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Karoline Leavitt, the 28-year-old firebrand who became the nation’s youngest-ever press secretary in 2024, is stepping down to “spend more time with her beautiful young children.”

President Donald Trump announced the news on Wednesday night in a Truth Social post, adding that Leavitt would remain an adviser and “an influential voice within the Republican Party.”

It feels fitting that Leavitt — whose public persona required her to perform both her job and her role as a wife and mom — is stepping down to parent. In MAGA’s conception of womanhood, there can be no higher calling. Not even serving the president. 

For more than two years, however, Leavitt made a show of trying to do both. She returned to work on Trump’s reelection campaign only days after the birth of her first child and regularly shared photos of herself working while holding her son. 

Leavitt also welcomed a daughter over the spring, amid what Fox News dubbed a White House “baby boom.” Officials and conservative media quickly turned the new mothers into advertisements for the pro-natalist movement: Proof that women could, and should, have both careers and children. 

Leavitt is still being held up that way, even — perhaps especially — as she departs. “She’s been a role model to millions and millions of young women,” deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told Fox News on Wednesday. “A mother, a family woman, a press secretary, a patriot.”

MAGA’s rules for women

The MAGA movement tends to glorify traditional female roles — wife, mother, homemaker — while simultaneously (and confusingly) elevating ambitious, career-driven women like Leavitt. 

At first glance, her prominence — and that of other women in Trump’s administration — would seem to rebut the charge that the movement is misogynist. In fact, that’s a line of defense that Trump himself has advanced. 

But look a little closer, and you’ll see the structural contradiction at the heart of MAGA femininity: Female power is only legitimate when it’s exercised on behalf of Trump, and by women who conform to traditional expectations around gender, marriage, motherhood, and physical appearance.

To Trump, a female White House correspondent was a “piggy,” for instance. But a female press secretary who defended the slur was “knocking them dead.” 

A female employee at a Trump golf course was asked to sign an NDA after reporting harassment. But the female attorney who allegedly pressured her to sign it was, according to Trump, “a rocket ship.”

A female politician rose to prominence championing the president’s deportation agenda. But to get there, she had to find her “Mar-a-Lago face” — and she was ousted after showing signs of personal ambition. (In fairness, she was also very bad at her job.) 

It’s a very tricky little tightrope to walk. And lately, that strain has begun to show. While Trump began his second term with an unusually high number of female Cabinet members for a Republican president, women now hold only four of 23 Cabinet or Cabinet-level positions. 

Trump’s support is also down among young women. In Congress, a bloc of prominent conservative female lawmakers recently broke from their party to censure Republicans accused of misconduct. Now, the MAGA movement is losing one of its fiercest female proxies in Leavitt. 

Even at the height of her powers, however, Leavitt never really got her due. The luxurious office traditionally reserved for the White House press secretary instead went to another White House staffer. A dude.

One link for later

➨ Meet the latest and greatest exercise cult. It’s called HYROX — yes, in all caps — and it’s an eight-round agility and strength competition. Participants spend thousands of dollars on training, registration, and travel for these events, which tend to “subsume your entire existence.” That’s a very hard no for me, personally…but a lot of very fit and competitive people are apparently into it. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the US attempted to assassinate longtime Cuban dictator Fidel Castro by poisoning his ice cream? And that’s somehow not even the weirdest or most far-fetched Castro assassination scheme. 
• Today’s trivia: Who was the first woman to perform hip hop at the White House? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the German philosopher who wrote Critique of Practical Reason. That would be Immanuel Kant, whose work also arguably inspired one of the core conflicts in the Avengers films.

Many restaurants in Japan put a small plastic device on tables. When you press it, a chime rings at the waitstaff station or in the kitchen, and a server comes to your table. 

Algis Tamosaitis writes the newsletter Japan or Die, and he explained the table call button for travelers. — Read the rest

The post In Japan, press the button on your table and a server appears appeared first on Boing Boing.

If you’re also a pop culture obsessive, it was probably around early 2025 when alarming photos of Ariana Grande began rolling up in your text messages and DMs; images of the star looking particularly gaunt, shoulder bones and clavicle protruding. With the recent release of her new music video for “Petal,” those messages intensified to establish a troubling refrain: “Is Ariana Grande OK?”

