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  • Venezuelans search rubble for survivors after 2 strong quakes kill at least 188

    Venezuelans search rubble for survivors after 2 strong quakes kill at least 188

    LA GUAIRA, Venezuela — Venezuelans searched for survivors beneath collapsed buildings Thursday and rescue teams raced to northern areas rocked by a pair of powerful earthquakes that officials say killed at least 188 people and left more than 200 trapped.

    More were feared dead from the 7.2- and 7.5-magnitude earthquakes that struck Wednesday evening — among the strongest in Venezuela in more than a century and felt throughout the region. Some 1,500 people were injured, thousands were reported missing, and buildings were evacuated as far away as Brazil’s Amazon.

    In cities across northern Venezuela, panicked residents poured out into the streets and searched for the missing in the debris. Injured children, animals and civilians covered in dust and blood were pulled out of concrete rubble.

    One mother sobbed and collapsed in grief as the bodies of her 3- and 10-year-old children were wrapped in blankets and carried away. Others screamed the names of missing loved ones. Some stood in silent shock.

    The coastal region of La Guaira — north of the capital, Caracas — suffered some of the heaviest damage and casualties, and it’s there that the country’s main airport was damaged and closed, complicating aid efforts.

    Retired schoolteacher Juan Alberto Mendaño climbed through wreckage in La Guaira and past a dead body when he spotted a woman who was trapped and signaling with her hand for help.

    “May God rescue her as quickly as possible,” said Mendaño. “When we heard the scream, there was nothing we could do.”

    Offers of help poured in from around the world, including from the United States, which seized Venezuela’s then-president Nicolas Maduro at the beginning of the year in a surprise military operation.

    The natural disaster is just the latest challenge for acting President Delcy Rodríguez, the former vice president who took office in January after Maduro’s capture. Venezuela has been facing economic disarray for more than a decade, and many people reject the legitimacy of the political movement Rodriguez represents.

    Rescue teams head to heavily damaged coastal region

    Venezuelan authorities said they were diverting rescue teams from other parts of the country to La Guaira, which is no stranger to natural disasters; a 1999 mudslide there, considered one of the country’s worst natural disasters, killed thousands.

    Rodríguez appealed to businesses Thursday to make heavy construction equipment available for rescue operations, while a United Nations spokesperson said search and rescue teams were just hours away.

    “We are currently carrying out intensive rescue operations to save lives,” said Rodríguez, who referred to La Guaira as a “disaster zone.”

    Jorge Rodriguez, the president of Venezuela’s National Assembly and brother of the acting president, gave updated figures for the numbers of dead, trapped, and injured.

    While Venezuela sits near multiple fault lines, its position straddling the South American and Caribbean plates makes strong earthquakes much less common than in other parts of Latin America.

    The U.S. Geological Survey said the first earthquake, with a magnitude of 7.2, hit west of Moron on the Caribbean coast, about 105 miles west of Caracas. It had a depth of about 14 miles. Just a minute later, USGS reported a second 7.5 magnitude earthquake, with a depth of about 6 miles and an epicenter 10 miles southwest of Moron.

    The one-two punch of the quakes, combined with the shallow seismic movements, amplified the destruction, said Marcos Ferreira, a geophysicist and researcher at the Geological Survey of Brazil.

    “It is as if I am screaming and then someone starts screaming, too. That amplifies the vibration and adds to the potential hazard,” Ferreira said.

    Venezuela residents reeling from two strong quakes

    During the quakes, people ran from swaying buildings. Many were stunned Thursday morning as they saw buildings reduced to skeletons, furniture hanging out of windows and helicopters circling overhead.

    In La Guaira, Cristian Carreño stared at his charred apartment building tilting precariously to one side.

    “I lost everything,” he said. “There are people still inside, I imagine, that couldn’t get out. It’s incredibly devastating.”

    Dayana Delgado, mother of three children, said she was desperate because her 8-year-old son was missing. Delgado asked where the heavy machinery was that government officials had promised, pointing out that neighbors were the ones digging through the rubble.

    “I want to know where my child is, if he’s trapped or in a shelter,” she said.

    Authorities warned people against returning to homes with structural damage. In downtown Caracas, hundreds spent the night huddled in parks, parking lots and other open spaces.

    “We were afraid the buildings would collapse on us,” said María Cristina Díaz, a 41-year-old janitor. “My mother, my daughter, and I were cold. We didn’t sleep a wink.”

    “It was awful. We cried, we screamed. Thankfully, we’re alive,” she added.

    Parts of the capital lost power and cell phone service, Rodríguez said. Subway services were suspended and natural gas was shut off, she said. Classes will also be canceled for several days, and the Ministry of Education said some school buildings would be used as shelters and donation centers.

    Families began posting missing-person flyers with photos of loved ones, while others shared handwritten lists of names as they searched for those still unaccounted for. Venezuelans living abroad struggled to make contact with relatives.

    Shortly after U.N. officials in Venezuela called on the government to lift social media restrictions so people can get potentially life-saving information, Venezuelans in the country were able to access X. The site had been blocked by Maduro since August 2024, in an attempt to suppress the exchange of information among those who rejected his claim of victory in the July presidential elections.

    Several governments offered assistance

    Rodríguez declared a state of emergency in an address to the nation late Wednesday. She said the government was creating a $200 million reconstruction fund for damaged hospitals and homes.

    Countries from across the world — from Qatar to Mexico — began to send aid to Venezuela.

    Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had spoken to Rodríguez following the quake, said the United States is “immediately” deploying search and rescue teams, medical resources other assistance, though he acknowledged the closure of the country’s main airport was creating some logistical challenges.

  • Roundup cases led to eye-popping Philly verdicts. Will that change because of the Supreme Court?

    Roundup cases led to eye-popping Philly verdicts. Will that change because of the Supreme Court?

    The largest verdict issued by a Philadelphia jury in recent years came out of a trial in which a Pennsylvania man accused agricultural giant Monsanto’s weedkiller, Roundup, of causing his blood cancer.

    The jury awarded John McKivison $2.25 billion in 2024.

    The Lycoming County man was not the only one who has sued the German company. Thousands of cases are pending against Monsanto nationwide, including 462 active lawsuits in Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia alone.

    But on Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court limited the types of claims that people who believe they developed cancer because of Roundup can argue in state courts.

    Here is what you need to know about the Monsanto Co. v. Durnell ruling and how it will affect Monsanto litigation in Philadelphia.

    What did the Supreme Court decide in ‘Monsanto v. Durnell’?

    In a 7-2 ruling, the Supreme Court held that lawsuits against Monsanto in state courts cannot include a failure-to-warn claim.

    The case arose out of Missouri, where a state court jury found that Roundup use caused John Durnell’s cancer, and that Monsanto should have included a cancer warning on the product’s label. Durnell was awarded $1.25 million for the company’s failure to warn him.

    Monsanto appealed, arguing that the Environmental Protection Agency had concluded that glyphosate — the main chemical in Roundup — is not cancer-causing, so the label did not need a warning.

    The case went all the way to the highest court in the land, which decided that states cannot force Monsanto to add anything to the EPA-approved label. So failure-to-warn claims cannot proceed in state courts, the Supreme Court said.

    “In sum, federal law requires Monsanto to sell Roundup with the label that EPA approved at the initial registration and that EPA has subsequently reapproved on multiple occasions — that is, the label without a cancer warning,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote for the majority.

    When it comes to pesticide labeling, Kavanaugh said, federal law preempts any state labeling requirement because it would force companies to deviate from the EPA-approved label.

    Not all justices agreed. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissent, which Justice Neil M. Gorsuch joined, that adding a cancer warning would be in line with the federal law’s prohibition on misbranding.

    What does the ruling mean for lawsuits in Philadelphia?

    The ruling does not erase the 462 lawsuits in Philadelphia overnight.

    Lawyers usually included multiple claims in each lawsuit in an attempt to advance different theories that could convince a jury a company is liable.

    In the $2.25 billion case, the jury found that Monsanto did not adequately warn McKivison of Roundup’s cancer risk. But jurors also found that the company was negligent and that it sold a defective product.

    While the ruling prohibits failure-to-warn claims from moving forward, Monsanto can still face lawsuits under other claims.

    The Supreme Court ruling “narrowed the playing field,” said Tom Kline, the Kline & Specter attorney who represented McKivison. But “it’s not the end. It’s not lights out. It’s not game over,” he said.

    Juries will have to answer fewer questions moving forward, Kline said.

    Whether the ruling affects trial outcomes remains to be seen. So far Monsanto has lost four of the seven Roundup trials held in Philadelphia.

    The ruling could also affect other product liability lawsuits against pesticide manufacturers, such as those against manufacturers of weedkillers that contain paraquat, a toxic chemical that has been linked to Parkinson’s disease.

    “I think it’s part of a larger part of an industrywide strategy to piece-by-piece dismantle the tort liability for defective products,” Kline said.

    What is Monsanto saying about the ruling?

    The company said that the ruling would result in a dismissal of failure-to-warn claims, which according to Monsanto make up the “vast majority” of the litigation.

    Bill Anderson, the CEO of Monsanto’s parent company, Bayer, said in a statement that the decision provides “regulatory clarity” and brings “overdue justice on an issue that should have been clarified much earlier.”

    “This litigation has enormous costs for the company and has impacted public trust,” Anderson said.

    The executive affirmed the company’s commitment to a proposed nationwide class-action settlement of up to $7.25 billion as part of the company’s “multi-pronged containment strategy” on Roundup lawsuits.

    How does ‘Monsanto v. Durnell’ relate to the MAHA movement?

    The case has put President Donald Trump’s administration in an uncomfortable position with the Make America Healthy Again movement.

    Trump courted the movement during his campaign by recruiting Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom he later appointed as his Department of Health and Human Services secretary. Before his turn to politics, Kennedy was an environmental lawyer who, in 2018, helped secure a $289 million verdict in the first Roundup cancer trial.

    And while the Trump administration has adopted some of the MAHA movement’s rhetoric on ultraprocessed foods, it took a different approach to pesticides.

    Trump’s solicitor general, John Sauer, filed briefs to the Supreme Court in support of Monsanto’s position on behalf of the White House, which drew the ire of MAHA supporters.

    After the ruling, MAHA influencers expressed anger at the administration.

    Kelly Ryerson, who is known online as Glyphosate Girl, posted Thursday on X that “never in history has an administration so blatantly and willingly sold out our fertility, vitality, and health to corporate interests.”

    Vani Hari, another MAHA influencer who posts to millions of followers as the Food Babe, said on Instagram she was “devastated” by the ruling.

    “We will remember who fought with us and who didn’t.”

  • Supreme Court clears way for Trump administration to revive restrictive immigration policy

    Supreme Court clears way for Trump administration to revive restrictive immigration policy

    WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court cleared the way Thursday for the Trump administration to potentially revive an immigration policy once used to turn back migrants seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

    The justices, in a 6-3 decision, overturned a lower court order blocking the practice that limited the number of people who could apply for asylum each day, first under the Obama administration and then expanded during President Donald Trump’s first term.

