A note about a deep dive I am working on for the third anniversary of October 7. In August I published the irreverently titled Genocide for Dummies, a serious legal primer that went viral. It set out what the 1948 Genocide Convention actually requires and why the war in Gaza does not meet that standard. I wrote it as a lawyer and a reporter, not as an advocate. The test I used is the one a competent court would use: the acts in Article II, plus specific intent to destroy a protected group as such. When intent is inferred from conduct, the International Court of Justice has said that inference must be the only reasonable one available. Now I am applying that same test to October 7. There is a large public literature accusing Israel of genocide and a much smaller, mostly specialized literature asking whether Hamas’s attack itself meets the legal definition. I have an intense week ahead — reviewing thousands of pages of case law, founding documents, leadership statements, operational records, and trial transcripts from Rwanda, Srebrenica, and the Yazidi genocide cases. The finished piece will be long and run well past the length of most online reading. I am drafting it to the standard an international legal scholar would expect, but writing it so a general reader can also follow the argument step by step. Whether October 7 legally qualifies as a genocidal act is not a rebuttal to the Gaza debate. It is one statute and one standard applied to two sets of facts. The first primer remains unlocked. The Jewish Journal also republished it. justthefacts.media/p/genocid… jewishjournal.com/commentary…

A Daily Mail headline today announced a "mysterious woman in a headscarf" from the JFK assassination footage had been tracked down 63 years later. For a second, I thought they'd finally found the so-called "Babushka Lady" — the still-unidentified woman filming the motorcade from the opposite side of the street from Abraham Zapruder. No such luck. The woman the Mail wrote about is Joan Jackson, now 94, identified after her daughter called the Sixth Floor Museum. Jackson didn't even know she'd been filmed that day. She's a different woman entirely from the real Babushka Lady (arrow, photo below) — the stocky figure in a long coat and scarf, caught in the Muchmore, Bell, and Zapruder films, always with her back turned or her face hidden behind her own camera. That woman is still unidentified. In 1970 a Texan named Beverly Oliver stepped forward claiming to be her, and said her film had been confiscated that day by the Secret Service or the FBI. But Oliver has serious credibility issues. She claimed to use a camera that did not exist in 1963. Another time she claimed to have met Lee Harvey Oswald before the murder when Jack Ruby introduced him to her as "Lee Oswald of the CIA." Many researchers, including me, now doubt that she was even in Dealey Plaza on the day of the assassination. So that brings us back to the still missing Babushka Lady. If her footage exists, it would show the assassination from the opposite angle of the Zapruder film. What happened to it is one of the real unanswered footnotes of November 22, 1963. This Daily Mail story is not that. The DM story: dailymail.com/news/article-1…

So @RoKhanna continues to double down on his alliance with Hamas in his shameless courting of the anti-Israel left in his party. Want to know more about the person he wants released? An Israeli civilian court in Tel Aviv convicted Marwan Barghouti in May 2004 on five counts of murder for orchestrating a string of attacks by Fatah's Tanzim militia and the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades — including the 2001 killing of a Greek Orthodox monk near Ma'ale Adumim, a 2002 shooting near Givat Ze'ev, and the 2002 Seafood Market restaurant bombing in Tel Aviv that killed three civilians — plus attempted murder for a failed car-bomb plot and membership in a terrorist organization. Ro Khanna is trying to out-flank Abdul El-Sayed, Hasan Piker, and Zohran Mamdani for ownership of the party's pro-Hamas fringe — and burying whatever's left of a Democratic foreign policy that could win a general election. He should be ashamed.

Some blunt 20-second advice from @mikepompeo — who knows the Islamic regime very well from his service as CIA Director and Secretary of State — on the 7-day “plan” Iran just floated to end the war. The NYT reports the offer: reopen the Strait of Hormuz, revive nuclear talks, unfreeze funds, end the U.S. naval blockade, lift the latest sanctions. Pompeo’s quick analysis: it’s “not new, it’s probably not a serious proposal.” Iran’s president “is both lying about their intention to have a nuclear weapon” and he is “completely irrelevant to the decision makers sitting back in Tehran continuing to work to undermine Western democracy and terrorize the world.” The Trump administration should listen. Don’t fall for it.

Political dodge of the day: Sen. Blumenthal claimed he skipped a hearing on protecting women’s sports because of an Iran briefing. Asked in the hallway what he thinks about men in women’s sports, he walked off: “I’m not going to talk about it… in the hallways here.” When do politicians on the Hill not grab the mic if they have a point they want to make? A senator who won’t answer a fairness question in the corridor has already answered it. The Democratic orthodoxy on biological males in women’s sports remains bewildering.

