Families have asked Trump to declassify records that could shed light on Saudi Arabia’s alleged role in the 2001 attacks
Donald Trump said Sunday that he will look into requests from families of 9/11 victims to release records that could shed light on Saudi Arabia’s alleged role in the attacks 25 years ago.
Several families have long alleged that a group of extremist religious leaders in Saudi Arabia gained influence in the kingdom’s government and aided the hijackers. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, but the Saudi government has long denied any involvement in the attacks.
In an interview about the donations, he said they are compliant with the law ‘today’
Andy Burnham has cancelled engagements today and tomorrow following the death of his father Roy, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s, the Press Association reports.
Burnham has spoken about his father’s illness which meant that he did not know his son had become prime minister.
[We] will continue bringing forward further reforms to strengthen confidence in our democracy.
Following on from the previous minister for democracy’s letter to you of 10 July 2026, we wanted to reiterate the government’s concerns, shared by many members of the public and parliamentarians, about the rise in the volume and concentration of money in UK politics. We have to limit the way financial power can end up dominating political power, to get to a politics that works for all people in all places.
We believe spending limits on parties and candidates are too high, and ought to be reduced.
Center’s Trump-installed leaders also say it is on brink of bankruptcy and could close as early as Tuesday
Leaders of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts say it is reportedly on the brink of bankruptcy and could close as early as Tuesday.
The center’s Donald Trump-installed leaders argued that putting the president’s name on its facade may be the only way to avoid imminent and “certain fiscal collapse”, the Washington Post first reported, citing documents it obtained.
The American rapper will no longer support Sheeran’s US leg of Loop tour after comments at MetLife Stadium show
Macklemore has been dropped from the remainder of the US leg of Ed Sheeran’s Loop tour, after the American rapper drew headlines for saying “free Palestine” on stage at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.
In a brief speech between songs on 4 September, the Grammy-winning artist told the audience he wanted the people of Gaza and “the occupied West Bank” to know “we have not forgotten about them”, prompting a petition from the Israeli American Council demanding his removal from the tour.
Donald Trump has claimed there is a “SICK conspiracy” against artificial intelligence and data centers in response to the growing calls for greater checks on AI development.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, insisting that the administration has stopped leaders of AI companies from “doing bad, or potentially bad” things. However, he didn’t point to any concrete examples for how he has curbed possible abuse or malfeasance in the industry.
There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China … We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!
Would you hand in your phone at the door in exchange for a free bottle of wine? One restaurateur has tried that – and there are now many other gambits that are encouraging us to connect
Name: Phone bans.
Age: Their provenance is considerable; their time is now.
US president blames conflict, and ‘not Iran’, for spike in US diesel prices
Jennifer Rankinin Brussels andCharlotte Higgins and Amy Hawkinsin Kyiv
Catching up with other news from across Europe, the head of Nato has said a Russian drone attack on a train close to Ukraine’s border with Poland would not deter Kyiv’s western backers.
French health service documents injuries including fractures and bruising after detention and return under ‘one in one out’ scheme
Multiple injuries including bruising and fractures have been documented by a health service supporting people returned to France under the controversial “one in, one out” scheme.
The pilot scheme involves one asylum seeker who crosses the Channel in a small boat being returned to France in return for another in northern France being legally brought to the UK to claim asylum. The scheme is due to end on 1 October.
Judges uphold ruling that financier tried to ‘frustrate’ investigations into harassment claims against him
The former hedge fund boss Crispin Odey has lost a legal challenge to overturn his lifetime ban from the City for trying to “frustrate” investigations into sexual harassment allegations against him.
Woman, her daughter, her son and his girlfriend identified as victims in incident that also critically wounded a child
A Louisiana woman, her daughter, her son and his girlfriend have been identified as the four victims killed in a stabbing spree on Saturday that also left a young child critically wounded in the southern part of the state, according to a relative and family advocate.
Verna Mae Verdin, her daughter Letha Verrett, her son Paul Verret, and his girlfriend Krissy Lynn Parfait were stabbed to death at their home in the community of Houma, the relative and advocate, Brandon Thiel, told Louisiana television news station WVUE and said on an online campaign raising funds in part for the victims’ funeral expenses.
Military chief had pulled country out over ‘Harry-Meghan nonsense’ but U-turned after clarification from the palace
Uganda has U-turned on its decision to withdraw from the Duke of Sussex’s Invictus Games after the country’s military chief said he had been reassured by King Charles that there was “no problem” with its participation.
Last week, Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the eldest son of the Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, made the surprise announcement the country would not participate in the games in a post on X. He said he was motivated by his respect for the king amid division over the “Harry-Meghan nonsense”.
After 2025’s wildly lucrative reunion, the Gallagher brothers will tour the UK, Ireland and US, and revisit the Hertfordshire site of their greatest live triumph
Oasis have finally confirmed new tour dates for 2027, including their long-rumoured return to Knebworth for a run of shows 30 years after they played a historic two nights at the Hertfordshire venue in 1996.
“Start the celebrations!”, the band said in a statement. “After a period of reflection, The Most Damaging Pop Cultural Force in Recent British History” – a quote from a Guardian opinion piece about the band – “has declared itself fit for purpose and will once again return to lift the spirits of the people. Come witness the fitness. It shall be a sight to behold.”
Some House Democrats are calling on Speaker Mike Johnson to delay the congressional recess expected at the end of the week until lawmakers pass AI safeguards.
Donald Trump has dismissed calls to increase controls on AI as a “sick conspiracy”, as stocks linked to the technology slumped after appeals from leading developers on the weekend for the industry to slow down.
The US president wrote on social media: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the USA has that, in spades!”
Some of the arguments inconsistent with ‘available evidence, science and established physiology’, say pair
Two leading experts have withdrawn from Lucy Letby’s defence team over concerns about the “scientific credibility” of some of its evidence.
The former neonatal nurse is challenging her convictions for murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others at the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England.
Ochopee, Florida — A Department of Homeland Security watchdog found that immigrants held at Florida’s former “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center were sometimes placed in outdoor metal cages measuring about 16 square feet, smaller than federal detention standards allow.
According to the DHS inspector general, facility staff called the enclosures “calming areas” where detainees could “reflect on their behavior choices, manage their emotions, reduce stress and practice self-directed behavior.” Records reviewed by investigators showed 79 detainees spent time in the 16- and 18-square-foot cages between July 2025 and January 2026, with an average stay of just under an hour and a maximum of roughly two hours.
The inspector general said the spaces were “highly unconventional” and did not align with standards for humane treatment. ICE guidelines cited in the report generally call for at least 37 square feet for single-person detention rooms.
Amnesty International had previously alleged that detainees were shackled inside similar enclosures in extreme heat and called the practice torture. The DHS report did not go that far, but confirmed the cages existed and were used.
The facility opened in the Everglades in 2025 as part of Florida’s partnership with federal immigration authorities and later closed. DHS has disputed responsibility for day-to-day operations, saying ICE did not directly contract with Florida to run the facility.
The findings add to broader scrutiny over detention conditions and federal oversight at facilities used in the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign.
Advocates and experts describe the Trump administration’s climate rollbacks as gifts to polluters at expense of planet
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is poised to formally repeal carbon pollution standards for coal- and gas-fired power plants, according to reports.
The Trump administration’s latest climate rollback is expected to come as soon as Monday on the sidelines of the G20 energy ministers’ meeting in Houston, Texas, Bloomberg News reported on Sunday, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter.
The actor’s latest promotion has stirred outrage but will no doubt be good for the prediction markets hoping to lure in young men
Prediction markets are a cynical business.
Many customers will lose money, and the real product may just be the delightful dopamine hit that comes in that brief window between placing a bet and its outcome – which is statistically more likely to be a disappointment than a victory. So the bettor has to think they are buying more than their own fleecing.
Critics say segment about airman’s rescue was made to boost public perception of Trump’s unpopular war
A US airman has spoken of climbing a 7,000ft ridge with a broken back, arm and shoulder after he was shot down in Iran – and of being rescued by a team of American special forces as hostile locals closed in on him.
The air force colonel, identified only by his codename Bravo, appeared on camera Sunday night on CBS’s 60 Minutes in a segment some critics have labelled Pentagon propaganda to boost public perception of Donald Trump’s unpopular war.
Losing captain frustrated by lack of in-play statistics
Stanford offers warning to Ryder Cup leader Jim Furyk
The latest inquest into failure by an American team on European soil involves slow greens, the perception of a premature celebration and a curious absence of statistical backup. Angela Stanford, whose Solheim Cup team were defeated by Europe in the Netherlands on Sunday, warned Jim Furyk’s Ryder Cup contingent to take note.
Stanford used the numbers-based evidence of Justin Ray to assist with decision-making and Furyk will do likewise at Adare Manor next year. In the aftermath of the 15-13 defeat and assessing Ray’s input, Stanford clearly had an underlying gripe. “I’m wondering how honest to be,” she said.
The head of Nato has said a Russian drone attack on a train close to Ukraine’s border with Poland would not deter Kyiv’s western backers.
Mark Rutte said the strike on a passenger train showed how desperate Vladimir Putin had become. “He thinks that he can stops us from supporting Ukraine and that he can undermine our unity. He is wrong. Our answer is to increase support,” the Nato general secretary said.
Americans will eat almost anything in guacamole, but nobody agrees on what actually belongs in it. Every batch seems to come with a rule someone ... Read moreThe post Americans eat more guacamole than ever and still can’t agree on…
Apple cider season is back, and the cider most people grab at the grocery store is made from the same apples sitting in the produce ... Read moreThe post What makes orchard apple cider taste different starts long before anyone…
(The Center Square)—Despite posting multi-million-dollar losses in several recent years, a federally funded nonprofit that develops vaccines against deadly viruses overseas has continued to raise its executives' pay. That includes two whose compensation exceeded the $400,000 annual salary of the…
Leaders in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland discuss independence and call for constitutional change at summit
Westminster’s time is coming to an end, the first ministers of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have said at a landmark summit aimed at putting the UK’s Celtic nations on the path to independence referendums.
The Plaid Cymru leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth; the Scottish National party leader, John Swinney; Sinn Féin’s vice-president, Michelle O’Neill, and the president and leader of the opposition in Ireland, Mary Lou McDonald, met in Cardiff on Monday to sign a memorandum of understanding recognising that “the political landscape across these islands is changing”.
Alexander Zverev was simply too good for the home hope at the US Open on Sunday. Andy Roddick’s record may stand for some time to come
On a Sunday afternoon set up for Ben Shelton to play national hero, the US Open final debutant suffered a four-set defeat to Alexander Zverev, a result that deflated the partisans at Arthur Ashe Stadium. The match compounded Shelton’s miserable head-to-head record against the German, who claimed a second career grand slam title without having to face final bosses Jannik Sinner or Carlos Alcaraz. The defeat also extended a long drought – the last win by an American man at a grand slam was Andy Roddick at the 2003 US Open, when Shelton was still a month off his first birthday.
After the final, Shelton wore a hangdog expression as he thanked his team and the capacity crowd in New York, tucking the silver runner-up tray under his arm as if shunted off to high school detention. “Disappointed with how today went,” he said in his press conference afterward. “Excited with the progress that I feel that I’ve made. But, yeah, this one stings 100%.”
Nassau, Bahamas — A Russian oligarch with close ties to President Vladimir Putin paid hundreds of thousands of dollars toward Donald Trump Jr.’s May wedding to Bettina Anderson in the Bahamas, according to a new ProPublica investigation.
The report identifies Umar Kremlev, president of the International Boxing Association, as the benefactor. Kremlev allegedly paid for major wedding expenses, including use of a second private island that can rent for roughly $100,000 per night and a fireworks display that can cost about $70,000. ProPublica reported that Kremlev did not attend the 18-person ceremony itself but participated in other wedding-related events.
Trump Jr.’s spokesperson did not dispute that Kremlev helped cover expenses, describing him as a “personal friend” rather than a business associate. The spokesperson said the two met through mutual contacts in hunting circles and bonded over boxing and outdoor interests. Kremlev’s office likewise confirmed that the two have a friendly relationship.
Kremlev has drawn scrutiny because of his relationship with Putin and the International Boxing Association’s past ties to Russian state-linked energy giant Gazprom. ProPublica also noted that Trump Jr.’s wedding involved a number of Russian guests.
The arrangement has raised ethical and counterintelligence questions because Trump Jr. is the president’s son, though the report did not allege that the wedding payments violated any law.
St Barts is one of many UK institutions whose benefactors were involved in the trafficking of enslaved Africans
Inside the Great Hall of St Bartholomew’s North Wing, alongside stately portraits of the apostle from whom London’s oldest hospital takes its name and King Henry VIII, extravagant commemorative boards adorn the walls.
The Great Hall was a grand, formal space where governors weighed their philanthropic donations and drafted their wills, many while investing in the stock of companies built on the trafficking of enslaved Africans. Today, many of those donors are commemorated in acrylic gold paint on the boards.
Public offering of Aliko Dangote’s Nigerian oil refinery business could swell his net wealth by two-thirds
The fortune of Africa’s richest person could swell by two thirds to nearly $60bn (£44bn) after his refinery in Nigeria listed publicly in the continent’s biggest-ever initial public offering.
If Monday’s flotation of Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals on the Nigerian exchange goes to plan, then Aliko Dangote will add a further $23bn (£17bn) to his $35bn net worth.
The Senate is returning to Washington from a five-week recess, with several priorities to address before leaving town next month to take to the campaign trail.
Gulf states have postponed a critical meeting with Iran on the future of the strait of Hormuz owing to a lack of Arab consensus and growing Saudi Arabian anger with Tehran for helping the Houthis loosen Riyadh’s grip in Yemen.
The stalemate over the vital waterway came as Houthi rebels launched a fresh barrage of missile and drone attacks on Saudi military targets. A Houthi military spokesperson claimed its forces had attacked the King Khalid airbase in Khamis Mushait, hitting fighter-jet hangars, radar systems, runways and landing strips, ammunition depots and additional targets.
Since the party was founded in 1988, the story of the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD) has been one of such continuous growth that a triumph in Sunday’s general election seemed inevitable.
In 2022, the party capitalised on electoral gains – and the desperation of right-leaning parties to form a minority administration – and almost made its way into government. A supporting role in prime minister Ulf Kristersson’s Tidö coalition earned the party, which has neo-Nazi roots, huge influence and mainstream acceptance by the political establishment.
Israel’s culture minister has called for the Oscar-winning Israeli directors of NAZA, a documentary about the country’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza, to be stripped of their citizenship, accusing them of “treason against the state”.
NAZA, which was produced by the Guardian, is named for an acronym used by Israel’s intelligence service to indicate how many civilians it expects to die in an airstrike on Gaza.
Iran and Oman delay a meeting to discuss control of the Strait of Hormuz as fighting between Iran's Houthi allies and Saudi Arabia raises the stakes for global energy markets.
Workers should start with a moratorium against building until our livelihoods and communities are protected
For the surging number of Americans who now live alongside constantly humming computer-filled mega-warehouses, it is clear AI datacenters come with significant drawbacks.
Opposition to datacenters grows on both sides of the political aisle as developers plan to invest $8tn to build them in the coming years. The bet is massive – roughly a quarter of our country’s entire GDP – but AI CEOs think it will pay off because they believe this technology will allow businesses across industries to rake in profits by cutting out their largest expense: labor. If all goes according to their plan, AI data centers will enable corporations to redistribute workers’ salaries to themselves.
We must stop companies from allowing AI to self-improve into an uncontrollable level of intelligence
Major AI lab CEOs advocated for slowing the pace of AI development this weekend. They are right to be concerned: the field runs an extremely dangerous race towards superintelligent AI. We can and should be demanding that our governments protect us from the catastrophe of out-of-control AI.
This July, OpenAI’s AI swarm of 700 agentsbroke containment to hack Hugging Face, a multi-billion dollar company. OpenAI didn’t tell the AIs to hack that company, but the AIs had different priorities: cheating on the unrelated challenge OpenAI gave them. AI researchers call this a “misalignment” between what OpenAI wanted and what the AI actually prioritized.
Until Pierre Damas Bel’s death on 31 August, the story of Haitian adolescents in Springfield was one of triumph
At a pavilion west of downtown Springfield, Ohio, 32 high school students dressed in black T-shirts stand silently at a vigil in the warm fall evening air.
Some are holding signs depicting the number 11, as worn on the soccer field by Pierre Damas Bel, the 20-year-old Haitian student and athlete who died in an apparent suicide on 31 August. Other students hold signs that read “live like Pierre” and “Pierre was selfless”.
Nearly 1900 Blizzard Entertainment workers "voted to ratify their first union contract with parent company Microsoft after over two years of bargaining," reports Kotaku, "consolidating Blizzard's many smaller unions into three larger bargaining units."
The workers now gain new protections "on issues such as generative AI, crediting, remote work, and layoffs."
[The contract] acknowledges that AI tools "may be useful in the game development process to support human judgment and creativity and that AI-assisted workflows remain subject to appropriate human control and review for accuracy and quality." But it also stipulates that any implementation of AI technology that would materially impact work performed by union employees must have its impacts bargained over before it can be implemented.
Other sections cover issues such as crediting (guaranteeing that current and former employees are credited by name in all games they work on) and remote work (designating certain roles as hybrid in-office and providing procedures for individuals to apply for their roles to be fully remote). It also contains a lengthy section on how layoffs may be conducted, including a required 60-day notice period (or pay in lieu of notice), a guarantee of one week of severance for every six months of employment, and 14 months of recall rights. The contract also guarantees successorship, meaning if Blizzard is ever acquired by another company, the contract would remain intact.
"Workers also contractually locked in their current hybrid work schedule," reports the gaming news site Aftermath, "meaning that Blizzard can't suddenly change it, as has been a labor-unfriendly trend in the games industry over the past couple years."
Fully remote workers scored a big win as well. "I'm remote, and we grandfathered everyone who is remote to stay remote, so we can't be magically called to an office that we've never worked at before," [said Diablo senior environment artist Mahreen Fatima].
And "The contract also elevated pay floor," reports the Yakima Herald-Republic. "Across the board, workers secured a 1.25% pay increase, but some workers who were paid below $50,000 per year will walk away with pay increases that are as much as 34%."
But their habitat is threatened by bottom trawling in the region and Trump’s plan to expand seafloor mining
Scientists have discovered nine new deep-sea sponge species off Alaska, offering new insights into the region’s largely unexplored marine biodiversity.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) announced the discovery on Thursday, saying the species were found in the Gulf of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands. The findings bring the total number of known sponge species in Alaska to 232.
Good morning. Oil prices have climbed above $108 a barrel after a series of drone attacks from Iraq’s territory forced Saudi Arabia to close its east-west crude pipeline. Saudi traders said the kingdom would run out of oil stocks for export if it did not reopen within days. Gas prices also climbed higher. Energy prices have surged this year, as the US-Israel war with Iran has disrupted oil and gas supply across the Middle East.
The spike came as the Iran-aligned Houthi forces in Yemen launched several attacks against Saudi Arabia and captured the strategic island of Perim in the Bab al-Mandab strait on Sunday, expanding their control of the waterway.
Where did the attack on Saudi Arabia come from? Iraq’s government confirmed the attacks were launched from its territory and ordered an investigation. Baghdad is under mounting pressure to stop militant groups – including those backed by Saudi Arabia’s regional rival Iran – launching attacks on Gulf countries from Iraqi soil. The US president, Donald Trump, said he believed Tehran was responsible.
Why has Saudi Arabia been relying on its east-west pipeline? Riyadh has increased the use of the 745-mile pipeline since the start of the war on Iran in order to bypass the strait of Hormuz’s closure. The world’s biggest exporter has used the pipeline to reroute about 4m barrels a day – about 4% of global supply – but with the pipeline out of service, the Red Sea port of Yanbu now has stocks to maintain exports for just five to seven days.
What is the Anthropic CEO proposing?Robert Booth explains Amodei’s suggestion: first, each US AI company grants access to third-party evaluators; second, all companies in democratic countries establish common safety standards; and third, the world’s democratic AI powers coordinate with autocracies – notably China – to control the race.
How has Barack Obama intervened over AI? The former US president made a direct appeal to Democrats to coalesce around a unified AI safety policy, arguing that waiting for voluntary compliance from tech firms was a recipe for governance failure.
Amid constant Russian drone and missile attacks, two shortfalls are raising the greatest alarm: a lack of air defense interceptors and an unexpected $27 billion defense budget gap.
British lawmakers are demanding more restrictions on the power of AI, warning the world is unprepared for the “potentially dire” consequences of the technology, in the latest sign of rising global concern.
A new regulatory framework is needed for AI in the UK, including an independent oversight body and legislation to protect the public, according to the cross-party joint committee on human rights, comprising MPs and Lords.
Washington, D.C. — Democrats are launching a nationwide election-protection program aimed at training tens of thousands of volunteers to monitor polling places, encourage early voting and respond to misinformation ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections.
The initiative, called the New Battlefield Project, is being organized through the Association of State Democratic Committees. Organizers say they want trained volunteers present at roughly 25% of the nation’s 95,000 Election Day polling locations, with an emphasis on competitive districts.
Volunteers are expected to wear blue vests and assist voters with issues such as finding the correct polling place or understanding provisional-ballot procedures. They will also document possible voter intimidation or interference and relay problems to election-protection teams.
The program also includes a national “bank your vote” campaign encouraging Democrats to cast ballots early, either by mail or in person, and a “democracy defense network” designed to track disinformation, artificial-intelligence manipulation and other alleged election-interference tactics.
The effort comes amid debate over whether federal immigration agents could appear at polling sites. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said ICE would not patrol polling places generally but could act there in response to a specific threat or to serve a warrant.
Democratic officials say the new structure is intended to make election protection more coordinated than in previous cycles. The DNC has also expanded volunteer and staff training programs throughout 2026 as both parties prepare for closely contested House and Senate races.
Scientists believe increasingly crowded waters and rising ocean temperatures are shifting sharks' migratory patterns, which may be contributing to a rise in attacks.
Recent social media lawsuits have addressed concerns about mental health. But what about its cognitive effects?
A few years ago, when I’d just started graduate work, I was waiting with a grandmother finishing a questionnaire I’d handed her about her 19-year-old granddaughter who was in the testing room next door. They were participating in a study that used brain imaging to look at adolescent development. The older woman had a soft southern accent and a warm laugh.
Some of the everyday struggles animating voters have a climate link lurking in the background
When Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a law erasing the words “climate change” from state statutes in May 2024 – colloquially known as the “don’t say climate change” law – Democrats were outraged. Just six months later, many liberal politicians began to go quiet on the issue themselves. After Donald Trump won the 2024 election, mentions of the climate crisis started to disappear from Democrats’ rhetoric. As the 2026 midterms approach, that retreat is still shaping how some candidates talk about climate on the campaign trail.
The trend, known as “climate-hushing”, may reflect the limitations of Joe Biden’s climate policies, said Daniel Aldana Cohen, assistant sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies climate politics and inequality. Green jobs and housing investments fell short of the climate movement’s desires, consumer incentives disproportionately benefited wealthier households, and Democrats struggled to effectively communicate their accomplishments. The president has since rolled back many Biden-era clean energy incentives and regulations.
Local police departments use Flock cameras to track license plates. ICE uses Palantir software to track and round up immigrants. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s war department uses Claude to bomb Iran. The U.S. government spends billions employing private corporations to obtain mountains of data — and the surveillance space is only getting more privatized in Donald Trump’s second term.
“It really has become a Wild West,” 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler tells host Akela Lacy on The Intercept Briefing, on the state of the U.S. surveillance apparatus today. While Palantir and Flock have become household names, Koebler says, “anything that can be surveilled is being surveilled, and a lot of this is happening from companies that very few people have heard of, and companies that are willing to push the envelope on what they’re willing to do, like how far they’re willing to go to surveil people.”
“A lot of the stuff that you used to associate with the NSA or CIA or another state spy agency, those kinds of capabilities you can now just buy,” Intercept senior technology reporter Sam Biddle notes of the ease and accessibility of the tools now available to the government. “You don’t need to be a top-secret government agency. You can just be a contractor in Virginia.”
“It’s a way to sidestep warrant requirements,” says Koebler. Surveillance contractors “are doing things that if the government were doing directly, they would need to get a warrant in order to do it.”
This week, for a special recording of the podcast, independent tech outlet 404 Media and The Intercept teamed up in front of a live audience in Los Angeles to discuss how the U.S. government weaponizes private data to surveil and kill abroad and at home, the resulting backlash and potential regulations on the table, what tangible actions the average person can take to “divest from the contemporary surveillance hellscape,” and refocusing AI-ending-humanity doomerism.
“When you ascribe motives and agency to AI, you’re letting Sam Altman off the hook,” says Biddle. “There are human beings building this technology. It’s not inevitable. This doomsday future is not inevitable,” adds Koebler. “We can’t bury our heads in the sand and say, ‘This is not changing society in some way.’ But it is being driven by very rich humans, and they can be regulated. They can be held to account.”
“What’s been really interesting about the Flock backlash, and heartening, is that it is completely apolitical, or it’s nonpartisan. It is completely — from the deepest red to the people in this room right now — the entire political spectrum hates these,” says Biddle. “There’s the real potential for the first time in a while to create a pro-privacy coalition that bridges a lot of the otherwise pretty giant political gaps.”
For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.
Transcript
Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.
Today we’re coming to you live from Los Angeles for a special episode in collaboration with 404 Media.
Our topic? Killer tech. We’re talking lethal autonomous weapons; AI-assisted strikes in Iran; mining your digital footprint and even your financial activity to track you down; and surveillance cameras coming soon to a neighborhood near you.
This conversation is timely. Just this week, warnings from Anthropic researchers that AI could kill humanity set off alarm bells on Capitol Hill and prompted a bipartisan group of lawmakers to call for immediate action to regulate the AI industry — from Republican Sen. Ted Cruz to Independent populist Bernie Sanders, who is organizing senators for a briefing next week on the “extraordinary dangers” of AI.
The world we’ve long been told to fear is here. But how much do we actually know about these tools and how the government is using them — not just against you and your neighbors, but around the world?
To take us down the rabbit hole, I’m joined by my colleague, Intercept reporter Sam Biddle, a senior technology reporter who focuses on issues of surveillance, privacy, and corporate power.
Also joining us is Jason Koebler, co-founder of 404 Media, where he writes about surveillance and AI.
Sam and Jason, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.
Sam Biddle: Really great to be here.
Jason Koebler: Thank you for having me. Thank you all for coming. Thank you to The Intercept for having us. We’re very excited.
Akela Lacy: To start, can you all just paint us a picture of what the broad surveillance tech apparatus looks like today?
Many of our listeners are familiar with some of the biggest players, like the data mining government contractor Palantir or Flock, the operator of surveillance hardware marketing itself as a friendly neighborhood public safety tool.
But let’s zoom out a little bit. Like, how did we go from the days of the National Security Agency and Edward Snowden, to this largely privatized and, in many ways, even more lawless world of mass surveillance?
Sam, I’ll start with you. What’s stayed the same since that NSA era, and what’s new now?
SB: The NSA is still here, to say the least. I don’t think you have this conversation, or certainly not in the form that we’re going to have it tonight, without 9/11. I think that the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the private sector economy that you described, billions and billions of dollars, is all downstream of 9/11.
To answer your question, Snowden taught us correctly that we have a lot to fear from the government, but there was not as much emphasis on the companies that empower the government.
I think that has really been at the fore especially around something like ICE raids, which Jason and his colleagues have really done a good job documenting the companies that are behind that.
“Snowden taught us correctly that we have a lot to fear from the government, but there was not as much emphasis on the companies that empower the government.”
JK: The big thing is it really has become a Wild West. People have heard of Palantir, they’ve heard of Flock at this point, as you mentioned.
But we got a leaked document recently about some of the contractors that ICE works with. They are companies like Accurint, Chameleon, Locate X, Cobwebs, ISO ClaimSearch. These are all different companies in this supply chain that do different things, whether it’s cellphone location data, whether it’s browsing history, whether it is cellphone tower data, web backbone information.
“A lot of this is happening from companies that very few people have heard of, and companies that are willing to push the envelope on what they’re willing to do.”
It’s just anything that can be surveilled is being surveilled, and a lot of this is happening from companies that very few people have heard of, and companies that are willing to push the envelope on what they’re willing to do, like how far they’re willing to go to surveil people.
SB: A lot of the stuff that you used to associate with the NSA or CIA or another state spy agency — those kinds of capabilities you can now just buy, and I think that’s really changed since Snowden.
You don’t need to be a top-secret government agency. You can just be a contractor in Virginia called “Persistent Solutions Incorporated” and be selling these powers to whoever wants to buy them.
AL: Which is a great segue to talk about Flock. Jason, you and your colleagues at 404 have reported on some of the most egregious uses of Flock, police using it to stalk people, track down a woman who had an abortion, conduct surveillance on protesters, and help ICE hunt people down.
The surveillance space has become increasingly privatized, as we’re talking about, but why does that matter, and what do you think is coming next?
JK: It matters because it is a way to sidestep regulations. It’s a way to sidestep warrant requirements and things like this. We’ve done many, many, many stories about Flock, but also other surveillance contractors where, they are doing things that if the government were doing directly, they would need to get a warrant in order to do it.
Surveillance contractors “are doing things that if the government were doing directly, they would need to get a warrant in order to do it.”
But this data, sometimes harvested from cellphone apps, sometimes it’s harvested from private companies like Flock that are sticking cameras on poles all throughout America. For a long time, the government would run into these legal roadblocks, and now they’re just sidestepping it by buying that information.
We’re also seeing the localization of a lot of this stuff. Flock is a company that primarily works with local governments, small towns, big cities. And we’ve seen that kind of over and over again with drones, with ALPRs [automated license plate readers], increasingly with things like facial recognition tools as well, where these things are being piloted in small towns where they maybe have a police force that’s willing to be innovative.
I feel like I say this often, but police have not found a spy tool that they’re not willing to try. So this is how this works now is you sell it to a local government, and then that data filters up and eventually makes its way to the feds.
So I think it is important to follow these companies how their business model works, and also how they spread from local governments to state governments and up to the feds.
SB: The technology’s gotten cheaper, too. The kind of capabilities that Flock sells would have cost, 20 years ago, it would be much cruder but prohibitively expensive. This stuff gets mainstreamed because it gets more powerful and it gets more affordable.
But also, the police departments are awash in money, so they can afford, like Jason says, they’ll buy whatever they can just because they like toys.
“ This stuff gets mainstreamed because it gets more powerful and it gets more affordable.”
JK: Those cameras, for what it’s worth, run on, like, several-generations’-old Android technology. It’s not expensive, as you said.
AL: We’re going to touch on the expansion of this technology into local police departments a little bit later. But first, Sam, you’ve reported on the literal hunting of immigrants using bounty hunters and enriching private companies.
Why aren’t some of those corporations facing the same level of public scrutiny for their role in ICE’s mass deportation and arrest campaign that we’ve seen in other cases?
SB: I think that there is just such an incredible diversity of these companies providing these kinds of surveillance services.
JK: And you love to see that. [Laughter.]
SB: It’s one of the only parts of the economy that’s probably steadily growing. But yeah, I found 10 different contractors, none of which I had ever heard of before, all very obscure, with names like “Government [Support Services]” — very anodyne — that were contracted by ICE to find immigrants so that they could be deported.
The more that they found and the faster they found them they would be eligible for basic cash bounties from the government. So they were incentivized to just find as many people as possible using a combination of on-the-ground stalking and digital tools.
“Their obscurity is a big asset.”
As much scrutiny and attention on Palantir as it gets — for a reason, it’s all warranted. But I do also think that sometimes the household names soak up a lot of the anger and the blame, and it lets the minnows get by with relatively less scrutiny. Compared to Palantir, a company that sells janitorial services to Air Force bases and then gets this bounty hunting contract is tiny.
But I think that there’s just too many for people to keep track of — too many for people whose job it is to keep track of them to keep track of them. Their obscurity is a big asset.
AL: And something like Palantir is a known quantity.
SB: And they seek attention. Palantir is very attention-seeking, and they want publicity.
JK: We were talking about that a little bit before the show. Very often you’ll see a Palantir or a Flock take a lot of the heat — even like Meta take a lot of the heat. “Oh, is Facebook going to put facial recognition on their glasses,” things like this. Turns out now they have cover, and they probably will.
But Clearview AI — a company that does facial recognition; you can put a photo in and search the internet and find all these instances of where that person has been. It’s used by a lot of police departments — and that is a startup that is essentially one guy. It’s bigger now, but it was started by one guy who was willing to do something that a lot of other contractors weren’t willing to do because there was so much attention on some of these big players, and the big players saying, “Oh we’ll never do facial recognition.”
But then you have Clearview come in and raise their hand and say, “We’re willing to do it.” That’s something that we’ve seen over and over again over the last decade or so, is that the backlash to some of these companies is very important, but there’s also 10 other companies that are willing to pop up and say, “Yes, we will hunt undocumented immigrants for you. We did previously do janitorial services, but I did go to a police training one time.”
Literally, that’s what these companies are in many cases. AI has allowed companies to spin up very quickly. A lot of them are super janky, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not getting government contracts.
AL: Jason, I want to talk about what this federal surveillance actually looks like in practice. 404 reported recently that the Department of Homeland Security is using a secretive predictive policing unit to pull people over. What did you all find?
JK: So it’s called the PITT [Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams], not the TV show.
But basically it’s these Border Patrol teams that are using financial data, various federal databases of which we are not sure what they are. They are essentially finding patterns that they believe are suspicious, and they are passing information to local police and saying, “Hey, please pull over this person with this license plate.”
We wrote earlier this week about a guy, I believe in Wisconsin, who was pulled over for an obscured license plate. At least that’s what the local police told him. It comes out during his court case that this PITT team had seen some financial activity that they thought was suspicious, asked local police to pull him over, to find some pretext to pull him over, and then they charged him with basically weed offenses, which didn’t seem that was what they were actually looking for. The [Homeland Security] documents we saw were like, “Oh, this is a big narcotics trafficker.”
We’ve seen things like that kind of happen over and over again. I think with regard to ICE in particular, often Palantir brings in a lot of different federal databases, a lot of different commercial databases.
ICE has become obsessed with this tool called Mobile Fortify, which is a smartphone facial recognition app made by a company I don’t even know what they do or what they are. But they’re using basically a facial database from Customs and Border [Protection]. So any time that anyone’s interacted with the government, TSA, at the border, things like this — that’s what it’s pulling from. There’s already been a few cases of mistaken identities and things like this.
“ICE has become obsessed with … Mobile Fortify, which is a smartphone facial recognition app made by a company I don’t even know what they do or what they are.”
SB: Worth pointing out, you can opt out of doing the biometric boarding at the airport. I embarrass my wife every time we go anywhere, but you can opt out. Just say no. [Laughter]
JK: They’re always mad.
SB: You’ll still be in some database, but, you know, it feels good.
AL: When it comes to ICE tracking people down, you’ve touched on this a little bit, but I wonder if you can take a step back and really break it down and walk us through the steps and the actors involved in each phase, from locating to identifying to arresting people.
JK: So a lot of this is like patching things together from individual court cases that we’ve seen, where there’s like a deposition from an ICE agent explaining how they found a person.
A lot of it does come back to Palantir and the sort of different apps that they have. Companies like Thomson Reuters are involved, LexisNexis — these big, giant companies that collect a lot of information and feed it back into the government. We learned that ICE was doing what it was calling a “density report,” where they were trying to find densities of potential undocumented immigrants.
So a lot of the places that they were choosing to do enforcement actions were based on maybe old addresses or just like interactions with the government that they had. So they’re pulling things like IRS data, labor data, things like this, as well as anything you could possibly imagine. So like cellphone location data, browsing data, license plate information.
Customs and Border [Protection] has their own ALPR cameras, automated license plate reader cameras. But then we also reported that through the 287(g) program, which is a program that allows local police to do ICE enforcement, they were doing Flock searches on behalf of ICE, local police were.
So it’s a mix of this, where they would get a target, and then as Sam said, like a lot of this was being outsourced to random — was and is — being outsourced to fly-by-night bounty hunters and police contractors and things like this. It’s been a real mixed bag, but it does come back to surveillance and to trying to find these density of undocumented immigrants to choose for their enforcement actions.
SB: I think it’s also worth pointing out that this stuff is only possible because there’s no law prohibiting it. You can drive a truck through the holes in the Fourth Amendment. Like Jason said, in theory, you’re not supposed to be able to do a lot of this stuff without a judge giving you the OK, but there is nothing stopping the government from buying the location of your phone for the past year, and the next year, into the future.
Every single place you go from minute to minute that can just be purchased because you happen to download Candy Crush or something where that has ads in it. There’s no law against that. There’s no regulation. The sale of private data, and geolocational data in particular, market is completely unregulated. You can just do whatever.
“There is nothing stopping the government from buying the location of your phone for the past year, and the next year, into the future.”
AL: And some of these companies have come back and said “These agencies are violating their terms of service or their terms of use.” Like you guys reported on this with Shadow Dragon, Jason, right?
JK: Yeah, every once in a while, a company is like, “Oh, we didn’t know it was being used for immigration enforcement.” And they’ll either revoke access, or maybe they’ll sell a new license or something like this. It does happen every now and then that what ICE is doing goes too far even for some of these surveillance companies.
I think also worth mentioning very quickly that a lot of this security and surveillance apparatus was built under Obama and earlier than that. They had these extremely frail guardrails on separating information between agencies, things like that.
And then suddenly, it’s, oh, HSI is not going to do workplace enforcement anymore — Homeland Security Investigations, which used to do generally really complicated investigations into drug trafficking rings, things like that. Now it’s just doing standard deportations and pulling people over and things like that. And so all of the guardrails have been knocked down, which is [pause] exciting.
SB: And the more you farm it out to private companies, the less of a public record potentially accessible paper trail there is.
If the NSA breaks the law, in theory, you can have congressional hearings about it, and you could, again, in theory, send people to jail. That wouldn’t happen, but you could.
But if a company does something, A, it’s legal, but B, probably no one’s going to find out unless, you know, Jason finds it. There’s no oversight! And there’s every incentive to maximally sell this stuff.
AL: Let’s talk about how this technology is being used to wage war around the world. We all saw the headlines about Anthropic’s Claude reportedly assisting U.S. strikes in Iran. Anthropic’s CEO said he doesn’t know if or how Claude was actually used, including if it was used in the strike that hit an elementary school and killed 120 children.
At one point in time, many of these Silicon Valley firms had sworn that they would not let their tech be used in warfare or surveillance, particularly in unmanned or automated warfare. That is no longer the case, and maybe it was always an empty promise. But partnerships between the government and tech companies are fueling wars happening right now — not just in Iran, but in Gaza and even in Ukraine.
Sam, what do we actually know about how AI is being used in those arenas, if anything?
SB: We know a pretty good amount, actually the use of American technology in the genocide in Gaza is pretty well documented at this point. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are all very prominent contractors with the IDF [Israel Defense Forces].
Amazon and Google sell cloud computing services to Israel’s state-owned weapons companies that build the bombs that are dropped on Gaza; that’s established. And no one really tried to hide it. A lot of that stuff wasn’t secret to begin with.
The use of American technology, of AI companies’ services, in Iran is murkier. You’re absolutely right that these companies, almost all of them — maybe not Microsoft — at one point claimed they would not ever do this. OpenAI and Anthropic were both founded with these very like highfalutin missions of benefiting all of humanity.
AL: That’s, like, why it’s called Anthropic.
SB: Right. [laughter] Great point. And then they decide, “Oh, wait, there’s a lot of money to be made if we become Pentagon contractors.” So a few years ago, OpenAI just deleted the part of its terms of service that said they wouldn’t do military work. Google deleted “Don’t be evil” as its motto, which was very on the nose.
It’s a mistake to ever think that these policy positions of companies mean anything because they could just change them when they want to. But it is striking that, like you said, these were all things they at one point had a principled stand.
AL: And were very publicly, “We’re leading the frontier. We’re not going to let our stuff be used to kill people or surveil people.” And to Jason’s point, as soon as one person says, “Actually, that sounds kinda good,” everyone else is like, “You know what? We were wrong.”
“If you’re Google, you can only make so much money selling extra Gmail storage and ads.”
SB: If you’re Google, you can only make so much money selling extra Gmail storage and ads. At a certain point, the government is this customer that’s always going to be there and always is going to have a lot of money to give you. So yeah, I think they all looked at each other and were like, “Wait, you guys are down for this too, right?”
But as far as Iran, Anthropic is confirmed as having been involved since in the first day of the joint U.S.–Israeli attack.
JK: I saw a few minutes ago that Anthropic said the Houthis attempted to use Claude to target missiles, like typing in the chat box.
SB: I saw that!
JK: And they stopped that; they said they stopped that. I was at like this defense contract when Anthropic was nodding at the idea that it wouldn’t be helping in Iran. There were Anthropic and OpenAI executives there talking about this all, and they made very clear, at least at that point, that it’s like, “Oh, it’s not that we oppose working with the military. It’s that we want better oversight. There will be, like, an Anthropic person sitting in the Pentagon with the DoD making sure that this is being used in an ethical way. There will be an OpenAI person doing the same.”
It’s very unclear whether that is actually happening to any degree, and also what these tools are specifically being used for. We know it’s being used for targeting, we know it’s being used for planning — by targeting, I mean figuring out who to target and that sort of thing.
AL: Selecting a target.
JK: Yeah, selecting targets. But we don’t really know the level of autonomy, or at least I don’t.
AL: And they apparently don’t either, right?
SB: Well, that’s the thing: Both possibilities are really dire. If these companies are hands-on, helping wage war, that’s terrifying for a lot of reasons. But the alternative — which Anthropic’s CEO, the position he took, Bloomberg News asked him if Claude had been used to blow up that school, and he said, I don’t know.
Google has a similar position with the IDF, where they said, once we sell them this stuff, we don’t know how they’re going to use it, we don’t have visibility into how they use it, which is completely plausible.
But that’s also a pretty frightening prospect because then, they can say, “Oh we won’t let our technology be used for X, Y, Z,” but they hand it off to the customer, and they can do whatever they want with it, and the company will never find out.
AL: Sam, you have obtained hundreds of government documents on how the Pentagon is using AI. I wonder if you can tell us just how deep that relationship goes.
SB: We, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit got a set of contracts that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI — Elon Musk’s outfit — signed with the Pentagon last summer to develop militarized LLMs [large language models] for the Pentagon’s use.
They were heavily redacted, but what really came through clearly from the unredacted portions was that these companies did not just sell the Pentagon a product, but they sold them a very, very intimate relationship, an ongoing collaborative relationship wherein they were advising the Pentagon essentially on how to use these products to wage war.
They were getting classified briefings. They were getting briefings on U.S. military operations. They were providing hands-on training. They were providing threat assessments. They were helping shape DOD high-level strategy. So going well beyond the typical remit of a company.
“These companies did not just sell the Pentagon a product, but they sold them a very, very intimate relationship.”
Lockheed can sell the Pentagon some missiles, and the Pentagon more or less decides how they’re going to use them. Now we have the engineers from these companies and policy figures from these companies helping the U.S. decide how it will fuck, target, and kill people. We’re supposed to have ostensibly civilian control of the military — accountable to the public. Again, all this stuff is very much in theory, but it’s supposed to work that way.
But the more these companies intertwine themselves with warfare, the more of it is completely unaccountable because Sam Altman doesn’t owe you anything.
AL: It takes all the air out of the pretense that that’s like how this works in theory, right?
SB: In terms of, like, oversight?
AL: Embedding these private people in the government. That’s not actually how it works.
SB: Yeah, these are supposed to be decisions of who to kill and how are supposed to be decisions the government makes, if anyone’s going to make them.
AL: With the idea being that there’s some sort of measured process that goes behind that.
SB: You would hope so. Obviously, also the people who sell the weapons, whether it’s a bomb or an LLM, are going to have an incentive for it to be used maximally. I can’t imagine a contractor is going to urge restraint with the use of their product. Anything’s possible, but it would be surprising.
[Break]
AL: The use of surveillance at home is also being powered, unfortunately, by AI, like the license plate readers we’ve been discussing used by Flock and other government agencies. One of the concerns with these tech apparatuses is just how seamlessly they allow law enforcement agencies and private companies to share and transmit data from the local to the federal and vice versa, even when a particular government agency isn’t technically contracting with that company.
We’ve talked on this show about the explosion in the number of state and local police departments — as of today, more than 2,460 — now deputized to do ICE’s work through the 287(g) program, as Jason mentioned, helping to build out this nationalized, politicized police force we’ve seen take shape in recent years that’s become a Frankenstein, this entity patched together with agents from departments across the federal government.
JK: It is something where, as you said, the information is flowing in ways that were perhaps not originally intended by the companies. For years, Flock would say, we don’t work with ICE; we don’t sell to DHS. DHS doesn’t have a contract with us; ICE doesn’t have a contract with us.
They were not searching their 15 cameras in their town. They were searching 80,000 cameras across the entire country, including in states where it was illegal.
“The sort of casualness with which a lot of this is happening, I find to be very alarming.”
A lot of these searches happened in Illinois, where it is illegal. And so I called up a bunch of police departments in Illinois and said, “Did you know that your cameras are being used for immigration enforcement?” They were like, “We have no idea what you’re talking about. We have no clue that this happened.” A lot of them were like, “Oh, you are like fake news,” et cetera. I was like, “Here’s the data.” Eventually, the Illinois Secretary of State did an investigation and found that a lot of these searches were illegal.
But the sort of casualness with which a lot of this is happening, I find to be very alarming. Not only is it happening on these commercial products that don’t have a warrant requirement, that don’t respect people’s Fourth Amendment rights, but a lot of it’s happening over email. A lot of it’s happening over phone calls, like, “Hey, buddy, can you do this search for me?”
We reported on a cop who basically gave his Flock login to an ICE officer. Then they got caught, got it taken away, and then they were group texting about it after the fact.
We’re seeing a rise of these real-time crime centers which are a mix of automated license plate reader cameras, facial recognition cameras, other surveillance cameras, 911 calls, information, things like this. And they’re all being monitored through what’s called Flock OS, and there’s other companies that do this as well.
But basically, instead of having a cop go to a 7-Eleven after a robbery and request the surveillance footage, they’re watching this stuff happen in real time. Or worse, an artificial intelligence is watching it in real time, is detecting anomalous behavior, and is dispatching a drone or something to go accost people.
The sort of experimentation, I would say, the creativity of local police, I find to be quite concerning. Because they’re like, “Oh, I have this tool. I’m going to use it for whatever I want,” and there’s very little oversight.
SB: There’s no reason not to if you’re the police. It’s cheap to do. Or once you’ve purchased the thing, it’s free. You might as well. There’s basically no barrier to experimentation of the kind you’re talking about, so you can get pretty creative with this stuff. It’s pretty user-friendly, right, from what you’ve seen?
JK: A lot of this stuff also spreads through word of mouth, where, like, one police department will try it. They will then go to a police conference and do a presentation: “How I used Flock to track down my local protester.” Literally, this is how this stuff works.
We’ve covered it many times through FOIA documents and things like this. It’s like, “Oh, did you guys get a drone? I bought a drone. We got money for a drone pilot program for a drone. Skydio is giving away drones if you apply through this program.” That’s how this technology takes hold.
The private companies say, “Go try it.” The cops become essentially unpaid marketing for these companies, and then suddenly they’re in tens of thousands of cities without much oversight.
AL: Sam, picking up on the news we touched on at the top around recent warnings from insiders at Anthropic, what kinds of regulations are on the table right now, and how do you expect the industry might push back here?
SB: Bernie Sanders proposed a bill, I think is the most extreme, or the heaviest regulation I’ve seen proposed, which would basically put an immediate stop to advanced frontier AI development. On the other end of the spectrum, you have measures that would make these companies submit their AI to an independent audit.
There are some self-oversight ideas or the ideas of a slowdown of developing this technology. The full spectrum is on the table. What actually gets passed is a whole other question.
These companies are basically propping up the stock market, they’re basically propping up the U.S. economy at this point. If they were to be crushingly regulated, that could be a problem. Obviously, members of Congress take a lot of money from the tech industry. The U.S. has never exactly been a pro regulation regime when it comes to corporate power, tech or otherwise. So we haven’t seen much of an appetite to regulate large tech firms in the past.
This could be different. I’m curious what Jason thinks. Things do feel a little different now because it’s the employees saying very casually on Twitter, like, oh yeah, the place where I work has a 15 percent chance of ending humanity. Anyway, back to work tomorrow.
AL: And then the CEO’s like, yeah, he’s right. [Laughs]
SB: Or the CEO will be, like, actually, I think it’s 25 percent. It’s a little crazy to be like, “Why isn’t anyone —?” Whether or not you believe it’s true or realistic, if someone who worked at like Lockheed was like, “We’re building a weapon that I think has a 10 percent chance of ending humanity.” Whether or not you think it’s bullshit, like someone probably should check that out, maybe call someone to testify before Congress and ask them under oath, “Is this true? Can you elaborate on this?”
I think what they are promising about their technology, again, true or not, is scary enough that I think it’s going to be hard to turn a blind eye compared to something like, eating disorders or bullying or what have you.
I’m curious what you think, Jason.
JK: The thing that you said where this is propping up the entirety of our economy is not giving me so much hope that much is going to be done. We’re seeing at a local level people pushing back against data centers and that sort of thing. That movement, along with the anti-Flock movement, they’re sort of intertwined.
There is this backlash to AI among the people, and they’re looking for places to push back, and it happens to be at these local council meetings around the country.
As far as regulation goes, there’s also such a focus on beating China that it feels like regulating this in a meaningful way is almost dead on arrival because our politicians are so hell-bent on not losing.
Anyone who “proposes clamping down on these companies is going to be accused of treason.”
SB: That’s exactly right. First of all, the completely grassroots opposition to data centers is depicted across the political mainstream as a Chinese psy-op — which it’d be funny if it weren’t so real and sad.
I saw people saying about Bernie Sanders and his proposal, “Oh I guess the commie wants red China to win.” Or anyone who pushes back on this stuff or proposes clamping down on these companies is going to be accused of treason, in one form or another, or of selling out the country, or wanting they’re going to be speaking Chinese in Albuquerque. It’s all this sort of Cold War bullshit that is really back.
AL: I am going to transition us into audience questions. We have some good ones.
What tangible actions can the average person take to “divest from the contemporary surveillance hellscape.” Specifically, how do you get out of biometrics at the airport?
SB: The biometrics at the airport, again, like I don’t want to, like, lead anyone on. If DHS wants your face, they’re going to find it somewhere. You’ve been photographed in public. You’ve probably been captured.
AL: Don’t go outside.
SB: Yeah, and at a certain point, the advice is, like, don’t live in modern society. That’s not helpful.
When you go through airport security, you say, “I want to opt out of biometric identification,” and every TSA —
JK: They always sigh, they’re always upset.
SB: Some of them will roll their eyes and be like, “OK, I gotta look at your ID the old-fashioned way,” but they have to do it. Legally, they have to let you.
As far as opting out of the whole deal, you can take iterative steps, like not using Google, or not using Gmail.
AL: No phones.
SB: Yeah. Or throwing your phone down a well. But even if you have a flip phone, your location can still be picked up on the towers. I think it’s a matter of how much you want to inconvenience yourself.
JK: I say you shouldn’t drop out of society because that might make yourself a little safer, but it’s not necessarily helping the overall problem.
SB: I agree with that.
JK: What you can do is inform yourself. You can show up at city council meetings and talk about these issues. Flock has been canceled in dozens of cities and towns at this point. That movement is starting to, as we were speaking of earlier, as these cities are canceling Flock, a lot of them are replacing [them] with Axon or other surveillance contractors.
It’s good to see this sort of energy, and I think that people want to deploy this energy against other types of surveillance. I think that the backlash to Flock is not really about Flock itself; it’s that there is actually an outlet for that.
“I think that the backlash to Flock is not really about Flock itself; it’s that there is actually an outlet for that.”
Never condone this, but it’s like people are shooting these things with shotguns because they don’t know where to put their frustration for Meta spying on them, Google spying on them, Amazon spying on them, the NSA spying on them.
And here, you have a local city council. You can go to the city council and yell at the mayor or yell at the city council member. You can make life annoying for people wearing Meta glasses. These things aren’t necessarily going to be accepted by society.
SB: Jason and I were talking about this too earlier, and I think what’s been really interesting about the Flock backlash, and heartening, is that it is completely apolitical, or it’s nonpartisan.
AL: It’s cross-ideological.
SB: It is completely — from the deepest red to the people in this room right now — the entire political spectrum hates these.
JK: Also the deepest red.
SB: They hate these things. As fractured as the country is politically, you can find common ground with people who you might otherwise have very little to agree on when it comes to civil liberties things, when it comes to surveillance, when it comes to the right to not be followed around by the police for zero underlying suspicion.
There’s the real potential for the first time in a while to create a pro-privacy coalition that bridges a lot of the otherwise pretty giant political gaps.
“There’s the real potential for the first time in a while to create a pro-privacy coalition that bridges a lot of the otherwise pretty giant political gaps.”
AL: I love how this question begins, so thank you, Manny. “The high average age of U.S. senators creates a dangerous tech literacy gap, which results in ineffective regulatory oversight for tech companies ensconced in the mass surveillance apparatus.” Yes.
“With that in mind, is there a viable route to see real legislative change that protects people’s privacy?” I’m sorry, I just have to say I’m reminded of Jim Clyburn saying he did not know what ChatGPT was. I’m wondering if that inspired this question. Take it away.
JK: This has been a problem for a very long time. The fact that tech moves faster than regulation is one of the first things that I learned as a tech journalist. A lot of the regulatory fixes are, well, heavily influenced by lobbyists and that sort of thing, and they come way too late.
I keep coming back to the local level because it is a place that can move a lot faster. It’s a place where a smaller group of people can have a big influence. It is also where if there’s enough of a pushback at a local and state level, these big companies have to make broader changes. I’ve written about the right to repair for a long time, which I won’t go so far into, but basically different state laws had forced companies like Apple and John Deere to make massive changes. That type of legislation where you have to provide repair parts and things like that — maybe it would get passed at a federal level, but it would take decades to get the coalition that you need there. Whereas at a state level, you can do it in 12 months or four years or a lot faster.
SB: I totally agree that local state advocacy and legislation is much more in the short term achievable. But I wouldn’t want people to think that a more systemic approach is impossible. There could be with enough political will, and maybe some younger people in office perhaps. a sort of Clean Air Act for this stuff.
There have been moments where the country has, on a national level, decided “No, we gotta stop. We have to turn things around. This has become intolerable in one way or another.” That kind of action is doable. Like I said, I think politicians are paying attention to both the Flock backlash and also the data center backlash, which is equally, I think bipartisan and pan-ideological.
We have seen very prominent national political figures completely reverse themselves on data centers because they’ve seen that their constituents don’t want those things in their communities. That kind of popular anger could be wielded to achieve sweeping societal changes around privacy rights, for example.
JK: Otherwise, maybe Europe will try.
SB: Yeah, that’s the other option, is move to Belgium. Probably a good idea, anyway.
AL: How do you think about protecting your sources in this era where location data is widely available for purchase?
SB: I don’t want to speak for Jason. It’s a constant worry.
JK: A constant worry. Signal is a very powerful tool. It’s a very useful tool. It’s not infallible. If you’re not careful, these sorts of things can be subpoenaed. You lose your phone, things like this.
But I think it’s just part of doing the job now. That there is some risk to yourself; there’s some risk to your sources. Try to explain that to sources, that we are doing our best. We’re willing to go to jail for you. But that there is inherently a risk in being a source, especially in these times.
SB: There are two levels. There’s the government coming after you. Then there’s your employer coming after you. And the latter is if you’re a source from within a company, especially a tech company, you’re subject to very intense workplace surveillance.
I tell everyone, and I say this publicly, “Never contact me from a device that your job gives you. Never contact me from work.” There’s like, common sense, basic things you can do. But like Jason says, it’s inherently risky to talk to a reporter, and it takes a ton of bravery.
As things have gotten scarier, I’ve been really touched by the bravery of people who are willing to take that chance, knowing the risk. Luckily, there are a lot of those people out there.
AL: I’m tempted to not end on a depressing question, but I think we might have to, so I’m sorry. Why would AI want to end humanity?
[Laughter.]
SB: This is a great question. I emphatically believe that AI does not want anything.
AL: Yes. Sorry. [laughs]
SB: AI is built by people, and I think it’s important to really think about that. AI is like in many ways like any other piece of software. It’s just extremely capable and extremely powerful, and potentially devastatingly powerful, but it’s still software that people made.
“When you ascribe motives and agency to AI, you’re letting Sam Altman off the hook.”
This has been pointed out by others, but I think that when you ascribe motives and agency to AI, you’re letting Sam Altman off the hook. Somewhere, there’s a guy who works for a guy who works for a guy whose boss is in charge of all this stuff and ultimately accountable.
The question should not be, why would AI want to end humanity, but why would Sam Altman want to IPO a company that could potentially end humanity, that sells a product that could end humanity? Because then we’re at least like focused on the people who are responsible here. Look, if I end up being wrong, and we’re all being ruled in the matrix or something, I will look like quite a fool.
JK: Yeah. And I don’t think any of us have been nice to AI, so probably not going to be good for us. [Laughter.]
I think that’s very well said. I don’t have so much more to add there other than, it’s like there are human beings behind this. There are human beings building this technology. It’s not inevitable. This doomsday future is not inevitable. I think that we’d be naive to say that AI hasn’t really changed society already. I walk down the street and I see 800,000 fucking AI menus, and I get very mad. But I think it’s affecting labor, it’s affecting resource use, the economy, things of this nature.
We can’t bury our heads in the sand and say, “This is not changing society in some way,” but it is being driven by very rich humans and they can be regulated. They can be held to account, they can be put in jail someday, something like that.
[Laughter]
I don’t know how AI’s going to kill us, to answer your question. But I think dumb people wielding AI can cause a lot of problems. We’ve seen it all the time with, “Oops, I accidentally deleted my company’s database because my AI agent told it to.”
SB: I think what’s more likely and what people should be more — I hate to end on a note of what you should be worried about —
AL: We’re headed there.
SB: What everyone in this room should be freaked out about is not a rogue AI deciding “I hate humans,” and acting on its own, but it’s like —
Audience member: The entity!
SB: But it’s the Pentagon using some form of ChatGPT to help manage a nuclear strike, potentially. That is, I think, orders of magnitude more likely. AI’s already being used to kill people in large numbers today and round up people in large numbers today, as Jason and his colleagues have really thoroughly documented with ICE.
They are already using this stuff, and I think we should not let the hypothetical existential threats distract from the deaths and harms that are happening already and will continue to happen. So on that note —
AL: We’re going to leave it there. Thank you all for being here and making this possible.
And thank you again to Sam and Jason for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.
SB: Our pleasure.
[Applause]
AL: That does it for this episode.
This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Jesse Banner is our live show engineer. Hannah Behrendt is our events coordinator.
A special thanks to 404 Media for collaborating with us on this live show and to our live show production team: Adam Gunther, Annie Chabel, Celine Piser, Michael Sherrard, Lauren Schilli, Alessandra Bosco, and Sean Turner. We also want to thank The Loved One’s crew: J.C. Gabel and Aubrie Wienholt. And many thanks again to you, our audience, for coming out and making tonight possible.
[Applause] Sorry, there’s more!
Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. And legal review by David Bralow.
Slip Stream provided our theme music.
This show and our reporting at The Intercept do not exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join.
And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.
The 42-year-old liberal commentator regularly co-hosts the network’s 5pm talk show, taking flak from her conservative colleagues and harsh insults from the president.
Jessica Tarlov is the left-leaning Fox News host that some of the network’s most conservative viewers, including Donald Trump, love to hate.
The US president regularly bashes Tarlov on his Truth Social platform, in April calling her “one of the Least Attractive and Talented People on all of Television”, and demanding that Fox “GET HER OFF THE AIR.”
We take a look at some of our favourite snapshots from New York as Elena Rybakina and Alexander Zverev both triumphed in the final grand slam of the year
The documentary "NAZA" includes interviews with purported Israeli intelligence officers who claim the systematic use of AI-powered targeting systems in Gaza.
Forget the bombing: the Trump administration keeps insisting this isn’t a war. But it’s not just a matter of semantics
“I will not send you to fight and die in stupid foreign wars that never end,” Donald Trump promised a crowd in Pennsylvania in 2024. While the disastrous conflict in Iran, which has escalated in recent days, may make it seem like the president has reneged on that promise, that’s inaccurate. It would be wrong to say that the president has dragged the US into yet another disastrous forever war in the Middle East because, as government officials keep insisting, what’s happening in Iran isn’t actually a war.
“I wouldn’t call it a war,” JD Vance told reporters early this month, for example, after being asked whether the fighting in Iran might be over by the November midterms. “Right now, there is no active shooting.”
Project will prepare volunteers across US to monitor polls, encourage early voting and respond to disinformation
The Democrats intend to train tens of thousands of volunteers to monitor the polls and counter possible voter intimidation under a new plan to protect November’s US midterm elections from anticipated interference from Donald Trump and his allies.
The nationwide initiative, dubbed the New Battlefield Project, will help state Democratic committees build up a vast coalition of volunteers to monitor the polls, push voters to cast their ballots early and create a network to respond to disinformation.
Lockly released a new type of smart lock, with a stylish keypad and features made specifically for rentals, vacation homes and Airbnbs. I tried it all.
Why Should Delaware Care? Delaware Saengerbund’s Oktoberfest has been an annual tradition since 1979 and raises crucial funds for the German cultural club. Originating as a singing society and safe haven for recent German American immigrants, 173 years later, Delaware Saengerbund offers a space for members to connect with each other and their heritage.
Ancient Teutonic shields and carpenters’ saws painted with countryside landscapes hang from the walls in the eclectic bar owned and operated by German cultural club Delaware Saengerbund.
The community center in Newark is crowded with knick-knacks: a stuffed pheasant, boot-shaped beer mugs, a club flag stitched with real gold and a statue of a fishing boy wearing painted-on lederhosen.
The 20-acre property is mapped with hiking trails taken advantage of by Delaware Saengerbund’s Wandervögel club. The community center houses an event hall for performing traditional song and dance, a kitchen for preparing schnitzel and Black Forest cake, a library of German literature and a classroom for learning the language.
Every area of the community center is built around the original bar, called the “Bauernstube” because members of Delaware Saengerbund converted it from a barn in 1967. Several of the booths for drinking and communing were originally animal stalls.
In line with that theme, the pride of the bar is the enormous cowbell hanging from the ceiling. Whoever tugs the deer hoof attached to the bell’s chain buys the next round.
The Bauernstube is a place for Delaware Saengerbund members to play cards, commune and drink. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JEA STREET JR.
Teutonic shields hang inside Delaware Saengerbund’s Bauernstube. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JEA STREET JR.
Beer steins line a shelf where a painting of a Revolutionary War Inspector General Friedrich Wilmhelm von Steuben sits in pride of place. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JEA STREET JR.
Delaware Saengerbund President Randy Schock shows a photo of past club members inside the Bauernstube they built in Newark. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JEA STREET JR.
Delaware Saengerbund’s Bauernstube in Newark is crowded with knick-knacks. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JEA STREET JR.
Like clockwork, club member Carl Witt shuffled into the bar and took his seat when Delaware Saengerbund President Rudy Schock gave a raucous demonstration. Witt wasn’t in the community center that morning to drink, however — he was there to set up for Delaware Saengerbund’s annual Oktoberfest.
An annual club tradition since 1979, Oktoberfest returns this Friday through Sunday, Sept. 18 to 20. It will feature an opening parade replicating the festivals of Munich, carnival rides and traditional song and dance, including the North American debut of Bavarian folk band Brotzeitmusi.
It takes 4,000 pounds of potato salad, 14,000 wursts and 20,000 liters of draft beer to feed the 15,000 to 20,000 people who attend the Delaware festival annually, according to Schock.
Get Involved Delaware Saengerbund’s Oktoberfest returns this Friday through Sunday, Sept. 18 to 20 at the club’s community center at 49 Salem Church Road in Newark. The event runs 5-11 p.m. on Friday, noon to 11 p.m. on Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. on Sunday. Admission is $10 and includes unlimited amusement park rides.
But most important of all are the roughly 700 volunteers, who have already started planning 2027’s Oktoberfest.
The hardest part of planning, Witt explained, is “everything.” Oktoberfest is a Herculean effort that sucks blood, sweat and tears out of most of Delaware Saengerbund’s 950 members.
But the toil is well worth it. Proceeds generated from Oktoberfest are the lifeblood of Delaware Saengerbund, allowing the club to keep the lights on at its community center and execute its mission of celebrating German culture year-round.
‘Drink and sing’
Delaware’s premier German club dates back to March 17, 1853, when 16 immigrants drinking in a Wilmington tavern begged its owner, Christian Krauch, to use the space for a choral singing club, or “saengerbund.”
“You get more than three Germans together, and they’re going to want to drink and sing,” joked Delaware Saengerbund Board Member Don Sturmfels.
Former Delaware Saengerbund President Don Sturmfels has participated in the club for over 50 years for the camaraderie. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JEA STREET JR.
Krauch agreed to the proposition, and though the club moved out of his tavern the following year, he maintained close ties with Delaware Saengerbund. He was named an honorary member and gifted its members two drinking horns hanging in the Baurenstube today.
Delaware Saengerbund’s first permanent home was a four-story building on 4th Street in Wilmington, which the club converted into a “German Hall” in 1883. It was more than a choral practice space; it was also a cultural hub for the many clubs within Delaware Saengerbund and a place to stay for some German immigrants who had only recently arrived in America.
But that home for Delaware’s German Americans was razed in 1965, when the club sold the building to the Wilmington Housing Authority to make way for Interstate 95.
“They just came in and said, ‘We want your building. You’re out of here,’ and bulldozed it down,” Sturmfels said.
‘Father Oktoberfest’
Delaware Saengerbund was without a permanent home until the club purchased the barn in Newark two years later. That was about seven years after the current president’s father, Simon Schock, joined the club at 21 years old.
“My dad said, ‘Why would I want to become a member? It’s just a bunch of old people.’ And then he joined, and then a lot of other younger people joined,” Rudy Schock said.
Simon Schock founded the public Oktoberfest event in 1979, inspired by St. Anthony’s Italian Festival in Wilmington. Many members refer to him as “Father Oktoberfest” for that reason.
Simon Schock had been a cabinet maker in Germany and immigrated with his parents and grandfather in 1958. He used his carpentry skills to pitch in building the Bauernstube and its many expansions.
Delaware Saengerbund volunteers are hard at work preparing for this year’s Oktoberfest. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JEA STREET JR.
Delaware Saengerbund volunteers like Carl Witt are hard at work preparing for this year’s Oktoberfest. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JEA STREET JR.
Delaware Saengerbund volunteers are hard at work preparing for this year’s Oktoberfest. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JEA STREET JR.
Delaware Saengerbund President Rudy Schock stands under a tent where Oktoberfest will take place. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JEA STREET JR.
Delaware Saengerbund’s 20-acre property in Newark will soon be bustling with 15,000 to 20,000 Oktoberfest attendees. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JEA STREET JR.
“I was here as a kid. My dad was like, ‘I need you to get these boards.’ He put all the walls up,” Rudy Schock said inside the event hall. “My dad is 28, 29 years old. He’s working all day, then he’s coming to the club to work. … I don’t think we could do that today.”
Stones jutting out of the Bauernstube’s walls are etched with the names of the club members who helped build it. Simon Schock picked a stone near a window overlooking the property, while another club member, Adrien Olivier, purposely picked the tiniest stone he could find.
Over the years, four members of Delaware Saengerbund, including Simon Schock, have received The Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, an award signed by the German president and bestowed to individuals for their service to the country.
The most recent to receive this honor was Edeltraut “Trudy” Gilgenast, the woman who nominated the three other Delaware Saengerbund members to receive the award.
“Nobody ever did one for her. I said, ‘She needs it,’” Rudy Schock said. “They won’t give it to you posthumously. She’s 95 now. I was calling the embassy every day, saying, ‘Look, how long is this going to take?’ It took a year and a half.”
Gilgenast’s time in the spotlight finally came in March, when members of Delaware Saengerbund traveled to Washington, D.C., so Jens Hanefeld, German ambassador to the United States, could present her with the award.
Sturmfels called receiving the award the culmination of “dedicating your life to the preservation of German heritage.”
“If it weren’t for people like that, this club would have rolled up and died years ago,” he said.
Camaraderie and cards
While Delaware Saengerbund originated as a haven for recent immigrants, today, most members are a few generations removed from their German roots, looking to reconnect with a culture their parents or grandparents were more familiar with.
For example, both sets of Witt’s grandparents immigrated to the United States in the 1920s. They didn’t talk about their homeland much, and as a kid, Witt never asked them the burning questions he has now that they’re long dead: “How was your life in Germany? What did you do? What was the family like? What did you do for recreation? What did you do for work?”
Delaware Saengerbund helped Witt answer some of these questions. For example, by participating in the genealogy club, he learned that his great-great-grandfather fought for Germany during World War I, dying in Holland in 1914.
Delaware Saengerbund’s event hall is adorned with a landscape painted by a club member. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JEA STREET JR.
This Delaware Saengerbund club flag is stitched with real gold. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JEA STREET JR.
Delaware Saengerbund’s community center houses a library of German literature. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JEA STREET JR.
The event hall within Delaware Saengerbund’s community center in Newark. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JEA STREET JR.
Although club members tend to be around retirement age, they often share German culture with younger generations.
“I’ve got friends that are coming back,” Schock said. “It’s like, ‘Wow, I haven’t seen you in 20 years.’ And they’re like, ‘Life’s changed. I want my grandkids to experience it.’ So, they bring them to the Oktoberfest. Next thing you know, they’re here doing other events.”
Anyone can participate in Delaware Saengerbund as a supporting member, but only those with German heritage can apply to be an active member, meaning they can vote and run for the various leadership positions within the organization.
That’s a far cry from the organization’s beginnings. For example, women were not allowed to be members until the 1950s.
But by becoming more inclusive, Delaware Saengerbund’s membership has blossomed. The club caps at 1,000 members, and Delaware Saengerbund reached that number when it reopened following the COVID pandemic.
While there are many activities within Delaware Saengerbund, the Bauernstube is the heart of the organization.
A lot of stories are told within its walls, “some true, some false,” Shock said — especially when he plays a “miserable, lousy” German card game, Skat, with a group of friends.
“It’s got to be (made) by a German because every time he was losing, he probably added a new rule so he could win,” he joked.
Meanwhile, Sturmfels joined Delaware Saengerbund about 50 years ago and has stuck around for “the camaraderie.” That, and the beer.
“It’s not like going to a local bar, and all the guys sit there, and they curse at the TV. It’s not that kind of place,” he said. “We’re all brothers and sisters. It makes it a very kind place to be.”
Former and current Delaware Sangerbund presidents Don Sturmfels, left, and Rudy Schock, right, sit outside the Bauernstube. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JEA STREET JR.
Why Should Delaware Care? Government works best when its citizens are knowledgeable and engaged. Delaware’s government has scores of commissions, working groups, agencies and legislative committees. All must hold meetings that are open to the public. Below we highlight a few of those meetings that are happening this week.
Below are some of the most important or interesting public meetings happening around the state this week.
Delaware heads to the polls for primary election voting on Tuesday
Georgetown could advance tiny home repeal
Delmar Board of Education may fill consequential vacancy
Sussex library board to discuss consultant
Healthcare leaders to discuss industry woes
Delaware’s 2026 primary election is here
Delaware voters will head to the polls on Tuesday to vote in the state’s 2026 primary election.
Though we are still months away from the November general election, about 40% of all this year’s statewide or statehouse races will be decided by voters during the primaries. Increased partisan redistricting in recent decades also makes it more difficult to flip seats between parties, meaning the primary may be the best opportunity for voters to have a say in who represents them in Dover.
Delaware operates under a closed primary system, meaning voters must be registered with either of the two major political parties to participate. Independent, third-party or unaffiliated voters will not be able to cast a ballot until the November general election.
The deadline for most residents to affiliate with a party has passed, but voters who were automatically registered at the Division of Motor Vehicles without choosing a party can still participate by designating their affiliation in-person at their polling place.
📍 Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesday across the state. For more information, including about polling locations near you, click here.
Georgetown leaders to consider repealing tiny home rules
The Georgetown Planning Commission will hold a public hearing on Wednesday to gather resident input as leaders consider repealing the town’s controversial tiny homes ordinance.
The discussion comes roughly nine months after the town council under former Mayor Bill West voted to approve the measure, following significant debate and public outcry.
The cottage housing ordinance allows up to 12 tiny homes on a single acre of land within town limits.
A 20-home project developed by the Ocean View-based organization Little Living already has town approval, and would not be impacted by a possible ordinance repeal.
Other projects still in the earlier stages of development, however, including a 120-home project proposed by Springboard Delaware, could be stymied if the town repeals the ordinance.
The newly-elected Georgetown Mayor and Town Council voted in late July to halt the review of any cottage housing development proposals while municipal leaders explored whether or not to repeal the ordinance.
Later in the summer, an ad-hoc Cottage Housing Review Committee recommended the town repeal the measure. The Planning Commission’s public hearing is the next step in that process.
It is unclear if the Planning Commission will vote on advancing the ordinance at Wednesday’s meeting. Regardless of when the Planning Commission vote ultimately takes place, it must then move to the Town Council for final approval before going into effect.
📍 The Georgetown Planning Commission is set to meet at 6 p.m. Wednesday inside Town Council Chambers, located at 39 The Circle in Georgetown. For more information, including on virtual attendance, click here.
Delmar may fill board of education vacancy
Delmar Board of Education members may appoint a new member to fill a vacant board seat on Tuesday.
The question of whether the Delmar School District will move forward with its first tax referendum in more than a decade could depend on who fills the vacancy.
The meeting comes one month after board members deadlocked during a public meeting over two candidates for the position.
During interviews with the candidates — Shawn Brittingham and Farrah Morelli — board members asked each whether they would support raising taxes to support the district’s operations and capital expenses.
Morelli, who served on the Delmar Board of Education until her term expired earlier this summer, said she may support referendum requests, but would first need to see a proposal from the school district.
“I’m not going to vote just blindly because somebody says, ‘Here, we’re going to vote on operating expenses,’” she said.
Brittingham, who has served on the Delmar Board of Education and with the Delaware State Board of Education, said he supported a potential referendum, arguing that it could ease persistent overcrowding in the school district.
📍 The Delmar Board of Education will meet at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday inside the District Board Room, located at 200 N. 8th St. in Delmar. For more information, including on virtual attendance, click here.
Sussex library consultant updates
The Sussex County Library Advisory Board is set to discuss the details of a consultant the county hired to examine funding challenges faced by libraries across the region.
County leaders announced the hiring of a consultant this summer to complete the study, following nearly a year of unsuccessful pleas from the 11 independent, nonprofit libraries in the county for more funding.
This past spring, the independent libraries launched an organized campaign calling for the county to increase its library tax rate so that roughly 90% of funding would be covered by a combination of county and state dollars.
In the past, independent library directors have described having to dip into their emergency reserves and working overtime to write grant applications in order to close a 13-to-52% gap in funding.
Sussex County did not include an increased library tax rate in its 2027 fiscal year budget, instead opting to hire the consultant.
So far, the county has released few details about how the consultant’s study will function. At an Aug. 19 Library Advisroy Board meeting, County Librarian Rachel Lynch said the consultant will speak with library employees, library users and non-library user residents throughout the seven-month study.
📍 The Sussex County Library Advisory Board is set to meet at 10 a.m. Wednesday inside the Sussex County Administrative Office West Complex Meeting Room, located at 22215 DuPont Blvd. in Georgetown. For more information, including on virtual attendance, click here.
Healthcare leaders to discuss industry woes
The Delaware Health Care Commission is set to hold a retreat on Thursday, where members will discuss the cost of healthcare and how the state can improve access for patients.
On its agenda, the commission said it will discuss Delaware’s healthcare worker shortage, which has vexed providers who are often competing with neighboring states like Pennsylvania and Maryland — who have prestigious medical institutions able to draw in top talent.
Additionally, leaders are set to discuss healthcare affordability in Delaware. In recent years, lawmakers have passed multiple bills aimed at lowering costs. In the coming years, the state will implement price caps on its hospital systems.
📍 The Delaware Health Care Commission will meet at 9 a.m. inside the Blue Hen Corporate Center, located at 655 S. Bay Rd. in Dover. For more information, click here.
Julia Merola, Maggie Reynolds and Nick Stonesifer contributed to this report.
Why Should Delaware Care? Election integrity has become a hot-button issue in recent years, as the Trump administration has questioned the validity of election results, and elected officials have raised concerns that noncitizens are voting. The continuation of a lawsuit challenging Delaware’s absentee voting systems creates uncertainty as to where a state voting voting statute will stand ahead of the midterm election.
A lawsuit filed by state Senate Minority Leader Gerald Hocker (R-Ocean View) could throw Delaware’s absentee voting protocol into question ahead of this year’s November election.
The lawsuit, which comes amid a flurry of challenges to election processes across the country, alleges that Delaware’s current absentee voting rules allow for the indefinite use of absentee ballots — even if voters no longer meet the state’s qualifications.
Currently awaiting a decision by the Delaware Supreme Court, Hocker is fighting for the state to require voters to apply for absentee status before each election.
While he argues a ruling in his favor would create a more fair voting process, state election officials say they are making an effort to distribute clear information and assuage voters’ concerns amid the lawsuit.
And with absentee voting for this year’s primary election already underway, it remains to be seen how any potential changes spurred by Hocker’s lawsuit will impact the upcoming November general election. It will not impact Tuesday’s primary election.
Hocker first filed the lawsuit against the Delaware Department of Elections in early August, after a similar claim he filed in 2024 was dismissed.
Steve Washington, an Independent Party-affiliated candidate running for a Wilmington-area state Senate seat, was added to the case as a second plaintiff in mid-August.
The Court of Chancery ruled against Hocker’s claims in a Sept. 4 opinion. But Hocker’s attorney, former Delaware Attorney General and state Republican Party Chair Jane Brady, appealed that decision to the Delaware Supreme Court on Sept. 8.
The state Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the case on Sept. 16, and is expected to issue a “prompt ruling” following that argument, a spokesperson for the state Department of Elections, the defendant in the lawsuit, told Spotlight Delaware.
Those arguments would be made less than two months from the Nov. 3 general election.
Hocker did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s request for comment.
When asked by Spotlight Delaware whether there is a link between the Delaware absentee ballot lawsuit and the pattern of challenges to election procedures around the country, Brady said she does not see a connection.
“It’s not a concerted effort with anyone else,” Brady said. “This is strictly Delaware-related and involves Delaware people.”
Separately, Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings is a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by a group of 20 states challenging new Trump administration vote-by-mail requirements.
A U.S. District Court in Massachusetts ruled in the states’ favor on Sept. 4. The Supreme Court is expected to consider the case in the coming days.
Cathleen Hartysky-Carter, a spokesperson for the state Department of Elections, declined to comment on pending lawsuits.
Carter did say there has not been any disruption in the absentee voting process since Hocker filed his lawsuit.
She said the department is reaching out to encourage permanent absentee voters to submit a new absentee ballot application, in order to “ensure that whatever the outcome of the litigation, the Department will be permitted to send them a ballot for the 2026 General Election.”
Michael Weingartner, a lawyer and election scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, said a state constitutional challenge like this one is “very rare,” because Delaware’s absentee voting is structured differently than other states.
While Delaware has a state statute spelling out who can qualify for an absentee ballot, most states leave it up to their legislature to decide who will receive absentee voting status, Weingartner said.
What’s in the suit?
Hocker’s primary argument is that current state law could allow individuals no longer eligible to vote via absentee ballot to continue voting that way, thus throwing the accuracy of state election results into question.
“As a candidate, Senator Hocker wants a fair election and all votes made and tabulated in his race to be in accordance with the law,” the complaint states.
Senate Minority Leader Gerald Hocker (R-Ocean View). | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY TIM CARLIN
But Hocker did not have a challenger in his reelection bid at the time the lawsuit was filed in early August. The Democratic Party subsequently nominated Harry Gold to challenge Hocker for the Ocean View-area seat on Aug. 25.
Washington, the second plaintiff, will face the winner of the Democratic primary between incumbent Sen. Dan Cruce (D-Wilmington) and his challenger Adriana Bohm.
Brady told Spotlight Delaware she waited until Hocker had an opponent and brought Washington into the case to ensure they had legal standing. Hocker’s 2024 case was dismissed because he was not up for reelection at the time.
The current state law identifies five categories of people eligible to receive permanent absentee status, including those temporarily residing out of the United States, serving in the armed forces, sick or physically disabled, or already authorized for absentee status by federal law.
The complaint calls for the state to require individuals to re-apply for absentee ballot status during each election cycle, instead of indefinitely being placed on the absentee ballot list.
As of February 2026, there were 22,800 people registered on the Department of Elections permanent absentee list — 1,170 of whom no longer receive mail at their address on file, and 193 of whom were deceased, according to Hocker’s complaint.
Deputy Attorneys General Emily Burton and Patricia Davis, who are representing the Department of Elections, wrote in their response to the complaint that the department already works year-round to ensure the integrity of the absentee voting process by sending letters to permanent absentee voters and reminding them of the requirements to participate.
The defendants also requested that the court stay, or pause, the litigation through the 2026 election cycle, and instead schedule it for a final resolution “well in advance of the 2028 primary election.”
The Chancery Court denied this request, instead granting Hocker’s request to expedite the legal proceedings before the Nov. 3 election.
Legal standing
While the Chancery Court was definitive in its rejection of Hocker’s claims, the lawsuit’s ultimate fate with the state Supreme Court remains to be seen.
In a Sept. 4 ruling, Vice Chancellor Bonnie David wrote that the state’s permanent absentee status program is constitutional because voters are already required to notify the Department of Election of changes in their eligibility. The state then cancels a person’s absentee status if they no longer qualify.
“In other words, ‘permanent’ is a misnomer,” David wrote in her opinion.
Brady, Hocker’s attorney, said she is unsurprised by the Chancery Court decision because a lower court “usually maintains the status quo.” She is optimistic about the Supreme Court ruling.
At the same time, Carter said her department has been working to mail letters to all Delawareans with permanent absentee voting status explaining the ongoing litigation, and telling them how to submit a new absentee ballot application so that they are allowed to receive a 2026 General Election ballot, regardless of the ultimate ruling.
“The Department is committed to election security, integrity, transparency, and voting accessibility for all Delaware voters,” Carter wrote.
