“I’m bored”: Kellyanne Conway talks “Sleepy Don” on “Real Time with Bill Maher”

Bill Maher had Kellyanne Conway — former campaign manager and counselor to Donald Trump — alongside author Joshua Green on “Real Time with Bill Maher” Friday, to discuss the election and other hot-button issues.

Prompted with controversial topics, including the International Criminal Court’s probe of Israeli officials and the death of a second Boeing whistleblower, the trio found some common ground, but the conversation took a turn eventually.

Asked about her thoughts on Trump’s near-daily naptime in court, Conway wasn’t convinced that it was a story at all.

“I'm bored. So, probably, he is sitting there. I’m bored just reading the clips every day,” Conway told Maher, shifting the question away from her former boss. “I think that’s less important than all the polls that show people don’t think Joe Biden’s got the energy, agility, acuity.”

Maher tried to ask a follow-up after Conway went on a tangent about Hillary Clinton, whose presidential campaign ended almost eight years ago, before being interrupted.

“I could show a video right now of Trump…” Maher said.

“We see them all day long. Trump Trump Trump, is all day long. Trump Trump Trump is everybody’s adjective, verb, noun in every sentence,” Conway interjected.

Conway seemed to laugh off being called out as Maher finished his point.

“I could put together — and people have — a video of Trump looking absolutely just as senile,” Maher said. “The reason why he’s so ahead is because he doesn’t have to worry about policy points that he makes because no one takes him seriously anyway.”

Green chimed in, adding that for undecided voters, “staying awake seems like kind of a baseline requirement for Trump.”

Conway gave, per her assessment, a view of voters’ decision that will work in Trump’s favor.

“People, for the first time in centuries, or ever, have an opportunity to look at two presidents who have served in the job as Commander in Chief," Conway said.

Maher highlighted a key issue for many voters: Trump's ongoing refusal to commit to accept the results of the election.

“The biggest fact in the last three elections… is that one guy does not concede when he loses,” Maher said. “This is the crux of what America is. There is nothing more important than that."

Watch Kellyanne Conway on "Real Time" here.

Boris Johnson couldn’t cast vote without photo ID, due to his own election integrity law

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who passed a controversial law requiring a photo ID to vote, was turned away from a South Oxfordshire polling place Thursday for leaving his at home.

The former Conservative Prime Minister couldn’t cast a ballot for the district’s police and crime commissioner as polling place staff were legally mandated to deny him, AP News reports.

Johnson, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2019 to 2022, pushed the 2022 Elections Act through the Conservative-led parliament. Thursday was the first election in which the bill governed vote-casting, two years after fielding criticism from the U.K.’s Electoral Commission and advocates for the potentially discriminatory effects of such a scheme.

Also included in the bill were provisions to change elections for mayoral and police commissioner positions to a first-past-the-post system, where the candidate with the most votes takes the seat, much like in the United States.

Moving from the previous supplementary–or ranked choice–system, Johnson’s government was accused of changing the rules to benefit Tory candidates.

Johnson, unlike the up to two million British voters without a photo ID who were effectively disenfranchised by the law, was able to vote later in the day once he retrieved his ID. Johnson resigned from the Prime Minister role in 2022 plagued by scandal, and ultimately left Parliament in 2023 during an investigation into ethics violations as Prime Minister.

The Kentucky Derby is tamed, and it’s a shame

I grew up on the backstretch of Churchill Downs, learning to imbibe, thrive and survive. From 1971 through 1979 I attended every wild Kentucky Derby ride I could and regret nothing for the bodily fluids I voluntarily and involuntarily left there.

Today that wild ride is tamed, and it’s a shame.

If you take the stoic’s view, then this too shall pass. But, the observer in me can’t help but notice the comic elements of the passing.

The Derby’s reputation as an out-of-control party that made Woodstock seem like a church fish fry rose at the height of the counterculture of the 1960s and culminated in 1970 with an article in Scanlan’s Monthly written by Hunter S. Thompson, “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.” The article was cheered as one of the first examples of “Gonzo” Journalism. Thompson could not have picked a better subject for his acid and bourbon-soaked narrative.

The infield of the Derby – the general admission area inside the racetrack where you couldn’t catch a glimpse of a horse – was a hippy fest of Biblical proportions during my youth. When Charlton Heston marched down from the mountain with the 10 Commandments in hand, rumor was the orgy scene in the movie was taken from memories of the Derby infield – though they had to dial it back for the movies.

In 1971 infield tickets were $3. LSD and marijuana, among other potent potables and edibles, were available at several locations inside the track from freelancers who sold their illegal wares to help everyone enjoy the day. While you couldn’t bring in your own liquor, patrons devised several ingenious methods to smuggle in alcohol past the requisite security searches prior to entrance. False bottoms in coolers were popular, as was inserting a clear bag of alcohol into a two-liter soda bottle, hidden by your favorite soda. Those worked occasionally, but my favorite method was smuggling my favorite bourbon in a large bottle of contact solution. That method always worked.

The Derby is still a fun afternoon, but it now costs what a family of two will spend for a week’s worth of groceries just to purchase the cheapest ticket.

In the infield on the back stretch of Churchill Downs, you’d occasionally see large groups of teens and young adults holding tarps and tossing people, many of them naked, into the air to the sounds of rock n’ roll, Motown, and the squeals of laughter and enjoyment that come with an early-morning buzz and a deep love of public nudity. Some of the most memorable occasions came during rainstorms – but cool, clear days brought their fun as well.

The infield smelled like bourbon, mint, horse manure (when the breeze was right), sweat, weed and the midway at your local county fair. Watered-down mint juleps were sold at concession stands and by vendors who walked through the crowd of half-naked people, some vomiting, some singing, some copulating and all of them partying. There were few fights, although one occasionally broke out and quickly subsided with the arrival of track security, cops, National Guard troops or because someone broke it up before it escalated. It was an atmosphere untainted by politics or religion. “To Hell with the horses, I came to party” was a popular t-shirt. Randy teenage boys could be seen walking around with signs that read “show us your t*ts” and they never failed to be surprised when someone did. Randy teenage girls had signs saying “Show us your package” – and had occasional offers as well.

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Infield tickets increased in price over the years, first from $5 to $10, then $20 and $25 before I ditched the infield for the grandstands. I didn’t see a horse until 1984 when I got to work the Derby as a reporter for the first time and witnessed the wind carrying Howard Cosell’s toupee aloft.

In the early 90s, I graduated to so-called Millionaire’s Row when I came back to Louisville as a correspondent for “America’s Most Wanted.” We put together a show about grifters and Derby scams, and got a table at the Finish Line several floors up, overlooking the track. The denizens of Millionaire’s Row wore white linen, seersucker suits, flowery hats and expensive lace versus the short pants and bathing suits among those who lived in the infield. Coolers were replaced by waiters who brought you everything you needed – often including whatever illicit drug of choice you craved. Celebrities wandered through Millionaire’s Row, as half-naked or violently vomiting as their lesser heeled brethren who never saw a horse. It was, in short, a communal experience. Though money helped grease the skids, the entire experience wasn’t about the Benjamins.

The lines between have and have nots was noticeable, but the attitude? Everybody came for a good time.

The city of Louisville, itself had the same character. The entire week ahead of the derby was filled with activities including the Great Steamboat Race, a mini-marathon, and a massive fireworks display from a downtown bridge that rivaled anything ever staged at the National Mall in Washington D.C. for Independence Day. The city cleaned itself up, and put its best face forward. Bars were open 24/7 during Derby week. Streets were closed down while music played and people roamed around sampling a variety of cuisine from food vendors.

People passed out in the street, sold space on their front lawns for parking and generally acted as if there wasn’t a care in the world.. Many among us felt the week was just a great big party and everyone was invited.

A newspaper article in the Courier-Journal and Louisville Times, about the time of the 100^th Derby (won by Cannonade) speculated what the 150^th Derby would look like. For the most part, the speculation was fairly accurate.

A five-story Jumbo Tron dominates the infield today. Additional seating has destroyed what little view infield dwellers have of the track. A turf course years ago cut down the size of the infield and the Twin Spires that once dominated Churchill Downs are now dwarfed by the Disneyland amusement park surrounding the track.

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But the Run for the Roses has lost something over the years. More than 160K attended the track in 1974 for the 100^th race. Many of those, in the infield, paid little for their tickets and the pleasure of being there. Those in Millionaire’s Row paid much more, but it wasn’t like today where you can spend $135K for a private suite and just to purchase a general admission “Infield” ticket costs you $130.

The divide between the classes is as dramatic as ever in society and that is reflected at the Kentucky Derby. Outside the gates at The Downs, those in the surrounding lower middle-class neighborhood still charge to park in their front yard – and sometimes not much more than they got 50 years ago.

People still pass out and walk around the street at all hours of the night. But, somehow, the town seems different. Political ads and vendors selling political swag of the MAGA and other variety are in several places. The town seems less clean and more worn out. A public bathroom at a gas station on Grinstead Drive and Bardstown Road in the Highlands – one of the most progressive neighborhoods in Louisville – is marked with graffiti that claims it was voted “The dirtiest public restroom in Louisville”. Mitch McConnell lives near there – maybe he’s to blame.

The Derby is still a fun afternoon, but it now costs what a family of two will spend for a week’s worth of groceries just to purchase the cheapest ticket. The most expensive seats cost more than a middle-class family will make in a year. Corporations have bought and sold the Derby. It’s no longer decadent. It’s no longer depraved.

The Paddock area is ostentatious. The appearance is decadent, but the reality is something else. Somehow, somewhere when they homogenized the Derby, they pulled some of the fun out of it. While it hits many of the old familiar notes— the genteel southern charm, the hats, the suits, the drinking and the infield mayhem — it’s a pale shadow of its former self. It’s not a wild hippy ride of freedom. It’s a corporate imitation of the same. It’s sanitized Disney under a five-story Jumbotron.

It’s enough to make me want to pick up a bottle of Wild Turkey 101 (the kickin’ chicken) drop a couple of hits of purple windowpane acid and chase the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson for several days on end looking for the perfect Derby degenerate – only to look in the mirror and realize it was me all along.

Oh, the good ole’ days.

from Brian Karem

An “extreme act of protest”: The long history of self-immolation as political statement

Increasingly, we are being confronted with the image of a body on fire. A human torch burning up in real-time in a public space.

Such images arrive at a time when Americans are grappling with a particularly dystopian image cast, from police marching into student protests on university campuses to the hellscape of images and videos coming out of the war in Gaza.

On April 19, Max Azzarello, a 37-year-old man and self-identified “investigative researcher” died after setting himself on fire outside Donald J. Trump’s trial in Manhattan. He is the third individual to publicly self-immolate in the United States in five months. In February, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force, self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. In December, a person who has not been publicly identified was hospitalized in critical condition after setting themselves on fire near the Israeli consulate in Atlanta.

The self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell should serve as a wake up call for the military

In a Substack post titled, “I have set myself on fire outside the Trump Trial,” Azzarello described his act as an “extreme act of protest.” These are the same words Bushnell used to characterize his own death in a livestream posted first on Twitch before circulating widely on social media.

This is likely not a coincidence but a citation. In the wake of Bushnell’s death, an Instagram account reportedly belonging to Azzarello posted a story of an image of Bushnell’s body being consumed with flames, along with the caption: “Heroes and martyrs, folks…God f——g bless you, Aaron Bushnell.”

After Azzarello’s death, and amidst nationwide debates about the meanings and modalities of political protest, I find myself returning to Bushnell’s video. [Note: A graphic description of the video follows.] That two-and-a-half-minute-long video — Bushnell’s digital suicide note — is horrifying, phantasmagoric, and familiar in equal measure. In it, Bushnell films himself walking toward the embassy gates. His voice is measured, lucid, and implacable. “I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” he states clearly. He continues: “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest but compared to what people in Palestine have been experiencing at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.” These do not appear to be the ravings of a lunatic.

