Preview: Boeing has been mired in a safety crisis since a door plug blew off a 737 Max 9 in early January.

Preview: Tesla CEO Elon Musk continues to promise investors that autonomy is in the company's future even as financials deteriorate.

Preview: Foot Locker unveiled its "store of the future" concept that will inspire the revamping of 900 stores the sneaker retailer is planning over the next two years.

Preview: Alzheimer's drug Leqembi brought in approximately $19 million in sales for the quarter, up from the $10 million the drug generated last year.

Preview: Tesla reported disappointing earnings and revenue, but the stock rose on optimism that a new affordable EV model could enter production sooner than expected.

Preview: In February, Starbucks and Workers United said they found a "constructive path forward," marking a major strategic pivot for the coffee giant.

Preview: British antitrust regulators are seeking views on partnerships between Microsoft and Amazon with smaller generative AI model makers.

Preview: President Biden initially proposed aid for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan in October.

Preview: The deluge closed schools and businesses, grounded hundreds of flights, and destroyed cars, businesses and other property.

Preview: • Fox-Dominion trial delay 'is not unusual,' judge says • Fox News' defamation battle isn't stopping Trump's election lies

Preview: The judge just announced in court that a settlement has been reached in the historic defamation case between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems.

Preview: A settlement has been reached in Dominion Voting Systems' defamation case against Fox News, the judge for the case announced. The network will pay more than $787 million to Dominion, a lawyer for the company said.

Preview: • DeSantis goes to Washington, a place he once despised, looking for support to take on Trump • Opinion: For the GOP to win, it must ditch Trump • Chris Christie mulling 2024 White House bid • Analysis: The fire next time has begun burning in Tennessee

Preview: • 'A major part of Ralph died': Aunt of teen shot after ringing wrong doorbell speaks • 20-year-old woman shot after friend turned into the wrong driveway in upstate New York, officials say

Preview: Newly released body camera footage shows firefighters and sheriff's deputies rushing to help actor Jeremy Renner after a near-fatal snowplow accident in January. The "Avengers" actor broke more than 30 bones and suffered other severe injuries. CNN's Chloe Melas has more.

Preview: It's sourdough bread and handstands for Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Preview: A tiny intruder infiltrated White House grounds Tuesday, prompting a swift response from the US Secret Service.

Preview: An arrest warrant has been issued for controversial Biden administration official Sam Brinton in connection with a second alleged theft at an airport in Las Vegas. Brinton, who works for the Department of Energy, was already placed on leave after he allegedly stole a woman’s luggage at Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) International Airport late last month. ...

Preview: Inside the Illinois State Capitol sits a display of several religious exhibits for the holiday season, which includes a Jewish menorah, the Christian nativity scene, and the “Serpent of Genesis” from the Satanic Temple, as reported by local radio media. Consisting of a leather-bound copy of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’ “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium” — which ...

Preview: The latest release of the “Twitter Files” Thursday evening revealed that leftists at the highest level of the company, who have all since been fired or been forced to resign, targeted one of the most popular right-wing accounts on the platform with repeated suspensions despite the fact that they secretly admitted that she did not ...

Preview: The second installment of the so-called “Twitter Files” was released Thursday evening after the company turned over documents to a journalist who then started to publish the findings on the platform. Musk released internal company communications through journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday about the company’s censorship of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story ...

Preview: The transgender community has turned on a once revered surgeon specializing in sex change surgeries after a patient posted graphic photos of an allegedly botched operation. Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher, a Miami-based surgeon specializing in double mastectomy surgeries for transgender-identifying patients, has been heavily criticized for performing the elective surgery on minors. She has also earned ...

Preview: Video emerged Thursday afternoon of Brittney Griner being swapped on a runway for convicted Russian terrorist Viktor Bout after Democrat President Joe Biden agreed to the trade. The video showed Griner, who is wearing a red jacket, walking across the tarmac with three men while Bout walked toward her with a man standing next to ...

Preview: After a woman claimed to be the daughter of a serial killer in a recent interview, a search of the supposed location of buried remains has turned up nothing. Federal, state, and local authorities did not find any evidence or remains after scouring the earth for several days in Thurman, Iowa, a small town just ...

Preview: A FedEx contract driver strangled a 7-year-old girl after hitting her with his van in Texas late last month, according to arrest warrant documents. Tanner Horner, a 31-year-old from Fort Worth, has been arrested and charged with capital murder of a person under 10 years old and aggravated kidnapping in the death of Athena Strand, ...

Preview: Disabled veteran Congressman Brian Mast (R-FL) took issue with fellow Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) over the way she chose to transport her American flag while she was moving from one office to another. Mast, who lost both legs and his left index finger in 2010 when he stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED) while ...

Preview: Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, slammed President Joe Biden Thursday for releasing notorious terrorist Viktor Bout in exchange for Brittney Griner. Griner, who has a criminal record in the U.S. stemming from a domestic violence incident several years ago, was arrested in Russia back in February on drug charges, ...

Preview: TESLA Accelerates Rollout of New EVs as Profit Plunges... (Top headline, 1st story, link) Related stories: Promises, promises... Company may let go 20% staff... Elon's ugly battle with Australia continues... Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: Promises, promises... (Top headline, 2nd story, link) Related stories: TESLA Accelerates Rollout of New EVs as Profit Plunges... Company may let go 20% staff... Elon's ugly battle with Australia continues...

Preview: Company may let go 20% staff... (Top headline, 3rd story, link) Related stories: TESLA Accelerates Rollout of New EVs as Profit Plunges... Promises, promises... Elon's ugly battle with Australia continues...

Preview: Elon's ugly battle with Australia continues... (Top headline, 4th story, link) Related stories: TESLA Accelerates Rollout of New EVs as Profit Plunges... Promises, promises... Company may let go 20% staff... Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: NATIONAL GUARD TO PROTECT JEWS? (Main headline, 1st story, link)

Preview: DIRTY PECKER HAD TRUMP'S BACK... (First column, 1st story, link) Related stories: Catch-and-kill scheme confirmed under oath... ENQUIRER made up story about Ted Cruz's father, Oswald! The Don faces potential punishment for violating gag... If convicted, what happens next? Marjorie Taylor Greene warns he will be murdered in jail... Michael Cohen says he's reformed. Will America buy it?

Preview: Catch-and-kill scheme confirmed under oath... (First column, 2nd story, link) Related stories: DIRTY PECKER HAD TRUMP'S BACK... ENQUIRER made up story about Ted Cruz's father, Oswald! The Don faces potential punishment for violating gag... If convicted, what happens next? Marjorie Taylor Greene warns he will be murdered in jail... Michael Cohen says he's reformed. Will America buy it?

Preview: ENQUIRER made up story about Ted Cruz's father, Oswald! (First column, 3rd story, link) Related stories: DIRTY PECKER HAD TRUMP'S BACK... Catch-and-kill scheme confirmed under oath... The Don faces potential punishment for violating gag... If convicted, what happens next? Marjorie Taylor Greene warns he will be murdered in jail... Michael Cohen says he's reformed. Will America buy it?

Preview: The Don faces potential punishment for violating gag... (First column, 4th story, link) Related stories: DIRTY PECKER HAD TRUMP'S BACK... Catch-and-kill scheme confirmed under oath... ENQUIRER made up story about Ted Cruz's father, Oswald! If convicted, what happens next? Marjorie Taylor Greene warns he will be murdered in jail... Michael Cohen says he's reformed. Will America buy it?

Preview: If convicted, what happens next? (First column, 5th story, link) Related stories: DIRTY PECKER HAD TRUMP'S BACK... Catch-and-kill scheme confirmed under oath... ENQUIRER made up story about Ted Cruz's father, Oswald! The Don faces potential punishment for violating gag... Marjorie Taylor Greene warns he will be murdered in jail... Michael Cohen says he's reformed. Will America buy it?

Preview: In U.S. college towns, booking a hotel room for graduation day can be challenging. Prices skyrocket as demand surges, leaving parents feeling exploited.

Preview: Students at a growing number of U.S. colleges and universities are forming anti-Israel protest encampments with a unified demand of their schools.

Preview: A third person of interest has been taken into custody in the deadly Florida carjacking case of Katherine Aguasvivas, and two of the three are expected to be charged for her death.

Preview: Oregon State Troopers found the wounded body of Elias Huizar, 39, following a police chase near Eugene at around 3 p.m. Tuesday. Huizar's 1-year-old baby was taken safely into custody.

Preview: Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox.

Preview: Richard Ehrhart, 69, had gotten separated from his wife when he fell hundreds of feet off a trail near Natural Bridge in Oregon and died on Sunday.

Preview: Activist groups inspired by anti-Israel protests at Columbia University, UC Berkeley, and Yale, are looking to lead their own resistance movements at schools in California, Texas and Maryland.

Preview: Columbia University has set a deadline for administrators and anti-Israel protesters to reach an agreement that would include ending the encampment on campus and dispersing.

Preview: Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., said he believes there's a government cover-up about UFOs, and the government continues to spend millions researching something it says does not exist

Preview: New York lawmakers changed the definition of "tenant" Monday to exclude squatters staying on properties without permission after a rash of home takeovers.

Preview: New US military aid package to Ukraine expected to be worth around $1 billion  CNN Senate passes $95B foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan: What's next?  ABC News As security aid advances, GOP confronts a missed opportunity  MSNBC How senators voted on a TikTok ban, aid to Ukraine and Israel  The Washington Post Russia-Ukraine war: US aid impact could be felt within days on front line  The Associated Press

Preview: What to listen for during Supreme Court arguments on Donald Trump and presidential immunity  The Associated Press Trump v US: SCOTUS likely to determine presidents get ‘some amount’ of immunity, experts say  Fox News Supreme Court takes up Trump's claim of 'absolute immunity' from criminal prosecution  ABC News Opinion | The Supreme Court Should Not Come Between Trump and Voters  The New York Times Fmr. U.S. Supreme Court Justice on presidential immunity  MSNBC

Preview: Columbia University: Pro-Palestinian protesters refuse to disband  BBC.com Columbia University extends negotiations with student activists over dismantling encampment  CNN Columbia Protesters Begin Clearing Out After School Set Midnight Deadline  The Wall Street Journal Opinion | I'm a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice.  The New York Times The Unreality of Columbia's 'Liberated Zone'  The Atlantic

Preview: 'They blew it': Judge shreds Trump's defense in gag order hearing  MSNBC How a gag order showdown explains everything about Trump  CNN Video Trump awaits gag order ruling - ABC News  ABC News Trump Trial Judge Questions Defense Lawyer’s Credibility as Pecker Testifies  The New York Times Trump contempt of court: Justice Merchan is not happy with Todd Blanche.  Slate

Preview: TikTok ban: What happens next after US Senate passed the bill?  Reuters TikTok may be banned in the US. Here's what happened when India did it  The Associated Press TikTok pressure campaign hit close to home for some lawmakers  USA TODAY Congress just passed a potential TikTok ban. Here’s what happens next  CNN Congress sends Biden a bill that could ban TikTok — after the 2024 election  NBC News

Preview: Biden asks how many times Trump has to prove 'we' can't be trusted in latest gaffe  New York Post Biden mocked for admitting 'we can't be trusted' in latest gaffe: 'Agreed, Joe'  Fox News Released documents sound alarm on emergency pregnancy care in U.S.  The Associated Press Eckerd College students react to President Biden's visit  Bay News 9 President Joe Biden hopes to boost reelection odds, slams Florida's 6-week abortion ban during Tampa visit  FOX 13 Tampa

Preview: 130 million Americans breathe unhealthy air, State of the Air report finds  NPR Nearly 2 in 5 Americans breathe unhealthy air. Why it's getting worse.  The Washington Post Maine air ranked one of the best in the country according to new report  WMTW Portland More than one-third of people in the US exposed to harmful air pollution – report  The Guardian US 131 million in U.S. live in areas with unhealthy pollution levels, lung association finds  NBC News

Preview: Supreme Court hears abortion clash over emergency room treatment for pregnant women  NBC NewsView Full Coverage on Google News

Preview: Trump Wins Pennsylvania Primary, but Remains Haunted by Haley  The New York Times Donald Trump Suffers Huge Vote Against Him in Pennsylvania Primary  Newsweek Map of Pittsburgh-area election results shows how your county voted in 2024 presidential primary  CBS Pittsburgh Five takeaways from the Pennsylvania primaries  The Hill Pennsylvania primaries 2024: Lee and Fitzpatrick survive, matchups set for November  ABC News

Preview: Ex-cop accused of killing 2 women and kidnapping son dead of self-inflicted gunshot wound in Oregon; boy is s  OregonLive Ex-school officer Elias Huizar shot himself while on the run with 1-year-old son after allegedly gunning down ex-wife, teen girlfriend: police  New York Post Manhunt for ex-cop ends with suspect’s death, 1-year-old’s rescue  NewsNation Now AMBER ALERT: Officials say man suspected of killing 2 women has abducted a 1-year-old boy  NBC Right Now Ex-Washington cop accused of double murder, abducting baby, shoots self  Fox 12 Oregon

Preview: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky extended his gratitude to the U.S. Tuesday after the Senate advanced a critical foreign aid package, ending a months-long stalemate over sending more aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia. Zelensky specifically thanked Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and others, who voted...

Preview: Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) took a shot at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) Tuesday, saying she is “dragging our brand down." “She is a horrible leader,” Tillis said of Greene, according to audio played on CNN's “Erin Burnett OutFront." “She is dragging our brand down. She — not the Democrats — are the biggest risk...

Preview: Let's celebrate Clark's accomplishment, but let's do it honestly.

Preview: Jailing an ex and possibly future president would be unprecedented. But these are unprecedented times.

