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Wednesday, August 13, 2025

Monthly U.S. inflation data is under increased scrutiny after President Donald Trump removed the head of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a move that could undermine confidence in the $2.1-trillion market for Treasury debt designed to protect against inflation. read more


Beef prices surged to an all-time high in July as the market grappled with consistently strong demand and long-term issues in domestic production. read more


Russia and the United States have discussed a model for ending the war in Ukraine that mirrors Israel's occupation of the West Bank, The Times has been told. read more


Israel has extensively documented the 2023 Hamas-led assault and is believed to be holding at least 200 Palestinians suspected of involvement. Not one has been charged or put on trial. read more


Tuesday, August 12, 2025

After being detained and handcuffed, the special needs teen was released but his mother said the trauma is still with him. Many parents are objecting: "Our government, the administration had stated they were going to go after criminals. At a school, what criminals are you going to find? Kids trying to enroll -- today's orientation day," parent Dorian Martinez said. read more


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More: Several hundred Palestinians have been detained on suspicion of direct involvement, and at least 200 of them remain in custody, according to public records. Israeli military officials have said that at least several dozen Palestinians were arrested in or near Israeli territory around the time of the attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

In addition to those detainees, Israel is holding roughly 2,700 other Palestinians who were rounded up in the Gaza Strip over the 21 months since the attack, according to government data. They are suspected of affiliation with Hamas or other militant groups in Gaza, but not necessarily of direct involvement in the Oct. 7 attack.

Israel has killed many of the senior Hamas figures from Gaza who were seen as masterminds of the attack. But some in the country worry that the extensive delays in prosecuting the suspects in custody will allow some perpetrators to escape justice.

Palestinians and rights groups have other concerns.

They say Israel has systematically violated the detainees' rights by holding them without charge or trial in harsh conditions, with limited access to legal counsel. Sweeping gag orders keep most details of their cases under wraps and for most of these detainees, there is no trace of them in any public records.

The way Israel detains those prisoners "effectively erases these individuals from public awareness and strips them of fundamental rights," said Nadine Abu Arafeh, a lawyer who has represented detainees from Gaza in other cases in Israeli courts. "Families in Gaza live with questions: Are their loved ones alive?"

Israel's Justice Ministry declined to comment.

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Ms. Malinovsky, the opposition lawmaker, said she believes that senior Israeli officials feared that pursuing the cases could intensify public scrutiny of the failures by the government and military or undermine negotiations to exchange Palestinian detainees for Israeli hostages.

"They don't want that discourse," she said of the government.

The prime minister's office declined to comment on the reasons for the delay in prosecutions. The prison service and Justice Ministry would not provide any information on the detainees.

More: Sure. The murder rate has been improving here recently. But the violent crime rate in D.C. is at a 30-year-low, and you are still helping them. So why not us?

Our situation is worse than numbers suggest. Our top cop, Attorney General Alan Wilson, has declared it is legally OK for men to get into a road rage incident, chase down the man they'd argued with for nine miles, get into a shootout and claim self-defense.

Not only that. A police department official in Horry County, one of our largest counties, helped the shooters afterward and one told the other the official had told him to "just be thankful that he wasn't Black."

Horrific. Just horrific.

You read that right, sir. Wilson has made it more likely for hot heads wielding guns to shoot at each other on our roads.

Sir, we are already a top 10 state for gun deaths. Save us like you're saving D.C.

Only seven states have a violent crime rate worse than ours.

Our homicide rate is nearly double the national average. Our aggravated assault rate is well above the national average " higher than that in the nation's capital. We are in the top 12 states for property crime. We suffer a high rate of drug overdoses, a scourge I know you are fighting by considering sending the U.S. military after Mexican drug cartels.

One analyst said aggravated assault, robbery, and murder "are common" here.

Our rate of rape is about the same as D.C's.

South Carolina's violent crime rate is higher than most blue states.

It's just not fair for you to be more concerned with the safety of residents of cities who voted against you than for residents who have repeatedly voted for you in overwhelming numbers!!

Sorry, sir, for sounding angry. I never want to disrespect a great man who has done so much good for this great nation. I just want fellow South Carolinians protected.

Even Rep. Nancy Mace, one of your most obedient foot soldiers, says it's too dangerous.

"In South Carolina, criminals are treated like victims " and victims like criminals," she recently tweeted in reference to disgusting dog fighting. "The attorney general is afraid to fight crime. He won't prosecute murder. He won't prosecute rape," Mace said in response to Wilson's declaration about self-defense laws, echoing criticisms he has denied as the two candidates embark on gubernatorial campaigns in South Carolina. "He won't prosecute human trafficking. He won't prosecute pedophiles."

I don't know how much longer we can hold on in a lawless, violent hellhole like this.

Only you can save us. I know we were the first state to secede from the union to try and destroy the United States. But that was so long ago. Send in federal troops. Now.

Please.

Sincerely, A proud (terrified) South Carolina native

More: Trump's mouthpiece justifies it this way: "President Trump is rightfully enlisting his emergency powers to quickly rectify four years of failure and fix the many catastrophes he inherited from Joe Biden " wide open borders, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, radical climate regulations, historic inflation, and economic and national security threats posed by trade deficits."

Unpack that for a second. A failed previous presidency, wars fought by other countries in other countries, subsidies for green energy, 2.7 percent inflation, and a trade deficit not much different than in the past few decades: if this amounts to a "national emergency," then an emergency is a permanent condition, and the president can rule by fiat from here on out. And so here we are: with the Congress a sad rubber-stamp to the mad king, and with the lower-court checks on him stayed by SCOTUS, which is taking its own sweet time to adjudicate.

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The question, it seems to me, is how Trump might respond to a real SCOTUS setback, or to a House he doesn't totally control. And the answer to that we already know: he will assault the court's legitimacy, threaten the Justices with mob violence, refuse to end the tariffs, and " of course! " claim the 2026 elections are rigged. The same, I think, applies to his term limits. He will attempt to defy them along the lines of his beloved thug-tyrant, Bukele. And if that open assault on a clear Constitutional amendment doesn't fly, which may be a stretch even for MAGA vandals, it still won't be over.

If a Democrat wins in 2028, Trump will call the election rigged and illegitimate, and will re-stage 2020 on behalf of a successor " with the full weight of the federal government behind him. If a Republican wins, Trump will remain POTUS the way Putin stayed president after making Medvedev "president" in 2008. Trump is an instinctual tyrant, and once those characters have tasted raw, arbitrary power, as he has, they can never let go. He must either have a family member succeed him or a puppet. Don Jr or JD " Trump's Medvedev.

The stain of this will therefore be deep and permanent. It already is. Trump intends to use the 250th celebration next year as a Putin-style glorification of his reign. By then he'll be riding in the Qatari jet that the Senate just allowed him to keep permanently. Tyrants also demand permanent monuments to their glory. So having paved over the Rose Garden, Trump is now intending to add a massive 90,000 square foot gilded ballroom to the White House itself, forever cementing it as a palatial symbol for his new monarchy.

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