While social media and streaming technologies make such deaths more visible, and knowledge about them more readily available, these examples chart a truncated history.

In the video, Bushnell props up his phone before stepping into the frame again and dousing himself in what appears to be gasoline or lighter fluid. He puts his patrol cap back on, then flicks a lighter around his ankles. “Free Palestine,” he says. Orange flames lick up the backs of his legs, the fire catching quickly on the fabric of his green military fatigues. He remains remarkably still, erect, almost at attention.

When the flames reach about waist-high, he begins to scream. “Free Palestine! Free Palestine!” Over and over. He screams the two words: “Free Palestine!” Are they a demand or a divination? He screams them exactly five more times, until his voice becomes coarse, almost inhuman with pain. He eventually collapses to the sidewalk. Off camera, police and security officers are yelling at him to “get on the ground.” One points a gun at Bushnell while he burns and continues pointing it at the fiery body crumpled on the pavement. Another officer yells, “I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers.” The audio cuts. Bushnell’s screams echo.

Aaron Bushnell did not have to scream while he burned for the world to hear him. When he set himself on fire, he was drawing on a very old and immediately recognizable (if not immediately intelligible) ritual of public self-burning as protest — a political language legible enough for Azzarello to recognize and reproduce less than two months later.

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After Bushnell’s death, comparisons were drawn quickly across social media to other self-burning protests. In 1963, the Buddhist Monk Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire at a busy intersection in Saigon. His death, captured in an iconic photo by American photographer Malcolm Browne, drew global attention to Vietnam — and to political self-immolation. In its coverage of Bushnell’s death, New York Magazine noted that “since the Vietnam War, self-immolation has been a dramatic but rare act of protest” while The Daily Beast has called Azzarello’s death “part of a startling trend” of such deaths in the United States.

Above all, commentators from the wider Arab world were quick to connect Bushnell’s death to the highly mediatized public self-burning of Mohamed Bouazizi. The Tunisian street vendor was just a year older than Bushnell when he set himself on fire in front of a municipal building in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, on December 17, 2010. Bouazizi’s self-immolation catalyzed the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia as well as a series of antigovernment uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East, often called the “Arab Spring.” What’s more, Bouazizi’s suicide in 2010 quickly spread well beyond Tunisia, producing a “copycat” effect and a dramatic uptick in suicides by public self-burning across the globe, spreading throughout North and West Africa and the Middle East. A longitudinal study published in the medical journal Burns showed that global rates of self-immolation had tripled in the five years following the self-burning of Bouazizi and that this was a “stable trend.”

Just a month after Bouazizi had died in the hospital from burn wounds, a Senegalese man set himself on fire on a sidewalk outside the Presidential Palace in Dakar while holding up a scrap of paper. Bystanders could not make out what was written on it, but the message of his suicide seemed clear: Bouazizi’s suicide had begun to travel. In the years that followed, self-immolations became more widespread in Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania. Although written in fire and effaced in ash, these deaths all become recognizable as messages of protest, refusal and resistance in reference to Bouazizi’s act.

There are many other relevant examples, of course. Wynn Alan Bruce, who self-immolated in front of the Supreme Court in Washington D.C. in 2022, and David Buckel, who set himself on fire in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in 2018 — both climate activists. Homa Darabi, the Iranian political activist who self-immolated in 1993 in protest of the compulsory hijab. Sahar Khodayari, an Iranian woman who set herself on fire in front of a courthouse in Tehran to protest the laws banning women from attending sporting events. Jan Palach, the 20-year-old Czech student who set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square in 1969 in protest against the end of the Prague Spring. Scholars of the history of self-immolation typically date the phenomenon to antiquity, to early Christian martyrdoms, and particularly to the Hindu practice of sati.

While social media and streaming technologies make such deaths more visible, and knowledge about them more readily available, these examples chart a truncated history. Contemporary public self-burnings draw their rhetorical and political force from their legibility in relation to an established practice of suicidal resistance. This is an ancient and nearly universal idiom that resurfaces, in different forms, in different places, and at different times, in the direst of circumstances. Historically, this has been the case especially in contexts of colonialism, imperialism and state violence.

Suicide, in other words, has always been a mode of political resistance — a language of protest and revolution. Self-killing has always been what anthropologist James C. Scott called “a weapon of the weak.”

[Suicide] is a text whose author has already disappeared. Any response to such an act, including my own, is also a kind of trespass and failure.

In a Facebook post penned shortly before his death, Bushnell wrote: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.” Bushnell’s invocation of the specter of slavery, colonization and apartheid in his post and again in the livestream is haunting, given the long history of public suicide (both individual and collective) as a strategy of protest and resistance in contexts of oppression and unfreedom and under regimes of racial violence. Throughout the Atlantic world, enslaved Africans regularly used suicide and suicide-like behaviors as modes of resistance, fugitivity and protest in ways that directly undermined the slave economy — so much so that some of the earliest innovations with suicide prevention came not from the world of medical care but from the dehumanizing self-interestedness of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

As a scholar of suicide under colonization, I have spent perhaps an unusual amount of time thinking, talking and writing about acts of self-destruction — this most difficult of subjects — and especially their representations across a vast array of discourses and media, from scientific treatises and colonial archives to oral histories and literary texts to police files and news reports. Bushnell’s and Azzarello’s deaths both resonate with and differ from these instances of self-killing — which are in large part responses to colonial and state violence, contestations of unlivable structural inequalities — in significant ways.

It is always risky, but also necessary, to draw connections between different kinds of deaths, and attempt to see how contemporary modes of protest and refusal through self-destruction are shadowed and informed by older ones. This is part of the impasse and provocation of public suicide: the paradoxical sense that we have seen something like this before and, at the same time, that what we are seeing is unlike anything else.

Bushnell was not Bouazizi. This is important. The latter was repeatedly harassed by police and had his complaints ignored by government officials. Shortly before his death, his only means of earning a living wage, his fruit cart, had been confiscated. His public self-burning emerged out of a context of extreme socioeconomic disparity, rampant governmental corruption, colonial and neocolonial asymmetries, and political unrest. As far as we can know, he did not intend to be hailed as a martyr. He did not plan to become the symbol of a movement. His suicide was conscripted to ends and meanings he could not predict or answer for. Bouazizi did not leave a suicide note.

Bushnell, like Azzarello, was white. He was an American, originally from Massachusetts — an active-duty member of the most powerful military in the world. Before he died, he outlined what he planned to do and why. He made a will, specifying that his savings should be donated to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and that he hoped for his ashes one day to be scattered in a free Palestine.

Bouazizi’s final words, supposedly, were directed to municipal government officials: “If you do not see me, I will burn.” They were an appeal to be seen in the immediate sense of "to have an audience with," but took on far-ranging resonance. Perhaps because of their semantic ambiguity, they became an injunction for the world to turn its eyes to Tunisia and the Maghreb and a metaphor for the invisibilization of the daily struggles of all downtrodden and oppressed peoples.

Bushnell’s and Azzarello’s last words — unlike Bouazizi's — tell us how they want their deaths to be understood: as “an extreme act of protest.”

Despite these differences, recent acts of self-immolation remain legible as protest precisely because of Bouazizi, and Quảng Đức, and so many resistant others — most from the Global South — who have protested myriad forms of displacement and dispossession.

In the weeks following Bushnell’s self-immolation, there were — and will likely continue to be — interviews, statements, speculations and theories about Bushnell’s frame of mind, about troubling behavior, about his upbringing, about early signs of distress or mental illness. For his part, Azzarello has largely been dismissed as a troubled conspiracy theorist who suffered from paranoia.

The discursive frames we bring to bear on voluntary death are powerful. Frequently, they radically overdetermine what and how a suicide means. In the wake of suicide, there is often — perhaps always — a desire to understand, a need to explain. Suicide scrambles our critical radars. It unsettles our usual frames of reference. It confronts us with an opaque message voiced in fatal and unverifiable idiom. It is a text whose author has already disappeared. Any response to such an act, including my own, is also a kind of trespass and failure. This does not mean that nothing can be gained from such an endeavor, that nothing can be learned from trying to understand the messages a suicide might contain.

I am not a psychiatrist. But I find the efforts to recuperate Bushnell’s death, in particular, as an instance of psychological rupture rather than a political statement troubling. To call Bushnell’s and Azzarello’s deaths “suicides” already begs the question (they used only the term “protest”).

Indeed, in their coverage of Bushnell’s death, a number of prominent news outlets immediately provided links to support for those in “mental-health crisis” or numbers for suicide hotlines. (Salon has included such wording in this story, too.) In this sense, the wheels of the powerfully racialized discursive apparatus that gathers around public acts of violence, including acts of self-destruction, are turning. When a white man shoots up a church or a school, he is sick but never a terrorist. When he lights himself on fire in a public space, he must be unwell or otherwise a fanatic (it has been reported that Bushnell was “an anarchist who grew up in a religious sect”).

What if he is neither? What if, instead, he is a fully rational member of the American military determined to make a political and deeply human point when no other means will get through? In that case, rather than dismissing or downplaying his death as incomprehensible, we would need to at least attempt to take that point seriously and consider its implications. To move toward a possible understanding. To resist the idea that such an act lies beyond the pale of comprehension. To understand is not to glorify, to respond is not to sanction.

Bushnell’s self-burning presents us with a unique set of paradoxes. He is, to the best of my knowledge, one of the first active-duty American servicemen to publicly self-immolate. If his death was provoked by a mental health crisis, it raises the question of how he remained on active duty without adequate psychiatric support. In that case, his suicide — a public cry for help — is the indictment of an entire system. But I think we should not be so quick to write off Bushnell’s self-burning as purely psychological, even if discussions of his death seem to have fallen easily into the ready-at-hand language that so often polarizes discussions of public suicide: Was his death a heroic martyrdom (as Azzarello seemed to view it) or the act of a madman? Should it be lauded or condemned?

Such questions bracket a long history of suicide as a tool of political protest in extremis. They risk depoliticizing what is potentially a profoundly political death. They are beside the point. Or, rather, they profoundly miss the point the man on fire was so desperate to make he managed to scream it six times before he died.

If you are in crisis, please call the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

about forms of protest

Don’t like this economy? OK, just wait for Trump and the GOP to ruin it

You’re unhappy with this economy? OK, that’s your right. But you should seriously consider whether you want the available alternative.

Last November, I wrote what I thought was a modest commentary about how the Biden economy was doing remarkably well, at least by most standard macroeconomic measures, and much of the corporate media wasn’t reporting about it. Job numbers were historically high, unemployment low and the U.S. had done the best of all G-7 economies in bringing down inflation resulting from the worst pandemic years.

I was careful to note that my wife and I, and members of our daughters’ generation, were still feeling economic pain around the cost of food and housing, and that many younger people felt they could not get their lives started due to student debt and high housing prices.

I got considerable grief from readers for that one, but I stand by what I wrote about the Biden administration’s active economic moves and a renewed focus on industrial policy to accomplish goals that simply cannot be left to “the marketplace.” Leaving infrastructure work to the marketplace is how America wound up with so many embarrassing airports, shaky bridges and poky, increasingly dangerous trains. There are things we must do together.

As I wrote at the time, Biden’s manufacturing plan invests in rural areas and will transform local economies:

He’s the first president in many decades to stand with organized labor and support its fight for better wages and benefits. He continues to work on alleviating the crushing student debt that limits so many young adults’ lives. He has taken on Big Pharma, moving to lower prescription drug prices and health care costs for older Americans. He is working to stop the junk fees hidden in so many transactions. He rejoined the Paris climate accords and has done far more to address that crisis than any previous president.

