In June 2024, Zoe Kazan boarded a flight to New Zealand. She was excited. For a mother of small children, a quiet solo flight is a vacation unto itself. She scrolled through the in-flight movies. “They had East of Eden, and I was like, ‘I guess the gods are conspiring,’” she says. She pressed play.

Until then she had been avoiding rewatching her grandfather Elia Kazan’s 1955 masterpiece. She was flying halfway across the world to scout locations for her own version of East of Eden, a seven-part adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel that premieres on Netflix on Oct. 1. She hadn’t wanted the film to influence her. But her script, which she’d begun working on in 2020, was finally turned in. 

As the end credits rolled, she sighed in relief. “It was less like the book than I remembered,” she says. The film, which introduced a brooding James Dean to cinema, is more inspired by the novel than a direct adaptation of it: It covers only the last third, crucial characters have been excised, and famous lines are missing. “For me,” says Kazan over cold brew, extra ice on the side, at a Brooklyn cafe on an August morning, “the power of the story is how, over 50 years, it shows history repeating itself—or not.”

Her faithful adaptation covers the entirety of the multi-generational saga, which reimagines the tale of Cain and Abel twice over. Cyrus (Tracy Letts in the new series), a self-mythologizing Civil War veteran, prefers his gentle son Adam (Christopher Abbott) to the violent one, Charles (Mike Faist). A generation later, Adam’s twin sons Aron and Cal (Joe Anders and Joseph Zada) vie for the affection of their emotionally absent father. Kazan wrangles with the novel’s central question: Whether those boys can escape the shadows of their family history and forge their own paths—and whether America, carrying the sins of slavery, campaigns of violence against Native Americans, and racism against immigrants building a future in the West, can do the same. 

Both versions are, in Kazan’s estimation, self-portraits of the artists who made them. Renowned for directing A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront and co-founding the influential Actors Studio from which the school of “method acting” was born, Elia Kazan was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. The Hollywood blacklist was in effect and, Faced with the possibility of never being able to work in Hollywood again, he named names. His granddaughter has never read his autobiography, though she has tried. “There’s some very young part of me that’s like, I still want my grandpa to be my grandpa and not have access to all of this adult stuff,” she says. But she believes that Elia Kazan, who died in 2003 when she was 20, saw himself in the black sheep of the family: “He had this cold and demanding father, and I think he was projecting onto Cal.” Made during a period when the director was facing significant backlash, his version focuses on guilt, rejection, and alienation.

What most intrigued Zoe Kazan, a new mother when she started on the script, were characters her grandfather rewrote or omitted: Cathy (Florence Pugh), a mother who walks out on her infant sons and whom Kazan calls “irredeemable, irresistible, and so full of agency,” and Lee (Hoon Lee), a Chinese American servant who steps in to raise the boys.

Kazan may live closest to Cathy and Lee in her script. But perhaps the reason she was drawn to the project is the notion of living and working in her grandfather’s shadow. One cannot help but draw the parallel between her and the grandchildren in East of Eden, struggling with whether to embrace or break away from a burdensome legacy. “The irony was not lost on me. There’s a literal way that I’m following in my family’s footsteps,” Kazan admits. “I don’t think I’d be doing my job as an artist if I weren’t thinking about my family while making this family story.”

Zoe Kazan was a teenager when she fell hard for Steinbeck. At 15, the Los Angeles native embarked on a Steinbeck-themed road trip up the California coast with her parents, dog-eared East of Eden in hand. Years later, she asked her agents to contact her if anyone purchased the rights. The call came in December 2019, while Kazan was shooting in Australia. She emerged bleary-eyed from a flight back to L.A. with her 15-month-old to pitch her idea to the buyers. “I talked about America and the way that we don’t want to look at our shadow, and how the book argues that embracing your shadow, all of yourself, the good and the bad, is the only way to change,” she says. 

By then she had built a career not just as an actor in The Big Sick and She Said but as a screenwriter with Ruby Sparks, a satirical take on the manic pixie dream girl, and Wildlife, a drama she co-wrote with her partner, Paul Dano. She landed the East of Eden job and spent the next six years in Steinbeck’s world, and much of that time in the head of one of literature’s most complicated female characters, Cathy.

Cathy appears mysteriously on Adam and Charles’ doorstep, badly beaten. From there, she vacillates between a mesmerizing seductress and evil incarnate. She’s a manipulator or a survivor, depending on your perspective. “I don’t think anything in her background excuses her behavior,” says Kazan, laughing. “At the same time, there’s something really compelling about her insistence on her autonomy and selfishness, especially as a woman. I was such a good girl, reading that felt very exciting.”

Cathy became the center of Kazan’s adaptation. Often accused by the narrator of being a liar, Cathy in fact often tells the truth. It’s just not a truth the men around her want to hear. She says she does not want to move to California. She says does not want kids. She says she does not want to stay once Cal and Aron are born. Today’s readers may be appalled by the way she earns her freedom, but we can also sympathize with a woman whose wishes are so blatantly ignored.

Not even Steinbeck could decide. In letters to his editor, “He starts out like, ‘You’ve never read a monster like this,’” says Kazan. “Then he starts referring to her like, ‘I’ll finally get back to my dear Cathy.’ He seems very seduced by her.” Kazan relied heavily on the book to flesh Cathy out. This is not some girlboss version of one of literature’s great antagonists. “I think the text supports my reading,” she says. “I don’t like historical fiction that imposes modern values on the past. I don’t think Cathy is a feminist. I don’t think she cares about other women. I think she cares about herself.”

Pugh was the only actor Kazan named in her script. She’s made an career of morally complex characters in Lady Macbeth, Midsommar, and even the Marvel movies. As Cathy, she’s transfixing. “Florence looks like a doll, but she has this steel rod inside,” says Kazan. “Cathy is all action, like a shark that always has to be moving forward.” 

East of Eden has aged so well in some respects that Kazan might get accused of making modern updates by those who haven’t read the text. After Cathy leaves Adam, the story centers on two men, Adam and Lee, platonically raising a family and navigating the complicated gender-role implications of that arrangement. 

Lee’s parents were brought from China to build the railroads. He spends his life being the smartest man in any room but feigning broken English to make the white men around him comfortable, only revealing his intellect to those he trusts. For a few chapters, Lee departs for San Francisco to pursue the dream of opening his own bookstore. He returns with little to say about what happened while he was gone. "Even though [Steinbeck] imagines things like Lee code-switching, which is such a shocking thing to read in this book from 1952, I felt like it was this mystery of what happens to Lee when he goes away,” says Kazan. “I wanted to give him a little bit more." Kazan brought in the novelist Alexander Chee to build out the scenes for Lee that Steinbeck left off the page. 

She wrote eight episodes, including one exclusively following Lee on his San Francisco excursion. Netflix greenlit seven. "It was the obvious stuff that had to go, partially because it's off the main track of the story, but also because it's all new locations. It would have added a third to our budget,” she says. She had to weave the plot into another episode. “I was so sad to lose that episode, but I do think it's stronger for it, because he's not siloed. He's part of the cohesive story." 

When Adam checks out psychologically for the better part of a decade, Lee raises Cal and Aron, deliberately trying to prevent in this new generation the fractures and violence of the previous one. Steinbeck’s narrator observes Lee’s domestic and emotional work with admiration and grants Lee an unexpected dignity given the time period. The Netflix series doubles down, lingering on Lee’s face to capture a flicker of resigned sorrow at moments when Adam claims ownership over the boys and their accomplishments. 

“A lot of this caretaking, doing the invisible work, my experience of becoming a mother, is embedded in Lee,” Kazan says. But so, too, is she Cathy. “There’s also a part of me, as there is for many mothers, that’s like, ‘I love my children more than anything, and I wish I could disappear.’” 

Early in our nearly two-hour conversation, Kazan asks a server to lower the music so we can dig our teeth into Lee’s famous monologue on timshel, a Hebrew word that translates to “thou mayest” in the Cain and Abel story. It offers Cain and others the choice to triumph over sin. It frees younger generations from repeating the mistakes of their forebears. One can guess why this may ring true for Zoe Kazan. We circle the question of the divide between an artist and their art as ice melts in her cup. I bring up a tweet she wrote over the summer.

When Taylor Swift got married in July and observers clocked the absence of a longtime friend from the wedding, Kazan posted her interpretation of the situation online: "I think she didn't invite her because she has come to the end of her marriage plot, thus cutting off access to her first great subject. Rather than root for her own divorce, she is generating the next chapter of interpersonal drama for herself via female friendship." The tweet read like a literary critic’s interpretation of a pop star’s public art. Swifties called it out of line. Kazan deleted it.

"When an artist makes her personal life the subject of her work, and has her wedding in one of our nation's foremost arenas with billboards outside saying ‘Just Married,’ I don't think it's a personal critique to talk about what they're doing in their personal life," she says. "I am very careful to be kind online. I never say anything mean about anyone's work. So I erased those tweets once I realized how upset people were by it. Should I have known better? Probably. But I had never been on the receiving end of Swifties before, so I didn't know." 

I have spent much of the interview trying to divine how much of East of Eden is an extension of Kazan herself—she cites the timshel passage when referring to her relationship with her family’s legacy. Viewers familiar with her history may theorize about her connection to the material in the same way that Kazan offered up a theory about Swift. “[Swift] puts the names of her exes in her liner notes. There's a way that she has made her private life incredibly public and explicit,” she says. “The overlap with my personal history in this was all very conscious, and made more conscious the longer I worked on it. But it’s not the explicit subject of it.” 

She hopes the story opens doors inside viewers, the way it did for her. “I think we have tendencies as humans to feel the weight of our nation’s original sins, or our family’s original sins, that they are so shameful and heavy that anything good we do is going to be insignificant,” she says. “And then I think we have this other, very Trumpian impulse, of whitewashing the past. I think the thing the book is arguing for, and that I find very moving, is this idea that we actually have to carry both things. The weight of our original sins, and the idea that we are not defined by them.”

In an early scene of the exquisitely devastating miniseries Trespasses, two strangers in a pub ruminate on the relationship between art and pain. Cushla (Lola Petticrew), a schoolteacher taking a shift behind her family’s bar, admits she couldn’t finish reading A Clockwork Orange; the knowledge that the novel’s author, Anthony Burgess, was inspired by soldiers’ savage attack on his wife disturbed her too much. “He turned his suffering into art,” protests her customer, Michael (Tom Cullen). “I’d rather have the art without the suffering,” she retorts. “I’m sure his wife would, too.” Michael isn’t quite swayed. “Can you have one without the other?” he wonders.