    Advocates said the tactic created a humanitarian crisis as thousands of people settled in unsafe makeshift shelters to await their turn. The Trump administration said it was necessary to deal with an increase of asylum seekers at the border.

    The policy is not in place now, though authorities have imposed other restrictions on asylum seekers. The Department of Homeland Security did not say if they plan to revive it, but applauded the ruling. “This decision opens up an important tool to continue securing our southern border,” said James Percival, the agency’s general counsel.

    The administration argued that metering is a critical tool that’s been used by presidents of both parties and should stay available. Federal attorneys say people turned away at the border could come back later, though lines were thousands of people long when the policy was in place before.

    The case is one of several immigration suits the court is considering this term, including Trump’s push to end restrict birthright citizenship. The high court also allowed his administration to end deportation for migrants fleeing instability and armed conflict on Thursday.

    Under federal law, migrants who arrive in the U.S. must be able to apply for asylum and be screened for fear of persecution in their home countries.

    The Justice Department argued that people stopped by authorities haven’t arrived in the country, so immigration agents don’t have to let them apply.

    The court’s conservative majority agreed. “A guest does not arrive in a house when he knocks on the front door,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote.

    But attorneys for people seeking asylum say the law has long meant anyone arriving at a port of entry should be screened, and blocking arrivals disregards the nation’s ideals.

    Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the bench, saying that the majority’s opinion “regrettably and tragically extinguishes the light of the torch of the Statue of Liberty.”

    In an unusual exchange, Alito voiced a response after she finished speaking. He expressed surprise that she had read her dissent out loud and defended his opinion by pointing out that the policy had been used during two presidential administrations. “I won’t add anything more to that,” Alito said.

    Metering was first used under President Barack Obama when large numbers of Haitians appeared at the main crossing to San Diego from Tijuana, Mexico. It was expanded to all border crossings from Mexico during Trump’s first term in the White House.

    It ended in 2020 when the government introduced greater restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic, and President Joe Biden formally rescinded it in 2021.

    The same year, a California-based federal judge found that metering violated the asylum seekers’ rights and the law requiring screening. A divided appeals court panel affirmed the ruling but nearly half of judges on the full San Francisco-based court voted to rehear it, a strong signal that might have caught the attention of the Supreme Court.

    Attorneys with the group Democracy Forward first brought the case, and condemned Thursday’s ruling. “We are disappointed in the Court’s decision and call on all Americans to demand that our government protect the families the Court today decided to keep in harm’s way,” said President and CEO Skye Perryman.

    They represented the group Al Otro Lado, whose executive director said the decision would mean a “hardening of borders to keep out the most vulnerable,” that is “sure to result in many more lives lost.”

    U.S. law allows people seeking refuge to apply for asylum once they are on American soil, regardless of whether they came legally. To qualify for asylum, they must show a fear of persecution in their homeland for specific reasons, like race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.

    People who are eventually granted asylum can’t be deported. They can legally work, bring in immediate family, apply for legal residency and seek citizenship.

  • Supreme Court allows Trump administration to end legal protections for Haitians, Syrians

    Supreme Court allows Trump administration to end legal protections for Haitians, Syrians

    WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed the Trump administration to end legal protections for migrants fleeing violence and natural disaster in Haiti and Syria, exposing hundreds of thousands more people to potential deportation.

    The 6-3 decision overturns lower court orders and allows the Department of Homeland Security to swiftly end temporary protected status, a program that protects a total of 1.3 million people from 17 countries.

    It marked another victory at the high court for Republican President Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration. Though the conservative-dominated court has put the brakes on some of Trump’s immigration policies over the last year, it handed him a second win Thursday in a decision clearing the way for the revival of a policy restricting immigrants seeking asylum.

    The court’s conservative majority found that immigration authorities have sole authority over the program, and the law doesn’t allow judges to intervene.

    The majority opinion from Justice Samuel Alito also brushed aside arguments that derogatory comments from Trump about Haitians showed the decision was unlawfully tinged by prejudice. He called the statements “insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti’s TPS designation was based on the race of the Haitian people.”

    Justice Elena Kagan forcefully disagreed, calling Trump’s comments “so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.” She pointed out that Trump had said Haitians in the U.S. “probably have AIDS,” and he also amplified false rumors during the 2024 campaign that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were abducting and eating dogs and cats.

    Lawyers said Haitian immigrants would be in serious danger if they are sent back. “Simply put, the Supreme Court’s ruling will directly result in thousands of innocent people dying violent, needless deaths,” Geoff Pipoly and Andy Tauber said.

    They urged the Senate to approve an extension of deportation protections for Haitians that’ passed the House on a rare bipartisan vote in April.

    “Families are here, kids are going to school, parents are going into work, folks are trying to commute, and it’s like the Supreme Court just put all those activities on stop and put folks in limbo,” said Viles Dorsainvil, who runs a support center for Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.

    Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, called the “a devastating betrayal of Haitian families who have lived, worked, and contributed to this country for years — only to be cast out based on anti-Black immigration sentiment.”

    Haitians with TPS are also a key part of the workforce in long-term care facilities. “This would be a dreadful loss for all seniors in our community,” said Rita Siebenaler, a resident at Goodwin Living, a senior living community in Virginia.

    The Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court after judges postponed the end of the program for about 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. The high court sided with the administration before and allowed the end of the program for people from Venezuela.

