Category: New York Times

Hundreds of thousands of mourners amassed in the Iranian capital, Tehran, on Monday to commemorate Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, who ruled his country for decades with an iron fist before he was killed in the war with the United States and Israel.

The ayatollah’s body was carried through the city in a public procession, part of a period of ceremonies and mourning strictly choreographed by the Iranian government. Later this week, it will be taken to several cities in Iran and neighboring Iraq that are significant to Shiite Muslims, before the late ayatollah is buried in his hometown, Mashhad, in northeastern Iran.

Some of the top ranks of Iran’s current and former leadership were among the sea of mourners. In a video shared by Iranian state television, President Masoud Pezeshkian was seen walking down the street, shaking hands with members of the crowd.

Though he was exalted by many Iranians, Khamenei was also despised by others for presiding over an authoritarian state that crushed dissent. In January, Iranian security forces violently suppressed mass anti-government protests, killing thousands, according to Iranian officials and human rights groups.

For Iran’s leaders, the mass funeral has served in part as a show of national unity. But the late supreme leader’s son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, has been conspicuously absent from the ceremonies.

Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen in public since succeeding his father, who was killed when Israeli forces bombarded Ali Khamenei’s compound on the first day of the war in late February. His absence from the funeral ceremonies has become a point of scrutiny for Iran’s leadership as they seek to project stability and continuity.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former Iranian president, was among the senior officials who attended the funeral ceremonies Monday. According to U.S. officials, Ahmadinejad was injured in an Israeli strike in February intended to free him from house arrest. The New York Times later reported on a failed Israeli plan to install Ahmadinejad at the helm of a postwar Iran.

The talks between Iran and the United States have been paused until after the funeral ceremonies. They have failed to prevent new bouts of fighting or to fully reopen shipping in the crucial Strait of Hormuz, let alone bring the two sides closer to resolving myriad thornier issues that were not covered by the countries’ ceasefire.

The New York Times was granted access to the funeral ceremonies by Iran’s government, which determined the ceremonies our reporters could attend, accompanied by a government-provided translator and a guide. The views expressed by people interviewed at these events may not be representative of many Iranians, while others may have felt unable to speak freely.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

WASHINGTON — The ads were jarring: a man with a hole in his throat where his larynx, or voice box, had once been. A woman whose teeth and jaw had been removed after oral cancer. Another woman speaking in a robotic voice, which was altered when her larynx was removed: “I wish I’d never seen a cigarette in my entire life.” A black screen followed, saying she died two days later.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 14-year ad campaign, called Tips From Former Smokers, was highly memorable and, research shows, highly effective in motivating people to quit. Last year, though, as tobacco companies gave millions to political organizations related to the Trump administration, the campaign went dark.

There is no definitive evidence linking the donations to the lapse of the ad campaign. But the decision to terminate it was one of several steps the administration has taken to unravel federal government antismoking initiatives that had long had bipartisan support during a time when the administration has delivered significant policy wins to tobacco companies.

The CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, which managed the campaign and worked with states on smoking cessation measures, has been shut down for more than a year, after its staff was laid off as part of the administration’s government downsizing efforts. While hundreds of other federal health employees were eventually rehired, the smoking office staff members have not been.

Even after Congress restored the office’s funding late last summer, its employees have remained on paid leave as litigation challenging the firings plays out.

In recent weeks, under pressure from Congress, the CDC has given states diminished funding to air ads from the campaign’s archive, but the federal government will not produce new ads or negotiate contracts for them to air nationwide. The ads had prompted millions of smokers to dial state quit lines for help on how to stop smoking. In interviews, people who ran quit lines in several states said that since the ads went off the air, calls have plummeted along with enrollment in programs that offered counseling and nicotine gum and patches.

The abandonment of an effort that was widely regarded as a public health triumph has puzzled antismoking activists who point out that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s platform was based on ending chronic diseases, which are a well-known consequence of smoking.

“We find it very ironic in an administration that wants to make America healthy again that we’re cutting all of these resources related to smoking and vaping,” said Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association.

Helping adults stop smoking is one of the most evidence-backed ways to improve the public’s health. Smoking rates in the United States have fallen significantly, to less than 10% of adults, compared with 42% of adults in the early 1960s. Still, smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death and disease in the country, causing about 490,000 premature deaths each year.

A national survey of adults who smoked from 2012 through 2018 found that the Tips from Former Smokers campaign was associated with more than 16 million people attempting to quit smoking and 1 million succeeding. During those years alone, the campaign was associated with saving an estimated $7.3 billion in healthcare costs.

“It’s crazy that they have cut this funding if they really want to save lives and save money,” said Sally Herndon, who ran North Carolina’s tobacco control program until her retirement last year.

Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement that the CDC “remains committed to tobacco prevention and control and continues to support this priority through outreach, education, and surveillance.”

The cuts have come as tobacco companies have aggressively lobbied the administration for policy changes that would likely increase their market share of vaping and other nicotine products.

The New York Times recently reported that Reynolds American, which makes Newport and Camel cigarettes, saw a coveted new federal policy take shape that would allow an entire new class of flavored e-cigarettes onto the market. The initiative was announced just days after a $5 million donation and lunch with President Donald Trump at his golf course in Florida. Executives from Altria, which makes Marlboro cigarettes, were also present.

