Iran attacks Bahrain and Kuwait following US strikes and threatens to halt talks to end the war
Center
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran launched drone and missile attacks Sunday targeting Bahrain and Kuwait in response to U.S. airstrikes that hit the Islamic Republic, and threatened a “complete halt” in negotiations to end the war if Washington continues its attacks. Efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz without Iran's direct oversight sparked [...]
Markwayne Mullin’s remarks come after controversial supreme court ruling to strip TPS from over 350,000 peopleMigrants in the US on temporary protected status should seek permanent residence or leave, Markwayne Mullin, Homeland Security secretary, said in the wake of last week’s supreme court decision that stripped humanitarian protections from hundreds of thousands of immigrants.The remarks to CNN’s State of the Union program comes after a decision that could allow Donald Trump’s administration to deport Haitian and Syrian immigrants to home countries plagued by conflict and destitution. Continue reading...
President Donald Trump's unveiling of a redesigned U.S. passport — complete with a "welcome" message and an image of himself — drew ridicule this week, with critics arguing the greeting makes no sense on a document meant for Americans traveling abroad.Trump had posted an image of what he called the new commemorative passport, marking the country's 250th anniversary, writing: "The U.S.A.'s New Passport, which says, 'Welcome, but be good!' President DJT." The design featured a photo of the president alongside patriotic imagery.The anti-Trump conservative outlet The Bulwark seized on the "welcome" framing in a segment by host Tim Miller, who questioned whether the president grasped the basic purpose of the document.In the video, Miller noted that Trump had updated the passport with the message "Welcome, but be good," then raised the obvious problem."This raises the question, does Donald Trump know what a passport is for? Welcome to who? The US passport is for Americans. We use it to go other places," Miller said.He framed the confusion as cause for concern about the president's faculties, in a line The Bulwark highlighted: "It's pretty concerning that the President of the United States either is so stupid that he doesn't know what a passport is or that his mentals are declining at such a rate that he's forgotten."Miller went on to mock the image of the president on the document, describing "a glowering president reminding Americans welcome in your own house, in your own country" — before working in a reference to Trump's legal history with the aside, "I've been indicted several times."He closed with a note of resignation: "This is it, I guess. This is real life."Conservative commentator and Bulwark contributor Bill Kristol also amplified the segment, calling Miller's take "very good" and adding his own variation on the critique."Trump clearly doesn't understand that a passport is for Americans, since the message he's delivering is suitable for a visa for foreigners," Kristol wrote.
Tehran launched drone and missile attacks on Bahrain and Kuwait Sunday, threatening to halt negotiations with the U.S. entirely. Meanwhile, violence between Israel and Hezbollah has escalated.
Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance praised Justice Elena Kagan's dissent in the Supreme Court's recent ruling on Temporary Protected Status as a devastating rebuke of the conservative majority — one that forced into print the very comments her colleagues "cannot even bear to repeat."Writing in her newsletter, Civil Discourse, Vance broke down the 6-3 decision, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, which held that courts cannot review a president's decisions about TPS. The ruling cleared the way for the Trump administration to end protections for roughly 336,000 people legally present in the U.S. due to natural disasters and armed conflict in their home countries, including Haitians and Syrians.Vance noted the decision's striking detail that Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who has two adopted children from Haiti, joined the majority.The heart of Vance's analysis centered on the majority's handling of a claim that the administration's decision was impermissibly based on race. Vance argued the Court's willingness to disregard the evidence was "so transparently in contravention of the facts" that it suggests the exception for constitutional claims "exists on paper" but will never carry weight with this Court.It was Kagan's dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, that Vance singled out as essential reading. She highlighted Kagan's pointed observation that the evidence of racial motivation was "plain to see, in the President's statements, which the majority (and for that matter, his own lawyers) cannot even bear to repeat.""Ouch," Vance wrote.Vance walked through the legal standard at issue, drawn from the 1977 case Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., under which plaintiffs need only show that a discriminatory purpose was "a motivating