• I was born and raised in the UK, and there are a few local bites and British dishes I recommend.
• Everyone should try a Cornish pasty, cottage pie, and Sunday roast at least once.
• Beans on toast, fish and chips, and Yorkshire pudding are classics.

The UK’s modern food culture is seriously diverse and exciting. In our cities, you can have sushi for lunch, and dosa for dinner, with pakora or a bahn mi as a snack in between.

But we Brits still love our potatoes, overdone meat, and root vegetables — all of which come plastered with brown gravy so thick you could have it on toast. Which, unsurprisingly, some people do.

If you’d like to transport yourself to a damp, English Sunday afternoon, try one of these delicious dishes, as curated by a begrudgingly nostalgic Brit who’s been writing about food for years.

I grew up in Cornwall, where eating pasties weekly, if not daily, is the norm for locals.

A Cornish pasty is a large, half-moon pastry enclosing chunks of beef skirt, finely chopped potato, and turnip with lashings of black pepper and a slab or two of butter.

The pastry, which is somewhere between shortcrust, flaky, and hot-water crust, should have the rigidity to withstand being transported, as traditionally it was taken down the tin mines as a “crib” (Cornish for a mid-morning snack).

The pasty’s edge is crimped on the side, never the top, and was traditionally thrown away because the miner’s hands would have been covered in arsenic and other metals, which are a tad deadly if ingested.

If you’re in the UK, I’m afraid you’ll have to go to Cornwall to eat a decent pasty.

In the UK, it’s traditional to have a roast dinner on a Sunday with your family, either at home or at the pub.

A Sunday roast is like a Thanksgiving or Christmas meal that occurs regularly.

It typically consists of roasted meat (often a whole chicken, a joint of beef, or pork with crackling) plus roast potatoes, root vegetables such as carrots and parsnips, and lashings of that aforementioned brown gravy.

Around Christmastime, roasts are often paired with our version of pigs in blankets — meat wrapped in more meat. Specifically, they are mini sausages hugged by a rasher of streaky bacon. Outrageous, I know.

Yorkshire puddings pair well with a roast.

Yorkshire puddings are clouds of cooked batter that puff up in the oven and soak up gravy like the most delicious sponge you’ve ever used.

They pair well with a roast, and so does stuffing (usually sausage mixed with onions, sage, and breadcrumbs served either inside the meat or cooked separately) and green vegetables.

Toad-in-the-hole is basically lots of sausages hiding in one giant Yorkshire pudding.

It’s unclear why the dish is called toad-in-the-hole, but some suggest it’s because the sausages peep out of the batter in the same way toads might hide just in the entrance of their burrows.

One thing is for sure, though: It’s a crime to serve your toads without a rich onion gravy, made slowly on the stove by caramelizing onions and reducing beef stock to a thick, brown tangle.

A seaside classic, fish and chips has been a traditional dish in Britain for centuries.

Some have traced the origins of this popular British dish back to Jewish immigrants fleeing Portugal.

It consists of fresh white fish — often pollock, cod, or haddock — deep-fried in a crispy batter, and served alongside thick-cut chips (no, we do not call them fries).

Depending on where you are in the UK, you’ll have it with curry sauce, just salt and vinegar, or brown gravy (which, once again, is appearing on my list).

Cottage pie and shepherd’s pie are prime comfort foods.

Cottage pie is what your granny makes you when you come ’round for dinner. The pie has a deep layer of ground beef cooked with carrots and onions that’s topped with mashed potatoes. It’s baked until golden.

The best cottage-pie fillings have been slowly simmered for hours, possibly with some red wine thrown in for good measure. Adding cheese to the potato topping is optional, but highly recommended.

The version made with ground lamb, rather than beef, is called shepherd’s pie and is equally delicious. Both are typically served alongside fresh garden peas or runner beans.

Pie and mash is sometimes served with gravy.

Pie and mash consists of a smallish, round pie, usually with a meat-based filling (traditionally mutton) that’s served with mashed potatoes and a green-flecked parsley sauce.

In the north of the country, you’ll typically find pie and mash served with gravy.

Scotland has managed to put mac and cheese in pies in place of the traditional meat, because why wouldn’t you want triple carbs for dinner?

Visitors must try a sausage roll from Greggs.

Greggs is a bakery chain that’s both a source of national pride and dependable baked goods.

Should you ever find yourself visiting the UK, you’ll probably be close to one of its 2,000+ outlets — unless you’re in Cornwall, where the chain is widely considered to be an invasive species, threatening the native pasty.

But if you’re elsewhere, do visit a Greggs and purchase a sausage roll.

Marvel at the flaky pastry, which is somehow the same color as the meat inside. Deeply inhale the aroma of a winning fat-to-carbohydrate ratio, before consuming your sausage roll the traditional way: on a cold park bench with gammy pigeons pecking at your feet.

And vegans, rejoice — Greggs has an excellent plant-based sausage roll.

Beans on toast is a British staple.

Usually eaten hot, baked beans here are typically canned haricot beans suspended in a vibrantly sweet orange-colored tomato sauce.

A UK cupboard staple, they’re found in households up and down the country, served alongside full English breakfasts, and used as a vehicle for visual comedy by early noughties game shows.

I eat baked beans piled onto buttered toast and top them with grated cheddar, which melts and oozes into the sauce.

Bread-and-butter pudding is a classic dish that utilizesleftovers.

Traditional British food often centers on a waste-not-want-not attitude, and the old-fashioned bread-and-butter pudding is a prime example.

This pudding is a sweet dish made with stale bread slices, which are buttered, then soaked in an egg-based custard before being baked with raisins and brown sugar.

It’s a lovely dish that can also be made with leftover non-British food, such as croissants or brioche.

This story was originally published on May 1, 2022, and most recently updated on August 24, 2026.

Read the original article on Business Insider

The post I’m a food writer who was born and raised in the UK. Here are 10 British dishes everyone should try in their lifetime. appeared first on Business Insider.

In the photo were lawmakers from four distinct parties, along with a handful of unaffiliated candidates.

“That was a period just like now,” Mr. Achilles said. “People were fed up with the party system and looking for something different.”

Today, he’s part of an effort to bring that same kind of something different to Idaho and other parts of the West. Mr. Achilles, an unaffiliated candidate for U.S. Senate, is among a wave of independent challengers to entrenched Republican incumbents or heirs apparent in red states.

In Idaho, where unaffiliated voters outnumber Democrats 2 to 1, Mr. Achilles is the more prominent and moneyed of two independents challenging the incumbent, Jim Risch. Independents also are running for Idaho governor, both of the state’s U.S. House seats and 12 state legislative seats.

Next door in Montana, another independent, Seth Bodnar, is running for the Senate as an independent, as is Dan Osborn in Nebraska and Brian Bengs in South Dakota. Another, Bill Hill, is running for Alaska’s lone House seat. All those candidacies say a lot about the state of the Democratic Party west of the Mississippi, excluding what’s known, affectionately or not, as “the left coast” — California, Oregon and Washington.

Some of these independents are long shots, none of them are favored, but they all figure they are better off than a Democrat would be.

“We’ve got a brand problem in places like Idaho and Montana,” said Jared DeLoof, Democratic Party chairman in Ada County, which includes Boise and its fast-growing suburbs. “Having a ‘D’ next to your name makes winning unlikely, if not impossible.”

Many Democratic leaders don’t love the trend. Lauren Necochea, chairwoman of the Idaho Democratic Party, said progressives and moderates could not “expect independents to save us.”

“I think the independent candidates will generally fade away after the election,” she said. “The Democratic Party will still be here doing the work to hold Republicans accountable.”

But Democrats face steep odds in most of the states with independent options this year — and for election cycles to come. That’s prompting some hard conversations with Democratic candidates.

Party leaders in Ada County wrote a public letter in July asking their U.S. Senate nominee, David Roth, to drop out. Their logic echoed Democrats who pushed nominees aside in Senate races in Nebraska and South Dakota this summer, and tried but failed in Montana: Mr. Roth wasn’t running a credible campaign and risked helping Mr. Risch glide to re-election.

“We simply want the best path forward for everyone fighting to save this country,” Ada County Democratic leaders wrote.

Mr. Roth initially balked, saying he and Mr. Achilles were too far apart philosophically, but he eventually withdrew.

“Democratic parties are doing some interesting calculus here,” said Jaclyn Kettler, a political scientist at Boise State University. “Is it best to have a candidate under the party label on the ballot, or is it best to have an independent candidate that’s more aligned with their issue positions than the Republican would be?”

Trump Administration: Live Updates

Updated Aug. 24, 2026, 9:00 a.m. ET

• U.S. military kills 2 people in an attack on a boat in the eastern Pacific.
• Oil prices fall ahead of a U.S. announcement on Iran.
• U.S. Marines cancel a drill with South Korea, citing the demands of the Iran war.

Since 1990, only five states have elected a governor running outside of the Democratic and Republican parties. Two senators — Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine — are independent; both caucus with the Democrats. No current U.S. representative was elected as an independent, though one, Kevin Kiley of California, became independent after Democrats redistricted his seat to make it unfriendly to his old Republican Party. He still caucuses with Republicans.

But critics of western Republicans say something must be done to challenge unchecked one-party rule and policies that have gone too far. Over the past five years, Idaho’s Legislature has passed some of the nation’s toughest restrictions on abortion access and gender-affirming care, while embracing aggressive tax cuts that have pushed the state to the brink of an unconstitutional budget deficit.

John Stegner, a retired Idaho Supreme Court justice, decided to run as an independent for governor because he believes incumbent Gov. Brad Little has “enabled” the rightward tilt, he said.

“I’m not talking about Republican or Democratic values,” he said. “I’m talking Idaho values.”

Early in his career, Mr. Stegner managed Butch Otter’s successful Republican campaign for lieutenant governor, before Mr. Otter ascended to Idaho governor and Judge Stegner was appointed to the bench and the Idaho Supreme Court by Republicans.

He dropped his party affiliation after Republicans successfully sued to close their primary to Democratic and independent voters in 2011. He decided to run for governor this year in part because he lost his primary-care physician amid the exodus of doctors after Idaho criminalized abortion.

So far, he’s raised more than twice as much as the Democratic nominee, Terri Pickens, a Boise trial lawyer who ran for lieutenant governor in 2022.

He said Ms. Pickens should leave the race and pointed to polling that suggests he stands a better chance against Mr. Little, who has largely ignored both his opponents and raised five times as much as Mr. Stegner.

Ms. Pickens, in contrast, said she welcomed Mr. Stegner to the race. She argues that the judge will pull moderate Republicans from the incumbent while she wins with Democrats, independents and Republican women frustrated with the Legislature and eager to vote for a November ballot measure that would repeal Idaho’s abortion ban.

“Every vote that gets taken away from Brad Little gets added to my likelihood of success,” Ms. Pickens said.

Mr. Achilles, a former U.S. Army tank commander, distinguishes his Senate campaign from Mr. Stegner’s run.

“I am running to talk about what is going wrong in Washington, D.C.,” he said, “not Boise.”

