It’s difficult to get one’s hopes up when it comes to the dicey state of Hollywood filmmaking, and even more difficult to keep them there. Mergers and consolidations threaten to dictate which films can get made. Theatergoing is only starting to boast consistent numbers again, taking six years to bounce back from its pandemic freefall. And Netflix has a Rolodex of movie stars trapped in terrible roles. But when things get tough, and our spirits wane, there’s no better pair to summon than Mulder and Scully, who are returning (technically) to the feature-length format with “The X-Files: I Want to Believe — Vrach Frankenshteyn.”
This version of Mulder and Scully’s widely panned 2008 outing has more gore, more grit and more gothic delights, courtesy of its director and “X-Files” series creator, Chris Carter, returning to clean up the mess left by Fox 18 years ago. Following the FBI duo as they search for a missing colleague, Carter’s director’s cut is for the most staunch sci-fi fans, those who crave every little bit of “X-Files” lore they can get.
Carter says that when the original film was in production, he faced intense pressure to cut enough grisly material to get a PG-13 rating so the movie could reach as many people as possible. That’s not an uncommon phenomenon, especially when working with a big, financially successful, well-loved property, but it is frustrating. And more often than studios realize, fans and even the average moviegoer can sense when a studio has tampered with a film.
But, notably, Carter’s director’s cut arrives on Hulu on the heels of Ryan Coogler finishing an “X-Files” reboot pilot for the streamer. Coogler’s recent deal with Warner Bros. to regain ownership rights to his smash hit “Sinners” was a boon for filmmakers who’ve long been frustrated with studio greed and meddling. That Carter’s been able to release the film he always intended to make, and Coogler’s helping to turn Hollywood in favor of artists, movie fans may finally have enough proof to believe again — though Scully, as always, would be skeptical.
Chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude are quickly changing the healthcare landscape. An estimated one in seven people have used AI for a health-related question instead of seeing a general practitioner. One in ten people have used AI for mental health support. Within the Venn diagram of people using AI for health-related information lies a cohort for whom access to accurate information is of the utmost importance: those seeking information on abortion care. In an era when the internet is already rife with abortion-related misinformation, LLMs entering the chat have complicated the landscape — and abortion rights advocates are fighting back.
“Unfortunately, we live in a world where it feels like some days you need a law degree to even understand abortion policy and legality on any given day,” Kelly Baden, Guttmacher Institute’s vice president of policy and communications, told Salon. “And the presence of AI has complicated that even further.”
On June 24, 2022, the SCOTUS ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — a case that challenged a Mississippi ban on abortion at 15 weeks of pregnancy — overturned Roe v. Wade, which effectively ended the federal constitutional right to choose to have an abortion in the United States. As a result, many states enacted so-called “trigger bans.” Since then, it’s already been difficult for people searching for information on abortion care as they’ve had to wade through misinformation and anti-abortion propaganda online. Today, organizations with dedicated staff and resources to share accurate information are feeling the effects of AI’s presence. Baden said, for example, that Guttmacher Institute has an interactive abortion policy map, which is a popular resource for people to understand the laws in all 50 states. Now, with AI summaries and LLMs, Baden and her colleagues have to be creative with how they write updates to this map to ensure LLMs aggregate the information accurately.
In an era when the internet is already rife with abortion-related misinformation, LLMs entering the chat have complicated the landscape.
“Our job now is to also think about how the information that we share is getting translated by other tools that didn’t exist, or weren’t on our radar, a few years ago,” Baden told Salon. “And now, these tools are a big part of how people understand their rights and their ability to get abortion care.”
While published data on how many people are using AI to access abortion-related information falls short, many organizations are seeing referral traffic from AI. Amy Merrill, co-founder of Plan C Pills, told Salon her organization — which provides resources for self-managed, at-home abortions with pills— has seen spikes of traffic from ChatGPT to her website. Rebecca Nall, founder of I Need an A, which is a free website that helps people find abortion providers, telehealth services, financial support and travel information, said they’ve also seen referral traffic from ChatGPT.
“We see in our data the referrals from AI assistants,” Nall said. “Referrals have been increasing over the last two years pretty significantly.”
Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last. Sign up here
The mirage of privacy and convenience could be causing more people to turn to AI for health-related information. However, when it comes to abortion care, there are concerns about AI’s ability to provide unbiased, accurate information.
“It feels like you’re dialoguing with your healthcare provider,” Merrill said. “Whereas you’re actually just talking to a tech company and giving them all your personal data, and that’s a real concern within the movement.”
In July, Open Democracy’s team of international investigative journalists found that AI chatbots were “nudging” pregnant women to anti-abortion resources. In 2025, a team of healthcare providers and researchers concluded that only 65% of ChatGPT-3.5’s responses to abortion questions were “acceptable.” A separate 2024 study found that ChatGPT was actively spreading misinformation about self-managed medication abortions. “The chatbot’s tendency to perpetuate health misinformation and associated stigma regarding self-managed medication abortions poses a threat to public health and reproductive autonomy,” the researchers wrote. This can have real-world impacts on patient care.
The mirage of privacy and convenience could be causing more people to turn to AI for health-related information. However, when it comes to abortion care, there are concerns about AI’s ability to provide unbiased, accurate information.
“Any day that you are delayed in getting the care that you need because you might have gotten confusing information, conflicting information, or wrong information potentially puts you out of reach of getting the care that you need,” Baden said. She gave an example of someone living in Louisiana, a state that prohibits in-person abortion care at all stages of pregnancy without exceptions. However, that person can still seek abortion care in Florida or Georgia before six weeks of pregnancy. “If you, for some reason, got misleading information or wrong information because of an AI model, and miss that cutoff, then you are that much farther away geographically and financially from getting an abortion that you need after six weeks.”
Nall, from I Need an A, said one of the biggest pieces of misinformation that they see come from AI is a lack of a comprehensive overview of a person’s options. While some states like Louisiana have highly restrictive laws, people can still choose to self-manage an abortion at home by receiving medication abortion pills in the mail. Abortion pills being shipped to states with bans are becoming more common. For example, in Missouri — where abortion access is highly restrictive with limited exceptions for medical emergencies— the number of medication abortions has quadrupled since 2023. “Many people are getting pills by mail in every single state,” Nall said. Nall added that they’ve seen LLMs recommend crisis pregnancy centers in restricted states as well.
The good news is that AI is currently influenced by SEO strategies. “We have been changing our language and encouraging other reproductive activists to change language on their websites,” Nall said. Advocates encourage media outlets reporting on abortion restrictions to keep in mind how their articles will affect how LLMs aggregate abortion-related information as well. Specifically, the use of the word “ban.”
“We’ve been talking about this with colleagues and journalists, but when the words ‘abortion ban’ are used, like ‘abortion is banned in Texas,’ some AI tools will interpret that to mean that there is no abortion available in any form, and factually, that’s just incorrect,” Merrill told Salon. “There’s a risk of oversimplifying, and that’s what we saw happening with the word ‘abortion ban.’”
Merrill emphasized it’s important to communicate that “in-person care is restricted,” but that people are still accessing pills by mail. When it comes to navigating the abortion landscape in the U.S. in the age of AI, she recommends website directories like PlanCPills.org, INeedAnA.com, or the Repro Legal Helpline if someone wants to talk to a human.
Nall said while she is hesitant to use the word “optimistic,” she has been seeing improvements in AI’s answers since they’ve been doubling down on their efforts to influence LLMs. However, Nall said, she wouldn’t recommend AI as a go-to source. “I highly recommend skipping Google, skipping ChatGPT, and going straight to INeedAnA.com.”
Martin, Tennessee, is a small, out-of-the-way town that is ultimately best explained to strangers by relaying its travel time from Memphis. (Two hours and some change.) It’s not the sort of place where grand history happens, and yet, in 1971 this sleepy burg was the site of a world-historic upset.
Inside the local university’s gym, the Harlem Globetrotters had come up short. The classic lineup featuring Meadowlark Lemon and Hubert “Geese” Ausbie had tried and failed to beat their perennial foils: the Washington Generals, playing that night as the New Jersey Reds. An audience expecting acrobatic basketball stunts and on-court clowning set to “Sweet Georgia Brown,” the Globetrotters’ signature song, was instead treated to a real, close-fought exhibition. At the end of overtime, the Reds pulled out a one-point victory, their first in more than 2,000 games. Lacking champagne for the occasion, they poured orange soda on owner-coach-player Herm “Red” Klotz’s head.
The upset might not have been what the exhibition’s management wanted, and it definitely wasn’t what the crowd paid to see, but it was a healthy reminder that the Reds’ squad was more than just the butt of an endless string of hardwood jokes. The losingest jersey in sports masked five no-funny-business basketball players who could give superstars a scare. When Abe Saperstein, the Globetrotters’ founder, stormed the Reds locker room in a huff, Klotz warned him, “If you let your guard down, we’ll get you again.” But the Reds/Generals would go on to lose their next 17,000 games, an unbroken streak of ignominy that continues to this day.
I was reminded of the 1971 fluke while reading that the Supreme Court handed Donald Trump a rare loss at the Supreme Court on Monday. Chief Justice John Roberts and Company once again rejected his bid to avoid paying the $5 million in civil damages awarded to the writer E. Jean Carroll, after a jury found the president had sexually abused her at a Manhattan department store and later defamed her.
The president had appealed that verdict, as well as a larger defamation verdict in a separate lawsuit, all the way to the Supreme Court. The high court rejected Trump’s first attempt to overturn the verdict in June.
The news was applauded across Bluesky, the largely liberal social media platform, with posts calling Trump “Senile Satan” and characterizing the decision as a rebuke for a “adjudicated rapist.” (The president has not been convicted of rape; he was found guilty of sexual abuse by a jury in a civil trial.) But for me, the ruling brought to mind Klotz’s orange soda bath and empty boasts.
Across its 2025-2026 term, the Court has proven that it’s more than willing to let Trump dunk all over them, doing everything short of giving him a boost on the way to the rim. In June, they allowed the president to pull Congress’ athletic shorts down, giving him the power to revoke the temporary protected status that lawmakers had granted to Haitian and Syrian immigrants.
That same month, Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Court’s liberal justices to ward off an attack on birthright citizenship, allowing liberals to claim victory while the dissenting conservatives laid out a road map for future cases.
But within a week, Roberts and Barrett had returned to their squad, getting caught up in the magic circle that surrounds Trump’s actions as president. In a decision that overturned nearly a century of precedent, the conservative majority granted Trump the ability to fire the heads of independent regulatory agencies in the executive branch, effectively letting the administration bowl over any career officials and oversight that might stand in the way of the president’s radical agenda.
Notably, there was an exception to the Court’s stooge act: They won’t allow Trump to toy with the Federal Reserve. Messing with the nation’s money is off-limits, apparently even for Republicans. You have to wonder how the Generals’ unwelcome win would be remembered if it had hurt the Globetrotters’ gate receipts.
All of this is downstream from the Roberts Court’s most egregious ruling: Trump v. United States. In a 6-3 decision that fell along partisan lines, the Court held that Trump could do almost anything he wanted while in the White House and be largely immune from prosecution. Writing for the majority, Roberts found that so long as Trump could provide the barest of cover, even illegal actions are allowed as part of his presidential duties. The chief justice’s ruling shredded an essential part of the Constitution to confetti, and like Meadowlark Lemon, Roberts loaded it into a bucket for Trump to toss into the air whenever he needs a distraction.
