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From Judge Steven Merryday (M.D. Fla.) today in Trump v. N.Y. Times Co. (for the Complaint in the underlying case, which involves various statements about Trump's early life and business career, "A public figure, perhaps the world's most prominent public figure, whose actions and remarks routinely generate immediate global news coverage, sues a newspaper, perhaps the world's most prominent English-language newspaper, along with the world's largest trade book publisher and three authors. The plaintiff initiates in the Middle District of Florida an action for defamation arising from two articles and a book, researched, written, and edited in New York but...

Nearly 1 million people who bought President Trump’s memecoin have lost money through the end of June, according to a report by the cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. Their losses total $3.81 billion. The analytics firm’s assessment was calculated this week after Mr. Trump signed an annual financial disclosure showing that he walked away with a $636 million payout on the same crypto bet, part of a haul of at least $2.2 billion from all of his business ventures in 2025. Once a crypto skeptic, Mr. Trump embraced the profit-making opportunity of digital currencies in 2024, while he was running for...

More ignorance from the New York Times: “Without Climate Change, U.S. Heat Wave Called ‘Virtually Impossible.” Heat and humidity as severe, prolonged and far-reaching as this week’s would have been “virtually impossible” in the Northeast and eastern Canada before humans began warming the planet, a team of scientists said on Friday. *** To estimate how much climate change increased the likelihood of this week’s sweltering conditions, the scientists analyzed records of a measurement of heat stress called “wet bulb globe temperature,” a figure that accounts for humidity, wind and direct sunlight. Given that the heat wave is still unfolding, the...

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pressed President Trump earlier to cripple Iran. But as Iran asserted its power, the prince urged a cease-fire, and is now pursuing his security priorities.President Trump and his military commanders were in a bind.They had announced the start of a new mission to help guide commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran had effectively closed early in the war. U.S. naval and air power would ward off any Iranian attacks during a tentative cease-fire, the commanders said.But U.S. Central Command was caught by surprise when officials from Saudi Arabia said American forces could...

Norway plays the Ivory Coast tomorrow afternoon in the first knockout phase of the soccer World Cup, and one suspects the New York Times will be backing the Norsemen. The Gray Lady has gone gaga for Norway’s “Viking Row,” a synchronized routine where fans mime the rowing of a Viking longboat to the bang of a drum. It’s caught on among the Norwegian players as well as politicians back in Norway, who performed the row in parliament last week. For the last two weeks the NYT has been publishing breathless pieces about the zany Norwegians and their Viking antics. “The...

John Stockwell, who publicly resigned from the Central Intelligence Agency in 1977, accusing it of deceit and illegality, after a career as a covert operative in Vietnam and Africa, died this month in Austin, Texas. He was 88. .... Mr. Stockwell’s break with the C.I.A. — during a period when several former officers published damning exposés of what was informally known as “the Company” — was public and showy. His resignation letter ran in The Washington Post. He wrote a tell-all book, “In Search of Enemies” (1978), which the C.I.A. sought to suppress. He was interviewed on the CBS news...

One of the stars of the Oriental Institute's new show, "Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond," is a clay tablet that dates from around 3200 B.C. On it, written in cuneiform, the script language of ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia, is a list of professions, described in small, repetitive impressed characters that look more like wedge-shape footprints than what we recognize as writing. In fact "it is among the earliest examples of writings that we know of so far," according to the institute's director, Gil J. Stein, and it provides insights into the life of...

<p>February 20, 2002 -- SUDDENLY, it seems, America is doing more wrong than right as it fights the war on terrorism. Or so you might think from the press and TV coverage.</p> <p>In the past few days, The New York Times and The Washington Post have taken up the case of Osama Awadallah, a 21-year- old Jordanian who was a known associate of two of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers. He admits having met one of them "35 or 40 times" and claims not to have met the other though his name appeared in the other's notebook.</p>

The main headline of Sunday’s Yediot Aharonot, a popular Hebrew daily, summed up in two words the prevailing sentiment in Israel over President Trump’s emerging cease-fire agreement with Iran: “Bad Deal.” Israel waged two wars against Iran in the past year, the most recent one the campaign launched in late February with U.S. forces. Now Israel, which had not been a party to the Trump administration’s negotiations with Iran, is being left out of the potential peace... Even before the announcement came on Sunday that a cease-fire agreement had been reached, the details that had surfaced in news media reports...

Even if you’re sick of hearing about Jeffrey Epstein — President Donald Trump and his team have been far more fixated on the relentless controversy than they have ever acknowledged. That (and plenty of other juicy revelations) is based on three years of reporting for a forthcoming book. "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump" is by New York Times correspondents Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan and slated to be published in two weeks. Whether you’re a Trump supporter or detractor, the book is packed with facts that make clear that most or all of the major participants...

