Thursday, May 29, 2025
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
US official who promoted antisemitic conspiracies appointed Pentagon press secretary
Kingsley Wilson, a US Department of Defense official who has repeatedly echoed antisemitic rhetoric online, will serve as the Pentagon’s new press secretary, according to an announcement Friday.
Wilson was appointed in January as deputy press secretary at the Pentagon and faced backlash from the Anti-Defamation League as well as several senators for a history of promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories. Last year, Wilson tweeted a neo-Nazi talking point about Jewish lynching victim Leo Frank, whose murder spurred the ADL’s creation.
Wall Street Journal calls for GOP Senate ‘revolt’ in confronting Russia
The Wall Street Journal editorial board is calling for Senate Republicans to push President Trump to take a tougher stance on Russia as the president tries to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine.
“Mr. Trump may be the only person in the world still surprised by how Mr. Putin is behaving. The Russian is the same man he’s been for two decades, bent on reconstituting as much of the old Soviet empire as he can get away with,” the Journal wrote in an editorial published Monday.
The Journal argued Trump’s “naivete is helping Russia continue the killing as long as Mr. Putin wants.”
Calls to Free George Floyd’s Murderer Grow — Here’s Why It’s Unlikely to Happen
https://capitalbnews.org/pardon-derek-chauvin-demands/
Even if a pardon for his federal conviction was issued, it would not affect Chauvin’s murder case because the president has no jurisdiction over state criminal convictions. Trump does have the authority to pardon one of Chauvin’s convictions for violating the federal civil rights of Floyd.
“I think it behooves us to be prepared for it,” said Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, in response to the possibility of Chauvin’s presidential pardon and return to state custody. “With this presidency, it seems like that might be something they would do.”
Ben Shapiro, Elon Musk, and other MAGA conservatives have downplayed the role of race in Floyd’s death since, dismissing the video evidence and condemning the jury’s verdict.
Could Derek Chauvin be pardoned? Conservative commentator launches effort to petition Trump
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/06/us/derek-chauvin-pardon-ben-shapiro
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has publicly called for the president to pardon former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for federal crimes related to George Floyd’s 2020 death – drawing derision from the Minnesota attorney general who helped put Chauvin in prison but amplification from one of Trump’s most powerful advisers.
Smoking and Halacha
https://ohr.edu/this_week/insights_into_halacha/5717
Several years ago, his son, Rav Dovid Feinstein shlit”a, was quoted as saying that with the current knowledge of the harm smoking causes, it is pashut that had his father, Rav Moshe, still been alive today, he would have prohibited smoking outright, as his dispensation was only based on the ‘fact’ that smoking endangered only a small percentage of smokers.[26] Indeed, in a newly discovered and recently published teshuva of Rav Moshe’s, dated Elul 5732, he himself wrote that his famous lenient psak was based on the facts as they were known at the time.[27] He added that if the metzius would change and the percentages of those proven harmed by smoking would increase, then certainly it would be prohibited to smoke, at least the amount the doctors considered harmful to one’s health.
There are proven ways to keep protests peaceful. Trump is doing the opposite.
In the months of Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd in May, President Donald Trump has called on local and state officials to crack down as harshly as possible — a call he repeated at Tuesday’s presidential debate. But experts say that Trump’s rhetoric and actions risk inflaming tensions and escalating protests further, instead of keeping the peace.
But if the goal is ensuring that protesters can exercise their First Amendment rights while avoiding the outbreaks of violence seen in Portland; Kenosha, Wisconsin; and other cities in the US this past summer, the confrontational, dismissive approach that Trump and his allies are taking will very likely make things worse, experts say.
The point of protests is for people to feel heard. Demonstrators are marching in the streets because they want to say something, and they want others — the public, politicians, and so on — to see and hear those messages.
None of this justifies the damage and harm that riots and general violence do. (And the research suggests riots can backfire politically.) But if you want to stop people from rioting, you have to understand the issues that led people to riot in the first place.
Meanwhile, Trump is basically doing the opposite of what experts recommend to calm tense demonstrations.
Perhaps the escalation is intentional. Trump has repeatedly pointed to the protests and chaos in US cities in what seems like an attempt to distract from his failures as president, including his botched handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and the collapsing economy. His campaign for president appears to see the violence as beneficial, speaking to the need for Trump’s dog whistle of “law and order.”
Israel destroys Houthis' final aircraft in strike on Saana International Airport
https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-855713
The IDF on Wednesday attacked Yemen's Sanaa international airport in response to several Houthi ballistic missile attacks fired against Israel over the last week.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said that the air force had destroyed the last airplane that the Houthis still had to use at the airport - this after Israel had attacked the airport already multiple times in the past several months.
Further, Katz said that Israel had or was in the process of instituting an aerial and naval blockade on the Houthis to try to deter them from future attacks on the Jewish state.
Trump pardoned man 1 month after mother attended $1M per person fundraiser
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5319932-trump-pardon-paul-walczak/?tbref=hp
President Trump pardoned Paul Walczak, a man who had pleaded guilty to tax crimes, one month after his mother attended a major fundraiser for the president, according to a new report from The New York Times.
Fago later attended a Mar-a-Lago fundraising dinner with a $1 million cost per person, according to the Times, and Walczak was pardoned less than three weeks later.
Walczak had pleaded guilty back in November, shortly after Trump’s election, to not paying employment taxes and not filing his individual income tax returns, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). He’d withheld nearly $7.5 million in taxes from workers at his health care companies but did not pay those over to the IRS, the DOJ said, among other issues.