Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is facing a major internal political challenge after a recently dismissed defense minister called for a wartime presidential election. But holding an election during an ongoing war would pose enormous legal and logistical challenges—and it may not be possible at all.

Ex-Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov's challenge comes amid an ongoing war with Russia. While Zelenskyy’s five-year term was scheduled to end in May 2024, elections have been suspended under martial law since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Fedorov posted a nine-minute video online Tuesday, demanding that Ukraine “restore a full democratic process even amid a prolonged war.”

Read More: Chalk One Up for Ukraine

“Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia. We are fighting precisely because we want to remain a free European state,” Fedorov said. “We must find a legal, safe, and ‌realistic mechanism which will allow Ukraine to renew its full democratic process even in the conditions of ​a long war.”

Fedorov, 35, was a longtime ally of Zelenskyy before he was abruptly fired in July amid mounting friction with military leadership, and his departure sparked days of protests. On Wednesday, Yevhenii Khmara was confirmed as the new defense minister.

Although Fedorov did not mention Zelenskyy in the video, he issued a blistering critique of Ukrainian leadership, saying that the country is in a “systemic crisis of governance” and alluding to corruption. The accusation comes just after Zelenskyy fired deputy chief of staff Iryna Mudra on Wednesday amid a money-laundering investigation. 

This is not the first time that Zelenskyy has come under fire for the suspended elections. Last year, President Donald Trump attacked him as a “dictator without elections.” However, the Ukrainian President has steadfastly denied that he is using the war to cling to power and said he would be open to an election if it could be safely and securely held.

“I am now asking—and I am stating this openly—for the United States, possibly together with our European colleagues, to help me ensure security for holding elections,” he told reporters on WhatsApp at the end of 2025. He said there would need to be “guarantees” from the United States and Russia to ensure safe voting practices.

Zelenskyy had yet to respond to the comments from Fedorov as of Wednesday afternoon, but experts say it is unlikely that an election can take place in Ukraine.

What stands in the way of holding elections in Ukraine?

Historically, very few countries have held elections in wartime, Konstantin Sonin, a professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, tells TIME, adding that it's very unlikely for an election to happen in Ukraine.

A ceasefire would first be needed—but Sonin says it’s unlikely that Ukraine would trust any assurances from Russia.

“I cannot imagine that Ukraine would rely on any kind of guarantees from Russia to have elections,” Sonin tells TIME. “[Concerns about] Russian election interference are half of the problem.”

Sonin says that there are also many “practical limitations” to putting the necessary technology and infrastructure in place for a secure vote.

“The main limitation is that it's difficult to count votes from the occupied territories,” he says. 

Russia occupies roughly 19% of Ukraine. According to Ukrainian figures from January of that year, there could be as many as 4.5 million adults living in those occupied territories. Millions more Ukrainians have been internally displaced.

Who could challenge Zelenskyy?

It’s unlikely that any challenger would successfully unseat the Ukrainian President amid the ongoing war, Sonin says.

“Zelenskyy won elections in 2019, defeating the incumbent, and since then navigated an extremely complex terrain of Ukrainian politics,” he says. “He would defeat any other candidate.”

Sonin says in years past there were potential presidential alternatives—including General Valerii Zaluzhnyi—who might have been perceived as someone who could “prosecute the war better.”

Zaluzhnyi long held that he had no political ambitions; however, in July, Ukrainska Pravda reported that Zaluzhnyi told Zelenskyy he would run if elections were held in the fall, citing sources close to both men. Sources told the outlet that Zaluzhnyi had changed his mind because he didn’t want to disregard the trust that people had placed in him.

“Ukraine is not losing, and there is so much hope,” Sonin says. “I do not see how Zelenskyy would not win these elections.”

Recent polling, however, complicates Sonin’s assessment. SOCIS, a polling firm, found that Zelenskyy would finish first in the first round in an election against Fedorov, Zaluzhnyi, and Kyrylo Budanov—the current chief of staff for the President, who has not publicly expressed any intention to run. Zelenskyy would capture 22% of the vote as compared with Zaluzhnyi’s 21% and Fedorov’s 13%. 

Because none of the candidates would command the majority, which is required in Ukraine, the top two contenders would move on to a runoff election. And if the vote did reach a second round, the poll projected a loss for Zelenskyy. He ranked behind Fedorov, Zaluzhnyi, and Budanov in the prospective runoff modeled by SOCIS.

Recent developments in the war could also shift those political dynamics. In the past few weeks, Ukraine has expanded its aerial war against Russia. It started ramping up production of long-range missiles that can travel up to 1,500 miles (2,400 km) from the border and has already targeted several key retail and energy hubs in and around Moscow.

According to Ukrainian media, Zelenskyy’s approval rating has dipped since the war started, but still remains close to 60%.

South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said Wednesday that Seoul was given no notice before President Donald Trump announced that he would be scaling back joint military operations between the two countries.

“Neither our government nor U.S. officials knew what President Trump wrote on his Truth Social," Cho told the National Assembly Committee on Foreign Affairs and Unification. "We were not notified in advance.” 

Cho added, however, that Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back was in “close consultation” with his U.S. counterparts regarding the reductions to South Korea-U.S. military exercises. 

Read More: Trump’s South Korea Shift Tests a Key U.S. Alliance

Trump on Sunday announced in a Truth Social post that he had instructed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “substantially reduce” joint military exercises with South Korea, citing the country’s refusal to participate in the U.S.-Israel war against Iran and his “very good relationship” with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. 

Trump called the joint exercises “costly” and “totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea, which he said has been “unthreatening and respectful” throughout his presidency. 

Both the Pentagon and South Korea have confirmed that joint operations have been reduced following Trump’s announcement.

A Defense Department official tells TIME that the U.S. has “substantially reduced” Exercise Ulchi Freedom Shield—an annual, large-scale training dating back roughly 50 years that combines multiple sectors of the military designed to prepare a U.S.-Korean joint response to international threats. The Ulchi exercise began on Monday and was supposed to last for 11 days, but will now end on Aug. 21, one week earlier than originally scheduled, the official says. 

“Associated live-training events have been reduced, with certain events canceled or converted to simulations,” the official adds, noting that “training that enhances tactical capability” will continue. “These adjustments preserve essential readiness and training objectives. There will be no degradation to U.S. training objectives.”

South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff also confirmed that it had agreed to the reductions at the request of the U.S.

North Korea has largely shrugged off the reductions, saying that they don’t change the geopolitical posture of either the U.S. or South Korea towards itself. 

"We are paying greater attention to the reality that joint military exercises between the U.S. and South Korea have continued and are still ongoing, and this is an unmistakable expression of hostility toward North Korea," Kim Yo Jong, the sister of the country’s leader, said on Wednesday, according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency. She added that Pyongyang had “no interest whatsoever" in Trump’s announcement and that “reducing the scale or duration of the drills does not change the provocative and aggressive nature of the military exercises.”

Trump said in the Oval Office on Monday, following his order to the Pentagon, that he had spoken with Kim Jong Un about a scheduled conversation. Kim Yo Jong said on Wednesday, however, that she was "unaware" and knew “absolutely nothing” about recent communication between Trump and Kim Jong Un. 

On Wednesday, Trump said that he would meet with Kim Jong Un this year, but did not elaborate further. 

“He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons,” Trump said to reporters on the White House grounds, referring to North Korea’s arsenal. “Should have never allowed it to happen, they should never have allowed it. If I were president, I never would have allowed it.”

Trump, who met Kim Jong Un face-to-face three times during his first term, has maintained a friendly relationship with the North Korean leader throughout his presidencies. "I have a great relationship with Kim Jong Un,” Trump said in August of last year. “I hope it stays that way, I think it will. I have a very good relationship. I understand him.” 

Amid his cordial relations with Kim Jong Un, Trump has repeatedly demanded that North Korea suspend its nuclear arms program, a request Pyongyang has said is off the table. Trump seems determined to negotiate towards that goal with the North Korean leader. 

The President’s recent move to halt joint exercises resembles one he made in his first term.  Following a summit in Singapore in 2018 during which Trump met with Kim Jong Un, making him the first sitting president to hold a summit with a North Korean leader, Trump suspended the Ulchi exercise with South Korea in the name of diplomacy with North Korea. 

A previously little-known White House aide has garnered growing public attention in recent days after Sen. Jon Ossoff mentioned her while levying an attack on President Donald Trump.

The Georgia Democrat said that Trump “doesn’t want to do the job” of President. Instead, Ossoff continued, “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie.”

Ossoff was referring to 35-year-old Natalie Harp, a longtime aide to Trump. When asked about Ossoff’s comments, Trump likened the Democrat to “Pee-wee Herman” and said he “would much rather do other things.”

Read More: CNN Condemns the White House’s Attacks on Journalist Kristen Holmes: Here’s What to Know

So who is Harp, and what is her role in the White House? Here’s what to know.

Harp said that Trump saved her life

In 2019, Harp went on Fox News and thanked Trump for signing the Right to Try law the year before. She told the network that she had stage 2 bone cancer, and that the new law allowed her to access experimental treatments, which she said saved her life.

After hearing her recount her experience, Trump asked her to give a speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention, according to the New York Times.

“When I failed the chemotherapies that were on the market, no one wanted me in their clinical trials,” she said at the event. “They didn’t give me the right to try experimental treatments, Mr. President. You did, and without you, I’d have died waiting for them to be approved.”

But after the convention, the Washington Post reported that medical experts cast doubt on Harp’s claims. Harp has said that she was treated with “an FDA-approved immunotherapy drug for an unapproved use,” and experts said that the federal legislation that Trump signed in 2018 wouldn’t have made that drug accessible to Harp because the medication had already been approved.

About two years after her speech at the Republican National Convention, she became a member of Trump’s staff.

She used to work for a far-right news channel

Before Harp joined Trump’s team, she worked as an anchor for a far-right news channel called One America News Network for a couple years. While working for the network, she propagated Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.

Her official title is ‘special assistant to the President and executive assistant to the President’

In Harp’s role, officially called the “special assistant to the President and executive assistant to the President,” she works closely with Trump. Many of the Truth Social posts that the President shares are ones that he dictated to her to type and hit “post” on. 

According to the Times, which cited two people who were aware of the situation, Harp hit the “send” button on the enraged messages that Trump sent to the billionaire and major Republican donor Miriam Adelson in 2024—messages that nearly lost him Adelson’s backing. 

Harp was also the one who transcribed dozens of social media posts that Trump dictated to her one day in which he attacked the writer E. Jean Carroll, who alleged that Trump raped her in the 1990s, the Times reported.

Some of Harp’s colleagues have dubbed her the “human printer” because she is known for carrying a portable printer as she trails Trump around so she can give him whatever information he wants or needs in print copies.

She was one of the select number of people who was on Trump’s secret flight out of Turkey

When Trump left Turkey in July on a secret, alternate plane after receiving an Iranian assassination threat, only a few people working in the White House were on his flight, including Harp, CBS News reported. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was also on the plane with Trump and Harp, as were a couple other aides. Other higher-up members of his Administration, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, were on the other plane—the one that the Administration had said that Trump would travel on, and that members of the White House press corps were on.

Read More: Why Trump’s Secret Flight Was Extraordinary by Presidential Standards

When asked by the Times about Harp’s role in the White House and why she was selected to be among the few staffers on the secret flight, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “Natalie Harp is one of the most loyal and hardest-working aides on President Trump’s team.”

The nature of her relationship with Trump has been a subject of scrutiny

According to the Times, Harp wrote Trump several letters in 2023 that concerned some people near him. In the letters, which reporters at the Times viewed, Harp wrote messages including: “You are all that matters to me” and “I don’t ever want to let you down.” She called Trump her “Guardian and Protector in this Life,” and thanked him, the outlet reported.

“I want to bring you joy,” she wrote in one of the letters, according to the Times, “to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’”

The news outlet also reported, citing two sources with knowledge of the remark, that Trump said at one point in 2023 that Harp was the only person on his team who cared about him.

Harp’s estranged brother, Preston Harp, was asked about the Times’ reporting about the 2023 letters when he appeared on CNN this week. He replied: “I’d say since she was like 16, she’s had an obsession with, gosh, how do I explain this? She’s written letters to other Presidents. Let me put it that way. And so like, her dream came true finally.” When asked which Presidents she wrote letters to, he said: “I didn’t see the letter, but George Bush obviously, during the Iraq war.”

He also described his sister’s relationship with Trump as an “infatuation” but said, “I don’t think it’s a physical attraction.”

“I think that Trump’s best friends are people who are his fan club,” he said. “And so she’s his biggest fan. And so that’s probably why he likes her. And she’s good looking. She’s got a good personality. I don’t know.”

“I mean she thinks that he saved her life, so, like, somebody living with that kind of gratitude—that must feel pretty good,” he continued.

Harp has not publicly spoken about her relationship with Trump in the wake of Ossoff’s comments, but other White House aides and Republicans have jumped to her defense.

In a statement to TIME, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle called Ossoff’s comments “cringeworthy” and criticized the Senator’s voting record, in addition to defending Harp.

“Natalie Harp is one of the most loyal and hardest working aides on President Trump’s team,” Ingle said in the statement.

Eric Trump, one of the President’s sons, slammed CNN’s interview with Preston Harp on Wednesday.

“What absolute trash,” he said in a post on X. “Natalie is an incredible young woman — a cancer survivor, a genuinely good person, and arguably one of the hardest-working people in the White House. She’s deeply committed to my father, to her job, and to this country.”

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced Tuesday that “all trade, commercial exchanges, and financial transactions with Iran have been halted until further notice,” alleging that Iran had fired two ballistic missiles toward it. 

The country’s foreign ministry said the decision comes “in light of regional escalations that undermine regional and international peace and security.”

Earlier Tuesday, the UAE’s Ministry of Defense reported that two missiles launched from Iran toward the country, both of which fell into the sea. The statement said it “affirms its readiness to respond to any threats and to resolutely counter any attempts to undermine the security of the country or the safety of maritime navigation in the region.”

Read More: Trump Again Threatens to Bomb Oman

Esmaeil Baghaei, a spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry, rejected the Emirati claim on Tuesday, saying that it “undermines ongoing efforts to strengthen trust between countries in the region and prevent the escalation of insecurity,” according to the semi-official Fars news agency. 

“The impact on the Iranian economy could be significant,” Simon Henderson, director of the Bernstein Program on Gulf and Energy Policy at the Washington Institute, tells TIME. “The UAE is one of the top non-oil trading partners with Iran.”

As of April, the UAE accounts for 12.5% of Iran’s exports and 30.43% of its imports, according to Iranian news agency WANA. 

Iran’s dollar currently ranks as the least valuable currency in the world, and its government told a Russian news agency in April that the war has already cost it some $270 billion in direct and indirect damages.

Regional instability amid the war in Iran

Stability in the region is fragile, as a number of incidents have been recently reported in the Strait of Hormuz. On Tuesday, a vessel reported that it had been struck by an unknown projectile, causing damage to the engine room and a crew casualty, according to the U.K. Trade Maritime Operations Centre (UKMTO). Last Thursday, a separate vessel was struck by a drone. 

The UAE has previously reported the detection of missiles coming toward it, most recently on July 12, when it confirmed that a missile fell outside of its borders.  

