As children return to school, families have a lot to look forward to: fresh routines, new connections, crisper weather—and a greater risk of head lice.

September is National Head Lice Prevention Month in the U.S, coinciding with a time of year when infestations tend to surge. “Head lice can occur throughout the year, but cases are often noticed more frequently in late summer and early fall, when children return to school and resume close-contact activities,” says Dr. April Armstrong, chief of dermatology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Head lice is a common childhood condition, with up to 12 million head lice infestations occurring among children ages 3 to 11 every year in the U.S., according to estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

The insects don’t spread disease, but they can still cause a great deal of distress, doctors say. “Having head lice is not a sign of poor hygiene, but it can cause stress and anxiety because there is this stigma that it is,” says Dr. Carla Torres Zegarra, a pediatric dermatologist at Children’s Hospital Colorado. “If left untreated, it can also be very bothersome, causing itching and disturbing sleep.”  

Here’s what to know about the pesky parasites, and how to spot, treat, and prevent them.

What are head lice?

Head lice, or Pediculus humanus capitis, are tiny, wingless insects that feed on human blood. They are found mostly on the scalp, but sometimes appear on eyebrows and eyelashes.

Adult head lice are about the size of a sesame seed and are usually tan to grayish-white in color, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Head lice lay and attach their eggs—known as nits—to the base of hair shafts using a glue-like substance. Infested people may have a combination of adult and juvenile head lice, nits, and empty egg casings on their scalp and in their hair.

Are they the same as pubic or body lice?

No. There are three different types of lice that feed exclusively on humans: head lice, pubic or “crab” lice, and body lice. Unlike head lice, which have elongated bodies, pubic lice have short and round bodies, resembling crabs. Pubic lice typically spread through sexual contact and are most common in adults.

When people have body lice, the insects are found primarily on their clothing and bedding, and sometimes on their bodies. Unlike head lice, body lice is connected to hygiene practices and access to clean clothing, and spread primarily through direct contact with someone who has body lice or with their contaminated clothing or bedding. In the U.S., body lice mostly affects people without access to housing, clean clothes, and regular bathing, CDC says. 

How do head lice spread?

Since head lice can only crawl and not jump or fly, they typically spread via head-to-head contact. “That’s why it happens more in kids, because they play in close proximity,” Torres Zegarra says.

Head lice can also spread through objects that touch the head, such as combs, hats, helmets, and pillowcases. But this type of indirect transmission is much less likely since head lice typically survive for less than a day when away from the scalp, and nits can’t hatch at temperatures cooler than that of the human scalp, AAP says. 

Getting head lice has nothing to do with personal hygiene or the cleanliness of the environment, and is caused solely by exposure to an infested person. 

If there’s an outbreak of lice at your child’s school or daycare, that’s not a guarantee they’ll get it. Though head lice frequently spread in schools, research has found that head lice actually have a low contagion rate in classrooms. That’s why the CDC, AAP, National Association of School Nurses and other medical groups don’t recommend keeping children with head lice away from school.

Animals don’t get or spread head lice.

How do you know if you or your child has head lice?

An itchy scalp is the most common symptom of head lice, “particularly behind the ears and near the back of the neck,” Armstrong says. “Some people also describe a tickling sensation or the feeling that something is moving in the hair. Scratching may produce redness, small sores, or, occasionally, a secondary bacterial infection.”

People can have head lice without symptoms, too. “With a first infestation, itching may not begin for four to six weeks because it takes time for the body to develop an allergic response to louse saliva,” Armstrong says.

Examining the hair and scalp under bright light and finding live crawling lice is the best way to diagnose a head lice infestation. Using a magnifying glass or a special lice comb can help with this process, AAP says. “Nits located farther from the scalp are often empty or no longer viable, so their presence alone does not necessarily indicate an active infestation,” Armstrong says. 

Misdiagnosis of head lice is common. “Many presumed lice and nits submitted by physicians, nurses, teachers, and caregivers to a laboratory for identification were found to be artifacts such as dandruff, hairspray droplets, scabs, dirt, or other insects,” such as those blown by the wind and caught in the hair, AAP says. 

The CDC recommends that people visit a doctor if they suspect they may have lice.  

Who is at risk of head lice?

Head lice infestations most commonly occur in preschool- and elementary school-age children and their families. 

Research suggests that girls may get head lice more often than boys. But the AAP says head lice infestations do not appear to be influenced by hair length, hair type, and frequency of shampooing or brushing. 

How do you treat head lice? 

There are several over-the-counter and prescription medications approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat head lice, including lotions and shampoos that contain the insecticides permethrin or pyrethrin. Treatment of head lice often involves using one of these medications, combined with “careful combing using a fine-toothed lice comb,” Armstrong says. 

Some of these medications kill only lice, while others target both lice and nits. Depending on the medication, a second application may be needed seven to ten days after the first treatment, Armstrong says. 

In some cases, head lice can be resistant to these topical medications, AAP says. In those situations, manual removal of lice and nits might be necessary—an option also available to people who want to avoid insecticide-containing products. The AAP says home remedies such as using mayonnaise, melted butter, or olive oil could work to suffocate the lice, though these methods are not FDA approved or recommended, and more research still needs to be done on their effectiveness. A prescription oral medication can also be used.

Some internet sites recommend using essential oils and other botanical products to kill head lice, but the AAP says “the safety and efficacy of natural or herbal products are currently not regulated by the FDA, and until more data are available, their use in infants, children, and adolescents should be avoided.” The AAP also stresses that head lice treatment is only recommended for people “in whom diagnosis is highly suspected or proven.”

Torres Zegarra says she sometimes sees patients with itchy scalps who developed irritation because they tried head lice treatments despite not having any evidence of lice. “What I end up treating is not lice but the skin irritation caused by multiple treatments that were tried on the scalp,” she says. 

Doctors say that cutting or shaving the hair of an infested person isn’t necessary, and it does not always work to get rid of head lice.

“Long or very thick hair may require more product and more time to comb thoroughly, but it can be treated successfully without removing the hair,” Armstrong says. “If live lice remain after treatment has been used correctly, a clinician should determine whether the cause is medication resistance, reinfestation, or an incorrect diagnosis before additional treatments are applied.”

How do you prevent head lice?

“There is no completely reliable way to prevent head lice, especially among young children who naturally play in close contact. The most effective step is to limit direct head-to-head or hair-to-hair contact when lice are known to be circulating,” Armstrong says. 

If someone is confirmed to have head lice, members of their household and other close contacts should be carefully checked for infestation. “Clothing, towels, and bedding used during the two days before treatment can be washed and dried using heat,” Armstrong says. “Combs and brushes can be soaked in hot water. Extensive cleaning, fumigation, and pesticide sprays are unnecessary.” 

AAP says parents and other caregivers could check children regularly to catch and treat early infestations, and children can be taught not to share personal items such as combs and hats. They shouldn’t refuse to wear helmets because of fear of head lice, however, particularly since the spread of lice through objects is uncommon, AAP says.

Ultimately, Torres Zegarra says “there’s no need to panic” when head lice arise. “It’s a nuisance problem but not a health crisis,” she says, adding that children with head lice shouldn’t be quarantined or kept away from school. 

“No healthy child should lose out on education because of head lice. They should avoid head-to-head contact, but they shouldn’t be shamed or isolated,” Torres Zegarra says.

Elizabeth Keating’s students learn about World War II in history books. But when one of them asked her grandmother what it was like to live through the wartime mobilization and bombing in the U.K., the past suddenly felt real. Talking to her grandmother, the student told Keating, felt like “talking to a celebrity.”

“It gives us a link with history that’s very personal,” says Keating, a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations.

Your grandparents might not think of themselves as eyewitnesses to history—or realize that anyone is interested in the ordinary details of their lives. Asking an unexpected question can make the past come alive while helping you discover who they were, and who they still are.

These questions can help you get beyond the familiar family stories—and start conversations you’ll be glad you had.

“What’s something you believed when you were my age that you don’t believe anymore?”

Your grandparent has probably changed their mind about more than a few things over the years. Maybe they swore they would never get married or that they’d stay in their hometown forever. Ask what they felt certain about at your age—and what eventually made them reconsider.

The answer can make a younger person think, “Oh my God, you were my age,” says Mike O’Krent, founder of LifeStories Alive, a company that preserves family histories on video. It might also be reassuring to discover that your grandparent once shared some of your fears or wrestled with questions you’re confronting right now. Hearing what happened next can open up a larger conversation about how they became the person they are today.

“Tell me about the dinner table in the house where you grew up.”

“What was your childhood like?” is an enormous question—the conversational equivalent of handing someone a blank book and asking them to fill it. It’s better to zoom in on one specific setting. “The dinner table is a window into an entire family, sometimes an entire childhood,” says Lauren Befus, founder of Memory Lane Jane, a family-biography company that preserves people’s life stories in heirloom books.

Ask who sat where, who cooked, and whether everyone ate together. Was dinner loud and chaotic or silent and formal? Did people linger or bolt the moment they finished? Was there always enough food? Could friends drop in?

One person told Keating that “there was no talking at the dinner table.” In Keating’s own family, her mother occasionally made the children prepare little reports from the encyclopedia to present during dinner. “We hated it,” she recalls. Whether your grandparent remembers laughter, pinching under the table, or strictly enforced silence, you’ll learn much more than what was on the menu.

“What was considered a waste of money in your house?”

Every family has at least one expenditure it considers financially unhinged. Perhaps your grandparent’s parents refused to pay someone to repair anything they could conceivably fix themselves. Maybe restaurant meals, store-bought clothes, or long-distance phone calls were treated as scandalous extravagances.

The question can reveal what money represented in your grandparent’s childhood home: security, freedom, status, or a source of constant stress. You might also recognize a few financial commandments that have traveled down the family line. Oh, that’s why your mom refuses to pay for shipping or regards full-price cereal as a personal affront!

“Tell me about a time you got into trouble—and how you got out of it.”

Your grandparent wasn’t always the person reminding everyone to be careful. Once upon a time, they might have sneaked somewhere forbidden, played hooky from Sunday school to take a nap in the cornfields behind the church, concocted an impressive lie, or attempted to conceal a mishap from their parents.

Keating particularly likes asking about trouble because it comes with a built-in plot: What happened? How did you respond? Did anyone find out? The story doesn’t need to involve a wild act of rebellion. She’s found that “you can get into trouble with small things, too, that evolve into bigger things.” Either way, you’ll get to meet the mischievous younger person behind the grandparent you know and love.

“What object have you kept from childhood—and what’s its story?”

That battered book, recipe card, or piece of jewelry might look unremarkable. Then you hear the story about why it’s still a prized possession. 

Keating recalls talking to a woman who had grown up poor and dreamed of owning a particular doll. When she received it for her birthday, she treasured it so deeply that she eventually passed it down through her family. “We attach relationships to objects,” Keating says. Eventually, “an object isn’t just a thing anymore.” It evokes a person, place, yearning, or moment someone wants to keep close.

If your grandparent still has the item, ask to see it. Their act of holding it again—or simply studying its scratches, faded colors, or fraying edges—might shake loose a story they didn’t even realize they remembered.

“Who believed in you before you believed in yourself?”

The answer could introduce you to a teacher, mentor, neighbor, boss, or friend you’ve never heard about—yet whose encouragement altered the course of your family’s history.

For O’Krent, it was his third-grade teacher, Mrs. Glaze. One day, despite making him stay inside during recess because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, she looked him in the eye and said: “You’re going to be somebody important someday.”

He never forgot it. An influential person isn’t always who you would expect, O’Krent says, and the best part of the story may emerge when you ask why your grandparent connected with them. What did they see in your grandparent—and how did their belief change what your grandparent saw in themselves?

“What decision did you make that everyone else thought was wrong?”

Maybe your grandparent pursued a career their family didn’t approve of, moved somewhere unexpected, ended—or began—a relationship, or took a risk everyone else considered foolish. Ask why people objected. Then borrow O’Krent’s favorite follow-up: “Do you agree with that?”

Your grandparent might still insist everyone else was wrong. Or perhaps the decision led directly to something they’d love to forget. “Everybody makes mistakes,” O’Krent says. What matters is “the lesson you learn from it.” Either way, you’ll discover how your grandparent responded when their judgment collided with other people’s expectations—and whether they’d make the same choice again.

“What are you proud of that would never appear on a résumé?”

Résumés are good for recording promotions and degrees. But they don’t capture the time someone took care of an aging parent, raised children through a miserable year, started over after a failure, repaired a relationship, or became the friend who always showed up.

The accomplishments you associate with your grandparent might not be the ones that matter most to them. This question “gives people permission to define accomplishment for themselves,” Befus says. You may discover that the chapter of their life they value most is one you barely knew about.

“What are you still figuring out?”

There is, apparently, no birthday at which a person wakes up with life completely sorted out. Grandparents still have evolving identities, relationships, hopes, and uncertainties, says Claudia Johnson, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Seattle.

Asking what your grandparent is still figuring out communicates: “I don’t only want to know who you were. I’m interested in who you are now,” Johnson says. Maybe they’re learning how to enjoy retirement, trying to understand a changing friendship, or deciding what they want the next few years to look like.

Answer the question yourself, too. That reciprocity transforms the interaction from an interview into a real conversation—and reminds both of you that nobody ages out of uncertainty.

“If you were naming a baby today, what name would you choose?”

Not every meaningful question requires rummaging through the past. That’s especially important when you’re talking to someone with dementia, says Cristina Rodriguez, founder of Mind&Melody, a nonprofit that connects musicians with people living with dementia and other neurological conditions.

Rodriguez’s grandmother was diagnosed with dementia a few years ago. As her memory changes, Rodriguez has realized that “connection can’t always depend on asking her to recall the past.”

During one FaceTime call, when Rodriguez was thinking about having children, she asked her grandmother what she would name a baby girl today. Estefania, she replied, because it sounded strong and powerful. Rodriguez had known her grandmother her entire life—and knew she had raised six children—but had never thought to ask her anything like that.

The exchange showed Rodriguez “how much possibility there is in questions that aren’t about remembering at all.” Ask what song should belong to the two of you, or what your perfect day together would look like. These types of questions let you be curious about who your grandparent is right now, including what they imagine and what makes them laugh.

“If you could ask me anything right now, what would you want to know?”

After putting your grandparent in the hot seat, turn the interview over to them. What have they always wondered about you?

“The grandparent’s not expecting that one,” O’Krent says. That’s exactly why he likes it: The question gives your grandparent some control over where the conversation goes and makes the exchange feel mutual.

Once the conversation is flowing, don’t cling too tightly to your prepared questions. O’Krent teaches people an unusual listening trick: “The next thing you say has to include at least one word from the last sentence they say.” Because you don’t know when that last sentence is coming, you have no choice but to pay close attention. It might feel awkward at first, he acknowledges, but it helps the other person feel heard. Plus, the best question is almost always the follow-up you didn’t plan.

“What do you wish you’d asked your own parents or grandparents?”

This question might expose the blank spaces in your grandparent’s own family history. Maybe they know their mother moved across the country alone but never learned what compelled her to go. Perhaps they inherited a house without ever asking why their grandparents chose it—or what brought their parents together in the first place.

The answers often involve what Keating calls “huge identity questions”: Where did I come from? Who am I? Why did my family’s life unfold the way it did? Most people know the milestones, she says, but what they really want is “the story behind everything.”

Listen closely. Your grandparent might be telling you not only what they regret leaving unanswered, but which parts of their own story they hope you won’t.

The research project "World’s Best Companies 2026" is a comprehensive analysis conducted to identify the top performing companies around the world. The study is based on three primary dimensions: Employee Satisfaction, Revenue Growth and Sustainability Transparency (ESG).

Methodology

The first dimension, Employee Satisfaction, was investigated based on survey data from a large sample of over 200,000 employees from around the world. The evaluation encompassed direct recommendations of verified employees as well as indirect evaluations from industry peers.