As they have in other states, Republican Party leaders in Idaho dismiss Mr. Achilles as an independent in name only.

“He’s always been a Democrat,” said Thad Butterworth, chairman of the Ada County Republicans. “Maybe he hasn’t always identified himself that way, but if you look at his voting record, it’s Democrat.”

Mr. Achilles’s father was a Republican state lawmaker in Oregon, and Mr. Achilles said he registered as a Republican until he switched to the Democratic Party in early 2024 to be appointed to an open West Boise legislative seat, which he later won a full term for as a Democrat. A year and a half later, he became unaffiliated, resigned and decided to run for U.S. Senate.

Now he’s on a group text with other military veterans running for Senate as independents in Republican-dominated states, including Mr. Bodnar, Mr. Bengs and Mr. Osborn. They want to build what they would call the “fulcrum caucus,” which they hope would be large enough to force rule changes in the narrowly divided Senate.

They’re all running on platforms that focus on issues like the costs of health care and housing; preserving public land; and acknowledging public dissatisfaction with the wealth, age and insularity of the Senate.

“The two-party system in D.C. is just fundamentally broken — we can’t get anything done under it,” Mr. Achilles said.

There is little indication so far that Mr. Risch, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is vulnerable. He entered July with more than $3.5 million on hand, compared with less than $200,000 for Mr. Achilles.

Mr. Achilles, in turn, has used some of his campaign money to make an argument about the incumbent: He bought billboards wishing Mr. Risch, who is 83, a happy birthday.

The post As Democrats Struggle in Some Western States, Independents See an Opening appeared first on New York Times.

According to a report from the New York Times, billionaire Jeff Bezos’s news organization will rehire opinion columnist Karen Attiah, who was fired in September over her social media posts about the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The arbitrator also ordered the company to compensate her with back pay.

Sarah Miller Espinosa, the arbitrator, said in a written decision Thursday that The Post “did not have good and sufficient cause” to terminate Ms. Attiah and “violated” its labor agreement. “The Washington Post failed to establish the grievant engaged in gross misconduct,” Espinosa wrote.

The ruling comes just three weeks after Opinion Editor Adam O’Neal announced his departure after just one year, having previously boasted he expected to stay for years, media watchdog Status previously reported.

During an all-hands meeting, he told Opinion staffers he was leaving for personal family reasons. The explanation caught staff off-guard, given his previously expressed commitment to the role.

The Washington Post said in its termination letter that Attiah’s posts about Mr. Kirk had harmed “the integrity” of the organization and violated standards requiring employees to use social media with civility and respect.

Attiah’s remarks about Kirk’s assassination, posted to the social network Bluesky on Sept. 10, the day he was shot, responded to the outpouring of grief after the shooting.

“Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is … not the same as violence,” Attiah wrote in one of the posts.

According to the Times, “Lawyers for The Washington Post and Ms. Attiah made their arguments before Ms. Espinosa in June during a hearing that included testimony from Ms. Attiah; Adam O’Neal, then the opinion editor at The Washington Post; and Wayne Connell, the company’s chief human resources officer. Ms. Attiah was represented by Democracy Defenders Action, a progressive nonprofit co-founded by the lawyer Norman Eisen, and by the Washington-Baltimore News Guild.”

In his testimony, O’Neal said that he saw Attiah’s posts the morning after Kirk died and sent them to Connell.

“Karen’s social media feed yesterday and today is beyond the pale, completely unacceptable for someone associated with Opinions,” O’Neal wrote, the Times is reporting.

Soon after, O’Neal and Connell met with Will Lewis, then the chief executive of The Washington Post, to discuss the posts. They ultimately decided to fire Attiah.

The post Bezo’s WaPo humiliated as court orders it to rehire columnist fired over Charlie Kirk post appeared first on Raw Story.

But the low-interest loan they secured from the Agriculture Department to make the purchase in Aztec, N.M., was on hold for months, first during the government shutdown that lasted until mid-November and then as federal workers left the agency in droves. Only half a dozen loan specialists who could help process their claims remained in the entire state, the couple learned, leaving them in limbo indefinitely and the seller impatient to know whether the agreement would ever go through.

Zachariah Ben, who along with his children is a member of the Navajo Nation, ultimately turned to private lenders instead, and the family absorbed more than $200,000 in interest as a result. “At least we got the land because we could have also lost that, and we would have if we had to wait” on the Agriculture Department, Mary Ben said.

The experience of the Bens, whose aim of providing organic and shelf-stable options for young children appears to align with some of the Trump administration’s stated goals, is not unique. Across the country, farmers and rural residents describe struggling to obtain the basic services the Agriculture Department is meant to offer, including loans and grants, technical assistance and financing for housing and utilities. Sharp attrition under the Trump administration, largely through voluntary resignations and dismissals by the Department of Government Efficiency, have left many of the Agriculture Department’s local offices with skeletal staffing — and, in some counties, with no one at all.

The ripple effects of the Agriculture Department’s depleted work force illustrate how the Trump administration’s mission of shrinking the federal bureaucracy has undercut a competing priority: delivering for farmers, a core political constituency. Strained government resources also risk posing additional challenges for a farm economy that administration officials have described as “dire,” increasing barriers to entry for new farmers who need more assistance, impeding assistance to producers already facing tough economic conditions, and hampering basic services and government aid in the most remote and poorest places.

“All these practical things that make the wheels go around in a community were facilitated by U.S.D.A., and it was with staff who knew how to navigate and had the trust of the local community,” Senator Pete Welch of Vermont, the top Democrat on the Senate subcommittee on rural development, said in an interview. “It’s something that was working, was working well, and was very cost-efficient. And now it is being demolished.”

Trump administration officials have defended the staffing cuts as voluntary and necessary to trim a bloated agency.

“We don’t have the money in our budget to pay for all of the employees that were hired in the prior administration,” Stephen Vaden, the deputy secretary of agriculture, said in a congressional hearing in July. He emphasized that the reductions were “voluntary decisions made by individual employees who chose, with the information that the agency provided to them, to seek a new career elsewhere.”

Overall, more than 20,000 workers out of more than 110,000 left the Agriculture Department through the first half of 2025, according to an inspector general report. Recently obtained data showed that the Farm Service Agency, a division whose approval the Bens sought in applying for a low-interest loan, has no staff left in dozens of counties across the country, forcing farmers to travel long distances for assistance or to simply give up. Among divisions that directly work with farmers and aid rural residents, the percentage of departures is even higher.

The Agriculture Department said that it currently had about 93,000 employees after hiring more workers this year, and that it believed staffing levels were adequate as “services and supports have become more targeted and efficient” through planned technological improvements.

Still, its plans to fundamentally overhaul the agency, as well as funding cuts proposed by President Trump’s latest budget, are likely to deepen difficulties for farmers and rural communities.

Already, the agency is moving more than half of its staff in the Washington region out of the nation’s capital, a move that is all but certain to further thin the ranks of the agency. Such losses will affect the department’s ability to finance home loans, carry out agricultural research and service farmers, according to federal workers, farm groups and rural lenders. (Unions and farm organizations have mounted a legal challenge to that plan.)

Likewise, Mr. Trump’s budget for the next fiscal year proposes a nearly $5 billion cut to the Agriculture Department, essentially eliminating programs for beginning farmers, conservation and rural aid.

Trump Administration: Live Updates

Updated Aug. 24, 2026, 10:04 a.m. ET

• Iran is defiant as Trump escalates an economic pressure campaign.
• The U.S. military kills 2 people in an attack on a boat in the eastern Pacific.
• Oil prices fall ahead of a U.S. announcement on Iran.

Some of the steepest cuts have fallen on a part of the Agriculture Department responsible for improving the economy and infrastructure in rural communities, leading to long delays in aid for residents and charities alike.

The subagency, known as Rural Development, has lost about 1,700 workers, or more than a third of its staff, since the Trump administration took office.

In New Mexico, questions directed at the agency often languish for weeks, as do approvals of key documents, with emails and queries bouncing among staff members scattered across the state and in Washington, said Lorenzo Alba Jr., the executive director of Casa de Peregrinos, an anti-hunger charity in the area.

After receiving a grant from the Rural Development section at the end of the Biden administration to build a food pantry in Hatch, N.M., the charity is still waiting for $300,000 in federal funding. For now, Casa de Peregrinos has cobbled together other sources of financing to set up and operate a makeshift pantry with limited hours and food varieties, despite no refrigeration or air conditioning.

“Our pantry should have been up and running, fully renovated by now,” Mr. Alba said. He added that the delays had led costs to balloon to $600,000 from $475,000, money the charity could have used to buy more food and serve more families.

“I quit blaming the U.S.D.A. on this because I didn’t know what they were going through,” he said. “Now I do.”

It is unclear whether staffing cuts have been a factor, but in the last year the subagency has also financed far fewer loans and grants. As of mid-August, with a little over a month left in the 2026 fiscal year, the agency has approved nearly 52,000 investments worth $15.8 billion. In comparison, in the past three fiscal years, the agency made between 63,000 and 74,000 investments totaling $24 billion to $40 billion annually.

Another crucial service the department offers — helping producers carry out sustainable farming practices through its Natural Resources Conservation Service — has lost more than 2,700 workers, or nearly a fourth of its staff, forcing farmers to miss contract deadlines and turn to expensive private consultants for advice.

In central Nebraska, Clay Govier, who farms corn and soybeans on 3,500 acres in Broken Bow, described the cascading effect of 50 percent staffing cuts at his local conservation agency. The technician he had worked with took a buyout at the start of the Trump administration. Now, Mr. Govier and his family coordinate with someone who travels between two counties to survey different farms.

Though the technician is knowledgeable, “he’s stretched very thin because if he needs a signature, he has to drive to our farm and then he drives back or we have to drive to him, and it just burns up an entire morning to get some basic paperwork done,” Mr. Govier said.

As a result, the office is missing more details and overlooking crucial steps to verifying the farmers’ practices these days, leading to delays in the contract cycle and payments.

“Farming is an art and a science,” he said. “It’s so different for every operation, every state, every region, so you need local N.R.C.S. staff that understand their region and how to implement these programs.”

In southwestern Pennsylvania, Amanda Butterfield worked with the conservation service for nearly a decade, first to restore roughly 180 acres of strip-mined land in Meyersdale into pasture for a herd of beef cattle. After her technician shared anecdotes about burnout and long working hours, Ms. Butterfield turned instead to private consultants who work for agribusinesses. But that advice often comes at a steeper cost, like the expectation of buying certain products.

Ms. Butterfield also added that staffing turnover at her local Farm Service Agency had led to errors and inefficiencies: A new worker hired to replace an employee who had left asked her husband to report crop acreage, unaware that the ranch did not grow crops at all.

“We’ve completely lost a whole group of experts within our communities across the United States that can no longer help and support us,” she said.

The post Farmers Struggle to Get Basic Services From Depleted Agriculture Dept. appeared first on New York Times.

The bell and the Catholic church in Ruidosa are hallmarks of an era when Mexican and American border communities lived as one. But nearly three generations ago, parishioners moved away from the tiny town. One of the church’s twin towers toppled. The bell disappeared.

