the whale’s head” with a chainsaw and then “bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco,” the outlet said.

“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car,” Kick said to T&C. “It was the rankest thing on the planet.” After the episode resurfaced during the 2024 election, Kennedy said at an Arizona rally that he was being investigated for “collecting a whale specimen 20 years ago.” He also “implied without evidence” that the investigation was itself “tied to his endorsement” of Donald Trump, The Associated Press said. In October, 2024, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration announced in a statement to The Hill that it had closed an investigation into the decades-old claim, having “determined the allegation to be unfounded.”

Worm

In a 2012 deposition, RFK Jr. described a period several years earlier when, feeling fatigued and mentally hazy, he’d scheduled a procedure to treat what he’d been told was a brain tumor. But, while “packing for the trip,” he was contacted by a second doctor with a “different opinion,” The New York Times said.

Kennedy, the doctor believed, “had a dead parasite in his head.” The parasite had “got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” Kennedy said in the deposition, as reviewed by the Times. “The issue was resolved more than 10 years ago,” Kennedy’s then-presidential campaign said in a statement to CNN during the 2024 presidential race. The candidate is in “robust physical and mental health.” Kennedy himself made light of his cranial condition in a post on X in May 2024. “I offer to eat 5 more brain worms,” Kennedy said, “and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate.”

President Donald Trump’s first term in office was marked by the cyclonic speed with which his White House’s revolving door spun for aides both incoming and outgoing. During his second term, Trump’s penchant for abrupt staffing changes has continued — if not apace, then at least with the same mercurial fickleness that characterized many of his first-term firings. Here’s who has already been shown the exit, shuffled into a new role or given little choice about their continued employment in the administration.

Attorney General Pam Bondi

Trump’s early-April 2026 announcement that Attorney General Pam Bondi was “transitioning to a much-needed and important new job in the private sector” offered “no specific reason for why she would be leaving,” CNN said. Bondi’s firing came “less than two months” after a “tense congressional hearing” in which she faced “aggressive questioning from politicians, with sometimes heated exchanges,” Al Jazeera said. While Trump may have been “frustrated” with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “handling of some of his key priorities,” changing DOJ leadership “doesn’t guarantee the president the outcome he seeks,” NBC News said.

Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino

Former Secret Service agent-turned-MAGA podcaster Dan Bongino spent less than one year as the FBI’s number two under Kash Patel before announcing in late 2025 his plans to leave the agency by the start of 2026. Bongino had previously spoken “publicly” about the “personal toll” the job was taking on him, Fox News said. In an interview with the network, Bongino said that he “gave up everything for this.”

Bongino’s assertions that sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein did commit suicide “frustrated many of Trump’s supporters” and led to a “contentious meeting between him and Bondi” in July, the BBC said. Bongino has since returned to podcasting, where he “won’t have the pressure of having to work in the reality-based world,” said MS NOW.

CBP ‘Commander at Large’ Greg Bovino

As the face of the Trump Administration’s Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota and Midway Blitz in Chicago, Customs and Border Patrol Commander At Large Greg Bovino played a key role in enacting the White House’s controversial immigration actions in both states. Bovino was “removed from his role” in January 2026 following the “deaths of two U.S. citizens” in Minneapolis and quickly returned to his prior position as CBP sector chief in El Centro, California, Fox News said.

Shortly after, he retired from federal work. Although he was “popular with direct subordinates for his bold and unapologetic leadership,” multiple DHS officials described Bovino as a “chronic institutional headache” whose behavior “alienated even those who generally shared his politics,” The New York Times said. Since his retirement, Bovino has found a “new target for posts on X: his former employers in the Trump administration,” who he has “taken to criticizing” for being “soft on immigration,” The Chicago Tribune said.

Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer

Former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer quietly exited her cabinet-level role in the Trump administration in late April 2026 to “move into a private sector job” following “scrutiny over several misconduct scandals,” said Axios. Any allegations of wrongdoing are merely the work of “high-ranked deep state actors who have been coordinating with the one-sided news media” to “undermine President Trump’s mission,” Chavez-DeRemeber said on Instagram in an emphatic denial of the accusations against her.

Chavez-DeRemer’s departure came at the tail end of a “monthslong investigation into a whistleblower’s allegations of professional misconduct,” said The New York Times. The “likelihood” that the inspector general’s pursuit might “reveal embarrassing details” was “compounded by a parallel inquiry on Capitol Hill.”

