The “Tonight Show” host took aim at the fair, which opened to the public on Thursday on the National Mall as part of America’s 250th anniversary celebrations, rattling off a list of fictional attractions inspired by Trump.

“The fair has everything,” Fallon said, according to Mediaite. “There’s a giant Ferris wheel, there’s a carousel. They even have a Trump approval rating roller coaster, which has the biggest drop in history.”

He kept going with a swipe at the president’s physician, joking that organizers had also “hired Trump’s doctor to guess what you want your weight to be. ‘150?’ ‘Sure.’”

Fallon told the audience that fairgoers could visit “a petting zoo with some of the animals Trump named during his last cognitive test.” Imitating the president, he deadpanned: “Horse, duck, stripey horse.”

The joke landed against a backdrop of Trump’s own repeated boasting about his performance on cognitive screenings, including the MoCA dementia assessment.

During a May 1 rally at The Villages, solidly GOP-leaning retirement enclave in central Florida, Trump abandoned his One Big Beautiful Bill sales pitch to revisit the tests.

“I don’t think Obama could pass it. Biden? Give me a break,” he told the crowd, describing how he was asked to name animals. “You know, the first question’s very easy. It’s a lion, a giraffe, a bear, and a shark. They say, ‘Which one is the bear?’ And everybody says ohhh– 30 questions. Very standard, very standard test, but very tough around those last 10 questions.”

Trump also told the audience that one doctor had described him as “a mad genius.”

The president’s mental fitness has drawn formal scrutiny on Capitol Hill.

On April 14, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) introduced legislation to create a 17-member commission empowered to assess whether a sitting president is fit to discharge the duties of the office under the 25th Amendment. The bill was offered with 50 Democratic co-sponsors but faces no path to a vote in the Republican-controlled House.

The post Trump’s cognitive health and tiny fair crowds take center stage in brutal Jimmy Fallon bit appeared first on Raw Story.

She could see they were getting paid handsomely to take in hundreds of shelter dogs annually, based on public records requests she filed. But she couldn’t understand where all these dogs were then going, given how tough it can be to find foster homes for rescue dogs in this rural area of Humboldt County, she said.

But after moving in next door to the Fortuna rescue, she claimed she saw large objects being dumped into a deep hole on the property, and had a sinking feeling she had figured it out. On the night of April 26, Raymond and a fellow animal advocate Jenna Moore decided to take matters into their own hands, trespassing onto her neighbor’s property in pursuit of answers, she said.

“We waited until dark and had our headlamps and shovels and gloves and phones and headed out to the hole and jumped in and started digging,” she said.

An investigation into allegations of fraud and animal abuse at the rescue are ongoing, according to authorities. No charges have been filed against its owner, Shannon Miranda, who did not respond to The Times’ request for comment on Thursday. In an earlier statement on his organization’s website, he urged that there not be a rush to judgment.

As Raymond and Moore started to dig, they systematically uncovered blood-soaked furry bodies, several of which had bullet holes in their head, Raymond said.

“Each time we uncovered a dog, we uncovered part of another dog, and so we just kept following the dog trail,” she said. “We knew by the time we were to our fifth or sixth dog that we weren’t leaving them there in this mass grave.”

In total, they took eight dog carcasses home that night and later handed them over to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, which served a search warrant at Miranda’s Rescue on May 1. A copy of the search warrant affidavit obtained by local news outlet Lost Coast Outpost corroborates the details of Raymond’s account.

Since then, the Sheriff’s Office has opened a sprawling investigation into allegations of felony animal abuse, animal cruelty, fraud, and conspiracy associated with the animal sanctuary.

Detectives learned that between January 2025 and May 2026, Miranda’s Rescue accepted more than 900 rescue animals from animal shelters and private citizens, but so far investigators have only been able to track down adoption records for a limited number of them, Sheriff William Honsal said at a Tuesday afternoon news conference.

For each animal Miranda’s Rescue took in, the organization charged a fee of $500 to several thousand dollars, he said.

Currently, around 730 animals remain unaccounted for, Honsal said Tuesday.

In a June 18 statementon the organization’s website, Miranda described the sanctuary as a “no-kill rescue” that does not euthanize animals to make space, but does euthanize in extreme circumstances such as a terminal illness or if an animal attacks staff.

He asked that people consider all the facts before reaching conclusions. “Allegations made without a full understanding of the circumstances can harm not only my reputation but also the future of an organization that has served this community for decades,” he stated.

On Tuesday, the Sheriff’s Office began using ground-penetrating radar to search the soil at Miranda’s Rescue in Fortuna for carcasses.

They brought a mobile refrigerator unit on scene to store the bodies as they were pulled from the earth.

“We are thinking worst-case scenario,” Honsal said, “and we are here to book and uncover whatever evidence we could possibly find.”

The Sheriff’s Office finalized its search Thursday afternoon, but has not yet disclosed the total number of animals found.

Raymond said she watched the search and counted at least 45 animal carcasses unearthed.

“It is just heartbreaking to see these totally innocent creatures, in various states of decomposition, be taken out and put on a tarp and put in the black plastic garbage bag for evidence,” she said.

For Raymond, who said she had been asking the Sheriff’s Office to investigate the facility for years, this week’s search brought mixed emotions. She was elated that authorities are taking allegations against the rescue seriously but overwhelmed by the “horrible darkness” of the carcasses discovered.

When asked at Tuesday’s news conference whether the office dropped the ball in investigating prior complaints, Sheriff Honsal said, “We are looking into those previous cases to see what was investigated, how it was investigated, to see if we did not do our job enough.”

In addition to excavating the property, investigators have seized financial records, adoption records and business records.

Currently, around 50 animals are still living at the sanctuary, which does not require a license to operate. As no criminal charges have been filed, Miranda is allowed to continue operating his business at this time, Honsal said.

Both Honsal and Raymond said they hoped the investigation would shine a light on the broader problem of animal overpopulation in California.

“The state has ignored this issue for many, many years,” said Honsal. “I hope that this case opens the eyes of many people and we are able to have spay-and-neuter clinics go and help.”

Raymond has founded two spay-and-neuter clinics in Humboldt County that treat from 3,500 to 5,000 dogs and cats every year, collectively preventing tens of thousands of animal births, she said.

She is also an advocate for making spaying and neutering, which typically costs several hundred dollars, more affordable. And although she wants more oversight of rescues, she said the most important thing is to eliminate unwanted animal births.

“We have been doing animal shelters in California for over 150 years and we have not solved the problem,” she said, “because we’ve never addressed the cause.”

The post ‘Mass grave’ investigated at NorCal rescue; officials say hundreds of animals are unaccounted for appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

First, a caveat: The left is not marching uniformly toward socialism. Many primaries outside New York City were won by moderate Democrats. In a swing district just outside the city, combat veteran Cait Conley won handily. But a certain kind of liberalism is losing energy, confidence and connection to the people it claims to represent.

In Adrian Wooldridge’s new book “The Revolutionary Center,” a brilliant intellectual history of liberalism from the Enlightenment to the present, Wooldridge reminds us that liberalism was once the most radical force in politics. It attacked inherited privilege, monopoly power, censorship, aristocracy, clerical authority and closed guilds. It was not the ideology of the establishment. It was the battering ram against the establishment.

Today, liberalism has become identified with power — great universities, foundations, media organizations, corporations and bureaucracies. Wooldridge argues that this has produced two deep failures.

The first is passivity. Modern liberalism, certainly since the 1990s, has celebrated free markets and free people. In practice, that has meant deregulating both economic life and personal life, then treating the consequences as the price of freedom. In markets, this has allowed corporate consolidation and inequality to run wild. In personal life, liberals have become reluctant to say that certain behaviors are socially destructive.

The result is liberal fatalism. People camp out on city streets, addicted and mentally ill, and liberals often describe this as a housing problem. Millions suffer from obesity-related illnesses, and liberals are more comfortable blaming “food deserts” than taking on the companies that hook their customers on processed food. Social media companies do the same with their consumers’ attention.

Wooldridge calls for a revival of liberal paternalism. The phrase grates on modern ears. But a liberal society should celebrate individual rights — and also demand individual responsibility. It should understand that freedom can be destroyed not only by the state but also by addiction, monopoly, crime, ignorance and dependence.

This is not an argument for socialism. It is an argument for truer liberalism. Liberals should love markets not because they allow the strong to dominate or inequality to grow, but because genuine competition allows the little guy to challenge the strong. A healthy market is not one in which four companies quietly divide up an industry and use lawyers, lobbyists and algorithms to keep challengers out. It is one in which new entrants can rise, consumers can choose, workers can move and incumbents can fail.

The second failure Wooldridge identifies is more uncomfortable because it concerns liberals’ own status. Liberalism believes in meritocracy. Historically, this was one of its noblest causes. It argued that people should rise by talent and effort, not birth, race, caste or class. But over time, the meritocratic elite has hardened into its own aristocracy.

Elite liberals support social justice, but do little to dismantle legacy admissions. They want the poor to move up the ladder, but not if that requires building more housing in the leafy neighborhoods where they live. They praise individual merit, but have created a vast diversity bureaucracy that too often judges people by group identity rather than individual character.

Nowhere is this clearer than in K-12 education. A genuinely liberal politics would start with the child. It would attack any institution — union, bureaucracy, school board, university department — that feeds its own power while failing America’s children.

This is where democratic socialists and right-wing populists gain their power. They understand that people want someone to fight for them. They may offer bad answers — the left with class warfare, protectionism and state control, and the right with protectionism, ethnic resentment and racial nostalgia. But they sound like outsiders willing to take on entrenched privilege and offer protection in a world where freedom seems to mean chaos.

The way out of liberalism’s crisis is not to abandon liberalism. It is to recover its radical spirit. Liberals should once again be the people who hate monopoly, inherited advantage, closed systems and rigged games. They should champion real competition, real meritocracy and real equality of opportunity. They should take on corporate power when it crushes markets, government power when it protects insiders and cultural power when it creates bureaucracies that substitute group identity for individual dignity.

As Wooldridge argues, the center cannot be merely a midpoint between left and right. It has to be revolutionary in its own way. Liberalism’s great promise was never that people would be left alone to decay in freedom. It was that people would be given the tools, rules and responsibilities necessary to flourish.

Liberalism began as a revolt against encrusted power. It will survive only if it becomes one again.

The post To beat socialists and populists, liberalism must get radical appeared first on Washington Post.

Shop Walmart’s Summer Sale Here

If you can’t find anything you like, be sure to browse our roundup of the Absolute Best Prime Day Deals, or dip into our Amazon Prime Day live blog for real-time updates.

Updated June 25 at 7:30 am ET: I’ve added deals from Yamaha, Synology, Lenovo, and Lasko. I’ve also removed discontinued deals, and updated prices throughout.

Best Tech Deals

Samsung S90F QD-OLED TV for $1,198 ($200 off)

The best TV for gaming is incredibly accurate, offers near-infinite contrast, and boasts vibrant yet refined colors. Samsung’s gaming hub is the best around whether you’re playing on a console or cloud gaming, and features an intuitive gaming bar, snappy input response, and a full suite of HDMI 2.1 ports.

TCL QM6K QLED TV (65-inch) for $528 ($70 off)

Affordable at its regular price, the TCL QM6K is a steal with this discount. The 65-inch model employs QLED display tech for bright colors and good contrast, even from a side viewing angle. Gamers will appreciate the 144 Hz refresh rate for low-latency performance, all powered by the intuitive Google TV operating system.

Yamaha SR-C30A Soundbar for $216 ($84 off)

This compact bar-and-subwoofer set is the best soundbar for people who you love deep, cinematic bass but don’t have tons of room right by the TV. The wireless subwoofer can be placed anywhere you have convenient power (you can even lay it flat to slide under furniture). There’s also Bluetooth support to stream music from your phone or tablet.

JBL Flip 7 Bluetooth Speaker for $95 ($55 off)

Our favorite portable Bluetooth speaker, JBL’s Flip strikes the perfect balance between mobility and sound quality. The Flip 7 also has some extra goodies like water resistance, an easy-release strap, and a two-hour battery boost (or four with reduced bass).

Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 Wireless Earbuds for $180 ($69 off)

With the same H2 chip that powers the AirPods Pro 2, the PowerBeats Pro 2 impressed our reviewer, who praised the “crazy comfy” fit and dynamic sound. There’s also ANC and transparency modes for both road safety and gym sanity, wireless charging, IP57 durability, full-on bass-forward audio quality, and built-in heart rate monitoring.

Apple AirPods Max 2 Headphones for $399 ($150 off)

With the same gorgeous, comfortable, iconic design as its predecessor, Apple’s AirPods Max 2 bring improved noise canceling and Bluetooth connectivity. Apple also upgraded software features, like gesture controls and Adaptive Audio. They’re a bit pricey at the RRP, but this discount is decent for Apple fans.

Apple Watch Series 11 Smartwatch for $279 ($120 off)

The Apple Watch Series 11 is by far the best smartwatch for iPhone owners. The headline improvement is 24-hour battery life, which enables proper sleep tracking. You also get clinically validated watchOS health updates, including FDA-cleared hypertension notifications, Apple’s proprietary Sleep Score, and blood oxygen sensing.

Apple 11-inch iPad (2025) for $299 ($50 off)

The base iPad ticks all the boxes you need in a tablet. This is the latest model, updated in 2025 to an A16 chip and 6 GB of RAM. It’s perfect for casual gaming, reading books, watching movies in bed, and sharing with your kids. Amazon has the same sale for Prime members right now, but this is as good a deal as we typically see on iPads.

Apple AirTag Tracker for $24 ($5 off)

These teeny tiny trackers might be the best way to keep tabs on your keys or luggage if you use an iPhone. They’re some of the best trackers around. Roughly the size of a quarter, they use Bluetooth and Apple’s special U1 location-finding chip to pinpoint locations in the Find My app.

