As American as Apple Pie

New York Post

Charles: Presidential assassinations are an unfortunate American tradition. Of the four successful ones–Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy–Lincoln’s and Kennedy’s were the most profoundly shocking.

Lincoln’s because he was the first, and it changed the course of American history; Kennedy’s mostly because there had been none since McKinley’s 62 years earlier.

Wikipedia notes, “Many assassination attempts, both successful and unsuccessful, were motivated by a desire to change the policy of the American government.”

Our current president has been the target of three assassination attempts, if the official stories are true. Saturday’s was apparently carried out by 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen. The would-be assassin shares the belief of many of his fellow citizens that our current president is the head of a criminal syndicate who is guilty of war crimes abroad and countless high crimes and misdemeanors at home.

For the last sixteen months, neither Congress nor the United States Supreme court has done anything important to restrain him.

You may disagree with the manifesto Cole sent to his family ten minutes before his failed assault.

But it was clearly written by a thoughtful American.

His reasons for acting are not insane: “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”

He also explained why he did not believe this is the right moment to turn the other cheek: “Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.”

What are a citizen’s obligations when his government has been seized by a cabal working every day to undo the rule of law in America?

Here is Cole’s full answer to that question, courtesy of the New York Post.

Cole Tomas Allen on graduation day.

“Hello everybody!

So I may have given a lot of people a surprise today. Let me start off by apologizing to everyone whose trust I abused.

I apologize to my parents for saying I had an interview without specifying it was for “Most Wanted.”

I apologize to my colleagues and students for saying I had a personal emergency (by the time anyone reads this, I probably most certainly DO need to go to the ER, but can hardly call that not a self-inflicted status.)

I apologize to all of the people I traveled next to, all the workers who handled my luggage, and all the other non-targeted people at the hotel who I put in danger simply by being near.

I apologize to everyone who was abused and/or murdered before this, to all those who suffered before I was able to attempt this, to all who may still suffer after, regardless of my success or failure.

I don’t expect forgiveness, but if I could have seen any other way to get this close, I would have taken it. Again, my sincere apologies.

On to why I did any of this:

I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflects on me. And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes. (Well, to be completely honest, I was no longer willing a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I’ve had to do something about it.)

While I’m discussing this, I’ll also go over my expected rules of engagement (probably in a terrible format, but I’m not military so too bad.)

Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest

Secret Service: they are targets only if necessary, and to be incapacitated non-lethally if possible (aka, I hope they’re wearing body armor because center mass with shotguns messes up people who *aren’t*

Hotel Security: not targets if at all possible (aka unless they shoot at me)

Capitol Police: same as Hotel Security

National Guard: same as Hotel Security

Hotel Employees: not targets at all

Guests: not targets at all

In order to minimize casualties I will also be using buckshot rather than slugs (less penetration through walls)

I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary (on the basis that most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit) but I really hope it doesn’t come to that.

Rebuttals to objections:

Objection 1: As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.

Rebuttal: Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.

Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.

Objection 2: This is not a convenient time for you to do this.

Rebuttal: I need whoever thinks this way to take a couple minutes and realize that the world isn’t about them. Do you think that when I see someone raped or murdered or abused, I should walk on by because it would be “inconvenient” for people who aren’t the victim?

This was the best timing and chance of success I could come up with.

Objection 3: You didn’t get them all.

Rebuttal: Gotta start somewhere.

Objection 4: As a half-black, half-white person, you shouldn’t be the one doing this.

Rebuttal: I don’t see anyone else picking up the slack

Objection 5: Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

Rebuttal: The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.

I would also like to extend my appreciation to a great many people since I will not be likely to be able to talk with them again (unless the Secret Service is *astoundingly* incompetent.)

Thank you to my family, both personal and church, for your love over these 31 years.

Thank you to my friends, for your companionship over many years.

Thank you to my colleagues over many jobs, for your positivity and professionalism.

Thank you to my students for your enthusiasm and love of learning.

Thank you to the many acquaintances I’ve met, in person and online, for short interactions and long-term relationships, for your perspectives and inspiration.

Thank you all for everything.

Sincerely,

Cole “coldForce” “Friendly Federal Assassin” Allen

PS: Ok now that all the sappy stuff is done, what the hell is the Secret Service doing? Sorry, gonna rant a bit here and drop the formal tone.

Like, I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo.

What I got (who knows, maybe they’re pranking me!) is nothing.

No damn security.

Not in transport.

Not in the hotel.

Not in the event.

Like, the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance.

I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat.

The security at the event is all outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.

Like, this level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again.

Like, if I was an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce in here and no one would have noticed shit.

Actually insane.

Oh and if anyone is curious is how doing something like feels: it’s awful. I want to throw up; I want to cry for all the things I wanted to do and never will, for all the people whose trust this betrays; I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done.

Can’t really recommend it! Stay in school, kids.”

Fifty years from now, historians will decide whether Cole is remembered as a John Wilkes Booth, or a Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the German officer who spearheaded the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler.

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Quote of the Day

“One of the things that made it such a crazy scene was that the people who were running around the hallways with guns were wearing suits and tuxedos because so many of the agents were dressed up like party guests.”

–Shawn McCreesh

Young Shawn McCreesh, a White House correspondent for the New York Times, learned on Saturday night that timing is EVERYTHING. He said in his video he had just “asked a young Secret Service Agent to” take him to “the bathroom and suddenly we heard all this yelling all this commotion. We both darted out of the bathroom and there were five or six agents pointing their guns. Whatever had happened had happened just there past the bathroom.”

An hour after the main event, McCreesh and Tyler Pager did a fine job of capturing the insane vibe at Trump’s press conference back at the White House after the attack:

But, really, Trump argued, the whole thing was just the latest example of why he needs to build his maximum-security, legally challenged ballroom at the White House.

“I didn’t want to say this,” he said, “but this is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House. It’s actually a larger room, and it’s a much more secure. It’s got — it’s drone proof, it’s bulletproof glass.”

It is no longer implausible to imagine that if this was a false operation, its purpose was to guarantee the construction of Trump’s beloved ballroom. That suggests how much this administration has done to degrade our expectations of what is possile in 2026.

McCreesh and Pager continued:

On the whole, Mr. Trump’s response from the podium late Saturday evening was remarkably zen from a man who has survived two assassination attempts, and whose wife was just ducking under a table while gun-toting agents bum-rushed the ballroom around them.

Who knows how or if the president’s mind-set, his rhetoric, his political instincts or his security apparatus may change in the coming days or weeks. Very little was revealed at the news conference about the suspect’s motivations.

Still, Mr. Trump kept downplaying any insinuation that this latest scare would alter how he goes about his life.

“I like not to think about it,” he said. “I lead a pretty normal life, considering, you know, it’s a dangerous life. I think I’m, I think I handle it as well — as well as it can be handled.”

He added: “To be honest with you, I’m not a basket case.”

All week long he had been aiming screeds at the news outlets in the room, but now he was praising the reporters before him, complimenting their outfits, using a polite tone of voice and thanking them for their work.

“You’ve been very responsible in your coverage,” he said. “I will say I’ve been seeing what’s been out. You’ve been very responsible.”

This was definitely not the message he had planned to deliver to the media tonight. He said he was going to make what he called the “most inappropriate speech ever made,” and sounded a bit disappointed that he had been robbed of that opportunity. So disappointed, in fact, that he vowed the dinner would be rescheduled for some time in the next 30 days.

But then, he would need a rewrite — or at least that is what he said for now.

“I don’t know if I can ever be as rough as I was going to be tonight,” he said. “I think I’m going to be probably very nice. I’ll be very boring the next time, but we’re going to have a great event.”

—---------------------------

The Eve of Destruction

From Greg Moscoe: This pretty much expresses my feelings about where things stand in this conflict.

I am for the people of Israel, Palestine, Libya, Iran and America. Sadly, their leaders are batsh*t crazy and need to go.

We’re standing on the precipice of World War III and a global economic debacle.

As individuals and collectively, we need to push back.

Your Online Moment of Zen

Beethoven: Piano Sonata no. 8 in C minor op. 13 "Pathétique"

My favorite piano sonata, performed here by the majestic Artur Rubenstein.

Edited by Imogen Sayers.

The Pugilist with Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

Charles: Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez has written a really smart piece about why we underestimate our vile president at our peril: “He is, within his own operational domain, essentially unrivaled at being evil.”

When Democrats dismiss Donald Trump as too stupid to be effective, they lose. They’ve been losing that bet for a decade, and they will keep losing it for the same reason a person might call a shark stupid for not doing algebra. The shark isn’t trying to do algebra. That’s not what it’s for.

There are different kinds of intelligence in the world. A cat cannot discuss philosophy, but it can do lots of things we can’t. It can jump six times its own height from standing, catch a hummingbird in flight, and twist itself mid-fall to land on its feet. You can’t do that. I can’t do that. We do not call ourselves stupid for lacking gifts that simply fall outside another creature’s metric. We should extend the same analytical honesty to Donald Trump — not to admire him, but to see him clearly, which is something his opponents have catastrophically failed to do.

Trump is, by most conventional measures, a deeply limited man. His reading is reportedly poor. His attention span is narrow. His grasp of history, policy, science, and law is weak at best. At the kind of intelligence most of us value — the capacity for empathy, for genuine human connection, for moral reasoning — he is, by the evidence of his entire life, essentially deficient. But none of that intelligence is required to run the Mafia. Or, as it turns out, the government.

What Trump possesses instead is something rarer and more dangerous than most of his critics have been willing to name: he may be the greatest con artist and mob operator the world has ever produced — quite simply the most effective sociopath to ever walk this earth. Consider the scale of what he has accomplished. He convinced tens of millions of working-class Americans that a Manhattan real estate heir who spent decades extracting wealth from contractors, students, investors, and tenants is their champion against elites. That is a con of staggering audacity — and it has not merely survived exposure, it has fed on it. Every indictment became a fundraising event. Every scandal became evidence of persecution. He somehow engineered a fraud immune to the mechanism that ends all frauds. Is that stupidity? I’d say it’s a form of operational genius. Repugnant, yes. Not something most people would want to do or be proud of. But a kind of genius nonetheless.

The organizational structure around Trump is not merely like organized crime — it is structurally identical to it: loyalty oaths, omertà culture, intermediaries for dirty work, pardons dangled as currency, defectors punished, soldiers rewarded. No Mafia don in history ran that kind of operation at the scale of a nation-state, with a major political party as his instrument. The Gambinos controlled parts of New York. The Cartels each have their little patch of Mexico or Colombia. But Trump? He controls half of America’s political reality, and all of its government at the moment. He captured the judiciary and the house. And he did it by being a con man. The comparison to Genovese is not hyperbole. It is taxonomy.

His critics might object that Hitler, too, was this kind of operator — and they would be right, which is precisely the point. Hitler was also mostly a moron, but with one special, horrible gift. Hollywood has done us a grave disservice with its brooding, thoughtful Nazi officers, staring meaningfully into the middle distance. Screenwriters projected their own fantasy of what powerful evil looks like onto men who were, in most respects, idiots and buffoons — gifted only in the precise ways that mattered for what they were trying to do. Only Charlie Chaplin, working from the music hall tradition, understood that buffoonery and menace are not opposites. His portrait of the dictator in The Great Dictator is psychologically truer than almost anything that followed. Hannah Arendt reached for the same truth at Nuremberg, finding not a monster in the dock but a mediocre bureaucrat — the banality of evil, she called it, to the outrage of people who needed evil to be smarter and more interesting than it is.

Trump is not more interesting than he appears. He is exactly as venal, as shallow, as reflexive as his critics say. But he is, within his own operational domain, essentially unrivaled at being evil. His cunning is largely instinctual rather than strategic, for he, like all other serial killers, lacks a conscience entirely — he wins by smell more than by plan, which is why his operation is chaotic even when it’s effective — but the results speak for themselves. Decades of survival. A second term. A country reorganized around his appetites.

A Big New Trump Balkans Scheme

The Guardian

Scott: Why have Jared, Qusay and Uday, and various other members of the Trump entourage been spending so much time in the heart of the Balkans lately? There have been an assortment of real estate deals and PR projects for assorted Russia-linked miscreants and war criminals. But it never really much added up. Now a huge oil and gas pipeline project has surfaced which has the Trump family’s fingerprints all over it. The Guardian reports:

The EU risks a confrontation with Donald Trump after it sought to stall the awarding of a lucrative Balkans pipeline contract to a company fronted by his personal lawyer, documents seen by the Guardian show.

Brussels has clashed with Trump over trade, Ukraine and military spending, but the intervention in the Southern Interconnection pipeline project appears to mark the first time it has challenged a commercial venture by those close to the president.

The pipeline will run through Bosnia and Herzegovina. Under what Bosnian sources say have been months of pressure from US officials, its leaders have been moving quickly to award the contract to a previously little-known company based in Wyoming.

AAFS Infrastructure and Energy was incorporated in November last year and has not disclosed its owners. It is fronted by two leading members of Trump’s campaign to overturn his 2020 election defeat: Jesse Binnall, a lawyer who defended him against allegations of inciting the Capitol riots after his defeat (and who this week filed a libel action against the Atlantic for Kashyap Patel, and Joe Flynn, the brother of the president’s former national security adviser.

Despite lacking any apparent track record, AAFS is planning to invest $1.5bn in the pipeline and other Bosnian infrastructure projects, its local representative has said…

Binnall has said the pipeline is a “priority for the Trump administration”. Asked about the EU’s intervention, he said: “AAFS will never lose sight of what truly matters in this project: delivering energy security and fostering economic development for the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We are committed to working closely with all relevant authorities to develop the infrastructure needed to make this vision a reality.”

This entire project aims to provide a corridor for the flow of hydrocarbons beyond the reach of Russia. But not only is the Trump family aligning itself unequivocally with the Kremlin, Michael Flynn quickly emerged as a man in the entourage with the tightest connections to Putin. Brussels, understandably, smells a rat.

Jared Kushner: Trump’s All-Purpose Negotiator

Süddeutsche Zeitung

Putin meets Witkoff and Kushner in Moscow, Jan 2026 - Press Service of the Russian President

Scott: Never before has a democratically elected leader deployed his own son-in-law the way Trump uses Jared Kushner. He now serves as Trump’s de facto emissary to Putin, Netanyahu, the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Zelenskyy, the Iranians and numerous others. Many of these relationships he explored while he was serving in the first term as a presidential advisor, with an office in the West Wing. His legal status in all of this is a careful study in ambiguity designed to maximize power and authority while denying any duty to make disclosures, divestments or to observe ethical standards that forbid self-dealing or acting for private interests.

Yet all of this has triggered no congressional oversight or demand for hearings, and has drawn astonishingly little coverage from US print and broadcast media. A recent study, for instance, shows that fewer than half of all print and broadcast reports about Kushner’s role in negotiations with Iran apprise their audience of the very fundamental fact that Kushner has a formal relationship with another combatant in the war—Saudi Arabia—which is in fact responsible for most of his income. Süddeutsche Zeitung asks how it is possible that a mature democracy like the United States allows something like this to happen without even viewing it as a scandal.

Bombs were already falling in Iran while Jared Kushner sat on a stage in Miami. It was late March, at an international investors’ conference. The moderator wanted to know what he, as a “dealmaker” in the business world, had learned about peace. “I don’t think peace is all that different from the business world,” Kushner said. “Both are puzzles, and I try to view every challenge I face as a puzzle.”

You can watch the video online and see this youthful-looking man—tall, slender, wearing a close-fitting suit, clean-shaven, with a precisely parted hairstyle. His gaze appears, in a strange way, both shy and self-assured at the same time. Kushner is 45 and currently arguably one of the most influential men in America—perhaps even the world.

He seems to be everywhere; he negotiates matters of war and peace in Miami, Moscow, Paris, Berlin, Geneva, Gaza, Jerusalem, and Islamabad—yet he holds no official government office. It was only in February that Kushner was permitted to call himself a “Special Peace Envoy”—a title his father-in-law, Donald Trump, invented specifically for him. Naturally, the son-in-law is now involved in the talks with Iran as well.

At the press conference following the first round of talks between the U.S. and Iran in Pakistan, Kushner recently stood alongside Vice President J.D. Vance and the Special Envoy for the Middle East, Steve Witkoff—an old buddy of Trump’s from the golf course and the New York real estate scene. Vance announced that the negotiations had failed. Now, Iran and the U.S. are set to talk again in Islamabad—even as the Iranians blockade the Strait of Hormuz, the Americans block Iranian ports, and Trump alternates between issuing threats and extending the ceasefire.

So, who exactly is this Jared Kushner, and what is he doing there on Trump’s behalf? From 2017 to 2021, Jared Kushner served as Trump’s senior advisor, while his wife, Ivanka—Trump’s daughter—served as an advisor to the President. In his role as “Senior Advisor to the President,” Kushner was widely regarded at the time as one of the architects of the Abraham Accords, through which Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and other nations normalized their relations in 2020. Following the conclusion of Trump’s first term, Kushner withdrew to private life in Miami, published his memoirs, and declared himself an investor. He remains one to this day—and, moreover, a global statesman.

Speaking from the podium in Miami, Kushner noted that, strictly speaking, he had never actually joined the U.S. government. “Therefore, I remain merely a volunteer—much like other businesspeople who, upon request, agree to lend their support to the government.” This sounds intriguing, particularly when one considers that this “volunteer”—a member of Trump’s own family—ranks among the U.S. President’s key negotiators. For Kushner, this arrangement offers a distinct advantage: as a “volunteer,” he is not bound by the ethics regulations applicable to government employees. Although, as President, Trump didn’t exactly adhere to those rules himself.

Thus, Kushner finds himself seated at the negotiating table alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, and Russia’s strongman, Vladimir Putin. He was present during the negotiations with Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that resulted in a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of several Israeli hostages held by Hamas. And now, he—along with Vance and Witkoff—is reportedly tasked with reaching an agreement with the Iranians in Pakistan.

Concurrently, Jared Kushner conducts business through his firm, Affinity Partners—sometimes in the very same regions where he has been, or remains, geopolitically active. A significant portion of his firm’s investment capital originates from nations that play a role in these various conflicts—most notably, Saudi Arabia. One moment he is in Russia, the next in Israel or Pakistan—as if the world could not go on without him.

In September 2025, for instance, it became public that Affinity Partners—together with another private equity firm and the Saudi sovereign wealth fund—intended to acquire the video game giant Electronic Arts for $55 billion. A decision from U.S. regulators is still pending. Even those hitting the gym in Munich or Berlin may well be contributing to Kushner’s investments, as Affinity Partners has acquired a stake in the startup eGym.

How did Kushner become so influential? What sway does he hold within the White House? And to what extent do political and private interests intertwine in his dealings?

“Capital in Motion” was the motto of the business summit held in Miami, where Kushner was interviewed in his dual capacity as both the head of Affinity Partners and Trump’s negotiator. The event was organized by a Riyadh-based institute closely affiliated with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which operates under the control of Mohammed bin Salman. This is the very same Bin Salman who, according to CIA findings, ordered the 2018 assassination of regime critic Jamal Khashoggi—an allegation Bin Salman denies…

In Geneva, Kushner and Witkoff met—one after the other—with Iranians, Ukrainians, and Russians on a single day in February; it was a cross between a marathon and speed dating. On April 20, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy complained on Ukrainian television that the two Americans had flown to Moscow multiple times—even meeting with Putin—yet had never visited Kyiv. He considered this disrespectful. Appearing on the ZDF program *Maybrit Illner*, he described the pair as “pragmatic guys.” He added: “The only problem is that they believe the Russians are winning this war. They are mistaken.”

Kushner and Witkoff, Zelenskyy further complained to Illner, were constantly preoccupied with Iran and had no time for Ukraine; he surmised “that their focus lies in the Middle East.” Experts give Trump’s “hobby diplomats”—Kushner and Witkoff—failing grades in the US-Iran crisis as well. They are “a bust,” Aaron David Miller—who served under several US Secretaries of State in the Middle East—told *Time* magazine. “When it comes to diplomacy, they get an ‘F’.”

And Gaza? “The waterfront property in Gaza could be very valuable,” Kushner remarked at Harvard University in 2024, “if one were to focus on creating livelihoods there.” He proposed temporarily relocating civilians to the Negev Desert, describing the situation in the devastated Palestinian territory as “a somewhat unfortunate situation.”

Then, in January 2026, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Kushner unveiled the “New Gaza” blueprint—once again with Witkoff by his side. The presentation immediately followed Trump’s introduction of his “Board of Peace,” which features autocrats such as Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus and Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. Naturally, Kushner and Witkoff also sit on the board of this peace council; its chairman is none other than Donald Trump. In the master plan, Gaza looks like Dubai—like a glittering resort on the Mediterranean. It features greenery-clad skyscrapers, lofts, and parks, along with “Coastal Tourism” and a “Transportation Hub”—things that, right now, are likely the furthest thing from anyone’s mind in Gaza. In this new Gaza, there will surely be plenty for the real estate sharks on Trump’s peace council to do—and, above all, to earn. The US President nodded contentedly on stage as his son-in-law and peace envoy praised his “amazing leadership.”

An Assistant Secretary at DHS with Sugar Daddies?

The Daily Mail

An assistant secretary of DHS on the cover of today’s Daily Mail

Scott: Do Republican sub cabinet officers have more fun, as they supplement their official income with contributions from sugar daddies? The DHS assistant secretary for counterterrorism is Julia Varvaro, 29. Now she has been suspended from her position while an investigation proceeds on the basis of a whistleblower complaint that alleges that Varvaro was a regular on the Seeking.com website, a platform that promises to unite attractive young women with wealthy older men willing to enhance their living standards in exchange for companionship.

The profile, which was under the name “Alessia,” said its owner worked for a government agency and offered “seductive sophistication.”

It used the same photo as Varvaro’s Instagram account and described Alessia as “flirty, fun, and fond of sultry spaces,” as well as “drawn to a masculine man who’s attentive, protective, and quietly playful for mutually beneficial experiences.”

The profile was revealed by Varvaro’s ex-boyfriend, an older executive and divorced father identified by the Daily Mail as Robert B. The two met on a different dating app, Hinge, and he spent $40,000 on her over the course of three months, including first-class trips to Aruba and Italy.

The relationship ended after Robert refused to spend even more on her, according to text messages he shared with the publication. He has since filed a complaint with DHS’s Office of the Inspector General exposing the alleged Seeking.com profile.

A Big Gay Anniversary in Manhattan

Ryan Grippi, Steven Love Menendez, Devlyn Camp, Randy Wicker, and Julius’ Bar owner Helen Buford reenact the “sip-in” at Julius’ Bar on April 21.

Photo: Donna Aceto

Charles: Sixty years ago it was a crime to knowingly serve a gay person a drink in a New York gay bar–because every gay person was by definition “disorderly.”

Nineteen Sixty-Six was three years before the Stonewall riots that marked the birth of the modern gay liberation movement. But there was already enough ‘60’s disruption in the air to convince three gay activists from the Mattachine Society to challenge the law by going into a bar, saying they were gay and demanding to be served. On their 4th try they finally found a bartender who obeyed the law by refusing to serve them, and they finally had a case to take to court to challenge the law.

Dick Leitsch, Randy Wicker, Craig Rodwell, and John Timmons were the heroes of that moment. Back then they explained that their “sip-in” was inspired by the Black Civil Rights Movement’s “sit-ins” of the same era.

Their challenge took place at Julius’ Bar on West 10th Street and Waverrly Place in Greenwich Village, a glorious New York institution which is also the city’s oldest continually-operated gay bar. The headline on the New York Times story about it was a perfect reflection of the status of gay people in the pages of the Grey Lady back then: “3 Deviates Invite Exclusion By Bars.”

In 1967 a New York judge ruled that indecent behavior had to be more than same-sex “cruising,” kissing or touching–and Gays could legally drink in a bar

This week Randy Wiicker, now 88, returned to Julius’ to re-enact the moment. The current owner, Helen Buford, who has done a fine job of keeping the bar exactly as it has always been, played the role of the bartender in the modern recreation of the historic moment.

In an interview with Gay City News Wicker explained why what happened sixty years ago was so important: “It wasn’t a sip-in; it was the first time that gay people demanded the right to assemble, to be by themselves. I grew up at a time when they raided gay parties and took people away in paddy wagons just for having a party.”

Today Julius’ remains a model of what every gay institution should be–multi-generational and multi-cultural, a place where everyone feels welcome to sample what is still one of the very best hamburgers in New York City.

The Roberts Racket

The Progressive

Senator Chuck Grassley administers the oath of office to John Roberts to serve as Chief Justice, Jan 2020

Scott: We now know courtesy of the exposé work of NYT, which featured rarely seen internal communications, that the supposed mild-mannered traditionalist John Roberts was in fact the architect of the shadow docket that SCOTUS now uses routinely to silence lower courts when they rule against Trump, without furnishing any explanation for their rulings. This furnishes an opportunity to revisit the stories which have now circulated for many years concerning Roberts’ failure to observe minimal ethics standards during his tenure on the Court. As veteran court-watcher Lisa Graves reported in Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, Roberts is by far the wealthiest member of the Court, and he derives his wealth unseemly—but indirectly—off the desire of commercial parties to benefit from matters that come before him.

Roberts is by far the richest member of the Court, Graves says, thanks to the [roughly $20 million] his wife has raked in as a legal-placement recruiter—a job she began after her husband became Chief Justice. Neither Roberts nor his wife disclose which lawyers she has helped place into high-powered law firms, notes Graves, “so there is no way to know how much of their lifestyle is effectively being underwritten by lawyers who appear before the Supreme Court or sign on to briefs to the Court.”

In the twenty years that Roberts has been Chief Justice, the Court has permitted corporations and Super PACs to funnel an unlimited amount of funding towards candidates up for election; struck down what had been a Constitutional right to abortion; and greenlighted what Graves calls “illegitimate and undemocratic electoral maps that have all but eliminated incentives to seek compromise, fueling extremism and division.”

Meanwhile, the Roberts Court has largely eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, in part by ending a “preclearance” rule for states and localities with an extensive history of racially discriminatory voting. “The effect of Roberts’s work,” writes Graves, “has been to uphold laws that make it harder for many Black Americans to vote and have their vote meaningfully count.”

On gun violence, the Roberts Court has seized on its every opportunity to do the gun lobby’s bidding. In a 2008 case, District of Columbia v. Heller, it established gun ownership as an individual right rather than a collective one belonging to militias, and upended the District of Columbia’s ability to restrict handgun ownership and require that firearms be stored unloaded or outfitted with trigger locks. In a 2022 decision in the case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Court struck down New York’s long-standing limits on concealed carry of firearms. In 2024 in Rahimi v. the United States, the Court considered using that precedent to uphold the gun ownership rights of a man Graves describes as “an unstable [domestic] abuser with a history of shooting at strangers,” but ultimately declined to do so in that election year. Also last year, the Court struck down a ban on “bump stocks”—devices that convert semi-automatic rifles into de facto machine guns. That ban had been issued in 2017 by President Donald Trump.

On basic justice issues, the Justices seem unmoored. In 2024, the court’s conservative supermajority refused to stay the execution of a Missouri man who, in the declared opinion of his prosecutor, had been wrongfully convicted and was, in fact, innocent. That same year, Roberts penned a decision that partially exonerated some of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6. Mercy is in the eye of the bestower.

Perhaps worst of all, the Roberts Court last year granted Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, which Graves calls “a shocking and atrocious political intervention by political judges to protect a political candidate from their political party from facing the consequences for major crimes that substantial evidence indicated Trump had committed.” It is a ruling that has clearly emboldened Trump to engage in even more outrageous and likely criminal behavior.

It’s clear that Roberts’ conduct would be unethical and cause for his removal from the bench if he were a district court or court of appeals judge. So how does he get away with it? Roberts has played the lead role in assuring that SCOTUS has no meaningful ethics rules, with a standard under which each justice determines his or her own ethics standards—something that runs afoul of basic norms of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence and invites corruption. He has refused to meet with or appear before Congress to discuss his ethics lapses, largely because he has no apparent defense. His conduct is shameful and easily warrants his removal from the court, and from the list of lawyers authorized to practice before it.

A Profitable Exit for Viktor Orbán

Bloomberg

Scott: Many analysts have puzzled over why Viktor Orbán, after painstakingly developing plans to overturn adverse election results, relented so quickly on Election night. Perhaps it was because his loss was simply too crushing for claims of voter fraud to be credible. But now we have an alternative explanation: there was a silver lining in his loss. Bloomberg reports:

An asset-management fund in the Equilor group of companies part-owned by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s son-in-law profited from financial-market bets on the strongman losing power.

Equilor Asset Management said it had amassed a “significant overweight” stance in government bonds and, right before Hungary’s election on April 12, in local stocks. The wagers paid off as the opposition Tisza party’s landslide victory extended a rally in the country’s assets.

While the ownership structure of the fund-management boutique is opaque, it operates from the same office as Equilor Investment Ltd., a broker controlled by Istvan Tiborcz, the husband of Orban’s oldest daughter. The firms also promote themselves as one group to clients.

“We were inclined to expect that Tisza would be the clear winner and positioned ourselves accordingly,” Attila Szabo, the chief investment officer of Equilor AM, said in a post-election interview at his office.

Large Scale Structure of the Universe

Image Credit: Claire Lamman/DESI collaboration

Text: Cecilia Chirenti (NASA GSFC, UMCP, CRESST II)

Explanation: This is a map of the universe. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) at Kitt Peak National Observatory, Arizona, has finished its five-year survey. It observed more than 47 million galaxies and quasars and created a 3D map centered on the Earth. Today’s featured image shows a thin slice of these data: the black gaps indicate where our Galaxy obscures distant objects. The feathery web in the inset shows the large scale structure of the universe. Light of the most distant galaxies shown here travelled for 11 billion years to reach the Earth. Galaxies cluster throughout cosmic history under the competing influences of gravity and dark energy, responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe. Analysis of early DESI results hinted at the possibility that dark energy, described as a cosmological constant by Albert Einstein, may not be constant after all. But we still have to wait for the analysis of the now complete dataset. The nature of dark energy is the biggest mystery of cosmology.

Qusay Lands a $24 mn no-bid DOD Contract

The New Republic

Eric Trump addresses a TurningPoint USA rally in 2025

Scott: Qusay is very proud of his ability to secure no-bid contracts from Pete Hegseth, and this week he’s been on a media tour to brag about them. The New Republic:

Eric Trump appeared on Fox Business Thursday morning, openly celebrating a $24 million defense contract his company won—through business with his father’s administration. The 42-year-old financier appeared on Mornings with Maria to promote Foundation Industries, a technology company building futuristic warfare tools such as a humanoid robot that the company has claimed could replace soldiers on the frontline. Trump, Foundation’s chief strategic adviser and a major financier, appeared alongside company CEO Sankaet Pathak. “We better be winning this race in the United States of America,” the younger Trump told Fox, referring to the international robotics industry. “We’re the greatest economy in the world.”

“When you go up and you interact with these robots, and they fist bump you, they high five you, follow your commands,” he continued. “You bring in A.I. autonomy, it’s going to change industry, it’s going to change military application, it’s going to change hospitality. The uses are unlimited, and I think it’s a very beautiful thing.”

Trump did not get into the details on how his company secured the multimillion government contract. Time magazine reported in March that Foundation had won research contracts from the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force that totalled $24 million, and had also obtained an SBIR Phase 3 award, which recognized Foundation as an approved supplier for military procurement.

Your Online Moment of Zen

The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1935

Edited by Imogen Sayers.

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The Guardian

Scott: Most Americans learn all about Pete Hegseth’s supposed drug interdiction operations strictly through the unchallenged (but usually substantially false) press reports issued by US Southern Command, which always claim that the persons attacked were drug smugglers and then list the number of deceased supposed drug dealers killed in the operation. But as a senior Drug Enforcement Agency official tells me, if the claim that the target is moving drugs is accurate half the time, that would be a good number.

Today, The Guardian has chronicled one of these attacks involving an Ecuadorian fishing vessel. It was searched and no drugs were found, so US personnel sank the vessel and sent the fishermen off to prison in El Salvador—which then released them.

A group of Ecuadorian fishers have described how they were attacked in a double drone strike and then detained at gunpoint by soldiers on a US-flagged patrol vessel, in a rare first-hand account by victims of Donald Trump’s militarized campaign against alleged drug-trafficking boats off South America.

At least 178 people have been killed in US military airstrikes in the Caribbean and Pacific since the offensive began in September, according to a tally by the Washington Office on Latin America (Wola).

The US has provided no evidence that any of the vessels were involved in drug trafficking, and legal experts and rights groups say the attacks amount to extrajudicial killings as they apparently target civilians who do not pose any immediate threat. The White House insists the killings are lawful.

The Don Maca, a 35-ton fishing vessel that worked with six smaller boats, was about 200 miles (320km) north-west of the Galápagos Islands, when it disappeared on 26 March. About a week earlier, it had departed from Manta, a port city in south-western Ecuador that has become a focal point in the country’s escalating “war on drugs”.

Its 20 crewmen, all from nearby communities including San Mateo, Santa Marianita and Jaramijó, insist they were fishing when they were attacked.

Earlier that day they had seen a military vessel flying US colours, but thought nothing of it. “They did not signal to us, so we just carried on fishing,” said Palacios.

The first drone strike hit the bow of the boat, and the second hit the antenna, knocking out all communications, he said.

Debris from the explosion raked through the crew. One of the fishers, Erick Fabricio Coello Saltos, 27, said his hearing and his vision were both damaged in the blast. “When I heard an explosion, my eardrums ruptured terribly ... I was covered in blood from the shrapnel,” he told Radio Contacto.

The fishers claim drones continued to circle overhead after the blasts, leaving them fearing another strike. Mobile phone footage of the aftermath of the attack shows the terrified crew huddled at the stern of the ship, with an alarm sounding as one of them waves a white shirt. One man appears to be wiping blood from his nose.

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Alex Karp, Super Villain

The Guardian

Scott: When Palantir published a screed derived from Peter Thiel’s alter ego—CEO Alex Karp’s book entitled The Technological Republic—veteran tech bro observer and press secretary to California governor Jerry Brown Gil Durán instantly labeled it as Palantir’s “Fascist Manifesto.” That assessment was pretty much on the money and squared with many other observers, but Thiel and Karp promptly had their buddy Elon Musk ban Durán from his social media platform X.

