macarthur_park

Non-paywalled link

[The Biden administration] assigned itself a larger mission than full-throated solidarity in the aftermath of the attack. It wanted to avert a regional war that might ensnare the United States. It aspired to broker an end to the conflict, and to liberate the estimated 251 hostages that Hamas had kidnapped and taken to the Gaza Strip. It sought a Gaza free from Hamas’s rule, and the dismantlement of the group’s military capabilities. And despite the scale of those tasks, it accelerated its pursuit of the Saudi normalization deal.

What follows is a history of those efforts: a reconstruction of 11 months of earnest, energetic diplomacy, based on interviews with two dozen participants at the highest levels of government, both in America and across the Middle East.

Apparently an autograph album is “is a book for collecting the autographs of others. Traditionally they were exchanged among friends, colleagues, and classmates to fill with poems, drawings, personal messages, small pieces of verse, and other mementos.”

They were popular among university students from the 15th to mid-19th century, but have since been replaced by yearbooks.

Everett’s methods may violate the Hippocratic Oath, but they sure are effective.

Just hold this pose for a while until the cement sets good!

Ever the artist, Mr. True branches out into mixed media (cement and fool face).

Get up out of that so I can take one more punch at you!

Sadly, Everett would need to wait for the Fair Housing Act of 1968 for this landlord’s behavior to be federally illegal. It’s unclear what state Mr. True lives in (besides anger, obviously).

“There’s no hope of my beating any sense into you, but I’ll knock some of the ignorance out of you!”

-Everett True

Sometimes Everett’s angry chastising gets downright poetic. Here he throws out a one-liner worthy of an 80’s action movie, all because of a messy banana eater.

American allies see a second Trump term as all but inevitable. “The anxiety is massive.”

Fear of losing Europe’s most powerful ally has translated into a pathologically intense fixation on the U.S. presidential race. European officials can explain the Electoral College in granular detail and cite polling data from battleground states. Thomas Bagger, the state secretary in the German foreign ministry, told me that in a year when billions of people in dozens of countries around the world will get the chance to vote, “the only election all Europeans are interested in is the American election.” Almost every official I spoke with believed that Trump is going to win.

Paywall removed: https://web.archive.org/web/20240603193105/https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/06/nato-trump-europe-allies/678533/

Congress on Thursday sent legislation to avert a partial government shutdown to President Biden, racing to fund federal agencies through early March one day before money was to run out.

Over the strenuous opposition of far-right Republicans, the House voted 314 to 108 to approve the stopgap funding just hours after the Senate provided overwhelming bipartisan backing for the measure in a 77-to-18 vote, allowing lawmakers to narrowly beat a Friday deadline.

…

In the end, Mr. Johnson was only able to cobble together a bare majority of Republicans voting on the bill, with 107 backing it and 106 opposed. Democrats supplied the bulk of the support.

Alternative non-paywalled source: ABC News