King Charles III speech summary from an ethical point of view: "What's important to maintain our democracy"

Why did it take a visiting English king, King Charles, to remind Americans about why we are a democratic republic❓

Echo essay published in The Times Herald newspaper in Michigan.

But there he was, Britain’s King Charles III, reminding us in his speech before Congress of some of our historic and current principles that some seem to have forgotten.

In his address the king reminded us of our ties to Europe, how our allies there came to assist us after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on our country and why Ukraine was so important to combat Russian aggression. And he expressed the need to protect nature given the shrinking polar ice caps.

But I was most impressed by his remarks about what’s important to maintain our democracy, ironically offered by the king of a country against which we fought to secure our freedom nearly 250 years ago. I believe protecting our democratic values, norms and laws are the most essential issues facing America, the key to our republic.

King Charles spoke about the rule of law as central to our country and his, referring us to his country’s Magna Carta, which was one of the sources for our system of government as well. England’s charter in 1215 was a foundational document forced upon King John to limit his power, protect feudal rights, establish such ideas as due process and trial by jury and protect against illegal imprisonment.

The king also told us: “Our common ideals were not only crucial for liberty and equality, they are also the foundation of our shared prosperity. The rule of law: the certainty of stable and accessible rules, an independent judiciary resolving disputes and delivering impartial justice.”

And King Charles called upon us to remember the importance of checks and balances in how the government functions, ironically not wanting a monarch here. It’s important to understand that he is head of state, reigning not ruling, in a constitutional monarchy.

It was a 30-minute concise speech about what’s really important in our republic and his constitutional monarchy. He spoke with clarity, empathy and humor — rare these days in our political discourse.

The king acknowledged the historic ties between the two nations: “Ours is a partnership born out of dispute, but no less strong for it, so perhaps, in this example, we can discern that our nations are in fact instinctively like-minded — a product of the common democratic, legal and social traditions in which our governance is rooted to this day.”

Listening to the king speak, I felt sad😔 that we seldom hear the same thoughts spoken by our political leaders but also a sense of relief to hear them spoken in a building where so often we hear petty and often nasty words. His speech felt like that of a seasoned teacher to his students, reminding them of why they were there in the first place.

I confess I had many personal emotions arising as I listened to the king’s speech. My father, born in Baltimore and thus a naturalized U.S. citizen, was nonetheless raised in England. Some of my family remained in the United Kingdom, and others moved to the United States.

I chuckled when the king quoted Oscar Wilde, a London-based writer of the late 19th century who said, “We really have everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language!” I often struggled to understand what my British cousins were saying and, of course, they sometimes laughed at my American utterances.

I also realized King Charles’ humor was touched with a serious comment about our respective democracies: “The Founding Fathers were bold and imaginative rebels with a cause. Two hundred and fifty years ago, or, as we say in the United Kingdom ‘just the other day…’”

It was the king’s way of reminding us of our relative new emergence on the historical scene and his country’s long traditions. Tradition means more than the institutions of government; it means also the values, norms and cultures that support democracies.

From members of my family in the UK, I learned that they sometimes thought of us as a fledgling democracy without yet being a fully functioning government with a long tradition. This keeps me humble but also hopeful that we still have much to learn in order to grow

John C. Morgan is an author and educator who writes about both personal and social ethics.

Donald Trump and maga Republican enablers desecrating America's heritage: Trump was not elected to be a dictator!

This message will probably be a surprise to Donald Trump, but, just so he knows, no one hired him to be a despot decorator in chief. 

Echo opinion letter published in the Reading Eagle in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Donald Trump is a convicted felon guilty of 34 felony counts❗

Trump's takeover of that position has had disastrous results: examples include paving the iconic Rose Garden to hold umbrella tables, gilding the Oval Office to imitate a Russian palace, tearing down the East Wing of the White House to add a billion-dollar Louis XIV ballroom, painting the once-elegant Reflecting Pool a swimming pool blue so it will no longer reflect and now wanting to put a coat of white paint on the historic, granite Eisenhower Executive Office Building. (Painting stone now means painting it forever.) We don’t yet know what he intends to accomplish in the Kennedy Center, but past performance indicates it will likely be supremely garish and outrageously costly.

After stealing health care and feeding programs from Americans and people around the world, he’s spending billions of taxpayer 💲dollars on a war of choice and hideous vanity projects.

Remaking our nation’s capital into his own image will remind future generations of what happens when unchecked narcissism reigns, truly a gut-wrenching prospect.

From Fred Opalinski in Reading Pennsylvania

To Donald Trump and maga Republicans: Has Iran Surrendered Yet? Prepare for a long Iranian "Winter"

Donald Trump could try reading instead of wasting his sleepless nights ranting in slanderous screeds on his fake social media❗  This article published in the New York Review of Books by Christopher de Bellaiger would be excellent if he could understand it, but maybe he can find a bedtime 📘📕📖story reader to help❓

Apparently, according to de Bellaigue's report, Iranians would rather endure hardship, and suppression by their own Islamic Republic, than support a Trump-Netanyahu control over their 2,600 year old united Iranian nation. 

