New York Wants to Fine Nuns for Refusing to Talk Patients Into Dying
Plus: Trump's Saudi nuclear deal contradicts his own "no enrichment" line, and the press hedges an "Allahu Akbar" stabbing.
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This will be my first weekend in four weekends without any guests in the house. So if you need me don’t bother I am busy doing nothing. ;)
Let’s get into the news!
In Today’s Read
New York’s new law orders nuns to refer dying patients for assisted suicide. Four orders are suing. California left them an out. New York didn’t.
Trump signed a Saudi nuclear deal and posted “no enrichment.” The text reportedly says otherwise. Read the paper, not the tweet.
A man yelled “Allahu Akbar” and stabbed two men, one Jewish. The press reached for “possible” and “mental health.” Run the test.
In the Rundown: oil past $100, the House votes to leave Iran, a judge blocks the work-permit purge, 130 hours of ICE bodycam, Missouri undoes its abortion ban, Trump’s name in the Epstein files, and a jobs number that isn’t what it looks like.
New York Wants to Fine Nuns for Refusing to Talk Patients Into Dying
The Story.
Four orders of Catholic nuns and a group of Catholic health providers sued New York in federal court to block the Medical Aid in Dying Act before it takes effect August 5. Who are these groups: the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm, the Little Sisters of the Poor, the Diocese of Rockville Centre, and Catholic Health. Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the law in February. It lets an adult with a prognosis of six months or less request lethal medication, and it requires health providers to tell qualifying patients the option exists and to refer them for it. Refuse, and you’re looking at fines, professional sanctions, and criminal exposure. The case is Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm v. James, brought by the religious-liberty firm Becket.
New York says no provider is required to participate in assisted suicide, which is what is framed as a full conscience protection. It isn't. The exemption covers exactly one step, the last one. A physician doesn't have to write the lethal prescription or hand over the drugs. Everything before that final act stays mandatory. Under the law a provider still has to tell a qualifying patient assisted suicide is a legal option, counsel them on it, help work through whether they meet the eligibility rules, and refer or transfer them to someone who will finish it. A provider who declines the prescription still has to arrange the transfer. Becket's complaint puts it flat: individual physicians are exempt "only from the very last step."
The religious home-hospice carve-out is just as thin. It lets an order decline to offer the program, but it can't stop a home-hospice patient from accessing it, and Becket says the sisters are still required to build and run an assisted-suicide information system inside their own home. So the honest description isn't "nuns can opt out." It's "nuns must inform, counsel, qualify, and refer, and are excused only from pushing the plunger."
The right’s read. Fox, Townhall, PJ Media, and LifeNews ran it straight as a religious-liberty fight the state picked on purpose. The framing keeps the women front and center: sisters who minister to the dying, ordered to participate in a death their faith calls a grave wrong. The Post Millennial put the coercion in the headline, a law “forcing them to assist patients in getting gov-assisted suicide.”
The left’s read. Mostly a shrug. When the mainstream covered the bill back in February, it was a compassion win, terminally ill New Yorkers finally getting autonomy over their own deaths, with the religious objection filed under footnote. The lawsuit itself has drawn little straight coverage. Nobody on that side is walking readers through the inform-and-refer mandate, because the mandate is the part that makes “it’s just an option” stop being true.
What both sides skip. The width of the exemption. New York’s opt-out covers religious home-hospice and stops there. California, the state everybody points to as proof these laws work fine, wrote its End of Life Option Act so that a provider can decline to participate entirely if it conflicts with their conscience. Same policy, two very different conscience protections. So when comparisons are made to California they are leaving out one very important detail.
Start with what the exemption actually exempts. New York keeps saying nobody’s forced to participate. True only if “participate” means one thing: writing the final prescription. That is the only carve-out. A nun who has spent forty years at the bedside of the dying still has to tell a qualifying patient the lethal option exists, counsel them on it, confirm they’re eligible, and route them to a doctor who’ll sign for the drugs. In other words they are compelled to assist a suicide.
And New York had an the example but chose to violate religious freedom. California’s End of Life Option Act lets a religious provider decline to take part at all. But Albany to write the narrow version instead, the one that reaches past religious freedom and reaches al the way to compelled speech.
Because that’s the second violation here that I see few talking about. This isn’t only a free-exercise of religion problem. It’s compelled speech. The state is ordering these women to deliver a message they reject, that ending your life is a valid medical choice and here’s how to get it done, inside their own hospice, in their own voice, to a patient who trusts them. Government doesn’t get to script what you profess. Justice Robert Jackson settled that in 1943 in Barnette: no official, high or petty, can force a citizen to confess a belief that isn’t theirs. Making a Catholic sister recite the availability of assisted suicide to a dying person is that confession, forced on to her under threat of a fine.