National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent

In resigning from the Trump White House this past March, former anti-terrorism official Joe Kent became the “most high-profile figure within the Trump administration to publicly criticize the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran,” said the BBC. Rights groups had spoken out against Kent’s initial nomination to the NCTC over “extremist links of his in the past,” including with far-right figures such as Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, said Liz Landers on “PBS News Hour.”

Kent, with a resignation letter rife with “potentially anti-Semitic undertones,” cast Trump as "someone swept up in events rather than driving them,” The Atlantic said. “I always thought he was weak on security,” Trump said to reporters in the Oval Office after Kent published his letter. “I didn’t know him well, but I thought he seemed like a pretty nice guy.” After reading Kenz's resignation letter, Trump said, “I realized that it’s a good thing that he’s out because he said that Iran was not a threat. Iran was a threat.”

Acting ICE Directors Todd Lyons and Caleb Vitello

Longtime Immigration and Customs Enforcement official Todd Lyons’ mid-April 2026 announcement that he plans to retire at the end of May 2026 adds to the “list of leadership shakeups at the Department of Homeland Security,” said NPR News. Though it was “not immediately clear” what prompted Lyons’ retirement announcement, the news came amid “continued scrutiny” of ICE’s “aggressive immigration tactics” and a “record-long funding lapse from Congress.”

Lyons had initially been tapped to lead ICE to replace previous Acting Director Caleb Vitello in 2025, after administration figures “expressed anger that the number of people being deported” was “not higher,” said NBC News. Vitello had been seen as “‘very popular’ among the rank and file during his month as acting director,” said a source to the outlet.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem

As the first cabinet secretary to be fired by Trump in his second term, former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s “tumultuous tenure” culminated in “two high-profile killings of U.S. citizens by federal agents” and a “pair of congressional hearings that displayed bipartisan frustration with her leadership,” The Wall Street Journal said. Prior to her firing, multiple DHS figures “privately questioned how much longer the secretary would remain in the post” given what they saw as a “series of missteps” on Noem’s part, said CNN.

Noem will be “moving to be Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas, our new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere,” said Trump in his announcement about the firing. As Secretary, Noem was the “architect” of a “frenzied bid to snap up commercial warehouses across the country and turn them into Amazon-style migrant processing hubs,” The Daily Beast said. After her firing that plan has been “beset by community uproar, scrapped deals and Republican revolts.”

Secretary of the Navy John Phelan

“Months of simmering tension” between former Secretary of the Navy John Phelan and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth came to a head in late April 2026, with Hegseth dismissing Phelan “in a phone call” that took place “just minutes” before the Pentagon released an official statement on the firing, The Wall Street Journal said. The dismissal followed extended “infighting” among Pentagon leadership and “disagreements over how to revive the Navy’s struggling shipbuilding program,” The New York Times said.

Phelan’s was a “short tenure” for someone who “prior to being confirmed” was a “big Trump and GOP donor,” with criticism “largely centered on his lack of a military background,” said Military.com. Though military experience is neither “mandatory” nor its lack thereof “completely unusual,” Phelan was nevertheless the “first Navy secretary since 2006 to be appointed” without a Pentagon background.

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz

Trump’s May 2025 announcement that he had removed National Security Advisor Mike Waltz marked the “first major staff shakeup since the president took office,” said CNN. Waltz’s position in the administration had been “in limbo” after the White House notified him that “his time leading the National Security Council had come to an end” in the weeks leading up to the announcement.

Although Waltz was the official responsible for the White House’s infamous “Signalgate” security breach, “in the end, it wasn’t Signalgate that toppled Mike Waltz,” said Politico. It was instead “increasing ire” over “Waltz’s hawkish stance on Iran,” a position that, at the time, placed him “out of step with the administration.” But “as a concession prize, the onetime congressman was nominated to serve as United Nations ambassador.”

Not many legal experts expect this week’s federal indictment of former FBI director James Comey to result in a conviction. Instead, observers say President Donald Trump’s Justice Department finds its credibility wavering amid ongoing efforts to prosecute the president’s political rivals.

The case will be a “challenge for the Justice Department to win,” said The Associated Press. Comey was charged with threatening Trump with an Instagram post showing seashells arranged in the numbers “86 47.” (He later deleted the post.) The message was “ambiguous” at best and given Comey’s background he likely “didn’t intend to convey a threat of violence,” John Keller, a former Justice Department official who prosecuted violent threats, said to the AP. “Broad First Amendment protections” for political speech will make proving the case a “tall burden for the government,” said the outlet.