The general economic news has only improved since then, including strong jobs numbers for March and April. As Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg writes, the U.S economy typically does much better when a Democrat is in the White House. Biden’s record of more than 15 million new jobs amounts to eight times as many as were created under the last three Republican presidents combined. Although inflation for consumer goods rose slightly in March, which is not good news for anyone, the Federal Reserve has done a good job in carefully bringing inflation down after the supply-chain disruptions and supermarket price hikes of the pandemic. Remember the corporate media braying endlessly about the coming recession? Well, it never came.

Why you feel poorer than ever: It ain't the price of eggs

So here we are: The macroeconomic indicators look great, but your household budget may remain a struggle. Gas prices keep rising, but that's largely the result of decisions made in Saudi Arabia and Russia, well beyond the Biden administration’s control.

But here’s what I wasn’t thinking about enough when I wrote that earlier commentary: People in this country are kept unsettled and economically stressed by living with a threadbare social safety net, one relentlessly under attack by Republicans. When you’re living paycheck to paycheck, as a frightening number of Americans do, there is no room for higher food, housing or fuel costs. Long before either Biden or Trump occupied the White House, living costs were rapidly outpacing rising incomes. That’s a global issue, but for a wealthy nation, we have a startling amount of homelessness, partly because of the high cost of housing and partly because of that paltry social safety net.

Still, if Americans actually paid attention to how other countries are dealing with inflation, for example, they might feel a lot better about the Biden economy. For that matter, if Americans were better versed in the writings and actions of our founders, they might understand that they believed in a strong central government and sometimes held surprisingly progressive ideas about how to manage an economy.

Biden’s record of 15 million new jobs is eight times as many as under the last three Republican presidents combined. Remember the media braying endlessly about the coming recession? Well, it never came.

The economic benefits of the massive Infrastructure Bill and the strategic CHIPS Act are just now beginning to be realized, with much of the funding specifically targeted to help create jobs in rural areas of so-called red states. (The White House has an interactive map explaining all the efforts across the country.)

Those economic benefits are twofold: the immediate well-paying jobs and then, down the line, the new or rebuilt roads, bridges, airports, public transit, waterway infrastructure, broadband internet and microchip factories that will serve us for decades.

Biden’s support for unions may have influenced the historic vote to unionize at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which comes after two previous failures. That was the first time workers at a foreign-owned auto plant in the American South had voted to join a union, even after six Republican governors spoke out against the campaign.

Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, one of the unsung heroes of the Biden team, is working to keep monopolistic companies from harming consumers and workers through price-fixing schemes, non-compete agreements and other underhanded tactics. If you didn’t catch Khan on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart recently, it's well worth your time.

Khan does an outstanding job of taking apart Republicans’ insincere claims about fixing the economy and supporting the working class when she explains how complex the task of protecting workers and consumers is, and how badly the FTC is outgunned by the big corporations aligned with Republicans.

So, as everybody knows — to borrow Trump’s favorite rhetorical device — the notion that Republicans do better with the economy is a worthless statement clause, one might say, in the GOP’s continuing contract on America, one that has duped people for decades by merely employing the propagandist’s trick of repetition.

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But since we have more or less been promised an authoritarian economy if Trump prevails in this fall’s election, how well do those work?

Not too well, especially if we’re talking about authoritarian governments that were formerly democracies. Such economies tend to be heavily based on one or two commodities, as with Russia, whose main exports are petroleum and, I’m pretty sure, corruption. Authoritarian governments tend to manage their economies about as poorly as Republicans have in the modern era, which makes perfect sense when you consider that Republicans are not moved by expertise or evidence but by ideology, such as the thoroughly discredited idea that tax cuts for the wealthy will somehow “trickle down” to benefit the average Jane and Joe. And Republicans' fallback argument that they are better with the annual deficit or the national debt is just silly. They have made both things dramatically worse, and mostly decry the national debt so they can further slash the social safety net.

Populist autocrats have their own notions about how to run an economy, and those tend to diverge, often wildly, from what less ideological experts would do. As Max Fisher wrote in the New York Times about the economic woes of Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, these strongmen are not so strong on economics:

They are unusually prone to creating this sort of crisis, unusually inhibited from fixing it and unusually slow to recover. They have, on average, higher rates of inflation and more artificially undervalued currencies. Their central banks are less independent, making them less capable of intervening.

Over the decades, Donald Trump has drummed into his fans’ minds the idea that he is a great businessman. By all accounts — and from every shred of evidence we have seen over the past four decades — he’s anything but. He is certainly a profligate money-burner who keeps being propped up by shady foreign banks, shadowy individuals and organizations and billionaire supporters. (Remember how Donald Trump Jr. bragged that the Trump Organization saw a lot of money pouring in from Russia?) He’s so inept at business that even his casino “empire” went under — in no small measure because he used it (as he did the presidency) to enrich himself. When Trump created a “university” and a purported charitable foundation, both were shut down and cost him millions in fines. Recently, the stock for his social media company has reportedly done so poorly that he may resort to flooding the market with more shares, screwing over the hardcore fans who jumped in with their hard-earned money to support the initial offering.

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That’s the “strongman” MAGA believers want in charge of the economy? As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte notes, “Trump supporters mistake petulance for strength.”

Several years back, I wondered whether businessmen had any business being president. The answer I was able to glean was, pretty much no.

This particular failed businessman (but world-class conman grifter and propagandist) who’s been hawking flag-embossed golden sneakers and Trump-branded Bibles and who attempted in multiple ways to overturn the last free and fair presidential election, which he still denies he lost, and who currently faces 88 felony charges, now proclaims himself immune from the rule of law and ready to be America’s first dictator.

Authoritarian economies tend to be heavily based on one or two commodities, as with Russia, whose main exports are petroleum and, I’m pretty sure, corruption.

He appears ready to follow the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which calls for replacing expert civil servants with a legion of loyalist lackeys, ditching climate science, imprisoning or expelling immigrants who are crucial to the economy, cutting taxes further and reducing Social Security and Medicaid benefits, forcing a misogynistic theocracy on a nation founded on the separation of church and state, and turning our back on historical allies around the world. Oh and, first and foremost, getting revenge on all of Trump’s enemies.

Does anyone actually think that living in that kind of country under that kind of leader would make his or her life better?

Some will claim they were doing better economically under Trump — but that’s only true in the sense that inflation was much lower, around the Federal Reserve target of 2 percent, before the pandemic hit. Trump himself seems aware, after his own fashion, that things have improved greatly under Biden. After all, he has openly wished for the U.S. economy to crash before the November election. When confronted with evidence of how well the Biden economy is doing, Trump has tried to claim that, somehow or other, it’s still his economy. Isn’t that the best compliment a political opponent can give you?

from Kirk Swearingen on the 2024 race

Was T. rex really as smart as primates? A new study argues the dino’s intellect has been overstated

Despite films like "Jurassic Park" depicting Tyrannosaurus rex as nothing more than a stupid killing machine, Dr. Suzana Herculano-Houzel believes the mighty dinosaur "deserves better."

"This is a smear job on T. rex."

Herculano-Houzel is no passive dinosaur observer. The Vanderbilt University neuroscientist is an expert in comparative neuroanatomy, as well as editor-in-chief of The Journal of Comparative Neurology. In 2023 that journal published a paper she authored about the intelligence of theropods, a clade of dinosaurs which includes Allosauruses, Spinosauruses, Giganotosauruses and of course the iconic Tyrannosaurus.

By analyzing data from T. rex remains as well as data from the theropod's closest living bird relatives, including emus and ostriches, Herculano-Houzel concluded that theropod brains had in excess of three billion neurons. That would mean they had more neurons than baboons, with perhaps even enough intelligence to use tools — the T. rex's notoriously tiny arms notwithstanding.

The real world behind "Jurassic World": How the story of dinosaurs reflects the story of humans

Yet other scientists quickly pounced on Herculano-Houzel's paper, with a recent study in the journal The Anatomical Record criticizing the argument's supposed "several crucial shortcomings regarding analysis and interpretation." Perhaps most importantly, the group of paleontologists, biologists, geologists and other scientists disagree with Herculano-Houzel comparing theropods to birds in her analysis, saying that she instead should have used lizards as her basis. The introduction refers to "the consensus of crocodile-like cognition in these animals, a position informed by comparative anatomical data." From there, the paper made other assumptions that the scientists felt needed to be publicly challenged.

"The methods used in the original paper are characterized by several shortcomings such as assuming the brains of many dinosaurs were very densely packed with neurons because they were warm-blooded," says one of the new paper's co-authors Hady George, a PhD student of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. "This led to over-exaggerated neuron number estimates, and this was then argued to be evidence for many dinosaurs, including T. rex, to be capable of complex behaviors, such as tool use."

Tyrannosaurus-rex (Getty Images)

The authors also contest Herculano-Houzel's assumption that one can predict different dinosaurs' metabolisms, aging rates and other life history traits based on the existing data.

"We are not inherently against their conclusions, as it is fascinating to think about dinosaurs in this new light, but the shortcomings of the methods used and the lack of consideration for other lines of evidence that more accurately predict metabolism and life history traits in fossil animals render their conclusions highly questionable," George says.

Herculano-Houzel is defiant against such criticism, taking particular umbrage by a statement by paper co-author and University of Southampton paleozoologist Dr. Darren Naish that T. rex were "more like smart, giant crocodiles, and that’s just as fascinating.” From Herculano-Houzel's perspective, it is both inaccurate and unfair to lump in the T. rex with its distant crocodilian relatives, regardless of the qualification that they would have been "smart" crocodiles.

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"We are not inherently against their conclusions, as it is fascinating to think about dinosaurs in this new light, but the shortcomings of the methods used… render their conclusions highly questionable."

"I absolutely stand by my original findings, and I want to do right by dinosaurs," says Herculano-Houzel. "They do not deserve to go back to being considered as dumb as crocodiles just because a group of paleontologists used their credentials (which I don't have; I am a neuroscientist) to back up an erroneous apples-and-oranges comparison due to a beginner's mistake in their analysis."

Herculano-Houzel also said that "this is a smear job on T. rex," one she claims the authors committed because "they had an opinion from the get-go: that T. rex had crocodile-like cognition."

Simply put, Herculano-Houzel says previous paleontologists take it for granted that "an animal that large could not have been smart, even with a respectably monkey-sized brain."

"I have already shown that body size is irrelevant, but never mind that," said Herculano-Houzel, observing that her original study "followed the data" and was correct in comparing T. rex to close bird relatives like ostriches, chickens and ducks. Although her critics say this is like comparing apples to oranges, Herculano-Houzel argues that her results prove "they were all applies."

"Think of T. rex as a scaled-up ostrich in body and brain size as well as number of neurons," Herculano-Houzel said. She argues her critics inaccurately divide all birds into two groups, thereby mixing theropods' closest cousins with more distant relatives like pelicans, egrets, albatrosses and penguins. Using a twist on the "apples and oranges" expression, Herculano-Houzel explained why she believes their reasoning is flawed.

"It's like mixing apples and oranges in the juicer then complaining that the drink doesn't taste like an apple, so it couldn't have been an apple going in," says Herculano-Houzel. "Given their decision to mix theropod dinosaurs with pelicans, albatrosses and penguins, the result is that theropod dinosaurs then appear to not have had bird-like brains already. But go to their graph knowing what the species are, and you will see T. rex exactly along the line together with ostriches and chickens and ducks — exactly like I showed. Apples."

George did not characterize the scientists as entirely opposed to the hypothesis that T. rex could have been intelligent. He instead argued they provided evidence "that dinosaurs did not have neuron estimates as high as those estimated in the original paper."

