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Far-Right at Risk: JD Vance Heads to Hungary as MAGA Ally Orban Trails in Polls (Washington Post)
As Vice President JD Vance arrived in Budapest on Tuesday, his support for Hungary’s embattled prime minister, Viktor Orban, represents a last-ditch bid to rescue the pro-Kremlin Hungarian who has forged ties to the top of the MAGA movement but is trailing in the polls ahead of a national election on April 12.
Questions are mounting about Vance’s visit, with polls indicating that Orban is falling increasingly behind his center-right rival, Peter Magyar, who is challenging Orban over alleged corruption and Hungary’s flagging economy, in the toughest election Orban has faced since reclaiming the premiership 16 years ago.
In
Rural Virginia: Their Tiny Church Is On the Cover of JD Vance’s New Book. They Don’t Know Him. (Washington Post)
The modest church on the cover of Vice President JD Vance’s new memoir unpacking his Catholic faith has a tiny but loyal congregation.
What it doesn’t have, members said: any connection to Vance or Catholicism, the Washington Post writes.
There are a couple dozen regulars at Mt. Zion United Methodist Church in rural southwestern Virginia, according to one, 78-year-old Marshall Funk. As far as he knew, nobody was aware that the White House’s second-in-command had broadcast an image of what Funk called his “second home.”
Vance, to Funk's knowledge, had never visited the church. Critics
mocked
the vice president for putting a United Methodist church on the front of a book tracing his road from loose evangelicalism to teenage Pentecostalism to atheism to Catholicism.
Higher Ed Playbook I: Trump Administration Plans Major Shake-Up of College Oversight Rules (Bloomberg)
The US Department of Education proposed a raft of changes to college oversight guidelines on Monday, moves that would upend the traditional regulatory framework for universities and amplify the Trump administration’s higher education policy agenda.
The shift, laid out in a department memo viewed by Bloomberg, would tie colleges’ federal funding to White House priorities like eradicating DEI initiatives and promoting political diversity among faculty. The proposals include measures to “address the college affordability issue” by cracking down on high tuition rates and requiring accreditors to consider post-graduate earnings when certifying degree programs for federal funding.
Higher Ed Playbook II: More States Adopt College Entrance Exam Touted by Conservatives Despite Concerns (Washington Post)
An upstart college entrance exam — designed to be an alternative to the ACT and SAT and featuring works from ancient Western civilization — is gaining support from the Trump administration and conservatives in red and purple states.
In recent months, the Pentagon decided to accept the Classic Learning Test for US military service academies and scholarships at other colleges around the country.
While all three tests
have verbal and math sections, the CLT stands out because it mainly features passages from noted philosophers, religious scholars, scientists and authors in the canon of Western literature, including Plato, St. Augustine, Dante and Shakespeare.
🎧 Catch today’s Daily Read Podcast for a smarter look at the day’s biggest headlines. We break down the key stories with context, insights, and why they matter, so you can stay informed fast. Listen on Spotify or Apple
Podcasts.
Boost for Betting: Court Sides With Kalshi in Major Ruling for Prediction Markets (Wall Street Journal)
New Jersey gaming regulators can’t regulate Kalshi, a federal appeals court ruled on Monday, in a win with implications for how prediction markets are run.
The court ruled that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has exclusive jurisdiction over Kalshi’s sports-related event contracts, which the state of New Jersey had argued were unregulated and in violation of state sports gambling laws.
The ruling by the Third US Circuit Court of Appeals is one of the most significant decisions to date on the legality of prediction markets and the question of whether the CFTC, a federal government agency, is the only regulator with the power to police them.
'Cats' Opens Tonight: I Was Broadway’s First Grizabella. I Couldn’t Have Imagined the New ‘Cats.’ (New York Times Opinion - Betty Buckley)
Tony Award-winning Betty Buckley, who played the first Grizabella when 'Cats' opened on Broadway in 1982, first saw 'Cats: The Jellicle Ball' at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York in 2024.
In a Times op-ed, she writes: "From the first moment, the audience went nuts!"
She explains that 'ballroom' choreography forms the basis of the production: "It’s where the competitive dance form called “voguing” was first developed. Members of the Black and Latino L.G.B.T.Q. communities built a dazzling cultural world entirely their own.
They grouped themselves into chosen families called Houses and competed against one another in elaborate categories. At balls, style, movement and identity were celebrated with fearless invention. In those years, even as the AIDS epidemic tore through those communities, ballroom became an act of care, of survival and of insisting on joy in the middle of devastation. It was theater in its purest form: performance as self-creation."
Win for Ann Arbor: Michigan Defeats UConn to Win the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship (New York Times - The Athletic)
Michigan is the national champion of men’s NCAA basketball for the first time since 1989, defeating UConn last night, 69-63, in a gritty, hard-fought title game.
Off the court, the tournament also brings Bloomberg’s annual Brackets for a Cause to a close.
For the 11th year, Bloomberg assembled a group of titans from the worlds of business and finance to take their best shot at building the perfect March Madness bracket. Each participant selected a charity and pledged $20,000, putting more than $1.2 million in play.
Half of the total pot goes to charities chosen by the three participants with the most accurate brackets for the men’s tournament; the other half goes to the top three for the women’s side, which was finalized on Sunday night.
All three top finishers of the men's bracket correctly
picked Michigan to win it all, led by George Walker, CEO and Chairman of Neuberger Berman, who claimed first place while playing for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Joe Reece, Managing Partner of SilverBox Capital, finished second representing Chair-ity, while James Zenni, Founder and President of Z Capital Group, placed third for Omnia Sol.
Explore the final leaderboard here to see how the brackets shook out.
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