Iran

The Hill - A senior Iranian official disputed Trump’s claim that there are negotiations between the two countries, arguing Trump has “backed down” due to pressure from the markets and allies.

“Trump backed down from attacking critical infrastructure as Iran’s military threats became credible. Financial market pressure and the threat of bonds within the U.S. and the West have increased, and this has been another important factor in this retreat,” the senior official told Iran’s Fars News Agency in translated remarks.

Trump then clarified: The president said he has not been in contact with Iran’s supreme leader, arguing his top envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner have been speaking with their Iranian diplomatic counterparts.

Newsweek -    The U.S. Department of State has issued a worldwide alert on March 22, 2026, urging Americans across the globe to exercise increased caution as geopolitical tensions continue to ripple far beyond the Middle East. The advisory, posted early Sunday, warns that U.S. diplomatic facilities and American interests abroad could face elevated risks in the coming weeks.

While this advisory does not cite a specific imminent threat, it highlights growing concern that groups supportive of Iran may widen the scope of their targets. These groups could focus on locations associated broadly with the United States, including American businesses, cultural centers, or areas frequented by U.S. travelers.

NPR - President Trump says he’s postponed military strikes against Iranian power plants, after he threatened on Saturday to “obliterate” them if Iran didn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz in 48 hours. On social media this morning, Trump said the U.S. had “very good and productive conversations” over the past two days, and that he would postpone strikes on Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for five days, “subject to the success of the ongoing meetings and discussions.”

Iran’s Defense Council said Monday that the only way for “non-belligerent” countries to pass through the Strait of Hormuz is through coordination with Iran, and warned that any attack on Iran’s coasts or islands would trigger mine-laying across the Gulf sea lanes. As the war enters its fourth week and attacks escalate, some Iranians tell NPR’s Emily Feng that the internet blackout is really scary because they cannot receive warnings about where the next strikes will be.

WE HAVE A PHONE PROBLEM

Having problems with our phone - 207-865-1485.  Can't get a repair job until April 1. Please use our email ssmith@igc.org at least until then. 

Donald Trump

Mykhailo Rohoza - More than 340 retired U.S. generals, admirals, and national security experts have issued a public warning: Donald Trump poses a threat to American democracy. The criticism has also been joined by prominent figures from his own administration — John Kelly and Mark Milley.

The letter directly called Trump “the most dangerous person for the country.” 

Particular concern is being raised about his strategy toward Iran. Military experts consider it unjustifiably risky and poorly planned. Instead of clear objectives — contradictory statements; instead of dialogue with opponents — personal attacks and threats.  Veterans warn that such an approach risks repeating the mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan, but on an even more dangerous scale.

Judaism and Zionism are not the same

Voice of Rabbis -  Over 10,000 Jews attended this event where Satmar Grand Rabbi Aron Teitelbaum declared: “We have no part in Zionism. We have no part in the State of Israel. We will continue to oppose Zionism in the name of our faith.” A reminder that Judaism and Zionism are not the same.

Jared Kushner

NY Times -   Jared Kushner, one of the U.S. government’s chief negotiators in the Middle East, is trying to raise more money for his private equity firm from governments in the region.

Mr. Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, has spoken with potential investors in recent weeks about raising $5 billion or more for Affinity Partners, his investment firm, according to five people with knowledge of the talks who were not permitted to speak publicly about the discussions.

As part of the fund-raising effort, Affinity’s representatives have already met with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which invests the proceeds of the kingdom’s vast oil reserves, two of the people briefed on the discussions said. PIF is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has formed close ties with Mr. Kushner and the Trump administration.

Jobs

Economic Policy Institute - The persistent gender wage gap widened slightly in 2025; women were paid 18.6% less than men on average after controlling for race and ethnicity, education, age, marital status, and state.

Women are paid less than men across all education levels. Women with a graduate degree earn less, on average, than men with only a college degree.

The gender pay gap worsened following a year of Trump administration attacks on workers, including cuts to the federal workforce; attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts; ordering mass deportations; and undermining child care and home care providers.

Health

Common Dreams -   About 24.3 million Americans were enrolled in healthcare plans within the Affordable Care Act marketplace last year, but a survey released Thursday by KFF found that about 1 in 10 of those people had no choice but to make a difficult and risky calculation at the end of 2025 when ACA subsidies expired due to Republicans’ refusal to support an extension.

According to the research, 9% of people enrolled in plans under the marketplace last year are now uninsured, having dropped their coverage—and costs were a deciding factor for the vast majority of those who left the marketplace.