Preview: Depending on where you live, the salary needed to be middle class can vary greatly.

Preview: Democrats are not entitled to Black political support.

Preview: Former President Trump’s lawyers will argue to the Supreme Court this week that he can do just about anything he desires and be immune from prosecution, based on the perks of the high office he held and lost. On Tuesday, Trump and his representatives suggested he has a right while on trial to counter his...

Preview: The Biden administration on Wednesday will head to the Supreme Court to defend one of its primary efforts to protect abortion rights after the fall of Roe v. Wade. At stake is whether a federal emergency care law passed 37 years ago trumps state laws that ban abortion in nearly all circumstances. The Justice Department...

Preview: The Biden administration is planning to boost offshore wind, announcing up to a dozen opportunities for industry to bid on chances to build wind turbines in U.S. oceans over the next five years. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland is slated to announce the lease sales at a conference in New Orleans. The lease sales represent opportunities...

Preview: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is emerging as a key surrogate for President Biden’s reelection campaign for young people and progressives, pushing his climate agenda as a win for those critical voting blocs. Ocasio-Cortez’s surrogacy comes with parameters. She said she supports Biden’s reelection bid and will stand by him during a climate event, but she...

Preview: The conservative attorney, whose ex-wife was a senior adviser to Trump, said the money came out of his kids' inheritance.

Preview: "The level of self-awareness here is in the deep negatives," one commenter wrote.

Preview: Trump is still losing significant votes in some GOP primaries despite being the party's presumptive nominee.

Preview: The audience laughed out loud as Biden mocked Trump's most recent venture.

Preview: The former president had a complaint outside of court. Kimmel was ready with an answer.

Preview: "The Daily Show" co-hosts found a few uncomfortable moments for Trump on the right-wing network.

Preview: In one high-profile instance at Columbia University in New York, more than 100 students were arrested Thursday.

Preview: “The future holds countless possibilities,” the former Republican said, “and I am ready willing and able to step up to the plate."

Preview: The bill that will let some teachers and staff carry concealed handguns on public school grounds, but bar parents and other teachers from knowing who was armed.

Preview: Elon Musk's electric vehicle company is laying off more than 6,000 employees after reporting a 9% drop in revenue and a Cybertruck recall.

Preview: Vertiv cites the “acceleration of AI-driven demand” in driving new orders.

Preview: The company said the big earnings beat was mostly driven by lower-than-planned administrative expenses.

Preview: The commercial-airplane business has weakened to the point that it is now Boeing’s smallest business segment.

Preview: Consumer-product sales fall but gaming provides a boost.

Preview: Orders for U.S. durable goods jumped 2.6% in March, but most of the increase was tied to new autos and passenger planes. Orders barely rose outside of the transportation sector in a sign of ongoing manufacturing weakness.

Preview: The battle comes as Trump is on the verge of being awarded shares worth more than $1 billion in the company, which is parent to his Truth Social platform.

Preview: Oil prices were steady on Wednesday morning as investors awaited the release of the official U.S. data on oil and product stockpiles due at 10:30 a.m. Eastern time.

Preview: Biogen shares gained ground before market open Wednesday, after the company reported first-quarter profit that beat analysts’ expectations amid improving uptake of its Alzheimer’s treatment.

Preview: Hilton’s stock rose early Wednesday, after the hotel operator’s first-quarter earnings beat estimates, even as the company grappled with bad weather and other issues.

Preview: The Supreme Court will hear arguments Thursday by Trump lawyers that the former president is constitutionally immune from prosecution on criminal charges that he conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Preview: Thursday morning, Juror No. 2 told Judge Juan Merchan that she could no longer be an impartial participant in Donald Trump’s historic trial. She was not alone.

Preview: The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments regarding Donald Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution for his actions on and before Jan. 6.

Preview: It took six months, but Congress passed a security aid package without border reforms, which is what Democrats wanted in the first place.

Preview: WATCH: MSNBC Legal Contributor Katie Phang breaks down what happened during day six of former President Donald Trump's hush money trial.

Preview: WATCH: MSNBC Legal Contributor Katie Phang breaks down what happened during day five of former President Donald Trump's hush money trial.

Preview: MSNBC Legal Contributor Katie Phang breaks down what happened during day 4 of former President Donald Trump's New York hush money trial.

Preview: MSNBC Legal Contributor Katie Phang breaks down what happened during day three of former President Donald Trump’s New York hush money trial.

Preview: MSNBC Legal Contributor Katie Phang breaks down what happened during day two of former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial.

Preview: MSNBC Legal Contributor Katie Phang breaks down what happened on day one of former President Donald Trump's New York hush money trial.

Preview: Arizona’s Kari Lake didn't need yet another legal setback, but the Republican conspiracy theorist just suffered one anyway.

Preview: Jimmie Allen recently revealed that he contemplated suicide after his former manager sued him for sexual assault.

Preview: Six balls, zero strikes, zero swings and yet one strikeout for Juan Soto.

Preview: The Biden administration on Wednesday slapped airlines with new rules that trigger instant refunds when flights are canceled and clamp down on “surprise junk fees.” Under the new Department of Transportation mandates, airlines must issue full cash refunds automatically rather in response to customer requests — including when flights are canceled or significantly changed —...

Preview: We're not sure if this show still needs the machine to tell its stories.

Preview: Appalling footage captured a mysterious liquid spilling out of the restroom and trailing down the airplane aisle on a Spirit Airlines flight to Newark.

Preview: If you think you've found your purrfect match, you may not consider what will happen to your precious pet if there's trouble in paradise.

Preview: "Didn't know it happened, and having MS at 3 o'clock in the morning and trying to change your sheets, it's not fun," the actress said on her "MeSsy" podcast.

Preview: His MLB dream has started with a nightmare at the plate.

Preview: The choice for the Jets looks pretty clear: Get more protection for Aaron Rodgers or get him another playmaker.

Preview: In the throwback prank, comedian Andrew Santino convinced the "Cruel Summer" singer that the firework she had set off ruined his boat wedding.

Preview: The case, which could reverberate beyond Idaho to other states with abortion bans, is the second time in less than a month that the justices have heard an abortion case.

Preview: Federal trial judges in Texas and Idaho came to opposite conclusions in a battle between conservative states and the U.S. government over limits on abortion access.

Preview: The almost-complete ban on abortions in the state could go into effect as early as June 8, the state’s attorney general said.

Preview: Progress in talks with protesters led officials to put off a crackdown. But the campus faces a tumultous day, with the U.S. House Speaker scheduled to visit.

Preview: Plus, clashes over Donald Trump’s gag order.

Preview: The overwhelming bipartisan vote for the long-stalled $95.3 billion aid package capped a tortured journey for the legislation on Capitol Hill. President Biden is expected to quickly sign it.

Preview: After President Biden signs the bill to force a sale of the video app or ban it, the legislation will face court challenges, a shortage of qualified buyers and Beijing’s hostility.

Preview: Assistance for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan is paired with legislation to impose fresh rounds of sanctions on Iran and Russia and a measure that could lead to a ban on TikTok in the United States.

Preview: For residents of Ukraine’s second-largest city, daily Russian attacks have escalated fears but have not brought life to a standstill.

Preview: Weapons from the aid package, considered “a lifeline” for Ukraine’s military, could be arriving on the battlefield within days.

Preview: Toranaga and Blackthorne turn toward a new life—and a new world.

Preview: Test your wits on the Slate Quiz for April 24, 2024.

Preview: Ready for some wordplay? Sharpen your skills with Slate’s puzzle for April 24, 2024.

Preview: Marjorie Taylor Greene and her gang have cost Republicans any real wins.

Preview: (Yes you do.)

Preview: 4/24/1963: Sherbert v. Verner argued.

Preview: Lower courts have been extremely skeptical of attempts to regulate unfinished parts as firearms.

Preview: An estimated 171,000 Californians are homeless, making up about 30 percent of all homeless people in the U.S. The state spent $24 billion in fiscal years 2018–2023 on 30 different programs for the homeless. But a state auditor's report found the agency responsible for coordinating the effort to reduce homelessness stopped tracking the programs' spending…

Preview: A Federalist Society Forum on "Jurisdiction Stripping: Fact & Fiction Flowing Through the Mountain Valley Pipeline Case"

Preview: In the Jim Crow South, businesses fought racism—because the rules denied them customers.

Preview: The Supreme Court will decide whether former presidents can avoid criminal prosecution by avoiding impeachment and removal.

Preview: Science can detect increasingly small particles of plastic in our air and water. That doesn't mean it's bad for you.

Preview: Certificate of need laws were supposed to ensure high-quality health care in rural places. Instead, they allowed hospitals to veto potential competitors.

Preview: I'm the DEA's poster child for prescription stimulant abuse: a 30-something adult who needs a telehealth psychiatrist and can't remember what day the garbage truck comes.

Preview: Holding that Jack Smith lacks defendant's standing lets the Supreme Court avoid the frought question of presidential immunity for criminal actions

Preview: See who's running

Preview: All four cases explained

Preview: The Crossword

Preview: Start the day smarter ☀️

Preview: After Hurricane Idalia made landfall on Wednesday, Florida communities are emerging to see its destruction with hopes and plans to recover.

Preview: Downgraded to a tropical storm, what had been Hurricane Idalia powered across Georgia and the Carolinas on Wednesday evening.

Preview: The 81-year-old Republican Senate minority leader struggled to answer reporters' questions in Kentucky, requiring help and drawing questions about his health

Preview: Nebraska volleyball set a women's sports attendance record Wednesday night as 92,003 fans descended on Memorial Stadium to watch the match vs. Omaha.

Preview: At least 73 people died when a fire ripped through a multi-story building in Johannesburg overtaken by homeless people, authorities said Thursday.

Preview: As the storm moves away from the shore, it can cause an additional life-threatening hazard: inland flooding. Georgia and the Carolinas are at risk.

