The Washington Post - 04.10.2026 — 2026-10-04

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The Washington Post

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Democracy Dies in Darkness

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Rape claim reignites debate on consent

In some states, it's tough to prosecute in cases of voluntary intoxication

BY JOANNA SLATER

As detailed allegations of a 2024 gang rape at Cornell University emerged last month, Summer Willis felt both horror and a sense of recognition.

There were fraternity brothers exchanging vulgar messages about the accuser on Snapchat, echoing what Willis says happened after she herself was assaulted in 2014. And there was a district attorney saying on television that state law had made filing charges difficult or impossible, just as Willis had been told years ago.

“I almost threw up,” said Willis, 32, who heads an eponymous foundation focused on sexual assault survivors. “This is literally what we’re working on.”

The Cornell case, Willis knew, could hinge on an obscure gap in sexual assault statutes around intoxication and consent in states across the country, something she has made it her mission to change.

New York law classifies rape as situations in which the victim clearly refused sex or was physically forced to submit to it. The same is true if the victim was unconscious or unable to communicate. The statute also covers instances in which victims were intoxicated against their will.

But it can be difficult for prosecutors in New York and at least a dozen other states to bring rape charges in situations in which victims were voluntarily drinking or taking drugs and say they were too intoxicated to consent.

In a civil suit filed last month, a former Cornell student identified as “Jane Doe” alleged that she was “plied with alcohol and drugs to the point of intoxication” at the university’s Chi Phi fraternity house and raped by several men over about seven hours on Oct. 19, 2024. Lawyers for some of the alleged perpetrators have denied those assertions.

Matthew Van Houten, the SEE INTOXICATION ON A9

Carter Stevens, 31, rifles through a dumpster behind a condominium in downtown Nashville.

WILLIAM DESHAZER/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

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He lost it all, then found riches in rubbish

For Carter Stevens, the American Dream runs on reinvention after overconsumption nearly ruined him

BY DANIELLE PAQUETTE

NASHVILLE — Behind a luxury high-rise, Carter Stevens inspected his favorite dumpster.

Dresses on plastic hangers dangled over its rusty edge. A 65-inch flat-screen television jutted through cardboard boxes. A marble side table, wedged between trash bags, gleamed under the lunchtime sun.

"Jackpot," the 31-year-old muttered.

Sweating in the 95-degree heat, Carter tied his curly black hair into a bun and strode up to the steel bin the size of a U-Haul truck, ignoring the sticker that read “KEEP OFF!” He stepped onto a support rail and rose to his tiptoes, scanning inside for cockroaches. Nothing rustled.

“Easy does it,” he said, hoisting himself into the garbage.

Carter abhorred insects and was allergic to cat dander, but rummaging through dumpsters, he'd found a Gucci bag. BAPE sneakers. A Louis Vuitton button-up. "All the stuff we use to fill the void," he said.

Overconsumption had nearly ruined him before he learned how to exploit it. In two years, he'd gone from homeless and in debt to earning six figures from selling what others threw away.

Americans buy and discard more stuff than anyone else, and in Tennessee's booming capital — the Music City, the bachelorette destination, the influencer hub of the South — junk struck Carter as aston-

SEE SALVAGE ON A10

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[Trump's power buildup targeted] DEMOCRATS AIM TO REIN IN THE OFFICE

A plan to keep co-equal branch in check for future

BY NAFTALI BENDAVID

Democratic House members are writing bills to rein in a president's emergency powers. Lawyers are strategizing about how to insulate the Justice Department from presidential influence. A House measure would block a president from unilaterally remodeling the White House. Ethicists are writing rules to prevent a future first family from self-dealing.

Throughout Washington and beyond, President Donald Trump's opponents are scrambling to ensure that after he leaves office, the changes he has imposed on the presidency, and the country, will fade with him.

Whether they succeed could determine whether Trump's aggressive exercise of executive powers will be limited to a finite stretch of U.S. history or will instead become a model for every president to come.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (Maryland), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said that Trump's uses of presidential power can and must be reversed — but doing so will take decades.

"We have a massive reconstruction task ahead of us," Raskin said in an interview. "Fortunately, reconstruction has a great history in our country, and when it's allowed to work, it has been a lot more successful than either authoritarianism or revolution. ... We will have to go department by department, subject by subject, and public purpose by public purpose to determine what we salvage and what we re-create."

From the beginning of the republic, the three branches have jostled for control over spending, war-making, immigration and virtually every other government function. Trump is hardly the SEE PRESIDENCY ON A4

SEE PRESIDENCY ON A4

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Bungled execution fuels calls to end the practice

Procedures are down nationwide, even as states like Florida ramp them up

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BY MARK Berman

After Tennessee tried and failed to execute Christa Pike by lethal injection Wednesday, the state's governor announced that executions would be halted there amid an investigation into what happened.

In effect, Tennessee took two starkly different approaches to the death penalty this past week. First, the state pushed to carry out an execution. When that was unsuccessful, it shifted to becoming a place where executions would not take place for the time being.

The conflicting actions highlight the unsettled, sometimes tumultuous state of the death penalty in America today: It remains on the books in many states, but executions have dropped sharply across the country in recent decades and capital punishment has diminished in other ways, with little to suggest that decline will reverse anytime soon.

Executions are now carried out by a relatively small share of states — including Florida, Texas and Alabama — and the annual number taking place nationwide has fallen significantly since the turn of the century. New death sentences have plummeted, while the number of states banning capital punishment has increased.

The broad decline in capital punishment likely stems from various factors, experts say, including lower violent crime rates, a wave of exonerations that have highlighted missteps in the justice system and better overall legal defense. “Jurors and the public at large understand a little bit more how the death penalty system works and doesn’t work,” said Emily Hughes, a law professor at the University of Iowa.

“With more information SEE DEATH PENALTY ON A13

ELECTION 2026

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Online trends force psychiatrists to rethink the diagnostic ‘bible’

Maladaptive daydreaming, obsessional jealousy and misophonia (an intense reaction to particular everyday sounds) are now topics of study

TIMO LENZEN/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

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BY ARIANA EUNJUNG CHA

As a teen, Jaweria Syed spent countless hours every day after school lying on her bed with her eyes closed, imagining herself onstage as a backup dancer for Drake, Nicki Minaj and other hip-hop artists. In reality, she hardly ever went out as her conservative Muslim family kept her from even trying out for after-school activities.

It wasn't until she was a young adult that Syed began to see her elaborate fantasy life as a problem — and, on TikTok, found a name for it: “maladaptive daydreaming.”

"I was living in my head more than in real life," said Syed, now 25.

The term helped Syed understand something that shaped much of her life. But it raised a more fundamental question: Where do ordinary human emotions and weirdness end and mental illness begin?

On Instagram, Reddit, YouTube and elsewhere, people are comparing symptoms and diagnosing themselves. People are creating communities around conditions, getting emotional support and identifying as sufferers before psychiatry has even decided what, exactly, they are.

Psychiatrists worry the information people encounter as they scroll has encouraged them to interpret ordinary quirks, distress or personality traits as a mental disorder.

Maladaptive daydreaming is one example. Misophonia (an intense reaction to particular everyday sounds) is another popular topic on social media, as well as pathological or obsessional jealousy (a persistent preoccupation with a partner's suspected infidelity).

María A. Oquendo, chair of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, said researchers once took notice of potential new diagnoses when enough patients began reporting similar symptoms to doctors. Social media has complicated that process, allowing reports of diagnoses and symptoms to spread in 30-second reels.

Oquendo chairs the American Psychiatric Association's committee developing a roadmap for the next “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” which is weighing new scientific evidence alongside patients’ “lived experience” as it considers how psychiatric conditions are defined.

But incorporating those experiences at a time when ideas and misinformation about mental health can spread rapidly online presents a challenge.

“Providing context in that climate is difficult if not impossible,” Oquendo said.

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#mentalhealthselfdiagnosis

Two studies published earlier this year provide a window into the sprawling social media world of mental health information.

A survey of 372 college students published in May in the Journal of Communication in Healthcare found that TikTok was the most commonly used channel for those seeking mental health information, followed closely by Instagram. A second analysis out in April in Health Communication analyzed 150 TikTok #mentalhealthselfdiagnosis or #mentalhealthdiagnosis videos and 1,400 comments and found that only 1 out of 5 of the content creators identified themselves as medical professionals. ADHD and autism were the most talked about conditions but many others were discussed.

Ran Ju, a professor of public relations at Mount Royal University who is a co-author of both studies, said that people are turning to online sources of information after encountering systemic barriers including long wait lists and long drives to see a doctor.

“We found frustration in getting medical diagnoses in the real world,” Ju said.

Clinicians are seeing the other side of that dynamic: Patients increasingly arrive not just with information gleaned online, but with a diagnosis already in mind.

Paul Weigle, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, has treated children and teens for 27 years. Early in his career, patients often dreaded getting a diagnosis, he said. Now, more are coming having already diagnosed themselves. In some cases, waves of young patients identify similar conditions, such as multiple personality disorder.

Weigle, who puts on a program about young people and screens at the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry's annual meeting, said he likes seeing young people more interested in mental health. But he cautioned that the most popular posts tend to feature influencers who are “relatable, entertaining and attractive — not necessarily those who are giving the most accurate information.”

“Very often I’ve found in clinical practice self-diagnosis doesn’t line up with professional diagnosis,” he said.

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BY ARIANA EUNJUNG CHA

As a teen, Jaweria Syed spent countless hours every day after school lying on her bed with her eyes closed, imagining herself onstage as a backup dancer for Drake, Nicki Minaj and other hip-hop artists. In reality, she hardly ever went out as her conservative Muslim family kept her from even trying out for after-school activities.

It wasn't until she was a young adult that Syed began to see her elaborate fantasy life as a problem — and, on TikTok, found a name for it: “maladaptive daydreaming.”

"I was living in my head more than in real life," said Syed, now 25.

The term helped Syed understand something that shaped much of her life. But it raised a more fundamental question: Where do ordinary human emotions and weirdness end and mental illness begin?

On Instagram, Reddit, YouTube and elsewhere, people are comparing symptoms and diagnosing themselves. People are creating communities around conditions, getting emotional support and identifying as sufferers before psychiatry has even decided what, exactly, they are.

Psychiatrists worry the information people encounter as they scroll has encouraged them to interpret ordinary quirks, distress or personality traits as a mental disorder.

Maladaptive daydreaming is one example. Misophonia (an intense reaction to particular everyday sounds) is another popular topic on social media, as well as pathological or obsessional jealousy (a persistent preoccupation with a partner's suspected infidelity).

María A. Oquendo, chair of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, said researchers once took notice of potential new diagnoses when enough patients began reporting similar symptoms to doctors. Social media has complicated that process, allowing reports of diagnoses and symptoms to spread in 30-second reels.

Oquendo chairs the American Psychiatric Association's committee developing a roadmap for the next “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” which is weighing new scientific evidence alongside patients’ “lived experience” as it considers how psychiatric conditions are defined.

But incorporating those experiences at a time when ideas and misinformation about mental health can spread rapidly online presents a challenge.

“Providing context in that climate is difficult if not impossible,” Oquendo said.

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#mentalhealthselfdiagnosis

Two studies published earlier this year provide a window into the sprawling social media world of mental health information.

A survey of 372 college students published in May in the Journal of Communication in Healthcare found that TikTok was the most commonly used channel for those seeking mental health information, followed closely by Instagram. A second analysis out in April in Health Communication analyzed 150 TikTok #mentalhealthselfdiagnosis or #mentalhealthdiagnosis videos and 1,400 comments and found that only 1 out of 5 of the content creators identified themselves as medical professionals. ADHD and autism were the most talked about conditions but many others were discussed.

Ran Ju, a professor of public relations at Mount Royal University who is a co-author of both studies, said that people are turning to online sources of information after encountering systemic barriers including long wait lists and long drives to see a doctor.

“We found frustration in getting medical diagnoses in the real world,” Ju said.

Clinicians are seeing the other side of that dynamic: Patients increasingly arrive not just with information gleaned online, but with a diagnosis already in mind.

Paul Weigle, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, has treated children and teens for 27 years. Early in his career, patients often dreaded getting a diagnosis, he said. Now, more are coming having already diagnosed themselves. In some cases, waves of young patients identify similar conditions, such as multiple personality disorder.

Weigle, who puts on a program about young people and screens at the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry's annual meeting, said he likes seeing young people more interested in mental health. But he cautioned that the most popular posts tend to feature influencers who are “relatable, entertaining and attractive — not necessarily those who are giving the most accurate information.”

“Very often I’ve found in clinical practice self-diagnosis doesn’t line up with professional diagnosis,” he said.

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Misophonia

Though it is not officially a disorder, misophonia occupies a peculiar place on social media: It is both a source of genuine anguish and an easy punch line. In one video, a woman describes how the sound of popcorn popping at family gatherings can make her irrationally angry. Elsewhere, an entire genre of short videos is devoted to provoking precisely that response, with creators chewing, slurping and making other noises to apparently torment people who say they cannot stand them.

Misophonia is commonly translated as “hatred of sound,” but it goes beyond that, according to M. Zachary Rosenthal, who directs Duke University's Center for Misophonia and Emotion Regulation. Sufferers can react intensely not only to sounds, but also to visual and tactile stimuli.

Research into the condition has accelerated in recent years. In 2022, Rosenthal and other experts convened to settle on a standard definition of misophonia. They succeeded, at least partly: The group agreed on what the condition looks like, but not on what, exactly, it is. A psychiatric disorder? A problem with how the brain processes sound? A difficulty regulating emotion? A learned response? Some combination of the three?

That uncertainty can make misophonia particularly easy to dismiss. Plenty of people, after all, find the sound of someone chewing annoying. But Rosenthal argues that this misses an important distinction. Many psychological problems do not operate like a light switch, with normal on one side and disordered on the other. They are more like a dimmer: The question is how intense the experience becomes, and how much it interferes with a person's life.

“Somebody can be anxious but not have an anxiety disorder,” Rosenthal said. “Just like someone can feel sad, down or hopeless but not have depression.”

For some people with misophonia, he said, the reaction becomes severe enough to cause significant distress or interfere with everyday life. It is at that end of the spectrum that an ordinary human irritation begins to look like something else.

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Obsessional jealousy

On social media, “pathological” jealousy is often discussed in the context of intimate partner violence and coercive control. But Johan Åhlén, a psychology researcher at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, argues that the phenomenon can be broader.

In February, he co-wrote a viewpoint article in JAMA Psychiatry arguing that, for some people, ordinary jealousy can become “excessive, intrusive, persistent, and uncontrollable,” suggesting such cases might constitute a distinct diagnosis. In the current DSM, it is described as a possible presentation of an obsessive compulsive disorder and some doctors refer to it as “relationship OCD.” This type of categorization can give researchers and clinicians a framework for studying emerging patterns of symptoms while they conduct more studies and assess whether these problems amount to a disorder.

Åhlén describes obsessional jealousy more as a kind of threat response, comparing it to health anxiety, or hypochondria.

“You feel something in your body and think you have a very dangerous disease,” he said. In much the same way, he said, a person may become consumed by the possibility that a partner is unfaithful.

However, he said, many of the people he has interviewed who describe obsessional jealousy “know rationally there’s nothing to be worried about.”

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Maladaptive daydreaming

The term “maladaptive daydreaming” was coined by Eli Somer, a researcher at the University of Haifa in Israel who has spent years arguing that it constitutes a distinct clinical syndrome.

“It is similar to behavioral addiction in terms of craving, lack of control, and the fact that it continues even when it causes harm,” Somer said. It also involves what he calls “dissociative absorption”: becoming so im-

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TikTok mental health videos

In a recent study, the most common topics were ADHD and autism.

1 Personality disorder

2 Disruptive mood dysregulation disorder

Source: "#MentalHealthDiagnosis and self-diagnosis: Harmful or helpful on TikTok." Health Communication, 1-12. 2026.

mersed in an internal world that engagement with the real one recedes.

Somer said “a diagnosis should identify a disabling pattern,” adding that therapy aims to help people “regain choice over their attention and their lives while preserving an imagination they may deeply value.”

The idea has since traveled far beyond academic circles. Joe Whittington, an emergency-medicine physician in Orange County, California, has 2.2 million followers on TikTok and nearly 1 million on Instagram, where he posts as @drjoe\_md. In a recent video, he took up maladaptive daydreaming, explaining that although it is not a diagnosis in the DSM, daydreaming itself is nearly universal. The distinction, he said, is what happens when it begins to interfere with daily life.

“Sometimes simply introducing people to a concept gives them a vocabulary for an experience they’ve had for years but never really knew how to explain,” Whittington said.

For Syed, that labeling proved consequential. As she spent less time retreating into fantasies, she said, she was forced to confront the life she had been avoiding. She divorced her husband from an arranged marriage and left her elementary-school teaching job to pursue her artistic interests.

She never sought professional help but says learning about the concept online gave her a starting point to recognize how unhealthy her daydreaming had become. She vetted what she found, consulting medical sources alongside first-person accounts.

While Syed can never go back and join the high school cheer or dance teams that she missed out on, she said she's happy to be able to explore her artistic side today through her work creating social media content for weddings and other events. She is now planning to sign up for dance classes near her home in Houston.

“I guess for the longest time I thought where I was was normal,” she said. But, the day-dreaming “was preventing me from making my dreams into reality and it was making my real life unproductive.”

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[THE NATION] This Democrat is struggling in state that rejects Trump

Democratic Senate candidate Rep. Chris Pappas greets supporters at his primary election watch party on Sept. 8.

PHOTOS BY CJ GUNTHER/GETTY IMAGES

Republican Senate candidate John Sununu, with wife Kitty, speaks at his primary election watch party.

New Hampshire's Senate race is considered a toss-up

BY BEN BINDAY

MANCHESTER, N.H. — In a year where Democrats are expanding the map of competitive Senate seats into deep-red states, they are facing a surprising source of angst in New Hampshire, which rejected President Donald Trump three times.

Republican John E. Sununu has many factors working in his favor in his campaign against Rep. Chris Pappas (D). He has high name recognition as a former senator from the early 2000s. He shares a last name with two popular former governors, and some voters said they don't know that he's a different Sununu. He maintains an endorsement from Trump while disagreeing with him on some unpopular policies, including Canadian tariffs and the war in Iran. Republicans have outspent Democrats in the state.

Some Republicans also believe having popular Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte, who is favored to win reelection, at the top of the ballot will help Sununu.

Recent polls by the University of New Hampshire and the New York Times/Siena University showed Pappas with eight and five point leads, respectively, though some polls have shown Sununu leading or even with Pappas. The nonpartisan election prognosticator Cook Political Report recently shifted the race from “Lean Democratic” to “toss up” even while moving other ratings in Democrats’ favor.

The competitiveness of New Hampshire's Senate race is somewhat surprising in a state former Vice President Kamala Harris carried by 2.8 percentage points in 2024.

In many years, Sununu's advantages might be enough to win in a state known for political independence and electing politicians from both parties. Yet interviews with dozens of voters in Merrimack, Hillsborough and Rockingham counties found an electorate where Trump is so unpopular (a recent UNH poll showed a 33 percent approval rating in the state) that voters appeared more inclined to cast their ballots based on the Senate candidates' party affiliations in an election they view as a referendum on Trump's presidency.

"I used to vote for either party based on the candidate," said Mark Hargreaves, a 72-year-old Derry resident who voiced strong opposition to Trump. "However, given recent events, I will not vote for a Republican."

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Why the race matters

The race to replace retiring Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D) is critical to Democratic efforts to flip control of the Senate, where Republicans hold a 53 to 47 majority. Democrats' clearest path to retaking the majority involves maintaining control of the seats they hold and flipping at least four Republican-controlled seats, in large part by trying to capitalize on voter frustrations with Trump.

Sununu, 62, has sought to keep the race local and demonstrate independence from the White House. He has broadly avoided engaging with national media during the campaign, and his campaign declined Washington Post requests for an interview.

He accepted an endorsement from Trump in February, allowing him to coast to the Republican nomination in September's primary. Now, the endorsements section of Sununu's campaign website doesn't list his most famous backer. Sununu has said Trump was wrong to start a war with Iran, criticized Trump's adversarial trade policy with Canada and argued Congress needs to reclaim power from the executive branch. He even published an op-ed in the New Hampshire Union Leader in 2024, before his campaign, headlined “Donald Trump is a loser.”

But Sununu is also counting on the president's supporters and money to help his campaign.

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A debate over independence

On the trail, he avoids explicitly criticizing Trump. He has praised the Iran war for weakening Iran and its nuclear program, and declined to endorse a congressional war powers resolution meant to stop the conflict. He backed Trump's signature domestic legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, that cut social services and other spending to fund tax cuts largely benefiting the wealthy. And he broadly defends the premise of Trump's tariffs even while criticizing those imposed on Canada, a trading partner of New Hampshire.

“Granite Staters are going to know that John Sununu is a vote for Donald Trump’s reckless agenda,” Pappas, who has served in Congress since 2019, said in an interview. “He’s been a pretty consistently conservative voice on the issues, where he’s out of step with the voters of the Granite State.”

Sununu campaign spokesperson Mike Schrimpf defended Sununu's independence in a statement to The Post.

“John has said he will have just one job as Senator: be an independent voice who will fight for the people of New Hampshire every single day, including standing up to the White House when it serves New Hampshire,” Schrimpf wrote, criticizing Pappas as a “partisan insider” and “a politician who always puts his political party first.”

Pappas, 46, has also sought to portray himself as an independent voice, though he doesn't talk much about how he would break from his own party.

