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Trump pausing 50% tariffs on some Canadian goods as deal being finalized
Trump Pauses 50 Percent Tariffs on Canada and Claims Deal Is Near
Trump announces temporary pause on Canada tariffs, citing new deal
Trump Pauses 50% Tariff on Some Canadian Products
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Democratic socialist Angie Nixon scores surprise win in Florida US Senate primary
Nixon bested Alexander Vindman to win Democratic nomination and now faces Republican Ashley Moody in November
In an upset for the Democratic establishment, progressive Angie Nixon won the party’s US Senate primary in Florida, beating former army intelligence officer Alexander Vindman.
Nixon, a state representative and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, had significantly less funding going into the primary – with $975,000 to Vindman’s $16.3m at the end of July, according to Florida Politics.
Continue reading...US-led drills to end six days early, South Korea says, amid Trump push for Kim Jong-un talks
South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff said the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise would end on 21 August at the request of the US
South Korea’s military has confirmed that joint military drills with the US will be cut short, days after Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon to scale back the exercises.
In a statement on Wednesday, South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff said at the request of the US side, the Ulchi Freedom Shield (UFS) exercise – which began on Monday would end on Friday, six days earlier than originally planned.
Continue reading...Trump pauses 50% tariffs on Canada for 3 days, citing a new deal
US-led drills to end six days early, South Korea says, amid Trump push for Kim Jong-un talks
South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff said the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise would end on 21 August at the request of the US
South Korea’s military has confirmed that joint military drills with the US will be cut short, days after Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon to scale back the exercises.
In a statement on Wednesday, South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff said at the request of the US side, the Ulchi Freedom Shield (UFS) exercise – which began on Monday would end on Friday, six days earlier than originally planned.
Continue reading...The worst primary in America just ended
Rep. Randy Fine, the Republican running for reelection in Florida’s Sixth Congressional District, has unfavorably compared Muslims to dogs and suggested Israel should starve Gazans. “We need more Islamophobia, not less,” he wrote in one post on X. “Palestinian is a synonym for evil,” he wrote in another.
You might think that such a person would obviously be the most repugnant candidate in tonight’s FL-6 primary. But then there’s Dan Bilzerian, the right-wing influencer who challenged him.
Bilzerian is an open antisemite and Holocaust denier with millions of social media followers who has said that “most of the problems today are caused by Jewish supremacy.” He has called the mastermind of the October 7 attacks a “hero” and fantasized about personally killing Israelis. During the campaign, he regularly called Fine a “fat Jew” and released an AI-generated music video on X that muses about a second Holocaust: “Jewish supremacist, Satan’s creepy little minions / should we revisit that Austrian painter’s opinions?”
Lest the reference be too subtle, the line is overlaid over a graphic of Adolf Hitler wearing a painter’s apron.
House leaders in both parties condemned the antisemitic attacks and Fine won easily, but Bilzerian appeared poised to finish with about 19 percent of the vote with over 90 percent of ballots counted, making him the top vote-getter out of four Republicans challenging the incumbent.
This should all be a giant flashing warning sign for the GOP’s post-Trump future.
As on the Democratic side, divides over Gaza and October 7 have created a schism inside the GOP. But the right has rejected the very idea of gatekeeping against bigotry as either “woke” or needlessly divisive. For all his anti-Muslim statements, Fine is a Republican in good standing, with President Donald Trump’s “complete and total” endorsement to prove it. And he and others with similarly vicious views have turned the right’s debate over the Middle East into an increasingly nasty fight over American Muslims and Jews themselves.
Fine and Bilzerian may be unusually blunt and cruel. But the tendencies they represent have much wider purchase in the GOP — and could end up derailing its future.
How the country’s worst primary came to be
Prior to 2025, Randy Fine was a Florida state legislator best known nationally for his intervention in the most recent Republican presidential primary — during which he initially endorsed Gov. Ron DeSantis, but then flipped to Trump. In 2025, he ran for the US House in a special election to replace Mike Waltz, the member of Congress Trump initially picked to serve as national security adviser.
