Suddenly Trump is no longer buying what Netanyahu has been selling

Suddenly Trump is no longer buying what Netanyahu has been selling

Mairav Zonszein writes: On May 12 an American-Israeli dual citizen and Israeli soldier, Edan Alexander, was released from Hamas captivity in Gaza after direct U.S.-Hamas negotiations that sidestepped Israel. The images that accompanied his release looked like an American operation that just happened to take place in Israel. It was a U.S. hostage negotiator, Adam Boehler — who conducted direct talks with Hamas in March — who accompanied Mr. Alexander’s mother on the flight from her home in America to…

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Legalistic noncompliance: How the Trump regime uses the language of the law to defy the law

Legalistic noncompliance: How the Trump regime uses the language of the law to defy the law

Leah Litman and Daniel Deacon write: America seems to be waiting for a clear indication that the country is in a constitutional crisis. Perhaps President Donald Trump will say, “I am defying a court order, and good luck trying to do anything about it.” But short of that, America’s constitutional crisis was always going to be a bit subtler—and that subtler crisis is already here. The administration is already flouting court orders. It’s just that, rather than admitting so, executive-branch…

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For Trump, civil rights protections should help white men

For Trump, civil rights protections should help white men

The New York Times reports: In his drive to purge diversity efforts in the federal government and beyond, President Trump has expressed outright hostility to civil rights protections. He ordered federal agencies to abandon some of the core tenets of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, on the basis that they represented a “pernicious” attempt to make decisions based on diversity rather than merit. But in recent weeks, Mr. Trump has turned to those same measures — not to help…

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A new Washington club for America’s ruling billionaires

A new Washington club for America’s ruling billionaires

Evan Osnos writes: To understand the vagaries of power in Washington, pay attention to where the powerful congregate. When Teddy Roosevelt was ascending, he could be found at the Metropolitan Club, a blue-blood hangout where he and his fellow-members planned the Spanish-American War. The more literary-minded might prefer the Cosmos Club, which hangs up portraits of members who win the Nobel Prize. (Thirty-six, so far.) The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg enjoyed the City Tavern Club, a modest, threadbare place…

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Chimpanzees are capable of complex communication, new research reveals

Chimpanzees are capable of complex communication, new research reveals

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology: Humans are the only species known to use full language, which involves combining sounds into words and words into structured sentences that convey infinite meanings. This process follows linguistic rules that determine how meaning changes with context. For example, the word “ape” can be used in compositional ways to add meaning—such as “the ape eats” or “big ape”—or in non-compositional idioms like “go ape,” which takes on a new meaning entirely. Syntax, the rule…

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How the Trump regime’s clash with the courts is brewing into an ‘all-out war’

How the Trump regime’s clash with the courts is brewing into an ‘all-out war’

USA Today reports: Arresting judges. Threatening their impeachment. Routinely slamming them on social media and trying to go around them completely. President Donald Trump and his allies have led an intense pressure campaign on the judiciary four months into his administration. Both sides of the political spectrum are using the term constitutional crisis. “It’s an all-out war on the lower courts,” said former federal Judge John Jones III, who was appointed by President George W. Bush. As the clash becomes…

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The judiciary considers taking measures to protect itself from the Trump regime

The judiciary considers taking measures to protect itself from the Trump regime

The Wall Street Journal reports: Amid rising tensions between the Trump administration and the judiciary, some federal judges are beginning to discuss the idea of managing their own armed security force. The notion came up in a series of closed-door meetings in early March, when a group of roughly 50 judges met in Washington for a semiannual meeting of the Judicial Conference, a policymaking body for the federal judiciary. There, members of a security committee spoke about threats emerging as…

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J. D. Vance warns the federal courts to get in line

J. D. Vance warns the federal courts to get in line

Ruth Marcus writes: Vice-President J. D. Vance offered some unsolicited advice to Chief Justice John Roberts the other day: the federal courts need to be more deferential to Presidential authority, and the Supreme Court must do a better job of keeping lower-court judges in line. Vance was speaking to the New York Times’ Ross Douthat about the Trump Administration’s nearly unbroken string of court losses in immigration-related cases. These setbacks, in Vance’s telling, represent an undemocratic project by some federal…

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Trump’s assault on Harvard University is an astonishing act of national self-sabotage

Trump’s assault on Harvard University is an astonishing act of national self-sabotage

Yascha Mounk writes: The best way to understand Donald Trump’s administration, Ivan Krastev told me a month ago, is as a “revolutionary government in the form of an imperial court.” And the most important thing about revolutionary governments is that they quickly develop an unstoppable dynamic of their own, one in which the logic of events pushes its originators to ever more radical actions which they themselves might not have anticipated taking a few months or weeks ago. “You’re not…

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Five years after George Floyd’s murder, the white backlash takes hold

Five years after George Floyd’s murder, the white backlash takes hold

The New York Times reports: Black Lives Matter Plaza is gone from Washington, D.C. The bold yellow letters that once protested police violence are now paved over, though police killings nationally are actually up. The Justice Department has abandoned oversight agreements for police forces accused of racial bias, even as it begins an investigation of Chicago after the city’s Black mayor praised the number of Black people in top city jobs. The U.S. refugee resettlement program is effectively shut down,…

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Georgetown scholar was ‘chained, shackled’ in ICE detention

Georgetown scholar was ‘chained, shackled’ in ICE detention

  In their first broadcast interview since his release from ICE detention, Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri and his wife, Mapheze Saleh, spoke to PBS News’ Laura Barrón-López about Khan Suri’s recent release after nearly two months in a detention facility in Texas. The Trump administration accused Suri of “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media”– an accusation he denies. “One should, at this time, show courage, because courage is also contagious. We need to break the cycle…

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Say what? Trump tells West Point grads to avoid ‘trophy wives’

Say what? Trump tells West Point grads to avoid ‘trophy wives’

USA Today reports: President Donald Trump told graduates to avoid “trophy wives” during his commencement address at the United States Military Academy at West Point on May 24. “He ended up getting a divorce, found a new wife. Could you say a trophy wife? I guess we can say a trophy wife,” Trump said, referring to real estate developer Bill Levitt. “But that doesn’t work out too well, I must tell you, a lot of trophy wives, it doesn’t it…

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Any trade deal with U.S. must be based on ‘respect not threats’, says EU commissioner

Any trade deal with U.S. must be based on ‘respect not threats’, says EU commissioner

The Guardian reports: The European Union’s trade chief has struck a defiant tone after Donald Trump threatened to place a 50% tariff on all goods from the bloc, saying any potential trade deal between Brussels and Washington must be based on “respect not threats”. The US president made his announcement after voicing frustration with the pace of progress on a trade agreement with the EU. The new rates would come into effect from 1 June. The EU trade commissioner, Maroš…

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Israel ‘killing babies as a hobby’ in Gaza, says Democrats party leader, an IDF reserve major general

Israel ‘killing babies as a hobby’ in Gaza, says Democrats party leader, an IDF reserve major general

The Times of Israel reports: Left-wing politician Yair Golan faced a wave of backlash on Tuesday from across the political spectrum after he accused Israel of killing babies in Gaza “as a hobby.” Golan, a former IDF deputy chief of staff and current head of the The Democrats party, a merger of Labor and Meretz, said in an interview with the Kan public broadcaster that “Israel is on the way to becoming a pariah state, like South Africa was, if…

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