When asked for a policy where he would break with Democratic leadership in the Senate, he cited a handful of times in the House when he pushed back against the Biden administration, including when he repeatedly criticized Biden's handling of the southern border. He would not commit to endorsing Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) as Democrats' leader in the chamber and he said party leadership was "flat-footed" at the beginning of Trump's second term.

Pappas, who has led a relatively low-key campaign characterized by small events across the state, is largely aligned with the Democratic Party's mainstream. He lacks the large national profile of some other Democratic Senate candidates, such as Michigan's Abdul El-Sayed, and is not seen as being on the leading edge of any high-profile policy. If elected, he would make history as the first openly gay male senator.

But when asked for their reasons for supporting Pappas voters rarely mentioned him by name. Many instead cited their opposition to Trump and the importance of Democrats gaining control of the Senate.

And New Hampshire voters of both parties said that they expect Sununu to be a reliable vote for Trump's agenda in Congress if elected.

“I don’t view [Sununu] as independent-thinking,” Laura Mick, 48, said in an interview in downtown Manchester. “He doesn’t seem in-touch with the average person, and I think he’ll vote with Trump.” Mick, who described herself as “center-left,” plans to support Pappas.

Hargreaves, the Derry resident, predicted Sununu would "be a rubber stamp for everything Trump and MAGA wants."

Jim Demers, a Democratic strategist in New Hampshire, said the election reminds him of the 2006 midterms, when New Hampshire voters disapproved of then-President George W. Bush and Democrats had a “huge, unexpected batch of wins across the board.”

"People have seen and heard over the past two years a lot of Republicans in Washington who have tried to sound like they're not with Trump, but every time a vote comes up, they are," Demers said. "People are really annoyed with the rhetoric that they hear that isn't backed up by action."

The contest, in some ways, is also a battle between two prominent statewide brands: Sununu, whose brother Chris Sununu was New Hampshire's governor from 2017 to 2025 and whose father John H. Sununu led the state in the 1980s; and Pappas, whose family has for generations run a popular restaurant in Manchester and whose grandfather is credited for inventing the chicken tender.

"The Sununu family has done a lot of good for this state, and I think he [John] will do the same," said Elizabeth Johnson, a stay-at-home mother backing Sununu, said in an interview outside a cafe in Portsmouth.

Sununu may also be benefiting from voters mistaking his identity with his brother, who left office in 2025 with an approval rating near 60 percent. Cook, the election prognosticator, cited the confusion as a factor in their toss-up rating.

Sununu's yard signs, displayed prominently in fields and paths across the state, don't say his first name. Instead, they just read “Sununu / Senator.”

Even Pappas took aim at the popular Sununu family, accusing Sununu in the interview of “coasting on his family name.” But he also downplayed concerns about confusion, saying voters would know the difference between the Sununu family members by November.

When asked about the confusion, Sununu has made light of voters mixing the two up ("I'm sure when Chris ran, people thought he was me, he told PBS) while emphasizing his own record in Congress and rejecting that his family name is carrying his candidacy.

Some New Hampshire residents speaking to The Post mixed up which Sununu is on the ballot. One, who said she follows politics, said there were “lots of things” she didn’t like about him when he was governor.

"I liked him as governor," said Robert Drew, a 33 year-old sales employee and Manchester resident. "I've met him personally, so I like him on a personal level."

When corrected, Drew, an independent who described himself as “more conservative-leaning” and said he has gone “back-and-forth” between Democrats and Republicans in elections, said that he has also had “positive” interactions with John Sununu.

“See, I’m not informed enough,” he joked. “But I’d support him too.”

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Trump announces plan to send \$90 payments to millions of seniors

White House says cash comes from a fund set up to improve Medicare

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BY DAN DIAMOND

The White House announced plans Friday night to send \$90 payments to more than 20 million older Americans, with President Donald Trump tying the initiative to his broader push to lower health care costs.

The money would be drawn from about \$2 billion set aside to improve Medicare's hospital and medical insurance programs, which has not been used for that purpose since the initiative's inception in 2008, administration officials said Saturday. Both parties have used the money, held in the Medicare Improvement Fund, in congressional budget maneuvers.

“We are finally using this Fund, along with my Most Favored Nations Deals, to substantially LOWER costs for our Seniors,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday night, also mentioning his initiative to lower U.S. drug prices.

The payments will be sent to most Medicare Part B enrollees, with many of them receiving a \$90 direct deposit this month, the White House said. Others will receive a check sent to the address on file with Medicare.

Trump's announcement follows his other pledges to send money to Americans ahead of November's midterm elections, including his plan to send \$500 Affordable Care Act refund checks to nearly 1 million people in 30 states. The administration began sending those checks this past week, alongside a letter touting his record.

Democrats have called the moves a stunt and questioned the legality of dipping into government accounts to send payments to Americans.

The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Medicare Improvement Fund, did not immediately respond to questions about the administration's legal authority to issue the payments.

Trump's announcement caught congressional offices in both parties by surprise, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment.

"This is another desperate attempt by a failed president to escape Americans' revulsion with his failed agenda, amounting to one tank of Trump-inflated gas," said Sen. Ron Wyden (Oregon), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which helps oversee the Medicare program.

Trump has floated multiple proposals to send dividends to Americans during his second term, but some of them have not materialized. In February 2025, he said his administration was considering a proposal to give 20 percent of savings from the controversial DOGE government cost-cutting effort to Americans. That proposal would have delivered roughly \$5,000 to each of the roughly 79 million households in which residents pay federal income tax.

The president said Friday night that the \$90 payments were proof that he would follow through with his pledge to send a \$5,000 dividend to every American adult if Republicans retain control of Congress in November's midterm elections — a pledge that has raised broad questions about its legality and funding.

“Because I delivered on this very important issue for the American People, they can also rest assured the highly popular \$5,000 Trump Dividend will be distributed to every U.S. Citizen if, and when, the Republicans win the Midterm Elections!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Stormwater is drained from the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool last month. The president's critics say his scale and aggressiveness have pushed executive authority far beyond any previous modern president.

FINN GOMEZ/GETTY IMAGES

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How Democrats hope to reverse Trump's changes to the presidential office

PRESIDENCY FROM A1

first president to try to sharply elbow the other branches out of the way.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan startled critics by firing more than 11,000 air traffic controllers. George W. Bush, jolted by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, secretly approved tactics against prisoners that many considered torture.

Barack Obama, initially critical of such actions, went on to expand presidential authority in his own right. He created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2012 by executive order, prompting GOP complaints that he was simply making up a law. He used drone strikes to target and kill suspected terrorists far from traditional battlefields. And he put numerous “czars” over areas like energy and health care, which Republicans charged was a way to avoid confirmation fights.

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"They are full of baloney – I don't think Democrats would ever limit the power of a Democratic president. The idea of Democrats saving democracy, it's nonsense."

Tiffany Justice, executive vice president of the conservative group Heritage Action, pointed to this history to dismiss talk of post-Trump reforms, saying the president is doing nothing Democratic presidents have not done and predicting that Democrats' plans will go nowhere.

“They are full of baloney — I don’t think Democrats would ever limit the power of a Democratic president,” Justice said. “The idea of Democrats saving democracy, it’s nonsense.”

Administration officials argue that Trump has changed the country forever and followed established procedures for everything he has done. “The Trump administration has abided by all legal decisions and gone through the appellate process with great success,” said a White House spokesman. “His successes on behalf of the American people will be imprinted upon the fabric of America and will be felt by every other White House that comes after him,” said White House communications director Steven Cheung.

But Trump's critics say that in the scale, sweep and sheer aggressiveness of his actions — from demolishing the East Wing of the White House to pursuing legal actions against political opponents — Trump has pushed executive authority far beyond any previous modern president.

With a possible recapture of Congress just one month away, Democrats' efforts to limit the staying power of those changes are heating up.

Several lawmakers are crafting bills to curtail a president's ability to declare emergencies, which Trump has used in novel ways, declaring about a dozen emergencies to justify policies as varied as imposing tariffs, accelerating deportations and deploying the National Guard. Reps.

Suzan DelBene (D-Washington) and Don Beyer (D-Virginia) have introduced a bill forbidding a president from levying tariffs under the guise of a national emergency unless Congress agrees.

Raskin has drafted bills to ban a president from accepting payments from foreign governments without Congress's consent and require a public review for renovations of the White House. Another measure would block a president from entering monetary settlements with his own government, which a federal judge scolded Trump and the Justice Department for this summer, saying they had attempted to "use" and "manipulate" the court to legitimize a deal that would have shielded Trump from IRS scrutiny and set up a nearly \$1.8 billion fund for alleged victims of politicized prosecutions.

Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and potential Democratic presidential candidate, recently released an ethics proposal for all three branches of government that would ban trading stocks and betting in prediction markets, require a blind trust for anyone worth more than \$1 million, and forbid individuals from accepting foreign gifts. Trump has traded millions of dollars worth of individual stocks since taking office and famously accepted the gift of an aircraft from the Qatari government.

Tiffany Justice, executive vice president of the conservative group Heritage Action

And Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) has introduced a No Political Enemies Act, forbidding executive branch officials from prosecuting or punishing individuals or groups for their speech, something Trump has done relatively openly.

Some of these proposals may be partly symbolic, aimed at galvanizing voters and showing resistance to Trump rather than serving as strict blueprints for reform. Democrats themselves do not know when, if ever, they may have the public support to push them through. They have no guarantee of success; Trump survived two impeachments, prosecutions and investigations before winning the White House a second time.

Still, the Democrats say they see little alternative to trying.

The Partnership for Public Service, which trains government employees and advocates for ways to improve the public workforce, has crafted proposals to strengthen civil service protections, making it harder for future presidents to fire employees en masse as Trump and his ally Elon Musk did. Congress, for example, could strengthen rules requiring that hiring and firing must be based on merit and due process — and then confront an administration that violates those rules.

Would-be reformers argue that periods of excess in U.S.

history often prompt waves of reform. The Gilded Age of the late 1800s gave way to the Progressive Era. The corruption of Watergate in the 1970s generated a slew of new ethics laws.

It is not clear whether Americans support a new wave of reform laws. But a Pew poll last year found that 78 percent of Americans had concerns about expanding presidential power.

“Throughout American history, reform follows scandal,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, a liberal-leaning think tank that focuses on law and democracy. “It does not always follow scandal, but that’s when it happens. I think there will be a real hunger, I hope from both parties, to write into law some of the protections that were assumed to be there before.”

Some historians say many of Trump's actions will be hard to reverse. It is far easier to smash through guardrails, they say, than to rebuild them. Most modern presidents have expanded executive power at the expense of Congress. Whether that trend continues could depend in large part on whether the legislative branch begins to reassert itself as a counterweight to the presidency.

“Once we get through this nightmare, the rest of our careers will have to be devoted to reviving American progress and building institutions that endure and succeed," Raskin said. "That is going to be the work of the rest of our lives."

Donald Trump walks out to speak at a campaign rally in Kinston, North Carolina, on Nov. 3, 2024, two days before he was reelected.

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

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The temptation for revenge — or acquiescence

The midterm campaigns have spawned numerous Democratic candidates with sharply combative anti-Trump messages. If they win majorities in Congress, some Democrats could well be tempted to turn the president's hardball tactics against him and his followers once he leaves the scene.

A post-Trump president could, for example, prod the Justice Department to investigate his own political adversaries, as Trump has.

“It will be very tempting for Democrats to say, ‘Oh, you think we are going to limit our abuse of the Justice Department? We don’t want to be suckers,’” Waldman said. “But I think that would be a big mistake. Everybody benefits when the rule of law is in play across the government.”

More immediately, the next administration will have to decide whether to prosecute Trump officials who may have broken the law by misusing their authority. Some Democrats, for example, say the way Justice Department officials have targeted Trump's enemies is illegal and could expose those officials to charges.

Trump, in an effort to counteract such moves, has promised that before he leaves office he will preemptively pardon anyone who has come “within 200 feet” of the Oval Office, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

Some liberals say Democrats should take a lesson from Trump on how to govern with force and purpose. Trump does not hesitate to take actions that skirt the edges of legality, happy to let the courts sort it out. He pressures private firms to back his policies. He issues sweeping executive orders rather than trying to persuade Congress to act.

"This president litigates the way he bargains: He makes some very far-out claims, not expecting to win them all, but sort of ‘what the hell’ — that’s his theory," said William A. Galston, a former domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton. "If you lose cases no other president would have dreamed of bringing, and you win a few big ones, you’re ahead of the game."

It may be tempting for future presidents to act the same way. "There has been an overcautiousness in some Democratic and some Republican administrations that will seem quite quaint after this administration," said Ben Olinsky, senior vice president at the Center for American Progress, a center-left SEE PRESIDENCY ON A5

---

Trump's foes work to ensure aggressive approach to power doesn't outlast him

scandal that brought down President Richard M. Nixon.

PRESIDENCY FROM A4

Gold leaf on sculptures along the Arlington National Bridge is a recent addition to Trump's makeover of Washington, D.C.

MATT MCCLAIN/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

think tank.

That is especially true of executive orders and actions, which Trump has refashioned as all-purpose policy and communications weapons. He has issued more than 280 so far in his second term, far outpacing his recent predecessors, according to figures compiled by the American Presidency Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

"A new administration will do a lot of governing through executive order," said Richard Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University. "They will want to show that they can act decisively."

Even while they plot a post-Trump future, many Democrats say they cannot simply return to a status quo that voters hated. Yet it is far from clear what their new agenda will be.

Max Stier, president of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, said the damage Trump has inflected on the current system opens up new possibilities. Stier has suggested slashing the roughly 4,000 political appointees in the government, saying they can be unqualified and unaccountable.

“There is opportunity in this madness, the opportunity to re-examine some of the basic expectations around our government,” Stier said. “Because the status quo has been disrupted, the ability to think larger and bigger is there.”

Tiffany Justice, of Heritage Action, challenged that entire narrative. Trump is not wielding the presidency in some new way, she said, but rather using it as Democrats always have — and that is what truly upsets the left.

“President Trump is using his power in a way that Democrats have in the past,” Justice said, citing, for example, President Joe Biden’s order protecting gender transition care. “Republicans always in the past have been uneasy about using power. Democrats are never uneasy about using power.”

---

Another Watergate?

If there is anything that gives would-be reformers hope, it is the aftermath of the Watergate

Nixon, like Trump, stretched presidential authority in ways that challenged the law and the Constitution. After his 1974 resignation, a previously quiescent Congress roared back to action, as lawmakers rushed to make sure Watergate could not happen again. Congress passed bills restricting a president's ability to misuse private data, spy on Americans, misspend campaign cash, declare emergencies, control spending and more.

Some critics envision a post-Trump America swept up in a similar reform fever, with lawmakers scrambling to score political points amid widespread public revulsion over Trump's self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment.

For example, Congress could make it illegal to do what Trump's firebrand housing official Bill Pulte has done — accuse the president's critics of mortgage fraud with little evidence. Or it could restrict the ability of a Federal Communications Commission chairman, like Trump's Brendan Carr, to target outlets disliked by the president.

The Justice Department is a particular focus of the would-be reformers, many of them former department lawyers frustrated by the way Trump has used DOJ to pursue his adversaries. Under Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly Trump's personal attorney, and his predecessor Pam Bondi, many experienced attorneys have fled the department or been forced out.

Vanita Gupta, who served as associate attorney general under Biden, said Justice Department veterans of both parties are discussing how to restore the department to its former ethos of independence.

“Rebuilding will be challenging, no doubt, but former DOJ officials from Republican and Democratic administrations are already thinking about how to get it done,” Gupta said. “Seasoned career leaders have told me that they would return to rebuild the department, even knowing lifetime tenure may be a thing of the past.”

Historians concede the Watergate analogy has its limits. The 1974 scandal propelled Democrats to overwhelming majorities of 61-39 in the Senate and 291-144 in the House; those margins are unthinkable today. Americans have become more polarized in the past 50 years, a trend that works against any broad-based reform crusade.

A powerful executive has gained additional theoretical backing in recent decades, as conservative legal scholars have advanced a “unitary executive” theory, arguing the U.S. Constitution gives the president nearly unfettered, unreviewable control over the executive branch.

---

What the people want

Ultimately, the shape of the post-Trump future will be determined by how Americans feel when he exits the stage: Will they applaud his exercise of power and attacks on long-standing structures? Or will they recoil?

"The president and the courts are staring at one another over the mostly supine body of the

Congress of the United States, and it's very dangerous for constitutional government," Galston said.

The Supreme Court's path is unclear as well. Some Democrats privately echo a sentiment voiced by Clinton — that the justices may not give future presidents the same leeway they have accorded Trump. The court has already been far more deferential to Trump than it was to Biden, these Democrats say.

"I have a sinking suspicion if our party wins the White House in the next election, there will be a hallelujah moment and the Supreme Court will rediscover the Constitution," Clinton said on ABC's "The View" last year.

Even if some curbs on presidential power are reestablished, Trump's demonstration that they can be dismantled is likely to have long-term effects.

Young people might be less willing to work for a government whose policies vacillate wildly from one president to another, and where long tenure is not guaranteed. Foreign allies have made it clear they are far less trusting of Washington's commitments. Businesses and nonprofits could be less interested in accepting funding they fear could be abruptly withdrawn.

“It’s not like a toggle switch that you can just turn it on and off,” Waldman said. “Much of the federal government took a century to build.”

Some historians note Trump's unique qualities, saying his combination of celebrity, aggressiveness and disregard for tradition is unlikely ever to be replicated. That suggests future presidents cannot simply repeat his performance, they say.

"Any thought that [Vice President] JD Vance or [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio gets to be president and do the same thing with the same abandon — I don't see that happening," said John Lawrence, a historian and former top aide to former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California). “He has created his own unitary executive theory, and I don’t know how it works outside the size and force of the personality of Donald Trump. But that doesn’t mean a Republican successor wouldn’t try.”

In the Progressive Era, Americans took to the streets by the thousands to demand reform, Stier said, and if Trump's changes are ultimately reversed, it will be because of a similar ground-swell.

"The most important question we face is whether we can return to a consensus that we had among Republicans, Democrats and independents for 140 years that an operating government of our values requires leaders committed to the public good, not the private interests of the officeholder of the day," Stier said. "Can we get back to that? I think the answer is yes. But we need a public that demands it."

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In Shasta County, skeptics still don't trust election results

ELECTIONS FROM A1

PHOTOS BY RACHEL BUJALSKI/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Room 206 at the office, containing election materials, was marked with “Keep Out” signs on Sept. 24.

Former Shasta County supervisor Patrick Jones speaks with a customer at his family's gun shop.

Clint Curtis added the American flag decor in the elections office's observation room.

to show up with bolt cutters so they could take a look.

For years, Shasta County has been a center of election denialism. Citing debunked conspiracy theories about voting machines, its conservative county supervisors dumped their contract with Dominion Voting Systems and toyed with counting ballots by hand. Activists sued over election practices. And during this summer's election, voters approved a measure that would require photo ID to vote, restrict mail ballots and mandate hand counts — policies that courts have blocked.

Shasta County offers a glimpse of what happens when distrust in elections takes root in a community. Across the United States, both Democrats and Republicans have seen their confidence in elections wane, especially when their side loses. In Shasta County, the doubts run so deep that some residents don't trust the results even when the candidates they back prevail.

Curtis has spent a quarter century warning about rigged elections. Last year, a majority on Shasta County's board that shared his suspicions appointed him to finish out the term of a retiring registrar of voters.

Curtis sought a full term this summer, but voters in this forested county south of Mount Shasta rejected him.

Since then, he has called the election into doubt in any way he can. He has questioned whether some ballots contained bamboo fibers, echoing a baseless claim from the 2020 election that counterfeit ballots in Arizona were shipped in from Asia.

"I have ballots that are rougher," Curtis said. "And I've been told that the bamboo fiber stuff would make it rougher. Do I know that's true? I don't know that's true."

In January, Curtis will step down so his successor can take over.

In the meantime, he has one more election to run as registrar, in November. And the doubts about voting in this county are unlikely to end even when Curtis leaves.

Curtis's backers are committed to scrutinizing past elections and remaking how future ones are conducted.

Among them is Patrick Jones, the former county supervisor most responsible for bringing Curtis to California. Jones, 58, lost his reelection bid two years ago, and he has refused to accept his defeat.

“I don’t feel like — 2024 — that I lost that race,” Jones said. “But then, how do you prove it, right? That’s a whole other thing. How do you prove what you feel?”

---

A new leader for elections

Jones, a conservative activist who helps run his family's gun shop, won his 2020 race by capitalizing on anger over covid restrictions. His attention soon after shifted to how elections are run in the reliably Republican county.

He believes even his own winning race was manipulated to lower his victory margin by unknown forces. He hasn't turned up evidence, but his suspects include foreign actors, state figures, local workers or a combination of all of them.

For six years, he and his allies have looked for ways to overhaul Shasta County's elections and replace the people who run them.

They found an opening when Cathy Darling Allen retired in 2024 after nearly two decades as registrar. She had been diagnosed with heart failure, and the stress of nonstop criticism was contributing to the decline of her health, she said.

"Some local rabble-rousers decided that Trump was right and that if they don't like the result, that means the election is rigged," said Darling Allen, 57. "That is profoundly un-American and unpatriotic."

Jones wanted to give the job to Curtis, but a fellow conservative supervisor insisted on Tom Toller, a former prosecutor with his own doubts about elections. Jones agreed to hire him but soon felt betrayed because Toller said he found no signs of fraud and kept many of the county's longtime election policies.

Ten months after taking the job, Toller stepped down in April 2025 because of health problems. Jones was off the county board by then, but he and his allies saw a fresh shot to put a sufficiently skeptical official in charge of elections.

On a 3-2 vote, the supervisors hired Curtis.