The indictment is a “grave embarrassment” to the Justice Department, Ken White said at The Popehat Report. Bringing charges over a “mildly sassy arrangement of seashells” demonstrates the “complete collapse” of the department’s integrity. Government attorneys have traditionally been granted a “presumption of regularity,” assuming that they are properly discharging their duties. That tradition is dissolving, and the “road back to credibility for the department will be long and arduous.”

DOJ ‘got the message’

Trump-friendly outlets and pundits are finding it difficult to defend the charges. The Comey indictment is “bogus,” Andrew McCarthy said at National Review. The Justice Department “shreds its credibility with the courts” when it “abuses power this way” and could invite retaliatory investigations when Democrats next take power. The Instagram post may have been “crass,” but the First Amendment “protects bad and hateful speech,” Jonathan Turley said at Fox News. The indictment probably will not survive a challenge, but it is “likely to fulfill Comey’s narrative” about the dangers posed by the Trump administration.

The indictment shows the Justice Department “got the message” from the recent firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi, Glenn Thrush said at The New York Times. The agency’s “roiled leadership,” including acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, is now sharply focused on the “president’s restless efforts to exact vengeance on his enemies.” That may keep Trump “happy, or at least at bay.” But with Democrats poised to take control of Congress, the department’s leaders may find that the “opinion of a lame-duck president is increasingly not the only one worth heeding.”

‘Whims and petty desires’

The prosecution “will almost certainly fail,” Steve Benen said at MS NOW. But a conviction may not be Trump’s “intended end point.” Instead, the president is making clear he can “orchestrate federal prosecutions based entirely on his whims and petty desires.” Federal prosecutors are getting a message they should “play along with the revenge campaign or face unemployment.”

Republicans may find the case a challenge to their midterm campaigns, said The Washington Post. No candidate “wants to run on ‘I stand with Donald Trump’s retribution tour’” while gas prices are rising, said GOP strategist Barrett Marson to the outlet.

‘The tragic decline of the American Navy’

Robert D. Kaplan at The New York Times

The U.S. Navy is “in decline relative to its own history and to the growth of the Chinese Navy, and has surrendered the control of the world’s vital choke points,” says Robert D. Kaplan. If the Navy “doesn’t grow significantly in size, the outcome could be disastrous for the whole world,” as “free trade, global capital flows and migration — the root of America’s worldwide power — would be impossible without a great U.S. Navy.”

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‘What has gone wrong with architecture’

Arthur Kay at Time

Architecture “sits between capital, politics, infrastructure, climate, design, engineering, art, psychology and economics,” says Arthur Kay. The job “has been one of great influence.” Architects “can cross over domains, lead public debate on the most pressing issues of the day and work with the greatest power in the land to shape the future of our cities.” But in “responding to wider trends in professional services, architecture embraced specialization,” and “has lost influence by steadily narrowing its scope.”

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‘SCOTUS ruling on voting rights is the Trump administration’s latest attempt to decimate Black political power’

Solomon Jones at The Philadelphia Inquirer

A “6-3 U.S. Supreme Court decision has gutted a key element of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, leaving Black voters twisting in the proverbial wind,” says Solomon Jones. The Voting Rights Act “was meant to protect Black voters, the very people who are now disenfranchised by this decision.” The “destruction of Black power was always the point. But demolishing Black power requires bolstering white supremacy.” This administration “has sought to target African American voting power at every turn.”

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‘Space is critical infrastructure — it needs an alliance to guard it’

Kathleen Curlee and Brian Golden at Newsweek

Space systems “are increasingly vulnerable to collisions and interference that can shut down critical systems such as navigation and communications in an instant,” say Kathleen Curlee and Brian Golden. Robust “policy and international coordination should support the advancement of space infrastructure and protection of the capabilities that already exist. What is needed is a military-backed alliance in space: an Artemis Alliance.” The “value of space goes well beyond the satellites we use each day.”

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What happened

President Donald Trump on Thursday tapped radiologist Dr. Nicole Saphier to be U.S. surgeon general, withdrawing the stalled nomination of nutrition influencer Dr. Casey Means, an ally of Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. and the Make America Healthy Again movement. Saphier is Trump’s third nominee, after Means and Dr. Janette Nesheiwat.

