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http://archive.today/2025.05.03-092052/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/us/politics/republicans-congressional-review-act.html

As President Trump moves unilaterally to slash the federal bureaucracy and upend longstanding policies, Republicans in Congress have embarked on a spree of deregulation, using an obscure law to quietly but steadily chip away at Biden-era rules they say are hurting businesses and consumers.

To do so, they are employing a little-known 1996 law, the Congressional Review Act, that allows lawmakers to reverse recently adopted federal regulations with a simple majority vote in both chambers. It is a strategy they used in 2017 during Mr. Trump’s first term and are leaning on again as they work to find ways to steer around Democratic opposition and make the most of their governing trifecta of the House, the Senate and the White House.

But this time, Republicans are testing the limits of the law in a way that could vastly expand its use and undermine the filibuster, the Senate rule that effectively requires 60 votes to move forward with any major legislation.

http://archive.today/2025.05.04-093155/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/us/politics/joe-biden-cognitive-test-age.html

Months before President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was forced to abandon his re-election campaign, his top White House aides debated having him undergo a cognitive test to prove his fitness for a second term but ultimately decided against the move, according to a forthcoming book.

Mr. Biden’s aides were confident that he would pass a cognitive test, according to the book, but they worried that the mere fact of his taking one would raise new questions about his mental abilities. At the same time, Mr. Biden’s longtime doctor, Kevin O’Connor, had told aides he would not take the 81-year-old president’s political standing into consideration when treating him.

The discussion took place in February 2024, a few weeks before Mr. Biden’s final White House physical exam and a period preceding some of his most damaging public episodes.

The same month that Biden aides considered the cognitive test, Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents, released a report concluding that the president was “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Mr. Biden held a late-night news conference to deliver an angry response in which he referred to the president of Egypt as the president of Mexico and declared, “My memory is fine.”

Throughout Mr. Biden’s presidency and especially during his re-election bid, his aides and advisers often argued that the news media was unfair in how it covered his age, fueling voters’ negative perception of his vigor. Few influential figures in the White House or on his campaign would entertain the idea that he was struggling to perform his presidential duties.

But outside Mr. Biden’s tight inner circle, many Democratic politicians and strategists began to worry quietly as his re-election bid took shape. By June 2022, Democrats were talking among themselves about his potential to drag down the 2024 ticket, with many suggesting he should not run again.

A New York Times article that month included an interview with David Axelrod, the former adviser to President Barack Obama who has become one of the party’s elder statesmen.

Mr. Axelrod said that Mr. Biden “looks his age” — then 79 — and that he was feeding a narrative that he was no longer up to the job of being president.

“The stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be a major issue,” Mr. Axelrod said.

That comment prompted an angry call to Mr. Axelrod from Ron Klain, then Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, according to the book. Mr. Klain wanted to know why Mr. Axelrod was fueling doubts about a Democratic president who was on track to begin a re-election campaign.

“There’s no Obama out there, Axe,” Mr. Klain told him, the book recounts. “Who’s going to do it if he doesn’t do it?”

http://archive.today/2025.05.02-221839/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/opinion/work-school-classroom-politics-harvard.html

On Oct. 8, 2023, I was on the steps of Harvard’s Widener Library, taking part in a vigil for the victims of Hamas’s terrorist attack. I’m an Israeli American tenured professor, and I felt it was my duty to stand up for Jewish and Israeli students. I helped organize an open letter denouncing antisemitism. I am a member of Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias. I have written numerous blog posts and opinion articles on this matter.

In my classroom, I have not discussed these issues at all. I am a professor of computer science, and students take my courses to learn the fundamental capabilities and limitations of computing devices. Students in my class have been on both sides of the campus divide. Two of them asked for more leniency in academic assignments because of their involvement in campus activism, one with a Jewish organization, the other with a Muslim one. I refused them both.

Why does this matter? An assignment about Boolean circuits is clearly less important than combating campus antisemitism, let alone the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. But the value I want to encourage is professionalism. When we erode the boundaries between the academic and the political, we ultimately harm both.

In recent years the mantra of bringing your whole self to work has replaced the old notion that you should leave it all at the door. This movement has had some positive outcomes. Ensuring everyone feels included and has access to mentors and role models can be crucial to attracting and retaining talent.