Fine coasted to victory in the GOP primary, but underperformed Trump by about 10 points in the general election. That was still easily good enough to win, as FL-6 is very red, but it pointed to Fine’s weakness as a candidate.
“He repels people,” DeSantis said in a press conference after the special election.
Since joining the House, Fine has made a name for himself for two things: his unshaking personal devotion to Trump and his frequent bigoted comments about Palestinians and Muslims, which he revels in using to generate controversy.
After his February comment about dogs — “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one” — prompted outrage from leading Democrats and civil rights groups, Fine went on the far-right TV station NewsMax to suggest that the United States should force Muslims out of the country. On his social media accounts, he started posting images of dogs superimposed on a Gadsden “don’t tread on me” flag.
As Fine was making a name for himself through explicit anti-Muslim bigotry, Bilzerian was doing the same with antisemitism.
Bilzerian, who retains a fortune of uncertain size from his prior career as a professional poker player, is best known for the hard-partying lifestyle portrayed on his Instagram. A manosphere influencer and self-proclaimed sex addict, he has claimed to be dating 50 women at once and to have suffered two heart attacks at age 25 due to a combination of sleep deprivation, Viagra, and cocaine abuse. He currently has 29 million followers on Instagram and 2.1 million on Twitter.
In November 2024, he did an interview with Piers Morgan — still pinned to his Twitter profile — that served as a kind of mainstream coming-out party for his antisemitic worldview. In the interview, he said, among other things, that Jews control the media, exaggerated the Holocaust, and killed JFK. He has escalated into eliminationist antisemitism from there.
When he entered the primary in the spring, Bilzerian framed his challenge against Fine entirely around the congressman’s religion. “This fat jew @RepFine…has no place in our govt,” Bilzerian wrote in a March post. “When I unseat him I’m going to draft laws to have anyone putting Israel before America tried for treason.”
Fine, ever the class act, responded by going after Bilzerian’s dual Armenian citizenship. “We don’t want Armenians to be able to serve in Congress,” he said in a May interview. The ensuing campaign has seen Bilzerian posting a pro-Holocaust video, a swastika spray-painted on a Fine campaign sign, and Fine attempting to get Bilzerian investigated by the FBI.
In a year full of ugly primaries across the country, this is without question the ugliest and most hateful.
What the Fine-Bilzerian race says about the right’s future
The scary thing about Florida’s Sixth District is that it might not be an isolated incident.
Among elected Republicans, Randy Fine may have made the most violently offensive anti-Muslim comments — but he is not the only one doing so. In fact, one of the most striking trends among congressional Republicans in the past year has been an uptick in more of them talking like Randy Fine.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) posted on Facebook that “Islam is not a religion. It’s a cult.” Former Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) posted on X that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) tweeted that “every single Muslim holding public office in America is a Trojan horse.” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) declared there should be “no more Muslims” in Texas, and (per a Washington Post count) posted on the topic 244 times in the first three-and-a-half months of the year on the topic. Rep. Barry Moore (R-AL) even introduced legislation — called The CRUSADE Act — that would effectively require Muslim immigrants to disavow the Islamic legal-moral code, called sharia, as a condition of receiving a visa.
This isn’t entirely new territory for Republicans. In 2010, there was also a wave of right-wing panic about sharia conquering American law that led to over a dozen state-level attempts to ban it. Trump’s proposal to impose a “total and complete ban” on Muslim immigration was, of course, a huge part of his message in his first campaign. And the national security team in his first administration was heavily influenced by a group of anti-Islam activists who called themselves “counter-jihadists.”
What’s new about the current wave of Republican Islamophobia is the explicitness. In the past, Republicans typically differentiated between ordinary Muslims and extremists, claiming to merely be targeting the latter even when their proposals would have restricted the former’s rights. Today, however, Republican officials have become increasingly comfortable dispensing with this fig leaf — saying that Muslims and Islam are the problem, period.
