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Ben Stokes’ storied England career ends in a series defeat by New Zealand, who wrap up the third and deciding Test on the final day in Nottingham.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who recently lost a primary for his seat, said in a new interview President Trump occasionally treats the legislative branch as “merely an appendage.” Cassidy told CBS News’s Margaret Brennan in the interview, aired on Sunday on “Face the Nation,” that “the Senate is a separate body, separate from the presidency.”…

Comcast is spinning off its NBCUniversal entertainment and media assets into a separate publicly traded company.

MANCHESTER, England — Andy Burnham, likely the next U.K. prime minister, pledged Monday to give away a chunk of his power by handing greater autonomy to local leaders in a “circuit-breaker” for the sclerotic British state

A highly unusual outburst occurred at the Supreme Court last week. Thursday morning, after Justice Samuel Alito announced the court’s decision in a case regarding asylum policy at the U.S.-Mexico border, Justice Sonia Sotomayor read aloud from her dissent. That in itself is a relatively rare occurrence, but part of the court’s tradition.

Once Sotomayor finished, however, Alito broke from decorum to accuse his colleague of catching him off guard. Alito’s outburst was more than just his latest public display of crankiness. It exemplified a far more insidious trend: the conservative justices on the court treating the loss of comity as some sort of outrage, while ignoring the real-world consequences of their rulings. 

The  majority opinion in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado gave a green light to a federal government policy that tried to avoid allowing migrants to make humanitarian claims for asylum. Under the law, a noncitizen is allowed to apply for asylum once that person “arrives in the United States.” To circumvent this, the government placed Customs and Border Protection officials along the U.S.-Mexico border to prevent asylum-seeking noncitizens who did not have valid travel documents from physically entering the United States — even those who were approaching a port of entry and were in the process of entering the country. 

Alito’s and Sotomayor’s opinions sparred about statutory definitions, including what the words “arrives in” meant. Alito held that since these refugees were not physically in the United States itself, they had not “arrived in” the country under the word’s “ordinary meaning.” Sotomayor pointed out that the “ordinary meaning” of “arriving in” does not always mean being within a physical space; one can say they have “arrived in” Washington, D.C., when they have landed at a nearby airport in Virginia. As Sotomayor opined, context matters — and the statutory context here, in her view, counseled against the Trump administration’s, and the conservative majority’s, cramped interpretation of the law. 

Beyond this linguistic dispute, what is undoubtedly true is that Alito’s decision will prevent legitimate asylum-seekers from receiving the protection the law was intended to afford them. Reading her dissent from the bench, Sotomayor outlined the difficult path many asylum-seekers face and articulated how our current asylum legal framework sprang from the “moral reckoning that followed the Holocaust and World War II.” She recounted the awful case of the MS St. Louis, when the U.S. refused to accept over 900 Jewish refugees who sailed from Nazi Germany in 1939. More than 250 of those turned away would die in the Holocaust. 

“Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980 because it did not want this country to repeat the mistakes of its past,” Sotomayor wrote. “Yet if the refugees on the M. S. St. Louis were to walk up to a port of entry on our southern border today, the majority’s interpretation would allow immigration officers to refuse even to consider their asylum applications by physically blocking them from stepping foot onto U.S. soil.”

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TPS ruling was a rug pulled out from under the Haitian community, attorney says

June 28, 2026 / 05:33

According to CNN’s Joan Biskupic, after Sotomayor finished, Alito “let his anger flash.”He snippily stated, “There is much that I would have added to my bench statement had I known there would be a dissent read.” The court later issued a statement that Sotomayor had in fact notified Alito in advance, claiming that his response was due to a “misunderstanding” on his part.

This testiness is something of a trend with Alito. He has repeatedly rolled his eyes and, one observer wrote, “visibly mocked” his colleagues while they have read their opinions. And in front of a national televised audience, he famously shook his head and mouthed the words “not true” when President Barack Obama criticized the Citizens United ruling during a State of the Union address. 

These instances of pearl-clutching were reactions to legitimate public criticism of decisions with dramatic, often harmful consequences. Indeed, the refugee ruling was not the only deeply destructive immigration-related decision he issued on Thursday. He also penned the majority opinion in Mullin v. Doe, in which the court cleared the way for the Trump administration to revoke Temporary Protected Status for more than roughly 350,000 Haitian and Syrian immigrants. This decision could also affect the status of immigrants from 11 additional countries, which could ultimately throw over 1 million people in the U.S. into limbo scrambling to avoid removal back to their dangerous homelands. 

