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Syria's interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa speaks during a Ministerial formation of the government of the Syrian Arab Republic, in Damascus, Syria, on March 29, 2025.
Hard Numbers: Syria gets new Cabinet, US steps up Houthi strikes, Top US vaccine official resigns, Hamas offers hostages for ceasefire, Trump eyes third term, Kashmir violence turns deadly, Trump shrugs off high car prices
23: Syria has a new transitional Cabinet. Interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa swore in his new 23-member team on Saturday, replacing caretakers who had been in those roles since former President Bashar Assad was ousted in December. While the new Cabinet is largely filled with al-Sharaa allies, it is religiously and ethnically diverse, a sign that Syria is moving forward to rebuild in the post-Assad and post-civil war era.
1: At least one person was killed amid suspected US strikes against Yemen’s Houthis on Saturday. According to the Associated Press, the Trump administration has embarked on an expanded anti-Houthi campaign in recent days, targeting ranking rebel personnel. Satellite photos also reportedly show an airstrip off Yemen that looks prepared to accept flights and B-2 bombers.
100,000: The FDA’s top vaccine official resigned on Friday after being told he could quit or be fired. Dr. Peter Marks stressed that he was worried that Robert F. Kennedy’s aggressive stance on vaccination would dangerously undermine public confidence in vaccines against common diseases such as measles, which is spreading in the US and has “killed more than 100,000 unvaccinated children last year in Africa and Asia.” An HHS spokesperson, meanwhile, said Friday that Dr. Marks didn’t belong at the FDA if he was not committed to supporting the “restoration of science to its golden standard and advocate for radical transparency.”
5-50: On Saturday, Hamas offered to release 5 hostages during the three-day Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr, which began Sunday, to secure a 50-day ceasefire. The offer came in response to a proposal the militants received from Egypt and Qatar. Israel offered a counterproposal in coordination with Washington, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is demanding the release of 10 of the remaining 24 hostages believed to still be alive.
3: US President Donald Trump mused on Sunday that he’s not joking about finding “methods” to serve a third term, including being elected VP and then having the president resign to become president by succession. While some Trump loyalists like Steve Bannon believe a third term might be possible, constitutional experts warn there’s no “one weird trick” to bypass the 22nd Amendment, which limits presidents to two elected terms.
6: Four police officers and two suspected rebels — dubbed terrorists for their opposition to Indian rule — were reportedly killed Saturday morning in Jammu and Kashmir. Thousands of people have died in battles between rebels and Indian security forces over the past few decades, but violence has lessened in recent years.
15,000: How much will US President Donald Trump’s 25% tariffs against Canada and Mexico drive up car prices? Goldman Sachs estimates a bump of between $5,000 and $15,000 per vehicle, depending on the brand and model. But Trump told NBC News on Saturday that he “couldn’t care less” if car prices soared, maintaining that manufacturers should build their vehicles in the US.
Leaked Signal chat shows Trump team's mindset
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: A Quick Take on the back of the full transcript of these Signal chat that's going on about the bombing of the Houthis. A few things here. First of all, are we surprised that a journalist is actually publishing what is clearly classified data? And there's no question, it's classified data. I mean, you're talking about the targets, the exact timing in advance of US military strikes, incredibly sensitive information, against people that are described as terrorists in the chat. And clearly, if that information had gotten out in advance when Jeffrey Goldberg had received it in real time, it would have put the operation at risk. It would have prevented it from going on. It would have been denounced as leaking classified information, and he would be facing some legal charges from the administration. So I don't think it's credible to say that this is not classified.
But since Trump and members of administration have now said that it isn't classified, there was nothing classified in it, I guess that provides legal cover since it is ultimately in the charge of the president to be able to determine, as president, whether or not something is classified. That there's nothing illegal in Goldberg and the Atlantic Magazine now taking all of that information and putting it out to the public. So is that embarrassing for the US with its allies in terms of how they're handling such a chat? The answer is of course, yes. And I expect that we're going to see a significant amount of continued focus on this topic. A lot of people are going to be asking questions about how it was that this conversation could have been had on Signal and also how it was that Goldberg could have been brought on board. But say that as it may. I mean if you are the Trump administration here, it is age-old tactic, full denial responsibility is actually of your political adversaries so blame Goldberg. Imply that maybe he tried to get on the call through nefarious ways.
It's all his fault. It's overstated. He's a fake news, no news journalist. No one should pay attention to him. He's a bad guy. I mean all of that stuff. And I was particularly bemused by Elon Musk sharing a post from the Babylon Bee saying that, "If you wanted to ensure that nobody ever saw information you'd put it on page 2 of the Atlantic." And of course, that is true for Elon, and it's true for Trump supporters. And this is why the strategy works, is because the Atlantic and the people that read the Atlantic and support the Atlantic are all considered disinformation by those that are loyal to Trump. And vice versa. Fox, and Newsmax and all of the right-wing podcasts. Those are considered fake news by people that don't support, that dislike Trump. And that allows a strategy of full denial, not engaging with the facts and blaming those that are coming after you to be successful. Now, I still think that there are interesting pieces of information here.
