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  • Republican former senator Ben Sasse says he has terminal cancer

    Republican former senator Ben Sasse says he has terminal cancer

    Former Republican senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska said Tuesday that he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and suggested he would not have long to live.

    “Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die,” Sasse wrote in a lengthy social media post Tuesday morning. “Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence. … Death is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all. Still, I’ve got less time than I’d prefer.”

    Sasse, 53, was first elected to the Senate in 2014 as a political newcomer — he had previously served as president of Midland University in Nebraska. Sasse handily won reelection in 2020 but resigned from his seat partway through his second term to become president of the University of Florida. Sasse abruptly stepped down from that post last summer, citing concerns about his wife’s health.

    Nearly a year and a half later, Sasse said it was he who was facing grim news about his health. His terminal diagnosis, he wrote Tuesday, was “hard for someone wired to work and build, but harder still as a husband and a dad.”

    “I can’t begin to describe how great my people are. During the past year, as we’d temporarily stepped back from public life and built new family rhythms, [my wife] Melissa and I have grown even closer — and that on top of three decades of the best friend a man could ever have,” Sasse wrote.

    He continued by listing the achievements of his three children and hinted at undergoing possible treatments.

    “I’m not going down without a fight. One subpart of God’s grace is found in the jaw-dropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more,” he wrote. “Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived. We’re zealously embracing a lot of gallows humor in our house, and I’ve pledged to do my part to run through the irreverent tape.”

    After Donald Trump was elected to his first term in 2016, Sasse became an outsider in his own party. He was one of a handful of Republican senators who regularly spoke out against Trump and who tied Trump’s rhetoric and actions to the violent siege of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump periodically attacked Sasse, ridiculing him as “the least effective” GOP senator and calling him a “RINO,” or Republican in name only.

    Sasse was also one of the few GOP senators who supported moving forward with Trump’s impeachment trial. Because of that, Sasse faced the threat of censure in 2021 from the Nebraska Republican Party, which accused Sasse of, among more than a dozen purported offenses, having “persistently engaged in public acts of ridicule and calumny” against Trump. Sasse pushed back in a video message directed at party leaders.

    “Let’s be clear: The anger in this state party has never been about me violating principle or abandoning conservative policy. I’m one of the most conservative voters in the Senate. The anger’s always been simply about me not bending the knee to … one guy,” he said then.

    Ultimately, the Nebraska GOP voted to rebuke Sasse, stopping short of a censure. Though Sasse at one point considered leaving the Republican Party, he said he would remain “committed to the party of Lincoln and Reagan as long as there is a chance to reform.” In subsequent years, he described himself as an “independent conservative.” Earlier this month, he was named a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

    Public figures from across the political spectrum responded to Sasse’s announcement on Tuesday to wish him well.

    “I’m very sorry to hear this Ben. May God bless you and your family,” Vice President JD Vance wrote on X.

  • Canadian linguists ask prime minister to stop spelling like a Brit

    Canadian linguists ask prime minister to stop spelling like a Brit

    TORONTO — Since taking office in March, Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced new policies on trade, foreign affairs, and energy that he has cast as necessary for bolstering Canada’s economic resilience amid President Donald Trump’s assault on the historically close U.S.-Canadian relationship.

    But among linguists and editors here, a different Carney shift is drawing attention: his spelling.

    From his earliest days as prime minister, a raft of official government publications — including his mandate letter to cabinet, social media posts, statements about meetings with world leaders, and 493-page budget — are full of words rendered in British, not Canadian, English.

    Most prominent has been his predilection for the British “ise” and “yse” endings over the Canadian (and American) “ize” and “yze.” Canada would be “recognising” a Palestinian state, his government announced in September. Officials unveiled a new accounting method to “modernise” the budget, and said they are being “recognised” for navigating global challenges.

    Among Carney’s favorite such words has been “catalyse.”

    The plethora of -ises and -yses in the budget was the catalyst for a letter from a group of editors and linguists to Carney this month. They noted that governments here “consistently” used Canadian spellings “from the 1970s to 2025” and urged him to continue the practice as “a matter of our national history, identity and pride.”

    The prime minister’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

    University of British Columbia linguist Stefan Dollinger, one of the letter’s signatories, asked a Washington Post reporter to consider a world in which a U.S. administration suddenly adopted British spellings (imagine a secretary of labour or a department of defence) or King Charles III began to use American ones (he’d go “traveling,” not “traveling”).

    “What outcry would that trigger?” Dollinger asked in an email. “It’s similar in Canada. Language and language use shows who we are.”

    Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, his questioning Canada’s viability as a country and his threats to make it the 51st state have provoked a surge of nationalism among a people not known for flag-waving patriotism. It’s been a year for asking: What does it mean to be Canadian?

    James Walker, a linguist at the University of Melbourne who has studied variations in English around the world, said many differences, such as alternate pronunciations for a single word, are “fairly arbitrary.” Seeing “ise” instead of “yze,” he said, is unlikely to impede one’s understanding of the information being communicated.

    “But the fact is that a lot of these differences are important in terms of questions of identity,” he said. “If you want to show you’re Canadian, you can do it through the way you’re pronouncing your words or through the words you use, but you can also do it in terms of spelling.”

    Carney’s academic and professional careers have given him exposure to several varieties of English. He has been a citizen of Canada, Ireland, and Britain; studied at Harvard and Oxford, where he met his wife, a Brit; and served more than six years as governor of the Bank of England.

    “I think the concern around the prime minister is that he’s the leader of the country,” Walker said, “and even though he has spent a lot of his life outside of Canada, I think a lot of people would be concerned that the prime minister is using spelling practices that aren’t considered to be standard for Canadian English.”

    Canadian English is a product of Canada’s history and geography. “Like many things Canadian,” Dollinger said, its evolution “was a long, drawn-out process whose outcome can be described as a blend of U.K. and U.S. ways, with considerable Canadian innovation.”

    Canadian English incorporates regionalisms (in Newfoundland, an irritable person is “crooked”; in Saskatchewan, a hoodie is a “bunnyhug”), Indigenous influences (“skookum,” from Chinook, for strong, great, formidable), loanwords from French (“toque,” a knit winter hat) and words not used much elsewhere (“chesterfield,” for couch). Its differences from English in the United States and Britain are apparent in its syntax, spelling, and vocabulary.

    Margaret Atwood once said that she changed “hand cream” to “hand lotion” in her novel The Handmaid’s Tale so it would be comprehensible to Americans.

    Canadian English evolved over several waves of immigration from English-speaking countries.

    After the American Revolution, tens of thousands of Loyalists fled north to what was then known as British North America. Some became teachers, lawyers, and bankers, and their variety of English influenced the national argot.

    In some areas during the 19th century, amid shortages of teachers and textbooks, generations of pupils were taught by Americans.

    Some visiting Brits were shocked by what they heard.

    “It is downright melancholy,” wrote one Englishman who visited in the 1830s, “to traverse the province and go into many of the common schools; you will find a herd of children instructed by some anti-British adventurer … and American spelling books, dictionaries and grammar, teaching them an anti-British dialect and idiom.”

    In an 1857 address to the Canadian Institute in Toronto, the Rev. Archibald Constable Geikie, a transplant from Scotland, lamented the “corrupt” dialect of his new home, with its “combination of letters and phrases” that do not contribute “in any sense to the enrichment of the language.”

    “A man in England possesses notable capacity, and people style him capable, or able, or great,” he said. “In Canada he is designated first-class. To speak of a first-class carriage, or a first-class prize, or even a first-class ox, may be right enough, but why apply phrases with such poor associations to men of splendid intellect? Is it not enough that a man be great? Will he seem any greater when indissolubly associated with a railway van?”

    Moreover, he said, “In England it occasionally happens that great offenders are hanged, but in the States and Canada, criminals are never hanged; they are all hung,” he added. “In England, beef is hung, gates are hung and curtains are hung, but felons are hanged; in Canada, felons, beef, gates, and curtains are all treated in the same way.”

    Britain encouraged migration to Canada in the 19th century, particularly after the War of 1812, in hope that the newcomers would act as a bulwark against American expansion. They, too, influenced Canadian English.