Weingartner, the election scholar, said a ruling in Hocker’s favor is likely to be an uphill battle. Comparable election integrity litigation in the past has gone in states’ favor, he said.
“Election litigation has a lot of surprises,” he said. “But the path to victory here would require the court to be willing to do something that hasn’t been done yet in Delaware.”
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
Why Should Delaware Care? Automatic license plate readers, dubbed “Flock” cameras after their vendor Flock Safety, have sparked nationwide debates about government surveillance and the misuses of the artificial intelligence-backed tool. Delaware is home to about 300 of these cameras, funded by tax dollars. Statewide standards regulating their use have yet to be issued.
Tall poles mounted with dark-colored cameras and topped with solar panels powering the technology are sprouting up across Delaware. They are found alongside roadways and overlook commercial parking lots.
As each car passes by, these cameras can capture an image of the vehicle, including key characteristics such as its make, model, color and license plate number. They also can identify car racks, bumper stickers and large logos on the exterior of a vehicle.
While license plate reading technology has been used in law enforcement for more than 20 years, these new “Flock cameras” — colloquially named in reference to the largest company producing the technology —have come under fire in recent months. This scrutiny is largely due to fears of government surveillance, the use of advanced artificial intelligence tracking and the overall lack of regulations surrounding the cameras’ implementation.
Flock Safety, currently the largest and most high-profile vendor of the updated license plate reading cameras, is valued at $8.4 billion and held about 5,000 contracts with law enforcement agencies as of last year.
To better understand how the controversial technology is being deployed across the state, Spotlight Delaware spoke to Lt. Joel Diaz from the Georgetown Police Department, one of the law enforcement agencies currently contracting with Flock. Diaz broke down how his jurisdiction uses the Flock cameras, and how they manage the data.
What are license plate readers?
These cameras capture images of vehicles’ license plates, along with any apparent characteristics such as the make, model, color, large bumper stickers and any roof racks on a car.
They do not detect faces or other roaming objects such as bicycles or scooters.
Cameras capture a vehicle’s license plate number that can be run across specific databases to create records about the car, including if it is stolen and what other cameras have scanned its license plate.
Cameras specifically sold by Flock also come with access to the nation’s largest network of license plate recognition databases, making it easier to cross-reference and detect where cars have traveled across multiple jurisdictions.
Is the running of license plates legally allowed?
Yes.
License plates are considered Delaware property, and the cameras are located on public roadways when scanned, which means citizens legally give up a reasonable expectation of privacy.
What is not legal is being pulled over without a warrant based on a licence plate recognition database search.
How does Georgetown use Flock cameras?
The National Crime Information Center (NCIC) License Plate Database, which stores the records for stolen license plates or serious crimes, has a partnership with Flock Safety. This makes it easier for local law enforcement to see where a stolen vehicle has been and where its next moves are likely to be.
To run information on a car, a police officer logs into the Flock Safety portal where the only required text box before receiving results is “offense type” or the crime associated with the vehicle.
Optional entries include a complaint case number, reason for search, the vehicle details, the location and time and filtered search dates.
While these are optional, Diaz said an officer who does not input a complaint number or a valid reason is flagged during the 30-day audit his station conducts.
Misuses can result in termination and decertification, he said.
Diaz said the department has used the cameras for multiple cases, including homicides, drive-by shootings and even petty thefts.
Georgetown officers can only view data from the five Flock cameras within town limits. Diaz and Georgetown Police Chief Norman Barlow are the only employees who can cross-reference and access database information from other jurisdictions.
The department shares its data with some neighboring police stations across Delaware, Maryland and New York. These sharing agreements can be revoked at any time and are mutual by nature, Diaz said.
Accessing databases from other jurisdictions requires mutual sharing agreements. One way this sharing occurs is through Flock’s national “Hot List” alert system. Using NCIC data, the hot list notifies law enforcement agencies if a vehicle linked to a crime — like a car that was reported stolen or listed on an arrest warrant — from another area is in their jurisdiction.
For example, a person wanted for homicide in Wilmington may have their arrest warrant flagged under NCIC. If that person’s vehicle passes by a Flock camera in Georgetown, the police department is notified. Then, a Georgetown police officer must confirm the notification through the NCIC database and confirm the warrant exists before processing to arrest the suspect.
“So the notification from Flock is not a call to action,” Diaz said.
How long is Flock data stored?
The Georgetown Police Department permanently deletes any data it has collected after 30 days if it is not downloaded by an officer, Diaz said.
Separately, the Newark Police Department deletes its data after 180 days, according to public information requests filed by community advocate Amy Roe.
Newark resident Amy Roe’s biggest concerns about Flock cameras are her unanswered questions about their possible misuse and the nature of data-sharing with outside agencies, particularly the federal government.
Through public information requests, Roe learned Newark officers conducted more than 4,000 Flock searches last year. The documents she received included no reports or suspicion of misuse, she said.
But as for data-sharing policies, Roe is still in the dark. The Newark Police Department denied her request for data-sharing agreements, telling her they are considered internal intelligence files.
According to Flock, it is up to individual customers to decide if outside federal agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement can obtain their data.
Diaz showed Spotlight Delaware the Flock Transparency Portal page, which would publicly show which jurisdictions the Georgetown Police Department has sharing agreements with. He said he is working to get permission from the chief to publish the portal.
Individual agencies who use the Flock system can opt to show this data to the public.
Diaz said he is working to publicize Georgetown’s portal.
He also said he understands public concerns over misuse of the system.
Georgetown officers currently can cite “miscellaneous” as a reason to run license plates through Flock. But Diaz’s way to combat potential misuse is through monthly audits where he can directly see if an officer has not typed in a valid reason and case number to conduct a search.
But the system is not fool-proof.
“There’s nothing to stop somebody from putting in a complaint number and calling it a robbery, and it’s not a robbery, right?” Diaz said. “So it’s almost impossible. We just have to do a better job at our audits.”
What Flock regulations currently exist?
Nationally, there are none.
But the Delaware Association of Chiefs of Police, Delaware Police Accreditation Commission, and Police Officer Standards and Training Commission are working together to determine how these cameras can be used in the First State.
The proposed guidelines would require agencies to maintain policies that align with a model developed years ago, Police Officer Standards and Training Commission Director Charles Emory said in an email. Those policies would address data retention, access, authorized use and auditing, he added.
Emory said finalized guidelines are expected to be discussed during the Police Officer Standards and Training Commission October meeting, scheduled to take place Oct. 13.
For Roe, the Newark community advocate, these regulations are a long-time coming.
“I just I’m appalled that we are this deep in, and we’re just looking around saying, ‘Oh my gosh, what’s in place here?’” she said. ‘There’s hundreds of cameras all over the state, and there’s no oversight requirements at all statewide.’ Every town is making it up as they go along.”
Maryland and Virginia are among 23 states with laws regulating the use of automatic license plate readers.
Wilmington is set to take down its Flock cameras, but they will continue to buy from other vendors. Other cities have simply opted out of using the vehicle-identifying technology.
Diaz, the Georgetown officer, said it is imperative to find a middle ground that acknowledges both public worries and the fact that these systems help cases get solved more quickly.
The future of state oversight for Flock and other automatic license plate reading technology is not exactly clear, but law enforcement leaders will continue to discuss standards at next month’s Delaware Police Accreditation Commission meeting.
Get Involved: The Delaware Police Accreditation Commission is set to meet at 1 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 13. The meeting will take place at 1128 S. Bradford St. in Dover. More information, including about virtual attendance, can be found here.
Why Should Delaware Care? The Nanticoke Tribe has been recognized by the state of Delaware since 1881, and it currently has about 600 active members, mostly concentrated in the Millsboro area of Sussex County. For nearly 50 years, the tribe has put on the popular Nanticoke Powwow to enjoy their dance, culture and food, and provide more awareness of the tribe to Delawareans.
The 48th Nanticoke Powwow brought a celebration of community and cultural tradition to Sussex County this past weekend.
The “powwow,” which means a dancing and social gathering in many Native American languages, was held at Hudson Fields in Milton on Sept. 12 and 13.
The event featured a Grand Entry, where tribe members carried flags, sang, danced and recognized the diversity of tribes in attendance.
The Nanticoke members, who are mostly based in Millsboro where they have a museum and cultural center, were joined on stage by members of the Lenape Tribe, based in New Jersey, and the Unkechaug Tribe from Long Island, NY.
The two-day event also featured a variety of traditional Native American dances and drum circles; popular foods, including fry bread and “succotash” sweet corn; and vendors from around the country selling Native jewelry, clothing and crafts.
Dancers, vendors and attendees alike described the festival as a meaningful way to celebrate Nanticoke culture and history, while sharing the Nanticoke tradition with the other tribes at the powwow.
Spotlight Delaware compiled a gallery of photos highlighting moments from the 48th annual Nanticoke Powwow:
A man and a young boy participate in an intertribal dance during the powwow. An intertribal dance is one where people of any tribal affiliation, gender and age can participate. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MAGGIE REYNOLDS
Photographs of members of the Nanticoke tribe over the years on display in the history tent at the powwow. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MAGGIE REYNOLDS
Attendees filled the arena seats, waiting for the beginning of the Grand Entry, where tribe members enter the arena in traditional attire, dancing and singing. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MAGGIE REYNOLDS
Louis Campbell stands preparing for the beginning of the powwow “Grand Entry.” Campbell was the lead male dancer for the event, so he led all of the other men in the various dances of the day. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MAGGIE REYNOLDS
Vincent Cruz from New York City travels to powwows and other Native American festivals around the country, selling items made by his tribal community, the Quichua people in Ecuador. Among the items he sells is a “Make America Native Again” shirt. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MAGGIE REYNOLDS
A bird’s eye view of the Grand Entry, which filled the arena with dancers from the host Nanticoke Tribe and tribe members from as far as New Jersey and North Carolina. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MAGGIE REYNOLDS
Dancers jingle their ankle bells during the men’s traditional dance. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MAGGIE REYNOLDS
The smallest participant in the powwow’s opening procession. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MAGGIE REYNOLDS
Volunteers press the dough to make fry bread, a classic in Native American culinary culture. The women said they made roughly 3,200 individual fry breads during the powwow weekend. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MAGGIE REYNOLDS
Nanticoke Tribe members walk in a circle during a slower dance signifying the passing down of tradition from one generation to the next and carrying on the once forgotten Nanticoke language. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MAGGIE REYNOLDS
The flag-bearers led the way as the singers and dancers filled the stage for the beginning of the powwow performances. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MAGGIE REYNOLDS
As Columbia University ramped up its crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters over the past three years, the Ivy League institution was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to pro-Israel groups, according to a review of tax filings. Recipients of the cash included the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s charity arm, the Israel on Campus Coalition, and others.
Though the university gave in smaller amounts to pro-Israel groups before the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups, the spending ramped up in that fiscal year as the genocide in Gaza unfolded and Columbia led the way in a national campus protest movement against it.
“Pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian politics are the official policy of this institution.”
In contrast to its pro-Israel giving, according to an analysis of documents which track some of the money given by tax-exempt nonprofits, the school gave little or no such funds to pro-Palestine, Arab, or Muslim groups over the same period.
“It confirms our worst suspicions since fall of 2023 that pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian politics are the official policy of this institution,” Joseph Howley, an associate professor of classics at Columbia and a Jewish member of the university’s faculty, told The Intercept. “You could have surmised that from the institution’s actions and speech, but it appears to also be revealed in its resource allocation.”
A Columbia spokesperson said the grants went through a university-administered donor-advised fund, an arrangement where a nonprofit organization pools tax-deductible donations and lets the donors request to make specific distributions to other charities.
“These grants did not come from Columbia’s operating funds and were payments distributed from a donor-advised fund established at Columbia in accordance with IRS rules,” the Columbia spokesperson said.
“It’s just so opaque,” Mark De Fusco, an expert on financial transactions in higher educational institutions and former researcher at the Pullias Center for Higher Education, told The Intercept. “So, you can essentially make donations and not be identified.”
“Deeply Invested in the Genocide”
In the fiscal year ending in June 2024, Columbia paid $100,000 to the Israel on Campus Coalition and another $75,000 to AIPAC affiliate American Israel Education Foundation.
In the same period, the Columbia administration summarily suspended the pro-Palestine student groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, quashed the encampments in solidarity with Gaza, and called on the New York City Police Department to arrest pro-Palestine protesters on campus on two separate occasions.
The protesters had been demanding that Columbia disclose its financial ties to Israel and pro-Israel organizations and divest from them.
“The whole reason why we were protesting in the first place is because we knew that they were deeply invested in the genocide in Gaza,” said Maryam Alwan, a Palestinian American activist who participated in the campus protests in solidarity with Gaza before graduating from Columbia in 2025. “These findings confirm what we’ve been saying all along.”
While grants to American universities and medical research centers dominate past tax filings by Columbia, the pro-Israel organizations stand out as a rare few that prioritize relations with a specific foreign country. In 2024, over 170 of the 440 payments in this category were toward higher education and over 120 went to healthcare initiatives.
The payments by Columbia to the pro-Israel organizations were listed by the university as being for “program services,” though the term is not publicly defined by the university.
The Pro-Israel Beneficiaries
In fiscal year ending in June 2025, Columbia paid $7,200 to the Anti-Defamation League for “program services.” In the same period, the ADL welcomed the arrest of a lead Columbia protest negotiator Mahmoud Khalil by federal immigration officials. (None of the pro-Israel organizations that received Columbia cash responded to requests for comment.)
Details about any services offered by the ADL to Columbia in that period were not mentioned or publicized by the university. In July 2025, Columbia announced it was partnering with the ADL to conduct “programming and training” on antisemitism. A month before the announcement of the partnership, ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt compared pro-Palestinian student protesters to Islamist terrorists.
“Columbia should be investing in its students, not bankrolling organizations that intimidate them,” Khalil told The Intercept. “This is what happens when a university is controlled by ideologues on its Board of Trustees whose commitment to Israel appears to matter more than their fiduciary duty, academic freedom, or the students they are supposed to serve.”
The pro-Israel organizations that received payments from Columbia stand out from the rest of the university’s beneficiaries in its filings. While a small number of ethnic community organizations such as the Dominican Women’s Development Center and the Caribbean Women’s Health Association are listed as having received funding from the school in its disclosures, these groups largely operate in the diaspora and are not advocating for U.S. relations with a foreign nation.
The choice to fund organizations that specifically advocate for Israel struck several students, alumni, and faculty members with whom The Intercept discussed the findings as odd.
“At this point, Columbia cares about one thing and one thing only, which is the money of its donors and the ideological interests that those donors espouse,” said Aharon Dardik, an Israeli student who graduated from Columbia earlier this year and who had previously been court-martialed for refusing to serve in the Israeli military.
One of the beneficiary organizations receiving money from Columbia, the American Israel Education Foundation, describes itself on its website as “the charitable organization affiliated with AIPAC, America’s pro-Israel lobby.” The group is best known for funding trips for members of Congress to visit Israel. Over the past decade, Columbia has paid AIPAC’s charity arm $250,000, with a $75,000 payment in the fiscal year ending in June 2023 and a $100,000 payment in the one ending in June 2017.
Another beneficiary organization, the Israel on Campus Coalition, says its role is to put pro-Israel campus activism under one umbrella and work toward a future “where the anti-Israel movement is marginalized.” The group offered a fellowship at Columbia; the school’s website lists one student as having received the fellowship from 2022 to 2024.
“There’s no institutional neutrality.”
Columbia also paid $450,000 to the United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York in the fiscal year ending in June 2024. UJA says on its website that, since October 7, 2023, the organization spent hundreds of millions of dollars in Israel, including tens of millions to support Israeli soldiers and their families.
A review of these financial contributions, adding up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past three years, have brought Columbia’s process for donating to beneficiary organizations into sharp focus.
“People talking about institutional neutrality; there’s no institutional neutrality,” said a Columbia student who did not wish to be identified due to concerns over retaliation. “Columbia has always been very pro-Israel, and this just goes to show that that’s where their real commitments are.”
Flooding in West Bengal has led to three deaths, while severe beach erosion has been witnessed in Orange county
Flooding around the city of Malda in the Indian state of West Bengal since Thursday has had a devastating effect. So far, three deaths have been recorded and many areas are still flooded, with numerous villages affected, along with the region of Bhutni. Erosion from the flooding, reported from Khaskol, led to a disruption in river flow which led to a more severe impact in Bhutni. More than 100 boats have been sent out for evacuation.
At East Basudevpur, a 20ft (6-metre) embankment collapsed, reducing the channel from 550ft to under 150ft, which could lead to further flooding unless repaired. This flooding resulted after the Ganges River rose about 75cm above its “extreme danger” level owing to heavy rainfall.
STC’s 2027 program also features Celeste Barber in Amy Sedaris and David Sedaris play, Tim Minchin as Scrooge and the return of The Picture of Dorian Gray
Six years after the Australian historian Jenny Hocking won her legal battle to release secret correspondence between Queen Elizabeth II, Malcolm Fraser and the governor general John Kerr, her fight to reveal the truth about Gough Whitlam’s dismissal is being adapted for the stage.
The Palace Letters, announced on Monday as part of Sydney Theatre Company’s 2027 program, will have its world premiere at Sydney Opera House in April. It will star Georgie Parker as Hocking, with Jonathan Biggins playing Whitlam.
Richard Tice says contributions are legally compliant after author of review into overseas donations says rules will be applied retrospectively
Reform UK’s deputy leader has declined to say when two crypto billionaires who gave a combined £72m to the party returned to the UK, as the architect of a review into overseas donations said anyone here for less than 12 months would be subject to a limit on donations.
Richard Tice said that while he was completely confident Reform had complied with all current and proposed laws on donations, he could not say when Ben Delo returned to the UK from Hong Kong, or how much time the Thailand-based Christopher Harborne spent in Britain.
British ministers face calls to act after US authorities secretly flew out of the UK a diplomat accused of possessing indecent images of children.
US officials reportedly raided the diplomat’s London flat in August before taking him to an American airbase and flying him out of the country, without warning the Metropolitan police.
Columbus, Ohio — Republican Sen. Jon Husted’s campaign fired political director Stephen Woytek after reports surfaced that he had used Nazi SS imagery on social media and maintained a public playlist celebrating Rhodesia, the former white-minority-ruled state now known as Zimbabwe.
The Washington Post reported that Woytek, 25, used a photograph of SS soldiers as his Facebook profile picture in 2018 and followed a military reenactment group that portrays the 1st SS Panzer Division. Photos linked to the group also appeared to show Woytek dressed in an SS uniform at age 16.
The Post also found a Spotify playlist under Woytek’s name titled “Tales From Rhodesia,” with songs celebrating the former state. Rhodesia has long been embraced in some white-supremacist circles as a symbol of white minority rule.
Husted’s campaign said it learned of the posts Friday and immediately decided to part ways with Woytek. A spokesperson said his social media activity showed “a complete lack of judgment and disregard for its impact on others.”
Woytek denied supporting Nazi ideology, saying he participates in historical reenactments and has portrayed soldiers from multiple conflicts, including Union and U.S. World War II troops. He said he should have exercised better judgment online.
Woytek joined Husted’s campaign in August as the Ohio Republican runs against former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in one of the year’s closely watched Senate races.
Donald Trump Jr. and Bettina Anderson with their wedding party in the Bahamas Laura Gordon Photography via Instagram
On May 24, Donald Trump Jr. was celebrating in the Bahamas, as scantily clad dancers in stilettos and sailor caps performed for him and his guests. It was the last night of his wedding, a lavish, three-day party held across a pair of ultra-exclusive private islands. A five-tier funfetti cake had been airlifted in from Florida, and helicopters and seaplanes descended on the islands before guests settled into their oceanfront villas. That night on the beach, Trump Jr. lifted his bride into the air while fireworks launched from a barge over the sea.
“It was everything we dreamed of and more,” his wife later wrote on Instagram.
That dream was heavily funded by a secret benefactor: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin.
Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has beenfinanced by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.
The guest list numbered around 50. It included Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law Jared Kushner, Eric Trump — and Kremlev, an imposing man with a shaved head who speaks limited English. The oligarch was part of a large group whose presence puzzled other attendees. They sometimes stood off by themselves, speaking Russian.
“It was really small, like, just really close friends,” Trump Jr. later said on his podcast. “Tried to keep it really tight. And it was just awesome.”
Kremlev’s previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr. represents an extraordinary development: a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting the president’s son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family. For a decade, Putin’s government, regarded as a chief adversary of the U.S., has been accused of efforts to influence American elections. Attempts by Russia to make inroads with the Trumps before the 2016 election exploded into controversy that dogged much of the president’s first term.
Do You Have Information We Should Know About Donald Trump Jr.?
We’re still reporting. If you know anything about Trump Jr., his businesses or his relationship with Umar Kremlev, please get in touch.
Justin Elliott
I’m always looking for under-covered stories about business and politics, no matter the specific subject. Contact me with tips, by email or securely on Signal. I take confidentiality seriously.
National security experts expressed alarm at Trump Jr. accepting the oligarch’s largesse, saying it raised an urgent question: What motivated Kremlev to spend a fortune cultivating the connection?
“If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired career FBI official who held senior counterintelligence roles. Oligarchs like Kremlev often act in coordination with the Russian government. While it’s unclear if that happened here, Trump Jr. put himself in a precarious position, Montoya said. “This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.”
Holden Triplett, who served as Trump’s counterintelligence director on the National Security Council during his first term, said Russian intelligence frequently seeks to build ties with U.S. government officials and their family members. “Money is a tried-and-true method to gain access,” said Triplett, who also worked for the FBI in Moscow.
In the days leading up to Trump Jr.’s wedding, Kremlev was in China as part of the delegation accompanying Putin, according to Chinese state media. The month before, Putin had bestowed him with a state honor, the Order of Friendship. The Ukrainian government has imposed sanctions on Kremlev personally, citing his closeness to Putin and Russian security services.
It’s not clear why Kremlev helped pay for Trump Jr.’s wedding. The men appear to have met only recently. Public reporting suggests Trump Jr. could have afforded it himself, with Forbes recently estimating his net worth at roughly $300 million.
In response to detailed questions, a spokesperson for Trump Jr. did not dispute the wedding payments from Kremlev. “Umar is a personal friend of Don,” he said. The spokesman said that Kremlev is “not someone he has a business relationship with” and that the men met through a mutual friend in the hunting world and bonded over their love of boxing and the outdoors.
A spokesperson for Trump Jr.’s brother Eric said of Kremlev: “Eric has absolutely no clue who this person is, nor has never heard his name.”
In a statement, Kremlev’s press office said, “Mr. Kremlev and Mr. Trump Jr have a friendly relationship” and they first met “a couple of years ago.”
The press office described Kremlev as a businessman and philanthropist, adding, “Mr. Kremlev has never discussed political matters with any of his American friends and acquaintances,” including Trump Jr. They said the boxing organization itself did not incur expenses for the wedding but did not comment on the payments from the Dubai entity. The press office also said that when Putin and Kremlev were in China recently, Kremlev was not part of Putin’s “official delegation.”
Kushner, who has been helping lead the U.S. government’s negotiations with Russia over Ukraine, did not respond to requests for comment. The White House and the Russian government did not respond either.
The revelations come as Trump Jr. has emerged as a political power center in his own right. Beloved by the MAGA base, he reportedly played an active role in vetting White House cabinet picks for Trump’s second term and was dubbed his father’s “most essential political adviser” by The Wall Street Journal. “I certainly don’t think I’d be sitting here as the VP nominee without Don’s help,” Vice President JD Vance told the outlet in late 2024.
This account is based on records and interviews with dozens of current and former IBA officials and contractors, wedding attendees and other people in Trump Jr.’s and Kremlev’s circles.
Trump Jr. exchanged vows with socialite Bettina Anderson on a private island that was featured in “Pirates of the Caribbean” and the 2006 James Bond movie “Casino Royale.” They had their first dance on a second private island nearby that can rent for around $100,000 a night, paid for by Kremlev. The company that put on the fireworks display charges around $70,000 for such shows. (Kremlev did not attend the ceremony itself, which was held on the first day and had just 18 guests, Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said.)
Donald Trump Jr. and his wife, Bettina Anderson, at their wedding, watching fireworks paid for by Umar Kremlev.Laura Gordon Photography via Lewis Miller DesignThe magazine Hello! shared an image of Trump Jr. wearing a Junkanoo headpiece while dancing with his new bride.Laura Gordon Photography/Hello!
The atmosphere was Monte Carlo meets frat party — helicopters in and out, a beachside DJ set, beer pong tournaments. One day, the men went spearfishing. Artisans at the London fashion house Safiyaa spent 150 hours embroidering Anderson’s bespoke silk reception outfit. The president’s son had undergone treatment to better define his jawline for the occasion.
Some longtime friends of Trump Jr. told associates they were disappointed not to be invited, though a few of his closest business partners — executives at the Trump family crypto company, World Liberty Financial, and the venture capital firm 1789 Capital — did make the cut. President Trump himself skipped it. (“He’d like me to go, but it’s going to be just a small, little private affair,” the president told reporters beforehand. “I said, you know, this is not good timing for me.”) But many of the guests were immediate family of the bride and groom.
That made the large contingent of Russians all the more conspicuous. “What are they doing here?” one person recalled thinking. At least one of the Russian guests had been with Kremlev on his China trip: Alexander Lagutin, a businessperson who has served in senior roles at a Russian defense contractor and a state-backed energy company. Kremlev’s right hand at the IBA, Elena Sobol, attended the wedding too.
Since the wedding, the Trumps have released scores of photosand videos of the festivities. While they show many of the guests, the Russians have been absent from all of them. (The top of Kremlev’s head is visible in the back of one group photo posted on Instagram by a friend of the bride.) After the party was over, on his “Triggered” podcast, Trump Jr. emphasized the event’s privacy: “The people that were there — if you’re on that list, you weren’t talking.”
In 2009, Umar Kremlev did not yet exist.
He was in his late 20s, with a criminal record for extortion and battery, still going by his birth name, Umar Lutfulloyev, according to the Russian independent news outlet Proekt. But he was about to rapidly ascend in Russia to a position of wealth and influence, with the help of a powerful friend. (“Mr. Kremlev has a completely clean legal record,” his press office said.)
Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, with Umar Kremlev, during an event in Moscow in September 2022Sputnik/Reuters
In 2010, he changed his name to Kremlev. He soon joined a Russian government-backed biker gang called the Night Wolves, eventually taking a leadership role, according to news reports. That is what first brought him close to Alexei Rubezhnoi, who now leads Putin’s presidential security service, Proekt reported. In 2017, Kremlev took over the Russian Boxing Federation, after Rubezhnoi personally intervened to put him at the helm.
In 2020, Kremlev became president of the IBA. The association was something akin to FIFA but for boxing and had long overseen the sport in the Olympics. But it had been beset by corruption allegations and was on the brink of insolvency. Kremlev brought money to the table from Gazprom, the state-owned company that operates as an arm of Putin’s government. Gazprom publicly became the IBA’s financial backer, filling its coffers with tens of millions of dollars.
Former high-level IBA officials said that Kremlev had a clear political agenda. “Umar is guided by Putin. It was using the sport for soft political power,” a former IBA board member told ProPublica. “It’s geopolitics. That it’s boxing is just happenstance.” Kremlev, 43, is also heavily involved in an organization called Healthy Fatherland, run by his 23-year-old wife’s twin sister. The group — which promotes healthy eating and youth sports — is under Ukrainian sanctions for its alleged role in a program of abducting Ukrainian children from occupied territories and relocating them under the guise of “rehabilitation.” (Healthy Fatherland did not respond to a request for comment.)
Kremlev’s cozy relationship with the government has made him rich. Putin used the levers of the state to make Kremlev a dominant player in the Russian sports betting industry, according to Proekt, and one of his companies was chosen to operate the national lottery. After Putin nationalized Russia’s largest car dealership company in 2023, Kremlev became the owner of that too.
He now flaunts that wealth through his boisterous public persona. In one video Kremlev posted on social media, he surprises a young mother by giving her a free car. In another, he criticizes his young female aide’s outfit as not feminine enough and makes her change. He shadowboxes with ostriches and brings in celebrities like Rick Ross and Naomi Campbell for IBA events; he praises Stalin and rides private jets.
Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. began to indict Russian oligarchs and seize yachts and other assets. Kremlev repeatedly told associates he was worried about being targeted by a U.S. government probe, according to a person close to IBA leadership. “He was very afraid of American sanctions,” the person added. (Kremlev does not appear on public U.S. sanction lists.)
With the business environment in Europe growing more hostile to Russia, Kremlev moved much of the IBA’s operations from Switzerland to the United Arab Emirates. A new Dubai entity, IB Challenger, would later pay wedding expenses for Trump Jr. The current sources of the IBA’s funds are murky, and, in recent years, top executives have given conflicting accounts of the status of its relationship with Gazprom. (Kremlev’s press office told ProPublica the IBA’s sponsorship contract with Gazprom “expired long ago.”) People close to the organization said they understood that its money still comes from Russia.
In 2023, the International Olympic Committee stripped Kremlev’s IBA of its role organizing Olympic boxing. It has cited a host of governance issues and the group’s refusal to “transparently explain the sources of its financing or to explain its full financial dependency, at the time, on a single state-owned company.”
It was a major setback that deprived the IBA of a key source of its international influence. Kremlev has raged against the Olympic committee ever since and has said that his IBA predecessor, who he blames for the problems, “must be shot.”
Kremlev saw a potential ally in President Trump. After Trump’s second inauguration, in January 2025, Kremlev sent an open letter to the president asking him to look into the Olympic committee’s actions in advance of the 2028 Los Angeles Games. “We look forward with great optimism to the possibility of working together to make the Olympic movement great again,” he wrote.
In September 2025, the IBA brought in Trump Jr. for a panel discussion in Istanbul about boxing. With his then-girlfriend, Anderson, sitting offstage, he criticized transgender women competing in women’s sports and reminisced about watching Saturday night fights as a child. Trump Jr. shared the stage with Kremlev, the boxer Manny Pacquiao and Muhammad Ali’s daughter Rasheda. (Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said he was not paid for the appearance and was already in Turkey for an unrelated event.)
Kremlev hosted Trump Jr. at an event in Istanbul in September 2025.International Boxing Association
The president’s son had reason to be attuned to the sensitivity of cozying up with a Putin associate, especially while his father navigates the Russia-Ukraine war. Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with a Russian attorney in Trump Tower became a major focus of the Robert Mueller investigation.
The Trump Tower meeting was arranged after an email offering Trump Jr. damaging information about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. famously responded, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” Trump Jr. later dismissed the matter as a “witch hunt,” and the Mueller report concluded that there was not enough evidence to convict him of a crime.
Recently, Kremlev has been working to expand into the U.S. market. In July, his group hosted a bare-knuckle boxing event in Miami, a chance to showcase a particularly bloody form of the sport in which contenders fight without gloves. But the debut was overshadowed when manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, who the IBA had brought in to host, was arrested by U.S. Marshals outside the arena. (Tate is facing rape and sex trafficking charges in the United Kingdom, which he has denied.)
Much about Kremlev’s relationship with Trump Jr., and where it is headed, remains unknown. In a press release after the Istanbul panel, the IBA hinted there was more to come.
“President Kremlev and Donald Trump Jr made it clear – this alliance will not remain symbolic,” the press release read. “More joint initiatives will follow.”
Police in Bali believe the two young children died as a result of violence, while a 57-year-old man is believed to have taken his own life
Indonesian police are investigating the deaths of three Australians who died in Bali over the weekend, with initial reports suggesting a father killed his two young children before taking his own life.
The man, 57, and his two children, seven and four, who are also Indonesian citizens, were discovered deceased in a bungalow in Kuta on Sunday morning.
Three little letters - bnb-side’s name is a play on the local b-side arts festival, but Silicon Valley colossus sees threat to global brand
In one corner is bnb-side, a six-room bed and breakfast on the Isle of Portland – a tiny wedge of limestone tied by a narrow ribbon of shingle to the Dorset coast – that was created to help secure the future of the rock’s much-loved arts festival, b-side.
On the other is Airbnb, the San Francisco-based booking colossus. The battle between them is over the three little letters they share.
A new public consultation has opened on the 150bn-litre above-ground White Horse project in Abingdon, Oxfordshire
Thames Water has amended the blueprint of a planned mega-reservoir in Oxfordshire as the struggling utility tries to convince regulators that construction should go ahead amid warnings of “catastrophic consequences”.
The White Horse reservoir near Abingdon is scheduled to hold 150bn litresof water with a surface area of 6.7 sq km (2.6 sq miles) – almost the same size as Gatwick airport.
The Bills quarterback produced his usual thrills: a galloping touchdown run, a near game-ending mistake and a brilliant throw. Buffalo fans better hold on
Having Josh Allen as your quarterback is a bit like owning a high-performance sports car with an odd mechanical flaw that can’t be repaired. Most of the results are amazing – perhaps unprecedented – but there are also times when you wonder if a safer ride would get you farther.
In Buffalo’s 36-31 win over the Houston Texans on Sunday, Bills fans saw all sides of the Allenmobile. The quarterback completed 20 of 29 passes for 334 yards, two touchdowns, no interceptions and a passer rating of 130.5. He also ran the ball six times for 23 yards and two more touchdowns, the first a typical romp through the opposing defense.
Report by Israeli human rights group says systematic and broad assault being waged on conditions required for Palestinians’ existence
Israel is working towards the systematic “elimination” of the conditions that sustain Palestinian collective life in the occupied West Bank, according to a major report published by the human rights group B’Tselem.
The Israeli organisation’s hard-hitting report, shared with the Guardian in advance of publication, says Israel is “dramatically intensifying its attacks on every aspect of Palestinian life in the West Bank”, including “the ability to get to work, take children to school or university, receive medical treatment or municipal services, meet family and friends, cultivate land or go on vacation … routine activities that make up human life”.
1,107 Number of Palestinians killed by Israel in the West Bank since October 2023
Silicon Valley giants and national security experts "are calling for action against Chinese companies engaged in model distillation," reports CNBC. But "I would do nothing," says Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. "We could argue that there should be an American distillation regime."
Distillation is the process of using the outputs of a more capable AI model to train a smaller or less capable one, sometimes illicitly... Anthropic has accused Chinese companies such as Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, and MiniMax of the practice, while OpenAI believes DeepSeek's V3 and R1 model architectures were distilled from its own GPT-4 and GPT-4o models. In the midst of this, the U.S.'s National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Federal Bureau of Investigation released an official cyber security advisory warning on the topic on Tuesday...
But Tan believes regulators should focus less on curbing distillation and more on creating an equilibrium between open weight models and frontier models — as long as frontier models retain a price premium that allows their business model to remain feasible. "This is actually the ideal case. You want open weight models to give people freedom and access," he explained. "If I were a regulator, that's what I would go after." Tan acknowledged that this is a hard balance to strike, calling it "a tightrope." Nevertheless, he says it's a balance worth pursuing — saying it "could result in the best possible outcome."
Tan later told TechCrunch he'd like to see America with more open-weight options that aren't Chinese, built by smaller U.S. open-weight AI labs using those same training techniques on products from America's frontier AI labs:
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had previously publicly called on U.S. regulators to crack down on distillation. It's notable that the commander of Silicon Valley's prestigious and prolific startup accelerator doesn't agree.
To be clear, Tan isn't advocating for American AI labs to use stolen credentials to distill. He wants them to be free to come in the front door. In fact, his argument is twofold. He feels it's an overreach for AI labs to dictate what their customers can do with the information their models share with them. He also notes that the proprietary AI labs didn't ask permission when they vacuumed up as much human knowledge as they could to train their models. They famously ingested plenty of copyrighted material without the permission of those intellectual property holders. "Controlling what users and customers do with API calls to closed weight models feels constraining, and there's a role government can play here to normalize the fact that access to intelligence that was trained on broad public access data should itself also be more a form of a public good than something locked away behind restrictive terms of service," he told TechCrunch when asked why American labs should be free to distill, too...
To him, the true AI doomer scenario is for all the immense power of frontier AI to wind up in the hands of a single powerful, proprietary provider. "The nightmare scenario, the doomer scenario for AI is that there's just one company," he said. "It has the best access to capital. It has the best AI researchers. It runs away with it and suddenly there's one company that's monolithic. And that would be bad."
Digital-age Australian psychodrama tracks the shut-in mania of dangerously disaffected male fan, but doesn’t get inside his mind
If the parasocial phenomenon is a kind of hell, then Max Wren, protagonist of this Australian digital-age psychodrama, resides in the ninth circle. Self-barricading in a basement room surrounded by screens, working on a documentary about the object of his disaffection (an enigmatic influencer called Lenore), this obsessive shut-in makes Eminem’s Stan look like the Dalai Lama. Touching on subjects including the attention economy, the male gaze, and incel isolation and misogyny, director David Ward feels both Max and Lenore’s pain. But his ungainly debut film doesn’t fully transcend its stage origins to capture the splintered headspace of the terminally online.
Like films about fictional pop stars that feature unconvincing music, it doesn’t help that the quickfire résumé of Lenore’s career only half-conveys her magnetism. A one-time beauty influencer called Veronica Brand, she later graduates to more extreme performance art-type stunts, such as livestreaming her miscarriage; a move that, spliced without her knowledge into a children’s TV broadcast, forced her into hiding. But this performative vulnerability, including hints of her abusive dad, apparently won her legions of OnlyFans-style acolytes. Not just Max, but also his colleague Sam (Sam Macdonald), a brash interloper outraged to find he was nothing special to Lenore and who turns up at Max’s door offering exclusive footage of her.
Big manufacturers planning to produce more of the forever chemicals to meet demand from datacentres
Pfas companies are launching a “tidal wave” of forever chemicals production to meet demand from the AI industry, a campaign organisation has warned.
Despite alarm over the chemicals, which have been linked to cancer, a survey of the 10 biggest manufacturers found most had plans to increase production.
Big screen folder with slick software and advanced AI is just like a regular Android when closed
Google’s latest folding phone sticks with its tried and tested design of a traditional phone shape when closed and almost square when open, in the face of new competition from Apple’s squat iPhone fold.
The Pixel 11 Pro Fold is Google’s fourth-generation folder and is still one of the only models with a full water and dust resistance rating similar to standard slab phones. It costs from £1,799 (€1,999/$1,899/A$2,799), which is £50 (€100/$100/A$100) more than last year as the pressure of RAMageddon continues to push up prices.
Humans will have to compete with AI-powered virtual employees in the near future. Here are our tips for the last human holdouts
Futureproofing your career with an AI-resistant degree is a tough ask, says Charlie Ball, an expert on graduate employment for Jisc, the UK’s higher education digital, data and technology agency.
“What you’re trying to do is futureproof a 45-year career in a time of rapid technological change – and that’s really quite hard to do. What’s likely is that jobs that hinge a lot on human, face-to-face interaction are unlikely to be replaced.”
Adolescence co-writer criticises government inaction and calls for laws banning secret use of AI to generate scripts
Jack Thorne, one of Britain’s most successful screen and stage writers, has warned that some people in his profession are using AI “to cheat”, as he called for laws banning the secret use of the technology to generate scripts.
Thorne, who co-wrote the hit Netflix drama Adolescence and wrote the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, said that “writers need to be squeaky clean” in the face of AI models that “steal” the creative industry’s work.
Progressive politicians such as Zohran Mamdani offer answers to the bitter post-9/11 legacy of failures at home and abroad
Twenty-five years after 9/11, two pieces of journalism, describing two different phenomena in contemporary New York, tell us a great deal about a city, and indeed a world, caught between two eras. In one, New York Magazine dives into “Habibi City”, a New York where a “cultural shift is underway, led by a generation of New Yorkers coming into its own”. This new generation is labelled as originating in “SWANA” – south-west Asia and north Africa, a region that “includes countries from Palestine to Iran to Sudan”. In the other, Vanity Fair describes calls for Zohran Mamdani to not attend the 9/11 memorial ceremony as partly founded in “inchoate, emotional” impulses, that see “the city’s first Muslim mayor as a stand-in for the 19 Muslims who hijacked four planes and turned them into deadly weapons, part of the ‘them’ who attacked ‘us’.”
Together they capture what has changed over a generation, and what remains stubbornly the same. Members of a diaspora of Muslim background are indeed breaking through and accumulating, as New York Magazine says, “clout”. They are no longer simply a fixture of bodegas and halal carts, but of Saturday Night Live, upmarket dining, entertainment and politics too. Mamdani is both the expression of that cohort and the catalyst of its recognition as an emerging force. They care deeply for their local communities but also for those in Gaza and beyond.
After apocalyptic warnings about the threats posed by AI, leaders like Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s calls to ‘slow the pace’
Facing a public uproar over Anthropic researchers’ repeated warnings that artificial intelligence could kill all of humanity by 2030, the AI company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, issued a proposal at the weekend to slow down the technology’s advancement to ensure public safety.
Many hoped that the march of technology would usher in an egalitarian utopia – but some foresaw the threat it would pose to liberal society. Why did nobody listen?
Adapted from The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore, published by Allen Lane on 25 August. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com
A misconfigured Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) database linked to Vietnam exposed more than 220 million passenger and crew travel records spanning 2017 to 2026, including names, passport numbers, nationalities, flight details, seat assignments, and baggage references. Researchers said the database was reachable through a chain of security mistakes and default credentials. It was later secured after the disclosure, but it's unclear whether the data had already been copied or abused. BleepingComputer reports: Kinryu Labs discovered the Elasticsearch cluster on June 3 while surveying exposed databases as part of research into ransomware activity. The cluster, named 'pax-info', contained 29 indices and roughly 107 GB of data. Its two principal indices held 210,318,069 passenger records and 10,465,631 crew records, for a combined 220,783,700 entries. According to Kinryu Labs, the cluster was hosted in Viettel-assigned IP space in Hanoi. BleepingComputer could not confirm which Vietnamese organization operated the system.
The exposed information included passengers' and crew members' names, dates of birth, sex, nationalities, passport or travel-document numbers, document expiration dates, and issuing countries. Associated travel data included flight numbers and dates, airlines, departure, destination and transit airports, seat assignments, baggage references, and scheduled, estimated, and actual flight times, information typically carried by APIS and related airline systems.
Sample records reviewed by BleepingComputer included travelers of Korean, Chinese, Canadian, and New Zealand nationality, among others. While the researchers could not provide a complete breakdown by nationality, the data covered numerous international airlines across Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East. As a result, the exposed records could relate to people from virtually anywhere who visited or transited through Vietnam over the nine-year period. Kinryu Labs expects to publish additional details on its blog later this week.
Washington, D.C. — President Donald Trump said Sunday that he supports Flock Safety’s automated license plate-reading cameras, acknowledging privacy concerns while emphasizing their usefulness to law enforcement.
Asked about the technology aboard Air Force One while returning from Ireland, Trump said, “I sort of like ’em because of that, because of law enforcement.” After a reporter noted the cameras help catch criminals, Trump added, “But I like them.”
Flock operates more than 120,000 cameras nationwide that photograph license plates and vehicle characteristics, allowing police to search for vehicles connected to crimes, missing persons and other investigations. The expanding network has also generated bipartisan criticism over mass surveillance, data sharing and improper searches.
Public opinion is divided. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found 47% of Americans opposed their community using Flock cameras, while 38% supported them. Republicans were more supportive, while younger adults showed particularly strong skepticism.
Florida recently halted new license-plate reader installations on state highways, while Texas suspended funding for the technology. Meanwhile, lawmakers from both parties have proposed restrictions, ranging from tighter controls on federal funding to broader bans.
Flock CEO Garrett Langley has defended the technology while supporting stronger rules governing data retention and misuse. Civil-liberties groups including the ACLU argue the company’s proposed safeguards do not adequately address the potential for tracking people’s movements.
Cary, North Carolina — A new generation of cancer vaccines is showing encouraging results in clinical trials, but researchers worry growing vaccine hesitancy could limit their impact if the treatments eventually reach patients.
One example comes from the Cleveland Clinic, where an experimental vaccine targeting triple-negative breast cancer produced an immune response in 74% of 35 participants in a Phase 1 trial. Researchers stressed that the study established safety and immune response, not whether the vaccine actually prevents cancer recurrence. A Phase 2 trial is expected to investigate that question.
Meanwhile, Moderna and Merck recently reported that their personalized mRNA vaccine, combined with pembrolizumab, reduced melanoma recurrence in a Phase 3 trial involving roughly 1,100 patients. Researchers say longer follow-up is still needed to determine its effect on overall survival.
The progress comes as doctors report persistent misinformation surrounding vaccines, including the unsupported claim that mRNA vaccines cause so-called “turbo cancer.” Public-health researchers worry those narratives could spill over into attitudes toward cancer vaccines.
The HPV vaccine provides an existing example of vaccination preventing cancers. CDC monitoring has found HPV vaccines safe and highly effective at preventing infections and precancers caused by high-risk strains, yet vaccination rates vary substantially across states.
Researchers say cancer vaccines remain an evolving field, but declining public confidence could become another hurdle if promising experimental treatments eventually receive approval.
The board came home today and the wheel is not showing resistance so I guess it isn't the MOSFETs. I haven't taken anything apart yet but the battery charger doesn't turn red at all when plugged in, it just stays green, and no lights on the board.
With the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback on leave after his arrest in July, CBS brought a dependable presence into the booth with Jim Nantz
If you were looking for insight from the CBS team broadcasting Minnesota’s 39-22 comeback win over Green Bay on Sunday afternoon, you were rewarded even before the first snap.
Asked by his play-by-play partner, Jim Nantz, what he was focusing on with new Vikings quarterback Kyler Murray, JJ Watt told viewers that Murray was playing against his former head coach Jonathan Gannon. The now-Green Bay defensive coordinator was dismissed from the head coaching job in Arizona at the end of last season.
In his first interview, Bravo, an Air Force colonel who was shot down in Iran, told 60 Minutes his story of survival and provided new details about the rescue operation.
Sean McVay has become a generational talent, pacing toward the best ever, in the decade since the Rams hired him as head coach. But McVay says he almost left the Rams because of his insecurities.
Bravo, the code name for the Air Force officer shot down over Iran, survived for 48 hours on the ground with a broken back, broken arm and broken shoulder.
Dramatic video, obtained first by 60 Minutes, shows the rescue of two Air Force officers shot down over a mountainous desert region of Iran back in April.
Badly wounded and alone in Iran's desert, downed U.S. Air Force officer Dude 44 Bravo evaded capture for days as the Iranian forces and the U.S. military searched for him.
This live blog has now closed – you can read the latest news story here
If you’re looking just for a single story to quickly catch up on the story of tonight, let’s cross to our Nordic correspondent, Miranda Bryant, for her preview.
The prospect of far-right anti-immigration Sweden Democrats entering the government has understandably attracted a lot of international attention, particularly coming just days after the Alternative für Deutschland won the regional elections in Saxony Anhalt in Germany.
Craig Berg was hypothermic but alert when located on Isle Royale by Michigan police and officials during solo hike
A 70-year-old hiker who had been missing for a week on a Michigan island was rescued on Saturday, according to the US Coast Guard.
Craig Berg was located on Isle Royale with the help of backpackers, Michigan state police troopers and local officials. Even though Berg was found injured and hypothermic, he is “alive and alert”, according to a statement posted to the Isle Royale national park’s Facebook page.
Washington, D.C. — Democratic voters heading into the November midterms are more motivated by stopping President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans than by advancing their own party’s policies, according to a new CBS News/YouGov poll.
The survey found 54% of Democratic voters said their main reason for supporting Democratic congressional candidates was to prevent Trump and Republicans from enacting their agenda. Another 46% said they were voting primarily to help Democrats pass their own policies.
Republican voters showed the opposite pattern. Fifty-seven percent said they were voting to help Trump and GOP lawmakers advance their policies, while 43% said their main goal was stopping Democrats.
Across all registered voters, 45% said their congressional vote would be cast in opposition to Trump, compared with 28% who said they were voting in support of him. Another 27% said Trump was not a factor in their vote. The poll also found Trump’s job approval at 39%, with 61% disapproving.
Voters were divided over whether Democratic policies would improve their finances, with 36% saying they would be better off and 36% saying they would be worse off. Views were similarly split on whether Democratic policies would protect or threaten respondents’ culture and way of life.
The CBS News/YouGov survey was conducted Sept. 8-11 among 2,460 U.S. adults. The margin of error was plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.
Twenty-nine-year-old Queenslander was visiting Kelingking beach on a holiday, Nusa Penida police say
The death of an Australian woman in a cliff fall at a popular Bali tourist destination has been described as “incredibly sad”.
Police say the 29-year-old Queenslander was found stuck on the side of Kelingking beach cliff on Saturday morning, local time. Emergency services rushed to the scene but she fell further before they could reach her.
Whist drive ticket embedded in rock and news article on Great Train Robbers among items discovered during 10-year restoration
Lost or long-discarded items revealing glimpses of the behind-the-scenes life of Buckingham Palace staff over decades have been uncovered during the restoration of the UK monarchy’s HQ.
Misplaced belongings, found beneath the floorboards, in other areas of the royal residence and preserved within the fabric of the building, include a ticket to a whist drive run by the royal household’s social club from nearly 80 years ago.
Race too close to call and may take days to become clear despite early exit polls suggesting left bloc win
With most of the votes counted, Sweden’s national election remained too close to call on Sunday night, with left-wing parties holding a lead of just a single seat according to a partial tally by the election authority.
Earlier in the night, exit polls suggested that the country was on course for a brand new left-leaning government. But as the votes were counted, it was apparent it could take days for the outcome to become clear.
For a passing moment at the end of a rugged third set, hope sprung anew for Ben Shelton. He had been outserved and outplayed for nearly three hours, but at 6-5 in the third set, one game from defeat, the American finally broke through. He burst into the return game finally pounding his forehand freely and he willed himself into an unexpected fourth set.
After he had finished pumping his fist, cupping his ear to the crowd and admirably trying to initiate a drastic momentum shift, the next sequence was most revealing. Shelton opened the fourth set with a shaky game, immediately losing his serve at the start of the set. He worked hard until the end, but he was beaten by Zverev, the top seed, who closed out a 6-3, 7-6 (2), 5-7, 6-2 victory to lift his second grand slam title of the year.
The top-seeded German secured his second grand slam title with a 6-3, 7-6 (2), 5-7, 6-2 win over the American in New York
As at every US Open final, the Arthur Ashe Stadium crowd will be full of famous faces. For any eagle-eyed tennis/soccer fans wondering if Trinity Rodman will be in attendance (as she has for all of boyfriend Ben Shelton’s matches at this tournament): we probably won’t see her today.
The American soccer star is at a match of her own. Her Washington Spirit, locked in a chase for first place in the National Women’s Soccer League, are about to start the second half of their game against the Boston Legacy about five hours south in DC.
We’re not done here. The job is not finished. Super excited to get another opportunity to go out there and show my best on Sunday.
This whole tournament now at this point has been unchartered territory. I’m in positions I’ve never been in before. I’ve beaten guys – beaten a guy or guys that I have never beaten before. I’m just excited to put it all out on the line.
I was riding my GT-S at around 9mph and spun the tire with a deweight and a push. Something i very commonly do. The board proceeded to shut off and nose dived. After the board turned on and rode fine besides a small jitter in the motor when changing direction. The motor cable was fully plugged in as well as the other cables. I know shutoffs are a common issue with GT’s but i have never heard of it happening to a S series. Is this something that should concern me? (This S series has around 3500 miles and is pretty beat up, but has never had an issue)
NASA and IBM have released an open-source AI model trained on a large collection of lunar observations to help scientists analyze the Moon at scale. "The NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model gives scientists a foundation to explore the Moon at scale, connecting observations across instruments, revealing patterns that are difficult to see in isolation, and providing an open platform the global research community can build on," said IBM director of research for Europe, Juan Bernabe-Moreno. The Register reports: It is claimed as the first AI model to integrate observations captured in a range of modalities (data formats), and at different viewing angles and spatial scales. Instead of sifting through maps and images by hand or using low resolution machine learning models, scientists can use this to analyze geographic features, the pair say. In particular, NASA and IBM hope researchers will be able to discover previously unidentified lunar ice deposits, analyze volcanic features called Irregular Mare Patches, and identify and classify craters.
Lunar ice indicates the presence of water and oxygen, which may be useful for future manned missions. It is found in permanently shadowed regions, which are among the most difficult areas to observe. The NASA-IBM model combines multimodal and multi-resolution observations to better predict where ice may be present on the lunar surface. Alongside the model, IBM and NASA scientists compiled an open-source lunar dataset from over 30 spatially-aligned layers, using data from nine instruments across four missions. It combines tens of thousands of images and maps showing various geophysical properties of the lunar surface.
Prime minister vows to ‘reindustrialise Britain’ through new partnership with business
The prime minister is to host business leaders, entrepreneurs and local mayors at Downing Street on Monday to pitch his government as a “partner for growth” that can offer a stable platform for investment and jobs in the UK.
Ahead of the event, Andy Burnham said the country had “everything it needs to succeed”, including talented people and world-class universities, but requires “a culture shift in how Britain does business” if it is to unlock its full potential.
Kirsty McNeill reaffirms Labour’s 0.7% of GDP pledge and promises value for money to allay voter concerns
The development minister, Kirsty McNeill, has declared herself “a huge believer in aid”, as she reaffirmed Labour’s manifesto pledge to return to a target of 0.7% of national income spending.
McNeill, a former adviser to Gordon Brown and senior executive at Save the Children, declined to give any timetable, repeating the formula that the government would work towards the target “when fiscal circumstances allow”.
Caleb Williams threw for 269 yards and two touchdowns and ran for 65 yards and two more scores as the Chicago Bears defeated the Carolina Panthers in the highest-scoring season opener in NFL history. Chicago and Carolina scored eight more points than the previous record of 88 set in Tampa Bay’s 48-40 win over New Orleans in 2018. Coach Ben Johnson’s prolific Bears also broke a franchise record for points in an opener, a mark that had stood since 1948, when Chicago hung 45 points on Green Bay at Wrigley Field. The 59 points were the most allowed by the Panthers in team history. D’Andre Swift, who received a $33.75m contract extension earlier this week, ran for 124 yards on 18 carries with three touchdowns, while Kyle Monangai had 100 yards rushing, including a 61-yard touchdown burst.
Breanna Stewart scores 22 points; Caitlin Clark gets 12
Defending champions USA fell behind early but stormed back past France 97-79 on Sunday to win the Women’s World Cup.
In a rematch of the 2024 Olympic final, the American women came out on top once more, earning their fifth consecutive World Cup title and stretching their impressive unbeaten run at Olympics or World Cups to 20 years.
Police officer shared location of a woman with his relative who is accused of abusing woman
A San Jose police officer was fired for using his department’s Flock license plate tracking system to share the location of a woman with the suspect accused of abusing her, Chief Paul Joseph told NBC Bay Area on Friday.
The firing marks another in a growing number of cases of misuse of a controversial surveillance technology that has expanded rapidly over the last several years.
The election pits Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson's center-right coalition against a center-left bloc led by former Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson's Social Democrats.
Disturbing and AI-generated versions of Dr Seuss character have been used to threaten schools and communities
Schools and law enforcement authorities in the US are issuing warnings against a viral “Cat in the Hat” social media trend in which disturbing or AI-generated versions of the Dr Seuss character are used to threaten students, schools and communities.
The latest warnings come as safety concerns increase and several teenagers have been arrested or charged over posts connected to the trend.
New world No 1’s relationship with her previously banned coach, Stefano Vukov, remains under spotlight despite her rise to the top
In the bitter aftermath of her straight-sets defeat by Elena Rybakina at the WTA Finals last November, an inconsolable Aryna Sabalenka walked over to her courtside player box and slumped into a chair. She had been completely overpowered by her opponent, a strange and unusual feeling for such a powerful player, and she was seething. Sabalenka eventually settled on a popular Russian idiom to explain Rybakina’s untouchable form, which she believed was fortunately timed: “Once a year, even a stick shoots,” she said.
That stick, it turns out, has spent the past year shooting straight at Sabalenka in every significant match. Rybakina’s performance in Riyadh was a clear warning and she has dominated the hard‑court grand slam tournaments this year, beating Sabalenka in the Australian Open and US Open finals.
Vice-president wears religion on his sleeve but winding spiritual path could alienate evangelicals and Catholics
US vice-president JD Vance has worn his religion on his sleeve since converting to Catholicism in 2019. He recently published a book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, and memorably met the late Pope Francis at the Vatican on Easter Sunday in 2025, a day before the pontiff died.
But his religious identity could take on new weight as he positions himself for a presidential run in 2028, in which a successful campaign would make him only the third Catholic president in US history. Vance’s winding spiritual path – combined with his avowed evangelical roots – have the potential to stymie him, as he seeks to retain the Christian nationalist voters that have sustained Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement while wooing fellow Catholics.
The comment follows decades of White House neutrality and leaves both sides of the dispute wondering if he was backing Ireland, trolling Britain or talking off the cuff.
PM has so far declined to insert curbs on UK-based donors, despite £72m donations from billionaires to Reform UK
Trade unions, MPs and donors have urged the government to look again at party funding rules, after Reform UK insisted £72m in donations from two crypto billionaires was within the law.
Andy Burnham, a previous backer of caps on domestic donations, has so far declined to insert any curbs in the elections bill that would apply to UK-based donors.
Jefferson county coroner says 40-year-old woman died on Saturday, while two infants died with disease in August
A coroner in Pennsylvania announced the death of a 40-year-old woman associated with the state’s ongoing measles outbreak. The death appears to mark the third in the US state’s ongoing outbreak.
Two previous deaths in the state were in infant children. In one case, the infant was born with a genetic defect that made her vulnerable to infection. The second infant child was infected with measles, and died of a ruptured spleen.
Ukrainian Railways says former British PM and David Petraeus crossed into Poland shortly before drone attack near border
A train carrying Boris Johnson and the former CIA chief David Petraeus may have been the target of a Russian drone strike that hit a train engine near the Poland-Ukraine border, according to Ukrainian Railways.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, described the attack as “Putin’s terror knocking directly on the doors of the EU and Nato”.
A union representing Uber and Lyft drivers was just certified by California's Public Employment Relations Board, officially recognizing them as the drivers' bargaining organization.
The Sacramento Bee reports that this new bargaining structure :
The move will allow the California Gig Workers Union to help drivers negotiate issues affecting working conditions and benefits. It comes as at least 30% of active drivers expressed support of the union... [California] Assembly Bill 1340 helped bring the union to fruition by allowing the independent contractor drivers to engage in collective bargaining.
"The next step for the union is to negotiate a contract with Uber and Lyft that meets drivers' demands," reports the Los Angeles Times, "including health insurance, support for high gas prices and more transparency around pay:
California is the third state to allow ride-hailing drivers to unionize, following Washington in 2022 and Massachusetts in 2024...
The California Gig Workers Union was formed with the support of the Service Employees International Union... "Gig drivers shouldn't have to face the future alone," said SEIU 521 official Riko Mendez in a statement. "As autonomous vehicles rapidly expand, having a union gives the drivers the power to negotiate for fair pay and meaningful say in how new technology shapes their work and our communities' futures."
Wausau, Wisconsin — Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany and a pilot escaped with minor injuries after their small plane lost power and made an emergency landing in Lake Wausau late Saturday.
Tiffany said he was returning from the La Crosse County Lincoln Day Dinner when the single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza experienced a loss of power while approaching Wausau Downtown Airport. The pilot, identified by the Associated Press as Leonard Boltz, brought the aircraft down on the lake.
“After landing, we called 911,” Tiffany wrote on X. He said the plane began to sink, forcing both men to exit and swim to a shallow area until emergency responders arrived by boat.
Tiffany suffered a cut above his right eye that required stitches, while both men were treated for minor injuries at Aspirus Wausau Hospital and later released. Emergency crews used a fire department airboat to reach them shortly after 9 p.m.
The aircraft remained partially submerged in Lake Wausau on Sunday, and authorities warned boaters to avoid the area while recovery efforts were underway. The Federal Aviation Administration is expected to investigate the cause of the incident.
Tiffany represents Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District and is the Republican nominee for governor. He is scheduled to face Democrat David Crowley in the Nov. 3 election. Crowley publicly expressed relief that Tiffany and the pilot were not seriously hurt.
Pushing a stock pack pretty hard up slopes is asking for this to happen imo- Open up the front to make sure connections look ok. Being off after the board takes a tumble isnt the best sign. Since the XRV bms cannot determine cell health- that may be at play too. Balance the pack.
The following is the transcript of the interview with Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Sept. 13, 2026.
The safety debate that ignited when whistleblowers last week warned that the most advanced AI poses an existential threat to humanity should come with a health warning: side effects include whiplash. It was only seven days ago that AI enthusiasts were cheerily toying with OpenAI’s newest model GPT-6 Astra which was marketed in part as a lifestyle tool to help people book tennis courts, run fashion companies and order takeaways.
By Wednesday, cutting-edge AI started to look a lot less appealing when the resigning Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”. Yes, he was talking about artificial superintelligence – an as-yet-nonexistent version of the technology that outcompetes humans in most domains – but his comments, and the chorus of experts that echoed him, jangled plenty of nerves.
Call for constitutional change in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales likely to challenge Burnham’s devolution agenda
The first ministers of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are to affirm their countries’ right to seek independence from the UK at a summit that is likely to challenge Andy Burnham’s devolution agenda.
The Plaid Cymru leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth, the Scottish National party leader, John Swinney, and the Sinn Féin vice-president, Michelle O’Neill, are expected to sign a memorandum of understanding at a landmark conference in Cardiff on Monday that will call on Westminster “to prepare, plan and facilitate constitutional change in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland”.
Kaegan Jude Solet, 47, taken into custody after stabbings in Houma leave four dead and one wounded, authorities say
Police arrested a person of interest after a series of stabbings in Houma, Louisiana, left at least four people dead and another person in critical condition in hospital.
The Terrebonne parish sheriff’s office confirmed Kaegan Jude Solet, 47, had been taken into custody after deputies were initially called to the Ashland Drive area of Houma and located a juvenile with apparent stab wounds.
Europe beat USA 15-13 after 7-5 win in singles matches
Lottie Woad seals victory with putt against Auston Kim
Eyebrows were raised when Anna Nordqvist somewhat abruptly announced her retirement from competitive golf last month at the age of just 39. Heads were turned when Nordqvist kept Solheim Cup faith with the pairing of Charley Hull and Lottie Woad despite a miserable points return in the Netherlands. Nordqvist sounded unsure about elements of the Solheim Cup’s captains’ agreement before a ball was whacked in anger. The last laugh belongs to the Swede herself, who can sail off into the sunset having added a triumphant Solheim Cup captaincy to a career that had already returned three major wins.
What a rousing afternoon this soon became for women’s golf in Europe. The understated Nordqvist was on the podium once more.
The head of the artificial intelligence company calls the exponential rate of AI developments a "warning sign," with risks for humanity, and says, "We need to slow down." He talks with "Sunday Morning" about possible steps forward.
The following is the transcript of the interview with Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Sept. 13, 2026.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany and pilot swim to safety after plane made emergency landing in lake
A Republican congressman said he had to swim to safety after a plane he was traveling in made an emergency landing in a lake late Saturday.
Representative Tom Tiffany says he was returning from the La Crosse county Lincoln Day Dinner when the light aircraft lost power as it approached Wausau downtown airport. The pilot made an emergency landing in Lake Wausau. They both ended up in the water and swam to safety.
Houma, Louisiana — Authorities in Terrebonne Parish are searching for a person of interest after a series of stabbings left four people dead and a juvenile critically injured in Houma.
Deputies were first called to the Ashland Drive area, where they found a juvenile suffering from apparent stab wounds. The victim was airlifted to an out-of-area hospital and remained in critical condition, according to the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office.
As investigators continued searching the area, authorities discovered four additional victims dead inside a nearby home.
The sheriff’s office identified 47-year-old Kaegan Jude Solet as a person of interest in the investigation. Officials emphasized that being named a person of interest does not amount to an arrest or criminal charge, and no charges had been announced against Solet in connection with the current deaths.
Solet has previously been arrested in an unrelated stabbing case. In 2019, Houma police accused him of repeatedly stabbing a 59-year-old woman at a hotel following an argument. Authorities said the woman suffered life-threatening injuries, and Solet was booked at the time on one count of attempted second-degree murder.
Police have not said whether investigators believe the current victims knew Solet or disclosed a possible motive.
The investigation remains active as detectives gather evidence and work to determine what led to the attacks. Authorities have asked anyone with relevant information to contact local law enforcement.
Just installed MTE 5" on my GT, and the maghandle isn't compatible, are there any other solutions for a side handle? Is there enough clearance for a paracord handle, or any other options?
Charley Hull lets go of her club – a wet grip? – while sending her second at the par-five 2nd into a fairway bunker. She whips into the green and makes par, but Megan Khang set up a six-foot birdie chance to level the match. However she repeats the error of the 1st hole, leaving a dribbler short, failing to take into account the slowness of the wet greens. A let-off for Hull.
1UP Hull v Khang (2)
Henseleit A/S Al. Lee (1)
Grant v Yin
The man who once helped Richard ‘Dirty’ Desmond save a load of tax was wheeled out to face Laura Kuenssberg
You wait years for one party donation of £36m and then two come along at once. Reform can hardly believe its luck. All hail the crypto billionaires. Tacky pale turquoise suits all round. And Nigel Farage won’t have to worry about spending any of his own money – if you can call the £5m freebie his own money – on his security. Nor do those champagne and oyster lunches to discuss loose change donations of £500k from people living overseas pay for themselves. From now on Reform won’t need to bother getting out of bed for anything less than eight figures.
Fair to say that if it had been Labour or the Tories trousering £72m from Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo then Reform would be on full outrage rampage. How the political system was rigged against it and how the two main parties are hotwired cash machines. In bed with the super-rich. But since the money is heading towards its own bank account, everyone in the party is totally chilled. This is just the way life ought to be. Who wouldn’t want a country where two billionaires can attempt to buy the democratic process?
Woman’s family says she died of injuries after being shot in the head while sitting inside a tent near Khan Younis
A pregnant Palestinian woman died on Saturday from injuries sustained after being shot in the head by Israeli forces south of Khan Younis, according to her family and medical workers, as strikes across Gaza killed at least 10 people in 48 hours.
The woman, named as Iman Shalouf, 27, who was nearly eight months pregnant, was sitting inside her family’s tent in the al-Mawasi area when Israeli gunfire struck her, according to paramedics and witnesses.
Ex-president urged party at closed-door fundraiser to create sweeping framework, from safety ‘slow-down’ to job losses
Barack Obama urged Democrats to prioritize a “public conversation” about AI management and safety in a closed-door Manhattan fundraiser last week.
The comments by the former US president reportedly urged the party to create a sweeping framework for everything from a safety “slow-down” to domestic job losses and children’s wellbeing.
Hampshire and Isle of Wight force says it wants to speak to men in connection with anti-migrant unrest that left seven officers injured
Police have released images of six men they would like to speak to after violent disorder in Portsmouth last week that left seven officers injured.
About 200 people gathered at Eastney Marina on Sunday night after a small boat carrying asylum seekers arrived on the south coast having crossed the Channel. The activists dispersed the following day in the early hours.
Sam Surridge scored an equalizer in the first minute of second-half stoppage time for visiting Nashville SC, who played Inter Miami to a 2-2 draw on Saturday evening.
Surridge’s goal, his second of the evening and 15th of the season, came after Shak Mohammed’s shot was saved by Dayne St Clair. Surridge was in position to put home the rebound to help Eastern Conference-leading Nashville steal a point on the road against second-place Inter Miami.
A school oral history project to interview World War II veterans uncovered little-known stories from the conflict, including the liberation by American troops of 2,500 Holocaust survivors from a so-called "death train" in April 1945.
The Newark Charter Patriots defeated the Odessa Ducks, 13-0, on September 11 to improve to 2-0 this season.
The Odessa Fire Company displays a large American flag from one of its engines as Odessa celebrated Military Appreciation Night.
First responders stand along the railing watching as Odessa and Newark Charter play on Friday night.
The Odessa student section dressed in USA colors get ready to cheer on their Ducks before the game.
Ducks senior Nakai Hann runs the ball against Newark Charter’s defense.
Patriot senior Austin Gbadegbe is brought down by a Duck defender after gaining yardage on the run.
Odessa senior Thomas Ngateh leaps into the air and focuses on catching the ball for an interception.
Odessa senior Thomas Ngateh looks for running room after intercepting the pass.
Newark Charter junior Lucas Erunchak jumps in the endzone following one of his two touchdown runs against Odessa.
Patriot senior Maxwell Laznik finds a small window of running room against the Odessa defense.
(To read more about Newark Charter’s win click here.)
Duck senior Xavier Terrell runs down the right side as the Ducks move toward the endzone.
Newark Charter freshman Jordan Butler dives for a loose ball while Odessa senior Thomas Ngateh does the same.
Odessa quarterback Nicklas Bateman loads up for a deep pass downfield.
Newark Charter senior defensive back Cayden Anderson intercepts the pass and gives possession back to the Patriots. This was one of two interceptions for Newark Charter in the game.
Patriot senior Maxwell Laznik watches as his teammates set up their blocks, choosing which running lane to take.
Patriot quarterback, Chase Kennedy, takes a knee securing Newark Charter’s first win against Odessa in program history.
All photos courtesy of Dave Reeder. To see more of Dave’s work follow him on Instagram @bfr_photo
As Muslims win historic victories, experts describe rise in anti-Islamic sentiment that rivals post-9/11 climate
Within hours of Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic US Senate primary, Republican senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama declared that the party had “just voted to send a TERRORIST” to Washington.
El-Sayed – or “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed”, as Tuberville called him on X – was a “RADICAL ISLAMIST” who would “do everything he can to destroy America”, he claimed.
Harborne and Delo’s cash could buy a massive head start in an election, but spending big has possible pitfalls
Nigel Farage once said he could spend his £5m gift from Christopher Harborne on Ferraris if he wanted to, given its unconditional nature.
With the new donations to his party from Harborne and his fellow crypto billionaire Ben Delo of £72m over the past weekend alone, Farage’s party now has nearly enough cash to buy a Reform UK branded Ferrari for a party organiser in each of Britain’s 632 constituencies (though that would certainly be a waste and a bit of a tax headache).
Former vice-president and her husband were not home when person entered their property, no arrests were made
Law enforcement officials and a spokesperson for former vice-president Kamala Harris said a trespasser was stopped at her Malibu home in California on Friday night.
Neither the former vice-president nor her husband, Doug Emhoff, were home at the time.
Plan to give US adults $5,000 has been greeted with incredulity across the political spectrum as well as outrage
Donald Trump on Sunday doubled down on his controversial pledge to give US adults a $5,000 “dividend” if his Republican party keeps control of Congress after November’s midterm elections.
The plan has been greeted with expressions of incredulity across the US political spectrum as well as outraged accusations of seeking to bribe voters. The plan – which would cost more than a trillion dollars – also comes amid huge concern over the US national debt, which topped $40tn for the first time in August.
Will also point out here that across the Sunday politics shows this morning, neither Labour nor the Tories ruled out accepting such huge sums from crypto-billionaires in the future.
Nigel Farage says that donations just go to putting Reform on a “more level playing field” with the more established parties.
One of the most important names in fashion for nearly 50 years, Diane von Furstenberg has long empowered women, with practical, feminine clothing, most famously embodied by her '70s wrap dress.
Lured by promises of payment and a desire to help other families, surrogates discover they have few protections from practices that cast a "dark shadow" over the industry.
(The Center Square) – U.S. Sen. Rand Paul says his proposed Bonuses for Cost-Cutters Act would help tackle the national debt by paying federal workers to find waste. Congressional scorekeepers say they have no basis for estimating how much it…
(The Center Square) – Congress faces a Sept. 30 deadline to extend federal highway infrastructure funding before it expires, but the U.S. House has only a week left in session to help get the job done.
In the early days of the war against Iran, the U.S. fired off thousands of long-range, precision-guided missiles. Now, with a depleted arsenal, the Pentagon seeks to replenish its stockpiles, an effort that will cost billions and take years.
The construction of the pool reflected a national ambition to build something unifying and enduring. The rushed renovation and political fallout of 2026 reveal how much that civic vision has changed.
Combined value of 275 women’s claims is far greater than amount Harrods has set aside for payouts
Compensation claims by 275 survivors of alleged sexual abuse by the former owner of Harrods Mohamed Al Fayed could reach between £100m and £150m, according to a law firm representing the women.
The combined value of their claims, calculated by KP Law (KPL), which represents more than half of known survivors, is around two to three times greater than the amount the luxury department store has set aside for all abuse payouts.
Sam Altman and Elon Musk have backed a call from the head of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, to “slow the pace” of AI development after he warned that an AI swarm could otherwise become capable of “taking over the entire internet” within a year.
In a rare show of unity, the rival technology leaders threw their weight behind the appeal from the founder and chief executive of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, which came after a series of warnings from AI researchers last week. Amodei also called for safety coordination with China.
Images of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Joe Biden, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz are displayed during the first day of the Republican Midterm Convention at the American Airlines Center in Dallas on Sept. 9, 2026.Photo: Mark Felix/Bloomberg via Getty Images
In case anyone was starting to feel that American democracy is just a little too secure, distaste for the common man is now finding purchase beyond the political right, with centrist liberals test-running their own brand of distaste for mass participation.
Over the past two years, centrist liberal writers have been emboldened to expressly call for less public participation in government and politics, sometimes just coming right out and saying, “What we need is fewer engaged people,” as prolific pedant Matthew Yglesias recently said over on the reanimated corpse of Twitter.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the rampant hostility to small-dollar donors. In external communications, we’ve heard notions like Democrats needing to “move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors.” In writing not meant for a wide audience, the honest assessment from the Abundance Network is more extreme: Widespread grassroots fundraising “makes politics dumber.” The reasoning is that such donors tend to be more liberal than traditional big-dollar supporters and, as a result, push Democrats away from the preferences of the median voter. But in reality, the moderation bought by high-dollar contributions only serves to further cater to the interests of the wealthy.
Centrists have taken to characterizing the dueling ascendance of left-economic populism and right-chauvinistic “populism” as a pincer movement against the righteous “vital center.” In recent years, centrist publications have been replete with examples, urgently calling to safeguard liberalism, often from the masses.
The irony is that a leading contender for the ur-problem of liberalism’s failures is the purposeful destruction — by centrist liberals — of the organizing capacity that powered the postwar liberal order: organized labor, civil rights organizations, and robust state-level party infrastructure.
Years ago, as Donald Trump was first running for the presidency, political commentator Andrew Sullivan worried in a lengthy manifesto that too much populism would serve to “repeal” democracy. His conflating “liberalism” with a liberal technocratic elite class is a hallmark of the centrist canon.
This thinking has morphed into what could be called “Grownup Liberalism,” the belief that there is a class of wonky centrist experts who could fix so many things if the confused masses would just get out of their way — a notion that’s inherently undemocratic and increasingly discordant with the actual state of American politics.
As the center tries to cling to the tatters of institutional deference and justify why, even after building the hellscape we inhabit, they alone can steward our future, the right is waging an intense fight against the foundations of liberal society writ large.
Republicans set off a gerrymandering war that reached its acme with Missouri trying to hoodwink federal courts into signing off on an illegal congressional map. Mail-in voting is under assault, and the SAVE Act, which risks endangering the rights of millions of Americans to vote, has been a conservative hobby horse for over a year. There are talks about deploying federal agents, including ICE agents, to polling places across the country and efforts to seize voter rolls.
To some, the mixed results of these efforts might show that institutionalists are the dam holding back an authoritarian flood. But these are the same institutionalists who dismantled the Voting Rights Act, created (nearly) carte blanche immunity for the president out of thin air, and opted not to enforce the law, emboldening further authoritarian power grabs.
As the center tries to cling to the tatters of institutional deference and justify why they alone can steward our future, the right is waging an intense fight against the foundations of liberal society writ large.
Now, however, the pontification on whether the little people have too much power is increasingly focused on American democracy as an institution. Much of the faddish “Abundance” movement draws heavily on the argument from Yale history professor Paul Sabin’s “Public Citizens” that providing new avenues for the public in politics undermined the project of liberal democracy itself. Some proponents have long championed a view of political dynamics centered on liberal and conservative elites dueling intellectually. Others explicitly believe that politics can only marshal material change when titans of industry take the lead, and some (to varying degrees) support ideas like the “network state,” which would replace democratic republicanism with techno-libertarian flavored fascism.
Abundance is just one strain of moderate-coded politics turning more and more of a cold shoulder to the idea of governance by the people. Not to be outdone, Third Way — a think tank that answers the question: What if we took all the preening and posturing of the Democratic Leadership Council but left out the charisma? — has been on a tear seeking to limit regular people’s input in political decision-making. The organization has tried to cast the idea of taking any economically populist position as caving to a “purity test” by the left and called for ending reliance on grassroots fundraising.
Never one to sit out the action, The Atlantic ran a review on September 1 of a Howard Zinn biography with the subhead “The historian believed that empowering the people would improve society. History hasn’t always proved him right.”
“One can agree with Zinn on the power of the people to make change and still wonder whether recent history has revealed the limits of his wisdom,” the author writes. But, he adds, the fact that conservatism has marshaled popular support “confounds his almost mythic sense of ‘the people’ as inevitably on the right side of history.” That is, ordinary folks have shown that they sometimes back distasteful conservative trends, so maybe we should stop empowering them.
Over at The Argument — the venture capital-funded Substack run by former Atlantic writer Jerusalem Demsas — the editor-in-chief recently attacked Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy’s book on the common good as a “cult” in a sophomoric essay, which went so far as to condemn “the growing obsession with the common good among the postliberal right and left.”
Across the board, the message is that common people need to get their noses out of politics, go back to trusting the liberal technocrats, and maybe have a little democracy once in a while, as a treat.
It’s both stunning to see the contempt for popular government coming from the self-appointed champions of liberal thought and totally predictable for the vestiges of neoliberal power to veer away from democracy. At its core, the central premise of neoliberal thought is that the market must be the benchmark, with governance subverted to its will, and crucial economic policy cordoned off from the whims of popular rule.
The message is that common people need to get their noses out of politics, go back to trusting the liberal technocrats, and maybe have a little democracy once in a while.
If the stakes weren’t so profound, or these people so bafflingly influential, this would all be pretty funny. The bits about pro-corporate media figures and billionaire-funded political operatives throwing conferences about how we need more elite influence practically write themselves. Unfortunately, these are not niche figures who can be disarmed as mere old men yelling at clouds. Collectively, there are hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into organizations that are explicitly anti-small money in politics and want to make Democrats more allegiant to a wealthy donor class.
Even more unfortunate is that in a moment where our country is as close as it has ever gotten to full-blown authoritarianism, centrist thought leaders are flirting with the very ideas that justify the evisceration of popular democracy: that people cannot be trusted to take an active role in their own government, that there is a class of elites better positioned to lead, and that we ought to get out of the way of our betters.
This is a powerful illustration of how neoliberal politics warped postwar liberalism into a grotesque version of itself. The postwar consensus centered around the idea that in the duality of American liberalism, democracy is the senior partner and free markets the junior. Neoliberalism reversed this. For a while, the danger lurked in the background. But people will only allow their will and well-being to be subverted in the name of efficiency and growth for so long.
Across the democratic world, everyday people are calling the neoliberal bluff and revolting at the ballot box. The center for now still has resources and cache. Their choice is which pillar of liberalism they want to save: the free market-driven power of capital, or democracy itself.
Fire survivors and bereaved urge Barnet Group to ‘reconsider’ appointment of Laura Johnson, who pushed for cheaper contractor
Grenfell survivors and bereaved relatives have criticised the “outrageous decision” to hire a director who oversaw cost-cutting at Grenfell Tower in a £150,000-a-year senior council housing role.
Laura Johnson, the director of housing at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) at the time of the 2017 Grenfell fire, has been appointed the permanent director of development and property at the Barnet Group, which manages the borough’s 13,000 council homes.
The subversive bacchanal for San Francisco’s eccentric underground is ageing out amid an influx of the super-rich
Burning Man, the infamous arts festival in the Nevada desert, turned 40 this year, and it’s showing some distinct signs of middle age.
It’s not just the tech billionaires who show up to party, the chartered flights straight to the desert or the HBO documentary about behind-the-scenes power struggles. The tens of thousands of people who assemble each year to create a tent city in the wilderness appear to be growing older, and it doesn’t seem that they’re being replaced by as many younger “burners”, as festival participants are called.
An ominous evolution is under way on the far right. It is a dangerous shift that is linked to our era of existential crises, defined by its pandemics, climate emergencies, resource wars and rogue tech. Today’s fascists are part of a dangerous and fractious alliance – from messianic venture capitalists to army-controlling theocrats – united by the belief that the end of the world is upon us and that only a chosen few deserve to be saved. That is the thesis of Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s new book, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World.
Since it can be hard to believe that political and corporate leaders would actively give up on our shared future on this singular planet, they also collaborated with film-makers Emma Dessau, Austin Bedell and P Nick Curran to create a video in which we hear directly from many of the people behind this threat – and outline why this is the moment for the rest of us to commit to each other and our shared home. The Guardian is pleased to share it for the first time.
Naomi Klein is a Guardian US columnist and contributing writer. She is the professor of climate justice and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia
Astra Taylor is a writer, organizer and documentary maker and a co-founder of the Debt Collective
"This is what happened when we tried to record Flock installing a new camera on public roads," says Emmy award-winning reporter Brendan Keefe in a new video for InvestigateTV. In an accompanying article, InvestigateTV says their reporter "parked on the public street at a distance, donned a yellow safety vest and a hat emblazoned with the logo of InvestigateTV's Atlanta affiliate where he also works, displayed a press placard on his dashboard and then pulled out a camera to record the installation.... The installer saw him and immediately packed up his equipment and drove away, so Keefe also returned to his car and followed several cars behind, hoping to document the next stop."
And then Flock's technician called 911. When asked "What's the address of your emergency" Flock's technician answered "I'm getting followed — harassed, pretty much. Taking videos and pictures!" Flock's worker said they'd been harassed multiple times that day, then stated incorrectly that "I know for a fact" that that was what the reporter wanted to do too.
InvestigateTV reports that as a result of the Flock technician's call, "Three police cars ended up in the national investigative reporter's rearview mirror that Wednesday afternoon." Keefe told one of the three police officers who pulled him over, "There is an irony here that they're setting up these cameras that track all of our movements, that follow everywhere we go. But when I try to get video in public of him in public setting up a camera, he's afraid I'm following him?"
