“Bari Weiss is not a journalist. She is an asset of the Trump administration,” said progressive group Our Revolution.
US President Donald Trump renewed his claims of momentum toward ending the conflict with Iran, after brokering a halt to hostilities between Israel and the Islamic Republic and easing tensions that had threatened to derail broader peace efforts.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan went on Fox News to warn that a key national security law is heading toward expiration Friday — and acknowledged that his own side may not be able to stop it.FISA Section 702, which Jordan described as responsible for more than 50 percent of the nation's most sensitive intelligence, is set to expire this week. Democrats are blocking reauthorization unless President Trump removes Bill Pulte from his role as Acting Director of National Intelligence. Jordan admitted to host Maria Bartiromo the two sides are at an impasse."It's a standoff," Jordan said.Pulte, who simultaneously serves as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, was installed as Acting DNI by Trump over Democratic objections that he lacks an intelligence background. Democrats have made his removal a condition for their votes on reauthorization.Jordan framed the Democratic position as political obstruction. "They're using this as leverage," he said. "This is typical Washington games. They want to play politics with national security."He defended Pulte as someone Trump trusts "to get the intelligence community back on track and focused on real threats, not going after conservatives or political opponents."But with the deadline days away and no deal in sight, Jordan's own description of the situation — a standoff — raises the possibility that a surveillance program Republicans have repeatedly called indispensable to national security could lapse because of a personnel dispute of the administration's own making.pic.twitter.com/q2QFsy4Z1Q— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) June 9, 2026
For Spencer Pratt's supporters, the last four days of the Los Angeles mayoral primary vote-counting and conclusion were like a gut punch delivered in slow motion.
Bari Weiss could be taking over the editorial leadership of another news network.Paramount has begun preliminary conversations with several top media executives about a business-side counterpart to Weiss, the CBS News editor-in-chief, as the company awaits regulatory approval of its proposed merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, two sources familiar with the matter told Axios."The search implies that if Paramount Skydance's deal with Warner Bros. Discovery goes through, Weiss would oversee all news editorial across both CBS News and CNN," Axios reported. "Her potential counterpart would manage business operations across both companies."Among the candidates under consideration are NBCUniversal News Group chairman Cesar Conde, CNN Worldwide CEO Mark Thompson and former NBC News president Noah Oppenheim. Paramount had also weighed Ben Sherwood, CEO of the Daily Beast and former ABC News president, and David Rhodes, former CBS News president and current Sky News executive chairman, according to a source familiar with the search.One candidate faces a procedural hurdle. Because Paramount is still awaiting regulatory clearance to acquire WBD, company executives are barred from holding conversations with any WBD personnel — which would include Thompson.Currently, CBS News president Tom Cibrowski serves alongside Weiss, reporting to George Cheeks, chair of TV media at Paramount. Weiss reports directly to Paramount chairman and CEO David Ellison.The role being sought would fill a void left by former CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon, who oversaw all business operations before resigning last year ahead of Skydance's merger with Paramount. No direct replacement was ever named.The search comes amid turbulence surrounding CBS News' flagship program "60 Minutes," though a source close to the process disputed recent reports suggesting Weiss' authority could be curtailed."The Paramount brass loves Bari Weiss," the source said. "She has the full confidence of David Ellison, who believes Bari has done a fantastic job as editor-in-chief."The search has not yet concluded. Federal regulators are expected to approve the merger, though attorneys general from California and New York are among a group preparing a lawsuit to block the deal.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has spent more than two decades winning Republican primaries in South Carolina without ever being forced into a runoff, but a sizable bloc of undecided voters could test that streak Tuesday in the state’s primary elections. A Citadel poll published last week found that 18% of likely Republican primary voters are […]
