Desmond Milligan

Former Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio announced Monday he is launching a comeback bid, giving Democrats a boost in their longshot campaign to win back control of the Senate. With no serious primary competition, Brown’s announcement effectively kicks off a nearly 15-month general election face-off against Sen. Jon Husted, a Republican appointed earlier this year by Gov. Mike DeWine to fill the seat vacated by JD Vance when he became vice president. “For the past eight months, all they've done is made things worse for Ohioans, handing over your hard-earned money to corporations and to billionaires,” Brown said in a campaign launch video. “Their reckless tariffs and economic chaos are increasing prices and threatening the survival of small businesses all across our state.” Brown, 72, was heavily courted by Democrats who saw him as their only hope to flip a Senate seat in an increasingly out-of-reach red state. Brown has cultivated a brand as a grizzled populist who supports the labor movement and is skeptical of free trade agreements. He has repeatedly outperformed other Democrats in the state, including in 2024, when Brown lost his seat by fewer than 4 percentage points. Former Vice President Kamala Harris fell short by 11 points in the same election. Brown is also a proven fundraiser, raking in more than $100 million in last cycle’s Senate contest. Senate Democrats have turned to familiar faces in the 2026 midterm elections as they try to take back power. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer visited and called Brown as he coaxed him to make another run. Top Democrats also successfully persuaded former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper to run for the Senate. And they are likewise looking to convince Maine Gov. Janet Mills to campaign against Sen. Susan Collins. Republicans have signaled that they intend to use Democratic Senate candidates’ long records against them. In a recent memo, the National Republican Senatorial Committee said that Democrats “appear ready to reach into the past” by recruiting Brown and vowed to “defeat him by an even wider margin the second time around.” Cryptocurrency interests are also indicating that they could again unload their war chest against Brown after a crypto-funded super PAC dropped more than $40 million to unseat him last year. Brown’s and Cooper’s entrance into the midterms immediately improves Democrats’ chances, but Republicans are still favored to maintain control of the Senate after 2026. To retake the chamber, Democrats would need to win four GOP-controlled seats and hold onto all their Democratic seats, including two in states that Trump won last year. View the full article

Nearly a year ago, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris faced off in their first and only presidential debate, and when the discussion turned to Russia’s war in Ukraine, the Democratic vice president told her Republican rival what he didn’t want to hear. Vladimir Putin, Harris said, turning toward Trump, “would eat you for lunch.” The prescient assessment came to mind anew about the Republican’s failed summit in Alaska. As NBC News summarized: President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin emerged from a nearly three-hour meeting on the Ukraine war and struck a cordial tone in brief public statements, but left without announcing a ceasefire or peace agreement. ... Trump appeared buoyant at the start of the summit, deflated by the end. “We didn’t get there,” the American president conceded during brief remarks to reporters. The first summit between the two men, held in Helsinki in 2018, was a national embarrassment for the United States. Trump defended America’s adversary, took cheap shots at his own country, and sided with Putin over the judgment of American intelligence professionals. Soon after, one U.S. official summarized a consensus view, concluding that it was clear whose side Trump was on, and “it isn’t ours.” Then-Sen. John McCain, a month before his death, went so far as to call Trump’s appearance in Helsinki “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” But the second summit was, by most measures, even worse — because as the American president acknowledged, the stakes were vastly higher. When Trump kowtowed to Putin in Helsinki, the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine was still on the horizon. When they met in Alaska, Russia’s war in Ukraine was an intensifying and deadly crisis. Trump’s first failure was humiliating. Trump’s second failure was consequential. Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut explained, simply, “Putin got everything he wanted.” There’s ample evidence to bolster the point: Trump handed Putin a victory before the summit even began by extending an invitation and giving the Russian leader the legitimacy he craved. Trump handed Putin a public-relations victory in Alaska, literally rolling out the red carpet for the dictator, literally applauding him, welcoming into the presidential limo, and treating Putin with deference, even letting the Russian leader speak first (and longer) at their pseudo press conference. Trump handed Putin a strategic victory by abandoning the White House’s own policy: The American president said he’s no longer seeking a ceasefire as a precursor to broader negotiations — the policy Trump spent months trying to secure — which necessarily strengthens Moscow’s hand. Trump handed Putin a economic victory by once again backing off his threats to punish Russia. Shortly before meeting with his counterpart, Trump said there would be “very severe” consequences if Putin didn’t move toward peace, but after the meeting, the Republican abandoned his own position. Trump handed Putin a tactical victory by shifting the onus onto Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as if it were up to Russia’s victim to end Russia’s war. “He got played again,” Ivo Daalder, the Obama-era ambassador to NATO, told The New York Times. “For all the promises of a cease-fire, of severe economic consequences, of being disappointed, it took two minutes on the red carpet and 10 minutes in the Beast for Putin to play Trump again. What a sad spectacle.” Remember, Trump didn’t just fail by objective metrics, he failed by his own metrics: The American president invited Putin to U.S. soil with the express goal of negotiating a ceasefire. After failing to prepare, the Republican not only fell short of his stated objective, he ended up abandoning his goal at Putin’s behest. In the wake of his failure, Trump tried to assure the public that it was a “great’ and “very successful” diplomatic gathering. When Fox News’ Sean Hannity asked the American president to rate the talks on a scale of 1 to 10, Trump replied, “I think the meeting was a 10, in the sense we got along great.” And if the point of the talks were for Trump and Putin to “get along great,” then it was certainly a triumph, but in Grown-Up Land, there were other objectives on the to-do list. “We’re not walking out of there with a deal,” a White House official told Politico ahead of the summit — hours before they walked out of there without a deal. Is it any wonder why there was “pronounced gloating in Russia” in the wake of Trump’s failure? As this week gets underway, Zelenskyy will meet with the American president in the White House, and he’s bringing some backup: The Ukrainian leader will be joined by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Watch this space. This article was originally published on MSNBC.com View the full article

US President Donald Trump piled pressure on Kyiv just hours before a critical meeting with Ukraine’s president and several European leaders over Russia’s invasion. Though Trump appeared to make concessions in talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, European officials viewed his openness to a US security guarantee as a positive and hoped to make further headway during talks in Washington today. Ahead of the meeting, however, Trump posted on social media that Ukraine should surrender Crimea and forego any hopes of joining NATO. Ukraine’s — and Europe’s — challenge “is to get Trump off the path that Putin has laid out for him,” the Financial Times’ chief foreign affairs commentator wrote, warning that they were entering “the lion’s den.” — Prashant Rao View the full article

A low-mileage 2019 Shelby Mustang GT350R is up for grabs alongside $20,000 in cash, with entries closing Aug. 24. Organizers say Modern Car Collector readers receive bonus entries, but—as with any sweepstakes—you have to enter to win. WIN HERE. The grand prize car, chassis #KR124, shows just 28 miles and is finished in Shadow Black with over-the-top white stripes over an Ebony and red cloth/Miko suede cabin. Equipped with the Electronics Package, the “R” model features 19-inch carbon-fiber seven-spoke wheels, Brembo calipers clamping two-piece rotors, a carbon-fiber rear wing, voice-activated navigation, a Bang & Olufsen 12-speaker audio system, blind-spot monitoring (BLIS), carbon-fiber interior trim, and Recaro seats. The car includes its original window sticker, manufacturer’s literature and a display model of the crankshaft and chassis badge. Under the hood sits Ford’s 5.2-liter “Voodoo” V-8 with a flat-plane crank, factory-rated at 526 hp and 429 lb-ft, paired to a Tremec TR-3160 six-speed manual and 3.73:1 Torsen limited-slip differential. Additional engine, transmission and differential coolers were standard on the “R.” The steering wheel is Alcantara-wrapped, and the analog/digital cluster includes a 200-mph speedometer, 8,250-rpm redline tachometer, and auxiliary oil temperature and pressure gauges. Prize details note full-body paint protection film (PPF), Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires (305/30R19 front, 315/30R19 rear), MagneRide damping and signature touches like HID projector headlamps, functional hood and fender vents, sequential LED taillights, Cobra puddle lamps and quad exhaust outlets. In lieu of the vehicle-and-cash package, a $75,000 cash option is available to the winner. Key dates: Entries close Aug. 24, 2025, at 12:59 p.m. MDT. The random drawing is scheduled for Aug. 30, 2025, at 4:00 p.m. MDT at the Shelby American Collection in Boulder. Eligibility, entry methods, odds and prize details are governed by the official rules. How to play it smart: Enter before the deadline, confirm any bonus-entry eligibility for Modern Car Collector readers, and retain your confirmation. Taxes, registration and delivery logistics vary by jurisdiction and are typically the winner’s responsibility per official rules. It’s an as-new, 28-mile GT350R with a manual gearbox and $20,000 in cash. If you want a shot at it, enter now—because not entering is the only way to guarantee you don’t win. WIN HERE. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter View the full article

無綫公布上周（11日至17日）收視，根據CSM媒介研究及YOUBORA收視資料數據顯示，資訊節目《東張西望》跨平台直播收視最高22.3點（144萬觀眾），比上周最高收視24.2點（157萬觀眾），下跌了1.9點，但仍踞收視榜首位。 東張西望》跨平台直播收視最高22.3點（144萬觀眾），踞收視榜首位。(節目截圖)處境劇方面，《愛‧回家之開心速遞》最高收視20點（130萬觀眾），比上周最高收視21點（136萬觀眾），下跌了1點；譚俊彥、李佳芯主演《麻雀樂團》最高收視19.4點（126萬觀眾），比上周最高收視20點（129萬觀眾），下跌了0.6點；外購劇《藏海傳》最高收視15點（97觀眾），比上周最高收視15.6點（101觀眾），上升了0.6點。 譚俊彥、李佳芯主演《麻雀樂團》最高收視19.4點（126萬觀眾）。（影片截圖）綜藝資訊節目方面，由區永權、何沛珈、王嘉慧、吳幸美主持的《健康新聞報道》上周首播，最高收視12.1點（78萬觀眾），與上周同期節目《玩轉粵東粵北懶人包》最高收視12.1點（78萬觀眾）平手。 區永權、何沛珈、王嘉慧、吳幸美主持的《健康新聞報道》。（IG：@hpgroxanne）周六晚《港姐最美任務在檳城》最高收視14.4點（93萬觀眾）；電影《風暴》最高收視13.7點（89萬觀眾），比上周同期節目《星光熠熠耀保良》最高收視15.1點（98萬觀眾），下跌了0.7點到1.4點。 《港姐最美任務在檳城》最高收視14.4點（93萬觀眾）。(節目截圖)周日晚歌唱大賽《聲秀》最高收視17.7點（114萬觀眾），比上周最高收視15.3點（99萬觀眾），上升了2.4點；真人騷戀綜《女神配對計劃》最高收視15.1點（98萬觀眾），比上周最高收視13.8點（89萬觀眾），上升了1.3點；清談音樂節目《今晚有歌廳》最高收視12點（77萬觀眾）。 《聲秀》最高收視17.7點（114萬觀眾）。 View the full article