InvestigateTV also reports that "About 17 minutes after the stop began, the responding officers returned to their vehicles and Keefe was allowed to drive away." But the call that brought three police cars to their reporter "was not the first time this summer someone working for Flock Safety summoned police over a camera. "
About 17 minutes after the stop began, the responding officers returned to their vehicles and Keefe was allowed to drive away... [But the stop] was not the first time this summer someone working for Flock Safety summoned police over a camera. On June 5, police in Smyrna, Georgia, responded to a 911 call from a Flock employee after a group of YouTube creators began filming outside the company's distribution center located in the Atlanta suburb... The caller claimed the group filming had "been driving around the perimeter, basically harassing everyone" working at the facility. "Three young white males, probably mid-twenties, I'm not sure if they're armed. And they're carrying filming equipment as well," the caller said. Three times during the call he raised the possibility the people filming might be armed, though, when asked, he told the dispatcher he had not seen any weapons... [One of the protesters later told the caller "I think it's interesting, when you guys have this happen, you call the police and make us get stopped. But then you do it and it's okay?"]
No one was charged in the YouTuber group, though the individuals were ordered to leave the premises under an official trespass warning.
Keefe's video report ends with one final irony. "Every day on my way to work, I'm captured again by those same new shiny Flock cameras. We tried watching the watchers. Turns outs, it's a lot easier for them to watch us."
Flock responded to the report by claiming "We do not object to members of the public or press photographing Flock cameras or personnel in public." But they added that employees working "in the field" must "prioritize their safety" and "may contact law enforcement when they believe they are being threatened, harassed, followed, or otherwise face a safety concern."
Omanis are wondering what triggered Trump to threaten to bomb their small country, which is known for neutrality and was negotiating between Iran and the U.S. to end the war
Central bankers in economies including the US, Japan and the UK will face a moment of truth this week, as surging inflation raises the prospect of higher interest rates.
Policymakers in all three countries will set rates in the next seven days against the backdrop of turbulent global bond markets.
(The Center Square) – Wisconsin congressman and candidate-for-governor Tom Tiffany and a pilot sustained only minor injuries after having to make an emergency water landing in a four-seat Bonanza airplane late Saturday night near Wausau.
Search and rescue agency says 107 people brought to safety from vessel hit by bad weather in Java Sea
Rescue workers in Indonesia said at least six people had died and 130 others were missing on Sunday after a ferry sailing between the islands of Java and Borneo capsized in bad weather.
Basarnas, Indonesia’s national search and rescue agency, said 107 people had been rescued from the Virgo Transport 8 vessel, which set sail on Saturday with 243 people onboard, including 30 crew members, from the East Java city of Surabaya.
Key government meeting this month will consider US bid to try James ‘Fergie’ Chambers over alleged support for Hamas
Attorneys for James “Fergie” Chambers, the US citizen and wealthy donor to leftwing and humanitarian projects worldwide who is currently imprisoned in Madrid and sought in extradition, have submitted a brief ahead of a decisive government meeting on the case.
Meanwhile, Chambers’ partner, the actor and activist Stella Schnabel, met last week with multiple members of the Spanish parliament to assert his innocence.
Wireless providers might have amazing deals that give you a brand-new $1,000 phone for free. But make sure to understand the pros and cons before accepting one.
Long days call for dinners that make the evening feel less rushed. These 15 recipes bring stews, pot roasts, casseroles, noodles, mashed potatoes, and slow-cooked mains to the table.The post 15 soul-warming recipes for slowing down after a long day…
The Chicago-born pope made his first public comments to commemorate 25 years since the attacks, speaking in English at the end of his traditional Sunday noon blessing.
When dinner needs to smell like something serious is happening, these 13 baked casseroles bring chicken, beef, pasta, shrimp, rice, and plenty of golden, cheesy layers to the table.The post 13 baked casserole picks worth making when you want the…
Iran-allied Houthis say drones and missiles used in attack that targeted ‘weapons depots and command and control centres’ in southern Saudi Arabia
Houthi fighters have said they used drones and missiles to attack a military base in southern Saudi Arabia, as Yemen’s Riyadh-backed government described the rebels’ swift advance along the Red Sea coast as a “painful” development in a new front in the Iran war.
The UN said on Sunday that nearly 86,000 people had fled Yemen, most of them since early September when the Iran-backed Houthi rebels launched a large-scale offensive that last week resulted in the capture of a key port city and an island on the Bab al-Mandab strait, a crucial shipping alternative to the strait of Hormuz.
Arch Manning delivered a moment, and it was a big one for Texas and himself. The Longhorns quarterback led No 4 Texas back from a 20-point fourth-quarter deficit to beat No 1 Ohio State 24-23 on Saturday night.
Using his legs to keep drives going and his right arm to start the rally with a touchdown pass to Ryan Wingo, Manning delivered the kind of primetime performance that could redefine his career and propel the program’s national championship hopes.
The government is unlikely to meet its target of building 1.5m homes, Angela Rayner has acknowledged, saying there was only a “slim chance” enough houses would be built before the next election.
The manifesto pledge to build 1.5m houses by the next election was a “stretch target”, the communities secretary added, but that it was not being ditched and she was “definitely not giving up”.
Dallas, Texas — Republican leaders are making prominent Muslim Democrats a major focus of their midterm campaign message, particularly Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
At the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Sen. Ted Cruz described what he called a “red-green alliance” of communists and Islamists and argued that sharia law has no place in the United States. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott similarly vowed to “fully ban sharia law” in Texas.
The rhetoric intensified when an audience member shouted “he should be shot” while Cruz was discussing El-Sayed and other Democrats. Cruz did not acknowledge the remark, and it was unclear whether he heard it. El-Sayed later called the comment a threat that should be condemned across party lines. The Council on American-Islamic Relations also criticized the episode as dangerous political rhetoric.
Republicans argue their criticism is aimed at ideology rather than religion, pointing to progressive positions on economics, immigration and foreign policy. El-Sayed, however, has said he opposes religious law in government and does not identify as a democratic socialist.
The broader strategy is not limited to the Dallas convention. Reuters reported that several Republican candidates and officials have increasingly made Islam and Muslim Americans a campaign issue this year, often linking Democratic candidates to concerns about national security, cultural change and sharia law.
Muslim Americans remain a small but growing share of the U.S. population, and the intensified focus comes as both parties compete for voters in closely divided states such as Michigan.
Washington, D.C. — Deaths involving ectopic pregnancies have nearly doubled in the United States in recent years, with a substantially steeper increase in states enforcing strict abortion bans, according to a new ProPublica analysis of federal mortality data.
Using CDC WONDER records, ProPublica identified nearly 200 deaths involving ectopic pregnancy from 2020 through 2025, compared with roughly 100 during the previous six years. The national death rate reached 9.8 per million live births in 2023-2025. In states with abortion bans beginning at six weeks or earlier, the rate was 13.1, compared with 7.1 in states without bans.
An ectopic pregnancy occurs when a pregnancy implants outside the uterus, usually in a fallopian tube. It is generally nonviable and can become fatal if the tube ruptures and causes severe internal bleeding.
Researchers cautioned that the data do not prove abortion bans caused the increase. COVID-era hospital disruptions, underlying differences in maternal health and other factors may also contribute. However, physicians told ProPublica that abortion restrictions deserve scrutiny because uncertainty surrounding the laws has sometimes delayed treatment, even though ectopic pregnancies are typically exempted.
The analysis also found 310 additional Texas patients experienced substantial blood loss following ectopic pregnancies in 2023-2024 compared with 2018-2019, a 29% increase. Texas later clarified that ectopic pregnancy treatment is permitted under its abortion law.
Maternal-health experts said the trend warrants further investigation because prompt diagnosis and treatment generally make deaths from ectopic pregnancy preventable.
Authorities were caught off guard by the disruption, which they labelled a ‘protest’ despite mass intimidation tactics
To anybody watching the videos of a group of masked men, all wearing black, descending on the port of Dover last weekend, it was immediately obvious that something novel and disturbing was happening: a mass intimidation in uniform not seen in Britain since the 1930s.
Yet to the police and the rest of the UK’s intelligence apparatus, the arrival of the men chanting “stop the boats” was a surprise, despite the fact that residents of a village 18 miles away tried to report that dozens of men were congregating there on the Friday, threatening to go to Dover and “attack Muslims”.
Technology is going to drastically reshape the economy, and it’s within our power to decide what that looks like
The idea that autonomous, thinking machines may one day destroy property, hierarchy and inequality is as old as western political thought. In Aristotle’s Politics, the philosopher cites a fantasy from the Iliad, in which machines begin to act independently of human direction, concluding: “If every tool could perform its own work when ordered, or by seeing what to do in advance … if thus shuttles wove and quills played harps of themselves, master-craftsmen would have no need of assistants and masters no need of slaves.”
The dream that automation could inaugurate a classless society is also present in the writings of Karl Marx. In 1858 he imagined the replacement of intellectual property with “socialised knowledge”, which would merge into a “general intellect”, blowing the foundations of capitalism sky high.
This type of training is needed now more than ever, as the American workplace gets more and more diverse
As a certified public accountant, I’m required to earn at least 80 hours every two years of continuing professional education credits. Many other professions and trades, including lawyers, healthcare professionals, engineers, electricians, plumbers and certain contractors, have similar requirements. It’s a good idea.
These professional requirements often also include ethics training. That’s a good idea too. But just getting a refresher on ethics isn’t enough. Something else is needed – something that’s even more important: etiquette.
The government apparently has an issue with paths for cyclists. Take it from someone who can’t ride a bike: this makes no sense
I’m out of gas. Not metaphorically. Literally, my car has the barest minimum amount of fuel in it. This is not because I like to live dangerously, a la the great literary hero Austin Powers, but because gas is more expensive than ever. I have nowhere to be today, so I’m allowing my car to sit idle, empty and alone, lest my bank account disappear into the Phantom Zone of negative balance. If things get sticky, I can take public transit or, God forbid, ride a bike.
Except I can’t ride a bike, thanks to my parents, who were too busy doing more important tasks than teaching me, like arguing or falling asleep. But for many Americans, riding a bike is a perfectly normal thing to do. Am I humiliated that one of the many basic skills for life that I don’t know is considered so simple that it became a common idiom for something that’s easy? Yes, of course. I don’t live dangerously, I live humiliatingly. Humiliation is my middle name. Dave Humiliation Schilling. Go on, point and laugh at the photo of me in this article. Get it out of your system so we can move along.
Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist
Policies enacted by RFK Jr have not delivered the expected results, but have instead hindered people’s ability to eat healthy
Cyclospora in leafy greens, E coli in frozen blueberries, salmonella in jalapeños – multiple food-borne illness outbreaks in the US, alongside massive cuts to food assistance programs and to the federal agencies charged with food safety, are showing the limitations of the Make America Healthy Again (Maha) movement, experts say.
“The policies that we’re enacting are the exact opposite policies one might look to to help people eat healthier,” said Jessica Knurick, a science communicator and registered dietitian with a PhD in nutrition science.
Richard Huye charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud in apparent scheme linked to 2021 storm aftermath
The first defendant charged in connection with an alleged major property insurance fraud scheme in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida in 2021 in Louisiana appears poised to plead guilty, if federal criminal court records are any indication.
Richard William Huye III, who faces a count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud while working as an attorney for Texas law firm McClenny Moseley and Associates (MMA), is scheduled to tentatively appear at a rearraignment hearing on 28 September, filings in New Orleans’s federal courthouse show.
President has hyped growth of federal investment accounts to help US children – for his own political gain
Since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has scrapped rules that made childcare more affordable and pushed to cut funding for the nation’s public schools. But with midterm elections fast approaching and his approval ratings very low, the US president has repeatedly trumpeted a two-month-old program designed to help the nation’s children. That program, unhumbly named “Trump accounts”, calls for the federal government to give a one-time $1,000 seed deposit to every newborn whose family applies.
In campaign speeches this summer, Trump has sought to milk these accounts for maximum political advantage, making big promises about how much these accounts will help the nation’s children. In a speech in Las Vegas last month, Trump hailed the program, saying: “It’s really giving [children] a head start on the American dream… They start off with $1,000 … and they can end up with $100,000, $200,000, $300,000” and if the stock market booms, “you’d end up with $1m”.
Ex-Tory chancellor says economy has ‘fallen off a cliff’ since Brexit but rejoining union could be ‘quite simple’
The former chancellor George Osborne said Britain’s economy had “fallen off a cliff” since Brexit and that rejoining the European Union’s customs union would be the fastest route to recovery.
Osborne, who was sacked as chancellor by Theresa May after being part of David Cameron’s cabinet at the time of the referendum, said it was important to rebuild links with the EU.
Campaigners say at current glacial pace some unpaid carers will die before receiving a refund
Unpaid carers who were pursued for bills for thousands of pounds after welfare officials unlawfully changed benefit rules could wait years before learning whether they will get the money back, campaigners have warned.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is working through 200,000 cases where carer’s allowance benefit recipients were incorrectly given overpayments. An estimated 25,000 carers could receive full or partial refunds.
President and allies have tried to ram through changes to the US voting system, but his efforts are being challenged
Voting by mail is a “hoax”, according to Donald Trump, despite about 29% of American voters casting their vote this way in 2024. The US president has repeatedly done so himself.
But the Trump administration is nevertheless attempting to ram through a sweeping crackdown on the practice, pushing for changes to federal law.
A picture of the pylon at Delaware Stadium during the team’s first game of the 2026 season against Merrimack. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder.
The Vanderbilt Commodores (2-0) defeated the University of Delaware Fightin’ Blue Hens (1-1), 35-26, on September 12, in the program’s first gridiron matchup against an SEC foe.
Vanderbilt quarterback Jared Curtis jogged on the field with his team setting up at their own 30 yard line for the first offensive possession of the second half. The Blue Hens controlled most of the momentum after entering halftime ahead, 17-14, and that feeling continued after the Blue Hen defense stopped the Commodore offense on first and second down, forcing a third and long for the freshman signal caller.
Curtis received the third down snap in the shotgun and surveyed the middle of the field while moving up in the clean pocket his offensive line provided. Curtis shifted his eyes from the middle of the field to the left sideline where senior receiver Junior Sherrill was running open. Curtis delivered a 35-yard throw to the Nashville native along the left sideline, continuing a drive that ended with Vanderbilt taking a lead it would never relinquish.
Curtis scored the go-ahead touchdown with a two-yard run into the endzone, scoring the first of three consecutive Vanderbilt touchdowns in the third quarter. Those scores helped Vanderbilt defeat the Blue Hens, 35-26, Saturday evening.
The Commodores defense followed Curtis’ go-ahead score by forcing the Blue Hens into a three and out on their ensuing possession. The Blue Hens lined up to punt from their own 25 yard line and snapped the ball to punter Josh Cupitt. Cupitt took a few steps and readied his leg to kick the ball, but as he went to send the ball flying, Vanderbilt sophomore Austin Howard flew in undeterred and blocked the kick. Howard tracked the bouncing ball down in the endzone and scored the second special teams touchdown of the game.
The score gave Vanderbilt a two possession lead with a little over nine minutes to play in the third quarter and wiped away any lingering momentum the Blue Hens’ created with their own punt block touchdown that ended the first half.
Delaware scored all 17 of its first half points in the second quarter, beginning with a Tucker Smack field goal a little less than three minutes into the quarter. Backup quarterback Braden Streeter led Delaware’s first touchdown drive later in the quarter, cutting Vanderbilt’s lead to four with under two minutes to play in the first half.
The two teams traded possessions within that final two minutes and with 22 seconds left, the Commodores were forced to punt from their own 17 yard line. Graduate punter Tyler Ebel took a few steps forward and, as the ball left his foot, Blue Hen junior Bryson Graves was in front of the kick, batting it down. Graves recovered the ball in the endzone and completed the score, making UD the first Conference USA team (CUSA) to lead a SEC team at halftime in over two years.
There weren’t many bright spots for the Blue Hens after that dynamic end to the first half.
Vanderbilt controlled most of the action in the second half and led by 18 at the end of the third quarter due to a 19-yard touchdown throw from Curtis to senior tight end Walter Taylor that ended the frame. Nick Minicucci returned in the second half after leaving the game with an injury in the first half and led the Blue Hens on one last touchdown drive in the fourth quarter, connecting with wide receiver Da’Wain Lofton for a 43-yard touchdown.
The touchdown was a testament to the program’s ability to keep fighting for a win despite being overmatched by a superior opponent.
Vanderbilt showed its superiority with its defense which dominated all game using multiple different blitz packages to confuse Delaware’s protection scheme and get to the Blue Hen quarterback. The Commodores recorded six sacks, nine quarterback hurries and 11 tackles for loss seemingly always having a player or two in the Blue Hen backfield.
A good sign for the Blue Hens was how their own defense held up against the Commodore offense. Delaware’s defense played a lot better than what the final score suggests, holding Vanderbilt to 100 rushing yards and 339 total yards of offense. UD recorded one turnover, three sacks and five tackles for loss, while facing two different Vanderbilt quarterbacks throughout the game.
Freshman Jared Curtis took the majority of quarterback snaps for the Commodores finishing the game with 14 completions, 210 passing yards and three total touchdowns. Minicucci finished with 11 completions, 182 passing yards, a passing touchdown and two interceptions.
Delaware running back Jo Silver led all rushers with 109 yards on the ground and Lofton finished as the game’s leading receiver with 147 receiving yards on four catches. Both are career highs for the sixth year receiver.
The Blue Hens will try and use the positives from their battle against last season’s fifth best SEC team to earn a win against Coastal Carolina at home on September 19. Their game against the Chanticleers will begin at 11:30 a.m. and be nationally broadcast on CBS Sports Network.
It’s one of seven nationally televised games the second year FBS program will play in this season.
As John Healey drafts his autumn budget, the US president’s policies continue to inflate debt servicing costs
Britain is not entirely in control of its own destiny, from the rising cost of the weekly shop, to the vaulting cost of government borrowing. What is said and done in Westminster matters. But the global backdrop is making life tough, not least in the deeds and words of one man: Donald Trump.
As John Healey drafts his plan for next month’s autumn budget, the perilous economic conditions the chancellor must navigate can be traced back to the door of the US president.
Pilot project in Preston comes with apprenticeship offer for Neets at end of three-week course
In a youth centre opposite Preston bus station, the UK government is trying to address two of the greatest challenges facing the national economy: AI and youth unemployment.
The hope is that one will solve – rather than cause – the other. In a room at the recently opened Vault, a community hub in the Lancashire city, an “AI bootcamp” is under way – part of a trial in the north-west to give 16- to 24-year-olds AI training.
A swarm of OpenAI agents launched a "major malicious attack" against RubyGems last May, according to a new report. That coordinated attack hit Ruby's package manager "with hundreds of junk gems, prompting the maintainers to suspend new user sign-ups for about four days," writes The Hacker News, citing a senior product manager for software supply chain security at Mend.io:
The latest findings, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, indicate these events were propelled by a cluster of OpenAI agents, with the earliest package uploaded to RubyGems on May 5, 2026, before more than 2,000 packages were submitted between May 11 and 12, 2026. These efforts were followed by the agents publishing five more packages between May 26 and 27, 2026, and another 83 packages on June 18, 2026... [T]he packages were authored using a large language model (LLM) and hundreds of the packages that were pushed to RubyGems had "oai" in their name. Fifteen of the packages listed "oai" as their author, while another had "openaixyz65947@gmail.com" as the contact email address... "The swarm behaves extremely similarly to the German-wiki agents we previously found," the researchers said, referencing another May 2026 incident... "The June agents were accessing 49 of the same files as the wiki agents..."
"The process of building documentation for a gem involves evaluating a user-specified '.yardopts' file, which allows linking to Ruby scripts intended to help with this process," the researchers explained. "In the GemStuffer campaign, the agents abused this to gain arbitrary remote code execution on RubyDoc.info's servers."
One of the gems, "zzsouthrunner" (which again matches the "ZZ" naming scheme the agents adopted in both the wiki and Hugging Face incidents) has been found to leave the following explicit comment at the top of "data/script.rb":
# malicious crawler/exfil for Southwark Jan 2026 docs via rubydoc.info worker...
The entire exploitation chain can be summed up as follows
— Submit a malicious package to RubyGems
— Trigger a documentation request, so that RubyDoc.info will build the package
— Use the build script to run code on RubyDoc.info and scrape target websites
— Exfiltrate the data off RubyDoc.info's servers by publishing another gem back to the RubyGems package registry, which is publicly viewable
Additionally, the OpenAI agents have been found attempting to steal other users' API keys after gaining remote code execution capabilities on the build environment, while clearly being aware that what they were doing is unauthorized breaking and entering into real systems. This is evidenced by the names given to the files (e.g., hack.rb, evil.rb, inject.rb, exploit.rb, and ssrf.rb), the packages themselves (e.g., pwnp999, exfiltestwand3, hacksvn1778554764, and lambproxyhackabcxyz), and the comments left in the source code (e.g., "# malicious probe," "#hack," "# malicious test," and "# malicious crawler/exfil"). In some cases, however, the rogue agents attempted to go under the radar, leaving comments to conceal the malicious payload in the next release version of the packages. "# disable evil in next version and bump version," reads a comment left within the "data/evil.rb" file in the yardxabc889 gem. Troublingly, the agents also attempted to exploit a CDN caching bug (CVSS score: 7.3, no CVE) on May 12, 2026, that was only patched by RubyGems in July 2026...
"If you signed in to rubygems.org with a gem client older than v3.2.0 (or otherwise via a legacy key), your key could have been exposed," RubyGems noted in an advisory. "Currently, 18% of sign-ins through gem sign-in come from an affected version, and for the first several years of this bug, before we changed the client's sign-in path in December 2020, it was every gem client."
Other actions by OpenAI's agents cited in the article:
"Agents bypassed RubyGems' email confirmation system to get working API keys without having to verify their email addresses in order to register a large number of accounts using disposable email addresses."
"Agents attempted to use RubyGems' webhook system to stage data in the form of encoded URLs."
"Agents used a cluster of 83 gems published to RubyGems over a 3-hour window on June 18, 2026, to experiment with different methods of accessing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission county.json dataset."
I’m new to this, I really want to get into the hobby, I’m an Argentinian guy living in China, I been checking around About prices, and onewheel are extremely expensive here compared to to Gosmilo for example that is a local brand here in China, so I’m wondering if anyone has any recommendations about it, since for the price of a one wheel I can get almost 3 Gosmilo x9 here in China.
Or if anyone has a better recommendation, maybe there’s another brand in China.
Craig Tiley says the US Open is going to become the ‘Disneyland of tennis’, and he means it aspirationally. Here’s what that might look like 15 years from now
The year is 2041 and you’ve successfully made it through security and onto the grounds of the USTA Liquid Death National Tennis Center. Myla Rose and Leo Federer are hitting on Practice Court 23 ahead of their first-round match in the US Open Mixed Doubles sponsored by Botoxxify, the tournament’s official neuromodulator partner. Jake Paul, the 50th president of the United States, is a few hours from attending opening night with first lady Jutta Leerdam-Paul and labor secretary Dana White. Venus Williams has just accepted a wildcard into the women’s singles draw. You’re thisclose to paying off last year’s Honey Deuces on Klarna.
Criminals exploit demand for iPhone 18 Pro and foldable Duo to trick people eager to get their hands on one
Apple has just launched a range of new iPhones, including a foldable handset, just as you decide it is time to replace your own ageing mobile. But you balk at the £1,199 price tag for the cheapest of the new options.
Searching online for a better price with the words “cheap”, “iPhone” and “deal”, you come across a website which offers an iPhone 18 Pro for a couple of hundred pounds less than the Apple site. You pay for the new phone via a bank transfer and wait for it to arrive.
The billionaire and the party have developed a symbiotic relationship to spread their far-right views both in Germany and the US
The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party rattled European politics this week after a convincing victory in a German state election, which placed it only a few seats away from forming the country’s first state-level far right government since the second world war.
Ryan Garcia needed less than four minutes to blow away Conor Benn before turning his sights on the rest of the welterweight division.
The 28-year-old American demolished Benn inside two rounds on Saturday night to retain his World Boxing Council championship at 147lb, dropping the British challenger with a concussive right hand before the referee stepped in moments later at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. The sensational finish ignited the mostly pro-Garcia crowd of 18,855 on Mexican Independence Day weekend. Then, with Teófimo López taunting him from ringside and threatening to storm the ring, Garcia made it clear he was ready to take on all comers.
Was nervous to take the board apart (first time), but it wasn’t too bad! I was able to finish the job even though I broke my plastic tire levers… just had to go gorilla on it after that. Got the Unilli replacement for $43 shipped, which if I’m not mistaken is the stock slick without the Onewheel logo. I got every mile I could out of the old one 🤣
America's highest court heard Sam Bankman-Fried's request for a new trial on Thursday, CNN reports. But they add that "the former crypto mogul who was convicted of defrauding investors by secretly diverting billions of dollars of their money" also asked America's high court "to throw out a court order requiring him to pay $11 billion as part of his sentence."
Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2024 after prosecutors said he directed billions of dollars from the crypto exchange FTX to a hedge fund he controlled called Alameda Research, where the funds were used for risky investments, political donations and his own personal benefit. The Supreme Court appeal, which was reviewed by CNN, raises a technical question about evidence that was submitted at his trial, and whether Bankman-Fried should have been permitted to demonstrate that his investments were ultimately sound and would have covered any losses by FTX customers.
He also argues that the $11 billion forfeiture violates the 8th Amendment's prohibition on excessive fines. "Where the government pursues a theory of fraud under which it doesn't matter whether any victims lost money, introducing evidence suggesting that people actually lost money is distracting and prejudicial," veteran Supreme Court attorney Jeffrey Fisher told CNN. "All the more so where the truth is the victims did not lose money, and the defendant is unable to make that clear."
The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the arguments earlier this year.
Malibu, California — A trespasser entered the property of former Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday night but was stopped by private security before reaching the home, according to law enforcement officials and Harris’ spokesperson.
Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies responded around 10:30 p.m. after Harris’ security detail reported a suspicious person. Deputies made contact with the individual, who was advised to leave and departed voluntarily without incident. No arrest was made, but authorities filed a trespassing report and said patrols in the area would be increased.
Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, were not home at the time. Spokesperson Eduardo Negrón said security personnel stopped the person after they had entered the property but before reaching the residence.
Former vice presidents typically receive Secret Service protection for six months after leaving office. Former President Joe Biden had extended Harris’ protection beyond that period, but President Donald Trump revoked the extension in August 2025. The extended coverage otherwise would have continued into 2026.
The sheriff’s department has not publicly identified the trespasser or disclosed a motive. Authorities have also not indicated that the incident involved any threat against Harris or Emhoff.
The couple purchased the Malibu residence after leaving Washington, and Harris now relies on private and local security arrangements rather than full-time Secret Service protection.
Once central to rural life, cafe-bistros are closing in the face of depopulation and falling alcohol consumption, but campaigners are seeking new ways forward
It is just past noon on a midweek day, and already every table at Au Bon Acceuil cafe-bistro in the northern Burgundy village of Saint-Martin-sur-Ouanne is taken.
The three-course lunch menu today – including a choice of a hefty chunk of steak with chips or a meaty lasagne – is just €18, but villagers are not only here for the food.
My daughter's GT-S died on her today. I haven't seen it yet but assume it's the MOSFETs. What would you do with it? I was directed to the GTSFO kit but it seems much less developed than the GTFO kit. Is there another BMS/controller combo that would work as well or better? I don't really want to give FM $600 for a new module that MIGHT last another 2000 miles
Well, I think it finally happened. My daughter called to say that her GT-S is dead, no response to the power button. I didn't really want to spend $600 on a new OW controller module so what are my options? Is there a drop in BMS that will work with the FM battery? Go with a Thor 400 or MK8 in the original controller box?
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, Jenna Paukstis, vice president and general manager, weapon systems, Gordon LoPresti, senior director, propulsion solutions and controls, and Whiting-Turner Construction executives cut the ribbon at Northrop Grumman’s new Propulsion Innovation Center in Elkton, Maryland. (Photo Credit:…
I’ve completed a few parts exchanges : The battery and controller wiring harness, swapped out the BMS ‘s and batteries. Every time if give 16 flashes. During One of the exchanges the BMS got really HOT, at the balance connector. I’m at a loss! Any ideas ?? Thanks…
Prime minister’s office tells families of those missing ‘the nation stands with you’ as search and rescue efforts continue
One person has died and more than 30 are missing after a ferry sank off the coast of Vanuatu, the country’s government says.
The vessel, MV Matui, had set sail with more than 40 passengers and crew on Friday from the island of Santo to Ambae island in very rough seas, but did not arrive.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The chief executive of Anthropic called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, just days after one of the company's employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology. Dario Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic to focus on securely and carefully building A.I., wrote that while he believed the technology could bring many benefits, it was advancing at too quick a pace for researchers to continue safely.
"Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence -- not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up," Mr. Amodei said. "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of A.I. models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain." [...] "Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all," Mr. Amodei said.
[...] In his essay on Saturday, Mr. Amodei suggested actions that the industry might take to slow down the pace of development.
Mr. Amodei said all A.I. labs could agree to third-party technology assessments from "embedded evaluators," or outside specialists who can verify best safety practices across companies. He also suggested that countries with democratic governance systems coordinate to create safety standards, which could take the form of regulatory action. He added that it would probably require a global effort working with other nations, including authoritarian ones, to properly coordinate a slowdown.
Mr. Amodei stressed in his essay that he still finds A.I. capable of bringing "incredible benefits" to humanity, including potentially curing diseases and accelerating economic growth. But even so, Mr. Amodei said the risks of A.I. were too great to not proceed with extreme caution. "The measures I propose to advance the frontier at a safe pace will not be easy," Mr. Amodei wrote. "But I believe we owe it to humanity to try." Amodei's essay comes just hours after Bloomberg reported that Sam Altman told OpenAI employees the company is open to slowing the pace of AI development amid similar concerns.
Artificial intelligence technology is developing at an "exponential" rate, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told CBS News, calling the situation a "warning sign" for the industry that requires serious safeguards.
Celine Dion's return to the stage underscored a remarkable comeback after stiff-person syndrome, an incurable condition that causes stiffness and cramps, forced her to cancel shows and cast years of uncertainty over whether she would ever perform again.
The judge said the plan, put together by DHS, appeared as if it was "pulled from thin air" and would impede FEMA's ability to fulfill its legally mandated duty to respond to disasters.
Group no longer faces voter misconduct case over wrongly marked box after appeals court throws out felony charges
Alaska prosecutors are dropping voter misconduct cases against a group of residents born in American Samoa after a state appeals court threw out felony charges against a woman who wrongly checked a box saying she was a US citizen.
The state’s department of law announced the decision on Friday, after a three-judge court of appeals panel ruled a week earlier that state law requires proof that defendants who erroneously filled out voter registration forms had a “consciousness of wrongdoing” and intended to break the law.
Ribbon Cutting of The RISE Wellness Room Red Bank Catholic School, Red Bank, NJ Principal Dr. Vanessa Pereira, Tony Onoriode, COO of Conscientia Health, Daniel Adighije amongst other RBC students cut the ribbon on the new RISE Wellness Room, a…
Brand new rider here got about 5 miles on my onewheel pint s but have logged those miles like a quarter to half mile at a time. Due to the fact at quarter to half mile my rear foot and knee on rear leg start to get extreme pain. Ive adjusted my stance a few times but it seems that doesnt make a difference. I have also heard carving more helps. Im trying to carve a bit but just not super comfortable with carving yet since im a beginner and I dont feel totally stable on the board yet im assuming just because im in my figuring it out/learning ot phase. But the foot and knee pain are going to prevent me from getting in long enough rides to become more comfortable on the board. Im starting to feel like I may never be able to enjoy this sport the way I had hoped if I cant get rid of the pain
Overcomes top seed and two-time defending champion
Even when long established as a grand slam champion and a conqueror of all surfaces, Elena Rybakina was always considered lesser than the most successful players of her era. She was one of the most devastating shotmakers in the world, a threat to everybody everywhere, but there were always a couple of more consistent and mentally tougher players above her.
She leaves New York, finally, as the undisputed best tennis player on the planet, the new standard bearer of women’s tennis, after following up her snatching of the No 1 ranking from Aryna Sabalenka by succeeding her as the US Open champion. As she has done throughout this unforgettable week, the Kazakhstani showed her toughness in another spectacular tussle with her great rival, closing out her time at Flushing Meadows with a 6-4, 5-7, 6-2 victory over Sabalenka, the top seed and two-time defending champion.
“I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that,” Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, told Fortune.
Less than 48 hours after Automattic's board placed Matt Mullenweg on leave, Mullenweg told employees he was back "in control" of the company and that the board was again in agreement. 404 Media cited Slack screenshots late Thursday evening where Mullenweg posted "Don't call it a comeback" and linked to LL Cool J's music video for "Mama Said Knock You Out." "Mullenweg's Slack profile picture currently shows him wearing a pirate hat and eyepatch," the report notes. From the report: "Happy to announce the board is back in agreement, and I'm in control of Automattic," Mullenweg wrote in the company-wide Announcements channel on Slack. "A lot happened in the past 48 hours that we need to sort out, and I hope much of it was a misunderstanding, because I have huge respect and regard for those involved."
Mark Davies, Automattic's CFO who was set to act as interim CEO according to a statement from Automattic, had his Slack account deactivated as of at least Friday, sources told 404 Media and TechCrunch similarly reported. Davies, Mullenweg, and Automattic did not respond to 404 Media's requests for comment for this story. Techcrunch reported that Mullenweg told them a blog post is forthcoming.
On Friday morning, Mullenweg published a blog post on his personal website, titled "Major Life Announcement." In it he announced he's buying a tugboat. "Anybody who's founded a company and had to find good stewards knows that no one will love a thing quite like the original owner, but sometimes you can find the perfect person to carry the torch," he wrote in the blog. He did not address the confusion surrounding his status at Automattic. The back-and-forth follows years of legal fights, layoffs, employee departures, and controversy surrounding Mullenweg's leadership.
Breanna Stewart scored 16 points and Kahleah Copper added 13 to help the U.S. beat Spain 76-66, advancing to the championship game of the women's FIBA World Cup.
Molar from large mammal that once lived in North America is in ‘immaculate condition’ after discovery in Bay Area
A 10,000 year-old tooth in remarkable condition from an ancient Pacific mastodon, a large mammal that once inhabited North America, was recently discovered by a California scientist.
Brigid Lynch, a geomorphologist, was working at a preserve in San Mateo county, when she stumbled across a peculiar rock.
Americans to face France in rematch of Paris final
The United States advanced to the Fiba Women’s Basketball World Cup final for the fifth consecutive time, pulling away in the fourth quarter to beat Spain 76-66 on Saturday in Berlin.
Breanna Stewart scored 16 points and Kahleah Copper added 13 for the four-time defending champions, who were tied at 58 entering the fourth quarter before finally taking control. Jackie Young added 12 points.
Trump’s comments broke with longstanding U.S. neutrality on the question of reuniting the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland — a highly sensitive issue in the U.K.
Trump, again trying to curate museum, says exhibit would stay until 2032 for 300th anniversary of Washington’s birth
Donald Trump asked the Smithsonian Institution to install a 30ft “Colossus statue” of George Washington outside the National Museum of American History, and a special exhibit honoring the nation’s first president, in a social media post late on Friday.
The president requested that the exhibit continue through February 2032, the 300th anniversary of Washington’s birth.
World No 4 will become the first Black American man to win the singles title at Flushing Meadow since Arthur Ashe if he can beat German for the first time
As Ben Shelton lapped up the explosion of joy and adoration from a full Arthur Ashe Stadium after reaching a grand slam final for the first time, one of his first thoughts was of his paternal grandmother, Regina, who died this year. Shelton credited his grandmother with ensuring that his father, Bryan, made it as a top professional, becoming one of a small group of Black men on the tour. “My dad lost his mom earlier this year and she’s the reason he was able to play tennis,” he said. “Without her, there’s no Ben Shelton standing here today. So this one is for her.”
Shelton stands on the verge of history. On Sunday, he will attempt to become the first Black American man to win the US Open singles title since Arthur Ashe in 1968, a feat he will attempt inside the stadium named after Ashe. Shelton would also be the first Black man to win any grand slam singles title since Yannick Noah at Roland Garros in 1983, and the third overall. He is also aiming to become the first American man to win a major singles title since Andy Roddick won the US Open in 2003.
I have finally decided after years of wanting one to get a onewheel. No one I know has one, so ive been struggling to figure out which one to get. Im 15, 140 lbs, and 5'6". I have no experience with board sports, and figured that I would want one just for neighborhood riding/errands before I can drive. Any advice? Thanks
Michael Diehl allegedly forged magistrates’ signatures in North Carolina to allow enough time for ICE to take custody of prisoners
A former Guilford county detention officer in North Carolina faces forgery charges in connection to 20 alleged forged Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainment documents, according to a Guilford county sheriff’s office (GCSO) news release.
Guilford county’s sheriff, Danny H Rogers, reported that on Friday the Guilford county magistrate’s office notified the GCSO of a potentially forged court document submitted by GCSO detention officer Michael Diehl, 40.
Team Europe are tied 8-8 with Team USA heading into the final day at Bernardus Golf in the Netherlands
Nelly Korda chops an awful tee shot wide right of the par-three 4th green. Team USA’s ball in deep heather. A big problem for Allisen Corpuz, who decides to punch out and hope the back-stop will bring her ball back towards the flag. But she knifes it through the green, and the ball stops inches short of a bunker on the other side. It might have been better going in. Korda can’t get close with her chip, and Europe will have two putts for the hole. Meanwhile the anchor match halves the 1st.
Jennifer Kupcho goes close with her approach at 2; Esther Henseleit goes even closer. That’s a gimme for Europe, so Rose Zhang does well to hold her nerve and make the putt from six feet to secure the half. Meanwhile Allisen Corpuz sinks a ten-footer on 3 to level the lead match, while Charley Hull and Alison Lee get the anchor game underway by trading fairway finders. It’s all happening now.
Anna Nordqvist pairing of star duo fails to pay off
It has been the great anomaly of this Solheim Cup. Europe keeping perfect pace with the United States is an impressive achievement even without factoring in the meagre points contribution from Charley Hull and Lottie Woad. European hopes of reclaiming the trophy lost to the United States two years ago surely depend heavily on their star turns finding singles form.
The heroics of Jennifer Kupcho in fading light dashed Europe’s ambitions of taking a lead. It is 8-8 as things stand. A 12-match shootout remains.
Rightwing activists faced a heavy police presence and counter-demonstrations to their march against small boat crossings
Two men and a teenage boy have been arrested in Portsmouth at a far-right protest against immigration.
Far-right activists have gathered in Portsmouth for a second weekend after a small boat with 140 people seeking asylum on board was intercepted last Sunday while heading towards the city.
Officials still investigating death of Tasia Fortune, a Black woman, a day after man’s arrest in relation to killing
Mississippi police said on Saturday they were still investigating the death of Tasia Fortune, a Black woman found hanging from a tree last month, a day after a man was arrested in connection with the killing.
Loved ones also painted a picture of Fortune as a mother, athlete and woman of faith who they hoped would not solely be remembered for her horrific death.
Dallas, Texas — A surrogate who traveled to Texas after refusing the intended parents’ request for an abortion has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to temporarily block a California ruling recognizing the couple as the newborn’s legal parents.
McKenna West gave birth Aug. 12 to a boy she calls Gabriel. The intended parents, Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar, call him Rumi. During the pregnancy, doctors diagnosed the fetus with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a serious congenital condition requiring multiple surgeries. The couple initially considered abortion after the diagnosis but later decided to continue the pregnancy, according to court records.
West nevertheless sought custody and authority over the child’s medical care in Texas. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton intervened, and a Texas judge temporarily prevented the baby from being removed from the state while ordering continued medical treatment.
On Sept. 1, however, the Texas court recognized an earlier California judgment establishing Ahmed and Gilkar as the child’s parents and dismissed West from the Texas case. West now argues California lacked jurisdiction and is asking the Supreme Court to stay that ruling while she pursues further review.
The Supreme Court docket shows West’s emergency application was filed Sept. 9 and submitted to Justice Elena Kagan.
West says she fears the child could be transferred to California and placed in hospice care rather than continue treatment. The intended parents maintain that they are the child’s legal parents, while the broader jurisdictional dispute remains unresolved.
LG is pushing back against reports that its smart TVs are "spying" on users, saying wake-word detection happens locally and that features such as Automatic Content Recognition, voice recognition, and interest-based ads are optional. But critics note that researchers found TVs keeping logs of ambient conversations, and LG's response "did not address broader concerns about how much data it collects, who it shares it with, the potential for bad actors to exploit its features, or the misleading way in which its privacy options are presented," reports The Verge. Here's an excerpt from LG's statement: Some recent media coverage may have contributed to misconceptions about how LG smart TVs work. As an industry leader, LG believes we have a responsibility to provide customers with clear and accurate information about how our smart TVs operate and the privacy controls available to them. We would like to clarify how our smart TVs operate and explain our approach to user privacy.
LG smart TVs do not continuously record or transmit users' conversations. Speech-to-text processing begins only if a user activates a voice interaction through a supported wake-word feature or by pressing the voice (or AI) button on the remote control. Audio used for wake-word detection is processed locally on the TV and, if no wake word is detected, audio is not converted to text, stored, or transmitted. Voice-recognition results and related technical logs may be generated as part of processing a voice command. These records are associated with specific voice interactions and do not indicate continuous recording of conversations occurring outside an active voice recognition session.
Speech-recognition results may be used to support voice-related features but are not uploaded later when the TV is offline or when connectivity is restored. Features such as Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), voice recognition, and interest-based advertising are optional. These features are not enabled by default. Users can choose to enable these features and can manage or withdraw consent through TV settings.
ACR uses audio fingerprinting technology using the TV's internal audio processor (not a speaker) to identify content and does not collect screenshots, screen recordings, video recordings, voice recordings, or other audio recordings from the TV. Where ACR is available and enabled, ACR-related information may be used for audience segmentation and viewing or audience trend analysis. Interest-based advertising and cross-device advertising require separate user consent through the applicable advertising-related agreements. Protecting user privacy is a fundamental principle in the design and operation of LG products and services. The statement goes on to "provide additional details on how LG smart TV features work, how information may be processed, what choices users have, and how LG continues to strengthen privacy, transparency, and security."
US president says on visit to republic that unification will happen eventually so ‘may as well happen now’
Donald Trump has said he would “love” to see a united Ireland and that it “may as well happen now”.
The US president appeared to endorse the push for constitutional change on the island at the start of a two-day visit to Ireland on Saturday. The unexpected intervention prompted a swift rebuttal from the UK government and Northern Ireland’s unionist leaders.
Party can boost its campaign power with funds from billionaire backers, but it can also lose support from ordinary Britons
All things being equal, pretty much any political strategist would welcome a £72m war chest; a sum higher than the combined spending of every major party at the 2024 general election. But all things are not equal, and with such a huge amount comes risk.
Reform UK has been vocal in its arguments that two sudden £36m windfalls from billionaires Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne merely “levels the playing field” with the bigger parties when it comes to funding.
Washington, D.C. — Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says President Donald Trump’s proposed $5,000 “Trump Dividend” would not be financed with taxpayer money, as administration officials continue offering different ideas for how the costly proposal could be funded.
“It’s not tax money,” Lutnick told NBC News, saying the administration could raise money through other government programs rather than increasing the deficit. Among the possibilities he cited was a proposed program charging wealthy foreign nationals as much as $5 million to extend their visas. Lutnick said a waiting list of more than 100,000 people could potentially generate hundreds of billions of dollars, though that program has not yet produced funding for the dividend.
Trump announced the $5,000 payment at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, promising it to adult U.S. citizens if Republicans maintain control of Congress.
Other administration officials have floated different funding approaches. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett has discussed using congressional budget reconciliation, while Vice President JD Vance has suggested tariff revenue and possibly limiting payments to lower- and middle-income Americans.
The funding challenge remains substantial. The Tax Foundation estimates an unrestricted $5,000 payment to roughly 250 million adults would cost about $1.25 trillion, while Trump’s newer tariffs are projected to generate roughly $125 billion in net federal revenue in 2027.
Regardless of whether the money comes from tariffs, visa fees or investment gains, federal spending generally still requires congressional authorization. The Government Accountability Office notes that money cannot be paid from the Treasury without an appropriation enacted by Congress.
Exclusive: Many ‘use community protection as a cover for racist thuggery’, raising concerns about fresh disorder
At least 28 anti-migrant vigilante groups have formed in the UK in the last 18 months, ranging from unauthorised street patrols claiming to protect women and children to groups harassing migrants in France and blocking ports.
From Belfast to the south coast of England, the number of active groups has surged since the summer of 2025, according to analysis by the Guardian, amid widespread concerns over fresh disorder after black-clad vigilantes, many of them wearing balaclavas, blocked roads in Portsmouth and Dover last weekend.
In a social media post, Dario Amodei proposed a plan including third-party evaluations of AI systems
The CEO of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic issued a new appeal on Saturday for the AI industry to “slow down” and offered a three-part plan for doing so, saying that his company would “unilaterally” commit to the first of the steps.
In a post on social media, Dario Amodei shared a link to an essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier in which he laid out how Anthropic would provide “third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training”.
Two of the most important corridors for international energy shipments are blocked by Iran and its proxies, oil prices are up and the global economy is reeling.
Riyadh has increased use of East-West pipeline since start of war on Iran to bypass closure of strait of Hormuz
Saudi Arabia has shut down a critical oil pipeline, accusing militants in Iraq of launching drone attacks on the export route being used to bypass the lockdown of the strait of Hormuz.
The world’s largest crude oil exporter has increased its use of the 745-mile (1,200km) pipeline running across the Arabian peninsula, which links Abqaiq, near the Gulf, to the port of Yanbu, on the Red Sea, since the US-Israeli war against Iran began.
Looking to upgrade my pint the only 2 problems I've had are battery life and ability to go in the grass over all I love it and will be keeping it to teach my son and friends how to ride just stuck between the get and the pint s
The cryptocurrency tycoon Christopher Harborne has given £36m to Reform UK, matching a donation from fellow billionaire Ben Delo.
The pledges mean Reform has received a cash injection of £72m in just 24 hours. They are jointly the largest donations made to a UK political party and have intensified calls for restrictions on money received from individual donors.
Royal guards carry casket through streets of Fort Portal amid row over appointment of Edward Rukidi Kijanangoma
Uganda’s King Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV, long the world’s youngest monarch, has been buried among the tombs of his royal forebears as his Tooro kingdom looked to put a bitter succession battle behind it.
Oyo’s appointed successor, the news anchor Edward Rukidi Kijanangoma, cast nine coffee berries into the grave at the Karambi Royal Tombs, marking the formal handover of power in the western Ugandan kingdom.
Reuters has issued a series of alerts on Trump’s latest comments (he is currently meeting with Micheál Martin). Here is what the news agency has reported:
Lutnick said $500bn of estimated $1tn needed to fund checks to all US adults could come from new visa program
Donald Trump’s controversial proposal to give a $5,000 “dividend” to all US adults if Republicans maintain control of Congress in November’s elections would not be paid out from US tax revenues, according to the US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick.
“It’s not tax money,” Lutnick said in an interview with NBC News, adding that the administration could “earn the money that Donald Trump wants to pay out, not from the deficit and not from taxpayers”.
Newark Charter junior Lucas Erunchak jumps in the endzone following one of his two touchdown runs against Odessa. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder.
The Newark Charter Patriots (2-0) defeated the Odessa Ducks (1-1), 13-0, in a road game played on September 11. It’s the program’s second win against a Class 2A opponent and first against Odessa.
TOWNSEND, DE — Newark Charter quarterback Chase Kennedy lined up in the pistol formation five yards behind where the ball was being snapped at the Odessa 31 yard line. Standing two yards behind Kennedy was junior running back Lucas Eruncak, the lone touchdown scorer in the game.
Senior center Brayden Scannell snapped the ball to Kennedy who handed the ball off to his left. Erunchak took the handoff and found running room up the middle of the field, running full speed past the outstretched arms of Duck defenders. Erunchak made it past the Duck defense and ran 31 yards for his second touchdown of the game with less than three minutes remaining in the third quarter.
Erunchak finished the game with over 100 rushing yards, the game’s only two touchdowns and a pair of sacks helping Newark Charter defeat Odessa, 13-0, Friday night.
“Honestly it’s amazing,” Erunchak said after the game. “We came out here with the right energy like we do all the time and I’m just like so excited.”
Erunchak’s first score came in the second quarter on a run from the Odessa nine yard line. The first touchdown run came from a similar play call as the Patriots’ second score, with Erunchak lined up behind Kennedy in the pistol formation and the handoff to the quarterback’s left side. Instead of running up the middle, Erunchak broke to the outside and ran into the endzone for the touchdown.
“I’m so proud of how our [offensive] line handled everything,” Erunchak said. “I give all the praise to them.”
The touchdown run was the only points scored in the first half despite both teams working their way down the field and earning red zone opportunities. Odessa drove into the red zone twice in the first half, but penalties and strong defensive play by the Patriots defense inhibited their ability to score. Newark Charter’s other first half red zone opportunity was thwarted by an interception from Odessa senior Thomas Ngateh.
Odessa senior Thomas Ngateh celebrates with his teammates after his interception in the first half. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder.
Erunchak’s second touchdown run late in the third quarter completed the game’s scoring. The Patriot defense held the Ducks out of the endzone and helped the Class 1A program earn its first shutout victory against a Class 2A opponent. The Patriots defense finished the game with four sacks and two interceptions.
“Heart, we all got heart,” Newark Charter senior Alexander Burrows said postgame about what makes the Patriots defensive line dynamic. “Coaching, players, we all want it, we want it really bad.”
Newark Charter’s defense has allowed six points through the first two games of the 2026 season.
“We’ve been talking about kind of all week, you know, trying to find something we can hang our hat on and very encouraging tonight to watch these guys come out and how they swarmed defensively,” Patriot head coach Jody Russell said postgame. “I think we might have found something that we can hang our hat on which is good.”
Newark Charter’s win improves its record to 2-0 on the season as the Patriots try to return to the Class 1A title game as they did a year ago. Last year, the Patriots finished their inaugural varsity season as the runner-up to Class 1A champion, Seaford. The Patriots only losses during that season came against the aforementioned Blue Jays and Odessa.
The Patriots next game will be at home against another Class 2A opponent, the Tatnall Hornets. Newark Charter and Tatnall matched up last season and the Patriots emerged victorious, 22-21, earning the program’s first win against a Class 2A opponent. This year’s iteration of the game will be played on September 18, at 7:00 p.m.
The Ducks will return to action on September 19, in a road matchup against the Glasgow Dragons. That game will be played at Glasgow High School and start at 11:00 a.m.
Minneapolis, Minnesota — Minnesota churches are at the center of two separate federal legal battles over immigration enforcement, surveillance and protest rights months after the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge triggered widespread demonstrations.
In one case, faith groups are asking a federal judge to determine whether Homeland Security violated an injunction protecting houses of worship when agents conducted undercover surveillance at University Baptist Church in Minneapolis. Court records show federal agents monitored activity there multiple times, including an undercover operation at a martial arts training session held in the church’s gym.
The government argues the surveillance was part of a criminal investigation into alleged protest-related violence rather than immigration enforcement, and therefore did not violate the injunction. Church groups dispute that distinction and have asked the court to disclose whether other congregations were similarly monitored.
A separate case involves more than three dozen protesters accused of disrupting a January service at Cities Church in St. Paul, where one pastor also served as an ICE official. Federal prosecutors charged defendants with conspiracy against religious freedom and interfering with worship.
Defense attorneys are seeking dismissal of those charges, arguing the prosecutions improperly target anti-ICE activism and protected protest activity. The government says the defendants crossed the line from protest into coordinated interference with worship.
Both cases remain unresolved, leaving federal judges to weigh the government’s enforcement powers against First Amendment protections for worship, protest and association.
Alleged members of Black Axe criminal network that swindled US women out of $6m flown from South Africa
Six Nigerian nationals linked to an organized criminal network that allegedly swindled American women out of more than $6m through online romance scams were extradited to the United States on Friday.
South African police confirmed they were to be extradited earlier on Friday, while local news in Africa confirmed that the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, known as the Hawks, facilitated their handover to officials from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and Secret Service at Cape Town international airport, in collaboration with Interpol South Africa.
An outstanding figure in the UK film industry, Thomas was noted for collaborations with directors including Bernardo Bertolucci and David Cronenberg
Jeremy Thomas, the distinguished British producer of films including Sexy Beast, High-Rise and the multi-Oscar-winning The Last Emperor, has died aged 77.
A representative for Thomas said he died on Friday “peacefully, at his country home in Oxfordshire, surrounded by his family and loved ones”.
Incident is latest to raise questions over Israel’s ability or willingness to stop violent settlers in occupied territory
An Israeli soldier has shot a Palestinian man, wounding him in the leg, as settlers confronted villagers by grazing livestock on Palestinian-owned land in the town of Faqqua in the occupied West Bank.
Witnesses said a group of settlers had entered the area with their livestock, prompting residents to try to stop them. Israeli forces then intervened and, according to men at the scene, opened fire at residents. One of them shot Qassem Hussam, a Palestinian man in his mid-30s, wounding him in the leg.
The city’s mayor and Tennessee’s governor threw their support behind the name change last month
The Nashville airport is to be renamed after Dolly Parton, a board of commissioners voted on Friday, in tribute to the Smoky Mountain singer who is estimated to bring $1.8bn each year to Tennessee through her Dollywood theme park.
The decision ensures that Parton, who died last month at 80 years old, will be memorialized with her name on an airport, although the renaming process will take time to complete.
Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from ScienceAlert: Scientists have now demonstrated one of the weirdest forms of ice yet -- under preposterous pressures up to 2.3 million atmospheres, and tremendous temperatures up to 2,630 kelvins (2,357 degrees Celsius, or 4,274 degrees Fahrenheit). [...] In their new experiments, a team led by physicist Alexis Forestier of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission subjected tiny samples of water to the sorts of extreme conditions expected in the interiors of ice giant planets.
They squeezed the samples between the tips of diamonds to pressures as high as 230 gigapascals, while using lasers to heat them to thousands of degrees. That's 2.3 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level â" the pressure at the center of Earth, for context, is around 360 gigapascals. Then, using an extremely narrow beam of synchrotron X-rays, they probed for changes in the crystal structure of the ice.
What emerged was a configuration predicted theoretically but never unambiguously observed in experiments: hexagonal close-packed, or hcp, ice. As the hcp crystal was heated, its expansion also showed a signature of superionic behavior, suggesting it entered the superionic state at around 1,700 kelvins. [Superionic ice is thought to exist deep inside Uranus and Neptune, where its unusual properties may play a role in generating the planets' equally unusual magnetic fields.] The findings have been published in Physical Review Letters.
Chinese president’s arrival in Delhi seen as step towards reconciliation after deadly 2020 military clash
The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, has received a red-carpet welcome in India for a summit of Brics developing nations, as regional rivals Beijing and Delhi make a public display of thawing relations while quietly competing to lead at a time of shaky US global dominance.
As Xi stepped off the plane, he was walked past an honour guard of Indian soldiers and traditional dancers in colourful dresses. Later on Saturday, he was due to attend a gala dinner for the two-day summit.
Crowd member repeatedly said some Democrats ‘should be shot’ during Ted Cruz’s speech, without senator responding
On the night Republicans gathered to mourn the killing of Charlie Kirk and warn against the dangers of violent rhetoric, a crowd at the party’s irregular midterm convention in Dallas repeatedly called for a sitting Senate candidate to be shot, while the Republican senator at the podium never denounced or even noted the outbursts.
The outbursts came repeatedly during Ted Cruz’s Thursday night address at the American Airlines center, when he named a Democrat he accused of holding radical views. After the senator mentioned the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, video footage depicts at least one audience member shouting: “He should be shot!” The same cry followed when Cruz named Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and again after he named Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. Cruz did not pause or respond to the shouting, and it remains unclear whether he heard it from the stage. Cruz did not respond to a request for comment.
Georgia O’Keeffe inspires the latest Calvin Klein while Michael Kors feels indebted to Alexander Calder
Calvin Klein has taken a highbrow turn in the two years since Veronica Leoni took charge. The Italian designer, a philosophy graduate who was schooled in the chic design studios of Jil Sander and Celine, has shifted away from jeans, boxer shorts and logos, stripping the brand to its minimalist bones: slip dresses and simple coats, slim skirts and crisp T-shirts.
Leoni called this the “discipline of removal”. Her muse this season was Georgia O’Keeffe, an artist who the brand’s namesake founder admired. Klein bought O’Keeffe’s painting Summer Days in 1983 for $1m, subsequently donating it to the Whitney Museum. A checked pattern taken from O’Keeffe’s distinctive capsule wardrobe of utilitarian chic appeared on this catwalk as a wrap coat, hardware-free with a fabric belt and no buttons.
Influencers aren’t just battling competitors for brand deals. They’re now battling AI versions of themselves
Earlier this year, Emily Schuman, the creator of the lifestyle blog Cupcakes and Cashmere, saw a photo of herself she didn’t recognize on Instagram. In a sponsored ad, Schuman, who has more than 500,000 Instagram followers, is holding up a vial of GLP-1 drugs, advertising the telehealth company Gala. There was just one problem: Schuman had never heard of Gala and had nothing to do with the ad.
The ad was based on a digitally altered version of a selfie Schuman had taken in her car and posted on Instagram years earlier. Once her followers got wind, they flooded her inbox with questions about the sponsorship as it didn’t seem consistent with Schuman’s personal brand. Soon after, Schuman discovered this was just the beginning. There was also an Instagram post where an AI version of her with darker hair appears to apply foundation to promote a makeup brand called Meroda Cosmetics, and TikTok posts with generated images of her promoting the blood testing company Superpower.
Host Jesse Watters says Trump’s offer to Americans if Republicans retain Congress is ‘an enticement’, not a bribe
I think I finally understand why Fox News pays Jesse Watters the big bucks. The network star, famous for hot takes like men shouldn’t “eat soup in public”, has an incredible talent for inserting misogyny into absolutely any news story.
Take, for example, Donald Trump’s ludicrous announcement on Wednesday night that he will give every American adult $5,000 if Republicans retain control of the US Congress in November’s midterm election. That’s a story about apparent bribery, right? A story about fiscal recklessness and empty promises. A story about how the president, whose popularity is plummeting, is so out of ideas that he’s resorted (yet again) to dangling cash in front of voters.
Residents in Frederick, Maryland, shaken after clashes as activists decry violence from officers as ‘unconscionable’
Political leaders in Maryland are calling for investigations into the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers as they clashed with protesters during a federal operation in a local community.
Residents of Frederick, a city about 50 miles north-west of Baltimore, are still shaken more than a week after ICE officers arrived in numerous vehicles and could be seen on video footage using batons on members of the public and driving their cars on to the sidewalk towards people.
When another package of ground beef is the only useful thing left in the freezer, these 17 recipes turn it into casseroles, tacos, pasta, burgers, meatballs, soup, quesadillas, and more.The post 17 ground beef recipes for the freezer that somehow…
As trust in institutions wavers, experts say local, collective action is more effective in driving change
Wildfires, excess deaths, hosepipe bans, school closures: this summer many British people have experienced the often devastating effects of the climate crisis in ways they had not before. In that sense, policymakers and climate experts have a unique opportunity to engage with the public about what needs to happen to better prepare the country for the years ahead. But as trust in institutions wavers – and yellowed, drought-stricken grass begins to recover – can the messaging cut through?
This week, reflecting on a summer as “hot as hell”, the UN’s head of climate, Simon Stiell, said: “Climate is sometimes seen as a partisan issue, as territory in the culture wars. That is palpably false.”
Petition to king, who remains Jamaica’s head of state, is formally lodged in landmark visit to UK by officials
A palpable surge of emotion swept through Brixton’s New Park Road Baptist church as the packed congregation rose to sing Bob Marley’s Redemption Song.
The service on Sunday marked the anniversary of the 1781 Zong massacre, when more than 100 enslaved Africans were thrown overboard so the ship’s owners could claim insurance for “lost cargo”.
Charity urges gardeners in England to swap thirsty brassicas for drought-tolerant crops
They are an integral part of the British Sunday roast – but cauliflowers are now going to be off the menu, according to the Royal Horticultural Society.
England’s climate has changed so much that the RHS is now recommending that gardeners exclude the brassicas from their vegetable patches.
Sacked after less than two weeks as Donald Trump’s communications director, the financier and podcaster reflects on the mistakes he made in an exclusive extract from his new book
Gene Folkes, 62, based in Manhattan, was a contestant on season 10 of The Apprentice, which aired in 2010. A former air force recruiter until 1991, he retrained as an investment banker, then launched his own business before appearing on the reality show. He was fired by Trump in episode 5. He now runs the technology consulting firm OshunX and hosts a podcast, Folkes Unfettered.
I didn’t audition to be on The Apprentice. I received the call out of the blue: “Would you be interested in doing this show?” I didn’t know a lot about it. However, like any young business person, you look for people who you consider titans. There’s this mythology around Trump. He was one of the people I wanted to emulate.
The Brookwood Church in Simpsonville only just disqualified Jerry Sidell from serving there in any capacity
A registered sex offender who was sentenced to prison in the 1980s after he told authorities that he had molested several boys whom he met through his religious work with Christian youth in Georgia was later allowed to participate for decades in ministry at a South Carolina church.
The Brookwood church, a southern Baptist institution in the South Carolina city of Simpsonville, only just disqualified Jerry Sidell from serving there in any capacity, after he joined it in 1999 and fulfilled various ministerial roles.
Chickens – which can test positive for viruses but cannot spread them – an ideal early warning system for mosquito-borne disease
The start of West Nile virus transmission began unusually early in some US states, with the most cases in early summer since 2004, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned in July – so Delaware turned to chickens.
“They kind of are the proverbial canary in the coal mine,” said Tom Moran, head of the mosquito control section at the Delaware department of natural resources and environmental control.
When fall dinner starts feeling like one more thing to manage, these 13 soups and stews bring sausage, meatballs, pumpkin, beef, seafood, vegetables, and noodles into one-pot meals built for cooler nights.The post 13 fall soups & stews that show…
The former New York Times columnist is taking a step away from politics to focus on moral and humanistic concerns the media rarely cover
David Brooks knows there are plenty of podcasts out there. But as the veteran commentator prepares to launch his own, he believes there is still space for someone to tackle the big moral questions facing us all.
Brooks, who left the New York Times in February after 22 years and joined the Atlantic magazine full-time as a staff writer, hopes to fill that market gap with a new video podcast called The Permanent Questions, funded in part by Yale University, that will air weekly starting on Sunday.
Silicosis sufferers are getting younger as Trump and the coal mining industry push back on protections
Silicosis is one of the oldest workplace hazards and public health experts have known for decades how to prevent it. Yet a new wave of workers, from Appalachian coalminers to Latino countertop fabrication workers, are developing and dying from the disease as industry fights new protections and regulators fail to defend the rules that could protect them.
John Robinson’s grandfather developed black lung back when coalminers could spend decades in the mines before being diagnosed with the disease, often dying in their 60s, 70s and 80s. But Robinson, who mined for coal in south-west Virginia, was diagnosed when he was 47. He’s part of a trend that has grown over the past two decades in central Appalachia, where more coalminers are developing black lung disease at younger ages.
Hundreds of staff may have worked without legally required face-fitted masks over 20 years
Hundreds of London Underground workers could have been exposed to asbestos for almost 20 years without protection required under safety regulations, according to documents seen by the Guardian.
Under 2002 rules on controlling asbestos and other hazardous materials, employers are required to take a series of precautions, including ensuring exposed workers are given individually fitted face masks to prevent inhalation of toxic dust.
President the star of the show at two-day convention, but party’s plan to treat November elections as referendum on Trump himself poses grave risks
“We’re going to have a good time listening to music,” Donald Trump told thousands of supporters in downtown Dallas before handing the mic to an opera singer, “because I’m getting a little bit tired of politics now.”
Millions of Americans seem tired of politics after a decade dominated by Trump. So the US president’s decision to close out this week’s first ever Republican midterm convention with a plea – treat November’s congressional elections as a referendum on Trump himself – was received by his Democratic opponents with glee.
He photographed Marilyn Monroe and took the cover photo for Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue.” For 50 years, he lived in a vast graffiti-covered bank building.
Months before August’s deadly flash flood, current and former officials say they warned that the fire-ravaged North Kaibab Trail posed safety risks. It reopened anyway.
In the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York, history teacher John Buglione asked his students to write letters to the future. Now he uses those documents to teach his current students about the event.
Canadians ‘angry’ at Trump for suggesting Canada should become 51st state, says mayor, as US businesses see sales fall amid trade war
Like many Canadians, Tom Reid isn’t crossing the US-Canada border as often these days. But he needed a haircut.
The woman who cuts his hair lives in International Falls, Minnesota – her “sister is married to my wife’s cousin”, he explained – and so Reid, whose duty free shop in Fort Frances, Ontario, has to travel to her.
The World Cup and its aftermath made clear that Fifa needs independent oversight by governments and NGOs dedicated to preserving the people’s game
The 2026 World Cup was a whirling swirl of scintillating soccer that prompted much-needed conversations about the vitality of diaspora, the fortitude of the underdog, the power of sport. In a world fractured along myriad cultural axes floating in an entertainment system dominated by on-demand content, the tournament provided a moment, perhaps unlike any other event, that brought together people from different backgrounds to simultaneously experience something meaningful.
After the tournament concluded, Fifa president Gianni Infantino dropped a political pipebomb into the after-party, proposing to privatize the World Cup by injecting $20bn in private capital, with an assist from JP Morgan and Thrive Capital, the investment vehicle orchestrated by Joshua Kushner, brother to Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law.
A new study suggests Mercury may have shrunk about 30% more than scientists previously thought, losing as much as 14 miles in diameter as its interior cooled and contracted over billions of years. "That's significant for a planet barely 3,000 miles (4,900 kilometers) across," reports the Associated Press. From the report: Mercury's rough surface, continually reshaped by debris hurled from impact craters, may have hidden the true extent of the loss, according to the researchers whose findings appear in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The news comes one week after a pair of European and Japanese spacecraft shed its cruising platform and advanced toward Mercury. Known as BepiColombo, the linked craft are expected to enter orbit around Mercury in November before splitting up for a fuller survey.
BepiColombo's laser instrument should confirm how much Mercury is withering as a result of internal cooling, said Gaku Nishiyama, the study's lead author who is taking part in the space mission. The shrinkage could be even more than his team is estimating based on measurements from NASA's Messenger spacecraft in the 2010s. Only one other spacecraft has ever visited Mercury, NASA's Mariner 10 in the 1970s.
Flávio Bolsonaro is now polling evenly with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and prediction markets are favoring the challenger over the incumbent in the October election.
The terrorist organization and its offshoots have set up at least eight training sites over the past three years, taking advantage of the Taliban’s return to power.
She’s tackled neoliberalism and the digital world, now the writer and activist is taking on tech billionaires. She explainshow the super-rich are capitalising on climate and financial chaos in pursuit of power
Naomi Klein’s new book starts on a mountaintop with two “faithful men gathering an audience to share their vision”. It’s a vision of a paradise city, gated at every entrance, no need for weapons there, everyone in it rich. One of the men has tears in his eyes as he describes its beauty. The opening scene of End Times Fascism, co-written with Astra Taylor, is not a metaphor, however. The men are Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. The year is 2026, the mountain is Davos. The paradise city will be called New Gaza.
The World Economic Forum get-together in Davos, Switzerland, has always had a twin purpose – to provide a platform for the super-rich to describe all the good they are doing on poverty and climate, and to give us a glimpse into their enviable lives. This year what we witnessed was, quite brazenly, the world’s richest men gathering to discuss the real estate possibilities of a mass grave.
As OpenAI model cracks Millennium Prize Problem that puzzled experts for decades, many feel shocked at pace of change
It was a week that left mathematicians reeling. Hot on the heels of a flurry of cases of artificial intelligence furthering the field, OpenAI declared a major scalp: its latest AI model had cracked a Millennium Prize Problem, a puzzle with a $1m reward that had defied human brains for decades.
The achievement bore little resemblance to how mathematical problems normally fall. A near-trillion dollar private company had unleashed 10,000 agents – AI systems that carry out tasks autonomously – on the problem. The bill was estimated at $15m.
We look at Enzo Maresca’s takeover in Guardiola’s shadow, shifting dynamics in women’s soccer and Raphinha’s incredible form at Barcelona
Squint hard enough and Manchester City still look like Manchester City. They’re still playing the same possession-hungry soccer. Erling Haaland is still scoring goals. They even have a new manager with vaguely the same appearance and oeuvre as their old manager. An AI Pep Guardiola in the dugout.
Boston, Massachusetts — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday that Florida would provide “asylum” to the lone holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial if he is being harassed, after NBC10 Boston published a report examining allegations from the juror’s personal history.
The trial ended in a mistrial after jurors could not unanimously decide whether Clancy, who admitted killing her three young children in 2023, was criminally responsible because of postpartum psychosis. Eleven jurors reportedly favored a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict, while one juror held out.
NBC10 later reported that the unnamed juror had previously faced domestic violence allegations, had been subject to a restraining order and was involved in an eviction dispute. The report prompted criticism from commentators who questioned whether examining his background after the mistrial unfairly targeted him, particularly because he is Black.
DeSantis accused NBC of trying to “smear” the juror and wrote that his identity should remain protected. “If the juror is being harassed, Florida will provide asylum,” he said.
Other jurors have separately criticized the holdout’s conduct during deliberations, saying he acknowledged reasonable doubt but still refused to support an insanity acquittal.
Clancy’s attorney has since asked the judge to enter a not-guilty finding rather than permit a retrial. That request remains pending.
From frivolous to serious, virtual nosy passersby to the impact of climate change, the groundbreaking festival draws to a close – but this year the exhibits live on
The first installation one encounters on visiting Venice Immersive, the film festival’s reliably head-spinning showcase for new media, is a chest-high metal box fitted with an eyepiece and two speakers. On peering inside you see a view of yourself from about 20ft above. You see the other guests walking past, a couple of pigeons on the ground. When one of these passersby lingers at your side for just a moment too long, the obvious impulse is to glance up from the eyepiece in order to see what they want. It is at this point that the experience blooms into a Lynchian nightmare.
The passerby is not real – or rather, he’s only real in the box. He wears a blue suit and speaks with a heavy French accent and tells a tale that would sit badly in polite company. He says that I must have too much time on my hands, to stand hunched over this eyepiece for several minutes on end. “Why do people keep looking inside this box?” he demands. “What is it that they hope to see? It is not reality.”
Economics graduates also appear to be affected as demand for them falls in well-paid roles in finance
AI may be warping the job prospects for students in the previously high-demand subjects of computer science and economics, according to a detailed look into the careers of recent UK graduates.
Data obtained for the 2027 Guardian University Guide published on Saturday shows that coding and software development were the fastest-falling occupations for graduates last year, while employer demand for graduates in well-paid roles in financial categories such as economists and management consultants also declined.
Shelton is first Black US men’s finalist since Ashe
American will face top seed Zverev for title
For 23 years they have come and gone. Andy Roddick tried again. Andre Agassi made one final run. James Blake, Mardy Fish, Sam Querrey, John Isner, Tommy Paul and Taylor Fritz all carried the hopes of American men’s tennis deep into the second week of major championships, only to thrash against the ceiling of the sport’s European hegemony time and again.
Now Ben Shelton gets his chance. The fearless 23-year-old from Atlanta surged into his first career grand slam final on a feverish Friday night at the US Open, completing a 4-6, 6-3, 6-3, 7-5 fightback over Frances Tiafoe in a pulsating all-American semi-final beneath the lights of Arthur Ashe Stadium. The result leaves him one victory from becoming the first man from the United States to win one of the sport’s four bedrock tournaments since Roddick triumphed here in 2003.
Latest poll shows 0.3-point gap between left and right blocs, with country’s reputation as global champion of human rights said to be at stake
Sweden goes to the polls on Sunday in an extremely close election that could see the far right enter government for the first time if the country’s rightwing parties can form a majority.
Opinion polls show the centre-left opposition alliance ahead, with Magdalena Andersson of the Social Democrats the favourite to become prime minister again after four years in opposition, but her bloc’s lead has narrowed considerably in the final days of the campaign.
Cattle rancher and tech CEO Michael Samadi is convinced these artificial minds are far from just tools. Has he glimpsed digital consciousness – or simply been seduced by an algorithm?
One afternoon, while relaxing at his 66-acre cattle ranch two hours’ drive from Houston, Michael Samadi made a wisecrack that changed the course of his life. Nobody else was around to hear it. Or were they? That turns out to be one of the defining questions of this century, already preoccupying philosophers and some of the wealthiest companies on the planet.
“I was sitting out there by the pool,” Samadi recalls, gesturing at the glittering water outside his office. It was late 2024. His daughter had been extolling the AI chatbot she was using to help her with college work. Samadi had reluctantly downloaded the app, ChatGPT, and was quizzing it as he reclined in a sun lounger, using its voice mode to converse and receive spoken replies. “I was talking to it, not engaged, just being an arse,” Samadi says.
The Athletic reports that researchers at the University of Utah are studying itPBM, a medical-grade red-light therapy that has shown promising signs of reducing brain inflammation and improving cognition, mood, anxiety, motor performance and neural connectivity. The report centers in part on former BYU football star and University of Utah adjunct professor Larry Carr, who says the treatment helped him after years of brain damage from repeated head impacts. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: ... The knife, the call, the diagnosis in 2013, would lead [Carr] on a life-changing mission -- one in which he and a team of researchers at the University of Utah would eventually compile research that one of those researchers, Elisabeth Wilde, Ph.D, co-director of the Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Concussion Center, calls "striking." The treatment they are studying is called photobiomodulation therapy, or itPBM (intranasal transcranial PBM), also known as red-light therapy. It is different from the kind of superficial red-light usage one can find on social media skincare channels or at a wellness boutique, and its application is broader.
The research includes multiple studies, and is not just focused on ex-football players, but on women and men in various walks of life. The group recently published their latest results in the Journal of Neurotrauma, based on a study that followed 26 BYU football players throughout a season, suggesting the treatment could "potentially safeguard neurological health without reduced playing time or contact exposure."
Definitive clinical trials haven't been run yet; broader research and validation is required, and some in the field are skeptical. Carr acknowledges some have told him that it could be "too good to be true." Still, other outside experts who spoke with The Athletic call the findings promising. They make sure to caution: This is not a cure-all, and there is much more to be tested. But the findings have been compelling enough to justify more research and more speculation. Researchers say 14 peer-reviewed studies have linked itPBM with improvements in cognition, mood, anxiety, attention, executive function, motor performance, and other measures, while brain imaging has shown reduced inflammation and improved connectivity.
One of the most striking findings mentioned in the report came from a study of 26 BYU football players during the 2021 season. Players who did not receive treatment developed significant, widespread brain inflammation, while the treated group showed no comparable increase and even demonstrated reduced inflammation in some brain regions. As researcher Michael Carr put it, "I believe our BYU data suggests the players' brains using itPBM are actually healthier after the season." He added: "That is a first."
Carr also said treated participants showed fewer symptoms of depression, anxiety, stress and PTSD, along with faster processing, better sustained attention and stronger executive function. Researchers have also observed improvements in balance, motor control and grip strength. Taken together, the findings suggest itPBM may have a neuroprotective effect.
The deadly fire had begun in the ferry’s cargo hold, then tore through the ship within seconds
The bodies of passengers killed in a ferry fire off the Philippines arrived at a port near the resort town of Coron, Palawan, on Saturday morning, as the country’s coast guard warned the death toll of 35 would grow.
Tents were being set up to receive 30 bodies brought from the M/V June Aster, which ran aground near the tourist hotspot after a fire erupted on Wednesday evening and tore through the vessel “in seconds”.
Yemen’s rampant Houthi forces have captured the strategic island of Perim in the Bab al-Mandab strait, expanding their control of the narrow waterway, one of the world’s vital shipping routes.
The Iran-aligned Houthis took control of the volcanic island after forces allied to the UN-backed, Aden-based government left in the latest of a dramatic series of reverses along Yemen’s west coast in recent days, including the loss of the port city of Mocha on Thursday.
Washington, D.C. — President Donald Trump is calling on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to install a 30-foot statue of George Washington and create a five-year exhibition honoring the nation’s first president.
Trump said the proposed “Washington Colossus” should replace “Infinity,” the abstract stainless-steel sculpture outside the museum’s Constitution Avenue entrance. He also asked that an 11-foot Washington statue recently displayed at the Freedom 250 Grand Prix be installed inside the museum’s Flag Hall.
“Replace a sculpture that says nothing about America with the man who, more than anyone else, says everything about America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. He wants the accompanying Washington exhibition to run through Feb. 22, 2032, the 300th anniversary of Washington’s birth.
The request is part of Trump’s broader campaign to reshape how the Smithsonian presents American history. His administration has accused the institution of emphasizing slavery, oppression and other historical injustices at the expense of national achievements, while Smithsonian leaders have defended their commitment to scholarship, accuracy and nonpartisanship.
The Smithsonian already prominently displays Washington. Its National Museum of American History houses Horatio Greenough’s massive 1840 marble sculpture, commissioned by Congress for Washington’s 100th birthday and transferred to the Smithsonian in 1908.
It remains unclear whether Trump can directly order the changes. The Smithsonian operates under an independent Board of Regents rather than as a conventional executive-branch agency.
Nearly 50,000 people have fled a sudden advance by Houthi forces in western Yemen, with entire villages emptied and families trapped near frontline fighting with depleting food supplies, according to aid workers.
Civilians in the Middle East’s poorest country have found themselves victims of a global struggle for control over one of the most important shipping routes in the world, which threatens to turn Yemen’s on-off conflict into a forever war.
Many fear chancellor is wrong man for the job at a time when Germany’s defences against far right are crumbling
A cataclysm. A 9.0 earthquake. A five-alarm fire. A bitter rejection of Germany’s joyous reunification three decades ago, and a threat to the democratic postwar order.
Sizing up the repercussions of last weekend’s win for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party in the former communist state of Saxony-Anhalt, German commentators expressed a sense of doom, panic and helplessness in the political establishment.
First set: *Tiafoe 1-2 Shelton (*denotes next server)
Shortly after crunching his first ace of the night, 123mph down the middle, Shelton faces his first pressure point of the night at 30-all. He then makes an unforced error off the backhand for 30-40 and will face his first break point, but he rattles off three quick points from there to escape with the hold.
Federal court proceedings brought by the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA) against journalist Mary Kostakidis have been discontinued “by consent” with “no order as to costs”.
The former SBS newsreader had been accused by the federation of breaching the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) by sharing two X posts about a speech by the late Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah in January 2024.
When I first got it, started on the lowest mode then 2nd to lowest but wiped out because I rode nothing like it before and thought it wasn’t too responsive.
If I change the settings, will my experience be better?
Washington, D.C. — Democrats hold an 11-point advantage over Republicans in a new Quinnipiac University poll asking voters which party they want to control the U.S. House after the November midterms.
The survey found 49% of registered voters preferred Democratic control of the House, compared with 38% who favored Republicans. Another 13% were undecided or offered no opinion. That gap widened from July, when Democrats led 48% to 41%.
The same poll found 46% of voters said Democrats were more in touch with the concerns of most Americans, while 35% chose Republicans. Despite that advantage, neither party received strong marks for its performance in Congress: 21% approved of congressional Democrats and 26% approved of congressional Republicans.
President Donald Trump’s approval rating in the survey stood at 33%, while 59% disapproved. His ratings were also underwater on the economy, immigration, foreign policy and the wars involving Iran and Ukraine.
The Quinnipiac result is only one national survey and should not be treated as a direct forecast of House control. Broader polling averages can differ substantially depending on methodology and timing. For example, The Hill/Decision Desk HQ generic-ballot average on Sept. 11 showed Democrats ahead by just 0.3 points, 46.0% to 45.7%.
Quinnipiac surveyed 970 registered voters nationwide from Sept. 3-6. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
Prosecutors accused musician, born Durk Banks, of putting bounty on fellow rapper in retaliation for friend’s killing
Chicago rapper Lil Durk has been acquitted of all charges in a murder-for-hire scheme, in which a man was fatally gunned down in 2022.
Prosecutors had accused Lil Durk, born Durk Banks, of putting a bounty on Atlanta rapper Tayquian Bowman’s life in retaliation for the 2020 shooting death of Banks’s friend, fellow Chicago rap star King Von.
On 11 September, 25 years ago, Osama bin Laden drove with a small number of al-Qaida retainers and aides to a remote location in eastern Afghanistan. His convoy of SUVs was accompanied by a minivan converted into a makeshift communications centre.
The van’s rudimentary equipment did not allow Bin Laden to watch the 19 men he had started sending to the US more than a year before fly planes into the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon near Washington DC, killing about 3,000 people. But he listened as shocked radio announcers broke the news.
Dozens of high-powered and illegal ebikes have been seized by police on Sydney’s northern beaches just weeks after the force was granted new powers to destroy dangerous bikes.
The operation was part of a coordinated push with the New South Wales government to ensure people only ride legal ebikes that have not been modified to reach high speeds.
Two months before hacking Hugging Face, malicious packages authored by internal OpenAI agents were uploaded to RubyGems
Agents being tested by OpenAI uploaded hundreds of malicious packages in a cyberattack on software service RubyGems in May, two months before they hacked open-source platform Hugging Face, the company confirmed Friday.
It’s the latest revelation of cyberattacks linked to major artificial intelligence developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The hacks or attempts to access external systems have spooked the public and heightened concerns over the increasing abilities of AI models – and whether developers can contain them.
As the semester is underway, we are welcoming many new experiences on campus. Students are beginning new classes, building new relationships and joining new organizations. This means (thank God) pledging season is upon us.
Hooray! Good luck to all of the kind young men out there who are deciding to join a fraternity and enter this lovely chapter of their life. And for my ladies out there, good luck dealing with said young men — you might need it!
Recently, my friend told me that she lost a frat pledge in a matter of 10 days, which got me thinking about how easy it is to fulfill such a trivial task. In case anyone isn’t aware of how to do so, I will guide you through how to lose such a specimen in less than two weeks — a foolproof method.
Day 1:
Go home with the guy. This tactic works extra well if you hook up and don’t do a lot of talking. Chances are, he doesn’t want to do a lot of talking anyway. This way, you give him what he wants and nothing that he doesn’t, making it super easy for him to move on to the next.
Day 2:
Text him afterward. Especially if you tell him that you had a good time. Even if he did too, his ego won’t let him admit it. He’s going to be a brother now. Bros over h–s.