In May, the defense ministry reported that it had intercepted six unmanned aerial vehicles within 48 hours that “attempted to target civilian and vital areas in the country.”

One drone, launched from the direction of the UAE’s western border, struck an electricity generator near the Barakah Nuclear Energy Plant on May 17. Its origin has not been confirmed and is under investigation.

During the first few weeks of the conflict, Iran launched a series of more aggressive strikes on targets in the UAE, hitting military, energy, and civilian infrastructure. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) vowed at the time to “punish aggressors throughout the region,” pointing toward U.S. military assets stationed in the country, as well as other Gulf states. 

Tehran resumed targeting U.S. allies in the Middle East, including Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain during the return to hostilities in early July, when negotiations based upon a Memorandum of Understanding collapsed. 

Where do peace plans between the U.S. and Iran stand?

Peace talks between the United States and Iran have made little progress in recent weeks.

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that “there are no talks or conversations going on, or scheduled,” between the U.S. and Iran. He also reaffirmed that the naval blockade on Iranian ports and vessels remains in place, amid ongoing claims that the Strait of Hormuz is “open and operating.”

Marine traffic data suggested Wednesday that some ships were indeed passing through the Strait, but still at significantly lower levels than before the conflict began. 

Earlier this week, the President also threatened to “bomb the s---” of Oman, a U.S. ally and mediator between Washington and Tehran, should it “get in the way” of U.S. attempts to gain  effective international control of the Strait of Hormuz. 

Oman and Iran have reportedly been working toward an agreement to manage traffic through the Strait, which carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supply. 

The U.K. government has indicated its willingness to reconsider its digital services tax amid increasing pressure from the Trump Administration.

The concession came in response to an interview published Monday in which U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told The Times that President Donald Trump’s threats to scrap a trade deal with Britain and impose a 100% tariff were “not a bluff.”

When asked if the interview might lead Downing Street to change its stance on the tax, a government spokesperson told TIME, “We remain open to discussing U.S. concerns and working with partners internationally.”

The digital services tax imposes a 2% levy on the revenues of “search engines, social media services, and online marketplaces which derive value from U.K. users.” Several other European countries, including Portugal, Spain, and Poland, have also implemented similar taxes.

Greer said Britain was using American companies as “piggy banks” and that he was “not going to tolerate that.”

“We have very good relations with the U.K. We’ve had very constructive relationships, we’d love to keep talking to them about this issue. The President is quite serious about digital services taxes all over the world,” he said.

Read More: Why Trump Is Threatening to Impose a ‘Big Tariff’ on the U.K.

“This tax is about making sure that businesses pay their fair share of U.K. tax based on the value they derive from U.K. activities. It is an interim measure, and we are still committed to removing it once a global solution is in place,” the spokesperson said, adding that both countries “share a strong trading relationship.”

A White House official tells TIME that “the Administration continues to address digital services taxes and other tech issues with our trading partners.”

Rising trade tensions between the U.S. and the U.K.

The U.K. and the U.S. agreed to a “groundbreaking” Tech Prosperity Deal in September 2025, which was expected to bring billions of dollars in investment from U.S. tech companies into the U.K. technology sector.

However, relations between the two countries have splintered since the onset of the Iran war.

"This is not Winston Churchill we're dealing with," Trump said of former British Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the height of tensions in March, as he accused the former U.K. leader of "ruining" relations.

Trump later warned the U.K. that he would implement a “big tariff” in April if the country did not drop its digital services tax on U.S. tech companies. And in June, he threatened to impose a 100% tariff on imports from any country that taxes digital services provided by U.S. companies.

“This tariff will supersede trade deals made with the country, whether implemented, signed, or not,” Trump said June 26.

The Trump Administration has not yet made any official tariff announcements linked to these threats.

However, the U.K. government, which has recently come under new leadership, has signaled that it is open to discussions.

Burnham aims to bridge relations between the two nations

Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who took office in July, has indicated intentions to mend the relationship between the two countries.

Asked whether there was a deadline for discussions with the new Burnham government, Greer declined to set one, instead emphasizing cooperation with the U.K.

“I don’t set artificial timelines. All I know is the President is eager to enforce our trade policy, he’s eager to make sure our companies aren’t discriminated against,” he said.

Since taking office, Burnham has appeared keen to repair relations with Trump. The two have spoken by phone, and Burnham extended an invitation for Trump to visit Manchester in the future—where the 2027 G20 summit is rumored to be taking place and where Burnham served as mayor before becoming Prime Minister.

But he may be hesitant to remove an important source of revenue for the U.K.

Between 2021 and 2025, the tax generated more than £2.4 billion ($3.2 billion) in revenue for the British government.

Read More: ‘We Won’t Be Bullied’: U.K. Responds to Russian Threat Over Ukraine Drone Support

Trump has pushed the U.K. on policy in the past, including his consistent calls for Britain to allow new North Sea oil and gas licenses—something the Starmer government intended to ban.

On the eve of Burnham’s entry to Downing Street, Trump claimed: “The people of Aberdeen, in Scotland, are dancing in the streets because the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has stated that he will be opening up, all the way, the invaluable North Sea Oil."

Burnham has signaled that he is open to reconsidering Britain’s access to North Sea oil and gas.

“I’ve got something of an open mind, you know. I don’t have a sort of fixed position,” he said in early June.

Trump has continued to tout the new British Prime Minister’s willingness to reconsider the issue.

“One of the things he is going to do, I think he's going to open up the North Sea. That'll make the U.K. pretty rich,” Trump said on Monday in the Oval Office.

Burnham, however, has yet to make a final decision.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Lucky finale.

Morning is just reaching the shoreline when Lucky (Anya Taylor-Joy) walks barefoot toward the water. The waves slide over her feet, then her ankles. She looks up at a scatter of birds, spreads her arms wide, and the camera moves in close as her expression turns—eyes open, taking it in, then the beginnings of a smile. The ocean was the destination her father dangled in front of her as a child, the reward waiting at the end of a con. She reaches it without him, the only way she was ever going to get there.

These are the final moments of Lucky, an Apple TV limited series that follows Luciana “Lucky” Armstrong, a con artist raised inside the life by her charming grifter father, John (Timothy Olyphant). At John’s urging, Lucky and her husband, Cary (Drew Starkey), lift $10 million from Wayne Whittaker (William Fichtner), the crime boss they all answer to. The money was John’s own skim from the energy-fraud scheme that sent him and Priscilla (Annette Bening), Wayne’s second-in-command and Cary’s mother, to prison years earlier. Then Cary vanishes with the score, leaving Lucky to run from FBI agent Billie Rand (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) on one side and a newly sprung Priscilla on the other. By the finale, Cary is dead, the money has resurfaced as cryptocurrency locked behind a seed phrase only Lucky knows, and Lucky is walking into a meeting with Wayne wearing an FBI wire.

Behind all of it, the writers saw one repeating pattern. “The mechanics or the mechanisms of a con are a cycle of trust and betrayal,” says Cassie Pappas, the series’ co-showrunner, who wrote the finale episode. “She’s locked in this cycle of trust and betrayal with all the people in her life: with Cary, with Priscilla, with her father. And so we’re rooting for her to finally break free of that cycle.” The finale lets Lucky stop running, granting her the freedom to wipe the slate clean. “We wanted to make sure it wasn’t a happy ending or a bad ending,” creator and co-showrunner Jonathan Tropper says. “It was really important that she make a sacrifice to basically get to the point where she can start her life again.”

A performance for an audience of one

Before the meeting with Wayne, the episode lingers on Priscilla at her mirror. Dutch (Clifton Collins Jr.), her devoted enforcer, fastens the watch that belonged to Cary on her wrist. “Thought you’d want it,” he says. In the car, Priscilla gives Wayne exactly what he wants: gratitude for springing her from prison and an apology for how long it took to find the money. When he excuses his refusal to claim Cary as his son by saying it was Priscilla’s choice to have him, she absorbs it and keeps up the act, drawing internal strength from Cary’s watch on her wrist. The watch mattered beyond what the camera captured. “The whole car ride with Wayne up to the gas terminal, Annette was touching it, feeling it,” Pappas says. “She let that watch be a part of her performance. Like she could feel him on her wrist.”

Lucky arrives at the gas terminal with her own act to sustain: get Wayne on tape admitting he knew about the gas scam and profited from it, and stay alive long enough for it to matter. But the con she runs is aimed somewhere else entirely. “Who she’s really playing to in that moment is not Wayne, but Priscilla. It’s a performance for Priscilla,” Taylor-Joy says. “She’s performing for somebody else’s eyes.”

That’s why the scene’s most cutting line isn’t really for the man it’s addressed to. When Wayne muses that Lucky could have worked for him, she declines. “I know how you treat the women who work for you,” Lucky says. She tells him about the child Cary wanted: a girl, because he couldn’t imagine raising a son with a father-shaped hole where his own had been. Every word lands on the woman off to the side.

“It’s coded conversation directly to Priscilla, playing to her,” Pappas says. “She doesn’t know if she’s going to [turn on Wayne], but hoping that she will.” Lucky isn’t guessing blindly. In episode 6, Priscilla let slip that she once tried to leave this life and couldn’t. “In another life, if she had gone left instead of right, or if she had made a few different choices, Lucky could have easily become Priscilla,” Pappas continues. “I think that’s why Priscilla’s intrigued by her.”

Midway through the standoff, with Wayne demanding the seed phrase, Lucky drops a revelation she’s just pieced together: he already knew the money had been converted to crypto, she announces, knew how to find Cary in La Jolla, and knows the FBI is listening, because Kershaw (Eric Lange), the FBI supervisor stationed above with Rand, has been feeding him information. Up on the gas tank, Rand pulls her gun on the mole.

The gambit nearly dies anyway. Wayne, meanwhile, produces John, snatched from the hotel in episode 6 and beaten bloody, then hands Priscilla his gun: she can prove she’s “really ready” to be back by executing him herself. Instead, Priscilla presses the barrel to Lucky’s head. A tear runs down Lucky’s cheek. “Priscilla,” Lucky pleads.

“Hon, I’m sorry,” Priscilla says, then turns and shoots Wayne in the stomach. Whether she decided at the mirror, in the car, or in the half-second before the trigger, the episode declines to say.

The same moment splits the frame. Above, Rand, shoved over the tank’s edge by Kershaw and hauling herself back up, shoots him dead; below, Dutch, who trailed Priscilla to the site, emerges firing and cuts down Wayne’s remaining men. Wayne himself crawls. “If you had tried even once to be any kind of a father to my boy, you wouldn’t be in the position you’re in right now,” Priscilla tells him, and fires the last shot.

Wayne’s final rejection of Cary earlier in the finale sealed his fate for Priscilla. Tropper frames her life-saving gesture to Lucky as the episode’s strangest gift: alive, Cary could never make peace between his mother and his wife. “In death, he’s able to reconcile them in a way that he couldn’t in life,” he says. “His absence is the presence.”

When the shooting stops, Priscilla wonders aloud what she’s supposed to do with the two of them. Lucky makes an offer. “I’m asking you to do for me what they didn’t do for you,” she says. “Give me a chance. Or you can kill us, but I’m done running from you, from anyone.” 

For Taylor-Joy, the plea is her character’s emotional exhaustion finding words. “Most people walk around waiting for the other shoe to drop without there being a shoe there. Lucky knows there’s a shoe,” she says. “Having the promise of a reality where there is no shoe that’s going to drop is where she would rather be.”

So Priscilla lets Lucky and John go, sending them off with a warning never to return and a parting verdict on John—“Lucky bastard”—as the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s “Anemone” plays, their SUV pulling away.

One hell of a bluff

Lucky’s mole reveal plays like a plan. It wasn’t one. Instead, it was Lucky’s oldest instinct: that in a game built on borrowed trust, even the feds might be playing dirty. At the motel afterward, Lucky admits she’d pieced Kershaw’s defection together from La Jolla (Priscilla couldn't have found Cary unless Wayne had someone inside) but kept the theory to herself because she wasn’t sure. John is incredulous: she detonated a federal sting on a hunch? “Well, I was either right, or it was one hell of a bluff,” she shrugs.

The day’s losses trail Rand into the finale’s quietest confrontation. That night, she finds Priscilla at home in her backyard, sunglasses on in the dark, at the edge of her pool. Rand isn’t there to arrest her; she’s there to promise that one day she will. Priscilla tells her to take the win: Wayne is dead, the FBI mole exposed. Rand refuses. “You killed my partner,” she says, referring to Gates (Mo McRae), the agent gunned down when Wayne’s men stormed the hotel for John. “You didn’t pull the trigger, but you killed him.”

Tropper reads the standoff between Rand and Priscilla as a diagnosis. “They’re both kind of trapped in their cycles,” he says. “These two are still going to be locked in this eternal struggle that Lucky has managed to extricate herself from. But neither of these women will be able to pull that off.” The images say it more simply: Priscilla ends her season the way Lucky ends hers, standing at the water’s edge.

The con after the con

A conventional thriller would have rolled credits after the gunfire. But Lucky spends many of its final minutes at a motel instead. “We always looked at this as a character show that has a thriller element to it,” Tropper says. Pappas describes it the way the writers’ room did: the finale holds two cons: an “action set piece” with a con built into it, and an “emotional set piece.”

That second con trades on episode 6’s hotel-room reckoning, when Lucky told John the life she had as a child was never one she wanted, when she admitted she was the reason he went to prison years earlier, and when John apologized, at last, for the childhood he’d mistaken for a good one. The apology was slow in coming; John’s first reflex was to call her an idiot for ever trusting Rand. “You just see her become seven years old,” Taylor-Joy says of the moment. “It’s the face and the feelings of a child that’s been trapped in there the whole time.” Seven, not incidentally, was the age of Lucky’s first haul.

A deeper understanding of her father unfolds over a burger with him. John eats, as Lucky nibbles a pickle. They share their recurring dreams. His: a ball of sheets on his prison bed that turns out to be infant Lucky, whom he straps to his chest and carries past a charmed guard into the sunlight. Hers: “I’m underwater, and I can’t breathe, and then I wake up.”

Pappas, who wrote John’s monologue, built his dream from a question the writers kept circling: why is her nickname Lucky? “You can imagine growing up, he could probably use her as a baby as part of his cons,” she says. “She’s been his lucky charm for as long as she’s been alive.” Lucky’s dream sits at the opposite pole, “almost a nightmare connected to her childhood trauma of the drowning con,” and the fact that John never thought “that was traumatic for her.” When Lucky tries to say what the dream means to her, John cuts in with his own reading and pivots to the money.

Taylor-Joy explains that the father-daughter exchange reveals John for who he really is: a “narcissist.” The cruelty of the motel stretch is that its warmth is real. Tommy Tangles, the imaginary friend John invented to get a squirming girl through hair-brushing, gets a fond retelling. But none of it changes the long-held family dynamic. “She hopes that he will do the right thing, whilst making contingencies for what his actions in the past have told her about who he is,” Taylor-Joy says. By Pappas’ account, Lucky spends the scene deciding, and by the end of the scene, she knows “she’s going to set the trap.”

Ninety percent truth

Lucky wakes the next morning to an empty bed, an empty parking space, and no surprise. John is on the road with the teddy bear that held Cary’s recorded seed phrase riding shotgun. When he presses its stomach, Cary’s voice recording is gone; Lucky’s has replaced it.

