Happy Monday! Congratulations to Liesl Benecke, an Australian woman who secured a Guinness World Record earlier this month for the largest collection of Minions memorabilia, gathering more than 1,000 pieces of clothing, plush toys, and other items related to the little yellow villains from the Despicable Me series.
She’s in for a rude awakening, though, once Jonah Goldberg reads this and realizes he can submit his collection.
Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- At least 40 people were killed and more than 1,000 injured on Saturday at the Shahid Rajaee port in southern Iran, as a shipment of a chemical used to make missile propellant exploded. The shipment of sodium perchlorate, which reportedly had arrived in two ships from China earlier this year and was being stored in the port, was meant to help replenish Iran’s missile stocks, depleted from strikes on Israel. The exact cause of the explosion remained unclear.
- Eleven people died and dozens more were injured in Vancouver, Canada, on Saturday after a motorist drove a car into a street where people attended a Filipino cultural festival. Vancouver interim police chief Steve Rai said the driver, who is in police custody after being apprehended by bystanders, had a “significant history” of mental illness-induced interactions with police. Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, canceled campaign events ahead of Monday’s parliamentary election. Investigators have reportedly ruled out terrorism as a motive, according to Carney, who added, “we do not believe there is any active threat to Canadians.”
- A Russian drone attack across multiple regions of Ukraine early Sunday left at least four people dead and others wounded. The strikes from some 150 drones killed people in the Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions and came hours after Russia claimed to have reestablished control over areas in the Kursk region that Ukrainian forces took last summer. President Donald Trump told reporters Sunday evening he was “disappointed” in Russia’s continuing attacks as the U.S. tries to broker a peace deal. “I want him to stop shooting, sit down, and make a deal,” Trump said of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In a Truth Social post on Saturday, Trump seemed to question whether Putin was actually interested in a lasting peace deal. “There was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns, over the last few days,” Trump wrote. “It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently, through ‘Banking’ or ‘Secondary Sanctions?’ Too many people are dying!!!”
- An estimated 250,000 people attended the funeral Mass for Pope Francis in Rome on Saturday, including dozens of heads of states. The pontiff was buried in St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome, at his request, the first time a pope’s final resting place lay outside the Vatican in more than a century. President Donald Trump, who attended the funeral, also met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, French President Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the Vatican to discuss plans for a ceasefire for the war in Ukraine.
- FBI agents on Friday arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan on charges of “concealing an individual to prevent his discovery and arrest” and obstructing or impeding a proceeding. The arrest came after Dugan allegedly sent Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, who was in court for a hearing on a domestic battery charge, and his attorney out of her courtroom through the jury door as immigration agents waited outside the courtroom to arrest Flores-Ruiz, who they allege entered the U.S. illegally. He was later apprehended outside the courthouse following a chase. After her arrest, Dugan appeared in federal court and was released on her own recognizance. “Judge Dugan will defend herself vigorously, and looks forward to being exonerated,” the judge’s attorney said in a statement.
- The Associated Press reported Friday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had used a private internet connection that circumvented Pentagon security protocols in order to use the Signal messaging app on a personal computer. The purpose of the connection, called a “dirty line” and connected to the public internet, was for Hegseth to avoid having his IP address flagged as one assigned to the Defense Department. The New York Times also reported on Friday that the phone number used by Hegseth in recent Signal chats, which were used to discuss classified information, was publicly available on WhatsApp, Facebook, and a fantasy sports site as recently as March.
- The Trump administration on Friday abruptly reversed the cancellations of thousands of foreign student visas. The decision came after mounting legal challenges to the cancellations of thousands of visas from a federal database used to track foreign students, often citing minor or dismissed legal infractions. About 50 of the more than 100 legal challenges filed resulted in judges ordering the government to temporarily undo the cancellations. The Department of Justice said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was developing a new set of policies for foreign students present in the U.S. on student visas.
- U.S. consumer sentiment has fallen to its fourth-lowest level since the late 1970s, according to the University of Michigan’s survey of consumers released Friday. The final April sentiment index, compiled from a survey of more than 500 households, showed that respondents expected inflation to rise 6.5 percent over the next year, and at a 4.4 percent annual rate over the next five to 10 years, the highest such marks since 1981. Large majorities of the respondents also believed that their incomes would decline, unemployment would increase, and home buying would become more challenging.
- A federal judge sentenced George Santos, the former Republican congressman from New York, to more than seven years in prison on Friday. Santos pleaded guilty last August to charges of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, after federal prosecutors alleged that he laundered campaign funds to pay for personal expenses, claimed unemployment benefits while being employed, and lied to the Federal Election Commission. Elected in 2022, Santos was expelled from Congress in 2023 after media investigations found he had lied about his résumé, and further allegations of fabrications snowballed.
A Course Correction on Revoked Visas?