The new policy was crafted over the objections of Marty Makary, then the FDA commissioner, who cited it as the reason for his resignation in May. It stunned some public health experts, who say the FDA set aside one of its central authorities: to approve or reject individual products based on their merits.

“It’s very clear this guidance is a gift to the tobacco industry on a silver platter with a side of public health malpractice,” said Brian King, a former leader of the FDA’s tobacco division and executive vice president for U.S. programs of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

Opponents of the policy say flavored vapes will introduce young people who have never smoked to nicotine products.

But Hilliard, the health department spokesperson, said the FDA was focused on protecting youth and a “science-based review process for tobacco products.”

She added: “Cigarette smoking remains the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States. And the agency supports the development of products that may provide less harmful alternatives for adults who smoke.”

The federal cuts to antismoking programs and what some view as lenient new policies represent a reversal of decades of setbacks for tobacco companies under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

The CDC’s shuttered Office on Smoking and Health employed experts on effective tobacco interventions who worked with state health officials to advance antismoking policies such as bans on indoor smoking, higher tobacco taxes, and education for parents about e-cigarettes.

The office sent most of its $240 million budget to states each year, but shortly after laying off the staff, in April 2025, the CDC notified states that their annual funding for tobacco control would not be coming.

Many state tobacco control offices cut their own staff as a result, including in New York, Texas, and North Carolina. Late last year, Congress reinstated some funding to states that had relied on the CDC office for expertise.

“We know that we really save lives and save money with tobacco prevention and control,” said Herndon, who until recently led North Carolina’s tobacco control efforts. “But without the training and technical assistance and support from the Office on Smoking and Health, a lot of the newer staff coming along are struggling to know what to do.”

The Tips From Former Smokers campaign went off the air around September of last year, though some larger states such as New York and California continued to run some antismoking ads.

Since then, calls to 1-800-QUIT-NOW lines — which traditionally experience a 30% spike in the weeks after an ad campaign — have fallen off significantly.

National data on the quit line call volume was not compiled for the last year after the federal employee in charge was let go, said Thomas Ylioja, president of the North American Quitline Consortium.

But at Quit for Life, an organization that operates quit lines in 19 states, Guam, and Washington, D.C., calls fell by 25% in the first half of 2026 compared with the first half of 2025 when the ads were on the air, according to Nick Fradkin, the group’s director of public health strategy.

Officials in other states said calls had fallen off too — by about 45% in Texas, 25% in California, and 18% in New York. In Virginia, enrollment in the quit line counseling services fell by half from October 2025 through February 2026, said Logan Anderson, a spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Health.

In recent weeks, the CDC offered $40 million, down from the usual $65 million, for states to air archived antismoking ads. It is unclear whether new ads will be created.

In North Carolina, at least, “we don’t have the media machine that produced those fabulous ads,” Herndon said.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. — At the base of Yosemite Falls, where white waters roared down a granite cliff, a couple jockeyed through dense crowds to try to take the perfect waterfall selfie. A family of five traded off resting in the single available seat on a wooden bench. A tourist tripped over a toddler, who fell and began wailing.

There was one spectacle at Yosemite National Park last weekend not in the glossy brochures: the visitors themselves.

The crown jewel of the nation’s park system, Yosemite is even more crowded than usual this year, after a decision by the Trump administration to do away with summer reservations here and at other popular parks.

In the first half of 2026, visitors to and employees of California’s regal wilderness park reported hourslong traffic jams, waits at entrance stations, and long lines just to purchase a bite to eat.

Employees of Yosemite and organizations that support it say that the hordes of visitors are demoralizing staff and damaging the park, as well as its reputation. Many visitors are determined to make the most of their visit, even with long waits. But some travelers have abandoned their plans altogether and driven out of the park’s gates after being turned away from every at-capacity major attraction.

”This is a far cry from the awe-inspiring sights Yosemite is known for,” the state’s two U.S. senators, Democrats Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla, wrote in a letter last week to the administration criticizing the cancellation of Yosemite’s reservation system.

July is already the busiest month across national parks. And at Yosemite, it’s shaping up to be chaotic.

On the morning of July 3, so many people had already arrived at Yosemite Valley, known for its sprawling meadows and towering palace of granite rock faces, that by 7 a.m. drivers were circling lot after lot as they tried to find a spot.

“The traffic is terrible in the park,” said Lakshmi Duddukuru, 41, who spent 45 minutes of her first trip to Yosemite searching for a parking space. She spoke as she scaled the steep Mist Trail, where throngs of hikers were ascending in a slowly snaking line.

Yosemite offers free shuttles to transport visitors between popular destinations, but many were too full to pick up any of the dozens of people waiting at the stops. On one bus, a frustrated driver trying to squeeze in more sightseers shouted, “If you’re not touching somebody, you’re not close enough.”

Yosemite Valley helped inspire the creation of the national park system, as it was the first federally protected land to be designated for public use, under an act signed in 1864 by President Abraham Lincoln. Its waterfalls and glacier-carved monoliths, such as Half Dome and El Capitan, have made it one of the country’s most beloved national parks — and most visited.

In 2020, Yosemite began experimenting with a summer reservation system to manage its ever-growing summer crowds. But Yosemite, as well as Arches National Park and Glacier National Park, did away with reservations this year, after President Donald Trump signed an executive order urging parks to rescind restrictions to improve access and help local economies.

