Nicusor Dan exits a voting booth in Fagaras, Romania, Sunday, May 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Eduard Vinatoru)

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Dear Commons Community,

Pro-European Union candidate Nicusor Dan yesterday won Romania’s presidential runoff against a hard-right nationalist who modeled his campaign after U.S. President Donald Trump. The victory marked a major turnaround in a tense election that many viewed as a geopolitical choice for the former Eastern Bloc country between East or West.  As reported by The Associated Press.

The race pitted front-runner George Simion, the 38-year-old leader of the hard-right Alliance for the Unity of Romanians, or AUR, against Dan, the incumbent mayor of Bucharest. It was held months after the cancelation of the previous election plunged Romania into its worst political crisis in decades.

With more than 99% of polling stations reporting, Dan was ahead with 53.9%, while Simion trailed at 46.1%, according to official data. In the first-round vote on May 4, Simion won almost twice as many votes as Dan, and many local surveys predicted he would secure the presidency.

But in a swing that appeared to be a repudiation of Simion’s skeptical approach to the EU, which Romania joined in 2007, Dan picked up almost 900,000 more votes to solidly defeat his opponent in the final round.

On Sunday evening, thousands gathered outside Dan’s headquarters near Bucharest City Hall to await the final results, chanting “Nicusor!” Each time his lead widened as more results came in, the crowd, many waving the flags of Europe, would erupt in cheers.

Once it was clear he had secured a victory, Dan gave an emotional speech from an outdoor stage where he thanked his supporters, and reached out to Simion’s backers with a message of national unity.

“What you have done as a society in these past weeks has been extraordinary,” he said. “Our full respect for those who had a different choice today, and for those who made a different choice in the first round. We have a Romania to build together, regardless of political choices.”

High turnout drives win for Dan

Final electoral data showed a 64% voter turnout — a sharp increase from the first round on May 4 where 53% of eligible voters cast a ballot. About 1.64 million Romanians abroad participated in the vote, some 660,000 more than in the first round.

The high turnout was believed to have benefited Dan who, shortly after 11 p.m. local time, emerged onto the balcony of his headquarters and waved to his thousands of supporters who had gathered along the length of a boulevard in central Bucharest, eliciting an ecstatic roar from the crowd.

At the raucous rally, Ruxandra Gheorghiu, 23, told The Associated Press that she had been considering leaving Romania, but that with Dan’s victory, “I feel like everything is going to be fine.”

“I was so scared that our European course is near the end. … We are still in Europe and we are not fighting for this right,” she said. “I cannot explain the feeling right now.”

Dan, a 55-year-old mathematician who rose to prominence as a civic activist fighting against illegal real estate projects, founded the reformist Save Romania Union party in 2016 but later left, and ran independently on a pro-EU ticket reaffirming Western ties, support for Ukraine and fiscal reform.

After the election Sunday, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sent her “warmest congratulations” to Dan and noted that Romanians “turned out massively” to vote.

“They have chosen the promise of an open, prosperous Romania in a strong Europe,” she said in a post on X. “Together let’s deliver on that promise.”

What’s going on in Romania?

Romania’s political landscape was upended last year when a top court voided the previous election in which far-right outsider Calin Georgescu topped first-round polls, following allegations of electoral violations and Russian interference, which Moscow denied.

Simion capitalized on the furor over the annulment of that election and, after coming fourth in last year’s canceled race, allied with Georgescu, who was banned in March from running in the election redo.

Simion then surged to front-runner in the May 4 first round after becoming the standard-bearer for the hard right, and promised to appoint Georgescu prime minister if he secured the presidency.

Years of endemic corruption and growing anger toward Romania’s political establishment have fueled a surge in support for anti-establishment and hard-right figures, reflecting a broader pattern across Europe. Both Simion and Dan have made their political careers railing against Romania’s old political class.

Cristian Andrei, a Bucharest-based political consultant, told the AP that the election results showed that Romanians “rejected hate and reactionary politics and embraced the pro-western direction” for their country, which has played a major logistical role in delivering Western assistance to neighboring Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s full-scale invasion.

“It is a win for the optimistic Romania, but there is a large part of voters that are really upset with the direction of the country,” he said. “Romania comes out of this election very divided, with a totally new political landscape, where older political parties are challenged to adapt to a new reality.”

In the lead-up to Sunday’s vote, Simion’s rhetoric had raised some concerns that he wouldn’t respect the outcome if he lost. In the early afternoon, he told reporters that his team was confident in a “landslide victory,” if the election was “free and fair.”

In the afternoon on election day, he repeated allegations of voting irregularities among Romanian citizens in neighboring Moldova and said that his party members would conduct a parallel vote count after polls closed.

However, Simion gave a statement on social media in the early hours on Monday acknowledging that “we lost the second round of the elections.”

“We cannot accuse significant tampering with the ballots,” he said. “We’ll continue to represent the sovereignist, patriotic, conservative movement in Romania, and we’ll continue to fight … for freedom, for God, for family and for our common ideas.”

The president is elected for a five-year term and has significant decision-making powers in matters of national security and foreign policy. As winner of Sunday’s race, Dan will be charged with nominating a new prime minister after Marcel Ciolacu stepped down following the failure of his coalition’s candidate to advance to the runoff.

Congratulations President-Elect Dan!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Former President Joe Biden is battling an “aggressive” form of prostate cancer, his office announced yesterday, adding his condition is characterized by a “Gleason score of 9.”