While some of Alito’s conservative colleagues have a more genteel demeanor, they follow a similar trend: lambasting colleagues or critics for a supposed lack of decorum, while discounting the material and immediate repercussions of their decisions. In recent years, the conservative justices, including John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett, have repeatedly lamented attacks on the court’s integrity and legitimacy.

But, as Justice Elena Kagan pointedly retorted, those attributes are rooted in its “connection with the public and with public sentiment.” A decade of decisions — repealing abortion rights; preventing the government from taking action on climate change; eroding voting rights, civil rights and labor power; and even granting the president criminal immunity for official acts — has radically reshaped American life and the law. As Sotomayor has pointed out, these decisions often come without thoughtful consideration of their consequences on the people who relied on the protections these laws and rights afforded them. 

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Springfield reverend ‘ashamed’ by TPS ruling: ‘I feel betrayed by my country’

June 26, 2026 / 09:46

Yet the conservative justices seem most concerned about perception and process, rather than the tangible impact of their work. Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, bemoaned that the leak of the opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization posed an existential threat to the court’s existence, and indeed, to the country itself. “I wonder how long we’re going to have these institutions at the rate we’re undermining them,” he fretted. “And then I wonder when they’re gone or destabilized, what we’re going to have as a country.”  

Fortunately, these attempts to influence public perception of the court and avoid blame for throwing millions of lives into tumult are not working; the American people increasingly see through these efforts. Public approval of the court is at historic lows — nearly 60% of Americans say the Roberts Court is “out of touch with the values and beliefs of most Americans,” and 7 in 10 Americans believe the justices put ideology over impartiality.

That is not a reflection of leaks or tough criticism by outsiders, but a result of the Roberts Court’s substantive impact on American life. And the damage will only get worse.

The post Samuel Alito’s outburst directed at Sonia Sotomayor is part of a troubling trend appeared first on MS NOW.

Kate Middleton has completed the National Three Peaks Challenge—becoming the first royal to do so—in aid of The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) confronted a Fox News digital reporter and asked him if he likes “gay porn” as part of a video he posted online over the weekend. “So let me ask you, I heard that you like gay porn, is that true?” Massie asks the reporter in the video he posted on the…

Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged for the first time Sunday that Russia is facing fuel shortages following a wave of Ukrainian attacks deep inside the country.

As Americans, we tend to think of dissidents as heroic, saintly figures in faraway, repressive foreign countries, or maybe from sometime in the distant past. But in our time, in this political moment, Americans are finding that the idea of being a dissident is local to us, and contemporary to our time.

But what does that mean in practical terms? What do we actually do? How can we stay safe while doing it? And how effective are today’s American dissidents likely to be?

Last spring, The New Yorker published an article titled “So You Want to Be a Dissident?” by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin and a former senior policy adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, Ami Fields-Meyer. The article was billed as “a practical guide to courage in Trump’s age of fear.” Angwin and Fields-Meyer have now expanded that reporting and research into a new book, “On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear.”

Their methodology is simple and pragmatic — and surprisingly revelatory. Angwin and Fields-Meyer simply interviewed “people who had bravely stood up to authoritarianism around the world [to] see if they had any advice for staying safe and preserving democracy.”

I’m not in the business of doing book reviews, but suffice to say, I’m so impressed by their work, I volunteered to record the audio version of the book.

“On Courage” helped me think about my own prejudice — my own sort of self-defeating assumption that the most effective dissidents aren’t made from the same stuff as us normal, flawed concerned citizens — that somehow they were born superheroically brave and insightful, and because they know they are superheroically brave and insightful, they have innate confidence that their own destiny is to go out and slay Goliath.

What Angwin and Fields-Meyer discover — and what international dissidents explain to them in their own words — is quite the opposite. Most people whose stories get told in this book found themselves becoming dissidents simply because they insisted on paying attention to their own quiet internal moral compass. It didn’t mean they didn’t have fear or conflicting emotions, only that they trusted the personal, moral tug that guided them to say no, and then to take action.

Angwin and Fields-Meyer describe “a conflict often faced by people in authoritarian societies: a collision between the head and the heart, between values deeply held and an outside world unfolding in dramatic divergence. It can happen over decades, or in an instant. It comes of morality, or it arises out of necessity.”

“Dissidents don’t choose to be dissidents. They simply choose to be who they are,” Angwin and Fields-Meyer write.