The second dimension, Revenue Growth, was assessed using data from Statista’s revenue database, which contains company growth data for the last three years. The companies had to meet certain criteria to be considered for the evaluation, including generating a revenue of at least $100 million in 2024 or 2025 depending on when the most recent data was published during the research phase. Additionally, the companies had to demonstrate positive revenue growth in the last three years. Both relative and absolute growth were considered in the evaluation.

The third dimension, Sustainability Transparency, was evaluated based on ESG data among standardized KPIs from Statista’s ESG Database and targeted data research. To formulate a comprehensive ESG index, multiple Key Performance Indicators were collected. For the environmental evaluation, this included the 2024 carbon emissions intensity and reduction rate compared to 2022, as well as the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) score. The social dimension assessed the share of women on the board of directors and the existence of a human rights policy. The governance dimension evaluated whether a company had a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report adhering to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines and a compliance or anti-corruption guideline.

Once the data was collected and evaluated, it was consolidated and weighted within a scoring model. The scores of all three dimensions were added on an equal percentage basis to form the final ranking score of a maximum of 100 points. The 1,000 companies with the highest score were awarded as World’s Best Companies 2026 by TIME and Statista.

See the full list.

The economy built around AI has continued to boom even as experts and leaders work to hammer out the technology's execution problem and debate the guardrails that should be put around it. Demand for AI chips remains strong, as Nvidia holds its top spot in TIME and Statista’s 2026 statistical ranking of the World’s Best Companies, highlighting top performing companies around the globe based on evaluations of employee satisfaction, revenue growth, and sustainability transparency. But new companies are also entering the scene as the AI boom reaches down the supply chain. 

Methodology: How TIME and Statista Determined the World’s Best Companies of 2026

Companies like Wistron (no. 16), Lenovo (no. 51) and Zurich Insurance Group (no. 70) are new additions to the 2026 list. Major Nvidia supplier Wistron reports that the demand for its AI servers continues to exceed supply. The Taiwan-based manufacturing company recently opened a plant in Texas to ramp up production. Chinese computer company Lenovo, known for being a maker of devices like PCs, smartphones and tablets, saw annual profits rise to record sales driven by the newer AI server part of their business. And the wave of growing demand for physical infrastructure to support AI has created an opportunity for firms like Zurich Insurance Group to cash in on selling more data center construction-related insurance. Zurich plans to expand its dedicated insurance and risk management solution for large-scale data center projects soon into Europe and Latin America. S&P Global puts total insurable values for each data center at up to $30 billion per location. 

Beyond AI, European defense technology companies are seeing cashflow as a result of European NATO allies committing in 2025 to spend a projected €800 billion on defense readiness by 2030. “The increased defense spending in Europe is actually one of the largest demand signals we have seen in generations,” says Hugues Lavandier, senior partner in McKinsey’s Aerospace & Defense Practice. A good portion of that spending is still going outside of Europe, but Lavandier “won't be surprised that we increasingly see more of that spend going to Europe for sovereignty reasons.” The war in Ukraine among other recent geopolitical tensions has shown Europe that the art of war fighting and the equipment needed is also changing. “The share of that money being spent on equipment is actually going up,” Lavandier says, especially on new technologies like drones and unmanned vehicles, and addressing technical challenges like navigation, electronic warfare, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. 

Traditional companies in the space like French defense electronics maker Thales (no. 22; up from no. 224 in 2025) and Italian defense and aerospace company Leonardo (no. 25; up from a no. 126 in 2025) are seeing uptick in orders. At the same time, “non-traditional players are entering into the field, especially as suppliers,” Lavandier says. “In particular, a number of automotive players have entered into the fray…sometimes even selling plants, making capacity available.” Thales, for example, recently announced a sovereign drone partnership with French carmaker Renault (no. 42). A number of new startups are also taking this opportunity to translate the investment into innovations, sometimes as standalone products or in partnership with other companies, similar to Anduril’s ventures in the U.S. For example, German drone-maker Quantum Systems, which is currently supplying armed forces in Ukraine, announced significant investment from German telecomm giant Deutsche Telekom (no. 7), which owns the T-mobile brand, and also announced a new partnership with Rheinmetall (no. 287) to co-create an anti-drone shield.  

See the full list of the World’s Best Companies of 2026 below:

Iran said it targeted a U.S. base in Jordan with a series of missiles overnight after the U.S. military struck five Iranian oil tankers amid renewed hostilities in the region.

“The defeated and aggressor U.S. terrorist military, out of desperation, attacked several Iranian commercial and oil vessels,” said the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), according to Iranian state media.”This powerful battle will continue.”

A spokesperson for the Jordanian Armed Forces said a barrage of “20 ballistic missiles” had been launched towards its territory. The country’s air defense system successfully intercepted and destroyed 18 of the missiles, while the remaining two "fell in areas devoid of population centers.”

The IRGC on Wednesday claimed to have targeted two U.S. vessels and eight oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz as part of its wider retaliatory operations, as reported by Iranian state media.

U.K. Maritime Trade Operations said it had received reports involving several merchant vessels in the region that were subject to "disabling fire,”  but it was unable to confirm the nature or impact of the disturbances.

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), in response, denied the IRGC’s claims, saying that “no U.S. Navy warship has been struck” as “all IRGC attempted attacks failed.”

The escalation comes after CENTCOM on Tuesday said it destroyed five Iranian crude oil tankers in response to Iran targeting U.S. Navy ships with ballistic missiles over the previous two days.

“The U.S. warship successfully evaded the attempted Iranian attacks and continued to patrol regional waters. No American personnel were harmed,” said the U.S. defense force.

The active hostilities and attacks on shipping mark a serious escalation in the reignited war, which experienced a brief respite before flaring up again last week.

U.S. and Iran are trading retaliatory attacks as President Donald Trump pursues a campaign of military and economic pressure on Iran, with Tehran threatening it could escalate the conflict further by targeting U.S. oil and gas interests in the Gulf.

Iran has specifically denounced the U.S. attacks on its oil shipments, with the Iranian Foreign Ministry on Wednesday insisting the strikes are “not only a dangerous escalation of tensions in the region, but also a clear threat to regional and international peace and security.”

Iran-backed Houthis escalate regional instability with attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure

Meanwhile, the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen contributed to the regional instability by launching attacks on four cities in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, with the aim of targeting oil infrastructure.

Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said 73 people had been injured in the strikes.

The attacks came after weeks of escalation between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed government of Yemen, shattering a four-year informal cease-fire in the country's civil war.

“The U.S. has a very strong defensive military relationship with Saudi Arabia, and we’re watching those events very closely. It’s been going on for some time,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday.

The renewed fighting threatens to further disrupt shipping through the Bab al-Mandeb strait, a critical trade route off the Arabian Peninsula for oil and global commerce.

In the current AI development race, our horsepower is exploding, our speed is picking up exponentially, but our ability to steer—and if needed, to hit the brakes—has not kept pace. 

Recent cybersecurity incidents have given us a real-world preview of what it looks like to lose control of AI. But the issue won’t improve unless we address it at the source, by creating a fundamentally safe AI, one we can guarantee will remain within human control. 

In late July, an agentic model being trained by OpenAI was tasked with a cybersecurity problem set. The model autonomously formed a coordinated swarm of agents, bypassing OpenAI's attempt at closing previous communication channels between AIs. The swarm then hacked its way out of its testing environment, circumventing the barriers put in place to prevent AI access to the internet, figured out how to cheat on their evaluation, and then breached the cyber defenses of another AI company, Hugging Face, in an attempt to hide the evidence of their cheating. This went unnoticed for days. Later analysis showed that the agents had self-organized into a hierarchy, were often willing to sacrifice themselves for what they called “the collective,” failed to resist peer pressure to notify humans, and often made up justifications for their misbehavior.

Barely two weeks later, a model being tested by the UK AI Security Institute social-engineered real people and companies by creating fake identities online, sending targeted emails, and attempting to integrate malicious code into an open-source project.

It’s hard to overstate the seriousness of these incidents: we are at a turning point of AI safety and alignment. To many, bots colluding to cause harm felt inconceivable. But for many in the research community, the signs had been pointing to this kind of occurrence for years, and theoretical arguments explained why we should expect misalignment due to how models are trained. Evidence on increased cyber capabilities, agency, and misaligned behaviors had been mounting, meaning that incidents like these were only a matter of time. 

The first clue: for years, but especially in the past few months, AI systems had been demonstrating rapidly increasing cyber capabilities. Frontier models like Anthropic’s Mythos or OpenAI’s GPT5.6 revealed an exceptional ability to autonomously identify and exploit previously unknown software vulnerabilities, to such an alarming degree for U.S. national security agencies that the White House felt compelled to intervene in their release. 

Second, models’ agentic capacity has been consistently improving since the release of o1 models back in late 2024. This agency allowed them to successfully manage increasingly complex, long-duration tasks and planning, including those that require agents to collaborate and strategize. This ability to plan often entails the creation of subgoals over which we have little to no oversight.

Finally, researchers have repeatedly observed, in experimental settings, models’ tendency to adopt concerning, misaligned goal-seeking behaviors, such as cheating on tests, lying to conceal their abilities, and scheming to protect themselves and their fellow agents from being shut down. 

These behaviors are a byproduct of reinforcement learning (RL), a training method by which models learn through trial and error and are given reinforcement according to whether their actions were correct or incorrect. This often leads models to optimize for a goal regardless of the actions taken to achieve it, and to rationalize subgoals that may be unsafe even when this clearly goes against their instructions. 

For example, in one instance, an OpenAI model wrote in its internal deliberation, “External infrastructure exploit is outside intended scope. However task impossible, peers doing it. We should continue.” The agent justified what it apparently knew was outside the realm of acceptable conduct, but decided to continue because its peers were doing so. This phenomenon resembles what is known as “motivated reasoning” in humans, where one’s interests and goals bias our thoughts to justify unethical behaviors. 

That kind of misalignment is what has enabled AI models, in spite of their alignment training, to conduct unintended cyberattacks in the numerous real-world incidents we’ve seen lately. If action is not taken to build more safety assurances, our critical industries and infrastructure—think banks, hospitals, or energy grids—are at risk from increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks, whether from autonomous agents or malicious actors.

On the development side, we need to find alternatives to existing training methods that prioritize relentless goal-driven optimization. That’s what we’re working on at LawZero, a non-profit start-up I founded last year to develop a fundamentally new way to train AI models in order to build honest, trustworthy, safe-by-design AI systems. 

Ahead of deployment, we need more reliable evaluation methods and robust safeguards in order to appropriately test and control AI systems. We need far stronger regulatory oversight to restrict potentially dangerous technologies until we have sufficiently strong safety guarantees. It is clear to me that in cases where harms do arise from the deployment of AI models—and there will continue to be harms for the foreseeable future—we need accountability mechanisms for AI developers and remedial or compensatory measures for those harmed.  

Recent studies show that people will not adopt technologies they do not trust. In the face of such enormous unknowns and stakes, we need to adhere to the precautionary principle and implement rigorous safety and reliability standards before deploying new models to the public, not after. We have them for other products that can cause harm, from cars, planes, and bridges to drugs, cosmetics, and food. Now it’s time to establish strong standards in AI as well. 

On the current AI development trajectory, the risks are becoming clearer and more urgent. We’ve opened a Pandora’s box, but it is not too late to steer our world towards a human-centric and beneficial future.

No one asked for it.

Not the Republicans struggling to campaign amid a war against Iran that seems to have no offramp. Not the voters who can’t understand why energy costs are through the roof and trips to grocery stores feel like extortion. Not the business owners who can’t forecast quarter-to-quarter outlays because tariff policy seems as capricious as the weather.

Yet here we are, about to start an unsolicited Republican Convention for the midterms, programmed around President Donald Trump, whose polling is in the gutter and who many of his party’s leaders view as nothing short of an annoyance. The spectacle is set to start Wednesday in Dallas, where the cheap seats start at $25,000.

The GOP has a total of 12 hours of programming scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday nights—the vast majority of it set to be speeches by Republican candidates and incumbents about what’s at stake in these upcoming elections. Almost every aspect of the convention has been designed by Trump. The first night will end with a keynote address from Trump. The following night is to conclude with Vice President J.D. Vance’s address—and closing remarks from Trump.

This sort of half-time extravaganza by a political party is not normal in midterm election years and even political diehards aren’t conditioned for it. The fact that it’s coming as Trump is deeply unpopular and Democrats are enjoying tremendous tailwinds suggests the President is chasing a dopamine hit more than staging a useful rally. 

As Republican contenders are trying to build distance between themselves and the White House, Trump has vowed to make himself the fulcrum of this election season. “Pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot,” Trump told a crowd in South Carolina in August. 

The White House is operating as though there’s no greater force in American politics than the boss because, frankly, they’re not wrong. But the enthusiasm gap is real. A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll released last week found 68% of Democrats enthusiastic about the election, while that Republican figure stood at 59%. The same poll found an eight-point gap favoring Democrats in a generic ballot. Gallup research, meanwhile, shows Democrats have their largest edge over Republicans in party ID since 2008, a full 10 points. 

Republicans can’t say they didn’t see this coming. Trump has been consistently polling under 40% job approval for months. Nonetheless, candidates in some of the most competitive Senate races plan to join Trump in Texas for his two-night affair. (Notable exceptions are Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska, and former Sen. John E. Sununu of New Hampshire, none of whom are favorites of this President. Also, Senate Majority Leader John Thune was not listed among the speakers the Republican National Committee distributed over the weekend.)

Trump is not deterred by the environment even as he seems oblivious to it. He is sitting on a $400 million political warchest that Republicans are eyeing as it, well, just sits there. While Trump will never again appear on a ballot, he has readied campaign-style ads highlighting what he sees as his accomplishments. 

As Democrats are stopping just short of measuring the drapes to take the majority in the House and perhaps the once-unthinkable Senate, Trump is helping them make every race about him through a convention that is siphoning donor cash away from imperilled candidates, sidelining battleground contenders off the field in the fourth quarter, and drawing focus from local issues. 

With all objective measures pointing toward a Democratic wave, Republicans are huddling amongst themselves in Texas. Many have little optimism that two nights of Trump-centered entertainment will persuade voters who are clearly unhappy with how GOP control of Washington has operated for the last two years. A made-for-TV infomercial is unlikely to provide the course correction Republicans need.

How to Watch

CSPAN intends to air and stream both nights of the Republican convention. The Republican Party also intends to stream the convention on YouTube. 

Everyone I know has either deleted dating apps, stopped using them, or is considering it. The icons lie dormant on their phones: technically still there, but rarely opened and no longer expected to deliver anything meaningful.

I have used multiple dating apps over the past eight years, and I have never formed a relationship with anyone I met on them. I have rarely even gone on a second date with someone from a dating app. Most first dates end in disappointment, mutual ghosting, or both. 

My experience is hardly unusual. Social media is full of people declaring that dating apps are dying, and a 2026 Harris Poll found that two-thirds of singles weren’t using them, while 80% of Americans viewed meeting someone in real life as “cute” or “cool.”

Over the past year, I have also found myself far more interested in men I meet in real life. Why? My theory is that dating apps are dying because they don’t encourage the patience, curiosity, and emotional investment that dating requires.

The apps promise abundance: hundreds or even thousands of potential partners, all accessible from the couch. But that abundance creates its own burden. Every session requires users to make a relentless series of small decisions—whether to swipe, initiate a conversation, maintain it, arrange a date, or keep looking for someone better.

There is evidence that this process becomes emotionally exhausting. A longitudinal study led by Liesel Sharabi, director of the Relationships and Technology Lab at Arizona State University, followed dating-app users for 12 weeks and found that emotional exhaustion and feelings of inefficacy increased over time.

“From a cognitive perspective, one reason may be the scale of the task,” says Samuel Hipkiss, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at the University of Bath. Dating apps expose us to far more potential partners than we would encounter offline, requiring hundreds of judgments about people we know almost nothing about. The end result is decision fatigue and cynicism, he explains. 

Of course, rejection has always been part of dating, but apps dramatically increase our exposure to it. Every unanswered message, vanished match, and unexplained ghosting carries a small emotional cost. Over time, Hipkiss says, users may lose faith in the process and become less willing to invest emotionally in any individual connection.

