Pete McCloskey, GOP congressman who once challenged Nixon, dies at 96Former California Congressman Pete McCloskey, who ran as a Republican challenging President Richard Nixon in 1972, has died
Armenia's prime minister in Russia for talks amid strain in tiesRussian President Vladimir Putin hosted Armenia's Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan for talks after a summit of the Eurasian Economic Union they both attended earlier in the day.
The Tight Line Trump Has a Judge WalkingThis is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Donald Trump is in his third week on trial in New York, where he faces 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. He’s accused of covering up a $130,000 hush-money payment made in 2016 to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels, who recently testified about her encounters with the former president. I spoke with Atlantic staff writer David A. Graham about where the case stands, Trump’s penchant for violating his gag order, and the bizarre nature of this trial.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: The nudes internet Trump’s latest abortion position is more radical than it sounds. “Listen to what they’re chanting,” Judith Shulevitz writes. Like an Ordinary CitizenStephanie Bai: To start off, let’s lay the groundwork for this trial. Can you briefly explain the case that the prosecutors are trying to make?David A. Graham: People talk about this as “the hush-money case,” but paying hush money is not itself illegal. What prosecutors are arguing is that Trump paid Stormy Daniels in exchange for her not talking about their alleged sexual relationship, and then falsified the business records to cover up that payment. They say that this constituted election interference because the goal was to keep knowledge of the relationship from voters during the 2016 election.The prosecution needs to establish that Trump was deeply involved in the creation and the payment of this hush-money agreement, because the defense is trying to say that Trump may not have been aware of the situation. When the prosecution questions people who worked in accounting at the Trump Organization, for example, they are trying to show that Trump was deeply involved in payments, deeply involved in the minutiae of the business—so he obviously would have been aware of a payout as big as $130,000.Stephanie: What is Trump’s defense team’s counterargument?David: They don’t deny that this money was paid, but they say that he didn’t falsify the records. They’re also trying to impugn the honesty of some of the witnesses. They mostly seem to be trying to pick apart aspects of the prosecution’s case rather than offering some sort of counternarrative.Stephanie: If the prosecution isn’t able to successfully prove that Trump was aware of the hush-money agreement, what does that mean for their case?David: If they can’t prove that Trump was involved, or if Trump’s lawyers can plausibly argue that he did this simply to protect his reputation or to protect his marriage rather than to interfere with the election, then the prosecutors will have a harder time getting the jury to convict.Stephanie: In defending comments Trump made about the trial, his attorney Todd Blanche said that Trump had a right to complain about the “two systems of justice.” In some ways, it seems like the prosecution is arguing two cases: the hush-money case, and the case for this being a legitimate, fair trial—and not the “political witch hunt” that Trump has called it. Let’s say that Trump ends up getting convicted. Do you think his supporters will accept that outcome?David: It depends on what that means. There was a poll yesterday saying that most people expect Trump to be convicted, and that includes a plurality of Republicans. So in that sense, they see what’s coming. But I think there’s a widespread sentiment that either he’s being prosecuted by Democrats who are out to get him or that what he did wasn’t wrong. If anything, the trial seems to be solidifying support within his base.Stephanie: At the core of this case is the extramarital affair Trump allegedly had during his marriage to Melania. Have we heard anything from her during this trial?David: We have not! Trump has brought a rotating posse with him to court, including not just his lawyers but also his aides, his campaign manager, and his son Eric. Melania has not been there. He complained that he had to be in court on her birthday, which is a little ironic given the alleged events that led to the case.Stephanie: Headlines and pundits have called this a “historic” and “unprecedented” trial, because it’s the first time a former president has gone to trial for criminal charges. Has this case set any precedents for how a criminal trial of a former president would proceed?David: This is not a legal precedent, but it’s been powerful to watch Trump have to show up in court when he clearly doesn’t want to be there, listen to testimony he doesn’t want to listen to, sit in this courtroom with a bad HVAC system, and endure it like an ordinary citizen. Even if he argues that he is above the rule of law, we are seeing him sit there like anyone else.Stephanie: Does the gag order, which has been imposed on Trump and bars him from attacking people involved in the trial, set any sort of precedent for presidential trials going forward?David: The gag order comes from Trump’s habit of attacking witnesses, the family of prosecutors and judges. I don’t know that you would get one of these as a standard practice with presidents. But each time you have a defendant who has that kind of history or who starts doing that, there’s a good chance of the gag order. Still, Trump has been able to exploit the weirdness of this case and get away with things that other defendants would not have.Stephanie: Can you say a bit more about how