Middle East

The Hill  - President Trump on Sunday announced that the U.S. military will begin blockading ships seeking to enter the Strait of Hormuz after weekend talks with Iran did not bring about a deal.  “Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump wrote in a Sunday morning Truth Social post, adding that he instructed the Navy to “seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran.

War to Resume as Iran and US Leave Peace Talks w/ No Deal

The Guardian  - The US vice-president, JD Vance, has blamed the failure of marathon negotiations with Iran on the country’s refusal to abandon its nuclear weapons programme, while Iranian sources have hit back at “excessive” demands from Washington.

Vance, who left Islamabad on Sunday morning after 21 hours of talks with Iranian officials in the Pakistani capital, said his team had been very clear on its red lines, as hopes faded of a quick end to the conflict that began on 28 February.

The vice-president said he spoke with Donald Trump at least half a dozen times during the talks, and one of the most significant points of difference between the two sides was on Iran’s nuclear programme.

“We need to see an affirmative commitment that [Iran] will not seek a nuclear weapon, and they will not seek the tools that would enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon,” he said. “That is the core goal of the president of the United States, and that’s what we’ve tried to achieve through these negotiations.”...

Iran’s foreign ministry downplayed the apparent breakdown, saying no one had held any expectation that the talks with the US would reach an agreement within one session.

The Guardian - The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims.

The demolitions came after Israel’s minister of defence, Israel Katz, called for the destruction of “all houses” in border villages “in accordance with the model used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza” to stop threats to communities in northern Israel. The Israeli military destroyed 90% of homes in Rafah, in south Gaza.

Kanye West

MS NOW - Kanye West suffered a setback when the U.K.’s Home Office announced on Tuesday that it would block him from traveling to the country for a summer music festival. That’s not surprising, given that in the last few years he has said he loved Nazis, sold T-shirts with a swastika and released a song called “Heil Hitler,” argues author and culture writer Mychal Denzel Smith. And yet, his latest album debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard charts and celebrity guests, such as CeeLo Green and Lauryn Hill, have appeared with him at sold-out shows in Los Angeles — a disappointing endorsement of his horrifying behavior. Read more.

Moon trip didn't save NASA

MS NOW - Friday’s splashdown of the Artemis II crew was a moment of celebration for the entire planet. But it comes as the Trump administration is proposing troubling budget cuts that would all but dismantle much of NASA, argues Bill Nye the Science Guy. These cuts would be an insult to our astronauts and the entire NASA workforce, even as there is a growing consensus in Washington that we are in a new space race, this time with the China National Space Administration, which is planning to have taikonauts walk on the moon in 2030. Read more.

More in Europe no longer regard US as a reliable ally

Washington Post - Amanda Sloat is a professor at IE University in Madrid. 

More and more Europeans no longer view the United States as a reliable ally. ..... One recent survey found that one-quarter or more of respondents in some countries — including France, Germany and Spain — see the United States as a rival or adversary. Another found that an absolute majority view Trump as an “enemy” of Europe and U.S. foreign policy as “recolonization.” Polls also reflect a growing belief that China is a more dependable partner.

But the damage goes far beyond public opinion. Across multiple domains, the practical foundations of the transatlantic relationship are eroding.

The U.S. is losing access to European bases and intelligence....

The U.S. is also losing European business....

There is growing support for “Buy European” movements. In the Nordic countries, new apps scan a product’s barcode, view its origin and identify local alternatives....The E.U. is also expediting new trade deals with partners like India and Mercosur.

Do You Really Need to Wash New Clothes Before Wearing Them?

Decline of marriage

NY Times - As of 2023, the last data available from Pew Research Center, there were about 111 million single adults ages 18 and up in the United States. That was a sizable increase from 70 million in 1990. There is now consensus among researchers that after years of a steady decline in marriage rates the institution has lost its luster for many....