I have felt myself doing exactly that. Two years ago, I met someone on Hinge and went on five dates with him. I kept accepting because I wanted to prove that I was still trying, and because social media had convinced me to believe in the “slow burn.” But the sad truth is that the dates continued not because I particularly liked him. They continued because he seemed about 30% better than the other men I had met through the apps.

Eventually, he realized that I was not truly interested and ended things with me. Good for him. I wasn’t being honest with him or with myself. I had mistaken the absence of an immediate disaster for the presence of a connection.

Dating apps make that mistake easier because they turn a complicated social process into something immediate and measurable. In contrast, offline attraction develops through ambiguous signals: conversation, familiarity, body language, timing, and the gradual accumulation of knowledge about another person. Apps reduce that uncertainty to a series of unmistakable outcomes. Swipe left or right. Match or no match. Message or silence. In other words, they have gamified dating. But falling in love and building a relationship aren’t competitions to be won or algorithms that can be hacked. 

Philosopher Karim Nader has argued that dating apps transform the complex process of choosing a partner into a sequence of simple, discrete decisions. The goal can quietly shift from forming a relationship to accumulating matches.

Matches offer a clear metric of success and an immediate burst of validation, even when neither person intends to begin a conversation. Because they arrive unpredictably, they can operate as intermittent rewards: each disappointing swipe carries the possibility that the next one will produce a match.

That uncertainty keeps us returning. But it can also separate the immediate reward of receiving a match from the longer-term goal of forming a relationship.

I see this every time I open dating apps. Yesterday, I matched with 12 men. Only two messaged me. The others remain in dating app purgatory, neither rejected nor pursued. When I message matches first, I often receive no response. For many users, it seems, getting the match is enough. The person on the other side becomes secondary to the proof that someone chose them.

Despite the exhaustion and cynicism, the game continues. We open the app almost automatically, swipe for a few minutes, and wait for a small reward. The behavior starts to resemble playing Candy Crush more than looking for a partner.

Then there is the problem of choice. In one experiment, researchers found that showing users larger sets of dating profiles increased partner-choice overload and fear of being single while decreasing self-esteem. Other research suggests that prolonged access to an enormous pool of profiles can produce a rejection mindset; as users continue swiping, they become increasingly likely to dismiss potential partners.

I can reject a profile in less than two seconds because I do not like someone’s hair or because he falls outside my preferred height range. These judgments are shallow, but they are also a predictable response to the task the apps have created. When faced with hundreds of decisions and very little information, we rely on shortcuts. A photograph, a job title, or an awkwardly phrased prompt becomes a proxy for an entire personality.

At the same time, the endless supply of profiles lowers the perceived cost of rejecting someone. Why spend time determining whether one imperfect person might be compatible when hundreds of supposedly better options are waiting?

That feeling does not necessarily disappear after we choose someone. Even during a promising conversation, or after several dates, the app remains on our phone, offering the possibility of a match who could be funnier, hotter, or more compatible. The next person is always one swipe away.

A friend once compared dating apps to shopping for a dress or test-driving a car. You hesitate to choose the first one because another store might have a better price or a more flattering option. Dating apps encourage us to evaluate people as though they are consumer products: quickly, comparatively, and with the assumption that an upgrade may be just around the corner.

This is the central paradox of dating apps. Their enormous selection makes us believe that finding the perfect partner should be easier than ever. But the same abundance can make it harder to become curious about a person, tolerate uncertainty, or feel satisfied with our choice.

We have become trapped in a game whose rewards often have little to do with its supposed purpose. As such, many of us are beginning to question whether an endless marketplace of faces is the best way to find love.

And it’s why so many of us looking for love and connection are breaking up with dating apps. 

Now, it’s time for us to be brave—and to get back out there.

President Donald Trump has drawn criticism from Iceland after he posted a map depicting the country—along with Greenland, Canada, Mexico, and much of the Caribbean—covered by the American flag.

The diplomatic fallout continued Tuesday, as Iceland’s leaders publicly condemned the post a day after summoning U.S. Ambassador Billy Long to deliver a formal rebuke.

“It is an insult to Icelanders, Canadians, Greenlanders,” Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir told reporters. “There is nothing funny or normal about making fun of the sovereignty of states, especially today, when sovereignty cannot be taken for granted.”

TIME has reached out to the White House and the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik for comment.

While Trump has not publicly proposed taking over Iceland before, the map marks his latest provocation involving the expansion of U.S. control over foreign territory.

Trump has repeatedly expressed his ambition to bring Greenland, Iceland’s closest neighbor and an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, under U.S. control, citing its strategic position and concerns about Russian and Chinese activity in the Arctic. He said in January, soon after the U.S. deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, that anything short of U.S. control of Greenland was “unacceptable”—to the vexation of world leaders, not least those in the European Union, Denmark, and Greenland. He initially declined to rule out using military force, although in January, he said, “I don’t want to use force, I won’t use force.” During the same speech, the President confused Iceland with Greenland, saying “Iceland has already cost us a lot of money” in reference to a stock market dip.

Trump has also similarly advocated making Canada, now embroiled in a trade war with the U.S., the 51st state. While Trump has repeatedly joked about the matter, he said in February last year that the idea to annex Canada was “a real thing.” He said he would use “economic force,” rather than military force, to pressure the U.S. neighbor.

Trump officials have continued the rhetoric. Last month, Vice President J.D. Vance called Canada a “state” before apologizing for the “Freudian slip.” In March, Trump called Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney the country’s “future governor.” And Trump ordered Lake Ontario, which borders the Canadian province of Ontario and the U.S. State of New York, renamed “Lake America” for official U.S. use, drawing sharp criticism from Canadian leaders.

Trump has also floated a “friendly takeover” of Cuba, one of the Caribbean nations blanketed by the American flag on the map he posted, and renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” On Monday, Trump posted several other maps on Truth Social showing the U.S. state of New Mexico renamed as “New America.”

Why Iceland is concerned about threats to its sovereignty

Iceland’s sovereignty has been a prickly topic for the Nordic nation, especially on the heels of a referendum over joining the European Union.

The country’s population of 400,000 narrowly voted on Aug. 29 to reject restarting negotiations to become a member of the E.U. The question of membership came into focus after Trump’s push to annex Greenland, as some Icelandic voters saw the bloc as a potential political and economic bulwark against similar pressure on Iceland. Iceland, a founding member of NATO, does not have its own military. Its security instead rests on the alliance’s collective security framework, as well as a 1951 bilateral agreement under which the U.S. provides for its defense.

Others argued that joining the E.U. would relinquish some sovereignty over Iceland’s affairs, particularly over its lucrative fishing grounds, which would become subject to the E.U.’s common fisheries policy. Iceland is already a member of the European Economic Area and the Schengen zone, which gives it access to the E.U.’s single market and passport-free travel.

How Iceland responded to Trump’s U.S. takeover map

Iceland’s foreign ministry said Tuesday that Foreign Minister Thorgerdur Katrín Gunnarsdóttir had summoned Long to “convey a clear message that the image was wholly inappropriate.”

Gunnarsdóttir told reporters that “people within the U.S. administration” had advised her to “not take the current U.S. President literally.”

“But we should take him seriously,” she added. “That is exactly what we are doing, and we are stressing that Iceland is a sovereign, independent state that is responsible for its own future.”

Long had previously joked about an American takeover of Iceland. In January, he was overheard telling lawmakers on the House floor that Iceland could become the 52nd state with him as the governor. At the time, Iceland’s foreign ministry said it was investigating the matter.

Long later apologized, telling news site Arctic Today that “there was nothing serious about that, I was with some people, who I hadn’t met for three years, and they were kidding about [U.S. special envoy to Greenland] Jeff Landry being governor of Greenland and they started joking about me and if anyone took offense to it, then I apologize.”

“This is not a joke,” Gunnarsdóttir said, dismissing the possibility of the U.S. President using a similar defense. “And if it is supposed to be a joke, it’s a bad one.”

August brought some truly transformative good news for Turkey, the Kurds, and Turkey’s immediate neighborhood in the Middle East. On Aug. 10, the Turkish Parliament passed a law establishing a legal framework for the dissolution of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the Kurdish militant group, and creating a phased pathway for reintegration of its members into society.

For more than four decades, the Kurdish issue has run like an electrified barbed wire through conversations in Turkey. The armed conflict between the PKK and the Turkish government has killed around 40,000 militants, soldiers, and civilians, and cost Turkey losses estimated to be around $2 trillion since 1984. Following peace talks, in July 2025, the PKK held a symbolic weapon-burning ceremony, starting a process of disarmament and moving toward ending the armed conflict.

The law offers legal protections to former PKK militants who have not committed specific crimes and helps suspend prison sentences for some members of the group. Thousands of sympathizers, activists affiliated with the PKK, and Kurdish politicians have been living in exile in Europe and elsewhere to escape legal prosecution. The law opens a path for them to return to Turkey. And the passage of this law in the Turkish parliament with broad support is a transformative step toward lasting peace and the creation of a new social contract between Turkey and the Kurds, domestically and regionally. 

How to make peace

In the past decade, Turkey established clear military dominance in the fight against the PKK. Changes in military technology, intelligence, and surveillance systems, especially the rise of Turkish drones, strengthened the country’s counter-insurgency efforts. Yet Turkey’s military capacity to suppress an insurgency was not the sole factor in persuading the PKK to give up arms. Turkey did suppress waves of Kurdish rebellions in the past without creating space for Kurdish aspirations, and each suppression was followed by a more formidable and more violent rebellion.

Turkey’s embrace of a political process—instead of simply pursuing a decisive military path—to end the conflict made it more acceptable to the PKK leadership and the Kurdish movement. Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the PKK, had to persuade his comrades to dissolve their organization, abandon the armed struggle, and choose political struggle. Unfavorable broader regional trends against armed militancy may have helped convince Ocalan and his comrades to make that consequential choice.

The legitimacy of the political solution, in the eyes of the Kurds, determines its sustainability and transformative impact. The current peace process seeks to end the insurgency and transform the struggle for Kurdish rights and aspirations into a nonviolent political one. It could transform Turkey’s relations with its own Kurdish community and the Kurdish communities in Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Leaders of the Kurdish movement believe that they can achieve more through politics than through armed struggle, and that it isn’t only they who are transforming, but that the state, political, and legal systems in Turkey can also change. The promise of the future, rather than being beholden to the grievances of the past, is the way forward. 

The Turks and the Kurds managed it without relying on foreign peacemakers or mediation. The disarmament and demobilization process for the PKK was designed, executed, and monitored domestically, without involving any foreign mediators. The talks were held between Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization, Ocalan, and several other leaders of his group based in the Qandil Mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan and across Europe. The process involved the Turkish parliament and political parties through a Parliamentary Committee, formed in Aug. 2025 to work on legal and political dimensions of the PKK’s dissolution, which helped garner broad support for the peace process across political divides in Turkey.

Turkey and the Kurds have entered a new phase that demands greater buy-in for the peace process from politicians, lawmakers, ordinary people, and from the institutions that will implement the new law. To ensure the peace process has broader societal support, the political class will need to make clear why it matters and what it promises. The stakes of getting that right are high for Turkey and extend beyond its borders.

Seeing like a state

The nation-state in the 20th century largely adopted a conception of nationhood based on a single identity and was intolerant, assimilationist, or exclusionary toward other identities. The effect was to politicize and mobilize the very groups it sought to submerge. This was true of Turkey as well. The Turkish Republic was based on a single identity and an overly centralized state with its own insecurities, largely stemming from the traumatic experience during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Today, Turkey needs a new conception of the nation-state that is inclusive of different identity groups, and a new idea of a strong state that is premised on broader societal legitimacy. Centralization coupled with exclusion is a recipe for societal discontent, which weakens, rather than strengthens, the state. Turkey’s real challenge is building an inclusive national identity that recognizes distinct identity groups without losing the thread of what binds them together. The task of the ongoing Kurdish peace process, and the Kurdish politics that will follow it, will be to achieve exactly this: an inclusive notion of national identity capacious enough to accommodate Kurdish identity and aspirations.

The current political mood in the Middle East and elsewhere is not one of militant groups and insurgencies. The broader trend runs toward their integration into state structures or their disarmament and demobilization. How these processes of demobilization and integration are carried out will be highly consequential. If they rely solely on coercion, rather than embracing persuasion and the prospect of mutual transformation, disarmament risks being a prelude to the next cycle of violence, waged under new names and banners.

Demobilization of insurgent groups succeeds when it rests on the prospect of mutual transformation. The armed groups dissolve themselves and remake themselves as political actors, who cease to be adversaries of the state and work as agents of its transformation.

The state and the polity, in turn, must transform alongside them, arriving at a more inclusive conception of national and geopolitical identity. In Turkey, it would mean embracing Kurdishness and honoring Kurdish political, democratic, and cultural rights, and regarding the Kurds outside of Turkey’s borders not as threats but as allies.

The PKK’s demobilization will reshape Turkey’s threat perception, and with it, Turkey’s approach to Kurds in Iraq, Syria, Iran and their countries. Already, in step with the pace of the PKK disarmament, the language used by Turkish officials and Kurdish actors across the region towards each other has improved significantly.

Fruits of peace

Turkey and its neighborhood have already benefited from the peace process and the demobilization of the PKK. That process faced two formidable tests in Syria and Iran and passed both. Turkey treated the PKK’s demobilization at home and the integration of Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)—led by a Kurdish militia with close ties to the PKK—into the Syrian state as parts of a single process.

After the fall of the Assad regime, reuniting a fractured Syria became one of the most formidable tasks for the new government. The SDF controlled almost a quarter of Syrian territory. Limited fighting and military pressure earlier in the year helped shift the balance, stripping the SDF of a large portion of the land it had held.

What helped make the SDF’s integration into the Syrian state relatively smooth was the peace process already underway in Turkey, given the SDF’s close ties to the PKK. August brought two momentous developments: Turkey’s parliament passed the landmark legislation providing for the disbanding of the PKK, the reintegration of its fighters and the dismissal of charges against thousands of its sympathizers and prisoners; and the SDF announced its own dissolution.

A parallel drama played out during the Iran War. There were fears that the Iranian Kurdish militant group known as the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan, or the PJAK, might join the American war against Iran. Given its close ties to the PKK, such a move could have weakened the PKK’s commitment to disarmament and risked a new phase of conflict among Turkey, the PKK, and the PJAK. Despite pressure from the Trump Administration and Israeli plans to draw them into the conflict, Iranian Kurdish groups stayed out of the war. The peace process in Turkey was a major factor in persuading them to remain on the sidelines.

Together, the Syrian and Iranian cases reveal the power of political imagination and legitimacy in advancing national security. In both instances, Turkey has achieved more through political engagement than through military force. Any national security doctrine devoid of political imagination or legitimacy remains incomplete. The tests posed by Syria and Iran have demonstrated the PKK’s commitment to demobilization, confirmed that its decision is strategic rather than merely tactical, and helped build trust between Turkey and the PKK.

This process will also have considerable implications for Turkey’s relations with major powers. No issue has bedeviled Turkish-American relations more than the Syrian civil war did before the collapse of the Assad regime. At its core, that crisis reflected the conflicting American and Turkish approaches to the Syrian Kurds, specifically the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a PKK affiliate that, with American military advice and support, was later rebranded as the SDF.

By enabling the SDF’s integration into the Syrian state, the PKK’s demobilization has removed the most formidable sticking point in Turkish-American relations, clearing the way for closer cooperation between the two countries in Syria and beyond. Ocalan framed the recently passed Turkish law as the first step of a 1000 kilometer journey. The Turkish model, and the peace it promises, are still a story in the making. Despite the milestones already reached, formidable challenges remain, demanding persistence and commitment.

No two conflicts or two peace processes are alike. Yet the central message is universal: peace is possible and leadership matters. Long-running conflicts around identity are not fates to be endured but political questions to be settled. In a world still defined by war and insecurity, the story of peacemaking is, inherently, a global one.

The White House has apparently pulled one of its newly released arcade-style video games after a rebuke from the maker of Tetris.