Who said what

The “MAHA movement had pushed hard for Means’ nomination,” The Washington Post said, and it blamed its failure on Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and two other Republican senators skeptical of her qualifications and stance on vaccines. Trump called Saphier, a former Fox News contributor, an “INCREDIBLE COMMUNICATOR” on “complicated health issues” in a social media post. Kennedy called her a “longtime warrior for the MAHA movement.” But unlike Means, Saphier “does not appear to be a heroine” of MAHA, The New York Times said. Its “leaders view her as too conventional” due to her tempered praise of vaccines and criticism of Kennedy, though she has “also embraced” some of his agenda.

What next?

Even as MAHA lost its “favored influencer for surgeon general,” it “notched a big win on pesticide regulation” in a House farm bill, Axios said. Thursday’s events highlighted how MAHA retains “clout on matters related to the food supply” but “can be a political liability” on “vaccines and other public health matters.”

What happened

The House on Thursday passed a Senate bill funding all of the Department of Homeland Security except for its immigration enforcement arms, and President Donald Trump signed it, ending the longest-ever partial government shutdown after 76 days. DHS agencies, including the Coast Guard, Secret Service, FEMA and TSA are now funded through September. ICE and Customs and Border Protection never lost funding thanks to the GOP’s 2025 megabill.

Who said what

After weeks of delay and GOP infighting, the House “unanimously” approved the DHS bill “through voice vote with little fanfare,” suggesting Republicans were “finally ready to put the impasse behind them,” CBS News said. After Democrats refused to fund ICE and CBP without new guardrails, GOP leaders agreed to finance the rest of DHS and separately give Trump $70 billion for deportation operations through a filibuster-proof GOP-only reconciliation bill.

If the House had “waited for the Senate to pass a reconciliation bill, as some GOP lawmakers insisted, it would have left DHS closed until mid-May,” Axios said. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had been facing a “growing revolt from centrists in his party,” CNN said, and his “major retreat” on holding out for ICE funding was a “major win for Democrats.”

What next?

After lawmakers “return in mid-May,” The New York Times said, Republicans will “try to meet the president’s June 1 deadline” to get their $70 billion ICE-CBP bill to his desk.

Ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary this July, you might spot a historical exhibit on wheels: Six mobile museums are crisscrossing the contiguous United States to showcase the country’s history. But these ‘Freedom Trucks,’ funded by the right-wing company PragerU, heavily feature artificial intelligence, and some say this AI presents a whitewashed version of the country’s past.

What do these museum trucks showcase?

The trucks are a “traveling exhibition of touchscreen displays, Revolutionary War artifacts and AI,” designed to teach children about the United States’ founding, said The New Yorker. They are part of PragerU’s goal of “developing programming for America’s birthday,” and the trucks themselves “received a $14 million grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services,” an agency that provides funding for educational institutions.

The museums feature AI-generated displays of early figures in colonial America, including “Revolutionary figures like George Washington, Betsy Ross and the Marquis Lafayette,” said 404 Media, as well as a wall of 50 “American heroes” throughout U.S. history. The museums also feature digital copies of famous American documents such as the Declaration of Independence alongside quizzes on U.S. history. Each AI video “ended with a title card showing the White House and PragerU’s logo,” plus a closing video of President Donald Trump.

Why are the trucks controversial?

They have come under fire for their perceived whitewashing of history, as well as their use of AI to do so. The trucks do not completely omit non-white figures, as “several Black luminaries are mentioned: among the 50 American heroes are Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks,” said The Guardian. But the majority of the exhibits are geared “toward the white men who led the charge to nationhood, with minor roles granted to their women dutifully holding the fort back home, and on God as the source of the country’s greatness.”

Christianity features heavily in the displays. The AI-generated Washington “says that ‘our rights are a gift from God,’” while a nearby placard “makes the point overtly: ‘The foundational principles of America are rooted in the Western and Judeo-Christian traditions,’” said The Guardian. Many dark moments in U.S. history are also allegedly downplayed; slavery “makes an entry, though it is presented as a sort of wrinkle in America’s perfect design that was ironed out in time,” not as an endeavor “whose consequences still loom large over the country.”

Other marginalized groups are reportedly treated similarly in the museums. Native Americans “get barely a look in,” and there isn’t a “single reference to the large swathes of the country that were acquired from Spanish colonies and Mexico,” said The Guardian. Some critics claim the museum as a whole is historical revisionism. The trucks are a “work of propaganda that promises to tell only one side of American history” and “promote only one set of so-called American values,” said Book Riot.