Oura Ring 4 for $244 ($105 off)

Our top pick among the best smart rings, the Oura Ring 4 has never been cheaper than this. Oura did just release a slimmer version, but the Ring 4 is currently close to half off and it’s still an excellent option for tracking health, fitness, and sleep.

Google Fitbit Charge 6 Fitness Tracker for $76 ($84 off)

The Charge 6 is old, but it’s still our favorite Fitbit and may remain so until the Fitbit name is submerged by Google. The bright AMOLED touchscreen is easy to read and it covers all the basics, monitoring your heart rate, blood oxygen, and skin temperature. It also has ECG and electrodermal activity scans to gauge irregular heart rhythms and stress levels.

GameSir G7 SE Wired Xbox or PC Game Controller for $36 ($24 off)

The GameSir G7 SE is an excellent wired controller with sensitive and drift-resistant hall effect sticks, customizable rear buttons, and swappable faceplates. If you don’t mind plugging in, it makes an excellent choice for Xbox or PC gamers.

Nex Playground Game Console for $239 ($60 off)

Worried about your kids becoming couch potatoes? This fun game console will get them up and jumping around your living room. I liked the Nex Playground when I first tried it, and the company has polished and added more games since then.

EcoFlow River 2 Pro Portable Power Station for $289 ($240 off)

This is one of the best portable power stations for camping or road trips because it’s a manageable size. EcoFlow’s River 2 Pro has a LiFeP04 battery inside, good for 768 watt-hours. It has all the ports you need to charge your phones and small gadgets, and the X-Boost surge enables it to power small appliances.

Synology DiskStation DS225+ NAS Storage Server for $275 ($65 off)

This tops my best NAS devices guide because it’s very fast, Synology offers the most polished and comprehensive software lineup, and it has a generous array of ports. It’s also compact and relatively quiet, and the two bays are screwless.

Lenovo LOQ 15 Laptop for $1,079 ($171 off)

The Lenovo LOQ 15 really stands out as impressive for the price. It is thick and fairly plain-looking, but leapfrogs many budget gaming laptops that only feature an entry-level Nvidia RTX 5050 GPU. The LOQ 15 delivers well over 60 fps in almost any game at Medium settings.

Lasko Classic Box Fan for $21 ($5 off)

The best box fan is even more affordable than usual as part of the Walmart Deals event. With a big surface area, a handle to move it around, and a shape that fits easily in a window or sliding glass door, this is a solid way to keep cool.

Ninja Slushi Machine for $179 ($120 off)

Just in time for the summer sun, the best slushie machine is on sale. Whip up icy soft drinks for the kids and a frozen margarita for you. The perfect way to cool down on hot days, this machine has intuitive controls and a reliable drip tray, and it’s easy to clean.

Ninja Luxe Cafe Pro Espresso Machine for $600 ($150 off)

Ninja’s flagship semi-automatic espresso machine can go toe-to-toe with Breville’s Barista Express for the title of most popular semi-automatic espresso machine. This is a great deal on a machine that nails automatic milk frothing.

Google Nest Cam Outdoor for $130 ($50 off)

The best wireless outdoor security camera for Google households, the Nest Cam Outdoor has a handy magnetic mount, an expansive 130-degree field of view, and captures sharp 1080p video with HDR and night vision. There’s also a clear-sounding speaker and microphone. You only get three hours of free event history, but you can add a Home Premium subscription ($10 a month, or $100 for the whole year) to get 30 days of event history and face recognition.

Mova Lidax Ultra 2000 Robot Lawn Mower for $1,199 ($700 off)

The best robot mowers save you from a tedious chore, and Mova’s sleek model boasts 360-degree lidar for 3D mapping and a camera with AI vision. Setup was straightforward when I tried it: there’s no need for wires or an antenna, and you can set multiple mowing areas. It mowed in neat lines, successfully avoided obstacles, and completed an excellent edge pass at the end.

Bissell Little Green Portable Carpet Cleaner for $85 ($25 off)

You may remember this gadget went viral on TikTok a few years ago, and it’s still an excellent upholstery or carpet cleaner at its regular price. It’s pretty good at sucking up spills and may even remove stains, and it’s way less bulky than your average carpet cleaner.

Govee Smart LED A19 Bulbs (4-Pack) for $25 ($34 off)

While you can get better smart bulbs, Govee’s Smart LED bulbs are a solid choice if you already have Govee lights and want to group everything. These boast tons of colors, scenes, and effects, and you can schedule them, change the color temperature, and dim them using the Govee app.

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The post 23 Walmart Deals We Like Better Than That Other Sale Happening Right Now appeared first on Wired.

That technology was Claude Mythos, the latest large language model developed by Anthropic using generative artificial intelligence, the capabilities of which were so great that the Trump administration suspended its use by foreign nationals, effectively blocking its public release for the immediate future.

“[Anthropic] told the model to find a vulnerability in a bank and empty accounts, and then it went and did it,” said Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-NY), the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, speaking with Punchbowl News. “[Mythos] then could find this vulnerability and fix it.”

Beyond the Mythos’ apparent ability to drain bank accounts, Anthropic also demonstrated far more nefarious uses for its latest technology.

“One unspecified model showed a detailed plan on how to kidnap a lawmaker in 30 seconds,” Punchbowl News’ report reads, paraphrasing Garbarino’s remarks. “Bad actors could hack the models and use them to attack critical infrastructure, [Garbarino] said, noting that AI’s agentic capabilities would allow models to take action without human prompting.”

Citing specific examples he feared could be employed by those with access to Mythos, Garbarino warned that individuals could “turn off this gas pipeline” or “increase the amount of chlorine” in a community’s water supply, and all from an individual’s home.

“You have the ability to not just learn how to do it, but to tell it to do it for you,” Garbarino told Punchbowl News. “I’d say 95% of my colleagues don’t understand what the hell’s going on.”

While the Trump administration has, in effect, blocked Mythos’ public release for the immediate future, President Donald Trump has handicapped states’ ability to regulate the emerging AI technology with an executive order he signed last December that blocks states from creating their own laws to regulate the technology.

The post GOP rep terrified after ‘closed-door demo’ of new tech ‘showed how to kidnap a lawmaker’ appeared first on Raw Story.

• When I got pregnant as a single freelancer, I assumed I wouldn’t get paid family leave.
• But I learned that I could get paid maternity leave if I worked on a project for 22 weeks.
• When I finished my leave, I went to Germany, where I learned more about European family leave.

In 2024, I made the potentially absurd decision to become a single mom without a full-time job.

I didn’t know how I’d handle the first few months without paid maternity leave or a partner. I briefly debated moving to Germany, where I’ve heard the parental leave is incredible.

Ultimately, staying in New York worked out better, and I was able to obtain paid maternity leave.

I thought I didn’t have paid family leave as a freelancer

I’m a freelance writer and producer. I’ve pieced together project-based work for about 20 years. Between projects, I often sublet my New York apartment and travel.

That freedom is a huge benefit — and it’s the only benefit. Even when I worked 40 hours a week as an editor at CBS News and later at Yahoo Sports, I was an hourly employee without paid vacation, 401(k) matches, or any other benefits often associated with jobs in the US.

Then, at 37, I decided to have a baby on my own. I looked for a full-time job but never landed one. I had a slight financial cushion: I’d always made the maximum contributions to my Roth IRA and HSA, and, later, a solo 401(k); starting in my late 20s, I’d invested everything else into index funds, and, a decade later, I had a decent amount invested. But I didn’t want to spend down my savings. I’d need those to actually raise a child.

I picked up an extra gig to cover IVF. Then, around the time I got pregnant, three unexpected offers came in. I said yes to everything. It was chaotic, especially while pregnant, but in eight months, I earned almost twice as much money as I typically make in a good year. I felt like I’d created my own maternity leave fund.

It was only at the very end of pregnancy that I realized there were other options.

An unexpected paid leave

About a month before my due date, a friend asked when I was starting paid family leave. I laughed. I don’t get that, I said.

She corrected me. If you’re on a project for 22 weeks and are paid on a W-2, she said, you are entitled to paid family leave.

Two of my recent projects were paid through payroll companies, which meant I was paid on a W-2.

I worried that asking for leave would ruin my relationship with the production companies. My friend said the payroll company’s insurance pays the leave; the production company never needs to know.

I called an hour later and couldn’t believe what happened next. The representative said that because I was working on two projects paid by the same payroll company, I was eligible for two paid family leaves.

He filed the claim, and for the first 12 weeks of my daughter’s life, I received $2,354 each week.

The payments didn’t cover my usual income, as parental leave does for most full-time employees in the US, but in those 12 weeks, I made enough to be a mom in New York.

European family leave gave me a new perspective

When my maternity leave ended, I wasn’t ready to return to work full-time. Instead, I left the US and traveled to Berlin for an extended stay.

There are ways European leave policies are superior, including minimum payments available even to the lowest-income parents, the length of leave, the job security attached to it, and the abundance of affordable childcare available afterward.

But overall, my paid family leave in the US seemed comparable.

This experience has made me more certain that there is no right way, or right place, to become a parent. And now, 10 months in, it’s time to figure out childcare and find work.

Read the original article on Business Insider

The post I never thought I’d get paid family leave as a freelancer. I then found a way to get $2,300 a week as a new mom. appeared first on Business Insider.

Published earlier this week, “Regime Change” was written by Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, and had already rattled the White House before its release, with officials fearful that the book’s authors had acquired audio recordings from within the White House Situation Room, arguably the most secure area of the complex where top officials discuss matters of crises and national security.

“There’s something in the book that hasn’t gotten nearly the level of attention of the aforementioned scoops… and yet it’s something that, according to sources familiar with the matter, has privately and absolutely infuriated the president and helped contribute to his decision to impose an intra-administration blackout on publicly talking about the book,” Zeteo reported Friday.

The claim in question is centered around Trump’s bathroom and bedroom habits, namely his preference for having a carpeted bathroom, which reportedly has sparked fear among White House staff of mold growth.

“It makes him look so f—— gross,” a senior Trump appointee told Zeteo, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The president sees everything, and he knows about the trash and bathroom sections, and thinks it’s complete bulls— that it got published.”

According to those familiar with the matter who spoke with Zeteo, Trump, who Zeteo’s Asawin Suebsaeng described as “perennially image-conscious and self-obsessed,” was “complaining to aides and other longtime advisers about the book’s descriptions of his bathroom and bedroom habits.”

“If you think this all sounds weird as hell or disgusting, you’d be right,” Suebsaeng wrote. “That’s why the 80-year-old president is so sensitive about it, petty and small as that sounds.”

The post Trump ‘absolutely infuriated’ after ‘gross’ habit exposed: senior official appeared first on Raw Story.

“She doesn’t call me. I’ve accepted that’s the way it is,” Harp’s paternal grandmother, Dolores ‘Dee Dee’ Harp, told the Daily Mail, speaking of her granddaughter, who was described as Trump’s “right-hand woman.”

Harp’s father died in 2020 in what was ruled a suicide by an Orange County coroner in California, but according to Preston Harp, her 38-year-old estranged brother, she and her mother “wanted to say that he died in his sleep.” Mr. Harp, however, told the outlet he “can’t keep that kind of a secret” and ultimately informed his extended family of the circumstances surrounding his father’s death.

“Other family members contacted by the Daily Mail admitted there was a family fallout over Robert’s suicide and the fact that there was no funeral, just a private cremation,” the Daily Mail’s report reads. “Carolyn Creutzer, a cousin, said Harp has blocked her on social media.”

Mr. Harp, who lives in Nicaragua and is a fierce Trump critic, said he’d also become estranged from his sister, though in large part due to her closeness with the president.

“It just kind of caused some cognitive dissonance,” Mr. Harp told the Daily Mail. “I don’t understand why my sister, or anyone, could want to work for Trump. It’s hard to believe that’s my sister and my mom. I can’t connect with that vibe, so I’m just going to let it be.”

The post Trump aide’s estranged brother reveals dark family ‘secret’ he refused to keep appeared first on Raw Story.

So goes the the story circulating among veterans living on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs campus in West Los Angeles.

Residents say their reports of the theft — like their complaints of other crimes — go unheeded because their 2-year-old apartment building lies in a law enforcement no man’s land where no police agency has the power or resources to investigate and prosecute run-of-the-mill crime.

The unincorporated island is surrounded by the city of Los Angeles but outside the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department. Technically, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department polices its 388 acres, but the distant West Hollywood Station rarely responds to calls, if ever. The VA Police Department, which is mostly tasked with providing security at the hospital, is prohibited by an obscure federal rule from being “deputized” to enforce state law.

The need for policing is becoming more acute as residences for hundreds of disabled veterans have been built in recent years and the campus population grows from the hundreds to potentially thousands under President Trump’s 2025 executive order to create a National Center for Warrior Independence with housing for 6,000 veterans.

In the absence of an official investigation, the incident last September has been magnified, and perhaps embellished, in the minds of veterans living on the campus, a community defined by the vulnerability of physical disability, substance use and trauma.

“Every time we turn around we’re doing an incident report,” said Tammy Chelossi, a resident service coordinator for the company that manages the building that opened in 2024.

“We call the VAPD all the time,” Chelossi said. “They don’t do anything. They come out [but say], ‘Our hands are tied.’”

In public forums and interviews, veterans living on the campus have spoken of a culture of impunity. Among their complaints: non-residents coming and going to buy and sell drugs, prostitution, crime brought on campus from outside and unruly behavior by residents.

In May, a man pushed a wounded and visibly bleeding woman in a wheelchair out of the entrance of a building. In one version circulating, attributed to a source in the VA police, she had already been stabbed by the time she arrived at the VA. Chelossi said she was disappointed the police didn’t consider the man who pushed her out a suspect.