According to Pew, the U.S. marriage rate hit a 140-year low in 2019 and has never fully rebounded. A slight rise in the overall marriage rate in the past few years may be attributable to a dip in the divorce rate and longer life spans. “Men are living longer,” Dr. Fry said, which means fewer widows are being pooled into the singles population.

Trump vs. Forest Service

New Yorker - For more than a century, the Forest Service has been a fairly stable fact of life across vast swaths of the American landscape. Which is why last week, though in the big cities it was barely noticed amid the noisy horror of the war in the Middle East, there was much talk in rural America about the Trump Administration’s sweeping changes to—really, a gutting of—the Service, which operates under the purview of the Department of Agriculture. The Service’s regional headquarters will vanish, along with most of its research facilities and experimental forests—and also quite likely the sense of mission that has animated the agency for more than a century.

Trump vs. military standards

The New Republic - During his first term, Trump pardoned a pair of Army officers convicted of war crimes and ordered the promotion of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, who was acquitted despite posing with the body of a teen he had killed. Gallagher’s own teammates accused him of sniping women and children in Iraq. Trump celebrated all of them, seeing nothing wrong in what they had done. This was indicative of how he would approach his second term in office.

One of the first acts of the Trump-Hegseth Pentagon was to purge the military of its top lawyers (also known as JAGs, or judge advocate generals). JAGs perform the critical function of assessing the legality of anything done within the military. One piece at The Atlantic correctly described them as the “conscience” of the military.

They also dismissed the Joint Chiefs chairman, the chief of naval operations, and Air Force vice chief. At the time, Hegseth told reporters that all these senior military officers were removed because he didn’t want them to pose any “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” The clear goal was to remove anyone who might raise ethical objections to anything the military was ordered to do by the administration.

Supreme Court

Washington Post 

Polls

Democratic Coalition A new Harvard CAPS/Harris survey found more than half of U.S. voters think the economy is worse under Trump than it was under Biden.  And 62% blame the current state of the economy on Trump, not Biden.

Pew Research - Around six-in-ten Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Israel (60%) and lack confidence in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to do the right thing regarding world affairs (59%). In both political parties, majorities of adults under 50 now rate Israel and Netanyahu negatively.

How AI Is Transforming the Global Scam Industry

Time - For the past few years, it’s escaped no one that levels of Internet and telephone fraud have skyrocketed. One in four adults worldwide lost money to scams last year, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance NGO, while 13% encountered an attempted scam at least once a day. Globally, over $1 trillion is lost to online fraud annually in what the U.N. has dubbed a “scamdemic.” 

The vast majority originates from Southeast Asia, where some 300,000 people from over 65 countries have been trafficked into fortified compounds predominantly in Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. From these “scam prisons,” victims are forced to orchestrate romance-investment cons, crypto fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling. In Cambodia alone, online fraud is estimated to generate $12.5 billion annually, or half the country’s formal GDP, according to a 2024 estimate by the U.S. Institute of Peace. It’s little wonder the war-ravaged nation of 18 million has earned a snide moniker: “Scambodia.”

Iran

Washington Post - Direct U.S.-Iranian talks stretched into early Sunday here, as the two sides began to delve into technical details in the highest level of face-to-face engagement between leaders of the United States and Iran in decades.

The negotiations, led on the U.S. side by Vice President JD Vance, continued for more than six hours and were largely positive but went through “mood swings,” according to a Pakistani official briefed on the progress of the talks.

After the two sides took their first break of the night, the talks resumed at the technical level, signaling progress in the initial phase, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive closed-door deliberations.

Washington Post - The negotiations between the U.S. and Iran in Islamabad, Pakistan, on ending the six-week conflict are the first face-to-face talks between the two nations since 1979, the White House confirmed on Saturday.

Donald Trump

The Guardian - Donald Trump has reportedly said he will issue pardons en masse to his closest advisers at the end of his second presidency, promising them in casual conversations over the last year. “I’ll pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval [Office],” the president reportedly said in a recent meeting, garnering laughs from the room, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing amp used the line in an earlier conversation, but with a smaller radius: he said he would pardon anyone who came within 10ft of the presidential office. Other sources claim Trump has floated hosting a news conference at the end of his term where he will announce mass pardons.

