A day before Monday’s 78th Primetime Emmys, giddy headlines proclaimed that reigning king of basketball Jalen Brunson would be joining host Mariska Hargitay for a pre-taped intro bit. Well, it happened. We got a few seconds of the real-life pals steaming work outfits together, of all things. Then, suddenly, Hargitay was leading an “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” production number that had her singing about Guy Fieri on an airplane and cuddling up with Jean Smart in a hotel bed, in what felt uncomfortably like an ad for Marriott and United Airlines, whose logos were prominently placed. And then she was onstage at LA’s Peacock Theater, delivering a notably brief monologue. Spanning just eight minutes, the opening segment proved to be an accurate preview of a mediocre NBC and Peacock telecast that was by turns hasty, random, heavily reliant on big-name cameos, and not much of a showcase for Hargitay at all. 

It was a shame, not least because Hargitay was touted as the Emmys’ first female host since Jane Lynch in 2011. For many years after the Glee standout’s stint, the awards relied on a rotating cast of SNL and talk-show guys. Recently, however, with late night in decline, they’ve cast a wider net, and results have been all over the map. Following Anthony Anderson’s forgettable performance, we got an effortlessly charming turn from Eugene and Dan Levy—and then last year’s tedious, gimmick-freighted telecast, led by standup superstar Nate Bargatze. 

It wasn’t just gender that set Hargitay apart from those predecessors, though. She was also the Emmys’ first emcee not known primarily for her comedy work since 2008, when the five first-ever nominees in a new reality-TV-hosting category, including Ryan Seacrest and Heidi Klum, delivered what critics agreed was one of the worst ceremonies in history. Hargitay is, of course, synonymous with Olivia Benson, the heroic sex-crimes investigator she has portrayed in NBC’s Law & Order: SVU since its 1999 premiere. What casual fans might not have known is that she trained with legendary improv troupe the Groundlings and appeared in sitcoms like Seinfeld; “all I wanted to be was you,” she told Amy Poehler on the latter’s podcast, Good Hang. Hargitay also went into the gig with lots of goodwill from audiences inside the Peacock Theater and at home. Not only is she an advocate for survivors of sexual violence, on screen and off; she’s also in the midst of a pop-culture renaissance, having won two Emmys for the documentary she directed about her famous mom, Jayne Mansfield, conquered the one-woman play Every Brilliant Thing on Broadway, and endeared herself to Knicks fans as a stalwart supporter on the sidelines of this year’s NBA Finals. In light of all this, Variety dubbed her “a national best friend.”

Maybe that explains why Hargitay was just kinda there with us throughout the ceremony, more an affable companion than a genuine ringmaster. In a monologue that was practically over before it started, she quipped about how many of the stars in the room she’d “arrested” in their guest appearances as SVU’s twisted perp of the week. There was a sendup of Nicole Kidman’s five-year-old viral AMC Theatres commercial, featuring an interjection (“That’s my line”) from Kidman herself. It wasn’t the only joke of the night that felt stale (see: Hargitay griping that the Game of Thrones furs she donned to introduce two of the franchise’s stars were “hot as balls”). Minutes after Hargitay joked that male hosts had dominated the Emmys for so long because “for 15 straight years, Amy and Tina said no,” Poehler presented an award with a joke about the night’s losers outnumbering its winners that surpassed anything in the monologue.

She was only the first scene stealer in a program full of them—and I’m not even talking about the many deserving winners, to whom the Emmys do rightly belong. (It does seem worth noting that Writing for a Drama Series winner Vince Gilligan made the strongest political statement of a telecast whose scripted portions steered conspicuously clear of controversy, urging Americans to show each other respect and “stop listening to a relative few who tell us that that is for suckers and who get their power from dividing us.”) Presenting the award for Lead Actor in a Drama Series, frequent awards-show MVP John Mulaney eclipsed the monologue in both humor and stage time with a tongue-in-cheek celebration of men that ultimately had him reading from A Guy’s Guide to Being a Man’s Man by Frank Vincent. Andrew Rannells swooped in with a burst of musical theater energy to save Hargitay’s shaky song about canceled series. The host didn’t even get to own the obligatory pre-taped SVU parody, whose mock-investigation into whether Taylor Swift would attend the Emmys landed as a flimsy excuse to get the most famous entertainer on Earth (who is also famously an SVU superfan and Hargitay pal) on screen. 

All told, it was neither an excruciating Emmys nor a great one. There were certainly some lovely moments. The Catherine O’Hara tribute from her on-screen children Macaulay Culkin, Annie Murphy, and Dan Levy stood out as moving in its genuine warmth and specificity. More often, opportunities to honor a beloved person or show were squandered; was Sarah Michelle Gellar and David Boreanaz presenting an award together really the exciting 30th anniversary Buffy the Vampire Slayer reunion fans were anticipating? Similarly, Hargitay didn’t embarrass herself. Many of the flaws in her performance should be blamed on lackluster writing, from a non sequitur segue after her self-deprecating Ghoulies flashback to that unforgivable “Hannah Mammogramma” pun. She may have failed to match the Levys’ energy or belatedly prove herself as a great comic talent, but at least she avoided a Bargatze- or Seacrest-level disaster and came out with her likability intact. Regardless of whether she gets invited back, here’s to the Emmys giving women more chances to be wonderful, awful, and even just-OK Emmys hosts.    

A Russian businessman with ties to the country’s President Vladimir Putin footed the bill for celebrations following the wedding of President Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., Trump Jr. and his wife, Bettina, have confirmed.

Oligarch Umar Kremlev’s contributions to the wedding festivities were first reported by ProPublica, which wrote that the Russian businessman spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent out a private island in the Bahamas and a fireworks show. The outlet reported that the guest list included roughly 50 guests, including family members, close friends, and Kremlev, who according to ProPublica was part of a larger group of Russian guests whose presence was a source of confusion for other attendees.

Trump Jr. and Bettina Trump shared a statement on social media in response to criticism over his financial involvement in the event, defending what she described as an “extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend” and denying any political motive behind Kremlev’s attendance.  

“Our dear friend Umar very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations for us AFTER our wedding,” they wrote in a post on Bettina Trump’s Instagram on Monday in a caption that accompanied a series of photos from the evenings in question showing the couple partying with other guests, performances, and the beach-side venue. “It’s unfortunate that something so personal and happy can be recast as something political or sinister simply because of who someone is or where they come from. Friendship doesn’t require a political motive.”

The Trumps’ connection to a figure closely tied to the leadership in Russia—and his apparently lavish financial contribution to the wedding celebrations—has however drawn concerns from Democratic politicians and experts in ethics and intelligence, who have raised questions about what might be expected in return for the "gift" and warned that Russian intelligence services may seek to weaponize such a relationship.

Here’s what to know about Kremlev and his ties to Putin and the Trump family. 

Who is Umar Kremlev?

Kremlev, 43, is a native of Tajikistan. He was previously known by his surname at birth, Lutfulloyev, which he changed to Kremlev in 2010 when he was in his late twenties, according to the independent Russian news organization Proekt. Prior to that name change, Kremlev was convicted of extortion in 2004 and battery in 2007. 

He went on to join a notorious biker gang, the Night Wolves, not long after changing his name, according to Russian news reports. Outlets reported that during his time in the group, which was the first official biker community in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Kremlev met Alexei Rubezhnoi, who currently leads Putin’s presidential security service. The Washington Post reported that Putin himself is considered an honorary member of the Night Wolves. 

In 2015, Kremlev, who had boxed since he was a child, founded a company, Patriot, that promoted boxing matches. Two years later, he became the secretary general of the International Boxing Association (IBA) after a shake up led to Rubezhnoi becoming the chairman of its supervisory board. Rubezhnoi then nominated Kremlev to the secretary general position; from there, Kremlev went on to be elected as president of the IBA in 2020.

In 2024, Kremlev acquired Rolf, Russia’s largest car dealership group, which had previously been state-owned.

“These services,” Triplett says in reference to the Kremlin, “are exceptional at finding pain points and then and then manipulating them, and you can get people into difficult positions.”

What are Kremlev’s ties to Putin?

Kremlev has been connected with Putin for years, as has been documented through public appearances and business dealings. 

During Kremlev’s time as IBA president, Gazprom, a state-owned energy company and one of the largest companies in Russia, became a financial backer of the boxing federation. 

That same year, Kremlev stood alongside Putin during the opening of the International Boxing Center in Moscow.

Under Putin, many Russian government officials or oligarchs serve in supervisory positions for sports organizations in the country.

“Umar is guided by Putin. It was using the sport for soft political power,” an ex-IBA board member told ProPublica of Kremlev’s leadership of the organization. “It’s geopolitics. That it’s boxing is just happenstance.”

Following Kremlev’s acquisition of Rolf in 2024, meanwhile, Putin repealed the company’s federal ownership, which he had established through a presidential decree in 2023.

He was also honored by Putin with the Order of Friendship, according to the IBA, a state accolade that celebrates those who have helped to improve the Russian Federation in various sectors. And earlier this year, Kemlev accompanied Putin on a visit to China, according to Chinese state media. Kremlev’s press office told ProPublica in a statement that he was not part of the Russian President’s “official delegation” during the trip.

What are Kremlev’s ties to the Trump family?

Kremlev has been publicly linked to President Trump and Trump Jr. through the IBA in recent months. It’s unclear how else he may be connected with the Trump family.

After President Trump returned to the White House last year, Kremlev and the CEO of the boxing organization sent him an open letter congratulating him on his re-election and expressing the IBA’s “sincere gratitude for your strong and principled stance regarding the inadmissibility in the participation of ineligible athletes in women’s boxing competition,” in reference to Trump’s stance against the participation of transgender women in women’s sports. 

The letter then nodded towards the 2028 Olympic Games, which will be hosted by the U.S. in Los Angeles, saying that the IBA looks ahead “with great optimism to the possibility of working together to make the Olympic movement great again, advance the sport of boxing and to champion the rights of athletes globally.”

Last September, Trump Jr. sat on a panel discussion hosted by the IBA in Istanbul, during which he also critiqued the participation of transgender women in women’s sports while onstage with Kremlev.

Kremlev’s press office said in its statement to ProPublica that he and Trump Jr. initially met “a couple years ago” and that the two men “have a friendly relationship.” It added that Kremlev “has never discussed political matters with any of his American friends and acquaintances,” Trump Jr. included.

A spokesperson for Trump Jr. told the New York Timesthat the two men bonded over boxing and hunting after meeting through a mutual friend, and that they are not in business with one another.

The President, who did not attend Trump Jr.’s wedding or the following celebrations, said in a statement provided to the Times on Monday that “I have no idea who Umar is, never heard of him, and he didn’t pay for Don and Bettina’s wedding, which took place at a totally different location, and on a different day.”

A spokeswoman for Eric Trump, Trump Jr.’s brother, meanwhile told the Times and ProPublica, “Eric has absolutely no clue who this person is.”

Intelligence experts raise concerns

“If the allegations are true, then it certainly reflects poor judgment on Donald Trump Jr.’s part,” Dan Hoffman, an intelligence expert with over 30 years of experience working in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), U.S. military, Department of State, and Department of Commerce, tells TIME. “It is highly unlikely Umar Kremlev would have any interaction with any member of the Trump family without the Kremlin knowing about it beforehand.”

Holden Triplett, who served nearly 15 years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and was previously the Director for Counterintelligence at the National Security Council at the White House during Trump’s first Administration, says that any kind of relationship between an individual with ties to the President and someone linked to the Kremlin can pose a risk to the U.S.—though he says he doesn’t find the Trumps’ apparent relationship with Kremlev to be particularly alarming.

“Even the most above-board, non-threatening-nefarious relationship could be weaponized by intelligence services,” he tells TIME. “Russians commonly try to use, as a lot of intel agencies do, business relationships as a non-alarming way to establish connection with someone … It is one that the Russians have used with lots of, or attempts at least, with lots of other individuals in politics.”

This isn’t the first time Trump Jr. has drawn controversy over interactions related to Russia. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer who claimed she could provide information that would hurt his father’s Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton’s campaign. That meeting later became a point in the investigation special counsel Robert Mueller conducted into President Trump’s campaign and its ties to Russia, though Trump Jr. was never accused of wrongdoing in the probe. 

Sen. Mitch McConnell announced that he’s casting a vote in the Senate on Monday, marking the end of his months-long absence from the upper chamber after he was hospitalized in June following a fall.

“Today, I’ll cast my first Senate vote since I took a bad fall back in June,” McConnell said in a post on X on Monday evening. “I’m really looking forward to being back on the Senate floor and seeing my colleagues.”

The 84-year-old Kentucky Republican went on to say that his "recovery has been a long and often frustrating process,” adding that the “lingering effects” of his bout with polio during his childhood have also impacted his recovery.

“I’m still not quite back to 100%, but I’ve assured [Senate Majority Leader John Thune] that, as I continue with physical therapy on the advice of my doctors, I will do my best to be present for tough votes when our Conference needs me,” McConnell said.

McConnell’s office initially shared little to no information when the Senator was hospitalized on June 14. After weeks of uncertainty—and his absence from the Senate—rumors and speculation over the state of his health began swirling online. In July, Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear shared a letter in which he urged McConnell to “fully update Kentuckians regarding the current status of [his] health.” 

Read More: Kentucky Gov. Beshear Keeps Pushing for Info on McConnell’s Health. He Says He’s ‘Heard Absolutely Nothing Back’

A few days later, the Republican lawmaker disclosed that he had been taken to the hospital after he “briefly” lost consciousness following a fall, and that he later had to grapple with a “mild case of pneumonia.” He pushed back, though, on rumors that he was suffering from any severe conditions, saying that his doctors confirmed that he didn’t break any bones or suffer a concussion, and that he didn’t have any tumors or experience a heart attack.

At the end of July, McConnell’s office shared another update, stating that the Senator was maintaining his physical therapy, per his doctors’ orders, and that he had been discharged from the hospital but was not, at that time, medically cleared to leave the rehabilitation center he was at and return to the upper chamber. On Aug. 6, his office announced that he had been discharged from the rehabilitation facility that day and would continue his recovery at home.

McConnell plans to retire in January, when his term comes to an end. This is not the first time that he has had a health scare; he has had multiple falling incidents in recent years.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada is seeking a “unique alliance” with the European Union as he aims to strengthen international ties amid a deepening trade war with the U.S.

“What we are looking, and will begin discussions for, [is] a unique alliance with the European Union,” Carney told reporters at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday. “We share the same values, we have the same priorities, and we have very complementary strengths.”

Canada’s European pivot has been months in the making, following growing tensions between Carney’s government and the Trump Administration. Canada’s retaliatory tariffs came into effect last week, matching the economic pressure imposed by the U.S. after negotiations collapsed last month. Carney has encouraged Canadians to take back economic power at the kitchen table, and many have embraced a boycott of U.S. products. Trump has also repeatedly threatened Canada’s sovereignty, speaking openly of his desire to annex the country and make it the “51st state.” 

The U.S. accounted for 72.5% of Canadian merchandise exports in 2025, according to the country's annual trade report, making it Canada’s largest trading partner. But Carney is keen to build an international support network that isn’t reliant on the U.S.

Over the past 18 months since Carney entered office, Canada has signed agreements that cover trade, defense, more with countries such as Indonesia, Japan, and Ecuador.

At the E.U.-Canada summit in June 2025, Canada established a new Security and Defense Partnership with the bloc. “Our partnership is grounded in the core values we share: democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and open, rules-based markets," read a joint statement marking the occasion.

In January, Carney notably met with China’s President Xi Jinping to forge what he referred to as a “new strategic partnership” to end Canada's economic reliance on the American market. Carney agreed to cut his country’s 100% tariff on Chinese electric cars in return for lower tariffs on Canadian farm products, including canola seeds, a major Canadian export.

Continuing with these efforts, Carney on Monday brought together executives and senior leaders from global investment firms to encourage them to invest in the country at the Canada Investment Summit in Toronto. 

He’s heading for a three-day trip to Europe on Tuesday, where he’ll meet with various European leaders including British Prime Minister Andy Burnham. He’s also set to address the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, on Thursday, in what could symbolize the mark of a new era between Canada and Europe.

Here’s a look at the alliance options on the table between Canada and the bloc, and what that could mean for U.S.-Canada relations.

Is Canada trying to join the E.U.?

Canada is not looking to join the E.U. as a member, Carney clarified amid questions over what a firmer relationship between his country and the 27-member bloc might look like.

“We’re not looking to become a member,” Carney said, emphasizing he’s instead keen to form an alliance. “We’re stronger together, and this is at a time where the world’s more dangerous and divided, and friends need to stick together in these times.”

Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union explicitly states that any “European State” can apply for membership, making Canada ineligible.