Of more commercial significance, however, the publication sounded alarm bells with defense ministries in the United Kingdom and Germany, and various police outfits then in the process of contracting with Palantir.

Thiel is of course famous for talking of “freedom” and “democracy” and saying “you can’t have both.” But the manifesto made perfectly clear that Palantir’s mission is to supplant both with a new technocratic state in which the tech bros—and not elected representatives of the people—had total information access and de facto political power. The Guardian takes a look at the controversy here:

The US spy tech company Palantir published a manifesto extolling the benefits of American power and implying some cultures are inferior to others – in what MPs have called “a parody of a RoboCop film” and “the ramblings of a supervillain”.

“Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive,” wrote Palantir in a 22-point post on X over the weekend, which also called for an end to the “postwar neutering” of Germany and Japan.

The post exhorted the US to reinstate a military draft, saying that “free and democratic societies” need “hard power” in order to prevail.

It also predicted a future dominated by autonomous weapons: “The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.”

The pronouncement is the most recent of a number of high-profile statements from Palantir and its chief executive, Alex Karp, which appear to indicate that Karp views himself as not simply the head of a software company, but a pundit with important insights into the future of civilisation.

It led to criticism from several MPs, who said that it raised yet more questions about the UK’s portfolio of contracts with the company. Palantir has built up more than £500m in contracts in Britain, including a £330m contract with the NHS, as well as deals with the police and Ministry of Defence. These deals have come in for increasing criticism.

“Palantir’s manifesto, which embraces AI state surveillance of citizens along with national service in the USA, is either a parody of a RoboCop film, or a disturbing narcissistic rant from an arrogant organisation,” said Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat MP who is a member of the commons science and technology select committee.

“Either way it shows that the company’s ethos is entirely unsuited to working on UK government projects involving citizens’ most sensitive private data.”

The Only Battle Trump Really Cares About…

…is the battle for white supremacy in America

Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

Charles: The Department of Justice was created in 1870 to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan and to defend the civil rights of freed slaves.

Today its rightful name is the Department of Vengeance, because that’s the only thing it’s allowed to prosecute under the Trump administration. In the ultimate betrayal of the department’s original purpose, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Kash Patel have announced an insane indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center–because it has done more than any other institution to destroy the Klan.

Joyce Vance explains:

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was founded in 1971 in Montgomery, Alabama, by a lawyer named Morris Dees. His goal was to protect civil rights and combat hate groups. He went about it with precision, using a civil lawsuit to bankrupt and cripple the Ku Klux Klan in 1981, when other approaches, including criminal prosecution, failed to make headway.

So it makes sense that Kash Patel’s FBI would sever all ties with them, which happened last October. Until then, SPLC’s insightful intelligence product on domestic hate groups had been shared with the FBI and was widely viewed as being very helpful. They had access to information other groups, even law enforcement, didn’t have as they committed people and resources to programs like KlanWatch.

But apparently, that wasn’t enough. Tuesday morning, the interim President of the SPLC, Bryan Fair (full disclosure: my colleague at the University of Alabama School of Law), announced that the Center was under criminal investigation. Then, in a 5:30 p.m. press conference, DOJ announced it had indicted SPLC. Kash Patel called it “a massive sweeping indictment” charging fraud. The claim is the SPLC was paying the leadership of the hate groups it was keeping track of, and that it was defrauding its donors. He called it a “decade-long, multimillion-dollar” fraud, using the banking system and a series of fictitious entities to perpetuate the fraud. Only the Center is charged. No individuals are named, although Blanche said, “we’ll go from there,” and that it should be “obvious from the indictment that the investigation was ongoing.”

Todd Blanche, under questioning during the press conference, explained the case like this: The SPLC raised money to dismantle racism. It used some of the money to pay informants for information and access. When questioned about how a group like SPLC could be accused of supporting the very groups it was committed to disassembling, Blanche repeatedly said, “That’s what the grand jury found.” When pressed further, he explained that because the SPLC is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt entity, they have to disclose to donors what they’re going to do with money that they raise—and, per Blanche, they never said “we’re going to give a million bucks to the Ku Klux Klan,” so “that’s wire fraud.”

This is a speaking indictment with a story to tell; it’s an effort to rewire the public perception of a longstanding civil rights organization as a criminal enterprise, starting with headings like “The SPLC’s Paid Informants Network” and “The SPLC’s Fictitious Entities,” that sound ominous. Then we get to the charges:

There are six counts of wire fraud, taking place on just a single day, April 25, 2023. Wire fraud is found in 18 U.S.C. § 1343 and involves the use of electronic communications like the internet, or, as here, a bank wire transaction, allegedly to intentionally deceive someone and steal money or property. The allegation is that SPLC

There are four counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1014. The law prohibits knowingly making false statements or concealing material facts. The jury instructions used in the 11th Circuit explain that “The heart of the crime is the attempt to influence the action of the institution by [knowingly] [willfully] making a false statement or report. The Government does not have to prove that the institution was actually influenced or misled.”

One count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, in violation of 18 U.S.C.1956(a)(1)(B)(i)

At first blush, these allegations feel like an extension of the revenge docket and the attacks on universities and law firms, an effort to delegitimize and marginalize an organization that is pushing back against the administration. We’ll have a chance to study the charges as we learn more about the government’s evidence. The government’s core theory is that the SPLC paid high-ranking white supremacists, but they seem to ignore the reason—that the use of paid informants was essential to the intelligence the Center was gathering on the groups they were members of, including intelligence that was shared with the FBI.

Just like the federal government pays cooperating witnesses, including some within white supremacist domestic terror groups, in order to prosecute crimes those groups commit, the SPLC used paid informants to obtain information. “Klanwatch” refers to a project established in 1981 to monitor, investigate, and litigate against the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist hate groups in the United States. It focused on exposing extremist activity and curbing racist violence through legal action. There are obvious reasons for not publicizing the fact that you are recruiting sources, and that you’re paying them to accomplish your goals. But the proof is in the pudding, and this is a group that not only tried to take down white supremacist groups, but it was also highly successful. Suggesting that they were taking action designed to enrich the informants they were paying for some nefarious, unspecified reasons would be silly if the consequences here weren’t so serious.

Morris Dees. Photo by Tim Pierce

Bryan Fair, the interim president of the SPLC declared, “We will not be intimidated into silence or contrition, and we will not abandon our mission,” Fair said. “We will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work.”

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Pedro Sánchez Tackles the “Silent Colonialism” of AI

El País

Scott: When JD Vance and Donald Trump—well as the US State Department and Justice Department—attack the EU and individual European nations these days, the attacks are more often than not scripted by the tech bros.

The Faustian bargain behind the 2024 election involved the tech bros giving Trump cash and support in many other forms (most of which is likely still little understood by US media) in exchange for control over US government organs for all the issues that matter to them: quashing the regulatory state, putting an end to antitrust, and mobilizing all the resources of the US government for war with governments which—unlike the United States—actually presume to regulate and rein in their excesses.

Within the EU today, there is a growing consensus, unexpectedly fueled by the Vatican’s own doctrinal stance on artificial intelligence, that control over AI must be exercised imminently or the tech bros will soon emerge triumphant. Alongside Pope Leo, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has emerged as one of the most tenacious critics of the tech bros and their agenda.

Pope Leo and Sánchez are both among the few world leaders who have a clear understanding of the dominant position of the tech bros behind the Trump administration, and of their rapid accumulation of power and influence.

For Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the concentration of power around AI is a fact. The Executive he leads wants to place Spain at the front line of the development of this technology, while warning of the risks entailed by its uncontrolled deployment: it can enhance social gaps, concentrate wealth, erode democracies and influence climate change. Its regulation and those who guide its direction have been placed at the center of the challenge. “We defend that the governance of AI should be in the people, and not in the hands of a small group of people,” he said this Wednesday at the first meeting of the UN Panel of Experts on Artificial Intelligence, held in the Congress of Deputies.

Sánchez highlighted that, right now, the direction of AI is not defined by society, nor by democratically elected governments, nor by the market, but by a small group of large companies: “Five of them concentrate almost 60% of the world market. All from the same country.” We are facing a “silent colonialism,” he warned.

During his speech, Sánchez said that it is not a “concentration of capacity; we are talking about a concentration of power, because technology is power.” “We need a global multilateral response, where there is an alliance between business, academia, scientists, legislative power and executive power,” he emphasized.

In his opinion, the panel of experts that he chaired today represents a “transcendental” step in the commitment of Spain and the international community to respond to the phenomenon. “Social networks promised a more open, connected and democratic society. But today they are a failed state,” he stated.

What Even Is Going On with Kash Patel?

After Sarah Fitzpatrick laid out Kash Patel’s alarming and excessive drinking habits in The Atlantic, he sued the publication for defamation.

On Wednesday, Scott of Horton-Kaiser fame joined Ian Masters on Background Briefing to discuss the exposé and how long Patel might last in his job.

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LISTEN: How Long Can the Ridiculous Drunken Fanboy in Charge of the FBI Last?

After Sarah Fitzpatrick laid out Kash Patel’s alarming and excessive drinking habits in The Atlantic, he sued the publication for defamation…

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3 days ago · 2 likes · Scott Horton and Imogen Sayers

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Another Chapter in the Disintegration of the World Liberty Scam

Wall Street Journal

Scott: Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun was among the earliest supporters of Qusay’s and Uday’s cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial. Now he’s suing. He alleges that the Trump-brother driven business froze his $75 mn investment, blocked sales, and stripped away his voting rights the instant he got a bit critical. Specifically, Sun says he was pressured to buy more and retaliated against when he refused—calling it a scheme to “profit through fraud.”

Crypto tycoon Justin Sun sued the Trump family’s crypto venture, accusing World Liberty Financial of “criminal extortion” for freezing valuable digital tokens over his refusal to invest more money with the company.

The lawsuit, filed late Tuesday in a California federal court, said Sun remains “an ardent supporter of President Trump and the Trump family,” but that World Liberty’s managers “see the project as a golden opportunity to leverage the Trump brand to profit through fraud.”

The lawsuit underscored Sun’s dramatic turn from early and vocal supporter of the Trump-backed company to its critic-in-chief.

The Chinese-born billionaire accused World Liberty of blocking him from selling WLFI tokens he began to amass in late 2024, just after Trump’s re-election. Sun initially bought $30 million’s worth of WLFI tokens, making him the first significant investor in the then nascent project.

Night and (Earth) Day

This image, released in celebration of Earth Day, shows the terminator—the line between night and day—on Earth. The Artemis II astronauts captured this view on April 2, 2026, during their journey to the Moon.

NASA science improves life on Earth every day. The agency provides insights on our home planet that can only be gathered from space to help put actionable satellite information in the hands of decision-makers.

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Russia’s War has Stalled on the Edges of Ukraine

Seymour Hersh

Charles: Seymour Hersh has been consistently bearish about Ukraine’s prospects on the battlefield. But this week he offers a much more somber assessment of Russia’s prospects:

The war in Ukraine, which began with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion in February 2022, has gone on longer than the Soviet war against Nazi Germany. With its huge army and population, Russia seemed in the early years to be on the verge of winning only to have Putin, behaving like the irrational czars of the past, reject peace plans that gave him control of some of the territory his troops had taken inside eastern Ukraine. And now, I have been told, a war that Russia seemed to be winning has turned in the last year into an economic and military nightmare for Putin and the Russian army led by General Valery Gerasimov, the battle-tested commander who is one of three men in Russia with access to the nation’s nuclear codes.

The war is now a war of drones, in the view of one military expert who has toured the front under cover, with Ukraine holding a distinct edge. Bedraggled Russian soldiers at the front find themselves under deadly drone attack the moment they crawl out of their bunkers. “Ukraine has a vast drone surveillance network that is picking off Russians as soon as they appear,” the expert told me. He added that he was repelled by the horrid living conditions for all the soldiers on both sides of the front lines.

One fix to the growing Russian battlefield losses was to offer potential recruits a bonus of hundreds of thousands or millions of rubles to sign up. The bonus is not fully paid out in most cases, I was told, until the recruits finish their basic training and get to the front. Once there, the corruption reaches new heights because officers demand payments to keep the new recruits from being sent to combat zones at the front, where death by drone awaits.

The result of the corruption and the intense Ukrainian drone surveillance, the expert told me, is that the Russian army “is no further along in its invasion than it was two years earlier. They can’t move—have no offensive capability. This is the same army that went from Moscow to Berlin in World War II. Now the army has gone only one hundred kilometers into Ukraine. No real progress at all.”

General Valery Gerasimov

America First, Emirati Edition

New York Times

Scott: Who suffers from Donald Trump’s war on Iran?

The number is legion, and those likely to suffer the most are the millions who will face food scarcity and famine as a result of crop failures which are the predictable consequence of fertilizer and fossil fuels not moving out of the Gulf. But Trump doesn’t much care about them. Nor is he terribly concerned for the moment about the plight of American consumers.

On the other hand, the Emirati sheikhs who have given millions to his family businesses and supported Trump and like minded Republican politicians through a myriad of paths—many of them plainly illegal—get a lot of attention. And today, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announces the makings of another multi-billion dollar bailout designed to show that Trump really cares for those who treat the Trump Organization and the Kushner Companies right.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Wednesday that he backed the idea of providing economic support in the form of a currency swap to the United Arab Emirates, an oil-rich ally that has been contending with economic fallout from the war in Iran.

Speaking at a Senate hearing, Mr. Bessent said that the Emirates, along with several other countries in the Persian Gulf and Asia, had inquired about the possibility of a swap. He said such a maneuver would prevent the disorderly sale of U.S. assets as nations look to secure access to dollars. The war in Iran has damaged oil and gas infrastructure throughout the Middle East, dealing a blow to economies such as the Emirates that rely on the Strait of Hormuz to transport crude around the world.

The Treasury secretary said that providing a currency swap to the Emirates could benefit the United States by stabilizing foreign exchange markets and protecting American assets around the world. He added that it could be provided by the Federal Reserve or by the Treasury Department, which can deploy its Exchange Stabilization Fund to buy another nation’s currency.

“Swap lines, whether it’s from the Federal Reserve or the Treasury, are to maintain order in the dollar funding markets and to prevent the sale of the U.S. assets in a disorderly way,” Mr. Bessent said. “The swap line would both benefit the U.A.E. and the U.S.”

Needless to say, Bessent does not believe that he or Trump need congressional approval for this maneuver—nor for much of anything.

Your Online Moment of Zen

THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND

Just seventeen years, three months and four days ago, America finally fulfilled the original promise of the Declaration of Independence by inaugurating its first African-American president,

Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen led a gigantic audience in front of the Lincoln Memorial in one of the most gorgeous celebrations of all time.

We will see many more moments like this in our own lifetimes.

This song is Woody Guthrie’s magnificent gift to America.

His machine killed fascists.

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On Wednesday, Scott of Horton-Kaiser fame joined Ian Masters on Background Briefing to discuss the exposé and how long Patel might last in his job.

Scott starts at 40:50.

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What Even Is Going On with Kash Patel?

On Friday, April 17th, The Atlantic published investigation into current director of the Federal Bereau of Investigation, Kash Patel.

Journalist Sarah Fitzpatrick found that Patel has “alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.” Fitzpatrick writes:

On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log on to an internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.”

Agency officials told The Atlantic that Patel is “deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy.” And that it is in part because of “bouts of excessive drinking.”

Several officials told me that Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., while in the presence of White House and other administration staff. He is also known to drink to excess at the Poodle Room, in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his weekends. Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.

On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

Within 24-hours of publication, Patel filed a defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic for publishing a “hit piece.” The lawsuit attacks Fitzpatrick for “relying entirely on anonymous sources she knew to be both highly partisan with an ax to grind,” and gives a summarized list of her findings. The Independent reports:

Patel’s federal court filing - which included a plethora of typos - summarized the report’s nearly 2,200 words of somewhat dense prose into a concise list of 17 easy-to-read sentences about the damning information provided by more than two dozen anonymous sources, some of them current and former FBI officials or staffers at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies.

The allegations cited include that Patel “is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., while in the presence of White House and other administration staff,” that he’s “also known to drink to excess at the Poodle Room in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his weekends” and that “members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated” multiple times over the past year.

This isn’t the first time Patel has sued a reporter for libel. The prior suit languishes in Texas, effectively unpursued and was filed as a sort of alternative press release. Time will tell with this latest lawsuit. If it becomes active, however, the discovery could be amazing.

Got thoughts about Kash Patel’s behavior?

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The Telegraph

Scott: As the day progresses, the Very Tory Telegraph—the unofficial newspaper of the British Ministry of Defence—has been keeping count of the efficacy of the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

True, the US is deploying massive resources for its effort… but this hasn’t stopped 26 Iranian tankers from running the blockade so far. Telegraph:

Shipping traffic through the Strait of ​Hormuz remained broadly ‌halted on Tuesday with only three ships passing the waterway in the past 24 hours.

The Ean Spir products tanker, which had no known flag or known ownership, sailed through Hormuz on Tuesday after previously calling at an Iraqi port, ship tracking data on the MarineTraffic platform showed.

The Lian Star cargo ship, which had no known flag or known ownership, also sailed through the strait from an Iranian port, the data showed.

Separately, the ‌Meda liquefied petroleum ‌gas tanker, which had called at ⁠a United Arab Emirates port in the Gulf and also had no known flag or ownership, crossed the strait on Monday in its second attempt to leave the Gulf

Jon Stewart: Should Trump Get High? Could Anyone Tell The Difference If He Did?

Charles: Turns out Donald Trump’s decision to sign an Executive Order speeding up the availability of hallucinogens to treat depression was almost entirely a result of Joe Rogen’s lobbying for them and Trump’s eagerness to mend fences with the powerful MAGA influencer who has repeatedly attacked him for the war in Iran, saying Trump’s supporters feel “betrayed” by it.

In any case, it was almost certainly the first time in our lifetimes that both of them ever embraced such a good idea.

Monday night Jon Stewart expressed some skepticism when Trump said at the same signing ceremony that he might jump on the ibogaine bandwagon himself.

“Can I have some, please? I’ll take it. I’ll take it, whatever it takes.”

Stewart didn’t want the man with his finger on The Button to do it

“I don’t think Trump should be using hallucinogens.”

And then he asked the existential question.

“But if he did would we even notice?

“‘They’re eating the cats and dogs…right near my beautiful ballroom. By the way did you know I’m Jesus.’”

Trump’s Purge of Female Cabinet Members Continues with Lori Chavez-deRemer

New York Times

Scott: Lori Chavez-DeRemer has become the latest—and third—woman from Donald Trump’s cabinet to face the ax.

Her ties to the Labor Department were never very clear, although her father was a teamster, and the Teamsters Union president is said to have asked Trump to appoint her as a payback for the union’s support.

In her year in office, she amassed an astonishing amount of controversy, most of it attached to alcohol and sex, and most of it being showcased in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which for whatever reason invariably pictured the secretary in a yellow bikini, lounging by a pool.

It appears that the secretary handpicked young female staffers and tasked them to arrange for the entertainment of her husband (who was banned from the premises of the department based on allegations that he assaulted young women) and her father.

All of this was building to a crescendo in the form of a deposition by the Labor Department’s Inspector General, which she avoided by resigning from office. The New York Times report on the IG investigation seems to have triggered her resignation.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and her top aides and family members routinely sent personal messages and requests to young staff members that are now under review by the department’s inspector general.

Ms. Chavez-DeRemer and her former deputy chief of staff sent texts asking employees to bring wine to them during trips for the department. Sometimes the requests came in the middle of the workday.

Ms. Chavez-DeRemer’s husband exchanged text messages with young female staff members, as did her father. Some of the young women were instructed by Ms. Chavez-DeRemer and the former deputy chief of staff to “pay attention” to the men, according to people familiar with the investigation.

The text messages have been reviewed by The New York Times.

The messages were gathered as part of a monthslong investigation into Ms. Chavez-DeRemer’s leadership of the department, which began with a complaint filed to the inspector general’s office claiming widespread misconduct. The inquiry has revealed deep frustration in the department with Ms. Chavez-DeRemer, who took office in March 2025. Staff members across the political spectrum have described her as disconnected from the work of the department.

Some Laws Are So Bad They Can Still Make Opposites Attract

The New York Times

Charles: Senator Mike Lee of Utah is a wacko Republican, Dick Durbin a quintessential establishment liberal from Illinois. But both of them are so offended by Section of 702 that they have crafted a bill that would at least limit its most extreme abuses.

Another vile legacy of the War on Terror waged after the attacks of 9/11, it gives the government the unlimited right to tap the phone calls of foreigners without warrants.

Lee and Durbin explain Section 702’s worst unintended consequences:

It’s true that Section 702 doesn’t allow the direct targeting of Americans, but their communications are still often gathered during the warrantless surveillance of foreigners abroad. Once the government has this data, agencies then have the ability to search through it. And they do: Transparency reports reveal that thousands of such searches are performed every year. A federal court previously found that some the F.B.I. had violated the Fourth Amendment.

Predictably, without a requirement for court approval of these searches, abuses have been rampant. As a recent report from the Brennan Center for Justice highlighted, F.B.I. agents in recent years have searched for the communications of “protesters across the political spectrum; members of Congress; a congressional chief of staff; a state court judge; multiple U.S. government officials, journalists and political commentators; and 19,000 donors to a political campaign.” In a time of extreme partisanship, these abuses have provoked bipartisan outrage.

Under the Senators’ proposed Security and Freedom Enhancement Act, the government could still search its data bases for connections between foreigners and Americans, but it would at least have to get “court approval in the small number of cases in which these searches have generated results and the government has a proper basis for gaining access to the contents of the communication.”

It would also go a long way toward closing another loophole that allows a huge amount of warrantless surveillance:

The widespread practice of circumventing the Fourth Amendment by purchasing Americans’ sensitive information from data brokers.

The Department of Justice (including the Drug Enforcement Administration and the F.B.I.), the Department of Homeland Security (including ICE, Customs and Border Protection and the Secret Service) and the Defense Intelligence Agency have purchased cellphone location information for millions of Americans. Such information is highly sensitive and can reveal intimate details of that person’s life. Even more troubling, artificial intelligence could supercharge such surveillance, allowing the government to harvest and analyze mass quantities of highly personal and sensitive information about Americans without court approval. Our legislation would close these loopholes—again with pragmatic exceptions to accommodate legitimate safety and security needs.

Congress should not take an all-or-nothing approach to reauthorizing Section 702… But simply extending the law without any changes to protect Americans’ privacy should be off the table.

Four Agents Dead in US-Led Raid in Mexico, and Washington’s Explanations Don’t Add Up

El Universal

Scott: US agencies including the CIA and DEA were working with Mexican federal police and the Mexican army on a massive operation targeting a drug cartel’s lab operations in the Mexican state of Chihuahua immediately south of the United States, and something went wrong, resulting in several deaths.

So far accounts of the operation are so riddled with contradictions that it’s difficult to figure out just what happened though it’s evident that there’s a scramble to cover it up.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has insisted that she wants a straight and well documented account. It’s another episode of Sicario in the making, featuring US militarized ops under the nose of local governments, largely coopted.

The government in Chihuahua is run by the conservative and generally pro-US PAN party; it’s a reasonably good bet that the Trump team decided to sidestep Mexico City and work with local authorities. El Universal reports:

Two Mexican officials and two Americans died in a car accident in northern Mexico; among the deceased were a member and the Scdirector of Chihuahua’s State Investigation Agency (AEI). The two US officials who died on April 19 were agents of the CIA.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum stated that an investigation would be launched to determine whether the operation violated the country’s national security laws, noting that her administration had no prior knowledge of the operation; the CIA declined to comment.

According to the news outlet, the officials were returning from an anti-drug operation in Chihuahua conducted as part of the joint effort between the two countries to combat drug trafficking. The officials had reportedly attended a meeting following the operation to dismantle a clandestine drug laboratory in a remote area.

In a joint operation involving AEI, the Ministry of Defense, and the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office for Strategic Operations, two methamphetamine laboratories were located. The Americans who died in the accident were CIA agents returning from an operation led by the Mexican Armed Forces to dismantle clandestine methamphetamine laboratories in the mountains. Eloy García, a spokesperson for the state prosecutor’s office said that the US agents were part of an authorized training program designed to teach their Mexican counterparts how to handle synthetic drugs. “There is a misconception regarding what training and support actually mean,” John Feeley—who served as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City between 2009 and 2012. “It’s not just about studying in a classroom. And not everything can be learned in an office setting.”

“What sets these joint operations apart from similar ones under the Mérida Initiative right now is the level of transparency with which they are conducted,” Mr. Feeley added, referring to the security alliance between the United States and Mexico. “This is exactly what should be happening: the Mexicans are in command of the operation, while the Americans provide the skills that Mexico needs, allowing both governments to combat illegal drug production in a more professional and lawful manner,” he continued.

What happened in the accident that claimed the life of the AEI Director in Mexico?

On Sunday, April 19, the deaths of four officials were reported following a car accident in which the vehicle they were traveling in allegedly veered off the road, plunged down a ravine, and exploded.

Their deaths occurred as they were returning from an operation to destroy six clandestine laboratories in the municipality of Morelos—located in the southern part of the state—where 100 hectares of land were secured. Furthermore, it was confirmed that two of the deceased were personnel from the U.S. Embassy.

State Attorney General César Jáuregui Moreno stated that the two U.S. Embassy personnel were engaged in “training activities as part of the exchange we typically and routinely conduct with U.S. authorities.” He stated that the U.S. employees were conducting training activities approximately eight or nine hours away from the site of the operation against the drug laboratory.

Upon the conclusion of the raid, they met with personnel from Chihuahua’s AEI, and the accident occurred hours later.

US Response Regarding the Deaths of Its Officials in Mexico

In its article titled “Two CIA Agents Die in Accident in Mexico Following Anti-Drug Operation,” WaPo reports that the US Ambassador to Mexico, Ronald Johnson, stated “This tragedy serves as a solemn reminder of the risks faced by Mexican and U.S. officials dedicated to protecting our communities, and it reinforces our determination to carry forward their mission and uphold our shared commitment to security and justice, in order to protect our people”.

The Attorney General of Chihuahua stated that Sheinbaum’s office was not notified because only Mexican agents—approximately 40 in total—participated in the seizure of the drug laboratory, the planning of which took around three months.

Did Sheinbaum know about the operation in Chihuahua?

During her daily morning press conference on Monday, April 20, the Mexican leader commented that the federal government had no knowledge of the operation; she asserted that the operation was a decision made by the Chihuahua state government. Furthermore, she requested additional information from the administration of Governor Maru Campos (of the PAN party), and an inquiry is currently underway to determine whether there was a violation of the National Security Law, as well as to address the U.S. government.

“She is right; it was never reported that there was any participation by U.S. agents in the operation, because there were no U.S. agents present in the operation that led to the seizure of the narco-laboratory—perhaps one of the largest ever located. That operation involved the participation solely of agents from the State Investigation Agency and SEDENA,” emphasized Jáuregui Moreno. The Washington Post reports that individuals familiar with the matter spoke about the intelligence agency’s role in the events in Chihuahua on condition of anonymity, due to the sensitivity of the subject.

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War Without End

The Guardian

Charles: Guardian columnist Sina Toossi has this week’s most concise explanation of why the Trump administrations’ non-strategy “strategy” is a complete disaster—and has left the Iranian strongmen feeling more powerful than ever.

Iran’s delegation to the first round of post-ceasefire talks with the US in Islamabad arrived on a plane named Minab 168 after the people – mostly young schoolgirls – killed in a US bombing early in the war. The name signalled both grievance and resolve, framing the talks as part of a conflict in which Tehran has already absorbed immense costs.

That framing helps explain how Iranian officials approached the talks and how they view the current impasse. Rather than negotiation from a position of weakness or urgency, they see diplomacy as an extension of a battle they believe they endured without losing their core advantages. With the ceasefire set to expire on Wednesday and no diplomatic breakthrough in sight, the risk of a return to war is sharply rising.

From the Iranian vantage point, military pressure did not break their position. Their main leverage remains: stockpiles of enriched uranium, the disruption of the strait of Hormuz and its global economic ramifications, and a wartime record of absorbing sustained US and Israeli strikes over more than 40 days while continuing to strike back across the region with missiles, drones, and allied forces in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen.

This stands in sharp contrast to prevailing assumptions in Washington, where the focus has been on how pressure might accelerate Iranian concessions. Iran, however, appears more willing to bide its time, hold on to its core leverage, and pursue a broader strategic settlement that links its development and prosperity to that of the Gulf and, by extension, the global economy.

That divergence reflects a deeper mismatch in how each side understands the trajectory of the conflict. For US policymakers, the central question is what combination of military and economic tools can compel movement on far-reaching demands, including curbs on Iran’s nuclear programme, missile capabilities and regional alliances. For Iranian decision-makers, the question is whether those demands require trading away what they see as core pillars of security.

So naturally Trump announced late yesterday that he was extending the ceasefire “until such time as Iran’s leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”

Pope Talks Oil, Corruption and War

Associated Press

Scott: Equatorial Guinea is sometimes described as the most corrupt nation on earth, and by any measure, the thievery of its political leadership is spectacular. Vast oil revenues fund lavish lifestyles for the small elite surrounding the president, while a large proportion of the population continues to live in poverty.

In his apostolic journey in Africa, the Pope ventured there and addressed subjects that seem more than simply topical.

“In a world wounded by arrogance, people hunger and thirst for justice. We must encourage those who believe in peace and dare to engage in “countercurrent” politics, which focus on the common good. What is urgently needed is the courage of new visions and an educational pact that gives young people space and trust,” he said. “Even more than in the past, it is clear today that the proliferation of armed conflicts is often driven by the exploitation of oil and mineral deposits, with no regard for international law or the self-determination of peoples. Without a change of direction in the assumption of political responsibility, and without respect for institutions and international agreements, humanity’s destiny risks being tragically compromised.”

His remarks were well measured for his surroundings, but to most observers they appeared unmistakably tied to the conflict now engulfing the Middle East as well, where the movement of fossil fuels is regularly cited as the principal cause of conflict. Associated Press reports:

The discovery of offshore oil in the mid-1990s transformed Equatorial Guinea’s economy virtually overnight, with oil now accounting for almost half of its GDP and more than 90% of exports, according to the African Development Bank.

Yet more than half of the country’s nearly 2 million people live in poverty. And rights groups including Human Rights Watch — as well as court cases in France and Spain — have documented how revenues have enriched the ruling Obiang family rather than the broader population.

Leo, who arrived from Angola, met with Obiang at the presidential palace and then addressed government authorities, diplomats and civil service representatives. Noting that the encounter occurred on the first anniversary of Pope Francis’ death, Leo quoted the late pope in denouncing income inequalities that he said had been exacerbated by a global economy focused on the pursuit of profit at all cost.

A Fresh Look at the Crab Nebula

This image that NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured of the Crab Nebula, paired with its past observations and those of other telescopes, allows astronomers to study how the supernova remnant is expanding and evolving over time.

This observation from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, released on March 23, 2026, gives an unparalleled, detailed look at the aftermath of a supernova and how it has evolved over the telescope’s long lifetime.

Hubble captured the nebula’s intricate filamentary structure, as well as the considerable outward movement of those filaments over 25 years, at a pace of 3.4 million miles per hour.

Learn more about the Crab Nebula.

Your Online Moment of Zen

I Love Every Little Thing About You

Charles: This song came out in March of 1972, when I was the Columbia stringer during the day counting demonstrators on Broadway for Marty Arnold, a brilliant Timesman who sat back at his desk at 229 West 43rd Street crafting another beautiful tone poem about the latest anti-Vietnam protest that would fail to prevent Richard Nixon’s landslide re-election in November.

My best contribution to one of Marty’s stories: the middle-aged woman carrying the sign reading “My son and 40,000 others Died in Vain in Vietnam.”

At night I was downtown discovering the joys of men at the Ninth Circle on West 10th Street. All the time I was listening to amazing Stevie Wonder songs like this one, which were the only things that kept any of us a little sane through all of that madness.

The Horton-Kaiser Report is edited by Imogen Sayers.

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Le Monde

Scott: When Elon Musk decided that the best way to expand the use and reach of X (formerly Twitter) was to flood social media around the world with artificial intelligence-generated pornography, France was more than one dozen nations that launched a criminal probe focusing specifically on his role in the process.

Several months into the process, French prosecutors say they have specific evidence that Musk’s decision was driven by a specific profit motive and that he was particularly targeting sexually frustrated young men—who have been identified as a prime recruitment zone for fascist political parties that Musk favors.

How will Musk respond? To date his responses have been consistent, and indirect. He mobilizes the U.S. Department of Justice and State Department, each of which acts on his instructions, to put pressure on foreign law enforcement.

Le Monde reports:

The Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office has been investigating numerous alleged abuses involving the social network X and its CEO since January 2025. The billionaire was summoned on Monday for a voluntary interview.

On his X account, Elon Musk posts frantically. In recent days, he has shared his opinions on universal basic income, South African politics, a local election in Nevada, and progressivism. But will he be in Paris on Monday, April 20? He hasn’t said, and it seems unlikely.

Nevertheless, he has been summoned there by the head of the cybercrime unit for a voluntary interview, as part of a preliminary investigation launched in January 2025 against the social network he leads. About ten executives from the American company—including Linda Yaccarino, its CEO until the summer of 2025—have also been summoned.

Initiated following reports filed by a Member of Parliament and an executive at a public cybersecurity agency, the investigation initially focused on two alleged offenses: the possible deliberate manipulation of the algorithm to influence French public debate, and the potential illicit use of users’ sensitive personal data for the purpose of displaying targeted advertising.

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America 1, Fascists 0

The Seattle Times

Charles: This is a story about the still-beating heart of democracy in America.

On September 18, 2023, President Joe Biden nominated United States Magistrate Mustafa Kasubhai to serve as a United States District Judge for the District of Oregon.

Republican Senators attacked him as an advocate of diversity, equity, and inclusion and the use of preferred pronouns and honorifics in his courtroom; they suggested he might be a Marxist. After a 14-month-long pitched battle, on November 19, 2024, the Senate invoked cloture by a 51–43 vote and his nomination was confirmed by a 51–44 vote.

