Weather

 AP - A dangerous heat wave will bring record-breaking temperatures to parts of the Western U.S. this weekend, prompting warnings for people to stay inside and heightening wildfire risks in areas that already are dry or burning.

A ridge of high pressure is holding heat close to the ground — what’s known as a heat dome — from Arizona to Montana, though the good news is that it will be relatively short-lived, National Weather Service meteorologists said.

The National Weather Service on Saturday forecast a high of 115 degrees Fahrenheit (46 degrees Celsius) in Las Vegas, the hottest temperature of the year. Phoenix is expected to reach 116F (47C), while El Centro, California, was expected to hit a record 118F (48C). Even parts of Montana were expected to broil, with a record 104F (40C) forecast for Great Falls.

In Las Vegas, Saturday's forecast high was 10 degrees above normal, with meteorologists warning of dangerous heat through Sunday, when the high is expected to be 114, said weather service meteorologist Morgan Stessman.

Overnight lows in the upper 80s to low 90s will make the situation especially dangerous because it doesn't allow people’s bodies to recover. “There's just no relief overnight,” Stessman said.

.The August record for Las Vegas is 116F (47C), while the hottest on record was 120F (49C) in July 2024, which also was the hottest summer on record, Stessman said.

                Via Annie

Religion

Press Herald -  A recent ruling by a federal appeals court on a case involving religious institutions mostly upheld Maine’s anti-discrimination law, but said one rule about religious expression cannot be enforced.

Maine must no longer enforce a part of its anti-discrimination law that requires religious institutions that accept public school tuition funds to allow all forms of religious expression, a federal judge said this week.

It was the only part of the state’s Human Rights Act that a federal appeals court found to be an issue. The court recently issued a decision on a challenge to the law by two private religious schools. On all other components challenged by the schools, the judges found Maine’s law to be sound.

Maine had long excluded religious schools from its policy that allows public money to be used for private school tuition if students have no local public school options.

But in 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down that ban, and the state Legislature amended the Human Rights Act to require all schools receiving public money to follow certain nondiscriminatory hiring and admission practices. That included allowing students to express gender identities different from those assigned at birth, and permitting them to practice a different religion than the school’s.

Money

NPR - More than half a million Americans filed for bankruptcy last year, a nearly 50% increase over the past three years. While filings remain below pre-pandemic levels, rising debt and higher living costs appear to be catching up with many households. 

Health

Nautilus -  The rate of high blood pressure among women who gave birth shot up 73 percent between 2016 and 2024, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control. In fact, more than 1 in 10 women who gave birth in 2024 were plagued with some form of hypertension (including preeclampsia), up from a little over 6 percent in 2016.

Even more alarming, the incidence of hypertension increased in every state and for women of every age, race, and weight. And because the report drew on data collected at birth, and not prior medical tests, the issue may be even more widespread than documented by the CDC.

According to the report, American Indian and Alaska Native mothers suffered the highest rates of hypertension, but even Asian women, who had the lowest rates, saw their risk double in the eight years studied. The incidence of high blood pressure was lowest for mothers younger than age 20 and those aged 30 to 34 and highest for mothers 40 and older. The rates of high blood pressure also increased along with body mass index, with heavier women showing a greater risk, but hypertension also went up among underweight mothers during the eight-year period.    

The Hill - The end of a subsidy program that helped keep costs down for Medicare drug coverage could leave millions of seniors with higher monthly costs, a move that undermines the Trump administration’s message of cutting drug costs. 

President Trump often touts his push for access to cheaper drugs through the TrumpRx platform and making “most-favored-nation” deals with drug companies.  But healthcare advocacy and policy organizations have said the end of the subsidy program will raise premium costs and put a burden on seniors at a time when costs are already high.

“President Trump has had a lot of strong rhetoric on drug prices and negotiating deals with manufacturers to lower prices, and they’ve taken a lot of different steps to try to bring drug prices down,” Juliette Cubanski, vice president and director of the Program on Medicare Policy at KFF, told The Hill.

