Two explosions in Damascus, Syria, killed at least 40 Shiite pilgrims traveling to holy shrines, the United Nations says that with 20 million people at risk of starvation the world faces the greatest humanitarian crisis since World War II, and more news from the U.S. and around the globe.
—Two explosions in Damascus, Syria, killed at least 40 Shiite pilgrims traveling to visit holy shrines.
—The United Nations said the world faces the largest humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II, and some 20 million people in four countries are at risk of starvation.
—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).
Manhattan US Attorney Says He's Been Fired by DOJ After Refusing to Resign
Brendan McDermid / Reuters
Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Saturday he was fired from his position after he refused a request from the U.S. Justice Department to resign. On Friday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked the 46 remaining U.S. attorneys appointed by former President Obama to step down, something that usually happens much earlier in a new president’s term, but was delayed because the Trump administration had not lined up replacements. Asking for their resignations early on allows the U.S. attorneys to tie up loose ends on important investigations while their replacements are confirmed. What was surprising in Bharara’s case was that he was asked to remain in his current position after he and Trump met in Trump Tower in November. News of the firing came from Bharara’s personal Twitter account.
I did not resign. Moments ago I was fired. Being the US Attorney in SDNY will forever be the greatest honor of my professional life.
Secret Service Arrests a Man After He Climbs the White House Fence
Carlos Barria / Reuters
U.S. Secret Service says it arrested a man late Friday night after he climbed the White House fence and tried to enter the south entrance. The man was identified by police as Jonathan Tran, a 26-year-old from Milpitas, California. President Donald Trump was at the White House during the incident. Tran, who was carrying a backpack, climbed the fence just before midnight, and was found near the south entrance portico. A search of his belongings didn’t turn up anything hazardous, and he has been taken into custody. In the past few years, several people have scaled the fence around the White House, and one man, in 2014, made it through the north entrance doors with a small knife in his pocket. The first family was not at the White House at the time.
20 Million People Face Starvation in East Africa, the Worst Humanitarian Crisis Since WWII
Siegfried Modola / Reuters
The United Nations said more than 20 million people in four countries are facing starvation due to drought and exacerbated by conflict, marking the largest humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II. Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia, and Nigeria are in immediate need of aid, otherwise “people will simply starve to death,” Stephen O’Brien, the UN under secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, told the security council at a meeting in New York late Friday. To “avert catastrophe,” O’Brien said, nonprofits would need about $4.4 billion by July. An unusual dry season has caused a drought in parts of East Africa, with crops wilting and livestock dying by the thousands. In South Sudan, where a famine was declared last month, the crisis has been exacerbated by a civil war. Famine is a technical term used to measure the risk of starvation in a country, and in order to meet the requirements, more than 30 percent of children would need to be suffering from acute malnutrition, with mortality rates of the country’s population reaching two starvation deaths per day for every 10,000 people. In Nigeria, too, Boko Haram has worsened the situation with attacks on villages in the country’s northeast, displacing 2.6 million people.
Explosions in Damascus Kill at Least 40 Shia Pilgrims
Omar Sanadiki / Reuters
Two explosions killed at least 40 Shia pilgrims and wounded 120 others Saturday in Damascus, Syria. No group has claimed responsibility for the bombings. Local TV said the attack was carried out by two suicide bombers, Reuters reported, and images from the scene showed buses with windows shattered, bloodstains on the street, and random bits of scattered clothing. The pilgrims had gathered at a bus station nearby the Bab el Saghir Cemetery when the first bomb exploded, and about 10 minutes later, as victims were being tended to, the second blast went off. The pilgrims had just come from the shrine of Sayeda Zeinab, the granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad. The shrine is a frequent target of attack by ISIS because it’s regularly visited by Shia pilgrims.
Thirteen thousand miles. Infinite contenders. One beautiful loaf.
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Here is the promise you and I must cling to across the thousands of words that follow: At some point within this text, I will reveal to you what—after 555 responses, 13,000 miles of travel, and months of monomaniacal research—I have determined to be the best free restaurant bread in America. I will not attempt to slither to the moral high ground, arguing that best is a meaningless measure, or insisting that all bread is dear in its own way. Even if you attempt to betray me—for instance, by merely scanning the text that follows for the phrase Here it is: the best free restaurant bread in America—I will uphold my end of the bargain.