In addition to what George described as their "convincing argument" that the neurons in dinosaur brains were not as densely packed as those in modern bird brains, the scientists also argued "various other lines of evidence like gross anatomy and trace fossils can collectively better inform on dinosaur metabolism and life history traits than neurological variables such as relative brain size alone." The authors did not definitively conclude one way or the other on the question of dinosaur intelligence, aside from arguing that it is "a very complicated topic that cannot be understood using only neuron number estimates."

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While that last observation may seem counterintuitive, George said that there are some bird species with large neuron counts that do not have the capacity to use complex tools, even though other bird species with comparable neuron counts do have that ability. Similarly, although some dolphin species have billions more neurons than humans, George said there is no evidence that they are more intelligent than humans.

"Overall, neuron counts do inform on intelligence, but are very limited in telling us what exactly animals are capable of," said George. He instead pointed to other kinds of evidence, such as the fact that many dinosaur species had elaborate head crests and feather fans. "Both of these adaptations have been argued to be socio-sexual display structures," said George. "Additionally, many dinosaurs have been found together, suggesting they might have once lived together. Many dinosaurs probably engaged in sophisticated communication with each other to live in groups and find mates, and this indicates at least some level of impressive intelligence."

As far as Herculano-Houzel is concerned, though, "the absolute number of neurons in the cortex (or telencephalon) certainly is by far the best known correlate of cognitive capacity." She is unmoved by a paper that Smithsonian Magazine declared "official refutes" her own.

"It's really a pity," says Herculano-Houzel. "Like I said, T. rex deserves better. My hope is that open-minded paleontologists who read my original paper have already restarted revisiting the data on T. rex-associated fossil record and reconsidering it with new eyes that are accepting of the possibility that maybe they did, yes, make and use tools, and maybe even had a culture."

about dinosaurs

May Fourth and China’s legacy of revolution

On May 4, 1919, 3,000 university students in Beijing emerged from their dormitories and lecture halls, gathered in front of Tiananmen Gate and set off the most famous protest movement in Chinese history. Angered by the weakness of the Chinese government in the face of colonial encroachment by Japan and the Western great powers, students, workers, and other opponents of imperialism had taken hold of most of China’s major cities by the next day in a defiant show of patriotic resistance and mass consciousness.

The galvanizing issue was the future of a 213 sq mi territory in the Shandong Peninsula and the surrounding sphere of influence, which Germany had seized from China in 1898. China had agreed to support the Allies in World War I on the condition that the territory be returned to its rightful owner, but a series of concessions forced on its leaders by Japan fated it to instead fall into the latter’s hands. The shotgun agreement, accepted by the western Allies, burdened China with yet another national humiliation after eighty years of coercion, extortion, and military defeat at the hands of foreign powers, and people blamed the impotent Beiyang government and the squabbling warlord cliques that ran much of the country for letting it happen.

With negotiations over the Treaty of Versailles threatening to ratify Japanese control of Shandong, students distributed copies of a “Manifesto of All Students in Peking” that exhorted the nation to “secure our secure our sovereignty in foreign affairs and to get rid of the traitors at home.”

“The Chinese people may be massacred but they will not surrender,” the manifesto declared. “Our country is about to be annihilated. Up, brethren!”

As 3,000 students marched through Beijing, spectators were recorded to have wept or cheered them on. They first attempted to petition foreign representatives in the Legation Quarter, but police blocked their way. The demonstration soon turned violent. Protesters broke into the house of a pro-Japanese official and gave him a beating, while police attacked the protesters on the streets, injuring several and causing one to later die in a hospital. Another 32 protesters were arrested.

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If the Beiyang government hoped to contain the unrest within Beijing, they had, true to form, failed miserably. Inspired with national fervor, provoked by harsh repression, and furious at political elites that many perceived as more concerned with retaining power than acting for the good for the country, a broad protest movement swept across China, demanding opposition to Japanese imperialism, a boycott of Japanese goods, and modernizing domestic reform. The crackdown also escalated, with the government characterizing the students—who defined themselves as "citizens" first and foremost—as reckless and immature youths who needed to be put back in their place. Police arrested them by the thousands, such that that they had to turn university buildings into makeshift prisons when the usual facilities became overfilled. Many students, expecting arrest, carried on their backs food and bedding to be used under detention.

While students spearheaded the uprising, the multitudes of urban workers who joined them swung the hammer-blow against the government's will to resist. The workers were already resentful of their exploitation by foreign companies and their collaborators; now was an opportunity to make common cause against a hated oppressor. On June 5, a strike by 90,000 workers from the textile, printing, metals, and other industries paralyzed Shanghai, the country’s main economic center, in full view of the European, Japanese, and American residents living in the foreign concession. More strikes soon followed in other cities as well as along strategic railway lines. Merchants, industrialists, and shopkeepers, perhaps hoping to stave off Japanese competition, also supported the protests, ceasing trade and threatening to withhold their taxes until their demands were met.

Confronted with a population united in outrage and a potential economic crisis, the government released some of the arrested students, dismissed three pro-Japanese cabinet members, and offered to negotiate terms. The demonstrations continued until, on June 28, Beijing instructed its representatives not to sign the Treaty of Versailles unless Shandong was restored to China. The other powers shrugged off Chinese objections and signed the treaty anyway, and so the territory remained in Japanese hands until the end of World War II. But the so-called May Fourth Movement represented a stunning victory for the people who had, through mass mobilization, forced their government to its knees, and also unleashed forces that far exceeded the boundaries of 1919 politics.

Many historians characterize the May Fourth Movement (MFM) as the cumulative expression of the so-called New Culture Movement (NCM), an older, intellectual campaign that sought to supplant traditional Confucian culture with Western, "modernizing" ideas like democratic politics, vernacular literature, and the scientific method. In doing so, proponents of the NCM argued, China could awaken to its full potential, free itself from foreign subjugation, and emerge from the deplorable social, economic, and political conditions of the past and present. The NCM's rejection of Confucian hierarchy, which demanded strict obedience from the subaltern to the authority, resonated strongly with the May Fourth protesters and in particular the ascendant Marxist voices within the MFM who viewed the struggles against foreign oppression by the Japanese and domestic oppression by feudal and capitalist elites as one and the same.

"We must break down the old prejudices, the old way of believing in things as they are, before we can begin to hope for social progress," wrote Chen Duxiu, the chief editor of the New Youth literary magazine and a future co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921. "We must discard our old ways. We must merge the ideas of the great thinkers of history, old and new, with our own experience, build up new ideas in politics, morality, and economic life."

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If the NCM was primarily a thought-oriented movement that created intellectual ferment among China's youth, the MFM put such thoughts of national revival into action by harnessing the power of the organized mass. This in turn expanded political thought to include consciousness of the decrepit working and living conditions suffered by the Chinese proletariat, who after marching alongside the students on May 4 were increasingly seen as revolutionary partners rather than people who needed to be led. The workers, emboldened by their recent show of strength, set up organizations and unions across China as the basis for organizing more strikes. There were 25 strikes in China in 1918. By 1922, there were more than 100.

China's educated elite and the general populace, formerly detached from one another, now realized that by joining forces in a time of crisis they could effect transformative change. As ill-will from the Allies' betrayal at Versailles festered, activists turned away from Western liberal democracies and looked instead to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia as a source of inspiration for the future.

Reflecting on the events of 1919, Mao Zedong posited that the MFM marked a key step in the transition from a largely bourgeois movement to one led by the proletariat, the beginning of a revolution that would bring the Communists to power in 1949.

"Before the MFM, the struggle on China's cultural front was a struggle between the new culture of the bourgeoisie and the old culture of the feudal class," he wrote. "After the MFM, there was born in China an entirely new cultural force: the cultural thought of Communism under the leadership of the Chinese Communists. The new Western knowledge from the natural and social sciences, useful only to the bourgeois class, thus came to be replaced by the Communist world view and the Communist theory of social revolution."

The Chinese government continues to commemorate May 4, 1919, as the moment of China's awakening and an important link to the current ruling party. But as the modern CCP has chosen to focus on its role in leading China's rapid economic growth and restoration as a first-rank global power, their lip service to the events of 1919 has largely extolled nationalistic fervor rather than defiance against authority. The pro-democracy student protesters of 1989 also drew inspiration from May Fourth, using its memory to legitimize their cause. Tanks and gunfire cleared them from Tiananmen Square. More than one hundred years later, May Fourth's legacy is still fought over.

Trump pays $9,000 gag order fine in two installments

Donald Trump has paid a $9,000 fine assessed to him by Judge Juan Merchan for violating a gag order in his criminal hush-money trial.

The violations stem from attacks Trump made on Truth Social towards witnesses Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels, as well as jurors, which the judge ordered he delete, warning that he may need to turn to jail time in further incidents.

A Manhattan court clerk told The Daily Beast that Trump had made two separate payments, one for $2,000 and one for $7,000, to meet the fine, which Judge Merchan noted was the maximum the law enabled.

“It would be preferable if the Court could impose a fine more commensurate with the wealth of the contemnor,” Merchan said in an April ruling, adding that he “must therefore consider whether in some instances, jail may be a necessary punishment.”

It’s unclear why Trump made the payment in two chunks. He boasts majority ownership in the Trump Media group, which is valued at over $6.5 billion dollars, and previously used fundraising dollars to pay legal bills.

In a second gag order hearing Thursday, prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office laid out a case demonstrating four further violations, though Merchan is yet to rule in this matter.

Trump was quick to pay the 4-figure sum, though he’s taking another payment — a $454 million civil judgment from years of fraud — to the state’s highest court on appeal.

Kristi Noem’s book claims she met with Kim Jong Un, but that’s not really checking out

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem’s forthcoming book, which previously made headlines for an excerpt outlining her shooting a puppy, is steeped in controversy once again.

In "No Going Back," Noem describes a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, recalling that she was “sure he underestimated me.” But, as it turns out, the two have actually never met.

“We’ve been made aware that the publisher will be addressing conflated world leaders’ names in the book before it is released,” spokesperson Ian Fury said in a statement.

The book contains at least one more possibly inaccurate account of a conversation, one which Noem alleges took place between her and Nikki Haley. According to the book, the then-Ambassador to the United Nations called the Governor to introduce herself and offer advice on leading a state, which Noem somehow took as a threat.

“I’ve heard a lot of really good things about you. But I also want you to know that if I hear something bad … I will be sure to let you know,’” Noem recounts Haley saying. “I’m pretty sure I was just threatened by Nikki Haley. It was clear that she wanted me to know that there was only room for one Republican woman in the spotlight. It was weird."

A spokesperson for Haley, Chaney Denton, noted that the conversation occurred a year before Noem said it did, and that she unfairly twisted what was merely a show of support.

“How close did we come to a dead student?”: Columbia faculty slam NYPD for firing gun during sweep

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office confirmed Thursday evening that a New York Police Department officer shot a gun inside Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, prompting further criticism of the department’s handling of student demonstrations.

In the raid on the occupied Hamilton Hall Tuesday night, an officer fired a handgun which he claimed to be using as a flashlight. No students were injured and the bullet lodged into a wall. The raid itself, which closed off much of Columbia University’s campus to the public, and the press, resulted in the arrests of more than 40 people.

The office’s Police Accountability Unit is reviewing the shooting according to The City, a local newspaper. Beyond the shooting, students inside the building described the “extreme force” in the police response per an interviewed occupier on WKCR, the Columbia student radio station.

“Some were kicked on limbs, some were kicked in the chest, some were kicked in the face” the anonymous student told WKCR. “None of us decided to resist arrest.”

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams criticized the incident on X, alongside Mayor Eric Adams’s statements applauding officers.

