Donald Trump’s team is starting to institute a new system to better determine who gets access to the former president and who is allowed on his Palm Beach property, following the dinner he held with prominent white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.

The scramble to put in place better filters, described by three people familiar with it, is the latest fallout from a meal that has roiled Trump’s nascent presidential campaign and raised questions about the operation around him.

In the two weeks since Trump announced his third presidential candidacy, he has been weighed down by a series of self-inflicted wounds. He has been blamed for a lackluster GOP midterm performance after a number of candidates he endorsed lost high profile races. His announcement speech failed to capture widespread party enthusiasm. He faced a barrage of bad legal news. And his long-planned dinner with Ye, better known as Kanye West, launched a week’s worth of nightmare headlines — and new questions about his fitness for office — after it was revealed Fuentes joined them for turkey and stuffing, too.

“It’s been a disaster,” said a person close to the campaign.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/29/donald-trump-campaign-00071225

French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said Tuesday that "the COVID epidemic is starting again" and called for preventative measures.

Borne said that more than 40,000 cases are being detected every day at the moment, while "an increase of almost 10 percent in hospitalizations, 22 percent increase in hospitalizations in critical care and 400 deaths from COVID" was observed last week.

"This new wave reminds us: The virus has not disappeared, the epidemic strikes again, kills again," she added.

The prime minister stressed that hospitals are facing additional pressure due to an epidemic of bronchiolitis as well as the flu season.

KYIV — In Crimea, the war is drawing ever closer, and nerves are on edge.

In conversations via secure communications, people in Crimea describe growing tension across the Black Sea peninsula as they increasingly expect the advent of direct hostilities. They say saboteur and partisan groups are now readying in the territory, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.

Frustration and panic are surging, over everything from conscription to runaway prices. One person told of anger over an inability to secure hospital places thanks to the numbers of Russian wounded brought in from the fronts, while another said that the fretful Russian elite were trying to sell their glitzy holiday homes, but were finding no buyers.

When Vladimir Putin launched his all-out invasion of Ukraine in February, few people expected Ukrainian forces would nine months later be threatening to reclaim Crimea. That no longer feels like a military impossibility, however, after Kyiv’s well-organized troops showed that they could drive out Russian forces in offensive operations around Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine and Kherson in the south.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange service FTX, revealed in a new interview that he donated "about the same amount of money" to both Democrats and Republicans, but that all his donations to Republicans was "dark money."

Bankman-Fried claimed he used a loophole in the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling. "All my Republic donations were dark," he said, adding that he didn't disclose them because "liberal" reporters would "freak the fuck out."

"I've been their third biggest Republican donor this year as well," he told Tiffany Fong in an interview released by YouTuber Coffeezilla on Tuesday.

NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams is eyeing Washington in 2024 — but not a run for president.

Nearly 18 months ago, after winning a crowded primary, Adams declared himself the future of the Democratic Party. And since he became mayor in January, Adams ratcheted up his role in national politics — hosting President Joe Biden to tout their shared vision on reducing crime, pushing for New York City to host the next Democratic National Convention and penning an op-ed advising Democrats on how to win back working-class voters.

In a sit-down interview at POLITICO’s offices in New York, Adams said he has offered his support to the president, outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her presumed successor, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, as attention turns to the 2024 elections.

“I said, ‘Any way you guys need to use me, I’m willing to help,’” Adams said. “I want to make sure the party retains the White House.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/29/eric-adams-dems-2024-new-york-00070947

NEW YORK — The U.S. gun death rate last year hit its highest mark in nearly three decades, and the rate among women has been growing faster than that of men, according to study published Tuesday.

The increase among women — most dramatically, in Black women — is playing a tragic and under-recognized role in a tally that skews overwhelmingly male, the researchers said.

“Women can get lost in the discussion because so many of the fatalities are men,” said one the authors, Dr. Eric Fleegler of Harvard Medical School.

Among Black women, the rate of firearm-related homicides more than tripled since 2010, and the rate of gun-related suicides more than doubled since 2015, Fleegler and his co-authors wrote in the paper published by JAMA Network Open.

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A judge on Tuesday ordered Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, two right-wing conspiracy theorists behind robocalls that sought to intimidate Black voters here out of casting mail-in ballots in the 2020 presidential election, to spend 500 hours registering voters in low-income neighborhoods in the Washington, D.C., area.

Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge John Sutula placed each on two years of probation, fined each $2,500 and ordered them to wear GPS ankle monitors with home confinement beginning at 8 p.m. each day for the first six months of their probation.

Sutula, 71, said that most of the civil rights advances in the United States have occurred in his lifetime. He compared the men’s effort to those who used violence to suppress southern Black voters in the 1960s.

“I think it’s a despicable thing that you guys have done,” he said.