Teens who use social media two hours daily at higher risk of depressive symptoms, study finds
Teenagers who spend hours glued to social media are likely to experience poorer mental health and a decline in wellbeing, a decade-long study shows, with young girls most at risk.
Government urged to reconsider proposal for 1,100 Afghans, currently stranded in Qatar, who worked with US forces
Dozens of US lawmakers urged the Trump administration on Thursday to roll back any plans to ship to unsafe third countries Afghan nationals who worked with US forces during the war in their homeland.
In a letter seen by Reuters, more than 80 House of Representatives members, including at least three Republicans as well as Democrats, appealed to secretary of state, Marco Rubio, to reconsider plans for 1,100 Afghans who have been stranded in Qatar awaiting relocation.
Although not all of the relevant details are yet clear, according to U.S. Central Command, an Army AH-64 Apache helicopter crashed off the coast of Oman; the two crew members on board were rescued and are now in stable condition. Whether the incident was the result of a deliberate Iranian attack is the subject of some debate.
Trump offered additional insights on his perspective with a pop culture reference that he didn’t appear to fully understand. The Washington Post reported:
President Donald Trump on Tuesday night appeared to defend his latest military strikes on Iran by posting a short clip from “The West Wing,” the popular NBC television drama about a fictional U.S. president, in which the show’s characters debate their own military action.
In the video Trump promoted on his social media platform, he referred to an episode from the show’s first season in which Syria downed a U.S. military plane. The clip, which ran about a minute and a half, showed the fictional American president in the White House Situation Room, expressing his dissatisfaction with the idea of a “proportional response.”
Voicing support for a “disproportional response,” the fictional president declares, “Let the word ring forth from this time and this place, gentlemen — you kill an American, any American, we don’t come back with a proportional response. We come back with total disaster.”
This evidently resonated with Trump, who promoted the excerpt late Tuesday. What the incumbent president neglected to do, however, is to watch the rest of the episode.
In the show, the president eventually concedes his initial reaction was reckless and overly emotional, and that the kind of “disproportional response” he initially envisioned would lead to civilian casualties. Indeed, the whole point of the episode was that responsible global superpowers reject the very idea of a “disproportional response.”
Trump, in other words, got it backward.
It wasn’t the first time. Exactly one year ago, my MS NOW colleague Hayes Brown noted that Trump had touted “Les Misérables” while clearly missing the point of the production. A month earlier, the Republican tried to have a little fun with “Star Wars” day, but he inadvertently promoted an image that presented him as a villain.
These weren’t isolated incidents. In 2019, for example, the Republican White House tried to use “Game of Thrones” as part of a clumsy argument about the president’s border wall project, and the whole thing fell apart rather quickly. A year later, Trump talked about the Capt. William Bligh character from “Mutiny on the Bounty,” though it wasn’t altogether clear whether the president realized that Bligh is the villain of that story.
After his defeat in 2020, Trump talked obsessively about fictional character Hannibal Lecter, including a weird instance in which he referred to the infamous cannibal from “The Silence of the Lambs” as “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” and “a wonderful man.”
Maybe the president should just steer clear of making pop culture references? He’s clearly not good at it.
Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, has maintained a rather high profile lately. In late April, for example, he appeared on CNBC and celebrated Donald Trump’s “palpable” commitment to the First Amendment. A few weeks later, Clayton also made the case on CNBC that the defunct $1.766 billion compensation fund had merit because “they” tried to “destroy” the president.
As recently as Monday, as the White House pushed conspiracy theories about election results in California, Clayton again toed the party line on national television, arguing the public is “right to question” the vote tallies.
If that was an audition for a promotion, it was apparently a successful one. On Thursday afternoon, Trump announced by way of his social media platform:
I am pleased to announce the Nomination of very Highly Respected Jay Clayton, former Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the former Head of Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the most prominent and successful Law Firms anywhere in the World, and the current United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to be the next Director of National Intelligence and, importantly, to serve in my Cabinet. Few people anywhere in the Legal Community are respected at the level of Jay. I encourage the United States Senate to confirm Jay as soon as possible. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
If confirmed, Clayton would succeed outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard, whose resignation will take effect next week.