Action links

“Un-cancel Stephen Colbert” petition

Sign and send a message urging your members of Congress to block any executive order that would federalize or seize control of our elections.

Congress should reject the SAVE Act and all attempts to make it harder to vote.

Impeach and convict Donald Trump... 30,000 activists have already signed on this week 

Save Stephen Colbert's show ....

Who should be the Democratic nominee for President in 2028? 

Mark Kelly is suing Pete Hegseth for violating the Constitution, after Hegseth abused his power and tried to punish Senator Kelly for speaking the truth. To support Kelly

Tell Congress: Protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Markwayne Mullin

Forward Blue -  After firing Kristi Noem, Trump is nominating Markwayne Mullin to run DHS. A department with 240,000 employees, including FEMA, TSA, the Coast Guard, ICE, and Customs and Border Protection.

Mullin has no national security experience. No law enforcement leadership background. No record of managing anything close to this scale.

The Senate confirmation process was designed to evaluate whether a nominee can actually do the job. Mullin cannot.

Remember when federal agents shot and killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year? Mullin's answer was to block any new restrictions on federal agents. He called it "handcuffing" them.

Congress

MS NOW -  In the first year of the 119th Congress, the House held the fewest number of roll call votes in the first session in decades — 362, according to congressional records. The next two lowest on the list? The first year of the 102nd Congress, which held 439 roll call votes throughout 1991, and the 117th Congress, which held 449 throughout 2021. (Democrats controlled the chamber both of those years.)

By comparison, during the 118th Congress — when the GOP also controlled the House — the chamber cast 724 roll call votes in the first year, ranking among the busier first sessions of the past few decades...

Congressional data also shows that in the first year of the 119th Congress the second-fewest number of bills became law since at least the 1970s: 45. That is surpassed only by the 29 in the 118th Congress, when the GOP led the House and Democrats controlled the Senate and White House. (In the 1970s, some congresses saw upwards of 200 bills become law in the first year alone.)

Polls

A Yahoo/YouGov poll published last week found that gas prices are already doing serious damage to Trump’s popularity. The survey of about 1,700 U.S. adults found that 66% disapprove of how the president is handling gas prices while only 27% approve. A similar breakdown emerged over cost of living: 67% disapprove of the president’s approach, while 26% approve.  The poll also documented a sharp plunge in public perception of Trump’s handling of the economy compared with findings a month earlier. Approval dropped from 37% to 32%, and disapproval rose from 57% to 61%.

Cuba

Bloombeg - A senior Cuban official told NBC the country is preparing for a possible military assault as Trump increases economic pressure on the government in Havana and suggested it could be the next US target after Venezuela and Iran.

• Trump has repeatedly threatened Cuba, saying he can “Free it, take it—I can do anything I want” and calling for its president to step down.
• The plan? Less regime change, more US economic control. The Atlantic reported the US is discussing which Republican donors with Cuban ancestry could be considered for future transition or leadership roles.
• Cuba has mostly resisted the pressure, but the country is facing severe stress after Trump cut off fuel and funding. It suffered another another nationwide blackout Saturday, the second in a week.

ICE

Flyover -   Border czar Tom Homan said ICE won't operate X-ray machines but will cover exit lanes and check IDs to free up screeners for security checkpoints. It takes four to six months to train and certify a TSA officer, a process ICE agents haven’t undergone

Bloomberg - Trump is directing ICE agents to airports, where “they will do Security like no one has ever seen before.” The goal is to help ease long security lines, triggered by TSA agents—who haven’t been paid in several weeks—calling in sick. 

NY Times - ICE personnel, including agents from Homeland Security Investigations, are planning to be at 14 airports, according to a document obtained by The Times. The airports include Newark, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston and Phoenix, as well as Kennedy and LaGuardia in New York.

Trump regime seeking preemption of state artificial intelligence laws

Roll Call -   The White House on Friday proposed its framework for a national artificial intelligence policy, pushing for broad preemption of state AI laws and against “open-ended liability” for AI firms.

The proposal urges Congress to take some steps to protect kids, energy costs and copyright holders, while also requesting streamlined permitting for data centers, regulatory “sandboxes” to allow exemptions to federal regulations and no new regulatory body to oversee the fast-spreading technology.

The four-page document fulfilled a request from President Donald Trump’s December executive order on state AI laws, which directed White House science and technology adviser Michael Kratsios, along with Special Adviser for AI and Crypto David Sacks, to develop a national policy to preempt state laws.

House leadership immediately offered their support for the proposal.

