“We have gone from a monopoly world to a brutal competitive world,” Grantham said in a recent appearance on the Excess Returns podcast. “And we will stay there for years and there will be blood in the streets.”

The GMO co-founder and market historian argues that the Magnificent 7—the mega-cap tech giants that powered Wall Street’s AI-fueled rally—built their dominance over the past two decades in an unusual era of antitrust permissiveness. Regulators stood down, competition was crushed or acquired, and profit margins swelled to levels with few historical precedents. That window, he says, is closing fast.

The culprit is AI itself.

What’s easy to forget, Grantham previously told Fortune, is that the AI boom didn’t arrive into a healthy market. The S&P 500 had already fallen roughly 25% from January through October 2022—a correction quietly underway—when ChatGPT launched and the Magnificent 7 “lifted the market on its broad shoulders and staggered forward,” as Grantham told Fortune in April. In his view, the AI frenzy didn’t fix the underlying problem. It deferred it while making it larger: a fresh speculative frenzy injected on top of an already overvalued system.

Now, each of the largest technology companies is racing to win what amounts to an existential arms race. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have collectively earmarked $725 billion in capital expenditures this year, according to analysis of company statements first calculated by the Financial Times. This is roughly 2% of U.S. GDP, much of it directed at AI infrastructure. Rather than compounding the advantages of incumbents, Grantham argued on Excess Returns, AI is forcing them into brutal, costly competition with one another. The moats are being drained to fill the war chests.

“It will not move aggregate profit margins or aggregate profits notably higher than they are typically,” he predicted.

His reasoning draws on a lesson from an earlier technological revolution. When asset managers in the 1970s and ’80s rushed to buy room-sized minicomputers, the first movers enjoyed a genuine edge—for perhaps two or three years. Then adoption became universal, the technology became a cost of doing business, and profit margins normalized. Grantham, speaking on Excess Returns, said he sees AI on the same arc: a transformative technology that will reshape how work gets done while ultimately leaving aggregate corporate profitability right where it started.

Bulls would counter that this is exactly the point: two or three years of outperformance before normalization is still enormous value for early shareholders and the trade is about getting out before the normalization hits. Grantham’s own firm, in its February 2026 paper Sink or Swim, examined whether capex booms “foretell wise investments or warn of over-optimism,” and notably stopped short of a clean answer.

The argument cuts against one of the most widely held assumptions currently embedded in equity valuations: markets are pricing the Mag 7 at elevated multiples because they assume AI will be deployed to sustain or expand these historically high profit margins.

And yet Grantham himself acknowledged on Excess Returns, as he did with Fortune, that the AI spending boom has been doing real economic work. Without it, he said on the podcast, the U.S. “would have gone into a minor recession” in 2023, with a downward correction of around 25%. He called the current situation “terra incognita”—unprecedented reliance on AI spending as a share of GDP, with no historical roadmap for how it resolves. The bet Wall Street is making, in other words, may be self-fulfilling right up until it isn’t.

But Grantham flagged a divergence already playing out in public markets. GMO’s emerging market fund has returned approximately 70% over the past 12 months compared to roughly 25% for the S&P 500—a gap he frames as textbook mean reversion from a period in early 2025 when international equities sat near all-time cheapness relative to U.S. stocks. He said that trade still has room to run.

For now, Grantham stopped short of sounding the alarm bell. His quarterly letter of July 15, 2008, opened with a single instruction: “Abandon ship.” He invoked the old French expression “sauve qui peut,” or anyone who can save themselves, save themselves, and closed with a nursery rhyme: Don’t be brave, run away, live to fight another day. Emerging markets fell 50% in the four months that followed.

He’s not there yet. But he’s watching for blood in the streets.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

The post ‘Blood in the streets’: Legendary investor Jeremy Grantham pulls back the curtain on the AI wars to reveal a ‘brutal, competitive world’ appeared first on Fortune.

Three years later in 1964, King left without a degree to devote full attention to her burgeoning tennis career.

Failing to earn the degree bothered her, and King would correct anyone who said she had graduated.

“I said, ‘Don’t ever say ‘graduated.’ I haven’t earned it — yet,’” she said.

“Yet” became a reality Monday when King, 82, received her bachelor’s degree in history from the same school she attended more than 60 years ago — now called Cal State Los Angeles — walking across the Shrine Auditorium stage with the rest of the Class of 2026.

King also served as a commencement speaker, telling the roughly 6,000 fellow graduates, “It is a privilege for me to be here.

“Yeah, baby, only 61 years!”

King mentioned that “like many of you,” no one in her immediate family had graduated from college.

She noted that her lifelong fight against discrimination began when she realized at age 12 that nearly everyone at tennis clubs was white.

“I asked myself, ‘Where is everybody else?’” King said. “From that day forward, I committed my life to equality and inclusion for all. Tennis is a global sport and it became my platform, but equality was my dream — to make the world a better place.”

“We can never understand inclusion unless we’ve been excluded.”

Known then as Billie Jean Moffitt, she chose Los Angeles State because tennis coach Scotty Deeds trained men and women together. She soon became an international star, winning a Wimbledon doubles championship at 18 with Karen Hantze, who was only 17.

She married her college sweetheart Larry King in 1965 and they divorced in 1987. Afterward, King and Ilana Kloss, an accomplished tennis player in her own right, were a couple for decades before marrying in 2018 in a secret ceremony in the apartment of former New York City Mayor David Dinkins.

“You’re finding your truth, and it doesn’t have to stay the same,” King told People magazineat the time. “I only liked guys when I was young. I didn’t think about girls. And then all of a sudden I’m like, ‘Oh my God, what’s happening?’ My truth was changing over time. It took me forever.”

King became a trailblazer for LGBTQ+ and women’s civil rights and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 in part for her advocacy for equality. King and Kloss co-founded the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative to promote inclusive workplaces and gender equality.

Shortly after they married, King and Kloss became part owners of the Dodgers and the Sparks, acquiring undisclosed minority stakes in the franchises through an invitation from controlling owner Mark Walter.

“We believe all professions, and professional sports, need to be more inclusive and equitable,’’ Walter said at the time. “It’s going to be wonderful to have a role model like her in both clubhouses from time to time.’’

King returned to Cal State L.A. in the 2025 spring semester. She also earned course credit for her interaction with fellow students enrolled through the university’s Prison Graduation Initiative.

“They have made a commitment to improving their lives through education,” she said, and “getting their degree will be life-changing for them.”

King now knows the feeling firsthand. At the graduation ceremony on Monday, she wore a gold stole embroidered with a multicolored tennis racket and the letters G.O.A.T — greatest of all time.

“It means a lot more to me than I thought,” she told reporters. “I am so glad I did it. My hope is that one other person will go back to school.

“It’s never too late, whatever age you are, whatever your abilities are, go for it if you want it.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The post Tennis great Billie Jean King graduates from Cal State L.A. 65 years after enrolling appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

Strolling out to inspect his $400 million East Wing project, the president stopped to talk to reporters and quickly turned a question about health care affordability into a bitter complaint about the media — including the conservative outlets that usually carry his every word.

“That was a big announcement,” Trump groused, referencing his Monday health care event. “Got no coverage.”

The snub still appears to be eating at him. Neither Fox News nor Newsmax took the event live — a striking omission given the lineup. Trump was joined by former Shark Tank host Mark Cuban and CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz as he announced a major expansion of TrumpRx, his federally run direct-to-consumer drug platform, adding more than 600 generic medications to the site.

“I reduced drug prices by 50, 60, 70, 80 percent, and it gets no coverage,” Trump fumed Tuesday. “I think it’s — maybe other than medicine itself, like a cure — I think it’s the biggest thing to happen in health care ever, maybe.”

The president, who turns 80 next month, then launched into a sprawling riff comparing his second-term record to his first.

“In 28 years, they never went down,” he said of drug prices. “In my first administration, I got it down one-eighth of one percent — and I thought that was great. The first time, the only time in 28 years that it went down. Now I got it down 50, 60, 70, and even 80%.”

The numbers themselves are doing a lot of work. Trump has repeatedly claimed prices have dropped by figures that are mathematically impossible — including a Truth Social post insisting prices had fallen by “500%, 600%, 700%.” Experts have also noted that the administration’s Most Favored Nation deals — which now cover 17 major drug makers — apply mostly to Medicaid patients, not to Americans on private insurance or Medicare.

That hasn’t stopped Trump from declaring himself “the Affordability President” and demanding Republicans hammer the message ahead of the midterms.

Apparently, his favorite networks didn’t get the memo.

“We paid the highest price in the world,” Trump said Tuesday, before abruptly cutting himself off. “Listen, go have breakfast. Have a good time.”

And with that, he turned back toward the construction zone.

The post Fuming Trump lashes out after Fox News and Newsmax skip his live event appeared first on Raw Story.

I.R.S. officials prepared a 25-page memorandum outlining what they saw as flaws in Mr. Trump’s suit and advising the Justice Department to move to dismiss it, according to two people familiar with the memo. That memo was provided to Treasury officials in April, and it is unclear if they passed it along to its intended recipients at the Justice Department, according to the people, who spoke anonymously to discuss internal government deliberations.

No lawyers from the Justice Department ever appeared in court to respond to the suit or disputed any of Mr. Trump’s claims, which demanded at least $10 billion from the I.R.S. for not doing enough to prevent the leak of his tax information. The Justice Department instead made to a highly unusual deal in the case. In exchange for Mr. Trump dropping the suit, the Trump administration created the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund for people who say they were wrongly targeted by the federal government.

The existence of the internal memo, which has not been previously reported, shows that the Trump administration disregarded readily available defenses to a lawsuit filed by the president against an agency he controls. While the Justice Department has said that Mr. Trump will not receive money from the new fund, critics have slammed the arrangement as a corrupt attempt at paying Mr. Trump’s political supporters, including, potentially, those who were convicted and later pardoned for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The Treasury Department and the I.R.S. did not respond to requests for comment. The Justice Department did not respond to questions about why it chose to settle the case.

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, will be able to appoint five people to a commission that will oversee the disbursement of the money, though Mr. Trump can fire any of those people at will. The Justice Department has so far offered few other details about who will be eligible for payments from the fund.

Among Republicans on Capitol Hill and within the Trump administration, there has been concern about the fund. Brian Morrissey, a Trump appointee and the general counsel at the Treasury Department, resigned on Monday soon after its creation.

The I.R.S. memo was prepared by career civil servants in the agency’s office of chief counsel, who followed the agency’s normal procedures for responding to a lawsuit, the people said. While the Justice Department represents the I.R.S. in federal court, lawyers at the agency routinely provide their views on tax law.

In the memo, the I.R.S. lawyers laid out several issues with Mr. Trump’s suit that they thought the federal government should point out in court.

One was that Mr. Trump might have filed his suit too late. Federal law allows people to sue the I.R.S. if their tax information is released without authorization, but they must do so within two years. In his suit, Mr. Trump said he did not become aware that his tax information had been leaked from the I.R.S. until he received an official notice from the agency on Jan. 29, 2024, exactly two years before he filed the complaint this January.

Trump Administration: Live Updates

Updated May 18, 2026, 11:24 p.m. ET

• Trump is said to have proposed a new helipad at the White House.
• A top Treasury lawyer resigns hours after the Trump administration announces the fund.
• The Justice Dept. fund creates a pipeline to funnel taxpayer money to Trump allies.

But the I.R.S. memo calls that claim into question. It references the fact that Alina Habba, a personal lawyer for Mr. Trump, appeared in court when Charles Littlejohn, a former I.R.S. contractor, pleaded guilty to leaking the tax information of Mr. Trump and thousands of wealthy Americans, according to the people familiar with it. That was in October 2023, more than two years before Mr. Trump filed his suit.

