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Nvidia, Berkshire Hathaway, Baidu, Lockheed Martin, Incyte, NCL: Stocks to watch today

Quartz

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Stocks may not extend Friday’s rebound. Futures tied to the S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average were pointing to a lower open Monday after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he he was “not at all” worried about the stock market, calling corrections…

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Comcast is shelling out $3 billion to keep the Olympics on NBC

Quartz

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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Comcast (CMCSA) NBCUniversal announced a new partnership today that will keep the Olympics on NBC and Peacock through 2036.

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Peace at Any Price, as Long as Ukraine Pays It

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2025 › 03 › trump-ukraine-russia-war › 681993

Donald Trump’s approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has always been to root for Russia while pretending he isn’t. Trump just hates killing and death. More than that, he hates sending American money overseas. The claim that he actually agrees with Moscow is a hoax, remember. Trump is all about putting America first. Or so he’s said, and so his mostly non-Russophilic supporters claim to believe.

But now he has flung the mask to the ground. The president’s latest positions on the war reveal that he is indifferent to ongoing slaughter—indeed, he is willing to increase it—and that his opposition to Ukraine’s independence has nothing to do with saving American tax dollars. Trump simply wants Russia to win.

[Jonathan Chait: The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

In recent days, Trump has said he is “looking at” a plan to revoke the temporary legal status of Ukrainians who fled to the United States. After Ukraine expressed willingness to sign away a large share of the proceeds from its natural-resource sales (in return for nothing), Trump said that might not be enough to restore support. Trump is now pushing Ukraine’s president to step down and hold elections, according to NBC. Volodymyr Zelensky’s domestic approval rating sits at 67 percent, and his most viable opponents have said that they oppose elections at the present time. The notion that Trump actually cares about democracy, and would downgrade his relations with a foreign country over its failure to meet his high governance standards, is so laughable that even a Trump loyalist like Sean Hannity would have trouble saying it with a straight face.

Trump exposed his preferences most clearly in his decision to cut off the supply of intelligence to Ukraine. The effect of this sudden reversal—which does not save the American taxpayer any money—was immediate and dramatic. Russian air attacks, now enjoying the element of surprise, pounded newly exposed Ukrainian civilian targets, leaving scenes of death and destruction.

The grim spectacle of watching the death toll spike, without any appreciable benefit to American interests, ought to have had a sobering effect on the president. At least it would have if his ostensible objectives were his actual ones. Instead, he seemed visibly pleased.

Paying close attention to his rhetoric reveals the significance of the turn. Speaking to reporters from his desk in the Oval Office, Trump, asked whether the bombing campaign changes his oft-expressed view that Vladimir Putin desires peace, affirmed that it does not. “I believe him,” he said. “I think we’re doing very well with Russia. But right now they’re bombing the hell out of Ukraine, and Ukraine—I’m finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine. And they don’t have the cards.” It was Trump himself, of course, who had taken “cards” away from Ukraine by suddenly exposing its cities to bombardment.

A reporter asked if Putin was “taking advantage” of Trump’s move. Trump made clear that the Russian president was doing precisely what he had expected. “I think he’s doing what anybody else would do,” he said. “I think he wants to get it stopped and settled, and I think he’s hitting ’em harder than he’s been hitting ’em, and I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now. He wants to get it ended, and I think Ukraine wants to get it ended, but I don’t see—it’s crazy, they’re taking tremendous punishment. I don’t quite get it.”

[Olga Khazan: Putin is loving this]

Why not, a reporter asked, provide air defenses? “Because I have to know that they want to settle,” Trump replied. “I don’t know that they want to settle. If they don’t want to settle, we’re out of there, because we want them to settle, and I’m doing it to stop death.”

Trump’s rhetoric signals an important evolution in his policy. He is no longer arguing for peace at any price. Instead, he has identified a good guy (Russia) and a bad guy (Ukraine). The good guy definitely wants peace. The bad guy is standing in the way of a settlement. Consequently, the only way to secure peace is for the good guy to inflict more death on the bad guy. Increasing the body count on the bad guy’s side, while regrettable, is now the fastest way to stop death.

This is the same moral logic that the Biden administration and NATO employed to support Ukraine—the way to end the war is to raise the cost to the party responsible for the conflict—but with the identity of the guilty and the innocent parties reversed.

If you want to see where Trump’s position is going next, pay attention to the bleatings of his closest supporters, who echo his impulses and point it in new directions. Elon Musk, for example, has begun demanding sanctions on Ukraine’s “oligarchs” and blaming them for American support for Kyiv. This is an echo of Putin’s long-standing claim that Ukraine is dominated by an unrepresentative class of oligarchs who have steered it away from its desired and natural place as a Russian vassal. The fixation with Ukraine’s corruption and the push to replace Zelensky both reflect Russian war aims. Putin wishes to delegitimize any Ukrainian government mirroring its population’s desire for independence, which would allow him to control the country either directly or through a puppet leader, like the kind he enjoyed before 2014 and has in Belarus today.