he’s exploited the weirdness of the case?David: Anytime he gets in trouble for saying something, he says, Look, I’m a politician running for office. I have to be able to make political speeches. It’s unfair for me to be muzzled. That’s something that the judge has had to figure out: How do you write a gag order that allows Trump to be a candidate but protects the witnesses and the sanctity of the case?To me, it also looks like Trump is daring the judge to jail him—like he concluded that getting sent to jail for a night or a weekend would actually help him politically. So the judge has to decide how much he protects the sanctity of the system by enforcing the gag order versus giving Trump an opportunity to undermine the system in an even bigger way by claiming political persecution.Stephanie: You wrote earlier this week that some of the best-sourced reporters in the courtroom are saying that Trump largely wants to avoid jail time. Is this a situation where Trump can spin either option in his favor?David: I think it’s very “heads I win, tails you lose.” If the judge lets him get away with it, he can talk all kinds of trash about the proceeding, and that’s a win for him because he wants to undermine the trial for political reasons. If he gets thrown in jail, I’m sure he would hate it, but it also gives him another political talking point.Stephanie: It seems like a very tight line for Judge Juan Merchan to walk.David: It’s really challenging. Every judge Trump has recently come before has had to deal with this in some way or another. They’re trying to figure out: How do we keep him in line without that becoming the story? They want the focus to be on the facts of the case. And that’s really hard to achieve with Trump, because he doesn’t want the focus to be on the facts.Related: The Stormy Daniels testimony spotlights Trump’s misogyny. Judge Merchan is out of good options. Today’s News Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said that President Joe Biden’s decision to pause weapons shipments to Israel was related to Israel’s plans to move forward with a large-scale offensive operation in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza. An appeals court in Georgia agreed to review the ruling that allowed Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to stay on the election-interference case against Trump after it was revealed that she had a romantic relationship with a prosecutor on her team. The New York Times reported that in a 2012 deposition, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that a doctor told him that his memory loss and mental fogginess could be due to a worm in his brain that “ate a portion of it and then died.” Dispatches Work in Progress: No one knows what universities are for, Derek Thompson writes. Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read Illustration by Vartika Sharma for The Atlantic Ozempic or BustBy Daniel Engber In the early spring of 2020, Barb Herrera taped a signed note to a wall of her bedroom in Orlando, Florida, just above her pillow. Notice to EMS! it said. No vent! No intubation! She’d heard that hospitals were overflowing, and that doctors were being forced to choose which COVID patients they would try to save and which to abandon. She wanted to spare them the trouble. Barb was nearly 60 years old, and weighed about 400 pounds. She has type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and a host of other health concerns. At the start of the pandemic, she figured she was doomed. When she sent her list of passwords to her kids, who all live far away, they couldn’t help but think the same. “I was in an incredibly dark place,” she told me. “I would have died.” Read the full article.More From The Atlantic Taxpayers are about to subsidize a lot more sports stadiums. The absurdity of believing China’s great at protecting kids online Culture Break Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Teenie Harris Archive / Carnegie Museum of Art; Getty. Read. “When Nan Goldin Danced in Low-Life Go-Go Bars in Paterson, N.J.,” a poem by Rosa Alcalá:“While men fed her tips and she tucked them into her bikini, / a fist hit an eye in a house in Paterson, like a flash going off / in a dark kitchen. And in the corner, a girl stood watching.”Revisit an iconic photo. American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson, a book about Gordon Parks’s widely celebrated 1942 portrait of the government worker Ella Watson.Play our daily crossword.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
The Tight Line Trump Has a Judge WalkingThis is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Donald Trump is in his third week on trial in New York, where he faces 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. He’s accused of covering up a $130,000 hush-money payment made in 2016 to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels, who recently testified about her encounters with the former president. I spoke with Atlantic staff writer David A. Graham about where the case stands, Trump’s penchant for violating his gag order, and the bizarre nature of this trial.