Happy Monday, and happy Easter to our readers who celebrated on Sunday! We hope it was a blessed and joyful day. 

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Tel Aviv and other cities across Israel Saturday evening, calling for both the return of the hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 and for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ouster. The weekend’s demonstrations—the largest since the war’s start—came ahead of a Monday deadline for the coalition government to agree to a new law regarding whether the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community should keep its exemption from the military draft, which has divided the secular and religious conservative members of Netanyahu’s coalition. Additional mass protests demanding the release of the abductees in Gaza began outside of the Knesset in Jerusalem on Sunday and are expected to continue through Wednesday night. Meanwhile, Netanyahu underwent surgery for a hernia Sunday evening, temporarily transferring his duties to Justice Minister Yariv Levin.
• Jeffrey Donaldson—the leader of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which supports remaining in the United Kingdom—resigned Friday after he was charged with “non-recent” sexual offenses. After a two-year boycott, Donaldson last month ushered the DUP into a power-sharing agreement with Sinn Féin—a party that favors becoming a part of Ireland—that may now be at risk with a DUP leadership change. 
• Friday marked one year in Russian prison for Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested in Yekaterinburg, Russia, last March while on a reporting trip and accused of espionage—charges he and his employer deny. The State Department has designated the journalist “wrongfully detained” and called for his immediate release. “To date, Russia has provided no evidence of wrongdoing for a simple reason: Evan did nothing wrong,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement on the anniversary of Gershkovich’s arrest. “Journalism is not a crime.” 
• Turkey’s largest opposition party swept municipal elections on Sunday, holding or taking control in the country’s five largest cities—including the capital, Ankara—and dealing a blow to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice Development Party (AKP). In Istanbul, the largest city in the country, residents reelected Mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu of the secular Republican People’s Party (CHP) to a second term, cementing Imamoğlu as a serious challenger to Erdoğan.
• The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation, the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, increased 2.5 percent year-over-year in February, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Friday—ticking up from a 2.4 percent annual rate one month earlier. After stripping out more volatile food and energy prices, core PCE increased at a 2.8 percent annual rate in February, stubbornly—though expectedly—above the Fed’s 2 percent target. 
• The Food and Drug Administration on Friday issued its highest level warning—short of pulling a product from the market and reserved for products that may cause “serious injury or death”—for an Impella heart pump connected to 49 deaths and more than 100 serious injuries since it was approved in 2008. The alert warned of the potential for injuries from the device—which is used to help support a patient’s heart—due to “operator handling” and requested that information about the risks be added to the device’s instruction manual. 
• Former President Donald Trump and several co-defendants on Friday asked an appeals court to review Judge Scott McAfee’s decision allowing Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to remain on the sprawling racketeering case against Trump and his co-defendants accused of attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. In a decision last month, McAfee ruled that Willis was allowed to remain in charge of the case despite having a romantic relationship with a special prosecutor she hired—provided the special prosecutor resigned, which he did. It’s not clear whether the appeals court will take up the defendants’ request. 

The Challenge of Bringing Americans Home 

On March 29, 2023, Evan Gershkovich arrived at a steakhouse in Yekaterinburg—a Russian city in the Ural Mountains—during a reporting trip, ready to meet with a source. Gershkovich didn’t know it would be the last thing he did as a free man: Russian security agents led him out of the restaurant. As of Friday, the Wall Street Journal reporter has been in detention at the notorious Lefortovo prison in Moscow for a year. 

Gershkovich—accused of espionage by Russian authorities—is one of dozens of Americans currently being detained wrongfully overseas, including several others held in Russia. The process of bringing people home often takes years, and when official channels stall, cases can hinge on the personal efforts of a handful of non-government actors working on behalf of the detainees’ loved ones.

Gershkovich has spent much of the past year in solitary confinement, with one hour each day spent outside in a small prison courtyard. The world has caught glimpses of him only in …

As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. Our full 1,763-word story on Evan Gershkovich’s detention and American hostages around the world is available in the members-only version of TMD.