In response to the report, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said: “The Wall Street Journal should learn to take a joke. However, the president’s pardon power is absolute.”

Since starting his second presidency, Trump has granted clemency to more than 1,800 people. On his first day in office, Trump gave unconditional pardons to 1,500 people who had participated in the 6 January 2021 US Capitol attack carried out by his supporters, including those charged or convicted with assaulting or resisting law enforcement during the riot.

Furkan Gozukara - Prominent journalist Max Blumenthal reveals Lara Trump and Don Jr. own a 30 percent stake in Salem Media, a registered Israeli foreign agent! The Trump family is literally taking millions from the Israeli government to propagandize the American public.

Occupy Democrats  -  A former White House doctor calls for Trump to undergo an immediate "medical evaluation" after a disturbing new Truth Social post supercharged concerns about his mental collapse....

"Earlier in the week the president threatened to kill an entire civilization. Now he posts a video of a woman being beaten to death," Dr. Jonathan Reiner, who was Vice President Dick Cheney's cardiologist, wrote on X.

"To put it mildly, that’s concerning behavior. If he was a member of your family you would urge him to see a doctor. He should have a medical evaluation," he added.

Education Department nullifies previous agreements over gender identity

The Hill - The Education Department took an unprecedented step this week to nullify Title IX agreements previous administrations had made with school districts over gender identity, laying the groundwork for an environment that turns such settlements into political ping-pong. 

The department rescinded six agreements made during the Obama and Biden administrations that required districts to implement policies such as gender discrimination trainings or instructions on preferred names and pronoun usage for transgender students.

The Trump administration said Title IX is based on sex, therefore the enforcement by past administrations was “illegal and burdensome.” 

Ecology

The budgets of the EPA, NOAA and FEMA would all be slashed, as would incentives for renewable energy, under President Trump’s annual budget request to Congress.
Seven Senate Democrats have launched a probe into a $370 million “alternative fuel” payout to the LNG export company Cheniere Energy.

Rising temperatures and overfishing have seen the U.K.’s iconic cod decline for over a decade. Now, consumers are warned to “completely avoid” eating the fish.

National Poetry Month

Melissa Kirsch, NY Times -   It’s the 30th anniversary of National Poetry Month, begun in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. I’m celebrating it in my own fashion, reading favorite poems about April. T.S. Eliot dubbed it “the cruellest month.” Edna St. Vincent Millay was equally suspicious: “It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, / April / Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” An idiot! When I read those lines, spring fever beginning to throb in my veins, I feel like Millay is mocking me for being so awed, again, by the magnolia blossoms flinging open their floppy petals for a brief window of delirium.

To Ogden Nash, April was “Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy.” There’s the cruelty again, but he ends having come to appreciate the month’s contradictions: “I love April, I love you.” Langston Hughes’s “April Rain Song” concludes similarly: “The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night / And I love the rain.”

April has, in the Northeast, been inconstant as always. A perfect spring bike ride there; a windy, rainy hustle back. The poems tend to capture this fickle quality. As Robert Frost put it: “The sun was warm but the wind was chill. / You know how it is with an April day.”

Meanwhile....

How Zohran Mamdani in doing in NYC 

People - Automatic registration for the U.S. military draft pool will begin in December Eligible men between the ages of 18-25 were previously required to self-register into the Selective Service System, but registration will now be automatic The U.S. hasn't had a military draft since 1973, however, questions about the draft have been posed to Trump's White House amid the ongoing conflict in Iran.

Impeachment

The Hill - Democratic leaders are walking a delicate line as liberals clamor for President Trump’s removal over the Iran war.  On one hand, the minority Democrats are well aware that they have virtually no power to boot Trump from office — an effort that’s opposed by even some in their own party — and they don’t want to distract from the issues of rising costs and inflation, where they see Republicans as most vulnerable heading into the midterms. 

