Do Jewish leaders really prefer an antisemite over Israeli official?

The Morning Briefing: OK, I Think President Trump Really Enjoys Trolling Kristen Welker

Ex-Israeli official decodes Trump's early morning demand: 'Not my war anymore'

A former Israeli diplomat reacted in real time to a social media post by President Donald Trump on the latest developments in the Iran war.The 79-year-old president demanded "Israel and Iran must immediately stop 'shooting,'" and former Israeli consul general Alon Pinkas appeared minutes later on CNN to offer his analysis of the extremely short Truth Social post."This is something you would expect from the president to say, you know, the diplomatic lingo of show restraint, exercise caution, patience, and so on. It's clear that he, President Trump, had to make this statement, but basically what the statement is saying, you know, the underlining, the underlining logic of it is that 'this is not my war anymore, I, President Trump, this is not my war anymore – this is between Israel and Iran, and I'm not part of this, I'm pursuing negotiations to get a deal. Good deal, bad deal, mediocre deal, we could discuss this.'""Yeah, he's basically saying to Mr. Netanyahu, you're on your own, and he's basically saying to the Iranians, 'Well, 'you're not necessarily going to have a deal if you keep on shooting,'" Pinkas added. "But the bottom line is this: 'I'm not involved in this.'"Trump has been pressing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop attacks on Lebanon to give him space to pursue a deal with Iran to end the war, but he has ignored the president's warning and Israel and Iran have traded strikes over the weekend in the worst escalation since a truce in April."Netanyahu and Trump have a different political calculus," Pinkas said. "Trump is saying, 'I want to end this war and I can rein in Israel, and I and I will tell them what to do, and they will do what I tell them, and I call the shots,' etc., etc. Netanyahu, on the other hand, has defied Trump three times in the last three weeks with breaking violating the cease fire in Lebanon, with attacking the Dacia, which is the quarter the neighborhood, the area in Beirut where mostly is centered despite Trump's warnings and again last night when Iran launched a barrage of missiles. Trump called on Netanyahu to show restraint and exercise restraint and and not retaliate, and three times Netanyahu defied him.""Netanyahu is speaking to a domestic audience," he added. "He's got an election in two or three months, either in September or October, three or four months. So Netanyahu wants to brag that I stood up to the American president and came to national security and came to the defense of Israel. I stood up, and only I could do this. What Mr. Trump is doing in stating more than once that he calls the shots and Netanyahu will have no choice but to accept he's talking not necessarily about the ceasefire, but about a a framework or a provisional or a memorandum type of deal with Iran." - YouTube youtu.be

European Leaders Join Ukraine’s Call for Ceasefire With Russia

European leaders called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree to an immediate and complete ceasefire that allows talks to begin on a lasting peace deal.

Lawmaker pushes panic button on 'really stupid' Trump move that is 'not getting attention'

The Trump administration is dismantling a $368 million deep-ocean monitoring network at the precise moment scientists say the world's oceans are behaving in alarming ways — and a Democratic congressman says the timing is not a coincidence.Rep. Mike Levin, a California Democrat and environmental attorney who represents San Diego's North County coast, posted a scathing response Saturday to CNN's reporting on the decision, arguing the move serves a hidden agenda."The same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea for minerals," Levin wrote. "So they are destroying the only tools that could measure what that mining does. That is not an accident. That is the point. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first."The system being dismantled is the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network of more than 900 instruments positioned throughout the world's oceans that launched in 2016 with an expected 25-year lifespan. It provides continuous real-time data on ocean temperatures, carbon absorption, circulation patterns, and coastal flooding risks. The Trump administration's fiscal 2026 budget cut its funding by 80 percent, and removal of the anchored instruments began this month from sites off Oregon, North Carolina, and the Irminger Sea near Greenland.Scientists say the timing could not be worse. Ocean temperatures are breaking records. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — the system of currents that regulates climate across the Northern Hemisphere — is showing signs of potential collapse, a scenario researchers warn could bring severe winters to Europe and accelerating sea level rise on the U.S. East Coast.The administration described the decision as a "nimbler approach" and "smart lifecycle management." Levin was unimpressed. "That is fancy nonsense for 'we shut it off and hoped nobody would ask why,'" he wrote. "There is no return-on-investment analysis. They cannot show taxpayers save a dime, because the gear is already paid for and the science it produces protects real money and real lives."His bottom line: "That is not budgeting. That is smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire and calling it efficiency."

