- Disgraced former president Donald Trump weighing in with invaluable insight on the GOP speaker’s race

Beneath the looming specter of an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza, two hostages from the October 7 Hamas attack were returned to safety. 
 

• The armed wing of Hamas announced on Monday that it had released on poor health grounds two elderly Israeli women who had been held as hostages. The pair, identified by Israeli media as Nurit Cooper and Yocheved Lifshitz, are the third and fourth hostages to be released by Hamas, following the return of an American mother and her daughter to U.S. custody on Friday. All four were among the more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas in the October 7 terrorist attacks that claimed 1,400 Israeli lives. More than two weeks after the horrors of the October 7 attack, world leaders are urging the government of Israel and its Israel Defense Forces to operate by the laws of war as outlined in the Geneva Conventions, and calls for a ceasefire continue to grow. As Israel prepares for a ground invasion, many families of hostages abducted in the October 7 attack are imploring the government to rein in military action and instead focus on negotiating the release of their loved ones, who are likely being held in the besieged territory. 
   

• According to several U.S. government officials, the Biden administration has advised Israel to delay a ground invasion of Gaza in order to buy time for further hostage negotiations and in order to allow humanitarian aid to reach Palestinian civilians affected by the war. The administration is not making any specific demands of Israel, and still supports the ground invasion toward Israel’s goal of eradicating Hamas. President Biden spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has had near-daily phone calls with his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant. The Pentagon has sent multiple military advisers to Israel to aid in planning ahead of the invasion. Israeli air strikes continued to hit Gaza, but also Syria, Lebanon, and the West Bank, where a mosque in the Jenin refugee camp was struck on Sunday, killing two people. The Palestinian death toll has climbed to over 4,700 according to latest reports. 
   

• Former president Barack Obama took to his personal Medium account to release a statement on Israel and Gaza. He reiterated a belief in Israel’s rights to defend itself and to exist, but the former president was also circumspect, saying, “any Israeli military strategy that ignores the human costs could ultimately backfire.” He also called attention to the thousands of Palestinian civilians already killed, “many of them children.” He continued, “Hundreds of thousands have been forced from their homes. The Israeli government’s decision to cut off food, water and electricity to a captive civilian population threatens not only to worsen a growing humanitarian crisis; it could further harden Palestinian attitudes for generations, erode global support for Israel, play into the hands of Israel’s enemies, and undermine long term efforts to achieve peace and stability in the region.” He did not call for a ceasefire, and expressed his full support for “President Biden’s call for the United States to support our long-time ally in going after Hamas, dismantling its military capabilities, and facilitating the safe return of hundreds of hostages to their families.”

Even as Western leaders are increasingly moving towards criticizing the Israeli government’s wartime decisions, in line with global humanitarian aid organizations like Amnesty International, private citizens in some of the country’s largest industries have been retaliated against for taking similar positions. 
 

• Maha Dakhil, a top Hollywood agent who represents stars like Reese Witherspoon, Natalie Portman, Ava DuVernay, and Anne Hathaway, was asked to step down from her leadership role as Co-Head of Motion Pictures at CAA after she reposted an Instagram Story on Wednesday about the Israeli-Hamas conflict. Dakhil’s own comment on the post read, in part, “What’s more heartbreaking than witnessing genocide? Witnessing the denial that genocide is happening.” The posts were later deleted and Dakhil issued an apology, saying, “Like so many of us, I have been reeling with heartbreak. I pride myself on being on the side of humanity and peace…I’m so grateful to Jewish friends and colleagues who pointed out the implications and further educated me. I immediately took the repost down. I’m sorry for the pain I have caused.” CAA stated that Dakhil will still work with her clients, but not in a leadership role on their board.
   

• Similarly, Paddy Cosgrave, the CEO Web Summit, of one of the world’s largest technology conferences, resigned on Saturday in response to outrage over remarks he made about the conflict. Last week, he wrote on X, the website formerly known as Twitter, “War crimes are war crimes even when committed by allies, and should be called out for what they are,” referring to Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza. A former Facebook executive David Marcus wrote in reply, “You could've taken a more nuanced [stance], condemning these atrocities and calling for restraint. That would've been acceptable. You chose to support terrorists. As such I'll never attend/sponsor/speak at any of your events again.” Google, Meta, Amazon, and Intel, all withdrew from the event in the wake of Cosgrave’s comments. In an apology, Cosgrave wrote that he “unequivocally” supports Israel’s right to defend itself, but “like so many figures globally, I also believe that, in defending itself, Israel should adhere to international law and the Geneva Conventions – i.e. not commit war crimes.” 
   

• University of California Berkeley Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology Michael Eisen—who is himself Jewish and has family in Israel—announced that he was being replaced as Editor-in-Chief of eLife Magazine for retweeting an article from satirical website The Onion entitled, “Dying Gazans Criticized For Not Using Last Words To Condemn Hamas.” Many in the science community, fellow Jewish academics among them, wrote letters in his defense. Manhattan’s famed 92NY, one of the city’s leading cultural organizations, announced on Monday that it was halting its prestigious literary reading series after pulling an event from Pulitzer Prize-winning Novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen last week. The decision to cancel Nguyen’s event was made regarding his criticism of Israel’s “grave crimes against humanity,” as one of more than 750 signatories to a letter to the London Review of Books about the conflict, and support for the BDS movement, which calls for boycotting, divesting from, and sanctioning Israel. Bernard Schwartz, 92NY’s Poetry Center director called the organization’s decision to cancel Nguyen’s event “unacceptable.” 
   

