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Rubio Shuts Down De Facto Palestinian Embassy. Plus, the Pulitzers Are Back on Their BS.
State Department glow up: Secretary of State Marco Rubio is shuttering the Biden administration’s Office of Palestinian Affairs (OPA), “a Biden-era creation that elevated relations with the Palestinian Authority,” our Adam Kredo scoops. The move aims to restore “the Trump administration’s first-term vision for a unified U.S. diplomatic mission in Israel’s capital” and eliminates what critics have described as a de facto Palestinian consulate in Jerusalem.
“The office repeatedly earned the ire of Republican lawmakers for its anti-Israel advocacy during the Biden-Harris administration,” Kredo reports. “In the early hours of Hamas’s October 7 attack, the OPA called on Israel to stand down and forgo any retaliation.”
The OPA “has come under fire in the past for its potential violation of the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995,” which mandates a single U.S. embassy in Israel. Rubio’s directive also eliminates the position of Special Envoy to the Palestinians. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!
READ MORE: Marco Rubio To Close State Department’s De Facto Palestinian Embassy
What vibe shift? The Pulitzer board handed out prizes this week—we forgive you if you’re a normal, well-adjusted person who missed the big event—and it turns out the media still hasn’t gotten the memo about the post-2024 political landscape.
“The winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes, announced Monday, suggest the media remain as determined as ever to advance their radical left-wing political agenda despite the fact that most Americans find it weird and obnoxious,” writes our Andrew Stiles.
Among the honorees: a “reconsideration” of Huckleberry Finn from the slave’s perspective, a “musical call to action” on climate change, and a “Palestinian” poet who told NPR the media should “stop talking about Hamas.” Feature writing honors went to a journalist who covered a mayor’s suicide after being exposed for posting erotic fiction and pornography, including images of children from his own town, on social media.
Doug Mills of the New York Times, meanwhile, won for his dramatic photos of Trump during his 2024 assassination attempt—images that several journalists feared could be used by the Trump campaign to “further their agenda.”
No reporting on former president Joe Biden’s decline—and the White House’s attempts to conceal it—received an award.
READ MORE: What Vibe Shift? Pulitzer Prize Board Affirms Media’s Obsession With Woke Politics
Fanigate rolls on: When Fulton County DA and cash hoarder Fani Willis fired a member of her executive staff, Amanda Timpson, after Timpson blew the whistle on improper spending, Willis alleged that Timpson had physically threatened her colleagues. Our Andrew Kerr obtained a recording of that meeting, however, and it shows “the alleged threats of physical violence appear to be fabrications by Willis’s deputy chief of staff.”
“The recordings, reported here for the first time, add to a growing body of evidence that Willis is running an office rife with dysfunction,” writes Kerr. Timpson alleges in a whistleblower lawsuit that Willis “embarked on a retaliatory campaign to destroy her reputation” after she informed the district attorney “that one of Willis’s top aides had tried to misappropriate federal funds for ‘swag’ and computers.” Lawmakers in the House, Senate, and Georgia state legislature opened investigations into those claims last year following a Free Beacon report, and Timpson’s attorneys expect her case to go to trial as soon as July.
“Timpson’s case could mark yet another embarrassing setback for Willis. The liberal darling was a rising star in the progressive legal world when she indicted President Donald Trump on state racketeering charges in 2023. She proved to be her own worst enemy, however, and the case derailed last year after an attorney for Trump discovered the district attorney had romantic entanglements with Nathan Wade, the man Willis had hired to lead the prosecution.”
Away from the Beacon:
- Donald Trump can implement his executive order barring transgender troops from serving in the military while appeals work their way through the courts, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday.
- India launched strikes on Pakistan in response to a terror attack on Indian nationals in Kashmir, sparking conflict between the two nuclear powers. For background reading, check out a recent column from the Hudson Institute’s Mike Watson here.
- Democrats are facing some heat for posting a swanky photo of Kamala Harris at the Met Gala on the party’s official X account. New York’s Mike Lawler might have summed it up best: “Because nothing quite says ‘TAX THE RICH’ like attending the Met Gala.”
- House GOP Conference Chair Lisa McClain accused Jasmine Crockett of cutting in front of disabled passengers to board a Delta flight.
Check out our full Wednesday lineup below.
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Leighton Meester breaks silence on Michelle Trachtenberg’s ‘devastating’ death in emotional statement
Trachtenberg, who played Georgina Sparks on “Gossip Girl,” passed away in February at age 39. The actress died of complications caused by diabetes.
‘The Bear’ star Abby Elliott serves up the year’s most dazzling jewelry
Abby Elliott talk gems and caftans, improv and impressions, and the singular emotional support to be found in a ladies’ text thread.
MOG Coin Rallies as Elon Musk, Garry Tan Embrace ‘Mog/Acc’ Identity
Move over dogecoin. The new memecoin making waves in tech Twitter’s inner sanctum isn’t just about fun; it’s about mindset.
MOG Coin, a popular token offered on Ethereum and Base, is trying to bring in a cultural shift as “mog/acc” — a mashup of mogging (a slang for being better, stronger, faster) and accelerationism (speeding up technological change at all costs).
Techno-optimists are quickly putting on Pit Vipers, a flashy sunglass brand, as their X account display, which is leading to mindshare of the mog token outside of crypto circles.
Influential X accounts from Y Combinator founder Garry Tan to owner Elon Musk have all joined the mog/acc train, changing their displays to one wearing a Pit Viper. MOG prices are up more than 11% in the past week, extending 30-day gains to over 130%.
Solana ecosystem firms like Raydium and Jupiter have joined in, changing their online displays to a cat or their mascot wearing Pit Vipers and stating “mog/acc.”