Preview: A coyote in the El Capitan meadow area at sunrise in Yosemite National Park. | Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Your taxes fund an obscure government program that kills millions of wild animals to benefit Big Ag. A red fox killed with a cyanide bomb. A gray wolf gunned down from an airplane. A jackrabbit caught in a neck snare. These are just a few of the 1.45 million animals poisoned, shot, and trapped last year by the euphemistically named Wildlife Services, a little-known but particularly brutal program of the US Department of Agriculture. The program kills wildlife for many reasons, including poisoning birds to prevent them from striking airplanes and destroying beavers that sneak onto golf courses. But one of the primary purposes of the mostly taxpayer-funded $286 million program is to serve as the meat and dairy industries’ on-call pest control service. “We were the hired gun of the livestock industry,” said Carter Niemeyer, who worked in Wildlife Services and related programs from 1975 to 2006. Niemeyer specialized in killing and trapping predators like coyotes and wolves that were suspected of killing farmed cattle and sheep. Wildlife Services has also killed hundreds of endangered gray wolves, threatened grizzly bears, and highly endangered Mexican gray wolves, often at the behest of the livestock industry and enabled by exemptions from the Endangered Species Act. The top three species Wildlife Services killed in 2023 were European starlings, feral pigs, and coyotes, according to data released last month. How these animals were targeted — from shooting coyotes to poisoning birds — has prompted Congress to fund nonlethal initiatives within the program and conservation groups to call for sweeping changes to how Wildlife Services operates. The USDA didn’t respond to several questions sent via email. “God was our only witness out there,” Niemeyer said about agents killing animals in the field. “You just hope that everybody makes [choices] morally and ethically acceptable and as humane as possible.” To Wildlife Services’ credit, the vast majority of its work entails nonlethally scaring animals off. Controversy, though, has dogged the program for decades, as critics like Niemeyer and other former employees say much of its predator killing is unnecessary, imprecise, and inhumane. Conservation groups say it’s ecologically destructive, as such predators are crucial to ecosystem health and biodiversity. Predator hysteria, explained Adrian Treves, an environmental science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the origins of today’s rampant predator killing can be found in America’s early European settlers, who brought with them the mentality that wolves were “superpredators,” posing a dangerous threat to humans. “We’ve been fed this story that the eradication of wolves was necessary for livestock production,” he said. Today, Wildlife Services’ most controversial work is its killings of coyotes and other predators for the supposed threat they pose to American ranchers and the food supply. But according to a USDA estimate, predation accounted for just 4.7 percent of cattle mortality in 2015. Conservation groups say that figure is exaggerated because it’s based on self-reported data from ranchers and shoddy methodology. According to an analysis of USDA data by the Humane Society of the United States, predation accounts for only 0.3 percent of cattle mortality. (Disclosure: I worked at the Humane Society of the United States from 2012 to 2017 on unrelated agricultural issues.) The Humane Society points to several flaws in the USDA data, including the fact that ranchers reported livestock predation from grizzly bears in six states that don’t have any grizzly bears. In the Northern Rocky Mountains region, the rate of livestock predation reported by ranchers was 27 times higher than data provided by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which had actually confirmed livestock deaths by predators. “When I first went to work, there was just sort of this acceptance that if a rancher called and he said he had a coyote problem, we assumed that [he] had a coyote problem,” Niemeyer said. “We didn’t question it. I didn’t see a lot of meticulous necropsy work done” to investigate the cause of death. The numbers reported to the USDA by ranchers, he now believes, are “exaggerated and embellished.” USDA-APHIS A coyote caught in a foothold trap. The USDA financially compensates ranchers for livestock killed by wolves and some other species, which can create an incentive to attribute farm animal deaths to predators. Robert Gosnell, a former director of New Mexico’s USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service who administered the state’s Wildlife Services program, told the Intercept in 2022 that the agency’s field inspectors had been ordered to report livestock deaths as “wolf kills” for ranchers. “My guys in the field were going and rubber-stamping anything those people asked them to,” Gosnell said. Niemeyer is not opposed to killing individual coyotes or wolves suspected of killing a particular cow or sheep. But much of Wildlife Services’ predator control, he said (and another former employee has alleged), is done preventively in an attempt to reduce coyote populations. “Every coyote is suspected of potentially being a killer,” Niemeyer said, which he characterizes as coyote or wolf “hysteria.” Last year, 68,000 coyotes were taken down by a variety of means, including ingestion of Compound 1080, a poison that causes acute pain in the form of heart blockage, respiratory failure, hallucinations, and convulsions. Thousands more animals are killed as collateral damage. Last year, over 2,000 were killed unintentionally, a consequence of setting out untold numbers of traps and baited cyanide bombs. These devices have also injured a small number of humans and, between 2000 and 2012, killed more than 1,100 dogs. Some employees have died on the job, and there have even been allegations of orders within the agency to cover up unintentional kills of pets and a federally protected golden eagle. USDA-APHIS A hawk caught in a trap. An irrational bias against predators has made it hard for Americans, and its regulators, to recognize predators’ many ecological and social benefits. One study in Wisconsin, for example, found that wild wolf populations keep deer away from roadways, which in turn reduces costly, and sometimes deadly, car crashes. And killing predators may, counterintuitively, lead to more livestock deaths, Treves said. Some predator species that experience mass killing events may compensate by having more babies at younger ages. That could partly explain why, when wolf killings increased in some Western states, livestock predation went up, too. And when you wipe out some animals, others may fill the void. Coyotes significantly expanded their range in the 1900s after America’s centuries-long wolf extermination campaign. Finally, Treves said, killing suspected predators from one ranch may simply drive the remaining population into neighboring ranches. One study he co-authored on wolf kills in Michigan found “a three times elevation of risk to livestock on neighboring properties after a farm received lethal control of wolves from Wildlife Services.” Agricultural sprawl and the war on “invasive” species Wildlife Services represents yet another example of the USDA’s seeming indifference to animal welfare, but it also highlights a little-known fact of human-wildlife conflict: Most of it stems from agriculture. Almost half of the contiguous United States is now used for meat, dairy, and egg production — most of it cattle-grazing — which has crowded out wildlife and reduced biodiversity. And whenever wild animals end up on farmland that was once their habitat, they run the risk of being poisoned, shot, or trapped by Wildlife Services. That’s true for animals that find their way onto fruit, vegetable, and nut orchards for a snack, too. But Wildlife Services’ primary goal is to protect the interests of livestock producers, USDA public affairs specialist Tanya Espinosa told me in an email — yet another subsidy for an already highly subsidized industry. While much of the criticism lobbed at Wildlife Services pertains to its treatment of charismatic megafauna like coyotes, bears, and wolves, little attention is paid to the European starling, Wildlife Services’ most targeted species. Starlings accounted for a little over half of all animals killed by Wildlife Services, at 814,310 birds. Starlings, which are targeted because they like to feast on grain at dairy farms and cattle feedlots, are mostly mass-poisoned with DRC-1339, also known as Starlicide, which destroys their heart and kidney function, slowly and excruciatingly killing them over the course of three to 80 hours. It’s not uncommon for towns across the US to suddenly find thousands of starlings dropping dead out of trees or raining from the sky. Despite these deaths, starlings receive little sympathy — even from bird enthusiasts — given its status as an “invasive” species, a term often invoked to justify excluding a species from moral consideration, according to Australian ecologist Arian Wallach. Here too, as with predators, we may be in need of a reframe, or at least a broadening of our often one-track conversation about nonnative species like feral pigs and starlings. “In no way does the starling imagine itself as an invasive species — that is a human construction,” said Natalie Hofmeister, an assistant professor of ecology at the University of Michigan and author of the forthcoming book Citizen Starling. Rethinking mass killing Despite Wildlife Services’ high kill counts, it has expanded its use of nonlethal methods in recent years, including guard dogs, electric fencing, audio/visual deterrents, bird repellent research, and fladry — tying flags along fences, which can scare off some predator species. “The last three years have shown a little bit of a turning of the tide for Wildlife Services,” said Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation director of the advocacy group Center for Biological Diversity. “There’s been more focus on preventing conflicts versus the Band-Aid of killing animals.” Matt Moyer/Getty Images A range rider in Montana hangs fladry — long red flags attached to fencing — to scare away livestock predators. Treves agrees, but is skeptical there will be meaningful change. Most importantly, he wants to see Wildlife Services experimentally test its lethal methods to see if they actually prevent livestock predation. “I am cynical,” he said. “I am frustrated that this is 20 years of arguing with this agency that’s entrenched, stubborn, and will not listen to the people who disagree with them.” There are no easy answers here. While much of Wildlife Services’ work is ecologically ruinous and unjustifiably cruel, wild animals do inflict real damage on our food supply. Better management on the part of farmers and ranchers and further USDA investment into nonlethal methods could help. Even better would be to rethink the USDA’s — and the meat industry’s — license to wage war on wildlife. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

Preview: On April 18, the United Auto Workers won the union vote at a Volkswagen assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. | Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images The UAW is unlocking worker power in the South. An expert explains why it matters. The Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, has about 5,500 employees. On April 19, almost three-quarters of them voted to join the United Auto Workers. It’s the latest victory for one of the country’s largest labor unions, coming on the heels of a major contract win last fall with the “Big Three” American carmakers: GM, Ford, and Stellantis (which merged with Chrysler), whose workers make up about 150,000 of the UAW’s 400,000-plus membership. A union vote at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga assembly plant is big news for many reasons. For one, the US was the last country where Volkswagen workers didn’t have some form of representation. But perhaps more importantly, it’s failed twice before, once in 2014 and again in 2019; Volkswagen Chattanooga will be the first non-Big Three auto plant in the South to become unionized. The UAW has no intention of slowing down now. Union president Shawn Fain told the Guardian that the Volkswagen plant was “the first domino to fall” in a strategy targeting mainly foreign automakers in the South: In May, there’s a UAW vote at a Mercedes plant in Alabama, and organizing efforts are also beginning at BMW, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, and Nissan plants, among others, across several Southern states. (The union has also set its sights on Tesla facilities in Texas, Nevada, and California.) The UAW has eyes on the South because it stands to gain huge ground there. In the last few decades, a slew of auto plants have popped up in the region, a trend that’s only accelerating as more car companies invest in making EVs and announce new manufacturing facilities in the US. States often offer tempting subsidies to attract automakers to set up shop within their borders, but companies have an extra incentive to head South: it has some of the lowest unionization rates in the nation. In South Carolina, just 2.3 percent of workers belong to a union, compared to 24.1 percent in Hawaii and 20.6 percent in New York. This stark regional difference is tied to a history of racist anti-labor laws, an outgrowth of Jim Crow laws that segregated Black and white Americans in the South until they were overturned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Vox spoke to Andrew Wolf, a professor of global labor and work at Cornell University, on how unionizing the South could not only raise wages for all auto workers, but also tear down some of the racial disparities workers of color experience in the economy. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Why was the union vote at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant such a big deal? This was a big deal for many reasons. There has not been an organizing victory of this size in the South in decades. It’s a place where the union had lost previously. It just has really big ramifications for the future of organized labor, and the future of the economy in the South. This is the first Volkswagen union in the US, but Volkswagen already has unionized workers in other countries. Did that make organizing easier or harder here? The existence of unions and the really strong labor laws that exist in Germany generally certainly helped. It helped compel the company to be far more neutral and less aggressive in opposing the union than, for example, what’s happening right now at Mercedes in Alabama. Yes, workers at the Alabama plant are claiming Mercedes is retaliating against their union efforts. As you noted, the Chattanooga vote is a huge deal because it’s in the South. I think I know the answer to this, but — are there many unionized auto plants in the South? No. These companies opened in the South to avoid unions, especially with the rise of neoliberalism after the general financial crisis in the 1970s. It’s a within-country version of outsourcing. More and more companies move to the South to avoid unions, to take advantage of the lower wages that are the historical legacy of Jim Crow. You see it explicitly in the comments of the governors — you had the governors of all of these states talking about how this unionization would undermine the culture and values of the South. That’s very coded language for, “We don’t let workers get representation or fair pay in the South, because it’s better for business.” In the past few years we’ve seen some high-profile wins for American unions, but the reality is that union membership rates in the US are pretty low. In the 1950s, about a third of workers were in a union. What happened in those intervening years? Many things happened — globalization, neoliberalism, change in laws. The biggest thing was just that there were declines in the industries where unions were strongest, and a lack of union organizing in the industries that were fast-growing. So that combined with increased employer hostility, increased political hostility, and weakening of labor and employment laws, drove down the rate of unionization in this country. In the South, specifically, what were the policies that led to such low unionization? As with everything in America, the answer to the question is race. Avoiding unions was part of the Jim Crow apparatus. Unions are particularly threatening to orders like Jim Crow, because they bring workers across races together in common cause. So unionization was a real threat to the economic order of the South and that has had lasting impact, with wages being significantly lower in the South, unionization rates lower in the South, and poverty rates being higher. The National Labor Relations Act passed in the ’30s, and then after World War II, Congress passes the Taft-Hartley Act, which undermined the NLRA. But specifically, [Taft-Hartley] empowers states to undermine [the NLRA]. All the Southern states passed these right-to-work laws while the more heavily unionized states in the North and Midwest didn’t institute right-to-work. Essentially, it’s a strategy that makes it both harder to organize and keep the unions funded if you do organize. And what are right-to-work laws? Right-to-work laws are laws that allow workers in unionized workplaces to refuse to pay fair-share fees. Where unions exist, workers can either become a member, in which case they pay dues, or if they don’t want to become a member they have to pay their fair-share fees, which covers the cost of the union representing them. This makes it much harder for unions to fund themselves. Then there’s other little things that exist in right-to-work laws in different states, such as requiring the union to get everyone to re-sign up for the union every single year in order to pay dues. Do workers who aren’t members of a union still benefit from them? [Yes.] For example, if you’re a worker in a shop that’s unionized in a right-to-work state, and you decide you don’t want to pay dues, but then you get fired and you want to challenge that termination — the union is still legally required to represent you, even though you have not paid for that representation. How does low unionization tie into the high rates of poverty we see in the South today? There’s two mechanisms. There’s a significant and persistent union premium, with unionized workers making more money. Additionally, there’s the spillover effects of this. If you have a high unionization rate in your locality, the other employers pay better as well, to remain competitive — a kind of “rising tides lifts all boats” situation. Without unionization, in the South, it depresses wages across the board, and then in turn it depresses wages across the country because there’s always this threat that auto companies could leave Detroit and go south. Also, many Southern states haven’t set their own minimum wage separate from the federal minimum [which is still $7.25 per hour]. Yes, exactly. And right now there’s this huge push across the South to roll back the few labor rights they do have — most prominently, removing all these child labor laws. They just rolled back health and safety laws, including heat laws in Florida for agricultural workers. To get back to Volkswagen in Chattanooga — the union vote passed with 73 percent saying yes. Is that high? Just okay? I was shocked. I mean, it’s a completely overwhelming victory, especially when you consider that the union had lost here in the past. It just really shows you how powerful this moment is right now, and how much workers are buying the message that the current UAW is selling. The Chattanooga facility voted no to unionization twice before. What do you think was different this time? Everything’s different. The biggest difference was this massive contract victory that UAW had at the Big Three last fall. When workers see unions win, it increases interest in the unions — so it had a real galvanizing effect. There was so much publicity on it, talking about these big wage increases. I think these workers down in the South were looking at their paychecks and comparing, right, and realizing the raw deal they have. Additionally, you had the experience of the pandemic, where all these workers were told they were essential, but then they weren’t compensated as if they were essential. It’s just spurred this massive upsurge in labor organizing since the pandemic. What did you think when you heard that the UAW was going to try to unionize the South? It just struck me as really smart, to leverage this big contract victory to go out and try to improve conditions more generally in the industry. Because, as I said, a rising tide lifts all boats, but also, the sinking tides in the South can diminish the wages for unionized workers in the North. I think [UAW organizers] also realize there’s this imperative, that you can’t let this big disparity in auto wages exist between the North and South and continue to win these meaningful contracts. What does this portend for the upcoming Mercedes UAW vote? It’s a different state, a different company. Are there different headwinds? It will be more challenging there, because the company is being far more aggressively anti-union. We talked about how the relationship with the VW union in Germany helped in this situation. But, at the same time, I think there are reasons to be hopeful that the UAW might succeed given what we’ve seen elsewhere. I feel much better about it considering that the Chattanooga vote was 73 percent than if it had been, say, 51 percent. Right now, many foreign carmakers are trying to establish a bigger presence here as the US transitions to electric vehicles. Does that make it more pivotal that the UAW expansion happen right now? Yeah, and you saw this reflected in the contract the UAW secured with the Big Three as well. The move to electric vehicles is going to really change the auto industry — it’s probably going to result in less putting-the-car-together jobs, so to speak, but probably more parts jobs. So the UAW contracts last fall secured the right to organize some of these battery factories. It’s absolutely coming at the right time, because it’s a moment [that] would have only further undermined the UAW foothold in the industry. Do you see this as potentially inspiring for other companies and industries in the South? For sure. I would imagine that is what we would see. It’s hard, though — I don’t know if interest in movements for it will necessarily result in victory. But I think you’ll see much more labor action in the South and elsewhere across the country.