    Federal authorities deny prejudice played a role. They also cited a Supreme Court decision from Trump’s first term that rejected bias claims based on his social media posts and upheld a travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries.

    James Percival, DHS general counsel, applauded Thursday’s ruling. He said the program had, in many cases, become “de facto amnesty. This is a win for the rule of law and common sense.”

    Since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, Homeland Security has ended the protections, including some that had been in place for more than a decade, for people from 13 countries.

    The terminations were made even though countries such as Haiti and Syria remain dangerous, immigration lawyers said. Four Haitian women who were deported from the United States in February were found beheaded and dumped in a river several months later, lawyers said in court documents.

    The United States first granted protections to Haitians in 2010 after a catastrophic earthquake and extended them multiple times amid ongoing gang violence that has displaced more than a million people, according to court documents.

    Syrians were first granted protected status in 2012, during a civil war that lasted for more than a decade before the fall of President Bashar Assad’s government in late 2024.

    “Today, many of our community members they feel lost,” Farrah AlKhorfan of Immigrants Act Now said about Syrian immigrants losing TPS protections. “They are trying to understand … what this decision means for them and how it will be implemented and how much time they will have to prepare for what comes next.”

    The program was created by Congress in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters, civil strife and other instability. It allows people already in the country to stay with work permits in increments of up to 18 months, but it does not provide a path to citizenship.

  • New acting intel czar Bill Pulte starts trimming staff as Trump urged

    New acting intel czar Bill Pulte starts trimming staff as Trump urged

    Acting director of national intelligence Bill Pulte, installed Friday by President Donald Trump, has at Trump’s urging begun trimming his organization, which coordinates the nation’s 18 spy agencies.

    This week Pulte fired a half-dozen political appointees and notified several dozen career officers on loan to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that they were being sent back to their home agencies.

    Pulte’s immediate predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, had already culled hundreds of personnel, boasting that she had slashed the staff by 40%. Trump has long been distrustful of what he calls the “deep state” intelligence community, and the cuts by Pulte are the latest in a series of shocks that have roiled the ODNI.

    Gabbard, who left office last week, had a stormy tenure, falling in and out of favor with Trump’s White House. Current and former officials criticized as ham-handed her release of files related to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. She selectively declassified data on Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election and other matters that supported Trump’s views.

    In recent months, the ODNI has seen a number of high-level resignations and a roller coaster of leadership announcements by Trump.

    The agency “is being so hollowed out that its new name might become DNR — do not resuscitate. It’s on life support already,” said Beth Sanner, a former ODNI deputy director who served as Trump’s intelligence briefer in his first administration.

    While a number of current and former intelligence officials note that there are merits to shrinking the ODNI, the Trump administration, they say, has gone about it in a haphazard way that could undermine the intelligence coordination that Congress created the agency to do.

    “Reasonable people can debate ODNI’s size and mission, but sacking dozens of seasoned officers in your first week isn’t reform — it’s performative firing to please a president who treats his own intelligence community as the enemy within,” said Julia Curlee, who served as a director for intelligence programs in Trump’s White House until last year and recently resigned from the CIA after 20 years as an analyst.

    Pulte asked program heads for a rank-ordered list of personnel to guide decisions on who could be let go, according to former intelligence officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

    One apparent casualty of the personnel moves that began under Gabbard is the National Intelligence Council, which was staffed primarily by career officers on loan from other agencies, such as the CIA. The NIC is considered the most authoritative intelligence analysis unit, producing in-depth reports on key topics for top government officials using information gathered by multiple spy agencies.

    About 20 NIC personnel have been removed or have chosen to leave, including several senior officers who oversaw the production of analysis on Russia, China, and Europe.

    The deputy director for mission integration, Will Ruger, who effectively led the council, was placed on administrative leave, according to three former intelligence officials.

    It is unclear whether and to what extent the vacancies will be filled. When the principal deputy intelligence officer for Russia left last year, the position was kept open.

    Trump told the Wall Street Journal this month that he’d like to see a “smaller” ODNI. “I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there,” Trump said, noting that he was referring to holdovers from the Biden and Obama administrations.

    Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton said on the Senate floor Wednesday that “mass firings” were not taking place. He said Pulte told him that “a small handful of front-office personnel” were leaving, “which is not at all uncommon when a senior leader leaves an agency or one comes into an agency.” He added that “around 45 or 50 career officers” were returning to their home agencies.

    “I think that’s a step in the right direction,” said Cotton, who has long called for shrinking the ODNI and last year proposed legislation that would cap its full-time staff at 650.

    Some agency insiders have heard that there could be subsequent rounds of cuts and that keeping each round relatively small will help avoid congressional blowback, according to one former intelligence official.

    Trump’s appointment of Pulte, who has no intelligence or national security experience, has alarmed Democratic lawmakers, as well as some Republicans. Some current and former intelligence officials fear he will use the post to further Trump’s agenda, including weaponizing intelligence against the president’s enemies.

    As head of a federal mortgage regulation agency, Pulte has launched mortgage fraud probes of people Trump considers adversaries, including Sen. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) and Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook.

    Government reorganization efforts under Trump have been marked by chaos and missteps, such as when Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency last year dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and conducted mass firings at the State Department and other agencies.

    The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created by Congress in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks, after investigations found that the CIA, the FBI and other agencies had failed to share critical information about al-Qaeda plots.

    The ODNI had a little more than 2,000 employees at the start of Trump’s second term. By the time Gabbard left last week, the number had shrunk to 1,300, according to congressional aides.