The fiction being peddled by the Court — that this is the legitimate carrying out of the checks and balances enshrined in the Constitution — is similar to the one used in basketball arenas across the country when the Globetrotters come to town.
The fiction being peddled by the Court — that this is the legitimate carrying out of the checks and balances enshrined in the Constitution — is similar to the one used in basketball arenas across the country when the Globetrotters come to town. The team is free to carry out any number of obvious fouls, double-dribbles and prop-assisted scoring plays so long as the audience maintains the idea that what they are watching is a refereed game of basketball. The Court is free to play-act at being a check on Trump’s power, so long as the majority of Americans consider it a legitimate body. Keeping that ruse going is crucial for the aims of the wider right-wing project. And to do that, the conservative majority can’t just rubber stamp every last thing this president does.
By handing Trump a highly publicized and embarrassing loss on an issue that doesn’t hamper Republicans’ agenda, the conservative justices are continuing their smoke screen by reinforcing the Court’s legitimacy as an impartial body at a time when they’re more captured by partisan politics than ever. Occasionally ruling against the president keeps up the charade.
Trump might have been sent packing this time, but don’t expect his foils on the Court to go on a winning streak. SCOTUS will be back to their regularly scheduled losing soon enough.
NBC’s “Heroes” made Hayden Panettiere a household name by making us believe she was unstoppable. Not her, of course, but Claire Bennet — the Odessa, Texas high school cheerleader who couldn’t be killed.
In the series premiere, Claire throws herself off an oil derrick’s rusty platform, plummeting at least 70 or 80 feet in a fall that should have broken her body. Instead, she stands up, pops her dislocated shoulder back into its socket and grimly declares to the shocked classmate filming her, “This is Claire Bennet, and that was attempt No. 6.” Later, in that same episode, she runs into a burning building to rescue a man trapped inside. He suffers horrible burns, but she dashes away unscathed.
Claire wears her cheerleader uniform in both scenes — the identifying outfit that generated the first season’s catchphrase, “Save the cheerleader, save the world.”
There are so many dark stories about child stars that make us wonder what might have been, if only. Panettiere, who died on Sunday at 36, lived one of them. She rocketed to stardom with starring roles on “Heroes” and “Nashville,” where she played up-and-coming country star Juliette Barnes opposite Connie Britton.
Both productions also transgressed personal boundaries that pushed Panettiere to lows no one should endure, but so many stars growing up in the spotlight unfortunately do. During her time on “Heroes,” she wrote in her recently published memoir “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” someone in her orbit began slipping her pharmaceuticals to amp up her energy for public appearances.
Later, the writers on “Nashville” mined Panettiere’s private battles for her character’s storylines: Her postpartum depression and struggles with substance dependency began turning up in scripts. Since she was raised to be a good soldier, she took it all in stride. Privately, Panettiere spent time in and out of rehab to treat her addictions to alcohol and prescription drugs.
When emergency responders in Greenville, S.C., found Panettiere in an apartment on Sunday, she was unresponsive and in cardiac arrest. An anonymous source told The New York Times that the cause was an apparent drug overdose.
It is easy to regard a former child star’s troubles as an inevitability of the profession. From the looks of where Panettiere was steering her life, it didn’t have to be. Yes, she grew up in front of TV cameras, landing her first regular roles on soap operas, including ABC’s “One Life to Live” and CBS’ “Guiding Light.” Four seasons on “Heroes” launched her to a level of celebrity few child actors achieve.
There are so many dark stories about child stars that make us wonder what might have been, if only. Panettiere, who died on Sunday at 36, lived one of them.
But she also defied the industry tendency to pigeonhole performers based on the breakout success of characters like Claire Bennet. Panettiere’s high school hero emerged on TV during the “sheroes” era of the aughts, arriving in the wake of Sydney Bristow on “Alias” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” another cheerleader turned supernatural brawler.
But where Jennifer Garner and Sarah Michelle Gellar struggled to shake the action-hero personas that made them stars, Panettiere followed “Heroes” with ABC’s “Nashville,” a series created by “Thelma & Louise” writer Callie Khouri that showcased the full range of her acting ability. Playing Juliette earned Panettiere two Golden Globe nominations, and her performances of the character’s songs landed her on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs charts 11 times.
What we saw onscreen, along with the catchy music she made, was, in her telling, the fruit of a creative yield achieved by pressing beyond her breaking point.
In “This Is Me,” she describes spending time in and out of rehab, losing custody of her child and rebuilding her life to a place that, as of this year, included plans to produce and direct new projects, as she mentioned in a recent New York Times profile.
“This is Me” also depicts her mother, former soap actress Lesley Vogel, as demanding her daughter’s absolute best at every step in her career and leaving her with no alternative path. Panettiere’s first national TV gig came at 11 months old with a Playskool toy train commercial, the start of around 50 advertising appearances she’d rack up before she was 5 years old.
Her feature film debut came in 1998, when she voiced Princess Dot in “A Bug’s Life.” She was 9. After that, she became one of the youngest Grammy nominees ever in the best spoken word album for children category thanks to her voice work on “A Bug’s Life Read-Along.”
As Panettiere told Jay Shetty on a May episode of his podcast “On Purpose,” those early achievements came at the cost of enjoying a normal childhood. By the time she was 11, she’d already acted alongside Denzel Washington in “Remember the Titans,” which led her teachers and classmates to treat her differently. Vogel bought an apartment for her daughter when she was 16, Panettiere recalled, and the whole family lived in it. She parted ways with Vogel professionally when she was 19.
Her father, Alan “Skip” Panettiere, worked for New York City’s fire department and was the parent she leaned on for emotional support. “That has kind of continued in my life,” she told Shetty, “just wanting to know that if I found myself in a terrible position, that I could call somebody to help me. I could rely on somebody . . . I wasn’t the person that everybody else was relying on, and therefore nobody was there for me.”
Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last. Sign up here
Panettiere was 17 when “Heroes” became a breakout hit and made her and co-stars Milo Ventimiglia, Masi Oka and Zachary Quinto sought-after talents. But she was the one that the paparazzi hounded most fiercely, feeding malicious tabloid coverage focused on her body image and weight.
The news that she was dating Ventimiglia kicked the frenzy into overdrive, especially since he was 30 years old at the time while she was 18.
Not long ago, she told The Messenger that, overall, she looks back on her career with a sense of curiosity. “Because [‘Nashville’] took six years of my career when I was at my physical prime, my mental, my everything, I just wonder what it would have been like in the hiatuses, [if I] did one project or film, or was encouraged to do that,” she remarked. “Where would I be today?”
Jon Ossoff certainly struck a nerve. At a campaign rally on Sunday, the Democratic senator from Georgia declared that Donald Trump “doesn’t want to do the job” of president but would instead prefer to “travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” The crowd went nuts, showing how much people, at least on the left, have been noticing that Trump goes everywhere with a 35-year-old blonde aide named Natalie Harp, whom New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman has deemed his “human binky.”
The White House erupted in rage, furious that Ossoff had called out the walking security blanket provided to the president. Because there’s no way around it: Having a babysitter makes the 80-year-old president look even older and weaker than he already is. The over-the-top response revealed how sensitive Trump and his staff are about his visible aging, and how much it ties into their larger anxieties about his rapid decline.
Harp’s devotion to Trump is ecstatic to the point of religiosity. When she worked at One America Network, she would end her segments by quoting Trump or the Bible, as if they were one and the same.
As Haberman and her colleague Jonathan Swan have detailed, Harp’s main job is offering a steady stream of reassurances to Trump. She leaves love letters on his pillow with language like, “You are all that matters to me” and “I want to bring you joy.” She carries around a briefcase full of clippings from social media and right-wing media websites of MAGA types praising him, to be brought out and shown to him whenever his mood needs stabilizing, much as a parent would offer a stuffed toy to a baby. Harp’s devotion to Trump is ecstatic to the point of religiosity. When she worked at One America Network, she would end her segments by quoting Trump or the Bible, as if they were one and the same.
At a speech intended to honor graduates of a New York police academy on Friday, Trump himself bragged about how his staff surrounds him with pretty young women to flatter him. “These young beautiful girls in the White House, they come in,” he said. “These young, these gorgeous, beautiful girls, they want to be safe and they come say ‘Mr. President, thank you, sir.'”
After Ossoff mocked Trump’s “young, beautiful girls” spiel, however, it seems the White House realized how embarrassing the situation is for the president. But the hyper-defensiveness only made the situation worse. White House communications director Steven Cheung tweeted, “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics.” Alas, Cheung made the fatal error of posting a clip of the handsome 39-year-old speaking behind a podium, his posture erect, his delivery natural and confident, his sentences coherent — a man on a mission. Cheung’s colleague Davis Ingle made the same mistake. Calling Ossoff a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid,” he posted the same video of Ossoff.
Still, the White House could not let it go. In what may be the biggest backfire of the debacle, Trump himself had to weigh in. “You mean Pee-wee Herman? Pee-wee Herman look-alike,” he said when asked by CNN reporter Kristen Holmes about Ossoff’s comments. (The president proceeded to disparage Holmes and CNN for asking the question, and later, in a particularly disgusting episode, the White House’s rapid response account launched a blistering personal attack on the reporter, even invoking her children.)
Trump’s reference to Pee-wee Herman, played by the late actor Paul Reubens, was both homophobic and antisemitic. But what’s striking about it is how it’s one more reminder that the president is very old. The character’s silver screen debut in 1985’s “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” came two years before Ossoff was even born. Back then, calling a Jewish man “Pee-wee” to impugn his manhood was probably a huge hit with the bigots at the country club. Now it’s just confusing, especially since Reubens is widely regarded as a comedy legend.
Ever since Swan and Haberman, in their recent book “Regime Change,” revealed the humiliating details of Harp’s job as what amounts to Trump’s full-time babysitter, speculation has run rampant about the nature of the president’s relationship with her. Some have speculated that given Trump’s long history of chronic adultery, there might be something more to the arrangement. Others, pointing to Trump’s strange gait and prominent backside, which is often seen to have an odd shape, wonder if he might be forced to wear a medical device or garments. The expanding size of the bag Harp lugs around isn’t helping dissuade rumors that nursing duties are an important part of her job.
Whatever the case, the rumors have served to draw more attention to Trump’s age. But the simple fact that he requires a woman to linger around him most of the time, ready to express her devotion and that of his most ardent followers, isn’t a great look. When considered alongside the extraordinary medical privacy exerted by Trump and the White House, it cuts against his failing efforts to position himself as virile and robust.
But Trump’s decline isn’t just physical. As the November midterms approach, the president is setting new records for low approval ratings. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted Aug. 14-17, 64% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s performance as president. He’s losing a war with Iran that he assured Americans would be over months ago. His promises to create jobs and lower prices have gone up in smoke. His mismanagement of public health agencies have even contributed to outbreaks of explosive diarrhea and measles across the country. Republicans in Congress are expecting major election losses in November.