However, a report in the Wall Street Journal, quoting officials from both sides, said Carney is keen for Canada to become an “associate member” of the E.U.

When approached for comment, the European Commission directed TIME to remarks made during a Monday press briefing in Brussels.

“Canada is a strategically important partner for the European Union, and indeed a close friend,” the European Commission’s deputy chief spokesperson Olof Gill told reporters. “We deeply value this co-operation. You will recall that at our E.U.-Canada summit last year, we set a very high level of ambition for cooperation across the board, this year our ambition is even higher.”

When asked directly what discussions had taken place between Canadian and European officials, or what this “unique alliance” could look like, Gill declined to answer.

TIME has reached out to the Canadian Prime Minister’s office for comment.

Frank Schimmelfennig, a professor of European politics at ETH Zurich, predicts that Canada may wish to pursue deeper cooperation through additional trade agreements, or take inspiration from countries that have close relationships with the bloc without being E.U. members.

“Canada is already one of the most integrated non-European countries. It has the densest network of institutional relationships with the E.U.,” he tells TIME, referencing the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), a major free-trade deal between the E.U. and Canada, signed in 2016, and Horizon Europe, an initiative on collaborative research launched by the European Union in 2021 and joined by Canada in 2024.

“Canada could have more of the same, which means additional sectoral agreements for sectors that haven't been covered yet,” he says. “That would basically be a lateral extension of the current relationship. Anything more, would mean access to the internal market which would require an arrangement like the EEA.”

The European Economic Area (EEA) includes countries such as Iceland and Norway, which are not members of the E.U., and provides for the free movement of goods, services, and people within the E.U.’s member states, while enabling cooperation across multiple industries.

“The EEA countries have access to the E.U. internal market in return for adopting the relevant E.U. regulations and directives, so that would be a much denser legal integration than what Canada has now,” says Schimmelfennig.

Burgeoning E.U. relationship comes amid deepening U.S.-Canada trade rift

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, Carney declared a "rupture" in the international rules-based order. He said "great powers" were using tariffs and financial systems as instruments of coercion. He did not directly name Trump or the U.S.

The speech came at a moment of acute transatlantic tension over Trump’s push to annex the semi-autonomous Danish territory of Greenland and his short-lived threats to tariff European allies until Denmark relented.

Patrick Leblond, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa, says Carney’s movements now are in response to the world “seeing a United States that is becoming more protectionist, nationalist, and willing to use its leverage points to gain concessions, including on very close allies like Canada and Europeans.”

“For Canada, [the consensus is] we need to do more with partners who share our values based on liberal democracy, open markets, rule of law, international agreements, and the first port of call for Carney is the European Union,” Leblond tells TIME.

These trade efforts, he continues, may allow Carney to “build momentum, and hopefully bring other countries” into a broader coalition of what the Canadian leader has often called “middle powers."

In July, Carney, in a joint op-ed with Finland’s President Alexander Stubb, urged the “middle powers of the world” to “unite.”

Championing middle power countries that possess significant economic power and diplomatic influence, but lack market or military power, the leaders implored: “In a rapidly changing world, we have the grit and the sisu to chart the path ahead—and we know that so have many others whom we invite to join us on this quest.”

Leblod explains that “ultimately trust has been eroded” with the U.S. and Canada must re-think its place in the wider global economy in the long-term.

“The first time we thought Trump was a blimp, but he's not, and we're looking at what's happening in terms of democracy and political polarization, and a lot of Canadians think we can't rely on the U.S.,” he says.

According to a poll by Nanos Research, conducted between Aug. 30 and Sept. 2, 74% of Canadians disagreed that “the U.S. is a trustworthy ally of Canada.” An earlier poll by Angus Reid Institute, conducted between July 10-14, found that 42% of respondents said they think the Canadian government should approach the U.S. as an enemy/potential threat.

The E.U. has also clashed with Trump over tariffs, his Greenland annexation threats, and the wider split between the U.S. President and several European leaders.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in February warned of “a deep rift” between Europe and the United States, arguing that the latter “will not be powerful enough to go it alone.” But relations have since soured further amid the fallout of the Iran war, particularly between Merz and Trump.

Meanwhile, Canada has also embraced Europe in the cultural space. It was announced earlier this year that Canada will ​join the Eurovision Song Contest in 2027, becoming the first new ⁠participant since Australia in 2015.

Carney to address European Parliament

Carney’s highly-anticipated speech at the European Parliament in Strasbourg this week stems from an invitation extended by European Parliament president Roberta Metsola.

Leblond predicts Carney will use the speech “to reiterate a lot of the things he mentioned at Davos,” but with a strong, intentional focus on the E.U.

“I would expect that he will use that address to call on the E.U. to work with Canada to push this idea of co-operation beyond the North Atlantic and include partners and allies in the Indo-Pacific,” he says.

The Canadian leader is also expected to be a guest at the State of the European Union debate, where European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is due to deliver a speech outlining the Commission's work and plans for the future.

Von der Leyen called E.U.–Canada ties “one of the closest partnerships in the world” when she celebrated 50 years of E.U. diplomatic presence in Canada in May. She declared the two sides were “closer than ever” as they confronted wars, an energy crisis and “new fractures in old alliances.”

Schimmelfennig says Canada inching closer to the E.U. is a strong display of “how both partners are affected by the deteriorating transatlantic relationship” with the U.S. “They feel that they need to move together because the world is getting more dangerous, and more difficult for both [parties],” he says.

In the Netflix teen drama Crew Girl, 16-year-old solo rowing champ Teagan Tao has her life uprooted when her hotel-magnate dad gets a tip that he’s about to be arrested for financial crimes and disappears. Suddenly, Teagan (Miku Martineau) and her flighty mom, Ella (Jessica Paré), are broke and moving across the country to the crumbling New England house where Ella grew up. The town is all clam shacks and marinas—and the prestigious Easton Prep, where Teagan matriculates thanks to an education trust that was somehow spared from the seizure of the Taos’ assets. The only problem, besides the rampant snobbery, is that Eaton has no girls’ crew team. Forced to coxswain for the boys, Teagan starts falling for two of her teammates: kind, working-class townie Cam Dillinger (Kyle Clark) and bratty airline scion Josh Regis (Sam Braun), who’s locked in a premature succession battle with his cousin Ryder (Connor Paton). Meanwhile, a gay rower, Baloo (Jude Wilson), is secretly hooking up with a guy on a rival team.  

All of which is to say that Crew Girl, whose first season is now the no. 1 show on Netflix, plays like a greatest-hits compilation of teen romance tropes. First among the classics is a love triangle (see: Twilight, Riverdale, The Vampire Diaries, My So-Called Life). As is often the case, this one is enhanced by the quaintness of its small-town setting (Dawson’s Creek, One Tree Hill) and complicated by both wealth disparities (Gossip Girl, Pretty in Pink) and one character’s fish-out-of-water, new-kid-in-school status (The O.C., Beverly Hills, 90210). There’s also a youthful mom (you might remember Paré as Mad Men’s Megan) doing a painfully slow will-they-won’t-they dance with an old friend (Thomas Cadrot), à la Gilmore Girls’ Lorelai and Luke.

But what’s remarkable about Crew Girl—which is, despite an effervescent lead and a few fun storylines built around eccentric minor crew-boy characters, otherwise decidedly mid—is how comprehensively it showcases the conventions unique to the genre’s newest generation. TV has, in the last few years, capitalized on publishing’s pandemic-era romance boom, churning out love stories tailored to the young, female audience driving authors like Emily Henry and Ali Hazelwood up best-seller lists. Often, that means adapting popular YA or New Adult novels; Prime Video’s success with Jenny Han’s coming-of-age, beach-town love triangle The Summer I Turned Pretty paved the way for Netflix’s take on Ali Novak’s My Life with the Walter Boys as well as XO, Kitty, Han’s spinoff of her book-to-film franchise To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. Queer romance, mainly of the gay male variety, from Netflix’s tender and chaste Heartstopper to the spicy Canadian phenomenon Heated Rivalry, which streams on HBO Max in the U.S., has also jumped from page to screen. (Crew Girl isn’t an adaptation, but a novelization released in tandem with the show suggests it’s meant to feel like one.) This year has seen a particular glut of new titles, from Netflix’s figure-skating drama Finding Her Edge to Prime’s Off Campus and Every Year After. The latter platform even scored a hit in August with an exceptional original teen romance, Sterling Point, proving the niche isn’t entirely dependent on preexisting IP. 

These shows have all the love triangles and class struggles and outsider angst that have defined youthful romance tales since Jane Austen was writing them, capturing eternal adolescent fantasies (being desirable enough to have two people fighting over you) and fears (not measuring up to the rich kids) alike. Pretty appears to have sparked a mini-trend of siblings competing for the same crush, a trope that also pops up in Every Year After, Walter Boys, and Finding Her Edge. The fraught post-DEI-backlash politics of representation, especially for the most racially and ethnically diverse generation on record, are evident in the shows’ leads. Like Crew Girl’s Martineau, many are multiracial but play characters with vaguely defined backgrounds who live with either a single white parent or a white surrogate family. (New York magazine just spotlighted the "Wasian generation," a long list of up-and-coming white and Asian stars, citing Heated Rivalry’s Hudson Williams, Pretty’s Lola Tung, and XO, Kitty’s Anna Cathcart among other white and Asian stars.) Liberal and minority viewers get to see mixed-race families and romances, and a TV landscape that isn’t all white. The anti-”woke” crowd is spared identity politics, non-English dialogue, and often all other forms of cultural specificity. Savvy streamers avoid backlash from both sides.

What’s most striking about these series, though, are the novel ways in which they embrace physicality. With the steamy exceptions of Heated Rivalry and Off Campus (both geared toward a slightly older age range), the sexual content is pretty PG-13. Objectification is kept to a minimum, at least by characters we’re supposed to like. Yet bodies are conspicuously activated, in what feel like pointed responses to—and, for young viewers, escape hatches from—digital disembodiment. 

Summer romances, and specifically those that bring together wealthy vacationers and the locals who work for them, aren’t new to fiction. It’s the prominence of nature in the recent crop of teen romances (and teen hits in other genres, like Netflix’s Outer Banks) that makes an impression. As it toggles between protagonist Percy’s (Sadie Soverall) life in her late 20s and a sequence of idyllic teenage lake-house summers glimpsed in flashbacks, Every Year After uses its setting to visualize two brothers’ rivalry for her affection. In one recurring image, Percy sits at the edge of her house’s dock, looking on as sensitive Sam (Matt Cornett) and arrogant Charlie (Michael Bradway) shove each other off a slippery wooden raft. Sterling Point brings a high-strung New York City girl (Ella Rubin) to an island in Canada’s Muskoka region, a paradise of lush, lakefront forests. Her rich-vs.-poor-boy love triangle plays out over lazy days spent boating, swimming, and sunbathing on rocky beaches. Cellphone service is conveniently spotty.

An abundance of sports romances make such physicality even more explicit. In Off Campus and Heated Rivalry, the boys who serve as eye candy for any viewer attracted to men are always slamming into each other on the ice and changing together in the locker room. In Finding Her Edge, a show about young Olympics hopefuls at a residential training center, an ice-dancing duo is bound to become a love affair (as long as the guy is into girls). Even the neurotic hero of Heartstopper (Joe Locke) finds first love on the rugby field. Crew Girl casts many thirsty gazes on the musclebound upper bodies of Teagan’s teammates. These stories aren’t just about the sweaty sensuality of athletes in motion, though. They’re about ambition and passion and the competitive spirit as romantic accelerants—about how the shared commitment to spend hours every day striving for excellence while one’s peers are screwing around online can bond people.

Why use athletics as a fig leaf for sex in the uncensored age of streaming, years after shows like Euphoria and Skins obliterated the notion that TV for teens should be wholesome? Maybe because modesty is in. Gen Z’s squeamishness about sex on screen has fueled successive waves of hand-wringing among their elders. The so-called sex recession plaguing this cohort in real life has been duly noted, with suggested explanations ranging from extreme onlineness in general to poor socialization during the COVID years of Zoom school and virtual prom in particular. The thing is, biologically speaking, teens are the same jumble of hormones in 2026 that they were during the Summer of Love. “Many of them are very horny,” Carter Sherman, the author of The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future, assured WIRED last year. “They would like to be having sex, and in fact they feel a lot of shame over the fact that they haven't had sex yet or that they’re not having sex enough.” As transitional objects to ease anxieties around physical intimacy, swimsuits and erg machines make a lot of sense.

The most salient takeaway from Crew Girl and its ilk might be buried in a less eye-catching finding of 2025’s Teens and Screens, the annual UCLA report on young people’s attitudes toward entertainment media that reliably stokes the “Gen Z hates sex scenes” panic. Relatability is the new watchword. Whereas millennials wallowed in wealth porn, took vicarious flight with superheroes, and sucked the life out of vampire content, today’s adolescents ranked “people with lives like mine” as the No. 1 element they’re looking for in TV shows and movies. Although they’re aspirational enough to feel escapist, with their summer houses and prep-school popularity contests, this season’s teen romances reflect that shift. For a generation raised in the sensory deprivation tank of the internet, whose fears of infinite digital liminality just gave us the horror movies Backrooms and It Ends, the fantasy is humbler than superpowers. It’s being grounded in physical space, a human body capable of sharing tactile experiences with other embodied people. Sex is one way to make those connections. Crew is another. 

A happy ending for Shang Zhitao (Sun Qian) and Luan Nian (Jing Boran) on Netflix’s Chinese workplace romance The Early Spring was incredibly hard-won. At the start of the 24-episode series based on a web novel by Gu Niang Bie Ku, recent college graduate Zhitao is hired by Beijing advertising agency Lime—against bigwig Nian’s wishes. The initial power imbalance between ordinary office worker Zhitao and her boss Nian is significant, and there is a company policy against romantic entanglements between co-workers. Still, they quickly fall into bed together. Over the next six years, the two are on-again, off-again as a prideful, emotionally repressed Nian struggles to say nice things to Zhitao and Zhitao struggles to balance her love for Nian with her commitment to her career.  

Why does Shang Zhitao leave Beijing?

For Zhitao, Beijing isn’t just a place—it is a symbol of her career ambitions, and the kind of life she aspires to. While The Early Spring’s central focus is romance, the C-drama also delves into other aspects of Zhitao’s character and journey. A major throughline of the show is Zhitao’s efforts to make Beijing a home, and to succeed not just at a company or in a bustling metropolis, but in one of the most prestigious companies in one of China’s most global cities. So, when Zhitao chooses to leave Beijing in Episode 21, “A Grand Retreat,” she isn’t just retreating from Nian, she is retreating from the lifestyle that Beijing demands for success.

It’s not just one event that informs Zhitao’s decision to leave Beijing. When she tells Nian that she wants to get married and he tells her he doesn’t really think about it, Zhitao begins to reconsider their relationship. Then, one of Zhitao’s best friends dies by suicide. Finally, she gets passed over for a promotion in favor of a less experienced, nepo-baby co-worker. When she seeks comfort from Nian, he offers none. It’s the final straw for Zhitao, who begins to feel like all the time and energy she has committed to their relationship might not have been worth it. 

The Early Spring’s happy ending

Heading into the final installments of the drama, Zhitao has finally called it quits on her toxic dynamic with Nian, moving home to Harbin and starting her own advertising agency in the snowy, northeastern city where she grew up. A few years pass before a bereft Nian attempts to reconcile. Zhitao’s company has partnered with Lime for a local project, and Nian uses it as an excuse to see Zhitao again. Zhitao is understandably reluctant to let Nian back into her life, but Nian uses the excuse of their dog, a Samoyed named Luke, to spend time with his ex-girlfriend.

Over the following months, Nian elbows his way into Zhitao’s life and attempts to show her that he has changed. He apologizes for his past behavior, and mostly listens to her when she asks for space. Eventually, Zhitao’s love for Nian wins out and she lets him back into her heart and her life. Nian makes it clear to Zhitao’s parents that he intends to marry their daughter, and then proposes to Zhitao by decorating an art gallery with photos from their time together. He calls it Flora’s Museum of Time and Eternity, using the English name Zhitao used when she worked at Lime. Lian gifts Zhitao a necklace with the “L” key from the typewriter Zhitao knocked over in his office during their first in-person meeting. He invites Zhitao’s closest friends and family, and asks the woman he has loved for almost a decade to marry him. She says yes, finally believing that the two can have a relationship as equals. In the final scenes of the show, we see Zhitao and Nian splitting their time between Harbin and Beijing, happy together.

Will there be a second season of The Early Spring?

