EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

NEWS NEWS

1. Trump hush-money trial: Closing arguments ended with the judge to give jury instructions today.

2. Alito flag controversy: Justice Alito's explanation for his wife's upside-down flag incident contradicts evidence.

3. Louisiana law: Governor Landry signed a bill allowing police to arrest those documenting their activities.

4. French troops in Ukraine: Ukraine's top general retracted a statement about French military instructors training troops in Ukraine.

NOT NEWS NEWS

1. Jenna Ellis suspension: Former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis agreed to a three-year suspension of her law license.

2. Jan. 6 plaque delay: Congress failed to install a plaque honoring Jan. 6 police officers by the March deadline.

3. Mexico's first female president: Claudia Sheinbaum is likely to become Mexico's first female president.

4. Solar generation increase: Solar power generation increased by 25% compared to last year.

5. China's emissions: China's CO2 emissions might have peaked in 2023 due to a massive influx of solar and wind power.

6. Teen depression and social media: Evidence suggests that social media might not be the sole driver of increased teen depression.

7. Ozempic clinical trial: Ozempic was found to reduce the risk of kidney disease progression, major cardiovascular events, and death by 24%.

8. UCLA medical school: Racial preferences in admissions have led to a decline in educational quality and national rankings at UCLA's medical school.

QUICK ROUNDUP (May 24th thru May 27th):

• Louisiana’s legislature passed a bill that would designate abortion pills as dangerous controlled substances and make possessing them without a prescription a crime punishable with jail time. The Republican governor is expected to sign it.

• Senate Republicans again blocked a bipartisan border-security bill. Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona independent who helped negotiate it, also voted no.

• July 4th ([TS] really?) UK is going to hold general elections (current PM is Rishi Sunak)

• Cannabis tops alcohol as US drug of choice

• Biden met with Egypt, they now agree to let aid and fuel into Gaza.

• Good story about leader of Hamas, Yahoo Sinwar, who was treated by a Jewish dentist in an Israeli prison infirmary.

• Putin overhauled his Defense Ministry

• 2,000+ people died in a landslide in Palau New Guinea, 18 people died from storms in AR, KY, OK, TX (hundreds of thousands w/o power), 34 died in fires in India, cyclone in Bangladesh killed 23+ people

• ISRAEL / HAMAS:

  • Hamas fired barrage of rockets at Israel for the first time in months

  • Gaza pier attacked, has broken apart and is nonoperational. Aid that was delivered was stolen by Hamas. [TS] $320M perhaps poorly spent…

  • Israeli airstrike targeting leaders incidentally hit a Hamas munitions supply, creating an explosion and igniting a nearby tent camp, killing 35 people in Rafa. Update on strike:

    • Strike was not in the safe zone

    • Strike was not aimed at the refugee camp

    • Strike used limited munitions, suggestions the secondary explosion and fire was due to hitting something combustible.

    • Hamas not only was operating and had leaders next to the camp, but also had a rocket launcher in the ground next door and was clearly storing munitions there.

  • Benny Gantz, a member of the Israeli war cabinet, said he wanted to establish a commission to investigate the failure to stop the Oct. 7 attacks and to analyze Israel’s conduct in the war.

• Polls still lean Trump, but closer examination reveals weakness:

  • Trump gains are with young/not active voters

  • Biden gains within older demo

• Trump has a rally in the Bronx (aerial photos show it was not a packed house) with two rappers:

  • Sheff G - charged with attempted murder and a central figure in a sweeping gang case

  • Sleepy Hallow - facing conspiracy charges in the same criminal case

• Trump gets booed/heckled at a libertarian convention.

  • Also, his team failed to submit the required paperwork by the specified deadline, disqualifying him from being considered as a candidate for the Libertarian nomination.

• Trump suggests he can get WaPo’s Evan Gershkovich free from Russia’s prisons, but only if you elect him. [TS] Sounds like, “Vote for me or the reporter doesn’t come home.”

  • [RELATED] Trevor Reed: “As a former wrongful detainee in Russia, I would just like to remind everyone that President Trump had the ability to get myself and Paul Whelan out of Russia for years and chose not to. I would be skeptical of any claims about getting Evan Gershkovich back in a day.”

