Philadelphia pharmacy, a 37-year staple in community, reopens despite looting

The Philadelphia Pharmacy was open Wednesday, hours after looters ransacked the business.

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  • Post-holiday COVID-19 data spells a grim forecast for the rest of the year

    By rounding up data from a few sources — previous holiday spikes, current travel patterns, cellphone proximity trackers and various pandemic forecasting models — it’s possible to get a rough start on predicting what to expect in the weeks ahead. The early numbers are worrisome. 

  • Biden told this immigrant rights activist 'vote for Trump' in a blunt exchange. He voted for Biden but is ready to push him hard on immigration reform.

    Carlos Rojas Rodriguez confronted then-candidate Joe Biden about deportations in 2019. Here's what Rodriguez wants to see from the president-elect.

  • Hong Kong activists Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow, Ivan Lam jailed

    Three prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activists were sentenced to jail Wednesday for a protest outside police headquarters as authorities stepped up a crackdown on opposition to tighten control by Beijing over the territory. The activists — Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow and Ivan Lam — are among more than 10,000 people who have been arrested since June 2019 on charges related to protests against a proposed extradition law that expanded to include demands for greater democracy. Beijing responded to the protests by imposing a sweeping national security law to crack down on dissent, which prompted more public opposition.

  • Retiring GOP Sen. Lamar Alexander praised for bipartisan efforts as he bids farewell

    As Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) bid farewell to his colleagues on the Senate floor Wednesday, the retiring lawmaker received a standing ovation from the rest of the upper chamber.In an emotional speech, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Alexander is "leaving this body and those of us in it, and the nation it exists to serve, stronger and better because you were here."> WATCH: Sen. Mitch McConnell gets emotional while speaking on Sen. Lamar Alexander: "You're leaving this body and those of us in it and the nation it exists to serve stronger and better because you were here." pic.twitter.com/JKqBpefAM5> > -- The Hill (@thehill) December 2, 2020Veteran Democratic senators, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), also heaped praise on Alexander. Schumer, referring to Alexander as his friend, said he "will leave this chamber with a legacy that every senator should be proud of," emphasizing instances in which he's reached across the aisle despite potential personal political cost.Feinstein, meanwhile, said "I truly have come to appreciate Sen. Alexander's fairness, interest in solving problems, and his bipartisanship. Most of all, I so appreciate your friendship."In his final address, Alexander said the Senate needs "a change of behavior" resulting in lawmakers ceasing to block each other's amendments. > Not something you see often -- bipartisan standing ovation on Senate floor for retiring GOP Sen. Lamar Alexander after he wraps up farewell address, which featured a heavy emphasis on his cross-aisle relationships and bipartisan accomplishments, especially on education issues> > -- Deirdre Walsh (@deirdrekwalsh) December 2, 2020More stories from theweek.com The naked corruption of Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue Our parents warned us the internet would break our brains. It broke theirs instead. Freshly pardoned Michael Flynn shares message telling Trump to 'suspend the Constitution' to hold a new presidential election

  • This Trump Crony Is Trying to Overturn the Election. His Own Group Has Thrown in the Towel.