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: The nudes internet Trump’s latest abortion position is more radical than it sounds. “Listen to what they’re chanting,” Judith Shulevitz writes. Like an Ordinary CitizenStephanie Bai: To start off, let’s lay the groundwork for this trial. Can you briefly explain the case that the prosecutors are trying to make?David A. Graham: People talk about this as “the hush-money case,” but paying hush money is not itself illegal. What prosecutors are arguing is that Trump paid Stormy Daniels in exchange for her not talking about their alleged sexual relationship, and then falsified the business records to cover up that payment. They say that this constituted election interference because the goal was to keep knowledge of the relationship from voters during the 2016 election.The prosecution needs to establish that Trump was deeply involved in the creation and the payment of this hush-money agreement, because the defense is trying to say that Trump may not have been aware of the situation. When the prosecution questions people who worked in accounting at the Trump Organization, for example, they are trying to show that Trump was deeply involved in payments, deeply involved in the minutiae of the business—so he obviously would have been aware of a payout as big as $130,000.Stephanie: What is Trump’s defense team’s counterargument?David: They don’t deny that this money was paid, but they say that he didn’t falsify the records. They’re also trying to impugn the honesty of some of the witnesses. They mostly seem to be trying to pick apart aspects of the prosecution’s case rather than offering some sort of counternarrative.Stephanie: If the prosecution isn’t able to successfully prove that Trump was aware of the hush-money agreement, what does that mean for their case?David: If they can’t prove that Trump was involved, or if Trump’s lawyers can plausibly argue that he did this simply to protect his reputation or to protect his marriage rather than to interfere with the election, then the prosecutors will have a harder time getting the jury to convict.Stephanie: In defending comments Trump made about the trial, his attorney Todd Blanche said that Trump had a right to complain about the “two systems of justice.” In some ways, it seems like the prosecution is arguing two cases: the hush-money case, and the case for this being a legitimate, fair trial—and not the “political witch hunt” that Trump has called it. Let’s say that Trump ends up getting convicted. Do you think his supporters will accept that outcome?David: It depends on what that means. There was a poll yesterday saying that most people expect Trump to be convicted, and that includes a plurality of Republicans. So in that sense, they see what’s coming. But I think there’s a widespread sentiment that either he’s being prosecuted by Democrats who are out to get him or that what he did wasn’t wrong. If anything, the trial seems to be solidifying support within his base.Stephanie: At the core of this case is the extramarital affair Trump allegedly had during his marriage to Melania. Have we heard anything from her during this trial?David: We have not! Trump has brought a rotating posse with him to court, including not just his lawyers but also his aides, his campaign manager, and his son Eric. Melania has not been there. He complained that he had to be in court on her birthday, which is a little ironic given the alleged events that led to the case.Stephanie: Headlines and pundits have called this a “historic” and “unprecedented” trial, because it’s the first time a former president has gone to trial for criminal charges. Has this case set any precedents for how a criminal trial of a former president would proceed?David: This is not a legal precedent, but it’s been powerful to watch Trump have to show up in court when he clearly doesn’t want to be there, listen to testimony he doesn’t want to listen to, sit in this courtroom with a bad HVAC system, and endure it like an ordinary citizen. Even if he argues that he is above the rule of law, we are seeing him sit there like anyone else.Stephanie: Does the gag order, which has been imposed on Trump and bars him from attacking people involved in the trial, set any sort of precedent for presidential trials going forward?David: The gag order comes from Trump’s habit of attacking witnesses, the family of prosecutors and judges. I don’t know that you would get one of these as a standard practice with presidents. But each time you have a defendant who has that kind of history or who starts doing that, there’s a good chance of the gag order. Still, Trump has been able to exploit the weirdness of this case and get away with things that other defendants would not have.Stephanie: Can you say a bit more about how he’s exploited the weirdness of the case?David: Anytime he gets in trouble for saying something, he says, Look, I’m a politician running for office. I have to be able to make political speeches. It’s unfair for me to be muzzled. That’s something that the judge has had to figure out: How do you write a gag order that allows Trump to be a candidate but protects the witnesses and the sanctity of the case?To me, it also looks like Trump is daring the judge to jail him—like he concluded that getting sent to jail for a night or a weekend would actually help him politically. So the judge has to decide how much he protects the sanctity of the system by enforcing the gag order versus giving Trump an opportunity to undermine the system in an even bigger way by claiming political persecution.Stephanie: You wrote earlier this week that some of the best-sourced reporters in the courtroom are saying that Trump largely wants to avoid jail time. Is this a situation where Trump can spin either option in his favor?David: I think it’s very “heads I win, tails you lose.” If the judge lets him get away with it, he can talk all kinds of trash about the proceeding, and that’s a win for him because he wants to undermine the trial for political reasons. If he gets thrown in jail, I’m sure he would hate it, but it also gives him another political talking point.Stephanie: It seems like a very tight line for Judge Juan Merchan to walk.David: It’s really challenging. Every judge Trump has recently come before has had to deal with this in some way or another. They’re trying to figure out: How do we keep him in line without that becoming the story? They want the focus to be on the facts of the case. And that’s really hard to achieve with Trump, because he doesn’t want