On the other hand, Trump’s threat to use the military to attack civilian infrastructure and destroy “a whole civilization” has infuriated base progressives, who say the president crossed a line that demands his removal, either through impeachment or the 25th Amendment. Liberals in the Capitol are advancing the cause.

Time - Congressman Jamie Raskin knows as well as anyone in Washington the promise and perils of impeachment. As the lead manager in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, the Maryland Democrat spent days prosecuting a case that ultimately collapsed against the hard arithmetic of a Senate acquittal. 

Now, with Democrats once again confronting calls to try to remove Trump from office after his recent threat to wipe out the Iranian civilization, Raskin was asked by party leaders to talk the caucus through the range of options available to address presidential conduct before they reach a consensus position.

In an interview with TIME...Raskin says he plans to walk colleagues through the constitutional pathways available in moments of presidential crisis, including impeachment and the 25th Amendment, while underscoring the political constraints around both options.

“There’s obviously tremendous anxiety in the country about the deranged conduct and behavior of the President,” Raskin says, while stressing that Democrats remain in the minority. “For people to say we should just go ahead and impeach him simply denies this political reality. There is not a single Republican who has called for impeachment or indicated to us interest in impeachment at this point.”

Labor unions

In These Times - The 2024 election made one thing unmistakably clear: organized labor is no longer the unshakable pillar of the Democratic Party coalition that it once was. According to a new report from the Center for Working-Class Politics, Arizona State University’s Center for Work and Democracy, and Jacobin, titled ?“Can Unions Make a Difference?,” more than 40% of union members voted for Trump in 2024. The Democratic coalition has been fracturing across class lines for the last decade — a process known as class dealignment — and that divide is only growing.

The issue isn’t that workers don’t trust unions — 70% of Americans approve of them, the highest approval rating in over 50 years. It’s that they don’t trust politicians. Rather than rebranding, the solution for Democrats is clear: embrace the party’s roots in a concrete way by putting union leaders on the ballot.

At a time when trust in all kinds of institutions — political, business, economic — is collapsing, labor unions stand out with a singular kind of public approval that could be leveraged into real electoral influence. To the American people, unions are a counteragent to the political machine — an institution, yes, but one of the few that people can actually get behind. Despite this, most unions vastly underuse their electoral position, opting to simply donate to incumbents or candidates whose victories look inevitable.

The study found that candidates with union backgrounds use 159% more pro-worker language and 66% more progressive economic language, prioritizing a pro-worker, economic populist agenda. Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.), a former industrial electrician, has experience catching language in bills that could hurt workers’ needs:

Postal Service financial crisis

Time - The U.S. Postal Service announced on Thursday that it’s pausing its payments to a federal pension plan and moving to increase stamp prices in the midst of its “severe financial crisis.”

USPS said that it has informed federal budget officials of its plan to temporarily halt its employer contributions for the defined benefit portion of the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS). That same day, the Postal Service also said it filed notice with regulators to raise postage rates, including increasing the price of a First-Class Mail Forever stamp by 4 cents.

The agency attributed both changes to the financial challenges it’s currently facing. Last month, Postmaster General David Steiner said that, if no significant changes are made, USPS is set to run out of cash in 2027.

Trump losing support in MAGA

Jon Passantino - This week, some of Donald Trump’s most loyal right-wing media personalities who helped carry him back to the White House sounded a lot like the liberals they’ve spent years mocking.

"The 25th Amendment needs to be invoked. He is a genocidal lunatic. Our Congress and military need to intervene. We are beyond madness," wrote far-right extremist Candace Owens.

“How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracy theorist and ardent Trump supporter, asked on his Infowars show.

And Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host turned podcaster, denounced Trump for his expletive-laced Easter message, calling it “vile” and suggesting he might be the Antichrist. Still others, including Megyn Kelly and Matt Walsh, turned on Trump in strikingly harsh terms after he threatened to wipe out the entire Iranian civilization.