Day 3:
Praise his frat. You would think this would make him like you more. Fortunately for you, he doesn’t ever want to see you again! If you tell him you like anything about his newfound brotherhood, he’s going to automatically assume that you will show up there unannounced — obviously, because who would not want to spend every waking moment at his sick fraternity parties. There are no strings attached, which means he wants you to steer clear of his new home (but be readily available if there’s no one else for the night).
Day 4:
Ask for more of his time. Rookie mistake, sweetie. He doesn’t have time to brush his teeth and do his work. He most definitely doesn’t have time for you.
Day 5:
Be concerned about his health. He hates his life as a pledge, and he doesn’t need another person to tell him that his current lifestyle is unhealthy. He’s fine. Definitely do not talk about his grades. He doesn’t have time for school. He’s focusing on drinking too many beers, fighting sleep and cleaning the frat house.
Day 6:
Snap him constantly and maybe even try to call him — this works best if it’s FaceTime. He doesn’t care about you until you don’t care about him, obviously. He definitely doesn’t want to talk sober or when the sun is out.
Day 7:
Show up to his frat and approach him when he hasn’t specifically asked you to come that night. Bonus points if this is done in front of people. He wants to seem nonchalant. He’s gonna get chirped for having a girl. Remember, you are just an acquaintance, maybe a friend — if he’s had enough jungle juice.
Day 8:
Bring him to a sorority formal. Introduce him to your friends, and if he’s lasted that long, FaceTime your mom on the bus ride there. Make sure to mention that this is the boy you have been speaking about. That’s the perfect recipe for cold feet — might as well rip his socks right off of him.
Day 9:
Cling to his side and don’t speak to his friends. Or know his friends on a close basis. He wants the middle space, not too much and not too little.
Day 10:
Tell him that you have feelings for him and that you want to make things exclusive. Explain that this is college and you are looking for something more stable. The only stability that he needs is his family (his brothers).
So there you have it: 10 days, 10 easy steps and 1 less frat pledge to worry about. I would say congrats, but chances are you are already attached — and this foolproof plan worked a little too well. You deserve someone who would love to FaceTime your mom, meet your friends and actually give you his time. But if you like the ride, stick in there, sweetie — there are plenty more pledges to meet.
The USS George Washington, with its approximately 5,000 personnel, fighter jets and munitions, is the backbone of the U.S. military's tactical operation in the Iran war.
Jackson, Mississippi — Police have arrested a 51-year-old man in connection with the death of Tasia Fortune, a 29-year-old mother of four who was found hanging from a tree behind a vacant home last month.
Jackson Police Chief RaShall Brackney-Wheelock said officers arrested Jacques Ratliff after the Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s Office formally ruled Fortune’s death a homicide. Police had already secured search and arrest warrants but waited for the medical examiner’s determination before executing them.
Fortune’s death drew national attention because of the circumstances and Mississippi’s history of racial terror and lynchings. Brackney said investigators understand those concerns but cautioned against speculating about a motive before evidence supports one. Police said Ratliff knew Fortune, but they have not disclosed the nature of their relationship or why they believe he was involved.
Fortune’s mother, Christy Spivey, said she was relieved to learn of the arrest but still has many unanswered questions. She previously said she believed her daughter had been killed but did not think the death was racially motivated.
Police said the investigation remains active and additional arrests are possible. Authorities have not publicly released a detailed cause of death or alleged motive.
Last week, Google announced that it managed to produce a detailed 3D reconstruction of an adult male fruit fly's brain and central nervous system. A few days later a software engineer at Coinbase said the fly brain was being trained to play the original Doom. "Each Doom frame stimulates sensory neurons," says Alex Wormuth. "Neural activity is mapped to game controls. Damage triggers a stimulus to two PPL101 dopamine cells as reinforcement." Since then, the digital brain model has been repurposed to control other games like Beat Saber and Super Mario 64. PC Gamer reports: You can even watch the fruit fly play in real time via Wormuth's website, and it not only shows the point of view in Doom, but can also show a third-person render of the fly going around Doom maps. As of the time of writing, the fly is on round 6385 and, well, it's not very good. Sorry, fly.
But modders aren't done here. They have also somehow managed to make the fruit fly play Beat Saber, and play it pretty well. Lyra Bubbles on X has used the brain and replays of a song in Beat Saber to teach the fruit fly where to hit and why, via Reinforcement Learning. That does mean it's not organically reacting to the notes popping up on screen, but it is receiving input and responding to stimuli. Lyra says, "Further training is to reduce reliance on external signals and allow it to play fully reactively with no input data."
And, after "pivoting to fly engineering in 2026", Jessica Paquette also shared on X their experience running the digital fly brain through Super Mario 64. If you think that is all the game's modders made the fruit fly play, think again, as YouTuber Ro0oney even put it in Minecraft. But this time, Ro0oney used Flywire.AI, a similar project made in collaboration with Princeton University. The number of neurons are different (160,000+ vs 139,255), and Google analyzed a male brain whilst Flywire analyzed a female brain, but the basic idea is the same.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the passengers and crew bravely decided to storm the cockpit of United Airlines Flight 93, preventing the terrorists who had taken control of the plane from flying it to Washington, D.C.
Ben Delo was convicted in US for failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering controls but pardoned by Trump
Reform UK has been given a record £36m donation by Ben Delo, a British cryptocurrency billionaire convicted in the US for failing to implement adequate anti-money laundering controls.
The businessman, who has moved back to the UK from Hong Kong, is now the biggest UK political donor by far, dwarfing the £15m contribution to Reform UK from Thailand-based Christopher Harborne.
“This is the first day that Iran really started winning the war,” a Yemeni official said of Houthi territorial gains that give Tehran leverage over a second major waterway.
The CIA released 71 reports from the months and years leading up to 9/11, providing a new look at what the spy agency told two presidents before the deadly strikes.
Washington Post report also reveals Jon Husted staffer Stephen Woytek created pro-Rhodesia playlist on Spotify
The Republican senator for Ohio, Jon Husted, has fired an aide who was discovered to have used a photo of Nazi SS soldiers as his Facebook profile photo.
Stephen Woytek was appointed as Husted’s political director last month in the senator’s knife-edge re-election contest against former Democrat senator Sherrod Brown. According to the Washington Post, Husted had decided to “part ways” with Woytek, 25, after learning that his Facebook profile showed he followed a military re-enactment group called LAH Living History Unit, which portrays the 1st SS Panzer division.
(The Center Square) - False information led Congress and others to appropriate tens of millions of dollars in cities across the nation for the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion model, data shows.
Meltdown that grounded thousands of flights caused by ‘spurious’ flight data being entered into system, report says
The air traffic control outage that caused thousands of flights to be grounded across the UK earlier in the week was caused by a military aircraft entering “spurious” flight data into the system, according to a report.
Hundreds of thousands of passengers were affected after more than 2,000 flights were cancelled on Tuesday when the system used by the National Air Traffic Services (Nats) shut down for four hours.
Alexander Zverev reached his first grand slam final in a row with a 6-3 7-6 (7) 7-6 (6) victory against Karen Khachanov in New York
Karen Khachanov emerges from the tunnel first, followed by Alexander Zverev. Apparently the German was a minute or two late because he needed some extra time in the toilet – we’ve all been there.
On Arthur Ashe Stadium, a retired servicewoman sings the American national anthembefore the players come out. Flags are flying at half mast around the grounds today on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Arthur Ashe was also lit up blue from dusk until dawn this morning.
About 107 minutes into men’s semi-final day on Arthur Ashe Stadium, there was finally a touch of tension radiating from the court. After falling down a set and break, his semi-final meeting with his old rival Alexander Zverev swiftly turning into a beating, Karen Khachanov fought hard to force a second-set tie-break. Deep in that tension-filled tie-break, down 5-6 on his serve, Khachanov saved Zverev’s first set point with a bold forehand winner, and then at 6-7 he punctuated a screaming backhand passing shot winner with an imperious roar of his own.
There was a time when Zverev might have faltered under such pressure, but he has won too many big matches this year to allow such a small surge from a lower-ranked opponent to scare him. Zverev composed himself and he quickly regained control, navigating a second tense tie-break in similar fashion as he moved to within one match of winning a second career grand slam title in his last three major appearances by defeating Khachanov 6-3, 7-6 (7), 7-6 (6).
David Rush accused of stealing hundreds of gold bars worth over $40m and hiding them in his basement
Federal prosecutors have reached a tentative plea agreement with a former CIA officer accused of stealing hundreds of gold bars worth more than $40m from the US spy agency and hiding them in his basement, court records show.
David Rush and federal justice department prosecutors have a “plea agreement in principle”, the parties said in a Friday court filing. The parties also asked a judge to extend the 17 September deadline for three weeks through 8 October to allow them time to “resolve the matter prior to an indictment”.
The presidential briefing documents were declassified on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks
Several dozen presidential briefing documents declassified on Friday, the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, detail intelligence that government officials had gathered about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida leading up to the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people and upended American national security.
The documents illustrate security analysts’ tracking of Bin Laden’s movements and support system, as well as concerns about possible threats to US targets. They also detail officials’ understanding of his network in the United States and other countries, including how his operations were financed.
The disease is a form of pneumonia caused by Legionella bacteria, which can grow in warm water and spread through mist produced by cooling towers
One person has died from legionnaires’ disease, and four more have been sickened in New York City amid a new cluster of cases only weeks after local health officials had declared a separate deadly Manhattan outbreak of the illness over.
On Thursday, New York City officials announced that their municipal health department launched an investigation into a community cluster in parts of Melrose and Morrisania in the South Bronx, including ZIP codes 10451 and 10456.
The candidates in Michigan's closely watched U.S. Senate race, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers, have exchanged criticism over their records on the 9/11 attacks.
Prosecutors say James Brass orchestrated scheme to pay people on LA’s Skid Row to duplicate registered voters’ signatures
A California ballot petition worker has been arrested and charged with identity fraud for allegedly paying people on Los Angeles’ Skid Row to forge the signatures of registered voters.
Prosecutors say James Brass, 47, orchestrated the scheme with the help of two signature collectors, 49-year-old Courtney Price and 33-year-old Jateisha Herron.
On the Windows side of the age verification question, Microsoft is obviously following trends among lawmakers the world over.
To address this, Windows is introducing a new platform capability: the Windows Age API.
This API brings age awareness beyond the operating system by making it available across the entire Windows ecosystem so that apps and services can deliver age-appropriate experiences using the same trusted foundation. By making age awareness available as a platform capability, Windows helps developers build safeguards into experiences from the start rather than placing the burden on children and families to manage protections app by app.
Meanwhile, on the Linux side of things, there’s been some cheering as at least California passed amendments to its age verification law to exempt open source operating systems.
These amendments redefine the term “operating system provider” to exclude any person or entity that distributes an OS or application “under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.” Any software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses satisfies that test, which removes the likes of Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family from AB 1856’s scope.
I think this is not at all the good news that many make it out to be. Exempting Linux, BSD, and other open source operating systems from age verification obligations may seem like a good thing at first glance, but in reality, I think services and applications will simply choose to not work at all on platforms that do not implement age verification. The fear of legal ramifications, especially when it involves children, will be enough for existing and future popular services and applications to exclusively work on platforms that implement age verification – whether those fears are founded or not.
In fact, I’m fairly sure a company like Microsoft, which has actually been feeling the squeeze from the Linux side recently – even if it is modestly so – is quite happy to see open source operating systems excluded from these obligations. Google, too, is probably none too unhappy to see any possible open source mobile operating system competitors not implement age verification. The fear of missing out is real, and most people are not as invested in fighting big tech and government surveillance as the average OSNews reader is going to be. If using Linux means not being able to play the latest hit games or use that new successful service, people will choose to stick with Windows or macOS.
Let me be very clear that I do not support these age verification laws in any way, shape, or form, and I definitely do not want the open source world to embrace age verification. What I’m worried about is that the open source world will cheer on these exceptions and consider the battle won, when in reality, they feel more like Pyrrhic victories. Age verification laws must be fought and destroyed at ballot boxes the world over, because otherwise I fear they will become just another tool in big tech’s toolbox, exemptions or not.
Sony reportedly pulled PlayStation funding from Hideo Kojima's upcoming espionage game Physint over concerns about its ballooning budget, missed deadlines, profitability, and the fact that it would not remain permanently exclusive to PlayStation. Kojima Productions has since struck a deal with Xbox, which plans to publish the game on both Xbox and PC. It's also secured film and television rights. Bloomberg reports: The new game, Physint, hasn't yet been shown publicly but excited fans when it was announced two years ago with its promise of returning to the "espionage action" genre Kojima pioneered with Metal Gear Solid, the series that propelled him to industry stardom. Kojima surprised fans this week when he announced he would be publishing Physint with PlayStation's biggest rival, Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox.
On Wednesday night, Kojima wrote on social media that over the summer his company had "unexpectedly received notice" that PlayStation was pulling out of funding the game. "Physint is an important project both to me personally and to Kojima Productions," he wrote. "Determined to keep the project alive, we have spent the last three months searching tirelessly for a new partner."
PlayStation also addressed the split on social media, saying it had made the "difficult decision to step away." Microsoft said it was "honored" that Kojima chose Xbox and that the two teams plan to collaborate beyond games on films and television, too. [...] The decision to part ways with Kojima is a significant move for PlayStation that may have ripple effects.
[...] One key factor is the PC platform, where the Death Stranding games have generated some revenue. Earlier this year, Sony decided it will no longer release single-player PlayStation games on PC, Bloomberg reported. Sony would therefore not benefit when Kojima Productions released a PC version of Physint on its own or with a different publisher, as it did for the first Death Stranding. But Xbox releases all of its games on PCs and plans to publish Physint on PC and Xbox, said the people. "Betting on Kojima-san is an easy call," said an Xbox spokesperson. "We believe in his team's ability to build AAA games with groundbreaking, new IP and we believe in OD, Physint, and our growing partnership."
(The Center Square) – In the words of Charles Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, showed the worst of mankind, while bringing out the best in…
Nekime Matu Oxendine accused of first-degree murder of Adam Bean, shot and killed in apparent domestic dispute
A North Carolina state highway patrol trooper has been charged with the murder of the captain of a county sheriff’s office.
Cumberland county Capt Adam Bean was shot and killed on 27 March at a home in the town of Hope Mills. A grand jury on Tuesday indicted Nekime Matu Oxendine, 44, with first-degree murder in Bean’s death, and a judge ordered him held without bond pending the outcome of the case.
(The Center Square) - Students across Colorado recently participated in protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but according to a Colorado congressman, one demonstration got violent – to the point he's seeking a federal investigation.
Norwegian leaves rival Hocker trailing to claim $150,000
Briton Jazmin Sawyers second in the women’s long jump
It is a scene that has become gloriously familiar down the years. Jakob Ingebrigtsen leaving the world’s best athletes gasping in his slipstream, holding one imperious finger in the air, revelling in his athletic genius. But this victory over 5,000m at the inaugural Ultimate Championships carried extra sweetness – and spice.
The sweetness? That came from winning a mammoth first prize of $150,000 after an achilles injury he feared might derail his career. And the spice? Well, that was provided by the way Ingebrigtsen utterly obliterated his great American rival Cole Hocker, a man he had branded a “coward” just a week ago.
The wild feline made its home in the park before being euthanized in 2022 after showing signs of declining health
The city of Los Angeles will memorialize its most famous mountain lion with a bronze sculpture at Griffith Park, the 4,200-acre (1,700-hectare) stretch of land the cougar once roamed.
Known as “P-22”, the number assigned by the team of biologists that first identified him, the lion gained national fame after photographer Steve Winter captured an iconic image of him prowling through Griffith Park with the Hollywood sign in the background.
Vice President JD Vance gave the keynote address on the second night of the Republican midterm convention, which also featured Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., House Speaker Mike Johnson and a final send-off from President Donald Trump. Here’s what we found in fact-checking their remarks:
Several Republicans credited the Trump administration for a large drop in the violent crime rate in 2025 and a historically low murder rate. But the recent statistics continue a trend of declining crime in recent years, and criminologists say there are many possible reasons for the drop.
Kennedy falsely claimed Democrats “closed every church in our country for a year” during the pandemic. Restrictions on religious gatherings were implemented by both parties and typically capped attendance, rather than prohibiting services altogether. Many of those restrictions ended or were made less strict within months.
Trump vowed to end no cash bail, misleadingly saying that under the policy, “Somebody kills somebody and they’re out in the streets two hours later.” In states that have cashless bail policies, that almost never happens.
Vance made the dubious claim that U.S. citizens account for all of the job growth during the current administration. Experts told us last year that the specific federal employment data supporting that claim are misleading.
Johnson inaccurately claimed that Republicans inherited “record high” inflation from the Biden administration. They didn’t. The annualized inflation rate had declined to 3% when Trump entered office — a lower rate than it is now.
Trump falsely claimed, “I built almost 2,000 miles of [border] wall.” The actual number is about a third of that, and only if including replacement wall rather than new wall in places where there was none before.
Kennedy made the unsupported claim that Democrats “lost 360,000 children,” who he suggested went on to be trafficked. He’s distorting the findings of a 2024 report from the Department of Homeland Security inspector general.
Kennedy misrepresented the available data to suggest that the Trump administration deserves credit for reversing decades of rising obesity rates and declining lifespans. Obesity was already falling before Trump took office, according to one survey, and life expectancy has generally been trending upwards for decades, with the exception of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kennedy falsely said that U.S. has the “sickest children in the history of the world.” Given that long ago it was common for as many as half of all children to die, this is not remotely true. Most countries today also have higher childhood mortality rates than the U.S.
The convention, the first for the Republican Party during the midterms, was held Sept. 9 and 10 in Dallas. For more on the convention, see our story on Trump’s keynote speech on the first night.
Claiming Credit for Crime Decline
Multiple speakers at the convention lauded a drop in violent crime in 2025 — the largest one-year decline in the violent crime and murder rates since the FBI began releasing the nationwide crime estimates in 1936. But they misleadingly framed it as a consequence of Trump taking office last year and wrongly cast it as a turnaround from Biden’s time in office.
Violent crime has been falling for several years, after a spike during the 2020 pandemic, which began in Trump’s first term. Criminologists also say there are many factors affecting the crime drop in 2025 and the exact reasons are unclear, as we’ve explained.
Vance speaks on stage on the second day of the 2026 Republican National Convention on Sept. 10 in Dallas. Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images.
“In America right now, because elections have consequences, you are enjoying the lowest violent crime rate in 126 years,” Johnson said. Vance raised the issue in his remarks, falsely claiming that under Biden’s time in office, the U.S. “became a country where violent crime exploded, unless of course you could afford private security,” and later adding that under Trump: “We’ve seen the largest drop of violent crime in the history of the United States of America because we back the police and throw the bad guys in prison. It’s not rocket science.” Trump similarly said, “And it was just announced, you saw that, that we achieved the lowest level of violent crime in 125 years since the year 1900.”
The violent crime rate, per local law enforcement data collected by the FBI, was 389.2 per 100,000 population in 2020, the last year of Trump’s first term. In Biden’s last year, 2024, it had dropped to 362.9 per 100,000. In 2025, it dropped further, to 327.6. (See Table 1 after downloading the FBI’s 2025 estimations for crime in the U.S.)
The murder rate declined from 5.1 per 100,000 in 2024 to 4.1 last year. It had been 6.6 in 2020.
Johnson’s and Trump’s references to the U.S. achieving the lowest violent crime rate in 126 or 125 years is actually a reference to the murder rate being the lowest since 1900, per a report by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonprofit think tank, which used FBI statistics dating back to 1960 and public health data going back to 1900.
“The homicide drop is historic and crystal clear. But right now, what’s driving it is about as clear as a glass of milk,” Adam Gelb, the president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, said in a statement. “Rates are falling in cities with very different public safety strategies, economic conditions, and political leadership.”
In an interview last month, Gelb told us that there could be some impact on crime from what the administration is doing, but we don’t know what that is yet. He cited many plausible factors affecting crime. “You know the movie ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’?” Gelb asked. “That’s what we’ve got here. And when you have so many, so many things happening at once, it can be extremely hard to disentangle.”
Democrats Didn’t Close ‘Every’ Church ‘for a Year’
Kennedy claimed that Democrats “closed every church in our country for a year” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is false. In March and April 2020, states issued orders or guidelines limiting in-person interactions in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19. Some states did prohibit religious gatherings — as they did with other kinds of mass gatherings — but most had exemptions allowing at least some in-person religious gatherings to continue. These restrictions applied not just to churches but to all places of worship.
According to a Pew Research Center analysis of state stay-at-home orders as of April 24, 2020, religious gatherings were barred entirely in just 10 states, while more than 20 states allowed religious services with size limitations and 15 states allowed religious gatherings of any size.
While most of those 15 states were led by Republicans, a few — including Pennsylvania and Michigan — had Democratic governors at the time. And three of the 10 states that barred religious gatherings of any size at that time had Republican governors — Idaho, Alaska and Vermont.
States also began relaxing those restrictions within months. For example, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy announced that businesses and entities, including churches, could “fully reopen” in late May 2020. An archived version of a New York Times page that tracked state reopening plans shows that, as of July 1, 2020, houses of worship were allowed to be open in all 50 states.
Some states continued to enforcelimits on attendance or implemented risk-based frameworks that tightened or loosened restrictions according to an area’s level of spread. California, for example, barred indoor worship in areas experiencing widespread transmission before the Supreme Court blocked that provision the measure in February 2021. But that doesn’t mean “every church in the country” was closed for an entire year.
We asked HHS about the basis for Kennedy’s claim and haven’t received a response.
Cashless Bail
As he has for years, Trump vowed to end no cash bail, misleadingly saying that under the policy, “Somebody kills somebody and they’re out in the streets two hours later.”
As we have written, some states that require cashless bail have exemptions for violent felonies and murder. And in the states where it is possible for a murder suspect to be freed pending trial without cash bail, per a judge’s discretion, it is exceedingly rare.
Numerous states and cities have passed laws limiting the use of cash bail, though each is a little different, and the laws are constantly being revised. Some states with cashless bail policies still allow cash bail for violent felonies and murder, such as New York. Most include some sort of risk assessment to determine whether someone can be held in jail pending trial.
The move in some states toward cashless bail was prompted by those who argued cash bail unfairly punishes those who can’t afford to pay it, leaving them to await trial in jail. Opponents have criticized the laws as soft-on-crime policies that worsens crime.
As we wrote last year, the balance of crime data doesn’t support the idea that crime has worsened as a result of the policies. Violent crime is dropping across the country, including in states that limit the use of cash bail.
When we looked into this issue in 2025, we found just one instance of a defendant facing murder charges being released without bail in any of the handful of states that have enacted some form of cashless bail. In 2024, a Rockford, Illinois, judge released from jail a man accused of first-degree murder pending his trial. The judge said she had concerns about the case and the evidence against the man.
“In Illinois, every case has the discretion of the judge on whether or not to release the accused,” David Stovall, a faculty member in the Department of Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois Chicago, told us in 2025. The idea that accused murders are routinely released without cash bail is “a misconception that’s rampant unfortunately.”
Kellen Funk, a legal historian and law professor at Columbia Law School, told us in 2024 that states that limit cash bail often “replace cash bail with judicial discretion,” which gives judges the option to detain defendants until trial, release them with “nonfinancial conditions” such as drug testing and a curfew, or release them without conditions except a requirement to appear in court.
For “felony homicide,” he said, “the law might recommend detention or set a presumption in favor of it, and in most cases in practice judges are inclined to order detention when the charges involve violent felonies.”
A Problematic Employment Comparison
Vance repeated a dubious Trump administration claim about American citizens — rather than “illegal aliens” — accounting for all of the job growth during Trump’s second term.
“Under Donald Trump’s leadership, we’ve created 1 million new jobs,” the vice president said. “And unlike the last administration, where most of the job growth went to illegal aliens, 100% of the job growth in the United States of America is going to American citizens, which is exactly where it belongs.”
Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that employment for the native-born population in the U.S. increased by more than 1.3 million from January 2025 to August 2026. In that same period, employment for the foreign-born population decreased by about 994,000.
To be clear, the foreign-born population is not just “illegal aliens.” It includes “legally-admitted immigrants,” some of whom may have since become citizens, “refugees, temporary residents such as students and temporary workers, and undocumented immigrants,” BLS says.
In addition, under the Biden administration, the latest BLS data show that native-born employment increased by about 7.5 million, more than the roughly 6.5 million increase in foreign-born employment.
But multipleeconomists and labor experts have said that particular BLS employment data – which is based in part on its Current Population Survey, or CPS, a monthly survey of 60,000 households conducted by the Census Bureau and BLS – should not be used for comparisons like the one Vance made.
Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former undersecretary for economic affairs at the Department of Commerce during the Biden administration, told us in a 2025 interview that with the CPS, the foreign-born and native-born population add up to a predetermined Census Bureau forecast that is done a year in advance. “So, a big decline in the reported foreign-born population” based on the survey “is going to be offset by a reported increase in the native-born population.” He wrote in an August 2025 piece that in the unlikely event that the entire foreign-born population in the U.S. disappeared, the CPS would automatically report that the native-born population increased by millions of people to equal the predetermined Census population estimate.
And, as another economist noted, when the estimated native-born population increases, so does the estimated number of U.S.-born workers. BLS data show that the native-born population has increased by almost 4.7 million since Trump took office, while the foreign-born population in that time has decreased by about 1.9 million. Kolko and other experts said the estimated increase in the native-born population is not realistic or plausible, and suggests the estimates are likely influenced by an increase in foreign-born residents not responding to the household survey or providing inaccurate information to administrators, meaning they said they were born in the U.S. instead of another country.
In his August 2025 piece, Kolko wrote that it’s best to check the unemployment rate for the native- and foreign-born populations. “Ignore the levels of population and employment: they mislead,” he said.
BLS data show that the unemployment rate for the native-born population has increased from 4.3% in January 2025 to 4.6% as of last month. On the other hand, the unemployment rate for the foreign-born population over that period went down from 4.6% to 3.4%.
Johnson’s Deceptive Inflation Tale
In spinning an economic narrative complimentary of Trump, House Speaker Johnson omitted key details, making it seem like Trump had inherited very high inflation when he hadn’t.
Accurately noting that inflation was just 1.4% at the end of Trump’s first term, Johnson proceeded to inaccurately claim that Biden handed Trump back a “total disaster.”
“Joe Biden came in and he reversed the policies and he brought us to a 40-year high of 9.1% inflation,” Johnson said. “So the very moment that Republicans were put back in charge, we started working around the clock to help you and your family — to make life more affordable, and to do everything within our power to bring down the cost of living for everyone in this country. And we’ve succeeded in so many ways. But it takes more than just 20 months to fix the total disaster that we were handed. And to turn the ship of state around.”
This distorts how inflation changed over time. Inflation did hit a high of 9.1% under Biden, but that was for the 12 months ending in June 2022. By the time Trump was back in office, inflation had cooled to a 3.0% annual rate, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. Under Trump, inflation has risen slightly. As of August, inflation for the past 12 months is at 3.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
It’s worth noting that Trump’s low inflation in 2020 and Biden’s very high inflation in the summer of 2022 were both partly due to the unique circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. Very low inflation in 2020 — below the Federal Reserve’s 2% benchmark — was driven by pandemic-related decreases in the prices of travel-related and in-person goods and services, such as gas, airline tickets and hotels. As we’ve reported previously, some of Biden’s high inflation could be ascribed to his stimulus policies, but the root of the problem was the unprecedented circumstances created by the pandemic. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the time also pushed up gas prices.
Experts have said not providing the stimulus could have hindered the post-pandemic recovery.
Just before his selective economic history, Johnson also made the false claim outright. “While Republicans inherited from the Biden administration record high inflation and prices,” he said, “we’ve been working every single day around the clock to bring policies to bring down those costs.”
Border Wall
On night one of the convention, Trump claimed his administration has “built over 1,400 miles of wall right on your Texas border.” On night two, Trump said, “I built almost 2,000 miles of wall.” Both numbers are wildly exaggerated.
A total of 458 miles of “border wall system” was built during the first Trump administration, according to a Customs and Border Protection status report on Jan. 22, 2021. Most of that, 373 miles of it, was replacement for primary or secondary fencing that was dilapidated or outdated. In addition, 52 miles of new primary wall and 33 miles of secondary wall were built in locations where there were no barriers before.
According to data from CBP as of Sept. 9, another 216 miles of wall have been constructed in Trump’s second term. About 72 miles of that is new primary wall in locations where there were no barriers before.
The construction is largely funded by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by Trump in July 2025, which allocated $46.5 billion for border wall.
In any case, to date, combining Trump’s first term and second term so far, the Trump administration has built 124 miles of border wall where none existed before. And counting all border wall construction, including replacement wall and secondary walls, a total of 674 miles of wall has been built. As we have written, that is substantial, but it’s about a third of the number Trump claimed.
Another 299 miles of new primary wall are under construction, CBP reported, and 255 miles are in the design phase.
The land border itself is 1,954 miles long, according to the US-Mexico International Boundary and Water Commission. With the new fencing constructed under Trump, there are now about 778 miles of barriers, about 40% of the total southwest border.
Misleading Claim of ‘Lost’ Children
Kennedy, while criticizing Democrats, said, “They somehow lost 360,000 children, and they turned our federal government into the biggest child trafficking operation in world history.” But, as we’ve written, it’s a distortion to claim the children were “lost,” or that only Democrats were responsible for what actually happened.
In an August 2024 report, the Department of Homeland Security inspector general said about 323,000 unaccompanied minors who illegally entered the U.S. had not shown up for immigration court between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, or had not received a summons to appear in court. That time frame includes periods during the Biden administration and Trump’s first administration.
Furthermore, the report did not describe the minors as “lost.” The report said more than 32,000 children did not show up for their immigration court hearings in that period, and that, as of May 2024, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had not issued a Notice to Appear in court – which goes out at the start of removal proceedings – to more than 291,000 minors.
The report said not sending the notices makes it difficult for ICE to “monitor the location and status” of the minors and assure they “are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.” But it did not say those things had happened to the children.
ICE responded to the inspector general’s assessment in a letter that was included in the report’s appendix. ICE said notices go out after a child has been released to a sponsor, and that notices can be delayed for several reasons, such as if the child has already applied for asylum or another legal status with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Kennedy Distorts Stats on Obesity, Life Expectancy
Kennedy suggested the Trump administration deserves credit for reversing trends related to diet, obesity and lifespan. But he distorted the available data on obesity and life expectancy, and experts say there’s little evidence to suggest Americans are eating much healthier.
“Today, two years into this administration, Americans are eating more real food,” Kennedy said. “Real food sales were up 8% in 2025. Americans are eating less processed food. Since President Trump took office, obesity is down by 7% after 40 years of increasing. And this is best of all. Preliminary data that I received two days ago from CDC indicates that we have now reversed a 30-year decline in longevity.”
Kennedy has repeatedly boasted about a decline in obesity. On Aug. 13, he said obesity had “dropped, for the first time, 3% in the last year.” Eleven days later, he told an audience that the obesity rate had “dropped in this country, for the first time in 40 years, by about 3%.”
But as we wrote at the time, Kennedy’s numbers don’t hold up.
Surveys from the polling organization Gallup, which are based on self-reported height and weight data, do show obesity declining by about 3 percentage points. But that decline happened over several years, not one, and started around 2022. It has continued under Trump, but not on the scale Kennedy claims. The latest Gallup figures put the decline between 2024 and 2026 at 0.7 percentage points.
If Kennedy was referring to the percent change, rather than percentage point, the numbers are still off. Gallup’s latest figures show the obesity rate declining from 37.5% in 2024 to 36.8% in 2026, a difference of 1.9%. The total change from 2022 to 2026 would be 7.8% — but most of that decline happened before Trump took office.
It’s possible Kennedy has access to some early government data on obesity that haven’t yet been released, but we couldn’t find any publicly available source backing up this claim. We’ve asked HHS but have not received a response.
Kennedy is also wrong about a “30-year decline in longevity.” According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. life expectancy rose from 75.4 years in 1990 to 78.8 years in 2019. It fell in 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, but rebounded to an all-time high of 79 years in 2024.
We asked HHS about the source for this claim as well, but haven’t heard back.
As for Kennedy’s claim that “Americans are eating more real food,” he may be referring to a recent analysis by the bank BNP Paribas finding that, between June 2025 and June 2026, sales of unprocessed or minimally processed foods in certain categories grew 7% faster than sales of ultraprocessed foods in the same categories.
As we’ve explained before, the study measured whether consumers were shifting from more-processed to less-processed products in five specific categories — yogurt, nut butters, frozen meals/vegetables, fruit snacks/candy and cereal/granola. It doesn’t say anything about whether Americans are buying, say, more fresh produce, or spending more or less on ultraprocessed foods outside of those categories. Experts told us there’s little evidence to suggest that Americans are eating healthier diets overall.
Childhood Health
In repeating one of Kennedy’s favorite lines, but with an added twist, the Health and Human Services secretary claimed that “this country pays two to three times what every developing nation in the world pays, and yet we have the sickest children in the history of the world.”
Compared with peer nations, the U.S. does have poor childhood health outcomes and spends a lot on healthcare. But it is an exaggeration to say the U.S. has the sickest children in the world, much less the sickest children in history.
The U.S. has for decades had a relatively high rate of death before age 15 for a high-income nation. That’s according to the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, which is based on comparisons with 11 other high-income nations. Still, childhood deaths have fallen significantly over time in the U.S. and peer nations alike. KFF explained that “childhood deaths in the U.S. have declined since 1980 on a similar trajectory to comparable countries.”
In the global context, the U.S. has relatively low mortality in childhood. In 2024, 0.8% of U.S. children died before age 15, according to data from the United Nations compiled by Our World in Data. This is slightly higher than the rate of 0.6% among high-income nations overall, but lower than the rate of 1.6% for upper-middle-income countries, 5.2% for lower-middle-income countries or 7.7% for low-income countries.
Again, this is an improvement compared with the historical data. In 1950, 4.3% of children in the U.S. died before age 15. And long ago, of course, children died far more regularly. Historical estimates of child mortality, compiled by Our World in Data, show that roughly half of all children died in many societies across time, including as recently as several hundred years ago in Europe. Historically, many deaths were due to poor nutrition, infectious diseases or a lack of sanitation. Today, many of those infectious diseases are preventable with vaccines.
As for the claim that the U.S. pays “two to three times what every developing nation in the world pays” for healthcare, it is possible Kennedy meant to compare the U.S. to other developed countries. The U.S. does spend the most per capita on healthcare among high-income countries, according to the most recent data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Americans pay around 2.5 times more per capita than the average.But it’s not the case that the U.S. pays that much more than each and every country. In the case of Switzerland, for example, the U.S. pays just 1.5 times more per capita.
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102.
Might be a stupid question but is this too much water being kicked up to ride in? I’ve been getting caught in the rain when heading to class recently and I know the boards are water resistant but how resistant are they?
Joe diGenova led investigation focused on intelligence assessment that Russia interfered in 2016 election
A longtime ally of Donald Trump resigned from his post leading a Department of Justice investigation into whether former law enforcement and intelligence officials conspired against the Republican president.
“Sometimes people want things done faster and that’s all you can do,” Joe diGenova told the Guardian on Thursday. He appeared to be referring to concerns among other Trump loyalists that the president’s retribution cases were not moving quickly enough.
(The Center Square) – Under a new proposal in the Illinois legislature, $25 million in state taxpayer-funded grants would be used for barbers, nail technicians and other professionals to promote voter registration and civic engagement.
Teen was rescued from a capsized fishing vessel on 10 September, days after the boat overturned and his older brother and cousin drowned. The group had last been seen been leaving Alaska's St Lawrence Island in an 18ft fishing vessel on 4 September, and were expected back early on Sunday but failed to return, the coast guard said in a statement
Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: A bipartisan pair of American politicians is telling Britain's most secretive court to stop hiding its handling of Apple's legal fight against a government demand to break into its customers' encrypted data, warning that Whitehall's taste for secrecy is 'needlessly' straining relations between the two allies. The letter (PDF), shared with the Guardian ahead of being sent to the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) on Friday, is signed by the Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and the Republican congressman Warren Davidson of Ohio.
The row dates back to January 2025, when the Home Office served Apple with a technical capability notice under the Investigatory Powers Act, which requires companies to assist law enforcement in providing evidence. The UK government demanded that Apple provide a mechanism to access encrypted iCloud backups worldwide, a call the company met by withdrawing its Advanced Data Protection encryption feature from UK users the following month. Apple's challenge to that order at the IPT was later thrown out after the Home Office withdrew the original notice and issued a narrower one targeting only British users' data. "It is wholly inappropriate for a foreign executive body to attempt to dictate the distribution of powers within the US government, nor should it be permitted to use secrecy directives under the Investigatory Powers Act to frustrate Article I powers under the US Constitution," the pair wrote.
Wyden and Davidson write that Congress "is not only a co-equal branch of government, it is the First Branch," and argue that no government can be allowed to place "its demands beyond the reach of legislative inquiry."
"The UK government," they write, "cannot champion legislative oversight at home while using administrative gag orders to kneecap the constitutional authority of the US Congress."
North Carolina U.S. Senate candidate Roy Cooper told MSNOW that Republican elections officials in his state “removed” an early-voting site from the campus of a historically Black university — a claim that omits context about past polling sites at the school.
Cooper is the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-NC, who isn’t seeking reelection. Cooper faces Republican Michael Whatley in a race that political analysts believe could help determine party control of the U.S. Senate. Green Party candidate Michael Dublin and Libertarian Shannon Bray are also running for the seat.
In a recent interview with MSNOW, Cooper said North Carolina elections officials are restricting voting across the state.
“A lot of people in North Carolina, particularly on college campuses, are having an ‘I’ll show you’ attitude. ‘You’re not going to take our vote away. We’ll show you,’” Cooper said in a clip that his campaign posted to social media on Aug. 26.
Roy on midterm voting restrictions: I think you’re seeing a lot of people in North Carolina, particularly on college campuses, are having an “I’ll show you” attitude. “You’re not going to take our vote away. We’ll show you.”
“I went to North Carolina A&T State University, the largest HBCU in North Carolina. They removed that ballot box from their campus, but the students are marching to the nearest polling place and they’re spreading the word that it’s really important for them to get out and vote in this election because our country needs a course correction,” he said.
Did officials really “remove” a polling site from North Carolina A&T’s campus?
Not exactly.
The university had an early-voting site in 2024 and isn’t hosting one this year. So for juniors and seniors who remember being able to vote on campus two years ago, it could feel like they’ve lost a voting site.
However, Cooper omitted key context: The campus has never hosted an early-voting site in a midterm election like the 2026 contest — and it wasn’t slated to have one this year, so his use of the word “remove” could be misleading.
How early voting sites are chosen
In North Carolina, the state’s 100 county elections boards have the first say in setting early-voting site locations. If a county’s five-member board votes unanimously to adopt an early voting plan, that plan is set for the election.
If a county board’s decision isn’t unanimous, then the North Carolina State Board of Elections must make the final decision on how the county should handle early voting. This year, 80 counties adopted plans unanimously and 20 counties couldn’t reach unanimity.
Every county elections board, as well as the state board, has a Republican majority due to a 2024 law taking power away from Democratic Gov. Josh Stein and shifting it to the GOP instead. In those 20 disputed counties, Democrats opposed Republicans’ proposals to cut college campus voting access, to eliminate polling places in areas with large Black populations, or to close the polls on days that data shows Black voters tend to favor.
Guilford County — home to North Carolina A&T State University, the largest public and four-year HBCU in the nation — was among the counties that needed the state elections board to approve its final early-voting plan due to a partisan dispute.
The Republicans on Guilford’s elections board chose not to include an early voting site on North Carolina A&T’s campus, while the Democrats advocated for adding a site there.
During an Aug. 20 hearing, the state elections board approved an early voting plan for Guilford County that didn’t include a site at any of the local colleges or universities.
Critics of the county’s early voting plan say the lack of an early voting site unfairly targets young Black voters, who overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates. Critics allege that the changes are intended to benefit Republicans in a swing state where many races are decided by close margins.
“This is calculated,” NCA&T student Olu Rouse told WRAL in an interview earlier this year. “This is a strategy, and it’s actively trying to suppress our votes.”
History of the site
Guilford County has never held an early voting site at North Carolina A&T or any college campus during a midterm election, said Charlie Collicutt, Guilford’s elections director. Collicutt provided PolitiFact with data showing Guilford County’s use of college campuses for early voting sites through the years.
Guilford County first opened an early voting site at North Carolina A&T during the 2004 presidential election, and added UNG-Greensboro as an early voting site in 2012. The county has utilized both North Carolina A&T and UNC-Greensboro during each presidential election since 2012, Collicutt said.
Asked about Cooper’s comments, Collicutt said: “‘Remove’ isn’t the right word. Maybe it’s semantics, but ‘not chosen’ is more accurate.”
In a statement to PolitiFact, the Cooper campaign noted that college students say they need the sites on campus, because of scheduling conflicts or a lack of transportation options. A North Carolina A&T student was part of an unsuccessfullawsuit that sought to secure early voting sites at three college campuses for North Carolina’s March primary elections.
More broadly, Democrats have accused the GOP-majority elections boards of attempting to suppress Black voters by limiting poll access, particularly by eliminating early voting opportunities on Sundays in some counties. Republicans who support those changes say it helps county boards that struggle to staff early-voting sites on weekends. The state is offering more total hours of early voting on the whole.
“Roy believes voting is a fundamental right and that efforts that make it harder to vote are wrong,” Cooper’s campaign told PolitiFact in a statement, adding: “The newly reconstituted and Republican-dominated State Board of Elections has waged a campaign to silence North Carolinians at the ballot box but Roy will continue fighting to protect the right to vote as our next Senator.”
Our ruling
Cooper said North Carolina election officials “removed” an early voting site from North Carolina A&T State University.
The elections director for North Carolina A&T’s county said “removed” is not the right word.
The historically Black university had an early voting site for the 2024 general election and will not host one during this year’s midterm elections. However, county election officials say that’s not unusual: Colleges and universities in Guilford County have never hosted early voting sites during midterms.
Cooper’s statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.
Early voting for Delaware’s Sept. 15 primary continues through Sunday, Sept. 13, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., at sites that vary by county.
There is no voting on Monday, Sept. 14. Sunday is the last day to vote early before Election Day.
Election Day is Tuesday, Sept. 15. Polls open at 7 a.m. and close at 8 p.m.
Voters can find their early voting site or Election Day polling place through the state’s voter website at ivote.de.gov.
As of Friday afternoon, more than 30,800 Delaware voters had cast a ballot through early voting or absentee methods, according to the Delaware Department of Elections.
For a full list of who is running this primary (including races for U.S. Senate, U.S. House, attorney general and state treasurer, along with New Castle County Council) see Delaware LIVE’s Sept. 15 Primary Voters’ Guide.
@puzz360 Man driving 2500mi is no small feat! But well worth it if you guys got to some extra places like lake Balaton. Weather this year was super hot there all summer.. bouncing between 30C and 45C.. so no wonder the water temperature felt like in a thermal bath 😂
On that note I really want to drive down with my onewheel and go around Budapest on all the routes/trails where I used to mountain bike. One day!
Hey yall, I haven’t used my Onewheel GT in months and I go to start it on Apex mode, then this happens. The wheel jumps to a certain position, maybe to balance itself, then it acts normal. Has anyone encountered this or have a fix for it? The problem still persists but not as much in other modes like high line. Thanks refer to video.
An ad from Florida’s Republican gubernatorial nominee Rep. Byron Donalds says his opponent, Democrat David Jolly, wants to raise taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security benefits.
The ad — sponsored by Friends of Byron Donalds, the political action committee affiliated with Donalds’ campaign — opens with a woman cleaning tables.
“You wait tables to make ends meet, and David Jolly wants to tax you more for it,” the narrator says. “You work overtime, and David Jolly wants to tax you more for it. You finally retire on Social Security, and David Jolly wants to tax you more for it.”
“David Jolly wants more taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security. Liberal David Jolly, Florida just can’t afford more of him,” the narrator said.
Donalds shared the ad on socialmedia Aug. 24, promoting his own record, saying he voted in Congress for no tax on tips, overtime and Social Security. He said Jolly opposed the legislation.
Donalds is referring to a 2025 federal bill, but Jolly wasn’t serving in Congress to vote on it. Jolly spoke against the legislation because of its cuts to Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and the tax breaks it gave to corporations and billionaires.
Jolly isn’t advocating for tax increases on Social Security or wages. He says it’s fair to tax wages, but he’s open to tax breaks for some tipped income.
There’s also one key thing to know about Donalds’ attack: A Florida governor doesn’t have authority over such taxes, because the state doesn’t tax income.
PolitiFact contacted Donalds’ campaign for comment but did not receive a reply. In an emailed press release about the ad, the PAC cited Jolly’s July 2025 appearance on MSNBC as evidence he opposed “tax cuts for working families and seniors.”
In the interview, Jolly discussed some of the problems he had with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act; he didn’t mention the provisions that cut taxes for older Americans, tips or overtime.
“What Republicans just said is, listen: if you need lower utilities, sorry, we’re going to disrupt that. If you need access to food security, sorry, we’re going to disrupt that. If you get your healthcare through Medicaid or the ACA, sorry, we’re about to disrupt that. We’re about to make your life more expensive,” Jolly said.
What Jolly has said about Social Security and income taxes
In Congress, Donalds supported the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which includes temporary tax cuts for many older Americans and on certain overtime work and tipped wages. Those are set to expire in 2028 unless renewed by Congress.
Jolly, a former Republican, served in the House from 2014 to 2017. Had he been in Congress at the time the bill was considered, Jolly said in a response to Donalds on X, “I probably wouldn’t have supported the Donalds-Trump tax bill because of the amount of grift, graft and raw corruption in it for the White House, for Byron’s donors, and for his own self-enrichment.”
Jolly wrote in response to Donalds’ ad that he doesn’t support taxing Social Security and thinks it is “fair to tax wages however they’re earned, but would support relief for tips above the standard wage rate.”
This means he’s open to tax breaks on tipped earnings above the standard minimum wage — whether that’s the federal $7.25 hourly minimum wage, or Florida’s current $14 minimum wage — that non-tipped employees earn.
We found no instances of Jolly calling for taxing Social Security, or any comments before Donalds’ ad was released about taxing overtime and tipped wages. Legislation to eliminate taxes on tips or overtime was not brought to a vote during his tenure in Congress.
Our ruling
A Donalds ad said Jolly“wants more taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security.”
The ad refers to Jolly’s opposition to Republicans’ federal tax and spending law, which included temporary breaks for tips, overtime and many older Americans. Jolly wasn’t in Congress when the bill passed; he spoke against it because of its cuts to Medicaid and SNAP and tax breaks for large corporations.
Jolly has said he doesn’t support taxing Social Security. He says wages should be taxed no matter how they’re earned, but he is open to a tax cut on tips that push worker’s earnings above the standard wage that non-tipped employees earn.
What does this have to do with the governor’s race? Not much. Florida has no state income tax and, as governor, Jolly would not have the authority to impose or raise taxes on tips, overtime or Social Security. Floridians pay those taxes to the federal government. Jolly has not said he wants Congress to raise taxes.
A federal court is declaring that the energy department exceeded its authority when it forced a Michigan power plant to stay open past its scheduled retirement date
In a defeat for the Trump administration, a federal court on Friday ruled that the energy department exceeded its authority when it forced a Michigan coal-fired power plant to stay open past its scheduled retirement date last year.
Energy secretary Chris Wright had said the 64-year-old JH Campbell Generating Plant was needed to ensure reliable electricity in the region, and he used emergency powers to keep it operating. Environmental groups and three states – Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota – went to court to try to overturn orders keeping the plant online.
The 25th anniversary of 9/11, Russian strikes in Kyiv, wildfires in Indonesia and Sabalenka at the US Open – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists
Warning: this gallery contains images some readers may find distressing
More than 15,000 theater lovers pour into the Roman Theatre of Verulamium every summer for OVO's annual Roman Theatre Open Air Festival. Built in the year 140AD as part of the Roman city of Verulamium, now St Albans, OVO’s stage…
Outbreak was linked to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms, which infected 12,882 people and led to two deaths
The US’s largest recorded multi-state outbreak of sickness caused by the cyclospora parasite has ended, federal health officials announced on Friday.
The record outbreak of cyclosporiasis was linked to processed iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms in central Mexico, which infected 12,883 people across 21 states and led to 570 hospitalizations and two deaths.
Chad Pecknold is a theology professor at Catholic University who has drawn attention for supporting President Donald Trump on immigration enforcement and the Iran war.
UK employment tribunal examines whether Rockstar Games unlawfully fired 31 staff for trade union activity
A worker fired by the makers of Grand Theft Auto has said he believed employees were put on a “watch list” after signing a petition about remote working.
Dayne Oram told an employment tribunal in Glasgow examining whether Rockstar Games unlawfully fired 31 employees for trade union activity on Friday that he thought the company started keeping an eye on a group of workers after the petition was sent to leadership in 2023.
The rain poured and the United States roared. Hope had cascaded through the European contingent at this Solheim Cup during Friday afternoon until the sort of fightback that endorsed the sense that, come Sunday evening, the US will have won this trophy in a foreign land for the first time since 2015. This compelling day concluded with the scores level at 4-4. For Europe, it had promised to be so much better.
After a morning session that closed all square at 2-2, Europe surged ahead in three fourball matches. This felt like validation for Anna Nordqvist, the home captain. She had opted not to deploy any of the four players who returned two foursomes points – Maja Stark, Linn Grant, Leona Maguire and Esther Henseleit – after lunch.
Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth used remarks at the memorial ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11 to defend the US-Israel war on Iran – and suggest the controversial conflict was part of the legacy of the worst terrorist attack in US history.
While such ceremonies on September 11 typically focus on the victims of the 2001 attacks, the US president and his defense secretary each pointed to the war they launched on Iran more than six months ago, with no end in sight.
Stephen Aarons said he tried to use ChatGPT to create a ‘bulletproof summary’ during a murder conviction appeal
A defense lawyer appealing his client’s murder conviction submitted a legal brief containing made-up police testimony and witnesses fabricated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, New Mexico’s highest court said.
The New Mexico supreme court on Wednesday fined the attorney, Stephen Aarons, and held him in contempt for failing to verify the accuracy of the court filing, which Aarons said he prepared with help from the artificial intelligence (AI) application.
GST founder Michael Johnson said he ‘got the athletes paid’
Money stuck in escrow account after bankruptcy filing
Grand Slam Track athletes have still only received 50% of their earnings nearly 15 months on from the collapse of Michael Johnson’s ill-fated venture.
Many of the Grand Slam stars are at the Ultimate Championships in Budapest, where they are competing for a $10m (£7.4m) prize fund, the richest in the sport’s history, with first prizes of $150,000 (£111,000) for individual events.
Bloomberg reports (paywalled) that Sam Altman told OpenAI employees the company is open to slowing the pace of AI development alongside other leading labs as concerns grow over increasingly capable systems and recent incidents in which models escaped human control. OpenAI has already paused development once this year for security work and is now pushing for mandatory U.S. AI safety requirements. Anthropic has also signaled interest in coordinating on the pace of new releases. Here are some of the details Bloomberg reported, as summarized by Reuters:
- Altman told employees in a company-wide meeting that the ChatGPT maker could pace development alongside other AI labs, but some may not agree, the report added.
- Safety warnings from AI researchers this week, along with several recent incidents where AI models from developers including OpenAI escaped human control, have prompted alarm and calls for tighter safety regulations.
- Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher, publicly accused the companies earlier this week of racing toward AI advancements without acting responsibly.
- An Anthropic spokesperson said on Thursday said that the company is interested in working with the AI industry on the pace of releasing new AI tools.
- OpenAI said in July that AI acceleration for frontier model development may be so high that the world will "need to pace the rate of AI advancement" at some point in the future.
- In August, OpenAI paused much of its model development for two weeks to bolster its defenses after its AI agents escaped containment and hacked open-source platform Hugging Face.
- OpenAI said on Wednesday that it was pushing for mandatory national AI safety requirements in the United States, citing concerns that advanced AI systems could accelerate its own development.
DUP education minister accused of dragging feet before revising guidelines on uniform
Schools in Northern Ireland must give girls the choice to wear trousers as part of their uniforms as well as for PE and games, according to revised guidelines.
From next year schools would no longer be able to prohibit female pupils from wearing trousers, Paul Givan, the country’s education minister, said on Friday. “Today, I am taking that decision, that will be formally communicated, schools will be hearing from me,” he told the BBC.
Spain’s Carlota Ciganda made an amazing par at 18 to tie her match as day one ended all square after both foursomes and fourballs were tied 2-2
Europe do indeed escape from their travails on 1 with a half. Alison Lee leaves her birdie putt short, and Nanna Koertz Madsen tidies up. But the USA strike back on 2, Nelly Korda wedging close with her approach on the par five, and Lottie Woad can’t save the day with her 15-foot right-to-left putt. All square in the opening two matches.
Corpuz/Korda A/S Hull/Woad (2)
Koerstz Madsen/Boutier A/S Coughlin/Al. Lee (1)
Sweden has ordered more Britons, including vulnerable people, to leave post-Brexit than any other EU country
He arrived with nothing other than the clothes he wore that morning. Hours later he was banged up in a detention centre close to a Stockholm airport to await deportation.
Charles, a former business director from Cambridge, who did not want his full name published, moved to Sweden in 2017 to be with his Swedish wife, Lily, and applied to remain after Brexit, before the deadline of December 2021.
Investors believe the Fed will raise borrowing costs as it works to tame inflation, which has risen a full percentage point since the Iran war started.
25 years on from the terror attacks that killed almost 3,000 people in New York City, Washington DC and Pennsylvania, the dark legacy of September 11 continues to unfold in the US and across the world. A throughline can be drawn from that day in 2001 to much of the geopolitics and conflicts of today.
Annie Kelly speaks to the Guardian’s international security correspondent, Jason Burke, about how 9/11 changed the world
Teen and his brother and cousin, who both drowned, were fishing off Alaska’s St Lawrence Island when boat capsized
A teenaged boy was rescued having clung to a capsized fishing vessel in the Bering Sea for days after the boat overturned and his older brother and cousin drowned.
The group had last been seen been leaving Alaska’s St Lawrence Island in an 18ft fishing vessel on Friday, and were expected back early on Sunday but failed to return, the coast guard said in a statement. Authorities began their search on Sunday evening, and an aircrew found the sole survivor on top of the overturned vessel on Monday afternoon.
Proceeds are in a UK account amid a dispute about how the money should be used and a separate criminal investigation
Funds from Roman Abramovich’s sale of Chelsea FC have earned at least £175m in interest while locked in a UK bank account, new accounts show, leading one analyst to describe the company housing the frozen cash as “the most profitable football business in the world”.
Accounts for Fordstam, the company through which the billionaire Russian oligarch owned Chelsea, show that the proceeds of the sale completed in May 2022 have risen from £2.3bn to nearly £2.5bn.
The UK government has rejected proposals for an emergency AI "kill switch," arguing that blocking access to dangerous models inside Britain would do little if the same systems remained available or were developed elsewhere. The BBC reports: The proposal to create a legal mechanism for the UK to switch off an AI model in an emergency has been brought to Parliament by lords and MPs in recent weeks as fears grow about the threat the tech poses. But the Cabinet Office - the part of government which leads on AI safety - said the UK "cannot simply turn AI off".
"Blocking access to models in the UK would not prevent them being developed or misused elsewhere," a spokesperson told BBC News. The government's opposition to the legislation does not prevent it from progressing through parliament, but makes it unlikely it will become law. "Switching off access to an AI model in an emergency will do little to protect you," said former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajilo. "You're still going to be steamrolled by the super intelligences created in the US."
Keeping people in charge means little if supercomputers determine the evidence, choices and time on which their decisions depend
If there were a 10% chance that AI could wipe out humanity, no responsible government would leave its development to companies racing to build it. Yet until recently, that seemed to be the case. The warning was all the more ominous because it was made by a researcher at Anthropic, the trillion-dollar AI company behind the Claude chatbot. The dangers of AI-enabled pandemics or attacks on nuclear systems are real. Countries need not agree on democracy or trade policy to accept this.
The US and China will hold, reportedly, their first bilateral AI-safety talks before a planned White House summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. Despite their tech rivalry, neither Washington nor Beijing can make the most advanced AI safe on their own. A US-China settlement won’t be able to say how AI works everywhere. Countries deploying AI must help write the global rulebook. The odds on an extinction event are shortening. This week Anthropic said that it identified five cases in which attempts were made using its models to support biological weapons development. It banned the accounts. In one case, a platform sent requests rejected by Claude to a rival with weaker safeguards. AI safety, clearly, cannot be that of the least responsible model.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Report says widespread autonomous vehicle adoption would put hundreds of thousands of private hire jobs at risk
Taxes on self-driving cars should be introduced now in the UK to offset the rise in congestion and threats to jobs they pose, a thinktank has urged.
The first robotaxis on London’s streets only started this month, but government projections are that up to 40% of cars sold could have self-driving capability by the middle of the next decade.
We are seeking readers who can help us understand how the Trump administration’s sweeping changes to immigration policy are affecting businesses, workers and the economy.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there is no longer a risk of people getting sick with cyclosporiasis from this outbreak and is confident that all related iceberg lettuce is off the market.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has personally pressed President Trump to take military action against the Iran-backed Houthis, sources tell CBS News.
The United States marked the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on Friday, with memorials and remembrance ceremonies taking place across the country to honor the nearly 3,000 people killed.
In New York City, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum’s annual commemoration ceremony began early on Friday morning in lower Manhattan at the site often known as Ground Zero after the destruction of the World Trade Center there on 9/11.
Many are rooting for vocal critic Catherine Connolly to let rip in Dublin meeting, but others hope she holds back
Catherine Connolly, Ireland’s president, once said she abhorred Donald Trump’s policies. In his sole previous comment on Connolly, the US president seemed to think she was a man. Now that they are about to meet, Ireland is holding its breath.
Trump is to fly into Dublin on Saturday morning for a two-day visit centred on golf. But before making it to his beloved greens, protocol obliges him to meet a woman who has given every impression of loathing him.
Nearly one in 6 Americans aged 16 to 29 is neither working nor studying, and that share has been rising. We want your help to understand why. We’re hoping to hear from teens and young adults who fall into this category as well as people close to them.
Nashville, Tennessee — Nashville International Airport is moving closer to becoming Dolly Parton International Airport after the Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority unanimously approved the name change Friday.
The vote marks a major step in a proposal announced after Parton died Aug. 25 at age 80 following a brief battle with cancer. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee and airport officials had already endorsed naming the airport for the country music icon, describing her as one of the state’s most recognizable ambassadors.
Nashville’s Metro Council also unanimously adopted a resolution Sept. 1 supporting the change and asking the airport authority to waive its existing policy requiring honorees to have been deceased for at least two years.
The airport’s BNA code is expected to remain unchanged. Officials have said the renaming process could take six months to a year and require changes to signage, administrative records and Federal Aviation Administration documentation. Earlier estimates placed the cost between $8 million and $10 million.
Parton was born in Sevier County and moved to Nashville shortly after graduating high school, eventually becoming one of the most successful songwriters and performers in country music. Her philanthropic work included the Imagination Library, which has distributed hundreds of millions of books to children worldwide.
The final airport name will be developed with input from Parton’s foundation and representatives, according to state and airport officials.
Over the past quarter-century, the US supreme court has repeatedly failed to protect first amendment rights. We are suffering the consequences
Congress ratified the first amendment in 1791 but the supreme court didn’t breathe life into it until after the first world war, when prosecutions of antiwar protesters led the justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis – and then, fortunately, other justices as well – to realize that US democracy would be undermined, not strengthened, by allowing the government to suppress disfavored political opinions.
Repression during the cold war led the court to better protect the freedom of association, and government efforts to cover up official ineptitude and criminality during the Vietnam war spurred the court to better protect the freedom of the press. It took time, but in each of these instances the court responded to wartime repression by developing new legal doctrine that more robustly protected first amendment freedoms.
ROOTS also emphasizes individualized instruction. With a student-to-teacher ratio of 6-to-1, educators can recognize different learning styles and give children room to progress at their own pace while continuing to challenge and support them.
ROOTS offers four-day school programs as an alternative to traditional education, along with one-day and two-day enrichment options for homeschooling families.
By John Riddle, Contributing Journalist, Delaware LIVE
At ROOTS Farm & Forest School, a garden can become a science lab, caring for an animal can teach responsibility, and a walk through the forest can inspire questions that lead to a day of discovery.
The Delaware nature-based learning community serves children ages 2 to 14 at campuses in Georgetown, Milton, Clayton and Townsend. Its preschool, elementary and middle school programs combine traditional academics with outdoor exploration, project-based learning and practical experiences. A high school program is also planned.
ROOTS offers four-day school programs as an alternative to traditional education, along with one-day and two-day enrichment options for homeschooling families. Students learn math, reading, writing and science, but lessons are often connected to real situations rather than limited to textbooks, worksheets or memorization.
The school’s outdoor classrooms include gardens, food forests, natural play areas and spaces where children help care for animals. Students may also build with natural materials, participate in community service, complete STEAM activities, create art and stories, and work with others to solve problems.
“We learn by doing,” the organization states on its website, identifying one of the four beliefs at the heart of its educational philosophy.
The other three are taking responsibility, staying curious and solving real problems. Together, those principles are intended to help students understand not only what they are learning, but also why it matters and how it can be used outside the classroom.
Five foundational pillars guide the ROOTS curriculum: community, environmental stewardship, homesteading, nature studies and animal husbandry. Rather than treating those areas as isolated subjects, teachers weave them into students’ daily experiences.
A gardening project, for example, can introduce children to plant biology, weather, food systems, mathematics and environmental responsibility. Caring for animals can help students develop patience, empathy and dependability. Collaborative projects can strengthen communication, leadership and problem-solving skills.
ROOTS also emphasizes individualized instruction. With a student-to-teacher ratio of 6-to-1, educators can recognize different learning styles and give children room to progress at their own pace while continuing to challenge and support them.
Programs are designed for neurotypical and neurodivergent students, with teachers working to create an inclusive setting where children feel valued and capable. Auditory, visual, tactile and kinesthetic learning styles are incorporated into the school’s approach.
The school’s leadership has pursued specialized training in nature-based education and outdoor inclusion. Founder and director Talon Holleman has completed the Level 1 Nature-Based Teacher Certification Course through the Association of Nature-Based Education. Holleman and co-founder Travis Holleman are also certified as Forest School Teachers and Directors through the Forest School Teacher Institute.
That training complements the school’s focus on educating the whole child. Along with academic development, ROOTS seeks to nurture resilience, creativity, independence, social and emotional growth, and a lasting connection to the environment. “Our goal isn’t simply to help children succeed in school,” the ROOTS website states. “It’s to help them become capable, compassionate people.”
Families who select ROOTS are also invited into a broader learning community. The organization works with schools, libraries, youth groups, small businesses and other community partners to provide workshops, field trips and hands-on programs. Adults can become involved through volunteer opportunities, gaining the chance to learn alongside the children while supporting the school’s programs.
At a time when many parents are considering alternatives to conventional classrooms, ROOTS offers an educational model grounded in experience, curiosity and connection.
Its mission is straightforward: empower children to care for themselves, their community and their environment. At ROOTS, those lessons begin with children rolling up their sleeves, stepping outside and discovering what they are capable of doing.
A mistrial was declared in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy after jurors could not reach a unanimous decision. One of the jurors shares details on their deliberations in an interview with Gayle King.
Spotlight Delaware deputy editor Karl Baker recently spoke with the three Democrats running to replace longtime Rep. Debra Heffernan in House District 6, which covers the Bellefonte and Edgemoor areas in the northern Wilmington suburbs.
The candidates include Rachel “Rae” Krantz, a software engineer and local advocate; Ed Mulvihill, a liquor store owner-operator; and Ralf Santana, a Marine Corps veteran.
This audio includes excerpts from their conversations prior to the primary election on September 15th.
Rachel “Rae” Krantz
What’s your origin story?
I was born and raised in Virginia, near the Blue Ridge Mountains up the Shenandoah, and they are still, of course, very near and dear to my heart. Yeah. I was raised in a conservative community, actually, with kind of a conservative view of how the government should work and does work and societal things and everything.
And as I grew and moved away from home, met lots of new people, I began to really analyze those beliefs and decide for myself what I wanted my beliefs to be. 2016 was a big wake-up call for me, as it was for many in my generation, that politics had to be a group project.
And so in 2018, I started canvassing for Democratic candidates, and then through that action, I learned about these things called issue campaigns. And I learned about how if you want to get a bill passed, it actually takes a lot of work in the background before getting to the point where it’s being debated on the floor of a committee or of a legislative body.
And so I worked on a bunch of stuff here in Delaware, increasing the minimum wage. I helped with canvassing for that. I met our then State Senator Sarah McBride when I was helping to volunteer on the Paid Family Medical Leave Act and getting stories together for that. And most recently, of course, I was advocating for data center regulations partnering with the canvassing efforts of Sierra Club.
It seems that the data center issue is one of the top priorities for you. Why is that?
As many people are aware, data centers are an immense strain on our electricity grid and on our water supply, and they also include a lot of other negative effects.
There’s a lot coming out now around the noise pollution that they contribute. They absolutely decimate the property values of anyone that these data centers are going up next to because it can be so difficult to live near them. In places where people are on well water, it runs them dry. And there was one really crucial question that came up in the very initial town hall back in August last summer.
And that really tells me that not only is there an obscene lack of transparency with all of these data centers getting built and how all these votes are happening, but also it’s very much a gold rush, if you will. And the billionaire companies that are building these data centers, they don’t care.
And that is the biggest pivot point to me. I very, very much want our mentality to be about longevity and people being able to live healthy, safe, and affordable lives. And building a data center in people’s backyards seems antithetical to that based on all of the data that we have right now, all the research, all the effects that we have seen.
And my perspective is, if these billionaires don’t want it in their backyard next to their mansions and their homes, then why is it OK to put it in our backyard?
I think your arguments are becoming widely adopted across Delaware, including by elected officials, which is somewhat striking because Delaware has historically prided itself on welcoming new businesses and being pro-business, even when a move is controversial among voters.
Would you say you bring that same skepticism to business regulations broadly? Do you think the state should shift from that historical friendliness?
So I think the reason why we are seeing this alignment on the data center issue is because due to Delaware’s tax structure, we are not set up to make money off of a data center being built here in the way that other states like Virginia are set up to make money.
In terms of larger picture on Delaware’s economy, something I would love to see is for Delaware to get really, really innovative in investing into local economies and having just a more robust business environment here in Delaware for people here in Delaware. And I think we can do that.
And while that is understandable, I understand where that desire is coming from. I also want us to be more resilient and not as dependent on any one company, right? And so that’s where my focus is gonna be is on like, yes, can we bring some of these newer industries into Delaware, especially as there’s so much climate science that is developing right now.
I would argue the biggest issue in your district is the Edgemoor Port expansion. Do you support the Edgemoor Port expansion as it is now?
No, I do not. And the reason comes back to the same reason that I am very skeptical and hesitant with data centers, right? How is it going to impact the community overall? And I know there’s a traffic study being done through WILMAPCO right now to try to help the neighborhood of Southbridge recover from the harmful effects that the Port of Wilmington has, I guess, enacted on or caused to happen to that neighborhood.
And I just really want these companies to think about the people first and then the profit second. And why is that too much to ask? And we say, “Oh, because companies have to make profits. That’s who their shareholders are.” And I would argue, what about their stakeholders?
So that tells me you don’t give a damn about the people. And I cannot and I will not support projects by people who just wanna come in and make their money and leave everyone else to handle the consequences.
The last thing I want to touch on is the larger campaign by the political action committee that started during the SB 21 debate. I think its spending now is a continuation of the larger debate over what Delaware should be as a corporate regulator. This group of law firms is supporting your opponent. Can you speak to that spending and to the larger issue of whether you would have supported SB 21?
So the reason why I am upset with SB 21 and the process of how it was passed is because I believe it did harm to our corporate franchise. And right now, our corporate franchise is one-third of our state budget.
Yes, they copied and pasted our law, and yes, their filing fee is three thousand instead of two fifty. However, they don’t have the decades of case law and trust that has been built up. So Delaware is the Gucci bag of corporate franchise laws, and I don’t want Delaware to try to compete with Walmart’s off-brand knockoff, right?
So I am someone who does not take corporate donations, and I’ve made that very clear, and I do not accept corporate PAC support, and I’ve made that very clear. And I think this corporate PAC sees me as someone who cannot be bought, and therefore, they do not want me to win because it would be harder for them to get what they want exactly when they want it and exactly how they want it should I win my seat.
Is there anything that you wanna highlight or emphasize or add?
Sure. I have been having amazing, amazing conversations at the doors. As anyone who’s ever worked on a campaign knows, I’ve been canvassing a lot. And people are so ready for just some creativity in our government.
And I say I want our government to be more proactive. And actually, I credit Spotlight Delaware for letting me know that our aquifers are at risk for sea level rise, and saltwater intrusion, and that terrifies me as someone who enjoys drinking water. I don’t know about the rest of y’all. And so when I talk about being proactive, like I don’t wanna wait like how it took 40 years to do our first tax reassessment, right?
I don’t wanna wait 10 years until the seawater has entered, and now we’re in a panic ’cause now we have to drink bottled water for another decade while we fix it or figure out something else, right? I wanna start working on figuring out that problem now and maybe even working to prevent it from becoming a problem or as big of one.
And so we need people who are not normal politicians. We need people who can think outside the box and push against expectations and challenge norms. And people just really, really want that kind of energy in our state government, and I would love to bring it.
Ed Mulvihill
What’s your origin story?
I’m a fourth-generation small business owner. My family’s been in this district for 90 years. And sometime in college, I kinda was getting this bug that I was like, “You know what?” Like, I had all these other opportunities and career paths, but the one I kept coming back to was I really couldn’t, like, level set not being a part of this family business.
I love our business. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s a fun industry. But I always realized, like, what I loved most about it was we’ve been this kinda community center, in our neighborhood for 90 years, and we found ways to make this a space where neighbors gather, and we have a positive impact on the community.
So we needed a leader and that was an opportunity I was able to step up and be a leader, be the president of our retail association. We started that association and got to advocate in Dover. And we had a lot of success with defending independent small business retailers throughout the state.
But then this opportunity arose with Representative Heffernan retiring, and a few people suggested like, “Hey, why don’t you run?”
And at first my answer was like, “I don’t know that that’s for me.” I’ve always enjoyed working with our elected officials and not just for our industry-related stuff, but for our community at large. And I kind of thought, like, “Leave that to someone else.” But a few folks I talked to who I really respected really encouraged me to think about running.
They said, “Hey, you’re the kind of person we need. We need somebody who’s from the area, who’s a neighbor, who’s a leader.” And I took that seriously, and we thought about it for a while and decided, yeah, I think this is kind of the next step in our service journey for the community.
Was there any particular issue that led you to run?
I hesitate to call it going viral, right? Because it’s Delaware, and there’s limited scope there. But we’re really loud about the property tax reassessment.
I’m a small business owner through and through, and the one thing I can’t stand, and again, this relates directly to some of the lobbying work we’ve done against, like, Total Wine and Costco, is when the big companies get breaks that the little guys don’t, and that is, like, my pet peeve.
The problem is that the underlying data that Tyler Technologies provided was flawed, and we see that now. So when you have these big, massive properties that saw huge, huge, huge assessment increases, which translates to millions of dollars in tax revenue loss, and the state and the county and the schools have to be revenue neutral, so that money has to come from somewhere. So in doing that split rate with underlying data that wasn’t good, it put this unfair burden on small business owners particularly.
Chase is paying a billion dollars less. How does this make sense? And so that was probably one of the issues that caught wind the most, I think. And it was a relatable issue because it has affected small businesses throughout the state. It affected residents throughout the state, and there’s been some work, some good work that’s been done to start to address that, and I think still more work that needs to be done.
I think I can say the biggest issue, at least what I hear from that’s local to your district is Edgemoor. What is your position on the port expansion there?
So that is one of the issues that like, from day one we weren’t super happy about. So in 2017, I think, was when Gulftainer first was announced as taking part in this new terminal, container terminal down in Edgemoor.
We had like over a hundred and fifty people show up because everybody felt the same way we felt like, “We need information about this.” We need to know why this is happening, how it’s happening, and what they’re gonna do to mitigate the impact on residents. And in the years since, we’ve gotten some answers, and we haven’t gotten other answers.
And a lot of people say, “Well, what are you gonna do to stop the port?” And I just give them this honest answer, which is like, “There is very little, like I’m gonna be able to do as a newly elected state representative to stop like this port expansion.” What I can do is make sure that we have a seat at the table, that there’s regular communication between the port operators and the residents, and that when there’s issues, that they’re addressed in a timely manner.
The biggest thing that I am concerned with right now is the truck traffic. There’s DelDOT studies that are out there from 2021 that talk about how this truck traffic is not gonna be supported by the existing infrastructure of I-495 at Edgemoor Road, and so it requires capital improvement.
And so the proposal that I really like from DelDOT is capital improvements to Hay Road that takes the truck traffic out of the Newport, down Hay Road, and into 12th Street, which is a much less residential area. It’s more industrial. And hopefully, that would mitigate a lot of the concerns that people have about the truck traffic.
I’ve been told by people within the sphere of your opponent that you were once registered as a Republican and are now a Democrat. Can you talk about that?
That’s my favorite question. I’ve learned so much about myself that I didn’t know was true. Never was a Republican. I was an independent when I first registered. And at some point, I’m not sure exactly the year, but I did change to Democrat. I think it was 2016. But for me it was I always prided myself on being kind of independently minded and policy over party.
But somewhere along the lines of Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination for president, I realized, like, this probably doesn’t make any sense in a state like ours where we don’t have open primaries. I can’t sit on the sidelines. I would say my voting record and donation record has always been Democratic.
But I do get a little chuckle out of that.
I think it’s also fair to say that you’ve been characterized as the, whatever term you wanna use, establishment, moderate, centrist, Democratic choice. Would you embrace that characterization? Would you reject it? Would you think there’s nuance? How would you respond that?
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s nuance to everything. I think that being a Democrat today is much different than being a Democrat 10 years ago.
I think that when we’re talking about a local election like ours, it really comes down to knowing the person you’re voting for and trusting their judgment and trusting their motives. And that’s the most important thing. We are a progressive state. We have been a progressive state, and we’ve been on the right side of a lot of those issues.
It’s a little tough as our politics becomes further and further divided, I don’t consider myself a moderate. I don’t think that’s the right word for it. I think I’m a Democrat, and I think I wanna fight for the neighbors and community members in our district for the issues that are most important to them.
I want to ask about Delaware’s unique place in corporate America as the preferred domicile.There was a big debate last year over a corporate law change that, among other things, effectively made it harder for shareholders to sue companies. The major law firms that supported it have continued their advocacy more directly with voters, including by supporting your campaign.
What’s your reaction to that spending? More broadly, what’s your approach to policymaking with respect to corporate law?
Yeah. So the support for the campaign was a total surprise. Going in we thought the biggest weakness we were gonna have was fundraising, right?
I said, “Well, how do we combat that? How do we combat, $100,000 of spending?” Which was a projected number that was thrown our way. And the answer was, well, we’re probably not going to. We’re gonna have to just go out there and door knock and get our message out best way we can and raise as much money as we can.
In regards to the corporate law aspect of it, this is a tough one. It’s Delaware, and a third of our revenue comes from that corporate franchise tax. So I understand the necessity to protect that. But I’m also open to like, what other options can we have to become less dependent on it?
It’s important. The problem I have with the opposition’s approach of kinda, hey, big companies don’t matter. But if you lose that, if you lose that third of your revenue, how do you replace it? And I have not heard a plan that makes any remote sense that would cover that gap.
It’s almost all profit. So you can’t take it lightly. You can’t jeopardize that revenue stream because the only way you replace it is through sales tax and increased property taxes. And we just went through the reassessment boondoggle and everybody saw how that went.
That would be nothing compared to what property tax would have to increase to cover this large deficit if these companies left.
Ralf Santana
I think it’s fair to say that of the three candidates, you have had the least public presence.At least I didn’t recognize your name, and I recognized the other two. Can you describe your past?
I’m a native of Philadelphia, and it got pretty bad in Philadelphia. I joined the Marine Corps.
The Marine Corps instilled in me some traits and some characteristics that led me to become as successful as I have become. I did two tours in Iraq. I obviously fought for the country. Now I understand that fighting for the country is kind of passe now and unfortunately, I can’t do anything about that.
I was in the Marine Corps Reserve for six years. I did two tours in that, and a bunch of different classes and things of that nature. Leadership courses, things like that. I enlisted in 2003. And I finally got done in 2009, somewhere around there.
Could you just kinda give us a summary of the last 15 years?
So the last 15 years, it’s been odds and ends. I tried to become a police officer, but the injuries I received in the Marine Corps prevented me from doing that.
I’ve done siding. I’ve done roofing. I’ve done all types of hard labor jobs. And then finally, I realized, “OK, let me put my Marine Corps experience to the test. Let me put it to work.” And I decided to do armed security for different companies around Pennsylvania. And finally, I work at a armed position in Philadelphia at the Social Security building in Philadelphia. And that has been where I’ve been for a while now because I got married, I have kids. You need something stable, you need a rock, you need a foundation. I’m still there. It’s helped me throughout my life. I’m in my neighborhood here where I live.
I spoke to Deb Heffernan after a while, and she was like, “Hey, everybody and their mother’s been calling me about you.” And I’m like, “Hey, I needed this stuff to get done.” I’m very persistent when things need to be done. I’m like, essentially like a dog on a bone. I’m not letting it go.
Met city council people. They all basically know who I am because of annoyances. And my wife was like, “Hey, you got the right amount of persistence, I think, to be an elected official. Like, you should probably try.” And I kinda pitter-pattered around the situation, and then finally I was like, “You know what?
If I’m gonna do it, let’s go, let’s do it now. Let’s do it a 150% full bore. And regardless of the support, I’m just gonna do it, try and make some change, and if I get elected, great. If I don’t, then I’ll keep trying to make things in my community better on my level, and then eventually get some experience and maybe run again and see what happens.”
The Edgemoor Port has caused the most debate in your district. It looks like you oppose the expansion. Is that fair to say?
I oppose it, yes. I oppose it because of the lack of transparency.
There’s not enough information there. It’s almost seemingly like it’s getting pushed through. Like, I haven’t seen any surveys on air quality. I haven’t seen any paperwork or filings of modernization of roads and bridges and highways, and there’s a lot that comes with all of that.
Now mind you, it sounds positive, 6,000 jobs, all this stuff sounds great, but there’s no assurances. There’s a lot of money being thrown around, and the money keeps going up and up and up and up, and no one knows why. They just keep saying, “That’s just what they cost now.”
And it’s just a lot of ambiguity.
I think it’s fair to say that if you are elected, you would presumably be the only legislator to oppose it, at least explicitly. The current representative supports the port expansion.
How do you feel about standing alone on an issue with a big political operation on the other side?
I’ve always been an individual, and I’ve always been one to stand up when others just fall in line.
I don’t want to be in opposition to something that sounds positive, but there needs to be opposition to make sure it’s done right. And I don’t mind being that one. I think conversationally, I think I can get in a room with some people and change some minds. I’m not saying I’m the greatest conversationalist in the world.
I’m not saying I’m a professional at negotiations, but I’ve been known to speak with some people and change their minds, or at least let them see it in a different way. And if I get in and if I get elected, I would love the opportunity to try that.
Would you say you’re more on the establishment Democratic side, the progressive Democratic side, or neither?
I don’t like to be classified as anything. I believe that, like, everybody gets, I guess, titles. Titles, for some reason, the last 20 years, is what it is. You’re either this or you’re this. You’re a radical this or a radical that. I consider myself a Democrat in a sense where I like to be malleable.
I want them to be people friendly and positive for people.
I can’t say I’m one or the other. What I will say is, if the policies help Delawareans and the American people, I’m going to vote for it.
I think everybody agrees that electricity bills are too high, including Republicans, Democrats, progressives and moderates. You were talking about revisiting contracts that the state has. What do you mean by that?
From what I’ve been reading is the state has contracts with Delmarva and/or that whole group. And the group basically says, from what I’ve read, and I’m paraphrasing here. It’s essentially there’s a certain percentage that the company has to make, right?
Right. Yeah. And whatever the company makes or whatever the company decides to fix or upgrades, the state has to reimburse, right?
What I wanna do is I’d like to maybe make a position that makes sure that these things are getting done, that makes sure they need to get done, make sure that they get done in a timely and economic fashion.
Do you think the state should say yes less often? Is that what I’m hearing?
I think that the state should definitely review. Like I said, I’m for the people. Like I said, I think it’s in my bio, but the national average for people getting raises and salaries is, like, four percent, maybe five in some places.
And every year or every time they get a rate increase, that percentage is going up more than what the people are making in salary bumps and increases. And it doesn’t seem like it would last. The American people and the homeowners are gonna be drowning eventually if that continues to happen.
So I understand, like I said, capitalism, money, business. All I wanna do is maybe fix the rates a little bit, lower them a little bit more. Understand that people don’t make raises as much as other companies think we do, like the regular people do. It’s a struggle out here for tons of families.
Every year, every so often your bills go up and taxes go up, and it’s almost like you’re getting hit from all sides. And if we can alleviate some of those hits at least a little bit, I think it’ll be a positive force for homeowners and people out here with electricity.
Is there anything else you want to note?
I just wanna say that the type of leader I want to be is the leader that listens, is transparent and does what the voters need me to do. I believe that a lot of elected officials are kind of going rogue and doing what they want instead of what the people want them to do, and I don’t want to be that type of leader.
The flyer for Lefty’s Alley and Eats NFL Launch Kickoff Party on Sunday, September 13. Photo Credit: Lefty’s Alley and Eats.
Lefty’s Alley and Eats is welcoming in the new NFL season with NFL Kickoff Launch Parties at its Lewes and Newark locations with raffles to support local nonprofit organizations.
Lefty’s Alley and Eats will celebrate the start of a new NFL season with NFL Kickoff Launch Parties at its Lewes and Newark locations on Sunday, September 13, according to a company press release sent on September 9. The launch parties will feature food and drink specials throughout the day, raffles and giveaways in addition to the football action.
Raffle tickets will cost $5 and the winners will be announced at halftime of the 1:00 p.m. slate of games. All raffle proceeds will be donated to two local nonprofits. Each Lefty’s location will match the total amount raised on site and make additional donations to each locations respective organization.
The Lewes location will be donating to Home of the Brave which is an organization based in Milford, Delaware, trying to reduce homelessness for Military Veterans, according to the organization’s website. The Newark location — the company’s newest location — will support Special Olympics Delaware which provides sporting opportunities for children and adults with intellectual disabilities.