the focus to be on the facts.Related: The Stormy Daniels testimony spotlights Trump’s misogyny. Judge Merchan is out of good options. Today’s News Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said that President Joe Biden’s decision to pause weapons shipments to Israel was related to Israel’s plans to move forward with a large-scale offensive operation in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza. An appeals court in Georgia agreed to review the ruling that allowed Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to stay on the election-interference case against Trump after it was revealed that she had a romantic relationship with a prosecutor on her team. The New York Times reported that in a 2012 deposition, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that a doctor told him that his memory loss and mental fogginess could be due to a worm in his brain that “ate a portion of it and then died.” Dispatches Work in Progress: No one knows what universities are for, Derek Thompson writes. Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read Illustration by Vartika Sharma for The Atlantic Ozempic or BustBy Daniel Engber In the early spring of 2020, Barb Herrera taped a signed note to a wall of her bedroom in Orlando, Florida, just above her pillow. Notice to EMS! it said. No vent! No intubation! She’d heard that hospitals were overflowing, and that doctors were being forced to choose which COVID patients they would try to save and which to abandon. She wanted to spare them the trouble. Barb was nearly 60 years old, and weighed about 400 pounds. She has type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and a host of other health concerns. At the start of the pandemic, she figured she was doomed. When she sent her list of passwords to her kids, who all live far away, they couldn’t help but think the same. “I was in an incredibly dark place,” she told me. “I would have died.” Read the full article.More From The Atlantic Taxpayers are about to subsidize a lot more sports stadiums. The absurdity of believing China’s great at protecting kids online Culture Break Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Teenie Harris Archive / Carnegie Museum of Art; Getty. Read. “When Nan Goldin Danced in Low-Life Go-Go Bars in Paterson, N.J.,” a poem by Rosa Alcalá:“While men fed her tips and she tucked them into her bikini, / a fist hit an eye in a house in Paterson, like a flash going off / in a dark kitchen. And in the corner, a girl stood watching.”Revisit an iconic photo. American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson, a book about Gordon Parks’s widely celebrated 1942 portrait of the government worker Ella Watson.Play our daily crossword.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
House GOP caught off guard by effort to oust Speaker JohnsonMatt Gorman, Meghan Hays and CNN's Eva McKend speak with CNN's Jake Tapper
The US paused a weapons shipment to Israel. Is it a real shift in policy? Palestinians walk around the rubble of buildings destroyed after an Israeli attack on the As Salam neighborhood in Rafah, Gaza, on May 6, 2024. | Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images The US has offered unconditional military aid to Israel throughout the war in Gaza. Israel’s operation in Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza that houses more than a million displaced Palestinians, may have finally forced the Biden administration to do something it has been hesitant to do: pause a weapons shipment to Israel. The administration has been reluctant to restrict military aid to Israel in any way despite federal law requiring that it do so when members of a foreign military to which the US is providing aid commit gross human rights violations — something international organizations and individual nations have accused Israel of. But this week, US officials announced that they paused a shipment of thousands of bombs to Israel — the first known instance of the US withholding military aid since the start of the war. “We’re going to continue to do what’s necessary to ensure that Israel has the means to defend itself, but that said, we are currently reviewing some near-term security assistance shipments in the context of unfolding events in Rafah,” US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at a Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing on Wednesday. The decision comes as the death toll in Gaza has surpassed 34,000 and full-fledged famine has broken out in the north, with the rest of Gaza at famine risk in the coming months. A ceasefire agreement appeared within reach this week when Hamas announced that it had accepted a draft proposal negotiated by Egyptian and Qatari mediators that involved a release of all Israeli hostages taken during Hamas’s October 7 raid on Israel. Israel, however, refused that deal, saying the gaps in the negotiations remain wide. The Biden administration’s decision to pause the bomb shipment is a big step. “This action is welcome,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT), who has advocated against sending weapons to Israel for anything but defensive purposes, told Vox. “That sends a message I hope the Netanyahu government hears loud and clear.” At the same time, the decision to pause a weapons shipment is so far only a one-time occurrence. However, if the US were to continue to withhold weapons from Israel, that could signal an actual shift in the US policy of offering unconditional support to Israel. Some foreign affairs experts say existing US laws meant to safeguard human rights, including what is known as the “Leahy law” and the Foreign Assistance Act, should have long ago restricted the flow of military assistance to Israel, even predating the war in Gaza. With Israel in mind, President Joe Biden also signed a new memorandum in