Zolan Kanno-Youngs writes: For President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, a lot is riding on how much he can trust President Trump. Mr. Trump offered only vague assurances on Monday that the United States would play a role in guaranteeing Ukraine’s safety if Mr. Zelensky were to cut a deal with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to stop the fighting. “We’re going to make sure it works,” Mr. Trump said at the start of an hourslong meeting with Mr. Zelensky…
Cristian Farias writes: The Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is so short and self-evident that you don’t need a law degree to understand it, or a judge to explain it to you: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” That language had real teeth during Donald Trump’s first Presidency, as states, cities, and localities invoked it to stop…
Politico reports: Andrew Cuomo’s counting on President Donald Trump and top Republicans to tell the party faithful to vote for Cuomo for mayor if they want to stop Zohran Mamdani, and not to vote for GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa. “We can minimize (the Sliwa) vote, because he’ll never be a serious candidate,” Cuomo told the crowd at a Hamptons fundraiser Saturday, according to audio obtained by Playbook. “And Trump himself, as well as top Republicans, will say the goal is…
The New York Times reports: In the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, nearly an hour from the closest city, a small group of homesteaders is building an exclusive community from scratch. Applicants to the community are screened with an in-person interview, a criminal-background check, a questionnaire about ancestral heritage and sometimes even photographs of their relatives. The community’s two architects — a classically trained French horn player who has livestreamed his own sex videos, and a former jazz pianist arrested but…
Charlie Warzel writes: It is a Monday afternoon in August, and I am on the internet watching a former cable-news anchor interview a dead teenager on Substack. This dead teenager—Joaquin Oliver, killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida—has been reanimated by generative AI, his voice and dialogue modeled on snippets of his writing and home-video footage. The animations are stiff, the model’s speaking cadence is too fast, and in two instances, when it…
The Columbia River running through The Dalles, Oregon, supplies water to cool data centers. AP Photo/Andrew Selsky By Peyton McCauley, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Melissa Scanlan, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee As demand for artificial intelligence technology boosts construction and proposed construction of data centers around the world, those computers require not just electricity and land, but also a significant amount of water. Data centers use water directly, with cooling water pumped through pipes in and around the computer equipment. They also…
Politico reports: Handing over massive fortification lines to an expansionist neighbor hellbent on destroying your state tends to be a bad idea. In 1938, ceding the Sudetenland and its dense network of forts, forests and trenches led to the rapid collapse of Czechoslovakia’s ability to defend itself against Nazi Germany. There are fears in Europe that Kyiv’s ability to resist Russia will be similarly devastated if Donald Trump — swayed by Russian President Vladimir Putin — presses Ukraine to hand…
Ruth Marcus writes: Other Attorneys General have shared close—to some, disconcertingly close—relationships with the Presidents who appointed them. Robert F. Kennedy was his brother’s modestly qualified A.G. and consigliere at the age of thirty-five. Eric Holder once described himself as Barack Obama’s “wingman” and the President as “my boy.” But, even on a team of Trump sycophants, Bondi stands out for her fawning devotion. At an early Cabinet Room praise session, Bondi turned to Trump and said, “President, your first…
Roger P. Alford served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice in the first Trump administration, and as principal deputy assistant attorney general in the division in the second term. He writes: The Republican Party today is a battleground. The confrontation isn’t between traditional conservatives and Trump supporters. Rather, it pits genuine MAGA reformers against MAGA-in-name-only lobbyists. It’s a fight over whether Americans will have equal justice under law, or whether the…
The New York Times reports: When House Republican leaders rushed to leave Washington for a long August break, they seemed desperate to quell the anger among their supporters about the Trump administration’s backtracking on a promise to release files related to its investigation of the accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. But halfway through a five-week congressional recess, the clamor shows little sign of quieting. While Republicans had hoped that legal rulings might insulate them from having to confront the issue,…
Robert J. Shapiro writes: Last week, Donald Trump claimed the authority to deploy the country’s military to the streets of Washington, D.C. to help fight crime. Yet, hard data show it’s not about crime in the nation’s capital. Instead, the evidence points to other, more troubling reasons and aspirations, especially the president’s personal sense of entitlement to power, MAGA’s approach to partisan politics, and an implied threat to public opposition to his exercise of power in the future. Trump is…
Wired reports: In the months leading up to the January 6 Capitol riot, a now deleted Twitter account bearing the full name of E. J. Antoni, President Donald Trump’s pick to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), betrayed a seeming obsession with promoting election denial conspiracy theories while talking about violent threats to those who stood in Trump’s way. The account, which used “Dr. Erwin J. Antoni III” as its screen name for a time, was linked by the…
Science Alert reports: All over the world, fresh water is disappearing, and a new analysis reveals that much of it is entering the ocean, with drying continents now contributing more to the alarming rise in global sea levels than melting ice sheets. The research team, led by Earth system scientist Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar from FLAME University in India, says that urgent action is required to prepare for much drier times ahead, thanks to climate change and human groundwater depletion. Using more…
David French writes: One of my life’s greatest regrets is that I didn’t join the Army sooner. I was commissioned at age 37, late for the military, and I didn’t exactly impress my officer basic course instructors with my physical prowess. But I made it through, and I spent eight years in the reserves, with active-duty deployments to Iraq and South Korea. I love this country, I believed in our missions, and I felt great purpose playing my very small…