This is rooted in some combination of genuine bigotry and a cynical read of the GOP primary electorate. Polls consistently show high levels of hostility to Islam and Muslims among Republican voters; in May, for example, the pollster PRRI released a survey showing that 76 percent of Republicans agreed that “the values of Islam are at odds with American values and the American way of life.”
Disturbingly, Bilzerian’s antisemitic strategy might be similarly in tune with elements of the GOP base.
Antisemitism is still far less tolerated within the Republican Party — in fact, condemnation of Bilzerian has been notably bipartisan and his support on Tuesday, while unnervingly high, was nowhere near enough to threaten Fine. But his hyper-online cohort of far-right influencers has been growing in relevance, especially among Gen Z conservatives, who (per recent polling) form the demographic epicenter of America’s growing antisemitism problem.
In fact, Bilzerian wasn’t even the most prominent extremist candidate in Florida on Tuesday. That would be James Fishback, the GOP candidate for governor who ran a longshot campaign against Rep. Byron Donalds that was frequently accused of racism and antisemitism and had a visible following among young “groypers.” He appeared set to finish with around 10 percent of the vote with over 90 percent of ballots counted. Both are following the trail blazed by Nick Fuentes, the right-wing livestreamer who has made a name for himself as a leading voice of antisemitism.
Increasingly, this overt antisemitism is becoming a normal part of the lexicon in certain corners of right-wing media. Tucker Carlson, who has long taken care to hide his more inflammatory ideas under layers of innuendo and plausible deniability, recently accused Jewish conservative Ben Shapiro of wanting everyone to eat “goyslop” — an antisemitic term popular with far-right young people that implicitly accuses Jews of ruining the lives of non-Jewish Americans. Candace Owens, the right-wing podcaster second only to Carlson in reach, has been even more brazen.
And while their clashes with the White House over the Iran war have recently alienated Trump, it’s still an open question what will happen when his influence wanes and whether the next Republican nominee — whether it’s Vice President JD Vance or someone else — will bring these figures in from the cold.
There is, of course, both Islamophobia and antisemitism on the Democratic side as well. But there are also some antibodies in that the party has, however imperfectly, long made anti-bigotry one of its core values — many of the critiques of “Woke 1” were about excesses in this regard.
By contrast, Republicans have turned on the very idea of imposing guardrails, making it harder to repel candidates who cross the line into hate. Last week, a pair of conservative writers — professor Greg Conti and journalist Aaron Sibarium — warned that this rejection was setting the party up for disaster.
“Frustrated by the suppression of mainstream, center-right views, conservatives increasingly reject as cancel culture any public repudiation of genuinely fringe ideas, creating a subculture of racism, sexism and antisemitism that did not exist to the same degree even five years ago,” they wrote in the New York Times.
The Fine-Bilzerian race shows that this concern is not hypothetical. Trends on the right are moving swiftly to normalize the unthinkable, to make it so two candidates in a primary race could think that the gutterest of gutter bigotry could be a ticket to victory (or at least, enhanced stardom).
If things keep going this way, the future of the Republican Party could end up looking a lot like Florida’s Sixth.
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Florida Rep. Cory Mills Loses Primary After Scandal-Filled Campaign
Florida Rep. Cory Mills, the incumbent representing the state’s 7th District, lost his Republican primary on Tuesday to former TV anchor Ryan Elijah after a controversial campaign for a third term in Congress.
President Donald Trump notably gave Mills his “Complete and Total Endorsement” on Feb. 10, when he wrote a social media post describing the candidate as “an America First Patriot.” But it didn’t seem to outweigh ongoing allegations of sexual misconduct, accusations of mishandling campaign finances, and questions about his military record.
