ORDERS Conceived and Publiſhed by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London, concerning the Infection of the Plague, 1665.

'WHEREAS in the Reign of our late Sovereign King James, of happy Memory, an Act was made for the charitable Relief and ordering of Perſons infected with the Plague; whereby Authority was given to Juſtices of the Peace, Mayors, Bayliffs and other head Officers, to appoint within their ſeveral Limits, Examiners, Searchers, Watchmen, Keepers, and Buriers for the Perſons and Places infected, and to miniſter unto them Oaths for the Performance of their Offices. And the ſame Statute did alſo authorize the giving of other Directions, as unto them for the preſent Neceſſity ſhould ſeem good in their Diſcretions. It is now upon ſpecial Conſideration, thought very expedient for preventing and avoiding of Infection of Sickneſs (if it ſhall ſo pleaſe Almighty God) that theſe Officers following be appointed, and theſe Orders hereafter duly obſerved.

Examiners to be appointed in every Pariſh.

'FIRST, It is thought requiſite, and ſo ordered, that in every Pariſh there be one, two, or more Perſons of good Sort and Credit, choſen and appointed by the Alderman, his Deputy, and common-Council of every Ward, by the Name of Examiners, to continue in that Office the Space of two Months at leaſt: And if any fit Perſon ſo appointed, ſhall refuſe to undertake the ſame, the ſaid parties ſo refuſing, to he committed to Priſon until they ſhall conform themſelves accordingly.

The Examiners Office.

'THAT theſe Examiners be ſworn by the Aldermen, to enquire and learn from time to time what Houſes in every Pariſh be Viſited, and what Perſons be Sick, and of what Diſeaſes, as near as they can inform themſelves; and upon doubt in that Caſe, to command Reſtraint of Acceſs, until it appear what the Diſeaſe ſhall prove: And if they find any Perſon ſick of the Infection, to give order to the Conſtable that the Houſe be ſhut up; and if the Conſtable ſhall be found Remiſs or Negligent, to give preſent Notice thereof to the Alderman of the Ward.

Watchmen.

'THAT to every infected Houſe there be appointed two Watchmen, one for every Day, and the other for the Night: And that theſe Watchmen have a ſpecial care that no Perſon go in or out of ſuch infected Houſes, whereof they have the Charge, upon pain of ſevere Puniſhment. And the ſaid Watchman to do ſuch further Offices as the ſick Houſe ſhall need and require: and if the Watchmen be ſent upon any Buſineſs, to lock up the Houſe, and take the Key with him: And the Watchman by Day to attend until ten of the Clock at Night: And the Watchman by Night untill ſix in the Morning.

Searchers.

'THAT there be a ſpecial care to appoint Women-Searchers in every Pariſh, ſuch as are of honeſt Reputation, and of the beſt Sort as can be got in this kind: And theſe to be ſworn to make due Search, and true Report to the utmoſt of their Knowledge, whether the Perſons whoſe Bodies they are appointed to Search, do die of the Infection, or of what other Diſeaſes, as near as they can. And that the Phyſicians who ſhall be appointed for Cure and Prevention of the Infection, do call before them the ſaid Searchers, who are, or ſhall be appointed for the ſeveral Pariſhes under their reſpective Cares; to the end they may conſider, whether they are fitly qualified for that Employment; and charge them from time to time as they ſhall ſee Cauſe, if they appear defective in their Duties.

That no Searcher during this time of Viſitation, be permitted to uſe any publick Work or Employment, or keep any Shop or Stall, or be employed as a Landreſs; or in any other common Employment whatſoever.

Chirurgeons.

'FOR better aſſiſtance of the Searchers, for as much as there hath been heretofore great abuſe in miſreporting the Diſeaſe, to the further ſpreading of the Infection: It is therefore ordered, that there be choſen and appointed able and diſcreet Chirurgeons, beſides thoſe that do already belong to the Peſt-Houſe: Amongſt whom the City and Liberties to be quartered as the places lie moſt apt and convenient; and every of theſe to have one Quarter for his Limit: and the ſaid Chirurgeons in every of their Limits to join with the Searchers for the View of the Body, to the end there may be a true Report made of the Diſeaſe.

And further, that the ſaid Chirurgeons ſhall viſit and ſearch ſuch like Perſons as ſhall either ſend for them, or be named and directed unto them, by the Examiners of every Pariſh, and inform themſelves of the Diſeaſe of the ſaid Parties.

And foraſmuch as the ſaid Chirurgeons are to be ſequeſtred from all other Cures, and kept only to this Diſeaſe of the Infection; It is order'd, That every of the ſaid Chirurgeons ſhall have Twelve-pence a Body ſearched by them, to be paid out of the Goods of the Party ſearched, if he be able, or otherwiſe by the Pariſh.

Nurſe-keepers.

'IF any Nurſe-keeper ſhall remove her ſelf out of any infected Houſe before twenty eight Days after the Deceaſe of any Perſon dying of the Infection, the Houſe to which the ſaid Nurſe-keeper doth ſo remove her ſelf, ſhall be ſhut up until the ſaid twenty eight Days be expired.

Orders concerning infected Houſes, and Perſons ſick of the Plague.

Notice to be given of the Sickneſs.

'THE Maſter of every Houſe, as ſoon as any one in his Houſe complaineth, either of Botch, or Purple, or Swelling in any part of his Body, or falleth otherwiſe dangerouſly Sick, without apparent Cauſe of ſome other Diſeaſe, ſhall give knowledge thereof to the Examiner of Health, within two Hours after the ſaid Sign ſhall appear.

Sequeſtration of the Sick.

'AS ſoon as any Man ſhall be found by this Examiner, Chirurgeon or Searcher to be ſick of the Plague, he ſhall the ſame Night be ſequeſtred in the ſame Houſe, and in caſe he be ſo ſequeſtred, then, though he afterwards die not, the Houſe wherein he ſickned, ſhould be ſhut up for a Month, after the uſe of the due Preſervatives taken by the reſt.

Airing the Stuff.