By Fatos Bytyci and Florion Goga SKENDERBEGAS, Albania (Reuters) -As wildfires raged across Albania last week, people were forced to flee for their lives, with no time to save their livestock. Now the fires are subsiding, some volunteers are turning their attention to caring for the scorched animals. Swiss national Maria Cristina Medina, who runs the Tierhilfe animal shelter, near the capital Tirana, watched on as a veterinarian administered antibiotics and applied lotion to a horse that sustained burns in Delvina – one of the worst affected towns in the south of the country. “Delvina has a good chance to survive, as her lungs were not damaged, and she is fighting for her life,” Medina said. The injured horse, which now shares its name with the town, began eating and drinking after receiving treatment. A donkey with burns is also under care. Medina said she has received a steady stream of calls accompanied by photos of scorched animals, many of which ultimately had to be euthanised due to the extent of their injuries. “I saw pictures of burned animals, and I cried and even threw up, but then I got back and carried on because they need my help,” Medina said. She and her team later headed to the village of Skenderbegas, some two hours away from Tirana in the eastern part of the country, to check for more burned animals. More than 30 houses and barns were destroyed in the village and evidence of devastation is stark, with the skeletons of goats, cows and donkeys scattered amid the ruins. “The flames arrived so quickly. We were rushing to save the children, but I could not unchain the cow,” said Manjola Doci, whose one-month-pregnant cow suffered burns over large parts of its body. One neighbour lost all 12 of his goats, another three cows, a profound loss in a region where such animals are often the primary means of food and transport for locals. (Reporting by Fatos Bytyci; Editing by Sharon Singleton) View the full article

GENEVA (AP) — Swiss watchmaker Swatch apologized Monday for an ad campaign that upset consumers in China and elsewhere and said it had “immediately removed all related materials worldwide.” In an image for the Swatch Essentials collection, an Asian male model is shown pulling the edges of his eyelids upward and backward with his fingers — a gesture seen as derogatory and racist, Swiss public broadcaster SRF reported. Swatch wrote on Instagram that “we sincerely apologize for any distress or misunderstanding this may have caused.” It said it would “treat this matter with the utmost importance.” SRF reported that the apology was also posted on the Chinese social network Weibo in Chinese and English. View the full article

CAIRO (AP) — The Palestinian Health Ministry said on Monday that more than 62,000 Palestinians have been killed in the 22-month war in Gaza. At least 60 people were killed in the past 24 hours, bringing the death toll from the Israel-Hamas war that started on Oct. 7, 2023, to 62,004. Another 156,230 have been wounded, it said. The Health Ministry said 1,965 people have been killed while seeking aid from aid convoys or killed close to aid distribution sites. At least seven Palestinians were killed attempting to access aid on Monday morning. The ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count, is staffed by medical professionals. The United Nations and other independent experts view its figures as the most reliable count of casualties. Israel has disputed its figures, but hasn’t provided its own account of casualties. The Palestinian Health Ministry said on Monday that more than 62,000 Palestinians have been killed in the 22-month Gaza war. At least 60 people were killed in the past 24 hours, bringing the death toll from the Israel-Hamas war that started on Oct. 7, 2023 to 62,004. Another 156,230 have been wounded, it said. The Health Ministry said 1,965 people were killed while seeking aid from aid convoys or killed close to aid distribution sites. At least seven Palestinians were killed attempting to access aid on Monday morning. Also on Monday, Egypt’s top diplomat condemned Israel’s plan to forcibly resettle Palestinians outside of Gaza and said the country is attempting to restart ceasefire negotiations along with Qatar. Mediators are “exerting extensive efforts” to revive a U.S. proposal for a 60-day ceasefire during which the warring parties will negotiate an end to the war, Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty said on the Egyptian side of a crossing between Egypt and Gaza. He met there with Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa. View the full article

A centrist and a center-right candidate made it through the first round of Bolivia’s presidential election, which was marked by voters’ rejection of the ruling left-wing party. The Movement Toward Socialism has ruled Bolivia for almost two decades since Evo Morales became president in 2006: It initially benefitted from a commodities boom that fed a surge in government spending, but as energy prices fell and state coffers dried up, the government piled up debt in a failed bid to revive economic growth. The two successful candidates, who will face each other in an October runoff, have both vowed to slash spending. “People have generally stopped believing in socialism,” a former Morales voter told The Wall Street Journal. A chart showing Bolivia’s debt as a share of GDP. — Jeronimo Gonzalez View the full article

Lexus has shown what might become a production reality with its Sports Concept revealed during Monterey Car Week. While what we see is clearly just a design practice, we already know Lexus is working on a new sports car, so it could borrow part of its styling from this concept. California Air Resource Board has been sued. That future sports car is rumored to be based on the upcoming MKVI Supra from parent brand Toyota. While the two might be similar mechanically, we would expect the Lexus version of the sports car to not only be more luxurious but to also have a more sophisticated look about it. Image via LexusThere are many things we love about this concept. First, it’s a big departure from the current design malaise we see everywhere as manufacturers have obviously been copying each other. Even better, the Lexus Sports Concept actually looks muscular or athletic without appearing to try too hard. That’s not an easy balance to strike, but Lexus has nailed it with this design study. The thing sits wide and low, as a sports car should, and looks ready to pounce. Adding to its performance-geared design are the large vents behind the front wheels, others disguised in the rear fascia, and the subtle scoops ahead of the rear wheels. Plus, the hood has heat extractors which look more like nostrils, giving the vehicle more of an animalistic vibe. Image via LexusWhat’s also great is one can immediately identify this concept as a Lexus, even if the badge weren’t present. The Boomerang running lights on the front are a dead giveaway and look great on this concept sports car. We’re not so sure about the crazy digital side mirrors, something automakers keep flirting with, but those likely wouldn’t make their way to a production car, so that’s neither here nor there. But overall we’re intrigued by this concept and what it means for the future Supra-based Lexus sports car. Images via Lexus Join our Newsletter, subscribe to our YouTube page, and follow us on Facebook. View the full article

Autoblog aims to feature only the best products and services. If you buy something via one of our links, we may earn a commission. DeWalt's 'Durable' 20V Max Battery Is Now Nearly 50% Off at Amazon originally appeared on Autoblog. If you rely on power tools for work, DIY projects, or weekend repairs, you already know the battery is the lifeblood of your setup. Whether you are framing a deck, hanging drywall, or building a backyard shed, a high-capacity battery means fewer interruptions and more time getting the job done. Investing in quality batteries can save you time, frustration, and money in the long run by keeping your tools running at full power throughout the day. Right now at Amazon, you can grab the DeWalt 20V Max Lithium-Ion Battery Pack for just $61, nearly 50% off its regular $119 price tag. This is a solid discount on one of DeWalt’s most popular batteries, and it works with over 200 tools in the 20V Max lineup. Whether you are adding to your collection or replacing an older pack, this deal is worth considering before it’s gone. DeWalt 20V Max Lithium Ion Battery, $61 (was $119) at AmazonGet It!This premium 4.0Ah pack provides up to 33% more capacity than standard 20V Max batteries and weighs just 1.4 pounds, so you can take it with you on longer jobs without constantly rotating through multiple packs or getting tired. It features a 3-LED fuel gauge system, giving you instant feedback on your remaining charge, which helps you plan your work more efficiently. The battery also has no memory effect and virtually no self-discharge, so it’s ready to go when you are, even after sitting idle for extended periods. Related: Walmart Has a 'Very Sturdy' Carport on Sale for Just $179 One reviewer raved about this unit, saying, “It's hands-down one of the best tool batteries I’ve owned. The 4.0Ah capacity delivers noticeably more runtime compared to the standard batteries—perfect for long jobs where you don’t want to keep swapping out power.” Another customer shared, “Overall, this is a solid, dependable battery that’s perfect for anyone already using DeWalt’s 20V Max tools.” A third happy buyer put its durability to the test, saying, “Lasts a long time on my impact and drill and is very durable. I used it as a hammer a couple times and it's still kickin’.” It’s not often you see name brands like DeWalt with a discount like this, so head over to Amazon and pick up the DeWalt 20V Max Lithium Ion Battery for just $61 while it’s still 49% off. DeWalt's 'Durable' 20V Max Battery Is Now Nearly 50% Off at Amazon first appeared on Autoblog on Aug 18, 2025 This story was originally reported by Autoblog on Aug 18, 2025, where it first appeared. View the full article