Clayton isn’t as outlandish a choice as Bill Pulte, whom the president recently tapped to serve as the acting DNI, but it would be an exaggeration to say his looming nomination is entirely uncontroversial.
In mid-November, Trump went even further than he usually does in directing the Justice Department to target his perceived political foes and critics, announcing that he wanted then-Attorney General Pam Bondi and federal law enforcement officials to investigate former President Bill Clinton and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, among others, over their alleged Jeffrey Epstein ties.
Four hours later, Bondi did as she was told, announcing via social media that she was tapping Clayton, who chaired the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term, to “take the lead” on the matter.
In other words, the president’s new choice to serve as the director of national intelligence — an office that Trump has freely admitted that he wants to weaponize for political purposes — has spent the last seven months investigating Trump’s opponents at the president’s insistence.
It’s the sort of thing that should give senators pause while weighing whether to confirm him.
What’s more, despite the statutory qualifications for the office, which require a DNI to have significant experience in intelligence, Clayton is a former Wall Street lawyer with no background in intelligence.
As for Pulte, it’s not yet entirely clear whether Trump sees him as the odd man out, or whether the White House still expects the highly controversial director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to serve as acting DNI until there’s a confirmation vote on Clayton. Watch this space.
Portugal’s ‘minister of the presidency’, António Leitão Amaro has acknowledged today that the government “may need to make concessions” to right-wing CHEGA in order to secure approval for legislation creating
The Kremlin called Canada a 'warmonger' nation for signing the joint production deal and vowed to respond, including by publishing the addresses of Canadian firms.
The Kremlin called Canada a 'warmonger' nation for signing the joint production deal and vowed to respond, including by publishing the addresses of Canadian firms.
"We are all here together, we are defending the state, we are the same and we have absolutely the same rights, regardless of any prejudices held by people from the 15th century," President Volodymyr Zelensky said, in a rare public reference to the topic.
As this week got underway, the public saw Donald Trump abruptly end his latest “Meet the Press” interview when NBC News’ Kristen Welker asked the president whether he had evidence to support his election conspiracy theories. “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid,” the Republican told the host instead of answering the question like an adult who wasn’t making stuff up.
Unprompted, Trump returned to the subject Wednesday at an unrelated White House event, telling reporters:
They rigged the election, the second election, as you probably heard and probably know, most of you know, that happened and now it’s been proven, and it will be proven as time goes by, even more so. We have things that you won’t believe. When we release the full files, you’re not going to believe how crooked the second, the 2020 election was.
He made the comments while surrounded by congressional Republican leaders, who simply nodded along.
Trump: "They rigged the election. Now it's been proven, and it will be proven even more as time goes by even more so. We have things that you won't believe. When we release the full files, you won't believe how crooked the 2020 election was."
There’s probably no point in rehashing what reality-based observers already know: The election wasn’t rigged; it isn’t “proven”; Trump and his team haven’t found “things”; there is no “they”; etc.
What I found notable about this, however, was the idea that there might still be people out there who are willing to believe that the president may yet uncover and release some evidence of a conspiracy that did not and does not exist.
Six months ago, for example, Trump sat down with Politico’s Dasha Burns, and when she brought up the president’s views on Russia’s war in Ukraine, his brain quickly shifted to what he described as the “rigged election.” Trump declared at the time, “It’s going to come out over the next couple of months too, loud and clear, because we have all the information.”
A couple of months came and went. The “information” never surfaced, because there is no such information.
For nearly six years, Trump and his team, like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown, have said the evidence to support the election conspiracy theories really is on the way. Any day now. Just you wait. It’ll be awesome.
My advice for those waiting for the president to follow through on his vow: Stop. He can’t produce that which does not exist.
Immediately after professing his “love” of inflation at a White House event, Donald Trump went on to tell reporters on Wednesday afternoon about an operation he’s been eager to disclose.
