Riley on news · June 14th

On June 14 1941, the Soviet NKVD started sweeping up thousands of Estonians they labeled “suspects,” a wave of arrests that historians trace to the first days of the German invasion. The operation unfolded in the early morning; families were pulled from their homes before breakfast, and the streets of Tallinn emptied as men, women, and children vanished.

Eyewitness accounts describe a quiet household turning chaotic: a maid’s trembling warning about a phone call from a relative, and the sudden realization that relatives—an uncle, aunt, cousins, even a small child—had already been taken. Those taken were often accused of imagined crimes, and their families were detained alongside them, creating a ripple of fear across the nation.

The June 14 arrests marked the beginning of a broader campaign of repression that would scar Estonia’s wartime memory, a day still remembered for the sudden, brutal loss of ordinary lives.

A bill introduced in the Michigan House on June 9 by Rep. Dylan Wegela would create a “right to sit” for workers whose jobs can be done while seated. It says employers must provide appropriate chairs, stools or benches whenever standing isn’t required for the task, and it would apply to businesses across the state.

If a company forces employees to stay on their feet when sitting wouldn’t affect performance, the law would allow a civil fine of $250 per employee for each two‑week period the violation continues. Supporters say the measure would ease physical strain for people in retail, customer service and similar roles.

The proposal is headed to the House Committee on Government Operations, and if it passes, it would kick in 90 days after the governor signs it. Similar “right to sit” statutes already exist in a handful of other states.

Write to me with any problem or dilemma at [email redacted] Subject to Terms and Conditions Dear Philippa I would very much appreciate your thoughts on how much of one’s personal life you can/should share with your adult children and how much (if anything) you should leave for them to discover after your death. My situation is this: my husband and I have been married for decades. I was a widow when I married and had young children and he was divorced with three teenage children. The marriage has always been difficult though we have had some happy times and have managed to achieve a pretty successful blended family over the years. My husband is an emotionally immature man, self centred, unable to reflect on his behaviour, lacking in empathy, unwilling to accept responsibly for his actions (everything is always someone else’s fault) highly sensitive to even the mildest criticism and given to explosive outbursts and temper tantrums when challenged or when things don’t go his way. He can be controlling and domineering and sometimes very verbally abusive to me. He was jealous I think of my children but things improved when they left for university. One example of his behaviour : a few years into our marriage he had an affair with a work colleague which came to light when her husband found out and wrote to me about it. He also phoned and was very abusive and threatening. My husband and I worked in the same field, so I think many of our colleagues and friends probably knew what going on which was humiliating apart from anything else. It turned out that my husband was planning to leave us and was persuading this woman and her small child to move in with him a flat he was renting at the time. His own son’s marriage was only a few months away so I really don’t know how he thought it was all going to work out but in any case the affair collapsed once the woman’s husband knew. When I tried to talk to my husband about it all his response was that it was my fault because I hadn’t been treating him very well. He has never accepted his responsibility for any of it. Or apologised. I now see (with the benefit of hindsight and therapy) I was ‘love bombed’ into a marriage he very much wanted and which happened after only a few months after the death of my first husband and my children’s father. I was traumatised and hardly knew day from night, my sole concern being to provide stability and care and to protect my children. I think I must have seen the marriage (if I thought about it at all) as a safe haven, a retreat from all the confusion, grief and trauma I was living through. Of course it turned out to be anything but that. In any event we have battled on because for many years I didn’t have the strength or emotional resilience to do anything but stay and I wanted to give my children a stable home and not uproot them again after so much trauma. I will probably never leave now. I have financial and economic stability. A good circle of friends and activities and interests I enjoy. I have learned how to distance myself from him and set boundaries so his behaviour doesn’t impact so much. The other side of this coin is that everyone thinks my husband is a great chap. He can be sociable, cheerful, friendly and always helpful if friends or family need anything at all. Even my children think he’s ok (he has been very helpful with the DIY as they’ve acquired their own houses and need work doing) and his own children are his biggest fans. I resent this deeply given what I have had to live through. I have a lot of stuff, paperwork mainly - my diary recounting my feelings and some of the worst episodes and all the letters and emails from the wronged husband after the affair. I could leave all of this for everyone to discover after our deaths, but would this be fair, given I wouldn’t be around to answer all the inevitable questions. Or I could share it with my children (and friends?) now so we can discuss it together. It feels like I want to take my revenge on him for what he has put me through and also that I want to be finally heard and my experiences acknowledged. Somehow it feels like he is the one ‘getting away with it’ and I have been belittled and just suffer in silence. What do you think? My Reply and Her Response to My Reply Revenge is a satisfying feeling AND if you are still living with the person you want to get revenge on you might want to think how it would pan out. You describe the strange position of being married to somebody whose public self and private self, appear to be far apart. The charming, useful, sociable man admired by family and friends exists alongside the man who blamed you for his affair, who could be verbally abusive, explosive and controlling, and who left you carrying not only the pain of what happened but also the burden of keeping quiet about it. I wonder whether part of your resentment comes from feeling that you have had to protect a version of him that he himself created.