The president is on a losing streak, and even some of his aides are dismayed by his choices.
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You’ve heard the joke: The White House is going to start talking about the Epstein files to distract from how badly the Iran war is going.
Except that this reverse “Wag the dog” is based on bizarre truth: First Lady Melania Trump did bring the disgraced financier up, unprompted, late last week in an effort to distance herself from the scandal (in a move that, predictably, only shifted it back into the spotlight once again). Meanwhile, as negotiations with Iran stumble forward, the Strait of Hormuz is still in Tehran’s hands and now President Trump has authorized a risky naval blockade that will likely send prices soaring further. Moreover, Trump’s poll numbers have continued to fall, Republicans worry that both houses of Congress could be lost in November, and the president threw away a remarkable amount of geopolitical capital trying to support his now-defeated illiberal buddy Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Oh, and Trump deeply offended adherents of the world’s two largest religions in one week’s time.
The car industry says it has an answer for drivers wary of going electric.
Two hours into a road trip in my Tesla, I start to get twitchy. By that point, the battery in my 2019 Model 3 has dipped to an uncomfortably low percentage. If I can’t reach the next plug, I’m in trouble. This is the kind of problem that Ram’s electric pickup truck—the first of a new breed of EV to arrive in the United States—is intended to solve. When the range starts to dwindle, the truck automatically fires up a hidden gas engine that refills the giant battery. The “electric” vehicle keeps on chugging down the highway, hour after hour; pit stops are once again decided by the need for bathroom breaks rather than battery range.
The Ram 1500 REV, set to debut later this year, is what’s called an “extended-range electric vehicle,” or EREV. In essence, it is an electric vehicle that burns gas. There’s nothing revolutionary about a half-gas, half-electric car, of course. Hybrids have been a mainstay in the United States since the Toyota Prius broke through two decades ago, and automakers have released more efficient plug-in hybrids—allowing drivers to charge up for about 30 miles of electric driving, just enough to accomplish daily errands without fossil fuels. An extended-range EV is a different kind of beast. The engine burns gasoline for the sole purpose of replenishing the battery—it never actually pushes the wheels. In the Ram, the battery can run for about 150 miles of electric driving, and the whole setup delivers enough range to travel nearly 700 miles between stops.
A minimally speaking autistic man just wrote a best-selling book. Or did he?
On a recent morning at Rockefeller Center, NBC employees strolled through the crowd with copies of Upward Bound, the latest book-club pick from the Today show co-host Jenna Bush Hager. “It’s deeply heartfelt and moving,” Hager said, after holding up the debut novel from the 28-year-old Woody Brown, “and the reason it’s so authentic is that the author understands autism firsthand.”
That understanding is indeed profound. Brown’s autism is such that he can barely speak, and he communicates mostly by pointing to letters, one by one, on a laminated board. This is also how his novel, which is already a New York Times best seller, came to be. In the recorded interview that followed Hager’s introduction, Brown’s mother, Mary, sat beside him, holding the letter board and reading his tapped-out messages.
Maybe you’ve seen photos of Tehran in the 1970s, just before the Islamic Revolution: images of young women going to work in miniskirts, of couples making out in parks while wearing bell-bottoms, of people at pools in bikinis. It looks like Paris or Milan or Los Angeles. But in 1979 the revolution happened, and now Tehran looks like something from an earlier century.
Sometimes I think that our whole world has become kind of like that—going backwards in time. The religious movements thriving in today’s secularized age are the traditionalist ones that dissent from large parts of contemporary culture—not only the Shiite Islam of post-revolution Iran, but Orthodox Judaism and conservative Catholicism. Young Americans are flooding into Eastern Orthodox churches.
Is the president’s son-in-law carrying out the public’s business or pursuing his own private interests?
In 2021, shortly after he left his role as a senior White House adviser, Jared Kushner let it be known that he had loved his job but disliked the scrutiny and disclosure that came with being a top U.S. government official. He set up a private-equity firm and took a $2 billion investment from a Saudi fund led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He proclaimed that he was embracing private life. “I’m an investor now,” Kushner said in a 2024 interview. If President Trump “calls you on November whatever and says, ‘I’d like you to come back to D.C.,’ you say, ‘Thanks, but I’m good’?” the interviewer, Dan Primack of Axios, pressed. “Yes,” Kushner responded.