“But it’s also true that this move to end these extra premium subsidies for some Medicare drug plans cuts in the other direction because it could translate to higher premium costs for millions of people with Medicare,” she said.

The destruction of the American Dream: Some stats

Hartmann Report -   The destruction of the American Dream isn’t just an abstraction; it’s measurable. In 1980 when Reagan was elected president, at the peak of the American Dream, fully two-thirds of American families were in the middle class. A single income could support a family, buy a house, take an annual vacation, send the kids to college, and even retire with dignity.

Today, only 43 to 47 percent of Americans qualify as middle class (depending on whose numbers and what criteria you use). And it takes two full-time incomes today to achieve what a single union job gave a family in 1980.

Consider wages. If wages had kept pace with productivity since 1980, the median American individual worker’s income would be over $100,000 today. Instead, it’s around $50,000. With help from the Reagan Revolution, that missing $50,000 has largely gone into corporate profits and executive compensation: in other words, into the money bins of the nation’s oligarchs.

Then there’s housing. In 1980, the median home price was about $47,000, roughly three times the median (single-worker) household income. Today, the median home price exceeds $400,000, while median household (two-worker) income is around $75,000. That’s more than five times the household income, and in many cities it’s ten times or more. People who could have bought a home in their twenties, like Louise and I did in the 1970s, now struggle to do so even in their forties.

The same is true of education. When I attended college in the late 1960s, I paid my tuition working part-time jobs. My mom paid her way through four years at Michigan State in the 1940s working summers as a lifeguard and propping airplanes. Today’s post–Citizens United students graduate with an average of $30,000 in debt, and total American student loan debt exceeds $1.7 trillion. We’re the only developed country in the world where this is true, and an entire generation is now starting life in a financial hole that previous generations never faced.

Or consider healthcare. In 1980, healthcare costs were 8.9 percent of GDP, and most hospitals and health insurance companies were required by state law to be nonprofits. Today, healthcare costs are nearly 20 percent of GDP, and half a million American families declare bankruptcy every year just because someone got sick. Medical bankruptcy like this doesn’t exist in any other developed country in the world. Only in America.

And then there are the under-siege unions. In 1980, about a third of American workers belonged to unions, so those union contracts established the wage floor for another third of American non-union workers. Today, after forty-five years of Reaganomics’ relentless assault grounded in corporate constitutional rights, union membership has collapsed to around 10 percent. When workers can’t organize, they can’t bargain for fair wages, so corporate profits and billionaire wealth soar while workers struggle

Kennedy Center stops free public tours

NY Times -  The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is stopping free public tours of the center, which had been a mainstay of the cultural institution for more than five decades, according to an internal memo.  In a memo viewed by the The New York Times, Brooks Boeke, the director of the volunteer program, said the center was putting a “temporary pause” on the tour program, effective Friday. Volunteers serve in a variety of roles at the Kennedy Center, but only tour guides were mentioned, instructed to stop reporting for duty “until further notice.”

The memo did not provide a reason for halting the tour program; it has operated continuously since the center’s opening in 1971, except for a one-year hiatus during the Covid-19 pandemic.  The ending of the tours comes after a volunteer tour guide was featured in a New York Times article detailing President Trump’s gutting of the iconic cultural institution. Before the memo was circulated on Thursday, three volunteers had expressed worries to a reporter that the Kennedy Center would target the tour program in retribution.

Middle East

The Hill - President Trump late Saturday said he was halting an attack plan against Iran and pointed to the outline of a deal being reached as the reason why.

“The U.S.A. is locked and loaded and ready to go against the Islamic Republic of Iran, at levels of Military Terror, Strength, and Power not seen since World War II. Despite this, we have just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any attack in that the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Trump added that the deal “would include the Immediate, Complete, and Total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT, and an end to Iran’s nuclear threat.”

“Based on this request, I have agreed, for the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran, to cancel the attack, subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL,” he added.  American officials had told several outlets on Friday that the U.S. was reportedly planning to restart strikes targeting Iran as soon as this weekend.