---

'I neutered the machines'

Curtis came to Shasta County from Florida, and he said he moved across the country for the

job because he wanted to revamp elections in a way that other communities might replicate. He had never run an election before, but he had spent more than two decades scrutinizing them after concluding that voting machines could throw off results.

He wrote computer code in 2000 to show voting machines could alter results, he said, and he took his concerns to a congressional committee led by Democrats four years later. He became an immigration attorney but also continued to focus on voting machines, both as a lawyer and as a Democratic congressional candidate.

Curtis, 68, usually wears a suit and tie, even on stiflingly hot days. A holster on his hip holds three cellphones. Because of his Baptist upbringing, he doesn't drink, smoke or curse. He avoids reading media accounts of his activity, he said, even in friendly publications.

Curtis started out as a Republican but said he became a Democrat when he grew disillusioned with the Bush family's version of the GOP. He returned to the Republican Party when Trump began transforming it.

Throughout his political conversions, one belief never changed: Cheating is rampant.

Independent reviews have found no widespread fraud in voting, by machine or otherwise. But those studies didn't satisfy Curtis, who suspects the 2016 election was rigged in Trump's favor and that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

As registrar of voters, Curtis sought to alleviate fears of ballot stuffing by shutting down nine of the 13 drop boxes where county residents deposit their ballots. He hired fellow election skeptics. He removed a barrier separating election observers from county workers. He decked out the observation area in U.S. flags, making it look more like a Fourth of July celebration than a government office.

His signature achievement, he said, was mounting cellphones over employee workstations to film ballots before and after they are fed into tabulators. Online viewers can conduct their own tallies and compare them with the official count, he said.

"I neutered the machines," he said.

His supporters say the setup gives them more confidence in the count. His critics call it political theater, noting that some ballots aren't filmed and that the live stream has at times crashed.

Inside the office, Curtis has repeatedly clashed with longtime employees, prompting two personnel investigations. One found he probably threatened employees by saying he would throat-punch them, slap them or have them pulled out of the office by the hair. Curtis denied making such statements and has pledged to sue the county and his accusers for millions of dollars.

"These are some of the worst people on the planet, in my opinion," he said of a contingent of county employees. "And so, I will have no qualms at all about bankrupting them."

---

'Stand up for what's right'

His most consequential disputes were with Joanna Francescut, the assistant registrar of voters.

Francescut cares so much about her line of work that she planned a pregnancy to ensure she could perform her duties on Election Day in 2012. (A couple of months later, a surprise special election meant she wound up working on Election Day near her due date, and she had to leave that morning to give birth to a son.)

For years, she enjoyed giving voters tours of her office and showing them how elections work, she said. Then came 2020.

After Trump lost, visitors who once thanked her came with hostile questions. She set up training sessions for election observers only to find attendees exploiting them to criticize how she did her job.

The county supervisors didn't trust her either. When they got rid of voting machines and moved toward hand counts, she told them she would need more staff and more money. They didn't believe her figures but had to abandon their plans when the state legislature passed a law re-

SEE ELECTIONS ON A7

Shasta Dam and Shasta Lake with Mount Shasta in the distance. Voters here approved a measure to require photo ID to vote, restrict mail ballots and mandate hand counts – policies that courts have blocked.

RACHEL BUJALSKI/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

---

For years, California's Shasta County has been a center of election denialism

ELECTIONS FROM A6

quiring machine tallies.

The supervisors twice declined to appoint Francescut as the registrar of voters, passing her over for candidates who had not run elections before. When they named Curtis to the job, she announced she was running for the job in the next election.

Within weeks, Curtis fired her as his top assistant, saying he could dismiss her because she was an at-will employee. Francescut, 44, responded with a wrongful termination lawsuit that remains ongoing.

Getting passed over for the job frustrated her, but she refused to give up, she said, because she didn't want to send the wrong message to her teen daughter.

“I can’t allow her to watch me get stomped on by men that are lying about me and not stand up for what’s right,” she said.

This June, she beat Curtis in the race for registrar of voters with 58 percent of the vote. She will take office in January.

---

His last election

That left Curtis with an un-

usually long seven-month period as a lame duck.

Curtis did not just lose the election; he lost allies. Kevin Crye, a supervisor who voted to hire Curtis, lost his own race in June. Chris Kelstrom, another supervisor who voted to hire Curtis, now says he trusts Curtis “less than gas station sushi” and accused him of creating an “HR nightmare.” In August, Kelstrom joined a board majority in censuring Curtis over the personnel investigations.

Curtis said he needs help running November's election, so he offered a job to Tina Peters, a former county clerk from Colorado convicted of four felonies for allowing an outsider to copy voting machine software in an attempt to prove the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Peters is a hero and martyr to election skeptics, and she has been touring the country to warn of rigged elections since Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) commuted her sentence this summer.

The job offer made national headlines and angered election officials from both parties across the country. Peters turned Curtis down, saying she wanted to keep a national focus.

Last month, after Curtis questioned the ballots, he received a grand jury subpoena telling him to bring them to Sacramento, he said. The subpoena was canceled, he said, after FBI agents and officials with the California secretary of state's office visited Shasta County to interview him and inspect the boxes of ballots.

County supervisors have called Curtis's claims about the June election frivolous and said they welcome any state or federal review of the election. The FBI declined to comment. The secretary of state's office said representatives recently went to Shasta County but declined to provide other details.

Now, Curtis is preparing to run his last election for Shasta County. His detractors are worried about how he will do his job. His backers fear Francescut will reverse the changes Curtis has made.

“We want truth, we want honesty, we want a fair and transparent election,” said Rich Gallardo, a Curtis ally who has spent years deriding the county’s election practices. “And we’re willing to keep fighting. I don’t know how much longer we can keep it up, but we’re willing to fight for it.”

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What to know about Cornell University rape allegations

Students at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, on Thursday.

LAUREN PETRACCA/REUTERS

Hochul has appointed attorney general as special prosecutor

BY AMY B WANG,

SUSAN SVRLUGA

AND TODD WALLACK

Allegations that a Cornell University student was raped by seven fraternity members in 2024 have drawn national attention after the accuser, identified only as “Jane Doe” in court documents, filed a lawsuit last month.

The litigation and subsequent public outcry prompted New York state prosecutors to reopen their investigation and begin the process of pursuing criminal charges against the alleged perpetrators, which they declined to do in the immediate aftermath. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) on Thursday appointed state Attorney General Letitia James (D) as special prosecutor, saying she had lost faith in the Tompkins County district attorney's ability to fairly oversee the case.

Here's what we know about the allegations and investigations.

---

Who is Jane Doe, and what does she allege happened to her?

According to the Sept. 16 civil complaint, on Oct. 19, 2024, Jane Doe, then a 20-year-old student, visited two bars in Ithaca, New York, with her sorority sisters and consumed the equivalent of 10 drinks in about three hours. At about 11 p.m., she left the second bar and “stumbled alone” to the Chi Phi fraternity house to hang out with a friend, according to the complaint.

The complaint states that the friend handed Doe a beer and danced with her in the main room of the house, then pulled her off to a quieter area and propositioned her with having a threesome with him and one of his fraternity brothers.

The complaint alleges that her friend and another member of Chi Phi then pressured Doe into ingesting ketamine, marijuana and liquor. It contends that the two men assaulted her and that, at 1:42 a.m. on Oct. 20, 2024, one of them sent a Snapchat message to fraternity members effectively inviting them to join in the assault. Several did, the complaint says.

A screenshot of the Snapchat message included in the complaint shows one person saying there was “Free p---y” and another saying, “Like you can walk in and whip it out.”

A screen recording of the Snapchat conversation, obtained by The Washington Post, shows that a picture of Doe was shared in the chat at one point. Afterward, someone asked, “Shop still open?” Another responded, “Yeah,” with a devil emoji, and later added: “Boys come whip it out”.

The 101-page complaint states that Doe “was plied with alcohol and drugs to the point of intoxication” at the fraternity house, and alleges in graphic detail that she was sexually assaulted and raped by members of the fraternity over the course of about seven hours.

The complaint names seven members of the Xi chapter of Chi Phi, Cornell University, the national Chi Phi fraternity, the Delta Delta Delta sorority, an Ithaca bar and others.

The lawsuit accuses the students of sexual assault and battery, while accusing Cornell of failing to do enough to protect Doe. It seeks a jury trial to determine damages.

---

What happened after that night in 2024?

According to the New York Times, which obtained documents from Cornell's internal investigation, in the three weeks between the fraternity party and when Doe went to police, her thinking about that night evolved from apparent shame to the belief that she had been a victim of sexual assault.

On Oct. 21, 2024, Doe received a text message from one of the men she later accused of sexual assault, who said he “just wanted to apologize for how things went down the other night,” according to the Times. Doe also visited a doctor at the university’s health center Oct. 22 and reported that she had contracted a urinary tract infection “in a traumatic way.”

On Nov. 3, 2024, Doe sent a text to another fraternity member she later would accuse of sexual assault and told him that “90% of what happened that night was not consensual” and that she “was given more [ketamine] than i can remember,”

according to the Times.

The complaint states that Doe reported what happened to campus police Nov. 8, 2024. Campus police interviewed her Nov. 14 and Nov. 15, according to CBS News. An officer drafted a six-page statement based on those interviews and, after making about 20 handwritten corrections, Doe signed a final version Nov. 15, according to the Times.

---

How did Cornell respond?

The university said in a statement this past week that it conducted a thorough Title IX investigation over several months and issued a range of sanctions, including suspensions and expulsions. Title IX regulations dictate how schools have to respond to allegations of sex-based discrimination and sexual assault and misconduct. Schools are required to conduct such investigations if they receive federal financial assistance.

“Any suggestion that the university did not impose consequential punishments for those involved is false,” Cornell spokesman Kyle Kimball wrote Monday. “A continuation of the false narrative that there were minimal consequences in this case is irresponsible, will make survivors feel less safe and supported, and will perpetuate the underreporting of sexual assault.”

The Xi chapter of Chi Phi and seven students were placed on temporary suspension on Nov. 8, 2024, the day Doe went to campus police, according to Doe's civil complaint. The fraternity chapter was closed and remains barred from campus.

The Cornell University Police Department has said it shared Doe's sworn statement and the Snapchat screenshot with the Tompkins County District Attorney's Office.

---

Why didn't prosecutors press charges in 2024?

Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten has defended his decision not to pursue criminal charges in 2024 because he said there was “insufficient evidence” to do so when his office reviewed the case then. Specifically, he has said that his office at the time did not receive a screenshot of the Snapchat message — contradicting the university’s claims.

In a lengthy statement that in part sought to explain his initial decision not to file charges, Van Houten said Doe did not allege in her 2024 sworn statement to Cornell police that she was drugged against her will or gang-raped.

"On the contrary, Jane Doe's statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual," Van Houten wrote. "My office obviously did not and could not have based our November 2024 decision on the allegations in a civil lawsuit that would not be filed until nearly two years later."

Van Houten said he also recognized “the reality that it can take years of therapy and healing for victims of sexual assaults to fully process and understand what happened to them.”

---

What did Jane Doe say in her sworn statement?

The sworn statement that Doe gave police in 2024 has not been publicly shared. But in his statement this past week, Van Houten provided a summary of facts from that statement.

His summary does not include certain details reported by NBC News, which said Thursday that it had obtained a copy of the sworn statement.

According to NBC, Doe said in her statement that she initially had consented to a threesome but that she grew increasingly uncomfortable and isolated throughout the night, which she also described as “the most intoxicated” she had been in her life.

“I felt like I was unable to make any decisions because of how intoxicated I was,” she said in the statement, according to NBC.

Other details not included in Van Houten's summary of Doe's statement, but reported by NBC, include her saying that she felt coerced, in that two men “were asking me to have sex so many times that I finally gave in.”

---

What other details have emerged?

CBS News reported this past week that it had obtained a copy of a transcript of the interview between Doe and campus police in which she says that she had gaps in her memory, that she remembers being “physically hit very, very hard” during the assault, and that she said, “I can say with 100% confidence I was raped.”

Van Houten told CBS News that he had never seen a transcript of that conversation before CBS reported it.

Newly unsealed court documents showed that Cornell conducted an internal disciplinary investigation involving more than 50 interviews with 32 witnesses in the months after the incident.

“I felt like bait. I felt like lions around me,” Doe said at a May 2025 disciplinary hearing, according to the documents. “It just was a totally debilitating place to be in.”

At least one fraternity member is fighting in court to overturn the disciplinary action against him and clear his academic record, the documents show.

---

How did Chi Phi respond to the allegations?

In a statement Wednesday, Chi Phi said its Xi chapter at Cornell voted unanimously to remove the accused members from its rolls three days after Doe filed her police report. The chapter also recommended that the national fraternity expel those members permanently, and Chi Phi's grand council did so at its next meeting.

"These actions went beyond anything the law or Cornell University required of us. As a private membership fraternity, Chi Phi acted within its own authority at both the chapter and national levels to remove men suspected of betraying the values of our brotherhood," said Trey Robb, the national fraternity's interim executive director.

“They failed to meet the standards we set for every brother, and accountability is how we will always respond to behavior that falls short of those standards,” Robb added.

---

Did Cornell follow its policies?

Cornell has a 49-page document detailing its procedures for handling cases in which students are accused of sexual assault. Those policies have evolved since Doe reported what happened to her in 2024. A university task force was established in February 2025, and the school's leadership endorsed its final recommendations in March 2026.

Under the version of the policy in place in 2024, the school was required to take a number of steps, including passing along the report to specific people, and giving the victim the right to report the incident to police and the option to participate in the university's disciplinary process. The policy also lays out rules for any disciplinary hearings, including offering the accused the right to appeal, and providing support to victims, such as assistance accessing counseling or changing student housing. Cornell's 2024 policy does not specify what information, if any, the university should turn over to law enforcement from its disciplinary proceedings.

It's unclear from the public record whether Cornell violated its own procedures. The university temporarily suspended the fraternity and students while it investigated the incident and held hearings that led to further discipline. It's not clear what specific support Cornell offered the victim and whether it should have provided additional aid, based on the 2024 policy.

Hochul has called for Cornell to hire outside counsel to investigate whether it “met every obligation to protect its students and pursue justice" in this case. On Thursday, Hochul said that she had spoken with Cornell's president and that he had agreed to an independent review.

---

What happens next?

Hochul said Thursday evening that she had appointed James as special prosecutor because she had lost faith in the county district attorney's ability to fairly oversee the case.

James said Friday her office would gather evidence, interview witnesses and pursue prosecutions if warranted in the coming months.

“I know that you want answers. I do, too,” James said at a news conference. “A comprehensive investigation of this nature takes time, but my office is committed to seeing it through.”

Van Houten said that he supports James's appointment and that his office will cooperate fully with her.

“I trust that she will examine the facts and apply the law,” Van Houten said Friday in a statement. “It has become clear that we were not provided the full picture by the University. The focus has been and should continue to be on the victims.”

Some of the additional evidence that could be taken into consideration include the screenshot of the Snapchat message and a fuller transcript from Doe's interview with Cornell police, according to Moira Penza, a trial lawyer with experience in prosecuting sexual assault cases. Penza does not represent anyone in the Jane Doe case.

"As a former prosecutor, you don't want to rely on a single statement alone, especially in a situation as serious and as complex as this one, and where there was so much additional evidence available," Penza said. "It's very rare that in a sex crime case that you would have so many eyewitnesses, that you would have so much electronic communication."

Meanwhile, Doe's civil lawsuit will proceed separately from the criminal investigation. Megan Bonanni, a lawyer who has represented hundreds of sexual abuse survivors, said one of the biggest differences between the civil lawsuit and the criminal investigation is “control of the process” for an accuser.

“Jane Doe can report what happened to law enforcement, but she cannot control whether prosecutors bring charges. Oftentimes, they don’t,” Bonanni said. “Through a civil lawsuit, she has the freedom and the ability to pursue legal claims and seek accountability.”

Hochul also called on state legislators to tighten a law that limits the ability to prosecute a sexual assault case if the victim voluntarily became intoxicated.

Students walk past Cornell police headquarters this past week.

SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES

---

In some states, rape charges difficult in cases of voluntary drinking or drugs

INTOXICATION FROM A1

Students walk on the campus of Cornell University last month in Ithaca, New York.

SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES

Tompkins County district attorney, issued a lengthy statement this week that cited the state's law on intoxication and consent when explaining why he did not bring charges in 2024.

Advocates and legislators have tried since 2019 to close what they call New York's “voluntary intoxication loophole” or “voluntary intoxication exclusion.” On Friday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said she would move to amend the law early in the next legislative session.

“If someone is too intoxicated to consent, it should not matter whether they chose to use drugs or alcohol,” Hochul told reporters. “Voluntary intoxication is not a license for sexual assault or gang rape, period.”

Opponents of changing the law say doing so would erode due process protections and increase the risk of wrongful convictions.

A bill introduced this year to change the law is “simply too vague to be fairly enforced,” the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said in a statement. The bill “fails to provide any objective guidance about when a partner is too intoxicated to legally agree to engage in sexual conduct.”

Experts on sexual assault note that victims are often unwilling to report the crime and that prosecutors sometimes hesitate to bring the cases to trial. Research indicates that about half of sexual assaults involve alcohol use by the victim, perpetrator or both.

The existence of laws that distinguish between voluntary and involuntary intoxication is a “concrete example of legal victim-blaming,” said Deborah Tuerkheimer, a law professor at Northwestern University. They emerge from a “long-standing legal and cultural impulse to blame victims who don’t do enough to keep this from happening.”

Researchers found in 2022 that 20 states had statutes that only considered victims incapable of consent if they had been drugged against their will. (Texas changed its law last year, in part due to Willis's activism.)

Experts criticized Van Houten for relying on the Cornell campus police instead of involving the Ithaca Police Department, as well as his office's decision not to conduct its own interview of Jane Doe. They said New York law did not block him from filing charges, but complicated it.

A poster advertising an upcoming demonstration to raise awareness for sexual assault prevention at Cornell University.

LAUREN PETRACCA/REUTERS

Rick Trunfio, a former Onondaga County prosecutor who created its specialized sex crimes unit and now teaches law at Syracuse University, said he would "never, ever rely on campus police putting together a case of sexual assault, ever."

“They do not have the expertise, the experience and the skill set,” Trunfio said.

Michal Buchhandler-Raphael, a visiting law professor at Michigan State University who has written about drinking and consent, said prosecutors are wary of cases that involve voluntarily intoxicated victims because they are worried juries will question their credibility. But if sufficient evidence exists, the cases should be brought to trial, she said.

"In real life, victims are not perfect," Buchhandler-Raphael said.

Van Houten said via email Friday that the facts in the case as of 2024 did not permit him to file charges. He also said the campus police officer who interviewed Jane Doe was “trained and experienced.”

Since 2021, at least two states — Texas and Minnesota — have changed their sexual assault statutes to include victims who were voluntarily intoxicated. In both states, the changes followed a particular case or personal story that galvanized public opinion.

"These are not easy laws to pass," said Texas state Rep. Ann Johnson (D), a former prosecutor who worked on the effort. "I guarantee you that provision would not have passed were it not for Summer Willis's willingness to come forward."

In 2014, Willis was at a party

"If someone is too intoxicated to consent, it should not matter whether they chose to use drugs or alcohol. Voluntary intoxication is not a license for sexual assault or gang rape, period."

Kathy Hochul (D), New York governor

at a University of Texas at Austin fraternity when a man gave her a drink she believes was drugged. His friend later assaulted her, she says. Years later, after meeting fellow survivors of sexual assault, she learned that under Texas law, her case would be very difficult to prosecute.

In February 2025, Willis crawled for 13.1 miles, the length of a half-marathon, to draw attention to the bill that would ultimately carry her name. A week after it passed in May, she traveled to New York to lend her support to a similar bill there. Although the measure has passed the New York Senate several times, it has never been brought to the New York State Assembly for a vote.

Jeffrey Dinowitz, a Democratic member of the New York State Assembly who sponsored the bill, said opponents include the criminal defense bar, which is seeking to protect the rights of defendants, as well as those worried about over-policing of certain communities. For Dinowitz, however, it's a "terrible gap in the law and we've got to do something about it."

Willis agrees, saying it is terrible “that it took this horrific thing to bring national attention to it,” she said. “The real tragedy would be if we don’t do anything.”

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A sword was among the many dumpster finds.

---

From homeless and in debt to earning six figures

SALVAGE FROM A1

PHOTOS BY WILLIAM DESHAZER/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Carter Stevens photographs products that he plans to list on eBay.

Stevens looks up the value of a bracelet he found in a trash heap.

He also found an iPad in a trash bin behind a warehouse.

ishingly valuable. People came here chasing stardom or a fresh identity; 86 new residents arrived each day, per the local government's last count. Carter imagined some crash-landed, like he had, leaving wreckage for him to sift through when Everything Must Go. Or they acquired upgrades they associated with success, shedding whatever hadn't satisfied them.

Carter had salvaged stuff in unopened boxes. Stuff that he'd seen models praise on TikTok. Stuff that reminded him of what he'd once maxed out his credit cards to wear. Stuff that he'd had to offload, quickly, when he couldn't cover the rent for his three-bedroom house in the summer of 2024 and moved into a \$30-per-day Zipcar.

“Still has the tag on it,” he said, yanking a lacy white Simply Southern frock from the heap. Someone had spent \$59.99 on what he called a “grandma dress” before chucking it unworn. Carter popped the trunk of his cherry red Lexus ES and tossed it in. “Might be worth something,” he said.

Probably not enough for him to risk a bug crawling up his pantleg. Yet it could help fund his next venture, one Carter hoped would set up the rest of his life.

Damp and itchy and distressingly close to what smelled like spoiled yogurt, he tried to apply that optimism to his own recovery. If Carter could repurpose rubbish, he figured, maybe he could repurpose himself.