Ray McPadden, Yosemite’s superintendent, said that a reservation system should be a last resort. In previous years the park had to turn families away because they hadn’t booked a visit in advance, he said, which was unfair to them and meant a loss of fees that could have gone toward fixing up trails, campgrounds, and bathrooms.

McPadden thinks the park is not overly crowded, except on holidays and Saturdays, he said. He expects a 12% increase in visits compared with last year, which would be about 4.7 million visitors, and the second-busiest year in the park’s history.

“No secret: Yosemite is really popular,” he said. “We are having a great summer.”

Some park employees disagree. The union local representing Yosemite staff, NFFE Local 465, said in a statement that the decision to end the reservation system had undermined staff and was “disheartening and disappointing,” particularly when the park was short-staffed after federal cuts. Gridlock traffic inside lengthens staff members’ commutes and makes it difficult, if not impossible, for them to perform their duties, the local said.

Advocacy organizations point out that Yosemite did not benefit much from fee revenue over the holiday weekend. As part of his overhaul of the National Park Service, Trump ended free park entry on some days, such as Martin Luther King’s Birthday, while granting free park admission to U.S. residents on Trump’s birthday, which coincides with Flag Day, as well as July 3, 4, and 5.

They worry that overcrowding encourages people to go off trail, and that guests aren’t as supervised as they once were. The bumper-to-bumper traffic also means that ambulances and other emergency vehicles can be delayed.

The overcrowding “is an environmental disaster for the park, and it’s a safety issue for visitors,” said Mark Rose, the Sierra Nevada program manager for the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association.

For the most part, however, visitors seemed unfazed by the crowds. The magnificence of Yosemite’s glassy rivers and giant sequoias is difficult to diminish, and tourists said they expected summer crowds when they traveled.

Duddukuru, who was visiting from Chicago, said that despite the delays the park was “wonderful.” She and her family had to wait 45 minutes to board a shuttle, but then spotted a bear, so the delay felt worth it, she said.

Sasha Rubeiz, 23, said one particularly narrow trail felt a little dicey with so many other hikers, but they were mostly not a bother on her first, “unreal” visit here. She tilted her head up toward soaring pine trees and blue skies.

“I’m looking up more than down,” said Rubeiz, who lives in Sacramento, Calif.

McPadden said he was working on solutions to some of the crowding issues, including new fencing and boulders to stop people from parking illegally. He said he hoped to install digital signs showing guests which parking lots are already full so they don’t waste time circling.

He would not say whether a reservation system would return next year. “I try to follow the facts, which generally are very, very positive here in the park,” he said.

Brett Birkbeck, a police officer who lives in Huntington Beach, Calif., ate a hot dog and drank red wine out of a plastic cup as he set up camp at dusk under pine trees.

Birkbeck, 49, said the crowds could not put a damper on his annual summer trip to Yosemite, during which he and his friends hike and grill ribs for a week in one of the most spectacular places on Earth.

“I call it pressing the reset button on the year,” he said.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

The Justice Department on Saturday forcefully argued that an offer from India’s richest man, Gautam Adani, to invest billions of dollars in the United States played no role in the department’s decision to abandon criminal charges against him.

In a letter filed Saturday, Trent McCotter, the principal associate deputy attorney general, defended the Justice Department’s decision after a federal judge demanded that the government explain its move. McCotter accused people within the department of leaking to media outlets about the case and acting “unethically.”

The New York Times reported in May that Robert J. Giuffra Jr., a lawyer for Adani, had met privately with Justice Department officials to argue why the case should be abandoned. He asserted that prosecutors lacked basic evidence, and said that Adani could invest $10 billion in the United States and create tens of thousands of jobs, if the charges were dropped.

McCotter appeared to acknowledge the existence of such an offer, but said that the decision to end the criminal case had been reached before the offer was made.

“Before that topic first arose, I had already firmly concluded I would seek dismissal of the securities charges no matter what,” McCotter wrote in a letter to Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York.

McCotter assailed Justice Department lawyers, current or former, whom he accused of leaking information in hopes of preventing a flawed case from being dismissed.

Giuffra declined to comment. The Justice Department did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Adani, an industrial titan in India and a close ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was indicted along with seven co-defendants in November 2024, in the last weeks of the Biden administration. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said that he had paid hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Indian officials to secure lucrative solar energy contracts for his company, Adani Green Energy.

Although the bribes took place in India, Adani and his co-conspirators were subject to American law because his company had sought investments from people in the United States, prosecutors said at the time.

Adani’s lawyers and McCotter have vigorously disputed that reasoning. On Saturday, McCotter wrote that no harm was done to U.S. investors and that the case was fundamentally about Indians bribing other Indians, which the Justice Department had no interest in litigating.

McCotter wrote that if someone searched for the word “India” in the indictment, it would appear more than 200 times.

Yet the trajectory of the case against Adani — particularly the investment proposal — has highlighted the highly transactional approach to justice during President Donald Trump’s second term.

In May, days after federal prosecutors wrote that they had chosen “not to devote further resources” to the criminal case, multiple Justice Department lawyers withdrew from the case, signaling internal disagreement over the move.

