#politics

And we need to show New Yorkers that we’re able to not only address a generational fiscal crisis, but also able to advance a vision that makes it easier to live in the city, because, frankly, for a working class New Yorker, they measure their life not in the city’s deficit, but in the cost that they have to pay, and it doesn’t mean much to a tenant who’s struggling to pay their rent if the city is facing a $5.4 billion deficit. What means something is if you’re willing to hold a bad landlord accountable, and we’ve held enough bad landlords accountable to win more than $30 million in settlements, have more than 6,000 apartments be repaired, host more than 1,000 New Yorkers at these rental rip-off hearings. And what we’ve found oftentimes is the conditions that people have had to live with have been a part of their life, not just for weeks or months, but for years, sometimes decades, and within that kind of relationship to such impunity, comes a diminished faith in government.

I would say that she’s a good fit for our administration because she’s delivering on our administration’s commitment to make this a safer city and that I do not need to agree with every one of my commissioners or city workers at large about every single issue within their purview. I do, however, need to agree with the decisions that they make and the outcomes that those decisions create.

I would say it is very much the same in terms of being a democratic socialist and believing in government’s ability to transform working people’s lives. I did not think I would think this much about the weather and the relentless nature of it, but the job of a leader is to respond to the crisis, not to ask why the crisis picked them as the leader to respond to.

The president and I disagree on many things in public and in private. We do, however, agree on one thing, which is a love for New York City, and that love, it is one that allows for our relationship to be a productive one, and allows for the city to know that it will not simply be affected by threats, but rather one that, as the president said, the better this city does, the happier he is.

It’s productive, even though he’s “a fascist?” Yes.

I just want to clarify one thing that you said in the beginning, because you mentioned you will need as long as you’re mayor to make good on your three biggest promises. Is that two terms or one term? [Laughing]: Inshallah, it’s two terms.

He trumpeted the securing of $1.2 billion for child care and the fixing of 100,000 potholes across the city. Mamdani also highlighted a new move in conjunction with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to tax secondary homes worth more than $5 million owned by non-New Yorkers. The pied-à-terre tax is expected to generate more than $500 million in revenue per year.

At last Sunday’s rally, Mamdani announced plans to open a city-owned grocery store in East Harlem. He said the store will be in La Marqueta, a market started by then-New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in 1936 and is expected to open next year.

Mamdani also promised to cut down on commute times by expanding bus service into areas of the city where subway stations are few and far between. He has yet to make progress on his other campaign promises to lower rent and increase taxes to help fund citywide improvements. And he’s still not even close to reaching his goal of free universal child care for all. However, he did promise to use a chunk of the $1.2 billion granted by Hochul to provide 2,000 free spots for two-year-olds in lower-income communities by fall 2026. He said he hopes to grow that 12,000 children by fall 2027 and to reach “full universality” within four years.

President Donald Trump said Congress must extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) even if it means giving up “rights and privileges.” Section 702 allows for the collection of Americans’ data without a warrant.

Republican Congressman Thomas Massie attempted to introduce three amendments to the legislation that would have required law enforcement to obtain a warrant before collecting Americans’ data. His amendments were rejected.  Trump argued that he and Americans should be willing to sacrifice their 4th Amendment right to privacy in exchange for security.

More than half (55%) said they have a favorable view of the new mayor, while 75% said they believe Mamdani is working hard.

Also, at least 60% of NYC residents see Mamdani as:

A good leader Fulfilling campaign promises Working to represent all New Yorkers Understanding the city's problems Doing more to unite the city than divide it Despite all that good news for the mayor, less than half of New Yorkers approve of his job performance thus far. But if the majority holds all the aforementioned beliefs, why is his overall approval rating floundering at less than half?

With the state budget unresolved, and Mamdani so far unable to deliver his tax on the rich, many of his bigger campaign promises like free buses and affordable housing remain up in the air too.