That was a total vibe shift from the tedious “extreme theater kid energy” discourse that popped up whenever Grande and her “Wicked” co-star, Cynthia Erivo, so much as breathed in the same room together throughout the film and its sequel’s exhausting two-year press tour. The new messages carry with them a deep sense of concern and bewilderment, because they come from people who are mere spectators with neither the medical degree, language, nor relationship with Grande to perform the appropriate wellness check. Still, what comes across is the sincere questioning of the health of celebrities like Grande and, more recently, Kaia Gerber and Jenna Ortega, both of whom have also raised alarm bells with their extremely thin bodies. Potentially, this questioning is a call for an intervention.

Attempts to bring concern from intimate settings to social media are too often met with accusations from masses of strangers, some who even call themselves fans, of body shaming replete with suggestions that these women celebrities are just “petite” and other accompanying body positivity platitudes. 

It’s hard to tell when, exactly, raising legitimate concern about a woman celebrity’s appearance became synonymous with your run-of-the-mill misogyny or bullying. But somewhere between the “you go, girl” and #MeToo eras emerged a dishonesty around how we discuss women’s bodies at a time when there’s been a frightening return of the ‘90s “heroin chic” look and amid an increasingly worrying dependence on GLP-1s. Consider it an overcorrection of hypercritical commentary that has historically targeted female stars throughout Hollywood history. 

On one hand, the impulse to protect women in the public eye who have been especially vulnerable to criticism that too often ties their physical appearances to their success and, sometimes consequently, their self-worth is fair. On the other hand? The urge to deflect from difficult conversations, distorting concern for something ugly or otherwise pejorative, is misleading and unproductive. 

That kind of response too often is more about proving a sense of standom than actual concern for a fave. 

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The silence, and silencing, of what may or may not be a serious issue that these young celebrities are experiencing feels reminiscent of the kind of culture that women such as Karen Carpenter were immersed in several decades ago. The kind that shrouded The Carpenters’ silky-voiced singer’s emaciated appearance in a quiet shame until her death in 1983 at age 32. 

At the height of her fame and success in 1981, Carpenter weighed about 80 pounds. Her fans, some “who knew something was terribly wrong but assumed she had cancer or some other disease,” were aghast at her appearance whenever she took the stage. Few people then, not even Carpenter’s closest confidantes, knew how to talk about what was actually an eating disorder, much less manage it. “If this had happened in today’s world, I think Karen would have lived,” Frenda Franklin, Carpenter’s friend, said in a 2010 interview with The Guardian. “I think we would have had a good shot. They know so much more. We were dancing in the dark.”

While Grande has not publicly confirmed either way, Gerber recently opened up about her own “disordered eating,” as reported by People, and a clip of Ortega has been circulating in which she looks back on her struggles as a child actor, saying, “I would go all day without eating, drinking, whatever, because I wanted so badly to not be in the way of anybody.”

The truth is even with constant access to information about medical breakthroughs, counseling on how to support or approach someone who may be experiencing a health crisis, people aren’t much more equipped to confront female body issues today, including their own, than in the ‘80s. It might actually be worse. Not only do people still struggle with how, if, and when to talk about it, but whether that concern is wrapped up in their own self-image in a social media era that too often normalizes untenable and outright unrealistic female bodies.

To that end, when Grande recently said “that sh*t is not mine to carry,” following a statement from her team that she is planning a break from the public eye after the “Petal” tour due, in part, to public scrutiny, she has a point. Hopefully her personal circle gives her the love and support that she deserves during that time. She has become the latest poster child for body issues, who the masses have decided to stack a mountain of (some of their own) baggage on top of. 

In the last several years, Grande has been ubiquitous. She’s been on virtually every major red carpet, nominated for an Oscar, released a new album, launched a new tour, was cast in one project after the next, and appeared in countless social media and magazine interviews. During that time, people from every corner of the world online seemed to take every opportunity to scrutinize every contour of her frail frame.  