    Adam Laxalt, the co-chair of the Trump campaign in Nevada, is fighting ferociously against his state’s decision to reward its six electoral votes to President-elect Joe Biden, alleging widespread voter fraud and hyping litigation to overturn Biden’s victory.But a nonprofit ethics and transparency group affiliated with Laxalt, Nevada’s former attorney general, has already conceded Biden’s victory and is looking ahead to the new administration.“It’s become clear that we’re going to be having a Biden team and a Biden administration in 2021,” said Caitlin Sutherland, the executive director of Americans for Public Trust, in an interview on Tuesday. The new administration is “what we will remain focused on going into next year.”Sutherland stressed that Laxalt’s work with the Trump re-election campaign, and his efforts to invalidate Biden’s win in Nevada, were entirely separate from his work with APT, a tax-exempt nonprofit that’s barred by law from engaging in political or partisan activity. “That is something he does in a personal capacity outside his role in APT,” Sutherland said. “As a 501c3, we, and Adam when he works with us, do not engage in anything with a partisan or political bent.”Nevada Gov. Calls Trump’s Conspiracy Theory Retweet ‘Unconscionable’ But Laxalt maintains his position as APT’s outside counsel and frequent spokesman even as he works with the Trump team in a personal capacity. And the fact that the group he works with is planning for a reality he refuses to concede underscores just how great a divergence has developed within the broader conservative movement. One faction appears unable to acknowledge the reality of Joe Biden’s win—perhaps for fear of offending Trump. Another doesn’t want to get caught flat-footed for when that reality comes about.Illustrating the political complications that these two pulls can create for the president’s political allies, Sutherland followed up on her initial interview with The Daily Beast to clarify her statement—and hedge her view on the outcome of the election. “As Biden is working to build out his team, APT will provide transparency and scrutiny, even as litigation on the election results are ongoing,” she wrote.As a leading Trump campaign official in Nevada, Laxalt has been a face of the campaign’s efforts to overturn the state’s presidential contest. Last month, he appeared at a news conference in North Las Vegas—alongside former Trump intelligence chief Ric Grenell and GOP lobbyist Matt Schlapp—to level allegations of widespread voter fraud and preview a lawsuit demanding that a state court declare Trump the winner, despite trailing by more than 33,000 votes.The Shady Ex-Cop Behind Trump’s Nevada Voter-Fraud FarceAs part of that lawsuit, the campaign submitted a list of thousands of voters who it said had cast ballots in Nevada despite living out of state. Many of those voters turned out to be military servicemen and their families stationed outside of Nevada, but who are permitted by law to cast ballots in the state.Like nearly all of the Trump campaign’s election-related lawsuits over the past month, the Nevada effort has so far fallen short. Last week, Nevada’s Supreme Court certified Biden’s win in the state. The campaign’s efforts persist nonetheless, and the president and his attorneys continue to gripe about a nonexistent conspiracy against him perpetrated by high-level government officials—including Republicans—and voting machine companies with nebulous ties to foreign dictators.Those voting machine conspiracy theories, which largely focus on the company Dominion Voting Systems, have not extended to Nevada, or Laxalt's efforts there. But on Tuesday, the president hailed a Nevada court ruling allowing both presidential campaigns to inspect voting machines used in the state’s largest county. In a tweet on the ruling, Trump tagged Grennell, Schlapp, and Laxalt.Founded this year, APT uses open records requests and other transparency tools to root out apparent conflicts of interest and ethical breaches among government officials and interest groups. APT is a conservative-leaning group, though Sutherland, a former research director at the National Republican Congressional Committee, said it has and will continue to investigate Republicans and Democrats alike.“We have demanded accountability and transparency from a variety of groups and politicians from both sides of the aisle. That momentum will not change as we head into a Biden administration,” she said.APT has already begun to file open records requests for documents related to incoming Biden administration officials, Sutherland said. “We are taking a look at each individual that will be nominated to the cabinet, and who President-elect Biden is surrounding himself with, what that network has done in the past, and what they would mean in a Biden administration.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

  • COVID will help Asia advance economically on Europe, says Merkel

    The coronavirus pandemic will further shift the global balance of power in Asia's favour, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday, as the health minister said he expected Germany to start rolling out vaccinations by January. "The pandemic will set us back economically," Merkel told a government digital summit, pointing to an economic revival in countries like China and South Korea where more people wore masks and there were fewer demonstrations against lockdowns. "I believe this will lead again to another reordering of the regions," she said, adding that Germany did not want to control its population in the way China did, but it did have to make more of an effort to keep up with technological developments.