'FOR Sequeſtration of the Goods and Stuff of the Infection, their Bedding, and Apparel, and Hangings of Chambers, muſt be well aired with Fire, and ſuch Perſumes as are requiſite within the infected Houſe, before they be taken again to uſe: This to be done by the Appointment of the Examiner.

Shutting up of the Houſe.

'IF any Perſon ſhall have viſited any Man, known to be infected of the Plague, or entred willingly into any known infected Houſe, being not allowed: The Houſe wherein he inhabiteth, ſhall be ſhut up for certain Days by the Examiners Direction.

None to be removed out of infected Houſes, but, &c.

'ITEM, That none be remov'd out of the Houſe where he falleth ſick of the Infection, into any other Houſe in the City, (except it be to the Peſt-Houſe or a Tent, or unto ſome ſuch Houſe, which the Owner of the ſaid viſited Houſe holdeth in his own Hands, and occupieth by his own Servants) and ſo as Security be given to the Pariſh, whither ſuch Remove is made; that the Attendance and Charge about the ſaid viſited Perſons ſhall be obſerved and charged in all the Particularities before expreſſed, without any Coſt of that Pariſh, to which any ſuch Remove ſhall happen to be made, and this Remove to be done by Night: And it ſhall be lawful to any Perſon that hath two Houſes, to remove either his ſound or his infected People to his ſpare Houſe at his choice, ſo as if he ſend away firſt his Sound, he not after ſend thither the Sick, nor again unto the Sick the Sound. And that the ſame which he ſendeth, be for one Week at the leaſt ſhut up, and ſecluded from Company, for fear of ſome Infection, at the firſt not appearing.

Burial of the Dead.

'THAT the Burial of the Dead by this Viſitation, be at moſt convenient Hours, always either before Sun-riſing, or after Sun-ſetting, with the Privity of the Church-wardens or Conſtable; and not otherwiſe; and that no Neighbours not Friends be ſuffered to accompany the Corps to Church, or to enter the Houſe viſited, upon pain of having his Houſe ſhut up, or be impriſoned.

And that no Corps dying of Infection ſhall be buried, or remain in any Church in time of Common-Prayer, Sermon, or Lecture. And that no Children be ſuffered at time of burial of any Corps in any Church, Church-yard, or Burying-place to come near the Corps, Coffin, or Grave. And that all the Graves ſhall be at leaſt ſix Foot deep.

And further, all publick Aſſemblies at other Burials are to be forborn during the Continuance of this Viſitation.

No infected Stuff to be uttered.

'THAT no Clothes, Stuff, Bedding or Garments be ſuffered to be carried or conveyed out of any infectd Houſes, and that the Criers and Carriers abroad of Bedding or old Apparel to be ſold of pawned, be utterly prohibited and reſtrained, and no Brokers of Bedding or old Apparel be permitted to make any outward Shew, or hang forth on their Stalls, Shopboards or Windows towards any Street, Lane, Common-way or Paſſage, any old Bedding or Apparel to be ſold, upon pain of Impriſonment. And if any Broker or other Perſon that buy any Bedding, Apparel, or other Stuff out of any infected Houſe, within two Months after the Infection hath been there, his Houſe ſhall be ſhut up as Infected, and ſo ſhall continue ſhut up twenty Days at the leaſt.

No Perſon to be conveyed out of any infected Houſe.

'IF any Perſon viſited do fortune by negligent looking unto, or by any other Means, to come, or be conveyed from a Place infected, to any other Place, the Pariſh from whence ſuch Party hath come or been conveyed, upon notice thereof given, ſhall at their Charge cauſe the ſaid Party ſo viſited and eſcaped, to be carried and brought back again by Night, and the Parties in this caſe offending, to be puniſhed at the Direction of the Alderman of the Ward; and the Houſe of the Receiver of ſuch viſited Perſon, to be ſhut up for twenty Days.

Every viſited Houſe to be marked.

'THAT red Croſs of a Foot long, in the middle of the Door, evident to be ſeen, and with theſe uſual printed Words, that is to ſay, Lord have Mercy upon us, to be ſet cloſe over the ſame Croſs, there to continue until lawful opening of the ſame Houſe.

Every viſited Houſe to be watched.

'THAT the Conſtables ſee every Houſe ſhut up, and to be attended with Watchmen, which may keep them in, and miniſter Neceſſaries unto them at their own Charges (if they be able,) or at the common Charge, if they be unable: The ſhutting up to be for the ſpace of four Weeks after all be whole.

'That preciſe Order be taken that the Searchers, Chirurgeons, Keepers and Buriers are not to paſ the Streets without holding a red Rod or Wand of three Foot in Length in their Hands, open and evident to be ſeen, and are not to go into any other Houſe then into their own, or into that whereunto they are directed or ſent for; but to forbear and abſtain from Company, eſpecially when they have been lately uſed in any ſuch Buſineſs or Attendance.

Inmates.

'THAT where ſeveral Inmates are in one and the ſame Houſe, and any Perſon in that Houſe happens to be Infected; no other Perſon of Family of ſuch Houſe ſhall be ſuffered to remove him or themſelves without a Certificate from the Examiners of Health of that Pariſh; or in default thereof, the Houſe whither he or they ſo remove, ſhall be ſhut up as in caſe of Viſitation.

Hackney-Coaches.

'THAT care be taken of Hackney-Coach-men, that they may not (as ſome of them have been obſerved to do) after carrying of infected Perſons to the Peſt-Houſe, and other Places, be admitted to common uſe, till their Coaches be well aired, and have ſtood unemploy'd by the Space of five or ſix Days after ſuch Service.

Orders for cleanſing and keeping of the Streets Sweet.

The Streets to be kept clean.

'FIRST, it is thought neceſſary, and ſo ordered, that every Houſholder do cauſe the Street to be daily prepared before his Door, and ſo to keep it clean ſwept all the Week long.

That Rakers take it from out the Houſes.