But Trump doesn’t appear to be deterred. He recently attempted to troll liberals — his old go-to hat trick — by posting an AI-generated picture of himself in a “Trump 2028” hat. While some of the usual suspects took the bait, this threat to run for the presidency again felt a little hollow this time around. It wasn’t just because a third term is forbidden by the Constitution. The swift signs of aging he is exhibiting simply makes it hard to imagine. As Dr. Jonathan Reiner, who served as Vice President Dick Cheney’s cardiologist, recently wrote in the New York Times, “the president has not looked well.” Reiner pointed to “a variety of physical ailments” that are “easy to see,” including bruised hands, swollen legs and an inability to stay awake. Trump also brags frequently about taking cognitive tests, seemingly unaware that’s usually a sign doctors are tracking dementia symptoms.
Whatever the extent of Natalie Harp’s duties, it seems undeniable that she is there to keep the temperamental president calm by distracting him from his own failures with words of praise. That he needs this is a sign of profound weakness. Stable adults do not need full-time babysitters. That Harp’s job even exists is a testament to Trump’s incredible narcissism, but it also carries more than a whiff of elder care and suspicions about medical conditions that require monitoring and placating.
The White House’s extreme response only serves to underscore how worried they are about the narrative being created — one they themselves weaponized against another aging president, Joe Biden. By flipping out at anyone who brings it up, they’re only ensuring more people are paying attention.
I’m a huge fan of the corporate death penalty, a legal process in which a corporation is forced to dissolve or stop existing. (This is actually the only death penalty I support, because the state executing humans isn’t just unethical, it also doesn’t work to deter homicides. But unlike what the Supreme Court believes, I don’t think of corporations as human.) More formally known as judicial dissolution, the corporate death penalty basically happens when the government is so pissed off by the corruption or damage a corporation causes that it yanks away their charter.
The mechanism has existed since at least the 19th century, but it has only been used a few times, usually in response to severe environmental destruction. In 1890, the North River Sugar Refining Corporation was dissolved by New York’s highest court on the grounds that it was abusing its power as a corporation. The judge’s opinion contains this little gem: “The life of a corporation is indeed less than that of the humblest citizen…”
It’s hard to find any modern examples of the corporate death penalty, but that doesn’t mean critics of abusive business haven’t attempted to invoke it. Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Equifax and even the National Rifle Association have all been the target of calls for this form of execution.
There is at least one semi-recent example of the government destroying a business as punishment for corruption. Arthur Andersen was once one of the “Big Five” accounting firms (it’s now the Big Four) that dominate the financial sector. Among the company’s biggest customers was Enron, the energy company that infamously filed for bankruptcy in 2001 after widespread internal fraud was uncovered. The largest corporate bankruptcy in American history at the time, Arthur Andersen was instrumental in helping Enron cover up that fraud by destroying evidence, and the firm was indicted and found guilty of a narrow charge of obstructing a Securities and Exchange Commission official proceeding. Arthur Andersen surrendered its CPA license, effectively putting the firm out of business in 2002, although the Supreme Court later overturned the conviction. But the damage was done, and the firm no longer exists.
Generally, while calls to invoke judicial dissolution don’t result in much action, it’s still fun to fantasize about which corporations should face execution. Perhaps there should be a reckoning for Flock Safety, whose mass surveillance devices have spread like a plague through communities, and are ripe for abuse from police and riddled with false positives. Or we could break up Amazon for a million reasons. But to pick one just from this month, the company is planning to build a power plant (for fueling artificial intelligence data centers, naturally) so big it threatens to instantly become the country’s largest polluter. That seems like a decent rationale for invoking the corporate death penalty. And Taylor Farms would certainly top the list for anyone glued to a toilet bowl lately, thanks to the company’s alleged indiscretion handling lettuce laced with the “explosive diarrhea” parasite.
In another universe, one in which Donald Trump hadn’t secured a second term, he may have been convicted of the fraud he was accused of and his companies could have been liquidated by using the corporate death penalty. Indeed, people were floating the idea before the 2024 election, which allowed Trump to dodge the numerous lawsuits against him that may have resulted in total dissolution of his businesses. It could still happen one day, but it doesn’t seem likely any time soon.
Much like jury nullification — another legal mechanism that is not widely known — there is a reason the corporate death penalty isn’t part of the Overton window, the range of acceptable discourse in the mainstream public. The corporate death penalty is the kind of thing that keeps the ultra-rich scared. It’s why corporate shills love to make the excuse that using the corporate death penalty would unfairly punish employees and bring shocks to the economy. More likely, it would persuade big business to pursue due diligence instead of profits over people and the environment.
“This weapon might help minimize corruption but with collateral damage,” John F. Hulpke, a professor at University College Dublin, wrote in the Journal of Management Inquiry in 2017. “But if society is serious about wanting to curb corruption, all weapons must be considered, including this one.”
In yet another universe, we would restructure corporations to have more than one bottom line beyond their shareholders. So-called public benefit corporations do actually exist, and with a triple bottom line: a dedication to people, planet and profit, essentially in that order. Corporate responsibility could encompass so much more than making the stock market rise. There are approximately 10,000 of these entities in the U.S. It’s difficult to get an exact number of corporations in the U.S., but the IRS flagged 6.8 million active corporate returns filed in 2022, so to say there’s a big gap in ideology here is a major understatement.
Corporations aren’t people — they’re technology. And if our corporate law is actually outdated and destructive tech, maybe we should update it. Don’t worry, the rich will still make plenty more than they need, but it doesn’t have to come at the expense of everyone else.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.
Tensions between state election officials and the Trump administration are rising as we head into the heart of the midterm election season. Frustrations boiled over on Monday during a rare election security call hosted by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for state officials. During the call, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes unloaded on the agency.
CISA used to be a go-to shop for many states looking for help ensuring that their elections weren’t hacked, targeted, or undermined by cyberattacks or foreign interference. CISA provided states with classified security briefings on threats, helped ensure that state voting equipment wasn’t vulnerable to cyberattacks, and worked with election leaders to game out potential risks.
Changes at CISA have paired with the president’s broad focus on controlling how elections are run. The federal government is threatening to arrest election officials if they allow noncitizens to vote. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has vowed to withhold federal funds from states that don’t implement Trump administration election overhaul proposals. A coalition of Democratic states and officials has sued the Department of Homeland Security in a suit that accuses the Trump administration of withholding Federal Emergency Management Agency funding in an attempt to coerce states into enacting disputed election changes.
With all that as backdrop, CISA organized this week’s call – and things didn’t go too well.
After more than a year of near silence, elections officials wondered if CISA would step up to offer classified intelligence briefings on emerging cyber threats from hostile countries, specialized testing of election equipment, or training on how to prepare for potential problems on Election Day.
Instead, CISA leaders provided what one participant characterized as a generic “CYA” (cover your a**) briefing that offered state officials few assurances that the federal government would help thwart threats this November.
Participants said acting CISA Director Nick Andersen and Jim Harrell, the assistant director for integrated operations, offered no concrete support for the 2026 election, which is less than 90 days away. Instead, the participants said, CISA leadership seemed more focused on the 2028 presidential election.
When they were done, according to participants, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, lashed out at the CISA officials. Fontes blasted the Trump administration for threatening state election officials and made it clear he had no confidence in their leadership, they said.
“Fontes got testy with them,” said one participant on the call who asked not to be identified. “‘I don’t trust you,’ [Fontes told the CISA officials.] ‘Your boss came out there and said: We are going to criminalize the work you do. Why should we trust you?’”
When asked about the call, Fontes confirmed that he’d made those comments and expanded on his frustrations
“They don’t work with us, they work against us,” Fontes told Votebeat. “Why should I trust them?”
Fontes said it was difficult for state and local elections officials to have confidence they would get support from the federal government when the administration treats them like an adversary rather than a partner. He and others on the call said CISA leaders offered few assurances they would provide much support in the coming weeks.
“They just wholly and completely abandoned their duties and threatened prosecution,” Fontes said. “If they want to apologize for threatening us and ruining perfectly good systems, that’s a good start.”
CISA did not respond to requests for comment on the call.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, also a Democrat, echoed Fontes’s frustrations.
“It’s unhelpful to have political leaders, including the secretary of Homeland Security, hinting at imprisoning election administrators who don’t do what they want,” Simon told Votebeat. “That’s just not helpful.”
Simon said Minnesota and other states have spent months working to fill the gaps left by the drop-off in CISA support.
“It’s pretty clear states are almost entirely on their own this election cycle and cannot rely on the federal government for election assistance,” said Simon.
Not everyone on the call came away with a sour taste in their mouth, though. Some participants described it as a tentative move that could help repair the strained relationship between state and federal leaders working on elections.
Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, also a Democrat, described the call as a “positive step” in rebuilding relations between CISA and state election officials.
“While this engagement is encouraging, CISA and our other federal partners must focus on continuing to rebuild trust with election officials,” Hobbs said. “Over the last two years, we have watched this administration systematically dismantle many of the election security resources in place at the federal level.”
With the November election fast approaching, he said, “election officials need sustained commitment to supporting local elections, not renewed attention only as major elections approach. Meaningful support will do more to rebuild relationships than words alone.”
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
The Trump administration’s construction project in Big Bend National Park, which is destroying the area’s pristine environment to build more of President Donald Trump’s border wall, is temporarily on hold following bipartisan outrage over the environmental damage.
“CBP is pausing all construction activity in Big Bend National Park while I visit and conduct a personal, on-the-ground evaluation,” Rodney Scott, head of Customs and Border Protection, posted on X Monday. “CBP is firmly committed to protecting America, and that includes our national treasures like Big Bend National Park.”
Last summer, Congress gave the Trump administration $46 billion to construct a wall from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, a project that is happening with little to no oversight in order to fast track construction.
Big Bend, bordering Mexico in West Texas, features volcanic dikes, dinosaur bones and stunning canyon views. In July, the Trump admin waived restrictions on construction, allowing bulldozing and parts of the border wall and roads to be built, drawing the ire of environmental groups and the National Parks Conservation Association, which has warned that the damage could last generations.
“Bulldozing Big Bend National Park is an unconscionable attack on one of America’s greatest treasures,” Tiernan Sittenfeld, National Parks Conservation Association President and CEO, told USA Today. “The administration is slashing through miles of this wild landscape, threatening access to recreation and harming sensitive wildlife habitat.”
The Big Bend project is on hold for now, but on Tuesday, the Trump admin advanced plans to open up approximately 45 million acres of wilderness in places like Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to road construction and logging, removing protections that have been in place for a quarter century, according to the New York Times. The move will rescind the “roadless rule” enacted by President Bill Clinton, opening up millions of acres of untouched wilderness to destruction.
“By ripping protections from some of our oldest intact forests, the Trump administration is endangering the drinking water supplies of tens of millions and threatening wildlife habitats and recreation opportunities in almost every state,” Drew McConville, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told the Times.
None of this is entirely surprising given how Trump eroded environmental protections for national parks in his first term, such as shrinking the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah. Those efforts were challenged in federal court, but in his second term, Trump has doubled down on his efforts to reshape these and other parks. It’s not yet clear how bad the damage is, but it’s also evident that Trump is just getting started.