THE LONGING THAT GOT HIM into this mess started with light-up sneakers. As a first-grader, Carter ached for a pair, but his parents didn't cave. They taught him to work for what he wanted.

His father was a successful music producer, so Carter grew up around wealth, which intensified his fixation on flashy shoes and Ed Hardy rhinestone shirts and souped-up Mustangs. Sophomore year, he applied for a job at McDonald's and began saving for what he coveted. "Nice sh--," Carter said.

The appetite for more and better was baked into American culture long before he was born. Spending was patriotic in the nation that invented mass marketing. Spending kept the factories running. Spending became so excessive, the historian who coined the term “American dream” advised his countrymen in 1931 not to mistake prosperity for “material plenty.” But over the last century, federal statistics show, the amount of clothes and shoes that Americans scrapped each year shot up almost tenfold.

Carter found a silk Christian Dior windbreaker at Goodwill for \$1 in 2018, shortly after he'd dropped out of college. He'd never felt comfortable in a classroom, but for much of the next six years, he excelled at sourcing vintage pieces from donation bins and estate sales for a second-hand market near Vanderbilt University. "I made it," he thought when a friend told him the young woman browsing his clothing racks was country star Kacey Musgraves.

Carter could have stashed away money. “But I screwed myself,” he said. First, he started taking too much Adderall. Then too many other drugs. In 2021, he spent a week in rehab and eased off the narcotics. But Carter still struggled with his addiction to spending.

He bought Christian Dior Birkenstocks for \$1,200. A camping van for \$10,000. A Mercedes-AMG that cost \$3,100 monthly, including insurance. “I just woke up itching for stuff,” he recalled. His monthly outflow, at its highest, surpassed \$15,000.

When the celebrity interest moved on and business dwindled and Carter owed more than he was making, he slept in his storage unit until an attendant warned he'd get kicked out. Crashing with his parents hadn't worked, either. They'd argued. He'd wanted to be alone.

Cramped in a Nissan Sentra for three weeks, Carter vowed to control his cravings.

A cousin loaned him cash to get into a one-bedroom apartment, and he hawked just enough shirts to cover the \$1,000 monthly rent. His rebound started one November afternoon last year, when, emerging from Goodwill, Carter noticed men behind the warehouse next door plopping dozens of office chairs next to a dumpster.

“Those are trash?” he’d walked over to ask. Yes, replied one man, who introduced himself as a trucker for a moving company. And more were coming, he said, thanks to a corporate office shuttering.

Carter crouched over the swivel seats and Googled the brand. Steelcase. They were going for hundreds of dollars each online.

He returned with a trailer and grabbed 190 chairs. All but 40 sold in six weeks to liquidators he'd emailed. The \$17,000 profit allowed Carter to pay off his credit cards and pay back his cousin.

His foraging expanded to other warehouses, hotels, apartment buildings and the mall. Eager for leads on personal clutter, too, he printed lawn signs: "JUNK AWAY JUNK REMOVAL. TEXT OR CALL." Carter retrieved couches, standing desks, industrial lamps and iPads. After six weeks, his eBay sales hit \$30,000. Once, a security guard confronted him with a gun drawn. Mostly, though, nobody seemed to care.

Carter wondered what his parents would think. They'd refused to lend him money when he'd felt most vulnerable, and for two weeks, he'd been too angry to speak to them.

Still, he wanted to make them proud.

"I'm providing a service," he told them.

THE GRANDMA DRESS was a bust.

“Nobody’s buying these,” Carter said, scrolling through his phone. The eBay app showed 189 other sellers had listed the same one. Nineteen had sold.

“That’s a 10 percent sell-through rate,” he said, dropping it onto a mound of others that he would not try to sell.

Carter Stevens, referring to a found lacy white Simply Southern frock

With his savings nearing \$12,000, Carter didn't have to clean, photograph and post every item. He lit a French vanilla-scented candle on his West Elm coffee table — both acquired from a junk removal gig — as pot roast simmered in the Crock-Pot he'd splurged on at Goodwill for \$8.

Someone else could have the Simply Southern frock, Carter thought — like his buddy, another thrifter, who sent second-hand dresses back home to Ghana. Another stack of vintage shirts would go to a friend who'd agreed to pay \$150 for 11 pieces. Carter could have doubled that profit on eBay, he estimated. What he wanted now, though, was time to focus on his new business idea.

The skin on his arms was red from brushing against insulation panels. His back was sore from all the lifting. He sensed the jack-pots couldn't last forever.

Carter sat at the white Ikea desk he'd bought in college, opened his old laptop and played a YouTube video titled, "How to Wholesale Real Estate Step By Step."

"If you are looking for a way to make a lot of money that is low risk, easy to learn, that you can do from anywhere," a male voice gushed as hundred-dollar bills proliferated on the screen, "then nothing beats wholesale real estate."

That guy was wrong about “easy to learn,” Carter thought. After watching at least a dozen similar tutorials, he was still stuck at Step 1: Find a list of pre-foreclosure properties. Clicking through Nashville.gov, he’d located zero of those supposedly public records. That held him back from calling people who’d defaulted on their mortgages and asking, “Would you like to sell your house?”

Step 2 was offering to connect them with a home-flipping investor who'd give a cut of the sale to Carter. All from the comfort of his Steelcase chair.

“This is going to take a lot more work,” he said.

His attention veered to another browser tab: a digital car auction. Carter had sworn off new models, but the familiar yearning surged back when he scanned the selection of repossessed clunkers.

---

"Still has the tag on it."

He'd bought three used vehicles, including the cherry red Lexus, since becoming what his younger brother wryly described as an “acquisition technician.” His rule was: Purchase only what you can sell for more ... if the need ever arises.

“Goin’ once, goin’ twice ...” an auctioneer warbled on the live stream.

The one he wanted was almost up.

Carter paused at the 1993 Ford Ranger pickup truck he'd gone to inspect at the lot. Nice engine, nice transmission. He'd pay up to \$1,600.

A user named Coming2SeeYou had offered \$850.

Carter clicked the auto-bid button, putting him in the lead with \$950.

Coming2SeeYou responded with \$1,000.

“I’m not going to get it,” Carter said, clicking the auto-bid button again.

INJURY LAWYER BILLBOARDS and payday loan banners gave way to gated mansions as Carter drove to his parents' house in the upscale suburb of Brentwood.

He admired the golden-hour clouds. After quitting drugs, Carter had trouble feeling anything except the dopamine boost from clicking “add to bag.” Now he talked about the skyline and choked up.

“More beautiful than a \$10 million painting,” he said.

It was pizza night at the brick Colonial with the newly remodeled kitchen. His parents had swapped their stove for a six-burner cooktop that Carter had procured on Facebook Marketplace.

“Awesome!” his dad exclaimed as Carter greeted him with another gift, a faded blue T-shirt emblazoned with “ARIZONA.”

“Because of the house,” Carter said, meaning his parents’ other one, the vacation ranch in Sedona.

Chris Stevens, 58, realized he might be the only five-time Grammy winner whose son dug through trash. Picturing what Carter encountered out there unnerved him. There could be dirty needles. Trigger-happy security guards. Chemical burns. Trespassing charges if Carter irked the wrong property owner.

But Chris told his son that he was proud of him. His own dad used to return greasy from 4 a.m. shifts at the Southern Pacific Railroad, where he labored under trains for five decades. The machinist cycled to work because he couldn't afford a car while raising six children, but when Chris was 13 and transfixed by a keyboard at Radio SEE SALVAGE ON A11

PHOTOS BY WILLIAM DESHAZER/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Carter Stevens pulls unused insulation from a dumpster that had been discarded. In Tennessee's booming capital, junk struck Carter as astonishingly valuable.

---

Americans buy and discard more stuff than anyone else

SALVAGE FROM A10

Shack, his father scraped together the \$250.

That's how Chris got into music, which drew him from Eugene, Oregon, to Nashville, which led to him writing songs for Kenny Chesney and Carrie Underwood and buying a house that Zillow now valued at \$1.3 million.

He liked being generous with his four kids, but not always in the way they wanted. “I don’t ever want to rob you of the feeling of working your way to success,” he’d told them.

a deal? Carter had considered knocking on doors, but he didn't want to scare anyone. "Not trying to get shot," he said.

When Carter's old car broke down while he was still frequenting Goodwill to cover rent, though, Chris gave him \$3,000 for the truck that towed the trailer full of office chairs.

“Got a new one today,” Carter said as they sat down for pepperoni pizza.

"You got a new truck today?" asked his mom, Nancy.

“I got a good deal!” he assured her, “but...”

“Where is it right now?” she pressed.

"At my apartment with my other two cars," Carter deadpanned.

He'd wanted to drive it there, he explained, but when he filled it up with gas, the fuel leaked onto the pavement.

“Corroded pipe?” his dad guessed.

“Pretty simple repair,” Carter replied.

Unless he had to replace the tank, which could cost twice the \$1,300 he'd paid at the auction lot. Whatever the case, he worried the Ranger wasn't the good investment he'd bet it was.

"I've been thinking more about real estate," he announced.

Other dumpster finds for Stevens included flip phones.

THE YOUTUBERS AND TIKTOKERS and Redditers suggested their own version of a cold-call script, but Carter didn't want to repackage someone else's words. How many competitors, he wondered, were reading from the same prompt?

On a notepad he'd snagged from a dumpster, Carter jotted down the start of a pitch he hoped would come to sound like himself. Hello, is this ...? Are you the owner of ...?

I'm reaching out to see if you'd be looking to sell that property anytime soon?

Driving through neighborhoods near his apartment, he'd counted five houses with overgrown lawns and mail piling on the concrete stoops. Proba-

Another option was hiring a business coach who could teach him how to access hundreds of addresses and phone numbers. Or finding a mentor at a real estate meet-up who'd do that for free. Successful wholesalers became investors, he'd read, and investors benefited from what Carter aspired to become: a go-getter bringing them leads. One Redditer on the advice page he'd skimmed was seeking "a killer willing to grind every waking hour."

“I can outwork anyone,” he thought.

Or Carter could pay for online marketing and paper fliers. The first round would cost \$2,000, he estimated.

Was that a good investment or another risky clunker? A luxury builder who'd been a regular at his vintage stall had started in wholesaling. Carter had seen him posing on Instagram with his Lamborghini. Another Redditer, though, had posted: "My phone is glued to my ear. And nobody picks up."

Stuck in that Zipcar, Carter would have answered such a call. He'd wanted to sell his designer wares as soon as possible

bly abandoned. Several others looked shabby but had the lights on.

— to free himself from the crush of stuff he couldn't afford. His buyers had gotten a bargain, he knew, and Carter had received money for food and half of a security deposit. He'd been glad to have the option.

Were those people open to

Carter didn't have to write down the next thing he'd say to whoever was defaulting on their mortgage.

He'd thought about it in the dumpsters, and when he cooked dinner in his apartment, and when he visited his parents, and when he studied for the career he hoped would stick. He thought about it while repainting his new truck — which just needed a \$30 fuel filler neck replacement, thank God — and when he paused to watch the sunset.

I know what it's like to lose everything.

---

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Executions are down nationwide, but states like Florida are ramping them up

DEATH PENALTY FROM A1

CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: Witness Damon Lawrence recounts the attempted execution of Christa Pike on Sept. 30. A view of San Quentin Rehabilitation Center in California. Since the start of last year, Florida has accounted for nearly half of all executions nationwide.

DENNY SIMMONS /THE TENNESSEAN/USA TODAY NETWORK/REUTERS CONNECT

DAVID FISCHER/AP

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

comes more skepticism, and you see it playing out in jury verdicts," added Hughes, who runs annual death penalty defense training sessions. "You see it in prosecutors' decisions not to seek death. You see it in states deciding to stop."

Botched executions like Pike's have also fueled new calls to halt executions, with death penalty opponents saying the Tennessee case shows its inherent cruelty. Pike's lawyers said officials there tried giving her two doses of lethal injection drugs, leading her to end up unconscious and on a ventilator afterward.

Supporters and opponents of the death penalty alike have also criticized the amount of time people spend on death row, which has skyrocketed. The Washington Post found in 2024 that the average person on death row was sentenced more than 20 years earlier, more than triple the amount of time in 1994.

Capital punishment was once far more common in the United States. Prosecutors in the 1980s and 1990s — a period marked by high levels of crime and violence

— frequently sought and won death sentences. The number of people on death row swelled, climbing into the thousands during this period.

The ultimate punishment was also broadly popular among Americans. Gallup polling found that by 1994, 4 in 5 people supported the death penalty for someone convicted of murder. By 1999, there were an average of nearly two executions each week nationwide.

A third of those were carried out in Texas, and the following year, the state's governor, George W. Bush, was elected president after a campaign in which the death penalty was a prominent topic.

"The reason I support the death penalty is I believe it saves lives," Bush said in 2000. "That's why I support it. It so happens the people of my state support it as well."

After the turn of the century, though, the death penalty began a decades-long decline. There were 98 executions nationwide in 1999; the number dropped to 22 by 2019, the last pre-pandemic year. Public support also declined from mid-1990s levels, with Gallup finding last year that 52 percent of people said they support the death penalty for someone convicted of murder.

New death sentences also plunged, dropping from hundreds annually handed down during the 1990s to 23 new capital sentences imposed last year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks capital punishment.

But while the death penalty has diminished, it has not disappeared. In a handful of states, executions are regular occurrences. Southern states including Florida, Texas and Alabama, along with Oklahoma and Missouri, regularly carry out executions.

The number of executions nationwide rose to 47 last year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center — the highest since 2009, but still far lower than it was around the turn of the century. The figure appears almost certain to be lower this year.

The increase last year was driven largely by executions in Florida, where Gov. Ron De-Santis (R) — who is term-limited and leaving office next year — has said he views capital punishment as “an appropriate punishment for the worst offenders.” Since the start of last year, Florida has accounted for nearly half of all executions nationwide.

At the same time, many states have moved away from the practice entirely, with a string of states abolishing or reducing its use over the last two decades.

In 2022, then-Oregon governor Kate Brown (D) commuted the sentences of the 17 people on the state's death row before leaving office.

"I have long believed that justice is not advanced by taking a life, and the state should not be in the business of executing people — even if a terrible crime placed them in prison," Brown, who had kept a moratorium on executions in place, said in a statement.

California Gov. Gavin New- som (D) imposed a statewide moratorium there in 2019, and a coalition of activists has now filed a challenge in the state hoping to end capital punishment in

California for good on the basis that it is racially discriminatory.

While the death penalty remains on the books in 27 states and available to the federal government and U.S. military, many places that have it do not use it.

President Joe Biden commut-

ed the sentences of 37 of the

40 people on federal death row

shortly before leaving office, say-

ing he was “guided by my con-

science.”

California and North Carolina last carried out executions in 2006, while Pennsylvania's last execution was in 1999. Some places have moratoriums blocking executions, while in others, court orders are preventing them from taking place.

In these states and others, death sentences linger for years and decades.

"The imposition and implementation of the death penalty seems capricious, random, indeed, arbitrary," former Supreme Court justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in a 2015 dissent. "From a defendant's perspective, to receive that sentence, and certainly to find it implemented, is the equivalent of being struck by lightning."

Opponents of the death penalty say leaving people on death row for so long is cruel, subjecting them to overly restrictive conditions and years-long uncertainty about their fates. Supporters of capital punishment also rue how long people linger on death row, saying it harms victims' relatives and undermines the justice system by announcing punishments that may never be carried out.

Support for the death penalty is “declining in some circles because it’s just so expensive,” said Daniel Nagin, a Carnegie Mellon professor of public policy and statistics. “It’s a source of never-ending appeals, and people realize that it's extremely costly."

Death penalty supporters say the solution is to speed up the process, including potentially by shortening the amount of time the condemned can mount appeals.

Actually carrying out death sentences, though, has proved difficult for some states, as Tennessee has shown twice this year.

Some states have also struggled to obtain the drugs used in lethal injection, with pharmaceutical companies objecting to their products being used to kill people. That has prompted a scramble among states figuring out how to get drugs and sometimes adopting other methods, such as electrocution, the firing squad or using nitrogen gas to deprive the inmate of oxygen.

In Tennessee, officials have not said how long the execution moratorium could last.

Gov. Bill Lee (R), who announced the pause, is leaving office in January. The issue could linger for the next governor to decide. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican running to succeed him, called last week for a return to the electric chair, while Democrat Jerri Green favors abolishing the death penalty altogether.

President Donald Trump has long backed the death penalty, and he has pushed his administration to ramp up its use.

This spring, the Justice Department said it was moving to make firing squads and the electric chair options for carrying out federal death sentences. The agency has also lifted the Biden administration's pause on executions.

During Trump's first term, his administration carried out a wave of executions. Fearing a second Trump term would continue this, opponents of capital punishment had called on Biden to commute federal death sentences before leaving office.

When he did so in December 2024, Biden left three people on federal death row: the surviving Boston Marathon bomber and the gunmen convicted of massacring people in a Pittsburgh synagogue and a South Carolina church.

Trump and his allies excoriated Biden's commutations. After taking office last year, Trump issued an executive order directing the attorney general to help push for greater usage of capital punishment nationwide.

While the Justice Department is seeking the death penalty in dozens of cases, including for the man charged with killing a couple at the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C., the agency has not won any new federal sentences so far during Trump's second term.

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“Commissioner Strada has served with integrity, and I appreciate his willingness to put the interests of Tennesseeans first during this difficult moment,” Lee said.

---

Tennessee prison chief resigns job in wake of botched Pike execution

Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada offered his resignation and will step down sometime this month, Lee said in a statement, after the failed execution on Wednesday.

Pike remained hospitalized and on a ventilator as of Thursday in a Nashville hospital, according to a court filing from her attorneys. Doctors worked to remove pentobarbital from

The Tennessee prison chief has resigned after the botched execution of Christa Pike, Gov. Bill Lee (R) said Saturday. After two doses of lethal injection drugs rendered Pike unconscious, Lee had earlier ordered a third-party review and halted all scheduled executions in the state.

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Pike had been sentenced to death for her role in killing Colleen Slemmer in 1995, when both of them were teenagers. Pike and two other teens lured Slemmer into the woods in Knoxville, where they tortured and killed her, according to court filings.

Pike's legal team alleged state officials did not follow their own lethal injection protocol while trying to execute Pike with pentobarbital. The execution team acted incompetently and showed "deliberate indifference to her basic medical needs," Pike's lawyers wrote.

Dorinda Carter, a spokesperson for the Tennessee Department of Correction, declined to respond to questions about Strada's resignation and whether the failed execution of Carruthers also played a role.

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Strada defended his agency's role, saying he believes the corrections department “carried out its responsibilities in accordance with the established protocol.”

Community leaders and attorneys have called on Lee and and other Tennessee officials to address “huge problems with the competency of the state’s execution process,” said Laura Porter, executive director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Death Penalty.

"The resignation of Commissioner Strada is justified, but it does nothing to help Christa now," her attorneys said in a statement. "What happened to her Wednesday reflects a systemic failure that goes far beyond any one person. We hope the Governor's call for a full, independent review will expose the profound problems within Tennessee's entire death penalty system."

Mark Berman, Katie Mettler and Brady Dennis contributed to this report.

Advocates have seized on the high-profile failure to call for the abolishment of the death penalty across the country.

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Pike's botched execution was the second this year under Strada. In May, the execution of convicted murderer Tony Carruthers was called off after personnel could not establish a backup IV line, as required by the state's execution protocol. It left him bleeding and in pain, his attorney said, and Lee granted him a one-year reprieve.

her system after she arrived with both arms “swollen, burned, and blistered,” the filing said.

“They were ignored,” Porter said. “Hopefully this is the beginning of accountability and an end to secrecy that enables these debacles.”

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[THE WORLD] Fighting in Ethiopia threatens to spill into other conflicts

As attacks escalate between the nation and Tigrayan rebels, intersecting wars could deepen instability across regions already mired in bloodshed

Residents of Mekelle, the capital city of Ethiopia's Tigray region, shop for essentials recently as fresh fighting erupted between Tigrayan rebels and the federal government.

PHOTOS BY AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Members of the Tigray People's Liberation Front walk along a main road in Mekelle.

Residents gather to buy flour and other groceries at a local market in Mekelle.

BY RAEL OMBUOR

AND RACHEL CHASON

NAIROBI — Explosions sounded this past week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, a city rarely under direct attack. Though exactly what happened remains murky, the apparent drone strikes were a sign of just how far and fast renewed fighting in the country has spread. Clashes between government troops and rebel groups have killed scores of civilians in the north in recent days, spilling south toward the pilgrimage site of Lalibela.

The conflict, in many ways, has picked up where a grueling civil war, which left hundreds of thousands of people dead, ended with a tenuous peace agreement in 2022. Amid shifting alliances, rebels in northern Ethiopia have once again picked up arms against the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed as the United Nations warns of humanitarian disaster.

But this time, the fighting comes amid a wider sprawl of compounding conflicts in the Horn of Africa and beyond. The risks have only grown that full-blown war in Ethiopia could erupt and become intertwined with instability beyond the country's borders, as tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea reach a breaking point; Sudan fights a civil war of its own that has sparked the world's most severe humanitarian crisis; and Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen gain ground along the Red Sea — a strategic waterway at the heart of geopolitical rivalries spanning Africa and the Middle East.

This time, Tigrayan rebels from the north have joined forces with an alliance of six other rebel groups across the country. And Ethiopia has accused neighboring Eritrea — which in the previous war fought on the side of Ethiopia's government — of backing the rebels.

As the potential for conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea looms, a dizzying array of countries and armed groups are lining up behind the respective sides, introducing further prospects for escalation.