Such beer-in-hand debates are as old as public drunkenness, but the conversation takes on new layers as the Troubles rage and Cushla and Michael’s romance blossoms in mid-1970s Belfast. She’s an empathetic Catholic, caring for a hypercritical mom (Gillian Anderson’s Gina) who has been lost in alcoholism since the death of her saintly husband and trying to help a young student who’s being bullied by the religious school’s leaders as well as his peers about his own parents’ “mixed” marriage. A Protestant barrister who speaks out against brutality by loyalist police, Michael has made fierce enemies on both sides of the conflict. All around the nascent couple is evidence that their love is doomed. Yet, like so many star-crossed lovers of fiction, they are drawn together by a force stronger than the ones pushing them apart. Whether you see their story, which debuted on Channel 4 in the UK and will premiere Sept. 20 on PBS, as a triumph or as a tragedy will depend on whose view of suffering you find most convincing.

Adapted by Ailbhe Keogan (Bad Sisters) from Louise Kennedy’s celebrated 2022 novel, Trespasses defies Romeo and Juliet cliché through specificity. It is a profound geopolitical injustice that the past few generations of Westerners mostly know war, even when it’s initiated by our own governments, as a misfortune that befalls people thousands of miles away, in dusty deserts and steaming jungles. Keogan subverts that notion, depicting Belfast as a war zone with violence at every doorstep and hatred festering on every corner. Everyone knows which side their neighbors are on—and surveils them, consciously or not, to make sure they stay on it.   

The characters are no mere victims of circumstance. Petticrew, fresh off a thrillingly dark turn in Furious and returning to the place and era of her breakthrough role in the IRA drama Say Nothing, gives us a protagonist who is as bright and stubborn as she is compassionate. You can see why she’d fall for an older, more mature man over the boyish types who clumsily court her. Cullen makes his character irresistible—a crusader who voices unpopular truths, warning law enforcement that their cruelty only mints new IRA recruits. He’s not a pure hero, though. He faces his minefield of a life by compartmentalizing; Cushla knows he’s married, but his infidelity is not up for discussion. The slumped and slurring Gina seems, at first, to be the kind of messy grande dame Anderson has taken to playing in recent years, with mixed results. But even this broad matriarch deepens, and the performance hits subtler notes, in later episodes.      

Just about every character surprises us, at least once, for good or ill. That complexity serves a thematic purpose as well as a narrative one. War flattens the enemy to slurs and stereotypes. Fighting for humanity means insisting upon individual identity; it means believing a Catholic and a Protestant in ’70s Belfast might belong together. “We must find the bravery to choose freedom over fear,” Michael proclaims in one of his righteous moments. “We cannot let the old bigots and the boys with guns tell us how to live.” For a couple on opposite sides of a war that allows for no gray area, this may be a suicidal ideology. But even if art is possible in the absence of suffering, love never comes without the risk of heartbreak. Whether it justifies that pain, Trespasses suggests, is a question too fraught and personal to be resolved by any glib barroom debate.

At a time when companies are racing to deliver commercial fusion energy and promising a new generation of geothermal wells across the U.S., three-wheel electric vehicles may not seem like the most exciting clean energy technology. But in India, three-wheel vehicles are an essential part of daily transportation and account for up to a quarter of motorized trips in many cities.

The majority of new full-size passenger auto rickshaws sold in India are now electric, according to registration data, a striking milestone given that 10 years ago they were barely off the ground. Initially, scaling took a mix of policy, infrastructure build out, and innovative financing; now, the market has taken on a life of its own. “Once you cross 50%, electric becomes the dominant technology,” says Suman Mishra, the CEO of Mahindra Last Mile Mobility, a key player in the market.

The development underscores an idea that is gaining currency in some climate circles: sometimes technologies that matter most are not the futuristic breakthroughs waiting to scale but the familiar ones where adoption begins to reinforce itself.

That shift sits at the heart of a new framework the Earthshot Prize is using this year to evaluate climate solutions. Rather than simply picking the climate solution with the most impressive technology, the judges looked for ways to recognize and advance “positive tipping points” that will unlock transformative changes beyond any individual company or project. “We know exactly the things that we’re looking for to try to tip these global systems in the right direction,” says Jason Knauf, CEO of the Earthshot Prize.

The pattern is visible across the finalist list. Mahindra Last Mile Mobility, one of this year’s Earthshot finalists announced on Sept. 18, has not just built affordable electric three-wheelers but also helped facilitate the infrastructure and policy necessary for them to take off. Another finalist, the Zero Emission Maritime Buyers Alliance, or ZEMBA for short, has sought to coordinate demand for low-carbon shipping fuel from customers that ship goods. And Yellowstone to Yukon restores habitat corridors across North America, which then unlocks feedbacks that restore the underlying ecological ecosystem.

The concept of climate tipping points entered the vernacular nearly two decades ago to describe some of the most alarming risks posed by climate change. At the time, tipping points referred to the thresholds that, when crossed, would trigger a chain reaction of often irreversible damage—think of Antarctic ice sheet collapse leading to sea level rise or the destruction of the Amazon releasing stored carbon dioxide.

More recently, scientists have sought to reframe tipping points, showing that positive developments can have tipping points, too. Cheap energy leads to a rewiring of economies. Social movements unlock widespread policy changes. “The tipping point is where you have strong amplification within the system,” says Tim Lenton, a professor of the University of Exeter who has written seminal papers on the tipping points concept.

The reframe comes at an important moment for the climate narrative. With increasingly bleak climate news, positive tipping points offer grounded optimism about how things may change. That was a key logic for Earthshot’s embrace of tipping points.

“We don’t think you can just leave people with the negatives and the warnings,” says Knauf. “We think we have a responsibility to show them” where positive action is possible.

But the positive tipping point framework is also useful from a capital allocation perspective. As companies cut costs and governments look for ways to trim public spending, tipping points offer a way to identify what Lenton describes as the best “bang for your buck” for climate investment dollars.

In some cases, that means supporting initiatives outside the typical wheelhouse of climate technology startups. ZEMBA, for example, works with the customers who would like to reduce their shipping footprint with low-carbon fuel but cannot afford to do so on their own, thereby helping create a demand signal. That’s a coordinated effort that competitors rarely engage in. “Once those markets are spinning, we will fade into the mist,” says Ingrid Irigoyen, the organization’s CEO.

Such an approach makes sense for governments evaluating how they spend their public dollars. It also makes sense for pension funds and institutional investors concerned with the long-term economic implications of climate change. With relatively few dollars, certain investments will generate a long-tail of positive climate outcomes.

In a future world where climate impact is an important investment metric, tipping points may be a useful tool. For those interested, the Earthshot finalists may offer a useful place to start.

Recently, the world has collectively mourned the unexpected losses of several well-known public figures, from Dolly Parton and Gloria Steinem to Bob Mackie and Tim Curry. Their deaths have hit fans, followers, and industry colleagues hard, and their tributes are going viral online. 

Although these celebrities primarily appear to us on screen or on stage, many people feel as though they know them personally because of the meaningful impact they’ve had on their lives. These are known as parasocial relationships or “nonreciprocal social-emotional connections” with public figures and celebrities, per the journal of Current Opinion in Psychology.

When a public figure or celebrity dies, we grieve collectively. According to Gina Moffa, grief therapist and author of the book, Moving on Doesn’t Mean Letting Go, this happens when a large group of people mourns at the same time. “This can be felt even if they never knew the person or community, or weren’t directly affected by the event,” says Moffa. And it isn’t limited to the passing of public figures and celebrities. Many people also experienced shared loss after 9/11, Sandy Hook, COVID-19, and the Nepal floods.

In this current cultural moment, we’re seeing collective grief intersect with a psychological phenomenon called parasocial grief. According to psychotherapist and NYU adjunct professor Olivia Verhulst, this can occur when there’s a one-sided sense of familiarity with a public figure after they die. “Relationships don’t need to be reciprocal for feelings to be real,” Verhulst says. “Loss brings up a lot for all of us no matter what form it takes, whether it’s shock, disbelief, or confrontation with our own mortality.”

A small study in 2025 from the journal Acta Psychologica found that parasocial grief can negatively impact mental health and can lead to unhealthy coping mechanisms like substance use. 

In comparison with individual grief, shared bereavement is more diffuse. “It doesn’t have the built-in rituals we rely on, like experiences of a funeral and traditional closure,” Moffa explains. Therefore, when celebrities or public figures die, it’s now common practice to post online and engage in comments sections with other grievers. In this way, the comment sections become public memorials. 

After Steinem’s passing, people expressed their gratitude and heartbreak by leaving flowers and cards outside her home. When Parton died, fans held up their iPhones with the flashlight on during Harry Styles concert at Madison Square Garden while her song, “I Will Always Love You,” played. Both of these in-person tributes circulated on social media and were widely shared.

Verhulst argues that the most significant difference in mutual sorrow is its “being witnessed” and it can offer more validation than individualized grief. “Given that human beings are fundamentally wired for connection, this broader sense of communal loss can feel comforting in many ways,” she says. 

Shared bereavement isn’t a new idea; it dates back for centuries. Some of the most visible representations in recent decades have been the outpouring of support after the deaths of President John F. Kennedy, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Princess Diana. At her funeral, there were an estimated one million people in-person and roughly 2.5 billion viewers who watched it on television. 

Society often pushes individual grievers to move on from their losses, rushing them to heal before they’re ready, which can lead to more people struggling alone. But in our current culture, shared bereavement has become more widely accepted. “Social media has become a kind of ‘modern funeral,’ a space where people can come together online, without the barriers of physical geography getting in the way,” Moffa says. “For a lot of people, it’s become the primary place mourning happens now.” 

Research has found grieving together is more beneficial than doing it without help. A meta-review from 2022 in the journal Frontiers in Psychology discusses the theory of collective effervescence, a phrase coined by sociologist Émilie Durkheim, as it relates to mourning practices, public memorials, and communal storytelling like after the loss of a public figure. This “intense state of shared emotional activation and sense of unity” can help people feel connected in the long term to others who understand their pain.  

“When Steinem and Parton passed within days of each other, comment sections turned into genuine gathering places, telling each other how these women shaped their lives. It made the feeling less isolating and more like something they were carrying alongside a whole community instead of alone,” Moffa says. 

Working with a therapist, especially for cognitive behavioral therapy, can also be effective. Treatment can give people a safe space to talk about discomfort and divulge feelings of loss over someone they didn’t know personally, with validation and without shame. It can provide more insight into a person’s emotional state, to see if there’s any unresolved or prolonged grief.