“They shook his hand and said, ‘Good job taking her outside to the ambulance,’” she said.

The VA Police did not respond to a call requesting reports of the two incidents.

Residents who spoke to The Times on condition of anonymity and veteran advocates say the lack of information on reported crimes and follow-up investigations feeds their anxiety about safety.

Although federal law requires the VA to publish statistics on arrests, citations, investigations and prosecutions by local agencies, the campus police website has no link to crime data. The VA responded to a Freedom of Information Act request from a campus advocate for data with a demand for $20,004.36 in programming costs to retrieve the data.

The Times filed a Freedom of Information Act request on June 2 for VA Police records of the hallway death and the stabbing. The VA acknowledged the request but has not turned over any materials.

For the decades after the historic Old Soldiers’ Home was shut down in the 1970s, the two-thirds of the campus north of Wilshire Boulevard remained a collection of vacant deteriorating buildings and residential programs for physical and mental health recovery. VA Police focused on the third of the campus south of Wilshire Boulevard where the VA Medical Center rose.

VA Police enforcement was long concentrated on the southern third of the campus south of Wilshire Boulevard, where the VA Medical Center stands. For decades, the north campus had no resident population, remaining a collection of vacant deteriorating buildings and residential programs for physical and mental health recovery. That changed in recent years as legal actions forced the agency to begin repopulating the north campus.

A 2011 lawsuit filed by disabled veterans began a slow but now accelerating movement by the VA to restore the north campus as a veteran community. First came a federal court settlement requiring 1,200 units to be built (about half are now completed), then a second lawsuit resulted in an order to add 2,500 more, a ruling now under appeal. Last May, President Trump issued an order to build housing for 6,000.

The jurisdictional conundrum grew only worse as the VA issued 99-year leases to local developers to build those initial 1,200 units.

“As the VA leases the buildings to an entity, that’s no longer considered federal property,” said Jim Zenner, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Military and Veterans Affairs. “So they’re not able to enforce laws in those buildings.”

Zenner said the VAPD told him they were unable even to secure the dead body last September because they didn’t have jurisdiction.

“And so they had to literally wait for the Sheriff’s Department to get here and the Medical Examiner to get here,” Zenner said. “They didn’t get here for 10 or 11 hours.”

He’s not sure their interpretation of the law is right.

“I get mixed messages like, ‘We can and we can’t because of the jurisdictional thing,’” he said. “‘Maybe we can, maybe we can’t’ is not allowing the VAPD to do what they need to do.”

The future north campus remains a contest of differing visions. The housing now existing and being built is subsidized for the homeless and disabled. Some veteran groups are pushing for more diversity with housing for students, VA staff and veterans working off campus. Trump’s order calls for veterans from around the country to come for rehabilitative services.

Whatever ultimately develops, there is little disagreement that future campus security will depend on expanded law enforcement and clearer lines of authority.

During a congressional hearing in May on Trump’s order, VA officials acknowledged a public safety problem and said they are taking steps to manage it.

“We want to make sure that veterans are living in a safe, drug free environment where they can thrive, and, as you all are aware, that’s not happening,” senior counselor to the secretary Danielle Ranyan testified. “We’re taking care of that. But this didn’t just happen overnight, and it didn’t happen on President Trump’s watch.”

Under Secretary for Health John J. Bartrum testified that the VA police had been beefed up from the 50s and 60s last year to over 80 and will eventually reach 160 — a staff responsible not only for the campus, but for other facilities in the VA’s five-county Greater Los Angeles catchment area.

“Security is job one,” Bartrum said. “The veterans have to feel secure on the campus.”

As a stopgap, the VA brought on a private security firm in June to provide uniformed 24-hour “observe and report” sentry posts and roving patrols.

“I’m happy to see they’re at least doing something,” said Rob Reynolds, an Iraq war veteran who assists veterans to obtain services and housing. “I would say it makes it feel safer.”

But Reynolds and others, see security as a systemic problem.

Retired VA police chief Dave Weiner, who now owns a training business, was skeptical that the VAPD could sustain the necessary strength without increasing its pay scale.

New recruits must work years to equal starting pay at nearby departments, and retirement benefits only kick in after 30 years, compared to 20 years elsewhere, Weiner said.

“The pay has never been on par,” he said. “It makes it very difficult for officers to live in the LA area. They have to live in Riverside or San Bernardino.”

(On Thursday, the VA announced a package of national reforms of the VA police force including an increase of entry-level pay. Weiner said the modest increase “would not do much to change the competitive picture here in LA.”)

Weiner thinks one administrative change that could make VAPD more effective would be to revise the clause in VA Directive 0730 that prohibits the agency from being deputized or appointed as special officers “for the purpose of enforcing state laws and local ordinances on VA property.”

That could clear up confusion of whether VAPD can respond to and investigate reported crime on the leased properties.

It would also clear officers to make mental health holds under California’s Welfare and Institutions Code, both on the campus and across the region. VA police often respond to veterans in crisis seeking to get them into care but have no power, Weiner said.

“That is a tool for officers to utilize to get people into a system of care,” Weiner said. Currently, “either we have to leave people in crisis or we have to incarcerate them. That’s not a good situation.”

Zenner, the county military affairs department head, testified at the May hearing that the VA needs both state policing powers and a federal veteran treatment court on campus to support veterans who run afoul of the law.

Four Los Angeles Superior Court judges in courtrooms from Compton to Van Nuys hear cases of veterans charged with state crimes. They function like mental health diversion courts, suspending adjudication of qualifying crimes while veterans receive treatment, often at the VA. But the nearest federal treatment court that could handle cases under the VA’s jurisdiction is in San Diego. Few Los Angeles cases are routed there, Zenner said.

“Justice-involved veterans near the campus grapple with PTSD, traumatic brain injury, substance use disorders, and other invisible wounds stemming from their military service,” Zenner said. “Instead of repeated incarceration, participants would be mandated into integrated mental health services, substance abuse programs, and veteran mentorship.”

Anthony Allman, executive director of the nonprofit Vets Advocacy set up to monitor the earlier settlement, proposes that the VA contract with the Sheriff’s Department, as numerous small cities do, to provide routine patrol on campus.

The opportunity is ripe, Allman believes, because the Sheriff’s Department is losing its contract with Metro and it will have extra capacity.

The VA says it’s already tested that course and came up empty-handed.

During the congressional hearing, Ranyan testified that the agency’s assistant secretary for security met with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department earlier in the year to pursue a contract for 24-hour patrol.

“We were told that they’re down 2,000 police officers and that their morale is low and that they’re not even [able] to meet their own needs,” Ranyan said.

In response to questions from The Times, the Sheriff’s Department characterized Ranyan’s comment as inaccurate but acknowledged ongoing discussions with the VA on a new “memorandum of understanding.”

Under an existing MOU, “Sheriff’s personnel respond to critical or emergent incidents when requested and when our resources or capabilities would be better equipped to address dynamic situations,” it said, the statement said.

Sheriff’s Department records reviewed by The Times show that the agency reported one crimes on the VA property in 2025 and one this year, both on the southern campus.

The post In a no man’s land for law enforcement, hundreds of disabled veterans are moving in appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

Since President Trump began his second term in January 2025, EPA has blocked more than 2.4 million pounds of illegal pesticides from entering the country, said Lee Zeldin, the agency’s administrator. Much of it comes from China, but some comes from Mexico and, on the East Coast, from Africa.

“We’re very alarmed by any chemical that anyone would seek to bring into this country that our own government hasn’t had the opportunity to vet, to research to fully understand,” Zeldin said. “That’s why it’s so important that these products get stopped at the border.”

The announcement came just hours after the Supreme Court handed a major victory to the makers of the weedkiller Roundup, shielding it from thousands of lawsuits from states alleging the company failed to warn people the product could cause cancer.

Speaking from a U.S. Customs and Border Protection warehouse in Carson, Zeldin pointed to a white bottle with a yellow label reading “SNIPER” — an illegal pesticide product commonly imported from abroad and sold online — that was recently intercepted at the Port of L.A. complex. Sniper contains dichlorvos, or DDVP, a highly toxic insecticide that is not registered or approved for use in the U.S. It is known to cause neurological problems, convulsions and comas, with children particularly at risk.

Illegal pesticides are cause for concern in California, where they are often associated with illegal cannabis operations. Last year, Siskiyou County declared a local emergency in response to the “escalating threat” posed by illegal pesticides, often fumigants, in illicit cannabis operations.

“These chemicals, when burned, create thick, poisonous smoke that presents serious risks to public health, the environment, waterways, and first responder safety,” the county said.

A 2024 Los Angeles Times investigation found that contraband Chinese pesticides used on cannabis farms is a growing problem in the state.

Much of the illegal product comes through the ports of L.A. and Long Beach, which together handle more than 30% of the nation’s container traffic, officials said. EPA works closely with Border Patrol officials, who flag suspicious cargo containers at the port for further inspection.

CBP spokesman Jaime Ruiz said the agency is using artificial intelligence tools to help scan incoming cargo manifests for potentially illegal items. Thousands of containers are flagged for inspection each year, although that number also includes drugs, counterfeit goods and other contraband in addition to pesticides, he said. He could not immediately say what percentage were illegal pesticides.

Illegal pesticides have at times been found in California agriculture and the California Department of Pesticide Regulation has taken enforcement action against violators. The DPR operates one of the nation’s largest pesticide residue testing programs, analyzing some 3,500 produce samples each year from wholesale and retail stores and other outlets. The state produces about half of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.

Jeff Hall, assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance, said the issue should be bipartisan.

“We cannot allow foreign actors to profit by sending toxic and poisonous products into the United States and poisoning American communities,” he said. “This is a message that we should all be able to agree on, especially for pesticides.”

However, the agency’s visit to L.A. arrived at a fractured moment for U.S. pesticide regulation and for the Trump-aligned Make America Healthy Again movement.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of Bayer’s Monsanto, the maker of the powerful weedkiller Roundup, shielding it from thousands of state lawsuits that allege the company failed to warn people the product could cause cancer.

Roundup contains glyphosate, which was classified by the World Health Organization as “probably carcinogenic” in 2015. But the Supreme Court found that the company can’t be sued in state courts because federal agencies — including the EPA — have determined that it’s not likely to cause cancer in humans when used as directed. The EPA has repeatedly approved a label for the product without a cancer warning.

“When people are exposed to pesticides, they deserve honest warnings about the risks,” said Bill Jordan, former deputy director of EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs, in a statement. “The Court’s decision leaves families, workers, and communities with fewer tools to protect themselves and to recover damages when they are injured by a pesticide.”

The post EPA touts crackdown on smuggled pesticides in L.A. visit appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

On July 3 at its Fifth Avenue flagship store, the house intends to unveil a newly restored nearly 8-foot clock that it completed in 1893 with an unusual Independence Day connection: One of the clock’s 13 dials tracks the number of years that have passed since 1776.

“It is very, very symbolic for Tiffany, as an American brand, to have that particular detail,” said Nicolas Beau, senior vice president of Tiffany Horlogerie, the jeweler’s watchmaking division.

Last year Tiffany sent a team of three specialists to inspect the timepiece, which was in storage at the Geneva Freeport, a warehouse about five miles southeast of the brand’s watch- and clock-making headquarters in Meyrin, Switzerland.

“Imagine,” Mr. Beau said, “that you open a wooden box, which looks like any wooden box, and suddenly you discover a treasure inside.”

Tiffany decided to buy the clock, even though it clearly wasn’t running properly. (The house declined to identify the seller or to disclose the price.)

“There were a lot of broken, twisted and dented components,” said Baptiste Guye, an expert watchmaker at Tiffany who specializes in archival pieces and later oversaw the restoration. “We realized the amount of work we had to do.”

The 550-pound clock — a type known in the watch world as a long case or grandfather clock — was made of amaranth wood, adorned with ornate marquetry and inlaid with abalone. Its silver-rimmed enamel dials were designed to tell such things as the time in various cities, the moon and sun’s positions in relation to the earth’s Equator and the number of Sundays until Easter. It was first displayed at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

After a special mount was made to hold the clock steady, it was disassembled and work began in October in Meyrin. Mr. Guye said Tiffany was eager to use as many 19th century techniques in the restoration as possible, but an Excel spreadsheet was used to track progress and an ultrasound machine cleaned parts that were especially grimy.

One unexpected discovery: The independence year dial was stuck on 61, the number of years between independence and 1837, the year Tiffany was founded. The brand said it didn’t know if that setting was intentional or mere coincidence, but the dial was updated to start its count at 249, or 2025, when repairs began.

Mr. Beau said about a dozen people were involved with the clock’s seven-month restoration, including a wood expert in Geneva. Last month it was reassembled and tested for accuracy in Meyrin and, in early June, it was flown to New York City, with Mr. Guye as, essentially, its bodyguard.

Before the flight, the clock’s internal weights and balances were packed separately and custom-built stabilizers were placed inside the case — “to avoid shocks, friction, and unnecessary movement,” Mr. Beau said.

The clock, which is to be added to Tiffany’s archives, will be displayed through the end of the year in New York along with some other Tiffany-made items shown at the 1893 fair.

It is, Mr. Beau said, going “back to where it really belongs, not to mention this incredible coincidence of being so close to the anniversary of independence.”

The post Tiffany & Company Marks America’s 250th appeared first on New York Times.

Right now, six AI-Generated George Washingtons are roaming around the country in semitrucks, stopping at sites as varied as the New Mexico desert and the National Mall and attracting lines in some places that would rival those at Disney World. On an afternoon last month at an American Legion parking lot in Bel Air, Maryland, locals—many sporting the Stars and Stripes in cap, tee, and even Croc form—waited for a glimpse of the past with an eagerness history teachers could only dream of. “Introducing: the Freedom Truck, a mobile museum,” a deep voice boomed to crescendoing music. “Go back in time and experience the dawn of America.”

