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- Mark Carney Is on the Verge of a Big Election Win
TORONTO — Danielle Martin was going door to door meeting voters when a woman, newly released from the hospital, really wanted to show off her stitches. “I said, ‘I’m really sorry, but I don’t feel like that would be appropriate,’” Martin, a high-profile family doctor-turned-Liberal candidate, recalled with a laugh. “I’m not sure my insurance covers that.” Martin became Canadian famous after defending the country’s health care system before a U.S. Senate committee a dozen years ago. Now, she’s bringing a health lens to some of the biggest challenges facing the country — “housing is a health issue, the economy is a health issue” — as she runs for office under Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal banner to fill a downtown Toronto seat that could prove pivotal for Carney. Voters will hit the polls Monday in three by-election parliamentary races — contests to fill mid-term vacancies in the House of Commons — and winning just one would turn Carney’s minority government into a slim majority. That would give him some real breathing room to enact his agenda and would secure his grip on power until at least 2029, when the next national election could be held. It’s the latest turn in a remarkable trajectory for Carney. Until a year ago, he was a political neophyte. He had a sterling economic resume and international contacts to match, but he had never run for office. Then Donald Trump started mouthing off about annexing Canada and imposing tariffs — pissing off Canadians, accelerating the end of the Justin Trudeau era and vaulting Carney into a stunning election victory over a collapsing Conservative Party.Carney has since proved fairly adept in domestic politics, helping to poach a handful of lawmakers from both Conservative and farther-left New Democrat benches. More are reportedly toying with the idea of joining Carney’s Liberals as Canadians continue to sour on Trump’s America. Trump is also partly responsible for Martin’s decision to run. Liberals had previously tried to recruit her a few times before when the party was tied to Trudeau’s falling star. But the timing never worked out, she said in an interview, citing a mix of factors including a yearning to stay in medicine and having a young daughter home at the time. Then a seat came open after a series of events beginning when Trudeau deputy Chrystia Freeland quit his Cabinet amid no confidence he could take on… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 weeks ago - Trump’s Favorite European Strongman Is in Trouble. Soccer Explains Why.
FELCSÚT, Hungary — The whitewashed peasant-style cottage that belongs to Viktor Orbán is Hungarian picture-perfect, with wooden shutters and a garden water well. It speaks to the humble origins of the country’s long-serving, globe-trotting prime minster, the son of a Communist collective farm foreman. Of course, that’s exactly what the village house is meant to signal — that despite his success, his 16 years dominating Hungarian politics and his alliances with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, Orbán is still a down-to-earth man of the people, who hasn’t forgotten his past and remembers what it was like as a young boy to harvest beets and dig up potatoes. Never mind that four kilometers away the Orbán family has a sprawling manor house and farm estate once owned in the 19th century by Archduke Joseph of Austria. The family insists the estate, which includes a zoo and palm house, is owned not by the prime minister, but by his father. No, indeed, they say, the modest cottage facing me is Orbán’s real country retreat.I look over the picket fence into the yard. Strangely, there are no guards protecting it this spring day, and with the cherry blossoms starting to bud, the place seems inviting. I resist the lure to click open the gate to get a closer peek and to lounge in the MAGA ally’s garden chairs. I’m also cognizant of the many CCTV cameras attached to the football stadium on the other side of the street overshadowing Orbán’s cottage. Best not to trespass. I’ve traveled west over the hills for 40 minutes from Hungary’s capital, where national election campaigning is in full raucous mode. With polling days away, Orbán’s political dominance is in serious question for the first time since he took power in 2010. His foes hope April 12, Election Day, will mark the day of his downfall.Orbán continues to trail in the opinion polls behind Péter Magyar, a defector from Orbán’s own ruling Fidesz party. Magyar’s center-right Tisza party has been on average 10 points ahead of Fidesz and last week three independent polls suggested the gap between the two is widening. A majority of Hungarians seemingly are losing patience with Hungary’s struggling economy, high prices, dilapidated hospitals and the chronic underfunding of the country’s railway networks which has left normally loyal Fidesz villages feeling abandoned. That explains why Magyar has remained laser-focused in his campaigning on bread-and-butter issues while… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 weeks ago - States Are Learning the Wrong Lesson from the ‘Mississippi Miracle’