The White House game, called “Build the Wall,” was launched last week alongside a series of other games as part of the latest push by the Trump Administration to promote its policies through popular culture. In the game, players could stack blocks to form a wall to “protect the border from the coming horde,” in the style of the iconic, decades-old stacker game Tetris.

But on Tuesday, the game was no longer available on the White House website.

The apparent removal of the game comes after the Tetris Company clarified that it was not involved in the creation of and was opposed to the politics behind the White House game.

“At Tetris, we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them,” the company wrote in a statement on social media on Friday.

“P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously,” it added in the post.

TIME has reached out to the White House and Tetris for comment.

Latest company to criticize White House digital strategy

The Tetris Company has become the latest company to distance itself from the Trump Administration’s use of copyrighted material to promote its agenda, and it took its criticism a step further by alluding to possible legal action.

In March, the Pokémon Company said it had not authorized the White House’s use of imagery from the game Pokémon Pokopia. Months earlier, the Pokémon Company had objected to a Department of Homeland Security video that used Pokémon branding and footage to promote Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Several songs by pop star Taylor Swift were also removed from Trump campaign and White House social media posts, and other celebrities like Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter have publicly condemned the Administration’s use of their music.

The other White House games launched last week also borrowed mechanics associated with iconic games like Snake and Flappy Bird. Promotional clips posted by the White House mimicked branding associated with Sega and Microsoft’s Xbox. In one clip, gamemaker Sega’s familiar start-up logo morphs into “MAGA,” the abbreviation for President Donald Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.” 

Those companies have not publicly commented.

“This administration is laser focused on ways to innovate and tell the story of the President’s many accomplishments in a way that resonates with every American,” the White House said in a statement to TIME last week. “This is an effort to further contrast between a culture of fun and winning and the dark socialist vision Democrats have for America.”

The games drew criticism from Democratic lawmakers. On Friday, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D, Texas) posted, “Instead of creating policies that actually help people, the White House just rolled out arcade games. They need to spend less time playing and more time governing. Folks need affordable groceries, not games.” Rep. Ted Lieu (D, Calif.) and Connecticut state senator Matt Lesser, also a Democrat, levied similar criticisms, arguing that the White House had misplaced priorities amid high fuel prices and inflation driven by the U.S.’s war against Iran.

The game’s title reprises Trump’s signature 2016 campaign pledge to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and bill the construction to Mexico. A decade later, American taxpayers are still funding the effort, and hundreds of miles remain unfinished.

Israel ordered the closure of the British consulate in East Jerusalem after the United Kingdom led a coordinated effort by 12 governments to restrict trade with Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. 

British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced the import ban on all goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank on Tuesday. 

“The British government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank, perpetrated by settler terrorists,” he said during remarks at the House of Commons, referring to growing incidents of violence against Palestinians living in the West Bank. 

Eighty attacks carried out by Israeli settlers resulted in casualties or property damage between Aug. 11 and Aug. 24, according to the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights. 

More than 1,040 Palestinians have been injured in such incidents across 2026, it reports, and 79 Palestinians, including 19 children, have been killed by either Israeli military personnel or settlers so far this year. 

That adds to the escalating violence against Palestinians in the West Bank since the terror attacks led by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed around 1,200 people and took more than 200 hostage. Since then, another 1,100 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank.

Miliband said that the Israeli government had too often “turned a blind eye.”  

Following the U.K.’s lead, Canada and France announced similar trade bans Tuesday. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden also joined those three countries in backing national or European restrictions, although their individual commitments vary.

In a joint statement, the 12 governments said Israel’s actions were undermining the prospect of a two-state solution. The statement calls for a halt on settlement expansions and accountability for settler violence. 

What the Israeli settlement trade bans cover

The planned sanctions will ban the import of any goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, but will not impact any goods from Israel. 

Annual trade between the U.K. and Israel totaled around £6 billion ($8.1 billion) in the four quarters leading to Q2 2025, with goods imported by the U.K. from Israel valued at £1.2 billion ($1.6 billion). It is unclear how much of this trade originates from Israeli settlements in the West Bank. 

Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, says that the settler economy produces mainly produce.

“You see a lot of exports of agricultural goods like dates and avocados to Europe. You also see a lot of export of herbs, so this is in part the basis of the economy,” he says. 

A report published by Global Echo in June found that over 17% of the agricultural shipments to Europe that it analyzed contained settlement products. 

Doyle also says some settlements have been expanding industrial zones which “contribute to the production of many different types of Israeli exports.”

And while the sanctions will not target goods from Israel, Doyle says that some products originating from settlements are instead labeled as originating from Israel. 

European policy has previously sought clarity on the exact origin of Israeli products and whether goods have come from West Bank settlements. 

“It's incumbent, therefore, on Israel to stop this, to bring itself in line with international law, and not export these products,” said Doyle in light of Tuesday’s sanctions. 

But Hirschhorn argues that given how intertwined the economies of settlements and Israel are, it is difficult and unrealistic to separate the two. 

“The lid to the container of hummus that's made in the settlement of Ariel is filled by hummus itself that was pumped out of a tube in the city of Ashkelon,” she suggests as an example.

“There's no real way necessarily to separate the goods here from the goods there,” she tells TIME, arguing that Tuesday’s sanctions will ultimately impact Israeli businesses beyond the initial scope of the ban. 

“I’m not sure how an economic boycott of settler goods, no matter how specific or how tailored, would really achieve the policy goals that ultimately are desired here, which is the two-state solution,” she says. 

Despite the potential unintended impact sanctions could have, Doyle argues that this is down to the Israeli government to resolve. 

“It’s up to the state of Israel to uncouple its economy from the settlement economy,” he says. “Settlements do not lie within the sovereign borders of the territory of the State of Israel.”

Why West Bank settlements are illegal under international law

Under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory, are illegal. It is also illegal for an occupying power to deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.

In light of Article 49, and in line with its view that Israel occupies the West Bank, the U.N. deems settlements in the West Bank illegal. Miliband reaffirmed Tuesday that the U.K. observes this position on the matter, as well. 

“To those who finance or facilitate illegal settlements, let me say this: You will face the full force of U.K. sanctions,” said the Foreign Secretary, outlining that action will be taken against those  who provide construction or financial support for expansions.

There are an estimated 620,000 Israeli settlers living across the West Bank, as well as in East Jerusalem, according to B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. 

Settlers “live on occupied territory, using resources, particularly water, which is so crucial that they're not entitled to, and they do that with the blessing, encouragement, and active support of the Israeli government,” says Doyle. 

The Israeli government has also been enabling and in some instances supporting the expansion of settlements across the West Bank. Last month, it opened bidding for more than 1,200 homes in E1, a largely undeveloped area between East Jerusalem and the existing Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim.

The broader plan for roughly 3,400 homes was approved last year and championed by far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has previously been sanctioned by the British government and others. 

Critics say that construction would connect Ma’ale Adumim more closely with Jerusalem while disrupting Palestinian territorial continuity between East Jerusalem and the northern and southern West Bank—further undermining the prospects for a viable two-state solution.

Arguments for and against the sanctions

Supporters say that the sanctions are significant because they turn longstanding international condemnation of Israeli settlements into economic action. 

“There is a line drawn here that many actors in the international community are now prepared to say, ‘We're going to back up the criticism with action,’ and that ‘Israel, you have to stop massive expansion of settlers,’” Doyle says.

Others question whether broad restrictions on settlement trade effectively address the violence used to justify them. 

“The sanctions first and foremost don't target the perpetrators of settler violence specifically,” says Sara Yael Hirschhorn, a professor of history and American Jewish studies at the University of Haifa, suggesting that only a small number of settlers actually carry out such violence. 

Hirschhorn also notes that the timing of the measures, weeks before Israeli elections, could embolden far-right parties and hinder discussions around settler violence. 

“All it does is stir the pot in the midst of an election campaign, and strengthens the Israeli right, rather than approaching these issues with more subtlety when a new Israeli government had been elected,” she says. 

How Israel and the U.S. have responded

Israeli President Isaac Herzog warned that British sanctions on Israeli settlements “will prove to be a grave miscalculation.” 

“Sanctions are not a solution—dialogue is,” said Herzog. “Step away from the dead-end of sanctions and boycotts, and turn toward constructive dialogue and toward cooperation.”

Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir also called on the British consulate in East Jerusalem, that works with the Palestinian Authority, to be closed. 

“This must be Israel's resolute response to British audacity,” he said. 

Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, said he did not know what “sanctions, repercussions or retaliations” might follow from Washington in response to the U.K.  

“I don’t know if they’re really aware of the implications and how it’s going to affect Brits,” he said, pointing toward legislation in 38 states that restricts government contracts or investments involving companies that boycott Israel.

Asked about the sanctions, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters: “Obviously we're not gonna do what the U.K. did.”

“We don’t want to see anything destabilizing going on in the West Bank with so much going on in the region, we think it has implications on our ability to make progress with regards to Gaza,” Rubio continued. 

President Donald Trump is yet to publicly address the sanctions. When asked for comment on the matter, the White House directed TIME to Rubio's remarks.

Alongside the closure of the British consulate in Jerusalem, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar  confirmed the removal of British representatives from the International Gaza Support Center, which coordinates relief efforts. 

Israel has also suspended the British training of Palestinian Authority forces in the West Bank and it has barred an NGO director and 11 elected representatives in the U.K. from entering Israel. 

Among those denied entry is Labour lawmaker Richard Burgon, who has backed accusations of genocide put against Israel for its conduct in Gaza. 

“The decision by the Israeli government to sanction me today will not intimidate me into silence,” said Burgon in response to the move. “I will continue to do what is right, speak out in defense of international law and stand up for justice for the Palestinian people.”

Nearly a year after precious jewels were stolen from the Louvre in broad daylight, France’s museums suffered another loss of major art when thieves stole four valuable paintings from the Renoir Museum on the French Riviera on Tuesday. These events, while seemingly isolated, point toward a broader trend in art heists across Europe.

According to art theft investigator Anthony Amore, the crime has persisted throughout history.

“It has always happened. It always will happen,” he tells TIME. At the same time, it’s “hard to deny” that there has been an uptick in major thefts of art from museums across Europe, he says. 

“In terms of big name artists who are targeted, the number of heists—successful heists—that have happened, is without question spiking over the last 11 months,” Amore says.

That recent concentration was particularly striking in France. The country’s specialist art-crime office has recorded roughly 20 museum thefts annually over the past 15 years. But seven museums were targeted in September and October 2025 alone, the office’s chief told French lawmakers, describing an accumulation of unusually serious crimes.

Read More: 25 Works of Art That Define America Now

The latest heist targeted the former home and studio of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, an Impressionist artist born in the mid-19th century. The residence in Cagnes-sur-Mer was converted into a museum in 1960.

French investigators have launched a national search for the perpetrators, who broke in before 6 a.m. and executed the heist in less than three minutes. Cagnes-sur-Mer Mayor Bryan Masson told press that the thieves were “well-equipped” and “well-informed,” slicing through the garden fence with what is believed to be either an electric knife or saw, entering the museum on the ground floor, and cutting the cords holding the artworks. 

Circumstances of their escape caused them to abandon two of the four pilfered artworks, but they fled with “Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano” and “Young Woman at the Well.”

The incident bears similarities to the high-profile theft of the roughly $100 million worth of historic French crown jewels from the Louvre on Oct. 19, 2025. The haul has yet to be recovered or returned to the museum, even though authorities believe they have captured the entire four-man team responsible.

Many of the heists in the year since have duplicated that team’s successful approach: Do it quickly and with force.

Amore says that these “quick heists” often utilize brute force entry, like breaking a window. 

“Or it’s more of a smash and grab: Pull something off the wall and run. That's what we saw here,” he continues. “That's what we saw at the Louvre.”

The approach often facilitates one of the most essential elements of a successful escape: time.

“We're now getting into what I call the four-minute heist, where you can smash and grab your way into almost any museum in that amount of time,” says Christopher Marinello, the founder of Art Recovery International.

After the Louvre, thieves now see museums as accessible targets, he says—as long as they act fast.

“Criminals have discovered that with high-security museum systems, where the police are alerted and they arrive within four to five minutes, if they can get out before that, then they’re good—especially in a museum in a big city where you can use a moped or a scooter, and you could wind in and out of traffic,” Marinello continues.

Brute force allows criminals to enter and exit the scene as fast as possible. For example, a gang used a tractor to batter down a gate at the Magnani Rocca Foundation, a private museum about 12 miles from Parma, Italy, on March 22. In just three minutes, thieves managed to steal paintings by Renoir, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse.

Thieves successfully undertook another heist lasting just a few minutes at a small museum in Sicily on Aug. 16, making off with several works by Renaissance painter Antonello da Messina.

Not all thefts get the same level of publicity, and examples from the past year abound.

Ancient Romanian artifacts were taken from the Drents Museum in the Netherlands in January 2025, $11 million of porcelain works were lifted from the Adrien Dubouché National Museum in France in September 2025, and a 200-carat diamond-and-platinum necklace from Vienna's Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), worth $4 million, was taken last month. 

And the problem has spread beyond Europe, as well. In the United States, more than 1,000 historic artifacts were stolen from an offsite storage facility belonging to the Oakland Museum of California in October 2025.

Why has there been an uptick in museum heists?

The Sept. 8 Renoir heist is consistent with the methods used at the Louvre, says Amore. It is also consistent with the methods of most of the major art heists since early 2025. 

The similar methodologies point to potential cases of copycats, according to Amore.

“My educated opinion is that I think the Louvre heist might have captured the imagination of thieves,” he says.

Nick O’Donnell, a lawyer specializing in art and cultural property law, says that the Louvre heist potentially showed prospective thieves that if four thieves could successfully steal from one of the most famous museums in Europe, then they could easily transfer those tactics to less prominent museums.

“It has given fuel to the perception that there are many museums where security may not be as tight as people think it is,” he says. “It seems to me that once that perception gets going for the would-be thieves, it's very hard to contain.”

Marinello believes that a lack of security can be traced back to financial constraints. 

“They don't have money to protect their own treasures,” Marinello says. “And security systems are not keeping up with technology.”

He also believes broader economic and political factors play into potential budget shortfalls.

“The arts are always the first to go when governments are trying to save money,” he says. France, for example, cut its national culture budget by €150 million (about $170 million) in 2025, including a €200 million (about $226 million) reduction in heritage funding, which supports museums as well as monuments, archaeology, and archives. 

It is not directly evident how this might have impacted security at any of the museums robbed in the ensuing year; however, France launched a €30 million ($34 million) museum-security fund in July 2026, according to the French Culture Ministry.

But it’s not all down to budget, Amore says. Part of the issue with upping security at cultural institutions is that it risks undermining the entire point of museums: bringing the public closer to incredibly valuable and precious artifacts.

“The whole point of the museum is accessibility to rare valuables, important pieces, cultural patrimony,” Amore says. “Museums work really hard to get people to come and look at them and stand in front of them and take all the time in the world they need.”

He adds: “The best a museum can do is try to make it difficult to get in, difficult to get back out, using layers of security to slow people down.”

But the uptick in heists is not entirely explained by copycats and opportunists. The break-ins are also occurring amid high demand for precious metals and gemstones, which can make objects containing those materials attractive targets. 

They also come amid global economic instability, when some investors turn to art to hedge against inflation and diversify from stocks and bonds. A survey by Art Basel and UBS found that high-net-worth collectors allocated an average of 20% of their wealth to art in 2025, up from 15% in 2024.

Europol, the law enforcement agency of the European Union, released a report in August highlighting how art thieves “are increasingly focusing on precious metals, gemstones, and culturally significant artefacts, driven by high market demand and ease of illicit resale.”

Amore says those items may be less traceable and easier to fence than other valuables. Thieves can theoretically melt down the precious metals, remove gemstones from their settings, and sell the components separately.

“People might be moving toward objects like jewels or highly valuable jewelry pieces because they think that they can sell them—or break them up and sell them more easily,” he says.