Local volunteers have begun restoring the church, El Corazón Sagrado de la Iglesia de Jesús. They view it as one of the last vestiges of a shared history along a southwestern landscape that is as Indigenous, Spanish and Mexican as it is American. Fortifying its walls and twin towers means that perhaps the bell could ring again.

Now their work faces a new danger: President Trump’s border wall. The church is one of dozens of historical sites across the Southwest threatened by the construction. In Arizona, portions of a 1,000-year-old etching in the earth have been bulldozed. In Texas, work is endangering ancient cave murals and landmarks on the Underground Railroad.

“If you value a people’s worth and contributions, then you preserve their history in textbooks and curriculums,” the historian Trinidad Gonzales said. “You would preserve these physical markers.”

Trump administration officials say the wall will go up yards away from the church and help deter violent drug traffickers in one of the most remote parts of the Chihuahuan desert. Preservationists, though, warn that the relentless vibrations of the construction threaten the church’s fragile structural integrity.

To historians and border residents, the administration’s construction plans, alongside a campaign to deport thousands of immigrants, amount to uprooting centuries of Mexican and Latino American history and presence.

The 110-year journey of the church and its bell is a story of displacement and migration, of being lost and improbably found, and of artists, historians and community residents who have gone to great lengths to bake and haul adobe bricks, bail the bell out of a Marfa jail and reclaim a piece of lost past.

El Corazón Sagrado arose during the Mexican Revolution. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were migrating north. They opened schools, theaters and newspapers and, in the borderland, they organized against U.S. segregation and anti-Mexican discrimination.

In Ruidosa, a tiny settlement southwest of Marfa, the community built a church. Mexican and Mexican American families from both sides of the river molded clay bricks to raise its mission-style walls and twin towers. From a central wooden gable, they hung its bronze bell.

For nearly 40 years, the bell tolled. It brought people together for weddings, funerals and Sunday masses.

”The church was a center of life,” said Zenaida Maria Nazeri, 77, who was born in Ruidosa and attended its services.

But by the 1950s, a New Mexico dam and a drought had choked the river that sustained Ruidosa’s farmland. Many in the region began to move again. The post office closed. El Sagrado Corazón fell into disrepair, and the Catholic Church officially retired the mission in 1956.

Sometime in the 1960s, the bell finally migrated, too. The front entryway fell after years of winds and rains had eroded its foundation. The great bell crashed to the earth. A family retrieved it and gave it to Johnnie Tucker Chambers, a teacher living in a nearby schoolhouse. She mounted the bell on a wooden stand and used it to call children from both sides of the border to class.

When she left, she took it to her property in nearby Candelaria, where she used it to call her ranch hands to dinner.

Trump Administration: Live Updates

Updated Aug. 24, 2026, 10:04 a.m. ET

• Iran is defiant as Trump escalates an economic pressure campaign.
• The U.S. military kills 2 people in an attack on a boat in the eastern Pacific.
• Oil prices fall ahead of a U.S. announcement on Iran.

Without its bell, the Ruidosa church, named for the Sacred Heart, seemed to lose its own pulse. The building was locked up, its doors and windows boarded up to prevent vandals from scavenging its wooden floor and pews.

By the early 1990s, the left tower had collapsed, and the El Paso Diocese officially ordered the mission demolished.

That stirred something in people.

Historians, church patrons and community residents expressed their outrage in letters to local newspapers and the diocese. County commissioners paused the Catholic Church’s demolition request.

Restoration efforts regained momentum in 2019, not long after Mr. Trump was elected on rallying cries to “build the wall.”

In his second term, the Trump administration has pushed those plans forward, placing El Sagrado Corazón in jeopardy. U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to questions regarding the community concerns about preserving the church and other sacred sites. In federal lawsuits, administration officials argue they have the authority to waive environmental regulations and other legal claims in the interest of tackling drug smuggling and illegal immigration.

Across the Southwest, similar projects have already begun. In California, explosives have blasted Tecate Peak, also known as Kuuchamaa, a mountain sacred to the Kumeyaay people that is on the National Register of Historic Places. In Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, construction crews bulldozed parts of the 1,000-year-old Las Playas Intaglio, a giant fish-shaped image etched into the earth, disturbed sacred burial grounds at Monument Hill and threatened Quitobaquito Springs, a 10,000-year-old desert oasis revered by the Tohono O’odham and Hia-Ced O’odham nations.

Further east in New Mexico, land seizure efforts are targeting church-owned land around Mount Cristo Rey, a 720-foot Catholic pilgrimage site. In Texas, proposed barriers endanger the 6,000-year-old cave murals of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, Underground Railroad sanctuaries such as the Eli Jackson Cemetery and Jackson Ranch Church, and the 19th-century La Lomita Chapel in Mission.

In West Texas, protests erupted this month as bulldozers cleared terrain in Big Bend National Park and near the site of the Porvenir Massacre, where a force of Texas Rangers, U.S. Cavalry soldiers, and local ranchers rounded up and shot dead15 unarmed Mexican men and boys in 1918.

Last week, Rodney Scott, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner, paused the construction in Big Bend as he visited the region. He said only patrol roads and vehicle barriers were planned to go through the national park and that his agency was “firmly committed to protecting America, and that includes our national treasures.”

The preservationists of Ruidosa church say that Mr. Scott’s pause is not cause for celebration. Construction of a steel wall is still expected to continue miles up the road, bringing heavy machinery and excavations within yards of the sanctuary. They and local leaders have filed federal lawsuits and have been pushing back with the help of landowners, including some Trump supporters.

For Mike Green, a retired architect who has long lived in West Texas and helps lead the latest restoration campaign, the construction has been especially troubling.

He felt a kinship with the church when he first saw its ruins in 1984. Scavengers had stripped most of its timber, but he was captivated by its adobe arches — among the tallest still standing in Texas — and by the history of the 160 farmworkers buried on a hill just above it.

“Presidio and Ojinaga have had this rich history, and it’s a history of longstanding community cooperation,” he said of the Mexican and American border cities.

In 2020, after years of negotiation, the diocese deeded the property to Friends of the Ruidosa Church, a nonprofit founded by Mr. Green and the archaeologist David Keller. The group resumed the process of making thousands of sun-dried adobe blocks by hand and has worked with restoration and engineering experts to build and install a modular steel tower structure to buttress the church’s right tower.

The group has even found its key missing piece: the bell.

In 2023, Mr. Green happened to lament the lost artifact to his friend, Betty Gaddis, over lunch. Unbeknown to him, Ms. Gaddis, then 90, had been a longtime friend of Ms. Chambers and had once seen the old bell sitting in her Alpine apartment. Within two days, she tracked the bell down — it was sitting in storage in the Presidio County jail in Marfa.

On Oct. 28, 2023, members of the nonprofit gathered to “bail out” the bell. A month later, they trucked it back to Ruidosa for an annual celebration, displaying it on an altar against an art installation and before dozens of glowing candles.

Now it sits in Mr. Green’s Marfa home, waiting to chime across the valley again.

The post In West Texas, Trump’s Border Wall Collides With Latino History appeared first on New York Times.

The sitcom star threw a birthday party at her home in Los Angeles on Aug. 14, as seen in photos obtained by Page Six.

James wore a white “Spiritual Gangster” T-shirt and a floral skirt as she walked around the outside of her house, a paper cup in hand.

She completed her look with a red bandana on her head, brown sunglasses and white sneakers. James’ ankle tattoo was visible in the pictures.

Some of her family and friends were also photographed at the gathering, including three women wearing bright summer dresses.

James rose to fame starring in the ’60s TV series “The Name of the Game,” which won her an Emmy Award in 1969.

She went on to have roles in the spy series “It Takes a Thief” and the detective series “McMillan & Wife,” the latter of which earned her four Emmy nominations.

In 1984, James began starring opposite Jane Curtin in “Kate & Allie,” which followed two divorced mothers who live together and raise their children in the same New York City home.

After “Kate & Allie” ended in 1989, James, who was in her 40s, retired from acting and chose to focus on spending time with her husband, TV executive Dick Ebersol, and their children.

In November 2004, tragedy struck James’ family when a private plane carrying Ebersol and two of the couple’s sons, Charles and Teddy, crashed during takeoff from Montrose Regional Airport in Colorado.

Ebersol and Charles survived, but Teddy, who was 14, died in the accident.

In a past interview, James spoke about how she’s processed losing a child.

“It’s hard because the circumstances can slow you down a lot, because you’re busy trying to justify this,” she said. “But I had to find a way to live with this thing. I mean, how do you live with this thing? You have to find a way to make it, to own it, not to walk around it and pretend it didn’t happen.”

James added at the time that she was in “a new phase” of her life because of her grandkids.

The post Rarely seen ‘Kate & Allie’ actress Susan Saint James celebrates 80th birthday appeared first on Page Six.

Fabares’ death was confirmed in a statement to media written by her family.

“To her family and friends, Shelley was a source of love, strength, laughter and comfort,” read the statement. “She was a devoted wife, cherished stepmother, daughter, sister, niece, aunt, family member and loyal friend whose warmth, generosity, humor and grace made an enduring difference in the lives of everyone who knew her. She had a remarkable ability to make people feel welcomed, valued and cared for.”

Fabares’ acting career spanned six decades, with her first credit coming in a 1955 episode of “The Loretta Young Show” at the age of 10. She achieved generational fame with her role as Mary Stone in “The Donna Reed Show,” the teenage daughter to characters played by Donna Reed and Carl Betz. As a main cast member through the first five seasons and a guest player across the final three, Fabares appeared in more than 190 episodes of the highly popular ABC sitcom.

Her prominence in “The Donna Reed Show” led to a number of film credits, most notably including three instances in the ’60s playing love interest to Elvis Presley, in “Girl Happy,” “Spinout” and “Clambake.” Her popularity as a teen idol also led to a recording career, with her performance of “Johnny Angel” hitting No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1962 along with the release of three studio albums across the early ’60s.

Fabares remained a mainstay on television as she grew older. After “The Donna Reed Show,” she was a main cast member of NBC’s physician sitcom “The Practice,” which ran for two seasons in the ’70s. She found her most enduring gig in 1989 with ABC’s “Coach,” playing the wife to Craig T. Nelson’s lead NCAA football coach. The series ran for nine seasons and Fabares earned two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for her performance.

Other notable television guest credits included “One Day at a Time” (which yielded a single-season role as a main cast member), “The Rockford Files,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Mork & Mindy,” “The Love Boat” and “Murder, She Wrote.” Younger generations were introduced to Fabares through her voice role as Martha Kent on the 90’s run of “Superman: The Animated Series.”

Born Jan. 19, 1944 in Santa Monica, Calif., Michele Ann Marie Fabares worked as a child actor from her earliest years and was the niece of actress and dancer Nanette Fabray. She married recording producer Lou Adler in 1964, before the pair divorced in 1980. She later wed “M*A*S*H” star Mike Farrell in 1984 and the two remained married until her death.

Fabares is survived by Farrell and her stepchildren, Erin and Michael.