President Trump on Monday said two crew members who were aboard a U.S. attack helicopter when they crashed near the Strait of Hormuz are “fine.” The two crew members, whose AH-64 Apache helicopter was patrolling regional waters, were rescued within two hours after they crashed near Oman’s coast, according to U.S. Central Command (Centcom). The…
“It is a death sentence for us if larger nations continue to open new fossil fuel projects,” Feleti Teo, the prime minister of Tuvalu, said in 2024. Located roughly halfway between Australia and Hawaii, Tuvalu is a nation of extremely low-lying reef islands and atolls. Sea level rise—driven primarily by burning fossil fuels, which boosts global temperatures and melts polar ice sheets—threatens to put those islands and atolls underwater within the lifetimes of Tuvalu’s current inhabitants. No wonder Tuvalu, along with other Pacific island nations, will co-host a follow-up meeting to the landmark First Conference on Transitioning Away From Fossil Fuels held six weeks ago in Santa Marta, Colombia.So it comes as a shock to learn that Tuvalu’s government is heavily invested in fossil fuels, as revealed by an investigation published on May 28 by the global news agency Agence France-Presse. The Tuvalu Trust Fund, the nation’s largest financial asset, according to AFP, “has invested in coal mining, gas exploration and the world’s largest crude oil refinery,” reported correspondent Steven Trask, referring to the Jamnagar petrochemical complex in India. Income from the fund helps pay for government programs in Tuvalu, but it’s unclear how aware government officials were about the investments. Since 2022, the Tuvalu Trust Fund, which was first established in 1987, has been operated by Mercer, a consulting firm based in New York, which told AFP it did not comment on its clients’ portfolios. Presented with AFP’s findings, a spokesperson for the trust said it would review the fund’s holdings and continue “to seek to minimize its exposure to fossil fuel reserves and carbon emissions.”AFP’s exposé points to a jaw-dropping conflict in an investment portfolio for a nation that is quite literally disappearing as a result of climate change. It is also public-minded journalism at its best. It holds power to account. It reveals surprising information about two vital, often overlooked issues: sea level rise and fossil fuel production. It notes the implications not only for Tuvalu but for the broader world. And it accomplishes all of this at a time when some news outlets, especially in the U.S., are retreating from the climate story, as a recent white paper by Covering Climate Now, or CCNow, shows. AFP is demonstrating the value of staying the course.In the U.S., National Public Radio also offered fine climate reporting recently, airing a 19-minute podcast on May 24 that challenged the notion that the Trump administration’s hostility to climate action makes progress impossible. Julia Simon, NPR’s climate solutions correspondent, shared audio from the Santa Marta conference to illustrate what’s happening outside the U.S. Then it was off to Denver to hear about a city program to heat and cool buildings more sustainably. Then to Massachusetts, where volunteers plant carbon-absorbing “pocket forests” on abandoned land. Citing one of the studies behind CCNow’s 89 Percent Project, Simon concluded by reporting that “80 percent of people worldwide … want stronger climate action from their governments.”That widespread public sentiment makes what happened next all the more head-scratching: Four days later, NPR fired its climate editor and disbanded its climate desk. “Today, I was laid off by NPR,” Neela Banerjee, the head of NPR’s climate desk, posted on LinkedIn. She added, “The climate desk no longer exists separately but has been folded into the National Desk.” In other words, NPR still plans to cover climate change but without the focus and expertise provided by a dedicated team. Simon remains on staff.NPR’s climate desk was shut as part of broader budget cuts management said were necessary after Congress voted last year to eliminate federal subsidies for public media. But NPR’s “commitment to climate journalism has not changed,” NPR spokesperson Juliet Barbara said, in a statement to the Climate-Colored Goggles newsletter. NPR “has not eliminated our Climate team,” she added, “we have reorganized our newsroom.” Nevertheless, it’s hard not to conclude that NPR saw dedicated climate expertise as nonessential.At a time much of the planet is broiling in unseasonable heat, with worse to come this summer, that is a grievous misreading not only of the climate crisis but of the public’s interest in tackling it. CCNow’s white paper identified a number of news outlets—AFP, along with The Guardian, The New York Times, CNN, AP, and more—that are bucking the trend of deprioritizing the climate story. Most of them employ a climate team because it makes for more informed, engaging coverage.
