by Amy Fried | Jul 18, 2026 | Civil Rights, Congress, Opinion
Nothing has absorbed Maine politics like the candidacy of Graham Platner. Almost from the moment he announced his run for the U.S. Senate in mid-August 2025, he drew big crowds and lots of attention. His strongest backers stuck with him through controversy after controversy until Jenny Racicot publicly accused him of sexual assault. Platner denied the allegation, but his support collapsed.
Yet even after Platner officially withdrew as the nominee on July 10 and the Maine Democratic Party began the process of replacing him, it seemed like Mainers were going to keep talking about him for a while. Many of his committed voters were deeply disappointed about what they learned; others were very angry that the news had been revealed. Some suggested they might write in Platner’s name or not vote at all in the fall.
Then came an awful event that starkly shifted Mainers’ attention, and moved the focus of the Maine Senate race from Platner to Sen. Susan Collins.
The killing of 26-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday was a real shock in the state. Maine often has the lowest rate of violent crime nationally and homicides are rare, with only 21 in 2025.
Maine, like Minnesota, is a highly participatory state, and both places responded similarly to ICE incursions this past winter.
Of course, it wasn’t just Guerrero’s death that was the story, but also who shot him — an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer — and the circumstances of his killing. For one, unlike other shootings by ICE officers, the Department of Homeland Security did not even claim that Guerrero posed any sort of imminent threat or that
by MS NOW | Jul 18, 2026 | Letter to the editor, Opinion
MS NOW welcomes letters from readers who want to respond to our journalism, add context, raise a thoughtful disagreement or share a perspective that may help other readers better understand an issue. Please review our submission guidelines. Then use this form to send us your letter.To the editor:
Regarding Hayes Brown’s July 14 op-ed column, “The courts won’t give cover to Trump’s IRS self-dealing”:
This was an excellent article as far as it went. But it does not prominently address the part of the lawsuit settlement that would prohibit the IRS from auditing President Donald Trump, his family or his businesses. As far as I am concerned, that is equivalent to describing the fishing pole instead of the great fish that was caught.
The goal of this lawsuit could reasonably be described as prohibiting Trump audits. Surely the lawyers acting on the president’s behalf knew that the proposed $1.776 billion slush fund would be torpedoed by the courts. Is that why the Justice Department didn’t mention the IRS audit details when it first announced the settlement? What is happening with the IRS agreement? It seems to me that this entire bizarre fiasco was created to obtain the side deal.
— Kate Long
Charleston, West Virginia
Hayes Brown responds
Thanks for reading! With only so much space to talk about a very dense ruling, I didn’t have room to go heavily into some details. But I delved into the IRS audit part of the settlement in a previous article that I linked to in the July 14 column. To send a letter to the editor, review our submission guidelines and use this form.
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by Ja'han Jones | Jul 18, 2026 | Business, Opinion, White House
A dozen states are suing to thwart a merger that would give Paramount Skydance executives ownership of Warner Bros. Discovery – and effectively give outsize media control to the pro-MAGA Ellison family.
On Friday, a judge heard arguments as the case kicked off, with Variety reporting that the judge “suggested at one point that Paramount had conceded that it will not suffer harm if a temporary restraining order is granted, which would put the merger on hold for up to 28 days.”
Paramount has been central to President Donald Trump’s authoritarian visions of wielding media control. And that’s necessary context for any potential approval of this merger.
Paramount agreed to pay $16 million last year to settle a bogus lawsuit Trump filed over a “60 Minutes” interview involving his 2024 presidential opponent, Kamala Harris. Paramount platforms have been used to promote the president’s cryptocurrency ventures, and Trump has boasted about MAGA-friendly changes instituted at CBS after his administration approved the Paramount-Skydance merger.
In addition, the overtly pro-Trump chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr — who authored a chapter in the far-right playbook Project 2025 — has even depicted Paramount-Skydance’s control of CBS as one of Trump’s “wins” over the media.
Trump even seemed to allude to the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger last weekend, when he snapped at CNN’s Jake Tapper: “We’re trying to have CNN go on a normal path. And we’ll do that.”(CNN is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery.)