The fame machine is a distinctly American invention. In what other country is it wired into people’s heads from the moment they can coherently string together five words that they, too, can be a star if they work hard enough and dream big enough? Here, “fame” doesn’t merely suggest flashy movie-star celebrity; it’s a status you can attain in any industry, so long as you climb to its upper ranks. Fame is a bedfellow of the newer, more modern American dream, which promises not only contentment, but success, as a reward for ambition, ravaging the lifestyles of millions of people in the process. It’s getting harder to be happy with what one has, and even more difficult to stop destroying ourselves — either with contempt for others or regret for what we perceive as imperfection — in striving for more. America might not have a monarchy, but that doesn’t mean most of us won’t try to bow at fame’s feet at some point. Each trade has its kings and queens, its princes and princesses.
When news broke of actress Hayden Panettiere’s death at the age of 36 late last week, the immediate aftermath felt like watching the fame machine go on the fritz, rumbling and sputtering before outpouring a swath of both genuine grief and rubbernecking greed. Those who grew up watching Panettiere light up screens both big and small were devastated. Others — maybe even a subset of the same people — jumped to alarmism and misinformation. After an extended hiatus from acting, Panettiere was returning to work and primed for an even bigger comeback. Earlier this summer, she detailed her struggles with postpartum depression, abuse, child stardom, addiction and recovery in her memoir, “This Is Me: A Reckoning.” Many assumed her death was a result of any one of these. (First responders found Panettiere in cardiac arrest, but no exact cause of death is known at the time of writing.)
Considered alongside its stars’ tragically brief lives, “Ice Princess” conveys the critical need to give teenagers both stalwart encouragement and the tools to speak up when they need help. And while the movie’s legacy looks a little more macabre now, Panettiere and Trachtenberg’s glimmering performances are enough to push through the darkness.
Within hours, conspiracies about Panettiere being killed for speaking out about Hollywood appeared online. A TikTok search for her name brings up ghoulish videos with thousands of views: “Last video of Hayden Panettiere alive”; “Nobody realized Hayden made three unusual moves before her death.” CBS News posted audio of the 911 response call to their TikTok page just this morning. It’s as if, in the untimely death of a famous person — especially a former child star — particles of their fame dissipate into the air, leaving the desperate and discontent to try to snatch a piece of their own before it dissolves completely.
Some of Panettiere’s most notable roles point back to this phenomenon, with her TV arcs in series like “Heroes” and “Nashville,” at their cores, tracking the effects of the whole world watching and depending on you. But it’s her 2005 Disney film, “Ice Princess” — one of my first experiences with Panettiere’s work — that’s most illustrative of both fame’s pitfalls and the culture that cosigns them in the name of success. In the movie, Panettiere plays Gen Harwood, an archetypal most-popular-girl-in-school and less-than-standard teenage ice-skating prodigy. Though her form and marks in the sport are good, real success is just out of Gen’s reach. That is, until physics geek Casey Carlyle (Michelle Trachtenberg, another child star gone far too soon) begins studying the science of Gen’s skating in hopes of scoring a college scholarship.
Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last. Sign up here
Casey and Gen’s journey from competitors to confidantes is the film’s familiar emotional center, but tucked into an unfamiliar narrative. Beneath its Disney dialogue and some smoothed-over depictions of the harsher realities of competitive sports, “Ice Princess” boasts winning messages about the pressures put on young people to achieve greatness at an age when they’re too young to define personal success. That the film is led by two young women who accomplished such greatness in their childhood and teenage years at the risk of their privacy and potentially their well-being is a tragically meta asterisk that will now hang over the movie forever.
But that doesn’t mean “Ice Princess” doesn’t still come loaded with hope and pertinent themes of personal choice, active listening, and cheering young people on in whatever they choose to do (within reason). Considered alongside its stars’ tragically brief lives, “Ice Princess” conveys the critical need to give teenagers both stalwart encouragement and the tools to speak up when they need help. And while the movie’s legacy looks a little more macabre now, Panettiere and Trachtenberg’s glimmering performances are enough to push through the darkness.
Casey and Gen are, for a Disney movie, as different as they come. Casey lives with her mother, Joan (Joan Cusack), in a cozy, rural house outside of town, where Casey skates for fun on the frozen pond in their backyard. Gen is your typical blonde suburbanite who wishes she could spend her Saturday nights at parties or with her friends, instead of in intensive training on the ice, coached by her mother, Tina (Kim Cattrall). Gen and Casey aren’t enemies, but they’re not exactly friends, either. But when Casey’s science teacher encourages her to apply for a college scholarship that could change her entire life — and make the project she submits as part of her application personal — Casey’s affection for ice skating becomes a thorn in Gen and Tina’s side.
The two girls are thrown together by their mutual commitment to their passions, science and skating. What Gen and Casey want is to enjoy these things for the personal thrills they offer. Fame or excellence in either field seems to be the desire of their parents and other adult figures in their lives. “People wait their whole life to find their calling,” Casey’s teacher tells her about the scholarship, asserting that a natural fluency in science means it must be her destiny. These sentiments are reflected by Joan, who desperately wants more for her daughter than she’s been able to provide on her own teacher’s salary.
Tina, on the other hand, gets to the point with candor. “You’re not like other girls,” Tina tells Gen when her daughter asks why she can’t take a half-hour break from training to be with her boyfriend. “Winners make sacrifices.” For Gen, those sacrifices come at the expense of joy. Gen knows the exact measurements of her salad order and is strictly forbidden from eating any bread. Her practice doesn’t stop when the sun goes down. And attending a high school party is entirely out of the question. There is something genuinely quite heartbreaking about watching Panettiere, a young woman just coming to understand Hollywood industry standards, repeat the sickly refrains of a similarly demanding profession. When Gen orders cheese (in a strict one-quarter cup measurement) for her salad one afternoon, her friends poke fun at her. “It’s Saturday,” she replies, “I can pig out if I want to.”
With its focused screenplay, “Ice Princess” quickly cultivates an atmosphere that’s sympathetic to Gen and Casey. The film frames their lapses in rigor as the joys of being a teenager, rather than imperfections — or worse, weakness in the pursuit of glory. No 16-year-old should be so strictly confined to a routine that prevents them from actually living their life.
(Alli Harvey / Getty Images for Stuart Weitzman) (L-R) Hayden Panettiere and Michelle Trachtenberg attend the unveiling of Stuart Weitzman’s Young Hollywood Cares Collection in aid of ovarian cancer research during Fashion’s Night Out at Stuart Weitzman Boutique on September 8, 2011.
It’s ironic that, in the aftermath of Panettiere’s death, so much of the response has been about the lack of protections offered to child stars in the film and television industries, and not the content creation field. Social media is the new breeding ground for the kind of toxicity that the people mining Panettiere’s death for views purport to abhor.
But that’s not the message that America is selling. The same tracks to success still exist for young people gifted in sports or science. But fame as a general concept also seems much more attainable than it did 21 years ago. Teenagers want to grow up to be influencers or TikTokers, spending a significant portion of their youth creating content about life instead of actually living it.
It’s a lifestyle not entirely dissimilar to the rigorous training of an ice-skating prodigy, putting in the work at all hours to hone their skill. But it does strike me as odd that, in the aftermath of Panettiere’s death, so much of the response was about the lack of protections offered to child stars in the film and television industries, and not the rapidly booming content creation field. How ironic that social media is the new breeding ground for the kind of toxicity that the people mining Panettiere’s death for views purport to abhor.
That dissonance is a big part of why “Ice Princess” holds up today. One could even argue that it’s now an even more critical part of Panettiere and Trachtenberg’s legacies. The film is no longer just a tender-hearted story of fame and all its drawbacks, but also a look at two women who bravely wrestled with those flaws, making a major impact in the short time they were here. When they’re on screen, Panettiere and Trachtenberg shine through all the Disney conventions, their characters pointing back to their real selves.
Each one has her singular presence — Trachtenberg plucky and inspiring; Panettiere charming and bold — but together, they’re beautiful complements. Panettiere’s grounded presence helps untether the film from its somewhat corny conceit, giving it authentic complexity. She deviates from the one-note mean girl role, supplying Gen with dimensionality and kindness that characters like these were rarely afforded. That Gen’s growing discontent with skating is so closely linked to Panettiere’s real-life trajectory — trying to figure out where she fits in a ruthless industry — is a sour cherry on top: unexpected, but worth embracing. Though the importance of “Ice Princess” is obscured by histrionic high school drama and feel-good fluff, it remains a vital work for teaching parents and kids of all ages that success is what you make of it. And none of that would be possible without its two forever-shining stars.
The act itself — appointing a crony and longtime friend to an important government job — was not unusual. It’s not even unprecedented for them to appoint family members. (See: Kennedy, President John F. and Attorney General Robert F.) But Donald Trump’s appointment of Todd Blanche, his former criminal defense attorney, as attorney general may be a first, and not because Blanche has been a close associate. What’s striking about it is the fact that the president needed a criminal defense attorney in the first place.
On Sunday Blanche made his first appearance since his confirmation on “Meet the Press”, and from the first seconds of the interview he made it clear that his new, permanent position would not change his understanding of his role as the president’s apparatchik. When host Kristen Welker pressed him on whether he would act independently, Blanche did not mince words. “No, I’m not going to pledge that,” he said. “No attorney general should ever pledge that.”
Blanche clearly believes that his job is to run the Justice Department by doing the president’s bidding. But he did take time to assure the country that Trump had never, and would never, ask him to do anything unethical or illegal, so we needn’t worry our pretty little heads about that. “There is this extraordinarily false narrative that the president wakes up in the morning and calls me and says, ‘Todd, go prosecute X or Y,’” Blanche said. “He does not do that. He has never done that. He will never do that.”
Well, we know that isn’t true, don’t we? Aside from the mountain of evidence of Trump’s unethical, vengeful public rhetoric, we also have the September 2025 Truth Social draft post he mistakenly published in which he demanded that then-Attorney General Pam Bondi prosecute his political enemies, saying “They’re all guilty as hell” and complaining “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” Ultimately, Bondi was fired in part for failing to get the indictments he ordered for former FBI director James Comey, California Sen. Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Blanche won’t make that same mistake.
When Welker asked him how he squares his and the president’s commitment to prosecute anyone who “inappropriately touches” a law enforcement officer after Trump’s pardons of the violent Jan. 6 criminals, Blanche essentially replied that pardons are the president’s business and they have nothing to do with him. (In fact, the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney has traditionally had oversight of the process.) Unfortunately, Welker didn’t point this out in a follow-up, nor did she ask him about his role as deputy attorney general in overseeing the firings of the department’s prosecutors and staff members who worked on the Jan. 6 cases.
The irony is that this is exactly the kind of interference in the Justice Department that precipitated the rules and norms that call for the attorney general to operate at arm’s length from the White House. Admittedly, it’s a complicated role; the attorney general is a prominent member of the Cabinet, but is also expected to act independently. Some have been more successful at that than others, and at times attorneys general on both sides of the aisle have been thorns in the side of the presidents they serve.
In the 1990s, Janet Reno’s liberal use of the independent counsel statute, which resulted in several investigations against the Clinton administration, caused the president and his staff heartburn. But although he may have groused privately, Bill Clinton did not retaliate against her; Reno remained at the Justice Department throughout his two terms. On the other hand, John Ashcroft’s refusal to allow the George W. Bush administration to override the Justice Department’s finding that a covert domestic surveillance program was illegal — which included a “showdown” at the severely ill Ashcroft’s hospital bedside in March 2004 — helped ensure he was replaced in Bush’s second term.