The post Shelley Fabares, ‘Donna Reed Show’ and ‘Coach’ Star, Dies at 82 appeared first on TheWrap.

Voters are uneasy about President Trump’s handling of the economy, and his unpopular war with Iran has driven increases in the costs of fuel, food and health services, putting Republicans on the defensive in states they once saw as much safer terrain.

The basic contours of the map remain challenging for Democrats. Holding 47 seats in the Senate, they must flip at least four to win a majority. At the same time, they are trying to defend seats in two states Mr. Trump won in 2024. And four of the six most competitive races are in states Mr. Trump won by double digits.

Republicans are also hoping that Democratic divisions in two important battlegrounds, Maine and Michigan, could help offset some of the political headwinds.

Mr. Trump himself has expressed concern about a pattern of Republicans not performing as well in cycles when he is not on the ballot. “Pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot,” he said at a rally in South Carolina on Friday, aiming to motivate his base.

But Mr. Trump’s approval rating is below 40 percent, unnerving Republicans, who worry that voters in the center will break for Democrats. And rank-and-file Democratic voters are plainly energized: They have been turning out in huge numbers for primaries.

Now the battle for the Senate, once seen as tilting heavily toward the G.O.P., is increasingly up for grabs.

Democrats Make Recent Gains

The National Picture

The latest show of Democratic strength came last week in conservative-leaning Alaska. Former Representative Mary Peltola, a Democrat who had recently fired a top aide and changed campaign managers, led Senator Dan S. Sullivan, the Republican incumbent, by more than five percentage points in the state’s nonpartisan primary, according to incomplete results.

“I haven’t seen that kind of energy for a Democrat in Alaska in decades,” said Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, a former chair of Senate Democrats’ campaign arm. “Democrats are energized. You see it across the country.”

By Thursday, the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan election forecaster, moved races in Texas and Iowa from “Lean Republican” to “Toss Up,” citing polling and the economic environment.

The shift grew the core Senate battlefield from four states — Alaska, Maine, Michigan and Ohio — to six, widening Democrats’ margin for error.

“It’s a 50-50 tossup,” said Douglas Heye, a Republican strategist. “Republicans are nervous. They’ve watched Trump’s numbers be a constant limbo contest of ‘How low can they go?’”

While Republican groups have a vast cash advantage over Democratic ones, individual Democratic Senate candidates are handily out-raising their Republican opponents in most of the key Senate races.

Alex Latcham, executive director of the top Senate Republican super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, said his party still had “advantages in the quality of candidates, in our message and in our ability to raise and spend resources.”

As of Friday, Republican advertising spending surpassed that of Democrats in all the top six races except for the one in Texas, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact. Democrats, whose national party is entering the fall in debt, argue that spending will not be decisive.

“The truth is that all the money in the world should not change the fact that Trump and the Republicans in Congress have made life much more difficult,” said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, chair of Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, adding: “People are fed up. And they’re exhausted. And they can’t afford anything. And they’re going to change who’s in charge.”

Alaska, Iowa and Ohio

Economic Conditions Challenge Republicans

By May, when the average gas price rose as high as $4.56 a gallon, Mr. Trump had dismissed the economic costs of the war with Iran, saying they were outweighed by national security interests.

“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” he told reporters in mid-May. In a cabinet meeting later that month he declared, “I don’t care about the midterms.”

Gas prices have since dropped somewhat from their spring peaks, but they remain elevated, and the fallout from the fighting has spilled across the economy, driving inflation that has outpaced wage growth. Voters say they feel gloomy about the economy.

Some states at the center of the Senate battle have been hit hard.

In Alaska, the cost of a gallon of gas on Sunday was $4.82, roughly 70 cents above the national average, according to the AAA motor club.

Josh Turek, a centrist Democrat, is trying to flip a Senate seat in Iowa, which has a farming-heavy economy that has struggled under Mr. Trump’s tariff policies in his second term. Those troubles have been exacerbated by fertilizer prices that have soared since the war began.

The economic pressures have been enough to give Democrats hope in a state where Republicans feel their nominee, Representative Ashley Hinson, a skilled fund-raiser, is a particularly strong candidate.

The same economic forces are at play in Ohio, another agriculture-heavy state. There, Sherrod Brown, a former senator and a Democrat, is trying to stage a comeback and has out-raised Senator Jon Husted, the Republican incumbent, by an overwhelming margin.

Dale Butland, a Democratic strategist in Ohio, said the signs of deep voter discontent were plainly visible. “It’s bad here,” Mr. Butland said of economic conditions in Ohio. But politically, he added, “it’s all breaking now in our favor.”

Maine, Michigan and Texas

Candidate Concerns for Both Parties

In other areas of the country, Republicans see more encouraging signs.

In Maine and Michigan, Republicans say that primary season handed them relatively weak Senate opponents who they believe could lose in more Democratic-leaning terrain. In Maine, the candidate the party initially nominated, Graham Platner, was accused of rape a month after the primary.

Mr. Platner, who denied the allegation, exited the race, requiring Democrats in Maine to scramble to find a last-minute replacement. They settled on Troy Jackson, who finished third in Maine’s primary for governor in June.

Democrats have appeared to quickly coalesce behind Mr. Jackson, and some polls show him leading Senator Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent. But many in the party remain anxious about his electoral track record. And they are concerned that some Democrats captivated by Mr. Platner’s campaign may not turn out for a candidate who did not go through the normal primary process.

In Michigan, where Mr. Trump won narrowly in 2024, Democrats are rushing to heal the wounds from a bruising primary animated by personal attacks and fierce disagreements over Israel. Some Jewish Democrats in Michigan have declined to immediately back the nominee, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who spoke out forcefully against Israel during the primary.

The Republican nominee, Mike Rogers, who is trying to flip a Democratic-held seat, has already begun to issue appeals to disaffected Democrats. Dr. El-Sayed, a left-wing insurgent, is trying to defy a trend for activist progressives, who have tended to perform worse electorally than the rest of their party.

In Texas, on the other hand, Democrats believe Republicans offered them an opening by nominating Ken Paxton, the state’s scandal-plagued attorney general.

Mr. Paxton has been indicted on securities fraud charges (he reached a deal with prosecutors to avoid a criminal trial), has escaped an impeachment trial, has been accused of adultery by his estranged wife and was even caught on video years ago pilfering a prize pen.

Democrats have nominated James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian who has made his Christian faith a centerpiece of his campaign. The popular podcaster Joe Rogan once told him to run for president.

The contrast between the candidates has fed Democratic hopes and Republican fears that Texas might slip out of G.O.P. hands for the first time in three decades.

Georgia and North carolina

Democratic Strength in the South

Nowhere is the Senate picture brighter for Democrats than in the South, where two popular and well-known Democrats have raced out to leads in states Mr. Trump carried two years ago.

In Georgia, Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat and the youngest sitting senator, has a huge war chest and consistently leads his Republican rival, Representative Mike Collins, in the polls. His advantage, which Georgia Republicans attribute in part to his focus on constituent services, has led some Republicans to write off the race, and some Democrats to encourage him to run for president in 2028.

In neighboring North Carolina, the Democratic nominee, former Gov. Roy Cooper, is trying to flip a seat and is running as a tough-on-crime moderate. He has never lost an election. Mr. Cooper consistently leads his Republican opponent, Michael Whatley, in the polls, with some showing him ahead by double digits.

Matt Zdun contributed reporting.

The post Can Democrats Win Back the Senate? Why Their Chances Are Improving. appeared first on New York Times.

An investigation by the New York Times found that the Bureau of Land Management is rounding up thousands of these free-roaming animals and selling them to private buyers for pennies on the dollars, who then sell the horses to slaughterhouses at a huge profit. 

Slaughtering wild horses is illegal, but the investigation found that the agency is exploiting a legal loophole to offload the animals so it can save it millions of dollars it’d have to spend taking care of them.

“The BLM is saying to the public that slaughter is off the table, but they’re doing it in plain sight using a third party,” Clare Staples, who runs an Oregon wild horse sanctuary called Skydog Ranch, told the NYT. “There are simple steps the bureau could take to end this, but they are turning a blind eye. And the only ones getting punished for what is going on are the horses.”

The government has sold wild horses in the past, but the practice has gone into overdrive during the Trump administration. In 2025, sales doubled to more than 3,700 horses, the NYT found in bureau records. As the reporting notes, Project 2025, the conservative policy paper that has served as the playbook for Trump’s second term, lays out a plan for killing horses to cut government costs.

Buyers stand to make a healthy chunk of change. It can cost the government up to $3,000 to capture each mustang — which sometimes requires the use of helicopters — and then bring one to market, but it only sells each horse for as little as $25. The buyers can then sell the horses for up to $750 each at a slaughter plant, making it a surprisingly lucrative investment.

To facilitate this practice without breaking any laws, the BLM first needs to put the horse up for adoption. When it fails to be adopted through an online marketplace after three weeks, the horse can legally be put up for sale. An adopted wild horse, crucially, receives special government protections, but a sold one doesn’t.

Because a buyer legally can’t slaughter a horse or “knowingly” sell it to anyone who intends to, they then resell the horse to a middleman, who is under no obligation stopping them from selling the horse to slaughter.

The investigation found that the 3,700 horses that the BLM sold last year ended up on trucks bound for slaughter plants in Canada. By off-loading the thousands of horses, according to the NYT, the agency estimated that it saved around $56 million.

One of the BLM’s missions is to protect wild horse populations. But by rounding them up and selling them at such low cost, it’s essentially accelerating their annihilation, experts say.

“The BLM is using sales in a way that was never intended by the law to send young, healthy wild horses into the slaughter pipeline,” Patricia Miller, the director of American Wild Horse Conservation, told the NYT.

More on environment: Scientists Forced to Go on OnlyFans After Their Funding Was Cut

The post Trump Admin Enabling the Systematic Slaughtering of Thousands of Wild Horses appeared first on Futurism.

Sarah Miller Espinosa, the arbitrator, said in a written decision Thursday that The Post “did not have good and sufficient cause” to terminate Ms. Attiah and “violated” its labor agreement, according to a copy of the decision shared with The New York Times by Ms. Attiah’s lawyers.

“The Washington Post failed to establish the grievant engaged in gross misconduct,” Ms. Espinosa wrote.

In a statement, Ms. Attiah said that she hoped the decision “sends a message to journalists and media institutions everywhere that freedom of expression is always worth fighting for.” She said that she was “willing to go back” to her work at The Post, which she called “one of the world’s most storied newspapers.”

“This decision confirms what we’ve said from the start: I was doing my job as an opinion writer, and this was wrongful termination,” she said, adding that she was “relieved to finally have that record set straight.”

A spokeswoman for The Post said that the company respects the arbitration process and declined to comment further.

The decision is the result of a yearlong fight between The Post and Ms. Attiah, who last year accused the company of violating its labor agreement and social media policy when it fired her for posts she said were within her purview as an opinion columnist. A clause in the agreement allows employees to submit disputes for arbitration.