Even by the standards of the recent feuds that have rattled the MAGA movement, the rhetoric from some of its biggest stars amounted to a scorched-earth assault on a figure they had long elevated and defended. During the 2024 campaign, those same personalities amplified Trump’s claims with little scrutiny, casting him as America’s savior from a “communist” Kamala Harris.

In a 482-word tirade on Truth Social, Trump unloaded on his now-former allies as “stupid people” and “nut jobs.”

The changing value of a college degres

New Republic - Starting in about 2005, something nearly unthinkable began to happen: The lifetime value of a college degree began to decline. Up until then, and really for quite a while afterward, a degree was considered a smart bet on a person’s future income and prospects. Possessing a college degree (any degree!) generally meant higher income. At the late date of 2013, Barack Obama called higher education an “economic imperative.”

Once upon a time, very few people got college degrees. About 6 percent of the population in 1950 had one (which itself, thanks to the GI Bill, was a remarkable high). College was, at some level, affordable, and by 2010 degree holders received a glorious 75 percent pay bump. And if you didn’t go to college, no sweat: Nondegree holders had plenty of options for work that paid OK, too—for instance, in skilled trades like electrical work or union jobs in hospitality.

Over the years, more and more people went to college, and today more than 50 percent of working-age adults have college degrees. Overall, they still make more money than people without college degrees. But after 2005, the ever-rising prospects for degree holders began to slouch. The job market for grads shrank, wages flatlined or backslid, and college got so expensive that the debt some people took on to get their degree almost permanently ate into their expected windfall. Degree holders had been promised the world, and a vaunted place in the professional or managerial class. Yet five years after graduation, only 55 percent of college graduates were employed in jobs that require a degree, according to a 2024 report. Many ended up working in the service industry. Caught in low-wage, often precarious jobs, some sought to form unions.

This is the basic story of decline told by Noam Scheiber in his new book, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class. The book expands on the early reporting Scheiber did on Starbucks Workers United at his day job as the workplace reporter at The New York Times. In Mutiny, Scheiber reports in depth on multiracial, cross-class organizing campaigns at Starbucks, Apple stores, video game design studios, and among screenwriters for television. These campaigns were not entirely composed of college-educated people, but many of their participants certainly fit the bill.

Degree holders had been promised the world, and a vaunted place in the professional or managerial class. Yet many were caught in low-wage, often precarious jobs.

The story of a highly educated yet disillusioned generation has been told repeatedly since roughly 2011, when Occupy Wall Street gave voice to the frustration of a struggling mass of college debtors, unemployed degree holders, and others. They have formed a vocal and enthusiastic base of support for left populists from Bernie Sanders to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and have pushed for relief from crushing student loan repayments, as chronicled in works such as Ryann Liebenthal’s Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis. The workplace-organizing campaigns that Scheiber traces are particularly notable because, for generations, college-educated Americans did not tend to throw in their lot with unions. These efforts and their successes, he suggests, not only illuminate the changing fortunes of the college-educated; they also might open a new front to the labor movement.

Donald Trump

Wall Street Journal - President Trump has repeatedly promised his top administration officials pardons before he leaves office, according to people who’ve heard his comments.
“I’ll pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval,” Trump said in a recent meeting to laughs, according to people with knowledge of the comments. Another person said the president earlier this year cited 10 feet. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said WSJ “should learn to take a joke, however, the President’s pardon power is absolute.” This term, Trump has wielded clemency far differently than any other president, dispensing some 1,600 grants to date. Many have gone to allies and donors, or those who had hired them.

Polls

Headline USA - A new poll found that six in ten Americans now have an unfavorable view of Israel. Young Americans have a negative view of Israel. 

The Pew survey released on Tuesday reported that overall, 60% said they have an unfavorable view of Israel. In 2022, only 42% of Americans held negative views of Israel. 

