Music: Tom Misch — ‘It Runs Through Me’ ft. De La Soul
WSJ editorial board says they were being ‘kind’ calling Trump’s trade war ‘the dumbest in history’
The Wall Street Journal editorial board says: President Trump wanted a trade war with the world, and Americans are getting it, good and hard. Stock prices continued to decline on Tuesday amid the latest Canada-U.S. tariff tit-for-tat. By the end of the day the two sides were talking about a temporary truce, but who knows which side of the tariff bed Mr. Trump will wake up on Wednesday? North Americans awakened Monday to the news that Ontario premier Doug Ford…
The U.S. has covertly destabilized nations. Now, with Canada, it’s being done openly
CBC News reports: Former senior Canadian intelligence officials say Canada needs to be on the lookout for campaigns aimed at destabilizing the country amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s escalating 51st state threats. And they told CBC News that the most potent weapon wielded by the Trump administration to advance the cause of annexation would likely not be the intelligence agencies directed by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. “I would regard Mr. Musk as a problem,” said Ward Elcock, who…
Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of economy, poll finds
Politico reports: Americans have flipped their views on President Donald Trump’s handling of the economy since the end of his first term, according to new polling, amid a brewing trade war with America’s neighbors and stock market decline. When asked about how Trump is handling the economy, 56 percent of adults said they disapprove and 44 said they approved, according to a CNN/SSRS poll released Wednesday morning. Throughout his first term, Americans had generally held a positive view of the…
Trump is cracking down on colleges that are willing to be bullied
Jonathan W. Gray writes: The detention of Mahmoud Khalil signals a significant escalation in the Trump administration’s promise to crack down on campus dissent. During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised to punish colleges and universities that allowed what he characterized as “illegal protests” against Israel’s conduct in Gaza, singling out Columbia University for special opprobrium. His administration followed up on that threat on Friday by canceling roughly $400 million in grants and contracts. Combined with an earlier interruption of funds from the…
How a global online network of white supremacists groomed a teen to kill
By A.C. Thompson, ProPublica and FRONTLINE, James Bandler, ProPublica, and Lukáš Diko, Investigative Center of Jan Kuciak This story was originally published by ProPublica The teen entered the chat with a friendly greeting. “Hello lads,” he typed. “Sup,” came a reply, along with a graphic that read “KILL JEWS.” Another poster shared a GIF of Adolf Hitler shaking hands with Benito Mussolini. Someone else added a short video of a gay pride flag being set on fire. Eventually, the…
Republicans in Congress discover a timeless dimension in which votes don’t need to be counted
The New York Times reports: House Republican leaders on Tuesday quietly moved to shield their members from having to vote on whether to end President Trump’s tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China, tucking language into a procedural measure that effectively removed their chamber’s ability to undo the levies. The maneuver was a tacit acknowledgment of how politically toxic the issue had become for their party, and another example of how the all-Republican Congress is ceding its power to the executive…
How the right created its own draconian version of woke
Thomas Chatterton Williams writes: One of the defining features of the social-justice orthodoxy that swept through American culture between roughly the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 to Hamas’s assault on Israel in 2023 was the policing of language. Many advocates became obsessed with enforcing syntactical etiquette and banishing certain words. “Wokeness,” as it’s known, introduced the asymmetrical capitalization of the letter b in Black but not the w in white. It forced Romance languages like Spanish to submit to gender-neutral constructions such as Latinx. It called for…
Music: Tom Misch — ‘South Of The River’
In $4 trillion sell-off, investors turn away from the U.S. because it’s no longer a reliable trade partner
Reuters reports: President Donald Trump’s tariffs have spooked investors, with fears of an economic downturn driving a stock market sell-off that has wiped out $4 trillion from the S&P 500’s peak last month, when Wall Street was cheering much of Trump’s agenda. A barrage of new Trump policies has increased uncertainty for businesses, consumers and investors, notably back-and-forth tariff moves against major trading partners like Canada, Mexico and China. “We’ve seen clearly a big sentiment shift,” said Ayako Yoshioka, senior…
Billionaires’ bet on Trump has already cost them $209 billion
Bloomberg reports: As Donald Trump took the oath of office on Jan. 20, he was flanked by some of the world’s wealthiest people. The billionaires present that day — including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg — had never been richer, flush with big gains from frothy stock markets. Seven weeks later, it’s a different story. The start of Trump’s second term has delivered a stunning reversal for many of those billionaires sitting behind Trump in the Capitol Rotunda,…
Mark Carney: Americans ‘would destroy our way of life’
The Associated Press reports: Trump’s trade war and his talk of making Canada the 51st U.S. state have infuriated Canadians, who are booing the American anthem at NHL and NBA games. Some are canceling trips south of the border, and many are avoiding buying American goods when they can. The surge in Canadian nationalism has bolstered the Liberal Party’s chances in a parliamentary election expected within days or weeks, and Liberal showings have been improving in opinion polls. “The…
U.S. will immediately resume military aid as Ukraine says it is open to 30-day ceasefire
The Associated Press reports: The Trump administration lifted its suspension of military aid and intelligence sharing for Ukraine, and Kyiv signaled that it was open to a 30-day ceasefire in the war with Russia, pending Moscow’s agreement, American and Ukrainian officials said Tuesday following talks in Saudi Arabia. The administration imposed the measures a week ago to push Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to enter talks to end the war with invading Russian forces. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the…
Elon Musk has wanted a government shutdown
Wired reports: As President Donald Trump has been trying to keep House Republicans in line over a continuing resolution to keep the government open through the fall, Elon Musk has expressed a desire for a government shutdown, four sources familiar with his position tell WIRED. Sources also tell WIRED that Musk has wanted a government shutdown—an aim that runs contrary to the White House’s stated desire to avoid one—in part because it would potentially make it easier to eliminate the…
Judge to consider free speech issues in Columbia activist’s arrest
The New York Times reports: A judge on Wednesday is expected to scrutinize the constitutional issues at play in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and permanent legal resident who was arrested over the weekend and taken to a Louisiana detention center. The judge, Jesse Furman, has ordered the government not to remove Mr. Khalil from the United States while his case is pending. Mr. Khalil, who has Palestinian heritage, was a leader of demonstrations against…
A word that hasn’t changed in sound or meaning in 8,000 years
Sevindj Nurkiyazova writes: One of my favorite words is lox,” says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than a lox bagel—a century-old popular appetizing store, Russ & Daughters, calls it “The Classic.” But Guy, who has lived in the city for the past 17 years, is passionate about lox for a different reason. “The pronunciation in the Proto-Indo-European was probably ‘lox,’ and that’s exactly how it is pronounced in…