Arbitration is generally considered binding in most disputes, though courts have occasionally overturned decisions after courtroom findings of fraud or other improprieties. The Post’s labor agreement says that arbitration is binding, though both the company and the employee retain their legal rights.

The Washington Post said in its termination letter that Ms. Attiah’s posts about Mr. Kirk had harmed “the integrity” of the organization and violated standards requiring employees to use social media with civility and respect.

Ms. Attiah’s remarks about Mr. Kirk’s assassination, which she posted to the social network Bluesky on Sept. 10, the day he was shot, responded to the outpouring of grief after the shooting. “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is … not the same as violence,” Ms. Attiah wrote in one of the posts.

The Post’s opinion section has been in flux since early last year, when Jeff Bezos, the newspaper’s owner, moved to reorient the section to focus on “personal liberties and free markets.” Some readers canceled their subscriptions and accused Mr. Bezos of attempting to curry favor with the Trump administration.

Lawyers for The Washington Post and Ms. Attiah made their arguments before Ms. Espinosa in June during a hearing that included testimony from Ms. Attiah; Adam O’Neal, then the opinion editor at The Washington Post; and Wayne Connell, the company’s chief human resources officer. Ms. Attiah was represented by Democracy Defenders Action, a nonprofit co-founded by the lawyer Norman Eisen, and by the Washington-Baltimore News Guild.

In his testimony, Mr. O’Neal said that he saw Ms. Attiah’s posts the morning after Mr. Kirk died and sent them to Mr. Connell, according to a transcript of the hearing obtained by The New York Times. “Karen’s social media feed yesterday and today is beyond the pale, completely unacceptable for someone associated with Opinions,” Mr. O’Neal wrote, according to the transcript.

Soon after, Mr. O’Neal and Mr. Connell met with Will Lewis, then the chief executive of The Washington Post, to discuss the posts, according to the transcript. They ultimately decided to fire Ms. Attiah.

During her testimony, Ms. Attiah defended her social media posts, saying that they were part of her work for The Post, “commenting on our discourse on political violence,” Ms. Attiah said, according to the transcript.

In a statement, Mr. Eisen called the decision “a landmark victory for one of our nation’s crusading journalists.”

The post Washington Post Ordered to Rehire Fired Columnist appeared first on New York Times.

The U.S. Marine Corps had notified its South Korean counterpart in June that Middle East operational demands would prevent the deployment of forces for the biennial exercise known as Ssangyong, or “Twin Dragons,” the South Korean Marine Corps said on Monday. The U.S. military in Korea did not immediately comment on the announcement.

The move marked the second joint military drill with South Korea to be canceled or downsized during President Trump’s second term. The decision has intensified doubts over Washington’s commitment to maintaining a credible deterrent on the Korean Peninsula and ​its capacity to manage concurrent global conflicts, as U.S. weapons stockpiles have fallen to troubling levels.

Ssangyong is one of the highest-profile joint exercises that the allies have conducted for decades. In a typical iteration, more than 10,000 Marines from both countries storm a sandy beach on the southeastern coast of South Korea, supported by columns of amphibious vehicles and fleets of military aircraft. North Korea has routinely condemned the drill as a rehearsal for invasion.

While Ssangyong was previously shelved during Mr. Trump’s first term​ —​ when he dismissed major exercises as “provocative” and too expensive amid his personal diplomacy with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un​ —​ it was revived in 2023.

However, Mr. Trump recently renewed his criticism of the drills, labeling them “insulting” to Mr. Kim. Earlier this month, he abruptly ordered the Pentagon to curtail the Ulchi Freedom Shield, shortening the 11-day annual exercise to just five days.

“The U.S. and South Korean Marine Corps are continuing close consultations regarding the future resumption” of Ssangyong, Han Seung-jeon, a South Korean Marine Corps spokesman, said on Monday.

Beyond financial concerns, Mr. Trump has questioned why his country should support joint military drills when South Korea has declined to participate in the conflict with Iran. The war has significantly strained U.S. military resources, depleting critical munitions stockpiles and forcing a realignment of assets from Asia to the Middle East.

Mr. Trump also appears eager to pivot from the Middle East conflict toward renewed diplomatic engagement with Mr. Kim, with whom he once said he “fell in love.” While halting drills successfully incentivized Mr. Kim to negotiate​ during Mr. Trump’s first term, North Korea dismissed this month’s scaling down of Ulchi Freedom Shield as “unworthy of comment.”

The post U.S. Marines Cancel Drill With South Korea, Citing Iran War Demands appeared first on New York Times.

The Treasury Department could tap nearly $1 trillion in general accounts to fund an increased pace of government bond purchases, according to two senior agency officials, in a move that CNN global economic analyst Rana Foroohar called “a really big deal” with troubling implications.

The U.S. carries too much debt, she said, and international buyers increasingly don’t want more of it, wary of what they see as the president’s mishandling of the economy and unpredictable flip-flopping on who counts as an ally versus an adversary.

Using Treasury funds to prop up the bond market and hold down borrowing costs, Foroohar warned, is the kind of move “troubled emerging market countries used to do,” not a message that reassures global investors, and she said it’s already making the dollar look like a weaker bet, which is bad news both for the U.S. broadly and for anyone holding dollars.

“I feel like we need ominous music to play when we talk about the bond market,” Berman said. “Tremors in the bond market requires, like, dark, bleak music.”

Foroohar blamed that bond market anxiety on the president’s escalating trade war with Canada. The U.S. has imposed a 50 percent tariff on roughly $20 billion in Canadian goods, from dairy to alcohol to paper products, and Canada plans dollar-for-dollar retaliation on U.S. goods starting Sept. 8.

The analyst agreed with a Wall Street Journal editorial calling the fight “the dumbest trade war revisited,” calling a trade war with America’s closest northern ally “idiocy.”

While Canada is more economically exposed overall given the size of the U.S. market, Foroohar noted Americans will feel real pain too, since Canadian lumber and energy imports are sensitive, already-strained categories tied to fuel, housing and building costs.

Foroohar argued the economics and politics are now inseparable, especially heading into the midterms, with voters in both red and blue states expressing confusion and frustration over tariff policy.

She also pointed to the political dynamics in Canada, where Prime Minister Mark Carney has positioned himself as unwilling to capitulate to Trump, particularly over U.S. pressure on Canadian French-language content protections — a sovereignty issue Foroohar said would provoke any nation.

“Things like trying to prevent the Canadians from pushing French-language streaming content and cultural products, that’s a sovereign issue,” Foroohar said. “I mean, any nation would feel a little miffed if you say that they can’t, you know, produce products in their own, you know, content in their own language. It’s a dual-language country. That’s something that is going to get anybody’s back up, and Carney is certainly not going to take it lying down.”

– YouTube youtu.be

The post ‘Ominous music’ requested by CNN anchor as ‘tremors’ threaten to rock Trump economy appeared first on Raw Story.

A small Russian drone resembling a model airplane swooped down from the sky last month in the city of Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine. As it tried to navigate toward a gas station, it crashed into a wall and exploded in a hail of shrapnel, killing Tetiana Bubynets, 19, a university student, and two others.

They were among the thousands of Ukrainian civilians who have died in Russian airstrikes, but the circumstances of their deaths came with an ominous twist. The drone that killed them was guided by an experimental artificial intelligence system, not a human pilot, according to drone experts, Ukrainian military commanders and the forensic team that examined wreckage from the deadly strike and others in the city.

The drone was programmed by human operators to travel toward a particular gas station, but once it got close, it chose its exact target — most likely propane tanks — on its own, based on its training to recognize such tanks and strike them, the experts and military officials said.

It is a development long watched for in the war in Ukraine, presaging a dystopian future in which killer robots roam the skies making life-or-death decisions that reduce targets to data points.

“This is a risk for the whole world,” said Col. Serhiy Minaiev, the commander of air defenses in Zaporizhzhia. “In a few years, we will be living in a ‘Terminator’ movie. It’s no joke. Machines are making decisions to strike.”

Analysis of debris from this attack and others in Zaporizhzhia found that the drones had onboard minicomputers, sold commercially by Nvidia, that made their targeting decisions, the experts and military officials said. Nvidia produces a majority of the chips powering the world’s most advanced A.I. systems.

The presence of Nvidia modules and a lack of antennas on the drones led Ukrainian air defense commanders to surmise that the weapons were guided by an autonomous A.I. system, which was confirmed on further investigation.

Autonomous A.I. systems can be trained on thousands of images to recognize categories like “river,” “military truck” or “person.” Self-targeting drones use their cameras to hunt for these things with greater precision than a human pilot can provide. But opponents of such weapons argue that, without human intervention, drones may be more prone to mistakes or violations of the laws of war, such as by failing to distinguish innocent civilians from combatants.

The use of self-targeting A.I. in the gas station attack, on July 6, would be the first documented case in which civilian deaths were caused by a Russian drone outfitted with such a system, said Kateryna Bondar, a senior fellow at the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. She added that the Nvidia module “is the best proof” that Russia was experimenting with autonomous A.I.

While an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky has written on social media that Russia was testing self-targeting A.I. systems, the fatalities have not been previously reported, nor have the details of the Nvidia Jetson Orin computer module that was used.

Both Russia and Ukraine were already using A.I. in multiple drone models before the fully autonomous drones emerged. In those earlier models, A.I. is used only for what is known as the “last mile” — the final stage of the attack, after a remote human pilot has selected the target. Fully autonomous A.I. removes humans from the final target selection.

The Nvidia chip in the Zaporizhzhia attack was not encrypted, Ukrainian officials said, so they could see the terrain images that had been uploaded to the module, enabling the drone to track visual landmarks and stay on course. They were also able to examine coding, they said, that revealed what types of targets the drone had been trained to recognize and attack, like propane tanks.

Earlier drone models are generally either piloted by human operators, through radio transmissions or fiber-optic cables, or they are preprogrammed with coordinates. As drones have taken over the battlefield in Ukraine, their pilots have become prime targets.

An autonomous A.I.-guided drone, by contrast, requires no human pilots and can be more accurate than a munition programmed to hit coordinates.

Local air defense officials say that Russia has been aiming for civilian objects like pumps or propane tanks at gas stations in trying out autonomous drones in Zaporizhzhia, along with military recruitment centers. It is not clear why these targets were chosen for the tests.

Vadym Kushnikov, a drone expert at the Kharkiv Aviation Institute in Ukraine, said the drone that killed the three civilians was “a preprogrammed tool trained in virtual reality to track specific objects.”

While traditional software follows step-by-step rules written by a person, an A.I. system derives its own rules by finding patterns across enormous amounts of data, a process called machine learning. That allows it to manage unanticipated situations. It also means no one can fully predict what it might do.

Rights groups and the International Red Cross vehemently oppose the use of A.I. weapons without humans in the loop. Such groups say that autonomous systems essentially leave robots to interpret international law in determining legitimate targets in war.

But some exports argue that, in the future, weapons should in fact be required to have A.I. systems. These weapons are safer, the argument goes, because they are able to make decisions before striking, even if not always perfectly, unlike unguided aerial bombs or ordinary artillery shells that just fall without seeing what they will hit.