No story has caught the imagination of education reformers this decade quite like the “Mississippi miracle.” From 1998 to 2024, fourth-grade reading and math scores in my home state—the nation’s poorest—rose from among the worst in the country to among the best. When adjusting for demographic factors such as poverty, we’re in first place.Other states are now trying to emulate what Mississippi did. Those efforts largely revolve around adopting what’s known as the “science of reading”— a set of principles and teaching techniques, including phonics, that are grounded in decades of empirical research. Last fall, for example, the Wall Street Journal editorial board marveled that “even California is now following Mississippi’s lead by returning to phonics” as Governor Gavin Newsom prepared to sign a major new reading bill into law. But what many outsiders fail to understand is that Mississippi changed far more than just how reading is taught. They therefore miss why and how our literacy approach succeeded.As I detail in a new report for the Progressive Policy Institute, Mississippi’s transformation depended on holding students, educators, and even policy makers accountable for better student performance. Imposing real accountability in education is politically onerous, which is why such policies have fallen out of favor over the past decade. But reforms that try to copy only Mississippi’s commitment to reading science without accountability will not deliver the intended results. Fixing education is never that simple. If states really want to replicate our success, they need to understand that what Mississippi did wasn’t a miracle at all.For decades, education policy in Mississippi was driven mostly by a desperate desire to avoid ranking last in the country. Aiming higher wasn’t on the agenda, because state and local leaders believed that Mississippi kids were too poor to make real progress. In practice, this meant that the state set abysmally low standards for what students should learn to advance and graduate.In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Mississippi was pulled onto the path of reform by federal legislation, most notably George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which required states to ensure that students met challenging learning standards on standardized tests and established consequences for schools that failed to do so. Our performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, improved substantially from 1998 to 2009. But because the whole country was improving, too, Mississippi’s… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 weeks ago - Democrats Are Obsessed With the Wrong Senate Races
I rise in defense of old white guys. No, not the last president, whose selfish insistence on running for re-election as he neared 82 begot the current White House occupant, whose daily degradations of the office are sure to worsen after he enters his 80s this summer. No, I have in mind two baby boomers, the most underrated and under-covered candidates in this midterm: Ohio’s Sherrod Brown and North Carolina’s Roy Cooper. In what’s shaping up to be a strong Democratic year, Brown and Cooper are linchpins of their party’s increasingly realistic, bordering on likely, prospects for reclaiming the Senate. Each comes from a state that has been forbidding for Democrats in federal races. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that each may be the only person who could flip the seat for which they’re running. Brown, 73, previously won three Senate races, the last in President Donald Trump’s first midterm, and Cooper, 68, just left office last year after serving two terms as governor. Both are about as well-known in their respective states as is possible in an era of media fragmentation. If you doubt me, maybe you’ll be persuaded by Republicans. Just look at the top two television ad reservations laid down this week by the Senate GOP super PAC. Where are they planning to spend the most, whether on offense or defense? You guessed it, that would be in Ohio ($79 million) and North Carolina ($71 million). Yes, of course, the scale of that investment is partly because of the number and cost of media markets in the two states. But it also underscores real GOP concern in both states. While those spending priorities wouldn’t surprise anyone working in electoral politics, they may stun, or at least confuse, the hobbyist class of activists. Understanding that disconnect matters. You, my dear reader, have likely heard more about a Senate race that’s far more of a long shot for Democrats (Texas) and another that’s far likelier to flip (Maine) than the two I present above. There’s a recency bias in the case of Texas and the campaign of James Talarico, who just last month won a high-profile primary. Also, that primary was freighted with matters of race — Black, white and Hispanic — which are often at the heart of Democrats’ intra-party contests. Similarly, the Maine primary reflects another enduring — and divisive — clash within the Democratic… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 weeks ago - Oil Prices Rise Again And World Shares Retreat On Fragile Iran Ceasefire
Brent crude, the international standard, was up 3.5% to $98.09 per barrel. [TheTopNews] Read More.3 weeks ago - Shippers Seek Clarity On Hormuz Reopening After U.S.-Iran Ceasefire DealMost stranded oil and gas tankers remained inside the Gulf, LSEG shipping data showed. [TheTopNews] Read More.3 weeks ago
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