Another recommendation in the memo, according to the people with knowledge of it, was for the Justice Department to challenge whether the I.R.S. could be held liable for the conduct of Mr. Littlejohn.

Mr. Littlejohn was employed by the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton when he leaked the tax information to The New York Times and ProPublica in 2019 and 2020. In response to other suits stemming from the same leaks, lawyers for the Justice Department took the position that people could not blame the I.R.S. for the behavior of Mr. Littlejohn because he was a contractor.

Those arguments may or may not have succeeded in court. The I.R.S. did settle a case brought by the hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin over the leak of his tax information. In that instance, the government did not make any payments but publicly apologized to Mr. Griffin.

Mr. Trump, who sued the I.R.S. alongside two of his sons and his family businesses, will also receive an apology as part of the settlement with the Justice Department.

While I.R.S. lawyers followed the typical process for responding to a lawsuit, officials at the Justice Department did not. Lawyers at the Justice Department struggled with whether they could oppose a lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump, The Times previously reported, given that he leads the executive branch and signed an order binding government lawyers to his view of the law.

When the Justice Department neared the mid-April deadline for responding to Mr. Trump’s suit in court, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, rather than the government, asked the judge to extend the deadline. Lawyers for Mr. Trump, in that filing, said they were in talks with unnamed officials at the Justice Department.

That prompted the judge overseeing the case, Kathleen M. Williams of the Southern District of Florida, to question whether Mr. Trump could legally sue an agency that he controls as president. She ordered Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers and the Justice Department to write briefs discussing whether they were actually in opposition to each other — or if they were, in fact, on the same side of the suit. Such collusion would require the judge to dismiss it.

The parties had until Wednesday to write those briefs. But Mr. Trump withdrew his suit on Monday, the same day the Justice Department rolled out the anti-weaponization fund. Judge Williams closed the case.

Frank Bisignano, who is working in the newly created role of chief executive of the I.R.S., signed the agreement with the Justice Department to create the fund. Mr. Bisignano was not confirmed by the Senate to that I.R.S. job, and he is splitting his duties there with his job as the commissioner of the Social Security Administration.

Andrew Duehren covers tax policy for The Times from Washington.

The post The I.R.S. Thought It Could Fight Trump’s Lawsuit, but It Reached a Deal Anyway appeared first on New York Times.

The two-day summit in Paris came at a moment of upheaval for the global economy, which has been destabilized this year by the United States-Israeli led war in Iran. The war fueled a fresh bout of inflation and has been a drag on global growth. It has also created new points of tension between the United States and Europe, which must deal with the fallout of a war that it did not want.

“We acknowledge that global economic uncertainty has heightened risks to growth and to inflation amid the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, particularly through pressures on energy, food and fertilizers supply chains, which particularly affect the most vulnerable countries,” the G7 finance ministers and central bank governors wrote in a joint statement, known as its communiqué. “To mitigate these negative impacts, we recognize that a swift return to free and safe transit through the Strait of Hormuz and a lasting resolution to the conflict are imperative.”

The meetings also focused on how to bolster supply chains of critical minerals, which are dominated by China, and continued support for Ukraine as it continues to fight its four-year war with Russia. The officials pledged to “impose severe costs on Russia” and consider additional sanctions.

That statement was undercut during the meetings, however, after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Monday evening that the United States would grant a third sanctions reprieve to Russia, giving it permission to sell its seaborne oil.

The move was intended to bolster international oil supplies and help the world’s poorest countries cope with high energy costs while the war persists. Mr. Bessent suggested that the sanctions relief for Russia was only temporary and intended to “help stabilize the physical crude market and ensure oil reaches the most energy-vulnerable countries.”

But the watering down of Russia sanctions was a disappointment to European officials, who have spent the past four years working with the United States to cripple Russia’s economy with coordinated statecraft.

“The waiver on Russian oil — this was not a G7 decision,” Roland Lescure, France’s finance minister, said at a news conference on Tuesday, referring questions about the decision to Mr. Bessent directly. “Nobody wants Russia to have a windfall profit.”

Valdis Dombrovskis, the European commissioner responsible for the trade bloc’s economy, lamented on Tuesday that Russia was gaining from the war in Iran and said that he disagreed with the United States’ decision.

“From an E.U. point of view, we do not think that this is a time to ease pressure on Russia,” Mr. Dombrovskis said. “If anything, we would need to strengthen that pressure.”

Noting that the sanctions exemption had been extended to Russia before, Mr. Dombrovskis added that they were “not so temporary anymore.”

In a post on social media on Tuesday, Mr. Bessent said that he had “constructive discussions” with his counterparts about the global economy, global imbalances, cybersecurity, Iran and critical minerals. He had no further explanation for the Russia sanctions relief, which he had said last month would not be renewed.

Speaking at a conference about combating terrorist financing following the G7 meeting, Mr. Bessent also called on Europe to get tougher on Iran. He asked European policymakers to impose more sanctions on Iranian banks, shell companies and financiers.

“If you share our fury about Iran’s destabilizing agenda, terrorists seeking to hold the global economy hostage, drug cartels poisoning our communities and threats to innocent lives, then now is the time to join the United States in moving aggressively,” Mr. Bessent said.

Pressuring Europe to exert more economic pressure on Iran while the United States eases sanctions on Russia could pose challenges for the Trump administration. Despite the financial might of the United States, adversaries have become more adept at evading U.S. sanctions and coordination with western allies is important for maintaining their effectiveness.

“U.S. sanctions policy is increasingly unilateral and transactional, which diminishes its effectiveness,” said Alex Zerden, the founder of Capitol Peak Strategies and a former official in the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. “The decision to unilaterally relax sanctions against Russia while pushing the G7 to toughen Iran sanctions creates inherent policy tensions.”

It is not clear that the U.S. sanctions on Iran have been effective in negotiations over reopening the Strait of Hormuz or that easing sanctions on Russia have helped to corral oil prices.

Crude prices have for the most part remained above $100 per barrel and volatile since the war started in February. With inflation fears mounting, investors have been selling U.S. Treasury bonds, causing the yield on the 30-year bond to rise to its highest level since 2007.

The International Monetary Fund warned on Tuesday that sustained energy price surges could sharply reduce household purchasing power and force businesses to shutdown. At the same time, the agency urged policymakers to be careful in their responses and to avoid remedies that would add to debt burdens or worsen inflation.

Many G7 nations are pushing ahead with their renewable energy agendas in hopes of buttressing their economies from energy shocks. While the United States no longer favors such technology under Mr. Trump, there was broad agreement that advanced economies need to be less reliant on oil from the Gulf.

“This is the largest energy challenge that we have faced in a generation,” said François-Philippe Champagne, Canada’s finance minister, who explained that Canada hoped to increase its energy exports to countries in Europe and Asia. “I think what you’re going to see is energy systems around the world are being redesigned.”

Alan Rappeport is an economic policy reporter for The Times, based in Washington. He covers the Treasury Department and writes about taxes, trade and fiscal matters.

The post Inflation Fears Cloud G7 Economic Agenda as Iran War Persists appeared first on New York Times.

That Clichy, who previously worked as an animator for Pixar on projects like “WALL-E”  and “Up” as well as co-directing a couple of the “Asterix” films, is setting off on his own only makes it that more exciting that his first film already feels like the work of a confident, bold new voice. It proves that he’s not only up to the task of directing a film all his own, but that he and his animation team have a real skill for stylistic experimentation that you can only hope we’ll get to see more of from them. In an animation landscape that can often feel dominated by bigger studios like Pixar going back to what they’ve done before rather than trying anything formally or narratively new, Clichy offers a path forward. He shows us the wonder that can be found from striking out on your own and making something beautifully original. 

Premiering Tuesday at the Cannes Film Festival, the film centers on 11-year-old Christophe, who himself already feels like a classic animated character. Wonderfully voiced by Gary Clichy, the director’s own son, he’s just like any other kid in that he is still finding his place in the world and is often full of energy that he doesn’t know what to do with. What makes him different is that he is also beginning to periodically tip over, even collapse, without always realizing that it’s happening. This is introduced via a hilarious opening montage involving class photos, but poor Christophe is not laughing about the fact that he’s now expected to wear an iron corset to keep himself upright. 

While this is the beginning of what will become a grounded yet high-flying journey that’s bursting with more imaginative, almost magical breaks in reality, to start, the young lad’s reality is quite miserable. Despite the corset drastically restricting his freedom of movement, it’s something he’s expected to do day and night, even when he’s sleeping. His family, who runs a farm that’s going through increasingly hard times, doesn’t always seem to know how to be there for him.

Thus, he’s often left to his own devices and soon discovers there’s so much out there for him. Namely, he finds some of his first loves, one involving a person and the other involving the organ music being played at the local church. It’s there where the film starts to make beautiful music of its own just as Christophe starts to do so himself. The pains of reality remain threaded through every frame, but the simply stunning animation also makes it all feel magical.

Brought to life via Chinese inkbrush paintings, every frame is full of rich details while not being tied down by too much realism. Everything feels alive and textured, as if the town itself is something you could wander through and various drawings move to make it all feel like a dream. There are even recurring moments where gravity itself is upended as Christophe imagines his tilting as a way of also tilting the world around him. It takes the breath away just to see everything being thrown up in the air, especially in a flooring finale that pulls out all the stops. If anything, it’s a moving thesis statement for the film itself: sometimes, all you need is a different perspective to see the beauty of the world.

In the film’s animation, this beauty can come from embracing a hand-drawn approach rather than stiff yet familiar 3D techniques. In its plotting, it can come from telling a story about seeing everyday people, each of them full of complexities most others would overlook — be they the young girl trying to avoid paying the bus fare, with whom Christophe forms a deep yet fleeting bond; the elderly man who begins to teach him how to play the organ; or his own family that, for all their flaws, still deeply cares for him. Each character is overflowing with life that Clichy and his animation remain deeply attuned to. 

While “Iron Boy” is not the best animated film of the festival, as that’s still “We Are Aliens,” it’s a mighty close second and a spectacular reintroduction to Clichy and company. That it is uninterested in talking down to potential younger viewers and instead invites them to reflect on the many complexities of life only makes it that much richer a work. It’s a film you can’t help falling in love with just as Christophe gradually does with his own life. In every beautiful song and stunning frame of animation, Clichy makes something truly magical from the everyday. 

The post ‘Iron Boy’ Review: This Former Pixar Animator Has Made His Own Magical Hand-Drawn Movie appeared first on TheWrap.

The incident exemplifies an all too common form of terrorism: attacks by people who have easy access to weapons and a desire to use violence to make a statement. Some of these attacks come from the left, or from people with inscrutable worldviews. In recent years far-right extremism has proved more frequent and more deadly than the left-wing version. The killings in San Diego took place amid a documented increase in anti-Muslim incidents in the United States since October 7, 2023.

[Read: The Trump counterterrorism strategy makes America more vulnerable]

This reality is not reflected in the latest version of the United States Counterterrorism Strategy, which the Trump administration released earlier this month. The report, periodically updated, is meant to inform the American public about the current nature of the terrorist threats facing the country and to advise state and local officials about how to plan and train. This year’s document makes no mention of right-wing extremism or of victims who are targeted because they are not white Christians. Once a serious document written by serious people, the counterterrorism strategy has been hijacked by the Trump appointeeSebastian Gorka, who used the document to assert that the greatest challenges to the American homeland come from Islamist terrorists, drug cartels, and left-wing extremists. Each is a threat, of course, but the report is striking for overlooking the violence perpetuated by those on the ideological right.

Upon its release, the strategy was criticized for its slipshod quality and lack of strategy recommendations. It might have been quickly forgotten but for the tragic reality check in San Diego.