'THAT the Sweeping and Filth of Houſes be daily carry'd away by the Rakers, and that the Raker ſhall give notice of his coming, by the the blowing of a Horn, as hitherto hath been done.

Layſtalls to be made far off from the City.

'THAT the Layſtalls be removed as far as may be out of the City, and common Paſſages, and that no Nightman or other be ſuffered to empty a Vault into any Garden near about the City.

Care to be had of unwholſome Fiſh or Fleſh, and of muſty Corn.

'THAT ſpecial care be taken, that no ſtinking Fiſh, or unwholeſome Fleſh, or muſty Corn, or other corrupt Fruits, of what Sort ſoever be ſuffered to be ſold about the City, or any part of the ſame.

'That the Brewers and Tippling-houſes be looked unto, for muſty and unwholſome Casks.

'That no Hogs, Dogs, or Cats, or tame Pigeons, or Conies, be ſuffered to be kept within any part of the City, or any Swine to be, or ſtray in the Streets or Lanes, but that ſuch Swine be impounded by the Beadle or any other Officer, and the Owner puniſhed according to Act of Common Council, and that the Dogs be killed by the Dog-killers appointed for that purpoſe.

ORDERS concerning looſe Perſons and idle Aſſemblies.

Beggers.

'FOr ras much as nothing is more complained of, than the Multitude of Rogues and wandring Beggars, that ſwarm in every place about the City, being a great cauſe of the ſpreading of the Infection, and will not be avoided, notwithſtanding any Order that have been given to the contrary: It is therefore now ordered, that ſuch Conſtables, and others, whom this Matter may any way concern, take ſpecial care that no wandring Begger be ſuffered in the Streets of this City, in any faſhion or manner, whatſoever, upon the Penalty provided by the Law to be duely and ſeverely executed upon them.

Plays.

'THAT all Plays, Bear-Baitings, Games, ſinging of Ballads, Buckler-play, or ſuch like Cauſes of Aſſemblies of People, be utterly prohibited, and the Parties offending ſeverely puniſhed by every Alderman in his Ward.

Feaſting Prohibited.

'THAT all publick Feaſting, and particularly by the Companies of this City, and Dinners at Taverns, Alehouſes, and other Places of common Entertainment be forborn till further Order and Allowance; and that the Money thereby ſpared, be preſerved and employed for the Benefit and Relief of the Poor viſited with the Infection.

Tipling-Houſes.

'THAT diſorderly Tipling in Taverns, Ale-houſes, Coffe-houſs, and Cellars be ſeverely looked unto, as the common Sin of this Time, and greateſt occaſion of diſperſing the Plague. And that no Company or Perſon be ſuffered to remain or come into any Tavern, Ale-houſe, or Coffe-houſe to drink after nine of the Clock in the Evening, according to the antient Law and Cuſtom of this City, upon the Penalties ordained in that Behalf.

'And for the better execution of theſe Orders, and ſuch other Rules and Directions as upon further conſideration ſhall be found needful; It is ordered and enjoined that the Aldermen, Deputies, and Common-Council-men ſhall meet together weekly, once, twice, thrice, or oftner, (as cauſe ſhall require) at ſome one general Place accuſtomed in their reſpective Wards (being clear from Infection of the Plague) to conſult how the ſaid Orders may be duly put in Execution; not intending that any, dwelling in or near Places infected, ſhall come to the ſaid Meeting whiles their coming may be doubtful. And the ſaid Aldermen, and Deputies, and Common-Councilmen in their ſeveral Wards may put in Execution any other good Orders that by them at their ſaid Meetings ſhall be conceived and deviſed, for Preſervation of His Majeſty's Subjects from the Infection,'

Sir John Lawrence

Lord Mayor

 

Sir George Waterman

Sir Charles Doe.

Sheriffs

From "A Journal of the Plague Year"

This is a fascinating look at some of the earliest public health regulations intended to deal with a major epidemic. 

Defoe wrote in a style that is suggestive of the transition from early modern English (Shakespearean) into the first stages of what we would recognize as modern English. Still we see elements including odd spellings, seemingly random capitalization of words in mid sentence and the use of the the "long s," an archaic form of lowercase 's' that fell into disuse around the turn of the 19th century. 

The Ups and Downs of the American Elevator

Why does America have a fraction of the number of elevators per capita as the rest of the developed world? And why do their construction and maintenance cost three three times as much as in most other countries?

Iran sets out steep demands for reopening Hormuz

There are no ongoing negotiations between Tehran and Washington, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Sunday, after Tehran set out a steep series of demands for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

“The intermediaries are still making efforts to find ways to resume negotiations,” Araghchi said.

He tempered optimism stirred by Iran’s separate discussions with Oman over the future management of the waterway, saying that “changes to maritime routes in the Strait of Hormuz are a technical and legal matter and do not mean that the Strait of Hormuz has been reopened.”

Araghchi’s statement came a day after top Iranian security official Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr laid out the country’s conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, saying it would not do so “until America corrects its behavior.”

The statement from Iran’s Supreme National Security Council secretary, as carried by Iranian state media, stated that the U.S. must withdraw its naval blockade, pay Iran damages for the war, unfreeze Iranian assets, lift sanctions on Tehran and permanently end the conflict against Iran and its regional allies.

Read the rest here.

Iran knows that to borrow one of Mr. Trump's favorite cliches... they "hold the cards."

Are We Witnessing a "Soft Secession"

“I actually think,” Rush Limbaugh told his many millions of listeners during the weeks between Donald Trump losing the 2020 election and his supporters’ assault on the Capitol, “that we’re trending toward secession. It can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs.”

Twenty months later, on the day the F.B.I. seized thousands of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, The Times reported that “posts on Twitter that mentioned ‘civil war’ had soared nearly 3,000 percent in just a few hours” and “jumped again a few weeks later, after President Joe Biden branded Mr. Trump and ‘MAGA Republicans’ a threat to ‘the very foundations of our republic.’”

