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

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

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

The center cannot hold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The age of anger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

President Donald Trump appeared to float the idea of renaming New Mexico as “New America,” sharing several maps of the state that listed the new moniker. The images posted Monday, without context or comment, came a day after Trump uploaded an initial "New America" map via social media—an item that was later reshared by the official White House account.

Trump also posted an AI-generated video of himself slapping “America” over a road sign that had previously read “Welcome to New Mexico” and claimed that “many people” had suggested the name change. The White House has not announced any effort to rename New Mexico. TIME has reached out for comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the close of the investment announcements, von der Leyen reemphasized that the E.U. stands in “full solidarity” with Greenland. The public reminder comes against the backdrop of U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated threats to annex the island.

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

Significance of the financial pledges amid fraught geopolitical tensions

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

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

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

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

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

The E.U. support and investment boost also comes as the bloc pursues stronger ties to the Arctic region after Icelandic voters recently opted not to resume accession negotiations with the European Union.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump's annexation threats loom over Greenland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every room has a parallel conversation running underneath what appears on the surface. It’s a pulse, a vibe, a temperature. This undercurrent of unspoken behavior delivers data instantly, but only if you can decipher it. 

Neuroscientists, psychologists, anthropologists, and linguists have studied subtle behaviors for years in a quest to unravel the mystery of how humans create meaning together. I’ve spent the last decade training others how to spot invisible signals, detect who holds power, identify which relationship will influence a decision, spot who has already made up their mind, and decipher who is lying. 

These are the very skills you need to read the room—and they are all learnable. Here are four science-based approaches to improve your ability to do this:

Declutter your mind to get an accurate read

Your mood influences your judgment, and cognitive load distorts what you see. Happy people tend to predict positive outcomes and underestimate negative risks. Stressed minds can find hostility in neutral interactions, according to research by Australian psychologist Joseph Forgas. Landmark work by J.A. Easterbrook showed that emotion and strain reduce the range of cues we can take in and process.

Overload your mind, and you will misread the room. Heightened cognitive load, the baggage you carry into a meeting or conversation, distorts what you see. When your mind is cluttered with thoughts of a fight with your spouse or an unfinished project, you stop observing what’s happening and start reading others through the prism of your own stress. In this mindset, a flat “thanks” can become a slight, and a colleague’s distraction can feel like contempt. 

When a room feels like it’s turning against you, the first question worth asking is whether the room changed or your bandwidth did.

Manage what you transmit

Every gathering has a vibe. While that may sound like astrology, science tells us it’s brain circuitry, and that we probably catch each other’s moods far more often than we think. 

Yale neuroscientists led by Joy Hirsch paired strangers face-to-face and used brain imaging to track what transferred when one person watched emotionally charged videos while the other person watched only the video-watcher. The second person began to mirror the video-watcher’s emotional state, even though they never saw the videos themself. 

A 2023 study in Communications Biology timed the process: strangers watching television together synchronized their emotional responses within 850 milliseconds. The synchronization ran strongest during positive moments, suggesting joy travels freely while we keep our darker feelings hidden.

The emotional state you bring into a room can also shape how everyone else behaves before anyone has consciously registered that you’re anxious or angry. An anxious person can make people rush or interrupt others more frequently. A contemptuous person can license cruelty and make dismissive jokes or harsh judgment feel acceptable. A calm person can reduce the temperature long enough for rational thought to return. 

The message? Manage your own state of mind before you attempt to manage anyone else’s.

Take note of who is missing in the room

A group’s intelligence is not the sum of its IQs. Research by Carnegie Mellon Professor Anita Williams Woolley into the collective intelligence of teams found that group performance had less to do with average or maximum individual IQ than with collaboration. She found that strong groups have good communication skills, open minds, and an equal flow of ideas among participants. A room where one person dominates may feel decisive, but it may be losing intelligence in real time. 

Watch who grabs attention and who recedes into the background. Who gets interrupted? Who is allowed to finish? Who tried to get into the conversation and then gave up? The smartest thing to do, for the group, is to allow everyone to speak and to be heard. 

Read body language like a pro

Amateur room readers imbue simple gestures with definitive meaning: crossed arms signal defensiveness, eye contact suggests honesty. The pros observe changes from baseline and look for clusters of behavior that point in the same direction. 

Science tells us how badly shortcuts deceive us. For example, many people believe that liars avoid eye contact. Researchers at an international airport asked 338 passengers from 81 countries to tell the truth or lie about their travel plans on camera. The liars held eye contact longer—deliberately, a beat past comfortable. Meanwhile, honest people, nervous under questioning, glanced away and looked guilty. 

Fidgeting is also meaningless as a single gesture. Let’s say someone taps their foot in a meeting or plays with their pen nervously. Maybe that’s their norm. The behavior only becomes a signal when their pattern shifts. The savvy room reader asks what triggered the shift from baseline and watches for a cluster of behaviors. Did a particular question cause them to shift their posture, stop their normal foot-tapping, and freeze their blink-rate? That’s worth noting. 

The question is never, “What does this gesture mean?” The better question is, “What does this gesture mean here, from this person, under these conditions?” 

Room reading is a powerful skill that’s part social observation and part emotional intelligence.

As you start to see people and interactions more clearly, you’ll alter your own behavior accordingly. And when you do, many more doors will open because you won’t be guessing what the moment requires.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party on Monday ruled out working with Alternative for Germany after the far-right party emerged victorious in ​state elections in Saxony-Anhalt but fell short of earning an absolute majority.

The AfD won 43.8% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt’s state election on Sunday, according to exit polls. Merz’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) secured 17.2% of the vote.

“This is the hardest defeat that the CDU has had for decades. Of course, this is going to have consequences,” Merz told reporters during a press conference in Berlin.

The Chancellor tried to ease concerns over the stability of democratic institutions in Germany, as the AfD’s victory puts them a step closer to governing at the regional level, something no far-right party in the country has achieved since World War II.

“I can reassure you: our institutions are stable, and our basic law protects this order, and the federal government, led by me, will make sure that the basic law is going to be enforced,” Merz continued. “This message also goes out to our friends in Europe, as we know that Germany has a special responsibility because of its history.”

“This election has further weakened the unpopular Merz. He was unable to fulfill his promise to significantly weaken the AfD,” Benjamin Höhne, a professor of comparative European governance systems at Chemnitz University of Technology, tells TIME. “The CDU in Saxony-Anhalt had already distanced itself from Merz during the campaign. This [result] is particularly dramatic given that, for many, Merz was seen as a beacon of hope as Merkel’s successor.”

The AfD's national co-leader Tino Chrupalla has appealed to CDU lawmakers to make a "center-right conservative majority" in Saxony-Anhalt a reality, telling a German radio station that “partisan games really ought to be a thing of the past.”

Despite the AfD's uncertain path, the surge in support for the far-right party—which ran on a platform of restricting immigration, ending aid to Ukraine, and floated the possibility of taking Germany out of the E.U.—is remarkable in a country where the legacy of Nazism has long kept the far right at the political margins. The party’s Saxony-Anhalt branch is classified by the state’s domestic intelligence as “right-wing extremist,” a designation that its leaders reject.

“We have made history in this country,” said Ulrich Siegmund, AfD’s lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, after polls closed. “We’re taking our country back, it starts in Saxony-Anhalt. A jolt is going through all of Germany.”

According to an analysis by Infratest Dimap, the AfD vote swept across almost all age groups, except in the over-70 category, which saw 32% vote for AfD and 31% vote for CDU. The result was more divided across gender lines, with 50% of men backing the AfD, while only 39% of women voted for the far-right party

The state election result has drawn reactions from across the globe.

U.S. President Donald Trump posted a screenshot of the projected results without comment on Truth Social. Members of Trump’s Administration, including Vice President J.D. Vance, have previously expressed public support for the party.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who spoke at AfD’s campaign launch last year, congratulated AfD co-leader Alice Weidel on the victory. In response, Siegmund thanked him for his “support” and said he would “welcome the opportunity for strong and constructive cooperation.”

Kirill Dmitriev, an envoy for Russian President Vladimir Putin who handles informal negotiations with the White House, argued that “AfD will restore Germany and Europe by leading the common-sense approach that migrant-friendly, warmongering Biden-think E.U. politicians tried to eradicate.” 

Europeans split over far-right AfD's victory as experts mull impact

The victory of the far-right AfD party has divided European officials.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez framed the result in Saxony-Anhalt as a “warning that the far-right threat, thanks largely to the surrender of the traditional right, is gaining ground in Europe and around the world."

French Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Valérie Hayer said AfD’s win “should serve as a wake-up call” for Europe.

“Europeans are turning more and more each day toward populist forces based on clearly identified issues,” she said. “Faced with the radicalism of the extremes, I am deeply convinced that we must counter with another kind of radicalism—one that is pro-European.”

France’s Europe minister Benjamin Haddad said the win was a “grave moment in Europe,” while Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk insisted “in Poland, only idiots or traitors can rejoice at the triumph of the AfD in Germany.”

Others across Europe welcomed waking up to the news from Germany.

Former Hungarian Prime Minister and Trump-ally Viktor Orbán said the result was a “huge night for Germany and Europe" and told everyone to “buckle up, this is just the beginning.”

Remarking on the impact for Europe, experts tell TIME that success in regional elections is often just the first step.

“There has been an increasing trend for the far right to do well. They start doing really well in the local elections, and then, slowly, they become more embedded, more legitimate,” Daphne Halikiopoulou, chair of comparative politics at the University of York, tells TIME.

Halikiopoulou points to other upcoming elections in other European countries like France, where far-right candidates currently show a lead ahead of the 2027 presidential contest, as ones to watch.

What to know about Siegmund and the AfD

The AfD’s platform in Saxony-Anhalt ranges from tighter immigration controls to a sweeping overhaul of the state’s education system. Among its more controversial proposals is a policy of “remigration,” which is widely interpreted as mass deportation, although the party says it will prioritize deporting people with a criminal record. It has also called for segregating children of refugees and asylum-seekers in schools, and ending war refugee status for Ukrainians fleeing the war with Russia.

The party would largely be unable to enact many of its immigration policies in any individual state even if it can form a government, since many of its proposals would require federal action. But it could tighten policing and pursue changes to schools and cultural policy at the state level.

The party wants to steer schools and cultural institutions towards more traditional and nationalist values. It has also advocated revising history curricula to shift emphasis away from the Third Reich and for schools to ban rainbow flags. Instead, it wants schools to fly the German national flag daily, sing the national anthem at school celebrations, and teach more Russian language.

The AfD has also attacked Bauhaus, calling the influential school and design movement an “aberration of modernism.” Critics, including Germany’s Culture Minister, have said the AfD’s rhetoric echoes that of the Nazis, who forced the Bauhaus school to close in 1933.

Other proposals include establishing citizen patrols and imposing a moratorium on new wind farms.

The AfD capitalized on disillusionment with the political establishment and drew on regional and national pride, including “Ostalgie” or nostalgia for aspects of life in the former communist East Germany. That message found fertile ground in eastern strongholds, like Saxony-Anhalt, where economic disparities with western Germany persist decades after reunification. During the campaign, Siegmund frequently rode a blue Simson, a moped manufactured in the former East Germany, a move that drew criticism from the descendants of the Jewish family that founded Simson.

The Halle Institute for Economic Research in Germany has warned that the AfD’s anti-immigration policies could deepen Saxony-Anhalt’s labor shortage and cost the state billions in economic output. Merz has also argued that an AfD victory could turn away foreign investment from the state.

Founded in 2013, support for the AfD has grown significantly in recent years.

The AfD doubled its national vote share in 2025, and is the country’s most popular party nationally, polling at 28%, according to a recent INSA poll. At the same time, support for the federal government led by Merz, which is struggling to revive a sluggish economy, has fallen to historic lows. In the same INSA poll, Merz’s conservative party had 20% support. In Saxony-Anhalt, 87% of voters were dissatisfied with the federal government, according to an ARD poll.

Siegmund has said he wants to become state premier and eventually bring the AfD to victory in the 2029 national elections. 

What the results mean for the AfD

While the election delivered the AfD a commanding victory, the party still lacks enough votes to govern alone. With 39 seats in the 83-member legislature, the party remains three short of an outright majority, and faces no obvious path to obtaining it.

Germany’s established parties have long refused to work with the AfD, continuing their “firewall” against cooperating with the far-right. State premier Sven Schulze acknowledged defeat but his party, the CDU, said it would explore talks with other parties about forming a multiparty coalition.

The AfD could find unlikely support in the populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW, which scraped into parliament with 5.3% of the vote. BSW has rejected the firewall and expressed a willingness to speak with the AfD, although it said it would not elect either Siegmund or Schulze as premier.

Siegmund has thus far ruled out leading a minority government or adopting an informal arrangement that would leave his government depending on unsteady support. “If necessary there’ll just be new elections, then we’d just get 50 or 55%,” he told ZDF on election night. He said, however, that he would be willing to work with individual lawmakers or parliamentary groups.

Thousands joined an anti-AfD demonstration on Saturday in the regional capital of Magdeburg. Some carried banners that read, “life is better without Nazis.” One protester, Laura Saalfeld, told AFP, “Whatever the results, the atmosphere will change. Far-right sympathisers will show themselves more openly on the streets.”

At least five people were killed and five others were injured after an Amazon cargo plane overshot the runway upon landing at Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon.