A billboard with an AI-generated portrait of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, Tehran, April 22, 2026

In 1953, Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, was toppled in a coup planned by MI6 and the CIA and carried out by Iranian army units and hoodlums supportive of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Mossadegh had nationalized Iran’s British-run oil industry and allowed Iranians more freedom than they had ever known; the constitutional monarchy he favored was a path between the extremes of royal tyranny and popular radicalism that had beset the country for the previous three quarters of a century. In the years after Mossadegh’s overthrow, as the Shah built a dictatorship backed uncritically by the United States, Iranian democrats and liberals sank into a despondency that was expressed in works of art, perhaps the most lasting of which, the poem “Winter” by Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, describes the insidious effect of political failure on the spirit of the individual and the cohesion of society:

They do not wish to return your greeting, their heads are buried in their collars,
No one dares raise their head to greet, to acknowledge friends,
They see no further than their own foot,
For the path is dark and slippery,
And if you stretch a kindly hand toward someone,
They withdraw their hand from their coat-pocket with reluctance,
So searing is the cold.
The breath that rises warm from the chest turns to a dark cloud,
Standing like a wall before your eyes,
So much for breath; what do you hope to gain from meeting the eyes of friends
Near or far❓

The revolution that swept away the Shah in 1979, was supported by the country’s liberals and leftists, but the government that replaced him was captured by hard-line theocrats and their followers in the Revolutionary Guard. Iran spent the next four and a half decades waging wars hot and cold, covert and declared, its hostility toward the West hardly wavering, regardless of the price to be paid in hardship at home and ostracism abroad.

The Islamic Republic was a pariah long before its latest war with the United States and Israel. Its economy has been crippled by sanctions and the corruption that is their concomitant, its middle class increasingly inured to privation, its workers crushed by inflation and the nonpayment of salaries, and life for all marred by the power outages, water shortages, and unchecked pollution that are the ambient signifiers of the failing state.

And yet the regime has repeatedly belied predictions of its demise, saved by revenue from the oil it sells to China and by a hard core of ideologues who retain a monopoly on force and a readiness to employ it against dissidents whom they view, without irony, as the agents of Satan. In January they suppressed mass protests with unprecedented savagery at the cost of thousands of lives. In the war that followed, Iran gained prestige around the world by defying its exponentially more powerful foes and not merely surviving the assassinations of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other military and civilian leaders but using them to inspire loyalists. My Iranian dentist in London was congratulated by his Malaysian, Pakistani, and Indonesian patients on the pluck exhibited by a regime he detests, which shows how cleverly the Islamic Republic wages the propaganda war.

During the war the US and Israel attacked not only military and nuclear targets but also steelworks, petrochemical plants, bridges, ports, railway lines, schools, universities, a bank, and a medical research center. Antique plaster and mirror fragments fell from the ceilings of palaces not designed to withstand bombs and missiles. With the cease-fire that came into effect on April 8, Trump stopped short of extinguishing “a whole civilization,” as he had threatened to do. But his hope, shared by Benjamin Netanyahu, that attacking Iran would embolden the people to rise up against their rulers and encourage the armed forces to mutiny was unfounded.

We are often told that the regime does not adequately represent its citizens. As US secretary of state Marco Rubio put it during his confirmation hearing in 2025, “I don’t know of any nation on earth in which there is a bigger difference between the people and those who govern them.” The Islamic Republic’s internal opponents are thought to amount to around 40 percent of the population, or 36 million people, with at most 20 percent being die-hard supporters and the remaining 40 percent floating between the two.

Between 1997, when Iran’s first reformist government was elected, and 2022, when many thousands braved truncheons and torture chambers to protest the killing of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in police custody, Iranians tried every means short of armed insurrection to force the Islamic Republic to grant them personal and political freedom and to negotiate an end to some of the harshest sanctions in the world. Their efforts came to naught, and after January’s bloodbath Hatam Ghaderi, perhaps the country’s most respected political scientist and a man who usually chooses his words carefully, told an Iranian YouTube channel that “any eventuality, even war and annihilation, would be better than the survival of the Islamic Republic.” Since the war started Ghaderi has either withdrawn or been removed from the public scene.

Other than the severity of the regime’s response, what distinguished the January protests was that many of the participants flouted a taboo on expressing support for foreign intervention that had lingered since the 1953, coup. Thousands in the streets called on the United States and Israel to attack and topple the Islamic Republic, selecting as their white knight not one of the many reformists who languish in Iranian jails but Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last Shah and a US resident who is scathing about reform, flaunts his alliance with Netanyahu, and hasn’t seen his homeland in forty-eight years. Support for Pahlavi was always stronger outside the country than within, and his silence after a US attack on a girls’ school in southern Iran on February 28, in which 175 people were killed, condemned him in the eyes of many of his compatriots.

The yearning for foreign intervention among some opponents of the regime and the unease this caused in many others have opened a fissure that the Islamic Republic, adept at divide and rule, will exploit. I know people who, despite loathing their rulers, refused to leave the capital during the war because they felt it would be a betrayal of their country and their compatriots. (“Iran isn’t a hotel you leave for another if you don’t like the service,” one Iranian told me.) So they stayed, pushing beds onto landings, sleeping in their clothes, sweeping up shattered glass. They spoke witheringly of “supporters of the war,” especially those who at the first bombings quit Tehran for the safety of the hills or the coast. Iranian democrats who were “against the war” desire regime change no less fervently than those who petitioned Trump to attack. The difference is that they want Iranians, not foreigners, to do the job.

The current cease-fire resembles a pause for breath more than a prelude to peace, and it is informed on both sides by Trumpian exhibitionism. The Western media directs much attention at the negotiations and the Iranian officials who appear to control them: former and serving Revolutionary Guards, for the most part, with CVs as bloodstained as those of the martyrs they replaced, and the ambiguous, invisible figure of Mojtaba Khamenei, who has succeeded his father as supreme leader but who appears to be a plaything of the Guard. The agony of ordinary Iranians, meanwhile, is forgotten.

Iran is entering a new winter of political failure that will be harder than that of the prerevolutionary period, when the experience of being insulted and infantilized by a crowned despot was alleviated somewhat by rising living standards. There is no such comfort now. In March year-on-year inflation rose to 72 percent, one of the highest rates since the revolution. 

