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.

PROTEST - Tuesday  8/18, 5-6 PM

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.

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.

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.

 (Originally posted October 27, 2023 and reposted July 31, 2026)

Uninsured patients and hospital closures are surging. This is what Trump’s healthcare cuts actually cost

Since October 2023 more than 20,000 children

were killed and over 44,000 injured.

Early on Sunday morning, Israelis set fire to two mosques in the West Bank, as well as agricultural land and property, according to Palestinian reports and footage, as settler violence continued to intensify in the wake of clashes that left two Israelis and four Palestinians dead on Friday. The IDF has since detained at least 27 Palestinians and two Israelis.

It turns out Trump has not abandoned his plan to paint the massive grey granite Eisenhower Executive Office Building white. As Philip Kennicott reported in the Washington Post yesterday, more than two dozen experts have sued to stop the plan, saying paint could irreversibly damage the stone and would be a “taxpayers’ nightmare” as the building would have to be repaired and repainted regularly.

Tony Romm and Brad Plumer of the New York Times reported this afternoon that the Trump administration’s claim last October that it was cutting programs in order to protect taxpayers against waste was, in fact, a lie. In court filings, federal officials admitted that the $7.5 billion in cuts from clean energy projects begun under former president Joe Biden were “based solely” on whether states had voted for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.