Miami-Dade County officials said in an evening press conference that 21 Air Flight 7598, a Boeing 767-300 freighter operating on behalf of Amazon, crashed into several vehicles shortly before 2 p.m., local time.

The National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration are investigating the incident. The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s office warned residents Monday morning to avoid the area, detailing that “the cargo plane crash remains active and has heavy law enforcement presence.”

"The airplane, which was operated by 21 Air, was attempting to land when this incident occurred,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a statement. “We’re working closely with local authorities and officials to learn more and will cooperate fully with any investigation.”

Nantel said the company’s “deepest sympathies go out to the families, loved ones, and all those affected by this devastating loss.” Amazon contracts out its cargo flights.

The incident has impacted operations in “America’s busiest airport for international freight and second busiest for international passengers,” according to the Miami airport’s website.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy advised travelers to anticipate significant delays and potential flight cancellations. A full ground stop had initially been issued, but has since been lifted.

Here’s what we know so far.

How it unfolded

According to the FAA, Flight 7598, a Boeing 767-300 cargo aircraft, departed from Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico. 

Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz said during the news conference that the crash happened at around 1:58 p.m. Data from tracking site Flightradar24 shows that the plane had a speed of nearly 130 mph when it left the usable portion of the diagonal runway.

It’s unclear what caused the plane to overshoot, and the NTSB and FAA are investigating. The airport’s runways and taxiways were closed, and the aircraft was left disabled at the northwest end of the airport. Some of the runways were later reopened.

According to Miami-Dade Fire Rescue, more than 60 units and approximately 200 personnel responded to the scene, arriving at the airport “to find an airplane that had stopped beyond the airport operational boundary with heavy flames and smoke showing.” Photos and videos from the scene showed black smoke billowing from the plane.

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue chief Raied Jadallah said in the news conference that several people were trapped in their vehicles. 

“What we found was a very complex situation here,” Jadallah said, and added that responders also conducted search and rescue of the pilot and co-pilot who were trapped in the aircraft.

What we know about the victims

The authorities had not released the identities of the victims as of early Monday afternoon. 

Jadallah said there were a total of 10 people involved in the crash: five were killed, three are in critical condition and were transported to the trauma center, and another two were transported to a local hospital.

It is not clear whether those killed and injured were on the plane or on the ground.

What we know about the carrier and the plane

North Carolina-based cargo airline 21 Air began operating Boeing 767-300 freighters on behalf of Amazon in 2024. The company was founded in 2014.

Keith Winters, the airline’s CEO, said in a statement on their website that they were “devastated by the accident” and that the company’s “deepest condolences are with the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives.”

Flightradar24 data shows the plane involved in the crash was a 32-year-old Boeing 767. The aircraft model is used for both passenger travel and freight delivery. The first Boeing 767 flew on Sept. 26, 1981, and started commercial operations in 1982 with United Airlines. 

Amazon’s cargo flight history

Amazon Air’s cargo network oversees more than 100 aircraft and over 250 flights daily. It contracts all of its cargo flying to other operators. In its fleet are Boeing 737 and 767 planes, as well as the Airbus A330.

Citing details from aviation analytics firm Cirium, the New York Times reported that 21 Air runs eight planes for Amazon Air, while Air Transport International operates about 40 planes, and low-cost carrier Sun Country Airlines operates 22.

It’s not the first plane crash involving Amazon Air. In February 2019, Atlas Air Flight 3591, a cargo plane flying from Miami to Houston, crashed into Texas’s Trinity Bay. All three people onboard were killed, and a subsequent federal investigation attributed the crash to pilot error.

Sunday’s incident is the latest high-profile crash involving a cargo aircraft in the U.S. Last November, more than a dozen people were killed after a UPS plane crashed into an industrial area in Louisville, Ky. shortly after departing Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport.

Lawmakers share condolences

Floridian lawmakers expressed their sympathies with the victims of the crash as they thanked emergency services in the Miami area.

Republican Sen. Rick Scott said he and his wife were “heartbroken by this tragic loss of life” and credited “all the emergency personnel for responding so quickly to the scene and putting out the fire.”

Republican Rep. Carlos A. Giménez, a career firefighter and former Miami Fire Chief, shared that he was “extraordinarily proud” of the emergency services’ response and said he would be “praying for all victims and injured.”

Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar said “Miami is with every family affected by this tragedy,” adding that “as we pray for the victims, their families, and those injured, we are also grateful for the Miami-Dade firefighters, police officers, sheriff’s deputies, and first responders who rushed to the scene and continue their work.”

In the early 2000s, if your idea of a cheap thrill was to see presumed sicko pedophiles caught on camera as they advance upon their ostensibly underage prey, NBC’s To Catch a Predator was your show. The host, Chris Hansen, had once been considered a serious journalist, spearheading investigative reports on events like the Columbine shootings and the World Trade Center attacks. But on the sleazy, sensationalistic To Catch a Predator, he was more of a vigilante showman. The show worked like this: A crusading organization called Perverted Justice would initiate conversations in online chatrooms designed to attract potential sex offenders. Then they’d be lured to sting houses outfitted with hidden cameras, where Hansen and his crew would await their arrival, ready to enact a pruriently dramatic Gotcha! moment, generally followed by an arrest. Nobody likes a pedophile, and without leaving the Barcalounger, viewers could revel in the self-congratulatory certainty that they too were helping to keep the world safe for the kiddos.

Documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim’s first fiction feature Primetime—premiering here at the Venice Film Festival—fills in some background pixels on the show’s rise and fall, focusing particularly on an ambitious, egotistical, and at least somewhat delusional Hansen, played by Robert Pattinson. It’s 2006, and Hansen and his beleaguered producer Andie (Merritt Wever, bringing an edgy nervousness to the role of a woman struggling to stay afloat in the ruthless world of TV news) get a chance to move their show into a primetime slot. The stakes are high, but the potential rewards are great. Hansen’s hubris balloons, and he infects others with his own inflated sense of the public service he claims to be providing. To complete its mission of reeling in the bad guys, the show employs youthful-looking decoys posing as underage kids. One of these is an elflike performer named Del (singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers) who can impersonate either a boy or a girl; she passes some tips along to a nervous newcomer who will come to be known as Decoy Dan (Skyler Gisondo, in a performance laced with touching eagerness). Though he hopes to become a real actor and thinks this is his way in, he wants to quit when he sees how demeaning the gig actually is. But Hansen, with his crocodile smile and purring, almost sultry intonation, persuades him to stick with it, assuring him that he’ll be helping to cleanse the world of evil.

Hansen has gotten high on what he perceives as his own power, and his ambitions grow even greater as he and his team try to draw in a “whale,” ideally a major government figure, rather than the pathetically sad—though still dangerous and repellent—lowlifes who tend to creep into their trap. These thankless roles are heroically played by an assortment of actors including Tony Revolori; despite his character’s unsavory and illegal intentions, his tremulous shock at being caught underscores the show’s legally questionable entrapment methods.  

Hansen’s unfolding mania is one of the chief features of Primetime, and Pattinson’s performance is one of the only reasons to see it. As he practices dialogue that he’ll use in the show, drawn from the chatroom fodder that has lured the show’s marks into its trap, he relishes the prurient material a little too much: “I will undress you, you will undress me.” His theatrically precise diction is both disturbing and weirdly alluring.

Still, it’s not exactly clear what Primetime is aiming for: it seems to be making the point that while sexual predators are unequivocally bad, the people who make trash TV—particularly a sordid show that’s masquerading as a means of protecting kids and meting out justice—are also immoral, scheming, and just all-around unpleasant. That’s a shaky equivalence. Oppenheim, director of docs like Spermworld and Some Kind of Heaven, structures the film as if he were shaping a mosaic from disorienting shards; sometimes the scenes feel jaggedly disconnected. He and cinematographer David Bolen have given the picture a grubby, grainy look, including sections that mimic early-2000s-style video recording. If you feel dirty watching it, that’s by design—and if you enjoy feeling dirty, that’s your choice.

Pentagon investigators administered polygraph tests to dozens of military officers and civilian employees in August as part of an investigation into disclosures about the nation’s dwindling weapons stockpiles. 

The polygraph tests, first reported by The New York Times last week, followed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcement in July that the Pentagon was forming a joint task force with the Department of Justice to identify and prosecute what he called the “unauthorized disclosure ​of sensitive” information to the press.

Read More: Trump Vows to Jail ‘Leakers’ Over Reports of Munitions Shortage Amid Iran Talks

Spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement to TIME that the Pentagon does not comment on investigative matters but “takes all leaks of classified national security information extremely seriously and investigates accordingly.”

“Securing classified information is critical to ensuring the security of the United States and of our troops deployed around the world,” the statement said.

The August interrogations included some 50 members of the Joint Staff, according to the Times. CBS News also reported that several dozen officials were tested earlier this summer, including those from the U.S. Central Command.

Why did the Pentagon polygraph dozens of officials?

Sources familiar with the matter told multiple outlets this summer that U.S. supplies of certain critical munitions—including long-range precision-guided missiles and air-defense interceptors—had fallen dangerously low. They suggested that its inventory would likely dwindle further amid the ongoing war with Iran. 

Sources told The Washington Post that Trump clashed with Hegseth over the matter during a visit to Camp David on July 31, claiming that he had been “misled on extreme munitions shortages that now threaten to limit military options with Iran.”

Trump refuted the idea that there were any shortages in a Truth Social post on Aug. 6.

“The U.S. has massive amounts of ‘munitions,’ especially of certain types,” Trump wrote in his post. “Additionally, large amounts are being manufactured and shipped to the U.S. as needed.”

The President called for lengthy imprisonment for those caught leaking information to the press.

“The ‘leakers’ of these treasonous statements are being hunted down,” he added. “Long term jail sentences will be sought!”

In a separate post that same day, he denied that he’d fought with Hegseth, calling the reports “completely unfounded rumors.”

“I am extremely happy with the job that Pete Hegseth is doing,” he said.

Trump intensified his attacks on the coverage on Sept. 3, calling media outlets who reported on the shortages “treasonous scum” who refuse to “accurately report” on the conflict with Iran.

Despite Trump’s repeated denials of a broad munitions shortage, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimated in late July that missile interceptor inventories have dropped—with Patriot inventories now under 1,000 and THAAD inventories at about 250. 

Exact figures about the U.S. weapons cache are classified—and that’s for a good reason, according to Harrison Mann, a former defense intelligence official and a senior fellow with the advocacy group Win Without War.

“That is valuable information to any U.S. adversary,” he tells TIME. “Obviously, if they know that we're out of ammo in some significant way, it changes deterrence calculations for U.S. adversaries.”

At the same time, however, he argues that any shortage would likely be clear to the public and to Iran.

“Smart people can put together pretty accurate estimates of what the U.S. has used up between looking at what's been produced, which isn't necessarily a closely guarded secret, and looking at what has been expended on the battlefield,” he says. “Maybe not with the same amount of fidelity [as Pentagon officials], but the Iranians can tell when they're not getting hit by as many standoff munitions, and certainly everyone can tell when U.S. and partners have run out of interceptors.”

Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the CSIS Defense and Security Department, says he and his colleague created CSIS’s July report on dwindling munitions using only “unclassified” sources.

“If two people at a think tank can do this analysis with entirely unclassified sources, then the Chinese, with tens of thousands of intelligence operatives, and way better sources of information can get much better numbers,” Cancian says.

What Pentagon polygraph rules require—and what the tests found

The Pentagon adheres to specific guidelines and restrictions when administering polygraph tests. They are most commonly used in pre-employment and vetting for intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency. They are also administered when personnel are seeking or maintaining access to top-secret, special-access, or other sensitive information—as well as in the event of unauthorized disclosures of classified information. 

Pentagon rules require an examinee’s written consent and allow the person to end the examination at any time. For an issue-specific counterintelligence examination, investigators must have interviewed the person, reasonably believe that the person knew about or was involved in the matter, pursue other investigative avenues as thoroughly as circumstances permit, and determine that the polygraph is essential to the investigation.

The Defense Secretary is also required to establish a process for monitoring the “responsible and effective” use of polygraphs and to make information about their use available to congressional defense committees.

The Pentagon has not released enough information to determine whether investigators followed all those requirements. It also has not disclosed the investigation’s findings. CBS News, however, reported that no one had failed the questions meant to determine whether any officials had leaked information to the media.

It also said that the polygraph tests included a wide range of questions pertaining to national security. Specifically, The New York Times reported that officials were asked if they had disclosed classified information to members of the press, according to information provided by its sources close to the investigation, and if they had provided information about diminished munitions stocks. 

People familiar with the effort told the Times that the tests appeared intended not only to identify a leaker but also to deter officials who might leak classified information to the media in the future.

How unusual are polygraphs in Pentagon leak investigations?

While the use of polygraphs is not unheard of, the sheer number of people targeted during this investigation is uncommon, officials told CBS News.

David Pozen, a law professor at Columbia University, pointed TIME toward his article for the Harvard Law Review that assesses information leaks within the federal government.

“Periodically, task forces have recommended that the White House take concerted steps to facilitate leak investigations, such as regularizing the use of polygraphs and requiring government employees who speak with the press to provide advance notice, followed by summaries of what was discussed,” he wrote.