It’s so pathetic watching Elon Musk’s groveling bootlickers fall all over themselves on social media to defend their favorite oligarch from criticism as he becomes the world’s first trillionaire. They’re like “Don’t be mean to the trillionaire, just become a trillionaire yourself! All you need is luck, connections, wealthy parents, the ruthlessness to step on anyone who gets in your way, and a willingness to cooperate with murderous imperial institutions like the Pentagon and the CIA!” Elon Musk is a military-industrial complex plutocrat who is balls deep in the US intelligence cartel and recently facilitated the US-Israeli attempted regime change operation in Iran. You have infinitely more in common with the average person in Iran, Cuba, Lebanon or Palestine than you have with the world’s first trillionaire. It’s so gross how many fawning admirers this freak still has. The trillionaire is not your friend. People who say “Zionism is just the belief that Jews should have a homeland” are hilarious. Zionism isn’t some abstraction; we can all see its material manifestations with our own eyes. We can all see that Zionism means genocide, apartheid, and nonstop wars and abuse. This isn’t some kind of theoretical debate where we all get to have our own opinions about what Zionism is and what it entails. It’s 2026, not 1890. The facts are in and the case is closed, kids. This is what Zionism is. This is the only Zionism in existence. What you see is what you get. And what you see is quantifiably one of the most evil things happening on our planet. Some guy told me, “Why are you fine with the existence of approximately 50 Islamic nation-states, but the single Jewish one is apparently too many?” I showed him an illustration of a nail stuck in somebody’s foot and said, “Why are you fine with an entire foot made of flesh, but a single metal spike is too much? The only possible explanation is that you have a seething hatred of metal. It can’t possibly be that you object to a foreign object being violently forced into a region where it does damage.” He got upset and wound up telling me he hopes I get murdered by Mossad. Hasbara is so gross because it’s just Zionists throwing walls of language at you to convince you you’re not seeing what you’re seeing. You see raw video footage of the most horrifying thing imaginable in Gaza, and then you see them in the replies going “This is actually fine and normal because words words words words words words words.” You see a news report about Israel doing something astonishingly evil in Lebanon, and there they are underneath it going “There’s actually a lot more to the story because words words words words words words words.” You see some far right Israeli minister spouting nakedly genocidal rhetoric, and they’re swarming all over it saying “Well this isn’t actually what it looks like because words words words words words words words.” You see every major human rights group on earth saying Israel is guilty of genocide and apartheid, and they’re running around frantically telling you it’s a giant conspiracy to frame Israel and the truth is that words words words words words words words. You see more and more mainstream news institutions reporting on the mountains of evidence of widespread rape and torture in Israeli prisons, and they saturate the airwaves claiming it’s an antisemitic blood libel because words words words words words words words. The idea is to just pound your intellect with a firehose of verbiage until your inner sensemaker has been shredded and you’re too confused to form a coherent picture of what’s actually going on. It’s a disgusting, abusive, and profoundly unethical thing to do to people. But the good news is it’s not working anymore. Language is immensely powerful, but its power has its limits. Israel’s behavior has become so transparently unacceptable that no amount of word magic can manipulate people into seeing anything other than what’s happening in front of their face.

