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A top former US health official, however said the epidemic could be the worst ever.

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The explosives-packed aircraft that hit an apartment building was ostensibly bound for nearby Ukraine.

Nate Bear Do Not Panic It’s been record hot in parts of Europe and Asia over the last week and this has provoked an outburst of three things that have become de rigeur whenever this happens: The first one is baked in to the conversation, you might say, if you were reaching for an appropriate metaphor. And normally I’d […]

Many governors across the country, Democrats and Republicans alike, are making a point of mentioning childcare these days. In fact, nearly half of them mentioned it in their 2026 State of the State addresses, according to a tally released this week by the Center for American Progress. And it stands to reason. Childcare is less affordable than ever, even for middle-0class families, and voters want the government to do something about it.To that end, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger on Wednesday signed a bill creating an Employee Child Care Assistance program that would, through matching government funds, incentivize companies to contribute to their employees’ childcare costs. “Because when a family cannot afford child care, oftentimes a parent—and the numbers bear it out, oftentimes a mom—drops out of the workforce altogether. That doesn’t just create a family budget issue, that creates a challenge for our economy,” Spanberger said.It is true that women are disproportionately likely to drop out of the workforce because they can’t afford to pay for care for young children. But a survey released Wednesday from New America, a nonpartisan, liberal think tank, paints a more complicated picture. Parents of young children want to work, but they also want to be able to spend more time with their children. Making childcare more affordable only addresses half of that equation. What can policymakers do to give parents more time with their children?The research, from New America’s New Practice Lab, surveyed 5,472 parents with children under 6 years old and found that across income groups and around the country, 72 percent wanted more quality time with their kids—even more than they wanted personal time (63 percent) or sleep (56 percent). The most common ways they wanted to spend this time were “playing, enjoying outdoor activities, and traveling.” Alas, more than half of them said they didn’t have enough money for the kind of childcare arrangement that would allow for more time with their kids.This was true for men as well as women, and the problem started from the moment their child was born: Nearly everyone said that they didn’t get to take the amount of parental leave they would have preferred, with 59 percent taking six weeks or less and 15 percent taking no leave at all.“At its simplest, parents need money, but they also need time,” said Tara Dawson McGuinness, executive director of the New Practice Lab. “It’s one thing to be able to afford putting food on the table, but we heard in some of the open-ended questions, a real hunger…to be there with your children at the dinner table, and that wages and work were competing with the ability for people to see their kids.”This is why Democrats around the country are pushing for more paid family leave; Spanberger recently signed such a bill in Virginia. While there’s no federal guarantee of paid family leave, a recent analysis by the National Partnership for Women & Families found that the District of Columbia and 13 states have passed paid-leave laws, providing coverage for nearly a third of private-sector workers across the country; that number would rise to 44 percent if six more states follow through with efforts to pass such a law. Having the right to leave doesn’t mean workers will take it, though; states also need to ensure that workers can afford to take the time and are not punished for doing so.But paid family leave typically covers only the time right after birth, or when an adopted child joins a family. The New America survey showed that parents wanted more time with their kids throughout their toddler years as well. But when workers, especially women, take extended time out of the workforce to be with young children, they face barriers returning to work and take a hit in their lifetime earnings.  As long as women are discriminated against after having children, the prospect of taking more time off to be with children is unlikely to appeal to men, out of fear that they would be punished in the workplace, too.Unsurprisingly, low-income parents faced the biggest hurdles finding family time and affording activities, according to the New America study. But parents with higher incomes also wanted more time with their children and named financial concerns as a big reason they couldn’t have it. “What struck us… was how many commonalities there were across income levels,” said Kelly Bidwell, who also worked on the report.While most of the parents they surveyed wanted to work, there weren’t clear majorities when it came to how their work schedules should look. Parents wanted flexibility, and the biggest barrier to that was money. Two-thirds of parents, across all income groups, said they wanted higher wages, both to be able to afford the activities they wanted to do with their kids and to be able to work less.The U.S. does need more affordable childcare. But providing that doesn’t solve this fundamental problem: Parents want the resources to be able to spend more time with their children while they’re young. No policymaker can find more hours in a day, but one of the big reasons parents don’t take off more time for their families is that they don’t earn enough to be able to do so. “We are not having a national conversation about time and wages, which are what parents are really asking for,” McGuinness said. “Our policies for families aren’t wrong, but they are not exactly right either.”

