The Trump administration is trying to bake quid pro quo deal making, coercive tactics, loyalty tests and other dishonorable practices into American government. Source link

President Trump has promised a bold new American approach to the world. Nowhere is that more urgently needed than in Afghanistan. Not only have its Taliban rulers crushed dissent and stripped away the rights of the country’s women and girls; they have also taken Americans hostage and are allowing Afghanistan to serve as a nerve…

On Thursday morning, an Afghan refugee deliberately plowed a car into a crowd in Munich, motivated by what the police called an “Islamist orientation.” A 2-year-old girl and her mother were killed, and nearly 40 others were injured. A day later — in a country where migration has been a major election issue — that…

At least nine people, including a child, were dead after a severe rainstorm pounded a large swath of the South and left hundreds of thousands of people without power on Sunday morning and communities contending with flash flooding. In northeast Tennessee, the National Weather Service in Memphis issued a flash flood emergency on Sunday afternoon…

A few years back, the online right became enamored of a new epithet for liberals NPC short for non-player character. Non-playable non-player character. But you don’t know about this. Do I get to tell you the NPC meme. Yes, this is the most important meme of our lifetime. The term was lifted from video games,…

My parents had friends and attended and threw parties, but even so, there was something about adulthood that struck me as serious when I was a kid — adults spent their days getting their oil changed, filling out paperwork, going to funerals — and the sheer silliness of “S.N.L.” seemed charmingly, enticingly at odds with…

Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany on Saturday accused Vice President JD Vance of unacceptably interfering in his country’s imminent elections on behalf of a party that has played down the atrocities committed by the Nazis 80 years ago. A day after Mr. Vance stunned the Munich Security Conference by telling German leaders to drop their…

Naama Moses, a volunteer selling merchandise to support the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which represents relatives of the captives, ascribed this to the pain that many felt when they saw the three men who were freed last week. “Perhaps containing your disappointment would be easier at home in front of the telly, on your…

The top foreign policy official for the European Union had a blunt assessment on Friday of the Trump administration’s apparent willingness to give Russia’s leader, Vladimir V. Putin, much of what he wants in Ukraine, even before negotiations to end the three-year war begin. “It’s appeasement,” the official, Kaja Kallas, declared at the Munich Security…

Feb. 14, 2025, 8:07 p.m. ET “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion,” wrote Hagan Scotten, the assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, to Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, in a resignation letter that…