Integration is another useful method. Moffa suggests creating a small ritual in honor of that person, like playing their music, reading their books, or rewatching a favorite video clip. Then, write down what that person meant to you, rather than what they meant to the world, and talk about it with someone. “This can provide validation and connection, instead of having to carry it alone,” she adds. In fact, a recent study from the Death Studies journal in 2026 found sharing emotions, ceremonies, and rituals offer “sense making, solidarity and healing” in shared mourning. 

While these are effective ways to navigate the pain, they aren’t the only ones. It’s key to adapt them to meet your needs and determine what works for you. 

Verhulst noted there’s an outdated idea that grief occurs in fixed stages which is somehow linear. But, she says, there are truly no universal stages to heal from loss and no right way to grieve. 

Sometimes, the best way to mourn is together.

The U.S. may have committed war crimes when its strikes allegedly hit an elementary school and a sports facility in Iran, according to a United Nations report publicly released on Thursday.

The U.N.’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran said it found “reasonable grounds to believe that the United States committed a war crime by launching indiscriminate attacks that killed or injured civilians or damaged civilian objects.”

The U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on Feb. 28, triggering a war that has stretched into its seventh month. Among those attacks, the mission identified U.S. Tomahawk missile strikes that hit Tree of Tayyiba Elementary School in Minab, killing more than 150 people, including 120 children, and an alleged U.S. missile strike that dispersed tens of thousands of tungsten pellets over a sports complex and residential area in Lamerd, killing 22 civilians. (The U.S. denied carrying out any strike within the vicinity of Lamerd on Feb. 28.)

Both civilian facilities were “clearly identifiable,” the report said.

“The U.S.’s failure to update information in relation to the school in its targeting databases and to verify that the building was a military objective before launching the attack went beyond mere negligence,” the report said. “Rather, the U.S. directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen.”

The mission is expected to present its findings, which also conclude that Iranian authorities likely committed crimes against humanity during their deadly crackdown on protesters in December and January, to the U.N. Human Rights Council on Monday.

“People in Iran are caught between intensified repression and violence by their government and renewed armed conflict and insecurity resulting from the hostilities between Iran and the U.S and Israel,” the report said.

The war has produced a significant civilian toll, with at least 2,100 people killed across the region by late April. In Iran, human rights groups estimate that more than 1,700 civilians were killed by the end of April, including more than 1,000 civilians who were killed in the first five days of the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign. That includes hundreds of women and children, dozens of health care workers, and at least nine journalists. Iranian authorities reported another 18 deaths from U.S. strikes on Sept. 1, which included several civilians. Israel’s strikes on Lebanon have also killed more than 4,300 people and displaced more than one million since early March, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

U.S. conduct in its war against Iran has come under growing scrutiny. On Sept. 1, an apparent U.S. strike hit a wedding celebration in Kuhestak, killing five people and wounding more than 60. Washington has not accepted responsibility, although it launched an internal probe into the strike. An analysis by Reuters indicated that the damage was likely caused by a direct hit from a U.S. munition.

The U.S. also carried out strikes on bridges and electrical infrastructure in Iran in July, after President Donald Trump repeatedly threatened attacks on Iranian bridges and power plants. In March, Trump threatened to “blow up” Iran’s desalination plants if Tehran did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a move that legal experts said could violate international law. He also warned in April that a “whole civilization will die tonight” unless Iran acquiesced to U.S. demands. Israel’s bombing of Iranian fuel depots, which shrouded Tehran in plumes of toxic black smoke, also raised warnings of potentially decades-long harm to public health.

The State Department told the Associated Press that it did not consider the latest U.N. report credible. The Trump Administration withdrew from the Human Rights Council, which comprises 47 countries, in February 2025, over its “anti-American rhetoric and antisemitism,” the department said.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told news outlets the Human Rights Council has “accomplished nothing for human rights while spouting unserious nonsense for decades.”

“The only party in this conflict that has committed war crimes is the Iranian regime, which has murdered thousands of its own people, killed Americans overseas, executed acts of terrorism in the Strait of Hormuz, and launched indiscriminate attacks against its neighbors in the region,” Kelly said.

What the U.S. has said about the strikes

In March, the Pentagon launched a formal command investigation into the Minab school strike following a preliminary review. It has not released its preliminary findings, although a U.S. official told the Associated Press that the strike was likely the result of outdated target coordinates supplied by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The school was adjacent to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps complex, but satellite imagery showed the school had been separated from the compound in 2016. It had been publicly listed as a girls’ elementary school for years.

Members of Congress have also questioned whether the Pentagon used artificial intelligence tools to identify the school as a target. No publicly disclosed evidence has established that an AI model independently selected the school as a target.

In June, Trump said the incident was still under investigation. “Nobody did that on purpose,” he told reporters at a press conference in France.

The Pentagon told Reuters on Thursday that the investigation is ongoing.

The U.S. was also accused of carrying out strikes with precision missiles that scattered clouds of tungsten pellets in the city of Lamerd, which the U.N. report also mentioned.

On March 28, BBC Verify reported that weapons experts had identified the type of missile used in Lamerd from video footage as a probable U.S.-made Precision Strike Missile (PrSM). A visual analysis by the New York Times also indicated the same type of missile.

A review by the conflict monitor Airwars last month mapped three apparent missile detonations over a sports complex and two residential neighborhoods in Lamerd. Weapons experts told AP that the missiles appeared to be PrSMs and were unlikely to have been fired by Iran or Israel.

On March 31, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) refuted claims that the U.S. struck Lamerd and said U.S. forces did not launch strikes in Lamerd or within 30 miles of the city on Feb. 28.

CENTCOM said that the missile visible in video footage was too long to be a PrSM, and suggested it was instead an Iranian Hoveyzeh cruise missile.

“U.S. forces do not target civilians, unlike the Iranian regime which has attacked civilian locations in neighboring countries more than 300 times,” CENTCOM said on March 31. No formal investigation into the alleged strike has been announced since.

In May, CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper told Congress that the military was investigating only one case involving possible U.S.-caused civilian deaths: the Minab school strike.

Iran may have committed crimes against humanity in deadly crackdown

The mission also found grounds to believe that the Iranian government committed crimes against humanity during their “violent” crackdown on mass protests beginning late December. Iranian security forces killed 3,038 people and injured 25,000, according to official counts, although the report said the toll is likely higher. At least 221 children, including two two-year-olds, were killed in the crackdown, the report said, citing a human rights organization.

The government arbitrarily detained tens of thousands of people, some of whom were subjected to torture, solitary confinement and denial of legal advice, the report said.

Security forces also attacked health care facilities, arresting wounded protesters and health care workers, the report said.

The mission said at least 29 men were executed, five publicly, in connection with the protests following summary trial. More than 70 people, including five women and three children, are at “imminent risk” of execution, the report said.

Iran has not publicly commented on the report.

In January, Iranian protesters urged Trump to make good on his promise that “help is on its way.” Trump said he was considering military action, although he ultimately declined to launch a strike at the time, and called on demonstrators to continue standing up to the theocratic regime.

In recent weeks, amid renewed U.S.-Iran hostilities, Trump has again urged the Iranian public to resist their government, asking “When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?”

South Korea this week announced that it plans to approve abortion medication, with restrictions, for the first time in a nation that used to have one of the strictest policies against abortion among developed countries.

Government officials are looking to authorize such medication seven years after the country’s Constitutional Court ruled a longstanding ban on most abortions unconstitutional. While abortion was decriminalized, the South Korean parliament has yet to enact new regulations.

President Lee Jae-myung recognized this legal vacuum on social media and said the government’s decision to introduce abortion drugs in phases can improve protections for women who need access to medically safe procedures.

“During that time, women have been unable to obtain safe abortion drugs and have had to rely on overseas direct purchases or illegal transactions, taking risks in the process,” Lee said Thursday. “Even while fixing a leaking roof, the floor gets wet. I believe that doing what we can now, rather than waiting for a perfect solution, is a slightly better decision.”

Won Min-kyong, Minister of Gender Equality and Family, said Wednesday that under the proposal, women up to nine weeks pregnant could acquire the drug with a prescription and only through hospitals or clinics. The first rollout, starting in the first quarter of 2027, will span at least two years, and Won added that they will use this period to monitor for safety issues or side effects.

“We expect this to serve as an opportunity to strengthen the policy foundation for overall women’s health, including pregnancy, childbirth, and contraception,” Won said.

Before the 2019 ruling, abortion was strictly banned save for a few exceptions, including for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. Estimates from South Korea’s Institute for Health and Social Affairs suggest that the number of abortions in the country had fallen from an estimated 241,411 in 2008 to just 32,063 in 2020, the last year for which statistics are available. In 2011, the health ministry director at the time attributed the downward trend to “a combination of factors including easier accessibility and use of contraceptives, broadening anti-abortion campaigns, and an improved social environment for childbirth and childcare.”

Prime Minister Han Seong-sook responded to critics and conservatives who are against the abortion medication plan, saying the government is also taking “concerns regarding the value of life” seriously. “This measure is aimed at protecting the people’s health rather than encouraging abortion,” Han said. 

What drug will be used?

The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety has been reviewing an application for approving the import of a drug combination of mifepristone and misoprostol—the most common regimen for abortion medication in the U.S. 

Misoprostol and its combination with mifepristone are included on the World Health Organization’s Model List of Essential Medicines and are used for the management of medical abortion. Mifepristone blocks progesterone, the hormone that keeps pregnancies going, while misoprostol, taken 24 to 48 hours later, empties the uterus. But misoprostol is also used to treat stomach ulcers.

The WHO has recommended that women less than 12 weeks pregnant could use the drug combination to induce abortions. But South Korean officials said that the limit was set to 9 weeks since the product seeking approval in the country was tested on women that long into their pregnancies.

How is abortion medication used globally?

France and China became the first countries to approve mifepristone in 1988. 

According to the WHO’s Global Abortion Policies Database, 84 nations have country-recognized approval of mifepristone or a mix of mifepristone and misoprostol, which means that the drug is either included on the national Essential Medicines List or any other official national list. Of the 84, 32 are in Europe, 23 in Africa, and 18 in Asia. However, dispensing regulations and prescription requirements widely vary.

The database also lists that 123 nations have country-recognized approval of misoprostol, with 41 in Africa, 28 in Asia, and 23 in Europe. Some countries, however, have only approved misoprostol for non-gynecological use. 