His office also said Biden’s diagnosis included metastasis to the bone.

Biden’s cancer diagnosis comes after a small nodule was found in the former president’s prostate after “a routine physical exam” on Tuesday. The discovery of the nodule “necessitated further evaluation,” his spokesperson said at the time.

In February 2023 — while the now-82-year-old former president was serving in the White House — Biden had a lesion removed from his chest that was cancerous, according to the former White House physician. Additionally, before entering office, Biden had several non-melanoma skin cancers removed with Mohs surgery.

As the world reacts to Biden’s medical news, ABC News has broken down what his condition means and what possible treatments can be done.

What to know about prostate cancer

Prostate cancer is a type of cancer that forms in the tissues of the prostate, the small gland in men’s prostate that produces semen, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH)

It is the most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer death among men in the U.S., according to the federal health agency.

The NIH reports an estimated 313,780 new cases of prostate cancer will be diagnosed this year — representing over 15% of all new cancer cases.

An estimated 35,770 deaths from prostate cancer will occur this year — representing 5.8% of all cancer deaths, according to the agency.

Prostate cancer has a five-year relative survival rate, meaning the percentage of people alive five years after diagnosis, is roughly 98%.

Generally, prostate cancer usually grows very slowly and finding and treating it before symptoms occur may not improve men’s health or help them live longer.

However, it is generally a more treatable type of cancer, even when it has spread further.

Roughly 12.9% of men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point in their lifetime, according to the NIH. In 2022, there were an estimated 3.5 million men living with prostate cancer in the United States.

The median age of prostate cancer diagnosis is 68 years old, according to the agency, while the median age of prostate cancer death is 79.

While the agency reports rates for new prostate cancer cases have been rising an average 1.8% each year over from 2013 to 2022, death rates have been falling on average 0.6% each year over between 2014 and 2023.

What is a Gleason score?

The Gleason grading system, or Gleason score, refers to how likely the cancer is to advance and spread, but does not predict the outcome.

It’s way of describing prostate cancer based on how abnormal the cancer cells in a biopsy sample look under a microscope and how quickly they are likely to grow and spread, according to the NIH.

The Gleason score is calculated by adding together the two grades of cancer cells that make up the largest areas of the biopsied tissue sample, the NIH says.

The grading system usually ranges from 6 to 10.

Biden’s diagnosis of a Gleason score of 9 indicates his cancer is aggressive.

A score of 9 indicates that the cancer cells look very different from normal prostate cells and are likely to grow and spread rapidly. This places the cancer in Grade Group 5, the highest risk category, associated with a greater likelihood of metastasis and a more challenging prognosis. Yet, despite the cancer’s apparent aggressiveness, its hormone-sensitive nature offers a viable treatment pathway.

Possible treatment options

While Biden’s official treatment plan remains to be announced, possible options for the former president include hormone therapy, or androgen deprivation therapy (ADT), which can reduce levels of male hormones that can fuel prostate cancer growth.

This approach can effectively slow disease progression and manage symptoms, even in advanced stages where the cancer has spread to the bones.

Regular monitoring of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels is crucial, as rising PSA levels can indicate cancer activity and help assess treatment effectiveness.

Surgery is typically not an option in cases like Biden’s, when the disease has spread to the bone and is not confined to the prostate.

Following the former president’s diagnosis, the American Cancer Society released a statement, saying, “This news is a reminder about the tragic impact of prostate cancer in the U.S.”

“Early detection is key, and we are concerned given the 5% year-over-year increase in diagnosis of men with more advanced disease. We can and must do more to prevent late-stage diagnosis and death from prostate cancer,” the ACS said.

Former President Barack Obama responded to news of former President Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis by expressing confidence in his former vice president’s “trademark resolve and grace.”

He also pointed to the work Biden has done to advance cancer research.

“Michelle and I are thinking of the entire Biden family,” Obama wrote in a post on X.

“Nobody has done more to find breakthrough treatments for cancer in all its forms than Joe, and I am certain he will fight this challenge with his trademark resolve and grace,” he continued.

“We pray for a fast and full recovery,” he added.

In God’s hands!

Tony

Photo/Yuki Iwamura)ASSOCIATED PRESS

Dear C0mmons Community,

A Mexican navy sailing ship on a global tour struck the Brooklyn Bridge in New York last night, snapping its three masts, killing two crew members and leaving some sailors dangling from harnesses high in the air waiting for help.  As reported by The Associated Press.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams said the 142-year-old bridge was spared major damage but at least 19 people aboard the ship needed medical treatment.

Two of the four people who suffered serious injuries later died, Adams announced on social media early this morning.

The cause of the collision was under investigation.

In a scene captured in multiple eyewitness videos, the ship, called the Cuauhtemoc, could be seen traveling swiftly in reverse toward the bridge near the Brooklyn side of the East River. Then, its three masts struck the bridge’s span and snapped, one by one, as the ship kept moving.

Videos showed heavy traffic on the span at the time of the 8:20 p.m. collision. No one on the bridge was reported injured.

The vessel, which was flying a giant Mexican flag and had 277 people aboard, then drifted into a pier on the riverbank as onlookers scrambled away.

Sailors could be seen aloft in the rigging on the damaged masts but, remarkably, no one fell into the water, officials said.

Sydney Neidell and Lily Katz told The Associated Press they were sitting outside to watch the sunset when they saw the vessel strike the bridge.

