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Harriet Torry @ WSJ: AI Investment Boosted Economic Growth, While Consumers Tapped the Brakes

GDP grew at a 2% rate in the first quarter, improving after shutdown-induced slowdown

U.S. economic growth picked up in the first quarter as businesses invested heavily in artificial intelligence, rebounding from a fourth quarter dented by a government shutdown.

At the same time, the economy didn’t expand as fast as economists expected, weighed down by softer consumer spending growth.

Paul Krugman: The Logic of NACHO

On Wall Street, TACO — Trump Always Chickens Out — has abruptly been replaced as a favorite meme by NACHO — Not a Chance Hormuz Opens. As a result, oil futures have soared.

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – April 30, 2026

Today G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers noted that Trump has hit a new low in overall job performance and in his handling of the economy, at -22.2 and -40.3, respectively. Those numbers reflect the percentage of people who approve of his handling of an issue minus those who disapprove. Indeed, Morris noted that Trump’s approval rating on the economy is so low it “literally broke the scale of this graph on my data portal.”
…

The upcoming elections are definitely on Trump’s mind. He called in to NewsMax today, saying: “It is a problem I’m not on the ballot. And I have to convince—Everyone says if I was on the ballot we’d win in a landslide. I have the best, I have some of the best poll numbers I’ve ever had.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Naomi RaineyandEmer Moreau @ BBC: Oil price jumps to $115 after reports of ‘extended’ Iran blockade

Oil prices have climbed sharply following reports that the US is preparing for an ‘extended’ blockade of Iran.

Brent crude rose to around $115 (£85) a barrel on Wednesday, having closed at just over $110 (£81) on Tuesday evening. The price had fallen slightly to $114.37 (£84.68) just before midday BST.

It follows reports from the Wall Street Journal that US President Donald Trump has instructed aides to prepare to extend obstruction of Iran’s ports, in an effort to squeeze the country’s economy.

Iran has said it will continue to disrupt traffic travelling through the Strait of Hormuz in response to the US blockade.

Al Jazeera: Trump vows to maintain Iran blockade, Tehran threatens ‘practical’ action

US president says Washington’s naval siege on Iranian ports is ‘more effective than the bombing’ as oil price soars.

Lucian K. Truscott IV: Trump has ideas about how to end the Iran war. You won’t believe what they are.

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Jennifer Rubin: We haven’t “taken out” anything except free navigation

Donald Trump keeps telling us he has wiped out the Iranian regime. “We’ve taken out their navy, we’ve taken out their air force, we’ve taken out their leaders,” he said last week. At various times he has insisted, “Their entire Navy is at the bottom of the Sea,” or claimed, “They have no navy, it’s been knocked out.” As CNN recounted:

The president has said for weeks that Iran had “no navy,” “no military,” “no air force” and “no anti-aircraft systems.” …

“They have no anti-aircraft equipment. Their radar is 100% annihilated,” Trump said. “We are unstoppable as a military force.”

And yet somehow this “sunk” navy last week was able to fire on three vessels, seize two, and maintain the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. It seems — shocker! — “taken out” does not mean, as the dictionary tells us, “to extract or remove,” it means to leave the enemy potent military assets. And “no” does not mean “none,” but rather “some powerful military equipment able to inflict real harm.” Even the Pentagon has let on that Trump was lying.

Janna Brancolini @ Daily Beast: Trump Aides Leak Fears of Toxic Stalemate

Kyle Stock and Lili Pike @ Bloomberg: From the UK to South Korea, Consumers Turn to EVs as Oil Prices Spike

Borowitz: Iranians Catch Jared Kushner Trying to Set Up Own Tollbooth in Strait of Hormuz

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Harriet Barber @ Guardian: ‘We were terrified they were going to kill us’: fishers who survived US boat strike speak out

An Ecuadorian fishing crew describe their ordeal as victims of Trump’s purported war on ‘narcoterrorists’
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“We were just working, waiting for the last trawler to return,” said Jhonny Sebastián Palacios, one of the fishers. “Everything was perfectly fine.”

From nowhere, an explosion ripped through the boat. “There was a sudden crash – boom! It came from a drone,” he said.

