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Israel strikes Gaza hours after ceasefire progress

admin - Latest News - October 4, 2025
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Israel airstrikes hit the Gaza Strip on Saturday, local authorities said, hours after President Donald Trump called to halt the bombing, saying that Hamas was ready for peace. NBC News’ Richard Engel reports.



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Oct. 4, 2025, 12:00 PM EDTBy Natasha Korecki, Jonathan Allen and Carol E. LeeFormer President Barack Obama has stepped up his criticisms of the Trump administration in recent weeks, weighing in more forcefully and frequently than he did at the start of the president’s second term.It is an intensification that Democrats welcome at a moment when they lack party leadership, even as some say his trademark caution is still getting the better of him.In the last three weeks, Obama called President Donald Trump’s news conference linking Tylenol and autism “violence against the truth,” and he attacked the administration in the wake of comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s initial late-night ouster for taking “cancel culture” to a “new and dangerous level.” After Charlie Kirk’s killing, Obama aggressively called out Trump’s rhetoric, saying the president was further dividing the country. And before the government shutdown, he clapped at Republicans, saying they would “rather shut down the government than help millions of Americans afford health care.”Obama’s headline-grabbing comments come after private conversations over the summer with allies about whether he should speak out more and how he should approach high-stakes White House actions as they unfold, according to two people familiar with the discussions. According to one of the sources, the former president recognizes the gravity of a moment when Trump is seen as stretching the limits of the Constitution, and one former aide said he is cognizant that there is a dearth of party leadership.It’s unclear, however, whether Obama will sustain this pace.A former Obama White House official with knowledge of his team’s thinking said before Obama sat for a series of paid speaking events in recent weeks, his team mulled how to best take advantage of the appearances. At the same time, a flurry of high-profile events transpired, including the Kirk shooting, Kimmel being pulled off the air and the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey.“I’m aware there are discussions of ‘Should we be out there more? How are we calibrating?’ Of course they’re asking that, that’s responsible because he’s trying to be thoughtful. It’s fair to say they’re constantly asking themselves, ‘How do we meet this moment?’” the former official said.But that person noted that some of Obama’s newsmaking moments emerged from public appearances that had been on the books for months. “To take that shot is intentional,” the person said of Obama’s rhetoric against Trump. “Don’t get me wrong — that is definitely a choice. But I can’t overstate the extent to which the realities of the opportunities you have on the calendar inputs into your strategy. They reinforce each other.”Obama’s role in the country’s current political discourse has been a topic of conversation — and at times a source of deep frustration — among Democrats since he left office more than eight years ago. While it’s still not enough for some, his cadence in recent weeks is a sharp change from Trump’s first term, when he subscribed to post-presidential norms of not talking about a successor.But this time is arguably unlike any other. Eight months into Trump’s presidency, the Democratic Party remains leaderless, creating a void that Obama is best suited to fill.“The party itself is in the wilderness and I think the last person who can speak with credibility on behalf of Democrats is Obama,” said Ami Copeland, a Democratic strategist who previously served as Obama’s deputy national finance director. “People don’t want to hear from Biden about anything right now. Clinton is still kind of tainted, I think. And the last person who really led a successful campaign that moves the big-tent party is him.”Copeland characterized Obama’s recent public statements as likely coming from a sense of duty.“He still feels a responsibility to not just the party, but more importantly, to the country. I don’t even see that as a partisan comment. That is just [an] ‘I care about the country and babies’ comment,” Copeland said, referencing Obama’s retort on Tylenol. In response to a request for comment on Obama’s recent remarks, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said, “Barack Hussein Obama is the architect of modern political division in America — famously demeaning millions of patriotic Americans who opposed his liberal agenda as ‘bitter’ for ‘cling[ing] to guns or religion.’””If he cares about unity in America, he would tell his own party to stop their destructive behavior,” she added.Even as many Democrats point to Obama’s impact, they acknowledge they need to look beyond him if they’re ever to move forward with a new generation of leadership.But for now, they point to Obama’s popularity as giving his words more weight. A Gallup poll in February showed Obama had the highest approval rating among presidents who were still living. A Marquette University Law School poll released last week showed Trump with net minus-15% favorability while Obama enjoyed net 17% favorability. Obama’s discussions on whether to weigh in more publicly on developments out of the Trump administration have included exploring ideas of how, when and in what format, according to the people familiar with the discussions. They characterized the approach as a work in progress, meaning he’s made his views on Trump clear over the past decade, but as the administration rolls out new actions, he’s sought to ensure his approach has an impact.This summer, the former president was called out for clinging to a reserved posture.In June, a headline in The Atlantic asked, “Where is Barack Obama?” and thrashed the former president, casting him as all but sitting on his heels as democracy burned.