The Early Spring has done incredibly well on Youku and Netflix, where the C-drama has steadily been in the Global Top Ten list. East Asian dramas don’t tend to have second seasons, but The Early Spring could easily be extended with the adaptation of the second book in the web novel series. Titled Miss Talkative, the sequel novel follows the unlikely romance between Zhitao’s work bestie Lumi and her stoic, more traditional co-worker Will. A developing relationship between the two is hinted at in The Early Spring TV series, but the plot line is left unresolved. 

Netflix’s increasing commitment to Chinese dramas

Though Netflix has become known as a home for Korean dramas, with the U.S. streamer investing billions of dollars into the East Asian country’s TV and film industries, the same has not been true for Chinese dramas. 

China is not interested in giving any U.S. company too much power in its economy, which has kept the streamer from setting up shop in the country. In 2016, Netflix released a letter to shareholders alongside a quarterly earnings report stating: “The regulatory environment for foreign digital content services in China has become challenging. We now plan to license content to existing online service providers in China rather than operate our own service in China in the near term.” That same year, the Chinese government implemented a de facto ban on South Korean entertainment in China following the announcement that the U.S. would be installing an anti-missile system in South Korea. Netflix is still not legally available in China.

In the decade since, Netflix’s catalogue and business model have become increasingly international. As Netflix focuses on expansion into international markets, C-dramas have become an increasingly valuable asset. While C-dramas have a growing audience in the U.S., they are even more popular in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam. “Audiences in Asia have long loved this category, but we're making them accessible to an even bigger global viewership,” Maya Huang, Head of Chinese-Language Content at Netflix, tells TIME. 

Netflix has been growing their Mainland China offerings since 2024. Recent hits have included historical fantasy romance Pursuit of Jade and costume drama Ashes to Crown, adding to the organic popularity of earlier series like The Untamed, a historical fantasy romance based on a BL web novel that blew up in popularity during the pandemic. As Netflix looks towards the future, C-dramas are part of their plan, with “a team dedicated to finding the most authentic and best-in-class Chinese language stories” including ones—like The Early Spring—that are simulcast with a Chinese streamer. “With Netflix's reach, dubs and subtitles, and our ability to release titles simultaneously worldwide, we're seeing audiences discover these stories in the U.S., South America, Europe and the Middle East,” says Huang. “We want to give these fans more of what they love—so there's plenty more to come from our Chinese language slate.”

Every time you welcome a guest into your home, you may be letting in thousands of other ones as well—if you allow your visitors to wear their shoes when they enter. The world outside your door is a messy place—full of bacteria, viruses, and environmental toxins—and the soles of your shoes can pick up a lot.

According to one 2023 CBS News/YouGov poll, 63% of Americans regularly remove their shoes when they get home, and 24% ask their guests to do the same. This year, the Indiana Department of Health launched a “Shoes Free Protects You and Me” ad campaign about the benefits of a no-shoes policy at home, targeting tracked-in lead in particular. 

How serious is the risk that shoes pose, and should your house be a no-shoes zone?

What the research says about wearing shoes inside

The published research on shoe contamination is not extensive, but some stands out. In one 2008 study, Charles Gerba, professor of virology at the University of Arizona, studied 26 pairs of shoes that had been worn for three months in the outside world and came up with some alarming results. The shoes carried between 3,600 and 8 million colony-forming units of bacteria, both on the inside and outside of the shoes. E. coli, or fecal bacteria, was the most common organism being tracked around.

“[About] 80% of the bottoms of the shoes had fecal bacteria on them,” Gerba wrote in an email to TIME, “largely picking them up from the floors of public restrooms, which always have fecal bacteria on them. They may also pick them up outside, in places that dogs and birds are.”

According to Gerba’s numbers, shoes are significantly more germ-ridden than public toilet seats, which have an average of 3,200 colony forming bacterial units.

E. coli is not the only infectious agent that shoes carry around. According to University of Houston researchers, 40% of shoes tested carry C. difficile, an intestinal bacterium that causes diarrhea. Health care settings are particularly germ-filled. One 2016 meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Microbiology surveyed 13 studies, tracing where shoes have traveled and what they picked up there. A small study in that group found that after physicians did rounds in hospitals, 65% of their shoes tested positive for either antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) or Enterococcus faecalis, another gastrointestinal bacterium. Another found that 48% of shoes worn in operating rooms tested positive for at least one pathogenic bacterium, most commonly Staphylococcus.

Rural areas, where livestock, birds, and other animals are common, are ready sources of Salmonella and other bacteria. One 2009 study conducted in rural Alaska had people put on sterilized boots, then walk along a randomly selected outdoor path, and finally step onto a piece of sterilized linoleum and remove the boots. From just that walk, 70% of the boots were positive for multiple gut bacteria. People then wore the contaminated boots on short walks across a sterile floor. On half of those walks, bacteria were transferred to the flooring.

Urban settings present their own perils, particularly as a result of dogs being walked on sidewalks and in parks. Even in cities where owners routinely pick up after their dogs, traces of fecal bacteria—and pools of urine—regularly collect on heavily foot-trafficked routes. 

The type of flooring bacteria love

In one 2023 study published in Design, Architecture, and Ergonomics, investigators from Northeastern University in New York City sampled sidewalk rain puddles, shoe bottoms, and flooring inside one of the school’s buildings on its urban campus. On average, they found 30,000 gut bacteria per 100 milliliters of water in puddles on the neighborhood sidewalks. Every shoe sole they sampled from student and teacher volunteers carried varying levels of the same bacteria, and the interior of the building was also contaminated—especially in carpeted areas.

“The surface of your flooring makes an enormous difference,” says Alessandra Leri, professor of chemistry and biology at the school and the lead author of the study. “If you have carpets, they function as a reservoir of bacteria.” But no matter the interior floor surface, she says, “shoe soles are a serious vector of transmission of fecal bacteria from the outdoor environment to the indoor environment.”

Shoes track in more than germs

PFAS, the “forever chemicals” so named for how long they linger in the environment and our bodies, are regularly picked up by shoes and used in manufacturing the soles. Lead dust, which can often be stirred up and released into the air during remodeling of older homes and other buildings, can cling to shoes as well. Pesticides, used both on farms and in home gardens, are similarly free-riders on our shoes.

Where shoe-removal matters most

In most homes in which people do not remove their shoes upon entering, the area nearest the front door is generally the most contaminated. “We found that the first four steps at the entrance to the household are the germiest floor area in the home,” says Gerba. “We also did tracer studies putting dye and tracer viruses on the bottom of shoes and could see how they left a trail on the floor.”

Wherever contaminants spread in the home, they present the greatest danger to the household members who have the most contact with the floor—typically babies and small children who crawl and play on surfaces. 

Leri follows a no-shoes policy in her home and leaves her shoes by the door when she enters. She does not ask guests to remove their shoes, especially when she hosts parties. “If you are having a cocktail party, you are sensitive to guests feeling like shoes are a part of their ensemble,” she says. But she does roll up the rugs before company arrives, making it easier to clean the floors when the guests are gone.

More people—especially younger people—may be taking a harder line, enforcing a universal ban on shoes for anyone in the home. While only 7% of people over 65 and 13% of people ages  45 to 64 require guests to remove shoes before entering, according to the CBS/YouGov poll, 44% of people in the 18 to 29 demographic do. 

“I find that many people have already adopted that custom,” says Leri. “It is a more hygienic way of living.”

In just a few years, AI has gone from a specialist topic to something everyone has opinions on. It has been praised as miraculous, condemned as dangerous, and debated everywhere from boardrooms to dinner tables. But between these poles of euphoria and dread lies the reality most of us now face: a technology powerful enough to reshape how work gets done, yet still deeply dependent on human judgment.

Too often, headlines focus on extremes, but the practical questions are far more grounded. How do we manage this technology? How do we and our teams work alongside it effectively? How do we capture its benefits without compromising our values or our goals? To find useful answers, we have to start by understanding where we are, what has truly changed, and what has not.

Artificial intelligence, after all, is not new. It has been with us since at least 1956, when a small group of computer scientists gathered at Dartmouth College to explore a deceptively simple question: Can machines think? Since then, the technology has seen decades of progress and setbacks, so-called AI summers and winters.

AI didn’t suddenly appear in the world in the 2020s. But powerful, general-purpose AI systems pushed the technology into mainstream awareness in ways that earlier breakthroughs never did. 

It’s natural that the reactions have been polarized; rapid change often leaves people

unsure what comes next. Today’s systems are powerful and raise new challenges, and we will take those challenges seriously throughout this book. But they are not as alien or unmanageable as they are sometimes made out to be. We already have decades of lessons and frameworks from earlier generations of AI and from other complex technologies, from aviation to automobiles to power plants, all of which can be adapted to this moment.

Understanding what’s the same and what’s different about this moment for AI and work, and how we can build on what we already know, is crucial. If you’re new to AI, I will offer you a map of essential concepts so you can navigate confidently. If you’ve been here for a while, I will reframe the challenge, moving the conversation toward leadership and collaboration rather than technical mastery alone.

After all, how we choose to work with AI, and who we’ll become in the process, is something we still get to decide.

What’s different about today’s AI?

A number of factors have propelled today’s AI from data science laboratories into the center of everyday business conversations. The technology has not only gotten more powerful, but harder to ignore.

Generalists, not specialists: 

For decades, AI was used behind the scenes, embedded in models that (for example) predicted customer churn or flagged fraud. Those systems were specialists, usually trained for one narrow task and confined to it. Today’s AI models are generalists. These “foundation models” are vast neural networks trained on oceans of data and capable of being adapted across contexts. The same model that helps a developer write code can also be harnessed to help a marketer write copy or an HR leader write a job description. 

That versatility is what brought AI out from the back office and into nearly every corner of knowledge work.

AI that speaks like humans:

A second shift is that AI now speaks our language, literally. We no longer need to code or click through rigid menus to interact with AI. We can simply use everyday language, and the responses come back in polished, humanlike prose, making the technology broadly accessible. These systems can also generate new content, including text, images, and beyond—which is why this wave is often called “generative AI.” But that ease of use creates a new kind of business responsibility. We must now learn when to trust AI’s output and when to challenge or shape it. 

AI that takes the next step: 

The third change, and perhaps the most profound, is agency. AI no longer just analyzes or predicts. Now it acts. “Agentic AI” can plan steps toward a goal, call for the right tools, check its own work, and keep going from there. A single AI agent can draft an email, open a ticket, schedule a delivery, and log the transaction, all without a human clicking “send.” This can bring immense productivity potential but also raises new questions. How much autonomy should we give AI? What does accountability look like when decisions are distributed across humans and machines? 

Put these shifts together, and it makes for potentially confusing implications for how work gets done. If AI can “reason” through tasks and carry out steps without a human at every turn (and if its outputs look and sound like a colleague’s message rather than robotic communication) the line can start to blur between using AI as a tool and AI being part of the team. 

But just like previous waves of AI, generative AI (which creates new content like text, images, or code) and agentic AI (which can take actions independently to complete multistep tasks) are good at some things and bad at others.

An AI agent can draft a sophisticated legal memo. But it can also confidently misread a contract’s indemnity clause. It can write working code, yet stumble on a small, unspoken requirement a junior engineer would catch. Harvard’s Fabrizio Dell’Acqua (with his colleagues) describes this as the “jagged technological frontier” of AI.

AI can amaze us with its ability to do some tasks and similarly stupefy us with

its lack of common sense regarding others. The task for us now is to learn that frontier: to know when to rely on AI, when to supervise it, and when to step in with uniquely human judgment. But to do that well, we need a clearer map of the technology’s actual capabilities and its limitations.

Excerpted from Manage the Machine: How to Harness Human-AI Collaboration at Work by Paula Goldman with permission from Basic Venture.

Disclosure: Salesforce chair and CEO Marc Benioff is the owner of TIME.

U.S. President Donald Trump said Saturday that he would “love to see” a united Ireland and believed it was “going to happen eventually,” breaking with decades of careful neutrality by U.S. presidents over Northern Ireland’s constitutional status.

“You have Northern Ireland, and you have Ireland,” Trump told reporters on Sunday while visiting a golf tournament ​at one of his resorts in the Irish village of Doonbeg. “It would seem to me that one of the ‘naturals’ of all time is to put them together.”

It’s also not the first time Trump has discussed Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic: he joked about a “merger” of the two in March, though the Northern Ireland official he was addressing at the time, who opposes unification, emphasized that the comment was clearly in jest only.

The President seemed aware that his recent remarks would garner backlash, particularly from the British. “The U.K. would have something to say about it obviously, but I think it would be a great thing,” he said Saturday, while in conversation with Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin. “I mean, how can it be bad?”

Trump’s statements come weeks after newly installed U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said there was not enough public support for a referendum on Northern Ireland’s future. Other British politicians have balked at Trump’s statements, arguing that Northern Ireland is indisputably part of the U.K.

Martin also downplayed the U.S. leader’s remarks. “It shouldn't be a surprise,” Martin told reporters on Sunday, adding that Trump “takes a different sort of perspective on things.” The Irish leader said that some responses to Trump, however, were an overreaction.

“They asked me about Scotland—that one I won't talk about yet,” Trump said Sunday, referencing another country divided on leaving the U.K. The Trump family also owns a golf ​resort in Scotland, which voted against independence from the rest of Great Britain in 2014. “I’ll save that for another day.”

Why Ireland is divided—and how reunification could happen

The island of Ireland was divided in 1921 following the Irish War of Independence. While a northern region of six counties remained part of the U.K., the rest of the island, comprising 26 counties, became the Irish Free State, which eventually became a sovereign republic in 1949. 

From the 1960s, tensions in the north between largely Catholic Irish nationalists, or republicans, who wish to reunite with the Republic of Ireland, and mainly Protestant unionists who want to stay with Britain culminated in a three-decade, violent period known as the Troubles. 

A 1998 peace agreement—dubbed the Good Friday Agreement and mediated in large part by the U.S.—ended the violence and recognized the right of those in Northern Ireland to recognize themselves as British, Irish, or both. It also recognized that Northern Ireland’s status must be based on democratic consent.

Following the agreement, Northern Ireland has not yet held a referendum. But Irish nationalism gained momentum when Sinn Féin, the predominant Irish republican party, won the most seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2022. It was the first time a republican party dominated the assembly since Northern Ireland’s formation, though Sinn Féin must still share power with unionists under local laws. Polls, however, show that the Northern Irish public is still divided on whether it should leave the U.K., and Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland has focused on socioeconomic issues over reunification in recent years. 

In the Republic of Ireland, Sinn Féin is the largest single party, but it belongs to the opposition after two more moderate center-right parties formed the government following the 2024 election, with Martin as the current leader. Some have criticized the Irish government under Martin for its slow uptake of the unification issue. Ireland’s Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald said after Trump’s comments: “The conversation on Irish unity has shifted, and the onus is on the Taoiseach to begin planning.”

Claire Hanna, who leads the small nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party in Northern Ireland, also welcomed Trump’s support. “Turns out he’s not as orange as he looks,” Hanna said, in reference to the political color associated with the Protestant and unionist community in Ireland.

How British politicians responded to Trump’s remarks

The 1998 Good Friday Agreement stipulates that the U.K.’s Northern Ireland secretary can decide to hold a poll and must call one if they believe a majority would vote for Irish reunification. Chris Bryant, the incumbent secretary, posted this section of the agreement on social media amid Trump’s unification remarks, adding: “Just in case anyone should need a quick refresher course on constitutional matters in Northern Ireland.”

In a visit to Northern Ireland last month, Burnham said that calling for such a poll is “off the table,” citing the divisiveness of past votes on Brexit and Scottish independence. “We’ve got to focus on bringing people together as best we can,” the British Prime Minister told the BBC.

The U.S. President also rankled some on the British far-right who usually side with him. “Northern Ireland is a proud and integral part of the United Kingdom,” Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, a known Trump ally, wrote on social media, explaining that “the people of Northern Ireland neither want a referendum, nor unification.” Rupert Lowe, another British parliamentarian who heads the Restore Britain party, called Trump’s statements “unacceptable” and “insulting,” and suggested that the President “should not be aiming to permanently damage our country to get back at the current malign Labour Government.”

Lowe’s claims come as Trump has expressed frustration over the U.K.'s refusal to get involved in the U.S.’s war against Iran.

Kemi Badenoch, who leads the opposition Conservative Party, posted on social media that Trump was “shooting from the hip as usual, just like he did with Greenland and Canada becoming the 51st state,” though she argued that “this sort of loose talk about the future of democratic countries is deeply unhelpful and creates unnecessary tension.”

Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish leaders meet to discuss potential break-up of United Kingdom

The First Ministers of the U.K.’s devolved nations—Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland—signed a Memorandum of Understanding Monday, calling for each country to have the “right to determine its own future.”

Michelle O'Neill of Sinn Féin joined Scotland's John Swinney of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Wales' Rhun ap Iorwerth of Plaid Cymru as they insisted no Westminster government has the right to “block democracy or undermine the principle that our people will decide their own future.”