Many communities in America are far better attuned than Gorka and his colleagues are to the homegrown radicalization that surrounds us. Synagogues have been forced to ramp up their own security due to violence from the left and the right; major mosques must take greater precautions as well. The Islamic Center’s guard, identified by community members as Amin Abdullah, was killed trying to protect the facility, which includes a school. He is reportedly the father of eight children. Pictures from the scene show children being escorted out in the familiar pattern of post mass shooting evacuations, in a single line, hand to shoulder, to be reunited with family members far from the scene. The police response was described as fast and efficient after the first calls from the Islamic Center.

[Jake Tapper: Trump’s purge of terrorism prosecutors]

But those weren’t the first notifications that police received. In a press briefing, the authorities said that two hours before the shooting, the mother of Cain Clark, called police. She described her 17-year-old son as suicidal, and reported that he and a friend had gone out dressed in camouflage and in possession of three guns and her car. A hate-filled note left behind didn’t target the Islamic Center but, according to San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl, covered a “wide gamut” of “general hate speech.” The mother understood the reality of what could occur and perhaps, the danger of the ideologies that motivated her son.

Americans are gaining too much experience with this kind of violence. We deserve a counterterrorism strategy that responds thoughtfully to trends that endanger not only religious minorities but the country as a whole. “Houses of worship must always be sanctuaries of peace, safety, and prayer,” Bishop Michael Pham of the San Diego Roman Catholic Diocese said in the wake of the local tragedy. “An attack on one faith community is an attack on the sacred dignity of all human life.” This is America’s shared reality, even if it isn’t shared by the White House.

The post San Diego’s Tragic Lesson About Terrorism appeared first on The Atlantic.

If you missed it, you can watch it here:

An Asteroid the Size of the Washington Monument Just Flew Between Earth and the Moon

CNN reports that the asteroid, officially named 2026 JH2, was first spotted on May 10 by astronomers at the Mount Lemmon Survey. By Monday evening, it had already made its closest pass to Earth, flying within roughly 56,000 miles of us at nearly 20,000 mph.

The scientific community, which was caught a little flat-footed by its sudden appearance and immediate exit, stressed that we were never in any danger. The asteroid, which was estimated to be between 50 and 115 feet wide, was not on a collision course with Earth. But obviously the real story here isn’t that, cosmically speaking, it narrowly passed by us; it’s that it narrowly passed by us, and we had no idea it was coming until it had one foot out the door.

It’s all just a bit unsettling. Even more unsettling is that we identify only a small fraction of similarly sized near-Earth asteroids. Most are effectively invisible until a little sunlight hits them at the right angle. There’s also the fact that there is a ton of junk out there, and it’s hard to parse it all.

Asteroid tracking tech isn’t exactly in peak condition. While technology to track these rogue rocks exists, some of our most trusted satellite-spotting telescopes, like the Arecibo Telescope and NASA’s Goldstone radar system, are out of commission as they undergo repairs.

For now, rest easy knowing that we didn’t have to scramble for a last-second asteroid-deflecting/asteroid-obliterating mission. We know we can use a rocket to bonk an asteroid off course, should we need to. So there’s always that option. Let’s just hope we never have to break that glass in case of emergency.

The post Everything We Know About Asteroid JH2, the Washington Monument-Sized Space Rock That Just Flew Between Earth and the Moon appeared first on VICE.

• I expected to be a laid-back parent before my son was born.
• Raising a neurodivergent child changed how I think about parenting.
• I learned to focus less on philosophy and more on his actual needs.

I really want to be a chill mom.

I don’t want to be a helicopter parent. I don’t want to hover. I don’t want to be one of those moms whose whole identity is consumed by watching out for their child, who stops being an independent person and becomes a soft, pillowy shield between their child and the outside world.

I want to be one of those cool moms who sit on the porch with a beer and let their child figure things out for themselves. But I’ve learned from experience that this isn’t always what’s best for my son.

He wouldn’t sleep anywhere but his crib

Before he was born, I figured his dad and I would take him everywhere. He’d sleep when he needed to sleep, and he’d learn to be flexible. One of my friends had done that; her baby daughter fell asleep in all kinds of places — including the middle of the floor at a crowded party — and she and her husband continued to enjoy their social lives, albeit with an infant strapped to their chests.

But when my son was small, he refused to fall asleep anywhere but in his crib. I figured he’d sleep if he got tired enough, but what actually happened when he got tired enough was that he screamed for hours. We soon figured out that we needed to be very strict about being home at naptimes and at bedtime, not because we wanted to, but because it was what worked for him.

Independence is important to him

As my son has grown, the distance between the “chill mom” I want to be and the mom I actually am has grown wider. I want to give him “90s kid summers,” playing outside for long, unstructured afternoons, but I’ve learned that he thrives on structure and predictability.

I want to sit and gossip with my friends while he plays in another room with their kids, but I’ve learned that this often ends in fights and tears. Like many neurodivergent kids, he has a hard time with emotional regulation, and if there’s not an adult keeping an eye on him, things can go south very fast.

On the other hand, independence is very important to him. His nervous system is constantly on high alert, and this means control is a very big deal. He wants to brush his own teeth, choose his own clothes, and make his own decisions. I can’t just give him a cookie for dessert; he has to choose one from the box.

As he gets older, I want to respect and foster his desire for autonomy, while also providing enough structure and guidance to support him.

It can be hard to parent a neurodivergent kid

This is a balancing act for every parent, of course. But it’s more challenging as a parent of a neurodivergent kid, because the things that work for other kids don’t always work for mine.

Sometimes choices are essential; other times choices lead to meltdowns. Sometimes letting him run around with his friends at an outdoor concert turns into a magical night catching fireflies; other times it ends with him screaming and me dragging him back to the car.

Of course, there are also things that are easy for him, things that are a challenge for other kids and their parents. He can sit through a three-hour musical (and discuss the characters’ backstories and motivations in great detail afterward). He can carry on a genuinely interesting conversation with a table full of adults about anything from reincarnation (“I think I will come back as a kitten”) to where the Easter Bunny lives (“the East pole”). He’s very popular at my parents’ retirement home. When he was in kindergarten, he got suspended for kicking the principal in the head and then, later the same afternoon, he astonished a group of my colleagues by sitting perfectly still and paying close attention to a new play reading. I felt like I had emotional whiplash, going from feeling like a terrible mom to an amazing mom so quickly.

My child is his very own person

I don’t think either my son’s strengths or his challenges have much to do with anything I’ve done. It’s easy to think of our children as reflections of ourselves, but my son is very much his own independent person.

Before I had him, I spent a lot of time thinking about my “parenting philosophy,” reading books, and talking to friends about different approaches. I thought it was something you decided on in the abstract: this is the kind of person I am, and so this is the kind of parent I’m going to be. But since having an actual child, I’ve realized that my parenting philosophy can’t come from books or friends or even who I am. It has to come from who my child is, and what he needs, and it has to be constantly evolving and changing.

I feel like I’m doing it all wrong most of the time. It would be easier if I had a clear set of guidelines. But even though I doubt almost everything about my parenting, the one thing I never doubt is how much I love my son. So all I can do is keep paying attention and trust that even if my parenting journey looks very different from what I once imagined, this love will be enough to guide us.

Read the original article on Business Insider

The post I wanted to be a ‘chill mom.’ My son needed something different. appeared first on Business Insider.

Jackson was referring to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in late April when it voted to effectively gut a provision of the Voting Rights Act designed to prohibit racially discriminatory voting policies. The court was deciding on a matter related to Louisiana’s congressional district map, with Republicans having challenged a lower court’s order requiring state lawmakers to create a second majority-Black district.

In taking up the case, the conservative-leaning Supreme Court forwent the “typical 32-day waiting period,” the Post reported, and instead, decided to expedite the case, a decision that paved the way for the ongoing GOP gerrymandering blitz seen across the American South, and one that Jackson was the only justice to object to.

“The parties who came to us said please alter your rules so that we can essentially have an advantage,” Jackson told a group of lawyers in Washington, D.C. on Monday, the Post reported. “That should not be something that we should do because it would look like we were doing something unusual.”

Jackson went on to further condemn the Supreme Court’s decision to expedite the case, warning that it risked harming the court’s reputation going forward given that “speeding up the release of its ruling made it appear as if it were favoring one side,” the Post reported. However, she ultimately “stopped short of accusing her fellow justices of being motivated by political considerations.”

Jackson also criticized the decision to expedite the case in her lone dissenting opinion.

“To avoid the appearance of partiality here, we could, as per usual, opt to stay on the sidelines and take no position by applying our default procedures,” Jackson wrote in her dissent. “But, today, the Court chooses the opposite.”

The post Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson hammers Supreme Court colleagues over ‘unusual’ move appeared first on Raw Story.

In 2023, Utah siblings Ty and Brynlee Larson – 15 and 12, at the time – barricaded themselves in an upstairs roomin their mother’s house for nearly two months, live streaming their experience to the world. 

They did this to protest a court order seeking to reunite them with their father, Brent Larson, who they had accused of sexual abuse.

Brent denied the allegation and made his own claim, alleging that the sibling’s mother, Jessica Zahrt, turned them against him in a term known as “parental alienation,” which she denied.

The case went viral from the sibling’s videos, and ignited a nation-wide debate about children’s abuse allegations, the concept of “parental alienation,” and the family court system. 

In the doc, Jessica explains that she had a troubled childhood and impulsively married Brent young — after knowing him for less than a month. 

“In the beginning, he came off as charismatic, successful, fun,” she says.  

Brent’s family was descended from a Mormon church founder. The former spouses divorced in 2012 after welcoming son Ty and daughter Brynlee.

In March 2018, when Brynlee was 7, she made the first abuse allegation, claiming that Brent had “put lotion” on her “private areas.” 

Jessica explained onscreen that her daughter was “graphic in her disclosures” and she “couldn’t believe” what she was hearing.

She didn’t want to “destroy” Brett’s life over “something that could be a misunderstanding,” but she wanted to protect her kids. Following her attorney’s advice, Jessica called the Utah Department of Child and Family Services.

Brynlee’s allegation was investigated, which sparked a years-long cycle of continuous investigations and court hearings. That same year, Ty also came forward with his own allegation that Brent had sexually abused him, which Brent also denied.

According to a February 2023 ProPublica report, at the time of the 2018 investigation, authorities found the abuse allegations against Brent to be credible, and “severe and chronic.”

Although Brent was only allowed supervised visits moving forward, he was never charged.

In footage of Brent’s interview from the investigation, he claimed that he “never touched” his daughter “like that,” and said that Brynlee’s allegation had some “small truth, wrapped up in misunderstandings.” 

He added that he believed, “my ex wife really really dislikes me,” and he said he believed the female detective interviewing him was a “man hater.” 

His second wife, Sandy, who divorced him shortly after, testified that she trusted him with her kids. But later on she changed her tune and alleged that Brent had “coached” her “on some things to say” and he wanted her to allegedly say she was with him any time Brynlee needed cream.

Sandy also alleged that Brent had coached her to say that she had “no concern whatsoever” about leaving her kids “alone with him.” 

After getting “clarity” about their relationship, Sandy said she realized Brent was “manipulative and controlling.” 

Brent’s mother, Jolleen Larson, called the abuse allegations “false” onscreen, and said that her son would “never harm a child.” 

Jessica moved to terminate Brent’s parental rights, and the court battle became ugly. He countered with a petition to modify their custody agreement based on “parental alienation.”

“Brent was saying the allegations were fabricated, and my fault,” Jessica said.

Jolleen said she supported Brent’s claim that Jessica had “fed” the kids “misinformation.” 

“We all recognized what was going on,” Jolleen added. “You can create memories in these children, you can make any child believe anything.”