The Netanyahu government is broadly considered the most far-right coalition in Israeli history, and its antidemocratic actions had already been the subject of protests held by tens of thousands of Israeli civilians for months before the unconscionable October 7 Hamas attack. Companies in the United States retaliating against critics of that government with forced resignations, terminations, and demotions sets a dangerous precedent.  

BIG NEWS! Lovett, Tommy, and Favreau have written their very first book: Democracy Or Else: How To Save America in 10 Easy Steps, coming June 4th, 2024. Democracy or Else will take you on a step-by-step journey through the daunting task of citizenship - from voting basics to volunteering, organizing, running for office and beyond.

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We’ll be sharing more in the coming months, but if you’ve heard a podcast, you probably know how important pre-orders are to landing on the New York Times Bestsellers List. Ask yourself: Do you really want to live in a world where Donald Trump Jr. is on the NYT bestseller list and we aren’t? I know I don’t. We don’t have a shameless father who can get the RNC to buy 100,000 copies of our book, and that’s why we are counting on you. Pre-order Democracy or Else now at crooked.com/books or wherever books are sold.

In three major upcoming elections—a ballot initiative in Ohio, a gubernatorial election in Kentucky, and a fight for the state legislature in Virginia—abortion will be the key issue. Abortion rights measures won in all six states where they appeared on ballots in 2022, including red and swing states. Democrats have also won special elections in battleground states on the strength of reproductive-rights organizing. But it’s been more of an uphill battle to unseat anti-abortion governors and members of Congress, and most 2024 Republican candidates seem to be competing with one another to see who can propose the most ghoulish anti-abortion policy. Lubbock County, TX commissioners voted on Monday to outlaw transporting another person along the county’s roads for an abortion. This is part of a conservative legal strategy to even further restrict abortion in the wake of last year’s Dobbs ruling. Nine cities and counties in Texas have considered such bans, and six have enacted them—Lubbock is the largest. Texas already has one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans.

It’s been almost three full weeks since the House of Representatives had a speaker, and now a clown car of eight Republican members of the lower chamber have thrown their hats in the ring. Will we ever have a speaker again? Not if this GOP caucus has anything to say about it. 

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) was arraigned in Manhattan on Monday on new charges of accepting bribes from the Egyptian government. He’s also charged with conspiring to act as a foreign agent while serving as a member of Congress. He pleaded not guilty. Lol okay Bob!

Right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has begun his campaign for next year’s European parliamentary elections by going on the offensive against many of the European Union’s leaders. Meanwhile, disgraced former president Donald Trump referred to Orban as the leader of…Turkey.

Oil giant Chevron has agreed to buy Hess for $53 billion in an all-stock deal to gain a larger U.S. oil footprint after rival Exxon made a similar $60 billion acquisition earlier this month. Chevron CEO Mike Wirth today told the Financial Times a series of frankly hilarious lies about his daily schedule, including that he gets up at 3:45 for a 90-minute workout and reads six newspapers in 45 minutes, among other lies like “We are not selling a product that is evil.” Yay fossil fuels!

Fans of the Houston Astros are begging Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to stay home from the team’s postseason games, as they have lost almost every game he has attended, which they have dubbed the “Cruz curse.” We think of the “Cruz curse” more generally as “Anywhere this man goes, terrible vibes follow.”

Los Angeles isn’t known for being walkable. But the fantasy Los Angeles of our gay, progressive dreams? That’s a different story. 

Lace up a pair of Cariuma x Lovett Or Leave It kicks and step into a world where people can safely ride bikes while reading Gay News, dogs can surf, and the rant wheel has arms and legs. They’re the perfect shoes to kick off the fall, whether you’re gearing up for work, school, or another day of following your dog around until they poop.

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A key architect of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) signature policy initiative to cancel student loan debt, Jon Donenberg, will join the Biden administration's National Economic Council as a deputy director. 

Meanwhile the Debt Collective, an anti-debt group, sent letters to 2,777 Morehouse College alums informing them that it had purchased their student loans from a collection agency and forgiven them.

Martin Scorcese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon”, a three-hour epic about the brutal murders of the Osage people in Oklahoma during the 1920’s, raked in a $23 million opening weekend, an especially impressive feat considering there has been no promotion by its actors due to the Screen Actors Guild strike. 

Former Florida Republican lawmaker Joe Harding, who authored the infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill will serve four months in federal prison for fraud and money laundering of pandemic relief funds. Tale as old as time!

The European Union Tax Observatory suggested on Monday that governments create a global minimum tax on billionaires as part of ongoing efforts to fight tax evasion from the super-rich. The tax could raise a quarter of a trillion dollars annually, and would only account for about 2 percent of the nearly $13 trillion in wealth held by 2,700 billionaires globally.