But, as she also said, “many things can be true at the same time.” 

It’s true that this article will undoubtedly bring even more unwanted attention to Grande’s body, but hopefully in a way that compels people to engage in more honest conversations about body image and their own complicity in female body issues. The discourse around these celebrities shouldn’t center, for instance, on whatever message their body image might be sending to young people who look up to them. To Grande’s point, and to be especially frank, that is more on those people and how their support systems help them better understand those images than her. 

This is about how people express concern for young women whose bodies we’ve witnessed deteriorate on screen — and that they do at all. 

The post In protecting women from body-shaming, we lost something important appeared first on Salon.com.

The woman whose son brought terror to Berlin is sitting on a worn red leather couch in a three-room apartment in Berlin’s Tiergarten district. It is Thursday afternoon, and she is pointing to the several missed calls on her phone screen.

They are all from the evening of July 25. They are all from the same person: Abdul Ballout, her son.

“He was terribly afraid for me,” she says quietly, her voice trembling. “I didn’t know why.”

She scrolls through the call log — the last traces of her child from the day of the attack, the day the unknown 21-year-old became the most wanted man in Germany.

She wants the public to get to know him — the son, the brother, the young man that she knew. “I find the way people talk about him incredibly painful, to be honest,” she says. “He was a good person.”

These are the subjective recollections of a mother who cannot and will not accept what her son did — and whose account is difficult to reconcile with what authorities established about him both before and after the attack.

She asks that her name not be published, nor any photograph or recording of her voice.

“I have two other children I have to think about,” she says.

* * *

On the evening of July 25, Ballout drove a rented van into a crowd on the fringes of Berlin’s Christopher Street Day parade.

After coming to a stop, he got out of the car and, according to authorities, began attacking people with a machete before fleeing on foot. One person was killed, and at least 29 were injured.

Around 20 hours later, special forces tracked Ballout to a garden in suburban Spandau, where he allegedly attempted to attack officers with a knife when they tried to arrest him. Police opened fire, and Ballout was shot dead. Nine days later, he was buried at Gatow Cemetery in Berlin.

The person killed in Ballout’s attack was a 65-year-old woman from Poland who had traveled to Berlin with her daughter specifically for Christopher Street Day.

Not far away, a gay refugee from Iraq was celebrating at an electronic music event when panic spread through the streets. He had fled a country where being openly gay could put his life at risk. Germany was supposed to be different.

Granted anonymity to speak openly, he said: “For many people, freedom is something they never have to think about. For me, it means being able to love someone, to leave the house in the morning without wondering whether I could be attacked or killed for who I am.”

After the attack, he said, that feeling of safety cracked. “That old fear was suddenly back.”

Sitting across from me just weeks later, Ballout’s mother is dressed in all black, her headscarf framing a face that looks exhausted. There are deep shadows beneath her eyes. She speaks so quietly that at times I have to lean in to hear. The only other sound in the room is the monotonous hum of a fan.

On the coffee table lay empty coffee cups, an open packet of TUC crackers and a box of iron tablets. Propped between them is a framed photograph of Ballout, a faint grin on his face.

She doesn’t want to begin our conversation with the attack; she wants to start with her son. She reaches for her phone and starts showing me videos. In one, he is a little boy in swim trunks, running along a beach and laughing. In another, he is an adult, dancing exuberantly through the living room with his family. He jumps onto the couch and pulls his sisters along, making everyone laugh.

His mother talks of evenings spent together watching television or playing Monopoly, how he would sometimes cheat if he were about to lose. As she speaks, her smiles give way to tears, and her tears give way to smiles.

The contrast with the image of the terrorist could hardly be greater.

* * *

Four days before our interview, I visited the neighborhood where Ballout grew up. Children were crisscrossing a courtyard, neighbors leaning out of windows or standing outside doorways. I asked them about him.

All their answers were strikingly similar: “He always said hello;” “he was polite;” “he was helpful.”

No one disputed what Ballout did. No one tried to excuse it. And yet, no one could explain how the young man they knew was capable of such an act.

