Good morning. It's May 28th. It is a bright morning in New York City. The humidity is plunging. As we head into a clear, scintillating warm day from the muggy and soggy Memorial Day holiday yesterday, just take this day off in your heart. Anyway, this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. Today is also allegedly the so -called Manhattan Hinge.

in which you are supposed to look on with delight and wonder as the setting sun perfectly aligns itself with the grid of the streets. The key word here for anyone who's already been out recently strolling the island in the late night is sunset. Because the lowering sun is already quite nicely pouring across the grid, as the Manhattanhenge story in this morning's New York Times does note, in between the formal Manhattanhenge days that bracket the summer solstice,

Viewers, the Times writes, can still catch the sun emerge from behind the city's skyscrapers as it sets, though it will appear at different heights in the sky. So enjoy the daylight. Don't let them tell you it's a limited opportunity. It's a limited opportunity in the sense that before too long, the days will start getting short again and will be plunged into the grim night of fall and winter. But for now, we still got six more weeks of days this long or longer. So enjoy the good times while they're here.

In less charming news in the natural world, on page A17, 23 people were killed by severe storms, including tornadoes, as our overheated planet sent Memorial Day weekend spasms across the Midwest and East Coast. There were severe air travel disruptions. There was baseball -sized hail. Hundreds of thousands of people were left without power. And all that's not even front -page news. Nor, for that matter, are the estimated 2 ,000 people

buried alive in Papua New Guinea after a landslide there. That's on page 89. The official death toll is 670, although that's expected to rise as people manage to dig through the rubble in the inaccessible disaster zone. On page 1, the left -hand column is about how Israel shows no signs of changing anything about its approach after massacring dozens of people in a refugee camp in Rafa. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is calling the military destruction

of the refugee camp a tragic accident, which is not the most persuasive way of describing the obvious consequence of his decision to carry out a full -scale military assault against an urban area overcrowded with hundreds of thousands of refugees, driven there by the previous full -scale military assaults against the urban centers where they used to live. Netanyahu also said, despite our supreme effort not to harm uninvolved civilians, a tragic accident occurred to our regret and

For us, every uninvolved civilian who is hurt is a tragedy. For Hamas, it's a strategy. That's the whole difference. Obviously, he's lying about almost everything there, but it's certainly true that Israel's decision to keep on killing all these people does not seem to have any identifiable strategy behind it. The lead story on page one is that Joe Biden wants to keep Chinese electric cars out of the US, even though they seem to be affordable, effective, and popular wherever people are able to.

get them, but its protection is in time, so that's that. There's also an investigative piece about the fact that freight companies are now running people over with remote controlled trains in their unending quest to employ the fewest possible workers. And there's a profile of Richard Grinnell, the bottomlessly cynical and combative Trump supporter who hopes to expand his foreign policy portfolio from the first Trump administration into being Secretary of State the next time around.

To note where the facts in the story are, first of all, that when Grinnell was running Trump's post -election war room in Nevada, in a suite at the Venetian resort, the Times reports, as he fired off various complaints of electoral fraud, he was freely admitting to his colleagues that it was all a sham, according to operatives who were there who talked to the Times. In retrospect, the Times writes, one of the operatives said the House committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol should have subpoenaed everyone in the room.

including the operative himself. Do tell. The other interesting passage gets to one of the chief paradoxes of Trump's effort to envision a second Trump administration, namely that the people who stuck with him through the bitter end are inherently untrustworthy crooks and scumbags. Privately, the Times writes, Mr. Grinnell has on occasion implied to former Trump administration colleagues that the Secretary of State job has been promised to him, although two people in Mr. Trump's inner circle

say such certainty from any job seeker is premature. One person close to Mr. Trump said the former president has raised questions about Mr. Grinnell's communications work for foreign clients, prompted by Mr. Grinnell's Balkans work, where the Times noted earlier he has spent three and a half years leveraging his Balkan contacts in business ventures, and a request from him last year that Mr. Trump meet President Erdogan of Turkey. The Times continues, concerns over conflicts of interest might seem ironic coming from Mr. Trump.

who used the presidency to benefit his businesses. But the person close to Mr. Trump cited two conversations in which the former president said that he does not like his advisors traveling the world, making money from their association with him. The ideal Trump staffer is someone who completely shares his values, but doesn't dare to act like him. That is the news. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.