Holding closely to your deepest values; listening to the internal voice that is uncomfortable with what is going on around you: these are the individual starting points for how a people, a nation, can become collectively stubborn against a dictator — how they can find the courage to inconvenience, annoy, slow down, mock and ultimately topple an authoritarian government.

They write, “Beginning with small acts like showing up, telling the truth, searching for our options, and bearing witness to injustice can embolden us to do more.”

Angwin and Fields-Meyer tell the story of Kathy O’Leary, a suburban mom who helps keep watch outside the Delaney Hall immigrant prison in Newark, New Jersey. She and the other volunteers offer human-level practical help to the families being hurt there — everything from blankets on cold days and sunscreen on hot, sunny ones, to phone calls and rides. That practical work is an important form of resistance to a government that tells us to hate and fear each other. O’Leary and her fellow volunteers have also done everything they can to document what’s happening at Delaney Hall, making sure there’s a record — often a video record — of everything they can see that happens there. That’s important resistance work too.

Angwin and Fields-Meyer point out that historically — in the Soviet Union, for instance — getting the truth out about what was happening inside their country was the job of journalists, writers and artists, smuggling illegal newsletters — physical paper — to the wider world. Today, when almost everyone has a smartphone, the work of witness and documentation and spreading the word is shared among everyone.

The work of witness is crucial, because victims and perpetrators need to know that justice will come one day. This is what one human rights statistician tells Angwin and Fields-Meyer:

“We will know who you are,” says [Patrick] Ball, who has spent his career cataloging perpetrators of state violence. “You are not going to be anonymous,” he says. “You can wear cute little balaclavas. It may protect you from a few minutes of social media shame, but people are never going to give up their pursuit of you because you’ve destroyed their lives.” … “The things you’re doing now will haunt you for the rest of your life,” he says. “Your children will be ashamed.” 

Angwin and Fields-Meyer say another key to finding courage in a repressive regime is finding a political home — a group of like-minded people to keep you grounded and sane and supported: “None of us can be expected to absorb the shocks of authoritarianism on our own, or to face rapid-fire changes in laws, norms, and institutions alone.”

For that, they point out that you need not start from scratch: “Campaigns, movements, and political efforts … are built on the foundations of existing relationships, out of groups of people who have known each other in a different context and who decide to repurpose their relationships for a new, higher purpose. Any network will do.”

It could be your colleagues, your book club, your theater troupe, your neighborhood association or your quilting bee.

When I spoke with the authors of “On Courage,” Angwin told me that the American response to the authoritarianism of Donald Trump is giving her a lot of hope:

“What I felt when I was hearing all these stories from dissidents around the world, and studying all the literature, was that in the United States … we are doing the things fairly textbook,” she said. “The most important things are to keep throwing sand in the gears [of the regime] and to do that nonviolently.”

She added, “I’ve been impressed. The Minneapolis nonviolent movement drove ICE out of their town. Boycotts are really effective — we’ve had the Avelo boycott, which basically caused this airline to cancel its ICE deportation contract. We have been seeing effective movements. The Tesla boycott also cut their stock price in half and probably led to Elon Musk having to leave government to take care of that company. So what we’re seeing is people organizing, doing things together that are textbook what you want to see in a resistance.”

In the same interview, Fields-Meyer cautioned that “most Americans — and even most Americans of conscience — still don’t quite understand where it is that we are.”

He explained, “Authoritarianism looks different now than it used to. It’s not your grandmother’s authoritarianism. It comes in through elections. It doesn’t come in through the back of a coup in the way it has in the past.”

But Fields-Meyer said that’s not all bad news. “Because of the gradual nature of the way authoritarianism now comes in,” he said, “that means we have off-ramps.” He added, “The United States has the opportunity to go down an off-ramp. The question is whether we’ll continue to do the things that we need to do in order to get there.”

I’ve read a lot of books about authoritarianism, and about fighting fascism, and about activism. This is one that’s really worth spending some time with. “On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear” will make you think and feel differently about what it means to live in this country at this moment. (And if you feel like you don’t have time to read it, get the audiobook and I’ll happily read it to you!)

This is one of those books that will make you feel less alone in the world, and less alone in history. It will make you feel more equipped for whatever is coming next.

Watch my full interview with Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer here.

The post Maddow: Finding ways to express your defiance in the age of Trump appeared first on MS NOW.

A funeral is held for three sisters who died in the sea off the coast of Brighton in May.

A funeral is held for three sisters who died in the sea off the coast of Brighton in May.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the University of California, Berkeley, are partnering to form a new nonpartisan academic institute they say will be dedicated to strengthening democracy