The Feast of the Ass, observed on January 14, marked the day the Holy Family fled to Egypt on a donkey. In medieval towns a girl and a child would lead a live donkey through the streets, then place the animal beside the altar while the priest delivered the sermon.

During the service the priest would deliberately bray, mimicking the donkey’s call, and the congregation would answer in kind, turning the ritual into a playful echo of the animal’s voice. The scene was recorded in a 13th‑century manuscript from Beauvais, which shows the donkey standing calmly at the altar while the clergy and worshippers join in the noisy chant.

The custom faded after the Reformation, but the vivid image of a church full of braying voices survives in the old illustrations, reminding us how medieval faith could blend reverence with a touch of humor.

“It’s War” Watch it. It’s chilling. Its the message of a candidate whose grievance is spitting out of his mouth with anger and vitriol. A reality television celebrity who ran for Los Angeles mayor — and lost — standing in front of a camera, cutting together movie clips, news broadcasts, and UFC fight footage, vowing to wage war on the city he claimed to want to save. “You thought you could get rid of me that easily?” he opens. “It’s war.” War. He threatens to release a recording of one of the remaining candidates “doing or saying something that would make her resign in shame,” staring into the camera, addressing Karen Bass and Nithya Raman by name: ask yourself if one of your employees has a recording of you. No policy. No reflection. No concession in any conventional sense. Just a promise of more combat, more content, and more chaos — labeled, with perfect reality TV instincts, “Saving LA — Phase III.” If you thought the Republican Party in the post-Trump era would be more rational, more serious, more focused on governing — you just got your answer. You were wrong. Like Donald Trump, being the heel has always been the point Professional wrestling figured something out long before politics did: the villain draws the crowd. In wrestling, the “heel” is a necessary character that draws attention…the bad guy, the rule-breaker, the one the audience loves to hate. The heel is often the most important figure in the arena. The heel creates the drama. The heel sells the tickets. The hero is only as compelling as the heel makes him. And the best heels never break character. They embrace the hatred. They need it. Spencer Pratt understood this before most people in entertainment, let alone politics. Except for one Donald Trump. He spent years on the reality TV show “The Hills” perfecting the persona of the irredeemable schemer — the guy you couldn’t look away from precisely because he was so flagrantly, gleefully bad. He wasn’t a villain who wanted sympathy. He was a villain who wanted attention. The distinction matters enormously. Donald Trump internalized the same lesson. His years on The Apprentice weren’t a detour from politics at all…they were the preparation for it. He played the ultimate heel: dismissive, unpredictable, contemptuous of the rules everyone else followed. “You’re fired” wasn’t the management philosophy of a successful businessman. It was a character beat. An actors tool. A showmans calling card. And when he walked down that golden escalator in 2015, he brought the character with him. The heel works because the audience participates. The booing is not rejection — it is engagement. And in the attention economy, engagement is the only metric that matters. Pratt learned from the master. “I didn’t get in this for political power,” he says in the video, which is probably the most honest thing he has said in this race. “I got in this to expose this corrupt machine.” Translation: I got in this to play a role, and I intend to keep playing it regardless of what the voters decided. Spencer Bratt isn’t conceding, he’s moving on to the next season. Remember, he signed a TV deal to be the frist reality show mayor if he won the race. He’s gonna do everything he can to save that TV contrcat because he’s broke and without the political entertainment complex he’s something worse - irrelevant. The Romans built the Colosseum because the government couldn’t (or wouldn’t) deliver what citizens actually needed. Bread and circuses: keep them fed enough to survive and entertained enough not to revolt. The spectacle was never incidental to the failure of governance. It was the response to it. We don’t build colosseums anymore. We build reality shows. But they serve exactly the same purpose. Have you seen the spectacle taking place at the White House right now? Motocross, MMA fights and WWE wrestling while the country collapses, our currency devalues, prices rise and America slinks on the global stage. But wait theres more! Here is where Pratt’s campaign becomes something more than a celebrity vanity project and more than a punchline. Los Angeles has two candidates remaining who were — by his telling and by many Angelenos’ lived experience — responsible for the city’s cascading failures. The Palisades Fire destroyed his home. Homelessness has metastasized across the city. Karen Bass received under 35% of the vote — a staggering rebuke for a sitting mayor. The city is, by any honest accounting, in genuine distress. When government fails that profoundly and for that long, the space it vacates doesn’t stay empty. Entertainment rushes in. Spectacle fills the vacuum. Performance replaces substance. The outsider who promises to burn it all down is not an aberration from the failure of governing institutions — he is a product of that failure. Pratt didn’t create the audience for his campaign.