The court ordered the kids to participate in “reunification therapy” with Brent. Jessica said that the court wanted to “force” her kids to have a relationship with their father, and these therapy sessions “went on for years,” which was “traumatic” and caused more “damage” to her kids.  

In 2023, when a judge ordered that Ty and Brynlee spend 90 days in a “reunification camp” with Brent — without being allowed to contact Jessica — they responded with their barricade. 

“I chose to barricade because I was afraid for my life,” Ty said in the doc, adding that it was an “impulse decision.” The teenager live streamed his experience because he “knew the court wasn’t going to listen,” he explained.

“As long as I was live streaming it, I wouldn’t be taken.” 

In one of his videos, Ty said, “The court system isn’t trying to save us. Nobody’s trying to keep us safe.”

Police came to their mother’s house, with permission from the judge to use “reasonable force” to remove Ty and Brynlee from Jessica’s home to bring them to Brent. After conferring with their caption, the cops backed off.

Reporter Hannah Dreyfus, who covered the case, said that she spent months reporting on how “parental alienation” was being used as an argument in court to “influence custody decisions.” 

What “stood out” about this case was how “the focus in the courtroom shifted from abuse to parental alienation,” she noted. 

After the kids came out of their barricade, the judge gave Jessica full custody, but Brent was still given visitation, which made Ty “sick with anxiety,” he said. 

The ordeal ended in 2024, when Brent voluntarily signed away his parental rights to Ty and Brynlee. This came out of “left field” for Jessica, she said, adding that she holds “gratitude” that Brent took that step.

Shortly after, Jessica’s second husband, Aaron, formally adopted them, and Ty explained onscreen that he has since found a good therapist. 

Both sides of the fight had been decimated by legal bills.

Jessica estimated that she owes over $300,000. “I will be paying on that for probably the rest of my life,” she said. 

Jolleen said her family also still has legal bills, but didn’t specify a number. 

Jolleen said her son signed away his parental rights because the constant court battles and emotional turmoil on the kids was “torture” for everyone involved. 

In a video message to his kids, Brent said that it was “the hardest thing I’d ever do.” 

“I couldn’t watch my children endure more pain for something they did not or could not control,” he said onscreen, referring to his claim that his kids had been brainwashed. 

He noted that his kids deserved more than what this “broken [court] system put us through.” 

“My greatest hope is that one day we will have the opportunity to reconnect,” he said. 

Page Six has reached out to Brent and Jessica for comment.

“The Nightmare Upstairs: What Happened to Ty and Bryn?” is now streaming on Hulu.

The post Inside real story behind Hulu’s ‘The Nightmare Upstairs’ — when Utah siblings barricaded themselves in bedroom for 54 days appeared first on Page Six.

Amazon reports that its AI podcasts pull from over 200 news publications and a wide range of sources in order to make sure that the content generated is accurate and up-to-date. According to the company, it has partnered with the Associated Press, Reuters, the Washington Post, Time, Forbes, Business Insider, Politico, USA Today and a number of other Condé Nast, Hearst and Vox outlets, as well as over 200 local newspapers across the United States, to create the knowledge base that Alexa+ now uses to create its AI podcast episodes.

Apparently, the podcast generator requires no extensive prompts, pre-existing knowledge or supporting documents from its users. All listeners have to do to generate their episodes is tell Alexa what topic they want to learn more about. The generator will then provide users with an overview of the generated episode before it is created, allowing listeners to adjust the length and direction of the episode ahead of time. Once the user provides approval of the plan, a podcast episode featuring AI-generated host voices is created within minutes.

Users can subsequently listen to the episodes on their Echo Show devices, the Alexa App and Amazon’s Music and More section. Amazon also boasts that topics can range from the trending news of the day to breakdowns of a recent sporting event, rundowns of the latest top music releases, deep dives into historical events, practical tutorials and complex scientific lessons.

Alexa Podcasts is available to Alexa+ customers in the U.S. now. On Monday, Amazon teased that the new Alexa feature is just the next step in its ongoing venture into AI-generated audio, hinting that users may be able to generate personalized news briefings in the future as well.

The move notably comes the same week Spotify began rolling out its new “Verified” podcast badges, which are intended to inform users of when a podcast comes from an authentic creator, publisher or brand and does not have fraudulent or bot-driven listenership. In April, the music streamer started rolling out the same “Verified” badges for musical artists with the same purpose in mind — namely, to inform listeners of when they’re listening to music that has been created by fraudulent sources or AI.

On Tuesday, Spotify also announced it would be removing from this point on any podcasts that impersonate another creator or host’s likeness without their permission, regardless of whether said impersonation is created through AI generation or another method.

The post Amazon’s Alexa Will Now Create AI Podcasts From News Articles on Demand appeared first on TheWrap.

As local outlet AZFamilyreported, students and families at the Phoenix-area school were left disoriented when the names being read over the ceremony’s loudspeakers failed to match those of the students actually walking across the stage. The names displayed on the ceremony’s jumbotron were also mismatched.

“I also didn’t hear a lot of cheering, and I know my family is a pretty loud family,” graduating student Grace Reimer told AZFamily, explaining that she didn’t quite realize what went wrong until she heard her own name announced as she watched another student walked to receive their diploma.

“Yeah. That’s not right,” she told the outlet. “It definitely made me feel uneasy.”

After some starts and stops, college president Tiffany Hernandez took to the podium to reveal that the error was made by a “new AI system” the school was using, prompting a wave of boos and jeers.

“That is a lesson learned for us,” Hernandez continued. She then noted, optimistically, that the students whose names were bungled “were able to walk the stage and get a picture, which is what I would hope is the most meaningful.”

“I am so sorry,” said Hernandez. “There’s plenty of opportunities, I hope, to take some really good pictures and to celebrate you with your loved ones as well.” She later offered that students could re-walk with their names re-read, should they choose to.

Is the picture the most “meaningful” part of walking the stage at graduation, though? The whole point of a graduation ceremony is for each student to be recognized, collectively and individually, for the work that it took to earn a college degree. A photo is a way to commemorate the moment; it’s not the moment itself. The moment itself is about having your achievement recognized, which — yes — involves hearing your name read out to a crowd as you receive your diploma, while people you love cheer for you from the stands.

Now, for these students, that picture will recall the time they graduated from college, and the AI that was for some reason used to read their name spectacularly missed the mark — the perfect celebration, perhaps, as they emerge into a job market that AI has made a nightmare for them.

More on AI and graduation: Graduation Speaker Shocked When She’s Loudly Booed by Students for Saying AI Is the Future

The post Students Boo and Jeer as AI Name-Reader Flops Spectacularly at College Graduation Ceremony appeared first on Futurism.

The first mobile game of the partnership will be available to play on Peacock Tuesday. With new cases dropping weekly, gamers will have a chance to solve crimes of their own by finding hidden objects and identifying key suspects.

“’Law & Order’ has one of the most passionate and enduring fandoms in television, and this game gives fans a new way to engage with the world they love,” said Elliot Wolf, chief creative officer and co‑founder of Wolf Games. “With ‘Clue Hunter,’ we’re excited to put players at the center of the investigation and challenge their eye.”

Erin Underhill, president of Universal Televsion added that the game is a natural extension of the television franchise, which has maintained an audience for 35 years.

“For over three decades, “Law & Order” has built an incredibly durable and iconic franchise,” she said. The game Elliot created is a natural evolution of that legacy tapping into storytelling that our fans already have a deep connection to.”

“Law & Order: Clue Hunter” is just the first game released in partnership with Wolf Games, the entertainment company founded by Elliot Wolf, Andrew Adashek and Noah Rosenberg. NBCU announced in 2025 that it would build several fan-first experiences, such as mobile gaming.

Peacock and Wolf Games will also launch “Public Eye,” a game built around episodic, narrative‑driven cases, later this summer. The game gives fans the control to solve crime, expose secrets and control the narrative.

The game launch comes a little after a week after NBC renewed “Law & Order” for a 26th season. The pickup was later than usual for the franchise with the announcement just before the start of the parent company’s upfront presentation.

“Law & Order: SVU” was renewed in mid-April for Season 28, continuing its reign as the longest-running primetime drama in American history. Another spinoff “Law & Order: Organized Crime,” however, was canceled after five seasons on NBC and Peacock.

The post ‘Law & Order’ Mobile Game Launches on Peacock With New Cases Dropping Weekly appeared first on TheWrap.

According to a New York Times/Siena poll, while Trump’s “grip on the Republican Party remains indisputable,” there are clear signs that fissures are widening within his coalition. Thirty-seven percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents want to see the party’s next nominee move in a different direction.

The dissatisfaction is most pronounced among Republican-leaning independents, with a majority — 55 percent — saying the party should move beyond Trump. In contrast, nearly two-thirds of those who identify fully as Republicans want the party to follow his lead.

According to the Times’ report, divisions are emerging even among Trump’s strongest supporters regarding the economy and foreign policy. The unpopular Iran war has driven up gas prices, creating visible economic pain that is translating into political vulnerability.

Only 43 percent of Republicans think the Iran war has been worth the costs. Thirty percent believe the war was the wrong decision entirely. That has led some Trump supporters to now openly question their 2024 vote.

Nathan Coletti, 49, a wastewater operator from Rock Springs, Wyoming, voted for Trump but has grown disillusioned, telling the Times, “Unfortunately, now we’re fighting a war that, to be honest, I have no idea why we’re there. And I would tell you that I am actually embarrassed that I voted for him.”

Coletti echoed frustrations about misplaced priorities, arguing the administration should focus on domestic economic concerns rather than foreign military interventions.

“If your family is starving, you have no right in trying to feed another family if your family is dying. And that’s exactly how I feel,” he said.

The post GOP coalition looking to ‘move beyond Trump’: new poll appeared first on Raw Story.

Morbidly humorous and shot with such patience as to conjure its latent anxieties up to the surface, “Minotaur” is a thriller about how the personal always intertwines with the political, and the damning reality that we can never deal with one crisis at a time.

For Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), a company director living in 2022 Russia, it would be nice if he didn’t have to wrestle with his wife’s infidelity, corporate pressures, and Russia’s invasion of other countries all at once, but those aren’t the cards he’s dealt. As we follow how the pressures crack his psyche and body, Zvyagintsev frames the site of Gleb’s grievances as a way to comment on Russia as a whole. What we see on screen isn’t just one man’s crash out but the soul of the whole country being corrupted, with little hope of resuscitation. It’s a quietly damning and riveting political thriller, dressed in the skin of a domestic drama.

The clever disquietude about “Minotaur” is how it manages to make the intangible yet ever-present dread faced by his characters imbue spaces that should otherwise provide solace. It’s a masterclass of collaboration between his cinematographer, Mikhail Krichman, and production designers Andrey Ponkratov and Masha Slavina to transform the house of Gleb, Galina (Iris Lebedeva), and their son, into its own haunted house.

The three live in the countryside, which means they’re all totally isolated yet surrounded by beautiful scenery. While Gleb and Galina are affectionate with their son, it’s in these seemingly normal moments of domesticity that Zvyagintsev tips us off that not all is well. When his son divulges that he’s having trouble at school, Gleb tells him not to be afraid to intimidate his bully by using physical force. Gleb demonstrates a helpful tactic by grabbing his son’s lapels before telling him to do the same to him. There’s some dark humor here, but the scene is mostly played straight, and it’s the fact that it’s all portrayed so matter-of-factly that’s the most chilling.

Galina sees no issue with this pedagogy, and their son seems measured if excited by the newfound freedom such methods will bring him. It’s like staring at a mirror that’s both inverted and not; we see what Gleb must have been like when he was young (and was probably told the same advice from his father), while there’s a fairly clear 1:1 transference between Gleb and his son.