“What unites us is a determination to ensure that the voices of our nations are heard, that our people have the opportunity to thrive, and that cooperation between Scotland, Wales, and Ireland can be strengthened," the agreement read.

O'Neill wants Ireland to be reunited. Swinney and ap Iorwerth are open to calls for independence from their nations. O'Neill and Swinney urged for referendums in their respective countries, while ap Iorwerth declined to set a timetable for a Welsh independence vote.

I was a 33-year-old organizer when I first met Gloria Steinem in 2007. Despite being a women’s studies major in college, I had not fully grasped Gloria’s role in supporting grassroots women's organizations.  She had created the Ms. Foundation for Women to do just that, to fund and amplify women’s organizing, like the work I was doing with domestic workers in New York. Meeting her at their annual fundraising gala, I was moved by how kind, warm, and genuinely excited she was to learn about and support our efforts.

“Do you know about Carolyn Reed?” she asked me.  

Reed founded the Household Technicians of America in 1971. Her organizing, along with the work of Dorothy Bolden and the National Domestic Workers Union in the South, catalyzed the inclusion of domestic workers in federal minimum wage laws after 40 years of exclusion from Roosevelt’s New Deal.

I had never heard of Carolyn Reed or Dorothy Bolden. None of my women’s history classes had taught me about these two Black women who helped pave the way before me. But Gloria knew Ms. Reed well; she frequently enlisted Gloria in domestic workers’ efforts to gain respect and recognition as professionals. 

At the time, together with organizers from around the country, I was planning what would become the founding meeting of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Gloria’s prompt helped us find our roots in the legacy of Black domestic workers organizing and leadership throughout the country, whose bravery has made our economy better for women generation after generation, a legacy our organization was founded to carry forward.

This is who Gloria was. She recognized value and power where others didn’t.  She corrected the omissions that kept us from finding one another.

A year after we met, I reached out to Gloria to let her know that we were at an important point in our efforts to pass the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York State, the first comprehensive state-level legislation to extend labor rights to domestic workers, including new protections such as paid leave. We were planning a 24-hour vigil in front of the governor’s office. We communicated by email; she formatted her emails like letters, with all the accompanying formalities and indentations. 

“Dear Ai-jen, 

Ok, I’ll see you there. 

Love, Gloria.” 

We were five years into our campaign. Dozens of domestic workers had taken time away from work and sacrificed their wages to hold vigil. When Gloria arrived, she joined our circle on the sidewalk across from the governor’s office, listened to everyone’s stories, and when it was her turn to speak on our little red and white battery-operated bullhorn, she spoke of Carolyn Reed, how she was applauding our campaign from heaven, and would be walking alongside us on our march to victory. 

This was the beginning of a long friendship and mentorship. But Gloria’s specific form of mentorship included listening and sharing what she learned from other women, curated by her strategic mind and communicated with her unparalleled way with words. She did not give advice; she shared stories. She never saw herself as a mentor, as much as she felt mentored by others, always learning from the women she met, especially younger women.  

Gloria identified as an organizer more than an activist, because organizers re-organize relations of power to be more equal, and put power in the hands of everyday people. When I told her we were experimenting with neighborhood-based organizing circles to reach more domestic workers, she told me that previous movements of women gathered in circles of 13—small enough that everyone felt seen and heard, but large enough to feel the power of the collective.  

Like any good organizer, Gloria appreciated the chance to roll up her sleeves: she wrote letters to governors to help us get across the finish line in our legislative campaigns and called mayors to ensure that domestic workers would not be excluded from paid sick days legislation. If she was invited to speak at a press conference related to labor legislation, she would check with me to see how the bill impacted domestic workers. 

Several years into our friendship, I found her essay “Revaluing Economics” in Moving Beyond Words. Published in 1994—years before the National Domestic Workers Alliance was even the germ of an idea—she wrote about care as an essential resource that our economic model has never adequately valued, in no small part because of its association with women.  She argued that if we are to not only survive but thrive in the future, we must fundamentally protect and revalue care.  The last 15 years of my work have been deeply shaped by these ideas. 

More recently, I spent much of my time with Gloria through an intergenerational, multi-racial circle of women who affectionately call ourselves the “G Squad”—composed of a writer, two artists, a pro-democracy organizer, me, and Gloria. We gathered over the years to celebrate Gloria’s birthday, to strategize big moments in the women’s movement, or vet a new love interest in the mix. We learned about Gloria’s life and adventures from one another, and we learned about other women through Gloria. 

Much has been shared about the talking circles Gloria hosted in her home, but Gloria was part of dozens of ongoing circles of relationships with women like ours around the world. I wondered how she had the time for so many, including us.  She was one of the first people to send me a note when she learned I would be joining the Board of Trustees of the Ford Foundation. 

“I can't tell you how happy it makes me to know that your understanding and way of organizing will be there—you who don't hold a finger to the wind, but become the wind,” Gloria wrote. “It also makes me feel a little better about the way too early loss of Wilma.” 

She was referring to her close friend and former principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, Wilma Mankiller, who died of cancer with Gloria at her side.  Wilma was a legendary organizer and leader who also served as a trustee of the Ford Foundation. Gloria urged me to read Wilma’s speech, Context Is Everything.  

 Gloria changed the context for women like me, our choices and our understanding of them. It was as if she lived on a different time and space continuum, one composed of circles of women throughout history, all “linked, not ranked.” 

Her true gift was helping so many of us see the hidden stories, ideas, lives, and contributions of women. She helped us locate our place in the story. In this world sorted by hierarchies of human value, at a moment when too many of our stories are being erased, may her memory be a reminder that we are not alone in the world or in history. 

We are part of a proud and vast legacy of women, seen and unseen, that continues to change the world. And that is exactly what Gloria would have wanted. 

An escalating wave of attacks around the Red Sea has pushed oil prices above $100 a barrel, as Houthi territorial gains near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and strikes on Saudi energy infrastructure threaten a route that has become a critical alternative to the Strait of Hormuz.

On Sunday, Yemeni government forces, which are backed by Saudi Arabia, launched attacks against the Iran-backed Houthis along the Red Sea. The strikes were part of an effort to dislodge the Houthis after the rebel group captured the port city of Mokha and Perim Island at the mouth of the Red Sea, key positions that give the group a vantage point to threaten shipping through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

The Houthis also launched missiles at several areas in Saudi Arabia, and in recent weeks attacked the kingdom’s oil infrastructure and shipping. The group declared a blockade on Saudi vessels in July, but said other countries’ commercial shipping can continue through the narrow Bab el-Mandeb.

The escalation has pushed up energy prices around the world. It also potentially gives Iran leverage over the U.S. by threatening another maritime chokepoint, putting economic pressure on Washington just before the midterm elections.

The attacks come as diplomatic efforts to end the nearly seven-month-long U.S. and Israeli war with Iran have dropped off. An anticipated diplomatic meeting between Gulf countries and Iran was postponed, Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi announced on Sunday. The meeting, meant to take place in Oman on Monday, would have been the first talk between Iran and Gulf Cooperation Council countries to discuss the Strait of Hormuz since a mid-June memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran collapsed. 

The attacks have also reignited major fighting in Yemen’s yearslong civil war, which killed 150,000 people and created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. The U.N.’s migration agency said more than 82,000 people have been displaced by fighting in Yemen since the start of September. That includes more than 2,000 Yemenis who fled to Djibouti, which hosts a U.S. base on the other side of Bab el-Mandeb.

Here’s how escalating attacks in the Red Sea have impacted energy prices and what could happen next.

What is the latest escalation?

Saudi authorities said a projectile struck al-Tuwal in Jazan province, wounding two people and damaging a mosque, several buildings and vehicles. Earlier in the week, Saudi Arabia said a large wave of Houthi missile and drone attacks over four southern cities had injured 73 people.

The Houthis said they launched ballistic missiles and drones at the Sharurah military base in Saudi Arabia’s southern Najran region, near the border with Yemen. Saudi Arabia has not confirmed damage at the base.

The group alleged on Sunday evening that Saudi Arabia had conducted 58 airstrikes across Yemen during the preceding 24 hours, and 129 strikes across Yemen over the 48 hours before Saturday evening. Saudi Arabia has not confirmed those strikes.

Inside Yemen, government forces launched strikes near Mokha, Dhubab, and elsewhere in Taiz, claiming they destroyed Houthi vehicles and weapons. After initially retreating from parts of the western coast, government units said they were regrouping late Saturday and would return to battle.

The government-allied National Resistance said more than 500 of its fighters have been killed on the west coast over the past month, while more than 1,000 Houthis were killed in Hodeida and Taiz provinces over the same period.

How have the attacks affected oil and gas?

Oil prices climbed more than 2% on Monday. Brent crude futures opened at $108.23 a barrel in late Sunday trading, up $3.62 or 3.46%, while WTI futures opened at $103.20, up $3.15 or 3.15% from Friday’s close. U.S. diesel prices surpassed $6 a gallon on Friday for the first time on record, while oil gained more than 8% last week, with Brent surging over $100 a barrel for the first time since July.

Saudi Arabia closed its East-West oil pipeline as a precautionary measure after multiple drones from Iraq damaged infrastructure in the Riyadh and Medina regions. No group has publicly claimed responsibility for the attack, although U.S. President Donald Trump said Iran was “probably” responsible. Saudi Arabia had recently rerouted around 4 million barrels per day—around 4% of global supply—through the pipeline to circumvent Hormuz.

The attacks around the Red Sea have also added a substantial risk premium to transit through Bab el-Mandeb. Increased Houthi activity can discourage shipping even though the group said it will only target Saudi-linked vessels, Allison Minor, the director of the Atlantic Council’s Project for Middle East Integration and former U.S. deputy special envoy for Yemen, warned in a July analysis of the blockade. Tanker owners may weigh delaying voyages or charging higher freight rates, which could quickly raise costs for consumers.

While some shipments could be redirected north through the Suez Canal or Egypt’s SUMED pipeline, both of those routes are estimated to carry smaller capacity than Bab el-Mandeb and could mean longer, possibly costlier, journeys for some cargoes.

Experts say the duration of the disruptions will determine whether the current price increase becomes a sustained supply shock. If operations resume quickly, the pipeline’s effect could remain limited, June Goh, a senior analyst at Sparta Commodities, told Bloomberg. An extended shutdown, however, could force Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest crude exporter, to cut production, Goh said. Saudi Arabia reportedly has enough oil stored at Yanbu to sustain current exports for five to seven days. 

The impact on global energy supply is exacerbated by severe restrictions through the Strait of Hormuz, which already pushed up energy prices around the world. The International Energy Agency (IEA)  estimated that Gulf oil exports in August were nearly half their pre-war level. Global oil inventories have fallen by 507 million barrels since February, the agency said.

Thye May Ting, an analyst at Hong Leong Investment Bank, wrote in a research note that Brent is likely to remain elevated because of the combined pressure at Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb, forecasting prices of $95 to $100 a barrel toward the end of the year.

Using a baseline of $110 a barrel, economist Mohamed Shadi projected Brent could reach a peak of $120 a barrel if 25% of oil flows through Bab el-Mandeb were halted, $145 if 50% of flows were impacted, and $229 under a complete shutdown.

Meanwhile, fighting near Hormuz has continued. A vessel transiting the Strait was struck by a projectile, causing a fire to break out onboard, the U.K. Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) reported on Sunday. Iranian state media said an Iranian commercial vessel was struck off its coast, killing one and wounding four.

The IEA projects world oil supply to average 100.7 million barrels per day this year, a decline of 5.7 million barrels per day from last year, according to its September report. It had previously forecast a year-over-year decline of 4.3 million barrels per day in August.

What could Saudi Arabia do?

Saudi Arabia has reportedly pressed Washington for more military support, but the Trump Administration has so far resisted direct participation. Axios reported that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman called Trump twice on Thursday urging him to authorize U.S. strikes as the Houthis advanced along the Red Sea coast, but Trump refused. The U.S. had sent more than 100 military advisers to Saudi Arabia to provide military intelligence, according to CNN.

Trump said Saturday that the Houthis had called his Administration. “They would much prefer not having us involved, and they’re letting most ships go through. There’s just one country that they’re not too happy with, and we’ll get that straightened out,” Trump said.

The kingdom could independently intensify its air campaign and provide more support to Yemeni government forces on the ground, although Saudi air support reportedly failed to arrive during Thursday’s battle for Mokha despite requests from Yemen. A larger campaign could expose Saudi Arabia to more missile and drone retaliation from the Houthis, which it is likely keen to avoid after its costly intervention between 2015 and 2022 failed to defeat the group and prompted repeated attacks on Saudi cities, airports, and energy facilities.

Saudi Arabia could also turn to Pakistan and Turkey for help under the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, signed last month. Riyadh has not formally invoked the pact before, but it could request additional intelligence and technological support, Riaz Khokhar, a researcher at Islamabad’s Institute of Regional Studies, wrote in Al Jazeera. Islamabad, however, may be wary of domestic opposition and a confrontation with Iran, Khokhar wrote. Instead, it might push for a multinational naval coalition to protect Bab el-Mandeb.

Saudi Arabia could also pursue diplomatic efforts to negotiate a cease-fire. Minor suggested in July that the Houthi campaign may be aimed at extracting concessions from Riyadh rather than creating an all-out war. Other analysts told Reuters that the Houthi gains could push Gulf governments toward accommodation with Tehran, especially since Iran’s talks with the U.S. have tapered off while fighting has intensified.

Trump said Sunday that he still expects the Iran War to end this year, and that gas prices would “drop like a rock” once it did. Last week, Trump accused the Iranian government of prolonging the war in order to sabotage Republicans’ midterm prospects, but said Iran “can’t hold out any longer” and that the war would end “immediately after” the elections.

He also floated the possibility of maintaining a U.S. presence to control Iranian oil.

“We’ll ultimately get out [of Iran], ​unless ⁠we decide to stay and keep the oil like Venezuela,” Trump said. U.S. revenue from Venezuela, he added, “paid ⁠for ​the war many times.”

Two out of every five Michelin-starred restaurants close their doors within a few years of receiving the honor, a statistic so counterintuitive that it forces us to ask what, precisely, the star confers and what it destroys. 

A 2024 study by Daniel Sands, then of the UCL School of Management, tracked New York City's elite restaurants that had opened between 2000 and 2014 and earned a glowing review in The New York Times. Sands found that receiving a Michelin star significantly increased a restaurant’s likelihood of closing compared with equally acclaimed restaurants that never received one: 40% of Michelin-starred restaurants had shuttered by 2019, against roughly 20% of their unstarred but similarly lauded peers. 

One reason: The arrival of the star and crimson plaque can alter the entire local food ecology around a restaurant. Suppliers and vendors, aware of a kitchen’s new status, often increase prices. Landlords like to raise rents. Staff, suddenly more marketable, must be paid more to be retained. The kitchen, chasing the standard the star implies, tends to reach for costlier and rarer ingredients. Every plate becomes more expensive to produce, yet few diners can absorb the escalating cost of eating there. That change can be lethal. 

Fine dining, by its nature, runs on razor-thin margins. Exclusive guest lists cap revenue, rare ingredients inflate costs, and a kitchen brigade requires constant, expensive supervision and training. Consider what a plate costs at a typical three-star establishment: at Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athénée in Paris, Ducasse’s own three-star flagship, a single main course runs €80 to €135, and the tasting menu alone costs €260 to €360 per person, before wine, tax, or service—figures that hold across most three-star houses, where a full tasting menu routinely clears $400 to $600 a head once the bottle list is opened. Even at those prices, industry accounts suggest that margins remain thin once the true cost of labor, rare ingredients, and the theater of service is tallied. After all, the diner is paying as much for craft and spectacle as for food. 

To keep the star, a restaurant must submit to a rigid, largely unwritten catalog of expectations—the wine list, the choreography of service, the physical opulence of the room—that locks owners and chefs into an inflexible, high-overhead model precisely when they most need room to adapt to shifting economics and changing appetites. 

Chefs who sought the star in pursuit of creativity often find themselves instead locked into an endless rat race simply to preserve the status quo. Michel Roux Jr closed Le Gavroche, London’s pioneering two-Michelin-starred institution, in January 2024 after 56 years, citing the toll of the grind and his need for a different balance of life and work. Magnus Nilsson closed his celebrated two-star Fäviken in rural Sweden in December 2019 after 11 years, confessing that he had simply stopped waking up excited to go to work. Both talented chefs were crushed, at least in part, by Michelin’s expectations.

Chasing a Michelin star takes nerve; keeping one takes a very deep pocket. Atelier, a 22-seat tasting-menu restaurant in Chicago’s Lincoln Square, opened in February 2023 under chef Christian Hunter and won a Michelin star within its first year. But the restaurant could not sustain its costs against rising rent, wages, and inflation, and it closed abruptly in May 2026 with owner Tim Lacey telling staff and guests that the restaurant’s finances had left the team no choice. 