Middle East

Toys for Trump

Daily Beast - The White House ballroom. The Triumphal Arch. The relined Reflecting Pool. The new 747. Together, they cost a small fraction of just one of the “Golden Fleet” of battleships that President Trump has ordered in a multibillion-dollar scandal that gets less notice than the gilded cherubs in the Oval Office. Their name: The Trump Class.

The first Trump-Class battleship is expected to cost $17.5 billion, with the next two coming in at $14.5 billion each, a total of $36.5 billion for three. A Naval warship expert describes them as hugely expensive, easily targeted behemoths that drain funding for small, more effective alternatives that the U.S. Navy actually needs.

Federal government wants to cut water use in three states

The Hill - The federal government is proposing potentially steep cuts to water used by California, Arizona and Nevada, a major step toward figuring out the management of the dwindling Colorado River.  The river provides water to states throughout the West, including drinking water and water for agricultural, industrial and municipal uses.

As the West becomes drier, figuring out how to manage the shrinking resource has been a challenge.  A final environmental impact statement released Friday by the federal government cuts to California, Arizona and Nevada, collectively known as the Lower Basin states of the Colorado River, of up to 3 million acre-feet per year.

That could be dramatically deeper than the 1.6 million acre-feet per year that the lower basin states themselves have proposed for the next two years.

Arizona’s Department of Water Resources said in a statement that a cut of 3 million acre feet per year “would devastate Arizona’s water users and its economy.”

However, the federal government has yet to release anticipated specific plans for managing the river over the next two years.

The Washington Post reported Friday that the forthcoming two-year plan is more in line with the cuts proposed by the states for the next two years.

Economy

Greg Gerritt  -  In the first quarter of 2026 the economic growth rate was 2.1%, which is not that far off of the long term trend, in which the US has averaged something like 2.3 or 2.4% economic growth per year for the last 40 years. Admittedly the guy who invented Gross Domestic Product thought it was a really lousy way to measure the economy, but it is what we use, so it is worth noting. Growth in the second quarter was 1.5%, mostly due to the stupidity of the Trump administration in starting a war that has no plan and resulted in a major disruption of global energy markets and rising inflation. The data from the BEA is adjusted for inflation, but even so, rising prices caused consumer spending to slow.

Unemployment rates are barely changed for the last year, the rate nationally is about 4.3%, which is pretty close to the long term average, though when the rate is lower it is much easier to find a job so a lot of us prefer to see a rate closer to 3%. But the interesting thing is that overall employment has barely moved, even in places in which the unemployment rate is down. I have not done any kind of statistical analysis, just eyeballed the raw data which is presented as total employment in each state comparing the last two months, and the same months last year, the total number of people employed in those same months, and the unemployment rates in the same months.

Polls

Pew Research Ctr - Far more Americans support than oppose in-class cellphone bans for middle and high school students (77% vs. 18%). And for the first time in our surveys, more people now support than oppose banning cellphones during the entire school day (48% vs. 43%).

Just over half of Americans (53%) have an unfavorable opinion of the Supreme Court, while 45% have a favorable opinion. While Democrats largely describe the court’s ideology as conservative, Republicans tend to see it as “middle of the road.”

Climate change

Study Finds - Summer heat is more than a seasonal discomfort. A new study suggests it may be aging people from the inside out, faster than the calendar ever could. Researchers found that exposure to extreme heat events was linked to accelerated biological aging in middle-aged and older adults. Under the study’s strictest heatwave definition, each additional heatwave event was associated with pushing the body’s internal clock forward by roughly half a year, though the size of that effect varied considerably depending on how heatwaves were defined, and was weaker or statistically insignificant under looser definitions. As heatwaves grow more frequent and more intense worldwide, that finding carries serious consequences for public health.

The Guardian -   A senior policymaker at the European Central Bank has said the climate emergency and the breakdown of nature poses a dramatically growing risk to the global economy.  Frank Elderson, a member of the ECB’s executive board, said the eurozone lender of last resort was stepping up its monitoring of the financial risks linked to the destruction of “ecosystem services”, which are nature-related processes or assets that support human activity.