Days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, then-Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene reiterated her push for legally splitting up the country: “I want a peaceful national divorce. Our country is too far gone and too far divided, and it’s no longer safe for any of us.” Polls since 2021 by universities, YouGov and others have consistently found that a third or more of Americans said they expected a civil war during the next decade or so.

A national divorce — let alone a civil war — is, for now, the stuff of fiction. But while loose talk from rabble-rousers has distracted us, the nation has sunk, almost unnoticed, into an unspectacular yet profoundly strange new arrangement. It’s not yet a divorce; it’s more like a bitter, loveless marriage in which the parties stay technically but less and less enthusiastically united because splitting up is too complicated or dreadful or expensive.

...During the past two Democratic presidencies, many red states and counties declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries, prohibiting their police forces from enforcing some federal gun regulations. (The term was a trollish play on Democratic sanctuary cities, which did the same for federal immigration policies.) Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas took it upon himself to override federal immigration policy, deploying the National Guard to string the banks of the Rio Grande with coils of razor wire and ordering his troops to prevent federal border agents from helping migrants who got tangled in them. More than two dozen Republican governors endorsed the show of anti-federal strength.

Now that Mr. Trump is back in office, Democratic-led states and cities are getting almost as aggressive, overriding or ignoring federal and state policies they find objectionable. Local police departments aren’t cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Many states passed laws to shield residents from prosecution if they are charged elsewhere with facilitating abortions, and several have stockpiled abortifacients in case federal law or regulations make them hard to get.

Read the rest here.

Hunter Biden says Joe Biden’s cancer is spreading

Former President Joe Biden’s cancer has spread to other parts of his body, his son Hunter Biden revealed in an interview, describing the disease as “very painful” and “very debilitating.”

“The cancer has spread, metastasized into his bones and further,” he told the BBC’s “Newsnight” Friday. “It’s really sad to watch.”

Several months after leaving the White House, the former president announced in May 2025 that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. At the time, his office said the cancer appeared to be “hormone-sensitive,” allowing for “effective management.”

Hunter Biden became emotional during the interview while discussing his father’s condition, saying that watching the former president’s health decline has been “really hard.”

“The only thing that I’d say about my dad, about his health right now, is I wish he would complain more, because it’s not good,” he said.

Despite the cancer’s progression, Hunter Biden said his 83-year-old father remains active and engaged in public life.

Read the rest here. 

Report: US has largely exhausted its stockpile of long range missiles in Iran War

Washington — The U.S. has used nearly all of its global stockpile of long-range precision missiles during the war with Iran, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter tell CBS News.

Specifically, the U.S. has used virtually all of its Army Tactical Missile Systems, known as ATACMS, and Precision Strike Missiles, the sources said. Reuters was first to report that the U.S. had used "virtually all" of its long-range precision missiles during Operation Epic Fury. 

CBS News has previously reported that the U.S. has dwindling stockpiles of defensive interceptors and long-range missiles, which has become a pressure point within the administration, and that the U.S. cannot sustain the rate at which it expended precision munitions early in the war with Iran. 

U.S. officials said there are limited inventories of the ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles, and that the most pressing concern involves the number of Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors, which have been used faster than the industry can replace them. 

Read the rest here.

What the Crackup of the Heritage Foundation Says About the Post-Trump Right

“You can never institutionalize the gut instincts of a great, heroic populist like Donald Trump, or Teddy Roosevelt, or Andrew Jackson,” Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, told me this spring. “But the point is that, moving forward, on the evening of Jan. 20, 2029, President Trump will have left the stage. We as conservatives have to answer the question, Where is this movement going? And what it can’t do — what it must not do — is go back to 20 years ago.”

The Heritage Foundation currently finds itself engulfed in an internal struggle that mirrors the one roiling the Republican Party: how to harness the energy unleashed by Trumpism without being completely overrun by its conspiracy- and nativist-minded elements, particularly among the rising generation that has known little else. Long accustomed to placing its experts in key positions in Republican administrations, as it did in Trump’s first term, Heritage presented its Project 2025 as just the kind of master plan an uncompromising second Trump administration would need to implement its agenda.

But once Trump took office, Heritage was instead pushed to the side. As it tried to work its way back into the center of power, the foundation was consumed by a vicious in-house conflict. An old guard of establishment experts saw themselves swamped by an influx of more radical, often younger conservatives eager to remake the institution for the post-Trump right in their image: terminally online, ruthless in fighting the culture wars and vehement in rejecting the dogmas of postwar conservatism.

A watershed moment came last October, when Roberts posted a video to X in support of Tucker Carlson, who had been widely criticized for inviting the 27-year-old white nationalist and antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes onto his show. Condemnations flooded in from across the right, with several of Carlson’s closest allies breaking with him over his decision to turn his show into what one of them, the Israeli American philosopher Yoram Hazony, recently called “the leading clearinghouse for virulent antisemitism on the political right.” Roberts leapt to Carlson’s defense, denouncing the “venomous coalition attacking” Carlson and arguing that conservatives should “feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class” and the “bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda.”

Roberts later apologized to Heritage staff for his choice of words, which some had criticized as playing into antisemitic tropes, and for having “let down this institution.” But when I asked him about the video, he insisted that it was Heritage’s job to figure out how to bring together a coalition that can win elections and exercise power effectively. Roberts, who is 52, projects a friendly, confident energy. He was wearing a fitted blue suit along with alligator-style cowboy boots, in keeping with his years as president of Wyoming Catholic College. Before taking over at Heritage in 2021, his pitch to the board of trustees, according to The Dispatch, was that he could marry the conservative movement’s new populist ethos with a traditional institution like Heritage. “You can’t have a governing coalition if you’re saying, I’m not even going to talk to people who occasionally listen to a podcast by someone who’s a total goofball,” he went on, referring to Fuentes. “That doesn’t mean that we endorse what that person says. We endorse trying to convince these people of what’s right, and what isn’t right.”