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Black death-row prisoner in Mississippi on Thursday who claimed that he had been denied a fair trial because prosecutors had struck all but one of the Black potential jurors during jury selection.Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for a 5–4 court, held that the Mississippi courts had “unreasonably applied the clearly established Batson precedents,” referring to a landmark 1986 case, and “unreasonably determined” that defendant had “waived his opportunity to rebut the prosecutor’s asserted race-neutral reasons” for striking multiple Black potential jurors.The court’s ruling is not surprising based on the available record. But the fact that only five of the court’s nine members reached this conclusion is somewhat troubling. Kavanaugh, along with Chief Justice John Roberts, joined Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson to form the majority. Justice Neil Gorsuch led the rest of the conservatives in dissent.This lineup is not as surprising as it might look. While Kavanaugh tends to vote with his fellow conservatives on most criminal justice matters, he has shown a special interest in questions of racial discrimination during jury selection throughout his legal career. He even wrote a law review note on Batson v. Kentucky, the landmark 1986 case on the matter, while attending Yale Law School in 1989.Thursday’s ruling is good news for Terry Pitchford, who robbed a grocery store in Mississippi in 2004 along with his then-friend Eric Bullins. During the robbery, Bullins shot and killed the store’s owner. State prosecutors reached a plea deal with Bullins, who was ineligible for the death penalty as a 16-year-old, and instead sent him to prison for 20 years. Under the felony-murder rule, prosecutors then charged Pitchford, who was 18 years old at the time, with first-degree murder, even though he didn’t pull the trigger. A Mississippi jury convicted him, and the court sentenced him to death.As recent events have shown, the American jury system is an essential bulwark against tyranny, oppression, and prosecutorial abuses. For that reason, prosecutors in the Jim Crow South routinely excluded Black Americans from participating as jurors in criminal trials, especially in cases with Black defendants. So prevalent was the problem that the phrase “all-white jury” entered the American lexicon as a shorthand phrase for manifestly unjust and unreliable trials in the South.Black jury participation increased after the demise of de jure racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, alongside other forms of direct political participation. But old habits die hard. In the Batson case, for example, a state prosecutor had used his peremptory challenges to strike all of the Black jurors from the jury pool, resulting in an all-white jury for a Black defendant. The Supreme Court ruled in Batson that a state violates a defendant’s equal-protection rights when it “puts him on trial before a jury from which members of his race have been purposefully excluded.”Since Batson, prosecutors have typically given race-neutral explanations to the court for why they are striking jurors to avoid future legal challenges. According to court records, the prosecutor struck four of the five Black potential jurors and gave reasons that ranged from their showing up 15 minutes late to court to their being young, unmarried, and male like Pitchford. A defendant’s lawyers then have the opportunity to respond or rebut those explanations. In Pitchford’s case, however, that did not happen.Rather than allow Pitchford’s lawyers to challenge those strikes, the trial judge simply declared that each of them was race-neutral and moved on. This was implausible, as Pitchford’s lawyers later explained, because the prosecution had “deselected black people from the jury panel who had the same familial, living, social or marital circumstances as whites who were not deselected.” Pitchford’s lawyers tried to object at the end of the process, only to be rejected again by the trial judge, as Kavanaugh summarized:At the close of jury selection, defense counsel sought to raise the Batson issue again. But the trial court twice cut off defense counsel and ended the inquiry before counsel could try to rebut as pretextual the race-neutral reasons articulated by the prosecution: “I think you already made those, and they are clear in the record. For the reasons previously stated, first the Court finds there to be no—well, all the reasons were race neutral as to members that were struck by the district attorney’s office. And so the, the Court finds there to be no Batson violation.”One might expect the Mississippi Supreme Court, to which Pitchford turned next, to have ordered a new trial after learning about this flawed jury selection process. But it did not. Instead, the court argued that Pitchford had actually waived his Batson objection on appeal because his lawyer had not argued that the