By and large, administrations respected the formal guardrails that were enacted in the wake of Watergate, which saw Richard Nixon manipulate the Justice Department for his own political protection.
After the so-called Saturday Night Massacre on Oct. 20, 1973, which saw Nixon fire the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate break-in, and subsequent revelations of Nixon’s abuses of power — including the fact that his Attorney General John Mitchell was personally involved in the planning of the Watergate break-in — Congress enacted a series of reforms to insulate the Justice Department from political pressure and interference. The Justice Department itself created guidelines to make the department a “neutral zone” to ensure that while the president could set national law enforcement goals, the White House would not be involved in specific investigations and prosecutions.
For the most part, administrations stuck to those regulations for decades, although the Republicans started pushing the envelope even before Trump came along. Recall that in 2007 Bush’s second attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, was forced to resign when it became known that he had fired several U.S. attorneys when they failed to follow orders to go after Democratic politicians on dubious charges before elections.
While serious, even that is small potatoes to how Trump has blown the guidelines to smithereens. Like Nixon, Trump sees the Justice Department as a personal law firm that possesses all the power of the U.S. government to use for his own purposes. And since vengeance against his enemies is his top priority, the department is his chosen weapon.
At every step of the way — from deputy to acting attorney general, and now to holding the post in his own right following his narrow Senate confirmation — Todd Blanche has acted in Trump’s interest over that of the people of the United States.
At every step of the way — from deputy to acting attorney general, and now to holding the post in his own right following his narrow Senate confirmation — Todd Blanche has acted in Trump’s interest over that of the people of the United States. In further insult to the public, Blanche told NBC in April that they should be “happy” Trump is meddling in matters of the Justice Department. In his various roles, Blanche has helped cover up the Epstein files, and he personally signed a memorandum of understanding assuring the president that he and his family would never face an IRS audit again. Since he took office as deputy attorney general, some 16,000 to 20,000 personnel have left the Justice Department, apparently unwilling to go along with an edict bearing his imprimatur that Donald Trump is their “chief client.” Here, they’d been thinking their chief client was the American people.
During his interview with Welker, Blanche attempted to spin his refusal to ensure the department’s independence from Trump. “If I were to pledge I were to be independent of the White House, what that means is that if President Trump says, ‘I want the Department of Justice to go after every violent criminal in this country, which is what he has said — what you’re saying to me is I should say, ‘No sir, I’m not gonna do it,’” Blanche said. “So I will act with integrity, our prosecutors will act with integrity, we will prosecute without fear or any sort of favor, and that’s exactly what we have been doing.”
With over two years left in Trump’s presidency, I can’t even begin to contemplate what Blanche will do on his behalf. Whatever happens will be cloaked in lies — and followed by gaslighting.
In the year the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its break with the British crown, there is something almost painfully ironic about a broadcaster from the kingdom that once ruled us now being more willing to stand up to Donald Trump than much of the American establishment. But the irony isn’t really the story. The story is that the president filed a $10 billion lawsuit to punish the BBC, and in doing so, he may have handed the corporation a legal instrument to drag his children Ivanka and Donald Jr., and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, into a Miami courtroom to answer for what happened on Jan. 6.
The lawsuit was supposed to be another exercise in the familiar Trumpian playbook: File a claim, demand an astronomical sum, bury the target in legal expenses, force a humiliating settlement that gets marketed as a political win. That strategy has worked before. In 2024, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million after network anchor George Stephanopoulos inaccurately said Trump had been found liable for rape. Paramount later paid more than $24 million over CBS News’ handling of an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris that took place during the 2024 presidential race. With that track record, Trump had every reason to expect the BBC to fold in the same way.
He miscalculated badly. As a public service corporation, the BBC operates under a royal charter that explicitly bars it from entering into out-of-court financial settlements to make litigation disappear. It cannot cut a check to sweep away Trump’s claims. The corporation is legally bound to fight until a verdict is reached — or until Trump himself gives up. And its defense team, anchored by the First Amendment firm Ballard Spahr, has used that obligation to go straight at the people closest to Trump on Jan. 6.
The underlying claim concerns a 2024 documentary about Trump’s candidacy that aired on “Panorama.” Titled “Trump, A Second Chance?”, the program edited together separate portions of Trump’s Jan. 6 speech so that it sounded as though he said, in immediate sequence, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you,” followed by “we fight, we fight like hell.” Those lines were actually spoken nearly an hour apart, and the BBC has apologized for how the edit was constructed. But the corporation has not apologized for the underlying accusation — because the documentary’s producers and the BBC’s lawyers believe it is true. The BBC has also noted the documentary never aired in the U.S., including in Florida, which creates its own problem for Trump’s attempt to establish the legal connection between the broadcast and the injury he claims to have suffered.
But the discovery fight is where this stopped being a media dispute and became a family liability. Because the entire defamation claim hinges on Trump’s intent — on what he meant by the phrase “fight like hell” — the BBC’s lawyers moved to subpoena the people who helped draft that speech and who were closest to him as the Capitol riot unfolded. On Aug. 14, the BBC asked a federal court in Miami for permission to compel testimony and records from Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Kushner concerning the drafting and meaning of the speech.
According to the BBC’s own filings, Donald Jr. and Ivanka were in the room while the speech was being revised and were present when it was delivered. Kushner drafted a statement condemning the Capitol violence that the White House never issued. He also reportedly told then-chief of staff Mark Meadows the situation was “getting really ugly” as it unfolded, while Trump Jr. texted Meadows begging him to get his father to “condemn this” immediately.
These are not neutral bystanders being swept into a media spat. They are three people who watched the fire get lit and, by their own contemporaneous words, knew exactly what was burning.
These are not neutral bystanders being swept into a media spat. They are three people who watched the fire get lit and, by their own contemporaneous words, knew exactly what was burning. And if the case proceeds, they may have to say so under oath.
Trump’s own conduct made this exposure worse. The BBC also sought his financial records to test the legitimacy of the massive damages he claimed to have suffered — a maneuver that prompted him to quietly abandon his monetary claims rather than open his ledgers to public scrutiny. His lawyers had previously dismissed the request as a “fishing expedition.” But this is how discovery works: If you claim a broadcast inflicted extraordinary economic harm, the defendant gets to test that claim. Trump built the case that now threatens to expose his own children and son-in-law, and he built it because he assumed no one would ever call his bluff.
But the most revealing part of the BBC’s filing isn’t the subpoenas themselves — it’s the account of what happened when the network tried to serve them. Process servers attempting to deliver subpoenas to Ivanka and Kushner at their fortified Miami residence in May were physically blocked by local law enforcement, who directed them to coordinate through the Secret Service. When the BBC’s legal team did exactly that, Secret Service counsel Troy Epstein flatly declared the agency was neither authorized to accept service on the family’s behalf nor willing to help facilitate it. The BBC says it also could not serve Trump Jr. at Trump Tower. It has now asked the court for permission to use alternative methods — email or certified mail — because the ordinary machinery of American process service has been quietly closed off by a federal agency to a foreign broadcaster trying to hold the president’s family accountable.
That is the part of this story that should trouble people well beyond press freedom circles. Taxpayer-funded federal security agencies are being used as a private shield for a political dynasty, deployed to physically block the basic mechanics of a civil lawsuit that Trump himself initiated. It echoes the darker pattern already established around this family and this date — the Secret Service’s unexplained failure to preserve text messages and call logs from around Jan. 6, and allegations that agents played a role in intimidating witnesses like former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson before her explosive congressional testimony. A protective detail meant to keep the first family safe is being repurposed to keep it unaccountable.
Trump has responded predictably, complaining that the BBC is “abusing the deposition process.” His projection is transparent. Nobody dragged his family into this. He is the plaintiff. He asked for $10 billion. He put his own reputation, his financial losses and the meaning of his own speech at the center of a case he chose to bring, and in doing so he opened the door to exactly the kind of scrutiny now aimed at Ivanka, Donald Jr. and Kushner. A defendant testing the plaintiff’s claims isn’t harassment. It’s the legal process working according to centuries of jurisprudence — just as the president intended.
None of this guarantees the subpoenas will be enforced, or that Ivanka, Donald Jr. or Kushner will ever sit for testimony. The court could still limit the subpoena’s scope, and the family’s lawyers will fight the serving of them on every available ground. But the posture itself matters.
While the BBC absorbs real financial strain from international litigation against a sitting American president, it has refused to play the domestic game of corporate capitulation that has defined how ABC, CBS and so many other news outlets have handled Trump’s legal threats. It punched back in the fight Trump started and pushed it toward the people who were actually in the room on Jan. 6 — the same people the taxpayer-funded Secret Service is now, apparently, working to keep out of reach.
Pencils are more expensive. So are notebooks, scissors, glue sticks — just about every back-to-school item that families will load into their literal or virtual carts this summer has gone up in price at a time when American families already feel crushed by rising costs.
According to one analysis of the 21 most common school supply items by the Groundwork Collaborative and The Century Foundation, two progressive think tanks, prices are up about 7.7 percent with parents paying an average of $173.45 for their school supply haul. That’s an even bigger jump than last year. Add to that an 11 percent hike in prices for school lunch essentials — from the literal tons of blueberries needed to feed young children to apple juice — and costs balloon to nearly $4,000 a year to cover supplies and meals.
That data was first shared exclusively with The 19th. The analysis is based on weekly retail transaction data on millions of products collected by NielsenIQ from about 50,000 retailers.
With school supply costs outpacing inflation, many families — and especially the women who do the majority of purchases in American households — are going to feel the sticker shock, said Lindsay Owens, the president and CEO of the Groundwork Collaborative.
“Women in this country are rip-roaring mad about the price hikes that they’re absorbing. They’re trying to manage household finances and budgeting. They’re trying to feed their kids healthy food,” Owens said. “The work is getting harder of providing for your family.”
Here are the school supplies with the biggest spikes in price:
Lunch boxes are up 27 percent
Notebooks, notebook paper, tissues and index cards are all up about 20 percent
Scissor costs rose 14 percent
Dry erase markers and glue sticks are up 8 percent
Headphones, binders, crayons, colored pencils and No. 2 pencils increased between 5 and 7 percent
On the lunch side:
12 ounces of blueberries are up a whopping 48 percent
A loaf of sandwich bread is up 22 percent
Apple juice prices have risen 20 percent
A pound of oranges has risen 17 percent
A box of packaged animal crackers will run you nearly 16 percent more
A package of chocolate chip cookies is up 14 percent
Driving up some of these costs are tariffs and the war on Iran.
Take blueberries, which American families have increasingly been eating more of every year, particularly those with berry-aged children who pop them like M&Ms. About half of the berries Americans eat are imported, many from Peru, which is now increasingly selling its berries to China instead of the United States because of tariff increases.
The other half of America’s blueberries are grown domestically, a good portion of them in Maine, the top producer of wild berries in the country. But tariffs on steel and aluminum have made it more costly to purchase the equipment needed to harvest the crops.
“Our consumers, our manufacturers, our blueberry growers, and more will all continue to pay the price,” Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican from Maine, wrote to the Department of Commerce in December.