Many employees and experts at Heritage appeared to disagree with the premise that such people belonged in their coalition, and especially that anyone was trying to set them right. Longtime Heritage employees told me that the people they usually collaborated with in congressional offices, circuit courts, foreign embassies and other institutions no longer wanted to be publicly associated with Heritage and what they perceived as its fidelity to Carlson. In a resignation letter later made public, Josh Blackman, a legal scholar who had for years been working on a new edition of “The Heritage Guide to the Constitution,” said the volume’s contributors pulled out of an event promoting the book and refused to sign copies. Judges who had spoken at the foundation, Blackman wrote, said “they would no longer affiliate with Heritage.”

Read the rest here.

The DSA Envisions a ‘World Without Prisons,’ but Not One Without Camps

The list of things the Democratic Socialists of America want to abolish is long: federal immigration enforcement agencies and the borders they police, the Pentagon, the Senate, the Electoral College, the two-party system, and the Constitution’s separation of powers among them. But it’s the existence of America’s prisons, and the justice system that consigns convicts to incarceration, that seems to irritate the DSA’s vanguard most.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called for “prison abolition” designed to “abolish our carceral system.” The Democratic nominee in New York’s 13th district, Darializa Avila Chevalier, couldn’t agree more. “I am an abolitionist and oppose reform that entrenches the expansion of the carceral state,” she wrote. CNN described Zohran Mamdani as “evasive” when the New York City mayor was asked whether he sought the end of incarceration as we know it. “There are prisons,” he replied with remarkable obtuseness when asked if there “should be” prisons. Mamdani skeptics were probably not persuaded that he had abandoned his longtime confusion over the “purpose” of prisons.

Of course, defunding the police is part and parcel of this campaign. “I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police,” the Democratic Party’s likely nominee for Wisconsin governor, Francesca Hong, once insisted. Such reforms are a sine qua non if we are to realize her “perfect world,” which “would be a world without prisons.”

The press rather gently describes these views as “ambitious” or even “aspirational,” but the DSA’s most notable agitators are not dealing in metaphors. It would be foolish, however, to expect DSA candidates to “explain the nuances of prison abolition in a hostile media environment,” the Maoist influencer Hasan Piker brooded. “We need far more political education, power [and] credibility before we get there.”

Some of the DSA’s candidates appear to struggle with the concept of criminality itself. For her part, Chevalier agonized over the impossible moral conundrum presented by murder, and whether punishing the murderer renders us complicit in some cosmic injustice. And yet, for all the DSA’s hostility toward the conventional methods for punishing criminals, most of them can still summon passion for prosecuting crime as they define it.

Read the rest here.

Why Trump is Afraid of International Law

President Donald Trump and his aides rarely go easy on their perceived enemies. But their attacks on the International Criminal Court — describing it as, among other things, filled with “lunatics” and pledging to destroy it — are hyperbolic enough that you have to wonder:

Are they afraid the court will prosecute them?

That’s the conclusion many former government officials and legal scholars are reaching. They point not only to Trump’s anti-ICC campaign but also his administration’s broader efforts to defund, abandon or otherwise damage a range of global mechanisms that enforce human rights laws, from treaties to United Nations organizations.

Those moves come as the Trump administration is accused of a series of abuses, from killing Iranian schoolchildren to deporting asylum-seekers. At the same time, Trump is going to great lengths to protect his backers from domestic justice, including through his extensive use of pardons.

“They’re doing everything they can to evade accountability as they attack the very institutions and advocates charged with holding rights abusers to account,” said Uzra Zeya, a former Biden administration official who is now president of Human Rights First.

Spokespeople for the White House and the State Department deny such assertions. In statements to me, they reiterated complaints that the ICC threatens U.S. sovereignty and cast their campaign against it as squarely within Trump’s America First agenda.

“All of the administration’s actions are lawful and in line with the agenda that President Trump was elected to implement,” stressed Anna Kelly, a spokesperson for the White House.

But when it comes to the ICC in particular, Shakespeare might say the administration “doth protest too much.” By wildly overstating the court’s power, it is feeding the notion that it is genuinely worried.

Read the rest here.

New York City's Loyal Opposition

Reihan Salam has a lot in common with the man he is trying to stop.

They went to rival New York City public high schools. Both are South Asian Muslim men with a talent for remembering faces and names. Mr. Salam, the head of the conservative Manhattan Institute, and his democratic socialist foil, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, both favor merch embroidered with the same 1970s cursive City of New York insignia.

They share something else. They are convinced that their beloved city is in crisis. For the mayor, the crisis is affordability. For Mr. Salam, the crisis is Mr. Mamdani.

“You have a couple of decades of prosperity that are slipping away,” said Mr. Salam, 46, who lives with his family in a Brooklyn neighborhood that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Mamdani. “We are squandering this incredible opportunity to show that urban life can work.”

He fears that many of his fellow New Yorkers have been seduced by what he sees as the mayor’s vilification of the city’s wealthiest residents and misled by Mr. Mamdani’s vision of free buses, free child care and frozen rent. He believes the mayor’s big plans to subsidize the costs of city life for even well-off New Yorkers (“unlimited welfarism for the near-rich,” Mr. Salam calls it) could steer New York City into a financial tailspin reminiscent of the dark days of the 1970s.

To counter all that, Mr. Salam is trying to make the Manhattan Institute, a think tank with a roster of New York City obsessives, the intellectual engine of the resistance.

Slowing down the mayor and his popular movement will be no easy task, as others have discovered. The city’s vaunted business elite spent tens of millions of dollars trying to persuade voters that Mr. Mamdani’s ideas about capitalism and Israel were too radical for New York, without success. The Democratic establishment has largely been cowed by the mayor’s political strength. Elected Republicans are so outnumbered in New York that they have no real power to stop him.

Neither does the Manhattan Institute. Over a half-century, the organization has lobbied constantly for shrinking the city’s sprawling bureaucracy and letting private industry work its magic. The election of a democratic socialist marks a low point for the institute in New York, where its project has never been further from the halls of power.

But Mr. Salam, its president since 2019, sees an opportunity. Mr. Mamdani’s electric campaign has created unusual interest in big ideas about what works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to administering government in the city.