Polling is “90% bullshit.” In fact, all political data is “garbage.” The Democratic consultants who traffic in such numbers are perpetrating a “scam” against their own party and are largely responsible for President Donald Trump’s victories. Instead of trying to gauge public opinion through pseudo-scientific surveys, Democrats should mostly just read history and the classics. This is the gist of John Ganz’s recent column, “Against Polling” — a widely-shared polemic that actually earned plaudits from some Democratic pollsters. Both this piece and its reception are puzzling. Ganz is a brilliant writer with many insightful things to say about history and political philosophy. (I recommend subscribing to his newsletter and buying his book.) Yet his diatribe against “data” is unfair and unpersuasive. He patently mischaracterizes the positions he’s arguing against and provides little evidence for his own. He does not acknowledge some obvious objections to his anti-empiricism, let alone rebut them. His piece’s valid assertions are uncontested while its contentious ones are unvalidated. Nevertheless, it was warmly received, even by some whose vocations it disparaged. I’m not certain why this is. But I fear that Ganz’s argument is appealing for the very reason it undermines clear-eyed thinking about electoral politics: it offers an elaborate rationalization for dismissing any data one does not like. This story was first featured in The Rebuild.Sign up here for more stories on the lessons liberals should take away from their election defeat — and a closer look at where they should go next. From senior correspondent Eric Levitz. Ganz makes some valid points (that no one actually disputes)Ganz’s critique is aimed at both political data in general, and a specific set of ideas about Democratic electoral strategy: Principally, the notion that Democratic candidates should seek to increase the salience of their popular positions, avoid talking much about their unpopular ones, and give greater deference to public opinion than the party presently does. This basic outlook is often described as “popularism” (a hideous but useful neologism). And it is championed by, among others, the Democratic data scientist David Shor, the commentator Matt Yglesias, and less prominently (and more equivocally) myself. In prosecuting his case against popularism, Ganz says many things that are inarguably true. For example — after spending the bulk of his column arguing that public opinion data is “garbage” and “90% bullshit” — he retreats to the claim that polling is “part of getting a picture of the world,” just “not the entirety of it.” Needless to say, the idea that polling shouldn’t be your only tool for discerning reality and the idea that polling is almost entirely fraudulent are pretty different. The first claim is indisputable; the trouble is that no one disputes it. This is the problem with virtually all of Ganz’s valid assertions. He correctly observes that polling is flawed, that public opinion isn’t fixed, that not all useful knowledge about politics is quantifiable, and that there is more to good campaigning than mirroring the public’s policy preferences. But he does not quote a single Democratic consultant or commentator who rejects these truisms, likely because none do. Instead of refuting the popularists’ actual ideas, Ganz rebuts an absurd ideology of his own invention. He writes that “the worldview of the data guys is based on a giant mistake” — namely, that “there’s an objective world out there, and it doesn’t change.” Yet no serious person has ever claimed that public opinion doesn’t change. It obviously does. And this is not lost on the “data guys.” David Shor, to take one example, has argued that Democratic politicians have the power to reshape many of their base voters’ views, that the Dobbs decision made Americans more liberal on abortion, and that “what people care about and trust [the Democrats] on really is responsive to concrete events that happen in the world.” On this point, the actual dispute between Ganz and the popularists is not about whether public opinion can change, but about how much scope Democratic politicians have to reshape the views of swing voters — which is to say, voters who do not particularly trust Democratic politicians. Everyone recognizes that this scope is limited. Most progressives would doubtlessly agree that Democrats can’t persuade swing voters to support large new taxes on meat. There may be a strong moral case for making steak more expensive, given the cruelty and ecological harms inherent to large-scale animal agriculture. Were Democrats to campaign on the case for making meat less affordable, however, they would surely do less to change swing voters’ views on factory farming than to poison the Democratic Party’s image. I seriously doubt that Ganz would contest this. Assuming he doesn’t, then the debate on this point isn’t about whether Democrats must acquiesce to the public’s existing preferences on some subjects. Rather, it is about 1) what those subjects are and 2) how they can be identified. These are difficult questions. To answer them, one must make not only empirical judgments but normative ones (chiefly, about how Democratic politicians should weigh the risk of alienating voters against the benefits of evangelizing for worthy causes). It is reasonable to argue that Shor, Yglesias, or any other “data guy” gets these questions wrong. But demonstrating that requires engaging with their actual premises, not shredding a caricature of their worldview. Did Democratic pollsters misjudge the politics of immigration?Ganz comes closest to addressing the data guys’ actual views in his discussion of immigration. In 2024 — and during the early months of Trump’s presidency — popularists encouraged Democrats to focus on the electorate’s economic concerns, rather than emphasizing the moral case against Trump’s mass deportation plan. Ganz argues that this was a mistake, one rooted in an overvaluation of polling data and an underestimation of the electorate’s moral judgment. His argument is as follows: Polling in 2024 indicated that voters agreed with Trump about mass deportation. This led the popularists to discourage Democrats from attacking the cruelty of Trump’s vision. But surveys on this subject were fundamentally misleading: Most voters did not harbor any deep commitment to purging the country of hardworking, law-abiding immigrants. And once people actually saw what Trump’s policy entailed, they recoiled in horror. Now, a majority of Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of immigration. In Ganz’s view, we should not blame the public for failing to anticipate the consequences of Trump’s agenda, but rather, the “lazy politicians” and “craven advisers” who prevented Democrats from alerting voters to those harms. By refusing to appeal to the electorate’s “faculties of judgement and imagination,” Ganz suggests that the “data guys” abetted Trump’s election. There are many problems with this argument. But most derive from two unsound assumptions at the core of Ganz’s reasoning: • If voters soured on Trump’s immigration agenda after witnessing its effects in 2025, then Democrats could have changed their minds about that agenda in 2024, had the party only helped Americans picture those effects. • If voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, then the Democratic Party must not have any interest in reducing that subject’s salience relative to economic issues. On the first point, it simply isn’t true that Democrats failed to warn voters about what mass deportation would entail. To the contrary, on the campaign trail last September, then-Vice President Kamala Harris explicitly appealed to voters’ “faculties of judgement and imagination” on this subject, warning that Trump had “pledged to carry out the largest deportation, a mass deportation, in American history. Imagine what that would look like and what that would be? How’s that going to happen? Massive raids? Massive detention camps?” At the time of these remarks, Democrats had been making versions of this argument for nearly a decade. At one point during that period, Trump had used presidential power to separate migrant parents from their children, in a notorious scandal. If all this wasn’t enough to persuade swing voters that Trump’s approach to immigration was intolerably cruel, why should we be confident that Harris could have convinced them of as much, if only she’d made the case more forcefully? Ganz offers evidence that public opinion on immigration is sensitive to shifts in objective conditions and media coverage. But it doesn’t follow that such opinion is highly responsive to Democratic rhetoric. Yet there is a more basic problem with Ganz’s case: Current polling still indicates that immigration is a source of relative strength for Trump and weakness for the Democratic Party. In RealClearPolitics’s polling average, immigration remains Trump’s best issue, with voters disapproving of the president’s handling of that subject by only 5 percentage points as of August 15. By contrast, voters disapprove of Trump’s management of inflation by 20.5 points, and of the economy more broadly by 11.6 points as of the same time. More critically, some recent polling indicates that voters still prefer Trump’s cruel brand of immigration enforcement to the Democratic Party’s perceived laxity on the issue. In a July Wall Street Journal poll, voters said that they trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle immigration by a 17-point margin. On illegal immigration, meanwhile, voters favored the GOP by 24 points. Therefore, the popularists’ basic proposition on this subject — that Democrats have an interest in emphasizing economic issues over immigration — is as plausible today as it was in 2024. To be clear, none of this necessarily means that Democrats shouldn’t spotlight the cruelty of Trump’s immigration policies, for non-electoral reasons. In my own view, the popularists can get monomaniacally fixated on political optimization, at the expense of other considerations. Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s decision to agitate for the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia — an immigrant whom Trump unlawfully deported to El Salvador — may or may not have marginally increased the Democrats’ odds of winning the 2026 midterms. But doing so brought comfort to a longtime US resident who was suffering in a nightmarish foreign prison. That seems worthwhile. Yet Ganz does not frame his case against popularism in purely moral terms. Rather, he asserts that the “data guys” are specifically wrong about how to win elections — so wrong that their polling amounts to “garbage” and a “scam.” His only evidence for this extremely strong claim is that public opinion about immigration has changed since 2024. In other words, Ganz is guilty of precisely what he accuses the “data guys” of doing: drawing sweeping conclusions on the basis of a myopic and incurious reading of cherry-picked polling data. If empiricism is dead, then everything is permittedIt is easy to enumerate the liabilities of polling and election data analysis. The real difficulty lies in naming alternative methods for ascertaining political reality that are more reliable and less vulnerable to motivated reasoning. And Ganz fails to meet that challenge. He argues that politics is an art — not a science — and can therefore only be mastered through humanistic methods: There is no alternative to studying “the words and actions of politicians past” and the vast philosophical literature on effective rhetoric, beginning with the ancient Greeks. FDR’s oratory may not offer the precise guidance of polling, message tests, or elaborate statistical analyses of election results. But Ganz argues that such number crunching can obscure more than it reveals by abstracting away essential context, which can only be captured through a qualitative examination of political history and the classics. It’s surely true that some useful political knowledge can’t be represented mathematically, and that history is an indispensable supplement to political science. Yet as a tool for anticipating how voters will respond to a given agenda or message, the humanistic study of “politicians past” has obvious flaws. For one thing, as Ganz himself emphasizes, public opinion changes over time. Rhetorical tactics and substantive positions that worked in the past may therefore have less purchase in the present. Polling can offer a portrait of contemporary attitudes; history can’t. Further, what history and the classics tell us about optimal electoral strategy in 2025 is extremely indeterminate: By focusing on distinct historical examples or emphasizing different pieces of context, one can draw an enormous variety of different conclusions. Of course, one can apply quantitative tools in biased ways. But scientific methods impose far greater constraints on motivated reasoning than humanistic inquiry does. Rigorous polling can falsify one’s assumptions about public opinion (or at least, cast them into doubt). Analyses of which candidates have outperformed their party in recent elections can validate or undermine certain theories of political best practice. By contrast, no one has ever learned that their policy preferences were unpopular by reading Aristotle. Ganz’s piece unintentionally illustrates his method’s susceptibility to biased reasoning. To appreciate how, it’s worth quoting his conclusion at length: The statistical fixation of the early 21st century that’s made so many bad predictions and fathered so many puzzling defeats must be abandoned. We are not in an era of small calculations but of great movements. Politicians with a vision and a strong, clear rhetorical appeal, like Trump, Bernie, AOC, and now Mamdani, are those who excite people. People become disappointed and disillusioned when they lapse into focus-group-tested canting. Say something for a change. It’s difficult to say exactly what Ganz is asserting here, since his language is a bit vague and aphoristic. If you squint, you could read him as merely asserting a bunch of truisms (it is bad for a politician to speak in canned lines that sound inauthentic; charisma matters; having an energized base is desirable, all else equal). In the most straightforward reading, though, Ganz appears to be making at least three contentious propositions: • Democrats’ recent defeats were caused by excessive deference to public opinion data. • Trump’s success demonstrates that paying close heed to polling is less important than offering a vision that excites people and mobilizes a “great movement.” • For a model of the type of Democratic politics that works in our era, one should look to Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. None of these claims are self-evidently true. On the first point, one could just as easily assert that Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris lost because they paid too little attention to opinion polling, rather than too much. After all, both declined to embrace many majoritarian positions that contradicted progressive principles. And Harris famously ignored the counsel of data-driven Democratic consultants, who had implored her to focus less on “democracy” and more on the cost of living. Similarly, it’s not obvious that Trump has been more successful than a less charismatic, but more moderate and disciplined, Republican would have been in his place. It’s worth remembering that Trump 1) lost the popular vote by 2 million ballots in 2016, despite running against a historically disliked Democratic nominee, 2) lost the presidency in 2020, despite running against a senescent man who could not reliably speak in coherent sentences, 3) won narrowly in 2024, even with the tailwind of a global anti-incumbent backlash, and 4) through it all, has had an unusually low approval rating (for a president or party leader). It is entirely possible that Republicans would have done much worse over the past nine years, had they been led by a straitlaced moderate with poorly attended rallies. But how does Ganz know that? Finally, it’s difficult to see a firm basis for selecting Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani as exemplars of effective Democratic politics in 2025. All are gifted politicians. And I think there are things that the broader Democratic Party can learn from each. Yet they have collectively won zero general elections outside of New York City and Vermont — two of the most Democratic jurisdictions in America. And Mamdani has a negative 9 percent favorability rating in New York state, according to a Siena College poll released this week. The challenge facing Democrats today is not how to win a New York City mayoral election, but how to win presidential races in Pennsylvania and Senate contests in North Carolina. And Ganz offers no evidence that appealing to majoritarian opinion in those places (as measured through scientific methods) is less important than exciting “great movements,” in the manner that Sanders, AOC, and Mamdani have. All of which is to say: By dismissing “scientific” methods of evaluating claims about political reality, Ganz enables himself to draw strong conclusions about how Democrats can best disempower the GOP — without providing much in the way of substantiation or even argument. And those conclusions happen to be ideologically convenient for Ganz, whose social democratic politics are well-represented by Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani. This is what I find insidious about his whole argument: It serves to insulate progressives’ intuitions about electoral politics from any empirical challenge. Progressives have strong incentives to engage in wishful thinking about electoral politicsThis is a problem, not least because the left’s political intuitions are liable to be biased, unless disciplined by data. Left-wing activists and public intellectuals have strong incentives to believe that there are minimal tensions between the progressive movement’s factional project (to pull Democrats leftward) and the Democratic Party’s electoral one (to disempower the Republican Party). If there were large trade-offs between these two endeavors, then such progressives might have a moral obligation to counsel some form of moderation. After all, as the Trump administration demonstrates on a near-daily basis, the stakes of keeping the authoritarian right out of power are extremely high. Yet one cannot advocate for a more ideologically cautious Democratic Party without risking estrangement from other progressives. In principle, there is no reason why it couldn’t be true that social democracy is the most just political system and that — at this particular point in history — the Democratic Party would win many more elections if it moderated on some issues. The latter is an empirical judgment, not a normative one. Yet to articulate this view as a progressive is to jeopardize your sense of belonging and esteem among those who share your moral commitments. Doing so is sure to get you derisively branded as a “centrist.” Some progressive writers may even feel comfortable calling you a “craven” scammer without evidence. Thus, anyone who finds community and identity in progressive politics — a group that includes a large share of Democratic operatives, staffers, and commentators — is liable to err on the side of underestimating the political utility of moderation. Polling and election data are the only real checks on such a bias. And Ganz’s piece provides a rationalization for dismissing them. None of this is to say that the popularists are necessarily right about how Democrats can win elections, much less about how the party should balance the dictates of principle against those of political expediency. The latter is an inescapably value-laden question, which data cannot resolve. Yet you can’t formulate a morally serious answer to that dilemma without a plausible conception of political reality. And scientific methods remain our best tools for forming such a conception. For all of polling’s flaws, there is still no better way to find out what voters think than to ask them (or more specifically, a representative sample of them, using maximally neutral question wordings). And for all the methodological disputes among political scientists, there is still no better way to discern which types of candidates most voters favor than to rigorously examine whom they elect. View the full article