This was notably implemented during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in 1983. Reagan authorized polygraph testing in investigations of unauthorized classified disclosures, although he barred agencies from using the results alone to discipline employees.

Polygraphs have been considered or used in leak investigations under more recent administrations, as well. During the George W. Bush administration, the FBI interviewed nearly 100 members and staff of congressional intelligence committees while investigating leaked intelligence connected to the Sept. 11 attacks. Agents commonly asked whether they would take polygraphs, but most declined.

In subsequent years, publicly documented operations involving dozens of senior military officials appear exceedingly rare. But the Trump Administration has used polygraphs in previous leak investigations. 

In early 2025, the Department of Homeland Security administered lie detector tests to identify people suspected of disclosing plans for immigration raids. That year, members of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office were reportedly polygraphed in response to a leak investigation. At the direction of Director Kash Patel, the FBI also began using polygraphs in leak investigations in 2025. In a separate episode this year, more than two dozen current and former members of Patel’s security detail—in addition to some information-technology employees—were reportedly tested in an effort to identify sources of leaks about his leadership.

Still, Cancian says that polygraph use is more common at intelligence agencies than among senior military staff. He characterizes a polygraph hunt of this scale as incredibly unusual.

How the Pentagon’s polygraph hunt could affect future disclosures

While no leakers have been identified to the public, and it remains unknown whether the efforts uncovered any, the tests may serve a secondary purpose—which is to dissuade officials from sharing information in the future.

Cancian says the investigation stems from an “understandable” desire for senior Pentagon officials to have candid conversations with their employees without worrying about leaks to the press.

“Every administration is concerned about that. I think this one is particularly concerned about that,” Cancian says. Otherwise, officers may hesitate to put concerns in writing, circulate formal objections, or talk openly within authorized channels. The Joint Staff is tasked with giving civilian leaders candid assessments of readiness, risk, and operational sustainability, while coordinating with combatant commands around the world.

“Meetings get smaller and smaller, fewer and fewer people can attend because of concerns that larger groups, you know, might leak,” he says.

Mann adds that a polygraph test is known as an “inconclusive” tool.

“You can game them. You can get false positives,” he says. “So, you certainly won't necessarily get to the bottom of whatever you're searching for by running a lot of polygraphs, but it is quite effective as an intimidation tool and as a deterrent against leaks.”

He says that many officials are “still nervous” about doing routine polygraph tests, even if they have “nothing to hide.”

“They know it's something that you can fail and that can then disrupt your career or suspend your clearance if you can't pass it, even if it's just because you were nervous that day,” Mann continues.

He says that this polygraph hunt is a way for Hegseth to test the loyalty of his employees amid pressure over the continuation of efforts in Iran. Just this week, Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina urged Trump to replace Hegseth as Defense Secretary.

“Independent of the Iran war, [Hegseth] has been trying quite hard, in my view, to streamline that bureaucracy to more personal loyalty—often at the expense of readiness or combat effectiveness,” Mann says. “This is one of the products of somebody who is trying to have a very, very tight grip on the bureaucracy he leads.”

Lee Chang-dong’s delicate yet sturdy drama Possible Love—premiering here at the Venice Film Festival, hitting theaters Oct. 23 and streaming on Netflix Nov. 6—is a movie about figuring out how to function in the world. If that description seems confoundingly vague, Lee’s movie is not. It shows us a world where people feel lost after losing their livelihood, where individuals strive to connect with others despite differences of class and temperament, where tenderness ultimately has more power than arrogance. It’s a movie with a gentle, generous spirit.

Lee opens the picture with a funeral, or, rather, a small family piling into their car to get to the funeral venue. Wife and mother Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) wonders if she’s wearing the right dress, and the shoes she has chosen, a pair she hasn’t worn in a long time, are already pinching her feet. Her husband, Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), says little—so little that it’s clear he’s filled with dread over whatever awaits him at this upcoming, obviously unhappy social event. Their extremely quiet young son (Jung Seop) sits in the back seat, amusing himself by dangling an empty chip bag out the window like a windsock. “It’s flying,” he says, just before letting it go—he’s not the only one feeling the oppressiveness of that car ride.

It’s never expressly spelled out who this funeral is for, but we can intuit that it’s one of Ho-seok’s former work colleagues. It turns out that Ho-seok is one of many workers who not so long ago lost his job at a large corporation, SP, and he hasn’t yet recovered, either financially or emotionally. Mi-ok is doing the best she can—she holds down a menial factory job—but her husband’s depression and excessive drinking is getting to her. By chance, in the funeral home parking lot, she meets a handsome stranger, Sang-woo (Zo In-sung), who moves his very expensive car when Mi-ok believes her wedding ring, having slipped off her finger, has rolled beneath it. It turns out that Sang-woo’s wife, Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-Jong), is making a documentary about, as she puts it, “the personal lives of laborers.” Ye-ji is thrilled to have found Mi-ok and Ho-seok as subjects—she’s particularly interested in the melancholic Ho-seok, who, she believes, could be the dramatic key her project. But she and Mi-ok also genuinely like each other and strike up a friendship. Possible Love traces the tangled dynamics between these four characters, while also flirting with uncomfortable questions about the moral quandaries that can arise in any filmmaker-subject relationship.

Mostly, though, Possible Love traces the ways people come to care for one another, either platonically or romantically. Ye-ji and Mi-ok quickly come to think of themselves as sisters. Though Ye-ji has married well, she doesn’t come from a privileged family—her father ran a dry-cleaning establishment—and she has some sense of Mi-ok’s money worries and feelings of insecurity. At an early meeting, where Ye-ji outlines the aim of her proposed documentary to Mi-ok, she leaves the table momentarily, and Mi-ok snaps a picture of the elegant backpack she’s left behind. Then she uses a Google-image search to find out the brand. It’s made by Loro Piana, and quite obviously beyond Mi-ok’s means. That's just one example of how Lee explores simple human wants, desires, jealousies. We often can't help wanting things we can't afford, especially when they've already been stamped by the approval of someone we admire.

Lee has dedicated the film to the memory of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog 10; he has said he was particularly struck by the commandment “Thou shalt not covet.” As humans, we often like nice things, but what we really need is a way to keep a roof over our head and food on the table. Possible Love explores the desperation that can strike when we can’t meet those basic needs. Sang-woo, cocksure and a little clueless, spends much of the movie on the phone making business deals. Meanwhile, Ho-seok suffers quietly, as if encased in a bubble of isolation. Mi-ok loves him, but she’s frustrated with him; no wonder she’s drawn, perhaps romantically, to sexy and stalwart Sang-woo. The movie’s most potent scene occurs late in the film when, with Ye-ji’s camera rolling, Ho-seok finally lets his guard down: Ye-ji may be getting the footage she set out for, but has she earned it honestly? Sul Kyung-gu is sensational here. If the character he’s playing is key to Ye-ji’s movie-within-a-movie, he’s also Possible Love’s anguished beating heart.

Lee’s 2018 noir mystery Burning was, what we used to call in the days before the pandemic, a surprise art-house hit. An art-house hit today may not mean the same thing as it did then, given how much the cinema-going audience has shrunk in less than 10 years. It’s hard to predict whether Possible Love will find a similarly enthusiastic audience. This is perhaps a more plainspoken movie than Burning; its moral questions are fairly easy to identify and parse. But at a time when more people worldwide are worrying about hanging onto gainful employment, even as a relatively small handful of people control the majority of the world’s wealth, the dramatic pull of Possible Love may be even greater than that of Burning. Sometimes it’s a relief when a movie captures undercurrents of anxiety that, in our daily lives, we find difficult to put into words. With Possible Love, it’s as if Lee has taken our unspoken feelings and handed them to his actors. With words and gestures, with tentative smiles and flashes of anger, they show us fears and worries we might be feeling ourselves, possibly galvanizing us to face them.

“911, what is your emergency?” 

For the millions of Americans who have dialed 911, these are the familiar and comforting words we hear upon placing the call. It is the question that guides us through a moment of chaos or crisis, the linchpin to saving lives and protecting health. 

But in recent years, an increasing number of 911 callers have heard something a little different:

“911, where is your emergency?”  

It is very nearly the same question, but the slight change underscores vast differences in people’s experiences seeking help in an emergency. In an era when parents can monitor their children’s movements in real time, and ride-share drivers know the precise corner to stop, many Americans may be surprised to learn a sobering truth: the 911 professionals who answer the phone are often unable to automatically pinpoint a caller’s precise location, and cannot always rely on callers themselves to provide it.  

The extra time it takes to figure out exactly where to send help, even if it’s a few extra seconds, costs lives. But the United States has let our 911 emergency response system languish for decades, failing to make the necessary investments to bring it into the digital age. That inaction should be unacceptable to every American. Upgrading 911 technology should be a national priority, and Congress must provide sufficient funding to ensure it works in every community. 

When America’s 911 system launched in 1968, it was built to serve people calling from landlines at fixed locations. Callers were tracked using address directories that listed the location of the phone they were calling from. As a result, emergency personnel could be dispatched almost immediately. It made sense, and it worked fast. 

Nearly 60 years later, we are living in a completely different era. In 2024, more than three-quarters of 911 calls came via either cellphones or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and other wireless voice services. Since some states do not break down calls by service type, that number is likely even higher. By contrast, only about 7% came from landlines. In many states, landlines now account for less than 5% of 911 calls. That number is likely to decline further in the years ahead. 

Our current 911 system isn’t built for this. Often, a 911 professional can trace a call only to the cell tower that received it, which can be a fair distance from a caller’s exact location. As many as 20% or more of calls are traced to the wrong tower. Unlike apps like Google Maps or Life360 that can continuously track a phone’s precise location, 911 call takers must rely on carrier data when the call was first made. Updates come in 20- to 30-second intervals. If the call needs to be transferred, this process must start from scratch. This wastes precious time. It is especially hard in rural areas, where towers can be few and far between, or dense locations like high-rise apartments.

Asking “where is your emergency” may sound like an easy fix, but that incorrectly assumes a caller can always answer the question. Callers may be in an unfamiliar location. They may be navigating imminent danger, such as an intruder or attacker, that prevents them from sharing. They may give the wrong address, or they may move locations from the moment a call is placed to the time help arrives. Even the emergency data that may be stored in a person’s cell phone for precisely such a circumstance can’t be accessed by call takers or dispatchers.  

Simply put, our nation’s 911 system is rapidly becoming obsolete. 

Past attempts to fix these errors have failed. The ENHANCE 911 Act, enacted in 2004, authorized up to $250 million in annual federal grants to help states upgrade their 911 systems. But those appropriations were never made. Other funding opportunities for states wound up being far smaller. Ultimately, the legislation was not reauthorized by Congress, and national funding efforts dried up. In recent years, federal funding for 911 upgrades has ground to a halt.

Congress should right this wrong by fully funding NextGen 911 services, which would provide 911 professionals and Emergency Communications Centers with the life-saving information they need—such as accurate location information—to do their jobs. Thirty-eight states have pledged to upgrade to NextGen 911. If fully implemented, 911 would shift from an analog relic to an Internet Protocol-based system. That would allow for more advanced communication technologies, including receiving 911 “calls” via text or video, that would be especially useful for 911 callers who are either unaware of or unable to share their location. It would also help callers with disabilities, such as people who are deaf or hard of hearing, access the system as well. 

Full NextGen 911 rollout nationwide is estimated to cost approximately $15 billion. The cost of inaction is far higher. Fixing access to location data would free up 911 professionals to rapidly triage calls. It would also mean a quicker and more accurate on-scene response, helping callers and emergency personnel alike. 

When 911 launched, cell phones did not yet exist, and America’s emergency response system is still largely stuck in that bygone era. This is an emergency of our own making, and it is fixable. Our leaders must answer the call for help.

Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a 72-hour pause in strikes on Kyiv starting at midnight on Sept. 6. The temporary pause coincides with a visit from U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. 

“Putin has ordered that no strikes be carried out against Kyiv for three days, starting at midnight today,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told state media early Saturday. Ukrainian media had previously reported that its army would observe a ceasefire during the visit, though the details had not yet been finalized. "Such information did come from Ukraine,” Peskov confirmed.

Witkoff and Kushner touched down in Moscow later that day to meet with Putin and discuss ending the war with Ukraine. They are scheduled to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday.

Read More: What It’s Like to Live in Ukraine, 4 Years Since Russia’s Invasion

Both men are real estate developers whom Trump has used as envoys in high-level diplomatic talks. Kushner is also the President’s son-in-law and served as a senior adviser during his first term. 

“They're bringing with them a proposal to end the war,” U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, calling the two “great negotiators.”

The U.S. served as a primary mediator between Russia and Ukraine in 2025 and into 2026. The envoys’ arrival represents a potential revival of that role, which largely stalled in February when Washington and Jerusalem launched joint strikes on Iran, killing the country’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and igniting an ongoing war.

Following the Kremlin’s announcement, Zelensky wrote on X that he had been in touch with the envoys and was “ready to observe a ceasefire in airstrikes against the cities involved in the negotiation process.” 

“From now through the end of Saturday, as well as on Sunday and Monday, Ukraine is ready to refrain from strikes on Moscow, and we expect the Russians to do the same regarding Kyiv,” he wrote, adding that Ukraine is ready for “substantive conversation.”

Hours earlier, however, Zelensky posted about an overnight wave of Russian attacks that targeted major airports in Kyiv and Boryspil and killed five people at an industrial site elsewhere in Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian air force, Russia launched ballistic missiles and 167 attack drones in the attack.