A community member has even built a mog/acc bot that automatically converts any display into the aesthetic the mog/acc believers strive for, with the account going viral hours after launching in the wee hours of Wednesday.
But what’s mog/acc anyway? Believers have a very specific view of it.
“Mog accelerationism is the extension of mog memetics into the sphere of technological progress,” @Virotechnics, a memecoin thought leader, told CoinDesk in a Telegram message. “It’s about winning, competing, and performing well in everything.”
“Accelerationism is a philosophy of technological progress, speeding up its pace & ensuring that it’s made at any cost. Mog/Acc is the hybrid of the two; and it’s a perfect synthesis — the two ideas complement each other well, and the memetics help spread the philosophy,” he added.
Accelerationism, or “acc” in online slang, is the idea that humans should speed up technological progress no matter the cost. Whether AI, crypto, biotech, or automation, the gist is to go faster, break things, and move the future forward.
That has birthed effective accelerationism (e/acc), a recent spin that tries to make accelerationism practical, not just a meme. Subscribers of the mindset include early crypto investor Balaji Srinivasan.
In 2023, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared his own version of e/acc as d/acc, or defensive accelerationism, which called for building technology to move forward but actively avoids paths that are filled with greed or a net-negative.
As such, Mog/acc isn’t just about piggybacking off existing accelerationist trends. It’s morphing into its own, distinctly internet-native philosophy.
Where e/acc intellectualizes the future and d/acc moralizes it, mog/acc memes it into existence. Believers are stripping away the thinkpieces in favor of flashy avatars and a shared language of winning.
Whether mog becomes more than a coin or a vibe is yet to be seen. But for now, it’s a full-blown identity play.
Ethereum Activates ‘Pectra’ Upgrade, Raising Max Stake to 2,048 ETH
Ethereum activated its long-awaited “Pectra” upgrade on Wednesday, marking the blockchain’s most significant overhaul since the Merge in 2022.
The update aims to streamline staking, enhance wallet functionality, and improve overall efficiency. It arrives as Ethereum contends with rising competition and internal debates over its direction.
The Pectra upgrade, a “hard fork” in blockchain parlance, was triggered at 10:05 UTC and finalized around 13 minutes later.
A key element of the upgrade involves increasing the amount of ETH one can stake from 32 to 2,048. This change could help speed up and streamline operations for stakers, the vast network of companies and individuals who help keep the Ethereum network afloat.
Previously, staking at scale required setting up multiple validators; now, stakers can consolidate up to that amount under a single node.
The upgrade, considered to be Ethereum’s biggest since the 2022 Merge to proof-of-stake, comes at a delicate moment for the ecosystem. It follows two failed test runs, one of which put a key Ethereum test network permanently out of commission.
Additionally, Ethereum, the network that introduced smart contracts and blockchain-based decentralized applications, has steadily lost market share to more nimble competitors in recent months.
Solana, in particular, has attracted more new developers over the last year than Ethereum, which was long considered the dominant non-Bitcoin blockchain.
In response, the Swiss foundation introduced new leadership and a fresh set of plans to reinvigorate the chain’s developer community.
Relief for staking providers
Central to the upgrade is EIP-7251, which increases the maximum amount validators can stake from 32 to 2,048 ETH.
The change is intended to assist staking institutions and infrastructure providers by addressing the needs of validators who stake ETH to keep the chain operational. If you want to invest more than 32 ETH with the network, you must divide your stake among dozens—or sometimes, hundreds—of separate nodes.
This not only consumes time and incurs costs, but it has also resulted in weeks-long lines for new nodes to join the network.
By upping the staking limit, “This means that small operators can compound their stake directly, while large ones can consolidate validators to reduce bandwidth use on the p2p network,” wrote Tim Beiko, the protocol support lead at the Ethereum Foundation, over X.
Account Abstraction
Another core component of the hard fork, EIP-7702, would allow crypto wallets to temporarily function as smart contracts. This change brings the Ethereum network closer to account abstraction, a series of features that pave the way for more user-friendly crypto wallets.
Users could, for instance, pay transaction fees in stablecoins instead of ETH, set up an automatic payments system, or introduce recovery access to wallets if they forget their seed phrases.
What else is in Pectra?
While EIP-7251 and EIP-7702 are the main focuses of Pectra, nine other Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) have made it into the package, mostly affecting staking providers, validators, and developers:
- EIP-2537: Introduces a function to the network that makes certain cryptographic operations faster and more efficient, which could benefit privacy tools.
- EIP-2935: Stores more past block information on the blockchain, making it easier to verify that data.
- EIP-6110: Makes the process for new validators to join less complex by handling their staking deposits more directly within the system.
- EIP-7002: Allows validators to initiate withdrawals of their funds directly, improving security and user experience for staking services.
- EIP-7549: Optimizes how the blockchain processes validator votes.
- EIP-7623: Increase the costs of calldata, which is used for data availability (DA).
- EIP-7685: Establishes a standardized way to communicate requests between the execution layer and consensus layer.
- EIP-7691: Increases the blockchain’s capacity to handle more data blobs per block.
- EIP-7840: Introduces a configurable setting for managing how much data Ethereum can handle per block.
Read more: Ethereum Preps for Biggest Code Change Since the Merge With Pectra Upgrade
UPDATE (10:22 UTC): Updates to state that Pectra upgrade has finalized.
Left turns on Fetterman for daring to make sense
May 7, 2025: 6:58 a.m.:
Left turns on Fetterman for daring to make sense
The Left comes for John Fetterman https://t.co/BxUkrFwqSw
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) May 7, 2025
Rising Gold Warns Markets: Fed Must Cut Reserve Rates Now
Tariff turmoil and a shaky economy demand action. The Fed must cut interest on reserves and revive a gold-linked dollar to help our vulnerable economy.