The next month, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) wrote in a letter to Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, that the department’s decision “gives the appearance that the DOJ is an equal partner in corrupt behavior.”

Federal prosecutors cannot unilaterally decide to end a case. Garaufis, who will ultimately decide whether to drop charges, ordered prosecutors to provide a more detailed explanation for their decision.

Judges have little ability under federal law to stop the government from abandoning criminal cases. But experts say that increasingly, under Trump, judges have scrutinized the rationale behind such decisions.

After the Justice Department in 2025 moved to dismiss federal bribery charges against Eric Adams, then the mayor of New York City, the judge overseeing the case, Dale E. Ho, called the government’s rationale — that the case was harming Adams’ ability to help with Trump’s immigration crackdown — “unprecedented and breathtaking in its sweep.”

On Saturday, McCotter chided Garaufis for what he called a “judicial inquisition.” Such queries, he argued, risked exposing “privileged internal debates” within the Justice Department.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

The Trump administration is scrapping more than three dozen firearms regulations, abandoning a crackdown on illegal sales, restoring gun rights to some people with mental illness, and loosening oversight of private weapons transactions.

The drastic retrenchment at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the federal agency responsible for enforcing the nation’s gun laws, was not entirely unexpected: President Donald Trump campaigned as a champion of gun rights.

In the view of critics and even some ATF veterans, the agency, in closely mirroring the demands made by gun owners and manufacturers to lighten their regulatory burden, is enacting changes at the expense of public safety. The moves, they worry, come as the bureau has already been weakened, with hundreds of its officials diverted to immigration enforcement.

Proponents of the changes point out that some of the reversals would return regulations to what they were only a few years ago, before President Joe Biden took office. After a series of deadly mass shootings, Biden signed into law gun control measures, ending nearly three decades of gridlock over whether and how to regulate firearms.

The divisiveness illustrates the complicated landscape for gun policy.

“With the Biden regulations that we got and put in place, we advanced the ball,” said Kris Brown, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, one of the country’s biggest gun control organizations.

But the Trump administration’s approach “takes us back 100 years,” she said. “It’s really decimating ATF’s ability to regulate this industry.”

A White House official said the administration’s policies reflected Trump’s commitment to ensuring that Americans could exercise their Second Amendment rights, accusing the Biden administration of bypassing Congress and using the regulatory process to restrict gun rights.

Mark Oliva, a spokesperson for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry’s trade association, said the changes were meant to clarify gun regulations.

“We want clarity to know how we’re going to be able to conduct business,” he said, “to be able to produce and to be able to sell firearms in accordance with the laws and regulations that govern our industry.”

Already, the administration has done away with major policies, including a zero-tolerance approach toward gun dealers who repeatedly broke the law. The more than three dozen rules that it has moved to eliminate would raise the legal threshold for revoking a dealer’s license; extend gun rights to buyers who had faced restrictions because of mental illness or inability to manage their own finances; and end extra scrutiny of stabilizing braces, gun accessories that have been used in mass shootings to lethal effect.

The administration is now targeting gun regulations that Democrats have passed at the state and local levels. It has challenged bans on semiautomatic rifles in Colorado, the District of Columbia, and Virginia. On Wednesday, it sued California for its restrictions on the sale of Glock and Glock-style handguns, and Virginia for limits on the sale of semiautomatic rifles, hours after both laws went into effect.

Since his first run for office, Trump has positioned himself as an ardent supporter of gun rights. In the run-up to the 2024 election, he vowed to be “the best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House.” Days after being inaugurated, he signed an executive order instructing the attorney general to scrutinize what he described as “ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens.”

By May 2025, the ATF had overturned its “zero-tolerance” policy, which had empowered its inspectors to revoke the licenses of federal gun dealers who were known to have broken the law. Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, said it had “unfairly targeted law-abiding gun owners and created an undue burden.” The policy increased the chances that dealers who had falsified business records, skipped background checks, or otherwise sold guns to people prohibited from owning them would face consequences. The agency ultimately revoked more than 600 licenses. But critics say that the new standards seriously curb the agency’s ability to do so.

It is a part of a broader bid across government to enact changes in line with the president’s directive. The Veterans Affairs Department in February removed the requirement that veterans who require a fiduciary to manage their benefits be prohibited from buying firearms, and veterans who were previously reported to the FBI were being removed from its list. The Health and Human Services Department slashed funding for research into gun violence prevention. The U.S. Postal Service has proposed allowing people to ship handguns in the mail, upending a nearly century-old law.

In realigning the Justice Department’s priorities to bolster Trump’s agenda, the agency said in December that it would balance defending the right to own a gun with ensuring the public’s safety.

But when the ATF announced in April nearly three dozen changes, the administration’s own analyses acknowledged the pitfalls to public safety.

The ATF’s director, Rob Cekada, defended the agency’s approach. In a statement, he said that it reflected an effort to be as explicit as possible about “the full range of costs and benefits, including even remote scenarios.”

“This was an honest attempt to fully and transparently inform the public and is exactly the kind of analysis the comment period exists to test,” he said.

In unveiling more changes on Friday, including eliminating fingerprinting requirements for certain firearms applications, Cekada again asserted that the agency was committed to public safety, pointing to a news release that heralded how its shift in priorities had led to the seizure of nearly 50,000 firearms and the handling of nearly 950,000 gun trace requests. Still, the data is far from a complete picture because it does not reflect all the policies the Trump administration has rolled back and because many of its proposals have yet to go into effect.