The “Freedom Trucks” are part of the official celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday, an 18-wheel complement to the fairs, rallies, and work crews currently proliferating in Washington, D.C. When you enter one, after walking past a reproduction of a painting of English colonists praying before a cross, you meet the animated Washington, who tells you sternly that despite their differences, the 13 colonies agreed: “Our rights are a gift from God, not a favor from kings or courts.”

It’s a familiar-sounding line, invoking the core American concept of inalienable rights, but the statement isn’t actually from Washington. Lindsay Chervinsky, the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon, told me in an email that the quote doesn’t even sound like the first president. “He regularly spoke of providence and a higher power, but usually called on republican values and virtues to defend his positions.” A similar sentence can, however, be found in an events tool kit from Freedom 250, the White House–led group behind the trucks, under suggested “faith-based messaging.” 

President Trump has had much to say about how museums treat our country’s past. He has griped about the Smithsonian’s focus on slavery’s horrors, and his administration has asserted that the public has no tolerance for museums that are “uncomfortable conveying a positive view of American history.” But his efforts to influence the United States’ preeminent museum complex haven’t gotten far. With the trucks, at least, the administration has been able to take its preferred version of the American story on the road, where history is more, well, movable. 

I’ve spent a lot of time unpacking which kinds of museum displays and narratives the White House rejects (for example, artwork showing migrants crossing the southern border). I went to a Freedom Truck to try to figure out what sort of materials the administration supports, which has been trickier to ascertain. You can only squeeze so much information into a semi, so I figured that what made it inside the trailer would surely be revealing.

What I saw felt like a typical, triumphant middle-school-textbook telling of the American Revolution and its aftermath, but with digital interactives, a Trump cameo, and the volume on Christianity turned up a few notches. Institutions such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History tend to highlight the political circumstances of the nation’s birth—the people versus a monarch, the sense of injustice that gave way to rebellion—and include an array of belief systems when they do talk about religion (as a 2018 exhibition at the museum did). Here, the truck nods to one notable American value, religious freedom, to the neglect of another: the separation of Church and state.

For two and a half centuries, Americans across the political spectrum have projected their own ideals onto this amorphous country. The Trump administration has been a passionate participant in this tradition, gearing some of its recent efforts toward the Christian right. In shifting the story one way, the trucks risk blurring the distinction between a country founded in a religious context and a country founded as religious, and pushing the background into the foreground.

The right-wing edutainment nonprofit PragerU, which aims to help “people of all ages think and live better while upholding Judeo-Christian values,” put the vehicles together. Criticized for spreading misinformation about climate change and downplaying the significance of slavery, the outfit has a recent history of teaming up with the Trump administration, including on a civics-education campaign assembled for the semiquincentennial. At least one organizer canceled an appearance of the truck to avoid appearing to endorse PragerU’s politics. (Hillsdale College, a liberal-arts school known for its conservative, Christian bent, also worked on the trucks.)

Logos plastered on the truck’s exteriors advertise its affiliation with Freedom 250, which the White House created last year to organize patriotic activities for the anniversary. Confusingly, it’s separate from America250, the nonpartisan organization that is charged by Congress with doing the same. Freedom 250 has been behind events with a notably partisan flavor, such as last month’s daylong prayer rally on the Mall and the Great American State Fair. In December, $10.1 million of federal grant money that the Institute of Museums and Library Services had originally given to America250 for a truck-based traveling exhibition was redirected to Freedom 250, government-spending records show. 

The exhibition focuses largely on the Revolutionary War and the country’s founding, but opens with some of North America’s early religious settlements and ends with a Wall of American Heroes, whose faces (Steve Jobs, Katharine Drexel, John Wayne, Aretha Franklin, many more) surround a quote from Trump about American bravery. Selected quotes stress colonial Americans’ beliefs in a higher power, and displays emphasize the country’s “Western and Judeo-Christian traditions.”

In some spots, the history is just plain wrong. When, in 1782, Robert Aitken printed the first full English-language Bible in the newly independent nation, a project for which he had sought—and failed—to secure funding from the U.S. government, congressional chaplains recommended the work “to the inhabitants of the United States” and celebrated it as an “instance of the progress of arts in this country,” Seth Perry, a professor of religion at Princeton University, writes in Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States. When I emailed Perry about the wall text in the Freedom Trucks, he pointed out that the display asserts falsely that Congress “passed a resolution to print the bible” and describes Aitken’s Bible, also inaccurately, as “authorized by Congress.” As Marylanders in Bel Air pointed out to me, the truck also incorrectly says that the state was settled in 1664—it happened in 1634. 

When asked about the Maryland issue, a Freedom 250 spokesperson told me in an email that the group was “reviewing the matter” but directed questions about the Aitken Bible back to PragerU, which did not respond about that content. She also said that the scripts accompanying the exhibition, like the monologue offered by the AI Washington, aim “to bring history to life for visitors” and “are not intended to serve as verbatim quotations or historical reenactments of historical figures.” 

[Read: First the Kennedy Center, now the Smithsonian]

 The truck nevertheless found a sympathetic audience in Bel Air, a roughly 10,000-person town where more than 3,000 people visited over three days, according to the American Legion post that hosted the truck. Toby Keith’s country anthem “American Ride” blasted from a nearby speaker to a crowd of scouts, current and former schoolteachers, restless toddlers, retiree history buffs, and at least one Daughter and one Son of the American Revolution. Multiple people told me that seeing the truck was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity; many talked about adding their signature to the Declaration of Independence on an interactive screen, one of the trucks’ features. Ned Hoedebecke, an American Legion member who brought in the truck, which can be requested online, was overjoyed about the turnout. Standing alongside him in front of the 18-wheeler, Ray Bengel, the post’s commander, told me that one of the organization’s pillars is “Americanism.” “It can’t get any more American than this,” he said. 

Something about the nation’s birthday seems to inspire cross-country educational journeys—as if one might mend this divided land simply by traversing it. While the Freedom Trucks trek across the nation by road, the National Archives’ Freedom Plane is flying historic documents to museums around the country. Both projects trace their inspiration to an earlier example: the bicentennial’s “Freedom Train.” 

The concept originated in the 1940s, when a corporate-sponsored and government-endorsed Freedom Train toted 126 historic documents across the country, aiming to inspire patriotism and civic engagement after World War II. The organizers refused to stop at cities that insisted on segregating crowds. In remaining integrated, the train tour helped “break down barriers of racial discrimination that some of its documents declare do not exist in law,” The New York Times wrote in 1947.

More famous, three decades later, a Freedom Train for the United States’ bicentennial had its own cultural moment. It was the subject of a Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner song. Johnny Cash and Lady Bird Johnson made commercials for it. Actors such as Ossie Davis and Richard Kiley recorded exhibition audio. The train carried hundreds of historic objects borrowed from big-name institutions such as the Smithsonian and the National Archives, as well as local museums and private collections. Visitors rode along a moving walkway through the cars, passing the Louisiana Purchase Treaty, Native American artifacts, African crafts, a lunar rock, Judy Garland’s dress from The Wizard of Oz, a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, and an Oldsmobile. 

Sponsored by corporations including PepsiCo, Prudential, and General Motors, the train credited “free enterprise” with its creation and served as something of a brand booster, staying within the comfort zones of its benefactors. M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, a professor of history at American University who has written about the bicentennial, told me that, then and now, commemorations are “always a moment that kind of perfectly reflects their own cultural context.”

Still, compared with its contemporary descendants, the 200th-birthday train “was a whole different level,” Jonathan Goldman, the chief curator at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore, where one of the locomotives that pulled the train is on permanent display, told me. “The way that they were able to stitch the country together into one exhibit that all Americans could access reasonably, I think, was a major achievement.” 

At the Freedom Truck in Maryland, Lou Raborg was dressed as a Revolutionary soldier and throwing it back much further than the 1970s. When I told him that I liked his costume, he responded that it was a uniform, correcting me with such enthusiasm that I worried I might also need to take up a colonial character to continue the conversation. He told me that he’s been wearing the outfit, made of original materials, to events like this for about 20 years—or, as he put it, for a length of time that spans from the end of the French and Indian War to the end of the Revolutionary War.

The uniform might have been the most “real” thing at this truck. The vehicle was jam-packed with information, but I didn’t see a single historic object on view. One wall text that might amuse René Magritte read: “This authentic Wells Fargo shotgun represents the grit and danger of the American frontier.” Above it was an image of the gun. 

All the same, there was a sense among the crowd that what was inside the truck—U.S. history—was in dire need of preservation. “It’s something that really needs to be brought back to light in schools today, is teaching history,” Randy Reinecke, the owner of the Cowboy Eats food truck, which was stationed nearby, told me. Some visitors I spoke with blamed modern life or “wokeness.” 

[Read: How America gave up on its own history]

A self-selecting group, maybe, but the truck’s visitors seemed to defy their own claims. One student came after her AP U.S. History exam, her mom, Kerry Stratemeyer, told me, because “it felt like a good way to kind of close that test out.” More than one parent whom I asked to chat with for this story referred me, instead, to their history-obsessed child. 

Sarah Weicksel, the executive director of the American Historical Association, noted to me that she has her own War of 1812–loving third grader as proof that U.S. history is alive and well. In a survey published by Weicksel’s organization in 2024, more than half of history teachers said that the American Revolution and the country’s founding were among their top-three favorite topics to teach. For years, right-wing media and political leaders have been circulating the idea that the accurate story of U.S. history is disappearing from classrooms, while progressives, trying to expand that telling to include more voices, have sounded parallel alarms about a full version of U.S. history eluding us. Kelly Crowe told me outside the Freedom Truck that she had pulled her child from public school because “we were just seeing things that was more about DEI than we were seeing about true history being taught.” 

To Trump’s camp, the “wrong” history—history that is not positive enough, is not Christian enough, or focuses on stories of oppressed groups—is essentially the same as no history at all. Adherents have enlisted themselves in a war over the past, waged against proponents of efforts such as The New York Times Magazine’s “The 1619 Project”—a ground-shaking, though at times erroneous, undertaking that frames the country’s story through the lens of slavery.

One of those history-loving teens, Dillon, could sense that what he saw at the trucks had been streamlined. “I feel like a lot of the information was pretty surface-level,” he told me. “It didn’t go into a lot of the nuances about American history, which is something that I feel like as a country we should be more aware of.” The scout pointed as an example to Thomas Jefferson, whose heroic role as a Founding Father often blots out discussion of the hundreds of people he enslaved. The truck, Thomas said, shows only “one point of view.”

With this rah-rah, tightly proscribed approach to history, PragerU is a natural partner to the White House. Marissa Streit, PragerU’s CEO, told me she believes that history that is too pessimistic is nothing less than a national-security threat. “I feel very, very strongly that if young Americans are going to be taught to hate America, they’re not going to want to enlist in the military. They’re not going to want to defend America. They will propagate anti-American ideas that will lead to the weakening of our country and our society,” she said. At the same time, Streit said she hopes that the trucks help people understand their heritage: “A country that doesn’t understand its roots, it’s like a nation with amnesia. It’s a person who doesn’t know himself.”

According to the trucks, those roots lie in Western and Christian traditions. The truck notes, for instance, that in reviewing Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Congress “made several important changes, including adding references to the ‘Supreme Judge of the World’ and ‘divine Providence.’” There, it does not mention the most famous edit: Jefferson had originally written, “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable.” The final document replaces “sacred & undeniable” with the more secular “self-evident.” Neither does it mention the third president’s own idiosyncratic beliefs, including his rejection of many tenets of Christianity. 

The trucks contain what Christopher Grasso, a professor of American culture, religion, and politics at Brown University, called sleights of hand. They paraphrase in a way that allows for more neutral-sounding terms referring to a creator to be swapped out with the more religious-sounding “God.” They use the word faith repeatedly. They talk about the founding as if it extends all the way back to the early-Christian settlements, and they neglect that early America also included enslaved people and Native Americans with their own faiths. 

“It’s the ambiguity of language,” Grasso told me. “They can use these broad terms that are themselves contested to help spin their argument in the direction that they want.”

There’s also a question of emphasis. Some of the Founding Fathers had strong religious beliefs, but how much airtime should that receive? “I think we should be giving it the same weight that they would have given, which is not that much,” Seth Perry, the Princeton professor, said, describing an “easygoing Anglicanism” in the air at the time. Stressing religion in the country’s founding, Perry said, can create a sense of national providentialism—that everything the country does is God’s will. 

Streit, the PragerU CEO, isn’t worried about alienating people, and said that those who “are uncomfortable with the fact that America was founded based on Judeo-Christian values are uncomfortable with America in general.” She called concerns about giving too much attention to the Founding Fathers’ religion “silly.” 

When I asked people in Maryland about the emphasis on Christianity in the trucks, I heard a refrain along the lines of what Leslie Bankert, who had brought her teen sons to the truck as a homeschool field trip, told me: “We’re Christians, so we liked that.”

Like any exhibition organizer, PragerU knows a thing or two about human psychology. You can see it in how it lets visitors add their names to a digital Declaration of Independence, and in how it has bookended the exhibition with Washington and Trump, a choice befitting a president who has been keen on depicting himself alongside historic figures. People want to see themselves reflected in history; they need to. It’s, ironically, why museums and universities have taken such pains to diversify over the past decade. And it’s why, at the end of the truck, PragerU includes one final element, but whether it breaks with or continues the narrative that the truck tells may depend on who’s looking. Right before you exit, the last wall proclaims America’s Next Hero! Above it, there’s a mirror. 

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The post Here Come Trump’s ‘Freedom Trucks’ appeared first on The Atlantic.