“This (and worse) can happen with an administration wanting to cosplay war. This was not a village being liberated from armed bandits,” Williams said. “The Mayor is celebrating forceful accountability for student led protests.”

Associate Professor Joseph Howley slammed the police response, asking on Bluesky, “How close did we come to a dead student in my place of work?”

Also on Tuesday, City College of New York student demonstrations were broken up by police. More than two dozen students were arrested by campus public safety before NYPD was called to detain at least 173 people. It’s unclear how many were “outside agitators,” a claim spouted by Mayor Adams and the NYPD.

Raids continued on New York campuses early Friday morning, with at least 43 arrests made at The New School and 13 at New York University. Both schools authorized the sweeps Thursday, per NYPD Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry. The NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors put out a statement of “no confidence” in the University’s president, Linda G. Mills following the sweep, according to Washington Square News, the school’s student newspaper.

In apparent first, an orangutan was observed using plant medicine to heal itself

The reddish orange orangutan rubs the mashed up plant on its face. One could mistake this for mindless monkey business, but it is quite the opposite: The wild Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) previously chewed up the Akur tuning plant (Fibraurea tinctoria), extracted its juice and then applied the liquid to a facial wound.

In other words, the male orangutan spent more than 30 minutes engaged in a process to treat its injury, which ultimately closed in five days and fully healed within a month, according to scientists studying the incident for the journal Nature. Rakus even seemed to rest more than usual, further suggesting that the animal was intentionally undergoing a self-healing process.

Yet this was no ordinary medical treatment. The orangutan — dubbed "Rakus" by the scientists at Indonesia's Gunung Leuser National Park, where he was spotted — may now be the first documented case of a wild animal treating its own wound with medicine.

"More human than we thought": Orangutans have their own "dialects," just like us

"This possibly innovative behavior presents the first systematically documented case of active wound treatment with a plant species know to contain biologically active substances by a wild animal and provides new insights into the origins of human wound care," the researchers write.

Orangutans are widely beloved as among the most intelligent and human-like wild primates. Their nickname is "gardeners of the forest" because they play a key role in maintaining the health of their native ecosystems. Because they eat leaves, fruits and insects, they help disperse seeds and regenerate forests. Yet orangutans are currently listed as Critically Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. They face extinction because of human activity like habitat destruction, climate change, poaching and the illegal pet trade.

about primate intelligence

GOP congressman seems to endorse Ole Miss student’s racist response to a Black protester

After pro-Palestinian demonstrators were met with racist jeers from counter-protestors at University of Mississippi on Thursday, Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) reposted a video of a student making monkey noises towards a Black woman, captioning it “Ole Miss taking care of business.”

Roughly 25 student demonstrators took to the campus quad this week to protest the ongoing killings in Gaza, carrying Palestinian flags and signs reading "Stop the Genocide." Amid “free Palestine” calls, hundreds of counter protestors showed up, throwing food and bottles and flipping off the pro-Palestinian gathering, with some reportedly waving Trump flags. Counter-demonstrators recited the national anthem and chanted “lock her up,” “hit the showers,” and a variety of racist remarks.

In the video reposted by the Georgia representative on X, formerly Twitter, a group of students in American flag apparel viciously boo and jeer at a Black demonstrator, including the student making monkey noises. As police attempted to keep the two groups separated, counter-protestors appeared to push further towards the pro-Palestinian group. Eventually, according to local news station WTVA, the pro-Palestinian protestors had to be escorted off campus by law enforcement.

Amongst others, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves showed support for the counter-protestors, posting on X that the counter-protests “warms [his] heart.”

Collins, who voted no on the House bill to expand the definition of antisemitism, has previously amplified posts by avowed neo-Nazis, including one in March of this year which targeted a Jewish reporter.

Trump Media audit firm charged with fraud

BF Borgers, the accounting firm that handles Trump Media & Technology Group’s financial audits, was slapped with fraud charges by the Securities and Exchange Commision for allegedly running a vast operation to misrepresent their auditing process.

According to a Friday statement from the SEC, at least 75% of Borgers’ audits on the 369 companies it worked with from January 2021 through June 2023 were not compliant with federal regulations. The SEC says that the firm didn’t properly maintain documentation of their work, and alleges that it created fraudulent documentation on several occasions.

“Thanks to the painstaking work of the SEC staff, Borgers and his sham audit mill have been permanently shut down,” Gurbir Grewal, director of the SEC’s enforcement division, said in the statement.

Owner Benjamin Borgers and his firm agreed to pay $14 million and face a permanent suspension from practicing accounting in a settlement with the federal regulators, which didn’t require an admission of guilt. Each of Borgers’ clients will be forced to find new auditors, per the SEC.

The filing makes no mention of Trump Media, which told CNN that it intends to find a new accounting partner per the SEC order. BF Borgers has worked with Trump Media since before it became a public company, and audited its April prospectus to issue more shares.

Since Trump Media was not a public company during the scope of the SEC’s investigation, its past filings were not reviewed for fraudulent accounting practices.

Trump Media, which owns Truth Social, was one of the firm’s highest valued clients, currently clocking in at a whopping $6.6 billion dollar valuation despite minimal revenue. While the SEC said Trump Media and others don’t necessarily need to amend filings that Borgers worked on, it advised that forms be amended “to address any reporting deficiencies.”

“Audibly sniffling”: Trump “locks his eyes” on Hope Hicks as she breaks down in tears at trial

Former Trump aide Hope Hicks broke down in tears on the stand Friday just as the ex-president's defense team was beginning to cross examine her — and just after she testified that it would be "out of character" for Michael Cohen to have paid $130,000 in hush money to a adult film star without expecting anyone to pay him back.

Hicks, who helped lead Trump's communications strategy during the 2016 campaign and his time in office, earlier Friday said that she was "nervous" to be testifying in Manhattan hush money case. While she praised Trump as a "very hard worker," she also offered details useful to the prosecution, saying she had heard Trump and Cohen discuss the hush payment to Stormy Daniels after the Wall Street Journal publicly revealed its existence in 2018.

The New York Times' Kate Christobek, reporting from inside the courtroom where Trump is being tried on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, wrote that the former president "largely avoided looking at Hicks" as she spoke. But that changed just as defense counsel Emil Bove was preparing to question her about her time working for the Trump Organization — and Hicks began to tear up. Trump, Christobek wrote, "locks his eyes on her as she starts to cry."

According to CNN, Hicks was "audibly sniffling with tears," resulting in a brief interruption to proceedings and both she and the jury leaving the room. "As she left, Hicks moved her hair to one side of her neck, lowered her head and quickened her pace slightly as she passed Trump," the network reported.

The incident came after Hicks rebutted the defense team's argument that Cohen was freelancing when he paid off Daniels, noting that it came as the Trump campaign was in turmoil following the release of the "Access Hollywood" tape, in which the Republican candidate boasted of sexually assaulting women.

Cohen would not have paid Daniels on his own volition, Hicks testified.

"I'd say that would be out of character for Michael," Hicks said, per NBC News. "I did not know Michael to be an especially charitable or selfless person; he is a kind of person who seeks credit."

Giada de Laurentiis’ 5 best salads to enjoy this spring or summer

As we ring in May and the weather warms, why not enjoy some light, but substantial, salads courtesy of everyone's favorite "Everyday Italian" herself?

Giada de Laurentiis — who recently made headlines when she said that she left Food Network because she "got burnt out" — has a deep catalogue of sensational recipes, but some of her best are her rich, satisfying salads, which combine bright, refreshing ingredients with flavorful additions, sharp mix-ins and crunchy garnishes.

“I got burnt out”: Giada De Laurentiis said her decision to leave Food Network was not an easy one

Note that these are by no means all vegan or vegetarian, but of course, with some swaps here and there, they certainly can be made with only plant-based ingredients.

Each salad includes varying colors, textures and flavors, which all the best salads always do. If you're a salad purist, though, this list may not be for you — there's a lot more going on here than just dressed salad greens, that's for sure.

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All of these salads come together in no time and make a great lunch or a dinner side. Without further ado, here are five of Giada's absolute best salads.

Whip one up this weekend!

Orzo Salad with Cranberries and Mozzarella

Grain salads are one of my favorites and this one is top tier. Packed with fennel, orzo, diced chunks of fresh mozzarella and a dijon and apple cider vinegar vinaigrette, you'll be amazed by how flavorful this is. There's always some arugula in the mix to add that familiar bright, peppery note. It's a winner.

Grilled Endive Salad with Citrus and Pancetta

If you haven't tried grilled endive before, you're in for a treat.

By lightly charring endive, the bitterness is mellowed and the vegetable's inherent flavor nuances becomes richer and fuller. Pairing the grilled endive with treviso (similar to radicchio), cara cara or blood oranges, clementines and pomegranate before tossing it with a whole grain mustard-and-champagne vinegar dressing with pancetta and shallot? Yeah, this salad is sure to impress anyone.

Fava Bean Salad

Enter your Hannibal Lecter era with this incredibly simple fava bean salad. Comprised of nothing more than fresh favas, shaved pecorino or toscano cheese and a combination of olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper, it's an exercise in simplicity.

Make sure you're using the highest quality of each ingredient and don't cut corners; the dish is so straight-forward that using a lower-quality cheese or oil will be immediately noticeable.

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Pickled Radish Salad

This dish is a perfect distillation of the importance of texture and consistency in a well-made salad.

With both regular and watermelon radishes, plus red onion, arugula, burrata and the addition of pink peppercorn, the entire salad is rooted in the flavor of perfectly pickled radishes, their sharp edges softened by vinegar, sugar, salt and water. The pickled radishes are a perfect complement to the smooth, lush burrata and the peppery arugula helps to add yet another dimension of deep flavor.

Citrus Caprese

Instead of the traditional mozzarella-tomato-basil combination in a standard caprese, Giada trades the tomato for citrus in the form of orange and grapefruit, swaps the basil for bright, fresh mint, and adds in some raw fennel for crunch and flavor.

The vinaigrette has a bit of punch with Calabrian chili paste, orange-infused olive oil, and white or rosé vinegar. Not many ingredients — but a ton of flavor and color.

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Brittney Griner says she contemplated suicide, recalling experience in Russian prisons

For years, Brittney Griner was WNBA's most high-profile athlete, known for her 6-foot-9 nine stature, her 7-foot wingspan and her NCAA record-breaking slam dunks. She was even the first openly gay athlete to be endorsed by Nike. But in 2022, the basketball player's life was catapulted to the international stage.

Griner, who played basketball in Russia during her off-season from the WNBA, was detained in a Russian airport after a cannabis vape cartridge was found in her belongings. The athlete was sentenced to nine years in a Russian penal colony after being found guilty of drug smuggling and possession charges.

In a New York Times profile published on Thursday, Griner recalled the events surrounding her arrest, subsequent nine-year prison sentence and eventual release in a high-profile prisoner swap at the center of a bitter, contentious rivalry between President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

WNBA star Brittney Griner released from Russian custody in prisoner swap — but Paul Whelan excluded

Griner detailed that when Russian authorities detained her in February 2022, she was immediately held in a cell that she said had a feces-stained hole where she would use the bathroom. She had no way of cleaning herself so she ripped T-shirts into sections to keep her body clean. “I’ve never been so dirty in my life,” she told the NYTimes. The dehumanizing treatment would lead her to suicide ideation.

The treatment in prison led Griner to feel "horrible." She recalled that guards would stare at her body and question her gender. And any time that she was transported to a doctor or a court appointment, she was forced to be in a cage way too small for her nearly 7-foot stature. The profile wrote that Griner once "felt like a dog on a leash." She was even forced to undress and be photographed nude by doctors.