  • 155 MPs write to Carrie Lam, asking her to advocate for better rights for the 'Hong Kong 12'

    An international coalition of more than 150 parliamentarians has urged Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, to guarantee a fair legal process for 12 young people who were detained in China in August after allegedly trying to flee the former British colony to reach Taiwan by sea. The open letter issued on Tuesday by 155 politicians from the UK, US, Australia, Canada, Japan, Myanmar and multiple European nations adds weight to a global campaign that has sprung up since the so-called “Hong Kong 12” were intercepted by the Chinese coastguard and jailed in the mainland city of Shenzhen. They were facing accusations of illegally crossing the border between Hong Kong and China. The group had tried to escape Hong Kong by speedboat, fearing political persecution amid an ongoing crackdown on pro-democracy activists and the introduction in June of a draconian national security law. The law punishes broadly defined crimes such as “secession” with up to life in prison. Beijing imposed the law to curb year-long anti-government protests. Hong Kong's Security Bureau has said all 12 were suspected of committing crimes including manufacturing or possessing explosives, arson and rioting in Hong Kong. The group consists of unnamed individuals aged 16 to 33. Signatories to the letter, who include Tom Tugendhat, the Foreign Affairs Committee Chair, and fellow MPs Iain Duncan Smith, Damian Green, Hilary Benn and John McDonnell, have appealed to Ms Lam to intervene to bring the group back to Hong Kong to face trial in local courts.

  • Freshly pardoned Michael Flynn shares message telling Trump to 'suspend the Constitution' to hold a new presidential election

    Retired Gen. Michael Flynn is fresh off a presidential pardon and ready to get back into some trouble.President Trump pardoned his short-lived national security adviser last week, after Flynn had previously pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with a Russian ambassador. Flynn has since been sharing dubious allegations of voter fraud, and on Wednesday, boosted a message telling Trump to take some radical actions to stop it.In a full-page Washington Times ad from something called the We the People Convention, Ohio Tea Party leader Tom Zawistowski tries to draw a comparison between Lincoln trying to save the union in 1863 and Trump trying to claw back the 2020 election, using some disputed facts along the way. Zawistowski alleges a lot of similarities between the two times, from "Democrat/Socialist federal officials plotting to finish gutting the U.S. Constitution" to big tech "actively censoring free speech and promoting leftist propaganda." So to counter that, the We the People Convention suggests Trump "declare limited Martial Law to temporarily suspend the Constitution" in order to hold a presidential election re-vote overseen by the military.> Big pro-authoritarian energy in Trumpland today:> > The president's (recently pardoned) former national security adviser, Mike Flynn, shared a message encouraging President Trump to "temporarily suspend the Constitution," impose martial law and "silence the destructive media." pic.twitter.com/cQh0wl7oWw> > — Brad Heath (@bradheath) December 2, 2020Flynn shared the ad on Twitter on Wednesday, seemingly trying to encourage a bunch of Fox News hosts and QAnon supporters to share it. It's just one of many disputed facts and allegations about the election that are apparently flowing through the mind of the man who used to oversee America's national security.More stories from theweek.com The naked corruption of Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue Our parents warned us the internet would break our brains. It broke theirs instead. Americans are choosing death over deprivation

  • 2017 ban on local LGBT ordinances ends in North Carolina

    A 3 1/2-year ban on new local ordinances aimed at protecting LGBT rights in North Carolina expired Tuesday, prompting gay rights groups to urge the passage of such measures now. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper agreed to the moratorium in March 2017 in exchange for GOP lawmakers agreeing to do away with several portions of a “bathroom bill” that Republicans had approved a year earlier. It drew national condemnation and prompted several large corporations and sports teams to relocate events to other states or reconsider expanding in North Carolina.

  • Egyptian model arrested over photo shoot at ancient pyramid

    Both model Salma El-Shimy and her photographer were arrested and were accused by one lawyer of "insulting the great Pharaonic history."

  • 10 Remote Airbnbs As Stunning As They Are Secluded

    From a private island to a tiny Vermont tree houseOriginally Appeared on Architectural Digest

  • US Supreme Court asked to block Biden win in Pennsylvania

    Republicans attempting to undo President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to take up their lawsuit, three days after it was thrown out by the highest court in the battleground state. In the request to the U.S. Supreme Court, Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly of northwestern Pennsylvania and the other plaintiffs are asking the court to prevent the state from certifying any contests from the Nov. 3 election, and undo any certifications already made, such as Biden’s victory. Biden beat President Donald Trump by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, a state Trump had won in 2016.

