Today’s edition of quick hits.
* Fortunately, a suspect was identified and apprehended quickly: “A man is facing charges after allegedly jumping an iron fence into Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s official residence in Harrisburg early Sunday, breaking into his home, and starting multiple fires with Molotov cocktails while the family was inside, officials said.”
* Good for Harvard: “Harvard University will ‘not accept’ demands made by President Donald Trump’s administration amid threats of funding cuts, according to a statement issued Monday.”
* One of the deadliest single attacks on Ukraine this year: “A Russian ballistic missile strike killed at least 31 people and injured more than 80 others in the Ukrainian city of Sumy on Sunday, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, marking one of the deadliest single attacks on the country this year.”
* In Budapest: “Hungary’s parliament on Monday passed an amendment to the constitution that allows the government to ban public events by LGBTQ communities, a decision that legal scholars and critics call another step toward authoritarianism by the populist government.”
* No good will come of this: “U.S. DOGE Service employees have inserted themselves into the government’s long-established process to alert the public about potential federal grants and allow organizations to apply for funds, according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive situation.”
* Will those who cared about Jade Helm care about this? “President Trump authorized the U.S. military to take jurisdiction over a strip of public land at the border that spans three states, a key step toward having U.S. troops play a larger role enforcing immigration laws at the southern border. In a presidential memorandum released Friday evening, Trump ordered the Defense Department to have authority over the Roosevelt Reservation, among other public lands. American-Indian reservations are exempt from the order.”
* There’s no good reason to end these protections: The Trump administration will end temporary protections for more than 10,000 people from Afghanistan and Cameroon, putting them on track for deportation in May and June, Department of Homeland Security officials said on Friday. Many of the Afghans affected by the decision had been allowed into the United States after the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from their country in 2021. Now, the Trump administration could send them back to a country under Taliban rule.” * An official with a past related to Jan. 6: “Pete Marocco, a State Department official who oversaw the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), has left the agency after less than three months, according to a senior Trump administration official.” * The Supreme Court protected affirmative action in the military, but here we are: “The Air Force Academy has stopped taking the race, gender or ethnicity of applicants into consideration, the Justice Department stated in a filing Friday responding to a lawsuit that accused the institution of discrimination for making class diversity a factor in its admissions process.” See you tomorrow.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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