explanations were pretextual during the trial. Since the argument hadn’t been raised then, the court surmised, he could not raise them for the first time now.Generally speaking, U.S. appeals courts do not review legal questions that weren’t already considered and decided at trial first. Last week, for example, the Supreme Court dismissed a case that it had agreed to hear last year after concluding that the underlying legal question hadn’t been properly considered by the lower courts first. Preserving arguments for appeal is an essential part of the criminal trial process, especially in death penalty cases where the stakes can be existential.But the Mississippi Supreme Court’s ruling was only true because, as Kavanaugh recounted, the trial judge gave the defense lawyer no real opportunity to do so, even acting at one point as if the argument had already been made. This was obvious to the federal district court that heard Pitchford’s federal appeal, prompting it to rule in his favor. But the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision and deferred to its Mississippi state court brethren.When arguing before the justices, the state of Mississippi tried to claim that Pitchford’s lawyers had preserved one kind of Batson argument at trial, but not the most important one: that the prosecution’s strikes were pretextual. Justice Neil Gorsuch and the other four dissenting justices agreed, with Gorsuch concluding that Pitchford’s trial lawyers were trying to make a statistical argument of some kind. The majority dispensed with those assertions with little fanfare. “The State’s argument—that Pitchford preserved his Batson objection but nonetheless somehow waived his Batson pretext argument—does not make much sense and is not a reasonable reading of this record,” Kavanaugh explained. “We need not belabor the matter.” This is a justice’s polite way of saying something is not just wrong, but obviously wrong.But this particular wrong was apparently not so obvious to four other members of the court. They leaned heavily on a federal law known as the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, or AEDPA. Congress enacted the law in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing to curb criminal defendants’ ability to invoke—and federal courts’ ability to provide—habeas corpus for state-level criminal convictions unless the lower court’s ruling was clearly “unreasonable” under “clearly established” federal law or Supreme Court precedent.In his dissenting opinion, Gorsuch noted that the Supreme Court has interpreted this limit in extremely strict ways. “Showing legal error, we have said, isn’t enough to satisfy [AEDPA],” he explained, quoting from a 2022 ruling by the high court. “Instead, a petitioner must demonstrate that ‘no fairminded jurist could reach the state court’s conclusion under this Court’s precedents.’” As the law’s many critics can attest, AEDPA made it much more difficult for defendants to challenge their convictions in federal court.Notably, Gorsuch also disputed Pitchford’s implication that his lawyers had been shut down by an overbearing trial judge. He cited purported examples from the transcript where the lawyer could have, in his view, interjected to preserve the argument at hand. I won’t bother outlining his version because Gorsuch himself ultimately says it doesn’t matter. Even if he relied fully upon Pitchford’s version of events, the justice concluded, AEDPA would still obligate him to reject Pitchford’s challenge.“Even if it were a plausible account, that still would not be enough,” Gorsuch argued. “Under [AEDPA], a federal habeas petitioner must show not only that his version of events is plausible. He must show that the record ‘compels’ it. And no matter how generously one interprets the record in this case, that is a standard Mr. Pitchford cannot meet,” relying on his own “reasonable” inference that Pitchford’s lawyers only preserved one kind of Batson claim but not another.Kavanaugh, for his part, found that the Mississippi-Gorsuch narrative missed the forest for the trees. “That slices Batson way too thin,” he explained. “At that key point in the jury-selection process—after the prosecutor had asserted facially race-neutral reasons for the peremptory strikes—the Batson objection was a Batson pretext argument.” In a footnote, he stated more bluntly that the dissenters’ “speculation” is not “how the Batson inquiry ordinarily operates.”Gorsuch, undeterred, made sure to conclude his dissent by noting that Thursday’s decision was a “narrow” one. “Precisely because so many of our AEDPA precedents go unmentioned, I do not read today’s decision as calling any of them into question,” he wrote. If those precedents would compel at least four justices to vote to execute a defendant who didn’t actually kill anyone, and whose lawyers could not properly object to the nearly all-white jury composition at trial, then maybe they deserve a few more questions than they received here.