“I had a feeling you’d do this,” the recording begins. “A feeling I’ve been ignoring most of my life.” As she speaks, the season’s most persistent image finally resolves. The childhood flashback threaded through the episode, young Lucky at the lip of a hotel pool, completes itself: she goes into the deep end, flails, is hauled out by a stranger while John rushes over performing paternal alarm, then threatens a lawsuit and gets their rooms comped. “You knew I couldn’t swim,” adult Lucky says. “But the best cons are 90% truth, right, Dad? And the truth was I was drowning.”

Taylor-Joy locates the wound in child psychology. “When you’re a kid, your parents are God,” she says. “You rely on them so much for survival that you never stop to think that there’s something wrong with them. You internalize everything as something being wrong with yourself. The one person who was supposed to take care of [Lucky] and value her above anything else was happy to let her almost drown in order to get a free room. And if you really think about that, it’s just so painful.”

Tropper is just as unsparing about what the memory indicts. “Lucky never had a choice,” he says. “[John] is sort of a classic narcissist where he loves her, but only in the way he can, which is as a reflection of himself.” The scene suggests this wasn’t a one-time con, and Tropper confirms it: “You get the sense that it had been done more than once.”

That’s what makes Lucky’s counter-con the season’s real climax. Both showrunners knew from the earliest drafts where the story had to arrive. “The end had to be that the student becomes the master,” Tropper says. Lucky’s final con inverts everything John taught her, building not on a lie but on an honest accounting of who he is. “He trained her so well that he trained her to be better than him,” Pappas says. “She outsmarts him.”

A proud father

The recording ends with a gift and a form of severance. “I’m not giving you the money, but I’m giving you your freedom. I hope you use it wisely,” Lucky says. “I love you, Dad. But you won’t see me again. Goodbye.” John thumps the bear against the dashboard, pulls over, gets out, stares at the horizon, and laughs.

Ask the showrunners what that laugh contains and they answer, independently, with the same word. “I saw it as pride,” Tropper says, with John thinking, “if she was able to pull this on me, I taught her well.” Pappas echoes the sentiment. “After absorbing the blow, he almost makes it again about himself. Like, look at how well I taught her,” she says. His laugh is also a reversal, of sorts: hours before his abduction, John told Lucky he was proud of the ways she isn’t like him. But the laugh is pride in the way she is.

For Taylor-Joy, the message is the closure the relationship never offered between father and daughter in person. “[John] is a person who will continuously dismiss her, not listen to what she’s saying,” she says, adding, “If she’s going to have a shot in hell of living a decent life, he just can’t come with her.” Pappas calls the goodbye a look at the “tension of opposites.” Two things can both be true: John can be bad for Lucky, and she can know it, but he’s also her dad, and there’s no undoing that. Tropper, meanwhile, has no illusions about what John does with his life. “He’ll be back in jail in a year or two,” he says.

The money goes where the father couldn’t: away. Rand opens a FedEx package at the bureau to find a laptop and the seed phrase taped to it on an index card. The fortune, Tropper argues, was the tether. “John stole this money, and so for Lucky to really be free of her father, she has to get rid of that money,” he says. Pappas reads the FedEx package as a proposed truce. “You stop hunting, and I’m going to stop running,” she says, pointing to the flicker on Ellis-Taylor’s face as Rand takes in the card. “Rand kind of smiles too, in a way. It makes you wonder if Rand is secretly maybe happy that she’s out from underneath her father as well.”

The great big blue

Which leaves the beach Lucky arrives at in the finale’s final moments. The show planted it in that same episode 6 hotel room, in a promise Lucky recited back to her father. “Remember when you used to tell me about the ocean?” she said then. “How some people can go their entire lives without ever seeing the water, but we weren’t going to be like that? One day, Lucky, our feet will be in the sand, and we’ll be looking at the great big blue and we’ll finally be still.” Then she tells him why she’s bringing it up: “I’m ready to be still, Dad.”

In the end, the ocean John teased throughout her childhood became the image that unlocked the season, and also became its sharpest irony, since Lucky must claim the promise alone. “It starts off in trauma in water, and it ends with water being this cleansing, purification moment,” Pappas says. Even the nickname goes. Dropping the alias is what Pappas calls the “last mask” Lucky has to shed. 

An alternate finale ending existed on paper. “We did have one that jumped ahead in time, where she’s taking her daughter to school in a very sort of simple suburban life,” Tropper says. They cut it for the same reason they refused her the money: the show should hand her a new beginning, not a future. Still, every version they ever sketched, Pappas says, shared one property: “It was always some image of freedom, and it was always somewhere in nature.”  

That the finale spends its last beat on Taylor-Joy’s face in extreme close-up, as Phantogram’s cover of Phil Collins’ “Take Me Home” swells, is no accident. As an executive producer, Taylor-Joy pushed the series toward its visual extremes: faces or vistas, almost nothing between. “It felt like you had to either be seeing thoughts as they were forming on somebody’s face, or be reminded of the scope of the world and the scope of the responsibilities that were about to come crashing down on Lucky,” she says. Her creative fingerprints run through the Americana-inspired color palette—“these places that seem very desolate,” sprinkled with the “touch of the American dream”—and a costume philosophy of making “found clothing” still express a “point of view.”

Taylor-Joy also helped choose the final frame. “I remember when we were picking what the ending shot was going to be, and I was like, it’s got to be this one,” she says. In it, Lucky’s expression is unguarded: the look of someone who’s “genuinely never imagined that they could possibly get to where they are.” It’s also the “first time where she doesn’t have a shoe that’s gonna drop.”

Tropper points out the series returns to a shot of Lucky, transformed. “We started the show with a close-up of Lucky, and we end the show with a close-up of Lucky, because the world has shifted around her, but it’s always been her,” he says. John knew the game, but what he never imagined was a daughter who would run it on him, then walk away for good. That is the con he couldn’t see coming: Lucky trusting what she knows about him over what she wants from him. And the show grants her a glimpse of life on the other side. “It kind of feels like the first inhale of a new life,” Pappas says of that final close-up. “We cut away before she gets to exhale.”

That exhale belongs to Lucky now, somewhere past the edge of the frame. What it took for this woman to stop running turns out to be everything she had: the money, the long-running nickname, her narcissistic father. She gives up all three, and the ocean, which was never really John’s to promise, comes to meet her anyway, with whatever follows finally hers to choose.

As students go back to school in the midst of record-breaking summer heat, many are returning to overheating classrooms whose aging air conditioning systems can't keep up with extreme heat waves—if they even have air conditioning at all. 

Extreme heat has already caused school closures and disruptions across the country. In July, Milwaukee Public Schools shut down its Summer Academy and other indoor school programs for two days because of extreme heat. One day in May, 57 Philadelphia schools went remote and canceled all in-person activities due to soaring temperatures. That same month, a Washington, D.C. high school carried out a "heat evacuation" as classroom temperatures reached the mid-90s. Eight elementary schools in Doylestown, PA also closed for a day because old buildings couldn’t protect students from the heat. And in recent years, schools in Memphis dismissed students early as temperatures climbed to 110 degrees. 

During the 2024-25 school year alone, more than 9 million students at 10,000 schools nationwide experienced extreme heat- and weather-driven school closures or disruptions. These are not isolated inconveniences. They are warning signs that our school buildings and grounds were not designed for today’s new weather patterns.

It’s important to understand that students struggle to learn in hot, stuffy classrooms. Air quality, temperature, and ventilation can affect how students think, focus, and perform. Poor ventilation can impair cognitive function, while excessive heat diverts the body’s energy from learning, slows reaction time, and weakens attention.

In fact, research has shown that in schools without cooling, each 1° Fahrenheit increase in school year temperature reduces the amount learned that year by approximately 1%.

Extreme temperatures (80 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit and above) are known to exacerbate student absenteeism and disciplinary referrals, while poor indoor environments can also contribute to the spread of illness and exacerbate respiratory conditions like asthma, one of the leading causes of missed school days. Younger children, whose bodies and brains are still developing, are especially susceptible.

In medicine and education alike, we have seen how the environments where people spend their time can directly affect their health, well-being, and ability to thrive. We would never accept these conditions in a hospital. We should not accept them in a classroom.

At the same time, outdated heating and cooling systems are placing a growing financial strain on school districts. Across the country, energy costs are rising and becoming more unstable. For school leaders, that often means tradeoffs: dollars spent on inefficient energy systems are dollars not spent directly on teaching and learning. But there is a better path forward.

Modern HVAC systems, often paired with on-site solar energy, offer schools a way to deliver reliable heating and cooling while reducing exposure to volatile fossil fuel costs. These solutions can stabilize energy budgets over time and are increasingly supported by domestic manufacturing, including the production of heat pumps here in the United States.

Just as important, new federal tools make these upgrades far more accessible than they once were. Through energy tax credits and a mechanism known as Elective Pay, public school districts can receive direct financial support to invest in these improvements. That means lower upfront costs and faster payback, turning what was once out of reach into a practical, near-term option.

We are already seeing what this looks like in practice.

In Indiana, Center Grove Community Schools are demonstrating how modern HVAC upgrades can improve classroom comfort while helping manage energy costs, in part by replacing aging boilers, chillers, and fan coils with a geothermal heat pump system. In Virginia’s Prince William County, at the heart of the nation’s data center corridor, district leaders are acting to shield their budgets from steep projected utility increases. And in Wisconsin, a school in Menasha modernized its facility with a ground-source heat pump system, solar panels, and energy storage to deliver better air quality, lower costs, and create local jobs.

The benefits extend well beyond temperature control. Students are better able to focus and learn. Districts gain predictability in their operating costs. And communities benefit from more resilient, efficient infrastructure that reduces strain on the grid during periods of peak demand.

For school and district leaders, this moment calls for action. Now is the time to explore how these solutions can work in your community.

The environments we live in shape the health within us. Nowhere is that more immediate, or more consequential, than in the classroom.

We can improve student health and learning, strengthen our schools, and protect public resources at the same time. And we have real-world proof from communities across the country that this is not only possible, but doable.

The real risk is not the price of modernization, but the cost of continuing to send students and teachers into unhealthy, inefficient buildings unprepared for the realities ahead.

President Donald Trump’s Administrations have overseen construction work on hundreds of miles of barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border. But one small portion of the planned wall—stretching merely 17 miles—has become the center of a hard-fought battle.

That section of the project, which extends across challenging terrain in Texas’ Big Bend National Park that has historically seen relatively few attempted border crossings, has faced pushback from everyone from public lands advocates to congressional lawmakers to local residents.

Read More: What's the Status of Trump's Border Wall? A Key Campaign Promise, Over a Decade On

The Trump Administration has been pushing the construction of the border wall in Big Bend despite the public outcry, going so far as to bypass a score of environmental laws to expedite the project. 

But on Monday, after months of opposition, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) Commissioner Rodney Scott announced that CBP had paused “all construction” in the park while he visited the site to conduct a “personal, on-the-ground evaluation.” In post on X, Scott wrote that he would be working to “evaluate the terrain and listen to local leadership, community members and stakeholders” over the next “couple of days.” 

Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott also said on Monday that he had spoken with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who Abbott said had “committed” to not building “a wall or a fence” in Big Bend. Abbott said there were “other tools” to ensure border security. 

Here’s what to know about the Trump Administration’s efforts to build the border wall in Big Bend, and the opposition the project is confronting. 

What the Trump Administration is seeking to build in Big Bend

Big Bend National Park sits in a remote southwest corner of Texas along the U.S.-Mexico border in Brewster County. The Administration has sought to build 17 miles of barriers across that section of the border as part of the larger border wall project.

Perhaps the most recognizable image of Trump’s wall is the “primary wall,” a structure built from tall steel bollards up to 30 feet tall that makes up the first line of the barrier system that would be encountered by those travelling north from Mexico. The section of the project planned to run through Big Bend, however, would look notably different, according to Scott.

“CBP is building one new access road, improving existing roads, installing detection technology, and placing vehicle barriers in limited, strategic locations,” he said. “We are NOT building a 30-foot wall or stadium lighting through Big Bend National Park, Big Bend Ranch State Park, or the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area.”

The portion of the wall in the park would be made up of a non-contiguous “vehicle barrier system,” according to the CBP, which consists of “steel posts supported by continuous steel rails,” power cables, cameras, roads for patrol cars, and shelters along the border. 

According to the agency’s Smart Wall tracker, an interactive and frequently updated map that shows the status of the border wall, CBP has several construction projects interspersed along the border labeled as a “vehicle barriers … technology & patrol road.” A couple of these are located at the southern tip of the park; one sits far west near Presidio County, while others are located at the eastern edge of the park. These sites are in the Chihuahuan Desert, which presents a difficult landscape to navigate filled with steep canyons and mountainous terrain.   

A controversial push to speed construction

In June, the Trump Administration waived more than 20 environmental and preservation laws intended to protect Big Bend’s landscape in order to accelerate the construction of the border wall in the park.

To do so, the Administration invoked a section of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which allows the government to bypass laws that obstruct the building of border wall.

DHS defended the move at the time by describing Big Bend as an “area of high illegal entry” and saying that “there is presently an acute and immediate need” to build more barriers.

Migrant encounters are relatively rare at the section of the border that runs through the park, however—and have become more so in recent years. The park includes roughly 118 miles of what’s known as the Big Bend Sector of the border, which spans 517 miles from Sierra Blanca, Texas, to Sanderson, Texas, and covers roughly one-quarter of the full length of the U.S.-Mexico boundary. CBP recorded a 74% decrease in border crossings through its Big Bend Sector between fiscal years 2023 and 2025, with apprehensions dropping from 11,823 to 3,096. There were a total of 237,538 migrant encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border in FY 2025, meaning that the 3,096 apprehensions in that sector accounted for just 1.3% of the total number. And CBP’s planned border wall in the park would only cover a fraction of a fraction of the full sector.

The Administration’s move to bypass the environmental laws triggered immediate opposition. Bob Krumenaker, the park’s most recent former superintendent, called the news “devastating” to Marfa Public Radio and referred to it as “giving CBP unfettered authority to do anything they want within the national park.” Legal challenges also followed in the form of multiple federal lawsuits, while members of Congress made efforts to block DHS’s funding for projects in Big Bend. 

Why the project has faced opposition, and from who

Grassroots organizations, conservation groups, businesses, local communities, and lawmakers have also made efforts to fight against the construction of the border wall in Big Bend.

Much of the opposition stems from concern over the park’s natural landscape, which is home to an array of wildlife and is effectively undeveloped. Other groups oppose the construction because they view the park as a cultural and heritage site, while still others have voiced concerns for the impact the planned barrier construction could have on the tourism economy there. 

A series of lawsuits have been filed in an effort to block DHS’s plans to construct the border wall in Big Bend.

One lawsuit from the Center for Biological Diversity challenged DHS’s waiving of laws to carry out construction in the park. “Until now no administration has been heartless enough to waive laws in a national park like Big Bend, so we’re suing to uphold the U.S. Constitution and protect this crown jewel,” Laiken Jordahl, national public lands advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement according to a news release. 

The Center for Biological Diversity had previously filed a lawsuit that argued the construction would “devastate the region’s wildlife, recreation economy, and natural and cultural heritage.”