Preview: Ukrainian soldiers fire artillery near Siversk, in Donetsk, Ukraine, on April 1, 2024. | Wolfgang Schwan/Anadolu via Getty Images New American weapons will buy Ukraine’s defenders some valuable time. Ukrainian forces are having their best week in months, and it’s coming not on the muddy battlefields of the Donbas, but across the Atlantic. On Saturday, after months of delay, the US House of Representatives approved $61 billion in new funding for Ukraine, alongside aid packages for Israel and for US allies in the Pacific; last night, the Senate approved the package and sent it on to President Joe Biden. He said he’ll sign it today. The new weapons can’t come soon enough. During recent months, the tide has turned decisively against the Ukrainians on the battlefield as they have been forced to conserve artillery and air defense ammunition. Russia’s military has been firing as much as five times as many artillery shells as the Ukrainians, and one US commander recently warned that the advantage could soon be as high as 10-1. Farther from the front lines, Ukraine’s much-vaunted air defense systems —which once shot down around 90 percent of Russian missiles and drones — have become dramatically less effective, with disastrous consequences for Ukraine’s cities and infrastructure. Kateryna Stepanenko, a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, told Vox that Ukraine has lost an estimated 583 square kilometers (225 square miles) of territory since last October, when the US began reducing the size of its aid packages. This is not a huge amount of territory within Europe’s second-largest country, but more important than the actual ground covered was that the Russian advances forced the Ukrainians to “waste their precious resources on repelling Russian attacks rather than taking the initiative,” Stepanenko said. “The delay in providing assistance to Ukraine cost us dearly,” Yehor Cherniev, a member of the Ukrainian parliament and deputy chair of its defense committee, told Vox. “Due to a lack of ammunition, we lost [the city of] Avdiivka and a number of small settlements, and also suffered significant human losses … All this could have been avoided if help had been provided on time.” Now that help has been provided — can it stanch the bleeding? Turning the tide, or buying time? The Pentagon, which has certainly had ample time to prepare, reportedly has an initial weapons package ready for approval and deployment as soon as the funding comes through. While the administration has not yet announced what specific weapons will be sent, Reuters reports that the initial tranche may be worth as much as $1 billion and include vehicles, artillery ammunition, and air defense ammunition. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) has also suggested it could include long-range ATACMS missiles, a capability Ukraine has been asking for since the early days of the war but which the White House has been reluctant to approve due to concerns they could be used to strike targets inside Russia. But more than two years into the war, will this aid really make a difference? “Yes, this is enough to stabilize the front lines,” said Mark Cancian, a retired US Marine colonel and expert on defense logistics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “You’ll see almost an immediate battlefield impact.” That’s no small thing considering the concerns expressed recently by observers in Ukraine that the country’s defenses could collapse entirely. Franz-Stefan Gady, an analyst with the Center for a New American Security who recently returned from a study trip to the front lines in Ukraine, said the new aid package was likely to “restore a situation more akin to November 2023, when the Ukrainians didn’t have to make as many trade-offs” about which sections of the front line and targets in the rear they were able to defend from Russian aerial threats. The aid also comes in the nick of time, as Russia has been stepping up its strikes along the front line, likely ahead of new attempts to seize territory in the spring, when drier conditions will make it easier to maneuver military vehicles. However, Gady cautions, “the package doesn’t address the most critical issue, which is manpower.” Ukraine’s front-line units have an acute shortage of infantry soldiers and the government has been reluctant to expand the use of conscription to refill their ranks. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did sign a law earlier this month lowering the minimum conscription age from 27 to 25 (the average age of Ukrainian soldiers is over 40) but Russia, with its higher population and much higher tolerance for large numbers of casualties, is still likely to have the manpower advantage. The optimistic view of the conflict for Ukraine is that new assistance will buy it much-needed time. It can hold the line this year and replenish units that were badly damaged in last year’s disappointing counteroffensive, hopefully putting it in a better position to push back Russia’s gains in 2025. By that time, Ukraine will have access to some new capabilities, such as F-16 fighter jets, and more importantly, the US and Europe will have ramped up their production of artillery ammunition, hopefully allowing the Ukrainians to narrow the Russians’ ammo advantage. But there’s a difference between avoiding losing the war and actually winning it. No one expects this new aid alone to accomplish the latter. “Okay, you’ve stabilized the front. Now what?” said Cancian. “The Ukrainians have to answer that question. What is their theory of victory?” The Washington front No one should expect a Russian collapse overnight. Even the most optimistic scenarios for Ukraine envision a long and costly war of attrition. Unfortunately, the lengthy and agonizingly difficult process of passing this aid bill suggests Washington may not be so patient. If the new aid allows Ukraine merely to preserve a new stalemate on the battlefield rather than make significant gains, international pressure on Kyiv to negotiate with Moscow may grow more prominent. Ukrainian leaders will counter that they have no reason to trust that Russia will honor such a settlement. As for Russia’s own calculations, the passage of the aid bill was an important signal to President Vladimir Putin that there’s still strong political support for Ukraine in the United States, even if it’s not quite as robust as it was two years ago. Of course, that could all change next year if former President Donald Trump, who would likely pressure Ukraine to give up territory to end the war, returns to the White House. Ukraine and its allies have been reaching out to Trump and his allies in hopes of hedging their bets, and in a slightly positive sign for Kyiv, Trump ended up backing the new aid package after it was structured as a loan rather than a grant, an idea he had floated earlier. But it’s safe to say that leaders in both Kyiv and Moscow will have to continue keeping one eye on America’s political climate even as they plot their next moves on the battlefield. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. 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Preview: Trump speaks at an event in Pennsylvania on April 13. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images Voters trust Trump to lower prices, even as his advisers put forward plans for increasing Americans’ cost of living. Donald Trump is currently leading the 2024 presidential race, in no small part because voters trust him to combat inflation. This is a bit strange since Trump has for months now been advertising plans to drastically increase consumer prices. Over the weekend, an NBC News poll found Trump leading Biden nationally by a 46 to 44 percent margin. Yet on the question of which candidate would better handle inflation and the cost of living, the Republican led the Democrat by a whopping 22 points. Trump’s landslide lead on price management is significant, since inflation was the poll’s single most commonly cited “critical issue” facing the United States. Unfortunately, Trump does not actually have a bulletproof plan for making Big Macs cheap again. To the contrary, the Republican and his advisers have developed an economic agenda that amounts to a recipe for turbocharging inflation. The claim that Trump’s policies would increase prices does not rest on a debatable interpretation of their indirect effects. Rather, some of the president’s proposals would directly increase American consumers’ costs by design. Here is a quick primer on the likely GOP nominee’s four-point plan for making your life less affordable: Step 1: Reduce the value of the U.S. dollar In the years since the Covid crisis, inflation has plagued consumers all across the wealthy world. Americans, though, have one advantage over their peers abroad: Their nation’s currency is relatively strong. The US economy is growing at nearly twice the pace of other major rich countries without suffering substantially higher inflation. Nevertheless, the Federal Reserve has kept America’s interest rates elevated. Taken together, these two realities increase demand for the dollar: Foreign investors want to place their capital in countries that are growing fast and/or that are offering high, low-risk returns on their sovereign debt. America is currently doing both. Thus, many investors abroad are swapping their local currencies for greenbacks, thereby bidding up the dollar’s value. As a result, Americans’ paychecks are going a bit farther, as a strong dollar makes imported goods cheaper for them. But Trump’s advisers want to change this. According to Politico, the former president’s policy aides are “ actively debating ways to devalue the U.S. dollar if he’s elected to a second term.” Their rationale is not hard to understand. Although a strong dollar is good for US consumers, it’s not great for US exporters, as it renders their goods more expensive to potential customers abroad. And since Trump and his former trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, have long sought to boost American manufacturing and shrink the trade deficit, they’re prepared to privilege the interests of the nation’s producers over those of its consumers. Lighthizer reportedly hopes to coerce other nations into strengthening the value of their currencies by threatening to impose tariffs on their exports if they don’t comply. Trump’s advisers are also mulling ways to weaken the dollar without foreign cooperation, according to Politico. Reasonable people can disagree about whether the US dollar is currently too strong. Plenty of analysts on both the right and left believe that America has a national interest in sustaining and growing its domestic production capacities. And all else being equal, a strong dollar does hurt American manufacturing. On the other hand, only about 8.6 percent of US workers are employed in the manufacturing sector, which suggests that a large majority of Americans have a stronger immediate interest in affordable imports than competitive exports. Further, there’s reason to believe that the Trump team’s plans would backfire, as many foreign governments would retaliate against tariffs and dollar devaluation by imposing duties on US-made goods and seeking to weaken their own currencies. Yet even if one supports Lighthizer’s priorities and proposals, an inescapable fact remains: A plan to devalue the dollar is — quite literally — a plan to make products more expensive for American consumers. And this isn’t the Trump team’s only proposal for directly increasing your household’s costs. Step 2: Apply a 10 percent tariff on all foreign imports To further boost American manufacturing, Trump and his aides are considering the imposition of a 10 percent tariff on all foreign imports. In practice, this would almost certainly mean that US consumers would pay roughly 10 percent more on all the foreign-made cars, electronics, toys, and other goods that they purchase. In theory, it is possible for the burdens of a tariff to fall entirely on foreign producers rather than domestic consumers. If a tariff applies only to raw commodities (such as soybeans or wheat) produced in a single country, then exporters in that country might slash their prices in response. This is because lots of countries export raw commodities, so a targeted producer would likely lose market share in the US unless they offset the impact of the tariff with a price cut. In that scenario, American consumers wouldn’t pay much higher prices for imports, but the targeted foreign producer would be forced to accept smaller profit margins. This is not how a universal tariff would work. Americans import a lot more than raw commodities. And the country cannot currently produce all the goods and production inputs that the economy requires, let alone produce them as cheaply as foreign firms do. Producers of specialty products such as advanced semiconductors will know that American consumers have nowhere else to turn. They therefore will feel little pressure to cut their prices. According to multiple studies, when Trump imposed tariffs on specialty Chinese goods such as silk embroidery, US consumers paid roughly 100 percent of the costs. Meanwhile, sheltered from foreign competition by tariffs, US manufacturers would be able to raise their prices considerably without risking a loss of customers. The result of all this would be a dramatic increase in consumer prices. This said, precisely because Trump’s universal tariff would function as a 10 percent sales tax on all foreign goods, it would somewhat reduce consumer demand. Make products less affordable for Americans and they will be forced to buy fewer of them. As consumers reduce their purchases, inflation could theoretically slow. But don’t worry, Trump’s comprehensive (if unintentional) plan for juicing inflation accounts for this possibility. Step 3: Enact massive, deficit-financed tax cuts The Republican Party’s number one fiscal priority in 2025 will be extending the Trump tax cuts. Many provisions of the former president’s 2017 tax package are set to expire at the end of next year. Merely preserving those policies will increase the federal deficit by $3.3 trillion over the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). But Trump is not satisfied with merely maintaining America’s current tax rates. Rather, his team hopes to further reduce the corporate rate from 21 percent to as low as 15 percent. That would further swell the deficit by $522 billion, under conventional assumptions, according to the Tax Foundation, a conservative think tank. The president also hopes to enact a large middle-class tax cut, according to a recent report from Reuters. Specifically, Trump and his advisers are considering a cut to the federal payroll tax and/or a reduction in marginal income tax rates for middle-class households. Since the scale of these cuts has not been specified, it is impossible to say how much they would cost in fiscal terms. Since America’s middle class is large, any substantial reduction in its tax burden would be very expensive in fiscal terms. At first brush, a middle-class tax cut might seem like it would make life more affordable for Americans, at least in the short term. This would be true if such a policy came with no risk of triggering a resurgence of inflation, but unfortunately, it would entail precisely that hazard. If you increase Americans’ post-tax incomes by hundreds of billions of dollars, they will suddenly be able to dramatically boost their purchases of goods and services. If the economy’s capacity to produce goods and services does not increase at the same pace, then demand will outrun supply and consumers will bid up prices. Theoretically, Republicans could enact non-inflationary, multitrillion-dollar tax cuts without sparking inflation, but this would require offsetting the fiscal impacts of tax cuts with spending reductions. The combination of extending the 2017 tax cuts and slashing the corporate rate to 15 percent would cost nearly $4 trillion in foregone revenue. Tacking on a large middle-class tax cut could easily bring that sum total north of $6 trillion. During both the Trump and George W. Bush presidencies, congressional Republicans ultimately didn’t have the stomach to enact spending cuts anywhere near that large. Critically, offsetting the inflationary impact of tax cuts in 2025 and 2026 would require slashing spending immediately, not years down the line. Republicans have no appetite for cutting Medicare and Social Security benefits for existing beneficiaries. And coming up with $6 trillion in spending reductions without tackling entitlements would require gutting all manner of popular social programs. The path of least resistance would therefore be to deficit-finance the bulk of Trump’s tax cuts. This would likely lead to faster price growth and more interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve. Granted, if Republicans somehow found a way to rapidly increase the US economy’s productive capacity, then their tax cuts would be less inflationary and the typical American might come out ahead (at least, until the consequences of gutting future funding for Medicare and Social Security caught up with them). But Trump’s team plans to do the opposite. The final plank in their pro-inflation agenda involves abruptly shrinking the supply side of the US economy. Step 4: Shrink the American labor force As the New York Times reported in November, Trump and former White House adviser Stephen Miller have hatched plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants during his second term in office, even without Congress’s cooperation. Currently, due process rights constrain the government’s ability to deport undocumented immigrants en masse. But Miller and Trump believe they can scale back those rights under existing executive authorities. They intend to make all undocumented immigrants who’ve been in the country for less than two years subject to expedited removal. In other words, the government would be empowered to remove such immigrants without first giving them an opportunity to challenge their deportations at a legal hearing. Current law makes it more difficult to summarily expel longtime US residents, but Trump’s team thinks it can force millions of them out of the country anyway. First, they would scale up raids of workplaces and other areas where undocumented immigrants are believed to be present. Then, they would condemn the captured immigrants to indefinite detention in federal camps. These detainees would still have the right to contest their deportations in court but they would need to wait out that often years-long legal process in confinement. Miller reportedly bets that most will choose to leave the country instead of tolerating de facto incarceration. In my estimation, there are strong moral reasons to oppose these policies. But even Americans who have no empathy for their undocumented compatriots have economic incentives to oppose mass deportation. As scholars at the Brookings Institution noted last fall, the upsurge in immigration since the pandemic is one major reason why the US managed to bring inflation down without suffering a recession: Foreign-born workers increased the economy’s productive capacity, helping supply to catch up with rising consumer demand. Conversely, if America abruptly deported all undocumented workers, labor shortages would devastate myriad industries, from housing to agriculture to the care economy, and prices would soar. Some Americans might consider such labor shortages beneficial. After all, when labor is scarce, workers can demand higher wages. But there are more undocumented workers in the United States than unemployed ones. Purging America of the former would not leave the US with the same economy with higher wages for the native-born. Rather, it would leave the country with a smaller economy, where millions of existing jobs simply would not get done. When you slash the agricultural labor force, food gets scarce and thus expensive. The same principle holds for construction, hospitality, leisure, or health care. Put all of this together and you have a recipe for making the inflation rate 9 percent again: Slash the dollar’s value, insulate US producers from competition, juice demand with tax cuts, and then throttle supply with mass deportation, and prices are bound to soar. Unfortunately, Trump’s proposals and their economic consequences appear to be largely lost on the American electorate, possibly because neither have attracted much media attention. If that does not change between now and November, the country could pay a heavy price.