There was a sharp divide between Democrats and Republicans. 41% of Republicans have an unfavorable view of Israel; that number is double with Democrats. There was also a large split between younger and older Americans. 70% of Americans under 50 had an unfavorable view of Israel, including 57% of Republicans. 

Newsweek - Vice President JD Vance's approval rating has fallen sharply, hitting what CNN data analyst Harry Enten says is the lowest point for any vice president at this stage in office... Enten showed that Vice President Kamala Harris was at minus 13 points at a comparable moment. Mike Pence stood at minus 7, Joe Biden had a net positive of 4 points and Dick Cheney had the significantly higher net approval rating of plus 37.

While he allowed that vice presidents in general appeared to be becoming less popular over time, the trend did not fully explain the depth of Vance's decline.  "JD Vance is not doing too hot to trot at this point," Enten said, noting that the former U.S. senator from Ohio had started his vice presidency in positive territory.  Vance's net approval rating has dropped from plus 3 points to minus 18. "That is a 21-point swing in the wrong direction," Enten said, adding, "Down he goes."

Newsweek -  U.S. President Donald Trump's approval rating has fallen since he announced a two-week ceasefire deal with Iran on Tuesday after threatening to annihilate the country's infrastructure, according to a new poll.

The survey by Daily Mail and JL Partners, conducted on 1,000 registered voters on Wednesday, found that 43 percent of respondents approved of Trump, while 57 percent disapproved. This gave Trump a net approval rating of -14 percentage points. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

Newsweek - Vance has 36 percent of the potential vote, compared with Newsom's 33 percent. The survey shows that 12 percent are undecided, and 17 percent say they would not vote.

Politics

Joel Silberman - Shawn Harris, a Black retired brigadier general, cattle farmer, and Democrat, got 44% of the vote in Marjorie Taylor Green’s blood red GOP district (votes still being counted). That number represents a 30 point swing for the district away from Trump’s vote share in 2024.

In Wisconsin, Chris Taylor, a liberal Supreme Court justice was elected with a 21% swing from Kamala Harris’s performance in 2024.

And that’s on top of other recent mega-swings, like Democrat Emily Gregory winning with a 20% shift in the Florida district that includes Mar-A-Lago, or Eileen Higgins riding a 19 point swing to become the first Democratic mayor of Miami since before Britney Spears dropped “Baby, One More Time” in 1999.

Money

Axios - Nantucket County, Mass. ($296); San Francisco County, Calif. ($282) and Nobles County, Minn. ($273) had the highest estimated average monthly electric bills in the continental U.S. in 2025.

Property taxes vary across America

A new analysis from the personal finance website WalletHub has underscored how property taxes can fluctuate significantly from state to state, with some boasting effective rates several times higher than lower-taxed parts of the country.

Property taxes have emerged as a primary “hidden cost” facing both current and prospective homeowners, as widespread housing affordability pressures have dampened demand across the real estate sector. Falling sales, reluctant buyers, and inventory issues have been cited among key challenges facing the housing market in 2026, and ones which experts say are likely to persist with the influence of wider economic conditions on home-selling activity.

According to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the average American household pays $3,119 each year in property taxes, and WalletHub notes that these can impact both owners and renters given their importance to local government budgets as well as the influence on rental prices.

Iran

Bloomberg - Overnight, Israel launched its largest assault on Lebanon since invading, killing at least 200 people. Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, whose father was killed in the first days of the US-Israel attacks, repeated demands for war reparations as part of any peace agreement. —David E. Rovella

NPR - Vice President Vance will head a U.S. delegation for peace talks with Iran in Pakistan this weekend. Negotiators will meet in the country’s capital of Islamabad for crucial talks aimed at ending the ongoing conflict involving the U.S., Israel and Iran. This is a significant moment for Vance, who has previously made statements about keeping the U.S. out of foreign wars. He faces the challenge of bringing together two countries that have been enemies for nearly 50 years. 

NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben tells Up First there is some logic to Vance playing a role in trying to end this conflict, especially if he wants to run for president in 2028. A major objective for the talks is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The crucial waterway doesn't appear to be fully open even after the ceasefire, and it's unclear where things stand, Kurtzleben says.