Where some right-wing critics have caricatured the mayor as a communist, a jihadist and a candidate for deportation, Mr. Salam and his fellow conservative urbanists are testing a less hyperbolic approach. They have taken direct aim at Mr. Mamdani’s policy agenda, deploying deep knowledge of city history and policy expertise to try to serve as a voice of skepticism whispering in the city’s collective ear.

Do people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year really need free child care?

Read the rest here.

The DSA is the political equivalent to the Flat Earth Society. They are not serious people. The MI on the other hand is a refreshingly sober group of people offering cogent alternatives to the fringe platform of the DSA and its followers.

Trump Administration Admits Canceling Grants to States That Did Not Vote for Him

When the Trump administration canceled more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era federal grants for clean energy projects in October, it framed the move as an urgent corrective to protect taxpayer funds from waste.

But it wasn’t true.

In little-noticed court documents, federal officials acknowledged this month that they had terminated the funding “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, in the 2024 election.

The stunning admission offered an unvarnished glimpse into the way President Trump has weaponized the provision of federal education, energy, health, housing and infrastructure aid in his second term. Far from rooting out the sort of misspending that Mr. Trump sees as rife in Washington, the White House has instead sought to leverage the budget as a tool to assist its allies — or as a cudgel to hurt the president’s foes.

Read the rest here.

The Problem With Middle Class Socialism

Have you heard the news? The socialists are winning. Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York. Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, having won their respective Democratic primaries in deep-blue congressional districts, are set to become members of the U.S. House. So is 29-year-old Melat Kiros, who recently stunned the party by knocking out 15-term Colorado Representative Diana DeGette by 13 points.

All of them are members of the Democratic Socialists of America. The group, which went from obscurity in the 1980s to a Beltway punchline in the 2010s, now holds more than 250 offices in 40 states. Say what you will about DSA, but it’s is no longer a fringe organization.

I mention all this not to relitigate the merits of rent freezes, Medicare for All, abolishing the police, or government-run grocery stores. I agree with many of the group’s positions and with the underlying conviction that American society needs to be rebuilt from the foundation up. Which is exactly why DSA’s rise worries me. For it to truly succeed, and become a nationwide movement that transforms American politics, it will have to do more than fight on behalf the “working class” and actually start resembling the working class.

Appeals to the working class are rampant in the DSA. Mamdani, who acknowledges his “privileged upbringing,” is fond of saying, “I fight for working people.” Valdez, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who left a program assistant job at Columbia University to join the New York State Assembly, declared on the night of her primary victory that she would be “a fighting force for the entire working class.” Chevalier, who had a poor upbringing but went on to become a Columbia graduate and now a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at CUNY, describes herself as a “working-class Dominican New Yorker.”

But here’s the problem: They don’t fit the part. Their finances may or may not equate with the working class, but they’re not working class. Sure, they might “work to pay … bills,” which Mamdani, rather squirrelly, has said is “one definition of being a part of the working class.” But that expansive definition won’t fly with most observers—especially not those whom we commonly think of as working class, which is to say non-college-educated workers who rely on an hourly wage. Rather, these DSA politicians are part, as their hipster glasses convey all too well, of the college-educated creative class. And that’s true of the DSA broadly. It simply is not a working-class organization.

If history is any indication, that’s cause for concern. George Orwell diagnosed the problem nearly a century ago. In 1936, with socialism in retreat amid fascist takeovers in Europe, he was sent north by the Left Book Club to document working-class life in industrial England. He came back not with the tidy indictment of capitalism his publisher was expecting but with The Road to Wigan Pier, half of which presented a devastating account of English coal-mining poverty, and the other half a lengthy, still-controversial essay about why working people, the miners themselves, didn’t like socialists.

It wasn’t that the miners disagreed with socialist principles, Orwell said. Instead, he pointed to the obvious fact of the class divide, diagnosing the problem of “middle-class” socialism: “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”

It remains one of the great insults in English political writing, and it still gets at the heart of the matter today, as it relates to the question of class solidarity. “I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists,” Orwell added, a little more soberly, “and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners.”

Read the rest here.

Call the Veep, Agent Mulder!

Somewhere around the two-hour mark in JD Vance’s nearly three-hour podcast interview last week with Joe Rogan, the pair got into a serious conversation about supernatural and extraterrestrial phenomena. By serious, I mean it in the sense that Rogan seemed to take the subject seriously while Vance cynically, or cretinously, or cravenly, or credulously or conspiratorially — or perhaps it’s all of the above — played along with him.

It contained the following insights from the vice president of the United States:

“If we’re talking about an extraterrestrial being that is humanlike, but not human, that contains effectively infinite powers and is torturing human beings, you can call it an alien if you want, but I think there’s a lot of historical precedent to call that a demon.”

And:

“If you’re looking for me to concede the point that there is something different or could be something different between an angel, a demon, a space alien, a supernatural but non-any-of-those-other-things beings, yes, I concede that.”

And:

“I got two-and-a-half more years as V.P., and I swear to you, if there are little green men, like body remains, I’m not going to text you. I’m going to try to smuggle a camera in and get a photo of these things.”

Call the veep, Agent Mulder!

By this point, the two men had already propounded one conspiracy theory — that the Los Angeles mayoral election had been rigged (a claim previously debunked by a Trump-appointed federal prosecutor); followed by Vance’s accusation that Joe Biden’s staff got him to eat ice cream “in the most ridiculous, suggestive way imaginable” (a remarkable way of turning naked mendacity into adolescent prurience into another conspiracy theory); followed by an exchange about eating corn dogs in public (because, you know); followed by an argument about whether the Ten Commandments should be mandated in Texas public schools, in which neither man appeared to be aware that the commandments are not originally Christian.

Read the rest here.

Russia Halts Bond Auctions

Russia's Finance Ministry has suspended federal government bond auctions indefinitely as borrowing costs climb and investor demand weakens, complicating efforts to finance a widening wartime budget deficit.