Another lawsuit, filed by The People of La Junta for Preservation and Far

Flung Outdoor Center, a tribal nonprofit and an outdoor recreation company, argued that the construction will cause damage to archaeological sites associated with indigenous peoples and could threaten protected religious freedoms. 

Groups have also mounted protests and sent letters to lawmakers to call for the planned construction to be halted.

In March, the grassroots organization No Big Bend Wall sent a letter to several leaders on congressional committees on behalf of 132 organizations asking that the use of any federal funding for the border wall in Big Bend be prohibited. 

All the Democratic members of the Texas delegation in Congress sent a letter to Mullin later that same month voicing “staunch opposition” to the wall. 

“This proposal threatens preservation of one of America’s crown jewels, Texas’ largest state park, and the state’s only congressionally-designated Wild & Scenic River,” the lawmakers wrote. “Construction and maintenance of a border wall segment and the associated roads, secondary barriers, power lines, towers, and lighting will disrupt natural biodiversity, river dynamics subject to routine flash flooding, and one of the darkest night sky areas in the world.” 

Over the following two months, more than 2,000 people rallied at the Texas Capitol building in Austin, and seven former superintendents of Big Bend National Park urged Mullin not to waive federal laws to build the border wall in the park. 

In early August, video showed heavy machinery bulldozing the land at Big Bend. A bipartisan group of Texas House lawmakers soon after sent a letter to Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday in which they urged him to halt the Big Bend construction, citing “damage to one of Texas’ most pristine and irreplaceable landscapes” that they said had already begun with the movement of bulldozers and construction equipment into the park. 

Last Wednesday, a large crowd of protesters gathered in the park chanting “No road. No wall. No wire. No way," as they held hands in a circle. They also held a large banner that read “NO WALL,” along with a series of other wildlife-themed flags and signs. 

More than 140 local businesses, recreation groups, and outfitters who rely on the tourism economy in the park also penned a letter on Aug. 4 to Cornyn, Cruz, and Abott asking them to halt the border construction to preserve the vibrant tourism economy that lives within the park.

Scott released a statement last week in response to the public reaction specifying that “what people are seeing right now is survey and design work—NOT construction of a wall through the park.”

Following Scott’s later announcement that CBP would be pausing construction on the wall in Big Bend, the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), which has pushed back against the Big Bend construction, lamented the damage that it said the project has already done to the park’s lands. 

“The people have spoken, and they do not want the Trump administration to bulldoze America’s national parks for border infrastructure,” said NPCA President and CEO Tiernan Sittenfeld in a statement. “Unfortunately, the federal contractors’ bulldozers have already inflicted tremendous damage to one of America’s most iconic national parks. Their heavy equipment has torn through miles of priceless wild landscape, wreaking havoc on sensitive wildlife and irreplaceable habitat.”

Laurie was on her way to a gate at the airport where she worked as a manager when a colleague called with a warning: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had turned up again and were asking airline staff to help locate a passenger.

She had years of experience cooperating with federal law enforcement. But the encounters she was accustomed to followed a protocol: airline managers were notified in advance, officers arrived in uniform with their badges visible and judicial warrants were presented for passenger arrests.

Read more: ICE Considers Expanding Detention Space in 14 Locations—Including Guantanamo Bay and Virgin Islands

Multiple gate agents working at airports in Colorado, Texas and Arizona have told TIME that ICE agents have become a recurring presence in recent weeks. With protocols for handling such encounters unclear or inconsistently applied, airline employees like Laurie say they are increasingly being left to decide for themselves how to respond.

She knew how consequential that decision could be.

Ten days earlier, two men in plain clothes had approached a gate agent, identified themselves only as federal officers and asked the employee to summon a passenger. Laurie, who was the manager on duty, had received no advance notice of their arrival. She approached the men and asked for identification.

She said the officers told her they were ICE agents and showed their badges, which had not been visible. An announcement went out over the airport’s public address system. A woman approached the desk, and the officers took her into custody.

Laurie asked to see a warrant and the men told her it was in their car. She followed as they escorted the passenger to an unmarked vehicle with an out-of-state license plate, where the officers showed her an administrative warrant rather than a judicial warrant signed by a judge.

“Well, this isn't a criminal. This is immigration, it's different,” the agents told her, before handcuffing the passenger and driving away.

Laurie asked TIME to use a pseudonym because she fears government retaliation and was not authorized by her employer to speak publicly. TIME reviewed video footage of the incident filmed by Laurie.

“Because I hadn't seen this before, I was kind of freaking out, thinking, ‘What do I do?’” she said.

ICE ramps up its presence at airports

Airline employees around the country are confronting similar questions as ICE expands its presence at U.S. airports. Gate agents say officers have asked them to help identify or locate passengers, provide information from internal airline systems and grant access to restricted areas such as jet bridges and, in some cases, aircraft. The requests have left some workers uncertain about when they are required to assist federal officers and when doing so could conflict with airline security protocols.

The increase in airport enforcement comes as ICE seeks to meet a White House goal of 2,000 arrests a day, a target confirmed by an ICE official not authorized to speak publicly. Last month, it was reported that the agency was making an average of 20 to 40 arrests a day at airports, targeting, among others, travelers with expired visas and pending asylum cases.

Videos of airport arrests have also circulated widely online. On July 21, two plainclothes ICE agents arrested Chantal Morales Rojas, a 27-year-old woman from Ecuador, at the jet bridge at Denver International Airport, according to a widely shared video. That same day, ICE arrested an Ethiopian faculty member from the University of Maryland at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport.

The operations have been aided by expanded sharing of travelers’ information between federal agencies. Since May 2025, ICE has been obtaining traveler information through the Transportation Security Administration under a previously undisclosed data-sharing program, according to a declassified memo released by the watchdog group American Oversight. The New York Times reported that the program gives ICE access to the names and birth dates of passengers the agency believes may be subject to immigration arrest.

The administration has also broadened its use of administrative warrants. Previous administrations used such warrants to arrest people who were already in deportation proceedings. Under the Trump administration, they have also been used in cases involving immigrants who are actively applying to renew their immigration status.

“In the past, people like that have never been prioritized for deportation if they pose no other public safety threat, given that they're taking steps to get into compliance with the law,” said Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council.

Backlogs and processing delays in the immigration system can put immigrants at risk of losing legal protections while their applications are pending, she said. 

ICE agents can also make arrests without a warrant in certain circumstances if they have probable cause to believe someone is in the country without legal status and is likely to escape if not immediately arrested. Gupta said that authority has been abused in previous immigration operations.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said that law enforcement officers are “simply enforcing our nation’s laws and following all applicable laws and established policies.”

“When DHS components operate in the same transportation environment, they coordinate as appropriate to support public safety, security, and lawful operations while minimizing disruption to the traveling public,” the statement continued. 

Some recent airport arrests have faced scrutiny in court. Jodi Ziesemer, an immigration lawyer who represents four immigrants arrested by ICE at Denver International Airport in separate cases, said two of her clients were told that the officers arresting them did not know why they were being detained. In one case, she said, ICE could not initially establish the reason for the arrest.

“I asked ICE why they had arrested her, and they told me they thought that maybe she had a deportation order from 2002, but they couldn't find any other paperwork about it because it wasn't a digital file, so they detained her first, and then they started looking for some paperwork about her,” Ziesemer said. The client spent six weeks in a detention center before a federal judge ordered her release.

How airline employees are responding

The encounters have also raised concerns about the position in which they place airlines and their employees. A Phoenix couple is suing United Airlines for false imprisonment and negligence over the carrier’s role in an ICE arrest at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

“I've gone to agents who have been involved with any ICE agent,” Laurie said. “Most of them are just like, ‘I don't want to be doing this. Like, why are we helping them?’”

After the first arrest she witnessed, Laurie raised her concerns with airline leadership and asked for guidance.

“We haven't gotten a clear security directive,” she explained. “There's never been an official written directive about ICE."

Laurie says she was still waiting for guidance when ICE agents returned to the airport looking for another passenger. This time, she made a different choice. She called the supervisor at the gate, asked for the passenger’s phone number and called the woman herself.

“I know this is going to sound extremely radical, or crazy,” she recounted telling the woman, “but ICE is there at the gate, and they're looking for you."

There was a pause. “Are you serious?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” Laurie said. “I know this is crazy, but I promise you. I'm being serious.”

“Should I leave?” the woman asked. “I think it might be best if you do,” Laurie said.

When Laurie reached the gate, the woman she had called approached her. She appeared to be in her late 20s and was traveling with a family member. Laurie said the two stepped into a bathroom to speak privately, where the passenger said she did not understand why ICE was looking for her.

“Why is this happening? I have all my papers,” she asked.

After calling a relative, the woman decided not to take the flight. She returned with the hood of her jacket pulled over her head, thanked Laurie and left the gate with her family member.

The ICE agents arrived after she was gone. Laurie recognized two of them from an earlier encounter. About 10 minutes later, one approached her, showed his badge and asked whether she could confirm that the passenger had checked in. Laurie refused, telling him airline employees could not provide passenger information.

As the flight neared final boarding, another ICE officer accused Laurie of interfering with the operation and pressed her to help locate the passenger. Laurie declined to say whether the woman was on the flight's passenger list and told the officer he would need to contact the airline’s corporate security department for information. “You're going to need a subpoena,” she said. No arrests were made at the gate that day.

The next day, the passenger called her. 

She had made it home. And she was with her child.

"I was extremely scared that ICE would take another person in front of me, but also for myself and how I was jeopardizing my job and safety," Laurie said. "But I would 100% do it again, without a moment of hesitation."

For Boeing, Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 live in infamy. The first plane crashed in October 2018 in the Java Sea shortly after taking off, and the second crashed in central Ethiopia only five months later. Both were Boeing 373 Max aircrafts, a newer and more fuel efficient model that had was certified by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2017. Within two years of first entering into service, every 737 Max had been grounded after the same malfunction led to a combined total of 346 fatalities. Three years later, Netflix released Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, exploring how the company’s obsession with profit and maintaining a competitive edge led the former titan of aviation safety to the point of endangering anyone who flew their newest aircraft model—as well as Boeing’s efforts to deny their own complicity. 

That was in 2022. This year, Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing takes a wider look at Boeing’s continued reputation. “When we finished that film, Boeing ultimately had taken responsibility,” says Rory Kennedy, director of both documentaries. Speaking to TIME over Zoom, she says the company “assured the flying public, as well as the airlines and Congress, that it had learned its lesson and changed its ways. It did seem initially that it had made some corrections, but soon after the 737 Max got [back] into the air, I started seeing the headlines again.”

The need to return to the Boeing story

Kennedy has made documentaries about the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, the final weeks of the Vietnam War, and the impact that the death of her father—Robert F. Kennedy—had on her mother Ethel. Freefall is her first sequel, motivated, she says, by Boeing’s refusal to improve its once venerated, now dire safety standards. “I was getting approached by whistleblowers inside Boeing saying, not only had things not improved, but they were actually getting worse, and would I consider revisiting this?”

At a certain point, you didn’t need to be a whistleblower to recognize Boeing was struggling to improve its recent track record. In January 2024, a 373 Max 9 plane operated by Alaska Airlines lost a rear door plug in midair, plunging the 171 passengers into pure terror until the plane was able to land with no fatalities. An investigation found that Boeing had improperly fitted the outsourced fuselage and door plug parts in cost-cutting moves that once again resulted in danger. Kennedy was also motivated by a highly publicized but personally-felt tragedy—the death of prime whistleblower John Barnett, who by the end of his 32 years working in quality control at Boeing had made detailed reports on the company’s manufacturing negligence. In March 2024, Barnett was giving a lengthy deposition against Boeing in South Carolina when he failed to appear for his third day of testimony. He was later found dead in his truck from a gunshot wound that the Charleston County coroner described as self-inflicted. Barnett was a friend of Kennedy and lent his expertise to Downfall, and his interviews play throughout Freefall, forming what Kennedy calls a “defining thread" of the film.

“When we started, we didn't know what had happened to John Barnett, we didn't know how the Alaska Airline incident was going to unfold,” she says. “There were whistleblowers still working at Boeing coming forward and wanting their stories to be shared for the first time. Frankly it's one of the things I love about filmmaking, you're on a journey. We followed what was happening and pivoted as necessary to pay justice to the stories as they were unfolding.”

Still, to Kennedy the heart of the story is crystal clear. “If there was one reason I went back to make this film, it was because of John.”

Dreamliner, greed, and a reputational nosedive

By all accounts, Boeing used to be a great place to work. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, the aviation company went from strength to strength in the postwar period and beyond, boosted by international aircraft sales and defence contracts. Safety and rigor was paramount, and engineers and quality inspectors held a lot of sway. As the narrator of an old company promotional film claims, Boeing’s ethos is to “make everything a little better than it needed to be.”

But the whistleblowers featured in Freefall, including Merle Meyers, Sam Salehpour, and Roy Irvin, found that Boeing’s former “safety culture” was scrapped in the modern era: quality inspectors were undermined and harassed for doing their job, the crews building the planes were less skilled or closely supervised, and outsourcing parts became the norm. The company’s $14 billion merger with aircraft producer McDonnell Douglas in 1997 confirmed their new trajectory—increasing shareholder value and lowering production costs, overseen by a series of CEOs like James McNerney and Dennis Muilenburg who had been mentored in Wall Street worship prior to taking the role.

While Downfall dips into the history of Boeing to explain why the new 737 Max aircraft was unsafe, Freefall paints a more revealing picture of a company contributing to its own decline. In 2009, Boeing opened a facility in North Charleston, South Carolina—a non-union state—to produce the Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” plane as cheaply and quickly as possible. The majority of the plane structure was outsourced from cheaper suppliers rather than being assembled in-house. The facility was soon full of shoddy engineering—ill-fitting pipes were sledgehammered into place, holes were found in aft body fuselage sections, and tiny metal slivers that were liable to cause massive electrical problems were found in the planes.

Barnett was one of many Seattle employees sent to South Carolina to work on the 787, where quality inspectors received a rude awakening on Boeing’s new safety culture. Management would dismiss and mock their complaints, discipline whoever spoke up, and demanded that recordings were deleted. In 2013, the entire 787 fleet was grounded after the plane’s lithium-ion batteries caused two separate electrical fires; a subsequent Al Jazeera investigation included clandestine recordings of Boeing employees joking about the Dreamliner’s haphazard and unsafe construction. To Kennedy, the footage was too revelatory to not use in her own film. “It’s so shocking to think that the people who are building the airplane won't get on the airplane.”

John Barnett was indicative of how Boeing treated whistleblowers

If Boeing grew careless in how it built planes, it was ruthless in how it responded to internal complaints. Barnett diligently documented all the faults at the Charleston facility after his attempts to use the official channels of complaint were met with dead air, or worse, harassment. Every few months, Boeing moved him from site to site in an effort to demoralize him and stop him from getting too comfortable, which actually meant that Barnett got to witness a wider range of defects and malpractices. Ultimately, he was disciplined and “benched” for not toeing the company line, and after his retirement in 2017, Barnett filed a defamation suit, accusing the company of deliberately harming his career after he spoke out against Boeing.

Barnett was back in South Carolina in March 2024, to give evidence on the hostile work environment in Charleston. His body was found in his truck on the morning of his scheduled third day of deposition. “He talks about how he's exhausted, and could he take some time off from the deposition? And the Boeing lawyers respond, “No. You can't take the time. You can't leave. You have to keep going.” And this is after years and years and years of just being trampled by Boeing,” says Kennedy.