As the U.S. and Iran prepare to negotiate a peace deal, the two-day-old ceasefire is showing signs of stress. Iran's Foreign Ministry says it won't take part in the overall talks on Saturday unless Lebanon is included in the ceasefire. Israel says its offensive against Hezbollah militants in Lebanon is not part of the deal. Under pressure from President Trump and other leaders, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he plans to enter into direct talks with Lebanon. Talks between Israel and Lebanon will take place at the ambassador level in Washington. NPR’s Carrie Kahn says this is a huge deal because the two countries have never had negotiations like this before. 

The Guardian - As Pakistan prepared to host negotiations between Iran and the US, the already fragile ceasefire in the conflict showed further strain as Donald Trump accused Tehran of doing “a very poor job” in upholding promises on the strait of Hormuz, and Israel attacked Lebanon – which Iran claimed violated the truce.

The two-week ceasefire agreement brokered by Pakistan included the two sides agreeing to meet in Islamabad this weekend for talks to negotiate a lasting peace. But while Iran and Pakistan asserted that the ceasefire included Lebanon, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said there was “no ceasefire in Lebanon” and Israel would continue “to strike Hezbollah with full force”.

What about the strait of Hormuz? The agreement also included Iran lifting its near-total blockade of the strait, which has caused the worst-ever disruption to global energy supplies. Trump posted on Truth Social late Thursday that Iran was being “dishonorable” in not allowing oil to go through the strait. “That is not the agreement we have!” Trump wrote.  More

Healthcare costs

Caitlin Owens,  Axios - I haven't seen this level of interest in going after the underlying drivers of health care costs in the 11 years I've been covering the subject. Lowering health care costs explicitly means clamping down on the business practices that make some people a lot of money.

If either party is serious about any of this, it's declaring war on a sector that makes up nearly a fifth of the U.S. economy.

The big picture: Every major health care segment seems to be in trouble.

... Both parties are raging against "Big Insurance" and want to see profit-seeking behaviors checked. The pharmaceutical industry, which used to enjoy the full-throated backing of the GOP, has very few friends left who are willing to go to bat for it.

And the protective halo that used to enshroud hospitals from political scrutiny has been pierced.

In  recent weeks, an influential Democratic-aligned think tank has put out a health plan calling for premium regulation and hospital price caps, and a Republican-aligned one published a blog post attacking one of hospitals' arguments for more government funding.

The Trump administration filed its second lawsuit accusing a hospital of anti-competitive contracting behavior.

....And let's not forget that Republicans' massive Medicaid overhaul last year included hundreds of billions in payment cuts to providers.

...The pharmaceutical industry has survived two different administrations' efforts to lower drug prices, and analysts have largely dismissed the changes that were enacted as immaterial to companies' bottom lines.

....The bottom line: Health care costs have been going up forever. The question has always been whether they'd reach a breaking point — and politically speaking, we might be there.

But we're still a ways off from serious attempts to rein in prices, and no future attempt is guaranteed to work.

Attorney General appointment

Roll Call - President Donald Trump will have wide latitude to keep his preferred pick leading the Justice Department after his firing of ally Pamela Bondi, including scenarios that could entirely avoid a Senate confirmation process well into the future. Any permanent attorney general nominee could face a tough path to confirmation in the Senate, where controversies and attacks against the department’s independence have outraged Democrats and at times spurred concern from some Republicans.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, already indicated in a CNN interview that he would not back an attorney general nominee who has excused the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. He previously has criticized a Justice Department probe into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell as a threat to the independence of the central bank.

Several names have been floated in news reports as potential replacements for Bondi, but the president has not announced a nominee. Meanwhile, the president’s former personal attorney, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, is leading the department as acting attorney general. Blanche, experts say, could remain as acting attorney general for many months, if not longer, depending on the consent of Senate Republican leadership and the interpretation of federal statute.