The ministry said on Monday it was halting its regular weekly auctions of government bonds, known as OFZs, "to facilitate the stabilization of market conditions." It did not say when sales would resume, saying only that it would announce their restart at a later date.

OFZs are ruble-denominated government bonds that underpin Russia's financial system. They are the government's primary source of domestic borrowing to cover budget deficits, while banks hold them to manage daily cash needs and foreign investors buy them for returns.

The Finance Ministry has relied heavily on domestic borrowing to help finance a budget deficit that reached 5.7 trillion rubles ($72.39 billion) at the end of June, while military spending continues to outpace initial government plans.

Prices of OFZs have fallen sharply since mid-June. The RGBI government bond index has dropped from around 119 points to about 110, its lowest level this year, while yields on bonds with maturities longer than 10 years have climbed above 16.5%.

Read the rest here.

See also... Could Russia's Wartime Debt Boom Trigger a Banking Crisis?

Nuns Challenge NY Assisted Suicide Counseling Mandate

Last week, four Orders of Catholic Sisters along with the Catholic Diocese and Bishop of Rockville Centre, New York, filed suit in a New York federal district court challenging, at least as applied to them, the constitutionality of New York's Medical Aid in Dying Act as it interacts with the state's Palliative Care Information Act. Labelling these a "Suicide Counseling Mandate", the 102-page complaint (full text) in Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm, Inc. v. James, (ND NY, filed 7/17/2026) alleges in part:

Read the rest here.

Nicaragua's Dictator Danial Ortega: “There won’t be anymore elections..."

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega said his country won’t be holding elections anytime soon, a statement underscoring the strongman’s efforts to extend his nearly 20-year rule and dashing hopes by the opposition that he might heed their demands for a democratic vote.

The announcement effectively canceled Nicaragua’s next elections, originally scheduled for November 2027 after the government-controlled Congress voted in January 2025 to extend the five-year presidential term by one year.

Ortega spoke on Sunday at the anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution that toppled the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 and first brought him to power. He returned to the presidency in 2007 and has since rewritten the constitution, crushed political opposition and solidified his control over virtually all branches of the Nicaraguan government.

Since mass protests in 2018, which led to a bloody government crackdown that killed hundreds, Ortega and his wife and co-President Rosario Murillo have been holding on to power.

Ortega declared himself the winner of the 2021 election — a vote widely viewed as illegitimate by the international community — after jailing all the candidates who could have possibly beaten him. The U.S. does not recognize Ortega’s presidency.

“There won’t be anymore elections,” Ortega said in a speech railing on his longtime adversary, the United States. “Parties put in place by the Yankees, put in place by the Somoza regime, coming back to power — that story is over.”

Read the rest here

The Most Corrupt Presidency in American History, by the Numbers

Ask historians or laymen to name the most blatantly corrupt pardon over the first 230 years or so of American presidenting, and most will likely arrive at the same answer: Marc Rich.

Rich, a multiple-passport-holding, proudly amoral oil trader who specialized in sanctions-circumventing commerce with the likes of Nicolae Ceaușescu and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, fled to Switzerland in 1983 rather than face a potential life sentence and $1.6 million in fines on 65 counts of wire fraud, trading with the enemy, and tax evasion. (It was the biggest tax evasion case to date in U.S. history, at $48 million—around $150 million today.) Yet Bill Clinton, in the final minutes of his presidency, gifted Rich a midnight pardon.

All normal pardon protocols had been circumvented. The Justice Department was blindsided, and the longtime fugitive—a veteran of the FBI's Most Wanted List—had never expressed the customary remorse. Reporting soon revealed that Rich's ex-wife, the songwriter Denise Rich, had donated $1.1 million (roughly $2.3 million in 2026 dollars) to Democratic causes during the Clinton presidency, including (in nominal dollars) $450,000 to the Clinton Library, $120,000 for Hillary Clinton's Senate race, and $25,000 to Al Gore's Florida recount effort. "Not just a large donor," Sen. Russell Feingold (D–Wisc.) noted at the time, but "a huge donor."

Rich's last-ditch clemency drew widespread bipartisan condemnation. "Disgraceful," judged former President Jimmy Carter. Added New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani: "The fact that Bill Clinton and Eric Holder engineered a pardon for him—without input from me, as the U.S. Attorney who prosecuted him, or Janet Reno, as Attorney General, will forever be a blemish on our justice system."

You have likely never heard the name Trevor Milton, yet in a couple of key respects his 2025 pardon by President Donald Trump was worse. The founding CEO of the electric vehicle manufacturer Nikola Corporation, Milton in 2022 was convicted on three counts of investor fraud that could have brought him four years in prison and a staggering $676 million worth of mandated restitution to shareholders. Among his more notorious stunts was a 2018 promotional video of a supposedly functional prototype Nikola truck that was not in fact operational but had instead been rolled down a desert hill. Milton, represented in court by the brother of then–Attorney General Pam Bondi, was still awaiting final sentencing when he got the call from Trump announcing an unconditional pardon, no restitution (or remorse) required. When asked about the clemency, the president said: "They say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president….He supported Trump. He liked Trump." Milton and his wife, The Wall Street Journal reported, had donated "at least $3.2 million to Trump's 2024 election and to political groups and people in Trump's orbit." The couple had not previously demonstrated a financial interest in politics.

Milton's family paid more in political donations than Rich's. He had exponentially more in fines and restitutions taken off the table, and he has spent his post-clemency life not in humiliated exile but in lavish Washington excess, hobnobbing with the president and Cabinet members at investment conferences and black-tie events to gin up interest in his latest schemes. Such is the rule, not the exception: When it comes to plausibly pay-for-play pardons, Trump in his second term makes Bill Clinton and every other president look like pikers.

Paul Walczak, a nursing home executive who'd pled guilty to spending his employees' federal tax withholdings on such baubles as a $2 million yacht, was in May 2025 on the verge of commencing an 18-month sentence and paying $4.4 million in fines when Trump issued his get-out-of-jail-free card. On his pardon application, Walczak made the explicit pitch that his mother, Elizabeth Fago, had raised millions of dollars for Trump and the GOP in 2024 campaigns, and additionally assisted the president by publicizing embarrassing revelations from the diary of President Joe Biden's daughter Ashley. Less than three weeks before the pardon, Fago accepted an invitation to attend a million-dollar-per-head fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, crowned by a one-on-one with the president.

