—In a speech packed with policy proposals, a dark view of the past, and hope for the future, President Trump addressed a joint session of Congress. More here
—Authorities will investigate the shooting at a Kansas bar that resulted in the death of an Indian man as a hate crime, the FBI announced. More here
—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).
In a speech packed with policy proposals, a dark view of the past, and hope for the future, President Trump addressed a joint session of Congress Tuesday evening. As my colleague Clare Foran notes, the speech was “perhaps more notable for its tone than its substance.” She writes:
It marked a striking change of tone from his campaign and his early days in office, from a president who has frequently feuded with critics, including members of his own party. The optimistic tone was equally a departure from Trump’s inaugural address, in which he painted a picture of a country in decline and memorably promised to end “American carnage.” On Tuesday, he acknowledged that “the challenges we face as a nation are great,” but he added “our people are even greater.”
For a full breakdown of the moments of the speech and what the president proposed, check out our full coverage here.
Malaysian authorities charged two women in the death of Kim Jong Nam, the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The women, Siti Aishah from Indonesia and Doan Thi Huong from Vietnam, face the death penalty if convicted. Kim was killed on February 13 at the Kuala Lumpur airport when the women allegedly rubbed a VX nerve agent on his face. Lawyers for the women have said they thought they were playing a prank on a gameshow. Kim died within 20 minutes of the attack. The North Korean government is suspected in orchestrating the attack. Leaders in Pyongyang have denied those accusations. Authorities in Malaysia are seeking to question a diplomat in the North Korean embassy in Kuala Lumpur.
FBI to Investigate Shooting of 2 Indian Men in Kansas as a Hate Crime
Alok Madasani, who was wounded in the bar shooting, attends a candlelight vigil alongside his wife in Olathe, Kansas on February 26, 2017. (Dave Kaup / Reuters)
Authorities will investigate the shooting at a Kansas bar that resulted in the death of an Indian man as a hate crime, the FBI announced Tuesday. The decision comes nearly one week after 51-year-old Adam Purinton allegedly yelled at Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani, both 32-year-old Indian men, to “get out of my country” before opening fire, killing Kuchibhotla and wounding Madasani. Ian Grillot, another bar patron who tried to intervene in the shooting, was also injured. Purinton, who was charged with first-degree murder and first-degree attempted murder, reportedly believed Kuchibhotla and Madasani to be of Middle Eastern descent. The incident has since prompted fears within the Indian community of future racially-motivated attacks, and Madasani’s father, Jaganmohan Reddy, cautioned Indian parents against sending their children to the U.S., adding: “The situation seems to be pretty bad after Trump took over as the U.S. president.” In a press briefing Friday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer called suggestions of a correlation between the shooting and President Trump’s immigration policies “absurd.”
2 Police Officers Shot in Houston; Suspect at Large
(Richard Carson / Reuters)
Updated at 3:42 p.m.
Two Houston police officers responding to a burglary were shot Tuesday in the southwest portion of the city, prompting a shelter-in-place for residents of the area. Both officers were shot multiple times and are being treated at local hospitals. One, identified as Officer Jose Munoz, a 10-year veteran, received non-life-threatening injuries; the other, Officer Ronnie Cortez, a 24-year veteran of the force, was critically injured, Chief Art Acevedo said at a news conference. Acevedo said there were two suspects, one of whom was killed at the scene, and the other who is at large.
Update: two officers shot during incident at 8714 Sterlingame; both being treated at hospitals; conditions not being released at this time
Female and Child Migrants Face Rampant Abuse in Libya, UNICEF Says
Migrants sit at a detention center in Tripoli, Libya, on May 17, 2015. (Hani Amara / Reuters)
Female and child migrants making the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean to Europe face sexual abuse, violence, and exploitation at the hands of smugglers and traffickers, a report published Tuesday by UNICEF finds. According to the UN agency, there are more than 250,000 migrants in Libya; women make up 11 percent and children 9 percent. These migrants are often held within any one of the 34 government-run detention centers identified throughout the country, though UNICEF said many of them are also held in unofficial detention centers run by armed groups. Of the 122 women and children interviewed by UNICEF, three-quarters “said they experienced violence, harassment, or aggression at the hands of adults” while in detention, and nearly half of them reported sexual abuse. Those interviewed also reported a lack of access to proper nutrition, sanitation, health care, and legal access—conditions UNICEF described as “living hellholes.” Afshan Khan, the UNICEF Regional Director and Special Coordinator for the Refugee and Migrant Crisis in Europe, said in a statement that migration routes from Libya to Europe are “controlled by smugglers, traffickers and other people seeking to prey upon desperate children and women who are simply seeking refuge or a better life,” adding: “We need safe and legal pathways and safeguards to protect migrating children that keep them safe and keep predators at bay.” Indeed, there are few safeguards for migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean. Of the more than 180,000 who attempted the journey from Libya to Italy last year, more than 4,500 drowned—a figure which made 2016 the deadliest year for migrants on record.
UPDATE: Samsung's Chief, 4 Executives Charged in Corruption Scandal
Lee Jae-yong (Jung Yeon-Je/ Pool / Reuters)
Updated at 9:19 a.m. ET
South Korean prosecutors say they charged Lee Jae-yong, the Samsung heir, and four other company executives with corruption and embezzlement in a scandal that has already resulted in the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. Three of the four executives, who were named in Tuesday’s announcement, resigned from the company. Lee was arrested earlier this month. My colleague Yasmeen Serhan previously reported: “The arrest concerns multimillion-dollar donations the Samsung executive made to companies associated with Choi Soon-sil, a longtime friend of Park whose Rasputin-like relationship with the president prompted allegations of undue influence and ultimately led to Park’s impeachment. Prosecutors allege Lee made the donations in exchange for political support for a 2015 merger between Samsung and Cheil Industries, an affiliated firm. Though Lee confirmed he made the donations, he denied that they were bribes.” The charges could have major implications for Samsung; Lee has run the conglomerate since his father, Lee Kun-hee, suffered a heart attack in 2014.