Preview: Finnish activist Aiski Ryökäs at a My Voice, My Choice press conference. | Varja Jovanovič A massive effort to expand access throughout Europe launches today. An unprecedented effort to expand abortion rights throughout Europe launches today, led by groups that were already fighting for reproductive freedom at the national level in their eight home countries. The My Voice, My Choice campaign aims to collect 1 million signatures in the next few months to pressure leaders of the European Union to commit to helping anyone who is not easily able to end an unwanted pregnancy where they live. While legal abortion is supported throughout Europe and is broadly more accessible and affordable in the EU compared to the United States, there are some exceptions. Poland and Malta have near-total abortion bans, Austria and Germany generally do not provide free abortion care through national health insurance, and in countries such as Croatia and Italy, many doctors refuse to provide the procedure. Activists say their effort could help shore up access for nearly 20 million women. Their campaign for a European Citizens’ Initiative would help address those gaps by providing financial support for people to get care internationally if needed. Activists are presenting their initiative as voluntary — member states can choose to opt in. Those states that do participate “in the spirit of solidarity” could then receive financial support from the EU to terminate pregnancies for those who lack access to safe and legal abortion where they live. The proposed EU mechanism would cover the cost of the procedure but not travel costs. “What’s really special is it’s basically being built as the largest feminist movement in Europe, which is crazy and super tiring sometimes, and also really, really beautiful,” said Nika Kovač, a Slovenian activist leading the campaign. Varja Jovanovič Nika Kovač. Kovač told Vox she decided to mobilize on the European-wide level after seeing the Supreme Court overturn legal abortion in the United States. “The whole idea for this campaign came from the despair in the US,” she said. Kovač and her colleagues at the 8th of March Institute, a Slovenian human rights group named for International Women’s Day, planned this citizens’ initiative idea in secret for about 18 months, and then started recruiting international partners in late 2023. The core coalition now includes activists from Poland, Ireland, Spain, France, Austria, Croatia, and Finland. They aim to collect 1 million signatures in advance of the European parliamentary elections in June, which occur only once every five years. Collecting so many signatures in such a short time will be difficult, and if they’re successful, it would be the fastest signature collection for a European Citizen Initiative in history. Still, success is not inconceivable given that the effort is being led by organizers with years of mobilization experience in their home countries. Signature collection can be done both in-person and online, and activists are looking to organize at big upcoming events like May Day protests. “One thing I can rely on is the stubbornness of these women,” Kovač said. “In Europe we are so often caught up in our own national context, and this is the first time I feel like we’re slowly coming out of it.” How the proposed European abortion rights measure would work The European Union, which is comprised of 27 member states, has authority to govern via international treaties, primarily in realms such as monetary policy, trade policy, environmental policy, and consumer protection. Any powers — officially known as competences — not covered by these treaties remain exclusive to the member states, and for years activists were told that reproductive rights were simply beyond the scope of what the EU could legislate on, meaning that abortion had to be left to each sovereign country. “So many European politicians and bureaucrats say nothing can be done in the context of abortion on the European level because it’s not directly one of the competencies of the European Commission,” Kovač explained. “So we had to do a lot of thinking and researching.” They convened a group of international lawyers who helped develop a novel legal strategy, positioning their citizens’ measure as one within the “supporting competence” of the EU, an established official authority that allows the European Commission to support member states for a variety of purposes, including the protection and improvement of human health. Even with broader grounds for legal exceptions in European countries with earlier gestational age limits, first-trimester bans in Europe still force thousands of pregnant people to travel internationally every year to end their unwanted pregnancies. One study published in 2023 looked at pregnant people who traveled from countries like Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany, and Italy to the Netherlands or England for later abortion care. Over half of the pregnant people surveyed hadn’t learned they were even pregnant until they were at least 14 weeks along, when they had already surpassed the limits in their home countries. If activists succeed in collecting enough signatures, then members of the European Commission would need to decide if they would support the citizens’ initiative. Activists aim to press all candidates running for European Parliament in June to clarify their stance on the proposal so voters have that information when they go to the polls. “It really will depend on what the next European Commission looks like, but the important thing for us is that this will go to them and they will need to speak to it and then do something,” Kovač said. “It’s really the first concrete solution for the people in Europe.”

Preview: Rep. Summer Lee, a progressive and member of the Squad, is running for reelection in Pennsylvania. | Nate Smallwood/Bloomberg via Getty Images Lee was the first Squad member to face a 2024 primary challenge. It could send a strong message about progressive power. Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA), the first member of the progressive group of House Democrats known as the Squad to be up for a 2024 primary challenge, won her race Tuesday. Her contest could be a preview of how Democratic divides over Israel may play out this year. Lee, one of the earliest lawmakers to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and to condemn Israel’s airstrikes, has fielded critiques from some Jewish leaders and members of her constituency for taking these positions. Her moderate challenger, Edgewood City Council member Bhavini Patel, was vocal about her support for Israel and focused her attacks on Lee on the Israel-Hamas conflict, as did outside groups. Their race reflects the intense focus there’s been on the conflict in the wake of Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack and Israel’s devastating bombings of Gaza. Democrats have been divided in their stance on the ongoing war, with many progressives on the Hill calling for a ceasefire and more moderate lawmakers arguing for military aid to Israel. As congressional primary season unfolds, many anti-war progressives — particularly those in the Squad, including Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) — are facing primaries against challengers supported by pro-Israel groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Though Lee’s race isn’t a perfect analog for those of her Squad colleagues, it sends an early signal about just how serious a threat the primaries pose to those progressives facing challengers. “What it can tell you if someone wins with [Lee’s] position is that it may not be a vulnerability,” says Berwood Yost, the head of the Franklin and Marshall College poll in Pennsylvania. “But of course, it will depend on the candidates who are running and what they’re emphasizing.” Summer Lee’s primary, briefly explained Lee, a former community organizer and state representative, is a first-term lawmaker who represents Pennsylvania’s 12th district. The district — which is in the western part of the state and includes Pittsburgh — is solidly Democratic, but more moderate than some of the other districts that progressives hold around the country. Lee has said that she strives to “be a representative” for everyone in her district. Lee has long backed progressive policies like Medicare-for-all and a Green New Deal. During the race, she emphasized how much federal funding has flowed to her district during her term, including $1.2 billion dedicated to everything from replacing lead water pipes and building out passenger rail in the region. (Much of this funding is tied to the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which passed before Lee took office, but she could have still had a role in its distribution.) When it comes to Israel-related policy, she has condemned Hamas, called for a ceasefire, voted against a resolution establishing that Congress stands with Israel, and voted against sending a recent aid package to Israel. These positions build on past statements Lee has made in support of Palestinian rights and calling for the conditioning of US aid based on humanitarian requirements. Lee’s position on Israel’s war in Gaza has been scrutinized and, at times, criticized by some of her constituency, which includes a large Jewish American population. Squirrel Hill, a neighborhood in Pittsburgh and part of Lee’s district, was the site of a devastating antisemitic mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. “We call on Rep. Lee to exercise better leadership and join her colleagues in upholding the moral obligation for Israel to protect its citizens against Hamas,” a group of Jewish leaders in the region wrote in a letter last November. Some Jewish constituents who’ve expressed concerns about Israel’s attacks on Gaza have, however, supported Lee’s stances. Patel, meanwhile, is an entrepreneur and city council member. Some of her key policy positions include backing labor unions, supporting policing, and lowering prescription drug costs. Across a broad array of issues, including criminal justice reform, health care, and environmental policy, her stances are to Lee’s right. Patel has a more moderate position on Israel’s offensive and has expressed support for the country. She claimed, too, that Lee’s position is not a reflection of where her constituents stand and condemned Lee’s backing of voters who choose “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary instead of supporting President Joe Biden. “She’s clearly picked a side in this situation and completely disregards her entire district,” Patel told the Washington Post. “I think it’s important that any call for a cease-fire should acknowledge that hostages are still being held.” As the Post noted, however, Lee’s support for a ceasefire in Gaza reflects where many Democrats stand on this issue as well. A February 2024 Data for Progress poll found that 63 percent of Democrats support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. “There has been increasing criticism of this war, even among those who were horrified by the October 7 attacks and believe Israel has the right to defend itself,” says Dan Mallinson, a political scientist at Penn State University. “If this was January, or maybe November of last year, and she was in this position, it may [be] slightly different politically than it does now.” Lee built up an impressive arsenal of fundraising and endorsements that far outpaced Patel, including backing from Pennsylvania Sens. Bob Casey and John Fetterman — an indication of the strength of her candidacy. Such support put Lee in a solid position going into primary day, despite the disagreement some constituents have expressed about her stances. This strength may have been a reason why AIPAC, a pro-Israel group that’s vowed to send $100 million to unseat progressive candidates, did not invest in this particular primary. Other outside groups — including the Moderate PAC, which draws much of its funding from a pro-Israel Republican donor — backed Patel. Fundraising strength, incumbency, endorsements, and the state of public opinion helped Lee come out victorious against her moderate challenger. Her success will now likely send a positive signal to her fellow progressives who are also under threat of primary challenges, including some that could be heavily supported by pro-Israel groups like AIPAC. Democratic divides are set to play a role in the election Lee’s race is far from the only one in which lawmakers’ stances on Israel are expected to be a flash point. AIPAC has already said it intends to spend its sizable war chest — as much as $100 million — on taking out certain progressive members, though that spending has yet to manifest, and groups including the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC (DMFI) have said the same. In 2022, AIPAC saw successes in six of eight Democratic primary races that it invested in, including Rep. Haley Stevens’s win over Rep. Andy Levin in Michigan. Some of the members that AIPAC and DMFI intend to target include other members of the Squad like Reps. Jamaal Bowman (NY), Cori Bush (MO), Ilhan Omar (MN), and Rashida Tlaib (MI), all of whom will be up for primaries later this year. “We’re not interested in defeating people who are pro-Palestinian, we’re interested in defeating people who are anti-Israel and I think it’s fair to say that Bowman, Bush, and some of these other members are decidedly anti-Israel,” Mark Mellman, the head of the DMFI, told the Hill. Experts note that AIPAC and DMFI may have passed on investing in Lee’s race in favor of putting their dollars in primaries in which lawmakers are perceived to be more vulnerable. Bowman and Bush are two of the lawmakers who could well see more difficult races because they’re navigating other issues that could affect their candidacies, including Bowman’s past blog posts regarding September 11 conspiracy theories and a DOJ investigation of Bush’s use of campaign security funds. “I think with Bowman and Bush, in particular, they both have controversies surrounding them that have nothing to do with the Israel issue but have made them uniquely vulnerable,” Erin Covey, a House analyst for Cook Political Report, tells Vox. Beyond Democratic primaries, there’s also an open question on the impact that intraparty fissures on Israel will have on support for Biden in November. Already, a fraction of Democratic voters have expressed their opposition to his willingness to continue backing the country’s military as more than 30,000 Gazans have been killed. In Michigan, for example, more than 100,000 people cast their vote for “uncommitted” in order to register their opposition to Biden. “We’re anticipating [the presidential race] to be close again. So anything that’s going to depress your turnout or people not being excited about you is potentially problematic,” says Mallinson. Update, April 23, 10:07 pm ET: This story, originally published earlier on April 23, has been updated to reflect Lee’s primary victory.