Sitting in his mother’s living room a few days later, her phone rings, and for a brief moment, Arabic singing fills the room. “That’s his voice,” she says. Her ringtone is a recording of her son reciting an Islamic prayer.

But is it just an innocuous recording?

Court records show Ballout repeatedly posted videos containing Islamic State propaganda dating back to 2024, before starting to circulate recordings of his own. In some of the audio files obtained by WELT, which is — like POLITICO — part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters network, he recited the Quran; in others, he appeared to preach. He had hundreds of followers on TikTok and Telegram, with comments praising his voice.

But Ballout’s online messages were radical, speaking of “unbelievers,” God’s “agonizing punishment,” and his rejection of democracy and the German legal system.

Online, he went by the name Abu Muawiyah — a reference to the first caliph of the Umayyad dynasty who emerged victorious over the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali and his followers, from which Shiite Islam later emerged. It is also a signal of his shifting faith, as Ballout converted from Shiite to Sunni Islam in 2021.

Was this also a break with his family? His mother gives no indication it was.

She speaks calmly about religion, and without hesitation. She says she was born in Beirut and grew up in Germany. She can neither read nor write Arabic and has therefore never read the Quran in its original language.

“I’m not particularly strict about religion,” she says. But her son was different.

For the last several years, he had increasingly been trying to push her toward stricter observance, urging her to pray regularly, to take her religious obligations more seriously and to engage more deeply with Islam.

“He told me every single day how important it was to pray and that it was my duty.”

* * *

Speaking about the days leading up to the attack, one word keeps coming up in our conversation: fear.

Her son had changed, she says. He seemed more nervous, more tense, more restless. He had started changing his phone number constantly — at least five times in 10 days.

“Why are you changing your number again?” she had asked him. But his answer was always roughly the same. Some people kept calling him; he felt followed, harassed and no longer safe.

To this day, it makes no sense to his mother. But to investigators, this is the behavior of someone who had realized he was on their radar — and was planning something big.

In late May 2026, Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office classified Ballout as a high-risk individual capable of committing a serious act of politically motivated violence. And the reasons for this are documented across dozens of pages of case files.

In 2021, Ballout took part in street dawah events organized by a Salafist group in Berlin, where Islamists seek new followers and often distribute copies of the Quran. This is where Berlin’s State Criminal Police Office first took an interest in him.

From 2023 onward, he increasingly frequented mosques influenced by Salafist ideology — which espouses an ultraconservative, fundamentalist view of Sunni Islam — while investigators noted he began openly expressing his rejection of Germany’s free democratic order.

In the summer of 2024, he repeatedly posted propaganda from the Islamic State organization, and in May 2025, attempted to join the terrorist group in Africa but was refused entry into Mauritania. Shortly after, he tried to travel to Syria via Lebanon to receive weapons training, communicating with IS members through Telegram.

Lebanese authorities arrested Ballout in July 2025, and a military court sentenced him to three months in prison for incitement to religious conflict. In court, he spoke of two cousins on his father’s side who had died fighting in Syria.

Returning to Germany in November 2025, Ballout was then arrested at Berlin airport and taken into custody on suspicion of preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state. According to the case files, he presented himself as a preacher in prison. His religious fervor intensified, and his appearance changed. Ballout’s father later told Der Spiegel that he had argued with his son over his long hair and beard, which he regarded as a sign of religious extremism.

Finally, in May of this year, Ballout was sentenced to one year and 10 months in prison but was initially released under the supervision of a probation officer while the court deferred its verdict on whether to suspend the sentence. This judicial decision is now at the center of a heated debate in Germany over how the country handles high-risk Islamist offenders.

From then on, police kept him under surveillance.

Did his mother know any of this? She shakes her head.

* * *

There is only one incident Ballout’s mother is willing to discuss: July 2 this year, his birthday. That day, she says, showed just how closely her son was being monitored.

Ballout had been playing outside with his sister, spraying her with a water gun, she says. Shortly afterward, officers from the State Criminal Police Office appeared. They had assessed the situation as a possible threat.

But investigators describe the scene differently.