“Clearly, these Russian strikes on the airports are a reaction to the discussions and preparations for the possibility of the U.S. side using an aircraft to travel to Ukraine and land at Kyiv Airport or Boryspil Airport,” Zelensky said.

Trump attempts to revive stalled Ukraine-Russia peace talks

Trump has repeatedly stated that ending the Russia-Ukraine war is a major priority of his Administration, but the reality of that aim has proven difficult. 

In August 2025, the U.S. President met his Russian counterpart in Anchorage, Alaska, to pursue a ceasefire agreement. The talks proved unsuccessful, and Trump left empty-handed.

In October 2025, Trump and Putin planned to meet in Budapest in hopes of furthering peace talks. But the summit was canceled just a few days after the summit was announced after Russia indicated that its hard-line stance on the war had not shifted.

“It just didn’t feel right to me,” Trump said at the time. “It didn’t feel like we were going to get to the place we have to get. So I canceled it.”

Strain between Trump and Zelensky also impeded progress. In February 2025, Oval Office talks collapsed within minutes when the U.S. President accused Zelensky of being “ungrateful” for U.S. aid and refusing to agree to a ceasefire without security assurances. In the 18 months since, however, that tension has largely dissipated, with Trump saying at this year’s NATO summit that the two had “actually developed a good relationship.”

The revived push for peace talks comes days after CIA Director John Ratcliffe flew to Moscow last week and met with his Russian intelligence counterparts, a trip that Trump later called “semi-routine,” though it had not been announced to the media in advance and little is known about what transpired.

Renewed mediation comes as Ukraine continues to launch some of its largest aerial assaults of the war yet, showcasing the nation’s rapid advancement of drone and missile capabilities in recent months.

It demonstrated its growing capacity to strike deep inside Russian territory in August, with strikes landing up to 1,500 miles over the shared border—including attacks on warehouses used by the prominent online retailer Wildberries, after Kyiv said its logistics sites are being used to support the Russian military.

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.

“I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years, as crazy as it may sound to ordinary people and frankly to biologists as well (I used to be one!).”

This is what Dario Amodei, the co-founder of Anthropic recently posted on X.

Truth be told, this is not an uncommon take among AI leaders. On 60 Minutes last year, Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google DeepMind, declared that “we can cure all disease with the help of Al… maybe within the next decade or so, I don’t see why not.” 

Actually, there’s a big reason why not: human nature. An estimated 80% of chronic diseases and premature deaths are not driven by our genes, but by the way we live: what we eat, how much we move, how we sleep, how we manage stress and stay socially connected. It’s true AI can accelerate drug discovery and personalize nudges for our daily behaviors, but it can’t “cure all disease” while ignoring human nature, free will, and how we live. 

The view among those currently working to lower the disease burden is considerably less utopian than in AI. “Diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease—we don’t have cures for any of those common diseases,” says cardiologist Dr. Eric Topol. “To think that in the next five or 10 years new drugs are going to change everything, there’s no precedent for that. It’s unrealistic, and it sets the expectations for AI too high. It’s hype.”

“Cancer is not one disease. It is more than 200 distinct diseases, all with different causes, biology and mechanisms,” explains Dr. Catherine Young, a Senior Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Scientists who study cancer rarely talk about ‘curing cancer’ because it’s nothing more than an empty slogan.”

As Amy Dockser Marcus writes for The Information, we’ve been here before. In 2000, on the heels of the first sequencing of human DNA, Francis Collins, then-director of the Human Genome Project, predicted that “in another 20, 25 years we should be able to prevent or cure most cases of cancer, of diabetes, of heart disease, of multiple sclerosis, of asthma.” And yet, here we are, 26 years later, facing a growing epidemic of chronic diseases.

Daphne Koller, CEO of the AI-driven drug development company insitro, calls it the “magic wand” assumption. “Hundreds of years into modern medicine,” she writes, “our understanding of most human disease, and much of healthy physiology, is best captured by the parable of the blind men and the elephant; in this case, a really huge elephant.”

The current debate about whether AI can cure all diseases is more than a tempest in a GPTeapot. It points to a larger problem: we are too often focused solely on improving the machines, and too rarely focused on investing energy and resources in improving humans.

In 2024, Amodei wrote about the limiting factors that stand in the way of AI transforming the world for the better: “speed of the outside world,” “need for data,” “intrinsic complexity,” “physical laws” and “constraints from humans.”

Of those, I would argue that the constraints imposed by humans will be the ultimate limiting factor. And I'm not alone.

“If for every dollar and every minute that we invest in developing artificial intelligence, we also invest in exploring and developing our own minds, it will be okay,” suggests Yuval Harari in his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. “But if we put all our bets on technology, on AI, and neglect to develop ourselves, this is very bad news for humanity.”

As we work to realize all the possibilities of AI, the bottleneck that will hold us back from maximizing its benefits will be what it has always been throughout human history: human nature. That is why I believe the greatest risk we face is that AI will get better but humans won’t.

We need the same relentless focus on helping humans tap into their better selves and achieve better health outcomes through healthier daily behaviors as we have on helping the machines achieve better frontier models.

What we don't need is hype.

In its 250th year, America finds itself confronting an age-old question with new urgency: what, exactly, counts as progress? 1776 was a hinge year for the modern world. Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, America adopted the Declaration of Independence, and Matthew Boulton and James Watt commercialized the steam engine—three developments that unleashed an age of capitalism, bringing unprecedented growth and unprecedented inequality.

And while growth and inequality are often treated as separate stories, fetishized respectively by the right and the left, corporate America and labor unions, and Wall Street and Main Street, this November’s midterm elections will put them on a collision course. But they have always gone hand in hand, their fates inextricably intertwined.

America’s triumphs are real. The United States is still the world’s largest economy. It remains a global engine of innovation. Its stock market is booming thanks to artificial intelligence, while its capital markets remain the deepest and most powerful in the world. And despite tariffs, a labor market slowed by restrictive immigration and repeated energy price shocks, its growth—as attested to by its $32.3 trillion GDP, larger than China, India, and Germany combined—appears to defy the odds and remains resilient.

Yet this dynamism is only half the story. Affordability has become the defining issue of the moment, and many signs indicate that the midterms in November will be decided on that basis. The Pew Research Center has found that the voters place the economy front and center by a wide margin, even as only 24% of Americans describe it as “good” or “excellent.” Gallup, meanwhile, reports that voters identify the cost of living as their foremost concern in the election.

GDP, the single statistic that now determines a country’s economic might, traces its roots to the scholarship of the American economist Simon Kuznets during the Great Depression, particularly his landmark 1934 report, National Income, 1929-1932. But as the Cambridge economist Diane Coyle points out, Kuznets was, himself, aware of the many flaws and pitfalls of the metric he had developed and warned against confusing economic output with human welfare.

What even fewer people know is that the “godfather” of GDP was also a pioneer in the study of inequality. The Kuznets curve—his famous prediction that inequality would eventually decline as economies grew richer—is not one history has obliged, but it points to the Janus-headed quality of modern capitalism.

Indeed, it’s been exactly 15 years since the Occupy Wall Street protests radiated out of Zuccotti Park in New York’s Financial District. Born in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008, the movement became the most visible public outcry against economic inequality in recent American history and gave the country an enduring rallying cry: “We are the 99%.”

While the movement dissipated, the issues it raised have not. If anything, the concerns it foregrounded have migrated from the political margins to the mainstream in American politics, championed by progressive figures like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani.

The World Inequality Report 2026 finds that the top 0.001% of the globe’s population own “three times more wealth” than the entire bottom half of humanity combined, and within “almost every region, the top 1% alone” hold more wealth than the bottom 90% combined. Inequality in America is no longer only a question of who has more; increasingly, it is a question of who has enough to make ends meet. According to the Brookings Institution, 45.5% of American households do not earn enough to cover even basic necessities, with housing, health care, and childcare among the most acute pressures.

The problem is that a single statistic can conceal as much as it reveals. GDP can tell us how the economy is performing without telling us how Americans are faring. It can tell us how much an economy produces, but not who receives the rewards, whether those gains improve people’s lives, or what is destroyed and what is sacrificed in producing them.

Some of the things on which society most depends—unpaid caregiving, clean air, cohesive communities—barely register in its accounts. Economists classify many of these costs as “externalities”: consequences borne by people and places that fall outside the transaction being measured.

Climate change provides perhaps the starkest example of GDP’s glaring blind spots. A natural disaster can destroy homes, lives, and ecosystems without being registered as an equivalent loss in GDP; the money spent to rebuild afterward, meanwhile, counts as additional economic activity. The meter can rise even as human welfare falls. 

But the two metrics—GDP, our shorthand for growth, and the Gini coefficient, our shorthand for inequality—are not rival ways of describing the economy so much as incomplete halves of the same story; the two key consequences of capitalism, joined at the hip. One shows us how large the pie has grown; the other, something about how it has been sliced.

On growth and inequality

When it comes to growing the pie, the relentless efficiency of global capitalism in allocating resources is hard to match. It has allowed, in the aggregate, societies to eke out more from finite resources than ever before. Its advocates point out that most people live longer and better lives: they are better fed, more securely housed, and better protected against diseases that once routinely killed them.

Capitalism’s champions can reasonably claim that it has helped lift much of humanity above bare subsistence while proving more compatible with individual freedom than its major rivals. It holds out the promise of a game that everyone has an equal chance to play—and win. Its defenders often invoke the specter of repression and unfreedom associated with state-led communism or socialism as a cautionary tale.

Capitalism’s unique two-plus-two-equals-five quality—its capacity to produce more than the sum of its parts—may also have helped pave the way for the material foundations of modernity. The shift from sustenance to surplus created, in many ways, the foundations for our moral revolutions, from liberalism and feminism to cosmopolitanism.

Yet, beyond some vague gestures toward “trickle-down economics,” the discipline’s approach has largely been to focus on growing the pie and argue about slicing it later. Economics has tried to separate the two: markets create wealth; politics distributes it. Friedrich von Hayek, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, who was an early and influential proponent of free-market economics, warned against the “fatal conceit” that governments could know enough to design an economic order from above.

The Kaldor–Hicks principle, a dominant idea in modern economics, offered a technical basis for avoiding the reckoning with distributive questions. An outcome counts as an improvement if the winners gain enough that they could compensate the losers—even if they never do. That “even if” is a significant caveat.

Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, another foundational result in economics, exposes the deeper difficulty: there is no perfect mathematical procedure for turning individual preferences into a coherent collective choice. At some point, as even mainstream economists recognize, economic calculation must give way to political judgment. It follows that morality should trump mathematics.

But what if inequality is baked into the pie itself? Thomas Piketty coined the famous formulation for the notion that the odds may be stacked against the ordinary person: r > g, the proposition that the return on capital tends to exceed the rate of economic growth. History suggests that the playing field was never level.

In Empire of Cotton and, now, Capitalism, Sven Beckert excavates the blood-soaked origins of modern capitalism through slavery, colonialism, and state power; Ha-Joon Chang shows how rich countries used tariffs and industrial policy before prescribing freer markets to poorer ones. Such empirical evidence reinforces a broader idea: markets do not simply materialize, as the spectral metaphor of the “invisible hand” suggests. Markets are made—by human hands.

If the economy is a game, then the question is not merely who wins and who loses. The question instead is: Who designed the board, who wrote the rules, and whether the game was rigged from the start? Today, capitalism treats Monopoly money as real while human beings are reduced to pieces on a chessboard.

Perhaps the most important omission from the current economic paradigm concerns the psychology of the sport. Research on “inequality aversion,” the idea that who gets what matters as much as how much there is, suggests that people care deeply about how the pie is sliced, even when a fairer division means settling for a slightly smaller one.

The economics of the everyman

Can growth, given enough time, deliver widely shared prosperity, as capitalism’s champions still insist? Or does the way the game is designed predetermine who benefits from growth? Far from disappearing, could excessive inequality gnaw away at the very foundations of economic growth?

GDP’s shortcomings have inspired repeated attempts to devise a better answer. In Mismeasuring Our Lives, Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi argued for moving beyond economic production and measuring well-being, distribution, and sustainability. Sen’s capabilities approach asks a still more fundamental question: not merely what resources people possess, but what those resources actually enable them to be and to do.

The late Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq’s Human Development Index, inspired in part by Sen’s work, was an attempt to translate that insight into numbers, treating health, education, and income as measures of human progress.

The point is not to dispense with GDP. Growth matters enormously. It has financed scientific discovery, lengthened lives, reduced material deprivation, and expanded the range of human possibility. But human progress may be better represented by a dashboard of indicators rather than by a single number. More fundamentally, what should be a means to an end has too often become an end in itself. A metric intended to crudely measure the output of the market economy has gradually acquired the authority to tell us whether society itself is succeeding.

America’s 250th anniversary offers an unusually apt moment to question that bargain. The Declaration of Independence did not promise Americans the pursuit of economic growth. It promised something considerably more ambitious: the pursuit of happiness. Two and a half centuries later, perhaps the most important economic question America can ask is also the simplest: Who is the economy for?

Fittingly, this fall, American voters will have an opportunity to offer their answer. If the elections of the past decade were won in part by rejecting an outdated economic playbook, 2026 may present a more constructive opportunity: not merely to discard the economic playbook, but to redesign and rewrite it with Everyman, the ordinary American, as its protagonist.