The blast tore through the vessel, shattering glass, and injuring several crew members. …

Landon Mion @ Fox News: US military conducts strike on another boat carrying alleged narco-traffickers, killing 3

The Pentagon has refused to provide evidence of drugs on board the ships it has targeted since last fall in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific
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Heather Delaney Reese: The problem is, we can’t trust a word they say

Hugh Dougherty @ Daily Beast: I Slept Next Door to the Assassin in Hilton Room 10235. This Is a Security Fiasco

The Daily Beast’s Executive Editor witnessed a jaw-dropping security breach. And then it got worse.
…

It does not take a security expert to unravel the layers of failure that happened at a Washington, D.C. hotel on Saturday night.

How on earth could someone with a disassembled long gun check into a room at a hotel where the president was going to speak? I can answer that: Nobody even looked at my luggage on Friday afternoon. Worse, my colleague arrived on Saturday at 5 p.m. Nobody looked at his luggage either: No magnometers, no hand checks, no I.D. checks. Nothing.

How on earth could that person get downstairs and assemble a long gun? I can answer that too. I moved up and down from Floor 10 all day. Nobody ever stopped me and asked me anything. I have never shown my I.D., except to the clerk who checked me in; I have never been searched or frisked when I checked in, or moved in and out of the hotel. To get down from my room to the dinner, I simply flashed my ticket. It could have been a photocopy.

The only time I went past a checkpoint was at the same magnetometers that Cole Allen, 31, sprinted past with his gun.

Another colleague was outside; I texted them a copy of their ticket. That allowed them to get into the hotel as far as those same magnetometers, entirely unchecked.

How on earth could that be considered safe?

Jennifer Rubin: Lessons From the Correspondents’ Dinner

Chris Geidner: DOJ jumps into action — to defend Trump’s ballroom plan and attack those challenging it

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – April 26, 2026

Today Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Department of Justice Civil Division wrote to the lawyer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation demanding that the organization drop its lawsuit against Trump’s planned ballroom on the site where the East Wing of the White House used to be.
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Shumate said last night’s incident “proves, yet again, that the White House ballroom is essential for the safety and security of the President, his family, his cabinet, and his staff. …

This is an odd angle to take, since, as Bluesky user Tom Shafer pointed out, the Hilton ballroom seats 2,945 people and Trump says his proposed ballroom will seat only 999. And to be clear, a judge has permitted the construction of the secure facility under the ballroom to continue despite the lawsuit; it’s just the ballroom itself that’s currently at issue.

Attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is not an official requirement; this is actually the first time Trump has chosen to go as president. As Emily Davies, Isaac Arnsdorf, Jeremy Roebuck, and Joe Heim of the Washington Post reported today, the Trump administration could have provided a higher level of security last night as it has for other gatherings of high-ranking officials, but it did not designate the dinner as a “National Special Security Event.” …

The focus on last night’s event has obscured this upcoming week’s big story.
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Heather Delaney Reese: Pete Hegseth needs to be next

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Hegseth opened by comparing Operation Epic Fury favorably to every major American military engagement of the last century. Korea. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. All of them, he said, dragged on for years with vague missions and little to show for it. Epic Fury, by contrast, has been “laser-focused from the very start.” A “decisive military result” delivered “in just weeks.” A “bold and historic” mission, led by a “bold and historic President.”

But here is what he does not seem to realize he just said. The reason those wars dragged on with vague missions and nothing to show for it is precisely because nobody could define what winning looked like going in. And that is exactly where we are right now. We are on day 55 of a war that was supposed to last four to six weeks. A war never authorized by Congress that is costing at least an estimated one billion dollars a day. And nobody, not Hegseth this morning, not Trump, not a single person in this administration, has been able to tell us what we are actually trying to achieve.

They keep saying that we can never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. That is the implied mission. Except their own people told us last summer that we neutralized their nuclear capabilities. Their own CIA said there was no immediate nuclear threat. Their own Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, testified under oath after the war started that Iran had not rebuilt its nuclear enrichment capability since last summer’s strikes. …

William J. Broad and David E. Sanger@ NY Times: Trump Seeks to Abolish Iran’s Atomic Stockpile, a Problem He Helped Create

President Trump withdrew from the Obama-era nuclear accord in 2018, saying it was the worst deal ever. But Iran responded with an enrichment spree that haunts the negotiations to this day.