As part of his administration’s war on “woke”, Donald Trump has asked the American public to report anything “negative” about Americans in US national parks. But the public has largely refused to support a world view without inconvenient historical facts, comments submitted from national parks and seen by the Guardian show. Notices have been erected at every National Park Service (NPS) site, which spans 433 national parks, monuments and battlefields, following an order from May entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, issued by Trump’s department of the interior (DOI). The president had demanded a crackdown on any material that “inappropriately disparages Americans”. The signs ask visitors to report any damage to parks as well as, via QR code, to identify “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features”. But a trove of nearly 500 comments relating to the signs submitted across the US by the public in June and July, seen by the Guardian, show that visitors have mostly been reluctant to demand the removal of park materials about the darker chapters of America’s past, such as slavery or the mistreatment of native tribes. “Are we such weak, fragile people that we can’t view the full length and breadth of our history?,” one visitor to Muir Woods in California wrote in July after a sign called “history under construction” was taken down. “Are we so afraid that we have to hide factual history from the telling of our past? Oh, please!!” Related: US national parks staff in ‘survival mode’ to keep parks open amid Trump cuts Another visitor to Cumberland Gap national historical park in Kentucky wrote in June that “the staff that work at this park are among the kindest, most knowledgeable people you will find anywhere”. They added: “I hate that this administration feels that history that may depict the United States in a bad light should be covered up.” Many of the comments praise park rangers or call for more information on issues such as the Indigenous American experience or the climate crisis. Some complain about the decision to remove the ‘T’ from LGBT at New York’s Stonewall national monument, to exclude transgender people, while some visitors demanded the unvarnished truth be told at Manzanar, a California facility where Japanese-Americans were interred during the second world war. “Sanitizing or downplaying this history does a disservice to those who lived through it,” one Manzanar tourist wrote. “Whoever authorized this sign should be fired,” added another visitor about the new signage. “History belongs to all people, and any attempt to rewrite or gloss over even our darkest days should not be tolerated.” The QR code comments, a snapshot of public opinions that are filtered before being stored by the NPS, come at a tumultuous time for the park service. Nearly a quarter of NPS staff have departed the agency since Trump became president, leading to overstretched and potentially dangerous conditions at storied sites often referred to as “America’s best idea”, such as Yellowstone, the Everglades and the Statue of Liberty. “Americans have demonstrated they have a deep love affair with national parks and what we’ve seen from these comments is that the public has said this is an insulting and misguided effort,” said John Garder, a senior director at the National Parks Conservation Association. “Rangers shouldn’t be intimidated to not talk about slavery and other things that have happened in America’s past. It’s outrageous and the American public have been deeply disturbed by it.” However, not all of the submitted comments from what some park staff call “snitch signs” will be used to direct the revamp of park signage. Of the comments seen by the Guardian, fewer than 40 were ‘flagged for review’ by the park service and of those, fewer than 10 were indicated to be definitely used as part of the response to the interior department order. This small selection of comments mostly aligns with the administration’s perspective. One complains about “revisionist history based in woke religion” at Muir Woods, another criticizes “fashionable leftist jargon” and a third, from a visitor to Washington’s Rock Creek park, is upset that materials on Francis Newlands, a US senator around the time of the first world war, “disparage him as a white supremacist for holding what were common views at the time”. “They want this virtue-washed version of history and they are trying to drive a wedge between us and the public,” said one senior NPS employee, who did not want to be named for fear for retribution. “Every time there is a comment asking for more information on Indigenous people, it won’t be acknowledged. If there’s someone who says they are terribly offended by a sign, it will be flagged and sent for review.” The NPS staffer, part of the “resistance rangers” movement within the park service comprising more than 1,000 off-duty rangers that has its own podcast in which they contribute anonymously, said that the composition of comments has recently become more pro-Trump since the park service noticed the public were mostly supportive of signs. “It seems like an orchestrated effort was made, a lot of the comments appear the same or AI generated,” said the employee. The Guardian has seen no evidence that the public responses have been distorted by the administration in this way. “Overwhelmingly, we have a positive response from the public every day. People don’t want this. Every day I have people whisper to me ‘we love the parks, we want to help.’” The administration is expected to act soon to take down signs it deems inappropriate. On Monday, it began a separate month-long process to review and remove other materials in national park sites, such as books and posters found in gift shops. “We have to review every single pamphlet, pin and magnet,” said one NPS employee. “There are going to be hundreds of items that are going to be removed.” A superintendent of a history-based park said there has been very little guidance on how to judge materials as problematic. “It’s on the park staff, who are already under resourced, to figure out what to censor, which is really troubling,” they said. “I’ve tried to not delegate any of this because I don’t want to make staff do things that go against their values,” the superintendent said of the signs. “This is a way to stop us talking about difficult topics and tie our hands behind our backs. Overwhelmingly, the public aren’t buying it. They don’t want this. When the department set this up I don’t think they expected so many of the comments to be positive, it backfired a bit on them.” The purge is part of a wider push by the Trump administration to bend American historical, cultural and scientific life to fit its ideological imperatives. Military bases and statues will again bear the name of Confederate generals, climate science reports will be re-edited to potentially include discredited, fringe views while current and planned exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum and research complex, will be reviewed to “assess tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals”. An NPS spokesperson said by 18 September signs found to be “inconsistent” with the department of interior order will be removed, covered up or reinstated at a later date. “The National Park Service has received several substantive comments to date from across the country complimenting park programs or services, noting maintenance issues, or flagging potential inaccuracies or distortions of information out of context,” the spokesperson said. “In implementing the order, the goal is to foster honest, respectful storytelling that educates visitors while honoring the complexity of our nation’s shared journey and park staff are only sent actionable comments related to that goal.” View the full article