A growing, if still informal, collective of chefs worldwide is now actively requesting the removal of their own stars, choosing instead to reclaim food as a site of authentic community, relational care, and cultural survival.

Their conclusion: The economics of the Michelin star simply does not work. 

So how did we get here? The Michelin Guide was launched in 1900 by tire manufacturers André and Édouard Michelin as a free promotional roadmap distributed to fewer than three thousand motorists then on French roads—a way to encourage driving, and with it, tire wear. 

By 1926, the guide had transformed into an arbiter of taste, awarding a single star to mark exceptional dining; by 1931 it had formalized the now-iconic one-, two-, and three-star hierarchy, alongside the red cover and the roly-poly figure of Bibendum, the Michelin Man. The red-bound guide became, over the following century, shorthand for elite dining the world over. Restaurateurs quake at the prospect of an anonymous inspector’s unannounced visit, yet the status a star confers is so vast that chefs the world over continue to chase it. And when the star finally arrives, the regular, vernacular diners who sustained a kitchen through its lean years are often displaced by gastro-tourists chasing a commodified edible experience and influencers eating for the camera rather than for the plate.

And then are the ways in which the Michelin system has undervalued certain cuisines. For instance, despite Indian cuisine standing among the world’s great culinary traditions, only Indian restaurants located outside India have received a star; only recently, in 2024, did a Mexican establishment—the taco stand Taquería El Califa de León in Mexico City—receive one, becoming the first taquería in the world to do so. I had long assumed this asymmetry was a matter of distinctly European taste and bias. It turns out I was only partly right. It is also a matter of money. 

The Michelin Guide is ultimately a business that manufactures and confers value. And to be sure, a Michelin star does come with benefits. So much so that municipal chambers of commerce understand precisely what a Michelin presence does for a city’s status as a gastronomic destination, and in recent years cities have begun paying substantial fees for the privilege of having Michelin inspectors visit their food halls and restaurants.

The issue is that these privileges tend to carry a hefty price tag. While a Michelin star can bring notoriety and exposure, these benefits are often outweighed by unsustainable costs

Michelin figured out how to sell status back to us, one unsustainable plate at a time.

Showing up at a funeral matters everywhere, but especially in the Arab world and the wider Middle East. When Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was buried on July 9,just over four months after he was killed in a joint American-Israeli military strike. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman sent official delegations to the funeral. The United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Bahrain did not. To many analysts, the absence was more telling than any official statement.

Before the war, the Gulf states were diversifying their economies beyond oil, betting on remaining islands of stability in a turbulent Middle East. President Donald Trump’s decision to wage war on Iran, despite their opposition, exposed the fragility of that bet. War-risk insurance costs soared, and Iranian attacks followed.

Saudi facilities at Abqaiq and Qatar’s Ras Laffan gas complex were hit; the UAE intercepted barrages for weeks; Bahrain and Kuwait weren’t spared either. Though it wasn’t widely reported, Saudi Arabia and the UAE struck Iran, as, according to some accounts, did Qatar—though Doha denies it. In private, Gulf officials confirm that most Gulf Arab states retaliated.

The war produced unusual strategic convergence among the Gulf monarchies. There is now widespread recognition that the region’s existing security framework has failed. Though coordination behind the scenes may run deeper, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), created in 1981, has invoked its collective-defense clause only once.

Officials broadly agree on three points: Iran remains a long-term threat; the U.S. security umbrella is no longer dependable; and regional stability has become an existential priority. They also see two clear challenges. One is an Iranian regime that continues to pursue its vision of an “Iranian Axis” across the region. The other is an Israel bent on “regional paramountcy,” the presumption that it alone sets the terms of force while the region adjusts. Yet consensus on diagnosis only sharpened disagreement over the prescription.

Competition among the Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE, means that convergence remains a trend rather than a settled fact. But such rivalry is hardly unique to the region. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced a fractious Europe into greater cohesion without resolving disagreements over how forcefully to confront Moscow. Iran and Israel are now subjecting the Gulf Arab states to a comparable test.

An unreliable U.S. security umbrella

The war altered the Gulf’s calculus on two fronts at once. Iran proved to be at least as dangerous as the most hawkish Gulf capitals had warned. The other shock was less expected: Washington was willing to start a regional war alongside Israel, despite Gulf objections, and then prove unable or unwilling to manage what followed.

The Gulf states had long since stopped assuming that Washington had a coherent and effective Iran strategy; the war added a new extreme. Objectives shifted by the week, and an administration in a hurry to exit, even as Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, left the Gulf Arab states feeling that they had been taken to war without being warned, consulted, or protected.

Even so, overwhelmingly, Gulf Arab states managed to intercept the overwhelming majority of what Iran fired at them. “Restraint backed by functioning defenses,” Rashid Al-Mohanadi, a Qatari analyst, argued, “is not the same as restraint born of vulnerability.” Privately, Gulf officials also say that they engaged in genuine, if discreet, quiet coordination.

Researchers at the Carnegie Endowment recommended that GCC states could share air-defense stockpiles with each other during the attacks. The GCC’s own mutual-defense clause was never formally invoked, but member states reaffirmed their commitment to it as the war ground on. None of that erases the economic toll of war-risk premiums or the failure of the collective-defense mechanism to activate, but it complicates the picture.

Most Gulf states have reverted to a previous preference: containing and de-escalating rather than confronting Iran. Qatar and Oman pressed Washington toward a memorandum of understanding with Tehran; Saudi Arabia backed the Pakistan-brokered track that produced it; the UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain wanted to fight on but came on board within weeks. Even that agreement highlighted the Gulf’s limited influence; it raised the possibility of a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran financed by “regional partners” who were not consulted.

For more than a decade, the Gulf states have been working on a diversification strategy to insure against an unreliable Washington and a threatening Tehran at once. This tack gained momentum after the 2015 nuclear deal eased Tehran’s isolation even as Syria and Yemen deepened fears of Iranian regional reach. At the same time, Washington emphasized a pivot to Asia, though the Gulf capitals never quite believed in it. The strategy hardened into doctrine after Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018.

Not every Gulf state draws the same conclusion about how to navigate a region that will see less American dominance over time, a debate that remains unresolved. But all of them expect a new regional security architecture eventually, and the harder question is where diversification stops being hedging and starts being an architecture in its own right.

Old and new alignments in the Gulf

The strategic alignments within the GCC have shifted repeatedly. The Saudi-UAE-Bahrain blockade of Qatar, imposed in 2017, has largely given way to a different configuration, with Riyadh now closer to Doha and Muscat than to Abu Dhabi. But beneath these differences, a growing Gulf consensus is taking shape: a rejection of both an Iranian-led axis and Israeli regional paramountcy, coupled with a willingness to engage pragmatically with both countries.

Israel’s pursuit of “regional paramountcy” has revealed a fundamental divergence over the shape of postwar regional order and helped stall wider normalization in the absence of meaningful progress on Palestinian statehood. Qatar and Oman have maintained channels to Tehran throughout, while Saudi Arabia has adopted a similar posture of strategic restraint, refusing to let its territory be used against Iran and sending a delegation to Khamenei’s funeral.

Every Gulf state is now pursuing some version of the same wager: no single external guarantor can be trusted on its own, so the safer course is to pursue several policies at once rather than commit to a single tack.

The UAE just does it most visibly: striking Iran directly while also trading with it when convenient and walking out of OPEC without consulting Riyadh. Saudi Arabia finds exasperating the UAE’s preference for early, unilateral action rather than waiting to see whether a deteriorating situation might resolve itself. The gap between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi is the clearest sign that the Gulf states remain a considerable distance from genuine strategic cohesion.

Geography constrains every strategy the Gulf has tried. Iran and the Gulf share the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil flows. Decades of mutual suspicion have never severed their economic interdependence; Qatar and Iran still jointly exploit the world’s largest gas field. None of that produces trust, but it hasn’t produced pure passivity either: escalation was available to every Gulf Arab capital here, and each chose restraint and diplomacy instead.

Tehran has learned a new kind of leverage from this war—chokepoints, not proxies—and demonstrated how much strategic leverage control over Hormuz can provide. It has also survived the attempt at regime change, emerging with an economy contracted by 6.1% and inflation near 69%. It cannot sustain an open-ended war against most of its neighbors, and it knows it. That argues for a bargain, unless Tehran’s new leadership judges ending the war on Washington’s terms the greater risk.

Iran cannot be wished away. Increasingly, neither can Israel, which supplies the other side of the problem. The ceasefire that paused the direct U.S.-Iran fighting, brokered largely by Pakistan, never bound Israel at all. Tel Aviv wasn’t a signatory; it kept striking Hezbollah in Lebanon throughout the negotiations and treated the deal’s promise to end hostilities on every front as somebody else’s commitment. Washington backed Israel’s argument. The ceasefire itself came apart on its own terms: talks in Islamabad over access to Hormuz collapsed, and by July, Iranian strikes on commercial vessels that had bypassed Tehran’s approved shipping lane brought the fighting back in earnest.

Iran built the missile and proxy networks that gave the region reason to fear it long before February, and nothing here excuses that record. But Gulf governments are not choosing between two threats. They are managing both at once, and Israel’s demonstrated readiness to ignore arrangements even Washington negotiates makes it just as pressing a strategic problem as Iran, if not more so, depending on the Gulf government in question.

The case for building collective security

None of this amounts to reconciliation with Iran, and no serious figure in Riyadh, Doha or Abu Dhabi calls it that. What is emerging is an uneasy accommodation among adversaries that distrust one another but have run out of cheaper alternatives: an Iran too weakened to sustain war but unable to walk away from it unbeaten, and Gulf states too exposed to keep outsourcing their security to a Washington whose steadfastness in their defense has proved limited.

Tehran’s leverage over Hormuz, perhaps its only tangible gain, will last, and it leaves the Gulf states with a long-deferred choice: credible collective defense, or continued diversification. Oman is still negotiating to restore navigation through the strait and a meeting on the subject between Gulf Arab states and Iran was postponed on Sunday.

The challenges for Saudi Arabia have increased after the Houthis in Yemen took control of the Perim Island in the Bab El-Mandeb strait that would allow them to disrupt maritime traffic through the Red Sea and weaponize it as a chokepoint. Saudi Arabia has signed the Mecca Pact, a mutual defense agreement with Turkey and Pakistan, though its strength remains untested.

These initiatives suggest the emergence of not one alliance, but overlapping partnerships: a diminished but enduring American partnership; Turkish and Pakistani security ties; bilateral arrangements among Gulf states; and channels of engagement with both Iran and Israel.

The Gulf Arab states are not trying to replace Washington but are layering a series of relationships to prevent domination by a single power. Yet coordination is not collective security. The Gulf needs standing mechanisms for integrated air and missile defense, intelligence-sharing, maritime security and mutual assistance, and a credible collective defense commitment. The GCC already has much of the institutional skeleton; what it has lacked is the political trust and strategic consensus to make it work.

The Gulf monarchies can keep stacking insurance policies, or begin turning those relationships into a genuine regional security system. The war has shown that the Gulf states can coordinate more effectively than many expected, and the foundations for something more durable may already be there.

President Donald Trump said Monday morning that Ukraine and Russia have both agreed not to strike targets that impact energy infrastructure.

"Ukraine has agreed not to hit Russian Energy targets. Russia has agreed to do, likewise!" he wrote in a post on Truth Social.

Neither Russia nor Ukraine had publicly confirmed the agreement as of midday Monday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that he was willing to reciprocate if Russia would agree to the de-escalation, as well. But he added that such an agreement would also require assurances from "partners," likely referring to the U.S.

"If our partners are ready to ensure that Russia genuinely refrains from striking our electricity system, other energy facilities, critical infrastructure, and food supply routes, then, of course, we are ready to ensure a corresponding halt to our strikes," he wrote on X.com on Monday. However, he added: "Ukraine is not convinced that Russia is willing to abide by any agreement."

Trump’s announcement broadened the demand he made a day earlier, when he called solely on Ukraine to halt its attacks on Russian energy facilities. On Sunday, Trump said that Zelenskyy should halt strikes on Russia's diesel fuel infrastructure and refineries, claiming the attacks are contributing to a fuel shortage.

“Mr. Zelenskyy has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia,” Trump told reporters during his scheduled visit to Ireland. “Let him go after targets but not diesel fuel, because he’s causing a shortage.”

For Ukraine, that would mean curtailing one of its principal means of imposing pressure on Moscow. Yet energy-market data indicates that the much larger source of the global diesel squeeze stems from the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, raising questions about how much Trump’s proposal would even impact the shortage—and what it could cost Kyiv.

Read More: Zelenskyy Faces Pressure to Hold Elections. What Stands in the Way?

Though the U.S.-Iran war has dramatically limited the distribution of oil since February, Trump said that it is not responsible for current shortages.

“This isn’t done by the Middle East,” Trump said. “This is done by what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine. So we spoke to Mr. Zelenskyy about it.”

Trump’s comments appeared to be referring to last week’s mediation efforts which saw U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visiting Russia and Ukraine to discuss a path toward peace. Witkoff said afterward that he was “confident that there'll be a good resolution here.” 

Washington’s intervention in the peace efforts had previously stalled last spring following the outbreak of war with Iran. 

Throughout the summer, as Ukraine stepped up its long-range attacks, it increasingly set its sights on oil refineries. Overnight into Sept. 13, Ukraine targeted two Russian refineries—one of which, the Slavyansk Oil Refinery, is one of the “largest independent oil refineries in the south of the Russian Federation” according to the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Zelenskyy has not publicly responded to Trump’s comments, but he has previously said that these refineries fund and fuel Russia’s war with Ukraine. He said that his country’s attacks are meant to disrupt Moscow’s financing capacity.

"Every dollar paid for Russian oil is money for the war,” Zelenskyy said on X in April.

Olena Lennon, a Practitioner in Residence of National Security at the University of New Haven, says ending the attacks would deprive Kyiv of an unusually effective source of leverage.

“Taking away one of Ukraine’s most effective pressure points inside Russia—one that has actually put Russia on the back foot—would significantly weaken Ukrainian leverage and set Ukraine back, leading to more Ukrainian deaths,” Lennon tells TIME.

TIME has reached out to Zelenskyy’s office for comment.

Is Ukraine responsible for the global diesel shortage?

Disruptions to Russia’s oil refineries have undoubtedly impacted Russian fuel markets, as well as those in Central Asia. 

When Ukraine intensified its attacks on Russia’s energy facilities in late 2025, the northern nation faced a domestic gasoline shortage estimated at around 20%. It began instituting export restrictions. The disruption persisted, however, with Russian refinery runs reaching a 24-year low last month.

Those restrictions then reverberated across Central Asia. According to the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, part of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Central Asian nations saw a rise in retail gas prices as a result of Moscow’s restrictions—by as much as 25% year over year. Some countries, like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, turned to suppliers in China as a result.

But Russia is only one contributor to a global fuel squeeze driven more substantially by disruptions in the Middle East. The effects of that broader supply shock have been felt worldwide.

In Australia, the government launched an A$20 million National Fuel Security Campaign that encouraged citizens to voluntarily reduce fuel consumption as a result of shortages. It ran from April to June. Fuel prices are set to rise again in the country as fighting once again ramps up. 

Last week in Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva introduced 30-day tax cuts on gasoline and ethanol, along with a subsidy of one real per liter for diesel producers and importers, as the U.S.-Iran war drove up global oil prices. Although Brazil is a major crude exporter, it still depends on imports of refined fuels.

In the United States, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at its lowest level since 1982. The reserve holds just 285.4 million barrels as of Sept. 4, which is less than half of the 638 million barrels held at the beginning of 2021—and significantly less than the reserve’s peak of 726.6 million barrels in 2009. The reserve has dwindled following releases under both Trump and former President Joe Biden, including emergency drawdowns intended to shield consumers from escalating crude-oil prices.

In light of this, Lennon finds Trump’s request “purely hypocritical.” “If Trump’s primary concern is the disruption of global energy markets, then the much larger issue is America’s continued war with Iran, which has contributed far more significantly to the current fuel shortage,” she says.

The International Energy Agency has also identified the conflict in the Middle East as the principal source of the broader global supply shock, saying in June that global markets are dealing with “their largest supply disruption in history resulting from the near closure of the Strait of Hormuz.” 

The Strait of Hormuz, the vital passageway through which 20% of the world’s oil flowed prior to the war, was effectively closed by Iran after the U.S. and Israel coordinated attacks on the nation on Feb. 28. Control of the Strait has been a sticking point in peace negotiations, and the U.S. and Iran most recently traded strikes in the Strait on Sept. 9.