Preview: Hundreds of “Freedom Convoy” supporters march in downtown Ottawa on Canada Day, July 1, 2022, in Ottawa, Canada. | Dave Chan/AFP via Getty Images Justin Trudeau’s true dough plans to fight populism with policy. Canada has a growing populism problem. Even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau thinks so. Like many other countries — including the United States — Canadians have spent the last several years dealing with pandemic restrictions, a rise in immigration, and a housing affordability crisis (among much, much else). And like many other countries, that’s showing up in a host of ways: Trust in institutions like the government and media is down. Sentiment on immigration is becoming more negative. “Well, first of all, it’s a global trend,” Trudeau told Sean Rameswaram in an exclusive interview on Today, Explained. “In every democracy, we’re seeing a rise of populists with easy answers that don’t necessarily hold up to any expert scrutiny. But a big part of populism is condemning and ignoring experts and expertise. So it sort of feeds on itself.” As Trudeau points out, Canada is not alone. But our northern neighbor’s struggle is notable because the country has long been seen as resistant to the kind of anti-immigrant, anti-establishment rhetoric sweeping the globe in recent years — in part because multiculturalism is enshrined in federal law. It goes back to the 1960s, when French Canadian nationalist groups started to gain power in Quebec. They called for the province’s independence from Canada proper. The federal government, led then by nepo daddy Pierre Trudeau, stepped in. Rather than validating one cultural identity over the other, the elder Trudeau’s government established a national policy of bilingualism, requiring all federal institutions to provide services in both English and French. (This is why — if you ever watch Canadian parliamentary proceedings, as I did for this story — politicians are constantly flipping back and forth between the two languages.) Canada also adopted a formal multiculturalism policy in 1971, affirming Canadians’ multicultural heritage. The multiculturalism policy has undergone both challenge and expansion in the half-century since its introduction. But Pierre Trudeau’s decision to root Canadian identity in diversity has had lasting impacts: Canadians have historically been much more open to immigration — despite having a greater proportion of immigrants in their population — than their other Western counterparts. But in more recent years, that’s begun to change rapidly as large numbers of immigrants have entered the country amid a housing affordability crisis. An Environics Institute survey showed that in 2023, 44 percent of Canadians felt there was too much immigration — an increase from 27 percent the year before. That’s where Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre comes in. Known as a “soft” populist, he’s started calling on Canada to cut immigration levels (so far, without demonizing immigrants, as we’ve seen from his populist counterparts elsewhere in the West). That said, he looks like a traditional populist in a lot of other ways: Poilievre embraced Canada’s 2022 Freedom Convoy protests, opposed vaccine and mask requirements, voted against marriage equality, has proposed defunding the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, wants schools to leave LGBTQ issues to parents, and has talked about repealing a litany of government regulations — from the country’s carbon tax to internet regulations. Basically, he’s against any “gatekeepers” to Canadians’ “freedom.” And that message? It seems to be resonating with voters, including young ones. The plan: Fight populism with policy Enter: Trudeau’s half-trillion-Canadian-dollar plan for “generational fairness,” also known as the “Gen Z budget” for its focus on younger generations feeling the economic squeeze most acutely. “People are facing an anxiety that the economy doesn’t work for them anymore. That the deck is stacked against young people in a way that is different from previous generations,” Trudeau said on Today, Explained. “And that’s a problem because it leads to a sense of uncertainty about the future and a sense of, ‘Okay, the institutions and society and government can’t actually help.’ And that sort of feeds into populism.” To demonstrate that government can work for young people, Trudeau has allocated C$6 billion to help Canadian provinces build new housing — if they agree to certain conditions, like building denser neighborhoods and more climate-friendly housing. It also includes provisions to expand child care, provide school lunches, and invest in the Canadian AI sector. To pay for it, the country plans to increase capital gains taxes on the wealthiest Canadians — C$19 billion over the next five years. “I know there will be many voices raised in protest. No one likes paying more tax, even — or perhaps particularly — those who can afford it the most,” Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland said. “But before they complain too bitterly, I would like Canada’s 1 percent — Canada’s 0.1 percent — to consider this: What kind of Canada do you want to live in?” Though the Conservatives will oppose the plan, it’s likely to pass. Arlyn McAdorey/Bloomberg via Getty Images Trudeau speaks in April about the government’s proposal to provide low-cost leases of public land to developers and push factory construction of homes as part of a “historic” plan to alleviate Canada’s housing crisis. Can it work? The bet Trudeau is making is this: The best counterpoint to anti-establishment rhetoric is … using the establishment to make people’s lives better. “The biggest difference between me and the Conservatives right now is: They don’t think government has a role to play in solving for these problems,” Trudeau told Today, Explained. “I think government can’t solve everything, nor should it try. But it can make sure that if the system isn’t working for young people, that we rebalance the system. Market forces are not going to do that.” A key challenge will be demonstrating progress by the time elections roll around. Housing and real estate experts generally cheered the announcement — but noted that it might be years before people on the ground see any real change. Elections, on the other hand, aren’t yet scheduled but have to happen by October 2025 (parliamentary systems, man). In the meantime, Conservatives are still ahead in the polls, though there’s some evidence that their lead is starting to diminish after the Liberals spent a month previewing their budget. If he’s successful, Trudeau argues that his strategy could be a blueprint for other nations confronting similar trends — particularly during an election year in which we expect populist rhetoric to play a significant role. “There’s no question that democracies remain a lot more advantageous to human beings than any other structures, but it’s not as obvious as it used to be,” Trudeau told Today, Explained. “We have to remember: Democracies didn’t happen by accident, and they don’t continue without effort.” This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions. Correction, April 23, 1:25 pm ET: This story, originally published April 23, misstated the name of Canada’s public broadcaster. The correct name is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Preview: Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty Images American conservatives are cozying up to British feminists who argue that the sexual revolution has hurt women. In February, America’s most prominent conservative activist declared his opposition to having sex for fun. In a post on X, the “anti-woke” crusader Christopher Rufo wrote, “‘Recreational sex’ is a large part of the reason we have so many single-mother households, which drives poverty, crime, and dysfunction. The point of sex is to create children—this is natural, normal, and good.” Much gawking at Rufo’s grimly utilitarian take on sex ensued. Yet the firestorm largely ignored the woman whose anti-birth-control tirade had ignited it. Rufo’s remarks were sparked by a video of a 2023 Heritage Foundation panel. In that clip, a bespectacled British woman details the supposed ravages of both oral contraception and the sexual culture that it birthed. She claims that the normalization of birth control has condemned women to higher rates of mental illness while offering them little in recompense beyond the freedom to endure “loveless and sometimes extremely degrading” sex. Therefore, she continues, the world needs “a feminist movement” that is “against the Pill” and for “returning the consequentiality to sex.” That woman, the writer Mary Harrington, is an unlikely spokesperson for fundamentalist Christian morality. A onetime leftist, Harrington remains a fierce critic of free-market economics and an opponent of abortion bans. Yet her 2023 book, Feminism Against Progress, won her an avid following among American social conservatives, receiving adulatory notices in the Federalist and the National Review and earning her bylines at the conservative Catholic journal First Things. Harrington’s appeal to these institutions isn’t hard to discern. She is a proponent of “reactionary feminism,” an ideology that shares Christian conservatism’s hostility toward permissive sex norms, birth control, rights for transgender people, and mainstream feminism. But instead of indicting social liberalism on theological grounds, Harrington does so on entirely secular and avowedly feminist ones. Her complaint with birth control is threefold: First, Harrington argues that the Pill undermined sexual norms that had previously protected women from the hazards of single motherhood and exploitation. Second, she insists that the advent of oral contraception led the feminist movement to embrace an excessively individualistic vision of women’s liberation. Before birth control, according to Harrington, the movement aimed to challenge the values of capitalism, insisting that familial caregiving was socially indispensable even if it had no market price. But once they gained control over their fertility, feminists no longer felt compelled to defend the value of caregiving. Their critique of capitalism ceased to be that it valued what was profitable over what was socially valuable and became that it merely didn’t pay women equal wages. Third, by dramatically reducing women’s vulnerability to unplanned pregnancy, the Pill led feminists to indulge in the fantasy that there were no innate differences between the sexes that couldn’t be transcended through social reform and biotechnology. In sum, for Harrington, feminism is now defined by the quixotic pursuit of women’s freedom from all social and biological constraints. And this anti-social, utopian quest has served most women poorly, condemning them to a sexually exploitative dating market, alienating them from their own bodies, leaving them vulnerable to the predations of Big Biotech, and exacerbating their caregiving burdens by promoting social atomization and male irresponsibility. Harrington is not alone in staking out this ideological turf. Louise Perry, a fellow British feminist, championed a similar vision in her 2022 book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Like Harrington, Perry evinces opposition to free markets and blanket bans on abortion yet has nonetheless received a warm welcome from US conservatives. The American Christian right’s enthusiasm for sex-negative British feminists may reflect the conservative movement’s present challenges. As the reaction to Rufo’s condemnation of “recreational sex” demonstrated, the moral intuitions of religious conservatives have become deeply alien to an increasingly secular American public. With religiosity and church attendance in sharp decline, conservatives need nonscriptural arguments for traditional social mores. Reactionary feminism offers them precisely this. And the ideology appears to have some potential appeal among young women alienated by online dating, pornography, and birth control’s side effects. In recent months, Harrington-esque diatribes against contraception, online dating, and porn have trended on TikTok, a social media platform dominated by Gen Z. Reactionary feminism therefore warrants liberals’ attention — and our critique. Harrington and Perry are both strong writers whose work speaks to some genuinely problematic aspects of sexual modernity. But there are (at least) three broad problems with their worldview. First, where reactionary feminism speaks to genuine social problems, it offers few compelling answers for addressing them. Second, contrary to Harrington’s theorizing, there is no sharp trade-off between increasing women’s individual freedom and meeting society’s caregiving needs. Finally, this brand of feminism is reactionary in the pejorative sense: Many of Harrington’s and Perry’s complaints with sexual modernity are rooted less in careful reasoning than in a reflexive skepticism of change. Why reactionary feminists want you to have less casual sex Reactionary feminism is built atop one fundamental premise: There are unalterable differences between the sexes, and mainstream feminism has ignored them at women’s expense. This idea is at the core of Harrington’s indictment of casual sex. In her telling, the Pill may have reduced women’s susceptibility to pregnancy, but it did not erase the psychological predispositions that males and females inherited from millennia of evolution. By downplaying or denying the persistence of these differences, Harrington argues, feminists abetted the emergence of sexual norms that harm women and benefit predatory men. (Her analysis of modern sexual relations is focused exclusively on straight, cisgender relationships. Beyond her opposition to trans rights, she has little to say about the sexual revolution’s implications for LGBTQ people). Here, Harrington’s analysis converges with that of Louise Perry. In The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Perry notes that psychologists have consistently found large sex-based differences in “sociosexuality” — a measure of an individual’s interest in sexual variety and adventure. In every culture psychologists have studied, men tend to express a higher degree of interest in having lots of commitment-free sex than women do. This does not mean that every man is more interested in sexual variety than every woman. But in the aggregate, Perry argues, the divergence is clear. She further insists that these patterns are rooted in evolutionary biology. Males can pass on their genes merely by orgasming inside a female, while women cannot reproduce without enduring an extensive pregnancy and risky labor. This gives women a greater incentive to be selective in their choice of partners and men a greater interest in sowing their wild oats. Over millennia, she says, evolution translated these disparate incentives into distinct psychological tendencies. Alas, in Perry’s view, modern sexual culture ignores these distinctions. According to her, most women prefer a committed relationship to casual hookups. But the existence of oral contraception and legal abortion — combined with feminism’s insistence on male and female interchangeability — has left them without an excuse for withholding sex until commitment is offered. More crucially, such women face a collective action problem: Perry argues that in a culture where casual sex is normative, refusing to placate male desire puts a woman at a competitive disadvantage in the race for desirable men. Online dating exacerbates these problems. According to Harrington, natural selection has also bequeathed to modern women a preference for men with high social status (in addition to various coveted physical traits). Combine that predisposition with men’s taste for sexual variety and a norm of casual sex, and you end up with a highly dysfunctional dating market. Harrington and Perry note that on the dating app Hinge, 10 percent of men receive 58 percent of all women’s “likes.” From this, they extrapolate that predatory high-status men are each stringing along several women at a time, exploiting them for degrading and unfulfilling sex (only 10 percent of women orgasm in first-time hookups) before assembling new harems. Meanwhile, legions of mediocre men go sexless and mutate into misogynistic incels. Mutual hostility between the sexes festers. In the reactionary feminist narrative, all of this translates into fewer marriages, a collapsing birth rate, and, within Gen Z, a widespread, porn-addled celibacy. At the same time, partly because oral contraception is not always effective (especially when imperfectly used), the normalization of casual sex has yielded an increase in single motherhood. And although such mothers should not be stigmatized, Harrington and Perry argue, it’s nevertheless true that both mothers and children tend to fare better with a partner in the picture. Thus, reactionary feminists validate the Christian right’s deep-seated conviction that birth control is lamentable and that women have suffered from the decline of traditional sexual morality. And this is far from the only place where heterodox British feminists and fundamentalist American theocrats see eye to eye. As one might expect, reactionary feminists also share the right’s opposition to pornography, sex work, BDSM, and health care and inclusion for trans people. Even on reproductive rights, Harrington and Perry aid the conservative project. Although both oppose the legal prohibition of abortion, they also maintain that modern feminism favors personal autonomy over social responsibility to a pathological extent and see the normalization of abortion as a case in point. Harrington writes that “as long as we uphold women’s right to end a pregnancy, we conclusively favour the Hobbesian vision of selfhood over one that makes room for dependency and care.” Perry has suggested that the trivialization of abortion puts us on a slippery slope to normalizing a sexual culture on par with ancient Rome, up to and including infanticide. Modern sexual culture does fail some women Reactionary feminists get a few things right. Harrington and Perry aren’t entirely wrong about human sexual psychology, and they speak to some genuine flaws in contemporary gender relations. But their inattention to public policy and their warped political priorities leave them ill equipped to provide solutions to the real problems they identify. That cis men have, on average, a greater appetite for casual sex than cis women has been exhaustively documented. As the evolutionary psychologists David Michael Buss and David P. Schmitt noted in a 2011 journal article, a long list of studies have found that men are more likely than women to 1) seek one-night stands, 2) consent to sex with a stranger, 3) agree to have sex with a partner after knowing them for only a brief period of time, and 4) express positive attitudes about casual sex, among myriad other behaviors indicative of high sociosexuality. A large-scale survey of 52 different nations — spread across six different continents — found that in every single culture surveyed, male respondents expressed more interest in sexual variety than female respondents. It is theoretically possible that these disparities are entirely the product of social conditioning. But their presence across cultures lends credence to the notion that biology plays some role. Evolutionary psychology can be put to ill use. But Harrington and Perry are certainly right that we are all products of evolution, and it’s doubtlessly true that ejaculating requires orders of magnitude less time and energy than carrying a pregnancy to term. Given the centrality of sex to natural selection, it would be surprising if this fundamental asymmetry between what it takes for a cis man to pass on his genes and what it takes for a cis woman to do so left no imprint whatsoever on their respective average predispositions. It does not follow, however, that the collapse of taboos against casual sex has been a disaster for women. Men may be more likely to desire casual sex than women. But plenty of women appreciate the prerogative to have a little fun (or, at least, to know whether they have sexual chemistry with a person before marrying them). This said, there is a little evidence to back up the reactionary feminist claim that modern dating is serving men better than women, if only slightly. In a 2022 Pew Research survey, 57 percent of men who used online dating platforms reported primarily positive experiences with the apps, while 48 percent of women did. Men were also more than twice as likely as women to say that they were using online dating to “have casual sex,” with 31 percent of the former saying it was a “major reason” they used the apps and only 13 percent of the latter said the same. But this data paints a far less dystopian portrait of modern dating than reactionary feminists do: Nearly half of women using online dating have had largely positive experiences, and a plurality of male daters (42 percent) are looking for a committed relationship, according to the Pew survey. Nevertheless, it appears to be true that some number of heterosexual women are having a rough time on the dating market, partly because their male dates tend to be more interested in commitment-free hookups than they are. Some of reactionary feminists’ other complaints with sexual modernity are more indisputably well-founded. There is no question that the percentage of children growing up in single-parent households has increased in the US since the arrival of the sexual revolution, rising from 9 percent in the 1960s to 23 percent in 2019. It is also clear that the overwhelming majority of single parents are women, that children of married parents tend to fare better than those of single parents (all else equal), and that single mothers suffer exceptionally high rates of poverty. Reactionary feminists have few answers for what we should do about this But reactionary feminists offer little insight into what, precisely, we should do about any of this. Harrington and Perry both recognize that there is no going back to a world before the Pill (and grudgingly acknowledge that doing so would have significant downsides, in any case). In their prescriptive content, both Feminism Against Progress and The Case Against the Sexual Revolution more closely resemble self-help guides than political manifestos. Harrington’s book encourages women to reclaim their “sexual self-discipline” by going off birth control, thereby ensuring that they only go to bed with men whom they trust enough to wear a condom or pull out. Perry’s book, meanwhile, concludes with a chapter titled “Listen to Your Mother,” in which she advises young women to (among other things) love themselves, trust their moral intuitions, and hold off on having sex with a new boyfriend “for at least a few months” to discover whether he’s serious about them. It’s plausible that some young women will find this advice helpful. But given that — in reactionary feminists’ own telling — so-called hookup culture is a downstream consequence of reproductive technology, it is unclear how Perry’s call for chastity is supposed to produce social change. Meanwhile, if one’s aim is to reduce single motherhood, encouraging women to abandon the Pill in favor of “cycle tracking” and the pull-out method for pregnancy prevention seems unwise. Perry’s and Harrington’s books both evince disdain for free-market economics. And in an email to Vox, Harrington described American social policy as “frankly barbarous” in its failure to provide universal access to “perinatal healthcare or federally mandated maternity leave.” And yet if reactionary feminists support economic reforms that would ease the poverty of single mothers and support family formation, they devote little time or space to advocating for such measures. Indeed, the only political activity that Feminism Against Progress endorses at length is the struggle against trans rights. Rather than trying to elect parties that support expansions of family-centric social welfare policies, Harrington implores reactionary feminists to focus on capturing NGOs and educational institutions so as to push back against gender-neutral restrooms and policies on the use of trans students’ correct pronouns in schools. This seems like a difficult set of priorities to justify, even if one were to accept all of Harrington’s own trans-exclusionary premises. Whatever one’s opinion on sex-segregated spaces or public schools’ pronoun policies, it seems obvious that these measures have less material impact on the welfare of cis women writ large than, say, whether the state guarantees them enough income to take maternity leave or keep their children out of poverty. Giving women control over their fertility makes it easier to care for our society’s vulnerable, not harder Harrington’s concern that mainstream feminism has grown excessively individualistic — and inadequately attuned to the interests of working-class women — is not entirely unfounded. Certainly, upper-middle-class women have dominated the feminist movement since its inception. And, at least in the United States, that movement has had greater success in dismantling barriers to women’s full participation in market commerce than in fundamentally remaking economic institutions. Nevertheless, the belief that there is a sharp trade-off between increasing women’s individual autonomy and economic agency on the one hand and meeting our society’s collective needs for caregiving on the other is mistaken. Women’s rising labor-force participation may have entailed a reduction in the number of hours that mothers spent with their own small children or older relatives. Yet the half century since the sexual revolution has also witnessed declines in poverty among both children and older adults. In material terms, the United States is taking much better care of its most vulnerable residents today than it did in the mid-20th century. We have achieved this by funding social welfare programs that transfer income from the working-age population to those who are older, younger, and poorer. And women’s full participation in the economy makes it easier to fund such programs. If our economies could not draw on the productive capacities of one-half of all adults, there would be much less income to redistribute. Of course, children need more from their caregivers than material resources. And Harrington is doubtlessly correct when she writes that many professional-class women can only escape the burdens of domesticity by “outsourcing chores” and child care to a mostly female “servant class.” She is also surely right that some nannies and child care workers would prefer to be at home with their own children if they were not economically compelled to nurture someone else’s instead. But her book leaves the upshot of this observation unclear. By email, she clarified that she would like all public child care programs to include a cash benefit for stay-at-home parents. This is a reasonable idea. But it is also one with a long pedigree in progressive feminism — left-wing feminists have been demanding “wages for housework” since the 1970s. Finally, Harrington and Perry’s notion that the push for legal abortion epitomizes mainstream feminism’s prioritization of personal freedom over obligation to others is highly tendentious. Their argument only holds if one accepts the metaphysical premise that a fetus is a person; if one rejects that notion, then getting an abortion can actually be an affirmation of one’s sense of obligation to other people. After all, the typical person having an abortion is already a parent, and parents often choose to terminate a pregnancy out of a desire to concentrate more energy and resources on their existing children. Reactionary feminism’s case against biotechnology and BDSM is rooted in superstition Harrington casts herself as a clear-eyed realist who learned to see through her progressive milieu’s unthinking dogmas. Ultimately, though, like her sympathizers on the Christian right, she tends to substitute mere intuition (if not superstition) for facts or reasoned argument. This habit is best exemplified by her indictments of BDSM and biotechnology. Harrington sees the rise of “kink” as a scourge, and one inextricable from the advent of contraception. She posits that people have gravitated toward BDSM as a way of compensating for the drab safety of protected sex, writing that eliminating the risk of pregnancy “takes much of the dark, dangerous and profoundly intimate joy out of sex” and that men and women seek to recapture that “darkness and danger” through “depraved fetishes and sexual violence.” She provides approximately zero evidence for this theory. And although I am extremely ill-positioned to speak to the unconscious motivations of masochistic women on hormonal birth control, it seems doubtful to me that the majority turn to BDSM in an attempt to recapture the lost “thrill” of worrying mid-coitus that a condom just broke. Meanwhile, Harrington’s hostility toward both contraception and gender-affirming medicine is rooted partly in a superstitious aversion to biotechnology. Harrington says that she felt alienated from her female body as an adolescent but came to find comfort and joy in it later in life. She is therefore understandably concerned that young women going through a similar period of pubescent angst today might be misdirected toward unnecessary medical treatments with significant side effects. But her concerns about trans-inclusive health care are scarcely confined to questions of pediatric gender medicine’s diagnostic protocols or the limitations of existing research on patient outcomes. Rather, she’s skeptical of all attempts to bring our bodies into closer alignment with our conscious needs and desires. As she put the point to me, “The significance of the contraceptive revolution, as I see it, is that it breaks with millennia of medical tradition in seeking not to fix something that’s working abnormally, in the name of health, but to break something that’s working normally (female fertility) in the name of individual freedom.” Harrington regards the latter endeavor as inherently hubristic and liable to be corrupted by amoral profit seeking. Yet her book also demonizes medical innovations aimed at preventing a patient’s imminent death. In Feminism Against Progress, she cites attempts to develop lab-grown organs — a line of research aimed at saving the lives of very ill people — as one of the nightmarish consequences of the contraceptive revolution. Her book’s only actual argument against the practice, however, is that it is “unnatural.” But nature is not our friend. Evolution didn’t shape our bodies and brains with an eye to our welfare as conscious beings or our morality as social ones. Rather, it shaped us for survival and reproduction under a set of ecological and social conditions that our species long ago outgrew. For this reason, the “normal” functioning of our bodies can be quite antithetical to our well-being. “Natural” bodily processes leave many of us susceptible to clinical depression, cancer, and gender dysphoria. For the bulk of our species’ history, meanwhile, the natural functioning of human fertility condemned many human communities to cyclical famines as population growth outpaced gains in economic productivity. Of course, we should have humility when messing with biological systems that we do not fully understand, and novel interventions that radically disrupt bodily processes should be subjected to clinical scrutiny. But the idea that contraception and gender-affirming care are inherently bad because they “break” our “natural biology” — and open the door to further enhancements of the human body — is a quasi-religious argument, not a rational one. If we should not reflexively venerate nature, the same is true of the sexual revolution. Any social transformation is liable to have some negative consequences. Reactionary feminists aren’t wrong to ask pointed questions about how well contemporary sex norms are serving women. But they’re wrong to provide regressive and misleading answers. Focusing one’s public commentary on making a contrarian case for traditional sexual morality — and against trans rights — is a sound way of carving out a niche in a crowded culture war discourse and earning the patronage of American conservatives. But it is a poor approach to actually improving women’s lives.

