CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) — Nevada lawmakers passed a bill on Monday that aims to make the state the first to weigh in on the 2024 presidential primary contests.

The move upends decades of political tradition and is likely to prompt pushback from other early states that want to retain their places in the calendar.

The bill that passed in the state’s Assembly on Wednesday and the Senate on Monday still must be approved by Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak to become law. It would also need the backing of the national political parties to eventually make the change for the 2024 calendar.

The push for Nevada to jump past Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s longstanding first-in-the-nation primary follows a behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign led by former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

The light media coverage means that many Americans may be unaware of the heavy funding—and strange bedfellows—pushing the Biden administration to reenter the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal. Curiously, Iran seems determined to violate the provisions of the agreement to create leverage to convince member nations to lift sanctions.

One weirder aspect of this almost certain return to Middle East diplomacy of the early 2010s is the aligning of ostensible political enemies under a new foreign policy think tank called the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Two of the best-known funders of the Quincy Institute are progressive billionaire George Soros and libertarian icon Charles Koch. This alliance makes it quite reasonable that Tablet Magazine recently referred to the new think tank—which purports to embrace the idea of restraint in foreign policy—as something of a strange chimera.

According to its application for tax exemption filed with the Internal Revenue Service in July 2019, which Tablet has obtained, Quincy’s purpose would be “to educate the public about ‘restraint,’ a foreign policy grand strategy developed by interdisciplinary academic thought-leaders,” and to support scholars who “generally argue that in regions where the US possesses vital interests, it should lead with diplomacy.” The institute’s titular director and president is Andrew Bacevich, a historian, former U.S. Army colonel, and a widely respected if sometimes overwrought proponent of the idea that a military-industrial complex has hijacked American society. The IRS document identifies Trita Parsi, head of the National Iranian American Council [NIAC] until 2018, as another one of Quincy’s co-founders and as its executive vice president. The tax exemption application lists Parsi’s estimated compensation at $275,000 a year, compared with $50,000 for Bacevich—a fair indication of who is actually running Washington’s weirdest and most intriguing foreign policy shop.

Israeli opposition said to be closing in on deal to oust Netanyahu

Rival politicians in Israel united only by their opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu could be closing in on a deal to oust the country’s longest-serving leader as soon as this week.

The opposition leader Yair Lapid, a former TV news anchor popular with the country’s secular middle class, has until a Wednesday deadline to build a coalition government after Netanyahu failed to do so.

Local media reports suggested Lapid, 57, had made a power-sharing offer to a political foe, Naftali Bennett, 49, a former settler leader and hard-right religious nationalist who wants to annex most of the occupied West Bank.

Under the unconfirmed agreement, Bennett, a tech millionaire who previously headed the defence and education ministries, would become prime minister for the first two years of a term, with Lapid replacing him for the final two. Bennett is due to meet with his Yamina alliance on Sunday.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/30/israel-opposition-netanyahu-lapid-bennett

It took months for bosses and employees to adjust to working remotely in the pandemic. The next era of work might be even more messy.

Companies are laying down new rules and setting expectations for hybrid work as some workers come back in and others remain out of office. At JPMorgan Chase & Co., employees on some teams can schedule work-from-home days, but not on Mondays or Fridays. At Salesforce.com Inc. offices that have reopened, Thursdays are proving to be the most popular in-office day, creating high demand for meeting rooms and collaboration spaces, and prompting the company to rethink its office design.

Executives at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP have voiced worries that workers who stay remote could wind up as second-class corporate citizens, falling behind in promotions and pay, so the company plans to track rates of advancement for office-based and remote staff in an effort to make sure nobody lags behind.

After months of discussions, big employers from Humana Inc. in Louisville, Ky., to Nike Inc. near Portland, Ore., say they are cementing plans to return to corporate complexes after Labor Day—in some cases relaxing capacity restrictions—while also promising employees some measure of flexibility in where they work.

Lawyers for the Justice Department urged a federal judge on Friday to dismiss lawsuits against former president Donald Trump, former attorney general William P. Barr and other officials for last June’s violent clearing of demonstrators from Lafayette Square by U.S. military and police.

Trump and other U.S. officials are immune from civil lawsuits over police actions taken to protect a president and to secure his movements, government lawyers said of the actions taken ahead of a photo op of Trump holding a Bible in front of the historic St. John’s Church. A crowd of more than 1,000 largely peaceful demonstrators were protesting the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis before the park was cleared.

A year to the week after Floyd’s death, Justice Department lawyers argued that the lawsuits should also be tossed because last November’s presidential election made future violations unlikely. The government said the square has been reopened, and President Biden’s administration does not share Trump’s stated hostility toward Floyd and the racial justice movement.

The American Civil Liberties Union of D.C., Black Lives Matter, other civil liberties groups and individual protesters accuse Trump and senior officials of driving the June 1 events. Military, federal and local police forcibly cleared the square using batons, clubs, horses, pepper spray, smoke and fired projectiles 30 minutes before a citywide curfew began. Images of violence drew a national backlash against Trump’s calls for “overwhelming force” to put down those he called “THUGS” and domestic terrorists. The nation’s top military official later apologized for walking with Trump before television cameras that day.