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President Biden will face reporters in his first formal news conference Thursday afternoon, using the stately backdrop of the White House to promote the benefits of his economic recovery efforts, call for action on gun control and respond to criticism about his handling of the border with Mexico.

It will be Mr. Biden’s first high-stakes grilling by reporters since taking office more than two months ago. Since then, his advisers have carefully controlled his interactions with the press, which have included one-on-one interviews and some limited opportunities for reporters to ask questions during brief appearances.

In the wake of two mass shootings in a week, the president will probably be asked why gun control has not been a more pressing priority for his administration.

President Biden’s first formal news conference will not be remembered as one in which major news was made. Instead, the session was revealing for how he thinks about and plans to approach his presidency, major issues and his opposition.

The president has one of the most ambitious agendas of any president in the last half century: pandemic, economy, climate, infrastructure, immigration, voting rights.

“All of the above,” Biden responded, but with a major caveat. “It’s a matter of timing,” he continued. “As you’ve all observed, successful presidents, better than me, have been successful in large part because they know how to time what they’re doing — order it, decide on priorities, what needs to be done.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has gone 69 days without holding a press conference or visiting the U.S. border with Mexico amid a historic migration crisis amid a global pandemic.

Her supports and the White House have said her mandate is not to visit the border, but to score a diplomatic victory with leaders from countries in the Northern Triangle. Harris hopes to solve the root causes of the crisis. Detractors say the grandiose objective allows the White House to pin the blame on other countries if nothing can be resolved.

Biden was criticized by Republicans for appearing to not take the crisis seriously when he appointed Harris. Last week, his administration announced it will request $52.2 billion in funding for the Department of Homeland Security in the coming fiscal year, the Washington Post reported. The number matches the agency’s budget from last year before the surge.

The Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, a conference held twice a year, is America’s premier forum for relating academic research to “the most urgent economic challenges of the day.” The lead presentation at the September 2022 conference was a paper by Laurence Ball, Daniel Leigh and Prachi Mishra on inflation. And its conclusions were dismal. Harvard’s Jason Furman, one of the assigned discussants, wrote an opinion piece calling it “the scariest economics paper of 2022,” suggesting that to get inflation down to 2 percent “we may need to tolerate unemployment of 6.5 percent for two years.”

My question instead is why so many economists got the inflation outlook so wrong.

Unemployment is still near a 50-year low, yet here’s what happened to the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of underlying inflation, the personal consumption expenditures deflator excluding food and energy (try saying that five times fast):

Founded in 2013, the AfD isn’t brand new, nor is its provocative, thinly veiled racism and Islamophobia. But over the course of the past five years—and in the face of damning revelations last week about a secret meeting that took place in November—it has radicalized dramatically. The AfD is now more extreme than many fellow far-right parties across Europe, such as the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party, and the Dutch Party for Freedom, among others.

Germany’s foremost expert on the subject, sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer, said the AfD now stands for an “authoritarian national radicalism,” namely, an ideology that propagates a hierarchically ordered, ethnically homogeneous society overseen by a strong-arm state. What’s particularly radical, he said, is the party’s communication with and mobilization of misanthropic groups that rain violence on select minorities

Its victims are refugees, foreign nationals, Jews, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.

President Bashar al-Assad’s government has given Russia the names of officials who would attend international talks intended to end the war in Syria,

leader of the Free Syrian Army, Gen. Salim Idris, to discuss the proposal for a peace conference

Neither side has publicly committed to attend the talks, nor has a date been set, though Mr. Kerry and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said they hoped to convene the conference within a month under the auspices of the United Nations.

And while Mr. Biden implicitly criticized Russia for supporting the Assad government, he gave the Syrian opposition little hope that Washington would change its mind about allowing more sophisticated arms to flow to the rebels.

“As the Syrian people have their chance to forge their own future, they will continue to find a partner in the United States of America,”

Standing in his front office before the State of the Union, Rhodes quickly does the political math on the breaking Iran story. “Now they’ll show scary pictures of people praying to the supreme leader,” he predicts, looking at the screen. Three beats more, and his brain has spun a story line to stanch the bleeding. He turns to Price. “We’re resolving this, because we have relationships,” he says.

Price turns to his computer and begins tapping away at the administration’s well-cultivated network of officials, talking heads, columnists and newspaper reporters, web jockeys and outside advocates who can tweet at critics and tweak their stories backed up by quotations from “senior White House officials” and “spokespeople.” I watch the message bounce from Rhodes’s brain to Price’s keyboard to the three big briefing podiums — the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon — and across the Twitterverse, where it springs to life in dozens of insta-stories, which over the next five hours don formal dress for mainstream outlets. It’s a tutorial in the making of a digital news microclimate — a storm that is easy to mistake these days for a fact of nature, but whose author is sitting next to me right now.

Watching Rhodes work, I remember that he is still, chiefly, a writer, who is using a new set of tools — along with the traditional arts of narrative and spin — to create stories of great consequence on the biggest page imaginable. The narratives he frames, the voices of senior officials, the columnists and reporters whose work he skillfully shapes and ventriloquizes, and even the president’s own speeches and talking points, are the only dots of color in a much larger vision about who Americans are and where we are going

Thousands of people showed up in freezing temperatures on Sunday in Michigan to hear Sen. Bernie Sanders denounce Republican efforts to repeal President Barack Obama's health care law, one of dozens of rallies Democrats staged across the country to highlight opposition.

"I'm going to get really sick and my life will be at risk," said Bible, an online antique dealer.