It was already dark, and Ballout had stepped outside for just a few seconds, holding what appeared to be a handgun but was difficult to identify, they said. He tucked it into his waistband and went back inside. When officers eventually searched the apartment, they found only a toy gun.

Investigators believe the 21-year-old was testing whether he was under surveillance — and how much time he had before police would intervene.

And while his mother insists she noticed nothing that would suggest Ballout was preparing an attack, she does not rule out the possibility that others knew of her son’s plans. However, she gives no names.

He spent most of his time with family, she says. He had few friends, at least no one she knew particularly well.

* * *

The day of the attack began, in her memory, just like any other. Both mother and son slept in late, then ran errands. Ballout was unemployed and had no particular obligations, she says. In the late afternoon, he left the apartment before a family gathering that evening.

Then, suddenly, the calls started piling up.

At 5:10 p.m., Ballout called his mother. An hour later, he called again. Then again. Each time, she says, the conversation revolved around the same question: “Are you okay?” He had never done that before.

Then, after one of the calls, she received a short message: “Take care of yourself.”

The words still haunt her today.

At 7:05 p.m., Ballout called again. He asked that his mother inform her partner of over two years that he had a new phone number again. Ballout’s parents have been divorced for three years, but Ballout continued to see and speak with his father regularly, she says. And as the family prepared for the evening, the phone kept ringing. 

They were supposed to have dinner at his sister’s place. Schnitzel, his favorite meal, was on the menu. Ballout loved these family gatherings, his mother says. “They always made him happy.” That is precisely why so much of what happened next is incomprehensible to her.

“He wanted to live,” she says, her voice rough.

He had spoken of the future, about having a family of his own, about all the things that still lay ahead of him. Nothing had suggested this might be a farewell.

Shortly before 10 p.m., her partner received one more call. They were the last words Ballout deliberately addressed to his family: “Get my mother to safety.”

Minutes later, the van drove into the crowd.

* * *

By the time Ballout’s mother was driven home by her partner that night, the first reports of the attack had started to circulate. At that point, she still didn’t know exactly what had taken place. But when she entered the apartment, she says, something immediately caught her attention.

A key was still in the door.

And right beside it, on the hallway shoe cabinet, were documents that seemed to be deliberately placed where they could not be overlooked. It was the rental agreement for a small van. It listed Ballout as the renter.

“That was when I knew immediately that it couldn’t mean anything good,” she says.

That same night, she took the documents to the police. And as she was questioned, a picture slowly started to emerge — one she initially refused to accept.

At the same time, she kept trying to reach her son, sending message after message. But there was no reply. She only learned the truth the next day, when her daughters called and told her about the reports on the news.

Her son was dead.

Since then, she has spent hour after hour in her Berlin apartment searching for explanations, her thoughts circling endlessly around her son’s last words, his fear and whether there may have been something in those calls that she failed to recognize. She cannot let go of the distorted image she has of her son, of the good boy who wanted to start a family.

Asked what she would say to the victims of the terrorist attack, she thinks for a long time. She is sorry, she eventually says.

“I would also tell them that wasn’t my son.”

Additional reporting by Lennart Pfahler.

Julia Zabert is a trainee journalist with the Global Reporters Network at the Axel Springer Academy. The Academy trains the next generation of leading journalists through hands-on, innovative work with a clear focus on the future of journalism. More information at axelspringeracademy.com.

Ukraine’s normally copious grain exports are stuck in the country — caught between Russian attacks in the Black Sea, drought on the Danube and distrust among Kyiv’s closest allies. 

It’s bad news for global food prices.

“If it keeps going like this, you’ll have once again a global price increase of at least 25, 30 percent, with all the consequences we had in 2022 for world food inflation,” Ukraine’s Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi said.

With missile strikes keeping cargo ships away from its ports, Kyiv is scrambling, yet again, for a way out via Europe. But its fallback routes run overland through EU countries, including Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, where previous waves of Ukrainian grain left governments facing a fierce domestic backlash.

The last surge of Ukrainian agricultural exports through Eastern Europe unleashed mass protests from farmers, particularly in Poland, who complained that cheap Ukrainian produce that was meant to merely pass through the region was instead ending up on their domestic markets. Poland imposed a ban on Ukrainian grain in 2023, alongside similar measures in Hungary and Slovakia, defying EU trade rules and souring relations with Ukraine.