Dame Helen Mirren has said James Bond should be played by a man, even though she is "such a feminist". In a new interview with Saga Magazine, the Oscar-winning actress said "you can't have a woman. It just doesn't work. James Bond has to be James Bond, otherwise it becomes something else". Amazon MGM Studios will produce the next iteration of the spy franchise, with Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight set to write what will become the 26th film in the series. The US production and distribution company previously said it was planning a "fresh" take on franchise but would honour the "legacy" of the "iconic character". Dame Helen, 80, is currently starring opposite former James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan in the much anticipated film adaption of The Thursday Murder Club, in which she plays a retired spy. Brosnan, 72, also told the magazine that he believed a male actor should continue to play Bond and he was excited to "see a whole new exuberance and life for this character". He starred in four Bond films during his tenure as 007, starting with GoldenEye in 1995 and finishing with Die Another Day, which was released in 2002. Dame Helen has previously been quoted saying that the concept of James Bond was "born out of profound sexism", and that women have always been an "incredibly important part" of the secret service. The two actors are not the first to push back on the idea of a woman playing Bond. Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Halle Berry, who also starred in Die Another Day, said: "In 2025, it's nice to say, 'Oh, she should be a woman.' But, I don't really know if I think that's the right thing to do." The James Bond franchise was owned by the Broccoli family for more than 60 years, but producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson sold creative control to Amazon for a reported $1bn (£760m) earlier this year. Speculation about who will next play the titular character has been rife, with British actors Aaron Taylor-Johnson and James Norton rumoured as frontrunners for the part. There is no current release date for the next film. Who will be the next James Bond? Speculation mounts after Amazon buys 007 Peaky Blinders creator will write new James Bond film Amazon plans 'fresh' James Bond but will respect 007 legacy View the full article

Sir Ian McKellen may not be officially attached to Andy Serkis’ return to Middle-earth, but it has not stopped the British thespian from teasing details about the new Lord of the Rings movies. McKellen was on stage at a fan event in London over the weekend, flanked by his Fellowship comrades, including Elijah Wood (Frodo Baggins) and Sean Astin (Samwise Gamgee). Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan were also present. More from Deadline Ben Kingsley, Andy Serkis & Joel David Smallbone Join Presidential Biopic 'Young Washington' From Wonder Project And Angel Studios 'Animal Farm' Review: Andy Serkis Directs Seth Rogen And All-Star Voice Cast In Clever And Chilling Take On Orwell's Classic Novella - Annecy Animation Festival HBO's Rachel Sennott Comedy Series Adds Lauren Holt, Moses Ingram, Elijah Wood & Josh Brener Pacing the stage, McKellen revealed that Gandalf and Frodo will feature in Serkis-directed The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum (working title), with the first of two films slated for a December 17, 2027, theatrical release by Warner Bros. Pictures. McKellen also disclosed when cameras will get rolling. “I hear there’s going to be another movie set in Middle-earth, and it’s going to start filming in May. It’s going to be directed by Gollum, and it’s all about Gollum,” he told the For The Love Of Fantasy event, per a video. “I’ll tell you two secrets about the casting: There’s a character in the movie called Frodo, and there’s a character in the movie called Gandalf,” he continued, knowingly adding: “Apart from that, my lips are sealed.” McKellen did not say whether he and Wood will reprise their roles, but the actor has previously said that he hoped to put back on his wizard’s hat. “Enthusiasm for The Lord of the Rings shows no sign of abating … I can’t tell you any more than that. I’ve just been told there are going to be more films and Gandalf will be involved and they hope that I’ll be playing him,” he said last year. The Oscar-winning team behind The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies — Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens — is reuniting to produce two new films from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth for Warner Bros. Pictures and New Line Cinema. Zane Weiner is also producing. Walsh and Boyens are writing the screenplay, along with Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou. During the For The Love Of Fantasy event, McKellen also revisited one of his most famous quotes from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Best of Deadline Everything We Know About ‘Nobody Wants This’ Season 2 So Far 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Emmys, Oscars, Grammys & More Everything We Know About Prime Video's ‘Legally Blonde’ Prequel Series ‘Elle’ Sign up for Deadline's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. View the full article

Un cadeau plus qu’inattendu. En marge de la rencontre entre Donald Trump et Vladimir Poutine à Anchorage, vendredi 15 août, un épisode pour le moins insolite a attiré l’attention. Le président russe aurait profité de son passage en Alaska pour offrir une moto flambant neuve de marque Ural à un habitant de la ville. L’homme, présenté comme Mark Warren, aurait reçu ce « cadeau personnel » de Vladimir Poutine, selon les images diffusées par la télévision d’État Rossiya-1. Passionné de mécanique, il circulait déjà sur une ancienne Ural mais expliquait avoir du mal à se procurer des pièces détachées depuis la mise en place des sanctions américaines. Sur la vidéo, il apparaît ébahi, affirmant être « sans voix » et parlant d’une différence « comme le jour et la nuit » avec son ancien modèle. L’agence Reuters, qui relaie le récit, souligne toutefois qu’elle n’a pas pu contacter Mark Warren et que les seules images disponibles proviennent des médias russes, et notamment de l’agence d’État TASS. Aucune confirmation indépendante n’a pour l’instant été publiée par la presse locale en Alaska. Une opération de communicationLe geste de Vladimir Poutine n’est pas anodin. L’Ural, dont la production a été déplacée au Kazakhstan après l’invasion de l’Ukraine, reste un symbole de l’industrie soviétique. Et c’est en Alaska, ancien territoire russe cédé aux États-Unis en 1867, que ce présent a été remis. Interrogé par un journaliste russe, le motard confie qu’une résolution du conflit ent... Lire la suite sur ParisMatch View the full article

Ngày 18/8, TAND TP Hà Nội đưa các bị cáo là thành viên đội bóng “FC 3T” ra xét xử theo trình tự phúc thẩm về tội Cố ý gây thương tích. Theo bản án sơ thẩm, khoảng đầu tháng 2/2024, bị cáo Nguyễn Minh Hùng (SN 2009) nói chuyện với các thành viên trong đội bóng “FC 3T” gồm các bị cáo Dương Minh Khuê (SN 2003), Nguyễn Đại Sơn (SN 2004), Đào Vũ Nam (SN 2002), Đoàn Minh Quân (SN 2001), Phan Chấn Nam (SN 2004) về việc Hùng có mâu thuẫn với đội bóng “FC Duy M và AE” do anh M. (SN 2002) làm đội trưởng. Khoảng cuối tháng 2/2024, Hùng nhắn tin vào nhóm Messenger “FC 3T” là đã thống nhất sẽ đá bóng với đội “FC Duy M. và AE” tại sân bóng Thúy Lĩnh, quận Hoàng Mai (cũ). Các thành viên đội bóng “FC 3T” vào đọc tin nhắn và hiểu là quá trình gặp nhau cùng đá bóng, khi đá bóng sẽ xảy ra mâu thuẫn, va chạm và đánh nhau với nhóm “FC Duy M. và AE”. Khi đó, bị cáo Khuê và Chấn Nam đã tự bàn bạc với nhau việc mua hung khí, mục đích để sử dụng khi đánh nhau. Đến khoảng 18h ngày 3/3/2024, Khuê và Chấn Nam mỗi người góp 400 ngàn đồng chuyển cho Sơn để đi mua hung khí. Sơn tìm mua được 6 dao tông để sẵn trong balô chờ “nghênh chiến”. Theo cáo buộc, khoảng 20h30 ngày 3/3/2024, tại sân bóng Thúy Lĩnh, hai đội tham gia đá bóng, rồi bắt đầu chửi bới nhau. Bản án sơ thẩm cho rằng, các bị cáo đã dùng dao tông chém vào vùng cổ tay trái, lưng trái, đùi trái của anh M. Nguyễn Đại Sơn đã xông vào dùng cùi trỏ đánh 1 phát trúng đầu anh M. Các bị cáo Hùng, Nam, Quân đều cầm dao định chém anh M. nhưng chưa chém được. Kết luận giám định xác định tỷ lệ tổn thương cơ thể của anh M. là 34%. Theo nội dung điều tra, tất cả hành vi phạm tội của các bị cáo đã được camera tại sân bóng ghi lại. Hành vi phạm tội diễn ra rất nhanh, chỉ trong vòng 20 giây. 20 giây phạm tội của các bị cáo đã bị tòa án cấp sơ thẩm buộc những người phạm tội phải trả giá bằng hơn 26 năm tù giam. Bản án sơ thẩm xác định, hành vi của các bị cáo là nghiêm trọng, đã trực tiếp xâm phạm đến sức khỏe của người khác và trật tự xã hội được pháp luật bảo vệ. Vì vậy cần áp dụng hình phạt tù với mức phạt nghiêm khắc. Với hành vi phạm tội nêu trên, Tòa án cấp sơ thẩm tuyên phạt bị cấo Dương Minh Khuê mức án 5 năm 8 tháng tù; Nguyễn Minh Hùng 36 tháng tù treo; Nguyễn Đại Sơn: 5 năm 6 tháng tù; Đào Vũ Nam 5 năm 6 tháng tù; Đoàn Minh Quân: 5 năm tù; Phan Chấn Nam: 5 năm tù. Sau bản án sơ thẩm, người bị hại là anh M. có đơn kháng cáo đề nghị tăng hình phạt đối với các bị cáo. Anh M. và luật sư của anh đều cho rằng có dấu hiệu bỏ lọt tội phạm, đề nghị HĐXX xem xét khởi tố thêm người liên quan. Theo luật sư của người bị hại, hành vi của các bị cáo có tính chất côn đồ, quá trình xảy ra va chạm có sự phối hợp nhịp nhàng, hỗ trợ cho nhau. Có bị cáo dù không chém anh M. nhưng lại cầm dao đứng đó, vây hãm anh M., không cho nạn nhân chạy thoát, đồng thời cũng ngăn cản những người bên ngoài vào can ngăn... Sau khi xem xét, HĐXX quyết định bác kháng của người bị hại, giữ nguyên bản án sơ thẩm vì cho rằng nội dung kháng cáo của anh M. là không có căn cứ. Sàm sỡ hàng xóm, còn vung dao chém gục chồng nạn nhân ở Hà Nội Là đối tượng từng có tiền án, sau khi ra tù Nguyễn Anh Tú nhiều lần có hành vi sàm sỡ phụ nữ. Khi bị phát hiện, ngăn cản, Tú còn dùng dao chém người, gây thương tích cho các nạn nhân. Nhóm thiếu niên đánh nữ sinh có dấu hiệu tội 'cố ý gây thương tích' Liên quan video lan truyền trên mạng nội dung một nhóm thiếu niên đánh hội đồng một nữ sinh, Công an ở Bình Dương xác định có dấu hiệu tội phạm của tội "cố ý gây thương tích". Cựu công an lĩnh án tù vì cố ý gây thương tích Nhậu ở quán, mâu thuẫn xô xát, nguyên cán bộ công an đã gây thương tích dẫn đến chết người. Nạn nhân tử vong do chấn thương sọ não... View the full article