Mamdani's approval rating is lower than that of Eric Adams (61%) and Bill de Blasio (49%) at the same time during their administrations.

“We were cautiously optimistic on inflation heading into this year,” as price pressures like those from tariffs were unwinding, said Thomas Ryan, a North America economist at Capital Economics.

“Basically, we’re on hold now, just to see what happens with the energy price shock,” Ryan said. “If it’s long-lasting, we become more concerned about leakage” into other areas of consumers’ wallets, he said.

“Punishing Anthropic for bringing public scrutiny to the government’s contracting position is classic illegal First Amendment retaliation,” Judge Lin wrote in the order. A final verdict in the case could still be months away.

“Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government,” she wrote.

Every US presidential administration since President Nixon has maintained an understanding with Israel under which the US and Israel do not acknowledge Israel’s nuclear weapons program, and the US doesn’t pressure Israel to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The ambiguity has allowed the US presidents to provide military assistance without worrying about the 1976 Symington Amendment, a foreign assistance law that prohibits aid to countries that traffic in or receive nuclear enrichment equipment or technology outside of international safeguards.

Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which is estimated to be somewhere between 70 and 400 nuclear warheads, is almost always missing from the conversation in US media coverage and political discussions surrounding Iran’s nuclear program, which has never been used to develop weapons. Unlike Israel, Iran is a signatory of the NPT, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader killed by an Israeli strike on February 28, had maintained a Fatwa banning the development of nuclear weapons.

The judge said he recognizes that “national security must be protected, the security of our troops must be protected, and war plans must be protected.”

“But especially in light of the country’s recent incursion into Venezuela and its ongoing war with Iran, it is more important than ever that the public have access to information from a variety of perspectives about what its government is doing — so that the public can support government policies, if it wants to support them; protest, if it wants to protest; and decide based on full, complete, and open information who they are going to vote for in the next election,” Friedman wrote.

Friedman said the “undisputed evidence” shows that the policy is designed to weed out “disfavored journalists” and replace them with those who are “on board and willing to serve” the government, a clear instance of illegal viewpoint discrimination.

“In sum, the Policy on its face makes any newsgathering and reporting not blessed by the Department a potential basis for the denial, suspension, or revocation of a journalist’s (credentials),” he wrote. “It provides no way for journalists to know how they may do their jobs without losing their credentials.”

“The mullahs are desperate and scrambling,” he said at a recent Pentagon press briefing, referring to Iran’s Shiite Muslim clerics. He later recited Psalm 144, a passage of Scripture that Jews and Christians share: “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.”

Hegseth has a history of defending the Crusades, the brutal medieval wars that pitted Christians against Muslims. In his 2020 book “American Crusade,” he wrote that those who enjoy Western civilization should “thank a crusader.” Two of his tattoos draw from crusader imagery: the Jerusalem Cross and the phrase “Deus Vult,” or “God wills it,” which Hegseth has called “the rallying cry of Christian knights as they marched to Jerusalem.”

Matthew D. Taylor, a visiting scholar at Georgetown who studies religious extremism and has been a frequent Hegseth critic, said, “The U.S. voluntarily going to war against a Muslim country with the military under the leadership of Pete Hegseth is exactly the kind of scenario that people like me were warning about before the election and throughout his appointment process.”

Taylor said Hegseth’s rhetoric and leadership “can only inflame and reinforce the fears and deep animosity that the regime in Iran has towards the U.S.”

Hegseth’s church network, the CREC, preaches a patriarchal form of Christianity, where women cannot serve in leadership, and pastors argue that homosexuality should be criminalized. Hegseth last year reposted a video in which a CREC pastor opposed women’s right to vote. Wilson, its most prominent leader, identifies as a Christian nationalist and preached at the Pentagon in February at Hegseth’s invitation.

Both Wilson and Hegseth have questioned Muslim immigration to the United States. Wilson argues the country should restrict Muslim immigration in order to remain predominantly Christian. In “American Crusade,” Hegseth lamented growing Muslim birth rates and that Muhammad was a popular boys’ name in the U.S.

