France Is Burning, and Trump Thinks He Knows Why.

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(Photo by Basile Dubouis / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images)

Tear gas in Paris. Fires in Lyon. Projectiles in Strasbourg and Rennes. More than 6,100 arrests, most of them children. That was Tuesday in France, the worst day yet in a school protest movement that began in September and has curdled into something uglier. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu called it the school system’s “heaviest toll in decades.” He told lawmakers at least 215 teenagers and 85 school staff had been hurt. His office put the number of injured police at more than 700, according to Reuters. More than half of France’s roughly 3,700 high schools were blockaded or expected to

With a T-Shirt, Jack Smith Shows His Hand.

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(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Jack Smith went to a concert Saturday night. That should be the least interesting sentence written about anyone this week. For three years he was the most consequential prosecutor in the country. Merrick Garland picked him in November 2022 to decide whether Donald Trump would face federal charges. He decided yes, twice. Whatever you thought of those cases, they all rested on one claim: this was law, not politics. The man bringing the charges had no rooting interest. Then he turned up at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md., beer in hand, wearing a black Bruce Springsteen tour shirt with

A Wounded Captain, an Open Door, and a Warning to Tehran.

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(Photo by Kent NISHIMURA / AFP via Getty Images)

A pilot, stabbed by the man in the seat beside him, made it to the cockpit door and got it open. That may be the reason everyone aboard flydubai Flight 1073 lived to talk about it. Now the question is who else had a hand in that cockpit. President Trump made clear Thursday what happens if the answer turns out to be Iran. “Oh, they’ll be hit very hard, don’t worry,” Trump told reporters. “They know what happened. They’ll be hit very hard.” He was careful to say the investigation isn’t finished. He made less effort to hide where he

The Government Got Smaller, and the Sky Stayed Up.

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(Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images)

The federal government is the smallest it’s been since 1966. The country is fine. That’s the news in the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers. About 2.7 million civilian federal workers. Down from roughly 3 million when President Trump took office. More than 300,000 jobs, gone. About 11% of the whole. Most of it happened in year one. Then the number held. Think about 1966. LBJ was building the Great Society. Washington was learning to answer every problem with a new office. The country had fewer than 200 million people then. Now it has more than 330 million. Per citizen,

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