Preview: A new study found that empathy among young Americans is rebounding after having reached worrying lows a decade ago. | Getty Images/iStockphoto A decade ago, research showed a troubling dip in empathy. A new study provides more hope. Think back to the United States as it was a year ago, a decade ago, a generation ago. Is the US a more caring or less caring nation now than it was back then? If you think Americans have lost their compassion, the data would be on your side — until recently. Since the late 1970s, psychologists have measured empathy by asking millions of people how much they agreed with statements such as “I feel tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.” In 2011, a landmark study led by researcher Sara Konrath examined the trends in those surveys. The analysis revealed that American empathy had plummeted: The average US college student in 2009 reported feeling less empathic than 75 percent of students three decades earlier. The study launched a thousand think pieces agonizing over what had gone wrong. There were plenty of theories: We were too lonely to care about each other, or too stressed, or too siloed, or too tech-addled. Younger generations took the most fire, labeled as too self-obsessed and too hyper-online to connect. Most of all, the research provided new fuel for old fears that American morality was on the decline. As Jennifer Rubin wrote for the Washington Post, “The empathy decline has manifested itself in an erosion of civility, decency and compassion in our society and our politics.” But the decline also revealed something else: Empathy is not a fixed trait. It’s easy to assume that each of us is born with a given level of care, and stuck there for life. But that’s not true; our experiences can grow or shrink our empathy. That’s true of individuals’ lives and across generations. Sara Konrath emphasized this back in 2011, telling me, “The fact that empathy is declining means that there’s more fluidity to it than previously thought. It means that empathy can change. It can go up.” By now, Konrath’s optimism might seem quaint. The news bludgeons us with stories of callousness and cruelty. If empathy indeed changes, these examples encourage us to think it’s taking a one-way trip downward. And yet, Konrath’s hopes from over a decade ago have turned out to be prescient. A few months ago, she and her colleagues published an update to their work: They found that empathy among young Americans is rebounding, reaching levels indistinguishable from the highs of the 1970s. Why aren’t we celebrating an increase in compassion? As with the decline, we might grasp for explanations for this rise. One possibility is collective suffering. Since the empathic lows of 2009, we have faced the Great Recession and a once-a-century pandemic. For all their horrors, hard times can bring people together. In her beautiful book, A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit chronicles disasters including San Francisco’s 1906 and 1989 earthquakes, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11. In the wake of these catastrophes, kindness ticked up, strangers stepping over lines of race and class to help one another. More recently, researchers chronicled a “pandemic of kindness,” as donations to charity and volunteering increased in the face of COVID-19. Still, history is not a science experiment, and it’s impossible to know exactly why American empathy has risen, just like we can’t isolate with certainty why it fell. But we might ask another question: Will people react to this good news as strongly as they did to the bad news that preceded it? Human beings pay more attention to negative news compared to positive events. This makes evolutionary sense: It’s safe to ignore a sunset, but not a tsunami. But a bias toward badness can also give us the wrong idea about our world and the people in it. We judge people more readily based on the worst things they’ve done, rather than their best, and routinely underestimate how kind, caring, and open-minded others are. Humans are prone to seeing the worst side of each other, and to imagine things are getting worse, even when they’re not. Researchers recently amassed surveys in which nearly 600,000 people were asked how humanity in the modern era compared to years past. Across dozens of countries and several decades, people agreed: Human beings were less honest, kind, and moral than they had been before. This decline is almost certainly an illusion. In other surveys, people reported on kindness and morality as they actually experience it — for instance, how they were treated by strangers, coworkers, and friends. Answers to these questions remained steady over the years. And across the decades, even as people complained about society’s collapsing morals, some major trends like decreases in violent crime pointed in the opposite direction. Our biased minds tempt us to see the worst in people. The empathy decline reported 13 years ago fit that narrative and went viral. The comeback of American compassion, I worry, might instead fly under the radar. Konrath tells me that reporters still regularly contact her about her 2011 paper on empathy decline. She tells each one about the more optimistic update on this work, yet articles on this new work appear to be much scarcer than ones about the gloomier, earlier science. At least some of this is up to us. We can keep paying attention to callousness, cruelty, and immorality. There’s certainly plenty of it to occupy us. But we can also balance that perspective by looking for kindness and care in the people around us. The data is clear: There’s plenty of that, too.