Thus Kasubhai became the third Muslim in American history to become a district court judge–all of them honored by a president named Joe Biden, and a Senate controlled by Democrats.

Last Saturday this Muslim jurist granted summary judgement to Democratic attorneys generals from twenty states and the District of Columbia after they had sued HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr and his inspector general to overturn their threat to deny Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements to any health care institution that provides gender-affirming care for American youth.

In a preliminary decision rendered in the same matter last month, Judge Kasubhai said the case was part of a broader effort to undermine democracy: “The notion that ‘I will go forward and issue a declaration and see if we can get away with it’ is not a principle of governance that adheres to the overarching commitment to a democratic republic that requires the rule of law to be regarded and respected and honored as sacred.”

In a blistering new 49-page opinion, Judge Kasubhai condemned the federal government’s “wanton” efforts to limit the care, which did not follow proper administrative procedures.

“Unserious leaders are unsafe,” Kasubhai began. “This case highlights a leader’s unserious regard for the rule of law.”

The judge also denounced how quickly the health department took these actions, instead of giving patients and families time to seek other alternatives.

“Kennedy’s utter failure to promulgate rules in accordance with statutory authority … caused chaos and terror for all the people and institutions of our great nation.”

“This is a resounding win for the rights of youth, their families, and the rule of law when it comes to medical care,” Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown declared. “The court agrees that the administration ignored the law in its rush to deprive transgender youth of the health care they are legally entitled to.”

Gender-affirming care for minors mostly includes puberty blockers, hormone treatment and mental health support, and rarely surgery. Most professional medical associations in the U.S. approve the care for young trans and gender-diverse patients — including the Pediatric Endocrine Society and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Ukrainian Drone Supremacy Is Clear

Financial Times

Scott: Russia’s war on Ukraine involves a mixture of World War I trench warfare with high tech, but low budget drone technology. In the latter category, the edge has seesawed between Kyiv and Moscow, with the Ukrainians now holding something of an edge while the Kremlin focuses on the abilities of its Iranian and North Korean suppliers.

The Financial Times reports here on the Ukrainian distance drone attacks:

With Russian attacks growing in intensity and Ukraine facing a shortage of air-defence missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have proven to be a cheap and effective solution.

As of March, they were responsible for 70% of all Russian drones shot down in the Kyiv region, according to Ukraine’s top general, Oleksandr Syrsky. But the first generation of UAVs had limited flight time and relied on radio frequencies, which meant that their operators had to stay close — and potentially become targets themselves. The same companies that rushed last year to develop these interceptors, including Tenebris, have been working on upgrades that use a secure internet connection, allowing operators to control their UAVs hundreds — and potentially thousands — of kilometres away. The Bagnet’s test flight out of Kyiv was observed by three Ukrainian officers on the ground. Two minutes into the flight, the pilot assisting Velma deactivated the safety feature to arm the drone. Soon after, AI-powered software highlighted a Russian drone in a green square and guided the interceptor towards its target until the image cut out.

Closer to the frontline, they use Starlink internet terminals to guide larger quadcopter drones and robots to resupply infantry and evacuate the wounded. But long-distance piloting has not yet been deployed to the small quadcopters operated by soldiers just a few kilometres from the drones they are flying. If deployed en masse, long-distance piloting could alleviate Ukraine’s enduring manpower crisis and save the lives of drone pilots deployed near the frontline who are subsequently targeted by Russian strikes. Conversely, Ukrainian defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov said his country was also in the process of setting up units dedicated to “hunting” Russian drone pilots.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last month that the number of drone interceptors produced had overtaken the number of pilots. “The situation last summer was critical, we were already producing enough interceptors but we just didn’t have enough crews,” said Lyuba Shipovich, the co-founder of Dignitas, a Ukrainian NGO supporting the use of unmanned vehicles in the military. “Now, you can picture having fewer, very skilled operators located underground somewhere in Kyiv and on the field you’ve got boxes filled with interceptors . . . and based on the path of the Shahed, the operator picks from which box he will launch the drone,” said Shipovich.

Eye on the Milky Way

Have you ever had stars in your eyes?

It appears that the eye on the left does, and moreover, it appears to be gazing at even more stars. The featured 27-frame mosaic was taken in 2019 from Ojas de Salar in the Atacama Desert of Chile.

The eye is actually a small lagoon captured reflecting the dark night sky as the Milky Way Galaxy arched overhead. The seemingly smooth band of the Milky Way is really composed of billions of stars, but decorated with filaments of light-absorbing dust and red-glowing nebulas.

Additionally, both Jupiter (slightly left the galactic arch) and Saturn (slightly to the right) are visible. The lights of small towns dot the unusual vertical horizon. The rocky terrain around the lagoon appears to some more like the surface of Mars than our Earth.

The War in Iran: A Précis

By Mohamad safa:

Charles: The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States for the seventh time won the war that wasn’t a war, so the United States can open the Strait of Hormuz that was open before the not war.

The not war that started to get the uranium that was completely obliterated, so that the Iranians can’t build the nuclear bomb that they weren’t building for the not war that the United States started.

Then the United States which has nuclear weapons threatening to use nuclear weapons to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons because having nuclear weapons is dangerous.

If the United States saw what the United States is doing in the United States, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

Conservatives Bid Farewell to Trump

Financial Times

Scott: Donald Trump and his White House team have dreamt of building a Fascist International, with Trump as the centerpiece. But with an unexplained war in Iran sending energy costs soaring and a humiliating defeat in Hungary, the Eurofascists are quickly rethinking the costs of a close association with Trump and Vance.

The same is true for traditional European conservatives—who have never seen Trump as one of their own—as the Financial Times reports.

Mainstream European conservatives such as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz are moving, albeit unsteadily, in the direction of a more critical position towards Trump. Nationalists are pivoting away from him faster than the mainstream. France’s Rassemblement National was fast and confident in challenging Trump’s designs on Greenland and Iran. In Berlin, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) leadership campaigned against the Iran war and urged colleagues to scale back their trips to Washington. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni blocked the use of a Sicilian air base for sorties against Iran and called Trump’s attacks on the pope “unacceptable”.

An electoral logic is driving this. Polls are laying bare European disgust at the US administration. In Denmark’s election last month, even the far-right Danish People’s Party rejected the US president. In Hungary, a nationalist who rejected the country’s subordination to Maga defeated a leader who championed that subordination. As multiple European countries gear up for major votes in the next 18 months, including crucial state elections in Germany and general elections in France, Italy, Poland and Spain, rightists are paying heed. Yet there are also hints of something deeper going on beyond electoral arithmetic.

The European right, from moderates to radicals, is rediscovering a spirit of European autonomy. During his campaign, Magyar asserted that “Hungarian history is not written in Washington”. In a recent speech to Italy’s parliament, Meloni criticised past Italian leaders “satisfied with a pat on the back or an endorsement tweet” from US presidents and insisted: “History is knocking at the door, and Europe must not fail this test.” Jean-Pascal Hohm, the AfD’s youth leader, pointedly wrote after Orbán’s defeat that “the future of European rightwing parties lies in Europe” and that relations with other Europeans “are always more important to us than any special hotline to Moscow, Beijing, or Washington”.

European politicians from the centre-right to the nationalist fringes feel burned by their indulgence of or association with the American president. They are turning to visions of a more distant Europe-US relationship, and thus back to older ideas and political icons. Charles de Gaulle is once more in vogue, and not just on the right.

Meanwhile, among more radical nationalists, the present moment is a chance to reconnect with the ideas of Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler and Julius Evola — thinkers who saw the US as a decadent, “plutodemocratic” society contrasting with a supposedly more soulful ethno-Europe. Perhaps this will not amount to much. But the European right’s pivot away from the US is sincere, not just tactical. And the continent’s radical right especially has a record of adapting fast to chaotic world events; they are “crisis entrepreneurs” deft at finding ways of making their politics successively fit the Eurozone crisis, the migration crisis, the pandemic, then Russia’s war in Ukraine.

It is thus plausible to anticipate them adapting to the meltdown of Euro-Trumpism in a similarly nimble way, switching rapidly and without sentimentality to a politics of European independence from the US. That poses a challenge for centrist and progressive parties, which could conceivably find themselves outflanked by the right in their opposition to Trump. The answer is to move fast to craft their own, rival, more confident and emotionally resonant vision of a more autonomous Europe.

The FBI Director is MIA

The Atlantic

Scott: Sarah Fitzpatrick’s exposé on Kash Patel and his drinking problems has already, within 24-hours of publication, drawn a libel suit. But no one who’s been tracking the career of Patel since he emerged as a central figure in the Trump entourage is the least bit surprised by any of it.

This isn’t the first time Patel has sued a reporter for libel. The prior suit languishes in Texas, effectively unpursued… it was filed as a sort of alternative press release. Time will tell with this one. If it becomes active, however, the discovery could be amazing.

Patel, according to multiple current officials, as well as former officials who have stayed close to him, is deeply concerned that his job is in jeopardy. He has good reasons to think so—including some having to do with what witnesses described to me as bouts of excessive drinking. My colleague Ashley Parker and I reported earlier this month that Patel was among the officials expected to be fired after Attorney General Pam Bondi’s ouster, on April 2. “We’re all just waiting for the word” that Patel is officially out of the top job, an FBI official told me this week, and a former official told my colleague Jonathan Lemire that Patel was “rightly paranoid.” Senior members of the Trump administration are already discussing who might replace him, according to an administration official and two people close to the White House who were familiar with the conversations…

Several officials told me that Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., while in the presence of White House and other administration staff. He is also known to drink to excess at the Poodle Room, in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his weekends. Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.

On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

Your Online Moment of Zen

By Joseph Stouter

Oils on Canvas.

Loire Valley #4

Miniature Paradise

Edited by Imogen Sayers.

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New York Times

Scott: Foreign scholars studying the astonishingly rapid disintegration of constitutional protections during Trump 2.0 have consistently fingered one quick explanation for this phenomenon: the Supreme Court should be the guardian of constitutional protections and the enforcer of limitations against presidential overreach. In Trump’s second term, however, it has played the opposite of this role—smacking down lower court rulings that restrained Trump sometimes on the basis of century old legal precedents, usually without offering any clue of the legal pretext upon which it is acting.

Today, Adam Liptak and Jodi Kantor of the New York Times have offered us a rare glimpse inside the working of the Court which reveals how this procedural brush-off mechanism—now known as the shadow docket—was summoned into being by a supposed conservative traditionalist Chief Justice, John Roberts. The context was a search for a way to overturn one of Barack Obama’s signature projects, the Clean Power Plan, which was vehemently contested by fossil fuel interests that have long exercised outsized political influence within the Beltway and on the Supreme Court. The documents that the New York Times reveal demonstrate a Court very much beholden to these commercial interests and determined to loosen regulatory burdens without engaging in any meaningful legal analysis.

Since that night a decade ago, the logic behind the Supreme Court’s pivotal 2016 order has remained a mystery. Why did a majority of the justices bypass time-tested procedures and opt for a new way of doing business?

The answer would remain secret for generations, legal experts predicted. “We’ll never know (at least, until our grandkids can read the justices’ internal papers from that time period),” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, wrote in a newsletter in February marking the anniversary of the order.

The New York Times has obtained those papers and is now publishing them, bringing the origins of the Supreme Court’s shadow docket into the light.

The 16 pages of memos, exchanged in a five-day dash, provide an extraordinarily rare window into the court, showing how the justices talk to one another outside of public view…

In public, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has cultivated a reputation for care and caution. The papers reveal a different side of him. At a critical moment for the country and the court, the papers show, he acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama’s plan to address the global climate crisis.

When colleagues warned the chief justice that he was proposing an unprecedented move, he was dismissive. “I recognize that the posture of this stay request is not typical,” he wrote. But he argued that the Obama plan, which aimed to regulate coal-fired plants, was “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector,” and too big, costly and consequential for the court not to act immediately.

In the Trump era, he and the other conservative justices have repeatedly empowered the president through their shadow docket rulings. By contrast, the papers reveal a court wielding those same powers to block Mr. Obama. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. warned that if the court failed to stop the president, its own “institutional legitimacy” would be threatened.

While energy interests could upend the Obama environmental program with votes on the Supreme Court they could not muster in Congress, years later it became very clear that the same tactical maneuver could be used to underscore dictatorial grabs of power by a president who belonged to John Roberts’ party—and to bring the judiciary to heel—without ever even offering an explanation for what was being done.

The Size of Trump’s Arch Even Alarms Its Inventor

The New York Times

Charles: Providing the latest proof that his entire life has been a master class in overcompensation, Donald Trump’s proposed arch, that would loom over Arlington Cemetery and destroy historic sitelines to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., is now supposed to be 250 feet high. That’s four times the size originally proposed by Catesby Leigh, an architecture critic who is now reportedly as alarmed as everyone else by Trump’s hideously super-sized idea.

Jimmy Kimmel says, “It strikes the perfect balance between Scientology and Liberace which we have come to expect from our president.”

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Putin Builds a Powerful Surveillance State

The Bell & Kommersant

Scott: In George Orwell’s 1984, the protagonist Winston Smith lives in a surveillance state.

As a member of the party’s nomenklatura, he understands better than most how it works—still he barely perceives the full scope of it. Every public and private space is under surveillance through “telescreens,” which broadcast announcements, news, and propaganda. But these screens are also monitoring devices, noting every move, every word, every facial expression, of the populace of Oceania in the constant quest for thoughtcrime. “Big Brother is watching you” is the signature promise, and it is to be understood literally.

In our own times, the metric of the surveillance state is less big-screen TVs, and more social media platforms—which under the guidance of people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg are now capable of and do perform nearly identical functions in collecting information about their subjects/subscribers.

For those who want to understand better the trajectory on which Trump is embarked, four authoritarian, oppressive regimes merit closer scrutiny. They are mostly countries whose leaders Trump holds in inexplicably high esteem—Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. And they are all countries which have invested very heavily in exercising control over social media and bending it to the will of their strongmen.

Over the last weeks, Putin has been particularly busy in making major transformations, drawing heavily on technology developed by his Iranian allies. The Bell reports:

The Bell has uncovered the driving force behind the recent wave of repression targeting the Russian internet—ranging from restrictions on voice calls via WhatsApp and Telegram to the outright blocking of messaging apps and a war on VPNs. Behind these measures stands the FSB’s Second Service—the intelligence agency’s most shadowy division, tasked with safeguarding the constitutional order against the political opposition and combating terrorism. It was agents from this very unit who attempted to poison Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza. Since at least last summer, control over the Russian internet has been handed over to the Second Service, which is now aggressively attempting to purge it of “hostile means of communication.”

“The whole thing looked like total madness—they simply printed out sheets of paper [containing directives to combat VPNs], handed them to the executives of every company present, ordered them to sign them, and then immediately collected them. Anyone who refused to comply was promised severe retribution,” an IT industry source for The Bell recounts, describing a recent meeting at the Ministry of Digital Development. At this meeting, telecom operators and internet companies were presented with a fait accompli: they were required to take full responsibility for combating the tools Russians use to bypass internet censorship. Failure to do so, they were warned, would result in serious consequences—potentially ranging from the revocation of tax incentives to exclusion from official “whitelists.”

Executives at Russian tech companies were unaccustomed to such treatment; typically, the Ministry of Digital Development has positioned itself as a defender of the industry. However, an explanation for this shift quickly emerged. According to a The Bell interlocutor who attended the meeting, it was there—for the first time in his two decades of working in the Russian IT sector—that he encountered a representative of the FSB’s Second Service (officially known as the FSB’s Service for the Protection of the Constitutional Order and the Fight Against Terrorism). “Everything changed because the Second Service has seized the initiative [within the industry]. Now they show up everywhere; they make all the decisions,” he told The Bell. An employee at one of Russia’s telecom operators is also aware that the FSB’s Second Service has recently assumed responsibility for internet oversight in the country. Meanwhile, a source for The Bell within the payment services sector claims that, several weeks ago—at the behest of the Second Service—inspections were carried out at several major payment service providers. Officials visited these companies with inquiries regarding whether they were processing user payments directed toward VPN services. The largest operators handling such payments (including, for instance, *YuMoney*—a service owned by Sber) were ordered to immediately cease such transactions.

The Second Service’s offensive against the Russian internet began at least as early as last summer; according to one of The Bell’s industry sources, the restrictions placed on calls via WhatsApp and Telegram last August were already being spearheaded by the “Second Service.” Another source claims that, around that same time, a meeting took place between the head of the Second Service, Alexei Sedov, and Vladimir Putin. “Sedov allegedly promised Putin that he would ‘bring order’ to the internet—and was given carte blanche,” the source recounts. Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, did not respond to The Bell’s request for comment regarding this matter.

In essence, the plan is to block Russians from using “foreign” communications platforms and require them to use a new platform which is in fact operated by the Russian intelligence services, who will monitor everything that transpires on them in real time. Essential to this effort is weaning Russians off the use of VPN services which would allow them to continue the use of the less-accessible platforms. And Kommersant has now reported how this will transpire—through criminal law legislation which will transfer control over the use of VPN system to the FSB, the Russian intelligence service formerly headed by Vladimir Putin:

Amendments drafted for the second reading of the second package of anti-fraud legislative changes (dubbed “Anti-Fraud 2.0”) prohibit hosting providers from leasing their computing resources to owners of websites and information systems that facilitate access to content blocked within the Russian Federation. Consequently, the proposed measures aim to restrict providers from granting access to VPN service operators. This information is derived from the latest draft of the bill, which Kommersant has reviewed. The document does not, however, specify any sanctions for non-compliance with these requirements.

In response to an inquiry from Kommersant, the press service of the Ministry of Digital Development stated that “at this moment, the amendments for the second reading are being coordinated with relevant government agencies and organizations,” and that a final version of the document is not yet available.

For hosting providers, this potential new regulation signifies a shift in status from that of a “technical intermediary” to that of a “controller,” explains the hosting provider RUVDS. Whereas previously a hosting provider could disregard activity occurring “inside” a server until a formal complaint was received, they are now obligated to prevent the very possibility of leasing resources to violators. “In practice, this will entail a tightening of service agreements and closer cooperation between companies and Roskomnadzor,” believes Nikita Tsaplin, the provider’s CEO.

In December 2023, Roskomnadzor—the Russian Ministry of Propaganda—began compiling a registry of hosting providers. As of February 1, 2024, hosting providers not included in this registry are prohibited from offering services within the territory of Russia. Currently, 566 organizations are registered in the registry. Authorities are now aiming to reduce the number of users utilizing VPN services. As Kommersant previously reported, digital platforms that remain accessible to users while a VPN is active may be removed from “whitelists” of approved websites, stripped of their IT accreditation, and face other penalties. Service providers will be required to verify whether a client is included on a blacklist and whether the owner of that client complies with Roskomnadzor’s directives, says Igor Bederov, Chairman of the Council on Combating Technological Violations at the NSB Coordination Council. If a client disregards the law, the provider will be obliged to deny them service: “This is not merely a matter of banning servers, but rather a specific procedural requirement for hosting providers.” Mr. Bederov adds, however, that many companies currently lack established practices and technologies to effectively identify and block such clients; furthermore, the transition to this new operational model entails significant complexities and costs, and providers’ readiness to implement it appears low at this time. “One positive outcome could be the purging of unscrupulous players from the market,” he added.

Bouquets for Europe’s Fascists from Marco’s Monsters

The New York Times

Charles: Vile like only this administration can be. Two hundred thousand American soldiers died fighting the Nazis in Europe. After that the State Department spent eighty years showing its contempt for their successors.

Now Rubio’s white supremacists are celebrating right-wing extremists wherever they can find them. In a disgusting perversion of American diplomacy, 27-year-old Christian Nationalist Sam Samson has been paying homage to every right-wing monster in Europe, from Beatrix von Storch and Joachim Paul of neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany, to Nigel Farage in Britain and Marine Le Pen in France. After Le Pen was convicted of overseeing an embezzlement scheme and barred her from running for another public office for five years, Samson lobbied a French official to allow Le Pen to run again anyway. He was then reported to the French government for foreign interference.

Intergalactic Ice Water

An observation made by NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) shows the chemical signatures of water ice (shown in bright blue) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (orange) in Cygnus X, one of the most active and turbulent regions of star birth in our Milky Way galaxy. The image was released on April 15, 2026, along with a study detailing the observation.

One of SPHEREx’s main goals is to map the chemical signatures of various types of interstellar ice. This ice includes molecules like water, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide, which are vital to the chemistry that allows life to develop. Researchers believe these ice reservoirs, attached to the surfaces of tiny dust grains, are where most of the universe’s water is formed and stored. The water in Earth’s oceans — and the ices in comets and on other planets and moons in our galaxy — originates from these regions.

SPHEREx launched March 11, 2025, and has the unique ability to see the sky in 102 colors, each representing a different wavelength of infrared light that offers distinctive information about galaxies, stars, planet-forming regions, and other cosmic features.

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Using the Justice Department as His Personal Revenge Machine, Again

The New York Times

Charles: Charlie Savage and Alan Feuer report the Justice Department has now designated a former Donald Trump campaign lawyer, Joseph diGenova, to pursue one of the president’s favorite conspiracy theories, that the Russia investigation was part of a law enforcement plot to frame Trump. To make sure the legal process is as skewed as possible, diGenova will present evidence to a grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida overseen by Justice Aileen Cannon, who previously made a series of outrageous rulings to ensure that Trump would never be prosecuted for the top secret documents he absconded with when he left the White House the first time.

In 2020, as part of the legal team for the Trump campaign, Mr. diGenova said that Christopher Krebs, a cybersecurity official who had contradicted false pro-Trump claims of election fraud, should be “shot.” (Mr. diGenova later apologized.)

Mr. diGenova’s appointment comes after Maria Medetis Long, a senior career prosecutor in Miami who had been in charge of the investigation, was abruptly removed from the case. Ms. Medetis Long, who leads national security investigations for Mr. Quiñones’s office, is said to have objected to moving forward with a portion of the inquiry focused on John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director.

Brennan appears to be a principal target of this witch hunt.

16 Bets tied to the Iran War Netted a cool $1bn

The Guardian

Scott: Iranian diplomats and leaders have now repeatedly called attention to the fact that Trump regularly makes a series of very dramatic posts to his social media account, just as the markets are about to close. And these tweets are usually rife with false claims designed to influence the markets.

Here the Guardian draws attention to the fact that someone with perfect knowledge of what Trump was about to tweet make a $1 bn profit at the outset of the Iran war.

Sixteen bets made $100,000 each accurately predicting the timing of the US airstrikes against Iran on 27 February. Later, a single user would make over $550,000 after betting that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would topple, just moments before his assassination by Israeli forces. On 7 April, right before Donald Trump announced a temporary ceasefire with Iran, traders bet $950m that oil prices would come down. They did.

These bets and other well-timed wagers accurately predicted the precise timing of major developments in the US-Israel war with Iran, creating huge windfalls and raising concerns among lawmakers and experts over potential insider trading.

Betting – once largely siloed to sporting events – has now spread to include contracts on news events where insider information could give some traders an advantage.

Trump Goes Full Haight-Ashbury

The New York Times

Charles: This could be the first sensible policy decision the Trump Administration has ever made—thanks apparently to Joe Rogen’s advocacy.

Andrew Jacobs and Noah Daly explain:

President Trump on Saturday signed an executive order seeking to hasten research into the therapeutic benefits of LSD, Ecstasy, psilocybin and other mind-altering drugs by ordering federal agencies to ease restrictions that have long limited the ability of scientists to study them. The measure also provides $50 million for state-level research into ibogaine, a powerful psychedelic made from the root of a Central African shrub that has been drawing interest from researchers for its potential to treat opioid use disorder and other forms of substance abuse.

“I’m pleased to announce historic reforms to dramatically accelerate access to new medical research and treatments based on psychedelic drugs,” Mr. Trump said from the Oval Office, where he was joined by a number of top cabinet officials and the podcaster Joe Rogan.

Spain Seeks Termination of EU’s Association Agreement with Israel

El País

Scott: In a fiery address, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez has called on the EU to take the steps necessary immediately to suspend Israel’s association agreement with the European communities, which forms the bedrock of Israeli trade and commerce. Sánchez specifically cited war crimes committed by Israel in its military operations in Gaza, its violation of its responsibilities as an occupying power in the West Bank, the manner in which it conducted military operations in Lebanon and Iran and finally its passage of legislation which would impose the death penalty only on Palestinians as the basis for his call.

The Prime Minister and Secretary-General of the PSOE, Pedro Sánchez, kicked off the pre-campaign for the Andalusian elections—scheduled for May 17—this Sunday in Gibraleón (Huelva). His objective is to shore up the Socialist Party’s electoral base, which is currently at an all-time low according to the latest polls, as well as to boost the candidacy of his nominee for the regional government, former minister María Jesús Montero—who currently registers the lowest approval ratings of all her competitors in those same surveys. Sánchez has armed himself with one of his key political assets—the “No to War” stance—and announced that Spain will formally request, during Tuesday’s meeting of the EU-27 Foreign Ministers in Luxembourg, the “termination of the Association Agreement with Israel.” “A government that violates international law or EU principles cannot be a partner,” he argued.

Sánchez took the stage at the first pre-campaign rally—before an audience of some 2,000 people (several dozen more were left outside the venue due to capacity limits)—in a province that has historically served as a Socialist stronghold. Through his presence in Andalusia—which will be a recurring feature of the campaign leading up to May 17—he seeks to boost the prospects of the second cabinet minister he has backed in a regional election during the current legislative term. The strategy employed with the previous Minister of Education, Pilar Alegría, in the region of Aragon resulted in a return of just 18 seats—the lowest level of Socialist representation ever recorded in that autonomous community.

Melania, Epstein Ungaro and Zampolli The Lego-Rap Version

The Cover Up

Charles: Inspired by this interview in The Cover Up.

Trump’s World Liberty Crypto Venture Unravels

Financial Times

Scott: The signature investment scheme led by Don Jr. and Eric—known to Trump insiders as Uday and Qusay, after the sons of Saddam Hussein—in Term 2 is tagged as “World Liberty,” and it focuses on crypto currency speculation with an insider twist.

Critics consistently suggested that the project was merely a cover for bribe taking and rent seeking, and there is no doubt that many investors were in fact seeking something: usually to block criminal investigations or settle prosecutions. Now some of the venture’s biggest investors believe they have been fleeced, and they’re talking publicly about what they have seen on the inside. The Financial Times reports:

The difficulties facing World Liberty increased a week ago after one of its largest backers launched a social media attack on the project. Crypto billionaire Sun purchased $75mn worth of WLFI tokens following Donald Trump’s election in late 2024. US securities regulators later settled a fraud case and dropped certain charges against Sun, one of several friendly moves towards the crypto industry since Trump’s re-election. Sun has also bought at least $100mn worth of a Trump memecoin, which granted him a seat at a dinner with the president. “I have always been a staunch supporter of President Trump and his crypto-friendly policies,” Sun said on X. But he turned on World Liberty over proposals to change the token’s governance rules, calling the project “World Tyranny”. Sun accused the “WLFI team” of “treating the crypto community as a personal ATM”. World Liberty said on X that Sun’s posts contained “baseless allegations”. On Wednesday, World Liberty followed up with a proposal for further governance changes, including a path for early token holders such as Sun to sell coins that are currently locked.

World Liberty was launched in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election in 2024 as Donald Trump campaigned on his support for crypto. In total, it has raised about $715mn from token sales, according to crypto fundraising tracker ICO Drops. World Liberty still holds a cache of its tokens, some of which it pledged to take out the loan in dollar-pegged stablecoins. The transactions on digital asset lending platform Dolomite, which has close ties to World Liberty, sparked particular concern among holders since the group used about 5% of the total supply of WLFI as collateral. Dolomite chief executive Corey Caplan is also chief technology officer at World Liberty, and Dolomite’s technology serves as the architecture for World Liberty’s lending offering. World Liberty’s reasons for the borrowing are unclear, though the firm has said it is “generating yield”, or deriving income from the move.

Your Online Moment of Zen

Olympia by Edouard Manet

Scorned by critics as pornography when Manet painted it in 1863, it was championed by Claude Monet who insisted it belonged in the Louvre.

The painting was finally exhibited in the Musée du Luxembourg before eventually becoming required viewing for every Lycée art appreciation class in room 14 of the Musée d’Orsay

Edited by Imogen Sayers.

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Financial Times

Scott: Sometimes the differences between running an “elite modeling agency” and human trafficking can be fairly abstract. But in the case of Paolo Zampolli, who was born and raised in Milan and who claims ties to Pope Paul VI and Silvio Berlusconi, there can be no question about the claim to be elite. Among his models was a Slovene named Melanija Knavs, who transitioned from Novo Mesto to Moscow to Paris and New York with Zampolli’s patronage.

Zampolli’s falling out with his former partner, Brazilian super model Amanda Ungaro, led to reports, to date unfulfilled, that the details of Melania Trump’s path to fame and wealth in America—in which Jeffrey Epstein and Jean-Luc Brunel are believed to play a central role—would now be revealed in detail.

Zampolli insists that he was the matchmaker between Melania and Donald Trump, and that Epstein was not involved. He has thus emerged as the cover story for Melania in a contested narrative at the center of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Against this background, the Financial Times has undertaken a detailed investigation of Zampolli and his rise to a central position in the Trump entourage.

The resulting feature offers us a perfect snapshot of what Trump World is all about.

Paolo Zampolli has a catchy pitch: “$20bn in 20 minutes”. It’s a motto for the man who has said he introduced Melania and Donald Trump, and jets between European and Middle Eastern capitals, sometimes alongside top US officials, sometimes next to catwalk models. “My number-one boss is the president of America,” Zampolli told the FT. “I get my instructions from the White House, Commerce and the Department of War . . . anything to advance the America First agenda.” Last week, in his official capacity as US special envoy, Zampolli was with vice-president JD Vance in Hungary, where he cut a deal to sell nuclear energy. A few months earlier, he was in Uzbekistan pushing Boeing planes. “I’ve actually become Boeing’s number-two salesperson in the world, right after the president . . . unpaid, but it’s true,” he said, with a mix of pride and theatrical disbelief. Boeing did not confirm this characterisation of his role. But the line is vintage Zampolli. It captures an archetype for an era of outrageous moneymaking. Zampolli’s evolution from New York socialite and former modelling agent to globetrotting Trump envoy offers a window into how the US president exercises transactional power. Loyalists are deployed as intermediaries in a system where access, relationships and deals often blur into one.

Zampolli’s proximity to power has drawn scrutiny. The New York Times recently reported that he sought help from US immigration authorities in a dispute with his former partner, Amanda Ungaro, a Brazilian national who was ultimately deported. The report suggests Zampolli may have used his ties to the White House to target his former partner of nearly two decades, with whom he is in a custody dispute over their son…

But the recent noise has not hampered Zampolli’s ability to build a role and a business model around facilitating deals for Trump’s America…

Zampolli, characteristically, brushed it aside. “And what does Jeffrey Epstein say [about me]? ‘He’s trouble stay away.’ And sure enough, he hated me. It’s not like the Epstein files revealed, ‘If you want hookers, call Paolo,’ or ‘Paolo is on the island.’ No he never invited me to the island.” In a Trump administration that prizes loyalty and results over process, Zampolli embodies a kind of parallel diplomacy: informal, personality-driven and all about the deals. The effect is the collapse of distinctions that have long underpinned US foreign policy: between statecraft and salesmanship, public office and private network, diplomacy and dealmaking. For Zampolli, there is no contradiction. The pitch remains the same, whether delivered in a Budapest ministry or a Central Asian capital: big numbers, quick timelines and a clear message about how to get what you want.

Stop All American Military Aid to Israel

The Guardian

Charles: Decent people everywhere must denounce the Israeli government and its bloodthirsty genocides.

Bernie Sanders enumerated all of the most important reasons for that in The Guardian.

The time is long overdue for members of Congress to listen to the American people and end US military aid to the extremist Netanyahu government

I am a proud Jewish American. My father fled Poland in 1921 to escape poverty and antisemitism. Those in his family who stayed were murdered by the Nazis. Since childhood, I have known very well where antisemitism, racism, fanaticism and demagoguery lead.

So let me be clear. Speaking out against the horrific and inhumane actions of Israel, and its extremist leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, is not antisemitic. Speaking out about the dangerous and destructive role that Israel plays in shaping US foreign and military policy is not antisemitic. It is, in fact, what every member of Congress and every American should be doing.

On 7 October 2023, Hamas, a terrorist organization, attacked Israel. They killed more than 1,200 innocent men, women and children and took hundreds of hostages. Like any other country, Israel had the absolute right to respond to the Hamas attack. But they did not have the right to violate international law and wage an all-out war of enormous destruction against the entire Palestinian people—in what experts have correctly concluded is a genocide.

They did not have the right, out of a population of 2.2 million, to kill more than 72,000 Palestinians in Gaza and wound over 170,000—the majority of whom are women, children and the elderly. They did not have the right to destroy almost all of Gaza’s infrastructure, including its water and sewer systems and its supply of electricity.

They did not have the right to demolish every one of Gaza’s 12 universities, along with hundreds of schools—dismantling their entire educational system. They did not have the right to damage or destroy over 90% of the housing units in Gaza, resulting in the vast majority of the population now sleeping in tents.

They did not have the right to damage or destroy 94% of the hospitals in Gaza and kill 1,700 healthcare workers. They did not have the right to impose a blockade, which prevented food, water, fuel and medicine from entering Gaza—resulting in thousands of Palestinians being diagnosed with malnutrition and hundreds actually starving to death.

That carnage has not stopped. Despite the so-called “ceasefire”, humanitarian aid is still far below what is needed and Israel continues to kill civilians.

But it’s not just Gaza. In the West Bank, in direct violation of international law that protects Palestinian territory, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed 1,071 Palestinians, including 233 children, since October 2023. During that period, they have demolished more than 6,000 Palestinian homes and established more than 200 new illegal settlements and outposts in Palestinian territory.

This is not just the action of extremist settlers. This is government policy. Netanyahu’s security cabinet has approved the most sweeping changes to the West Bank’s legal status since 1967—removing nearly all constraints on settlement expansion. Netanyahu himself declared: “There will never be a Palestinian state.” His finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, bragged that new settlement construction would “bury” the idea of a Palestinian state.