But Kushner did come back. Two days before the United States and Israel attacked Iran this past February, he was in Geneva in a negotiation of the highest possible stakes. Over the weekend, he traveled with Vice President Vance to Islamabad to participate in failed peace talks with Iran. Without title or remit or any kind of official designation—only “presidential son-in-law”—Kushner has in the first 14 months of the second Trump administration sat down with world leaders including Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Volodymyr Zelensky, along with Saudis and multiple other actors from the Middle East.
The president’s attempts to interfere with the midterms demand vigilance, but a recent flimsy gambit is an argument against despair.
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Anxiety among election officials and experts had been building for months before Donald Trump issued his latest executive order purporting to ensure election integrity late last month. When the actual text emerged, the reaction wasn’t relief exactly—but a definite sense that things could have been much worse.
Americans have many reasons to be worried about whether the midterm elections will be free and fair. As I laid out in a cover story last fall, the president’s plan to subvert the 2026 election is multifaceted and already in swing. But last month’s order and the dismissive reaction it’s received from experts—along with this weekend’s decisive defeat of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, which shows how the competitive-authoritarian playbook that Trump has imitated can be beaten—also point to the reasons to resist doomerism.
A phonics-based curriculum is only one part of how Mississippi went from worst to first in education. The other part is much harder to pull off.
Updated at 8:52 p.m. ET on April 9, 2026
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No story has caught the imagination of education reformers this decade quite like the “Mississippi miracle.” From 1998 to 2024, fourth-grade reading and math scores in my home state—the nation’s poorest—rose from among the worst in the country to among the best. When adjusting for demographic factors such as poverty, we’re in first place.
Other states are now trying to emulate what Mississippi did. Those efforts largely revolve around adopting what’s known as the “science of reading”— a set of principles and teaching techniques, including phonics, that are grounded in decades of empirical research. Last fall, for example, the Wall Street Journal editorial board marveled that “even California is now following Mississippi’s lead by returning to phonics” as Governor Gavin Newsom prepared to sign a major new reading bill into law. But what many outsiders fail to understand is that Mississippi changed far more than just how reading is taught. They therefore miss why and how our literacy approach succeeded.
On many recent nights, Donald Trump has been posting obsessively on his Truth Social site into the wee hours. The president, of course, has never been one for a solid night’s sleep—or restrained and temperate commentary on social media—but his emotional state seems to be fraying: This weekend, he attacked Pope Leo XIV, presented himself as Jesus Christ, and then jabbed at his phone until dawn.
Judging from those posts, the commander in chief is in distress. No one can say for sure what is causing the president’s bizarre behavior. Perhaps Trump’s narcissistic insistence that he is always successful in everything he undertakes is feeling the sting and strain of multiple public failures, including the collapse of his campaign to dislodge the Iranian regime, plummeting approval ratings, the decline of the U.S. economy, and, on Sunday, the crushing defeat of one of his favorite fellow authoritarians, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.
Hungary offers lessons in defeating right-wing populists.
To the outside world, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán began his rule as a pariah—an obstreperous, often lone dissenter from European Union policies, especially over migration. Then he became a prophet to new-style “national conservatives”—the anti-immigration, anti-elite right-wing movement that has reshaped the politics of the West. After resoundingly losing national elections held on April 12, Orbán has become a parable for how populism can be defeated.
His political demise was hardly inevitable. It had to be shrewdly engineered by politicians and voters who put aside their ideological differences to defeat him. In politics, there is no natural law of self-correction.
From 2010 until now, Orbán and his Fidesz party transformed Hungary into a new kind of state, which he proudly proclaimed as an “illiberal democracy.” He and his allies rewrote the constitution to entrench his power, centralizing control over civil society and countervailing institutions such as courts and universities. Péter Magyar, the presumptive next prime minister, triumphed against a tilted electoral system—gerrymandered districts, government influence over traditional media and even over the country’s billboards—designed to keep Fidesz in power. Magyar understood that such a regime does not simply collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and mismanagement.