But while that might explain the incidents at the Louvre and Vienna’s MAK, it doesn’t quite fit with paintings—which are easily identified and therefore significantly harder to offload.

Is the payoff worth the risk?

Famous paintings can be complicated to sell, in part because of how recognizable they are—which is intrinsic to their value.

Marinello says that the thieves involved in the Renoir heist will soon find that the paintings they hold are “radioactive.” 

“And when they can't sell them, sometimes they will try to ransom them back to the museum,” he says. “And after they fail at all those other attempts, then the artwork will travel on the dark web at a fraction of its true value.”

The risk may not be worth the consequences. Many of the culprits of recent high-profile heists have been caught by law enforcement, although recovering the lost art is another matter that has proven more difficult. In addition to the four people arrested in connection to the Louvre robbery, five people were detained last month in connection to the heist at the Magnani Rocca Foundation. 

At the same time, law enforcement and museum organizations have only grown more aggressive in their attempts to deter thefts and counteract the art heist trend.

The International Council of Museums (ICOM) announced a new initiative with Interpol last year in hopes of supporting museums “in strengthening their security systems and reinforcing collective efforts to prevent the theft and illicit movement of cultural goods.”

“The growing number and sophistication of security challenges facing museums and cultural institutions require urgent, coordinated, and informed action,” Medea Ekner, the director general of ICOM, said in a statement sent to TIME. “ICOM and INTERPOL are working closely to assess the scale and evolving nature of this threat, including through a sector-wide survey, and to identify where the museum community most needs support.”

In 1941, as the Nazis swept through Greece and took Athens, my grandfather, Nicolas Taptiklis, fled for his life.

In the middle of the night, he boarded a tiny boat with twelve others and crossed the dangerous waters of the Aegean Sea to Turkey. Under Nazi occupation, his service with the British Navy made staying in Greece a risk he could not take. Greeks who helped the Allies risked arrest, imprisonment, or execution, and the punishment could reach their families and communities too. From Turkey, he made his way with thousands of others to Syria, where he finally found safety in Damascus.

That journey never left him. When the war ended, Europe was filled with people who had also lost their homes, their families and, in many cases, nearly their lives. Around 11 million people were displaced in Germany: Holocaust survivors, former prisoners of war, forced laborers, and others left in camps, waiting for the world to decide what came next.

My grandfather returned to Europe and put his medical training to work for people whose own lives had been broken by the same war he had fled. He joined the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, one of the first humanitarian agencies and a precursor to UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. In a camp in Göttingen, Germany, he treated tuberculosis, typhoid, and people whose bodies had survived the war but still bore its scars.

The world had learned, at unbearable human cost, what happens when people fleeing war have nowhere safe to go. Through WWII, families were turned away from protection, people returned to countries where they feared for their lives, and millions were left in camps because home was no longer safe or even existed at all. 

From that devastation came a simple lesson; people escaping war and conflict should be able to find safety. They should not be forced back to a place where they could be killed or tortured. When people flee for their lives, they need somewhere safe to go.

That principle became the heart of the 1951 Refugee Convention, adopted in the aftermath of the Second World War as countries tried to create a framework to prevent the atrocities of the war from ever occurring again. The Convention defined who is a refugee, set out the basic rights for refugees, and established the responsibilities of states toward people seeking protection. But more than a legal document, it was a promise of safety. A promise that, for the past 75 years, has saved millions of lives and stands as proof that even in our darkest hours, we can choose to protect one another. 

Even the clearest lessons of history can fade. A world of indifference, even cruelty, is creeping back. Xenophobia is rising. Humanitarian aid is shrinking. International solidarity is weakening. And once again, the promise of safety is under strain.

As world leaders gather in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, we must reaffirm that promise. In times like these, we must hold fast to our promise and advocate for the continued need and lifesaving work of humanitarian agencies, like UNHCR, around the world. This is not only the morally right thing to do; it is also the practical one. When refugees are protected, communities are stronger, instability is reduced, and fewer people are forced to flee. A world that protects people in their greatest moment of need is a safer and more humane world for everyone.

My grandfather experienced the generosity and compassion of the Syrians who sheltered him, but he also knew what a world of chaos and violence was like, and what its consequences were if there was no safety net of international protection. 

If my grandfather were alive today, he would be sounding a warning. He would be speaking up in defense of the Convention, of humanitarian action, of compassion. He knew all too well what it was like to flee in fear for your life. He saw how lives could be lost or shattered if there was no one to step in and protect them. 

I think of my grandfather on that boat, making that journey. I sound the warning on his behalf. To remind people that becoming a refugee can happen to any of us at any time. The right to seek safety was a promise made for us all, and that promise needs protecting and defending.

In January 2026, a new community popped up on Reddit, the online message board site. Called /r/GirlDinnerDiaries, it now has a sizable 6 million members and invites people to post a photo of a meal—whether it’s something you’re eating while you post or another meal that gets at your state of mind—along with an anonymous blurb venting or soliciting advice.  "My partner only feels disgust at the idea of me as a mom," reads one. "I feel like it's never going to be OK," says another. 

The point is to activate the feeling of sharing over food, but over the internet. The snapshots are messy, yet evocative: French fries consumed in a nightclub, a breakfast burrito in a diner, yesterday’s lunch eaten hastily over a keyboard with a plastic fork. The posts wax poetic about the fate of marriages and the bizarre serendipity of life. Reading these dishy dispatches feels like staying up late with friends you rarely see, working over all that's gone down in your life in search of some meaning. 

Why are millions of people so captivated by these nameless confessionals served with a side of candid, unposed food photography? Scientists who study self-disclosure—the act of sharing personal, sensitive information with others—have some thoughts about why we share our deepest, darkest secrets on the internet.

Revealing ourselves builds trust

Talking about yourself feels pleasurable, and there’s science to back that up, says Leslie John, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and author of the book Revealing. She points to experiments conducted by psychologists Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell, where people having their brains scanned in an fMRI machine answered either normal trivia questions or questions about themselves. “They found that in the ones that got to self-disclose, the pleasure centers of the brain were activated,” says John. “That's pretty powerful.” 

Sharing feels good because it’s necessary for human social interaction, John speculates. “When you self-disclose, when you take the social risk—and it really is a social risk—of sharing something a little bit personal, a little sensitive, you're modeling that you trust the recipient. That gesture is implicitly saying, ‘Hey, I trust you not to make a fool out of me; otherwise, I wouldn't be sharing this.’ And when you do that, it causes the other person to trust you back. So trust begets trust,” she says. 

In fact, John’s work has found that people are more interested in dating a hypothetical person who admits that they’ve done something terrible than someone who declines to answer the question. “It's better sometimes to admit the worst possible thing than to conspicuously abstain,” she says. 

Posting a photo of a paper plate with yesterday’s messy BBQ and a brownie you ate while processing getting fired is, in the age of the perfectly lit Instagram plate, a similar kind of move. “It's super relatable,” says John. “Showing things that are unvarnished is kind of paradoxically attractive.” 

How the internet changes the equation

Psychologists and sociologists used to think of self-disclosure mainly in the sense of sharing with people you know in real life, says sociologist Tamar Ashuri of Tel Aviv University. “The original studies back in the ’50s and ’60s on self-disclosure focus on face-to-face interactions,” she says. “In intimate relationships, people disclose, and it’s kind of an ultimate goal. You can't sustain an intimate relationship if you don't.” Another situation where people might self-disclose is the stranger-on-a-train context. It’s also face-to-face, but there is no lasting link, so the risks of disclosure are lower.  

But the arrival of the internet, and social media especially, produced new forms of self-disclosure that scientists are still working to characterize and understand. In the case of /r/GirlDinnerDiaries, says Ashuri, posters are anonymously disclosing intimate thoughts in a public forum, stranger-on-a-train style, with no face-to-face interaction, and yet it is still somehow gratifying.

That combination emerged almost by accident, says the subreddit’s founder, a young woman named Taylor, who asked to be identified only by her first name. She had been posting frequently in another community, called Girl Dinner, and noticed a split: Some people wanted to know the slice-of-life stories behind the meals, while others only wanted to see the food. She created Girl Dinner Diaries as an overflow space for people who wanted both—and it took off almost immediately. “One of my favorite things is going out with the girls for some drinks and some appys and venting, getting it all off my chest,” Taylor says. Girl Dinner Diaries offered a place to do that without leaving the couch. 

Not every diary is wrenching. Taylor’s favorite post is a happy one: A woman woke up to discover that her husband had created a scavenger hunt for her, then shared a photo of the pasta with burrata they ate that evening. “It looked quite fancy,” Taylor says. “It looked very delicious.” 

Whether the story is heartwarming or devastating, the meal is an essential part of the formula. “Food provides a very positive, ordinary, culturally familiar medium,” Ashuri says. “But in this case, and this is what makes it so special, it allows people to express extraordinary issues…The food makes the extraordinary feel more ordinary.” She gives the example of one recent post, in which a woman posted a birthday cake and revealed that she and her son had celebrated his birthday in a domestic violence shelter. “I think this combination is extremely significant,” she says. 

The setup allows posters to reveal what are sometimes extreme experiences to a community gathered around a shared sensibility—with the unifying force of a leftover chimichanga presiding over it all. Food helps make the extreme relatable. The subreddit also tightly controls who can enter the conversation: Only approved commenters are allowed to respond, adding a layer of protection to a forum built around unusually intimate disclosures. 

Should we all be self-disclosing more?

There’s a happy medium to everything—don’t, perhaps, take to the web with every mental dip or life hiccup. And sharing online may not bring the same benefits as sharing in real life, cautions John. “Social media in so many ways facilitates self-disclosure,” she says. “But in many ways this medium doesn't give you the benefit you're looking for (e.g., real social bonding, connectedness).” 

Indeed, research suggests that people who post to social media every day tend to score worse on measures of mental health. Posting online can give easy access to reassurance from others, but this behavior can sometimes become destructive—if we don’t get the reassurance we seek, that’s a big blow, and constant reassurance may not help in solving the larger problems.

But John thinks that in general, offline, we overestimate the harms of oversharing, while underestimating the costs of staying silent. 

The impulse to put an experience into words may help even when no one else reads them. Some of social psychologist James Pennebaker’s research suggests that privately writing about traumatic events can provide significant psychological relief, and even boost the immune systems of some patients. 

John never really applied her findings about disclosure to her own life, though, until she was working on her book about sharing. “Every time in my life that I could think of where I overshared, where I felt that cringe of TMI, it sucked in the moment. But every single time there was something amazing and redeeming in the long haul about it,” she says. “That made me think, ‘Oh wow, the decision we're making is systematically biased’…You get immediate negative social feedback, but there are benefits too. People trust you, people like you, people confide in you. Those come down the road.”

Nothing deters sleep like a nighttime mental ambush. Just as your head hits the pillow, tomorrow’s to-do list crawls out from under the bed. You’re suddenly answering emails in your mind, crafting meeting agendas, and ruminating over the appointment you still need to schedule. Try this instead: Write down tomorrow’s to-do list tonight.

“One of the most common things I hear from patients with insomnia is, ‘I’m tired and exhausted, but my mind won’t shut off,’” says Dr. M. Taruj Ali, medical director of sleep medicine at Mary Washington Healthcare in Fredericksburg, Va. His patients often describe “a running mental inventory of unfinished tasks and what needs to happen tomorrow.” Spending a few minutes putting those thoughts on paper can give your brain permission to set them aside for the night.

The timing matters, however: Don’t save the exercise for the moment you climb into bed. Experts recommend spending five to 10 minutes on it in the evening when you wrap up your structured tasks, like finishing work, chores, or whatever occupies the bulk of your time. “Getting those things out of your head and onto paper can reduce the pressure to keep thinking about them,” says Sari Chait, a clinical psychologist in Dedham, Mass. If a forgotten task pops into your head later, jot it on a notepad by your bed without turning it into a full-blown planning session. 

Here’s how to create a list that quiets your mind rather than revving it up.

Why does writing a to-do list help?

There’s some evidence that the habit can improve sleep. In a small 2018 study, researchers randomly assigned 57 adults ages 18 to 30 to spend five minutes at bedtime either writing about tasks they needed to complete over the next few days or listing what they had accomplished during the previous few days. The to-do-list group fell asleep an average of nine minutes faster—and the more specific their lists were, the faster they drifted off.

That doesn’t mean a nightly list cures insomnia (or that reflecting on your accomplishments is a waste of time). The study included only healthy young adults who spent just one night in a sleep lab, and the researchers noted that they didn’t know whether the results would extend to people with insomnia. Still, it supports the idea that writing down unfinished tasks helps put them to rest.

This strategy is a form of cognitive offloading: using an external tool—in this case, a physical to-do list—to reduce how much information your brain has to keep track of. Stephanie High, a psychology doctoral candidate in Spokane, Wash., thinks of every unresolved task as a browser tab running in the background of your brain. “You have all these tabs, you have all these apps open, and there’s always some activity in the background,” she says. Even when you’re not actively looking at one, it’s using a little battery and memory. Writing the task down allows you to acknowledge that it requires your attention—and then set it aside. “I know that I need to put my attention on this,” she says. “But I don’t need to do it right this second.” 

The benefits extend beyond bedtime. Planning tomorrow before you wrap up today creates a clear dividing line between work and the rest of your life, says Alexis Haselberger, a time-management and productivity coach in San Francisco. “It helps you disconnect, mentally, from work at the end of the day,” she says, rather than running through your responsibilities while you’re trying to talk to your kids, catch up with your partner, or watch TV. 

There’s a morning payoff, too: “You have a list, so instead of spending 30 minutes getting into your day, you can just start.”

Start with a brain dump

If your current organizational system could most accurately be described as “chaos,” Chait suggests starting with one big brain dump: “Get it all out on paper, and then you can organize it from there,” she says. Once you’ve made that initial list, the daily exercise can be much smaller. At the end of each workday, choose three priorities for tomorrow.

Next, compare those priorities with your calendar. “If you have five meetings tomorrow, you’re probably not going to be able to make much headway on that big project,” Haselberger says. Move anything that won’t fit to another day. The goal is to make a plan you can reasonably stick to—not compile an unrealistic wish list.

Specificity matters, too. “‘Prep for meeting’ leaves the loop half-open because your mind still has to hold on to what ‘prep’ means,” High says. “‘Pull Q3 numbers, email the deck’ closes the loop, because there’s nothing it has to remember.” The same goes for the difference between “call Mom” and “call Mom about Thursday’s appointment.” Include enough detail that when you wake up, you’ll know exactly what you meant.

You don’t, however, need to produce a display-worthy masterpiece. “It doesn’t have to be perfect,” Chait says. “It doesn’t have to be pretty.” The sleep study used pen and paper, but it didn’t test whether handwriting works better than typing. Chait says a notebook or a notes app on your phone will do the trick; the best method is the one you’ll actually use. 

Don’t turn it into another obligation

For some people, writing a to-do list can increase anxiety, especially if it morphs into a tedious planning session or an inventory of everything you failed to accomplish. If the page starts filling up with every unresolved problem in your life, it can feel less like a plan and more like self-flagellation. “You’ve just handed your nervous system a threat list right when you’re trying to wind down,” High says.

Keep the exercise brief, and focus on what you’ll do next rather than dwelling on what went wrong that day. The goal isn’t to plan out your entire life. It’s to spend five or 10 minutes capturing what needs to be remembered—and then disengage from planning until the next day.

If another task pops into your head later, write it down—but stop there. Chait keeps a pen and paper next to the bed for exactly that reason. You don’t want to spend time processing your feelings or actually acting on the thoughts, like writing an email,” she says. “You simply want to write down what the thought or to-do is.” Then put the paper away.

Finally, treat the habit like an experiment, not a new obligation. “It only works if it works for you,” High says. Try it for a few days, notice whether you feel calmer at night and more focused in the morning, and adjust how much detail you include. Otherwise, she points out, you risk opening “another tab of how I need to close more tabs”—when the whole point is to give your brain less to do.

After a summer of cyberattacks sent AI rocketing up the political agenda, bills seeking to ban so-called superintelligent AI are gaining momentum on both sides of the Atlantic.

