—A bus full of students returning to Budapest, Hungary, from a field trip to France, slammed into a pylon while driving through northern Italy and killed more than a dozen people.
—The Taliban has claimed credit for a bomb that exploded in a crowded Pakistani market and killed more than 50 people.
—Storms, including a tornado, killed four people in southern Mississippi and destroyed homes in the city of Hattiesburg, where the mayor declared a state of emergency.
—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).
A Deadly Tornado Cuts Through Southern Mississippi
AP
A tornado struck the southern Mississippi city of Hattiesburg early Saturday in the dark and ripped roofs off homes, downed trees, and killed four people. The tornado was part of a violent storm rolling across the area, bringing sheets of rain and heavy winds. Hattiesburg is a city of about 46,000, and a search is still underway there for those who might be trapped in their homes beneath debris. Pictures of the damage sent out by the city and residents showed crumpled homes and trees in the street. A fire station received heavy damage, as well as William Carey University, a private Christian college, where the windows shattered and parts of the roof tore off. The mayor of Hattiesburg declared a state of emergency. The National Weather Service in Jackson, Mississippi, issued a severe weather warning for the state and parts of Arkansa, telling people to expect hail the size of golfballs, winds gust up to 60 miles per hour, and possibly more tornados.
A wide shot of all the homes damaged looking towards Edwards Street in downtown Hattiesburg. pic.twitter.com/elmJ2hA10c
A Bombing Attack in a Pakistani Vegetable Market Kills 22 People
AP
A bomb exploded Saturday in a vegetable market in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal region of Kurram and killed at least 22 people and wounded 50 others. The blast happened in the city of Parachinar, a mainly Shia Muslim area near the border of Afghanistan. A sectarian militant group called Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a banned Sunni extremist faction of the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility, and has carried out similar attacks in the area in the past. There are varied accounts of what caused the blast, with some saying it was an improvised explosive device hidden in a box of vegetables, and others saying it was a suicide attack. Some of the wounded were airlifted to a hospital in Peshawar, the capital of another province nearby. It’s expected the death toll will rise as other wounded victims die from their wounds. The region of Kurram has been the site of increased violence lately, as the Pakistani army carries out operations to fight extremists in the area. In 2015 a bomb blast in the same market killed more than 20 people.
A Bus Full of Hungarian Students Returning From a Field Trip Crashes in Italy and Kills 16 People
AP
A bus full of Hungarian students returning from a ski field trip in France crashed into a pylon while driving through Italy and killed 16 people, injuring about 40 more. Police in the nearby city of Verona, in the north of Italy, said the victims were teenage students, parents, and teachers on their way back to Budapest. Officers are still investigating the cause of the crash, and said there was no other vehicle involved and it appears the bus veered off the road of its own accord. A driver who was following the bus as it crashed told an Italian radio station he’d noticed a problem with one of the wheels on the bus and had tried to alert the driver, The Guardianreported. After slamming into the pylon the bus caught fire, and some of its 55 passengers were thrown out of the windows while others were trapped with the flames. The survivors were taken to local hospitals, and at least one person was placed in a medically induced coma.
When President Trump last summer implored Republicans to launch a nationwide gerrymandering blitz to pad their narrow House majority, the fight he started did not seem fair. GOP lawmakers had both the will and the power to draw their party new seats, while Democrats were hamstrung by limits of their own making. The question was not whether Republicans could expand their edge in Congress, but by how much.
This morning the landscape looks a lot different, after Virginia voters yesterday approved a lopsided new House map that could hand Democrats an additional four seats that Republicans currently hold. The Democratic redistricting victory is the party’s second in a statewide referendum. When combined with new lines that California voters endorsed in November, Democrats have now succeeded in drawing districts that will likely yield them nine more seats this fall, at least matching what Republicans have been able to achieve in states that they control. By some measures, Democrats have jumped into the redistricting lead, bolstering their chances of winning back the House majority in the midterm elections.
The economist Adam Posen on the effect of the war in Iran on the world’s economy and the darkening economic outlook for the United States. Plus: A shifting partisan balance of power and Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, by Maureen Callahan.
In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a discussion of the likelihood that the partisan balance of power will shift from Republicans to Democrats at state-government level.
Then, David is joined by the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Adam Posen, for a conversation about the state of the world’s economy. Frum and Posen discuss the economic effect of the war in Iran, the United States’ reputational hit caused by Trump’s tariffs, and the chance of global recession.
Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, by Maureen Callahan, and reflects on why reactions to the abuse of women by men in power seem to have become a partisan issue.
For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.
At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-baron character, old now and richer than Croesus, beats Paul Dano’s preacher to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s Eli Sunday, a nemesis of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview during his seminal, wealth-building years, has come to sell Plainview the oil-rich land that he once coveted. But Plainview doesn’t need the land anymore, because—as he explains in one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema—he has sucked out all the oil hidden beneath it from an adjoining property, like a milkshake.
Desperate for money, Eli begs for a loan. Instead, Plainview chases him around a bowling alley and murders him with great enthusiasm. Once it’s over, a butler comes to see what all the noise was about. “I’m finished,” Plainview yells.
Patients are getting stuck in the emergency department for days while waiting for a spot in an inpatient ward.
In the last months, weeks, and days of his life, “I will not go to the emergency room” became my husband’s mantra. Andrej had esophageal cancer that had spread throughout his body (but not to his ever-willful brain), and, having trained as a doctor, I had jury-rigged a hospital at home, aided by specialists who got me pills to boost blood pressure; to dampen the effects of liver failure; to stem his cough; to help him swallow, wake up, fall asleep.
