Playbook: Jim Jordan's day of reckoning  —  Presented by With help from Eli Okun and Garrett Ross  —  DRIVING THE DAY  —  STILL TAKING APPLICATIONS — “How House Speaker Became Washington's Most Miserable Job,” by Ian Ward: “'You basically have a tied House with no operational majority,' said [political scientist MATTHEW] GREEN.

Israel-Hamas war: Israel bombs Gaza where civilians sought refuge  —  The Gaza Health Ministry said an Israeli airstrike Tuesday hit a Gaza City hospital packed with wounded and other Palestinians seeking shelter, killing hundreds.  If confirmed, the attack would be by far the deadliest Israeli airstrike in five wars fought since 2008.

Ukraine uses secretly shipped U.S. missiles to launch surprise strike  —  The delivery and use on the battlefield marks a major ramp up of the administration's defense of Ukraine.  —  The Ukrainian military on Tuesday used U.S.-supplied longer-range missiles to strike nine Russian helicopters …

Man, Wrongfully Imprisoned for 16 Years, Is Fatally Shot During Traffic Stop  —  Leonard Allan Cure, who was exonerated in 2020 after being convicted of armed robbery, was shot and killed by a sheriff's deputy in Georgia after being pulled over for speeding.

Supreme Court tells 5th Circuit to stop its defiance in ghost gun case  —  The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday once again stepped in to leave in place the federal government's ban on so-called “ghost guns.”  These are unassembled and unmarked guns that can be bought online and then assembled into fully operative guns.

Lawyers, Trump and money: Ex-president spends millions in donor cash on attorneys as legal woes grow  —  Donald Trump's political fundraising machine is raking in donations at a prodigious pace, but he's spending tens of millions of dollars he's bringing in to pay attorneys to deal …

Broidy scores a win in hacking case  —  BROIDY SCORES A WIN IN HACKING CASE: GOP fundraiser Elliott Broidy scored a legal victory on Friday in his bid to expose possible involvement by Qatari lobbyists in the alleged hacking and dissemination of a trove of Broidy's emails.

America's highest gun death rates are in the South  —  The cities with the highest firearm homicide rates are clustered in the South, generally in red states with less restrictive gun laws, according to an analysis by the left-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund provided exclusively to Axios.

America's zombie “crime wave”  —  Judd Legum, Tesnim Zekeria, and Rebecca Crosby  —  The outset of the pandemic in 2020 coincided with a surge in violent crime in the United States, with murder rates rising particularly dramatically.  According to a lot of people with large megaphones, this crime wave continues today.

'There's just no excitement': Retail politics takes a nosedive in a Trump-dominated campaign  —  Operatives and activists can't recall a recent cycle with so little grassroots campaigning.  The numbers back them up.  —  If the Republican presidential primary this year is putting you half to sleep, you're not alone.