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Campaign group holds silent protest at prestigious English university ..read more

Mike Johnson had been speaker for less than two months when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy came to him with a stark message: Time is running out. As the two men huddled in the speaker’s office in December, a Ukrainian Ostroh Bible perched near them, Zelenskyy made it clear just how much longer his country could hold out against a renewed onslaught of Russian missiles and drones. “March or April,” the president said, according to two people familiar with the discussion. The December meeting and the bleak prognosis contributed greatly to Johnson’s decision to go against his conservativ ..read more

Capitol Hill powerbrokers came together to fund the government and pass a $95 billion foreign aid deal. Now some top lawmakers are opening the door a crack to another feat: boosting the Pentagon budget. Lead Republicans on the House and Senate Armed Services committees have already said they’re open to busting spending caps for the Pentagon as part of annual defense policy legislation. But a pair of top appropriators — whose panel actually parcels out funding for the Pentagon — are now talking about the chance of an eventual deal to exceed those limits. President Joe Biden’s fiscal 2025 defen ..read more

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is writing a film about the Jan. 6 insurrection and how he believes Facebook’s “divisive material” influenced the attack on the nation’s Capitol. Sorkin, the writer famous for "The West Wing," "The Social Network" and the HBO series "The Newsroom," put it bluntly in a podcast episode of “The Town with Matthew Belloni”: "I blame Facebook for January 6.” When asked to explain why, he responded: “You’re gonna need to buy a movie ticket.” “Facebook has been, among other things, tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible,” he said in a live podcas ..read more

President Joe Biden participated in a surprise live interview on Friday with radio host Howard Stern, the latest example of the White House favoring media personalities and nontraditional outlets ahead of the president’s reelection. Biden said in the interview that he planned to debate former President Donald Trump this election cycle, but did not know when or where it would happen. “I am happy to debate him,” Biden said. Although Trump did not participate in any of the presidential primary debates, his campaign has called on Biden to debate and has suggested adding more debates to the genera ..read more

Secretary of State Antony Blinken ended three days of meetings in China on Friday with a stark warning to China’s leadership — stop exporting materials that allow Russia to rebuild its industrial base or face U.S. sanctions. Chinese state-owned firms are providing key components for Russia’s defense industrial base, including microelectronics and machine tools that have “a material effect against Ukraine” and constitute “a growing threat that Russia poses to countries in Europe,” Blinken told reporters ina press briefing in Beijing on Friday. Blinken said that, in his meetings with China’s le ..read more

America is “saying one thing and doing another,” Chinese leader cautions top US diplomat ..read more

SOMERVILLE, New Jersey — Jack Ciattarelli has been campaigning for governor of New Jersey for the better part of a decade. His first 2017 gubernatorial bid ended in a nearly 16-point primary loss. He came up 3 points short as the Republican nominee in 2021. Now, Ciattarelli is convinced the third time’s a charm — and he thinks national GOP leaders will agree. “They’re not going to make the same mistake they made last time,” Ciattarelli told POLITICO in an interview at a diner in suburban New Jersey. “They bought into that conventional wisdom that a Republican couldn’t win. We proved that I ca ..read more