Envoys urge Israel, Palestinians to back peace

More than 70 countries have called on Israel and the Palestinians to restate their commitment to a peace settlement and to refrain from unilateral actions.

Trump's campaign platform made no mention of Palestinian independence — the solution favored by the international community.

A fresh string of attacks by Donald Trump this week on rivals in the GOP establishment — including one delivered against a prominent Latina governor in her home state — raised new doubts about his ability or desire to unite the party’s badly fractured leadership.

The intraparty skirmishing began with an attack on New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) during a campaign rally in Albuquerque, where Trump blamed her for mismanaging the state’s economy and suggested that she was shirking her responsibilities to her constituents

He knocked South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s decision to endorse Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), mocked former Florida governor Jeb Bush for his energy level and blasted 2012 ­Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney as a “choker.” None of the three have endorsed him.

Senior diplomats attending a summit in France are aiming to organise a peace conference by the end of the year to restart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

Israeli and Palestinian representatives are absent, making the chances of success slim

French diplomats said they felt compelled to act as the opportunity to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel was slipping away, with the situation in the region deteriorating.

the tech ethos has escaped the bounds of hardware and software. Tech is turning into a culture and a style, one that has spread into new foods and clothing, and all other kinds of nonelectronic goods. Tech has become a lifestyle brand.

Because it draws a critical mass of tech-conversant people to a small space, SXSW has also made a reputation as a catalyst for new social networking ideas.

there is a sense of ennui in the world of tech conferences. What is the purpose of a conference in an age of instant online collaboration?

Lenin’s seizures in the hours and days before he died are a puzzle and perhaps historically significant. Severe seizures, Dr. Vinters said in an interview before the conference, are “quite unusual in a stroke patient.” But, he added, “almost any poison can cause seizures.”

Dr. Lurie concurred on Friday, telling the conference that poison was in his opinion the most likely immediate cause of Lenin’s death. The most likely perpetrator? Stalin, who saw Lenin as his main obstacle to taking over the Soviet Union and wanted to get rid of him.

Dr. Vinters believes that sky-high cholesterol leading to a stroke was the main cause of Lenin’s death. But he said there is one other puzzling aspect of the story. Although toxicology studies were done on others in Russia, there was an order that no toxicology be done on Lenin’s tissues.

He displayed flashes of sardonic wit, anger and palpable disdain, especially toward the Americans and Europeans but also toward the leaders of a country, Ukraine, he made clear was a political neophyte, unable to govern itself.

paramount leader for more than 14 years, at last broke his studied silence on the political upheaval in Ukraine on Tuesday during a 66-minute news conference that sought to justify Russia’s actions and policies.

“The only thing we had to do, and we did it, was to enhance the defense of our military facilities because they were constantly receiving threats and we were aware of the armed nationalists moving in,”

TPM Editor’s Blog GOP’s Long-Predicted Comeuppance Has Arrived Share this story on Facebook Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); Tweet this story Email this story to a friend Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., right, the Republican Conference Chair, arrive at the House of Representatives. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) Brian Beutler July 31, 2013, 5:55 PM 65028 Republicans have dealt with some embarrassing moments on the House floor over the past year, but none so revealing or damning as today’s snafu, when they yanked a bill to fund the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development. Even the recent farm bill fiasco wasn’t as significant an indictment of the GOP’s governing potential. It might look like a minor hiccup, or a symbolic error. But it spells doom for the party’s near-term budget strategy and underscores just how bogus the party’s broader agenda really is and has been for the last four years. In normal times, the House and Senate would each pass a budget, the differences between those budgets would be resolved, and appropriators in both chambers would have binding limits both on how much money to spend, and on which large executive agencies to spend it. But these aren’t normal times. Republicans have refused to negotiate away their budget differences with Democrats, and have instead instructed their appropriators to use the House GOP budget as a blueprint for funding the government beyond September. Like all recent GOP budgets, this year’s proposes lots of spending on defense and security, at the expense of all other programs. Specifically, it sets the total pool of discretionary dollars at sequestration levels, then funnels money from thinly stretched domestic departments (like Transportation and HUD) to the Pentagon and a few other agencies. But that’s all the budget says. It doesn’t say how to allocate the dollars, nor does it grapple in any way with the possibility that cutting domestic spending so profoundly might be unworkable. It’s an abstraction.

many close Congress watchers — and indeed many Congressional Democrats — have long suspected that their votes for Ryan’s budgets were a form of cheap talk. That Republicans would chicken out if it ever came time to fill in the blanks. Particularly the calls for deep but unspecified domestic discretionary spending cuts.

It turns out that when you draft bills enumerating all the specific cuts required to comply with the budget’s parameters, they don’t come anywhere close to having enough political support to pass. Even in the GOP House.

Saudi Arabia has wanted the United States to do more to train and arm rebel fighters. And the Saudi leadership was hoping that President Obama would order a cruise missile attack on the Syrian military in response to what Western and Arab powers said was the Syrian government’s Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack near Damascus.

We know that the Saudis were obviously disappointed that the strike did not take place,” said Mr. Kerry, referring to the cruise missile attack

Saudi Arabia has also been worried that the Obama administration may be too eager to seek a compromise with Iran over its nuclear program and was unhappy that Washington did not take a stronger stance against the Muslim Brotherhood when President Mohamed Morsi governed Egypt.

The US space agency has said it will allow Chinese scientists to attend an astronomy conference in California next month, reversing an earlier ban.

Nasa put the earlier ban down to a misinterpretation of its policy on foreign nationals.

agency faced criticism from Chinese officials and US scientists who claimed Chinese students and researchers in their labs were being subjected to discrimination.