FDD Action’s Nick Stewart joins Trump Iran negotiating team

 

The Trump administration added a new member to its Iran negotiating team amid stalled talks with Tehran, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

Nick Stewart, managing director of advocacy at FDD Action, the lobbying arm of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, joined the office of Special Envoy for Peace Missions Steve Witkoff, US officials and sources said.

Stewart previously served in the first Trump administration as chief of staff at the State Department’s Iran Action Group under then-Special Representative Brian Hook.

US Representative Claudia Tenney said Nick Stewart is an “outstanding addition” to the Office of the Special Envoy for Peace Missions, describing him as one of America’s “sharpest experts on Iran policy” in a post on X.

Nick Stewart is an outstanding addition to the Office of the Special Envoy for Peace Missions.

Nick is one of America's sharpest experts on Iran policy.

His extensive expertise and proven leadership will help advance President Trump’s peace goals and deliver a deal that puts…

— Rep. Claudia Tenney (@RepTenney) May 2, 2026

https://www.iranintl.com/en/liveblog/202604294038

Iran struggles to counter US blockade as strategy falters - WSJ

 

Iran is scrambling for ways to respond to a US naval blockade that has disrupted its oil exports and exposed weaknesses in its long-standing strategy of relying on maritime disruption and sanctions evasion, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The report cited analysts as saying the blockade is testing Tehran’s long-standing strategy of leveraging disruption in the Strait of Hormuz and evading sanctions through covert oil shipments.

The report said the pressure is fueling internal divisions within Iran’s leadership, with some officials pushing for renewed escalation while others favor negotiations to end the standoff.

The U.S. Navy’s blockade is revealing a hole in Tehran’s strategy of guerrilla warfare and controlling the Strait of Hormuz https://t.co/HhtOxtgU80

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) May 2, 2026

https://www.iranintl.com/en/liveblog/202604294038

The Marriage Gap Is America's Most Overlooked Source of Inequality

by Veronique de Rugy

The most consequential inequality in America is not the wealth gap or the wage gap. It may not be the racial opportunity gap. The marriage gap is wreaking havoc. And unfortunately, it's the gap that gets the least attention.

I'm a libertarian. I don't care whom, or if, you marry. Yet I'm reminded that there is a problem by a new report from the American Enterprise Institute. Edited by Kevin Corinth and Scott Winship, "Land of Opportunity: Advancing the American Dream" covers a broad range of challenges facing the country today, from the cost of living and workforce development to education, crime, and the erosion of community life.

The authors are not culture warriors. They are empirical economists. But among their most important findings are those dealing with the collapse of the American family and what the government has done to accelerate it.

From economist Robert VerBruggen's chapter on the erosion of married parenthood, I learned that in the mid-20th century, only one in 20 children were born out of wedlock. Now it's two in five. I also learned that America has the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households: 23 percent in the U.S. against an international norm of 7 percent.

Drawing on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, VerBruggen shows that 40 percent of millennials from intact, two-parent families graduated from college and 77 percent achieved middle-class incomes or higher. Among those who didn't grow up in intact families, only 17 percent graduated from college and just 57 percent reached middle-class incomes. The latter are also roughly twice as likely to be incarcerated, even after controlling for other socioeconomic factors.

The damage doesn't stop at the front door: Research using tax-return data "suggests that neighborhoods with high rates of single parenthood cultivate lower social mobility, including among kids who themselves are not raised by single parents," VerBruggen notes.

This is a rather bipartisan idea at this point. In a 2013 review of the relevant research, Princeton University sociologist Sara McLanahan and coauthors found that "studies using more rigorous designs continue to find negative effects of father absence on offspring well-being." Economist Melissa Kearney's work shows that marriage protects against poverty among all races. In fact, married parents regardless of race and education suffer significantly less poverty than unmarried mothers.

This collapse in family stability is not happening evenly. Winship and O'Rourke found that while marital births dropped by 29 points overall from 1970 to 2018, they fell by 47 points for the bottom education quintile and by just 6 points for the top. Consistent with that divide, from the early 1960s to the late 2010s, marriage rates fell by roughly 46 percentage points for the least educated young women compared with about 17 points for the most educated, leaving those least able to bear the costs of single parenthood the most likely to experience it.