For the first time since July, Brent crude oil prices have surged back above $100 a barrel this week, with the average diesel price in the U.S. rising above $6 for the first time ever.

Oil transit has grown even more fraught following advances last week from Yemen’s Houthi rebels. 

On Sept. 10, the Houthis—who are backed by Iran—took control of Yemen’s port city of Mokha, which is vital to controlling shipping through the Red Sea. The next day, the group captured Perim Island. The island is located within the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a waterway through which 8.1 million barrels of oil and petroleum products per day passed during the second quarter of 2026, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. If the group takes control of the Strait, oil prices could rise further, as it was a lifeline for the global economy when the U.S.-Iran war effectively shuttered the Strait of Hormuz.

On Sept. 11, Saudi Arabia closed a critical oil pipeline after it was struck by drones launched from Iraq. An investigation is underway to ascertain who is behind the attacks, but no group has claimed responsibility. Saudi Arabia—a U.S. ally—is facing mounting threats from the Houthis, which has pulled the Saudi government further into the Middle Eastern conflict. Trump said Saturday, without providing evidence, that Iran was “probably responsible.” Amid Iraq’s investigations into the drone attacks, it has closed down three border crossings with Iran.

If the pipeline does not restart within days, the shutdown could remove up to 4% of global oil supply, according to Saudi oil buyers and traders. On Monday, regional officials told the Associated Press that the pipeline could be out of service for several weeks.

The White House has not responded to TIME’s request for comment on how Trump’s remarks Sunday might sit in contrast with comments he made last week linking elevated oil and gasoline prices to the war with Iran.

On his way to the Republican midterm convention in Dallas last week, Trump told reporters that he expects the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran to end “immediately after” the midterm elections. He claimed that Iran was prolonging the conflict to influence the election.

He added that “it’s going to take a little bit longer than the midterm” for gas prices to come down, indicating that would happen as soon as Iran was ready to reach a resolution to end the war.

What would heeding Trump mean for Ukraine’s fight against Russia?

If Ukraine were to comply with Trump’s request, it would relinquish one of its most effective tools for damaging Russia’s energy sector. The International Energy Agency said last week that the cumulative strikes degraded Russia’s refining system, with sanctions making damaged equipment more difficult to replace.

Halting the campaign could give Moscow greater opportunity to repair its refineries, preserve fuel and revenue for its war effort, and resume some exports. That could ease one source of pressure on global diesel supplies—but it would not make up for the much larger disruption caused by the war with Iran.

Beyond those practical consequences, Lennon says, “Trump’s request reflects a larger pattern of the U.S. leveraging its power to put more pressure on Ukraine while reducing pressure on Russia.”

Even so, compliance might not alter the war’s trajectory as significantly as the campaign’s economic impact suggests.

George Beebe, director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute, acknowledges that Ukraine has “hurt Russia’s energy sector,” but argues that it has not been “nearly enough to force Putin to capitulate to Ukraine's war demands.” He points to Russia’s “damaging counter-escalation on Ukraine's energy infrastructure, ports, and transportation networks.”

“In short, Ukraine's campaign of deep drone strikes in Russia has backfired, producing far more Russian destruction in Ukraine than Ukraine has inflicted on Russia,” Beebe tells TIME.

Beebe’s assessment comes as Russia has ramped up its air campaign in recent weeks, including attacks on Ukraine’s power grid and gas stations ahead of winter. Ukraine is struggling with a shortage of U.S.-made Patriot missile interceptors, leaving a critical gap in its defenses against Russian ballistic missiles.

But Lennon believes that Trump’s request is “in and of itself further evidence that Ukraine’s drone strikes have become increasingly effective in reducing Russia’s economic and combat power—and that Ukraine’s leverage has grown exponentially.”

“The refinery campaign has actually allowed Ukraine to offset some of its quantitative disadvantages of fighting a much larger power by using relatively inexpensive, domestically produced drones to inflict significant costs on Russia,” Lennon continues.

Separate from the debate over the campaign’s effectiveness is whether Ukraine is capable of fulfilling Trump’s request as narrowly as he described it. 

Konstantin Sonin, a professor with the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, says that the Ukrainian military is not necessarily trying to hit diesel fuel in particular—it is just trying to target Russia’s energy sector.

Sonin says Ukraine lacks the intelligence and targeting process necessary to distinguish among installations producing different fuels. “When they strike a refinery, they strike what is vulnerable there,” he tells TIME. “They use their precious resources to create as much damage as possible.”

By Sonin’s analysis, complying with Trump’s request would therefore be difficult without broadly curtailing attacks on Russia’s energy sector—something Ukraine does not appear poised to do.

Lennon, however, believes Ukraine could halt refinery strikes without abandoning its broader deep-strike campaign.

“I would not say that halting refinery strikes would necessarily kneecap Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign,” she says. “Ukraine still has other important targets inside Russia, including airfields, ammunition depots, missile and drone production facilities, and logistics hubs.”

The more important issue, she believes, is what would happen if Ukraine chooses to eschew Trump’s request.

“Although European partners have increasingly assumed the brunt of the burden for supporting Ukraine and have demonstrated that they can replace a substantial portion of the financial and military assistance previously provided by the U.S., they have not eliminated Ukraine’s dependence on critical American capabilities,” she says, referring to the Patriot missile interceptors—an area in which she says Europe can supplement U.S. support but cannot replace it.

For that reason, the question becomes whether the U.S. would choose to add sanctions and otherwise pressure Putin to scale back—or continue pushing for Ukraine to abandon that source of leverage.

“Over time, that choice could significantly affect the strategic balance of the war and its outcome,” Lennon says.

When Elena Rybakina won her first major championship—Wimbledon, in 2022—observers noted her low-key victory celebration. Rybakina barely registered a fist-pump. Her opponent in that final, Ons Jabeur, joked she’d have to teach Rybakina “how to celebrate properly.” 

Rybakina’s second Slam, the Australian Open earlier this year, wasn’t all that animated either: another left fist, maybe more of a smile, after she delivered an ace to bounce Aryna Sabalenka in Melbourne. 

Would outlasting Sabalenka again, on a Saturday in New York City, to thwart Sabalenka’s well-publicized attempt at a U.S. Open three-peat, compel Rybakina to at least fall to the ground, as per tennis tradition? We’re not asking for a hardcourt snow angel over here. But Rybakina’s 6-4, 5-7, 6-2 victory over Sabalenka in Saturday’s U.S. Open final didn’t just make her a first-time U.S. Open champion. By winning two majors this year, Rybakina became one of the standout global athletes, across sports, in 2026. 

Read More: At the U.S. Open, Ben Shelton Has America Believing Again

On Monday, she’ll take the world’s No. 1 ranking from Sabalenka.

How about a mere leap, Elena? 

Not here, not now. Rybakina, 27, just goes about her business. She aced Sabalenka, again, to clinch her third career major on Saturday. She raised her arms, hugged Sabalenka at the net, and clapped her racket, gently, as the Arthur Ashe Stadium crowd gave Rybakina her due. In a tournament marked by the “look at me” behavior of influencers and other clout chasers—in the stands blocking walkways and at times interrupting on-court proceedings with murmurs and selfies—Rybakina sent the opposite message. That approach, combined with her 2026 performance, is certainly worth our admiration. 

Late in the second set, the match almost turned. All was going Rybakina’s way: Sabalenka, known for on-court histrionics, had already been pegged with a ball abuse violation, had bounced a racket off the court in frustration, and spent some time berating herself on the court. New Yorkers connect with Sabalenka, in part, because she can be neurotic, in public, just like them.

All of a sudden, however, Sabalenka had two chances to break Rybakina’s serve and win the set. While Rybakina held her serve that game, Sabalenka, 28, capitalized on her third set-point chance. A strong return on a Rybakina second serve forced an error, and the match was now headed into a deciding third set. 

Sabalenka had the crowd, keen to see a three-peat, on her side. She had the experience of winning the prior two U.S. Open finals. It stood to reason she’d capitalize on her good fortune, and at least make the last set competitive. 

Shockingly, that didn’t happen. Rybakina deserves all the credit. 

“I told myself that I can still do it,” Rybakina says. “I need to focus on my serve and just risk a little bit more when I have the chance.” Her serve was too strong. Rybakina doubled Sabalenka’s ace count, 12 to 6, in the match. In the third set, Sabalenka did not win a single point while returning Rybakina’s first serve, going 0 for 10. 

Rybakina is the first player representing Kazakhstan to win a U.S. Open singles title. She was born and raised in Russia, but the Kazakhstan Tennis Federation offered her more financial support, so she switched allegiances in 2018. Rybakina ice skated and did gymnastics when she was younger, but her height—she’s now 6 feet tall—disqualified her from a professional career in those sports. So she took up tennis. 

A foot injury forced her to retire from an Aug. 20 quarterfinal in Cincinnati. Her U.S. Open status was in peril. “We arrive to New York,” she says. “We did

MRI. It didn't look that great.” She went a week without picking up a racket. “I was just going from my hotel room to the gym, three hours there a lot of recovery, treatments,” she says. “Yeah, couple dinners to also a little bit switch the mind.”

Rybakina struggled walking. Now, she’s lifting the U.S. Open trophy. And while she didn’t celebrate on the court, her understated vibe might end there. 

“Don't know what we're going to do yet,” she said of her Saturday night post-victory plans in New York. “But I'm sure it's going to be a lot of fun.”

We all know at least one or two adults who like to have things done for them: someone to run their errands, drive them to the doctor, pick up their medications and groceries. My mother was like this. I was what is referred to as the parentified child, taking care of her since I was a young girl until she died seven years ago. I was so put off by my mother’s complete reliance on other people that I went in the opposite direction; I became a psychologist who strongly prefers to do everything for herself.

I learned over time that the problem with excessive self-reliance or stoicism is that it isn’t always, or even often, effective. As a psychologist, I had to learn and teach myself, as well as my patients, the importance of asking for help when one needs it. As I tell my patients (and as I learned to tell myself), we do ourselves a disservice by not asking for and accepting help when we need it. 

No one can go through life alone. Humans are social beings, and we are designed to be interconnected with one another. Being able to effectively ask for and receive help also makes us stronger and more independent over time.

There are many reasons why people don’t like to ask for help. One is we think we should be able to do everything for ourselves. We feel like if we ask others for help that we will look weak or needy. We might fear rejection or are concerned with imposing on others. We may be concerned that asking someone for help gives people some kind of power or leverage over us. We may even believe that receiving help from others means we owe someone something back. 

Believe me, I get it. I have some of those same cognitive distortions in my thinking as well. I need to give myself grace and compassion for having such thoughts, and then push through them.

The next step is figuring out what help we could benefit from, and knowing how, when, and who to ask for help. Doing this helps set us up for success. 

Humans aren’t perfect. We aren’t supposed to have all the answers, capabilities, or capacities. I encourage the people I work with to take an inventory of the needs that they have. We have to understand that, as emotionally healthy adults, we need to meet many of our own needs ourselves. Some of our needs we can ask other people for help with, and some of our needs will go unmet.

Once we figure out the needs we have, we can spot which ones might benefit from support and assistance. Let’s say we don’t want to go to the end-of-summer company picnic alone and would prefer a plus-one to come with us. There’s nothing wrong—and, dare I say, everything right—with asking another person to accompany us. But we need to be strategic.

First, pick a supportive person to ask. (This isn’t a task for your least-social friend.) Then, ask politely. When we ask for help, we might want to consider what our body language, posture, tone of voice, and choice of words say about us and our request. For example, if we stand in front of someone with our arms crossed over our chests, this often signals defensiveness or a lack of openness. If we slump or shrug, avoid eye contact, or point a finger, this also doesn’t invite people in. Similarly, making demands, threats, or insults—or insisting someone help us—can also be off-putting, and decrease our chances of getting support. 

I really like a treatment called Seeking Safety. Though originally designed for trauma survivors who have co-occurring PTSD and substance abuse, these are behavioral, cognitive, and people skills that have wider applicability. For example, in regards to asking for help, the method suggests that people consider starting small, practicing on safe people with simple requests. It may seem obvious, but your odds of getting a ride to a job interview or doctor’s appointment are higher than if you ask someone for money to pay this month’s rent or the next car payment.

Of course, there are other great treatments and resources for learning related social skills. For example, the psychologist Donald Meichanbaum has written extensively on the skills needed for interpersonal effectiveness, behavioral rehearsal, and problem-solving.

When we ask for help, we also must be prepared for someone to say no. If they do, we must learn not to take it personally. Most of the time, their reasons for refusal are not about us. It could be about their own time management, finances, or resources.

I reached out to Adam Brown, a psychologist and professor at the New School for Social Research who has conducted research on factors that contribute to mental-health risks and resilience. “Strong social connections and support are among the most important protective factors when people face stress, adversity, and difficult life circumstances,” he said. “Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. It is a form of adaptive coping that strengthens relationships, reduces isolation, and creates opportunities to gain new perspectives, learn from others, and grow.”

I agree, and I need that reminder sometimes when my old imprint comes back to me, and I think that I need to have all the answers and take care of everyone but me. 

I’m human. I deserve support, connection, and help, just like everyone else. And so do you.

The United States is on pace to see one of its most active wildfire seasons on record. According to a new AccuWeather report, large fires were active in at least 13 states as of Sept. 9, while more than 8.4 million acres had burned nationwide this year—about 1.3 million acres above the full-year annual average over the previous decade.

The extraordinarily active season is testing a recently overhauled federal wildfire-response system while placing mounting financial pressure on governments, taxpayers, insurers, and individual households.

How the U.S. changed its wildfire response after the Los Angeles fires

The Los Angeles fires in January 2025 were high-profile incidents that drew widespread attention to the nation’s risk. They were notable as sudden, highly concentrated, urban conflagration events—and they stand in contrast to the 2026 wildfire season, which has garnered less attention with the incidents geographically dispersed across the U.S. 

However, almost twice as much land has burned so far in 2026 as had burned at the same point in 2025, according to AccuWeather. 

The Palisades and Eaton fires in L.A. showcased just how costly massive wildfires are in terms of infrastructure damage, loss of life, and economic impact. Collectively, the fires burned about 37,500 acres and destroyed nearly 17,000 structures, killing at least 31 people. Munich Re estimated total damage at $53 billion, including $40 billion in insured losses—“by far the largest insured loss on record from a wildfire event,” according to the United Nations.

Read More: What Happens When the World Is on Fire

In response, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on June 12, 2025, calling for the consolidation of wildfire response resources within the Interior and Agriculture departments within 90 days. The U.S. Wildland Fire Service was formed as a result. 

The order also directed agencies to review rules that might impede wildfire response, develop performance metrics, release relevant historical satellite data, and evaluate the sale of excess military aircraft for wildfire response. Those provisions carried deadlines ranging from 120 to 210 days.

Since then, the Administration has overhauled how the federal government fights fires. One of the largest shifts involves focusing on wildfire suppression. Since April, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has directed crews to presume a full-suppression strategy for every wildfire under the management of the Interior Department. While managers are instructed to select tactics according to on-the-ground conditions, the presumptive approach is suppression—a pursuit that is widely known to be expensive. 

The move has drawn criticism as states compete for limited firefighting resources, and as federal forecasters expect above-normal significant-fire potential in parts of the West through September.

The financial toll of wildfires has dramatically escalated in recent years as fire seasons grow longer and fires become more severe. 

Why wildfire costs are rising for federal and state governments

The National Multi-Agency Coordination Group (NMAC), composed of representatives from the federal and state agencies, establishes national preparedness levels ranging from 1 to 5. The country remained at Level 5 from July 18 through Sept. 4, meaning national resources were heavily committed and some regions had to take emergency measures to sustain operations. The level was lowered to 3 on Sept. 9. 

During the Level 5 period, the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group warned of “high competition” for firefighting resources nationally. It said the system lacked sufficient incident-management resources to meet every request, prompting concerns among lawmakers about whether resources could be exhausted before the season ended.

On Friday, five Democratic Senators—Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff of California, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper of Colorado, and Ron Wyden of Oregon—released a letter to Burgum and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, expressing “serious concerns” about the departments’ preparedness and ability to adequately respond to the ongoing wildfire season.

The letter says the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Wildland Fire Service had more than $6 billion in fire-suppression budget authority for fiscal year 2026 and had spent more than 70% by Aug. 31.

“Any wildfire that represents a threat to life, property, infrastructure or the environment should be extinguished as quickly as possible,” federal officials with the Wildland Fire Service said in a statement to the Associated Press in July when the policy was instituted. “Our experienced fire managers retain the authority to select the safest and most effective tactics based on conditions on the ground.”

Some experts argue, however, that full suppression is part of the issue that makes wildfires so large and expensive in the first place.