February that requires countries receiving US security assistance to provide “credible and reliable written assurances” that they will use American military assistance in accordance with international law. Under that memorandum, the US government is expected to issue a formal decision as soon as this week as to whether Israel has committed human rights abuses through its airstrikes on Gaza and by curbing the delivery of humanitarian aid. Reports have varied on what that decision may be. Depending on the outcome, that could lead to further restrictions on US military aid to Israel. “Our weapons cannot be used in ways that violate international law or where the government is interfering with the ability of the US to provide humanitarian aid,” Welch said. “So if there’s a finding that there’s a violation, I would argue that means we’ve got to stop delivering those weapons.” But despite a longstanding record of human rights abuses, Israel remains the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign aid, and Biden has been clear in his intent to maintain the US’s “special relationship” with Israel that goes back decades. What we know about the bomb shipment The shipment reportedly included 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs. The administration is also reportedly considering halting an upcoming shipment of 6,500 munitions that convert unguided bombs (“dumb bombs”) into precision-guided bombs. The held shipment could still be released, depending on what Israel does next. US officials have expressed particular concern about how the 2,000-pound bombs could be used to inflict mass destruction in a dense urban area such as Rafah, as they already have in other parts of Gaza. Biden had personally urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to undertake the operation in Rafah because of its vast refugee population, and because the city provides the only route for getting humanitarian aid into Gaza. Netanyahu appears to be proceeding anyway, further straining the two men’s already icy relationship. Overall, Biden has rarely directly criticized Israel, with his expression of outrage following the killings of humanitarian workers for World Central Kitchen being one of the few occasions on which he has done so publicly. (Biden has reportedly had some strong criticisms of Netanyahu in private.) Israel has seized the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, meaning that the Israeli military now controls the flow of humanitarian aid at a time when hospitals in southern Gaza are days away from running out of fuel. About 50,000 Palestinians have evacuated from Rafah ahead of Israel’s operation there, but many more remain and there is no plan to ensure their safety. Why withholding weapons from Israel matters The decision to pause a weapons shipment is only a temporary administrative decision that isn’t tied to any law. But it is an indication that the US is attempting to exert its leverage over Israel — and perhaps enforce its laws protecting human rights — in a way it has not before. The US was already providing Israel with $4 billion annually through 2028 before Congress approved another $14.1 billion in supplemental aid last month. Seven months into the war in Gaza, Israel is increasingly reliant on that aid, having run down its own munitions stores already. Foreign military transfers like those sent to Israel go through numerous reviews and approval processes, involving the State Department, Pentagon, and Congress. They are also governed by a set of laws, including the Leahy law. First approved by Congress in 1997, that law’s purpose is to prevent the US from being implicated in serious crimes committed by foreign security forces that it supports, by cutting off aid to a specific unit if the US has credible information that the unit committed a gross violation of human rights. Such violations generally include torture, extrajudicial killing, enforced disappearance, or rape, but can also be interpreted more broadly. No security forces, not even American ones, are entirely immune to committing such violations. Aid can be later reinstated if the State Department determines that the country is taking effective steps to bring responsible units to justice. Some former administration officials and congressional staff previously told Vox that the law has never had teeth against Israel, despite what human rights experts, both in and outside of the US government, have identified as substantive evidence that Israel has committed human rights violations both before and during the current war in Gaza. In one 2022 case, for example, a UN investigation found that Israeli forces killed Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist who worked for Al Jazeera, while she was covering a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank and was wearing a blue vest that read “Press.” Immediately following her killing, Israeli officials argued that she had been “filming and working for a media outlet amidst armed Palestinians” and may have been killed by stray Palestinian fire, something that those on the scene rebutted. Israel later admitted that she was likely killed by Israeli fire, but ruled her death accidental and never charged the soldiers involved. Some Senate Democrats, as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), have recently asked the Department of Defense to address concerns that the Leahy law is not being consistently applied to Israel. “Not a single incident resulted in the denial of assistance to any unit of the IDF,” the senators wrote in a letter. “In order for the United States to protect our own national security interests and maintain credibility as a global leader of human rights, we must apply the law equally.” The weapons shipment pause could be a first step in ensuring that Leahy is equitably applied.
