Today’s edition of quick hits.
* Ottawa responds to the White House: “Canada struck back at the United States on Tuesday with retaliatory tariffs on about $20 billion worth of American goods, including steel, dairy products, appliances and farm equipment, as the trade war between the once-friendly neighbors escalated sharply.”
* In the Middle East: “Palestinian residents of war-battered Gaza fled homes and businesses as Israeli strikes and tank fire killed at least four people Monday, including two children, hospital officials said, a week after a U.S. delegation asked Israel to draw down attacks. After evacuation warnings by Israel’s military, a strike hit a building in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.”
* Arguably the nation’s most important ongoing legal dispute: “A federal judge in Massachusetts found that the Trump administration violated her order that barred the government from moving forward with certain restrictions on mail-in voting. Yet even though she did not impose a remedy for that violation, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani said it may ultimately benefit the voting rights plaintiffs who brought the case, because the violative government action makes it ripe to sue over.”
* An unexpected trip: “Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe made a surprise visit to Moscow on Tuesday, U.S. officials said, his first publicly known trip to the Russian capital. It came as the U.S. struggles to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Iran war, although the reason for the visit wasn’t immediately clear.”
* The overall death toll from these boat strikes is at least 223 people: “The U.S. military killed two men in a strike against a boat in the eastern Pacific that it said was transporting narcotics, U.S. Southern Command announced early Monday. It was the first such strike by the military since June 21.”
* Ukraine would benefit from help like this: “British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said Monday that the U.K. will help Ukraine make its own long-range missiles by sharing classified technical information for British components.”
* Aren’t we due for a national conversation about this? “Just how many N.F.L. players will end up with [the degenerative brain disease known as C.T.E.]? New data provides a sobering indication: At least one in four of all the people who have played in the N.F.L. might expect to end up with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, according to a study of hundreds of cases over a recent six-year period.”
* Pirro sure does seem to lose a lot: “Jeanine Pirro, President Trump’s handpicked U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, messed up the prosecution of two accused MS-13 gang leaders earlier this year. CNN reports that in April, Pirro, a former Fox News host, failed to get a jury to convict Moises Rivera-Luna, who is accused of ordering murders on U.S. soil from a Salvadoran jail cell more than 10 years ago, or his co-defendant Tokiro Rodas Ramirez, who was reportedly a local MS-13 leader in D.C.”
* The administration’s fixation on wall art over the last 20 months is a story unto itself: “The State Department wants to sell a painting by the celebrated artist Kehinde Wiley that the director of its Art in Embassies program called ‘very woke’ and ‘aesthetically terrifying.’ It was removed from the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic last week. … State Department officials removed the painting from the embassy last week, after first hiding it behind a tarp designed with an image of the American flag.”
See you tomorrow.
The post Tuesday’s Mini-Report, 8.25.26 appeared first on MS NOW.