We’ve run this exact play before. In 2018, California passed a law forcing pro-life pregnancy centers to post notices advertising the state’s free abortions and to hand patients a referral number. NIFLA v. Becerra. The Supreme Court struck it down as compelled speech, because the government cannot draft objectors into promoting the thing they exist to oppose. New York copied California’s homework and swapped abortion for assisted suicide. Same coercion, new lethal service.
The fact is that the left treats religious freedom as an obstacle, a loophole they think Christians hide behind to dodge policy. So they reach for “separation of church and state,” a phrase that appears nowhere in the Constitution, and stretch it to mean faith has to stay private, walled off from any room the government funds or touches. That’s backwards. The Establishment Clause stops the state from imposing a religion on you. It was never a gag order on the believer. What this law does is take one creed, that personal autonomy is absolute and the body answers to no one, and forces it onto people who believe the opposite, in the homes they run for the dying. That is an establishment of religion. The religion of secularism, and it wants the nuns to say its grace.
Here’s the good news. They keep losing this fight. The Little Sisters of the Poor are on this very complaint, and they already beat the Obama administration’s contraceptive mandate at the Supreme Court, 7-2, after Hobby Lobby cleared the path in 2014. 303 Creative, 2023: the state couldn’t force a web designer to build messages she rejected. Fulton, 2021: Philadelphia couldn’t force a Catholic agency to place children against its faith. Every time the government tries to conscript conscience, the Court says no. New York knows the record. It passed the law anyway, betting the fines land before the injunction does.
Watch whether the court blocks the law before August 5, because if it doesn’t, the penalties start on day one. Watch whether Attorney General Letitia James defends the narrow opt-out on the merits or quietly moves to widen it once NIFLA lands in the briefs. And watch whether one outlet that called this “compassion” in February will print the sentence that orders a nun to advertise a lethal prescription.
Everyone's Spinning the Saudi Nuclear Deal. Here's What It Actually Says.
The Story.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman signed a “123 agreement” for civilian nuclear cooperation, a 30-year pact worth tens of billions to U.S. firms like Westinghouse. Trump posted that Saudi Arabia will not enrich uranium under the deal and that the final terms hinge on Riyadh joining the Abraham Accords and normalizing with Israel.
Allow me to clarify what is happening because everyone keeps leaving out key details. The deal doesn’t hand Saudi Arabia the right to enrich, and it doesn’t flatly ban it either. It sets up a two-year joint U.S.-Saudi study to decide whether enrichment on Saudi soil is warranted and commercially viable. If Washington says no at the end of it, the Saudis are barred from enriching on their own or with any other foreign partner for ten years. Riyadh did refuse the “gold standard,” the 2009 UAE deal where the Emirates gave up enrichment for good, and Congress can still review or block the agreement.
Quick context on the “123 agreement.” It’s the section of the Atomic Energy Act that governs how the U.S. shares civilian nuclear technology abroad. The gold-standard version, which the UAE accepted in 2009, bars the partner from enriching uranium or reprocessing plutonium, the two roads to a weapon. Saudi Arabia wouldn’t sign that. What it signed instead kicks the enrichment question to that joint study, with a U.S. veto on the back end and a ten-year lockout if we walk. So “no enrichment” and “the Saudis get to enrich” are both wrong. The accurate version is “not now, maybe later, and only if Washington signs off.”
The right’s read. A jobs-and-oversight win, and a bargaining chip on Iran. Rubio’s pitch: the deal keeps the Saudis building with American firms instead of “competitors,” meaning Russia or China, who would sell the same technology with none of the guardrails. Tie it to the Abraham Accords and you might pull the biggest Arab state into normalizing with Israel, which is the real prize.
The left’s read. Proliferation risk and hypocrisy. Sen. Ed Markey did the heavy lifting, charging the administration is “allowing Saudi Arabia, a belligerent and authoritarian nation, to develop nuclear weapons technologies while starting a war with Iran under the guise of preventing an Iranian nuclear bomb.” PBS and the JTA led with the enrichment “loophole” and mostly skipped the two-year study and the U.S. veto that gates it.
What both sides skip. The gates. The left reports an open door and forgets it locks from Washington’s side. The right waves “no enrichment” and skips that Saudi refused the gold standard and kept the study door open at all. The real terms are more restrictive than the left says and less airtight than the right says. The answer is in the text, and everyone is picking and choosing.
Read the deal before you panic about it, because the version going around isn’t the one on paper. The left is telling you Saudi Arabia just got a green light to enrich uranium on its own soil. It didn’t. What it got is a two-year joint study, and if that study doesn’t satisfy the United States, the Saudis are locked out of enrichment, alone or with any other partner, for a decade. That’s not a blank check. It’s a maybe with an American veto stapled to it.
A detail that the right glosses over is that Saudi Arabia wouldn’t accept the gold standard, the no-enrichment pledge the UAE signed in 2009. But it isn’t the alarm the left is sounding, because 2026 barely resembles the world that produced that pledge.