The US paused a weapons shipment to Israel. Is it a real shift in policy? Palestinians walk around the rubble of buildings destroyed after an Israeli attack on the As Salam neighborhood in Rafah, Gaza, on May 6, 2024. | Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images The US has offered unconditional military aid to Israel throughout the war in Gaza. Israel’s operation in Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza that houses more than a million displaced Palestinians, may have finally forced the Biden administration to do something it has been hesitant to do: pause a weapons shipment to Israel. The administration has been reluctant to restrict military aid to Israel in any way despite federal law requiring that it do so when members of a foreign military to which the US is providing aid commit gross human rights violations — something international organizations and individual nations have accused Israel of. But this week, US officials announced that they paused a shipment of thousands of bombs to Israel — the first known instance of the US withholding military aid since the start of the war. “We’re going to continue to do what’s necessary to ensure that Israel has the means to defend itself, but that said, we are currently reviewing some near-term security assistance shipments in the context of unfolding events in Rafah,” US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at a Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing on Wednesday. The decision comes as the death toll in Gaza has surpassed 34,000 and full-fledged famine has broken out in the north, with the rest of Gaza at famine risk in the coming months. A ceasefire agreement appeared within reach this week when Hamas announced that it had accepted a draft proposal negotiated by Egyptian and Qatari mediators that involved a release of all Israeli hostages taken during Hamas’s October 7 raid on Israel. Israel, however, refused that deal, saying the gaps in the negotiations remain wide. The Biden administration’s decision to pause the bomb shipment is a big step. “This action is welcome,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT), who has advocated against sending weapons to Israel for anything but defensive purposes, told Vox. “That sends a message I hope the Netanyahu government hears loud and clear.” At the same time, the decision to pause a weapons shipment is so far only a one-time occurrence. However, if the US were to continue to withhold weapons from Israel, that could signal an actual shift in the US policy of offering unconditional support to Israel. Some foreign affairs experts say existing US laws meant to safeguard human rights, including what is known as the “Leahy law” and the Foreign Assistance Act, should have long ago restricted the flow of military assistance to Israel, even predating the war in Gaza. With Israel in mind, President Joe Biden also signed a new memorandum in February that requires countries receiving US security assistance to provide “credible and reliable written assurances” that they will use American military assistance in accordance with international law. Under that memorandum, the US government is expected to issue a formal decision as soon as this week as to whether Israel has committed human rights abuses through its airstrikes on Gaza and by curbing the delivery of humanitarian aid. Reports have varied on what that decision may be. Depending on the outcome, that could lead to further restrictions on US military aid to Israel. “Our weapons cannot be used in ways that violate international law or where the government is interfering with the ability of the US to provide humanitarian aid,” Welch said. “So if there’s a finding that there’s a violation, I would argue that means we’ve got to stop delivering those weapons.” But despite a longstanding record of human rights abuses, Israel remains the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign aid, and Biden has been clear in his intent to maintain the US’s “special relationship” with Israel that goes back decades. What we know about the bomb shipment The shipment reportedly included 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs. The administration is also reportedly considering halting an upcoming shipment of 6,500 munitions that convert unguided bombs (“dumb bombs”) into precision-guided bombs. The held shipment could still be released, depending on what Israel does next. US officials have expressed particular concern about how the 2,000-pound bombs could be used to inflict mass destruction in a dense urban area such as Rafah, as they already have in other parts of Gaza. Biden had personally urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to undertake the operation in Rafah because of its vast refugee population, and because the city provides the only route for getting humanitarian aid into Gaza. Netanyahu appears to be proceeding anyway, further straining the two men’s already icy relationship. Overall, Biden has rarely directly criticized Israel, with his expression of outrage following the killings of humanitarian workers for World Central Kitchen being one of the few occasions on which he has done so publicly. (Biden has reportedly had some strong criticisms of Netanyahu in private.) Israel has seized the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, meaning that the Israeli military now controls the flow of