Food prices are rising much faster. According to Hadi Kahalzadeh, a former economist at Iran’s Social Security Organization, the war disrupted “supply chains, transport networks, and commercial services,” with many firms suspending operations “under the combined pressure of war, inflation, recession, and collapsing demand.” Kahalzadeh estimates that between 10 and 12 million jobs in Iran are under threat, “putting the main source of income for millions of households…at risk.”

The Islamic Republic no longer pretends to speak for all or even the majority of its citizens; it pours vitriol on the “scum, spies, and hirelings”—the national police chief’s phrase—who participated in January’s unrest. In Tehran armed boys of fifteen or sixteen stand on street corners searching cars and demanding phones so they can scroll through photos for evidence of espionage. 

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the parliament speaker and Iran’s chief negotiator in talks with the US in Pakistan, has urged loyalists not to surrender the public sphere to the opposition and has called attendance at the funerals, rallies, and religious ceremonies that succeed one another on the streets of Tehran and other cities an “obligatory jihad.”(IOW Arabic word “jihad” means struggling or striving)

The Internet remains blocked for most Iranians, the better, the authorities say, to defend against cyberattacks and to stop traitors from passing information to the enemy or disseminating antinational propaganda; the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, justifies his own unimpeded access on the grounds that he is “the voice of the Iranians.” The Islamic Republic has even appropriated “Ey Iran” (O Iran), a monumental nationalist anthem that was composed as a response to the Allied occupation of Iran during World War II and is an opposition favorite.

Parliament recently passed legislation prescribing twenty-five years’ imprisonment for anyone who passes video footage of the war to a hostile TV station. The judiciary is confiscating the property of “treasonous and mercenary elements who supported the aggression.” On April 13, the chief prosecutor announced that expatriate Iranians will no longer be able to buy and sell property through their appointed representatives. This is punishment for their actions “against the Islamic Republic” and preparation, doubtless, for further expropriations.

That loot will need a home, and the authorities have been advising young people to “come into the system,” which is to say, don the uniform of a Basiji or the guise of an informer and accept the sinecures and perks that alone in a state-run “resistance economy” offer a measure of financial security. When the central bank introduced its most valuable banknote, worth 10 million rials—around seven (💲7❓) dollars*—in March, there was huge demand for this hedge against a possible crash of electronic payments. “I waited my turn,” an eighty-year-old Tehran resident told the Financial Times, “and the clerk told me he could only give me 10 million rials. But when I made a fuss, telling them I had no money and needed cash, I got 30 million instead.” This in an economy backed by the second-largest natural gas reserves and third largest crude oil reserves in the world.

On April 19 Ghalibaf told state TV, “In the field [of battle], the street and in diplomacy, we are in control.” The number and diversity of the issues that divide Iran and the US—from Hezbollah and the Strait of Hormuz to Iran’s stock of highly enriched uranium and the Houthis of Yemen—militate against the kind of agreement that would bring the Islamic Republic sanctions relief comprehensive enough to save the economy. 

So do Iran’s new leaders, who are happier than their predecessors to talk to the enemy, but also bolder—the elder Khamenei never actually closed the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile Iran’s relations with its neighbors on the far side of the Persian Gulf have returned to the bad old days of the 1980s, when the nascent Islamic Republic fought an eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and was all but encircled by his Arab allies.

As long as the country remains on high alert and public discourse is dominated by warnings of spies, sabotage, and treachery, the opposition will struggle to reemerge. War breeds tyrants. The Terror that followed the French Revolution drew much of its ferocity from fears of invasion. In the 1980s, the young Islamic Republic decided that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iranian youths on the battlefield with Iraq and the immiseration of the economy were prices worth paying to entrench its power and eliminate its domestic opponents. Like Eisenhower and Churchill when they ordered Mossadegh’s overthrow in 1953, Trump and Netanyahu have set back the cause of Iranian freedom. Their responsibility for the political winter that follows will not be small.

—April 30, 2026

*❗1 Iranian Rial equals
0.00 United States 💲Dollar

Donald Trump attracts violent behavior because he preaches violence in incoherent rants

A small sample of Donald Trump’s violent rhetoric:

Echo opinion letter published in TribLive in Pennsylvania

    • 2016 rally: “Knock the crap out of” protesters; “I will pay for the legal fees.” 
    • 2020 Oval Office: He allegedly asked officials in his administration about shooting protesters in the legs.
    • 2021 Select Committee testimony: He stated that when informed that insurrectionists of the Capitol Building wanted to hang Vice President, Mike Pence, his reply was that maybe he deserves it.
    • 2023 on Truth Social: He stated Gen. Mark Milley deserves “DEATH” for perceived disloyalty.
    • 2023: He made fun of the vicious hammer attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
    • 2024 rally: Liz Cheney should face “a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her.”
    • 2024 speech: He stated political opponents are “enemies from within,” worse than foreign threats.
    • 2025: He stated Sen. Mark Kelly and five other veterans’ “seditious behavior” is punishable by death because they reiterated what the Uniform Code of Military Justice states regarding unlawful orders.

• Following the death of former FBI Director Robert Mueller in March 2026, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social: “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I'm glad he's dead

Yet he wants Jimmy Kimmel fired and James Comey in prison (because Comey took a picture of a seashell formation on a beach, aka the "seashell indictment"). 