When they wave the comparison at you, “the Emirates gave it up, why won’t the Saudis,” start with who’s holding the pen. Back in 2009 the kingdom was run by King Abdullah, an old-guard, go-slow monarch. He died in 2015. The man running it now is Mohammed bin Salman, who wasn’t in charge of anything in 2009 and didn’t become crown prince until 2017. And MBS said it flat out, on CBS in 2018: if Iran builds a bomb, Saudi Arabia will “follow suit as soon as possible.” The 2009 benchmark predates the man who runs Saudi Arabia now, and it predates the war with Iran now underway. His nuclear hedge against Tehran isn't hypothetical anymore. Holding it up as the standard ignores the difference 17 years makes when the leadership and the threat both flipped underneath it. Different country, different decade. Not a fair comparison.
And MBS being on tape promising to match Iran is the strongest reason to keep this program on an American leash, not proof the deal is reckless. “Left ajar under U.S. supervision” and “the Saudis are enriching” are not the same sentence, and only one of them is true today.
Here’s what the proliferation panic buries. The alternative isn’t a Saudi Arabia with no nuclear program. Riyadh has told anyone who’ll listen it’s building one, and if America won’t help, Russia’s Rosatom and China’s CNNC are already in the lobby with a pen and zero interest in inspections or a ten-year lockout. Better the thing gets built by American firms, under an American 123 agreement, with Congress able to look, than by Moscow or Beijing on terms nobody outside the room ever sees.
And the Abraham Accords piece is the actual point. Getting Saudi Arabia to normalize with Israel is the biggest prize in Middle East diplomacy, period. This is the custodian of Mecca and Medina and the heavyweight of the Arab world. Its recognition pulls the other holdouts toward Israel and isolates Iran, which has spent decades funding Hezbollah and the Houthis to keep exactly this peace from happening. Normalization also opens the door to integrated air and missile defense between Israel and the Gulf, the precise shield you’d want with Iranian missiles and Houthi drones already in the air. The Houthi strikes on Saudi tankers this week (see the Rundown) are the argument for it, not against it. Using civilian nuclear cooperation to get there is a bargaining chip, not recklessness.
So where do I land. The deal is a reasonable bet as long as the guardrails hold, and the guardrails are real: an American veto on enrichment and a ten-year bar if we walk, with Congress able to block the whole thing. The thing to actually watch isn’t Markey’s press release. It’s whether that two-year study turns into a rubber stamp, and whether Saudi Arabia ever signs the normalization the deal is built to buy.
Watch whether the administration hands Congress the full 123 text or keeps summarizing it for us. Watch whether Riyadh takes one concrete step toward recognizing Israel or just pockets the nuclear cooperation and stalls. And watch who gets named to that two-year enrichment study, because that panel, not a Truth Social post, is what decides whether “no enrichment” holds.
A quick, honest ask.
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A Man Yelled “Allahu Akbar,” Stabbed Two New Yorkers, and the Press Reached for “Possible”
The Story.
Two men were stabbed in broad daylight on the Upper West Side Thursday afternoon. Around 1:31 p.m., a 57-year-old Asian man was stabbed in the torso near West 84th and Central Park West. Minutes later, a 50-year-old Jewish man was stabbed in the chest and abdomen near West 86th. Witnesses and both victims said the attacker yelled “Allahu Akbar” during the attacks. Police arrested 51-year-old Raul Morales. Both victims were hospitalized in stable condition and are expected to survive. The NYPD said Morales has no known mental-health history with the department, but that mental health “may have been a factor,” and it’s evaluating the stabbings as possible hate crimes. The mean are alive and are being treated at Mount Sinai Morningside.
The right’s read. Fox, RedState, Newsweek, and the Times of Israel led with the shout and the target: an antisemitic attack the city is soft-pedaling, the Jewish victim and “Allahu Akbar” up top, not buried. Fox ran a second angle hard, that Mayor Zohran Mamdani was “slow to respond” while Hochul and other officials condemned it faster, and Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar accused Mamdani of helping create “a climate in which Jews are targeted.”
The left’s read. CNN, ABC, and NY1 led with “unprovoked” and “possible hate crime,” foregrounding the mental-health line and the lack of any known link between the suspect and either victim. The randomness and the first victim’s ethnicity got used to suggest the motive is unsettled, not clearly antisemitic.
What both sides skip. Each side keeps the fact that flatters it and drops the other. The right leans on “Allahu Akbar” and the Jewish victim and skips that the first man stabbed was a 57-year-old Asian man with no obvious connection to the second, which muddies a clean terror story. The left leans on “mental health may have been a factor” and “possible,” technically accurate and also the exact hedge that never seems to surface when a suspect’s politics cut the other way. Nobody holds both facts at once.
