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Category: Politics

Amid quarrel with pope, Trump abruptly strips Catholic charity of funding to house migrant children

Amid quarrel with pope, Trump abruptly strips Catholic charity of funding to house migrant children

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…

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Trump is trying to distract us from Pope Leo’s calls for peace. Don’t take the bait

Trump is trying to distract us from Pope Leo’s calls for peace. Don’t take the bait

Sam Sawyer, S.J., writes: During a weekend full of bad news for Mr. Trump, his post [attacking Pope Leo] followed a lack of progress in negotiations with Iran and the resounding electoral loss of his favorite European leader, Viktor Orban, in Hungary. Relative to the Catholic world, his post came the day after Pope Leo XIV led a prayer vigil for peace in St. Peter’s and was joined in prayer all around the world. It came within hours of a…

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Vance questions the pope on just war theory hours after Leo honored its founder, St. Augustine

Vance questions the pope on just war theory hours after Leo honored its founder, St. Augustine

National Catholic Reporter reports: Hours after Pope Leo XIV paid public homage to St. Augustine, one of the key architects of just war theory, Vice President JD Vance questioned the pontiff’s understanding of the Catholic doctrine for determining whether a war is morally justifiable. “When the pope says that God is never on the side of people who wield the sword, there is more than a 1,000-year tradition of just war theory,” Vance said at a Turning Point USA event…

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Former U.S. and Iranian negotiators on ceasefire talks and how war could end

Former U.S. and Iranian negotiators on ceasefire talks and how war could end

  After the first round of ceasefire negotiations in Pakistan collapsed over the weekend, we speak to two former nuclear negotiators about prospects for ending the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, including what another nuclear deal might look like. Robert Malley, a U.S. negotiator for the 2015 nuclear deal (which President Trump withdrew from in his first term), says Trump’s “mercurial” behavior makes it difficult to predict his objectives and the course of any future talks. “Iran was in full…

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MAGA is starting to look beyond Trump

MAGA is starting to look beyond Trump

Wired reports: For months now, it seems that every day brings with it a new faction of MAGAworld getting angry with President Donald Trump over something he says or does. In recent memory, to name a few, podcaster Joe Rogan has compared ICE raids to Gestapo operations; conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has questioned Trump’s cognitive abilities; former US representative Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed Trump had “gone insane;” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson called the president a “slave” to Israel;…

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How geography powers Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz, despite U.S. blockade

How geography powers Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz, despite U.S. blockade

The Washington Post reports: Shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains constrained a week after the United States and Iran said they would facilitate vessel passage under a two-week ceasefire agreement. Instead, tensions have escalated. After Iran said ships must coordinate with its forces — and, in some cases, pay a toll — President Donald Trump called the demands “extortion” and announced Sunday that the United States would block ships entering or exiting Iranian ports, adding pressure to an…

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The Strait of Hormuz blockade is as much about China as Iran

The Strait of Hormuz blockade is as much about China as Iran

Javier Blas writes: Over the past decade, China has built the world’s largest oil emergency stockpile — a multi-layered cache of strategic and commercial reserves with more than a billion barrels. Washington probably hopes that Beijing will convince Iran to soften its demands at the negotiating table, as it has done previously: In 2023, it brokered a deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran. But most of the leverage Beijing had over Tehran rested on the money it was paying for…

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Iran war escalation could trigger global recession, IMF warns

Iran war escalation could trigger global recession, IMF warns

The Guardian reports: A further escalation in the Iran war could trigger a global recession, spiralling inflation and a sharp backlash in financial markets, the International Monetary Fund has warned. Against an increasingly volatile backdrop, the Washington-based fund said the economic damage from the Middle East conflict was steadily rising as it cut its growth forecasts for 2026 based on the impact from the war so far. In its half-yearly update, the IMF said the UK would suffer the sharpest…

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Italy halts defense pact with Israel

Italy halts defense pact with Israel

Politico reports: Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has suspended Italy’s defense cooperation agreement with Israel as she continues to distance her government from the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran that has enveloped the Middle East. Speaking on the fringes of a wine industry event in the northern city of Verona on Tuesday, Meloni told reporters her government “has decided to suspend the automatic renewal of the defense agreement with Israel in consideration of the current situation.” The 2003 deal concerns the exchange…

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Trump turns against his last ally in Europe

Trump turns against his last ally in Europe

Politico reports: U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday branded Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as “unacceptable” and complained she was “no longer the same person,” a day after she criticized his attack on Pope Leo XIV. In a phone interview with Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Trump said he was “shocked by her. I thought she was brave, but I was wrong.” Asked about Meloni’s comments on Monday — where she branded Trump’s attack on Pope Leo XIV as unacceptable…

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Caught in the crackdown: As arrests at anti-ICE protests piled up, prosecutions crumbled

Caught in the crackdown: As arrests at anti-ICE protests piled up, prosecutions crumbled

By A.C. Thompson, ProPublica and FRONTLINE, and Gabrielle Schonder, FRONTLINE This story was originally published by ProPublica The National Guard soldiers in desert camo piled out of unmarked vans in East Los Angeles last June, cordoning off East Sixth Street, a residential street lined with single family houses, and blocking a nearby road leading to an elementary school. A squad of federal agents moved in flinging flash-bang grenades — explosives designed to disorient — into a small home before storming…

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Trump’s blockade ushers in dangerous new phase of Iran war

Trump’s blockade ushers in dangerous new phase of Iran war

Politico reports: American forces began their blockade of Iranian ports on Monday, even as allies scrambled to understand how it will work — and how the Trump administration will avoid sparking new showdowns with the move. More than a dozen U.S. warships in the region are available to take part, according to one U.S. official, including the USS Tripoli, which has an embarked Marine unit aboard trained to interdict and board ships. Additional details remain scarce — including how long…

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Trump’s attack on a pope he cannot control is really a ‘declaration of impotence’

Trump’s attack on a pope he cannot control is really a ‘declaration of impotence’

The Washington Post reports: After white smoke in the rafters of the Sistine Chapel signaled the rise of a new pope last May, President Donald Trump heralded the first U.S.-born leader of the Catholic Church by declaring the choice “a Great Honor for our Country.” But now the two most influential Americans on the world stage — Trump, the leader of 340 million Americans, and Pope Leo XIV, with a global flock of 1.4 billion Catholics — are locked in…

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Inside Trump’s effort to ‘take over’ the midterm elections

Inside Trump’s effort to ‘take over’ the midterm elections

By Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield This story was originally published by ProPublica In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters. They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr. Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines…

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How ICE jail echoes life in occupied Palestine

How ICE jail echoes life in occupied Palestine

The Guardian reports: A Palestinian woman who was released last month after spending a year in a Texas immigration detention center told the Guardian in an exclusive interview that she sees “a lot of similarities” between the treatment of people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody and that of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Leqaa Kordia, who was detained by ICE following her arrest at a protest against Israel’s war in Gaza, says that she will continue to speak…

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U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran show a pattern of ‘double-tap’ strikes

U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran show a pattern of ‘double-tap’ strikes

Chris Osieck and Nilo Tabrizy write: At least 1,700 civilians have been killed since the start of the U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activist News Agency. An analysis of a series of strikes by the U.S.-Israeli coalition reveals a pattern of civilian harm — specifically, a number of attacks on infrastructure and facilities in densely populated urban areas, often when bystanders were present. Across multiple verified cases in Karaj and Tehran, New Lines found that…

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