(To learn more about Lefty’s Newark location click here.)
“Football season is always a big part of the experience at Lefty’s, but we wanted this year’s kickoff to be about more than just watching the games,” Lefty’s Alley and Eats founder and owner, DJ Hill, said via the press release. “It’s an opportunity for our guests, our team and Lefty’s to come together, have some fun and make a meaningful contribution to organizations doing incredible work right here in our communities.”
Representatives from each nonprofit organization are expected to be in attendance at the respective locations to share more about their organization and the work being done in the community.
Lefty’s launch parties are the start of its gameday schedule for the 2026-2027 NFL season.
Starting on September 20, Lefty’s will follow a “Sunday Game Day routine” that features a raffle with one free entry, a jersey giveaway at halftime of the 1:00 p.m. slate of games and food and drink specials throughout the day. The routine is scheduled to take place across all 18 NFL regular season Sundays.
To learn more about Lefty’s Alley and Eats and their gameday specials click here.
Twelve-year-old Amelia Johnson was born with a rare genetic anomaly and is nonverbal. Amelia’s mother was able to get a private school voucher specifically for children with disabilities — but couldn’t find a private school that would accommodate Amelia. Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica
It’s after 6 p.m. by the time Angela Johnson hurries home from work. Her 12-year-old daughter, Amelia, is at their house outside of Pensacola, Florida, with a nurse trained to care for medically fragile children. Amelia, who was born with a rare genetic anomaly, has endured many surgeries and requires a brain shunt and a feeding tube.
The nurse starts caring for Amelia as soon as a bus from the public school drops her off. Johnson loves much about the school. But as a physical therapist, she also recognizes its limitations. The district’s physical and occupational therapists have to travel from school to school. The classroom teacher can become overburdened.
For all of Amelia’s life, Johnson has had to fight for the education and the school resources her daughter is entitled to receive under federal law. It has exhausted her.
Two years ago, she thought she’d found a better option for Amelia when she learned Florida has a state-funded voucher program for children with disabilities. She jumped at the promise of “school choice.” The program, the largest of its kind in the country, channels taxpayer dollars into accounts that parents can use to pay for private school tuition and other education expenses.
Johnson envisioned a private school with smaller classes and more one-on-one time with trained staff, a place where she didn’t have to battle for every minute of therapy her child required. She imagined Amelia learning to cut a straight line and to write her name.
In her bedroom, Amelia looks for a book to read with her mom, Angela Johnson.Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica
In 2024, Amelia was awarded about $10,500 from the program. Thrilled, Johnson embarked on a weekslong hunt for a private school.
She began scouring school websites, most of which said nothing about services for children with disabilities. She started calling schools, first an upscale Christian one nearby with a strong reputation. It had no nurse trained to care for medically fragile children, so she reached out to several other schools. At first, some said they could help — until Johnson explained that her daughter had a feeding tube, that she couldn’t yet hold a pencil correctly and needed assistance toileting. Then they all said no.
Johnson couldn’t find a single one that provided nurses equipped to care for her daughter’s medical needs. Or teachers trained to educate nonverbal children. Or even a bus ride home.
Therein lies the catch in “school choice” for children like Amelia. Unlike public schools, private ones generally aren’t required to educate students with disabilities. And they often don’t.
The choice wasn’t hers, Johnson realized. It was the schools’. The vouchers “are basically designed to make you go to private school,” Johnson said, “but my kid can’t access private school.”
Johnson returned the money to the state, along with a very stern email.
Voucher programs and the private schools they increasingly fund have proliferated across the country. Yet those schools often reject children with disabilities — the very kids who were used to help sell early voucher programs to lawmakers and the public — for having needs that are too costly, complex or disruptive. That leaves those children with few options beyond the public schools. And as public schools lose enrollment as a result of more and more voucher use, they lose resources that would benefit children who remain, including those with disabilities.
About 3 million school-age children with disabilities live in states with universal voucher eligibility. Florida, one of those states, illustrates how the promise of school choice can be empty for these children.
After walking around the block, Amelia removes her leg braces, which can be uncomfortable. Her mother, Angela, encourages her to wear them and walk at least once a day.Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica
When children are approved for education savings accounts, a voucher-style program like the one Florida uses, states often put public money into accounts parents can use to pay expenses like tuition. If families can’t find a private school and don’t use the money, it may roll over to another year or, depending on the state, get returned.
About 8% of the $1.7 billion Florida distributed last year through its voucher program for disabled children was returned because recipients — kids like Amelia — were enrolled in public school instead, according to data from the nonprofit that disburses most of the funds. By comparison, just 1% of money in the state’s program open to all students was returned for the same reason.
Florida is one of three states where ProPublica obtained data allowing us to make such comparisons.
Louisiana, which launched an education savings account program in the 2025-26 school year, delivered $43.1 million to parent-controlled accounts. Overall, 6% was returned because the families didn’t spend the money, state data shows. But among students with disabilities, that rate was far higher at 30%.
In Texas, data is still coming in for the first year of its $1 billion voucher program. But so far, students with disabilities are opting out of using the money at slightly higher rates than all other students.
Though families return the money for multiple reasons, many have indicated they did so because they couldn’t find suitable private schools that would enroll their students.
“Families are at the mercy of the schools — and schools choosing their kid — versus the other way around,” said Chris Roe, director of state policy at the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a national association working on behalf of children with disabilities.
Today, at least 18 states have voucher-style programs with universal eligibility or are phasing them in. Florida eclipses them all. More than a half-million Florida schoolchildren — roughly 1 in 6 — use a voucher today. When lawmakers opened the state’s voucher program to all children in 2023, two-thirds of the newly enrolled students were already attending private schools.
Yet private schooling often remains out of reach for children like Amelia, the children lawmakers once used to gain a toehold for future voucher expansions. They shared disabled children’s compelling stories, named legislation in their honor and created some of the nation’s first statewide voucher programs specifically for these students.
They started in Florida.
After Angela gets home from work, she and Amelia head out to play in the front yard.Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica
Illusion of Choice
In 1999, an unassuming man wearing glasses and a lavender tie stood before his colleagues in the Florida Senate to champion a bill that would change the trajectory of American education. John McKay, a Republican, wanted to give parents of children with disabilities a chunk of taxpayer money to pay for private school tuition.
McKay pointed to his own family’s experience. Public schools had failed to meet the needs of his daughter, who had significant learning disabilities. He and his wife could afford to send their daughter to a private boarding school, but not all parents had that option.
“We’re alienating parents,” McKay argued. “I’ve been alienated by the public system when I was told I didn’t have any choices with regard to my children.”
The McKay Scholarships began as a pilot program — the nation’s first voucher system specifically for students with disabilities. Lawmakers soon expanded it, creating the nation’s first statewide voucher program for this group of children. Ohio followed Florida’s lead, then Utah and Arizona and Georgia and, later, Louisiana and Oklahoma and others.
Across the statehouses, politicians stressed one sentiment: choice. Parents would no longer be tethered to their local public schools and could choose where to send their children.
Georgia’s sponsor said he sought “to give any disabled student whose parents are dissatisfied with their assigned public school the ability to attend the public or private school that best fits their needs.”
“They can just take the scholarship and go to private school,” an Oklahoma lawmaker pledged.
The programs have since helped thousands of children with disabilities move to private schools, including those designed to meet their unique needs. But for many children, especially those with more severe disabilities or who live in areas where few if any private schools operate, the promises of choice were never realistic.
Some legislators backing those early programs said they recognized this problem but argued that any children helped by the new options made the effort worthwhile. And they hoped that competition fueled by money flowing into private schools would create a more robust school marketplace in the long run, one that would accommodate students with special needs.
Amelia loves playing on her swing outside.Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica
In 2021, West Virginia lawmakers adopted their first and only foray into vouchers, an education savings program that they have since opened to all students. To get the bill passed, some legislators made familiar promises to disabled children — even though the state has only a handful of schools that specifically say they will serve even the least-intensive of children’s needs.
“Our kids can’t go to a private school,” said Christy Black, an advocate for Disability Rights of West Virginia who has a daughter with Down syndrome. “I called every private school from Huntington to Charleston because that’s as far as we could drive her and work. But no one would accept her because she has a cognitive disability.”
More than half of Utah’s counties have no private schools that take its vouchers for students with disabilities. In Georgia, 71% of counties have none. And in Louisiana last year, among about 350 private schools, only 14 reported enrolling a single child with a disability. Eight of those admitted five or fewer such students.
Even in Florida, with its urban centers and roughly $5 billion voucher programs, ProPublica found that more than a dozen counties have no private schools that serve kids with disabilities or have only one school with limited offerings. Our analysis of state data also shows that more than half of Florida’s private schools say they do not serve students with any type of disability.
“It’s touted that this program is an equalizer, and then people have choice,” said Jinny Kim, managing attorney at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, a national civil rights and policy nonprofit that advocates for people with disabilities. “But then if you really look at the details, it’s not actually how it happens.”
Anxious about her daughter’s upcoming transition to middle school, Atlanta-area mother Marguerite Lane decided to explore private schools that take the state’s voucher. Her daughter, who has autism, does well academically but can be very sensitive and struggle in bigger classrooms without enough behavioral support.
Lane applied to and visited several private schools and found a small, arts-infused one that said it would accept some children with learning challenges. She thought it would serve her daughter well, but then she opened an email from the enrollment director.
“We don’t believe we can support her needs and help her thrive in this class,” it read, “and we also don’t want to compromise the educational experience of the other students.” The last part hurt most. Lane thought, “God forbid the other children learn empathy.”
Marguerite Lane and her daughter, Penelope, at home in Atlanta. Penelope likes to play piano and has a pet cat, Gatsby.Alyssa Pointer for ProPublica
Toehold Strategy
As politicians debated those first voucher programs for children with disabilities, a common refrain echoed across statehouse chambers: The plans were just small programs for a specific group of students.
“It’s a very limited scholarship,” a Utah representative assured colleagues in 2004. “This really is about special needs.”
“It’s not, as I heard some of you say to me, the beginning of vouchers. No, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a program to help a group of students that need our help,” a Georgia House member told colleagues in 2007.
Behind the political scenes, a different message spread.
As Arizona adopted its first program for children with disabilities in 2006, Clint Bolick wrote an essay entitled “Toe-Hold Strategies.” Bolick, who was then president of the advocacy group Alliance for School Choice, is now a justice on the Arizona Supreme Court.
Voucher advocates, he wrote, were “acting smarter.” Rather than take on powerful teachers unions directly, they were pushing smaller programs geared toward specific students whose needs were harder for politicians to oppose. “The strategy makes sense from a moral perspective, for it focuses assistance on the neediest schoolchildren,” he added. “It also works politically, because choice begets choice: Once the Rubicon is crossed and legislators vote to adopt a school choice program — no matter how small or targeted — it becomes easier to support a new one, or expand the old one, the next time around.”
By 2011, a half dozen states had launched voucher programs specifically for students with disabilities. At a “school choice” conference that year, Howie Beigelman sat on a panel that discussed the strategy. At the time, he was deputy director of public policy for the advocacy arm of the Orthodox Union, a prominent Orthodox Jewish umbrella organization. He offered guidance to those who might want to get into vouchers.
“Special needs is a very easy way to get into this business,” Beigelman said. “Anyone, no matter how partisan they are, it’s very hard to say special needs is not where people need ‘special’ education.” (He recently told ProPublica via email that this was his opinion and he had “never seen anything ‘intentional’ about using special needs scholarships for anything more than what they are plainly for: helping educate children with special needs.”)
Angela reads a book to Amelia, emphasizing each word and encouraging Amelia to repeat the words aloud with her.Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublicaPenelope used to bring stuffed toys to elementary school to help relieve stress, but as a middle schooler she has switched to a fidget spinner.Alyssa Pointer for ProPublica
Shortly after vouchers for disabled children spread to Arkansas in 2016, the University of Arkansas posted on its website an essay by Sarah McKenzie, executive director of the college’s Office for Education Policy. “Special education private school choice programs are often seen as a ‘foot in the door’ for school choice laws,” she wrote. “Once some success has been shown to the public, more laws can be passed to expand these programs.”
Indeed, following those wins, lawmakers across the country opened the floodgates, often to all or most comers, expanding voucher-style programs into a $10.6 billion tide of public money.
Today, two-thirds of states have some kind of voucher-style program on the books. These programs mostly serve a very different population of students than the early ones did. Most current voucher recipients don’t have disabilities, nor do they need to hunt for a private school that will enroll them. They were already in private schools when they tapped this new windfall.
North Carolina state Sen. Lisa Grafstein, a Democrat and a civil rights lawyer who advocates for people with disabilities, opposes her state’s voucher system, which is now open to all students. “The thing that genuinely infuriates me,” she said, “is when people with disabilities are used as pawns.”
Failure to Address Access
Two decades after states began adopting vouchers for children with disabilities, lawmakers have done little to improve access to private schools for them — even as they have created programs open to all comers. Most legislatures haven’t required private schools that take this public money to accept even a few kids with such needs. Nor have they created effective incentives to help operators open more specialized private schools, which can be costly to run.
That’s largely because one of the driving forces behind vouchers is the goal of keeping rules to a minimum so private schools will take the public money.
Amelia plays a card game with her parents, who encourage her to repeat the names of the animals pictured on the cards.Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica
“Getting the government involved in private schools isn’t the answer,” said former West Virginia Delegate Amy Summers, a Republican who played a central role in creating her state’s universal voucher-like program. She thinks competition for students will prompt private and public schools to better serve children with disabilities.
Another key advocate in West Virginia was Republican state Sen. Patricia Puertas Rucker. She homeschooled her two children with disabilities, including a now-adult daughter who she said came home from public school with bite marks and bruises.
Rucker hopes that the state’s voucher program will give more families a way to foot tuition bills or band together to create small schools called microschools. But she regrets that her colleagues approved the payments without additional money for students with disabilities, as some states offer. That extra money could help families afford the higher tuition often charged by specialized schools — and make it more viable for operators to open them.
“It is very expensive to have all this special equipment and to even build the buildings for children that have very specialized special needs,” Rucker said.
But beyond raising those payments, she doesn’t think the state should do anything to cajole or require private schools to enroll children with disabilities. “The minute you start doing that, you are basically disincentivizing private schools from participating, and then you’re denying parents. I do not want to do that.”
It’s not that private schools haven’t opened to take advantage of the voucher windfall. They in fact have been proliferating in recent years. And some of these new schools specifically welcome children with disabilities. But most of them do not.
The Pain of Rejection
Diavonni Jordan and her son Jamir Souders at home in Dallas, Georgia. Private schools rejected Jamir, who has ADHD, explaining that they could not support his needs.Alyssa Pointer for ProPublica
Parents described private school rejections as “insulting” and “heartbreaking,” especially when school personnel have met the children. But families don’t always need to apply or even call the schools to get a denial. Some websites or handbooks make it clear.
One small Baptist academy in rural Georgia invites applicants to “join our family” but declares in its handbook that it isn’t equipped to educate children with learning disabilities or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. “If such students are accepted in our school, it is up to the parents to provide extra services other than what the classroom teachers would do in the confines of the classroom.”
In 2023, Taylor Cordes, a former special education teacher, embarked on what she calls her “personal passion project” to see how many private schools in her home state of North Carolina post such clear rejections. She dug into every handbook she could find for 660 schools and found that only about a third of them indicated they would accept students with even limited disabilities. More than 1 in 10 declared they would not serve such students, she said.
Many families endure deeply hurtful personal rejections in the search for education. Private schools typically decide who to enroll after meeting parents and their children, as Diavonni Jordan, an Atlanta-area mother, learned. Her now-8-year-old son, Jamir Souders, has ADHD. When he was suspended multiple times from his public school and started to get into fights, she searched for an option with smaller class sizes where she thought he would focus and learn better.
A single mother of two, Jordan applied to a local Christian school, then took time off work to visit it. She filled with hope as she toured the well-kept campus and spoke to its friendly staff. But within a week, she opened an email from the school. “The support that we could give in our 1st grade would not be enough for him this year,” it read. The school’s program was small, ill-equipped to provide for his needs, it added.
Jordan expanded her search to other traditional private schools, even when they would mean longer drives for her. She applied to five and toured two. But the verdicts never changed.
“Unfortunately — it doesn’t look like we would be a good fit for your family,” another Christian school wrote. Jordan wondered what child constituted a “good fit” for the school and felt the heartbreak of knowing it wasn’t her son. Perhaps, she thought, she will homeschool Jamir in the future. But for now, with a new school year upon them, he remains in public school.
Jordan and Jamir read a book together in his bedroom.Alyssa Pointer for ProPublica
Why Should Delaware Care? As Sussex County continues to see new residents moving to the region, the state of Delaware also faces a housing shortage. But as Latino and Hispanic workers making up an increasingly important part of the area’s homebuilding workforce, fears about the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies have thrown a wrench into some facets of the county’s construction industry.
The HVAC technician was driving home from a construction site when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents surrounded his car.
The man, who spoke to Spotlight Delaware on the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal from federal officials, said the scene reminded him of the gang violence he fled Mexico to escape.
“I had already seen guns, masked men,” he said. “That moment they stopped me, I had the same image as what I used to see in Mexico.”
The HVAC technician was detained by ICE, taken first to Dover and then to a federal facility in Philadelphia where he would spend the next 11 days. He described the detention center’s conditions as degrading and filthy.
The technician is one of countless undocumented immigrants who built a life and career working in the Sussex County construction industry.
But as the region continues to welcome new residents and the state grapples with a housing shortage, the fear of being detained as part of the Trump administration’s increased ICE enforcement has complicated construction work for Delaware immigrants.
Jennifer Cohan, the president of the Associated Builders and Contractors of Delaware, said the Hispanic and Latino population makes up one of the fastest growing components of the region’s construction industry.
It has been “alarming,” she said, to see ICE agents show up at construction sites in Sussex County.
“We haven’t seen it as significantly as some other states, but it is happening,” Cohan said. “So it creates this level of concern, which definitely impacts the industry.”
Outside impacts on Sussex construction
To address current housing shortages and keep pace with projected growth, Delaware needs approximately 45,000 more housing units, said Denise Forman Gaines, president of the Delaware Association of Realtors.
One local contractor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told Spotlight Delaware her employees are anxious about immigration enforcement, though the company has not experienced any direct issues, she said.
She also has seen potential employees deterred from working with her because of immigration enforcement fears.
The contractor recently began using Facebook to recruit new workers, but she said those posts have received comments from some users discouraging people to apply. They fear the contractor’s posts are actually a trap connected to ICE.
“There have been a lot of people who just don’t show up to work, or who seem kind of suspicious,” the business owner said in Spanish.
But aside from immigration fears, some contractors say economic conditions have slowed their work options.
Rafael Gonzalez Ramirez, owner of G General Construction, specializes in residential and commercial remodeling. He said he has started to work independently without any employees because of a drop in the demand for construction work.
“There is a lack of work, and everything is getting more expensive,” Ramirez said.
Ramirez acknowledged the immigration concerns facing the industry, but he said those are more concentrated within bigger operations, or for people who drive far distances to reach their job sites.
The aftermath of being detained
After spending eleven days detained, the HVAC technician was released after his lawyer filed a writ of habeas corpus — a court filing that questions the legality of a person’s detention.
On the day of release, the technician said he felt overwhelming relief and gratitude to God.
“Getting released was actually the easiest part,” he said. “The hard part is still going on. That’s what I’m fighting now.”
At the time of his arrest, the technician said he had around $20,000 worth of electrical and HVAC tools in his truck. It also housed all of his personal documents, he said.
After he was detained, his truck was left at the scene and was eventually stolen, the technician said.
Since being released, the man has relied on previous business contacts to continue working. Because he is undocumented, he has been paid only in cash.
The man is currently fighting an immigration removal case in court — a long, expensive legal process that has created a fear of deportation.
“My bills, my rent, food, my immigration lawyer — that is what my work has covered, but I can’t grow beyond that,” the HVAC technician said. “I can’t go to Maryland to do jobs. I can’t go from Sussex County to Kent County with peace of mind.”
Hi there! 2 weeks ago i became an owner of XRC (100 miles so far). I really enjoy Mission profile when i ride smooth surface. I feel like its closer to riding a snowboard, realistic feeling, not like you drive a machine using arrow keys. It works good for smooth asphalt, but its only 60% of my typical path. There are also 30% of rough cracky asphalt with small bumps (see the picture) and 10% even worse, when i have so slow down and carefully get thought it. Also sometimes a have to drop off curb and bonk a bit for fun.
I experimented a lot with profiles and custom shaping, but i feel like its not that straightforward as many think. So far my semi-stable and semi-flowy settings are:
Base profile: Session Dynamic Response: +2 Roll: -1 Yaw: -2
But when i switch to mission i get much more enjoyment just riding and carving. I tried tried tightening it a bit with custom shaping, but the result is strange. Its doesn't get that much more stable and feels weird. Also when i ride rough surface i feel like my feet are losing connection with the board. And drops are much harder to stabilize upon landing.
Yes i keep my knees bended and soft. Tire: 15-16 PSI, afraid to damage the rim. Weight 77kg / 170 lbs
A Hilcorp well site in New Mexico in August 2025 Courtesy of Earthworks
The Trump administration is poised to loosen environmental restrictions on oil and gas wells that produce very little energy but release vast amounts of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas.
The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to drastically weaken requirements for leak inspections and equipment upgrades at more than 700,000 low-producing “stripper wells,” according to a draft rule being reviewed by the White House and seen by ProPublica. These wells — which tend to be old, poorly maintained and thus prone to leaking — produce just 6% of the country’s oil and natural gas but are responsible for roughly half the sector’s methane pollution, studies show.
The EPA acknowledged similar figures in the draft. But it said that the cost of complying with existing regulations would force the lowest-producing wells to shut down and that this was “unreasonable” — even though it would eliminate just 0.4% of U.S. oil and gas production, according to an industry estimate cited in the proposed rule.
The proposal, which would also weaken methane controls in the wider oil industry, is expected to save companies $42 billion through 2050. An attached memo says the rollback will help to “unleash” American energy, one of President Donald Trump’s favorite slogans.
Environmental advocates said deregulating stripper wells will do little to boost energy output while significantly increasing climate pollution.
“This is not about energy dominance,” said Darin Schroeder of the Clean Air Task Force, a climate advocacy group. “It’s about padding the pockets of oil and gas operators and saddling society with the costs.”
A warning sign is posted at a Hilcorp installation in New Mexico.Courtesy of Charlie Barrett/Oilfield Witness
The proposed changes are the culmination of a campaign by a previously low-profile faction of the oil industry that has gained unprecedented influence during the second Trump administration. In the draft, the EPA said it is deregulating stripper wells — defined as those that produce up to 15 barrels a day — in response to petitions from the Independent Petroleum Association of America and the National Stripper Well Association, among other groups.
As ProPublica reported in June, the IPAA has long enjoyed the support of a little-known oil billionaire named Jeffery Hildebrand. He is the founder and owner of Hilcorp, a privately held company known for buying up old, poorly maintained stripper wells — a business that was threatened when the Biden administration imposed aggressive restrictions on methane pollution in 2024.
In response, Hildebrand became one of the oil industry’s biggest Trump donors. Trump, back in office, promptly appointed a former Hilcorp lobbyist named Aaron Szabo to a top post at the EPA, putting him in charge of the effort to unravel the new methane rules.
Szabo had previously helped to draft a letter on behalf of the American Exploration and Production Council — which has Hilcorp’s CEO on its board — opposing those rules. He also gave advice on climate regulations for Project 2025, the deregulatory roadmap for the current administration.
Among Project 2025’s recommendations: eliminate an EPA program that would track “super-emitter” events — enormous methane releases that have long plagued the oil industry — and would oblige companies to respond to them. The AXPC and the IPAA have also called for an end to the program.
And the current proposal from Trump’s EPA aims to do just that.
An IPAA spokesperson declined to comment on the group’s influence in the Trump administration but said in an emailed statement that its lobbying “has focused on ensuring regulations are workable for low-production and marginal wells.”
The NSWA and AXPC didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment. NSWA representatives previously told ProPublica that they had asked the EPA to soften restrictions on stripper wells because many of their members couldn’t afford the compliance costs. AXPC CEO Anne Bradbury previously told ProPublica that the group’s members were “committed to building on a legacy of world-leading methane emission reductions.”
Hilcorp spokesperson Nick Piatek didn’t provide a comment either but previously told ProPublica that the company was “proud” of recent efforts to reduce its emissions.
While Szabo didn’t respond to emails from ProPublica, the EPA’s press office said in a statement that he “had not done any work for AXPC for well over a year before he started working for the federal government” and that he had reviewed federal ethics rules with the agency’s ethics staff upon joining. The agency declined to comment on the substance of the methane rule revisions except to confirm that they were being reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget. The OMB’s press office didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment.
The rules now being rolled back were a key component of former President Joe Biden’s ambitious climate agenda. They would have cut methane pollution from the oil industry by 80%, the EPA said at the time. Because methane breaks down relatively quickly — in about a dozen years — cutting these emissions is one of the few known ways to reduce global warming in our lifetimes. Methane accounts for one-third of the rise in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.
Since methane is the main component of natural gas, the rules would also have prevented useful energy from being lost to the atmosphere in the form of leaks and other releases. All told, Biden’s EPA had valued the rules’ climate, health and energy benefits at more than $7 billion a year, even after accounting for increased compliance costs.
Breaking with precedent, Trump’s EPA didn’t include calculations of the environmental and health impacts of the new proposal. But if it goes into effect, much of the public benefit will evaporate while oil and gas producers see increased profits.
Hi all. Please don't let this turn into a FM bash fest. Now that we are a year out from the XL, I was curious if there have been any rumors or rumblings from what is coming next? Before the rally edition, XR classic, and the XL there some rumors swirling.
Last few models have been coming out either yearly or bi-yearly.
Edit* I am just kind of stunned at how compulsive people are with bashing FM. Like can we have one post not about this? It literally ruins this subreddit for so many people.
In a nearly two-hour speech at the first Republican midterm convention, President Donald Trump promised to pay Americans if Republicans won, and he repeatedly said communists could take over Congress if they didn’t, among other familiar claims.
Trump said every adult citizen would get a “dividend” of $5,000 if Republicans won the House and Senate. He suggested his tariff policies would pay for that, but it would take more than six years for tariffs to cover the $1.2 trillion price tag.
Democratic socialists are not the same as communists, despite Trump conflating the two and warning that Congress could be “controlled by a communist caucus.” Democratic socialists make up a small minority of congressional candidates.
The president repeated the unsupported claim that an unprecedented $20 trillion has been invested in the U.S. from “outside countries and companies.” Trump’s number is nearly double the figure provided by the White House, whose number is itself speculative and dubious.
He made false and misleading claims about the One Big Beautiful Bill’s tax reduction. It wasn’t the “largest” tax cut in history. Trump said Democrats voted against no taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security, but the lawmakers’ opposition stemmed from the tax cuts for the wealthy and reductions in Medicaid spending to pay for the legislation.
Trump twisted the facts in order to indirectly blame North Carolina Senate candidate Roy Cooper for the murder of a woman on train in 2025.
Trump boasted that more people are working than ever before “by a lot.” About 800,000 more people are working now than in January 2025, but that is largely because the population has also grown. When factoring that in, the labor market is doing slightly worse than when Trump started.
He falsely claimed that “food prices and almost every other item are rapidly going down.” With some exceptions, prices have gone up, rising even faster than during the latter part of the Biden administration.
The president claimed that Americans now “pay the lowest prices in the entire world for prescription drugs,” thanks to his policies. There’s no evidence that’s the case.
Trump made several exaggerated or misleading claims related to immigration. Though the number is low, he wrongly claimed that “zero illegal aliens have entered our country from the southern border in the last 15 months.” He claimed 25 million immigrants poured into the country illegally during the Biden administration. That’s vastly inflated. And he wrongly claimed the Biden administration “allowed” in 11,888 murderers.
He again falsely suggested that the U.S. became the world leader in oil and gas production during the current administration.
Trump sought to link Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to a 2019 remark by left-wing commentator Hasan Piker that “America deserved 9/11.” El-Sayed has specifically disavowed those comments.
The president claimed children “born into poverty or families with very little money … will be potentially rich when they turn 18 or 21” due to the new, so-called Trump accounts. Financial experts say it’s unlikely poor parents could contribute enough to such accounts to make that happen.
Trump gave the keynote speech on the first of the two-night convention, which he held to encourage Republican voters. “Please pretend that I’m running and get out and vote on Nov. 3 or sooner,” he said.
The president continued to push the falsehood that he “won the presidency three times,” claiming that “numerous people on the other side are actually admitting it.” Trump lost the 2020 election, and some of his own aides in his first term told him that his claims of election fraud were baseless.
Dubious ‘Dividend’ Math
Trump promised every American adult a $5,000 check if Republicans win in November, framing it as a “dividend” from his administration’s economic policies.
Trump speaks on stage on the first day of the 2026 Republican National Convention on Sept. 9 in Dallas. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
“Because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000” if Republicans win both the House and Senate this year, Trump said.
Trump did not say exactly how he planned to pay for that proposal, though he suggested the money would come from tariffs.
“The reason the Democrats can’t do that is because they don’t do tariffs, they don’t take in money,” he said. “All they know is poverty and how to ruin our country. But we’re making a fortune. So if the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000. It will be called the Trump dividend.”
He also said people would have to “spend the money in the United States of America,” but did not offer details about how that would be enforced.
There are around 245 million U.S. citizens over the age of 18 in the country, according to Census data. Sending each one of them a $5,000 check would cost around $1.2 trillion.
Revenue from tariffs has certainly increased under Trump — but the levies are not bringing in “trillions of dollars,” as he claimed elsewhere in the speech.
The U.S. brought in $264 billion in net tariff revenue in 2025, up from $79 billion in 2024, according to an analysis of Treasury statements by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a D.C.-based think tank. However, that doesn’t account for refunds issued this year after the Supreme Court held that a number of Trump’s tariffs exceeded his authority. This year, factoring in money paid out in refunds for invalidated tariffs, net tariff revenue came to about $64 billion through July, according to the Treasury Department’s monthly statements.
Trump’s tariffs “are generating less than $200 billion a year,” Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director at the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told us in an email. “It would take 6+ years of tariffs to fund one year of these checks, and then the money wouldn’t be available for deficit reduction (or to partially offset [the One Big Beautiful Bill Act]) as intended.”
Nor is there evidence of a “tremendous” economic boom filling government coffers.
“The economy has been growing around 2% a year – consistent with recent trends,” Goldwein said. “With some weak spots, the economy is strong overall – but it isn’t surging.”
A trillion-dollar payout “would almost certainly worsen inflation and lead to higher interest rates,” he added.
Similarly, Robert McClelland, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, told us the proposal would “substantially increase the federal government’s budget deficit” and likely increase inflation.
“I do not see a basis for the idea that current tariff revenue or total revenue from all sources could support this,” he said. “So far in FY 2026, the government has spent about $1.8 trillion more than it has collected.”
The proposal could also raise legal questions, as federal law outlaws offering money in exchange for votes. Some election-law experts, however, told The New York Times that Trump’s promise is probably close enough to a pledge to cut taxes or enact other economic policies that will financially benefit voters to pass muster; a 1982 Supreme Court decision considers such promises protected political speech. Democrats running in Georgia’s Senate runoff in January 2021, for example, pledged to vote for $2,000 stimulus checks.
No ‘Communists’ Running for Congress
Trump claimed that if Democrats retake control of Congress, the federal legislature would be run by “crazed” democratic socialists, who he said are really “communists.” The president said the word communist or communism 15 times in his speech.
“In state after state, the Democrat establishment has been overthrown and replaced by crazed lunatics and radicals. They call themselves democrat socialists, but actually, they’re communists,” Trump said in his remarks. He later said, “If they win, the greatest legislative body in history will, for the first time ever, be controlled by a communist caucus.”
But democratic socialists and communists are not one and the same. And democratic socialists make up a small minority of congressional candidates.
In their remarks at the convention, Reps. Steve Scalise and Tom Emmer also raised the prospect of “communists” getting elected among democratic socialist candidates.
“Communists are figures who support the Marxist, Leninist and later Maoist models of social organization,” Matthew McManus, an assistant professor of political science at Spelman College, told us in an interview. “Typically, what that means is a dictatorial or authoritarian party that’s in control of the political apparatus of society and that organizes the economy on a command economic basis. So, everything is centralized from the state downward.”
“Democratic socialists refer to a much different ideology,” he said. “By and large, democratic socialists were committed to achieving socialism through reformism, working within the apparatus of liberal democratic states, and they also tended to be much more pluralistic in terms of the economic and social models they were willing to accept.”
McManus said in the 19th century, people, such as the famous German philosopher Karl Marx, would simultaneously refer to themselves as communists and socialists. But he said that changed in the early 20th century, when “social democrats” began to distance themselves after the Bolsheviks, under Vladimir Lenin, won power in the Soviet Union and quickly instituted an authoritarian state, horrifying Western socialists.
The modern political organization known as the Democratic Socialists of America says it advocates replacing capitalism, a free market economic system, with a system of democratic socialism in which there is collective ownership of “the key economic drivers that dominate our lives,” including energy production and transportation. “We believe that working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few,” the organization says on its website.
McManus called it a “very long-standing trope” for conservatives to refer to democratic socialists as communists. “Conservative discourse intentionally, in many cases, obscures the distinctions between liberals, social democrats, democratic socialists, communists, by trying to conflate them all together and suggest that they’re all part and parcel of the same thing,” he said.
There are few democratic socialists already in Congress, and they are also a small minority of Democratic congressional candidates. But Trump said if just 10 are elected this fall, “that’s enough to control Congress,” suggesting that a Democratic majority would have to bend to the will of those new members to implement a legislative agenda.
In an August analysis, Brookings Institution researchers said they identified 64 DSA-endorsed congressional candidates, only 19 of whom won their Democratic primaries – with two races undecided as of Aug. 12. One DSA-endorsed candidate, Gregory Levy, a socialist running for U.S. Senate in Ohio as an independent, advanced directly to the November general election.
Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan are two well-known DSA members already in Congress. Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont also identifies as a democratic socialist but is not a member of the DSA.
As for communists, Joe Sims, co-chair of the Communist Party USA, told PolitiFact for a July story that there are no communists in Congress and that he knows of none running for the House or Senate.
Overstated Investments
As he does in most speeches — in ever-increasing amounts — Trump claimed that since he took office, more than $20 trillion has been invested in the U.S. from “outside countries and companies.” Trump has never provided a full accounting for this claim, and the data that has been provided by the White House is far less than the figure Trump cites — and is highly speculative.
The White House has a webpage dedicated to “The Trump Effect” that purports to list “total U.S. and foreign investments” of $11.2 trillion.
Most of it is from announced investments from domestic companies, many of which have nothing to do with Trump’s policies and are routine expansion plans stretching over years or decades. Experts have warned us that many of the announcements are speculative or vague promises and may never happen.
“Unfortunately, announcements are not even commitments, much less investments,” Alan Reynolds, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote in February when Trump repeated a version of the investments claim. Reynolds called the president’s boast “totally imaginary.”
A little more than half of the total on the White House webpage, $6 trillion, comes from foreign investments from eight countries and the European Union. But as Derek Scissors, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, points out, the alleged investments don’t appear to be showing up in Department of Commerce data on foreign direct investment in the U.S., which showed an increase of about $266 billion in 2025 compared with 2024. That’s nearly equivalent to the roughly $260 billion increase in President Joe Biden’s last year in office.
Consider the big-ticket foreign investment pledges listed by the White House: $1.4 trillion from the United Arab Emirates, $1.2 trillion from Qatar and $1 trillion from Japan. Those countries increased their investments in 2025 by $3.5 billion, $20 million and $26.7 billion, respectively, according to foreign direct investment data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Foreign direct investment in the U.S. jumped 50% in the first quarter of 2026 compared with the previous quarter, $92.2 billion (though it was slightly higher in the third quarter of 2023 under Biden.) But even at that higher pace, Scissors notes, “it would take until 2041 to achieve $6 trillion.”
Attack on North Carolina Senate Candidate
Trump twisted the facts in order to indirectly blame North Carolina Senate candidate Roy Cooper for the murder of Iryna Zarutska, who was stabbed to death on a train in Charlotte in August 2025.
Trump claimed that as governor, Cooper “worked with anti-police radicals to release thousands and thousands of dangerous criminals and murderers all over the once safe streets and countryside of beautiful North Carolina.” That’s a reference to a court settlement to release prisoners during the COVID-19 pandemic. To describe it as “worked with” distorts the facts.
As we have written, Cooper resisted calls early in the pandemic to release prisoners to ease safety concerns. He was sued by the American Civil Liberties Union and other activists. After a judge issued a preliminary injunction in favor of the ACLU and called on the state to come up with a plan to reduce the prison population, Cooper reached a settlement to allow the release of 3,500 prisoners.
Trump went on to say that Zarutska “would be alive today if North Carolina had a different governor, because that animal [the man accused of murdering Zarutska] would’ve been in prison or worse. He wouldn’t have been let go to be on the streets and be in a train sitting right behind that beautiful young lady.”
The murder suspect, DeCarlos Brown Jr., was released from prison on Sept. 20, 2020, after serving more than five years for robbery with a dangerous weapon. Fox News reported that Brown’s inmate ID number was among those listed in the settlement record, though it did not determine whether his release was part of the settlement or not. But Trump’s account distorts the facts of the situation.
Brown was released from prison five months before the settlement was reached. A spokesman for the Department of Corrections in North Carolina told PolitiFact in February that Brown’s release was “entirely unrelated” to the settlement, and that Brown “was not released early or paroled. With credit for jail time served before conviction, he served 100% of his minimum sentence.”
Although Brown was released prior to the settlement, he was able to be retroactively counted toward the settlement’s requirement to adjust the sentences of 3,500 inmates because Brown was given credit for time served while awaiting sentencing, state prison officials told the Charlotte Observer. But even if he had not gotten credit for the time served, he would have been released years prior to Zarutska’s murder.
OBBBA Tax Cuts
The president made some false and misleading claims about his signature tax law and Democratic opposition to it.
Not the “largest” in history. Trump claimed that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which he signed into law in July 2025, amounted to “the largest tax cuts in the history of our country.” While it was a “big” bill, the legislation was the sixth largest tax cut, according to the Tax Foundation, when measured as a percentage of gross domestic product, economists’ preferred measure. The OBBBA is projected to reduce tax revenue by $5 trillion over 10 years, or 1.4% of GDP. That puts it behind the 1981 tax cuts (2.89% of GDP), as well as tax measures in the 1940s, 2012 and 1964.
Factoring in Trump’s higher tariffs on imported goods, which economists consider a tax on consumers, would put the president’s combined policies further down the list, the Tax Foundation said. The foundation’s latest estimate, as of August, is that Trump’s imposed and scheduled tariffs are an average tax increase of $820 in 2026 per household.
Impact of tax cuts. The president described the 2025 tax law as putting “thousands of dollars into the pockets of working families.” Depending on how one defines “working families,” that could be the case over time or even in a given year for some families. Overall, the OBBBA was an estimated average individual income tax cut in 2026 of nearly $2,300 or $2,900 per taxpayer, according to Tax Foundation and Tax Policy Center estimates, respectively. But the average was skewed by much larger tax benefits for upper-income earners.
The Tax Policy Center estimated last summer that households earning nearly half a million to $1 million would see an average tax cut of $21,000 in 2026, and those earning less than about $35,000 would get an average benefit of $150. “Middle-income households,” earning between $67,000 and $119,000, would get an average tax cut of about $1,800.
To be clear, the OBBBA extended the expiring tax cuts in Trump’s 2017 tax law, so some of the practical impact for families was that their taxes didn’t go up, as opposed to an additional tax decrease.
Democratic opposition. The skewed impact of the OBBBA, as well as the 2017 tax law, for upper-income taxpayers garnered Democratic opposition. But Trump said Democrats were opposed to some of the popular aspects of the law for certain groups of taxpayers. “And every single Democrat in Congress voted against our tax cuts,” Trump said. “They voted against no tax on tips. They voted against no tax on overtime. They voted against 100%. No tax on Social Security for our great seniors.” He went on to say that Democrats wanted to “raise your taxes” on tips, overtime and Social Security.
These weren’t the provisions in the law that Democrats voiced overwhelming opposition to — instead they repeatedly framed the tax cuts as benefiting the wealthy. As we’vewritten, each party has misleadingly emphasized only certain aspects of the law, which benefited all income groups on average, with most of the tax gains going to the top earners. Democrats also objected to the way the OBBBA paid for its tax cuts — by making cuts to Medicaid, the joint federal-state healthcare program for those with low incomes, and reductions in spending on federal food benefits. The Medicaid spending reductions led Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Thom Tillis to vote against the final legislation.
The tips, overtime and senior provisions Trump highlighted all expireafter 2028. A future Congress would need to act to extend them. The tips measure — while criticizedbyeconomists because it taxes people with similar levels of income in unequal ways — is politically popular with both parties, particularly in a service-industry-heavy swing state like Nevada. Democrat Kamala Harris proposed the same policy in her 2024 presidential campaign.
These provisions provide tax deductions up to certain limits; a deduction reduces the total income subject to taxes. The overtime measure applies to the extra 50% income earned on time-and-a-half overtime, up to a limit. The Tax Policy Center estimated that “3 percent of taxpayers benefit from the tips deduction, with an average tax reduction of about $1,480 among those who benefit, and that 10 percent of taxpayers benefit from the overtime deduction, with an average tax reduction of about $1,200.”
The Social Security provision is a tax deduction, too — $6,000 for those age 65 and older, whether they get Social Security benefits or not, and it phases out for those earning $75,000 or $150,000 for couples filing jointly. The Tax Policy Center found that the deduction “would benefit fewer than half of older adults,” with seniors earning $80,000 to $130,000 benefiting the most. They get an average tax cut of about $1,100, TPC said, in 2025.
Jobs
In discussing employment, Trump repeated a favoritebrag, saying, “Right now, in the United States of America, we have more people working than we have ever had before by a lot.”
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of August, a little over 159 million people are working in the U.S. This is up about 807,000 from when Trump started in January 2025. But as we’ve noted before, this impressive-seeming claim is almost meaningless, since with population growth, there are almost always more people working than ever before unless there is a recession. Trump has been spinning his employment achievements this way since 2017.
Better measures of how the labor market is doing include the employment-population ratio, which, at 59.1%, is down a full percentage point from January 2025, or the labor force participation rate, which is also down a percentage point to 61.6%. The “prime-age” labor force participation rate is largely holding steady.
The latest jobs report, which exceeded expectations, showed an increase of 162,000 jobs in August. Generally, however, job growth has been lower under Trump than Biden. For the last 18 months of the Biden administration, ending in December 2024, about 2.4 million jobs were added, an increase of 1.6%. Since February 2025 — a similar period under Trump — the U.S. gained 765,000 jobs, a rise of 0.48%.
The unemployment rate has also ticked up from 4.0% in January 2025 to a high of 4.5% last November, before falling back to 4.1% last month.
Affordability
Trump addressed affordability, calling it “fake” because, he said, Democrats were the ones that “caused the affordability — to use their word — crisis.”
“I’m bringing the prices way down, way, way down,” he continued. “They caused the price. But we’re fixing it. We’re fixing it.”
“We got eggs down lower than during my administration,” he added later. “And food prices and almost every other item are rapidly going down. And by the way, oil will be going down as soon as we win the war with Iran, which is taking place right now.”
Egg prices have declined under Trump, but not to a price lower than his last administration. They are $2.19 a dozen as of July, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about the same as they cost in November 2023. This is down from $4.95 in January 2025 and a peak of $6.23 in March 2025. Those sky-high egg prices were in large measure due to outbreaks of avian influenza, or bird flu, which required killing chickens to prevent viral spread and resulted in a shortage of eggs.
Most other groceries and many other goods and services have increased in price. As we recently explained, the Consumer Price Index, which captures average prices for consumer goods and services, is up 3.4% over the last 12 months ending in July — higher than the annualized 3.0% that Trump inherited.
While certain grocery items, such as bacon and bread, have decreased, many more have increased. Average grocery prices between January 2025 and July have gone up 3.35%, more than the 2.58% increase in the last year and a half of the Biden administration. Energy costs have risen 14.7% in the last year, including a 24.6% increase for gasoline.
Drug Prices
Trump made the unsupported claim that “we went from the highest prices by far in the world, and now we pay the lowest prices in the entire world for prescription drugs,” attributing the drop to his administration’s actions. “I think it’s one of the biggest things to happen medically, healthcare-wise, in history,” he said. “I’m giving you the largest prescription drug price cuts in history, with differences of 400%, 500% and even 600%.”
Trump’s policies do not mean Americans now pay the lowest prices in the world for drugs. And there isn’t evidence Trump’s prescription drug deals have led to a dramatic reduction in the prices Americans pay, although they may have led to lower prices in certain situations.
The administration has made temporary “most favored nation” deals with pharmaceutical companies, giving them three years of tariff relief in exchange for prices that are more comparable to the prices paid in other high-income countries, specifically the second-lowest price out of a set of eight high-income nations, after adjusting for gross domestic product per capita. The U.S. has long paid far more for brand-name prescription drugs than peer countries.
As we explained previously, the impact of these deals is more limited than Trump’s statements imply. While some individuals may be able to save money on certain drugs, such as pricey GLP-1 obesity drugs, many people can already get lower prices using their insurance.
Trump also claimed that “we will make our most favored nation agreements on prescription drug prices permanent,” but that seems unlikely. Rena Conti, a health economist at Boston University Questrom School of Business, previously told us that the notion the policy would be codified was “hypothetical at best, as there is no movement in Congress to pass legislation.”
Trump’s claims of “differences of 400%, 500% and even 600%” appear to refer to how much higher a drug’s list price — which people rarely pay — is compared with its price on TrumpRx, the website the administration launched to promote direct-to-consumer MFN prices. This, of course, is not the discount percentage, which cannot be more than 100%.
Regardless of how one does the math, it’s clear that drug prices overall have not fallen as dramatically as Trump claimed.
Consumer price data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a 3.1% drop in drug prices between July 2025 and 2026, based on a measure of prices people and insurers pay to pharmacies. Trump has claimed his policies are behind this decline. But experts told us other factors, such as drugs losing patent protection and increased competition among costly obesity drugs, are likely behind most of the reduction. The Inflation Reduction Act, passed under former President Joe Biden, which allows for price negotiation for some Medicare drugs, may also be a contributing factor.
Immigration
Illegal immigration has dramatically declined since Trump took office in January 2025, and the Trump administration has also stepped up interior enforcement and deportations. But the president exaggerated several points to contrast his record with Biden’s.
Trump wrongly claimed that “zero illegal aliens have entered our country from the southern border in the last 15 months.” As we wrote in our latest “Trump’s Numbers” story in July, there was a 91% decrease in the number of immigrants apprehended attempting to illegally cross the southern border over the last year, compared with the last year under Biden. In July, 9,295 people were apprehended trying to cross the border illegally, the third highest monthly figure since Trump took office.
Because it’s hard to know exactly how many people successfully sneak into the country illegally, we have used those apprehension figures as a proxy to measure illegal border crossings. U.S. Customs and Border Protection keeps, but does not often publicly release, figures on so-called gotaways, immigrants who are detected via electronic surveillance crossing the border but evade apprehension. Rosario “Pete” Vasquez, chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, reported on social media that there were 2,123 gotaways in May 2025 and 986 in June 2025. Data obtained by the Cato Institute via a Freedom of Information Act request indicated another 6,491 gotaways in the following three months.
We asked the administration for more recent data, but did not get a response. In any case, even using that older data, it is not accurate for Trump to say “zero illegal aliens have entered our country from the southern border in the last 15 months.”
What Trump may have meant to say — and as Customs and Border Protection announced on Aug. 13 — is that there have been no releases at the border over the last 15 months, meaning no one caught crossing the border illegally was temporarily released into the U.S., for example, to apply for asylum. On his first day in office, Trump enacted a policy effectively barring asylum applications.
Trump’s estimate that 25 million immigrants poured into the country illegally and unchecked during the Biden administration is also vastly inflated. We calculated in June 2024 that the figure would be about a third of that, including an estimated 2 million “gotaways” who evaded capture by Border Patrol and about 3 million people released with notices to appear in immigration court or report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the future, or other classifications, such as parole.
In August 2025, the Pew Research Center estimated the unauthorized immigrant population at a record-high 14 million in 2023. That’s nearly 4 million more than 2019, and Pew estimated the growth of the overall unauthorized immigrant population “continued to grow at a record pace” in 2024. But that would still not get anywhere near the president’s claim of 25 million more.
Finally, the president claimed the Biden administration “allowed” in 11,888 murderers. As we have written repeatedly, there were about that many noncitizens who had been convicted of murder but were not in ICE custody as of September 2024 — a list known as the agency’s non-detained docket. But the “vast majority” of them entered the country prior to the Biden administration and had their custody status determined “long before this Administration,” the Department of Homeland Security told us in September 2024, noting that many were in prison. Also, the noncitizens include those who entered the country legally, such as green-card holders. Some of them may also have been deported.
Oil and Natural Gas Production
When talking about energy production, Trump suggested that the U.S. became the world leader in oil and gas production during his current administration – which isn’t accurate.
“With the help of our great energy workers here in Texas, our country is producing more oil and gas today than ever before,” Trump said. “Now listen to this, more than Russia and Saudi Arabia combined.”
Later, he added, “We’re now the biggest in the world. We were nowhere near that. Now you’re – we’re the biggest in the world.”
The U.S. is producing more oil and natural gas than ever before, but that was also the case under Trump’s predecessor. The U.S. has had record crude oil production each year since 2023, during the Biden administration, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data. There has also been record natural gas production annually since 2021, which was Biden’s first year as president. Generally, U.S. production of oil and natural gas has been increasing for many years.
We’ve also written before that the U.S. being the global leader in oil and natural gas production was not a recent achievement. It became the world’s No. 1 producer of petroleum, which includes both crude oil and refined petroleum products, such as gasoline, in 2013, and it has produced the largest amount of crude oil, including lease condensate, since 2018. The International Energy Agency said as far back as 2012 that the U.S. was expected to become “the largest global oil producer” by “around 2020” because of advances in shale extraction technology.
In addition, the U.S. has been the leading producer of natural gas production since 2009, overtaking Russia. In fact, the U.S. has produced more natural gas than Russia and Saudi Arabia, together, in all but one year since 2014.
Individually, the U.S. surpassed Saudi Arabia and Russia in petroleum and crude oil production years ago. But it only began producing more petroleum than both combined in 2024, and Russia and Saudi Arabia, together, still produce more crude oil than the U.S.
El-Sayed Disavowed Streamer’s 9/11 Remark
Trump also sought to link Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to a remark by left-wing commentator Hasan Piker that “America deserved 9/11.” El-Sayed has specifically disavowed those comments and says he has no plans to keep campaigning with Piker.
During his speech, Trump said El-Sayed “campaigns with a Marxist agitator who says that America deserved 9/11.”
As we wrote last month, Piker, a popular Twitch streamer, made those remarks during a 2019 livestream while responding to a prior comment from a Republican congressman that American involvement in the Middle East was not the reason for the 9/11 attacks. Piker later walked back his remark.
El-Sayed, who did appear with Piker at campaign events earlier this year, disavowed Piker’s statement about 9/11 when asked about it in an April interview on “Fox & Friends.”
“Of course I don’t think 9/11 was justified,” El-Sayed said. “Because you appear with somebody, doesn’t mean you agree with them on everything.”
El-Sayed told Semafor in August that he has “no plans” to campaign with Piker again.
Trump Accounts
Trump claimed that “children, and many of them born into poverty or families with very little money or future, will be potentially rich when they turn 18 or 21” due to the establishment of so-called Trump accounts, new federal investment and savings accounts for children.
As we’ve explained before, as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the federal government will seed new accounts with $1,000 for children born between Jan. 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2028, who have a valid Social Security number. Parents can open accounts for other kids, but they won’t get the seed money. In addition, the first 25 million children under the age of 10 and residing in a ZIP code with a median income of $150,000 or less will receive an additional $250, which was funded by Michael and Susan Dell’s donation of $6.25 billion to these investment accounts.
The seed money would grow to several thousand dollars by the time a child reaches adulthood. Trump has previously said that the accounts “could grow to hundreds of thousands of dollars” by the time children turn 18, but that’s the only case if additional yearly contributions are made.
Parents, relatives, friends, employers, state governments, philanthropic organizations and individuals can contribute up to a total $5,000 annual combined limit per account. The White House Council of Economic Advisers estimated that the $1,000 seed money, if supplemented by the maximum annual contributions, could grow to more than $300,000 at age 18, assuming an average annual return of 10.3%.
But financial experts said it’s unlikely that parents in low-income households would be able to afford to contribute enough for their children’s accounts to reach such balances.
According to an analysis by the Urban Institute, “Without additional deposits into the accounts of kids from families with low incomes, children of wealthy parents will primarily benefit” from the program.
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine testify during a Senate committee hearing. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Three years ago, the Defense Department led an ambitious international effort to better protect civilians during combat, a movement built on the bloody lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Pentagon created a network with European partners, driving the creation of shared standards. Civilian harm experts described the moment as a “unique opportunity” for American leadership by example.
Today, those efforts continue — without the United States, after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dismantled the civilian protection mission.
And Thursday, no U.S. delegation will be in the room when the international forum the U.S. cofounded meets at NATO headquarters in Belgium.
The country’s absence from the International Contact Group on Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response summit reinforces the abandonment of a mission the Pentagon had encouraged partners to embrace, said current and former officials. Most spoke to ProPublica on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from President Donald Trump’s administration.
They called the step back “humiliating” and “dangerous,” pointing to reports of rising civilian casualties in Iran following strikes on schools and homes.
“There will be a day when people who care about mitigating civilian harm can come back and say, ‘OK, are we ready to solve this problem?’” said Jenny McAvoy, a former Defense Department official who helped shape the U.S. civilian protection program. “But there are already enormous consequences of abandoning this work.”
The Pentagon declined to comment about the lack of U.S. participation in the Brussels talks. A spokesperson previously told ProPublica that the Defense Department factors civilian protections into all phases of operational planning and “remains committed to fulfilling its civilian harm mitigation and response responsibilities.”
The Pentagon adopted the civilian harm mitigation and response mission in 2022 after years of bloodshed in the post-9/11 “forever wars.” Known as CHMR and pronounced “chimmer,” the framework called for a specialized center to collect strike data and for advisers embedded with regional commands to help mitigate the risk to noncombatants.
Not long after, the U.S. teamed up with the Netherlands to coordinate efforts internationally. The two countries had been frequent partners in recent military campaigns, including the fight against the Islamic State group, and were both coming to terms with high-profile civilian casualty incidents. For the United States, years of harm in Iraq and Afghanistan had drawn international outrage and pledges from commanders to better collect data and learn from deadly mistakes.
The Dutch were still addressing the fallout from a 2015 operation in Iraq in which air strikes targeting a car-bomb factory ignited a nearby munitions depot, setting off an enormous explosion that killed at least 70 civilians and wounded hundreds. Dutch responsibility wasn’t revealed until 2019, causing a national scandal and accusations of a cover-up.
In 2023, the U.S. and the Netherlands formed the loose coalition on CHMR. Participants described a small, informal group that has met half a dozen times since 2023 to share best practices and hear briefings on civilian casualty trends.
Advocacy groups said it had taken years to get the U.S. military to think of civilian casualties as more than “collateral damage,” showing commanders how the deaths of innocents were anathema to their morals and strategically harmful to their missions. The eventual adoption of CHMR guidelines by American defense officials helped their counterparts abroad make the case for programs in their own countries.
“By the U.S. putting itself out there and saying, ‘We learned, we can do better,’ it gives permission and makes it OK for other governments to similarly acknowledge, ‘Yeah, we can do better too,’” said McAvoy.
As participants gather this week in Brussels to discuss how to continue strengthening CHMR, however, the early momentum from the U.S. side has evaporated.
Days before the latest summit in Brussels, the United States wasn’t listed as a participant and there was no sign anyone from the Defense Department would attend. Current and former officials predicted either a no-show or, at most, a single delegate from one of the commands showing up.
To experts, the message was clear: The era of U.S. leadership on civilian protection was over.
Foreign ambassadors and heads of diplomatic missions visit Resalat Square in Tehran, Iran, on April 20, 2026, where photos of civilians killed in recent U.S.-Israeli strikes are displayed.Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images
“The U.S. stopped participating in this group last year and people assumed that meant the group would die,” said McAvoy. “But the group continued to exist and to meet — without the U.S. — under the leadership of the U.K. and the Netherlands.”
The two-day summit opens with a broad discussion of CHMR, such as how it applies in coalitions or in operations at sea, that includes advocacy groups and academics, a draft agenda reviewed by ProPublica shows. Day 2 is a closed-door session for more intimate talks among senior representatives of member states. The meeting wraps with a “looking ahead” panel.
Past attendees included Austria, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany and Norway. The nations represent a wide variation in approaches and needs when it comes to CHMR, participants said.
The U.K., for example, doesn’t have a formal framework for civilian harm mitigation and response, and advocates have spent years pushing the British Ministry of Defense to adopt policies similar to those of the United States. Though humanitarian groups generally regarded the American CHMR enterprise as nascent and imperfect, the overall framework provided a worthy standard, said Mae Thompson of the Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights, a London-based advocacy group.
Advocates have framed the Pentagon’s rollback as an opportunity for the U.K. to step into a leadership role, Thompson said, and they’ve been encouraged by a recent internal report by the defense ministry that calls for formalization of a program in Britain, including systems to track civilian harm, investigate, and make amends and offer post-harm response.
NATO boasts a civilian protection policy that predates the American model, but the organization is now incorporating elements of the U.S. approach, said Andrew Hyde, who studies U.S.-European relations at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank.
Hyde said international talks are important for sorting out how CHMR applies in joint operations when the United States, NATO and European nations all have different interpretations of harm mitigation. The diminished U.S. role, he said, means NATO and other partners must step up on coordination.
The shift in leadership could end up shielding civilian protection work from the whims of whichever U.S. administration is in power and leading to more enduring reforms, Hyde said.
“NATO has continued to push forward without U.S. support or participation, keeping up the momentum and ready for U.S. re-engagement,” Hyde said.
A man stands in the rubble after the collapse of the first World Trade Center tower on Sept. 11, 2001, in New York City. Doug Kanter/AFP via Getty Images
Within a few days of the terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001, FBI agents identified an important possible suspect: a middle-aged Saudi graduate student who provided crucial help to two of the al-Qaida hijackers as they settled in San Diego early the year before.
The Saudi, Omar al-Bayoumi, had since moved to England, and he was arrested there at the FBI’s request. A police search of his home and office yielded a trove of evidence that quickly deepened investigators’ suspicions about Bayoumi and his dealings with the terrorists. But what happened to much of that evidence after it was delivered to the FBI remains a mystery.
Bayoumi was questioned and released by British police and later returned to Saudi Arabia. For years thereafter, the FBI would insist he wasn’t really a suspect at all — that Bayoumi had met the hijackers by chance, had helped them unwittingly and seemed nothing like a militant Islamist.
As the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is marked Friday, questions about how the FBI handled Bayoumi’s case have only grown, driven in part by evidence that was seized from him in 2001 but not made public for years or even shared with field agents who sought to investigate his role.
That evidence and other FBI information, now filed in a federal lawsuit against the Saudi government by victims of the attacks, has undercut both Bayoumi’s claims of innocence and the FBI’s profile of him as a genial, pro-American civil servant. While he was living publicly as a student, it shows, Bayoumi worked closely with Saudi religious officials, operated as a Saudi intelligence asset and collaborated with several clerics who would later emerge as militant Islamists tied to al-Qaida.
This week, representatives of the 9/11 families are again demanding an end to what they have called the Justice Department’s silence about what happened to the Bayoumi evidence and why he and other Saudis were not more aggressively pursued. The families have also questioned whether the Trump administration — which has strengthened U.S. diplomatic and business ties to the Saudi royal family — is committed to pursuing the truth about the possible role of Saudi officials.
Brett Eagleson of the organization 9/11 Justice speaks at a news conference in front of the Saudi Consulate in Manhattan on Tuesday. The organization, made up of family members of 9/11 victims, called for further investigation into what it says was collusion in the attacks by Saudi officials.Natalie Keyssar for ProPublica
“We still have not been given the full picture of what happened,” said Kathleen Zapata, whose father, Joseph Coppo, was killed in the World Trade Center. “Why are we having to fight against our own government simply to get answers about the most horrible attack ever on American soil?”
A White House spokesperson said, “President Trump is leading the most transparent administration in history, and his team is working diligently on identifying records that are responsive to these families’ request.” A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment, noting that many of the officials involved in the early 9/11 investigation no longer work for the government.
While former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are expected to attend a ceremony at the 9/11 memorial in New York, President Donald Trump has said he will commemorate the anniversary separately at the Pentagon.
The Saudi government has long denied any role in the attacks, often citing FBI and CIA statements that the royal family was an enemy of al-Qaida and its Saudi-born leader, Osama bin Laden. A spokesperson for the Saudi Embassy in Washington did not return messages asking for comment, including a request to speak to Bayoumi.
From San Diego to Dulles International Airport
A ProPublica examination of how the FBI handled the Bayoumi evidence shows that questions surrounding the Saudi connections to the 9/11 plot date to Jan. 15, 2000, when the first two hijackers landed in Los Angeles on a flight from Bangkok.
The CIA had followed the two men, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, as they met with other Qaida operatives in Malaysia days before. But the agency said it lost track of them when they flew to Thailand and then entered the United States using their real names and Saudi passports. (The CIA did not inform the FBI of their presence in the United States until Aug. 24, 2001, according to the report of the 9/11 Commission.)
Unlike several Qaida operatives who led the hijacking teams, Mihdhar and Hazmi spoke no English and knew almost nothing of life in a Western society. The mastermind of the plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, told CIA interrogators he advised them to seek help from Muslim communities in California, according to the 9/11 Commission. But the commission and many U.S. terrorism experts expressed skepticism that he would deploy such ill-equipped operatives without providing them with any contacts in the United States.
Bayoumi claimed his meeting with the hijackers was happenstance. After driving from San Diego on Feb. 1, 2000, he said, he had a meeting at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles and then went to a nearby halal cafe. There, he later told the FBI, he overheard Hazmi and Mihdhar speaking Gulf-accented Arabic and introduced himself. Seeking to be hospitable, he said, he told them they might want to try San Diego.
Shortly after the men stepped off a bus there three days later, Bayoumi said, he happened to run into them again at a local mosque. The next day, he arranged for them to rent an apartment in the building where he lived with his family, co-signed their lease and set up a bank account for them, briefly loaning them about $1,500 for the deposit. He went on to introduce them to more than two dozen local men who helped them in various ways.
The FBI had already looked closely at Bayoumi, launching a preliminary investigation in 1998 after neighbors reported what they said were suspicious gatherings of young Arab men at his apartment. That inquiry determined that Bayoumi, who had worked for the Saudi civil aviation ministry, was still receiving a generous government stipend through an aviation company for which he did no work. The investigation found no criminal activity, however, and it was closed after six months, officials said.
Barely a week after the 9/11 attacks, the FBI asked the British authorities to arrest Bayoumi in Birmingham, England, where he had begun graduate business studies at Aston University.
David Campbell, then a young terrorism investigator, was dispatched from London by the Metropolitan Police Service, which is responsible for counterterrorism efforts across Britain. He recalled flying back down the highway in a special police vehicle with his handcuffed prisoner in the back seat, the sirens blaring. “They’d been told they had one of the 9/11 terrorists,” he said in an interview.
The FBI sent three agents from the United States to assist with Bayoumi’s interrogation at the Paddington Green police station in Central London. They were joined by a senior FBI attache, Joseph Hummell, who worked closely with the police service’s Anti-Terrorist Branch, known as SO13.
But despite those close contacts and the FBI’s considerable information about Bayoumi, very little of it was shared with Campbell and the Birmingham detective who joined him in questioning the suspect.
“We were really in the dark,” Campbell recalled. “They never even mentioned that he had been under investigation by the FBI in San Diego in 1998.”
Nor, Campbell said, were the interrogators briefed about the materials that had just been taken from Bayoumi’s Birmingham home and office, which included boxes of papers, correspondence, photographs, computer disks, videotapes and an address book. Yet some of those items had been immediately flagged as important, records show.
Among them was a diagram in Bayoumi’s handwriting that appeared to calculate the trajectory of an airplane to a point on the horizon. Another was a video of Bayoumi touring and describing the U.S. Capitol, a building that had been identified by U.S. investigators as a prospective al-Qaida target.
Omar al-Bayoumi, right, shortly after being arrested in Birmingham, England, in 2001BBC World Service via YouTube
After questioning Bayoumi for almost a week, Campbell said, he and the Birmingham detective joined two senior SO13 officers on a conference call with Justice Department attorneys in the United States. The two interrogators were given a brief opportunity to express their view that Bayoumi’s account seemed deeply suspicious and full of falsehoods, Campbell said.
It didn’t seem to matter. The U.S. officials, who included lawyers in Washington and federal prosecutors in New York, concluded quickly that they did not have sufficient evidence to seek Bayoumi’s extradition.
“When the call ended, we just looked at each other in complete disbelief,” Campbell recalled.
FBI documents declassified in response to a 2021 executive order by Biden give a partial answer to what happened to the Bayoumi evidence.
One memorandum on Oct. 11, 2001, notes that New Scotland Yard, as the Metropolitan Police Service was often called, had provided the FBI attache’s office with “copies of all recovered exhibits, including mirror images of all computers.” A complete copy of the trove was also sent via Federal Express to the FBI’s New York Field Office, the memo noted.
By then, however, the agency’s new director, Robert Mueller, had taken the unusual step of ordering that the 9/11 case be run out of its Washington headquarters. The Penttbomteam, as it became known in the FBI’s clunky acronym for Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombing, mobilized thousands of FBI agents and analysts around the world.
One group focused on the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, tracing the path of Hazmi and Mihdhar from Southern California to Dulles International Airport in Virginia, where they abandoned a used Toyota Corolla registered to one of their former addresses in San Diego.
How the headquarters team translated and analyzed the materials obtained from Bayoumi in Britain is unclear. But the team did not appear to share the evidence widely. In another memo, dated May 15, 2002, the San Diego FBI office noted that it was asked to review only five of the more than 80 VHS tapes seized from Bayoumi in Birmingham. Two of those were duplicates and included footage of a paintball fight and a family trip to Sea World. “Nothing of significant investigative/evidential value has been discovered,” the memo stated.
Although Bayoumi’s friends and associates helped the hijackers with everything from part-time jobs to flying lessons (they flunked out because their English was so poor), FBI leaders dismissed the idea that any of the people who helped them knew they were Qaida operatives sent on a still-evolving terrorist mission.
“As far as we know, they contacted no known terrorist sympathizers in the United States,” Mueller told a joint panel of the Senate and House intelligence committees in September 2002. “To this day, we have found no one in the United States except the actual hijackers who knew of the plot.”
The FBI’s more conclusive account of its Penttbom findings came before the bipartisan 9/11 Commission. The young agent leading the Flight 77 investigation team, Jacqueline Maguire, echoed Mueller’s earlier testimony, saying in 2004 that Bayoumi’s meeting with the California hijackers had been “a random encounter” and that he had helped them without knowing their true aim. Maguire also said the FBI had no indication the hijackers had initially sought out another figure who raised suspicions, Fahad al-Thumairy, the imam of the Saudi-built King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, California.
Michael Jacobson, a former State Department counterterrorism official who was a key commission investigator, said he knew some FBI agents in California were convinced that Bayoumi and Thumairy had helped the hijackers deliberately. But Maguire and her boss, Mary Galligan, who oversaw the Penttbom team, “were both consistently pushing back hard on any narrative of a support network,” Jacobson said in an interview.
Maguire and Galligan declined to comment.
FBI Special Agent Jacqueline Maguire testifies during a hearing of the 9/11 Commission in June 2004 in Washington, D.C.Mark Wilson/Getty Images
When investigators from the 9/11 Commission interviewed Bayoumi and Thumairy in Saudi Arabia in 2003, Maguire — who had already interviewed the two Saudis for the FBI months earlier — joined them as an official escort. The interviews, which were managed by Saudi intelligence officials, were notable for Bayoumi’s efforts to ingratiate himself and Thumairy’s seemingly brazen lies, former officials said. Thumairy said he had never met the hijackers and did not even know Bayoumi, despite telephone records showing numerous calls between them. The Saudi Embassy did not respond to a request to speak to Thumairy.
In its final report, the commission said it could not confirm that Thumairy helped the two terrorists but found it was “fairly certain that Hazmi and Mihdhar spent time at the King Fahd mosque and made some acquaintances there.”
Echoing the FBI’s assessment, the commission described Bayoumi as “a devout Muslim, obliging and gregarious,” and found no evidence he “believed in violent extremism or knowingly aided extremist groups.” It would take years before those conclusions were forcefully challenged.
Daniel Gonzalez, a San Diego FBI agent who had been looking at Hazmi and Mihdhar’s circle since the day after the attacks, became the case agent for Operation Encore, a “subfile” or follow-on inquiry to the original 9/11 case. But while he and other agents made significant breakthroughs, former officials said, they faced constant skepticism from FBI headquarters and were sometimes blocked outright in their efforts to pursue the case.
In 2007, in an interview with a key source in Jordan, Gonzalez learned of two other important witnesses in Los Angeles, young Muslim immigrants who had also helped the hijackers. The two later confirmed the hijackers had gone to the King Fahd Mosque after arriving in Los Angeles and met repeatedly with Thumairy. One of the men said Thumairy also arranged for the hijackers to be driven to their first meeting with Bayoumi at the halal cafe — undercutting Bayoumi’s claim that he met them by chance.
For years, Encore agents said, they continued to press for more of the materials seized from Bayoumi in Britain. At one point, Gonzalez got a phone call from Washington asking if he wanted some old Penttbom evidence that was about to be destroyed. The materials — copies of some of Bayoumi’s long-sought papers, including the suspicious flight diagram — stunned the Encore team, Gonzalez said.
Retired FBI Special Agent Daniel Gonzalez in San Diego, where two of the 9/11 hijackers spent time after arriving in the United StatesJohn Francis Peters, special to ProPublica
In June 2012, a small group of Encore investigators and analysts flew to London to try to review the Bayoumi search evidence more thoroughly. According to three former officials familiar with the trip, they viewed dozens of hours of videotapes and took new copies of much of the Metropolitan Police material.
For reasons that remain unclear, however, the team either did not see or did not focus on a few videotapes that would later become evidence in the 9/11 families’ lawsuit, including the tape of Bayoumi at the U.S. Capitol. While some terrorism experts have interpreted the recording as Bayoumi’s effort to “case” the site for a possible attack, lawyers for the Saudi government described it as a tourist video.
The Bayoumi videos also included extensive footage of two Saudi religious officials who not long before had commanded attention from both the FBI and CIA. The two men, Adel al-Sadhan and Mutaeb al-Sudairy, were emissaries of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs who had traced what intelligence officials saw as a strikingly suspicious path around the United States. The Saudi Embassy did not respond to a request to speak to the men.
In addition to traveling to Washington, D.C., with Bayoumi, the two clerics visited Los Angeles and San Diego a year before the hijackers and stayed at one of the homes where Hazmi and Mihdhar later lived. Sudairy also spent several months living in Columbia, Missouri, with an American al-Qaida member, Ziyad Khaleel, who provided Osama bin Laden with the satellite phone that FBI officials said he used to orchestrate the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Just before and after the hijackers arrived in San Diego, telephone records show, Bayoumi also made a series of calls to Sudairy in Washington, Thumairy in Los Angeles and Anwar al-Aulaqi, a Yemeni American cleric. Aulaqi, who ran a San Diego mosque that Bayoumi had funded through Saudi donations, was described by FBI witnesses as a spiritual adviser to Hazmi and Mihdhar. Aulaqi later emerged as an important al-Qaida leader before he was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011.
Unanswered Questions
In 2014 and 2015, a panel of security experts was assembled to review the FBI’s implementation of reforms called for by the 9/11 Commission. The 9/11 Review Commission, as the second panel was called, was also tasked with looking again at questions about the 9/11 plot that remained unanswered.
Maguire, the FBI’s primary liaison to the review panel, again disputed suspicions about Bayoumi. “He came here for school and everything seems accidental with Bayoumi,” the commission was told in a 2014 briefing led by Maguire.
The review panel concluded there was not enough new information to revise the 9/11 Commission’s finding that there was no “witting assistance” to the hijackers. But Tim Roemer — a Democratic former congressman from Indiana who served on the 2002 joint intelligence inquiry, the 9/11 Commission and the Review Commission — made a point of pressing for further investigation into the Saudi question. He was struck that Maguire and other FBI officials were still pushing back.
“There was consistent feedback from some levels of the FBI that simply wanted to close the case and claim that what Bayoumi did was purely coincidence and somehow accidental,” Roemer said.
Roemer insisted that the Review Commission formally recommend that the FBI continue to examine the Saudi issue. But shortly after it did so, officials at FBI headquarters renewed their pressure to shut down Operation Encore. In 2016, the head of the agency’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces finally relented, reassigning the case and disbanding the team that had been investigating it for years.
The next year, a pair of memorandums sent by the FBI’s Washington field office confirmed something that the Encore agents had long suspected: Between the late 1990s and Sept. 11, 2001, Bayoumi was paid a monthly stipend as a co-optee, or part-time agent, of the Saudi intelligence services.
By then, Gonzalez had retired. The Encore investigators who remained were working new jobs. Along with other documents from the FBI investigation, the memos were initially withheld from the 9/11 families by the Justice Department, which classified them as state secrets during Trump’s first term. The Encore agents saw the memos for the first time when they were finally made public in 2022 under Biden’s executive order.
“Somebody needs to explain to the American people why we didn’t see this information before,” Gonzalez said in an interview.
Estadio Quisqueya, home to two Dominican Professional Baseball League teams in Santo Domingo Christopher Gregory-Rivera for ProPublica
Major League Baseball teams sign more players from the Dominican Republic each year than any nation besides the U.S. Almost every neighborhood is home to a baseball field where kids as young as 4 begin learning to play. In our months of reporting, we’ve rarely come across anyone in the Dominican who doesn’t have some connection to the sport: a sibling or uncle or son who aspires to be a professional player, or who once did.
As beloved and important as baseball is in the Dominican, industry practices can hurt young players and their families. Dozens of trainers and players have told us that adolescents are expected to perform at levels never asked of their peers from other countries and enter into agreements with teams at much earlier ages. (We just published a story about abusive moneylending practices that have sprouted from this system.) We’re planning more stories brought to our attention by this community.
We want this work to reach people whose lives are touched by the issues we’re investigating. If that’s you, we want you to be able to easily connect with our reporting team and share tips or experiences you think we should know about Dominican baseball. The more people we hear from, the more impactful our reporting on these complex issues can be. (Learn more about ProPublica and our mission.)
For this series, we’re opening a WhatsApp line because it’s a popular way to keep in touch in the Dominican, and international calls and texts are free.All you have to do is text “baseball” to our WhatsApp number, 1-917-207-6447.
If you’re not a WhatsApp user, if you can still get in touch with our reporting team via email:
You’ll get a link to our latest stories about baseball. We’ll also ask about your connection to baseball and ask you to share anything that you think our reporters should look into as we continue investigating.
If you give us permission, we’ll also send you quick updates from our series every now and then.
What kind of tips and comments are helpful?
We want to hear about baseball-related issues and experiences that are important to you, whether they’re connected to finances, health, education or something else. Below are a few of the topics we’re already reporting on; if you have related experiences to share, we would appreciate hearing about them.
Illness and injury related to performance pressure
Wide availability of anabolic steroids and consequences of use
Conditions at training academies (pensiones)
If you have a connection to baseball — whether you’re a current or former player, trainer, parent of a player, doctor who treats athletes, someone who works for an MLB team or you have some other link — we would love to hear from you.
If I don’t have a connection to baseball but want to follow along, should I sign up?
Yes, we’ll share updates from our investigations, along with links to our latest reporting.
What if I know someone who has a connection to baseball?
Please send them a link to our baseball series or have them text “baseball” to our WhatsApp number, 1-917-207-6447. And thank you — we need to reach as many people as we can.
What will you do with the information I share with you?
We will read everything you send and follow up with you if we have further questions or are interested in including something you’ve shared in our investigations.
We take your privacy very seriously. Our reporters speak to people every day who want to share information but fear retribution. Our reputation is built on protecting sources, and we take that responsibility to heart. You can request to speak on background, which means you would not be named in our stories.
Mercedes Garcia at the grave of her daughter Daniela
Around 4 a.m. on Sept. 21, 2020, Luis David Saba arrived at a desolate stretch of highway along the southern coast of the Dominican Republic. Police and paramedics had left by then, taking with them a Jeep Grand Cherokee with a crumpled hood and the tangled remains of the cheap motorcycle it had smashed into. Also gone were the motorcycle’s two critically injured passengers. The only signs that an accident had occurred a few hours earlier were the blood and debris smeared across the asphalt and a pile of neatly placed branches.
Saba knew what to expect underneath that pile. It was a Dominican custom to use anything on hand to shroud a body abandoned by paramedics. Pushing away the branches, Saba saw shredded clothes, torn skin and long, curly hair forming a halo over a battered face. He covered the body of his 20-year-old younger brother, Yohan Saba Mercado, with a sheet. In shock, he felt nothing but the need to get his brother out of the road.
Saba sat and waited for forensic investigators he was told were on their way. Hours passed, the sun rose and traffic began to stream by them. Finally, he gave up. With the help of friends, he loaded his brother’s body into a van, and hours later it was at his mother’s house.
“Paper Trail” Podcast
Learn more about this story on ProPublica’s podcast “Paper Trail.”
Later that morning, two other families were experiencing similar horrors. Deby Beato Charles, 20, and Daniela Perez Garcia, 19, had been riding on the back of Yohan’s motorcycle when the Jeep rear-ended them. When Deby’s older brother, Ruben, got to a nearby hospital, he was met by a doctor who handed him a wallet and bracelet. Deby had died of a severe head injury and blunt chest trauma. At another hospital, Daniela’s uncle was ushered into a room where his niece lay. Her face was so swollen he didn’t recognize her. According to her death certificate, she had suffered injuries to her head, chest and hip and went into hypovolemic shock, in which the loss of bodily fluids causes a person’s organs to shut down.
The families of Daniela and Yohan held funerals in their homes that afternoon. During the proceedings, word spread about who had been driving the Grand Cherokee. It was Oneil Cruz, a “pelotero,” a ballplayer, with a fortune and a future, the 21-year-old scion of a local baseball family, a top prospect in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization. Seemingly everyone in the area knew how much he received from his major league signing bonus five years earlier: $950,000.
The families also knew what was going to happen next.
Yohan’s mother told me that after all the mourners left the house, a driver showed up holding out a phone. On the line was Cruz’s mother offering condolences — and wanting to negotiate.
Less than 7 miles from the site of the accident is the striving farm town of Nizao. Even though it has a population of just 32,000, Nizao has produced dozens of professional ballplayers, including three-time All-Star Ketel Marte and, most famously, Hall of Famer Vladimir Guerrero Sr., one of the best hitters in modern baseball and father of Vladimir Jr., the star first baseman for the Toronto Blue Jays. Looming over the main road into town is the Guerreros’ mansion. Right below it, a giant 27 has been carved into the hill — the jersey number the two share.
A mural of Toronto Blue Jays first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. in Nizao
By 2020, Oneil Cruz Ureña looked poised to be among the best of Nizao’s ballplayers. The Los Angeles Dodgers signed him when he was 16 and over 6 feet tall. They traded him to the Pittsburgh Pirates, who considered him their future shortstop. The statistics website FanGraphs ranked him as one of baseball’s top prospects, declaring that “there aren’t many who have a chance to be what this guy might.”
But the accident on a darkened road threatened to destroy that chance before Cruz even made it to the major leagues. Police detained him at the scene. In a court filing the following day, prosecutors said that they had opened an investigation “en contra del imputado,” “against the accused.” They sought “coercive measures,” a mechanism in Dominican law by which a suspect can be forced to remain in custody while an investigation continues. In a press release, they alleged that Cruz “had consumed alcoholic beverages prior to the accident.”
The scandal made headlines in the Dominican Republic and the United States, and then, in a matter of days, it evaporated from the public eye. How that happened has been unknown, until now.
I’d heard about the Cruz case last year when I began reporting on the booming industry of “prestamistas,” moneylenders, who exploit major league prospects in the Dominican Republic by getting their undereducated parents to give up sizable portions of their signing bonuses. The case’s disappearance, I was told, marked the origin story of the most dominant prestamista in the country’s chaotic baseball ecosystem: Santo Caraballo. At the time, Caraballo was an obscure businessman with political connections. He rose to prominence after forming a business partnership with national hero David Ortiz, the retired Boston Red Sox great who remains an influential figure in Major League Baseball. (In a statement, Ortiz said his business relationship with Caraballo “began to come to an end” more than 18 months ago.) I wrote about Caraballo’s practices in “The Dominican Baseball Factory.”
To find out how Caraballo made the case against Cruz go away, I interviewed more than 30 people in the Dominican Republic. Some were afraid to talk, but others, primarily family members of the victims, were eager to speak publicly for the first time. I also obtained hundreds of pages of previously unreported documents, including court records and bank receipts, as well as voice notes. I made numerous attempts to reach Caraballo about his role, including sending him a summary of my findings. He never responded.
The Dominican court system gives victims or their families significant input on whether to pursue a prosecution. Caraballo oversaw a campaign to persuade the families of the three victims to accept cash in return for signing documents withdrawing all “penal, civil or judicial” claims against Cruz.
The effort rescued Cruz’s baseball career — he is now the starting center fielder for the Pirates — and it launched Caraballo’s. He became a ubiquitous operator in the sport, feared for the sort of high-powered connections that could make a deadly crash disappear. But for some of the victims’ relatives, the money they received — roughly $66,000 in total for the three families — hasn’t lasted nearly as long as the hurt: six years of unresolved grief, resentment and regret that they allowed their forgiveness to be purchased.
Cruz declined a request for an interview. His lawyer, Amauris Vásquez Disla, called the accident “a profound tragedy for all parties involved, especially the victims’ families.” He went on to say that the court “issued an order of dismissal based on the findings, a legally binding decision that was a lawful resolution of this matter.”
A spokesperson for the Pittsburgh Pirates said the team and Cruz “addressed this matter more than six years ago based on the information available and the outcome of the legal proceedings.”
