Thousands in Serbia Protest Jared Kushner’s Real Estate Plans

Thousands of student protesters in Belgrade, Serbia, formed a human shield on Tuesday around a bombed-out military complex, vowing to stop Jared Kushner’s redevelopment company, Affinity Partners, from turning the historical monument into a luxury complex.

NATO bombed Serbia for 78 days in 1999 in an effort to end then–President Slobodan Milosevic’s violent ethnic cleansing of Albanians living in Kosovo, which resulted in the death of 13,000 people (mostly ethnic Albanians). NATO bombed bridges, military buildings, and government buildings. Human Rights Watch estimates that as many as 528 civilians were killed in the bombings. 

Many Serbians still see the bombed buildings as a point of cultural and architectural pride today. 

But in May, Kushner’s company and the Serbian government signed a deal for a 99-year lease of the land the bombed-out buildings are on for “revitalization”—meaning a high-rise hotel, office space, and stores. It will be a $500 million project. Kushner’s company will reportedly build a separate memorial for the bombing elsewhere.  

“The economic progress in Serbia over the past decade has been impressive,” Kushner said at the time. “This development will further elevate Belgrade into the premier international destination it is becoming.”

Protests were planned from the minute the deal was signed. “This is a warning that we will all defend these buildings together,” one of the students told the Associated Press on Tuesday. “We will be the human shield.”

It is unclear how effective the protests will be in delaying or denying the project.

Virginia Senator Tim Kaine accused MSNBC host Katy Tur of “overdramatizing” Democrats’ anger after he voted with seven other Democratic senators to end the government shutdown without any meaningful concessions.

Tur, who spoke with Kaine on Monday, questioned him about why he chose to end the shutdown without securing the Affordable Care Act subsidies that the Democrats had been fighting for. “It doesn’t seem like some of the party is just angry about this; it seems like this is ripping the party apart at a time where it felt like the party was coming back together postelections,” Tur said. “How do you convince your fellow Democrats to stay together on this, and how do you convince voters across the country to believe in the Democrats again?”

“Can I just say: ‘Ripping the party apart’? I think you’re overdramatizing this,” Kaine replied, looking smug. “I know the news business is to try and make everything the biggest crisis since the Cuban missile crisis, or something. There’s differences of opinion!”

Tur, defending her point, went on to quote responses from fellow Democrats, like California Governor Gavin Newsom, who called the deal “pathetic.” “This is me quoting Democrats. I’m not making things up. It’s reading what people are saying and reporting it,” she insisted.

“We’re a big tent, we have different points of view,” Kaine responded. “I’ve been doing this for 31 years. This is by far, by far, a minor league issue within the Democratic Party.”

The most that Kaine and his fellow Dem defectors could do to prevent Americans’ health care premiums from shooting up was get Republicans to agree to a vote on extending the subsidies, which is unlikely to pass in the Senate (and not even guaranteed to happen in the House). But Kaine still touted this as a victory.

“We’re going to unify around having the health care fight within a month, and people are going to see where Democrats are and see where Republicans are,” he said.

What Kaine fails to realize is that he and the seven other Democrats who voted to end the shutdown have already shown us where they stand, and the rest of the party won’t forget it.

Women are already getting squeezed out of Pete Hegseth’s military.

A female Navy captain was set to become the first woman to oversee Navy SEALs in a Naval Special Warfare command in July—until her promotion was abruptly canceled with little to no explanation.

She was the top officer for promotion in her cohort, CNN reported Tuesday on the unnamed commander. She received a Purple Heart for her time in Iraq, during which she was injured in an IED attack. She was also the first female troop commander to serve with SEAL Team Six.

“She was the best man for the job. There is absolutely no DEI,” a retired SEAL told CNN.

But two weeks before the ceremony commemorating her advance was set to take place, her rank change was canceled.

The decision came through a series of phone calls that skirted formal channels while omitting a paper trail, several sources told CNN. The consensus among Naval Special Warfare is that the incoming commander was yanked by the defense secretary because of her gender.

“They want to keep it the brotherhood and don’t like that she’s coming in and challenging the status quo,” a Navy special operations source familiar with the situation told the news network.

A Pentagon official said that the command was pulled because the officer wasn’t a SEAL, not because she is a woman, and that Hegseth had no hand in the matter. But multiple people familiar with Navy personnel dynamics weren’t buying it.

And many people are worried about what Hegseth’s policies will do to the state of women in the military in general. “To be quite honest, I am fearful for women in uniform right now,” said Patti J. Tutalo, a retired Coast Guard commander. Tutalo served on an advisory group for women in the military before it was shut down this year after decades of work.