Adapted with permission from Everyman: The Untold Story of Economics by Antara Haldar.

Argentina’s President Javier Milei has escalated his country’s claim over the Falkland Islands, a British overseas territory, warning he will place economic pressure by sanctioning oil companies with operations in the area.

The Falkland Islands are "Argentine, by history and by right, there is no debate about it,” he said in a nationally televised address Thursday evening.

Milei argued the “winds of change blowing around the world” are favorable to Argentina’s long-claimed sovereignty over the South Atlantic archipelago, citing remarks made by his ally, U.S. President Donald Trump, who recently suggested the U.S. would be reviewing its neutrality on the dispute.

The Argentine President flagged a planned oil project in the area as a cause for concern. Within the next 18 months, two companies—one British and the other Israeli—are set to start extractions from the Sea Lion oilfield, which lies north of the islands and holds an estimated 1.7 billion barrels of oil. 

Milei described the project as an urgent threat to Argentina’s sovereignty. "If we do not act swiftly, in a few months they will have the material capacity to access the oil that lies underneath our sea—something that has never happened before,” he said.

The Falkland Islands, known in Argentina as “Islas Malvinas,” sit roughly 300 miles from the Argentine coast, and have been a British territory for almost two centuries, but Argentina has never accepted British sovereignty over the area.

Vowing to take action, Milei said he plans to send a bill to Congress to strengthen Argentina’s response to what he views as attacks on its sovereignty. 

Responding to the economic threats, the U.K. government reasserted its “unshakeable” commitment to the archipelago on Friday, with British Defense Secretary Wes Streeting insisting: “Milei’s statement overnight tells us more about domestic politics in Argentina than it does about the Falkland Islands.”

“The U.K. supports the right of the Falkland Islanders to develop their natural resources for their own economic benefit, and this is an integral part of their right to self-determination,” a spokesperson for Prime Minister Andy Burnham told TIME. “We continue to have a diplomatic relationship with Argentina, and from our perspective we want to continue to strengthen that.”

Here’s what to know about the contentious history of the Falkland Islands and why Milei and Trump’s remarks have sparked concern amid mounting geopolitical tensions. 

Do the Falklands belong to Britain or Argentina?

The Falklands' defense and foreign policy is handled by the U.K., but otherwise it has an internal government of its own. The territory has its own constitution and as of 1983, residents of the islands have been British citizens. 

In a 2013 referendum, Falkland residents voted overwhelmingly in favor of remaining under British rule. The referendum saw 92% of all eligible voters turn out, with 99.8% of votes being “yes.”

“The Falklands are British because Falkland Islanders choose to be British,” Streeting said Friday, pointing to the will of the voters.

The first recorded landing on the island was made in 1690 by English naval captain John Strong. Britain took possession of West Falkland in 1765. France and Spain each had settlements on the islands at different times, but Britain re-established control in 1833 and has since administered the islands. 

“Argentina claims the U.K. took the islands as an act of imperialism in the 1830s, but the remedy to colonial acquisition would be self-determination,” says Marc Weller, programme director of the international law programme at U.K.-based think tank Chatham House.

Given the British government’s insistence on Falklanders deciding their future, “it is therefore acting in accordance with the principle of self-determination,” he tells TIME.

Under the rule of military dictator Leopoldo Galtieri, Argentine forces attempted to stake a territorial claim in April 1982, sparking a 74-day war that Britain won.

Argentina has since continued to claim sovereignty over the islands and the rhetoric has become a unifying issue in the country, experts tell TIME.

The issue recently reared its head during Argentina’s victory over England in the semi-finals of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with some Argentine players holding up a banner reading "Las Malvinas son Argentinas,” which translates to "The Falklands are Argentine.”

“The Argentinian nation is easily united behind this claim through the Falkland Islands. It's a rallying point, and it's perhaps no accident that as the present Argentinean government is in a little bit of trouble, that they have rediscovered the issue,” says Weller, pointing towards Milei’s controversial fiscal policies and falling popularity among the public. 

Milei steps up claim over British territory with sanctions threat

Milei has previously ruled out using force to claim the islands, instead pushing for a diplomatic resolution. Still, his newly-announced plans to impose sanctions against oil companies with operations in the area pose an economic threat. 

The two petroleum firms heading the Sea Lion oil drilling project have already felt the impact of Milei’s proposed sanctions.

British company Rockhopper Exploration’s stock value fell by around 10% on Friday morning, with Israeli firm Navitas Petroleum stock value falling by at least 4.5%.

“It's an attempt to add some uncertainty, perhaps to inhibit investment,” suggests Weller, adding he’s doubtful any such threats will impact Downing Street’s position on the sovereignty dispute.

Trump says U.S. position on Falklands is under review

The dispute over sovereignty remains a tense geopolitical issue. China, for example, has been vocal in its support of Argentina’s claim, encouraging negotiations to take place on the matter.

The U.S., meanwhile, has historically recognized the U.K.’s “administration of the islands,” but has maintained a neutral position regarding sovereignty.

However, Trump has indicated that the U.S. may be open to reversing that position.

The Falklands sovereignty became a talking point in April as the U.S. and Europe drifted on account of Trump lambasting European leaders for refusing to get actively involved in the Iran war.

A leaked Pentagon email, which reportedly suggested various ways the Administration could punish NATO allies it believes let the U.S. down, suggested a review of the U.S. position on Britain’s claim to the Falkland Islands, according to Reuters.

Earlier this week, when asked if the U.S. position on the islands was under review, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office: “I always review every position. That's just one of many."

In an interview with a British broadcast channel that aired on Thursday, Trump did not directly respond when asked if the U.S. would come to the U.K’s aid if Argentina claimed the Falklands.

Trump instead pivoted to discuss the Iran war, repeating his claims that the U.K. let him down. “Your country was not there to help me,” he insisted.

When approached by TIME, a spokesperson for Burnham said such comments “are a matter for the U.S. President.”

TIME has reached out to the White House for comment.

Andrew Gawthorpe, a lecturer at Leiden University and an expert in the foreign policy of the U.S., tells TIME a Washington reversal on the issue “would be an enormous defeat for the U.K. diplomatically and a huge blow” to the special U.K.-U.S. relationship.

Weller agrees, adding that if any U.S. policy were to go against the territorial integrity of the U.K., then “Britain would have to respond quite strongly.”

Trump’s remarks on the Falklands this week could prove difficult for Burnham, who inherited a splintered Washington-London relationship upon replacing Keir Starmer as Prime Minister in July.

“On the one hand, Burnham needs to appear like a strong leader,” says Gawthorpe. “But on the other hand, I think he's very aware that he needs to not annoy Trump any more than is strictly necessary.”

President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that Adam Telle, the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works, will temporarily replace Dan Driscoll as the Army’s top civilian leader following Driscoll’s abrupt resignation from the role earlier this week.

Trump lauded Telle as "a Great Patriot, who is respected by all” in a Truth Social post, saying Telle would take over as acting Army Secretary “effective immediately.”

The news comes after Driscoll, who Trump nominated as Army Secretary last year after returning to the White House, stepped down amid reports of tension between him and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Hegseth praised Trump’s announcement on Thursday, calling Telle “strong and whip smart.”

“Huge congrats to Adam,” Hegseth said in a post on X. “He is indeed a great Patriot — and will be an immediate asset to the @USArmy.”

Here’s what to know about Telle.

Telle has overseen the Army Corps of Engineers since last year

Telle was sworn into his current role as the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works last August, becoming the second person nominated by the President to an Army position in Trump's second term to be confirmed by the Senate, according to Telle's biography on the U.S. military’s website.

In that position, Telle has served as a civilian official in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, an agency that builds and maintains infrastructure, including dams. According to his bio, he has had “principal authority to establish policy direction and to provide supervision of all aspects” of the civil works tasks that the agency performs for the Army, including projects aimed at reducing flood and storm damage.

Telle previously worked under multiple Republican senators

Before being appointed to his current role in the Trump Administration, Telle served as the chief of staff to Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee from 2021-2025, according to Legistorm. He previously worked under another Republican, then-Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, for about a decade from 2007-2017, and held various roles in the office, including deputy chief of staff and legislative director, according to Legistorm. While serving in Cochran’s office, he helped with the lawmaker’s work on Hurricane Katrina recovery, according to his Army bio.

Telle also served on the Senate Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee that was responsible for overseeing the Department of Homeland Security’s budget, according to his bio.

Telle served in the first Trump Administration

During Trump’s first term in the Oval Office, Telle served on the White House Office of Legislative Affairs’ Senate team and “was President Trump’s chief liaison to the Senate,” according to his Army bio.

Telle will take over as acting Army Secretary at a tumultuous time

Telle will step into his new role in the Army at a time of turmoil both abroad and within the Department of Defense. 

The war in Iran, which began on Feb. 28, has now stretched on for longer than six months and has sparked backlash from many Americans.

And Telle will also be taking on the new position amid upheaval within the U.S. military’s senior ranks. About 20 military and civilian leaders have been ousted or have resigned since Hegseth took over the Department of Defense, including Driscoll earlier this week. Even some Republicans have criticized Hegseth for the chaos at the agency, including Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who has called on Trump to replace the Defense Secretary.

“[Hegseth] is creating a leadership void at the top of our military ranks,” Tillis said in a social media post this week. “I urge the President to find a new leader at the Pentagon who will retain and empower our military talent rather than diminish it.”

Almost nothing in Werner Herzog’s fractured fairytale Bucking Fastards, playing in competition here at the Venice Film Festival, makes literal sense. But it all makes a kind of sideways sense, especially if, before watching, you can will yourself into a Herzogian brainspace, a place where possibly nonexistent elephants roam the Earth, where ancient cave drawings bear witness to the enduring creativity and wonder of humankind, where mad dreamers insist it’s possible to haul a multi-ton ship over a mountain. In that context, two inseparable sisters who speak only in unison, who are crazily lovesick over the man who has spurned them, and who believe they can dig a literal tunnel into a land of freedom, acceptance, and love: in a world where our deepest desires are so seldom met, how nuts does that really sound?

Real-life sisters Rooney Mara and Kate Mara play Joan and Jean Holbrooke, sisters living in Ireland—they are not, they adamantly insist, twins—who share every emotion, every thought, every waking moment as if they were a single entity. They dress exactly alike, in droopy trenchcoats and modest granny-style skirts; they both wear their long, silky hair parted neatly in the middle and tied partially back, like identical waterfalls. They don’t finish each other’s sentences; instead, they form their thoughts and words in unison and speak as one. It’s an eerie effect the first time you hear it. Even more unsettling, it comes to sound completely normal as the movie wears on.

Joan and Jean have fallen for a single man, their handsome rapscallion neighbor Gareth Mulroney (a saucy, salacious Orlando Bloom). It’s love at first sight—or is that sights?—when he bursts into their local church, a tankard of beer in hand, stirring up nothing but trouble. Afterward, they breathlessly wait for him to emerge through the church doors. Their eyes gleaming like double constellations, they proposition him: “I’d love to show you my inner cowgirl!” they tell him, the words tumbling out more like a song than a sentence. He’s charmed, intrigued; he’s horny. The trio land in bed, with Gareth in the middle flanked by his semi-nude cutie cowgirls, who ooh and ahh over him adoringly. They’re Goldilocks and he’s their just-right. This is how a sex scene, as imagined by Herzog, plays out.

But their bliss is short-lived. That meet-cute and its aftermath are relayed in flashback as the sisters huddle together in a courtroom, essentially defending themselves against charges of stalking. Gareth, after dallying with Joan and Jean for a time, has thrown them over and taken a wife. They can’t believe it—in their futile rage, they set the interior of his car on fire. (Their procurement of the gasoline they use to do so is a cracked mini-adventure by itself.) They also set the postbox outside his house aflame. Before the bewigged judge, Gareth’s lawyer tries to argue that the relationship was purely sexual. Joan and Jean justify their actions plaintively. “It was love!” they cry in unison, and later, “I am never going to stop loving him!”

But there’s no hope. Their linked hearts are broken, and the court case has brought them both fame and embarrassment. A kind villager (John Kavanagh) takes pity on them, knowing that the best thing for them is to get away. He offers them the use of a flat he doesn’t need, located in another town. He urges them not to open the door to strangers, people who want only to take advantage of them. From there, Bucking Fastard becomes a set of wriggly vignettes more than a linear story. There’s a sleazy neighbor (Malcolm Adams) who attempts to take, and post on the Internet, pictures of them undressing. (They put their heads together and cook up a giggly-devious plan to outwit him.) A kind social worker, played by Domhnall Gleeson, tries to show them how to collaborate in the task of opening a tin of sardines. But soon even their cozy flat comes to feel like a prison: they strike out on an adventure, going to live with an aunt who loves them (Marion O’Dwyer) and who encourages them to explore a mysterious cave near her country property, one whose twists and turns ignite their two-for-one imaginations. A fox named Cupid, with a perpetually alarmed-looking face, becomes their mascot. Through it all, they continue to mourn their lost love. But perhaps they can find a new one?