The U.S. approved mifepristone in 2000. In the U.S., medication abortions accounted for 63% of abortions in states without total abortion bans in 2023, according to the sexual health research and advocacy organization Guttmacher Institute, with higher proportions recorded in rural states like Wyoming (95%) and Montana (84%). As of August, 28 states have policies restricting access to medication abortion.

What have been the reactions in South Korea?

The Korea Women’s Political Network welcomed the plan, saying in a Wednesday statement that it was “a significant step forward in that it establishes an institutional foundation to enable women seeking abortions to access safe and verified medical services, amidst the legislative and institutional vacuum.”

But the women’s advocacy group also raised several concerns about the plan, such as the prescription requirement. It said that requiring a prescription and dispensing only in hospitals and clinics “excessively restricts women’s access to medication” and could act as a barrier for those having difficulty accessing ob-gyn services. It also urged increasing the covered period up to 10 weeks into a woman’s pregnancy. Most women find out they’re pregnant around the four-week mark or later.

The Catholic Bishops' Conference of Korea, meanwhile, said the government should move away from expanding access to abortion pills and instead build “a roadmap of support to help women in crisis not give up on life.”

Representatives of South Korea’s medical community called for protections for medical professionals who could “risk criminal punishment” for administering abortion medication or for refusing to administer it, given the lack of legislation around abortion’s legality. 

“Our organization is not opposed to the introduction itself in principle (of Mifepristone),” the Korean Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said in its statement. “We will not accept any introduction that does not guarantee patient safety and the legal protection of medical professionals.” 

The Trump Administration announced this week that it plans to shift tens of millions in military aid from countries in Europe and the Middle East to nations in Latin America with right-leaning governments. 

A State Department official confirms to TIME that the department notified Congress that $52 million in foreign military funding for Iraq, North Macedonia, Slovakia, and Tunisia will be diverted to Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Peru, and that the funds will be used to “combat narcoterrorism in our own backyard and help continue to secure the Panama Canal.” The department did not specify how much military funding the U.S. will continue to provide those Middle Eastern and European nations following the shift.

“The proposed reprogramming in the Western Hemisphere will reduce opportunities for adversaries to establish or sustain strategic footholds in our hemisphere,” the State Department official says.

The reallocation of military funding reflects a broader shift in the U.S.’s priorities when it comes to foreign policy. Since Trump’s return to office last year, his Administration has worked to buttress the U.S.'s presence in the Western Hemisphere in the name of curbing drug trafficking from Central and South America and squashing the influence of other nations, such as China, in the region. 

The Trump Administration has also sought to recalibrate its foreign policy regarding the Middle East and Europe. A national security strategy laid out by the White House at the end of last year stated that the Administration intended to take a more hands-off approach to armed conflict in those regions and allow them to become more militarily self-reliant. The diversion of foreign military aid marks the latest in several moves Trump has made to cut U.S. troops and funding in Europe during his second term—though in the Middle East, his war in Iran has engaged the U.S. in months of conflict.

Read More: The U.S. Military Drawdown in Europe Has Only Just Begun

Experts warn that the shift in military funding—and the broader plans of realigning U.S. foreign policy it fits into—threatens to weaken the country’s alliances around the world over the long term.

“You're eroding silently, quietly, bit by bit, this trust in the United States,” Jim Townsend, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy for eight years in the Obama Administration, tells TIME of the Administration diverting military funding from European and Middle Eastern countries. “And then when we need them to do something … well, you're turning to a weaker country because you have been pulling their assistance and all of these tools that we have to make them a stronger ally.”

And the Trump Administration’s increasing support for conservative-led nations in the Americas carries its own risks, contends Rebecca Bill Chavez, who served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Western Hemisphere Affairs in the Obama Administration.

“U.S. security relations, these are some things you build over time, and if they start to become relationships only with particular governments rather than with countries, that's risky,” she says. “We have to show the region that we are a reliable partner. And one of the best ways to do this is to be consistent.”

How—and why—the Trump Administration is ramping up U.S. military involvement in the Western Hemisphere

During Trump’s second term his Administration has increased military funding to Latin American countries, as well as boosting the U.S.’s own military presence in the region.

The U.S. has also conducted a number of military operations in the region since Trump returned to the White House, including a series of lethal attacks on what federal officials claimed were vessels transporting narcotics to the U.S. from the Caribbean that have drawn blowback from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in Washington. The Trump Administration has also partnered with Ecuador for a joint military operation targeting “narco-terrorists” in the South American country, while announcing plans for further campaigns of the same kind in other nations in the region. 

And in January, the U.S. launched a military operation in Venezuela that resulted in the capture of the country’s then-leader Nicolas Maduro, who had previously been indicted in the U.S. on charges of drug trafficking and corruption. After the operation, Trump pledged that “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

These moves reflect what the President has referred to as the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine or, later, as the “Donroe Doctrine,” a revival of a 19th century foreign policy framework first articulated by former President James Monroe that was used to justify assertions of U.S. military and economic control in Latin America. 

Read More: The 200-Year-Old Foreign Policy Vision Underlying Trump’s ‘Donroe Doctrine’

“Reinvigorated by my Trump Corollary, the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well—and American leadership is coming roaring back stronger than ever before,” Trump said in a December proclamation. 

A national security strategy released by the White House in November detailed that “Trump Corollary” in effect as an assertion that the U.S. must be “preeminent in the Western Hemisphere … a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.”

“We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States; we want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations; we want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations,” the strategy document reads.

The strategy described the Administration’s plans to back like-minded leaders in the Western Hemisphere as well, stating that it would “reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy.” 

Read More: Trump’s National Security Strategy Sparks European Backlash Over ‘Far-Right’ Rhetoric. Here’s What It Says

Experts warn about the potential consequences of shifting military aid

Townsend warns that reducing military funding for European and Middle Eastern countries will weaken their ability to collaborate with and support the U.S.

“It creates allies who are not as strong as they could have been,” Townsend says. “It creates allies who are not as helpful as they could have been, and they're creating allies that are not as integrated and as pro-U.S. as they could have been.”

This is especially true, he asserts, for members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which include North Macedonia and Slovakia. Trump has repeatedly clashed with the U.S.’s NATO allies during his second term, going so far as to threaten to pull out of the military pact after several other member countries declined to help the U.S. in its ongoing war against Iran.

Foreign military financing (FMF) allows other governments to purchase U.S. military equipment and carry out military trainings in tandem with the U.S. Without it, countries may be left unable to purchase key defensive equipment, such as drones or aircrafts, Townsend explains, which in turn weakens U.S. military alliances in the region. 

Chavez meanwhile tells TIME that many Latin America nations could benefit greatly from U.S. military support, but argues that selecting who receives that support based on political ideology isn’t sustainable for U.S. relations in the region.

“All of this raises the question whether U.S. security assistance is increasingly being tied to the political orientation of a president rather than to long-term relationships with countries and institutions, and there's a risk there,” Chavez says.

Townsend contends that there is also risk in supplying military equipment to Latin American governments which could use it for ill. 

“In the past, the trouble has come when we've been feeding money to a regime that ends up killing the opposition,” he says. “It's been a very spotty record in terms of assistance that we give to countries in the Caribbean or in Central America, Latin America, where this money ends up going to the wrong people.”

Rep. María Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican up for re-election in November, released an ad on Thursday in which she criticized President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, just months after he endorsed her campaign.

“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Salazar said in the ad. “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

"You can be for immigration what Lincoln was for slavery and Reagan was for communism," she continued. "I’m not talking about giving them amnesty. I’m talking about giving them a dignified life in this promised land. And only you can do that.”

The video marked a stunning break from the President who backed Salazar’s re-election bid earlier this year. In February, Trump said in a Truth Social post that the Congresswoman was “doing a truly fantastic job representing the wonderful people of Florida’s 27th Congressional District!” and that she “knows the Wisdom and Courage required to confront the Corrupt Fake News.” He said that she had his “Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election” before telling voters that Salazar “WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”

Salazar joins a growing number of Republicans who have publicly pushed back on Trump’s policies. 

Trump has railed against other members of his party who have broken with him, going so far as to endorse several of their challengers in the primaries. The President endorsed Ed Gallrein, for instance, who ultimately defeated Rep. Thomas Massie in the May Republican primary for the Kentucky Congressman’s seat, after Massie broke with Trump on various issues, including objecting to the “One Big Beautiful Bill” and leading the effort to push the Department of Justice to release the so-called “Epstein files.”

Salazar’s campaign said that the video released on Thursday is the first of multiple ads that it plans to run before the upcoming midterm elections, in which Salazar is facing off against Democratic nominee Eliott Rodríguez. Both Salazar and Rodríguez are Cuban American, and previously worked as journalists. 

Rodríguez criticized Salazar for the ad in a video that he shared on social media on Thursday, claiming that she had "desperately sought Donald Trump's endorsement" but was now speaking out "because [Trump's] immigration policy is political poison in her re-election campaign." Rodríguez went on to accuse his Republican opponent of being a "pathetic rubber stamp for Donald Trump."

"María Elvira Salazar did this—make no mistake about it," Rodríguez said. "She owns all of these deportations, ICE harassment, family separations, and racial profiling. She voted for it. She gave Donald Trump the money and the tools to do it. Now, just 47 days before the midterm election, she is trying to convince voters that she disagrees with Trump's inhumane practices on undocumented people with no criminal record."

The Cook Political Report indicates that Salazar, a three-term Congresswoman, is expected to hold on to her seat come November, rating it as “Likely Republican.”

In the district Salazar represents, the foreign-born population makes up more than 54% of the total population—one of the largest proportions of all the districts in the lower chamber.

Thursday’s ad isn’t the first time that Salazar has expressed concerns about the Trump Administration’s immigration enforcement efforts. Earlier this week, she responded to reports that Luis Galeano, an exiled Nicaraguan journalist whose U.S. asylum application has been pending for years, had been detained by federal immigration agents.

“America must always know the difference between a criminal and a political exile,” Salazar said in a statement shared on social media. “Luis is a respected journalist who paid a price for telling the truth about the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship. The regime persecuted him, forced him into exile, and stripped him of his citizenship. That history matters. He cannot be sent back into the hands of the people who targeted him.”

“I have been clear with the Administration: enforce the law and deport dangerous individuals, but do not treat political exiles like criminals,” she continued.

Salazar has also been backing a bipartisan measure in the House that would grant immigrants who don’t have a criminal history a route to secure legal status in the U.S., but not a pathway to citizenship.