Similarly, many school supplies are produced overseas, like pencils and crayons, which are predominantly imported from Brazil, China, Mexico and India. The war in Iran, which has raised fuel and shipping costs, has directly impacted imports and those price increases are being passed on to consumers. Though inflation is showing signs of cooling, oil prices hit a six-week high in late July.
“Gas prices filter through to everything, but especially food,” Owens said. “The cost of transporting food goes up. The cost of farming goes up because the cost of diesel is up. The cost of plastic goes up, so the packaging around pencils or deli ham, that gets more expensive. All of that is going to filter through to higher food prices and higher prices for consumer goods like back-to-school staples.”
The problem is parents don’t have a lot of wiggle room on the matter, said Julie Margetta Morgan, the president of the Century Foundation. Kids need the supplies to be successful during the year, and parents, whether they’re low- or high-income, want to ensure their kids can thrive.
About half of parents expect to take on debt to cover back-to-school shopping this year, up from 34 percent in 2024, according to a survey of parents with kids under 18 conducted this summer by Intuit Credit Karma. One in five parents say they also feel pressure to keep up with what other parents are buying their kids, a June NerdWallet survey found.
“There’s a really strong actual cost — but also emotional cost — to having to make really impossible choices about caring for yourself and caring for your family in order to bear the costs of tariffs and of a war that seems impossible to explain why we’re involved in it,” Morgan said. “It is weighing particularly heavily on mothers.”
It’s around this time every year that Victoria Albano starts to cut back on any expenses for herself to make sure she can cover all the back-to-school items for her 6-year-old daughter, who is entering first grade this year. A July trip to Target to get everything on her list — among the items, two packs of wired headphones, Band-Aids, eight folders and four composition notebooks — cost about $230.
Albano, her husband and her daughter moved to Duluth, Georgia, three years ago because housing costs squeezed them out of New Jersey. They swapped their $2,500-a-month, two-bedroom apartment there for a $2,000-a-month, three-bedroom home in Georgia. But even with the savings, utility and gas prices remain high, Albano said. School supplies are another stressor.
Recently, she said, “I was up all night trying to figure out what to buy and what not to buy.”
“I’m not struggling, but I’m not where I want to be,” Albano said.
When Albano, a full-time content creator, posts her school supply hauls on social media, a deluge of messages come in from moms desperately asking Albano to donate items to their kids.
Many families cite living under that financial stress, said Ailen Arreaza, the executive director of ParentsTogether, a national nonprofit that works to engage parents politically. In the organization’s surveys, about 70 percent of parents cite experiencing financial strain, with little relief in sight.
It’s all further complicated by the loss of government benefits over the past year. More than 4 million Americans, including 1.5 million children, have lost their benefits through SNAP, the food assistance program that helps low-income people buy groceries. That makes family budgets even tighter going into the new school year.
“It feels like we are a little bit at a breaking point,” Arreaza said. “The concern and the situation just feels untenable right now.”
To get by, parents are searching their local back-to-school fairs for supplies, or seeking out backpack giveaways and school supply distributions. Some families are working more over the summer to cover increased costs.
By the time November’s midterm elections roll around, some of this pressure is likely to be on parents’ minds in an election that will no doubt center affordability. Both parties face uncertainty heading into the midterms.
Right now, Arreaza said, “parents are so busy and focused on their day-to-day and November feels far away and the election can feel far away for parents, but the reality of what is happening everyday feels very real for families.”
Even if folks aren’t thinking about the election, she said, “they’re thinking about the system that is making it harder for them and they’re noticing the differences.”
Beneath the shadows of indigo-streaked clouds, a young woman strolls through a fog-covered city, stopping at the base of a skyscraper. She looks up, eyes following every square inch of the structure until the point where it juts past the clouds and into the dark atmosphere above, beyond where she can see. She is the princess, and this is the castle she’ll be locked in, an indomitable beast of a citadel fittingly titled the Tower Hotel.
“How hokey,” you might say, “a modern princess trapped in a luxury high-rise.” But really, everything in “Her Private Hell” is contrivance. Writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn — “NWR,” as he’s taken to branding himself — isn’t exactly known for his subtlety. His previous feature, 2016’s love-it-or-hate-it loony toon “The Neon Demon,” was a modeling industry semi-satire that featured beauties quite literally gobbling up their ingenue competition. It’s really no surprise that his first film in 10 years would arrive with its thematic commentary just as legible.
But that’s where the fun begins. Once the viewer understands where Refn is headed, they can submit themselves to his grotesque neon visions. His appeal as a filmmaker lies in his stylistic flair; the joy comes from watching him marry the aesthetically manicured with the ideologically bizarre. Whether it’s a union of love or force is another matter. NWR’s high concepts and their abrasive execution don’t always coalesce. But when they do, it’s like watching a magic trick play out before your eyes, leaving you so stunned you’re stammering, unable to utter even a single “How?”
(Neon) “Her Private Hell”
Refn’s cold, theoretical violence and Thatcher’s knack for affected, high-glamor drama are a match made in DayGlo heaven. Her work is unlike anything I’ve seen this year, a ruthless and surprising turn from someone who’s struggled to find the right type of script for her unique style and physicality.
“Her Private Hell” is Refn’s greatest trick yet: A beguiling fairy tale for a lost lamb named Elle (Sophie Thatcher). In this story, Elle is the archetypal royalty figure, thrust through a kaleidoscope of Refn’s signature bright pinks and blues and spit back into the tower where she passes her days, waiting for her savior to arrive. But as she greets her fate and rides the elevator to her penthouse prison, Elle strolls past Hunter (Kristine Froseth), a real-life Sleeping Beauty, napping on the lush chairs in the hallway outside. Elle and Hunter are due to shoot a movie together, which Elle’s father, the filmmaker Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), will produce. “The airline lost my luggage because of the Mist,” Hunter tells Elle. Ugh. Of course. The Mist seems to be screwing up everything these days.
Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last. Sign up here
In the extraordinary abstraction that follows, Thatcher finds her ideal role as one of NWR’s stilted avatars, gussied up in couture and spouting riddles. Her energy rises and falls alongside the mysterious mist, which has engulfed the city and brought whispers of a mysterious ancient entity lurking in its haze. Thatcher performs as if this was the part she was born for, and it very well may be.
Refn’s cold, theoretical violence and Thatcher’s knack for affected, high-glamor drama are a match made in DayGlo heaven. Her work is unlike anything I’ve seen this year, a ruthless and surprising turn from someone who’s struggled to find the right type of script for her unique style and physicality. If there is a God, somewhere amid all this mist, “Her Private Hell” will be Thatcher’s entrée to a new era of hyper-ostentatious, Elizabethan — Taylor, that is — cinematic elegance, a large void in the once-plentiful pool of subgenres that only she can fill.
Thatcher has been searching for her niche for a moment, but the delay hasn’t been for lack of trying. Since her breakthrough in Showtime’s “Yellowjackets” in 2021 — where she plays the troubled teenager Natalie, fighting for survival in the Canadian wilderness alongside her high school soccer teammates after their plane crash-lands — Thatcher’s had more than a few substantive roles. In 2024’s “Heretic,” she played a Mormon missionary lured into a violent theological maze by a wicked Hugh Grant. And in 2025’s “Companion,” Thatcher scored a decent turn as a sex robot with her programming on the fritz after she’s implicated in a murder plot. If those films sound preposterous, it’s because they are. “Heretic” was underbaked and half-thought, while “Companion” tried to create big laughs and bigger action from minuscule ideas. Thatcher, though, was far and away the best part of both films, bringing a striking depth to her thinly sketched characters.
But one gets the sense that Thatcher’s worried about being pigeonholed. “Yellowjackets,” “Heretic” and “Companion” are all horror-thrillers. And Thatcher’s other film roles in 2023’s “The Boogeyman” and a bit part in the following year’s “MaXXXine” certainly don’t help Hollywood’s perception of her as a wannabe scream queen. The perennial problem with horror, even contemporary horror, is that it’s an extremely difficult genre to migrate from. But Thatcher’s talents extend past genre confines. She conjures a bewitching onscreen presence that many of her contemporaries could only dream of, pulling the viewer’s gaze with a single glare from her steely eyes or the quiver of her chin. The same grin can look menacing or jovial, depending on how Thatcher contorts the rest of her features. What’s more, there’s an ease to all of these things — a soft tenderness that counterbalances the frigidity — as if such intensity comes casually. And maybe it does.
With “Her Private Hell,” Thatcher has found an auteur who matches her refreshing self-assurance. Here, Refn lets it all go and indulges in his every artistic impulse, drenching a Brian De Palma-inspired deception in neon (and bringing in De Palma’s longtime collaborator, Pino Donaggio, for a resplendent score better than anything you’ve heard this decade). Thatcher isn’t so different from De Palma’s muses either. The naive exuberance of Nancy Allen, the innate sex appeal of Melanie Griffith and Michelle Pfeiffer, the informal immorality of Amy Irving; Thatcher has it all, rolled into one captivating package. When Elle and Hunter witness the brutal murder of a neighbor across the way — presumably by the mist’s fabled entity, The Leatherman — Refn completes the thread that ties his violent vapidity, where pretty girls do ugly things, to De Palma’s voyeuristic dreaminess. If you’re a fan of film and all the places it can take you, you can’t do much better than this.
“Her Private Hell” is not merely glittering debris, as some have posited, nor is it style over substance; it’s a campfire story told by Thatcher’s unearthly orator, with just as much chilling impact.
That is until Thatcher ratchets up the eerie tension tenfold while Refn builds his gorgeous fantasy around her. When Elle’s father unexpectedly departs, leaving her to finish shooting her movie in the care of her not-so-wicked stepmother, Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), the pair’s psychosexual strain further complicates matters. Before Dominique married Elle’s father, the two were the best of friends. As strange as it is, their dynamic seems to alter everything around them, as if their mutual destiny were written in the stars — not that anyone can see the stars with all this mist, that is.
For a director who’s staked a name on films and television shows that are narratively impenetrable, “Her Private Hell” may feel like a big ask for some viewers. And I get that, I do. The movie sways almost imperceptibly between Elle’s quest for the truth and the haunting story of Private K (Charles Melton), a soldier who lost everything to the mist and its monstrous entity the last time it immersed the city. It can occasionally feel as if Refn is playing a game with you, softly whispering if you’re still there. But though some have complained about what they call “a total lack of plot,” I simply must object, and not just on behalf of Thatcher, whose work is worth seeking out even if you don’t jive with Refn’s aesthetic obsessions.
There is so much to admire with “Her Private Hell” — too much for just one go-round. It’s not only gripping, but extremely intricate if you’re brave enough to get on its level. Two women witness the strange murder of a neighbor and begin to believe that something could be lurking in the mist that’s enveloped the Earth. When they start shooting a movie together, they begin to understand their connection to this ancient evil, and their place in a cyclical inferno wrought by absent parents and bad weather. They soon understand that to be heartbroken is to be damned to know the exquisite pain of being alive. This film is not merely glittering debris, as some have posited, nor is it style over substance; it’s a campfire story told by Thatcher’s unearthly orator.