White House security evidently did not get the memo. Last night, after taking the case under consideration for only a few hours, a federal judge ordered the White House to temporarily restore access to CNN, MS NOW, and Politico — the three outlets the president banned from the building in a social-media post last week. The order was explicit: immediately return, reinstate, and restore the hard passes. This morning, according to Politico and CNN, that did not happen. A Politico reporter showing up for work was blocked and had his credentials seized. CNN’s Betsy Klein and a photojournalist were denied entry around 6 a.m. One CNN producer later got in. No explanation at the gate. Here is why this story matters. The judge is Timothy J. Kelly. President Trump nominated him in 2017. The Senate confirmed him 94–2. He is not a "media crusader." He is a former DOJ Public Integrity prosecutor and was chief counsel for national security to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The legal bar for a temporary restraining order is high: likelihood of success on the merits, irreparable harm, balance of equities, public interest. Kelly said the outlets met it. He did not write a love letter to the three outlets. He wrote that the journalists got no notice and no chance to be heard before their passes were yanked — a due-process problem the White House did not even dispute. He called the disputed stories “routine” and said he was “skeptical — at least on this record” that national security was the real motive. Nothing predating the lawsuit, he wrote, suggested the ban was about safeguarding secrets. What the president said when he announced the ban was “alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity.” That distinction is the whole case. A president can loathe terrible and negative coverage. He cannot treat White House access as a loyalty program and then retrofit a national-security theory after the lawsuit is filed. The Politico count makes the point. In a letter defending the ban, the White House cited Politico’s use of an anonymous “senior administration official” on Iran talks as a standards violation. It turns out the quote came from a background press call the White House itself hosted. Reporters were instructed on the line to attribute the remarks to an unnamed senior official. Other outlets used the same attribution. They were not banned. No administration can impose background rules and then punish an outlet for following them. Access to the briefing room is not a constitutional ticket to the Oval Office. Courts have said that for decades. But once the government creates a press facility and issues hard passes, it cannot revoke them as punishment for coverage it dislikes without any process. That is not “the media versus Trump.” That is *Sherrill v. Knight*, the D.C. Circuit rule Kelly cited, applied to this White House the same way it applied to others. I said last week that the answer to bad journalism is better journalism, not a locked gate. I have not changed my mind about sloppy coverage, anonymous-source inflation, or newsrooms that confuse opposition research with reporting. None of that, however, is cured by the Secret Service confiscating a badge at 6 a.m. after a federal judge has already ruled. Fourteen days is not a final victory for the media outlets. It is a stay while the case proceeds. If the administration has a clean national-security record, it can put it in the file. What it cannot do is ignore the order overnight and dare the court to notice.

Last week I wrote that the New York Times's Israel coverage since October 7 had cost it my trust. I have written fifteen pieces for the paper over 35 years — eleven in Opinion, four in the Sunday Magazine. I still read it, but with a jaundiced eye. That article drew a quarter-million interactions. This morning two Times shareholders sued in New York County Supreme Court for the internal records the company has refused to produce for four months. The petitioners are the State Board of Administration of Florida, which manages the state’s public pension assets, and the National Center for Public Policy Research. Most of what they want concerns Israel-Hamas coverage and whether the board oversees the paper’s own editorial standards. The suit relies in part on a Jewish former video-desk employee who, according to the complaint, flagged antisemitism and anti-Israel bias internally at least 15 times between 2019 and when she left the paper in March 2026. I treated this as a journalism standards issue. The lawsuit notes that since the Times eliminated its public editor in 2017 — and never replaced the job — there has not been an independent in-house watchdog over what ends up under a Times byline. The Israel-Gaza coverage is the worst example of what has resulted. @SulkinMaya's Free Press exclusive: thefp.com/p/exclusive-shareh…

Here is what Zohran Mamdani left out when he told CNN that Netanyahu is a "war criminal and an architect of a horrific genocide of the Palestinian people" The ICC warrant he keeps invoking does NOT charge genocide. Not a single count. Even the ICC prosecutor, no friend of Israel, did not go there and he had that option. The International Court of Justice has made no genocide finding, and that case won't even finish its written phase until 2029. So "genocide" is not a legal finding. It's an incendiary slogan. And Mamdani knows exactly what that slogan does. It's the word spray-painted on synagogues. The word screamed at Jewish students crossing their own campuses. When you tell people that Jews are committing genocide, you should not act surprised when someone decides Jews deserve to be punished for it. This genocide theater must stop. Hey, @NYCMayor - read my legal primer on why Gaza does not qualify as a genocide under international law. Maybe the facts and evidence will change your mind? justthefacts.media/p/genocid…

62 years ago tomorrow the Warren Commission handed LBJ its report. They got the shooting sequence wrong — the first shot missed, not the second. The FBI and CIA were often more worried about their own reputations than the truth. But the Commission still nailed the question that mattered: Lee Harvey Oswald did it. Alone. I paid $850 in 1990 for a used set of the 26 volumes — missing Vol. XI — in a San Francisco Tenderloin bookstore a few blocks from where I’d gone to law school. The volumes ran to more than 18,000 pages and had no index. It was like buying an entire shelf of the Encyclopaedia Britannica at once (anyone under 40, ask your parents). @TrishaPosner and I spent months building a subject index by hand on hundreds of 3x5 cards. We marked those volumes with extensive yellow highlighter and margin notes. The search box was in our heads. The government finally put the Report and all 26 volumes online around the 50th anniversary. I wish they’d done it decades earlier. It would have saved us a lot of grueling work in the weeds. And, of course, today AI would have done the index while we took a coffee break.

