The U.S. Supreme Court ended its term Monday with a highly anticipated decision that provides American presidents with a modicum of immunity from criminal charges. The case was ostensibly about Donald Trump, but in fact the ruling sets guidelines intended to ensure the nation — regardless of which man, woman or party holds the Oval Office — doesn’t become mired in a series of retaliatory and vindictive prosecutions.

Progressives, fixated on Trump, argue that the 6-3 decision “creates a law-free zone around the president,” as Justice Sonia Sotomayor described it in her dissent. But it does nothing of the sort.

“The president enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority,” and not everything the president does is official. The president is not above the law. But Congress may not criminalize the president’s conduct in carrying out the responsibilities of the executive branch under the Constitution.”

Note that the court explicitly rejected Trump’s claim of absolute immunity. “Trump asserts a far broader immunity,” the majority opinion holds, “than the limited one we have recognized.” But the idea, put forth by special prosecutor Jack Smith and the government that a president has no special protection is equally pernicious. Would it be good for the country to allow a former president to face politically motivated prosecutions involving a policy dispute?

In the current political climate, such concerns are not theoretical.

“Virtually every president is criticized for insufficiently enforcing some aspect of federal law (such as drug, gun, immigration or environmental laws),” Roberts wrote. “An enterprising prosecutor in a new administration may assert that a previous president violated that broad statute. Without immunity, such types of prosecutions of ex-presidents could quickly become routine.”

The decision will require federal courts to hold evidentiary hearings to determine which actions charged by Smith amount to “official” and “unofficial” acts. But it in no way stops the government from prosecuting Trump for actions he took that were unrelated to his duties as president. Trump’s attorney conceded during oral arguments that some of the conduct that caught Smith’s attention was related to unofficial actions.

Despite the apocalyptic protestations of the dissenting liberal justices, the majority has carved out a middle ground that rejects the extreme arguments made by both the former president and the special prosecutor who pursues him. Trump — or any other president — is not above the law. But neither should they be victims of politically motivated criminal prosecutions.

— The Las Vegas Review Journal

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Minnesota judges are offering to marry people at no cost this summer at three county fairs.

Judges love to marry people — it’s a “feel-good thing,” said a spokesperson for the Minnesota Judicial Branch. Judges across the state offered free weddings on Valentine’s Day, and more counties wanted to get in on the act at their local fairs.

Judges will be performing weddings at the Dakota, Goodhue and McCleod county fairs in August, with the ceremonies taking place in public areas.

Interested couples should contact the county court to register. They need not live in the county to get married at that fair.

Ready to get married? Here’s how:

Dakota County, Aug. 5, 6, 7, 8 and 10 — email 1stDakota@courts.state.mn.us
Goodhue County, Aug. 7 and 8 — email Vanessa.Jeske@courts.state.mn.us  or call 651-267-4815
McLeod County, Aug. 16 and 17 — email McLeod.FamilyCivil@courts.state.mn.us  or call 320-864-1285 or 320-864-1284

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When Qamaria Yemeni Coffee opened its first Minnesota location in May in Little Canada, the line to get in the door stretched around the block.

The Twin Cities are home to many delightful Middle Eastern restaurants but fewer specific coffee shops. The opening-day rush at Qamaria (pronounced “ka-ma-REE-ya” with, in Arabic, a guttural initial ‘k’ sound) suggests, perhaps, that we’re overdue for a place like this.

Qamaria started a couple years ago in Dearborn, Mich. — home to one of the country’s largest Middle Eastern immigrant populations — and all the coffee is grown in Yemen and roasted in Michigan.

The Little Canada location is a locally owned franchise and, like other coffee shops that have opened in recent years in the East Metro, has gained instant popularity not only for great food and drinks but also as a deeply rooted cultural space.

The drink menu includes several traditional Yemeni coffee and tea preparations, including the Mufawaar, or coffee steeped with cardamom and served with cream, and the Juban, which blends coffee and qishr — a tea-like drink made with the husks of coffee beans — with cinnamon, ginger and cardamom.

The pistachio latte — one of the best flavored lattes in the Twin Cities, I think — was stunningly full-bodied, with a pitch-perfect savory, woodsy edge that quality pistachio treats should have. The house Qamaria latte, flavored with cinnamon and cardamom, was also particularly enjoyable: richly aromatic but not overpowering, and with none of the grainy texture or sludge that can result when other coffee shops try to add ground spices to beverages.

Food options

There are some food options, too; mostly sweet, with a savory option here and there. (On a recent Thursday morning, they were serving crispy, spicy beef sambusas.)

Food at Qamaria Yemeni Coffee, including beef sambusas and slices of khalyet nahel, or “honeycomb bread,” was served on intricately decorated trays on June 13, 2024. Much of the cafe’s food and drink menu consist of traditional Yemeni recipes, from coffee blended with cardamom to vibrantly colored milk cakes. (Jared Kaufman / Pioneer Press)

The pastry case, full of colorful cakes and breads and cheesecakes, is the main attraction. I opted for a slice of khalyet nahel, a.k.a. honeycomb bread, a Yemeni specialty. Small balls of cream cheese-stuffed dough are arranged in a concentric pattern and topped with sesame seeds, and each slice is toasted and drizzled with honey. It’s the ideal coffee snack. Sweet but not too sweet; light and airy but still substantial.