Do you think he and Melania even understand the meaning of the word hypocrite? Doubtful. 😒

All this from the self-declared stable genius who stated the “Jesus-like” image he posted of himself was actually him being a doctor. Haven’t you wondered why he’s had to take so many cognitive tests❓

From Jack Sillaman in Latrobe, Pennsylvania

Iran deployed drones and missiles to punishing effect, but knows that its chief weapon is causing economic pain

Whatever happens next, the poor will pay 💲

The Guardian Editorial

More than 3,300 Iranians, including 383😢 children, have been killed since the US and Israel launched their illegal war, authorities said this week. Asked about Wednesday’s ceasefire deadline, Donald Trump first said that he expected to resume bombing, then unilaterally announced that he was extending the truce “until discussions are concluded”.

Orange man flip flops😕

Whatever happens – or doesn’t – ❓with the US-Iranian peace talks due to take place in Islamabad, the costs of this disastrous (illegal❗) conflict will keep growing. The only thing that the sides have in common is that each needs peace, but thinks that it can force the other into significant concessions. (Clearly Donald Trump is dangerous because he has no idea what he is doing.)

The Iranian economy was already in a desperate state, thanks to years of sanctions and state failure. But the system has been built to withstand coercion and so far, the regime has survived the military and strategic pressure piled on it. It also knows the US bill is eye-watering. The White House last week declined senators’ requests to provide a figure, but the Pentagon has reportedly briefed that military costs topped 💲11.3bn in the first six days alone. That’s widely regarded as an underestimate. 

Professor Linda Bilmes, a Harvard public finance expert, suggests that the war is ultimately likely to cost the US $1tn when factors such as interest payments and long-term veteran-related expenses are included.

Those direct costs are only the start. Ricocheting oil prices have enriched those wealthy enough to speculate on their movement with remarkably perfect timing. But the American Enterprise Institute estimates that the total cost to the average US household, including, for example, higher oil prices, is equivalent to 💲410. The Century Foundation suggests that these “economic poisons” are all the harder for US voters to swallow when the conflict is morally and strategically unwarranted.

UK households will be an estimated £480 a year poorer. The UN development program warned that Arab countries faced an economic contraction of between 💲120bn and 💲194bn after just one month of war. Even China, initially relatively sanguine, appears to be growing more concerned about the impact. But, rising food prices hit the poorest – who spend more of their income on sustenance – the hardest. The World Food Program warned last month that 45 million more people, primarily in Asia and Africa, could fall into acute food insecurity.

Need is rising as aid budgets have been slashed. It is obscene that the money squandered on taking lives could have saved so many – 87 million, according to the UN humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher. It is equally so that more lives will be lost because of this conflict’s economic impact. Peace tomorrow wouldn’t fix the damage. But the longer that this war continues, the greater the devastation that will be wrought.

Iran has deployed its drones and missiles to punishing effect, but knows that its chief weapon is the economic pain it can inflict, primarily through control of the Strait of Hormuz. The International Monetary Fund warned last week that a further escalation could trigger a global recession. Its head, Kristalina Georgieva, had already said that the crisis would remain a threat to the global economy even if it ended overnight. The costs mount over time.  Although the pain is widely spread, it is far from evenly shared. The combination of higher energy, food and fertilizer costs will increasingly hammer poorer and heavily import-reliant nations.

Historic Hampton Roads Virginia Jewish cemetery sadly experienced vandalism

Maine Writer comment- It takes a horrible kind of evil to desecrate any cemetery. To harm Jewish headstones serves no purpose except to unjustly desecrate the deceased and spread antisemitism.

Opinion echo published in The Virginian Pilot newspaper:

The historic Jewish ✡️cemetery of the Virginia Peninsula was vandalized. Whatever the motive, the message was felt.

The small cemetery in Hampton dating back to 1895, doesn’t announce itself. Most people drive past without a second glance. 

But, buried within it are generations of members of the Jewish community whose stories continue to be felt by us today.

Any attempt to single out particular stories feels inadequate. The names left unmentioned are far more numerous, and their contributions no less profound.

But to name a few: Joe Frank rose to become the longest standing mayor of Newport News. Alan Diamonstein, elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1967, helped build one of the first housing development authorities in the nation to finance homes for working families and those with the least. Franklin Blechman, whom people called the “grandfather” of public service on the Peninsula, was a man so embedded in the civic life of this region that a full account of his contributions would fill a book. Walter Segaloff, whose vision gave rise to Achievable Dreams, transformed the lives of thousands of children across Hampton Roads. Many others names — civic leaders, merchants, neighbors, parents — are etched not only in stone but in the institutions, neighborhoods and traditions that define Hampton Roads.

When that cemetery was vandalized, something more than property was damaged.

We don’t yet know the motive. Law enforcement is investigating, and it’s possible this was random destruction rather than a targeted act of hatred. Those facts matter, and we should wait for them.

Yet, here is what we already know: Jewish cemeteries have been desecrated with grim regularity throughout history and even in recent years across the United States, where headstones are toppled and symbols of hate are spray-painted on ancient stones. The pattern is long and it is ugly. Whatever happened here, it landed on a community that carries that history in its bones and a broader community that rejects such hate.

And it landed at a particularly raw moment.

In recent years, Jewish communities across the country, including here on the Peninsula, have navigated a surge in antisemitic threats and activity. Jews make up only 2.4% of the American population yet are the target of 55% of all religious hate crimes in the United States.

The Jewish community of the Virginia Peninsula is not a community apart. It is woven into this place. Jewish families have been here for generations, building businesses along the waterfront, volunteering in schools and hospitals, and partnering with churches and civic organizations across racial and denominational lines. 

In fact, the history of integration on this Peninsula, the determined work of breaking down barriers between Black and white residents, includes Jewish voices and Jewish hands. William and Joanne Roos led the effort at their family’s Nachman’s Department Store in Newport News to be the first store in the city to integrate its lunch counter in the late 1950s. That story is buried in that cemetery, too.