In response to Barnett’s death, his lawyers Brian Knowles and Robert Turkewitz said, “He was in very good spirits and really looking forward to putting this phase of his life behind him and moving on. We didn’t see any indication he would take his own life. No one can believe it.” Although the coroner found no physical evidence that someone other than Barnett was responsible for his death, conspiracy theories spread online, further fanned by a friend of the whistleblower who claimed that Barnett told her, “If anything happens to me, it's not suicide.” Barnett left a note, a line of which read, “I hope Boeing pays.” As his lawyers put it, “while Boeing may not have pulled the trigger, the company is responsible for his death.” 

Boeing addressed the claims raised in Freefall in a statement to Kennedy and Netflix: "The allegations in this film have been widely reported over the years. Some remain unfounded claims to this day while others are issues that Boeing thoroughly addressed or continues to improve upon. Under the leadership of our new CEO and with feedback from our employees, we introduced new values and behaviors that are strengthening our culture.” 

The continued fight for change

While the whistleblowers drive Freefall’s investigative narrative, they are far from its only focus. After the two 737 Max crashes, Boeing negotiated a “deferred prosecution agreement” with the Justice Department, which meant that criminal fraud charges would be dropped if the company avoided more scandals and accidents for a probation of three years. For the loved ones of the crash victims, this was not good enough, and they pushed their fight for meaningful accountability from Boeing and assurances that aviation companies wouldn’t be able to shirk on safety ever again. “One of the things that comes through is just the remarkable humanity of the people who work there, and the remarkable lack of humanity by the corporation,” says Kennedy.

Naoise Connolly Ryan is the widow of Mike Ryan, a United Nations employee who died in the Ethiopian Airlines crash. In Freefall, she comes across as a clear-minded, courageous and dogged organizer, appearing with her fellow activists with placards and posters of her husband in the benches of senate chambers where Boeing leaders are being grilled. Just before Freefall’s release, a Chicago jury awarded her $29 million for a civil suit brought against Boeing. It sets a strong precedent for the other families, but it’s a small step against a stubborn giant—a company once regarded as symbolic of American growth and excellence that has turned its back on the public. 

“You're seeing this company really be destroyed, and at the same time, the people running it have become some of the richest people in the world,” says Kennedy. “It does speak of a larger correction that needs to happen to make sure that corporations and governments are focused on the public interest and not destroying these institutions for the profit of a very small group of people at the expense of everybody else.” Boeing’s downfall is ultimately a historic betrayal.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) said Wednesday that it “deplores” sanctions imposed this week by the U.S. State Department on its president, Judge Tomoko Akane, and Abdoulaye Seye, a Senegalese senior trial lawyer for the Office of the Prosecutor.

The State Department announced the sanctions Tuesday, accusing Akane and Seye of having “directly engaged in efforts by the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute officials whose government has not consented to ICC jurisdiction.” 

The sanctions include the freezing of assets in the country, blocking financial transactions, and prohibiting entry to the U.S. They were imposed under an Executive Order issued by President Donald Trump in February 2025, which reads: “The United States unequivocally opposes and expects our allies to oppose any ICC actions against the United States, Israel, or any other ally of the United States that has not consented to ICC jurisdiction.”

Neither the U.S. nor Israel is a state party to the Rome Statute, the treaty that founded the ICC and went into effect in 2002, and therefore do not recognize the jurisdiction of the court. 

Read More: Trump Administration Vows to Dismantle the International Criminal Court

“These sanctions are a flagrant attack against the independence of an impartial judicial institution which operates pursuant to the mandate conferred by its states parties,” the ICC statement said. “Such measures targeting judges, prosecutors and staff who work towards the fulfilment of the mandate that was conferred to the ICC by states undermine the rule of law.”

The Court further warned that the sanctions put “international legal order” at risk.

In his first term, Trump imposed sanctions on ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and another senior official, Phakiso Mochochoko. These were later lifted under the Biden Administration. 

The ICC says that nine of its 18 judges are now under sanctions from Washington, as well as both deputy prosecutors, a former prosecutor, and one other member of staff. 

Why does the Trump Administration oppose the ICC?

Announcing the sanctions on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the ICC a “corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court.” He accused it of repeated attempts “to assert authority over nationals of the United States and other countries that have not consented to its jurisdiction or ratified the Rome Statute.”

The Trump Administration has long pushed back against the ICC’s investigations and charges against nationals from both the U.S. and Israel. February’s Executive Order said the ICC’s recent actions against both countries “set a dangerous precedent.”

The State Department also launched a campaign in July to “dismantle” the ICC’s jurisdiction, saying it will “systematically disable the ICC’s ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty.” 

But the tensions trace back to Trump’s first term, when the ICC sought to investigate possible war crimes committed by the CIA and military personnel in Afghanistan. Bensouda requested authorization in 2017 to investigate those allegations. Trump then brought sanctions against her in 2020.

The U.S. has also rebuked its actions in recent years against Israel.

In November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the recently dismissed Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Both were accused of “crimes against humanity and war crimes" pertaining to the ongoing Israel-Hamas War, including “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” and “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.”

The conflict was ignited by Hamas’s terror attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which left some 1,200 people dead and 250 taken hostage. Since then, over 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza—1,262 of whom have been killed since a cease-fire began last October, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Public Health on Aug. 15. 

The prosecutor also pursued arrest warrants for Hamas leaders Mohammed Deif, Ismail Haniyeh, and Yahya Sinwar, all of whom have since been killed. 

During Rubio’s Senate confirmation hearing in 2025, he addressed the warrant for Netanyahu. “This is a test run. This is a trial run to see, ‘Can we go after a head of state from a nation that’s not a member?’” he said, adding: “If we can go after them and we can get it done with regards to Israel, they will apply that to the United States at some point.”

Israel has denied the ICC’s war crimes accusations and challenged its jurisdiction. The Pre-Trial Chamber initially rejected that challenge, but in April 2025 the Appeals Chamber sent it back for reconsideration. The arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant remain in effect.

Netanyahu commended Rubio’s sanctions announcement on Tuesday, describing the ICC as “a kangaroo court that cloaks its abuse of power in the language of international law while undermining the very principles of justice.” 

The future of humanity is being built along the world’s coastlines. Around 2.4 billion people live within 100 km (62 mi.) of a shoreline, including roughly one billion within 10 km (6.2 mi.). This narrow band of land, about 5% of the inhabited world, generates an estimated 30–50% of global GDP. It contains many of our fastest-growing cities, ports, energy systems, tourism economies, fisheries, and water infrastructure.

In this small sliver of the planet, the foundations of a new blue economy are already being laid, once set, they will be difficult to change. 

We have a narrow window in which to decide what kind of economy will emerge from the ocean. More than three billion people depend on the ocean for their livelihoods. Yet the ocean economy, valued in the trillions, is steadily eroding the ecosystems that make this activity possible. Fish stocks are under pressure. Coral reefs are approaching catastrophic thresholds. Mangroves, seagrasses, and wetlands that protect communities from storms and rising seas continue to disappear. Without deliberate intervention, this blue economy will simply default to the familiar extractive model that has already depleted so much of the natural world. But we have an opportunity to take a different path, to shape it instead around a more resilient and equitable form of prosperity.

The world must do more than simply slowing the depletion of our oceans. Instead, a net positive, regenerative, blue economy is needed. One that sets a higher standard: economic activity must give back more than it takes and help to rebuild the natural and social capital on which it depends.

This requires a different model of growth. Established industries such as shipping, ports, and fisheries need managed transitions that reduce pollution, decarbonize operations, rebuild stocks, and redirect harmful subsidies. 

Expanding sectors—including offshore renewables, aquaculture, and coastal tourism—must integrate ecosystem health and community benefit into their business models. This shift can unlock a new generation of companies focused on restoration, blue biotechnology, and ocean data, which create value by improving the health and resilience of marine systems. 

The good news is that we already know that this approach pays. Research suggests that a nature-positive economy could create more than three times as many jobs as business as usual, while investment in ecosystem restoration can generate nearly four times as many jobs as investment in oil and gas. As populations grow and AI reshapes labor markets, we need to be far more deliberate about the kinds of economic activity we encourage. Regenerative businesses offer a rare triple dividend: creating jobs, restoring critical natural systems, and accelerating the climate transition.

The opportunity is substantial, but regeneration will not emerge from thousands of disconnected projects and initiatives. Oceans function as systems, but our governance remains divided by ministries, sectors, permits, and political boundaries. We need to manage whole seascapes: connecting coastlines, watersheds, nearshore ecosystems and the people and industries that share them. Marine spatial planning can expose trade-offs, account for cumulative impacts and establish where development belongs, where restoration must take priority, and where activity should not proceed.

This governance must place Indigenous Peoples and local communities at its center. They are often the most experienced stewards of coastal ecosystems yet remain excluded from the decisions and capital that shape them. 

The Bird’s Head Seascape in Indonesia shows what a better model can achieve. Across 225,000 sq. km (over 86,800 sq. mi.), traditional community rights over land and coastal waters have been embedded in conservation planning since the early 2000s. Local and government authority has been connected, and tourism revenues help finance conservation and ecosystem protection. A network of marine protected areas now covers more than 52,000 sq. km (over 20,000 sq. mi.). Community-led tourism has diversified incomes, while former “bomb fishers” have been trained as coral gardeners. Ecological recovery, livelihoods, and local authority reinforce one another because they were designed not as separate entities, but as a single interconnected system. 

We now need global financial and entrepreneurial architecture to step up to take such models to scale. Public and philanthropic capital can reduce early risks; blue bonds, blended finance, and debt-for-nature swaps can mobilize larger pools of investment. Dedicated financing windows, patient capital, technical assistance, and venture-building support can help coastal entrepreneurs and cooperatives grow viable businesses. Technology and AI can lower the cost of monitoring, verification, and coordination, provided they strengthen good governance rather than substitute for it.

The next chapter of the blue economy will be judged by more than the wealth extracted from the ocean. Its true measure will be the fish stocks rebuilt, coastlines protected, jobs created, communities strengthened, and natural systems restored. The future of our societies is increasingly tied to the sea, and our prosperity will depend on learning to give back more than we take.

President Donald Trump announced late Tuesday a temporary pause on 50% tariffs on Canada as both countries race to finalize a trade deal.

The President’s announcement came hours before a series of tariffs set to cover about $20 billion worth of imports into the U.S. from Canada were set to take effect.

“I have paused the 50% tariffs against Canada, that were scheduled to kick in tomorrow morning for a three day period, based on the fact that Canada and the U.S.A., subject to the finalization of documents, have a deal!” Trump said on social media.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney released a statement moments later, confirming that there had been “intensive discussions” with the U.S. to “address outstanding trade issues.”

“Substantial progress has been made, although there is important work still to be done,” he said.

Read More: Trump Imposes 50% Tariff Hike on Canadian Goods

The tariffs will now be paused until Aug. 21, subject to the finalization of an agreement between the two countries.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the deal will include "comprehensive market access for ​all ⁠American goods, economic security commitments, digital trade alignment," along with other provisions.

Trump added in his social media post that the Keystone XL pipeline—a cross-border oil pipeline project between the U.S. and Canada that was canceled by former President Joe Biden in 2021 after pushback from environmentalists, Native American tribes, and Indigenous advocates—"may be awoken from the grave," but did not provide further details.

The President later posted what appeared to be an AI-generated image of himself dragging the Keystone pipeline out of the ground.

Neither side has provided further confirmation about the contents of the agreement.

TIME has reached out to both the White House and the Prime Minister's office for comment.

U.S. and Canada push toward a deal

Carney said earlier this week that he planned to speak with the U.S. President ahead of the tariff deadline. The announcement follows a period of negotiations between the two sides.

During a tour of a tire factory in Iowa last week, Greer told reporters that the U.S. and Canada were engaged in “constructive negotiations” but warned that if a “country retaliates” they would “take action.”

Canada's minister responsible for U.S. trade, Dominic LeBlanc, and chief trade negotiator Janice Charette have been in Washington since last week for talks.

The negotiations unfolded against a backdrop of ongoing grievances between the two countries, including Trump’s repeated statements about his desire to annex Canada and make it the 51st U.S. state—an idea Carney has strongly pushed back against.

In August, Carney took a swipe at Trump, mocking the U.S. President after a teleprompter malfunctioned in the middle of an on-camera speech.

The tense relationship between the pair has also played out over the Gordie Howe International Bridge—a cross-border bridge connecting the two countries that has repeatedly become a source of disagreement between Washington and Ottawa.

How U.S.-Canada trade tensions escalated

The last-minute tariff pause comes after more than a year of escalations between the two countries.

In February 2025, the White House hit Canada with a 25% tariff on most goods and 10% on energy resources, citing what it regarded as inadequate progress in curbing cross-border illegal immigration and drug trafficking.

Canada then imposed tariffs on some vehicle imports from the U.S. in April 2025, amid a larger trade war sparked by Trump’s global tariffs—the majority of which were struck down by a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year.

The 50% tariff hike on a range of Canadian goods was announced in July, with Trump signing a series of proclamations citing Canada’s “discriminatory treatment” of American products.

The new levy, a retaliation for Canada’s tariffs, would apply to a range of Canadian goods, including electronics, sports equipment, and essential oils.

The Administration had also announced targeted new tariffs on Canadian dairy products and exports of wine and other alcoholic beverages.

According to economists, the tariffs could have had significant economic consequences if enacted. TD Economics estimated that, if maintained, they could reduce Canadian GDP growth by 0.3 to 0.6 percentage points over the following year.

A Canadian Federation of Independent Business survey of 1,833 firms found that 77% of affected exporters expected revenue losses, while 35% expected their revenue to fall by at least half.

In a new proclamation issued Tuesday suspending the tariffs, Trump said: “Canada has expressed a commitment to remove the discriminations or unreasonable and unequal impositions.”

In a statement late Tuesday, the Distilled Spirits Council of the U.S. applauded Trump's announcement and called for "a negotiated solution that gets American spirits back on retail shelves in all Canadian provinces and returns the spirits sector to a zero-for-zero tariff framework."

The new tariffs were set to apply despite the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement (USMCA)—which had shielded Canadian industries from earlier U.S. tariffs.

The USMCA, which was signed by Trump in 2018, is a trilateral agreement that eliminated or reduced tariffs on goods traded between the nations of North America. It governs nearly $2 trillion in annual trade among the three countries.

In early July, the U.S. declined to renew the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement for a 16-year term. Rather than terminate it outright, this puts the USMCA under annual review. Trade experts told TIME that the move is expected to carry profound long-term economic consequences.

At one of their first dinners together, Lindsey Hall watched the man she was dating take enormous bites, talk with his mouth full, and—horror of horrors—burp loudly without seeming to register it. The evening was supposed to feel romantic. Instead, Hall remembers thinking: “Have I made a mistake?”

She tried to dismiss his behavior as a minor incompatibility. But it continued, meal after meal, and gradually soured her feelings and attraction toward him. Table manners had never seemed like a priority until then. “I didn’t realize how important it was to me until I dated someone who just … doesn’t have it,” Hall says.