• Trump has a nice Memorial Day message.

• Musk’s AI company - xAI raised $6B

• Mexico City worries about running out of water

1.) Trump hush-money trial (Day 22)

• Closing arguments wrapped up for the defense and prosecutors.

  • Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass, spoke for more than four hours,

  • It ended at 8pm

• Trial will resume at 10am today

  • The judge will give instructions to the jury before it begins deliberations.

[TS] Trump also learned a bit about the criminal justice process in NY:

[TS] I’m reminded of this quote:

“About 90% of the outrage from Trump and his supporters is learning how something works for the first time”

[RELATED] Judge Cannon delayed the classified documents case - again.

Judge Cannon denied Trump’s motion for sanctions and the DoJ’s motion for a gag order without prejudice, criticizing the DoJ for filing without a proper meet and confer, which leaves the issue unresolved and potentially delays further action.

[RELATED 2] Biden will likely give remarks at WH after verdict. [TS] I’m guessing this is because genpop probably doesn’t know what’s going on / has tuned this out.

[UPDATE] Trump has another comment on the trial:

What is he talking about?

Trump was welcome to use an advice of counsel defense if he agreed to the legal terms, specifically that you have to waive attorney client privilege & likely testify. Trump refused to waive privilege because the DA would get ALL attorney client communications, and we know he’s too chicken to testify.

2.) NYT: Alito’s wife’s flag story — the first flag — falls apart.

Per Jodi Kantor (NYT):

Mrs. Alito's conflict with her neighbors in Virginia escalated so much that the neighbors called the police. But that final incident, which Justice Alito said helped spur his wife to raise the upside-down flag, happened a month after the flag was up

There are some differences: For instance, the justice told Fox News that his wife hoisted the flag in response to Ms. Baden’s vulgar insult. A text message and the police call — corroborated by Fairfax County authorities — indicate, however, that the name-calling took place on Feb. 15, weeks after the inverted flag was taken.

[TS] What’s the saying? “If you tell a doozy, you must recusey?”

Not a good look having a US flag inverted on your property (let alone after Jan 6th, let alone if you’re a sitting Supreme Court justice!!) Especially not a good look to be caught lying about the reason you hung the flag upside down to begin with…

This explanation never made sense anyway. Why hang a US flag upside down after an argument with a neighbor? When are the Senate dems going to pass some ethics rules for SCOTUS? This is getting ridiculous, these justices can not be trusted to police their own behavior.

3.) Louisiana Gov. Landry (R) has signed a bill giving police the ability to arrest reporters and others documenting their activities in order to block public scrutiny of police violence

The previous governor, John Bel Edwards (D) vetoed this bill last year. The bill HB173 creates the crime of approaching an officer while they are engaged in their duties. People have to back up 25ft if an officer tells them to or they face arrest.

4.) KYIV POST: French Troops Coming to Ukraine, Syrsky Says, Then Walks Back Announcement

Ukraine’s top general, Oleksandr Syrsky said an agreement has been signed in which France will prepare to send military instructors to train Ukrainian troops directly on Ukrainian territory.

5.) NEW: Former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis agrees to a three-year suspension of her Colorado law license for a felony guilty plea in Georgia for attempting to overturn the 2020 election results.

6.) CBS: Congress defies its own law, fails to install plaque honoring Jan. 6 police officers

Lofgren and a group of other top House Democrats are questioning why a small plaque to honor police officers who saved the Capitol — and the lawmakers and staffers working there — on Jan. 6, 2021 was not completed or installed by the March 2023 deadline required by law.

But Republicans on a House Appropriations subcommittee declined to answer questions about its progress and instead referred CBS News to the Speaker's office.

A spokesperson for House Speaker Mike Johnson answered no questions about the progress of the work on the plaque or offer an explanation for the delay. The spokesperson instead issued a statement to CBS News, which said, "The Speaker's office is working with the (Architect of the Capitol) to get the plaque mounted."

7.) Mexico is likely to elect Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City.

If elected she would become Mexico’s first female president, marking a significant milestone in the country’s history.

[TS] She has a pretty interesting backstory.

8.) Solar generation up 25% compared to Mar last year.

[RELATED] Who has banned solar and wind energy development?

[TS] Interesting to see Vermont, Connecticut, and parts of Oregon and California. The dem lawmakers must be cozy to oil.

9.) Per Lauri Myllyvirta from Asia Policy: China’s emissions might have peaked in 2023.

Key drivers of the emission drop:

• massive influx of solar & wind power covered almost all of added power use despite rapid demand growth

• emissions from steel & cement fell sharply, as the construction slump continued

• oil consumption growth stopped, after post-Covid rebound

These trends indicate that China’s CO2 emissions may have peaked in 2023. However, there is a wide disagreement between the clean energy industry and government on clean energy growth, with the government's level of ambition far below current rate of clean energy additions.

10.) [TS] Seems to be growing body of evidence that shows social media might to be the sole driver of increased depression among teens.

A datapoint to consider from NYT ([TS] - the whole article is great):

Here is another story. In 2011, as part of the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a new set of guidelines that recommended that teenage girls should be screened annually for depression by their primary care physicians and that same year required that insurance providers cover such screenings in full. In 2015, H.H.S. finally mandated a coding change, proposed by the World Health Organization almost two decades before, that required hospitals to record whether an injury was self-inflicted or accidental — and which seemingly overnight nearly doubled rates for self-harm across all demographic groups. Soon thereafter, the coding of suicidal ideation was also updated. The effect of these bureaucratic changes on hospitalization data presumably varied from place to place. But in one place where it has been studied systematically, New Jersey, where 90 percent of children had health coverage even before the A.C.A., researchers have found that the changes explain nearly all of the state’s apparent upward trend in suicide-related hospital visits, turning what were “essentially flat” trendlines into something that looked like a youth mental health “crisis.”

What do we really know about the state of mental health among teenagers today? Suicide offers the most concrete measure of emotional distress, and rates among American teenagers ages 15 to 19 have indeed risen over the past decade or so, to about 11.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2021 from about 7.5 deaths per 100,000 in 2009. But the American suicide epidemic is not confined to teenagers. In 2022, the rate had increased roughly as much since 2000 for the country as a whole, suggesting a national story both broader and more complicated than one focused on the emotional vulnerabilities of teenagers to Instagram. And among the teenagers of other rich countries, there is essentially no sign of a similar pattern. As Max Roser of Our World in Data recently documented, suicide rates among older teenagers and young adults have held roughly steady or declined over the same time period in France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, Greece, Poland, Norway and Belgium. In Sweden there were only very small increases.

[RELATED] A study from NBER finds the opposite: Further Evidence on the Global Decline in the Mental Health of the Young

“We show that young people with poorer mental health spend more time in front of a screen on the internet or their smartphone…This evidence appears important because it is among the first research to use panel data on individuals to track (this)”

[TS] This could point to a Reverse Causality: ie Several studies suggest that depressive symptoms might lead to increased social media use rather than the other way around. Depressed teens may turn to social media as a way to alleviate negative feelings or fulfill unmet social needs, rather than social media causing the depression in the first place.

11.) [TS] I’ve covered this before, but in a major clinical trial, Ozempic was found to reduce the risk of kidney disease progression, major cardiovascular events, and death by 24%

The reason I’m highlighting this again is to show some graphs on obesity. Here’s the obesity rate by country:

[TS] France is really an outlier here. Take note of that, because it makes this next graph really interesting:

12.) Free Beacon: 'A Failed Medical School': How Racial Preferences, Supposedly Outlawed in California, Have Persisted at UCLA

Up to half of UCLA medical students now fail basic tests of medical competence (CONTEXT: national failure rate is about 5%). Whistleblowers say affirmative action, illegal in California since 1996, is to blame.

Specific incidents highlight these issues: students failing to identify major arteries during operations and lacking basic lab test knowledge have been cited by faculty as alarming indicators of a decline in educational quality

This shift has coincided with UCLA's drop in national rankings and an increase in the number of students failing key medical exams. Faculty and admissions officers have expressed concerns about the qualifications of incoming students, citing instances where less academically qualified candidates were admitted over more qualified ones. The ongoing debate highlights tensions between the goals of diversity and maintaining high academic standards.