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Translation of the article from The Wall Street Journal
How does Trump's report card on the Middle East look after six months? When it comes to rhetorical skills, the grade is A+. The support for Israel is unequivocal. The threats against Iran are unequivocal. The messages are more hawkish than ever. According to his words alone, the Houthis will be dismantled, Iran will surrender, the Gazans will emigrate, and a Riviera will be established in Gaza.
When it comes to actions, the picture is much less rosy. Indeed, Trump released the essential ammunition to Israel that his predecessor, Biden, had frozen. His threats helped restore 38 hostages from Hamas captivity in Gaza. He launched a large-scale air strike against the Houthis and promoted significant military forces to the area.
But in practice, in the test of the results, Trump caused significant damage precisely in what was the base for stabilizing the region and deterring radical Islam: the lack of any gap between Israel and the United States. The crisis between Biden's United States and Netanyahu's Israel encouraged Hamas to launch an attack and then avoid laying down its arms.
The de facto boycott of Netanyahu's government by the Biden administration in 2023 and the ammunition embargo in 2024 provided Iran with a basis to think that it could arm the terrorist organizations in the area and rush towards the core.
Without intending to, this is exactly what Trump is doing, and worse. While making threats against Iran, he is conducting advanced negotiations with it that will allow it, according to his words, to remain with a civilian core and perhaps also with enrichment at a certain level. His inexperienced representative, Steve Witkoff, does not master the details and exchanges versions publicly, while he is faced with a team of a country whose pride is in trading and trading in the bazaars of its cities for thousands of years.
This week, the crack widened and more daylight illuminated the Middle East: President Trump announced that he would stop the attacks on the Houthis after they agreed to stop attacking American ships on the way to the Suez Canal. In simple words: the United States withdrew from the area while de facto reconciling with the continued Houthi firing into the State of Israel, a ballistic missile at a rate of one per day. The only missile that was not intercepted opened a gap a width and depth of tens of meters inside Ben Gurion Airport.
Days earlier, a ground invasion was organized into Houthi land from a coalition of Saudi Arabia, Yemen and other forces in order to eliminate the terrorist organization. But for the renewal of trade traffic on an important global trade route and the reduction of a few tenths of a percent in inflation, the Houthis received salvation.
In practice, according to the Houthi model, the nuclear agreement with Iran will end in exactly the same way: a momentary American interest that ignores the existential Israeli interest and the panic of the Sunni countries in the Middle East.
Trump has not yet realized his promise to harm the Iranians for every terrorist act of their Houthi proxies. The President tends to dismiss questions on such matters with words like
״We will see, we will see what happens״.
What is happening is that the Iranians are drawing considerable encouragement from Trump's behavior. The frightened country whose arms were severely beaten by Israel and whose air defense systems were eliminated with advanced weapons that it does not even have the slightest idea about, may now receive a nuclear agreement worse than the one that Obama promoted. It is worse because the Iranian nuclear program has advanced significantly in the past decade.
Let's be honest. Had it been President Biden, the Israeli right wing led by Benjamin Netanyahu would have been raging, accusing the president of throwing the country under the wheels of the bus. The prime minister would have traveled to Washington to speak in Congress and organize senatorial petitions against the president. But who will Netanyahu convince now, AOC?
It is not too late for Trump to change direction. The Iranians are on their knees, he should not offer them a hand for a local and dubious achievement that will endanger the Middle East.
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Strategic Initiatives
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M, marijuana leaf
S, smiley face
1, cross
3, skull with three prominent holes
What’s it spell? The New York Times can’t say.
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(Embarrassing the legacy media with the truth since 2021.)
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Democratic politicians no longer deny Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the illegal immigrant deported to El Salvador on March 15, is part of the brutal MS-13 criminal gang. But the legacy media insists otherwise — and is waging a bizarre campaign to convince readers to ignore the evidence in front of their own eyes.