    Morale was shaken last year when Gabbard dismissed the chair and vice chair of the NIC after it produced a report that found that the Venezuelan government was most likely not directing the activities of Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang that Trump has vilified. The finding contradicted his rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act and deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process.

    “Getting [the agency] smaller makes sense, but this isn’t the way to do it,” said John Sipher, a 28-year veteran CIA operations officer and former Moscow station chief, who has argued that the ODNI should be dismantled.

    Sipher said the ODNI’s problem is that it suffers not just from bureaucratic bloat, but from political interference. “The office that was meant to safeguard intelligence from fragmentation has become another perch from which intelligence can be politicized and bent toward partisan narratives,” he wrote in the Bulwark.

    This week’s cuts do not appear to have significantly affected the agency’s largest component, the National Counterterrorism Center, which was set up by Congress to be the government’s primary organization for analyzing international terrorism and which in its heyday had more than 1,000 personnel, according to former senior intelligence officials.

    Trump has nominated Jay Clayton, U.S. attorney and former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, to be the permanent director of national intelligence.

    But last week, Trump abruptly froze Clayton’s nomination, prompting the Senate to postpone a confirmation hearing, in a fit of pique over lawmakers’ failure to pass unrelated election legislation.

  • Reflecting Pool’s algae bloom and peeling paint reflect Trump’s treatment of U.S. history

    Reflecting Pool’s algae bloom and peeling paint reflect Trump’s treatment of U.S. history

    President Donald Trump’s latest D.C. renovation, painting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool “American Flag Blue,” to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday has instead turned the symbolic heart of the National Mall Algae Bloom Green. The paint is peeling, and the water is a swampy muck.

    Trump has asserted, without evidence or corroboration, that vandals cut a 250-foot gash into the new lining and poured corrosive chemicals into the basin. Yet, the explanation for what has happened appears to be more mundane and predictable than the cloak-and-dagger sabotage Trump has suggested. Rosalina Stancheva Christova, an aquatic ecologist from George Mason University’s Algal Ecology Laboratory, sampled the water and found an ordinary, non-toxic bloom — the kind any ordinary swimming pool owner has fought in their own backyard.

    And yet, the problem with the renovation runs far deeper than all of this. Trump’s painting project reflects a fundamental lack of understanding of the original purpose and vision for the reflecting pool. For more than a century, the basin has functioned as a civic mirror, a place where visitors could see themselves reflected alongside the monuments that commemorate the nation’s story. Today that possibility is gone.

    The roots of the reflecting pool lie in the “City Beautiful” movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Gilded Age and decades of laissez-faire growth had left many of America’s cities in disrepair, full of tenement districts, boss-run wards and blight.

    American architects Daniel Burnham, Charles McKim, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Augustus Saint-Gaudens wanted to change that, and they were inspired by European urban renewal projects like Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann’s redesign of Paris. In 1893, at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, they explored the principles that spawned their movement to reimagine American cities — demonstrating how monumental architecture and carefully designed landscapes could express civic ideals.

    Their experience in Chicago helped to convince the men that beautiful, orderly, civic space could repair the disordered industrial cities the Gilded Age had left them. Their vision reflected a broader Progressive Era faith that urban renewal and public investment could address the social problems of industrial America while restoring civic pride through monumental construction projects designed to project an image of a robust and resilient nation.

    In 1903, all four architects became members of the Senate Park Commission (McMillan Commission) whose mandate was to replace decades of haphazard development in Washington D.C. with a coherent civic plan.

    They set their sights on the National Mall, which was, at that time, a disunified Victorian garden punctuated by marshland with a public green transected by a railroad depot and tracks.

    The commission’s 1901 report complained that the mall “has been diverted from its original purpose and cut into fragments, each portion receiving a separate and individual informal treatment, thus invading what was a single composition.” Their redesign plans aimed to unify the space into a legible and cohesive civic story and the reflecting pool eventually became the spine for that narrative.

    Over the next two decades, the McMillan Plan gradually reshaped the mall.

    Architect Henry Bacon was charged with designing the Lincoln Memorial. In 1911, he completed his first sketches, and he incorporated the commission’s vision by extending the mall’s central axis westward and anchoring it with the reflecting pool. Bacon imagined the pool as a mirror reflection, where visitors could see both the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. As a result, Bacon created a linear and legible connection between the man who presided over the creation of the republic at one end and the man who led the nation through the war for its preservation at the other.

    The future Reflecting Pool site facing west toward the Lincoln memorial in 1921.

    In 1919, the Army Corps of Engineers began excavating a former Potomac marshland known as the Kidwell Flats, to enable construction of the pool. The project took four years and was still under construction at the time of the Lincoln Memorial’s dedication in 1922.

    The pool quickly became a symbolically rich venue for crucial moments in U.S. history. In 1939 the African American contralto Marian Anderson sang from the memorial steps to a crowd of approximately 75,000 people massed along the pool after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her perform at Constitution Hall.

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    Twenty-four years later, a quarter million people lined both banks of the pool to hear the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaim his dream, to challenge the nation to complete the unfinished journey toward racial equality and achieve a meaningful resolution of the issues that had nearly destroyed the nation.

    Marian Anderson performs from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on April 20, 1952, in this image showing the Reflecting Pool and the Washington Monument. . Anderson’s accompanist is Franz Rupp, lower left, at piano. (AP Photo/Henry Griffin, File)

    The pool reflected those crowds, those moments and those movements only while they occupied the space. Each reflection vanished and was replaced by another individual, another gathering, another episode in the nation’s story.