According to media watchdog Status, Weiss is eager to launch a media counter-offensive. She’s been in talks with the New York Times’ Michael Barbaro about appearing on “The Daily” podcast—a choice that reveals her strategy: find a friendly interviewer willing to let her explain away the wreckage.

As Oliver Darcy is reporting, Weiss, who counts Barbaro as “a friend and admirer,” even floated his name earlier this year as a potential addition to “CBS Mornings.” Now she’s leveraging that relationship for what amounts to a high-stakes PR intervention.

However, multiple sources told Status that Weiss has been advised against doing the “blockbuster sit-down,” with some executives pumping the brakes because David Ellison’s $111 billion deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery is still pending,

Paramount executives are reportedly worried Weiss might complicate the acquisition, because they want to “avoid as much media scrutiny as possible—and such a media appearance would not help.”

Behind the scenes, Weiss has reportedly been conducting an ongoing charm offensive. She’s held off-the-record phone calls with journalists over recent months and met privately with media figures.

The problem is “Weiss has no compelling story to sell,” Darcy wrote.

Under her leadership, CBS News ratings have plummeted to historic lows, the Status report noted. She’s been openly accused of ethical violations by some of the network’s most respected journalists—allegations CBS News has denied but that have stuck in the public consciousness. Her “60 Minutes” purge triggered mass staff resignations and created a public relations catastrophe.

According to Darcy, Weiss may believe she can explain it all away in a sympathetic interview; however, “More likely, a Weiss interview would serve up fresh material for her critics, further damaging her public reputation and creating an avoidable distraction for Paramount at a particularly sensitive moment.”

The post Panic at CBS as Bari Weiss eyes ‘blockbuster sit-down’ appeared first on Raw Story.

The attack on the Ever Lovely, a container ship that was passing near the Omani side of the strait, has underscored a central ambiguity in the preliminary peace agreement between Washington and Tehran. Although President Trump has declared the waterway open to unrestricted navigation, the accord does not clearly state who has the authority to regulate passage.

Iran’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Friday, carried on state media, that the strait lay within the territorial waters of Iran and Oman, and it cited a provision of the U.S.-Iran deal that calls on Tehran to arrange safe passage for commercial vessels.

The Thursday strike on the container ship came hours after Iran, demonstrating its hold over the strait, warned that the only route through the vital pathway for oil and natural gas was through its waters. Many ships, like the Ever Lovely, had been using a route on the southern side of the strait, hugging the Omani coast.

“Safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz is not guaranteed under vague arrangements, parallel routing systems or decision-making processes that exclude Iran as a coastal state,” Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, wrote on social media on Friday.

The White House has not commented on the attack Thursday. It came shortly after Secretary of State Marco Rubio left the Persian Gulf, where he had met with foreign ministers from the Gulf Cooperation Council.

In a joint declaration after the meeting, the United States and the Gulf countries in that organization called for “free, unconditional and unrestricted navigation” through the strait and rejected tolls, fees or attempts by any country to assert control over the waterway.

The attack prompted the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations agency, to suspend an effort to help hundreds of stranded vessels leave the Persian Gulf. At least two tankers turned around after Iran’s warning earlier that day, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence, while the number of ships passing through the strait fell to 54 on Thursday from 73 a day earlier, according to Kpler, a maritime data firm.

Oil markets largely shrugged off the escalation. Prices rose after the strike on Thursday, but they fell on Friday as the continued movement of tankers appeared to ease concerns about supply disruptions. Brent crude, the global benchmark, dropped to roughly $73 a barrel, while West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, fell to between $69 and $70.

Jenny Gross and Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting.

The post After Attacking Cargo Ship, Iran Presses Its Claim to Authority Over Strait appeared first on New York Times.

• AI-generated job applications are overwhelming recruiters and making it harder to stand out.
• A recruitment CEO says old-fashioned networking may beat AI-written cover letters.
• LinkedIn says the number of applicants per US job has doubled since 2022 as AI reshapes hiring.

AI-generated cover letters may be all the rage, but one recruitment veteran says the best way to get noticed is a far more traditional approach.

James Reed, the CEO of Reed Recruitment, said generative AI has flooded employers with near-identical applications, making it harder for candidates to stand out. His advice: make a human connection.

“Some very old-fashioned things still work,” Reed said this week on the BBC’s “Big Boss Interview” podcast. “If you write to someone and put it in a postbox with a stamp on it, and it lands on their desk, they’ll look at it.”

His comments come as generative AI is rapidly reshaping recruitment. Candidates can tailor CVs and cover letters in seconds using tools like ChatGPT, while employers increasingly rely on AI to screen growing numbers of applications.

The technology has sped up both sides of the hiring process, but Reed suggested it has also upended it. “At the moment, you have very frequently a situation where you have sort of AI talking to AI and no person is any wiser,” he said.

AI is creating an application overload

Reed said his recruitment firm is receiving so many applications that they all “pretty much look the same, because people have gone on ChatGPT, said, ‘Help me with my CV,’ and it sort of generates the same thing for everyone.”

According to LinkedIn’s Talent Research 2026 survey, the number of applicants per open role in the US has doubled since the spring of 2022.

That flood of applications leaves hiring managers struggling to review every submission, reducing the value of carefully tailoring an application, Reed said.

“People just aren’t seeing the benefits of the investment in time of personalizing it, because the companies are so overwhelmed with applications,” he said.

LinkedIn’s research found that 65% of the 19,113 workers surveyed said finding a job had become more challenging over the past year. Meanwhile, 93% of the 6,554 recruiters surveyed said they planned to increase their use of AI in hiring in 2026.

Daniel Chait, the CEO of hiring software company Greenhouse, previously described the dynamic to Business Insider as an “AI doom loop“: job seekers can apply to more roles more quickly, while recruiters face a growing pile of applications and struggle to find the right person through the noise.

The human touch may be the differentiator

Instead of relying solely on online portals, Reed encouraged applicants to look for ways to establish direct human contact.

“It’s an important point that it’s about connecting with people in the end,” he said, adding that technology has “automated things very effectively, but also almost too effectively.”

Reed’s advice echoes a broader shift in hiring.

Recruiters and hiring managers previously told Business Insider they are placing less emphasis on AI-polished résumés, with some companies replacing traditional applications with work trials, skills-based assessments, or direct outreach.

Read the original article on Business Insider

The post The best way to stand out in an AI hiring market may be surprisingly old-fashioned, a recruitment CEO says appeared first on Business Insider.

The justices ruled 6-3 that a policy adopted in response to a surge of Haitian immigrants did not violate a federal law permitting noncitizens to apply for asylum upon arrival in the U.S., and the majority and dissenting opinions addressed the racial animus in the policy – but from completely different vantage points.

“Look, this administration has said such heinous things about Haitians, in particular, that there’s obviously racial animus in the way they made this decision about [temporary protected status] for their status, and it was interesting,” said “CNN This Morning” host Audie Cornish. “You had Elena Kagan writing, ‘the statements fairly shout in their racial undertones and overtones alike that race entered into the president’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.’ I’m not sure if we have some clips of that, we might, but, needless to say, we have been hearing over the years, especially during campaign time, when [Vice President JD] Vance accused Haitians of all manner of things, and that, the Court rejected that.”

The Daily Signal’s Rob Bluey could hardly contain his glee over the ruling.

“Well, I’m glad you brought up the campaign because, I think, going back to this conversation just more broadly, on immigration, Donald Trump promised to carry out the largest mass deportation in our country’s history,” he said. “The fact of the matter is, if you look at the first year of the Trump administration, they did not hit the mark on the President’s own promise, and now the deportation coalition is saying that they need to deport up to a million legal immigrants this year.”

Cornish challenged him to explain more.

“Are you bringing this up because you’re saying this was a win they needed?” Cornish said.

“Yes!” he yelped. “I’m saying that Donald Trump is, if that’s the promise that he was going to deliver on, and that was a central theme of his 2024 campaign. These victories at the Supreme Court certainly put him on the pathway to getting back on track when it comes to carrying out that. Now we may disagree on whether or not that’s the policy the United States should carry out. I just happen to say, as a conservative and as somebody who [is happy] with the ruling – absolutely. I think that these rogue judges were out of step, absolutely I do.”

New York Times podcaster Lulu Garcia-Navarro had been looking on with mute horror as Bluey gushed over the ruling, and she picked apart his argument when he finished.

“Well, the first thing is these were not illegal immigrants,” she said. “These were people who were here and were given legal status. They did all the things that they needed to do. Specifically, they got vetted, they have jobs – they are nurses, they are doctors, they are journalists.”

“The problem that I have always with this argument is made by conservatives is that they conflate everything, right?” Garcia-Navarro added. “It’s like illegal immigrants, TPS holders, it’s basically anyone who’s brown who has been allowed in this country, we have seen under this administration – basically refugees. The entire refugee program being suspended and being now handed over to white South Africans. What is this about, if not about racial animus? And I think what Elena Kagan was pointing to was the president’s very own statements. ‘They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats,’ talking about Haitians who were working, and that was completely fabricated.”

– YouTube youtu.be

The post Giddy conservative’s claim debunked to his face on CNN: ‘They conflate everything’ appeared first on Raw Story.

“Heterosexual, sober men who marry girls and read Bibles, we’re the new punk rock!” the pastor Mark Driscoll said in a fiery sermon that brought attendees to their feet.

More than 4,500 men gathered in central Washington over Father’s Day weekend for a testosterone-fueled celebration of Christianity and patriotism that culminated in a statement calling conservative Christian men “to rise as statesmen.”

Men came with their sons. They came with their pastors. They came with their brothers, their hunting buddies, their Bible study friends.

The two-day event took place just outside the small town of George, Washington, against the backdrop of America’s 250th anniversary. The amalgam of political activation, Christian worship and male bonding provided a glimpse of an emerging right-wing movement with masculinity as its unifying force.

Rick Slaughter, 44, camped overnight at the festival on Friday with a group of eight men and boys from around Orting, Wash. On Saturday afternoon they smiled for a photo on the sloping lawn overlooking the Columbia River, with the state flag of Washington and another one reading “JESUS IS KING.”

The men meet weekly in a group affiliated with Promise Keepers, an evangelical men’s ministry that boomed in the 1990s and has recently been resurrected with a sharper political edge. The trip was an opportunity for them to spend more time together and hear from political candidates and well-known pastors about their responsibilities as Christian men, as they saw it.

“What we’re trying to do is be better men,” Mr. Slaughter said. Many of the members have become sober and started marriage counseling since joining the group. Mr. Slaughter has gotten a handle on an anger problem, he said. (Federal prosecutors accused Mr. Slaughter of attacking Capitol Police officers in the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, but the case was dismissed last year when President Trump granted sweeping clemency to participants. Mr. Slaughter described the charges in an interview as “a lot of lies.”)

Mr. Driscoll, who resigned under pressure more than a decade ago from the large church he founded in Seattle, has made a roaring comeback as the evangelical mainstream has embraced his style of brash provocations in the Trump era. Accused of bullying and cultivating a culture of fear at his church in Seattle, he now leads a large congregation in Scottsdale, Ariz., and has a huge online following.

His sermon on Friday swept through the first books of Genesis and Exodus, drawing connections between ancient biblical stories and contemporary American politics. He described the Tower of Babel as an illustration of the perils of globalism, and an entity faced by Moses as “the transgender god of Egypt.”

“New days, old demons,” he said. “You men need to understand, if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.”

Many of the pastors on the program’s lineup were leaders of a growing cohort of politically aggressive churches closely allied with the Trump administration and its priorities. Some were there to promote new political and educational institutions that indicated their ambitions to extend their influence beyond the purely spiritual.

Grace City Church, a large congregation in nearby Wenatchee, Wash., spearheaded the event under the auspices of Stronger Man Nation, a men’s ministry. Both were founded by Josh McPherson, a pastor who has been invited to pray for Mr. Trump in the White House and whose empire now includes a popular podcast and a new “antiwoke” college he envisions as a “Protestant West Point.”

Issues mentioned from the main stage included social-conservative mainstays like abortion and gender identity, but also housing prices and construction costs, in a state where both significantly outpace the national average.

“Even young men like me, who want to be providers, who want to start a family, who want to say no to vice and live a righteous life, are crushed by the weight of tyranny,” David Prince, a student at Grace City’s new college, said from the stage on Saturday during a presentation with other Gen Z men.

Another recurring theme was how important it was for conservative men to stay in blue states rather than decamping to friendlier jurisdictions like Texas.

“What a weekend like this represents is an infusion of hope into good men who have been sidelined, by virtue of feeling like this is a David versus Goliath here in Washington,” Russell Johnson, 40, the pastor of a growing network of churches in Washington, said in an interview. “If all the good guys leave, the state doesn’t get better, it gets worse.”

It was up to pastors like him to encourage them, he said.

“What in the hell is the point of having influence if you don’t use it for stuff that matters?”

In a hypnotically energetic sermon on Saturday night, Mr. Johnson exhorted men in the state to stay put.

“This place is worth fighting for!” Mr. Johnson said from the stage. “It doesn’t matter how far you’ve gone or how many mistakes you’ve made or how upside-down this region appears to be: When God starts speaking, things start shifting, darkness begins trembling, and God’s people start advancing.”

Nate Schatzline, a pastor and Republican state representative in Fort Worth, told attendees at an afternoon panel that many of his church’s small groups — a format that traditionally includes Bible study and socializing — organize outings to speak at local city council meetings. Another pastor on the panel reminded the group that churches in Washington can collect ballots for their congregants, a strategy once viewed skeptically by Republicans but more recently embraced.

Mr. Schatzline, 34, also runs an organization that mobilizes churches to support local conservative candidates and train others to run for office. The group has chapters in four states, including Texas and Washington, but plans to expand to 28 states by the end of the year. The church he works for, Mercy Culture, has endorsed candidates and recently opened an outpost in Washington, D.C.