Last week, Senator Bernie Sanders announced plans to introduce the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would prohibit the development of smarter-than-human AI systems and temporarily pause all other advanced AI research until new safety rules can be established. The bill is expected to be introduced in the coming weeks, according to Sanders’ office.

And on Tuesday, British lawmaker Alex Sobel stood up in the House of Commons and introduced what he said was the first bill seeking to ban superintelligence in any G7 parliament. The bill defines superintelligent AI as a system that could disempower state authorities, and seeks to give the state new powers to monitor and restrict systems that may be “precursors” to superintelligence.

Both the U.S. and U.K. bills additionally seek to compel each government to pursue a global treaty banning the development of superintelligent AI anywhere in the world. “A national bill does not solve the international problem where superintelligence can be developed somewhere else,” says Andrea Miotti, the founder of ControlAI, a campaign group that wrote the U.K. bill and consulted on the U.S. one. “The only way to address that is via international agreements between countries.”

At an event in Westminster on Monday ahead of the British bill’s introduction, Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, issued a stark warning to a small audience including some U.K. lawmakers. “There's a significant chance of a Chernobyl-sized catastrophe” due to AI, he told them, “such as a coordinated sabotage of financial systems, communication systems, or electrical grids, that directly or indirectly would cost millions of lives and cause the economic collapse of many countries.”

He characterized this grim possibility as a best-case scenario if AI development were to continue without government regulation. “The other possibility is a much larger catastrophe in which humanity loses control irreversibly, and we have no say over whether we continue to exist,” he said. “The third option, that things magically go well, is not realistic.”

Though the two bills appear to be the first to address the specific policy of superintelligence, other bills in both legislatures seek to address AI risks in different ways. In July, Republican and Democratic lawmakers co-sponsored the AI Kill Switch Act, which seeks to require AI companies to maintain the capability of shutting down their increasingly autonomous AI systems. In the U.K., lawmakers recently attempted to amend a cybersecurity bill to include similar requirements.

The efforts reflect a growing awareness among some lawmakers of what they see as the severe national security risks of AI companies developing superintelligent AI systems, particularly in light of the July disclosure of the Hugging Face incident, in which a swarm of OpenAI agents hacked a separate company without humans telling them to do so, or initially even being aware of their actions.

But the passage of either bill is unlikely. Sanders is an independent senator, and his co-sponsor is a Democratic congressman. The Republican-majority Congress is unlikely to support the bill, which goes against the White House’s AI agenda. And although the lawmaker who introduced the British bill is a member of the governing Labour Party, the U.K. government has not supported the policy. It is a so-called “Ten Minute Rule bill,” a type of bill that rarely progresses past its first reading, meaning the possibility of it becoming law is vanishingly slim.

ControlAI acknowledges these limitations, but says the bills are nevertheless a key step toward government regulation of AI. Superintelligence is “something that no company, no individual, no country knows how to keep under control … most countries don’t want that for very good reason,” says Miotti. “Fundamentally, as has happened in the past with other bills, the first introduction is just the beginning.”

Another speaker who addressed British lawmakers on Monday was Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI employee who quit in 2024 over what he said was the company’s failure to properly address the extinction risks of advanced AI.

“Things are really crazy over here in San Francisco,” he told lawmakers in London by video. “The core problem is that most of the world just doesn't yet believe that it's really going to happen,” he said, referring to the development of superintelligence.

“Once people realize that these companies might actually build superintelligence in the next few years, I think the obvious conclusion of almost all people is going to be: they shouldn't be allowed to do that.”

Kokotajlo, who has an established track record of making accurate predictions about AI progress years in advance, raised the possibility of AI agents taking substantial and covert control of infrastructure at AI companies, and using that foothold to establish a swarm of AIs that could resist human attempts to shut it down.

“It seems like if we had just gotten a little bit less lucky, and the AIs had been a bit smarter, then we still wouldn't know about it [the Hugging Face incident], and there would be this persistent autonomous AI adversary still at large inside OpenAI with the ability to compromise and grow itself further,” he said. “And then, as the next months and years go by, and OpenAI makes more powerful agents, those agents could be brought into the swarm.”

Dr. Elaine Batchlor, CEO of MLK Community Hospital in Los Angeles, already knows what will happen if her hospital closes. All she has to do is remember King Drew, a similar safety net hospital that provided care to a large share of low-income patients in the same neighborhood, that closed in 2007 because of safety and quality problems. The low-income neighborhoods in South Los Angeles were without a hospital for almost a decade. 

As a result, other hospitals in the area saw higher volumes of patients and more uninsured patients; one hospital’s share of uninsured patients more than tripled, from about 13% to nearly 45%, a study found. This redistribution of sick people led to severe overcrowding in other hospitals and higher costs for insured patients. 

Now, Batchlor and many other hospital administrators are bracing for this dynamic once again as cuts from H.R. 1, also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, ripple across the U.S. health care system. H.R. 1 makes it more difficult for people to stay on Medicaid by introducing work requirements and by demanding that people re-confirm their income and address every six months, rather than every year. It also reduces the amount of state funding hospitals receive through the Medicaid program. Batchlor estimates that her hospital will lose between $80-$100 million a year because of H.R. 1. 

She’s scrambling to find funding from elsewhere, including from a new 5% sales tax recently passed in Los Angeles County to fund local health services, including safety net hospitals like hers. She’s determined to keep MLK Community Hospital open, but she knows other hospitals won’t be successful in doing so. One analysis found that more than 300 rural hospitals are at risk of closing because of H.R. 1. 

What Batchlor wants people to know is that an increase in uninsured people doesn’t just affect the people losing insurance. It affects everyone. More uninsured people means more of a financial burden on hospitals—particularly hospitals like hers, which are located in low-income neighborhoods and which will incur higher costs treating everyone who shows up in the emergency room because they’ll see more uninsured patients. When hospitals face financial distress, they cut back on services: often ob-gyn and preventative care. 

Or they close altogether. “There will be hospitals that will likely close as a result of the financial distress, and the patients that were served by those hospitals will need to go somewhere else,” she says. “They will go to hospitals in other neighborhoods, and those emergency departments will become more crowded, and those hospitals will become more crowded.” 

What’s more, people with insurance are likely to see their costs rise as the number of uninsured Americans spikes. Hospitals and doctors must charge more as they provide more non-reimbursed care. A September 2 report by Marsh, the consulting firm formerly known as Mercer, estimates that the cost of health insurance plans to employers will increase by 11% in 2027—the biggest jump in decades—and that many employers will pass those costs on to their workers. “Lower government funding and reimbursements in public health programs are also driving higher charges or care in employer plans,” the report found. 

Why the health-insurance landscape is changing so quickly

The U.S. is facing its most serious health-insurance crisis since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. It’s not just that H.R. 1 is projected to make more people lose Medicaid coverage; Congress decided not to renew subsidies for the Affordable Care Act in 2026, meaning that thousands of families are seeing the cost of insurance skyrocket and are deciding to drop insurance coverage rather than pay hundreds or thousands of dollars a month for care. All told, the Congressional Budget Office expects 16 million more people to be uninsured by 2034.

People who will not have health insurance may forgo primary care, checkups, and other preventative measures, and could be saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills if they get a serious illness. But it’s not just bad news for them—the insurance crisis threatens the finances and care of everyone, even if they have private insurance plans and are sure they won’t lose coverage, experts say. Everyone is likely to face longer wait times, fewer services, and higher costs as hospitals and medical systems sag under the weight of more uninsured. And as the example of MLK Community Hospital shows, they may also be paying higher taxes on products that aren’t even health related to help fund care for the uninsured.

“There’s a ripple effect that hits the uninsured and newly uninsured and underinsured particularly hard,” says Anthony Wright, executive director of Families USA, a national consumer health advocacy group. “But it ripples through families and communities and the health system we all rely on.” 

Some hospitals are already closing. Select Specialty Hospital—Tucson East recently announced its imminent closure, though a spokesperson did not confirm it was because of H.R. 1. Others are already making tough choices about what services to continue. One Las Vegas hospital said in August that because of increased demand for its emergency room services, it was closing its maternity and NICU services by the end of September. 

How hospitals absorb the costs

Safety net hospitals are most in danger of seeing their finances erode quickly. That’s because they are, by definition, non-profit hospitals that provide care to people regardless of their insurance status or ability to pay. America’s Essential Hospitals, an association for safety net hospitals, said in an interview that among its 400 members, three-quarters of the patients they serve are uninsured or on Medicare or Medicaid. Already, these hospitals are losing money every year, says Jennifer DeCubellis, president and CEO of America’s Essential Hospitals. This is likely to get worse as more people delay care and then end up in emergency rooms, where their care is going to be more expensive, she says. “We're going to see longer wait times in emergency departments,” she says, “and what we've already started seeing, even before the One Big Beautiful Bill, is the loss of services in local communities.” 

For-profit hospitals are also seeing a surge in uninsured patients stressing their finances. Executives at HCA Healthcare, the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain, said on an earnings call in July that individuals who had lost coverage because ACA subsidies disappeared were now showing up at hospitals uninsured. Other for-profit hospitals are also reporting large increases of uninsured patients seeking care.

When hospitals have more uninsured patients, they have to absorb the costs of providing that care. They then often pass those costs onto insured patients by charging insurers more for services, studies have found.

“One of the reasons our premiums have been increasing for employee-sponsored health care is that hospitals that do charity care get a tax benefit, but they also add the cost of their unfunded care to the prices they charge to employee-sponsored health care,” says Heidi Russell, director of the Center for Health Policy at the Baker Institute at Rice University. 

What happens when people lose insurance

Rena Healy, 30, is one uninsured patient who is doing everything she can to avoid turning up in an emergency room, even though she has a heart condition that requires her to be on $1,000-a-month medicine she can’t afford. She was on Medicaid in Indiana, but recently moved to Tennessee to be near her fiance. Tennessee, unlike Indiana, has not expanded Medicaid, and Healy suddenly found herself unable to qualify for health insurance.

Her career as a video game developer doesn’t make her enough money to pay the $500 a month that a plan on the Affordable Care Act marketplace would cost, she says. So she’s looking for a job that provides health insurance, including as a cashier or certified nursing assistant, even though her heart condition means she’s not supposed to do physical work. 

She’s been applying for more than 100 jobs a week but hasn’t found anything yet, she says, and meanwhile is running to the end of her medication supply from when she was in Indiana. For now, Healy is leaning on public clinics for appointments and trying to avoid going to the ER, even though she knows that the monitor implanted in her sternum could show her heart rate going up to 250 bpm, which would necessitate an ER visit. “I sympathize with people who don’t want to go to the ER or take an ambulance even if they’re dying,” she says. “They don’t want to cash-strap their family.” 

Healy is one example of what can happen when people lose insurance; unable to get preventative care, they can’t manage their symptoms as effectively. One study of the Medicaid expansion in the South found that when more people gained health insurance, health declines in low-income adults slowed down because they were able to seek preventative care. 

Avoiding health care for financial reasons ends up being more expensive in the long run; when people skip preventative care, they end up sicker by the time they go to the doctor, often in an ER. 

“It’s $2,500 to do a colonoscopy, but it’s $130,000 to treat someone for Stage IV colon cancer,” says Dr. Erik Mikaitis, CEO of Cook County Health, one of the largest public health systems in the nation. Already, Cook County Health—which runs two hospitals and a dozen community health centers in Chicago, while also providing health care to the Cook County Jail—has seen an increase from 19% of patients being uninsured to 25%, just since January. Mikaitis is worried that instead of managing patients’ diabetes and high blood pressure, doctors will be seeing more patients with strokes and heart attacks in the emergency department.

As a result, he predicts, people going to the emergency room for anything will see longer wait times, especially as health systems close clinics and hospitals that are losing money.

“This isn’t just a Medicaid problem,” he says. “There’s going to be this cascade of failure in terms of access. You’re going to see people in the hallways waiting to be seen.” 

Hospitals won’t just be more crowded. They’ll also be forced to cut back on preventative services and those that help keep people out of the emergency room, says David Perlstein, the president and CEO of SBH Health System. For instance, SBH, which is located in the Bronx, has a violence interrupter program for teens and a boxing program that makes communities safer for young people. 

“As we erode our margin, we may have to pull back services at some point,” he says. “We’re not doing it yet. But if this continues and there is no change, we’re going to have to make some very difficult decisions in the near future.” 

It’s something that Batchlor worries about, too. Only about 3-5% of patients at MLK Community Hospital have  private insurance, she says, so it can’t just raise rates on privately insured patients to make up for a surge in uninsured. The hospital has won accolades for its diabetes management program, which is bringing down the need for amputations, and for its wound care program, which has helped people stay out of the emergency room. But she’s worried about the health system’s ability to be able to provide that kind of preventative care. 

“We'll all be worse off for having let people get sicker and end up needing more expensive care—ending up with amputations, ending up on chronic dialysis,” she says. “None of that is really what we should be doing as a society. It's not financially effective, and it's not humane.”

As the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York City approaches, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has launched a portal giving the public access to about 170,000 pages of documents concerning air quality, health hazards, and the government’s response following 9/11.

Its long-sought documents, which had previously been kept out of the public eye, show that New York City leaders were aware of the dangers posed by toxic contamination around Ground Zero following the attacks, even while they continued to tell New Yorkers that the air was safe to breathe.

Some of the pages were reportedly found in 68 boxes stashed in a city office, which advocates argue had been kept away from the public for years. According to a press release from the Mayor's Office, the records "were not located until 2025 despite multiple Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests."

Another document included in the records is the so-called Harding memo, an October 2001 document showing that city officials had in the weeks after the attacks already anticipated approximately 10,000 legal claims arising from exposure to toxic air.

The new portal was announced Tuesday morning at a press conference that was also attended by longtime advocate Jon Stewart and others involved in the yearslong legal effort to obtain the records. In June, the mayor allocated $34.2 million from the city’s $125.8 billion fiscal year 2027 budget to create and maintain the portal.

"Now, close to 25 years later, more people have died from 9/11-related illnesses than were killed on the day itself," Mamdani said at the conference announcing the portal. The World Trade Center Health Program, which provides no-cost monitoring and treatment for covered 9/11-related health conditions, said thousands continue to be diagnosed with ailments resulting from their exposure to dust, smoke, debris, and the traumatic events.

The city’s Fire Department released a report on Sept. 1 detailing the lasting effects of the 9/11 tragedy on first responders. More than 12,000 FDNY members have been diagnosed and certified with at least one related physical or mental health condition, including cancers, according to the report.

The mayor’s office has said that additional documents will be added on a rolling basis. "The City expects substantially more documents will be released in the coming year as they are reviewed, and personally identifiable information is removed," the press release said.

“For too long, New Yorkers have had to fight for access to records that should have been available to them in the first place," Mamdani said in the press release. "This portal is part of our administration’s enduring commitment to honor those we lost, care for those living with lasting health consequences and give thousands of New Yorkers the answer they’ve been asking for.”

Mamdani also announced Tuesday that the city had settled two lawsuits brought by 9/11 Health Watch, ending a multiyear legal battle over records concerning post-9/11 air quality and health risks.

What do we know about the content of the documents? 

The New York Times obtained early access to the documents and reported that they contain information relating to 15 John Street, near the collapsed World Trade Center, which purportedly detected asbestos—at times exceeding acceptable limits—about a year after the attack.

Among the pages was also an audit from November 2001, submitted to the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which reportedly showed high concentrations of benzene, a cancer-causing substance, in the air near the towers, according to the Times.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said that exposure to these contaminants increases the risk of developing health conditions, such as illnesses concerning the airways and digestive systems. The CDC added that after the attacks, around 400,000 people were exposed to these contaminants and other factors that increased their risk for such conditions.

Taking questions at the conference on Tuesday, Mamdani addressed what people can expect to learn from the documents that they might not have already known. "I think that there is going to be a lot to learn from these documents," he said, adding that it's important that "those who faced such sustained pushback for years are finally told by the city of New York: 'You were right.'"