“You know, I can say it now, something you didn’t know,” the president said. “You know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil. Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran — until right now.” He said this operation involved 22 ships that traveled “with no lights” and went undetected because Iranians “don’t have any radar because we blasted the crap out of it.”
Trump added, by way of a statement published to his social media platform, that this was “a secret mission.”
Soon after, during a congressional hearing, Energy Secretary Chris Wright was asked if he knew what the president was talking about. The Cabinet secretary conceded he was “unaware” of the developments Trump described, and he assured lawmakers the president was merely “talking casually.”
That wasn’t much of an answer, and it left unresolved the obvious underlying questions: Had Trump disclosed an actual secret mission? Had he kept it from his own energy secretary?
As often happens with Mr. Trump, the truth was less dramatic. According to a senior U.S. military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the president was referring to an American effort to steer the passage of dozens of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz.
While the operation was surreptitious enough — the U.S.-guided vessels have been turning off their transponders to avoid detection when crossing the narrow waterway — it could hardly have been news to Iran. Late last month, The New York Times published an article about the effort, reporting that U.S. Central Command had shepherded around 70 commercial ships through the strait.
In other words, when the president said “nobody” knew of the operation, he apparently meant nobody except everyone who read the Times’ article that was published on May 31.
I had a professor in college who used to joke about politicians who “burst through open doors.” This comes to mind often when watching the current White House.
Indeed, it came up last week when Trump said it was a “big thing” that he and his team had persuaded Iranian officials to agree not to pursue a nuclear weapon. Except, as anyone who’s followed the issue has long understood, Iran has been saying this same thing for more than a half-century.
I can appreciate the broader political dynamic: Trump, struggling in the polls and short on successes, appears desperate to share some good news, especially about a war that hasn’t gone according to his expectations. But pointing to meaningless accomplishments and disclosing operations that have already been disclosed aren’t going to turn things around for him.
Control of the Senate in the next Congress might very well come down to the closely watched contest in Maine, where longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins is seeking a sixth term. On the surface, Democrats have reason for cautious optimism: Collins is New England’s only remaining GOP senator, and recent polling suggests many Mainers are ready for a change in a year that’s shaping up to be a rough one for the incumbent’s party.
But against that backdrop, Maine Democrats have decided to take a gamble on nominating oyster farmer Graham Platner, a Marine Corps combat veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The list of controversies from his background is not short: Platner has faced difficult questions about online comments downplaying sexual assault in the military, his since-removed tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol, allegations he sent sexually explicit texts to several women who were not his wife and, most recently, allegations from three ex-girlfriends about volatile personal behavior, some of which he’s denied.
Platner nevertheless easily won his party primary this week, and soon after, the National Republican Senatorial Committee circulated a memo warning donors and allies to take him seriously.
“The political fundamentals in Maine remain challenging, and it is a fatal mistake to assume Platner is too damaged to win,” the NRSC wrote. “He is currently leading.”
With this in mind, Donald Trump decided to weigh in on the race during an unrelated White House event on Wednesday afternoon, formally endorsing Collins and condemning her Democratic rival in stark terms. The president told reporters in the Oval Office:
I watched that thug that’s up in Maine. He’s a thug. … I mean, he’s worse than any human being that’s ever run for office, probably. I don’t know him. I don’t want to say bad, but I just, look, I mean, nobody’s ever had a record like that. […]
I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s a thug. I know thugs. I had to deal with thugs. I built a lot of buildings, I dealt with the toughest people on earth. I dealt with worse than thugs. This guy’s a thug. He’s a low-level thug. … he’s just an outright pig. He’s like a pig; I watched him a couple of times. He’s like a pig, that’s what he reminds me of. I come up with good names for people.
To be sure, it’s fair to say Platner is a controversial candidate who will have to prove himself over the next 21 weeks. Unlike most Democratic Senate candidates, the Mainer will have to make the case, not just for his vision and priorities, but that he’s overcome mistakes from his past.
But I’m not sure if Trump fully appreciates just how poor a messenger he is for his message.