Perhaps the most important is that the actual policy conversation, not the details of the war fighting itself, but rather whether or not it was a good idea to be attacking the Houthis, in a big way that was potentially going to increase energy prices. And that was much less of a fight of the Americans than it would be of those in the region that are engaged in the direct proxy war with Iran or the Europeans who have a lot more directly at stake, in terms of their trade in transit. And that was a very reasonable question, and it was strongly, in other words, Vice President Vance opposed these strikes and he's the most important person. He's the most senior ranking person in this chat. Trump isn't on the chat. And he's not saying the president is wrong. He's saying, "I don't believe the president is fully informed and this clearly is not in his interest, in his policy interest."
Now, the reason this is important is because in Trump's first term, I think you would have had a very similar conversation from people like Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo and others that would have been on this chat, but then they would have brought it to the president. And many, many instances in the first term of policy disagreements that then came up and said, "Mr. President. Respectfully, we think we've got additional information and we can better carry out your will by doing X, Y, and Z." And there were checks. There were internal checks on executive authority. What we see this time around is we see JD Vance, who's obviously a very smart guy saying, "I think this is a really bad idea. We shouldn't be doing it, but I'm prepared not to raise it to the president unless I have everybody around me supporting me because I can't do this by myself. I'm just going to get my head chopped off." And there's a little bit of back and forth.
And Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff for policy in the White House and a full-on Trump loyalist, says, "Nope, the president wants this. I'm ending the conversation." And that's the end of the conversation, and it never gets to Trump. And then they go ahead and they bomb. So whatever you think about whether this was a good or a bad decision, the challenge here is that we have a big cabinet, some of whom are very capable, some of whom are absolutely not capable. But first and foremost is not getting the best information to the president because he's extremely confident. He believes that his policies are always the right ones, and he is absolutely punishing anything that feels like disloyalty, inside or outside of his team. That's why Pompeo, for example, John Bolton, have had their security details stripped away. Even though the Iranian government has been trying to assassinate them, right? Why? Because they were disloyal to Trump. That's not why they're trying to assassinate him. That's why Trump took away their security detail and that is a very strong message to everybody that is on this chat.
And I do worry, I worry that the three most powerful men in power today around the world, all in their 70s, Trump, Putin, and Xi Jinping, are also men that are incredibly confident about the rightness of their views. That loyalty is the key to the most important currency of power that exists inside those systems. And increasingly, they're not getting good information from their own advisers. That's a dangerous place for the world to be. It's a dangerous place for the world to be heading, and that's frankly the most important thing that I took out of this chat. So that's it for me. I'll talk to you all real soon, thanks.
What Trump team's war plans leak revealed
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here, and a Quick Take on this extraordinary story in The Atlantic. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of this magazine, invited into a Signal chat, the Signal app, by the national security advisor, Michael Waltz, with all of the major national security related principles in the Trump administration, to discuss imminent attacks by the United States on the Houthis in Yemen, the single biggest war fighting that the Trump administration has been involved in the first two months of their term. A lot to think about here, a few points I think worth mentioning.
The first point, it's pretty clear this should not have happened. A discussion of this sort, classified, involving direct war preparation, should not have been happening on Signal, but clearly everyone in the conversation was aware and okay with that. So, I don't think you blame singularly Mike Waltz for the fact that he was the guy that happened to bring the outsider inadvertently in. This collective responsibility, everyone, this is the way the Trump administration is handling these sensitive national security conversations, that is what needs to be looked into and rectified going forward. Mike definitely made a mistake here, and what seems almost certainly to be the case is that he thought he was including the US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, JG, same initials as Jeffrey Goldberg - and The Atlantic editor-in-chief, and he's the only obvious person, Greer, that otherwise wasn't on this broader conversation. So, I would bet my bottom dollar that is the way this happened. And I think all the people that are calling for Mike Waltz to be fired, I certainly wouldn't let him go for that. The issue is the broader lack of operational security around war decisions and fighting.