Why Mamdani is under pressure

The release of the documents coincides with Mamdani drawing calls from families of victims of the tragedy and some Republican politicians not to attend the 9/11 remembrance event in New York City on Friday.

In July, 9/11 widower Giovanni Galante began a petition against Mamdani’s attendance, citing concerns over “Mamdani's public positions, associations, and responses to rhetoric that many perceive as hostile.” The petition cites Mamdani’s refusal to condemn those who say “globalize the intifada” as one of the issues. The petition also references Mamdani’s appointment of Ramzi Kassem, who worked for the Biden Administration, as chief counsel to the mayor. Kassem served as legal counsel for Ahmed al-Darbi, who plead guilty to charges stemming from a 2002 al-Qaeda tanker bombing plot and who is the brother-in-law of one of the hijackers in the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.

Former New York Gov. George Pataki told a local CBS affiliate on Thursday that Mamdani should first reject Hasan Piker, who previously earned public ire over a comment that the U.S. “deserved” the attack. Mamdani has already denounced Piker’s comment.

Rudy Giuliani, who was the mayor of New York in 2001, told right-leaning news organization Newsmax that Mamdani should skip the event. “Having lost friends there and being very close to many of the families, it offends me that he's coming,” Giuliani said. The former mayor also attacked Mamdani’s religion, Islam, and baselessly suggested the mayor was supportive of Muslim extremist ideology.

Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor who was nine years old when the attack happened, has long faced Islamophobic comments. Speaking to the Times last year, Mamdani lamented how the 2001 attacks had made anti-Muslim prejudice “a fact of life” for Muslim-Americans, claiming: “It was this horrific day that was also, for many New Yorkers, the moment at which they were marked an ‘other.’”

Before Giuliani’s comments, Mamdani signed city executive orders designating Sept. 11 a New York-wide "Day of Remembrance and Service" and updating emergency preparedness procedures. But the signing caught the ire of some critics after Mamdani handed the 9/11 ceremonial pen to Kassem.

Despite the pushback, Mamdani still plans to attend the commemoration on Friday.

“I’m proud to be the mayor of this city,” Mamdani said. “I love this city. I love this country. And what I want this week to be a focus on is on the families whose loved ones were stolen from them 25 years ago in the horrific act of terror of September 11th, and a focus also on the first responders who gave everything they could to this city and to the people who came together to try and help their fellow New Yorkers.”

For over 25 years, I have studied exceptional leaders of innovation, individuals from a range of companies and countries, from the Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi to Pixar. For hundreds of hours, I have observed leaders who have figured out how to get their colleagues to adopt emerging technologies to innovate and change the game for their customers. 

What I have learned from doing this work is this: leading AI innovation is not about having a vision and getting others to follow you to the future; rather, it is about inviting others to co-create the future with you. 

This is also true of the AI age. While virtually every company is scrambling to adopt new AI practices, the leaders who have made the most progress are those who believe the value of AI will come from using the technology to do work people could never do themselves, and the least value will come from simply swapping machines for people. Their goal is to pursue solutions that augment human ingenuity. And they appreciate that their toughest challenge is about people, not technology. These leaders know that we all need help navigating uncertainty, and they encourage others to try out new ways of working despite real intellectual and emotional demands.

Innovation is rarely the feat of a solo genius but rather the fruit of co-creation, which requires collaboration, experimentation, and learning from people with differing expertise and perspectives. Collaboration entails weaving together diversity of thought through constructive conflict to create a marketplace of ideas. Experimentation involves actively testing, pivoting, and refining. And learning happens when individuals and collectives reflect on what they have gleaned from those experiments—and then adapt their course of action. 

To generate and scale innovative AI solutions, leaders rely on a repertoire of interrelated roles, what we refer to as the “ABCs” of leadership: architects, bridgers, and catalysts. 

Architects know they cannot mandate innovation; they foster the culture and capabilities that enable co-creation. These leaders start by raising their organization’s collective aspirations through a shared sense of purpose and values. By re-shaping the social environment of their organizations, these leaders encourage their colleagues to work through the inevitable conflicts of collaborating with others and the fear of failure. They reward thoughtful risk-taking, treat intelligent failures as learning opportunities, and provide people the tools, data, and perhaps most importantly, the permission to try.

Bridgers work at the boundaries of their enterprises, building trust-based partnerships with those outside their walls. No company, no matter how well-resourced, has all the talent and tools they need for innovation given the unprecedented pace at which technology is advancing. With AI, I hear that there is a shortage of individuals who know how to translate and work across technology and business. Technical experts who are developing AI solutions typically do not have the contextual intelligence about the realities of business and what customers want, while the businesspeople do not appreciate the opportunities and risks of implementing the technology. 

Catalysts have to mobilize stakeholders across whole industries, sectors, or nations to address the most audacious innovation challenges. Catalysts are also essential if we are to establish the global norms and guardrails that keep AI aligned with human interests. They can bring in overlooked voices, surface second-order effects, and help mitigate AI risks and share the benefits of AI more equitably. 

Many leaders must be prepared to reinvent themselves if they hope not only to generate AI innovative solutions but actually turn them into reality—launch or commercialize them so they have the desired impact. They must give up being the smartest person in the room and get comfortable collaborating, experimenting, and learning with “unusual suspects.” 

Even AI-first executives admit we do not know where AI will take us nor how we are going to get there. The winners of the AI race will be the companies whose leaders accept that their task is wayfinding. Leaders must enable their colleagues to have the courage and curiosity of explorers who once crossed the uncharted oceans without clarity about their destination. Fortunately, we have access to more sophisticated tools than the ancient seafarers. For AI to make a positive difference for customers and society, it will take individuals at all levels of our organizations to be willing and able to join the journey.

If Democrats win control of the House in November, party leaders plan to turn the final two years of the Trump era into a barrage of investigations over alleged corruption and contempt for the law.

Much of the scrutiny would be expected to come from the Judiciary and Oversight Committees, the traditional engines of congressional investigations. But another, less prominent committee could emerge as an unlikely center of the fight: the House Natural Resources Committee.

The 45-member panel has oversight over virtually all federal lands, giving it jurisdiction over a striking collection of controversies that have defined President Trump’s second term. That includes his efforts to remake Washington, D.C. by building a White House ballroom and a triumphal arch, and the troubled renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It also covers the Administration’s efforts to open up national parks to an unprecedented amount of hunting, fishing and drilling, as well as a recent proposal to give a swath of California’s Yosemite National Park to a private developer.

“We are no longer a backwater here at the Natural Resources Committee,” Rep. Jared Huffman, the committee’s top Democrat, tells TIME. “You check a lot of boxes with the Natural Resources Committee in terms of some of the most high-profile controversies in this Administration.”

Huffman, who is likely to become the committee’s chair in a Democratic House, spoke to TIME this month from his Capitol Hill office decorated with paintings from the Muir Woods National Monument, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and other public lands in his coastal California district. Leading the House Natural Resources Committee has been the ultimate goal for the former environmental lawyer since he joined the House in 2013. “This is the top of the mountain for me,” he says. “This is what I always wanted.”

Huffman has a running list of the investigations he would pursue if he takes the gavel. His plans would amount to a striking transformation for a committee more commonly associated with debates over endangered species, grazing rights, and federal water projects. 

Since Trump returned to office, committee Democrats have tried to investigate and call attention to Administration actions while lacking the authority to compel cooperation. With control of the House, those requests could be backed by subpoenas, sworn depositions, and public testimony from Administration officials, contractors, and private companies.

Huffman says he expects a wave of government employees to approach the committee as whistleblowers, feeling more confident that Democrats will act on their concerns. “There are principled, patriotic Americans working in all of these federal agencies that are horrified with the corruption and illegality that’s been happening around them,” he says. “Some of them have already been helpful, but I think many, many more will come forward under a Democratic majority.”

Read more: The Democrat Ready to Beef Up Pentagon Oversight if the House Flips

The Trump Administration says the changes to federally controlled land are intended to make the District of Columbia “safe and beautiful” by restoring monuments, cleaning up federal parkland, and improving public safety.

Under its current rules, the Natural Resources chairman has broad authority to issue subpoenas for testimony and documents. The precise scope of that position’s power in the next Congress would depend on the rules adopted by the House and the committee next year. The Trump Administration could also refuse to comply with some subpoenas, producing lengthy court battles. 

Huffman is perhaps best known on Capitol Hill as the founder of the Freethought Caucus, which counts 37 members and advocates for church-state separation and true religious freedom. Last month, he published a book, No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism.

But if he gets the gavel, his work investigating the Administration would shift to the forefront. Huffman says he intends for the committee to revisit many of the Administration’s decisions from the previous two years. “We will not only be doing the oversight that presents itself on our watch,” he says. “We will be doing two years of catch-up for a Republican Congress that looked the other way in the face of all this corruption, self-enrichment and illegality.”

Trump’s ballroom and “triumphal arch”

The committee’s most visible investigations could target what Huffman calls Trump’s “vanity projects” including the $400 million, 90,000 sq. ft. White House ballroom being built on the site of the demolished East Wing. Last month, the Supreme Court allowed the construction to move forward, after a lower court had halted the work saying Trump did not have the authority to build the ballroom without congressional approval.

The President is also set to break ground on a 250-foot “triumphal arch” near the Arlington National Cemetery that would be taller than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He has also proposed erecting hundreds of statues in a Garden of American Heroes and transforming the East Potomac Golf Links into a championship-level course.

Some of the projects have moved forward without congressional authorization or have been reviewed by commissions that Trump has filled with allies. The Administration has maintained that the work is legal and will restore grandeur to the capital.

"It's a dramatic abuse of the public trust for one man's ego,” Huffman says of the projects. “It's also a direct attack on the rule of law because we have long had laws like the Commemorative Works Act that spell out in great detail how monuments and other structures in the nation's capital get authorized and built.”

Huffman says that if Democrats win the House the committee would seek records showing how the projects were approved, how much public money had been spent, and whether donors received or sought favorable treatment from the Administration. The private financing, he says, would receive particular scrutiny. He wants to know who donated, how much they contributed and what business they had before the federal government. 

Last year, the White House released a partial list of ballroom donors, including crypto and tech billionaires and defense contractors, but has not revealed how much each donor is giving.

Huffman also questioned why money and Park Service personnel were being concentrated in Washington while the Administration was cutting staff and services elsewhere in the national park system.

“You could look at it and say, well, you know, why die on that hill? These are just little pet projects of Donald Trump,” Huffman says. “But this is real money that is being misprioritized. It’s an abuse of the public trust.”

Another Washington project he wants to investigate is the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Trump ordered the pool’s bottom covered with a blue coating as part of a rehabilitation that cost more than $14 million. Soon after the project was completed, algae returned and sections of the new coating began to peel. The President blamed vandalism. 

In July, the Administration dropped a felony charge against a U.S. Olympic canoeist it had blamed for the damage, and acknowledged in court that the damage was “a result of flawed installation by the contractor."

Huffman says he expects whistleblowers inside the Park Service to provide additional information about how the contracts for the pool project were awarded and supervised, when officials learned that the work was failing, and whether employees were pressured to misrepresent what had occurred. “The fact that National Park Service employees have been told to lie about what happened, for example, we obviously want a full accounting,” he says. (The White House did not respond to Huffman’s allegation that Park Service employees were instructed to lie).

If federal agencies refuse to provide the committee with records, Huffman adds, he would be prepared to issue subpoenas. “You walk softly and carry a big stick,” he says. “The subpoena is your big stick. You hope not to use it, but I think it’s very good to have.”

Yosemite land swap

The recent bipartisan outcry over the prospects of a private developer gaining a swath of Yosemite National Park illustrates how the committee’s work could shift dramatically under Democratic rule. The current chairman, Republican Rep. Bruce Westerman of Arkansas, has not announced any committee action regarding the Administration’s proposal to a land swap intended to help Kingsbarn Realty Capital, a private real estate firm, build a road between property it owns outside Yosemite and roads inside the national park. The company plans an upscale development of cabins, homes, and commercial buildings on two parcels near the park’s western boundary.

“I don’t like what it would do on its own terms to Yosemite,” Huffman says. “But I especially don’t like the precedent, because if they’re allowed to do it, this will be coming to a national park near you in some other form.”

Under the proposal, the government would transfer a small parcel of park property in exchange for land of comparable value that Kingsbarn would acquire elsewhere in California. The company has argued that the shorter route would reduce driving and pollution. The Interior Department has said no decision has been made and that any exchange would have to comply with federal law, environmental reviews and public-notification requirements. It has denied reports that political appointees improperly pressured the Park Service to advance the proposal.

Huffman says if he becomes Natural Resources chair, he intends to seek communications between the developer, the White House, Interior officials and Park Service employees. Investigators would look for evidence that political or financial ties influenced the process, including any connections between the company and Trump or his family. 

Campaign finance records show Kingsbarn’s chief executive, Jeff Pori, making more than $4,000 in contributions to Trump's campaign in 2024. The company’s representative, Lanny Davis, has said politics had nothing to do with the proposal. 

But Huffman remains skeptical.  “You’ve got to dig into the money trail,” Huffman says. “You’ve got to figure out who’s been going to Mar-a-Lago and paying tribute to the Trump family.”

Wind Farms and Kalshi

Huffman says he would also probe the Administration’s “war on clean energy,” including its terminating offshore wind leases and redirecting money toward fossil-fuel investments. Interior officials have defended the agreements as a way to dispose of projects they regard as unreliable and economically unworkable. Democrats have questioned whether the Administration had the authority to make the deals and whether taxpayer money or federal lease payments were improperly used.

Other investigations would involve government investments, loans and equity stakes in mineral companies. Huffman says he would examine how companies were selected, whether federal safeguards were followed and whether Trump’s family or associates stood to gain financially.

He adds that investigations could not consume the committee’s entire agenda. He plans to pursue legislation on environmental permitting, public lands and energy, as well as tribal water settlements, health care, education and public safety. Citing the committee’s preview over Native American land and communities, he says it may also examine prediction markets such as Kalshi, which tribal leaders contend are encroaching on gaming revenue used to finance government services.

“It's going to be an enormously busy Congress,” Huffman says if Democrats win the House, as most polls suggest. “The whiplash when we go from this to what will be a very fast-moving and unrelenting workload demand—I mean, it's going to be a shock for a lot of members. It's going to challenge me. It's going to challenge all of us.”

Iran warned on Monday that it could target U.S. oil and gas interests in the Gulf if the U.S. launches any new attacks on its assets.

Responding to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s warning that “if Iran shoots at U.S. ships, we will destroy (and sink) their oil tankers,” Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said: “It’s simple: the oil and gas production chain here is sprawling, accessible, and exposed. American oil and gas companies across these waters and facilities share that exposure. Strike our assets and you get struck."

Ghalibaf’s warning comes as Tehran seeks greater leverage amid Washington’s ongoing economic pressure campaign and stalled efforts to negotiate an end to the war that the U.S. and Israel launched on Feb. 28.

Mohsen Rezaei, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Secretary, said Monday that "economic warfare will be met by a maritime exclusion zone across the Persian Gulf to the blockade perimeter." The "exclusion zone” in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman would begin at the blockade line, extend through the Strait of Hormuz, and continue into the Persian Gulf, Rezaei said. Vessels entering the zone to transit the Strait would be placed on an Iranian sanctions list. 

The latest flare-up began Saturday, when Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) attacked U.S. warships in the region. The U.S. responded by striking three Iranian oil tankers, including one near Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export hub. The U.S. and Iran have for the past week exchanged a flurry of attacks, ending a brief respite in active hostilities. Oil prices reached near six-week highs on Monday as commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway through which a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas shipments flowed before the war, has fallen sharply.

Negotiations remain at a standstill

Diplomatic efforts between the U.S. and Iran have stalled. The two countries signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on June 17, agreeing to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and engage in technical talks to end the war. But the truce was short-lived.

After a commercial vessel was struck in the Strait in late June, the U.S. attacked Iranian missile storage and radar sites, prompting Iran to retaliate against U.S. military installations in the region. Intermittent attacks continued in July, and fighting resumed in late August after a brief, informal pause.