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here.The rapid adoption of generative artificial intelligence is reshaping business, education, and other sectors of life, including politics. Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, a left-leaning economic policy group, says it’s essential that progressives and liberals accept that AI will be a huge force in the world and design strategies for how to deal with it. He argues, citing polling, that Americans’ biggest concern about AI is losing their jobs due to technological advances. Democrats can’t stop AI from putting some Americans out of work. But Jacquez says it’s critical that Democrats push to ensure that the benefits of AI go to all Americans, not just the rich; companies are not allowed to use AI in ways that drive up prices and rip off average Americans; and people who lose their jobs from AI are given sufficient support from the government to find new roles. He says that most people want to earn their income through work, so liberals should concentrate on pushing for policies such as a federal job guarantee instead of proposals like universal basic income that directly give cash to people.

Here and there, it’s been a good month for humanity—or “magnificas humanitas,” as Pope Leo XIV calls us poor featherless bipeds.On May 25, the pope published his encyclical letter “on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.” It made a stern but loving case against AI fatalism, reminding humans of our intrinsic worth and cautioning against seeking transcendence in tech rather than grace.But the human person got another boost in late May. It came from a less holy figure too: Peter Thiel, net worth $28 billion. As the founder of omnipresent MAGA AI surveillance machine Palantir and longtime student of the Antichrist, Thiel didn’t mean to help out humanity. Benevolence is not his strong suit. He’s out to live forever and build a master race. But by failing to make the case for transhumanism with his much-hyped Enhanced Games, a pro-doping sports event, Thiel accidentally showcased what’s magnificent about humanity.What makes Thiel’s Enhanced Games different from other competitions is that at his games, which wrapped May 24 in (where else?) Las Vegas, elite athletes were permitted to juice to the gills. They were highly incentivized to break world records, albeit with an asterisk, on the promise of six-figure purses. The Enhanced Games, in other words, were expected by one and all to showcase the possibilities of transcendence through tech and money. “Like most bad ideas,” wrote Mitchell Duran for Yahoo Finance, “Enhanced Games was born from a mix of grievance and the belief that, with the right amount of tech, financing, and new-age, untested science, any human being can transcend any and all natural limitations.”Tech and money sure do make a lot of damn winners in this life. In fact, in our corrupt and oligarchic era, tech and money are styled as the one true path to glory. The unaugmented are suckers and losers. It’s surprising how few people dispute that. In fact, from the time that the Enhanced Games were announced in 2023, lavishly capitalized by Thiel and one Don Trump Jr., no one doubted that a doped athlete chasing a huge purse would smash the world records of noncheating, clean ones. After all, why else has doping been so closely policed, unless it gives an athlete a giant advantage? A chess player with an extra queen would win every game. But not so fast.Here are the results. They undercut the case for tech-and-money supremacy so radically that humankind should consider this a big win. Maybe—maybe—the pope’s faith in us is not misplaced.In short, no doped athlete at the Enhanced Games broke even one record, except a swimmer who won in a buoyant polyurethane supersuit that corseted him into an underwater missile. (The supersuit has been banned by World Aquatics for 15 years.) The other doped swimmers, runners, and power lifters could barely get it together to win, let alone break* any records. “They were nowhere close to world records,” said the online track influencer Coach Rob. “They were nowhere close to personal records.”More surprising still: Several athletes who competed clean beat their juiced opponents. Among these are the Olympic gold medalist sprinter Fred Kerley. Kerley, who was banned from the sport until 2027 for missing drug tests, has always maintained he doesn’t dope. He was determined to run clean in the Enhanced Games too. (“I’m inclined to believe him,” said Coach Rob. “The time he ran is consistent with that.”) Kerley says he ran for the money. But he clearly wanted to prove something too. Indeed, he proved it. When he won the 100 meters with a respectable but not earth-shaking time (9.97 seconds), he trash-talked the rest of the field—and it was hard to blame him. “They gotta do better than that,” he said. “Train a little harder.”The event, in the end, was deeply depressing. It was a ratings flop, and Thiel and Junior lost a lot of money; the Enhanced Games start-up lost 70 percent of its value overnight. The bet on drugs over humanity simply didn’t pay off. Sport, which should highlight the triumph of the human spirit, is unwatchable when it’s geared to highlight the triumph of lab-made biochemicals. Why not just have robots race?But there was politics at the Enhanced Games too. In 2025, Bloomberg called the pro-doping event “the ultimate MAGA athletic competition.” It was hard to miss the point. At a time when Trump is hell-bent on cheating at elections and chases filthy wins to spite the rule of law, the defeat of MAGA Thiel’s dirty athletes by clean ones suggests that humankind’s better nature might, one day, reassert itself. Even in our fallen world.“God gave me fast feet for a reason,” Fred Kersey said before the race. “I’m here to showcase my talent. You still have to work. Drugs aren’t going to give you an advantage if you’re not putting the work in.”Fast feet, hard work, and of course God—the pope would approve.

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