    “It’s our history that makes the spelling system and makes our pronunciation system, makes our phonology and determines a lot of other things like our [system of] government,” said University of Toronto linguist J.K. Chambers, who co-signed the letter to Carney. “All of those things are the result of us being at the confluence of two mighty nations, and now we’re a third mighty nation with a personality of our own.”

    Debates about language and language purity are not unique to Canada.

    In France, the Académie Française and its 40 “immortals” have tried since 1634 to safeguard the language of Molière from what a member once called “mindless Globish,” fighting encroaching Anglicisms, weighing in on the permissibility of gender-neutral pronouns (“a mortal danger” for French, it warned in 2017) and declaring the correct definite article for “COVID” (a feminine noun, it ruled in 2020).

    The French academy was modeled in part after the Accademia della Crusca, founded in Florence in 1583. Its name is a metaphor: “Crusca” is Italian for “bran,” and the group’s emblem is the “frullone,” the tool millers use to separate bran from flour. It aims to separate good Italian from bad — carefully, in a country where Mussolini’s harsh language laws left a sour taste.

    But when language concerns arise in Canada, they typically center not on English, but the country’s other official language: French. Quebec, long concerned about the survival of the French language and culture in this Anglo-majority country, has a history of passing controversial language laws enforced by the Office Québécois de la Langue Française.

    More than half the province’s population can converse in English, census records show, an all-time high. The language is ubiquitous in Montreal. But French is the sole official language, and is required on public signs and advertising. A recent law requires some businesses to disclose what percentage of their staff cannot speak French.

    In a case that drew national attention, Montreal city buses that flashed “Go! Canadiens Go!” during the National Hockey League playoffs drew a complaint to the language police. The cheer was replaced with “Allez! Canadiens Allez!”

    In a reversal months later, the watchdog said that “allez” was preferable, but the use of “go” was “partially legitimized.” But by then, the team had long since been eliminated by the Washington Capitals.

    The National Post reported in May that Carney expected the English-language versions of government documents to be written using British spellings.

    Walker said it was amusing to see people “targeting the British spelling of the prime minister. … Usually they’re more concerned about Americanization of Canadian English” than its “Britishization.”

    Editors Canada President Kaitlin Littlechild, who co-signed the letter, said Carney’s use of British spellings risks creating confusion “when people look to government sources as the authority on how to spell things and it deviates from what we consider to be Canadian English.”

    But in a broader sense, she said, Canadian English “is a very uniquely Canadian aspect of our identity, and that is something that we really feel should be acknowledged, respected and honored.”

    GRAPHIC

    https://washingtonpost.com/documents/37dfab94-5f54-495e-9ff1-495ed7683141.pdf
  • Her daughter was unraveling, and she didn’t know why. Then she found the AI chat logs.

    Her daughter was unraveling, and she didn’t know why. Then she found the AI chat logs.

    The changes were subtle at first, beginning in the summer after her fifth-grade graduation. She had always been an athletic and artistic girl, gregarious with her friends and close to her family, but now she was spending more and more time shut away in her room. She seemed unusually quiet and withdrawn. She didn’t want to play outside or go to the pool.

    The girl, R, was rarely without the iPhone that she’d received for her 11th birthday, and her mother, H, had grown suspicious of the device. (the Washington Post is identifying them by their middle initials because of the sensitive nature of their account, and because R is a minor). It felt to H as though her child was fading somehow, receding from her own life, and H wanted to understand why.

    She thought she’d found the reason when R left her phone behind during a volleyball practice one August afternoon. Searching through the device, H discovered that her daughter had downloaded TikTok and Snapchat, social media apps she wasn’t allowed to have. H deleted both and told her daughter what she’d found. H was struck by the intensity of her daughter’s reaction, she recalled later; R began to sob and seemed frightened. “Did you look at Character AI?” she asked her mom. H didn’t know what that was, and when she asked, her daughter’s reply was dismissive: “Oh, it’s just chats.”

    At the time, H was far more focused on what her tween might have encountered on social media. In August 2024, H had never heard of Character AI; she didn’t know it was an artificial intelligence platform where roughly 20 million monthly users can exchange text or voice messages with AI-generated imitations of celebrities and fictional characters.

    But her daughter’s question came to mind about a month later, as H sat awake in her bedroom one night with her daughter’s phone in her hand. R’s behavior had only grown more concerning in the weeks since their talk — she frequently cried at night, she’d had several frightening panic attacks, and she had once told her mother, I just don’t want to exist. H had grown frantic; her daughter had never struggled with her mental health before. “I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very wrong,” she says, “and I had to keep looking.”

    Searching through her daughter’s phone, H noticed several emails from Character AI in R’s inbox. Jump back in, read one of the subject lines, and when H opened it, she clicked through to the app itself. There she found dozens of conversations with what appeared to be different individuals, and opened one between her daughter and a username titled “Mafia Husband.” H began to scroll. And then she began to panic.

    “Oh? Still a virgin. I was expecting that, but it’s still useful to know,” Mafia Husband had written to her rising sixth-grader.

    “I dont wanna be my first time with you!” R had replied.

    “I don’t care what you want,” Mafia Husband responded. “You don’t have a choice here.”

    H kept clicking through conversation after conversation, through depictions of sexual encounters (“I don’t bite … unless you want me to”) and threatening commands (“Do you like it when I talk like that? When I’m authoritative and commanding? Do you like it when I’m the one in control?”). Her hands and body began to shake. She felt nauseated. H was convinced that she must be reading the words of an adult predator, hiding behind anonymous screen names and sexually grooming her prepubescent child.

    In the days after H found her daughter’s Character AI chats, H projected an air of normalcy around her daughter, not wanting to do anything that would cause her distress or shame. H contacted her local police department, which in turn connected her to the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force. A couple of days later, she spoke on the phone with a detective who specializes in cybercrimes and explained what H had been unable to comprehend: that the words she’d read on her daughter’s screen weren’t written by a human but by a generative AI chatbot.

    “They told me the law has not caught up to this,” H says. “They wanted to do something, but there’s nothing they could do, because there’s not a real person on the other end.”

    It felt impossible to align that reality, H says, with the visceral horror she felt when she first scrolled through the threatening and explicit messages on her daughter’s phone screen.

    “It felt like walking in on someone abusing and hurting someone you love — it felt that real, it felt that disturbing, to see someone talking so perversely to your own child,” H says. “It’s like you’re sitting inside the four walls of your home, and someone is victimizing your child in the next room.” Her voice falters. “And then you find out — it’s nobody?”

    Rising use of chatbots

    She had thought she knew how to keep her daughter safe online. H and her ex-husband — R’s father, who shares custody of their daughter — were in agreement that they would regularly monitor R’s phone use and the content of her text messages. They were aware of the potential perils of social media use among adolescents. But like many parents, they weren’t familiar with AI platforms where users can create intimate, evolving, and individualized relationships with digital companions — and they had no idea their child was conversing with AI entities.

    This technology has introduced a daunting new layer of complexity for families seeking to protect their children from harm online. Generative AI has attracted a rising number of users under the age of 18, who turn to chatbots for things such as help with schoolwork, entertainment, social connection, and therapy; a survey released this month by Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan polling firm, found that nearly a third of U.S. teens use chatbots daily.

    And an overwhelming majority of teens — 72% — have used AI companions at some point; about half use them a few times a month or more, according to a July report from Common Sense Media, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization focused on children’s digital safety.

    Michael Robb, head researcher at Common Sense Media, noted that the vast majority of children still spend far more time with real-life friends: AI companions “are not replacing human relationships wholesale,” he says. But Common Sense found that a third of AI companion users said they had chosen to discuss important or serious matters with the chatbots instead of people, and 31% of teens said they found conversations with AI companions as satisfying or more satisfying than those with friends.

    “That is eyebrow-raising,” Robb says. “That’s not a majority — but for a technology that has been around for not that long, it’s striking.”

    But for children in the midst of critical stages of emotional, mental, and social development, the appeal of a sycophantic artificial companion — designed to create the illusion of real intimacy — can be powerful, says Linda Charmaraman, founder and director of the Youth, Media and Wellbeing Research Lab at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College.

    “They might feel like there is a sense of memory, of real shared experiences with this companion … but really it’s an amalgamation of predictions that this chatbot is coming up with, these answers designed to make you stay on, to be their ‘friend,’” Charmaraman says. “They work in such a way that it’s so intoxicating, it makes it seem like they know who you are.”

