...President Trump truly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize because he has already ended the Iran war eight times.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trumps-latest-iran-deal-7c90e6cc
Mortgage rates jumped to their highest level in a year, dealing another blow to a long-stalled housing market that shows little sign of recovering.
The 30-year fixed rate averaged 6.66% this week, up from 6.58% the week prior, according to Freddie Mac. That marked the fourth consecutive week of rising rates, as intensifying conflict in the Middle East pushed up inflation expectations and a divided Federal Reserve sowed doubt about the path of interest rates.
Inflation looks unlikely to ease soon, with the war in the Middle East still dragging on, threatening oil supplies and blocking shipping routes.
https://www.wsj.com/economy/housing/mortgage-rates-jump-to-a-one-year-high-9ea35b8a
It has been clear for some time that President Trump’s forays into the crypto world have been lucrative, but the stunning disclosure that those ventures earned him some $1.4 billion last year underscored the different reality the president is living in from many of the investors who have embraced digital assets alongside him.
The president raked in cash by issuing new assets—World Liberty tokens and memecoins. But those who bought them at high prices had to suffer as their value went belly up, part of a wider crash in crypto. Political followers and crypto true believers who bought into the Trump brand were left holding the bag. A crypto summer for the president was a crypto winter for them.
Roughly two-thirds of investors in Trump’s memecoin are currently in the red, according to crypto data provider Nansen, which tracks 1.48 million crypto wallets that bought the token since its January 2025 launch.
Trump’s Deal With His Administration Also Ends His Tax Audits
WASHINGTON—President Trump’s extraordinary agreement with the federal government expanded Tuesday to end all pending tax audits of him and his businesses, according to a document posted by the Justice Department.
In the document, signed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the government said it would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from pursuing certain claims against Trump, his businesses and family members. The agreement specifically blocks the government from taking any action regarding tax returns that already have been filed.
Tuesday’s addendum includes broad language in which the U.S. pledges to cease pursuing any matters that are or could be pending with the IRS and with other agencies or departments. The statement includes family members and “related or affiliated individuals,” although it doesn’t clearly define those terms.
“He gets the money to spread among his friends and allies and also gets immunity for any review or audit. These guys just have no limit to what they’ll try to get away with.”
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/government-deal-with-trump-expands-to-end-tax-audits-aad8f2bc
The accounts purchased at least $1.75 million of Nvidia’s stock in the quarter, including $500,000 on Jan. 6. A week later, the administration cleared the way for Nvidia to send its H200 artificial-intelligence chips to China. Last week, Trump invited Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to travel aboard Air Force One for the state visit to China.
Natalie Harp, Trump’s executive assistant, plays an integral role in Trump’s Truth Social activity. She brings the president stacks of printed-out draft social-media posts for his approval. The proposed posts often recycle content from other accounts that Harp or advisers think would appeal to Trump, according to people familiar with the matter.
Harp then logs onto the president’s account—at times outside of normal work hours—and posts batches of Trump-approved messages, the people said. Trump personally signs off on all of the content posted to his account. While Harp often posts content on Trump’s behalf, the president posts some messages himself, White House officials said.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-truth-social-late-night-posts-167cb47a
They [two Trump's posts on Iran: 1. open the f-ing strait; 2. civilization will die tonight] constituted hitting a new bottom, a new and infernal, face-lit-by-flames bottom, in world communications. The posts weren’t showbiz, they were sinister. You destabilize the world when, as the American president, you say such things. You make all the babies in this delicately poised, always knock-down-able world less safe. You rob your own nation of a claim to moral seriousness in the military action in which it’s engaged: You are saying we’re not trying to protect life but plan to attack, and in the attacking kill noncombatants who are members of the targeted civilization. The moral high ground is relinquished. You lower the bar for all potential response. You encourage violent action by trumpeting your readiness for it.
It bolsters the position of your enemies—their animus is justified, their commitment deepened. It allows them to pretend they’re fighting for the continuation of their people and not only the continuation of their regime.