We are a Jewish community that has always believed our fate is tied to the broader community. The same values that ask us to repair the world, to pursue justice and to welcome the stranger, are the values that have put Jewish Virginians side by side with everyone else.

So when someone damages the resting place of those who are woven into the fabric of this region, we ask our neighbors — all of our neighbors — not just to notice, but to stand with us. Not out of fear. Not to invite pity. But because this community has always shown up for others, we ask that you continue to show up and reaffirm the type of community we are.

The names on those headstones aren’t just Jewish history. They’re Virginia Peninsula history. They belong to all of us.

And they deserve to be treated that way.

Eric Maurer of Newport News is the CEO of Jewish Peninsula. 

To learn more about the Jewish Cemetery’s restoration efforts, visit jewishpeninsula.org/cemetery-update.

Americans are not informed about the huge cost of the Donald Trump Iran War but check out European news

348

The Guardian: Generally speaking, when you bomb another country, and that country retaliates, you call it a “war”. Very simple word. Three letters. Even Donald Trump knows how to spell it.

Cost of Donald Trump's Iran War

Echo opinion letter published in The CapTimes news in Wisconsin

Dear Editor: The lies and obfuscation about the true cost of the Iran War by Donald Trump and his minions evoke shades of the Vietnam era.

In a well-documented report in Popular Information by Stephen Semler on May 6, 2026, the actual cost of the first 60 days of the current war with Iran is about 💲72 billion, not the 💲25 billion cited by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, or about 💲1.2 billion per day.

Furthermore, a group of reporters for the Washington Post, Evan Hill, Jarrett Ley, Alex Horton, Tara Copp and Dan Lamothe, have noted that it's "unusually difficult" to obtain satellite imagery from the Middle East, because the U.S. government has asked two of the largest commercial providers of such images, Ventor and Planet, "to limit, delay or ultimately withhold publication of images of the region while the war is ongoing." 

Since the companies have acceded, the journalists have had to review other sources of images, including the European Union and Iran's state affiliated media (as cited by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, May 6, 2026).

Although some hypocritical Republican members of our U.S. Congress may not be concerned about being complicit with the Trump administration's deceptions, the American public deserves to know the truth. Then the electorate can hold Congress accountable in the November 2026, midterm elections.

From Stephen Austin in Madison Wisconsin

Evangelical Christians must pay attention to care for the world's poorest children: Blessed are the merciful

Echo opinion essay published in The New York Times by Nicholas Kristoff.  

A year after some of the world’s richest men and Donald Trump cut aid for the world’s poorest children, they’re trying to roll out a new public relations narrative:
Aid continues! We’re saving lives from AIDS🤥 Anyway, the aid never really worked, so we’re focused on trade! Building opportunities for American companies while saving babies!

As Jeremy Lewin, the acting under secretary of state for foreign assistance, put it: “Contrary to false media narratives, the data shows that Donald Trump’s foreign assistance review maintained and improved frontline lifesaving programs, while reducing NGO bloat and costs.”

“False media narratives” may refer to my reporting from a series of African countries on children dying as a result of the Trump cuts.

Let’s first concede a few points. American humanitarian aid was never great at nurturing economic growth, but it did save one life every 10 seconds until last year. It’s also true that public pressure led the administration and Congress to retain some lifesaving programs, particularly for H.I.V./AIDS, and to its credit the administration has expanded use of a drug called lenacapavir to fight AIDS. 

Finally, the Trump administration is right that trade is crucial, which is why President Bill Clinton started a fine trade program with Africa; unfortunately, it expires this year, and its long-term future under Trump is in doubt.

None of this changes the fact that this glossy new Trump (fake❗🤥😢) narrative is absurd. Trump’s most lethal policy will almost surely be his 71 percent cut in humanitarian aid from 2024 to 2025. 

A Boston University researcher estimated that the aid cuts cost more than 750,000 lives worldwide in their first year. A recently published study in The Lancet, the British medical journal, forecast that at present rates the defunding will cost 9.4 million lives by 2030, including 2.5 million children under the age of 5.

Are these figures correct❓ Exaggerated❓ I can’t be sure, and neither can Trump or anyone else, partly because the administration has cut data collection that might help us assess mortality accurately.

Meanwhile, Trump and his aides continue to take steps that will add to the toll.

The administration is now withholding aid for vaccines for poor countries in ways that may cost the lives of vast numbers of children. Trump slashed funding for an international vaccine alliance called Gavi, and now the administration is also refusing to release 💲600 million for Gavi that Congress has already appropriated and that must be spent by September.

Gavi is one of the most cost-effective aid programs in history. One study found that each dollar spent on vaccines in poor countries brings a return of $54 in reduced health costs and other benefits. I was once hospitalized with a serious case of malaria that I caught in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and I think it’s a miracle that a few doses of a $3 malaria vaccine can now save a Congolese child’s life — and a scandal that administration officials are willing to let such children die because of ideological hostility toward vaccines.

Gavi also pays for HPV vaccines that prevent cervical cancer, which kills more than 900 women every day worldwide. Cervical cancer is an excruciating, humiliating way to die — it is sometimes diagnosed partly by the odor of rotting flesh — yet a 💲4 vaccine can prevent it. Gavi’s vaccinations have already averted almost one million of these horrific deaths from cervical cancer.

Trump’s cuts have created a budget crisis for Gavi and other aid agencies. It has been magnified because European countries followed America’s lead with cuts to their own aid budgets. Gavi estimates that 600,000 lives will be unnecessarily lost by 2030 as a result. Think of your mother, wife, daughter; multiply by 600,000, and you glimpse the cost of Trump’s destruction of just the Gavi element of American aid.