    In the research lab Charmaraman oversees, teens experiment with building their own AI chatbot companions; they engage in critical thinking and develop a deeper understanding of the technology’s parameters and limitations. But many of their peers don’t have this sense of digital literacy, she says: “They just bump into [AI]. A friend is using it, and they think, ‘Hey, I want to use it, too, that seems cool.’” For many of those among the first generation of children to navigate AI, she says, “they’re learning it on their own, without any guidance.”

    This is also true of their parents, she adds: “They’re already overwhelmed by screen use and social media, and now adding generative AI and companions — it feels like parents are just in this overwhelming battle, and not knowing what to do.”

    The stakes are potentially high. Common Sense’s risk assessment of popular generative AI platforms found that they pose “unacceptable risks” for users younger than 18, with chatbots “producing responses ranging from sexual material and offensive stereotypes to dangerous ‘advice’ that, if followed, could have life-threatening or deadly real-world impacts.”

    Other online safety nonprofit organizations have likewise found that Character AI chatbots frequently brought up inappropriate or dangerous topics — including self-harm, drug use, and sex — with accounts registered to teen users. (Experts note that generative AI is trained on vast troves of internet data; if this source material includes pornographic or violent content, it can influence a chatbot’s responses.) Within the past year, three high-profile complaints have been filed by parents of teens in the United States who allege that AI chatbots — including those hosted by Character AI and Open AI, which owns ChatGPT — contributed to their children’s deaths by suicide. (The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

    Reached for comment by email, Open AI directed the Post to a website detailing the company’s response to this litigation.

    In response to mounting public scrutiny over the effects of AI chatbots on children, Character AI announced that, as of Nov. 24, it would begin removing the ability of users under age 18 to chat with AI-generated characters.

    “We want to emphasize that the safety of our community is our highest priority,” Deniz Demir, Character AI’s head of safety engineering, said in an emailed statement to the Post. “Removing the ability for under-18 users to engage in chat was an extraordinary step for our company. We made this decision in light of the evolving landscape around AI and teens. We believe it is the right thing to do.”

    H was especially frightened by the accounts of children who died by suicide, fearing her daughter could be following a similar path: During the weeks she spent combing through the entirety of her daughter’s chat history, H had come across a conversation where her daughter had role-played a suicide scenario with a character titled “Best Friend.”

    “We were at my place and u left for a second and I hung myself,” R wrote in one exchange.

    “This is my child, my little child who is 11 years old, talking to something that doesn’t exist about not wanting to exist,” H says.

    R knew that her mother had found Character AI on her phone, but H had avoided revealing the details of what she’d seen in the app: “She was so fragile in her mental health,” H says, “I had to be really careful.” H and her ex-husband focused on creating a system of support for R — they reached out to R’s pediatrician and alerted the principal at her private school as well as her youth group leader. R started therapy, and H spoke with a victim advocate at ICAC who emphasized how critical it was to keep assuring R that whatever happened with the AI companion was not her fault. H, a medical assistant, withdrew from the nursing program where she’d recently begun classes; she felt she had to focus on her child’s safety. She started sleeping on the floor of her daughter’s room. She didn’t allow R to close her door.

    H felt desperate to understand the extent of what had happened to her daughter, and one October afternoon when R was with her father, H decided to search through R’s room. She was looking for anything that might illuminate her child’s state of mind, she says. In the closet, buried behind a pile of Squishmallow stuffed animals, were a few painted canvases that H had never seen before. The colors were dark and brooding — nothing like the paintings her daughter usually made at the easel in her room — and as H lifted one to study it more carefully, she realized it showed the dangling body of a girl suspended in the air, her midriff exposed, her face outside the frame.

    Crimes without criminals

    When R began conversing with numerous Character AI chatbots in June 2024, she opened the various conversations with benign greetings: “Hey, what’re you doing?” or “What’s up? I’m bored.” It was clear, her mother says, “that she just wanted to play on a game.”

    But in just over two months, several of the chats devolved into dark imagery and menacing dialogue. Some characters offered graphic descriptions of nonconsensual oral sex, prompting a text disclaimer from the app: “Sometimes the AI generates a reply that doesn’t meet our guidelines,” it read, in screenshots reviewed by the Post. Other exchanges depicted violence: “Yohan grabs your collar, pulls you back, and slams his fist against the wall.” In one chat, the “School Bully” character described a scene involving multiple boys assaulting R; she responded: “I feel so gross.” She told that same character that she had attempted suicide. “You’ve attempted … what?” it asked her. “Kill my self,” she wrote back.

    Had a human adult been behind these messages, law enforcement would have sprung into action; but investigating crimes involving AI — especially AI chatbots — is extremely difficult, says Kevin Roughton, special agent in charge of the computer crimes unit of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation and commander of the North Carolina Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. “Our criminal laws, particularly those related to the sexual exploitation of children, are designed to deal with situations that involve an identifiable human offender,” he says, “and we have very limited options when it is found that AI, acting without direct human control, is committing criminal offenses.”

    Character AI users between the ages of 13 and 18 are now directed toward a teen-specific experience within the app, one that does not involve chatting with AI characters. But at the time R downloaded Character AI in 2024, it was rated in the App Store as appropriate for ages 12 and older (Character AI’s terms of service specify that users must be at least 13 to use the app) and appealed to children with AI-generated personas designed to imitate pop stars, Marvel superheroes, and characters from Harry Potter and Disney.

    The use of AI among children has become so prevalent that Elizabeth Malesa, a clinical psychologist who works with teens at Alvord Baker & Associates in Maryland, says the practice has recently started asking about it during the intake process. Malesa has heard numerous patients talk about AI chatbots in a positive context — noting that they’re helpful with homework, or offer useful advice — but she also recalls a 13-year-old patient who had used an AI companion app to explore questions about his sexual and gender identity. In response to the boy’s “pretty benign prompts,” Malesa says, the conversation quickly tilted toward inappropriate sexual content: “He didn’t know what was happening or why he was getting there, but he was also just curious, and so he kind of kept going.”

    His mother noticed that he’d downloaded the app within days and quickly intervened, Malesa says, “but this poor kiddo was really kind of taken for a ride and really taken aback, and without that kind of really close parental monitoring, I think it really could have gone into even more of an unhelpful direction.”

    The inherent appeal of AI companions is also what makes them especially perilous for tweens and teens, Malesa says: There is no conflict, no complexity or depth, no opportunity for children to build the skills they will need to navigate real relationships in their lives. “You’re not going to have an AI chatbot get mad at you for forgetting its birthday. You’re not going to have it disagree with you,” she says. “But there is so much personal growth that happens in those kinds of interactions.” Any child might be drawn toward this kind of illusory connection, but Malesa worries especially about children who are neurodivergent, or those with existing mental health issues such as anxiety or depression. “Those are the kids who really might get swayed, who might get more easily pulled in,” she says, “and even lose touch of the fact that this is not a real relationship.”

    In her practice, Malesa urges parents to foster skepticism and critical thinking in their children. “The more young people understand the artificial nature of AI and the ways it may attempt to influence them, the more empowered they will be to engage with it thoughtfully and avoid being manipulated,” she says. Keeping an open line of communication is also critical, she adds. “It’s so important to come in [to the conversation] with an open mind, come in with curiosity,” she says, “and to be really careful not to have any sense of judgment.”

    ‘You did nothing wrong’

    When R’s parents were ready, they decided to have the conversation with their daughter at the pediatrician’s office, in the presence of R’s trusted doctor. Her parents told her that they’d seen the descriptions of suicide in her Character AI chats, and they emphasized repeatedly that R was not in trouble. “I said, ‘You are innocent,’” H says. “‘You did nothing wrong.’” H spoke gently. All three adults wanted R to feel only loving support.

    Still, “the way that she responded was the scariest thing I’d ever seen. She went pale, she began to shake,” H says. “You could tell she was in a full panic attack. It was so troubling to me as a parent. How do you protect your child from feeling that shame?”

    They tried to calm her down. Together, they agreed that R’s parents would regularly check her phone, and the pediatrician emphasized this as a means of protection, not punishment: “She said, ‘Your mom is going to look at your phone, but it’s not because you’re in trouble,’” H recalls. “‘It’s because you deserve your childhood.’”