UPDATE: 'I Don’t Think We’ve Explained it Well Enough to the American Public,' Trump Says
Updated at 9:01 a.m. ET
President Trump toldFox & Friends he’d give himself an “A” on his achievements so far, but would give himself a “C or C-plus” for messaging. “I think I’ve done great things, but I don’t think I have—I and my people—I don’t think we’ve explained it well enough to the American public,” he said. The remarks came hours before his scheduled remarks to a joint session of Congress. Trump said he’d use the address to elaborate on his plans for the military, border security, the economy, and health care. The speech isn’t technically a State of the Union address, which is given a year after a president has been in office. The address, which begins at 9 p.m., comes a little more than a month after Trump’s inauguration as president. My colleague Molly Ball assessed his time in office so far.
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.
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.
More families who can afford it are hiring a house manager, a kind of “chief of staff for the home.”
Here is the promise of a house manager. Hire one, and soon someone else could be doing your laundry, washing your dishes, prepping your meals, and completing those Amazon returns you’ve been meaning to make. They could reorganize the utensil drawer, notice if your kid is outgrowing their shoes and order more, take your car to the repair shop, and be at home to meet the plumber. If your child needs food for a class party, a house manager could make the dish and drop it off; if that child also has a pet lizard, a house manager could buy the crickets to feed it.
House managers are not a nanny or a house cleaner. They’re a “chief of staff for the home,” a “personal assistant for Mom,” and “a clone of myself,” according to the more than a dozen people I spoke with who have either hired one or work as one. They are, in effect, what might have once been called a housekeeper—a person who helps oversee a household’s basic functioning. Middle- and upper-class families used to more commonly employ this kind of position (the title “house manager” dates back to at least the 1830s), but it has become rare enough that a couple of people I spoke with thought they may have come up with the term.
Why is Donald Trump breaking bread with the “enemy of the people”?
Even in the best of times, the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner is an awkward and ethically fraught affair. Journalists spend the evening partying with the president and administration officials whom they’re supposed to cover rigorously and skeptically. I’ve been to the dinner several times over the years. It’s typically crowded and a little chaotic, and the ratio of non-journalists to journalists is about 10 to 1. The evening is promoted as a celebration of journalism and the First Amendment, but it has always been a bit of an embarrassment.
These aren’t the best of times for White House correspondents or, for that matter, the First Amendment. And this year’s gala figures to be even more awkward and embarrassing than usual.
The “disappearing scientists” story is, in its way, a remarkable achievement.
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.
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.
El-Sayed has followed the classic strategy of adopting positions that appeal to a majority of his party’s voters—thus giving him an advantage over more cautious rivals—but that do not appeal to a majority of the general electorate. In El-Sayed’s case, those stances include supporting single-payer health insurance, abolishing ICE, and intensely criticizing Israel; at the same time, he positions himself as the most doctrinal left-wing candidate in the race.
Stories about women living together are proliferating—and offering alternative visions to the nuclear family.
Years ago, I moved into a small, cold house with two women I’d never met. Quickly, we became very close, in part through living communally: divvying up the big chores and scarce hot water, waiting until everyone was home to watch the latest episode of Girls. We were the same age as the show’s characters and had our share of similar dramas, largely related to the boyfriends who, we rightly assumed, would eventually end our cohabitation. Much as we loved our setup, we all wanted and expected to move in with men. Still, each of us recalls that time lovingly, and I, at least, sometimes idealize it.
I know I’m not alone. I’ve heard many women daydream about setting up house with female friends. Mostly, though, those are fantasies, ones that don’t stretch to mortgages or arguments about whose hair is clogging up the shower drain. No one wants to imagine the many challenges that the Danish writer Pernille Ipsen describes in My Seven Mothers, a memoir of growing up in a women’s commune that’s full of descriptions of conflict. But Ipsen includes those struggles for a reason: She quotes one of her mothers telling her, “What I wanted, wanted, wanted, was that this way of life, women living with women, should include it all.”
Montana Democrats thought they found a novel way to win control of the U.S. Senate—until the party faithful started fighting back.
Jason Boeshore, a grain-elevator manager on the eastern plains of Montana, fired off a rocket this month to the private Signal chat he shares with the 23 other members of the state Democratic Party executive board. He demanded that leaders make clear in newspapers across the state that the Democratic Party would support only Democratic candidates in the fall elections. The response was swift and not to his liking. Shannon O’Brien, the chair of the party, wrote that her staff, not the board, would set the messaging strategy. Then she addressed the unspoken concerns at the heart of Boeshore’s request. “Listen if ANY of you EVER find yourselves questioning my intentions, please call me,” O’Brien wrote. “I will continue to move forward to get Democrats elected. There’s no hidden agenda.”
The people we were died at the exact moment our child did.
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My husband, David, hates Valentine’s Day. He once called it “New Year’s Eve with nuclear weapons.” I pretend not to care. Still, when the day passes entirely unremarked on, a woman can’t help but feel overlooked.
On Valentine’s Day 2024, David found a way out. He booked a speech on February 14 that required traveling from our home in Washington, D.C., to Toronto. I couldn’t object—he was getting paid. Anyway, I had my own plans: an “anti–Valentine’s Day” dinner hosted by one of the foreign embassies.
As I got ready, I called our oldest daughter, Miranda. She answered from her Brooklyn bathroom, getting ready for her own party. She propped her phone up beside her sink and laughed when I told her about her father’s strategic Valentine’s Day escape.