Elite hospitals spent years pushing the false narrative that pediatric gender medicine was “settled science” and “life-saving care”—puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and even surgeries on children. Both claims were demonstrably false and sat at the center of a social-contagion scandal. Now at least six major hospital systems are paying millions and shutting their youth gender clinics. NYU Langone: $8.5 million and the program closed. Mount Sinai, Texas Children’s, Cleveland Clinic, Connecticut Children’s, and UPMC have already folded. Some agreed to provide free care to former patients who now want to detransition. For those of us who reported on the weak evidence and the ideological capture of WPATH and the major medical associations, these DOJ settlements are one of the Trump administration’s real achievements. They will spare many more children from a pipeline that leaves them as victims of a medical system run amok.

Germany's far-left Die Linke party won Berlin’s city-state elections on Monday and celebrated its victory with Free Palestine chants. The party is infected with the same radical anti-Israel contagion as the UK Green Party and America’s DSA.

Third year in a row that Qatar’s Emir took the UN podium and accused Israel of "genocide." This is the country the world trusted to broker peace in Gaza. Today Sheikh Tamim called it “a genocide in every sense of the word and a stain on the conscience of all humanity” and demanded the world “rein in” Israel’s “unlawful behavior.” Qatar has hosted Hamas’s leadership in Doha for more than a decade. It sent billions into Hamas-run Gaza. Hamas still has not disarmed. Here's the irony, Emir: your own mediation undercuts you. Nobody negotiates ceasefires and hostage exchanges with a people they intend to erase. I explain why in my legal primer, "Genocide for Dummies." The law has a definition. Gaza doesn't meet it. You don’t care. Your foreign policy requires Israel to be the villain. Facts that get in the way get dropped. justthefacts.media/p/genocid…

Gen. Jack Keane just back from Israel and Gaza with blunt advice for the president: Do not sign any deal with Iran. The Islamic regime will violate it. Maybe they play along during this administration. Then they cheat in the next one—recovering nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and proxy networks. Even a “perfect” deal still requires lifting sanctions, unfreezing assets, and sending billions into the regime. That finances their recovery and hands the problem to whoever comes after. Keane’s bottom line for the president: “inadvisable”

In debates about America’s culture of political violence, remember this day in 1975: Pres Gerald Ford faced his 2nd assassination attempt only 17 days after a Charles Manson-acolyte had tried to shoot him. The wannabe assassin on this day, Sarah Jane Moore, had been evaluated by the Secret Service earlier that same year and cleared as "not a security concern"

I never realized until today that UK conservative commentator @calvinrobinson had gone full-blown, Protocols-grade Jew-hatred. This is Father Coughlin with a collar he bought at a succession of fringe shops — mercifully without Coughlin's 1930s radio audience. Robinson posted a few days ago: "It is the Jews. It has always been the Jews. Not all of them, but always them... Once you notice, you cannot unsee" — then blamed Jews collectively for Marxism, feminism, Zionism and more. When that wasn't enough, he added trans and "the modern concept of racism" to the list in a follow-up, then pornography, Covid vaccines and AI in another. A third post cited scripture to brand Jews as those who "killed the Lord Jesus" and the "synagogue of Satan." I remember a different Robinson a few years back when I first came across him on YouTube. After George Floyd, as a Black British commentator, he took real heat for pushing back on BLM as a bad import. That was before he started calling himself a "priest." And I had lost sight of him until his tweet below popped up in my feed today (not sure whether I should say thanks to the algorithm). He is not a priest in any historic Catholic or mainstream Christian sense. The Church of England wouldn't ordain him. He's since cycled through the Free Church of England, the Nordic Catholic Church, the Anglican Catholic Church (which removed him after a Nazi-salute stunt), a nine-day license from the Reformed Episcopal Church, and now yet another splinter body. "Old Catholic Priest" is his branding, not orders. I write that as someone born and raised Catholic — watching a man treat holy orders like a costume while preaching vile antisemitism isn't edgy, it's just ugly. Was this always in him, waiting for an audience that rewards it with clicks? Either way, the mask is off. His own posts are the evidence.

Getting a little tired of the constant “high IQ” refrain. Some of the best lawyers and journalists I’ve known over decades never knew—or cared—whether they had a high or low IQ. They had street smarts, judgment, and the ability to get the story or win the case. High IQ doesn’t always translate into the best.