What does any of this mean? Though the story was inspired by real-life twins from York, England, Freda and Greta Chaplin—who spoke in unison and, like Jean and Joan, did everything together—the meandering storyline is pure, sweet, gaga Herzog. The picture’s most radiant sequences take place in the girls' beloved cave, where they toil for years to dig their way, admittedly nonsensically, to a better life. Herzog and his frequent cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger film the two of them, within a halo of light as they dutifully chip through a rocky passageway—their twin images are as luminous as a delicately carved shell cameo.

The Mara sisters are brilliant here, their eyes as hungry and haunted as those of an orphan in a Keane painting. You laugh with them, not at them, when they take revenge on that peeping tom. But there’s also something deeply touching about their refusal to give up on love. There’s a metaphorical idea shimmering beneath the surface of Bucking Fastard: it’s as if, through this strange and somewhat simple story, Herzog were trying to explore the things women want but don’t dare demand. Here, those longings are voiced in stereo. And yes, men can sometimes drive you crazy. What can you do?

The ending of Bucking Fastard might be considered a flaw; it’s hard to know exactly what has happened, or what it means. But then, an ambiguous ending is one we’re free to write ourselves. How can you not want the best for these dreamy, heartbroken girls, who at one point race through their cave in matching gauzy white gowns, like freedom-loving butterflies? You’ll want to believe that their hearts have at last found a home—a cave not of forgotten dreams, but of remembered ones, made sweeter with every recounting.

The U.S. is investigating a strike on a wedding in southern Iran, Vice President J.D. Vance said Thursday, as reports suggest American weapons killed at least five people and injured dozens of others.

“We’re investigating it because obviously we care,” Vance told reporters. “We want to know.”

The strike represents the U.S.’s latest controversial action in its war with Iran, raising questions about its conduct and civilian harm. Washington and Tehran have escalated their attacks this week, ending a lull in hostilities since July.

But Vance said he was “extremely skeptical” about reports coming from Iranian state media, arguing they have “not been a very good scribe about what’s happened in the conflict thus far.”

Iranian state media reported that a residential building in Kuhestak was attacked on Tuesday evening, where a wedding was being celebrated. Among the casualties was a 4-year-old kid. Reuters and the New York Times independently verified footage from the scene and found that a wedding was taking place when the building was struck.

Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it “will respond to these savage crimes with firmness”—and responded to a broader barrage of American attacks by launching missiles and drones at sites used by the U.S. in Middle East states. The Iranian Red Crescent Society, a humanitarian group, also urged a probe from the International Criminal Court to assess potential violations of international law.

The U.S. Central Command said Wednesday it was already looking into reports of the incident but argued that the “U.S. military never targets civilians, unlike the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps],” referring to Iran’s armed forces branch.

Vance also defended U.S. military action, telling reporters: “If we do make mistakes, again, this is a big difference between us and Iran: when our military makes mistakes, they learn from them to try to get better from them.”

What we know about the strike

On the evening of Sept. 1, CENTCOM reported strikes on military targets, including “air defense sites, radar systems, maritime assets and facilities, mine laying capabilities, and communications sites.”

Iranian media later reported four deaths and at least 68 injured in Kuhestak, a coastal town on the Strait of Hormuz, where trade has been bottlenecked since the start of the U.S.-Iran war in late February. The strikes happened at around 9:30 p.m. local time, per the Red Crescent.

Analyses of footage from the incident conducted by Reuters and the New York Times reveal that wedding guests were gathered in a Kuhestak building. Amid the celebration, what was likely a U.S. munition hit the building and, as the Times put it, “brought down the roof.”

Experts told Reuters and the Times that weapon fragments seen in Iranian media were consistent with what Americans have used.

The attacks on Kuhestak also hit a communications tower roughly 100 m away from the building. A human rights group told the Associated Press that one of the four people initially reported killed—a 16-year-old—was struck by shrapnel near the tower rather than at the wedding. Iranian state television said Thursday that a 22-year-old woman had since died in hospital following the strike, bringing the reported death toll to five.

Axios reported that CENTCOM Commander Adm. Brad Cooper ordered an internal review of the strike. 

Civilian casualties raise concern

The Red Crescent sent a letter to the International Criminal Court Wednesday calling for “an independent, impartial, thorough, and effective investigation,” citing the “civilian character” of the strike’s location.

The organization also argued that under the Rome Statute, intentionally directing attacks on civilians and knowingly launching a clearly excessive attack may constitute “war crimes.” However, both Iran and the U.S. are nonparties to the Rome Statute, so the ICC does not have automatic jurisdiction over them.

Still, “the laws of war state that civilians are protected from military attacks,” Melanie O’Brien, a professor of international law at the University of Western Australia, tells TIME. “A wedding is not a military objective, particularly in a civilian residential building. It is clear that there was a direct missile hit to the home. This would render the attack unlawful.”

It’s also not the U.S.’s first involvement in strikes that hit civilian structures without obvious military use and that endangered or killed civilians. On the first day of the war with Iran on Feb. 28, a U.S. Tomahawk missile hit a primary school in Minab—just 30 km (18 mi) away from Kuhestak—where more than 100 children were killed.

O’Brien, however, says she is skeptical about any result from the U.S.-led investigation of the wedding strike: “The U.S. track record is to only investigate when allegations gain significant public traction, and even when any convictions occur, the penalties are minor or pardons are given.”

When Iza Thiago-Munoz brought her first baby home, she instituted a rule: She was the only person allowed to carry the baby upstairs. At the time, she lived in a narrow Philadelphia rowhouse with a steep staircase. If anyone else—including her husband—wanted to take the baby up, they had to buckle the infant into a car seat first.

Her husband occasionally tried to reason with her. He could hold the baby tightly, he pointed out. “But what if you fall down the stairs?” she would reply.

She didn’t know it at the time, but Thiago-Munoz was struggling with postpartum depression and anxiety, which amplified her lifelong tendency to imagine the worst-case scenario. She also felt enormous pressure to be a perfect mother. “I thought I had to do everything,” she says. Otherwise, she worried, “people would just think that I wasn’t good enough.” Asking for help felt like admitting that they were right.

Thiago-Munoz is now a lactation consultant, postpartum doula, and founder of Clementina Health, a postpartum and lactation telehealth company. Her work is informed by what she experienced after giving birth—and by what she wishes the people around her had understood. “I just didn’t feel joy in anything,” she says. “I felt like I was supposed to be happy because, wow, this major thing just happened. And I was happy, but I wasn’t joyful.”

Supporting someone with postpartum depression starts with knowing how it can show up, even when it doesn’t match the image you have in your head. 

Know the difference between “baby blues” and postpartum depression

Both the “baby blues” and postpartum depression can cause sadness, tearfulness, irritability, and feeling overwhelmed after giving birth, says Dr. Kelli Burroughs, an ob-gyn and vice chair of clinical affairs and patient experience at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. But the baby blues are generally mild, begin within the first week after delivery, and improve within about two weeks. Postpartum depression lasts longer and interferes more significantly with daily life.

Signs can include a persistently depressed mood; losing interest in things that usually bring joy; withdrawing from other people; difficulty eating, concentrating, or sleeping even when the baby is asleep; extreme fatigue; and feeling disconnected from the baby. Postpartum depression can also begin months after giving birth—not only during those first blurry weeks at home.

It doesn’t always look the way people expect, either. Sometimes, the moms who are suffering the most appear to have everything under control, says Jayme Scarfo, a licensed professional counselor in Surprise, Ariz., who specializes in working with pregnant and postpartum women. They’re showering, cooking, going to the gym, and insisting: “It’s hard, but don’t worry. I’ve got it.”

You don’t need to decide whether someone meets the diagnostic criteria before checking in. Describe what you’ve noticed without labeling her, Scarfo suggests: “I know this is a huge adjustment, and you haven’t seemed like yourself lately. How are you really doing?” Or: “You seem much more anxious than usual, and I’m worried about you. Can we talk about it?”

Consider who should initiate that conversation, too. “The best person to ask those hard questions is often going to be whoever she feels the least pressure to perform for,” Scarfo says. That might be a sister, best friend, therapist, or fellow mom—not necessarily her partner or mother. 

Burroughs also likes asking questions that are harder to brush off with a reflexive “I’m fine.” For example: “Are you having more good days or bad days?” It’s also helpful to ask when she last slept for more than two hours or ate a real meal sitting down. Those answers can help you understand where she’s struggling—and how you might lighten the load.

Don’t argue with how she feels

When someone declares they’re a “terrible mother,” your instinct might be to disagree. Of course you’re not! You’re doing an amazing job. But depression and anxiety symptoms can start to feel like part of someone’s identity, says Emma Basch, a clinical psychologist in Washington who specializes in perinatal mental health. Trying to prove her wrong might leave her feeling even more misunderstood.

Instead of correcting her, acknowledge how much she’s hurting: “It must be so painful to feel that way. I’m here for you.” Burroughs likes: “I’m glad you told me. I’m glad you feel comfortable confiding in me.” That signals that you can handle the truth, and that your friend doesn’t need to resume pretending everything is fine. 

Skip the sunny reassurances, like “Enjoy every moment,” “They’re only this little once,” and especially “You just had a baby—you should be happy.” Those comments suggest she can simply choose her way out of what she’s experiencing. “Postpartum depression is a true medical condition,” Burroughs says. “This is not a sign of weakness. This is out of the control of the new mom.” 

Listen without panicking

Loved ones should try to remain calm if a new mom shares an intrusive thought, Scarfo says. A frightening flash like “What if I drop the baby?” isn’t the same as wanting it to happen. An alarmed reaction—or immediately suggesting an intervention like hospitalization—could make her less likely to confide in you again.

Acknowledge that the thought sounds scary, and gently ask more: “How often are you having these thoughts?” “Do you feel like you might act on them?” “Do you feel safe right now?” “Who can we call together?”

You don’t need to act like the thought is no big deal; it clearly feels like a very big deal to her. The goal is to become a safe place for her to say the things that aren’t picture-perfect, Scarfo says—and then help her figure out what she needs next.

Know when it’s an emergency

Talking about suicide or harming the baby does require immediate intervention, Basch says. The same is true of signs of postpartum psychosis, which can include hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, confusion, or a decreased need for sleep accompanied by a surge of energy. “It’s not a layperson’s job to diagnose,” she says, “but it’s a layperson’s job to take action.” 

Anyone experiencing a mental-health crisis can call or text 988. The National Maternal Mental Health Hotline, available at 1-833-TLC-MAMA, also provides free, confidential support 24/7 to pregnant and postpartum women and their families.

Make a concrete offer

“Let me know if you need anything” might sound kind. But it puts the burden back on the person who’s already overwhelmed. She hears “ball’s in your court,” Scarfo says, and “a depressed mom is not picking up the ball. She has 17 other things to do.” 

Instead, tell your loved one exactly what you’d like to do, Basch advises. “I’m dropping off dinner tonight—does 6 p.m. work?” is much easier to answer than “Can I bring you something sometime?” She can still say no or suggest another time, but she doesn’t have to identify a need, invent a solution, and delegate it to you.

Be careful not to turn helping into unwanted visits. Scarfo and her sister-in-law used to leave meals on each other’s porches and say: “I’m dropping off dinner at 6. I’m going to leave it on the porch, and I’ll text you when it’s there.” There was no expectation that the recipient would invite anyone inside or make conversation. “It doesn’t put that burden of gratitude on the new mom,” Scarfo says—“that burden of performing or hosting.” 

Take the legwork out of getting help

Professional treatment might include therapy, medication, or both. Yet finding a provider, staying on top of insurance, making calls, and arranging child care can feel impossible when someone is already overwhelmed.

Basch has seen loved ones do that legwork themselves and say: “I found a few therapists who specialize in postpartum mental health. I’d be happy to help you connect with one.” You might offer to make the call, accompany your loved one to an appointment, or watch the baby while she goes.

If your partner keeps insisting that she’s fine but you remain concerned, Burroughs suggests contacting her ob-gyn, midwife, or other maternal-care provider yourself. Be specific about what you’ve observed: persistent sadness, repeated crying, withdrawal, difficulty bonding with the baby, or struggling to complete essential tasks. You might say: “I’m concerned about my partner’s emotional recovery after giving birth. These are the changes I’ve noticed at home.”

The provider can then reach out to the patient without necessarily revealing who called, Burroughs says. They’ll usually open by saying: “I’m just calling to check on you. I want to see how your recovery is going.” Then, they’ll ask how the new mom feels emotionally on a scale of 1 to 10, whether she’s bonding with the baby, how often she feels sad, and whether she’s having more good days or bad ones. Those specific questions can make it harder for serious symptoms to disappear behind “I’m fine.”

Keep showing up

Support tends to pour in immediately after a baby is born, when everyone wants to deliver a casserole and tickle the newborn’s toes. Then people return to their own lives, even though the need for support often outlasts that initial flurry of attention. 

Continue checking in without demanding a response: “Thinking of you today. No need to text back.” Keep offering specific help, even if your loved one turns you down the first time. Scarfo suggests making it clear that you’ll come over whether she wants to run an errand alone or lie down on the couch while somebody else handles the chaos around her.

Thiago-Munoz still remembers the neighbor who noticed that she had stopped taking her dog on his usual 9 a.m. walk. If Thiago-Munoz hadn’t appeared by 9:15, her neighbor came over and walked him herself. “I honestly never would have asked her to take the dog for a walk,” she says. “I didn’t have the capacity to look for someone to do it. She knew my routine.” 

AI is everywhere. It's reshaping industries, accelerating innovation, and changing how millions of people work. 