“No matter how brazen Trump becomes, the most effective communicator in the Democratic Party continues to opt for minimal communication,” the piece stated. “His ‘audacity of hope’ presidency has given way to the fierce lethargy of semi-retirement.”Less than two weeks later, Obama made news at a public event where he warned that the United States was “dangerously close” to slipping into an autocracy. At the time, news pieces found it notable that Obama appeared publicly to speak against Trump at all. But even at that event, no audio or video was allowed, and Obama was cautious and circumspect. He did not mention Trump by name.“Democracy is not self-executing. It requires people, judges, people in the Justice Department, and people throughout the government who take an oath to uphold the Constitution,” Obama said in those remarks. “It requires them to take that oath seriously. When that isn’t happening, we start drifting into something that is not consistent with American democracy. It is consistent with autocracies.”Aides have long said they want to avoid a “dilution” factor with the 44th president, so that he’s not so frequently weighing in on issues that his words lose their impact.In July, Obama’s office did issue a rebuke of Trump after the president accused him of committing “treason” and rigging the 2016 and 2020 elections.“But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction,” his office said at the time.To some Democrats, Obama is falling short at a critical time.“Obama has a singular role in impacting the national debate that he is not in any way maxing out right now, at a time when he is most needed,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.Green held up Obama’s signaling of support for California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s effort to match Texas in redrawing its maps mid-decade as the kind of “trickle down” messaging he should take part in to help guide other Democrats.“He has an unmatched ability to cut through the noise and focus in on the Republicans’ most effective arguments, and then completely debunk them, oftentimes with humor that has been devastating for some Republican candidates on the receiving end during campaign season,” Green said. “But we need him to use that same prowess in this moment to help save the country.”As president in 2011, Obama showed no reticence in ripping into Trump for promoting the false claim that Obama had been born outside the U.S. At that year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, Obama mercilessly mocked Trump, who was in the audience, for having little experience in making consequential executive decisions and for peddling conspiracy theories.“Now, I know that he’s taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald,” Obama said. “And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter — like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”Trump was visibly irritated during the remarks, and some of his allies say the moment likely factored into his decision to seek the presidency in 2016.To be sure, Obama has for years served as a Trump critic, particularly when shifting to his familiar role as a closer in critical races on the campaign trail for other Democrats. He’s trotted out punchy one-liners, including at the Democratic National Convention when he memorably needled Trump over an obsession with crowd size, then gestured with his hands in a way that made clear he also was referencing Trump’s manhood.In August, it was Obama who acted as the party elder and congratulated Texas Democrats in a video address for standing up to Republicans by leaving their state to deny the GOP a quorum before a redistricting vote. Obama has kept up his advocacy for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, led by his friend and former attorney general Eric Holder.“President Obama has been sounding the alarm about the threat of gerrymandering for a long time. He was integral to the formation of the NDRC and has made our mission a priority in his post-presidency,” NDRC President John Bisognano said in a statement.The recent recalibration of Obama’s comments is in part due to the increasing pace and scale of Trump’s actions, two former aides said.“When I hear not just our current president, but his aides, who have a history of calling political opponents ‘vermin,’ enemies who need to be ‘targeted,’ that speaks to a broader problem that we have right now and something that we’re going to have to grapple with, all of us,” Obama said at a Sept. 17 public appearance before the Jefferson Educational Society, a nonprofit think tank.Before that, he stood out among Democrats for having called New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani in June, even as many of his peers in the party tiptoed around the democratic socialist’s primary win.