Trump Strips Miami Charity of Funding to House Migrant Kids

Miami Herald

Scott: Donald Trump: “Nice church you got there, bud, would be a shame if something happened to it.”

The first dispute between Trump and the Catholic Church occurred over the systematic abuse and persecution of immigrants, who the Church rose up to defend.

JD Vance was dispatched to defend Trump against their criticism, and he did so, in his signature baseless manner, by claiming that the Church was motivated not by its pastoral mission but rather by a profit motive associated with its role as a recipient of public funds to provide assistance to refugees, and particularly to children separated from their families.

Following up on this carefully scripted line of attack, Trump is now moving to defund the Catholic Church as a recipient of federal funds for charitable services. The victims, of course, are the children who will now be deprived of these services. The Miami Herald reports:

The Trump administration has abruptly canceled an $11 million contract with Catholic Charities to shelter and care for migrant children who enter the U.S. alone, ending a relationship between the Catholic Church and the U.S. government dating back to the first arrivals of Cuban exiles in South Florida. The development comes amid rising tensions between the administration and American Catholics over President Donald Trump’s heated criticism of the Vatican’s first American pope, Leo XIV. The pontiff has made opposition to the U.S. war with Iran, as well as concern for the welfare of migrants, a cornerstone of his ministry.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, has paid Catholic Charities in Miami for several years to house immigrant children who enter the U.S. without parents or adult supervision. The non-profit operates the equivalent of a federally funded foster care system, separate and apart from state agencies that have custody of abused and neglected children. The federal government reached out to the charity in late March about the cancellation of the funding. The Archdiocese of Miami said late Tuesday that Archbishop Thomas Wenski was not immediately available to discuss the contract’s cancellation or the Trump Administration’s rift with the church. But it shared a statement that Wenski, a longtime immigrant-rights advocate, wrote for the Miami Herald’s editorial board.

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I Almost Never Predict Supreme Court Outcomes. Trump Will Lose This Case.

The New York Times

Charles: Linda Greenhouse is the dean of American Supreme Court reporters. So attention must be paid when she predicts that this Supreme Court is about to do the right thing by upholding two lower Court decisions instead of over-ruling them.

The case before the court will determine the future of the Temporary Protected States of hundreds of thousands of Syrian and Haitian immigrants who could face dire consequences if they were forcibly repatriated to their home countries.

The surprise wasn’t that the Supreme Court last month agreed to decide whether the Trump administration can revoke Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants. Federal District Courts had deemed the revocations improper, and similar cases were pending as Kristi Noem, then the homeland security secretary, methodically revoked or denied extensions of grants of protected status that immigrants had received under previous presidents. The situation seemed tailor-made for the Supreme Court’s intervention.

The surprise in that Supreme Court order lay in what the court didn’t do. The justices turned down the administration’s request for an immediate pause of the district court decisions.

That means that while the Supreme Court considers the cases—Trump v. Miot and Mullin v. Doe have been consolidated for a single argument on April 29—these Haitians and Syrians remain protected against deportation, free to work legally and live openly. In other words, at least for now, they get the benefit of their lower-court victories. That relief is something the Supreme Court has denied other winning parties by routinely granting the administration’s requests to put adverse decisions on hold.

The justices have failed to explain themselves in granting earlier stays and in denying this one. So we are left to guess at their reasoning and to wonder at the apparent unanimity of the latest order, which was issued without noted dissent.

The justices know the Trump administration is going to lose. With that knowledge, granting a stay to enable the deportation of some 350,000 Haitians and more than 6,000 Syrians, who would regain their protected status within months, became unthinkable…

My prediction here rests on one word: procedure.

The records in both the Haitian and Syrian cases reveal a brazen violation of procedural requirements on the part of Ms. Noem. The 1990 law that established the Temporary Protected Status program requires consultation “with appropriate agencies” about conditions in a country before terminating protected status for the country’s nationals. But Ms. Noem “did not consult other agencies at all,” Judge Ana Reyes of Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., found in her opinion in the Haitian case in February…

Procedural irregularity has proved to be the administration’s Achilles’ heel in dozens of adverse court decisions. These are the first such cases to reach the Supreme Court on the merits since Mr. Trump took office again. Being first in line makes these cases even more important than they might appear. The justices’ response to the sordid record of the administration’s behavior will set the tone for the cases to come.

In other words, Greenhouse believes the administration’s violations of the Administrative Procedure Act have been so flagrant in this case, not even this Supreme Court will give Trump a pass this time.

It is devoutly to be wished.

Germany and Ukraine Sign Landmark Defense Pact

MSN

Germany and Ukraine finalized a €4 billion defense deal covering several hundred Patriot missiles, 36 IRIS-T launchers and the joint production of 5,000 artificial intelligence-enabled mid-range strike drones and other advanced systems. This is the latest effect of Donald Trump being flagrantly pro-Vladimir Putin and anti-NATO.

Signed in Berlin by defence ministers Mykhailo Fedorov and Boris Pistorius, the package is described by President Zelenskyy as the largest of its kind in Europe.

Merz suggested this could lead to a European-wide system with Ukraine to strengthen strategic independence.

A key component of the package is a German-financed contract with US defence contractor Raytheon to deliver several hundred Patriot interceptor missiles to Ukraine. Valued at approximately €3.2 billion, the deal will be supported by a new production facility in Germany operated by MBDA Deutschland through the COMLOG joint venture. Germany is also funding about €182 million for additional IRIS-T air defence launchers to bolster protection of Ukrainian infrastructure and cities. DPA International

One plausible outcome is the emergence of a joint Ukraine-Germany defence industrial hub, accelerating Europe’s shift toward rapid, modular weapons production and reinforcing NATO’s eastern flank.

At the Edge of Light

In this photo taken on April 6, 2026, a portion of the Moon’s far side is seen along the terminator—the boundary between lunar day and night—where low-angle sunlight casts long shadows across the surface.

A section of Orientale Basin is visible along the upper right portion of the lunar disk, its structure subtly revealed under grazing illumination. This lighting enhances contrast across the cratered terrain, highlighting variations in surface features and providing insight into the Moon’s geologic history.

Commission of Fine Arts Advances Massive Desecration of Nation’s Capital

NPR

Charles: The Commission of Fine Arts, now staffed entirely by Trump sycophants, including a 26 year-old presidential assistant with no arts experience, voted yesterday to “build a 250-foot ‘victory arch’ at the National Mall that will tower over Arlington National Cemetery and obstruct the sightline to the Lincoln Memorial.”

The president’s signature piece of drek would be two and a half times as tall as the Lincoln.

Watch White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, brimming with the enthusiasm of Leni Riefenstahl over her boss’s newest vanity project.

Your Online Moment of Zen

Guys and Dolls

Charles: The title song of Frank Loesser’s masterpiece inspired by Damon Runyon’s greatest Broadway characters. It opened on Broadway 11 days after my birth and stayed there for 1,200 performances. I fell in love with it five years later and our affair has continued uninterrupted ever since.

Edited by Imogen Sayers.

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Paul Krugman Explains why Hungarian Corruption Gives Hope To America

Charles: Krugman writes: Autocracy and corruption aren’t separate issues. In practice they inevitably go hand in hand. They’re a natural pairing, like crypto and crime, because authoritarian rule removes accountability and opens the door for Grand Theft Autocracy.

What Hungary has shown the world is that autocratic corruption can be a powerful mobilizing issue…

Under Trump II blatant corruption has run wild at the highest levels of government, on a scale like nobody has ever seen before.

Trump and his family have used his office to extract billions in de facto graft, through crypto deals with petro-state autocrats, investments in prediction markets and defense contractors, making sweetheart foreign real estate deals that line up with favorable tariff treatment, soliciting hundreds of millions for Trump vanity projects.

Yahoo News Reports that Trump acolytes lucky enough to be original investors in Trump’s $TRUMP token have now lost 97% of their investment, if they still have it in their portfolio.

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Caveat emptor! Telegraph Sparks A Furor with False Report of Turkey Threatening to Invade Israel

Charles: The Hindu Times reports The Telegraph has apologized for a false report that Turkey was threatening to invade Israel. The Jerusalem Post picked up the story before Ankara called it “entirely unfounded.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has, however, frequently compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Hitler since the beginning of Israel’s war in Gaza. In a 2024 speech to the UN General Assembly, the Turkish president urged the world to stop Netanyahu just as Hitler was stopped 81 years ago.

China Supplies Iran With Spy Satellites

Financial Times

Trump this morning in an interview with Maria Bartiromo: “President Xi just wrote me a beautiful letter. He responded to a letter I wrote because I had heard that China is giving weapons to Iran. I wrote him a letter asking him not to do that. And he wrote me a letter saying that essentially he’s not going that.”

Meanwhile an investigation by the Financial Times concludes:

Iran secretly acquired a Chinese spy satellite that gave the Islamic republic a powerful new capability to target US military bases across the Middle East during the recent war, according to a Financial Times investigation. Leaked Iranian military documents show the satellite, known as TEE-01B, was acquired by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Aerospace Force in late 2024 after it was launched into space from China. Time-stamped coordinate lists, satellite imagery and orbital analysis show that Iranian military commanders later tasked the satellite to monitor key US military sites. The images were taken in March before and after drone and missile strikes on those locations. TEE-01B was built and launched by Earth Eye Co, a Chinese company that says it offers “in-orbit delivery”, a little-known export model under which spacecraft launched in China are transferred to overseas customers after reaching orbit. As part of the agreement, the IRGC was granted access to commercial ground stations operated by Emposat, a Beijing-based provider of satellite control and data services with a global network spanning Asia, Latin America and other regions.

The use of a Chinese-built satellite by the IRGC during a war where Tehran has repeatedly targeted its neighbors with missiles and drones is likely to be highly sensitive across the region. China is the largest trading partner of the Gulf countries and is the largest buyer of their oil. The logs show that the satellite captured images of Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia on March 13, 14 and 15. On March 14, US President Donald Trump confirmed US planes at the base had been hit. Five US Air Force refuelling planes were damaged. The satellite also conducted surveillance of the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan and locations close to the US Fifth Fleet naval base in Manama, Bahrain, and Erbil airport, Iraq, around the time of IRGC-claimed attacks on facilities in those areas. Other areas surveilled by the satellite included Camp Buehring and Ali Al Salem air base in Kuwait, the Camp Lemonnier US military base in Djibouti and Duqm International Airport in Oman. Gulf civilian infrastructure monitored included the Khor Fakkan container port area and the Qidfa power and desalination plant in the United Arab Emirates, as well as the Alba facility in Bahrain — one of the world’s largest aluminium smelters.

It appears that Trump was briefed by the US intelligence community on the move and that he decided the proper response was a “nice letter to Xi.” He uncritically accepted Xi’s assurances of non-involvement, just as he uncritically accepted Putin’s denial that Russia was assisting Iran in the targeting of US military personnel and equipment. For Trump, criticism from Pope Leo is far more troubling than Russia and China guiding Iranian missiles and drones down on US service personnel.

Meanwhile, 50% of Americans approve of Trump’s performance on national security questions, while 43% disapprove, making this Trump’s sole net positive polling issue, according to a Morning Consult poll from early April. This results from US broadcast media giving Trump overwhelmingly favorable and uncritical coverage on his military misadventures.

The International Space Station Transits the Moon

Keighley Rockcliffe:

This is an image of the International Space Station (ISS) as it begins to transit in front of the Moon. The ISS is in low-Earth orbit (LEO) where it wizzes around the Earth every 90 minutes. Orbiting the Earth 16 times per day for 25 years, the ISS has photobombed many familiar celestial objects including Venus, Mars, Saturn, and the Sun. Thousands of experiments led by researchers from over one hundred countries have been conducted on the ISS. Growing protein crystals in low gravity was one of the first experiments onboard the ISS and continues to contribute to new medical treatments. ISS astronauts study plant growth, water recycling, human health, and more to support the Artemis missions which will take humans farther than they’ve ever gone before. Next time you are out and about at night, try to spot the ISS zooming across the sky!

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War Fever

“One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation, we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we’re profoundly virtuous. Sweet and decorous to murder, lie, torture for the sake of the fatherland.”

-Aldous Huxley, Eyeless In Gaza

H/t John Loughery

The Voice of Reason on Late Night Since 1999

The Daily Show

Jon Stewart: Trump’s invincibility is being slowly eroded by world events and his own heart’s ability to clear liquid from his capillaries

We must embrace these moments of light and hope and oxygen.

There Goes The Neighborhood:

All the Neighborhoods

The Guardian

Charles: The critical Atlantic current system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the biggest slowdown are the most realistic. Scientists called the new finding “very concerning” as a collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system and was already known to be at its weakest for 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis. Scientists spotted warning signs of a tipping point in 2021 and know that the Amoc has collapsed in the Earth’s past.

The Amoc is a major part of the global climate system and brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. A collapse would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50-100cm to already rising sea levels around the Atlantic.

Your Online Moment of Zen

San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk

Claude Monet

Venice 1908

The New York Times

Charles: As everything happening on the ground in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon makes the possibility of a peaceful outcome feel permanently out of reach, two courageous survivors of this —one Palestinian and one Jew—have just published a new book that beseeches all of us to imagine a better world.

Maoz Inon’s parents were killed on Oct. 7, 2023 in the massacre at Netiv HaAsara, the closest Jewish community to the Gaza Strip. His co-author, Aziz Abu Sarah, was first shot at by Israeli soldiers when he was “seven or eight.” Then, when he was nine, his beloved elder brother Tayseer was arrested by the Israeli military and accused of throwing rocks at soldiers. According to Abu Sarah, the interrogators “beat and tortured him” and Tayseer later died from “untreated trauma to his internal organs.”

The two authors had only met once when the Palestinian reached out to Inon days after the massacre committed by Hamas with a simple text “Maoz, I’m so sorry to hear about your parents.” At practically the same moment, Maoz’s younger brother asked his whole family to reject revenge—“because avenging the death of our parents is not going to bring them back to life.”

After that, Inon and Sarah both quickly promised to renounce violence and devote themselves to peace. Their efforts have attracted praise from the current Pope and his predecessor, and, when their book was published this week, Fintan O’Toole immediately praised it in The New York Times as

an immensely poignant account of a shared journey across Israel and the West Bank…It remains true to the horror while refusing to be defeated by it. It is raw with pain and rage and yet bravely insistent on the imperative of hope…

As they travel . . . from Inon’s parents’ burned-out home, through Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank and on to the Sea of Galilee, the sharing of personal experiences of suffering gives a common shape to their successively related chapters.

Abu Sarah writes: “Many Palestinians fear that acknowledging the horror of the Holocaust is tantamount to excusing the Nakba and the occupation of our land. They have a fear of acknowledging any Jewish pain at all, regardless of whether it was caused by Nazis or by Palestinians. It’s the same for Jewish Israelis who don’t know the history of the Nakba. They fear that if they acknowledge Palestinians’ suffering, it will absolve Hamas of its horrific deeds. But this mind-set keeps us trapped in endless violence.”

Last night Jon Stewart invited the authors on to The Daily Show for a 20-minute interview. Stewart called their book a “beautiful testament [to their] friendship and their pilgrimage.”

In British Parliament, Sir Ed Davey calls Trump a ‘dangerous and corrupt gangster’

Daily Express

Scott: Question time in the House of Commons can produce some remarkable repartee. On Monday, Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey took to the floor to urge cancellation of King Charles’ planned visit to the United States.

Ed Davey lambasted Donald Trump in the House of Commons today, accusing the US President of being a “dangerous and corrupt gangster”. The leader of the Liberal Democrats made the comments as he called on the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, to advise King Charles to cancel his upcoming visit to the United States, marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

It comes amid the fallout from the US and Israel’s deeply controversial war in Iran, which began in late February and led to Tehran effectively closing the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping route in the oil trade. In the weeks that followed, Trump has bashed Britain and other NATO allies for not joining the conflict as he comes under pressure to de-escalate. Trump sparked further fury with a chilling threat to Iran ahead of the start of a two-week ceasefire between the two nations that’s now in effect. In a post on Truth Social, the President said: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to ​be brought back ​again. I don’t want that ‌to ⁠happen, but it probably will.”

Addressing the Commons, Mr Davey said they were words “I never thought I would hear from an American president”.

“And though Donald Trump thankfully didn’t follow through this time, these words are a stark reminder of how reckless, immoral, and completely outside the bounds of international law this President is,” he added.

“Regrettably, he is no friend of the United Kingdom, he is no leader of the free world, he is a dangerous and corrupt gangster, and that is how we must treat him.

Easy Come, Easy Go

The Guardian

Charles: Exactly one week after Bloomberg published a transcript of a phone call in which Viktor Orbán likened his relationship with Vladimir Putin to that of a mouse with a lion, and one day after Orbán lost in the most exciting electoral wipeout in recent European history, the Kremlin insisted it was never really attached to its Hungarian puppet at all.

“We were never friends with Orbán,” declared Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov.

Analysis Shows US Has Adopted Israeli ‘Double Tap’ Strike

New Lines Magazine

Scott: A striking number of emergency medical personnel are being killed in both Iran and Lebanon as a result of the use of a ‘double tap’ strike technique. After a first strike on the target, the attackers then wait until medical and rescue personnel have rushed to the scene before striking a second time. The technique is harshly criticized by medical groups and international humanitarian law experts as a conscious targeting of medical personnel which is forbidden under international law. And now both Israel and the US are using this approach.

Centcom [U.S. Central Command] said they hit 13,000 targets in just over a month. We’ve been documenting U.S. wars for more than a decade now. In the most intense period of fighting in the war against ISIS [the Islamic State group] — that second-phase, really intense heavy fighting period — they were averaging about 800 targets a month, across both Iraq and Syria,” said Emily Tripp, the executive director of Airwars. “There’s a certain inevitability about [civilian] harm given the scale.”

Taken together, the cases we documented reveal that the U.S. and Israel have employed so-called “double-tap strikes” in their campaign in Iran. The attacks, which involve aircraft bombing a site and then conducting further strikes, usually after civilians and medical personnel have gathered to rescue survivors, have been a consistent feature of the Russian war on Ukraine and Israel’s war on Gaza, and the tactic was repeatedly used by Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Experts say the strikes show a callous disregard for civilians by the U.S. and Israel, and may show a pattern of seeking to inflict harm on Iranians.

On April 2, videos posted online showed airstrikes on a bridge under construction in Karaj, a city northwest of Tehran in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains. Families had gathered near the bridge to mark Sizdah Bedar, an annual Iranian festival held on the 13th day of Nowruz. Marking the end of the Persian New Year celebrations, Sizdah Bedar is a day when Iranians spend time outside, picnicking and welcoming in the beauty of a new season. But in a year when Nowruz had already been marked by so much grief, Sizdah Bedar in Karaj ended in tragedy.

New Lines verified at least seven munitions striking the Bilqan B1 Bridge in Karaj. According to independent investigator and weapons specialist Leone Hadavi, these are consistent with precision-guided 2,000-pound bombs.

Wes Bryant, a former U.S. Air Force Special Operations targeting expert and former chief of civilian harm assessments at the Pentagon, also identified the use of these bombs in this strike. “This is even less of an excuse than launching Tomahawks from hundreds of miles away, where you don’t have a drone or other footage overhead in real time. There’s a capability now in this strike, and all these strikes, to have real-time characterization of the target area via that pilot before a strike is conducted, and then certainly with a reattack,” he said.

If you want to learn more about what’s happening on the ground in Lebanon, listen to our podcast episode with Abdi Latif Dahir.

The Horton-Kaiser Report

LISTEN: Israel's War on Lebanon with Abdi Latif Dahir

Yesterday, Israel marked the implementation of a ceasefire agreement, which as announced explicitly included Lebanon—it also marked heaviest day’s bombardment of the country since the war began. Israel’s attacks had a focus on the heavily populated, mixed commercial and residential, center of the city of Beirut—an area which the International Committee …

Listen now

17 days ago · 6 likes · Scott Horton, Charles Kaiser, and Imogen Sayers

Advantage China: How China Emerges from Trump’s Chaos as the Decisive Winner

Financial Times

Scott: Through a series of colossally destructive steps, including incomprehensible tariffs, trade wars, threats against historical allies, and most recently wars and threats of war against Iran, Venezuela, Canada, Mexico, Greenland, Nigeria and a host of other nations, Trump has established himself as a chaos agent without equal on the global stage. But one nation has not simply weathered Trump’s storm but has actually figured out how to reap enormous benefit from it: China.

In a remarkable essay coupled with impressive graphics, the Financial Times has examined China’s formula for success and explained how the Middle Kingdom now stands poised to exercise global commercial dominance at a level once exercised by the United States—which turns out to be the principal victim of Trump’s antics.

Huang Xian’s product is about the size of his fist, a sensor that detects electrical current leakage and slots into electric vehicle chargers as a safety guard between the car and the grid. The device is not just a symbol of the innovation and accomplishments of China’s high-tech sector. It also reflects a trend eviscerating high-end manufacturing across the world, to the near despair of governments from Asia to Europe and beyond. The EV boom has propelled Huang’s sensor shipments to a projected 10mn units this year, up from about 20,000 in 2019, when his company Mega-Senway Electronic Technology entered the market. Back then it was still a niche product, supplied by a handful of German and Swiss groups that sold the sensors for roughly Rmb200 (around $30) — or more per unit. Mega-Senway made its first sensors for about Rmb40 each and sold them for Rmb100, leaving Huang with a healthy margin. As Chinese competition poured in, prices started to fall. European groups gradually exited the market. Huang’s Shanghai-based company now sells some sensors for as little as Rmb10 a pop. “We never thought the price decline would happen this fast,” he says. His company’s trajectory is emblematic of the larger economic forces reshaping global industry and trade as extraordinarily competitive Chinese companies push into a variety of industries at dizzying speed. Twenty years ago the global economy was shaken by a first “China shock” as a wave of low-cost goods destroyed the business models of manufacturers in advanced economies, displacing millions of workers and feeding discontent that fueled populist politicians including US President Donald Trump. Now a second shock is under way — one that is even more threatening to China’s trading partners: an assault on high-end manufacturing…

In China, there is a word that has come to describe the phenomenon: neijuan, or involution — a term that has become shorthand for a competitive dynamic in which everyone runs harder and harder for diminishing returns. It forces companies like Mega-Senway to move fast. Huang explains how they cut their own costs so dramatically over just a few years. First they acquired the factory that manufactured the sensors they designed. Then he visited nearby factories to study their best practices. A worker testing their finished sensors initially did it one at a time, he says. Huang redesigned the testing jigs to test four at a time, then eight, with a worker constantly loading or unloading batches. Now he has replaced the workers with robotic arms. “We would update our processes two or three times a year,” Huang says. “The pressure came that fast.”

China has ramped up market share in industries ranging from solar to shipbuilding and steel

And is gaining global share in cars and machine tools

Overall, China is trading more with the world

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The Iran War: Winners and Losers

Financial Times, New York Times & Associated Press

Scott: The Roman pontiff heard his call to the priesthood in studying the writings of the greatest African doctor of the church, St Augustine of Hippo. And today he uses a pilgrimage to Augustine’s birthplace, then in the Roman province of Nomidia, and now in Algeria, to make some points about just and unjust wars. Augustine believed that war is an unavoidable part of the human condition, that it accentuated the injustices of any society afflicted by it, and that leaders involved in wars needed to be conscious of that fact and work against it. Today our newspapers have reports on the victims of war, but we should pause to think also about the less-obvious winners and losers—those who profit from war, and those who suffer less obviously through economic distress.

First, the Financial Times reports today on how American financial institutions are poised to achieve bumper profits as a result of the war on Iran:

Volatile markets helped drive a rise in first-quarter profits at three of Wall Street’s biggest banks, as their trading businesses benefited from the geopolitical upheaval.

JP Morgan reported net income of $16.5bn, up from $14.6bn a year ago and the bank’s second-best quarter ever.

Chief executive Jamie Dimon said the US economy “remained resilient” even as concerns mount about the effect of higher oil prices.

At Citigroup, profits rose 42% year on year to $5.8bn, also beating expectations. Citi’s shares rose to their highest level since the financial crisis after its results.

Second, the Associated Press reports on how Trump’s sons—known in the marketplace as Uday and Qusay—are poised to reap immense profits from an investment in a drone-producing company that sells its wares to Gulf states seeking new protective systems against Iranian missiles and drones:

A drone maker backed by President Donald Trump’s two oldest sons is trying to sell to Gulf countries while they are under attack by Iran and dependent on the U.S. military led by their father.

The sales drive by Florida-based Powerus—which announced a deal last month to bring aboard Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.—positions the company to potentially benefit from a war that their father began.

“These countries are under enormous pressure to buy from the sons of the president so he will do what they want,” said Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush. “This is going to be the first family of a president to make a lot of money off war—a war he didn’t get the consent of Congress for.”

Powerus co-founder Brett Velicovich told The Associated Press that the company is making sales pitches that include drone demonstrations in several Gulf countries to show how its defensive drone interceptors could help them ward off Iranian attacks.

Finally, the New York Times reports on the plight of hundreds of thousands of guest workers in Dubai who are imperiled—largely as a result of the sudden collapse of Dubai’s once booming hospitality industry because of the war.

When the war with Iran began in late February, customers hunting for bargains on designer wares stopped coming to the Outlet Mall Dubai and a saleswoman named Marjorie was forced to go on leave for a month.

Two weeks later, she said, her furlough was extended until June 1 without pay.

“All we do is worry about this situation and think ‘What if they repatriate us?’” Marjorie, a 32-year-old migrant worker from the Philippines, said in a recent interview. “If this continues for three months, maybe we will go back.”

The United Arab Emirates and its major metropolis, Dubai, have been spared much of the destruction and casualties that other countries in the region have suffered in the war. That is thanks largely to the interception of most of the drones and missiles that Iran has fired at it—more than 2,500—in retaliation for the assault launched by the United States and Israel.

The war has nevertheless taken a toll on the economy in Dubai, one of the major financial powerhouses in the region, and especially on the tourism and hospitality industries. Many expatriate residents have fled the country and tourists have largely stayed away.

Every war has winners and losers. But, when the instigators of the war are individuals who reap personal profit from it, that is a moral issue which requires special attention.

Three Nuclear Powers Are Involved in the Gulf War (And Iran Isn’t One of Them)

Drop Site News

Scott: Supposedly, Trump’s Iran War is all about stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons. But a significant community of national security experts are convinced that, to the contrary, everything Trump has done is likely to hasten nuclear proliferation and make a nuclear exchange far more likely in the coming years.

It’s essential to recognize going into a study of this conflict that three nuclear powers are already implicated in it: the United States, Israel… and Pakistan, the possessor of the “Islamic bomb,” which is currently attempting to facilitate talks between the United States and Iran. Pakistan’s implication comes through a recently concluded mutual defense agreement between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the details of which have long been sketchy. But Drop Site News offers some new detail:

On Saturday, as Pakistan was in the middle of mediating hard-won ceasefire talks between the U.S. and Iran, Saudi Arabia made a sudden revelation that appeared to undermine Pakistan’s status as a neutral host. In a statement posted on X, the Saudi Ministry of Defense announced “the arrival of a military force from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan at King Abdulaziz Air Base in the Eastern Sector,” adding that the force would include a contingent of military aircraft and would improve “operational readiness between the armed forces of the two countries.”

Those deployments are the result of a defense pact signed last year between Riyadh and Islamabad that has now been activated amid an ongoing regional war and numerous Iranian attacks against military and energy targets in Saudi Arabia.

Ceasefire talks collapsed over the weekend in Pakistan, with the American delegation leaving without an agreement. But Pakistan is far from out of the picture; secret documents obtained by Drop Site News reveal the extent to which Pakistan is committed by treaty to potentially become a participant in the war it was attempting to mediate.

The details of the Pakistan–Saudi Arabia defense agreement have never been made public or even reviewed by Pakistan’s parliament. They are being reported here for the first time based on an archive of classified documents about the pact obtained by Drop Site.

The risk that Pakistan may itself be pushed into the war is also important context for the zeal of Pakistan’s leaders to bring an end to the fighting. Pakistan enjoys good ties with both Iran and the U.S., and relies heavily on financial support from Saudi Arabia. Following news that the United Arab Emirates had recalled a loan from Pakistan last week, Saudi Arabia and Qatar stepped up with $5 billion aimed at propping up Islamabad’s foreign reserves as it deals with fallout from the economic crisis caused by the war…

The classified 2005 agreement—a copy of which was obtained by Drop Site—states that the goal of the MCA is “to develop and strengthen cooperation in the military field between the two countries through expansion in areas such as training, deputation of personnel, defense production and transfer of technology, exchange of experience, purchase of weapons, equipment, spare parts and military medical services.” The document also includes provisions allowing for both parties to amend and expand the pact over time.

While the 2005 agreement was significant, it limited the scope of the bilateral military relationship to cooperation in training and equipment sharing. It did not obligate Pakistan to engage in actual military action or assume responsibility for the defense of Saudi Arabia.

The Long Wispy Tail of Comet R3

Why does Comet R3 (PanSTARRS) have a wispy tail? The newest bright member of the inner Solar System, Comet C/2025 R3 (PanSTARRS) is already extending an impressive stream of glowing gas. This tail starts from an unseen central nucleus of dirty ice that is likely a few kilometers across. The nucleus is warmed by the Sun and emits a cloud of neutral gas into a coma that glows light green. Nuclear gas ionized by energetic sunlight is pushed away from the Sun by the solar wind into an ion tail that glows light blue. The wispy nature of the ion tail is caused by the constantly changing structure of the solar wind. Pictured from Rhode Island, USA two days ago, Comet R3 (PanSTARRS) shows off a many-degree ion tail. Comet R3 (PanSTARRS) is best seen before dawn from northern skies for another 10 days, after which it will be best visible from southern skies.

Stop the ‘Space Race’

Nature

Scott: Shouldn’t all humankind cooperate in a reach for the stars?

Why has international cooperation that was once normal and commonplace, even during the Cold War, ground to a stop under Putin, Trump and Xi? That question isn’t asked strongly enough. Although led by NASA, Artemis II wasn’t just a US achievement; the mission was a collaborative effort, just barely, with Canada paying full freight. As the Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot taught us, nationalism needs to be held in check when it comes to science, because scientific endeavor must be for all humankind, if the species is to survive.

The Artemis II mission showed the world what curiosity and collaboration can achieve. It was not, strictly speaking, a scientific flight, yet it demonstrated some of the best aspects of science. Despite the conflicts and other challenges that humanity is facing on Earth, Artemis II was a global project, driven by a shared spirit of discovery.

Although NASA was at the controls, Artemis II was a multinational endeavour. The European Space Agency’s service module provided the power and propulsion needed to keep NASA’s Orion capsule going. The Canadian Space Agency cheered the presence of its astronaut, Jeremy Hansen, on board. And the space agencies of South Africa, Australia and other nations contributed tracking and other data to help monitor the spacecraft during its flight.

Staying connected

Throughout the mission — and in contrast to overtly political statements made by NASA’s administrator, Jared Isaacman — the Artemis II astronauts emphasized that they were flying not for the United States or Canada, but for all of humanity. Crew member Christina Koch reiterated the message of human connectivity after the astronauts briefly lost contact with Earth as they traversed the far side of the Moon and began their voyage home. “We will always choose each other,” she said. It was a powerful message.

Human space flight has always been a polarizing issue, with some in favour and others opposed. Today, robots can accomplish many of the goals of space exploration, making it unnecessary to endanger human lives…

Space scientists need to lean further into global collaboration. Space agencies, including those of China, India, South Korea and Japan, have been successfully exploring the Moon using robotic orbiters and landers in recent years. Researchers should continue to collaborate on scientific discovery missions and on analysing the lunar samples being brought back to Earth by various programmes.

This is also the time to demonstrate good stewardship of the Moon. As aerospace engineer Moriba Jah writes in a World view column, the governments and companies involved in lunar exploration must, at a minimum, accept that the Moon’s surface belongs to all of humanity (M. Jah Nature 652, 275; 2026). NASA and its international partners need to strengthen their commitment to the general principles laid out in the Artemis Accords, a non-binding set of principles, signed by 61 nations, for safe and sustainable lunar exploration.

Your Online Moment of Zen

This Boy

Charles: Early magnificence from the Fab Four. In England this was the flip side of I Want to Hold Your Hand. In the first of an endless series of indefensible decisions by Capitol Records, it was replaced for the American B-side with I Saw Her Standing There.

There is no Beatles song more important to me than this one. It never appeared on a Parlophone Album until Past Masters was released (as two CD’s) in 1988.

The Horton-Kaiser Report is edited by Imogen Sayers.

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The New York Times

Charles: In a guest essay for the Times, Gaza-based journalist Ghada Abdulfattah uses her words to paint a landscape of unrelenting horror: a place where a ceasefire still doesn’t mean the end of random murder by the Israelis. Israeli drones still hover all night, almost every building is destroyed, almost every Palestinian family decimated.

Rubble isn’t just a grave for people in Gaza. It’s a grave for our futures… Here, war has only changed form. It manifests in the smaller wars that repeat in our lives every day. Life in Gaza is lived in fragments: searching for water, charging a phone, cooking on a fire when fuel is available, checking the news, waiting. What exists now is not a return to normal life but a warped version of it—where the mundane persits alongside the unbearable… We are alive, but there’s no going back to once upon a time. We are learning how to live in the in-between.

Hamas’s vicious attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023 was a war crime. It did not justify the vastly larger war crimes Israel continues to carry out in Gaza, in the West Bank and in Lebanon.

Péter Magyar is pro-EU, but is likely to prove a tough partner

Süddeutsche Zeitung

Scott: Hungary’s centrist opposition managed to convert the spirit of the country 1956 uprising into a powerful campaign weapon that had resonance all across the country’s rural nationalist countryside that—up until this election—had supported Viktor Orbán and Fidesz. With the rise of the Tisza Party, the European Union can breathe a sigh of relief, but this doesn’t mean there will be no conflicts.