▲台北自來水事業處徵才！起薪上看47K，9月2日起報名。（ 圖／北水處）[NOWnews今日新聞] 台北自來水事業處徵才！招募土木工程助理工程師正取5名、備取10名及土木技術士正取14名、備取14名，起薪上看47K，9月2日起報名、9月20日筆試、10月18日口試及體能測驗，以114年支薪標準，新進助理工程師月薪約47335元（職員試用期6個月，期滿成績合格正式進用），新進技術士月薪約33045元（工員試用期3個月，期滿成績合格正式僱用），表現優秀者有望5年後月薪分別達64365元及44310元；除月薪外，另有年度績效獎金最高2.4個月、考核獎金1個月，表現優秀的助理工程師為例，第1年年薪約72萬元，5年後年薪可上看近百萬元。 北水處為制度完善的公營事業機構，服務地點均在大台北地區，且為照顧員工，提供定期員工健檢、休假旅遊補助、員工多元休閒活動、職場保母、員工子女非營利幼兒園等健全福利及友善職場措施。 北水處表示，報名方式：一律採「網路報名」方式辦理，不受理現場與通訊報名。招考資訊及甄試簡章於114年8月18日建置於臺北自來水事業處網站「資訊公開/新進人員甄試專區」及報名網站，報名期間自9月2日上午10時起至9月10日下午5時止，近2年職員平均錄取率約11.6％、工員平均錄取率約21.8％。 更多 NOWnews 今日新聞 報導 半導體每月徵才3.4萬人！3類職缺「不限科系」文組也有機會 虎航徵才！徵運務員、商用機師 還有內勤也開缺 南部徵才崛起！南高工作機會成長逾11% 2縣市「可存最多錢」 View the full article

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美國總統特朗普（Donald Trump，又譯川普）8月18日下午（香港時間19日凌晨）將與烏克蘭總統澤連斯基（Volodymyr Zelensky）及多位歐洲領袖在白宮會談，澤連斯基目前已經抵達美國首都華盛頓特區，特朗普則在會面前夕發文稱，烏克蘭想停戰的話，就要「不取回克里米亞，永遠不加入北約」。本文會持續更新有關這次峰會的消息。 烏克蘭哈爾科夫（Kharkiv）2025年8月18日遭遇俄軍襲擊的情況（Press service of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine in Kharkiv region/Handout via REUTERS）【20:00】根據白宮公布，特朗普將於美東時間下午1時15分（香港時間19日凌晨1時15分）在白宮橢圓形辦公室會見澤連斯基，然後在下午3時（香港時間19日凌晨3時）於東廳與所有歐洲領袖一起會面。 澤連斯基：需可靠安全保障【19:50】澤連斯基在社交網站發文及上傳影片，顯示烏克蘭受俄軍攻擊的情況。 他指「俄羅斯戰爭機器不顧一切地繼續摧殘生命...... 正因如此，我們需要可靠的安全保障。正因如此，俄羅斯不應因參與這場戰爭而獲得獎勵。戰爭必須結束。莫斯科必須聽到停止這個詞。」 2025年7月10日，意大利羅馬，圖為澤連斯基在會議上發表講話，討論未來戰後重建議題。（Reuters）特朗普促烏放棄克里米亞、不加入北約在會談前夕，特朗普發文指，若然澤連斯基想的話，他可以立即結束俄烏戰爭，就是不取回克里米亞，永遠不加入北約，形容「有些事情永遠不會改變」。 歐洲領袖將晤特朗普　馬克龍：擬問美願為烏提供多大程度安全保障「箍頸」行業稅開始了　特朗普操弄關稅進入下一步歐洲領袖7+1見特朗普：美俄峰會愈說愈模糊　澤連斯基有三大目標 View the full article

消火活動が続く火災現場＝大阪市中央区で2025年8月18日午前10時38分、本社ヘリから加古信志撮影 　大阪・ミナミの繁華街で起きたビル火災は、消火活動中の消防隊員2人が死亡する惨事となった。 　大阪市の横山英幸市長は18日、報道陣に「懸命に消火活動にあたっていた消防隊員が命を落とすことは、本当に痛恨の極み。火災の原因究明と再発防止に努めていく」と語った。 ビル火災の現場 　大阪市消防局は21日にも局内に検証委員会を設置する方針。「二度とこのようなことが起こらぬよう、原因を明らかにすべく徹底した調査を進め、再発防止に向けて全力を尽くしてまいります」とのコメントを出した。 Advertisement 　消防隊員が活動中に犠牲になる事故は、過去にも起きている。 　2019年1月、秋田県能代市で住宅兼店舗など5棟が焼けた火災では、消火活動中の消防署員2人が焼死した。濃く立ちこめた煙に巻き込まれ、方向感覚を失うなど退避できなくなったところで、火災に巻き込まれたとみられる。 　20年7月に静岡県吉田町で起きた工場火災では、消防隊員3人と警察官1人が死亡した。火元を確認するため4人が建物に入った後に爆発が起きて黒煙が発生したとされる。 　総務省消防庁によると、23年までの5年間で消防活動中に死亡した消防隊員は計10人に上る。 　元東京消防庁麻布消防署長の坂口隆夫・市民防災研究所理事は「空気ボンベは20分ほどしかもたない。いつ脱出するか事前に決めておくが、ミナミの火災では不測の事態が発生して脱出できなかったのだろう」と推測する。 　その上で坂口さんは、3人1組で結ぶ「命綱」や空気呼吸器の装着、照明器具の携帯などの基本装備に加え、建物の状況確認など「安全管理を軽視した進入でなかったかどうか検証が必要だ」と指摘した。【井手千夏、高良駿輔、矢追健介】 View the full article

HATTERAS, N.C. – Powerful Hurricane Erin restrengthened and became an extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane as it continued its journey across the Atlantic, prompting officials in North Carolina to issue local states of emergency and forcing residents and visitors to evacuate some areas. Hurricane Erin, which became the first major hurricane of the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, is no doubt going to be a storm for the history books. The powerful storm rapidly intensified over the weekend, going from a Category 1 hurricane to a catastrophic Category 5 hurricane with winds of 160 mph in a matter of hours. Hurricane Erin’s outer rainbands have now started to impact the southeastern Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands, where Tropical Storm Warnings remain in effect. A Tropical Storm Watch was issued for the central Bahamas on Monday morning. And while the monster storm will likely stay to the east of the U.s., officials are warning of life-threatening surf and rip currents at beaches up and down the East Coast from Florida in the Southeast through the mid-Atlantic, Northeast and New England this week. Track Hurricane Erin: Live Maps, Forecast Cone, Us East Coast Rip Current Threat And Spaghetti Models On Sunday, officials in Dare County, North Carolina, declared a state of emergency and issued a mandatory evacuation for Hatteras Island, including unincorporated villages of Rodanthe, Waves, Salvo, Avon, Buxton, Frisco and Hatteras. "Now is the time to secure property, finalize plans and evacuate with belongings," officials said in a Facebook post. "Please follow instructions from officials and property managers." A similar situation unfolded in nearby Hyde County, where the Board of Commissioners enacted a state of emergency for Ocracoke Island due to anticipated flooding impacts from Hurricane Erin. In addition, a mandatory evacuation order was issued for visitors that started at 8 p.m. Sunday, and for residents starting at 6 a.m. Tuesday. "While Hurricane Erin is expected to stay well off our coast, the system will continue to increase in size and is forecast to bring life-threatening impacts to the Ocracoke coastline and render Highway 12 impassable," officials said in a statement. The National Weather Service office in Newport/Morehead City issued a High Surf Advisory and Coastal Flood Watch in advance of Hurricane Erin’s impacts. The NWS said large breaking waves of 7-12 feet are expected in the surf zone, and "significant oceanside inundation" above ground level is likely in the low-lying areas near the shore and in tidal waterways. How To Watch Fox Weather As of the latest advisory from the National Hurricane Center (NHC), Hurricane Erin has maximum sustained winds of 130 mph, making it a Category 4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. The NHC said that some additional strengthening is expected on Monday. "Even though some weakening is forecast beginning (Monday night), Erin will remain a large and dangerous major hurricane through the middle of the week," the NHC wrote. Hurricane Erin is a massive system. The NHC said that hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 80 miles, while tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 230 miles. Download The Free Fox Weather App Hurricane Erin is currently located more than 900 miles south-southeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and was moving off to the northwest at 13 mph. The NHC said that Hurricane Erin should make a gradual turn toward the north later Monday and into Tuesday. On that track, the NHC said the center of Hurricane Erin is expected to pass to the east of the southeastern Bahamas on Monday and move between the U.S. East Coast and Bermuda by the middle of the week. The outer bands from Hurricane Erin will produce locally heavy rain across portions of Hispaniola through Monday, and through Tuesday for the Turks and Caicos Islands and portions of the southeastern Bahamas. Additional rainfall amounts of 2-4 inches are possible, with locally higher amounts of up to 6 inches not out of the question. Swells generated by Hurricane Erin will impact the Bahamas, Bermuda, the East Coast of the U.S. and Atlantic Canada over the next several days. Those dangerous conditions will likely cause life-threatening surf and rip currents. A storm surge could also cause minor coastal flooding in areas of onshore winds in the Turks and Caicos Islands and in the southeastern Bahamas. It was a tense weekend for residents in the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, as Hurricane Erin scooted by to the north. The hurricane didn’t make landfall and stayed well north of the islands, but impacts were widely felt across the region. FOX Weather Correspondent Robert Ray spent the weekend in St. Thomas, which was hammered by gusty winds and heavy rain that led to power outages and flooding. More than 10 inches of rain fell across Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, while several areas of Puerto Rico picked up more than 4 inches of rain. Thousands of power outages were also reported in Puerto Rico. Tropical-storm-force wind gusts were also reported across the region, with Tortola seeing a wind gust of 65 mph. Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands reported a 51-mph wind gust. Ports had been closed and flights were canceled and delayed ahead of the arrival of impacts from Hurricane Erin over the weekend. Original article source: Hurricane Erin's life-threatening impacts prompt North Carolina evacuations, states of emergency View the full article