    Yet, despite its symbolic significance and its success as a site for large scale civic dialogue, from a physical standpoint, the pool faced problems almost from day one. At issue was the soggy foundation created by the choice of marshlands for the reflecting pool’s site.

    This 1922 photo was taken at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial. Nearly from the start, the Reflecting Pool faced structural problems.

    During its construction, the Army Corps of Engineers had attempted to mitigate the potential problem with concrete support beams and a drainage system undergirding the pool. But almost immediately these mitigation systems proved inadequate. The result was cracks and leaks that have plagued the pool for its entire lifetime.

    Numerous administrations have tried to solve the issues. In 1986, the Reagan Administration drained the pool and poured an entirely new concrete foundation. Even this did not solve the problem. The pool continued to leak nearly 30 million gallons per year.

    In 2011, Barack Obama’s administration undertook another round of renovations. While matters improved, the pool still leaks 16 million gallons of water per year.

    The current issue with the reflecting pool and Trump’s response to it, however, go well beyond structural inadequacies and sabotage theories. They reflect a lack of understanding about the pool’s purpose.

    In April, Trump posted a doctored image of himself and his officials in swimsuits lounging in the reflecting pool, a woman in a bikini reclining in the water beside them. But the pool is a mere 18 inches deep, not swimming pool/ lounging depth and Bacon never intended anyone to use it that way. He built a basin you stand beside because its work happens in the mind of the person at the rim. Trump’s artificial intelligence revisionism gets the object exactly wrong — an instrument of contemplation made over into the feature of a tacky resort.

    Trump directed the Department of the Interior to repaint the pool in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary and used an emergency exemption to award a no-bid contract to a company that specialized in painting swimming pools. The result essentially took an area that was a swamp, before its transformation into a civic mirror, and returned it to a swamp. An algae-greened surface now sits where the reflection used to be, and the connection the pool held, the citizen to the monuments, individual to the national story, has been severed.

    When the pool functions as a mirror surface, it is a monument that embodies an evolving republic rather than a finished one. Trump’s swamp has transformed it into a static, murky image that defies the idea of a nation moving forward. As this history makes clear, the health of the republic depends on its ability to see itself clearly, and Trump’s algae-infested reflecting pool is a symbolic reflection of a nation and a history he and his administration continue to try to obscure from clear view.

    Susan Deily-Swearingen holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of New Hampshire, and has taught at multiple universities since 2015. She has a forthcoming book about the persistent legacies of the U.S. Civil War in contemporary politics and society, and frequently writes about historical memory and the echoes of the past in the modern world.

    Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.

  • Rural area in Northern California jolted by its biggest quake since 1940

    Rural area in Northern California jolted by its biggest quake since 1940

    SAN FRANCISCO — A rural area of Northern California experienced its strongest earthquake since 1940 on Wednesday morning, causing some injuries but no immediate reports of major damage, officials said.

    The epicenter of the quake, with a preliminary magnitude of 5.6, was about 7 miles northwest of the agricultural town of Willits, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It was widely felt, including in the coastal city of Fort Bragg. The initial quake was centered inland about 50 miles east of Fort Bragg at 8:10 a.m. Pacific Time, and the USGS said it was about 5 miles deep.

    The area in Mendocino County dotted with small, agricultural towns is 140 miles northeast of San Francisco.

    Heather Rose, a Mendocino County spokesperson, said that hospitals had reported some injuries but that she had no details on their nature or extent. She said officials plan to meet later Wednesday when more information could be released.

    Power outages are affecting more than 6,000 residents of six towns near the epicenter, the Mendocino County Executive Office said in a statement. The office encouraged people to stay off the highways and roads to allow work crews to inspect for damage and make repairs.

    Brie Leon and her colleagues had just opened Club Calpella Restaurant when the building started shaking, rattling plates and liquor bottles.

    “I had just turned the open sign on and went back into the kitchen, and that’s when it happened,” she said. “It almost felt like something hit the building.”

    The restaurant is in Calpella, Calif., a town about 10 miles south of the epicenter and in a region of Mendocino County that has been struck by smaller quakes this year.

    This was the biggest earthquake in nearly nine decades in the region, which is not on a major fault, said Lucy Jones, a veteran California seismologist.

    “The area is not without earthquakes, but they’re usually smaller than this,” Jones said. She added that aftershocks are likely, but they’ll “probably stay on the low side.”

    Three other quakes under a 2.7 magnitude struck near the epicenter within an hour.

    Leon said the quake knocked frames off the walls and bottles off the shelves in the restaurant and the stockroom next door. She and other servers were cleaning up not long after to welcome customers for breakfast.

    “It wasn’t a big, big quake, but things went everywhere,” she said.

    Alan Harris and his family were at home in Kelseyville, about 40 miles southeast of the epicenter, when he received an earthquake alert on his cell phone. Soon after, the house began shaking.

    “I yelled downstairs immediately to my wife and daughter to make sure they were hanging on,” Harris said. “It was scary. You could hear things crashing, mostly on the third floor of the house.”

    A security camera inside Harris’ home shook vigorously as the quake struck. A few loud, crashing sounds can be heard on the video footage before Harris calls out: “Is everyone OK?”

    It lasted only about 30 seconds. Framed photos fell off the walls and a computer monitor was knocked over, Harris said. Nothing appeared badly damaged, he added, noting he found no structural damage to the house.