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, in announcing the proposals in April, said that the moves struck a careful balance between the interests of the gun industry and gun owners, as well as public safety. “For too long, regulations were written without any real understanding of how firearms businesses operate, how lawful gun owners actually handle their firearms, or what truly improves public safety,” he said.

One proposed change allowing more people with a history of mental illness to have a gun would mean that the public safety risk could range from minimal to considerably greater, “up to and including potential mass casualty events,” according to a cost analysis by the agency. For instance, people involuntarily committed to a mental health institution would still be barred from owning a gun, whereas those who voluntarily enter those facilities would not. The rule also seeks to extend the Veterans Affairs Department’s policy to ensure that all Americans unable to manage their financial affairs, not just veterans, are not automatically prohibited from buying a gun.

In the analysis of another proposal, seeking to undo a Biden-era rule intensifying scrutiny of the use of stabilizing braces, the agency acknowledged that the gun accessory to create “dangerous, easily concealed weapons would pose an increased public safety problem.”

The agency is also proposing a higher bar to revoke a federal gun dealer’s license, instead requiring evidence that the dealer knew that it was violating the law. The agency said in its analysis that it expected the number of federal firearms licenses it revoked to drop “considerably” both under the new rule and “shifting enforcement priorities.”

Another rule would end the so-called gun show loophole, which required background checks for gun shows and certain private sales as a way to crack down on straw purchasers, or people who illegally buy guns on behalf of another.

Critics warned of the potential consequences. The rapid changes under the Trump administration flew in the face of its vow to be tough on crime, they said, crediting the Biden-era measures for helping to bring down the murder rate after coronavirus pandemic highs, though experts have suggested that a number of factors could have contributed to the drop.

“These guns are going to start to percolate back out into the community over the next couple of years,” said Marianna Mitchem, a former ATF official who now advises Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit advocacy group founded by Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York.

She added, “I sadly expect that we will see an increase in violent crime.”

Even as the proposals have yet to take effect, some supporters of gun rights are pushing for the regulations to be loosened even further.

Erich Pratt, the senior vice president of Gun Owners of America, one of the country’s largest gun advocacy groups, said it was not enough to simply revert to regulatory standards on the books before the Biden administration.

His group, for instance, opposes the Justice Department’s approach to a 2022 rule directing federal licensed gun dealers to hold on to records indefinitely, reducing the amount of time that gun dealers have to keep records of sales. It has argued that the administration should eliminate the requirement altogether.

“The ATF proposals are a mixed bag,” he said, adding, “Gun owners would expect better from our Republican Justice Department.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Mia Taylor looked down at her Los Angeles County election ballot a few weeks ago and felt a familiar mix of duty and dread. How could she possibly know the best choices in the dozens of local contests she was asked to vote in? Partly on a lark, she turned to a newly ubiquitous tool: Claude.

Taylor snapped a picture of her ballot and asked: “So, who do I vote for here?”

Claude, an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Anthropic to analyze data and hold natural conversations, initially declined to answer. Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, other widely used tools, Claude is trained to avoid answering political questions that could expose biases.

So Taylor, a self-described liberal Democrat, sharpened her question, asking it to find links to well-regarded progressive groups and help her come up with strategic voting options.

“Here are some sources you can look at,” it replied, linking to voter guides and describing each race in detail. Taylor was especially torn about her vote for mayor, wondering how she could help stop Spencer Pratt, the Republican who momentarily looked likely to win one of the top two spots in the open primary. Claude’s advice: Vote for the incumbent, Karen Bass, not Nithya Raman, a member of the City Council. (Pratt later lost the race, while Bass and Raman advanced to the general election.)

It was probably only a matter of time before voters began to use artificial intelligence to help guide their choices. The 2026 midterms may be the first U.S. elections in which voters are using AI in meaningful numbers.

Voters are turning to new AI tools to serve as nonpartisan researchers, viewing them as a viable alternative to traditional news coverage, voter guides, or social media. They provide an appealing and seemingly efficient way to learn about campaigns and ballot measures, allowing users to bypass the sometimes dizzying array of political literature, advertising, and commentary coming their way. But some experts warn that the tools are far from foolproof: The results they produce can be marred by factual errors or shaped by flawed assumptions.

Chris Johnson, a 58-year-old resident of Atlanta, appreciates the allure of relying on AI to choose candidates and the worry about its accuracy.

Johnson, a registered Republican who considers himself a libertarian, has voted in every Georgia election for the past 40 years. When he prepared to vote in the state primary in May, he asked ChatGPT to tell him which of the candidates was the most libertarian. Initially, the system resisted answering directly, so Johnson asked it to rely on the candidates’ voting history. The chatbot suggested Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who was running for governor in the Republican primary but ultimately lost the race.

Johnson felt chagrined by how easy it was. He recalled that for years he read the print edition of the local newspaper to come up with his own sense of which candidates most closely matched his values.

“I felt a bit lazy for not doing more,” he said. “It felt easier, but I am not sure that everything was correct.”

The appeal of artificial intelligence tools, also referred to as large language models, lies in their simplicity: Users often find the information they produce more straightforward and understandable than data from a more traditional internet search. And many welcome the interaction. Researchers and AI companies are already envisioning a time when political campaigns create their own chatbots, enabling voters to question them directly.