Still, at the moment it’s Donald Trump and Valdimir Putin who should be worried. In his first press conference, Péter Magyar noted that Orban’s foreign minister, who had gone missing after a series of embarrassing leaks of his private chats with Putin’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov—in which he shared state secrets and sought instruction—had resurfaced in the foreign ministry and was seen barricaded behind closed doors shredding documents. What’s in those documents? Dealings with the Kremlin no doubt. But something else. A well-placed Hungarian diplomat tells me that a careful audit of funds moved through the Danube Foundation and other Orbán GONGOS will show that they were used to launder payments to an array of persons and entities around Trump, including the now disaffected Tucker Carlson, The Heritage Foundation and a host of social media figures, some of whom were caught earlier taking money from the Kremlin. Orbán was also busy funding “populist” groups around the world. And he was laundering money from the Kremlin. We’ll see if this pans out, because now an audit will indeed take place.

Even under Magyar, Hungary will not be among Ukraine’s staunchest supporters.

Magyar has already announced that he intends to largely continue Viktor Orbán’s migration policy. Since the rest of the EU has, in recent years, at least moved closer to Orbán’s stance, this is unlikely to cause any major friction initially.

Once Magyar takes office, the focus will primarily shift to financial matters. Magyar must first fulfill his campaign pledges—something that is only possible with the currently frozen EU funding. He will presumably insist on being treated in the same manner as Donald Tusk. Following Tusk’s election victory in late 2023, the EU released previously frozen regional development funds to the Polish Prime Minister, even though he had merely initiated—but not yet fully implemented—the judicial independence reforms demanded by the EU.

One of Magyar’s first official acts regarding European policy will involve addressing the €90 bn designated for Ukraine. Even under his leadership, the Hungarian government will not rank among Kyiv’s most ardent supporters. “No one wants a pro-Ukrainian government”—such sentiments were frequently heard during Magyar’s campaign appearances. In the European Parliament—where he currently serves as an MEP—Magyar voted against the €90 bn loan package for Kyiv. Furthermore, in confidential discussions, representatives of the Tisza Party have indicated that the release of these funds will not be a foregone conclusion. They have therefore advised their European partners to prepare contingency plans.

This is primarily due to the timeline involved. The first tranches of the EU loan were actually supposed to have been transferred already, but Orbán held up the disbursement, claiming that Ukraine was blocking the Druzhba oil pipeline from Russia—a vital link for Hungary. With this loan, the EU is assuming almost sole responsibility for financing Ukraine following the withdrawal of American support. At the EU summit in December, the heads of state and government had unanimously decided to lend money to Kyiv and to back the loan using the joint EU budget. The Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary had supported this decision on the condition that they would not be held liable.

One area where Magyar and the EU will see eye-to-eye, however: aggressive pursuit of the fraud and embezzlement cases in which the EU suspects Orbán and figures close to him mismanaged EU monies.

Péter Magyar Is A Fine Role Model for the Next Democratic President of the United States

The Guardian

Charles: This is the housecleaning America will also require:

Hungary’s prime minister-elect, Péter Magyar, has pledged to pursue those who “plundered, looted, betrayed, indebted and ruined” his country, promising “a new era” after a landslide election victory over his far-right predecessor Viktor Orbán.

Magyar, whose centre-right Tisza party won at least 138 of the 199 seats in parliament, said the full election results should be confirmed by 4 May and he hoped his government could be installed the next day.

“Our country has no time to waste,” he said during a wide-ranging press conference on Monday. “We will do everything in our power to ensure this truly marks the beginning of a new era … The Hungarian people didn’t vote for a simple change of government, but for a complete change of regime.”

Although Orbán was easily the most corrupt politician in the EU, Trump as easily bested him with the billions his current term in the White House has already brought him.

Pope Leo: I have ‘No Fear’ of Trump

Financial Times

Scott: Embarking on a visit to Africa, Pope Leo offered remarks that seemed to perfectly mirror remarks of Pope John Paul II to his fellow Poles. At the height of a vicious crackdown against the Solidarity labor movement and pro-democracy demonstrations, in 1979, the first Polish pope visited students in his home town of Krakow and told them “Do not be afraid.” Pope Leo’s remarks were directed to his fellow Americans.

Speaking on Monday at the start of a trip to Africa, Pope Leo said he had “no fear . . . of the Trump administration”, adding that he would continue speaking out “loudly against war”. The declaration comes after Trump accused Pope Leo, the first American pope, of being “weak” on crime and “terrible” for foreign policy. In a Truth Social post late on Sunday, Trump said the pope should stop “catering to the Radical Left and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician”. “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon,” Trump posted. “I don’t want a Pope who criticises the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do.” Pope Leo has been outspoken in his criticism of the US-Israeli war against Iran, describing Trump’s threat last week to wipe out Iranian civilisation as “truly unacceptable”.

At a worldwide peace vigil at St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City on Saturday, the Pope warned of a “delusion of omnipotence” that is “becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive”. Although he did not mention the war in Iran directly, his remarks were interpreted as some of his most critical of every uttered about a US president.

It should be noted that Trump misstated the Vatican position on nuclear weapons, which opposes their proliferation and seeks their control and destruction. It should also be noted that Pope Leo’s position on the war on Iran is shared by an overwhelming majority of his fellow Americans.

Today’s Dose of Trump Sacrilege Comes in Technicolor

The Washington Post

Charles: It lasted twelve hours on the sewer which is Trump’s Truth Social feed. The Washington Post reported:

“I don’t know if the President thought he was being funny or if he is under the influence of some substance or what possible explanation he could have for this OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy,” wrote Megan Basham, a prominent conservative Protestant Christian writer and commentator. “But he needs to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness from the American people and then from God.”

Asked about the post Monday afternoon, Trump said he posted it.

“I thought it was me as a doctor, and had to do with the Red Cross, as a Red Cross worker, which we support,” Trump said. In the photo, Trump’s clothing is reminiscent of clothing worn in Jesus’ time and does not appear to be an outfit a modern doctor would wear. There is no reference in the photo to the Red Cross.

This comes after Pope Leo said in an address on Jan. 9th to the diplomatic corps that “war is back in vogue” and that unnamed powers had “completely undermined” the post-World War II order. Such a mentality, Leo said, “gravely threatens the rule of law.”

The Washington Post reported the Pentagon then summoned a top Vatican official to voice its unhappiness.

In light of the pope’s comments, the Department of War officials “attempted to justify [their] military activity” and sought to frame American force as “a legitimate path to peace,” said one person who spoke with people who attended the Pentagon meeting. That pitch, the person said, surfaced “contrasting views as to the role and purposes of war” from both sides. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Two days ago Trump renewed his attack on the Pope: “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.”

“He talks about ‘fear’ of the Trump Administration, but doesn’t mention the FEAR that the Catholic Church, and all other Christian Organizations, had during COVID when they were arresting priests, ministers, and everybody else, for holding Church Services, even when going outside, and being ten and even twenty feet apart.”

The Pope shot back on Monday:

I’m not afraid of the Trump administration or of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel, which is what the Church works for. We are not politicians. We do not look at foreign policy from the same perspective that he may have. I will continue to speak out strongly against war, seeking to promote peace, promoting dialogue and multilateralism among states to find solutions to problems.”

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Blockade Wars: The Escalation Trap at Work

Der Spiegel

Scott: Donald Trump responded to failed talks in Islamabad with a Twitter announcement that he would now blockade the Strait of Hormuz, to match the de-facto Iranian blockade and to insure that no Iranian oil could escape the Gulf. In so doing, he reversed himself on a policy premise for the third time in the course of a single week. And he did so without consulting any allies, whose assistance he demanded just the same. Within 36 hours, a response was in, and there were no takers. “It would help if he would for once ask us to help him in a way that wasn’t blatantly illegal,” says one NATO ally, citing the maritime law which forbids such blockades in the absence of a United Nations Security Council mandate. German newspaper Der Spiegel interviews Israeli analyst Danny (Dennis) Citrinowicz about all of this.

Citrinowicz: It is unlikely that Iran will back down. It is more probable that the regime in Tehran will target American naval units. Furthermore, they could attack infrastructure designed to bypass the Strait of Hormuz—such as pipelines like the East-West Corridor in Saudi Arabia. Such a move would drive global oil prices sky-high, with immediate and far-reaching consequences for the global economy. The Yemeni Houthis, who are allied with Iran, could blockade the Bab al-Mandab strait—thereby blocking another strategically vital maritime chokepoint for global trade.

SPIEGEL: Trump told Fox News: “I predict that they will come back and give us everything we want.” How much pressure can the U.S. actually exert through this blockade?

Citrinowicz: Trump does not want to return to war. He believes that this blockade can ultimately force an agreement on American terms. But he is wrong about that.

SPIEGEL: Why?

Citrinowicz: Even after five weeks of intense fighting, the U.S. administration still seems to be missing a fundamental point: Iran is not Venezuela. Closing the Strait of Hormuz will not force Iran to capitulate. What five weeks of sustained airstrikes failed to achieve, maritime pressure alone is unlikely to accomplish. No threat will compel the current Iranian leadership to accept terms dictated by Washington. If Trump wants an agreement, he must make compromises and move closer to the Iranian position.

Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate

New York Times

Scott: Peter Baker assesses the political banter over Trump’s mental health. He lines up all the quotes, and they’re impressive. But there’s a fundamental question about the professional journalistic standards of such a piece. Having a man who is experiencing mental health issues in charge of one of the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals could be an existential threat to humanity, that’s the situation in which America and the world presently sit. It’s also something that can’t be properly addressed by a group of political hacks on a he said-she said-they said basis. It calls for medical professionals who are capable of observing the conduct of a public figure over protracted periods and come to some conclusions, even if they can’t constitute a diagnosis because of professional restrictions like the Goldwater Rule.

President Trump’s erratic behavior and extreme comments in recent days and weeks have turbocharged the crazy-like-a-fox or just-plain-crazy debate that has followed him on the national political stage for a decade.

A series of disjointed, hard-to-follow and sometimes-profane statements capped by his “a whole civilization will die tonight” threat to wipe Iran off the map last week and his head-spinning attack on the “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” Pope on Sunday night have left many with the impression of a deranged autocrat mad with power.

The White House rejected such assessments, saying that Mr. Trump is sharp and keeping his opponents on edge. But the president’s eruptions have raised questions about America’s leadership in a time of war. While the country has had presidents whose capacity came under question before, most recently the octogenarian Joseph R. Biden Jr. as he aged demonstrably before the public’s eyes, never in modern times has the stability of a president been so publicly and forensically debated—and with such profound consequences.

Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who recently broke with Mr. Trump, advocated using the 25th Amendment, telling CNN that threatening to destroy Iran’s civilization was “not tough rhetoric, it’s insanity.” Candace Owens, the far-right podcaster, called him “a genocidal lunatic.” Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars, said Mr. Trump “does babble and sounds like the brain’s not doing too hot.”

Europe’s far right questions merits of Trump ties after Orbán defeat

Financial Times

Scott: The complete electoral collapse of Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party has come as a shock to the right-wing populist parties across Europe that he helped launch and finance, and for whom he was an important model.

These same parties are now taking a close look at the electoral toxicity of Donald Trump and JD Vance. True, Trump and his MAGA movement and State Department have pulled out all the stops to fund and promote them, but then Trump is someone who now seems hellbent on launching wars all over the world on no or little pretext.

The move to distance themselves is now well underway.

The far-right Alternative for Germany has traded blows over the wisdom of building ties with Donald Trump after the defeat of Viktor Orbán, with some claiming that the US president’s support for the Hungarian leader had backfired. AfD lawmaker Matthias Moosdorf, a US-sceptic with close ties to Russia, said that the “ostentatious friendship” with Trump and vice-president JD Vance had “hung like millstones around Orbán’s neck” ahead of Sunday’s election. He said that Hungary, where the opposition claimed a landslide victory and ended 16 years of Orbán’s rule, should serve as a warning for others against the risk of “grabbing falling knives”. Moosdorf’s warning, posted on the social media platform X, was reposted by one of the party’s influential ideologues, Benedikt Kaiser. Trump threw the weight of his administration behind Orbán, despite his deeply fraught relations with many of the US’s traditional allies in Europe. Last week, vice-president JD Vance flew to Budapest to support him. On Friday, Trump promised to use “the full economic might” of the US to support an Orbán-led Hungary. But some of Trump’s Maga allies in Europe now view the Hungarian election as a cautionary tale.

NGC 602 and Beyond

The clouds may look like an oyster, and the stars like pearls, but look beyond. Near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy some 200 thousand light-years distant, lies 5 million year young star cluster NGC 602. Surrounded by natal gas and dust, NGC 602 is featured in this stunning Hubble image of the region. Fantastic ridges and swept back shapes strongly suggest that energetic radiation and shock waves from NGC 602‘s massive young stars have eroded the dusty material and triggered a progression of star formation moving away from the cluster’s center. At the estimated distance of the Small Magellanic Cloud, the featured picture spans about 200 light-years, but a tantalizing assortment of background galaxies are also visible in this sharp multi-colored view. The background galaxies are hundreds of millions of light-years or more beyond NGC 602.

Your Online Moment of Zen

Charles: When I first saw this painting at the Jeu de Pomme during one of my first visits to Paris, it became my favorite Toulouse-Lautrec. In 1986 it moved with most of the great French impressionists into the Musée d’Orsay, but the repurposed train station has never had the same charm for me as the Pomme did.

Its subject is Louis Bouglé, an eccentric French sportsman and renowned tournament caster who inspired the iconic Hardy Bouglé fly reel.

Portrait de Louis Bouglé

Edited by Imogen Sayers.

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In Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon, the Scramble for Private Profit Is Intense

The Guardian

Scott: When Trump refashioned the Department of Defense at the outset of his second term, placing a cashiered Army major and Fox News weekend anchor in charge and renaming it the “Department of War,” profit motive was a prime factor. Being a venture capitalist was a prime factor in appointments, proximity to the tech bros was a must, and the lack of any history of uniformed service was really no obstacle. Indeed, four senior executives who worked for tech bros were suddenly given unprecedented commissions as lieutenant colonels to facilitate their involvement in artificial intelligence contracting. Uday and Qusay also have their sights on huge Pentagon procurement contracts, investing in drone-producing start-up firms that appear poised to secure significant deals. Now The Guardian’s Aram Roston has taken the lid off more insider dealing.

A high-profile US defense department official who oversees the agency’s artificial intelligence efforts made a profit of up to $24m selling a private investment he held in Elon Musk’s AI company earlier this year, according to government ethics records released this month. The value of his stake totaled a maximum of a million dollars when he joined the department.

Emil Michael, who is the Pentagon’s under secretary for research and engineering under the Trump administration, oversees negotiations with AI companies and has been pushing the defense department to rapidly increase the widespread use of AI.

Michael declared in March 2025 that he had a position in xAI valued between $500,000 and $1m.

He sold those holdings on 9 January for between $5m and $25m, according to disclosures filed with the office of government ethics (OGE). He reported that he owned the xAI shares through a company called KQ Partners. (Government financial disclosure reports are designed to show ranges of holdings, rather than precise amounts.) The increase in value amounts to a gain of between 400% and 4,800%.

xAI, which is the company behind Musk’s Grok chatbot, is not publicly traded, so it is unclear how Michael obtained his position, how it was priced or to whom he sold it.

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Orbán Out in a Landslide Election in Hungary

Süddeutsche Zeitung

Scott: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin pulled out all the stops to secure the reelection of their friend Viktor Orbán, who in the final days of the campaign was revealed to be the keystone in Putin’s plans to defeat Ukraine and disable and undermine NATO and the European Union. The opposition Tisza Party led by Péter Magyar appears to have narrowly secured a two-thirds majority, which will be essential to undo all the firewalls Orbán installed to keep himself in power indefinitely.

Hungary faces a change of government, and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—after 16 years in power—faces the prospect of being voted out of office. In Sunday’s parliamentary election, with just under half of the votes counted, the pro-European Tisza party—led by Péter Magyar—stands at 135 seats in the 199-seat parliament, according to the National Election Commission. This would effectively secure them a narrow two-thirds majority—a threshold that, according to observers, is necessary to bring about genuine political change.

Leading up to the closing of the polls, a very high voter turnout was evident. Two hours before polling stations closed, the central election authority reported that 74.23% of eligible voters had already cast their ballots. This figure represents a significantly higher turnout than at the same point during the last parliamentary election in 2022, when it stood at 62.92%.

In many places, long lines formed outside polling stations. In the southern Hungarian city of Szeged, many voters—unwilling to wait any longer—unceremoniously cast their votes outside the voting booths. There was also a massive turnout at Hungarian diplomatic missions abroad; long lines formed in cities including Barcelona, ​​Stockholm, Málaga, Munich, Manchester, and Oslo. According to press reports, even the current Nobel Prize laureate in literature, László Krasznahorkai, waited nearly two hours outside the Hungarian consulate in Milan to cast his vote.

Several Hungarian media outlets described the voter turnout as record-breaking. According to experts, however, it remains unclear—for the time being—which side stands to benefit from this high turnout. After casting his ballot, Péter Magyar, leader of the opposition Tisza party, characterized the election as a pivotal choice “between East and West.” The only remaining question, he suggested, was whether his party would win with a simple majority or a two-thirds majority.

In his final campaign appearance, Magyar pledged that his first act as prime minister would be to commission a special inquiry into Orbán’s murky dealings with the Kremlin which led, among other things, to his foreign minister giving periodic briefings to Putin’s foreign minister and taking instructions from him as to how to obstruct support for Ukraine in the EU and NATO. In exchange, it appears that Orbán sought Putin’s agreement to give Hungary a chunk of Ukrainian territory after the country had been conquered. Hungarian legal analysts suggest this conduct might be viewed as treason under Hungarian law and might lead to criminal prosecutions.

The United States is destroying itself

The Guardian

Charles: If you only read one column this week, make sure it’s this one from the Guardian’s brilliant Rebecca Solnit, in which she hits upon the very reason for being of The Horton-Kaiser Report: “The daily news can’t adequately convey the administration’s sabotaging of our government, economy, alliances and environment.” Against all odds, Solnit manages to mention all of them in a single 1200 word piece:

The United States is being murdered, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled. All this is common knowledge, but because it dribbles out in news stories about this specific incident or department, the reports never adequately describe an administration sabotaging the functioning of the federal government and also trashing the global economy, international alliances and relationships, and the national and global environment in ways that will have downstream consequences for decades and perhaps, especially when it comes to climate, centuries.

Across the branches of government, the services that are supposed to protect us – nuclear stockpile monitoring, cybersecurity, counter-terrorism – are being undermined, understaffed or trashed. A different kind of protection that consists of public health, vaccination programs, food safety, clean air and water, social services, civil rights and the rule of law is also under attack. The federal government that serves us is being starved while the federal government that serves the Trump agenda and the oligarchy is glutting itself on taxpayer money, including the grotesque sums dumped on the Department of Homeland Security and the US military now being warped into Pete Hegseth’s twisted vision of a ruthless mercenary force. Hegseth has reportedly stood in the way of promotions for more than a dozen Black and female officers…

But the offensiveness may be a distraction from the destructiveness. A whole sector of mainstream media now functions as spirit mediums attempting to interpret Trump’s actions to try to fit them into the context of competent leadership and coherent and consistent agendas. If there was a coherent agenda, it would be a destructive one, a malevolent one. The newly popular slogan “the purpose of a system is what it does” is useful here, because what this system does is weaken, damage, corrupt and harm. The idea that there’s a coherent agenda driven by Vladimir Putin works in the sense that most of what Trump has done is good for the ageing Russian dictator while also bad for the US.

Solnit also nails exactly what will be necessary when this nightmare is finally over: the most fundamental reconstruction the United States has undertaken since the end of the Civil war.

We do not need to understand these criminals in order to try to contain and ultimately remove them. They will not last forever, and we need to think about what happens when they’re gone – to talk about the kind of reconstruction the US will face for the first time since the civil war, the reconstruction a ravaged and corrupted country has to go through to return to functionality. But not to return to the way things were.

It’s the antidemocratic weaknesses in our system that created the vulnerabilities that let this happen – the electoral college and voter suppression that gave Trump a minority victory in 2016, the gerrymandering that has given a minority party majority power in Congress and statehouses, a grotesquely corrupted and unaccountable supreme court and the corrosive influence of the ultra-wealthy in a system that gives them power on a scale that is a direct assault on democracy. We need to imagine a more democratic, more egalitarian, more generous country, one that operates in recognition of an abundance of wealth that should serve all of us – and nature and future generations too – rather than is driven by the moral poverty of billionaires.

Detail Emerges on the Relationship Melania Didn’t Have with Jeffrey Epstein

El País

Scott: What caused Melania Trump to suddenly give a nine-minute press statement in front of the cameras? Charles has offered some takes, as have many others. One persistent claim was that Melania has word that Brazilian supermodel Amanda Ungaro was known to have given a couple of press interviews in which she was going to spill some very embarrassing Epstein beans. Indeed, an interview ran Sunday morning in the Madrid-based El País, which took the added step of releasing its entire piece in English. Ungaro was married to model agency entrepreneur Paolo Zampolli, who Melania insists introduced her to Trump. They had a harsh falling out, and Zampolli appears to have availed himself of the power of the Trump White House to get custody of their child and have his trophy wife brutalized by Trump’s secret police—she was locked away for three months and then deported. However, Ungaro’s ire in her interview is focused principally on ICE and their mistreatment not only of her but of a host of others she met in captivity.

Handcuffed at the hands and feet, she was transferred to an immigration detention center in Miami, where she spent three and a half months in complete horror. Her husband, who had a green card (permanent residency permit), was released. “I volunteered to scrub the floors at six in the morning so I wouldn’t go crazy. I spent the whole day crying; I read the Bible from beginning to end,” she says. She helped others, sharing with them her phone credit to make calls. She claims that there were detainees with residency permits, an octogenarian handcuffed in a wheelchair, and a young woman who had just lost a baby and had to wait a long time to receive medical care…

To proceed with the deportation, she was taken to Louisiana. “It was a hall with more than 120 people, the floor was wet, there were no windows, four days without seeing the sun… I came out infested with lice,” she recounts. She landed in Brazil wearing the prison uniform, with nothing, not even a cell phone. “I spent a month depressed in a room.”

Ungaro regrets not having left Zampolli sooner — and not having reported him. “I was living at the mercy of a sick psychopath who abused me psychologically, sexually, and physically. I asked many people for help. No one ever helped me. But I couldn’t leave without my son, and he would not sign [the authorization],” she says.

Ungaro does offer some fresh detail on Epstein and Maxwell, however:

In 2002, when she had not yet turned 17, she flew from Paris to New York on the Lolita Express, the private plane of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “My agent told me, ‘We’re going with a couple of friends, a private plane just for us.’ There were around 30 very young women there, 14, 15, 16 years old. I said, ‘What is this?’ And he replied, ‘Don’t worry.’” That is how she recalls a trip she first revealed to the Brazilian newspaper O Globo.

Ungaro claims that she didn’t interact with anyone on the flight, except to greet the hosts, Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, his accomplice, who is currently serving a sentence for sex trafficking. “Amanda, let me introduce you to Jeffrey,” her agent said. “He came over and asked, ‘Where are you from? How old are you? Which modeling agency do you work for?’ And he introduced me to Ghislaine.” She claims she never saw Epstein again; he was found dead in his cell in 2019. The same fate befell the modeling agent who put Ungaro on that plane, Jean-Luc Brunel, who was arrested in connection with the Epstein case and died in a Parisian prison in 2022.

It appears that Ungaro has given several other still unpublished interviews.

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No Exit

The Guardian

After JD Vance’s completely predictable failure to make any progress with the Iranians, Donald Trump’s latest insanity was to lurch from “a complete blockade” of the Strait of Hormuz, to just blocking ships “entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas.”

Sidney Blumenthal’s latest column recalls all of the president’s other lurches of the last four weeks, and usefully reminded us that the last person to make the same threat as Trump was air force general Curtis LeMay, “who said that the correct strategy for the Vietnam War was to “bomb them back to the Stone Age”. LeMay was the most vocal of the critics within the military’s high command of John F Kennedy, accusing his diplomacy that ended the Cuban missile crisis as ‘almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.’”

Some of us remember how well that worked when Richard Nixon extended the bombing of Vietnam to Cambodia.

Donald Trump: “The Iranians have no cards.”

Colin Jost: “They are LITERALLY holding a Straight.”

The Horton-Kaiser Report Podcast

Iran’s LEGO Videos Take War Propaganda to a New Level

WIRED

Scott: War propaganda in some form is ancient, but it is a routine aspect of most military confrontations from the twentieth century forward. With Trump’s war on Iran, it has entered into a new phase in which pop culture and AI play increasingly powerful roles. American propaganda has been mundane, unimaginative, and often illiterate, much of it focused on Pete Hegseth strutting across a stage. It provides a perfect target for ridicule, and pro-Iranian videomakers have seized upon it.

Minutes after President Donald Trump announced that he would not wipe out “a whole civilization” on Tuesday evening, a team of self-described young Iranian activists jumped into action.

Members of the group known as Explosive Media were putting the finishing touches on their latest AI-generated, Lego-inspired Trump video. The video features a Trump mini-figure colluding with leaders from Gulf states, Iranian officials pressing a big red button labeled “back to the stone age,” and Trump throwing a chair at US generals.

This was the latest of more than a dozen videos the pro-Iran group has released since the beginning of the war in February, many of which have racked up millions of views on mainstream platforms. While Iranian government accounts have posted Lego-style videos in the past, Explosive Media’s content is more sophisticated and scripted. And it’s produced by a team of young pro-Iranian creators who appear deeply knowledgeable about the internet and American culture. Already some critics have alleged the group has ties to the Iranian government…

“People are disengaging from some of the real conflict content and looking for something that can distill what’s happening quickly and in a language and tone that they understand and that’s what those Lego videos are doing,” Moustafa Ayad, a researcher with the Institute of Strategic Dialogue who has closely tracked the online content being shared by Iranian groups during the war, tells WIRED. “They’re making it easily accessible to understand the conflict from Iran’s point of view, and it’s hitting on points of disaffection in the United States at the same time. It’s working on two fronts.”

You can view the most recent of the LEGO videos here.

Why Do Populists Have Such a Russia Fetish?

Byline Times

Scott: One thing that’s a constant about the so-called “populist” parties in Europe. They make a great show about being nationalists and disdaining newly arrived immigrants. But they all also have a very peculiar relationship with one other country in particular: Russia. Süddeutsche Zeitung today reports from a gathering of the neo-Nazi Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany, at which the party’s platform is being discussed. Under schools and education, they want to be done with “woke” subjects like art appreciation, and in its place install something really practical and necessary: compulsory study of Russian.

Here, Byline Times takes a look at Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s party, whose leaders all seem to have carefully disguised financial relationships with the Kremlin. What could be more patriotic?

There is something deeply strange about the British far-right’s version of patriotism.

Its adherents drape themselves in the Union flag and talk endlessly about sacrifice, sovereignty, and standing firm against foreign threats. Their social media profiles are decorated with poppies, Spitfires, and Churchill quotes.

Taking their rhetoric at face value, you would think they were ready to put their lives on the line for their country at a moment’s notice, like some modern incarnation of Dad’s Army.

But when actual threats to the country emerge – not imagined assaults by migrants or cultural Marxists, but real, tangible attacks by a hostile foreign power – these would-be patriots melt into thin air.

They grumble about Nato aggression. They complain about fuel prices. Or they side, directly or indirectly, with the foreign aggressor…

The far-right defines Britishness not by values or principles, but by internal enemies: remainers, immigrants, academics, the BBC, and the ‘woke’. Its vision of patriotism is less about belonging and more about exclusion. It is a narrow, brittle nationalism in which only a select few are allowed to truly partake.

This isn’t new, of course.

Our far-right has long been clinging to a sepia-tinged fantasy of wartime Britain: a Britain that can only exist in the distant past.

This same model applies to the AfD in Germany, the neo-Pétainist Rassemblement National in France, FIDESZ in Hungary, and a dozen other beacons of new right populism around the globe. And it derives straight from the Kremlin playbook that calls for using whatever levers are available to create strife, mayhem and civil war in democratic societies to weaken them or bring them down.

Exploring the Antennae

Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus, two large galaxies are colliding. Stars in the two galaxies, cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, very rarely collide in the course of the ponderous cataclysm that lasts for hundreds of millions of years. But the galaxies’ large clouds of molecular gas and dust often do, triggering furious episodes of star formation near the center of the cosmic wreckage. Spanning over 50 thousand light-years, this stunning telescopic frame also reveals new star clusters and matter flung far from the scene of the accident by gravitational tidal forces. The remarkably sharp ground-based image follows the faint tidal tails and distant background galaxies in the field of view. The suggestive overall visual appearance of the extended arcing structures gives the galaxy pair, also known as Arp 244, its popular name -The Antennae.

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Fine Young Cannibals 1989

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Yesterday, Israel marked the implementation of a ceasefire agreement, which as announced explicitly included Lebanon—it also marked heaviest day’s bombardment of the country since the war began. Israel’s attacks had a focus on the heavily populated, mixed commercial and residential, center of the city of Beirut—an area which the International Committee of the Red Cross noted contained no obvious military targets. The current conflict is now widely dubbed the “Iran War,” yet Lebanon, though not itself a combatant, has become a separate focus of the war, which is a pretty one-sided affair: Israel dropping bombs on its targets.

Israel styles this a war against Hezbollah—a Shia group that has considerable political clout inside Lebanon and wields de facto control over much of its territory, and which is closely aligned with the clerical-Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps regime in Tehran.

Following a practice that was honed in the Gaza War, the Israeli military invariably justifies attacks on what are plainly civilian targets, like apartment blocks, by saying that they had a legitimate military target. Perhaps a Hezbollah commander lived in the apartment block, for instance. But the destruction in many parts of Lebanon, particularly the area around and south of the Litani River and the heavily Shia southern part of Beirut, is so extensive that this sort of justification raises obvious objection among independent observers about Israel’s actual intentions.

The official word in Israel is that the intention is to secure ‘peace for Galilee,’ to stop the periodic shelling of the settlements in Israel’s far north. For the United States, even less effort has been made to justify the bombings than is the case for Iran. But it seems increasingly clear that the Israeli effort entails a Gaza-style approach both to the adjustment of boundaries and a conscious decision to displace a large population (the International Organization for Migration put the number of internally displaced persons in Lebanon at over 1 million when the war began, and that number has certainly grown). These objectives are being achieved largely by demands for evacuation coupled with bombing strikes that have destroyed entire towns and villages. In the end, it is clear, Israeli planners would be satisfied with an outcome in which Lebanon is reduced to a pile of smoldering rubbish, consumed by chaos and civil war.

With this in mind, we settled on the best war correspondent now reporting out of Lebanon, Abdi Latif Dahir of the New York Times, for our first podcast interview, and made the war in Lebanon the subject.

“The Israeli defense minister came out last week, essentially talking about how this operation is going to continue and that they’re going to occupy much of southern Lebanon. Initially, when this war started, they talked a lot about deterring Hezbollah.

But I think those comments from last week were the clearest indication that they intend to control the region even after this invasion is over. It’s going to, as you said, basically control this stretch of territory that is At its farthest point in Lebanon, like it’s about 20 miles, I think, from Israel.”…

“More than a million people, in a country that just has less than six million people have been displaced. And so pretty much everywhere you go, there are people are sleeping inside cars. The shelters are really packed.”

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Editors’ note—This episode of The Horton-Kaiser Report was recorded on April 5th, 2026, before Trump’s genocidal Truth posts and the so-called ceasefire which Israel has ignored when it comes to incessantly bombing Lebanon.

Please power through the audio quality, we promise the content is good and important.

Credits

Host

Scott Horton and Charles Kaiser

Producer

Imogen Sayers, Scott Horton and Charles Kaiser

Field recording

Abdi Latif Dahir

Music

Kinan Azmeh

Read the transcript

[00:00:00] Imogen Sayers: You are listening to the Horton Kaiser report.

[00:00:10] Charles Kaiser: Welcome to the Horton Kaiser report. Scott Horton and I first bonded 20 years ago when we were each blogging about the horrendous torture being carried out by the second Bush administration during the War on Terror. We both thought it was a terrible thing. We’ve kept in touch ever since. I have noticed that whenever I’ve read Scott on Blue Sky, I was the best educated person in the room that day.

This is because he’s not only a great lawyer and a fine journalist, he’s also the most assiduous consumer of media who I’ve ever met. This means that when you read our. Newsletter, you’ll get the benefit of his reading of newspapers in Italy, France, Germany, Russia, and many, many other places.

[00:00:58] Scott Horton: I quickly came across Charles Kaiser as someone who thought about things almost exactly the same way I did and prioritized the same thing.

So I think we had a kindred spirit. And the perspective, I’m trying to think. We may have had disagreements at some point along the line about something. I can’t recall exactly what something about Trump, I think.

[00:01:18] Charles Kaiser: We had a slight disagreement about that, but as you say, 99% of the time we are on the same page about everything that’s going on in the world.

[00:01:28] Scott Horton: Exactly. It’s rare.

[00:01:29] Charles Kaiser: I came to this originally as a metro reporter for the New York Times. I covered all the city beats, including real estate, where I met one Donald Trump in the 1970s, and I ended up at City Hall and then I was a media reporter at the Wall Street Journal, and then I got into the business that we’re still in.

As the press critic at Newsweek, which was really my best staff job. And after that I’ve written books about the 1960s, about gay life in America since 1940, and about one family in the French resistance who I’ve known all my life.

[00:02:02] Scott Horton: I’d say I have a passion for looking at war reporting and the problems that people who do war reporting face.

In fact, my legal career, I spent a good deal of time. Working for CBS news for NBC News. For the Associated Press and for other publications helping their war reporters when they got into legal troubles and doing war zone reporting. And I handled trials and gave tactical advice and other things and spent quite a bit of time in war theaters, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan during those wars.

So, you know, I think one thing we’ll be doing regularly here is inviting in war reporters and getting their fresh perspective on what’s going on.

[00:02:50] Charles Kaiser: We’re launching the first podcast today with Abdi Latif Dahir, the new Beirut correspondent of the New York Times. Before he got to Beirut last November, he had been covering East Africa for four years and he did a groundbreaking series with Justin Scheck and Vivian Nereim, which is the winner of this year’s Poke award.