Some have taken it too far, letting the personal and political overtake the professional, which has led to pressure on businesses to take positions in matters outside their domain. Makers of business software weighed in on elections. Google employees staged a sit-in over Gaza. Right-wing activists began a boycott of Bud Light after it was featured in a transgender influencer’s promotional social media post. The result is that people who disagree with one another find it hard to work at the same company or buy the same products, increasing the problem of polarization.

A vast majority of faculty members do not attempt to pursue a political agenda. They are busy doing the work of education and research that has made American universities the envy of the world and the engine of our prosperity. Unfortunately, a few faculty members can have a disproportionate influence on how universities are perceived and provide ammunition to those who want to see them destroyed.

http://archive.today/2025.05.01-112854/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/world/europe/ukraine-trump-minerals-deal.html

The minerals deal signed between the United States and Ukraine on Wednesday could bring untold money into a joint investment fund between the two countries that would help rebuild Ukraine whenever the war with Russia ends.

But Ukraine’s untapped resources that are the subject of the deal will take years to extract and yield profits. And those could fail to deliver the kind of wealth that President Trump has long said they would.

It is not yet clear how the nine-page deal, the text of which Ukraine’s government made public on Thursday, will work in practice. Although the Trump administration had wanted Kyiv to use its mineral wealth to repay past U.S. military assistance, the idea of treating that aid as debt was removed in the final document.

​The deal also seemed to specifically keep the door open for Ukraine to eventually join the European Union, a move that neither the United States nor Russia has opposed.

But there was no mention of a security guarantee — which Ukraine had long sought to prevent Russia from regrouping after any cease-fir​e.

Still, the much-anticipated signing of the agreement has almost certainly accomplished one thing that seemed almost impossible two months ago: It has tied Mr. Trump to the future of Ukraine.

Ukraine’s parliament still has to ratify the agreement, which will probably happen in the next two weeks, parliament members said on Thursday morning.

In the end, it appears that Ukraine managed to get some of what it wanted, but not everything. The notable omission was the absence of a security guarantee.

The signing of the deal on Mr. Trump’s 100th day in office was just the latest twist in his ever-shifting approach to the war, which Russia started with its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Mr. Trump has falsely blamed Kyiv for instigating the war and seemed to find more of a kinship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia than with anyone in Ukraine. He has repeatedly questioned why the United States became Kyiv’s biggest ally under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. And he has made no secret of his irritation with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and Kyiv’s requests for more military assistance.

http://archive.today/2025.04.28-134416/https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-biden-aide-israel-missed-opportunity-for-saudi-deal-hopefully-it-wont-do-so-again/

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government missed an opportunity to reach a normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia last year, a top aide to former US president Joe Biden said in an interview that aired Sunday.

The deal would have required a ceasefire and hostage release deal and a willingness on the part of Israel to establish a political horizon for an eventual Palestinian state — something Netanyahu has long rejected and, since Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, has stated would amount to a prize for terrorism.

“I don’t understand the decision not to grab that opportunity as the most important strategic move Israel can make,” Amos Hochstein told Channel 13’s “Hamakor” investigative program. “I think it was missed before. I hope Israel doesn’t miss that opportunity moving forward — even if it means doing things that politically are uncomfortable.”

Hochstein was one of nine senior Biden administration officials interviewed for the Sunday program who took viewers through their frustrations in dealing with Netanyahu’s government throughout the Gaza war.

The former US officials shared their belief that Netanyahu’s refusal to plan for the postwar management of Gaza was a stalling tactic to avoid decisions that risked toppling his government.

They detailed brief deliberations in Washington about having Biden deliver a speech aimed at potentially spurring an election in Israel, given Netanyahu’s intransigence.

And they revealed that a video posted by Netanyahu accusing the US administration of withholding various weapons transfers for months scuttled a nearly final agreement to release the lone shipment of 2,000-lb bombs that had actually been frozen.

Biden officials fumed at Netanyahu, who they felt was being ungrateful for the support that the US had been providing.

Weeks earlier, the White House had pushed a $19 billion supplemental security assistance package for Israel through Congress.

“Hamakor” also interviewed a more junior administration official who resigned in protest of what she said was Biden’s decision to give Israel a pass despite a US law that bars the transfer of weapons to countries that block the transfer of humanitarian aid.