Marriage is clearly a singularly important institution for raising children and for income mobility. Still, I don't view government efforts to tilt the scale toward marriage favorably. I am also firmly opposed when the government puts its thumb on the scale against marriage.

Unfortunately, VerBruggen marshals evidence showing there is a lot of that going on. A couple with two kids, with each parent earning $30,000, receives around $5,000 in earned income tax credit benefits if they remain unmarried. They lose all those benefits if they marry. That's a tax on marriage.

Medicaid thresholds, housing vouchers, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits all phase out in ways that punish couples who combine households and incomes. VerBruggen cites a Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimate showing that "7.5 percent more low-income women with kids would be married by age 35 if they were not penalized for doing so."

You cannot simultaneously believe that family structure doesn't matter and that the single-parent disadvantage is a crisis. Or that children's outcomes are shaped by economic conditions and that it's irrelevant whether two committed adults are in the picture or one parent cycles through unstable relationships. Careful researchers, including those attempting to debunk the marriage effect, keep finding it.

My conservative friends focus on redesigning America's $1 trillion safety net to reduce the marriage penalty. But the harder question—the one almost no one asks—is whether that safety net's existence changes the marriage calculus in ways no redesign can fully fix. If the government reliably tries to replace the economic function of a spouse, more people will rationally choose not to marry.

Acknowledging this doesn't require abandoning people in genuine need. Nor does it require overcorrecting and incentivizing women to live in abusive unions. It does, however, require admitting that every dollar of well-intentioned assistance comes with a behavioral price tag that we've largely refused to count.

Sometimes the most compassionate long-term answer is to remove the marriage penalty in welfare programs. Sometimes, it's to have a smaller program or no program at all. We will never know until we honestly ask the question.

https://reason.com/2026/04/30/the-marriage-gap-is-americas-most-overlooked-source-of-inequality/

US approves $8.6B arms sales to Israel, UAE, Qatar

 The United States State Department approved new weapons sales to Israel, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, worth approximately $8.6 billion.

Under the new purchase, the UAE will receive the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) and related equipment, with a total sale value of $147.6 million. The estimated worth of the equipment sold to Qatar is $992.4 million. Moreover, the State Department said it approved Kuwait's request to buy the Integrated Battle Command System and other military gear for a total of $2.5 billion. Israel will receive APKWS and other arms for $992.4 million.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/US-approves-dollar8.6B-arms-sales-to-Israel-UAE-Qatar/66203879

Moscow airport halts traffic

 Moscow's Vnukovo Airport instituted temporary flight restrictions, halting civilian traffic, the country's Federal Air Transport Agency, Rosaviatsiya, said.

Restrictions were also put in place at the Pskov Airport in western Russia. Hostilities with Ukraine continued throughout the night, with blasts being reported in several Ukrainian cities. Previously, Ukraine launched drone strikes targeting oil refineries across the European part of Russia, inflicting damage on vital infrastructure.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Moscow-airport-halts-traffic/66203914

DOJ Probes 36 Illinois School Districts Over Sexual Orientation Content In Pre-K–12 Classes

 by Naveen Anthrappully via The Epoch Times,

The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division has launched multiple investigations into 36 Illinois public school districts to assess whether sexual orientation and gender ideology content is being taught in pre-K-12 grade classes.

If the districts are determined to be teaching sexual orientation and gender ideology-related content, “the investigations will examine whether the schools have notified parents of their right to opt their children out of such instruction,” the DOJ said in an April 30 statement.

“The investigation will also assess whether the Illinois School Districts limit access to single-sex intimate spaces (such as bathrooms and locker rooms) and girls’ sports teams based on biological sex.”

The probe will cover whether the districts violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which explicitly prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance. The districts are “recipients of hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer funding,” the DOJ said.

The investigations will also look into whether the school districts adhere to the U.S. Supreme Court’s “extensive precedents on parental rights” as affirmed in Mirabelli v. Bonta and Mahmoud v. Taylor cases.