Terrible table manners might sound like a trivial complaint. But eating is one of the most routine things we do with other people, and a habit that inspires disgust three times a day can quickly become difficult to shrug off. The challenge is figuring out whether—and how—to address bad dining habits without making the person feel humiliated.

Here’s what psychologists and etiquette experts suggest.

First, consider whether the behavior is actually rude

Table manners can feel like universal rules, but they’re shaped by culture, family, and upbringing. “We talk about them as though they’re laws of physics,” says Gwenhwyfar Dunne-Henry, a psychologist in Dubai and author of Unbind Me: How to Break the Rules That Keep You Small. “They’re not. They’re social agreements.”

Before correcting someone, think about whether they’re being inconsiderate or simply behaving differently from the way you were taught. Slurping noodles, eating with your hands, and keeping your elbows on the table, for example, can carry different meanings depending on where and how someone grew up.

That doesn’t mean you have to enjoy every habit you encounter. Talking while chewing, spraying food, or sharing utensils while sick can interfere with other people’s comfort or hygiene, says Virginia Chow, a clinical psychologist in Montreal. The point is to understand exactly what’s bothering you—and avoid turning a difference in upbringing into a judgment about someone’s character.

That’s especially important because people rarely react only to the offending behavior. “We argue about what we think it means,” Dunne-Henry says. Someone chews with their mouth open, and you might start thinking they’re selfish, oblivious, or disrespectful. “If they don’t notice this,” she says, “what else don’t they notice?”

Sometimes the habit also becomes a symbol of every other irritation in the relationship. Perhaps the person also interrupts you, leaves messes behind, and routinely takes the last helping without asking. Suddenly, as Dunne-Henry puts it, “the bread roll is carrying a lot of emotional responsibility.”

Hall experienced that escalation firsthand. Once her former partner’s table manners began bothering her, she started noticing every other habit that irritated her. “I think you just start becoming hypercritical,” she says—a reaction she disliked in herself. 

Decide whether it’s your place to say something

Correcting another adult’s table manners is inherently awkward, so Stayce Wagner, a business-etiquette consultant in Jacksonville, Fla., recommends letting an isolated lapse go. Everyone occasionally speaks before swallowing or reaches all the way across the table for something. A repeated habit is different—but even then, your relationship with the person matters most.

A partner or child is one thing. A close relative or trusted friend might also appreciate knowing, particularly if you have the kind of relationship in which you would alert each other to spinach in your teeth. But correcting an acquaintance, coworker, or stranger is rarely worth the embarrassment it could cause.

“Correcting the terrible table manners of someone who isn’t your partner—or your child—is social and relationship dynamite,” Wagner says. Most people ultimately decide whether they can tolerate the habit, find a way around it, or stop sharing meals with the person.

Chow suggests asking yourself whether the behavior is truly affecting you or merely annoying you. “Not every annoyance requires a conversation,” she says. With a stranger, speaking up generally only makes sense when there’s a legitimate health or safety concern—someone who is visibly sick using a shared serving utensil, for example. In that case, focus on solving the immediate problem rather than critiquing their manners: “Would you mind using a clean serving spoon? I’d really appreciate it.”

Bring it up away from the table

If you do decide to say something, resist correcting the person in the moment—particularly if other people are present. “It’s a soul-crushing experience for most people to have their manners corrected in public,” Wagner says.

Instead, choose a private, neutral moment when neither of you is eating. Ask permission to broach an uncomfortable subject, and then describe one specific behavior. Avoid sweeping declarations like “Your table manners are disgusting” or “You eat like an animal.” Those statements turn a changeable habit into an indictment of the entire person.

Chow suggests phrasing it like this: “Can I mention something a little awkward? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but sometimes when you’re talking while eating, a bit of food comes out. I figured you’d probably want to know because I’d want someone to tell me.”

That wording assumes the person isn’t doing it intentionally and gives them a face-saving reason to hear you out: You’re sharing information they might want to have, not delivering a verdict on their upbringing.

When the habit is directly affecting your ability to enjoy meals together, Wagner recommends being honest about it—without describing the person as repulsive. Try: “I know you don’t realize it, but sometimes you talk with food in your mouth, and I find it affects my ability to enjoy the meal. Would you be open to me pointing it out when it happens?”

The distinction is small but important: You’re explaining how the behavior affects you, rather than insisting that your standards are objectively correct.

Hall says she wishes she had been that straightforward. At first, she tried making jokes or telling her partner that she couldn’t understand him while his mouth was full—an approach she now suspects sounded passive-aggressive. “I wish I had been a little bit more direct about how much it was affecting my attraction,” she says. 

Agree on how you’ll handle it next time

Table manners are habits, which means one conversation probably won’t make a lifelong behavior disappear. If the person is receptive, ask how they’d like you to alert them if it happens again. You might agree on a word, gesture, or subtle signal that won’t embarrass them in front of other people.

In less intimate relationships, Wagner recommends finding subtle, polite ways to avoid encouraging the behavior. If someone begins answering a question immediately after taking a bite, for example, you could say: “Take your time and enjoy your food—I can wait.”

What’s unlikely to help, meanwhile, is glaring, recoiling, kicking someone under the table, or making snide remarks. “Jokes, sarcasm, public corrections, or visibly expressing disgust probably won’t change the behavior in the long run,” Wagner says. “But it will damage the relationship.”

Even the most tactful conversation might embarrass the person; there’s no magic phrase that makes criticism delightful to receive. “The goal is to not intentionally embarrass or insult them,” Wagner says.

Know when to adapt instead

Sometimes the kindest and easiest choice is to work around the behavior. Wagner has encountered friends and colleagues who double-dipped, for example, but she never corrected them. She simply ordered her own appetizer or transferred what she wanted to a separate plate before they began eating. The behavior bothered her, but she decided the relationships mattered more.

That calculus changes when the offender is a partner and the habit makes you dread eating together. If you’ve raised the issue respectfully and the person repeatedly dismisses your discomfort, the problem may no longer be their chewing. It may be that you don’t feel heard or considered—and that’s a larger conversation.

That, Hall says, was ultimately the problem in her relationship. Her partner didn’t merely struggle to change an ingrained habit; he dismissed her concern as evidence that she was too demanding. “He didn’t really value how I felt about it,” she says.

Etiquette, after all, isn’t really about mastering a complicated rulebook. Instead of tallying another person’s violations, Dunne-Henry suggests asking yourself a simpler question: “How easy am I to share a meal with?” That standard applies to everyone at the table. It means extending some grace when another person’s habits annoy you—and caring enough to listen when someone you love tells you that one of yours is making meals difficult. 

Cancer treatments have been veering toward more personalized approaches that recruit the immune system, and the latest results involving an mRNA-based therapy and an immunotherapy show that combining them may result in significant benefit for certain cancer patients.

In a release, the two companies report that people with melanoma who received intismeran, jointly developed by Moderna and Merck, and Merck’s pembrolizumab (Keytruda), lived longer without any recurrence of their cancer, as well as had fewer incidences of their cancer spreading, compared to those receiving Keytruda alone, which is the current standard treatment. Combining the two therapies seems to lead to better outcomes in this later-stage trial. Intismeran is not yet approved, while Keytruda was first approved to treat melanoma in 2014, and in 2019 to treat melanoma in people after tumors were removed. The current study included people in this latter group with stage 2 to stage 4 melanoma who were treated with either intismeran and Keytruda or Keytruda alone after surgeons removed the bulk of their tumors.

“What we’re trying to do here is to tell the immune system that it missed the signature of the tumor cell if you have cancer,” Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel tells TIME of intismeran. “This product basically allows us to teach the immune system about the mutation in your cancer that allows the cancer to grow.”

The study involved 1,137 people with stage 2 to stage 4 melanoma who received surgery then were randomly assigned to receive either the combination of therapies or Keytruda for just over a year. Intismeran is the first of its kind autogene therapy that relies on studying a patient’s cancer mutations, making mRNA sequences of those mutations and giving them back to the patient in so their immune systems can recognize the tumor signals in the same way it would a virus—in what's known as a therapeutic vaccine. One of the advantages of the mRNA platform is its ability to generate such genetic sequences relatively quickly, in a matter of weeks, which is essential for scaling up more personalized cancer treatment approaches. Keytruda works by unveiling the cancer cells, which can often hide from the immune system since they start out as normal cells before picking up mutations that make them grow out of control.

The companies did not provide specific details about the recurrence or survival rates, but earlier this year reported at ASCO, a major cancer conference, from an earlier stage study that showed that the combination lowered the risk of recurring melanoma by 49% and lowered the risk of distant spread of the cancer or death by 59%.

The latest results bring some good news to Moderna, which has seen its stock drop after reaching highs during the COVID pandemic following development of the first mRNA vaccine, against SARS-CoV-2. In 2025, Bancel laid off 10% of the workforce, amounting to 500 to 800 employees worldwide, after a combination of sagging sales from the COVID shot and loss of important government contracts to develop pandemic flu vaccines based on mRNA technology. In August, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first mRNA flu shot, developed by Moderna, but only after initially refusing to review the company’s submission.

Bancel says that Moderna is also exploring using intismeran alone, perhaps in earlier stage cancers. For the current trial, because intismeran is still an experimental therapy under study, and an approved therapy, Keytruda, does exist for melanoma patients, regulators at the FDA were more comfortable with combining the drugs so every patient received at least the standard of care and therefore would not be additionally harmed by joining the study. “It would be unethical for us to tell people to come on a study of something that we don’t know if it works, when people are fighting for their lives,” he says. “That’s why we did the study together with Keytruda, which can improve outcomes, and we tried to show that the combination was better, and we did.”

Bancel’s teams are already studying intismeran in stage 1 lung cancer, to see if using it earlier, and priming the immune system, can lead to equally beneficial outcomes for those people. In lung cancer, standard treatment involves surgery and careful monitoring for any signs of returning cancer, so doctors can ethically study how adding intismeran for some patients affects their cancer outcomes compared to those not receiving it. While that study is still in early stages, Bancel is optimistic since “from a scientific standpoint there is no scientific sense that it would work in melanoma and not work in another tumor type,” he says of the mRNA-based approach. “I think it will be transformational. Think about if you get a screening X-ray and find stage 1 lung cancer. Then you get intismeran, which is like a vaccine so you have no severe toxicity like with other immunotherapy. Think about getting this product on your way to work, or even [potentially] at your local pharmacy—that would be an incredible change in care. And it can help reduce the risk of metastasis, and have a profound impact on patients, as well as prevent people from getting very severe disease.”

Moderna is also studying intismeran in stage 3 lung cancer, and hoping to see similarly encouraging results as they did in melanoma patients. And its scientists are studying the compound in kidney, pancreas, and bladder cancers in nine ongoing studies, says Bancel.

“Because of all the things we learned over the years in the field of immunology, we believe this molecule will be used in many different cancer types,” he says.

Correction, Aug. 19

The original version of the story misstated which companies developed intismeran. It was jointly developed by Moderna and Merck, not solely by Moderna.

The Trump Administration ordered 30 universities to audit their foreign research partnerships or risk losing funding.

The order, issued Monday by the Defense Department, instructs universities to review their ties to 130 foreign institutions, mainly Chinese, that “engage in activities that increase the likelihood of U.S. government-funded research and development efforts being misappropriated.” Schools that fail to terminate any “problematic” partnerships within two weeks may lose their eligibility for future federal research funding.

The order is intended to protect taxpayer-funded research from “unauthorized technology transfer, intellectual property theft and adversarial exploitation,” the Pentagon said in the announcement.

“The Department of War has zero tolerance for academic partnerships that compromise our national security,” Emil Michael, undersecretary of war for research and engineering, said.

The announcement did not identify which schools had received the order or how they were selected, but a U.S. official told the Associated Press on Tuesday that they include Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Johns Hopkins University.

The order is the latest effort to clamp down on alleged Chinese influence in the U.S., including in higher education. The Trump Administration and several lawmakers from both parties have argued that China exploits U.S.-funded research to obtain sensitive technology and intellectual property.

U.S. concerns about Chinese intellectual property theft and espionage have grown in recent years. Last year, a federal jury convicted former Corning scientist Ji Wang of stealing files containing trade secrets from a Pentagon-funded project. Prosecutors said he planned to use the technology in a Chinese business backed by government entities. In May, Eileen Wang, the mayor of Arcadia, Calif., resigned after admitting to acting as an unregistered Chinese government agent before taking office.

But some observers have warned that the crackdown unfairly politicizes academic collaboration, stigmatizes Chinese academics, and could weaken American scientific competitiveness.

The Chinese embassy in Washington said in a statement to news outlets that it opposed “the overstretching of the concept of national security and the politicisation or instrumentalisation of normal scientific, educational and academic exchanges.”

“The U.S. side should abandon the Cold War mentality and foster an open, fair and non-discriminatory environment for educational, scientific and people-to-people exchanges between China and the United States,” it added.

Here’s what to know about the raft of policies aimed at curbing institutional ties to China.

Order targets primarily Chinese institutions

The foreign institutions the U.S. seeks to blacklist were identified by the Pentagon last month. Eighty-eight of the 130 institutions are in mainland China, while the remaining institutions are in Russia and Iran. The list has been updated annually since an earlier version was first released in 2023. It was established under Section 1286 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, which was enacted during President Donald Trump’s first term.

While some Chinese universities on the list have more explicit ties to the military, others are prominent civilian institutions with extensive international research partnerships. These include Fudan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The updated list also added a number of other Chinese institutions with varying links to China’s defense and security establishment, including Shandong University, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Shenyang Aerospace University, and the University of International Relations.

People familiar with Chinese academic institutions previously told TIME that Chinese Communist Party structures are embedded throughout the country’s universities, making institutional links to the government common, even though individual students or researchers may not be engaged in political or military work.

The Pentagon also instructed universities to audit collaborations with organizations associated with “rebranded Confucius Institutes.” Confucius Institutes are non-profit language and cultural programs funded by the Chinese government and hosted in universities around the world. Launched in 2004, there were at one time more than 100 Confucius Institutes operating on U.S. college campuses. But most U.S. programs closed after 2019 amid congressional scrutiny and federal funding restrictions. By late 2023, there were fewer than five active Confucius Institutes in the U.S.

Many universities, however, retained partnerships with their former Chinese partner institutions or established successor language and cultural programs under different names. Critics characterized some of these arrangements, particularly those that continued to receive Chinese funding or instructors, as “rebranded Confucius Institutes.” Of 74 former Confucius Institute hosts surveyed by the Government Accountability Office in 2023, 43 said they maintained ties to their former Chinese partner institutions. Nine reported receiving continued funding or other support for programming from those institutions, although eight of the nine said the partnerships predated their Confucius Institutes.

Crackdown on broader Chinese ties

The Trump Administration has pursued a slate of policies that build on Trump’s first-term “China Initiative.” These have included tighter scrutiny of universities’ foreign funding and research partnerships and restrictions on collaborations with blacklisted Chinese institutions. The Trump Administration has also increased vetting of Chinese student visa applicants, threatened visa revocations for some students, and renewed investigations of China-linked researchers.

Since last year, the Pentagon has prohibited funding fundamental research projects conducted in collaboration with a listed foreign institution or its employees. The policy was expanded in March to bar the use of equipment from listed entities in certain Pentagon-funded projects.

Meanwhile, China has sought to bring in more foreign talent and investment, including by seeking to attract more international students to its universities and exchange programs, and by introducing a K visa for young foreign STEM professionals.

