The News You Need on Friday, April 17th, 2026.
The news you need today from Scott Horton and Charles Kaiser. More news on Melania and Jeffrey Epstein, Bernie Sanders makes a plea to end US military aid to Israel and Trump is getting an arch.
“$20 billion in 20 minutes:” The Man Turning Donald Trump into a Global Deal Machine
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.
The Horton-Kaiser Report is independent, and relies on generous support from readers like you.
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.
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
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.