In the Mirabelli v. Bonta case, the Supreme Court blocked a California policy on March 2 that prohibited school personnel from informing parents when their children requested changing their preferred gender identity at schools.

“The State argues that its policies advance a compelling interest in student safety and privacy,” the court wrote in its decision. “But those policies cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents.”

In the Mahmoud v. Taylor lawsuit, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Maryland parents, who, for religious reasons, wanted to opt their children out from getting exposed to school storybooks promoting LGBT lifestyles.

Commenting on the DOJ’s probe into 36 Illinois school districts, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the department’s Civil Rights Division said, “This Department of Justice is determined to put an end to local school authorities keeping parents in the dark about how sexuality and gender ideology are being pushed in classrooms.”

“Supreme Court precedent leaves no doubt: parents have the fundamental right and primary authority to direct the care, upbringing, and education of their children,” he said. “This includes exempting their children from ideological instruction that contradicts their values or decisions about their children’s health and best interests.”

The Illinois school districts under investigation include Bloomington Public Schools District, Lick Creek Community Consolidated School District, O’Fallon Community Consolidated School District, and Pembroke Community Consolidated School District.

The Epoch Times reached out to these school districts for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

The full list of school districts being probed was posted on the DOJ website.

Gender Ideology Investigations

On April 17, the Department of Education said it found four school districts in Kansas to have violated Title IX and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

These districts had policies “that were likely to prevent schools from notifying parents of their child’s so-called ‘gender transition,’ even if the parent requested their child’s records,” the department said.

In August 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) asked 46 states and territories to remove gender identity references from teaching materials, failing which they would face penalties, including the termination or suspension of federal funding.

This was met with a legal challenge by a coalition of 16 states and the District of Columbia, which filed a lawsuit in September 2025, arguing that terminating funding would harm “the very populations Congress intended to help.” The plaintiffs said complying with the order would conflict with their own laws and policies that require “inclusive” sex education curricula.

“The federal government’s far-reaching efforts to erase people who don’t fit one of two gender labels is illegal and wrong—and would deny services to millions more in the process,” Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said in a statement. The case is still ongoing in the court.

The HHS justified its order by citing a Jan. 29, 2025, executive order signed by President Donald Trump—Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling—which said that no federal dollars should go towards indoctrinating children in “radical, anti-American ideologies.”

At the time of the HHS order, Andrew Gradison, acting assistant secretary for the department’s Administration for Children and Families, said that “federal funds will not be used to poison the minds of the next generation or advance dangerous ideological agendas.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/doj-probes-36-illinois-school-districts-over-sexual-orientation-content-pre-k-12-classes

Mental Health Awareness Is Backfiring: How ‘Helpful’ Campaigns Are Manufacturing Illness

 by Monty Donohew

For decades, the mental health industry and its allies in media, government, and education have operated on a simple assumption: the more mental health awareness we spread, through campaigns, school programs, social media, and public service announcements,  the better. Raise awareness, reduce stigma, encourage help-seeking, and mental health will surely improve.

New evidence shows the opposite is happening. Well-intentioned awareness efforts are actively backfiring, manufacturing distress, inflating diagnoses, and turning normal human emotions into chronic “disorders.” The shocking result is that these campaigns are turning mentally fit people into self-diagnosed mentally ill patients, with symptoms effectively “contracted” from the awareness messages themselves.

A major new review in Nature Reviews Psychology (March 2026) confirms what many conservatives have long suspected: well-meaning mental health awareness efforts can harm more than they help. Titled “The psychological consequences of mental health awareness efforts,” the paper, led by Oxford psychologist Lucy Foulkes, synthesizes experimental evidence showing these campaigns lower the bar for what counts as a “disorder,” train people to pathologize normal emotions, and lock in self-fulfilling “illness identities.”

The authors aren’t anti-awareness radicals: they acknowledge real benefits from such campaigns, such as reduced stigma in some cases and modest increases in help-seeking. Nonetheless, the actual data on harms is damning and growing.