    Nearly 657,000 earthquake early warning alerts were sent by the MyShake App throughout Northern California, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services said. Cal OES had not received any reports of damage or injuries, but it was coordinating with authorities to evaluate impacts, the office said in a statement.

    Hundreds of thousands more people received alerts through other public safety alert systems, but those numbers have not been finalized, said Robert de Groot, a scientist with the ShakeAlert operations team.

    “The alert deliveries for this are going to be well over a million,” Groot said.

  • Trump-endorsed de la Espriella declared winner of Colombia’s presidential runoff election

    Trump-endorsed de la Espriella declared winner of Colombia’s presidential runoff election

    BOGOTA, Colombia — Conservative outsider Abelardo de la Espriella, a millionaire political neophyte, will be Colombia’s next president after electoral authorities on Wednesday declared him the winner of Sunday’s runoff election.

    The businessman and lawyer, whose ventures include a clothing line, wine and rum brands, and a restaurant, earned President Donald Trump’s endorsement despite never having run for office. He defeated progressive lawmaker Iván Cepeda by 1 percentage point, or more than 251,000 votes.

    The result effectively was an indictment of outgoing President Gustavo Petro’s government, whose policies Cepeda had promised to continue, including a largely failed effort to establish dialogue with multiple armed groups.

    Electoral authorities published all but a fraction of the vote count hours after polls closed Sunday. Petro and Cepeda did not accept those results, with the latter saying he would wait for a recount to do so. Authorities finished the recount before declaring de la Espriella’s victory.

    De la Espriella’s victory adds Colombia to a growing list of countries that have turned to political outsiders in search for solutions to complex social, security, and economic challenges.

    The self-proclaimed representative of “the never-before-seen” promised voters fearful of renewed internal conflict to take a heavy-handed approach to combating violent crime with strategies borrowed from Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s playbook, including building mega-prisons. Those tactics have lowered homicide rates in the Central American country but have fueled accusations of human rights abuses.

    Earlier Wednesday, Cepeda conceded Colombia’s presidential election to de la Espriella and accepted a Senate seat reserved for the runner-up in the presidential election.

    “We assume with serenity, responsibility, and absolute resolve — and let there be no doubt about it — the role that circumstances demand of us,” Cepeda said in an address to the nation. “We will exercise a democratic, vigilant and constructive opposition.”

    De la Espriella, 47, will begin a 4-year term Aug. 7.

    In a statement on Wednesday, de la Espriella’s campaign said de la Espriella’s “purpose is to work for national unity, with the people and for the people.” The campaign also stated his government will be committed to guaranteeing “the right to political opposition and peaceful protest, within the framework of the Constitution, the law, and respect for democratic institutions.”

    A day earlier, de la Espriella announced he is putting together his cabinet. He also said he plans to add Colombia to the Trump-dubbed “Shield of the Americas,” a coalition of countries purportedly aimed at cracking down on criminal groups in Latin America.

    More than 26 million people voted in the polarizing runoff, setting a historic record. Of those, over 426,000 people chose a third, no-name option on the ballot that allows voters to express dislike of both candidates. About 29,000 people cast blank ballots.

  • White House seeks $87.6B from Congress for Iran war costs, U.S. farmers, and Ebola response

    White House seeks $87.6B from Congress for Iran war costs, U.S. farmers, and Ebola response

    WASHINGTON — The White House has formally requested $87.6 billion mostly to replenish the Pentagon after the U.S. war against Iran, submitting the request to Congress at a politically difficult time as Republican and Democratic lawmakers have objected to any further military action.

    The Office of Management and Budget sent the supplemental spending request on Wednesday. It arrived just hours after President Donald Trump assailed Republican senators during a private lunch — engaging in a shouting match with one — over their votes to approve a war powers resolution that would halt further hostilities.

    The request is mostly for expenses incurred by the Defense Department as part of Operation Epic Fury, the U.S.-led attack on Iran. But it also includes a range of other items, including aid to American farmers, help for the Ebola crisis in Africa, and other needs closer to home, including restoration projects in Washington, D.C.

    “I urge the Congress to take action on these important and urgent requests as soon as possible,” said OMB Director Russ Vought in a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson.

    It’s unclear how quickly the House and Senate could act on the White House’s request, or if Congress takes up the matter at all. The funding faces a difficult path because many lawmakers could view any votes as a reflection of test of their support for the war effort.

    Yet the White House was clear to include provisions to interest lawmakers from various regions, including $1 billion to assist “the final design and construction of a modernized Penn Station in New York City,” which would be of interest to the Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both of New York.

    The administration said it is requesting $67 billion for the Department of Defense for what it said were urgent needs related to the war against Iran, including “funding for military personnel and readiness expenses, operational costs to rebuild stocks.”

    It also wants $11.1 billion toward economic assistance for American farmers, $1.4 billion for the Ebola virus outbreak in Central Africa and requests $500 million to support ongoing efforts “to complete restoration and construction projects in and around Washington, D.C.”

    The package also includes a collection of policy proposals that the administration strongly supports, and which are certain to raise interest among lawmakers.

    Among them, the package proposes revisions to federal regulations of hemp products that have long been in dispute, changes to the year-round sales of renewable fuels and lifting of restrictions around federal investment support in Venezuela.

    Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the lead Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said the request is not merely to pay for “the president’s disastrous war, but an attempt to secure tens of billions of additional dollars for unrelated Pentagon priorities that should rightly be considered through the annual appropriations process.”

    Murray added: “I will closely review this request in its entirety and ensure we take care of our service members, but I will not rubber-stamp tens of billions more for this disastrous war of choice.”