Dozens of Chinese tenure-track scholars have left U.S. universities for China over the past year.

Days before the latest announcement, the Republican-led House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the House Education and Workforce Committee released a report accusing Harvard of failing to adequately screen its relationships with Chinese institutions linked to the People’s Liberation Army and China’s defense industry. The investigation said it identified more than 140 publications co-authored by Harvard-affiliated researchers and scholars at certain Chinese defense-linked civilian universities.

Harvard disputed the report’s “mischaracterizations,” and said it follows federal national security standards.

The changes also come as the U.S. seeks to maintain its lead over China in the global AI race. A 2025 report warned that major AI data centers in the U.S. were vulnerable to Chinese espionage, sabotage, and intellectual property theft.

In July, the Administration recommended redirecting potentially billions of dollars of federal research funding from universities toward individual scientists and AI-focused projects as part of an effort to counter Chinese scientific advances.

Last week, Reuters also reported that the Administration was preparing to tell 35 partner countries that participation in Pax Silica—a U.S.-led initiative to strengthen supply chains for semiconductors, critical minerals, and AI infrastructure—was conditioned on their refusal to join China’s rival AI framework. The reported demand appeared in an internal draft and has not been formally issued.

Lizzie Post still remembers the time she walked into a party and an acquaintance greeted her with exciting news: “You had a baby!”

“Nope,” Post said.

“You got engaged!”

Nope again.

“You got married!”

“I’m going to the bar,” Post replied.

Post, co-president of the Emily Post Institute and Emily Post’s great-great-granddaughter, knew the woman meant well. She had apparently heard that something momentous had happened—it hadn’t—and cycled through three incorrect milestones trying to identify it. Fortunately, she eventually stopped guessing: a relief for everyone involved.

Life is full of faux pas, but even when you’re the one making it, you can dig your way out of social quicksand most of the time. Here’s what psychologists and etiquette experts suggest saying, plus when to stop talking.

First, take your foot out of your mouth

Your immediate reaction after saying something you regret might be to turn fire-truck red. Then comes the urge to reach for the very thing that got you into trouble in the first place: more words. People often try to explain, defend, or excuse their misfired remark, says Karina Schumann, a social psychologist and associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies apologies and conflict resolution. The instinct is self-protective: They’re frantically trying to repair their image in the other person’s eyes.

“What actual repair looks like is to shift the attention to the other person,” Schumann says. “Put aside this very strong need that you have to repair your self-image, and instead think: ‘If I were on the receiving end of this, what would I need to hear?’” 

Pause, acknowledge the impact of what you said, and take responsibility. She suggests phrasing it like this: “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed.” Or: “I can see that my joke was insensitive. I apologize.” 

Then take a breath. More words will still be available later, should the situation require them.

Match the apology to the offense

A minor blunder and a painful faux pas shouldn’t trigger matching productions of remorse. Forget an acquaintance’s name? A quick “I’m sorry—please remind me” may be enough. Ask when someone is due when she isn’t pregnant, or make a joke that accidentally lands on a painful subject? That calls for a direct acknowledgment of the harm, without trying to laugh it off, and perhaps a longer conversation if the other person wants one.

The person responsible isn’t always the best judge of what it will take to repair the situation. Schumann points to a phenomenon researchers call the “magnitude gap”: People who cause harm tend to view it as less severe and less damaging to the relationship than the people on the receiving end do. The offender may think, I apologized; this should be over. The other person may still be wondering how the offender could fail to understand how much it hurt. 

Don’t turn an apology into an autobiography

An apology doesn’t require an origin story, a director’s commentary, or a guided tour of everything happening inside the offender’s head.

“Blame is like a hot potato,” says Jennifer Thomas, a psychologist and co-author of The 5 Apology Languages: The Secret to Healthy Relationships. Defensive responses—including “I was only joking,” “I didn’t mean it that way,” and “Why did you take it so personally?”—toss it back to the injured person. They minimize the harm, gloss over the offender’s intentions, or suggest the other person is simply too sensitive. 

An explanation can sometimes make what happened easier to understand, Schumann says, but it has to provide context without weakening responsibility. Lead with: “I shouldn’t have done that. There’s no excuse for it.” Then ask whether an explanation would be helpful.

A digital faux pas calls for the same restraint. If you send a text to the wrong person with information you wouldn’t have divulged to them otherwise, Post suggests writing: “I’m so sorry. Clearly that text wasn’t meant for you—and I probably shouldn’t have been sending it anyway.” Then leave it at that.

Resist the apology encore

For a minor, accidental blunder—maybe you stuck your toe in your mouth instead of your whole foot—one sincere apology is generally enough. “The more you apologize, the more it’s about you,” Post says. That means no apology cookies, no anguished message the following morning, and no campaign to extract an official declaration that everything is fine.

Serious harm is different. Schumann cautions against treating every apology as a “one-shot thing,” as though finding the perfect words should settle the matter. The other person may need a longer conversation, an effort to make amends, or simply more time.

“The timing of any forgiveness should stay wholly in the hands of the person who was hurt,” Thomas says. An apology offers them a choice, not a deadline.

What if you don’t realize you made a faux pas until hours or days later? It’s usually better to address it than hope the other person forgot, therapist Elika Dadsetan-Foley says. Try: “I’ve been thinking about what I said yesterday. I realize it may have been insulting, and I’m sorry I didn’t recognize that in the moment.”

The next time you meet, act normal

The next time you run into the neighbor you assumed was sick but who had merely gone makeup-free, or the acquaintance who received a text that was definitely not meant for them, offer a friendly greeting. Avoiding the person can make one uncomfortable exchange feel like a permanent rupture; bringing it up again can give a dying embarrassment fresh oxygen.

Keep the story to yourself, rather than retelling it as evidence of what a hopeless fool you are. “You may think that’s you throwing yourself under the bus, but you’re dragging the other person with you,” Post says. Your self-deprecation may get a laugh, but it also makes the other person’s embarrassment public.

Fortunately, most faux pas don’t require a lifelong of self-flagellation. If you’ve apologized sincerely and the other person seems ready to move on, follow their lead. “We all get stuff wrong from time to time,” Post says. Sometimes recovering gracefully means making amends. Other times, it means saying sorry—and letting everyone get on with the party.

Every August, our country celebrates new beginnings. Families fill cars with bedding, desk lamps, laptops, notebooks, and high hopes. Students decorate dorm rooms and imagine the people they will become, while parents drive away with a mix of beaming pride and quiet, heavy lumps in their throats. 

Every August, I go back to 2006. 

Twenty years ago this fall, I helped my daughter, Reema, begin her freshman year at Virginia Tech. I remember believing she had her whole life ahead of her. Like every parent, I assumed the biggest challenges she would face would be exams, homesickness, and choosing a major. 

My family could never have imagined that eight months later, she would be among the 32 people killed in her classroom on April 16, 2007, coming home in a mortuary van. 

In the years since, mass violence has become a recurring nightmare in American life. Yet every August, millions of parents still make that same drive, entrusting their children to colleges and universities across the country. No parent should have to make that journey wondering whether their child will come home safely. 

We have learned a great deal since 2007. We know more about recognizing warning signs, responding to mental health crises, and building stronger safety protocols on campus. We know more about what proactive prevention requires. The problem is that knowing what works and consistently doing it are two different things. 

As another academic year begins, we cannot rely on prayers or goodwill to keep our students safe. While most colleges and universities spend phenomenal budgets emphasizing sports, campus events, and academics, parents need to ask the most important question: how safe is my child? We need sustained, measurable, and accountable action from lawmakers, university leaders, and citizens. 

First, campus safety cannot remain reactive. Every college president and administrator will tell you that student safety is a top priority. But a pledge to safety is not enough. Colleges should be able to demonstrate, through regular and rigorous self-assessment, where their vulnerabilities are and what they are doing to address them. 

Every single college and university should be using the 32 National Campus Safety Initiative, or 32NCSI. Through the VTV Family Outreach Foundation, in partnership with NASPA (Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education), we launched this campus safety tool in memory of the 32 people killed at Virginia Tech. It gives colleges a framework for assessing critical areas of campus safety and infrastructure, including threat assessment teams, emergency communications, mental health services, and physical security.

The tools exist. The question is whether we are using them consistently, and whether we are holding ourselves accountable. 

Second, campus safety cannot begin when a student arrives at college. It must begin years earlier. Every elementary, middle, and high school should have access to evidence-based programs that help educators and school resource officers recognize concerns, build positive relationships, and address problems before they escalate. 

One such model is Preventing Problems by Promoting Positive Practices, or P5, developed by the Virginia Tech Center for Applied Behavior Systems with support from the U.S. Department of Justice’s COPS Office, and in conjunction with VTV Family Outreach Foundation. P5 provides a comprehensive safety model and training program for K-12 school resource officers and administrators to create a safety net for students when they are in the yellow zone, prior to entering into the red zone. Simply put, it creates a culture of caring. 

Finally, we need to restore national infrastructure for campus safety. The National Center for Campus Public Safety was established in 2013 to conduct research, develop best practices, and provide campus security training. Its federal support eventually lapsed after funding allocations ran out, and the federal government no longer maintains the Center as the sustained national resource it was created to provide. While archived federal documents and reports remain available through the Office of Justice Programs Virtual Library, an active national center is no longer doing the work it was created to do. This needs to change.

In 2026, there is no reason to wait for another warning sign, another missed opportunity, or another family to experience an unimaginable loss. When I watch parents drop off their freshmen this month, I do not want them to live in fear. Hope is a vital part of entering college, and every student deserves to experience the wonder of a new beginning. 

But hope is not a policy. If we truly want to honor the memory of Reema and the countless others lost to mass violence, we must match our back-to-school hopes with uncompromising action. 

Twenty years after I helped my daughter move into Virginia Tech, every parent should be able to drive away from a college campus believing their child has a whole life ahead of them. That belief should not be a matter of faith. It should be a matter of policy.

In late July, the Federal Bureau of Investigation received reports of cyberattacks on water facilities from utility companies in at least seven states in the United States.

One of those attacks, in Braham, Minnesota, a city of around 1,800 people, affected the functioning of a pump at a water treatment plant and threatened the water supply. Public works crews in the city quickly and impressively isolated the system, restored a backup, and had the water plant back up and running in around 90 minutes, according to Nate George, the mayor of Braham.

While this ad hoc response worked this time, much more is needed to make America truly resilient to hybrid attacks by malicious actors on the critical infrastructure that Americans depend on every day for water, power, healthcare, and financial transactions.

In April, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a warning saying that Iranian-backed groups are targeting America’s critical infrastructure, including water systems. More capable adversaries of America, China and Russia, are also actively targeting critical infrastructure in the United States, according to U.S. officials. 

President Donald Trump said he does not believe that Iran is behind these most recent cyberattacks. Unnamed U.S. officials reportedly believe that Iran-backed groups are the likely culprits but also caution that the findings are preliminary and that there is a chance that the attackers may be impersonating Iran to stoke tensions.

Meanwhile. the Trump Administration has been gutting U.S. cybersecurity capabilities, cutting roughly a third of the federal cyber agency’s workforce at exactly the moment small utilities need it most. A new approach is needed. Washington needs a whole-of-society, resilience-based approach to deter and defend against these increasing hybrid threats to the American homeland.

Washington can learn a lot from its European allies. Europe has spent decades hardening its systems through a whole-of-society effort it calls “total defense.” Finland and Estonia are especially instructive examples. Finland runs a national supply agency that holds reserves of fuel, grain, and medicine and rehearses shortages alongside the private companies that would actually have to manage them.

Estonia fields a volunteer cyber unit within its Defense League, a militia under the command of its defense ministry. The volunteers are civilians with day jobs who train with the state and show up when attackers strike. They run exercise programs built around cyber resilience, information sharing, and public-private partnerships.

So what does Washington need to do to harden America’s water systems and other critical infrastructure? First, America needs to broadly embrace a whole-of-society “total defense” approach to homeland security, adopting and adapting innovative ideas from partners and allies.

More specifically, policymakers can take three specific steps now that will help prepare for, and perhaps deter, the next attack. First, they should renew the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program, a small grants program for states that helps build state and local level cyber defenses. The program has already lapsed once and now runs on year-to-year extensions, which is no way to fund a defense. Make it permanent and carve out a sizable share for water.

Second, Washington should set a response floor for water municipalities and measure it in hours. Electric utilities operate under binding federal cyber standards backed by real financial penalties. Water utilities have no equivalent, and the Environmental Protection Agency currently has no authority to impose one. Congress should give it a narrow version: every system above a modest size must be able to run manually for 72 hours and must prove it in an annual drill. This is not a technology mandate; it is a time standard, and it is the only number that matters once the pumps stop. Braham did it in 90 minutes. That should be the benchmark.

Finally, the U.S. needs to build the bench. There are roughly 50,000 small water systems in this country, and most have no dedicated IT staff at all. No grant program can hire its way out of that. Governors can act tomorrow with authorities they already have: cyber teams in the National Guard on standing state active duty orders, tied to a water mutual aid compact modeled on the one power companies use to restore each other’s lines after hurricanes. When a plant serving 1,800 people gets hit at two in the morning, somebody should already have the phone number.

A country that can afford 11 aircraft carriers can afford to teach 50,000 water operators to turn a valve by hand. Resilience is not a consolation prize for failed deterrence. By forcing an adversary to think twice about whether an operation will succeed, resilience is deterrence.

Florida Rep. Cory Mills, the incumbent representing the state’s 7th District, lost his Republican primary on Tuesday to former TV anchor Ryan Elijah after a controversial campaign for a third term in Congress.

President Donald Trump notably gave Mills his “Complete and Total Endorsement” on Feb. 10, when he wrote a social media post describing the candidate as “an America First Patriot.” But it didn’t seem to outweigh ongoing allegations of sexual misconduct, accusations of mishandling campaign finances, and questions about his military record.

Read More: Trump Says Voters Are Angry With Republicans—But Not With Him. Here’s What Polls Show

“Whether [Mills] wants it to be or not, obviously the allegations against him have become the defining thing that people are talking about,” says Kevin Wagner, professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University.

“The president's endorsement is powerful,” he says, “but it doesn't prevent voters from making a calculation on what they think of him individually in that seat.”

The controversies that came to define Cory Mills’s campaign

Going into the primary, the latest polling showed Elijah with 44% of the vote, while 27% backed Mills and 19% remained undecided. That meant there was no assured winner heading into Tuesday, Wagner says, with the number of undecided voters suggesting a lot of “volatility” in the race.

Incumbents are often the strong frontrunners in re-election campaigns for Congress, but Mills has been embroiled in a string of scandals in the past year. Last October, there was a court-issued injunction against him after a former girlfriend accused Mills of threatening to release explicit videos of her. The judge found that the woman in question, Lindsay Langston, provided evidence in support of her claim that Mills caused "substantial emotional distress." He wrote in his ruling that he did not find Mills's "testimony concerning the intimate videos to be truthful." In a separate incident in February 2025, D.C. police responded to a report that Mills had assaulted a woman with whom he was in a relationship. The woman later retracted her account, according to Politico, and police did not charge Mills.