Artificial Intelligence

Letter to NY Times - A.I.’s staunchest defenders would have us believe there is little to worry about because we’ve seen all this before and it worked out, most recently when computers and automation ended many factory jobs as we shifted to an information economy. In those past transitions, most workers successfully retrained for new and different kinds of work.

It’s different this time for three reasons. First, change is coming spectacularly quickly. Many of this year’s college freshmen are in majors that will be obsolete by the time they graduate. Second, many of the smartest people — even those in the A.I. field — are already wary about where this technology is headed and how it could be used, especially by bad actors. And third, there is a difference in the kinds of jobs that are being eliminated.

Previous technology shifts displaced millions of workers who were typists, telephone operators, assembly-line workers and bookkeepers, where the skills were learned quickly and required modest investments in education and training. The work and careers A.I. will eliminate in management, programming, law, medicine, health care, engineering, the arts and other fields often require significant investments in advanced education. Many in those roles are paying off student loans that will not go away when their jobs disappear.

All indications are that this time the great displacement will be bigger and much faster, and it’s becoming clear that we are not prepared. - Jay P. Maille, Pleasanton, CA

7-year-old Drew Barrymore on the Tonight Show

Donald Trump

Grok  - According to trackers like DidTrumpGolfToday, Trump has visited golf courses 99 days out of 427 since Jan 20, 2025 (23%). Estimated taxpayer cost for security/travel: $138.6M.

NY Times - Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute. ...

“When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of the influential 2018 book “How Democracies Die.”

A grandchild with a problem

Careers with the lowest unemployment rates

1) Pharmacy ~ 1 %

2) Electrical Engineering ~ 1.5 %

3) Computer Science ~ 2 %

4) Computer Engineering ~ 2 %

5) Nursing ~ 2 %

6) Mechanical Engineering ~ 2.5 %

7) Civil Engineering ~ 2.5 %

8) Accounting ~ 3 %

Via Beni 

Polls

Millions warned to stay out of Florida waters

Newsweek -   Millions of people along parts of the Florida coastlines have been warned to stay out of the water as the National Weather Service (NWS) forecasts "life-threatening" rip currents through Sunday, lasting until Sunday evening. A high rip current risk is in place for coastal Palm Beach County in Florida until Sunday night, as the NWS warns that rip currents can drag even the strongest swimmers away from the shore, into deeper waters. 

... Elsewhere, the NWS has also issued a high rip current risk warning to the north-facing beaches from Rincon—which is on the west coast of Puerto Rico—to Fajardo, on the northeast coast, along with the east-facing reefs of the Marianas, which are under a high rip current warning until Tuesday. 

Gas and oil prices

New York Times  Many states across the American South and Southwest, which enjoyed some of the lowest gas prices before the outbreak of war, have seen the steepest increases, according to a New York Times analysis of data from GasBuddy. As of March 14, gas prices had shot up by about a third in Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas since the start of the war. In Colorado, prices were up 35 percent. In New Mexico, which has been hit the hardest, they had gone up just shy of 40 percent.

A potential presidential candidate takes on another

NY Times -   Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky on Saturday excoriated Vice President JD Vance as the “most arrogant politician I have ever seen,” escalating a yearslong rivalry between two potential 2028 presidential candidates who claim Appalachian roots.

Speaking at a local Democratic Party gala in the Ohio county where Mr. Vance grew up, Mr. Beshear accused the vice president of talking down to the people of Kentucky. For his part, the governor charged that the vice president had disappointed the people of Ohio, whom Mr. Vance represented in the Senate.

“Ohio deserved a much better senator than him, and we all deserve a much better vice president,” Governor Beshear, a term-limited Democrat, told the crowd at the event on Saturday night in Butler County, Ohio, according to audio of the event provided by his representatives.

Mr. Beshear, who is widely seen as a likely 2028 presidential candidate, assailed the vice president as an out-of-touch leader who he said made President Trump look comparatively humble. And he argued that “Hillbilly Elegy” — Mr. Vance’s well-read memoir about his youth in Kentucky and Ohio — amounted to “poverty tourism” and “trafficked in this tired stereotype” about the region.

An exhibition of typos

Smithsonian Magazine -  James Joyce wrote the manuscript of Ulysses with a steel pen over seven years. By his typists’ accounts, the Irish author’s penmanship was atrocious, and his revisions were overwhelming. When the book was published in 1922, it was full of mistakes. In a letter to his wife, he wrote, “The edition you have is full of printer’s errors.”