Preview: House Speaker Mike Johnson talks with members of the media following passage of a series of foreign aid bills at the Capitol on April 20, in Washington, DC. | Nathan Howard/Getty Images It heads to the Senate this week, and could soon be law. After months of uncertainty, the House has greenlit a $95 billion package with substantial aid for Ukraine, as well as funds for Israel and US allies in the Indo-Pacific region. It now heads to the Senate, which is expected to pass it later this week. This move is one of the most significant bills to pass the House in months, and follows weeks of intense GOP infighting about the wisdom of sending more money to Ukraine as its war with Russia enters its third year. Ukraine is heavily dependent on US aid, and its leaders have argued that American money will be critical to break the impasse the country is in amid tenacious Russian attacks. The bill is also a strong signal of support for Israel as global and domestic outcry has grown regarding the country’s attacks in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis there. And, it contains two elements meant to target China’s power: military funding for Asian allies — in support of Taiwan — as well as a measure banning TikTok in the US if the app’s China-based owner, ByteDance, does not divest it. All four measures advanced with the help of significant Democratic support, since many Republicans have maintained vocal opposition to more Ukraine funding. The votes for the package also point to a new reality: Due to fracturing in the GOP conference, and the party’s narrow majority, House Speaker Mike Johnson has increasingly had to seek help from Democrats, risking threats to his job in the process. What’s in this package In total, the package contains four bills meant to assist key allies with their military efforts, while also deterring China and Russia. Ukraine aid: The bulk of this aid package — $61 billion — is dedicated to helping Ukraine counter Russia’s ongoing military offensive. These funds include $14 billion aimed at replenishing Ukraine’s weapons and ammunition, $13 billion to restock US military supplies that have previously been sent over, and $9 billion in forgivable loans for other rebuilding efforts, including infrastructure. This measure passed 311-112, with only Republicans voting against it, and provides long awaited funds to Ukraine as Russia has made territorial gains. This bill prompted backlash from far-right Republicans, who argue these funds would be better spent domestically. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has threatened to call for Johnson’s removal as a result of this vote. Israel aid: There’s $26 billion in the measure dedicated to aid related to the Israel-Gaza conflict, including $13 billion to bolster Israel’s military capabilities and US stockpiles that have been depleted due to material transfers, and $9 billion for humanitarian aid for Gaza and other places around the world. This measure passed 366-58, and signals that the US will continue to boost Israel’s military resources despite the Biden administration’s occasional criticism of the country’s bombings of Gaza. More than 30 progressive Democrats opposed this bill and a handful of far-right Republicans did the same. Progressives have been vocal about the need for an immediate ceasefire and have spoken out against sending more money to arm Israel. Aid to Indo-Pacific allies: About $8 billion in the aid package is focused on helping US allies in the Indo-Pacific region boost their military capabilities and better support Taiwan. That includes roughly $6 billion for deterrence, which includes building out stronger submarine infrastructure in the region. This measure passed 385-34 and comes as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has put a new spotlight on Taiwan and the question of whether the Chinese government would one day invade it. Of the three aid bills, this one received the most bipartisan support, with just roughly three dozen Republicans voting against it. REPO Act and sanctions: A fourth bill, which contains provisions of the REPO Act, would allow the US to transfer seized Russian assets to Ukraine, which it could use for reconstruction. It also imposes harsher sanctions on Russia, Iran, and China. TikTok bill: A TikTok “ban” is also included in this fourth bill. That measure requires ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to sell the app within nine months or risk getting banned from operations in the US. This fourth bill passed 360-58 and had about 30 progressives and 20 far-right Republicans opposed. The REPO Act and TikTok measures were an attempt to add some concessions for Republicans reluctant to back Ukraine aid. Why this is such a big deal Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy enthusiastically welcomed the House’s actions, calling them “vital” and claiming they will save “thousands and thousands of lives.” Military leaders and foreign policy experts have emphasized that US aid to Ukraine has been central to its ability to hold off Russia and will be critical if Ukraine is to counter a potential summer offensive. Since the war began, the US has sent Ukraine roughly $111 billion in aid. In recent months, Ukraine has been running low on ammunition and materiel needed for its air defenses, as Russia has made more inroads. “Make no mistake: without US aid, Ukraine is likely to lose the war,” Max Boot, a military historian and fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has written. The Ukraine bill was a sharp reminder of the divides in the Republican Party, with more moderate and classically conservative members supporting aid and some far-right members calling for a more isolationist stance. Because of his support of Ukraine aid, and caucus rules allowing any member to trigger ouster proceedings, Johnson is now in a more precarious position. After the House returns from its current recess, he could face additional calls to vacate from those on the right, though some Democrats have signaled that they could save him. Should Johnson lose his gavel, the House would, once again, have to navigate the chaos of another speaker’s race as it did last year. The aid to Israel is notable in that the Democratic-led White House has offered critiques of the country’s offensive while simultaneously encouraging funding for it. The money comes as more than 34,000 people have been killed in Gaza and as experts warn of famine and a deepening humanitarian crisis in the region. The humanitarian crisis, as well as some members’ backing for a ceasefire, led to the measure being sharply debated among Democrats. Overall, Israel aid remains an enduring flash point for Democrats, with progressives calling out the Biden administration’s ongoing willingness to provide this support without strings attached. “To give Netanyahu more offensive weapons at this stage, I believe, is to condone the destruction of Gaza that we’ve seen in the last six months. And it’s also a green light for an invasion of Rafah,” Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT), a Jewish lawmaker who has called for a ceasefire, told the New York Times last week. Many of the issues raised by this package are enduring ones. Ukraine will need more support from the US down the line as Russia maintains its attacks, and Republican divides are expected to persist. It’s possible Israel could seek more funding too, as its war continues, and the bill doesn’t resolve the tensions inherent in the US’s current stance toward the country. And the TikTok measure isn’t necessarily the end of the dispute over what to do about the app. As Vox’s Nicole Narea has explained, TikTok intends to challenge the policy in court on the grounds that it threatens people’s free speech.

Preview: Pickup trucks and resilient consumer spending powered GM’s 24% increase in quarterly profit, but China remains a trouble spot.

Preview: Shares of Chinese bubble tea maker Sichuan Baicha Baidao Industrial slumped on lukewarm demand and comes ahead of planned listings by tea rivals Mixue Ice Cream & Tea and Guming.

Preview: Primark owner AB Foods raised its dividend and said it expects a significant rise in full-year profit after its budget retailer delivered robust margins and higher earnings.

Preview: JD Sports is buying Hibbett in a deal that values the American retailer at $1.1 billion, doubling down on its push into the U.S. at a challenging time for the sports-retail market.

Preview: Novartis lifted its full-year guidance after first-quarter profit and sales rose and beat consensus expectations, boosted by strong sales of key drugs.

Preview: Nidec Corp. reported a fourth-quarter net loss on restructuring expenses for its electric-vehicle traction motor business as severe competition disrupts the EV market in China.

Preview: DNB Bank’s first-quarter earnings beat forecasts, helped by a positive trend in the corporate market and a resilient Norwegian economy.

Preview: Renault confirmed its guidance for 2024 after its group revenue rose in the first quarter on higher sales, but revenue from its cars division fell slightly on unfavorable exchange rates.

Preview: Akzo Nobel reported a growth in revenue and adjusted earnings for the first quarter that exceeded expectations, with higher volumes helping its top line, and backed its outlook for the year.

Preview: Buyout firm Affinity Equity Partners’ has started the process to sell the 600-bed Island Hospital with the first bids expected mid-June.

Preview: Scores of Democrats, on the heels of a vote to pass a foreign aid package, cheered Speaker Mike Johnson -- a story in itself, dontcha think? -- and then celebrated their victory over Republicans by waving Ukraine flags madly in the air. Dems get so patriotic when it comes to other countries.

Preview: A brother of former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. is suing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for a $5 million "refund," accusing the church of misusing his mandatory tithing donations.

Preview: A Douglas C-54 Skymaster airplane carrying two people crashed into the Tanana River near Fairbanks on Tuesday and burst into flames, authorities said. No survivors have been found.

Preview: Joel C. Rosenberg, a best-selling author based in Jerusalem, says that attacks by Hamas and Iran have sparked a spiritual crisis for Israelis and Palestinians.

Preview: The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Chuch has suspended a priest who participated in services for the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Preview: Boeing said Wednesday that it lost $355 million on falling revenue in the first quarter, another sign of the crisis gripping the aircraft manufacturer as it faces increasing scrutiny over the safety of its planes and accusations of shoddy work from a growing number of whistleblowers.

Preview: Columbia University said early Wednesday that it was making "important progress" with pro-Palestinian student protesters who set up a tent encampment and that it was extending a deadline to clear out, yet standoffs remained tense on the Ivy League campus in upper Manhattan.

Preview: The government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying program because they're only looking to get the "bad" guys who are overseas. Don't believe it.

Preview: A top Russian military official arrested on suspicion of accepting a bribe was sent to pre-trial detention Wednesday after appearing before a court in central Moscow, court officials said in a statement.

Preview: Australian police arrested seven teenagers accused of following a violent extremist ideology in raids across Sydney on Wednesday, as a judge extended a ban on social media platform X sharing video of a knife attack on a bishop that started the criminal investigation.

Preview: With the November presidential election looming, Republicans are sadly struggling to win over female voters.

Preview: NEW YORK, NY — As pro-Palestine groups continued to gather on campus following the establishment of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, Columbia University protestors clarified that they only want "Death to America" after America is done paying their student loans for them.

Preview: TAMPA, FL-Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced Florida will now be launching all pro-Hamas protestors back to Gaza using a giant circus cannon.

Preview: REDDING, CA — In typical reverent fashion, Axl Mustaine led the congregation of LifeSource in the City Revivalpoint megachurch into a time of worship by reminding them to set aside all distractions even as the entire sanctuary was filled with an all-enveloping heavy fog and bombarded by intense laser lights.

Preview: CANAAN — Though villagers continued to notice mounting tensions and frequent disagreements between his sons, Abraham reports he's pretty sure this feud between Ishmael and Isaac will blow over soon.

Preview: NEW YORK, NY — According to sources, actor Alec Baldwin has already grown tired of everyone screaming "Look out!" and diving to the ground every time he reached for his cell phone.

Preview: MANHATTAN, NY — After anti-Jewish protests erupted on campus this week, Columbia officials say they are investigating whether calls to murder all Jews on campus violate the university's conduct policy.

Preview: MIDDLETOWN, OH—Shocked by the trove of mysterious compositions, household sources revealed Wednesday that a bench near the piano had been secretly hiding several books about music. “My God—ragtime classics, Disney favorites, A Charlie Brown Christmas—does anyone else know about this?” said one source, marveling over… Read more...

Preview: PARADISE, NV—Expressing bewilderment at the utter lack of spectacle during the jam band’s four-night run in the state-of-the-art entertainment arena, disappointed Phish fans confirmed this week that they were really expecting more from the Sphere’s visuals than a projection of the group’s website URL. “Given what a… Read more...

Preview: Researchers combing through a server based in North Korea found animation work for Amazon’s Invincible and Max’s Iyanu: Child of Wonder, including log files that suggest animators in China further outsourced the work to North Korea, unbeknownst to the American companies. What do you think? Read more...

Preview: VATICAN—Their excitement reaching a fever pitch as they awaited the supreme pontiff’s appearance for a papal audience, a wild St. Peter’s Basilica crowd grew increasingly fired up Wednesday as they tossed around inflatable crucifixes, Holy See sources confirmed. “Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy… Read more...

Preview: Nike came under fire recently after its women’s uniforms for the U.S. Olympic track and field team appeared far more needlessly revealing than the men’s. The Onion asked female athletes how they felt about the outfits, and this is what they said. Read more...

Preview: Being his sexual plaything doesn’t seem so bad once you realize you get to wake up to amazing views on his private island every day! Read more...

Preview: CAMBRIDGE, MA—Conceding that the ethical dilemmas raised by holding onto such an artifact had proven too great, Harvard University announced Wednesday the demolition of Houghton Library, an edifice covered in tanned human skin. “After careful consideration and consultation with experts in the field, the administration… Read more...

Preview: TAOS, NM—Returning the snacks to the cupboard a few bites before everything in his life would have fallen into place, local man Mario Rossi stopped one Oreo short of successfully eating away all of his problems, sources reported Wednesday. “Well, I’ve certainly had enough of those,” the 35-year-old said to himself,… Read more...

Preview: Taylor Swift’s latest album The Tortured Poets Department dropped Friday, immediately breaking streaming records on Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Music with 300 million streams in its first day. What do you think? Read more...

Preview: NEW YORK—Violating the judge’s order prohibiting the former president from killing his one-time fixer, Donald Trump was held in contempt of court Tuesday after stabbing Michael Cohen to death with a ballpoint pen. “Given the defendant’s willful and repeated refusal to comply with this court’s instruction not to shank… Read more...