Following a string of high-profile police shootings of Black men 10 years ago, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began protesting such incidents by sitting during the national anthem at preseason games. What began as a quiet action turned into a fevered national debate about freedom of expression, patriotism, and so much more. 

In Kaepernick’s new memoir, The Perilous Fight, the quarterback explains that his action was spontaneous. He wasn’t even in uniform on August 13, 2016, the first time he sat during the anthem. “I hadn’t given the anthem a second’s thought before I walked out onto the field that day, but it hit me in that moment that I should find a seat,” Kaepernick writes. “I didn’t want to stand up while that song was playing. Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white person in 1955. Muhammad Ali wouldn’t step forward when his name was called by the draft board for the Vietnam War in Louisville in 1967. Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black-gloved fists in the air during the playing of the anthem at the 1968 Olympics. They didn’t like what they saw, the way this nation touted its commitment to justice and at the same time showed little interest in it, and they took action. Those inspiring Americans had the courage of their convictions and literally changed the world in the process.”

Kaepernick, despite leading the 49ers to the Super Bowl in 2013 and throwing 16 touchdown passes, against just four interceptions, for a bad 49ers team in 2016, hasn’t played in the NFL since that season. In 2019, he and former teammate Eric Reid, who joined Kaepernick in kneeling during the anthem, settled a collusion lawsuit against the NFL. In late August, a decade after he etched his name in history, Kaepernick sat down with TIME to talk about why he hasn’t spoken up much about his protests, his relationship with the anthem today, his differences with Jay-Z, and the state of policing in the United States. 

(This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity) 

You’ve released a book, The Perilous Fight. Why tell your story now?

One, it's 10 years since the protest. I've gotten so many questions about why did I protest, what happened, what led up to it, the details behind the scenes of all of the moments. Not just the protest, but owners in the NFL, the conversations that were happening there, the workout in 2019 and all the things that transpired around that. Then also just the work that we're doing directly in the communities. It felt like it was a great time to be able to go out, answer some of those questions, and also be able to give insight into how we build, how we move forward together. I think it’s especially critical in a moment like this.

The book starts with a harrowing incident of racial hostility involving the N word that you experienced as a child—one you weren’t comfortable sharing with your parents, who adopted you and are white. Why start there?

One of the reasons we wanted to start with that moment of going through the neighborhood, being tied to a rose tree, and the dynamic of not feeling comfortable telling my parents is it really sets the stage for the rest of the book, and sets the stage for the rest of my life. I had to navigate the realities that you face when you are Black in predominantly white spaces. I had so many questions around, “You lived a privileged life. Everything was all good. Middle-class white family. What are you upset about?” And from the outside looking in, I understand how it can look that way. But also the reality of the experience, and what I went through, is also something that's important to put in context. 

You didn't really do any interviews during the heat of 2016 and 2017, and in the aftermath. What was your thinking on not doing these types of interviews then?

Yeah, it's interesting because I get both sides of that question. During the 2016 season, it was like, "Why are you talking so much? Be quiet.” As an NFL quarterback, you're required to speak three times a week. So reporters can ask you whatever they would like. I'm happy to answer any questions as part of that. But post that moment, one thing I realized was, it felt like there was a very, very intentional effort to make me the sole figure, or the sole voice, of the movement. I thought it was important to create space for other voices to be able to step up. And one of the reasons that I thought that approach was so important is looking back historically, yes, we need strong leaders, but we need strong people collectively. That's actually what allows us to be able to sustain over time. Also, as part of that, I thought it was very important as they were very intentional attacks to try to discredit me, discredit what I was capable of on the field, discredit my character. In those efforts of trying to discredit me, they were also trying to discredit the broader movement.

If there's one athlete who has stepped up in the way that you wanted, who would that be?

I think there are voices across the board that have stepped up. I would say my brother Eric Reid. I'm always going to bring him up. Love Eric. He continued the protest after I was blackballed. He himself went through the same reality. His final season, [he] went out, set two franchise records, was cut, and never saw the field again. We had voices throughout the NBA step up. Whether that was LeBron, we saw Steph Curry, we saw Carmelo, we saw KD, all stepping to the forefront. We saw this with Megan Rapinoe, doing that on an international stage. We’re seeing it to this day throughout Europe. I would not have had the insight that this would have had the lasting impact internationally the way it does, and that's just within the sports realm. More broadly, what I think it’s done is created opportunities, whether it is on a national stage, international stage, or within local communities. People saying, "Oh, this actually opened the door for me to be able to do the work in a way I previously wasn't able to.”

In 2016, when you first started sitting, and then kneeling, during the national anthem, you’re in this national spotlight and firestorm. Was there one surreal moment you experienced that we didn’t see during this time? 

One surreal moment early on, we had a high school, Castlemont in Oakland. After I took a knee, they went out the next week and took a knee, and I went to go visit them the following week at their game. I had a moment where I was in the locker room with them before the game. They're hyping each other up. It's going to be a big game for them. And one of the players says, "We don't get to eat at home. So we're going to go eat on this field.”

That is too often a reality within communities. Not only navigating threats against their life, but navigating whether or not they're even going to have a meal. For me, that was such a surreal moment that athletes in high school and students in high school are going out, trying to chase their dreams and compete at the highest level. They are willing to stand up and risk themselves to go out and advocate for their community, while at the same time not knowing whether or not they're going to have a meal when they get home. That really encapsulated and painted a surreal picture of how dire this is. While the broader national conversation was happening, this is just the reality on the ground. 

Were you physically or psychologically threatened while protesting? 

Threats became so normalized that I didn't really think about them too much. You get attacked from the President of the United States. You're getting attacked from senators. You have people trying to send bombs to your home. Online threats and mail threats. My now wife Nessa, as I was getting these threats, was like, “You can't be staying at your house alone.” She was in New York at the time. But that ultimately led to me staying at [manager Tony Ng’s] house for the rest of that 2016 season, just so people didn't know where I was at. 

Were you ever scared? 

No. I also think you get a little bit of the football mentality. If someone is going to try to do something, they’re either going to try to do it or aren't. My responsibility is to be prepared for whatever that is. 

Did you ever worry that what happened to you served as a warning to other athletes? That as a result of you not playing in the NFL anymore, they were quiet rather than speaking up?

Absolutely. I know the intention was to send that message: If you try to advocate for the Black community, if you try to fight against the status quo and create a different and better environment, we will take everything we can from you. And this actually showed up in one of our Know Your Rights camps in Las Vegas. One of our young high school students pulled me aside in the middle of the camp. “Hey, I really love football. I also really want to fight for my community and for that to be better. Which one do you think I should choose?” 

The fact that they have made that a conversation, that people feel like they have to choose, that is the very thing that I have to continue to fight against. I don't think there is an either-or. We can be phenomenal at our profession. We also can advocate for our community and a better society, better conditions for our people. 

In the last nine years of NFL exile, did deciding to stand for the anthem in order to get signed ever cross your mind?

No. 

Why not? 

Because I set out with a clear goal and clear objective, and the conditions in our society have not changed. There's been progress made in some areas, but holistically, when we look at the climate and environment that we are living in today, those conditions largely have not changed. There is never going to be a moment where I take a position of, “Hey, I'll stand up so I can get my career back.” Because that then becomes a moral concession: If you threaten my career, or if you threaten my money, I will actually say I don't care about the people, and I will look at this just from an individual perspective. That was a line I was not going to cross.

In the book, you detail conversations you had with a few teams around the league. Which team did you feel closest to signing with?  

There were three teams that I thought were close. The first was the Seattle Seahawks. In 2017, flew up there, met with Pete Carroll, John Schneider, the head coach and GM of the Seahawks. When I got there, basically the conversation was, “We know you're a starting quarterback.” I didn't do a

workout while I was there. They're like, “We know you can play. We've game-planned for you the last few years. That's not a question for us.” The entire conversation while I was there was just around my politics, taking the knee, how I thought about policing, how I thought about the military, what their community would think, what potential players would think. 

In retrospect, it was fascinating to me on a few different fronts. One, the NFL claims it’s a meritocracy. So walking in a building and telling me you know I'm a starter, and not walking out with an offer makes that fall flat on its face. The second part is I just think about it from a labor-laws perspective. Being the owner of a business, a company, I would never be able to ask those questions and get away with it. 

They didn't sign me that year. Reached back out the following year to have me come in for a workout. Had booked the flight, was ready to go out there, and prior to getting on the flight, they called my agent. Said, "Well, before he comes out to work out, will he commit to not taking a knee?” I said no. I won't commit to that. Canceled the flight. Canceled the workout. Never heard from them again. [A spokesperson for the Seahawks did not respond to TIME’s request for comment.] 

The second one was the Ravens, and this one came about because we played against the Ravens in the Super Bowl. Jim Harbaugh was my coach during that time. His brother John Harbaugh was head coach of the Ravens, and I reached out to Jim and wanted to get his perspective. “Is there anyone that you know that would be interested? Do you think your brother would be open to a call?” John was on board and was like, "Yeah, let's do it.” John went back, advocated for it, wanted to sign me. “It got shut down from above me. I don't have the power to just outright make that decision. But if it was my choice, you would be here.” [A Ravens representative referred TIME to a 2017 quote from Baltimore general manager Ozzie Newsome—now an executive vice president with the team—who said, “(Ravens owner) Steve Bisciotti has not told us we cannot sign Colin Kaepernick, nor has he blocked the move. Whoever is making those claims is wrong.”]

Then the third one was the Raiders in 2022. Had run into [Raiders owner] Mark Davis at an airport. This was actually the first time I had been face-to-face with one of the owners blackballing me. It was a very interesting conversation because it was almost disconnected from the reality of what was going on. Saw me and was like, "Hey, what's up? How are you doing? What you been up to?” I was like, "What? What are you talking about? I've been trying to play, and you've been keeping me out.”  

That led to a follow-up conversation about me trying to play. He came and sat in my living room, and we talked about playing for the Raiders. That led to a workout with the Raiders and Josh McDaniels. Workout went great. Josh McDaniels, after the fact, was like, “He looked bigger, stronger, faster than last time saw you.” Mark Davis came in the room after. “So proud of you. That was great workout.” One of the scouts on the way back said, “I'm surprised they let you walk out of the building without signing you. That’s the best workout we've had in years from a quarterback.” Never heard from him again. [The Raiders declined to comment.]

When Jim, who coached Michigan to the 2023 national title, got the job with the Los Angeles Chargers in ‘24, did you reach out to him? Was there any conversation there?