“There is a reason these models are persuasive: They come up with facts or factual claims and are just good clear explainers,” said David G. Rand, a professor of information science, marketing, and psychology at Cornell University who has done extensive research on the effectiveness of artificial intelligence in political persuasion.

Earlier this year, before voting in a local school board election, Rand turned to artificial intelligence for help. He uploaded an hourlong video of a campaign forum and then asked which of the candidates most closely matched his values. He used this research to make his choices. And when he ran his picks by friends who were more involved in local politics, they endorsed his reasoning.

Still, Rand noted, the output is only as good as the input: AI tends to reaffirm and mirror users’ biases, framing candidates’ views through the voters’ lens, rather than objective facts.

Anthropic, the parent company of Claude, has said users asking about political topics “should get comprehensive, accurate and balanced responses — responses that help them reach their own conclusions rather than steer them toward a particular viewpoint.” In a lengthy statement this year, the company said Claude is trained to “treat different political viewpoints with equal depth, engagement, and analytical rigor.”

Jeremiah Hain, a 42-year-old psychotherapist in Los Angeles who has used ChatGPT routinely for other small tasks, recently employed it to help him choose candidates in races for mayor and various other offices.

“I don’t have the time, nor did I want to do the same kind of research I have done in the past,” he said. “This was very intuitive, and I actually respect its intelligence, I guess.”

He was so enamored of the process that he posted a video on TikTok encouraging other voters to do the same. (And because he knows his videos get more engagement when he is shirtless, Hain filmed himself bare-chested. “I wanted to do this as a thirst trap on purpose,” he said.)

But that sense of efficiency may mask the risks of turning over the democratic process to technology, some experts warn. Because most chatbots produce answers that sound confident and authoritative, users may not make the time to check the underlying claims.

Ideally, AI tools for election help would rely on a curated and verified database of political information and policy platforms to help voters, rather than pulling data from across the internet, as the existing tools do, said Yamil Velez, a political science professor at Columbia University who has researched the effectiveness of AI in convincing voters. But he was reluctant to completely dismiss the usefulness of AI in election decisions. “It is important to think about what is the alternative,” he said. After all, he added, most voters are unlikely to spend hours in the county clerk’s office researching their election options.

A year ago, Velez added, he would have said that voters would be better off relying on an internet search, but the AI tools are becoming increasingly accurate.

Nonetheless, he cautioned, the current tools likely benefit candidates who are more vocal in the local press and on social media, making their views easier to find. Campaign strategists are keenly aware that voters are using these tools and have begun looking for ways to get more favorable results by publishing more material online in formats that chatbots prefer, such as using bullet points.

Still, in interviews, people who had used AI to research election choices said it allowed them to vote with more confidence.

Robert Siebelink, a 54-year-old Democrat who lives in Corona, Calif., turned to Claude after feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of researching the 61 candidates running for governor in his state, not to mention the candidates in less high-profile races. He uploaded his ballot and asked Claude to suggest candidates who most aligned with his values.

Eventually, he had narrowed down his choice for governor to two Democrats, Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer, and asked Claude how to strategize.

In less than half an hour, he had filled out his ballot and chosen Becerra.

“I just felt so refreshed,” Siebelink said. “That’s the most informed voting that I have ever done.”

“It felt like some political expert that knew all of the research and we just sat down over coffee and chatted, and they took notes,” he said.

Similarly, Rikki Powers, a 31-year-old Democrat who lives in Baltimore, took a photograph of his ballot before the recent Maryland primary and asked Claude to provide bullet points for each candidate. He said he was looking for a broader perspective than what he could get from candidate campaign websites. After checking some of the links for accuracy and to “make sure that I truly like the candidates I am voting for,” he used the summary to fill out his ballot on the spot.

“The last time I voted, I spent probably 20 hours researching,” he said. “This time was an hour.”

Still, Powers said, there are limits: While he had no hesitation uploading a blank ballot, he would never tell AI how he voted.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

WASHINGTON — U.S. officials believed that Israel might have been plotting to kill Iran’s top negotiators while Washington was engaged with Tehran in delicate talks this spring to reach an interim peace deal, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Killing senior Iranian leaders had been part of Israel’s strategy from the start of the war. But America’s concerns about the targeting of two particular Iranian officials — Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the parliament — spiked during delicate ceasefire negotiations that began in April.

Fearful that an Israeli assassination effort would doom the negotiations, the United States, according to some of the officials, went so far as to ask other countries in the region to warn Iran about the possibility Israel could target the two officials.

U.S. officials acknowledged that during the intense phase of the war, Araghchi and Ghalibaf, as senior government officials, could have been legitimate targets for Israel, which was intent on toppling Iran’s hard-line government. But after the negotiations started in earnest in April, U.S. officials believed that any attempt to kill the Iranian leaders would end the talks and reignite the fighting.

The war began Feb. 28 with an Israeli strike that killed the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other top officials, based in part on U.S. intelligence.

While U.S. strikes focused on Iran’s navy and missile forces, Israel prioritized targeting the leadership in the early phase of the war, intent on killing as many high-ranking officials as it could.