humanitarian aid at a time when hospitals in southern Gaza are days away from running out of fuel. About 50,000 Palestinians have evacuated from Rafah ahead of Israel’s operation there, but many more remain and there is no plan to ensure their safety. Why withholding weapons from Israel matters The decision to pause a weapons shipment is only a temporary administrative decision that isn’t tied to any law. But it is an indication that the US is attempting to exert its leverage over Israel — and perhaps enforce its laws protecting human rights — in a way it has not before. The US was already providing Israel with $4 billion annually through 2028 before Congress approved another $14.1 billion in supplemental aid last month. Seven months into the war in Gaza, Israel is increasingly reliant on that aid, having run down its own munitions stores already. Foreign military transfers like those sent to Israel go through numerous reviews and approval processes, involving the State Department, Pentagon, and Congress. They are also governed by a set of laws, including the Leahy law. First approved by Congress in 1997, that law’s purpose is to prevent the US from being implicated in serious crimes committed by foreign security forces that it supports, by cutting off aid to a specific unit if the US has credible information that the unit committed a gross violation of human rights. Such violations generally include torture, extrajudicial killing, enforced disappearance, or rape, but can also be interpreted more broadly. No security forces, not even American ones, are entirely immune to committing such violations. Aid can be later reinstated if the State Department determines that the country is taking effective steps to bring responsible units to justice. Some former administration officials and congressional staff previously told Vox that the law has never had teeth against Israel, despite what human rights experts, both in and outside of the US government, have identified as substantive evidence that Israel has committed human rights violations both before and during the current war in Gaza. In one 2022 case, for example, a UN investigation found that Israeli forces killed Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist who worked for Al Jazeera, while she was covering a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank and was wearing a blue vest that read “Press.” Immediately following her killing, Israeli officials argued that she had been “filming and working for a media outlet amidst armed Palestinians” and may have been killed by stray Palestinian fire, something that those on the scene rebutted. Israel later admitted that she was likely killed by Israeli fire, but ruled her death accidental and never charged the soldiers involved. Some Senate Democrats, as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), have recently asked the Department of Defense to address concerns that the Leahy law is not being consistently applied to Israel. “Not a single incident resulted in the denial of assistance to any unit of the IDF,” the senators wrote in a letter. “In order for the United States to protect our own national security interests and maintain credibility as a global leader of human rights, we must apply the law equally.” The weapons shipment pause could be a first step in ensuring that Leahy is equitably applied.
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Ex-KKK poster child R Derek Black quietly comes out as trans in new memoir: reportR Derek Black said that they were "quite happy about being often perceived as a girl" during childhood.
Cindy Adams pays tribute to her beloved mom for Mother’s Day: ‘The core of my being’Post columnist Cindy Adams remembers her late mother Jessica ahead of Mother's Day.
North Macedonia elects first woman president as center-left incumbents suffer historic lossesNorth Macedonia's Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova has been elected as the country's first woman president; she received close to 65% support with the majority of the vote counted in a presidential runoff.
Biden vows to withhold weapons from Israel if Netanyahu goes forward with Rafah invasionIn an interview with CNN, President Biden said he would withhold weapons from Israel if the Jewish State went forward with its invasion of the highly-populated city of Rafah.
Biden warns US will not supply weapons for Israel’s offensive attack on Hamas-controlled RafahWASHINGTON — President Biden said Wednesday that "I'm not supplying the weapons" if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu moves forward with a full attack on the Hamas-controlled city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip.
Biden’s Pause on Weapons Tests Ties to IsraelPresident Biden hopes the decision to withhold the delivery of 3,500 bombs will prompt Israel to change course in its war in Gaza.
Cops investigating Patrick Beverley hurling ball at Pacers fans during playoff lossCharges could be filed once the investigation is wrapped up and detectives will present the case to the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office, the department said in its statement.
Biden administration to propose narrow asylum regulation as border crisis remains top issue: reportThe Department of Homeland Security is believed to be rolling out a new rule to allow asylum officers to begin deporting some illegal immigrants sooner.