Yeah.

What happened? 

He told me that was a table he was not willing to stand on. It was disappointing because prior to that he had been advocating for me. Said I should be a starter. I can help a team win championships. Had a conversation with him and said, "Look, I don't even care what the role is. Like I know Justin Herbert's there. I know the reality of what you have to navigate as a head coach. Let me take the No. 2 spot then. Let me come in, just show you, show everyone else what I can do.” Wouldn't do it. No opportunity, no workout. 

Has that affected your relationship with him?

Yeah. And I'll say, also in part because there was a conversation that was put out that he had offered me a coaching job, which just wasn't true. I don't know where and why that came out. That's made the relationship a little bit different since. [When asked to respond to Kaepernick’s comments to TIME about joining the Chargers as a player or coach, Harbaugh, through a Chargers spokesperson, pointed to a 2024 press conference, in which he said he “pulsed” Kaepernick’s interest in coaching.]

Why are you confident that you are ready to be an NFL quarterback right

now?

Because I train for it. I rely on my training and preparation for any moment. I've grown confident in my ability to continue to stay ready because I've shown that the training works, and I've shown that I've been able to go out and perform. 

What’s your relationship with the national anthem today? When you go to sporting events, what do you do?

I don't go out for the Star-Spangled Banner. I’m either seated where I'm at, or I'm not out there at all, and then show up when it's time for the actual game to come on.

Your daughter is 4. When this time is right, what will you say to her about the national anthem? 

This is actually a funny and timely question. We just went through the process of moving. We're putting some of the artwork up and pictures up. We have the TIME cover framed. I don't like having any of my stuff in rooms that I'm in. Feels weird to me. But my wife wants to have stuff up. And my daughter found it, and she grabbed it and was like, "Oh, this is going to my room.” But she was like, “Baba, why are you taking a knee like this?” She's showing me how I'm taking a knee. Not a conversation I was expecting to be having at 3 ½  years old.

What did you say to her about it? 

“Well, Baba was protesting to try to create a better life for everyone. Thought all people should be able to be successful and have good lives and be treated fairly.” 

What are you going to tell her when she asks about why you stopped playing in the NFL? 

It's going to be an honest conversation, in part because I also know I have to prepare her for the reality that she's going to walk into rooms and they're going to see her last name is Kaepernick. She's going to get asked questions and she's going to have to have to navigate things that she never asked for. Part of my responsibility as a father is making sure that she's prepared and equipped for that.

Going back to your early life a bit – you credit your parents with raising you and having your back. But there were many moments where they weren't as sensitive to your racial experience and awakenings as you would have liked. You make that very clear in the book and don't spare your feelings about it. Have your mom and dad read the book?

They have not read it yet.

How do you anticipate they'll react to it? 

There's moments that they just don't know about. It is also something that, for me, in thinking about a white couple born and raised in Wisconsin, adopting a young Black boy, it is very difficult for them to understand the reality of what that's going to be for me growing up. As far as raising me on strong fundamentals and morals, teaching me to work hard, teaching me to treat people well regardless of what their position or status may be in life, all of those things they did extremely well. But when it comes to understanding being Black, being a Black man, what that means, navigating society, that part largely didn't exist. That's where a lot of the conflicts come in around culture, around perception, around who I actually was. I knew they always loved me as their son. I don't know if they always loved my Blackness. And I think that's an interesting nuance to be able to navigate.

How would you characterize your relationship with them now?

I think we're in a good place. My daughter loves calling them during dinner. That is part of her routine now. They come out, they visit. But there is still some of the complexities there.

At several points in the book, you talk about the business of the NFL in the same breath as slavery. Of being photographed in compression shorts at the draft combine, you write, “My mind immediately went to the scenes I had witnessed in numerous movies depicting slave auction blocks.” You also write, “I fully believe what happened to me was a form of buck breaking. That's a slave term to describe how masters used to whip and sexually abuse enslaved men in front of a crowd to dehumanize them and warn other slaves that they better not step out of line. I was made into a warning to other NFL players and professional athletes: You better not challenge the league's authority.” Were you ever worried that people might be offended by that?

No. I know people would take things in the context that they want to. But the parallels between the two are undeniable. Bill Rhoden wrote a whole book around it, Forty Million Dollar Slaves. This came up for Curt Flood when he was fighting for free agency for professional players. "Well, you're making $90,000 a year, Curt Flood. How can you compare this to slavery?” And I believe his quote around that was, "A well-paid slave is a slave nonetheless,” or something to that effect. Which speaks more to the institutions and practices around how you are treating people and the process that they're going through, and the systems that they have to navigate, as opposed to just taking something in isolation. 

Two news stories weren't addressed in the book. One is your decision to wear socks depicting police as cartoon pigs in 2016, before you took your public stance. That offended law enforcement personnel, and police unions in particular. Why don't you, or why do you, regret that specific decision?

When I wore those socks, we were seeing police killing Black people with impunity across the country. This is something that has systemically been in place. It came out of slave patrols, built into modern-day policing. Now, policing in the U.S. exists in a way that we don't see in other areas throughout the world, so to me, that was sending a message around the inhumane practices that police were practicing. 

It seemed to have an effect where some people would never forgive you after that. But you knew that was a risk?

The same people who are offended, in a way that, “hey, we're never going to forgive you for that,” why are you so remorseful for police killing Black people? Why are you so accepting of that? A pair of socks is so offensive to you, but the killing of a human life you're OK with. So, if we're really going to have a conversation around it, let's actually put it in contrast to the conversations that we're having. I'm going to choose valuing human life in every instance.

The other story is the shelving of the ESPN documentary about you, directed by Spike Lee. About a year ago, ESPN said in a statement that “ESPN, Colin Kaepernick and Spike Lee have collectively decided to no longer proceed with this project as a result of certain creative differences.” What were those creative differences?

We had approved for the documentary to go out, and that was not something that fit within their timeline. So the documentary is finished. It's ready to go. We're looking for potential partners to be able to place it.

Why didn't ESPN want it?

It's a great question. I know they have shifting priorities, as we're seeing publicly right now. We also know they were, I believe, at that point in time in the midst of negotiating their deal with the NFL. So I can't say that those things are connected. But I believe they’re all factors. [An ESPN spokesperson sent TIME a statement: “Two years ago, the three parties involved in this project came to a mutual decision, based on creative differences, not to move forward. Creative differences are not uncommon when several entities collaborate on a project of this kind. Because multiple parties were involved, we are limited in what we can share publicly. This is not new as the decision not to move forward was agreed upon Monday, July 29th 2024. We are grateful for the work that went into it.”]

In a recent interview, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seemed to agree with the sentiment that “Woke 1.0 was crazy.” She was referring to the period, after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, where there were calls, for example, to defund the police. You wrote in a 2020 essay “in order to eradicate anti-Blackness, we must also abolish the police. The abolition of one without the other is impossible.” What is your response to AOC's characterization and other political characterizations that sentiments like you expressed went too far?

I understand the political realities that politicians are navigating. I'm not naive to that. I also think the reality is, if we are trying to create better communities that allow us to thrive, our resources shouldn't be going towards policing. They should be going towards resources that allow the community to thrive. When you invest in communities, they get safer. People do better. Crime rates drop. I would not discredit the work that was done around the country during 2020, because that has laid the foundation for the movement that we're seeing now. We're seeing a different wave of politicians show up: “Am I providing direct benefit to the people that I'm serving?” I think that is the most important priority to be able to keep in mind. 

Do you still support abolishing policing?

Yes. I think that's the work that we should be doing. Reallocating those resources to directly benefit communities and give them the resources that they need to be able to thrive.

You write in the book about how, in 2016, you met with your San Francisco 49ers teammates to explain in more detail why you were protesting during the anthem. You write: "I told my teammates how law enforcement in this country has always been an enemy of Black people.” In 2026, do you still feel that law enforcement in this country is an enemy of Black people?

The institution has not changed. It still exists in the same form it did in 2016. We're still seeing the same issues come out of it. We're still seeing that fuel and funnel into the prison industrial complex. So until those systems are dismantled and those resources are allocated to benefit communities, the institutions are serving the purpose that they were laid out to do. 

How would you characterize how Donald Trump has treated you? 

At least to my knowledge, that was the first time I had seen a President use their position and political power to target an individual citizen. And I think that laid the foundation and set the stage for a lot of what we are seeing now. And in many ways, I feel like that was an initial test to see how far things could go. I obviously do not agree with his political views or approach. I do not believe that the work he is doing is actually to benefit people other than himself.

The NFL has reported giving more than $450 million to grassroots organizations to benefit communities in need. Do you see that as a sincere response to your protest or a PR play?

I view that as a PR play. There was a player-owners meeting. Bob McNair, who was the owner of the Texans at the time, said, "You need to tell your compadres to stop that other business,” meaning the protests. Bob Kraft was in that meeting and said, "We need to talk about the elephant in the room and ending the protests.” And Terry Pegula, the owner of the Bills, just said explicitly, “We need a Black face to be at the forefront of this to help us stop this.” If it was actually to try to create change and benefit Black communities, the NFL's response holistically from the start would have looked drastically different. I would have a job. Eric Reid would have a job. The other players that were targeted throughout that process wouldn't have had to navigate that.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell admitted, in 2020, that the league was wrong for not listening more closely to the message and meaning behind protests like yours. He encouraged a team to sign you. Do you forgive him?

No, because he's still taking those actions to this day. That they have not changed their practices. The NFL just went through navigating race-norming, where they were assessing that the baseline intelligence or cognitive abilities of Black players was lower than white players, so that they could deny them medical benefits after playing in the NFL. It’s important to put it into broader context. This isn't a practice that just exists in relation to me and the protest. [The NFL declined to comment.] 

The book details your relationship with Jay-Z, whose company, Roc Nation, partnered with the NFL in 2019 to consult on Super Bowl halftime entertainment and other performances and initiatives. Jay-Z recently brought you up in a rap lyric at Yankee Stadium, saying, “Buddy took a check, I ain’t even mad at him, but along with that check you gotta sign a non-disparagement. I’m the one they can’t control.” How would you characterize how Jay-Z has communicated with you, and used you or brought you up?

The fact that seven years after him cutting a deal to undermine the protest, unprompted, [he] brings me up, sounds like a guilty conscience to me. I would also say, just to make very clear, the distinction here. One, I did not sign a non-disparagement. But the second part of this is these are very different situations. He's trying to create a false equivalency around being blackballed by the NFL and having to go through the grievance process, the legal process that's already laid out by the collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and the players’ union–going through that process, and then reaching a settlement at the end of it, because that is your path towards reconciliation, is very different than cutting a deal with the NFL to create personal benefit and undermine the protests. Trying to conflate the two is very disingenuous. [A representative for Roc Nation and Jay-Z did not respond to TIME’s request for comment.]