“I definitely think there will be a retention issue for women. I also think that you’re going to see an increase in assaults, increase in harassment, increase in bullying, hazing, and I think there’ll be a lack of accountability for those things.”

In September, Hegseth announced to hundreds of America’s top military commanders at a mandatory in-person assembly in Quantico that he would be resetting military combat requirements to the “highest male standard only.”

“When it comes to any job that requires physical power to perform in combat, those physical standards must be high and gender neutral,” Hegseth said at the time. “If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is. If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it.”

Women made up 17.3 percent of America’s active-duty force in 2021, with more than 231,000 members. That same year, they composed 21.4 percent of the National Guard, according to a demographics report from the Defense Department.

Hegseth has openly said before that he does not believe women should serve in combat roles. During a November 2024 interview on the Shawn Ryan Show, Hegseth said, “I’m straight-up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated.”

The United Kingdom isn’t playing about President Donald Trump’s extrajudicial military strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats—it’s cutting him off from the intelligence apparatus used to track boats, CNN reported Tuesday.  

The U.K., which controls some territories in the Caribbean, operates an intelligence network in the area. The top ally has long assisted the United States in monitoring alleged drug trafficking in the Caribbean, sharing its intelligence with the Joint Interagency Task Force South. 

Typically, the boats would be stopped, boarded, and searched. But recently, Trump has opted to just blow them up, killing dozens of crew members, violating international law. 

In a major break between longtime allies, the U.K. stopped sharing this intelligence with the U.S. government after it grew concerned that the Pentagon was using the information to carry out its extrajudicial executions, sources told CNN.

The Trump administration has claimed that its military strikes have targeted “unlawful combatants” who are part of foreign cartels it argues are “nonstate armed groups.” To assert its authority to make the strikes, the U.S. government claims the transport of drugs constitutes “an armed attack against the United States.”

But a closer look at some of the men killed in these strikes revealed that they were not so-called “narco-terrorists” or members of criminal gangs or cartels. Many of them weren’t even heading for the U.S. And, crucially, they were smuggling cocaine, not synthetic opioids responsible for killing tens of thousands of Americans every year. 

Officials in the U.K. aren’t the only ones skeptical of the Trump administration’s ratcheting-up military campaign. During a tense meeting last month, Admiral Alvin Holsey, who has served as commander of the U.S. Southern Command for only a year, offered to resign from his position after he questioned the strikes’ legality, sources told CNN. He is expected to leave his post in December. 

A Utah judge rejected a Republican-drawn congressional map on Monday, choosing instead a map that would create the first Democratic-leaning district in the state in 25 years.

Judge Dianna Gibson found that the map submitted by Utah’s Republican-controlled legislature violated Utah law because it was “drawn with the purpose to favor Republicans.”

While states across the country mount gerrymandering offensives, Utah has been knee-deep in its own redistricting battle: Voters passed Proposition 4 in 2018, which created an independent redistricting committee to draw new state maps and prohibited maps that considered partisan data. But Utah Republican legislators couldn’t tolerate that and repealed the proposition in 2020, creating a new, Republican-favored map.

That caused the organizers behind Prop 4—the League of Women Voters of Utah and Mormon Women for Ethical Government—to sue in 2022.

Gibson ruled in favor of a Prop 4–compliant map submitted by the plaintiffs, deeming it independently and correctly structured, without partisan influence. Gibson’s ruling could give the Democrats another coveted seat as they head into the midterms.

Utah joins states like Texas, North Carolina, and California that have passed new maps ahead of the midterms—but unlike Texas or California, where the party in power is creating more seats for itself, Utah Republicans’ efforts to do the same thing have brutally backfired.

Eight Senate Democrats didn’t just give up on affordable health care by agreeing to a shutdown deal—they also gave the GOP a clear path to take revenge on former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith.

Bloomberg Law has reported that the very end of the Senate-approved shutdown deal contains a hidden provision that essentially allows Republican senators to sue Smith for millions of dollars in damages after their phone records were seized during his investigation into the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. The legislation allows any senator who has been searched without their knowledge to be awarded at least $500,000, so long as they weren’t the target of the investigation.

While the provision does not mention Smith by name, it is retroactive to January 1, 2022. That date was just a few months before Smith and the FBI began to request electronic communications from eight GOP senators as part of the January 6 investigation.