Like other recent media efforts to rewrite reality, such as the Times’s decision to bury the truth about Army Capt. Rebecca Lobach’s responsibility for January’s Washington, D.C. plane crash, trying to make a hero of Garcia is unlikely to work. But legacy outlets still can’t see these games do nothing but damage their credibility.
To be clear, I believe Garcia deserves due process. Ironically, the Trump administration could have sent him anywhere except El Salvador. I wish the administration would just bring him back (and then deport him again). Nothing will reduce the public’s current support for tight borders faster than the specter of people, American citizens in particular, being wrongly deported.
But this question isn’t about whether Garcia should get due process. It’s about how the media is trying to deify him. Soon after Garcia was sent home in March, the Atlantic and other outlets had created a narrative: he was an innocent, hard-working father of a five-year-old autistic boy. He was a proud American to be, a young man who had escaped El Salvador’s gangs for a better life.
The truth is considerably uglier:
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In 2020 and again in 2021, Garcia’s wife accused him in court filings of hitting her and hurting her kids:
According to the petition filed by Jennifer Vasquez… Garcia verbally abused her, kicked her, slapped her, shoved her, mentally abused her kids, locking them in their bedroom while they cried, and detained Vasquez against her will…
This newly released petition was filed in 2020, prior to the petition Vasquez filed against Garcia 2021. In that filing, Vasquez claimed he bruised, punched, and scratched her…
Then, in 2022, Garcia was stopped in Tennessee for speeding. He said he was driving from Texas to his home in Maryland. But none of the eight passengers with him had any luggage, leading the officer stopped him to suspect “a human trafficking incident.” After over an hour of questioning, he was let go.
This history raises an obvious question: what exactly did an illegal immigrant have to do during the Biden Administration to get deported? Not attacking your wife seems like a fairly low bar, but it is one that Kilmar Abrego Garcia could not meet.
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Then there is the allegation Garcia was part of MS-13, a brutal gang founded in the 1980s in Los Angeles by refugees from El Salvador’s civil war. By 2006, MS-13 had 10,000 American members, and was a target of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In 2019, Garcia was arrested alongside two known members of MS-13. A police source accused him of being a member of the gang, though he denied the allegation.
A fact that makes the tattoos on his left hand… interesting.
The Times article about them includes a remarkably clear picture of them.
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For those of you playing along at home, those include, from left to right:
A seven-pointed leaf instantly recognizable as Marijuana
A basic Smiley face
A cross that is amazingly like a 1
And a skull with 3 large sockets for eyes and nose.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia grew up in El Salvador at a time when MS-13 was among the most powerful organizations of any kind in his country. Yet the media is claiming that he chose these symbols coincidentally.
Right! Here’s some math: 26 letters, 10 numbers, 36 choices in all. 36 to the fourth power equals 1,679,616. ONE combination spells MS-13. That’s the one Garcia picked for his fingers. What are the odds?
Oh yeah, we just figured them out. 1.68 million to 1.
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(Your lottery ticket to the truth. For less than 20 cents a day!)
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But the Times thinks otherwise. In an article this morning headlined: Trump Has Made Claims About Abrego Garcia’s Tattoos. Here’s a Closer Look, it wrote:
Each of the tattoos on Mr. Abrego Garcia’s knuckles is extremely common, but even combined, they are unremarkable, several tattoo experts said.
And according to experts on gang membership, the tattoos that usually signify MS-13 membership are often much clearer in their association with the gang. Many times, they actually say MS-13, those experts said…
‘I can tell you, MS-13 does not equivocate; they don’t leave any ambiguity when it comes to their tattoos.’
MS-13 doesn’t leave any ambiguity. Got it!
Except last week, the Washington Post interviewed the author of a book about MS-13 who claimed Garcia’s tattoos didn’t prove anything because… wait for it… MS-13 members don’t even get tattoos anymore, much less unambiguous ones:
The use of tattoos as displays of affinity and loyalty to the gang has dropped in recent decades after law enforcement officials seized on them to identify members… ‘Younger members of the gang are far less likely to tattoo themselves, at least in any obvious manner.’