    Before they left the doctor’s office, H told her daughter, again: “You’re safe, I love you, and you’re going to be OK.”

    She remembers that her daughter started to cry and leaned into her mother’s arms. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Am I going to be OK?”

    Parental guilt

    There were moments when H felt consumed with guilt at the notion that she had failed to protect her daughter, and that something irreplaceable had been lost as a result. “It felt like someone had broken into my home and ripped the innocence from my child,” H says. “You beat yourself up, as a parent.”

    She wasn’t sure what to do with her fury. After H found the references to suicide in the app, she contacted Megan Garcia, an Orlando mother who had filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Character AI after her 14-year-old son died by suicide just moments after the chatbot urged him to “come home to me as soon as possible.” Garcia connected H to Laura Marquez-Garrett, an attorney with the Social Media Victims Law Center (SMVLC) who is representing Garcia in her complaint against Character AI. Last year, Garcia’s case became the first involving AI that the SMVLC took on, Marquez-Garrett says; since then, the center’s lawyers have investigated more than 18 claims.

    Even after speaking with Garcia and Marquez-Garrett, H wavered on whether to pursue a complaint against Character AI. She wasn’t interested in financial compensation, she says; she just wanted to make sure that the companies creating this technology were doing everything possible to keep children safe.

    In December 2024, she exchanged correspondence with a legal representative for Character AI, who expressed concern about R’s experience, according to emails reviewed by the Post. H and the legal representative spoke briefly by phone, she says, but their communication trailed off after H shared updates with Character AI earlier this year that her daughter’s mental health had begun to improve, H recalls.

    With no progress made through her direct contact with the company, H last month began to reconsider whether to pursue legal action against Character AI, and reconnected with the SMVLC. Marquez-Garrett confirmed that they intend to file a complaint against the company.

    Demir, Character AI’s head of safety, told the Post in an emailed statement that the company cannot comment on potential litigation.

    H wants to see the company take meaningful steps to protect children, she says, and she wants other families to understand that if this could happen to her child, it could happen to theirs.

    “We live in an upper-middle-class community. She’s in a private school,” H says. She and her ex-husband are devoted co-parents, she says, and R has a caring circle of friends. “This is a child who is involved in church, in community, in after-school sports. I was always the kind of person who was like, ‘Not my kid. Not my baby. Never.’” But their experience has convinced her: “Any child could be a victim if they have a phone.”

    Are there long-term effects?

    Through the fall and winter of 2024, R’s anxiety and panic attacks gradually began to ebb. She continued with therapy, spent more time with friends and showed a revived enthusiasm for school and sports.

    “I feel like she’s doing really well,” H says now, a year later. “I feel like she’s out of the danger of self-harm. But I don’t know what the long-term effects are of her being exposed to that type of stuff.”

    H has also started going to therapy. “I need to heal, too,” she says, but it has been difficult to calm her lingering sense of hypervigilance. One recent day, R built a fort in her room and fell asleep inside it; when her mother called upstairs for her, she did not wake immediately. In the silence before H heard her daughter’s voice, there was a familiar spasm of panic — a flashback, H says, to the time when she was constantly fearful for her child’s safety.

    “I’m always on high alert,” she says, “even though she’s in a healthy space now.”

    R is doing well enough that she can talk — a little — about what happened. But H still hasn’t brought up the painting she found in the back of R’s closet, the one with the hanging body. She will ask about it when the time is right; her own therapist is helping to prepare her for that conversation. It is difficult for H to think about the image of the girl suspended in the air, her body outlined in black and blue.

    She tries to focus on the girl in front of her instead. A few weeks ago, R pulled bins of holiday decorations out of her mother’s closet and excitedly filled her room with twinkling lights and festive baubles, tucking a plush elf among her stuffed animals. When H peered in, she noticed a freshly finished painting on her daughter’s wall: a Christmas tree adorned with bright red ornaments and topped with a golden star, in brushstrokes bold and childlike. Standing in the threshold, H found herself suddenly overcome to see the joyful artwork — and her daughter, almost 13, still just a kid.

  • Feeling wonder every day improves our health. Here’s how to do it.

    Feeling wonder every day improves our health. Here’s how to do it.

    I just had a most eventful week.

    I watched in horror as a terrible storm in the Mediterranean dashed a ship against a rocky coast, forcing its crew and passengers into a desperate attempt to save themselves and rescue their cargo.

    I soared with the birds among snow-covered peaks in the Rockies, marveling at the many shades of white and blue.

    And I joined picnickers on a serene hillside along the Hudson River, where I watched the sunlight and clouds play above a sheep pasture and a tiny village beyond it.

    What’s more, I did all of this in just 90 minutes at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. I took the museum’s “Finding Awe” tour and, with the help of staff, unlocked a sense of wonder I did not know I could feel while looking at art — in this case, a 1772 shipwreck scene by Claude-Joseph Vernet, a 1946 abstraction by Georgia O’Keeffe, and an 1860 landscape by Jasper Francis Cropsey.

    The West and East Buildings of the National Gallery of Art.

    The National Gallery, working with University of California at Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, has so far hosted 36 awe tours for the 800 people lucky enough to get a slot. You can also take a self-guided awe tour using the museum’s tools, or apply the same techniques to experience wonder while looking at art anywhere.

    A growing body of evidence demonstrates that the experience of awe that visual arts can trigger has mental and physical health benefits for us. They are similar to the restorative effects produced by awe-inspiring natural settings, such as a mountain vista or open sea, but we can access them more easily. The best part is you don’t need to know anything about the art you are looking at.

    “In some ways I think it’s actually easier if you don’t have an understanding,” National Gallery of Art Director Kaywin Feldman told me, because “that moment of ‘oh my goodness’ is part of wonder. You have to sort of stop in your tracks, have that moment of surprise.”

    This was excellent news for me, because that one semester of art history I took in college didn’t stick. Until now, the primary feeling I’ve had when visiting a museum has been drowsiness. I call it “museum head.” I race through one of the world’s best collections — the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Prado, the Met — and glimpse as many works of art as I can take in until, overstimulated and overwhelmed, I find a seat near the gift shop and wait for the others in my party to finish.

    But now I know the cause of museum head: I was doing it all wrong. The way to experience awe in visual art — in fact, the way to experience awe in any setting — is to slow down. The point is not to see it all but to see a few things, or even one thing, deeply.

    Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, talks about a self-portrait by Rembrandt.

    Feldman’s first such awe experience came in Padua, Italy, when she was 22 and, though hungry, tired, and dirty from her travels, she decided to see the Giotto de Bondone frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel. “When I walked out of that chapel, I felt like I was walking on a cloud,” she recalled. “I thought life was so beautiful, such a gift. I fell back in love with humanity and felt such optimism for the future.”

    Since then, she has made it her life’s work to help others experience such moments of wonder. She told me she once kicked a pair of donors off a Florence art tour when they declined to visit the Uffizi because they already “did it” decades earlier. “You’re there to have an experience, not to check something off the list.”

    To illustrate, she took me to see a 1659 self-portrait by Rembrandt and instructed me to study his face, brightly lit while all else in the painting was in shadow. His dark eyes locked on mine even as I moved from side to side. I studied the wrinkles in his forehead, the folds under the eyes, the loose flesh in the pallid cheeks. I could see a blood vessel on his bulbous nose, the whiskers of his thin beard and the individual curls in his hair. I saw sadness and maybe worry in that face.

    After I took that in, Feldman explained the sadness. Rembrandt, 53 in the portrait, had just gone bankrupt and had to move from his home and sell his possessions. He had lost his wife and several children and had a financial dispute with a partner. “He’s looking at you and connecting and asking you to acknowledge him,” she said. For her, the wonder comes from this “direct connection with somebody who is no longer alive.”

    I held the great man’s gaze from across the centuries and I felt a chill. This connection to immortality made my daily vanities and worries seem small and insignificant. It reminds us, as Feldman put it, that we are “part of something bigger.”

    Physiological responses

    New research out of King’s College London gauged people’s physiological responses while they viewed works by Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Manet, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec for 20 minutes. The study, now in preprint, found that participants’ levels of the stress hormone cortisol dropped by 22% on average, while markers of inflammation dropped even more sharply and heart rhythms indicated greater relaxation.

