Politics

Former ICE official falls short in Ohio battleground district GOP primary

Published

2 months ago

May 6, 2026

Former ICE official Madison Sheahan lost a GOP primary in a battleground Ohio House district on Tuesday, a relief to Republicans who worried she could sabotage their chances of flipping the seat.

Former state Rep. Derek Merrin won the GOP nomination in the 9th Congressional District for the second cycle in a row, and will face Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur in November. He lost to Kaptur by less than one percentage point in 2024.

Republicans see the seat as a prime pickup opportunity after the Ohio legislature redrew the state’s congressional map to make the district more favorable for Republicans.

Merrin’s victory comes with a sigh of relief from Republicans in the state who raised concerns about Sheahan’s background — she served as former deputy ICE director under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — being a soft target for Kaptur in a general election.

Sheahan drew attacks from fellow Republicans in the primary for her role in overseeing President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement operations in major cities, which triggered violent confrontations and protests.

Those clashes culminated in the killing of two American citizens by immigration officials in Minneapolis. Sheahan launched her campaign days after the killing of Renee Good, but before the death of Alex Pretti.

Trump didn’t endorse ahead of the primary, but the race was defined in part by candidates seeking to be the most MAGA candidate in the field. Sheahan ran TV ads touting her role at ICE and her connection to the Trump administration. Merrin went up with an ad in the race’s final days highlighting the endorsement he received from Trump during his 2024 campaign.

Kaptur starts the general election fight with a significant resource advantage over Merrin. Federal Election Commission filings from mid-April showed Kaptur with $3.1 million in cash on hand, dwarfing Merrin’s $189,000 in reserves.

Both the DCCC and the NRCC are expected to invest significantly in the race.

Politics

We should be exalting this major American milestone. Instead we’ve got Trump’s Great American Fair.

Published

25 minutes ago

July 3, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Christmas. 3, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT

This piece is part of“America in the balance: the fight for our history and future,”a special series from MS NOW that explores where we are as a nation as we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

One of my first fond memories was watching a patriotic pageant on TV, celebrating a major American anniversary, led by a president who, as a candidate, promised to “Make America Great Again.”

It was July 4, 1986, and the Statue of Liberty was turning 100.

Two years earlier President Ronald Reagan had appointed Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca to helm a foundation that would raise private funds, in coordination with the National Park Service, to restore Lady Liberty in time for its centennial. France’s fantastic gift of a few hundred tons of copper, granite and steel had been looking the worse for wear after a century of weathering the elements in New York Harbor — and “Liberty Weekend” was a ubiquitous, nationally televised four-day event featuring A-list performers and tall ships parading through the harbor, culminating in a massive fireworks display.

It wasn’t just because I was so young that the moment resonated. This was a pervasive American happening, celebrated by millions no matter their party.

I was just a little kid, and I hadn’t yet formed a political identity. Given a few more years to read up on the topic, I’m sure I would have had strong opinions about Reagan and the divisive politics of his movement, to say nothing of the jingoistic, late-Cold War era style of rah-rah American patriotism.

But it wasn’t just because I was so young that the moment resonated. This was a pervasive American happening, celebrated by millions no matter their party. And looking back on it, the messaging seems pretty unobjectionable: America is a land of opportunity, appreciative of its allies, welcoming of the “poor…huddled masses yearning to be free,” confident that the uniquely American melting pot is not only a good thing, it’s our thing.

Liberty Weekend also featured a helpful reminder for why we were all celebrating a statue, and why Americans felt so patriotic about it. As the Los Angeles Times reported, “Standing before the ghostly red-brick ruins of historic Ellis Island, [Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren] Burger swore in 267 people from 109 countries with a solemn oath of allegiance to this melting-pot nation of immigrants.”

I remember thinking at the time that, with any luck, I’d be alive to witness the next big, round American anniversary, the semiquincentennial — which would surely be an even more awesome and universally patriotic celebration of America’s best and most enduring values.

Well, that time has come. America’s 250th birthday is here and the president is yet another Republican who promised to make America great again.

But instead of a near-universal event celebrating the miraculous success of a nation proud to be made of immigrants, we have Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair, which kicked off on June 24 with a sparsely attended and barely watched opening ceremony featuring a military band playing cartoonish “patriotic” tunes like “Real American (Hulk Hogan’s WWE theme).”

Remarking on the many performers who dropped out of the event weeks ago — once it was evident that it would be a hyperpartisan political rally rather than a celebration for all Americans — Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy praised the military band as “way better than those libtards that canceled on us.” (Duffy, a father of nine, has a child with Down’s syndrome, who was onstage as he expressed his version of patriotism.) And rather than even pay lip service to uniting the country, Trump’s low-energy speech rambled through his rote menu of culture war red meat, liberally peppered with falsehoods and braggadocio about the war he started, swiftly lost and now seems helpless to bring to an end.

The day after Trump’s fair kicked off, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s move to revoke temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of people from Haiti and thousands from Syria who fled their war-torn countries. The architect of Trump’s war on immigrants, Stephen Miller, told reporters that same day, “One way or another, this nation has to end birthright citizenship.” (That dream of Miller’s was crushed on Tuesday when the Supreme Court struck down the Trump administration’s executive order to end birthright citizenshipallowing a nation founded by immigrants to breathe a sigh of relief, at least for now.)

