New York City‘s CEOs and other billionaire business leaders spent more than $40 million trying to stop Mamdani from becoming the city‘s next mayor. Now they have to live with him — and their reactions range from threatening to leave the city to pragmatic acceptance.
„I think it‘s the stages of grief,“ says Kathryn Wylde, who runs the Partnership for New York City, an influential business group that represents more than 300 large employers.
(September 2, 2025)
„There was a time where you couldn‘t speak bad, if you wanted to be a politician, you couldn‘t speak badly. But today, you have, you know, AOC plus three, and you have all these lunatics, and they‘ve really, they‘ve changed it. You‘re too young to know this, but if you go back 15 years, probably that‘s when it started… Israel was the strongest lobby I‘ve ever seen. They had total control over Congress, and now they don‘t, you know, I‘m a little surprised to see that. And people, they forgot about October 7th. You know, October 7th was a truly horrible day, because I‘ve seen the pictures,“ Trump elaborated.
(September 2, 2025)
In an interview with The Daily Caller, Trump said that because of left-wing U.S. politicians rallying against Israel and the growing unpopularity of its war in Gaza, the country is losing influence.
„Israel, you would understand this very much, Israel was the strongest lobby I’ve ever seen. They had total control over Congress, and now they don’t, you know, I’m a little surprised to see that,“ he said.
This has been the darkest year for the International Criminal Court (ICC) since it opened its doors in The Hague in 2002. Never before had the institution faced such strong headwinds. The US imposed sanctions on four judges and the chief prosecutor, the British national Karim Khan, while threats, intrigue, and pressure from Washington mounted on state parties. The objective: to annul and prevent any arrest warrants against Israelis, including those targeting Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, issued on November 21, 2024, and to close the ongoing investigation into crimes committed on Palestinian territory.
(August 2, 2025)
British lawyer Andrew Cayley, who was tasked with leading the ICC’s file on Palestine (ICC-01/18), said the months he spent working on the case in The Hague were the most difficult of his life.
“I went through the worst months of my life in The Hague,” Cayley told Le Monde.
He described receiving direct threats, including being told he was “an enemy of Israel” and warned to “watch his back.” He resigned in March 2024.
Le Monde also cited a July 17, 2024, intelligence memo from Dutch authorities warning that the ICC had become a “prime target for espionage and subversive influence” by states whose officials were at risk of prosecution.
The State Department has begun firing more than 1,300 people as part of a dramatic overhaul of the agency, according to a State Department official.
The firings will affect 1,107 civil service and 246 foreign service officers, an internal notice seen by CNN said. It comes as the State Department implements a drastic reorganization as part of the Trump administration’s broader efforts to shrink the federal government.
In fact, high-profile investors and business leaders in the Big Apple are up in arms about the stunning win by the democratic socialist in the primary to win the Democratic nomination to serve as the next New York City mayor. The three-term Assemblymember’s potential victory in the November general election could bring what the Street hates most — tax hikes and tighter regulation threatening corporate and investment interests.
“It’s disconcerting,” said Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington.
“It’s total panic,” said Shalom Lipner, a former Netanyahu aide and a fellow at the Atlantic Council, describing the mood in Jerusalem.
The Trump administration has fired the director and deputy director of the National Security Agency, the United States’ powerful cyber intelligence bureau, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the situation, members of the Senate and House intelligence committees and two former officials familiar with the matter.
The dismissal of Gen. Timothy Haugh, who also leads US Cyber Command — the military’s offensive and defensive cyber unit — is a major shakeup of the US intelligence community which is navigating significant changes in the first two months of the Trump administration.
Waltz, who previously served as a Florida congressman and as a decorated combat Green Beret, has come under fire from Democrats and critics since March, when the Atlantic magazine‘s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg published a firsthand account of getting added to a Signal group chat with top national security leaders, including Waltz, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, while they discussed strikes against Yemen terrorists. Trump and his administration have repeatedly defended the national security leader amid criticisms over the chat leak.
Signal is an encrypted messaging app that operates similarly to texting or making phone calls, but with additional security measures that help ensure communications are kept private to those included in the correspondence.
The initial market reaction suggested that the scale of the tariffs had come as a surprise to investors around the world.
Stock markets across Asia-Pacific and Europe fell Thursday and US markets were also set to open lower after US President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on trading partners around the world, with many Asian countries taking the biggest hits.
Trump and Vance may delight in shocking Europe, but their counterparts across the pond are coming to terms with the collapse of a united West. “Trump’s rhetoric melds with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s,” wrote Le Monde columnist Alain Frachon. “In less than two weeks, concessions to Moscow have piled up. Even if they had already been in the pipeline since Joe Biden’s administration: No Ukraine in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); no NATO forces to monitor a possible ceasefire; necessary territorial concessions from Kyiv.”
It’s not yet clear how the order could affect the work that several U.S. agencies do to track false claims that pose threats to election security, including the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA.
(December 16, 2024)
President Yoon Suk Yeol has changed the course of South Korea’s diplomacy like no leader before him. He put his country in lock step with the United States by countering North Korea with sanctions and joint military drills. He won Washington’s plaudits when he overcame a century of historical grievances Koreans held against Japan and helped lay the ground for trilateral cooperation to deter China.