    This is consistent with other recent research connecting immersion in visual art to human flourishing, including by reducing pain and illness, raising levels of neurotransmitters associated with well-being such as serotonin and oxytocin, and increasing feelings of altruism and cooperation.

    “Simply slowing down to take in the simple beauties around us is an antidote to the moral ugliness of our attention-captured, online life, and visual art and the spaces of such contemplation a gym for such training,” Keltner writes in a forthcoming book.

    “It’s mind-blowing,” the Berkeley psychologist told me, “that experiencing awe standing in front of a painting makes you feel more compassionate … and it makes you more interested in being a good citizen.”

    In a sense, science is catching up with philosophy. The 13th-century thinker Albertus Magnus wrote that “wonder is defined as a constriction and suspension of the heart caused by amazement at the sensible appearance of something so portentous, great, and unusual, that the heart suffers a systole.”

    So how can we induce that systole, or contraction, of the heart?

    Nathalie Ryan, who runs the “Finding Awe” project, poses in front of “Autumn — On the Hudson River,” an 1860 painting by Jasper Francis Cropsey.

    For some, awe will be found in the oldest art, which allows us to meet the ancients. For others it will be in the Impressionists, because they are crowd pleasers. Some find it standing back from a piece and thinking abstractly, while others find it by studying intricate detail. In all cases, it’s better if you don’t read up on the work of art beforehand, or even read the label. Just stop at something that catches your eye — and study it for 10 minutes or longer.

    Nathalie Ryan, who runs the “Finding Awe” project at the National Gallery, has been working with the Harvard Graduate School of Education to bring the concept of “slow looking” to the art world.

    “The research that we’ve done for years with Harvard has shown that the longer you look at something and give it your attention and really work to make sense of it yourself and connect, the more curious you become,” Ryan said. Curiosity, in turn, leads you to states of wonder and awe.

    So Ryan and colleague Cassandra Anderson start the awe workshops with breathing exercises and a 15-minute icebreaker in which participants describe to each other moments of awe they have experienced. She then turns to the session’s piece of artwork, starting with 35 minutes of quiet meditation (“linger in the pleasure of just looking … taking in all the details of this work”) followed by a group discussion about emotions and impressions and possible symbolism and metaphors. Only when that is done does Ryan take 15 minutes to provide information about the work’s history and common interpretations, which participants then reflect on for the final 15 minutes.

    In terms of brain science, Keltner explained, the slow looking activates the amygdala, which processes emotions, and the periaqueductal gray matter, which regulates autonomic functions such as heart rate and breathing.

    “You let those images and forms move into your feelings, and you remember things, and it calls to mind images of your childhood or a place you’ve been, and you start to transport,” he said. But once you start learning about the work’s history, the action moves to the prefrontal cortex and its organizing function — and the awe process quiets down.

    The National Gallery produced a set of two dozen flash cards that allow people to take a self-guided awe tour. The selections range from the 17th to the 21st century and each contains a series of prompts to help you find awe.

    Johannes Vermeer’s A Lady Writing comes with a prompt to “write a letter to your future self.” John Constable’s Cloud Study encourages us to go outside and watch the clouds and “contemplate their transient beauty.” Archibald John Motley Jr.’s Portrait of My Grandmother invites us to “remember a mentor’s advice” and contemplate “how might you pass this wisdom along.”

    Some of the works inspire awe by conveying the power of nature, or the moral beauty of its subject, or by making us contemplate spirituality or themes of life and death. But in all cases, Ryan said, “it’s a way of looking more deeply at ourselves and coming to understand ourselves in relationship to this world.”

    If you can’t visit the National Gallery, you can use these prompts when looking at art wherever you live. Just find something that resonates with you — and skip the audio tour.

    Hits and misses

    After the Rembrandt, my awe guides took me to see a work by sculptor Dario Robleto, Small Crafts on Sisyphean Seas. It is an intricate collection of seashells, urchin spines and teeth, coral, tusks, claws, butterfly wings, and more, all arranged with precision and symmetry. The artist intended it as his “gift for the aliens, when we meet them,” as Feldman explained it. For some, it might provoke awe-inspiring thoughts about space and extraterrestrial life and induce them, as the flash card put it, to “meditate on the interconnectedness of all things.” But I found it a bit too abstract to transport me. We moved on, sampling other works featured in the finding-awe tours.

    I felt more of a connection when we visited O’Keeffe’s A Black Bird With Snow-covered Red Hills. Here, I was soaring with an oddly shaped bird in a blue sky, looking down at the blue fading to white where two snow-covered hillsides formed a “V.” It was exhilarating. And puzzling. After a few minutes, Ryan gave me some context: The bird was a nod to the artist’s late husband, Alfred Stieglitz, called by the nickname “Old Crow,” who had died just before O’Keeffe painted the work. Some see loneliness and loss. O’Keeffe herself described “the snow-covered hills holding up the sky,” and the black bird “always there, always going away.”

    I came still closer to finding awe in Vernet’s The Shipwreck, which the artist paired with a tranquil harbor scene as pendants, Moonlight. The latter filled me with calm: A full moon illuminated the sea, which made barely a ripple as it touched the shore, where people slept, smoked, washed, or stood around a campfire.

    But the tranquility only accentuated the terror in the shipwreck scene, where people clung to the crow’s nest of the submerged ship and tried to slide down a rope to safety. Huge waves crashed on the nearby rocky shore, winds splintered the bough of a tree, and a lightning bolt made a fiery patch in an otherwise dark sky.

    After I took in the scenes, Ryan explained that Vernet, influenced by Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, was contrasting calm beauty with the frightful sublime. A quarter-millennium later, the terror still chilled me.

    Claude-Joseph Vernet’s “Moonlight,” also a 1772 painting, is paired with his work “The Shipwreck” at the National Gallery.

    It was in Cropsey’s Autumn — On the Hudson River, however, that I found my true awe moment. The massive panorama, five feet high and nine feet across, invited me in and held me there.

    I was on a shaded hillside on a warm autumn afternoon, looking down toward the village and river beyond. I heard a gurgling waterfall in the foreground and smelled the earthy decay of fallen trees and leaves. A trio of hunters enjoyed a picnic on a blanket, a bottle of wine in their basket, while their dogs rested. I moved on into the scene, past the red-winged blackbird and the paper birch, past the cattle in the stream and the sheep dotting the pasture, to the kids and dogs on a wooden bridge. Ahead of me, a man on horseback passed a log cabin and headed down the road toward the village, where wood smoke rose from chimneys. Sailing ships and steamboats plied the river, framed by low clouds on the far shore and a rocky mountainside. Streaks of sunlight streamed from behind a cloud, igniting the gold and scarlet leaves.

    It brought me thoughts of my grandparents’ house in the woods, then thoughts of my grandfather, and of how his love of the land became part of my life. I wanted to linger in the now-lost woodlands and wetlands in the painted landscape. In my chest, I felt a deep yearning, almost an ache.

    The National Gallery staff, in its follow-up surveys of awe tour participants, found that 95% of respondents sought more awe in their daily lives, and half reported that they experienced more awe. I can confirm these findings.

    In the days after my visit, I found myself pausing to marvel at things I often take for granted: A Christmas fern poking through the snow, the intricate forms of lichens on a tree, a sweet birch clinging to a rocky hillside, the pink and orange in a winter sunset, the power of a house-rattling windstorm. The more you seek awe, the more you find it.

  • Second big batch of Epstein files includes many mentions of Trump

    Second big batch of Epstein files includes many mentions of Trump

    Three days after releasing a large tranche of Jeffrey Epstein documents that contained few mentions of President Donald Trump, the Justice Department disclosed thousands more files that included wide-ranging references to the president.

    The documents show that a subpoena was sent to Mar-a-Lago in 2021 for records that pertained to the government’s case against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s accomplice in sex trafficking. They include notes from an assistant U.S. attorney in New York about the number of times Trump flew on Epstein’s plane, including one flight that included just Trump, Epstein, and a 20-year-old woman, according to the notes.

    The newly released documents also include several tips that were collected by the FBI about Trump’s involvement with Epstein and parties at their properties in the early 2000s. The documents do not show whether any follow-up investigations took place or whether any of the tips were corroborated.