Marcy Wheeler: Trump Is Not Ignorant of Iran Risks; He Is Attempting a Con to Cope with His Failure

E.J. Dionne Jr., Carlos Lozada and Robert Siegel @ NY Times: Trump’s True Deal-Making Abilities, Revealed

What moving deadlines — and red lines — in Iran means for America’s leverage.
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Thom Hartmann: From Surveillance State to Kill Machine: Has the Line Already Been Crossed?

Ever think a drone could chase you down the street or fire a bullet through your living room window because you pissed off Trump, Miller, or their ICE thugs? If the answer is “that’s science fiction,” please read on: that reality may be only a few months away, and every single part of the spying and death-dealing infrastructure needed to make it happen has been quietly assembled by the Trump regime over the last fourteen months.

This Tuesday, while America was obsessively watching the latest bizarre twists in Trump’s Iran debacle, Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon rolled out a $1.5 trillion budget request that contained a line item almost nobody’s talking about: a 24,000 percent increase, from $225 million last year to $54.6 billion this year, for an outfit called the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group.

That’s the largest year-over-year jump for any program in the entire defense budget, and it’s earmarked to build out AI-driven autonomous human-killing systems inside the Special Operations Command headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.

USSOCOM “[P]rovides elite, combat-ready forces… Their responsibilities include counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, direct action, special reconnaissance, foreign internal defense, and psychological operations.”

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Priyanka Shankar and Abid Hussain @ Al Jazeera: Trump calls Iran’s leadership ‘fractured’. Is it, and who’s in charge?

Almost 53 days into war, there is little evidence suggesting that Iranian government is fragmented.

George Grylls @ Times of London: Is Mojtaba Khamenei really leading Iran?

The badly wounded supreme leader gives orders by sealed messages to avoid revealing his location and has delegated negotiations to senior commanders

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – April 23, 2026

…
Today the Pentagon cracked down on the independence of Stars and Stripes, the newspaper charged with providing “independent news and information to the U.S. military community.” Stars and Stripes operates out of the Department of Defense. In order to make sure the paper protects freedom of the press and remains independent of the Pentagon rather than becoming a propaganda outlet, Congress provided for it to be overseen by an ombudsman who regularly reports to Congress. Today the current ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith, reported that she has been fired.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Tim Dickinson: Trump vs. Earth

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The danger posed by Trump begins with climate denial. On day one, the administration pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord — the international framework for lowering global greenhouse emissions. Not content to simply abdicate leadership, Trump has preached global warming denial on the (literal and proverbial) international stage. At the U.N. General Assembly in February, the president called climate change “the greatest con job perpetrated by the world.”

The administration has now made climate denial official U.S. policy. In February, the EPA jettisoned the “endangerment finding” that designated carbon dioxide as a pollutant, subject to limitations under the Clean Air Act. …
…
The move to rescind the endangerment finding was based in part on the findings of a “climate working group” that was secretly assembled by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, himself a former fracking executive. The group — which downplayed the dangers of climate change — was later found to have been operating illegally. Because, of course it was. But its work product was, egregiously, allowed to stand.

Alastair Marsh @ Bloomberg: How Microsoft Spooked the Global Carbon Removal Market

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Michele Hornish: He Worked Alone; We Have Each Other

… Dashrath Manjhi: “This hill had given us trouble and grief for centuries. The people had asked the government many times to make a proper road through the hill, but nobody paid any attention. So I just decided I would do it all by myself.”

And so, armed with a simple chisel, a hammer, and a shovel, Dashrath began – single-handedly – to cut a path through solid rock.

… And twenty-two years after heaving the first shovelful, Dashrath Manjhi broke that mountain.

… And in doing so he created a road that meant freedom, giving people from 60 villages access to markets, healthcare, and jobs that now were just five kilometers away. Children who used to walk eight kilometers to school could now get there in three. Now with easier access to healthcare, some lives were literally saved. Other lives were made simpler, better, safer. …

… while this story inspires me because of what one man did, it also breaks my heart because of what could have been. What would have happened if everyone else in the village had pitched in after that first year? Rather than having a road in 22 years, perhaps they would have had a road in 10. Or 5. Or two.

… We are still standing in front of a mountain. But now, we’re not standing alone. Now there are other people, like you, on our left and right, setting cracks in the rock, shoveling stone, and pushing boulders out of the way. We can already see the crack in the mountain. We’re not as far from the other side as we thought. We just have to put our shoulders to it. So pick up your chisel. Go grab your shovel.
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