Approximately 17,000 New York City homeowners were notified on July 22 that their properties may be subject to a new pied-à-terre tax, a surcharge on secondary residences valued at $5 million or more, should owners be unable to prove exemption by late August. (This deadline has since been extended to October 6.)
President Donald Trump holds up an image taken from his Truth Social account at a June event in the White House. Karoline Leavitt, the outgoing White House press secretary, has said that Trump’s posts represent official U.S. policy.
— AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson
Dear Friend of Press Freedom,
President Donald Trump appears determined to take out two birds with one stone: to help ICE assemble lists of non-citizens for mass deportations, and to weaponize the U.S. Postal Service in a campaign to suppress voting by mail.
The result is not merely administrative chaos. It is a coordinated attempt to sow confusion at the polls in November and to bend federal institutions toward partisan ends.
Last night, at exactly 9:25—9 to 5—the top of the Empire State Building in New York City lit up pink. The antennas of Chicago’s Willis Tower—formerly the Sears Tower—lit up pink, too. So did the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier, which also sported a giant pink heart. The Hoan Bridge in Milwaukee; Reunion Tower and other buildings in the Dallas skyline; and the Longfellow, Burns, Fore River, Braga, and Zakim bridges of Boston; Caesar’s Superdome in New Orleans; and, of course, Nashville’s KVB Bridge and historic Metro Courthouse were all lit up in pink last night.
Trump and the members of his administration are a disaster, but they aren’t the only ones. We are now seeing what happens when we elect Senators and Representatives whose entire allegiance is to their tribe and its leadership rather than the people they are elected to serve.
Leading up to the 2024 election, 4.7 million Americans were wiped off the voter rolls, a daylight robbery of democracy, an outcome not based on the will of the voters but on the cruel, racially poisoned trickery we politely call “vote suppression.”
Many people and families in the U.S. have had to return to their native countries, either voluntarily or due to deportation. . This resource was created to help people prepare so they can make the process as simple and safe as possible, whether they are returning to México, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, or Costa Rica.
Israeli soldiers and settlers have been besieging three Palestinian families in their homes in the village of Qusra in the occupied West Bank since August 9. Photo on August 14, 2026 by Issam Rimawi/Anadolu via Getty Images.
The Malecón seawall in Havana, Cuba. Photo: RenaatPeeters / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Yesterday at the White House, Trump held a photo op with a 16-year-old lifeguard, Ryder Williams, who’d pulled a drowning ten-year-old out of a dangerous surf in Santa Cruz. For any other president, it would have been a sweet, feel-good moment. Trump, though, turned it into something dark and most of our press either missed it or politely pretended to.
After giving the award, Trump looked at the blonde boy’s parents and said:
“You did a good job. It’s good genetics. When you look at him, you can see, really good.”
The Trump administration has begun arresting foreign citizens with expired U.S. visas as they travel through airports, including spouses of Americans, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with immigration lawyers — a tactic that opens up a vast new pool of people for deportation.
The Israeli military evicted on Thursday about a dozen settlers who had besieged two Palestinian families in their West Bank homes, but several hours later settlers returned.
The Palestinian families had been trapped in their homes since Sunday by Israeli settlers, who had erected a tent nearby and, residents said, attacked them, including with rocks.
On Thursday morning, Israeli soldiers dismantled structures set up in the area by the settlers, confiscated some equipment, detained one settler and dispersed the rest, according to a military statement.
US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) shares a laugh with 80-year-old Frankie Clark of North Carolina as she addresses a rally to reintroduce the Medicare for All Act on April 29, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators march through the Columbia University campus to mark one year of the war between Hamas and Israel in New York City on October 7, 2024. Photo by Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images
A group of current and former Palestinian students and faculty at Columbia University filed a lawsuit this week, alleging that the university discriminated against them because of their Palestinian identity and treated them less favorably than other students engaged in political advocacy.
If you’re unlucky enough to get Lyme disease, I hope you’re lucky enough to be diagnosed while that early window for effective treatment is still open. Once it closes, the path forward can be long, complicated, and painful.
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Any day now, Todd Blanche’s nomination to be our nation’s next attorney general — the top law enforcement official in the federal government — will be coming up for a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.
Blanche should not have made it this far. But two outgoing Republican senators on a key committee, John Cornyn (Texas) and Thom Tillis (North Carolina) — following some performative displays of integrity — caved in and voted to advance Blanche’s nomination to the full Senate.
Albanians, who endured a halfcentury of tyranny, are giving Americans a lesson in democracy. Hundreds of thousands of Albanians have been pouring into the streets
On Friday night, a court filing from Capital One denied there was any political motivation behind the closure of more than 380 bank accounts in the names of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization. Instead, it stated, the accounts were closed “for anti-money laundering reasons.” It said “transaction patterns” had triggered the review.
Robert Kagan, veteran warmonger extraordinaire, wants to know what the “utility” would be of admitting that the war on Iraq was “a mistake.” I’m glad he asked.
Sisters and brothers -
The bad news is that this country today faces more serious crises than at any time in our modern history. The good news is that progressives are making extraordinary and unprecedented political gains from one end of the country to the other.
Just before midnight last night, news broke that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had rescinded the order of May 18, 2026, establishing a $1.776 billion slush fund for those who claimed that the Department of Justice under former president Joe Biden had persecuted them. The fund was widely perceived to be a way to pay off those convicted of crimes related to their attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
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(Originally posted October 27, 2023 and reposted July 31, 2026)