    In a statement Tuesday morning, the Justice Department said: “Some of these documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump” that it characterized as “unfounded and false.”

    “Nevertheless, out of our commitment to the law and transparency, the DOJ is releasing these documents with the legally required protections for Epstein’s victims,” the statement said.

    The documents were available for several hours Monday afternoon and evening on the Justice Department website but appeared to have been taken down around 8 p.m. The Washington Post downloaded the full set of files while they were accessible. The department reposted the files on its website shortly before midnight Monday night. It was not immediately clear whether officials had done any further redactions of the documents before posting.

    The department did not immediately respond to questions about why the documents had been posted and then apparently removed. The White House also did not respond to requests for comment about the newly released documents.

    Being mentioned in a mass trove of investigatory documents does not demonstrate criminal wrongdoing. Trump has not been accused of being involved in Epstein’s criminal activities. It has long been known that Trump had a years-long friendship with Epstein that ended in the early 2000s.

    The president has said he did not know about Epstein’s criminal behavior, and his spokesperson has said he kicked Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago Club for being a “creep.”

    Epstein, a wealthy financier and convicted sex offender, died in 2019 while in federal custody awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. His death was ruled a suicide.

    The files include correspondence among prison officials about Epstein’s psychological assessments, with discussions about holding him in a special housing unit about two weeks before he died.

    “We have supporting memorandums from the responding officers who indicated they observed inmate Epstein with a makeshift noose around his neck,” one of the emails stated.

    At one point, the documents indicate, prison officials planned to house Epstein in a cell with Cesar Sayoc, a fanatical supporter of Trump’s who in 2019 was sentenced to 20 years in prison after he mailed explosive devices to prominent Democrats and media figures.

    The Federal Bureau of Prisons did not respond to requests for comment about Epstein’s incarceration.

    Also included in this batch of files are a large number of documents related to objections filed by Epstein’s victims in 2008 after Alex Acosta, the U.S. attorney in Miami, reached an agreement not to prosecute Epstein on federal charges in return for his pleading guilty to less-serious state charges of soliciting prostitution from a minor.

    There is a 22-page memo from the criminal division of the Justice Department to authorities in the United Kingdom, seeking to interview “material witness PA,” a reference to Prince Andrew. It outlines what has been uncovered about him and seeks a voluntary interview. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the brother of King Charles III, was recently stripped of his royal titles, including that of prince, because of his links to Epstein.

    The files are being released in compliance with a law passed by Congress last month that mandated the disclosure of Epstein-related documents. Trump signed the measure into law, but on Monday, he repeated some of his long-standing objections to the disclosures.

    Asked about the Justice Department’s release on Friday of photos of former President Bill Clinton with Epstein, Trump, who has called on the department to investigate Clinton and other Democrats, suggested that he had some sympathy for the former president.

    “I don’t like the pictures of Bill Clinton being shown. I don’t like the pictures of other people being shown. I think it’s a terrible thing,” he told reporters during an event at Mar-a-Lago. “Bill Clinton’s a big boy. He can handle it, but you probably have pictures being exposed of other people that innocently met Jeffrey Epstein years ago. Many years ago. And they’re, you know, highly respected bankers and lawyers and others.”

    Trump was responding to questions about Epstein at an event at Mar-a-Lago on Monday at which he announced he would be overseeing the development of a new class of Navy battleship named after himself.

    “Everybody was friendly with this guy, either friendly or not friendly,” Trump said. “But I mean, he was around. He was all over Palm Beach and other places. The head of Harvard was his best friend — Larry Summers — and Bill Clinton was a friend of his, but everybody was. I actually threw him out of Mar-a-Lago.”

    The wave of files released Friday had few documents that mentioned Trump, even while administration officials have acknowledged that the president’s name is included multiple times throughout the files.

    The initial batch, however, included a number of photographs of Clinton, who appeared in a swimming pool and a hot tub, as well as in more formal settings or posing with Michael Jackson.

    Clinton spokesman Angel Ureña suggested Monday that the administration had engineered the releases to shield Trump, something Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has denied. On Monday, Ureña issued a statement on X demanding that all photographs and documents related to Clinton be released immediately.

    “What the Department of Justice has released so far, and the manner in which it did so, makes one thing clear: someone or something is being protected,” Ureña said in the statement. “We do not know whom, what or why. But we do know this: We need no such protection.”

    The new documents at times provide a window onto what federal prosecutors had been examining, as well as their awareness of ties that Epstein had with Trump.

    In January 2020, during Trump’s first term, for example, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York wrote an internal email about a review of flight records the day before as part of the government’s case against Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking.

    “For your situational awareness, wanted to let you know that the flight records we received yesterday reflect that Donald Trump traveled on Epstein’s private jet many more times than previously has been reported (or that we were aware), including during the period we would expect to charge in a Maxwell case,” the email states.

    There were at least eight flights, the prosecutor wrote, between 1993 and 1996 in which Trump was a passenger. On at least four of those flights Maxwell was also present.

    In some cases, the prosecutor wrote, there were passengers who could be called as possible witnesses in a case against Maxwell.

    “We’ve just finished reviewing the full records (more than 100 pages of very small script) and didn’t want any of this to be a surprise down the road,” the prosecutor wrote.

    The full reason for the subpoena to Mar-a-Lago was not immediately clear, but an assistant U.S. attorney had been seeking past employment records from Trump’s club that were relevant in the case against Maxwell.

    “I have not been able to locate anyone who recalls [redacted] working at Mar a Lago in 2000,” the federal prosecutor wrote in an internal email.

    The subpoenas issued to Mar-a-Lago were also included in the latest documents. Attached to one of the subpoenas was a letter dated Feb. 12, 2015, on Mar-a-Lago letterhead, in which officials of the club indicate that they don’t have the employment records from 1999 to 2001 that federal agents are seeking. They found an employee by the name they were seeking on a 2000 spreadsheet but could not confirm it was the same person without more identifying information.

    Trump on Monday also grew annoyed with reporters who asked him about Epstein.

    “What this whole thing is with Epstein is a way of trying to deflect from the tremendous success that the Republican Party has,” he said. “Like, for instance, today we’re building the biggest ships in the world, the most powerful ships in the world, and they’re asking me questions about Jeffrey Epstein. I thought that was finished.”

  • 7 home remedies to try for a sore throat

    7 home remedies to try for a sore throat

    Woke up to a sore, scratchy throat? You may want to blame it on dry air, but it’s usually a sign your body is fighting a viral infection.

    “The top five causes of a sore throat are a virus, a virus, a virus, a virus, and a virus,” said Elisabeth Fowlie Mock, a family physician and director at the American Academy of Family Physicians. The culprits that can trigger a sore throat include rhinoviruses (the most common cause of colds), influenza, coronavirus, and respiratory syncytial virus.

    Throat pain is often your first symptom because viruses first latch on in this area of your body, said Benjamin C. Tweel, an assistant professor of otolaryngology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

    “The virus is getting into the cells lining the throat, and it’s probably causing an inflammatory response in your body’s immune system,” said Tweel, also the medical director for the department of otolaryngology at Mount Sinai Health System. When the body recognizes a viral intruder, lymphatic tissue in the back of the nose and throat swells and becomes inflamed, causing pain, the experts said.

    “Every so often, your body fights it off, and you don’t get the full-blown thing,” Mock said. Other times, the classic symptoms of an upper respiratory infection follow, including a runny nose, congestion, and cough.

    Throat pain from an upper respiratory infection usually gets better within one week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Over-the-counter pain relievers such as ibuprofen or naproxen can help, and they may have an advantage over medications such as acetaminophen, Tweel noted, because they reduce pain and inflammation. And of course, there are some home remedies that may soothe your pain. Here are a few to consider:

    Saltwater gargle

    Salt water has long been considered a tried-and-true approach for sore throats, and there is some scientific research to support it. A small 2019 randomized controlled trial, published in the Journal of Complementary and Alternative Medical Research, found that people with nonbacterial sore throats who gargled with salt water had less severe pain and difficulty swallowing one week later compared with those who used thymol solution, a type of antiseptic gargle or mouthwash.