“We saw someone dangling, and I couldn’t tell if it was just blurry or my eyes, and we were able to zoom in on our phone and there was someone dangling from the harness from the top for like at least like 15 minutes before they were able to rescue them,” Katz said.

Just before the collision, Nick Corso, 23, took his phone out to capture the backdrop of the ship and the bridge against a sunset, Instead, he heard what sounded like the loud snapping of a “big twig.” Several more snaps followed.

People in his vicinity began running and “pandemonium” erupted aboard the ship, he said. He later saw a handful of people dangling from a mast.

“I didn’t know what to think, I was like, is this a movie?” he said.

The Mexican navy said in a post on the social platform X that the Cuauhtemoc was an academy training vessel. It said a total of 22 people were injured, 19 of whom needed medical treatment.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum regretted the loss of the two crew members.

“Our solidarity and support go out to their families,” Sheinbaum said on X.

The Brooklyn Bridge, which opened in 1883, has a nearly 1,600-foot (490-meter) main span supported by two masonry towers. More than 100,000 vehicles and an estimated 32,000 pedestrians cross every day, according to the city’s transportation department. Its walkway is a major tourist attraction.

Traffic was halted after the collision but was allowed to resume after an inspection, city officials said.

It was unclear what caused the ship to veer off course. New York Police Department Special Operations Chief Wilson Aramboles said the ship had just left a Manhattan pier and was supposed to have been headed out to sea, not toward the bridge.

He said an initial report was that the pilot of the ship had lost power due to a mechanical problem, though officials cautioned that information was preliminary. Videos show a tugboat was close to the Cuauhtemoc at the time of the crash.

The Cuauhtemoc — about 297 feet long and 40 feet wide (90.5 meters long and 12 meters wide), according to the Mexican navy — sailed for the first time in 1982.

The vessel’s main mast has a height of 160 feet (48.9 meters), according to the Mexican government.

As midnight approached, the broken boat was moved slowly up the East River, going under and past the Manhattan Bridge, aided by a series of tugboats, before docking at a pier. Onlookers continued to gather on the waterfront to watch the spectacle.

Each year the Cuauhtemoc sets out at the end of classes at the naval military school to finish cadets’ training. This year it left the Mexican port of Acapulco, on the Pacific coast, on April 6, the navy said.

It arrived in New York City on May 13, where visitors were welcome for several days, the Mexican consulate said. The ship was scheduled to visit 22 ports in 15 nations over 254 days, 170 of them at sea.

Tony

Credit. NBC News.

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd has a column this morning entitled, “The Tragedy of Joe Biden.”  Playing off the new book, Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, she reviews Biden’s Shakespearean fall.  Here is the introduction.

“The denouement of Joe Biden is unbearably sad.

The Irishman who could spend 45 minutes answering one question lost his gift of gab. The father who saw two of his children die and two spin into addiction wilted under the ongoing stress, especially when Hunter Biden — “my only living son,” as Joe called him — got tangled in the legal system.

The gregarious pol, who loved chatting up lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, ended up barricaded in his Rehoboth, Del., house with Covid, furious at everyone, proclaiming his oldest friends disloyal naysayers. He was fuming at nearly everyone except Jill, Hunter and the cordon sanitaire of aides who had fueled his delusions that he could be re-elected despite his feeble and often incoherent state at 81.

And, saddest of all, the man known for his decency, empathy, humility and patriotic spirit was poisoned by power, losing the ability to see that, in clinging to his office, he was hurting the party and country he had served for over half a century. And hurting himself, ensuring a shellacking in the history books.

It is the oldest story in tragedy: hubris.”

Poor Joe and poor America for letting his “hubris” allowing someone like Trump back into the White House.

The entire column is below.

Tony

——————————–

May 17, 2025

The New York Times

The Tragedy of Joe Biden

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Washington

The denouement of Joe Biden is unbearably sad.

The Irishman who could spend 45 minutes answering one question lost his gift of gab. The father who saw two of his children die and two spin into addiction wilted under the ongoing stress, especially when Hunter Biden — “my only living son,” as Joe called him — got tangled in the legal system.

The gregarious pol, who loved chatting up lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, ended up barricaded in his Rehoboth, Del., house with Covid, furious at everyone, proclaiming his oldest friends disloyal naysayers. He was fuming at nearly everyone except Jill, Hunter and the cordon sanitaire of aides who had fueled his delusions that he could be re-elected despite his feeble and often incoherent state at 81.

And, saddest of all, the man known for his decency, empathy, humility and patriotic spirit was poisoned by power, losing the ability to see that, in clinging to his office, he was hurting the party and country he had served for over half a century. And hurting himself, ensuring a shellacking in the history books.

It is the oldest story in tragedy: hubris.

If presidents get reduced to their essence, Joe Biden’s is a chip on his shoulder.

He did not want to hear from former President Barack Obama that he should pass the torch to someone younger, so Obama tried to work obliquely through others to ease him out. Biden saw Obama as the one who pushed him aside in 2015 for Hillary Clinton, a fellow member of the elite world of Ivy Leaguers, a world Biden always felt was sniffy toward him.

Obama gave Biden a consolation prize in 2017, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, when Joe wanted a different piece of metal: Excalibur. Biden’s chip grew larger.

By the end, when he was bubble-wrapped in 2024, he trusted only his family and his closest aides. And they protected him with a damaging chimera. Sugarcoated interpretations of polls that were not reflected elsewhere. Extreme efforts to redesign the presidency to adapt to his ever more fragile state. Trashing Robert Hur for telling the truth. Refusing to do the cognitive testing that might have established a diagnosis.