The other issues plaguing Gleb’s life revolve around his work and wife; at work, the Russian invasion of Georgia is causing strain on his workers, with many leaving. Furthermore, Gleb has to come up with a list of people in his company to be drafted to fight in the Russian army. His relationship with Galina has also curdled, and he begins to suspect that she may be having an affair. The combination of these factors pushes him to the breaking point, where violence becomes the sole way in which to assert autonomy over situations that strip people of control.

Interestingly, though, while many may relate to Gleb’s struggles to balance all that he faces, Zvyagintsev’s choice to make someone so deeply tied to Russia’s imperialism is a striking one. It complicates the notion of empathy in ways that make the film both harder to access and intriguing at once.

It’s not that the film is short on dialogue, but rather, the “Leviathan” and “Loveless” director understands how people’s body language and their surroundings can be purveyors of tone and mood. Take one sequence where Gleb drives back with suspicious cargo in his car and stops on the road to let a train go by. It’s clear that the train isn’t carrying passengers but military cargo: scores of tanks dot the cars, and Krichman superimposes those scenes of the tanks onto Gleb’s face, conflating his inner storms with the infectious and belligerence of the nation he’s in. The political has invaded the personal.

There’s another striking sequence after a swift and unexpected murder where Zvyagintsev observes with uncomfortable detail the cleanup process. It’s almost humorous in how protracted it is, as we witness a man try to clean up every splotch of blood in this apartment complex, but there’s a cold fear that pervades as well. Russia, like any country, is a nation with skeletons, thorough in its silencing of dissenters, which it masquerades as sanitation. The personal now invades the political.

These long, protracted takes and juxtaposition also mean that the actors get to deliver their finest work, in that they can’t hide behind editing or camera cuts. They have to react, lie and live in real time, and Lebedeva deserves encomium for the way she displays resiliency amidst the suffocating anguish she feels in relation to her family life.

Watching the film would also work in wonderful conversation with Andrius Blaževičius’s “How to Divorce During the War.” Blaževičius film also explored a couple going through a crisis amidst Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and other countries, but from the countries being invaded. Collectively, they paint a portrait of how, on either side, the aggressors and the victims try to live day to day amidst the backdrop of these larger conflicts.

The film is bleak right up until the film’s coda, such as a scene where two detectives are told to stop their work over a suspicious person, having been told by their higher-ups. “Why do we bother?” one of them asks before the other replies, “F–k if I know. Let’s have lunch.” For those in power, like Gleb, who use their desire to protect their country to justify heinous actions, there’s little to no recompense. For those who hold such positions, the currency is a system of favors, of scratching each other’s backs whenever the other feels an itch for protection. The problem with such frequent scratching is the scar tissue left behind from those gashes. You can only scratch so much before you’ve removed too much skin, with only bone and open wound left behind.

The post ‘Minotaur’ Review: The Personal and Political Collide in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Chilling Drama appeared first on TheWrap.

Once viewed as a clear GOP pickup opportunity, the contest to take on Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff has remained largely static for months — with no candidate fully separating from the field and President Donald Trump yet to get involved.

Many expect the contest to go to a runoff, interviews with more than half a dozen GOP strategists and campaign officials reveal. Rep. Mike Collins, the front-runner, is likely to make the cut, but it’s unclear whether he’ll face fellow Rep. Buddy Carter or former football coach Derek Dooley, who’s had a late rise in the polls.

That means while the candidates are poised to duke it out until June 16 for the GOP nomination, Ossoff has free rein to shore up his cash advantage and attack lines ahead of November. The Democrat, Republicans say, is beatable — but the path to unseating him gets more difficult if their own primary drags on.

“The longer the party stays fractured … that harms the chances in the general election,” said Jason Shepherd, the former Cobb County GOP chair. “The beneficiary of all this is Jon Ossoff. All he has to do right now is continue to raise money.”

Cole Muzio, a conservative activist and president of the Frontline Policy Council who voted for Collins, said the nearly large faction of undecided voters “is wild for what was initially supposed to be the most competitive race in the country…. It is not a good scenario.”

With Trump still on the sidelines, the candidates have been largely left to battle it out on their own, exposing fault lines over MAGA loyalty. Collins and Carter, both allies of the president, have mostly aimed their fire at one another as they work to win over the far-right base.

Collins, who has the backing of the Club for Growth PAC, a major conservative super PAC, appeared at a campaign rally with Trump earlier this year, while Carter has presented himself as a “trusted MAGA warrior.” Carter has ramped up his spending in the contest’s closing weeks, but recent polling shows Dooley beating him in second place.

And that’s exactly where Dooley’s campaign says they want him to be.

Dooley jumped into the race with Gov. Brian Kemp’s backing — and he’s gained momentum in the final stretch by leaning on his status as a political outsider and emphasizing his ties to a popular governor whose approval rating is nearly 20 points higher than Trump’s in Georgia.

His rise is emerging as yet another test of Kemp’s political muscle against the party’s more hardline MAGA wing. The governor has joined Dooley at dozens of campaign stops. And Hardworking Americans, a Kemp-aligned PAC, is up on the air on Dooley’s behalf.

“I’m totally fine with the timing of where we are, because really all we lost is the D.C. chattering class thinking that Derek didn’t have a chance. I’m more than happy to overperform expectations,” said one senior Dooley adviser, who, like others in this article, was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Traditionally, you want to be spending your money and peaking when people are voting or right before they’re voting, and that’s what we’ve been able to do.”

Dooley’s campaign declined to comment.

Collins spokesperson Corbin Keown said in a statement that “despite the field outspending Mike Collins 15-to-1 in advertising, Georgians have consistently shown that they want [his] conservative record.” Carter, in a statement, expressed confidence in his standing with voters and said “Ossoff is desperate to face one of my primary opponents because he knows their baggage would distract from his terrible record.”

Republicans are hopeful that Tuesday night’s outcome — especially if it’s a runoff — will finally force Trump’s hand on an endorsement, putting the national political spotlight back on the Georgia Senate race.

The Collins campaign is already looking to make a pitch for Trump’s backing after the results come in.

“We are definitely going to make the case starting Wednesday that it’s clear he’s the best candidate for the general,” said one Republican strategist close to Collins’ campaign.

Trump’s endorsement has already proven to have significant sway in Republican primaries. His efforts to run challengers against several state GOP senators in Indiana and against Sen. Bill Cassidy in Louisiana paid off. His endorsement of Barry Moore in Alabama’s Senate race helped him become the new front-runner. And he’s fronting a challenger to Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie in what has turned into a very tight — and incredibly expensive — contest.

But even though all three leading GOP candidates for Georgia Senate have had meetings at the White House, they’ve had little luck getting Trump to weigh in publicly. That has meant that other party operations, such as the National Republican Senatorial Committee — which typically follow the president’s lead or wait until a nominee emerges from the primary — have also stayed on the sidelines.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Some Republicans argue that outside funding will ramp up significantly once the primary concludes.

“Every race in Georgia will tighten between now and Sept. 1, and when it comes time to put resources together, Georgia will be in the fold,” said one Georgia-based GOP strategist close to Kemp. The Senate Leadership Fund, the top Senate GOP super PAC, has committed an initial $44 million in Georgia.

But in the meantime, the fractured primary field has started Republicans on their back foot while Ossoff continues to raise money. The Democrat ended the first quarter of the year with $31 million in the bank, according to federal campaign finance reports, and has largely allowed his trio of challengers to battle themselves rather than taking direct aim across the aisle.

“[The race] will tighten, I think, but right now, it’s looking a little gloomier than what it normally would just because Ossoff is building a war chest and we’re infighting and all these things,” said another Georgia-based Republican strategist, who is unaffiliated with a Senate campaign.

Beyond contending with Ossoff’s warchest, the Senate GOP candidates continue to face another hurdle: Breaking through with voters at the same time as the Republican gubernatorial race is sucking up all the political — and advertising — oxygen.

Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and billionaire Rick Jackson, who are locked in their own monstrously expensive primary, have spent a combined $94 million in that race so far. Their television and digital ads, paired with an overwhelming amount of physical mailers, has made it harder for candidates in other races to attract Georgians’ attention.

“The challenge for the Senate race is you’re not going to see a slowdown in spending in the governor’s race come the runoff,” Muzio said. “Can any of these guys really elevate above the noise to make a clear message?”

The post ‘The beneficiary of all this is Jon Ossoff’: Georgia GOP steels for messy runoff appeared first on Politico.

The blaze in Simi Valley, Calif., about 40 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, began just before 11 a.m. on Monday and grew to 1,368 acres as of Tuesday morning, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Cal Fire officials reported on Tuesday that firefighters made “significant progress with very little fire growth observed” as they worked overnight. They were able to take advantage of calmer winds, cooler temperatures and higher humidity, though winds were expected to strengthen this morning.

Officials issued mandatory evacuation orders for a large swath of Ventura County where neighborhoods were being threatened by the blaze, called the Sandy fire. By Monday night, more than 33,000 people in Simi Valley and surrounding communities were under evacuation orders, according to Andrew Dowd, spokesman for the Ventura County Fire Department. Another 10,220 people were under evacuation warnings.

Mr. Dowd said on Monday that one home in Simi Valley had burned down, and he spoke by phone as he stood beside it. He said he could see a large plume of smoke nearby as the fire continued to rage and threaten additional structures.

“It’s a huge tragedy to lose one home,” Mr. Dowd said. “We are just in fire-prone territory, and this is a stark reminder.”

The blaze broke out on a warm, breezy day in Simi Valley. The large-scale evacuations were prompted by offshore winds that were fanning the flames.

Investigators were on the scene Monday trying to determine the cause of the fire, Mr. Dowd said.

Santa Ana winds from the northeast were blowing at 10 to 20 miles per hour with gusts of up to 35 m.p.h. on Monday morning, according to the National Weather Service, and caused the fire to spread rapidly. By Monday evening, calmer winds and high humidity had significantly decreased the fire’s spread.

Around 750 firefighters remained assigned to battle the blaze on Monday night, along with water-dropping helicopters.

The Sandy fire is burning in the burn scar from the Woolsey fire that grew to nearly 100,000 acres and destroyed 1,643 structures across Ventura and Los Angeles Counties in 2018.

The Woolsey fire eliminated heavy brush that had built up over years, while the Sandy fire is fueled by new growth, particularly dry grasses, said Andy VanSciver, a spokesman for the Ventura County Fire Department.

The fire was burning near several schools in Simi Valley. Officials had canceled outdoor activities and were keeping children inside classrooms because of poor air quality, according to the Simi Valley Unified School District. At least two campuses, Crestview Elementary School and Mountain View Elementary School, had their students and staff evacuated to Simi Valley High School, according to the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office.

The district announced that all of its schools would be closed on Tuesday “out of an abundance of caution and with the knowledge that so many of our families are directly impacted by the Sandy fire.”

The Ronald Reagan Library, on a hilltop in Simi Valley, closed early on Monday because of the fire. The museum isn’t in an evacuation zone but closed “out of an abundance of caution,” said Melissa Giller, a museum spokeswoman.

Ali Watkins contributed reporting.

Soumya Karlamangla is a Times reporter who covers California. She is based in the Bay Area.

The post Fire Activity Slows in Southern California Blaze That Has Forced Evacuations appeared first on New York Times.