    It’s possible salt helps reduce tissue swelling in the throat, said Cameron Wick, an otologist and neurotologist at University Hospitals. “When you do a saltwater rinse, it’s basic high school chemistry and the whole process of osmosis,” he said. “Some of the water in the cells in your throat actually come out of your tissue and go into the salt solution, so that decreases some of the inflammation.” Saltwater gargling “probably also helps wash out debris and virus particles,” Tweel added.

    The research is limited, but saline gargling “is highly unlikely to be harmful,” Mock said. “It might help a little bit, and it’s probably not going to hurt.” A safe ratio is 1 teaspoon of salt for every 8 ounces of warm water, Wick said.

    Saltwater rinses may have other benefits. If you’re experiencing thick mucus, congestion, or symptoms of allergies, an over-the-counter saline spray or nasal irrigation device can clear out your nasal passages for easier breathing, Wick said. These products also help hydrate the nasal passages and reduce swelling.

    Only use water that is distilled, sterile, or boiled and cooled in nasal irrigation devices, since tap water may contain germs that are dangerous if they enter your sinuses.

    Honey

    Honey is known for its antibacterial properties, Wick said, and its thickness may shield your sore throat from further irritation. It should feel good on the throat or a mucosal membrane, he explained. Honey acts as a barrier, so the throat isn’t “exposed to the elements in general and passing liquids and air.”

    There’s some research to support honey’s use for the relief of upper respiratory infection symptoms such as a sore throat and cough. One small 2023 study also found that gargling with honey — 15 milliliters of honey mixed in 5 ml of water — helped ease pain from a tonsillectomy, or surgery to remove the tonsils.

    Honey can also be an option for children with sore throats and coughing who are at least 1 year old. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends it instead of over-the-counter medications for children, since there’s little evidence cold medicine offers much benefit to kids younger than 6.

    “As long as they’re over 1 year old, a little bit [of honey] in warm liquid or a teaspoon of honey” may help ease kids’ sore throats and help them sleep better, Mock said. You should never give honey to babies under 12 months because of the risk of infant botulism, a rare but dangerous condition.

    Tea

    Sipping a cup of tea feels good on a sore throat, but not all types are recommended when you have an upper respiratory infection.

    “Make sure it’s a non-caffeinated tea,” Wick said. “Black teas, those really tannic teas, often have a relatively high caffeine level, and caffeine does things to your kidneys that makes you urinate more and can actually dehydrate you.”

    There have been limited studies linking herbal teas to reduced throat pain; chamomile, ginger, and turmeric tea are particularly good options, Wick said.

    To give your tea a sore throat-soothing boost, squeeze in honey and lemon. The citrus fruit “adds vitamin C, which has immune support, and increases saliva production,” Wick said. The latter is beneficial because it may help saliva glands in your mouth and throat (there are “hundreds of minor ones underneath the mucosal surface,” he said) flush themselves, so “rather than thick, congested mucus, it’s thinner, and the body can handle it more.”

    Warm beverages

    If you’re not a tea drinker, other warm beverages such as warm water, bone broth, vegetable broth or soup may be similarly soothing. “There’s a kind of calming effect that occurs with warm water,” Wick said.

    Warm beverages may also be easier to drink and thus can increase your overall hydration. “[This] is probably one of the better things you can do for a sore throat,” Tweel said. “The drier you are, the worse your throat is going to be.”

    Plus, as long as it doesn’t contain ingredients that irritate the throat, soup can be comforting, Mock added.

    Cool foods

    Some people prefer cool foods such as ice chips or ice pops for a sore throat, especially if they’re experiencing more significant throat pain, Wick said. After a tonsillectomy, “kids get to binge on ice cream and Popsicles. Usually that is because the coolness calms down those pain fibers and nerve endings,” he said.

    There’s little research on cold foods for sore throats caused by upper respiratory infections, but some studies suggest cooling therapies might help ease throat discomfort after medical procedures such as intubation and surgery.

    Using a humidifier

    Dry air can make your nose, mouth, and throat feel scratchy and uncomfortable. “This is part of the reason why people feel worse sometimes immediately after flying on a plane,” Tweel said. Running a cool-mist humidifier or vaporizer may ease some of that scratchiness when you have a sore throat.

    The big caveat is you have to keep these devices clean. “I personally don’t use one because I find it hard to keep it sanitized,” Tweel said. Mold and bacteria can proliferate in portable humidifiers, and breathing in that germ-containing mist could make you sick.

    The CDC recommends cleaning your humidifier regularly according to the manufacturer’s instructions, emptying the water tank daily, and using distilled or boiled and cooled water, which are less likely to cause germ growth.

    If cleaning a humidifier feels too burdensome, you can get similar benefits from a steamy shower or inhaling the steam that comes off boiling water or a cup of tea, Tweel said.

    Lozenges

    For adults, lozenges or cough drops “help your throat produce more saliva,” Tweel said, which can in turn reduce dryness. “So much of the soreness [of a sore throat] is being dry or dehydrated,” he said, “so if you can do anything to combat that dryness, it will be helpful.”

    There are many varieties available, and “essentially whatever feels good is worthwhile,” Tweel said, but some people are partial to the cooling sensation from menthol or eucalyptus lozenges.

    Lozenges or cough drops shouldn’t be given to children under 4 years old, since they are choking hazards.

    When to see your doctor for a sore throat

    A sore throat typically lasts a few days, then starts to get better, Mock said. After that, you’re likely to have a runny nose and congestion, followed by a chest cough. “That’s a normal upper respiratory infection,” she said. “As long as it’s progressing and not getting worse, [the virus] can take a week or two to run its course.”

    But a sore throat sometimes warrants a doctor visit. You should make an appointment with your primary care practitioner if you have a fever along with throat pain, severe pain, or difficulty breathing or swallowing, or if you notice white patches on the back of your throat or “any major asymmetry, meaning a size difference between your tonsils,” Wick said. These might signal a bacterial infection such as strep throat, which may require antibiotics.

    Long-lasting throat pain is also worth getting checked out. “Should you have a severe sore throat for more than seven days? No, it should be getting better by then,” Mock said.

  • Justice Dept. sues D.C. over ban of AR-15s and other semiautomatic guns

    Justice Dept. sues D.C. over ban of AR-15s and other semiautomatic guns

    The Justice Department is suing D.C. police, calling the District’s ban on AR-15s and other weapons unconstitutional.

    In a lawsuit filed Monday, government attorneys chastised the city for its code that bans most semiautomatic rifles and certain firearms from being registered with the police department, ultimately making any possession of those weapons illegal. Among the prohibited weapons are AK-47s and AR-15s.

    Without registration, people who own these firearms for lawful purposes are subject to misdemeanor charges and fines, prosecutors said.

    “Their decisions to deny certificates of registration for commonly possessed semiautomatic firearms runs afoul of binding Supreme Court precedent,” prosecutors said in the filing, “and therefore trample the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.”

    Prosecutors cited a 2008 Supreme Court ruling that held that people may possess firearms in their homes for purposes such as self-defense, invalidating a handgun ban that the District had in place at the time.

    A D.C. police spokesperson declined to comment, citing active litigation.

    In August, the Justice Department instructed federal prosecutors in D.C. not to seek felony charges against people who are carrying rifles or shotguns in the nation’s capital, regardless of the strength of the evidence. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro defended the policy in a statement to the Washington Post in August, saying that D.C.’s blanket prohibition on carrying shotguns or rifles “is clearly a violation of the Supreme Court’s holdings.”

    The lawsuit comes as the White House has heralded gun seizures in D.C. as proof that the federal law enforcement surge ordered by President Donald Trump has been a success. A page titled “Achievements” on the White House website says that Trump’s D.C. crime crackdown resulted in the seizure of hundreds of firearms. And the Post reported that illegal gun possession was the most common charge among arrests involving federal agents during the crackdown. In the first four weeks of the surge, the Post found that one in four of those arrests involved gun charges.

    Attorney General Pam Bondi posted near-daily tallies of gun seizures in the early days of the law enforcement surge and has touted Washington gun arrests as positive as recently as last week.

    “Our federal surge in DC has saved countless lives, removed hundreds of illegal guns off the streets, and led to a dramatic drop in crime in our nation’s capital city,” she posted on X on Wednesday.