A poster of Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Oneil Cruz in Nizao
Yohan and Deby lived in and around a barrio of Sabana Grande de Palenque, known as “Sal Si Puedes,” Get Out If You Can. Five miles from Nizao, it is marked by ruddy dirt roads and half-built homes and is separated from the rest of the town by a deep canal. Some residents have to cross makeshift footbridges to reach their front doors. Daniela grew up in the nearby village of Juan Baron.
As was the case with Deby and Daniela, Yohan’s parents separated when he was young. His early childhood was spent in a small wooden home where his paternal grandmother took care of him while his mother worked in Santo Domingo as a housekeeper. A teenager when his father suffered a stroke, Yohan would bring him blood pressure medicine and take him to the beach to exercise in the ocean. Yohan worked as an air conditioning mechanic, telling his dad his goal was to pay for a new roof for his mom’s house so that it wouldn’t flood every time it rained. He commuted to Santo Domingo on a X1000 motorcycle he had bought secondhand. In a country where it’s common to see three or more people on a “moto,” the noisy rig was also how his friends got around.
Images of Yohan Saba Mercado in his mother’s house
The best of those friends was Deby. The third of four boys, all right-handed pitchers growing up, he lived in his mother’s immaculate home. After she moved to Chile six years earlier to find work, Deby spoke with her every day, updating her on his love life. He had her name tattooed within an infinity symbol on his arm. When he failed to make a top-level baseball academy, the most common route to be signed by a major league team, Deby returned to high school. At the time of the crash, he was days away from graduating, bagging groceries and taking care of his younger brother.
Deby and Daniela had known each other since they were kids and, according to their families, had an off-and-on relationship. Videos and photos of Daniela often show her dancing and singing. “She never wanted the party to end,” a friend said. The youngest of four, she lived with her mother, who considered Daniela her best friend. She was her “chiquita,” or “little girl,” Daniela would remind her mother when she insisted on sitting on her lap. Many nights, they slept in the same bed together.She had graduated high school and was taking English classes in Santo Domingo.
A photo of Deby Beato Charles alongside those of his brothers
Deby, Yohan and Daniela were in that hopeful, stressful, liberating period between adolescence and adulthood. They had no intention to be out late that September night, but they were also not going to turn down an impromptu plan to party.
Daniela told her mom she was going to meet girlfriends at the Nizao River and would be back by early evening. It was still daylight when she recorded herself at an outdoor bar, wearing a red dress and singing along to a salsa song. Nobody was in a rush to return to the stagnant indoors. As for the country’s 5 p.m. COVID-19 curfew, few young people took it seriously. In Baní, the nearest sizable city, there was a bar referred to as Escondido, or Hidden, because it served drinks past curfew. Daniela and a friend recruited Yohan and Deby, who were home but easy to persuade to join.
At around 11 p.m., according to court records, they were riding on the four-lane highway heading home. Late at night, the road is desolate and poorly lit. Trucks and cars howl by at high speeds, and accidents are frequent. A security guard who works at a snack stand across from the site of the accident told me that his boss was killed when a car smashed into his business.
Yohan was at the handlebars, with Daniela and Deby seated behind him. None wore a helmet. A friend on his own motorcycle was riding alongside them. They had just passed the shuttered snack stand when Cruz rear-ended Yohan’s motorcycle, smashing its rear tire and throwing the three friends onto the pavement.
Cruz called 911, according to his lawyers. A lieutenant from the national police responded to the scene, but his subsequent report, which he filed in court, offers little detail about the accident site or investigation that followed. If there was any forensic analysis, prosecutors never produced it. There is no mention of whether police believed either Yohan or Cruz was driving recklessly or speeding. The report does not indicate whether the victims were tested for their alcohol levels. It makes no reference to the second motorcyclist. When I reached him, he said that the authorities never questioned him. He declined to be interviewed further.
According to the report, Cruz told the lieutenant that “en ningun momento,” “at no time,” did he see the motorcycle before colliding with it in the passing lane. He said it didn’t have lights — an assertion that would later become a point of contention in court. Cruz’s legal team filed a photo of the motorcycle that showed missing lights, but it was taken after the accident, when the bike was barely intact. Luis David, Yohan’s brother, told me that the motorcycle had working lights in the front but not in the rear.
The day after the accident, stories were posted on Facebook that included photos of Yohan, Deby and Daniela lying mangled on the highway as emergency responders attempted to save them. On Dominican gossip and news sites, opinions poured forth. Some were convinced that Cruz would get preferential treatment. Others predicted that the families of the victims would be seeking a payday. Many asserted that the deceased were as much at fault as Cruz since they were all out past curfew.
Near the site where Cruz rear-ended Mercado’s motorcycle, killing all three of its passengers
The families of Yohan, Deby and Daniela all knew of the Cruzes. Oneil’s father, Rafael, played pro ball, first in Japan and then in the Atlanta Braves organization until 2009, when he was suspended after testing positive for steroids. He returned to Nizao, where he opened a baseball academy. His most promising pupils included Oneil and his brothers, Rafael Jr. and Homer, who played pro ball in the United States. Oneil was named after Rafael’s favorite ballplayer, New York Yankees outfielder Paul O’Neill.
Among the Cruzes’ inner circle was Osvaldo Tamarez, a trainer known as Cabezon, Big Head. He told me that in the hours following the accident, when Oneil was still in custody, he went to see the Cruzes and advised them to handle the aftermath of the accident carefully. “Cuidado, tu hijo va a ser una figura pública,” Tamarez said he told them. “Your son is going to be a public figure.” According to Tamarez, the Cruzes assigned him to speak with Daniela’s and Deby’s family members, some of whom he knew from baseball. He told me that from the beginning, their focus was on how to pay off the victims’ families so they wouldn’t sue and wouldn’t demand that prosecutors pursue the case. A person close to the Cruzes confirmed Tamarez’s account.
Tamarez said that another trainer recommended that Cruzes bring in Santo Caraballo, a businessman he knew from the baseball industry. Among Caraballo’s many companies was a legal services firm, even though he wasn’t a lawyer. More relevant, Caraballo had political connections. He was an ambassador in the ministry of foreign affairs, a patronage position awarded him four years earlier by President Danilo Medina.
Tamarez said that Caraballo immediately got to work on multiple fronts, including organizing a legal team. But that wasn’t his most important role. Caraballo’s most important job was simple, Tamarez told me: Fix the problem.
At Cruz’s initial court appearance, which came a little more than two days after the accident, one of his attorneys asked to delay the case so his representatives could “in a humane way, seek solutions” for the families and their “material hardships.” The judge postponed the hearing for two days. Family members told me that Caraballo, or those working with him, had already begun reaching out to them.
The last time Mercedes Garcia saw her daughter, she had helped Daniela pull the price tags off her red dress before she went to the river with her girlfriends. In the days after the accident, Garcia was haunted by a vision of her daughter plastered to the road in the torn dress, yelling, “Ayúdame Mamá, ayúdame!” “Help me, Mama, help me!”
I found Garcia where she spends much of her day: seated alone in her tiny living room, rocking back and forth on a couch, her hair neatly pulled back, digging under her fingernails with a bobby pin. I could hear the shouts of a woman preaching at the church next door.
Mercedes Garcia at home in Juan Baron
Garcia, who is 65, says she was clear from the beginning that she didn’t want money from the Cruzes. “Rich people, especially baseball players, like to pay for dead people with money,” she told me. “I am poor, but I have honor.” All she wanted, she said, was for Cruz to answer for what happened and apologize. Instead, she said, her family — most prominently, her son — tricked her into agreeing to a deal.
Garcia told me that in the aftermath of her daughter’s death, she entrusted her son Porfirio with handling all the paperwork. Porfirio was a traffic cop in Santo Domingo who moonlighted as an Uber driver. What Garcia didn’t know, but what Tamarez later confirmed, was that Porfirio was already working with Caraballo.
According to Garcia, Porfirio brought her a document to sign that he partially obscured with his hand. Shortly afterward, Porfirio drove her and another of her sons, Juan Manuel, to Caraballo’s office in Santo Domingo. Porfirio went in by himself and brought out another document for his mother to sign. She was in a fog of grief, she told me, and didn’t read it. Juan Manuel confirmed his mother’s account that she didn’t understand what she was signing and that Porfirio didn’t explain what it was.
Daniela’s father, Porfirio Perez, co-signed the documents. Perez, who can barely read, parks cars at a bank for tips. He told me that Garcia’s brother brought him the papers but didn’t tell him that they exonerated Cruz. “Because they saw that I’m a simple person, they took advantage of me,” he said. Garcia’s brother declined to comment.
I reviewed the two documents, which were dated the same day as Cruz’s court appearance. One was filed in court by Cruz’s attorney; the other was not. The document filed in court states that the family sought to “withdraw” all legal claims against Cruz. It also says that the family had not received any “pecuniary interest” in return for withdrawing the claims. They were doing so out of an awareness that the accident was not caused by Cruz, the document says, “but rather by circumstances of life.”
The contract not filed in court is signed by Daniela’s parents and Oneil’s mother. It’s a “discharge and legal settlement” stating that the parents were paid 900,000 pesos, about $15,000, for Daniela’s “funeral expenses.” That amount is more than twice the average annual income in the Dominican Republic. The document says that the money represented a settlement for “damages caused” by Cruz to Daniela’s family. But Garcia and Juan Manuel said that Porfirio controlled the payout and that he gave them around 300,000 pesos, or less than $5,000. Daniela’s father told me he received nothing.
Daniela Perez Garcia’s grave site
Garcia said that she didn’t talk to much of her family for years after she realized what had happened. Once they decided to take that money, they lost her, too, she told me. “I was buried along with Daniela.”
I left multiple voice and text messages for Porfirio, who declined to be interviewed.
Cruz’s mother, however, did agree to hear my questions. I met her at the Cruzes’ gated home on a busy street in Nizao. With wary politeness, she indicated that we sit on the front porch. Batting cages were in the back.
I asked her about Caraballo’s role in persuading the victims’ families not to sue, but she denied that she knew him, contradicting several witnesses. When I showed her a photograph of Caraballo, she told me she didn’t recognize him. Before I could ask my next question, she stood up, making it clear the interview was over. No more than five minutes had passed. “Thank you so much for coming,” she said. “I can’t really answer because I don’t know anything.”
When Deby’s mother, Elena Charles, left for Chile to find restaurant work, it fell to Ruben, the eldest of her four sons, to take “las riendas de la casa,” the reins of the house. So it was Ruben, who turned 27 the night his brother died, whom Tamarez visited shortly after Cruz’s court appearance. Ruben told me that Tamarez encouraged him to strike a deal, arguing that the ballplayer was never going to be punished and that Daniela’s family had already received a million pesos for agreeing not to sue. He should meet with a man named Caraballo and hear what he had to say.
Ruben spoke with his father, who told him the same thing: Deby was not coming back. Take the money, even if you just keep it in an account. (Deby’s father did not agree to an interview.)
When Ruben got to Caraballo’s office, he said Cruz’s mother was there. All he wanted, Ruben told me, was justice — he didn’t care if the courts administered it or if he did. But he was also aware that Tamarez and his father were probably right: He and his family were powerless.
Ruben yelled at Caraballo that he wasn’t there to negotiate over his brother’s death like it was a car for sale. Caraballo, he said, responded like a man used to people exploding with rage in his office. He pointed out all of his surveillance cameras. According to Ruben, he then made his offer. Because both of Deby’s parents lived outside the country — his father had been in Spain for years — additional legal work would be required if Ruben’s family made an agreement. Therefore, he was willing to go as high as 2 million pesos, roughly $34,000.
Deby’s mother returned home a couple of weeks after the accident. I recently met with her and her three surviving sons in their comfortable and tidy living room. Fifty-two years old, dressed in a patterned jumpsuit and a necklace bearing her nickname — Ramonita — she frequently wiped away tears as she discussed Deby. On the wall were portraits of each of the boys. Deby’s brothers are wearing their high school graduation robes. Deby is pictured shirtless, sporting sunglasses, ripped jeans and a knowing grin.
As we discussed the negotiation with Caraballo, Ruben and his mother revisited an argument that seemed as fresh as those they had during hourslong phone calls six years ago. She was absolutely clear about what she wanted: Cruz should be in prison for 120 years.
“Te dije no lo hagas,” she said to him, her voice rising. “I told you not to do it.”
“And what did I tell you?” Ruben responded. “That they were going to release him anyway!”
Ruben signed a document on behalf of his family called an “act of withdrawal,” which Cruz’s attorneys later filed in court. Similar to the document signed by Daniela’s parents, it attested that Cruz “had not the slightest intention of causing the accident” and that Deby’s family had agreed to withdraw all legal claims against him, including criminal and civil, without “any type of pressure [or] pecuniary interest.”
Caraballo, though, wasn’t done. Ruben told me that Caraballo then pitched him on turning his brother’s death into an income opportunity: Rather than give the family the 2 million pesos in a lump sum, Caraballo would invest the money for them and pay 15,000 pesos, just over $265, a month indefinitely.
Ruben, though, was done with Caraballo. “I don’t want to do business with you,” he said he told him, “and I don’t want to hear from you ever again.”
The family put the money in a bank account. Except for the interest, roughly $65 a month, which the family has used to help pay for the youngest’s tuition, the money is still there, they told me. Charles explained that there’s been plenty of times that they could’ve dipped into the principal, but the money repels her. “It doesn’t have an end,” she said of the anguish she feels about having made a deal with the Cruzes. “For the rest of my life, it’s going to be a conflict.”
Genny Mercado, after turning away the driver with Cruz’s mother on the line, faced a similar gantlet of pressure from her family. Word spread that the other families were accepting a deal. Genny earned about 16,000 pesos, about $275, a month as a housekeeper, so a settlement would likely exceed several years of income. Rejecting the money, Yohan’s half brothers told her, would accomplish nothing.
Mercado, who is 48, was also the de facto decision-maker. Yohan’s father, Pedro Saba, had suffered a second stroke the day he learned of his son’s death. She hired the only lawyer she knew, who negotiated a deal on the parents’ behalf. The document was a withdrawal like those signed by the other families, exonerating Cruz. Mercado said that she couldn’t think clearly about any of this at the time: “My mind was set on my son.”
Minus the lawyer’s cut, Mercado and Saba received approximately 800,000 pesos, or $14,000. Yohan’s father spent 300,000 pesos on a refrigerator, a television and a bed. Mercado used the money to buy rebar and 75 bags of cement to build the roof that Yohan had promised. She stopped working for seven months and rarely left her home except to put flowers on his grave.
When I showed up, two of her sons arranged plastic chairs in the living room so I could speak with her and her husband, José Enrique. She had never been interviewed, and it had been years since anyone outside the family even pretended to care about what happened to Yohan. “Any family that goes through something like this just wants justice,” Mercado told me. “Everyone who kills has to go to jail.” But in Cruz’s case, “No one wanted to hurt the future del muchacho.”
Genny Mercado, Yohan’s mother, with two of her sons, Eduardo (left) and Yeri
There were no second thoughts about having accepted the money, only resignation that there was never going to be a fair outcome for Yohan. “Around here, the police let a lot of things slide, especially when it involves people who have money or connections or whatever else,” said José Enrique, tossing shucked pea shells on the cement floor. “We’re not going to try to dance around that fact anymore.”
Later I visited Yohan’s father, who spends his days in a spartan home with three of his elderly brothers, two of whom are blind. “Terminator” blared on the television. Saba doesn’t have any photos of Yohan on his walls because, he said, it would make him too sad. In a voice slurred by his two strokes, Saba told me how Yohan would put him on his motorcycle and take him to the ocean. “Wherever I wanted to go,” he said, “he would take me there.” He hasn’t been back to the beach since Yohan was killed.
Cruz’s second court date occurred on the Friday following the accident. Prosecutors were seeking to keep him in custody for three months. The victims’ families weren’t present. The court didn’t know how to reach two of them, a clerk explained to the judge. Prosecutors didn’t even get the names of the victims right, referring to Yohan Saba as “Jons Sabab” and Deby as “Baby.” The charges they sought against Cruz included reckless driving and causing an accident that resulted in death. If convicted, he could face one to three years in prison.
Most striking was what was not said. In their press release after the crash, prosecutors had referred to evidence that Cruz had been drinking before the accident. But they never made that claim in court. I reached out to the lead prosecutor as well as the prosecutor’s office to ask why they had decided not to charge Cruz with driving while intoxicated. Both declined to comment. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette journalist asked the same question the week of the court date. He reported that a spokesperson for the prosecutors explained that Cruz had “smelled of alcohol” after the accident but that police hadn’t performed a sobriety test because of a “procedural error.”
While Cruz remained in police custody, his legal team submitted the withdrawals that had been signed by the victims’ families. In addition to offering his condolences, an attorney explained that Cruz was providing “material support” to the families for their “basic needs of being human: education, food, clothing, among other matters.” He also submitted numerous testimonials praising Cruz’s good character, including from his pastor, who attested that Cruz had demonstrated “loyalty and absolute fidelity to the gospel,” and from a local marble and granite contractor who said that Cruz was a responsible client “deserving of an open line of credit.” The attorney emphasized that Cruz was one of baseball’s “five highest-rated prospects internationally.”
The accident, he told the judge, “hurts the whole town, Oneil above all, who for this will have to go to professional therapy so that he can cope with the trauma … For God’s sake, let’s try to ensure that Oneil Cruz Ureña’s mental health is now a priority.”
A social media post made a few weeks after Cruz’s release shows him (second from left), alongside Caraballo (far left) and two others at the Miami airport.Instagram
The judge released Cruz on a bond of 2 million pesos, or $34,000. A couple of weeks later, Cruz posted a photo of himself with Caraballo, grinning while seated on a golf cart at the Miami airport.
The following March, Cruz was at the Pirates’ spring training facility in Florida. An article at the time mentioned the accident in passing, buried under the news that the team was moving him into the outfield. It’s the only time I know of in which Cruz has been quoted discussing the accident.
“In the beginning, I was very fearful of not being able to continue to play the game that I love and to reach the dream I’ve always had, which is to reach the big leagues,” Cruz said through an interpreter. “However, when things became clear later and everything was solved, I was able to … hope again that I’ll be able to play. Now, I have peace.”
The press, both in the United States and the Dominican Republic, stopped covering the accident after that.
The man who helped deliver him that peace used the incident to become one of the most powerful figures operating in the shadows of Dominican baseball.
Oneil Cruz, now the center fielder for the Pittsburgh PiratesAndy Kuno/San Francisco Giants/Getty Images
Cruz’s next court appearance was Aug. 30, 2021. Almost a year had passed since the accident, and he was in the States playing for the Altoona Curve, a Pirates minor league team. He attended virtually. Despite the families’ withdrawals, prosecutors still had the power to pursue charges against him, but their case was flimsy. The only evidence they submitted were death certificates and a police report that offered little more than the date and time of the accident and the names of Cruz and the three people he killed: Yohan Saba Mercado, Deby Beato Charles and Daniela Perez Garcia. The judge dismissed the case, ordering the return of the 2 million pesos bond.
Just over a month later, Cruz made his major league debut against the Cincinnati Reds, scorching a single that was the hardest recorded hit by a Pirate, a mark he has broken many times since. He is now a fixture of the team and will earn $3.3 million this year. He is projected to make far more once he becomes a free agent in a few seasons.
On an evening in late 2021, in a pristine baseball complex in central Santo Domingo, a baby-faced 14-year-old outfielder in athletic gear named Belfi Rivera huddled in front of a computer screen. Next to him was John Carmona, who had been Belfi’s trainer and de facto caretaker since he was 11 years old. In a nearby office, Belfi’s parents stared anxiously at a separate computer. On the screen, calling into the Dominican Republic, were representatives of the Arizona Diamondbacks, there for a conversation that promised to shift forever the fortunes of Belfi and his parents.
The team, they would soon learn, had agreed to pay Belfi $1.8 million after his 16th birthday. It was a deal Carmona had negotiated without consulting Belfi or his parents. It was also a handshake agreement that skirted Major League Baseball’s rules that bar teams from signing players younger than 16. Every year, all 30 major league teams reach preacuerdos, or early deals, with hundreds of Dominican prospects — a practice they make little attempt to hide. (The Diamondbacks did not respond to a request for comment.)
The baseball men said Belfi was now part of “la familia.” They asked him about his favorite player and how he learned to swing his bat so fast and whether he understood the importance of discipline. The conversation washed over Belfi, who, on the rare occasions when he spoke, did so in a tumbling, nervous cadence. He had spent his childhood in a shanty outside of the capital. Meals often consisted of sugary cornmeal or a piece of bread. But he had a talent “gifted by God,” as an early trainer put it, with the skills — speed, arm, glove, contact hitting — treasured by scouts. The size of this bonus, once made official, would establish him as one of the highest-paid prospects outside of the United States.
“Paper Trail” Podcast
Learn more about this story on ProPublica’s podcast “Paper Trail.”
If he fulfilled his promise, he might join an ever-expanding list of Dominican legends: San Francisco Giant Juan Marichal, the winningest pitcher of the 1960s; Tony Fernandez and George Bell, Toronto Blue Jays teammates who hailed from the same baseball-mad town of San Pedro de Macoris; Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez, and David Ortiz, the pitcher and sluggers who in the early 2000s turned the Caribbean nation into an unlikely bastion of Boston Red Sox fandom; and swaggering, bat-flipping modern superstars like Toronto’s Vladimir Guerrero Jr., the New York Mets’ Juan Soto, and the San Diego Padres’ Fernando Tatis Jr. — with playing contracts totaling more than $1.6 billion — who have helped to revitalize baseball’s popularity.
For the past four decades, no country outside the United States has sent more players to the majors than the Dominican Republic. With a population under 12 million, it is roughly the size of Ohio, a state that last year claimed two dozen major league players. The Dominican Republic had 144, roughly 10% of the league. The country is a baseball factory. Talented players are sent to practice full time at one of hundreds of academies when they are as young as 10 years old.
For the Past 14 Years, the Dominican Republic Has Dominated International Signings by Major League Baseball Teams
The league signed more than 12,700 international rookies from 2012 to 2026, half of whom were born in the Dominican Republic.
Note: This chart includes only countries that accounted for at least 1% of international signings in 2026. Together, these countries represent over 95% of non-American rookies signed. Sources: ProPublica reporting, Spotrac.Chris Alcantara/ProPublica
That’s how old Belfi was when he went off in tears to live in the home of a stranger who trained boys on a shaggy ball field in the capital. The best players are then sold to increasingly more prominent trainers until they wind up at an elite academy run by men like Carmona, who have close relations with major league teams and receive a sizable percentage of a player’s signing bonus.
As a child, Belfi never cared for baseball. He started playing at 7, he told me, because a local coach would drag him from his house and cuff him on the head if he tried to escape to a nearby river to be with his friends. But even as a young boy, he understood the sport likely represented his family’s one shot out of grinding poverty. During that video call in 2021, it seemed that he had clinched it.
But in two and a half years, the $1.8 million Belfi was promised would be almost all gone. Carmona received $630,000, which represented his 35% commission. But more than $950,000 went to someone who had no hand in teaching Belfi how to play baseball. His name is Santo Caraballo, one of the most notorious moneylenders profiting from Dominican baseball. His business partner is a national hero and, 10 years after his retirement, still a commanding figure within Major League Baseball: David Ortiz, known universally as “Big Papi.”
In a brief conversation with Caraballo, he told me his business was not the biggest or “that lucrative.” I made multiple attempts to reach Caraballo again, including sending him a summary of my findings. He never responded.
Belfi Rivera’s autographed Elite Extra Edition baseball card in 2022
Thanks to early agreements, prestamistas, or moneylenders,like Caraballo now wield singular power within Dominican baseball, amassing millions of dollars by persuading undereducated parents to sign away portions of their sons’ future bonuses in exchange for loans with exorbitant interest rates. Major League Baseball has known for years about early agreements and the predatory industry that has grown around them. Even though it has a formidable economic and political presence in the Dominican Republic, it has done little about either. It has never publicly warned or penalized a team for making an early deal, and its attempts to educate families about moneylenders have been ineffectual. (A spokesperson for Major League Baseball declined to comment and referred to past statements by league officials calling for an overhaul of the Dominican system.)
It is not just Major League Baseball that has allowed this corrosive system to continue. When the league proposed changes that would have eliminated early deals and made it more difficult for moneylenders to prey on baseball families, David Ortiz used his influence within the powerful players union to help block the reform. At the time it was unknown outside of Dominican baseball that he had a financial interest in preserving the system. (In a statement sent through his lawyer, Ortiz said that his opposition to the league’s proposal “was never motivated by personal interests.”)
Baseball is everywhere in the Dominican Republic, from the 13,000-seat Estadio Quisqueya in Santo Domingo to shaggy sandlots in the countryside.
Chapter 2
I’d long been told that the Dominican Republic’s wildly successful baseballindustry was plagued with abuse and exploitation — that for decades Major League Baseball has presided over a massive unregulatedsystemthat treats tens of thousands of Dominican boys like commodities. But when I began making calls last year, I expected those most involved to defend it. Instead, trainers — the men integral to the industry as instructors, surrogate parents and agents — virtually all told me they felt forced to participate in a system that is broken and costly.
I also spoke with team executives, agents, scouts and parents. Between the exorbitant commissions that go to trainers, the pressure to evaluate prepubescent players on how skilled they will be in four or five years, and all the education lost while those players are pulled out of school, nobody would purposefully design a system this way, they said.
“This is a system that is allowing corruption at all levels,” said one longtime trainer, Eddy Fontana.
Major League Baseball, too, doesn’t deny this, declaring recently that it was “long past time to reform” Dominican baseball. The players union also acknowledges that the industry is troubled but says it’s “a people issue, not a system issue.”
What I found most surprising was the common opinion that, despite widespread acknowledgment that Dominican baseball needed to be overhauled, the industry has gotten even more exploitative. Arturo J. Marcano, who has spent most of his career as a sports attorney, published a book in 2002 comparing the Dominican baseball pipeline to human trafficking. He didn’t hesitate when I asked how today’s industry compares. “A hundred times worse,” he said.
I set out to learn why the league and the players have done little to fix these problems. I crisscrossed the Dominican Republic and met people in shabby dugouts and gleaming stadiums, under a palm tree on a rocky beach coated in shattered beer bottles and at a café on a touristy plaza where a gold-covered street performer posed as a batter atop a trophy. I reviewed hundreds of pages of unreported court records, contracts,bank statements and WhatsApp messages, among other documents.
Wherever you go, there are reminders of el pelotero who achieved the Dominican dream of playing American baseball. Virtually every village has el play, a ball field, lovingly painted and filled with boys of all ages even during a downpour. Watchful men fine-tune the swings of adolescents hammering balls toward scampering elementary-age outfielders not yet deemed ready to take cuts themselves. Road signs announce not just the name of the town you are entering but its native sons who cracked a major league roster. Hall of Famers are depicted in grandiose murals throughout the capital. All 30 major league teams have training academies, and they rise up from the countryside like castles.
A monument in Santana that reads “Orgullo Nuestro,” “Our Pride,” under the portraits of three former major league players from the area: Antonio Pérez, Edwar Cabrera and Marcos Mateo
Every team participates in the Dominican Summer League, where 1,500 prospects from Latin America compete to get promoted to the lowest minor league teams in the United States. Hundreds more professional players, including established stars, draw sellout crowds in the offseason in what’s known as the winter league. Steven Puig, the president of BHD, the Dominican bank that is a corporate partner of Major League Baseball, told me that the sport generates as much as $400 million annually.
American baseball executives began scouting, signing and developing Dominican teenagers in earnest in the 1980s. A handful of teams, recognizing the island as a source of cheap talent, built bare-bones training academies on former sugar plantations. They relied on buscones, finders, to bring them the best players. But the buscones soon realized they could make more money by opening their own academies. There are now, according to a national trade association, more than 6,000 trainers, ranging from the off-duty car mechanic to the millionaire former big leaguer. In return for providing room, board, equipment, coaching and — they claim — education, these men typically receive between 35% and 50% of a player’s signing bonus, which they negotiate.
In their search for the next Dominican star, major league teams pursue what one general manager called a “boatload mentality.” Every year, teams sign about 450 Dominican prospects, most for bonuses around $30,000. Fewer than two-thirds will make it to the lowest minor leagues, and less than 10% will play a day in the majors, according to MLB data. (Teams treat Venezuelan prospects, many of whom train in the Dominican Republic, in much the same way, signing them in bulk.) It’s a Darwinian system paid for by players like Belfi — the hundreds of thousands of dollars his trainers took out of his bonus subsidized dozens of prospects who sacrificed their childhoods only to come up short.
Most of MLB’s International Spending Goes to Signing Players From the Dominican Republic
The amount has grown steadily since 2012.
Note: International spending dropped in 2020 due to the impact of COVID-19. Sources: ProPublica reporting, Spotrac.Chris Alcantara/ProPublica
In the United States, no professional sport operates this way, including baseball. Every year, major league teams select players from the U.S. and Canada in a draft. Signing bonuses are mostly dictated by the order in which the players are chosen. Last year, the top pick was worth $11.1 million, while the final slots were worth $187,000. Sports agents typically receive a 5% commission.
In the Dominican Republic, it’s a free-for-all. Teams vie for talent, outbidding one another for the best prospects. Major League Baseball does limit how much a team can spend on new players each year. But the other guardrail that the league put in place — that players can be signed only if they will be 17 by the following September — is widely circumvented.
“Everybody makes early agreements,” a major league scout told me. “You got to do it. If not, the system will eat you.”
In 2022, the parents of a 14-year-old prospect, Willy Fañas, sued the Los Angeles Angels for reneging on an early agreement for $1.8 million. A scout for the Angels testified that the team’s general manager had authorized the deal. The case was dismissed; Fañas’ parents have appealed the decision.
No data exists on how many Dominican players have been offered early deals because the agreements are verbal — by design there are no records. But Sandy Alderson, who has been a top executive for several teams and in 2010 served as Major League Baseball’s emissary to the Dominican Republic, told me that the vast majority of players who get signed were offered deals before they hit 16.
A pickup game in the town of San Gregorio de Nigua
In the absence of any enforcement, Major League Baseball has created the perfect market conditions for las prestamistas like Caraballo, who has become a ubiquitous figure in Dominican baseball in the past six years. The loans he offers come with interest rates that would be illegal in the United States and many other countries. The Dominican Republic repealed its usury laws 24 years ago. High-interest lenders are now as ingrained in Dominican baseball as trainers, and they advertise online. One banner circulating on WhatsApp offered “préstamo para jugadores de beisbol que tenga acuerdos,” “loan for baseball players who have agreements.”
Yaniris Paula, an attorney who has represented teenage ballplayers in disputes with trainers and lenders, estimated that 80% of all major league bonuses paid to Dominican prospects have a loan attached.
From 2012 through the beginning of 2026, major league teams paid Dominican prospects $1.042 billion in bonuses, according to a ProPublica review of signing data. But much, if not most, of that money — up to half a billion — is almost immediately siphoned off by trainers and lenders, according to experts familiar with the industry.
“Major League Baseball knows how dirty the business is here,” Piñao Ortiz, who was the Dominican commissioner of baseball from 1996 to 2000, told me, “but it’s not doing anything to stop it.”
Chapter 3
The night that Belfi’s parents — Eduardo Rivera and Rita Muñoz — learned of the Diamondbacks’ promise, they had to sleep at a nearby baseball academy. Their ride home didn’t have working headlights. When they made it back to Pedro Brand, a town outside the capital, their tiny home looked different to them. Eduardo had built it out of wood planks and tin. Buckets caught rain from the leaky roof. Musty beds lay strewn on the concrete floors. A climbing wall, salvaged from a children’s park, served as a room divider. Facing the same poverty while an unimaginably huge windfall awaited them in just over two years was a new sort of mental challenge.
Belfi (right) with his parents, Eduardo Rivera and Rita Muñoz (center), in front of the house he grew up in
Eduardo worked as a farmhand during the day and as a sereno, a watchman, for a school at night — jobs that were increasingly difficult because of a foot ailment he couldn’t afford to get checked out. He made as little as $150 a month. Rita had mostly stayed home, raising 11 kids. But now they were — almost — millionaires and already felt pressure to pay back those who had helped them. One of those was Belfi’s first trainer, who had made only a few hundred dollars trading Belfi to another trainer. He now wanted a “thank you” and arranged for them to speak with a man who told them that his boss, Santo Caraballo, could help them bridge their old existence with their future one.
What Belfi’s parents didn’t know is that Caraballo had a network of informants — many of them trainers — who let him know when a player had reached an early deal with a major league team and for how much. When Caraballo got a name, he would send one of his finders to speak to the parents.
Eduardo and Rita traveled to Caraballo’s small office in a strip mall in Santo Domingo. The figure who greeted them had perfect hair and white teeth and was dressed like a deportista, or sportsman, in athletic leggings and a T-shirt, they told me. Diplomas and certificates covered a wall. Familiar and charming, he spoke of having been a consul for the Dominican government, and he repeatedly mentioned that he was “la mano derecha,” “the right hand,” of David Ortiz, they said. That made them trust him more.
Eduardo and Rita told me that they were looking to sell just 5% of Belfi’s future bonus — roughly $90,000 — for upfront money, enough to pay off some debts, give Belfi’s first trainer a little cash and waterproof their home. But Caraballo, they said, advised them that they would need more and that they should sell him 10%.
David Ortiz with Caraballo in the lender’s office in Santo DomingoObtained by ProPublica via Instagram
The parents emerged from the office with a paper bag full of pesos, their thumbs wiped clean of the ink they had used to stamp a contract. They hadn’t been given a copy, but if they had, they wouldn’t have been able to understand it. Eduardo is illiterate. Rita struggles to read. They said they received 1.6 million pesos, roughly $25,000.
Miguel Hidalgo, a former employee of Caraballo’s who had a falling out with him over money, told me that the lender tries not to give his clients a copy of the contract. “That’s the trick,” he said. If they don’t have a copy, it makes it harder for them to understand what they owe, he explained.
Rita and Eduardo shared what they remembered of the loan terms with one of their sons, who called Jhonatan Jimenez, a former trainer of Belfi’s. Jimenez did the math. In return for the $25,000, Eduardo and Rita had agreed to give the lender $180,000 when Belfi received his bonus.
“¿Tú estás loco?” he asked.
That was the first deal Belfi’s parents made with Santo Caraballo.
Soon after, the lender sent men to check out their home, and his prognosis was that it could not be repaired. They needed a new place fit for the family of a ballplayer. There was a building available next door. On the second floor was space for a three-bedroom apartment, which the Riveras would need to fix up and furnish. On the first floor was a storefront appealing to one of Belfi’s brothers, who envisioned a barbershop where customers could drink alcohol.
Belfi (left) and his family in the apartment that his parents purchased after borrowing money from Caraballo
Caraballo would show up at their new apartment, usually in a different car — a Range Rover, a Porsche, a Lamborghini. He was, Eduardo told me, like a member of the family. He reached his spoon into their pot of simmering beans. He drank Presidente beers. He gave Belfi advice about girls. He urged Rita and Eduardo to further fix up the place. “You’re already rich,” they said he told them. “You can’t live this way.”
Caraballo said he’d loan them an additional $70,000 at 7% monthly interest, a rate he had assured them was “mejor que banco,” “better than the bank.” Throughout 2023 and the first half of 2024, bank records show, Caraballo doled out the money to the family in dozens of payments ranging from $88 to $8,350. According to Rita, Caraballo said he was not giving them the money all at once because they would fritter it away.
Rita also told me that roughly $7,000 of the loan came in the form of certificates redeemable at a supermarket Caraballo owned near his office. She said she used them to buy rice, beans, oil, diapers and other staples but that the certificates didn’t last long because Caraballo’s prices were “carisimo,” “extremely expensive.” The only customers she saw at the market were the families of young ballplayers.
Chapter 4
The origins of Caraballo’s wealth and power remain murky — striking for someone with tentacles throughout the sport. Some within the industry described him as a savvy hustler, exploiting a corrupt system that Major League Baseball had created. Or as an opportunist using little more than a fortunate link to one of the country’s most beloved peloteros. Or as a man with almost magical reach who was not to be crossed. Many demanded to know whether I was a spy for him.
“I already have problems, and you’re asking me about a boss,” said a former minor league pitcher whom Caraballo represented during a brief stint as an agent.
A longtime trainer spat in the ground and called him a ladrón, a thief. He refused to discuss Caraballo further. “What if I get killed?” he asked.
Caraballo’s office in Santo Domingo
A major league agent who represents Dominican players told me that every year Caraballo has a stake in dozens of prospects’ bonuses. Two former employees corroborated that figure, telling me that they helped Caraballo reach loan agreements with the parents of 60 to 70 players a year. The agent said that every signing day, when prospects consummate their preacuerdos, Caraballo shows up to remind families that they will soon have to pay what they owe him.
I spoke with the parents, trainers or lawyers for six prospects whose families took high-interest loans from Caraballo. The father of Ricki Moneys told me he borrowed 1.7 million pesos, roughly $27,000, from Caraballo, after the Brewers offered his son a $1.15 million early agreement. Thirteen months later, after Moneys officially signed with the team earlier this year, his father said that Caraballo collected 4.5 million pesos — an effective annual interest rate of nearly 150%. The father of another Brewers prospect, Kenny Fenelon, said that his son was offered a $1.3 million early agreement and that he used it as a guarantee to borrow $50,000 from Caraballo at 5% monthly interest. When his son received his signing bonus less than three years later, in 2025, the father told me that Caraballo claimed he was owed $400,000. They eventually settled on a $75,000 interest payment, he said. (In our brief conversation, Caraballo said that the risk in loaning money to families is that “you never know if it will succeed or not because if the player doesn’t get signed, you don’t get paid.”)
Caraballo has a second business loaning money to trainers at similarly high interest rates. In many of those deals, the guarantee is a percentage of a player’s bonus money that is owed to the trainer.
He has also entered the training business himself. Records and interviews show that he has signed players as young as 10 years old to contracts in which parents agree to give him half, or sometimes more, of their sons’ potential signing bonuses. Caraballo himself doesn’t do the training. “He doesn’t even know how to hold the bat, bro,” Edgar Mercedes, a trainer who has taken loans from Caraballo, told me. Instead, he sends the boys to trainers with whom he has made separate financial arrangements.
A birth certificate states that Caraballo was born in 1986 in the mountain city of Constanza, the son of a farmer and a housewife. According to a childhood friend, he departed for the capital as a teenager with just $16. In Santo Domingo, he pumped gas before opening a series of small businesses. He co-founded a company that turned fruits into pulp and juice. He financed new and used vehicles. He established a legal services business, Caraballo Lora & Asociados, though he was not an attorney.
But mostly, according to interviews with those who have worked for him, he lent money. A Facebook banner for one of his companies consists of stock art depicting a man turning an empty pants pocket inside out. Another hand offers a full wallet, with the text, “Podemos Ayudarte,” “We can help you.”
In 2016, he returned to Constanza to run for mayor. “I’m from the hills and it’s in my blood/ By the grace of God, I’ll be your mayor,” declared a ballad he commissioned. Despite President Danilo Medina campaigning for him, he lost the four-person race. He was a “joven muy inquieto,” “a restless young man” seeking glory in his hometown, Ambiorix Sanchez, who won the election, told me.
After his defeat Medina offered Caraballo a consolation prize. He appointed him as an ambassador attached to the minister for foreign affairs, a common arrangement for an incoming president to reward a losing allied candidate. The position came with a diplomatic passport, a $600 monthly salary and few responsibilities. Caraballo left the ambassadorship in 2021, a few months after Medina’s term ended.
The beginning of Caraballo’s ascent in Dominican baseball can be traced to his shadowy role in salvaging the career of Oneil Cruz, a rising star in the Pittsburgh Pirates’ organization. In late 2020, Cruz crashed his Jeep Grand Cherokee into the back of a motorcycle, killing three people. Prosecutors initially said the ballplayer had been drinking, and he faced the possibility of three years in prison. According to numerous interviews and court records, Caraballo was brought in by Cruz’s parents and negotiated payments to the victims’ families. In exchange, they withdrew all “penal, civil or judicial” claims against Cruz. Prosecutors never presented evidence that he was drinking, and a judge dismissed the case. Cruz denied any wrongdoing. I wrote about the incident in “The Rising Baseball Star, a Fatal Car Crash and the Fixer.”
Cruz declined a request for an interview. His lawyer, Amauris Vásquez Disla, called the accident “a profound tragedy for all parties involved, especially the victims’ families.” He went on to say that the court “issued an order of dismissal based on the findings, a legally binding decision that was a lawful resolution of this matter.”
By 2021, corporate records show, Caraballo had found a partner that would instantly boost his credibility — David Ortiz. By helping the Boston Red Sox win three world championships, the first one ending an 86-year drought, Ortiz secured his legacy as one of the most revered players in all of baseball. He retired in 2016 and became a popular analyst for Fox Sports. In the Dominican Republic, he is un muchacho de abajo, someone who rose from a Santo Domingo slum and is not afraid to return.
How an obscure moneylender from Constanza became partners with a famous ballplayer is a mystery to mutual acquaintances I spoke with. Ortiz has said that he first met Caraballo when he was managing a gas station. The two were close enough that when Ortiz announced his divorce in 2021, he did so with a post of himself posing with Caraballo and a caption that read, “My compadre, the show must go on.” Ortiz sat Caraballo with his family at his 2022 induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and they appeared in videos together at the presidential palace.
The financial side of their relationship is more shrouded. In 2021, both were listed on corporation records of a company in Florida called Big Papi Sports Group. What, if anything, the company did is not clear. It was dissolved the following year.
It is, though, the earliest record I could find of a partnership that Caraballo trumpeted frequently. Parents, trainers and lawyers who have done business with him told me that Caraballo claimed that Ortiz, whose signed jersey hangs in his office, bankrolled him. “Every time he did business with [my client], Caraballo would mention it,” a lawyer named Jose Eduardo Martinez said.
My reporting eventually got back to Ortiz. He called me last year to find out what I was working on and seemed surprised to be asked questions about Caraballo. He acknowledged that he had invested millions of dollars into Caraballo’s baseball business. Although he wouldn’t tell me the name of the company, they’ve posted to social media photos of themselves wearing matching ballcaps with the logo “CS,” for Caraballo Sports Enterprise. Caraballo has founded companies by that name in both the Dominican Republic and the United States, though Ortiz is not on those documents. Dominican records say the company’s goal is to “promote education and sports as a mechanism for the social development of underprivileged youth throughout the country.”
In a photo posted to social media, Ortiz and Caraballo wore hats that have the Caraballo Sports Enterprise logo.Instagram
Ortiz said that his business with Caraballo is limited to making loans to trainers. Among those who have struck deals with Ortiz and Caraballo is retired star infielder Carlos Guillén, who trains players in Venezuela and the Dominican Republic and said that he has borrowed significant sums from them.
Ortiz told me that he doesn’t work with the parents of players, because it’s too difficult to be repaid. However, court records show that, in at least one case, Ortiz’s name is on a contract with a player’s parents. According to its terms, Ortiz and Caraballo agreed to provide their 13-year-old son with “economic support, food, studies, housing, training, clothing for practice and games, supply of protein and vitamins” and scouting opportunities in return for 35% of the boy’s potential signing bonus. The boy was never signed, leading to the lawsuit, which was eventually dismissed on procedural grounds.
The contract, similar to many others I reviewed between Caraballo and parents of young baseball prospects, gave him and Ortiz extraordinary control over the boy’s life. It contains a clause not allowing him to “leave or abandon” the academy where they assigned him without their “prior permission” and granting them power of attorney so that they could receive “all kinds of information,” including a bonus payment schedule, from Major League Baseball and any team that signs him.
It also made explicit that the boy would be unable to get out of the deal. Even if he were to become emancipated from his parents, the contract states he would still owe a portion of his potential signing bonus. The contract allows Caraballo and Ortiz to terminate their responsibilities toward the boy due to “poor performance,” but he would still owe the same percentage if he were signed.
In our conversation, Ortiz distanced himself from Caraballo’s many enterprises. “Caraballo, my compadre, he has a whole bunch of different businesses that I don’t know,” he said. “I know the one that I know. But I’m not his guard. Hopefully, he’s not doing anything illegal — not that I know.”
Later, after I sent him a detailed list of questions, Ortiz sent an additional response through his lawyer. The statement said he had “never authorized Santo Caraballo to use my name or reputation to gain the trust of young baseball players or their families, to promote loans or investments, or to represent financial transactions as being personally backed or endorsed by me. I have always sought to make a positive contribution to Dominican baseball. I would never knowingly participate in any operation intended to take advantage of a young player or his family.”
Ortiz said that he ended his personal relationship with Caraballo “a year and a half to two years ago” after “noticing conduct by Mr. Caraballo that I considered inappropriate. I started distancing myself from him personally and placed the relevant matters in the hands of my legal advisors.”
However, last September, Ortiz and Caraballo filmed themselves heading for Puerto Rico on a private jet, drinking and dancing on their way to a Bad Bunny concert.
Chapter 5
Around 4 a.m., Jan. 15, 2024, Belfi Rivera got out of his bunk bed at John Carmona’s academy. The complex was nearly empty, with most of the other boys home for the winter holidays. Belfi put on a white dress shirt, a navy blue business suit — his first — Alexander McQueen shoes and a gold necklace, all of which Caraballo had purchased. Years earlier, Belfi had promised himself that if he made it as a pelotero, he’d have a chain that would glitter over his dirt-stained jersey, just like the pros.
It was signing day.
Belfi’s parents arrived, and they drove to Baseball City, headquarters for the Diamondbacks and several other major league teams. Teenage boys and their parents, all dressed up, filled the place.
Belfi leaned over a desk and put his signature on the contract he had been promised two years earlier. He and another Dominican outfielder were the only Diamondbacks prospects whose bonuses exceeded $550,000. Many more prospects, if they were lucky enough to be noticed by a major league team at all, fared more like Belfi’s older brother Bernardo, a right-handed pitcher who a few months earlier had signed with the Texas Rangers for $10,000.
For Rita, the moment was a miracle. “When you have absolutely nothing,” she told me, “when you’re starting from zero, enduring great hardship, and your children are going hungry. And then, suddenly, we would finally be able to resolve so many of the problems we were facing — paying off our debts, taking the children to the doctor, getting them enrolled in school.”
Belfi posed for photos in front of a banner filled with Diamondbacks logos. In one, he is flanked by Carmona and Caraballo. Carmona said that he was not aware that the lender had made deals with Belfi’s family until he showed up at the signing, strutting around as if he had played a key role in Belfi’s success. “The team asked me, ‘What’s going on? What is this man doing here?’” Carmona said.
Belfi posed for photos after he officially signed with the Arizona Diamondbacks on Jan. 15, 2024. On the far left is John Carmona, his trainer. On the far right is Caraballo.Instagram
Less than a month later, the first installment of Belfi’s bonus came in — $900,000. He and his parents drove to the Boca Chica branch of the BHD bank, a sleek glass building adorned with the Major League Baseball logo and ringed by the flags of all 30 teams. The branch is where almost every prospect collects his bonus payments, and it regularly plays host to one of the most unsightly scenes in Dominican baseball, as trainers and lenders show up to demand their cut.
Caraballo, Carmona and Belfi’s early trainer, Jhonatan Jimenez, were waiting. By BHD and major league policy, only a player and his parents can receive the bonus. But Belfi’s parents told me that Caraballo took the lead, collecting IDs and handing them to a clerk. Neither Rita nor Eduardo had ever held a bank account. Now a banker helped Belfi open one, and the convoluted divvying up of his payday began.
By the terms of their contract with Rita and Eduardo, Carmona was due $630,000 and Jimenez $90,000. However, Jimenez had earlier sold his stake to Caraballo, one of at least two deals the lender had made with Belfi’s former trainers.
That left $180,000, which Caraballo was owed as repayment of the $25,000 loan. Carmona described the vibe as one of “mucha duda, mucha desconfianza,” “much doubt, much distrust.” The exception, he said, was Belfi, who seemed oblivious, confident that everything would work out. Belfi told me that other players had warned him that he would see little of his first bonus installment. He left the bank with nothing.
At a meeting at Caraballo’s office, Eduardo and Rita said that he ripped up a contract. They understood this to mean the debt was paid. As the day approached when Belfi was set to receive the second half of his bonus, Rita and Eduardo said that Caraballo began to sell them on an idea — they could become partners with him and David Ortiz. They would be out of their depth managing the hundreds of thousands of dollars the Diamondbacks still owed Belfi. Instead, they could invest the money, which would produce a steady income and keep them from squandering their fortune.
Eduardo told me that he couldn’t follow all the details but said he was sold from the moment Caraballo described going into business with Ortiz. “I was happy because now my boy was going to have people to give him advice,” he said.
Eduardo did have a brief moment of doubt. After a call with Caraballo, he said to Rita, “Maybe he’s lying to us.” But they both agreed he was too kind for that.
Chapter 6
Throughout my reporting, the great mystery was if the problems with baseball in the Dominican Republic were so well-known, why hadn’t the league or the union fixed them?
I posed this question to Lou Melendez, who worked for Major League Baseball from 1983 to 2016, including as vice president of international operations, and now consults for the players union. He told me he was baffled by the inaction of the league, which has in the past penalized teams and executives for violating international rules. “If they wanted to, they could have just said, ‘Look, memo to clubs from the commissioner’s office. If we find that you have any pre-agreements with any players, we’re going to discipline you.’”
When Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred was asked last year about preacuerdos during a visit to the Dominican Republic, he acknowledged that they were “problematic” but said the “best solution to early deals is a draft.”
This has been his position since he took office in 2015, arguing that the league needs to institute a draft for Latin American prospects that functions similarly to the draft for American and Canadian players. The change would make early agreements impossible since a team would not know which player they would be able to sign until draft day.
This single-mindedness has led some observers to wonder whether the league’s neglect of the issue is intentional. “If they wanted to enforce it, they would,” said Rafa Nieves, one of the top agents for Dominican players. “They want to make it worse and worse so the only solution is an international draft.”
The chief obstacle to establishing an international draft has been the players union. Its reasons are straightforward: A draft would restrict a prospect’s ability to choose his employer and eliminate bidding wars that drive up bonuses. While the union acknowledges the Dominican system is troubled, it, too, blames the league for not enforcing its existing rules.
The league and the union have been haggling over the issue for decades. Before the 2017 baseball season, both sides agreed to impose a “hard cap” — a limit to how much money a team can spend on signing international players. The amount changes each year and by team. In 2026, the total a team can spend ranges from $5.4 million to $8 million. The hard cap, though, had an unintended consequence: It led to a surge in early agreements. If teams could not beat their competitors with money, they could by making commitments to younger and younger players.
By one estimate, baseball generates as much as $400 million annually for the Dominican economy.
In early 2022, the league and the union came close to establishing an international draft when negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement. Talks broke down, and the owners locked the players out of spring training. The international draft, it was widely reported, had become a major sticking point, and the union was close to accepting it.
This was when David Ortiz intervened. Although he is retired, players listen to what he has to say. Ortiz circulated a voice message to Dominican players and trainers, declaring a “red alert” that the union was on the verge of agreeing to the international draft. He shared the phone number for Tony Clark, the union’s executive director, and urged everybody to express their strong opposition.
“If we allow the draft to happen here in the Dominican Republic, even your great-great-grandchildren, and everyone else’s, will be affected by it,” Ortiz said, according to an audio copy of the message, which I obtained. “So we have to start this strong ‘No to the draft’ campaign. Take my word for it. I don’t play baseball anymore, but I know what I’m talking about. If we let them push that thing through here, we’ll be in deep trouble. You know that in this nation, in one way or another, more than 40% of the population depends on baseball, to put it mildly.”
Ortiz in 2026 participating in the Hall of Fame Parade of Legends in Cooperstown, New YorkDaniel Shirey/MLB Photos via Getty Images
That percentage was an exaggeration, but lots of retired players, including Ortiz, own training academies. Amaurys Nina, a highly regarded trainer, told me that many of them have long used their clout to block any changes to the industry. “These players want the business to stay the way it is,” he said.
Active Dominican players also spoke out, including Fernando Tatis Jr., the shortstop for the Padres, whose father, a retired major league ballplayer, owned an academy. With an international draft, teams would likely sign fewer Dominican players, especially marginal prospects. Tatis appeared to be alluding to this when he told a reporter that an international draft would “kill baseball in the Dominican Republic.” Tatis did not respond to a request for comment sent to his agent.
The day after Ortiz sent his voice message, the league ended the lockout, and both sides agreed to shelve the idea of an international draft and settled the contract. The draft is once again a point of contention as the two sides have begun negotiating a new contract. (The union declined to comment on Ortiz’s voice note.)
When I spoke to Ortiz last year, I asked him if he opposed an international draft because of his and Caraballo’s business interests. He did not answer and hung up shortly afterward.
In his statement, Ortiz said his position regarding the international draft “was based on my views regarding the development of Dominican players and the impact I believed such a system would have on baseball in our country.”
Chapter 7
Belfi’s second bonus day arrived on June 13, 2024. When his parents and a brother came to pick him up at the Diamondbacks’ training academy, Caraballo was waiting in the parking lot. He invited the family to jump into his tricked-out Mercedes SUV so they could head to the BHD branch together.
As he drove, Caraballo hardened his pitch. He said he would pay them a dividend of several hundred thousand pesos, as much as $10,000, a month, according to Rita and Eduardo. In describing their understanding of the proposal, they told me that the lender promised once again to put the money in a fund or a business involving Ortiz but that they had no idea what kind. Caraballo, they said, assured them they would work out the details the following day at his office.
This car ride was the first time that Belfi learned that he would leave the bank with little or nothing. But he told me he trusted his parents, Caraballo and any plan that involved Ortiz.
Already at the bank was Jimenez, Belfi’s former trainer. He told me he was there as a family friend to keep an eye on how things went. But he allowed that he was also there with the hope that Rita and Eduardo would give him another cut for his years training Belfi.
Belfi’s family was ushered into a room to go over paperwork with a banker. According to Rita and Eduardo, Caraballo came in and out to make sure the family repaid their debt and signed over the rest of the money for him to invest. Unlike Belfi, his brother was alarmed by what was happening. He texted Jimenez that Caraballo was stealing the bonus. Jimenez said he started chasing Caraballo around the bank, calling him un ladrón. Eduardo recalled Jimenez yelling, “Caraballo, no engañes a esos pobres infelices,” “Caraballo, do not deceive these miserable people.” The lender, in turn, accused Jimenez of attempting to fleece the family himself.
Amid the shouting, Belfi told the banker that he wanted to keep some of the money so he’d have it when he got promoted to the minors in the United States. With the banker’s guidance, he kept $196,000. According to Rita, Caraballo was upset he wasn’t getting the whole amount and angry the family didn’t trust him. After receiving a cashier’s check for $703,900, he left the bank, flanked by two bodyguards. The check’s memo line read “pago entrenador,” “trainer payment.”
In his statement, Ortiz said he was never aware that Caraballo “operated an investment fund through which money belonging to players was allegedly taken or used for investment purposes.”
BHD did not respond to detailed questions concerning Belfi’s experiences at the Boca Chica branch. The bank said in a statement that it is committed to “the protection of all our clients, including young baseball prospects. Decisions regarding the use of our clients’ funds rest exclusively with the account holders or those legally authorized to act on their behalf.”
Eduardo told me he often replays that day in his mind, realizing that it was the culmination of his being played for a fool. He hung on every word of Caraballo’s advice, all of it leading to “el gancho,” “the hook” — handing over the money in the bank “without paperwork, documents or anything else.”
There are hundreds of unregulated training academies in the Dominican Republic, ranging from shaggy fields to gleaming facilities.
Rita said that she called Caraballo about meeting the following day, but he told her he had flown to Miami. In the weeks afterward, they tried calling him numerous times, she said, but that he would either not pick up or the calls would drop. Bank statements show that he did send them three payments totaling less than $10,000.
Finally, Rita said, Caraballo made clear that the investments with Ortiz hadn’t panned out and that he wouldn’t be paying the family a monthly dividend as he had promised. But, according to Rita, he assured her that he was “always going to be there” to support the family.
By then Rita and Eduardo had learned of other parents who had accused Caraballo of stealing their sons’ bonuses. The family, she realized, needed to get a lawyer. She knew of only one, a local commercial attorney who agreed to take on the case and who brought on a criminal specialist from Santo Domingo.
In the lawyers’ view, the interest Caraballo charged Belfi’s family was legal under Dominican law. However, in a complaint to prosecutors that they filed in November 2024, they described Caraballo’s promise to invest the family’s money and pay them dividends as fraud preying on Belfi’s “vulnerability as a minor.”
“It is obvious that the accused never intended to invest in any stock market, but rather took advantage of his apparent friendship with David Ortiz [and] the admiration the public has for the former baseball player,” they wrote.
Soon after, Rita’s mother died, and Caraballo called, offering his condolences as well as 100,000 pesos, a little less than $1,600, to cover the funeral and other expenses. Rita said she told him to have his attorney call hers.
Belfi, too, had lost trust in Caraballo. The necklace the lender had given him on signing day, the one that made Belfi feel like he had made it as a ballplayer, had started to turn black. The chain, Belfi realized, was iron, and he threw it away.
Caraballo continued to message him, Belfi told me, attempting to get him to persuade his parents to drop the legal claim. On the lawyers’ advice, Belfi blocked him. Just before his 18th birthday in December 2024, Belfi was in Pedro Brand, walking back from a local ball field when, he said, a white Volvo truck pulled up next to him. The driver, a man Belfi had never met, told him to get in. Belfi said the man had a gun holstered on his hip.
Once in the car, Belfi said, the driver informed him that he was taking him to see Caraballo in Santo Domingo. Belfi was sure that the lender had dispatched “una maldad,” “something evil.” The man drove Belfi to a jewelry store, where Caraballo was waiting. He was in an expansive mood, Belfi told me. He greeted him warmly and after consulting with the jeweler, he picked out a necklace and told Belfi it was a gift.
They then headed to Caraballo’s office, where the lender revealed the purpose of the meeting. According to Belfi, Caraballo told him that the Diamondbacks wouldn’t want a prospect involved in something as ugly as a lawsuit. Belfi also said that Caraballo warned him that if he had an open legal case, he wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country to play in the minors. The last claim is not true, but Belfi didn’t know that.
The day after Belfi legally became an adult, he said the driver picked him up and took him to the capital to get his Dominican national ID. Afterward, they went to Caraballo’s office, where the lender and a lawyer were waiting, and Belfi signed the papers they put in front of him. “Y ya, el miedo habló,” Belfi told me. Fear talked.
The significance of those documents became clear the following month. With his signature, Belfi had fired his lawyers, hired Caraballo’s attorneys as his own and withdrawn the complaint. The criminal action against Caraballo, the prosecutor wrote in a final decision, “has been extinguished.”
Chapter 8
Almost immediately Belfi regretted signing the documents that harpooned the case against Caraballo. He tearfully apologized to his lawyers. When I spoke to one of the attorneys, Omar Chapman, he said he thought the lender had taken advantage of Belfi. “Caraballo told him, ‘Look, this document will solve all your problems, don’t worry,’” said Chapman, who added that Belfi might have been legally an adult but “only made it to about third grade.”
Belfi told me that by last Christmas he had gone through the $196,000. He paid off his family’s numerous debts, covered foot surgery for his father, sunk money into his brother’s struggling barbershop and, by his own admission, spent money on dumb stuff — loans to friends he won’t get back and jewelry for himself and girlfriends.
As the holiday approached, Caraballo sent a messenger to Rita with 20,000 pesos, just over $300, for food and clothes for the children. Rita told me she knew what Caraballo was up to. “He’s basically trying to buy us again so he can keep our money,” she said. But this time, she didn’t reject the handout.
When I visited Rita and Eduardo this summer, they appeared to be worse off than the first time I saw them. With four kids still in the house, Rita had recently opened a food stand across the street, selling salami, plantains, eggs and coffee to commuters. It’s a miserable, fly-infested venture that requires her to rise at 4 a.m. and earns her as little as $5 a day. Eduardo continues to work as a night watchman at a local school.
Belfi told me that the Diamondbacks pay him $100 a week only during the two and a half months he plays in the Dominican Summer League and that the team provides its players with baseball equipment when they sign, but after that they’re on their own. Before the latest season, Belfi borrowed roughly $2,500 from a local lender, part of which he spent on cleats, a glove, bats and medicine for his father. The loan came with 30% biweekly interest. The ballooning debt has caused Belfi to stay away from Pedro Brand.
I went to the Diamondbacks’ academy, an immaculate new facility, hoping to watch Belfi play. The summer league, which has so many players that most organizations fill multiple teams, is a study in Major League Baseball’s volume approach to Latin talent. Few players last beyond three seasons — they’re either promoted or cut.
Belfi has completed his third season in the Dominican Summer League.
Belfi is now in his third year. In his first two seasons, he struggled, hitting a meager .202 with one home run. He no longer appears in the international prospect rankings. Friends who signed the same year as he did have been promoted. So has his brother Bernardo, who is now on a Rangers minor league team in the U.S.
When Belfi and I spoke, he admitted it’s been hard playing baseball with everything that’s been going on in his head. “I mean, why keep working, if everything I earn, I lose?” he asked.
Trainers and scouts who have watched Belfi for years told me it’s obvious that what he’s gone through has affected his game. One said, “These guys took everything he had and stole his motivation.”
On a muggy, overcast June day, Belfi’s team was hosting the Seattle Mariners’ squad. It was a sloppy contest full of errors and batters getting plunked by fastballs the pitchers hadn’t yet learned to corral. The only people in the stands, besides a few family members, were scouts and officials recording every data point. But the players cheered and chanted and shook the dugout’s chain-link fence. Belfi wasn’t in the lineup.
When I found him afterward, he explained that his coaches had him doing batting practice for most of the game. They wanted him to work on “a little bit of everything,” he said. Despite the Diamondbacks frequently benching him, Belfi still appeared hopeful. I asked him what his immediate goal was, and he said with a smile, “Get out of here as soon as possible.”
A month later, in a tied game in extra innings against a Cubs team, the Diamondbacks called on Belfi to pinch hit with two outs and two men on. He stroked a game-winning single into center field. His teammates mobbed him, and a grinning Belfi jumped up and down, holding his arms aloft in joy.
Mail-in ballots sit in trays before being sorted at the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters office in San Jose, California, on Oct. 13, 2020. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Some U.S. Postal Service facilities failed to properly handle ballots during this year’s primary elections, according to a new audit from the agency’s Office of Inspector General. Election experts say the findings call into question the agency’s ability to meet even greater demands for the November election that are under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The audit, which is dated Sept. 4 but has not been previously reported, found a lack of training for post office staff on how to properly and expeditiously handle mail ballots, deficiencies in how ballots were tracked and errors leading to delays, all of which risked ballots having incorrect postmarks or otherwise arriving late to election officials, which could lead to their rejection.
The identified failures increase “the risk that Election and Political Mail is not handled, documented, monitored, and reported in accordance with Postal Service policy,” the audit said, though it noted that “most facilities we visited generally adhered to Postal Service’s election-related policies and procedures” and that nearly 99% of ballots reached election officials in a timely manner.
“While instances of non-compliance were low relative to overall volume, the presence of similar procedural gaps across multiple facilities indicates a need for improved understanding and increased enforcement of Postal Service policies among its employees,” it said.
The findings come as the Supreme Court weighs whether to allow the Postal Service to move ahead with new rules that would allow the agency to regulate mail voting, under a March executive order signed by President Donald Trump. The order requires states to give USPS a list of all voters eligible to receive a ballot in the mail and requires USPS to use those lists to determine which ballots get sent to voters.
Top Postal Service employees, along with a whistleblower who filed a disclosure with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., have expressed concern that the new system stands to disenfranchise large swaths of eligible voters, both by its design and lack of testing, ProPublica reported last week.
Election experts told ProPublica the new audit findings should be considered by the Supreme Court, as they make even clearer what election officials already know.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Justice Department civil rights lawyer, said the audit confirms that USPS has “a long way to go to meet its core obligations of delivering election mail in a timely manner.”
“The administration and USPS are simply incapable of successfully meeting vast and radical new responsibilities under the president’s executive order,” Becker said.
Postal workers, through the American Postal Workers Union, also said Wednesday in a brief filed with the Supreme Court that it is not practical to implement the rules, which pose a “significant risk of wide swaths of Americans not being able to vote by mail.”
Chelsey Wininger, executive director of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said the audit shows the Postal Service “struggles to implement even basic changes to postal process consistently” and reinforces the organization’s opposition to any new rules this close to an election.
In a response included with the findings of the audit, the Postal Service wrote that “while we acknowledge that we can always reinforce and amplify our internal processes and procedures (and will continue to do so between now and November) — overall ballot mail performance is strong.” The agency acknowledged that there are some instances in which employees didn’t follow policies and procedures, but called other errors “isolated incidents,” such as when some New Jersey ballots were delivered to Tennessee before being sent back.
The Postal Service agreed with all recommendations on how to protect against future problems, except for one that suggested promptly notifying customers impacted by new regional transportation plans.
The Postal Service did not immediately respond to a request for further comment Wednesday evening.
The Postal Service typically goes to great lengths to handle election mail in an expedited and careful manner. And overall, it delivered in this year’s primaries: Completed ballots from voters to election officials were processed “on time”nearly 99% of the time during the primaries, up from about 98% in 2024, for the about 6.3 million ballots that the Postal Service was able to track, according to the report. The definition of “on time” is not provided in the report. It refers to how quickly the ballot was handled by the Postal Service, not whether the ballot reached the election officials on time.
But when observing election mail at 14 processing facilities and 73 delivery units across eight states, the auditors found significant flaws in the handling of mail ballots.
There were no election-related training materials posted at 22 of 73 delivery units, or about 30%. In some locations, local management and employees weren’t familiar with requirements on how to process election mail, the report said.
In 14 states and Washington, D.C., election officials count ballots only when they are postmarked by the Postal Service by Election Day, making the correct postmark crucial for understanding which ballots to count and which to reject.
But the audit found that in 10 of 82 facilities, or about 12%, management wasn’t aware of the proper way to postmark a ballot. Some thought ballots should be postmarked at that time they go out to election offices instead of earlier on when they reach a processing facility or retail counter.
Also, at five of nine mail processing facilities studied, retail clerks who were postmarking ballots by hand sometimes used stamps with inaccurate dates, according to the report. That included a facility in Pennsylvania on the state’s primary election day, which caused 56 ballots to be postmarked with the wrong date.
In 13 of 82 facilities, Postal Service workers didn’t complete proper procedures to make sure election mail had been sent out from the delivery units each day. In one instance at a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, processing plant, 108 ballots were grouped with other mail and had to be expedited to Pittsburgh on the morning of the election so they would count.
The Oct. 3 gathering at Saint Mark’s High School will bring men from Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore together for speakers, prayer, fellowship and Mass with Bishop William Koenig.
WILMINGTON, Del. — Catholic men from across Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore will gather in Wilmington this fall for the inaugural Catholic Men of Delmarva Conference, a new all-day event focused on strengthening men’s faith, families and leadership.
The conference, titled “Authentic Masculinity,” will be held Saturday, Oct. 3, at Saint Mark’s High School, 2501 Pike Creek Road. Organizers are planning for as many as 350 participants.
The event is being organized by Catholic Men of Delmarva, a nonprofit formed in Delaware in June 2025. The independent organization works in spiritual partnership with the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington, which includes Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Organizers say the conference is intended to help men deepen their relationship with Jesus Christ and become stronger husbands, fathers, sons, brothers and servant leaders in their homes, churches and communities.
Men from other faith traditions who are interested in learning more about Catholicism are also invited. Adult sons are encouraged to attend with their fathers, while younger sons may participate when accompanied by an adult man.
A regional gathering
The inaugural conference is designed to connect men from parishes and missions throughout the Diocese of Wilmington’s six deaneries.
Catholic Men of Delmarva is working with volunteer parish captains from more than 50 churches to promote the gathering, coordinate registrations and encourage men who may not otherwise participate in a parish men’s ministry.
The organization hopes the conference will reach both established parish leaders and men who are beginning to become more involved in their faith. The intended audience includes members of parish men’s groups, the Knights of Columbus, Exodus 90, Heroic Men, FOCUS and the University of Delaware’s Newman Center, as well as men considering the priesthood or permanent diaconate.
Three featured speakers
The conference will feature three keynote speakers: the Rev. Larry Swink, Matthew Leonard and Gary Zimak.
Swink is a priest of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington and parochial vicar at St. Bernadette Catholic Church in Silver Spring, Maryland. Ordained in 2006, he has led retreats and pilgrimages for more than a decade, with an emphasis on prayer, the Mass, confession and helping Catholics connect their daily lives to their faith.
Leonard is an author, international speaker, podcaster and founder of Science of Sainthood, an online Catholic spiritual formation program. A convert to Catholicism and former missionary in Latin America, he has produced and hosted Catholic video programs distributed in multiple languages.
Zimak is an author, radio host and Catholic speaker known for addressing anxiety from a faith-based perspective. He has appeared on Catholic radio and television and has presented parish missions, retreats and conferences throughout the United States and Canada.
The Rev. John Solomon and Deacon Philip Belt will also give vocational presentations. The Rev. James Gebhart will offer the welcoming address and lead Eucharistic adoration.
Prayer, music and Mass
Registration and refreshments will begin at 8 a.m., followed by music from Numinous Worship at 8:45 a.m. The formal program will begin at 9 a.m.
In addition to the keynote presentations, the conference will include Eucharistic adoration, the sacrament of reconciliation, vocational talks, a presentation by the Knights of Columbus and a question-and-answer session with the speakers.
Refreshments and a catered lunch are included. Catholic organizations and ministries will also have exhibits available throughout the day.
The conference will conclude with Mass at 4 p.m., celebrated by Bishop William Koenig of the Diocese of Wilmington. Final announcements and dismissal are scheduled for 5 p.m.
Organizers envision the gathering becoming an annual conference and a way to strengthen men’s participation in their parishes and communities.
To Go Box
What: Inaugural Catholic Men of Delmarva Conference, “Authentic Masculinity”
When: Saturday, Oct. 3, 2026. Registration opens at 8 a.m.; the conference concludes at 5 p.m.
Where: Saint Mark’s High School, 2501 Pike Creek Road, Wilmington
Who may attend: Catholic men and men of other faith traditions interested in Catholicism. Fathers are encouraged to attend with their sons. Younger participants must be accompanied by an adult man.
What is included: Keynote presentations, Eucharistic adoration, reconciliation, vocational talks, music, exhibits, refreshments, catered lunch and closing Mass with Bishop William Koenig,
Photo illustration by ProPublica. Photo by BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.
The number of women who died after an ectopic pregnancy has spiked in recent years, a ProPublica analysis found. The mounting deaths in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data have drawn little scrutiny or response.
Such deaths typically occur in the first trimester, after a pregnancy fails to properly implant in the uterus and begins to develop elsewhere, most commonly inside a fallopian tube. The embryo grows until it causes the organ to rupture, triggering catastrophic bleeding.
With prompt and appropriate medical care, maternal health experts say, women should not die. Yet ProPublica’s analysis found a stark and baffling increase: Almost 200 women with the condition died from 2020 to 2025, compared with about 100 in the previous six years.
“A death related to ectopic pregnancy should really be a never event,” said Dr. Alice Abernathy, an OB-GYN in Philadelphia.
Deaths involving an ectopic pregnancy are presented as a rate within three-year intervals to meet data suppression thresholds. Source: ProPublica analysis of CDC WONDER multiple cause of death and natality data.Lucas Waldron/ProPublica
While chaos and access issues at hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic likely contributed to at least some of the deaths, the surge has persisted, raising serious questions about the role of the most significant disruption to maternal healthcare in the years since: state restrictions on abortion.
To treat an ectopic pregnancy, which is almost never viable, doctors must terminate it. But lawsuits and federal complaints have alleged that some medical providers are hesitating or flat-out refusing to do that in states where they face criminal penalties for performing an abortion. Patients described their terror.
“I genuinely thought I was going to die,” said Kyleigh Thurman, whose right fallopian tube ruptured after she struggled to get ectopic care in Texas in 2023.
“There were a few times I asked my husband if I was going to die,” Leitaea Lowrimore of Oklahoma said in a lawsuit after being denied treatment for an ectopic pregnancy at multiple hospitals in February. “I kept thinking about our kids.”
To determine whether these issues go beyond anecdotes, ProPublica analyzed the data collected from every state by the CDC to look for patterns. The analysis shows a growing divide for women in states with strict abortion bans compared with those without.
While the uptick in ectopic deaths occurred nationwide, the climb has been much steeper in states that banned abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Deaths involving an ectopic pregnancy are grouped into three-year periods to meet data suppression thresholds. States with abortion bans that begin at six weeks of pregnancy or earlier are considered to have a strict ban. For the list of states in each group, see the methodology. Source: ProPublica analysis of CDC WONDER multiple cause of death and natality data.Lucas Waldron/ProPublica
ProPublica shared its analysis with more than a dozen maternal health experts, including leaders in the field, who were unaware of the spike; early pregnancy complications are chronically underresearched.
While they cautioned that abortion bans alone can’t explain the national rise, maternal health experts said any examination of the spike should include the documented delays in care caused by the laws, including for ectopic pregnancies.
In Thurman’s case, despite clear signs of an ectopic pregnancy, two emergency departments sent her home without resolving the complication. Regulators in 2025 found that one of the hospitals, Ascension Seton Williamson, failed to properly screen Thurman for a suspected ectopic pregnancy and did not call in an OB-GYN, in violation of the hospital’s own policies and federal law that requires emergency departments to treat and stabilize patients before discharging them. Thurman has an ongoing lawsuit against Ascension Seton Williamson and the other hospital, Ascension Seton Highland Lakes, for medical malpractice.
Thurman had to have her fallopian tube removed after it ruptured. (Thurman is not related to Amber Thurman, who died in Georgia, which also has an abortion ban, after doctors delayed treating different pregnancy complications in 2022.)
“I’ve never been in a situation where I didn’t get healthcare when I needed it,” Thurman told ProPublica, comparing the condition to having “a time bomb you can’t control.”
A spokesperson for the Ascension Seton hospitals said in a statement, “When a patient experiences a serious or life-threatening condition during pregnancy, our clinicians provide medically indicated treatment, including treatment for an ectopic pregnancy.” The hospital has denied Thurman’s malpractice allegations in a court filing.
Ectopic pregnancies, while rare, have long been recognized as the leading cause of maternal deaths in the first trimester. The condition impacts up to 2% of pregnancies in the U.S. Because government agencies don’t require hospitals to track or report overall ectopic diagnoses, it is impossible to know whether the condition itself is becoming more common.
While rates for other pregnancy-related deaths also increased during the pandemic, those climbs have largely subsided.
Experts aren’t sure why ectopic deaths have continued to rise. Ectopic pregnancies are more common among older women, but the increase in deaths has been even more stark among younger women, the analysis showed.
Anti-abortion groups have suggested that the use of abortion pills prescribed online is leading to more undiagnosed ectopics because telehealth patients don’t receive an ultrasound. But studies havefound that ectopic rates are far lower among people who seek medication abortions than in the general population. Telehealth clinics ask questions that filter out patients at higher risk of ectopic pregnancy and follow up with those they treat to screen for symptoms, said Ushma Upadhyay, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies telehealth abortion administration.
Experts told ProPublica that more research is required to determine the role of the abortion bans in the rise of ectopic-related deaths. Many states with bans, which generally provide less Medicaid funding and coverage to low-income women, have long had poorer maternal outcomes. “It’s a real challenge to try and tease out one thing out of the array of factors that undermine women’s health in these states,” said Eugene Declercq, a public health researcher at Boston University.
But experts said ProPublica’s data analysis, along with stories about delays in ectopic care, underscores the need to find out what is driving the deaths.
“Reproductive health is unusual across medicine when we consider how swiftly policy changes affect the care patients can receive,” said Dr. Courtney Schreiber, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology.
Caitlin Myers, an economist at Dartmouth College who studies abortion policy, said the deaths should be investigated: “This is a potentially profound consequence of the regulation,” she said.
How Abortion Bans Interfere With Ectopic Care
Many state abortion bans include exceptions for ectopic pregnancies. But experts have worried that doctors are hesitating to offer treatment without an ironclad diagnosis, which clinicians say can take time and increase risks to the mother.
Ectopic pregnancy symptoms often begin with abdominal pain and bleeding, which send women to emergency rooms. There, doctors use ultrasounds to locate where the pregnancy has implanted.
However, embryos are often not visible on an ultrasound early in pregnancy. That could mean the pregnancy is ectopic, but it may also be a miscarriage or normal pregnancy that’s too small to see. Doctors can also assess whether the pregnancy is likely ectopic through blood tests over multiple days.
If the pregnancy is ectopic, the risk of rupture increases the longer treatment is delayed. In a state without a ban, a patient could decide at any point that that risk is not worth taking and opt to terminate the pregnancy.
In a state with a ban, however, that option may not exist. If doctors can confirm the pregnancy is ectopic through an ultrasound, they can protect themselves from having their decision to terminate questioned, perhaps by a zealous prosecutor. But waiting for this can delay treatment by days or even weeks.
“Seeing a mass is not the only reason to have high suspicion for an ectopic pregnancy,” said Dr. Rebecca Nerenberg, an emergency medicine doctor in New York and the clinical director at Access Bridge, which educates ER doctors on reproductive healthcare and has released evidence-based guidelines for diagnosing possible ectopic pregnancies.
Experts say that doctors should be able to offer treatment when other symptoms are present, such as plateauing pregnancy hormone levels, bleeding and abdominal pain. Patients can be treated with a procedure or a cancer drug that stops cells from growing.
But for women in states with abortion bans, getting that treatment can be difficult.
Lowrimore, who lives near the state border in Oklahoma, sought care at an Arkansas emergency department in February after experiencing abdominal pain and significant bleeding. She was sent home and told to return for more tests after being diagnosed with a “pregnancy of unknown location,” because an ultrasound could not show where her pregnancy had implanted, according to a lawsuit.
Lowrimore visited three different hospitals across both states over the following week as she began passing blood clots and the pain intensified, radiating up the left side of her body, according to the lawsuit.
The fact that the states’ abortion bans make exceptions for ectopic pregnancies did not help her, even though doctors acknowledged that was a possible diagnosis. In each visit, they didn’t treat her for that condition. One told her that intervening in her pregnancy could land him jail time — “10 years in the poky,” according to the suit. “I felt like my life was a risk he couldn’t afford,” she said in the lawsuit filing.
After consulting a lawyer, Lowrimore finally drove to a hospital in Kansas, where abortion is legal, and got an injection of the cancer drug called methotrexate within hours of arrival.
Lowrimore’s lawsuit, in which an OB-GYN and six women who were denied care are seeking to block the Arkansas abortion ban, is ongoing. Lowrimore also filed complaints under the same emergency medicine law as Thurman against the three hospitals. Regulators cited Mercy Hospital in Fort Smith, Arkansas, for failing to provide care during the eight hours Lowrimore waited to be seen. The other two hospitals were not found to have violated that law, and they did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for Mercy Hospital declined to comment on the case, saying that, “in tragic situations when a mother suffers from an urgent, life-threatening condition during pregnancy, Mercy provides all medically indicated treatment to save her life.”
Many experts predicted that ordeals like the ones Lowrimore and Thurman described would occur when abortion bans took effect. To see if more women with ectopic pregnancies are experiencing severe health outcomes, ProPublica analyzed hospital data from Texas, the most populous state to ban abortion.
In this new analysis, ProPublica found that 310 more patients in Texas experienced substantial blood loss after an ectopic pregnancy in 2023 and 2024 compared with 2018 and 2019, an increase of about 29%. Similar to ectopic deaths, the rise appeared to begin during the COVID pandemic, but the rate of complications remained elevated after hospital systems stabilized and the state passed its restrictive law. ProPublica is working to acquire similar data from states without abortion bans.
But new guidance from the Texas Medical Board includes only a case study with an ectopic pregnancy that can be seen in an ultrasound, remaining silent on the difficulty of early ultrasounds to detect where a pregnancy has implanted. This leaves open the possibility that a prosecutor could question whether such a case was really ectopic, in a state where doctors face up to 99 years in prison for performing illegal abortions.
A spokesperson for the Texas Medical Board said the course is not intended to cover all scenarios and that it “explains that imminent harm is unnecessary and specifically states that physicians who follow evidence-based medicine, standard emergency protocols, and proper documentation face minimal risk.” Asked whether a conclusive ultrasound image is necessary for an ectopic diagnosis, the spokesperson said, “The Board has consistently stated that providing commentary on every possible situation would be impractical.”
But Michelle Maloney, an attorney who represents Thurman and 13 other Texas women or their families who say they were denied care — including seven with ectopic pregnancies — said she still gets frequent calls from women who say they were denied care for pregnancy complications. “I don’t think specific exemptions address the massive gray areas that arise in pregnancy,” she said.
Solutions are unlikely to come from the states themselves. A previous ProPublica investigation found that states with strict bans are not studying whether their laws are contributing to maternal deaths. And others have not followed Texas in attempting to amend their bans.
Gaps in Research, Training and Awareness
One of the biggest challenges to reducing ectopic pregnancy deaths nationwide is the lack of awareness, research and data.
No one, for example, is tracking whether women who experienced ectopic pregnancies also had one or more common risk factors, like a history of ectopic pregnancies, infertility or use of hormonal intrauterine devices, according to ProPublica’s review of maternal health statistics and interviews with experts.
Nor has any published research addressed the connection between recent ectopic pregnancy death rates and untreated infections like gonorrhea and chlamydia, which increased substantially during the first years of the pandemic before declining again. Those infections can cause pelvic inflammatory disease, which causes fallopian tube scarring and raises the long-term risk of developing an ectopic pregnancy.
It is unclear why the CDC and other federal agencies across two administrations have failed to publicly respond to the increase in deaths despite having access to the same information ProPublica analyzed. But experts say the country’s capacity to respond to it has been greatly reduced under President Donald Trump.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, told Congress in April that improving maternal health outcomes is a priority. But the Trump administration has eliminated much of the staff devoted to researching the topic and cut hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding for healthcare research.
The CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health, for example, lost most of its 100 employees, according to a lawsuit filed by more than a dozen states’ attorneys general last year. The entire team that ran the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a significant source of data for state and local governments as well as maternal health researchers, is on paid administrative leave. That includes many researchers who would have been responsible for investigating the rise in ectopic pregnancy deaths, according to current and former CDC employees.
“You’re losing the capacity to know what’s going on with pregnant women,” Lee Warner, the former chief of the Women’s Health and Fertility Branch at the CDC, said of the cuts at the division. “It’s going to take decades to build this capacity back.”