“Any Senator whose Senate data, or the Senate data of whose Senate office, has been acquired, subpoenaed, searched, accessed, or disclosed in violation of this section may bring a civil action against the United States if the violation was committed by an officer, employee, or agent of the United States or of any Federal department or agency,” the provision reads. That would certainly include Smith.

Smith has yet to release a statement in response to the news.

The former special counsel has been seen as an enemy of the administration ever since his dual criminal investigations into Trump for illegal possession of classified documents and his role in January 6. Trump pleaded not guilty on all charges before they were dropped altogether after the 2024 election due to convenient Justice Department policy that prevents the prosecution of a sitting president. Smith has maintained both his innocence and the validity of his investigation.

The full Senate-approved funding bill can be read here.

President Donald Trump unveiled his plan to remake the health care system—and it’s a doozy.

As the government shutdown begins to wind down, with some Democrats backing off their bid to extend subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, the president has started waxing on about his own vision for a new system of American health care. 

“I want instead of going to the insurance companies, I want the money to go into an account for people, where the people buy their own health insurance. It’s so good. The insurance will be better. It’ll cost less. Everybody’s gonna be happy. They’re gonna feel like entrepreneurs,”  Trump said during a Fox News interview Monday night. “They’re actually gonna be able to go out and negotiate their own health insurance. And they can use it only for that reason, that’s the beauty—only for that purpose.

“Call it Trumpcare, call it whatever you want to call it. Anything but Obamacare. Obamacare is a disaster, just like he was as a president,” he added. 

Over the weekend, Trump repeatedly floated this model in a series of posts on Truth Social, where he bid Senate Republicans to draft a bill that would distribute the funds directly to Americans in an effort to increase competition and drive down costs. 

While Trump has claimed his plan would help lower premiums, critics say that Trump’s idea is plainly worse than Obamacare.

The Affordable Care Act created a marketplace where consumers could use government subsidies to help purchase private-sector plans. It’s not clear that Trump’s plan involves any such marketplace, and would plunge consumers into a state of nature.

Democrats have sought to extend subsidies to make insurance plans more affordable, while Republicans claim Democrats are just lining insurers’ pockets while premiums steadily increase. Crucially, as Republicans ensure that enhanced ACA subsidies lapse, insurance premiums are set to skyrocket starting in January, and premiums for individuals will increase by as much as double. 

“This is, unsurprisingly, nonsensical. Is he suggesting eliminating health insurance and giving people a few thousand dollars instead? And then when they get a cancer diagnosis they just go bankrupt?” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy wrote on X Sunday.

Currently, Obamacare enrollees never see the funds from their tax credits, which instead are sent directly to insurers. Trump figures that consumers would rather see the money themselves, what little of it there is. His plan purports to take the burden of negotiating insurance rates away from health care providers and large companies, and place it on individuals. 

While it could be a fun foray for Americans who fancy themselves “entrepreneurs,” there is no reason to think the average Americans would ever want to negotiate, or have the tool kit or information to do so in their best interest. Brian S. King, an insurance claims attorney and chair of the Utah Democrats, wrote on X Monday that Trump’s plan would be like “sending lambs to the slaughter.”

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders chimed in to remind Republicans that there was another way. “Oh, Trump and the Republicans can’t stand how the big, bad insurance companies are ripping off Americans. Really? Are you serious? Then I welcome your support for Medicare for All. Let’s end the greed of the insurance industry & make healthcare a human right, not a privilege,” Sanders wrote on X Sunday. 

Meanwhile, Republicans celebrated Trump’s “simply brilliant” plan. Florida Senator Rick Scott, who committed massive health care fraud as a CEO, claimed Sunday that he was already working on a bill to make Trump’s dream a reality. 

Donald Trump’s latest excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act: commercial real estate vacancy in downtown Chicago.

“The Miracle Mile Shopping Center in Chicago, once considered our Nation’s BEST, now has a more than 28 percent vacancy factor, and is ready to call it quits unless something is done about the murder and crime, which is prevalent throughout the City,” Trump posted on Truth Social after midnight Tuesday, misnaming Chicago’s Magnificent Mile shopping district.

“CALL IN THE TROOPS, FAST, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE! ‘Just the News,’” the real estate mogul added.

The nineteenth-century law would let Trump utilize the military for domestic purposes, allowing troops to police and arrest citizens. If Trump invokes it, he would be able to deploy active-duty forces in order to enact his agenda, which involves federalizing the law enforcement agencies of Democratic-led cities.

Trump has floated the idea of leveraging the Insurrection Act for years, though it has picked up steam since his inauguration earlier this year.