“The public should be informed of the whole truth. Not selective truth,” Dr. Jonathan Reiner, an internist and cardiologist at George Washington University Hospital who has been a White House medical consultant for the last four administrations, told Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson for their compelling new book about Biden’s Shakespearean fall, “Original Sin.”

“Selective truth” sounds disturbingly like “alternative facts,” as Kellyanne Conway called Donald Trump’s modus vivendi. Tapper and Thompson show how Biden and his inner circle created an alternate universe that they tried to sell to the media and the public — the sort of corrosive mirage of unreality that Trump excels at building.

It was painful and infuriating to watch, and it’s painful and infuriating to read about. The nadir, of course, was Biden’s cascade of caesurae at the debate. It was not, as his advisers insisted, merely a bad night. It was a stunning display of a steep mental decline.

Witnesses behind the scenes told me they were dismayed from the start, when Biden showed up less than a half-hour before the debate started. He didn’t want to do a walk-through and test the equipment. He already seemed out of it, even though his large staff contingent seemed — to some CNN folks — oddly sanguine.

It was not just Joe and Jill who wanted to hang on to power, with all the perks and trips and, for Jill, glamorous Vogue covers. It was also their advisers, Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Anita Dunn, Anthony Bernal, Ron Klain and Annie Tomasini. The “palace guard,” as Chuck Schumer derisively dubbed top Biden advisers, slid from sycophancy to solipsism.

The more Biden was out of it, the more his hours and responsibilities were curtailed, the more of a vacuum there was at the top, the more power the advisers had. They treated his alarming deterioration like a political vulnerability, something to be concealed, not a matter of concern to all Americans, something we had a right to know.

It took the Democrats far too long to acknowledge and push back against what Americans could see with their own eyes. Democratic pooh-bahs and lawmakers were silent when they should have been screaming — as the Republicans are now with Trump’s egregious assaults on the Constitution, his cringey grifting, his crazed revenge moves against anyone who has crossed him, and his loony Truth Social screeds attacking Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift.

The Bidens and their allies still try to prove Biden is all there. He has done interviews on “The View” with Jill, and the BBC on his own, acting as though what happened was not a shocking tableau of duplicity.

“President Joe Biden got out of bed the day after the 2024 election convinced that he had been wronged,” Tapper and Thompson write. “The elites, the Democratic officials, the media, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama — they shouldn’t have pushed him out of the race.” The polls said he could have beaten Trump, Biden felt, and his team had always doubted Kamala Harris’s abilities.

But the polls Biden kept counting on never existed — except in Bidenworld’s gauzy alternate universe.

Dear Commons Community,

Moody’s yesterday downgraded the U.S. credit rating, citing rising debt and interest payments that outpace those of similarly rated sovereigns, in a move that marks the end of an era as Moody’s was the last major agency to maintain a triple-A rating for U.S. sovereign debt.

The downgrade to “Aa1” from “Aaa” follows a change in the outlook on the sovereign in 2023 due to wider fiscal deficit and higher interest payments, and comes as the U.S. Congress debates tax and spending plans that could deepen the U.S. fiscal hole.  As reported by Reuters.

“Successive US administrations and Congress have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs,” Moody’s said on Friday, as it changed its outlook on the U.S. to “stable” from “negative.”

Since his return to the White House on January 20, President Donald Trump has pledged to balance the U.S. budget while his Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, has repeatedly said the current administration aims to lower U.S. government funding costs.

The administration’s mix of revenue-generating tariffs and spending cuts through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has highlighted a keen awareness of the risks posed by mounting government debt, which, if unchecked, could trigger a bond market rout and hinder the administration’s ability to pursue its agenda.

“Moody’s downgrade of the United States’ credit rating should be a wake-up call to Trump and Congressional Republicans to end their reckless pursuit of their deficit-busting tax giveaway,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement on Friday. “Sadly, I am not holding my breath.”

Stephen Moore, former senior economic advisor to Trump and an economist at Heritage Foundation, however, called the move “outrageous”. “If a US backed government bond isn’t triple A asset then what is?,” he said.

The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump is pushing lawmakers in the Republican-controlled Congress to pass a bill extending the 2017 tax cuts that were his signature first-term legislative achievement, a move that nonpartisan analysts say will add trillions to the federal government’s $36.2 trillion in debt.

The downgrade came as the tax bill failed to clear a key procedural hurdle on Friday, as hardline Republicans demanding deeper spending cuts blocked the measure in a rare political setback for the Republican president in Congress.

Moody’s said the fiscal proposals under considerations were unlikely to lead to a sustained, multi-year reduction in deficits, and it estimated the federal debt burden would rise to about 134% of GDP by 2035, compared with 98% in 2024.

The cut follows a downgrade by rival Fitch, which in August 2023 also cut the U.S. sovereign rating by one notch, citing expected fiscal deterioration and repeated down-to-the-wire debt ceiling negotiations that threaten the government’s ability to pay its bills.

Fitch was the second major rating agency to strip the United States of its top triple-A rating, after Standard & Poor’s did so after the 2011 debt ceiling crisis.

“The downgrade is a wake-up call for Republicans. They have got to come up with a credible budget agreement that puts the deficit on a downward trajectory,” said Brian Bethune, Economics Professor at Boston College.

MARKET FRAGILITY

Investors use credit ratings to assess the risk profile of companies and governments when they raise financing in debt capital markets. Generally, the lower a borrower’s rating, the higher its financing costs.