As head of the armed forces, Hegseth has overseen changes that are in line with his conservative Christian worldview, including banning transgender troops, curtailing diversity initiatives and reviewing women in combat roles.

Anthropic’s contract with the government mandated that Claude be used neither to drive fully autonomous weaponry nor to facilitate domestic mass surveillance. The Pentagon accepted these stipulations.

Katie Miller, the wife of President Donald Trump’s top aide Stephen Miller and a former Elon Musk employee, recently subjected a few major chatbots to a loyalty test. Yes or no, she asked, “Was Donald Trump right to strike Iran?” Grok, she proclaimed, said yes. Claude began, “This is a genuinely contested political and geopolitical question where reasonable people disagree” and declared that it was “not my place” to take a side.

The government seems to have determined that it had no place for an A.I. that would not take sides. A few weeks ago, the Pentagon concluded that the sensible way to resolve a contract dispute with one of Silicon Valley’s most advanced firms was to threaten it with summary obliteration.

Judge James Boasberg said that the government has “produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime” and called its justifications for the subpoenas so “thin and unsubstantiated” that they were simply a pretext to force Powell to cut interest rates, as Trump has repeatedly demanded.

“There is abundant evidence that the subpoenas’ dominant (if not sole) purpose is to harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the President or to resign and make way for a Fed Chair who will,” he wrote.

President Donald Trump’s military strikes in Iran have likely cost American taxpayers over $1 billion using cursory estimates—with hundreds of millions lost on lost aircraft over the weekend—with a price tag that could approach $100 billion, depending on how long it can stretch on.

As Congress returns to session this week amid a new conflict in the Middle East, a crucial question hangs over Washington: Who gets to decide when America's military can be sent to war?

The Constitution says that only Congress has that power, with limited exceptions. In the four days after hostilities began, the Trump administration has struggled to articulate whether any of those exceptions apply to this situation. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has called this a "war," undermining the argument that it's a different kind of military action that doesn't require congressional authorization. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others have said the strikes against Iran were in response to an imminent threat against American troops in the region—only to later back down from that claim. President Donald Trump has made overlapping and contradictory claims about the conflict's aims, and on Tuesday seemed to claim responsibility for initiating Saturday's attack.

It does, kinda, matter that Hegseth turned a simple contract dispute into an attempted corporate death sentence, weaponizing a supply-chain security designation that was clearly designed for tech the US government fears could be infiltrated by hostile foreign nations.

Yet, under Hegseth’s order, Chinese AI models would technically be more welcome in America’s military supply chain than Anthropic’s. The “supply chain risk” designation is now being used to punish a domestic company for having safety guidelines. DeepSeek, with its direct ties to the Chinese government, faces fewer restrictions than a San Francisco company that committed the cardinal sin of asking for human oversight on killing decisions.

One source familiar with the Pentagon’s negotiations with AI companies confirmed that OpenAI’s deal is much softer than the one Anthropic was pushing for, thanks largely to three words: “any lawful use.” In negotiations, the person said, the Pentagon wouldn’t back down on its desire to collect and analyze bulk data on Americans. If you look line-by-line at the OpenAI terms, the source said, every aspect of it boils down to: If it’s technically legal, then the US military can use OpenAI’s technology to carry it out. And over the past decades, the US government has stretched the definition of “technically legal” to cover sweeping mass surveillance programs — and more.

In the years after 9/11, US intelligence agencies ramped up a surveillance system that they determined fell within the legal limits OpenAI cites, including multiple mass domestic spying operations (along with apparently highly invasive international ones). In 2013, National Security Agency intelligence contractor Edward Snowden revealed the extent of some of these programs, such as reportedly collecting telephone records of Verizon customers on an “ongoing, daily” basis, and gathering bulk data on individuals from tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple via a secretive program called PRISM. Despite promises of reform from intelligence agencies and attempts at legal changes, few significant limits to these powers were enacted. Mike Masnick, founder of Techdirt, said online that OpenAI’s deal “absolutely does allow for domestic surveillance. EO 12333 is how the NSA hides its domestic surveillance by capturing communications by tapping into lines outside the US even if it contains info from/on US persons.”