Ukraine certainly has its share of wealthy, influential business owners, but not nearly to the extent of Russia itself, whose entire economy is structured around oligarchic domination. And Trump is even less disturbed by corruption than he is by a lack of democracy. His administration’s earliest moves included defending or pardoning American politicians charged with corruption and ending enforcement of restrictions on bribing foreign governments. For that matter, Musk himself, who has obliterated conflict-of-interest guardrails by running much of the federal government while operating businesses with massive interest in public policy, fits the definition of oligarch neatly.

Senator Mark Kelly recently visited Ukraine and wrote on X, “Any agreement has to protect Ukraine’s security and can’t be a giveaway to Putin.” (His post did not mention Trump.) Musk replied, “You are a traitor,” which would be a rather odd sentiment unless one considered Ukraine an enemy of the United States. Where Musk is going, Trump is likely to follow.

[Anne Applebaum: The rise of the Brutal American]

Trump inherited an American government pushing to defend Ukrainian sovereignty. He has reversed American policy rapidly. The American position has already passed the point of neutrality. The new American goal is no longer simply to end the war, but to end it on Putin’s terms. Asked on Fox News Sunday if he was comfortable with the possibility that his actions would threaten Ukraine’s survival, Trump responded blithely, “Well, it may not survive anyway.” That is not merely a prediction. It is the goal.

Why It Matters Who Asks the Questions

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2025 › 02 › press-pool-trump-white-house › 681868

Kim Jong Un stared blankly as I spoke.

The North Korean dictator was seated across a small table from President Donald Trump, the two leaders and their entourages tucked away in a meeting room of a luxury hotel in Hanoi, Vietnam. It was their second summit, this one in February 2019—an event that the United States hoped would de-escalate the threat posed by the rogue nuclear nation, and one that Trump had told aides might yield him a Nobel Peace Prize. But I wanted to ask the president about something on the other side of the globe.

“Mr. President, do you have any reaction to Michael Cohen and his testimony?” I asked from a few feet away.

Trump scowled and shook his head. Kim didn’t react. The dozen other American reporters who were there and I were abruptly pulled from the room. And when the summit later adjourned without a deal, Trump blamed the stalled negotiations on the distractions caused by Cohen, his former lawyer, who had appeared before a Democratic-led congressional committee back in Washington hours earlier and delivered explosive testimony in which he labeled Trump a “racist,” “con man,” and “cheat.”

Trump later told aides on Air Force One that he didn’t like my question. And, certainly, he had the right to respond to it however he saw fit or to choose not to respond at all. But most important was that I had the ability to ask it at all—that a journalist, protected by the freedom of speech, could directly challenge the president about any subject of his or her choosing.

[Read: The day Trump became un-president]

I was able to do so that day only because I was part of what’s known as the White House press pool. Established during the Eisenhower administration, the pool is a small, rotating group of journalists who stand in for the rest of the press corps when security or space limitations prevent a larger number of reporters and photographers from being present—for example, in the Oval Office, on Air Force One, or, in this case, in a small room in Vietnam. Across generations of Democratic and Republican presidencies, the pool system has, with remarkable speed, kept the American public informed about what the president is doing on a daily basis.

In his first term, Trump went along with the system. But this week he made clear that he no longer would: The White House press secretary announced that the administration would disband the daily rotation, long coordinated by the White House Correspondents’ Association, and instead handpick which journalists would be allowed to follow the president.

That change might seem trivial to many Americans—just a Beltway-insider controversy or a fight among celebrity correspondents jockeying over who has access to the president. But it represents a dangerous moment for American democracy. If, as it has begun to do, the White House gives preference to Trump-friendly outlets, it will restrict the ability of fair, independent journalists to hold some of the most powerful people on the planet to account and to expose the president’s actions and decisions.

“Our job is to push the president beyond his comfort space to respond to questions that otherwise they’re never asked,” Peter Baker, the longtime New York Times correspondent who has covered the White House since 1996, told me. “Now he’s sending a signal that If you write something we don’t like, you’re out. You don’t get to be here anymore.”

The announcement this week follows the White House’s recent banishment of the Associated Press from the pool and White House events after the outlet refused to go along with Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” AP journalists have been allowed to keep their hard passes, security clearances that allow them access to the White House campus. But they are clearly being punished by the president for the words they use to cover him. The White House Correspondents’ Association, which represents the journalists who report on the day-to-day doings of the president and works with the West Wing to facilitate press access, objected to the decision. The AP, in a statement, said the move “plainly violates the First Amendment” and is suing the White House over the ban; a federal judge this week did not offer an immediate ruling but also did not restore the outlet’s access, causing the Trump administration to claim “victory.” (I worked at the AP for eight years, including while on that presidential trip to Vietnam, and am a member of the WHCA.)