  • Trump will sign McConnell's coronavirus stimulus bill, Mnuchin says

    President Trump will sign Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) coronavirus stimulus proposal, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told reporters Wednesday.McConnell announced what appears to be a tweaked version of his previous $500 billion deal on Tuesday, just hours after a group of bipartisan senators put forward a $908 billion proposal. McConnell hasn't revealed many details of his bill yet, but it does include school choice tax credits, a proposal blocking the federal government from using unspent CARES Act funding, and other GOP priorities.Mnuchin made no mention of the bipartisan senators' bill, nor of a "secret deal" Democratic leaders reportedly put forward. The bipartisan bill's price tag was similar to the package McConnell shot down in July, but repurposes funds from the CARES Act, meaning only half the figure is new money. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) meanwhile gave Republicans what Schumer called a "private proposal" on Monday night. No further meetings between Democrats and the White House are on the docket.COVID-19 relief bill negotiations have been stalled for months, with the last CARES Act expiring at the end of July. Boosted unemployment benefits ended then, but a slate of other unemployment protections and tax propositions will expire at the end of the year without action.More stories from theweek.com The naked corruption of Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue Our parents warned us the internet would break our brains. It broke theirs instead. Freshly pardoned Michael Flynn shares message telling Trump to 'suspend the Constitution' to hold a new presidential election

  • Trump family asks to halt lawsuit accusing president of promoting marketing scam

    A lawyer for President Trump on Tuesday urged a federal appeals court to halt a lawsuit accusing the U.S. president of exploiting his family name to promote a marketing scam targeting poor and working-class people.

  • Project Veritas’ CNN Sting Uncovers Explosive News That Tucker Carlson Is Racist

    All day, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe has been hyping the huge revelations the group would be releasing from their latest stunt. In a dramatic video posted Tuesday morning, the conservative activist could be seen unmuting himself and informing CNN chief Jeff Zucker, “We’ve been listening to your CNN calls for basically two months and recording everything. Just wanted to ask you some questions, if you have a minute.”“Do you still feel you are the most trusted name in news?” he asked. “Because I have to say from what I’ve been hearing on these phone calls, I don’t know about that. I mean, we’ve got a lot of recordings that indicate you’re not really that independent of a journalist.”“Thank you for your comments,” Zucker replied, dryly. “So everybody, in light of that, I think what we’ll do is we’ll set up a new system and we’ll be back with you, we’ll do the rest of the call a little bit later.”So what were the supposedly shocking comments O’Keefe uncovered? According to his group’s Tuesday night release, the most damning thing anyone on CNN’s editorial team did was accuse Fox News’ Tucker Carlson of being a racist.“I think it’s unavoidable that you have to talk about the naked racism of Tucker Carlson,” a man Project Veritas identified as CNN digital VP of global programming Marcus Mabry says in one tape. “Because that’s really what drove this anti-diversity push, you know, Trump watches Tucker Carlson's show and then reacts. And just as sort of the white supremacy hour they have on Fox News every night.”Not exactly news for anyone who watches Carlson’s nightly show, including some of his own Fox News colleagues who said as much earlier this year.Without mentioning Project Veritas, Carlson attacked Mabry directly on that show Tuesday night for “lecturing” media companies about the value of diversity. The host laughed out loud at the notion that “there’s a lot of work to do” to make newsrooms more diverse.CNN’s PR Twitter account, meanwhile, responded to Project Veritas with this message: “Legal experts say this may be a felony. We‘ve referred it to law enforcement,” though it’s unclear what laws the group may have broken.Later, that same account revealed that Mabry was not even the staffer who made those comments about Carlson. “James & Tucker, the voice you ID’d tonight as ‘Marcus Mabry’ is actually GA resident & CNN General Counsel David Vigilante. We’re certain you’ll want to correct the record and apologize to the Black executive for assuming he was the voice raising concerns over white supremacy.” The other big revelation from Project Veritas appeared to be that Zucker did not want his staff to “normalize” President Donald Trump’s delusional claims about the election.“This is a president who knows he’s losing, who knows he’s in trouble, is sick, maybe is on the aftereffects of steroids or not, I don’t know,” Zucker said. “But he is acting erratically and desperately, and we need to not normalize that.”“You know, this is what we've come to expect for the last three and a half years, four years, but it clearly is exacerbated by the time that we're in and the issues that he’s [Trump] dealing with,” he added. “I think that we cannot just let it be normalized. He is all over the place and acting erratically, and I think we need to lean into that.”It appears that for Project Veritas, pointing out the reality unfolding in front of Americans’ eyes, whether on Fox News or in the White House, is proof of CNN’s supposed bias. But if anything, their big sting is likely to endear Zucker to those who still like to blame him for elevating Trump during the 2016 campaign.Seth Meyers Brutally Mocks Sidney Powell, the Trump Lawyer ‘Too Insane’ for Tucker CarlsonRead more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