Kyiv’s fresh pleas — and insistence that the grain would only transit through its EU neighbors — have prompted Warsaw to reassure its own farmers that none of it will end up in Poland. 

“We are doing everything to keep the embargo,” Polish Agriculture Minister Stefan Krajewski told Radio ZET on Monday, referring to Poland’s ban on Ukrainian grain imports.

Blocked bounty

One of the world’s largest grain producers, Ukraine typically sends more than 90 percent of its agricultural exports by sea. The disruption of that trade after Russia’s 2022 invasion helped drive global food prices to record highs. This summer, Russia and Ukraine have intensified attacks on each other’s ports and shipping across the Black Sea. 

Ukraine exported just 463,000 metric tons of grain in the first nine days of August — about one-third of the usual pace, said Vysotskyi. By November, when the new harvest comes in, the country risks running out of storage for grain it cannot export.

Kyiv asked the European Commission for €220 million last week to help its farmers weather the disruption.

The non-repayable grant would subsidize bank loans, allowing small- and medium-sized farms to hold on to their grain until shipping resumes rather than sell at a loss. A Commission spokesperson confirmed receiving the request but did not say whether Brussels would provide the money.

But money can only buy time. The bigger problem is getting ships back into Ukraine’s ports.

No grain vessel has entered the ports around Odesa since late July, even though they remain open. That month, a Russian missile struck a corn carrier leaving port, killing 10 people aboard. The vessel sank a week later.

Since the attack, crews have refused to sail, and shipping companies have suspended service.

“Ship owners and crews are just afraid. They are not ready to send the ships at all,” said Vysotskyi. “It’s not that it’s impossible to make it. They are just not ready to.”

Back to the border

With the Black Sea route stalled, Ukraine is negotiating with Romania, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Moldova to move more grain overland.

But those routes cannot simply replace maritime exports.

Moving grain by rail and road costs $50 to $70 more per ton, said Vysotskyi. When grain prices soared after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, exporters could absorb that premium. At today’s prices, they cannot.

“It’s nonprofitable,” said Vysotskyi.

Ukraine’s main alternative route, through Romania, is also running into constraints. Low water levels on the Danube are limiting the amount of cargo that can reach the Black Sea port of Constanța.

And moving more grain overland revives another problem for Kyiv: the political backlash in its EU neighbors.

Polish farmers blockaded crossings with Ukraine in 2023 and 2024, turning agricultural trade into one of the most politically explosive issues between Kyiv and one of its strongest wartime supporters.

But Ukraine, said Vysotskyi, is not asking for greater access to the EU market.

EU quotas now cap Ukrainian wheat sales to the bloc at 1.3 million tons a year, which, according to Vysotskyi, makes a repeat of the earlier influx “legally impossible.” Kyiv would seek a larger quota only if the EU itself proposed one, he added.

“There should be consensus inside the EU, with EU farmers,” he said.

Warsaw has been adamant that its grain embargo will stay. But while Ukrainian grain can’t be sold in Poland, the government has been working with Kyiv to help pass it through.

Talks with Kyiv “concern exclusively the smooth transport of Ukrainian grain to third countries, not its export or admission to the Polish market,” said Polish Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maciej Wewiór, adding that Ukrainian grain remains critical for many countries in Asia and Africa.

Trust deficit

For Polish farmers, assurances that the grain will pass through the country uninterrupted are not enough, with farm groups arguing that some shipments supposedly bound for other countries never actually leave Poland.

Gustaw Jędrejek, head of the Lublin Chamber of Agriculture and one of the leaders of the border blockades, alleged that shipments are recorded electronically as delivered abroad while the grain itself is sold inside Poland.

“Documents travel to Lithuania, the Czech Republic or Slovakia — and the grain stays in Poland,” he said. The Polish government has consistently denied such allegations.

Asked whether he trusted assurances that additional Ukrainian grain would simply pass through the country, Jędrejek was unequivocal.

“I absolutely don’t believe it.”