A deal to merge two of the largest local television news companies, Nexstar and Tegna, closed Thursday despite a lawsuit from the attorneys general of eight states to block it. The Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department approved the $6.2 billion deal, clearing the way for Nexstar to expand its already massive broadcast operation. Meanwhile, Muslims around the world are celebrating the holiday of Eid al-Fitr, marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan. It's a day traditionally greeted with joy as families and friends gather in prayer, enjoy traditional delicacies, and take part in vibrant festivities, but this year the celebration comes amid conflict, with war in and across the Middle East. In business, Edison International's CEO received a significant pay raise despite ongoing scrutiny over its potential role in the fatal Eaton Fires, and a new bipartisan bill restored billions in federal funds to help Southern California aerospace and defense startups. Read more at https://LATimes.com.
WSJ Minute Briefing - Clock is Ticking For Iran to Open Strait of Hormuz
Plus: Two pilots have been killed after an Air Canada Express plane collided with a firefighting vehicle in New York’s LaGuardia Airport. And activist Elliott builds a big stake in chip-design software maker Synopsys. Luke Vargas hosts.
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Up First from NPR - Trump’s Hormuz Deadline, Congress DHS Funding, ICE In Airports
Congress returns this week with airport lines growing and TSA agents going unpaid, as President Trump links any DHS deal to a long list of new demands including voter ID and ending mail-in voting.
And hundreds of ICE agents have been deployed to help address chaos in airports across the U.S., but mixed messages have left questions about what they will actually do ease security lines.
Want more analysis of the most important news of the day, plus a little fun? Subscribe to the Up First newsletter.
Today’s episode of Up First was edited by Hannah Bloch, Anna Yukhananov, Mohamad ElBardicy, and Alice Woelfle.
It was produced by Ziad Buchh and Ava Pukatch.
Our director is Christopher Thomas.
We get engineering support from Zo van Ginhoven. Our technical director is Carleigh Strange.
(0:00) Introduction
(01:57) Trump's Hormuz Deadline
(05:50) Congress DHS Funding
(09:18) ICE In Airports
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The Daily - The Republican Identity Crisis Over the Iran War
The war in Iran has created strong divisions among President Trump’s supporters. An anti-interventionist wing of the Republican coalition and some senior administration officials partial to Mr. Trump’s criticism of long overseas conflicts have quickly become uneasy about the war, which has shown no immediate signs of ending.
Robert Draper, a domestic politics journalist for The New York Times based in Washington, discusses Mr. Trump’s justification for the war and whether he is explicitly violating a pact he made with his base not to start another.
Guest: Robert Draper is a journalist based in Washington, D.C., who writes about domestic politics for The New York Times.
Background reading: Joe Kent, a top U.S. counterterrorism official, resigns over the Iran war.
High gas prices, driven up by the war, loom over the midterms.
Photo: Eric Lee for The New York Times
For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.
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Start Here - Have an ICE Flight: Trump’s Plan for Airport Lines
As TSA agents wait for paychecks, federal officials scramble to send ICE agents to assist at airports. President Trump threatens to strike Iranian energy infrastructure. And analysts react to the president’s acknowledgement that the White House is “considering” drawing down forces in the Middle East.
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The Daily Detail - The Daily Detail for 3.23.26
Alabama
- Sen. Britt supports a bill that withhold paychecks from Congress during government shutdown
- Media outlets in Spain report that U of A student fell off dock into water
- 3 bill in state senate caused Dems to filibuster before Spring Break, bill will be re-offered upon state lawmakers return
- A petition against House Speaker Ledbetter's standing within the ALGOP has been dropped
- Central AL Water to drop the addition of fluoride into the water
National
- ICE agents to help TSA in airports during DHS government shutdwon
- Senator Mike Lee says SAVE American Act can be passed, he has a plan
- US Senate passes Trump's nominee to head up DHS, Markwayne Mullin
- Riverside county sheriff in CA seizes ballots from 2025 for hand recount
- 20 Nations agree to help US in freeing up vessels moving through Strait of Hormuz
Python Bytes - #474 Astral to join OpenAI
- Starlette 1.0.0
- Astral to join OpenAI
- uv audit
- Fire and forget (or never) with Python’s asyncio
- Extras
- Joke
About the show
Sponsored by us! Support our work through:
- Our courses at Talk Python Training
- The Complete pytest Course
- Patreon Supporters Connect with the hosts
- Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)
- Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.social
- Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky) Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 11am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it.
Brian #1: Starlette 1.0.0
- As a reminder, Starlette is the foundation for FastAPI
- Starlette 1.0 is here! - fun blog post from Marcello Trylesinski
- “The changes in 1.0 were limited to removing old deprecated code that had been on the way out for years, along with a few bug fixes. From now on we'll follow SemVer strictly.”