And while AI will transform work, it is crystal clear to me that AI can not replace relationships. Working in real estate has taught me this firsthand. 

Great real estate agents are more than just salespeople. Real estate agents help people as they build, and often rebuild, their lives. They act as crisis managers, trusted confidants during divorce, empty-nester therapists, grief counselors, life coaches, matchmakers, and above all, trusted advisors who guide clients through some of life's biggest transitions. 

This is not to say that the real estate sector is beyond disruption. In fact, it is a particularly turbulent industry. And yet, the role of real estate agents has survived global pandemics, market ups and downs, shifting mortgage rates, and every other major industry disruption. AI will be no different for real estate agents, or other relationship-based professions. 

Transforming work 

To be sure, AI is reshaping how we all work. And many workers are understandably anxious. 

Relentless reports predicting job loss and economic disruption have perhaps unsurprisingly deepened public skepticism about AI, particularly among young adults and recent college graduates. Numerous commencement speakers who touted AI this graduation season were booed, including both Google’s former and current CEOs.Communities across the country are pushing back against the rapid expansion of AI data centers, raising legitimate concerns about rising energy demands, water consumption, and the environmental impact these massive facilities can have on the places they call home. Even Pope Leo XIV weighed in on the rise of AI, publishing his first encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas, which thoughtfully evaluates the future of humanity in the age of AI. All of these concerns have exacerbated the AI trust gap.

However, once a transformative technology is unleashed on society, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. When Netflix sunsetted DVDs and made it possible for people to stream movies from the comfort of their homes, people stopped going to Blockbuster. When Spotify put a million songs in our pockets, people stopped buying CDs. 

AI is also a service that can make people’s lives easier. For example, it's really good at writing code. In my own industry, AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to innovation by empowering real estate professionals to build software and workflows tailored to their unique business needs—something expensive, off-the-shelf software often fails to deliver. 

Before AI, if a real estate professional had an idea for a new tool or workflow, they typically needed to hire a software developer, secure funding, and wait months—sometimes even years—for a finished product. Today, that equation has changed. With AI and vibe coding, they can turn an idea into a working prototype in a matter of hours with a fraction of the financial investment once required. I have a colleague who owns a real estate brokerage that now builds all of its technology in-house. Using Claude, he has created dynamic market reports, interactive sales dashboards, and even a custom Gmail widget that allows his agents to access and update the company's CRM without ever leaving their inbox. There's no need to log into another application or juggle multiple browser tabs. 

This kind of change isn't unique to real estate. It’s happening in education, finance, manufacturing, and virtually every other industry. No matter your profession, you may spend tremendous amounts of time on administrative work: writing spreadsheet formulas, analyzing documents, sending email, producing marketing content, organizing information, preparing presentations, and tackling repetitive tasks that add little strategic value.

What AI can’t replace

But whether you're an attorney, consultant, plumber, financial advisor, or sales executive, your greatest value doesn’t come from routine administrative work. It comes from solving problems and building relationships.

Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can analyze contracts, create reports, summarize research, review documents, and automate a plethora of other tedious tasks. They allow professionals to spend less time on administration and more time serving their clients and building meaningful relationships. But AI isn't replacing the qualities that matter most. 

AI can't demonstrate genuine empathy, navigate difficult conversations, inspire confidence, or build lasting relationships. It can't sit across the table from a family deciding whether to move across the country or coach a struggling employee. It can't read the room, recognize when someone is hesitant, or understand the deeply personal circumstances behind many of life's biggest decisions. Those are uniquely human capabilities and always will be.

As AI becomes better at technical tasks, human skills become the differentiator. Communication, empathy, and trust will define the next generation of successful professionals. The future of work isn't choosing between people and AI. It's using AI to amplify the human experience. Because AI will transform work, but it can't replace relationship

A Philippine court on Friday ordered the arrest of Vice President Sara Duterte over alleged grave threats to her former ally, President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., his wife, and a former House Speaker.

The warrant against Duterte, 48, set the bail at 120,000 pesos ($1,900) for ​each of the three counts against her.

“Regardless of the question on jurisdiction, she has no intention of evading the law and will continue to exercise all her legal remedies,” Duterte’s lawyer said in a statement.

Duterte has been charged with threatening the lives of Marcos Jr., First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos, and his cousin, former House Speaker Martin Romualdez.

The case stems from a November 2024 virtual press conference where the Vice President revealed an apparent assassination plot against Marcos, his wife, and Romualdez.

“I already talked to someone—I told him, If I’m killed, kill [Marcos], Liza Araneta, and Martin Romualdez,” she said in Filipino, “No joke, no joke. I already gave orders. If I die, I told them, ‘Don’t stop until they’re dead.’ And then he said, ‘Yes.’”

The threat is also one of the allegations included in the impeachment complaint against Duterte, on top of alleged misuse of public funds as Vice President and during her stint as Education Secretary. Duterte has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

The Vice President is currently standing trial at the Philippine Senate, serving as an impeachment court, following her second impeachment in May. If convicted in the impeachment court, she could be removed from office and barred from running in the 2028 national elections, where she said she plans to contest the presidency.

Philippine law typically allows candidates to run for public office even if they face pending criminal charges.

Duterte controversies and public standing

Duterte is the daughter of former President Rodrigo Duterte, who is awaiting trial before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, for the thousands of deaths attributed to his violent anti-drug campaign. 

The Duterte family still enjoys broad public support in the Philippines, despite the controversies. Recent surveys show Sara Duterte herself is the top preferred candidate by Filipinos to succeed Marcos, whom she had a falling out with. Marcos, who took office in 2022, is limited to a lone six-year term.

The presidential office said in a statement that it “respects the decision of the court” to issue an arrest warrant.

Jean Encinas-Franco, a political science professor at the University of the Philippines, tells TIME that “the law has finally caught up with the Vice President,” but questioned the timing of the arrest warrant’s release. Franco said Duterte’s arrest warrant could successfully repel criticisms that Marcos is a “weak” leader as the impeachment proceedings have dragged on.

However, Franco says it remains unclear which political camp—if any—will benefit from the latest political development. “We don't know what will happen because it's still 1-½ years [until the elections] and that's a lifetime in Philippine politics.”

It’s Saturday morning and your boss emails you a question that can wait until Monday. What do you do? If you’re like me, you read the message while walking out of your yoga class and respond before lunch. 

This work culture makes the U.S. an outlier among high-income economies. Since 2017, countries including France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Australia, Slovakia, Greece, and Argentina have legislated some form of a right to disconnect. The European Union is working on a policy that could take effect as soon as 2028. In Australia, employees have the right not to read or respond to employers outside of work hours. In Portugal, mid-size employers risk fines of over $10,000 for contacting employees when they’re off the clock.

As we think about the employment landscape in the U.S. this Labor Day, we should consider a similar approach that protects the right of employees to not work when they’re not officially working. This could solve a lot of problems for families and communities while actually improving job performance. Since the pandemic, the boundaries between work and home have all but collapsed. With many workers still doing a lot of remote work, many of us send our first email early in the morning and our last late at night, creating what Microsoft calls the “infinite workday.” We squeeze in a load of laundry, parent-teacher conference, and family dinner somewhere in between.

Being pulled in so many directions at the same time is awful for our health and the quality of our work, for a simple reason: The human brain can’t multitask. 

“Each time we are exposed to a new stimulus and engage in the sequential process of disconnecting and reallocating our attention, we are expending valuable metabolic energy,” University of California, Santa Barbara technology management professor Paul Leonardi writes in Digital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your Life. “Our attention is fragmented. We lose focus and become easily distracted. We can’t get things done as quickly or as easily as we should be able to, and often quality suffers.”

Humans just didn’t evolve to keep switching between tasks as quickly and regularly as we do today, Leonardi warns. This explains why so many of us are exhausted and burned out. It also explains why we spend so much time working: We aren’t as efficient as we could be.

When I don’t work on the weekend, I unquestionably show up as a better employee on Monday morning. That’s because spending time with friends and family, exercising, getting outdoors, and volunteering in my community leave me refreshed and energized. What’s more, when I get my kids’ permission slips filled out and the fruit and veggies chopped on the weekend, thoughts of unfinished business aren’t floating through my head while I’m working. That means I can achieve a state of what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi famously termed “flow,” getting completely absorbed in my work and reaching peak performance.

Allowing workers to disconnect would therefore make them better employees. It could also solve several public policy problems. Our children need present caregivers. It only takes seconds for a child to fall or drown while we’re distracted by a manager’s latest missive. When parents spend more time on screens, their children also develop poorer language skills. And, of course, children are unlikely to open up about their problems while we’re distracted on our phones.

Plus, if workers disconnected during their off-hours, they’d also have more time to nurture the offline connections that our country desperately needs. I would agree that we’re experiencing what psychologist Marisa Franco calls a “friendship famine.” Since 1990, the percentage of American adults who say they have no close friends has quadrupled, according to last year’s American Perspectives Survey. That is crushing. The quality of our friendships and social connections is one of the strongest predictors of our health, happiness, and how long we’ll live, according to the Harvard Study of Adult Development. It’s more important than things like our cholesterol, genes, and salaries. And being lonely is as toxic for our health as alcoholism or smoking.  

Of course, as Americans know one another less, we help one another less. This can explain why volunteerism has also been declining. That’s particularly sad because banding together has long been a central part of our national character, as Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote in Democracy in America. It’s especially important in a country like ours where people can’t rely on a strong social safety net when they hit hard times.

Labor Day is an obvious prompt for U.S. lawmakers to consider a right to disconnect. In the meantime, we can change our behavior and our workplaces. Employers should take the lead. Even without a national law, they should develop their own policies about disconnecting and publish them prominently on their websites so prospective employees can consider them even before accepting job offers. Volkswagen pioneered this approach in Germany in 2012 when it stopped sending emails to employees who weren’t senior managers 30 minutes after their shifts ended and resumed 30 minutes before their next shifts began. 

A series of studies published in 2021 found that when people receive non-urgent work emails outside of work hours, we tend to think we need to respond faster than the senders believe is necessary. Receiving these types of emails also increases our stress and decreases our wellbeing, but senders underestimate the degree to which their messages stress us out. Indicating in the email that a response wasn’t expected right away reduced the pressure on recipients. An even better strategy could be schedule-sending emails so colleagues receive them when they return to work.

Another thing we can combat individually is the urge to check our messages every time we have a spare minute. Pulling out our phones is often a convenient way to avoid negative emotions or awkward encounters. Yet all this task switching leaves us distracted and depleted, and I can’t realistically handle any of the issues in the emails I read in the 30 seconds it takes to walk from my yoga class to my car.

It stands to reason that our brains would be less foggy if we used those small slices of our lives to take a deep breath, notice our surroundings, and have short, pleasant interactions with the people around us. When we returned to our desks, we’d think more clearly, work more efficiently, and send better responses. 

This Labor Day, there’s a way for workers to be healthier, happier, more productive, and solve a lot of our public policy problems, too. We need to stop working when we’re not working.

“You’re gonna see everything on this show,” Alix Earle assures viewers in the voiceover that opens her Netflix reality series Earle Meets World. But if the show made a genuine effort to fulfill the 25-year-old social media star’s vow to reveal the rawest, most intimate aspects of her life, then the only reasonable conclusion to draw from it would be that there just isn’t much to see.

As her fans (she has 8.5 million on TikTok alone) will anticipate, “everything” refers specifically to ongoing drama around Earle’s parents’ divorce, her own breakup with NFL player Braxton Berrios, and her mysterious falling-out with fellow creator and former boss Alex Cooper. All of this does indeed come up in the eight-episode series, now streaming in full, which tries mightily to position the large, blended Earle family as the Kardashian-Jenners for a new generation. Yet the bombshells teased in months’ worth of promotional materials aren’t especially explosive. Nor is there a breakout personality among a cast that, understandably enough, seems either too chill or too concerned with appearing likable to really entertain. Earle Meets World plays less like a juicy docusoap than like a tediously extended version of the Get Ready With Me (GRWM) videos that made its subject famous—one that suggests less overlap than you might expect between the qualities of a successful influencer and those required for reality TV stardom.

Earle is one of those celebrities who are universally known to people under 30 but barely on the radar of anyone much older. (I’ll admit to having confused her with Cooper, another all-American blonde who parlayed internet fame into a Netflix series, and I know I’m not the only one.) Though I wouldn’t recommend making the show your first trip down the Alix Earle rabbit hole, here is a quick intro for the unfamiliar: Conventionally beautiful yet plagued by cystic acne, Earle grew her following as a University of Miami undergrad with mirror-facing GRWM TikToks, eventually going viral with a vulnerable post about her skin troubles. Then came the brand deals and new platforms. Cooper signed Earle, an obvious heir, to her podcast network; they abruptly parted ways in early 2025 and have been vaguely but publicly feuding ever since. Meanwhile, Earle has continued her ascent, launching a skincare brand, Reale Actives, and introducing herself to people elderly enough to watch network TV on Dancing With the Stars.