It chronicled the way. Nairobi women were being trafficked to Saudi Arabia by a company controlled by the family of the Kenyan president and sent to members of the Royal family in Saudi Arabia.

[00:03:33] Scott Horton: Abdi, it’s really great to have you with us, and particularly given the circumstances that prevail today in Beirut, it’s looks to be chaotic and difficult and I think one of the most important things we look to war reporters to do is to measure the rhetoric of governments against what they’re actually doing on the ground.

So with that in mind, I’d like to ask you to give us a sketch of how. The, um, government of Israel has described its operations in Lebanon to date and contrast that with what you’re actually observing on the ground.

[00:04:12] Abdi Latif Dahir: Thank you Scott, and thank you Charles. And congratulations again on, on this incredible Substack, uh, which has been incredible and informative in parsing the Israeli government and the way the government of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has been talking about this.

The government basically frames its operations. In Lebanon as precise, targeted, defensive. They talk a lot about like neutralizing Hezbollah’s military capabilities, preventing attacks on Israeli civilians, particularly those civilians who live in Northern Israel and. While a lot of these strikes have been able to target like, you know, specific Hezbollah infrastructure, I think what’s interesting and what’s been harrowing to observe has been the broader effects of these strikes.

Like a lot of them actually have damaged civilian areas. Civilian infrastructure like bridges, they’ve targeted hospitals and clinics. They have disrupted businesses. They’ve created massive humanitarian challenges. A large part of that, besides Southern Lebanon, the strikes have been happening in Beirut, particularly in the southern suburb.

Called where Hezbollah holds a lot of sway and tens of thousands of people who live in this area have now completely been uprooted. They’ve been forced out of their homes because of repeated evacuation warnings from the Israeli government. It’s a quite a dense, both residential but also very commercial area.

So a lot of those people have now been displaced. They’ve left their homes. So while the Israeli government essentially says that it’s targeting Hezbollah and it’s targeting this militant group that is also aligned with Iran. At the same time, like, you know, what we’ve been able to observe is essentially this catastrophic damage that it’s brought into civilians.

[00:06:01] Charles Kaiser: Let’s talk a little bit about how life has changed in Beirut. You arrived as the Beirut correspondent from the New York Times in November, and the war is now in its what, fourth week? Contrast your initial experience of being a new Beirut resident before and after this war began?

[00:06:19] Abdi Latif Dahir: Yeah, so I arrived in November, 2025, full-time, I should say, because I had been here on various stints, but.

I arrived in a country, in a city that it was slowly coming back to life. So many people that I spoke to in those first few weeks, particularly as the Pope came here on his first international, uh, trip, they were very hopeful. Many people were thinking that after a. Grueling war in 2024 that finally the country was taking slow steps to its stability.

Many places, for instance, like with the nightlife that had closed, had started reopening. A lot of businesses were getting renovated. And of course, like you have to remember the complex history of this country of just even in the last five years, gone through like a major financial crisis, that there was the Beirut Port explosion, then there was the 2024 war.

So there was a sense of things were looking up. And February, pretty much like for me, encapsulated that, like I went to a lot of gallery openings. I had met new friends, I was invited to people’s homes, and Christmas was pretty much the same too. And then the war started so quickly that it, over the last four or five weeks, it’s been incredibly difficult to even parse through this.

Difficult moment and how fast it’s moving. Like, you know, we just woke up one night at 2:50 AM I remember very vividly, uh, in this apartment and there was like a huge sort of like explosion or like, they shook the house and I was like, what’s happening? I was kind of like thinking that I was dreaming. Uh, and then the next thing you know, the second strike was happening and the third strike was happening and I went online and everybody was awake and it’s just been nonstop for the last five weeks.

A lot of people were telling me about the war and how things can quickly escalate, but it’s been interesting to live that and just be able to report on the harrowing realities and the difficult circumstances that the people are going through right now.

[00:08:08] Charles Kaiser: Are the streets spilled with refugees all over the place? What are the streets like?

[00:08:12] Abdi Latif Dahir: Yes.

Like if you take a walk, it’s usually people, you’ll find people always sleeping in the cars or just like have bonfires under roundabouts. It’s really quite difficult and it’s very visible, whatever, whichever neighborhood you go to. Some neighborhoods less than others. But it’s a pretty much yes displaced people or somebody who knows somebody who’s displaced or somebody who’s going out to like support other displaced people. It’s almost like a conversation that’s happening among everybody.

[00:08:56] Scott Horton: How are international relief organizations dealing with the internally displaced persons? What organizations are there? What are they doing? How are they able to address the situation?

[00:09:07] Abdi Latif Dahir: Yeah, there are a lot of like international organizations working like Doctors Without Borders, international Rescue Committee, international Organization for Migration. Other UN agencies are all working, particularly in Beirut, where a lot of people have come, or like closer to Beirut, like Townsends, where a lot of people who fled the South have also. Come. But the one thing that pretty much a lot of people that I have spoken to in the aid industry have talked about is that.

It’s a really difficult time to provide aid and humanitarian services, largely because so many of them lost their funding. Like the United States was like such a massive funder of aid in humanitarian services, not just to the Middle East, but like even Africa, Asia, so many other places. And I think with Trump, with the Trump administration, that has been lost.

So pretty much everywhere you go and like talk to eight groups, relief agencies, aid workers, everybody’s telling you like. Yes, in 2024 when all of this was happening, we had like 20 staff members, we had this many Lebanese staff members. We were able to like bring in people from abroad, like, you know, who had expertise on migration and whatnot.

None of that exists now. Right? And so I think you definitely are feeling the impact of the, the Trump eight cuts. You know, as usual, the Lebanese are quite resilient and they’re quite resourceful. So many people have come together to basically donate food. They make thousands of meals a day. A lot of cafes and restaurants basically have all these donation boxes or like they say that, that we are donating this many meals every single day.

There’s a sense of a lot of aid organizations just being like, we don’t have much, we’re not able to provide this. Or last time for it, like on Friday, I was. We were inside the, in the south, and somebody was telling us that in 2024 they had like about 10 mental health therapists who were coming in quite regularly to work with like all these displaced people, but like now that they have only two and they, it’s just impossible to be able to take care of people in that shelter that we were at, which has about 400 people.

[00:11:13] Charles Kaiser: Has the war affected any of the basic services in Beirut? Electricity, water, telephone, internet, anything like that.

[00:11:22] Abdi Latif Dahir: I will be honest and say that we live in an incredible bubble when it comes to like the challenges that people face every single day, particularly since the 2024. Electricity is still a problem, water is still a problem.

Heating is still a problem, and particularly if this goes into the summer, it’s just gonna be incredibly difficult. The fuel prices were already increasing even before the war started, and there were actually protests in Beirut about the increasing fuel prices. And now because of that increase, because of the ongoing economic crisis that preceded even this conflict, right?

The collapse of the Lebanese pound, the supply disruptions, and then of course all the. Disruptions that this current ongoing bombardments have created. All of this is now coming together to essentially make life incredibly difficult. Like transportation is expensive, like. I take Ubers around quite a lot or taxis and or even public services sometimes.

And pretty much like they would always tell you like, Hey, can you give me a dollar extra $2 extra $3 extra large? Because it’s quite difficult to find gas. It’s food prices have increased. They have so many other relatives or friends who are either displaced or have lost their jobs. So it’s really quite a dire reality for so many people.

And it was already, even before this conflict started, and now it’s just completely compounded.

[00:12:40] Charles Kaiser: What’s the closest bombardment you’ve witnessed? What’s the, how far away have you been from the closest bombardment?

[00:12:47] Abdi Latif Dahir: That’s a good question. I think it was probably the one that happened in Central. Beirut, which is just basically across the highway from where I am right now.

So about four, 500 meters. But essentially we had gotten the warning, it was about 4:30 AM in the morning.

[00:13:07] Charles Kaiser: How do you get a warning at four 30 on your phone?

[00:13:10] Abdi Latif Dahir: On the phone. Yeah, so basically the Israeli government or the Israeli military essentially either tweets them or they share them on telegram and immediately those things that’s shared, like you almost always like people are resharing or are quickly sending it to you or, so this was like quite shocking in that it wasn’t in the southern suburbs, like this was actually happening in a building in Central Beirut and everybody was like quite alarmed that this was happening.

You’ve been glu phones, your belly is sleeping. Even when you black out, you’re always thinking about what’s next? Is everything okay? And so we, I immediately got this and was just sitting up in bed, like waiting to hear it. And it was like interesting because right before that happened, you know, because.

It was closer to dawn. You could hear the birds chirping. You could hear the call to prayers from a nearby mosque, and then it was such a serene, beautiful morning. And then the next thing, you have this insane whoosh coming from like the sky, just like striking this building. And the entire neighborhood just there was this massive explosion that just rocked everything.

And it was, I think, one of the first buildings in Beirut in this war to be completely demolished.

[00:14:22] Charles Kaiser: And was it portrayed by the Israelis as a Hezbollah stronghold? What would, did they say what the, they thought they were doing?

[00:14:30] Abdi Latif Dahir: Yes, they said that the building had a storage for Hezbollah money, that there were millions of dollars that were hidden under it that belonged to Hezbollah, even though many people after that came out saying that we are civilians.

We are doctors, we are teachers, we are educators. We have worked all our lives to be able to afford an apartment in Central Beirut so that our kids and their grandkids can have something as an investment. And here we are, sort of like it’s completely gone right now.

[00:15:00] Charles Kaiser: Have there been other buildings in the center of Beirut that have been hit?

[00:15:04] Abdi Latif Dahir: Yes. So the yesterday was quite an in. Interesting. I should actually talk a little bit about the history. Yes. Other buildings and have been hit that are outside of the southern suburbs, they hit a hotel right by the beach where the, which where I used to. I’d love to actually jog and exercise to was hit.

They have hit other residential areas. Yesterday was quite interesting because two different residential areas that are not in the southern suburbs were hit even as the city was on a public holiday because people are marking Easter. So yeah. Other places that are not in the suburb, southern suburbs have been hit.

And so there’s now this sense of for of no way is peaceful. No way is safe, anything can be a target.

[00:15:50] Scott Horton: A major focus of concern right now is the south, what’s going on in the area 16 kilometers north of the Lat River, and the promise of, or the suggestion that there will be a mass displacement of the civilian population of this area.

So is Israel in their operations there, are they making a distinction based on ethnicity or faith?

[00:16:11] Abdi Latif Dahir: Yes, they are. We now know, particularly the Israeli defense Minister came out last week essentially talking about like how this operation is going to continue and that they’re going to occupy much of Southern Lebanon.

Initially when this war started, they talked a lot about the Tering, Hezbollah, but. I think those comments from last week were the clearest indication that they intend to control the region. Even after this invasion is over, it’s going to, as you said, like basically control this stretch of territory that is at its farthest point in Lebanon, like it’s about 20 miles, I think from Israel.

They said about 600,000 people who’ve been displaced from these areas are not going to be allowed to come back, and we now know that they have made calls to people in some of those. Towns, villages, particularly to the mayors of some of those villages and towns, essentially saying that we are going to Christian communities essentially and telling them that yes, if Hezbollah is not hiding amongst you, we’re going to let you stay in your villages.

Nothing is gonna happen to you, but if Hezbollah and anybody within the. Larger Shia displaced communities are in those villages. We’re going to be attacking you. So you definitely are seeing that there’s yes, an intention to occupy, but also an intention where they are making a distinction of residents by faith.

[00:17:33] Scott Horton: That reporting about the outreach from Israeli authorities to mayors and civic leaders in Christian communities suggesting the differentiation that was in your reporting from last week, as I recall, it was a particularly striking story. I guess I’d like to ask you is a bit of a follow up on that, about the role the United States is playing in all of this.

‘cause of course we’ve seen reports that the US Ambassador and Lebanon called on the IDF to protect. The Christian Villages and the South, and I was wondering if you had any detail on that statement, what led to it and what the reaction to it has been?

[00:18:11] Abdi Latif Dahir: Yeah, so that statement came about when the US ambassador to Lebanon met the Maronite patriarch, and essentially he was talking about Christian communities in the South, and he basically said that he had told the maronite that from day one of the conflict that they had asked the Israelis to spare the Christian border of village.

Particularly those in the south, of course, from the bombing. I think the comments particularly were quite amplified and reverberated across this country, largely because it’s a country built by different faiths, different sects, and that question around sectarian politics is like quite a touchy subject here.

In terms of the way it’s been received. Christian communities, particularly those in the South, may welcome some of these statements, particularly as a sign of international attention to their own safety, right? Many of those communities are still in those villages, particularly right now in very dire situation as they mark this Easter holiday, but.

For opposition groups, for people of different faiths, particularly within the Shia communities and Hezbollah supporters, they see this as another foreign interference, right? They see it as a partiality that according to some people, like even that we spoke to in the southern city of DER like a couple of days ago, undermining Lebanon sovereignty, and it’s quite a difficult reality to look at this country, which.

Has had quite a history of like complex sectarian landscape, long civil war in the seventies into the 1990. And so all of that now being amplified by the fact that this armed group that is close to and linked to the Iranians and is a Shia and the fact that now it’s decided to go into this war while supporting Iran and.

So many other people within the country, whether they’re Sunni Muslim, whether they are Jews, whether they are Christians, essentially being against this.

[00:20:07] Scott Horton: We see a lot of stories coming, particularly out of Israeli media, about there being a plan to give the south the sort of Gaza treatment, which would be bombardment, destroying all residential buildings and the far broader, uh, destruction with teams then going in and finalizing the destruction on the ground.

And I’m just wondering, to what extent do you see or have you heard. Locally reports of that sort of conduct and the operation going on.

[00:20:37] Abdi Latif Dahir: Yeah, I mean, the Israeli defense minister basically said that they will demolish towns and they are already demolishing towns. Right. We’ve seen some of that with the satellite imagery that are coming out, and when you talk to a lot of the people who fled the south, I think that’s the big fear that is happening now, that there is going to be.

I was just actually talking to a few more people today. I went to meet who are from the South, and I was asking them about the villages that they came from in the towns like Illa, which is quite a massive commercial like town. It’s historically known to be this sort of like center of trade. And in when I went there, I remember.

After the last war in 2024, like the entire market, I wrote a story about the market, this historic market that was completely leveled. And I met like another person who has a shop at the market today. And basically he is like, yeah, what you saw in 2024 is like nothing like you’re seeing today. So I think this idea of buildings being raised.

Entire towns being demolished and leveled. The fact that all these bridges that connect the south to the rest of the country, I think there’s only probably one standing, like many of them have been completely destroyed. This idea of also the fact that this war now is no longer just a war about. Lebanon and Israel, but it’s a regional war that involves Iran that in involves much bigger powers than Lebanon.

And you look at everything else that has happened in terms of the trauma that people already have about what happened in 2024. So was asking people today like, you know, who’ve lived through the 1982 and the Civil War and the invasion, and the 2006 war and the 2024, like if they all think that what’s going on now is gonna be much worse or is already much worse, pretty much everybody.

Agrees that it’s going to be.

[00:22:24] Scott Horton: How do decision makers in Lebanon today and opinion leaders view the policy of the Trump administration towards them? It’s really not clear to me certainly what the policy is towards Lebanon.

[00:22:39] Abdi Latif Dahir: That’s a good question. The role of America in Lebanon is, and particularly over the past year, it’s just been driven by this idea that you have to disarm Hezbollah, right?

And that you have to take their arms. I think. This war, it’s just. Reinforce like existing divides rather than like, how do I say this? Uniformly shifting sentiment about the United States, like many Lebanese, particularly the people they already view the US policy skeptics, particularly in relation to Israel, particularly in relation to when they look at larger regional intervention that the Americans have done.

So the war. For maybe the people in the communities, in the Shia communities, it’s already deepened anti-American feelings. A lot of people feel that America’s attack of Iran, the killing of Hani, its support of Israel, it’s creating or is exacerbating instability in the Middle East. I think for others it’s particularly for people in government who see Hezbollah as destabilizing force.

They look to the United States to basically be this ally, but I think it’s also like this war with Iran. The fact that they are here now, the fact that this has created another conflict in the region that has now in return also destabilizing Lebanon. And then there are also others for whom the anti-American sentiment is limited.

They’re mostly just worried about local governance, corruption, security, like how can the Lebanese state function and how can the United States support. Uh, a stronger Lebanese state to come into being.

[00:24:09] Charles Kaiser: What’s the situation at the airport? Is Middle East Airlines still flying every day?

[00:24:13] Abdi Latif Dahir: Middle East Airlines is still flying every day.

Quite the sense of resilience that is known among the Lebanese. It really has come to symbolize this. It’s the only way of leaving the country, even as many airlines have. Cancel their flights or rerouted. And so yeah, there’s no other way of looking at it other than to just appreciate that in a country that is locked in between these incredible powers that are fighting each other and fighting it, and are fighting on its land and have this one way of leaving the country, which is like to the sea that you’re able to fly out.

So people still hold onto that and I think it, it gives many, also for some of the people that I’ve spoken to, like it also still gives them the psychological. Like wellbeing or sense of, of calm in that they know that they can leave the country or some of their relatives can come to the country because people, Lebanese never stop.

Right. A lot of people have been on social media being like, I’m not canceling my summer plans to go to Lebanon no matter what happens.

[00:25:12] Charles Kaiser: Yeah. I was with someone yesterday whose partner’s grandmother was about to go to Lebanon to visit the grandchildren. Right now.

[00:25:19] Abdi Latif Dahir: Yes. They never stopped the first day of the conflict like we were in this upper view, like a neighborhood is like looking at the southern suburbs and also looking at the airport.

And there was this warning for some neighborhoods to be evacuated in the south. So they evacuated. And then the Israeli strike hit and literally five minutes later there, there was a plane taking off from the airport. And you could just see all of this. The smoke was still rising and the, but the fly just took off and yeah, it’s just another day in Beirut.

[00:25:49] Scott Horton: I’d like to ask you a little bit about a AUB, I mean you, you went to an American university abroad, and a AUB of course is often characterized as the flagship of the entire system of American universities outside the US and has a special role, I think in Lebanon and throughout the Middle East. And I’m just seeing this constant flow of reports about faculty and staff and students being killed and damaged buildings.

How are they holding up in the midst of all this?

[00:26:18] Abdi Latif Dahir: Yeah, I think the. American University of Beirut, right? Like it’s, uh, in many ways like one of the country’s most prestigious educational institutions, just given the breadth of amount of students that they have, but also the faculty, the kind of courses they offer. And I think the warning that came in from Iran last week, that they might or would retaliate against American universities in the region.

That really startled a lot of people, including the university, I mean a AUB now, basically just to take precautions. Moved classes, I think last week I think they moved the classes online. I don’t have reporting on whether that’s now continuing it or whether they’ve gone in person back, but there is like a a lot of alarm about what could happen.

Particularly again, because the US Embassy in Beirut issued. A warning last week. Basically. Also saying that Iran could retaliate against Uni- American universities and particularly American universities in Lebanon. I think, um, also given their location just close to the Kish in Beirut, that’s where a lot of the people who are displaced in the first few weeks of the war, that’s where they, a lot of people went.

Coexist in this space of being this prestigious institution that was very much a witness to this displacement, and then now all of a sudden is under a lot of attention, largely because of this Iranian threat to attack American investors in the regions.

[00:27:42] Charles Kaiser: But have they actually been, have they actually been hit or just a warning so far? Just been warnings?

[00:27:46] Abdi Latif Dahir: I don’t think they’ve been hit at all. Yeah, I don’t, we don’t have, I don’t think that’s happened just yet.

[00:27:52] Charles Kaiser: How can you sleep and not be worried about getting a alert of an incoming bombardment?

[00:27:59] Abdi Latif Dahir: Like I think the neighborhood where we are in East Beirut hasn’t been targeted in the past.

I think what’s interesting and different about this conflict is that the way in which. Neighborhoods that were thought to be safe are no longer safe and have been hid. And so the ever widening scope of danger, I think is on everybody’s mind. Even in people in my neighborhood who always thought that, yeah, this is not coming to us or it’s happening elsewhere, which is a sentiment that you were hearing a lot in the first few days of the conflict.

Like I usually walk around and there was always that sense of, oh no, it’s in the south. We’ll be fine. Like a lot of people were like assuring me that. Don’t worry. We love you. You are here. You’re with us. We are together. That’s there. And then here we go, like at 4:30 AM here is like a missile coming down.

But even when there are no missiles, right, like the din of the drone never stops. I’m sure it’s still up. It was upright when we were starting this conversation and then the war planes come very close. Yesterday I was recording all these audios of the hymns of the music coming out of the church next door, mixing with the warplanes above.

And it was really quite surreal. And then when none of that is happening, like the Sonic booms we had a week ago, the Sonic Booms and it was a beautiful Saturday night. I had opened all the windows I was cooking in the kitchen and it just like the Sonic booms rattled the entire apartment. Like things fell off the kitchen and whatnot.

So it’s like even when you feel know that a missile isn’t coming maybe to this neighborhood, like there are all these other factors that you are. Experiencing.

[00:29:45] Charles Kaiser: Do you think that there’s a sense in which the Israelis are using the breadth of the larger war as a way of distracting the world from what they’re doing in Lebanon, which they wanted to do all along, and it’s because attention is basically focused elsewhere.

They can behave with even more impunity in Lebanon than they have before, or at least have in many years.

[00:30:07] Abdi Latif Dahir: I think what’s happening, it might be that. They feel that they have a lot of the conflict, the strikes in Iran are being carried by pilots, right? Like they don’t have any boots on the ground or have a border with Iran.

And I think with them now that they’ve quote unquote dealt with Gaza, so they feel that that is no longer like a major thread. So a lot of their energy is now being directed towards Lebanon, largely because they think that this is where. The big threat is coming from right now. And so yes, you definitely are hearing words like the Gaza Playbook or the Southern suburb is going to look like Han Yunis, which is like really worrying a lot of people in that we all know.

And saw and and heard, and it was essentially live streamed everything that happened in Gaza. And so if anything close to that is going to happen in Lebanon, a lot of people are worried about what that’s going to do to their hometowns and their own businesses and their livelihoods, but also many people are worried about what that’s going to do to the rest of the country.

If you have a million people who are displaced, whom many people either, whether they’re Christian or Sunni Muslim, feeling like. Your communities or this armed group that is part of your community started this war, and we don’t want you in this neighborhood. We don’t want you living amongst us. What that is going to do to the, you know, to the social fabric of the country, and then essentially after this war, the day after, what that’s going to mean for the political situation in this country.

[00:31:41] Scott Horton: I’d really appreciate it if you could tell us what we should be looking for. Do you have any new stories coming down, down the pipe from Lebanon?

[00:31:47] Abdi Latif Dahir: Yes, I do. Um, one of the pieces that is gonna come out in the next few days is about looking at Hezbollah itself and essentially trying to understand why is it that this organization that was beaten and battered and bruised and its leadership decapitated, and many people thought that they had given up a lot of their weapons.

Like how has it been able to sustain itself, like where its weapons coming from, how many. Fighters does it have in the south? How is it looking at the future? So sort of like really trying to decode the military capabilities of Hezbollah. A way that is coming from and how it’s been able to sustain this five week long fight now is going to, is a story that is going to come out.

[00:32:54] Imogen Sayers: The Horton Kaiser report is hosted by Scott Horton and Charles Kaiser, and it’s produced by me, Imogen Sayers, Scott Horton and Charles Kaiser. We are independent different from other US media. Support our work at horton-kaiser.com.

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Keep your eyes peeled for The Horton-Kaiser Report’s podcast, which is launching today with an interview with Abdi Latif Dahir, who is the New York Times’ new Beirut Correspondent.

Who Is Playing the Markets With Prior Knowledge of Trump’s Tweets?

Associated Press

Scott: What can explain Trump’s bizarre and embarrassing rush late on Tuesday to announce a ceasefire—on terms that he later announced he hadn’t read and didn’t really understand? An aversion to reading complex texts? The absence of diplomatic skills, and more essentially, diplomats to advise him? Or perhaps it’s something still much more fundamental. People close to him who are eager to make a large fortune speculating predicated on their prior knowledge of his announcements. And perhaps these people had been told that such an announcement was imminent and had already plopped down large sums based on that inside scoop.

A group of new accounts on the prediction market Polymarket made highly specific, well-timed bets on whether the U.S. and Iran would reach a ceasefire on April 7, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits for these new customers.

These bets were made even though, in the hours before a two-week ceasefire was announced on Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s rhetoric had escalated sharply and there were few signals that a ceasefire deal was imminent. Early in the day Trump had issued a warning on social media that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran did not meet his demand to open the Strait of Hormuz by his 8 p.m. ET deadline.

An analysis of publicly available blockchain data from Polymarket, using the crypto analytics platform Dune, shows that at least 50 accounts, or wallets, placed substantial “Yes” bets Tuesday before Trump announced the ceasefire in a Truth Social post at around 6:30 pm ET. These were the first bets made by these particular wallets.

Donald Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric are investors and advisors to Polymarket. David Urban, a Trump campaign advisor, is Polymarket’s lobbyist. The SEC, DOJ and state law enforcement agencies have the power to investigate these and other smelly trades surrounding the Iran War, as does Congress. There is as of yet no sign that any investigation is underway.

The Madness of The Mad Man Theory

Financial Times

Charles: Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh explains all the reasons why there’s no comfort in believing Trump is emulating Richard Nixon’s “mad man theory.” In the original version, Henry Kissinger was supposed to tell the North Vietnamese that Nixon was crazy, to scare them into stopping the war in the south out of fear that the US would nuke them.

Nixon made his threats through private channels. If he decided to back down from them, he would not lose face in front of the entire world. In contrast, Trump’s threats to erase a civilisation could scarcely be more public. The pressure to make good on them at some point is correspondingly higher. This is why games of bluff are better played behind closed doors.

Mid-20th century Vietnam was not central to the world economy. Early-21st century Iran unmistakably is. If a few weeks of bombing can trigger the worst energy crisis for half a century, a “mad” escalation might turn oil-price inflation into outright oil shortages.

And the biggest reason of all: the mad man theory never worked for Nixon and Kissinger either:

Four years after the Oval Office conversation between Nixon and Kissinger, the North Vietnamese took Saigon. Of the 58,220 US deaths in the war, over 20,000 occurred under the genius pair.

Israel Botched the Iran War—and Shattered Its Standing in the United States

Ha’aretz

Scott: At the outset of the Iran War, Israeli public opinion was solidly aligned in support of the operation. Now, five weeks in, Israelis are not so sure… particularly because they don’t see where it’s headed and sense strongly that Netanyahu doesn’t want it to end. The fundamental dynamics are simple: Netanyahu believes he can continue to be Israel’s ruler indefinitely in war time, and thus he has no interest in war time ever coming to an end. Writing in Ha’aretz, Amos Harel captures the doubts perfectly,

When the campaign began on February 28, associates of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlined three overarching goals to journalists: the fall of the Iranian regime, the destruction of its nuclear program and the elimination of the ballistic missile threat.

So far, none of those goals has been achieved, though it cannot be ruled out that the war will resume in two weeks if the cease-fire collapses. The regime remains in place, no solution has yet been found for the 440 kilograms of enriched uranium, and the missile program remains active, at least in part.

By contrast, Israel’s standing in the United States has been significantly damaged, and it is likely to face accusations that it dragged President Donald Trump into an unnecessary war. Israel’s home front sustained considerable damage, which the military had to expend critical capabilities on a large scale to contain.

In the north, Israel has also entangled itself in a military confrontation with Hezbollah in Lebanon that threatens the security of northern residents and the rehabilitation of the Galilee.

As written here before and during the war, there is no full correlation between superior military capability and a desirable strategic outcome.

Supreme Court remade by Trump ushers in historic defeats for civil rights

The Washington Post

Charles: Justin Jouvenal brings the statistical receipts proving the success of this Supreme Court’s continuing effort to run the United States backwards into the glorious ‘50’s—when Black people couldn’t vote in the South, women couldn’t get credit cards, and gay people couldn’t get a legal drink in a New York City bar.

The sharply conservative Supreme Court that President Donald Trump’s three appointees remade is the first since at least the 1950s to reject civil rights claims in a majority of cases involving women and minorities, according to a detailed analysis conducted for The Washington Post.

Since the three Trump appointees joined the court, the share of cases won by the side advocating an expansion of civil rights fell to 44 percent.

In all the other time periods going back to the early 1950s, the Supreme Court issued rulings in favor of expanding civil rights in a majority of such cases.

The high-water mark for rulings in favor of civil rights was 74 percent during the court of Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s.

If there is a firm hand on the rudder of US war-making, perhaps it’s Netanyahu’s

NBC News & Bloomberg

Scott: The ceasefire agreement came right on the heels of the Swan-Haberman Path to War narrative in which a host of voices near Trump struggled to place the blame for the whole decision to go to war against Iran squarely on Benjamin Netanyahu. What transpired in the hours immediately after the ceasefire was negotiated served to underscore this attribution in a dramatic fashion. Trump clarified that the agreement covered Lebanon, and indeed the Pakistani prime minister’s text said as much… more strikingly, telltale signs emerged that the Pakistani text had actually been composed inside the White House. Then Netanyahu decided to disregard the ceasefire, launching the heaviest bombing of the entire war in downtown Beirut, in an area with no ostensible military targets. Veteran observer Bill Grueskin highlights these two reports coming in rapid succession as demonstrative. First, an NBC News report:

In a phone call Wednesday, Trump asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pull back on the strikes to help ensure the success of the upcoming negotiations, two senior administration officials told NBC News. Trump confirmed that conversation in his interview with NBC News on Thursday, saying the Israelis were “scaling back” operations in Lebanon.

And the second, coming only minutes later, after the Trump-Netanyahu call, in Bloomberg:

Israel is continuing to strike Hezbollah and won’t stop until the security of communities in northern Israel is ensured, the Israeli prime minister says, addressing northern residents. “There is no ceasefire in Lebanon.” Planned talks will focus on disarming Hezbollah and reaching a sustainable peace agreement with Lebanon.

Whenever there is a divergence in perspective, Netanyahu controls. And that quickly became evident in remarks from Trump and Vance in the coming hours.

EU Demands that Orbán Clarify His Secret Compact with Russia

Die Welt

Scott: Following a series of exposé pieces highlighting secret dialogues between Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin and between their respective foreign ministers, it became clear that Orbán had entered into a formal compact with the Kremlin in which he promised to facilitate the Russian objective of derailing Ukraine’s membership in the EU and NATO and blocking financial and military assistance to Ukraine—all in exchange to concessions to Orbán which are unclear. Now the EU leadership has issued a formal demand to Orbán for an accounting of all these matters.

Just days before the Hungarian parliamentary election, the EU Commission has called upon Hungary to respond to reports regarding alleged collusion with Russia concerning Ukraine’s accession to the EU. These reports are “extremely disturbing, and it is incumbent upon the government of the member state in question to urgently provide an explanation,” Commission spokesperson Paula Pinho said on Thursday in Brussels.

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen intends to “raise this matter at the level of heads of state and government as well,” she added.

In late March, several media outlets reported that Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó—a close ally of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—allegedly divulged details of EU discussions to his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov.

Melania’s Six Minute Presser

New York Times

Charles: Whenever you think for a moment that things can’t get any weirder, the First Couple always proves you wrong.

In a 2002 email written to Ghislaine Maxwell, a woman named “Melania” wrote to Ms. Maxwell to praise a profile of Mr. Epstein in New York magazine. Ms. Maxwell called the woman “sweet pea,” and the woman signed her email “Love.”

Times reporter Shawn McCreesh wrote that the First Lady

[summoned] a “small group of stunned reporters” yesterday afternoon to declare: “I never had a relationship with Epstein or his accomplice Maxwell. My email reply to Maxwell cannot be categorized as anything more than casual correspondence.

As she “turned on her stiletto heels and stalked out,”

“Daved reporters started shouting after her: “Why now!? Why now!?”

Of course there’s an obvious answer for that. If you were married to someone you loathed, who had just started a huge war just to distract attention from the name of Jeffrey Epstein, how could you possibly display more “epic fury” than this does?

Or else Melania is trying to get ahead of some gigantic new disclosure. Trump indicated he hadn’t been clear about the subject of his wife’s press conference before she held it.

Heather Cox Richardson noticed that Trump’s next big social media post after his wife’s remarks featured a graphic depiction of a man killing a woman.

Living through Trump’s time bomb

The Handbasket

Imogen: This week, Trump has topped what we thought was his worst yet—twice. Independent journalist Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket encapsulates what it was like to live through Trump’s genocidal whims, as real, or not, as they may be.

After the shock of the first read, the questions flooded: Which civilization would allegedly die Tuesday night? Iran? Ours? All of human civilization? How would it die? “WHO KNOWS?” What could he have planned that would warrant the hyperbole of calling it one of the most important moments in world history? Would April 7th become one of those seismic dates to which people knowingly refer without context? Why is he blessing the people of Iran when he wants them dead? Was this a real threat or did he just want attention? Did that distinction really matter when a country of 92 million people thought they might be vaporized overnight?

…

While a civilization did not yet die this week, we most certainly experienced a very real loss; the loss of that last shred of hope that no matter how unhinged Trump becomes, no matter what he says in a rambling speech or an incoherent press conference, that he wouldn’t do that. That is now a menu item, even if its threat is just a means to an end.

Army Survivors of Russian-Guided Attack on US Base in Kuwait Are Livid About Pentagon Lies About the Attack

CBS News

Scott: In his five o’clock follies (as Hegseth briefings are known in the White House), his temper flares at questions about wounded or dead US service personnel and lost equipment. He plays all of this down and dismisses injuries as always nothing serious. But US Army personnel who lived through a devastating Iranian missile attack on a base in Kuwait—later revealed to have been directed by intelligence furnished by the Kremlin to Iran—were furious about Hegseth’s denigration of the danger they faced when they were interviewed by CBS News.

From there they resumed managing the movement of equipment, munitions and personnel across the Middle East.

About 30 minutes later, “everything shook,” one soldier told CBS News. “And it’s something like what you see in the movies. Your ears are ringing. Everything’s fuzzy. Your vision is blurry. You’re dizzy. There’s dust and smoke everywhere.”