    Rep. Tom Cole (R., Okla.), the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, and Rep. Ken Calvert (R., Calif.), who chairs the panel’s subcommittee on Defense, said in a joint statement, “President Trump’s request reflects the reality that our defense strength must be maintained, not merely demonstrated.”

    The biggest share of defense funding, $21 billion, will go to weapons munitions, with another $17.3 billion for operational costs and $12.1 billion for other classified programs. Funds are also requested to cover fuel costs, drone manufacturing, and cybersecurity.

    The money for farmers would provide $10 billion in economic assistance to row and specialty crop farmers and $1.1 billion specifically to Florida agriculture producers who suffered losses from this past year’s winter storms.

  • Ex-chief of staff to former NYC Mayor Eric Adams charged with taking bribes

    Ex-chief of staff to former NYC Mayor Eric Adams charged with taking bribes

    NEW YORK — A former chief of staff to ex-New York Mayor Eric Adams was arrested Wednesday in a federal bribery case about a lucrative migrant shelter contract, the latest sign that prosecutors continue to scrutinize Adams’ inner circle months after the scandal-bruised Democrat left office.

    The charges against Frank Carone are the latest in a string of corruption allegations leveled at the former mayor — who was himself indicted on bribery and other charges that were later dismissed — and key aides. Separately, federal authorities searched the homes of current and former New York Police Department leaders Wednesday in connection with a different bribery investigation.

    Adams was not accused of wrongdoing in Carone’s indictment. It alleges the ex-chief of staff exploited his position to get more than $100,000 in payoffs for steering a migrant shelter contract to a hotel that social service officials had deemed unsuitable.

    “Frank Carone was entrusted to run our city government and instead put his own wealth and status above duty,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Winik told a court.

    Carone and his brother, Anthony Carone; hotel owner Yan Po Zhu, and hotel employee Crystal Chen pleaded not guilty to various charges. The brothers sat across from each other at a defense table, where Anthony Carone rubbed his face and Frank Carone appeared to read along during the proceedings.

    Frank Carone’s lawyer, Arthur Aidala, said outside court that the case was based on “assumption after assumption after assumption.”

    “There is not one fact that indicates Frank Carone did anything specific to influence anything in our government,” Aidala said. The other defendants and their attorneys declined to comment.

    Frank Carone and the Sabrina Carpenter church video

    Carone, a former Brooklyn Democratic Party lawyer and longtime political power broker, is widely credited as one of the architects of Adams’ political rise. He also drew attention for his financial dealings with a Roman Catholic priest who let pop star Sabrina Carpenter film scenes for a provocative music video in a church.

    Federal investigators later subpoenaed the church. “They found nothing,” Aidala said Wednesday, contending that the government first targeted Carone, then looked for a case.

    Carone played a key role in Adams’ 2021 mayoral campaign, was chief of staff in 2022, then left and formed a political consulting firm.

    He “dedicated decades of his life to public service, the legal profession and helping countless individuals, businesses, and charitable organizations throughout New York,” Adams spokesperson Todd Shapiro said in a statement.

    Indictment focuses on how the hotel became a shelter

    Starting in 2022, the city scrambled to expand its shelter capacity amid an influx of migrants. Zhu’s hotel got $6.8 million to shelter some of the new arrivals, though the city’s Social Services Department had repeatedly rejected the facility, which was small and in a Queens neighborhood where residents objected to more shelters, according to prosecutors.

    Prosecutors said in court papers that Frank Carone accepted around $120,000 in bribes from Zhu and Chen to intercede on the hotel’s behalf. The money was passed through Anthony Carone’s law firm, according to the indictment.

    In a September 2022 text message, Zhu asked Frank Carone for help getting the hotel an immediate one-year contract, according to the indictment. It said Carone replied by asking for the address, and Zhu gave it, adding: “Thank you my big guy.”

    In December 2023, Zhu texted Carone: “I asked my partners to pay you for a year,” according to the document. Carone, who is also charged with obstruction of justice, deleted the message after learning he was under investigation, prosecutors said.

    Zhu “is anxious to establish his innocence,” lawyer Stephen Scaring said before the arraignments. All four defendants later were released on bond, ranging from $100,000 for Chen to $8 million for Zhu.

    Police officials’ homes searched in unrelated probe

    Separately Wednesday, the FBI and the NYPD executed search warrants at the homes of NYPD Chief of Manhattan South James McCarthy and former Deputy Commissioner Tarik Sheppard, and federal agents also searched former Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey’s home, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the searches. The official, who was not authorized to discuss the investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the searches were part of a bribery investigation that grew out of an inquiry into Maddrey.

    There was no immediate response to an inquiry to Maddrey’s attorney. Attorney information for Sheppard and McCarthy was not immediately available.

    There is no public indication of any arrests as part of those searches.

    They were not related to Frank Carone’s arrest, according to another person familiar with the matter who also was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the case and spoke on condition of anonymity.

    Once the NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, Maddrey resigned in 2024 over allegations that he demanded sex from a subordinate in exchange for opportunities to earn extra pay. Maddrey denied the claims of a quid pro quo.

    Adams was indicted in 2024 on charges of accepting illegal campaign contributions from Turkish officials and others in exchange for political favors. The case was tossed by federal Justice Department leaders who said it was distracting Adams from assisting in Republican President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Adams has denied wrongdoing.

    After skipping last year’s Democratic primary, Adams mounted but eventually abandoned an independent campaign for a second term.