Where is the World Cup being played again? In the northeastern United States, eight World Cup games, including the final, will be played in what FIFA calls "New York New Jersey." But elected leaders from this portmanteau place are jostling over where exactly it is. The state of New Jersey and New York City bid for and won the right to be a host city, but New York state officials have become increasingly involved. So politicians on both sides of the river are just bursting with border-state rivalry that can be lighthearted and serious all at once. The matches, for the record, are at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. But that hasn't stopped New York Gov. Kathy Hochul from repeatedly declaring that "New York is not just hosting the World Cup, New York is the World Cup." There's some truth to it — most of the fans are expected to stay in and visit New York between matches. But New Jersey doesn't shrug off such slights because they reinforce long-running dynamics of New York as the bigger sibling and the Garden State's struggle for recognition. Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) made avenging this wrong a dayslong cause célèbre and taunted Hochul with social media posts such as: “If you’re planning to watch a FIFA match in New York, you’ll be SOL.” New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill pushed to get one of the temporary signs hung at MetLife changed to read "New Jersey New York" instead of "New York New Jersey." On Friday, she posted a six-second video from outside the sign. "For those keeping score at home, the World Cup is in New Jersey. And now the sign reflects that." The New York-New Jersey combo isn't new. “I never liked it,” said former U.S. national team goalkeeper Tony Meola, a native of nearby Kearny, New Jersey, who was subjected to the indignity of playing under a neighboring state’s banner during his years with the New York/New Jersey Metrostars, since renamed Red Bull New York. “I grew up there, I played there — it’s New Jersey,” said Meola. “That's just my opinion.”

After months of planning, some griping and a few tit-for-tats, the three top Democrats from New York and New Jersey showed up to watch the World Cup — together. New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani are all attending this evening’s Brazil–Morocco match. The TV broadcast captured the two New Yorkers sitting together. Sherrill also joined them during the match. Before heading into the stadium, Sherrill stepped off a New Jersey Transit train carrying fans from both teams just before 4 p.m. to hold a quick press conference with her top transit advisers. “This is the easiest, fastest way to get in and out of the stadium,” she said. New Jersey Transit generated international headlines for its high ticket prices — $150 at first, then lowered to $98. Sherrill said about 21,000 people booked tickets on the New Jersey Transit system to get to the match. New Jersey Transit planned to carry up to 40,000 to each match.