From the proposed merger’s likely negative impacts on quality and competitiveness in the media to its brazen usefulness to a corrupt administration, there’s plenty not to like about the deal. And the ethics, or lack
by Rep. Johnny Olszewski Jr. | Jul 17, 2026 | Opinion, Politics, White House
A federal judge this week rightly rebuked President Donald Trump’s outrageous $10 billion lawsuit against his own country, which originally ended in a bogus settlement that created a $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund for his allies and would have granted him and his family sweeping immunity from IRS audits. In ruling that Trump manipulated the judicial process for his own benefit, the judge reinforced what many Americans had concluded long ago: Trump has transformed the presidency into one giant grift.
Trump’s shameless attempts to cash in on the U.S. presidency are why I have introduced legislation to establish basic safeguards that should apply to every president, regardless of party. My proposals would require presidents to place their assets in blind trusts and prohibit sitting presidents from owning or trading individual stocks. I have fought to prevent presidents from receiving blanket immunity from federal tax law, and I have introduced a constitutional amendment that would let Congress review the most egregious abuses of the presidential pardon power.
Trump has transformed the presidency into one giant grift.
Most of these proposals have been flatly rejected by the Republican-controlled Rules Committee along party lines. My constitutional amendment has gained the support of one lone Republican, Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, who’s retiring.
But these aren’t partisan ideas. Nor are they radical. They’re commonsense protections rooted in a simple principle: Public office exists to serve the public — not enrich the officeholder.
Because corruption isn’t just unethical. It’s also expensive.
Americans know what it feels like paying more for groceries, gas, housing, healthcare and energy. Families are stretching every paycheck and making impossible decisions about what they can afford. At the
by Tara C. Smith | Jul 17, 2026 | Opinion, Science
Reports of “cyclospora,” the microscopic parasite infecting people in several states, have been multiplying. The epicenter of the diarrheal pathogen outbreak is currently in Michigan, with several other Midwest and mid-Atlantic states affected. Though the source remains unclear, lettuce and/or salad greens appear to be the leading culprit as of now, subject to confirmation from other states.
Cases of cyclospora have been mounting since late spring. So what’s taken so long to get this information? Why don’t we already know what product (or products) are making people sick? And why has the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention been so quiet?
The answers are complicated and a bit messy, due to characteristics of both the pathogen and the public health response.
There are concerns that the Trump administration’s removal of cyclospora from the FoodNet surveillance system and the dissolution of the Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria may have slowed detection and response.
First, federal case counts have lagged numbers reported by individual states. As of July 13, there were 1,645 cases of cyclosporiasis reported to the CDC, originating in 34 states. Astute readers will spot that number is very different from the 3,762 cases reported in Michigan alone as of July 15. This discrepancy is largely due to disconnect and delayed reporting and confirmation of cases between states and the CDC.
The CDC notes some of these cases “require further analysis to confirm the illness as domestically acquired cyclosporiasis.” Further, cases acquired months ago are less likely to be part of the current outbreak, so the national numbers alone are misleading when discussing ongoing transmission. There are concerns that the Trump administration’s removal
by Matthew Bartlett | Jul 17, 2026 | Opinion, White House
The White House billed President Donald Trump’s address to the nation Thursday night as presenting new information on the nation’s election security, but there was almost nothing the public had not heard or seen before. Instead, the rambling and disjointed speech from an aging president was best summarized by a Trump line from his only debate with Joe Biden in 2024: “I really don’t know what he said … and I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
After speeding through his stump speech, Trump dove deep into gutter politics. He claimed China engaged in a yearslong effort to meddle in U.S. elections, including the 2020 election. He also alleged a Deep State conspiracy involving intelligence agencies to conceal Beijing’s interference.
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said earlier that the speech would be shocking. True, but not in the way she meant.
A seemingly tired president appeared to struggle to read the speech, which aides had previewed as a “potpourri” of topics, but was more accurately a mishmash of MAGA buzzwords. He managed to name-check Biden, Barack Obama, Venezuela and the Los Angeles mayoral election. He spotlighted a fraudulent effort to register voters in Michigan — without mentioning that effort was caught before the election. He made hysterical claims about foreigners and dead people voting. And for good measure, he threw in a preposterous claim that the free press was paid to malign him.
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said earlier that the speech would be shocking. True, but not in the way she meant. While the president’s goal may have been to destroy faith in our elections, it may have succeeded in destroying whatever