“He picks and chooses his spots wisely. Sometimes you can watch for so long,” a person who frequently speaks to the former president said. “You won’t see him shadowing this president. He didn’t do it the first four years. There was a lot of crazy then. More crazy now. He’s not going to be a president who spends his time throwing shade on another president, but he’ll certainly lean in when he sees injustices.”While being interviewed onstage in London by British Nigerian historian David Olusoga, Obama last month described Trump’s claims about the link between Tylenol and autism as “violence against the truth.”“We have the spectacle of my successor in the Oval Office, making broad claims around certain drugs and autism that have been continuously disproved. … That undermines public health, the degree to which that can do harm to women who are pregnant,” he said. “That’s why, by the way, it is important for those who believe in the truth and believe in science to also examine truth when it is inconvenient for us.”John Anzalone, who acted as a chief pollster to Obama as well as to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and former President Joe Biden said Democrats are so far in the desert they’re craving a dominant voice to step forward.“More Obama,” Anzalone said, “just like ‘more cowbell,’” referencing a famous “Saturday Night Live” skit.Anzalone argued this moment is unlike others in history, as there is no major oppositional voice breaking through in the same way that then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich could act as a foil to President Bill Clinton when the Republicans were in the minority, for instance.If “he feels more comfortable ratcheting it up, you’re going to see a lot of people cheering, because we feel that it’s kind of leaderless and rudderless,” Anzalone said of Obama. “There’s an audience for President Obama and people do listen, but we also kind of understand that there’s a certain calculus when you’re a former president about what, how often and how loud you speak, and you’ve got to respect that.”Anzalone noted, however, that as much as Democrats want to hear from Obama early and often, new leaders need to emerge, and the party as a whole must find a way to break through to voters moving forward.“It’s good to hear from President Obama but there’s limits to what even he can do fixing the problems of the terrible branding,” Anzalone said. “Individual candidates are going to have to do that. Leaders are going to have to do that.”Natasha KoreckiNatasha Korecki is a senior national political reporter for NBC News.Jonathan AllenJonathan Allen is a senior national politics reporter for NBC News. Carol E. LeeCarol E. Lee is the Washington managing editor.
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Sept. 29, 2025, 1:52 PM EDTBy Angela YangA comedy festival in the capital of Saudi Arabia has become a cultural flash point as major comedians face criticism for accepting seemingly lucrative deals to perform in a country that was virtually impossible to visit until 2019 and a pariah in much of the West for its human rights record.The Riyadh Comedy Festival, which began Friday and runs through Oct. 9, features a variety of big names such as Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, Aziz Ansari, Pete Davidson, Andrew Schulz, Jo Koy, Bill Burr, Jessica Kirson, Jimmy Carr and Louis C.K.These comedians, most of them American, are now encountering resistance from some fans, human rights advocates and fellow comics in the industry.Marc Maron, host of the “WTF” podcast, blasted the festival in a recent stand-up clip, joking that it was easy for him to “take the high road on this one” considering he was not invited to perform.“I mean, how do you even promote that?” Maron said. “Like, ‘From the folks that brought you 9/11, two weeks of laughter in the desert. Don’t miss it.’ I mean, the same guy that’s gonna pay them is the same guy that paid that guy to bone-saw Jamal Khashoggi and put him in a f—ing suitcase.”The Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., declined to comment. Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority, which announced the festival in July, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.“The festival is the largest of its kind globally, bringing together a selection of award-winning comedy stars known for their outstanding performances on international stages and streaming platforms,” the Saudi Press Agency wrote in its announcement for the General Entertainment Authority. “It reflects the efforts to amplify Riyadh’s status as a leading destination for major cultural and artistic events.”Saudi Arabia, the oil-rich home of Islam’s two holiest sites, was for years among the most socially conservative nations on Earth with a morality police enforcing a strict interpretation of Shariah. In recent years under the rule of de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country expanded its cultural and political influence by diversifying its economy and investing in sports, entertainment and tourism to improve its global image. Along with this, the crown prince oversaw a sweeping crackdown on dissent — imprisoning disgruntled royals, women’s rights advocates, and reforming clerics as well as adherents to previously government-sanctioned proponents of strict Wahhabi Islam.Celebrities and influencers have often been criticized for performing in the country or participating in tourism campaigns, and FIFA drew condemnation last year for selecting Saudi Arabia to host the 2034 World Cup.Shane Gillis, who said he was offered an invite, claimed that the organizers “doubled the bag,” or the amount of money offered, after he declined to participate.