A white van drove into a crowd of the alphabet supporters at the big gay pride event in Berlin, Germany. At least one person is killed with many more reported as injured. Police are looking for the suspect who drove away. Berlin AP — A van slammed into people gathered for Berlin’s famed LGBTQ+ event […]
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A federal court dealt a major blow to President Donald Trump’s efforts to limit the use of mail-in ballots for the upcoming midterm elections, sparking a chorus of celebration among Trump administration critics.On Saturday, The U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to block a lower court order that prohibited the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) from carrying out the president’s executive order on mail-in ballots. Signed in March, Trump’s executive order would require states to send the federal government a list of all its voters it plans on sending absentee ballots. The USPS could then refuse to deliver mail-in ballots to any voters not on the list, essentially forcing states to fork over private and detailed voter information to the executive branch.With Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in ballots hitting another hurdle on Saturday, a number of onlookers celebrated, including Kristen McKnight, an advocate for survivors of abuse and a retired clinical psychologist.“Good news,” McKnight wrote Saturday in a social media post on X.Craig Goedecke, an amateur weather observer and retired photojournalist, not only celebrated the federal court’s decision Saturday, but argued that the ruling boded poorly for Trump’s other top priority, the SAVE Act, his controversial voter ID bill.“Back the F off from our mail ballots. Your SAVE Act crap is over. The First [Circuit] Court denied your request to allow the USPS to move forward,” Goedecke wrote Saturday in a social media post on X.“It’s illegal. Our election. Our votes. Our mail-in ballots. Not yours. You are not rigging our election… and the Senate is not passing it.”Good news.👇 https://t.co/zRdfxQkw8I— Kristen McKnight (@kristenmcknight) July 25, 2026
A bereaved new widow could not gather the will to respond to news that the Pentagon had still not replaced the names of her husband and three other soldiers to the public casualty count of soldiers killed during President Donald Trump’s Iran war last weekend.The Pentagon’s official online list of service member casualties did not include the four soldiers despite the fact that their names were included in a Pentagon press release on the formal transfer of their remains back to the United States on Wednesday. CNN anchor Erin Burnett reported on Friday that a day after the Pentagon suddenly changed its casualty count in the Iraq war, the websites that tracks war casualties still had the wrong number posted with just 14 fatalities listed, despite 18 service members being killed in the Iraq war since Operation Epic. Fury began.Jamiah Gonzalez-Swinton, wife of Sgt. Michael Swinton, could barely offer reactions to the news, however, on CNN’s “Erin Burnett Out Front.”“Now, the Pentagon does say it's a glitch,” Burnett told Swinton. “Has anyone spoken to you about this or told you anything about it?”After a long pause while gathering her nerve, Swinton replied: Um, nobody. Nobody has reached out yet.”“Um. Wow. Um. I kind of don't have words for that,” Swinton added after another visible effort.Earlier in the interview, before collapsing into emotion, Swinton described Sgt. Michael Swinton as “a big mush ball” for his new daughter. “It was beautiful to see their bond. Their bond was so strong,” she said, adding that her last video with her husband was three days before his death, but that the conference “felt different.”“He just sounded different,” she told Burnett. “Like, I don't want to say he sounded scared, but the way he spoke, he, you know, he said that he loved me. He wanted to talk to our daughter, and he was asking me if I was okay. And the conversation didn't even last a minute. And I just I was like, man, even the time of day that he called was really early in the morning for him. And it wasn't like him to call at that time. So, it just, the whole thing just felt off.”“I know that you said in those final days he sounded exhausted. Do you think that that he knew that things really had just become so much more dangerous in these past days,” Burnett pressed.“Um, I didn't share this yet, but he had sent me a message and he said, ‘you know, if I die, just make sure that my kids know that I love them.’ And that was maybe a month before this happened. So, I think we all knew that things were getting pretty serious. I just didn't think this would be the outcome. I don't think any of us did,” Swinton said.Trump, who unilaterally started the war with Iran, has himself ducked the draft and military combat during the Vietnam War through numerous educational and then medical deferments. After graduation in 1968, he avoided military service with a 1-Y medical deferment, which he said was due to a problem with his foot, earning him the name “Captain Bone Spurs” among critics. - YouTube youtu.be
About half of Americans think natural gas—a methane-based, planet-warming fuel—is a “clean” energy source, according to a recent poll. And a long-running fossil fuel industry marketing campaign might be to blame. The “clean natural gas” label is a myth. Methane, the primary component of natural gas fuel, is a far more potent greenhouse gas than […]