A delightful encounter between Morocco and Brazil just wrapped up at the Meadowlands, just a short train ride from downtown Manhattan. Back across the Hudson River, a potentially decisive Game 5 of the NBA Finals will tip off soon. The World Cup final will take place back here in less than six weeks. All of a sudden, New York seems like the center of the sports world. And the city has a mayor who is taking full advantage. Zohran Mamdani has been an ever-present face at Knicks games and at World Cup-related events, including today’s match, opining on both sports and often sporting an Arsenal or a Knicks jersey to boot. In doing so, the avowed socialist mayor is modeling for politicians around the world a new version of lefty sports fandom. His good fortune on this front is undeniable. Mamdani is a hardcore soccer fan and player; his basketball knowledge is somewhat less developed, but he’s able to talk about the Knicks and sound like an authentic supporter. He has avoided pitfalls like the one that tripped up New York’s Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul when she recently said she would “ask [President Donald Trump] to name the starting lineup of the 1993 championship team and see how he does.” (It was an almost unforgivable gaffe — the 1993 Knicks famously lost in heartbreaking fashion to Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls and failed to reach the NBA Finals.) “He doesn’t sound like he’s speaking a second language like so many Democrats do when they talk about sports,” said a source close to Mamdani, granted anonymity to candidly discuss Democratic Party messaging strategy. “He’s not putting on — with other Democrats, you run into an issue where they don’t know who [Knicks star] Jalen Brunson is. They don’t know who KAT is. They don’t have Linsanity memories.” Mamdani laces his World Cup press conferences with soccer references, so much so that Hochul has begun to call him a “super fan.” In an April event the two pols did together on Staten Island, the mayor recalled going to the World Cup in South Africa in 2010 and said his fondest memories from that tournament included playing beach soccer in Durban. At a midtown press conference last week laying out the city’s public transportation plans, Mamdani said the city would not “park the bus,” a joke about a derided defensive strategy that is familiar to soccer fans but that he had to explain to the American press corps. When Mamdani earlier this week announced a massive World Cup watch party in Central Park, he did so alongside George Weah, the former Liberian president and soccer star who is also father of American forward Tim Weah. “When I was a child growing up in East Africa, there were towering figures, and then there was George Weah, the first African player to ever win the Ballon d’Or,” he said. “If you had told seven-year-old me that I would one day go into the same line of work as this man, I would be extremely disappointed to understand that you meant politics.” Then he got in a subtle dig at Weah for playing for Chelsea — a rival to Mamdani’s Arsenal, whose uniform the mayor turned into a custom kurta during the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha in May. But he has also treated his commentary on sports as almost separate from his broader political agenda. While Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) (still angry about the Brooklyn Dodgers’ owner moving them to Los Angeles in his youth) calls MLB team owners “baseball oligarchs,” Mamdani has assiduously avoided comments on Knicks owner James Dolan’s controversial invite to Trump to watch the finals, aside from noting that he would be in a much cheaper part of Madison Square Garden, with a standing-room-only ticket. “Engaging with the sphere of sports for politicians can be more politically effective by being less explicitly political,” said Jules Boykoff, a former professional soccer player who is a professor at Pacific University and has written multiple books on sports and politics. Mamdani’s sports-focused mayoralty hasn’t been all sunshine. After he attended a New York Mets game earlier this year and the baseball team went on a long losing streak, the New York Post dubbed it the “curse of the Mambino.” Any politician who dares to be a public sports fan exposes themselves to the vicissitudes of a game they cannot control — no matter how powerful any lucky jersey is. But flexing sports fandom can work to advance a political agenda as well. If sports are often a reflection of society, and the World Cup is the globe’s most important sporting event, it stands to reason that a politician who can confidently talk about sports has a chance to benefit. Working with FIFA, which is frequently excoriated by the global left, Mamdani secured 1,000 tickets for just $50 to see World Cup games that are otherwise selling for thousands of dollars.

Donald Trump’s 80th birthday UFC extravaganza has been touted by one of its star players as a helpful “distraction” from the troubles the president himself created for Americans. The UFC’s all-time knockout leader, Derrick Lewis, described the upcoming event as a much-needed respite. “The country needs something like this,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “We can distract the American people from all that’s going on,” Lewis, 41, said. Lewis, who was added to Sunday’s fight card at Trump’s request, is facing fellow heavyweight Josh Hokit in the fourth of seven fights scheduled to take place at the gaudy new addition to the White House’s South Lawn dubbed ‘the Claw’ on Sunday evening. The fights are expected to take place in the midst of a heat wave and a possible thunderstorm, and possibly in the presence of a preponderance of pests. Trump’s octogenarian birthday party comes as many Americans are struggling to grapple with the rising cost of living, and are blaming his administration for it. The cost of a mortgage, gas, food and goods have all gone up, with inflation rising across the board. The Consumer Price Index rose 4.2 percent year on year, hitting a three-year high. When asked about the increase on Wednesday, Trump offered a startling response. “I love the inflation,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “You know why? Because as soon as this war is over ... when the war is over, it’s coming down, it’s going to come down like a rock.” The president launched the war in Iran without approval from Congress in February. Despite a tentative ceasefire in April, it has now dragged on for well over three months, increasing the cost of oil and pushing up gas prices exponentially. But Trump has shown no interest in the financial impact of his war on Americans, saying he didn’t think about it at all as he negotiated with Iran. Voters, however, have been thinking about it, and the polls reflect how deeply unpopular Trump’s handling of Iran and the economy have become. Lewis predicted that the UFC event will be a glowing success. “I’m happy to be part of American history,” he said. “This is one of the events they’ll be talking about 100 years from now.”