In July 2022, when Griner was sentenced to her nine-year prison sentence, she was transferred to a repurposed Soviet-era gulag in Mordovia in October. She said inmates referred to the region as “the ass of Russia.” Fully integrated into prison life, Griner said she was "tired of waiting for the day. It’s easier to just accept the situation I’m in. I’m an inmate.” It's here where Griner cut off her locs. To her, it felt like the only sense of agency and empowerment she had during her imprisonment.

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“The cut was horrible,” she told the Times reporter, “but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been minus the bars on the window. I was like, I kind of felt like I was in an actual shop right now. At least I can get away in here, a little bit.”

After appealing to Biden through a letter, Griner said her biggest advocates for release were actually Black women. Eventually, in December, a guard slipped the athlete a note, telling her that she was going home. The next day she flew to Abu Dhabi and met with an American envoy for hostage affairs in the State Department. Griner was going to be freed. Griner was exchanged for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer in a prisoner swap. They shook hands, and he told her congratulations.

Following Griner's release, she said she began experiencing symptoms of PTSD. However, from therapy, she learned that there is no “before” anymore. Last year, the WNBA star had a shaky season playing for her team the Phoenix Mercury but she's back on a regimented training cycle and will be traveling to Paris to play basketball in the Olympics this summer.

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Experts predicted olive oil prices would skyrocket due to scorching temperatures. They were right

Back in September, The Grist’s Max Graham penned the story “Climate change is coming for your olive oil, too,” which looked into why olive oil prices soared to a record high this past summer. He cited “heatflation,” the phenomenon of rising food prices caused by extreme heat. Spanish olive oil production had already fallen by a half — from an estimated 1.3 million to 610,000 metric tons — due to a yearlong drought and a spring of extreme heat in Spain. This was concerning not only for the local industry, but the global one too as Spain accounts for more than 40% of the world’s olive oil production.

“Now fears are mounting over the very real possibility that the country’s inventory will run out before the next harvest begins, in October,” Graham wrote at the time.

In recent months, however, those fears have become a reality. An olive oil shortage has caused prices to skyrocket, fueled a crime surge and pushed the industry “into crisis mode,” CNBC reported Thursday.

How this community-driven olive oil company is changing the status quo

According to market research group Mintec, a production range of 830,000 to 850,000 metric tons is expected for Spain’s 2023/2024 season. It’s an increase of roughly 40,000 metric tons from previous estimates but nowhere near Spain’s typical production range which is a little over a million. Within Andalusia, Spain's largest oil-producing region, extra virgin olive oil prices reached an unusual all-time high of 9.2 euros ($9.87) per kilogram in January. That price has steadily gone down to just over 8 euros at the end of March and 7.8 euros as of April 19. Per CNBC, much of that decrease can be attributed to an increase in rainfall in March and April along with an increase in production estimates for Spain’s olive harvest. But experts say such prices are only temporary due to fewer olive oil reserves that would spur price hikes sooner than later.

“The question on people’s lips is yes, prices seem to be going down right now, but eventually people are going to need to start buying,” Kyle Holland, an analyst at Mintec, told CNBC. “And when you’re buying against diminished volumes, they are saying that if volumes drain and everyone needs to buy, then prices have to go up.”

Miguel Angel Guzman, chief sales officer at Deoleo, the world’s largest olive oil producer, said the industry must undergo a “profound transformation” if it wants to overcome “one of the most difficult moments in the history of the sector.”

“Strong inflation along with high interest rates and unfavorable olive oil harvest forecasts (in terms of quantity and quality due to the drought cycle) has caused prices to increase considerably,” Guzman told CNBC in a separate report.

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Although olive trees can typically withstand high temperatures and drought conditions, the ongoing — and dire — climate crisis is pushing the trees to their utmost limit. So much so that the trees are now “exceedingly” vulnerable to the climate crisis. Experts, harvesters and analysts have branded the current situation as a “crisis.” However, the International Olive Council refrained from calling it as such, instead describing the situation as “complex,” per CNN.

Rising olive oil prices have also made the product more susceptible to thefts, mainly carried out by criminal gangs. Olive oil has become the most stolen product in supermarkets across Spain, according to Sky News. In August, more than 50,000 liters of olive oil was stolen from the Marín Serrano El Lagar oil mill, a family-owned company based in Córdoba, Spain.

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“More credible”: Legal experts say Hope Hicks’ testimony “ties everything more closely to Trump”

Former Trump campaign press secretary and White House communications director Hope Hicks testified on Friday in the New York criminal trial of the former president – and her testimony outlining Trump's hands-on leadership could help prosecutors make their case that Trump falsified business records to hide embarrassing information ahead of the 2016 election.

Hicks discussed her key role in meetings and made clear that she "reported to Mr. Trump," who, she said, closely managed his communications strategy. Multiple news outlets, including The New York Times, reported that Hicks said she was "very concerned" about the "Access Hollywood" tape in which Trump bragged about grabbing women by their genitals. The audio clip was published in October — a month before the election.

“I was concerned," Hicks said Friday. "Very concerned. Yeah. I was concerned about the contents of the email, I was concerned about the lack of time to respond, I was concerned that we had a transcript but not a tape. There was a lot at play."

Trump's defense, meanwhile, used their cross examination to ask Hicks questions about Cohen's informal role with the campaign and Trump's concern about his wife Melania's reaction to the "Access Hollywood" tape.

"He liked to call himself a fixer, or Mr. Fix-it, and it was only because he first broke it," Hicks said, according to The Times. Hicks also said of Cohen: "He would try to insert himself at certain moments."

Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, with prosecutors saying he was part of a scheme to kill damaging stories about extramarital affairs ahead of his 2016 campaign. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleged that Trump went to "great lengths to hide this conduct, causing dozens of false entries in business records to conceal criminal activity, including attempts to violate state and federal election laws."

Trump denies those charges, as well as the affairs. Each count is punishable by up to four years behind bars.

New York prosecutors have cited text messages, witness testimony, phone calls and other records to allege that Trump schemed to pay off adult film star and director Stormy Daniels, model Karen McDougal as well as a doorman who falsely claimed Trump had an affair with a housekeeper. The scheme allegedly involved a $130,000 payment to Daniels described as "legal expenses" in Trump Organization records. Bragg said the scheme "mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the reimbursements" for that payment.

According to The Times, prosecutors asked Hicks if Cohen would have paid Daniels without alerting Trump. Hicks said that would have been out of character for Cohen.

Prosecutors on Friday asked Hicks about an email she wrote saying "Deny, deny, deny" concerning the Washington Post's email seeking comment about the Access Hollywood tape. She described that reaction as a "reflex." She also said the campaign was concerned about a Wall Street Journal article about McDougal.

“One of the defining characteristics of Hope Hicks, both in the campaign and in her time in the White House, was that Mr. Trump wanted to have her in the room as often as possible,” Hofstra University constitutional law professor James Sample said. “Hope Hicks is a witness who will heighten the connection between what the jury has already heard and the prosecutors need to establish that part of the reason for these deals was to influence the election.”

Prosecutors have highlighted the "Access Hollywood" tape as the impetus for quashing Daniels' story over their concerns about his election prospects. According to The Times, Hicks called the media aftermath of the tape's release as "intense" and that it "dominated coverage."

Hicks said she spoke to both Trump and his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, about Daniels' claims. Hicks also said she asked Cohen to "chase down a rumor" about another tape that could hurt Trump's campaign.

“The question is, ‘how much does she know?’” Sarah Krissoff, a New York white collar defense attorney and former federal prosecutor, told Salon. “About this catch-and-kill scheme, to the extent that she may have had a broader understanding of that … overarching conspiracy than [Daniels’ former lawyer Keith Davidson].”

"Real embarrassment": Trump lawyer apologizes after judge called him out for "misleading" jury

Hicks could offer prosecutors a crucial nexus between the deals described by witnesses who have testified in the case so far – and the campaign’s desire for that deal to protect Trump’s chance of winning the 2016 election and mitigate the campaign’s fear that the Access Hollywood tape would decimate support from female voters. The Washington Post reported that their reporters contacted Hicks in October 2016 about its impending story breaking news about the tape.

“Obviously she has something useful to say,” Krissoff said. “Otherwise, the prosecutors wouldn’t call her.”

Krissoff said while Hicks is unlikely to add “bombshell” news, she likely she’ll help back up prosecutors’ case.

“Even if it's just little tidbits, sometimes it's a really small point of corroboration,” Krissoff said, adding: “Everyone sort of has just a little, little piece of the story and the DA’s office is going to argue that all of these puzzle pieces add up to a crime.”

Krissoff said Hicks offers a contrast to witnesses who have testified so far, including Daniels’ former lawyer.

“She probably has less baggage as a witness than some of the other folks,” Krissoff said.

According to The Times, Hicks testified Friday that Cohen told her he received a denial from Daniels about a Wall Street Journal detailing the alleged extramarital affairs. She also said she was told internally that Trump did not have an affair with McDougal.

Cohen, for his part, has said he lied to benefit Trump amid the 2016 election.

“All of the key witnesses so far are people that are been involved in a scheme in one way or the other,” Krissoff said. “They’re on one side or the other trying to get the money or paying money, other than a few sort of ministerial witnesses. She was more of a third party witness to the facts, not engaged in the underlying activity, but observing it because of her position with Trump. So I think that's going to make her more credible.”

Trump, for his part, argues he’s the victim of a political witch hunt and has called it a “bookkeeping” case. His defense has suggested he was the target of a shakedown – a Newsweek reporter tweeted that Trump lawyer Emil Bove on Thursday asked Davidson about the definition of extortion.

Trump attorney Todd Blanche has argued Trump was trying to protect “his family, his reputation and his brand.” In testimony last week, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker said Trump’s “family wasn’t mentioned” in conversations with Cohen and Trump about the “catch-and-kill” scheme.

Hicks, in contrast, said Trump was concerned about Melania's reaction to the "Access Hollywood" clip. "President Trump really values Mrs. Trump’s opinion, and she doesn't weigh in all the time, but when she does, it’s really meaningful to him. He really, really respects what she has to say. I think he was just concerned of what her perception of this would be," she said.

“It’s really crucial to the state of mind at this point,” David Schultz, professor of political science and legal studies at Hamline University, said.

“The question is: what was the purpose?” Schultz said. “What was the intention behind it? And she can clarify that. If she can say: ‘Oh, yeah, we did this because we knew that this information coming out, or we thought this information coming out would have an impact in terms of affecting the election, and that we arranged to do all this to hide embarrassing information that could affect the election,’ that's pretty significant. And that it's just a long way to making the prosecutor's argument.”

Prosecutors have yet to discuss at length the particulars of the business records they accuse Trump of falsifying – a move Sample calls a “strategic” choice.

“To show that they were intended to influence the election is necessary to turn these crimes into felonies,” Sample said.

Sample said prosecutors are focusing on detailing the deals first, before going into Trump records that described payments to reimburse Cohen for hush money as legal fees.

Bragg initially cited three potential “aggravating factors”: tax implications, federal election law and New York state election law.

“As they've gone to trial, it has become clear that the one on which they are primarily relying is New York State election law and it is a relatively untested area,” Sample said. “It's untested for a pretty good reason, which is that most of the time when a falsification of business records matter is tried, it's just statistically not likely to be falsification in order to influence an election.”

Sample said some critics think the nexus between the scheme and influencing the election is a “bit tenuous.”

But Sample said of the prosecutors’ case: “It's certainly plausible, and it certainly fits the facts on the ground.”

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Critics have questioned the merits of the case, the age of the events in question, its importance relative to Trump's other pending cases and whether prosecutors are overreaching on a federal election issue. In an opinion essay for The New York Times, Boston University law professor Jed Shugerman called the case an "embarrassment, in terms of prosecutorial ethics and apparent selectivity."

