The national average price for regular gas continued its downward trend on Monday, the start of the work week, falling to $4.164 per gallon, according to AAA. It marks the third consecutive week that fuel costs have decreased. Gas prices have dropped a fair amount in recent days. On Thursday, a gallon of regular gas […]
A Palestinian man opened fire in several towns across central Israel on Sunday, killing one person and injuring five others, police said. Israeli authorities said a 35-year-old Israeli man was killed in the shootings, with two of the five injured suffering severe wounds. The gunman in Sunday’s attack was in his 20s and had Israeli […]
Scott Pelley, the veteran broadcast journalist who was controversially fired by CBS News last week, revealed new “jaw-dropping” details Sunday about his last meetings before his ousting, one that included, he claimed, false accusations of physical abuse.CBS Executive Producer Nick Bilton – who was hand-picked by CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss and reportedly vetted by David Ellison, a strong ally to President Donald Trump whose company owns CBS – met with Pelley and proceeded to do “something absolutely jaw-dropping,” Pelley told The New York Times in its report Sunday.“He pulls out his phone and begins reading a statement off his phone in a room full of 50 heartbroken people,” Pelley recalled Bilton doing, explaining the reasoning behind the mass purge of staff for the network’s “60 Minutes” program. “The callousness, the tone deafness of that, you could hear the groan in the room. They put out a big spread of bagels like we were all going to feel better.”In a follow-up meeting immediately preceding Pelley’s firing, Tom Cibrowski – president and executive editor of CBS News since last year – leveled a shocking allegation against Pelley, who had been with CBS News for nearly four decades.“Tom accuses me of physically abusing Nick Bilton. This is a lie,” Pelley told the Times. “I didn’t come within 10 feet of Nick Bilton. In my life, I have never put my hands on anyone in anger. And when he was caught in that lie, he said, ‘well, OK, I take that back.’ And I said, ‘great.’”Pelley continued: “So I’m thinking that the meeting’s going to carry on. We’re going to have a long conversation. Very quickly after the meeting began, Tom Cibrowski said, this conversation is over. I was stunned. I didn’t have a 60-minute stopwatch in that room. I don’t know how long it lasted really, but I think it was about 10 minutes.”Pelley said that he left the CBS News office out of frustration, and later the same night, he received an email informing him of his termination “for cause.”
President Donald Trump, as a Republican, should theoretically support fiscal conservatism. Yet according to a report by a financial journalist, under Trump America’s national debt and deficit are ballooning to dangerous levels.“The price that the U.S. government has to pay to borrow money for 30 years has already punched through 5 percent a year, its highest level since the financial crisis of 2007,” reported The Washington Post's Matthew Lynn on Sunday. “For 10-year money, the annual price is 4.6 percent and climbing. Amid all the noise about the rise of artificial intelligence and the booming space economy, something far more significant is happening in the financial markets. The cost of borrowing is being reset.”Lynn added that this raises the possibility that American voters will care enough about deficit reduction that it can become a politically viable issue again.“The U.S. national debt has reached $39 trillion, with interest payments now exceeding $1 trillion annually, compared to the near-zero interest rate after the 2008 financial crisis,” Lynn wrote. “This could trigger a financial crisis and, even worse, modern political leaders are no longer even paying lip service to the need for deficit reduction.” As a result, “the big space in American politics will be waiting for a leader who can steadily balance the books while restoring competitiveness, keeping inflation under control and maintaining government services.”Lynn concluded, “That won’t be easy. The U.S. deficit came in at 5.8 percent of gross domestic product in 2025, and it is not likely to be any lower this year. Bringing it down will require sustained hard work, lots of patience and the ability to tell hard truths. Those are not qualities that Washington has in abundance. Even so, it would be a big prize. The only real question is whether there is a leader out there who is willing to step up and take it.”Lynn is not alone among finance experts who are concerned about America’s growing debt crisis, which has grown worse under Trump due to his tax cuts for the wealthy, war against Iran and spending cuts on programs that help low-income Americans.“Unless we change course, the debt will only get worse—fast,” Brookings Institution senior fellow William Galston wrote for The Wall Street Journal earlier this month. “The Congressional Budget Office estimates that we are on track to accumulate more than $24 trillion in debt over the next decade, for a total of $56 trillion—120 percent of estimated GDP in 2036.”He added, “These numbers are so large that it is hard to grasp what they mean. One key measure is the cost of financing this swelling debt burden. Twenty-five years ago, interest payments on the national debt were 2 percent of GDP. This year they will claim 3.3 percent; a decade from now, 4.6 percent.”Trump’s outsized impact on the budget deficit began in 2017, when he passed another series of tax cuts for the wealthy called the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA).“The Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office have published several estimates of TCJA’s expected budget impact,” the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center explains. “These estimates all show TCJA substantially reducing revenues and increasing deficits over its first decade. The specific amount varies—from about $1 trillion to $2 trillion—for three reasons.”The Tax Policy Center continued, “First, the agencies estimated budget impacts using both conventional methods (which do not account for potential changes to the overall economy) and dynamic methods (which do). Second, the agencies originally estimated the budget impacts against a budget baseline established in 2017, when the act was debated and enacted. They later published updated figures using a 2018 baseline, which included new economic and budget information. Third, official scores typically do not include any new debt service costs resulting from tax cuts or spending increases. Projections for the entire budget, however, do include debt service.”
The Socceroos playing on football’s biggest stage in my adopted country would normally have me racing to book tickets. Not this year Is “USA! USA! USA!” a more fundamentally obnoxious chant than “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!”? As an Australian who has spent most of the last 15 years living in the United States and is now a permanent resident, the Socceroos’ World Cup group match against the USA raises some questions. Has my adopted nation dethroned my homeland as the world’s foremost exponent of being unconscionably terrible to immigrants? And on a more personal level … who do I support here?Well, look, OK, there’s really only one answer to that second question. I’m not an especially patriotic type, but if anything does bring out my Australian-ness, it’s the World Cup – perhaps because it’s one of the few events at which we can still claim to be underdogs. And now, two decades after I rose at dawn to watch Australia’s dreams dashed by the intersection of Lucas Neill’s leg and Fabio Grosso’s general vicinity, I find myself living in a country hosting the tournament. Continue reading...
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is monitoring the deadly shooting attack along the seam line.”
Spencer Pratt’s once-comfortable lead in the Los Angeles mayoral primary has been slashed yet again — as a fresh batch of ballots delivered another major boost to progressive City Councilmember Nithya Raman in their race to the November runoff. New results released Saturday show Pratt’s advantage over Raman shrinking to just 7,494 votes, down from...
The Playoff Knicks — despite their comfortable cushions and robust series leads — are always fighting as if paying mortgage on death’s door.