As the night grows black and the last embers start to dull, “Her Private Hell” sends you off to bed wondering if it could all be true. Thatcher’s warbly voice hangs in the air; tales of the Leatherman and lost daughters spinning around your brain as you try to fall asleep. “None of this is real,” you tell yourself, turning off your brain for a good night’s rest. But just then, a piercing pink light appears outside, and a low, opaque mist begins to creep through the seams of your tent. As it turns out, the fantastical has much more grounding in reality than we ever want to imagine.
The tale of Donald Trump sneaking off Air Force One in a catering truck captured public attention for many reasons. It was a reminder that, for all his tough talk, the president harbors a sense of fear. Hiding away in a glorified ice chest would also have been a blow to the 80-year-old’s dignity. But the charade, which was first revealed by the Washington Post, also gave us insight, as political scientist Scott Lemieux wrote, “into who he considers his actual inner circle.”
Left behind on the decoy plane were Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and other administration officials and aides. The only people deemed worthy of saving from Iran’s reported threat were people whose full-time jobs are tending the president’s body and, more importantly, his ego: Natalie Harp, who writes Trump love letters, and whose main job is showing him flattering social media posts. Body man Walt Nauta. Dan Scavino, Trump’s former golf caddie. Oh yeah, and Pete Hegseth.
The defense secretary’s inclusion on this list does not suggest he is an especially well-regarded or important person, especially when other prominent Cabinet members — not to mention White House reporters — were left vulnerable to the rumored assassination threat. On the contrary, his inclusion in Trump’s flock of flatterers is another sign that Hegseth’s main skill is fluffing up the narcissist-in-chief. It helps explain how Hegseth — unlike former Cabinet members such as former Attorney General Pam Bondi or former Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem, who recently lots their jobs — seems in no danger of losing his job, even as his manifest incompetence is a big part of the reason Trump is losing the war with Iran. He may be bad at running the military, but Hegseth is good at lying to (and attacking) the press and stroking his boss’s ego, which are the only skills that count in Trump’s White House.
Recent news about the ongoing disaster aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln is another reminder of why Hegseth may indeed lead the highly competitive race to be the most hated man in Washington. Both Stars and Stripes and the Military Times reported that multiple service members had attempted to jump off the aircraft carrier, which has been deployed for over eight months without any real breaks. Sailors are reportedly “struggling with exhaustion and declining morale, including reports of suicidal thoughts,” explained Alison Bath of Stars and Stripes.
The details coming from family members offer a chilling illustration of how little regard Hegseth has for the actual well-being of service members, even as he releases videos implying they have low testosterone levels or berates them for being “fat” or “beardos.” Sailors have reported being fed “rotten” food or barely being fed at all, and desperate family members have been begging the Navy for relief. The wife of one sailor told MS NOW’s Priya Sidhar that the company is working 12-14 hour days and that her husband “said that he was exhausted working on the flight deck.” He also raised safety concerns with his superiors. “His prescription contact lenses had expired,” Sidhar reported, “and he told his chain of command that he couldn’t even see what he was doing, and he was worried about causing accidents.”
Hegseth, though, is shrugging off the concerns, telling reporters the issue is “completely misrepresented” and that the service members have “everything we can provide them at every single moment.”
Trump was even more callous and dishonest about the suffering of the sailors, saying that the deployment was “not nearly long enough,” even though, at over 260 days, it has set a record for the longest deployment. (On Friday, the acting Navy secretary announced the ship would be returning to the U.S. and replaced by the USS George Washington.)
Trump and Hegseth clearly share a disregard for the lives of the very service members they are asking to wage war on Iran. But the debacle also reveals how Hegseth’s twisted priorities appear to have endeared him to his boss, seemingly above every other sycophant surrounding the president. Beyond operating in the Northern Arabian Sea to aid in logistics and serve as a deterrent to Iran, it seems like the reason the USS Lincoln is being held in this Kafkaesque hell is to shore up the illusion — or perhaps even Trump’s delusion — that the war with the Islamic Republic will be over soon.
The president, desperate to keep stock markets afloat and MAGA voters on the hook, has been playing a game for months where he announces a “deal” with Iran to end the war, usually timed to the market’s opening bell, buoying stock prices. But the news invariably turns out to not be true. The danger for Trump is that investors might finally wise up and stop falling for false promises. Swapping out a major aircraft carrier deployed in the Middle East, as the Pentagon is now planning to do, could blow the whole game up, as it is a tacit admission that the war is not ending in the next few days, as we’ve been told is happening for months. Sunday’s news, reported by the Wall Street Journal, that Iran is secretly planning to “escalate the war” will also not help matters.
This pattern suggests Hegseth is far more concerned about his boss’s fixation on stock prices and media coverage than he is about listening to the advice of admirals, who have been bearing the brunt of complaints from families of service members over the USS Lincoln. Even by the low standards of Trump appointees, Hegseth has shown an eagerness to back up the president’s every lie and delusion, not matter the cost. This dubious distinction is no doubt why, even as he is shepherding what may turn out to be Trump’s most notable entry in a long list of failures, Hegseth was included in the small club of people Trump opted to save from a possible attack on Air Force One.
The secretary may be in Trump’s good graces, but in the real world, his reputation — which was never good to begin with, since he was comically unqualified for this job — is in the toilet. The American public loathes Hegseth. As CNN’s Harry Enten recently explained, at 22 points under water, Hegseth’s approval ratings are “the lowest of the low.”
Hegseth is also widely loathed by fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill, even as they held their noses and voted for him to pacify Trump. As POLITICO reported, Hegseth has been “regularly trekking to the Hill in recent weeks and hobnobbing with lawmakers,” asking them to pass the largest defense spending bill in history. This request — asking Republicans to spend lavishly on weapons — should be as easy as talking Hegseth into another round of martinis at breakfast. But GOP members are worried about the midterms, and they don’t want to answer for the Iran war or the equally unpopular defense secretary.
Hegseth is likely to stay, though, even as Trump posts on Truth Social that he’s “extremely happy with the job that Pete Hegseth is doing,” including “getting rid of DEI.” Sure, the secretary has mismanaged the military to the point that sailors are reportedly attempting suicide. But he has blocked the promotions of talented leaders who annoy MAGA by being women or Black, and that’s what really counts.
One sailor who reportedly jumped overboard is only 19 — practically still a kid. The terror and trauma Hegseth is inflicting him and his fellow service members in this losing war points to a man with no moral character at all. No wonder Trump loves him.
In late July, according to the FBI, utility companies in at least seven states experienced cyberattacks from “malicious cyber actors” who remotely accessed water management systems, causing loss of pressure and flooding. As it turned out, there were more hazards. The agency warned in a recent alert that “untreated ground water [could] seep into pipes.” At least 30 municipal water facilities were hit in Minnesota alone. These cyberattacks were likely launched by Iranian agents as part of Donald Trump’s ongoing war with the Islamic Republic he started alongside Israel, and they could become part of a new normal as the conflict drags on.
Now, in a memo released Wednesday, the White House is attempting to fight back against cybercrime by encouraging private companies to go after transnational criminal organizations “by incorporating the ingenuity of the private sector.” Details are vague, but a fact sheet hints at combatting “transnational cybercrime, fraud and other predatory schemes against American citizens,” such as ransomware attacks, phishing schemes and sextortion.
U.S. hacking laws prohibit individuals and companies from launching cyberattacks. According to TechCrunch, “the private sector can defend against incoming cyberattacks, but not launch of operate them,” a policy that spans several presidential administrations.
This program is still in the very early stages, with more guidance coming in the next few months. But there’s no way this could possibly backfire, right? I’m kidding: Even under normal circumstances, giving private companies this much power is likely to incentivize inventing enemies to fight or drive unnecessary spending. That’s the military-industrial complex in a nutshell.
You could say this program comes straight out of the Age of Sail, in which governments issued letters of marque and reprisal, licenses that authorized privateers to essentially practice legalized piracy, with private vessels attacking enemies of the state. Think of American shipping companies plundering British ships, which was common practice once upon a time. These letters haven’t been issued since the Civil War, but the parallel is obvious and creates shades of gray that could present major problems. Just look at Capt. William Kidd, who was hired by the British government to hunt pirates, but was later executed for being one.
Trump’s cyberattack program, in all likelihood, will just be another way for his tech-bro allies, like Peter Thiel of Palantir, to siphon more money from the government while doing next to nothing to actually protect Americans or improve their quality of life. This is especially concerning in light of recent news that the Homeland Security Department spied on left-leaning Minnesotans who criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Think these tools and tactics won’t be used domestically? That would certainly buck the trend of U.S. tech companies that regularly surveil Americans, be it Flock Safety, whose ubiquitous cameras are being used to stalk people getting abortions, or Clearview AI, the facial recognition company that hunts migrants.
A better solution might be to invest more in improved cybersecurity and critical infrastructure, like the power grids that risk being hacked. As they say, the best defense is a good offense. A digital bill of rights would be a major part of that by boosting privacy and protecting the level of data that corporations can siphon up about ordinary people. An even simpler solution, come to think of it, would be not picking fights with other countries that are likely to fight back. Alas, that’s probably too obvious a strategy for our tech-illiterate president, and not enough of a slush fund for Silicon Valley. Maybe someday we’ll have leaders who understand the internet and the importance of avoiding perverse incentives. Until then, it’s a good idea to keep your system software updated and use a strong password.
Flock Safety claims over 5,000 law enforcement agencies use its license plate readers to help locate missing persons, catch thieves and identify suspicious vehicles. The company is most known for its camera network, which extracts data about cars from photographs and allows operators to search for vehicles by description or license plate number.
But there’s been another persistent, unsanctioned use: officers stalking women.
At least 50 law enforcement officers have been accused or charged with the misuse of Flock or similar tools, and over half of the incidents involve surveillance related to romantic partners, per a recent investigation by The Washington Post. The reports include officers of all genders, but many cases involve a uniformed man stalking a civilian woman — or the people close to her. Forty-six of the cases tallied by The Post involved Flock equipment.
But the problem is not only one company. Two law enforcement agencies in Colorado cut ties with Flock, only to shift contracts to Axon, another automatic license plate reader (APLR) vendor. The heart of the matter, advocates say, is this: New surveillance technologies are always appropriated to inflict intimate partner violence. Experts say systems like smart cameras and automated license plate readers are sold to the public as ways to increase safety, but there are few, if any, guardrails to prevent them from becoming tools of domestic violence.
LOVEINT, short for “love intelligence,” entered the lexicon in 2013 when National Security Agency (NSA) officials admitted some employees misused intelligence networks to spy on romantic partners. The revelation came as the country grappled with whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks exposing the vast reach of the agency’s surveillance. Snowden also talked about how intimate images stumbled upon by young NSA analysts would travel through the workplace.
Any technology that has the capacity for mass surveillance is inevitably used for gender violence, said Reem Suleiman, senior campaign director at Fight for the Future, a digital civil rights nonprofit. She helps organize an effort to “deflock” Lowe’s, one of the company’s largest commercial clients.
“Even if you can find a use case or some utility for it, you cannot actually guardrail away some of these inherent harms,” she said. And those harms most often come at the cost of vulnerable groups like women, LGBTQ+ people and people of color.