While controversy looms over the content of these trucks, the people directly involved don’t appear to have many concerns, including Trump himself. “I want to thank PragerU for helping us share this incredible story,” the president says on the museum’s closing video, which reportedly plays on a loop. “I hope you will join me in helping to make America’s 250th anniversary a year we will never forget.”

President Donald Trump has long understood the power of a brand name — specifically his. And as world leaders flatter and impress upon him the merits of their prospective partnerships, his very name has become a global currency for appealing to his ego. From crucial transportation corridors to wholesale swaths of European countryside, these are the international Trump-titled pitches.

‘Donnyland’ in Ukraine

A growing push to name Ukraine’s embattled Donbas region after the president may be the “most improbable instance” of Trump’s name being “lent to a geopolitical flashpoint,” said The New York Times. Ukrainian officials have reportedly pitched renaming an approximately 2,000 square mile section of the Donetsk area of the Donbas as “Donnyland.”

The idea was “raised partly in jest but also as a diplomatic gesture,” The Kyiv Independent said. The “appeal to Trump’s vanity” has yet to be reflected in “official documents” from the ongoing Ukrainian peace negotiations, however. What’s important is that the Donbas’ various regions “remain Ukraine,” said Zelenskyy to reporters. “As long as it’s not ‘Putinland.’ That is the most important thing.”

Still, it could be in Ukraine’s long-term interests to apply Trump’s branding to their territory, said RAND Corporation Political Scientist Samuel Charap at the Times. Ukraine would likely see having a “Trump imprimatur on a free economic zone” as “something of a deterrent” against Russian aggression.

‘Fort Trump’ in Poland

First pitched publicly by Polish then-President Andrzej Duda during a 2018 White House visit, plans for a $2 billion Fort Trump military base ultimately fizzled before they were resurrected in the first year of Trump’s second term. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “talked about the fact that I hope that Fort Trump, which we talked about” during Trump’s first term, will “really be established,” Duda said to The Associated Press after a series of Warsaw meetings with American officials in 2025.

The proposal returned as Polish officials work to “preserve the U.S. commitment to NATO” over “growing” fears of Russian aggression, the AP said. Polish lawmakers are “convinced” that a strong U.S. alliance and a “high level of spending on defense will help its cause.”

The plans were initially met with public skepticism in Poland when first raised in 2018. Critics “castigated” Duda for what they framed as his “craven behavior,” said The New York Times. “What an embarrassment in front of the entire world,” said Polish lawmaker Tomasz Siemoniak on X, per the Times. “Even leaders of banana republics had more respect for themselves” than Duda.

‘Trump Heights’ in Israel

As thanks for Trump’s 2019 presidential recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the contested Golan Heights, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement that he would “bring to the government a resolution calling for a new community on the Golan Heights” to be named on Trump’s behalf. Despite a high-profile groundbreaking ceremony, a “large-scale influx of new residents never materialized,” said The Times of Israel. Still, after Trump’s 2024 reelection, residents hoped their namesake’s victory would “breathe new life into this tiny, remote community.”

‘Trump National Golf Course’ in Syria

When a group of wealthy Syrian investors seeking sanction relief for a luxury rebuilding project for their war-torn nation turned to Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) for advice, his message was simple. “I know how to get the president’s attention,” Wilson said during a meeting with the group. “Make it a Trump National Golf Course in Syria.”

The group, however, was “way ahead of the congressman,” with one member bragging that he “already planned to propose a Trump-branded resort,” said MS NOW. This type of “mixing of personal and diplomatic affairs” has “long been the norm in Middle Eastern nations,” said The New York Times, which first reported the meeting. The blending has “become the way Washington operates in Mr. Trump’s second term too.”

‘Trump Park’ in Israel

Trump “took a brave and unprecedented step that none of his predecessors were willing to take,” Mayor David Even Tzur of the Israeli city of Kiryat Yam said, per Arutz Sheva, after Trump’s 2017 declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. “We must honor him for it.”

Kiryat Yam subsequently invested $1.4 million in a nearly two-acre Trump Park that borders an “existing science park in the center of the city,” said The Times of Israel. “I am grateful for your gesture,” said Trump in a letter to Tzur, according to The Forward. Trump was “moved to know that the people of Israel are encouraged by my decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.”