Worth Your Time

• For National Review, Jack Butler meditated on running and Christianity. “The Gospel of John contains an amusing detail about Jesus’s Resurrection not found in the other gospels,” he wrote. “Informed by Mary Magdalene that His tomb was empty following His crucifixion, Peter and ‘the other disciple whom Jesus loved’ (John himself) rushed to the scene. ‘They both ran,’ John recounts, ‘but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first.’ Perhaps, like Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire, John believed that God made him for a purpose, but also made him fast, and wanted posterity to remember that. Regardless, neither he nor Peter could at first make sense of what they saw. ‘For they did not understand the scripture that he had to rise from the dead.’ Comprehension came later, when the resurrected Lord appeared to the disciples (sans Thomas). … Runners know well the strange mix of exhaustion and satisfaction that can come with a race’s end. Here it is not just a physical and emotional state but a spiritual one with an eternal reward. Christians spend our lives running toward that empty tomb—some faster than others, perhaps. To be a Christian is to believe that the risen Lord is gone from the tomb, but He is not gone from us. Rather, He is with us always, until the end of the age. And He is running alongside us—whatever our difficulties may be—every step of the way.”
• Last year, New York City set up an artificial intelligence chatbot—like the well-known ChatGPT—specifically designed to offer New Yorkers advice on starting and running businesses in the city. “The problem,” Colin Lecher reported for The Markup and The City, “is that the city’s chatbot is telling businesses to break the law. Five months after launch, it’s clear that while the bot appears authoritative, the information it provides on housing policy, worker rights, and rules for entrepreneurs is often incomplete and in worst-case scenarios ‘dangerously inaccurate,’ as one local housing policy expert told The Markup. … It’s hard to know whether anyone has acted on the false information, and the bot doesn’t return the same responses to queries every time. At one point, it told a Markup reporter that landlords did have to accept housing vouchers, but when ten separate Markup staffers asked the same question, the bot told all of them no, buildings did not have to accept housing vouchers. … New York City’s bot, according to the initial announcement, would let business owners ‘access trusted information from more than 2,000 NYC Business web pages,’ and explicitly says the page will act as a resource ‘on topics such as compliance with codes and regulations, available business incentives, and best practices to avoid violations and fines.’ There’s little reason for visitors to the chatbot page to distrust the service. … One small note on the page says that it ‘may occasionally produce incorrect, harmful or biased content,’ but there’s no way for an average user to know whether what they’re reading is false.” 

Presented Without Comment

Wall Street Journal: Harvard University Applications Fall by 5%

Also Presented Without Comment

New York Times: Police Raid Peruvian President’s Home, Looking for Rolex Watches

Also Also Presented Without Comment

The Hill: Lara Trump Drops Single, Teases Future Songs for ‘Liberal Media’ 

Toeing the Company Line

• Associate audio and video producer Victoria Holmes answered reader questions in March’s Monthly Mailbag. 
• In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics crew checked in on the Michigan Senate race, Jonah panned monocausal explanations and false binaries, Nick questioned the wisdom (🔒) of Trump’s critics skirting norms to keep him in check, and Chris argued (🔒) RFK Jr.’s vice presidential pick suggests a pivot to the left.
• On the podcasts: Jonah ruminated on monocausality on the latest episode of The Remnant, and Jamie discusses Israel’s tactics in Gaza with urban warfare expert John Spencer on the Dispatch Podcast. 
• On the site over the weekend: Michael Lucchese looked back at an Alfred Hitchcock film that warned against isolationism, Christopher J. Scalia explored how we make—and remake—the literary canon, and Jake Meador reflected on Easter’s rejection of the anxiety and urgency of our present moment. 
• On the site today: Nat Malkus dives deep into the lingering effects of COVID-19 on K-12 education and Bradley Vasoli argues against protectionism.