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 9 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Over the weekend, Donald Trump erupted in crazed fury at NBC’s Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. What enraged him is that she dared to ask him for evidence to back up his many lies, in this case about elections in California allegedly being rigged against the GOP candidates. But we think this episode deserves a deeper deconstruction. A big reason Trump is so angry, we think, is that the MAGA online disinformation universe has been unable to entirely reinvent reality and use propaganda to inflate the GOP candidate’s strength into something it isn’t. In a sense, then, this saga is really about the failures of MAGA propaganda.So we’re talking about all of it with Gil Duran, a tech writer who’s based in California and tracks all this stuff. Good to have you on, Gil.Gil Duran: Thanks for having me.Sargent: So in two big races in California, the GOP candidates are struggling as the votes get counted. In the Los Angeles mayoral race, Democratic incumbent Karen Bass leads, and progressive candidate Nithya Raman has pulled ahead of Republican reality TV star Spencer Pratt for second place and a chance to go to the general election. In the California governor’s race, Republican Steve Hilton is vying with Tom Steyer for second place. Gil, can you just tell us a little bit about Spencer Pratt and Steve Hilton and why the online right is so heavily invested in them?Duran: Sure. Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt are right-wing D-list celebrities who are desperate enough for attention to run for office in California, where they have virtually no chance of winning. Both of them have backgrounds mostly as entertainers. Spencer Pratt was a reality TV star, a sort of villainous character on a show called The Hills for many years. And Steve Hilton has a political background in the U.K. where he was an advisor to David Cameron, but most recently since coming to the United States has been a Fox News host. And he went from being a guy who was sort of what we would have considered a moderate Republican to being a complete right-wing lunatic during his time at Fox News. I know this because I actually met with Steve Hilton when he moved to the U.S. in 2014 and he was a totally different guy than he was a few years later on Fox News.And so both of them are trying to parlay their status as sort of right-wing low-level celebrities into political office in California, but that’s not very easy to do.Sargent: Just to be clear, what this means for Spencer Pratt is that if he gets edged out of second place by the progressive, Nithya Raman, then he doesn’t get to go to the general, correct? And so what’s really at stake here is, as the votes get counted, it’s really possible Spencer Pratt gets knocked out of contention. Is that what the situation is?Duran: Yeah, and it looks like it’s pretty certain that he’s now knocked out of contention. In the LA mayor’s race and in the California gubernatorial race, the top two vote-getters get to go to the general election. And in the gubernatorial race, it looks pretty clear that Steve Hilton will probably be in the general election. He’s edging out billionaire Tom Steyer for votes. Looks like Steyer is going to come in third place. So it’ll be Hilton versus Becerra. You’ll have a Republican and a Democrat in the gubernatorial race.But the LA race is nonpartisan. And LA is heavily Democratic by voter registration—LA is 52 percent Democratic voters compared to 19 percent Republicans. So with Spencer Pratt running with the MAGA endorsements as the right-wing reality TV guy, it’s not a big surprise that he wouldn’t make the top two. In fact, the polls showed him in third. What happened though is that in California, the early votes tend to be the more conservative ones. And so there was this idea that maybe he would make it, and that turns out to be a false prediction or false assumption. And most people familiar with the process knew that was a likely outcome.Sargent: So that’s the context for Trump’s blowup with NBC’s Kristen Welker. Here’s what happened. Trump first lied his ass off about the 2020 election being rigged. She challenged that. Then he brought up the California races and said those are also rigged. Kristen Welker challenged that as well. She said, look, your candidates—meaning the two Republicans we’re discussing here—look, they’re doing well. And then Trump said, well, no, they’re not. They’re dropping fast. And Trump meant by this that they’re dropping fast as the votes are getting counted. Listen to how it went south from there.Donald Trump (voiceover): They’re dropping fast because it’s a rigged election.