The weapon in the fatal strike was flying in a group of about half a dozen drones, according to the regional military governor, the city’s air defense commander and an air defense team on duty that day. None were emitting radio signals, and they had other characteristics associated with Russia’s autonomous A.I. tests, including being launched in a wave, the officials said.

While some of the A.I.-guided drones tested by Russia have detonated on impact, others have not and remained intact, Ukrainian officials said. They showed debris from two such drones to reporters for The New York Times. The Times photographed the Nvidia computer module inside the drones and sent the images to the company.

Nvidia confirmed that the photos showed a Jetson Orin minicomputer. Such modules, which cost only a few hundred dollars, have been found on several types of Russian weapons.

In a statement, the company said that the minicomputer was a consumer-grade product “sold to students, developers and start-ups for a wide range of beneficial applications.” Nvidia sells the computer in many countries but not in Russia. It is, though, widely available through resellers, the statement said.

Ukraine, too, has tested self-targeting A.I. systems. Mykhailo Fedorov, the defense minister who was recently ousted, said in an interview with The Times late last month that Ukraine tested an entirely autonomous A.I. system in Russian-occupied Crimea over the past several months. Mr. Fedorov said that the devices targeted fuel storage sites and military equipment and that no civilians had been killed.

While the drones in the Zaporizhzhia attack had no antennas to send back data on the tests, Russian forces often fly reconnaissance drones that can record strikes. The city is also believed to harbor Russian spies who report battlefield damage assessments.

The absence of an antenna would not by itself prove that a drone was self-targeting. It could be preprogrammed to fly a route, with computer algorithms like those used for decades in auto-piloting systems for aircraft. But that drone would not need an Nvidia chip.

Russia began test flights of A.I.-guided Molniya drones — a mass-produced fixed-wing model — in May, and started testing self-targeting systems in the V2U, another fixed-wing drone, several months before that, Ukrainian air defense experts said. Some of the V2U tests were only for “last mile” targeting.

In interviews, some residents of Zaporizhzhia, which lies just nine miles from the front, said that the thought of devices buzzing over the city, making their own decisions to kill, brought chills. But Ukrainian cities have been so heavily bombarded for years that life had already been reshaped by less sophisticated drones.

Interceptor drones, piloted (for now) by men and women who are local heroes, are one answer to the drone threat. Anti-drone nets are another, covering about 240 miles of roads in and around Zaporizhzhia.

Another defensive measure is camouflage. Plastic sheeting, for example, is propped at odd angles around propane tanks at gas stations, in an effort to fool A.I. image recognition systems.

Moments before the exploding drone barreled toward the gas station on July 6, a group of people huddled by the wall of a nearby apartment building for safety, having already heard blasts as the drones came in waves.

Oksana Ishenko, a station attendant, stood beside Ms. Bubynets. “She was crying from fear,” Ms. Ishenko recalled.

Then some in the group started to shout, “A plane! A plane!” Ms. Ishenko said. A drone was heading their way. Ms. Bubynets and several others bolted, fanning out in a parking lot. After the drone failed to make its way around the apartment building, it detonated before reaching its target.

Ms. Bubynets, who had been studying accounting at Zaporizhzhia National University, lay on the pavement, unmoving, with blood flowing from her nose. She was declared dead at a hospital, said Tetiana Melikhova, one of her professors. The two others killed, Oleksiy Svirin, 41, and Roman Karpiy, 48, died later of their wounds.

“They are training the technology,” Colonel Minaiev, the city’s air defense commander, said of the Russians. A.I. is good but not yet perfect, he added. “They are looking for mistakes and will fix them.”

Evelina Riabenko, Stanislav Kozliuk and Paul Mozur contributed reporting.

The post A Drone Killed Three Ukrainians. It Was Guided Entirely by A.I. appeared first on New York Times.

Hell, the titular hero mows down a bunch of gangsters with a Tommy gun by the time we get to the end. You’d be hard-pressed to find a scene from any modern-day Disney movie that plays out like this:

Believe it or not, though, the folks at Disney were looking to do a lot more with the Dick Tracy brand than just crank out a movie and be done with it. As a matter of fact, according to Parkeology, both Disneyland in California and Florida’s Disney-MGM Studios were planning on building some major Dick Tracy-related expansions ahead of the film’s premiere.

Each park was set to add new “neighborhoods” made up to look like locations straight out of the 1930s detective comic, complete with cobblestone streets, crumbling brick walls, and unique places to shop and eat. Somewhere along the way, visitors would find themselves outside of a grimy-looking warehouse intended to be the home of the star attraction: Dick Tracy’s Crime-Stoppers.

Disney Nearly Built a 1930s Crime Ride Based on ‘Dick Tracy’

“Guests will literally get ‘into the act’ in this new high-tech action-adventure featuring the very latest in Audio-Animatronics, simulation, sound, and special effects,” boasted a Disney press release from 1990. “Guests will join America’s favorite comic-strip detective in a high-speed chase with his gangster adversaries,” it continued. And not only would they join Tracy, but they’d also get to ride in a vintage roadster of their own equipped with a realistic-looking Tommy gun. From there, they’d pursue classic villains like Flattop and Big Boy Caprice while zipping through an intricate cityscape full of back alleys and elevated train tracks.

At times, riders would feel as though they were tipped on two wheels as they careened around corners, taking their best shots at the bad guys they’d encounter. Passengers would eventually wind up in the middle of an explosive battle sequence, during which Tracy and his cohorts were to swoop in and save the day. And just so we’re clear: This was all, of course, intended for people on the younger side of the spectrum. That’s not to say that it doesn’t sound awesome; it could just never reasonably be expected to get greenlit today.

Unfortunately, when the Beatty movie didn’t do as well as it was projected to, these plans were completely abandoned. However, for a brief time, lucky visitors were treated to a few Tracy villains threatening to “fill them full of lead” while taking the famous tram tour, in addition to a weird Dick Tracy musical show that ran for less than a year, for God only knows what reason:

The post Disney Almost Built a ‘Dick Tracy’ Ride Where Kids Shot Tommy Guns at Gangsters appeared first on VICE.

However, Fleming’s final credit was for an episode of a Wizard of Oz-themed TV show that never aired because it ultimately cost him his life. 

Off to See the Wizard was a short-lived anthology series featuring animated versions of the characters from The Wizard of Oz, who would introduce a variety of live-action feature films broken down into separate hour-long episodes. Fleming eventually signed on to star in a two-parter entitled High Jungle, which was to be shot on location in Peru. According to IMDb, High Jungle (or what was filmed of it) was directed by Tom McGowan and co-starred Anne Heywood and Nico Minardos. Set in 1850, the story revolved around two men going into a remote jungle in order to find a young girl being held captive by Indians.

Eric Fleming Drowned While Filming the Final Role of His Career

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the project was never completed. On September 28, 1966, Fleming and Minardos were shooting a scene aboard a canoe on the Huallaga River, 340 miles northeast of Lima. At some point in the process, the boat unexpectedly flipped upside down, leaving the actors at the mercy of the swiftly flowing water. Though Minardos was fortunately able to swim to safety, Fleming wasn’t so lucky.

By October 1, the U.S. Embassy reported that Fleming’s body had been swept away by the current and search parties were still looking for him. His remains were finally recovered downstream a few days after the accident. Fleming was just 41 years old at the time of his death. His body was said to have been donated to the San Fernando Medical School at the National University of San Marcos in Lima.

To this day, none of the footage Fleming shot during production has surfaced.

The post 60 Years Ago, the Star of ‘Rawhide’ Died While Filming a Forgotten ‘Wizard of Oz’ Show appeared first on VICE.

• Jason Stacy is a performance coach who helps Sabalenka train physically and mentally.
• He’s also a dad of four, and he aims to teach his kids the same things he coaches.
• He draws on skills like reading people and staying true to himself.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jason Stacy, author of “The Pressure Code: How Elite Performers Align their Energy, Emotions, and Environment.” It has been edited for length and clarity.

My dad died in my arms when I was 11. He had been in a motorcycle accident and was home, recovering. I heard my mom yell for me, and I tried to keep my dad breathing, but he stopped. We later learned it was a blood clot that killed him.

From there, my life became about surviving, minute by minute. My mom was really struggling, understandably. She was caring for my two younger siblings, and in my young mind, I thought her life would be easier if I weren’t there. I started staying away and was largely homeless from 12 to 15.

Without getting into all the gory details, those years were extremely violent and difficult. The things I’ve learned have shaped my life and have helped me become a father and coach.

I was true to myself

I was around plenty of drugs on the streets, but I never did them. That often led to fights — people didn’t trust me if I was around drug use, but not indulging. I was hit, and worse, for not doing drugs.

And yet, I had a core belief that I needed to stay true to my values, regardless of the cost to me. I was in a bad situation, but when I stuck to my values, I could maintain the belief that I didn’t belong there. I figured out how to get out of that awful life because I didn’t compromise on my beliefs.

I learned how important the people around you are

To survive, I had to know how to read a room and understand the intentions of the people around me. That helped me avoid some bad situations and make the most of good ones.

My life started to change when I went to a dojo (a martial arts center). There I met a family who has become my adoptive family. At the time, I just knew I needed to be around them and their genuine, good intentions.

This is something I help Aryna Sabalenka with today. Professional athletes have many people around them who influence them in various ways. I guide Aryna to be aware of what she needs in the moment and to surround herself with people who can help her get into the right mindset.

Small steps add up

There’s no one moment when I knew I was going to be OK. Instead, I took small steps to change my environment. One was when I went to the dojo; another was when I met that family, and started spending time at their house; another was when I became a massage therapist, then sports trainer.

By consistently showing up and staying true to who I am and what I do, I changed my life. It’s a lesson I’ve talked to Aryna and my own four children about. Small consistencies can lead to big change.

I want others to learn these lessons, without the trauma

Loyalty is a cornerstone of my life as a father and coach. Above all else, it’s important to remain loyal to who you are. If you can do that, you can deal with any challenge that life throws at you, in sports, relationships, or business.

So much of what I’ve learned has come through adversity. I aim to help my children and clients develop resilience and awareness through experience and exposure, rather than through trauma like I had to. Sports are a great way to do that.

My 15-year-old self wouldn’t be surprised that I’ve created a successful life — but he would be proud. Being aligned with who I am has served me well then and continues to pay off. I believe that’s true for everyone.

Read the original article on Business Insider

The post I was homeless as a teen. The survival skills I learned now help me coach Aryna Sabalenka. appeared first on Business Insider.

“Canada has been ripping off the United States of America for years. Their ridiculously high tariffs on our Farmers and farm products has made life impossible for these great American Patriots, and has long created a 60 Billion Dollar Deficit between our two Countries. Not sustainable, and NOT ANYMORE!,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

He added that on January 1, 2027, he will increase tariffs on all vehicles, automotive parts and steel to 50%. And, in what he likely deemed a great insult, he said Canada was no longer worthy of being the 51st state, something he has long teased.