Dazed, the service member surveyed a grisly scene: “Head wounds, heavy bleeding, lots of perforated eardrums, and then just shrapnel all over, so folks are bleeding from their abdomen, bleeding from arms, bleeding from legs.”

A video shows smoke billowing from the building, fires smoldering. The blast killed six—the deadliest attack on U.S. troops since 2021—and injured more than 20 others.

Starstruck

The Artemis II crew captured this photo of our galaxy, the Milky Way, on April 7, 2026. The Milky Way’s elegant spiral structure is dominated by just two arms wrapping off the ends of a central bar of stars. Spanning more than 100,000 light-years, Earth is located along one of the galaxy’s spiral arms, about halfway from the center.

IMF: 45 million around the world will face starvation due to Trump’s Iran War

Libération

Scott: For some, the war against Iran means an excellent opportunity to profit off the miseries of others. And for some 45 million it may well mean starvation.

At a briefing delivered on Thursday, April 9 in the International Monetary Fund headquarters in Washington, Fund director Kristalina Georgieva warned that the Iran war could plunge 45 million people into food insecurity due to rising energy prices and supply disruptions.

The institution anticipates additional requests for support from member countries “somewhere between $20 billion and $50 billion—at the lower end of that range if the ceasefire holds.” “It would have been worse without sound policies on the part of most emerging economies [...] and we have the necessary resources to weather this shock,” assured Kristalina Georgieva.

The sharp rise in energy prices and supply disruptions involving oil, liquefied natural gas, and fertilizers risk exacerbating global food insecurity, potentially driving the total number of “people suffering from hunger to over 360 million,” warned the IMF Managing Director. And “even in the best-case scenario, there will be no return” to the situation that prevailed prior to the outbreak of hostilities.

Your Online Moment of Zen

Academic Festival Overture

By Johannes Brahms, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

This was my uncle Jerry Kaiser’s favorite piece. Throughout my youth, Jerry was my very human. He devoted his life to Justice. He got Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at his synagogue in Westport Connectict, and he opposed the War in Vietnam way back in 1966.

For some reason classical snobs hate this gorgeous overture. I have no idea why.

As we wade toward the apocalypse, if you can find a more reliable way to cheer yourself up than watching Lenny conduct this, please tell me what that could possibly be.

Edited by Imogen Sayers.

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Charles: After the world’s most terrifying public figure backed down from his latest threat to become America’s proudest war criminal, millions of decent people gave thanks to Pakistan for brokering a ceasefire in the most pointless war of our lifetimes.

Pakistan declared all the guns would go silent, including the ones in Lebanon. But as the man who drove the United States into this catastrophe in the first place, Bibi Netanyahu remained as determined as ever to keep the bombs dropping as long as he possibly can—mostly because he might finally be convicted for his many alleged crimes if he is ever forced to leave the Israeli government.

A month into this madness, 600,000 Shiites had already been evicted from their homes in Southern Lebanon, and Emperor Bibi has declared that none of them can ever go back. Another 600,000 Lebanese are also homeless. But to destroy any chance of this cease fire succeeding, at mid-morning Wednesday, the Israelis launched a hundred new bombing raids in 10 minutes, dozens of them across Beirut, far from the Southern suburbs Israel had already decimated.

The Israelis’ excuse: they are targeting Hezbollah, the armed Shiite enemy that they are fighting in the South. Because Hezbollah fighters are now all over the capital, according to Israel, no Beirut neighborhood would ever be safe from Israeli bombardment again.

That sounds like Gaza genocide redux.

As of last Sunday, 1,500 people had been killed and more than 4,800 others injured so far in the current round of war in Lebanon. Yesterday the Lebanese Ministry of Health added 182 deaths and 890 injuries to those numbers after the latest Israeli onslaught.

Bibi pretends Israel is only attacking Hezbollah “command centers” but Hwaida Saad and Abdi Latif Dahir made clear in a moving dispatch from Yahchouch Lebanon that everyone can now be collateral damage, including Pierre Mouawad and his wife, even though he was an official of a Christian political party that was fiercely opposed to Hezbollah. The Israelis still pretended they had hit a “terror target” but admitted there were reports that “several uninvolved individuals” were also “harmed” in the attack.

“What was his crime?” asked Elias Bidran, one of the mourners, who attended Mouwad’s funeral with his wife and son. “He and his family were sitting in their home when a strike came and killed them,” he added.

“This is a war on all of Lebanon,” Mr. Bidran said.

A particularly vile part of the Israeli strategy is the way it will increase ethnic and religious-sect hatred among the Lebanese. Leaders of Christian villages in the South were told before yesterday’s barrage they would be spared bombardment—but they were simultaneously warned their protective shield would disappear if the Israelis learned they had allowed any Shiite refugees to linger among them.

The growing realization that the United States was led into this ghastly war by the Israelis has already done grave new damage to the standing of the Jewish State in the United States. When people realize the Israelis are determined to torpedo even a temporary ceasefire, it can only accelerate American disgust with our erstwhile ally.

Trump’s Psychotic Roller Coaster Ride

Yleisradio Oy (Helsinki, Finland)

Scott: Who has benefited from Trump’s War on Iran? At this point we can identify a few unambiguous winners—Russia, China, the fossil fuels industry outside of the Gulf. And in the United States, a very tiny class of investors with loads of capital and intimate access to Donald Trump… a group that invariably knew roughly three hours ahead of his tweets announcing war measures exactly what he was going to say. There has been, thus far, remarkably little demand to know exactly who these insiders are. But economists, like Finnish finance minister Riika Purra, are quite keen to know and to better understand what, exactly, drives Trump’s often seemingly psychotic actions with respect to the market… and how governments should deal with the huge losses inflicted on the marketplace as a result.

There have been calls for state supports as the US-Israeli attack on Iran pushes up prices for food, energy, fuel and mortgage interest rates. Such support could be on the table when the cabinet meets for budget negotiations in a couple of weeks.

Purra argued that it is very difficult for the government to intervene in prices based on market pressures.

“They are defined by the daily outbursts of President [Donald] Trump, which are becoming more and more confused and crazier by the day. The situation is quite chaotic,” Purra said on Tuesday, before news of a two-week ceasefire deal with Iran.

If anything, Purra suggested the government might decide to ease the fuel distribution obligation, which stipulates that a certain proportion of the fuel supplied to petrol stations must be renewable.

“I have raised the possibilities of the distribution obligation because it has no fiscal [tax revenue] implications. On the contrary, easing the distribution obligation would increase state tax revenue,” the Finns Party leader asserted.

Melania Lays Claim to Kristi Noem’s Love Boat

The Independent

Scott: The Department of Homeland Security spent $70 million on a Boeing 727 Max 8 on the pretext that it was needed to transport out of status immigrants being deported or sent to ICE detention camps. Former DHS secretary Kristi Noem, however, selected a different outfitting of the plane: it was given a bar and a luxury bedroom, in which she and her chief of staff, Corey Lewandowski, slept as they traveled about the United States and overseas. Dubbed “the love boat,” the plane figured prominently in the scandal that got both Noem and Lewandowski fired. Now the love boat will have a new mistress, Melania Trump.

President Donald Trump has decided to hang on to the controversial $70 million luxury jet leased by former Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem until she was ousted last month, according to a report.

The plane will now be made available to first lady Melania Trump and to cabinet secretaries.

Paperwork indicated that Noem intended to purchase the Boeing 737 Max 8 – which features a queen-size bed, showers, a kitchen, four flat screen TVs, and a cocktail bar – for use in carrying out “high-profile deportations.” While it had been assumed the purchase would be abandoned following her departure, the administration has pressed ahead with it, taking responsibility for the plane away from the Department of Homeland Security and redesignating it for more general use.

Earthset

Keighley Rockcliffe: And to all of you down there on Earth and around Earth, we love you, from the Moon. We will see you on the other side, said Artemis II pilot Victor Glover on April 6^th at 6:44pm ET as 8.3 billion minus four people and one Earth set below the Moon’s horizon. The Orion spacecraft, Integrity, then traveled behind the Moon as part of its seven-hour lunar flyby. The crew characterized never-before-seen regions of the far side of the Moon, which is puzzlingly less volcanically active than the near side. New observations of crater peaks, floors, terraces, and rings preserved on the lunar surface will help piece together the impact history of the Solar System. Among many other surface characterizations, the crew observed one of the Moon’s best-preserved basins, the Orientale basin, and identified two new craters. As Earth rose above the Moon’s horizon and Integrity began its return home, Artemis II mission specialist Christina Koch powerfully summarized humanity’s grander mission: ...we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.

Best Click Bait of the Week

New York Times

To Topple the Patriarchy, These Women Have Sex With Vegetables

Sadie Stein tells us the book is nevertheless disappointing:

Let’s start with the content warnings. “Hexes of the Deadwood Forest,” the best-selling Polish author Agnieszka Szpila’s first book to be translated into English, includes the following: adult themes, adult content, adult language, violence, suicide, sexual assault, torture, murder, genocide, bestiality, cruelty to children, sex with moss, sex with grass, sex with mushrooms, sex with lichens, sex with feathers, sex with rotten vegetables and sex with frozen dirt.

Your final warning? All this gets weirdly tedious.

Your Online Moment of Zen

Gustav Klimt

Woman with Fan

Leave a comment

Taco Tuesday

New York Times

Scott: Tuesday began with another deranged, and this time genocidal, Truth Social post from Trump promising “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran didn’t agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by 8:00 PM Washington time, and ended well short of that deadline with announcements from Tehran, Washington and Islamabad of a two-week ceasefire during which negotiations will resume. What Trump got out of this is unclear, though the reopening of the Strait would be a reset to the status quo ante. What the Iranians got is far more evident, starting with the critical fact that negotiations will resume on the basis of Iran’s 10-point plan, in which reparations collected in the form of transit fees is a central part, as well as an end to sanctions. Certainly the optics make Trump look like a blusterer with a very weak hand to play.

Shortly after the cease-fire announcement, a U.S. official said American military strikes against Iran had stopped. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said in a statement that the Iranians would “cease their defensive operation,” and that “for a period of two weeks, safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz will be possible via coordinating with Iran’s Armed Forces.”

The cease-fire buys both sides time to try to reach a longer-term end to the war, which began at the end of February with the United States and Israel subjecting Iran to a withering military assault.

Iran accepted Pakistan’s cease-fire proposal after frantic diplomatic efforts by Pakistan and last-minute intervention by China, a key ally, according to three Iranian officials. Iran’s national security council officially confirmed the agreement, casting it as a victory in which the United States accepted Iran’s terms.

Earlier, as the day wore on, it was not clear whether an off-ramp would emerge from the talks. It was not even clear if there were talks.

At one point, with Mr. Trump threatening devastating strikes on power plants, bridges and other critical infrastructure — a possible war crime under international law — Iran stopped engaging in the indirect negotiations.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Mr. Trump warned earlier in the day, though he said he hoped “maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen.”

In the hours before the 8 p.m. deadline, the United States and Israel stepped up their attacks on Iran. All the while, the Pakistanis were reported to be redoubling their efforts to get a cease-fire.

In urging Mr. Trump to hold off, the country’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, said on social media that diplomatic efforts were “progressing steadily, strongly and powerfully with the potential to lead to substantive results.” He also asked Iran to open the waterway for two weeks.

Iran’s ambassador to Pakistan said in a social media post on Tuesday evening that diplomacy to stop the war had taken a “step forward” from a “critical, sensitive stage.”

But as night fell in the Middle East, Iranians were bracing for the possibility of more strikes. Some formed human chains along bridges and around power plants across the country, videos and photographs posted by state and other local media showed. It’s unclear whether the demonstrations were spontaneous or planned by the government.

Performing a Journalist’s First Duty: Calling War Crimes War Crimes

The Guardian

Charles: Julian Borger, a glorious grand poobah of The Guardian, does his best to remind American troops that carrying out Trump’s insane instructions should land them behind the dock at the next Nuremberg that needs to transpire when this nightmare is finally over.

There is little debate among legal experts that such an attack on the life-supporting infrastructure for 93 million Iranians would constitute a war crime.

“Such rhetorical statements – if followed through – would amount to the most serious war crimes – and thus the president’s statements place service members in a profoundly challenging situation,” two former judge advocate general (JAG) officers, Margaret Donovan and Rachel VanLandingham wrote on the website Just Security on Monday.

“As former uniformed military lawyers who advised targeting operations, we know the president’s words run counter to decades of legal training of military personnel and risk placing our warfighters on a path of no return.”

They noted that Trump’s boast that he would bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages”, and the order by his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, to show “no quarter, no mercy” were not just “plainly illegal” but they also represented a rupture from the moral and legal principles that US military personnel had been “trained to follow their entire careers”.

With Threat to Wipe Out Iran’s Civilization, Trump’s Rhetoric Goes Beyond Bluster

The New York Times

Last night’s news analysis from the New York Times came with the dumbest sanewashing subhead of the week:

The president’s violent rhetoric risks damaging his credibility as a negotiator and the country’s standing in the world.

Trump’s Path to War

New York Times

Scott: Concerned about long-term repercussions of the Iran War for US-Israeli relations, AIPAC, ADL and other Likud-aligned leaders of the Jewish community in the United States have been aggressively pressing the case that responsibility for the war rests solely with Trump and cannot be pinned on Israel. They have a problem now with the publication of the first major account of the path to war in Iran, coming from Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman. The New York Times narrative, plainly fueled by people around Trump who believe the war will end in disaster for the United States and are eager to put themselves in the opposition—read Susie Wiles, JD Vance and Marco Rubio—have decided to pin all of the blame on Benjamin Netanyahu and his Svengali-like influence over Trump.

The gathering had been kept deliberately small to guard against leaks. Other top cabinet secretaries had no idea it was happening. Also absent was the vice president. JD Vance was in Azerbaijan, and the meeting had been scheduled on such short notice that he was unable to make it back in time.

The presentation that Mr. Netanyahu would make over the next hour would be pivotal in setting the United States and Israel on the path toward a major armed conflict in the middle of one of the world’s most volatile regions. And it would lead to a series of discussions inside the White House over the following days and weeks, the details of which have not been previously reported, in which Mr. Trump weighed his options and the risks before giving the go-ahead to join Israel in attacking Iran.

They also found that Hegseth’s makeover of the senior military brass had its effect. While many of them were convinced that Netanyahu was feeding Trump bad intelligence and offering unsound strategic advice, not a one was prepared to open his mouth and say that… it would be a firing offense to do so.

At no point during the deliberations did the chairman [Gen. Caine] directly tell the president that war with Iran was a terrible idea — though some of General Caine’s colleagues believed that was exactly what he thought.

Netanyahu was not simply supplying the impetus and drive towards war, he was also furnishing the tactical masterplan.

Trump steals $1.2 Billion in Foreign Aid for Himself

The New Republic

Charles: The total evaporation of Congressional oversight accompished by Republican castratis Mike Johnson and John Thune means that Donald Trump now uses the Federal budget as his personal piggy bank.

So instead of spending $1.2 billion in foreign aid for the purposes specified by Congress–to halt the spread of famine and HIV and provide disaster assistance–Marco Rubio has unilaterally redirected those dollars to Trump’s “war criminal-filled Board of Peace,” as The New Repubublic put it. Trump is in permanent control of all of the funds for his phony Peace Board, where membership for his vassal states costs $1 billion each. And this redirection of foreign aid is just a tiny portion of the whole grift: Trump has already said he plans to abscond with a total of $10 billion in Federal funds for this one.

“In a properly functioning government,” said The New Republic, “the president actually wouldn’t be allowed to take billions of dollars in the midst of a partial government shutdown to fund an experimental pet project.”

Overtaxed with Invasion Plans for Iran, Greenland and Cuba, Trump Gives Canada a Repieve

CBC News

Scott: Trump has long been adamant that he would make Canada’s 10 provinces and three territories into a single 51st state (the idea being to insure that Canada would have only two rather than 20 senators in Congress). But in a recent interview granted a royal biographer, Trump has relented, announcing that after two hundred years of separation, perhaps it just wasn’t feasible any more.

An upcoming book authored by a prominent royal commentator says U.S. President Donald Trump was primarily interested in annexing Canadian territory just above the U.S.-Canada border — and his respect for King Charles may have quashed that goal.The book, titled Elizabeth II: In Private. In Public. The Inside Story, is written by British journalist Robert Hardman and is being serialized in the Daily Mail. It’s a profile of the late former Queen, who Trump speaks glowingly about, and touches upon King Charles’s reign.An excerpt provided to CBC News includes conversations between Hardman and the president where Trump brought up his interest in taking over Greenland. “I replied that this would probably destroy NATO and, while we were on the subject, could he please leave Canada alone too,” Hardman wrote. The two men spoke in December last year in Florida. “It had been a staunch ally through history, a gallant D-Day partner and attempting to acquire it would undoubtedly make the King of Canada unhappy,” Hardman added.According to Hardman’s recounting of the conversation, Trump paused at that note and asked the British journalist whether Canada still recognized King Charles as its head of state. “Do they still recognize the King? Or have they stopped that?” Trump said, according to Hardman.

When Hardman told Trump that King Charles is indeed Canada’s head of state, the U.S. president said Canada has “terrible politicians” and that most Canadians live just above the U.S. border. “The problem is some guy drew that straight line to make a border. He should just have drawn it fifty miles further north and then there wouldn’t be a problem,” Trump said, according to Hardman.

Climate Change = Agricultural Apocalypse

The Washington Post

Charles: Your daily reminder that in spite of all the crimes Jeff Bezos has comitted against it, the reporters still toiling at The Washington Post deliver vital journalism every day—which is why I never cancelled my subscription. “Epic winter drought creates a bleak situation for farmers—and your food” is a superb take out by Post climate reporter Sarah Kaplan about all the catastrophic consequences of what is now gleefully unregulated climate change.

• More than three-quarters of sugarcane-producing areas, 83 percent of rice-producing areas and a whopping 96 percent of the peanut-producing region is besieged by drought.

• The number of cattle raised in the United States is already the lowest since the 1950s — a consequence of a 2022-2023 dry spell that reduced forage and raised hay prices across the High Plains.

• This year, according to the Agriculture Department, 64 percent of the U.S. cattle inventory is affected by drought, along with most of the hay and alfalfa used for feed.

• This gives ranchers no reason to regrow their herds and may prompt them to sell off even more animals — leading to high prices for people at the grocery store,

• In the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest, 30 inches of snow water equivalent disappeared in a matter of days. The Arkansas-White-Red river basin, which stretches from Colorado to the Mississippi River, contains just 8 percent of its average snowpack moisture.

• “There are simply no analogous years to this one,” said Jason Gerlich, the regional drought early-warning system coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

ICE-Spy

NPR

Imogen: United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement has admitted to using spyware so powerful it can intercept encrypted messages from platforms such as WhatsApp—which claim to secure users’ messages “end-to-end.”

Graphite uses what is known as “zero click” technology so that it can gain access to encrypted messages on a targeted device even if the user never clicks on a link.

The encrypted messaging app WhatsApp disclosed in early 2025 that it discovered some 90 journalists and members of civil society in various countries were targeted with Graphite…

Todd Lyons' confirmation that the agency is using spyware comes as ICE has ramped up its use of surveillance technologies to find people in the U.S. without authorization as part of the Trump administration's mass deportation campaign. Those tools have also been used extensively on American citizens who have protested ICE's activities.

Orbán Pledges Rodent-Like Fealty to Putin

Bloomberg News

Scott: In what may be the most striking election-eve scoop in modern European history, Bloomberg has gotten hold of private tapes of conversations between Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán—which show the Hungarian prime minister behaving in the most humiliatingly obsequious manner, and promising to advance Russian interests in the country’s war with Ukraine.

“Yesterday our friendship rose to such a high level that I can help in any way,” Orban said, according to a Hungarian government transcript of the call reviewed by Bloomberg. “In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.”

To underline the point, Orban recalled a children’s story he said was popular in Hungary. The Aesop fable involves a mouse freeing a lion caught in a net after it had earlier spared the rodent’s life. The remark drew a laugh from Putin, the transcript shows.

“I say the same to Trump,” Orban told Bloomberg when asked about the conversation and his comparison of Hungary’s role to that of a mouse. “Size matters.”

The full transcript can be examined here.

With an Unhinged Leader in Washington, Europeans Look To Restructure the Atlantic Alliance Without Him

Wall Street Journal

Scott: Trump hadn’t yet truthed—posted on Truth Social—about the eradication of an entire civilization when Yaroslav Trofimov’s piece appeared, but the point was clear enough from his weekend Truth tantrums: Trump is erratic, prone to violence, and incapable of holding a thought for more than five minutes. So what are the Atlantic middle powers to do about all this?

Many—on both sides of the Atlantic—wonder if they are even allies anymore. Angered by the refusal of European nations to join the war alongside the U.S. and Israel, President Trump has called European countries cowards, and threatened to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization altogether.

“The United States is unpredictable,” said Roderich Kiesewetter, a lawmaker from Germany’s ruling party, echoing a widespread sentiment in Europe. “It’s not a reliable partner anymore for the Western world.”

Their quandary is that nobody else can substitute for America’s military and economic might in the foreseeable future. China and Russia also carry out predatory policies. It will take time for middle-sized democracies in Europe and Asia to wean themselves from dependencies on America and to intensify cooperation among themselves.

Ever since World War II, the U.S. was mostly a benevolent power for its fellow democracies and achieved its hegemony by consent, said Michael Fullilove, executive director of the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank. That’s not how Trump’s America is viewed today.

“If you insult your allies and push them to the brink in every negotiation, if you present your ugliest face to the world, then this consent will evaporate,” Fullilove said. “But what is the alternative to the U.S.-led alliance system? The U.S. is the only country that can project power anywhere on Earth. Who else will lead the West, if not Washington?”

Uday’s and Qusay’s Excellent Adventures in East Timor

Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project

Scott: Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric venture boldly where few others tread. Their latest adventure takes them to the long-suffering tropical paradise of East Timor.

• Last year the AB network promoted a “blockchain theme resort” in Timor-Leste that involved three people who were later sanctioned by the U.S. for ties to an alleged scam syndicate.

• AB has partnered with World Liberty, a cryptocurrency firm co-owned by President Trump’s family, and counts the former leaders of Serbia and Ireland among its key figures.

• The three people connected to the resort and sanctioned by the U.S. were removed from the project shortly after the sanctions were announced, corporate documents and interviews show. None have been charged… yet.

Meanwhile, Uday Also Shows up in Banja Luka

KLIX Vijesti

Scott: Trump Jr. turns up in Banja Luka, Bosnia, today, to meet with the Russian-backed secessionist regime in Bosnia’s Respublika Srpska after their twice-indicted registered lobbyist Michael Flynn (also Trump’s “minister for retribution”) secured US sanctions relief for the entire government. Dodik will then meet Vance in Budapest to campaign for Orbán. This is diplomacy in the age of Trump, it always offers something highly remunerative for the family.

Donald Trump Jr., the son of US President Donald Trump, is arriving in Banja Luka tomorrow, and the Ministry of the Interior of Republika Srpska has issued an Order banning traffic for all motor vehicles weighing more than seven and a half tons. The order was issued for the purpose of ensuring the unhindered stay and movement of a high-ranking foreign delegation visiting Republika Srpska, as they stated, and does not apply to public and municipal service trucks and vehicles that will be engaged in security.

IC 4592: The Blue Horsehead Reflection Nebula

Do you see the horse’s head? What you are seeing is not the famous Horsehead nebula toward Orion, but rather a fainter nebula that only takes on a familiar form with deeper imaging. The main part of the here-imaged molecular cloud complex is reflection nebula IC 4592. Reflection nebulas are made up of very fine dust that normally appears dark but can look quite blue when reflecting the visible light of energetic nearby stars. In this case, the source of much of the reflected light is a star at the eye of the horse. That star is part of Nu Scorpii, one of the brighter star systems toward the constellation of the Scorpion (Scorpius). A second reflection nebula dubbed IC 4601 is visible surrounding two stars just below the image center. The featured picture was taken from Sawda Natheel in Qatar.

Your Online Moment of Zen

Up On The Roof

Charles: The ultimate penthouse anthem, written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin in 1962 and recorded by Laura Nyro in 1970. Laura lived in a tiny penthouse on West 79th Street directly across the street from my best friend since 9th grade, another brilliant singer-songwriter, Judy Barnett. Whenever I exited Judy’s apartment at midnight, after we had done everything college folk did in the ‘70’s, I would scream at the top of my lungs, LAURA!

To make sure Laura could hear her number two fan through her window—in case she wasn’t sitting on her fire escape.

In memory of Bart Gorin, a brilliant cultural historian who did the photo research for 1968 in America. He was Laura’s number one.

I can still remember the moment Bart brought her Christmas and The Beads of Sweat LP to my penthouse, just 55 years ago.

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Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntags-Zeitung

Scott: In FAZ, Stefan Trinks examines the nine portraits of Trump that the current White House occupant has collected and exhibited. Historically portraits of presidents adopt a classical pose of benevolence and enlightenment. Trump’s are shockingly different. They point to a distinctly dark and disturbed man whose instincts are violent and confrontational, even towards those who surround him.

It is an outrage and a slap in the face to all serious artists. The facial expression resembles that of a petulant child; the tie appears completely flat and insubstantial—like a red plastic arrow. If Trump had to walk on such knock-knees in real life, he would trip over them in an instant. Anatomically speaking, it is a death-defying feat: the left leg twists so far inward that one can practically hear the kneecap splintering. The creator of this carnival-style painting is the self-proclaimed “Christian praise artist” Vanessa Horabuena…

By now, no fewer than nine portraits of Trump adorn the White House. Some presidents have enriched their Washington residence with images of their predecessors; very few, however, have chosen to display images of themselves while still in office. Never before, however, has an American president hung so many self-portraits upon these neoclassical walls—and certainly none as bizarre as these: all nine of them exude an atmosphere of menace…

What is genuinely new about Trump’s portraits is that every flattering idealization typical of conventional portraiture is replaced by visual landscapes of menace and an aesthetic of intimidation. The visual language of the White House becomes an extension of strategic gestures of intimidation—for instance, against Denmark in the dispute over Greenland, against Iran, and most recently against Cuba—with “art” pressed into service for his aggressive and unpredictable politics.

Operation ‘Rescue Orbán’ Now Underway

The Times

Scott: Orbán has been caught staging a false-flag terrorist event to influence or to justify shutting down the elections. Hungary’s embattled right-wing prime minister is accused of staging a false flag operation to improve his chances of re-election after a bomb was allegedly found next to a gas pipeline into the country. Viktor Orban, who has ruled the central European nation for the past 16 years, claimed that “powerful” explosives and a detonator had been found only a few hundred metres away from the Balkan Stream pipeline, which funnels gas into Hungary, Serbia and Bulgaria. The scheme perfectly matches an operation plan that Orbán had his security service develop, which was leaked to the press in February.

Orban convened a session of the Hungarian national defence council over what he described as an “act of sabotage”, noting that “Ukraine has been trying to cut Europe off from Russian energy for years”.

Peter Szijjarto, his foreign minister, said the “attempted terror attack … fits right into the pattern of the Ukrainians’ ongoing efforts to disrupt Russian gas and oil supplies to Europe”.

The prime minister had previously alleged that Kyiv was trying to undermine his electoral prospects by deliberately dragging out repairs to the Druzhba oil pipeline from Russia to Hungary, which had been damaged by a Russian drone attack.

However, both Ukraine and the Hungarian opposition said that it was more likely that the Balkan Stream incident had been fabricated in an effort to revive Orban’s stalling campaign before the general election on Sunday.

Ship of Fools

JP Morgan Funds Research

Scott: In Sebastian Brandt’s Renaissance classic, The Ship of Fools (1494), we learn that fools can make astute observations about the difficult world in which they live. Today this role may be reserved to some funds analysts. Right now they are struggling for models and modes of analysis to tackle the peculiar dilemma into which America’s leadership have backed the country through their latest war in the Middle East. Michael Cembalest at J.P. Morgan says when we talk of regime change, perhaps we should start with what’s going on in the United States, where two cabinet officers have been fired while rumors predict the firing of another half dozen, and inside the Pentagon, where Pete Hegseth has fired a raft of senior generals he personally picked for high office. What should we make of this remarkable series of firings, in the midst of a war? In any event, it furnishes a warning sign: something is deeply wrong with America’s national security superstructure.

The pace of Trump’s military purge is the largest in the modern era. Posterity and military historians will determine which category the fired or sidelined four-star generals and admirals

below fall into, or if a new category is needed. All nine have occurred during the last 14 months compared to eleven

in the prior 150 years. There has always been a large degree of bipartisanship in the Congress on defense issues (see chart on NDAA passage margins), but this no longer applies to the Executive Branch.

The Further Adventures of Uday and Qusay

Financial Times

Scott: Fresh from their adventures with crypto and their heavy investment in the world of drones—using money thoughtfully advanced by the “Department of War”—Trump’s sons and heirs, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, have a new scheme. A company in which they have invested will offer an artificial intelligence-powered technology for scanning visitors to the World Cup games to determine who has an infectious disease. And soon this tech will be required at all ports-of-entry to the US.

A Trump family-linked investment group is backing a wellness and biosecurity company that plans to offer AI-powered infectious disease screening to US airports during the football World Cup in June. American Ventures in late February agreed to buy $31.3mn of convertible shares in Nasdaq-listed XWell, which at the time had a market capitalisation of less than $3mn. The American Ventures special purpose vehicle is managed by Trump Tower-based broker Dominari Securities. Through subsidiaries, XWell provides voluntary diagnostic tests to incoming international flyers, funded in part by US government contract awards. The company separately operates several airport spas and a small chain of waxing salons along Florida’s west coast.

Trump’s War on Universities Becomes Literal

Al Jazeera

Scott: By bombing Iran’s Sharif University, the nation’s most prestigious institution of higher learning, Trump’s war on higher education suddenly became quite literal. It’s the third school in Iran that Trump has bombed so far, starting with a girls’ school in Minab that claimed somewhere between 168 and 180 deaths, most of which were school girls.

At least 34 people have been killed, including six children, as the United States and Israel carried out massive attacks across Iran, targeting a top university as well as residential areas, after US President Donald Trump set a Tuesday deadline for Tehran to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face strikes on its power plants and bridges.

The Fars news agency reported on Monday that an air attack killed 23 people, including four girls and two boys aged below 10 years, in Tehran province’s Baharestan County. At least five people were killed in an attack on a residential building in the city of Qom, according to the political and security deputy of the governor, Morteza Heydari. Six others were killed in Bandar-e Lengeh, in southern Iran, authorities said. At least a dozen cities were hit across Iran, including Bandar Abbas, Ahvaz, Mahshahr, Shiraz, Isfahan and Karaj. US-Israeli strikes also hit Sharif University in Tehran, one of Iran’s leading scientific universities, often compared with the US’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Al Jazeera’s Tohid Asadi, reporting from Tehran, said the facility was severely hit, with extensive damage reported in the compound’s mosque and laboratories.

The Near Side of the Moon

The astronauts aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft captured this photo of the Moon’s near side on April 4, 2026. The image features dark patches at center and right; these are ancient lava flows, which are unique to this side of the Moon.

The Artemis II astronauts—astronauts Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Koch of NASA and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen—are set to fly around the Moon on April 6, 2026.

Record Boom for the Economy of California

Bloomberg

Notwithstanding both unprecedented efforts by Trump to disadvantage the Golden State and devastating losses due to wildfire, California’s economy is now in a boom that leaves all other states completely in the dust. In fact California, which has a population of 39 million people, just supplanted Japan—123 million—as the fourth-largest economy on earth, and easily the largest economy inside the United States.

• California became the top performing economy among its 49 siblings and any developed nation under Governor Gavin Newsom’s two-term leadership.

• Gross domestic product surged 40% to more than $4 trillion, accounting for more than 14% of US output, after Newsom took office in January 2019.

• California’s diversity and its strong technology and healthcare sectors are cited as key factors in the state’s superior economic performance, with the technology sector’s contribution to California’s GDP increased 59% since 2019.

Don’t expect to hear a word of this reported on Rupert Murdoch TV, but do ask yourself why the Murdochs live in California if they hate it so much.

Trump Demands Greenland, Again

Berlingske

Scott: Trump is back in front of the camera today, focused on his next invasion. Apparently it may yet be Greenland before Cuba. Describing his issue with NATO, he said, “It all began with, if you want to know the truth, Greenland. We want Greenland. They don’t want to give it to us and I said, Bye-bye.” In Trump’s mind, “they” is NATO. But in fact, Trump’s problem with NATO began in August 1987, immediately following a trip he made to Russia that was arranged by Russian ambassador Yuri Dubinin. Trump was hosted on this trip by Inturist, an entity later revealed to be an operating division of the KGB. He then took out ads that ran in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post, all lashing away at NATO. The ad copy he used was, according to a well-positioned Moscow friend, furnished by KGB operatives. But that was 1987. Here we are 39 years later.

“There is no doubt that we are in a NATO crisis.”

This is what Berlingske’s correspondent in the US, Jacob Heinel, said after the press conference at the White House on Monday evening.

“Trump uses almost every opportunity to hammer away at the alliance in relation to Iran - and now we also have to talk about Greenland again.”

Jacob Heinel does not believe that we should expect an escalation of the Greenland crisis based on the statement tonight, but it is a clear recognition from Trump.

“He was disappointed that he could not get his big deal so that he could become the president who could expand the USA with Greenland. It was a low point in the relationship between the USA and NATO,” says Jacob Heinel.

However, he does not believe that Trump will withdraw the USA from NATO right now, but after the Iran war he believes that it is very likely that we will be in a state of crisis again.

“Because the point is that Trump does not need to withdraw the USA for us to be in a NATO crisis. “NATO’s health, if you can put it that way, also depends on the mood among the allies – and in particular between the US and Europe. And it is really bad,” says Jacob Heinel, pointing out that the past 14 months have worn NATO down.

Your Online Moment of Zen

More by The Young Rascals

Charles: Released in 1967 and written by Marcello Ciorciolini, Norman Newell, Nino Oliviero & Riz Ortolani.