Late last month, Trump told U.S. troops stationed in Japan that he was prepared to send “more than the National Guard” to American cities to safeguard and enforce his presidential agenda—a threat that he said could involve any branch of America’s armed forces.

“And I’d be allowed to do whatever I want, but we haven’t chosen to do that,” Trump said at the time. “And the courts wouldn’t get involved. Nobody would get involved. And I can send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. I can send anybody I wanted.”

The legal loophole has been used by 17 presidents but has not been invoked since 1992, when President George H.W. Bush used it to subdue riots in Los Angeles after the local police force brutalized Rodney King.

In an apparent bid to justify the legal grounds, Trump and his associates have tried to fabricate a fictitious bedlam that they claim has taken over Democratic cities. Instead, they seem to be the ones instigating the chaos.

The state-sanctioned violence has been nearly nonstop in Chicago over the last few months. Last month, agents used tear gas in residential areas “multiple times without audible warnings,” court documents said, surprising families with the painful chemical irritant. A couple of weeks later, federal agents allegedly tear-gassed a group of school-age children on their way to a Halloween parade, in a residential Chicago neighborhood.

Meanwhile, Trump’s most militant supporters are ready and willing to thrust themselves into his violent fray as soon as he gives the signal: Stewart Rhodes said Sunday that he’s “relaunching” and “rebuilding” the Oath Keepers, the armed white supremacist organization that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

President Donald Trump is so deeply out of touch on what life is like for everyday Americans that even Fox News host Laura Ingraham had no choice but to correct him on her show Monday.

Trump, who over the weekend debuted a widely derided 50-year mortgage plan on Truth Social (where he compared himself to FDR), sat with Ingraham to clear things up.

“Your housing director has proposed something that has enraged your MAGA friends, which is this 50-year mortgage idea,” said Ingraham. “So—significant MAGA backlash, calling it a giveaway to the banks, and simply prolonging the time it would take for Americans to own a home outright. Is that really a good idea?”

Trump, in classic form, dismissed her concerns: “It’s not even a big deal. I mean, you go from 40 to 50 years—”

Ingraham corrected him: “Thirty to 50.”

Trump pressed on, saying, “And what it means is you pay something less, from 30—some people had a 40—and now they have a 50. All it means is you pay less per month, you pay it over a longer period of time.”

As Ingraham pointed out, the standard number of years for a mortgage is 30—not 40. And according to many economists, lengthening the time it takes to repay your mortgage by 20 years is, in fact, “a big deal.”

Trump is right that longer mortgages would result in smaller monthly payments. But the overall interest payments would skyrocket.

CNN maps it out like this: If you have a $450,000 home with a 30-year mortgage at a 6.25 percent interest rate, your monthly payment is about $2,771. By the time you’ve paid off your loan, you would have paid more than $547,000 in interest. If you had a 50-year loan at the same rate, your monthly payment would be slightly lower—$2,452—but your total interest would swell to around $1.02 million. That’s 87 percent more than on the 30-year loan.

Plus, it’s likely that the interest rates for a 50-year mortgage would be even higher than for a 30-year one, because a 50-year loan is more risky and it’s harder to anticipate how inflation will affect the economy that far into the future.

But Trump, of course, knows none of this.

Fox News’s Laura Ingraham took a light jab at President Trump’s gaudy, gold-lined Oval Office decorations during a White House tour Monday evening, asking him if he’d got the ornaments from Home Depot.

“Why not silver?” Ingraham asked while Trump gave her a tour.

“You can’t imitate gold, real gold,” the president replied, brushing off her question about the silver. “There’s no paint that imitates real gold.”

“So these aren’t like, from Home Depot?” Ingraham said dryly.

“Nooo, this is not Home Depot stuff.”

“No? Not stuff you buy?”

“This is not Home Depot.”

The Home Depot remark clearly irked the president a bit, especially given just how much time he’s put into making the White House look like Mar-a-Lago, or one of his many other luxury hotels and resorts. Crown molding, golden cherubs, a demolished rose garden, and of course the upcoming $200 million ballroom that he’s treating like some act of service.

All of this is meaningless, especially to the working-class voters Trump promised to fight for on the campaign trail. Sure, SNAP benefits were lost and inflation is up and owning a home is just a dream for many, but at least Trump can stick it to the libs with a gold-plated fireplace that is not from Home Depot. A Democrat, especially a woman, would get absolutely slammed for playing HGTV while the country runs on fumes.

And perhaps even more worrying—these feel like renovations for someone who plans to spend the rest of their days in the White House, not just the next three years.