Trump Calls California Primary 'Rigged.' Here's What's Really Happening

California election officials say the state's drawn-out tally is by design, not the result of fraud.

What really drove Trump's Big Lie — and why we're about to find out

The FBI agents arrived at David Bolter’s Milwaukee home on a cool, cloudy Wednesday morning in late May. They were armed with a list of questions for the 2020 poll worker, who had raised concerns about the way local officials handled the 2020 election, Bolter told Votebeat.This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.President Donald Trump relied on Bolter’s claims in an unsuccessful 2020 lawsuit that sought to throw out more than 220,000 votes. That would have been more than enough to move Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes from Democrat Joe Biden, who won the state, to Trump. Though courts, several election reviews, and many audits rejected Trump’s claims, the Republican never stopped believing that he was cheated out of the presidency in 2020.That appears to be why, last month, the FBI sent agents back to Milwaukee to question Bolter as part of an expanding national effort by the second Trump administration to investigate long-debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election. The investigation into the 2020 election appears to be relying on already disproven allegations from people like Bolter. Bolter declined to divulge more about his conversation with the FBI, which has not been previously reported, but allegations from Bolter’s 2020 affidavit were central to some conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. For example, he alleged that somebody in Milwaukee’s absentee ballot counting facility announced around midnight on Election Day that a “huge truckload of ballots” was going to be delivered — an accusation for which there has so far appeared to be no additional evidence.Around the same time Bolter says he talked to the FBI, two plainclothes agents with FBI badges showed up at the apartment of a former Milwaukee resident and 2020 poll worker about an affidavit she submitted, according to the former poll worker, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Christine, to give her the freedom to discuss an ongoing investigation. Christine had also submitted an affidavit about the 2020 election, saying election workers had been told that all votes were counted, but she then saw workers continuing to count ballots around midnight. That affidavit was the focus of the agents’ questions, Christine told Votebeat.“I suspected wrongdoing, but I’m not saying that it actually happened,” she said. “I’m just one lowly person that was working there.”During the interview, she added, an agent showed her a photograph of Claire Woodall, the former Milwaukee election chief, asking her if she recognized the former election official who has been central to false allegations about the 2020 election. She identified her by name. Woodall didn’t respond to a request for comment.Caroline Clancy, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Milwaukee office, declined to comment.While investigators seem mainly focused on the 2020 vote, some elections experts believe the Trump administration’s wide-ranging probe is actually designed to create more doubts among Americans about future elections, as Republicans face strong political headwinds that could cost them control of Congress later this year.“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “This is about intimidating election officials. This is about creating a stream of disinformation designed to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose. This is designed by the president’s underlings to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of a president that still cannot comprehend that he lost an election that he definitely lost, and it’s incredibly destabilizing.” Wisconsin is the latest known target of the Trump administration’s 2020 investigation. The FBI is looking to interview elections officials and Milwaukee police officers in what some worry could be a precursor to an effort to seize ballots from the 2020 presidential race, as it already has in Georgia.The Trump administration is revisiting allegations of election fraud that have been repeatedly scrutinizedIn January, federal investigators seized 600 boxes of ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. The heavily Democratic county, home to Atlanta, was key to Biden’s narrow 2020 victory in the state. As in Wisconsin, the FBI in Georgia has built its investigation on allegations that have already been repeatedly scrutinized by audits, investigations, and courts without unearthing any evidence of fraud or tampering that could have overturned the results.The Georgia search represented an unprecedented intervention by the federal government into local administration.

The Morning Briefing: OK, I Think President Trump Really Enjoys Trolling Kristen Welker

Israeli Military Kills 7-Month-Old Palestinian Baby in West Bank

Israel has killed at least 240 Palestinian children in the West Bank since October 2023.