In November 2025, the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into Mills. Its review included allegations of sexual misconduct, as well as allegations that he may have "omitted or misrepresented required information in his financial disclosure statements." The Committee emphasized that the investigation itself did not indicate that any violation had occurred, and Mills has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

Mills's military record also came under scrutiny when several veterans disputed the account provided in his recommendation for a Bronze Star, which he was awarded in 2021 for his actions in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. In 2025, five individuals who served with him claimed that they did not recall his presence at the incidents for which he was awarded the medal. According to NOTUS, Mills attributed the discrepancies to differing recollections amid the chaos of wartime.

His campaign was hurt further this month after two of his fellow incumbent lawmakers in the state, Reps. Anna Paulina Luna and Mike Haridopolos, endorsed Elijah. Then, last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis told reporters that he does not support Mills.

“I have not endorsed Cory Mills and I do not support Cory Mills,” he said.

Trump also appeared to distance himself last week when he reposted endorsements for all of the Republicans up for election in Congress on Truth Social—except Mills.

What to know about Florida’s 7th District race in November

While the 7th District will likely stay red in November, attention is turning to how Florida’s redrawn congressional map could reshape its midterm races.

The new map, signed into law by DeSantis in May 2026, redrew 21 of the state’s 28 districts, looking to reduce the number of Democratic-leaning districts from eight to four—affecting Democratic incumbents like Kathy Castor in Tampa, as well as Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Jared Mokowitz in South Florida.

While District 7 was not radically redrawn, Aubrey Jewett, professor of political science at the University of Central Florida, says that since this new map favors Republicans, flipping the 7th District could help offset any losses elsewhere in the state.

Elijah will go up against Democratic candidate and military veteran Bale Dalton in November, who is endorsed by Pete Buttigieg. Jewett says Dalton could be a viable candidate.

And if Dalton were to win, he says: “That might help not only the Florida congressional delegation pick up a Democratic seat, but of course, yeah, maybe at the national level, might offset some of these losses that they're expecting.”

Current polling and election forecasts show that Democrats are favored to take back the majority in the House of Representatives in November, which would be consistent with an existing pattern where the sitting President’s party typically loses seats in midterm elections.

CNN condemned the White House for launching personal attacks on one of the network’s journalists.

“Kristen Holmes is one of the most respected and accomplished journalists covering the White House,” CNN said of its senior White House correspondent in a statement shared on X on Monday. “This afternoon, she did her job and asked the President of the United States a tough, relevant, and newsworthy question on behalf of the American people.”

“Public officials are free to challenge reporting they disagree with, but personal attacks on journalists for asking questions are beneath the office and inconsistent with the principles of a free press,” CNN continued. “We stand firmly behind Kristen and reject these attacks in the strongest possible terms.”

The network’s rebuke came after a question that Holmes asked President Donald Trump during an Oval Office event on Monday drew a heated response from Trump and, later, a series of critical posts from the White House targeting the journalist.

“Jon Ossoff said that you’d rather travel with your aide Natalie Harp and build the ballroom than do your job as President,” Holmes asked the President, referring to a comment the Democratic Georgia Senator made during a speech the day before. “What is your response?”

“You mean Pee-wee Herman? Pee-wee Herman lookalike?” Trump replied. “No, I would much rather do other things. We’re building a great facility here. We’re fixing a White House that hasn’t been taken care of.”

The event in the Oval Office celebrated a teenage lifeguard who rescued a 10-year-old boy at a beach in Santa Cruz, California, in July. But it is common practice for journalists present at events like this to ask the President questions about a variety of issues.

Later on during the event, Holmes tried to ask the President another question, this time about whether North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un had asked him to “scale back” American military exercises with South Korea. Trump didn’t answer her, instead telling her “quiet.”

“You’re very disrespectful,” Trump said to Holmes. “Quiet.”

He then asked Holmes which news outlet she was with, to which she replied that she was with CNN.

“Fake news,” he shot back. “You’re a loud, boisterous person. You’re fake news.”

As Holmes tried to ask her question again, Trump repeatedly said: “Be quiet. Be quiet. Be quiet.”

“You’re a fake reporter and you report fake news,” he said to Holmes.

Tensions further rose after the official White House Rapid Response account on X shared a clip of Holmes asking Trump about Ossoff’s remarks and called Holmes “a disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession.”

“@POTUS hosts a hero lifeguard in the Oval Office and she uses it as an opportunity to take a cheap shot about one of President Trump’s staffers,” the White House continued. “These scumbags are the lowest of the low.”

Less than an hour later, the account made another post attacking Holmes.

“Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question,” the White House said, tagging Holmes in the post. “They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”

In addition to CNN’s official statement, many of Holmes’ colleagues fired back at the White House for its remarks. 

“What a horrible … thing to say. Kristen is an incredible reporter, person and, above all, mother,” Alayna Treene, a White House correspondent at CNN, said in a post on X. “I don’t understand such a reaction to a journalist asking the president for his response to something a Democratic senator has leveled against him.”

“Kristen is an excellent reporter who asked a good question, to which the president gave a fulsome answer,” Betsy Klein, a senior reporter and writer covering the White House for CNN, said in a social media post. “You know what’s disgusting and inhumane? Bringing her perfect children into this.”

Trump has repeatedly targeted news outlets and individual journalists throughout his political career. He has attacked female journalists in particular on a number of occasions; in November, for instance, he told one female reporter “quiet, piggy” after she asked him a question and, on a separate occasion later that month, called another “a third rate reporter who is ugly, both inside and out.”

The President propagated the term “Fake News” to denigrate the press, and members of his Administrations have continued to use the phrase in the years since. The White House has also created what it calls a “Media Bias Portal,” which lists journalists, news outlets, and articles that it claims are biased against the President. Several CNN stories, including some by Holmes, are listed on the site.

The U.S. venture capital industry is one of the most impressive economic growth engines this country has. Seven of the top ten companies by market capitalization today were VC-backed when they were young, innovative, and very risky. My research with Will Gornall shows that companies that received VC funding and subsequently went public now account for nearly half of the U.S. market capitalization and 94% of R&D spending among all public companies founded in the last 50 years. Today, global VC assets under management stand at nearly $3.5 trillion, spread across more than 11,000 institutional VC firms. Those firms have backed a quarter of a million companies, including almost 4,000 unicorns.

Yet the industry remains shrouded in mystery. Many capital allocators struggle to select fund managers and manage their VC portfolios, and many founders are uncertain which VCs are the best fit for them. In this light, TIME is publishing its second annual ranking of America’s 350 Top Venture Capital Firms.

Methodology: How TIME and Statista Determined America's Top Venture Capital Firms of 2026

The 2026 methodology is a weighted average of four factors, some quantitative, others more subjective: fundraising (30%—how much capital the firm attracted over a one- to ten-year span, and the trajectory of that growth); investments (20%—how much capital was put to work, including deal volume); performance (40%—the scale of outcomes, including IPOs and highly valued private companies, along with the consistency of follow-on investments, with early-stage bets weighted more heavily); and leadership (10%—leading rounds and winning board seats).

Each of these four factors is relevant, though how they are combined and measured of course matters and can dramatically affect which firms come out on top. The combined 50% weight given to fundraising and investments by the TIME methodology can reflect size. Size matters: many investors have minimum check sizes and pass on smaller VC funds, and many funds have grown dramatically in recent years. But capital allocators have yet to see whether greater size delivers similarly attractive returns and profits. Academic work also is not conclusive. Two factors balance TIME's methodology: deal volume favors firms making a great many bets, and the follow-on measure again rewards firms that invest early and then continue to back their winners. Performance is the critical consideration; at the end of the day, it is the ability to back home runs repeatedly and at scale that separates the greatest VC firms from the rest.

Taken as a whole, the methodology rewards what can be observed from the outside. Capital raised, deals done, and marquee portfolio names are all visible; the money actually returned to limited partners, for the most part, is not. Firms that are big, busy, and prominent will therefore do well, and on the whole they deserve to.

Every ranking methodology reflects the objectives of its creators. In my research, my partner and I have also assessed VC firms, with an emphasis on the economically relevant portions of the net profits generated by individual VCs’ investments. Both our assessment and TIME's ranking put the same handful of firms, which have been prominent for a decade or more, at the very top; firms such as Sequoia, a16z, and Lightspeed. That agreement is real: the elite of the American VC industry is very select, relatively stable, and well capitalized. Below that, of the roughly 110 firms in TIME's top 200 that do not appear in our research, only fifteen are ones we ruled out by definition: accelerators such as Plug and Play, angel networks, corporate vehicles, asset managers. We included some VC firms that are ineligible for TIME’s ranking (Meritech, Dragoneer, Addition, and Inflection Ventures all place in our top 100). We agree on the other firms: we simply score some lower. In other words, the industry has reached consensus on its top performers but not on the tier beneath it. For a founder or an allocator, that is the practical lesson: past the first twenty names, "top firm" is a claim about which yardstick you picked.

What our research makes plain is that VC no longer has clean edges. Capital comes from crossover funds, sovereign investors, corporations, and firms that would not have called themselves VC a decade ago, while the earliest support often comes from accelerators, angel networks, and solo investors. A list of top American VC firms is a useful map of the industry's core. The interesting question is how much of the action has moved to its edges.

Strebulaev is a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, focusing on startups and investors.

See TIME's full ranking of America's Top Venture Capital Firms of 2026 below.

Firms looking to submit data for consideration for the 2027 ranking can pre-register here.

Literacy rates have steadily risen around the world over the last decade, according to a 2025 UNESCO report—important progress on a key UN Sustainable Development Goal, as the ability to read, write, and use numbers is “crucial for thinking critically and navigating information-rich society and economy in a safe, effective and responsible manner.” Access to digital learning has largely been associated with higher test scores for students globally. As technology continues to advance, tech companies have pounced upon the opportunity to bring education systems around the world up to speed with the ever-more connected digital world and the proliferation of new tools like generative AI. 

To assess the top EdTech companies in the world, TIME partnered with Statista on a data-based research project evaluating the thousands of companies in the space on strong financial performance and industry impact. The end result is a list of the 500 top-performing companies in education technology.

Methodology: How TIME and Statista Determined the World's Top EdTech Companies of 2026

The top ranked company on the list is Duolingo, which was also the top-ranked EdTech company in the U.S. this year. The company, which started as a language learning app, has expanded into math, chess, and music. Duolingo now has over 60 million daily active users and generated more than $1 billion in bookings last year. As UNESCO advocates for more multilingualism, which can offer social, cognitive, and economic benefits, Duolingo’s chief product officer, Cem Kansu, believes that there are still more language learners the app has yet to reach. Roughly 15% of Duolingo’s users are in the U.S., with the majority distributed globally and Asia as one of their fastest growing regions recently. “Asia for English learning especially is a huge market,” Kansu says. Around half of Duolingo’s users are under 25, and use the app as an educational supplement—a lesser known product called Duolingo For Classrooms is designed specifically for teachers to assign Duolingo lessons as homework for students. 

Duolingo stands out among other language learning tools with engaging designs that motivate users to return and practice every day (more than 20 million users have a streak longer than one year); micro-lessons that use implicit learning rather than drilling grammar rules; and keeping its free tier to bring in new users.

“It is extremely important that we provide a very extensive free user experience because Duolingo was built around the idea of providing access to education,” says Kansu. “If someone that had to immigrate from Syria to Turkey had to learn Turkish to integrate, we want to provide access to them. On top of that, an excellent free product provides an amazing growth flywheel for Duolingo.” 

Word of mouth has certainly made Duolingo mainstream, but the company broke through the noise through its unconventional marketing tactics and its capitalization on cultural moments like the World Cup (daily learners studying Norwegian on Duolingo were up nearly 19% globally and 24% in the U.S. compared with the previous month), shows like Squid Game (Season 1 of Squid Game drove a 40% increase in new U.S. Korean learners on Duolingo immediately after its premiere), and Bad Bunny performing in the Super Bowl halftime show (engagement with Spanish jumped 35% the week after). 

While platforms like Duolingo are driving interest in learning and lowering the barrier for entry globally, in the U.S., where there appears to be a “learning recession” as standardized scores for math and reading drop, there are rising concerns about the use of technology in classrooms and too much screen time for children.

Emily Weinstein, a researcher at the Center for Digital Thriving at Harvard, says some students are using up to seven different apps to manage everything from grades to sports team schedules. Kids have reported feeling constantly tethered to these tools to monitor the “endless stream of notifications about what they're supposed to know and do,” which can add to the academic pressures they’re already experiencing, Weinstein says. Educators have also told her that these tools often arrive without the necessary onboarding. 

“Whenever you're thinking about technology in education, you should really think about it like a three-legged stool. You have the actual technology, you have the person using it, and then you have the place where they're using it,” says Stephen AguiIar, an associate professor at the USC Rossier School of Education. “In an ideal world, the technology works, the person knows how to use it, and it's used in the place where it's helpful or where it actually makes a difference. 

I think a lot of the backlash is about poor fit, where you have AI or EdTech companies entering a space they frankly know very little about, and then you have backlash from people who see things just not working. And what's a little unfortunate is that it doesn't always have anything to do with the core technology.”

A central problem is that educational institutions in the U.S. have been underfunded for decades, which creates strains in the system. “Whenever you put a system in strain, one of the things that happens is administrators rightly look for ways to cut costs and to become more efficient, even though education isn't an efficient enterprise,” says Aguilar. “Education is not this thing where you drop off your kids, they sit there for a little bit, knowledge gets poured into them, and then they come out a little smarter. That's the business way of looking at it, and it is fundamentally incorrect. Companies that do a little bit of a better job, they're really thinking about what teachers need to execute their work better.”

As some AI tools fuel the proliferation of digital cheating, there's a reckoning that's happening among educators about how they’re evaluating and assessing learning through traditional assignments, papers and homework, as well as how they’re teaching, experts say. Some leading EdTech platforms like Canvas-owner Instructure (no. 45) and Inspera (no. 31) have rolled out tools to deter AI cheating, including resources to help instructors understand the culture around cheating and how to change their focus from catching students cheating to creating an environment that encourages academic integrity. 

“The systemic issue is we don't have a sense of trust and integrity around the work, then we're trying to layer on EdTech as a solution, and kids are finding ways around it because they're missing the core thing that is going to give them pride in the work,” says Weinstein. “One of the things that we collectively need is to use this AI moment to have conversations in our classroom and school communities about what the purpose of learning is.”

From her research, Weinstein has found that listening more to student perspectives could fundamentally change how we understand what it looks and feels like to be a student in this context, and how these different technologies are shaping learning trajectories. “When you're talking to a young person, you can suddenly see that their good intentions are not always enough in a context where the market forces and design features are pulling them this way and that,” she says. “When I sit down with a kid and look at their ChatGPT logs, I can see such a difference in when they have turned to an EdTech tool for learning and when they have turned to it for a grade.”

Duolingo’s Kansu says that even though Duolingo For Schools’ dashboard for teachers had fairly good adoption, designing products for schools is not easy. “What we're realizing is if we just continue teaching better, Duolingo will become a great complement to classrooms anyway,” he says. “I'm hoping that Duolingo is always put in a bucket of good screen time…Meaning, any minute you spend on Duolingo, you are doing something good for yourself. Any fun minute you spend is also of extremely high learning value.”

Rising Stars

This sub-ranking highlights companies 10 years or younger with the highest revenue growth rates over the past three years out of those who submitted company data via the online application process.