After all, the president is a convicted felon who was under federal criminal indictment as recently as two years ago. Trump also ran a fraudulent charity, a fraudulent “university” and his business was found to have engaged in systemic fraud.
In the E. Jean Carroll civil case, a jury found him liable for sexual abuse, and Carroll is one of many women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. Relatedly, much of the public is probably familiar with the infamous “Access Hollywood” recording in which Trump said, in the context of his aggressive pursuit of women, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
This is just a small sampling of a record that includes countless examples of racism, in addition to remarks denigrating American military heroism. (He likes people “who weren’t captured,” for example.)
If Republicans want to make the case that Platner is a controversial candidate, there’s little point in denying the claim. But for Trump, of all people, to say the Mainer might be “worse than any human being that’s ever run for office” is a remarkable failure of self-awareness.
President Donald Trump’s penchant for characterizing pretty much any Black person who disagrees with him as “low IQ” hasn’t been called out enough as the nasty, unrepentant bigotry it is. Many Americans have come to tolerate all sorts of insults from Trump, but it’s important that we as a country condemn this racist filth, if only for the sake of Black children growing up during Trump’s presidency.
Trump expressed doubts about the intelligence of ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith after the commentator, a huge New York Knicks fan, correctly predicted that his team would lose Monday’s NBA Finals game at Madison Square Garden against the San Antonio Spurs if Trump showed up. After the game, a reporter, who mentioned that Smith has flirted with the idea of running for president in 2028, asked Trump about his comments. The president replied, “I think he’s a nice guy. You need a certain aptitude to run for president. You need a high IQ. I’m not sure that Stephen has that. I don’t think he does, actually.”
You need a certain aptitude to run for president. You need a high IQ. I’m not sure that Stephen has that.
President donald trump on ESPN’S stephen a. smith
Trump has called Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson “a low-IQ person.” In a May 1 social media post, he stacked up racist tropes when he wrote, “Low IQ Democrat Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, is nothing but a THUG, and he is a danger to our Country!” Speaking about Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, Trump said, “This is a low IQ person who I can’t even believe is a congressperson.” And Trump said then-Vice President Kamala Harris was so “low IQ” and “dumb” that she didn’t have the “mental capacity” to debate him.
One might think that New York Attorney General Letitia James prevailing against Trump in court in February 2024 was a sign of her intelligence, but Trump would later describe her as having a “big, nasty, and ugly mouth,” and as “a Low IQ individual.” Way back in 2018, he called Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., “an extraordinarily low IQ person.”
After Somali American Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Palestinian American Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., heckled Trump during his State of the Union address, he said, “Low IQ Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib … screamed uncontrollably last night at the very elegant State of the Union.” His inclusion of Tlaib is evidence that he has targeted people who aren’t Black with the “low IQ” insult. In October, after he took a cognitive test, he said of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., “AOC is low IQ” and said she should be made to take “the exams that I decided to take when I was at Walter Reed. Those are very hard.”
Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly and former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene are among the few white people Trump has called “low IQ,” but according to Mother Jones, which examined four years of posts on his social media site, Trump mostly uses “low IQ” for “Black public figures and legislators.” His occasional use of the insult for a white person does not diminish the racism he’s employing the rest of the time.
After all, in one of his many vicious rants about Somalis in the United States, Trump said, “They come to our country — low IQs — and they rob us blind. Stupid people, and they rob us blind.” In a 2024 interview with Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump Jr. referred to Haitians as having low IQs and then added, “It’s not racist. It’s just fact.”
Here’s a fact: Racism has long been baked into the design and interpretation of IQ tests. In “The Eugenic Origins of IQ Testing,” a 2008 article in the DePaul Law Review, Ajitha Reddy notes that many people who favor such tests wrongfully assume that:
1) intelligence is static; (2) it can be precisely measured; (3) it is possible to design a testing instrument capable of peeling back layers of political and socioeconomic shrouding to reveal a true essence of intelligence; (4) this essential intelligence can be expressed with a single number or with several numbers; and (5) the purpose of unmasking this essential intelligence is to allow society to identify and promote the best and brightest among us.