Jayson Ma was nearing the end of his final semester at Carnegie Mellon University when he received news that his student visa was in danger of being revoked. “I only have a semester left, and there’s only three weeks left for the semester. We have finals coming up. So, with everything going on, it’s kind of hard to process,” Ma, a Chinese national, told CBS News. “I want to finish my degree, I want to finish my school, and I want to do what’s right.”
But Ma and students like him may have just been tossed a lifeline—for now. After an estimated 1,800 foreign nationals had their ability to legally study in the U.S. revoked, the Trump administration on Friday moved to reinstate the visa registrations of thousands of students.
During a court hearing in Washington, a lawyer for the Justice Department told a federal judge that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is revising its system for reviewing student visa holders, of which there are more than a million in the U.S. Until the new policy is finalized, foreign nationals will no longer have their student visa records removed from an online database. But affected students fear the reversal, which came amid mounting legal challenges to the visa cancellations, may only afford them temporary protection from the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown.
About two months ago, the administration began wiping student visa registrations from the online database—in some cases without ...
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Today’s Must-Read
That Americans can purchase the product of their choice among countless available domestic and foreign brands is a quintessential part of living in a free society. And yet, our leaders in Washington, D.C., have forgotten that. At least that’s what it seems like based on what they’ve been doing and the rhetoric they’ve used as justification. Not only is Trump, supported by the Republicans who control Congress, implementing tariffs that threaten to make some imports prohibitively expensive or outright unavailable, government officials are telling us that we don’t need all of those choices anyway—that it’s for our own good.
Toeing the Company Line
Hogg Wild
All power, no principles, and the problem with our politics.
Pay to Play
What should a Democratic House do about Trump’s crypto scam?
After Francis, What Now for the Catholic Church?
Plus: How to remember Pope Francis and an interview with George Weigel.
AI Will Speed Up the Sex Wars
Technology already has a way of breaking things. At light speed, that breakage might be even more pronounced.
Don’t Wait for Your Teacher
Why young people should self-teach the great books.
The Brave New World of Book Publishing
The state of the industry is making some authors strike out on their own. Can they succeed?
How to Remember Pope Francis
Proper remembrance takes time and will help us think about the future.
For Spite
What do you call a Canadian 401k?
Surviving Trump’s Tariffs
‘You can’t undo uncertainty.’
Worth Your Time
- As the Trump administration threatens to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status, Joshua Zeitz, wrote for Politico about the only other time in American history such a step was taken: when the Internal Revenue Service acted against Bob Jones University, which had banned interracial dating. Decades later, the university eventually caved—but the government’s effort “morphed a ragtag collection of evangelical Christians and Catholic social conservatives into a movement.” Zeitz believes something similar could happen today. “There is a broad constituency of people who care about medical and scientific research,” he wrote. “There are alumni of elite and non-elite research universities who are invested in their future. There are families who rely on these institutions—they use their hospitals and affiliated medical centers (Harvard Medical School is directly affiliated with 15 hospitals and research institutes), and municipalities that count on them for employment, social services, and voluntary contributions in lieu of property taxes. Harvard alone funds over 7,000 units of affordable housing, operates free legal aid and mobile health clinics, partners with local nonprofits to combat food insecurity—the list goes on. The lesson for Trump is clear: When the IRS is weaponized to pursue public policy agendas, even when those agendas are laudable, unexpected consequences can ensue.”
- In yet another entry in the annals of “journalists explore ways people used to connect face-to-face,” Andrew Fedorov wrote in The Atlantic about the decline of hitchhiking and the brave souls who still embrace riding with strangers. “But, far and away, the most common reason I hear when I talk with people about why they hitchhike is they enjoy the unexpected connections they form. The conversations you have in a stranger’s car can be startlingly intimate,” he wrote. “Drivers tend to unload everything: their closeted sexuality, wartime traumas, crimes they’ve committed. Kenny Flannery, a Connecticut native who’s been hitchhiking regularly since 2007, remembered a driver taking advantage of their mutual anonymity to say he’d gotten away with murder. ‘He even said that out loud: “You don’t know anyone I know; you never will,”’ Flannery recalled to me. ‘I might be the only person he’s ever told that he killed some dude.’ Reporting any driver’s confession to the police felt like it would be a dead end, Flannery said: ‘By the time I would have had phone service or anything, it would have been, “Someone I can’t describe told me a story you won’t believe coming from a place they didn’t tell me.”’
Presented Without Comment
NBC News: Trump Calls NFL Owners ‘Stupid’ for Not Taking [Colorado Quarterback] Shedeur Sanders in First Round
Also Presented Without Comment
The Economist: Water Sommeliers Say the Simplest Drink Is the Future of Luxury
Also Also Presented Without Comment
Wall Street Journal: Meta’s ‘Digital Companions’ Will Talk Sex With Users—Even Children
In the Zeitgeist
The NBA playoffs are in full swing, and we’ve already seen one instant classic moment: Denver Nuggets forward Aaron Gordon’s buzzer-beating dunk against the Los Angeles Clippers on Saturday.
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