“The G.O.P.’s not perfect, and we need reformation, but let’s as the church stop complaining about the G.O.P. when we refuse to be engaged with the G.O.P.,” he said at the panel. “We consider the G.O.P. a partner in this fight.”

Afterward, dozens of men crowded up to the stage to speak with him.

Adam James, a pastor at Grace City Church, called Mr. Schatzline a “rising star” and compared him admiringly to Charlie Kirk in an interview.

Mr. James, who is running for a State House seat in central Washington, offered some of the event’s most direct policy prescriptions from the main stage on Saturday. He encouraged the crowd to support conservative candidates for five open Supreme Court seats in the state, and promoted “Bible-believing” candidates for several legislative seats, including the one he hopes to take over from a Republican legislator he described in an interview as an “establishment” figure. He also announced that a push to eliminate the state’s new income tax had just reached enough signatures to be added to the ballot in November, and urged the men to vote for it.

The takeaway for some attendees was that it was time to start paying attention to down-ballot races and midterm elections.

“Everyone shows up to vote for president, but no one shows up to vote for dogcatcher,” said Kenny Blight, 38, who is part of Mr. Slaughter’s Promise Keepers group. “I want a biblical dogcatcher.”

Almost the only women on the grounds, other than venue employees (and one journalist), were hundreds of volunteers from Grace City Church who each paid $55 to be there. (General admission for men was $199.)

“God created men for a purpose, they’re providers and protectors,” said Marcy Lyon, 55, who was volunteering with her teenage daughter. “When they get together and bond, it helps them stand up.”

A small pergola on the top of the hill was set aside as a women-only listening area for volunteers. A whiteboard read in looping script: “Ladies — please be considerate and enjoy this space quietly. We want to minimize distractions so our men can listen.”

The post Where Testosterone and the Bible Are the ‘New Punk Rock’ appeared first on New York Times.

Here are a few other games that have stood out:

Mewgenics

Reviewed on the PC.

After the death of Laszlo, my family’s lovable, moody, biting cat, I began playing feline-inspired games. None embodies his somewhat feral spirit more than Mewgenics, by a creator of Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac.

This sardonically humorous, sometimes violent strategy game is played on grids of squares. You breed cats (they’re horniest at night), amass power-ups and travel through levels like caves and the moon to battle foes. In the sewers, you can convince a plump shark to fight on your side.

What makes Mewgenics the cat’s meow is that it’s mischievous and odd. Characters like the mad scientist Thomas A. Beanies, with his wild Einstein-like hair, may have lost his marbles, exemplified by his narcissism and a deadly goal. Many characters, with their thick Sharpie outlines, are thoroughly creepy. They’re useful, too. Frank, an itchy, addled architect, lives under your house and builds rooms in exchange for retired cats.

The varied soundtrack, influenced by the Ramones at their punkiest, a growling Tom Waits and the Theremin-loving Danny Elfman, enhances every battle. There is no spoken dialogue, but reading and fighting to this smart music makes the game more imaginative and magical. The impressive depth of Mewgenics includes 281 available achievements, one of which is called Throbbing Gristle, a nod to the industrial music pioneers. Its spell turns foes into meat.

Despite the occasional grammar flubs (It’s “Science made you and me,” not “Science made you and I.”), the narrative is appealing. By the end, you discover a secret reason that Dr. Beanies engaged you to breed cats in the first place.

Although moving from square to square on the grid is time-consuming, Mewgenics rewards those familiar with the feelings of millions of cat owners: frustration, cuteness, beauty and impulsiveness.

— Harold Goldberg

Better Than Dead

Reviewed on the PC.

Better Than Dead, which is in dialogue with the unsettling aesthetic of “bodycam”-style shooters like Unrecorded and Ready or Not, sources its pastiche from low-budget ’80s Hong Kong crime action thrillers, the grungier and grimier and the better.

While its contemporaries set their firefights in empty warehouses and drug dens, Better Than Dead winds players through an intimate underworld with carpeted dim sum joints, kitschy neon-lit strip clubs and bamboo-scaffolded high-rises.

Your character is a sex-trafficking victim who wakes up in a dungeon, staring absently at a filthy wall panel laminated with old photos of a cloudy blue sky. You find a gun, and with it, the means toward freedom and revenge. It’s a simple plot with just enough flavor to cast meaning and depth into the gunfights, which are chaotic and brutal. Your character, no professional, blunders into rooms full of black suited gangsters, squeezing out panicked shots that shatter the eardrums and splatter the walls with blood.

Guns in games are often treated perfunctorily, as tools to click on baddies for points. The gun in Better Than Dead is the unmistakable center of its hazy nightmare, both as your redemption and your curse.

— Yussef Cole

TR-49

Reviewed on the PC. Also available on the Switch.

Call it vacuum-tube futurism.

TR-49 is both puzzle game and audio drama that gestures toward a dystopian reality where the rich can live forever at the expense of everyone else. It also caters to nostalgia for a time when computers were oddly-shaped tools that harnessed rather than scattered attention.

This visually spare but engrossing game places players before a monochromatic circular screen attached to a rectangular four-panel input device that accepts alphanumeric codes. The machine, as this story goes, was designed to help the cryptographers at Bletchley Park crack German war codes. In the wake of World War II, its creators, two married engineers, repurposed it as a “thinking machine” by feeding it books and periodicals that ultimately endowed it with quantum capabilities.

Players are entrusted with figuring out how the machine works and locating a specific document to help end the tyranny of the undying. To do so they must uncover codes that are mentioned, hinted at or alluded to within the machine’s archives. Enter a code and you will see documents whir past in a pleasing way that recalls a microfiche reader.

What one uncovers is a sort of intranet that shows off its creators’ inspirations, interests and concerns. Untangling the interlocking history of an array of people — scientists, novelists, academics, journalists — whose lives or work affected one another is intriguing enough that it makes up for some of TR-49’s more obvious plot twists.

— Christopher Byrd

The post Mewgenics Is a Mischievous Game About Breeding Cats appeared first on New York Times.

Damien O’Brien, 40, and his wife Jessica O’Brien, 41, are additionally facing child abuse and torture charges in the death of their 7-year-old son, Casper — who had never been to school and only ever visited a doctor once.

“On the face of it, this is cruel and extreme suffering from this child caused by the neglect of the parents,” Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton told WJRT of the couple, who also have a 5-year-old daughter.

Police responded to a 911 call for a child in distress at the family’s dilapidated home in Flint Township, Michigan on Nov. 4, 2025.

Casper was rushed to a local hospital where he died a short time later from dilated cardiomyopathy, a disease that leads to heart failure, with a contributing cause being morbid obesity, according to a medical report.

He was 4-feet, 2-inches tall and weighed 255 pounds when he died — far exceeding what the CDC considers a healthy weight for a 7-year-old boy of the same height, which is between 50 and 73 pounds.

“That is obesity. This child did not have a pediatrician, was only taken to the doctor I believe … once,” Leyton told WJRT.

Damien O’Brien has a good job and the family has health insurance.

The morning Casper died, they even called their veterinarian to have their dog treated, Leyton said.

Casper also has a 5-year-old sister who lived at the house, which police described as a hoarding situation.

“None of these kids even existed in the eyes of the government. CPS had never been out there, nobody knew about these kids, they had not been to school,” Leyton said.

“I can’t think of what else this is, other than extraordinary, terrible neglect. And to me, that is willful and wanton misconduct, which is second-degree murder,” he added.

The O’Briens were charged with second-degree murder, child abuse and torture this week.

They are being held at the Genesee County Jail without bond and are due to appear in court next on July 2.

The post Hoarder parents accused of murder, ‘terrible neglect’ of obese son, 7, who died weighing 255 pounds appeared first on New York Post.

She grew up in Los Angeles, the daughter of J.J. Abrams (“Star Wars,” “Lost”) and Katie McGrath, chief executives of Bad Robot Productions. She came of age as an artist in and around an emerging pop creative class that included the producer Blake Slatkin, the Kid Laroi and Tate McRae. Her best friend, Audrey Hobert, is a longtime collaborator who has become an emerging pop star in her own right. And Abrams’s witty and confessional whisper-pop has earned her opening slots for both Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo, the current lodestars of big-tent singer-songwriters.

And yet all of those things, viewed through a different lens, could be perceived as a burden — an invitation to heavy scrutiny of an artist still early in her career development. Such associations and expectations have made Abrams, 26, sometimes reticent to share too much about certain parts of her life, especially as her star rises with viral songs turned radio hits (“That’s So True,” “I Love You, I’m Sorry”), a Grammy-nominated duet with Swift (“Us”) and a 2024 nomination for best new artist.

But something has shifted on her third album, “Daughter From Hell,” out July 17. She confronts, with more directness, where she came from and the disorienting place she’s ended up. “Hit the Wall,” the album’s first single, is about being a burden — “I’m not a problem you can solve,” she sings — while the follow-up, “Look at My Life,” dares to express at least a passing dissatisfaction with the trappings of fame. On the title track, Abrams reckons with her relationship with her mother, and the ways in which she now regards her charmed teenage years warily.

“Just how it is in any household, I think there’s so much going down all the time, you’re sometimes fighting to find your own lane, and for me that included a total rejection of being around my family,” Abrams, the middle child between two brothers, said on Popcast, The New York Times culture chat show. “I would sometimes put myself in positions that were actually unsafe that I think I probably thought I was hiding more successfully than I was.”

Her willingness to engage with family tensions comes alongside a surprise peek into her longtime relationship with the Irish actor Paul Mescal, who co-wrote a song with Abrams for this album. She chose to include the song, “Imaginary Friend,” despite the additional public probing it might invite. Abrams said that “no amount of hate or trolling” could take away “how happy your experience was making something or how much you learned about yourself or your partner.”

In conversation with Popcast’s Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, Abrams discussed shaking off the weight of old associations, navigating the internet as a young star and the things you miss when fame whisks you away.

These are edited excerpts from the conversation, which can be watched in full or listened to below.

JOE COSCARELLI I wanted to start with the title of this album, “Daughter from Hell.” We just met, but you seem like a very polite, well-mannered —

GRACIE ABRAMS [laughs] Yes, I decided to be decent for you all.

COSCARELLI You’ve made a name for yourself, been nominated for some awards. Where does this version of you, as a daughter from hell, stem from?

ABRAMS The title track was written toward the end of the process of making the album. It felt like the first time I was able to write a song — but really, write anything other than a text — apologizing to my mom for being so brutal growing up. Obviously adolescence is tough for the child and for the parent. My mom and I, we earned our relationship we have now for sure. We FaceTime, I call her like six times a day. It just took so long to get to this point and I feel like, as I have grown up, I have luckily had more time to reflect and I owed her a big fat sorry and thank you. It wasn’t always lovely.

CARAMANICA Were you a real hellion as a teenager?

ABRAMS It wasn’t the craziest [expletive] you’ve ever heard, but there was lots of sneaking out. I think I would sometimes put myself in positions that were actually unsafe. If you’re a young kid, especially growing up in L.A., there’s maybe more access to things earlier on where if I put myself in my parents’ position, I would also be scared [expletive] at times, you know? It was just lots of lying.

COSCARELLI We should say, for those who don’t know, your father is the producer J.J. Abrams, for many people associated with “Star Wars,” for me, the creator of “Alias.” Your mother, Katie McGrath, also works with him in entertainment. Did you play them the song — specifically your mom — and what was her reaction?

ABRAMS I did play it for her the night that we made the song. And she did cry, which meant a lot to me. We’ve communicated prior to that song being written — my laundry list of apologies for probably taking years off her life — and I think she received it in the way I hoped she might.

CARAMANICA Were there certain things that you feel could only come out in this format?

ABRAMS I was listening to David Byrne talk about this with Louis Theroux — he was saying that sometimes it’s the music that you hear in the room that makes you recognize a feeling that you have not been looking at that just kind of bubbles out. That was the experience writing that song, and I was really hardcore weeping in a way that I haven’t writing a song in a long time.

There are some descriptors, and I think there’s a softness in that song, in particular. While it is a love letter and a thank-you note, it also presents personal anxieties about never achieving the quality of person that I know my mother to be. And I don’t think I’ve ever said that to her directly before. It was nice to vomit that up.

COSCARELLI This album and the last seem to share this “one foot in adulthood, one foot in where you came from” thing, working on what it means to bloom into your full adult self. Another new song, “Look at My Life,” also has some angst and insecurity. You have this line: “I got what I wanted / it doesn’t sit right.” What is it that you’re still wanting and reaching for that makes it so all you’ve done doesn’t feel like enough?

ABRAMS It doesn’t feel like teenage angst was the place that I wrote that song from. I was in college for one year at Barnard and took a leave of absence and I sometimes — like, there’s so much life and so much beyond my wildest dreams has gone down in the past handful of years that it’s hard for me to wrap my head around. And I also think sometimes about, what learning did I miss out on that might be integral to my development as a person on this planet, not just as a musician, but as a friend and a family member and a — you know, this is corny but — global citizen? Not that college is the place you get everything you need to know, but there was something about that.

There’s like something fishbowl-esque about perception with a platform. That also feels strange as I do grow up. I was a bedroom-dwelling teenager in many ways. I was introverted and there’s something about the amount of energy that it takes — which I love giving — but my social battery drains quicker than other people’s sometimes.

COSCARELLI You grew out of this very vibrant emerging cultural scene in Los Angeles, and then a bit in New York. Your co-writer and longtime friend Audrey Hobert has a career of her own. Your teenage boyfriend, Blake Slatkin, was working for the producer Benny Blanco, and became a hit writer and producer on his own. You were around the Kid Laroi, Addison Rae, Tate McRae. What was it like to be part of this very hungry, very driven ecosystem at such a young age?