The truth is that no such test exists.
In what she correctly terms “our fake meritocracy,” Reddy notes that “intelligence tests serve only as predictive measures of achievement (aptitude for success within the status quo) or as measures of oppression and social disadvantage.”
It’s an offense to suggest that an intelligence test can determine the worth of a person or that it should have a role in whether certain nationalities can enter the United States. But setting aside that, and the biases inherent in the tests, there’s no reason to believe any of the Black people Trump has labeled “low IQ” would perform poorly on an IQ test, and there’s no reason to believe Trump would outperform any of them on such a test.
But it’s a losing game to even try to prove a racist stereotype — if only because it suggests that the person expressing that stereotype deserves a response. Besides, what one of Trump’s Black critics would actually score on a test has never been Trump’s point. He seeks only to promote the slander that Black people are less than fully human.
Trump’s “low IQ” insult shouldn’t be labeled crass or impolite or rude, and it shouldn’t be laughingly dismissed as Trump being Trump. It should be labeled as hateful and racist. And every journalist who reports that Trump has disparaged yet another Black person’s intelligence needs to refuse to hide behind more innocuous words like “insults.” Call it racism. Because that’s what it is.
A considerable number of political scientists, when assessing the current state of international affairs, come to the conclusion that the most striking manifestation of the new global balance of power is the decline of Western civilization, the rapid rise of China, and the marginalisation of Western Europe. Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer noted in […]
Respect Henry Nowak's family’s wishes and don’t exploit his death, intoned Starmer. But when murdered Rhiannon Whyte's mother demanded an end to illegal immigration, Starmer didn't want to know, says Steven Tucker.
But don’t forget about his interest in a massive “triumphal” arch just across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial, in front of Arlington National Cemetery. The Washington Post reported:
Federal officials are laying more groundwork to begin construction on President Donald Trump’s planned 250-foot-tall triumphal arch, sharing additional documents that detail the project’s scope and an aggressive timetable for potentially completing work before Trump’s term ends.
According to National Park Service documents posted this month, the administration envisions 20 hours per day of construction on the arch, year-round, in hopes of completing the project within two to three years. Construction experts said that timeline — which would involve two 10-hour daily shifts — is aggressive for a nonemergency project.
To be sure, the controversy surrounding the arch was already messy. For one thing, there’s an ongoing lawsuit that may very well succeed. For another, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum recently told Congress that the project is only at the “discussion” stage, and when evidence to the contrary emerged, Rep. Jared Huffman of California, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, argued that the Cabinet secretary came “pretty damn close” to committing perjury.
In case that weren’t quite enough, the Washington Post reported last month that the administration was moving forward with plans to start work on the arch “by piggybacking on an existing, unrelated contract for engineering services” a mile away, which in turn would “allow the administration to bypass a potentially lengthy public bidding process.”
As a rule, when a White House has to rely on subterfuge to advance its ambitions, it’s a bad sign.
At this point, common sense might suggest that Congress would intervene, but the White House has already made clear that it intends to circumvent lawmakers. Trump was quite explicit on this point a few weeks ago, declaring at an Oval Office event, “We don’t need Congress to sign off on it. We’re doing it.”
But now that the details of the administration’s plan are coming into focus, the controversy has taken an even more farcical turn. Indeed, Trump and his team don’t just want an arch; they want it to be built at extraordinary speed, as if there were some kind of emergency need for the project. (There is not.)
The Post’s report added, “The arch also would be built with concrete clad in granite, unlike the nearby Lincoln Memorial and other monuments that were constructed with natural stone like marble and limestone — another way to expedite its construction, experts said.”
Maybe the president wants to see the arch in place before the end of his second term for ego purposes; maybe he’s worried that if he doesn’t rush, his successor might pull the plug on the boondoggle. Either way, the fast-track process is tough to defend.
Looking ahead, however, there’s another element to this that’s worth keeping in mind: safety.
Those familiar with the geography of the nation’s capital might realize that there’s a large airport in Arlington, just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., and that the flight path for many arrivals takes airplanes above where the proposed arch would sit.