An Easter Dinner, Heavy on the Herbs

Scott: Our Easter dinner has grown over the years more to resemble Nowruz—Persian new year—celebration in Central Asia. That means things are very green, and herbs play a dominant role. This year’s Hungarian mushroom soup has parsley, thyme, marjoram and chervil. The leg of lamb is marinated (for three days) in a yoghurt-and-herbs based marinade we discovered in Kyrgyzstan, where it’s used to make the most tender shashlik. It works just as well on the leg of lamb, too. Lots of spring vegetables are essential, as is our dessert table, filled with contributions from our guests and Carol’s magnificent peach tarte.

Edited by Imogen Sayers.

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New York Times

Scott: Americans woke up on Easter morning to learn that their president continues to rage internally over the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. Although the Strait of Hormuz isn’t actually closed, as vessels are passing through it. However, it’s closed to the US and Israel, which he finds infuriating. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.” The mocking or sarcastic invocation of the name of God, in Arabic, on the holiest day in the Christian calendar was an unusual flourish for Trump. It appears designed to show his contempt for Islam, but more generally it reflects his contempt for religions of all sort. The New York Times first fretted over actually reproducing the full test of Trump’s profanity-laced text. Then, much to its credit, it published a straight-forward discussion of Trump’s threats of war crimes by Edward Wong:

No other recent American president has talked so openly about committing potential war crimes, legal experts, historians and former U.S. officials say. Wartime American presidents and their aides have usually insisted they were trying to follow international and U.S. military law, even if they violated it in some cases.

International laws aimed at preventing the horrors of total war are codified in a series of agreements, including the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, the Nuremberg Principlesand the United Nations Charter. Deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure violate those. So does pillaging a country, which Mr. Trump has suggested he might do by taking Iran’s oil.

The Trump administration’s language and actions could have far-reaching consequences. Within Iran, it is likely to galvanize opposition to the United States, including among some ordinary Iranians who have protested their own government.

How Pete Hegseth Made Gigantic War Crimes Possible

Paul Krugman

Charles: Paul Krugman doing what he does best: focusing on what really matters:

If Trump is actually going to give the order for massive war crimes, for destruction of civilian infrastructure, power plants, bridges, which will, among other things, lead to a lot of deaths in Iran, will the military obey it? A year ago, I would have said no.

But what we do know now is that, first of all, there turns out to be at least a significant MAGA component inside the officer corps. And we know that Pete Hexeth has been systematically corrupting, dismantling the military over the past 14 months. Generals who raise ethical concerns have been fired. Officers who even just want to be intelligent about warfare. and not believe that it’s all about warrior ethos and lethality have been fired, so it’s quite possible that there’s a quorum of officers who will follow instructions to commit war crimes…

It’s entirely possible that basically by this time Tuesday, America will have established itself as one of the world’s great villains. I don’t want to be here, but, you know, be warned. This is happening.

Paul Krugman

Living in Hell

America as we knew it may end Tuesday…

Listen now

21 days ago · 4774 likes · 952 comments · Paul Krugman

Macron Reframes a World in Which the US is Nobody’s Leader

Le Monde

Scott: Traveling across East Asia, French President Emmanuel Macron had urgent but confidential discussions with leaders of erstwhile important US allies like Japan and South Korea. The discussions focused on the crisis Trump had ignited in the Gulf, steps which might be taken to free up the movement of oil and gas tankers through the Strait of Hormuz without becoming enmeshed in Trump’s pointless war, and generally what to do about America’s abdication of its leadership role.

Emmanuel Macron: “In today’s world, I discern a third way. A way that brings together Korea, Europe, Canada, Japan, India, Brazil, and Australia. This is a format for countries that wish neither to depend on China nor to automatically align themselves with the United States. It is about sovereignty, not submission.”

If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears

Charles: Marjorie Taylor Greene was Sunday’s Voice of Reason

Israel Has a Plan to Bomb Iran Back Into the Stone Age; Trump is Actually Implementing It

Israel Hayom

Scott: Israel Hayom is a central player in the pro-Netanyahu media. It is owned by one of Donald Trump’s and the GOP’s biggest campaign donors, Miriam Adelson. Here it reveals in some detail exactly what Netanyahu and his government intend to do in Iran. Put simply, the goal is to destroy Iran’s petrochemical industry and its transportation network, reducing it to a chaotic pre-industrial state.

As part of the escalating attacks, the targets expected to come under fire include additional bridges and major railway lines, especially those leading to the capital, Tehran. The expanded target bank also includes various sectors of the oil industry, both in extraction and in related products, including petrochemical industries.

The main reason is that these industries are controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and serve as a primary source of income for it.

“At a not-so-distant stage, the economic issue will begin to have an impact. Remember what brought down the Soviet Union: economic collapse. Already today, most public-sector workers in Iran are not being paid, including large parts of the regular army. That is in contrast to the forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its various affiliated mechanisms, where payments are continuing,” a diplomatic source involved in analyzing war scenarios explained. “Many factories have shut down or been taken out of operation, entire sectors of the economy have ceased to function, and that economic burden is having an impact. Even if the war ended now, the regime would not be able to begin reconstruction without a full lifting of sanctions,” the source added.

And that leads to the next phase of the economic war: a complete halt to Iran’s oil exports, its oxygen pipeline, which has already been hit hard since the start of the war. This economic move, which over the past year has deepened the crisis as sanctions enforcement intensified, is ultimately expected to bring about economic collapse. According to the source, no ideology, however fanatical, will be able to prevent that.

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How does it FEEL—Life on the Ground in Iran

Charles: New York Times reporter Farnaz Fassihi covers Iran and the United Nations from New York. She was born in the United States to Iranian parents and grew up in Tehran and Portland, Oregon. She has been a bureau chief in Kabul, Baghdad, Beirut and Tehran. She is the author of “Waiting for an Ordinary Day” about the impact of the Iraq war on Iraqis. When the current war broke out in Iran she reached out to two sources, one supporter of the current regime and one an opponent. Their diaries of their lives during the first three weeks of conflict bring you to ground zero in ways no reporter could.

Mehrdad: In the late morning, when I went to get some medicine for my stomach problems, I heard a fighter jet over Tehran, where I live. For a brief moment, I thought it was one of our own planes flying low for security reasons. It sounded so close that I checked our group chat for information.

Then I heard a distant but loud explosion. Someone in the group chat wrote, “They attacked.”

Yassi: My phone kept ringing and woke me up. I picked it up when it rang again, and my friend asked me, “You know Israel has attacked?”

Mehrdad: I called my family to tell them I was all right. I then called my sister, who was traveling to the countryside, and urged her to return home to Ahvaz immediately. She was traveling with her children.

Yassi: There is a school two houses away from us. When I went down to the street, it was total commotion. Cars were jammed — parents had left them to run to the school. There were schoolchildren everywhere.

I packed and went over to my sister’s house. My husband works in another city, so I was alone. We decided before the war that my parents and I would move to an empty apartment in my sister’s building so we could all shelter together.

That night, the airstrikes became more intense. We ran to the rooftop, staring at the sky and the rising smoke.

What Israel and America have Wrought on the Ground

The Guardian

Charles: One day of images of war reaching The Guardian’s newsroom.

How Donald Trump Has Turned the White House into a Private Cash Machine

Le Point

Scott: Le Point charts the government of Donald Trump: a triumph of kleptocracy, and the most corrupt regime that has ever come to power in America, or in any other developed democracy in human history. It is a monument to the atrophying of American institutions produced by the MAGA movement.

We know that America has long been a plutocracy where the wealthiest finance, with billions of dollars, the campaigns of candidates for the supreme office. But is it becoming a kleptocracy, in other words a state based on conflicts of interest, if not corruption? For political scientists Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon, professors at Barnard College and Georgetown, the answer is yes: “Donald Trump has used the foreign policy of the United States to increase his personal fortune, establish his prestige and favor a restricted circle of relatives, friends and associates. American diplomacy is now largely subordinated to the private interests of the president and his subordinates.”

Le Point marshals a great deal of detail, particularly focusing on crypto ventures, paid grants of pardons, and defense-sector investments of the Trump twins.

A Starburst Spiral Galaxy

Scott: The party is still going on in spiral galaxy NGC 3310. Roughly 100 million years ago, NGC 3310 likely collided with a smaller galaxy causing the large spiral galaxy to light up with a tremendous burst of star formation. The changing gravity during the collision created density waves that compressed existing clouds of gas and triggered the star-forming party. The featured image from the Gemini North Telescope shows the galaxy in great detail, color-coded so that pink highlights gas while white and blue highlight stars. Some of the star clusters in the galaxy are quite young, indicating that starburst galaxies may remain in star-burst mode for quite some time. NGC 3310 spans about 50,000 light years, lies about 50 million light years away, and is visible with a small telescope towards the constellation of Great Bear Ursa Major.

Suggested Use of Atomic Weapon Provokes Laughter

Scott: Yesterday evening on Israeli Channel 14, an Israeli minister laughingly discusses dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran so as to maximize civilian casualties...

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So In Love by The Tymes 1963

Charles: When the fourth day of Passover is also Easter…

You Need Two!

Camille Monet In the Garden at the House in Argenteuil

Edited by Imogen Sayers.

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Scott: On top, Artemis II launches from from Kennedy Space Center at 1835 EDT on a mission to earth’s moon. Below, Donald Trump delivers an urgent message to the nation from the White House at 2100 EDT. These two images summarize the current predicament of America. On one hand its scientific and technological achievements soar and furnish inspiration for all of humankind. On the other, its democratic institutions seem rotted to the core, having produced the most mendacious, least capable and most self-centered leader in the nation’s history, while endowing him with power that none of his predecessors had or sought. On this brilliant day in spring, America seems poised on the rim of a cliff.

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Trump Corruption Watch

Flooding The Zone With Incompetence and Theft

MS NOW

Charles: The second Trump term was only eight days old when The New York Times first reported the overwhelming success of the “flood the zone” strategy first articulated by Steve Bannon in 2018.

This time, the flood is bigger, wider and more brutally efficient. As President Trump begins his second term, he has enacted his agenda at breakneck speed as part of an intentional plan to knock his opponents off balance and dilute their response.

Firing inspectors general. Sweeping clemency for Jan. 6 defendants. Investigations of perceived enemies. A federal hiring freeze. Moving to end birthright citizenship. An immigration crackdown. Terminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Revoking security clearances.

On Tuesday, just when Democrats thought they might come up for air, news broke that Mr. Trump had ordered a freeze on trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans, prompting a new round of outrage.

Nowhere has this strategy worked better than the Department of Homeland Security, where the viciousness of its plans is only matched by the greed with which they are being implemented.

Let’s start with the viciousness. Last month Raul A. Reyes wrote in The Los Angeles Times that DHS was already warehousing 68,000 people in immigration detention centers; three quarters of whom have no criminal records. Now DHS will spend $38 billion to increase detention capacity to 92,000 beds.

This week Rachel Maddow focused on the obvious corruption in the amount being spent on existing warehouses that will be converted into prisons. DHS spent roughly $1 billion in recent months to buy eleven warehouses—and overpaid by at least $200 million:

In Salt Lake City, the administration paid almost 50% more than the property appeared to be worth. It was assessed at $97 million, and the government paid more than $145 million. In Roxbury, New Jersey, one warehouse was assessed at $62 million, but the Trump administration came in and offered $129 million for it — more than double the cost. In Georgia, one of the properties valued last year at $26 million was purchased for $129 million.

The press is so overwhelmed by scandals no one I could find has even had a chance to pinpoint who the owners of these warehouses are to figure out who is benefiting from this gigantic pillage.

In this administration, it is remarkable that DHS still has any inspector general at all. But it does and last month he said his investigations had been blocked eleven times by the newly ousted ex-secretary Kristi Noem. Noem told Congress the criticism was unfair because “he wants unfettered access to every single thing in the department, and that’s not the process.”

And then there’s the whole separate scandal of $227 million spent on TV ads starring Noem, virtually all of which went to firms with ties to her, Corey Lewandowski, or Trump campaign officials, like The Strategy Group Company, which is led by the husband of Noem’s then-spokesperson and Assistant Secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, and who has a long association with Noem and Lewandowski.

Pontifex Maximus v Tyrannosaurus Trumpensis: The Conflict Is Now a Daily Phenomenon

Financial Times

Scott: The two most powerful Americans on the global stage don’t see eye to eye on much of anything. One is basking in the highest approval numbers of any world figure. The other is more reviled than any world leader (excepting perhaps his friend and mentor, Vladimir Putin), and is now approaching Nixon-during-Watergate levels of disapproval at home. Just the same, they’re becoming intense rivals for the hearts and minds of Americans. JD Vance, a convert to Catholicism who has been publicly rebuked by two popes for his distortion of Catholic doctrine, is preparing a profession of faith that will defend Trump. Meanwhile Trump funder and thinker Peter Thiel has been hanging out in the back allies near the Vatican preaching heretical doctrine to counter the pope. Mattia Ferraresi, an Italian scholar of American intellectual history, takes a look at this curious phenomenon.

The war in Iran is not the only point of contention. The Vatican and the White House are sharply at odds over immigration policy, the assault on Venezuela, the US confrontation with Europe and the dismantling of multilateral institutions. The Holy See is also monitoring the situation in Cuba with mounting anxiety. Many of Washington’s wars and domestic crackdowns run on Palantir software, which is why the Vatican has also pushed back against Trump’s allies in the tech world. Last month, the apocalyptically oriented tech investor Peter Thiel descended to the Eternal City to deliver his highly secretive yet well-known lectures on the antichrist and the end times. The Catholic world welcomed him as though he were a Visigoth coming to sack the city. Catholic dignitaries treated the Palantir co-founder as a dangerous apostate to be shunned, not as an unconventional Christian deserving to be heard. The Catholic press attacked him as a sinister pseudo-thinker promoting a twisted political theology, and one theologian at a pontifical university suggested that Thiel himself may be the antichrist.

The US president seems to have accomplished the miraculous task of bringing together the American bishops, historically divided between progressives and conservatives, in common opposition to policies pursued by one of the most Catholic-filled US administrations ever. The Iran war is turning into a stress test for ties between Washington and the Holy See, which misses no opportunity to show its opposition to this US president.

Why Trump was the First Sitting President to Witness Oral Arguments at SCOTUS

Charles: That makes sense: he heard they were doing oral and he said, ‘I’m in!’

—Desi Lydic, The Daily Show

CK

It’s Spring Cleaning in the Cabinet Room: Bondi follows Noem, as Gabbard packs her bags to go

New York Times

Scott: As his approval numbers crash below 30% in some polls (including a calamitous 80% disapproval among voters 35 in under in one major poll), Trump does the usual thing, which is tee up decapitation strikes inside the Beltway. First, Kristi Noem was forced out of DHS, an agency she never actually ran (that was Stephen Miller’s unofficial gig) as scandals surrounding her contracting process became too much even for the supine congressional Republicans. Today it is Pam Bondi, who got the bad news right after Trump’s appearance at a Holy Week function at which his Office of Faith Initiatives director, dressed like Mothra from the Japanese monsterverse, dutifully compared Trump favorably to Jesus (as Bishop Robert Barron stood by, applauding). Bondi pleaded for a reprieve, but Trump badly needed fresh blood. Now Trump attorney Todd Blanche will run the Ministry of Love while Trump looks for a new AG. Bondi’s failings all have to do with her inability to make Epstein just go away, in Trump’s mind at least. In the wings, Tulsi Gabbard waits fitfully. She’s been told she’s next up. NYT describes Bondi’s demission as follows:

President Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday, removing the nation’s top law enforcement officer after privately venting his frustrations for months over her handling of the Epstein files and her failed efforts to prosecute his political enemies.

In prior presidencies, the choice of cabinet officers has been between the president, his senior advisors, and the Senate’s advice and consent function. That’s not how things work under Trump. One person who holds no office under federal or state law plays an outsized role. Her name is Laura Loomer, and she confidently announced the departures of Noem, Bondi and Gabbard. Sid Blumenthal described her role in a brilliant recent column in The Guardian:

On 2 April 2025, Trump invited the far-right influencer Laura Loomer into the Oval Office to unveil a dossier depicting staff experts of the national security council as treasonous to Trump. Vice-President Vance, chief of staff Susie Wiles, secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick, and other officials stood by. “You don’t want to be Loomered,” Trump said. “If you’re Loomered, you’re in deep trouble. That’s the end of your career in a sense. Thanks, Laura.” She played the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland: “Off with their heads!”

Six experts were summarily fired, including Nate Swanson, the senior adviser on the NSC on Iran. On the eve of Trump’s war, Swanson wrote articles for Foreign Affairs and the Atlantic Council warning about the closing of the strait of Hormuz and that “Iran may seriously consider targeting the Gulf Arab states’ energy infrastructure directly.”

The American Gestapo on the Ground In Minnesota

American Civil Liberties Union

Charles: Written statement of Mubashir Khalif Hussen for a field hearing on “Kidnapped and Disappeared: Trump’s Deadly Assault on Minnesota”

Ranking Member Jayapal and distinguished members of Congress, thank you for the invitation to testify before you today.

My name is Mubashir Khalif Hussen. I am a 20-year-old U.S. citizen. My family is Somali, and when I was six or seven years old, my family arrived in the United States from Ethiopia as refugees. Eight months after arriving in the United States, we moved to Minnesota.

I became a naturalized citizen in 2019, along with my parents and siblings. But my citizenship did not protect me from being physically detained and hurt by ICE agents.

On December 10, 2025, I was at work in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. Around 1 p.m. I heard a commotion outside and what sounded like whistles and car horns. When I looked out the window, I saw what I assumed were ICE agents on the street. I did not want to be confronted by ICE, so I waited 20 or 30 minutes until the sounds died down before taking my lunch break.

As I exited the building, I paused to speak with someone on the street about what had happened earlier. That was when I noticed an unmarked, tan SUV approaching us.

A man wearing a ski mask and a police-style vest exited the vehicle and quickly walked toward me. The man did not say “stop” and did not identify himself. I turned to walk away, hoping he would leave me alone. The man quickened his pace, grabbed me forcefully, pushed me into a restaurant, and asked, “Why are you running from me?” I was not running. I was just walking away because I did not want to talk to him. I knew that ICE agents had been targeting people that look like me.

I immediately started repeating over and over again, “I’m a citizen, I’m a citizen,” but the agent did not stop to look at my ID.

A second ICE agent entered the restaurant. Together, they dragged me outside and put me into a headlock on the ground. I repeated, “I’m a citizen, I have an ID.” The agent kept saying, “That don’t matter, that don’t matter.” They put me in the back of an SUV.

While I was sitting in the back of the SUV, my boss came out with a copy of my passport card. He held the paper up to the windshield, but the ICE officers ignored him and refused to take the documents into account.

They eventually drove one street over before parking and telling me that they had to “scan my face.” I was terrified of what they were going to do with a picture of me, and I did not trust them. I would not let them take a picture of me.

The officers also kept telling me that they were going to “take me in” if I did not let them “scan my face.” One of the officers pulled out his phone and threatened to “push a button” and “call for transport.”

At that point, there were three ICE agents with me in the car. My back hurt from when I was put in a headlock on the ground and the handcuffs were extremely tight on my wrist. Each time I asked the agents if they could loosen them, the officers squeezed them tighter. When I asked for medical attention for my back, the original ICE officer grabbed me and forcefully pulled me to the ground.

After about half an hour, the ICE agents drove me to their office near Fort Snelling. When we arrived, they forced me to take the “face scan.”

When we got into the building, the agents took the handcuffs off and put shackles on my ankles before searching me. I asked for water, and they said no.

Then, an employee told me I was getting deported.

I again insisted that I was a citizen and that I could show proof of it on my phone. I showed the picture of my passport card to a woman at the ICE office. She took a photo of my passport card and then searched for my name in a criminal database. Eventually she just said, “Kick him out.”

It is difficult to believe that this happened to me. I knew that the president had made statements about Somali people and that there would be additional ICE officers in the Twin Cities focused on Somali people, but I did not think that this would happen to someone in my family – we are all United States citizens so we should not be at risk of being jailed or deported by ICE.

In the neighborhood in which I work, I hear screaming all the time, coming from encounters with federal immigration agents. I also hear whistles and honking all the time. When I hear these things, my heart starts beating fast and I can’t breathe. It brings me back to what I went through, and it almost feels like it is happening to me again. It is terrifying right now, wherever I go.

I am here today because what happened to me is wrong. The targeting, harassing, violence, and detention of Somali Americans is wrong, and I am worried for the safety of me, my family, my neighbors and community.

If Congress does not act, we will continue to be harmed simply for living in the United States of America.

MubashirStatementHouseJudiciary.pdf

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Download Mubashir's full statement to the House Judiciary Committee here.

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A War With Little Planning or Thought to Execution

Le Monde

Scott: Trump has spent much of the last three days dispensing gratuitous smears to NATO and the leaders of long-standing American allies, including Britain, France and Italy. In the case of Emmanuel Macron, he added smears against his wife for further embellishment. Following Trump’s fiasco of a national address, the response from Europe has been measured and intentionally deescalatory. Nevertheless the consensus view is clear: this was an ill-conceived war which has unfolded the way just about every analyst expected, even if this comes as a shock to Trump and Hegseth. Trump has painted himself into a corner, from which it serves no one’s interests to extricate him.

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday, April 2, that a military operation to liberate the Strait of Hormuz is “unrealistic,” while lamenting Donald Trump’s differing daily statements on the Iran war and NATO. “There are those who advocate for the liberation of the Strait of Hormuz by force through a military operation, a position sometimes expressed by the United States,” Macron said during a visit to South Korea. “I say sometimes because it has varied, it is never the option we have chosen and we consider it unrealistic,” he said.

Rhenish Carnival Floats Stoke Kremlin Ire

Süddeutsche Zeitung

Putin, indicted war criminal with blood on his hands. A Mardi Gras float by Jacques Tilly

Scott: One of the hallmarks of a genuine wannabe totalitarian is a lack of any sense of humor. Putin is famous for that. Moreover, he really popped his cork over a series of carnival floats in Germany that took straight, ad hominem aim at him. So he ordained trials in absentia of the float designers, Jacques Tilly, on criminal charges of lèse majesté. This provides another opportunity to look at those floats, which are mischievous, naughty and hysterically funny—in the best tradition of Rhineland Fasching celebrations.

A court in Moscow has sentenced Düsseldorf carnival performer Jacques Tilly in absentia to eight years and six months in prison. Tilly was guilty of hurting religious feelings and spreading false news about the Russian armed forces, judge Konstantin Otschirov ruled in the controversial criminal case.

Tilly is known for his bitingly satirical theme floats in Düsseldorf’s Rose Monday parade. His motifs appear regularly on the front pages of the German and international press in the days after Carnival. He has dedicated his theme floats to Putin and specifically his war against Ukraine more than a dozen times. In the trial, which has been going on for months, there was repeated talk of insulting the Russian president… but ridicule, rather than insult, was Tilly’s explicit intention.

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The Strait of Hormuz Is Getting Sorted, and Trump will be Furious

Reuters

Scott: Is the Strait of Hormuz closed? No. But it has been sorted. Iran has built a three-tier access system for the most important waterway on earth. Tier one: allies transit free. Tier two: compliant neutrals pay. Tier three: enemies (US, Israel and collaborators) are denied entirely. Now the UK has convened a meeting of 40 nations to talk about free transit of the strait of Hormuz. Trump wants to see a military alignment of combatants that will enter the war on his side to open the strait. Of the 40 participants, the total favoring this approach is zero. On the other hand, most favor some accommodation of the Iranian position. It looks like another humiliating loss for Trump, but then again, it is unfolding exactly as most analysts anticipated.

About 40 ​countries on Thursday discussed joint action to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and stop Iran holding “the global economy hostage,” Britain said, after U.S. President Donald Trump ‌said securing the waterway was for others to resolve.

British foreign minister Yvette Cooper said Iran’s “recklessness” in blockading the waterway was “hitting households and businesses in every corner of the world” as she chaired the virtual meeting, which included France, Germany, Canada, the United Arab Emirates and India.

Albert Speer, Top This!

Scott: Ari Kuschnir offers us an unforgettable preview of Trump’s Presidential Library, Casino and Resort in 2030. https://www.instagram.com/arikuschnir/reel/DWmzKPQAcuA/

Trump Prepares his New Budget and it looks like Police State

Bloomberg

Scott: Bloomberg reports that Trump is preparing to release a fiscal year 2027 budget plan on Friday that will frame the GOP’s midterm election message around a massive defense buildup, partially paid for by cuts to domestic agencies, health-care and other services. The budget will make the government look progressively more like a police state in which expenditures on security forces dwarf services to the people, and a state of war is used to justify curtailing health care to an aging populace, education, housing and domestic infrastructure.

A Strong Solar Flare

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of a solar flare—seen as the bright flash toward the upper middle—on Feb. 4, 2026. The image shows a subset of extreme ultraviolet light that highlights the extremely hot material in flares and which is colorized in blue and red.

This Feb. 4, 2026, image from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captures a strong solar flare erupting from the star. Solar flares are powerful bursts of energy that can, along with other types of solar eruptions, can impact radio communications, electric power grids, navigation signals, and pose risks to spacecraft and astronauts. The flare pictured was classified as an X4.2 flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength.

SDO measures the Sun’s properties and solar activity to help us better understand the Sun’s magnetic changes. By studying flares and how they affect our planet and nearby space, SDO helps us to better prepare for and deal with these potential disruptions.

Your Online Moment of Zen

All I Want, Joni Mitchell, Blue

Edited by Imogen Sayers.

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MS NOW

Scott: Trump’s dramatically postured 19-minute address to the nation about the Iran War offered a jumbled take on the latest Gulf War with absolutely nothing new. The suggested surprise lines about NATO or a land invasion appeared nowhere in his remarks. He offered a long list of falsehoods to justify the war. His accomplishments, he said, were basically undoing the mistakes made by his predecessors, particularly the control agreement struck by Obama. “I was so proud to do it. I did what no other president was willing to do. They made mistakes, and I am correcting them.” But he offers no explanation for his decision to terminate the deal. We’ve only been battling Iran for 32 days, he says. “This is an investment in your children’s and your grandchildren’s future… We are free from Iranian aggression and the wickedness of Iranian nuclear blackmail.” Can anyone imagine Nixon, Reagan, McCain or either of the Bushes giving an erratic, confused blabberfest like this? I don’t think so.

But most significantly: no news on a settlement. No indication of how he plans to move forward in the coming weeks. No sign of any off ramp. Just lots and lots of words that frequently didn’t fit together.

ACLU 1, Solicitor General 0

The New York Times and The Hill

Charles: That is the considered judgement of the most seasoned court observers I know. The New York Times at least managed to suggest that in its lead:

A majority of the Supreme Court appeared skeptical of President Trump’s efforts to limit birthright citizenship during arguments on Wednesday.

Key conservative justices raised doubts about the constitutionality of the president’s executive order that would end automatic citizenship for children born on U.S. soil to undocumented immigrants and some temporary foreign visitors.

When a lawyer for the Trump administration suggested that the realities of modern migration required a new assessment of whether the Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who is seen as a key vote, retorted: “It’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.”

But the rest of the Times story, as well as those published by several of its competitors, failed to convey just how much better ACLU legal director Cecillia Wang did on her feet than her opponent, Solicitor General D. John Sauer. The lead story in the Times didn’t even mention Sauer’s most embarrassing moment, when he was unable to give an unambiguous answer when Justice Neil Gorsuch asked him whether Native Americans should be considered birthright citizens.

For the full exchange about that I had to turn to The Hill. Sauer responded to Gorsuch:

“I think so. I mean, obviously they’ve been granted citizenship by statute,” Sauer answered, referring to the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.

Gorsuch directed him to put aside the statute.

“Do you think they’re birthright citizens?” the justice pressed again.

“No, I think the clear understanding that everybody agrees in the congressional debates is that the children of tribal Indians are not birthright citizens,” Sauer answered.

Gorsuch pressed for clarification, asking him to answer again based on the domicile of the parents.

“I think so, on our test. They’re lawfully domiciled here. I have to think that through, but that’s my reaction,” Sauer said.

Gorsuch responded, “I’ll take the yes.”

It’s usually a fool’s errand to make a confident prediction about the outcome of any case before the Supreme Court, but this time seven of the Justices were so skeptical toward the government’s arguments, the odds are good that the unambiguous constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship will be affirmed by a vote of 7 to 2.

Trump’s Socks for the Initiates

Kommersant

Scott: Donald Trump has a favorite gift for his most devoted followers—socks in his image. Moscow’s Kommersant reports that when a Russian parliamentary delegation visited Washington for meetings with Russia-friendly Republican congressmen led by Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), Trump sent them socks with his effigy as a special token of esteem. The Russian delegation was led by Vyacheslav Nikonov, the grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov.

This visit was the first full-fledged mission of Russian parliamentarians to Washington in 12 years. Lawmakers met with their colleagues, administration officials, and academics at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), rather than in Congress itself. But the Russians also visited Capitol Hill: Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, who officially acted as convenor for the Russian delegation, also played the role of tour guide. As a result of the meetings, the Americans presented the Russian deputies with commemorative coins and socks with Trump’s image, to the great delight of Russian social media.

Happy Passover

Charles: My father was raised as an Orthodox Jew, my mother, a casual Congregationalist. As a child I thought their gods were Einstein and Freud, whose portraits hung in their bedroom. Our only reliable acknowledgement of religion came through faithful celebrations of the big eating holidays: Christmas and Passover.

My real indoctrination in Jewish customs was conducted by my father’s former camp counselor Sidney Korzenick. They had both attended a Jewish summer camp where Moss Hart was the social director. For twenty years, beginning with my freshman year at Columbia, I faithfully traveled to the Scarsdale home of Sidney and his wife Emily, who became one of the first women rabbis. Sidney was the greatest Seder leader of them all. He radiated warmth and wisdom; he was a magnificent scholar, and a genuine intellectual who taught me the most important thing I know about all the Jewish holidays.

The genius of our forefathers was to transform all of the pagan festivals by infusing them with ethical meaning.

In an era when Israel has become one of the principal makers of war in the world, the celebration of Passover is particularly complicated for anyone who believes that self-identification as a Jew comes with some very specific ethical responsibilities. As my good friend Boris Khmelnitskiy remarked last night, “I’m hosting a Seder that asks how Zionism managed to turn us into the Egyptians in the story. Abracadabra!”

So this is my Passover prayer for 2026: May the people of Israel finally rise up to expel Benjamin Netanyahu and all of his loathsome cronies from their government, because they have inflicted more death and misery on the Middle East than any ancient Pharaoh ever could.

Star Russian Journalist Gets a Four-Year Sentence

El País

Scott: Andrei Soldatov comes from a family with depth in the upper echelons of the Soviet (now Russian) intelligence services, but he pursued a career in journalism. Over time he emerged as the Tim Weiner of the Russian press. Soldatov revealed how the intelligence community transformed itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union, struggling at first, but over time achieving a budget and depth that surpassed anything of the Soviet era.

Their friendships crumbled as freedom in Russia crumbled. Journalists Irina Borogan (51, Moscow) and Andrei Soldatov (50, Moscow), who have been investigating the inner workings of the Russian security services for three decades, reflect in their latest book, Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation, on how a well-educated, informed, and cosmopolitan generation embraced Putinism; and how democrats and authoritarians cannot coexist in the same society in the long run. Today, this couple lives in exile while their old friends have risen high within the Russian propaganda machine and government. A more comfortable life, but one tied to the future of the regime. And the future looks bleak: “The Russian intelligence services believe they are in an eternal war against the West, a struggle that will never end,” Borogan warns alongside Soldatov in a video conference interview.

Once the repressive machinery is unleashed, it will never stop on its own. This Monday, after this interview was conducted, the Russian justice system invoked its label of “foreign agents” to sentence Soldatov to four years in prison and prohibit him from managing the website of his own investigative platform. “This sentence is a clear attempt to silence me and force me to stop working as a journalist. I will continue to do so no matter what,” the expert told this newspaper by telephone.

Germany Rethinks Its Turn from Nuclear Power

Financial Times

The anti-nuclear power movement (Atomkraft, nein danke!) dominated German politics for a generation, and ultimately forced the decommissioning of the country’s nuclear power plants. Now Germany’s economy minister Katherina Reiche says current problems surrounding fossil fuels mean there is no alternative but to reconsider this decision.

Germany’s economy minister has called for a rethink of her country’s opposition to nuclear power, warning that its reliance on gas leaves it vulnerable to energy shocks. Speaking as she launched a new investor conference to attract foreign capital to Europe’s largest economy, Katherina Reiche said previous governments’ decision to shut down Germany’s nuclear power plants meant there was now “no alternative” to gas to meet demand. “We need gas to secure our supply — that is the only baseload supply I have left,” she told the FT. “Politically speaking, I have no alternative.” Reiche’s comments reflect a deepening debate in Germany over the legacy of the nuclear phaseout, decided under former chancellor Angela Merkel in 2011 and completed under Olaf Scholz. While the policy was paired with an expansion of renewables, it has increased reliance on gas for baseload electricity.

The Claw and Bubble Nebulae

Explanation: What unexpected things do you see when you look up at the night sky? Today’s image resembles an abstract painting, with large swaths of color strewn across a cosmic canvas seemingly without design. Despite the image’s abstract nature, the human mind finds patterns, identifying a large claw reaching up towards a floating bubble. Embedded within these seemingly random structures are the physical laws that govern how light and matter interact. The Claw (Sh2-157) and Bubble (NGC 7635) Nebulae glow colors that are mapped to the yellow and blue shown, indicating the presence of hydrogen and oxygen ionized by the intense light emitted from stars several times the mass of the Sun. This image depicts both the chaos and structure of astronomical processes, showing that a common thread between art and science is to look for the unexpected.

Text: Keighley Rockcliffe (NASA GSFC, UMBC CSST, CRESST II)

Your Online Moment of Zen

Charles: Dayenu is my favorite Passover song. It means “that would have been enough,” and it’s a celebration of all of god’s blessings. I like the idea I just came across that it was written as a theological response to the medieval Christian Improperia, sung on Good Friday, which accused the Jews of being ungrateful to god, because they had crucified Christ after the lord had led them out of the land of Egypt.

Here’s the most famous modern interpretation of Dayenu from The Maccabeats.

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