ICE

NBC News - ICE plans to sign contracts for new detention facilities in its Seattle, Philadelphia, Miami and Denver jurisdictions that together would have the capacity to hold 5,500 detainees, according to a public solicitation document. It is the latest sign of the agency’s push to boost immigration arrests, even as two fatal shootings by ICE officers in recent weeks have drawn scrutiny across the country.

Health

NBC News -   Starting Wednesday, terminally ill patients in New York will gain the legal right to end their lives. Under a new law allowing medically assisted death, patients who a doctor says have less than six months to live will be able to take a lethal prescription medication that puts them to sleep, then ultimately stops their heart.

A  group of medical professionals has been readying for the change. Some patients, meanwhile, say the law brings relief. “I can have some assurance that if the suffering is too much to bear, that I have a peaceful option. And that peace of mind is invaluable,” said one breast cancer patient.

Scope of Hacks on U.S. Water Supply Widens

NY Times - The scope of cyberattacks on U.S. water systems has grown to include at least seven states and may be far wider, officials and experts warned, as the authorities raced to safeguard the nation’s water supply against an assault that increasingly appeared to be the work of Iran.

While there were no indications that any water supply had been altered or made unsafe to drink, state and local officials throughout the country were on high alert for potential problems in vulnerable computers that are commonly used to monitor and adjust water quality, including chemical-treatment levels and water pressure. Minnesota first publicly reported the attacks, and now Michigan says its systems have also been targeted.

The attack has little precedent, experts said, but has long been the stuff of nightmares and sensationalized Hollywood thrillers: an apparent cyberattack by a foreign power during a time of war that could, at least in theory, jeopardize the health and safety of Americans.

Officials cautioned that they had not definitively determined that Iran was responsible for the attack and that the investigation was still preliminary. But they said Iran had stepped up cyberattacks since the U.S. and Israel launched a war against the country five months ago, and had previously targeted similar water systems and other critical infrastructure in the U.S. There seemed no financial motive, making a criminal attack less likely.

Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool

In a court filing, former Fox News host-turned-U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro asked a judge to dismiss the federal indictment against U.S. Olympic canoeist David Hearn, who had been arrested and publicly accused by Pirro of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Pirro acknowledged that investigators had concluded the damage wasn't caused by Hearn after all, but by a "flawed installation" of the pool's newly installed liner.

The filing also contained a remarkable bit of finger-pointing: Pirro blamed the Trump administration's own Interior Department for withholding information that could have prevented the prosecution from moving forward. She wrote that officials at the Doug Bergum-led agency failed to disclose that the pool's liner had been improperly installed, despite "dozens and dozens" of requests from prosecutors. "Had [the Interior Department] been forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession, the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment," Pirro acknowledged.

The Hill -President Trump called out U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro on Saturday for agreeing to dismiss the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool vandalism case against former Olympian David Hearn.

The Justice Department moved to drop the case on Friday, finding that the damage to the tidal basin resulted from a “rushed and botched installation,” not alleged vandalism. Trump a day later distanced himself from that decision.

“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM, that included the grass, which had a big 86 47 emblazoned in giant letters on it, and other elements of the surrounding area.”

Politics

Prime Chronicle - California’s voter ID initiative, Proposition 39, would add ID and citizenship checks to state elections. Top Democratic leaders are organizing a major campaign to defeat the measure and protect broad ballot access. Attorney General Rob Bonta changed the official ballot wording, triggering accusations that Democrats are trying to mislead voters.  Supporters say the fight shows how political insiders can tilt the playing field even after citizens qualify a measure.

Gavin Newsom - $100,000,000.  That is the amount of money Elon Musk plans to spend in order to help Republicans win in the midterm elections this November. That includes Michigan - where control of the House and Senate runs through Michigan — with what will be some of the closest and most expensive campaigns in the country.