“The downgrade of the US credit rating by Moody’s is a continuation of a long trend of fiscal irresponsibility that will eventually lead to higher borrowing costs for the public and private sector in the United States,” said Spencer Hakimian, chief executive at Tolou Capital Management, a hedge fund.

Long-dated Treasury yields – which rise when bond prices decline – could go higher on the back of the downgrade, said Hakimian, barring news on the economic front that could increase safe-haven demand for Treasuries.

The downgrade follows heightened uncertainty in U.S. financial markets as Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on key trade partners has over the past few weeks sparked investor fears of higher price pressures and a sharp economic slowdown.

“This news comes at a time when the markets are very vulnerable and so we are likely to see a reaction,” said Jay Hatfield, CEO at Infrastructure Capital Advisors.

Further evidence that Trump’s policies do damage to the US economy!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Knicks played one of the best games in their history by defeating the Boston Celtics – 119-81- last night at Madison Square Garden to advance to the NBA East Championship Series.  Knick coach Tom Thibodeau deserves a lot of credit for having his team ready to play. All aspects (offense, defense, intangibles) of the Knick game were super.  Six Knicks scored in double figures and Josh Hart had a triple double (double figures is points, rebounds and assists). Hart with a bandage on his head and a big black eye sustained in Game 5 of the series against the Celtics looked and played like a warrior. 

It was also a big night for New York sports as crowds mobbed outside Madison Square Garden to cheer on their team.  Dozens of celebrities and former Knick players were in the front row seats of the game.  The Empire State Building was lit up in Knick blue and orange to honor the team.

Congratulations Knicks!

Below is a summary courtesy of ESPN.

Tony

——————————————————

Knicks oust Celtics as playoff run marches into East finals

Heading into Friday night’s Game 6, it would have been understandable for there to be questions about the New York Knicks‘ ability to shut the door on the Boston Celtics.

After all, the Knicks suffered a 22-point Game 3 defeat after a pair of improbable 20-point road comeback victories, with captain Jalen Brunson acknowledging New York might have gone into that contest “subconsciously satisfied” because of its unexpected series lead. Similarly, when the Knicks took a 3-1 series lead into Boston for Game 5 after Jayson Tatum‘s Achilles rupture, they faltered badly in that closeout opportunity and were routed by the short-handed Celtics.

It all raised the possibility of a high-pressure Game 7 in Boston if the Knicks couldn’t handle business Friday night.

But New York emphatically quashed that question — and the defending champion Celtics’ slim chances of a repeat — in a thorough 119-81 victory to win the second-round series at Madison Square Garden and advance to the Eastern Conference finals for the first time since 2000. The Knicks will host the Indiana Pacers, who knocked them out of last year’s playoffs in Game 7 of the conference semifinals, starting Wednesday night in New York.

Knicks fans, euphoric over the win, poured into the streets surrounding the Garden, with some climbing light poles and standing on top of taxi stands along Eighth Avenue.

After a 25-point shellacking in Game 5, the Knicks’ 38-point win marked the largest margin of victory in franchise postseason history.

“We watched the film, and we were kind of disgusted with our communication, our effort and our sense of urgency,” Josh Hart said of Gams 5 after finishing Game 6 with 24 points, 11 rebounds and 11 assists. “That was something we knew we had to fix.”

Coach Tom Thibodeau and multiple players repeatedly said New York had yet to piece together a playoff game with solid defensive effort, focus and ball movement for 48 minutes. But the Knicks brought it all Friday.

Asked if this was his team’s best postseason showing, Thibodeau thought for a moment before answering.

“Probably,” he said. “I thought from start to finish that we were terrific.”

No stretch of the game stood out more than the second quarter, when New York outscored Boston 38-17 and took a 27-point lead at the half.

In one of the defining plays of that quarter, Celtics guard Derrick White stepped in front of a pass from OG Anunoby and dribbled to the other end of the floor for what figured to be a layup. But Knicks guard Deuce McBride chased down White and pinned his shot against the backboard, sending the Garden into a frenzy.

With the crowd still on its feet because of the block, Hart grabbed the loose ball and began a fast break, eventually hitting a floater while getting fouled by Boston’s Jrue Holiday. Hart hit the free throw to cap the five-point swing for the Knicks in a game where the Celtics — without Tatum, and with Kristaps Porzingis again struggling physically — had no margin for error.

That didn’t stop Jaylen Brown and his Boston teammates from making miscues. The Celtics had six turnovers in the second quarter — matching their six field goals during that period — and gave up 15 offensive rebounds in the game. Brown, Boston’s high scorer with 20 points, fouled out late in the third quarter and was serenaded to Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road Jack” by the Garden crowd as he walked to the Celtics’ bench to end his season.

Four New York players — Brunson, Hart, Anunoby and Karl-Anthony Towns — finished with at least 20 points.

During the team’s postgame news conference, four of the starters answered questions together — perhaps to signify the collective win.

They were asked whether they understood the joy they injected into the city, and if they were aware of how long it had been since the club had gotten this far. And after a while, when the players continued to answer the questions in a straightforward manner, they fielded one about whether it was too soon for them to show a sense of accomplishment.

“I just think there’s still more to go. We’re not done,” said forward Mikal Bridges, who joined the team after being traded from the Brooklyn Nets during the offseason. “We played hard and handled business, but the season’s not over yet.”