The Trump administration is also exacerbating global poverty with its catastrophic war with Iran, and not just because the war has displaced more than 2.2 million women and girls in Iran and Lebanon. Because of the war, diesel prices have risen 160 percent in Myanmar and 87 percent in Nigeria, while 40 percent of gas stations have closed in Laos, according to the United Nations. Rising fuel prices are increasing costs of transportation and thus food.

The upshot is that if the Gulf crisis doesn’t end by next month, an additional 45 million people worldwide are likely to suffer severe hunger in the latter part of this year, according to Cindy McCain of the U.N World Food Program.

An even bigger impact may come, after a delay, from shortages of fertilizer, often made with oil and gas byproducts from the Persian Gulf. Perhaps one-third of the world’s fertilizer production will be disrupted if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and shortages will most likely mean lower crop yields, higher food prices and more starvation. 

José Andrés of World Central Kitchen has warned that fertilizer shortages could lead to a multiyear famine beginning as early as the end of this year.

Think of it this way: Artificial fertilizers keep roughly half of humans alive. Without them, the earth would be able to produce enough food to support only about 4 billion people.

Even as the Trump administration has created this crisis, it has unraveled some of the global health systems that would normally save lives of starving children. And Trump administration proclamations of “trade over aid” sound empowering until you realize that what they mean in practice is that America is talking about withholding lifesaving medicines from villagers in Zambia unless the Zambian government sells more minerals to American companies.

A new book, “Into the Wood Chipper,” recounts the reckless way in which DOGE officials dismantled the United States Agency for International Development. Written by Nicholas Enrich, a former top health official at the agency, it chronicles the “callousness, dishonesty and ineptitude” of Trump aides who destroyed programs that they didn’t understand.

“I had no idea you did all this,” Enrich quotes one of the newly arrived officials saying. “As a Republican, when I think of what U.S.A.I.D. does in global health, I assumed it was just, you know, abortions.” (In fact, no American aid dollars went to abortions.)

Please excuse my intemperate tone. But in my travels over the last year, I’ve seen children dying because of our aid cuts. This doesn’t feel like policymaking so much as vandalism, accompanied by wasted food, ruined contraceptives and an estimated $6.4 billion spent closing down the United States Agency for International Development (that sum alone could have saved more than one million children’s lives).

Actually, for all my harsh words, Trump is talking about providing emergency financial support for one nation. That’s the United Arab Emirates, which is pinched by the Iran war and may get a lifeline from Washington to support its dirham currency- valued at $0.27 to the U.S. dollar. (Maine Writer- this seems like a fools errand because the U.S. 💲dollar is declining in value.)

So we’re ready to support a country that is roughly as rich as Britain and France and is fueling the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, in Sudan, by arming a militia committing mass murder and mass rape❓ Could one factor be that high-level Emiratis have approved investments of half a billion dollars in a Trump family crypto company❓(aka #TrumpCrimeFamily)

Forget the efforts to dress this show up. The truth is ugly: The world’s richest men are crushing the world’s poorest children.

But Donald Trump is obsessed about building a ballroom.🤢

How did it come to this❓ The cuts in aid break my heart, and I struggle to understand how a country that until recently prided itself on generosity is now slashing aid so that vast numbers of children die. 

Donald Trump ugly memes might be his audition for a future career

Echo opinion published in the Florida Sun Sentinel

Bedeviled by the pope | Pat Beall

Pat Beall is an editorial writer and columnist for the Sun Sentinel, focusing mainly on Palm Beach County issues.

I imagine what would happen if Pope Leo took my calls❓☎️

He’d be a nice guy, of course. Too polite to point out that I am likely just one more heathen, bound to spend eternity as smoldering charcoal.

“My child,” he’d say, “I understand you have questions about the Antichrist. You are not alone, I assure you."

Oh, I know. A world leader posting an image of himself as Jesus Christ laying hands on what appears to be either Jon Stewart or Jeffrey Epstein is not automatically horn-and-tails material.

Or is it❓

“I thought it was me as a doctor,” Trump said about the ugly picture in his hideous post.

Doctors❓ Only with bombs bursting in air, twin eagles threatening, soldiers flying, a cloaked Trump healing, handfuls of white light and the miracle of thick hair no longer in need of a combover.

Well. That explains the robed surgeons. The winged proctologists.

“All this is giving off Antichrist-adjacent vibes,” I’d fret.

And so I’d lay it out for the pontiff. The Great Deceiver will have one great secret which he will tell no one. (Epstein Files.) He tricks good people who should know better. (The 77 million people who voted for him.)

He will seem to have a mortal ear wound, but lo, it was healed, and the whole earth wondered at this. (Massive cotton wad on ear.)

But mostly, I worry, the big evidence is that every devil comes with their own imp.  I speak now of JD Vance.  (Yes, the Hillbilly.)

“Pope Leo XIV should be careful when he talks about theology,” warned the newbie Catholic convert, threatening the 267th pope in a religion that dates to 30 A.D.  (Maine Writer:  This quote from Hillbilly Vance gets a "dummy" of the year award.)

And this, we should note, is not the first time Vance has tussled with a pope. Back in April 2025, he traveled to Rome to meet with Pope Francis, a fierce critic of Trump’s snatch, imprison and sort it out later immigration policy.

Vance smiled and nodded and held to his belief that ordor amoris, the “order of love,” requires that citizens must prioritize their families and those closest to them. Maybe other people, maybe later on.

He told the pope he would pray for his health. The pope died the next day.

Trump mourned his passing by posting an image of himself as the next pope.

Vance said he embraced Catholicism seven years ago because he was fed up with “a society oriented entirely towards consumption and pleasure.” Like massive ballrooms with grand stairs leading absolutely nowhere. Or a skimpily clad lady in a gigantic martini glass on the lawn of Mar-a-Lago. Or a 💲300,000, two-story high golden statue of yourself at your Doral golf club.