ABRAMS It was so cool in real time. When Blake and I met, I was 15 and he was my first collaborator, and he was always as amazing as he is. He was just so committed and so passionate and was Benny’s intern at the time. So it would be like my introduction to Benny’s world and there was this eclectic mix of artists from all different lanes, amazing chefs and sculptors and it was such a crazy thing to see, despite having come from the household that I did.

Nothing, when you’re a kid, is less cool than what your parents are doing. Even if now I can appreciate like, what a gift to have grown up with learning that vocabulary. It was like having this magical door into Narnia. Everyone was there because they loved each other, and everyone just wanted to make things. And then a couple years go by, and it is everyone you just listed really working hard and coming over to the house all the time. That’s what I learned from Blake: just the discipline of the whole thing. I was just so lucky to absorb their grit for it.

I also always felt like a bit of an observer, because even the kind of music that I was writing was like, not as heavy. I really did just feel like, I’ll be here [mimics strumming guitar].

COSCARELLI While they’re making pop smashes.

ABRAMS While they’re making “Stay,” you know what you I mean?

CARAMANICA Did it at least make the whole thing seem plausible? You weren’t strumming your guitar in the back of a two-bedroom apartment in Oklahoma City.

ABRAMS A million percent. I also think that growing up in L.A., period — it’s not a radical concept to pursue the arts as an adult. It was just rich with inspiration, ultimately.

COSCARELLI As much as you’ve benefited from the passionate stan communities of the pop internet, you’ve been on the receiving end of some brutal stuff from them also, whether the “nepo baby” stuff or just cruel memes that don’t account for the idea that there’s a human on the other side. Can you talk about what that feels like, as a young woman, to be pilloried in that way?

ABRAMS Well, I mean, the nepo stuff is obviously in the discourse appropriately.

I think about the privilege there and it’s like, I had a safety net and that allowed me the ability to experiment and to concentrate and I had the gift of time to dedicate to doing this thing I loved. I wasn’t growing up afraid financially and that’s the biggest deal. And then the specific household that I was born into, there is just this vocabulary that I’m so lucky to grow up with. So like, when I see people pointing that out, it’s like, I get it hardcore.

The jokes and things, I understand the tone of the internet.

CARAMANICA Like the “blocking Gracie Abrams” memes.

ABRAMS I’m fascinated these days, there’s just like abject cruelty floating. And I think when people decide to kind of cash in on that, I worry for their hearts. I feel very lucky. I feel support when I’m playing a show, or when I’m with my friends. I have a suspicion that people who either enjoy or just spend their time that way on the internet, the likelihood of them not getting support elsewhere is quite high.

CARAMANICA Comparing the last album to this album, there are two different modes of scathing-ness. There is the mode on this album, which feels a tiny bit more self-lacerating, whereas on the last one, it’s a little more playful, it’s little bouncier. What’s different about your songwriting?

ABRAMS Just a couple more years of living. This is something that has been embarrassing for me — having music exist out in the world forever after you’ve personally moved on from the point of view from which you were writing it. I was, in the past, quite careless about the impact of being on the receiving end of a song being written about you. And I think if you’re not being sensitive or gentle with the people you’re writing about and with that relationship, it can make someone feel terrible. And I have learned that.

I’m all for being direct and coloring with as much detail as possible and being honest — let your experience be your experience — but I do think there’s a way to be kind about it. I think you can be honest and I think you can be kind and I did not believe that, maybe, in the past.

As I am coming into myself, I suppose, I feel like all judgment is a bit of self-projection. On this album, I was careful to try to write from having been both the protagonist and the antagonist in the songs.

Credits

Popcast is hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli and produced by Sophie Erickson and Kate LoPresti. This episode was filmed by Lauren Pruitt, Dave Mayers and Jack Belisle and edited by Mark Zemel with help from Rebecca Blandon. Our theme music is by Elisheba Ittoop. Nick Pitman and Sam Winter are our audio engineers and Amanda Webster is our photo editor. Brooke Minters is our executive producer. Header video cinematography is by Tim Schutsky.

Special thanks to Sarah Bonn, Dahlia Haddad, Mike Cordero, Nicole Huber, Aaron Byrd, Carl Mazurek, Zach Caldwell, Maddy Masiello, Brad Kimbrough, Andrew Wilcox, Sia Michel, Nina Lassam and Sam Dolnick.

The post The Semi-Charmed Life of Gracie Abrams, Pop’s Mischievous Middle Child appeared first on New York Times.

Like human language, birdsong is dynamic. Every avian generation makes choices about which songs to continue singing, which to improve upon and which to drop altogether. A single Bachman’s sparrow might learn only 48 of the songs used by its community, and for decades researchers have been trying to figure out how baby sparrows choose which songs to adopt.

Previous studies have focused on social and cultural factors. During their critical song-learning phase of development, young songbirds imitate the adult males in their group who are successful in courtship or have elaborately ornamented plumage.

Now, a new study of Bachman’s sparrows reveals another possible part of the equation: the physical environment. Trees, dense shrubs and even wind can scatter or block the transmission of some sound waves, and researchers suspect that young sparrows are less likely to latch onto degraded songs, leading in turn to some songs becoming rarer than others.

“The rarer song types don’t propagate quite as well over distance than the common ones do,” said Rindy Anderson, a behavioral ecologist at Florida Atlantic University and an author of the study, which appeared on March 24 in the journal Bioacoustics.

All the Bachman’s sparrow song types have a similar form, with a buzzing or whistling note followed by a trill. Some trills are faster or slower than others, and some complex songs contain trills of several frequencies.

Researchers recorded a variety of rare and common sparrow songs and then rerecorded them playing in different environments — among dense trees, windy plains and other places that Bachman’s sparrows frequent but that could distort audio signals. Under these conditions, the researchers found that rarer songs did not propagate as well as common songs.

Earlier research with other songbirds has found that this sort of degradation can influence which songs birds choose to sing.

“The birds only learned the undegraded songs,” Dr. Anderson said of the previous research. “This is very interesting. This presents this idea of cultural evolution” driven by the environment.

The new finding and past research are in line with the acoustic adaptation hypothesis, which suggests that habitat and climate can shape the way animals vocalize. For instance, monkeys that bellow at low frequencies are more easily heard through the dense rainforest, and the shrill croaks of frogs cut through the sound of running water.

But some studies with other animals have yielded mixed results. For example, a recent study of 5,085 songbird species suggested that the main driver of song variation might be sexual selection. Even in the Bachman’s sparrow, acoustic clarity might not be the main factor determining which songs are passed on to the next generation. “It is one small piece of a big puzzle,” Dr. Anderson said. Social and cultural factors might play just as big a role, she added.

Still, the new result reveals another layer to the transmission of birdsong, and it could help to account for the ever-changing variety of birdsong in the world.

“On the one hand, for a song to be learned, it needs to be perceived, so it is only logical that songs that don’t transmit through the environment effectively should be more rarely learned,” said David Wheatcroft, an ornithologist at Stockholm University in Sweden who was not involved in the new study. “On the other hand, it is surprising to show this in the field, given that there must be so many variables other than degradation that influence song rarity.”

The post How a Bird’s Habitat Can Change Its Song appeared first on New York Times.

Trump, along with his real-estate-buddy-turned-diplomat Steve Witkoff and both his and Witkoff’s sons, launched World Liberty a few months before the 2024 election.

Then, earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that a member of the United Arab Emirates royal family had acquired a 49 percent stake in the company just days before Trump was inaugurated, netting the Trump family at least $187 million.

Now, World Liberty is on the verge of being approved for a national trust bank charter, NOTUS reported last week. If it goes through, the company would be able to issue its USD1 “stablecoin” — a type of cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar — more freely, without having to go through a cryptocurrency exchange. And, of course, the Trump family would receive a cut through transaction fees.

In addition to the straightforward potential for presidential self-enrichment, critics argue that the charter application itself is a conflict of interest; the application is being reviewed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, whose leadership is appointed by the president. (Trump has said he is no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, while Witkoff has divested outright.)

It’s all fairly complex — so to sort through what we know about Trump’s crypto enterprise and where it could be headed next, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Zach Everson of Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization. Everson is research director of the group’s Trump Accountability Project.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Zach, you’ve followed the Trump crypto business. What is happening here?

What we’re seeing here is making what happened in [Trump’s] first term look ethical. There are essentially three steps: First, in September 2024, shortly before the election, the Trumps and the Witkoffs launched World Liberty Financial. Second, they came out with two products for World Liberty Financial: a “stablecoin” and a crypto token.

Now what they need is the banking authority so that they can cut down on the fees that they have to pay outside sources, they can increase the fees that they make, and they can also centralize all regulation under the federal government.

What is the Trump stablecoin and who has invested in it?

USD1 is a stablecoin, which is crypto. It means it is backed one-to-one by reserves. Think of it as a bank loan, only going the opposite way. You are giving money to World Liberty Financial. You’re giving US dollars and they’re giving you this virtual currency. And the whole time that they’re sitting on your US dollars, they’re investing them in Treasuries and they are keeping the interest.

In spring of 2025 it was announced that an investment firm backed by the national security adviser of the UAE had purchased $2 billion of these magic beans using US dollars and was investing them in [the crypto exchange] Binance. It went from nothing to all of a sudden being one of the most popular stablecoins out there, by way of the UAE national security adviser directing this money towards them.

That’s a lot of what this banking trust license would allow them to do. Right now, the reserves have to be held someplace else — they can’t hold their own reserves. Similarly, they can’t issue their own [crypto] coin in the United States. It has to be done elsewhere. If this trust gets approved, which we believe it’s going to be soon, that would allow them to essentially collect more fees in direct transactions and take out some middlemen in transactions they already have going on.

Donald Trump has World Liberty Financial, this token, and he’s got this stablecoin. How would this transition into becoming more of a traditional bank? 

Public Citizen and other groups have long been concerned about regulatory capture. That’s when the lobbyist or the business interests come into government and they take control of the agency that oversees their former employer.

This is regulatory capture to the extreme, where they’re applying for a banking license from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. And that is part of the Treasury, which is under Donald Trump’s administration. So here you have World Liberty Financial to be regulated by an agency of the US government that is under Donald Trump’s control.

And someone who answers to the president of the United States will decide whether his financial firm, World Liberty Financial, gets to have these banking privileges.

Exactly. And another benefit of this that ties into the administration is if this does get approved for this license, it will fall under federal regulators, not state regulators. This puts his World Liberty Financial in the purview of a federal agency, which appears that it would make it a lot harder for states to try to get in there and push back on this.

What are the potential conflicts of interest here?

Everything. Everything. You’ve got an issue where we have a foreign government investing in this. Another firm backed by the UAE’s national security adviser also owns 49 percent of World Liberty Financial, something the American people didn’t find out about until a year after it took place. We heard a lot in the first term about foreign emoluments. There were all sorts of concerns about foreign governments buying rooms and drinks at his hotel holding banquets. 

Here, you’ve got hundreds of millions of dollars going to Donald Trump and his business partners right before he became president. So if you have concerns, as the Constitution does, about the United States president accepting payments from foreign powers, this one seems to be a massive one.

Is there something to “Trump has this long history of grift,” where people just look the other way at this massive grift?

When he first came in and had that DC hotel and the golf clubs, I thought people were like, well, it’s Donald Trump. Of course he’s going to do this sort of stuff. I think that’s the advantage that Donald Trump has long had is that people have known him for decades. And he’s always been like this. So what are you expecting? 

According to Forbes, Eric Trump’s net worth has shot up from $40 million before his dad was elected to $400 million. Donald Trump, Jr. went from $50 million to $300 million. Barron Trump? College student? He’s doing all right. He’s worth about $150 million. These are massive amounts of money. And a lot of that has come through World Liberty Financial.

The post Trump’s plan to run a bank appeared first on Vox.

What began as a localized fight against what critics describe as an alleged land grab has evolved to widespread outrage over potential damage to the region’s protected coastal wildlife, culminating this week with hundreds of thousands of Albanians taking to the streets of Tirana, the capital, to demand the end of the country’s government as they know it. Protesters have sworn to keep going until their demands are met.

Objection to the Trump-Kushner plans began at ground level on May 23, when word got out of a proposed development in the Zvërnec area—some 9 miles away from Sazan—which is affiliated with Kushner’s company Affinity Partners. The plan for Sazan Island was already public, but the Zvërnec project triggered a very different kind of reaction, due to its Vjosa–Narta ecosystem, one of Europe’s last wild coastal systems.

News circulated among the roughly 150 locals that a residential and tourist complex had been proposed. A fence erected around a development site became the immediate trigger for confrontation; dozens of local residents and environmental activists attempted to remove the fence, leading to a clash with private security guards. The incident, filmed and widely circulated online, became the first viral moment of the dispute as people were dragged away—bringing national attention to a project that critics say was previously discussed with limited transparency.

Protests soon spread from the nearby city of Vlorë to Tirana. Within days, solidarity demonstrations were organized in Albanian diaspora communities in Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Greece.

Unlike previous protests in Albania, this one claims no central leadership structure. It is decentralized, with students, activists, urban professionals, and diaspora groups converging around a shared set of grievances. It calls itself the Flamingo Revolution, named after the bird species that inhabits the area’s Narta Lagoon. Flamingo symbols—on banners, clothing, and social media—have become shorthand for resistance against what protesters describe as the privatization of coastal land and public nature.

Protesters are now calling for the resignation of Albania’s prime minister and the repeal of four pieces of legislation many say enable unchecked investment: the so-called “Mountain Package,” legislation for strategic investments, and amendments to the Law on Protected Areas and the Law on Cultural Heritage.

“We are protesting the protection and preservation of the environment, which has been privatized and handed over to oligarchic interests,” activist Entenela Ndrevataj tells WIRED. “This has concentrated the country’s wealth in the hands of a small group.”