factor" in the decision. She emphasized Kagan's accounting of the remarks the majority declined to reproduce — including President Donald Trump's claims about Haitians eating pets, his description of Haiti as a "s---hole country," and his assertion that Haitian immigration was "like a death wish for our country" and "poisoning the blood" of the nation.Vance underscored Kagan's blunt conclusion that the references "of filth, disease, and primitiveness — are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes," and that it was "hard to imagine the statements being made today of any White community."Quoting Kagan's assessment that the statements "fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President's resolve to remove Haitians from this country," Vance argued the majority chose to ignore them in order to hand still more power to a president willing to abuse it.Vance also drew attention to the human stakes Kagan foregrounded, recounting the case of plaintiff Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, a Haitian national who has held TPS for 15 years and works in a California laboratory researching Alzheimer's. Miot, who suffers from Type 1 diabetes, would face what Vance described as potentially fatal consequences if forced to return to Haiti's collapsed healthcare system.Looking ahead, Vance cautioned readers not to celebrate if the Court rules against Trump in the separate birthright citizenship case expected this week, arguing that rejecting such a "boldly illegal" effort to rewrite the Constitution is "a low bar for the Supreme Court to clear."She closed by placing the TPS ruling in grim historical company, predicting it would join decisions like Dred Scott and Korematsu in what she called "a Supreme Court walk of shame."
When President Trump stated that Haiti was a “shithole country”, Jake Tapper and the professional political left went bananas and claimed it was a vibrant nation filled with culture and beauty. When President Trump announces the Temporary Protective Status (TPS) has ended for illegal alien migrants from Haiti, Jake Tapper and the professional political left […]
The post Sunday Talks – Jake Tapper Laments Deportation for Haitian and Syrian Migrants appeared first on The Last Refuge.
Iranian state media has reportedly declared that the country now has "no choice but to obtain the atomic bomb," according to a post circulating online — a statement that, if accurate, would mark a dramatic escalation amid the ongoing exchange of strikes between the U.S. and Iran.The claim was relayed by the account The Hormuz Letter, which posted what it described as a breaking statement from Iranian state media. According to that post, Iranian state media argued the country must "absolutely reach nuclear deterrence" before current negotiations can be conducted, framing the pursuit of a weapon as necessary to remove what it called "the military option for the occupation and partitioning of Iran" from the table.The reported statement seized the attention of David Pyne, an America First conservative who posts under @AmericaFirstCon and who has been sharply critical of the administration's handling of Iran. Pyne argued the development vindicated his earlier warnings about the consequences of President Donald Trump's approach."Iran is responding to Trump's continued nuclear threats against it by building more nuclear missiles just as I predicted they would do," Pyne wrote. He contended that "Trump's war on Iran hasn't reduced Iran's nuclear threat in any way" but had instead "served to greatly magnify and expand Iran's nuclear threat against the US and Israel."Pyne went further, delivering a stinging assessment of the president's broader record."Trump's disastrous foreign policy and endless unwinnable wars make Jimmy Carter look like a veritable foreign policy genius by comparison," he wrote.The reported statement also caught the attention of Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, who reacted with unease. "Ugh. Hope it's just bluster; fear it is not," McFaul wrote, sharing the same post.The reported declaration comes against the backdrop of a rapidly deteriorating ceasefire, with the U.S. carrying out repeated strikes on Iranian targets in recent days and Trump himself warning that "the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist" if forced to "militarily complete the job." Trump has also continued to insist that "Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon."The Iranian framing — that only a nuclear deterrent can forestall foreign intervention — runs directly counter to the administration's stated goal of ending Tehran's weapons ambitions, and underscores the risk that the military campaign could harden rather than halt Iran's nuclear drive.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani launched an intellectually dishonest attack on Israel that wouldn’t survive five minutes of scrutiny. Asked point-blank whether he supports Israel as a Jewish state, he waffled, hedged, and retreated into a fog of false equivalence. Don’t be fooled. This wasn’t principle. It was pandering dressed up as philosophy. Reporter: Israel ...