Read More: Trump Says Voters Are Angry With Republicans—But Not With Him. Here’s What Polls Show
“Whether [Mills] wants it to be or not, obviously the allegations against him have become the defining thing that people are talking about,” says Kevin Wagner, professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University.
“The president's endorsement is powerful,” he says, “but it doesn't prevent voters from making a calculation on what they think of him individually in that seat.”
The controversies that came to define Cory Mills’s campaign
Going into the primary, the latest polling showed Elijah with 44% of the vote, while 27% backed Mills and 19% remained undecided. That meant there was no assured winner heading into Tuesday, Wagner says, with the number of undecided voters suggesting a lot of “volatility” in the race.
Incumbents are often the strong frontrunners in re-election campaigns for Congress, but Mills has been embroiled in a string of scandals in the past year. Last October, there was a court-issued injunction against him after a former girlfriend accused Mills of threatening to release explicit videos of her. The judge found that the woman in question, Lindsay Langston, provided evidence in support of her claim that Mills caused "substantial emotional distress." He wrote in his ruling that he did not find Mills's "testimony concerning the intimate videos to be truthful." In a separate incident in February 2025, D.C. police responded to a report that Mills had assaulted a woman with whom he was in a relationship. The woman later retracted her account, according to Politico, and police did not charge Mills.
In November 2025, the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into Mills. Its review included allegations of sexual misconduct, as well as allegations that he may have "omitted or misrepresented required information in his financial disclosure statements." The Committee emphasized that the investigation itself did not indicate that any violation had occurred, and Mills has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
Mills's military record also came under scrutiny when several veterans disputed the account provided in his recommendation for a Bronze Star, which he was awarded in 2021 for his actions in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. In 2025, five individuals who served with him claimed that they did not recall his presence at the incidents for which he was awarded the medal. According to NOTUS, Mills attributed the discrepancies to differing recollections amid the chaos of wartime.
His campaign was hurt further this month after two of his fellow incumbent lawmakers in the state, Reps. Anna Paulina Luna and Mike Haridopolos, endorsed Elijah. Then, last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis told reporters that he does not support Mills.
“I have not endorsed Cory Mills and I do not support Cory Mills,” he said.
Trump also appeared to distance himself last week when he reposted endorsements for all of the Republicans up for election in Congress on Truth Social—except Mills.
What to know about Florida’s 7th District race in November
While the 7th District will likely stay red in November, attention is turning to how Florida’s redrawn congressional map could reshape its midterm races.
The new map, signed into law by DeSantis in May 2026, redrew 21 of the state’s 28 districts, looking to reduce the number of Democratic-leaning districts from eight to four—affecting Democratic incumbents like Kathy Castor in Tampa, as well as Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Jared Mokowitz in South Florida.
While District 7 was not radically redrawn, Aubrey Jewett, professor of political science at the University of Central Florida, says that since this new map favors Republicans, flipping the 7th District could help offset any losses elsewhere in the state.
Elijah will go up against Democratic candidate and military veteran Bale Dalton in November, who is endorsed by Pete Buttigieg. Jewett says Dalton could be a viable candidate.
And if Dalton were to win, he says: “That might help not only the Florida congressional delegation pick up a Democratic seat, but of course, yeah, maybe at the national level, might offset some of these losses that they're expecting.”
Current polling and election forecasts show that Democrats are favored to take back the majority in the House of Representatives in November, which would be consistent with an existing pattern where the sitting President’s party typically loses seats in midterm elections.
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Continue reading...Two Trump-backed candidates lose, Debbie Wasserman Schultz wins in Tuesday’s House primaries in Florida
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Fire authorities have warned large parts of the Northern Territory are facing heightened fire danger throughout spring, with above average fuel loads leaving much of the territory vulnerable.
Low soil moisture has also led to elevated fire risk for parts of New South Wales, including some areas that were badly burned during the black summer fires, and south-east Queensland as an El Niño system continues to strengthen in the country’s south-east.
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