 

The following year, Joyce’s editors compiled a massive list of the book’s errors to be fixed in new editions. Joyce rejected some of the corrections, saying, “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.” Even so, some future printings of the book came with a seven-page errata sheet listing more than 200 mistakes.

Errors like those in Ulysses are the subject of a new exhibition at Yale. “‘Beauties of My Style’: Errata and the Printed Mistake,” which opens at the university’s Sterling Memorial Library on March 30, examines the history of typos across five centuries...

According to a statement from the library, “errors committed” lists first appeared in the 15th century. Authors slipped these lists—containing typos, additions and apologies—into the backs of books after publication. The exhibition examines errata lists alongside their companion texts, examining themes of “censorship, misrepresentation, intervention and instability,” per the statement.

Art

WBEZ -   When you think about presidential libraries, you probably don’t picture fine art. Among the 13 institutions in the United States dedicated to a more recent slate of presidents, only one features a notable commission: an expansive mural created in 1960-61 by regionalist Thomas Hart Benton for the lobby of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri.

Chicago will be the exception, keeping with President Barack Obama’s vision for a center that veers far from the conventional approach to presidential libraries. Obama and his wife, Michelle, envisioned art as being a fundamental part of the $800 million Obama Presidential Center when it opens on Juneteenth after 10 years of planning and construction.

Meanwhile. . .

 New York Times   - Kennedy Center Board Votes To Close For Two Years. The full scope of the renovations is not entirely clear. But Mr. Trump has said that both structural and internal work was needed, noting on Monday that the building’s heating system would be “ripped out in its entirety,” and that new theater seating and new marble would be installed. 

More than 400 Transportation Security Administration workers have quit since a partial government shutdown began on Feb. 14 that has left them working without pay, the Department of Homeland Security said.

Untangling election procedures

 

NPR - For this year’s midterm primary elections, some of my NPR colleagues and I tried to make it easier by revisiting a project we first did before the 2024 election — a registration guide for eligible voters in every U.S. state and territory. (Spoiler alert: The only territory-wide primary this year will be held in Guam.)

There are similar guides out there, but many of them don’t specify the exact dates of the deadlines for signing up in time for the 2026 primaries. To save you from scrolling through the webpages of election offices (some of which are smoother to navigate than others), our guide also compiles links for registering online, checking your status and changing your registration.... Elections are a patchwork across the country, and in some places, registering to vote can only be done in person and/or by mail. There’s no online registration in Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming, as well as American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands.... So if you’re an eligible voter who can use a guide to help you register, I’ll keep it simple: Start by going to npr.org/vote.

Getting people to show up in court can be difficult

Time -   When people are accused of breaking the law—from something minor like trespassing to a more serious offense like robbery—the next step is typically a court hearing. This is the beginning of the process to determine whether they are guilty, and if so, what the consequences will be.

Getting people to show up in court is a difficult challenge. We need to persuade someone who is accused of breaking the law to take time out of their life to face the consequences—not a pleasant task. It’s probably not surprising, then, that many miss their court hearings.

The standard approach in the U.S. is to lock people up, requiring cash bail for release. About 30% of people currently incarcerated in the U.S. haven’t been convicted yet—they are simply in jail awaiting trial. Cash bail entails paying part or all of the bail amount so that a defendant can go home; if they show up in court, they will get most of that amount back. Of course, low-income defendants are less able to pay, which means this system often punishes poverty. A major barrier to reforming the status quo is that people worry that defendants can’t be trusted to show up for their hearings and face punishment without these measures.

The legal system provides big incentives to show up for your court date. If you miss it, not only will you lose any money you put down as bail, but the court will typically grant a warrant for your arrest, and you could face new, often more serious charges. It could also mean more severe consequences if you’re ever arrested for another offense: since courts consider past “failures to appear” (FTAs) when deciding whether someone is a flight risk, missing a hearing today can mean pretrial detention (time in jail) in future cases. The best data suggest that 23% of felony defendants who are released pretrial still don’t show up for court, for a variety of reason

Action Links

“Un-cancel Stephen Colbert” petition

Sign and send a message urging your members of Congress to block any executive order that would federalize or seize control of our elections.

Congress should reject the SAVE Act and all attempts to make it harder to vote.

Impeach and convict Donald Trump... 30,000 activists have already signed on this week 3/11

Save Stephen Colbert's show

Who should be the Democratic nominee for President in 2028? 3/26

Mark Kelly is suing Pete Hegseth for violating the Constitution, after Hegseth abused his power and tried to punish Senator Kelly for speaking the truth. To support Kelly

Tell Congress: Protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge