Top World News

May 7, 2025 - World

Billionaire Mark Cuban offered up his unsolicited advice to the Trump administration on how to reform Medicaid without making any cuts to the entitlement. Congress has been trying to figure out how to give President Donald Trump his "big, beautiful" spending bill without making cuts to Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. Trump himself has said the entitlements would not be touched. However, DOGE's Elon Musk indicated in a March Fox News interview that entitlements would be on the table, saying, "The waste and fraud in entitlement spending — which is most of the federal spending is entitlements — so, that’s, like, the big one to eliminate. That’s the, sort of half-trillion, maybe $6-700 billion a year." ALSO READ: ‘Pain. Grief. Anger’: Families heartbroken as Trump backlash smashes adoption dreams Cuban, who owns the Dallas Mavericks and appears on "Shark Tank" alongside Trump pal Kevin O'Leary, posted on X Wednesday, "I'm against a reduction in benefits for Medicaid recipients. In fact I would like to see them get more benefits. BUT The way the system is currently constructed to move dollars from the fed gov to states and then to beneficiaries, like much of our health care system, is backa-- halfwards." Cuban continued, "States have learned how to arbitrage current laws to increase their receipts (see provider taxes ), insurance companies and their [pharmacy benefit managers] are still in the middle. Both create a lot of room for cost cuts, not only for taxpayers, but for the entire system. However. Talking about cuts and Medicaid is political suicide. What this really needs to be about is Medicaid Process Simplification. We need to make changes. Let's do what needs to be done across all of healthcare. Simplify it. Remove the arbitrage. Start with the patient, rather from the budget and work down. There is no silver bullet, but there are ways to make improvements and save money @HHSGov." According to Investopedia, "Arbitrage is the simultaneous purchase and sale of an asset in different markets to exploit tiny differences in their prices."

May 7, 2025 - World

Move sparks outrage in Iran as diplomats try to broker deal between Tehran and Washington over nuclear programmeUS politics live – latest updatesDonald Trump plans to announce while on his trip to Saudi Arabia next week that the US will now refer to the Arabian Gulf or the Gulf of Arabia rather than the Persian Gulf.The move has prompted outrage from Iranian leaders, and last-minute efforts are being made to persuade Trump to pull back from offending Iran in the midst of vital talks on the future of the Iranian nuclear programme. “If Trump went ahead with the proposal he would manage to unite every Iranian, pro- or anti-regime, against him, and that is a near impossible achievement,” one diplomat said. Continue reading...

May 7, 2025 - World

Lawyers say the Turkish national, who has been held in a Louisiana Ice center for six weeks, was illegally detainedA federal appeals court on Wednesday granted a judge’s order to bring a Turkish Tufts University student from a Louisiana immigration detention center back to New England for hearings to determine whether her rights were violated.A judicial panel of the New York-based US second circuit court of appeals ruled in the case of Rümeysa Öztürk after lawyers representing her and the US justice department presented arguments at a hearing on Tuesday.The Associated Press contributed reporting Continue reading...

May 7, 2025 - World

Judge confirms move would breach order as Libya’s rival governments say both would refuse any US deporteesThe Trump administration is reportedly planning to deport a group of immigrants to Libya, despite a judge’s efforts on Wednesday to block any such flights and the state department’s previous condemnation of the “life-threatening” prison conditions in the country.Reuters cited three unnamed US officials as saying the deportations could happen this week. Two of the officials said the immigrants, whose nationalities are not known, could be flown to the north African country as soon as Wednesday, but they added the plans could still change. The New York Times also cited a US official confirming the deportation plans. Continue reading...

May 7, 2025 - World

President Donald Trump's repeated claims that girls will have to get along with fewer dolls as his tariffs work their economic magic reveals an underlying MAGA misogyny that reinforces the beliefs of the manosphere, according to Salon's Amanda Marcotte.A week ago, Trump seemed to speak off the cuff when he said, "maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls." But Marcotte wrote that the "doll" talk became an actual talking point, as evidenced by the fact he told NBC's Kristen Welker, "I don't think a beautiful baby girl that's 11 years old needs to have 30 dolls. I think they can have three dolls or four dolls," then told reporters , "All I’m saying is that a young lady, a 10-year-old-girl, 9-year-old girl, 15-year-old-girl, doesn’t need 37 dolls."Marcotte argued that "Trump defended his trade-destroying tariffs by lecturing parents about not spoiling their daughters" who are inherently "frivolous" due to their gender, a point that speaks directly to the MAGA base that helped Trump get elected.Marcotte noted with interest that the the only children Trump talked about were girls, never boys or toys "more stereotypically associated with boys, like Legos or toy trucks."ALSO READ: ‘Pain. Grief. Anger’: Families heartbroken as Trump backlash smashes adoption dreams"This is likely not an accident, but part of a larger effort to sell the otherwise indefensible tariffs to the MAGA base by invoking the same misogynist resentment that helped Trump get elected," Marcotte wrote. "The image of 'too many' dolls taps right into this ugly worldview that overly indulged girls are growing into 'selfish' women who think they're too good to settle for Mr. Tweeting Incel."In fact, Marcotte wrote that "Trump superfans on X started arguing that the tariffs were the key to restoring male dominance. They falsely claim that tariffs will drive women out of the workforce and force them to get married to survive."Marcotte wrote that Fox News picked up on the sexist talk "and tried to argue that tariffs will restore the patriarchal gender order by bringing back manly manufacturing jobs, while destroying 'email jobs' that are primarily held by women in MAGA fantasy version of reality."Marcotte noted that whether or not Americans pick up on Trump's misogyny in delivering his tariff message, they do hear him "admitting prices are going up — and most people are smart enough to know it won't be limited to dolls."Read the Salon article here.