Beyond just the cakes, the whole cafe is colorful, from the upholstery on the bench seating to the ornately decorated food trays. And it makes sense: The Arabic word qamaria, which translates roughly to ‘moon-like,’ refers in Yemen to a particular type of vibrant half-moon-shaped stained glass window that’s a common architectural feature there.

But the real giveaway of Qamaria Yemeni Coffee’s Middle Eastern roots is its hours. Open at 8 every morning, the shop doesn’t close till 11 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays and midnight Fridays through Sundays.

Coffee culture in much of the Middle East, including Yemen, is central to social gatherings and hospitality. And because observant Muslims typically don’t drink alcohol, coffee becomes part of nightlife, too.

The Yemeni coffee shop isn’t necessarily an errand or a pit-stop — it’s a place to spend time.

And with the drinks and food on offer at Qamaria, that’s exactly what I want to do.

Small Bites are first glances — not intended as definitive reviews — of new or changed restaurants.

Qamaria Yemeni Coffee: 3 Little Canada Rd E, Little Canada; 651-219-5973; qamariacoffee.com or on Instagram @yemenicoffeemn

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Revolutionary. A game changer. Spine chilling. Those are some of the words experts used to describe fresh data for lenacapavir, a twice-yearly shot developed by Gilead Sciences for the prevention of HIV.

Their enthusiasm stems from a more succinct word: zero. That’s the number of cases of HIV that developed in the women and adolescent girls who received the drug in a huge study conducted across dozens of sites in South Africa and Uganda.

Lenacapavir has the potential to at long last move the needle on the incidence of HIV. The virus caused some 1.3 million infections and 630,000 deaths in 2022. One expert told me this preventive drug, if given to enough at-risk women, could be the way to get close to eliminating pediatric HIV. Another talked about finally bending infection curves in young women and adolescent girls, who account for 77% of new infections among younger people in sub-Saharan Africa.

But none of that will happen without the right pieces in place to get the drug to everyone who needs it as soon as it receives regulatory clearance. That’s an all-hands-on-deck effort that should be underway now.

Lenacapavir’s advantage is its unique mechanism and months-long activity. While other HIV antivirals target enzymes the virus needs to replicate, lenacapavir takes aim at the capsid, an eggplant-shaped shell made up of hundreds of proteins that carefully assemble to protect the virus’s genetic material. And it turns out, disrupting that shell works beautifully as a prophylaxis: In the trial, there were no HIV infections in the more than 2,100 women who received the drug, compared with infection rates of 1.5% and 1.8% in women taking Truvada or Descovy, two types of daily pills to prevent HIV infection (also known as PrEP).

“I’ve been doing this for almost 40 years, I have never, ever seen a result like this before,” says Salim Abdool Karim, an infectious disease epidemiologist and director of the Center for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa. “To see a 100% efficacious product? It just blew my mind.” (CAPRISA enrolled several hundred women for the study, though Abdool Karim was not directly involved.)

A separate prevention study of lenacapavir in men who have sex with men and transgender people is underway, after which Gilead plans to ask for regulatory approval. (The drug is already on the market in the U.S. and elsewhere as a treatment for HIV.)

But the data involving young women are already extraordinary. The existing options for PrEP — whether daily pills, the dapivirine vaginal ring, or ViiV’s bimonthly shot cabotegravir — have not moved the needle much on rates of infection among young women. “A daily intervention needs a daily decision: ‘I’m going to protect myself,’” says Linda-Gail Bekker, director of the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre at the University of Cape Town and an investigator in the trial.

A wildly effective, twice-annual shot could make a huge difference in bending infection curves, particularly among women and infants.

Yet this astounding success can only come to fruition if lenacapavir reaches the people who need it. That comes down to access and delivery: Lenacapavir needs to be made at a volume that it can be widely available, at a price that makes it widely accessible, and distributed in a way that makes it easy and appealing for everyone to stick with.

The ball is in Gilead’s court on the issues of price and supply. And Gilead is, so far, saying all the right things. The same day it revealed the astonishing trial results, the biotech company announced a two-pronged approach to ensuring lenacapavir can be widely available in the places being hit hardest by HIV. It will form license agreements that allow generic firms to make and sell the drug in low-resource countries hard hit by the HIV epidemic, a strategy used successfully in the past. And until that generic supply is up and running, the company says it will set aside supply for those regions. That’s elicited cautious optimism.

But Gilead will also need to commit to transparency at every step of the process. While the company has made substantial efforts to ensure people in low- and middle-income countries can access its HIV therapies, it also has been criticized for some of its tactics around the price and development of certain medicines. Global health experts would like to better understand which countries will have access to low-cost generic versions of the drug, and be assured that the company will work to transfer not only patents, but know-how to ensure a speedy increase in manufacturing.

That third piece of the equation, delivery, will require a huge effort by global health agencies and their partners to study the most effective way to get the treatment to at-risk groups — not just once, of course, but every six months during the years they might be vulnerable to infection. The work these groups have already done to provide existing forms of PrEP provides a good foundation for distributing lenacapavir, says Carmen Pérez Casas, senior strategy lead at Unitaid. Meanwhile, studies will need to be quickly designed and funded to understand the best way to ensure broad and consistent use of the biannual shot.

This new drug, while astounding, does not obviate the need to keep pushing for an effective HIV vaccine. Yes, the new drug will likely meaningfully reduce infections (which also reduces transmission). But a vaccine that ideally can be administered before puberty is the key to eradicating this deadly virus.

Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, she was executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News.

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