Donald Trump plays the part of the madman every day. His head fake would be sanity. If his advisers thought this was a good negotiating tactic—“Give ’em a little madman theory, Mr. President”—they really are hicks.
Mr. Trump’s trust in his gut seems to have grown overwhelming—not in his reasoning power, not his analysis of intelligence data, but gut.
A lot of gut instinct is pattern recognition—I’ve lived long, experienced much, and know how this movie ends. But that means gut is weighted toward past experience.
Sometimes gut is mere emotion dressed up as instinct. Sometimes it’s wishful thinking that feels like conviction. Sometimes it conveniently pre-empts hard reasoning.
You can trust your gut straight into catastrophe.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/in-gut-we-trust-dde164b6
“Ultimately, the task of parenting hasn’t changed, despite the demoralization of AI. It’s still about: How can we raise adaptable, grounded humans, who can respond to disruption—and, even more important, who believe they can respond to disruption,” says Dr. Elkins.
Resiliency is the key to functioning in a world moving so quickly under their feet.
Dr. Elkins assures me this will be easier than I think. “If you see your kid is doing a great job tolerating frustration, say, the videogame console breaks and instead of throwing it against the wall they fix it, that’s an opportunity to be like, ‘Hey, you dealt with that really well,’” she says. “Or when you notice flexibility—they were supposed to go to a friend’s house and someone got sick, but they pivoted nicely. You can say, ‘I saw you rebounded really well.’”
She suggests encouraging your kids to take initiative rather than waiting for instructions, to take healthy risks and do things more independently. “These are core skills that research tells us over and over are related to long-term adaptability,” says Dr. Elkins.
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/relationships/ai-parenting-anxiety-c054a54b
Most of the remaining staff at X, in addition to concentrating on cost-cutting, have been told to focus on growing X’s revenue.
X’s U.S. ad revenue is expected to grow 1.5% to $1.27 billion, while global ad sales are anticipated to rise 2.2% to $2.19 billion, according to estimates from Emarketer. In 2021, the last year in which X disclosed annual financials before Musk took the company private, Twitter said it generated $4.51 billion in advertising revenue.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/elon-musks-x-restructures-ahead-of-spacex-ipo-6aab5673
The Trump administration is set to receive a roughly $10 billion fee from investors in the recently completed deal to take control of TikTok’s U.S. business, delivering it a windfall for keeping the popular social-media app alive in America.
The investors include cloud-computing company Oracle, private-equity firm Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi investor MGX. They and other backers paid the Treasury Department about $2.5 billion when the deal closed in January and are set to make several additional payments until hitting the $10 billion total, the people said.
When announcing the framework for the TikTok deal in September, Trump said, “It hasn’t been fully negotiated, but we’ll get something,” adding that the size of the deal and money and effort put in by the government justify compensation.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/tiktok-deal-fee-trump-administration-5aa31c9f
In court on Wednesday, a Justice Department lawyer asked for Eaton to pause his order while the government appeals, but the judge denied that request.
The judge said the repayment process should be straightforward and grew impatient when a Justice Department lawyer said the government hadn’t yet formalized its position on refunding the tariffs, which President Trump imposed by citing a decades-old law. “Your position is clear,” the judge said. “The Supreme Court told you what your position is.”
The Justice Department lawyer, Claudia Burke, said that any refund process would be time-consuming for the tariff collector, CBP. The government agency would have to manually go through millions of import entries, she added.
“We live in the age of computers,” Eaton said. “It must be possible for Customs Service to program its computers so it doesn’t need a manual review."
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/judge-orders-government-to-begin-refunding-more-than-130-billion-in-tariffs-fdc1e62c.
First lady Melania Trump expressed condolences to families who have lost loved ones to death and injury during an address to the United Nations on Monday that described “these challenging times.”