Best Album of the Issue: Oneohtrix Point Never
Worst Album of the Issue: Jacob Collier
Best Sleeve of the Issue: Bronzeage
Worst Sleeve of the Issue: Men Without Hats

Animal Collective
Jetty (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
(Domino Soundtracks)

We’ve already got a foot in the Criterion Closet here, so let’s talk about Danny Boyle’s Yesterday, which is entirely forgettable except for one brief scene which seems to suggest that in a world without the Beatles, 9/11 would never have happened. No one without a Letterboxd has ever heard of Sam Fleischner, but his documentary Jetty, about the reconstruction of Rockaway Beach after Hurricane Sandy, provokes a similar counterfactual: In a timeline where Animal Collective only ever made beautiful, yearning soundtracks, rather than recording some of most insufferable “experimental pop” known to man, which world-historical disasters might we have been spared, and would have it included Danny Boyle’s Yesterday? As John Lennon once so famously said, “Time is a flat circle, bitch.”
6/10
WILL.I.WAS

Frank Turner
The Next Ten Years
(Xtra Mile Recordings / Polydor)

While the world works hard to overcome every barrier standing between it and total annihilation, Frank Turner plays on, relentlessly touring and releasing records while the good ship humanity continues to sink. Who knows how long we’ve got until we reach The Final Ten Years, or what we’ll do to differentiate “geriatric millennials” when all surviving millennials are, in fact, geriatric.
5/10
BARBARA ROSS-LONGYN

White Lies
Night Light
(Play It Again Sam)

Is it ever OK to lie? Most begin as harmless attempts to be polite—“this is a remotely enjoyable listening experience”; “I’d definitely recommend this to someone beside my enemies”; “I absolutely don’t hope to go deaf before I hear it again”—but taking liberties with the truth leads to the hard work of maintaining ever-more elaborate falsehoods—“I wish the Olympics would return to London, these guys would be perfect for the opening ceremony”; “when our beloved king dies, they should perform the state funeral.” That said, more pernicious still is our capacity for self-deception: “This ritualistic savaging is a higher form of honesty and serves an artistic purpose beyond providing, at most, one minute of vulgar entertainment.”
4/10
CALEÇON ENFEU

Wata Igarashi
My Supernova 
(Dekmantel)

You gotta hand it to mental illness: If it weren’t for the “ADHD Techno Focus” playlist, I’d be living in an apartment that forever looked like I was about to bell them birds again, lad. The same kind of go-getting mindset is produced by this record; put it on and soon you’re simultaneously gooning and doing the dishes, while the dog prepares a four-course meal and the vacuum cleaner traces infinity symbols across the ceiling. Although some of this might be down to my XX Strong Icy Blackcurrant ZYN. Or the Monster Ultra White I used to wash down these eight Vyvanse. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get on with doing this 600-puff Lost Mary in one fell drag.
6/10
XILBO XAGGITIN

DON WEST
Give Me All Your Love
(Mandatory Music)

Turns out the real-life Gigachad went east, had a shave, grew his hair out, got a little sun, and now he looks better than ever. He’s even changed his passport so it no longer reads “Ernest Khalimov” but “DON WEST.” fr, I’m not capping. He styles it all uppercase like he’s been jelqing his own name. He’s the Sydney sigma with a mewing streak longer than a dingo’s dangler, though sadly too busy looksmaxxing to bother rizzing up these songs. It sounds like brain rot, even if he’d mog me for saying so. You’ve no business making music with a jawline like that.
3/10
MANLY WARRINGAH

Men Without Hats
On the Moon
(Shocore Music)

When I saw the artwork, I put on my hard hat and braced for a hoax. Those responsible for “The Safety Dance” don’t exactly need help smearing their reputations, but AI seems to have leapt to their aid here anyway, suggesting that it may have evolved to the point where it’s trolling one-hit wonders as a statement about the limits of human creativity, purely for its own amusement. Musically, all of the songs here sound precision-engineered to soundtrack those videos the White House keeps posting of the president fist pumping over the top of ICE execution footage and suicidal penguin clips. And sadly, AI can’t be blamed for that.
1/10
SLOP ROCKIN’ BEATS

Bronzeage
C_W_RDS
(110 yrds)

If you pull out your album and it’s only six tracks long, my first reaction will tend to be “Is that it?”—especially when I’ve been made to wait for it. This statement could be read as a dick joke, the kind I spent the 2000s telling on the forum where I first discovered Public Relations Exercise, an obscure MySpace-era math-rock act that has basically returned now rebranded as Bronzeage. Positive spin: even a reduced runtime has got my heart beating in ⅞ time. Speaking of things which are short and back, I can neither confirm nor deny that my gray, shriveled pee-pee has started firing again.
7/10
BRONZEAGE HERBERT

Insecure Men
A Man for All Seasons
(Fat Possum)

Saul Adamczewski, the adult-child genius best known for his work with Fat White Family, is releasing this album after the lowest point of his life: living in a cupboard while working as a tea boy for a Rastafarian meth dealer. On the plus side, this is the kind of origin story that does all the heavy lifting necessary for me to get you to listen to it, even before we talk about songs that swing between triumphant glam (“Cleaning Bricks”) and suicidal gloom (“Tulse Hill Station”) and cartoon cover art based on a photo of Serbian war criminal Željko “Arkan” Ražnatović holding a baby tiger and a submachine gun.
8/10
MAMDANI DYER

Hayley Williams
Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party
(Post Atlantic)

When Hayley Williams does her eerie incantation of “The Bad Touch” by the Bloodhound Gang, it’s as if she’s possessed by a lustful demon: the true face of pop punk, only visible now two decades have passed and those of us who gorged so lustfully on American Pie have been warned by the doctor to start avoiding McDonald’s. For 20 years, the Paramore singer was working her way out of a 360 record deal signed when she was 15. I discovered that dreams always come at a cost at the same age, when I [REDACTED] a [REDACTED] at a [REDACTED REDACTED]. Now that’s the kind of ego death that doesn’t get you invited to any parties.
7/10
DICKHEAD TOLLE

011668
burial-sade
(Self-released)

I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, yet I have always been ashamed to admit how much I love the “mashup.” Just using the term feels depraved, but I am someone who was born with an insatiable lust for novelty who’s come of age in a world designed to make sure I always feel this way. I am the weak man the good times created, making me the perfect mark for this sad boy blubberfest.
7/10
THERE’S A KID SOMEWHERE

Jacob Collier
The Light for Days
(Hajanga)

Jacob Collier believes in a language beyond words: fart noises made with the mouth. He’s devoted his life to it, writing songs in keys that don’t exist (shart keys, fart keys), crashing studio computers layering track upon track of the wettest, most succulently fetid fart sounds imaginable, directing packed stadiums to make fart sounds with their mouths so voluminous as to register on those secret underwater listening devices that picked up the Titan submersible implosion. His goal: to bring human beings on every continent together in one simultaneous sonic fart, knocking the Earth off its gravitational axis, sending it tooting into the sun.
0/10
GUFFIN N. HUFFIN

Olan Monk
Songs for Nothing
(AD 93)

The latest album from Irish experimental musician Olan Monk is layered with atmospheric field recordings. There’s seagulls crying as footsteps fall on a windswept beach, just like in the allegorical Christian poem. Close your eyes, listen carefully, and you’ll surely be transported to that one night when me and boys got together for “Monk Time,” getting loaded up on Buckfast, giving out kitchen-scissor tonsures, playing Swans on full blast until the abbey walls started to shake and collapse, devotedly jacking one another off beneath our matching robes. Fortunately, my vow of silence prohibits me from going any further with this bit.
8/10
FRIED TUCK

Oneohtrix Point Never 
Tranquilizer
(Warp)

If we’re living on a dead internet populated by bots, then Dan Lopatin is conducting the NPC orchestra in funereal requiem. A choir of artificial angels sings the contents of every DM sent to the Legacy Contact you somehow outlived. The pearly gates open with a million tabs saved for the quiet moment that’s finally come. Step into the light: We’ve got every old MySpace recording you never thought you’d hear again. As the last server goes down, the gonetoosoon.org house band plays on. It looks like we were right to believe the promise that nothing is ever truly lost.
9/10
WIDOW TRANQY

TEN BAND NAMES INSPIRED BY THE MAKING OF THIS ISSUE

Polymarket Parlay

Hagfish Ceviche

Pauline Quirke Chungus

Eternal Sunshine of the Botless Mind

Bored of Peace

DeepSikh AI and Thee Chopped Wagecucks

My Blind Camgirl

Autism

Hangin’ With Mr Groyper

Jestermaxxine Carr

These reviews are from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Buy it now—or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.

The post Album Reviews From VICE Magazine, Spring 2026 appeared first on VICE.

• The AI researcher who coined “vibe coding” has joined Anthropic.
• Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and Tesla’s former AI director, is joining Anthropic’s pretraining team.
• Karpathy’s social media posts about the state of AI have become widely read among the community.

Anthropic just landed one of the biggest names in AI.

Andrej Karpathy, the OpenAI founding member who was formerly Tesla’s director of AI, announced on Tuesday that he had joined Anthropic.

Karpathy famously coined the term “vibe coding” and is prolific in the AI community, frequently publishing lengthy social media posts about the state of the industry that are widely read.

Personal update: I’ve joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) May 19, 2026

“Personal update: I’ve joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative,” Karpathy wrote on X. “I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.”

Anthropic said Karpathy will work on the AI startup’s pretraining team, which is responsible for large-scale testing of Claude. Karpathy started this week and sits on the team led by Nick Joseph, another ex-OpenAIer who was an early employee at Anthropic, OpenAI’s chief rival in the AI race.

Karpathy helped launch OpenAI as a founding research scientist before leaving for a stint at Tesla as its AI director before rejoining OpenAI in 2023. He publicly supported OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during his brief ouster, but ultimately left OpenAI again in Feburary 2024 and later started Eureka Labs, an AI-centered education company.

Interest in Anthropic has skyrocketed in 2026, thanks to major advancements in the company’s Claude Code and Cowork tools and a boost in broader public interest following a tussle with the Trump administration.

At the same time, Anthropic’s rivalry with OpenAI has reached a fever pitch. Altman recently accused Anthropic of helping to fuel the hate toward him that led to an attack on his house.

This is developing story…

Read the original article on Business Insider

The post Anthropic just scored a major AI hire: Andrej Karpathy, the former Tesla AI boss who coined ‘vibe coding’ appeared first on Business Insider.

Blanche was testifying before the Senate Appropriations committee on Capitol Hill when Murray pushed him to apologize to survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and the Department of Justice’s release of unredacted victim names in the Epstein files. The two got in a fiery back-and-forth over her questions.

“That is so not the question I’m asking,” Murray said, telling Blanche he needed to answer her questions.

Blanche said he was trying to answer the questions in order when she cut him off again.

“The question I want you to answer is, will you apologize to the victims whose names, sensitive personal information and even nude photos were not redacted by your department? Will you apologize?” Murray asked.

“Of course,” Blanche said. “We never want to release a victim’s name.”

Murray interjected again and Blanche appeared frustrated.

“Can I answer the question, please?” Blanche said.

“I’m asking if you’ll apologize,” Murray said again.

“And I just said yes, but I wanted to — I would like an explanation to be given to that,” Blanche said.

Murray also pressed him to answer her questions about the Justice Department’s controversial anti-weaponization fund, The New York Times reported. Blanche had said the compensation plan for Americans who claim they have been victims of political prosecutions was “not a slush fund.”

“This is corruption that has never been more blatant or more widespread,” Murray said.

“What is happening is you write the check, Trump and his cronies cash it. American taxpayers who are already being whacked with high prices are going to foot the bill. That is what we are seeing today and that is what many of us are really, really angry about,” Murray added.

The post Senator hammers Blanche​ over exposed Epstein victim names — and doesn’t let him respond appeared first on Raw Story.