That included killing potentially more pragmatic leaders that the Trump administration had hoped to negotiate with, such as Ali Larijani, Iran’s top national security official, and Kamal Kharazi, a former Iranian foreign minister. Both men were involved in the negotiations with the United States when they were killed in Israeli airstrikes.

The Trump administration’s suspicions about the possible Israeli plot to kill the two top negotiators show how the U.S. and Israeli war aims, which were close at the very beginning of the war, quickly diverged radically. And while the United States wanted a peace agreement, Israel has been skeptical from the initial cessation of hostilities in April.

The initial two-week ceasefire in April was met with grudging Israeli official support and broad public concern in Israel that the United States was ending the war too early. Rather than being driven from power, the theocratic government of Iran had become even more hard-line, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard had only consolidated its control over the country.

Araghchi and Ghalibaf have been the key officials negotiating with various countries in the region to reach a ceasefire and then a more lasting peace with the United States. In June, the United States and Iran reached a framework agreement that sought to open the Strait of Hormuz and set the outline for follow-on talks on Tehran’s nuclear program.

Officials and commentators in Israel viewed the initial agreement as a disaster, because it did not accomplish their country’s war aims of forcing regime change, destroying Iran’s proxy forces, and seriously damaging its missile program. Israeli officials also worried the agreement would put billions of dollars into Iran, allowing it to quickly rebuild after the war and without meaningfully restricting its nuclear ambitions.

A spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in Washington declined to comment.

Asked about Israeli plans and the warning to Iran, a U.S. official noted that talks between American and Iranian delegations continue and that Steve Witkoff, a special envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, had productive meetings in Qatar. President Donald Trump, the official said, wants the peace process “to play out.”

The Wall Street Journal reported in March that Israel had Araghchi and Ghalibaf on a target list but temporarily removed them as the United States discussed beginning negotiations with Iran.

A U.S. official and a Middle East official said that the Trump administration learned around that time that at least Ghalibaf was on an Israeli targeting list and asked Israel to refrain.

Ghalibaf was nearly killed in both the 12-day war in June 2025 and again in this year’s conflict, when Israel targeted a secret meeting of senior government officials in a bunker under a mountain, according to three senior Iranian officials and public comments by officials. In both incidents, Ghalibaf was rescued from under the rubble, the officials said.

“Today, Mr. Ghalibaf and Mr. Araghchi and other members of the negotiating team have put their lives on the line, knowing the grave security risks, and this is called a real sacrifice, not political maneuvering,” Mohsen Zanganeh, a lawmaker, told local media in late April after the Islamabad meeting.

During the negotiations, Iran has taken precautions aimed at making it more difficult for Israel to strike at senior officials.

In April, Ghalibaf was set to travel to Islamabad to meet with Vice President JD Vance. But Iranian security officials were concerned that Israel would use the opportunity to assassinate Ghalibaf or Araghchi to derail the talks, the officials said.

Iranians sought guarantees from the United States, through Pakistani and Qatari intermediaries, that Israel would not carry out any covert operations targeting the Iranian delegation, the officials said.

Pakistani fighter jets escorted the Iranian airplanes carrying a delegation of more than 70 Iranians from the border of Iran to Islamabad and back again when the session was over.

But on the way back to Tehran, an Israeli security threat emerged.

Iran’s security forces notified the plane carrying Ghalibaf back to Tehran that they had picked up intelligence that Israel planned to attack the plane and that two Israeli fighter jets had entered Iran’s airspace from its western border near Iraq, the two officials said.

Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser for Ghalibaf, who accompanied him to Islamabad, confirmed this account on his social media page. The plane made an emergency landing in the city of Mashhad, Iran’s closest airport to the Pakistani border, and the Iranian delegation traveled some eight hours by land back to Tehran, Mohammadi and the two officials said.

But the officials have continued to travel.

In late May, Ghalibaf and Araghchi flew to Qatar for talks and then traveled to Switzerland in June for a second in-person meeting with Vance and the American delegation.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Shirley Jennett, a retired nurse, loves her spacious ranch-style house in Denver, with its big backyard and gazebo.

“I want to stay here,” she vowed. “And die here.”

She might pull that off. In relatively good health, Jennett still drives to lunch with friends, does her own housekeeping and grocery shopping, and plows through a book a day, usually a mystery. But her children worry about her living alone at 89, especially since she has had a couple of falls.

Enter her new housemate, Susan Beese. Despite working four days a week in retail, Beese could no longer afford her nearby one-bedroom apartment as the rent topped $1,500 a month. She moved out, first staying with friends and then in what she delicately called “a senior women’s facility.”

Now Beese, who is 79, pays Jennett $800 monthly for a bright two-bedroom space, with a bath and a kitchen, on the lower level of her house. As part of the agreement the housemates worked out, she helps plant and water Jennett’s garden, takes out the trash, and cooks occasional meals.

“It’s been a lifesaver,” Beese said. Jennett even welcomed her dog.

Meet the real-life Golden Girls. In the much-loved 1980s sitcom, still in perpetual reruns, the four wisecracking women who share a house in Miami met through an ad on a supermarket bulletin board.

In Denver, the housing matchmaker was Sunshine Home Share Colorado, a local nonprofit that Alison Joucovsky, a senior services administrator, founded in 2016 when the problem became urgent. “My phone was ringing off the hook,” she said, recalling anxious pleas from older residents spending most of their Social Security checks on rising rent or facing yearslong waiting lists for subsidized senior housing.