Despite the disagreements, the top Biden officials professed devotion to Israel’s security, explaining that this dedication was what made attacks by Netanyahu and his supporters, who accused them of abandoning Israel, particularly stinging.

“Having the prime minister of Israel question the support of the United States after all that we did — do I think that was a right and proper thing for a friend to do? I do not,” said former national security adviser Jake Sullivan. “[However], I will always stand firm behind the idea that Israel has a right to defend itself and that the United States has a responsibility to help Israel, and I’ll do that no matter who the prime minister is, no matter what they say about me or the US or the president that I work for.”

Facing pressure from progressives in his party, Biden signed a memo early last year requiring the State Department to draft a report certifying whether recipients of US weapons were using them according to international law and not blocking humanitarian aid from reaching civilians.

Stacy Gilberg, who served as a senior adviser in the State Department, was among those involved in compiling that report. Shortly before it was released on May 10, she and her colleagues were boxed out of the process and the final conclusions of the report were written by higher-level officials, Gilbert told “Hamakor.”

The report concluded that while Israel did not fully cooperate with efforts to ensure aid flowed into Gaza, Jerusalem’s actions did not amount to a breach of US law that would require a halt on US weapons.

“I had to read the report twice because I couldn’t believe what it said. It was just shocking in its mendacity. Everyone knows that is not true,” she said, explaining her decision to resign in protest shortly thereafter.

Herzog, too, made a point of summarizing Biden’s perilous term positively.

“God did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period, because it could have been much worse. We fought [in Gaza] for over a year and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted,” the former Israeli ambassador said.

Some old antique condition kids bikes. Make an offer.

http://archive.today/2025.04.26-092803/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/26/us/politics/trump-putin-russia-ukraine.html

If President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia drafted a shopping list of what he wanted from Washington, it would be hard to beat what he was offered in the first 100 days of President Trump’s new term.

Pressure on Ukraine to surrender territory to Russia? Check.

The promise of sanctions relief? Check.

Absolution from invading Ukraine? Check.

Indeed, as Mr. Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff visited Moscow on Friday for more negotiations, the president’s vision for peace appeared notably one-sided, letting Russia keep the regions it had taken by force in violation of international law while forbidding Ukraine from ever joining NATO.

The notion that Russia would get to keep the territory it has taken as part of a balanced peace deal is broadly acknowledged as inevitable. But Mr. Trump is taking it further by offering official U.S. recognition of Russia’s control of Crimea, the peninsula it seized from Ukraine in 2014 in violation of international law, an extra step of legitimacy that stunned many in Ukraine as well as its friends in Washington and Europe.

Such a move would reverse the policy of the first Trump administration. In 2018, Mr. Trump’s State Department issued a Crimea Declaration affirming its “refusal to recognize the Kremlin’s claims of sovereignty over territory seized by force,” likening it to the U.S. refusal to recognize Soviet control of the Baltic States for five decades.

“Crimea will stay with Russia,” he said in the interview, which was released on Friday. He again blamed Ukraine for Russia’s decision to invade it, saying that “what caused the war to start was when they started talking about joining NATO.”

But that is not all that Mr. Putin has gotten out of Mr. Trump’s return to power. Intentionally or not, many of the president’s actions on other fronts also suit Moscow’s interests, including the rifts he has opened with America’s traditional allies and the changes he has made to the U.S. government itself.

Mr. Trump has been tearing down American institutions that have long aggravated Moscow, such as Voice of America and the National Endowment for Democracy. He has been disarming the nation in its netherworld battle against Russia by halting cyber offensive operations and curbing programs to combat Russian disinformation, election interference, sanctions violations and war crimes.

“Trump has played right into Putin’s hands,” said Ivo Daalder, the chief executive of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama. “It’s hard to see how Trump would have acted any differently if he were a Russian asset than how he has acted in the first 100 days of his second term.”

But what has been so striking about Mr. Trump’s return to office is how many of his other actions over the past three months have been seen as benefiting Russia, either directly or indirectly — so much so that Russian officials in Moscow have cheered the American president on and publicly celebrated some of his moves.

After he moved to dismantle Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, two U.S.-funded news organizations that have transmitted independent reporting to the Soviet Union and later Russia, Margarita Simonyan, the head of the Russian state broadcaster RT, called it “an awesome decision by Trump.” She added, “We couldn’t shut them down, unfortunately, but America did so itself.”