  • China #MeToo case heads to court after 2-year delay

    Zhou Xiaoxuan’s says her prestigious internship with Chinese state TV soured after a popular host forcibly kissed her. Outraged, Zhou took the previously taboo step of filing a lawsuit in 2018, joining the global #MeToo movement against sexual harassment. Zhou waited two years for a hearing, while the host fought back by filing a defamation lawsuit.

  • Bill Barr's rejection of Trump's election fraud claims suggests Republican support is weakening

    Back in July, the US attorney general Bill Bar was dutifully echoing Donald Trump's warnings that mass mail-in voting was vulnerable to election fraud. Mr Barr's forceful repetition of the unfounded claims were met with heavy criticism from opponents, who accused the country's top law enforcement official of using his position to boost Mr Trump's chances of re-election. After the vote, Mr Barr attracted criticism once more when he authorised prosecutors to pursue allegations of vote counting "irregularities" before election officials had certified the results - a significant reversal from long-standing Justice Department policy. So it was a severe blow to the president's hopes of overturning the election results when Mr Barr publicly declared on Tuesday night: "To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election". Democrats were quick to crow over the admission by the head of the Justice Department, one of the president's closest allies. "If you've even lost Bill Barr... it’s time to pack it up," said Adam Schiff, a senior Democrat congressman.