The longer we go without oil from the Persian Gulf, the less we’ll need it, says Christopher Smart for the New York Times. Whatever peace agreement the United States and Iran may cobble together, there will be no quick return to pre-war energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz. Even after the mines are cleared, it will take a brave tanker captain to trust that the passage is once again secure - and higher insurance costs could raise the price of that trip by millions. But with every passing day, the world is learning to live without the Gulf’s seaborne...

You might think that early Americans sounded like Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren, and that the American accent developed after independence. It was probably the other way around. Up until the early 1800s, you couldn’t tell whether a person was British or American from their accents. When naval officers tried to free sailors who had been shanghaied into service in the War of 1812, they said they couldn’t tell for sure who was American or British by the way they spoke. The hallmark of the British accent — pronouncing words like “path” and “fast” as “pahth” and “fahst” or “fah”...

AAmong the greatest early accomplishments of the second Trump Administration was the shuttering of USAID. It’s great in part because it’s saving billions previously supposedly spent on trans camel surgeries in the third-world, but also because it has shut down innumerable Democrat NGOs and non-profits, including the Democrat National Committee, which, within a month, went broke and had to borrow millions just to keep the lights on. It seems USAID’s money—taxpayer money—wasn’t just spent on bizarre, leftist boondoggles overseas. It largely funded the Democrat Party and their cronies in America. Smart, that Trump guy. A recent, tear-drenched New York Times...

I was speaking the other day with Scott Pelley of CBS News's "60 Minutes" about the mood in Iraq. He had just returned from filming a piece there and he told me something disturbing. Scott had gone around and asked Iraqis on the streets what they called American troops - wondering if they had nicknames for us in the way we used to call the Nazis "Krauts" or the Vietcong "Charlie." And what did he find? "Many Iraqis have so much distrust for U.S. forces we found they've come up with a nickname for our troops," Scott said. "They call...

Insipid former New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman is batting a thousand with the level of maniacal things he’s spewed onto the internet within just a 24-hour window. Krugman released a YouTube video of himself May 31 ironically calling President Donald Trump “mentally ill” before monotonously calling for a “thorough purging of the United States” tantamount to a “de-MAGA-fication” of the populace. He must have had some kind of inkling that what he said was cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs, because he had to assure viewers that he’s “not going over the top by using a word that’s very similar to the ‘de-Nazification’...

Each and every update about the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine somehow makes the guy seem even worse. Over the weekend, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal released verified investigative reports that Graham Platner was sexting between six and twelve women, despite being newly married. After this revelation, Platner and his wife addressed the media and said this was just gossip that is distracting people from things that matter. Unfortunately for Platner, his attempts at damage control are getting harder by the moment. We now have evidence that he created a raunchy profile on Kik, a social messaging...

President Trump likes his military and diplomatic victories quick, clean and decisive. (snip) But now, Mr. Trump has hit the stalemate phase of his presidency. The war with Iran is clearly at that stage. When he declared a cease-fire on April 7, Mr. Trump said on social media that the end of combat operations would be conditional on “the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz.” It wasn’t. Even if commerce now resumes across the strait under a memorandum of understanding still under negotiation, it will still leave the future of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs exactly...

Graham Platner exchanged sexually explicit texts with multiple women while married to his wife, Amy Gertner, his campaign confirmed to POLITICO on Saturday, the latest scandal he has faced since launching his Maine Senate campaign last year.In a statement, Gertner slammed a former friend for spreading “malicious gossip” in the wake of a Wall Street Journal report that she had informed her husband’s campaign of the texts in late August.“I confided deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I considered a friend,” she said. “In the months since, I have had to watch as she spread malicious gossip to...

In recent conversations with aides and allies, President Trump often interjects with a question about his vice president: Does JD Vance have what it takes to go all the way? He usually answers his own question: He’s not so sure. It is not that Mr. Trump is abandoning Mr. Vance. He involves him in major decisions, has given him high-profile opportunities to position himself for 2028 and trusts the 41-year-old vice president to wage partisan warfare on his behalf. In a cabinet meeting this week, Mr. Trump compared Mr. Vance to Eliot Ness, the mob-busting federal agent, for working to...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stole the show at a recent congressional hearing with two jars of brown water. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) explained that the dirty water had come from Morgan County, Ga., where a Meta data center is allegedly tainting the water of local residents. It was an image perfectly suited to driving the intensifying opposition to data centers in that it was photogenic, easy to understand — and misleading. According to reporting in the New York Times last year, the water problem has affected four homes in the vicinity of the data center, not the entire county, as AOC implied. It...