I’m not trying to put rose-colored glasses on the Reagan era, but when it came time to celebrate America on a grand scale — to express a universal version of patriotism — Ellis Island was the backdrop, and the swearing in of new American citizens was the ceremonial coup de grace. Trump’s celebration is only of himself, and all he could offer the few attendees was fear and hatred for “the other.”

It would have been nice for America’s 250th birthday to have been celebrated with class, fellowship and optimism — like Liberty Weekend 40 years ago. Instead, the semiquincentennial looks to be a limp and dreary nonevent, attended by extraordinarily fewunifying no one and mostly ignored even by its target audience.

Say what you will about Reagan, but he understood far better than Trump what really makes America great.

Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW.

Politics

How sports diplomacy for a dead empire built a World Cup underdog

Published

30 minutes ago

July 3, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

If you want to trace Cape Verde’s emergence as a soccer power, you might go back to 2009, when the country beat Portugal on its way to a gold medal at the Jogos de Lusofonia.

The Lusofonia Games were a junior varsity Olympics for remnants of a common empire, an effort by the 12-country Association of Olympic Committees of Portuguese-Speaking Countries to mimic the Commonwealth Games or Jeux de la Francophonie, an upstart competition for former French colonies. On its face, all of these competitions were an experiment in geographically unlikely camaraderie — could tae kwon do artists from Equatorial Guinea bond with East Timorese ping-pong players? — but beneath, they were an exercise of raw global sports politics.

ACOLOP, as the association is known by its Portuguese abbreviation, was created in 2004 and hosted its first, nine-sport Jogos de Lusofonia the next year in Macau, the Chinese region that was a Portuguese colony until 1999. Around the business meetings that accompanied the second games in Lisbon, the conversation among the national Olympic officials who ran ACOLOP focused on Brazil’s effort then underway to claim both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics for Rio de Janeiro, the first in South America. Both successful bids were built on a Portuguese-speaking coalition that crossed the traditional geographical bases within FIFA and the International Olympic Committee.

The next Lusofonia Games were held in 2014 in Goa, the Indian city where Portuguese traders planted their flag in the 16th century. Then the games stopped, leaving behind a series of canceled plans for follow-up encounters and an archipelago of never-updated web pages.

“To be honest, I think the games ended,” João Malha, a Lisbon-based sports communications specialist who served as press officer for the 2009 games, told Blue Light News. “At least, I’ve never heard anything about them since Covid.”

Their legacy roars to life again this week, when Cape Verde enters the knockout rounds in its first World Cup, the smallest country ever to reach that stage.

This era of competitive Cape Verde soccer — which has twice reached the quarterfinals of the African Cup of Nations — can be traced to the 2009 Lusofonia Games in Lisbon. The under-21 Cape Verdean side began with a bang: a 1-0 victory over host Portugal, from which the small Atlantic island nation had won its independence in 1975. It then stampeded through the five-country, round-robin tournament, defeating Mozambique and drawing against Angola en route to the country’s only gold medal, a task made admittedly easier by the fact that Brazil didn’t compete in soccer even as it was the leading medalist across the games.

For those of us who were at the José Gomes Stadium, the most eye-catching player on the pitch that month for Cape Verde was Ianique “Stopira” Tavares, a 21-year-old left back who rampaged down the opposition flank. Three years later Stopira — nicknamed for a French great — moved to a Hungarian club where he spent most of his career. He retired in 2023 and then reversed himself a year later so he could help Cape Verde qualify for the World Cup.

Stopira’s return was a success by any measure, marked by critical goals at every stage despite never having been much of a goal-scorer prior to his retirement. His winner helped second-tier Torreense defeat heavyweights Sporting Clube de Portugal in Portugal’s Taça cup final, becoming the first non-top flight club to reach the UEFA Europa League in its current incarnation. And last October, Stopira scored the most celebrated goal in his country’s history — an extra-time strike which sealed the win over Eswatini that sent Cape Verde to a World Cup for the first time.

Today, the team faces Argentina, and 38-year-old Stopira is likely to start on the bench, as he did in the three group-stage matches. But for at least one more day Stopira’s Cape Verde stands where the Jogos da Lusofonia imagined the country belonged: as a sporting peer to Portugal and Brazil.

Politics

Trump holds the golden tickets

Published

45 minutes ago

July 3, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

When FIFA President Gianni Infantino visited the Oval Office last August, he presented President Donald Trump with a giant oversized ticket to the World Cup final.

It turns out 10 real ones accompany it, raising anticipation around the White House for a much-coveted invitation to the July 19 match at MetLife Stadium, not far from Trump’s golf club in northern New Jersey.

Two people who have attended sporting events with Trump, granted anonymity to speculate on a sensitive matter, say they expect the coveted seats to go to family members and a handful of West Wing aides. Those on the hunt for an invitation might find White House FIFA World Cup Task Force czar Andrew Giuliani helpful, according to one of the people we spoke to, but he might steer inquiries to FIFA.com or to the White House Cabinet Affairs to adjudicate.

Trump’s latest financial disclosure report reveals this is something of a standard gift from Infantino, who also gave Trump 10 tickets to the final match of last summer’s FIFA Club World Cup, also at MetLife Stadium. Trump valued them at a combined $15,000 — tickets to the World Cup final will almost certainly be worth many multiples of that.