The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic young Democratic Party candidate for mayor of New York City, has been hard at work balancing his deep-dyed socialist beliefs with his need to show voters that he is at least a cousin to mainstream liberal Democrats. Last week, he confirmed that he had previously fielded a phone call from former President Barack Obama. With cameras rolling, Mamdani spent a day in early August in the political embrace of Elizabeth Warren, a progressive Democratic doyen. The Massachusetts senator talked passionately of challenging billionaires while Mamdani talked of his sympathy for police officers whom he described as overstretched and overworked. The same day, they sat on a park bench like old buddies, chatting and leaning in toward each other. Mamdani shed a possibly impromptu tear—after which he and Warren burst out laughing, in a moment that his campaign promptly retailed on Facebook and TikTok. Mamdani, 33, conveys that he is a man prepared to work with the organs of capitalist democracy to progressive ends and not to demand ideological litmus tests. But the Mamdani who takes great pride in his identity as a member of Democratic Socialists of America and who told Meet the Press in late June that “I don’t think we should have billionaires”—to the alarm of Wall Street donors—has hardly disappeared. By his own account, his political journey from state assemblyman to mayoral nominee owes almost entirely to his umbilical connection with DSA. A cache of podcast interviews and speeches over the past five years sheds light on his view of this evolution. Two years ago, in a speech at DSA’s national convention, he described how belonging to the organization helped him and a handful of fellow socialist assembly members survive in the cauldron of Albany. “We are special as DSA electeds not because of ourselves; we are special because of our organization,” he said. “It is far easier to corrupt an individual than a mass-movement organization.” He concluded, “So sincerity forever, solidarity forever, and socialism forever.” In past years, he has also argued that DSA must push for causes that make some supporters uncomfortable, such as the “end goal of seizing the means of production.” [Read: Zohran Mamdani’s lesson for the left] The practical meaning of that rhetoric—its old-school socialist flavor boarding on obscurantist—is difficult to parse, and not just because Mamdani is remaking his image in real time. The political left from which Mamdani emerges is a collection of disorderly tribes, sheltering self-styled revolutionaries alongside those who prize compromise and electoral victory, and those who want to sand the edges off capitalism alongside those who want to replace it altogether. Within DSA, that tendency toward sectarianism can produce a cacophonous and quarrelsome internal politics: Marx meets the Marx Brothers. Some members—likely a majority of the organization—seem intent on trying to change the Democratic Party from within, by supporting figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in primaries. Some speak of the group becoming a party of its own. Still others have formed Leninist cliques that yearn to transform DSA into a revolutionary vanguard. Earlier this month, a DSA-friendly Substack account cobbled together a reader’s guide to the organization’s clotted mass of caucuses. Among them is Red Star, a Marxist-Leninist outcropping whose unforgiving politics can be discerned from a recent post entitled “We Do Not Condemn Hamas, and Neither Should You.” My favorite DSA offshoot is the Caracol caucus, an eco-socialist degrowth group named for the Spanish word for snail. Those allied with Mamdani, and those who fear and oppose him, are alike in speculating how much socialism he might try to bring to New York. But the bigger question might be what kind of socialism he embraces. His challenge will be to draw on DSA’s organizing support while transcending its fractiousness and some members’ ideological excesses. DSA sprang to life in 1982 from the dying embers of earlier left-wing organizations. Its founders were committed to working within the Democratic Party. The group’s intellectual father was Michael Harrington, whose 1962 book The Other America: Poverty in the United States was credited with helping build support for Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society program. Harrington described DSA as occupying “the left wing of the possible.” That DSA refused for many years to work with Marxist-Leninists and Trotskyites, who were seen—for reasons grounded in decades of empirical observation—as authoritarian and disdainful of democracy. It attracted New York politicians such as former Mayor David Dinkins and had a membership of about 6,000. It remained bookish and locally respected and—for the first couple of decades after the end of the Cold War—more or less irrelevant. Then came 2016 and Bernie Sanders’s electric run for the Democratic presidential nomination. The Vermont senator is both avowedly a democratic socialist and temperamentally unsuited to behaving as any group’s obedient cadre. He never joined DSA (and long avoided joining the Democratic Party), but young people flocked to his banner—and to DSA’s. Two years later, a 28-year-old bartender and waitress vanquished a top House Democratic leader in a congressional primary. That insurgent, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was a preternatural political talent. She became the face of DSA and played a role in attracting tens of thousands more young people to join the organization, whose national membership stands at about 70,000. The New York City chapter has 10,000 members. Joshua Freeman, a retired historian at the City University of New York, joined DSA a few years ago, drawn by its sense of possibility. “The party is dominated by younger people, which is absolutely everyone except for about three of us,” he said. The 20-somethings gravitating to DSA in the past decade could be forgiven for viewing as ancient history the angry polemics and intellectual brawls that marked relations between 20th-century social democrats, Stalinists, and Trotskyites. [Read: Why older socialists are quitting the DSA] Yet significant divides have opened up within today’s group. “The problem is that while New York City DSA is pretty much in the ‘left wing of the possible’ tradition, the national party is not in that place,” Maurice Isserman, a historian at Hamilton College, told me. He was a DSA member for many decades before quitting when DSA equivocated about the brutal Hamas attacks of October 7. “Once the left sectarians are lodged in place, they become an immoveable force.” Militant groupings within DSA local chapters wield more power in cities such as San Francisco, Boston, Syracuse, and Portland, Oregon, than in New York. The Portland branch—four of whose members now sit on the city council—urges members to pursue a “rupture with the Democratic Party.” And its co-chair, Olivia Katbi, recently boasted on X of telling a New York Times reporter to bug off because that newspaper published “disgusting, racist, dehumanizing propaganda” about Palestinians. These militant caucuses wield considerable power on DSA’s national committee, which controls national endorsements. The militants hold candidates to exacting, even self-defeating, standards. In 2024 the national organization withdrew its endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez, the group’s best-known candidate. She apparently had paid insufficient attention to its Federal Socialists in Office Committee and, in a moment of apostasy, had co-signed a press release supporting stronger anti-missile systems to help Israel defend its civilian population. DSA’s New York City branch, by contrast, voted by a wide margin to endorse her. “We’re concerned at the increasing mismanagement and sectarianism in DSA’s national leadership,” a caucus prominent in the New York chapter said in a statement, “as some leaders attempt to steer the organization into powerlessness and isolation.” (Ocasio-Cortez survived the national DSA snub, besting her Republican opponent by 38 points.) Mamdani is more of a from-the-cradle socialist than Ocasio-Cortez. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a prominent theorist of settler colonialism at Columbia University; his mother, Mira Nair, is a well-known filmmaker—Monsoon Wedding, Mississippi Masala, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist—with left-wing politics. When invited to attend the progressive Haifa International Film Festival in Israel in 2013, she declined, tweeting that she would go there only when Israel ended the occupation and stopped “privileging one religion over another.” Zohran, who identifies as a Muslim, noted in August 2023 that Palestinian liberation is “at the core” of his politics and was the cause that drew him to DSA. DSA’s national political platform, rewritten when Mamdani was an assemblyman, is a gumbo of left-wing positions, many of which sit miles from the political mainstream. The organization would free all inmates from prisons and jails and decriminalize the drug trade, prostitution, and squatting in unoccupied homes. DSA endorses cutting police budgets “annually towards zero,” disarming cops, and decertifying their unions. [Maurice Isserman: The cause that turned idealists into authoritarian zealots] Mamdani has hauled some of this ideological baggage into the national spotlight. In December 2020, just after he was elected to the state assembly, Mamdani wrote of New York City’s police force: “There is no negotiating with an institution this wicked & corrupt. Defund it.” That view has not aged well. Mamdani of late has taken to energetically disavowing his former view, portraying it as an artifact from many years past, before he was an elected official. “I am not defunding the police. I am not running to defund the police,” Mamdani told reporters last month, after meeting in late July with the family of a police officer killed in a mass shooting. Mamdani said that he is a “candidate who is not fixed in time, one that learns and one that leads, and part of that means admitting as I have grown.” The political successes of Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and now Mamdani have done much to rehabilitate the term socialist and even give it a hip aura. Evidence that the term no longer carries a toxic sting can be heard on the right, as conservative commentators now use a harsher term to describe Mamdani: communist. His actual positions range from splendidly consumer-friendly promises such as free municipal buses and cheap groceries in city-owned supermarkets to universal day care for all children ages six weeks to 5 years. He promises to freeze apartment-building rents and to triple the city’s capital budget, creating 200,000 units of publicly subsidized housing. The price tag for this is $100 billion over 10 years. He has sidestepped the question of how he would pay for all this, however badly day care and housing are needed, other than to propose billions of dollars in new taxes, all of which are controlled by the state legislature and governor. [Michael Powell: The magic realism of Zohran Mamdani] As the Democratic nominee, Mamdani met recently with the Partnership for New York City, a chamber of commerce for finance, real-estate, and corporate leaders. Afterward, Kathryn S. Wylde, its longtime president, told me that although Mamdani “has no policy chops—none—he is smart, has a smile that will kill, and he will listen.” He has overhauled his communications and campaign team, importing distinctly non-cadre sorts from the Democratic mainstream. Mamdani seems aware that, however much he might still listen to his DSA comrades, he faces a larger reality: He could soon oversee some 300,000 employees in a city of 8.5 million people. Still, unease among wealthy New Yorkers is palpable. They are accustomed to winning and not inclined to bet on the chances that a smart left-wing candidate might moderate after being elected mayor. They would prefer to spend money and seek his defeat. Several years ago, Mamdani joked about this reflex: “It’s almost a ritual of the donor class to set their money on fire when it comes to running against DSA candidates.” Exhibit A is an email that an acquaintance forwarded to me in late July. Written by Ricky Sandler, the CEO of a global equity-management firm, the message predicted that a Mamdani victory would have “dire consequences.” It proposed a joint fund that would shower millions of dollars on a competing candidate. In his email, Sandler, who did not respond to my request for an interview, pledged to toss in $500,000, and he set the desired minimum counterrevolutionary donation at $25,000. Alas, the donor class’s other choices are not appetizing. They include formerly indicted Mayor Eric Adams, now running as an independent; former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, now running a sputtering independent campaign after Mamdani soundly defeated him in the Democratic primary; and Curtis Sliwa, a Republican best known for founding the anti-crime group Guardian Angels in the 1970s and more recently for sharing his apartment with 16 cats. Mamdani’s commanding lead in the polls offers him much room for political redefinition. His transition in the past five years—from obscure socialist state assembly candidate to a TikTok star who attracts Obama’s interest and sheds an artful tear with Warren—is remarkable. It is premature to say that he will wind up as just another left-liberal Democrat. He has been insistent throughout his brief political career on the centrality of his identity as a socialist. Without that, he told the DSA convention two years ago, “you will start to rationalize that which you initially rebelled against.” Socialists know, he told the convention, that “winning an election is not an end, but a means to an end.” The precise contours of his desired end remain, for now, something of a mystery. Article originally published at The Atlantic View the full article