He sang the praises of Western values such as freedom.
This is just the latest challenge for Trudeau, who has endured a very tumultuous six months.
The party lost two federal byelections in formerly rock-solid Liberal ridings in Toronto and Montreal this summer.
He also faced a caucus revolt earlier this fall, when about 25 of his own MPs wrote to Trudeau demanding he resign to save the party from electoral ruin.
The mood at Howard University had dampened after the evening started out with music pumping and crowds dancing.
As the night wore on, muted crowds watched with eyes glued to screens showing the results.
The Israeli response was yet another example of what Austin privately characterized as Netanyahu’s government “playing with house money”: taking big shots at its adversaries, knowing that the United States, as Israel’s chief ally, would throw its military and diplomatic weight behind it.
Some speculated that Biden’s new lame-duck status had further emboldened Netanyahu, who thought a possible Trump return to the White House would mean more U.S. support for Israel and less complaining. Just days before the attacks on Shukr and Haniyeh, after giving a table-thumping speech to Congress, Netanyahu had visited the former president and newly crowned Republican presidential nominee at his Florida residence.
Joe Biden’s government is urging Australia to say no to a draft UN resolution by the Palestinian authority.
The draft demands an unconditional withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank.
T.J. McCormack, a Republican communications specialist, said that after a „stratospheric liftoff“ to her campaign, any „less-than-stellar few days would constitute a bad week“ for the vice president.
„For a coddled candidate the real world can be a terrible thing, especially when that world has several multi-front wars, murdered hostages and polling firms carving up swing states with scalpels,“ McCormack told Newsweek. „Kamala loved the big stage, now she‘s in the trenches.“
The blue-chip Dow was lower by 519 points, or 1.3%. The S&P 500 lost 1.1% and the Nasdaq Composite fell by 1%.
(25.03.2024)
In a testy exchange earlier this month, a senior U.S. official warned Israeli counterparts of the reputational “damage” as a result of the ongoing war in Gaza. The internal memo of the exchange involving Assistant Secretary of State Bill Russo, obtained by NPR correspondent Daniel Estrin, offered yet another illustration of the rift between the Biden administration and Israel, driven largely by growing American horror at the humanitarian toll of the conflict and Israel’s role in making it worse — even as the United States shields Israel in international forums and helps replenish its war machine.
(22.03.2024)
„The Israelis seemed oblivious to the fact that they are facing major, possibly generational damage to their reputation not just in the region but elsewhere in the world,“ the memo says. „We are concerned that the Israelis are missing the forest for the trees and are making a major strategic error in writing off their reputation damage.“
The State Department memo recommended pressing Israeli officials on the matter „at the highest levels.“
One Democratic member of the House responded to being told of the questions about age and memory raised in the report with a morbid laugh and sullen shake of the head. Another started anxiously asking for a sense of how others were responding, palpably feeling at wit’s end.
The spectacle — at times chaotic, at times emotional — echoed around the country among the networks of Democratic donors and strategists who have been struggling for weeks to contain their concern about the state and direction of Biden’s campaign.
The broad conclusion, both inside and outside Biden’s inner circle, is that a dangerous and misleading caricature of the president’s performance is at risk of setting in, pushed by the biting prose of a special prosecutor they suspected of seeking political revenge.
Israel often boycotts international tribunals and U.N. investigations, saying they are unfair and biased. But the country’s leaders sent a high-level legal team to two days of hearings earlier this month — a sign of how seriously they regard the case and and an indication of likely concerns that any court order to halt operations would be a major blow to the country’s international standing.
„At every juncture, Netanyahu has given Biden the finger,“ Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who has been in close contact with U.S. officials about the war, told Axios. „They are pleading with the Netanyahu coalition, but getting slapped in the face over and over again.“
Behind the scenes: Biden hasn‘t spoken to Netanyahu in the 20 days since a tense Dec. 23 call, which a frustrated Biden ended with the words: „This conversation is over.“
Although a final ruling will likely take years, South Africa has requested the court issue provisional orders against Israel that could range from demanding a total and immediate ceasefire — which Israel and the US firmly oppose because Hamas has yet to dismantled — to more moderate orders such as insisting that more humanitarian aid be allowed in.
But it would be the interim ruling itself, that there is even plausibility to South Africa’s allegations, that would be the most damaging to Israel’s standing.
On Monday, Musk is set to share an audio chatroom with Robert Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist and Democratic candidate for president.
The decision to host Kennedy again highlights, for the second time in as many weeks, Musk’s unique potential to shape public opinion through a combination of his own personal celebrity and his private control of a social media megaphone.
Voters seem to have a higher opinion of the challenger than of the president.
Concerns were rising April 17 over oil production and exports in Sudan and its bigger-producing southern neighbor as fighting related to a vicious power struggle between military leaders rolled into a third day.
Saudi Arabia is mulling an invite to Assad to the Arab League summit that Riyadh will host next month.
The United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Oman, Algeria and Jordan have all resumed diplomatic ties with Assad, whose government remains under heavy US sanctions.