Are you surprised that DEI is under fire? 

I'm not surprised it's being attacked by this Administration. What I am surprised by is the capitulation by corporations, by organizations to go along with it. What I've seen is when you show weakness, that you'll bow down to them, that you'll capitulate to them, they're going to try to take that further and further. 

Did you make any mistakes over the past 10 years? 

One that I think about a good amount is, I had intentionally taken an approach of I'm going to do my best to not call out or attack people who I disagree with. I did not want to create an environment or narrative that was centered around Black people fighting and distracting from the intention of the protest. Even with Jay-Z, I didn't go out and do interviews around that. I believe people will see the work, and my hope is in seeing the work, people will look at and say, "Oh, that's how it should be done.” But I don't know if that created additional space for people to take the narrative in places that shouldn't have gone. It's one of those things that I'm very mindful of as I move forward. 

President Donald Trump on Thursday pulled his nomination of former Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper Lance Schroyer to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky blocked Schroyer’s confirmation hearing, stalling the process from moving forward. 

Trump tapped Schroyer to be the next ICE director in June, calling him a “PATRIOT with real operational experience, and proven leader with DECADES of experience locking up the worst of the worst,” and saying that he would play a “vital role” in the Administration’s immigration crackdown. 

The President did not provide an explanation for his decision to withdraw the nomination. The White House did not immediately respond to TIME’s request for more information.

Schroyer’s pick was somewhat of a surprise, given that he has no experience leading a law enforcement agency. He is close to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, whose department houses ICE; Schroyer previously served on Mullin’s security detail, and the Secretary later made him a senior DHS advisor. 

Schroyer also helped lead the Oklahoma Highway Patrol’s efforts to train troopers and enforce an immigration crackdown in conjunction with ICE in his state, and was deputized to make federal immigration enforcement arrests last year.  

Mullin and Trump both urged Congress to swiftly confirm Schroyer following his nomination.

"Lance is coming straight from the operational field where he ran large scale operations and worked alongside state and federal partners to remove illegal aliens from Oklahoma," Mullin said at the time, adding that Trump “made a great pick.”

But Paul, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said in August that he would delay a confirmation hearing for Schroyer until DHS provided further information regarding the investigations into the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis earlier this year, a major flashpoint in Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown.

Read More: On Thin ICE in Minneapolis: How Trump's Immigration Crackdown Sparked a Crisis of Trust

ICE has not had a Senate-confirmed leader since 2017. Schroyer’s nomination followed former acting ICE Director Todd Lyon’s departure from the agency at the end of May. Long-time immigration official David Venturella has headed ICE, also in an acting capacity, since June 1.

“Americans are calling on ICE to deescalate its immigration enforcement tactics, and the Administration needs to nominate someone who will right the ship, provide transparency, and restore the accountability Americans expect from law enforcement,” Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said in a statement, in which he called on Paul to bring Mullin and Venturella before the committee. 

“Despite the public's urging,” Peters added, “we now have an agency that has been engaging in increasingly questionable and escalatory behavior and refuses to be transparent and accountable to the American people.”

Smoking is one of the biggest contributors to lung cancer, but anywhere from 10-20% of cases in the U.S. each year are diagnosed in people who never smoked. In a new study published in Science, researchers report that for some of those cases, an inherited genetic mutation might be involved.

Scientists co-led by Dr. Jaclyn LoPiccolo, an attending physician and lung-cancer researcher at Dana Farber Cancer Institute, found that people with a mutation in the EGFR gene had a 25-fold higher risk of developing lung cancer compared to people without the mutation, regardless of whether they smoked. When the researchers looked just at nonsmokers, the risk was even higher: carriers of the mutation had a 60-fold higher risk compared to nonsmokers who didn't have the mutation. Since nonsmokers have a lower chance of developing lung cancer than smokers, this jump in risk reflects how strongly this genetic mutation might impact risk, LoPiccolo says.

The findings add to growing knowledge about what is driving lung cancer in people who don’t smoke. A handful of genetic mutations have been linked to lung cancer in nonsmokers, including some that appear to be more prevalent in Asian people who get lung cancer, as well as inherited mutations like BRCA2, but they aren't well understood. While the specific EGFR mutation in question, called T790M, was first discovered in a European family in 2005 with members who hadn't smoked but had developed lung cancer, it wasn’t clear how much the mutation, which is rare, actually contributed to lung cancer.

LoPiccolo and her team used a large data set of genetic samples from the 23andMe Research Institute to determine how much of an impact the mutation has on lung cancer. “While we knew that T790M was associated with lung cancer, we didn’t have a population large enough to determine how common the variant was, how strong its effect, and how the risk varies in different groups,” says LoPiccolo. “This mutation is so rare that we weren’t able to get population-level risk estimates without the size of a database like that from 23andMe.” About one in 15,000 people in the U.S. carry the mutation, but rates are higher—about one in 2,000—in Southern Appalachia, where scientists believe the first carrier brought the mutation to the U.S. from England or Ireland more than 200 years ago.

The findings open to door to considering how genetic testing might fit into lung-cancer screening. Currently, screening—in which people receive a low-dose radiation CT scan to look for lung cancer—is only recommended for people with a heavy smoking history who are above a certain age. “I do think that understanding your risk of lung cancer, especially from a genetic perspective, along with your exposures to things like radon and other environmental factors, would be really valuable,” says Nadia Litterman, executive director of the Susan Wojcicki Foundation, which funded the Lung Cancer Genetics Study that provided data for the analysis. (Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube, never smoked, yet she died of lung cancer in 2024.) “That’s the world we are trying to work toward, and this is a major step toward that.”

Litterman points to BRCA genetic testing for breast cancer as a potential model for lung cancer. “The lung-cancer guidelines are not quite there yet, but it’s a pretty clear path of what it could look like for people who are carriers of this mutation,” she says. “They could be screened on a more regular basis, and if they develop cancer, and it’s caught early, they would have a much better trajectory than if they didn’t know about [their genetic] risk.”

That’s what patients like Frank McKenna are counting on. A personal trainer in Virginia Beach, McKenna was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2016, despite never smoking or working in areas where he might have been exposed to environmental risk factors like radon. “I was shocked when I was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer after the only symptom I had was a little cough,” the 66 year old says. His doctor ordered a genetic test of fluid drained from his lung and learned he carried the EGFT T790M mutation. A biopsy from his lung lesion confirmed the mutation, and he started on a targeted therapy, which he continues today, designed to specifically neutralize his mutation. “When I started that targeted therapy, which is a pill I take once a day, within a couple of days, I could feel a difference,” he says. “I had lost weight, and there was cancer in various parts of my body, including in my bones, where it had spread. But I could feel my life coming back.”

A few months later, his daughter, who is now 33, was diagnosed with melanoma in her ear and was asked about her family history of cancer. She joined a study and provided samples to look for markers of cancer, and while she did not carry many common cancer mutations, she did carry T790M. But for now, there are no evidence-based recommendations to follow when it comes to how she should be monitoring her lungs for signs of cancer. “That’s why I’m pushing for how we can screen younger people, knowing that she has a genetic risk, and what low-dose screening she should get," says McKenna. "If something were to appear, she can catch it at an early stage, perhaps Stage I, and not go through Stage IV, because there are not as many options, and the outlook is not as positive.”

LoPiccolo is conducting a study, called INHERIT, which includes people from across the country with any inherited genetic risk for lung cancer, including the EGFR T790M mutation. Doctors will work with each participant to understand their family history of lung cancer, smoking history, genetic profile, and any environmental exposures that might contribute to lung cancer before coming up with a personalized plan for how often they should be screened with low-dose CT scans to look for cancer. “The goal is to use CT screening to detect lung cancer at the earliest, most curable stage when it can be removed or cured,” says LoPiccolo.

Such data will be critical to changing lung-cancer screening guidelines and providing families like the McKennas more peace of mind that they are giving themselves the best chance of conquering cancer. “I have scans every six to seven months,” says McKenna. “Because when you read any research on targeted therapies, one of the first things they say is that cancer will find a way to overcome the therapy. Fortunately, my last scan a few weeks ago was still clear, but what if you could catch the cancer early with screening often enough so it’s much easier to treat?"

Correction, Sept. 17

The original version of the story misstates the funder of the study. The study was funded by a group of philanthropic organizations and a government grant, not the Susan Wojcicki Foundation, which funded the Lung Cancer Genetics Study, which provided data included in the study.

After she was acquitted for the murders of both of her parents, Lizzie Borden did not adopt a pseudonym and disappear into obscurity. Instead, she spent her ample inheritance (equivalent to about $10 million dollars today) exactly as she’d always wanted to before her parents’ untimely demise: On an imposing 4,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom Queen Anne Victorian mansion in the swankiest neighborhood of her hometown of Fall River, Mass. She named her new abode “Maplecroft.”

Borden—the subject of the latest installment of Ryan Murphy’s Netflix Monster anthology, which has previously dramatized the stories of Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein—lived out the rest of her life at Maplecroft and died there almost exactly 100 years ago. The home’s a mere mile from the so-called murder house where Andrew and Abby Borden were famously axed to death in August 1892, when Lizzie was 32 years old. Some 50,000 true-crime fanatics flock annually to the macabre site (now a museum and bed and breakfast), but few know to trek up “The Hill,” as Fall River locals call it, for a glimpse of Borden’s other home. Now, as then, it’s a private residence whose owners would prefer looky-loos walk on.

Current owners Brooke and Michael Doherty bought the notorious property in 2021, reluctantly. “When Michael first showed me the house, I said I didn’t want to live in the house of a hatchet murderer,” admits Brooke, whose family previously lived 20 minutes away in a home they were quickly outgrowing. Maplecroft offered plenty of indoor and outdoor space, but with three young children in tow, they worried about unwanted publicity, strangers peeking through windows, and even ghosts haunting the halls. 

But it was those hallways—and the grand and back staircases, six carved fireplaces, original crown molding, Tiffany sconces, and stained glass windows throughout—that kept the Dohertys returning to the French Street home. “Soon enough I was convinced I could absolutely live in this old Victorian house that was basically a museum,” says Michael. When the previous owner’s plans to turn Maplecroft into a bed and breakfast fell through during the pandemic, the asking price lowered to $800,000 and the Dohertys made a successful (undisclosed) offer.  