Shugerman said Trump could have "falsely recorded these internal records" to hide the hush money payments in order to deceive the F.E.C. and state investigators probing his campaign.

But Shugerman said it's unclear whether Manhattan prosecutors are pursuing that "novel" argument.

Shugerman said he couldn't find a case of a state prosecutor "relying on the Federal Election Campaign Act either as a direct crime or a predicate crime." Trump's lawyers are arguing an underlying crime must fall under the laws of New York — and Shugerman said prosecutors couldn't cite a judicial interpretation supporting their approach.

Overall, Shugerman said the prosecutors' election interference is too broad and may not survive a state appeal. He pointed out that President Biden's Justice Department itself has not appointed a special counsel to look into the issue.

But Bennett Gershman, former New York prosecutor and law professor at Pace University, said at the end of the day, the alleged election interference is highly troubling.

"This is a case where a man violated the law, and whether he should be punished for violating the law," Gershman said.

Still, Krissoff said she sees hurdles for prosecutors: “This is not an easy case for them to prove.”

“One of their key witnesses here, Michael Cohen, and actually, Stormy Daniels as well, have a ton of baggage about truthfulness here,” she said. “So there is lots of fodder for their cross examination.”

“They have been sort of laying this foundation at the beginning of these relatively more reliable witnesses who are outlining this scheme,” Krissoff said. “But some of those witnesses really don't connect up directly to Trump as much as the DA’s office would like.”

For example, Davidson, the Los Angeles-based former lawyer for Daniels, testified Tuesday that there was as “unspoken understanding that there was a close affiliation between David Pecker and Donald Trump, and that AMI would not run this story or any story related to Karen and Donald Trump as it would tend to hurt Trump.”

“Having some sort of belief or understanding is not the same as it actually being true,” Krissoff said.

“She sort of ties everything more closely to Trump,” Krissoff said. “And corroborates the bits of story that have emerged so far that show Trump communications, trying to corroborate these meetings or calls Pecker talked about.”

The best-case scenario for Trump? Krissoff said Trump’s team would have to hope that Hicks’ recollection is “vastly inconsistent” with other witnesses.

“Then, the defense can stand up and say: ‘Listen, you have to convict beyond a reasonable doubt,’” Krissoff said. “‘You're hearing the stories from witnesses that are not remotely aligned. Who do you believe? Do you believe him, do you believe her? Everybody here is telling us their version of the story and this is certainly not evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.’”

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The D.A.’s office would likely argue that any inconsistencies are expected for recollections of years-old meetings.

Pecker testified last week that Hicks was “in and out” of an August 2015 Trump Tower meeting. Prosecutors say Pecker, Cohen and Trump conspired to break campaign finance laws by scheming to “catch-and-kill” salacious stories about Trump.

Pecker said he recalled a phone conversation in which he told Trump he was planning to extend McDougal’s contract for six months. “He thought that was also a bad idea,” Pecker said of Trump.

“I wanted to extend her contract so she would not go out and give any further interviews or talk to the press or say negative comments about American Media or about Trump,” Pecker said.

Pecker said he received a second call back from Trump, Hicks and former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “I explained to the two of them, that – why I was going to extend her agreement,” Pecker said. “And both of them said that they thought it was a good idea.”

During that second call, Pecker said Trump responded: ‘It’s your business. You do whatever you plan on doing.’”

Schultz said prosecutors may hope Hicks will shed light on whether “it was a deliberate decision on the part of Trump to make us basically work with Pecker to do catch-and-kill for the purposes of suppressing information that could affect the election – and not for the purposes of just covering up embarrassing material to protect Trump's family.”

In cross-examination, Trump lawyer Bove asked whether Pecker had told federal investigators in August 2018 that Hicks was at the 2015 Trump Tower meeting. At one point, he handed Pecker documents, saying, “I’m going to hand you a copy of this report, as well.”

The judge said Pecker could answer Bove’s question: “at no point during this meeting did you tell the government that Hope Hicks was present in August of 2015 at Trump Tower; correct?”

Pecker said: “I don’t remember.”

Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass raised an objection, saying that the report did not state whether investigators ever specifically asked whether Hicks attended the meeting.

The judge said: “Well, then how can he answer the question? The question is: were you asked?”

Bove said the report was not “memorializing then questions.”

The judge said that makes it “a bit disingenuous to hand the witness a document to refresh his recollection.”

The next day at trial, Steinglass asked the judge if he would address about “what we consider to be improper impeachment by omission by Mr. Bove?”

Bove said he apologized to Pecker “for any confusion about that.”

“That was my fault,” Bove told Pecker. “There was some confusion in the question about what had been said and whether Hope Hicks came up… I want to apologize and move on to another meeting from that. If I ask a bad question today, I think Mr. Steinglass will tell me.”

Bove later asked Pecker about the Trump Tower meeting: “And you did not suggest to the jury that you have a recollection of [Hicks] speaking during the meeting; correct?”

Pecker said: “That’s absolutely correct.”

about Trump's criminal trial

Selena Gomez set to make her Food Network debut with brand new show, “Selena + Restaurant”

Selena Gomez is officially embarking on a new chapter of her culinary journey. The global megastar is bidding adieu to her home kitchen and heading out into the professional kitchens of some of Los Angeles’ hottest restaurants in an all-new Food Network show.

“Selena + Restaurant,” premiering Thursday, May 2, features Gomez putting her cooking skills to the ultimate test by several big names in the business. Chefs Shirley Chung, Keith Corbin, Stephanie Izard, Andrew & Michelle Munoz, Wolfgang Puck and Marcel Vigneron will teach and test Gomez to see how well she can create a new dish that’s worthy enough to be in their respective restaurant’s menu. Over the course of six episodes, the chefs will also spotlight and donate to a charity that is meaningful to them.

“After cooking mostly virtually from my kitchen with some of the best chefs for the last four years, I was thrilled to step into their world,” Gomez said in a release. “You’ll have to see if being in person helped my skills at all.”

Throughout the show, Gomez will be accompanied by her best friend Raquelle Stevens, who also served as a guest on Gomez’s Max series “Selena + Chef.” The duo’s first stop is Puck's restaurant, CUT Steakhouse, in Beverly Hills, followed by Shirley Chung’s Ms Chi in Culver City. Additional locations include celebrity chef Marcel Vigneron’s old Hollywood-inspired Lemon Grove; Andrew and Michelle Munoz’s BBG haven, Moo’s Craft Barbecue; Stephanie Izard’s vibrant offering, Girl & the Goat; and Keith Corbin’s soul food restaurant, Alta.

“Selena + Restaurant” kicks off with double episodes at 7pm and 7:30pm ET/PT on Food Network. The show will also be available to stream on Max.

“There is nothing sexual about what I do – I’m a classy lady”: Latrice Royale champions drag queens

More than 12 years after her dazzling breakout performance in season four of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” Latrice Royale is easily one of the most influential drag queens. She’s performed all over the country, had a Las Vegas residency and starred in the fourth season of “RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars.” Latrice's latest project is co-hosting Season 4 of HBO's “We’re Here," streaming on Max.

Beyond her playful, bright eyeshadow and bold personality, Latrice was eager to talk about why being a drag queen is deeply important to her life's work when I sat down with her on "Salon Talks." "I owe everything to this art form," she shared. "I wouldn't be sitting here without this art form. I was able to regain my power through the art of drag."

As someone with early roots in the church, Latrice now calls drag her "ministry.” And it's something she's fighting to keep doing no matter what. "I will defend it to the end," Latrice said. During this season of "We're Here," the queens travel to towns where anti-drag and LGBTQ+ laws, homophobia and overall misconceptions about the art form are all at play. Finding community in red states like Tennessee and Oklahoma wasn’t easy, but it was necessary work to uplift the queer groups living there. “You can't get rid of queer people," Latrice said. "To be able to live comfortably out and proud, and authentically, in places like this is important because people want to feel safe."

Watch my full interview with Latrice here on YouTube, or read the transcript of our conversation below, to hear more about how Latrice approached an emotional experience at a church during the filming of the show and her take on "Drag Race" Season 16 winner, Nymphia Wind.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What drew you into hosting “We’re Here”?

I've been a fan of the show since inception. When I got the call that they were doing the recasting of the queens, they were still experimenting on how they were going to proceed. When they finally figured out what they needed and wanted, they gave me the call and said, "We need your voice, we need your perspective. Are you willing to come in?" I'm like, “Absolutely!"

I was in Vegas at the time when they called, finishing up my residency there. It was exciting because I was going to go straight from Vegas.

Straight to Oklahoma. Tell me about Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

Not so exciting.

Bartlesville had effectively banned public drag shows at that point. There was ongoing tension between the queer community and others. What's your experience like visiting there?

It was shocking to see that they had been so beaten down. They had really lost all will to fight. They had given in to the pressures and the oppression and the haters, and they were tired. They made a deal with the devil that if people left them alone, they would not have drag or a Pride situation.

That was really sad, really sad because the OK Equality of Bartlesville, who that's the voice of the people, they were the ones asking us not to come. That was a little shocking and jarring, but we came anyway because that's what we do. We found out, as you'll see, that this community needed us, they just needed a push to know that they are worth the fight. They were reinvigorated and galvanized, and very supportive.

Some residents were afraid of the backlash of having drag being performed in their city. What was that like seeing people so scared?

It's wild because in Bartlesville, we could not find one business to let us film inside of their place. We had to find a park bench outside in the public. The fear of losing their livelihood just by even being associated with a show like “We're Here” — the backlash and the fear that they would lose everything — rather than do that, which I understand, they just chose not to participate. It was quite like, "Whoa, no one here is going to?” It was like they were nice to your face, they were pleasant, but they're going to decline. It was just wild.

Why is it important though, as a cast and as a show, to go to places where there are queer communities that maybe are not visible?

“We're Here,” the title says it all. Going into these small towns and these rural areas is proof that queer life is everywhere. It's your neighbor. It's your friend. It's your family. You can't get rid of queer people. To be able to live comfortably out and proud, and authentically, in places like this is important because people want to feel safe. That's all. They want to feel happy and safe, and just live their life in harmony.

"Don't tell me I'm an abomination, I’m going to Hell — because I'm highly blessed and highly flavored."

There's a church in every corner in Bartlesville so that had a lot to do with it. The whole separation between church and state does not exist. It's definitely blurred lines, and religion has a tendency to run the rules of life there.

Was it surprising to you to find this sense of community in Oklahoma?

A little bit. I performed in Oklahoma years ago, back in Tulsa, and it was lit. I was completely surprised that they had even a whole scene.

But then, when you travel 45 minutes outside of Tulsa into Bartlesville and you're just like, "We have stepped back in time. We have definitely done a time warp, and these people are a lot different and not so welcoming." They're welcoming, as long as they don't know. If you're not being flamboyant and you can blend in, you're good.

You mentioned religion playing a large role and, in part, the reason why people are so afraid. Can you speak to your own personal relationship with religion? Some of it is visible on the show. How do you reconcile queerness and religion?

That was a struggle. It was a struggle even up until the moment I walked into the church, for me. As a young person, I grew up in the church — very active in the church. I was on the usher board, I was in the choir . . . youth choir, young adult choir, I was all up into the church! I loved it. But as I got older and started understanding the word that the minister was preaching, I started to feel a disconnect because now, I feel like I don't fit in here anymore.

As I got older and started struggling with my sexuality, it definitely affected my faith, and the turmoil and conflict of knowing that I was gay or queer and keeping my faith. That was hard. It wasn't until I was arrested and went to prison that I reconnected with my faith again because there's nobody but you and God up in jail, you know what I mean? You're going to find something to believe in to get you through it. I had lost my mother at the same time, so everything in my world had came to an end. Reconnecting with God, with what I call God, was important to me.