Three Mechanisms of Harm

The review identifies three converging pathways, drawn from previously disparate literatures on concept creep, nocebo effects, prevalence inflation, and illness self-labeling:

1. Lowering the threshold for disorder. Awareness materials serve to broaden definitions of mental illness. Normal feelings, such as loneliness, stress, and sadness, get “reframed” as pathology. Experiments show people exposed to awareness content are far more likely to self-diagnose with conditions they simply don’t clinically meet.
2. Symptom-scanning and reinterpretation. Campaigns teach hypervigilance, demanding that you constantly assess your inner life. Normal fluctuations like a few bad days, social awkwardness, or stress get misinterpreted as “symptoms.” One cited study found that simply learning “stress is harmful” demonstrably worsened performance and well-being. Trigger warnings, meant to protect those with vulnerability, in fact, increase anticipatory anxiety, inducing stress that might otherwise not have existed or caused alarm.
3. Illness identity becomes self-fulfilling. Once a person is labeled, whether by themselves or others, the person behaves in ways that confirm and deepen the identity. This is classic self-fulfilling prophecy, backed by decades of labeling theory now applied to mental health.

The evidence isn’t a handful of anecdotal stories drawn from specific extreme cases.  The review cites over a dozen experimental manipulations (2010–2025) showing causal effects: ADHD workshops doubled false self-diagnosis rates in healthy adults; fake “awareness” videos about nonexistent syndromes produced real symptoms (headaches, nausea); nocebo education experiments proved you can prevent these harms by inoculating people against them.

Real-World Fallout: Youth in Crisis Despite the Campaigns

Despite billions poured into awareness campaigns designed to help and protect our youth, ranging from school programs, TikTok PSAs, corporate “mental health months,” and government initiatives, youth mental health has dramatically worsened. CDC data shows persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in teens hovering near 40% in recent years. University counseling centers are overwhelmed. Medication use is up. Yet awareness literacy is higher than ever.

The paper’s timing is perfect. Social media has supercharged the problem: 80% or more of popular mental health TikToks are misleading or oversimplified. Adolescents, whose identities are still forming, are especially vulnerable to suggestion and peer contagion. 

Conservatives have warned about this for years. The left’s therapeutic culture, pushing “validate every feeling,” “trauma is everywhere,” and endless “awareness” without resilience education and training, turns normal human struggle into identity and disability. It’s the same dynamic seen in the explosion of rapid-onset gender dysphoria, ADHD self-diagnoses, and anxiety epidemics among affluent, screen-addicted youth. When every discomfort is a “disorder,” resilience atrophies.

Why the Left Won’t Admit It

Mainstream psychology and progressive media have treated awareness as an unmitigated and absolute good. Critics of overdiagnosis were dismissed as heartless or “stigma-enforcing.” Yet here is high-impact, peer-reviewed science, saying the quiet part out loud: some awareness efforts manufacture the suffering they claim to prevent.

This should prompt a reckoning. Social media platforms profit from doom-scrolling symptom lists. Big Pharma benefits from expanded diagnoses. The “awareness industrial complex” has incentives to keep the crisis narrative alive.  The Make America Healthy Again movement should directly confront and reform these incentives.

At a minimum, schools should stop mandatory “mental health” modules that pathologize normal adolescence.

A Better Path Forward

The authors don’t call for ending awareness; they call for smarter awareness. “Inoculation” works: brief education about nocebo effects and concept creep prevents false self-diagnosis. Emphasize resilience, growth mindset, and the difference between normal distress and clinical disorder. Teach stoicism, not fragility. More, stop rewarding fragility by elevating it to a protected class or special identity, and conferring to those self-identifying special privileges. This is particularly necessary in law enforcement and in the judiciary where identities and illnesses can be treated as excuses for criminality or given exception from consequence.

These steps align with timeless wisdom: character is forged in adversity, not endless validation. Faith, family, discipline, and community have protected mental health for generations far better than TikTok quizzes or school counselors armed with symptom checklists.

The Nature Reviews paper is a wake-up call. Mental health awareness isn’t neutral. In its current form, vague, expansive, and TikTok-ified, “Awareness” risks turning generations into patients instead of resilient adults. Time to stop the treatment-induced epidemic before another generation is told their normal struggles are permanent disorders.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/05/mental_health_awareness_is_backfiring_new_science_shows_how_helpful_campaigns_are_manufacturing_illness.html