Syndicated columns

Donald Trump used to quip that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support. The same might be said of the royal palace in the Hague, where the U.S. president arrived to a hero’s welcome despite having relentlessly berated, humiliated and questioned the utility of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and European allies.

For decades, a succession of American presidents pledged that they were willing to use force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But it was President Donald Trump who, by bombing three of Iran’s key nuclear sites Sunday morning, was willing to demonstrate that those pledges were not hollow and that Tehran could not simply tunnel its way to a bomb because no country other than Israel dared confront it.

Nobody, perhaps even President Donald Trump himself, knows for sure whether the United States will wind up joining Israel in launching military strikes on Iran. “I may do it, I may not do it,” he said Wednesday. But with a third U.S. aircraft carrier on its way to the region and the president calling for Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” the chance of war seems higher than ever – particularly now that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has gruffly rebuffed Trump’s demand.

It has been easy to dismiss efforts to raise the prospects of the world’s poorest as an abject failure. The United Nations reported 712 million people living in extreme poverty in 2022, 23 million more than in 2019. The share of the world’s population suffering hunger rose from 7.9% to 9.2% over the period. And 2.1 billion people still cook with dung, wood, charcoal and the like.

It’s a strange irony that in recent years the nationalist right has gotten much better at international organizing than the ostensibly cosmopolitan left. The Conservative Political Action Conference went global during Donald Trump’s first term; it held gatherings in Israel, South Korea, Hungary and Argentina, among other countries. American conservatives have a growing pantheon of international leaders they take inspiration from, including Hungary’s Viktor Orban, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Argentina’s Javier Milei.

Anyone looking to drench themselves in the 1950s nostalgia currently favored by the religious right in America should consider watching “Leave It to Beaver” stoned. Which is what I did with an old friend in the 1980s while attending graduate school at the University of California-Berkeley.

In the largest eviction of a homeless encampment in recent history, around 100 unhoused people were recently forced to vacate Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest – or else face a $5,000 fine and up to one year in jail.

In June 2020, there was a vigorous debate among progressives about whether protests that turned violent would risk helping President Donald Trump win reelection. “Vigorous” is a euphemism here: What actually happened was that Democratic strategist David Shor was fired from a progressive data analytics firm after tweeting academic research suggesting that riots helped tip the 1968 election to Richard Nixon, because left-wing activists deemed that kind of analysis a form of aid and comfort to the enemy.

Since Donald Trump was elected again, I’ve feared one scenario above all others: that he’d call out the military against people protesting his mass deportations, putting America on the road to martial law. Even in my more outlandish imaginings, however, I thought that he’d need more of a pretext to put troops on the streets of an American city – against the wishes of its mayor and governor – than the relatively small protests that broke out in Los Angeles last week.

At the height of the juvenile flame war on Thursday between the world’s richest man and its most powerful one, Donald Trump posted a barely veiled threat on his website Truth Social. “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” he wrote. “I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”

In another attempt to concentrate power, President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to “restore gold standard science” in federal research and policy. It sounds reasonable given the instances of bad or faked science being published, including high-profile papers on Alzheimer’s drug development and one misleadingly claiming that hydroxychloroquine would cure COVID-19. In the last decade, scientists themselves have grown concerned about the large number of studies whose promising results couldn’t be replicated.

Today is the 81st anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of France that began the liberation of Western Europe. I always mark the date, but this is the first time I’ve been able to commemorate it so personally: Last week, I fulfilled a lifelong dream of hiking the Normandy beaches stormed by those unimaginably brave American, Canadian and British soldiers. Like most who visit, I’ve tried to imagine how they must have felt. Unlike most, I suspect, I also spent the walk thinking about weather forecasting.

Iowa Senator Joni Ernst lobbed a verbal grenade into her town hall last Saturday with one heedless, heartless comment.

We’re on the verge of what will probably be one of the hottest Northern Hemisphere summers in human history. In early May, the water in the English Channel was already so hot that octopuses invaded it, inspiring Bloomberg News’ Joe Wertz to dub this “hot octopus summer,” and not in a fun, Megan Thee Stallion way.

I cried the first time I saw the play “John Proctor Is the Villain,” set in a high school in small-town Georgia during the height of the #MeToo movement, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks. On social media, I saw other women reacting similarly, leaving performances in tears. This past weekend, I went a second time with a friend. As the houselights went up, she was crying, as was the woman in the row in front of us. They spontaneously hugged, which is something I’ve never seen before at a Broadway show. Outside the theater, two women were sobbing.

In 1957, the United States had its “Sputnik moment.”

Ada County is about to get its third major national-interest trial in a little more than two years. And while the county’s experience with the trials of Lori Vallow Daybell in 2023 and Chad Daybell in 2024 were valuable, the upcoming trial of Bryan Kohberger promises to be of even higher interest. And based on a recent media briefing call with District Judge James Cawthon, the Ada County ...