Wildlife biologist Melitjan Nezaj argues that the ecological impact on the island could be irreversible. “Three habitat types have already been affected, and further construction would transform many more,” he told WIRED. He highlighted dune systems that take centuries to form. “Any intervention disrupts ecological processes developed over millennia. Thousands of species are affected, including endangered flora and fauna. Waterbirds are especially vulnerable.”

Urban planner Doriana Musai says the issue is not a single project but a systemic pattern. “The problem is the precedent created when protected areas are treated as negotiable territory,” she said. Similar disputes across Albania’s coastline have fueled long-standing frustration over transparency and public access.

The proposed development along Zvërnec’s protected area is described in planning materials as a large multifunctional tourism complex. Available documents suggest a footprint of around 437 hectares, with major construction covering over 250 hectares along a 15-kilometer coastline. Plans reportedly include villas, hotels, apartments, entertainment facilities, and a marina, with buildings ranging from one to eight stories. The protests have also drawn attention to other coastal development plans, including proposals linked to Sazan Island, where investment discussions involving Kushner have sparked debate.

Beyond the environmental concerns, the Sazan project has been accompanied from the start by a notable lack of transparency. Although presented as one of the largest tourism investments in Albania’s history, key documents—including the full investment agreement and the environmental impact assessment—have not been published, while official information has remained partial and often inconsistent.

In recent days, Albania’s Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime (SPAK) has announced probes into several investments in Tirana and along the coast. At least five Albanian shareholders in the ownership structure remain undisclosed, as the shares are arranged in a way that avoids public disclosure requirements, but the Albanian businessmen highlighted in a SPAK investigation are close to political circles and, in some cases, have criminal records.

Reports in Albanian media suggest the development company, Zvërnec South Adriatic Development, is controlled through a network of Dutch-registered entities, while the ultimate owners have not been revealed. The involvement of the Kastrati Group, Albania’s largest privately owned conglomerate, has also been reported, though its exact role is still unclear.

Zvërnec Adriatic South Development, Kastrati Group, and SPAK did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.

The government defends the development strategy as essential for transforming Albania into a high-end Mediterranean tourism destination. Prime Minister Edi Rama has framed such investments as part of long-term economic modernization, arguing they will increase national revenue and international visibility. Rama initially proposed dialog with the protesters, but as resistance grew he abandoned that approach and shifted to discrediting the movement.

“The problem is not the flamingos,” he said in a social media post, describing the protesters. “The problem is that the flamingos refuse to listen to the facts, discuss solutions, and coordinate efforts with institutions and serious sources of expertise in order to protect everything that needs protection while allowing the right project to move forward. In doing so, they become tools of the crows and ravens that surround them.”

Initially, protesters were described in various ways—ranging from accusations of being influenced by foreign interests to being labeled as agents of external powers. Later, criticism extended to international media coverage, and more recently the protests have been framed as driven by influencers and algorithms rather than genuine civic mobilization.

The protests have sparked both hope and anger at the same time, creating a domino effect across several Albanian cities. Inspired by the dismantling of the fence in Zvërnec, citizens have torn down barriers that, in their view, symbolize the abuse of power and the privatization of public spaces. Similar actions have taken place in Rrjoll and Librazhd, and most recently in Kakome Bay on the Albanian Riviera. For nearly two decades, access to the bay had been restricted due to long-standing property disputes, preventing the public from freely reaching one of the country’s most scenic coastal areas.

Rama, in an interview with Albanian media, denied that Ivanka Trump’s remarks about Sazan were accurate or reflective of the actual investment process. Rama defended the proposed developments, dismissing concerns as misunderstandings, and stated that in Albania islands cannot be privately given or taken in secrecy. Protesters are unpersuaded; earlier this week there were calls for a nationwide mobilization of demonstrations to take place this Saturday. They are now demanding a technical government and early elections.

The post Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s Island Resort Could Bring Down Albania’s Prime Minister appeared first on Wired.

Forget about the frozen yogurt craze, and the endless lines that go with its virality. Instead, this is the summer to double down on ice cream at the shops that make the New York City scene so special.

Start with Julia Jeans on the Lower East Side, where classic flavors are made in small batches; or with Biddrina Gelato in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, which just opened a second location at Shaver Hall in Midtown; or with the Ice Cream Window, a seasonal, weekend-only spot in Ridgewood, Queens. It collaborates with Lady Moo Moo, an ice cream maker with two shops in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, to create distinctive offerings like Styrian (pine nuts and pumpkin seed oil) and waldmeister (sweet woodruff).

Go to Mr. Ps Homemade Ice Cream in Flatbush, Brooklyn, for Caribbean flavors like soursop and coconut, or Sundaes Best in Koreatown for brown sugar milk tea gelato and kalamansi sorbet (a kumquat-mandarin hybrid), or Albero dei Gelati in Park Slope for Italian favorites like stracciatella.

Morgenstern’s Finest Ice Cream, a longtime favorite, recently reopened its original store on the Lower East Side. Sugar Hill Creamery has three stores in Harlem, and there’s Caffé Panna in Gramercy Park and the Original Chinatown Ice Cream Factory in Chinatown. Il Laboratorio del Gelato has shops on the Lower East Side and Upper East Side, while Malai’s stores in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, and the West Village are joined this summer by a pop-up at Hudson Yards.

Get Your Kicks

With the FIFA World Cup in full swing, New York City is becoming a soccer paradise: There are fan zones at Brooklyn Bridge Park, Battery Park, Rockefeller Center, the Louis Armstrong Stadium in Queens and Staten Island University Hospital Community Park. And for those who want to play, Street Lab’s Soccer Streets program offers free pickup youth games across the boroughs (see Street Lab’s calendar for locations and times).

Will this be the year that Americans fall in love with Panini? Not the sandwich, but the collectible World Cup stickers that have been a childhood rite of passage across the globe since 1970. This year, Panini has parked a bright yellow truck at the Telemundo Fan Village at Rockefeller Center, where you can buy and trade stickers from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. until July 19. Visit the Panini website for upcoming swap events.

Lincoln Center is getting in on the action with Penalty Flicks (July 9-18), a free outdoor film series at Hearst Plaza. Highlights include the documentary “Pelé” (July 9) and the cult favorite “Shaolin Soccer” (July 16), Stephen Chow’s hilarious kung fu-style film about a hopeless Hong Kong team.

While the eye-watering cost of World Cup tickets puts attending its games out of the reach of most, you’ll find family-friendly prices when the National Women’s Soccer League champions Gotham FC play two matches in July. This is the team’s first regular season in New York City, and it starts with the Queens Classic against the Washington Spirit at Citi Field on July 15. Before the game, there is an afternoon watch party for the World Cup semifinal and a festival with food trucks, caricature artists, a mini pitch and a photo booth. On July 18, the Bats, as the team is known, face the Seattle Reign at the recently upgraded Icahn Stadium on Randall’s Island.

Star-Spangled Spectacles

The tall ships are returning to New York Harbor for the nation’s 250th birthday. The ceremonies begin on July 3 from 1 to 3 p.m. with a procession of Class B ships on the East River. Then on July 4 from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., the Parade of Tall Ships sails from the Verrazzano Bridge up the Hudson River to the George Washington Bridge.

The public can board these ships from July 5 to 7, noon to 6 p.m., at Brooklyn Bridge Park, Sail City (next to the Intrepid Museum), South Street Seaport and Staten Island Waterfront Park. Admission is free, but reservations are recommended.

The 50th edition of the Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks is being staged on the East and Hudson Rivers this year. Prime viewing spots include South Street Seaport, Brooklyn Heights and Jersey City. The festivities start at 8 p.m., with the fireworks expected to begin about an hour later.

Alfresco Movies

On July 2 at around 8 p.m., Wollman Rink presents “Captain America: Brave New World” as part of its free family-friendly movie series, Thursday Movie Nights on the Overlook.

Other series screening free films include Movies Under the Stars, which offers scores of titles like “Wicked: For Good” and “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants” at dozens of city parks through July 31; Movies in the Square on Tuesdays at Domino Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (July 7-Sept. 15); SummerStarz on Fridays at WNYC Transmitter Park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn (July 17-Aug. 14); and Oculus Outdoors on select Thursdays and Fridays in Lower Manhattan (through Sept. 18).

Tennis, Everyone!

One of the highlights of the U.S. Open is Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day, which kicks off the 2026 tournament on Aug. 23. The daylong festival is free — children 18 and under don’t need a ticket, but adults must register for a U.S. Open Fan Access Pass — and features live music, face painting and kid-friendly tennis lessons and drills.

The real thrill is watching the pros get in some practice before the competition begins. As a bonus, the specially priced family meals are back. Costs have yet to be set, but last year they were a reasonable $10.

Island of Fun

Governors Island is one of the city’s great getaways when the weather gets hot and sticky — and The Yard is one of the island’s greatest treasures, an adventure playground that lets young people ages 5 to 19 create their own play space with scraps of wood, pipes, old tires and other castoffs (before entering, you must sign a waiver either on site or online). The 20,000-square-foot area is open every Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

On Aug. 15 from 2 to 8 p.m., the island hosts the House Crawl & Parade. Before participating in this march along the thoroughfares amid former military housing, you can make your own island-inspired costumes, luminaries and puppets with the artist Sally Beauti Twin.

Arts All Around

Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City runs through Aug. 8 and offers dozens of events that include story times, musical performances and workshops like the deep-sea-themed costume-making one on July 10 that is followed by a dance party with the D.J. Miho Hatori of the band Cibo Matto.

In Riverside Park, the Hippo Playground Summer Concert Series returns with performances every Wednesday afternoon at 3:30 from July 22 to Aug. 26.

Take a Dip

New York City’s public swimming pools are open for the season. The newest is the showstopping Gottesman Pool at Harlem Meer, on the northern end of Central Park. The most dramatic is the Floating Pool Lady, a seven-lane pool in a barge that docks at Barretto Point Park in the Bronx. Toddler-friendly pools can be found all over the city, including the recently reopened wading pool at the Asser Levy Playground at East 23rd Street and F.D.R. Drive, and the Mini Pool at Tompkins Square Park in the East Village.

The post 39 Ways to Entertain Your Kids in New York City This Summer appeared first on New York Times.

The burger I get at Petco Park, I explained to the server. She knew exactly what I meant.

“The F— the Dodgers burger,” she said, with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes.

In San Diego, it had been an impish inside joke for years. If you didn’t know what FTD meant on the menu at the Hodad’s stands at Petco Park, the burger — with cheese, onion rings, pickles, mayonnaise and barbecue sauce — still was a good time.

When the Dodgers played here last month, a fan posted a picture of the menu board and explained what FTD stood for. The next day, Jomboy Media did the same, in a post with 1.6 million views.

“When I first saw that,” Hodad’s co-owner Shane Hardin told me, “I thought, ‘Oh, sweet, Jomboy, cool. We’ll get a little bump.’ ”

Then Hardin got a call from Delaware North, the company that handles the San Diego Padres’ concessions. People are talking, Hardin was told.

“And I’m like, ‘Cool, great, let ‘em talk, there’s no profanity anywhere,’ ” Hardin said.

The Padres and Delaware North did not see it that way. “FTD” was stripped from the menu boards at the four Hodad’s stands, initially replaced by the lame quartet of “Foul to Dinger,” “For the Division,” “For the Dugout” and “For the Diegans” and currently replaced by the strained quartet of “For the Dads,” “For the Dub,” “Faithful til Death” and (gulp) “Flyball to Deep.”

The Padres declined comment for this column.

Hardin is more amused than annoyed, particularly given the origin of the FTD Burger. It’s been on Hodad’s Petco Park menu since …

“Was it the 2022 playoffs that the Padres beat the Dodgers?” he asked.

This is how a San Diegan tells time, but yes.

“The Padres hit us up and said, ‘We want a special menu item for the playoffs,’” Hardin said. “We go, ‘OK, without us ever saying what it meant, can we call it the FTD Burger?’ They said, ‘Oh, yeah, ha ha, that’s funny, go for it.’ And so we did.”

The burger has been sold at Petco Park ever since, with the same recipe, despite the online conspiracy theory that its three onion rings represented the Dodgers’ three World Series championship rings this decade.

“Dude, I don’t keep track of what the Dodgers have,” Hardin said. “I really don’t care.”

It is in that spirit that I am stunned the Padres made the change.

The Padres, the team that sells “Beat L.A.” shirts in the team store. The Padres, the team that put up a meme of Clayton Kershaw crying on the video board. The Padres, the team that begged its fans not to sell their tickets to fans of “a team from a little ways up north” and also refused to sell tickets to that 2022 playoff series to anyone in Los Angeles County.

The Padres deserve a ton of credit for breathing life into what now is a feisty rivalry with the Dodgers. It is odd that, all of a sudden, they’re worried about decorum.

“I was under the impression that FTD was just kind of a fun ‘if you know, you know’ sort of thing,” Hardin said. “People will hold up signs saying ‘FTD’ and they’ll get on the JumboTron.

“At the end of the day, Hodad’s is a little rough around the edges. But we’re still a family place.”

Hardin isn’t upset with the Padres. It’s their ballpark, after all, and he enjoys being part of it.

“I love being there,” he said. “The relationship is great, honestly.”

And he had one other thing to say about the demise of the FTD label: “That first homestand after that news broke, we sold 50% more of that burger each game. I’ll take that.”

The Padres might want to reconsider. In baseball, curses are no joking matter, and the Curse of the FTD Burger might now have befallen the team.

When the Dodgers left Petco Park five weeks ago, the Padres were 1½ games behind them. Before the Padres’ next game, the Jomboy post went viral and the “FTD” name vanished.

As the Dodgers return here Friday, the Padres are nine games behind the Dodgers.

The post Did Padres curse themselves by messing with that anti-Dodgers FTD burger? appeared first on Los Angeles Times.