I got through that situation, rebuilt my life, found out my purpose, started walking in my purpose and changing other people's life through my own testimony. That's how I reconnected with my faith. Now, I'm not religious, I'm very spiritual. I have a very, very strong connection with my faith because I know where my blessings come from and I wouldn't be here without the help of God. Now, I have something to battle and conflict these Christians with.

You will not argue me under the table about religion, faith, God because the God I know got me here. Don't tell me I'm an abomination, I'm going to Hell because I'm highly blessed and highly flavored.

Margaret Cho's message to drag show haters: "Take equal rights like a man"

You have this moment in a church where a preacher is preaching acceptance and you say it's the first time you've heard this.

Yeah.

You cry. What emotions did that stir up for you?

Well, the truth of the matter is production, the queens, no one knew that I was going through this internal struggle just 10 minutes prior to walking into the church. I didn't want to go in, not in drag. I thought I was strong enough and willing enough, but as we were getting closer to walking in, I knew I looked the part, I looked great. But those voices came back, that I was making a mockery of God and I was playing in His house and tabernacle, and I was going to Hell for this. What am I doing?

"There are people who are trying to eradicate us and make what we do illegal. I'm not having it because I owe everything to this art form."

I had to shout those voices down and really remember what my purpose was and walk through those doors. Then when I did, I felt his overwhelming sense of relief and welcome. Then to hear this man, the man of the cloth, use words like, "Drag ministry," oh my goodness, that was just it for me.

That's all I do, my drag is my ministry. For him to affirm all of that was everything.

You see your purpose as serving people through drag, right?

Yeah.

Drag has become this very contentious battle with “Don't Say Gay” laws and Drag Story Hour being banned, for example. How does this affect the larger drag community, and also you as a performer?

It's unfortunate because there's so many different facets of drag. The biggest thing that the conservatives are doing and the opposition is doing is sexualizing what we do. There is nothing sexual about what I do. I don't do that type of drag. I'm a classy lady. I'm a woman of faith, all these things. There are different types of drag, just like there's different genres of movies and music. You do what's appropriate.

We are very, very sensitive to where we are and what the conditions are and who our audience is, and we act accordingly. For some reason, people don't see that part. We are here to dispel all the myths, all the misinformation, all of that propaganda that they're spreading, and put it into that.

"Drag Race" icon Bianca del Rio on performing in an age of drag bans: "Don't take our brunch"

You were ranked as one of the most powerful drag queens by New York Magazine. How does it feel to wield that much power?

There's a huge responsibility in what we do and how we move. Especially now, because there is definitely watchful eyes on everything that we do, everything that we say. I'm not editing myself. I am definitely being authentic and 100%.

"Going into these small towns and these rural areas is proof that queer life is everywhere. It's your neighbor. It's your friend. It's your family."

But I am mindful that there are people who are trying to eradicate us and make what we do illegal. I'm not having it because I owe everything to this art form. I wouldn't be sitting here without this art form. I was able to regain my power through the art of drag. I was able to regain my life through the art of drag. I will defend it to the end. We not going nowhere. I promise you, as long as I have air and breath in my body, I'm going to be doing this.

What does it feel like to be that symbol of representation? Do you see it that way, or is this just you being you?

A lot of it is me being me. My mother was a person that helped others, and we had people live with us my whole entire life. She would take people in like stray cats. But no one was going to go hungry or homeless on her watch, and that's just what she did. She was always positive, she always looked for the brighter side of the things, and the lessons and the things that did not go well and try to persevere through them. That's how I live my life as well, and knowing that I am affecting people positively through my story and experience is amazing.

Someone did that for you at your first drag show.

100%.

In Las Vegas, right?

Yes!

Was it a full circle moment for you?

Sixteen-year-old me never would have thought that I would be on the Vegas Strip. No. I'm watching this show, "Boylesque" by Kenny Kerr, and all these bevy of beauties who were men who looked like the stars, the Chers and the Madonnas. They were legends. I could not fathom, these are men? This is wild. It was so cool. Then 30 years later, here I am still doing drag, never thinking that that was going to be my avenue, but here we are.

In 2017, RuPaul was on “Salon Talks” and said that drag, in itself, is about people “not taking themselves too seriously.” Do you feel that same way?

100%. We're not trying to give into the gender norm. This is our way of combating that and doing the complete opposite. Why does a gender have to be attached to anything? Because what goes on in your bedroom is your business. Drag for me, this is why it's so important because it takes all that out of the equation so now, it's more of a human connection versus whether this is a man, a woman situation. Or, gay and straight. It has nothing to do with sexuality.

Right. It's a larger thing.

It's a larger thing, it's bigger than me.

It is bigger than all of us because “Drag Race” has gone on for so long. Fifteen years. How does it feel to be one of the pioneers of the genre?

Back in my day, when we were Logo TV. Now these girls, they grew up watching us and now they're becoming stars in their own right. It's amazing to be a pioneer. It's amazing to be one of the most beloved queens in the world. And still carrying the legacy and working. I must be doing something right.

It's paved the way for Season 16 winner, Nymphia Wind. What did you think of her final performance?

Amazing. Oh my God. I knew that she was one of those girls who had a bag of tricks that she wasn't going to let anyone see until the time was right. She played her cards very close to her chest and it worked. Everyone got to see a little bit of her come out and transform. Her insecurities, gone.

Insane! Acrobats?

Stunts. Reveals. Hair.

Splits.

Fashion. Forget triple threat, she does it all. She's self-sufficient because she's a designer, and she sews and makes her own queen. That's a whole ‘nother level of excellence.

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"Salon Talks"

“Have you ever failed so bad, you bring back Jon Stewart?”: Hasan Minhaj on the “Daily Show” fallout

Hasan Minhaj on Thursday at the "Netflix Is a Joke" comedy festival jested about the controversy that saw him dropped from consideration as a possible Trevor Noah successor as host of Comedy Central's "Daily Show," reports Variety.

Near the end of the lineup, comedian Ronny Chieng joked, “I’m surprised that Hasan’s able to do this show. I guess canceling is not what it used to be.”

The scandal arose after the New Yorker September published an exposé that fact-checked several of Minhaj's stand-up routines. The piece accused him of being factually inaccurate about being rejected for prom due to racism, FBI informants harassing Muslim communities after 9/11 and receiving a letter with white powder that threatened his family. Minhaj, who Variety claims was the frontrunner to replace Noah, was subsequently left out of the running. Instead, "Daily Show" saw the return of Jon Stewart for Monday night episodes.

Minhaj jokingly replied, "You planted that story about me!” before taking the stage with Chieng. “Who the f**k fact-checks stand-up comedy? Only Ronny Chieng would set me up with some f**king mouth-breathing journalist,” he said. “It was you.

“We’ve all failed in our lives, but have you ever failed so bad, you bring back Jon Stewart?” Minhaj added. “I saved a dying institution. You’re welcome.”

Hope Hicks says Trump is a “hard worker” who ran his company “like a small family business”

Hope Hicks, the former Trump aide testifying in his criminal trial, has said that spoke with the former president and his fixer, Michael Cohen, the day they found out that adult film star Stormy Daniels wanted money for her story.

In court Friday, Matthew Colangelo began by asking Hicks to testify about her participation in key meetings as a former communications specialist. She acknowledged that she frequented Trump’s office and taking part in said meetings, describing her former boss as “a very good multitasker and a very hard worker," The Washington Post reported.

Hicks, in her Friday testimony, went on to say that Trump ran his company “like a small family business.” While that was intended as praise, it could also help the prosecution, which is seeking to portray Trump as someone who played a key role in the alleged hush payment scheme at the heart of his Manhattan trial.

“Everybody that works there in some sense reports to Mr. Trump,” Hicks said of the Trump organization.

The New York Times reported that Trump's eyes were "glued onto Hicks" as she testified, the often tired former president the "most alert" he's been all trial. But, the Times noted, the flattery could come at a cost: “Hicks can praise him while harming him in the same breath."

Hicks' praise for her former boss on Friday also stood in contrast to what she was saying privately after the Jan. 6 insurrection, according to text messages previously obtained by congressional investigators. "I'm so mad and upset," she texted a colleague. "We all look like domestic terrorists now."

“Last anti-abortion Democrat” Henry Cuellar faces federal indictment over possible corruption

One of the most conservative members of the House Democratic caucus — and its only avowed opponent of abortion — has been indicted on charges that he and his spouse accepted nearly $600,000 in bribes from foreign interests.

Henry Cuellar has represented his San Antonio-area district since 2004 but has been under a cloud of suspicion for the last two years following FBI raids on his home and office. In the 54-page indictment unveiled Friday, federal prosecutors accuse of him accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars as "an agent of the Government of Azerbaijan" and bank based in Mexico City.

"The bribe payments were laundered, pursuant to shame consulting contracts, through a series of front companies and middlemen into shell companies owned by [Cuellar]," the indictment states. In return, prosecutors say Cuellar promised "to influence U.S. foreign policy in favor of Azerbaijan," a former Soviet republic rich in oil and gas.

In a statement, Cuellar said he and his wife, who face the potential of decades behind bars, "are innocent of these allegations," without specifying what those allegations are. "The actions I took in Congress were consistent with the actions of many of my colleagues and in the interest of the American people," he said.

A self-styled centrist, Cuellar has long angered pro-choice activists. Planned Parenthood Action Fund and NARAL Pro-Choice America have labeled him "the last anti-abortion Democrat in the House." He has also joined Republicans in attacking President Joe Biden's handling of immigration.

But, indicted or not, Cuellar is set to be the Democratic candidate this November after winning an uncontested primary in his solidly blue district. The last time he faced a competitive challenge was in 2022, the same year as the FBI raids, when he defeated progressive candidate Jessica Cisneros by fewer than 300 votes. At the time, Cuellar enjoyed the backing of Democratic leaders.

Coach’s death spotlights pharma’s profit wins in chemo drug shortage

The death of a Milwaukee high school football coach has drawn attention to national drug shortages, as his family speaks out about their inability to access life-saving treatment. Jeff Bolle, 60, died on Dec. 29, 2023 of stage 4 bile duct cancer, seven months after his last chemotherapy treatment with a drug known as cisplatin.

Despite otherwise good health, Bolle was diagnosed in 2022. After undergoing surgery and four rounds of chemotherapy, Bolle's treatments were stopped in May of 2023 when cisplatin became unavailable.

“He was never able to get on cisplatin (again),” his wife, Connie Bolle told Today.com in a recent interview. “His cancer was just continuing to grow, and his bile ducts were getting compromised because the cancer was pushing on them even more. He was really getting so very sick. It was horrible.”

She told the outlet that by late September 2023, doctors realized "there was really nothing else they could do, which was hard to hear … There was no immunotherapy. There was no other chemotherapy."

To save lives, the FDA must change how it evaluates rare disease treatments

According to leading authorities over drug manufacturing in the U.S., the main reason for the national drug shortage is because pharmaceutical companies and drug-makers make decisions about whether to produce and distribute life-saving chemotherapy medicine based on whether or not the company can get rich doing so. Congress could change that at any time — but does not.

As reported by NBC News in May 2023, US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf said there's not enough profit in producing chemo drugs because many are generic and do not have a patent.

"A number of firms are going either out of business, or they’re having quality problems because of difficulty investing in their technology," Califf told the outlet.

Today.com reports that 15 cancer drugs are currently in shortage, up from 14 last year. The FDA said it can not force a pharmaceutical company to manufacture more of a drug, or force it to sell to customers equally — but that "the public should rest assured the FDA is working closely with numerous manufacturers and others in the supply chain to understand, mitigate and prevent or reduce the impact of intermittent or reduced availability of certain products.”

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