At the same time, survivors of domestic violence or stalking use these surveillance products for their advertised purpose: to monitor their personal safety. Products like Ring, doorbells with always-on recording capabilities, are easier to set up than a closed-circuit security system, but how the data will be used by surveillance tech companies varies from brand to brand and is often unclear. There is a difference in levels of disclosure and control between a police officer having to ask someone individually for their private surveillance footage versus submitting a request to a corporation that isn’t obligated to give notice to its customers when it shares their data.
Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has spent years working with survivors of domestic violence. That led her to co-found the Coalition Against Stalkerware, an international working group tackling the problem of software tools frequently used to spy on unknowing romantic partners.
Her efforts led the antivirus software Kaspersky to begin flagging the tools known as stalkerware as a privacy threat to its customers instead of labeling it as benign. But companies go under and relaunch with new advertising all the time. Galperin said she has seen how creators of stalkerware have resisted changing their product function in favor of rewriting ad copy to say their software is meant for parents, employees or “building trust in relationships.”
In response to cases of law enforcement officers across the country improperly accessing Flock for personal reasons, the company rolled out a voluntary audit tool in April. It requires precincts to opt in, and only catches abuse after it happens.
“We’re not going to change humans, and humans make bad decisions,” Garrett Langley, CEO and co-founder of Flock, told The Post. “What we can do is make sure that they know if you use this tool, you will be held accountable.”
Lucy Qin, a postdoc at Georgetown University who researches privacy, pushed back against this framing: “Shorter-term fixes can band-aid the immediate problem but do not address a long-term pattern,” she said.
Galperin is similarly skeptical of any potential features that could meaningfully curb stalking: “It is not salvageable technology because of just the sheer scale of propensity to abuse.”
The abuse wasn’t necessarily unpredictable, either. Galperin pointed out that Flock is frequently used by police, a population generally shown to have above-average rates of domestic violence. Qin echoed that unauthorized use of surveillance data among law enforcement isn’t unprecedented.
Langley told a TED audience in April that the misuse of the company’s technology was “a trade-off I can make” compared to the number of investigations he said it assists with.
But the scale of the stalking problem isn’t fully known, Galperin said: “This is not a matter of a few people engaging in aberrant behavior. These are just the people who have gotten caught, and who have gotten caught so blatantly that they have experienced consequences.”
And those consequences tend to be mild: Several incidents in the Washington Post piece resulted in probation for offenders who used Flock inappropriately. Among the NSA employees who were caught for LOVEINT, the ones who didn’t resign were temporarily suspended or had security clearances revoked.
Getting to even that point can be difficult. Norma Buster is the chief of staff at C.A. Goldberg, a victim’s rights law firm focused on survivors of tech-enabled abuse. She handles intake for new clients, including those who are targeted by stalkers.
She said the team evaluates every circumstance individually, but typically helps clients currently experiencing stalking to file for a protective order. In New York, where the firm is located, people are only eligible for those if they are being stalked by a partner or ex-partner. This is a huge limitation, as Flock has been used by officers to track not just exes but the new beaus with whom they have moved on. C.A. Goldberg advocated for the CREEP Act, which would allow for protective orders to be filed against anyone for harassment regardless of relationship status. The bill is currently awaiting the signature or veto of Gov. Kathy Hochul.
After Marci Bakely’s ex-boyfriend confessed to using Flock to track her whereabouts in 2024, The Washington Post reported a judge denied her petition for a protective order, saying she had no evidence to back up her allegations of stalking.
Buster said there’s a digital literacy problem in the legal system; she saw this firsthand when she had difficulty finding a prosecutor to take up her own case involving image-based sexual abuse years ago.
Ultimately, Buster said, it’s on tech companies to make sure their products are safe before they are released into the world. She doesn’t consider herself a tech expert, but over the years said she’s worked with thousands of survivors of tech-facilitated violence. “If I can foresee this, then I think an engineer who’s designing the product can foresee it too.”
Hayden Panettiere, the former child actor who became a household name as an indestructible cheerleader on “Heroes” before starring as a troubled country singer on “Nashville,” has died. She was 36.
Panettiere’s representative confirmed her death to ABC News on Sunday. A cause and other details surrounding her death were not immediately disclosed.
Born Aug. 21, 1989, in Palisades, New York, Panettiere began appearing in commercials before her first birthday. She went on to roles in “One Life to Live,” “Guiding Light,” “A Bug’s Life,” “Remember the Titans” and “Ice Princess.”
Her breakout role came in 2006 as Claire Bennet, a high school cheerleader with regenerative powers, on NBC’s “Heroes.” The character inspired the show’s signature slogan: “Save the cheerleader, save the world.”
Panettiere later starred opposite Connie Britton as ambitious country singer Juliette Barnes on the ABC and CMT drama “Nashville.” The six-season role showcased her acting and singing abilities and earned her two Golden Globe nominations.
Her other credits included “Bring It On: All or Nothing” and the “Scream” franchise. Her return as Kirby Reed in 2023’s “Scream VI” marked her first major screen role after a long acting hiatus.
Panettiere spoke candidly about her experiences with addiction, an abusive relationship and postpartum depression following the birth of her daughter, Kaya, in 2014. Her younger brother, actor Jansen Panettiere, died unexpectedly at 28 in 2023.
In May, she released “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” a memoir about child stardom, motherhood, addiction and recovery. She also publicly came out as bisexual while promoting the book. She was also battling back from a severe lower back injury that left her almost paralyzed last year.
Panettiere is survived by her 11-year-old daughter and her parents, Lesley Vogel and Skip Panettiere. She died just five days before her 37th birthday.
Nicholas Brendon, the actor best known for playing Xander Harris on the late-90s cult classic tv show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” has died at age 54. His family announced he passed peacefully in his sleep on March 20, 2026. In recent years, Brendon was plagued with medical health issues. By 2023, he had a heart attack and was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect and cauda equina syndrome, the latter led to several spinal surgeries.
We are heartbroken to share the passing of our brother and son, Nicholas Brendon. He passed in his sleep of natural causes. pic.twitter.com/DqVQfVL8Xk
Brendon’s portrayal of Xander — the everyman of the Sunnydale crew, who navigated a world of vampires and slayers armed only with wit, loyalty, and heart — earned him a devoted following and a lasting place in television history.
Costars quickly paid tribute on social media. Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played Buffy, wrote a heartfelt post invoking one of Xander’s comforting lines, a nod to the actor’s warmth both on and off screen. Alyson Hannigan, who portrayed Willow, shared: “My Sweet Nicky, thank you for years of laughter, love and Dodgers … I love you.” David Boreanaz, Buffy’s vampire love interest Angel, praised Brendon’s authenticity and spirit, emphasizing the depth of their personal friendship beyond the show.
Just last year, the “Buffy” cast and fans said goodbye to Michelle Tractenberg, Buffy’s younger sister “Dawn” to many fans.
Fans also expressed grief online, remembering Xander as the heart of the group, a character whose vulnerability and humor made him relatable in a world of supernatural extremes. Many reflected on Brendon’s candidness about his personal struggles, celebrating his humanity alongside his talent.
Though Brendon faced challenges in his life and career, his work on Buffy remains a testament to his ability to connect with audiences through humor, loyalty, and emotional honesty. Xander Harris may have been the “normal” one in a cast of extraordinary characters, but Brendon’s performance ensured he was unforgettable — both to fans and to the colleagues who mourn his passing.
The top U.S. military commander in the Middle East visited the USS Abraham Lincoln on Saturday as the aircraft carrier’s exhausted crew nears the end of a nearly nine-month deployment marked by reports of deteriorating living conditions and mental health concerns.
Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command, spent several hours aboard the Lincoln meeting with sailors and Marines during a 10-day tour of the region. It was the only ship Cooper visited during the trip.
The visit comes as scrutiny grows over conditions aboard the carrier, which left San Diego in November and has now been deployed for more than 260 days. The Lincoln has gone more than 200 days without a port call while supporting U.S. operations in the war with Iran.
Families have reported food shortages, problems with drinking water, broken showers and laundry facilities and growing psychological strain among the roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard. Reports of sailors attempting to go overboard have further raised concerns about the crew’s mental health. The Navy has acknowledged mental health cases but disputed reports that the ship is experiencing a broader crisis.
The administration has largely dismissed the criticism.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said reports about conditions aboard the Lincoln have been misrepresented. President Donald Trump went further Friday, telling reporters that the carrier’s record-setting stretch at sea was “not nearly long enough.”
Families of deployed sailors have pushed back, accusing Trump and Hegseth of dismissing what their loved ones have experienced aboard the ship.
Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., a Marine Corps veteran, blamed the administration Sunday for what he called a “true lack of leadership.”
Retired Adm. Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told ABC’s “This Week” that morale aboard the Lincoln has improved since sailors learned they will finally be coming home.
The USS George Washington, the Navy’s only forward-deployed aircraft carrier, is being pulled from the western Pacific and sent toward the Middle East to replace the Lincoln. The move will temporarily leave the western Pacific without a U.S. aircraft carrier even as China increases military activity in the region.
The Lincoln’s return date has not yet been announced.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., offered a blunt assessment Sunday of President Donald Trump‘s new childhood vaccine policy: It could mean more shots, more doctor’s visits, higher costs and more sick children.
“If it wasn’t so potentially tragic, you would break out laughing at a comment like that,” Cassidy, a physician and chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
Cassidy was responding to Trump’s assertion that “nothing bad can happen” from his administration’s plan to overhaul the childhood vaccination schedule.
Cassidy also warned that requiring families to return repeatedly increases the chance children will miss doses, leaving them — and others — vulnerable to preventable illnesses.
“If you’re pro-life, you should be pro-vaccine,” Cassidy said.
The Louisiana Republican pointed to a recent case involving a pregnant woman who contracted a vaccine-preventable illness after exposure to an unvaccinated person and subsequently lost her pregnancy. Cassidy noted that immunity can decline during pregnancy, making community vaccination particularly important for protecting pregnant women.
“That is being pro-life,” he said.
In addition, Cassidy argued that the changes could turn two MMR shots into six individual injections — while requiring additional trips to the doctor’s office.
Trump has called for separating the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into individual shots and spacing out childhood vaccinations across additional medical visits, despite opposition from major medical organizations.
“Instead of mom or dad missing work twice,” Cassidy said, parents could have to “miss work or take vacation or personal leave six times.” More office visits would also increase costs for insurers and potentially premiums, he argued.
“This is working backwards on affordability,” Cassidy said.
The physician also warned that requiring families to return repeatedly increases the chance children will miss doses, leaving them vulnerable to preventable illnesses.
Trump has called the combined MMR vaccine potentially “lethal” and compared administering multiple vaccines to a “nuclear weapon.” Tapper reminded Cassidy that the senator previously called for someone to challenge “crazy stupid things” that undermine confidence in immunization and asked whether Trump’s statements qualified.
“Yeah, that’s a crazy stupid thing,” Cassidy replied.
Cassidy’s criticism carries additional political weight because he provided a crucial Republican vote to confirm Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic. Cassidy initially expressed concerns before supporting Kennedy after receiving assurances about vaccine policy, which he has since accused Kennedy of breaking.
Tapper pressed Cassidy on whether Kennedy’s history should have been warning enough.
Cassidy declined to revisit his vote, instead arguing that Trump’s policy will “decrease immunization rates” while being “less convenient and costing families more.”
Login