Dear Commons Community,

Jeffrey Mervis, policy analyst for Science, has an article this morning on how the Trump administration is trying to radically change the National Science Foundation (NSF). Here is an excerpt.  

“Smaller. Cheaper. More constrained. That appears to be the vision for the National Science Foundation (NSF) that is emerging from an unprecedented series of changes by President Donald Trump’s administration, including moves last week to restructure the organization and transform how it awards grants.

The changes would result in a shrunken NSF that focuses on a handful of fields seen as economic drivers rather than supporting basic research across all disciplines. Its process of choosing what to fund would no longer rely heavily on scientists on leave from their universities, bringing with them fresh ideas on how to invest in cutting-edge science. And NSF would care less about finding the “missing millions,” NSF’s phrase for increasing the diversity of the country’s scientific workforce. 

Trump is a long way from achieving that vision for the country’s second largest funder of science. But last week’s restructuring comes on top of previous steps that have halted new awards, terminated existing grants, and reduced the agency’s 1700-person staff. The administration has also called for slashing NSF’s overhead payments to universities, and shrinking its $9 billion budget by more than half.

NSF officials have been largely silent about the larger significance of the changes. And its presidentially appointed oversight body, the National Science Board, so far has not commented on any of them, although one member, Alondra Nelson, resigned this week. And though individual scientists have expressed alarm about the turmoil at the agency, the sharpest public criticism to date has come from a handful of Democrats in Congress, who think the changes are misguided and will harm NSF and the U.S. research enterprise.

“Mere months ago, each of these individual decisions would have been an unprecedented shock,” a dozen members of the science committee in the House of Representatives that oversees NSF wrote in an 8 May letter to Brian Stone. He has been NSF’s acting director since the abrupt resignation last month of Sethuraman “Panch” Panchanathan, a Trump appointee. “President Trump has made this chaos and destruction commonplace. However, we refuse to accept this as our new reality.”

A 9 May memo obtained by Science from NSF’s chief management officer, Micah Cheatham, describes some of the changes. Science has learned about others from sources inside and outside the agency who requested anonymity because they feared reprisal.

One major change would abolish NSF’s current 37 divisions, spread across eight directorates, which distribute funding to researchers in a wide range of fields, from the social sciences to physics. Those divisions would be replaced by clusters that would focus on five areas: artificial intelligence, quantum information science, biotechnology, nuclear energy, and translational science.

Last week, NSF preemptively eliminated one of those divisions within the education directorate, on equity for excellence in science, technology, engineering, and math, and fired its entire staff, believed to number between 15 and 20. However, on 12 May NSF rescinded both moves after a federal judge temporarily blocked the White House from laying off workers at several agencies in a suit brought by a labor union representing federal employees.

“The focus on a few areas is gravely concerning,” says Suzanne Ortega, who leads the Council of Graduate Schools. “The basic, curiosity-driven science that has paid off so handsomely for the country over the decades doesn’t necessarily start in one of those fields. And the idea that the insights of social scientists aren’t important in understanding today’s world and our political adversaries is just ridiculous.”

A second change dramatically reduces NSF’s roster of employees on loan from universities for stints of 1 to 4 years. The number of such positions, called rotators, would drop by 81%, from 368 to 70. The surviving positions would be distributed across the five priority areas and filled by existing rotators “to the maximum extent possible,” Cheatham said in his memo.

A third major disruption to the status quo is the termination of existing grants. In the past month, NSF has pulled the plug on more than 1400 awards, amounting to a loss of more than $1 billion in promised funding.

The education directorate has been hit hardest. The terminations include grants from several programs mandated by Congress, notably the 34-year-old Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation and the Eddie Bernice Johnson INCLUDES Initiative to broaden participation in science and engineering, which began in 2011. The Trump administration apparently saw both programs as violating a presidential directive on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that bans funding for any research that favors one demographic group or excludes participation by some groups.

The grant terminations have disproportionately affected principal investigators (PIs) from groups traditionally underrepresented in science—notably women, racial and ethnic minorities, and those with disabilities—according to data collected by NSF. Women are PIs on 58% of the canceled grants, although they are PIs on only 34% of all active NSF grants.

Similarly, Blacks are PIs on 17% of the terminated grants, although they make only 4% of the total pool. Hispanic PIs and those with disabilities were twice as likely to lose a grant.

All the recent moves are consistent with Trump’s request to Congress this month to shrink the agency’s budget by 55%, to $4 billion, for the 2026 fiscal year that starts on 1 October. So is NSF’s plan to reduce by 60% the number of administrators classified as senior executive service (SES) employees, who earn salaries much higher than the regular federal pay scale. NSF’s current roster of 143 SES positions will plunge to 59, according to Cheatham’s memo, a number it says is commensurate with NSF’s “new organizational structure and proposed future budgets.”

NSF’s decision to abolish its divisions also appears to be part of a larger restructuring of the agency’s grantmaking process that would add a new layer of review. Currently, for all but the biggest grants, the final step in the award process is for a division director to concur with a recommendation made by a program officer, based in part on input from review panels. (The NSF system differs from the one used by the National Institutes of Health, where advisory councils for each institute have the final say and proposals are typically funded based on scores assigned by a review panel.)

Last week, NSF staff were briefed on the new process for vetting proposals. Those that are highly recommended, but modestly out of step with the DEI directive, could gain final approval after tweaks, according to a slide presentation obtained by Science. But proposals seen as having more serious flaws would be declined without additional comment. And even proposals that get a green light from a division director would be screened by a new body, whose membership has not been determined.