“Canada will be treated like a State no longer! On Trade, and in other ways, also, they are among the worst Nations in the World to deal with. They feel entitled, and yet, WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US! They do 95% of their business with the U.S., with us, the exact opposite!,” Trump wrote.

On Saturday, the Trump administration imposed a steep 50% tariffon an array of Canadian goods — such as beer, cheese, and electronics — after the two countries failed to come to a trade deal.

Carney vowed that Canada would fight back, imposing its own retaliatory tariffs beginning on Sept. 8.

“We were attacked. You’re at war when you get attacked. We got attacked,” he said Saturday. “That’s fine. We’ve got the reserves. We’ve got the resilience. We’ve got the plan. We’ve got the focus. We will respond.”

Canada will target American steel, dairy, agricultural equipment, and pulp and paper, among items. Carney said his country’s retaliatory measures would be “dollar for dollar.”

The post Trump revs up tariffs on Canada to 50% on autos and steel — says ally no longer worthy of 51st state status appeared first on New York Post.

The exchange took place at the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, the first IndyCar street race ever held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Professional lip reader Nicola Hickling, speaking to Metro, described the conversation as “intense.”

The first lady was seen leaning over to speak in the president’s ear before the two began talking over each other and she raised her hand, according to Metro.

“That is private and valuable text,” Melania Trump reportedly told her husband.

“Was it enough?” Donald Trump replied, according to the lip reader.

Melania Trump answered: “I don’t know.”

“Then I need to see it,” Donald Trump continued.

“Donald, listen, I’m gonna go,” Melania Trump said, the lip reader determined.

“It’s bad news, but it’s a bad timing Melania,” Donald Trump said as the exchange grew more pointed, according to Hickling.

“That’s crazy,” Melania Trump was said to have replied.

Melania Trump then whispered in the president’s ear, according to Hickling.

“I’ve had enough of her,” Donald Trump shot back, Hickling reported

Melania Trump whispered again, and as she pulled back, Hickling said she appeared to say, “Obviously I’ll see and talk to her in the morning.”

Also at Sunday’s event was Natalie Harp, Trump’s executive assistant, whose close relationship with the president has drawn scrutiny in recent weeks.

A clip of the moment Melania Trump left her seat — and Harp subsequently approached the president — circulated widely on social media.

TMZ reported that Harp was seated just a few feet behind the first couple during the race. Personal letters that surfaced recently showed Harp telling Donald Trump he was “all that matters” to her, according to TMZ.

A fact-check by MEAWW noted that the video of the Trumps’ discussion carries no audio and that nothing in contemporaneous reporting confirmed what the president and first lady were discussing.

Florida native Kyle Kirkwood, 27, won the race after leading 128 of 147 laps, according to Metro.

The post Trump and Melania’s ‘intense’ clash at Indy race decoded by lip reader: ‘I’ve had enough’ appeared first on Raw Story.

Ukrainian forensic examiners recently found the minicomputer, the Nvidia Jetson Orin, in the wreckage of drones launched by Russia’s military in apparent tests of a self-targeting system in the city of Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine.

Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency showed New York Times reporters two such guidance systems that included damaged but still recognizable Jetson computer components. Air defense officials said that a drone with one of the systems killed three people in an attack in Zaporizhzhia on July 6.

The Russian weapon is a new step in the use of A.I. in combat. Earlier A.I.-guided drones had a “human in the loop” safety button that required a live pilot to confirm a target. Those systems used artificial intelligence only in the last several hundred yards of a drone’s flight to help make them impervious to radio signal jamming.

The Russian drones tested in Zaporizhzhia from May to July, by contrast, left the strike decision entirely to the Jetson Orin computer, according to an analysis of the chip by Ukrainian investigators. The Red Cross and other rights groups have opposed allowing computers to find and strike targets on their own.

Ukrainian air defense officials and forensic specialists who examined debris from the drones said that the Jetson computers had been trained to identify a range of potential targets. Those included gas stations, which have been a focus of Russian attacks in recent months. The drone that killed three people on July 6 was flying toward a gas station.

Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency said this month that an Nvidia Jetson computer had also been found on a new type of Russian missile, called the S-71M Monochrome, that was being tested in attacks on Ukraine. The Nvidia system may have been used for A.I. guidance, the agency said.

In a statement, Nvidia said that the Jetson Orin computers found in the Russian drones were “consumer-grade products sold to students, developers and start-ups for a wide range of beneficial applications.” They were not designed for military applications, the company added.

The U.S. government restricts exports of items to Russia for military use. Nvidia said that the Jetson line of computers was not sold in Russia but was available in resale markets. The company has said that it cannot track such secondary sales.

The circuit board on which the Nvidia chip was installed was stamped “Made in China.” It was unclear how Russia’s military obtained the computers.

Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company by market capitalization, calls the line of Jetson minicomputers “the world’s most powerful embedded A.I. computers.”

The devices run applications that are trained on large volumes of data rather than explicitly programmed by a human.

As an example of possible uses, Nvidia cited a Japanese manufacturer, Musashi, that trained the Jetson computer to identify defects in welding and other areas on vehicle gearboxes.

The computers replaced human inspectors, whose work Nvidia called “repetitive, stressful and not very engaging.”

The post Minicomputers Made by Nvidia Are Powering Moscow’s A.I. Drones appeared first on New York Times.

One of them read aloud from a passage about Mary Wollstonecraft, the early women’s rights advocate, who had slammed the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau for writing, in her words, that “man was made to reason, woman to feel.”

Kimberly Begg, the president of the Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women, stood at the front of the conference room, leading one of her periodic book club sessions for summer interns and young staff members.

She had designed this discussion of 18th-century ideas specifically to confront a charged new political movement.

“I actually hear this a lot right now, that women are ‘feelers’ and men are ‘thinkers,’” Ms. Begg said. “Wollstonecraft is saying if we embrace this,” she added, “we are going to be not just harming women, but all of society.”

For the women listening, Rousseau’s assessment did not match reality. But it did sound familiar.

These days, the idea that women are intellectually inferior leaches steadily from manosphere podcasts, influencers who promote traditional gender roles and ultraconservative pulpits.

Ms. Begg, a lawyer with five children who often draws on her Catholic faith, has heard some conservatives pushing for a return to rigid gender norms, with women firmly planted at home. One of her sons told her that some of his male high school classmates have openly questioned whether women should be able to vote.

From a squat brick office park in Northern Virginia, the Luce Center is staking out what seems like a fraught position these days: that it is possible to be a conservative woman who values motherhood and family, but one with a career, an egalitarian marriage and a voice.

High-powered women are not exactly missing from the conservative world. President Trump has hired women for prominent positions, including his chief of staff and press secretary, as well as several in his cabinet (though many have left or been fired). Erika Kirk has led Turning Point USA since her husband and the group’s founder, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated last year. Many of the Make America Healthy Again movement’s biggest stars are women.

Yet such women, even those encouraging conventional gender roles, are often told to be quiet. Some red-pill conservatives have rebuked Ms. Kirk for her public role away from her children. They have chastised Alex Clark, a star MAHA podcaster, and Brett Cooper, a YouTube commentator, for having a platform.

And every summer, it seemed to Ms. Begg, more Luce Center interns have stories about coming face to face with open sexism from classmates, friends and boyfriends.

Mary White, an earnest 19-year-old bookworm in Invisalign braces, found herself debating a male classmate at the University of Dallas about the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

Women tend to lean liberal, he told her. Replacing women’s suffrage with “household voting,” in which husbands cast ballots for their wives and families, would fix that, he said, echoing arguments that have circulated online and in far-right circles.

Another intern, Lucy Carney, 19, a forthright politics and government major, was the only woman in her class to serve last year in student government at Benedictine College in Kansas.

She said she once confronted a male classmate when she heard that he had quoted Andrew Tate, the manosphere influencer accused of rape and human trafficking: “So I guess women just want to be raped.”

Anastasia Leffas, 22, a junior staff member and former intern, also had a story from college. At coffee with a male classmate, she mentioned being interested in law school. “I don’t know if women should be lawyers,” he said, casually.

“I really think he just wanted women to thrive, and very faultily thought that that’s how women best thrive,” she said. She retorted, “That was truly absurd of you to say, because I think I’d be a much better lawyer than you would be.”

It isn’t only men. Anastasia Shanahan, 22, Ms. Begg’s assistant and another former intern, was startled when two female friends said they were unsure whether women could lead. “Of course they can,” she said.

The Luce Center, a donor-funded nonprofit, says its mission is to mold young women into “strong, conservative leaders” like the center’s eponym, the congresswoman, diplomat and conservative activist Clare Boothe Luce.

With a new book, campus events and other programming, Ms. Begg is trying to offer a vision of womanhood and marriage that she says avoids the “false choices” presented by conservatives and liberals.

From some conservatives, including people Ms. Begg considers ideological allies on other issues, the message is “a diminishing of women’s intelligence and a discouraging of women from using their gifts, their God-given gifts,” she said.

From some on the left, young women hear “the denial of biological sex and the devaluing of marriage, motherhood and family,” Ms. Begg said. (Many liberals, however, say conservatives like Ms. Begg are limiting women by emphasizing motherhood’s importance and de-emphasizing the right to bodily autonomy, including for transgender people.)

The summer internship program, which is paid, offers Ms. Begg another avenue to counter what she sees as harmful messages.

The interns don’t fetch coffee or answer phones. Instead, they receive a crash course in practical and professional skills, alongside tutelage in conservative principles. One day is dedicated to media training and public speaking, another to constitutional law. In July, the interns visited the United Nations in New York. A National Review columnist, Caroline Downey, came to speak about what she described as Gen Z’s dangerous embrace of socialism. Later came training in self-defense and firearms and a tour of the Museum of the Bible.

One morning in July, an etiquette expert, Lynn Williams, gave a lecture on silver table settings (asparagus servers, tomato servers, five-o’clock teaspoons), what to carry to your gala dinner table (“a lady does not walk with a cocktail”) and when to blot your lipstick (before you sit down, lest you smear the linens, and before every sip, lest you sully the crystal).

They practiced introducing parents to their future bosses — perhaps a politician or a judge, she suggested. They discussed sending thank-you emails after job interviews.

“Given some of the careers that you all are pursuing, if you’re here in Washington, chances are you will be invited to black ties and white ties and other very special events where you’re expected to know what to do,” she told them, before elucidating the proper writing of a thank-you note.

As the summer went on, as the 13 interns debated their majors, next internships and careers, their conversations sometimes brought to mind the mid-2010s, when “The Future is Female” T-shirts and tote bags seemed to be everywhere — not so improbable, perhaps, given that these interns were raised in a world that had long accepted women in the workplace. Trading tips on hot yoga studios, gossiping about Taylor Swift’s wedding and comparing beauty products, they didn’t sound so different from many liberal young women.

But they were different. At a time when Gen Z women have become the most progressive group in America, these young women largely supported Mr. Trump’s conservative policies, if not his character or the often-misogynist views of the manosphere, which has flourished with Mr. Trump’s rise.

Many young liberal women want partnership and children someday. But at the Luce Center, marriage and family were far more likely to be concrete, near-term goals: Financial stability and career success need not come first.