Bloomberg - Michigan’s Senate primary on Aug. 4 is shaping up as the biggest test yet of whether the Democrats’ progressive wing can score a major victory in a presidential battleground heading into 2028, or whether longstanding weakness with Black voters will undercut its national ambitions. The contest pits Representative Haley Stevens, a moderate backed by much of the party establishment, against progressive Abdul El-Sayed, a former Detroit-area health official endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A swing state won twice by Donald Trump but carried by Joe Biden in 2020, Michigan is a must-win for Democrats hoping to retake the Senate in November

Auto workers stop support of Isra

In These Times - At the 39th Constitutional Convention of the United Auto Workers (UAW) in Detroit, Michigan, union delegates voted to divest the union from Israel bonds, which provide financial support to Israel’s government. Working People’s Maximillian Alvarez recently sat down with a panel of rank-and-file workers and members of Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), a left-wing caucus within the UAW, to discuss the historic vote and the broader trajectory of the UAW.t.com/

It's not just Trump; it's our obsession with personalities

Sam Smith – Most of the important and positive national legislation of the past century was the product of the Democratic Party. In part because politics has become, in the eyes of voters and reporters, the action of individuals rather than institutions. Donald Trump has been a prime beneficiary of this change even though he can’t even run for president in the next election and despite the fact that he has  been charged with an unprecedented number of serious offenses.

Television is a major participant in this shift from policies to personalities and as  result, for example, we find serious matters such as the cost of food and driving getting only a fraction of the attention they deserve. And decades of great liberal legislation is treated with near total indifference.

It’s time to revive the Democratic Party and its record as well as targeting not just Trump but the Republican Party that constantly bows to leaders like him.  Our problem is not just individuals but whole organizations and movements.

Workers

Robert Reich - This month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the labor participation rate — the percentage of people of working age who are working or actively looking for work — is now down to 61.5 percent. That’s 0.6 percentage points lower than it was at the first of the year.  In other words, the U.S. economy has lost 1 million workers since January.

Return of McCarthyism

The Guardian - There are many parallels between the first McCarthy era, roughly 1946 to 1956, and Trump’s campaign of political repression, his own updated McCarthyism.

Both regimes crafted a monster of quasi-facts and innuendo and fed it with fear: an enemy within, well-organized and financed, secretive and violent, allied with evil foreigners and bent on overthrowing capitalism, democracy and Christian morality. Both used flagrantly unconstitutional means to cleanse the nation of the spectral menace.

Each time, federal employees were targeted first. President Harry S Truman’s Federal Loyalty Program screened 5 million workers for communist affiliation; 2,700 lost their jobs, 12,000 resigned. Schools, unions and Hollywood fell in line; blacklists outlasted their makers. The Trump administration purged the federal agencies of his equivalent of the cold war communist, the “woke”. Applicants for civil service jobs were asked to identify their favorite administration policies and explain how they would advance them if hired. The federal employees’ union correctly called this request a “loyalty question”.

Then as now, law firms quailed, media companies capitulated, universities collaborated. Artists and performers – Zero Mostel, Jimmy Kimmel – were exiled from film and television. In the 1940s and 50s, the attorney general compiled lists of supposedly subversive organizations, which, along with communists and socialists, included groups from the National Negro League to the Nature Friends of America. Trump’s justice department is investigating progressive non-profits, including ActBlue, a chief funding source for Democratic candidates, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Open Society Foundations, funded by George Soros, best known for supporting democracy movements in the former Soviet Union.

Climate change

Climate change and its effects are possibly the most important story of our time

The Guardian - Global heating made hot, dry and windy weather at least 20 times more likely in Spain and twice as likely in France, experts from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium calculated. The finding is the latest to pin the blame for the continent’s sweltering and deadly summer firmly on the heating caused by the burning of oil, gas and coal.

The intense heatwave at the end of June, which is estimated to have killed 20,000 people, could not have happened without the extra heat trapped by carbon pollution, a previous WWA study showed. Another found that the climate crisis-driven heat was “sucking soils dry” as extreme drought spread across Europe…

This year’s wildfires in western Europe have been made worse by a wet winter and spring, which boosted the growth of vegetation, which then dried out and provided fuel for the fires – so-called whiplash conditions. Global heating is making winters wetter and summers drier and hotter in Europe.