In an unprecedented role for a first lady, she opened a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on behalf of the U.S. as the country assumed the rotating presidency of the council. “I extend my earnest wishes for a swift and smooth recovery to all those who have been injured. You are in my thoughts and prayers during these challenging times,” Trump said, without mentioning any particular conflict.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iran-israel-us-strikes-2026/card/speaking-at-un-melania-trump-expresses-condolences-for-the-dead-4oUsYCq5A2LzcAeEHn9Z
The federal government will stop working with Anthropic and designate the artificial intelligence company a supply-chain risk, a dramatic escalation of the government’s clash with the company over how its technology can be used by the Pentagon.
The company’s red lines had been domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, areas the Pentagon said Anthropic didn’t need to worry about because the military would never break the law with AI. Defense Department officials said Anthropic needed to fully trust the Pentagon to use the technology responsibly and relinquish control.
“We cannot in good conscience accede to their request,” Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said on Thursday.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/trump-will-end-government-use-of-anthropics-ai-models-ff3550d9
We asked Amodei and four other leaders in AI how they think about their own children’s futures and what advice they give them.
...
--There are two areas that I think will be vibrant in the short to medium term. One is energy. The other is healthcare.
-- In terms of what he should study in college... I’d rather it be something in the space of mathematics because logical thinking is something that will be required in any future role because of how AI works.
-- My kids are interested in broad careers like law and medicine, so I’m less worried. I think generalist jobs, where there are many different skills bundled together, are good jobs in an AI world. .. A liberal-arts education matters more than ever.
-- Metacognitive skills will be very important—flexibility, adaptability, experimentation, thinking critically, being able to challenge things. Developing critical-thinking skills requires friction, doing things that are hard, doing deep thinking.
For that, a traditional liberal-arts education is really important.
-- So, if anything—and this sounds funny to say about future teenagers—I might orient my kids toward more socializing and understanding how they relate to people in their own unique way.
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/what-ai-executives-tell-their-own-kids-about-the-jobs-of-the-future-1ba43f65
Right now, workers are potentially training AI how to make them obsolete. And they often don’t realize it.
The kind of AI used by companies, called an enterprise AI system, can capture everything you do at work and use that information to train itself. These systems can record your interactions within the platform—the prompts you write, the documents you create, the queries you run.
In other words, the company can potentially track—and claim ownership of—every keystroke you make within the system, every idea you document there, every tool you build using that platform.
This dynamic may fundamentally change the relationship between employer and employee. The stakes are so high and so urgent that both sides are rushing to position (or protect) themselves. Executives are rapidly implementing enterprise AI systems, seeking productivity gains and competitive advantage—and they often aren’t disclosing the implications for job security and privacy. Meanwhile, at least some employees are secretly adopting personal AI tools, sometimes violating corporate policies, so that their employers can’t capture everything they know and do.
Individual opt-out of AI is often impossible, so unions and professional associations need to pay attention. With collective bargaining, workers could demand transparency about the use of enterprise AI and demand fair compensation for the knowledge it gathers. Without collective power, individual employees will keep clicking “accept” on agreements that restructure their jobs simply because they have no alternative.
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/ai-knowledge-capture-employees-a69a0e1c
South Texas is a heightened example of what contractors are facing across the country in areas where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity has intensified. Home builders in Minnesota relayed similar experiences of raids picking up whole work crews, even those with legal documentation, said Grace Keliher, executive vice president of the Builders Association of Minnesota. Nationally, a third of commercial contractors reported being affected by immigration-enforcement actions in the past six months, according to a January report by trade group Associated General Contractors of America.
Two guards at a nearby immigration detention center said they frequently see detainees come in still wearing dusty work clothes from construction jobsites. A significant portion of the men they now guard have valid work permits, they said, which they haven’t seen in previous administrations, but those detainees still wait weeks to see a judge before being released.