“That last war was almost in slow motion, with battles moving from town to town,” said Cameron Hudson, an East Africa specialist and former CIA analyst. “This one is accelerated, and it is happening throughout the country.”

The U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia, Ervin J. Massinga, has put out a statement condemning the Tigray People's Liberation Front for launching an “unwinnable” offensive.

“Other armed groups would be wise to avoid this,” he cautioned.

Most of the Trump administration's activities related to Ethiopia, which is home to 139 million people and one of Africa's biggest economies, has focused on commercial deals rather than traditional diplomacy, analysts said.

Hudson noted that the reported explosions around Addis Ababa overnight Thursday, apparent drone strikes, have the potential to “change the entire character of the war.”

“Last time, the crimes felt distant and removed from the capital,” as the war unfolded primarily hundreds of miles off, in Tigray, Hudson said. He noted that Addis Ababa is home to many thousand foreign residents and an economic capital in East Africa. Rebels marched on the city in 2021 before being stopped as Ethiopian allies, namely Turkey, rushed to supply Abiy’s government with drones.

This time, Hudson said, the rebels and their allies succeeded in accomplishing “in a matter of weeks what took them two years last time.”

But despite its initial moves, the anti-government coalition could be less cohesive than its public messaging suggests, said Lesley Anne Warner, a visiting scholar with the Africa Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former U.S. government official.

“During the previous conflict, Tigray had more internal cohesion and collectively perceived the struggle as existential,” she said.

But recently, she said, tensions between hard-liners and more moderate figures in the movement have been “elevated” over the implementation of the peace agreement.

And while Abiy has created animosity outside of Tigray, which helped drive rebel groups into the coalition, Warner said, "unresolved disputes over territory as well as differences of opinion over Ethiopia's political future ultimately threaten the durability of this partnership in the long term."

---

A fragile peace

Abiy, who has led Africa's second most populous country since 2018, was once heralded for pursuing democratic reforms and brokering peace deals in the region. In 2019, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for securing an accord with Eritrea that ended a 20-year military standoff between the neighboring nations.

But after the Tigray People's Liberation Front held its own elections in 2020, Abiy accused renegade local officials of attacking a military base. The military campaign turned into one of the worst disasters of the 21st century: More than 500,000 people were killed and human rights atrocities were committed on all sides, including widespread sexual violence.

Those atrocities have been “absolutely ignored” by Ethiopia’s government and the international community, said Haimanot Ashenafi, a researcher on the Horn of Africa at London-based rights group Amnesty International.

"Survivors of the previous conflict are horrified about what will come right now," she said.

The new round of conflict broke out last month in Tigray, the northernmost region of Ethiopia, which is home to about 7 million people, when rebels seized three major airports in Tigray and launched an offensive against government forces in neighboring Amhara and Afar. Government forces have since made inroads with counterattacks.

Tigray's government accused Ethiopia of an “invasion” and said its battle was defensive.

The exact trigger was unclear, analysts said, but potential war had been in the making for months, as Abiy's forces launched quiet drone strikes in the north and limited supplies reaching Tigray, creating siege-like conditions that laid the groundwork for their revolt.

The government has also been clashing with militias in neighboring Amhara and Afar, which are now allied with the rebels. Analysts said that it is unclear what exact role Eritrea — a repressive nation of about 4 million that is Ethiopia's neighbor, and which has more than 1,000 miles of coastline — is playing.

In the last war, Eritrea backed Ethiopia's government. But since that war ended, tensions haven risen, in part because Abiy has pushed for access to the Red Sea, saying that it is “inevitable and existential” that Ethiopia gain it. Ethiopia lost its port when Eritrea gained its de facto independence in 1991. Fighting in Yemen under the shadow of the Iran war has further inflamed tensions around the Red Sea.

In a sign of Abiy's focus on the issue, Ethiopia in 2024 signed a memorandum of understanding with Somaliland for access to its Berbera port, in exchange for recognizing Somaliland's independence from Somalia.

---

Wider dangers

Ahmed Hussein, the deputy governor of Ethiopia's Afar region, said that Eritrea was directly involved in the recent fighting. Eritrea has publicly denied its involvement, and a government spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

Ethiopia also accused Sudan and Egypt, as well as Eritrea, of backing the armed groups fighting the federal government. Sudan and Egypt also rejected those claims.

Sudan, meanwhile, has accused Abiy of assisting the Rapid Support Forces, one of the factions fighting in the ongoing civil war in Sudan, including using Ethiopian bases to train RSF soldiers and fire drones into Sudan.

Ethiopia's government has also received support from the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, whose drones proved game changers for Abiy in the last war, along with support from China.

In recent days, government forces have seized control of strategic towns in Tigray, even as anti-government forces make progress in seizing territory further south, in Amhara and Afar, said Jalale Getachew Birru, East Africa senior analyst with Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a U.S.-based monitoring group.

Flights to the town of Lalibela, a UNESCO site popular with tourists, were suspended in the week because of fighting.

Widespread internet blackouts, she said, make access to information difficult and total figures of deaths and injuries hard to come by. Doctors Without Borders has reported hundreds of war wounded seeking treatment in hospitals in Tigray in recent weeks.

This past week, service disruptions in Tigray left locals unable to communicate. Most banks were closed and food prices soared, according to residents who spoke with The Washington Post. Residents told The Post that they feared a return to the famine-like conditions that had characterized the first war.

Tsegaye, a 28-year-old Tigrayan writer living in Addis Ababa whom The Post is identifying only by first name because of concern for his safety, said that he was able to reach his sister in Tigray briefly by phone.

“She told me things were getting worse,” Tsegaye said. “She said they were not sure how many were injured from the attacks, but she is very scared.”

Chason reported from Dakar, Senegal.

AMMAR AWAD/REUTERS

A plane, carrying passengers who were on the FlyDubai aircraft bound for Israel that was diverted to Saudi Arabia after a cockpit stabbing, arrives at an airport in Tel Aviv on Wednesday.

---

UAE: Co-pilot used crash ax to attempt a terrorist act

He had been banned from Oman Air over radical views, an insider says

---

BY HELIER CHEUNG, LIOR SOROKA AND ADAM TAYLOR

The co-pilot of a flight bound for Israel had been praying before he took a crash ax in the cockpit and began to strike the captain, hitting him several times and putting the plane into a sharp descent in an attempted terrorist act, according to officials and new accounts that emerged on Saturday.

The alleged attacker on Fly-Dubai Flight 1073 has been identified as Omani national Hamam al-Hammami, according to Yossi Avraham Shelley, Israel's ambassador to the United Arab Emirates.

Al-Hammami was “dismissed from Oman Air” and later departed from another airline, Morocco’s Royal Air Maroc, Shelley said. “He has flown to Israel in the past, including recently,” Shelley said, with FlyDubai, the budget airline owned by the Emirati government.

A person familiar with the matter said that al-Hammami had specifically been blocked from flying planes for Oman Air because of his radical views. The person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said that the pilot had been placed in a desk job because of these views and that he had then resigned.

The person did not give details about those views, and it was not immediately clear whether FlyDubai or the Emirati government, which did not immediately respond to requests for comment, were aware of this. Israel's Transportation Ministry said Saturday that it does not receive the names of the FlyDubai aircrew in advance, and that it receives a declaration from foreign airlines that their crew members have undergone security clearance.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said this week that the co-pilot was “suicidal” and “underwent Islamic radical indoctrination.” A spokesperson for Netanyahu told The Washington Post this week that the co-pilot had talked on “social media about killing Jews.”

Social media accounts that appeared to belong to al-Hammami on LinkedIn, Instagram and X were suspended on Saturday. CNN reported Saturday that two videos were posted to a LinkedIn account associated with al-Hammami hours after Wednesday's attack that included al-Qaeda imagery and videos of planes operated by El Al, Israel's national airline. It was not clear who posted the videos, CNN reported. The Post could not independently confirm the posting of these videos.

An account on X under al-Hammami's name that also matched other parts of his known biography appeared to regularly post messages that showed hard-line religious views, according to a review of thousands of archived messages. Those included arguing against women's rights, as well as others calling homosexuality a pervasion. X did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The developments have strained relations between Israel and Persian Gulf nations, particularly the UAE, a key signatory of the U.S.-backed Abraham Accords, which seek to normalize relations with the Jewish state.

The attack comes weeks before a bitterly contested Israeli election, in which Netanyahu is facing renewed questions about his handling of national security issues before the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. Netanyahu has denied one bombshell report that he was delivered a warning from UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan that Hamas intended to attack Israel.

FlyDubai Flight 1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv came perilously close to disaster. The flight lost half its altitude in less than two minutes on Wednesday when the captain, Smit Machchhar, was allegedly attacked by his co-pilot in the cockpit. The flight had 182 people on board.

Hamad Saif al-Shamsi, attorney general of the UAE, said Saturday that the attack involved a crash ax that was already in the cockpit. Al-Shamsi described the attack on the pilot as an attempt to “take control of the aircraft” and carry out a “terrorist act,” according to a statement published by the official Emirates News Agency.

Machchhar, an Indian national, gave a firsthand account to Netanyahu during a call Saturday, telling the Israeli leader that his co-pilot had been praying before the attack. A video of the call was posted to social media by Netanyahu's office.

Machchhar told the prime minister that he was hit in the back of the head after about four or five minutes of the co-pilot praying, and that his first thought was that it was damage to the aircraft before he realized he was being attacked.

As the blows continued, Machchhar said he realized that it was “not the aircraft, it’s the other guy who was in the cockpit with me.”

Machchhar managed to open the cockpit door, enabling passengers and crew members to take control of the Boeing 737 Max and make an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia, according to accounts from passengers. The passengers were unharmed, and the pilot and the co-pilot were hospitalized.

Al-Hammami's ban from flying with Oman Air, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, led to him being given a desk job with the airline in 2024. "He left Oman Air because of that," the person familiar with the situation told The Post.

The next year, he worked for a period with Royal Air Maroc, Morocco's national carrier, which said in a statement to the Associated Press that he had “completed a three-month theoretical training period with the airline in 2025, as part of the preemployment process,” but that he was not “selected for employment” afterward.

Israeli officials have said the alleged attack on the FlyDubai flight was ideologically motivated. Officials from Israel's Transportation Ministry on Saturday appeared to place the blame on FlyDubai and security in the UAE, telling reporters in a call that they should have conducted background checks on the pilot, and that a pilot from Oman — which does not have diplomatic relations with Israel — should not have been allowed to fly a plane to Tel Aviv.

No terrorist organization has so far claimed responsibility for the attack. The alleged use of a crash ax also suggests there was no need to smuggle weapons on board.

A crash ax is normally used for emergency evacuations, Marco Chan, a former pilot, said in an interview. "If none of the exit doors are available, the pilot can use the ax to crash" desirred.

... use the ax to crack" designated parts of the plane's structure.

In current Boeing 737 planes, the crash ax “is usually located just behind the first officer or co-pilot” in the cockpit, said Chan, now a senior lecturer in aviation operations at Kingston University in the United Kingdom.

Suzan Haidamous contributed to this report.

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The fears and frustrations shaping Brazil's election

One of them is Trump. Officials have grown increasingly concerned about the possibility of U.S. interference in the presidential vote on Sunday.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is seeking reelection, waves a Brazilian flag at a Sept. 23 rally in Rio de Janeiro.

Workers prepare to seal electronic voting machines on Sept. 23 ahead of the first round of balloting.

ADRIANO MACHADO/REUTERS

Merchandise promoting right-wing presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro in Goiânia on Sept. 27.

SERGIO LIMA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

BY MARINA DIAS

BRASÍLIA — For millions of voters, Brazil's presidential election on Sunday is less about who inspires them most than who scares them least.

The front-runners are, for many, wearyingly familiar. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 80, is running for an unprecedented fourth four-year term; the left-wing leader has already served the most terms, albeit nonconsecutively, of any president in Brazil's young democracy.

His principal challenger is Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, 45, the oldest son of former president Jair Bolsonaro. The younger Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist, is running in part to get his father out of prison. The elder Bolsonaro, convicted of plotting a coup to stay in power after losing to Lula in 2022, is serving a 27-year sentence for attempting the violent overthrow of the democratic rule of law.

Flávio Bolsonaro and Lula, political opposites in this deeply divided nation, are expected to finish first and second in a crowded first-round field on Sunday. If, as expected, neither wins a majority, they will advance to a head-to-head second round in three weeks, with polls showing them in a statistical tie.

Brazilians, who have been voting directly for president since 1989, are accustomed to the unexpected. In 2014, candidate Eduardo Campos, a rising political star close to Lula, was killed in a plane crash weeks before the October vote. In 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed at a campaign event. In 2022, Bolsonaro, following ally Donald Trump's playbook, refused to concede his loss as his supporters stormed Brazil's presidential palace, Congress and Supreme Court in an assault reminiscent of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump backers.

As Brazilians prepare to vote again, the mood is less anticipation than numbness. There has been little debate over ideas; much of the focus has been on a corruption scandal that has ensnared the business and political elite, including Flávio Bolsonaro, and now the Supreme Court. Concerns about U.S. interference have added another layer of uncertainty.

Lula ended the last of his first two terms, which stretched from 2003 to 2010, with approval ratings in the high 80s. Aided by the early 2000s commodities boom, he had presided over strong economic growth and used it to power Brazil off the United Nations' hunger map. But this time around, many voters say he has not delivered the improvement in living standards and purchasing power that he promised.

Lula has acknowledged the challenge. When a democracy fails to meet people's basic needs, he told The Washington Post in May, it creates space for anti-system rhetoric. “Then any idiot who speaks against the system gets applause,” he said. “That’s happening all over the world.”

Bolsonaro is selling himself as a change for voters frustrated with Lula. But he carries the burden of his father's presidency, which was marked by a chaotic response to one of the world's deadliest coronavirus outbreaks as well as rhetoric and policies that alienated women, Afro-Brazilians and Indigenous peoples.

Bolsonaro started his campaign describing himself as a more measured version of his father. “I’m grounded — more inclined toward dialogue and to build bridges,” he told The Post in April. “I’m the Bolsonaro you always wanted.”

The approach didn't last. Voters who wanted to move beyond Jair Bolsonaro now face the possibility that his family will return to power.

“Neither candidate is particularly exciting, and that is what years of polarization have produced,” said Thomas Traumann, a political analyst based in Rio de Janeiro. “This is an election of rejection. Each candidate is trying to define himself by saying he is not the other.”

The numbers reflect that dynamic. Forty-four percent of voters fear another Lula term, according to a Quaest poll released last month. Forty-two percent fear the return of the Bolsonaros.

Here are the fears and frustrations shaping their votes.

---

Trump and U.S. interference

The election in Latin America's largest country is the biggest test of Trump's drive to reassert U.S. dominance in the region. A Bolsonaro victory would strengthen the pro-Trump bloc taking shape in Argentina, Chile and Colombia. A Lula victory would confirm Brazil's status as the largest counterweight to that shift.

Trump, who endorsed Jair Bolsonaro in 2022, has not named a favorite in the race this year. But in recent weeks, diplomats and officials here have grown concerned that he might attempt to intervene in the vote.

Last year, Trump imposed tariffs on Brazilian products and sanctions on key officials to pressure them to drop the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro. Another Bolsonaro son, Flávio's younger brother Eduardo, moved to the United States last year to lobby the administration on this front.

In July, The Post reported, the State Department planned to send senior officials to cast doubt on the integrity of Brazil's electoral system. On Friday, the U.S. Embassy here suspended consular services, citing unspecified security concerns.

The State Department last month denied trying to influence the election, calling any such suggestion “a baseless lie.” Nonetheless, Brazilian intelligence has classified the risk of U.S. interference as “critical.”

Addressing the U.N. General Assembly last month, Lula delivered a clear message to Trump: Stay out of Brazil's election.

"On Oct. 4, millions of Brazilians will go to the polls to decide their own destiny," he said. Brazil "will not allow the enemies of democracy, internal or external, to interfere with the will of the people."

He didn't name Trump. But a person involved in preparing the speech, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the subject publicly, said it was intended for the U.S. president.

The specter of U.S. interference motivates voters here, so Lula is hitting it hard. Brazil, he told the General Assembly, “is nobody’s backyard.”

His campaign has accused

Trump of trying to sway the electorate toward Bolsonaro. “Flávio Bolsonaro is Trump’s candidate,” the narrator of one campaign ad says, “and what Trump wants is to colonize Brazil, take our riches, steal our future and leave us in the dust.”

Flávio Bolsonaro has said his family's ties to Trump benefit Brazil but insists he doesn't need and isn't getting the U.S. president's help.

---

Fear of Flávio

Bolsonaro climbed onto a stage in Recife recently wearing jeans and a green-and-yellow T-shirt and waving a fake machete.

“Attention, you rapist, abuser of women and children,” he shouted. “You’re going to get chemical castration, so you learn never to touch a woman without her consent.”

As the race has tightened, Bolsonaro has largely abandoned the moderation he once pledged for rhetoric that often matches his father's.

For undecided voters, however, the concern is less his rhetoric than who he is — and whether they can trust him.

Camila Rocha, a researcher at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning who has studied the Brazilian right for a decade, has been interviewing undecided voters since May. She said many have doubts about Bolsonaro's independence and experience.

“Many see Flávio as immature, a playboy, a puppet of his father,” Rocha said. “But their main fear is his [alleged] association with militias and organized crime.”

Bolsonaro spent 16 years as a Rio state lawmaker before becoming a senator in 2019. He awarded a state medal to Adriano da Nóbrega, a former police captain accused of leading a militia, and employed members of Nóbrega's family in his office. (Nóbrega was killed in a confrontation with police while a fugitive from justice in 2020.)

Separately, Bolsonaro was charged in 2020 with embezzlement, money laundering and other crimes in an alleged scheme to skim staff salaries. He denied the allegations, and prosecutors dropped the case after courts invalidated key evidence. Bolsonaro also denies involvement with militias.

Now he's under investigation over allegations that he sought millions of dollars last year from jailed banker Daniel Vorcaro, accused in an alleged multibillion-dollar financial fraud scheme, to finance a film about his father. Bolsonaro denies wrongdoing. Vorcaro's legal team has said it will not comment.

The candidate's advisers acknowledge the burden of the Bolsonaro name: To win the election, they say, he must persuade voters who rejected his father because they saw him as a threat to democracy.

They're attempting to turn fear into hope by presenting their candidate as a new generation of Bolsonaro. They believe that could help him particularly in the northeast, Brazil's poorest region and the heart of Lula's political base.

---

Lula fatigue

Just before the 2022 election, Lula appeared on Jornal Nacional, the country's most-watched newscast, and made a promise.

“I want to come back and be better than I was,” he said. He promised lower prices on meat so Brazilians could once again eat steak with beer.

Four years later, prices remain stubbornly high, and public frustration has grown.

"There is disappointment with the present and a lack of perspective for the future," Rocha said. "People acknowledge that Lula did a lot in his past terms, but now they complain about the cost of living, food and fuel."

That frustration is compounded by scandals within his orbit. Federal police are investigating

Lula himself was convicted in the late 2010s of accepting kickbacks from two Brazilian conglomerates and sentenced to 12 years in prison. He was released after 580 days, and the Supreme Court eventually annulled his conviction, finding that the court that tried him lacked jurisdiction and that prosecutor Sergio Moro was biased against him.

an alleged influence-peddling scheme involving his son, popularly known as Lulinha. Lulinha denies wrongdoing.

At the time of his conviction, Lula was leading polls for the 2018 presidential election. His removal from the race enabled Jair Bolsonaro, a previously obscure congressman, to win. Moro is now a senator with Bolsonaro's right-wing Liberal Party.

Lula has grown irritated by the low approval ratings for his government, according to aides, and has demanded changes to his campaign strategy.

"There is a disconnect between what he thinks his government has been and what many people think it has been," Traumann said.

Last month, Lula announced a 15 percent increase in Bolsa Família, Brazil's main cash-transfer program. He has banned online gambling, which has affected his supporters disproportionately.

Campaign chief Edinho Silva, president of Lula's Workers' Party, said the campaign needs to focus on voters' everyday concerns. "We have to talk about the economy," he said. "We have to distance ourselves from battles over scandals with our rivals and talk about people's lives."

---

The Supreme Court

As polarization has deepened, conservatives have targeted the Supreme Court, whose actions, they say, are proof that the political system is stacked against them. Now, a corruption scandal has engulfed the court.

In the spotlight is Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who presided over Jair Bolsonaro's conviction. Private messages appear to show a close relationship between Moraes and Vorcaro, owner of Banco Master. In text messages just before the banker's arrest, he appears to ask Moraes when he should flee the country.

The messages, released by Moraes's fellow justice André Mendonça, a Bolsonaro appointee overseeing the Banco Master investigation, do not include responses from Moraes.

Moraes, in a court filing last month, said he never received the messages. He called the investigation against him “illegal and unconstitutional” and “revenge” for Bolsonaro’s conviction.

Mendonça did not respond to a request for a comment.

The revelations have energized the right, which portrays Lula as close to Moraes. (Moraes, a former justice minister, was appointed to the court in 2017 by President Michel Temer, a center-right politician.)

But capitalizing on those revelations is complicated for Flávio Bolsonaro, given that his own dealings with Vorcaro are being investigated.

Lula has said the investigation should reach everyone, regardless of political affiliation. But neither side's message appears to be resonating strongly with undecided voters, who tend to see corruption as pervasive across the political spectrum.

Neither Lula nor Bolsonaro participated in televised debates for the first round. They've discussed policy, but the campaign has been less about what Brazil can be than which candidate voters are more willing to live with.