“It was a significant bag, but I’d already said no,” Gillis said on his podcast. “I took a principled stand.”On TikTok and Instagram, verified accounts that appeared to belong to Turki Al-Sheikh, a royal court adviser who has emerged as a powerful figure in sports and entertainment as part of Saudi Arabia’s push into the global culture industry, posted videos of Chappelle and Hart.In a news release last week, Human Rights Watch wrote that the Saudi government is using the festival “to deflect attention from its brutal repression of free speech and other pervasive human rights violations” and called on the performers “to publicly urge Saudi authorities to free unjustly detained Saudi dissidents, journalists, and human rights activists.”The nonprofit watchdog organization noted that some of the events land on the seventh anniversary of the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul by intelligence operatives with close ties to the crown prince. The festival also takes place just months after Saudi authorities executed Turki al-Jasser, a journalist known for exposing corruption within the Saudi royal family.“The seventh anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal murder is no laughing matter,” Joey Shea, Saudi Arabia researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “And comedians receiving hefty sums from Saudi authorities shouldn’t be silent on prohibited topics in Saudi like human rights or free speech.”Other listed performers for the festival include: Sebastian Maniscalco, Maz Jobrani, Tom Segura, Whitney Cummings, Jimeoin, Russell Peters, Andrew Santino, Bobby Lee, Chris Distefano, Mark Normand, Gabriel Iglesias, Hannibal Buress, Sam Morril, Jeff Ross, Omid Djalili, Ali Siddiq, Zarna Garg, Chris Tucker and Ben Hart.These performers did not respond to requests for comment.The Saudi government has been censured by dozens of countries, and in 2024 it was denied a second attempt at scoring a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council. In the U.S., relatives of victims of the Sept. 11 terror attacks have accused the Saudi government of having potential ties to the attack. (A direct link has not been proven.)But it has also made significant inroads with some powerful figures in the West, most notably the Trump family. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner worked with the Saudis to secure a $2 billion investment in his firm and recently partnered with the country’s public investment fund to strike a $55 billion deal to take the video game giant Electronic Arts private. Trump has maintained a close relationship with the crown prince throughout the Saudi royal’s fraught tenure. View this post on Instagram A post shared by TURKI ALALSHIKH تركي آل الشيخ (@turki) The festival and subsequent fallout has also provided a rare window into these events and, in particular, the money and self-censorship often involved.One comedian, Atsuko Okatsuka, posted screenshots to Threads of what she said was her invite to the festival, including a section on “Content Restrictions” that prohibited the artists from performing material that “may be considered to degrade, defame, or bring into public disrepute, contempt, scandal, embarrassment, or ridicule” the country, its royal family or any religion.“A lot of the ‘you can’t say anything anymore!’ Comedians are doing the festival 😂” Okatsuka wrote. “they had to adhere to censorship rules about the types of jokes they can make.”Mike Birbiglia and Leslie Liao were among the comics who responded to her post, sharing that they had rejected the offer as well.Stavros Halkias similarly revealed in a podcast episode with Distefano, who did agree to perform, that he didn’t take the deal. Distefano told Halkias that while he “didn’t want to do it either,” his fiancée had ultimately urged him to “take that f—ing money.”At least one comedian, however, appears to have changed his mind despite initially agreeing to perform. Nimesh Patel, who was slated to get on stage Sunday, posted a TikTok video over the weekend sharing that he recently canceled his appearance after “having a change of heart.” That video has since become unavailable.“I’ll just do 40 shows that I had not planned on doing here in the perfectly clean, moral, above-everyone-else, United States of America — I’m tired just thinking about it — to make up for the lost bag,” Patel said.Meanwhile, comedian and podcaster Tim Dillon said in an episode of his podcast that he was dropped from the festival for making a joke about the country “having slaves.”“I’m gonna get fired again from people that are not even Saudis. I’m gonna get fired by people who don’t chop hands off. I’m gonna get fired by reasonable people. I’m gonna get fired by people that don’t practice Shariah law,” Dillon said. “This is the most controversial the people who fire me will ever be. Let me relish in this. Let’s take this win.”The Saudi Embassy did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation about the cancellation of Patel’s and Dillon’s shows.Angela YangAngela Yang is a culture and trends reporter for NBC News.Natasha Lebedeva contributed.
