President Joe Biden returned to his childhood hometown of Scranton on Tuesday to open three straight days of campaigning in Pennsylvania, capitalizing on the opportunity to work the battleground state while Donald Trump spends the week in a New York City courtroom for his first criminal trial.

If someone says, “Trust the science!” these days, it’s usually an effort to short-circuit debate over weighty policy issues. “Trust the science” has been deployed in the past five years to prevent debate over COVID school closures and mask mandates, over electric-car subsidies, and over sex changes for boys and girls. For my entire time […]

THIS WEEK’S OTHER TRUMP LEGAL STORY. The trial of former President Donald Trump, the paperwork case over the nondisclosure agreement he had with a porn star, continues with jury selection in Manhattan. It’s been extensively covered; this newsletter wrote not one but two previews last week, plus more discussion yesterday. So enough about that for a […]

Qatar called Rep. Steny Hoyer’s (D-Md.) criticism of the country’s mediation efforts in the Israel-Hamas war “not constructive” and rebuked the lawmaker for "threatening" to “reevaluate” the U.S. relationship with Doha. Hoyer stated on Monday that Qatar should signal to Hamas that "repercussions" will ensue if the militant Palestinian group stalls “progress” toward releasing the...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a new bill into law Tuesday that limits the ability of individuals without students in a given school district to raise objections to books in those districts. Under the new wide-reaching education bill, HB 1285, individuals without children in the school district will only be able to raise one...

Venezuela has ordered its embassy in Ecuador closed in the wake of a raid on the Mexican Embassy in Quito. “I ordered to close our Embassy in Ecuador, as well as the Consulates in Quito and Guayaquil and for diplomatic personnel to return to Venezuela immediately,” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said Tuesday in a post...

Former President Trump on Tuesday visited a bodega in Harlem after getting out of court for the day, highlighting how he’s seeking to balance his time as both a criminal defendant and the presumptive Republican nominee for president. Trump stopped by the bodega, where supporters had gathered and greeted him with chants of “four more...

A chunk of the International Space Station that was released three years ago crashed into a Florida home last month, according to NASA’s Monday news release. A cargo pallet was released from the space station in March 2021. It was filled with aging batteries. When released, it was supposed to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere...

Alina Habba, an attorney and spokesperson for former President Trump, said in a Tuesday interview that it was “unlikely” that Trump fell asleep in the courtroom during the first two days of jury selection for his hush money case in Manhattan, despite reports indicating otherwise. “If anything, he's probably brutally bored,” Habba told Fox News’s...

The second day of former President Trump’s criminal trial in New York was more productive than expected, with the jury beginning to take shape. Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He is the first former president to be tried in a criminal case. The underlying story of the alleged crimes...