Police break up another protest by pro-Palestinian activists at the University of AmsterdamAmsterdam police ended a blockade created by hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists at the University of Amsterdam, in the second day in a row of unrest over Israel's war in Gaza.
Alvin Bragg, how about bringing the hammer down on NYC’s anti-Israel serial agitators?Hey, Bragg: How about getting serious and creative in investing, charging and criminally prosecuting the career agitators encouraging chaos across the city?
Pirates call up top prospect Paul Skenes after Triple-A dominationThe Pittsburgh Pirates are calling up their top prospect, right-hander Paul Skenes, who has been dominating at the Triple-A level this year.
Whistleblower speaks out on quality issues at Boeing supplierFormer Spirit AeroSystems worker Santiago Paredes was responsible for checking 737 Max fuselages before they were shipped to Boeing.
The Many Lessons of Steve AlbiniTo a certain kind of listener, it sometimes felt like he was the last honest musician in the industry.
Biden’s labor secretary could be forcing taxpayers to foot $32B in unemployment fraud she caused in California: GOP senatorsPresident Biden’s labor head could be forcing US taxpayers to foot the bill for roughly $32 billion in unemployment fraud she caused when serving during the COVID-19 pandemic as California’s top labor official, Republican senators wrote in a Wednesday letter. Sens. Bill Cassidy and Mike Crapo expressed concerns in a letter to Labor Secretary Julie...
El viaje más largo y extraño: algunos consumidores de drogas psicodélicas se ven atrapados en efectos no deseadosUna rara condición llamada trastorno de percepción persistente de alucinógenos ha desconcertado a los investigadores y ha generado alarmas a medida que los psicodélicos se vuelven populares.
Newsmax’s Ratings Have Crashed From Its Post-Tucker Carlson Sugar HighPhoto Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily BeastLast spring, pro-Trump cable channel Newsmax was riding a massive ratings surge after Fox News abruptly fired far-right primetime star Tucker Carlson, prompting disgruntled MAGA viewers to dump the conservative cable giant in protest.A year after transparently exploiting right-wing discontent over Fox’s removal of Carlson to gain a short-term boost in the cable news marketplace—which even saw the network occasionally surpass CNN in primetime—Newsmax is now experiencing a complete reversal of fortune.Despite a news cycle filled with high-profile events like Donald Trump’s hush money trial and the tumultuous pro-Palestine protests on college campuses, Newsmax’s primetime viewership has plummeted to its lowest levels of 2024. The decline is staggering, with a drop of over 60 percent in certain categories compared to the same period last year, as reported by Nielsen.Read more at The Daily Beast.
Newsmax’s Ratings Have Crashed From Its Post-Tucker Carlson Sugar HighPhoto Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily BeastLast spring, pro-Trump cable channel Newsmax was riding a massive ratings surge after Fox News abruptly fired far-right primetime star Tucker Carlson, prompting disgruntled MAGA viewers to dump the conservative cable giant in protest.A year after transparently exploiting right-wing discontent over Fox’s removal of Carlson to gain a short-term boost in the cable news marketplace—which even saw the network occasionally surpass CNN in primetime—Newsmax is now experiencing a complete reversal of fortune.Despite a news cycle filled with high-profile events like Donald Trump’s hush money trial and the tumultuous pro-Palestine protests on college campuses, Newsmax’s primetime viewership has plummeted to its lowest levels of 2024. The decline is staggering, with a drop of over 60 percent in certain categories compared to the same period last year, as reported by Nielsen.Read more at The Daily Beast.
Olivia Dunne hypes up boyfriend Paul Skenes after Pirates’ MLB call-upThe Pirates announced Wednesday that Skenes will join their MLB roster and make his big league debut against the Cubs on Saturday.
Students at Trinity College Dublin Dismantle Antiwar Protest CampStudents against the war in Gaza began taking down the camp after Trinity College Dublin said it would divest from three Israeli companies.
White House 'strongly opposes' GOP push to stop non-citizens being counted on censusThe White House "strongly opposes" an effort in Congress to place a citizenship question on the census in order to prevent non-citizens being accounted for congressional seats.
Gambling bill stalls in Alabama Legislature during session's final hoursA bill aimed at significantly liberalizing Alabama's gambling laws appears unlikely to progress any further in the Legislature this session.