Borden moved in just three months after a jury of 12 men freed her from the 9-by-7-ft. cell at the county jail, having decided a mere woman couldn’t possibly have committed the murders. Her new digs were upgraded spectacularly from the much humbler home that was the scene of the infamous crime: Maplecroft was completely modern (in 1893, at least) and comparatively luxurious, with electricity, running hot and cold water, and flush toilets in all of its three-and-a-half bathrooms. Borden would later own one of the first automobiles in town, a black Ford Model T fittingly nicknamed the “Tin Lizzie,” which she stored in her carriage house—now Brooke’s art studio—with a private gas pump and customized turntable; America’s most notorious alleged murderer, it seems, couldn’t reverse park. 

Fabulous real estate aside, popular culture paints post-trial Borden as a lonely outcast who was shunned by her neighbors and taunted by local kids who threw rotten eggs. But that’s not quite true: Borden lived at Maplecroft, for a time, with her sister Emma, nine years her elder, and their many pets—three Boston Bull Terriers and a black cat named Daisy. She had few if any friends among the townspeople, who had come to a slow acceptance, despite the jury’s verdict, that their Sunday School teacher had almost certainly committed the gruesome crime. Borden rarely ventured out except to go to the theater, where she could sit unnoticed in the darkness, and in 1904 the spinster fell into and found camaraderie with an inarguably more interesting bunch: the roving and booming Massachusetts theater community, including famous starlet Nance O’Neil, with whom Borden developed a close friendship.

Since she was shunned anyhow, Borden had slowly stopped complying with rigid social rules and norms. She didn’t attend church and quit her previously prominent role in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Both disapproved whole-heartedly of Borden’s rowdy theater friends, whom polite society considered similarly disreputable and immoral. Behind her tall fence, Borden hosted loud, lavish parties in Maplecroft’s basement, decked out as what the Dohertys call a speakeasy with, in Brooke’s words, “a nice wood floor big enough for dancing and floor-to-ceiling wainscoting wood panelling.” One latched panel, meanwhile, conceals a shallow hidden cupboard ideal for a Prohibition-era party. “Just enough space to hide a few whiskey bottles,” adds Michael. 

Whatever went down in the basement, prudent Emma upstairs didn’t approve of the shenanigans. With the Fall River Herald reporting on the sisters’ every sighting (even their clothing—Emma wore all black in eternal mourning while Lizzie defiantly refused to wear black as decorum dictated), Emma thought they should live discreetly. Lizzie disagreed and, following a particularly offensive week-long bash in 1905, the eldest Borden sister packed her bags and left forever. “The happenings at the French Street house that caused me to leave, I must refuse to talk about,” Emma later told the Boston Post before speaking rather freely: “I didn’t go until conditions became absolutely unbearable.” On the advice of their reverend, Emma cut ties with her sister and moved away. They never met or spoke again, but died days apart in 1927 and were buried next to one another in the family plot. 

Upon her death, the childless Lizbeth Borden (as she called herself in later years) gifted property, jewelry, books and furniture to some distant friends and family members but left most of her money to Fall River’s Animal Rescue League. To the Dohertys, it’s all more evidence that their home’s previous owner was kind and generous, a woman with good taste and an appreciation for fine workmanship, but most importantly—despite what most Borden historians and public opinion and Ryan Murphy says—an innocent one. “The longer we live here,” says Brooke, “the more we’re convinced she didn’t do it.” 

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Thursday welcomed the prospect of Canada becoming an “associate member” of the E.U., just hours after U.S. President Donald Trump dismissed the proposal as “laughable.”

Addressing the European Parliament as a guest of honor in Strasbourg, France, Carney insisted “Europe and Canada are stronger together” and said “Canada and the European Union can anchor our ground to hold our values while forming a protective canopy under which our citizens can thrive.”

Carney’s pivot toward Europe comes as he seeks to establish stronger international ties and curtail Canada’s reliance on the American market amid an all-out trade war. Canada’s retaliatory tariffs came into effect last week, matching the economic pressure imposed by the U.S. after negotiations collapsed last month. Trump’s repeated threats against Canadian sovereignty and calls to make it the “51st state” have added to the months-long tension.

While Carney did not directly mention Trump or his Administration while addressing European lawmakers, he appeared to make nods to the current volatility of Canada-U.S. relations and condemned economic coercions. Speaking about the "current geopolitical rupture," he said a "new dimension was needed.” 

“Economic integration is now being weaponized, tariffs being used to exert pressure,” he said. “Financial mechanisms have been used for coercion. Supply chains constitute weak points to be exploited.”

Championing the burgeoning E.U. alliance, Carney focused on what he said were shared values between Canada and the bloc, insisting: "We are not fair-weather allies. We believe that our ​prosperity grows when ⁠it is shared." 

“I'm not proposing a third bloc in order to become a 'great power' rival, only with better manners,” Carney continued. “We do not seek power to dominate others. On the contrary, we are pursuing resilience so no one can control our open markets, impair our sovereignty, threaten our territorial integrity, or undermine our freedoms, our democracies, our rule of law.”

Carney, who began his speech in French—one of Canada’s official languages—before continuing in English, with splatterings of German, welcomed how European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen had on Wednesday opened the door for Canada becoming an “associate member” of the 27-member bloc.  

When speaking about forging closer ties with the E.U., Carney referenced seeking strategic autonomy through “deep co-operation in the full range of strategic capabilities, including critical minerals, defense industrial capacity, AI and compute, energy security, space and payments.” He insisted Canada and Europe must not be dependent on “individual nations or individual companies” as this “creates vulnerabilities, particularly when supposedly global companies prove national in the breach.”

He also hinted at a potential freedom of movement between the E.U. and Canada that would allow “youth to work, study, and live where they want, on either side of the Atlantic.”

Carney’s passionate advocacy for the deepening of ties with the E.U.—a move he says Canadians have shown they’re in support of—came after Trump lambasted the idea of a new European dawn for Canada.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Trump called the proposal “laughable” and threatened economic punishments if the E.U. moves forward with von der Leyen’s plan.

"If they do that, if I think it's at all a hostile act, I will put very serious ​tariffs or stop trading with Europe on many things," Trump said en route to an event in North Carolina. "If ⁠it's a good intention, that's fine. If it's a bad intention, we'll put very heavy tariffs on Europe.”

In response to Trump’s remarks, a European Commission spokesperson told TIME: “As president von der Leyen made clear [on Wednesday], the proposed strengthening of our partnership with Canada is not against anyone else, but for our common strength.”

Carney welcomes new alliances on visit to Europe

Carney's speech to the European Parliament came on the final day of his stay in Europe, where he sought to cement and deepen Canada’s international relationships. 

The E.U. is Canada’s second-largest global trading partner for goods and services, with bilateral trade worth approximately C$178.6 billion in 2025.

The Canadian leader also traveled to Liverpool, England, to meet British Prime Minister Andy Burnham. The pair attended a football game and watched Everton—the team they both support—secure a victory against the Wolverhampton Wanderers.

"The leaders began by underscoring the close co-operation between the U.K. and Canada and emphasized the importance of building similar close ties with European partners, particularly on trade and defence,” a Downing Street spokeswoman told TIME.

Ahead of the meeting, Burnham called Carney a “great progressive leader” with whom the U.K. shares “so many values, but also with whom we have a shared opportunity on defense co-operation, on trade” and AI. 

Canada applies to join U.K.-led military coalition 

Following Burnham and Carney's meeting, it was announced that Canada has applied to join the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force military coalition. 

The force, formally launched in 2014, consists of 10 North Atlantic NATO member states that deliver rapid response and security operations.

“Prime Minister Carney announced that Canada has formally applied to join the Joint Expeditionary Force and welcomed the U.K.’s support for Canada’s participation in this important initiative,” Carney’s office said in a statement.

Canada, already a NATO member, is seeking to diversify its defense dependency from the U.S. with new partnerships across the Atlantic.  

In February, Canada became the first non-European country to participate in the "Security action for Europe” (SAFE) instrument, which provides up to €150 billion in low-interest loans to help member states purchase military and defense equipment.

What happens next as Canada seeks "associate" membership with the E.U.? 

Following von der Leyen’s proposal, a European Commission spokesperson told TIME that the executive cabinet will work “in close coordination with [its] member states and the European Parliament” to “create a new form of partnership that has not existed until now–building the closest imaginable form of association with a partner outside Europe.”

The proposed alliance is set to include deeper economic ties, a technology alliance, greater integration of defense industrial bases, and efforts to make the Arctic a flagship joint project. It could also expand cooperation on energy, critical minerals and batteries, as well as AI, quantum technology, cybersecurity, and economic security.

The E.U.-Canada summit set to take place in Montreal in late October will “provide the first meaningful opportunity to discuss these issues further,” the spokesperson told TIME. 

The proposal has been welcomed by many European lawmakers across the bloc.

Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Spain Javier Moreno Sánchez, who also serves as chair of the parliament’s delegation for relations with Canada, told TIME the decision to bring Canada in as an “associate member” was “politically and symbolically significant,” but warned it “must now be followed by concrete actions.”

Irish MEP Barry Andrews told TIME that the announcement is a clear “win-win for both sides,” adding that “in an ever more insecure world, truly democratic countries must come together and stand up to Trump, [Chinese President] Xi Jinping, and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin.”

Germany, the E.U.’s largest economy, also embraced the move, with government spokesperson Stefan Kornelius saying Berlin “welcomes the initiative for a particularly close partnership with Canada.”

The E.U., much like Canada, is seeking new partnerships amid a weakening alliance with the U.S. under Trump, following disputes over tariff threats, his lashing out at the NATO alliance,  and his push to annex Greenland.

Espen Barth Eide, Norway’s Foreign Affairs Minister, told TIME the world is "living through the most serious security situation since the Second World War.”

“At a time like this, it is welcome that the E.U. is strengthening cooperation on European security. We also welcome the E.U.’s efforts to involve Norway, the United Kingdom, Canada and Iceland. Such an approach strengthens European security,” he said.

Norway and Iceland are not members of the E.U., but both belong to the European Economic Area (EEA), giving them close economic ties to the bloc through trade and free movement—a model from which Canada could draw inspiration.

Elsewhere, the “associate” membership proposal faced backlash.

French MEP Manon Aubry, co-chair of The Left group, told TIME there was “a serious question of method,” arguing that “a decision of such magnitude cannot be made by the president of the European Commission alone.”