Amid swirling rumors that President Donald Trump and his administration are plotting a "massive" renewed military assault on Iran, experts who spoke with The Hill dumped cold water on the idea, warning that such a thing likely would not be enough to subdue Iran.In a report published Saturday morning, The Hill cited conversations with various foreign affairs and defense experts who warned about the efficacy of "an intensified air strike campaign" against Iran, even one that might, as Trump has threatened repeatedly, target "bridges, water facilities and electricity plants." They warned that even this sort of plan would not be enough to extract major concessions from Iran in the ongoing peace talks.“I don’t think it will change Iran’s calculation in any way, because from Iran’s perspective, this is when they said it publicly, that this is a war of survival for them. So bombing from the air is not going to change Iran’s calculation, even if the U.S. intensifies it,” Sina Azodi, director of the Middle East Studies Program at George Washington University, told the outlet. “The only thing that will happen is that, first of all, the entire region is going to suffer more. The Iranians have made it very clear. I think it destroys any chance of diplomacy.” He added: "You can’t just do a ceasefire. You need a comprehensive agreement that it’s language is no longer open to interpretation. And quite frankly, U.S. has to, when it makes a commitment, it needs to abide by it."Another source, described as an anonymous "former senior U.S. defense official, told The Hill that airstrikes are unlikely to yield any meaningful progress, and argued that it would be impossible "without collectively enforcing the naval blockade, securing to some degree the traffic going through the Strait of Hormuz and absorbing some of the international economic cost as a long-term strategy.""But you’re not going to bomb yourself into a ceasefire," they said. "I think you’ve got to be able to put the economic instrument of power just as make it just as significant as what you’re doing [militarily]."Michael “Mick” Mulroy, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, also cast doubt on the efficacy of heavy airstrikes, but also noted that the options left to the U.S. at this point "aren’t good.""If we allow them to sell their oil, if we unfreeze assets, they’re going to use it to rebuild those capacities potentially faster than we really rebuild the precision munitions and interceptors that we use during a conflict, and we have to get into a new nuclear agreement," Mulroy explained. "If we don’t, then this, at least from the nuclear side, would be a perpetual conflict, because the other way of preventing them from ever getting a nuclear weapon is to periodically target the facilities that are making the potential nuclear weapon. So the options are not good.”
CNN pushed back furiously after President Donald Trump turned Friday's White House Correspondents' Dinner into a mocking fest for reporter Kaitlan Collins — including a jab likening her to a transgender influencer.Trump set his sights on Collins roughly 10 minutes into his remarks at the rescheduled gathering, held at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, according to The Daily Beast. Collins had just accepted the WHCA's Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure for her reporting on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's February 2025 Oval Office blowup with Trump — a prize the president promptly dismissed as "fake.""She's a young, attractive woman," Trump told the crowd. "She never smiles. I said, 'Kaitlan do you ever smile? Smile!' You have a nice position; you're at CNN fake news. You should be a happy person. So smile, Kaitlan! Just smile."He then teased that Collins had landed a major sponsorship, before delivering the punchline that it was actually transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney on the Bud Light can, a reference to the 2023 conservative boycott of the beer brand. The riff was met with near silence."That was an appalling hit at our colleague Kaitlan Collins," responded CNN's Betsy Klein.Chief Media Analyst Brian Stelter flagged that a rebuttal from Collins' team was already circulating before Trump had wrapped up his remarks. "And the fact that CNN had a statement supporting Kaitlan ready to go... in advance... tells you everything about this media moment," he wrote.Chief National Affairs Correspondent Jeff Zeleny zeroed in on the contradiction of a commander-in-chief who routinely denounces the press nevertheless spending an entire evening at a dinner devoted to them. "For a president who complains so bitterly about the press, there's never been anyone in the history of the modern presidency who spends as much time talking to reporters," Zeleny wrote.CNN's Kristen Holmes delivered the sharpest jab of the night. "In addition to how much he speaks to the press, he is also one of the most unreliable sources at the White House," she said.The smile jab was not new. Trump has publicly hectored Collins about her facial expressions for months, telling her in June she had "hatred in her eyes" and calling her a "corrupt reporter."Friday's dinner was Trump's first as president. Originally scheduled for April, it was postponed after a gunman breached security outside the ballroom. The scaled-back redo drew about 700 guests, roughly a quarter of the original crowd. The 80-year-old president was also seen repeatedly closing his eyes for extended stretches as awards were handed out earlier in the evening.