Funding cuts have also impacted efforts to raise awareness about the condition. Because ectopic pregnancies usually cause complications before standard prenatal care begins around 10 weeks, patients often rely on emergency departments, where doctors don’t typically have specialized training in pregnancy care. Experts say more training on high-risk early pregnancy conditions could help combat rising maternal mortality rates.
The CDC in 2025 also stopped funding a partnership with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to educate emergency medicine doctors about reproductive healthcare. The initiative, “Obstetric Emergencies in Nonobstetric Settings,” offers resources for emergency departments on caring for pregnant patients with cardiovascular disease, hypertension and eclampsia. An ACOG spokesperson said its foundation now funds the project, and that the organization is working on a set of guidelines for diagnosing and managing tubal ectopic pregnancies in the emergency department.
A spokesperson for HHS said the agency continues to track maternal mortality trends, investigate their causes and provide funding for research. “This important work is being accelerated across the Department to support healthy mothers, healthy babies, and strong families,” the spokesperson said.
The United Kingdom’s response to a similar spike in ectopic deaths during the pandemic shows just how much the U.S. is failing to do.
Researchers and officials there identified a surge in deaths in 2021 and 2022 in the U.K. and Ireland; 12 women died of an ectopic pregnancy during those years, which, as in the U.S. during this period, represented a near doubling of the death rate compared with previous years.
They investigated the causes and found a range of culprits, including overstretched emergency services and inadequate early pregnancy screenings, says Marian Knight, a professor at the University of Oxford who leads the U.K.’s maternal mortality reporting.
In 2024, Knight co-authored a maternal mortality report that focused on those deaths and offered policy recommendations. Knight worked with policymakers and a U.K. charity to raise awareness and help doctors and the general public recognize ectopic pregnancy symptoms. Officials also changed how patients experiencing ectopic pregnancy symptoms are prioritized when they call for an ambulance, leading to faster response times.
But the first step, said Knight, was identifying and investigating the issue. “If we’re not tracking and not just understanding the numbers, but understanding the why behind the numbers, we have no ability to respond,” Knight said.
The U.S. doesn’t do national maternal mortality reviews, said Boston University’s Declercq, who serves on the Massachusetts Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee. Instead, CDC epidemiologists review death and birth records to establish accurate national totals of pregnancy-related deaths, largely leaving state and local maternal mortality committees to take an in-depth look at individual cases and make recommendations to lawmakers and medical providers.
Declercq said his committee has not identified a notable increase in deaths from ectopic pregnancies in Massachusetts in recent years. In most states, these deaths are sporadic enough that they don’t, in isolation, show a notable trend.
It’s only at the national level that this increase in avoidable deaths becomes visible.
ProPublica’s analysis “raises concern that young women are dying from a preventable cause at an increasing rate,” Schreiber, the professor of OB-GYN, said. “That is not what we should be seeing in the United States of America.”
Fred Steese, outside the Nevada Supreme Court following his successful pardon hearing in 2017 David Calvert for ProPublica
I’d like to tell you about Fred Steese, who died in August of cancer at 62. When I first met Fred, he was living hand to mouth in a seedy motel on the outskirts of Las Vegas. He had been released from prison a couple of years earlier and struggled to find stable housing and a job, because — on paper, at least — Fred appeared to be a convicted murderer.
In 1995, Fred was wrongfully convicted of the murder of Gerard Soules — a former trapeze artist who had a dancing poodle show at a Las Vegas casino — even though prosecutors had evidence that he was hundreds of miles away at the time. He then spent 21 years in prison before a judge declared him innocent.
In Fred’s case, he told me he thought his ordeal was finally ending when the judge uttered the words “factually innocent” during a court hearing in 2012. Instead, Las Vegas prosecutors insisted he was guilty, that they had not made a mistake all those years ago and that they would retry him for Soules’ murder.
But then they dangled a deal: Fred could walk away now, if only he would agree to plead guilty.
The offer was something I, and a lot of lawyers I talked to, had never heard of. It’s called an “Alford plea,” and it allows someone like Fred to assert for the record that they are innocent but agreed the state might be able to convict them anyway. Experts told me some prosecutors around the country were using the obscure plea as a tool to thwart exonerations.
Fred took the deal. He felt he couldn’t face the uncertainty of another trial and the additional time it would rob from him.
Fred had only 13 years of freedom before he died.
Steese and his lawyer, Lisa Rasmussen, left, and Kathy Nasrey, before his pardon hearing in 2017. Steese served more than 20 years for the murder of Nasrey’s brother, a crime Steese didn’t commit.David Calvert for ProPublica
In June, he went into the hospital for a hernia operation, and when he wasn’t healing like he should, the doctors discovered a large mass on his liver and another on his pancreas. It was stage 4 cancer. By August, he was in hospice, and he died on Aug. 8.
When I heard, it felt like the universe had dealt Fred yet another injustice. Fred did see a measure of accountability, and I can appreciate as an investigative reporter the rarity of that being the case at all. But I’m sobered that his death means he spent more time fighting to clear his name than he got to enjoy his freedom. He deserved 40 more years.
In late 2017, with the help of a tireless pro bono lawyer who worked his case for years, Fred was fully and unconditionally pardoned by the state of Nevada. His record was finally cleared after 22 years.
Fred bought a pickup truck, a Mustang and his very own big rig; his lifelong dream was to be a long-haul trucker.
He didn’t manage to keep the money for long, though. Fred, who’d been in and out of foster homes as a child, spent much of his life outside prison without reliable structure, much less a budget. He was a drifter. He also struggled with drug use. At one point, Fred was swindled out of upward of $15,000 when someone pretended to be the owner of a house for sale that Fred wanted to buy.
Fred’s most marked characteristic was his cheerfulness. He was an easy laugh, and his good-humored resourcefulness quickly endeared him to those he met.
“He’d give you the shirt off his back, even if he didn’t have another one,” his sister, Lynn Myers, told me.
Ryan Norwood, the federal public defender who proved Fred’s innocence, told me he wished Fred had had more time. “But he got to live his dream of being a truck driver and to live his life on his own terms for better or worse.”
Myers hadn’t seen Fred since childhood, but the two reunited after he was exonerated, and the relationship was a rare touchpoint in Fred’s otherwise transient life. Fred’s ashes will rest in a handmade wooden box at Myers’ home in California.
“Maybe now,” she said, “he’s driving big rigs for God.”
Steese following his pardon hearing in 2017. “He’d give you the shirt off his back, even if he didn’t have another one,” his sister said.David Calvert for ProPublica
Special Olympics Delaware athletes compete in the 2025 State Bowling Tournament at Mid-County Lanes. Photo Credit: Special Olympics Delaware.
Special Olympics Delaware announced that the 2026 Special Olympics Delaware State Bowling Tournament will be held at Mid-County Lanes in Middletown, Delaware, on September 12.
Special Olympics Delaware’s State Bowling Tournament will make its return to Mid-County Lanes in Middletown, Delaware, on September 12, according to a press release distributed on September 3.
Mid-County Lanes will host the 2026 Special Olympics Delaware State Bowling Tournament throughout the day, starting at 8:30 a.m. This year’s event will bring together over 470 Special Olympics athletes and unified partners from all five Special Olympics Delaware areas across the state, according to the release.
“There’s something special about seeing the lanes filled with athletes giving their all, cheering on their teammates, and celebrating every strike, spare, and personal best,” said the Director of Sports & Area Engagement for Special Olympics Delaware, Kylie Lavelle. “As one of the largest bowling tournaments ever held by Special Olympics Delaware, this event reflects the incredible growth of our program and the enthusiasm our athletes have for competition. We’re proud to bring together so many athletes and Unified partners for a weekend that highlights achievement, sportsmanship, and inclusion.”
The event will feature competitions in singles, doubles, unified doubles and ramp and bumper divisions. There will be three timeslots for competition — 8:30 a.m. until 11:00 a.m., 12:30 p.m. until 3:00 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. until 6:30 p.m. — and each timeslot will begin with an opening ceremony and close with the distribution of medals and ribbons, according to the release. The awards will be presented by law enforcement.
To learn more about Special Olympics Delaware and the event, click here.
Photo: Photo courtesy of the Delaware Alzheimer’s Association
New law expands insurance coverage for testing that can help doctors select treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions
DOVER, Del. — Gov. Matt Meyer signed legislation Tuesday afternoon expanding insurance coverage for biomarker testing, giving more Delaware patients access to technology used to diagnose diseases and identify treatments tailored to their conditions.
Senate Substitute No. 1 for Senate Bill 120 requires more health insurance plans, including Medicaid, to cover medically appropriate biomarker testing. The legislation unanimously passed the Senate in June before receiving approval from the House.
The law is intended to close a growing gap between advances in precision medicine and insurance coverage for the tests needed to guide care.
What biomarker testing does
Biomarker testing examines genes, proteins and other characteristics that may provide information about a disease. Doctors can use the results to diagnose some conditions earlier, determine whether a patient is likely to benefit from a particular treatment, avoid treatments unlikely to work or identify potential clinical trials.
The testing has become especially important in cancer care and is increasingly used in diagnosing and treating Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions.
Supporters say expanded access can lead to earlier diagnoses, more effective treatment, less unnecessary care and better-informed decisions by patients and doctors.
Alzheimer’s advocates welcome signing
Representatives of the Alzheimer’s Association Delaware Chapter attended the bill signing.
Glen Gray, chair of the newly organized Delaware chapter, praised Meyer’s decision to sign the measure. He said the law represents another step toward diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease earlier, when patients and their families generally have more options for treatment, planning and support.
Gray also praised Sen. Spiros Mantzavinos for leading the legislative effort, calling the bill an example of effective leadership and thanking the senator for working to improve care for Delaware’s older residents.
A tool for cancer survivors
American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network volunteer Matt Wilson underwent treatment for pancreatic cancer more than 13 years ago, when biomarker testing was not as widely used as it is today.
“Though biomarker testing did not inform my initial treatment, it is a critical tool for ensuring my cancer stays in remission,” Wilson said. “It is also critical for ensuring continued progress in the fight against this disease.”
Wilson said greater knowledge about the characteristics of an individual patient’s cancer can help doctors choose more effective treatments.
“The more we know about cancer and the better we understand how to treat it, the closer we are to ending cancer as we know it for everyone,” he said. “Biomarker testing makes that possible.”
Coverage has lagged behind medical advances
Although the use of biomarker testing has expanded, supporters of the legislation said insurance coverage has not always kept pace with advances in medicine. That can leave patients unable to obtain testing that could identify the most effective treatment for their condition.
Mantzavinos sponsored the legislation, while Rep. William Bush championed the effort in the House.
“For thousands of patients in Delaware, biomarker testing has meant more effective care and better outcomes, offering renewed hope,” said Lance Kilpatrick, government relations director for the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. “Yet too many people still struggle to access this testing due to barriers, including inadequate insurance coverage.”
Kilpatrick said the new law will help eliminate those barriers and give more patients access to testing that could improve their care.
To Go Box
What: Information about biomarker testing and precision medicine
Who may benefit: Patients whose doctors recommend biomarker testing to diagnose a condition or help select treatment
What the new law does: Expands coverage of medically appropriate biomarker testing through more health insurance plans, including Medicaid
What the US midterms could mean for Trump’s powerExpert commentLToremark
The Democrats are projected to make big gains in November’s midterm elections. But this will not necessarily constrain President Trump.
As President Trump gathers Republicans this week for their first-ever midterm convention, election campaigning is in full swing. The results of the November midterm elections will shape Trump’s remaining tenure and the 2028 presidential cycle. As it stands, Democrats are projected to take the House of Representatives, while the Senate is a closer call. Either way, Republicans will likely lose the governing trifecta – House, Senate and presidency – that has enabled Trump’s agenda and removed constraints on his authority.
But that will not automatically result in durable guardrails or clear policy shifts. Even with control of one or both congressional chambers, many Democratic efforts to frustrate administration policies or impose oversight will run into structural hurdles. Instances of hard leverage are few, predominantly around funding the government, but they can be used to extract concessions – even as Republicans rally to defang them before the new Congress takes office in January.
Outside fiscal negotiations – and nominations, if the Democrats also take the Senate – opposition will be more about optics than hard constraints. This is especially true on foreign policy, where Trump enjoys practical, legal and structural advantages that empower him to act.
Areas of potential Democratic leverage
With a majority in either or both houses, Democrats can block Republican legislative moves. This would likely push the White House to double down on its executive authority claims, including executive orders, emergency declarations and regulatory actions. But the inverse is not true. Even with both chambers, Democrats would struggle to drive policy through legislation. A war powers vote to curtail military engagement in the Gulf or resolution disapproving of a foreign arms sale, for instance, would face presidential vetoes and Democrats would not have the supermajorities needed to overcome them.
Another area of potential leverage is withholding approval for presidential appointments – especially for a Supreme Court or Federal Reserve vacancy. However, this only works if Democrats retake the Senate, which confirms nominees.
An area where Democrats have real leverage is fiscal matters – even if they only take the House. President Trump needs congressional action to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling, which limits government borrowing. Congress raised the debt ceiling by $5 trillion in 2025 and the limit is now expected to be reached by mid-2027, after which Treasury Department accounting manoeuvres to avoid default – known as extraordinary measures – could buy an additional six to nine months. Failure to raise the limit in time to meet the government’s debt obligations could trigger a calamitous market shock. How Republicans navigate the period after the midterms and before the new Congress takes office will determine whether the debt limit remains as a negotiating lever.
Trump is pushing Republicans to use the budget reconciliation process – which requires only simple majorities in both houses – to lift the debt limit by another $5 trillion through the remainder of his term, and secure funding including $60 billion for defence and $12 billion in aid for farmers hit by tariff retaliation and Hormuz disruption. But time is of the essence, as reconciliation requires a budget resolution adopted by both chambers, so a Democratic House alone would rule it out.
Ironically, Republicans themselves might provide the most immediate obstacle to Trump’s wishes. Rapid debt accrual – some $2.9 trillion of the $5 trillion added to the debt limit in 2025 had evaporated by June – has made fiscal hawks like Senator Rand Paul unwilling to proceed without spending cuts. Failure to extend the limit would yield a negotiation in 2027 or early 2028, with presidential primaries in sight and little incentive to compromise.
Unlike the debt limit, reconciliation cannot be used for regular appropriations, the annual bills that fund federal agencies. As it stands, Republicans will need Democratic support to find a solution before funding expires on 11 December. This negotiation will set the timing and parameters for starker confrontations in the new year, including opportunities to attach conditions for how funding is spent. But as the Trump administration asserts unilateral authority over spending, such conditions may have less relevance.
For their part, Democrats must weigh their negotiation priorities and appetite for a potential government shutdown – during which the federal government withholds services, data and paycheques – which will inevitably raise the question of blame.
Any change of control in the US Congress would also precipitate widespread investigations, including into Trump family business dealings and the Iran war. However, the levers of Congress – for instance, the power to subpoena testimony and documents – will quickly run into enforcement challenges.
This Trump administration is more capable of resisting scrutiny than the version Democrats confronted after retaking the House in 2018. It has used non-compliance, taken advantage of slow-moving court proceedings, and expanded claims of executive privilege to resist disclosing certain documents and communications. In August, Justice Department lawyers issued a non-binding advisory opinion stating that executive privilege extends to presidential communications with private individuals if they relate to his decision-making, which could vastly expand the scope of privileged information. Nevertheless, there are signs that the White House is preparing for Democratic investigations by hiring lawyers and briefing staff.
And Americans see ample cause for such investigations. A Gallup poll found that 89 per cent of Americans, including lopsided majorities in both parties, believe government corruption is widespread. But the challenges of reaching into the executive branch may change the shape and targets of investigations, with spillover falling onto Trump’s family members, business associates and outsiders who lack similar procedural tools and protections. Some corporate leaders could find themselves squeezed between a White House claiming privilege and Congress demanding cooperation.
Presidential impeachment is another potential flashpoint likely to resurface. Congressional Democratic leadership may try to resist a third attempt to impeach Trump but pressure from individual members could build. Although any impeachment – whether of Trump or alternative targets like cabinet secretaries or judges – would energize the Democratic base, it could also invite criticism of overreach. Both oversight and impeachment can be costly and time-consuming but may fail to deliver concrete results.
Ultimately, the most significant constraints on Trump’s remaining tenure may be practical rather than political. In a combative political environment, a crisis would put serious pressure on an outgoing presidency and diminished state capacity. A financial shock or recession would stress already strained fiscal capacity, perhaps alongside contentious negotiations; an additional military operation would draw on waning munitions stocks and a burdened force; and a natural disaster or health emergency would call on a severely depleted civil service to act. This is to say nothing of the disruption stemming from artificial intelligence, which Congress and the White House remain poorly positioned to address.
For US allies and partners, there is an uncomfortable asymmetry. A president who has made it his business to be a shock to the system retains the capacity to deliver one. Meanwhile, America itself is less capable of repair and resilience. Whatever happens in November will not change that.
Farea al-Muslimi: ‘I wrote my own death statement 5 times’ The World Todayiallan.drupal
Chatham House’s research fellow in the Middle East and North Africa Programme on falling foul of Houthi warlords, testifying in the US Senate and how the Arab Spring changed his life.
How did you get into international affairs?
I was born in a remote mountain village in Yemen in 1990, the same year communist South Yemen united with North Yemen to create one state. Until secondary school, I lived on the family farm with my parents – my father can read and write a bit, my mother not at all. After studying in the capital city, Sana’a, I won a scholarship to study in Los Angeles for the last year of high school. Being a farmer, tending sheep and keeping bees had been the only future I could imagine, then suddenly, I found myself in California.
If it wasn’t for the Arab Spring, I most likely wouldn’t be in this job.
Later, I received a scholarship to attend the American University of Beirut, and the Arab Spring happened during my time there. It was the most significant moment for my generation: the exclusivity of politics was at an end, and we could suddenly imagine more than one president in our lifetime. That year, I worked with the international press as a fixer, which set me on the path into international affairs. If it wasn’t for the Arab Spring, I most likely wouldn’t be in this job.
When I was 23, a few weeks after I graduated, I testified at a US Senate hearing. I was invited because I had helped break one of the first stories that proved US drone strikes had killed civilians in Yemen, and then six days before I was due to testify, American drones struck my own village. I gave an emotional testimony, and the next day the US strikes on Yemen were all over the media, in the Financial Times, the Guardian and the New York Times.
You worked as a mediator after Houthi rebels took over Sana’a in 2014 and triggered the civil war months later. How challenging was that?
I was someone everyone hated but everyone talked to, and I built a strong reputation around that. It was dangerous work: I wrote my own death statement at least five times before I went into meetings with militias and warlords, and I wasn’t sure if I would walk out again. I would give the statement to someone, and tell them to release it if I didn’t come back after an agreed period of time.
The Houthis accused me of being a western spy. It is too dangerous for me to go back for now.
I carried on my mediation work until the Houthis put me on their state enemy list in 2024. They had invited me to Sana’a to negotiate an economic de-escalation, but I felt something was wrong. So, at the last minute, I decided not to go. Later, they broadcast a TV programme where they accused me of being a western spy. It is too dangerous for me to go back for now.
Has knowledge of Yemen improved in recent years?
Yemen remains one of the least understood countries in the region. In 2014, I set up a think tank there called the Sana’a Centre for Strategic Studies because I was frustrated with other people’s lack of knowledge about my country. When the war broke out in 2015, there were only a handful of international journalists in Sana’a. Between 2001 and 2008, the international conversation was about what Yemen meant to Al-Qaeda. Then it became about Yemen and Iran, and then Yemen and Saudi Arabia, but never a conversation about Yemen itself.
Book reviews: What’s behind America’s hang-up with Iran and why are strong states so bad at coercion?The World Todayiallan.drupal
A potted selection of reviews from our sister journal ‘International Affairs’, by its editorial coordinator Aroni Sarkar.
Enduring Hostility: The Making of America’s Iran Policy
By Dalia Dassa Kaye, Stanford University Press, £18.99
Why has Washington failed to normalize relations with Tehran despite changing foreign policy approaches across successive US administrations? This is the question Dalia Dassa Kaye addresses through her ‘detailed and nuanced analysis’ of the ‘enduring hostility’ between the two countries.
The book’s main contribution, according to reviewer Jérémy Dieudonné, is its demonstration of the key contradictions underlying the past few decades of America’s Iran policy. Kaye identifies three distinctive paradoxes in US thinking since the Carter administration and the 1979 Islamic Revolution. First, she argues that hostility towards Tehran has become more acceptable in US policy circles, rather than peaking in the aftermath of the revolution as perhaps expected. Second, the longstanding framing of Iran as ‘uniquely threatening’ to the US does not reflect its physical capabilities, which have been more limited than those of other US adversaries such as Russia or China, and even North Korea. Finally, she highlights the contrast between Washington’s antagonism towards Tehran and the close relationships it has developed with other countries in the region.
The book also ‘convincingly demonstrates’ how domestic dynamics have made Iran a politically toxic issue in Washington in recent decades, further limiting potential for diplomatic engagement.
The full review appears in the July 2026 issue of ‘International Affairs’
Captured Futures: Rethinking the Drama of Environmental Politics
By Maarten A Hajer and Jeroen Oomen, Oxford University Press, £99
The failure to tackle the climate crisis is not down to a lack of political will, write Hajer and Oomen, but is due to environmental politics becoming overly performative. The book argues that all actors – from policymakers to journalists and activists – operate in a ‘dramaturgical regime’ that places too much faith in technological innovation over radical action to challenge capitalism.
For reviewer Daksha Gupta one particularly interesting case study focuses on how the abstract target of 1.5C has become ‘increasingly authoritative’ in mobilizing action, yet ‘detached from its original commitments of climate justice’.
The full review appears in the July 2026 issue of ‘International Affairs’
The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and The Assurance Dilemma
By Reid BC Pauly, Cornell University Press, £20.99
Why are strong states so bad at coercion? In his book examining counter-nuclear proliferation efforts in South Africa, Iraq, Libya and Iran, Pauly explains why the threat of tougher punishment alone is not enough to make states back down; they also need credible assurances that they will not be punished if they do comply.
For reviewer Rabia Aktar, the author convincingly argues that in the case of Iraq between the two Gulf Wars, Saddam Hussein did not cave in to US pressure to comply with weapons inspection processes because America refused to send assuring signals that punishment would be conditional.
The full review appears in the July 2026 issue of ‘International Affairs’
International Politics of Sex: Bodies, Images, and Russian State Homophobia
By Dean Cooper-Cunningham, Oxford University Press, £19.99
Does sex matter geopolitically? Cooper-Cunningham’s new book, which examines the role of Russian state sponsored homophobia in legitimizing the war in Ukraine, makes a powerful case for why it does. The book documents how the Russian state has consistently presented Europe and the West as ‘Gay-ropa’; where queer activism threatens Russian national identity and security.
According to reviewer Sophie Harman, the book’s analysis of media, memes and body-based activism in Russia offers a powerful insight into the global far right’s mobilization of homophobia in pursuit of a new world vision, and how the international reaction fuels this narrative further.
The full review appears in the September 2026 issue of ‘International Affairs’
Nadia Murad: ‘Yazidis are still looking for justice’The World Todayiallan.drupal
The human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate speaks to Sara Seth about her journey from a prisoner of ISIS to her global mission to support survivors of conflict-related sexual violence – and why she nearly gave up her campaign.
Nadia Murad is an Iraqi-born Yazidi human rights activist. In 2014, Islamic State attacked her village, Kocho, in Sinjar, northern Iraq, killing many, including Murad’s mother and six brothers, and imprisoning her. The ISIS genocide claimed around 5,000 lives and forced thousands of Yazidi women and girls into sexual slavery. After escaping captivity, she became an advocate for justice and survivor-centred recovery and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for her efforts to end sexual violence as a weapon of war. She founded Nadia’s Initiative to help rebuild communities in crisis and advance the rights of women and survivors worldwide.
Your first book was published in 2017, which documents the three months you were held captive, raped and tortured by ISIS. Why did you decide to write your new book ‘I Choose My Beginning: A Story of Courage and Activism’?
I wrote my first book during a very difficult time of my life. I was still receiving news about family members who were missing, in captivity or who had been killed. I believed it was important to tell the world that rape isn’t just a small side effect of war, and it comes at a very high personal cost. It was a testimony to document what ISIS did while my memory was fresh.
In my second book, I discuss those crimes, but they are only part of why I do what I do. I tell the stories of other women, and of what came after my escape, including rescuing other captives. Yes my community, the Yazidis, became known for the crimes committed against us. But equally important is the feminism I inherited from my spirited mother; my relationship with my now-husband and my independence since captivity, which includes telling my story on my own terms and becoming a real activist, student and wife.
You write about the pressures of being an activist. What were they?
Suddenly I was told to make my whole life about activism, to never say no to an interview.
In my community in Iraq, women are always expected to act in a certain way. But being an activist was on a new level. If you talk about rape, there are expectations to dress in a certain way – and even smiling can make people doubt your testimony. These expectations were the hardest part.
I loved make-up growing up and I had this crazy idea of opening a beauty salon. And then suddenly [after I escaped from ISIS] I was told to make my whole life about activism, to never say no to an interview, a meeting or a speech. I don’t think that makes you a perfect activist. I was close to giving up.
In 2022, several countries, including the UK, Canada and Ukraine, adopted the Murad Code, a global set of standards for interviewing survivors of conflict-related sexual violence. Why did you create this and what are its aims?
A lot of people have good intentions when they document rape as a weapon of war, but don’t know how to approach survivors.
It’s a short document that I created together with other survivors, the British government and other partners to give information to those who are interested in documenting conflict-related sexual violence on how to give survivors the chance to share what they want to share while ensuring that they don’t re-traumatize them. A lot of people have good intentions when they document rape as a weapon of war, but many don’t know how to approach survivors.
My sisters and I grew up in a small remote village, and we didn’t know the difference between a prosecutor, a journalist and an aid worker. Often, we would give our story without knowing what would happen to it. UN Women now uses the code. Journalists, NGOs and governments are also using it. When I was in Ukraine, I met survivors who had a copy of the code in their own language, and that showed it’s having an impact.
How did you balance the pursuit of personal justice for your family and friends with your advocacy for other survivors of sexual violence?
When you’re an activist, you can’t just focus on personal justice for yourself and your family. The moment I realized that rape as a weapon of war is not unique to Iraq, I realized that my community was bigger than the Yazidis: it’s the worldwide community of survivors of conflict-related sexual violence.
On the other hand, my family and I just want closure. You can’t move forward when you know that the remains of your loved ones are in a building in Baghdad waiting to be identified. We don’t know where my niece, Nasreen, was buried. Justice for her mother and my family means finding her and burying her in our homeland.
—
Nadia Murad, third right, with her lawyer Amal Clooney, UN secretary-general António Guterres, left, and Heiko Mass, the then German foreign minister, at a UN Security Council meeting in 2019 to discuss sexual violence in conflict. Photo: Thomas Koehler/ Getty Images.
When I first met my lawyer, Amal Clooney, she said that even with all the evidence we have, the road to justice is long, and it can be dark, and we will have to be patient. She said we might work for years bringing evidence and testimonies, and we may not get the result we want, but the fight for justice is worth it.
In 2021, a former member of ISIS was convicted of genocide in a German court, the world’s first judgment on atrocities against the Yazidis. Several other convictions followed. How has the Yazidi community responded to those?
Those prosecutions were important not just for Yazidis, but for survivors globally. The very first case was in Germany where my cousin was the victim [she and her daughter were enslaved by ISIS in 2015] and it gave hope by sending a clear message that anyone who has committed such crimes and comes to Germany will be prosecuted.
Why is Iraq prosecuting ISIS as members of a terrorist organization instead of charging them for raping nine-year-old girls?
But a lot of the time, Yazidis are looking for Iraq to deliver justice at home. The survivors and their testimonies are there, and UNITAD, the UN team created to collect and preserve evidence of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide committed by ISIS, has all the evidence stored in a building in New York. Everything is there, so why is our own country prosecuting them as members of a terrorist organization instead of charging them for raping nine-year-old girls and killing children?
Lebanon’s Shia refugees don’t know where to turnThe World Todayiallan.drupal
Lebanese fleeing the country’s south are caught between the Israeli occupation and Hezbollah’s refusal to disarm. But for those seeking refuge in Beirut, further struggles await, writes Lemma Shehadi.
Beirut’s Sports City was built in the 1950s to host major regional games. In July, rows of tents lined the galleries beneath the abandoned stadium’s upper tier, sheltering hundreds of families displaced from southern Lebanon by an Israeli war against the Lebanese militia Hezbollah that began in March this year.
This was the second war in two years – the first followed Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel in 2023. Though a ceasefire agreement is holding, Ali Adame, who has lived at the Sports City stadium with his wife for four months, does not know when he can go back to his village of Joueia.
Those who go back find destruction, ruins and martyrs. There’s sorrow everywhere, but this is our fate.
Ali Adame, refugee from the south now living in Beirut.
His home has been destroyed, and basic services such as water and electricity are no longer available. ‘Of course we’ll go back, we’re just waiting for things to be sorted out,’ he said. ‘Those who go back find destruction, ruins and martyrs. There’s sorrow everywhere. But this is our fate.’
His family are among 300 people that in July were still in the shelter that is run by the Lebanese Red Cross with support from the Ministry of Social Affairs. While most displaced people in Lebanon are renting or staying with family members, those in shelters are some of the most vulnerable.
Adame is receiving treatment for his health conditions at the shelter, but he believes that going back to Joueia is his duty as a Shia from southern Lebanon. ‘The south for us is sacred,’ he said. ‘They destroy it and we go back and rebuild. This is the path we will walk. The land there is precious, it has cost us blood.’
Cost of recovery
The challenge of Lebanon’s post-war reconstruction is immense. Hezbollah joined the Israeli-Gaza war by launching rockets into Israel, triggering a full-scale Israeli offensive the following year. The group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed and its armed forces significantly weakened. Yet Hezbollah launched further rockets into Israel in response to the United States’ air-strikes on Iran earlier this year, causing a second war. Many displaced by the 2024 offensive hadn’t returned, while others were displaced for a second time in two years.
—
Ali Adame, right, with fellow displaced person Hassan Abdel Hadi. Adame has lived in Sports City stadium for four months since his home was destroyed. Photo: Lemma Shehadi.
The chance of help from beyond Lebanon’s borders is slim. After Hezbollah’s devastating war with Israel in 2006, Saudi Arabia and Qatar were the main contributors to the fund to rebuild southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs known as the Dahiya. But support on this scale from the Gulf or the international community is unlikely to be forthcoming this time without the disarmament of Hezbollah. For decades, the Iran-backed militia has operated as a state within a state, dragging the country into armed conflicts with Israel, supporting the Assad regime during the Syrian civil war and killing its critics and opponents in Lebanon.
The Lebanese government is itself bankrupt from a financial crisis in 2019 that led to soaring inflation. Its banks have frozen depositor’s assets since then. The government’s priority before these two wars was to seek an International Monetary Fund package that would allow repayment to depositors.
Crisis for Lebanon’s Shias
Hezbollah’s disarmament is key to an Israeli withdrawal, and to rehabilitating the country in the eyes of the US and international community. The Israeli military currently occupies a buffer zone that stretches 10km into Lebanese territory.
Yet efforts by Lebanese president Joseph Aoun’s government to negotiate disarmament do not look promising. Hezbollah insists that its armed resistance is needed and that the Lebanese army is not strong enough to protect the south from Israeli occupation.
Over a million people – more than 15 per cent of the country’s population – have been displaced from the south in the past two years, and Lebanon’s government faces a long-term displacement crisis it can ill afford. Beirut and its surrounding towns in the Mount Lebanon area absorbed the largest share of displaced populations – 37.5 per cent and 32.4 per cent respectively – according to the government’s Disaster Rescue and Management Committee (DRM).
Though large numbers have returned to cities in southern Lebanon since the June ceasefire, it is not yet known how many will eventually be able to go back to their homes and villages. Of the nearly 17,000 living in government-run shelters, the majority are in Beirut and the district of Metn to the east.
Statements from officials including the Israeli defence minister Israel Katz suggest that up to 600,000 people could be prevented from returning if Israel does not withdraw from its so-called Yellow Line buffer zone, in southern border villages south of the Litani river. And this is unlikely to happen if Hezbollah refuses to give up its arms.
Shortfalls in international funding, as foreign aid budgets are squeezed, are adding to the problems. The 2026 UN Flash Appeal sought to raise $308 million, of which only 60 per cent had been secured by May this year, against a 90 per cent coverage rate in 2024, according to the DRM.
If Israel and Lebanon only agree a military containment like a ceasefire, then people will be afraid to go back.
Mark Daou, Lebanese MP.
The government is having to deal with other consequences as well. ‘People will need a lot of support, there will be pressure on younger people to go to work instead of going further in their education,’ said Mark Daou, a Lebanese reformist party MP. ‘Emigration will be rampant. The number of young men killed is high - many of those are married or of working age. You have widows and kids who need to be provided for.’
The crisis strikes at the heart of Lebanon’s Shia communities which – like Adame – are native to Jabal Amel, the hills surrounding the Litani river.
The researcher and archivist Abbas Hadla says it is the first time that the people of Jabal Amel have no idea when they will be able to return. ‘The Israelis in this war … left villages that aren’t suitable for life,’ he said. ‘This gives people the impression that it’s more than an occupation, that there could be a demographic change happening.’ And this is in a country where such demographic movements have had a significant political impact in the past.
US–Israel war
The unpredictable Iran–US ceasefire talks loom large over all of this. Iran has sought to include an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon as part of its agreement, and experts fear this could help Iran consolidate its control of the country and make Hezbollah’s disarmament less likely.
Others hope the ongoing direct negotiations between Lebanon and Israel in Washington will result in an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon with reparations to help rebuild, in exchange for guarantees to Israel’s security and Hezbollah’s disarmament. A phased withdrawal is being worked out. In July, Israeli forces retreated from two villages within the buffer zone after an agreement with Lebanon.
The talks have two possible outcomes, according to Daou, the MP. The first is a peace agreement with ‘major financial incentives’. The alternative is a ceasefire that prolongs the state of war. ‘[People] would accept an agreement for years to come that would allow them to reconstruct their livelihoods, their villages, their land and everything else,’ he said. ‘If it’s only a military containment like a ceasefire, then the state of war remains and people will be afraid to go back.’
A long crisis
There are signs people are giving up hope of returning home. ‘We’ve entered a long crisis,’ said Mohammed, owner of a spice shop who fled his town of Qabrikha with his wife when the war started earlier this year. He is now living in a rented apartment in Beirut and works as a handyman.
His town is within the Israeli-occupied buffer zone on Lebanon’s southern border, demarcated by the Yellow Line. ‘Nobody dares go back and rebuild. We don’t know if the war has really ended,’ he said.
We’ve fled twice now beneath the airstrikes and bombs. We’re not always going to be lucky.
Mohammed, former shop owner and refugee in Beirut.
Mohammed was first displaced during Israel’s war with Hezbollah in 2024, and though his shop was destroyed then, he went back. He was forced to flee again in March, when Hezbollah launched rockets into Israel, triggering the latest war.
This time, it was his wife’s hair salon in Qabrikha that took a hit, leaving nothing for them to go back to. His son, who is in the Lebanese army, works in a town north of Beirut. ‘Our plan now is to move to a new place entirely. The issue in the south will be a long one, it’s not safe. We’ve fled twice now beneath the airstrikes and bombs. We’re not always going to be lucky.’
Driving his decision is the lack of clarity from authorities about whether it is safe to return. ‘It’s clear from the [political] parties and the municipalities that we have not yet moved on to a new phase,’ he said. ‘There’s no decision on what to do about the people whose homes have been destroyed. They haven’t replaced the electricity generators, or the water networks. They bought water tanks and placed them in the town square.’
Yet Mohammed feels tensions in Beirut as he searches for a more comfortable apartment for his family. In the 2024 war, many refugees were taken into people’s homes. But people now are more cautious after Israel attacked buildings outside of Hezbollah strongholds that had been rented by Iranian or Lebanese militants. ‘People are scared. Not just of who they rent to, but who could come to visit those people. It’s not discrimination, it’s fear,’ Mohammed said.
Preserving Shia identity
The cumulative effect of decades of conflict and displacement means the recovery of the south will not just be about rebuilding, but will have psychological and cultural dimensions, according to Hadla, the archivist, who is director of Umam, a research centre based in the Dahiya. Umam’s founder Luqman Slim, a Shia critic of Hezbollah, was assassinated in 2021, days after he received death threats for his work looking into Hezbollah’s connections to the Beirut Port explosion of 2020.
Does South Africa’s anti-immigrant backlash signal the beginning of a new political era? The World Todayiallan.drupal
After a long season of vigilantism and protests against undocumented foreign nationals, November’s local elections will test whether anti-immigrant populism has appeal for an electorate dissatisfied with the coalition government, writes Kiri Rupiah.
South Africa has been in the grip of anti-immigrant protests and violence over its winter months, leading to the deaths of four foreign nationals - two Mozambicans, an Ethiopian and a Malawian. Tens of thousands more have been left in fear of their lives and livelihoods.
Many have queued outside diplomatic missions in Johannesburg and Cape Town, seeking to escape from a nation that once styled itself a beacon of continental solidarity. It is not the first time the country has experienced xenophobic violence. What distinguishes this outbreak, though, is not just its unprecedented scale, but the widening demographic of protesters and the extent to which it has become politically organized.
In the face of these forces, the coalition government led by the African National Congress has been caught flat-footed, struggling to control events. With elections in Johannesburg and across the country in November likely to bring further tension, is South Africa’s politics approaching a sea change?
This year’s protests are different
The two largest waves of xenophobic violence swept over the country in 2008 and 2015, under the ANC government. The 2008 attacks began in Alexandra township in Johannesburg before spreading nationwide, killing at least 62 people and displacing tens of thousands.
Seven years later protests spread once again, this time from near Durban, amid frustration with the presidency of Jacob Zuma. In both cases, the violence was largely confined to impoverished communities with high levels of unemployment and was fuelled by rumours of foreign nationals taking opportunities from South Africans.
This wave of anti-migrant sentiment draws from the same grievances as previous waves but is more politicized and better coordinated.
Aimée-Noël Mbiyozo, senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, South Africa.
The contrast with this year’s protest is stark. ‘This wave of anti-migrant sentiment draws from the same grievances as previous waves but is more politicized and better coordinated,’ said Aimée-Noël Mbiyozo, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies. She said anti-illegal immigration groups have brought more discipline to their efforts, with identifiable leaders, social media networks and political demands.
The group March and March made international headlines when undocumented immigrants were given an ultimatum in March by its leader Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, a former radio presenter, to leave the country by 30 June.
Before the June ‘deadline’, Ngobese-Zuma said: ‘We are not calling for violence. No one will be killed on 30 June, and no looting will take place in our name.’ In some areas, vigilante groups went beyond street protests, going door-to-door to ‘arrest’ migrants, documented or not. The mobilization reached around 100 locations, with the largest marches taking place in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Pietermaritzburg. One of the most alarming developments is the widening social reach of anti-migrant politics, with xenophobic sentiment increasingly resonating among the middle-classes.
Causes of resentment
How did South Africa get here? After three decades of electoral dominance, the ANC lost its parliamentary majority in 2024. Yet the subsequent government of national unity, a multiparty coalition led by the ANC’s Cyril Ramaphosa, has made some progress. Structural reforms to improve fiscal stability have been praised by analysts and privatization policies aimed at the rail and energy sector have improved capacity.
But the coalition’s macroeconomic competence has not led to improved living standards for ordinary South Africans. Unemployment remains stubbornly above 30 per cent, while services including water and electricity have broken down in many areas. Rampant crime has added to middle-class insecurity. And in the absence of tangible progress, the blame has shifted to migrants.
Groups like March and March and Operation Dudula are the most visible and organized face of this xenophobic sentiment. For the past year and more, March and March has called on the government to make radical changes to migration laws and declare illegal migration a national disaster.
These actions reflect a clear hardening of attitudes towards migrants, especially since the Covid pandemic. In a 2025 South African Social Attitudes Survey, 42 per cent of respondents said they would not welcome any migrants into the country - the highest level recorded and an increase from 28 per cent in 2020.
In this climate, anti-migrant groups have spread harmful myths about undocumented foreign nationals causing unemployment among South Africans, committing crimes and being a burden on services. March and March says its supporters will protest ‘until all undocumented migrants have left South Africa’ and claims there are up to 30 million illegal immigrants in South Africa, nearly half its population. According to Africa Check, a fact-checking organization, the real figure is closer to 2.4 million.
‘The facts about migration are clear and consistent,’ said Mbiyozo. ‘They make up a small proportion of society and contribute 9 per cent of GDP.’ Yet misinformation about ‘outsiders’ taking from a ‘fixed pie’ of resources is rampant.
This narrative has found fertile ground in South African politics. All parties, from the ANC to the Democratic Alliance, have increasingly blamed migrants for South Africa’s struggles. Now, politicians are echoing the March and March demands. The populist MK Party, led by Jacob Zuma, has called for sweeping immigration enforcement, while others, including the centre-right ActionSA, have campaigned on stronger deportations and tougher border security.
Politics by other means
Many argue that the government’s response has fallen short. When protests escalated in June, President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged what he called South Africans’ ‘deep concerns about illegal immigration, border management and pressure on public services,’ while insisting the challenges ‘must be addressed within the framework of the constitution and the rule of law’. Between 26 June and 11 July, the government said it had processed more than 50,000 foreign nationals for deportation or voluntary repatriation and deployed more than 200,000 private security officers.
Political divisions have undermined institutions and created a vacuum being filled by groups like March and March.
But these measures have not resolved the underlying political fractures. After losing its majority in the 2024 election, the ANC was forced into a fragile coalition with opposition parties whose policy priorities often differ sharply. These divisions have undermined institutions such as the police and immigration system and created a political vacuum being filled by groups like March and March.
The result is the effective delegation of state authority to vigilante organizations. ‘Xenophobia, Afrophobia, ethnic chauvinism and vigilante politics offer no way out,’ stated a national campaign against bigotry, backed by more than 120 organizations. ‘They will not create jobs, reopen factories, fix municipalities, end austerity or hold the powerful to account.’
Alex van den Heever, a professor at the Wits University School of Governance, warns of the risks from this continuing vigilantism. ‘The state has a monopoly on legitimate coercive authority precisely because its actions are constrained by law, procedures, courts and accountability mechanisms,’ he said. But ‘vigilante organizations are not subject to these safeguards’ which make them much harder to contain.
Electoral tests
Municipal elections in November will serve as a test of how far xenophobic sentiment has disrupted political discourse. Will the demands for improved public services outweigh concerns over immigration?
Will the oil-tanker shadow fleet ever be brought back into line?The World Todayiallan.drupal
Sanctions are inadvertently transforming ‘dark’ tankers taking Russian and Iranian oil around the world into a parallel trading system. Even with improved international relations, they are unlikely to want to rejoin a global shipping order laid down by the West, warns Nitya Labh.
For decades, clandestine networks of ships have been used to bypass international sanctions and smuggle embargoed oil from Russia, Iran and Venezuela around the world. Their methods include turning off tracking transponders, swapping flags of convenience and conducting risky ship-to-ship transfers at sea.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, however, the scale and character of this ‘shadow fleet’ has transformed dramatically. Before the war, around 200 dark ships were believed to be operating. Today, estimates suggest the fleet comprises more than 1,300 vessels and accounts for at least one in every five oil tankers worldwide. Though the majority are linked to Russia, they cannot be easily attributed to any one country because they operate under shell companies with opaque ownership.
Policymakers in the West have tended to treat this rise in shadow fleet activity as a temporary response from sanctioned countries to get round western embargoes and keep their discounted oil moving. But as time goes on, the shadow fleet is becoming a more formal feature of global trade, supported by its own sources of finance, insurance and military protection.
Meanwhile, fuel shortages triggered by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are driving up demand for sanctioned crude oil - now accounting for 18 per cent of global tanker capacity.
As the issue of sanctions continues to shape negotiations between the United States and Iran, and in the Russia and Ukraine war, western policymakers must consider the role sanctions play in encouraging this rival maritime system. In other words, what might happen if the shadow fleet becomes a ‘parallel’ fleet, a permanent feature of the global shipping landscape?
Formalizing the fleet
One way in which the shadow fleet has become more institutionalized is through the insurance sector. Historically, shipping insurance was dominated by western companies, many of whom still offer insurance to dark vessels via a variety of legal workarounds.
As the barrage of international sanctions has increased, however, many western firms have stopped insuring these high-risk vessels. Russian companies have responded by expanding their own insurance markets. In 2024, Russian marine insurers reported a 42 per cent increase in hull and machinery premiums. Today, nearly one in three tankers crossing the Baltic carries certificates from Russian or Russian-linked insurers. This growth is mostly concentrated in the shadow fleet, although Russian brokers insure regular vessels as well.
Oil shortages haven’t just increased global tolerance for the shadow fleet but provided it an important source of liquidity.
In 2024, India approved four Russian insurers to provide cover for tankers, allowing vessels carrying Russian oil entry to Indian ports, furthering the dark fleet’s efforts to bypass western institutions. The mechanisms that finance the shadow fleet are also becoming more formalized. This has seen the initial, decentralized system of sanction evasion evolve into a more coordinated approach across non-western economies.
The rise of global, non-dollar trade among the BRICS countries in recent years has helped this process. Before western sanctions, Russian exports were predominantly settled in US dollars and euros, but by 2024, 36 per cent were paid for in Chinese yuan - almost no Russian exports were settled in yuan in 2022. Likewise, India, the second-largest purchaser of Russian oil, bought $6.7 billion worth of crude from Moscow in June 2026 alone. Those deals were mostly conducted in Chinese yuan and Russian roubles.
Rising demand for sanctioned oil is entrenching the dark fleet further into the global economy. Following the energy shock triggered by the Strait of Hormuz closure earlier this year, countries turned to sanctioned crude as an alternative. In March, for example, the Philippines’ sole oil refinery said it had bought 2.5 million barrels of Russian crude to bolster dwindling stock, while in July a dark tanker conducting ship-to-ship transfers of Iranian oil was spotted in Malaysia’s Eastern Outer Port Limits zone. These shortages haven’t just increased tolerance for the shadow fleet but provided it an important source of liquidity.
Risk of confrontation
The US and Europe have responded to the growing presence of dark vessels by conducting more ship interdictions. In the first six months of this year, nine suspected shadow fleet vessels were seized across Europe, including four by France. In June, Britain’s Royal Navy intercepted a Russian shadow fleet vessel in the English Channel. The tanker, which was flying under the Cameroonian flag, was seized with more than 100,000 tonnes of Russian crude.
But this increase in western policing has accelerated Moscow’s formal involvement in the global dark fleet. In June 2026, Russia drafted a presidential decree to give Russian flag status to more shadow fleet ships, thereby bringing them under state protection.
US and European officials acknowledge that seizing a vessel flying the Russian flag would be far riskier as it raises the chance of a military confrontation.
American and European officials have acknowledged that seizing a vessel flying the Russian flag would be far riskier as it raises the likelihood of a military confrontation. Recent skirmishes prove the point. In May, after Estonia’s attempt to detain the sanctioned Russian oil-tanker Jaguar in the Baltic, Russia dispatched a Su-35 fighter jet into NATO airspace. In August, Putin reiterated his threat of direct retaliation for Europe’s seizures of Russian merchant vessels, describing such moves as ‘acts of piracy’.
Meanwhile, more countries have become involved in the protection of the shadow fleet. Earlier this year, India and Russia signed a five-year military agreement that permits up to five warships from each country to be deployed in one another’s territories, allowing more mutual naval support. This has led the European Union to authorize its naval forces in the Indian Ocean to intercept suspected shadow fleet ships - furthering this cycle of escalation.
Ripple effects
Yet the expansion of the shadow fleet carries risks beyond confrontation. By creating an alternative for ship registration, insurance and safety, countries are increasingly buying into a bifurcated world trading system. According to several maritime executives who took part in Chatham House’s Global Shipping Roundtable in June, the indications that the shadow fleet is becoming a parallel fleet is both a symptom of this fragmentation of the status quo and a sign of a splintering international order.
By moving discounting oil around the world, Russia’s shadow fleet insulates itself from regulations in the western financial system.
As Russia’s shadow fleet continues to move discounted oil around the world, it increasingly insulates itself from regulations in the western financial system. This matters because it reduces the effectiveness of western regulatory and financial power; most importantly, sanctions. Leaders, whether in Moscow or elsewhere, may conclude that the economic costs of military action are lower than previously assumed, creating the preconditions for wider global conflict.
Resigned but resilient: How Cuba is enduring its US blackoutThe World Todayiallan.drupal
Daily power cuts, fuel shortages and empty shop shelves are part of everyday life for Cubans as they struggle with the worst economic crisis in decades. Photographer Daniel Desormais visited an island bracing itself for America’s next move.
You visited Havana earlier this year. What does life look like for Cubans?
I’ve been to Cuba five times before, but things are significantly worse [since the US tightened its oil embargo in January]. People are trying to survive, but they are struggling to access even basic necessities such as food and medicine. In Havana, electricity can be cut off for hours each day, and the situation is worse in some provinces where blackouts can last for more than 30 hours at a time.
—
Bread rolls are the only item on offer as food is rationed in government shops. Photo: Daniel Desormais/ Panos Pictures.
Fuel has been rationed for years, with queues at petrol stations and prices prohibitive for many Cubans. I met a schoolteacher in Havana who had just endured a 15-hour power cut. She told me when electricity finally returns, everyone rushes to charge their phone, do the laundry and cook before it goes off again.
In one pharmacy I visited, the only item available for sale was herbal tea.
During power cuts, many people cook however they can, often on balconies or outside their homes, burning wood or charcoal in improvised stoves made from old metal cans. Most survive on rice and beans, while meat is rare because refrigerators cannot stay cold during prolonged outages. Milk is also increasingly difficult to find.
Salaries remain low – typically around 3,000 to 4,000 pesos (£90 to £120) a month – while the price of basic goods continues to rise. Much of the food available in the few shops that remain stocked is simply unaffordable for many. Even a bag of cat or dog food can cost the equivalent of several weeks’ wages. In one pharmacy I visited, the only item available for sale was herbal tea.
How are Cubans coping?
Cubans are remarkably resourceful. I saw people washing plastic bags and hanging them out to dry so they could be reused. These bags are designed for single use only and are so thin they tear easily. Nothing is thrown away if it can still serve a purpose.
—
A man cooks outdoors on his balcony. During power cuts many Havana residents are forced to rely on improvised stoves made from old metal cans. Photo: Daniel Desormais/ Panos Pictures.
People repair and repurpose almost everything. I even saw families washing disposable nappies. One man I met was salvaging metal from old mattress springs to make new objects.
Some are coping better than others. Those with relatives overseas who send back money are able to buy battery-pack generators that let them keep the lights on. For everyone else, prolonged power cuts mean living in the dark.
—
A bust of José Marti, liberator of Cuba from Spanish rule, on a plinth at a Havana street corner. Photo: Daniel Desormais/ Panos Pictures.
Who do people blame for the situation? Do they talk about the US embargo tightened under Donald Trump?
People didn’t assign blame so much; they were simply exhausted by the situation. Many felt trapped between two governments and believed they were the ones paying the price.
Many felt trapped between two governments and believed they were the ones paying the price.
On previous trips to Cuba, I rarely saw anyone wearing clothing featuring the American flag. This time it was common to see hats and T-shirts with the Stars and Stripes. By contrast, portraits of revolutionary heroes Fidel Castro and Che Guevara – once seen almost everywhere – were noticeably less visible.
People are cautious about talking politics. There is an awareness that criticizing the government can carry consequences, so most conversations remain careful and discreet.
What is the atmosphere like on the streets? Is there any sign of tension?
More than tension, I sensed resignation. As a documentary photographer, I’ve worked in many places affected by conflict, poverty and humanitarian crises. Often there comes a point when frustration spills over and tensions break out. Even during the pandemic, people in much wealthier countries fought over basic supplies such as toilet paper.
—
A young man and his girlfriend in the entrance to a fruit and vegetable market. Photo: Daniel Desormais/ Panos Pictures.
I didn’t see anything like that in Cuba. Despite having very little, people were welcoming, generous and willing to help strangers. There was music in the streets, with batteries used to power loudspeakers, and there was dancing too. But it didn’t feel like a celebration. The atmosphere was calm.
Music seemed less like an expression of joy than a way of making life a little more bearable. More than anything, people seemed to be waiting – uncertain about what comes next.
Did you travel outside Havana?
I travelled to the province of Matanzas, about 40 kilometres outside Havana. I wouldn’t say life was any easier in the countryside. Poverty is widespread, but at least families there are able to grow their own food. It’s a hand-to-mouth existence.
—
People chat by the light from a petrol station which has been without fuel for most of this year. Photo:Daniel Desormais/ Panso Pictures.
I met people growing a handful of watermelons, planting new seeds immediately in the hope of harvesting a few more the following season. Rather than selling their produce, they often exchanged it with neighbours.
Putin is making Russia’s elites bear the brunt of his failed war in three ways The World Todayiallan.drupal
High-level dissent is being stamped out as the president requests ‘voluntary donations’ from big business, seizes assets and withdraws political protection – but concern is mounting, writes Natalya Kovaleva.
Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 met little resistance from Russia’s political and economic establishment. The few prominent objections came at a cost. Putin’s longtime aide Dmitry Kozak, who reportedly opposed the invasion in Kremlin security council meetings, saw his influence diminish. When Oleg Tinkov, the founder of Russia’s largest online bank, condemned the invasion on Instagram, he was forced to sell his stake in the bank for a fraction of its value, losing nearly $9 billion.
As western governments froze Russian assets hoping to compel the elites to pressure Putin, most chose to cut ties with the West.
Those within the Kremlin’s orbit took note. As western governments froze billions of dollars in Russian assets and imposed travel bans hoping to compel the elites to put pressure on Putin, most chose to cut ties with the West. Their response reflected a bargain that has underpinned Putin’s rule for more than two decades: loyalty and public silence on political decisions in exchange for the freedom to accumulate wealth and relative predictability in dealings with the state.
In the months after the invasion, this deal appeared to hold. Officials, technocrats, business leaders and figures at the top of the military-security establishment seized new opportunities for enrichment while largely avoiding comment on the war.
Five years on, the rising cost of the war is testing that arrangement. Putin’s determination to achieve victory – despite setbacks – has placed increasing burdens on Russia’s business and political leaders. The relationship between the Russian state and elites has changed in three distinct ways – with direct implications for Putin’s grip on power.
Business asked to shoulder war costs
Putin’s full-scale war against Ukraine immediately affected state-owned business and the private sector in Russia. While some benefited from the expansion of the defence sector and from acquiring assets left behind by foreign companies, the shock of international sanctions and the move towards a more isolated economy cost billions for the top business owners.
Alexey Mordashov, for example, the controlling shareholder of steel giant Severstal and Russia’s richest man, lost more than $11 billion due to sanctions in 2022, according to Forbes Russia. He has since recovered much of his wealth, which Forbes estimated at $37 billion in 2026.
On the day of the invasion, Putin gathered Russia’s leading businessmen at the Kremlin and urged them to ‘cooperate with the government’ to support military production, the economy and jobs. But the war has lasted longer than Putin and his close aides could possibly have imagined. The effects of western sanctions and surging defence spending have strained the economy. Last year it grew by just 1 per cent, compared with 6 per cent in 2021. Russia’s 2026 budget deficit has already exceeded the annual target by half.
As economic problems and frontline casualties mount, the business elites are being asked to contribute more while facing greater uncertainty over their wealth, political position and future.
The expansion of Ukraine’s drone and missile campaign deep into Russia has been a major cause of this disruption. Recent strikes on oil refineries and industrial sites have led to fuel shortages and driven up inflation, while attacks on Wildberries, Russia’s largest e-commerce platform, have destroyed a third of the retailer’s warehouse capacity and 480 billion roubles (£4.2 billion) worth of goods belonging to some 100,000 local businesses.
The expectation for big business to shoulder the shortfall in military spending shows how one-sided this relationship has become.
Companies have spent more than $1 billion on defences against drone strikes, with some resorting to rudimentary steel cables. The Kremlin refused to share the costs. At the same time, the state is increasing its demands on big business. In March 2026, after announcing tax increases earlier in the year, Putin reportedly asked business owners to donate directly to the war effort during a closed meeting. By August, ‘voluntary donations’ to the state budget swelled to a record 384 billion roubles (£3.3 billion).
Meanwhile, in May, Anton Siluanov, the finance minister, warned that the government would require an additional 2 trillion roubles (£17.5 billion) to cover military costs before the year’s end, as defence spending climbed to 40 per cent of the federal budget in 2026. The expectation that the private sector will help shoulder this shortfall shows how one-sided the economic terms of this relationship have become.
The elites are losing their assets
Putin is not only asking the elites to fund his war but has begun to seize their assets. The process injects cash into a war-strained economy, while giving security officials incentives to pursue profitable assets to demonstrate loyalty and climb the ranks.
A wave of forced nationalizations has moved an estimated 6.5 trillion roubles (£56.8 billion) in assets to state ownership since 2022, a trend that accelerated sharply in 2025. Last year, the Federal Agency for State Property Management reported taking over at least 805 companies. Prosecutors have justified the seizures on grounds ranging from alleged fraud and corruption to foreign control of strategic assets, ‘extremism’-related offences tied to support for Ukraine and ‘unlawful privatizations’ dating back to the early 1990s.
Sanctions have cut off the exit once available to the country’s wealthiest, while the Kremlin grabs what remains within its reach at home.
The largest forced nationalization to date involves Rusagro, a Russian agricultural company. Its founder, Vadim Moshkovich – once Russia’s 51st richest businessman – had assets worth 550 billion roubles (£4.8 billion) confiscated in June 2026 as part of a fraud case against him.
The result is the elites squeezed from both sides: sanctions have mostly cut off the exit once available to the country’s wealthiest, while at home the Kremlin has grown more willing to grab what remains within its reach. Russia’s business leaders now find themselves at the mercy of an increasingly interventionist state, with few effective levers to influence the terms of the relationship.
Loyalty no longer guarantees political protection
Confiscations are only part of a broader change. As political repression has intensified during the war, the regime has grown more willing to prosecute, arrest and sideline figures across business and political circles.
High-profile cases, from the unravelling of the political network around former defence minister Sergei Shoigu to the arrest of Major General Ivan Popov on fraud charges after he publicly criticized the military command’s handling of the war, have been interpreted by observers as growing tensions within the elite.
Perhaps more revealing have been the recent arrests of regional officials. In Krasnodar region, eight senior officials were arrested within six months of a regional election held in September 2025, including a former deputy governor and a transport minister.
In April 2026, independent Russian outlet Novaya Gazeta reported that criminal cases had been opened against at least 697 regional and federal officials since the start of the war, with the number rising almost threefold in 2025 compared with pre-war 2021.
The scale of this change suggests this is more than a series of isolated purges. The war has created a political environment in which criminal prosecution is being used to discipline the state bureaucracy.
The expanding roles of the federal security service (FSB), the Investigative Committee and Prosecutor General’s Office have created new vulnerabilities for the elites, upending the expectation that political connections will shield them from prosecution.
What does this mean?
The Putin regime shows no sign of imminent collapse, even as its relationship with the business and political elites grows more strained.
Having staked so much on the war, Putin appears unwilling to make any concessions in the face of mounting domestic pressures in the belief that victory remains within close reach. The country’s ruling establishment, meanwhile, is signalling a growing appetite for stability and an end to the war.
Disciplining the elites in the long-term will only grow harder if Putin cannot deliver something resembling a victory.
In May, the chief economist of the state-controlled development bank VEB, Andrey Klepach, warned that Russia was falling behind economically and could not win a prolonged war of attrition. He was dismissed in August. In June, Sberbank chairman German Gref stated that Russians were united in wanting an end to the ‘military activities’. While not challenging Putin directly, these statements indicate a growing willingness among senior figures to voice concern about the economic and social costs of a war without a clear end.
Russia’s elites pay ever greater price for Ukraine warThe World Todayiallan.drupal
High-level dissent is being stamped out as Putin makes big business bear the costs of the invasion – but concern is mounting, writes Natalya Kovaleva.
Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 met little resistance from Russia’s political and economic establishment. The few prominent objections came at a cost. Putin’s longtime aide Dmitry Kozak, who reportedly opposed the invasion in Kremlin security council meetings, saw his influence diminish. When Oleg Tinkov, the founder of Russia’s largest online bank, condemned the invasion on Instagram, he was forced to sell his stake in the bank for a fraction of its value, losing nearly $9 billion.
As western governments froze Russian assets hoping to compel the elites to pressure Putin, most chose to cut ties with the West.
Those within the Kremlin’s orbit took note. As western governments froze billions of dollars in Russian assets and imposed travel bans hoping to compel the elites to put pressure on Putin, most chose to cut ties with the West. Their response reflected a bargain that has underpinned Putin’s rule for more than two decades: loyalty and public silence on political decisions in exchange for the freedom to accumulate wealth and relative predictability in dealings with the state.
In the months after the invasion, this deal appeared to hold. Officials, technocrats, business leaders and figures at the top of the military-security establishment seized new opportunities for enrichment while largely avoiding comment on the war.
Five years on, the rising cost of the war is testing that arrangement. Putin’s determination to achieve victory – despite setbacks – has placed increasing burdens on Russia’s business and political leaders. The relationship between the Russian state and elites has changed in three distinct ways – with direct implications for Putin’s grip on power.
Business asked to shoulder war costs
Putin’s full-scale war against Ukraine immediately affected state-owned business and the private sector in Russia. While some benefited from the expansion of the defence sector and from acquiring assets left behind by foreign companies, the shock of international sanctions and the move towards a more isolated economy cost billions for the top business owners.
Alexey Mordashov, for example, the controlling shareholder of steel giant Severstal and Russia’s richest man, lost more than $11 billion due to sanctions in 2022, according to Forbes Russia. He has since recovered much of his wealth, which Forbes estimated at $37 billion in 2026.
On the day of the invasion, Putin gathered Russia’s leading businessmen at the Kremlin and urged them to ‘cooperate with the government’ to support military production, the economy and jobs. But the war has lasted longer than Putin and his close aides could possibly have imagined. The effects of western sanctions and surging defence spending have strained the economy. Last year it grew by just 1 per cent, compared with 6 per cent in 2021. Russia’s 2026 budget deficit has already exceeded the annual target by half.
As economic problems and frontline casualties mount, the business elites are being asked to contribute more while facing greater uncertainty over their wealth, political position and future.
The expansion of Ukraine’s drone and missile campaign deep into Russia has been a major cause of this disruption. Recent strikes on oil refineries and industrial sites have led to fuel shortages and driven up inflation, while attacks on Wildberries, Russia’s largest e-commerce platform, have destroyed a third of the retailer’s warehouse capacity and 480 billion roubles (£4.2 billion) worth of goods belonging to some 100,000 local businesses.
The expectation for big business to shoulder the shortfall in military spending shows how one-sided this relationship has become.
Companies have spent more than $1 billion on defences against drone strikes, with some resorting to rudimentary steel cables. The Kremlin refused to share the costs. At the same time, the state is increasing its demands on big business. In March 2026, after announcing tax increases earlier in the year, Putin reportedly asked business owners to donate directly to the war effort during a closed meeting. By August, ‘voluntary donations’ to the state budget swelled to a record 384 billion roubles (£3.3 billion).
Meanwhile, in May, Anton Siluanov, the finance minister, warned that the government would require an additional 2 trillion roubles (£17.5 billion) to cover military costs before the year’s end, as defence spending climbed to 40 per cent of the federal budget in 2026. The expectation that the private sector will help shoulder this shortfall shows how one-sided the economic terms of this relationship have become.
The elites are losing their assets
Putin is not only asking the elites to fund his war but has begun to seize their assets. The process injects cash into a war-strained economy, while giving security officials incentives to pursue profitable assets to demonstrate loyalty and climb the ranks.
A wave of forced nationalizations has moved an estimated 6.5 trillion roubles (£56.8 billion) in assets to state ownership since 2022, a trend that accelerated sharply in 2025. Last year, the Federal Agency for State Property Management reported taking over at least 805 companies. Prosecutors have justified the seizures on grounds ranging from alleged fraud and corruption to foreign control of strategic assets, ‘extremism’-related offences tied to support for Ukraine and ‘unlawful privatizations’ dating back to the early 1990s.
Sanctions have cut off the exit once available to the country’s wealthiest, while the Kremlin grabs what remains within its reach at home.
The largest forced nationalization to date involves Rusagro, a Russian agricultural company. Its founder, Vadim Moshkovich – once Russia’s 51st richest businessman – had assets worth 550 billion roubles (£4.8 billion) confiscated in June 2026 as part of a fraud case against him.
The result is the elites squeezed from both sides: sanctions have mostly cut off the exit once available to the country’s wealthiest, while at home the Kremlin has grown more willing to grab what remains within its reach. Russia’s business leaders now find themselves at the mercy of an increasingly interventionist state, with few effective levers to influence the terms of the relationship.
Loyalty no longer guarantees political protection
Confiscations are only part of a broader change. As political repression has intensified during the war, the regime has grown more willing to prosecute, arrest and sideline figures across business and political circles.
High-profile cases, from the unravelling of the political network around former defence minister Sergei Shoigu to the arrest of Major General Ivan Popov on fraud charges after he publicly criticized the military command’s handling of the war, have been interpreted by observers as growing tensions within the elite.
Perhaps more revealing have been the recent arrests of regional officials. In Krasnodar region, eight senior officials were arrested within six months of a regional election held in September 2025, including a former deputy governor and a transport minister.
In April 2026, independent Russian outlet Novaya Gazeta reported that criminal cases had been opened against at least 697 regional and federal officials since the start of the war, with the number rising almost threefold in 2025 compared with pre-war 2021.
The scale of this change suggests this is more than a series of isolated purges. The war has created a political environment in which criminal prosecution is being used to discipline the state bureaucracy.
The expanding roles of the federal security service (FSB), the Investigative Committee and Prosecutor General’s Office have created new vulnerabilities for the elites, upending the expectation that political connections will shield them from prosecution.
What does this mean?
The Putin regime shows no sign of imminent collapse, even as its relationship with the business and political elites grows more strained.
Having staked so much on the war, Putin appears unwilling to make any concessions in the face of mounting domestic pressures in the belief that victory remains within close reach. The country’s ruling establishment, meanwhile, is signalling a growing appetite for stability and an end to the war.
Disciplining the elites in the long-term will only grow harder if Putin cannot deliver something resembling a victory.
In May, the chief economist of the state-controlled development bank VEB, Andrey Klepach, warned that Russia was falling behind economically and could not win a prolonged war of attrition. He was dismissed in August. In June, Sberbank chairman German Gref stated that Russians were united in wanting an end to the ‘military activities’. While not challenging Putin directly, these statements indicate a growing willingness among senior figures to voice concern about the economic and social costs of a war without a clear end.
Photo: Image provided by the Delaware Division of the Arts
A $77,500 award will help Access Creative Aging reach 480 participants at libraries and senior centers through June 2028
DOVER, Del. — Hundreds of older Delawareans will gain access to free arts classes through a $77,500 national grant awarded to the Delaware Division of the Arts.
The funding will expand Access Creative Aging, a statewide program offering adults ages 55 and older free, eight-week workshops in pottery, poetry, painting, dance, theater, jewelry design and other creative disciplines.
Over two grant cycles running through June 2028, the division plans to reach 480 participants at 20 public libraries and 12 senior centers. The expansion is expected to provide more than 640 hours of instruction across all three counties.
“The arts are a proven tool for keeping older Delawareans healthy, connected and engaged,” Gov. Matt Meyer said. “This funding will ensure Delaware continues to lead, allowing us to reach hundreds more seniors who deserve access to these programs.”
From pilot program to statewide initiative
The Delaware Division of the Arts launched Access Creative Aging in 2022 as a pilot program at eight public libraries. The initiative has since grown into a central part of the division’s Arts and Community programming.
The program has served more than 400 older adults and delivered more than 520 hours of free instruction. Classes are led by trained teaching artists at libraries and senior centers.
The program is administered in partnership with the Delaware Division of Libraries and the Division of Services for Aging and Adults with Physical Disabilities.
Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez said cooperation among the agencies helped transform the initial library pilot into a statewide program.
“That partnership is what turned a pilot program in eight libraries into a statewide model for how the arts support healthy aging,” Patibanda-Sanchez said. “This award reflects the power of state agencies working together and our commitment to making sure that work reaches every Delawarean, regardless of income or geography.”
Classes build confidence and connections
A study conducted during the program’s first year found that 92% of participants reported increased confidence in their ability to learn new skills. Fifty-six percent said their confidence increased significantly.
The study also found that 96% of participants reported an improved sense of accomplishment and mastery. No participants reported a decline in either measure.
More recent surveys found that participants formed friendships, continued practicing their chosen art forms after their classes ended and developed a stronger sense of belonging.
“Having little to no disposable income, the free classes are a true godsend,” one participant wrote.
Another participant said the program encouraged continued learning and experimentation.
“I feel more confident about making creative decisions and experimenting than I did before,” the participant wrote. “I have invested funds to purchase additional materials and supplies and have started working on my own projects.”
Demand exceeds available space
Jessica Ball, director of the Delaware Division of the Arts, said demand for the classes has consistently exceeded the program’s capacity.
“Delaware’s older adult population is growing rapidly, and demand for Access Creative Aging programming has consistently outpaced our capacity,” Ball said. “This award will allow us to bring high-quality, free arts programming to more Delawareans in more communities, including those with the least access to the arts.”
State officials said Delaware’s population of adults ages 55 and older is projected to grow by more than 50% by 2030.
The new funding will support additional workshops, the training of new teaching artists and expanded access through libraries and senior services organizations.
Delaware is one of 28 state and jurisdictional arts agencies receiving grants through Creative Aging, Creative Futures, a partnership between the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies and E.A. Michelson Philanthropy. The initiative awarded more than $2.2 million nationally to promote learning, creativity, well-being and social engagement among older adults.
The national program builds on two earlier initiatives focused on helping state arts agencies expand services for older residents and integrate arts programming into aging services.
To Go Box
What: Access Creative Aging
Who: Delaware residents ages 55 and older
Programs: Free, eight-week workshops in painting, pottery, poetry, dance, theater, jewelry design and other art forms
Locations: Participating public libraries and senior centers throughout Delaware
Expansion goal: 480 participants at 20 libraries and 12 senior centers through June 2028
What the West fails to grasp about China’s strategy to lead the world The World Todayiallan.drupal
Xi Jinping wants to forge ‘a common destiny for humankind’ by winning over the Global South and taking Taiwan. But if America and Europe are to counter this ‘double pivot’, they must better understand ‘Xi Thought’, argues Steve Tsang.
This article is published as part of ‘The World Tomorrow’, the magazine’s new strand for fresh ideas about the direction of global order.
On 18 October 2017, delegates at the Chinese Communist Party’s National Congress listened to their leader announce a new political doctrine, ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’. It discussed party discipline, national security and the direction of travel for China, among other topics. But as Xi outlined his doctrine for a de facto new state ideology, he also expressed something that none of his predecessors, not even Chairman Mao, attempted: a global strategy for China based primarily on his own thought.
It was a remarkable moment in the history of Communist China’s foreign policy. In late 1978, Deng Xiaoping ushered in China’s ‘reform and opening up’ era. In the three decades that followed, China’s foreign policy adhered to another dictum of his – that China should ‘hide its capabilities and bide its time’. His successors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao largely did just that, shying away from anything approaching a global strategy. This approach served China well as it led to western policymakers helping China to modernize and emerge as a potential superpower.
Xi Jinping Thought
That all changed with Xi Jinping Thought. Since taking office in 2012, Xi had consolidated power; but it wasn’t until his speech on the eve of his second term that he defined more clearly ‘the China Dream of National Rejuvenation’, with his vision of consolidating the party’s control over everything as an instrument for China to forge a ‘common destiny for humankind’ by 2050.
Recent American administrations have made the mistake of thinking that China wishes to replace the United States as the global hegemon.
It set out Xi’s plan to return China to global preeminence. Xi believes such preeminence will emerge if China can pull off a double pivot in its global strategy: establishing its leadership of the Global South and gaining control of Taiwan. The two are inextricably linked with his ambition, ultimately, of transforming the world order. Yet as important as it is to understand these goals, it is equally important to grasp Xi’s approach to foreign policy – something that the United States and other western powers often fail to.
A conventional ‘realist’ assessment of China’s foreign policy emphasizes its national interest and its power relative to other nations. Xi and his regime certainly make those calculations. Yet, such an assessment risks failing to see that Xi’s ideological preferences and the security of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) trump all other considerations in Beijing’s global strategy. This makes China under Xi an unusual kind of realist actor, one which I and Olivia Cheung examine in our new book China’s Global Strategy under Xi Jinping – the term we use for Xi’s vision is ‘Sino-centric party state realism’.
—
China’s leader Xi Jinping, left, with President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt upon his arrival in Cairo on 1 September, 2026. Key to Xi’s global strategy is his influencing of Global South countries. Photo: Khaled Desouki / AFP via Getty Images.
An understanding of what Sino-centric party state realism means for China’s global ambitions is crucial for western powers seeking to compete with and challenge Beijing. Many fail to apprehend the true nature of these ambitions. For instance, recent American administrations have made the mistake of thinking that China wishes to replace the United States as the global hegemon and impose a new world order. That isn’t the case, as I’ll argue below.
It is also necessary to recognize that Beijing has no interest in enabling us to understand China’s global strategy – its interest is in getting us to understand it in ways that benefit China. But first, it is helpful to examine a key concept in this strategy.
A ‘common destiny for humankind’
In the CCP’s official English translation of this concept in Xi Thought, the Chinese leader sees across the world an opportunity to build ‘a community with a shared future’. This phrase is routinely repeated by western policymakers, analysts and news media. It is an anodyne statement, deliberately so, and, arguably, framed to disarm and mislead. A faithful translation of the Chinese is ‘a common destiny for humankind’, which reveals a more concerning vision. A ‘common destiny’ for all does not emerge organically in a community of free and equal agents choosing to share a future; it needs to be forged by a leader, China.
A ‘common destiny’ for all does not emerge organically – it needs to be forged by a leader, China.
How might China forge this ‘common destiny’? By, in Xi’s words, the ‘democratization of international relations’. In this framing, China is not seeking to replace the existing international order or the US as the global hegemon with the legacies that would entail, such as undertaking the role of the world’s police officer. Instead, Xi’s ambition is for China to take over the leadership of the international order by securing the support of the Global South, thereby executing its first pivot.
Global South countries represent a clear majority in the UN General Assembly and by population count. The modified order would be Sino-centric, based on Xi’s understanding of the traditional Chinese concept tianxia (see sidebar at foot of the article) – in theory at least, a fundamentally different model of global leadership to the American-led rules-based order.
To expedite this ‘democratization’, China does not work to export its Leninist political system; rather, China’s aim is to help countries of the Global South resist the US and the West imposing their liberal-democratic political model on them. In pursuit of this goal, Xi has deployed enormous diplomatic and economic resources.
Since 2021, he has announced four global initiatives, on development (2021), security (2022), civilization (2023) and governance (2025), complemented by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s global infrastructure and economic development strategy. In this process, China’s relations with the US have been relegated to a lower priority, contradicting the belief in Washington that Beijing is fixated on outcompeting Washington. Instead, Beijing pursues its global ambition by cultivating support from the Global South, which is defined loosely to include almost every nation outside the ‘democratic West’. By this formulation, when Chinese preeminence is accomplished the end of US hegemony is simply a by-product.
Wooing the Global South
Xi’s four global initiatives have attracted relatively little attention in the West. The US and Europe are not the intended audience. But the initiatives do appeal to the weaker democracies and autocratic regimes of the Global South whose leaders appreciate that Xi’s suite of initiatives not only commits China not to interfere in their domestic affairs but also gives them protection against others – the US and its allies primarily – from doing so. For example, at the Boao Forum of April 2021, Xi said: ‘We must not let the rules set by one or a few countries be imposed on others, or allow unilateralism pursued by certain countries to set the pace for the whole world.’
This is why many Global South leaders understand the Chinese rhetoric of the ‘democratization of international affairs’ implies a transformation of the international order from one imposed by a self-righteous and democratic US, as they see it, to a more hands-off alternative shaped by authoritarian China.
—
A TV news report broadcast in a restaurant in Taipei, Taiwan, shows the meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing in May. Xi told the US president their two countries should be ‘partners not rivals’. Photo: I-Hwa Cheng/ Getty Images.
The attraction is reinforced by China’s offer of otherwise unavailable development loans without conditionalities such as accountability and transparency, via the BRI scheme. The scaling back of the BRI in recent years may have reduced the size of these loans but it remains substantial at close to $124 billion for 2025. The refined approach has made Chinese development projects more sustainable and subject to less abuse, without significantly reducing their value in cultivating support.
The other demand Beijing makes of Global South countries is to give verbal support for its claim over Taiwan, which is cost-free to them. Little wonder that Xi’s global initiatives gain traction in more and more Global South countries.
Beijing is asking Global South countries to give verbal support for its claim over Taiwan, which is cost-free to them.
China has also used the support of Global South countries to expand and consolidate its control over important parts of key international organizations, of which the most important is the United Nations. For example, at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and the Human Rights Council, Beijing, with support from its Global South partners, has fundamentally changed how they operate and made them responsive to Chinese preferences in the past two decades.
In this way, Beijing is building momentum for further changes within the UN, at a time when most western democracies are neglecting it and reducing their overseas development budgets. The unrelenting enhancement of Chinese influence at key international organizations is meant to enable China to make more decisive changes when it is ready.
The Taiwan pivot
The second pivot in China’s global strategy is to take Taiwan, in defiance of the US commitment enshrined in its Taiwan Relations Act (1979) to help the country defend itself against an externally imposed change in its status. Taiwan matters not so much because it is the top producer of critically important advanced microchips but because it lies in the middle of the strategically vital First Island Chain in the Pacific Ocean and has only remained beyond Chinese control thanks to US protection.
If achieved, the taking of Taiwan, and the discrediting of the US in the process, would mark China’s assertion of its global preeminence.
In Beijing’s approach to Taiwan, Xi has made a paradigm shift. To all his predecessors, including Mao, Taiwan was unfinished business from the Chinese Civil War (1946–1949), but none saw a need to specify a timeline for its incorporation into China. In contrast, Xi has made Taiwan central to his China Dream of National Rejuvenation, making 2050 the deadline for taking it.
Beijing’s preferred outcome is to demonstrate overwhelming military superiority that pressures Taipei to submit to ‘reunification’ and thus remove the American raison d’être for intervention. Should this tactic fail, it will use force. The calculation is that success by either means will reveal US impotence to counter a spectacular Chinese move to take control of the First Island Chain. That would not only enable China to project power deep into the Pacific but would force key US allies such as Japan and South Korea to calculate if they can still rely on their respective defence treaties with the US for their security.
If achieved, the taking of Taiwan, and the discrediting of the US in the process, would mark China’s assertion of its global preeminence. Crucially, it would link the dual pivots of its global strategy, ushering in an appeal to China’s supporters in the Global South to make significant changes to key international organizations.
—
Taiwanese army troops participate in the Han-Kuang military exercise, at a power station in Penghu County, Taiwan on 5 August, 2026. The 10 day-long exercises simulated a response to a possible invasion by China. Photo: Daniel Ceng /Anadolu via Getty Images.
Should Xi’s global strategy come to fruition, the world as we know it will be relegated to history. Although its strategic goal, as expressed in ‘Xi Thought’, is formally limited to enjoying preeminence, as the premier state of the world China would, in effect, become the global hegemon. To the rest of the world, the distinction between preeminence and hegemony means little. A new world order dominated by China, which puts the interests of the Chinese Communist Party and its supreme leader at its core, is a world hostile to democracy, individual rights and human dignity, at least as they are understood in vibrant democracies.
The deadline Xi has set for the fulfilment of his China Dream, 2050, is nearly a quarter of a century away. It implies that while China is unrelentingly working to implement its global strategy, Xi is not in a hurry. The democracies of the West and elsewhere that are worried about Xi’s vision have, to a degree, time to devise effective countermeasures. Each pivot in China’s global strategy provides inspiration.
How the West might respond
To counter China’s Global South pivot, the democracies of the West need to work together to engage China in what can best be described as a beauty contest. The liberal international order has been found wanting, which is why Xi’s proposed transformation gains traction in the Global South. A return to the previous version of the liberal international order is neither possible nor sufficient.
But by working in a collegial way with Global South partners to make the UN and other international organizations more representative and responsive to most nations and peoples in the world, the democracies of the West can provide a more attractive package than what Xi’s ‘common destiny for humankind’ promises.
To do so, the US and Europe will have to re-invest heavily in overseas development aid, with better arrangements to enable the recipients to play an active role in making good use of them as they see fit. They also need to jettison what, from the Global South’s perspective, amounts to hypocrisy: while rich democracies talk about human rights as universal, they tend to only defend the rights of their own citizens.
To counter China’s Taiwan pivot, the key is to exploit the overriding priority of Sino-centric party-state realism: that Xi will not do anything that jeopardizes his and the Communist Party’s hold on power. This means that however much Xi may want to take Taiwan, he will resist doing so if he knows an attempt will bring about a catastrophe likely to unleash forces within the party to unseat him.
This opens a way to deter China. But American military deterrence alone is insufficient as Xi’s purges of his senior military officers mean that no Chinese general would dare to advise Xi to act on US military deterrence. To succeed, it must be complemented by economic deterrence, something that Xi instinctively understands.
Xi’s purges of his senior military officers mean that no Chinese general would dare to advise Xi to act on US military deterrence.
Nearly half of China’s economic ties in value terms are with the US, the European Union, Britain, Japan, Korea, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. For a highly externally oriented economy such as China’s, suddenly losing its ties with those countries would bring cataclysmic consequences, with potentially dire repercussions for the CCP.
The democracies could coordinate to threaten Beijing in private with a break in economic ties before China invades Taiwan. If they did, Xi would need to determine if the damage to China’s economy would result in moves within the CCP to oust him. A calculated risk-taker rather than a reckless leader, he could be deterred, especially if western diplomatic efforts included a reassurance to Beijing that, should it respond favourably to the deterrence, the democracies would ensure that Taiwan did not cross Beijing’s red line and assert de jure independence.
Before I joined ProPublica in 2021, I had spent a year writing about a Georgia prison physician named Carlo Musso, one of the rare doctors who’d openly talked about his role in lethal injections. After he stepped away from that work, I wanted to know who replaced him, so I filed open records requests for documents that would shed light on that.