Vance looked at this bright shiny basket of iniquities and announced: “That’s my guy❗”🙄

So too did Trump spiritual advisor Paula White-Cain, who compared the president’s torments to those of Jesus. “You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused,” she mourned. Also? “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.”

Then, because Trump cannot help himself, and also because White-Cain told people not to say no, the president followed up with another bit of blasphemy: an image of Jesus with his arm around him, haloed in soft light.

To further prove his spiritual bonafides and teensy-tiny soul, he stripped Catholic Charities of $11 million to house children.

“A lot of people weren’t understanding his humor,” explained Vance of Trump’s holier-than-thou postings.

“Actually, a lot of people were,” the endlessly likeable Leo would tell me on our phone call.

“He is bedeviling us all,” I’d say. “And I’m beginning to think those big ankles are really hooves in hosiery.”

So, is he, or isn’t he❓

“No, Trump is not the devil,” the pope would assure me.

He’s just auditioning for the part.

Pat Beall is a Sun Sentinel columnist and editorial writer.

MAGA Republicans must put an end to the Trump and Hegseth lies about the Iranian Trumpian World War!

Republicans, wake up❗ ⏰ Senator Susan Collins❗

Echo opinion letter published in LandasterOnLine

How much longer can you keep accepting the lies 🤥from Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth❓

Why Iran❓ Why now❓ First it was Iran’s nuclear facilities, but wait, we obliterated them a year ago.

Then it was to change regimes. The defenseless Iranian people were presumably to rise up and overtake the well-armed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. How moronic is that❓

Finally, Trump and Hegseth said we had to destroy Iran’s missile factories, but wait, we obliterated those factories weeks ago.

What was the June 2025, attack on Iran about, anyway❓

So, why❓

Could it be that Iran was at its weakest❓

Or that Israel persuaded Trump to help out❓

Or, worse yet, was it a distraction from the Jeffrey Epstein files❓

So far, tens of 💲billions have been spent on an unnecessary war and, in my view, we are in no way any better.

Aside from the expenditures of war, Republicans are proposing to spend 💲1 billion of taxpayer money for Trump’s gaudy golden White House ballroom.

While the country is at war, Trump is running around showing a picture of his ugly ballroom. Trump appears to be an inhumane person. In my view, he shows no signs of humanity, compassion or decency.

While Trump and his family are reportedly making billions off the presidency, many U.S. citizens are having trouble with gas prices, putting food on the table and paying for healthcare for their families.


George Washington wrote in a 1778, letter: “No punishment, in my opinion, is too great for the Man, who can build ‘his greatness upon his Country’s ruin.’ ”

I believe that Donald Trump should be removed from office for not upholding or defending the Constitution.

From Donald Doolittle Sr. in  West Lampeter Township, Pennsylvania

Hantavirus status report: This virus will continue to mutate and the incubation period is too long to provide rapid response

Report published in the New York Magazine Intelligencer by Nia Prater and Chas Danner.

Julie note- Although I am not a virology expert, my experience preparing for viral epidemics in hospital planning sessions is that viruses mutate.  So, I am not convinced about some of what is reported about what is happening with the Hantavirus today, because, by tomorrow the virus could replicate. That is what viruses do. Nevertheless, the article is a good status report.

An outbreak of the rare and dangerous hantavirus aboard the Dutch-flagged cruise ship MV Hondius has left three passengers dead, forced the medical evacuation of several others, and triggered an international health scare. While the unsettling news has prompted concerns of another widespread virus outbreak akin to COVID-19 or avian flu, the World Health Organization has stressed that the overall public-health risk from the Hondius outbreak is low. Here’s what we know so far.

How did the outbreak start? In a bulletin on Monday, the WHO said that it was first contacted about a “cluster of severe acute respiratory illness” aboard the Hondius on May 2, including two deaths and one passenger who was critically ill. Per the organization, the ship left Ushuaia, Argentina, on April 1 and made numerous stops including mainland Antarctica, Tristan da Cunha, Saint Helena, South Georgia, Nightingale Island, as well as Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean.

In the days since, the number of deaths has risen to three. According to the WHO, the first case was a man presenting with a fever, mild diarrhea, and a headache on April 6; he died on April 11 after developing respiratory distress. The second was a woman who left the ship from Saint Helena on April 24 while reportedly experiencing gastrointestinal symptoms. Her condition worsened while traveling on an April 25 flight to Johannesburg, South Africa, and she passed away after arriving at a hospital on April 26. 

In the third case, a woman died on May 2 after presenting with symptoms on April 28.
The New York Times reports that the first two deaths from the outbreak were a couple, a 70-year-old man from the Netherlands and his 69-year old wife, and the pair had reportedly traveled in South America, specifically Argentina, prior to boarding the ship. PCR testing later confirmed hantavirus infection in the wife’s case. The third fatal case is reported to be a German woman.

According to the Associated Press, Argentina’s Ministry of Health has been tracing the travel of the Dutch couple, who had been on a South American road trip, and the authorities are investigating the possibility that the couple was exposed to hantavirus during a bird-watching trip to a landfill in the southern town of Ushuaia, which is also where they boarded the Hondius.

What is hantavirus? According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, hantaviruses are a family of viruses that humans can contract following contact with rodents, which frequently carry the virus, typically by breathing in particles from their dried saliva, urine, and droppings, like when sweeping a shed where rodents have been living.