Those are just a couple of the U.S. government organizations that Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have targeted to the delight of Russia. Moscow has long resented the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, all of which fund democracy promotion programs that the Kremlin considers part of a campaign of regime change, and all of which now face the ax.

At the same time, Mr. Charap said that the Ukraine peace plan offered by Mr. Trump, even though tilted in Moscow’s direction, did not actually address important points that Russia insisted on including in any settlement, like barring the presence of any foreign military forces in Ukraine.

The net effect of Mr. Trump’s tilt toward Russia and dismantlement of U.S. institutions that have irritated Moscow is to undercut America’s position against a major adversary, argued David Shimer, a former Russia adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Just last month, Mr. Shimer noted, the intelligence community declared that Russia remains an “enduring potential threat to U.S. power, presence and global interests.”

“The current approach,” Mr. Shimer said, “favors Russia across the board — making concession after concession on Ukraine, dismantling our key soft power tools and weakening our alliance network across Europe, which historically has helped the United States deal with Russian aggression from a position of strength.”

http://archive.today/2025.04.25-234108/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/world/europe/ukraine-peace-counterproposal.html

In response to a White House proposal to end the war in Ukraine that critics say would grant the Kremlin much of what it wants, Ukraine’s leadership has drafted a counteroffer — one that in some ways contradicts what President Trump has demanded, but also leaves room for possible compromises on issues that have long seemed intractable.

Under the plan, which was obtained by The New York Times, there would be no restrictions on the size of the Ukrainian military, “a European security contingent” backed by the United States would be deployed on Ukrainian territory to guarantee security, and frozen Russian assets would be used to repair damage in Ukraine caused during the war.

Those three provisions could be nonstarters for the Kremlin, but parts of the Ukrainian plan suggest a search for compromise. There is no mention, for instance, of Ukraine fully regaining all the territory seized by Russia or an insistence on Ukraine joining NATO, two issues that President Volodymyr Zelensky has long said were not up for negotiations.

In their proposal, the Ukrainians say their country should be “fully restored,” without specifying what that would mean. Though Mr. Zelensky has long said his administration’s ultimate goal is the return of all territories that made up Ukraine when it declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, including Crimea, Kyiv’s latest proposal seems to be intentionally vague on this point.

U.S. officials later explained that although the total amount of territory controlled by Russia was unlikely to change in any future negotiations, Ukrainian officials have made clear that they intended to propose territorial swaps to improve the country’s defensive positions. Trump administration officials have privately assured the Ukrainians that they would fight for the swaps, but said they could not guarantee that Russia would go along with them.

And the White House has taken Ukraine’s side, not Russia’s, when it comes to the future shape of Ukraine’s military. The Kremlin has demanded that Ukraine’s military, now the largest and most battle-hardened in Europe besides Russia’s own, be subject to strict limitations on its size and capabilities. Trump administration officials have told the Ukrainians that they would not support such limitations.

For any woodworkers who nned supplies $30 takes all, 1 byes 2 byes wood sheets treated untreated, its all there a little bit of evertyhing.

After firing thousands of U.S. Agency for International Development employees and gutting funding to programs across dozens of countries, this week Secretary of State and USAID administrator Marco Rubio set his sights on dismantling the State Department with the same hatchet-wielding fervor. On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported on a plan to scale back U.S.-based staff by 15 percent, and eliminate programs related to human rights, war crimes, and democracy-building. “Non-statutory programs that are misaligned with America’s core national interests will cease to exist,” Rubio tweeted on Tuesday.

But a review of USAID programs shows that, while following the DOGE playbook in public, the secretary of state has quietly safeguarded Cuban regime change programs aligned with the island’s exile base that has long powered his rise.

One of these programs is the anti-communist publication CubaNet, based out of Miami, which saw its nearly $2 million grant cut, then restored. “Our goal has always been to counteract the propaganda of the Castro regime. Without this funding, the government in Havana will have greater freedom to intensify its propaganda and repression,” the news site’s director Roberto Hechavarría Pilia said before the cash was turned back on.

A grant to the Pan American Development Foundation for “independent media and free flow of information” in Cuba was also listed as reinstated on federal contracting sites. Two people familiar with the program cuts told the Prospect that exceptions were made after Cuban exile groups lobbied the State Department to reverse their grant determinations.