Because of that, people are afraid to work whether they have legal authorization or not, a reality that has hit the industry and broader regional economy hard. Paul Rodriguez, CEO of Valley Land Title, estimated that residential construction activity fell 30% in recent months in Hidalgo County.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/texas-immigration-raids-economy-87e23e2e
Miller was influential in Trump’s first term, but his power has expanded in the second one. He personally drafted or edited every executive order the president signed, and faced little opposition from administration officials to his work to reshape immigration policy.
His authority, officials said, derives from his ability to manage the president.
Early in Trump’s second term, Miller told federal agents in a meeting at the headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that the president was disappointed in their numbers. Miller urged the agents to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens,” without bothering with targeted lists, according to people familiar with the meeting.
He demanded 3,000 arrests a day—a number deemed unrealistic by many federal agents—and came up with the idea of offering recruitment bonuses as high as $50,000 for thousands of new ICE agents.
Miller rarely leaves a written trail of his orders, using Signal, an encrypted voice and text-messaging app, to communicate.
Unlike most of his colleagues, Miller has Secret Service protection. He moved his family to a military base after protests outside his Arlington, Va., home.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/ice-stephen-miller-pretti-trump-2448e779
Only 13% of those arrested at the beginning of 2025 didn’t have either a conviction or a pending charge.
Since October, 73% taken into ICE custody had no criminal conviction and only 5% had a violent criminal conviction, according to a Cato Institute review of ICE data.
Many of the criminal immigrants the Administration counts among those in detention are convicted criminals culled from prisons.
Syracuse professor Austin Kocher, who tracks official ICE data, finds that between Sept. 21, 2025, and Jan. 7, 2026, single-day ICE detentions increased 11,296. But only 902 of those were convicted criminals, 2,273 had pending criminal charges and 8,121 were other immigrant violators. ICE arrests have been trending upward since January 2025, but criminal arrests have plateaued.
White House aide Stephen Miller’s undisciplined mass deportation and zero-immigration policy is building distrust, and the White House pitch that public safety justifies its enforcement is losing credibility.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/mass-deportation-trump-administration-ice-criminals-minnesota-tim-walz-kristi-noem-7f3bb88b
...
As Pretti and the two other civilians walk away, one of the agents follows them.
That agent then shoved someone who appeared to be with Pretti.
Pretti immediately puts himself between the fallen person and the officer, who appears to spray a nonlethal chemical agent on all three of them.
As a struggle ensues, agents pull Pretti from the others; at least five masked DHS agents surround him and force him to the ground.
Bystander footage shows one agent drawing his firearm and pointing it at Pretti.
Around the same time, a different video verified by the Journal shows Pretti pinned to the ground and agents appear to discover a firearm on him.
In a statement, DHS said, “The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted.”
Less than a second later, one of the agents fires his weapon toward Pretti—the first of at least 10 shots within 5 seconds.
As shots are fired, bystander footage shows another officer raising his firearm.
A preliminary analysis of the video’s audio suggests a total of 10 shots were fired from a single semiautomatic firearm, according to Robert Maher, a forensic audio analyst at Montana State University.
About a minute after the shooting, bystander footage shows officers shouting, “Where is the gun?” as they attempt to apply first aid to Pretti.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/videos-contradict-u-s-account-of-minneapolis-shooting-by-federal-agents-fbe1e488
The world is waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the legality of President Trump’s “emergency” tariffs, and Mr. Trump’s weekend tariff spree against European allies underscores again why his abuse of his authority needs to be reined in.
The episode puts in sharp relief how open-ended Mr. Trump’s claim of tariff emergency authority is. He can declare an emergency on his own, he can decide which countries and goods he can hit with the border taxes, and at what rate. This means he can use tariffs essentially whenever he wants for whatever reason he wants. Congress gave him no such expansive power under IEEPA or any other statute.
Tariff apologists will say the Greenland tariffs show the uses of border taxes for foreign policy, but the taxing power is Congress’s under the Constitution unless expressly delegated to the President.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-tariffs-greenland-ieepa-supreme-court-2a4a6591
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