October 2, 2025
Oct. 2, 2025, 12:48 PM EDTBy Shannon PettypieceJenna Norton drove out of the parking lot of the National Institutes of Health office in Maryland on Wednesday morning with a lump in her throat, leaving behind her research on kidney disease patients and not knowing when she’d see her colleagues or a paycheck again.“I feel really sad,” said Norton, who is among the roughly 750,000 federal employees furloughed this week as part of a government shutdown. “It was weird walking out the door and saying goodbye to everyone and not knowing when I’ll see them again.” We’d like to hear from you about how you’re experiencing the government shutdown, whether you’re a federal employee who can’t work right now or someone who is feeling the effects of shuttered services in your everyday life. Please contact us at tips@nbcuni.com or reach out to us here.Those furloughed employees won’t be paid until Congress passes legislation to fund the government, with neither side showing signs of budging as the shutdown entered its second day. While most of the furloughed employees won’t be allowed to work during the shutdown, others who are deemed essential — such as members of the military and airport security screeners — will have to continue working without pay. Federal workers typically receive back pay once the government reopens, but that requires congressional approval.On top of the uncertainty around when workers will see a paycheck again, the Trump administration has threatened to use the shutdown as a pretext to carry out more mass firings. “They’re really scared,” said Lauren Leib, a land law examiner at the Bureau of Land Management in New Mexico and president of the National Treasury Employees Union Local 340. “We’ve got people who are the primary income earners with very young children, and they’re going to be going without a paycheck and they don’t know what this is going to mean for them going forward.” That’s left federal workers, already drained and demoralized by months of layoffs and funding cuts, scrambling to figure out how to cope with the possibility of weeks without pay and a new round of layoffs, according to nearly two dozen federal workers who reached out to NBC News to share how the shutdown was impacting them.One State Department employee in his 20s said he was planning to deliver food for DoorDash and drive for Uber to pay his bills. The wife of a Department of Homeland Security worker in Ohio said she had to borrow $600 from a colleague to cover her co-pay on a set of leg braces she needed to pick up this week for her disabled child. “We run the risk, if this goes on longer than a week or two, of not being able to pay our mortgage and the possibility of losing our house,” she said, adding that her bank rejected her request for a deferment on her $1,700 a month mortgage. She said her oldest daughter has already asked if the shutdown will mean they will lose their home and have to move in with relatives and change schools. “Everybody thinks that federal workers get paid this really good money. But what my husband does, people who are in the military, who work for TSA, they struggle just like everybody else,” she said. “They are going to work without being paid, they’re wondering, without this paycheck, how am I going to pay this bill, where’s my next meal going to come from?”Like nearly all federal employees whom NBC News spoke with, she asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration, which has publicly fired federal workers it has deemed as being against its agenda.“I was never afraid to speak my mind before, I never felt afraid to talk. Now, people are afraid,” an Arizona TSA worker said, explaining her concerns over speaking publicly about how the shutdown is impacting her. The TSA worker, who will have to continue working without pay during the shutdown, said she has enough in savings to get by for two to three weeks because she’d borrowed some extra money over the summer while refinancing her home in anticipation of a shutdown. But if the shutdown goes beyond a few weeks, she’s worried about being able to even afford the $88 a week at the gas pump she needs to get to work. “I’m working as a civil servant for the citizens of America to make their traveling safe,” she said. “Do you want me worrying about your safety or do you want me worrying about how am I going to feed my kid? How am I going to be able to afford her medication? How are we going to survive? Am I going to lose my house?”Still, the TSA employee and several others with whom NBC News spoke said they were in support of the shutdown despite the near-term hardship, if it meant pushing back against cuts the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress have been making to health insurance programs and other federal services. “This is not something that any federal worker wants, but at the same time, enough is enough,” said M.T. Snyder, who works for the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency that ensures employers follow laws protecting workers’ rights to organize. “We really need to stand up for our services that we provide and the agencies that enforce laws because, since Trump has been in office, his main goal has been destroying these agencies.”The Trump administration has said the federal workforce would shrink by around 300,000 workers this year to a total of 2.1 million people as a result of voluntary resignations and firings led by the Department of Government Efficiency, an initiative started in the early days of the Trump administration by billionaire Elon Musk. At the NIH, Norton said she feels like the government has already been slowly shutting down since the Trump administration began sweeping funding cuts and new barriers were put in place limiting medical research, including the work she does trying to develop real-world interventions to reduce health disparities among kidney disease patients. Despite the cutbacks she will have to make without her paycheck, she said she is glad to see Democrats in Congress doing something to stand up to the attacks by the Trump administration on federal workers and the services they provide. Democratic leaders in Congress have said they want to see an extension of Obamacare subsidies that expire at the end of the year included in a bill to keep the government open, something Republicans have refused to agree to. People who get health insurance through Obamacare will begin getting notices in the coming days warning that their premiums will soon go up unless Congress extends the funds.“I am thinking about the suffering that always happens in a shutdown, the harm that happens when people don’t get the services that they need, and as a federal worker, I won’t be paid during the shutdown,” Norton said. “But I’m also looking at this bigger picture and continuing the status quo just seems so much worse. So I think somebody in Congress needs to do something to rein in the lawlessness and this just seems to be one of the few opportunities they have for doing that.”Shannon PettypieceShannon Pettypiece is senior policy reporter for NBC News.
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