Science advocates fear the additional review could be a mechanism to force NSF to fund only research that suits the ideological bent of the Trump administration. And Democrats on the House science committee suspect NSF is already feeling that pressure. “So, who is in charge here?” they wrote to Stone. “How much is [the White House budget office] dictating decisions based on hard-right political ideology and not scientific or research expertise?” And in a reference to billionaire Elon Musk and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency, the legislators ask pointedly: “How far does DOGE’s influence reach?”

The legislators could soon get a chance to ask those questions in person if, as has long been the tradition, House and Senate panels summon NSF officials to testify on the administration’s budget request.”

This is a sad state of affairs for science research in our country.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Doctors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia applied a personalized treatment to cure a baby’s genetic disorder, the first time such a procedure has ever been used. , It opens the door to similar therapies for others. Here is an excerpt that appeared in The New York Times. (Baby Is Healed With World’s First Personalized Gene-Editing Treatment)

“Something was very wrong with Kyle and Nicole Muldoon’s baby.

The doctors speculated. Maybe it was meningitis? Maybe sepsis?

They got an answer when KJ was only a week old. He had a rare genetic disorder, CPS1 deficiency, that affects just one in 1.3 million babies. If he survived, he would have severe mental and developmental delays and would eventually need a liver transplant. But half of all babies with the disorder die in the first week of life.

Doctors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia offered the Muldoons comfort care for their baby, a chance to forgo aggressive treatments in the face of a grim prognosis.

“We loved him, and we didn’t want him to be suffering,” Ms. Muldoon said. But she and her husband decided to give KJ a chance.

Instead, KJ has made medical history. The baby, now 9 ½ months old, became the first patient of any age to have a custom gene-editing treatment, according to his doctors. He received an infusion made just for him and designed to fix his precise mutation.

The investigators who led the effort to save KJ are presenting their work on Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy, and are also publishing it in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The implications of the treatment go far beyond treating KJ, said Dr. Peter Marks, who was the Food and Drug Administration official overseeing gene-therapy regulation until he recently resigned over disagreements with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services. More than 30 million people in the United States have one of more than 7,000 rare genetic diseases. Most are so rare that no company is willing to spend years developing a gene therapy that so few people would need.

But KJ’s treatment — which built on decades of federally funded research — offers a new path for companies to develop personalized treatments without going through years of expensive development and testing.

Illnesses like KJ’s are the result of a single mutation — an incorrect DNA letter among the three billion in the human genome. Correcting it requires pinpoint targeting in an approach called base editing.

To accomplish that feat, the treatment is wrapped in fatty lipid molecules to protect it from degradation in the blood on its way to the liver, where the edit will be made. Inside the lipids are instructions that command the cells to produce an enzyme that edits the gene. They also carry a molecular GPS — CRISPR — which was altered to crawl along a person’s DNA until it finds the exact DNA letter that needs to be changed.

While KJ’s treatment was customized so CRISPR found just his mutation, the same sort of method could be adapted and used over and over again to fix mutations in other places on a person’s DNA. Only the CRISPR instructions leading the editor to the spot on the DNA with the mutation would need to be changed. Treatments would be cheaper, “by an order of magnitude at least,” Dr. Marks said.

The method, said Dr. Marks, who wrote an editorial accompanying the research paper, “is, to me, one of the most potentially transformational technologies out there.”

This sounds like an incredible breakthrough.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Below is a review of a new book entitled Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, that depicts Joe Biden as out of touch and whose family and aides enabled his campaign for a second term as president.  According to the review, the book is “a damning, step-by-step account of how the people closest to a stubborn, aging president enabled his quixotic resolve to run for a second term. The authors trace the deluge of trouble that flowed from Biden’s original sin: the sidelining of Vice President Kamala Harris; the attacks on journalists (like Thompson) who deigned to report on worries about Biden’s apparent fatigue and mental state; an American public lacking clear communication from the president and left to twist in the wind. “It was an abomination,” one source told the authors. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.”

It is a sad indictment not just of Biden and his enablers but of the entire Democratic Party leadership for failing to recognize and do something to protect the country.

The book will be available for purchase next week.

Tony

———————————————————————————————

The New York Times

A Damning Portrait of an Enfeebled Biden Protected by His Inner Circle

By Jennifer Szalai

Published May 13, 2025Updated May 14, 2025

ORIGINAL SIN: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson

In Christian theology, original sin begins with Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. But Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin” chronicles a different fall from grace. The cover image is a black-and-white portrait of Joe Biden with a pair of hands clamped over his eyes. The biblical story is about the danger of innocent curiosity; the story in this new book is about the danger of willful ignorance.

“The original sin of Election 2024 was Biden’s decision to run for re-election — followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment,” Tapper and Thompson write. On the evening of June 27, 2024, Democratic voters watched the first presidential debate in amazement and horror: A red-faced Donald Trump let loose a barrage of audacious whoppers while Biden, slack-jawed and pale, struggled to string together intelligible rebuttals.

Trump’s debate performance was of a piece with his rallies, a jumble of nonsensical digressions and wild claims. But for many Americans, the extent of Biden’s frailty came as a shock. Most of the president’s appearances had, by then, become tightly controlled affairs. For at least a year and a half, Biden’s aides had been scrambling to accommodate an octogenarian president who was becoming increasingly exhausted and confused. According to “Original Sin,” which makes pointed use of the word “cover-up” in the subtitle, alarmed donors and pols who sought the lowdown on Biden’s cognitive state were kept in the dark. Others had daily evidence of Biden’s decline but didn’t want to believe it.