“These Western ecosystems are adapted to fire; they need fire, and they've burned for thousands of years. Roughly 150 years ago, we started suppressing fires, and in large swaths of the Western forests, that led to an accumulation of fuels,” Winslow Hansen, ecologist with the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, tells TIME. Fuel can refer to any vegetation, twigs, branches, or organic soils that may be prone to catching fire—especially in the hot, dry conditions that are more prevalent nationwide due to climate change, he explains.

The combination leads to more fuel and drier fuel for fires, Hansen says, and “that leads to more intense fires, larger fires, and even faster fires.”

Federal suppression spending captures only one portion of wildfires’ broader economic toll. A Department of the Interior review estimated that wildfires impose between $87 billion and $424 billion in annual costs, measured in 2022 dollars, including property and health damages and other economic losses. The department cautioned, however, that significant gaps in the available data make the total difficult to calculate.

Separately, a 2018 Headwaters Economics review of existing research and five wildfire case studies estimated that suppression represented approximately 9% of the fires’ full community costs. 

State governments are shouldering part of that broader economic burden. While no comprehensive national tally tracks their wildfire spending in real time, data within affected states illuminates the strain.

In Oregon, wildfires had burned 2.5 million acres and cost the state $236.2 million as of late August. Last week, the state approved nearly $123 million in additional funding and authorized $150 million in short-term Treasury borrowing to cover expenses while awaiting federal reimbursements. Officials project that the season’s total cost could reach $350 million, surpassing the state record of $318 million set in 2024.

In Utah, where more than 559,000 acres had burned as of Sept. 3, state wildfire costs had reached approximately $44.9 million and could approach $50 million. Federal costs associated with fires in Utah were estimated at approximately $216 million. Jamie Barnes, commissioner of the Utah Department of Natural Resources, said it could be a “record breaking” season by cost.

How rising wildfire costs affect Americans

While local, state, and federal governments are responsible for wildfire preparedness and suppression, these activities are funded primarily by taxpayers. For example, the four largest fires that plagued Colorado this year could cost taxpayers $266 million, according to a Colorado Drought Task Force meeting in July.

And the government does not bear the full burden of the fires; Americans shoulder it through property damage, skyrocketing insurance costs, supply chain disruptions, and lost business revenue. 
A study released in August analyzed data covering approximately 100,000 people and 50,000 homes inside wildfire burn areas. It found that occupants of destroyed homes experienced reduced earnings for three years after a fire, with cumulative losses equal to 26% of their pre-fire annual income. Within fire zones, lower-income households were more likely to lose their homes.

Wildfires also impose costs that are harder to quantify. A July study from the University of Southern California found that Los Angeles County residents who lived in evacuation zones during the 2025 fires reported elevated anxiety and depression nearly a year later, with the greatest effects among people already facing social and economic hardship.

These costs do not affect only people in communities directly touched by wildfires. In California, average homeowners-insurance premiums rose 84% between the end of 2020 and March 2026, according to Stanford researchers, who attributed the increase to a combination of wildfire risk, inflation and the state’s regulatory framework.

According to the 2026 Wildfire Risk Report by Cotality, a major real estate data and analytics company, more than 2.5 million properties across the 10 of the most exposed states face a moderate or greater risk of wildfire damage, with a combined reconstruction cost value approaching $1.4 trillion. The risk is concentrated in California, Colorado, and Texas. The report estimates that there are some 1.28 million at-risk properties in California alone.

No single figure can capture what the 2026 wildfire season will ultimately cost. The bills will emerge in different forms—from government spending and rebuilding expenses to higher insurance premiums and lost household income. The financial consequences typically persist long after the fires are contained.

As we approach the U.S. Open final, which takes place Sunday in New York City, the optimism about American men’s tennis is clocking in at a level unseen since Andy Roddick won the tournament in 2003. 

Ben Shelton, the big-serving southpaw who grew up in Gainesville, Florida, and won national team and singles championships at the University of Florida in 2021 and 2022, respectively, will face the event’s top seed—and the world’s No. 2-ranked player—Alexander Zverev of Germany. 

Sure, topping Zverev—the reigning French Open champion and Wimbledon runner-up—is no simple task for Shelton, who’s trying to become the first American man to claim any Grand Slam tournament title since Roddick. The German is 5-0 all-time against Shelton, who has taken a lone set against Zverev on tour. 

But let’s face it: The three American men who have reached a U.S. Open final since Roddick’s seminal victory had little chance of success against far superior opponents. Andre Agassi’s nostalgic run to the 2005 final, in his second-to-last U.S. Open, ran into a Roger Federer rally: Federer, 20-time Grand Slam singles champ and recent inductee into the International Tennis Hall of Fame, bested Agassi to win the second of his five straight U.S. Open crowns. 

Roddick returned to the final in 2006. Like Agassi the year before, he managed to take a set off Federer before succumbing to his rival’s inevitable triumph. 

Two years ago, Taylor Fritz won his semifinal over fellow American Frances Tiafoe to reach the final against Jannik Sinner, who was on the cusp of winning his second major championship and cementing his status, along with Carlos Alcaraz, as the alpha dogs of their game. Sinner beat Fritz in straight sets in 2024—and has since won three more Grand Slam championships.

I was there the night Fritz reached that final. I wrote all about it. And truth be told, until Friday, I pretty much forgot about it.

Bet I’m not alone. 

Win or lose on Sunday, Shelton’s performance at this year’s tournament will be remembered. After all, he already outlasted Alcaraz, the defending U.S. Open champion and a seven-time Slam victor, in a five-set quarterfinal epic that ended at 3:33 a.m. Wednesday—the latest finish in tournament history. Shelton won in a 10-point, fifth-set tiebreaker. 

By defeating Tiafoe, a close friend whom he called “a big brother,” in Friday’s semifinal 4-6, 6-3, 6-3, 7-5, Shelton became the first Black American man to reach a U.S. Open final since the event’s stadium namesake, Arthur Ashe, in 1972. Shelton’s the first Black American man to reach a Grand Slam singles final since MaliVai Washington, who lost to Richard Krajicek of the Netherlands at Wimbledon in 1996.

Against Tiafoe, Shelton showed the sort of mental fortitude he’ll need against Zverev. Shelton double-faulted late in the first set to give Tiafoe the first service break of the match. Tiafoe took advantage of Shelton’s error to take the set. Shelton, however, refused to let his mishap crush him. He broke Tiafoe right back to go up 2-0 in the second and eventually win that set. In the third, Shelton and Tiafoe dueled in a marathon game lasting more than 15 minutes: A Tiafoe unforced error, on Shelton’s third set point, gave Shelton the set and momentum he wouldn’t relinquish.

All match long, Shelton was able to extend rallies by chasing down Tiafoe’s best shots. At times he simply lobbed balls onto Tiafoe’s side of the net, almost daring his opponent to make a mistake. The match ended on a Tiafoe double-fault. Shelton delivered 20 aces, to Tiafoe’s three. Shelton’s energy reserves also gave him an advantage: In the fourth set, Shelton to his left and struck a full-court, diagonal winner that wowed the crowd. 

On Sunday, Ashe will be Shelton’s home floor. American tennis fans have been thirsting for a winner on the men’s side, going on a quarter century. 

“Let’s do this for the USA,” Shelton said on court after the match, drawing cheers from a crowd that had included Serena Williams, Shonda Rhimes, Nicole Kidman, Rami Malek, and NBA Finals MVP Jalen Brunson. Also in attendance was Shelton’s girlfriend, soccer star Trinity Rodman. Rodman has a 1 p.m. game in Washington on Sunday; Shelton-Zverev is slated to start at 2. 

Zverev, for all his impressive play this year—he’ll be appearing in his third-straight Grand Slam final—remains a divisive figure in tennis, thanks to past allegations of domestic violence. Zverev has consistently denied the claims. One case was settled out of court in 2024, without a finding or admission of guilt. In another, an ATP investigation was unable to find sufficient evidence to support the allegations.

He’s a convenient foil for a united American audience.

After methodically picking apart Tiafoe, Shelton seems unbothered by past struggles against Zverev, pointing out that before the quarterfinal, he had also never beaten Alcaraz (in three tries). “I feel that I’m a different player,” says Shelton, who last faced Zverev last November, at the ATP Finals in Turin, Italy. “I feel like I have so many more tools. I feel like I know my identity, am comfortable in my own skin, and I know what it takes for me to be playing top-level tennis.

A reporter noted that a lot is riding on Sunday. “Is there?” Shelton responded, with a laugh. 

The male American major title drought gets brought up ad nauseam. But Shelton knows he can’t dwell on the stakes.

“At the end of the day, I'm here in New York, I'm hanging out with my team, I'm with my homies playing a little bit of tennis,” he says. “Confidence and belief take over.” 

He’ll need it. He has it. A chance at making history lies ahead. 

Ronald Reagan, Charlton Heston, Tony Bennett, and Danny Glover have something in common. So do Margaret Thatcher, Norman Rockwell, and Sean Connery. 

All had been afflicted with Alzheimer’s or dementia—the progressive neurologic disease characterized by memory and functional loss—but with an important difference. The first group chose to make a public announcement of their diagnosis during their life, and the second chose to keep their dementia diagnosis private, their condition revealed by their survivors only after their death. 

Maintaining the confidentiality of one’s health information is a fundamental right, but when a public figure receives a life-limiting diagnosis, does disclosure matter? Some choose to do so as a form of farewell to their supporters and fans, others to raise public awareness of the illness that has afflicted them. 

When the actor Michael J. Fox announced almost three decades ago that he had been diagnosed with early-stage Parkinson’s disease, a bright spotlight was shone on the then relatively unknown neurologic disease. His namesake foundation has since raised over $3 billion for Parkinson’s disease research, his testimony to the U.S. Congress helped boost federal funding for neurologic and stem cell research, and his patient advocacy empowered persons with Parkinson’s to come forward, share their experiences, and receive support from others as they go through their Parkinson’s journey. 

In my decades-long career as a memory disorders specialist, I have found that one characteristic shared by patients with Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia is a preference, at least in the early stages, for secrecy about the diagnosis. After I informed a famous patient of her Alzheimer’s diagnosis, I handed her an informational brochure on memory loss. Her husband promptly took it from her, folded it neatly, and hid it underneath his coat, saying “In case we bump into one of her fans in the elevator.”  

Perhaps more than other diseases, the desire for privacy is particularly strong for dementia, which is still viewed by many as a mental health disorder rather than a neurologic disease like Parkinson’s disease or ALS. 

My patients and families typically limit the disclosure of the diagnosis on a need-to-know basis, and many choose to hide it till the end. Doctors, clinics, and hospitals are complicit with this secrecy, with only around 50% of people with dementia having their diagnosis documented in their medical records. 

Since dementia tends to begin later in one’s life, many simply fade into retirement and anonymity, which inevitably leads to social isolation and misleading others of their whereabouts. Interestingly, the shame associated with dementia is not typically shared by people afflicted with other neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis, stroke, or ALS. 

When singer Celine Dion was diagnosed with the rare, progressive neurologic condition called stiff-person syndrome, she came forward with a message to her fans, putting an end to speculation about the mystery illness that caused her to cancel a series of performances. In her documentary, she bravely allowed a glimpse of the painful muscle spasm she experiences daily. Through her foundation, Dion personally donated millions of dollars towards research into the rare disease that afflicts fewer than 5,000 people in the United States. 

There are over 57 million people with dementia globally, with nearly 10 million new cases diagnosed every year. In 2050, an estimated 152 million people will have Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia. In the United States alone, there are currently 7.4 million people age 65 or older living with dementia. While many important advances have been made in research on prevention, early diagnosis, and treatment of Alzheimer’s, many more of its mysteries need to be unraveled and a cure remains elusive. 

While I understand and respect people’s desires for privacy, the potential upside of destigmatizing dementia are significant. If every person, famous or not, whose life has been touched by dementia—in a spouse, parent, friend, or in themselves—were willing to share their stories and advocate for more research funding, better public policies, and greater community and caregiving support, perhaps the stigma and shame associated with this neurologic disease would be eased, and we would be closer to finding a cure. 

The desire for secrecy of a dementia diagnosis can sometimes have serious consequences. The actor Gene Hackman was living with dementia in private for years. The public became aware of his plight only when he was found deceased inside his home after his wife, who was his primary caregiver, unexpectedly died before him. Interviews with their neighbors painted a picture of a private and secretive couple who were rarely seen outside their home. It was believed that Mr. Hackman died alone after his wife and primary caregiver passed. Left to fend for himself, he was unable to provide for his basic needs: food, water, medications. 

It took a brain autopsy for Robin Williams to get diagnosed with Lewy body disease, a form of dementia that produces visual hallucinations, sleep disturbance, and tremors. For years, his condition was misdiagnosed as depression and Parkinson’s disease, as his doctors were unable to connect the constellation of classic symptoms to recognize that dementia has set in. After Williams died by suicide, his widow Susan Schneider Williams became a public advocate for Lewy body awareness, putting a public face to a disease that many have not even heard of.

Most people who are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia are not public figures, but like these famous people, they need to decide the price they are willing to pay for privacy. Even in the early stages of the disease, many decide to withdraw from their social circles, cease the activities they enjoy, and retreat to a life that is much too small. A big part of this unfortunate decision stems from the shame that comes with the diagnosis of dementia, which is often viewed not just as a loss of memory, but of intellect, social status, and identity.

So pervasive is the secrecy surrounding a dementia diagnosis that I now ask every family caregiver of my patient a telling question: If you became unavailable, who would take care of your loved one? Invariably, they declare that they are not going anywhere, that they will never leave their husband, wife, parent, or friend, so I ask a more direct question: If you were hit by a Mack truck on your way home today, who will feed, administer medication, and keep your loved one safe tonight?

If they provide anything other than a reassuring response, I counsel them on the importance of having a back-up plan: a relative, friend, or neighbor who can check in on the person with memory impairment to make sure they are safe. I remind them of the benefits of socialization and maintaining relationships with others in people with dementia. I tell them that even with cognitive changes, there is still a lot of life left to be lived—new places to see, new people to meet, new experiences to enjoy. 

I reassure them that whether they decide on privacy or disclosure, we will be there to support them, minimize dementia’s impact on their daily lives, and provide comfort when we can.

“Everything is Possible,” declares the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the far-right party sending shockwaves across Germany and farther afield, after winning 43.8% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, a state of around two million people in the eastern part of the country. Like other populist movements that have dominated politics over the last decade, the AfD has not hidden its light under a bushel. It’s all there in black and white.

At the start of its election campaign in Saxony Anhalt, the AfD published a 258-page manifesto bearing its motto: “Das Land Zuerst,” or “The Country First.” The manifesto promises large scale deportations of immigrants, including naturalized German citizens, under its remigration program, particularly targeting those who do not look or sound “German.” It seeks to change the history curriculum in schools to teach “more Bismarck and less Hitler,” emphasizing imperial achievements and national power while diminishing Germany’s postwar culture of remembrance and attention paid to Nazism and the Holocaust.

The manifesto promises to support “normal” heterosexual families and conventional households while withholding benefits and legal recognition from LGBTQ families and others it considers “deviant.” It aggressively opposes German military aid to Ukraine and insists that restoring friendly relations with Russia would provide cheaper access to energy and lower prices for Germans. The far right party’s manifesto is worth reading in full. It is no wonder that Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classified the AfD chapters in Saxony Anhalt and a neighboring state as right-wing extremist. Yet it is worth admitting that a large number of Germans are finding this vision enticing.

The beguiling promises of the AfD

The AfD’s sweeping, simplistic promises offer a beguiling contrast with the gray incrementalism of politics as practiced by a succession of coalition governments in Berlin— a politics of hard truths and achingly slow progress, when there is any progress at all. Why vote for parties synonymous with budget cuts to balance the books, job losses amid fierce competition from China, and billions spent on rearmament when you can return to the secure world of yesteryear?

The AfD won voters away from all its mainstream rivals, winning over 82,000 voters who had previously supported the governing Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU). But one of the more striking consequences of the Sept. 6 election in Saxony-Anhalt was that the AfD energized people who had stopped voting, and brought 170,000 of them—around a tenth of the local electorate—back to the ballot box. These are people who had largely given up on politics, and who, for years, have inhabited a parallel universe. Many of these voters regard Germany’s Nazi past as overblown and refuse to draw parallels between then and now. They also see centrist politics as the instrument of a deep state seeking to undermine their values.

While reporting from Saxony-Anhalt, I was reminded of a small incident I witnessed before the pandemic. I was walking along a street in Leipzig, one of the main cities of the former Communist East Germany, with a helpful contact, an intelligent local activist who had once worked for the Greens. As we passed the offices of MDR, the regional public broadcaster, she suddenly shouted, without provocation, “Lügenpresse”—“lying press,” or “fake news.” Startled, I asked what the station had done to earn her ire. “They don’t listen to the likes of me,” was all she could say. The more I pressed her to identify the specific source of her grievance, the more agitated she became.