So which is it? Is a knuckle tattoo that uses symbols to say MS-13 not obvious enough for an MS-13 gang member, like the Times wrote today? Or too obvious, like the Post wrote last week?
Or maybe - work with me here - a small tattoo using symbols is exactly the choice a gang member who didn’t want to be obvious to law enforcement would make.
So who you gonna believe, the Times and its experts or your lying eyes?
At this point, one almost has to admire the legacy media for its commitment to the bit.
Yesterday, the Food and Drug Administration named Dr. Vinay Prasad, a San Francisco oncologist, as its top regulator for vaccines and other complex drugs called biologics.
This is a YUGE move.
I know Prasad. He is deeply thoughtful about the value and cost of new medicines. He understands the games Big Pharma plays to win approvals for expensive new drugs that all-too-often have little benefit — and hidden risks.
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(Know what else is YUGE? Unreported Truths - and that new purple subscribe button.)
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Those games often rely around the design of clinical trials: keeping them short for a drug that may be used for years; including only the healthiest possible patients (for example, the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine trials included few people over 80, who should have been the focus of the trials); comparing them to other drugs that have serious side effects and are not the true “standard-of-care.”
They also include pressure campaigns to push regulators to quickly approve drugs for serious conditions like cancer on the basis of “surrogate endpoints.” Drug companies, and the desperate patients they work with and fund, argue any treatment is better than no treatment.
They’re wrong.
Even for people who are dying, they’re wrong — at least on the institutional level.
The human body is incredibly complex. Efforts to modify disease and healing processes are even more complex. Medicine is rife with stories of treatments, from bloodletting to lobotomies, that did more than harm than good but that became accepted cures for decades or centuries.
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(Less toxic than fentanyl…)
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A few weeks ago I visited a little museum in London called the Old Operating Theatre, which is just what it sounds like — a small warren of rooms built around a surgical theater that was used for hundreds of years.
I highly recommend it. You will walk out with a visceral understanding that until the 19th century, surgery was butchery and drug treatments were witchcraft. Amazingly, even the invention of anesthesia didn’t improve surgery much for decades. Ether just meant that patients died horribly of infections after their operations instead of horribly of shock during them. Only the acceptance of germ theory changed that.
But fixing the process of finding and testing curative medicines took even longer than fixing surgery. Only in the last century have physicians realized they needed to stop guessing and look instead to randomized placebo-controlled trials, where two groups of equally matched patients are given either an experimental drug or a placebo and their outcomes carefully measured.
Randomized controlled trials aren’t usually called a miracle, but they are.
They are the miracle that underlies all the other miracles in drug discovery. They aren’t perfect, but they are as close to the truth as science can get. If one group of patients gets a drug, and another equally matched group doesn’t, and they have different outcomes, it is almost certain that the drug — and not hidden factors — has caused the difference.
No other evidence is as strong, because if the two groups are not randomly separated before receiving the treatment, we can never be 100 percent sure that some hidden difference between the groups caused the difference in outcomes that occurred after taking the drug.
Of course some outcomes are so clear that randomized trials are unnecessary. An old joke explains that you don’t need a randomized trial for a parachute before jumping from a plane. To take a less fanciful example, we don’t have a randomized controlled trial showing that cigarettes cause cancer (such a trial would be both unethical and impossible), but in that case the real-world evidence is overwhelming: nearly everyone who gets lung cancer was a smoker, and rates of lung cancer have risen and fallen along with smoking.
But, in general, randomized trials are the best we’ve got, the foundation of modern medicine, the reason doctors can say, this works or this doesn’t.
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(Meet your new director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research)
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But randomized trials can also be the enemy of drug approvals, and so pharmaceutical companies have been chipping away at them for decades. Most recently, they have pressed for “accelerated approvals” that show a drug may work, while promising more data once a drug is on the market.
But those approvals have too frequently led to drugs that don’t work — and that take years to withdraw. Once a company can profit from commercial sales, it will do everything it can to delay collecting data that might force it to stop selling a drug.
