“President Trump said Monday that he’d planned to strike Iran ‘tomorrow’ but was holding off to give negotiations another chance. He claimed he made the decision at the request of several Arab leaders. The White House saw an updated peace proposal Iran sent Sunday as insufficient, leading to a growing expectation — including inside the White House — that Trump was about to strike.” (05/18/26)
“A California federal jury unanimously rejected Elon Musk’s claims against OpenAI and its co-founder Sam Altman, ending the latest chapter in a nearly decade-long feud between the two technology moguls over the artificial intelligence firm’s non-profit structure. … The nine-person jury told the court Musk took too long to file the lawsuit, missing the deadline for the statute of limitations. … Musk and Altman founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015 …. Musk invested about $38 million in OpenAI from late 2015 through May 2017. He [noticed] he was misled by the company when they decided to create a for-profit entity to get more capital for AI development. … Musk sought nearly $130 billion in damages that he said would be given back to OpenAI’s nonprofit. He also asked for the removal of Altman and Brockman from their roles and the unwinding of the firm’s for-profit conversion.” (05/18/26)
“I have now spent four decades practicing medicine. … Most physicians did. That is the part many people outside medicine still do not fully understand. Doctors do not sacrifice years of their lives, miss holidays, destroy their sleep schedules, and carry this kind of emotional burden because they dream about maximizing throughput metrics or documentation compliance. We entered medicine because we wanted to help people. It sounds simple saying that now, maybe even naïve, but it is true. Somewhere along the line medicine changed. Hospitals changed. The language changed first because that is always how these transformations begin. Patients slowly became ‘throughput issues.’ Beds became ‘capacity management.’ Discharges became ‘flow optimization.’ … Everything slowly started sounding less human and more operational. And eventually, hospitals stopped feeling like places centered around caring for human beings and started feeling like giant processing centers where movement itself became the priority.” (05/18/26)
Source: Christian Science Monitor
by Linda Feldmann
“As a United States senator from Florida, Marco Rubio was a high-profile ‘neocon’ – a hawk on China and Russia, a strong supporter of Taiwan, Ukraine, and NATO, and an advocate for free trade and human rights. Today, not so much – at least on those issues. As both secretary of State and acting national security adviser, Secretary Rubio is fully on board with President Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy: more ‘Art of the Deal’ use of American leverage, including tariffs, less hard-line absolutism with other major powers. Mr. Rubio’s evolution shouldn’t come as a shock. After all, he is no longer his own boss; he works for President Trump – in two key capacities, the first to hold both titles since Henry Kissinger in the 1970s.” (05/18/26)
“The judge overseeing the state murder trial of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, ruled Monday that prosecutors can use a gun and a notebook as evidence. Judge Gregory Carro’s ruling effectively rejected Mangione’s lawyers’ argument that those items were seized illegally, delivering a partial victory to prosecutors. However, Carro said prosecutors cannot admit items found in Mangione’s backpack when he was arrested at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania two years ago, including a loaded magazine, a passport and a wallet. Authorities have previously described the red notebook found in his bag as a ‘manifesto.’ Mangione’s arrest came five days after Thompson, a 50-year-old father of two, was shot dead outside a Manhattan hotel as he walked to an investors’ conference.” (05/18/26)
“Nonprofits face a series of interlocking crises in the second Trump administration. Most obviously, there are broadsides from the White House: indiscriminate funding cuts for human services providers, targeted pressure campaigns and cuts to research funding for higher education, threats to investigate and prosecute left-leaning philanthropies. But this challenge is layered on top of a deeper crisis of trust.” (05/18/26)
“The contemporary leftist [sic] is a consequentialist with no limiting principles. After the Virginia Supreme Court stopped the Democrats’ unconstitutional gerrymandering scheme, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now the favorite Democratic Party presidential prospect 2028 in a number of polls, claimed that the court ‘didn’t overturn a map’ but ‘overturned an election.’ ‘The power of the American people, that should be the ultimate check on all three branches,’ she declared. In any other age, vocalizing illiterate nonsense about our system of governance might be an embarrassing career-ending flub. Today, it’s the norm among progressives.” (05/18/26)
“Australia ordered the shareholders linked to China to sell their stakes in Northern Minerals, a company that is developing a rare earth mine. Treasurer Jim Chalmers said he had issued orders on Monday following concerns that Chinese investors had tried to take control of Northern Minerals. The Australia-based mining company is developing its Browns Range project in the far north of the state of Western Australia to mine significant reserves of dysprosium and terbium. The six companies are to sell their stake within two weeks. Chalmer’s decision aims to protect the country’s national interest and to ensure compliance with its foreign investment framework, he said in a statement.” (05/18/26)