Some of what is happening in German politics is particular to this country, not least the long-held resentment among many eastern Germans, whether real or perceived, at having been treated as second-class citizens since reunification in 1990. But much of it belongs to a broader far-right insurgency across Europe, the United States and beyond.

Echoes of MAGA

The victorious AfD candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund is a 35-year-old former fragrance salesman who ran a charismatic, brilliantly executed campaign. He has made clear that President Donald Trump is his “model.” In both policy and communications strategy, the AfD is one of MAGA’s closest international allies. Even as the U.S. war in Iran sent oil prices soaring and strained German household budgets, the AfD, unlike other political parties in Europe, did not distance itself from the Trump Administration.

That will not have gone unnoticed by Trump, whose National Security Strategy of Nov. 2025 promised to support “patriotic” movements across Europe to help prevent what it called “civilizational erasure.” In his first reaction to the election result, President Trump refrained from mentioning the AfD by name but declared: “Wow, the populist party in Germany had a really big night.” He ended his post with ‘MGGA!!!’—apparently shorthand for  “Make Germany Great Again.”

Trump is not the AfD’s only friend in high places. The party makes no secret of its warmth toward Vladimir Putin, echoing the Russian president’s positions on Ukraine and much else besides. It calls for immediate “peace” negotiations, pretty much on the Kremlin’s terms. Bringing Russia back into the heart of Europe, the party believes, would help advance its socially conservative agenda, restore a constant flow of cheap oil and gas, and provide stability.

There is still a big question mark attached to all of this. The German constitution, created after World War II, requires political parties to build coalitions at both the federal and regional levels. The intention has always been to prevent the accumulation of power in a single party’s hands. That the AfD came tantalizingly close to an overall majority in Saxony-Anhalt—falling just three seats short in the 83-seat regional parliament—is remarkable in itself.

Now Siegmund, the AfD leader, who made much of motorbike rides and other colorful campaign-trial outings, faces the hard graft of trying to form a government. To do so, he must either persuade one of the other parties to cut a deal or entice a few maverick lawmakers to defect. None of this will be easy, not least because of the so-called “firewall”: the refusal of the mainstream parties to work with the AfD so far. That resolve is ebbing, but it may yet hold this time, just barely. These machinations are likely to go down to the wire before the legislature convenes in early October. If Siegmund does become state premier, he has vowed not to dilute the AfD’s core policies to get legislation through.

The task confronting Siegmund and the AfD is considerably more exciting than the  one facing Germany’s mainstream parties. The characteristics that defined postwar German politics—compromise and consensus—were regarded for decades as virtues. Many voters now see them as vices. And social media has only intensified the demand for instant, painless answers to all the many problems the country and the world are facing.

Twilight in Berlin

Delivering his annual budget speech on Sept. 9, Chancellor Friedrich Merz cut a forlorn figure. His leadership is in grave danger. With two more regional elections looming in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, another eastern state, and Berlin, his Christian Democrats are bracing for a drubbing.

A naturally acerbic figure, Merz has endured historically low poll ratings for months. Much of the German media treats him with derision, dwelling on  campaign promises that have backfired and come to haunt him. He boasted that he would halve the AfD’s support, only to watch it double. He also pledged an “autumn of reforms”—by which he meant the autumn of 2025—but those measures are still struggling to make their way through Parliament.

Merz spent years angling for the top job, criticizing his predecessor, Angela Merkel, for dragging the party too far toward the political center, for being too generous to welfare claimants and too welcoming to migrants. He insisted that Germans needed the option of a more genuine conservatism. They have taken him up on the offer, but not of his variety. Some within the CDU wonder whether their party can survive the onslaught from its right.

And it’s not just Merz’s party that’s in the doldrums. The Social Democrats (SPD), the center-left junior partner in the ruling coalition, are also in disarray, their vote share in freefall. Party activists believe the solution lies in a return to the left’s more traditional program of state intervention. Meanwhile, CDU activists want the government to cut spending more deeply and crack down harder on migration. The two parties are pulling in opposite directions, even as governing together requires them to find ways of working together every day.

With Moscow and Washington egging on the AfD, the greatest danger to Germany may lie in its foreign and security policy. Merz may have struggled with his domestic agenda, but he has shown courage and resolve in overhauling Germany’s military posture. Defense spending is on course to meet NATO's target of 3.5% by 2029, an impressive achievement in a country that, only a few years ago, was barely hitting 1%. He has been outspoken in support for Ukraine and recently accused Russia for being behind an attempted drone attack at Leipzig airport.

The approach is replete with risk, as a still shell-shocked chancellor admitted shortly after the results in Saxony-Anhalt. Exactly 57.7% of voters in that state, he admitted, backed parties “that question our unstinting support for Ukraine.” Yet he added that he would “not deviate from his position one millimeter.” In Parliament, Merz accused the AfD of a “grotesque” embrace of Moscow and of “contempt for democratic institutions.”

While Merz struggled to be heard and struggled to sound optimistic, Alice Weidel, the co-leader of the AfD, dominated proceedings. Mocking “the public sector and the asylum industry” as the only growing parts of the German economy, she boasted that her party had “pulverized” all those that had stood in its way. It was a tour de force of fury. And there will be more to come in the dark weeks and months ahead.

TIME looks back 25 years after 9/11 with stories from the archive honoring the victims and the resilience of the survivors.

The explosive diarrhea outbreak that sickened thousands of people in the U.S. this summer has ended, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on Friday.

The outbreak marked the largest of cyclosporiasis, a gastrointestinal illness caused by a parasite known as Cyclospora cayetanensis, in the country’s known history. 

People become infected by the parasite by consuming contaminated food or water; in the U.S., outbreaks of cyclosporiasis have often been tied to fresh produce. While some people may not experience any symptoms, others who become infected by the parasite may report “explosive” bowel movements. 

In July, federal public health officials announced that they were investigating an outbreak of these infections in several states, eventually linking the cases to contaminated processed iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico. On July 17, the company recalled all of its iceberg lettuce products that were sourced from central Mexico, which it said it did “out of an abundance of caution.”

Read More: E. coli, Salmonella, Cyclospora: Is the U.S. Seeing a Surge in Foodborne Illnesses?

The CDC said on Friday that the number of recent cyclosporiasis cases tied to this summer’s outbreak “has significantly declined.” At the height of the outbreak, before the Taylor Farms recall, the CDC was reporting more than 1,000 cases in one day, but in August, the agency was reporting less than two each day.

“At this time, there is no risk of people getting sick with cyclosporiasis from this source,” the CDC said. “The best-by dates for all product linked to this outbreak have passed and it is no longer available in stores or restaurants.”

But, the agency added, the Food and Drug Administration is continuing with its investigation to determine how the lettuce product tied to the outbreak this summer was contaminated with Cyclospora cayetanensis.

Here’s what to know about the toll the outbreak took across the country.

How many people died in the Cyclospora outbreak this summer?

The CDC confirmed that two people died from cyclosporiasis in the outbreak this summer, both of them in Michigan. 

Michigan public health officials revealed last month that the two individuals who died had “significant underlying health conditions that may have been impacted by cyclosporiasis and dehydration.”

Cyclosporiasis rarely becomes fatal; most people without underlying conditions recover even without receiving treatment.

How many people were sickened in the Cyclospora outbreak this summer?

According to the CDC, 12,883 people across the country were sickened by the parasite in the outbreak this summer, though the agency has said that the true number is likely even higher than that because people often recover from cyclosporiasis without seeking medical attention and so are never tested for the parasite. Of those confirmed cases, 570 were hospitalized.

In a typical year, the U.S. reports only a few thousands cases of cyclosporiasis. The five-year average of cases per year between 2018-2022, for instance, was just 3,285, according to data shared by the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment. And of those individuals, less than 200, on average, were hospitalized.

Which states were affected by the Cyclospora outbreak this summer?

Twenty-one states were affected by the Cyclospora outbreak this summer. Michigan was the hardest hit, with the CDC reporting more than 5,700 cases there. Ohio and Missouri also saw high numbers, reporting 2,871 and 1,071 cases, respectively. States including Indiana, Kentucky, Kansas, Nebraska, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma saw case numbers in the triple digits.

Africa needs an agricultural revolution, both to feed the growing population and to power the continent’s economic growth. And yet, despite decades of efforts, a slew of challenges from climate shocks to market shifts have hampered progress.  

This was a flavor of the conversation at the Africa Food Systems Forum 2026 in Kigali, Rwanda, last week. And I was struck by a simple solution that came up time and again: focus on farmer profitability. 

“If the farmer prospers, then it means that our food systems are going to be resilient,” Elizabeth Wathuti, founder of the Green Generation Initiative, which promotes environmental community innovations in Africa, told me on a TIME panel hosted at the conference. 

The challenge is not simply producing more food. Agricultural production has increased in Africa over the last few decades, but growth isn’t necessarily durable. Agri-food supports two-thirds of African livelihoods and generates a third of the continent’s GDP. But farmers generate less value than their counterparts elsewhere: about $1,500 per worker annually versus $4,300 globally, according to figures from AGRA, the organization formerly known as the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Higher profits mean more farmers can afford to stay in the business and younger people will be enticed to join, thereby creating a more sustainable food system for the continent. 

Profitable farming isn’t just about feeding people, as important as that is. A developed agriculture sector creates opportunities for investment in processing, trading, and other functions along the agriculture value chain, leading to further economic growth opportunities. Only around 12-15% of Africa’s agricultural GDP comes from processing, compared to more than 60% in developed regions, according to AGRA. And agricultural outputs can be the basis of new industries: think of biofuels. From a climate perspective, too, higher profits create adaptive capacity. Farmers with margin can invest in irrigation, improved seeds, better soil health, or simply absorb a bad season.

“I don’t think food systems are part of the development or economic growth agenda, I think they ought to be the economic growth agenda,” Kingsley Moghalu, president at the Institute for Governance and Economic Transformation and a former central banker in Nigeria, told me on the panel.

Beyond humanitarian concerns, there are more positive reasons for those of us on the outside to pay attention to the developments in Africa. For one, the fact that Africa and other developing countries are being hit so hard first may make them a natural place to innovate solutions before they migrate to other developed markets. And, second, more mature agri-food systems in Africa create opportunities for investors and companies to do business on the continent that might not have otherwise considered the region.

Above all, though, the discussion offered an interesting reframe that can apply across geographies and sectors. Indeed, in all sectors profitability may be a prerequisite for durable climate action. 

Diesel prices in the U.S. soared past $6 a gallon Friday for the first time ever, and experts predict the costs will fall back on the consumer through steeper prices for everyday staples.

The U.S.-Iran war has severely disrupted the flow of oil, with the national average of diesel now $6.06 a gallon according to the American Automobile Association, up from $5.85 last week, as renewed hostilities persist. By comparison, the national average this time last year was around $3.71.

The spike in fuel prices has been driven by higher oil prices. The price of benchmark Brent crude oil, a key ingredient in diesel, spiked to $109 per barrel Thursday, amid widening regional instability. The active hostilities between Washington and Tehran are largely focused on the Strait of Hormuz, but the advances of Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis pose fresh risks for the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, another key shipping route.

Continued disruption of the Red Sea chokepoint would be “devastating to the global supply of energy,” says Shuting Pomerleau, director of energy and environmental policy at the American Action Forum. A surge in Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries have also significantly impacted production, she adds, bringing daily exports of diesel fuel down significantly compared to last year and therefore pushing up global prices.

President Donald Trump told an interviewer this week that he has no regrets over the Iran conflict. But the majority of Americans appear to disagree, with increased living costs, driven up by the war, proving to be a sticking point ahead of the November midterms. 64% of U.S. adults surveyed in late July said that the conflict with Iran has been “not worth fighting,” according to a poll conducted by the Associated Press. Furthermore, a Reuters/Ipsos survey of American adults conducted between Aug. 21-24 found that 74% of respondents felt their cost of living was moving on the wrong track.

The surge in diesel prices has sparked fresh concerns. While only around 3% of passenger cars on American roads use diesel, it’s relied upon for heavy transport, construction, farming, and military vehicles. Around 75% of all diesel consumption in the U.S. came from the transportation sector in 2025, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Pomerleau says that diesel's wider range of performance in terms of efficiency and safety makes it more desirable for heavy vehicles. “Diesel fuel has greater energy density than other liquid fuels, so it provides more useful energy per unit of volume,” she explains.

Higher diesel prices undoubtedly make an impact at the pump. In California, the average price climbed to $7.98 on Friday, the highest average of any state in the country.

Estimating that prices in California could go beyond $8 per gallon, Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, has warned: “Some pumps aren't even built to display what could come next.”

But with diesel a key component for several industries, American consumers can expect to experience steeper prices elsewhere too, experts say, and that’s on top of cost of living increases they’ve already experienced this year.

Here are three key ways the rise in diesel prices could impact you directly:

Perishables at the grocery store

Diesel is integral to the food supply chain. Foods that require refrigeration and are transported long distances ahead of landing on the grocery store shelves are most likely to see price increases.

U.S. Department of Agriculture data suggests that energy, transport, and storage costs contribute to over 7% of total food costs. If these costs rise due to higher diesel prices, experts say perishable goods stand to be most impacted. 

“The goods that need lots of refrigeration and are on long routes of transport that are perishable, so the vegetables, meat and dairy, those are more exposed to [diesel costs],” Bernhard Dalheimer, assistant professor in food economics at Purdue University, tells TIME.

Price increases could take a while to be seen at the grocery store, though, as Dalheimer notes  shifts in costs can travel “very slowly through the food pipeline.” But when they do trickle down, the increase is more likely to impact lower income families. “These could be small price changes, but people with lower incomes spend a higher proportion of their income on food,” he explains.

A cost tracking system from Brown University's Watson School of International and Public Affairs has found an extra $789.75 per U.S. household has been spent on gasoline and diesel since the war began.

Consumers can expect higher rises in grocery prices during longer periods of higher fuel costs, data shows. A sustained 10-15% increase in fuel prices could result in a 2-4% increase in retail food prices, according to the Independent Grocers Alliance.

The increased costs will also likely impact farmers and their margins. Dalheimer describes farmers as “price takers” who have little influence in determining market prices. 

“Their margins are being squeezed quite dramatically right now. They're under a lot of pressure,” says Dalheimer, explaining that producers have little alternatives than to take on the higher energy costs. “Combine harvesters, tractors and heavy transport trucks, they all need lots of energy and there isn’t an alternative to diesel,” he explains. 

“Farmers need to move all of their products from the farm to the grocery store shelves, so they have to pay for that extra cost, no matter how much that is,” adds Pomerleau, stressing that farmers still need to use diesel for agricultural machinery and transporting produce, regardless of fuel costs.

Shipping and mailing charges

Approximately 76% of the 17 million commercial vehicles in the U.S. are powered by diesel engines, according to the Engine Technology Forum. As such, a lot of mail and shipping couriers have already passed on rising costs this year to consumers.

“Not everyone drives on diesel, but everyone consumes on diesel,” says Pomerleau, pointing toward how integral the fuel is to shipping and transportation.

Shipping and logistics provider UPS has introduced fuel surcharges on shipping since late June. These charges increased for the week commencing Sept. 14, with the domestic ground surcharge rising from 27.5% to 28.5%. 

In March, the U.S. Postal Service sought a 8% charge on certain domestic products, citing increasing transportation costs, which came into effect in April up until January next year. 

Amazon also introduced a 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge on U.S. and Canada-based third-party sellers earlier this year, in response to rising fuel costs following the onset of the Iran war.

Homes that rely on heating oil

According to experts, households that use heating oils could also experience steeper prices.

Just under 5 million American households rely on heating oils, with most of these concentrated in the Northeast.

"Heating oil and diesel are very similar,” says Pomerleau. "Winter's coming. Some regions in the United States, for example, New England. If you look at the state of Massachusetts and Maine, a lot of households do use heating oil to heat their houses in the winter, and heating oil also comes from crude."

Analysis from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, published Aug. 27, when diesel was sitting at $5.45 a gallon, broke down the link between retail diesel prices and heating oil costs.

“Last winter, residential heating-oil prices averaged about $3.98 a gallon. Retail heating-oil prices averaged about 1.02 times the retail diesel price over the same period,” reads the analysis. “With retail diesel now at $5.45 a gallon, that relationship suggests a current heating-oil price of about $5.55 a gallon. For a representative oil-heated household using 450 gallons during the winter, that would mean a heating bill of about $2,497.”

Remarking on how diesel is practically indistinguishable from home heating oil, Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates, told CNN: “Consumers who use heating oil for their home are going to have quite a sticker shock when they get the first delivery for the season."