  • The naked corruption of Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue

    Control of the United States Senate hinges on two January 5 runoff elections in Georgia, where incumbent Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler are facing Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock respectively. Most immediately, the race is a contest over whether President-elect Joe Biden and the Democratic Party will be able to govern — especially by passing another big coronavirus rescue package.However, Loeffler and Perdue are also excellent examples of what interests the Republican Party serves — namely, the ultra-rich, which includes both Loeffler and Perdue personally. These are two people who were rich before they got into politics, and leveraged their power as senators to make themselves even more rich — by profiteering off the pandemic. It is government of, by, and for the top 0.1 percent.Let me consider their cases in turn. David Perdue is a longtime businessman who served as CEO of Dollar General in the mid-2000s, where he worked diligently to source more products from China. According to his financial disclosures, he is worth between $15 million and $43 million.As Michela Tindera writes at Forbes, Kelly Loeffler and her husband Jeffrey Sprecher own a big stake in International Exchange, a financial clearinghouse company that Sprecher founded and where he remains CEO and chairman. (That company also owns the New York Stock Exchange, where Sprecher is again chairman.) After closely examining Loeffler's financial disclosure forms and other information, Tindera estimates that the couple is worth at least $800 million, and likely over $1 billion — or roughly quadruple the wealth of the second-richest member of Congress, Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah).Here's how the pandemic profiteering worked. On January 24, there was a private all-Senate briefing about the looming disaster — long before there was a broad public understanding that the U.S. was going to get slammed by COVID-19. Immediately afterward, both Loeffler and Perdue started trading strategic stocks. As The Daily Beast reported at the time, Loeffler executed 29 transactions valued between $1.275 and $3.1 million in the following days before the market crashed, almost all of them sales — one exception was a purchase of Citrix, which sells teleworking software. (Also, Loeffler recently violated the legal prohibition on soliciting campaign funds in a Senate office building.)Perdue made a similar number of trades, but bought more than Loeffler — in particular, an investment of up to $850,000 in DuPont, which manufactures personal protective equipment. And as The Associated Press reports, in late January he sold between $1 million and $5 million in shares of Cardlytics, a financial technology firm, at $86 per share. Then, when the market had bottomed out in March, he snapped up between $200,000 and $500,000 of Cardlytics shares at $30 apiece; since then the share price has shot back up to $121. Nice tidy little profit to counterbalance the 270,000 dead Americans. (The Daily Beast also reports that in 2019, Perdue bought up shares of a submarine parts manufacturer before voting to give the company a lucrative contract, then sold it for another handsome profit.)When reports of these trades first came out, both Loeffler and Perdue insisted they had nothing to do personally with the moves. "I have never used any confidential information I received while performing my Senate duties as a means of making a private profit ... professionals buy and sell stocks on our behalf," wrote Loeffler in an April 8 Wall Street Journal op-ed. Perdue told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that advisers made his investment decisions on their own.In the first place, candidates not taking direct control of their stock trades does not actually remove the conflict of interest. If you are a senator, and you hire a bunch of asset managers to look after your investments without any kind of blind trust, you still know what those investments are. You can make decisions knowing that your Goldman Sachs lackeys will make the profit-maximizing move in response — which is the best-case scenario of what happened here.But realistically speaking, it is virtually impossible to believe that all these trades had nothing to do with the two senators. Are we really to believe it was a coincidence that these asset managers started making "there is a pandemic coming" trades the very same day the two were receiving classified briefings on the disaster? Come on. Indeed, The New York Times recently reported that Perdue was lying with his blanket denial — he did directly instruct his manager to sell the Cardlytics shares after receiving a cryptic email mentioning "upcoming changes" from the company's then-CEO. (Perdue and Loeffler have been cleared of legal wrongdoing by the Department of Justice, but given that Attorney General Barr is a shameless Trump stooge, that is hardly reassuring.)Since then, both Perdue and Loeffler have largely downplayed the pandemic. Unlike Ossoff and Warnock, both have been holding large, in-person rallies. In July, both Loeffler and Perdue came out against extending the boost to unemployment insurance in the CARES Act, and since then neither have answered questions about further economic rescue measures from Atlanta Magazine. Instead, since the election they have amplified Trump's flagrant lies that Georgia's Republican governor and secretary of state somehow helped Joe Biden steal the election there.Over the last decade or so, there has been a long discussion of why Democrats are bleeding votes in rural areas (precisely where Republicans run up huge margins in Georgia). And on one level it's an important debate — there is good evidence that as Democrats embraced austerity, deregulation, and free trade that harmed such places, it hurt their vote share.But on another level, it is frankly staggering that the Republican Party has swooped in to replace them. The Democrats may not be much of a friend to the working class or rural farmers, but Republicans are straight-up picking their pockets. If you want a couple senators to govern solely on behalf of their massive asset portfolio while leaving everyone else twisting in the wind, vote Perdue and Loeffler.More stories from theweek.com Our parents warned us the internet would break our brains. It broke theirs instead. Freshly pardoned Michael Flynn shares message telling Trump to 'suspend the Constitution' to hold a new presidential election Americans are choosing death over deprivation

  • Over 50 arrested, 27 firearms seized and $359,000 confiscated in BSO gang operation

    A three-week deputy operation has led to over 50 arrests and more than $300,000 of illicit money being confiscated by the Broward Sheriff’s Office.

  • Netanyahu rival threatens to end coalition, force election

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s chief governing partner on Tuesday said he would vote in favor of a proposal to dissolve their troubled coalition, accusing the Israeli leader of repeatedly breaking his promises and pushing Israel closer to its fourth election in two years. The announcement by Defense Minister Benny Gantz that he would vote in favor of a preliminary no-confidence measure on Wednesday did not immediately cause the government to collapse. Rather, it served as a warning by Gantz, who also holds the title of alternate prime minister, that he has run out of patience with Netanyahu and is ready to break up their alliance if a long-overdue budget isn't passed immediately.