In Louisiana, which has six congressional representatives, Republicans moved rapidly to eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black districts. Tennessee Republicans redrew the state’s congressional map to get rid of its only Black-majority district, in Memphis, then stripped Democrats who protested the move of their membership in state house committees. Governor Tate Reeves of Mississippi declared that the “reign of terror” of the state’s lone Black congressman, Bennie Thompson, would soon be over, and announced that he expected lawmakers to draw new districts before the 2027 elections. South Carolina legislators are hard at work to eliminate Representative Jim Clyburn’s plurality-Black district, the only one in the state. More than half of the United States’ Black population lives in the South, so this amounts to an all-out assault on Black political representation in Congress.

For many decades after Reconstruction, southern states deprived Black people of the right to vote while counting their bodies toward congressional seats. The 1965 Voting Rights Act effectively invalidated the superficially race-neutral schemes designed to deprive Black people of the vote. No longer able to directly deny the vote, racist lawmakers developed new methods of diminishing Black political power through schemes such as racial gerrymandering. Congress updated the VRA—repeatedly—to address these schemes. The law worked extraordinarily well, leading to dramatic increases in minority representation, a Congress that better reflected the diverse nation it represented, and, in 2008, a Black president.

And that was the last straw.

Since Barack Obama’s election, conservatives have argued that the VRA’s protections are no longer needed—indeed, that they are themselves racist. The backlash to the Obama presidency that swept Trump into office allowed him to appoint three justices—fully a third of the Court—who agree.

Writing on behalf of the majority in that April case, Louisiana v. Callais, Justice Samuel Alito argued that Louisiana’s creation of a second majority-Black congressional district, out of six, in a state whose population is one-third Black, was “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” Eliminating that district to disempower those voters was, apparently, not. The fact that “black voters have been aligned with the Democratic party,” Alito wrote, actually “undercut” any “showing of intentional racial discrimination because race and politics are so intertwined.” But this idea—that the more motivated partisans are to discriminate against Black voters, the less racist that discrimination is—is a perverse inversion of the Fifteenth Amendment. Thanks to this Supreme Court, so long as Republicans take care not to explicitly announce their intention to discriminate, they may discriminate as much as they like.

You can draw a line through American conservatism beginning with the argument that racism was necessary and proper, to the argument that laws meant to address racism were worse than racism, to the argument that those same laws were so effective that racism was eradicated and thus the laws were no longer necessary. More than a decade ago, the Supreme Court heard Shelby County v. Holder. At issue was Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to submit voting changes to the Justice Department in advance. Shelby County, Alabama, wanted to be free of such oversight, and during oral arguments, the attorney representing the county made the case that racial discrimination in voting was “an old disease, and that disease is cured.” If that were true, the VRA wasn’t necessary. But Justice Antonin Scalia went further, referring to the VRA as the “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” I was in the courtroom, and heard gasps from the gallery.

The Court decided in Shelby County’s favor; in her dissent, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that Section 5 had “worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes.” Nullifying it, she warned, is “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

The deluge is enough to refill America’s whites-only pools. The vaunted “progress” the justices cite at every opportunity to justify gutting the VRA was a result of the law effectively neutralizing racial discrimination, not an absence of the desire or intent to discriminate. Scalia’s remark that the VRA was a “racial entitlement” is illuminating in the way that statements from many ideologues are, in that they express their own motives rather than those of their targets. Until 1965, democracy itself was a “racial entitlement” in America. Much of the Republican Party is trying to make that true once again.

We’re now finding out exactly how far the Court will let them go.

In 2023, Alabama Republicans drew a map with just one majority-Black district (out of seven, in a state that’s a quarter Black), but a federal court blocked the map, concluding that “we cannot understand the 2023 Plan as anything other than an intentional effort to dilute Black Alabamians’ voting strength.” On Monday, the Supreme Court gave its blessing for Republicans to proceed with the map.

The Court has sometimes refused to order states to change maps close to an election—even when those maps have been found to discriminate against Black voters—on the theory that it would cause confusion (a doctrine known as the “Purcell principle,” after the 2006 case Purcell v. Gonzalez). And yet the Court is now allowing Alabama to apply this new map despite its primary elections being already under way. Some Alabamians, the writer Madiba K. Dennie points out, have even sent in their ballots: They “may have their votes thrown out so that Republicans can hold a do-over election, under a map that a federal court already determined is too racist to be legal.”

There appears to be no rule of constitutional or legal interpretation here beyond what will aid the Republican Party in retaining its congressional majorities—even if states have to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens to do so. As the attorney Stephen Vladeck writes, the Supreme Court has intervened in map disputes in Alabama, New York, and Louisiana, with “the remarkably coincidental effect of benefitting Republicans in all three contexts.” Excluding California’s redistricting effort, which benefited Democrats, and which the justices allowed to proceed, the Court has consistently decided that if a map is advantageous to Republicans, it is always too close to an election to change it; if a map is not advantageous enough, there is always time to replace it with a new map, even if voters have already started casting ballots.

The central question, William F. Buckley wrote in National Review in 1957, is “whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes.” He continued: “The White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” If a “majority wills what is socially atavistic,” he added, “then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened.”

This same sense of entitlement animates the attempts to obliterate Black representation in the South today. South Carolina Representative Ralph Norman explained the logic of eliminating Clyburn’s district clearly, saying that Clyburn “does not represent the rest of South Carolina, which is conservative. His district is close to 47 percent African American.” The implication is that Black people do not vote the right way, and so they are not entitled to equal representation. To thwart their will may be undemocratic, but, in Buckley’s worldview, it is “enlightened,” and the white community is entitled to do so.

“The majority straight-facedly holds that the Voting Rights Act must be brought low to make the world safe for partisan gerrymanders,” Justice Elena Kagan observed in her dissent in Callais. “For how else, the majority reasons, can we preserve the authority of States to engage in this practice than by stripping minority citizens of their rights to an equal political process?”

Alito’s argument—that race and partisanship are too entangled for the Fifteenth Amendment to prevent almost all racial gerrymandering—would have sounded absurd to the authors of that amendment. Black suffrage was, at that time, an entirely partisan cause. Democrats opposed it; Republicans supported it. And they supported it for partisan reasons as well as ideological ones. They were blunt about it.

“You need votes in Connecticut, do you not?” the Republican Senator Charles Sumner declared in 1869. “There are three thousand fellow-citizens in that State ready at the call of Congress to take their place at the ballot-box. You need them also in Pennsylvania, do you not? There are at least fifteen thousand in that great State waiting for your summons. Wherever you most need them, there they are; and be assured they will all vote for those who stand by them in the assertion of Equal Rights.”

The Republican Party was then in a state of relative emergency—the Civil War had been won and slavery had been abolished, but Black Americans in the South were still subject to terrorism and intimidation, while whites in the North had shown resistance to the idea of Black suffrage. Northern Democrats were having some success with their—admittedly accurate—arguments that Black suffrage would lead inevitably to Black equality, which they and many other white northerners opposed. The Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, as Michael Waldman writes in The Fight to Vote, was even blunter than Sumner about the necessity of enfranchising Black men. “We must establish the doctrine of National jurisdiction over all the States in State matters of the Franchise”—by which he meant the right to vote for all men, regardless of race—or the Republicans “shall finally be ruined.”

Republicans, the historian John Hope Franklin wrote in Reconstruction After the Civil War, “knew that there was little chance of luring the former Confederates” into the party. One did not have to “belong to the Thaddeus Stevens–Charles Sumner wing of the party to reach the conclusion that suffrage for blacks was not only desirable but imperative.” Radicals such as Sumner also warned, presciently, that the Fifteenth Amendment did not go far enough, and that its flaws would ultimately allow anti-Black reactionaries to undermine its purpose.

Democrats, on the other hand, knowing that they would have little luck winning Black votes for a program hostile to Black rights, decided that it would be best if Black people did not vote at all. In Louisiana, Waldman writes, white “rifle clubs” marched through the streets chanting “A charge to keep I have, a God to glorify. If a nigger don’t vote with us, he shall forever die.”

“I do not recall the name of one man who favored emancipation as a policy and adhered to the Democratic Party,” wrote the Massachusetts Representative George Sewall Boutwell, one of the authors of the Fifteenth Amendment, in his 1902 memoir. “When a man reached the conclusion that the negroes should be free, he could not do otherwise than join the Republican Party.”

The Fifteenth Amendment, in other words, was never not partisan. If it had not been intended to prevent politically motivated racist disenfranchisement, it would have done nothing at all. The entire purpose was to ensure that neither party—not Democrats in the 19th century nor Republicans in the 21st—could ignore Black voters. Attacking or defending Black rights is not inherently partisan, except when the parties themselves make it so, and the point of inalienable rights is that politicians should not be able to take the shortcut of disenfranchising voters to whom they do not care to appeal.

The shadow of Jim Crow did not fall all at once. Black voters continued to cast ballots in some areas of the South, particularly where they managed to make common cause with white populists. The Democrats reacted fiercely to these alliances, breaking them with intimidation, terrorism, and, finally, disenfranchisement. “The plan set up certain barriers such as property or literacy qualifications for voting, and then cut certain loopholes in the barrier through which only white men could squeeze,” the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote in The Strange Career of Jim Crow. This disenfranchisement coincided with an increase in lynching and other forms of racist terrorism; “the more defenseless, disfranchised, and intimidated the Negro became the more prone he was to the ruthless aggression of mobs.” The purpose of this disenfranchisement was to limit democratic rights to those who were entitled to them.

What the Democrats of the era understood was that, by neutralizing Black power, they were also neutralizing the motivations of the Republican Party—and of the populists—in protecting Black rights. If there were no votes to win for defending civil rights, racial equality, or defending Black people from terrorism, politicians would be less likely to support those causes. They celebrated this outcome much as Reeves did, by declaring an end to the oppression symbolized by Black people being elected to office.

How did such measures survive court review? Well, in the aftermath of Reconstruction, a Supreme Court very much like the current one decided in case after case that the “barriers” Woodward described were superficially race-neutral and therefore constitutional. In the 1898 case Williams v Mississippi, considering a state constitution that the future Democratic Senator James K. Vardaman announced had been adopted “for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics,” the justices saw no constitutionally prohibited discrimination. “The Constitution of Mississippi and its statutes do not on their face discriminate between the races, and it has not been shown that their actual administration was evil; only that evil was possible under them,” Justice Joseph McKenna wrote.

The message of Williams is identical to the message of Callais: that disenfranchising Black people is acceptable as long as you do not announce that as your intention. (But if you do, it’s also fine; we’ll just pretend we didn’t notice.) Southern states got the message and implemented disenfranchisement provisions with the same enthusiasm that modern Republicans have shown since Callais, and with the same intention of establishing one-party rule in the parts of the country where they feel entitled to power—no matter what voters have to say about it.

One could argue that, by modern standards, the Redemption-era Court—redemption was how southern Democrats referred to the restoration of white rule, and it has held on as a historical term for the period following Reconstruction—was extremely racist. But, to be fair, that Court confronted the reality of a popular white terrorist movement in the South. Even if it had ruled in line with the Reconstruction Amendments instead of neutering them, those decisions might have been unenforceable.

The Roberts Court faces no such pressure, no such threat of violence, no such popular demand. Six justices dismantled the Voting Rights Act and hollowed out the Fifteenth Amendment solely because they could. Doing so was politically advantageous to the party of the leader who appointed them, the party to which they presumably belong.

These justices have shown no particular alarm or regret over the sweeping attack on Black voting power that has followed their erosion of the VRA, displaying instead a haughty indignation that anyone would criticize their decisions or rationale. Earlier this month, Alito told the audience at a judicial conference that “it would be consistent with my public image if I told you that I spent the summer catching flies so we could pull the wings off,” as though he were the true victim of the ruling in Callais. It is not surprising that the justice who wrote the opinion setting off a wave of racist voting changes across the South flew a flag outside his home that many have used to symbolize support for the January 6 insurrection.