Now, as to the actual content of the conversations, frankly, I found all of the people involved to be pretty reasonable, especially in the context of how generally unprepared President Trump himself is on matters of national security. So, the fact that Vice President JD Vance was worried about the inconsistency of going to war for something that he doesn't think is a clear and direct US interest, that the US economy would be limited in terms of the impact of it, and this isn't really an American issue in the way that Trump defines American issues and war, that strikes me as not disloyal, but indeed the reality that Vance is aware of the fact that Trump doesn't know a lot of these details. But he doesn't want to bring it to Trump individually. Why not? Because he's going to get his head handed to him if he brings bad news to Trump unless everybody is on board, and of course, everybody isn't on board. There's some reasonable discussion around that, including with the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and then finally Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff and head of policy in the White House, is the one that cuts it off because, why? He's the guy that is saying, "Trump says he wants it, we're going to do it." In other words, you've got to be completely loyal to Trump, that's it. And that's exactly what we've seen from this second administration, what Trump wants, Trump gets.
Now, another interesting point here is that the Europeans are not considered allies by this group across the board. Should be clear from anybody that has seen Vance in Munich, anyone that has seen the recent interview between the US Special Envoy Witkoff and Tucker Carlson, a number of other places where that's happened. But the point is that the entire Trump cabinet is basically saying, "We shouldn't be helping the Europeans, and if we have to help the Europeans, and Lord knows we shouldn't, we have to ensure that they directly pay for American help, American assistance." This is not collective security. This is completely transactional. Also, you got a lot of that about el-Sisi in Egypt, someone that Trump has been very supportive of, and indeed the US provides more support to Egypt than any other country militarily in the world except Israel. So the last few months you would've thought that Egypt would've been an exception there. From what we've seen from the cabinet, apparently not. Certainly a concern in terms of what Egypt is and is not willing to do on the ground in Gaza for Trump. That relationship seems pretty dicey.
Final point here, Jeffrey Goldberg deserves credit. I know that Elon in particular likes to say a lot that the public is now the media, but it turns out that well-trained journalists have standards and those standards are important. I have had my disagreements with what Goldberg has had to say. Some of his positions over the years, support for the Iraq War, for example, lots of other things, but in terms of his professionalism, as soon as he realized that he had been invited into something that was an authentic conversation about actual war plans and fighting, he got out and he told Waltz that he had been mistakenly invited. He made the public aware of what was going on without divulging any of the direct war plans or outing intelligence, active intelligence member that was part of it, all of those things, it was absolutely the right thing to do. He's now getting smeared by Hegseth, the secretary of defense, who was clearly embarrassed by his own mistake and his participation and culpability in all of this. He personally won't take responsibility as we so frequently see with our political leaders and never should have gotten confirmed, in my view and in the view of many Republican senators who weren't willing to go out publicly because of course they were fearful for their own careers. But Jeff Goldberg has done the right thing in terms of his career and I commend him for it.
That's it for me. I'll talk to y'all real soon.
Smoke rises after Israeli strikes near Sanaa airport, in Sanaa, Yemen, on Dec. 26, 2024.
Israel hits the Houthis: Is this the opening of a bigger campaign?
Israel on Thursday struck military sites and power infrastructure across parts of Yemen controlled by the Houthi militia.
The move is the latest in an escalating tit-for-tat between Israel and the Iran-backed rebels who control most of Yemen and have launched several missiles and drones at Israel over the past week alone.
The Houthis pledged solidarity with Hamas in the days after the group’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and have attacked Israel directly as well as ships in the Red Sea since then.
Earlier this week, Israel threatened to kill the group’s leaders after a Houthi missile landed in a Tel Aviv playground.
Is this just a prelude? Israel in recent months has severely hobbled Iran’s other two main regional proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, killing the leaders of both groups. Is Israel gearing up for a bigger campaign against the last relatively unscathed part of Iran’s “axis of resistance”?An F/A-18 Hornet approaches the flight deck of aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt as USS McFaul trails behind, October 30, 2001. Theodore Roosevelt and its carrier airwing are conducting missions in support of operation Enduring Freedom.
Hard Numbers: US friendly fire downs F/A-18, Russia guns down prisoners, US court rules on Pegasus spyware case, China goes after Canadian activists
2: Two US Navy pilots were forced to eject from their F/A-18 fighter over the Red Sea on Sunday during a “friendly fire” incident when a US warship targeted their plane with a missile. Both pilots survived the ejection but one sustained minor injuries, and it is not immediately clear why the ship, which was on station to shoot down Houthi missiles launched from Yemen, fired upon the aircraft.
127: Russian forces have summarily executed at least 127 Ukrainian troops this year according to prosecutors investigating these war crimes. The figures is an immense spike — officials counted just 20 summary executions of prisoners of war in 2022 and 2023 combined — suggesting an alarming shift in Russian doctrine.
1,400: A US court on Friday ruled that Israeli cyber-intelligence firm NSO Group was liable for hacking the devices of 1,400 WhatsApp users using the secretive software known as Pegasus, in violation of US cybersecurity laws. Pegasus has been implicated in hacks on dissidents by authoritarian governments around the world, and has been on a US blacklist since 2021.