Dr Clair Barnes, a research associate at Imperial College London and part of the WWA study team, said: “We’ve seen repeatedly how climate change increases hot, dry, flammable conditions that are extremely conducive to wildfires.

“What’s unique about [the July fires in Spain and France] is that it’s still early in the season – and with another heatwave looming, these findings are extremely scary. What we’re seeing is a clear sign of the escalating impacts of [human-caused] warming.”….

The wildfires have released huge plumes of toxic smoke. Dr Augustin Colette, at the French National Institute for Industrial Environment and Risks, said: “The smoke increased particulate [pollution] peak levels up to 20 times above what is considered ‘fair air quality’, and extremely poor air quality was felt up to 400 km away from the fires.” About 1.5 million people a year are estimated to have their lives shortened by wildfire smoke.

….The UN’s climate chief, Simon Stiell, said: “These European megafires show how fast climate-driven extreme heat and dry landscapes can turn wildfires into devastating national disasters. “Humanity continuing to burn colossal amounts of coal, oil and gas is making these conditions more dangerous, and these megafires more deadly and destructive,” he said. “But the solutions are equally clear: all countries must move faster from fossil fuels to renewables and protect people from worsening climate impacts, from wildfires, to megastorms and floods, to droughts hitting food production.”

Blanche appears to given up sme Epstein material

Alternet  - President Donald Trump’s interim AG Todd Blanche appears to have given up the ghost on hiding information that could potentially out cohorts of convicted Jeffrey Epstein…. After months of stalling by the Trump administration and ignoring the letter of a new law demanding the release of the sex-trafficker’s files, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan demanded insight on Trump’s longtime friendship. Sullivan sided with former MS NOW show host Phang in her lawsuit demanding the Trump administration adhere to the Epstein Transparency Act.

….But instead, Blanche handed over the unredacted information to Sullivan to review, possibly for release to the public….

Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein spans decades, with the two meeting in the 1980s at Mar-a-Lago and socializing frequently in New York and Palm Beach. Multiple women have described witnessing Trump and Epstein together at parties and events during the 1990s.  After Epstein's 2008 conviction, Trump publicly distanced himself, claiming he barely knew him.

Artificial intelligence booms in China

The Guardian - China is encouraging the deployment of AI at a scale unseen in the west. The technology is being rolled out at a staggering rate in an increasingly precarious labour market, and the Wuhan episode helped to highlight the social tensions it is causing.

Gig workers … are fearful about the impact of AI on their livelihoods, while recent incidents of white-collar workers being replaced by AI have also sparked a debate over whether workers should embrace the technology – or try to compete with it.

Addressing Shanghai’s World AI Conference in July, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, said that AI should be “an important driver for shared prosperity and common security”.

But that goal is being pursued amid an increasingly fragile labour market. As well as suffering from high levels of unemployment, China has seen tens of millions of workers drop out of formal employment into the gig economy. According to one thinktank, the number of people in flexible employment will rise to 320 million this year, up from 160 million in 2019. That is about 44% of China’s workforce.

Taxi drivers are one part of this huge cohort. Across the country, as previously heavyweight industries such as real estate and education have floundered, workers have turned to ride-hailing apps to make ends meet. But now the rollout of robotaxis, one of the most popular applications of AI that is already in use in China, is threatening their livelihoods.

 

The hazard of finding an old book in the house you just bought

Independent - A book has been returned to an Australian public library an estimated 150 years late after being found in a sealed fireplace during recent home renovations.

Antiquities of Athens, published in 1858, was returned to a library in the seaside town of Kiama last week after a local man discovered the text inside a tea crate, bricked into a disused fireplace.

“We’ve never had anything that old come back to us,” Kiama Library manager Michelle Hudson said.

“I follow lots of libraries on social media, and often you’ll get things that are maybe 30 or 40 years old when they’re cleaning out estates and stuff like that,” she added.