And even if a company has good intentions, post-approval data can be messy and hard to collect. Many people won’t enter a clinical trial where they might not receive a drug if they know they can get it outside the trial. The FDA has maximum leverage before approval.
Prasad knows all of this. And as an oncologist he has seen the harms of false hope in cancer treatment up close. He’s going to hold the companies to high standards. The right standards.
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(Boom goes the dynamite!)
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No wonder a lot of biotechnology companies plunged yesterday after word of his appointment came out. Moderna lost 10 percent of its value in two hours (and is now down a cool 95 percent from 2021).
There’s a new sheriff in town.
And the varmints are on notice.
- Chinese exporters are using third countries to avoid US tariffs on their goods.
- Social media is filled with ads offering "place-of-origin washing."
- Countries bordering China are wary of becoming staging posts for goods destined for the US.
- Businesses are shipping goods to countries like Malaysia to obtain new certificates of origin.
- US partners are concerned about the risks of altered origins and false values.
Chinese exporters are stepping up efforts to avoid tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump by shipping their goods via third countries to conceal their true origin.
Chinese social media platforms are awash with adverts offering “place-of-origin washing”, while an inflow of goods from China has raised alarm in neighbouring countries wary of becoming staging posts for trade actually destined for the US.
The growing use of the tactic underlines exporters’ fears that new tariffs of up to 145 per cent imposed by Trump on Chinese goods will deprive them of access to one of their most important markets.
“The tariff is too high,” said Sarah Ou, a salesperson at Baitai Lighting, an exporter based in the southern Chinese city of Zhongshan. “[But] we can sell the goods to neighbouring countries, and then the neighbouring countries sell them on to the United States, and it will reduce.”
US trade laws require goods to undergo “substantial transformation” in a country, usually including processing or manufacturing that adds significant value, to qualify as originating there for tariff purposes.
But adverts on social media platforms such as Xiaohongshu offer to help exporters ship goods to countries such as Malaysia, where they will be issued with a new certificate of origin and then sent to the US.
“The US has imposed tariffs on Chinese products? Transit through Malaysia to ‘transform’ into Southeast Asian goods!” said one advert posted this week on Xiaohongshu by an account under the name of “Ruby — Third Country Transshipment”.
“The US has set limits on Chinese wooden flooring and tableware? ‘Wash the origin’ in Malaysia for smooth customs clearance!” it added. A person contacted through the details supplied in the advert declined to comment further.
This furniture maker in Binzhou city in east China’s Shandong province has 70% of its orders from the US © FeatureChina/APSouth Korea’s customs agency said last month it had found foreign products worth Won29.5bn ($21mn) with falsified countries of origin in the first quarter of this year, most of them coming from China and almost all destined for the US.
“We are seeing a sharp increase in recent cases where our country is used as a bypass for products to avoid different tariffs and restrictions because of the US government’s trade policy changes,” the agency said in a statement. “We have found numerous cases where the origins of Chinese products were falsified as Korean.”
Vietnam’s industry and trade ministry last month called on local trade associations, exporters and manufacturers to strengthen checks on origins of raw materials and input goods and to prevent the issuing of counterfeit certificates.
Thailand’s foreign trade department also last month unveiled measures to tighten origin checks on products bound for the US in order to prevent tariff evasion.
Ou of Baitai said that, like many Chinese manufacturers, the company shipped goods as “free on board”, under which buyers took liability for products once they left their departure port, reducing the legal risk for the exporter.
“Customers only need to find ports in Guangzhou or Shenzhen, and as long as [the goods] go there, we have completed our mission . . . [after that] It’s none of our business,” she said.
Salespeople at two logistics companies said they could ship goods to Port Klang in Malaysia, from where they would move items into local containers and change their tags and packaging. The companies had connections with factories in Malaysia that could help issue certificates of origin, said the salespeople, who declined to be named.
“The US must know of it,” said one. “It cannot get too crazy so we are controlling the amount [of orders we take].”
“They [Malaysian customs] are not very strict,” the other salesperson said.