A man shouts “Allahu Akbar,” stabs two people including a Jewish man, and the wire copy reaches for “possible hate crime” and “mental health may have been a factor.” Now change the shout to something a MAGA hat might yell and count how many outlets hold the word “possible” that gently. You already know. Don’t you love selective reporting?
But, let’s be honest. The motive isn’t airtight. I mean the “Allahu Akbar” gives us a sense of motive, my sense is he is not a fan of America, but the question is was it anti-semitism? The first victim was a 57-year-old Asian man with no clear tie to the second a block away, and that scrambles the tidy “targeted the Jew” version. If you’re going to demand the press hold its hedges, hold your own. A man screaming a jihadist phrase mid-stabbing and a messy victim pattern are both true at the same time, and the story is that tension, not whichever half you find more convenient.
But the media reflex was“mental health may have been a factor” before any diagnosis, before any known psychiatric history, on the same day the NYPD said Morales had no mental-health record with them. That instinct to reach for “troubled loner” the second the phrase is Arabic, while other attacks get called terror before the blood dries, is a pattern, and pretending it isn’t insults everyone who can read a chyron.
And then there’s City Hall. Mamdani’s statement quoted the “Allahu Akbar” detail and pivoted to praising NYPD’s fast arrest, careful not to name what the attack looked like. Gidion Sa’ar, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the State of Israel, didn’t bother with careful. He called out the climate outright. “This violence did not happen in a vacuum. Months of incitement against the Jewish state from Mamdani have helped create a climate in which Jews are targeted.”
Watch whether the Manhattan DA charges this as a hate crime or lets it ride as assault. Watch how the wires headline it 72 hours from now, once “Allahu Akbar” has had time to fade from the lede. And watch whether Mamdani says the word “antisemitism” without a reporter dragging it out of him first.
Oil blew past $100 a barrel for the first time since May. Houthi rebels struck two Saudi oil tankers, the Encelia and the Layla, in the Red Sea on Thursday, setting the Encelia on fire (crew safe) to enforce a self-declared blockade of Saudi ports. Brent jumped more than 6% to roughly $101, up over 30% on the month, with the Strait of Hormuz already choked. Goldman Sachs says $120 by the fourth quarter if the disruptions hold.
The House voted to pull U.S. forces out of the Iran fight. The Senate wouldn’t. On Thursday the House passed H.Con.Res.89, directing the president to remove American forces from hostilities with Iran, 214 to 208. Hours later the Senate rejected Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s parallel war-powers resolution 47 to 49, with Susan Collins voting yes and John Fetterman voting no. Two chambers, two answers. Watch Sen. Sheehy speech on Iran.
A judge temporarily paused the penalties for skipping the new asylum fee. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton on Monday blocked USCIS from terminating work permits or rejecting asylum applications over nonpayment of a fee created by the 2025 reconciliation law, while leaving the fee itself in place. The suit, from Democracy Forward, argues USCIS imposed those penalties without the notice-and-comment rulemaking the law requires, a procedural claim, not a ruling that the policy is illegal. He decides on a longer pause by August 5.
Vermont Public reviewed 130 hours of bodycam from a March ICE raid that went sideways. Agents in South Burlington were after Deyvi Daniel Corona-Sanchez, a Mexican national deported in 2022 who illegally reentered, but ICE admitted it tailed the wrong man and detained three people who weren’t on any warrant, all since released. The footage shows agents using flash-bangs and chemical spray on the crowd that surrounded the building, and local Vermont officers openly skeptical of ICE’s conduct in real time. National right-side coverage has been close to nonexistent.
A Missouri court struck down the state’s abortion ban, and voters could reinstate it in November. On June 18 a Jackson County judge ruled the restrictions violated the Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment that Missouri voters passed in 2024, the first time a state has undone a total post-Dobbs ban through the courts. Access is back for now, but a measure on the November 2026 ballot would ban abortion again except for life, rape, or incest up to 12 weeks. Same week, South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden signed a law making it a felony to sell or distribute abortion pills.
A judge found the DOJ likely broke the Epstein transparency law by withholding files that mention Trump. After releasing 3.5 million pages and holding back 2.5 million, the department withheld dozens of Trump-mentioning items, including, per MS NOW (the former MSNBC), FBI interview memos carrying an accuser’s unproven abuse allegation against Trump. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered DOJ to turn the documents over or justify the redactions, finding it likely violated the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is demanding an all-Senate briefing.
The unemployment rate dropped to 4.2%, and it’s not the good kind of drop. The rate hit its lowest in years in June, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the decline came because roughly 720,000 people left the labor force, pushing participation to its lowest in more than five years. Payrolls added just 57,000 jobs. The July report lands August 7. A rate falls two ways, and people quitting the search is the worse one.
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Is the unemployment rate affected by illegals who may have self deported and left the workforce?