With this in mind, the Post went on to report, “The Park Service said the project would require large cranes, including one that may be 320 feet tall and another that could be as high as 300 feet. The planned site for the arch is on a flight path to nearby Reagan National Airport, where planes can sometimes fly at around 500 feet of altitude, raising concerns about safety.”
Congressional Democrats have made no effort to hide their efforts to block the project, and if Republicans lose control of Congress in the midterm elections, this would likely be one of many points of contention next year. Watch this space.
Headed into this week, analysts expected to see another surge in inflation, and on Wednesday morning, those projections proved true: The consumer price index climbed to its highest level since April 2023, and inflation continued to outpace wage growth, exacerbating the affordability crisis.
The data left the White House not only with a policy challenge but also with a political one. How would Donald Trump and his team try again to convince the American public that the unpopular and unnecessary war in Iran is worth the economic sacrifice?
As it turned out, the president decided not to even make the effort. Instead, when asked for his reaction to the latest discouraging news, the Republican said the latest inflation data was “great,” adding, “I love the inflation.”
Reporter: Are you concerned, Mr. President, about the latest inflation number which came out this morning?Trump: No, I love it. I love the inflation.
He later told The New York Post about the point he was trying to convey. “The numbers are going to be phenomenal because what’s showing is that despite the fact that we’re in a war, the numbers are much lower than anticipated, and when we’re out of that war, the numbers will be at lower numbers than they were even before it started,” the president said.
There were substantive problems with the defense — there’s no evidence to suggest that the “anticipated” inflation hike was even worse than the status quo, for example — coupled with the fact that Trump noticeably failed to provide this context when he was talking to the White House press corps, on the record and on camera. (The number of people who will see the “I love the inflation” clip will far outnumber those who see the New York Post’s article.)
But just as notable is the recent history. In fact, it was only four weeks ago when a reporter asked Trump, “When you’re negotiating with Iran, Mr. President, to what extent are American financial situations motivating you to make a deal?”
Without hesitating, the president replied, “Not even a little bit.” The Republican added that, as part of his focus on preventing Iran from having nuclear weapons, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”
It was a brutal quote, not only because of its callousness, but also because Trump has spent so much time proving the underlying point true. As my MS NOW colleague Zeeshan Aleem added, “The truth, in this case, is that Trump obviously doesn’t care about ordinary Americans’ financial well-being. It’s sticky not just because he said it, but because he has long been acting like it.”
Nearly a month later, all of this has returned to the fore, not just because of the data, which paints an ugly picture, and not just because of the administration’s misguided policies, which are directly responsible for making the cost of living worse, but also because of the frequency with which the president expresses his public indifference.
The latest Economist/YouGov poll found that just 29% of the public approve of his handling of the economy — 10 points lower than Joe Biden’s worst poll on the same issue. With the midterm elections just 21 weeks away, it’s a number that will likely generate understandable panic among Republican officials and candidates.
But it’s not the only survey of interest. A recent Fox News poll asked respondents, “Do you think Donald Trump cares about people like you, or not?” Only 37% of Americans said they believe the president does in fact care about people like them.
There’s no reason to assume that number can’t sink lower.
With some matches being held in nearby Miami, a Cuban response to US military action could mar the tournament
As Cuba crumbles under a nearly five-month-long US oil blockade, many on the island hope that the World Cup might save the island from US attack – or at least offer a respite until the competition ends on 19 July.
“The beginning of the World Cup will make it more difficult for the United States to carry out a military action in Cuba,” said Carlos Alzugaray, Cuba’s former ambassador to the EU. “Cuba is very close to the US, and can hit many targets inside the US, especially in south Florida, with drones or other weapons.”
Recent tensions between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have fueled speculation about a growing divide in U.S.-Israel relations. However, a closer examination suggests that these disagreements are shaped more by domestic political calculations, electoral considerations, and regional dynamics than by any fundamental strategic rupture. “You are crazy. What the hell are you doing?” This is […]
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