Synergistically positioned to bring her social media followers to a streaming platform that needs young subscribers to maintain its dominance while filling gaps in her own reach, Earle Meets World is a multigenerational family soap. Alix and 23-year-old Ashtin—a less-extroverted brunette whose TikTok audience still tops a million—are the It-girl sisters who constantly squabble but consider each other best friends. Their mom, Alisa, and dad, TJ, have been divorced for more than a decade, their split catalyzed by TJ’s affair with Ashley Dupré, a key character in the prostitution scandal that sank former New York governor Eliot Spitzer. Now Dupré is Ashley Earle, TJ’s wife and the mother of their three kids; the eldest, Izabel, is, at 13, already cranking out Outfit of the Day videos like the Gen Alpha Kylie Jenner she has the pedigree to become. A recent breast cancer survivor, Alisa has her own longtime partner, Todd. Her messy separation from TJ has evidently given way to a tenuous friendship between the couples, although it seems doubtful they spend as much time together off-camera as on. These relationships are further complicated by the role TJ, who made his fortune in construction, has assumed as Alix and Ashtin’s “dadager.”

All the raw material for an unscripted family drama is present. Somehow, though, the fireworks tend to fizzle as soon as they’re lit. With the divorce so far in the past, a season’s worth of halfhearted conflict among the parents is wrung out of TJ joking that Alisa could be a “young piece of ass” on The Golden Bachelor. Ashley’s friction with Alix is framed as fallout from the latter’s history of oversharing about the former but feels more like standard stepfamily tension, heightened by reality-TV producers' prodding and Alix’s hypervigilance about her stepmom’s sometimes-awkward social media presence. Ironically, we only really witness the self-centered, control-freak behavior relatives are always attributing to Alix when she’s struggling to manage her image and brand identity. As a result, the most intense moments of the series tend to involve cringey TikToks or premature glimpses of Reale Actives packaging. You probably have to be a diehard Earle girl to find this stuff compelling. And even if you are, you might be disappointed by how many climactic Earle Meets World scenes, from Ashtin kicking Alix out of her New York apartment to Cooper goading Alix to come at her, unfold in now-ancient vertical videos that already have millions of views.

It doesn’t help the show that the two people with whom Alix seems most preoccupied throughout the season—Cooper and Berrios—aren’t present. Instead, we get her side of these stories, conveyed in interviews and stiff conversations over cocktails at trendy, jewel-toned lounges, often so stripped of details that they come off as, respectively, a generic exploitative mentorship and your typical ambivalent breakup. A scene in the premiere that seems even more staged than the average docusoap grievance dump has Alix talking with TJ about Cooper in sentences that could’ve been scripted by a crisis-PR pro: “I definitely feel betrayed by Alex Cooper.” “She took advantage of my admiration for her.” Neither this storyline nor the Berrios one advances until the very end of the season, and even those late developments are anticlimactic. (Tabloid headlines linking Earle and Tom Brady, meanwhile, get coy winks but no substantive context.)

Much of the blame for Earle Meets World’s slightness and superficiality, as well as the shapelessness of episodes that drag despite running less than 40 minutes apiece, should fall on the show’s producers. Not only have they failed to identify entertaining narratives within this family’s daily life; they’ve also made their desperation to do so too apparent in the final product. To be fair, they had a difficult assignment. As eager as they look to be on screen together, the Earles are—or act—too calm and conciliatory to drive reality-soap plots. No one wants to look unhinged, least of all Alix, who talks about being unstable but can’t risk her credibility as an entrepreneur, pitchwoman, and parasocial companion to millions by getting truly ugly on camera. Which is precisely what natural born reality stars have always done. Compare Alix and Ashtin’s nights at the club to the sloppy-drunk violence and infidelity of the 20-somethings on Jersey Shore and Vanderpump Rules, or her parents’ relationships to chaotic Real Housewives marriages, and it all looks rather tame. No one here can quip like the best Bravo scrappers and Traitors debaters, either, so the show lacks the element of humor that suffuses every classic of the genre.

Influencers fall into a cultural gray area between entertainment and entrepreneurship; most excel at one more than the other. Both fields demand storytelling skills. But that doesn’t mean a person with a preternatural ability to sell people the products they watch her apply to her face as she scatters breadcrumbs about her personal life necessarily has the makings of an unscripted drama’s protagonist. Earle might be too shrewd a businesswoman to have unadulterated main character energy.

Following the stunning final scene of Season 2 of Silo, the third season has diverged into two timelines: one with Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) and company in Silo 18 fighting for their survival, and another unfolding before the silo program began.

The season’s penultimate episode delivered some big revelations: The all-knowing Algorithm program that ensures the survival of the silo isn’t actually a digital algorithm, but a person watching from Silo 1, deciding everyone’s fates. Before he dies in Episode 9, Bernard (Tim Robbins) offers some hope: “A person can be defeated.” Meanwhile, in the past timeline, Daniel (Ashley Zukerman) and Helen (Jessica Henwick) discover the origins of the silos, only for a shocking nuclear explosion to separate them.

That’s a hell of a way to end an episode, and the Season 3 finale of Silo, “Troy,” brings us straight into Silo 1, where those running the system live, far in the future. How far, exactly? “Three hundred and fifty years,” says series creator Graham Yost. “It’s revealed in Episode 9 that the silos were part of a 500-year plan. And they're 350 years into that.” 

A memory suppression system

Inside Silo 1, we see Daniel waking from cryo-sleep. Except he’s no longer called Daniel: He is now Troy. And while Troy looks physically the same as Daniel, he’s completely changed. That’s made crystal clear when he settles into his shift and has to deal with the outbreak in Silo 17, the same silo Juliette ventured to in Season 2. Troy, without hesitation, delivers a ruthless decision to execute every single person—man, woman, and child—who left the silo. A top priority of Silo 1 is to prevent silos from discovering that any other silos exist. His decision to unleash drone warfare is met with disapproval by drone pilot Susan, who is actually Daniel’s sister Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay). Neither of them recognizes one another from the past. “He’s completely bloodless about it. Totally unemotional. It’s just his job,” says Yost. (Yost does suggest that Charlotte’s negative reaction to Troy’s behavior is worth our attention, though he won’t say why).

That lack of emotion bears no resemblance to the past Daniel. It turns out there’s a system designed to keep memories suppressed. Yost divulges some key details behind this Silo 1 initiative. “Your skill set, your skill knowledge, your expertise stays with you, and so that's why Daniel, as an engineer, is someone who can solve problems. There is an effort to wipe and control memory, so people don't know who they were. But they know who they became in the project.” Yost says we’ll discover more about specifics next season.

It’s precisely the same idea the Algorithm pushed Camille to implement in Silo 18, a major plot point of Season 3. If she had done it, the silo would have continued to function, but there would have been huge problems. “People would forget they had kids and not feed them, and people would forget they were married to each other,” says Yost. The memory suppression plotline is influenced by a book by British neurologist Oliver Sacks. “In one of his books, a guy has extraordinary short-term memory loss. He’ll say ‘Hello, nice to meet you’ every 15 seconds or so. But if he sits down at the piano, he can play an entire concerto. So there's something about that persistence of memory; that part of his brain keeps going. We modeled it on that.”

The person behind the Algorithm

We also discover that Daniel reports to Victor (Matt Craven), whom audiences first met as Charlotte’s doctor at the beginning of the season and who is one of the leading minds behind the silo program. Further, we see that Victor is actually the voice behind the almighty Algorithm. Victor seems deeply disturbed by Troy’s willingness to massacre the people of silo. Interestingly, he does not have a different name from the one he had before—and neither does the silo director, Senator Rosalind Thurman (Laura Innes). They have maintained their identities, and unlike Daniel/Troy, they know everything that’s happened in the last 350 years. “Power dictates who is in power, and that power gets to retain memory. But there’s a burden in retaining memory,” Yost says.

Troy comes to Victor with a request. He’s pestered by visions of a woman, who we know is Helen. These flashbacks play on his mind, and he hopes that Victor can help him find out who she is. “The whole purpose and design of the project is to free us from the past,” Victor tells Troy, gently brushing off his request. Victor makes a note of it before Troy goes back to cryo-sleep until his next shift. It’s revealed that Troy has been asking Victor for information about Helen ever since he became part of the silo over 300 years ago, as we see a folder full of the times he’s asked about her.

With Troy back in cryo-sleep, some time later, Victor has a new problem to deal with: the uprising in Silo 18. Victor has put the dreaded safeguard in motion, a fail-safe created by the silo founders to annihilate an entire silo’s population if rebellion or a discovery of knowledge threatens the entirety of the silo system. Camille (Alexandria Riley), Silo 18’s head of IT, now armed with the knowledge that the Algorithm is human, manages to outsmart it, providing a distraction to stop the safeguard by capping the concealed pipe that would flood the silo with lethal poison gas. 

It’s a monumental success for Silo 18, and a crushing blow for Silo 1, one that could threaten to destroy the entire system and everything that’s been building for over 300 years. And yet, Victor’s face does not register the disappointment we might expect. “He felt relieved that Silo 18 didn’t die,” says Yost.

It’s a surprise, but given what follows, it makes plenty of sense. Victor ends up taking his own life. “We never land on exactly why he killed himself, but there are a lot of different reasons, says Yost. “It's a constellation, more than one trigger. But I think that for him, a big trigger was seeing Daniel, this guy that he quite liked, do this horrific thing. It's like, ‘Is that what we are? Is that what we've done?’ I think when he realized he was actually happy that 18 survived, he knew he wasn't on board with this anymore.”

Juliette’s plan for Silo 1

Thirty-five years later, Troy is awoken from cryo-sleep again, and learns that Victor is no longer alive. Troy is to take over as the Algorithm, and faces off against Juliette, who’s approached the giant door at the bottom of the Silo 18. In Silo 18, that door is referred to as “the forward vault,” suggesting that the door is actually a path to another silo. This means that the massacre of Silo 17 happened approximately 35 years before we met Juliette for the first time in Silo Season 1.

As Juliette and friends approach the door, the Algorithm (a.k.a. Troy) communicates with them. They strike a deal. If Juliette agrees to stop investigating, Silo 1 won’t attempt any further safeguarding, leaving them in peace. Juliette accepts the offer, but she doesn’t mean it. Troy threatened to kill everyone in the silo should Juliette not agree, and she believes it’s only a matter of time before they try and kill everyone again.
Juliette has the genesis of a plan. “They’re expecting us to defend ourselves, which means they won’t be preparing to defend against us. If we can get to them first, we can protect everyone. We need to take out Silo 1” she declares. 

Before the season ends, Troy finds an encrypted message from Victor. The message threatens to undo 350 years of memory wiping: “Her name is Helen Drew,” Victor reveals to Troy. We close in on Troy’s face as tears fall down his cheeks as he says Helen’s name out loud, and the episode cuts to black.

Hints for what’s to come in Season 4

“The big things we wanted to set up at the end of the season were Juliette saying we have to take down Silo 1, and Daniel saying Helen’s name,” says Yost. These events seem to set up a Season 4 battle between Troy and Juliette, one that could topple the entire silo system. But Troy’s realization seems to suggest that he may in fact revert to Daniel, which could mean that he will instead begin to work against Silo 1, opening a possibility of teaming up with Juliette to take the silos down for good.

Yost, of course, will not reveal if this, or anything like it, will happen in Season 4, the final season of Silo, currently scheduled for sometime next summer. But there is one thing Yost will say about the upcoming struggle between Silo 1 and Silo 18: 

“This is war.”

The White House website on Thursday launched a series of arcade-style video games promoting President Donald Trump’s agenda.  

In “Rio Run,” a spin on the decades-old game Snake, players can gather and deport migrants along the Rio Grande. “Build the Wall,” a Tetris-style game, lets players stack sections of a border wall to “protect the border from the coming horde.”  In “Trump Savings Tycoon,” players collect cash and gold bars flying through the air to “fill your kids’ Trump Accounts,” referring to the Administration’s tax-advantaged investment accounts for newborns.

Other games include “Supply Line,” where players sort out school lunch items to “Make America Healthy Again,” and “Flappy Bill,” where players fly a bald eagle carrying legislation over the National Mall in the style of popular mobile game Flappy Bird.

“This is an effort to further contrast between a culture of fun and winning and the dark socialist vision Democrats have for America,” a White House official told Fox News.

TIME has reached out to the White House for comment.

Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the President and head of digital strategy, referred to the games as “policy you can interact with.”

https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2095615734567100766

The White House’s digital strategy

The video games are the latest effort by the Trump Administration to use the Internet and pop culture to promote its policies.

Across its social media accounts, the White House has posted AI-generated content and political memes, as well as mocked its critics online. The strategy has drawn criticism, with artists like Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo condemning the Administration’s use of their music in videos pushing its agenda.

The “Arcade” has drawn backlash from rights groups, who argue it gamifies mass deportations and trivializes human suffering.

“They’ve been playing games with people’s lives for years, now they’ve made a video game of what they’re doing,” Amerika Garcia Grewal, co-director of the Frontera Federation in Eagle Pass, Texas, told AFP.

Democratic lawmakers argued that the games reflect the White House’s misplaced priorities, especially as the U.S. war against Iran has driven up household inflation and fuel costs for Americans.

Read More: The Price of Happiness: Americans Feel Guilty After Spending on Things That Bring Them Joy

Rep. Ted Lieu of California questioned the White House’s focus on arcade-style games when the national average gasoline price has risen to around $4.14. “November is coming,” he wrote in a post on X, referring to the looming midterms. 

“Heating oil is near an all-time high, but hey you can play Border Czar Tom Homan in a video game,” Connecticut state senator Matt Lesser posted on X.