‘Trump Promenade’ in Israel

Donald Trump is “Israel’s best friend ever,” said Netanyahu at a 2025 groundbreaking ceremony for a seaside promenade in the president’s honor in the central Israeli city of Bat Yam. The concept of this “President Donald Trump Promenade,” said The Jerusalem Post, “originated from Trump’s idea to turn the Gaza Strip into beachfront property.” Israel has “wonderful beachside properties here,” Netanyahu said Trump had told him, clarifying that Trump had been “talking about one that’s a bit to the south here, in Gaza.”

“This is so great,” Trump said in a “personal note” to Netanyahu following the naming ceremony. The message was written on a printout of a post Netanyahu made on X showing the groundbreaking ceremony, the Post said.

‘Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity’ between Azerbaijan and Armenia

A key feature of a fragile brokered peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity “promises to become a vital connectivity link between Europe and Asia” that “could go down as” one of Trump’s “most impressive foreign policy achievements” since reelection, said the Atlantic Council. The project’s name was a “concession” sure to “delight Trump,” CNN said, as the president sought to “brand himself in his first six months in office as a global peacemaker.”

Though the project’s stakeholders “share the ambition” that the rail portion of the route “can be completed by 2028 and the end of Trump’s presidency,” the peace process is “still at an early stage,” said the Carnegie Russia Urasia Center. Local groups in the region are also “far less engaged in it than the leaders are.” The plan has elicited a minimal response from Russia, which is “cautious not to antagonize a U.S. administration led by Trump, whose name is tied to the project.”

‘California should reconsider its rush to regulate e-bikes’

Stephen Zoepf at the San Francisco Chronicle

Because e-bikes “fall into a convoluted mix of transportation policies, they remain contentious and unable to fulfill their potential,” says Stephen Zoepf. Americans “have treated small, powered two-wheelers as recreational devices for far too long,” and making them “illegal altogether means that e-bike commuters, merely acting in self-preservation, can find themselves treated like hooligans.” While “cars and trucks continue to get bigger and more powerful, those outside them are being killed at nearly record-high rates.”

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‘AI companies are just companies’

Robert Armstrong at the Financial Times

AI proponents “wave off the notion that the technology will lead to mass unemployment,” while “doomers respond that, in the case of AI, we’re not the drivers; we’re the horses,” says Robert Armstrong. This “back-and-forth highlights the idea that AI is unlike all the technologies that went before, with greater complexity, greater upsides and greater risks — for labor, cyber security, national defense, mental health and so on.” So “those controlling it have special responsibilities.”

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‘Hedging is the new normal’

Suzanne Nossel at Foreign Policy

We are “living in a new world of hedgers,” says Suzanne Nossel. The “shocks of the last several years” have “upended how nations approach international affairs.” The “smooth flows of a globalized and rules-based world have clotted into uncertainty, forcing states to find new pathways for trade, diplomacy, resource extraction and defense cooperation.” Countries are “no longer hedging within a system that is episodically volatile but out of a recognition that there no longer is much of a system at all.”

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‘“Microlooting”: The left’s latest language deception’

Christian Schneider at the National Review

Progressives “keep trying to invent new words,“ says Christian Schneider. Hasan Piker “introduced the term ‘microlooting’ into the American vocabulary,” and the “innocuous prefix ‘micro’ was affixed to ‘looting,’ a crime, to make stealing from retail stores somewhat more palatable.” Picking a “new word or phrase to explain something people already experience is similar to stand-up comics doing observational humor.” But “what once was the purview of comedians has been crowdsourced to the feral mob on social media.”

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What happened

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday he will remain on the Fed Board of Governors “for a period of time to be determined” after his term as chair expires May 15. His announcement came at the end of a two-day policy meeting in which the Fed voted to keep rates unchanged, and shortly after the Senate Banking Committee voted along party lines to advance Kevin Warsh’s nomination to succeed Powell.

Who said what

Powell’s “decision to stay, which he can do until January 2028, breaks with tradition” and denies President Donald Trump the chance to “appoint another governor” until he leaves, The New York Times said. Powell underscored that he was still concerned about the Fed’s independence and “made clear his decision hinged on the outcome of a criminal investigation” of him that the Justice Department has halted, with caveats.

His continuing presence could “make it a bit harder for Warsh to engineer the rate cuts that Trump has demanded,” The Associated Press said. But Powell downplayed concerns about a “‘two Popes’ scenario.” There’s “only ever one chair,” he told reporters. “I’m not looking to be a high-profile dissident.”

What next?

The Fed’s next policy meeting is June 16-17. “I won’t see you next time,” Powell deadpanned at his last post-meeting press conference.