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The video’s thumbnail looks like something ripped from the nightmare of an Onion editor: Benjamin Netanyahu—the leader at the center of one of the world’s deadliest conflicts—sits flanked by “The Nelk Boys.” But it’s real. The prime minister of Israel, one of the most sought-after interviews on the planet, gave an hour-plus exclusive to a pair of YouTube pranksters. The video’s opening line is perhaps its most honest: “We are so not qualified to do this,” Kyle Forgeard says to his co-host, Aaron “Steiny” Steinberg. They weren’t wrong. Over the course of the 73-minute video, Netanyahu grins his way through breezy questions about “bromances” with Trump and whether he prefers Burger King to McDonald’s. (It’s Burger King, which one of the hosts quipped was Netanyahu’s “worst take.”) And things got even worse as the trio delved into more serious topics. The prime minister repeated racist talking points about Palestinians raising children to kill Jews, repeated the trope that Israel is actually a “paragon of freedom,” and claimed the liberation of Palestinian women as central to his mission, suggesting they are essentially “cattle” in Gaza. Here’s what’s true: In March, a U.N. commission found that Israel has used sexual violence as a military strategy, including rape, forced nudity, and the destruction of fertility clinics, affecting over half a million women of reproductive age in Gaza. It’s the grim reality behind the very racist rhetoric about women being “cattle.” Since launching an invasion of Gaza following the Oct. 7 attacks in 2023, Israel’s military has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians—including 18,500 children and counting. Gazan civilians are now enduring a regime of deliberate starvation, which has been deemed an illegal weapon of war by multiple human rights groups, like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Netanyahu himself faces an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. All of this would have been worth raising during the interview, but the Nelk Boys pressed the prime minister on almost none of it. What Netanyahu got instead was an hourlong, humanizing PR spot that, as of this writing, has more than 2 million views. And yet, the absurdity of the setting is what made it effective. Netanyahu sipping espresso while bantering about junk food made it easier to disengage from the reality of what he’s accused of doing. That’s the danger of the influencer interview pipeline: It reduces life-and-death matters into fluffy, clickable content. Chill out. It’s a vibe, bro. It’s tempting to belabor how massively irresponsible it was for the Nelk Boys to let Netanyahu propagandize without pushback, particularly given the relationship between U.S. support for Israel and what actions the country takes. The disconnect between tone and stakes here is dizzying. U.N. surveys say 96 percent of children in Gaza believe they will die soon; nearly half say they want to. Toddlers are suicidal. It’s completely reasonable to be upset that the person responsible is asked to joke about hamburgers. But amid the many (rightful) condemnations is another story. Their failure to hold power to account isn’t so different from what we see in “serious” press. Both rely on the same underlying assumption that Netanyahu’s narrative deserves every benefit of every doubt, no matter how implausible, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The Nelk Boys made that difference look goofy. Traditional media makes it look credible. And as abominable as the Nelk Boys’ interview was, it was, perhaps, not even the month’s worst case of Netanyahu-related media malpractice. And it’s what happened after the Nelk Boys’ bit of disasterpiece theater that’s most interesting. Just weeks later, Netanyahu sat down with Fox News. The interviewer, Bill Hemmer, wore the look of professionalism, but the questions were hardly tougher. The interview was strikingly similar. It was another platform for Netanyahu to insist there is no starvation, that he should be believed over dozens of health care professionals and global aid institutions. Even Israeli genocide scholars and human rights organizations are condemning him and the Israeli military. If the Nelk Boys didn’t know any of this, fine. They said they didn’t. What’s Hemmer’s excuse? Ironically, the Nelk Boys’ Netanyahu move may have backfired. The Nelk Boys subscriber count shrank by more than 20,000. Comment sections turned against them. While Netanyahu sought to launder his image, he may have dragged theirs down with him. The goofy espresso gaffe makes it easier to tune out the gravity of what’s being said. But whether the audience is as credulous as both Netanyahu and the Nelk Boys seemed to believe is another question entirely. And here’s the part the media should actually learn from the Nelk Boys: They admitted their shortcomings, and they broadened their sourcing. They hosted a chaotic “debate” livestream with critics including Hasan Piker, Sneako, and—for reasons unknown—white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Then they gave an hour to Bassem Youssef, who scolded their “total lack of critical thinking” and bluntly told the pair of thirtysomethings to stop infantilizing themselves. Kyle Forgeard, chief Nelk Boy, looked genuinely embarrassed, calling the interview with Netanyahu a move they would “always regret,” adding they should have pressed him “100 times harder.” That willingness to listen and accept responsibility is a humility many of us in mainstream news could use. Too many outlets still default to assuming Israel has the moral high ground, while holding Palestinians to the standard of “perfect victims.” Coverage of this war matters because voters need reliable reporting to hold power to account. That’s why I got into this work. And moments like this are powerful reminders that it’s not access or high-profile interviews that make a story worthwhile, but the proliferation of verified facts. Reporting is best done on the ground, and the story of Gaza can be best told by the local journalists, who are both bearing witness and being directly targeted by Israel’s war effort. Since October 2023, at least 192 journalists and media workers have been killed, the deadliest period in the records of the Committee to Protect Journalists; the International Federation of Journalists puts the toll at 226. On Aug. 11, an Israeli airstrike targeted a journalists’ tent outside Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital, killing Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif and several colleagues. This makes the stakes plain. And you can’t expect Netanyahu to tell you any of that in a friendly sit-down interview. View the full article

The reminder story: As students return for a second week of classes, school districts across Florida are prompting parents to fill out all their forms. Florida’s emphasis on parental rights also has meant a raft of paperwork for families, as schools seek to protect themselves from taking actions that some parent might object to. Parents now face filling out permission slips for a variety of things including checking out library books, participating in clubs and attending after-school events. Opting out is becoming less an choice than opting in, as schools are moving away from considering the failure to return forms as passive consent. The reminder comes amid an ongoing discussion over a Brevard County teacher who lost her job after calling a student by the child’s preferred name without having permission from the parents. Read more from WFTV. Hot topicsTuition: Unlike other state universities, Florida A&M decided to delay any out-of-state tuition increases at least a year to give students time to prepare, WCTV reports. Student transportation: Some Manatee County parents are worried about the safety of their children walking to school along busy highways, Bay News 9 reports. Public comment: A federal court has revived a First Amendment lawsuit brought by a Manatee County pastor who said he was inappropriately kicked out of a 2019 school board meeting, Florida Phoenix reports. • The State Board of Education is poised to penalize Alachua County school board members over the way it dealt with comments at a recent board meeting, USA Today Florida Network reports. President searches: The University of West Florida has hired a search firm to look for its next permanent president, the Pensacola News-Journal reports. Former education commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. is serving as interim president. Pay raises: The Polk County school district introduced its referendum asking voters to approve a property tax increase in support of increased employee pay, Lakeland Now reports. Enrollment: Efforts to stem enrollment declines in Broward County schools have not shown early success, the Sun-Sentinel reports. Dress code: A Duval County mom says her daughter was prevented from attending her high school classes because the family could not afford the school’s mandatory uniforms, WJXT reports. From the police blotter ... A Clay County mom was arrested on allegations of putting a gun in her child’s school backpack, People reports. Don’t miss a story. Here’s a link to Friday’s roundup. Before you go ... Count Chocula, Franken Berry and Boo Berry as Henson puppets? Maybe it was just a matter of time. View the full article