“I will not go to the emergency room”—emphasis on not—were his first words after passing out, having a seizure, or regurgitating the protein smoothies I made to pass his narrowed esophagus. He said it again and again, even as fluid built up in his lungs, rendering him short of breath and prone to agonizing coughing spells. He had been a big, athletic guy, but now, in the ugly process of dying, he was looking gaunt. Ours was a precarious existence, but I understood his adamant rejection of the emergency department. Most prior visits had morphed into extended trips into a terrifying medical underworld—to a purgatory known as emergency-department boarding.
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The mystery of the missing scientists began with a Silver Alert. In late February, a retired Air Force major general named Neil McCasland left his house in New Mexico for a walk and never returned. Rumors spread on social media that the elderly former astronautical engineer had been abducted or killed. Forget Nancy Guthrie, they said. Here was a guy who used to run a “UFO-linked” lab. Here was a guy with knowledge of “America’s deepest, darkest secrets.” So where was this guy?
McCasland’s wife did her best with a post on Facebook to address what she called the “misinformation circulating about Neil and his disappearance,” but wild notions only multiplied. Dots were added, then connected: Another scientist—an advanced-materials researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) named Monica Reza—had disappeared while hiking near Los Angeles in June 2025. A physicist at MIT had been murdered in December. “What is going on seems to be an enemy action,” Walter Kirn, the novelist and podcast contrarian, said last month.
Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.
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On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log on to an internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.”
Patel oversees an agency that employs roughly 38,000 people, including many who are trained to investigate and verify information that can be presented under oath in a court of law. News of his emotional outburst ricocheted through the bureau, prompting chatter among officials and, in some corners of the building, expressions of relief. The White House fielded calls from the bureau and from members of Congress asking who was now in charge of the FBI.
Republicans seem to have expected that Democrats would continue to follow rules they had long since enthusiastically abandoned.
Voters in Virginia approved a lopsided congressional map on Tuesday, reducing the expected number of Republican-leaning districts in the Democratic-controlled state from five to one. Republicans have reacted by complaining that conservative-leaning voters in the state have been disenfranchised by gerrymandered maps that reduce the influence of their vote.
And they’re right. That is exactly what the new Virginia map does.
Gerrymandering is an attempt to thwart the will of the voters. It circumvents the vital process of democratic feedback by insulating politicians from political backlash. It should not happen, and yet this latest chapter of the redistricting wars did not begin in Virginia. It did not even begin last year, when Donald Trump openly urged red states to gerrymander their congressional maps so Republicans might retain possession of the House during the midterms. He did so despite the fact that the maps had been drawn after the 2020 census and would normally be expected to last until 2030.
Fifteen years after Steve Jobs’s death, the company is a successful, if unexciting, powerhouse.
Tim Cook’s job was to make Apple boring—and he did. Cook, Apple’s chief executive officer, is stepping down after 15 years in the role. He had succeeded Steve Jobs after the visionary co-founder of Apple Computer Company left only months before dying of pancreatic cancer in 2011. Since then, Apple has grown in market value by 2,000 percent. It has also transformed into a staid, if immensely effective, firm that sells people glass rectangles, wireless earbuds, and, sometimes, computers. This legacy is not tragic, but it is somber. The crucible in which the personal computer and the smartphone were forged is just a big company now.
Jobs and Steve “Woz” Wozniak started Apple Computer in 1976 to bring Woz’s design for an early personal computer to market, but Jobs did not serve as CEO until 1997, when he returned after years away. Before then, a series of more ordinary businesspeople had run the company—mostly former semiconductor executives including Michael Scott, Mike Markkula, and Gil Amelio, along with the former PepsiCo CEO John Sculley. But by the mid-2000s, after the iMac, iPod, and iPhone had appeared, Jobs had become the apotheosized Visionary CEO—a model for the technology industry and beyond. His exacting and sometimes unreasonable demands, which dated back to the design of the Macintosh in the early 1980s, had made him a singular and irreplaceable presence: a figure who could bend an organization, an industry, and the public who would be transformed by its products to his will.
Each is animated by the author’s love—for their subject, for language, and for pushing the boundaries of what the genre can do.
Literary biography is a cruel genre. The authors of these books—by which I mean not just biographies about literary figures but also those that aspire to writerly excellence—have been described by the writer Janet Malcolm as “professional burglars.” After rifling through a person’s affairs, they must conjure inside their pages a living, breathing human being—and then, inevitably, they’ll have to close the coffin on their resurrected subject. But I like to think the “literary” element can temper the sting of these dastardly deeds, insofar as the author is tasked with perpetrating them in the most humane way possible: with the appropriate amount of reverence, style, and, yes, love. This is, at least, what I tried to do in my own literary biography, Baldwin: A Love Story, about James Baldwin’s life and relationships.
Over the past 15 years or so, Democrats have won a lot of races because the opposing party’s primary voters decided to nominate right-wing ideologues (Christine O’Donnell, Todd Akin, Kari Lake) rather than normal Republicans. In all of these races, the Republican establishment warned that nominating an archconservative would undermine their chances of victory, and was proved completely correct.
Now Democrats finally have the chance to do the same thing. In Michigan, a purple state that Donald Trump won twice, the physician Abdul El-Sayed is running a competitive race for the party’s Senate nomination. If successful, he would turn a very likely Democratic win into a jump ball.