20: Beijing announced Sunday it was taking punitive action against twenty people and two Canadian institutions advocating on behalf of the human rights of Tibetan and Uyghur minorities in China. The measures include asset freezes, bans on entry to China, and seizure of any real estate in the PRC. They come just weeks after Canada also announced sanctions on Chinese officials accused of human rights abuses.People, mainly Houthi supporters, rally to mark the anniversary of the birth of the Prophet Mohammad and to show solidarity with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, in Sanaa, Yemen, September 15, 2024.
Netanyahu vows retaliation against Houthis, Hezbollah threatens war
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday vowed that the Houthis would pay a “heavy price” after a missile fired from Yemen struck central Israel. The Houthis credited theability of new hypersonic ballistic missiles to evade interception by Israel’s Iron Dome defense system and warned of more strikes ahead of the anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks “in solidarity with the Palestinians.”
Hamas welcomed the strike, which represents an escalation from Houthi aggression against Israeli-linked ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden since November. The group had previously also fired missiles at the Israeli port city ofEilat and struck Tel Aviv with a drone in July, killing one man and wounding four others.
Also this weekend,Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Naim Qassem, warned Israel that a full-scale war on Lebanon would result in “large losses on both sides” and further displacement of Israelis. Qassem made the remarks after Israel’s Channel 13 reported that Netanyahu was “on the verge” of launching a “broad and strong operation” on the country’s northern border with Lebanon.The Israeli military reported Saturday that it struck Hezbollah “weapons storage facilities” in Lebanon after “a barrage of 55 projectiles” were fired from Lebanese to Israeli territory earlier that morning. We’re watching for signs of further escalation.Flames and smoke rise from the site of Israeli air strikes at the port of Hodeidah, Yemen July 21, 2024.
Israel and the Houthis escalate their fight
In support of Palestinians now under fire in Gaza, Houthi rebels based in Yemen have attacked ships they say are affiliated with Israel in the Red Sea and have sent missiles and drones flying toward Israeli targets. Israel, with help from the US and neighboring Arab countries, has blocked most of those attacks.
But last Friday, the Houthis claimed credit for adrone attack on a Tel Aviv apartment building that killed one Israeli man and injured eight more. Israel responded with air strikes on the Houthi-controlled Red Sea port of Hodeidah in Yemen. Authorities there said the Israeli attack killed three civilians and injured 80.
The Biden administration has designated the Houthis a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist Group,” but has so far stopped short of the more serious label as a ”Global Terrorist Organization” for fear that automatically resulting sanctions would do little to deter the group but deepen the misery of Yemen’s large number of starving people.
There are several questions raised by this dramatic Israel-Houthi escalation.
- Will it distract Israel’s government from the more dangerous fights with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon?
- The Houthis claim the Saudis, who fought the Houthis in Yemen’s civil war, provided the Israeli strike with access to its airspace. Can the Saudis stay out of the conflict?
- How much damage will Iran allow their Houthi allies to sustain before they become directly involved?
- Will the attack on this crucial Yemeni port add to the humanitarian disaster inside Yemen?
Neither the Saudis nor Iran wants to get caught in a shooting war. And despite the escalation, the Israeli-Houthi fight will probably remain contained. But the stakes are high enough that no government in the region can afford to stop watching.
The Galaxy Leader commercial ship, seized by Yemen's Houthis last month, is seen off the coast of al-Salif, Yemen, December 5, 2023.
Hard Numbers: Migrant boat capsizes off Yemen coast, US banana giant found liable for murders, EU stocks up on bird flu vaccines, “Pink slime” crisis in America
8: A South Florida jury found US banana giant Chiquita liable for the deaths of eight men killed by the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, a right-wing paramilitary group designated as terrorists by the US. Chiquita, which financed the AUC with nearly $2 million, was ordered to pay the victims’ families $38.3 million in penalties. Under its former name, the United Fruit Company, Chiquita was famously meddlesome in Latin American politics – its infamous 1928 massacre of striking banana workers in Colombia was immortalized in Nobel laureate Gabriel García Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
40 million: These vaccines are for the birds – literally. The European Union has secured 40 million doses of bird flu vaccine as cases of the disease continue to rise. So far, at least 10 US states have reported outbreaks among farm animals in recent months, with three cases of the illness jumping to humans.
1,265: Pink slime is oozing through America. A new study has found that at least 1,265 websites are masquerading as local news outlets while drawing funding from dark money sources or openly political financiers on the left and right. The sites are particularly concentrated in swing states. The grossest part of the story? Owing to the long-standing decline of local journalism, these imposter sites, known as “pink slime” (a beef industry term), now outnumber legitimate local outlets for the first time.