Trump's second-term pardons and sentence commutations have wiped away more than $2 billion in fines and restitutions. The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2025 that the president's forgiveness spree "has spawned a pardon-shopping industry where lobbyists say their going rate is $1 million." The Atlantic in June 2026 set the updated price at $2 million. Whereas Bill Clinton conceded within 15 months that the Marc Rich clemency had been a mistake (even while hotly denying that political donations had anything to do with it; he claims to have been persuaded by testimony from high-profile Israelis such as Ehud Barak), the always-unapologetic Trump barely feigns interest in the process, even while his family and Cabinet members forge business deals with the ex-cons and their companies.

Queried by 60 Minutes in October 2025 as to why he had just pardoned Changpeng Zhao—the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who had already served four months in prison and had his company pay $4.3 billion for money laundering—Trump said: "I have no idea who he is." The president might have asked his son Don Jr., who had recently introduced his dad to Zhao's pardon lobbyist and in the preceding months had contracted Binance to exclusively host and build the blockchain technology for the Trump family crypto trading platform World Liberty Financial. (That company's stablecoin, USD1, was used in May 2025 as the currency for a $2 billion investment into Binance by the United Arab Emirates company MGX, a transaction that, according to The Wall Street Journal, "rocketed USD1 up the rankings of largest stablecoins," thereby "pushing its market capitalization up from $127 million to over $2.1 billion.") When asked about the controversial clemency, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a one-size-fits-all denial: "Neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest."

Read the rest here.

See also...

Trump’s 'Anti-Weaponization Fund' Marks a Pattern of Trying To Profit From the Presidency

Trump calls for revocation of ABC, NBC licenses over speech snub

President Donald Trump said TV networks that did not feature live coverage of his primetime address on election security should have their broadcast licenses revoked.

CNN, ABC and NBC opted against live coverage of the speech in which Trump claimed China illegally accessed millions of voter files as part of a broader effort to manipulate U.S. elections in 2018 and 2020.

Other outlets, including CBS, MS NOW and Fox News, chose to broadcast the speech at least in part. NBC and ABC aired Trump’s remarks on their streaming channels.

Trump called out NBC and ABC during his remarks, accusing the networks of covering up what he labeled election fraud.

“In a rare move, NBC and ABC fake news have both said that they would not cover this speech. They knew what it was about,” he said. “Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses.”

TV networks are not required to air presidential remarks in primetime. Past presidents have traditionally reserved such major addresses for national crises or critical moments. Outlets have traditionally provided live coverage, but there have been exceptions.

Multiple networks declined in 2022 to broadcast President Joe Biden’s address on threats to democracy. ABC, CBS and NBC did not air President Barack Obama’s 2014 primetime speech on immigration.

Read the rest here.

Prince of Lichtenstein Will Veto Bill Legalizing Abortion

 (ZENIT News / Guadalajara, Mexico, 07.09.2026).- In a Europe where monarchies generally retain a strictly ceremonial role, the small Principality of Liechtenstein serves as an exception. Its Prince Regent and heir, Alois of Liechtenstein, recently announced that he will veto the proposed abortion law reform if it successfully clears the parliamentary process. 

This move reignites a debate the country experienced fifteen years ago. The proposed initiative seeks to introduce a law allowing abortion within a specific timeframe, specifically, during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. Currently, Liechtenstein’s legislation permits exceptions only when there is a serious threat to the pregnant woman’s life or health, or when the pregnancy is the result of a sexual crime. In an interview with the newspaper Liechtensteiner Vaterland, Prince Alois, a practicing Catholic, recently announced that he would not sanction the proposed reform. «The protection of unborn life represents a fundamental social and ethical value,» he stated, adding that the proposal did not sufficiently guarantee «the fundamental legal interest of protecting life.» 

This is not the first time the heir to the throne has intervened so directly in this debate. In 2011, a similar initiative proposed legalizing abortion during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy and included provisions for cases involving severe fetal disabilities. Even before the public vote took place, Prince Alois announced that he would exercise his right of veto if the reform were to pass. Ultimately, this proved unnecessary. In the referendum held in September of that year, 52.3% of voters rejected the proposal; consequently, the Prince did not have to resort to one of the prerogatives that distinguish the Liechtenstein monarchy from other European Royal Houses.Liechtenstein’s Constitution grants significant powers to the country’s Monarch, following a 2003 referendum initiated by Prince Alois’s father, Prince Hans-Adam II. These powers include the authority to veto laws passed by Parliament, dismiss the elected government, and appoint judges; consequently, although it is a constitutional monarchy in practice, it is often described as a unique absolute monarchy within Europe. This power is held by Prince Alois, who has served as Regent since 2004.

Read the rest here.

Todd Blanche Defends Trump's Blatantly Corrupt IRS 'Settlement'

"I'm his lawyer," Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, describing his relationship with President Donald Trump. Blanche quickly corrected himself: "Was his lawyer," he clarified. But the slip went to the heart of the main question that senators should be asking as they decide whether to confirm Blanche's nomination as attorney general: Would he use that position to pursue justice or to advance Trump's personal interests?

Probably the latter, judging from Blanche's central role in Trump's brazenly corrupt "settlement agreement" with the IRS, which a federal judge this week condemned as the "improper" product of blatant self-dealing. That cozy arrangement, which was predicated on a lawsuit that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams said was phony from the beginning, delivered huge favors to Trump, his family, and his followers at taxpayers' expense.

One of those favors was a $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund," which was designed to reward the president's allies and supporters by compensating them for their alleged persecution by the Biden administration. Blanche approved that scheme and repeatedly defended it. But it provoked an intense bipartisan backlash that persuaded him to ditch the plan two weeks after announcing it.

Read the rest here.