Looks like the Vatican may have scored a diplomatic victory in the Russia-Ukraine war. During the funeral for Pope Francis, the Holy See arranged for Donald Trump and Volodyyr Zelensky to talk one-on-one in St. Peter’s Basilica. Neither side outlined the discussion, but many presumed it rested in large part on the mineral-rights deal that...
Today is Israel’s Independence Day, a national holiday celebrating the founding of the nation in 1948. But instead of celebrating today, many people near Jerusalem are evacuating their homes in response to fast-spreading wildfires. The fires interrupted Israel’s annual memorial day for the country’s fallen, one of the most hallowed dates on the national calendar....
One week ago, Muslim separatists crossed the border from Pakistan into India’s idyllic Pahalgam area in the disputed Kashmir region. They ruthlessly and methodically executed 26 people – some of the honeymooners, others with family they hadn’t seen in ages, and all of them for the sin of being Hindu. India blamed Pakistan for the attack...
What prompted a system-wide failure in Spain’s power grid on Monday? Thus far, officials in Spain and Portugal remain tight-lipped, leading to a free-wheeling speculation market for armchair sleuths. Was it sabotage? Incompetence? Or bad public policy that made the grid unable to adjust to variables? Jim Geraghty has a great round-up this morning at...
Mohsen Mahdawi, one of the leaders of the anti-Israel protests at Columbia University was ordered released on bail by a Vermont judge today. In ruling to release Mr. Mahdawi on bail, Judge Geoffrey W. Crawford of Federal District Court in Vermont found on Wednesday that he did not pose a danger to the public and...
In principle, there is nothing wrong with a state legislature and governor officially recognizing new holidays, and while a lot of Americans have a very bad impression of Islam, one can argue that the best way to integrate immigrant groups is to embrace them and incorporate people who are “outsiders” into the larger culture and...
Robby Starbuck, the conservative activist who has pushed a bunch of large companies to backtrack on their DEI commitments, is suing Meta for defamation over claims the company’s AI has been making about him. He discovered this by accident when a company he had criticized apparently used Meta’s AI to find out about him and...
Good Lord. Even if this were true — and it probably is — why would Tim Walz admit it in public? Walz has taken his act on the road again, purportedly as a “listening tour” across the country following the ignominious defeat he and Kamala Harris suffered last November. Rather than listen, however, it seems...
Any sane person with an IQ above 85 and below 120 knew that Joe Biden’s brain was turning to oatmeal as early as 2019. Most people whose IQ fell above 125 knew it too, but many used their intelligence to invent reasons not to believe the obvious. The ability to suffer from cognitive dissonance seems...
This was so under the radar with everything else going on in the world that I’m just reading about it this morning, days after it happened. The Rwandan genocide of 1996-1997, aka The First Congo War – you probably all remember those horrific images of minority ethnic Tutsi and moderate Hutus who had been slaughtered...
Talk about a tariff last hurrah. America rushed to import goods in the first quarter of 2025 in advance of Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day,” and that was enough to put the economy into negative territory. Today’s GDP report shows the Q1 result at an annualized -0.3% rate of growth, but the import data buried otherwise...
If the Democrats kick David Hogg out of his leadership position at the Democratic National Committee because he is a white male, the jokes will write themselves. Somebody figure out how to work in “Boss Hog,” please. I couldn’t think of one this morning. Semafor has the scoop on an upcoming meeting of the Credentials...
Hmmm. No wonder Scott Pelley and Bill Owens spent last week protesting internal accountability for the deceptive edits on 60 Minutes’ interview of Kamala Harris. It must have been worse than we thought. What else are we to conclude from an alleged decision by Paramount’s board to settle Donald Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit? The New...
I have often made a distinction between liberals and leftists, and will continue to do so. One of my most pleasant conversations at the CNN event in Washington was with a former Biden official (lower-level) who was your old-style liberal. He wasn’t angry. He didn’t hate conservatives–a rarity these days, I admit–and as far as...
In the world of resistance politics, Harvard is leading the university charge against the demands of the Trump administration. Harvard refused to a list of ten demands the administration had sent the school and sued the administration last week. But reports about the breakdown in communications that proceeded this suggested that, behind the scenes, both...