The late return fine would be about AU$28,000 (£14,600), allowing for inflation, Hudson said. That was calculated on the British three pence-a-week overdue fee that was printed on the inside cover of the book, along with a list of rules that applied when the library opened in 1872.

Polls

Feedly - Trump’s overall approval rating slumps to 34%, according to new CNN poll, as midterms testing Republican power loom. Three-quarters of Americans believe Donald Trump is not paying enough attention to the country’s most important problems, and two-thirds think he places himself above the needs of the US, according to a new poll. The CNN survey, conducted by market research company SSRS, comes less than 100 days before November’s midterm elections in which the president’s Republican party is widely expected to lose control of one or both chambers of Congress. 

This new Quinnipiac poll is one of the worst yet for Trump: approval at 32 percent, and support for Iran policy (28), foreign policy (34), handling of economy (34), and handling of immigration (40) at abysmal lows. He’s 17 points underwater on immigration. Also—57 percent of Democrats say they’re more motivated to vote than usual; corresponding number for Republicans, 39 percent.

The Hill - It’s no secret that both political parties are unpopular.  This is particularly true of Gen Z, which polls suggest feels like it is set to inherit a political system riddled with partisan hostility and congressional gridlock.

A report from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University found that 62 percent of adults aged 18-29 said that the design and structure of our nation’s government needs significant changes, no matter which party is elected. Additionally, 58 percent said the party they identify with needs to dramatically change.

The study’s conclusions pointed out that older generations have longer histories with politics (duh) and have lived through a mix of both steady and unstable leadership. They have been able to ground themselves in the political framework produced by prominent leaders, like former Presidents Reagan and Obama, the study cites. 

Gen Z, in contrast, grew up or continues to grow up through volatility with fewer frames of political reference, which makes it harder to feel anchored by today’s politicians and system overall.

At the same time, Gen Z is less likely to describe the opposing political party as “evil” or “less than human.” While 39 percent of Gen Z respondents said the opposing political party is “evil” or “less than human,” 44 percent of millennials aged 30-44 and 61 percent of baby boomers who are 65 years or older characterized their opposing political party negatively. 

But if Gen Z is less likely to see their political opponents as “evil,” they see more justification for political violence. Forty percent of Gen Zers said political violence is justified to some degree, compared with 30 percent of millennials and 11 percent of boomers.

Middle East

NY Times - Investigators believe a cyberattack this week on dozens of municipal water systems in Minnesota was probably the work of Iranian hackers, according to U.S. and state officials and others familiar with the matter, a potential act of aggression that comes at a precarious moment in the U.S. war against Iran.

Officials cautioned that they had not definitively determined who was responsible for the attack and that the preliminary assessment could change as the authorities collected more technical data.

They also warned that the hackers could be attempting to pose as Iran-based in an effort to ratchet up tensions between the two countries, though former intelligence officials said such a scenario was unlikely.

Local officials reported that the well and treatment plant in at least one city was temporarily offline on Monday, while other cities in the state had to use manual workarounds to cope with attempted attacks on automated operations.

1440 - Saudi Arabia confirmed yesterday it publicly joined the US' military campaign against Iran. The kingdom participated in a joint strike on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, reportedly killing at least 20 combatants. In announcing the strikes, the kingdom's Ministry of Defense cited Iranian attacks on its oil industry: Saudi Arabia blames Iraqi militias for up to half of the nearly 1,000 drone strikes it has weathered since February. Earlier this week, drones and missiles struck Saudi Arabia's Abqaiq oil facility (see map). Although Riyadh had not openly participated in military offensive action until this week, US officials say the kingdom has secretly participated in US-led attacks in the past.

Todd Blanche

The Hill - President Trump on Thursday floated the possibility of temporarily pulling Todd Blanche’s nomination to serve as attorney general to circumvent the opposition of Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and then resubmitting Blanche’s name after Cornyn and Tillis leave Congress.https://freeportfunfacts.blogspot.com/