“Politics has ceased to be an opinion, or even a cause, and has become an identity,” social scientist Rodrigo Tavares wrote in Folha de S.Paulo. “For a large share of Brazilians, politics is not about choosing between government programs.”

---

SUNDAY OPINION

DAVID IGNATIUS

---

The good, bad and dangerous in Hegseth's Pentagon overhaul

EVAN VUCCI/REUTERS

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on stage at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, on Wednesday.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is at war. The enemy, for better or worse, is the U.S. military's leadership and its traditional structure for promotions, training and procurement.

Hegseth announced his latest assault in a speech Wednesday afternoon to a cheering audience of junior officers and enlisted men and women. He mixed predictable rants about the media and “woke” ideology with genuinely radical calls for reforming how the military buys and uses technology.

I'm no Hegseth fan. But I like his proposal for a new “Autonomous Warfare Command” and his plan to draft defense-tech CEOs Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey and perpetual agitator Newt Gingrich for a quick 120-day study of the future of warfare. The United States is in trouble in Iran for many reasons, but a big one was the failure to anticipate the impact of drone warfare.

Hegseth, as always, was a histrionic performer, strutting across a stage backed by a huge American flag at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia. But this wasn't simply grandstanding by a former Fox News TV personality. It's part of a systematic disruption campaign organized by his Pentagon team and backed by a network of online activists. Make no mistake: They're modern-day Jacobins, and they mean to overturn military norms as aggressively as President Donald Trump has shattered those in other spheres.

"It's a turnaround," Hegseth told his audience. That's putting it mildly. It's a revolution, in the same spirit (sorry, Mr. Secretary) as Bolshevik Leon Trotsky's 1918 attack on a bloated "privileged caste" of Russian officers. For defenders of the Pentagon status quo, the Hegseth message was: Off with their heads!

Let's start with the part of this military populism that seems to me destructive and dangerous. Then I'll explain why I think some of the six radical reforms Hegseth announced Wednesday are generally sensible (and long overdue) attempts to transform a sclerotic Pentagon bureaucracy.

The damaging part is Hegseth's rage against senior military leaders. He has dismissed 26 generals and admirals since becoming defense secretary and blocked or withheld the promotions of about 55 others, according to a careful count by a congressional official who helps oversee the Pentagon. This purge has driven out some of the military's most respected combat veterans — the very warriors Hegseth claims he wants to support.

Hegseth said Wednesday he wants to go further and slash a total of 20 percent from the general officer ranks. “The number crunchers say we fired 10 percent of the generals and admirals across the force, and that number sounds about right,” he said. “We’ve also reduced the overall number of general officer slots by an additional 10 percent. So yes, 20 percent reduction across the board.”

“By hollowing out our military leadership ranks, President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have given a priceless gift to America’s enemies,” warned Sen. Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, in an email. “His actions are undermining the time-tested, merit-based promotion system ... [and] send a chilling message to all: Don’t give your best military advice, or you may be next.”

Many Republican senators share Reed's worry about the officer purge but don't express it. An exception is Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), who isn't seeking reelection and has broken the GOP code of silence. "What Hegseth has done is arbitrary and capricious," he told me Wednesday. "It smacks of a person who lacks confidence and experience. No qualified executive would ever do that."

Hegseth describes in his books how his anger at the military brass began during his service with the National Guard in Iraq and Afghanistan and subsequently deepened. “The military I loved, I fought for, I revered … spit me out,” he complained. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona), a 25-year Navy veteran and former astronaut who drew Hegseth’s wrath after the senator urged military officers to resist any illegal orders, put it plainly in an interview: “He holds some sort of grievance against senior military officers, perhaps because he wasn’t one himself.”

Hegseth removed many Black and female officers; others seem to have been purged simply because they worked with leaders he didn't like, such as Gen. Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Hegseth's interference with the promotion boards that select one-star and two-star generals drew a bipartisan rebuke from the Senate Armed Services Committee. The draft National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2027, approved by the committee but still awaiting final passage, “requires written justification and congressional notification before officer promotions can be delayed or withheld,” according to a summary provided to me by the committee.

The danger of Hegseth's intervention in the promotion process is that it presents officers with an intolerable choice: Join the chorus of support for Hegseth or keep your head down. Serving officers have told me they faced that dilemma. A half-dozen retired four-stars said that it will take at least a decade to repair Hegseth's damage to the officer corps.

With that grim prelude, let's look at some positive aspects of Hegseth's Pentagon revolution. His team has focused on obstacles that have blocked military modernizers for six decades — the Pentagon's addiction to legacy weapons systems and the myriad rules and regulations that make it nearly impossible for the Pentagon to spend money wisely.

“We are in a war of attrition against the Pentagon bureaucracy every single day,” Hegseth said at Quantico. Well, amen to that. Today, combatant commanders operate what amount to fiefdoms. Each service and command insists on its own modernization initiatives, snarling Pentagon-wide transformation. Rules are so complex that only the biggest prime contractors can compete. Congress keeps buying exquisite “Cadillac” weapons when what the military needs most is more cheap drones.

Hegseth promoted six initiatives to break through this Pentagon logjam. Three of them make sense; three others might make parochialism and paralysis worse, as I'll explain.

The top proposal is to create an Autonomous Warfare Command, “Autowarcom,” which would oversee air, sea and land drone operations the way U.S. Central Command manages conflict in the Middle East. Outlining a pathway to “drone dominance,” Hegseth proposed what he called “Project Agincourt,” named for the 15th-century battle where the longbow revolutionized warfare — in part because arrow makers operated alongside the archers. He said the goal was to “compress innovation timelines,” a worthy objective.

My worry about Autowarcom is that it could add yet another layer of Pentagon bureaucracy. War today is global. It doesn't have neat geographical boundaries, and nearly every weapons system in every domain will have autonomous components. The truly radical idea would be to fuse the combatant commands rather than add another. Why not be even bolder?

Hegseth's next big idea is to draft Musk, Luckey, and Gingrich for a fast independent assessment of the future of war in the age of AI and autonomy. He calls the 120-day review “Project Meridian.” (I guess “Warp Speed” was already taken.)

The three names make sense: Musk, despite the destructive folly of his DOGE chainsaw campaign, is a proven innovator at SpaceX and Tesla. Luckey's start-up defense company, Anduril, is driving advances in autonomous weapons in every domain. Anduril is also rethinking production at “Arsenal,” a huge factory in Ohio, where it hopes to make weapons much faster and cheaper. Gingrich is an intellectual gadfly, but he was one of the earliest champions of the new Space Force, which the Pentagon opposed but the country needed.

A final welcome idea is building reliable supply chains, energy grids and strategic reserves for key defense bases. This unfortunately is a necessary response to China's apparent efforts to "prepare the battlefield" for any future conflict by planting malware near the water and power supplies for military bases and choking off strategic materials like rare earth minerals. Hegseth chose a bad name for this one — "Fortress America" — because it conveys an inward-looking, hunker-down message. But the need is real.

Hegseth's fourth proposal, "The Next Great American Base," sounds like a TV game show. He wants to build a fancy new base for 15,000 to 25,000 troops and have states bid on land grants and tax breaks to woo the Pentagon dollars. The defense budget is already a sickening version of "dialing for dollars." If the military needs new bases, fine. But don't turn it into a political circus.

The last two pieces of Hegseth's revolution — on education and religion — are steps backward, not forward. They could undermine his larger effort to create the techno-warriors of the future.

Weirdly, this graduate of Princeton and the Harvard Kennedy School wants to separate the military from America's elite educational institutions, which he claimed Wednesday are “woke factories.” He even wants to ban civilians from tenured teaching positions at the service academies.

Wednesday, in a further assault on elites, he proposed that “America’s Corps of Cadets” should be educated through a new initiative with five institutions: Louisiana State University, Liberty University, Tuskegee University, Mississippi State University and Hillsdale College. The only relevant question is whether these institutions, two with conservative religious missions, are the best places to educate America’s best and brightest warriors. Working with smaller schools is fine, but frankly, I think the future dominance of our military would be served better by closer Pentagon partnerships with top universities like Harvard, Stanford and MIT.

The final Hegseth initiative is to expand the role of religion in the military through an enhanced “Office of Religious Affairs.” Surely, we need chaplains of every faith in battle, but is a faith-based military truly the way to leap into the future?

What I've learned in examining Hegseth's revolution is that it's well organized, and propelled by people who resent the traditional military leadership as much as he does. Overseeing the promotion process, for example, is Anthony Tata, a retired brigadier general who's serving as undersecretary for personnel and readiness.

Tata, whose time in retirement included writing military thrillers, has crusaded against what he described in a 2018 tweet as a “#DeepState-Cabal.” He posted about former CIA director John Brennan: “Pick your poison: firing squad, public hanging, life sentence as prison b---, or just suck on your pistol. Your call.” (Tata later apologized for posts that were “completely out of character.”)

An example of the deep anger that drives personnel management is Tata's deputy chief of staff, former Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller. On Aug. 26, 2021, hours after the attack on Abbey Gate in Kabul that killed 11 Marines, an enraged Scheller, then serving as a battalion commander, posted a video denouncing top military leaders who "let them down." He was relieved of duty the next day and pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty and disrespecting officers at a court-martial in October.

What's Scheller doing now? Hegseth announced last month that he had tasked Scheller with developing a new “Joint Warfighter Evaluation” that will shape future military promotions. Several retired four-stars described this effort to transform promotion as part of “the de-professionalization of the military.”

Behind Hegseth's team is an ecosystem that passionately supports his hard-charging approach. A self-described “watchdog” website called Restore the Military, for example, scours the internet for information that links officers with diversity initiatives, outreach efforts or activities linked to past military leaders. It’s a series of hit lists, in effect, profiling 35 officers from the Air Force, 30 officers from the Army, 20 from the Navy, four from the Space Force and two Marines.

A large number of the targeted officers are Black or female. Slashed across some photos are the words: "Retired," "Fired" or "Dismissed."

The Pentagon culture that Hegseth derides has many defects. Its great strength has been that it prizes and promotes good judgment. Being a strong leader wasn't about how many pull-ups you could do, but about whether you were tough and measured enough to lead people in battle. Hegseth wrote a book denouncing the "War on Warriors." How strange that he's now waging a version of it himself.

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[MATTHEW SCHMITZ] This ‘betrayal’ of religious freedom reflects forces beyond Trump

President Donald Trump championed international religious freedom in his first term, turning a long-standing bipartisan cause into a foreign-policy priority. His administration gave the Office of International Religious Freedom a higher position within the State Department's bureaucracy, stressed religious freedom in its 2017 National Security Strategy and appointed officials focused on religious freedom at the National Security Council and United States Agency for International Development.

Trump's second term has been dramatically different. He has failed to issue statutorily required annual reports, inflicted DOGE-style cuts on religious freedom advocacy groups and demoted the religious freedom office within the State Department's hierarchy. The 2025 National Security Strategy spoke skeptically of promoting “social change” in foreign countries, reflecting a retreat from the human rights advocacy of which the religious freedom agenda is a part. Far from prioritizing religious freedom through the NSC and USAID, Trump sidelined the former and gutted the latter.

Some religious freedom advocates have called the Trump administration's new approach “a betrayal.” But the challenges faced by international religious freedom extend far beyond the current White House. They arise from broad disillusionment with international bodies and idealistic foreign policy. Unless advocates can adapt to this reality, official backing for international religious freedom will continue to decline.

Though Trump has advanced the turn away from a human-rights-based foreign policy, it probably would have happened without him. As a July report by the Everett Center for Global Religious Freedom put it, “Political priorities in the United States and Europe are shifting back towards hard interests, reverting to the historical norm in foreign affairs.” This change is apparent in the fact that European governments, too, are cutting funding for religious freedom advocacy.

TYLER M. ANDREWS/THE WASHINGTON POST

President Donald Trump at the Faith and Freedom Coalition's Road to Majority conference in D.C. on June 26.

What explains this retreat from a cause that once enjoyed wide support? Efforts to promote religious freedom depend on a belief that American power — hard and soft — can be used to spread freedom and democracy. That idea has been challenged on both the progressive left and the populist right. U.S. interventions in the Middle East are invoked on both sides of the aisle to suggest that America is not a beacon of liberty but an agent of chaos.

On the right, this dim view of American power is complemented by growing skepticism of human rights as a tool of foreign policy. In 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a major speech declaring that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.” Her address was accompanied by a policy change from the Obama administration that prioritized LGBTQ rights in diplomacy and foreign aid. Religious freedom advocates adapted to this new reality. Sam Brownback, the ambassador at large for international religious freedom during Trump’s first term, has argued that “the countries in the world that are best on LGBTQ rights are also best on religious freedom.”

For conservatives, these changes in rhetoric and policy contributed to a sense that the international promotion of human rights, including religious freedom, was a partisan cause, colored by conceptions of LGBTQ rights with which many Americans disagreed. This suspicion accorded with Trumpian fears over the power of “the deep state.” When Trump returned to office, a profound mistrust of the federal bureaucracy helped to justify cuts to aid programs that had long enjoyed bipartisan support.

The changing politics of immigration have also upended support for religious refugees. Beginning with the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, America has been seen as a sanctuary for those fleeing religious persecution. President Joe Biden invoked this tradition when he responded to a question about whether there is a “human right” to migrate by mentioning Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.

Trump has spoken of migration not as a humanitarian matter but in terms of public safety and national security. Voters have responded by putting him in the White House twice, and Trump has delivered on his rhetoric by radically limiting America's openness to religious refugees. According to a September report from the Christian aid group World Relief, the U.S. refugee admissions program had not resettled a single person fleeing religious persecution over the past year.

Religious freedom advocates have good reason to criticize the Trump administration's policies. But their influence will continue to wane unless they can find a new language through which to articulate their concerns — one that is clearly tied to national interest. That will mean speaking of religious freedom not as part of a long menu of human rights but as something that advances America's traditions and security needs. It will mean relying less on international bodies and declarations, and more on discrete initiatives capable of commanding popular support.

An opportunity to do just that opened up this month, when Trump nominated Cissie Graham Lynch, the granddaughter of evangelist Billy Graham, to serve as ambassador at large for international religious freedom. He has also appointed prominent voices such as Bishop Robert Barron to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. In the name of American greatness, they should let freedom ring.

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[The Washington Post] AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER

EDITORIAL

The Looming 2030s

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When America's pot of debt will overflow

Tax hikes are not enough to get the debt under control

How federal debt as a share of GDP would change under different tax hike scenarios

KYLE ELLINGSON/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

THE 2030S ARE CRUCIAL because, if present trends continue, the United States will begin running out of fiscal space by the end of the decade.

What does that mean? Think of debt as water inside a pot made of soft clay. The potter is the American workforce, and the government is pouring the water. The national debt is the total accumulation of water in the pot. The amount of room left in the pot is fiscal space.

Fiscal space is the difference between the government's current level of debt and the maximum amount of debt it could take on before undermining confidence in its ability to pay it back. The government needs fiscal space so that it can manage events, such as major wars, recessions, pandemics or natural disasters, that might require an unexpected surge in borrowing.

The potter can make the pot larger by adding more clay and shaping the clay that is already there. That's what economic growth does. For most of American history, the government has had plenty of fiscal space because the U.S. economy grew as the population expanded. If a crisis happened, the government could use up some of that fiscal space without having to worry about the pot overflowing.

Without rapid population growth, economic expansion has necessarily slowed. But the rate at which government spending is rising has not. In fact, the largest programs in the federal budget are designed such that spending on them automatically rises faster than the economy grows. The government, in other words, is pouring water into the pot faster than the potter can make it larger.

The goal, at minimum, should be to reduce the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product to roughly the rate of economic growth. As it stands, the deficit is over twice as high as the rate of economic growth. One sensible deficit target with bipartisan support is 3 percent of GDP by 2030. With a slight boost to economic growth to go with it, that would roughly stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio and preserve fiscal space.

Circumstances have changed since the dawn of this century. Economists talked then about a “savings glut” that was keeping interest rates low. Interest rates are the price of money. High savings meant a large supply of money available to be borrowed, and high supply keeps prices down.

It turns out that when governments act on that information by issuing enormous amounts of debt, as most rich countries have done, and new large private investment opportunities come along, such as artificial intelligence, the savings glut gets eaten up.

Budget reforms must be based primarily on spending constraints, not tax hikes. While some moderate tax increases could help reduce the deficit, it is not feasible to structure a tax system in which revenue grows faster than the economy every year, which is what would be necessary given current spending projections.

Even boosting revenue as a share of GDP to the highest levels in American history would close less than half of this year's deficit, and such a large tax hike would destroy economic growth. No major tax proposal on its own, except perhaps a national value-added tax, comes anywhere near closing the deficit when the effect on economic growth is properly accounted for.

When government receives more rev-

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U.S. fiscal space is shrinking

The estimated difference between the maximum sustainable debt level and current and projected debt levels, as a share of GDP

Estimated maximum debt level is based on the real neutral interest rate and projected real economic growth.

enue, politicians' tendency is to spend it or refund it, not to pay down debt. That's true no matter which party is in power. The great majority of the increase in the national debt since the last surplus, in 2001, has come from bipartisan legislation.

To be credible, fiscal reforms must have bipartisan buy-in. Bondholders will not treat reforms as serious if they believe they'll be repealed when the other party retakes power, and they'll price that risk into interest rates.

Other countries that have made successful fiscal reforms led with the spending side. They have done so under center-left and center-right governments. The U.S. will be no different.

Constraining spending will need to be primarily focused on entitlement programs. The rest of the federal budget is roughly balanced in the long run. Reforms will also need to involve a revival in fiscal federalism, where state govern-

Most of the legislation that has added to the debt is bipartisan

The amount of federal debt added by legislation since 2001

Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act and Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act are projected to add to the debt in future years.

Sources: Winfree (2025), Economic Policy Innovation Center, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

ments reassert their proper constitutional role in funding public services. That will allow the federal government to refocus on its core purpose, national defense, instead of figuring out ways to pay ever-rising interest costs on ever-growing debt.

The U.S. is not doomed, dark though its current fiscal condition may appear. The economy continues to be resilient and dynamic, and even half a percentage point in higher economic growth would make the math easier. The trajectory of the debt is still in the government's control. Washington just needs to act before the debt begins to spiral and fiscal space vanishes.

The 2030s are almost here. The challenges we know are coming will be hard enough, but the world surely faces unexpected challenges as well. Getting on a firmer footing now would help ensure that America continues to be free and prosperous into the future.

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Universities should take assaults seriously

Regarding the Sept. 29 front-page article “Case of alleged rape being re-opened”:

In 2018, when I was a collegiate wrestler at Northern State University, my team was my brotherhood and my sport was my whole world. But when I was assaulted after a Halloween party, everything I thought I knew about strength and safety shattered. Men are taught that silence is strength and that being “weak” is unforgivable. Yet I broke that code when I reported the assault, and my perpetrator ultimately admitted what he had done and was forced to leave campus.

That process didn't give me my wrestling career back, but it did give me something vital: the chance to start healing. Because my school carried its weight, I didn't have to fight to prove what happened to me.

A student on the Cornell University campus on Thursday.

That is why I am watching the recent civil lawsuit against Cornell University and seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity, among others, with outright anger. According to the filing, a former student alleges she was drugged and assaulted by seven men at a fraternity in 2024. The lawsuit stated that the alleged perpetrators were temporarily suspended but allowed to “mitigate their conduct” by writing essays. Cornell said in a statement Monday that “none of the individuals charged were offered the opportunity to write essays as a sole consequence of their involvement.”

Nevertheless, true institutional justice requires moral backbone. It begins when a person says, “This happened to me,” and the institution refuses to force the victim to fight tooth and nail to demand proper accountability.

Far too many universities remain terrified of bad publicity and therefore don't protect their students. Survivors deserve better.

Justice Horn, Kansas City, Missouri

The allegations involving a former Cornell student are horrifying. In a civil lawsuit, she alleged that she was drugged and sexually assaulted by fraternity members in 2024. Cornell says its disciplinary process resulted in suspensions and expulsions. The allegations remain contested, and criminal responsibility has not been established. But after almost 20 years as a lawyer working in the field of sexual violence, there is something I wish more people understood: What is exceptional about the Cornell case is the attention it is receiving.

Too much of what surrounds it is painfully familiar. Volare, the organization I co-founded, has served about 13,000 survivors of crime. At our height, our lawyers handled roughly 50 Title IX matters annually in D.C. alone. When you see that volume of cases, certain myths become difficult to maintain. For example, federal data of rape and sexual assault among college-age women between 1995 and 2013 found that about 80 percent knew the person who assaulted them.

I want my daughter and my son to understand something this work has taught me: Courage is often much less cinematic than we imagine. Sometimes it is leaving the party with the person who cannot safely leave alone. Sometimes it is telling the truth about what your friend did when everyone around you would prefer that you didn't. And sometimes it is resisting the comfort of believing that terrible things happen only under extraordinary circumstances.

The Cornell allegations have captured enormous attention. I hope we do not mistake our shock for evidence that what they describe is rare. Progress

LAUREN PETRACCA/REUTERS

happens when what we know changes how we investigate, how we judge credibility — and whether we intervene when someone is vulnerable. We already know too much to keep getting this wrong.

Bridgette Stumpf, Washington

The writer is the CEO

and co-founder of Volare.

The Sept. 29 front-page article and additional coverage about the young woman's lawsuit alleging that she was gang raped by seven members of a Cornell fraternity two years ago makes me furious and sick. I cannot stop thinking about it.

It is crucial to take serious steps immediately to change the rape culture on college campuses and ensure that all students feel safe, are respected and are taken seriously. This isn't just about Cornell. The Greek life system should be abolished around the country. From this horrible episode to hazing deaths at fraternities to fraternities that became cocaine distributors, it is clear that the Greek system is significantly harming students. All colleges and universities around the country need to completely revamp what they do to better understand sexual violence, prevent sexual violence and protect all students. They should know better. They must do better.