Tapper is an anchor for CNN (and also served as a moderator for the presidential debate); Thompson is a national political correspondent for Axios. In an authors’ note, they explain that they interviewed approximately 200 people, including high-level insiders, “some of whom may never acknowledge speaking to us but all of whom know the truth within these pages.”

The result is a damning, step-by-step account of how the people closest to a stubborn, aging president enabled his quixotic resolve to run for a second term. The authors trace the deluge of trouble that flowed from Biden’s original sin: the sidelining of Vice President Kamala Harris; the attacks on journalists (like Thompson) who deigned to report on worries about Biden’s apparent fatigue and mental state; an American public lacking clear communication from the president and left to twist in the wind. “It was an abomination,” one source told the authors. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.”

This blistering charge is attributed to “a prominent Democratic strategist” who also “publicly defended Biden.” In “Original Sin,” the reasons given for saying nice things in public about the president are legion. Some Democrats, especially those who didn’t see the president that often, relied on his surrogates for reassurance about his condition (“He’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine”); others were wary of giving ammunition to the Trump campaign, warning that he was an existential threat to the country. Tapper and Thompson are scornful of such rationales: “For those who tried to justify the behavior described here because of the threat of a second Trump term, those fears should have shocked them into reality, not away from it.”

Biden announced that he would be running for re-election in April 2023; he had turned 80 the previous November and was already the oldest president in history. Over his long life, he had been through a lot: the death of his wife and daughter in a car accident in 1972; two aneurysm surgeries in 1988; the death of his son Beau in 2015; the seemingly endless trouble kicked up by his son Hunter, a recovering addict whose legal troubles included being under investigation by the Justice Department.

Yet Biden always bounced back. The fact that he defied the naysayers and beat the odds to win the 2020 election was, for him and his close circle of family and advisers, a sign that he was special — and persistently underestimated. They maintained “a near-religious faith in Biden’s ability to rise again,” the authors write. “And as with any theology, skepticism was forbidden.”

In 2019, when Biden announced a presidential run, he was 76. It was still a time when “Good Biden was far more present than Old Biden.” By 2023, the authors suggest, that ratio had reversed. Some of his decline was hard to distinguish from what they call “the Bidenness,” which included his longtime reputation for gaffes, meandering stories and a habit of forgetting staffers’ names.

But people who didn’t see Biden on a daily basis were increasingly taken aback when they finally laid eyes on him. They would remark on how his once booming voice had become a whisper, how his confident stride had become a shuffle. An aghast congressman recalls being reminded of his father, who had Alzheimer’s; another thought of his father, too, who died of Parkinson’s.

The people closest to Biden landed on some techniques to handle (or disguise) what was happening: restricting urgent business to the hours between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.; instructing his writers to keep his speeches brief so that he didn’t have to spend too much time on his feet; having him use the short stairs to Air Force One. When making videos, his aides sometimes filmed “in slow motion to blur the reality of how slowly he actually walked.” By late 2023, his staff was pushing as much of his schedule as they could to midday.

When White House aides weren’t practicing fastidious stage management, they seemed to be sticking their heads in the sand. According to a forthcoming book by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf, Biden’s aides decided against his taking a cognitive test in early 2024. Tapper and Thompson quote a physician who served as a consultant to the White House Medical Unit for the last four administrations and expressed his dismay at the idea of withholding such information: “If there’s no diagnosis, there’s nothing to disclose.”

Just how much of this rigmarole was desperate rationalization versus deliberate scheming is never entirely clear. Tapper and Thompson identify two main groups that closed ranks around Biden: his family and a group of close aides known internally as “the Politburo” that included his longtime strategist Mike Donilon and his counselor Steve Ricchetti. The family encouraged Biden’s view of himself as a historic figure. The Politburo was too politically hard-nosed for that. Instead, its members pointed to Biden’s record in office and the competent people around him. The napping, the whispering, the shuffling — all that stuff had merely to do with the “performative” parts of the job.

Tapper and Thompson vehemently disagree. They offer a gracious portrait of Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified materials and in his February 2024 report famously described the president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden and his team were incensed and tried “to slime Hur as an unprofessional right-wing hack,” but the authors defend his notorious line. They emphasize that it is incumbent upon a special counsel to spell out how the subject of an investigation would probably appear to a jury — and that what Hur wrote about Biden was true.

Of course, in an election like 2024, when the differences between the candidates are so stark and the stakes are so high, nearly every scrap of information gets viewed through the lens of “Will it help my team win?” Even competently administered policy could not compensate for a woeful inability to communicate with the American people. In a democracy, this is a tragedy — especially if you believe, as Biden did, that a second Trump term would put the very existence of that democracy in peril.

Earlier this month, in what looks like an attempt to get ahead of the book’s publication, Biden went on “The View” to say that he accepts some responsibility for Trump’s victory: “I was in charge.” But he was dismissive about reports of any cognitive decline. In “Original Sin,” Tapper and Thompson describe him waking up the morning after the 2024 election thinking that if only he had stayed in the race, he would have won. “That’s what the polls suggested, he would say again and again,” the authors write. There was just one problem with his reasoning: “His pollsters told us that no such polls existed.”

Dear Commons Community,

This cartoon by Tom Tomorrow says a lot about the state of our country.  

It was sent to me by my colleague, Patsy Moskal from the University of Central Florida.

Tony