USA

Former President Donald Trump cruised to victory in the Iowa caucuses Monday, serving as a likely harbinger of what is to come in subsequent nominating contests.

CNN and the Associated Press called the caucuses for Trump just 30 minutes into the nominating process, with less than one percent of the vote reporting. The 45th president had garnered 64.5 percent of the vote, with one percent reporting as of 8:42 p.m., according to the New York Times’ election results. He was beating his nearest opponent, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), by roughly 40 percentage points.

The U.S. Army is experiencing a sharp decline in the number of white recruits it’s bringing into the service, a new report found.

According to data analyzed by Military.com, “A total of 44,042 new Army recruits were categorized by the service as white in 2018, but that number has fallen consistently each year to a low of 25,070 in 2023, with a 6% dip from 2022 to 2023 being the most significant drop.” The report further noted how “[n]o other demographic group” has experienced such a downward trend in recent years, and that the “rate at which white recruitment has fallen far outpaces nationwide demographic shifts.”

There’s a funny clip from the TV series The Young Pope, in which Pius XII, a brash, cynical American played by Jude Law, hosts in his office the Vatican’s new marketing chief. She tells the pontiff that she was educated at Harvard.

“The word ‘Harvard’ may impress people around here,” the pope sneers, “but to an American, it means one thing only: decline.”

The Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza offers Iraq “a historic opportunity,” Hassan Nasrallah, the influential leader of the Lebanese group Hezbollah, said in his speech late last week.

Hezbollah is a political and military organization based in Lebanon and is opposed to Israel. As such, it is part of a network of groups in the region, which Iran supports to one degree or another, that feel the same way about Israel. That includes the Houthis in Yemen and various paramilitary groups in Iraq.

As Nasrallah said in his speech, all of these groups have been “distracting the enemy” during the Israel-Hamas conflict.

The Bezos Post sent Meryl Kornfield to the cornfields of Iowa to get a quote from Vivek Ramaswamy so she could write that he’s a white supremacist. She made the mistake of asking him the question in public, at a Ramaswamy rally, because that gave him the opportunity to humiliate her in public.

And he did.

WAPO reporter doubles down: You didn’t say that you condemn white supremacy though.

She immediately regrets it.@VivekGRamaswamy isn’t going to play the game. pic.twitter.com/2NHshriVZa

— Chris Carapezza (@Chris_Carapezza) January 3, 2024

h/t DS