Rebecca Batt, Rockville

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The perks of lifelong learning

I enjoyed the Sept. 17 Roundup, “It was a mistake”: What four writers wish they’d studied.” Far too many people think of education as a finite chapter that occurs only in the early years of life. Just because you marched in a graduation ceremony does not mean you have to stop learning. Night classes, mini-degrees and hobbies can allow you to continue learning throughout life. And there is always the choice to pick up a book and read.

A healthy life involves work, family, spirituality and recreation, as well as learning about the world. So, remember the person you were when your age was counted in single digits. You probably loved art, music, reading, math and sports. Figure out how to keep learning, and you will fight off depression, alienation and weariness.

Stuart Gallant,

Belmont, Massachusetts

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Post Opinions wants to know: What do you wish you had known earlier? What nuggets of wisdom, gleaned from years of experience, would you share with your younger self? Send us your response, and it might be published as a letter to the editor. wapo.st/wise\_words

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Source: Tax Foundation

ILLUSTRATION BY MICHELLE KONDRICH/THE WASHINGTON POST; ISTOCK

OPINION

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Flock cameras are too useful to ban

BY CHARLES FAIN LEHMAN AND RAFAEL A. MANGUAL

A mother in Richmond, Virginia, experienced every parent's worst nightmare last month when her car was stolen with her two sons —

A 1-month-old and a 3-year-old with autism — in the backseat. In a panic, she called 911. “I felt like I just wanted to jump through that phone and help her,” Richmond Police Chief Rick Edwards told local media. His officers promptly plugged the woman’s license plate into the city’s Flock Safety camera system, and in less than an hour, they located the car, recovered the children and arrested the suspect.

"I think they need to put more Flock cameras out. I think they should be everywhere," the mother told WTVR CBS 6 Richmond. "What if it was your child that was missing and the only way for someone to locate their car within a reasonable time . . . was cameras that was put around the city that don't nobody know about?"

Those words serve as a powerful counterweight to the furor over Flock, a firm that sells automatic license-plate readers, or ALPRs, to police departments through a low-priced subscription model. Such high-tech cameras capable of scanning the government-issued car registrations that pass beneath them have drawn the bipartisan ire of politicians across the country. Hundreds of communities, from Mountain View, California, to Arlington, Virginia, have taken them down. Even some governors have restricted their use.

The backlash is an understandable, if misguided, response to a number of concerning cases of police abuse. As The Post has reported, some officers have used the technology for nefarious purposes, including to “spy on their wives, their girlfriends, their exes, their exes’ new partners or women they wanted to meet.” At the same time, the effort to eradicate the tech is happening despite the objection of dozens of upstanding police leaders, who have emphasized what that Richmond mother saw firsthand: ALPRs save lives.

As we detail in a recent Manhattan Institute report, the technology helps cops do their jobs, from finding hit-and-run suspects to apprehending people wanted in alleged shootings. Legitimate concerns about abuse can be mitigated through intelligent regulation, not by eliminating a long-standing policing tool. Indeed, ALPRs have been in use in the United States for decades. By 2016, at least two-thirds of large police departments were deploying them. That's because the service they provide — detecting license plates and, with newer ALPRs, vehicle makes, models and colors — is useful.

There's a large body of evidence to support this. One of us (Lehman) has created a database of more than 1,700 news stories detailing crimes solved or prevented by Flock ALPRs alone. Data isn't the plural of anecdote, but the developing literature points to cameras generally, and ALPRs specifically, having some crime-reducing benefit.

That is a worthy goal, but any sensible person asks: At what cost? Many critics warn that AL-PRs will create an Orwellian surveillance state in which, as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) recently put it, we face “mass surveillance of every American” and violations of our “right to privacy.”

We think these concerns are largely misplaced. The constitutional question has been litigated many times, and by our count, every state or federal appellate court that's ruled on the issue has concluded that ALPR networks are within bounds of the Fourth Amendment. That's because the technology is nothing like the surveillance techniques that courts have held to implicate the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of "unreasonable searches and seizures." Those illicit techniques include attaching a GPS tracker to a car or using cell-tower data to track a potential offender. Both methods provide granular, near-constant tracking of individuals as they move through public and private spaces. ALPRs, meantime, capture vehicles from fixed points on public roadways, where, as the Supreme Court has said, expectations of privacy are greatly diminished.

More important, ALPRs can see only a fraction of the roads in a given jurisdiction. Less than one percent of Houston's roadways, for example, fell within the sight pictures of the city's nearly 4,000 ALPRs in June 2024. This makes it impossible for the camera networks to capture anywhere close to enough of residents' movements to make the systems analogous to the type of surveillance that has triggered the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement.

It's true that much like any police technology, from guns to driver databases, ALPRs come with risks of abuse. Yet states can mitigate those through much less drastic regulation than bans. In our report, we recommend, among other things, the mandatory logging of access to ALPR databases and requiring both individual user and case IDs for system entry. Supervisors ought to have to approve certain queries — such as those by non-investigators that are unrelated to crimes they are actively working on — and the system should maintain a 30-day image-retention limit. States, or city and town councils, should mandate regular audits of database access and impose strict criminal penalties for cops who misuse the technology. ALPR use should be limited to serious crimes, not petty traffic enforcement.

Why take these steps? Because while the risk of abuse is real, so too is the risk that, without the help of ALPRs, police wouldn't have been able to rescue those little boys in Richmond. Smart public policy seeks to balance costs and benefits in a way that makes everyone better off. In addressing the concerns of privacy advocates, we must consider the potential of making crime easier to commit.

Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael A. Mangual are senior fellows at the Manhattan Institute.

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As a doctor in palliative care, I've learned to know who's not in the room

ILLUSTRATION BY DARYA SHNYKINA/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

BY RAYA ELFADEL KHEIRBEK

For 15 years, my patient had kept a door open for a daughter who would not walk through it. Now he was dying.

His pancreatic cancer had progressed despite treatment. We controlled his pain and eased his breathing. We talked about hospice and how he wanted to spend the time that remained. His daughter was still listed in his medical record under next of kin, a simple entry that made their relationship look intact. It wasn't. As we discussed the people who would be with him at the end, it became clear that she would not be among them. But her absence carried enormous weight.

In more than two decades of palliative care, I have encountered this kind of absence more often than I once expected: a child who no longer calls, a sibling whose whereabouts are unknown, a name that remains in the medical record long after the relationship itself has dissolved.

My patient had tried over the years to reach his daughter through birthday wishes, brief notes and invitations to come home. Mostly the response was silence. Eventually she asked him to stop contacting her, and he did. But as the end of his life approached, he kept returning to a question he could not answer: How had they arrived at this point?

He did not imagine himself a perfect father. He remembered arguments, anger and words he regretted. He also remembered working hard, paying for her education, worrying when she struggled and celebrating her accomplishments. He had loved her deeply and believed that, despite all the imperfections of his parenting, he had done the best he knew how. Yet somewhere, his daughter had been hurt in ways he could not see or understand.

I hear this bewilderment from many estranged parents. They can name their failures but cannot always identify the moment when hurt became distance and distance hardened into silence. Their children may remember the same years very differently. Love intended is not always love experienced; what one person remembers as sacrifice, another may have interpreted as expectation, and protectiveness may have felt like control. Two people can inhabit the same family and emerge carrying different histories, with no shared account of how they came apart.

Families like this are not unusual. Cornell University's Family Estrangement & Reconciliation Project found that 27 percent of Americans — roughly 67 million people — are estranged from a close relative. One in 10 reported estrangement from a parent or child. Some relationships eventually mend. Many never do.

Serious illness lends the situation a new urgency. We like to imagine dying with family gathered around the bed, children coming home, hands being held and old grievances softening because time is short. Sometimes death does bring people home. But sometimes the absence of one person can be felt more powerfully than the presence of everyone else.

Medicine is built around the expectation that family will be there. Doctors and nurses ask for next of kin and health care proxies, depend on relatives for caregiving and turn to them when patients can no longer speak for themselves. Yet a name in a chart tells us almost nothing about the relationship behind it. Perhaps along with asking who should make decisions, we should ask who matters, who is missing and whether there is someone a patient would want to reach while there is still time.

This is not a call for physicians to repair fractured families. Some estrangements stem from abuse or profound harm, where distance is necessary. A request for no contact deserves to be honored.

But recognizing estrangement gives patients an opportunity to consider what, if anything, they want to leave behind: an apology that asks for nothing in return, an acknowledgment of harm, a letter that may never be opened, or simply words they need to say aloud even if the intended person never hears them.

My patient's daughter did not come to see him before he died. He could not rewrite their history, nor could he heal a wound he never fully understood. He had respected the distance she asked for. What remained was his hope that somehow, despite 15 years of silence, she knew that she was loved.

There was no reconciliation, and I am not sure “closure” applies to losses like this. But there can be a measure of peace in acknowledging what cannot be repaired while making room for the love that remains.

I have come to believe that one of the quiet duties of medicine at the end of life is simply to notice the people who are not in the room — and to let the dying person know that their absence has been seen.

Raya Elfadel Kheirbek is a professor and chief of the division of palliative medicine and geriatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

GEORGE F. WILL

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Spare these two Senate candidates from the midterm GOP carnage

Few who have ever lived could have had inscribed on their gravestones epitaphs as stirring as Thomas Jefferson's: "Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia." All but a few Americans currently living can, however, inscribe this: "At least I was not a Republican member of Congress during Donald Trump's presidencies."

It is sensible to hope that on Nov. 3 most of the Republican Party will be smashed to atoms. It is now a trembling and embarrassed, because frightened, emanation of one man. Justice — of a rough sort, but still justice — will be done if the undertow from his unpopularity drowns many of those who have tried to purchase political longevity by obedience to him.

Vast Republican carnage should not be entirely indiscriminate. Two Republicans especially deserve to win their Senate contests.

If Mike Rogers, former seven-term congressman and chair of the House Intelligence Committee, is not Michigan's next senator, Abdul El-Sayed will be. The Democrat is comfortable in the company of antisemites and Holocaust deniers.

If Sen. Susan Collins loses in Maine, this will be partly because she did something admirable and senatorial. Standing against manufactured hysteria, she voted to confirm Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. In 4,192 words spoken on the Senate floor, she examined his extensive judicial record and the sexual assault allegations against him.

---

Congressional Republicans can truthfully, if humiliatingly, say: Don't blame us. We have nothing to do with the nation's governance.

Demonstrating the complete lack of corroborating evidence, she concluded that the allegations could not meet even the minimal “more likely than not” standard. Read her statement and marvel at its sobriety about the Senate’s “advice and consent” duty. This is vanishingly rare among incumbent senators of both parties.

When judging Republican incumbents who have enabled Trump's rampancy, and Republican candidates eager to further abet it, voters should remember: If there is no penalty for travesties, travesties will proliferate.

The president's aching neediness explains his lengthening list of legally dubious, and unhinged, acts of self-celebration. Such as, taxpayer-financed ads praising him. And his proposed Arc de Trump that will double as a sniper's nest.

Voters should ask: If there were only enough Republicans in Congress to sustain a presidential veto, would anything, including the president's behavior, be any different? There will be enough in 2027. Beyond this number, any surplus of congressional Republicans is superfluous.

The electorate generally and particular constituencies are unhappy about the promised four-week war with Iran now in its eighth month. And about high gasoline prices. And about high diesel and fertilizer costs for farmers. And about another war of choice, Trump's trade war, which has resulted in agriculture exports to China plummeting from \$38.1 billion in 2022 to \$8.4 billion in 2025. And about deportations and immigration restrictions that have disrupted industries from construction to meatpacking. And about much else.

Congressional Republicans can truthfully, if humiliatingly, say: Don't blame us. We have nothing to do with the nation's governance. Other than by passively ratifying, through acquiescence, the exercise of powers that Congress has often improvidently and sometimes unconstitutionally delegated to the president.

Perhaps congressional Republicans harbor ineffectual resentments of their irrelevance regarding foreign and domestic policies, his vandalism of the White House, and much else. This irrelevance is, however, a sufficient reason for retiring them. Voters should say to many Republican incumbents what Oliver Cromwell said in 1653 to England's Long Parliament: "You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing ... Depart, I say, and let us have done with you."

If Republicans lose not only their House majority, but Senate seats they currently hold in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio and Texas, they might begin to wonder: Could we be doing something wrong? Such a resort to thinking is necessary to begin restoring legislative checks on the executive. And it is necessary if America is ever again going to have a conservative political party.

At last month's Dallas “convention,” a video told the Republican congregation this: “On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’” So, “God gave us Trump.” God’s caretaker constantly gives us an illuminating contrast with President John F. Kennedy, whose name on Washington’s performing arts center stirs Trump’s envy. Kennedy, when praised for his heroic leadership of his crew adrift in South Pacific waters after combat, was laconic: “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.” People who prefer Trump’s manner, and people who do not, know how to vote.

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[The Washington Post SPORTS] Caps aren't up to speed as offense goes AWOL

LIGHTNING 3,

CAPITALS 1

Upbeat vibes from opener dissipate in Tampa

BY ERIK ERLENDSSON

Associated Press

TAMPA — Andrei Vasilevskiy made 19 saves, Charle-Edouard D'Astous and Conor Geekie scored in the first period, and the Tampa Bay Lightning won their home opener with a 3-1 victory over the Washington Capitals on Saturday night.

Brandon Hagel had two assists for the Lightning, and Jake Guentzel scored into an empty net and had an assist. Tampa Bay opened play Thursday night in New York with a 5-1 loss to the Rangers.

Charlie Lindgren finished with 27 saves for Washington. Justin Sourdif scored for the Capitals.

D'Astous put Tampa Bay ahead 1-0 at 2:26 of the opening period as he cut down from the point into the middle slot to take a pass from Brandon Hagel and zipped a wrist shot past Lindgren.

The Lightning finished off the period with a goal from Geekie, who was off the right wing side to take a pass from Hagel for a quick shot to the inside of the post with 3:30 top go for a 2-0 lead.

The Capitals, who opened Friday with a road win over the Carolina Hurricanes, cut the deficit in half in the second period on a redirect from Sourdif off a point shot from Jacob Chychurn.

Guentzel scored with 2:05 left in the third.

Washington played the third period without defenseman Matt Roy, who suffered a lower-body injury and did not return.

Tampa Bay defenseman John Carlson, who spent 17 seasons with the Capitals, played his first career game against Washington, picking up an assist on the empty-net goal.

JASON BEHNKEN/AP

Alex Ovechkin and the Capitals were stymied by the Lightning on Saturday night in Tampa.

Players at Anna Maria College in Massachusetts were hoping to win a conference crown — the first in school history — before moving on.

PATRICK MCGUANE/ANNA MARIA COLLEGE

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One final run around the bases

Anna Maria College closed its doors for good this spring, but its tightknit baseball team played on

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BY NOAH WHITE

PAXTON, MASS. — At the end of his day, the deacon leaves his office and walks through the chapel to the elevator, his path lit by a rainbow of light from the stained glass above. Pinned to the office door that closes behind him is a crucifix. Beside it, a sticky note: “I’m off campus.”

As he walks, the altar catches his eye.

“I pray for their collective good health,” he says softly, bowing his head to commence this new ritual. “For sustained will, and that your work will continue elsewhere. I pray for those without jobs, the students who have gone home.”

His Toyota is one of four cars in the lot this spring evening. He has a few more weeks to clean out his office, but pretty much everyone else has already loaded their trash bags and said goodbye.

“And I pray,” he sighs, “for the poor few still here.”

Across campus that morning, in the leafy middle-class neighborhood where Anna Maria College has stood since the Sisters of St. Anne founded it in 1946, baseballs snap violently across the hardwood floor of the campus gym, occasionally escaping through a side door propped open to grant entry to the spring breeze.

Some neighbors wander by, peering in at the makeshift practice field. There is a batting cage surrounded by 20 or so young men, their shirts soaked in sweat, each taking turns blasting balls into the net. Across the court, pitchers test their arsenals from behind the hoop as a catcher defends the glass trophy cases. When a lefty loses control of his slider, the ball skips off the wood and over the catcher's glove and the glass cases, bouncing high up off the wall where the banner is.

Each stitching marks a conference title — a time when this tiny college beat all the other small colleges in the Division III Massachusetts State Collegiate Athletic Conference. A few are from basketball and hockey, New England's finest athletic pastimes. There's even an esports one. Missing? Baseball.

“That right there is what we’re playing for,” says Jonathan Guardascione, nodding toward the wall.

Guardascione is 20, a stump-like 5-foot-7, with a New York accent that catches every fifth word. It makes his many proclamations sound more serious than they are, considering the proclaimer plays “Call of Duty” most nights.

"We want this so bad," he continues. "We have nothing else."

Anna Maria, a private liberal arts school of about 900 undergrads, has fielded a baseball team since 1986. It has never won a conference title.

On this spring afternoon, however, Guardascione and his teammates are nearing the end of the best season in program history, four wins away from the program's first MAS-CAC crown — and the first NCAA tournament berth that would come with it.

There's just one hitch: Their school no lon-

SEE BASEBALL ON B4

EZ SU

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Wasserman is ready for his Olympic challenge

Chief of 2028 Games in Los Angeles discusses Epstein, challenges ahead

BY STEPHANIE APSTEIN

NEW YORK — Eight years ago, the president of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic organizing committee glimpsed a terrifying future. Casey Wasserman was seated in the stands at Pyeong-Chang Olympic Stadium for the Opening Ceremonies when he learned hackers had penetrated the Games' defenses, knocking out internet access and compromising the program used to judge timed events.

Officials patched the hole. But what got Wasserman's attention is what they found: The bug had been planted four years earlier.

“In Paris, there were 2 billion attempted cyberattacks,” he said in an interview Friday. “In Milan, which was one-tenth the size, roughly 15 billion. And both of those essentially are before AI. That’s only six months ago, right? So now go fast-forward 650 days from now. [What will they do?] I don’t know. I have no idea.”

Whatever is coming for L.A. might not even have been invented yet.

Wasserman shrugged. “Or,” he said, “they’ve already planned for it and executed it, and we don’t know it.”

He believes that the committee is prepared to stop attackers. But he recognizes that, like so much surrounding the Games, it's not entirely up to him.

After a quarter-century running his namesake sports and entertainment agency, and amid fallout from emails linking him peripherally to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Wasserman has turned his focus completely to the Los Angeles Olympics. He said Friday that he never considered stepping down from the position.

“I don’t think I ever doubted,” he said. “I mean, I really believe I’m the right person for this job, and I don’t think anything has changed that.”

While he was at the Milan Olympics in February, Wasserman's name appeared in a tranche of files related to Epstein. In 2003, Wasserman emailed flirtatiously with Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence after being convicted on sex trafficking charges. Earlier this year, Wasserman apologized for his correspondence and emphasized that it happened before Maxwell's crimes became public. Still, some of his clients threatened to leave the company if he did not resign. Multiplatinum singer Chappell Roan said she already had.

SEE WASSERMAN ON B3

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Midshipmen fall short in first leg of CIC Trophy

AIR FORCE 14, NAVY 9

ASSOCIATED PRESS

AIR FORCE ACADEMY, COLO. — Liam Szarka rushed for two touchdowns to lead Air Force to a 14-9 victory over Navy on Saturday.

This was the opening game of the round-robin Commander-in-Chief's Trophy competition between the Falcons (3-1), Mids (1-3) and Army. Air Force plays at Army on Nov. 7 with the Midshipmen (1-3) taking on Army on Dec. 12 in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Air Force leads its series with Navy 35-24.

The Falcons never trailed with Szarka scoring on a one-yard run to complete a 14-play, 65-yard drive that lasted nearly eight minutes. He added an eight-yard score in the final minute of the first half, set up by his fourth-down, 23-yard pass to Simon Kibbee on the previous play, for a 14-3 lead.

Navy's points came on a Nolan Bartley field goal and a 68-yard pass when Jackson Gutierrez found Truman Brasfield alone deep down the middle with seven minutes remaining in the third. A failed two-point conversion left Navy trailing by five.

The Midshipmen's final four possessions ended with a fumble then three drives for a combined 19 yards. They converted just 1 of 11 third downs for the game.

Szarka rushed for 81 yards and passed for 82 but was intercepted twice.

Gutierrez thew for 140 yards..

Defense secretary Pete Hegseth spoke to the Air Force cadets before watching the game.

Ashton Daniels set a record for a Seminoles quarterback by rushing for five touchdowns. He finished with 136 yards on the ground.

PETER JONELEIT/AP

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It's rush week for FSU in blowout of Cavaliers

[FLORIDA STATE 38, VIRGINIA 7] BY BOB FERRANTE Associated Press

TALLAHASSEE, FLA. (AP) — Ashton Daniels had five rushing touchdowns, setting a record for a Florida State quarterback, and the Seminoles had 10 sacks in a 38-7 rout of Virginia on Saturday.

Daniels ran 17 times for 136 yards and completed 12 of 19 passes for 183 yards with an interception as Florida State picked up its first win over a Power Four team in 2026.

The Seminoles (3-2, 1-1 ACC) held Virginia to 37 yards on 40 carries. Virginia came into the game averaging 192.8 yards rushing.

Florida State also recorded 10 sacks after producing seven sacks in the first four games. Defensive end Rylan Kennedy (two sacks) and linebacker Chris Jones (1.5 sacks) led the Seminoles.

Da'Shawn Martin caught a 13-yard touchdown pass from Beau Pribula in the first quarter for Virginia (3-2, 1-1). Pribula was under constant pressure and completed just 14 of 32 passes for 168 yards.