At a time of falling birthrates, several of the young women said their faith and upbringings taught them that large families were beautiful. They embraced the idea that life was seasonal, saying that they would happily have their careers take turns with child-rearing.

Their aspirations, they said, could feel strangely lonely. They felt themselves scraping, sometimes painfully, against expectations and stereotypes on both sides.

Mary White was debating whether to major in English or political philosophy; law school or academia might be next. She wasn’t waiting around for a diamond ring. But Ms. White could also see herself following her mother, who postponed her law career to raise eight children.

“I would love to be a stay-at-home mom, but I feel like a lot of times, girls are belittled for wanting that,” she said. Then again, she added, “On the right, there’s this idea that women shouldn’t work.”

She liked a “middle ground,” she said, “where it’s actually a beautiful thing to be a mother, but it’s also a beautiful thing to share your talents with a wider public spirit.”

That was exactly the message Ms. Begg hoped the interns would absorb.

During the book discussion, Ms. Begg invoked Mary Wollstonecraft’s argument that education in critical thinking would train girls for the professions, as well as to be wives capable of raising virtuous children.

The women’s rights advocate, she told her audience, said that “we should never understand domestic life as inferior.”

The young women nodded, taking notes. They were only on Chapter 1.

The post These Conservatives Want to Be Working Moms. The Manosphere Disapproves. appeared first on New York Times.

Schamis is an old-school Wall Street guy who spent his early career at Salomon Brothers, the trading shop immortalized in Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker. His current act involves running a publicly traded firm that’s built a business amassing Hyperliquid’s HYPE token. It’s a digital asset treasury, or DAT, in other words. Most DATs these days are a dumpster fire, but Hyperliquid Strategies, which started trading in December under the meme-inspired ticker symbol PURR, has been killing it with a soaring share price and a DAT stash that grows ever more valuable.

This success is partly due, no doubt, to Schamis’s sound management. But the biggest reason that Hyperliquid Strategies hasn’t flamed out like so many other DATs is because it is tied to a money printing machine. That machine is the Hyperliquid DeFi platform, which is dominating the perpetual futures trade and using its fee income to burn HYPE tokens. The situation is even sweeter for Hyperliquid because its customers are not just degens, but commodities traders using perps to swing oil contracts and other traditional assets 24/7.

So far, all of this action has been taking place overseas. Since the project’s 2023 launch, its hard-charging CEO Jeff Yan (check out Fortune’s profile of the Harvard grad and physics whiz here) has been content to use an offshore cowboy model to grow Hyperliquid. But that’s about to change as Schamis’s team ramps up a push to create a regulated U.S.-based operation.

Other offshore firms have made plays for the U.S. market but mostly struck out, learning the hard way that it’s not easy to dislodge longtime incumbents like Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood. Hyperliquid, though, is likely to fare better since Yan is American-born, and because it has some very influential people advocating for its platform, including President Trump and the Chairman of the CFTC, who is a fan of perpetual futures.

On the corporate side—Hyperliquid Strategies or PURR or whatever you want to call it—there is a powerful team. That includes Schamis, who brings decades of TradFi credibility, and Jake Chervinsky, a highly influential crypto lawyer who is determined to create a legal regime for DeFi in the U.S.

All of this suggests Hyperliquid could suddenly become a major competitive threat to the crypto industry’s big dogs—much as Binance emerged out of nowhere in 2017 to become the biggest exchange in the world. Indeed, the company was on the lips of many of those gathered in Wyoming last week. Incumbents take note.

Jeff John Roberts jeff.roberts@fortune.com @jeffjohnroberts

The post At the year’s buzziest blockchain conference, a new crypto powerhouse emerges appeared first on Fortune.

Abraham and Szor are two of the four directors of “No Other Land,” the documentary about the destruction of a Palestinian community in the West Bank, which won the 2025 Oscar for best documentary. The new film is produced by The Guardian and James Wilson and executive-produced by Jonathan Glazer. (The latter two previously worked together on the Academy Award-winning international film “The Zone of Interest.”)

A synopsis of “Naza” provided by the festival reads, “Shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the film reveals in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”

“Naza” will join films in competition that include Martin McDonagh’s “Wild Horse Nine,” with John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell; Werner Herzog’s “Bucking Fastard,” starring sisters Rooney and Kate Mara; Florian Zeller’s “Bunker,” with Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz; Lance Oppenheim’s “Primetime,” starring Robert Pattinson as “To Catch a Predator” host Chris Hansen; and Casey Affleck’s “Company,” with Nick Nolte and Ben Mendelsohn. “Ink,” a newspaper drama directed by Danny Boyle and starring Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce and Claire Foy, opens the festival on Sept. 2.

Maggie Gyllenhaal heads this year’s Venice jury, whose members include Kaouther Ben Hania and Daniel Blumberg.

“Naza” isn’t the only headline-grabbing documentary at the fest: Playing out of competition is “Musk,” Alex Gibney’s four-hour look at the controversial entrepreneur behind Space X and Tesla.

The post Venice Adds New Gaza Doc to Competition Lineup appeared first on TheWrap.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney walked away from negotiations over the weekend rather than accept a lengthy list of U.S. demands restricting his own country’s foreign trade, and the 80-year-old president ranted against the American ally after slapping 50 percent tariffs on many of its products.

“Canada has been ripping off the United States of America for years,” Trump posted Monday morning on Truth Social. “Their ridiculously high tariffs on our Farmers and farm products has made life impossible for these great American Patriots, and has long created a 60 Billion Dollar Deficit between our two Countries. Not sustainable, and NOT ANYMORE!”

“On January First, 2027, Tariffs on all Cars, Trucks, both large and small, Automotive Parts, and Steel, will be increased to 50%,” Trump added. “Build in the U.S. and there are ZERO TARIFFS. Canada will be treated like a State no longer!”

Trump has repeatedly referred to Canada as the “51st state” and claimed the North American nation wants “the benefits of being a state without being one.”

“On Trade, and in other ways, also, they are among the worst Nations in the World to deal with,” he added. “They feel entitled, and yet, WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US! They do 95% of their business with the U.S., with us, the exact opposite!”

The post Trump blows a gasket over ‘entitled’ Canada as trade talks collapse: ‘Among the worst!’ appeared first on Raw Story.

“Polyester” has been making the rounds on TikTok and X this summer as shorthand for anything that looks good from a distance and falls apart up close. The influencer hawking a product they’ve never used, polyester. The carefully staged candid moment, polyester. The aspirational lifestyle that appears to have been built from a checklist of trending signifiers, very polyester. A TikTok of an 18-year-old laying out his dream adult life—penthouse, Bible study, blue light glasses, an AI agent running in the background so he barely has to do anything—was labeled in the comment section by 40,000 people who all agreed: “Polyester lifestyle.”

The word has an interesting origin. Before it became a personality slam, “polyester” described a style of fan-edit video that emerged around October 2025, according to Know Your Meme—aggressively cut clips of characters like Spider-Man, layered over flashing footage and metallic audio, pushed through CapCut until the seams showed.

A Spider-Man edit in that style resurfaced and went viral in summer 2026, and viewers started using “polyester” to describe the format: flashy, frenetic, and fundamentally cheap. The insult didn’t stay in editing circles long. Gaming streamer LowTierGod got tagged “the Polyester Prince” after critics mocked him for selling 100% polyester merch, and from there the word shed its niche origins.

Why Gen Z Is Calling Fake People and Cheap Lifestyles ‘Polyester’

The fabric connection isn’t arbitrary. Polyester has taken years of abuse in online fashion discourse, with younger shoppers loudly purging it from their wardrobes and treating its presence in an expensive garment as a minor betrayal. It looks fine in the store. It falls apart in three months. That’s the whole metaphor.

What separates “polyester” from its predecessors is range. “Slop” calls out low-quality AI content. “NPC” is someone who has no original thoughts. “Industry plant” targets manufactured celebrity. Polyester absorbs all of it and adds a quality judgment on top—something can be sincere and still be polyester if the whole thing feels cheap and disposable.

The irony here is obvious: the more “polyester” gets used as a catch-all, the more generic the word becomes. Which would be so polyester.

The post The Real Meaning Behind ‘Polyester,’ Gen Z’s Favorite New Insult appeared first on VICE.

That, in a nutshell, is a dopplebanger—a portmanteau of “doppelgänger” and the fairly self-explanatory act of banging. As in, someone who hooks up with or dates a person who looks so much like them, it’s hard not to try and figure it out. The term has its roots in queer dating culture, where same-sex couples are statistically more likely to resemble each other simply by virtue of sharing a gender—and, very often, a haircut, a wardrobe, and a general aesthetic. But straight couples aren’t off the hook either. The “Siblings or Dating” meme exists for a reason.

Broad City nailed this one. In Season 2’s “Coat Check,” Ilana meets Adele—played by Alia Shawkat, who looks so much like Ilana Glazer in person that Abbi Jacobson once mistook them for each other—and kisses her before they even exchange names. Then Abbi points out the resemblance, and the whole thing unravels. Ilana has a full Black Swan moment mid-hookup, imagines her own face where Adele’s should be, and ends the coitus immediately. Her reasoning: “I have sex with people different from me.”

What Is a Dopplebanger? The Dating Term for Couples Who Look Weirdly Alike.

Science, for what it’s worth, takes the dopplebanger seriously. Research on assortative mating—the tendency for people to pair with those who share similar traits—suggests couples resemble each other at rates way above random chance. A 2013 study found that when people were shown composite images of their partner’s face blended with their own, they rated those images as most attractive. We are all, on some level, susceptible to a familiar face.

The term gets more loaded when it travels outside queer spaces. Jon Prezant, a certified sex and couples therapist who works primarily with gay men and queer relationships, points out that it has a complicated double life. Inside queer circles, it’s a self-aware joke. Deployed from outside, it curdles fast — a way to package same-sex attraction as narcissism with a punchier name. “Freud actually wrote about his theory of some homosexuality as a mirror of the self,” Prezant told Out. “It’s an old accusation against homosexuality, rebranded by queer people themselves in fact.”

LGBTQ+ psychologist Rod Mitchell has different thoughts regarding the pull toward a familiar face—one that has nothing to do with ego and more so with history. “If you spent years trying to figure out which spaces were safe, someone who looks like you is a shortcut,” Mitchell told Out. “That’s not vanity, that’s someone who learned early on that being understood is not always a guarantee.” In smaller queer communities with overlapping social circles and shared visual codes, the dating pool is already limited. Two people who look alike and go to the same bars on Saturday night aren’t exactly defying statistics.

As for whether any of this spells doom—it doesn’t. Physical resemblance between partners tells you almost nothing about compatibility, and the discomfort people feel when they see it says far more about how we police desire than about the actual couple. Unless someone is actively screening for a mirror image while ignoring every other quality that makes a person interesting, there’s no diagnosis needed. The question to actually sit with is the one Ilana eventually had to face: do you actually like this person, or do you just like what they remind you of?

The post What Is a ‘Dopplebanger’ and Why Is It So Common? appeared first on VICE.