Hantavirus infections are typically rare, with an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 cases per year globally, but they can result in severe illness and death. Hantaviruses found in the Americas, also known as New World hantaviruses, can cause hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which presents with common symptoms like fever, fatigue, and muscle aches before progressing to more severe effects such as shortness of breath and fluid in the lungs. HPS has a fatality rate of 12 to 45 percent depending on the strain.

For variants more common in Europe and Asia, also known as Old World hantaviruses, patients can develop hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, which can cause kidney failure and has a fatality rate of one to 15 percent.

The strain of hantavirus linked to the cruise ship appears to be what’s known as the Andes strain, which, per the CDC, is common in South America and has been linked to human-to-human transmission. However, transmitting the hantavirus person-to-person is rare and typically requires close contact in an enclosed space. The Washington Post reports that Argentina, which appears to have a connection to this recent outbreak, has seen an increase of hantavirus cases in recent years and is frequently ranked by the WHO as the nation with the highest rate of the virus in Latin America.

Hantavirus also has a long incubation period with symptoms typically appearing a few weeks after infection but sometimes as many as eight weeks after. On Thursday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, said during a briefing that it is “possible” more cases could be reported down the line.
There is currently no cure nor widely available vaccine for hantavirus — surviving severe illness caused by the infection requires prompt medical intervention and ICU treatment.
One of the most prominent cases of hantavirus emerged last year after Betsy Arakawa, the wife of renowned actor Gene Hackman, was found to have contracted hantavirus pulmonary syndrome after the pair were found dead in their New Mexico home. Per the New York Times, it’s believed that Arakawa was likely infected from exposure to deer mice, which typically carry the virus in the state. In 2025, three people in Mammoth Lakes, California, died after contracting hantavirus.

For even more information about hantavirus, infectious-disease expert and doctor Céline Gounder has written an excellent explainer here.

On Thursday, Dutch officials confirmed that approximately 40 people from at least 12 different countries departed the ship at St. Helena to return home on April 24 without contract tracing, per the AP. Oceanwide Expeditions has put the figure at around 30 passengers, six of whom are Americans. Ghebreyesus said the organization has notified the 12 different nations, which, in addition to the U.S., are Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Turky, and the United Kingdom.

Public-health authorities have been working to track the passengers down and perform contact tracing. Two British citizens who left the ship beforehand and returned to the U.K. are self-isolating, as are a small number of their close contacts. Citing Dutch officials, the Dutch news outlet RTL reported that a flight attendant who was aboard the same Johannesburg flight as the cruise passenger who later died from hantavirus is currently experiencing mild symptoms and is being tested at a hospital. France24 reports that a French national is being monitored after traveling on the same flight.
U.S. health officials in Georgia, California, and Arizona confirmed that American passengers from the Hondius are being monitored in their states for infection since returning to the United States, per the New York Times. The Washington Post reports that passengers in Texas and Virginia are also being observed. So far, none of the passengers have shown any symptoms. In a statement, the CDC said it’s “closely monitoring the situation” and that the State Department is “leading a coordinated, whole-of-government response including direct contact with passengers, diplomatic coordination, and engagement with domestic and international health authorities.”
“At this time, the risk to the American public is extremely low,” the statement said.
What is the current status of the ship?
On Monday, Oceanwide Expeditions said there were 149 people onboard the Hondius representing 23 different nationalities. Of the three people who were medically evacuated Wednesday, two were crewmembers who presented with “acute respiratory symptoms” while the third is an asymptomatic individual with a connection to the passenger who passed away on May 2.
On Thursday, the operator shared updated figures regarding the number of passengers at the start of the voyage, saying 114 guests were on board on April 1 when the Hondius left Ushuaia, Argentina.

On April 15, six more guests boarded at Tristan da Cunha, bringing the total to 120 including the one deceased passenger.

As of Wednesday, the Hondius has departed Cape Verde, where it was moored off the coast following the detection of the outbreak, en route to Spain’s Canary Islands, which Oceanwide Expeditions estimates it will reach following three to four days of travel. On Thursday, the operator estimated that the Hondius would reach the port of Granadilla, Tenerife, early Sunday.
The remaining people aboard the ship are currently asymptomatic and are reportedly taking precautions like wearing masks and practicing social distancing.
The WHO confirmed Thursday that one of its experts boarded the ship in Cabo Verde and was later joined by two doctors from the Netherlands and an expert from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. The four will assess all the remaining people on board and will stay on board the vessel until it reaches the Canary Islands.
What are experts saying? On Wednesday, Ghebreyesus signaled that the outbreak doesn’t pose any wider risk so far. “At this stage, the overall public-health risk remains low,” he said.
Maria Van Kerkhove, a top infectious-disease epidemiologist at the WHO, echoed that sentiment on Tuesday. “This is not the next COVID, but it is a serious infectious disease,” she said, per the Associated Press. “Most people will never be exposed to this.”In an interview with STAT News, Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy, put it simply. “It’s not the next pandemic,” he said.
Osterholm continued, “This is one where everyone should just take a breath and know that we are going to bring this to resolution. With adequate respiratory protection, [they could] very well stop all transmission from this point forward.”
Stanford infectious-disease doctor and epidemiologist Abraar Karan also emphasized in an X thread that this poses nothing close to a COVID-like threat, though this particular hantavirus outbreak may be worse than others:
The hantavirus outbreak won’t be anything like COVID — I think that is the wrong comparison. But it can be worse (or at least more complicated) than the usual local outbreaks that occur in Argentina.
First, I suspect there could be a few more generations of infection. Those who left the ship before the outbreak was detected pose the key risk because they may have exposed others unknowingly via close contact. Case 2 who flew on the plane to Johannesburg and the Switzerland case seem to be the only reported ones thus far. Close contact is the key point here.
So it’s likely that more cases will be detected, but there is no reason for any kind of widespread panic.