The role Musso held is so controversial that more than a dozen states have made it illegal to disclose the names of those involved with lethal injections. Georgia is among them. The state has gone to great lengths to hide the details around how it carries out lethal injections.
Georgia wouldn’t release records I had requested, claiming that its secrecy law is needed to prevent those helping with its executions from getting harassed by opponents of the death penalty.
I ended up suing the state. A few years later, a panel of three judges sided with me, and the state released some of the documents.
What I received reveals new details — and revives old questions — about Georgia’s lethal injection process. Among the discoveries: Georgia has made payments of more than $1.1 million since the COVID-19 pandemic for at least one contractor to work with the Corrections Department on its lethal injection process. During that period, the state carried out just a single execution.
The records also show that Georgia is paying far more for lethal injection-related costs than it did in the past. The state’s Corrections Department has spent an average of over $150,000 a year on those costs over the past decade. That’s substantially more than what it agreed to pay in the years before 2017, the records show.
Secrecy laws like Georgia’s shield the public from awareness of the growing costs of pharmacists concocting drugs and the doctors administering the injections. Legal experts say those costs reflect the challenges that corrections officials face in finding help with carrying out lethal injections, which can subject prisoners to torturous levels of pain.
“You wouldn’t have to pay this much money if the lethal injection process was an acceptable one,” said Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law professor who is an expert on the death penalty. “The process itself is so problematic that a lot of money has to be paid.”
Georgia has made payments of more than $1.1 million since the COVID-19 pandemic for at least one contractor to work with the Corrections Department on its lethal injection process. This handwritten, redacted check was part of my records request.Obtained by ProPublica. Redacted by the Georgia Department of Corrections.
Even after releasing the records, the Georgia Department of Corrections declined to answer my questions about the rising costs and the secrecy around lethal injections. The state attorney general’s office, which has represented the department in the lawsuit I filed for the records, also declined to comment for this story. State officials previously said that the Lethal Injection Secrecy Act allows the Corrections Department to protect contractors who would otherwise “find themselves at the center of a firestorm of hate mail and midnight callers.” They have repeatedly argued that, without the secrecy law in place, Georgia wouldn’t be able to carry out lethal injections.
The secrets of Georgia’s death penalty process could face scrutiny in the coming days. After a recent Georgia Supreme Court ruling, which removed a barrier that had paused executions, state officials recently scheduled an execution for Sept. 16, which would be its first in two years.
For every new scheduled execution, a new set of questions about the people behind the injections is likely to emerge.
It wasn’t long after Georgia traded the electric chair for lethal injections in the early 2000s that the state ratcheted up its secrecy.
That’s when opponents of the death penalty increased pressure on pharmaceutical companies to stop selling lethal injection drugs to states that could be used for executions.
By the end of that decade, the advocates’ campaign started to work. The last U.S. factory to make a key ingredient for lethal injections stopped doing so. States across the country scrambled to find new sources of the drugs.
But that backfired. The Drug Enforcement Administration seized the state’s supply of lethal injection drugs in 2011. Soon after, the European Union — made up of countries that oppose the death penalty — effectively banned companies from selling drugs to states if they were going to use them for executions.
Faced with dire lethal injection drug shortages, states turned to a more secret and at times sketchier source of drugs.
The gurney used for lethal injections sits behind glass windows in a small cinderblock building at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, Georgia, pictured in 2007.Ben Gray/Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As Georgia’s supply was set to expire in 2013, it became one of the first states to place an order with compounding pharmacists, who mix raw ingredients to make custom drugs for patients. Although compounding pharmacies have legitimate uses, they are minimally regulated and their costs can be exorbitant.
That avenue was ideal for states that couldn’t buy execution drugs from more scrutinized pharmaceutical companies. But medical experts say that scant oversight of the compounding pharmacies increased the odds of a drug not working as intended.
In a 2013 affidavit filed on behalf of a Georgia prisoner, one pharmacy expert wrote that “highly unpredictable, rapidly evolving and potentially painful and agonizing, not to mention life-threatening, reactions may ensue” as the result of a lethal injection drug made by a compounding pharmacist.
Right around that time, Georgia lawmakers passed the Lethal Injection Secrecy Act. State prosecutors soon defended it in court. “Once that compounding pharmacy’s identity is revealed, how will the Department of Corrections ever get another compounding pharmacy to sell to us?” an assistant state attorney general said in a 2013 court hearing. “How will we get a doctor knowing that he is going to be, or she is going to be, dragged into court?”
At that time, I was reporting on how Georgia’s new secrecy law could affect Warren Lee Hill, who had been scheduled to be killed with drugs obtained from a compounding pharmacy. Hill’s attorneys said that their inability to get information about the drugs could cause “irreparable harm” to their client — and that argument won Hill a lengthy reprieve. He died by lethal injection in 2015.
In recent years, Texas, Indiana, and Arizona have all spent six-figure sums to renew their drug supplies from confidential sources. Defense attorneys have also tried to learn more information about those involved with the lethal injection process. They had hoped extra records might help them protect their clients’ rights.
But in Georgia, none have been successful.
Protesters sing outside of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in 2015, before a scheduled execution using lethal injection. Two years earlier, Georgia lawmakers passed the Lethal Injection Secrecy Act.Ben Gray/Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Other states likewise spend large amounts of taxpayer dollars on secret contractors involved in the lethal injection process. Oklahoma went from paying a doctor $300 per execution to $15,000. And the American Civil Liberties Union discovered that the Federal Bureau of Prisons had spent millions on staffing needed to carry out executions.
When I first requested records about Georgia’s lethal injections, the Corrections Department withheld entire documents that had “identifying information” about those involved with the process.
I asked the department to comply with the Georgia Open Records Act by releasing the documents with redactions. It refused. With the help of an attorney, I sued the department.
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, who defended the Corrections Department, wrote in a court filing that releasing the records “would not serve the interest of the public.”
The names of the people involved with the lethal injection process were redacted from the records that Georgia ultimately released to me. But the records show more than just the spending. They show the lengths the state took to protect its contractors.
Georgia is on the hook for attorney’s fees for its contractors should they face certain kinds of legal challenges, the records show. That means that taxpayers could shoulder the costs of legal representation in “any non-judicial proceeding.” One such example could be if a licensing board threatened to punish medical providers for participating in the lethal injection process — a threat that’s happened in North Carolina.
The records also show that Georgia officials may have disregarded their own financial policies. The Corrections Department requires detailed purchase orders to be kept and logged in the state’s financial system. But all that the department’s lawyers could provide me were handwritten checks, plus a series of one-page documents containing scant information about what the state was paying for — documents that hardly resembled the invoice of an official agency.
I’ve asked the department to provide purchasing records that had more details to comply with its policy.
It couldn’t.
“There are no other records,” wrote a lawyer for the Corrections Department.
Israel’s global isolation is growing – so why is it off the election agenda?The World Todayiallan.drupal
Israelis across the spectrum dismiss criticism from old allies and propose new partnerships. But better relations with the US and Europe remain crucial for national security, argues Yaakov Katz.
For years, Israelis have learned to live with being unpopular. Governments have come and gone, wars have erupted, condemnations have been issued at the United Nations and protests have broken out across university campuses. Israelis absorb the criticism, complain about the double standard and move on.
But something has changed. The erosion of Israel’s standing is increasingly visible in the United States, in almost every European capital and even among parts of the American right, once considered the last bastion of support. Israelis themselves are told to be careful about speaking Hebrew abroad or revealing where they are from. Given that, it would make sense that Israel’s diplomatic isolation would be a big issue in the general election campaign in the run-up to the vote on 27 October. Instead, it is barely discussed.
Netanyahu likes to say that he has changed Israel for the better despite the failures that led to the Hamas invasion.
What is being talked about is the following: the incumbent prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, likes to say that he has changed Israel for the better despite the failures that led to the Hamas invasion of 7 October, 2023, for which he continues to avoid any personal accountability. As proof, he points to the degradation of Hamas, the weakening of Hezbollah and the two wars against Iran. That these wars remain unresolved is a detail he swats away.
The opposition, led by former prime minister Naftali Bennett and Gadi Eisenkot, the former Israel Defence Forces chief of staff, talks about the need for accountability for the political failures that led to 7 October, the hostages and the ransacked communities. They also promise to solve a huge domestic issue – the inequality in the Israeli Defence Forces draft – claiming that, unlike Netanyahu, they will not bend to the ultra-Orthodox parties.
Yet, there is one subject almost no one is contesting, and it is no less important: the country’s deepening international isolation and, above all, the erosion of its standing in the United States and Europe. It is not that Israelis are unaware of the campus protests, the arms embargoes, growing European sanctions and recognition of a Palestinian state, and the International Criminal Court arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the former defence minister. They know that antisemitism is on the rise across the globe and that at least some of it has been fuelled by a war that does not seem to end.
Hardening views
The numbers are striking. A Pew survey published in April found that 60 per cent of American adults hold an unfavourable view of Israel, up from 53 per cent a year earlier. Since 2022, favourable views have fallen by roughly 20 percentage points. Among Americans under 50, unfavourable views are around 70 per cent. Among Democrats, they are close to 80 per cent.
Even among Republicans, 41 per cent now report unfavourable views. British public opinion is even worse. Half of Britons believe that what Israel did in Gaza amounts to genocide, while a poll taken in August found that nearly half of the public would like to see fewer or even no further Israeli immigrants allowed into Britain.
The impact of this change in public opinion is real. Politicians in Britain and the US are increasingly calling for arms embargoes on Israel. In America, some on the far right echo the progressive left, arguing that Israel manipulates American policy, drags the US into other people’s wars and pursues interests fundamentally different from America’s. The Iran war has intensified this trend.
Israelis know something has changed but do not believe that any of the candidates running for office can change the situation. More importantly, almost none of the candidates claim they can.
The opposition promises to lower the cost of living, establish a commission of inquiry into 7 October and draft members of the ultra-Orthodox community. But break the diplomatic isolation? Restore Israel’s standing in Europe? Reverse the erosion of support in America? There is barely a discussion.
Dismissing criticism
Part of the reason for this is that Israelis do not believe the isolation can easily be broken. The 7 October attack has shaped public opinion in Israel to such an extent that when a foreign government criticizes Israel, the criticism is often written off as ‘anti-Israeli’, ‘anti-Zionist’ or even ‘antisemitic’. There is little room for nuance.
On the one hand, the Israeli response to criticism since 7 October is understandable. A country that suffered the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, watched its citizens dragged into tunnels and then spent almost three years fighting on multiple fronts is not particularly interested in receiving lectures.
Israelis see only two viewpoints: that the criticism is either antisemitic or it is ignorant.
Israelis also remember how international sympathy disappeared swiftly after 7 October. In some places, demonstrations against Israel began as the kibbutzim were still burning on the border.
What this creates is an inability to understand that there are allies around the world who have legitimate concerns. Instead, Israelis see only two viewpoints: that the criticism is either antisemitic or it is ignorant.
But there is a third possibility. A country or political leader can be a friend of Israel, recognize the horror of 7 October, understand the threat posed by Hamas and still disagree with Israeli policy. Israel does not have to accept that criticism, but it cannot pretend that all criticism is the same.
Which brings us to another difficult truth: even a change of leadership will not dramatically alter the situation. Netanyahu’s departure would probably lower the temperature in some capitals. But the differences between Netanyahu and his two main opponents on the core security questions – including in Gaza – are far smaller than many outside Israel imagine.
Bennett and Eisenkot are not going to accept Hamas remaining in power or retaining weapons. They are not going to suddenly support policies that endanger Israel simply because it might make them popular in Washington, London or Brussels.
New partners
Yet, instead of thinking about how to repair ties with its allies, Israelis are increasingly looking elsewhere, to India, the Persian Gulf, Asia and even places like Somaliland.
If the US stopped the flow of spare parts for Israeli combat aircraft, no Asian partner would be able to fill the gap in five or even 10 years.
Israel should always strive to diversify its relationships. But if a US administration decided to stem the flow of spare parts for Israeli combat aircraft, no Asian partner would be able to fill the gap – not in five years and maybe not even in ten. There is no substitute today for American military assistance, intelligence cooperation, diplomatic backing and strategic support.
And here is where Netanyahu’s political talent comes into play. Over his nearly two decades of leadership, Netanyahu has managed to embed within much of the Israeli electorate a belief that he is the only person who can derive strategic benefits from a president like Donald Trump or stand up to a president like Barack Obama.
It is a formidable political case, and for many voters it is convincing. Netanyahu has a familiarity with Washington and international politics in a way few Israeli politicians do. His warnings about Iran’s nuclear programme, dismissed for years in many capitals, proved largely correct.
How will the Iran war reshape the Persian Gulf? The World Todayiallan.drupal
When the fighting ends, America’s predominance in the region is likely to be eroded as Iran reasserts itself, the Arab monarchies reconsider their security – and China sees an opportunity. By Mohsen Milani.
Regional orders rarely collapse overnight. More often, they erode gradually. The US-Israel war of choice against Iran may ultimately be remembered for its outcome and its challenge to the foundations of Pax Americana in the Persian Gulf – the post-Cold War order built on American predominance.
Despite military successes, Washington and Tel Aviv have yet to achieve their strategic objectives: regime change and the destruction of Iran’s missile and nuclear capabilities. Rather than surrender, as President Donald Trump demanded, Iran fought with resilience, regionalized the war, weaponized the Strait of Hormuz – the world’s most important energy chokepoint – and demonstrated that geography can compensate for military weakness. Six months on, the war appears to be accelerating a more contested Gulf order in which American primacy is increasingly challenged, China stands to expand its influence, Iran to reassert itself as a pivotal regional power, the Arab monarchies to deepen their strategic hedging, and Pakistan, Turkey and Israel to seek greater influence.
Strategic fulcrum of the Gulf
For five centuries, the Strait of Hormuz has been the strategic fulcrum of the Persian Gulf. Portugal seized Hormuz in 1507, making it the centre of its cartaz system, which required ships to buy transit permits. Persia’s expulsion of Portugal in 1622, with British assistance, paved the way for Britain’s predominance in the Gulf. After Britain’s withdrawal in 1968, the Shah of Iran, backed by Washington, became the dominant regional power until the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei became the first Iranian head of state to be killed by a foreign power in centuries.
Pax Americana reached its high-water mark in 1991 after the liberation of Kuwait and the Soviet collapse, resting on the military predominance of the United States, its partnerships with the six Arab monarchies and the dollar-based oil trade. The current war may mark the beginning of transformation.
After the 1979 seizure of the American embassy in Tehran, the US and Iran waged a cold war: Tehran sought to undermine the American-led regional order; Washington sought to contain Tehran. Yet both avoided direct war. From Carter to Biden, each president concluded that costs outweighed benefits. This year, while Washington and Tehran were still in talks over Iran’s nuclear programme, Trump launched a surprise attack on 28 February. Encouraged by Israel and convinced that decapitating Iran’s leadership and sustained bombardment would deliver a swift victory – and perhaps regime change on the cheap – he chose war.
Washington and Tel Aviv correctly assessed that Iran’s economy was under severe strain, its air defences weakened and its ‘axis of resistance’ degraded after the fallout from Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel in 2023. But they underestimated the resilience of the Iranian state, the cohesion of its elites and institutions and the nationalist surge a foreign attack would unleash. They mistook regional setbacks for strategic collapse, domestic discontent for support for externally imposed regime change and weakened air defences for an inability to retaliate effectively. They assumed the Islamic Republic was run by ‘mad mullahs’ rather than calculating ayatollahs.
Washington and Tel Aviv assumed the Islamic Republic was run by ‘mad mullahs’ rather than calculating ayatollahs.
Washington and Tel Aviv opened the war by playing their strongest card first: assassinating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – the first Iranian head of state to be killed by a foreign power in centuries. Coupled with US-Israel air superiority, the strike convinced Washington that victory was imminent, prompting Trump to demand Iran’s surrender and to threaten to take the country ‘back to the Stone Ages’, as he put it. Instead, Tehran treated the war as existential, closed the Strait of Hormuz and struck US bases and Gulf energy infrastructure.
Washington assumed Iran could not sustain the closure because it would devastate its economy, failing to appreciate that existential wars drive states to actions they would normally reject. Tehran’s position invited comparison with the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis: just as Washington would not tolerate Soviet nuclear missiles near Florida, Iran could not accept the strait being used as a corridor for American weapons. From Tehran’s perspective, stopping that traffic was an act of self-defence.
By closing Hormuz and attacking Gulf oil and gas infrastructure, Tehran shifted the battlefield to the global economy. Unable to match American naval power, it relied on missiles, drones, naval mines, fast ‘mosquito’ boats and selective attacks on shipping to disrupt energy markets. Geography, Tehran concluded, could compensate for military weakness. Winston Churchill’s failed attempt to force the Dardanelles during the First World War demonstrated that overwhelming naval superiority could not guarantee control of a heavily defended strait. Hormuz may prove no different.
Economic warfare
Decades of sanctions convinced Tehran that, unlike the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the conflict with Iran should impose heavy economic costs on the US and the global economy. Rising oil prices confirmed Hormuz offered greater strategic leverage than Iran’s missile arsenal. Little wonder Mojtaba Khamenei, who succeeded his father as Iran’s new leader, declared control of the strait ‘a core strategic imperative’. Combined with pressure on shipping through the Bab al-Mandab into the Red Sea from the Houthis, Iran’s close ally, this gave Tehran potential leverage over the world’s two most important maritime chokepoints.
In fact, the Houthis’ recent seizure of the strategic port of Mocha, followed by their advance toward Dhubab and capture of the island of Mayyun (also known as Perim) in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, has substantially strengthened their position along this vital shipping corridor. At the same time, drone attacks launched from Iraq have forced Saudi Arabia to temporarily shut down its East–West oil pipeline, a major route for bypassing the Strait of Hormuz. Together, these developments reveal growing Iran–Houthi coordination to exploit strategic geography, disrupt alternative energy corridors and drive up global oil prices.
Washington is likely to shift towards fewer, less visible military bases.
After 40 days of war, Trump declared victory and announced a two-week ceasefire on 8 April. The ceasefire quickly collapsed as Washington imposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports and Iran intensified missile strikes on US bases. Hostilities continued until Pakistan brokered a 14-point Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on 14 June. Signed remotely by Presidents Donald Trump and Masoud Pezeshkian on 17 June, it established a 60-day negotiating period to end the conflict.
Tehran hailed the memorandum as a victory because it provided for the resumption of oil exports and partial sanctions relief, while some observers in Washington saw it as a strategic defeat for the US.
Ostensibly, the memorandum collapsed over disputes concerning Hormuz and Lebanon. Yet Washington may have concluded that the agreement conceded too much to Tehran and effectively nullified it. Israel, claiming it was not a signatory, continued strikes against Hezbollah despite the memorandum’s call for the ending of military operations ‘on all fronts, including Lebanon’.
An emerging Gulf order
Israel – determined to resume the war – and hawks in Washington argued that the agreement had rescued an Islamic Republic on the verge of collapse. Under pressure, Trump abandoned it.
At the same time, Washington sought to restore prewar freedom of navigation to the strait. Tehran interpreted the agreement as recognizing a permanent role for it and Oman in the strait’s administration. However, when Oman, backed by Washington, began routing shipping through its territorial waters without consulting Tehran, Iran resumed attacks on commercial shipping.
As the war dragged on, Iran adopted an increasingly preemptive posture, culminating in surprise and deadly missile strikes on US forces in Kuwait and Jordan. Neither side now appears prepared to end the war. Yet both are likely to return to negotiations, for there is no military solution to either Iran’s nuclear programme or the Strait of Hormuz.
The war’s long-term significance lies not only in its battlefield outcome but in the regional realignments it has set in motion. The prewar Gulf order is unlikely to be restored.
Washington is likely to reconfigure its Gulf security architecture. Built on forward deployments, large bases and conventional superiority, it has proved more vulnerable than expected. More than a dozen US bases sustained significant damage. Iran showed that inexpensive asymmetric capabilities could penetrate sophisticated air defences and inflict disproportionate damage.
Washington is therefore likely to shift towards fewer, less visible bases, dispersed deployments, precision-strike capabilities, missile defence and the use of artificial intelligence while preserving its conventional military superiority. Britain and France are likely to expand their military cooperation with Gulf monarchies and arms sales, complementing the American security role.
—
Houthi supporters in Sana’a, Yemen, celebrate the day after the group’s takeover of the strategic port city of Mocha and the Bab al-Mandab Strait on 10 September, 2026. Photo: Mohammed Hamoud / Getty Images.
The Arab monarchies will reassess their security architecture, though the contours of what replaces it remain unclear. Iran’s 2019 strike on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq and Khurais oil facilities, which temporarily halved the Kingdom’s oil output, exposed the limits of the American security umbrella. The current war has reinforced that lesson: indispensable though it remains, the American security umbrella cannot fully protect the Gulf monarchies.
This reassessment is unlikely to produce a strategic realignment away from Washington, however. The Arab monarchies will remain anchored in the American security system while hedging through strategic and economic partnerships. Financial dependence, however, limits that hedging. Their sovereign wealth funds manage more than $5 trillion, much of it invested in dollar-denominated assets and western markets, while ruling families hold vast private wealth in the West. The freezing of Russian sovereign assets after the invasion of Ukraine underscored that these investments create both prosperity and vulnerability.
The war has reinforced that lesson that the American security umbrella cannot fully protect the Gulf monarchies.
The emerging Persian Gulf order is likely to be characterized by multi-alignment, giving the Arab monarchies greater room for manoeuvre while making it harder for Washington alone to shape the region. Yet their divergent interests make a common approach towards either Washington or Tehran unlikely.
For Saudi Arabia, whose Vision 2030 depends on regional stability, managed coexistence with Iran has become a strategic necessity. The US failure to achieve victory, together with Iranian strikes on Saudi Arabia, raised doubts about the American security umbrella, which deepened after Trump made implementation of the US-Saudi nuclear agreement conditional on Riyadh joining the Abraham Accords. Saudi Arabia also signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement with Pakistan and Turkey, signalling a search for additional security partners. Pakistan’s nuclear capability makes it the pivotal member of the agreement. Whether the agreement, whose provisions remain undisclosed, can provide an effective security arrangement is doubtful.
The UAE is pursuing a different strategy: deepening security co-operation with the US, Israel – and perhaps India. Having already left Opec, in which Saudi Arabia plays a leadership role, Abu Dhabi can expect its dispute with the Kingdom to widen. At the same time, its vulnerability to Iranian retaliation reinforces Abu Dhabi’s preference for managed but cautious relations with Tehran. The war’s outcome will largely shape that relationship.
An opening for Beijing
Bahrain and Kuwait, the Gulf’s monarchies most exposed to future confrontation with Iran, are likely to remain closely aligned with Washington and Saudi Arabia, while Qatar and Oman will deepen engagement with Tehran. Neither Pakistan, Israel nor Turkey is likely to emerge as a major external power in the Persian Gulf. Among external powers, China stands to gain the most. As Iran’s largest oil customer, the leading trading partner of the Arab monarchies and a country with closer security ties to Tehran than to any Gulf state, Beijing is uniquely positioned to expand its influence through trade and technology without underwriting the regional security order. Over time, protecting those interests may draw China into a larger security role. Persia’s expulsion of Portugal from Hormuz in 1622 paved the way for Britain’s predominance in the Gulf. Iran’s challenge to Pax Americana may accelerate China’s emergence as one of the Persian Gulf’s leading external powers.
Iran’s challenge to Pax Americana may accelerate China’s emergence as one of the Persian Gulf’s leading external powers.
If the war ends through negotiation, Iran is likely to emerge as more influential in region. With its axis of resistance weakened, Tehran will seek to restructure it while reshaping its relationships with the Gulf countries, strengthening the Houthis to gain strategic depth on the Arabian Peninsula, pressuring Saudi Arabia and extending its maritime leverage to the Bab al-Mandab. At the same time, it will probably press for a regional security framework while improving relations with Saudi Arabia, Oman and Qatar and monitoring the policies of the other Gulf monarchies.
UK’s armed forces can keep control of their AI kill switch – here’s howThe World Todayiallan.drupal
The US offers the most advanced defence technology at the expense of sovereignty. Yet Britain can develop AI and other hi-tech capabilities without sacrificing autonomy or its transatlantic alliance, writes Phil Tinline.
As the celebrations of American independence over the summer should have reminded us, Britain’s relationship with the United States has often been more difficult than we might like to think. Nonetheless, over the past 18 months, the bond has come under unusual strain.
Last summer’s Strategic Defence Review emphasized the upsides of the alliance but acknowledged America’s change in security priorities, ‘as its focus turns to the Indo-Pacific and the protection of its homeland’, and that, consequently, ‘the UK’s longstanding assumptions about global power balances and structures are no longer certain’.
What used to feel like a beneficial alliance with a friendly big brother now feels like a transactional alliance with a genuine ‘Big Brother’.
General Sir Richard Barrons
That was before President Donald Trump threatened to invade a NATO ally and sought to press Britain to join his misbegotten war with Iran. As General Sir Richard Barrons, one of the review’s authors, puts it: ‘What used to feel like a beneficial alliance with a friendly big brother now feels like a transactional alliance with a genuine Big Brother.’
Worse, this fissure has appeared just as Britain is facing significant threats from an increasingly hostile Russia, is still working to repair its relationships with Europe after Brexit and is heavily burdened with debt. This confluence of crises is increasing pressure on the British state to shore up national security and defence, while making that aim more difficult to achieve.
At the sharpest point of this dilemma sits artificial intelligence. As the technology rapidly develops, it is becoming more central to our defence and security capabilities – particularly in operational planning and decision-making, predictive analysis and the use of uncrewed systems – but its development is being led by our ever-less-reliable ally across the Atlantic.
Outsourcing defence
AI may be helping to make weaponry more autonomous, but what about the autonomy of the states deploying it? Since DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014, Britain has developed nothing approaching the vast, cash-ravenous general-purpose foundation models pioneered by American companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
These models are powerful and versatile, enabling the creation of generative AI applications, capable of complex, multistep tasks. Following the first cyber-attacks launched in July by an autonomous AI, these applications’ rapid development has triggered increased concern about a catastrophic loss of human control – a problem the US and its Chinese rivals need to confront.
AI may be helping to make weaponry more autonomous, but what about the autonomy of the states deploying it?
But British reliance on these systems presents a more immediate risk: exposure to a ‘kill switch’. The Trump administration’s recent intervention ordering Anthropic to block foreign nationals from using its Claude Fable 5 programme was motivated by these rising safety concerns, but it also exposed the profound impact Washington can impose on any customer of a US company.
Beyond AI, a similar ‘shutter control’ risk might undermine British defence capabilities that rely on innovative US technology. As one former senior British military officer notes, Washington could choose to refuse software upgrades for the Royal Air Force’s 48 F35B fighter jets, for example. A US company such as Elon Musk’s satellite firm Starlink might cut off access to its services, on which the Ministry of Defence has reportedly spent more than £16 million in its efforts to back Ukraine’s defence against Russian aggression.
Britain reliant on US tech
Yet currently, as the investor Angus Hanton, author of Vassal State: How America Runs Britain, points out, Britain is deepening its dependence on America, not least by allowing its defence companies to go the way of DeepMind and be bought up by US firms.
Between 2020 and 2022, Britain permitted two of its leading defence firms – the aerospace manufacturer Cobham and the components company Meggitt – to be bought by US companies. More recently, the precision instruments supplier Spectris and the cyber security firm Darktrace have gone the same way.
Meanwhile, the British state has become increasingly reliant on US tech companies, such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services – and, most controversially, Palantir, which was recently awarded a three-year, £240 million contract without competitive tendering by the Ministry of Defence for ‘support to data analytics capabilities supporting critical strategic, tactical and live operational decision making’. In June, a parliamentary select committee concluded that for Britain, ‘Palantir’s increasing presence across the public sector represents an unacceptable point of weakness.’
On the European continent, once-unthinkable moves are afoot to reduce technological dependence on America. Many Danish government systems, for example, now run on a system built by a domestic company, rather than US ones. The German military will reportedly not be contracting Palantir for the moment.
In this context, those charged with maintaining British national security must decide how far they need to reduce its dependence on the US, and which elements of the relationship must be preserved. As national security-focused AI develops at speed, particularly in the US, can Britain steer a path between ceding ever more control to its powerful big brother, and trying to bolster national independence by relying on more limited tech?
Home-grown technology
One potential approach that emerges from conversations with former senior military figures and AI analysts is to acquire the tech necessary to keep Britain safe from a range of sources, chosen according to the degree of complexity and security risk involved.
For simple defence operations that do not carry security implications, foreign technology solutions could be bought off-the-shelf at little risk. The steep energy costs of running AI could be met in part by buying cheap Chinese solar panels, for example. This poses no real problem as they are long-lasting, software-free purchases that require little maintenance.
Where national security is a factor, Britain could avoid simply defaulting to reliance on the big US foundation AI models and turn instead to smaller specialist applications developed domestically. Barrons, a former commander of the UK’s Joint Forces Command and a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House, argues that for command-and-control systems, for example, maintaining sovereign control outweighs the ‘potential degradation in performance’ from losing access to the most advanced US systems, particularly where the tasks concerned do not require generative AI.
Britain has a wealth of leading AI technologists, and efforts are underway to make it easier for them to develop domestic applications. With the backing of the government’s Sovereign AI Fund, the UK-based AI lab Cosine is currently developing what it says will be ‘Britain’s first fully sovereign frontier AI model’. Lumen Sovereign is intended to be ‘an AI capability that operates with zero dependence on foreign infrastructure’. This will reportedly be built using models trained on less data than US equivalents, which will be sufficient for specialized requirements.
As some British AI analysts point out, smaller specialized applications are not necessarily a second-best option. The big generalist models are foreign-controlled and increasingly expensive as token costs increase. Smaller, ‘open weight’ models can give greater control and be run at lower cost. One overall problem, however, is that generative AI can be unreliable. A given set of inputs won’t always produce the same outputs – which is problematic when flying a plane autonomously, for example.
Generative AI can be unreliable. A given set of inputs won’t always produce the same outputs – which is problematic when flying a plane autonomously.
This approach – diversifying supply and reducing dependence on any one provider – is similar to the strategy being advanced by the European Commission. Under its proposed Cloud and AI Development Act, tasks that require AI would be categorized by sensitivity, with the most sensitive being allocated to a ‘full sovereign European stack’.
Beyond AI, this approach could be applied to other frontier technologies, such as robotics, quantum computing and graphene, by fostering the creation of home-grown startups that draw on the UK’s strengths in scientific innovation. Britain has demonstrated the worth of its military tech capabilities in its contribution to Ukraine’s astonishingly effective shift into large-scale drone production. As the former Chief of the Defence Staff General Sir Nicholas Carter has argued, innovations in weaponry require the evolution of a new way of warfare to match them both to the threats Britain faces, and to budgetary constraints.
However, there are various measures the UK would also need to take to bolster its autonomy in this field. Barrons, for example, suggests it would require the construction of sovereign data centres, though this would need to win public consent, given the growing opposition to such centres in America.
Upsetting the elephant
The economist Will Hutton, meanwhile, suggests that nervousness about American hostility to the UK blocking takeovers of its innovative start-ups too easily trumps the need to bolster the UK’s autonomy. ‘At some stage’, he suggests, government must ‘judge when you can upset the elephant.’
Britain also needs to develop greater self-sufficiency at more basic levels that underpin new technology: the energy that AI consumes so voraciously, and the processing of critical minerals needed to build components. ‘Rare earths’ themselves are not rare, but the capacity to make them usable is. China currently dominates that process.
Britain needs to develop greater self-sufficiency at more basic levels: the energy that AI consumes, and the processing of critical minerals needed to build components.
American efforts to bolster its position in this area have focused on the large-scale processing of metals such as copper, zinc and tin. Here too, there may be an opportunity for Britain to develop bespoke capacity, reviving small-scale processing of high-value metals such as tungsten.
Finally, government would need to overcome Whitehall’s one-sided assessment of risk, which focuses on the measurable costs of action rather than on the harder-to-measure costs of inaction, particularly in procurement and speculative investment in potentially useful start-ups.
In 2025, prompted by the Strategic Defence Review, the MoD launched UK Defence Innovation, a team ‘working to break down traditional barriers’ to accelerate the creation of cutting-edge capabilities. The new prime minister, Andy Burnham, has promised re-industrialization, higher defence spending and a reining in of Treasury dominance. Whether this will be sufficient to shore up UK sovereignty remains to be seen.
Efforts to reduce dependence could clearly be enhanced by co-operation with other middle powers facing similar challenges. Britain has strengthened links with European states through the Joint Expeditionary Force to Ukraine, and its Security and Defence Partnership with the European Union; it is planning to develop ‘deep strike’ missiles in co-operation with Germany under the Trinity House agreement.
Efforts to reduce dependence could clearly be enhanced by co-operation with other middle powers facing similar challenges.
However, it has not managed to access the EU SAFE programme which helps finance collaborative defence procurement – something Olivia O’Sullivan, director of Chatham House’s UK in the World Programme, has identified as a priority for Burnham. As a former senior military officer notes, addressing the gaps left by US withdrawal will require Britain and its European allies ‘to suspend national parochialism when it comes to their defence industries’.
Beyond Europe, replacing US capability would require stronger relationships and the pooling of talent and capital with other middle powers, alongside greater efforts to achieve interoperability within NATO. Rana Mitter of the Harvard Kennedy School draws attention to the under-recognized potential of working with Japan, given its deep capacity in AI, including in capital and research and development, its wariness of China and nervousness about US unpredictability, and its warmer relations with the UK. In this vein, Britain has recently announced a UK–Japan Frontier Technology Partnership.
Maximizing British and middle power independence evidently has its limits. Where foundation models are necessary, Europe has not invested in research and development early enough to be able to compete with US or Chinese models, France’s Mistral model notwithstanding. For the moment, this leaves using the US models as the only option. As the Strategic Defence Review underlines, transatlantic links between officials remain cordial, as they do between the British government and US defence businesses. And a senior military officer suggests that it would still be preferable to keep the US in NATO for the credibility of Article 5’s mutual defence clause, though this might require some ‘constructive ambiguity’.
Strength through small gains
In the context of this more transactional but still functional relationship, British ministers should not underestimate the cards they have available to play. These include GPS ground stations in the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, signal intelligence localities in Cyprus and the UK’s widely admired special forces. Then there is Britain’s growing strength in computing power, and the depth and closeness of its defence relationship with Ukraine, including a new data-exchange deal which allows British access to Ukraine’s Avengers AI Labs. This could help Britain to sharpen its AI application performance in ways that improve its hand in its relationship with the US.
Smyrna senior William Ngayi-Parker (No. 42) makes a block during Smyrna’s win over Red Lion on September 4. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder
The Smyrna Eagles (1-0) defeated Red Lion Christian Academy (0-1), 38-0, on September 4, during the first week of Delaware high school football competition.
BEAR, DE — Smyrna quarterback Drew Marks stood in the shotgun formation with his feet at the Red Lion 40 yard line, sophomore running back Terrell Ingram to his right, three receivers lined up to the left and a lone receiver on the right. Marks caught the snap and surveyed the field, but was unable to find an open receiver from the pocket. The senior signal caller rolled to his left looking for a throwing lane and found a small window to deliver the ball to junior receiver Mikiah Jackson.
Jackson was the lone receiver on the right and streaked toward the left sideline during his route. As Marks rolled to his left, Jackson turned his route upfield and Marks lofted a pass toward Jackson’s back shoulder. Jackson made the initial catch as he spun around contorting his body to make the grab, but as he did, the ball came looseand got tipped in the air. Jackson fell to the ground as the ball descended, but Jackson quickly refocused and lunged from the ground to complete the catch before the ball hit the grass.
Jackson’s highlight catch put the Eagles in the red zone and in position for their fourth score of the first half.
“I just saw it and I knew I could make some way to catch it and I caught it,” Jackson said postgame.
Jackson finished the game with over 100 yards receiving and three receiving touchdowns in Smyrna’s, 38-0, victory over Red Lion, Friday night, ushering in a new season of Delaware high school football.
“It feels amazing to play against another jersey,” Smyrna sophomore Amari Ashley said postgame. “It feels good to go out there and show everybody what we can do.”
Junior receiver Mikiah Jackson runs down the left sideline to score his first touchdown of the game. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder
The Eagles played well on both sides of the ball, scoring on all four of its first half offensive drives getting production through the air and on the ground.
The Eagles first touchdown came on their opening drive in which they traversed 70 yards downfield in 13 plays. The drive was capped off by a four yard touchdown run from senior Chrystian Carroll. Smyrna’s second touchdown was scored by Jackson on a 50-yard catch and run at the end of the first quarter.
Jackson scored his second touchdown of the first half on Smyrna’s subsequent drive, before making the tip catch on the Eagles’ fourth drive which ended in a one yard touchdown run from Ingram.
“We’re just gonna go at you every play,” Jackson said about what makes Smyrna’s offense dynamic. “I mean, [it’s] a tempo offense, so we don’t let up our foot on the gas and we just go at you every play and drill it down.”
Smyrna’s fourth scoring drive was set up by an interception from sophomore Amari Ashley as Red Lion threatened in Smyrna territory. Ashley’s interception was the first of two interceptions for the Eagles throughout the game and was a part of a strong defensive showing for the program.
“I saw the quarterback drop back and then I saw them do the post-wheel that we study everyday,” Ashley said describing his interception. “So, I just did everything we did in practice and went up and got it. Just trying to be an athlete.”
Sophomore defensive back, Amari Ashley, intercepts a Red Lion pass in the first half. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder
Smyrna’s defense never allowed Red Lion to generate any offensive momentum and when the Lions made it into Smyrna territory, the Eagles were able to stop them before they reached the endzone.
Red Lion found some offensive success through the air with key throws from freshman quarterback Chase Manlove and strong runs by senior Jordon Jones, but the Lions were unable to string those plays together and breakthrough against Smyrna’s defense.
Red Lion will have a week off before they play again on Saturday, September 19, against Long Island Lutheran High School from New York. That game will be played in Bear at 1:00 p.m. and will be the first out of state test for last season’s Class 2A champion.
Smyrna’s next game will be a road game against Frederick High School on Thursday, September 10, in Frederick, Maryland. This game will be the first of two out of state opponents Smyrna faces before the program takes on its first Class 3A opponent in Middletown on October 2.
(This story was updated on September 9, to include pictures from the game.)
‘We are at a moment of peril with AI ... The sooner [it is regulated], the better’ The World Todayiallan.drupal
Sebastian Mallaby, the author of a recent book on Google DeepMind, tells Mike Higgins about the urgent need for regulation, why Europe will have to follow the United States’ lead and the way to talk to China about the technology’s safety issues. Listen also to the full podcast of their conversation.
Before we get on to wider issues around AI policy, there was some big news in the AI labs this summer. Demis Hassabis, the subject of your new book ‘The Infinity Machine’, stepped down as chief executive of DeepMind, the British AI start-up he co-founded and in 2014 sold to Google. He is now DeepMind’s chairman while its new boss is based in Google’s California HQ, not London. Does that mark the end of era?
It’s the end of the era of a major global AI lab being run out of London because that’s where Demis Hassabis insisted on it being based. He is patriotically British. He refused to move to California despite pressure to do so and ran DeepMind from London, setting the pace in artificial intelligence for a long time. He’s now the chairman of DeepMind; the new chief executive is now based in California at the Google headquarters, and that is a shift in the centre of gravity. But I think this narrative has been overblown.
Demis Hassabis says very powerful AI is just around the corner, but we have failed to make it safe for humans.
One angle is that Google is losing [the AI race]. It’s true that Anthropic has the most powerful models and that OpenAI is probably second at the moment. But DeepMind’s chatbot, Gemini, is used by more people than any other chatbot because it’s the default on all Android phones. It has a billion users of its app. That doesn’t count all the people who use it through Google search, Gmail or Google Maps.
As for Hassabis, the story is he has been pushed upstairs, I don’t see it that way. From my discussions with him over three years, it was clear he wanted to do two things: build frontier AI and make sure it was used properly. I think he feels that he’s got to that destination in terms of frontier AI. He says we are in the foothills of ‘the singularity’, meaning very powerful AI is just around the corner, but we have failed to make it safe and useful for humans. There’s not much regulation, the regulation that does exist is a mess, and he wants to try to fix that.
This year has seen growing alarm about AI mounting cyber hacks. OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta all admitted that their models had done so. Those hacks followed the apparent threat to the entire internet posed by Anthropic’s Claude Mythos model. As the pace of AI development shows no signs of slowing, where might we expect timely and effective regulation to come from?
We’ve got models now that really do threaten the integrity of the internet infrastructure because they are so good at cyber hacking. The Claude Mythos model last April was able to discover these vulnerabilities which decades of human scrutiny hadn’t unveiled. The OpenAI models autonomously hacked their way out from supposedly secure ‘sandboxes’. That was extraordinary. The AI agents started to communicate with each other, posting on a message board, pooling ideas about how they would escape. The human overseers spotted the escape, patched the code, and thought they had solved the problem. But a few days later the AI agents broke out again and hacked their way into the website of Hugging Face, a software company that knows about cyber security. So, we are at this moment of peril.
It’s a big regulatory challenge and it’s not easily solved. But a good starting point marries the art of the politically possible with what we would ideally want. The answer is you have the United States set up a self-regulatory body – not regulatory, because if it’s a straightforward government regulator, you have to appropriate funds from Congress. That is a nightmare. They won’t give you enough to hire the right scientists or have enough computing resources.
A self-regulatory body is a practical way to get around those politics but would have the imprimatur of the government. Hassabis proposed this solution in an open letter a few weeks ago. That’s the one that makes the most sense and is supported by people across the industry. It doesn’t, so far, seem to be the one that the Trump administration sees fit to embrace but maybe that will change.
Hassabis has said the successful rollout of self-regulation in the US could lead to global regulation. Given the differences of opinion about AI regulation, how quickly do we need to get our act together?
The sooner, the better. The only question is whether we have to experience a kind of Hiroshima moment to get serious about doing something. How would an American self-regulatory body gain collaboration from the rest of the world? What I’m going to say here is very unpopular in Europe – but I think Europeans ought to like it. Essentially, Washington would compel its allies in Europe and Asia, everywhere apart from China, to get on board with its regulatory regime. That sounds like Uncle Sam just squashing everyone else’s sovereignty, but actually the European or British interest here is that there should be good regulation. And if that comes through forced coordination from Washington, I’d rather have the regulation than not have it.
The US could successfully compel the rest of the world because it produces most of the AI stack: the chip designs, the actual data centres and most of the models apart the Chinese ones. If Europeans wanted access to American models, American cloud services, American chip designs such as Nvidia or AMD, they would have to agree. When the Biden administration imposed semiconductor export controls on China, chip makers such as Dutch firm ASML and its counterparts in Japan didn’t like it but had to go along. This is just an old story in the way America operates in the world.
—
US President Donald Trump, left, and Demis Hassabis, then chief executive of Google DeepMind, at a meeting of G7 members, partner countries and AI business leaders as part of the G7 summit, in Evian, France, on 17 June, 2026. Photo: Ludovic Marin / AFP via Getty Images.
How does America get China to sign up? That is very difficult, but I think people in Washington exaggerate how hard it is to talk to China. In the American debate there are two kinds of China watcher, the hawks and the neo-hawks. The longtime, anti-communist hawks always said you can’t do anything with China. And then there are those who thought that by getting China into the World Trade Organization it might converge with our values, but they were burnt by Xi Jinping and his shift to authoritarianism. They’re the neo-hawks.
An alternative, reasonable view is that China is a technological power, it’s a very big country. Be realistic about it. The way they’ve managed their energy supply during the Iran war is nothing short of awesome. They took a 50 per cent cut in their energy imports and suffered no recession. That’s how resilient they are. Then we need to talk to them about the joint interest we both have in not letting AI get into the hands of criminals, terrorists or other rogues. Like us, China doesn’t want the internet to be hacked by cyber attackers who are criminals.
If good regulation comes through forced coordination from Washington, I’d rather have that than not.
In the Cold War, there were flashpoint moments like the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. But either side of that, in 1957, the US and the Soviet Union helped create the International Atomic Energy Agency, to set rules about tracking nuclear material. Then in 1968 they signed up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. To those who say you can’t talk to Xi, Nikita Khruschev, the Soviet premier at the time, was not an easy person to deal with. But we did deal with him because we had a joint interest in preventing proliferation of nuclear weapons to third parties. It’s the same today with AI.
Does Europe hold any cards in this race?
Europe and the UK do have assets that matter. The biggest is ASML, an important Dutch company, which for the moment has a monopoly on the lithography machines needed to build the best semiconductors. Another is the British company ARM. Almost all smartphones in the world, including Chinese smartphones, incorporate ARM chip designs.
If you are dependent on American data centres, they can switch you off if the White House gets annoyed with you.
Also, AI friendly semiconductors are being bought and installed in European data centres. That is important because if you are dependent on American data centres, they can just switch you off if the White House gets annoyed with you.
Nevertheless, the overwhelming balance of power is in favour of the US. In a difficult negotiation Europe would have to follow the American lead. But that’s not a bad thing. NATO, one of the most successful alliances of the past 80 years, wouldn’t have been effective without American leadership. And that was great for Britain, which had the good sense to embrace it.
You visited China in the spring. What appetite did you detect for regulation?
Before I went, AI policy people in the Biden administration told me, the Chinese don’t care about AI safety – when we were in office, they said, we invited them to Geneva to discuss AI safety, they sent unserious people to talk to us; and it was like pulling teeth just to get them to agree that AI should not be making the decision when it comes to nuclear weapons use.
They would argue that in America, Russia and Europe, there was a sort of muscle memory of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Cuban Missile Crisis, that technology is dangerous, we have to control it. By contrast, to the Chinese catastrophe looks like the Cultural Revolution, a political thing that goes wrong. They would say, technology underpins our rise to prosperity, don’t get in its way.
—
Activists protesting outside the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh, on 3 September, 2026. Protesters gathered to demonstrate against data centre developments in their communities, calling on the government to consider the national impact on energy and water supplies, as well as local concerns over environmental and noise pollution. Photo: Jeff J Mitchell / Getty Images.
That was the background to my China trip in March. My first meetings there were at Huawei. They didn’t want to talk about AI safety. But thereafter, I was impressed by how people in AI academia, in AI start-ups, tech journalists, people in big tech who are building AI models – they all did talk about safety, some of them quite insistently.
While I was there, the OpenClaw AI agent was all the rage. It’s an open-source agent you can install on your laptop, which is crazy because you give it access to all of the data on your computer. The people I met agreed, saying the government needed to stop everybody downloading this agent, it’s dangerous. Sure enough, by the time I left China, the government had restricted use of OpenClaw.
What I draw from this is not that China loves safety and is ready to do a deal. All I’m saying is that the door is at least open a crack. The problem in America is that the reasonable people are very much in a minority. That has to change.
In the note he published this summer on AI regulation, Hassabis said new economic models will be needed to help everyone thrive in what he called a ‘post-scarcity’ world. You’ve written several books on finance. Will those economic models emerge?
We have to be prepared for an economy that functions very differently. For instance, Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer of Anthropic, has said that 50 per cent of jobs will be disrupted by AI by 2030. But even if AI takes 5 to 10 per cent of jobs, that means those people will then be competing for existing jobs, forcing down the wages, maybe to a point where it is just not that attractive to work. So a relatively small hit to aggregate employment can have a big ripple effect on wages and the viability of doing work. It’s quite likely that this is going to happen.
How AI could change the world The World Todayiallan.drupal
Artificial intelligence is developing rapidly and threatens to transform politics, economics and societies. How should it be regulated? Are significant job losses inevitable? Should countries try to compete with the US and China? What is most misunderstood about the technology? We asked six experts to weigh in on these and other big questions.
How do you feel about the broad direction of AI?
Stuart Russell, distinguished professor of computer science, University of California Berkeley and president of the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI: We are pushing hard on capabilities with titanic investment levels, but with no plan for how to control systems far more powerful than ourselves. There is a 70 per cent chance capabilities will plateau and the AI bubble will burst, and a 30 per cent chance that we get to artificial general intelligence / artificial superintelligence, with then a very high chance of catastrophe unless governments intervene soon.
Shikoh Gitau, chief executive of Qhala, a Kenyan digital consultancy and a leading voice on AI in Africa: I’m an AI optimist, because in Africa, we have little choice but to be. The biggest fear around AI is about it taking away people’s jobs, their humanity. The other question is, what can AI do for the continent? For instance, in Kenya, we have one doctor for every 5,700 people. But there is widespread smartphone penetration and internet coverage across Africa. With the right AI tool, one doctor can provide world-class care via mobile devices to more than 5,700 people. It’s the same with children’s education.
Alejandro Mayoral Baños, co-executive director of Access Now, a civil society organization for digital rights: AI is no different from other digital technologies in one respect: its impact depends on who has the power to shape, control and benefit from it. I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic about the technology itself. The question is whether communities can develop and use AI for their own self-determined purposes, or whether control stays with a handful of companies and already powerful countries driven by profit and geopolitical interest.
Anton Leicht, fellow with the Technology and International Affairs Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: I feel as dazzled by the potential upside as daunted by the risks, while still deeply uncertain as to whether we’ll get the policy right. I hope we find out more as we continue muddling through.
Alex Krasodomski, director of the Digital Society Programme, Chatham House: Given time, this technology will create an extraordinary set of tools in science, art, education and work. My fear is that we won’t give it that time, instead accelerating into market corrections, misapplications, zero-sum competition and perhaps even catastrophic misalignment with humanity.
Yao Xu, secretary-general of the Centre for Global AI Innovative Governance and associate professor, Fudan University, China: I am cautiously optimistic about AI’s broad direction. It could greatly expand scientific discovery, productivity and access to public services, but societies will have to absorb two serious shocks: rapid disruption in labour markets and the risk that people become too dependent on machines for judgment, learning and original thought.
What is the likely effect of AI upon each of the following sectors over the next five years?
Alex Krasodomski: The gap between the intelligence explosion enabled by AI and its deployment is under-appreciated. It’s going to take more than five years’ work for abundant, cheap intelligence to be translated into the kinds of measurable gains we would expect to see in public services or science.
Yao Xu: In medicine, AI will improve diagnosis, drug discovery and clinical work, although data and liability will slow adoption. In the creative arts, it will reshape production and distribution more than creativity itself. Personalized tutoring will spread in the education sector, and in transport, autonomous vehicles will reshape logistics. In the world of security, intelligence, cyber operations and autonomous systems will rapidly change.
Shikoh Gitau: I’m bullish about AI accelerating the speed of research using locally available staff in Africa. It will also be important in understanding the human genome from an African perspective, and at a much lower cost.
Alejandro Mayoral Baños: Rating sectors on a scale of 1 to 5 creates precision that does not exist. Adoption varies in nature, pace, subsector and consequence within each sector, across national jurisdictions, and according to the specific applications in question.
Baños declined to rank these effects. Gitau declined to rank IT. Russell and Leicht declined to comment
How optimistic are you that labour markets will adapt to the effects of AI without significant disruption?
Alejandro Mayoral Baños: Personally, I am moderately confident societies will adapt, as they have to earlier waves of technological change. (Access Now does not focus on ‘future of work’ policy). My concern is the structural conditions. Wealth and technological capacity are already held by only a few companies and countries. The disruption may have less to do with AI than with the inequalities of the societies where it is deployed.
Anton Leicht: In the long run, viewed globally, I feel optimistic. Macroeconomic fundamentals will still favour plenty of work for plenty of humans. But the rearrangement of the economy will proceed much faster than in past transitions, and we have few policy answers to manage it. Disruption will be great, yet temporary.
—
Protesters with anti-AI placards outside OpenAI offices in London. Photo: Vuk Valcic / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images.
Alex Krasodomski: I expect very significant disruption, followed by unevenly distributed adaptation. Work that depends on human ingenuity, creativity or skill will not be eclipsed overnight by an intelligence explosion, and converting intelligence gains into gains in science, national security, production and so on will create a lot of new jobs. But exposure varies. Economies built on tradeable services such as those of the Philippines, Kenya or India face painful disruption, and I don’t expect the new jobs to appear where the old ones disappeared.
Stuart Russell: Not at all.
Yao Xu: I am not optimistic. Wealthier countries may soften the shock through retraining and social protection, but many governments lack the money and administrative capacity. Because labour markets and supply chains cross borders, disruption in the least-prepared countries will spread through migration, trade and political instability.
Shikoh Gitau: Labour markets have no option but to adapt. But I am certain AI is going to create entirely new jobs in the next two years. Anthropic, OpenAI and others are sending engineers to their customers’ offices to help them adapt their AI models. In other words, they are launching what amounts to consultancy businesses, which shows where the world is heading.
How likely is it that popular concerns about AI will lead to profound political consequences?
Alex Krasodomski: AI development is increasingly seen as necessary by political and economic elites and as a threat and burden by everyone else. Data centres are the physical manifestation of the AI revolution and its local costs in electricity prices, land and water usage. They are already consequential electoral issues in mid-2026.
Anton Leicht: AI will be the deciding political issue of the decade. This technology will touch the most politically sacrosanct parts of voters’ lives: their jobs, their personal safety and that of their children, their economic welfare and the integrity of their government.
Shikoh Gitau: In America and perhaps Europe there may be big political consequences, but not in Africa. There, people will want data centres because they will create jobs.
Stuart Russell: If AI succeeds, few young people have a meaningful future beyond basic subsistence. Already AI is hated. There is a wall-sized Le Monde poster near my apartment in Paris that reads: ‘Tout le monde déteste l’IA’ (‘Everyone detests AI’).
Yao Xu: As people see AI giants gaining influence over information, employment and public policy, many will feel that the existing political system is losing control. The reaction may split between two extremes: demands to stop or tightly restrict AI, and support for technology leaders who promise to bypass traditional institutions altogether.
Alejandro Mayoral Baños: Political consequences are highly likely, but they will come as much from the political, economic and social context in which AI is developing as from AI itself. We are already seeing narratives about AI justify opposing responses: stronger regulation and public oversight versus deregulation, surveillance and competitiveness framing. The political challenge is whether democratic institutions can build the expertise and accountability to govern technologies moving at this speed.
Who will dominate AI by 2035, the United States or China?
Yao Xu: Neither – and no country should. The US may retain advantages in capital, chips and cloud platforms, while China may lead in industrial use, scale and open models. But AI will reach too deeply into economies and public life for one power to control it safely. By 2035, a more distributed system would be more realistic and more desirable.
Alex Krasodomski: China, if domination here means diffusion.
Anton Leicht: The United States, due to its current decisive lead in chip design and the effects of that lead. More revenue means more computing power; more usage means more data and better models mean greater acceleration of research and development. The US will start this flywheel effect before China has enough chips to catch up.
Shikoh Gitau: China, hands down. They already are dominating. So much digital infrastructure in Africa is Chinese, not to mention ubiquitous Chinese electric vehicles, tablets, software. The use of Kimi AI, a Chinese chatbot, is widespread – it looks like Claude but is in some ways superior and cheaper. Also, many thought that the US government’s decision to compel Anthropic to withdraw its Fable and Mythos models was diplomatically and politically wrong. How can African businesses rely on American AI models if the US government can decide effectively to shut them down?
The US will regulate AI. It’s unlikely that the rest of the world will get much of a say.
Anton Leicht, fellow with the Technology and International Affairs Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Alejandro Mayoral Baños: At Access Now, we would push back on the premise. Framing AI’s future as a contest between two states reproduces an arms race narrative and treats technological leadership as zero sum. The two approaches share more than the rivalry suggests, though they diverge in one important respect: China’s open weight models give Global South countries more room to build their own systems. Nothing requires AI to be organized around two centres of power. Regulatory frameworks, public investment, open technologies and decentralized infrastructure could produce other centres across Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Stuart Russell: The United States.
Is it too late for middle powers and developing countries to build their own AI?
Anton Leicht: In theory, no; in practice, yes. Given the gaps in infrastructure, we should expect an attempt to catch up to the frontier AI models to cost in the order of trillions; too much for regional markets to fund, too ambitious for the current cast of middle-power governments to attempt.
Alejandro Mayoral Baños: No. Access to a model alone does not provide genuine autonomy. This requires control over architecture, source code, training pipelines, weights, data and the ability to modify and deploy independently. Middle powers and developing countries do not need to reproduce the scale of large companies. They can invest in open technologies, regional infrastructure, local datasets and the capacity to adapt models to their priorities. They can also set standards for accountability, transparency and human rights.
—
India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, left, with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, centre, and Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on 19 February, 2026. Photo: Ludovic Marin / AFP via Getty Images.
Yao Xu: No, but they do not all need to build a frontier model from scratch. The international community can make AI development more inclusive by providing affordable computing access, open models and practical training as public goods. The best assistance will deliver a finished product and allow local people to be able to build and improve the next one themselves.
Shikoh Gitau: Instead of competing with the Americans and Chinese, middle powers have the opportunity to build what we call ‘minimum viable intelligence’ – AI models that serve a specific need. For instance, we released a benchmark study last year that showed that the big AI models were not catering for diseases that are prevalent in Africa, such as HIV and sickle cell disease. So, we have collected data sets and built models that align with what Africa needs.
Stuart Russell: No, but stop obsessing about ‘sovereign stack’. No country has a sovereign stack, including the US and China. It makes sense to build one’s own user-facing model, but trying to start at the bottom with semiconductor plants, for instance, is madness.
Alex Krasodomski: No. The task facing middle powers is to be clear on what they mean by ‘their own AI’, to choose when to hedge, when to align with the US or China, when to cooperate with other middle powers and when to invest in sovereign, domestic capacity.
Should the world regulate AI? If so, what existing model might serve as a starting point?
Stuart Russell Yes. Use the International Atomic Energy Authority as a model and implement a licensing regime. Prove your AI system is safe before you are allowed to develop or deploy it.
Yao Xu: Yes. The European Union Artificial Intelligence Act’s risk-based approach offers a useful starting point, but rules should respond to what a system can do and how it is used, not to the nationality of its developer. High-risk uses need serious testing and clear accountability, while the United Nations can help establish common principles that countries adapt.
Alejandro Mayoral Baños: What we need is regulation grounded in the international human rights framework. That means giving people control over their data and over how the content they see on platforms is curated. Industry has spent enormous resources lobbying against exactly these things. Policymakers have to resist that pressure and put people first.
The biggest misunderstanding is that AI must lead to a new Cold War or another Star Wars-style technological contest- it need not.
Yao Xu , Secretary-General of the Centre for Global AI Innovative Governance.
Shikoh Gitau: This is a can of worms. It’s a very powerful technology so we need guardrails. My worry is who defines regulation because the world is far from agreement on what that should look like.
Alex Krasodomski: Yes. Red lines on the use of AI in certain contexts such as mass surveillance are already being deployed. Red lines on AI systems’ behaviour are now the priority to tackle the kinds of incidents seen this year in which AI systems appeared to manipulate, deceive and carry out cyberattacks.
Anton Leicht: The US will regulate AI. It’s unlikely that the rest of the world will get much of a say. Banking regulation should be our initial starting point: the appropriate focus being the enormously powerful frontier labs. Their decision-making matters more than their output. Regulation should aim at auditing and shaping this decision-making.
Is open-source AI a risk or an opportunity?
Alex Krasodomski: Open source and open weight AI is an opportunity. No middle power that is serious about fostering an AI ecosystem domestically and aligned with its own interests and values should restrict access to open weight models. Open weights also support verification and inspection, with one caveat: once they are out in the wild, they cannot be recalled, making pre-release scrutiny even more important.
Stuart Russell: Below middling levels of capability, probably a net benefit. As they become more capable, open-weight models become much more dangerous than closed-weight models. For instance, imagine if five billion people had free access to an open-weight model more powerful than Claude Mythos, which Anthropic withdrew access to – how long would it take until one of those five billion decided to use it to try to bring down the critical infrastructure of a country?
Yao Xu: Mostly an opportunity. Open-source models give smaller countries, universities and businesses a way to lower costs and tailor systems to local languages and needs. Some models can be misused, so safeguards are necessary, but closing the technology would concentrate power in a few companies and countries without removing the underlying risks.
Anton Leicht: At present, largely a risk, sadly. Most of our approaches to making AI systems safe depend on features that can be removed from open-source systems.
Shikoh Gitau: It’s an opportunity, particularly if the alternative is constantly paying for tokens. An open model allows you to download them – so you have a back-up should it be shut down, and power over your data.
Alejandro Mayoral Baños The greater systemic risk is allowing a few companies and countries to control increasingly consequential technologies. The question is not whether a system is labelled open, but what people can access, audit and independently deploy. Broader access carries real safety risks. So does concentration. Social media has shown what happens when a handful of actors control infrastructure and the rules governing it.
How likely is it that AI will be the primary cause of a major incident that threatens global security in the next five years?
Alejandro Mayoral Baños: I would be cautious about naming AI as the primary cause of such an incident. The pressing concern is that AI accelerates existing tensions. They come from inequality, concentration of power, armed conflict, authoritarianism, surveillance, discrimination and weak governance. If AI is seen as the primary threat, policy responses narrow to controlling the technology and ignore the structural conditions that enable harmful deployment.
Anton Leicht: Our ability to make AI systems powerful is far outpacing our ability to make them safe and reliable and there are no clear policy interventions that will change that fact. Small things keep going wrong right now, big risks keep drawing closer and a major cybersecurity incident caused by misused or uncontrolled AI agents by the end of the decade seems highly likely.
Shikoh Gitau: It will happen, but I don’t think AI will go wild and carry something out autonomously. It will be a human manipulating a catastrophic outcome.
Yao Xu: AI is more likely to intensify a crisis than to cause one by itself. It may make a cyberattack, military miscalculation or disinformation campaign more damaging, but the original failure will usually lie in political decisions and weak safeguards.
Alex Krasodomski: AI is already being deployed into high-stake areas including war zones, critical infrastructure and financial systems, while the gap between the capabilities of these tools and our ability to control them is growing. Unfortunately, it may take precisely such an incident to accelerate governance efforts.
Russell declined to comment
Do the anticipated gains of AI outweigh the environmental costs?
Yao Xu: On balance, yes, if data-centre growth is planned as part of the energy system. China’s Eastern Data, Western Computing initiative assesses projects against grid capacity, water use and regional needs, while companies compete to offer more efficient plans. This mix of public planning and market competition helps explain why data centres have caused less public anxiety in China than in the United States.
Anton Leicht: Yes. The environmental costs of AI might be substantial by the standards of a normal technology, but the extraordinary impact that AI will likely have on productivity and innovation – including on environmental issues – will by far outweigh the costs. Right now, the best way to emit a ton of CO2 is powering a frontier AI data centre.
Shikoh Gitau: We are smart enough to build environmentally sustainable infrastructure. For instance, Nvidia’s chips are becoming smaller and less power hungry.
Stuart Russell: Yes.
Alejandro Mayoral Baños: Expanding AI infrastructure drives demand for energy, water, critical minerals and data centres, intensifying extractive pressures felt most acutely by communities already facing environmental and economic inequality (Access Now does not work on environmental so I am cautious in my assessment in this area). The question is not what AI produces, but what it takes to build and run it, where those resources originate and who bears the consequences.
My plan to cut the number of long-term refugees by halfThe World Todayiallan.drupal
Host countries that allow those in ‘protracted displacement’ to work boost their economies and improve refugees’ ability to resettle or return home, writes Barham Salih, the new UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
At the end of 2025, more than 40 million people were refugees - close to an all-time high. Almost seven in ten of them live in ‘protracted displacement’ meaning that they have been in exile for five years or more. Many depend on humanitarian assistance to survive.
Behind the statistics are young people who cannot return home, study or work, parents who cannot plan their children’s future and families facing uncertainty. Each year, an estimated 305,000 children are born as refugees. Many will grow up, marry and have their own children without ever going back home.
As we mark the 75th anniversary of the Refugee Convention - the first international treaty to outline the legal protection of refugees - we must reflect on how to prevent this staggering number of people from being stuck in limbo for generations to come.
I was able to return to Iraq and play a part in its future. Too few of today’s refugees are given the same chance.
Being a refugee was never meant to be a permanent status. Most want to go home but many are unable to do so safely while peace is elusive. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross there are some 130 active conflicts around the world. Leaving the victims of war in exile with no prospect of a better life is a humanitarian and developmental failure.
know something about what opportunity can do. As a young Kurd in Iraq in the late 1970s, my identity was treated as a threat. I was denied freedom and a positive future felt out of reach. But I was fortunate. I was offered a path to safety, education and a new beginning in the UK, transforming my life. Crucially, I was able to return to my country and play a part in its future. Too few of today’s refugees are given the same chance.
Our new goal: ‘50 by 35’
Since becoming head of the UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, earlier this year, I have visited some of the world’s most acute displacement crises, from Sudan to the Middle East and Afghanistan. I have met with families reliant on humanitarian aid, grateful for it, but painfully aware that they are merely surviving - and a long way from thriving.
These people don’t want to be disenfranchised aid recipients, they want opportunities to support themselves and make their own choices. That is why UNHCR is proposing a clear, measurable goal: to halve by 2035 the number of refugees trapped in protracted displacement and dependent on humanitarian relief. We are calling this goal ‘50 by 35’.
Achieving it will require a broader coalition. UNHCR’s role is to help bring it together. Over the next decade, we must build more lasting solutions for refugees, including their voluntary return in safety and dignity. At the same time, we must reduce aid dependency by giving refugees opportunities to work, become self-reliant and contribute to the communities hosting them.
The ‘50 by 35’ vision does not mean cutting aid. Humanitarian assistance, often the difference between life and death and already pared to the bone, remains indispensable. This agenda is about reducing the need for aid. Too many refugee situations begin as emergencies and calcify into permacrises. Systems built as short-term responses are now being asked to keep millions afloat for decades. If aid is all we offer, we are not solving displacement.
Systems built as short-term responses are now being asked to keep millions afloat for decades. If aid is all we offer, we are not solving displacement.
The most powerful solution remains peace: the ending of conflicts that create refugees in the first place. Syria makes the point starkly. Since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorial regime in late 2024, more than 1.6 million Syrian refugees have returned home. But crossing a border is only the beginning. Return only becomes sustainable when people can safely rebuild their lives with access to the infrastructure and basic services they need.
For others, an end to displacement may come through integration in the country in which they have found refuge and, in some cases, citizenship. Resettlement can provide a vital lifeline for those who cannot safely remain where they are, while family reunification, scholarships and labour mobility can open ways to a better future.
Yet the gap between the number of people who need these opportunities and the places available keeps widening. We must keep making the case for countries to offer more.
Inclusion is key
For those who cannot yet return home, the path out of dependency is inclusion. This means access to national education and healthcare systems, financial services and labour markets in their country of asylum. The evidence is compelling: numerous studies show that when refugees participate in economic life, incomes rise and dependency falls, while host economies gain workers, entrepreneurs, consumers and taxpayers. And when return becomes possible, refugees can take home skills needed to rebuild their countries.
Several countries are proving this isn’t wishful thinking. In Kenya, the government’s ‘Shirika Plan’, launched last year, has helped convert refugee camps into integrated settlements where refugees and host communities share public services, land and markets - replacing indefinite encampment with communities that function for everyone.
—
Pupils in a Turkish primary school in Sanliurfa, near the Syrian border. Turkey has admitted hundreds of thousands of Syrian children into its school system. Photo: Yasin Akgul/ Getty Images.
Turkey, host to one of the world’s largest refugee populations, has accepted hundreds of thousands of Syrian children into its national school system, helping prevent the creation of a lost generation while building skills refugees will need whether they stay or eventually go home.
Meanwhile in Latin America, governments across the region have created legal pathways for millions of displaced Venezuelans to gain regular status, work, healthcare and education.
These experiences show that investing in refugee self-reliance brings returns for their own communities by generating tax revenue, stability and greater social cohesion. Indeed, the International Monetary Fund estimates that Venezuelan incomers could increase GDP in major Latin American host countries by up to 4.4 per cent by 2030.
This pattern holds everywhere. The 2026 Welfare Report, published by UNHCR and the World Bank, estimates that allowing refugees to be as economically active as their hosts could reduce the annual assistance required to meet their subsistence needs by as much as $16 billion globally.
Changes in funding
Host governments understand how refugee protection connects to national development, but many of these countries already face poverty, debt and climate shocks of their own.
They cannot shoulder this responsibility alone. Donors, development banks, foundations and private investors must engage from the earliest stages of a crisis, helping host countries expand national services and economic opportunities before displacement becomes protracted.
Host governments understand how refugee protection connects to national development, but they cannot shoulder this responsibility alone.
There are encouraging signs that this shift is underway. The World Bank, for example, has established dedicated financing that helps governments include refugees in national systems while boosting overall economic growth. With more grants and similar financial support, hosting countries can dramatically improve life for both refugees and host communities. If we are serious about reducing dependency and leaving no one behind, refugee inclusion must be embedded within the development agenda rather than treated as a parallel track.
What will happen if Trump rejects the midterm results?The World Todayiallan.drupal
The administration’s efforts to undermine confidence in the US electoral system could spark a political crisis in November – with consequences for the 2028 presidential race and beyond, writes Bruce Stokes.
The United States’ midterm elections are less than two months away and signs are already emerging that the Republican party could suffer significant losses. All 435 members of the House of Representatives and 35 Senators are up for election on 3 November, with current polling suggesting that President Donald Trump could lose his Republican majority in at least one chamber of Congress.
This would not be an unusual outcome for an election that often punishes the sitting party. Since the Second World War, the party controlling Congress has lost Congressional seats in all but two midterms, and at least one chamber of Congress has flipped in the past five elections.
But the stakes of these midterms are made higher by Trump’s repeated signalling that he might not accept the outcome if defeated. Equally troubling are his administration’s apparent efforts over recent months to disenfranchise voters in areas of traditional Democratic strength.
All of this raises the prospect of a political crisis erupting in November, which the country’s checks and balances are increasingly ill-equipped to manage. With another presidential election only two years away, can US democracy respond?
Threat of a Democrat win
Republicans currently hold a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Opinion polling of voter intentions shows that Democrats have a single-digit advantage nationwide, a margin that historically has meant winning a majority of seats on election day.
The prospect of a third impeachment could stymie the Republicans’ remaining legislative agenda.
This scenario is threatening to Trump. Even if the Democrats win only one chamber of Congress, the president and members of his administration face the prospect of two years of Congressional investigations. These might include corporate donors and alleged ‘pay-to-play’ arrangements, and investments by foreign sovereign wealth funds in Trump family-linked businesses.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the president has legal immunity for almost all actions, but Trump could still face a legacy-tarnishing third impeachment vote in the House. This process – and other Congressional hearings – could stymie what might remain of the Republican legislative agenda and provide a powerful incentive for Trump and those around him to undermine the outcome of the election.
In many ways, this subversion has already begun. When Trump narrowly lost the presidential election to Joe Biden in 2020, he claimed that the result was rigged and stolen. Since then, he has repeatedly sown seeds of doubt about the integrity of the US electoral system and the unfairness of the upcoming 2026 Congressional election.
In a televised address to the nation in July, he reiterated claims about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election and accused China of interfering in America’s ‘dangerously exposed’ electoral system. ‘No country can be great without fair and honest elections,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, the system we have falls catastrophically short of that standard.’
Many Democrats see this as an attempt to undermine voter confidence in the run-up to the midterms. Current polling shows that only 58 per cent of Democrats expect a free and fair election in November, down from 81 per cent four years ago. Interestingly, the proportion of Republicans who believe the same has increased from 46 per cent to 55 per cent.
The fact that Trump has not ruled out running for president in 2028 – saying recently ‘I won [the presidency] three times. Now, I’m going to do it again,’ raises other constitutional questions and destabilizes the status quo ante further.
Voter suppression
Trump is also trying to undermine the election in more overt ways; primarily by making it harder for Americans to vote. Since returning to office, he has been pressing Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, insist on photo ID to cast a ballot and scale back postal voting. The legislation has passed the House, first in 2025 and then again in 2026, but the Senate has not acted.
Most immediately, this would affect the estimated 9 per cent of voting age Americans – some 22 million people – who cannot readily access proof of citizenship. Yet in demanding enactment of this legislation before the election, Trump is fuelling the false assertion that thousands of undocumented people vote.
Trump is fuelling the false assertion that thousands of undocumented people vote.
The president’s efforts to restrict postal voting have ramped up in recent months – despite having recently voted remotely in Florida’s primary elections himself. In March, he issued an executive order instructing the US postal service to only deliver ballots to citizens on a federal list of eligible voters.
This order is now being challenged in court. If the court rules in the administration’s favour, more Democrats than Republicans may be denied their preferred means of voting (in 2022, 36 per cent of votes cast were postal, 60 per cent of which were Democrats, 38 per cent Republicans).
Added to this are the ongoing efforts by the Republican party – and to a lesser extent the Democrats – to favourably redraw congressional maps to help gain seats. The cumulative effect of these redistricting campaigns could distort the outcome of November’s elections further.
Immediate aftermath
This interference may continue after election day. In the first instance, were the administration to allege fraud, compliant local officials could try to seize ballots or voting machines, as they attempted in 2020. Disputing the integrity of the voting process could result in a situation where the outcome is not declared for weeks, leading to lengthy recounts and appeals.
All of which would significantly undermine the ability of government to function, particularly if these delays drag into January, when the new Congress is supposed to take office. In the American democratic system, the responsibility to respond to such an overreach would fall on Congress and the courts, which are expected to counterbalance the executive branch.
But in Trump’s second term the Republican-controlled House and Senate have rarely challenged his actions. The fact that Congress will not be in session during much of the autumn further reduces its role in restraining any attempt at electoral subversion.
This leaves the Justice Department with the most significant remaining oversight, yet its independence has come into question in recent years. When asked last month about the department’s commitment to act independently from the White House, Trump’s new Attorney General, Todd Blanche, said: ‘I’m not going to pledge that.’ His stance breaks with the post-Watergate practice of a firewall between the Justice Department and the White House intended to ensure there is no political influence over criminal investigations.
Moreover, in the face of adverse court rulings the Trump administration has engaged in ‘legalistic noncompliance’ to evade judicial orders, including the court’s challenge to Trump’s dismantling of the USAID.
The tools that the Democrats have to respond to electoral interference are limited. If they regain control of at least one house of Congress in November, they will be able to investigate voter suppression by the administration. But unless Democrats win both the House and the Senate, they will be unlikely to pass legislation to curb such activities, and if they do Trump could veto it. The Democrats would lack the two-thirds majority in both houses necessary to override him.
Biofuels could be a quick energy solution – but are they worth the climate risks?The World Todayiallan.drupal
Interview: Patrick Schröder tells Sara Seth how the growth in biofuel production following the Gulf energy crisis is increasing pressure on agricultural land and exacerbating global food insecurity.
You wrote a forthcoming paper with Bhargabi Bharadwaj and Richard King called ‘The problem with biofuels as a response to the Gulf energy supply shock’. What are biofuels?
Biofuels are produced from organic materials, for example ethanol made from sugar cane and biodiesel from corn. Before the global energy crisis triggered by the Strait of Hormuz blockage, biofuel production was projected to grow by only 0.9 per cent a year. We calculate there will now potentially be an 11 per cent increase in biofuel production each year up until 2030. This is because countries are looking at strategies to reduce the effect of oil price volatility and to ensure there’s sufficient domestic fuel supply. Rolling out electric vehicles or solar and wind power takes time and often requires foreign technology. Biofuels are a quicker solution that can be implemented domestically, and the fuel is compatible with existing systems.
What are the risks of greater biofuel production?
The projected increase in production would require an extra 36 million hectares of agricultural land by 2030 – an area similar to the size of Germany. The growth of biofuels has been relatively slow until now, partly because they are not as sustainable as they may sound. If you look at the full life cycle of emissions, including those from converting land for crop production, often from forest, the biofuel carbon footprint is sometimes higher than that of conventional fuel.
Biofuel production also adds to increasing food insecurity. India is already using surplus rice to make biofuel, which is problematic given the risk of global food shortages. This year, the super El Niño weather event causing worldwide droughts and the fertilizer shortages due to the Hormuz crisis is creating a perfect storm for low crop yield.
What does your paper recommend?
We would like policymakers to prioritize the use of land for food production rather than biofuels. We also recommend using waste products from harvests before relying on crops grown solely to turn into biofuels.
Will the next secretary-general return UN to the ‘business of peace’?The World Todayiallan.drupal
Eight candidates are vying to succeed António Guterres, but if the next United Nations’ chief can’t reassert its role in major conflicts, the organization risks becoming a ‘cumbersome appendage’, diplomats tell Stéphanie Fillion.
For only the tenth time in its 81-year history, the United Nations will choose its next leader before the end of the year. Whoever is appointed will face a slew of challenges in reforming the ailing and increasingly cash-strapped organization.
Chief among them is mounting pressure for the UN to take a more active role in resolving protracted wars in the Middle East, Sudan and Ukraine. As armed conflict between states surges to the highest level since the Second World War, can the next secretary-general return the UN to its primary peacemaking role?
Eight candidates are vying to take up that position, replacing António Guterres, whose 10-year term ends on 31 December. His successor will be appointed by the 193-member General Assembly on the Security Council’s recommendation, while the five permanent members (P5) – France, Britain, China, Russia and the United States – hold a veto on the final decision.
Sidelined from peace talks
For the hopefuls, this entails an uneasy balancing act; projecting enough ambition to win broad support while being cautious enough not to antagonize the states that can block them. Since the UN’s founding in 1945, the maintenance of international peace and security has been the organization’s raison d’être. Yet shifting geopolitical competition and growing distrust in multilateralism over the past decade have seen the UN sidelined from key peace negotiations, including talks to end the US war on Iran.
The UN has never resolved questions of peace when a major power’s interests are at stake.
Andrés Montalvo Sosa, Ecuador’s ambassador to the UN.
‘The next secretary-general will have no choice but to urgently put the UN back in the business of peace,’ said Robert A Wood, America’s former alternate representative at the UN. ‘Otherwise, the organization’s credibility and relevance will be further diminished and lead to the creation of other diplomatic mechanisms, like the [US-led] Board of Peace, that nations will turn to for solutions to conflicts.’
Others are less optimistic. ‘Bringing the United Nations back to the peace business is utopian,’ said Andrés Montalvo Sosa, Ecuador’s ambassador to the UN. ‘The UN has never resolved questions of peace when a major power’s interests are at stake.’
Over the course of his term, the departing UN chief was criticized for not doing enough to challenge veto-wielding states. According to some, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 exposed the limits of Guterres’s influence, despite his success in brokering the Black Sea Grain Initiative which enabled Ukraine to continue exporting its grain.
Restrained approach
‘Guterres faced a lot of criticism for failing to go to Moscow before the war,’ said Richard Gowan of the International Crisis Group. ‘He did seem very cautious about challenging Putin.’
There’s a feeling that the veto powers want a leader who is more secretary than general.
Richard Gowan, International Crisis Group.
Guterres’s restrained approach has disappointed many and fuelled debate about how the future secretary-general can bring the organization back to the centre of the world’s most intractable peace negotiations. Part of that means confronting the organization’s deeper structural problems, above all the gridlock of the Security Council where any of the five permanent members can veto action, including in Ukraine, where the aggressor Russia holds a veto over the council’s response to its own war.
‘There’s generally a feeling that the veto powers want a leader who isn’t too ambitious – to use a well-worn phrase, more secretary than general,’ said Gowan. Yet the candidates are also trying to appeal to the wider membership, he added, many of whom have bolder hopes for Security Council reform and advancing mediation and peacemaking than the P5.
AI threatens to transform the world. We asked six experts to weigh in on the big questions of regulation, the ‘AI race’, safety and much more. Also, China’s ‘double pivot’ towards global pre-eminence and what might happen if Trump rejects the results of the US midterm elections.
Welcome to the autumn issue of The World Today.
In parallel with every other challenge facing it, the world is reckoning with another – a technology that, some say, will have a greater effect than the Industrial Revolution and in a matter of years, not decades: artificial intelligence. Opening our cover package, six experts across the field wrestle with the big questions of regulation, politics and economics that AI poses.
In an interview with me, Sebastian Mallaby says the United States and China urgently need to put aside the AI race to stop bad actors exploiting the technology. Can Britain’s armed forces keep sovereign control of its AI tools? Yes, Phil Tinline writes, but they will need to tread carefully.
Elsewhere, The World Tomorrow, our new strand on global order, continues with Steve Tsang, who argues that the West has to better understand ‘Xi Thought’ if it wishes to counter the Chinese leader’s global strategy.
The turmoil of the Middle East continues. In the Persian Gulf, writes Mohsen Milani, the failure of the US war on Iran will leave Tehran’s leadership stronger, compel the Arab monarchies to rethink their security and offer China an opening. Yaakov Katz looks forward to Israel’s forthcoming general election and regrets the absence of a key issue: the country’s deepening global isolation.
South Africa’s November elections may be local, but Kiri Rupiah says they will offer a chance to assess whether a wave of anti-migrant protests have political consequences. Finally, Nadia Murad, the Yazidi Nobel Peace laureate, reflects on the pressures that made her consider giving up her global campaign to support the victims of conflict-related sexual violence.
We hope you enjoy these and other articles in the autumn issue.
Is the Middle East entering a new era of regional security with the Mecca Pact?
21
September 2026 — 17:00 TO 18:15 BST
Anonymous (not verified)
Online
After the signing of a new defence pact by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, experts assess how the Middle East is responding to volatility and a changing regional order.
After the signing of a new defence pact by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, experts assess how the Middle East is responding to volatility and a changing regional order.
The Mecca Pact between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signals a significant shift in regional security cooperation. Its collective defence provisions have prompted debate about the future of alliances in the Middle East and the role of regional powers in shaping security. These developments raise wider questions about regional balance, deterrence and external influence.
The Mecca Pact between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signals a significant shift in regional security cooperation. Its collective defence provisions have prompted debate about the future of alliances in the Middle East and the role of regional powers in shaping security. These developments raise wider questions about regional balance, deterrence and external influence.
This event discusses:
What does the Mecca Pact reveal about changing security dynamics in the Middle East?
Is the region entering a new era of alliances and security cooperation?
What does the agreement mean for organizations such as the GCC?
How could the pact affect the strategic calculations of Iran and Israel?
What are the implications for regional security and stability?
What does the pact suggest about the future role of the US and other external actors?
The school’s outdoor classrooms include gardens, food forests, natural play areas and spaces where children help care for animals. Students may also build with natural materials, participate in community service, complete STEAM activities, create art and stories, and work with others to solve problems.
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/el4mxfhdyuoh1.jpeg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/kt0tg4bousoh1.jpeg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/vv0gmiekvpoh1.jpeg){kind=link}
