Cali’s Improbable Contest: Establishment vs. Upheaval

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(Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

There is a particular kind of political theater that only California can stage, and on Tuesday, it raised the curtain again. Out of a field of sixty-one — sixty-one! — the voters of the nation’s largest state narrowed their choices to two men who could not be more different in pedigree or promise. Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Xavier Becerra are now headed toward a November contest to replace the term-limited Gavin Newsom, and the early-morning returns suggested neither man intends to be modest about it. For Hilton, the moment carries the weight of history, or at least the hope

Where Trump’s Diplomacy and Netanyahu’s War Diverge

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(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

There are calls that change a war, and then there is the one President Trump placed to Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday — blunt, profane, and, by every account that has leaked since, decisive. Israel had ordered strikes on Hezbollah positions in southern Beirut, Iran had walked away from negotiations with Washington in protest, and Trump saw months of his own diplomacy slipping toward collapse. So he picked up the phone and, according to Axios, opened with a question no aide would put on letterhead: “What the f–k are you doing?” It did not soften from there. A U.S. official summarized

When the Channels Close: Iran Walks Away and Widens the War

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(Photo by ATTA KENARE / AFP via Getty Images) /

The deal, such as it was, is off. Iran has stopped talking. And it has begun to organize instead. On Monday, after Israel’s strikes on Beirut, Tehran pulled the plug on the back-channel diplomacy that mediators had been quietly stitching together for weeks — the fragile architecture meant to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and walk everyone back toward formal talks. The Iranian negotiating team is suspending, in the words of the government-linked Tasnim News Agency, “discussions and exchanges of texts through intermediaries.” The reason given: the ceasefire, they say, has been violated on all fronts, including Lebanon, which was

The Question Jill’s Interview Raises — and Doesn’t Answer

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(Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images)

Nearly two years on, the debate that broke a presidency is being told again — this time by the woman who stood closest to it. In a new CBS interview, former first lady Jill Biden has offered an account that lands with a different weight than anything said in the immediate aftermath of that June night in 2024. She was not, she says, embarrassed. She was not disappointed. She was afraid. “I wasn’t horrified, I was frightened,” she said. “I had never, ever seen Joe like that before or since. I don’t know what happened. As I watched it, I

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