Home sharing “is a really efficient way to create affordable housing and to support older people who want to age in place,” Joucovsky said. Carefully vetting both “home providers,” who may be rattling around in family houses now too big and too empty, and “home sharers” seeking reasonable rents, Sunshine facilitated 31 shares last year, a record for the nonprofit.

“The cost of developing and building new housing is astronomical, and so is the length of time it takes,” said Laura Fanucchi, president of the National Shared Housing Resource Center and an administrator with HIP Housing, a home-share organization in San Mateo County, Calif. “Why not make use of existing housing stock?”

About 55 organizations around the country offer these services — and demand is growing, driven by housing shortages, rising rents, and sales prices that affect both the old and the young. Legislators in several states are working to promote home sharing as an option. (Personal care is not part of these arrangements.)

The need is acute. About one-third of households headed by someone 65 or older were “cost-burdened” in 2024, according to an analysis by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. That means they spent more than 30% of their income on housing.

Although nearly 80% of those people were homeowners, the center found, an increasing proportion are still paying off mortgages or home equity loans, and most contend with higher taxes, utility and maintenance costs, and insurance premiums.

“A lot of the people calling me to complain about property taxes and inflation are senior citizens on fixed incomes whose children have left, and maybe their spouse has died,” said Pennsylvania state Rep. Abby Major, a Republican, who has co-sponsored a bill that would facilitate home sharing. “They’re a single older adult living in a four-bedroom house.”

Yet most don’t want to relocate. Even if they do, many older adults will find that downsizing has also become prohibitively expensive, as home prices rise and very low interest rates become a memory.

Younger people are similarly cost burdened, including 37% of those aged 25 to 34, and 31% of those 35 to 44, the Joint Center has reported. Home sharing can benefit both older homeowners who need income and people of any age in search of lower-cost housing.

To help increase their reach, some home-share programs now supplement or replace the traditionally labor-intensive matching process with online platforms. (For-profit companies like Nesterly or Roommates.com also facilitate shared housing.)

“It’s like online dating, except that people who have rooms can meet people who need rooms,” said Candice Smith, executive director of HomeShare Oregon. “And it’s a lot more secure.” HomeShare’s online platform has drawn close to 7,000 providers and seekers over five years.

Further support has come from the city of Portland, which this year announced a pilot program to pay $1,000 to homeowners who make a spare room available (or $1,500 for two rooms) through qualified home-share programs.

In addition, legislators in several states have introduced or passed bills that prohibit municipalities from unduly restricting homeowners who want to rent spare rooms to nonfamily members. Sponsors in Pennsylvania and Connecticut actually call them Golden Girls bills, and they’ve drawn bipartisan support.

“So many young people have basically given up on buying a home,” said Colorado state Rep. Manny Rutinel, a Democrat. He helped pass a 2024 law prohibiting cities and counties from limiting the number of unrelated people who could live together in a single dwelling.

In Pennsylvania, state Rep. Tarik Khan steered a similar bill through the House in June; it awaits a Senate vote. “It doesn’t make sense that your cousin can move in but someone unrelated to you can’t,” said Khan, a Democrat.

The Pennsylvania bill caps the number of nonfamily occupants in a home at five; Connecticut’s limit would be three. That bill passed the Senate in April, and then died without a vote in the House. But the bill sponsors plan to reintroduce it next session.

Home sharing can’t solve the housing crisis, its fans acknowledge. But it could make a dent, potentially unlocking thousands of spare bedrooms across the country without requiring new construction that would change the character of neighborhoods.

Admittedly, matching homeowners with those who want to rent a room becomes a delicate process. Home-share staff members typically interview the individual parties, run background checks, verify incomes, coordinate initial phone calls and meetings, and mediate if problems later arise.

They also help applicants sift through the myriad lifestyle preferences that can torpedo a match. “Living together isn’t easy,” Fanucchi said. Will the home provider accept smokers, pets, visitors? Does the sharer work from home? Or need to park a car? Who sets the thermostat?

Sometimes the agreement includes a “service exchange,” in which the newcomer does a few hours of chores such as snow shoveling, shopping, or some meal preparation in return for reduced rent.

Jenlyn and Larry Boyer, for instance, have lived in their ranch house in suburban Broomfield, Colo., for 31 years and never want to leave. But Jenlyn Boyer, who is 80, has “gotten unsteady” and uses a walker. Her husband, 70, suffers chronic fibromyalgia pain and needs a wheelchair.

Because they now pay for tasks that they used to undertake themselves, and because inflation has undermined their finances, “I had an epiphany,” Jenlyn Boyer said. “We need more help and we need more money.”

Six months ago, through Sunshine Home Share, they met a 46-year-old graduate student whose monthly rent had doubled to an unmanageable $2,000.

The student moved into their furnished downstairs bedroom/family room with a bathroom, a small refrigerator and a microwave. In exchange for about 10 hours of dishwashing a month, she pays a reduced rent of $600.

The additional income has helped the Boyers cover expenses like van repairs and wheelchair batteries. But they also enjoy chatting with their new housemate.

“She turns out to be just a gem,” Boyer said. “We laugh together a lot.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.