The crash of a Russian drone into a Romanian apartment building on Friday laid bare Europe’s lack of preparedness in confronting modern aerial warfare even as fighting rages across the border in Ukraine for a fifth year.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth praised defense allies in Asia and hailed newly stable ties with China, while taking swipes at longstanding security partners in Europe.
Malaysia will not rush to increase its defense budget despite US pressure for partners to become more self-reliant, as the Southeast Asian nation seeks to balance military modernization with other critical sectors, Defense Minister Mohamed Khaled Nordin said.
The Texas Senate race has become a national laboratory for anti-"woke" politics, testing whether voters still recoil from the language of 2020 amid the economic pain of 2026.Why it matters: Republicans came away from 2024 convinced they had won more than an election — they had broken through on culture, turning Democrats' progressive language and identity politics into symbols of elite detachment.The durability of that culture-war coup is now an open question, as the GOP tries to redeploy the same playbook in a far more hostile midterm environment.Zoom in: Texas has produced a Senate race in which both parties see the other nominee as the perfect caricature of everything voters hate about the opposition.For Republicans: Texas state Rep. James Talarico offers the dream target — a young, viral progressive whose old comments can be stripped of context and turned into a one-man museum of "woke" Democratic excess.Republicans have seized on Talarico's 2021 floor speech declaring that "God is nonbinary," along with past comments on racism, whiteness and trans children, to cast him as a radical disguised as a Texas preacher.The attacks already are veering into sexuality- and masculinity-coded territory: Talarico's opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, has mocked him as "Low-T," while White House adviser Stephen Miller falsely labeled him as Democrats' "first transgender Senate candidate."Talarico has conceded that he "missed the mark" on some "cringey comments," while insisting his underlying principles — that "racism is immoral and wrong" and that "trans people deserve dignity and equality" — flow from his Christian faith.For Democrats: Paxton is a scandal-scarred Trump ally whose legal and ethical baggage could turn even a red-state Senate race into a referendum on Republican corruption.Paxton was impeached by the GOP-led Texas House in 2023 — then acquitted by the Texas Senate — over allegations that he abused his office to benefit a donor.He spent nearly a decade under indictment on fraud charges before reaching a pretrial deal in 2024, and has been plagued by whistleblower claims, a now-closed federal corruption probe and a very public divorce tied to allegations of adultery.Talarico's campaign wants to make Paxton the face of Republican impunity — arguing that his scandals are not distractions from the race, but the clearest evidence of what the GOP has become.Between the lines: Republicans believe Texas will prove the anti-"woke" playbook still works. Democrats believe prices, Paxton and two years of Trump have changed the terms of the fight.An influx of new residents — plus signs of buyer's remorse among Latinos who backed Trump — has cracked open a once-unthinkable Democratic scenario: Texas as the path to a Senate majority.Flashback: The Trump campaign's most memorable 2024 attack ad turned trans rights into a broad indictment of Democratic priorities, ending with the now-famous tagline: "Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you."Testing by Harris' top super PAC found the ad — which highlighted her 2019 support for taxpayer-funded gender-transition surgeries for prisoners and detained immigrants — moved viewers 2.7 points toward Trump.The big picture: The ad worked because it converted one obscure policy position into a sweeping theory of Democratic "wokeness": a party fluent in elite cultural language, but alien to voters' daily lives.But it didn't work in isolation: The Biden administration's handling of inflation, immigration and affordability were already making Democrats look out of touch before "they/them" gave the GOP the perfect slogan.Today, those forces have flipped: Trump is now 52 points underwater on inflation, turning the economy from a tailwind into the central threat to his party's midterm survival.The bottom line: Texas will be the ultimate test of whether the GOP's anti-"woke" strategy can survive the transition from insurgency to incumbency.
President Donald Trump reached an unprecedented agreement with his own Justice Department last week in which he, his family and his businesses would be granted broad tax immunity, but some experts say the agreement would be effectively worthless the moment Trump loses power, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday, kicking off a potential tax reckoning.“[Acting Attorney General Todd] Blanche signed an agreement that is not worth the paper it’s written on – except that government personnel at present will not challenge it,” said Stuart Bassin, a former Justice Department tax litigator, speaking with the Journal.Trump reached the agreement after agreeing to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) he filed over his tax returns leaking in 2019. In exchange, Trump received a nearly $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded settlement for his newly created “anti-weaponization fund,” designed to compensate those who’ve alleged to have been unfairly targeted by the Biden administration’s DOJ, including violent Jan. 6 Capitol rioters.In addition to the $1.8 billion settlement, the agreement also ended all pending audits of tax returns of Trump, his family and his businesses, despite the federal government having several "plausible defenses that it never asserted,” the Journal reported.Even so, several experts pointed out several flaws in the agreement. One, the agreement left open the opportunity for states to pursue their own audits of some of the president’s tax filings.“Trump and Blanche can give away federal stuff. They can’t give away the state stuff,” Bassin told the Journal.Secondly, the IRS has no deadline for unfiled gift tax returns, noted Duke University tax law professor Larence Zelenak, speaking with the Journal.“A future IRS could contend that Trump effectively received the $1.8 billion in the settlement agreement and directed it as gifts to fund recipients,” the Journal wrote, paraphrasing Zelenak’s comments. “Under that argument, which the settlement attempts to prevent, Trump could have taxable income and taxable gifts.”And thirdly, once Trump leaves the White House, the IRS under a different administration could simply perform an audit on Trump’s tax returns, the Journal’s report reads.“Typically, the IRS gets three years to audit a return, which would likely keep returns from tax years 2025 and beyond open to examination,” the report reads. “But there are exceptions that let the IRS reach further back. The IRS has six years if there are substantial omissions of income, and an unlimited amount of time to pursue tax fraud.”
The Treasury Department says it’s preparing to roll out $250 bills with President Trump’s face on it, as the U.S. celebrates in 250th birthday on Independence Day. But first, it will need Congress to green light the new bill. NBC News’ Monica Alba reports.
The former superintendent of Iowa’s largest school district who was arrested last year in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown was sentenced Friday to two years in prison.
A Russian drone that was part of an overnight attack on Ukraine crashed into an apartment building in eastern Romania, injuring two people, Romanian authorities said Friday.
On May 29, 2026, Italian prosecutors formally requested a life sentence for Cinzia Dal Pino, a 65-year-old businesswoman from Viareggio who ran over and killed Said Malkoun with her SUV after he stole her bag. The post Italian Woman Faces Life in Prison for Hitting North African Illegal Alien With Car After He Robbed Her appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.