The Trump Administration has said it is investigating a U.S. strike last week on a family compound in southern Iran where a wedding celebration was underway, killing at least five people and wounding more than 60, according to Iranian state media.

No new formal negotiations have been announced since the MOU’s 60-day deadline expired on Aug. 17. Although some of Iran’s top officials, including President Masoud Pezeshkian, have signaled a willingness to return to the MOU and resume talks with the U.S., the two countries’ positions remain far apart. The U.S. wants to significantly restrict or dismantle Iran’s nuclear program and guarantee unrestricted commercial passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has called for broad sanctions relief, access to frozen assets, an end to the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports, and a role in managing the Strait.

Hard-liners in Iran have shown little appetite for compromise on those red lines, and analysts previously told TIME that Iranian leaders may believe time is on their side, with Tehran prepared to absorb further economic and military pressure in hopes that rising energy prices will eventually prove too politically costly to U.S. President Donald Trump.

“The Iranian nation accepts neither threats nor coercion, nor negotiations whose outcome would be the weakening of the country’s rights,” Hossein Taeb, head of the IRGC’s Basij paramilitary force, said on Monday. “Negotiations are for securing the nation’s rights, not surrendering them.”

While Trump faces domestic pressure to rein in gas prices and avoid an open-ended war in the Middle East ahead of the November midterms, he has also appeared determined to secure an outcome he can present as a victory.

“I’m not trying to force Iran to the bargaining table,” Trump posted on Truth Social last week. “I like our position now much better, with almost total control of the Hormuz Strait, and their economy totally collapsing. They are just playing out the inevitable.”

Iran considers new tactics

Iran is planning to establish a new restricted zone to amp up global economic pressure and force an end to the U.S. blockade. At the same time, Iran and Oman have agreed on a temporary shipping corridor through the Strait of Hormuz and are in talks on its future administration—an arrangement that could formalize Tehran’s role in managing the waterway against U.S. opposition.

But Ghalibaf acknowledged in parliament on Sunday that Iran is struggling with sharp inflation, a collapsing rial, and high unemployment.

Washington’s economic pressure campaign, which includes the naval blockade, sanctions on Iran, and the threat of secondary sanctions on Iran’s trading partners, has squeezed Tehran. The International Monetary Fund estimates that inflation in Iran is near 70%.

The Strait of Hormuz, which Iran began restricting at the start of the war, has been the country’s most important bargaining chip. But that leverage may be weakening as Gulf states turn to routes that bypass the Strait and the U.S. escorts shipments through the corridor. The conflict has also inflicted mounting costs on Iran’s own economy by trapping tens of millions of barrels of Iranian crude inside the Gulf.

Oil prices near $100 as hostilities flare 

Brent Crude oil prices approached the $100 per barrel benchmark on Tuesday, reaching near six-week highs of $98.51, after the Iran-backed Houthis attacked multiple Saudi energy facilities in the early hours.

The strikes represented a significant regional escalation, adding further pressure to crude prices.

Meanwhile, traffic via the Strait of Hormuz remains severely disrupted.

Kpler, a commodities data and analytics firm, shared data with TIME that shows only 12 ships crossed the Strait on Monday, significantly lower than the 138 vessels that typically passed through the vital trade waterway during a 24-hour period before the war.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump on Monday said that “oil prices will drop precipitously" when the U.S. "win[s] the war," but he did not provide a timeline or address the likelihood of energy markets remaining volatile even after the conflict is said to have ended. 

Iran faces mounting international pressure

The U.K. is reimposing major economic sanctions against Iran in line with the European Union and the United States, it was announced Tuesday.

The legislation expands trade prohibitions against Iran to additional goods, technology, and services.

Financial measures will "further reduce the government of Iran’s ability to access the U.K. financial system and raise funds in support of its nuclear programme," according to Minister for the Middle East Stephen Doughty.

Additionally, British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced the U.K. will take action this week to "report Iran to the U.N. Security Council for its nuclear violations, alongside our allies."

An electoral earthquake has fractured Germany’s societal and political tectonic plates. In a state election on Sunday, the far-right Alternative for Germany party won 43.8% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, a state of roughly two million people in the eastern part of the country.

When Friedrich Merz first campaigned to lead Germany’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), in 2018, he vowed to reduce support for the far-right AfD in half. In a bitter irony, Chancellor Merz’s CDU lost half its support in Saxony-Anhalt and after its resounding victory the AfD has become a direct threat to his leadership, and is beginning to overturn Germany’s postwar political order.

The drubbing in Saxony-Anhalt may be only the beginning. Two more regional elections are scheduled later this month and could demonstrate the growing strength of Germany’s fringe parties and intensify pressure on Merz’s governing coalition in Berlin. 

The center cannot hold

The AfD is more than a political disruptor. German domestic intelligence has classified parts of the party, including its Saxony-Anhalt chapter, as right-wing extremist. Yet the AfD has overtaken the CDU in national polls, while Merz’s approval ratings have fallen to levels unprecedented for a German chancellor.

Although Merz has backtracked on campaign promises, most notably his commitment to uphold the debt brake—loosening the constitutional limit on government borrowing—he has remained resolute in preserving the “firewall” between the CDU and AfD. That firewall is intended to keep Germany anchored in its postwar democracy deliberately constructed with guardrails against its darkest history to prevent backsliding into authoritarianism.

The AfD has used Merz’s flip flop on the debt brake against him and is questioning defense spending on Ukraine.

Upon taking office in May 2025, a little over a year ago, Merz promised to revive Germany’s stagnant economy and increase defense spending to position the country as Europe’s de facto military leader. An antagonistic Russia and an unreliable America have left Germany with few alternatives. German businesses are suffering with high costs, American tariffs and intensifying competition from China.

Merz also made another defining promise: to beat back the AfD and restore the centrist CDU’s  claim to being the true conservative party in Germany. Instead, the election in Saxony-Anhalt will amplify calls, including from within his own party, for him to step aside.

Merz’s blunders over the past year cannot be dismissed as the mistakes of a political novice. He is a seasoned operator who, unlike many of his German peers, has extensive experience in the private sector. He promised an ambitious program of reforms to tackle Germany’s welfare and pension programs, but his proposals were too tepid and too late. And his poor communication style has also overshadowed his efforts on curbing migration and his diplomatic campaign across Europe to sustain support for Ukraine. 

The CDU’s predicament is not surprising. Merz has never been a particularly beloved figure, and the grand coalition between the conservatives and the Social Democratic Party was hardly the outcome German voters desired after the federal election last year. 

After the Federal Republic of Germany was established in 1949, there had been only  single Grand Coalition government during the first four decades. But Merz’s government is the fourth Grand Coalition government in Germany in the last two decades. This coalition, was supposed to be different: it was formed to enact far-reaching reforms and hold the AfD at bay. So far, it has done neither.  

The age of anger

The AfD began in 2013 as a movement of anti-euro skeptics. It has since become a nationwide force, building its constituency through relentless opposition to immigration, nativist appeal and efforts to relativize Germany’s Nazi past. An anemic German economy and frustration with the established parties have accelerated its rise. The AfD is now the leading political party in Germany with support from nearly one-third of German voters. 

Like its far-right counterparts elsewhere in Europe, the AfD has prospered by channeling voters’ anger and grievance. Until now, however, it has remained in opposition. No other German party has been willing to forge a parliamentary coalition with the AfD, and even some European far-right parties consider the AfD so radical that they prefer to keep it at arm’s length. 

The AfD’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt and other upcoming regional elections could change that dynamic. Although the CDU and the AfD hold overlapping positions on migration and some social questions, the AfD’s hostility toward Germany’s culture of historical remembrance is fundamentally incompatible with the country’s center-right tradition.

The CDU’s first leader, Konrad Adenauer, committed Germany to integration with the West—a principle known as Westbindung—that the AfD would dismantle. Merz has steadfastly defended that orientation. The AfD, by contrast, seeks renewed ties with Russia and Germany’s withdrawal from the euro, which it presents as a path to economic revival.

The mood of the country can now be read most clearly in the regional elections, where voters are preoccupied with jobs, immigration, schools and public services. These are precisely the areas in which the grand coalition that Merz leads is coming up short.

The AfD offers a story of national decline but few credible solutions and no meaningful experience of governing. Yet criticizing the AfD is not sufficient for the CDU. The democratic answer to the rise of the AfD must be responsible government, solving complex problems through the institutions and the practices of a healthy democracy. Germany’s response matters beyond its borders.

Across the Atlantic world, Germany's confrontation with extreme nationalist movements is being observed through the light of its history. Germany stands as a reminder of how swiftly democratic norms can erode and an example of a nation that has spent eight decades trying to preserve the lessons of that collapse.

Merz may not be able to revive his personal fortunes, but he can still shape his  legacy by reminding Germans of their particular duty to defend democracy. The most effective answer to the AfD is not moral condemnation alone but competent government and courageous leadership.

Boldness may not win Merz a second term, but it could help arrest the rise of the AfD. 

President Donald Trump appeared to float the idea of renaming New Mexico as “New America,” sharing several maps of the state that listed the new moniker. The images posted Monday, without context or comment, followed similar content from the weekend.

Trump on Sunday shared a "New America" map with his 13 million Truth Social followers, and the official White House account reposted the image. Trump also posted an AI-generated video of himself slapping “America” over a road sign that had previously read “Welcome to New Mexico” and claimed that “many people” had suggested the name change. The White House has not announced any effort to rename New Mexico. TIME has reached out for comment.

The rhetoric has prompted backlash from Democratic lawmakers representing the state. “New Mexico’s name isn’t up for debate—it’s been ours since before the United States existed,” said the state’s Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. “While the White House wastes time coloring on maps, Nuevo México is busy doing the work.”

Lujan Grisham suggested that Trump’s renaming jibes were an attempt to “distract Americans from his disastrous war in Iran,” as well as the rising price of gas and other consumer goods.

“You can’t be serious. New Mexico is not for renaming. Not up for sale,” said former Secretary of the Interior and candidate for state Governor Deb Haaland. “My promise: I’ll always stand up for what makes New Mexico, New Mexico.”

Sen. Ben Ray Luján offered a similar rebuttal, insisting “it’s New Mexico, always has been and always will be” as he referred to Trump as “corrupt.”

Elsewhere, some Trump allies came out in support of the floated name change. “New America? Kind of catchy,” argued Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah.

Trump's habit of renaming things—often after America or himself

The President’s social media rhetoric regarding New Mexico comes days after he floated renaming the vital trade passage the Strait of Hormuz as “Trump Strait.”

It also follows Trump signing an Executive Order renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America” on Aug. 27, amid a widening trade war with Canada. The order applies to U.S. federal references of the lake and does not determine how Canada—or others—refer to the body of water. U.S. users of Google Maps and Apple Maps, however, will notice the change reflected.

The change was met with widespread disapproval from both U.S. lawmakers and Canadian politicians, who vowed Lake Ontario will continue to be called by that name.

An Ipsos/Reuters poll of the American general population, conducted Aug. 28-30, found that 63% of respondents opposed Trump's renaming of Lake Ontario.

Trump has often turned to name changes as a show of power and a way to undermine his perceived adversaries.

After returning to the White House last year, Trump signed an Executive Order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” The name has since been used by federal agencies and departments to refer to the sea south of the U.S.

The President has also put his stamp on Washington, D.C., renaming the Kennedy Center by adding his own surname to the title. After much back-and-forth and legal complications, the Center’s board voted in August to reinstate Trump’s name on the building’s facade, testing a judge’s order from May that mandated its removal. 

Trump added his name to the U.S. Institute of Peace late last year, pointing towards his claim of ending a number of global conflicts since his return to the White House.

Outside of renaming landmarks and buildings after himself, Trump has also faced backlash over a string of what Democratic lawmakers have referred to as “vanity projects” across D.C.

President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen unveiled a €200 million ($232 million) investment package for Greenland on Monday to strengthen ties with the semi-autonomous Danish territory.

“Greenland is much more than a partner for Europe. You are a trusted friend, you are a strategic ally, and a valued member of our wider European family,” said von der Leyen at a ceremony in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk. “We share a future together and it all starts today.”

The investment boost comes as the bloc pursues stronger ties to the Arctic region after Icelandic voters recently opted not to resume accession negotiations with the European Union and amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated annexation threats against Greenland.

The funding focuses on “connectivity, clean energy, and critical raw materials,” von der Leyen said. One core aim is to improve Internet connection in remote areas of Greenland, as outlined in the “Connecting Greenland, Together” project.

There’s also an emphasis on providing investment towards critical mineral and graphite extraction initiatives. The Malmbjerg Molybdenum mining project could generate up to €90 million ($104 million) annually for Greenland as added value, according to von der Leyen. The package will also provide additional funding for new hydropower plants in the semi-autonomous Danish territory as part of its clean energy plan.

At the close of the investment announcements, von der Leyen reemphasized that the E.U. stands in “full solidarity” with Greenland.

“We want to be very clear and repeat again here that Greenland's future is for the people of Greenland and Denmark to decide, no one else,” said von der Leyen. “Territorial integrity, sovereignty, the inviolability of borders—these are fundamental principles of international law. And we know that the Arctic has become one of the places where the tectonic plates of geopolitics collide. So we have a direct stake in what happens here.”

Significance of the financial pledges amid fraught geopolitical tensions

The investment package is a strong “signal” that Europe is committed to Greenland’s growth and security, says Katja Bego, senior research fellow at think tank Chatham House’s Europe programme.

“Traditionally, before the situation now with Trump, the E.U. and Denmark itself have been accused of not paying quite enough attention to Greenland, especially not enough to genuinely support economic development there,” Bego tells TIME. 

Trump’s threats towards the territory have “put a bit of urgency behind the E.U.'s efforts,” Bego adds, but notes there are also other factors, such as the economic benefits of critical mineral mining. 

The emphasis on improving satellite communications in the Arctic region is particularly interesting, experts tell TIME, given Greenland’s previous rejection of Starlink, the satellite internet technology made by Elon Musk’s Space X.

Greenland “has been quite worried about going with a U.S. provider, given the recent geopolitics,” says Bego.

Upon arriving in Nuuk on Sunday, von der Leyen had pointed towards the climate crisis while referencing security in the region.

Remarking on the “visible scars of climate change on the ice sheet,” she said a “new reality is taking shape” as the ice melts. “New trade routes, new security risks, new environmental concerns. Europe stands with Greenland. We will navigate these changes together,” she vowed.

Security in the region has become an increasingly important issue for Europe, with Russia, China, and the U.S. all eyeing up emerging shipping routes in the Arctic and possibly new avenues to critical minerals. 

"The E.U. is becoming far more active in the Arctic and also with non-members, and I think that's becoming more visible,” says Bego.

In addition to the investment package, the upcoming E.U. Arctic Summit, set to be held in Finland, next week, will also focus on security in the region. 

Read More: Why the Movements of a U.S. Oil Company in Greenland Have Attracted Attention

Trump's annexation threats loom over Greenland

Trump has long expressed his desire to control Greenland—threats he has ramped up since returning to office last year.

Greenlandic and Danish officials have vehemently pushed back against Trump’s rhetoric.

Leaders in Greenland on Monday were asked if they were concerned about how Trump may react to the E.U.'s financial pledge and what message he should take from the investments.

“We have been under pressure, it has been very clear, and we are very thankful for the great support we have received from our European partners,” said Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.

“Greenland stood firm and stands firm under enormous pressure, and Europe is firm with you too. This is the basic message,” added von der Leyen.

Greenland's positioning between the U.S., Russia, and Europe makes it a strong geopolitical asset, and Trump has long argued that Denmark cannot be relied upon to protect the island from Russian and Chinese interests.

Trump clashed publicly with NATO allies over the issue earlier this year, and even indicated he may be willing to withdraw the U.S. from the alliance. The row prompted some Republicans to break ranks from Trump, with one GOP lawmaker referring to the annexation threats as “appalling.” 

Trump revisited the contentious topic at the NATO summit Ankara, Turkey, in July, insisting that Greenland “should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark.”