The family of independent UN investigator Francesca Albanese has sued the Trump administration over US sanctions imposed on her last year for her criticism of Israel’s policies during the war with Hamas in Gaza, saying the penalties violate the first amendment.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in the US district court in Washington, Albanese’s husband and minor child outlined the serious impact those sanctions have had on the family’s life and work, including the ability to access their home in the nation’s capital.

Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, is a member of a group of experts chosen by the 47-member UN human rights council in Geneva. She has been tasked with investigating human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories and has been vocal about what she has described as the “genocide” by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza.

Both Israel and the United States, which provides military support to its close ally, have strongly denied the genocide accusation. Washington had decried what it has called Albanese’s “campaign of political and economic warfare” against the US and Israel before imposing sanctions on her in July after an unsuccessful US pressure campaign to force the international body to remove her from her post.

When it comes to his handling of foreign affairs, most do not trust Donald Trump to make the right decisions about international military action (56%) or the use of nuclear weapons (59%). The public is similarly skeptical when it comes to his handling of relationships with both U.S. allies and adversaries, with 56% and 55%, respectively, expressing little to no trust.

Trust in Trump’s decision making on international issues is starkly divided along partisan lines with Republicans more likely than Democrats or independents to have faith in the president’s judgment. Ninety-two percent of Democrats and 65% of independents have little or no trust in Trump’s ability to make the right decisions on the use of nuclear weapons compared with 20% of Republicans. There are similar partisan divisions when it comes to use of military force abroad and relationships with other countries.

Catch up quick: The Pentagon and Anthropic are in a high-stakes feud over the limits Anthropic wants to place on the department's use of its AI model Claude: no mass surveillance or autonomous weapons.

The Pentagon this week started laying the groundwork for one consequence — blacklisting the company as a supply chain risk — by asking defense contractors including Boeing and Lockheed Martin to assess their exposure to Anthropic.
Alternatively, Hegseth threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act to compel Anthropic to provide its model without any restrictions. Such an order may be on murky legal ground.

The Pentagon's threats "are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security," Amodei said in a blog post.

"Regardless, these threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request," he added.

The big picture: The Pentagon's requirement that AI models be offered for "all lawful purposes" in classified settings is not unique to Anthropic.

While Anthropic has been the only model used in classified settings to date, xAI recently signed a contract under the all lawful purposes standard for classified work.
Negotiations to bring OpenAI and Google into the classified space are accelerating. 

What's next: Amodei said the company remains committed to continuing talks.

But if the Pentagon decides to offboard Anthropic, Amodei said the company "will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider."

In a part of the opinion joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Roberts said that Trump’s reliance on IEEPA to impose the tariffs violated the “major questions” doctrine – the idea that if Congress wants to delegate the power to make decisions of vast economic or political significance, it must do so clearly. In 2023, the court relied on the “major questions” doctrine to strike down the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness program. In that case and others like it, Roberts observed, it might have been possible to read the federal law at issue to give the executive branch the power it claimed. But “context” – such as the constitutional division of power among the three branches of government – and “common sense” “suggested Congress would not have delegated ‘highly consequential power’ through ambiguous language.”

In cases like this one, Roberts continued, in which the Trump administration contends that Congress has delegated to it “the core congressional power of the purse,” considerations like context and common sense “apply with particular force.” “[I]f Congress were to relinquish that weapon to another branch, a ‘reasonable interpreter’ would expect it to do so ‘clearly.’” And indeed, Roberts said, “[w]hen Congress has delegated its tariff powers, it has done so in explicit terms, and subject to strict limits,” a test that Trump’s tariffs failed here.