A return to the petty apartheid of Jim Crow segregation is unlikely—modern conservatism seeks the illusion of meritocracy in a rigged system, and de jure segregation would ruin the illusion. What we are unquestionably seeing, however, is an evolution of Jim Crow–era disenfranchisement, the purpose of which is to shape the electorate into one where inequalities of wealth, race, and gender can be maintained with a veneer of democratic consent.

That is not to say that this plan will inevitably succeed—these schemes do not always work as intended. In close Republican contests, for example, appealing to Black voters may provide a margin of victory—and so lawmakers who sought to diminish those voters’ influence may find themselves relying on it. No Supreme Court decision, no matter how reactionary or ill-reasoned, will ever extinguish the desire of Black Americans to be free and equal.

Defending the enfranchisement of Black men, Sumner noted that what he called an “oligarchy of the skin” was a protean enemy, one that would alter its appearance as needed.

“I have warred with Slavery too long, in its different forms, not to be aroused when this old enemy shows its head under an alias. It was once Slavery; it is now Caste; and the same excuse is assigned now as then. In the name of State Rights, that Slavery, with all its brood of wrong, was upheld; and it is now in the name of State Rights, that Caste, fruitful also in wrong, is upheld,” Sumner observed. The danger, he warned, was that “citizens, whose only offense is a skin not colored like our own, may be shut out from political rights.”

In the Roberts Court, Sumner would have recognized his old enemy.

The post Democracy Is a Racial Entitlement Now appeared first on The Atlantic.

So far, he has not found many.

Within hours of landing on Sunday in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, Mr. Landry was touring the town in a cold drizzle when one Greenlander gave his entourage the finger.

After he offered some MAGA hats to Greenlandic children, several shook their heads.

He even told some kids that if they came to his mansion in Louisiana, they could have “all the chocolate chip cookies you can eat.”

The next day, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, Greenland’s prime minister, expressed his discomfort with the whole thing.

“We have our red lines,” he told DR, Denmark’s public broadcaster. “And no matter how many chocolate cookies we get, we are not going to change them.”

Mr. Landy’s high-profile visit — his first since being appointed in December as Mr. Trump’s point person on Greenland — comes at an exceedingly awkward time. Confidential negotiations over Greenland’s future have been unfolding in Washington, and officials have told The New York Times that Greenland’s leaders are wary of the direction in which the talks are headed.

The United States is insisting on a much bigger role in Greenland, perhaps not as drastic as seizing the island as Mr. Trump has threatened, but with major oversight over the country’s economic and security affairs.

The Trump administration wants effective veto power over any sizable investment deals to box out competitors like Russia and China, officials said. And the American officials are pushing to insert a forever clause into a decades-old military agreement so that if Greenland ever becomes independent, U.S. troops will remain on the island.

Mr. Trump has said he needs Greenland for national security reasons, and there is no doubt that the Arctic island is a huge piece of the North American security picture. It is more than 1,500 miles long and 600 miles wide, and sits high up in the Arctic Circle, a region that is increasingly contested by China, Russia, the United States and Europe.

But the way Mr. Trump has constantly threatened the island, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, and vowed to “get” it, “one way or the other,” has frightened, angered and alienated many Greenlanders.

Greenlandic officials are watching Mr. Landry’s trip closely and have taken issue with an American doctor accompanying the governor to assess the medical situation. The Danish territory’s health care system, which is publicly supported, is one of the top reasons Greenlanders cite for not wanting to join the United States. They fear losing their Scandinavian-style social net under an American system that to them stands for vast inequality and dysfunction.

“Greenlanders are not experimental subjects in a geopolitical project,” said Greenland’s health minister, Anna Wangenheim.

Trump Administration: Live Updates

Updated May 18, 2026, 11:24 p.m. ET

• Trump is said to have proposed a new helipad at the White House.
• A top Treasury lawyer resigns hours after the Trump administration announces the fund.
• The Justice Dept. fund creates a pipeline to funnel taxpayer money to Trump allies.

As Mr. Landry was sightseeing on Sunday, several onlookers scowled at him.

“They should fix their own country first,” said Hanne Hansen, a homemaker.

“They need to get out,” said her friend, Vivi Nielsen.

To Nuuk’s residents, the trip seemed tone-deaf. Mr. Landry’s delegation carried cardboard boxes stuffed with red MAGA hats but few residents wanted them. Greenlandic entrepreneurs have made their own version: red baseball caps that read, “Make America Go Away.”

Mr. Landry’s tour guide was Jørgen Boassen, a former bricklayer who has emerged as the No. 1 Trump fan on the island but is reviled by many locals.

“Traitor!” and “Shame on you!” residents yelled as he walked past with Mr. Landry.

Mr. Landry would not discuss the negotiations and his visit was timed to catch a business conference that started on Tuesday in Nuuk. Sessions include talks on cryptomining and hybrid warfare and one titled, “What we need to understand about the United States.”

“I’m going to try to make as many friends, see as many things, talk to folks, and see if there are additional opportunities where the U.S. could engage economically — and certainly create opportunities for Greenlanders as well,” he told reporters.

American investors, including allies of Mr. Trump, have been scouring the island for deals in water, minerals and energy. A former Green Beret who served as an adviser during Mr. Trump’s first term even floated a plan to build a gigantic data center on a remote fjord.

The Trump Administration is clearly expanding operations in Greenland and reopening old military bases to bring in more troops for Arctic training exercises. This week, the United States will upgrade its consulate, moving from a little red house on the outskirts of Nuuk to one of the few office buildings in town.

Mr. Landry said he spoke to Mr. Trump over the weekend and that the president encouraged him to “make a bunch of friends.”

When asked by journalists what kind of friends, Mr. Landry replied: “All kinds of friends.”

But in an emotional speech at the business conference on Tuesday, a young Greenlandic woman expressed a different sentiment. “Trump wants to buy a country. Our country,” she said. “But what about us?

“Would he buy us too?”

Jeffrey Gettleman is an international correspondent based in London covering global events. He has worked for The Times for more than 20 years.

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“Higher education is expensive, and our health care system is already under immense strain. This rule will shut talented people out of critical professions and leave communities with fewer healthcare providers they desperately need,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the coalition, said in a statement.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Maryland, comes nearly three weeks after the Education Department finalized rules that lower the amount of money graduate students can borrow from the federal government. The rules, which take effect July 1, are a feature of the One Big Beautiful Bill that President Donald Trump signed into law last summer. They implement borrowing caps based on whether students are pursuing a degree in what is designated as a professional or graduate program.

Students in professional programs can borrow up to $50,000 a year and $200,000 total, while those in graduate programs will face annual limits of $20,500 and a lifetime limit of $100,000.

The law listed examples of professional programs, including pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, chiropractic, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry and theology.

Before now, all graduate students could borrow up to the full cost of attendance, which conservative lawmakers blamed for high program costs and high student debt.

In the fall, the Education Department and a committee of higher education experts negotiated the details of the loan caps, but the terms sparked a backlash over the exclusion of some professions from the higher loan limits, including nursing, physical therapy and social work. The department received more than 80,000 comments on the proposed rule, with many industry groups challenging the professional designation and warning that students would be shut out of critical fields.

Professional degrees are not limited to the list, the regulation says, but the Education Department held fast to the examples — only agreeing to add clinical psychology after intense debate with experts. The Education Department refused to further expand the list of degrees deemed professional in the final rules.

In the lawsuit, the states claim the department exceeded its authority with an arbitrary definition of “professional degree” that Congress never envisioned.

“The Department heavily relied on ‘its own historical practice’ in defining ‘professional degrees’ … as well as whether a worker was ‘supervised by another professional who has … more education, training, and qualifications,’ … neither of which Congress intended it to consider,” the legal complaint states.

The coalition of states fears the rules will force many students to rely on more expensive private loans, delay completing their education or abandon their pursuit of an advanced degree altogether. The group worries the rules will worsen workforce shortages and make it harder for patients, especially those in rural and underserved communities, to access health care. The states are asking the court to block the rules.

The Education Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit.

When the department drafted the rules, it primarily relied on the text of the One Big Beautiful Bill, which defines a professional student based on a federal classification from the 1970s. A degree is considered “professional” under that classification if the field requires skills beyond those needed to receive a bachelor’s degree, and licensure is generally required — terms that could describe a range of professions.

Nursing groups have been among the most vocal critics of the “professional” definition, arguing that the restrictions could shrink the pool of people who pursue the degrees needed to teach the next generation of nurses. The Education Department has said 95 percent of nursing students borrow below the annual limit and would not be affected by the new caps.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon referenced that data point during a House Education Committee hearing this month, when Democrats and a few Republicans raised concerns that the graduate loan limits will exacerbate the shortage of health care workers.

“It is our overall goal to bring down the cost of college and education,” McMahon said, after Rep. Randy Fine (R-Florida) questioned the potential impact of the loan caps on workforce shortages. “And I do think that, relative to the shortages we’re having, if we can bring down the cost for nurses in schools, we can get more students to apply.”

McMahon noted that a handful of colleges have reduced their graduate program prices in response to the loan limits, but Democratic lawmakers pointed out that the list is short and does not include nursing degrees.

A group of Democratic lawmakers in the House and Senate is seeking to overturn the student loan rules through the Congressional Review Act, which allows lawmakers to overturn recent regulatory actions of federal agencies with a simple majority vote in both chambers. Their campaign will be an uphill battle with Republicans, who championed the spending bill and control the House and Senate.

The post Health worker shortage will worsen with federal loan limit, 25 states say in suit appeared first on Washington Post.

The political landscape was convulsed by the mid-decade redistricting war kicked off by President Donald Trump in Texas, and last month’s Supreme Court ruling on Louisiana’s congressional map set off another mad dash of partisan gerrymandering, so Enten tried to determine the possible outcomes based on this new reality.

“I’m going to put on my professor cap here,” Enten said. “I think that, you know, sometimes we sort of get lost, right, we focus in on one poll and one narrative, and sometimes there are competing narratives, and I think it’s worth just taking a step back because I think some people are like, well, the polls showed one thing and another thing happened.”

Enten examined five polls showing Democrats with a lead in voters’ choice for Congress, but they led by 3 percent in one poll, 5 percent in two polls and 10 percent in two others.

“There’s quite this bit of variance that is going on right here, and you know what?” Enten said. “This is actually a good thing. This is a normal thing, this is what happens when you have margins of error that are going out there. You’d expect an average, but then you have a range of possible results around that average, and we’re not necessarily sure which one is right if the election were held today, and, of course, there’s the extra variance of the fact that the election is not being held until November.”

Enten drilled in further to try and predict how many seats Democrats could gain if those polling leads held firm.

“What’s the difference between, let’s say, Democrats winning by 100 versus winning by three, and this is where it gets really interesting,” he said. “Okay, so even if you take redistricting into account, given a popular vote win of, let’s say, three points, what would that mean for Democratic House gains? They gain probably somewhere in estimate is between zero and six seats, which at the upper end of that range would be enough to take back the House. But on the lower end of that range, that would not be, that would be Republicans holding on.”

“But what about that 10-point lead that you see in Marist, the New York Times?” Enten added. “Well, that would be a ginormous blowout, and this is just an estimate. It could be higher, a little bit higher, a little bit lower. But we’re talking about an estimate of a Democratic gain of between 20 to 30 seats or more. They could be ending up 245 seats or north of there potentially, versus being stuck, let’s say 213, 214, 215 to 216, maybe barely getting to a majority. So look, when you see this range of potential results, I want you to keep in mind, yes, Democrats are probably favored to take back the House. It’s by no means a guarantee, but they could end up blowing the Republicans right out of the water. All of that is within the margin of error at this point, especially given that months from the election.”

– YouTube youtu.be

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