- Fun comment in the “What’s next?” section:
- “Oh, and Sebastián, Starlette is now out of your way to release FastAPI 1.0. 😉”
- Related: Experimenting with Starlette 1.0 with Claude skills
- Simon Willison
- example of the new lifespan mechanism, very pytest fixture-like
@contextlib.asynccontextmanager async def lifespan(app): async with some_async_resource(): print("Run at startup!") yield print("Run on shutdown!") app = Starlette( routes=routes, lifespan=lifespan )
Michael #2: Astral to join OpenAI
- via John Hagen, thanks
- Astral has agreed to join OpenAI as part of the Codex team
- Congrats Charlie and team
- Seems like **Ruff** and uv play an important roll.
- Perhaps ty holds the most value to directly boost Codex (understanding codebases for the AI)
- All that said, these were open source so there is way more to the motivations than just using the tools.
- After joining the Codex team, we'll continue building our open source tools.
- Simon Willison has thoughts
- discuss.python.org also has thoughts
- The Ars Technica article has interesting comments too
- It’s probably the death pyx
- Simon points out “pyx is notably absent from both the Astral and OpenAI announcement posts.”
Brian #3: uv audit
- Submitted by Owen Lemont
- Pieces of
uv audithave been trickling in. uv 0.10.12 exposes it to the cli help - Here’s the roadmap for uv audit
- I tried it out on a package and found a security issue with a dependency
- not of the project, but of the testing dependencies
- but only if using Python < 3.10, even though I’m using 3.14
- Kinda cool
- Looks like it generates a uv.lock file, which includes dependencies for all project supported versions of Python and systems, which is a very thorough way to check for vulnerabilities.
- But also, maybe some pointers on how to fix the problem would be good. No
--fixyet.
Michael #4: Fire and forget (or never) with Python’s asyncio
- Python’s
asyncio.create_task()can silently garbage collect your fire-and-forget tasks starting in Python 3.12 - Formerly fine async code can now stop working, so heads up
- The fix? Use a set to upgrade to a strong ref and a callback to remove it
- Is there a chance of task-based memory leaks? Yeah, maybe.
Extras
Brian:
- Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity - interesting read and unfortunate truth in too many places.
- pytest-check - All built-in check helper functions in this list also accept an optional
xfailreason.- example:
check.equal(actual, expected, xfail="known issue #123") - Allows some checks to still cause a failure to happen because you no longer have to mark the whole test as xfail Michael:
- example:
- TurboAPI - FastAPI + Pydantic compatible framework in Zig (see follow up)
- Pyramid 2.1 is out (yes really! :) first release in 3 years)
- Vivaldi 7.9 adds minimalist hide mode.
- Migrated pythonbytes.fm and talkpython.fm to Raw+DC design pattern
- Robyn + Chameleon package
Joke: We now have translation services
What A Day - The Iran War Is Fueling Antisemitism
The MAGA Right is at war over the role that Israel has in American foreign policy and the war with Iran. If you listen to Tucker Carlson or former counterterrorism chief Joe Kent, you would think that President Donald Trump was bamboozled into this conflict, lured by the evil "Israel lobby." The way some on the American Right (and the American Left) are talking about Israel has edged into outright antisemitism. And with multiple violent attacks on synagogues around the world over the last few weeks, the lack of distinction between "Israel the country" and "Jewish people" is having a very dangerous impact. Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent at Vox, joins the show to talk about the rise of anti-war antisemitism.
And in headlines, President Trump threatens to escalate the already high-stakes war with Iran, the Trump administration plans to make airport security lines even more unpleasant by sending in ICE officers, and the White House grounds welcome a statue of Christopher Columbus.
Show Notes:
- Check out Zach's piece – https://tinyurl.com/49e2hezu
- Call Congress – 202-224-3121
- Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy
- What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast
- Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/
- For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday
Strict Scrutiny - Absentee Ballots, Asylum, and Too Many A**holes to Count
Leah, Kate, and Melissa preview this week’s arguments at the Court, including Watson v. Republican National Committee, a challenge over when election offices must receive absentee ballots in order for them to be counted. They also cover a flood of legal news, including the quagmire that is the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office, rulings from lower courts both encouraging (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia) and grim (the wrong-like-clockwork Fifth Circuit), and the showdown between Senator Rand Paul and Trump’s pick for DHS head, Markwayne “NOSPACES” Mullin.
Favorite things:
- Kate: How to stop a dictator, Zack Beauchamp (Vox); The Case of Kristie Metcalfe (NYT’s The Daily); Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir
- Leah: The Epic transcript from NJ; luck…or something, Hilary Duff (producer Melody’s pick: Future Tripping; producer Michael’s pick: Adult Size Medium); Her giveaway to celebrate Melissa’s new book (enter here);
Melissa: Love Story Official Playlist (Spotify); Paradise (Hulu); Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS, Aziza Ahmed.
Preorder Melissa’s book, The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader and enter the giveaway for a t-shirt HERE.
Buy Leah's book, Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes
Follow us on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky
Short Wave - Day Zero: When the wells run dry
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