Ousmane Kromah had 17 car-ries for 80 yards rushing for the Seminoles. He has 80 or more yards in all five of FSU's games this season.

The Cavaliers punted seven times and went 0 for 4 on fourth downs in their worst offensive showing of 2026. Virginia had just 205 offensive yards.

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Yamal and Kane score in Nations League wins

one himself. Substitute Morgan Rogers completed the rout.

BY JEROME PUGMIRE

Ballon d'Or rivals Lamine Yamal and Harry Kane starred as Spain and England won their matches in the Nations League on Saturday.

Both are in contention to win the prestigious award on Oct. 26.

Kane scored twice as England crushed host Croatia, 7-0, and Yamal scored another brilliant curling shot from outside the penalty area as Spain earned a 3-1 home win over the Czech Republic, extending its unbeaten streak to 40 games.

2024 Ballon d'Or winner Rodri and substitute Mikel Merino also scored as Spain recorded a third straight win to stay three points ahead of England in their Nations League A group.

With his brace in Rijeka, Kane extended his national record to 89 international goals — 36 more than Wayne Rooney in second place on England's list of scorers.

Right winger Bukayo Saka also netted twice, while left winger Anthony Gordon set up Jude Bellingham's goal and grabbed

“We were so fluid right from the start. It just never stopped,” England Coach Thomas Tuchel said. “We just kept the pace up and played through the gaps. We were very, very clinical.”

Yamal kept up his run of early goals when he put Spain ahead with a superb sixth-minute effort in Oviedo.

Spain Coach Luis de la Fuen-

te shook his head in admiration

and disbelief as Yamal cut inside

down the right and unleashed a

powerful curling shot with his

left foot into the top left corner.

Goalkeeper Antonín Kinský could not even get near the ball, and standout Spain midfielder Pedri walked up to hug Yamal as he celebrated near the corner flag.

In other Nations League action, Switzerland beat visiting Slovenia, 2-1, in Luzern for a third straight win, and group rival Scotland won, 2-0, at North Macedonia in Skopje for its first victory in their League B games.

\- Associated Press

Harry Kane recorded a brace against Croatia, giving him 89 goals in his career for England.

PAUL CHILDS/ACTION IMAGES/REUTERS

MANU FERNANDEZ/AP

Lamine Yamal got the scoring started against the Czech Republic for first-place Spain.

With a 64 in the final round Saturday, South Korean golfer Tom Kim, right, locked up the title in the men's singles competition at the Asian Games in Kasugai, Japan, to earn a gold medal — and a full exemption from his country's mandatory military service.

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THE DAY IN SPORTS

TELEVISION AND RADIO

NATSUMI YASUMOTO/KYODO NEWS/AP

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[You can't conscript this] PRO BASKETBALL Fever GM condemns 'attacks' on fanbase

General Manager Amber Cox defended the Indiana Fever's fanbase Saturday during the team's end-of-season news conferences.

"The attacks on our fanbase have no basis in reality, and they need to stop, especially with members of the media," Cox said. "I'm talking about media who have never been to a game at Gainbridge Fieldhouse. Every organization in the league, every organization throughout professional sports, all the way down to youth rec leagues, have to deal with occasional bad behavior from spectators. And anyone who crosses the line in an arena or online needs to be held accountable."

Criticism of Indiana fans stirred up again after Game 2 of the team's first-round WNBA playoff series against the Las Vegas Aces. Four-time MVP A'ja Wilson had an incident with a fan sitting behind the baseline, who shouted and pointed at her. She did the same to him. The fan was taken to the back of the arena before returning to his seat when it was determined that the fan code of conduct hadn't been broken.

“We did not have one fan pointed out by a player who violated the WNBA code of conduct this season. Not one fan was removed from a game,” Cox said. “Our fans love this team. They’re going to cheer, they’re going to boo, and sometimes they might point. It’s a home-court advantage for a reason, and it’s the same for the Pacers. And all of that is within the code of conduct.”

Former Fever player Brianna Turner, now with the Aces, disagreed with Cox's comments.

“This is an unequivocally false statement,” Turner wrote on social media. “Players inside and outside the organization have repeatedly issued complaints with the Fever fanbase. While it’s not all Indy fans, it’s certainly a trend. To say the attacks have ‘no basis in reality’ is disingenuous.”

Kelsey Mitchell, who had a career-best season with the Fever, said in her exit interview that playing in Indiana can be difficult at times because of interactions with some of the fans. She has spent her entire nine-year career with the Fever but is entering free agency.

“I don’t think people really understand how much we endure,” Mitchell said. “Like, if I showed y’all my DMs about the hate and all of the stuff that comes with being a professional athlete, but specifically being an Indiana Fever basketball player, it’s a lot that goes into that. And those days are hard.”

HOCKEY

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Panthers put C Barkov on IR with leg injury

The Florida Panthers placed center Aleksander Barkov on long-term injured reserve, meaning the injury to his left leg will keep him sidelined for at least the next 10 games and possibly beyond.

The Panthers have not revealed any details of Barkov's injury, and the evaluation process appears to be ongoing. Barkov will see team physicians Monday, Coach Paul Maurice said.

Barkov was hurt midway through the second period of Florida's 4-3 overtime loss to the San Jose Sharks on Thursday night. He was jostling for the puck along the boards, got pushed by the Sharks' Darnell Nurse and awkwardly fell to the ice with his left leg at an unnatural angle. His knee appeared to buckle on the play.

Barkov remained down for a few moments, then got up and headed toward the tunnel leading to the Florida dressing room. He walked with a bit of a limp and appeared to angrily try to throw off his gloves as he moved toward the room.

Barkov — Florida's captain and a huge part of the Panthers' runs to Stanley Cup championships in 2024 and 2025 — missed the entire 2025-26 season with torn ligaments in his right knee. He went scoreless in his first two appearance of this season for the Panthers, who play Sunday at the Anaheim Ducks.

Florida made a pair of roster additions after placing Barkov on the injured list, bringing up center Sam Lafferty and defenseman Alexander Petrovic.

There was some good injury news for the Panthers. Maurice said forward Brad Marchand is getting closer to making his season debut, and defenseman Gustav Forsling is a game-time decision for Sunday. ...

Lyle Odelein, a defenseman who won a Stanley Cup with the Montreal Canadiens in 1993 and played for six other NHL organizations, died Friday, several of his former teams confirmed on social media. He was 58.

No cause of death was provided. Odelein played the last of his 16 NHL seasons with the Penguins in 2005-06 and lived in the Pittsburgh area.

The native of Quill Lake, Saskatchewan, was a seventh-round pick of the Canadiens in 1986. He played in 1,056 NHL games with the Canadiens, New Jersey Devils, Phoenix Coyotes, Columbus Blue Jackets, Chicago Blackhawks, Dallas Stars, Panthers and Penguins. ...

Sebastian Aho scored a pair of goals and assisted on Shayne Gostisbehere's overtime winner as the Carolina Hurricanes beat the host Philadelphia Flyers, 3-2, for their first win of the season.

It was the ninth consecutive season Carolina won its road opener, tying a record set by Philadelphia from 1980 through 1988. Coach Rod Brind'Amour became the first coach to win nine consecutive road openers. ...

Ilya Sorokin made 36 saves for his 30th career shutout, leading the New York Islanders to a 6-0 home win over the Devils in Elmont.

Simon Holmstrom,

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DIGEST

Brayden Schenn, Bo Horvat, Viktor Eklund, Ondrej Palat and Casey Cizikas scored for New York, which won its home opener after losing its season opener Wednesday.

GOLF

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At St. Andrews, Jarvis starts hot, pulls ahead

Casey Jarvis of South Africa holed out for eagle on his first hole and used the brilliant start to post a 7-under-par 65 on the Old Course at St. Andrews, giving him a two-shot lead in the Dunhill Links Championship as he goes for his third DP World Tour title of the year.

Jarvis played bogey-free on a breezy day in Scotland at the home of golf, and he didn't make a birdie putt longer than six feet in keeping his distance against the field. The South African, who won the Kenya Open and South African Open in consecutive weeks in February, was at 18-under 198.

Adrian Meronk of Poland, one of 22 players from LIV Golf in the field, birdied his opening four holes at Kingsbarns and had an eagle late in his round of 63. He was tied for second with Matthew Jordan of England, who shot a 66 at Kingsbarns.

Thomas Detry of Belgium, another LIV player, was three shots back after a 65.

Jarvis began his round on the 10th hole and watched his wedge land about six feet beyond the hole and spin back into the cup. He followed that with a tee shot over the Strath bunker to four feet on the par-3 11th. When he two-putted for birdie on the 14th, he already was 5 under. ...

Austin Smotherman responded with a string of birdies each time someone caught him in the Utah Championship, making one last birdie on No. 18 for a 6-under 65 and a one-shot lead over Doug Ghim.

At stake for Smotherman and Ghim is a chance at their first PGA Tour victory. Smotherman is making his 100th career start, Ghim his 192nd.

Smotherman three-putted from just outside 30 feet on the the par-4 10th, a bogey that enabled Kevin Streelman to tie him for the lead. Smotherman then birdied three of the next four holes.

Then it was Ghim's turn. He holed an 8-foot birdie on the par-3 17th and birdied the par-5 closing hole at Black Desert Resort in Ivins with a nifty pitch to 3 feet. Both times the birdie gave him a share of the lead. Both times, Smotherman matched birdies. ...

South Korean golfer Tom Kim got what he came for by winning the men's singles at the Asian Games: a gold medal and an exemption from military service back home.

He shot a 6-under 64 in the final round in Kasugai, Japan, for a four-day total of 18-under 262. Three golfers were three back and faced a playoff, with Kazuki Higa of Japan taking silver and Thailand's Sadom Kaewkanjana earning bronze.

TENNIS

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Top-ranked Rybakina goes down in Beijing

No. 1-ranked Elena Rybakina was ousted from the China Open by No. 118 Alina Charaeva of Armenia in the second round.

Charaeva held her head in her hands in disbelief after her 3-6, 6-4, 6-3 victory in Beijing. Rybakina had seven double faults and dropped her serve five times, the last time to fall behind 4-2 in the third set.

The newly crowned U.S. Open champion became only the second woman to lose her first match as world No. 1. Naomi Osaka was the other, in 2019. Charaeva, meanwhile, became just the ninth woman outside the top 100 to beat a No. 1.

Coco Gauff, who lost to Rybakina in the U.S. Open semifinals, won her first match since then against Camila Osorio, 7-6 (7-4), 4-6, 6-2.

In the men's tournament, top seed and U.S. Open champion Alexander Zverev beat wild card Shang Juncheng, 6-0, 6-3, to set up a quarterfinal against Novak Djokovic.

Third-seeded Daniil Medvedev advanced by beating Jan-Lennard Struff, 6-4, 6-3.

In a second-round match, Alex de Minaur beat Quentin Halys, 3-6, 7-6 (7-5), 7-5. ...

Top-seeded Carlos Alcaraz beat Matteo Arnaldi, 7-6 (8-6), 6-1, in a second-round match at the Japan Open, continuing his strong return to play after a four-month layoff with a wrist injury.

In an earlier second-round match in Tokyo, Denis Shapovalov beat Alejandro Tabilo, 7-5. 3-6. 6-4. Alcaraz will play Shapovalov in the quarterfinals. ...

Top-ranked Jannik Sinner withdrew from the Shanghai Masters as he deals with a knee problem.

Sinner has not played since beating Alexander Zverev in the Wimbledon final. He withdrew from the U.S. Open because of an injury to his right knee.

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AUTO RACING On pole, Hamlin looks to close gap on Larson

Denny Hamlin seized the pole position for Sunday's NASCAR South Point 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, positioning himself to make up ground on points leader Kyle Larson, who qualified sixth.

Hamlin, second in the Cup Series standings, posted a lap of 28.910 seconds at 186.787 mph on the 1.5-mile track. He was 0.017 seconds faster than second-place Ty Gibbs and 0.088 seconds faster than Christopher Bell. Larson was 0.144 seconds behind Hamlin.

Hamlin earned his 53rd pole position in 752 Cup Series races. It marks his fifth pole and 19th top-10 start of 2026.

Gibbs's second-place start is his 22nd top-10 start of 2026 and his sixth in nine races at Las Vegas.

— From news services

MLB PLAYOFF ROUNDUP

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Skubal, Los Angeles bring the heat to beat Atlanta in Division Series opener

The Dodgers' Teoscar Hernández hit a two-run home run during the fourth inning against the Braves.

RYAN SIRIUS SUN/GETTY IMAGES

DODGERS 5, BRAVES 3

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Tarik Skubal tossed six dominant innings in triple-digit heat; Teoscar Hernández, Kyle Tucker and Max Muncy homered; and the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Atlanta Braves, 5-3, in Game 1 of their National League Division Series on Saturday.

The game-time temperature of 100 degrees fell just short of equaling the Dodger Stadium record of 103 degrees at Game 1 of the 2017 World Series. The feels-like temperature was 105 degrees, with umpires chugging water between innings and fans shielding their heads with giveaway towels on a cloudless day.

Skubal was cool, though.

The two-time Cy Young Award winner allowed one run and two hits, struck out seven and walked two while starting a postseason game at home for the first time in his career. His previous playoff starts were all on the road for the Detroit Tigers, who traded him to the two-time defending World Series champions just before the Aug. 3 deadline.

"To go through six in these conditions I thought was fan-"

tastic," Dodgers Manager Dave Roberts said, "and I thought the bullpen did a fine job."

Skubal's 63 strikeouts are the second-most in a pitcher's first seven postseason appearances behind Bob Gibson's 74.

“It was a ton of fun,” Skubal said. “I’ve got a lot of respect for the fans that came out and showed up today. It’s not easy. It’s 100 degrees. The sun was on us the entire game."

Game 2 at Dodger Stadium is Sunday evening, when an extreme heat warning remains in effect.

Hernández and Tucker both went through major slumps at the plate during the season. But they came up big with two-run homers against the Braves' bullpen. Atlanta's rotation got upended during its three-game first-round series win over the Philadelphia Phillies, with the Braves using ace Chris Sale in relief in the deciding game.

• RAYS 1, YANKEES 0: Drew Rasmussen didn't allow a hit until two outs in the eighth inning, Jonathan Aranda homered off Gerrit Cole, and Tampa Bay beat New York in their American League Division Series opener in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Rasmussen retired 15 consecutive batters before Austin Wells doubled with two outs in the eighth inning, ripping a liner just inside the right-field foul line on an inside sinker.

He was easily thrown out on shortstop Taylor Walls's relay to third baseman Junior Caminero of right fielder Victor Mesa Jr.'s throw. Wells ran through the stop sign of third base coach Luis Rojas, who raised both arms before Wells rounded second.

Rasmussen dominated a line-up that scored 18 runs in a two-game first-round series sweep of the Boston Red Sox and was still missing three-time AL MVP Aaron Judge, sidelined since

Sept. 16 by a calf injury.

A 31-year-old righty, Rasmussen struck out 10 and walked two in eight innings. He threw 69 of 101 pitches for strikes, getting 23 swings and misses.

\- WHITE SOX 3, GUARDIANS 0: Munetaka Murakami hit a two-run homer, and five Chicago pitchers combined for a three-hitter in a victory over Cleveland to open their AL Division Series.

Colson Montgomery added an RBI double for the White Sox, who have won nine of their last 11 games dating back to the regular season. Chicago advanced to the division series after sweeping the Houston Astros in the wild card series.

The Guardians — who won their third straight AL Central title by one game over the White Sox — had the bases loaded with two outs the third and fourth innings but couldn't get any runs across.

The White Sox went with a bullpen game for the second time in three postseason contests. It worked again as the pitchers combined for 12 strikeouts.

Bryan Hudson (1-0) got the win and Grant Taylor got the save, going four innings and striking out six while allowing two hits.

NFL NOTEBOOK

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Against Commanders, Colts will be down Allen

FROM NEWS SERVICES

The Indianapolis Colts ruled out wide receiver Keenan Allen for Sunday's game against the Washington Commanders at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium because of a groin injury.

The Colts said Saturday the six-time Pro Bowler was downgraded after being limited in practice this week and then sitting out Friday. He was listed as questionable on the final injury report.

Allen caught six passes for 63 yards and a touchdown in last week's 19-17 win over the Houston Texans. Indianapolis then elevated wide receiver Nick Westbrook-Ikhine to the active roster from the practice squad for the game. He also was active last week.

Ashton Dulin also was listed as questionable with an ankle issue, though the receiver was a full participant at practice Thursday and Friday.

The Colts were already without No. 1 wide receiver Alec Pierce (heel), who is on injured reserve.

\- BEARS: Quarterback Tyson Bagent is expected to start for Chicago against the New York Jets, multiple outlets reported.

Bagent took the majority of the first-team reps at practice this week. He gets the nod over Case Keenum, who passed for 247 yards and accounted for three touchdowns in Monday night's victory over the Philadelphia Eagles after Bagent spent much of the previous week in concussion protocol.

Bagent was injured late in the Bears' loss to the Minnesota Vikings on Sept. 20. He came on in relief of Caleb Williams, who suffered a Grade 2 hamstring strain in that game and is still sidelined.

•PANTHERS: Carolina placed wide receiver Xavier Legette on IR with a knee injury.

Legette, a first-round draft pick in 2024, has not played since he was injured in Week 2 while hauling in a 55-yard reception against the Atlanta Falcons.

The Panthers promoted wide receiver Ja'seem Reed and cornerback Robert Rochell from the practice squad to the active roster. They also said rookie right tackle Monroe Freeling cleared concussion protocol and does not have an injury designation.

•BUCCANEERS: Tampa Bay elevated Easton Stick off the practice squad to be its No. 2 quarterback against the Green Bay Packers.

Stick will back up Jalon Daniels, an undrafted rookie from Kansas making his first career start. Regular starter Baker Mayfield is sidelined with a dislocated thumb on his throwing hand.

The Buccaneers signed Stick, 31, to their practice squad Sept. 1. He has played in six games, all for the Los Angeles Chargers, and passed for 1,133 yards and three touchdowns with one interception.

\- CHARGERS: Los Angeles elevated tight end Patrick Herbert and outside linebacker Caleb Murphy from the practice squad for its game at the Seattle Seahawks.

Herbert, the younger brother of Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert, signed to the practice squad in September. Murphy has appeared in 20 games for three teams and has been a regular contributor on special teams.

•EAGLES: Wide receiver DeVonta Smith is expected to miss multiple games with a hamstring injury, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

The 27-year-old Smith missed time in training camp because of the injury, but he was able to suit up for the Eagles' first three games. He did not practice this week, however, as he dealt with the injury once again.

\- SEAHAWKS: Seattle placed rookie running back Jadarian Price on IR with a chest injury.

Price, a first-round selection out of Notre Dame, suffered the injury in Week 2 against the Arizona Cardinals. The Seahawks already ruled him out against the Chargers.

\- PACKERS: Star edge rusher Micah Parsons, continuing his recovery from a torn ACL, is not likely to see game action for Green Bay until November.

That's according to NFL insider Tom Pelissero, who said Parsons has not had any setbacks. But the three-time all-pro is less than 10 months into his comeback from the Dec. 14 injury.

\- BILLS: Linebacker Joe Andreesen, also known as “Buffalo Joe,” is sticking arond for a few more seasons after signing a two-year contract extension.

The 26-year-old Andreesen is into his third season with the Bills and has established himself as a key special teams player.

Keenan Allen was limited in practice this week for the Colts, and the six-time Pro Bowler sat out Friday before being downgraded.

JEFF ROBERSON/AP PHOTO/JEFF ROBERSON

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Wasserman presses on with L.A. Games on horizon

WASSERMAN FROM B1

So Wasserman sold his stake, and the firm rebranded as the Team. But he said he received immediate support from L.A. 2028's board and sponsors.

Casey Wasserman, a veteran of the sports and entertainment industry who heads the Los Angeles Olympics organizing committee, pitched President Trump on using the Games to enhance his legacy.

PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

"There was no empirical evidence that anybody was going to behave any differently with the Olympics" because he was attached, he said. "By the way, there was no empirical evidence that they were doing so with the company. We didn't lose a client. Chappell Roan, still a client of the company. She never left." (A representative for Roan did not respond to a request for comment before this article was published. Later, a different representative said the singer has indeed left the company.)

“Sometimes noise is just noise,” Wasserman said. “And the truth is, all the noise that was being created online was facilitated via bots. Ninety percent of the comments were bots. Seventy-five percent of those accounts were from countries that don’t speak English.” He said a firm had run an analysis for him and determined: “It was an orchestrated, paid-for campaign.” He said he had identified the organization that paid for the campaign but declined to elaborate.

“Someone who’s a mentor to me said in that period of time, ‘Never let your memories be bigger than your dreams,’” he said.

That brings him back to the Olympics.

In reality, everything brings Wasserman back to the Olympics. For him, February's Super Bowl — which will take place at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles — is a practice run for the Games, as was this summer's World Cup.

He loved the soccer event, he said, and believes the committee that ran it did a great job. But for him, it served mostly as a frame of reference for how much more challenging the Olympics will be. The World Cup brought some 1,000 athletes from 48 countries to 16 cities. The Olympics will involve approximately 12,500 athletes from 209 countries in one city.

"It pales in comparison to the size of our event," he said. "So if you just take what happened in L.A., there were six or seven games in L.A. That's less than there are Rams games. We will do what is essentially two World Cup games a day for swimming for 11 days straight, and then half a mile away at the Intuit Dome, we'll have four NBA games a day for 17 days. And that's two sports of 36."

The logistics are one thing. But Wasserman is not heading the committee because he excels at designing road signs and securing WiFi networks. Part of his value comes from his ability to navigate the politics of the event, specifically with the government.