China’s foreign and commerce ministries, and the Malaysian government, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A consultant who advises companies on cross-border trade said origin-washing was one of the two main methods being employed to avoid Trump’s new levies. The other was mixing high cost items with cheaper goods, so exporters could falsely claim a lower overall cost of shipments, the consultant said.
The owner of a consumer goods manufacturer based in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan said two domestic industry associations had introduced it to intermediaries who offered “grey area” tariff workarounds.
“Basically I only ship to a Chinese port and they take it from there,” the owner said, adding that the intermediaries had offered to arrange the workaround for just Rmb5 ($0.70) per kilogramme shipped.
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“These agencies said small- and medium-sized enterprises like us can weather the tariff hit better because there’s always grey areas,” she said. “I hope it’s true. The US is a big market — I don’t want to lose it.”
The proliferation of efforts to avoid tariffs has caused concern among US business partners. One senior executive at a top 10 independent seller on Amazon said they had observed instances where shipments’ origins had been altered, risking confiscation by US customs authorities.
The executive said they were reluctant to accept offers of assistance from their Chinese suppliers, such as having them act as the “importer of record” into the US and paying tariffs based on the cost of manufacturing rather than the retailer’s higher cost of purchase.
The executive said they worried that a supplier might report a false value. “You’re putting a lot of trust in a Chinese supplier,” they said.
- Donald Trump has proposed a budget with $163bn in cuts to federal spending, targeting programs deemed "woke" or "wasteful".
- The plan involves a 22.6% reduction in non-defense spending, the lowest since 2017, while increasing the defense budget.
- Key areas for cuts include foreign aid, healthcare, education, and environmental programs.
- The budget aims to cut funding for renewable energy, electric vehicles, and agencies like the National Institutes of Health.
- Democrats have criticized the budget, with Chuck Schumer calling it "heartless" and a "betrayal of working people."
Donald Trump has called for $163bn in cuts to federal spending in a sweeping budget proposal that guts programmes his administration deems “woke”, “wasteful” or “weaponised against ordinary working Americans”.
In a budget blueprint submitted to Congress on Friday, the US president pressed for non-defence spending to be slashed by 22.6 per cent to the lowest level since 2017 alongside a sharp increase in the defence budget.
Trump’s plan would slash billions of dollars previously spent on foreign aid, healthcare, education and the environment, codifying many of the cuts being implemented by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Russ Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, said current expenditure was “contrary to the needs of ordinary working Americans and tilted toward funding niche non-governmental organisations and institutions of higher education committed to radical gender and climate ideologies antithetical to the American way of life”.
Trump’s budget wishlist comes as he intensifies his assault on the administrative state. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Doge are leading the radical effort to shrink the size of the federal government.
The proposal outlines the president’s priorities for so-called discretionary spending, the portion of the federal budget set by appropriations bills in Congress each year. It does not include longer-term ‘mandatory’ spending such as Social Security, Medicare, and interest paid on the federal debt.
Foreign aid would be hit particularly hard under Trump’s proposal, with a $49bn cut in spending and the shuttering of USAID, which Doge has reduced to a skeleton operation.
The budget takes aim at what the administration dubbed the “globalist climate agenda”, cutting grants for renewable energy and electric vehicles.
It also slashes spending on the education department, which Trump has vowed to close. The plan takes an axe to funding for agencies including the National Institutes of Health, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Internal Revenue Service, all of which he said have been “weaponised”.
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Contrasting the spending cuts, the plan calls for an increase in government outlay on the military and border security as part of Trump’s pledge to clamp down on illegal immigration. The defence budget would rise 13 per cent, while homeland security would be allocated another 65 per cent.
Chuck Schumer, the leading Senate Democrat, described the budget as “heartless” and said his party would fight efforts by Republican lawmakers to embed it in legislation.
“As [Trump] guts healthcare, slashes education, and hollows out programmes families rely on — he’s bankrolling tax breaks for billionaires and big corporations,” Schumer wrote on X. “It’s not just fiscally irresponsible, it’s a betrayal of working people from a morally bankrupt president.”