[Read: Intimidating Americans will not work]

By overriding the entire pool system, the White House has now gone one step further. The WHCA represents nearly 300 news organizations—from a wide range of ideological viewpoints, including conservative ones—that are accredited to cover the president. It has long determined the identities of the outlets and reporters in the pool with no input from the White House. About three dozen outlets rotate, on an alphabetical basis, pool duties at the White House; a smaller number participate in what’s known as the travel pool, following the president when he leaves White House grounds, because of the costs involved. (The media organizations themselves cover those costs, not taxpayers.) When he travels, 13 journalists—a mix of correspondents, photographers, and technicians—go along with him (because that’s how many seats are in the press cabin of Air Force One). When the president is at the White House, the number increases slightly. In both cases, those in the pool send out information through reports that are distributed directly to the other members of the WHCA.

On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the White House would no longer use the WHCA’s rotation. The next day, Reuters joined AP in losing its scheduled shift; Blaze Media, a conservative outlet making its debut in the pool, and Axios—one of the few outlets to adopt the “Gulf of America” name—were allowed in. Today, two more partisan, right-leaning outlets—One America News and The Federalist—received pool slots. And a reporter from the Russian state news agency TASS was allowed to gain access to today’s Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, while the AP and Reuters were not. That reporter was later removed by staffers for “not being on the approved list,” according to the White House.

“This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” Eugene Daniels, the president of WHCA’s board and a Politico correspondent soon leaving to host an MSNBC show, said in a statement earlier this week. “It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

The mere presence of the pool is important; its reporters stand poised at just about any moment to provide the nation with real-time updates on the president’s actions and health. The pool is there if the president travels to Boston or Beijing or just up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. It has been on hand for some of the nation’s most historic moments, including when John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas and when George W. Bush was scrambled into the Florida skies after hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center. It has been there when presidents made unannounced trips to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. And it’s there for mundane moments too, with reporters sometimes sitting for hours in vans while the president golfs.

The pool’s purpose is not just stenography about what the president says or a daily diary of what he does. Pool reports, compiled by independent journalists and untouched by any government officials, are often full of answers to unsparing questions posed by pool reporters. Trump feeds off media attention and, at times, enjoys going back and forth with reporters. He is accessible to the press and answers far more questions than his immediate predecessors. But most of the questions he fields are in spontaneous sessions with members of the pool, in the Oval Office, in the Cabinet room, or on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews. He takes far fewer questions in larger news-conference settings with the full press corps, and he doesn’t regularly sit for one-on-one interviews other than with friendly, right-leaning interlocutors.

If the pool is now stacked with right-wing journalists, Trump will face fewer challenging questions, a blow to transparency and Americans’ ability to keep tabs on the most powerful person in their government. Ron Fournier, who covered the White House for the AP for more than a decade beginning in 1993, described such a system to me as “state media.”

[Read: The free-speech phonies]

“That is not a democracy,” Fournier said. “If this precedent holds, every future president will want the same deal.”

The changes to the pool system are all the more worrying because they are part of a larger attack on the press from the White House. No president likes his media coverage, but no one before Trump has made the press such a part of the story. Trump has long deemed journalists “the enemy of the people” while deriding institutions and individual reporters (me included), and he has successfully inspired fear in the Fourth Estate. His litigation prompted ABC to pay $15 million to his presidential library in a settlement. His Federal Communications Commission has opened investigations into PBS, NPR, and the parent company of NBC. Trump threatened this week to sue members of the media over anonymous sources, claiming that “a big price” should be paid for stories he doesn’t like. The Pentagon has told reporters that it will eliminate its own pool that travels with the defense secretary. And before taking office, Trump’s FBI director mused about targeting journalists he believes have covered the president unfairly.

The WHCA circulated a letter this week that was signed by 39 outlets protesting the changes to the pool. Some right-leaning organizations, such as Fox News and Newsmax, signed the letter, warning that a future Democratic president might exclude conservative media outlets. Newsmax’s owner, Chris Ruddy, made that case to Leavitt yesterday, a person familiar with the meeting told me. The press secretary was unmoved by the argument, the person said. (Ruddy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) She has stated publicly that the changes to the pool will allow a more diverse set of outlets to cover the president. In response to a social-media post from Baker, the New York Times correspondent, criticizing the move, Leavitt wrote, “Gone are the days where left-wing stenographers posing as journalists, such as yourself, dictate who gets to ask what.”

Members of the WHCA board continued negotiations with the White House yesterday. Reporters have speculated that Trump will get bored of softball questions from friendly outlets or that the White House will tire of shouldering the logistics of staging press events without the WHCA’s help. Some of the White House correspondents I have talked to in recent days have floated the idea of boycotting covering Trump events in protest, but others, including members of TV networks, have pushed back on the idea. Among the fears: that a boycott could cause the White House to fully stock the pool with sycophantic outlets, or to disband it completely.

Some rank-and-file WHCA members have also advocated for canceling the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the annual black-tie celebration of the First Amendment scheduled for late April, because of the bad optics that would be produced by scenes of correspondents mingling with administration officials who have cut back on press access. But calling off the event would deprive the organization of its best yearly opportunity to raise money for journalism scholarships and operating expenses. For now, the dinner is on.

Although presidents are always invited, Trump did not attend the event during any of his first four years in office. A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, told me that Trump had not decided whether to attend this year’s dinner, but that many of his aides were urging him to go—“to make clear that he owns you.”