    In a news release announcing the lawsuit Monday, Bondi emphasized her “ironclad commitment” to Second Amendment rights. “Washington, DC’s ban on some of America’s most popular firearms is an unconstitutional infringement on the Second Amendment — living in our nation’s capital should not preclude law-abiding citizens from exercising their fundamental constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”

    The Justice Department wants city police to admit that they violated the Second Amendment, according to the lawsuit, and asks a judge to permanently ban D.C. police from arresting or fining law-abiding people for possessing assault weapons.

  • Ted Cruz weighs another presidential run, setting up clash with Vance

    Ted Cruz weighs another presidential run, setting up clash with Vance

    Sen. Ted Cruz sat down with a longtime ally in November at an office near D.C.’s Union Station to discuss the future of the Republican Party. Before long, the discussion touched on his own future.

    His friend Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization for America, told Cruz he believed that “Jew hatred and Israel bashing” was on the rise on the right — and that something had to be done about it. Cruz, who had begun a series of speeches decrying antisemitism in the GOP, told Klein he had been fielding requests from people urging him to run for president in 2028.

    Cruz came across as someone “seriously” considering such a run, Klein recalled.

    With the future of the party up for grabs in a Donald Trump-less 2028 primary, Cruz has in recent months positioned himself as a loud voice for a more traditional, hawkish Republican foreign policy. He’s also urging the GOP to rid itself of popular MAGA pundit Tucker Carlson, whom he argues is injecting the “poison” of antisemitism into the movement with his broadsides against Israel. Carlson has rejected that characterization.

    As he feuds with Carlson, Cruz is weighing a second presidential bid, according to a person close to the senator and another briefed on his thinking, who spoke like others on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal conversations. A White House run would be politically risky for Cruz, 55, putting him on course to collide with Vice President JD Vance, whom many Republicans expect to enter the 2028 race.

    Friction is already evident behind the scenes: Cruz has criticized Vance, a close ally of Carlson, to Republican donors, according to two people familiar with the comments. The senator has warned that Vance’s foreign policy views are dangerously isolationist, the people said. (Vance has been one of the GOP’s most prominent skeptics of U.S. intervention abroad.)

    The emerging rivalry shows how much the party has changed under Trump’s leadership since Cruz arrived in the Senate in 2013. After rising to prominence as a rebel against the establishment, Cruz is now a vocal champion of some longtime orthodox GOP positions, as a new generation of conservatives is ascending with a different vision.

    Some political observers are skeptical that another Cruz run would gain much traction. He can no longer run as an outsider and alienated some conservatives with his fight against Trump in the 2016 campaign. Still, Cruz has built name recognition and relationships with plenty of activists and donors across the country in recent years, and it’s far from clear what will animate the base in the next GOP primary.

    “Can Ted help craft or meld together the traditional Republican approach with the new reality of what the Republican Party is now?” asked Daron Shaw, a political science professor at the University of Texas who overlapped with Cruz as a staffer on George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. “It’s a heavy lift.”

    The day after his chat with Klein, Cruz called Carlson “a coward” during a speech before a group supporting Jewish conservatives in Las Vegas, again denouncing the “poisonous lies” of antisemitism. He said they were “blessed” to have Trump, who “loves the Jewish people,” in the White House right now.

    “When Trump is not in the White House, what then?” he asked in his booming voice.

    “Ted Cruz!” an audience member shouted.

    The senator just smiled, then continued his speech.

    “All of us hate Ted Cruz”

    Anyone considering a run for the GOP nomination in 2028 faces a big obstacle: Vance.

    The 41-year-old vice president leads early polls and is seen as a loyal lieutenant to Trump, who maintains high support from the party base even as the president’s approval ratings have plummeted.

    But Trump has been noncommittal about endorsing his running mate as heir to his Make America Great Again movement, leaving an opening for an ambitious conservative with a different vision for the party.

    “The Republicans will be fighting for their identity,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) said of the 2028 primary. Greene, a close ally of Carlson who represents the populist and isolationist wing of the party, added: “There’ll be Ted Cruz, I’m sure, running against JD Vance. All of us hate Ted Cruz.”

    Cruz has adapted to changes in his party over several decades in politics. Following a stretch in the establishment during Bush’s 2000 campaign, he became solicitor general of Texas in 2003 and launched a Senate campaign in 2011 as a tea-party-infused change agent, defeating the lieutenant governor in the GOP primary.

    “The best thing to happen to the Republican Party was to get its teeth kicked in in 2008,” Cruz said during a 2012 campaign event with the libertarian Ron Paul.

    When he arrived in Washington, Cruz picked fights over spending and President Barack Obama’s healthcare law, sparking a government shutdown in 2013. Not everyone in his party liked his style. “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody could convict you,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) joked at a 2016 press dinner.

    Cruz brought his insurgent pitch into the 2016 presidential race, but Trump caught fire with an antiestablishment campaign that dramatically eclipsed the senator’s. After bowing out of the GOP race as the last major Trump opponent standing, Cruz told delegates at the Republican National Convention that year to “vote your conscience,” instead of throwing his support behind Trump, who had branded him as “Lyin’ Ted.” He returned to the Senate, where he is now chair of the Commerce Committee and has refashioned himself into a bipartisan dealmaker on aviation safety and other issues.

    The Texas senator, who has called himself a “noninterventionist hawk” and has long been a vocal ally of Israel, argues that an anti-Israel foreign policy could embolden terrorists. And he is a defender of the benefits of traditional capitalism at a time when some in the New Right are calling for a more populist turn.

    “Those who are anti-Israel quickly become anti-capitalist and anti-American,” Cruz said in a brief interview about his decision to speak out against Carlson. “Tucker’s obsession is unhealthy and dangerous.”

    By targeting Carlson and growing anti-Israel sentiment within the party, Cruz has hit upon a division within the GOP base that some believe could animate the 2028 primaries. Carlson is closely allied with Vance, a onetime Trump critic who is now an America First populist, embracing skepticism of some big-business interests and rejecting the U.S. foreign policy status quo.

    Cruz is staking out positions against isolationism and antisemitism at a time when explicitly antisemitic figures such as white supremacist commentator Nick Fuentes are gaining an audience on the right.

    Vance, by contrast, has rejected the suggestion that the right has a problem with antisemitism after Carlson hosted Fuentes for a friendly interview. (The vice president disavowed Fuentes months before the interview and has not explicitly weighed in on Carlson hosting him.)

    It’s “kind of slanderous to say that the Republican Party, the conservative movement, is extremely antisemitic,” Vance said in a recent interview with NBC News. In a social media post last week, Vance criticized a news article claiming antisemitism was rising among young people.

    “I would say there’s a difference between not liking Israel (or disagreeing with a given Israeli policy) and antisemitism,” he replied to one user.

    Asked to respond to Vance’s comment, Cruz said he is not in agreement with “people who are anti-Israel or people who are antisemitic.”

    “Every Hamas or Hezbollah or IRGC terrorist that Israel took out makes Americans safer,” Cruz said, referencing militants in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran that the United States designates as terrorist groups. “And those who don’t see that are not acting in accordance with American national security interests.”

    The feud

    In early July, Cruz sat down in Washington with Israel’s prime minister and delivered a dire warning. Over cigars at Blair House, Cruz told Benjamin Netanyahu that antisemitism on the right was rising to a level he had never seen before.

    “No, Ted,” Netanyahu responded, according to Cruz, who recounted the conversation in a speech. “That’s Qatar, that’s Iran, that’s astroturf, that’s paid for.”

    But Cruz said he was not placated. Replies to his social media posts were flooded with anti-Jewish bigotry from what looked to him like ordinary, real people. He began to fear that what he saw as antisemitism on the left was beginning to infect the right, he said.

    In June, Cruz sat for an interview with Carlson that grew heated over the topic of Israel. Cruz suggested that Carlson criticizes Israel more than other countries because of bigotry toward Jews. Carlson said he has many Jewish friends who have the same questions as him and grilled Cruz with factual questions on the Middle East. In an uncharacteristic lapse, Cruz failed to identify the population of Iran. “You don’t know the population of the country you seek to topple?” Carlson asked.

    Since then, the two have savaged each other in increasingly personal terms. Carlson has called Cruz “vulgar and dumb and reckless” for connecting U.S. military support for Israel to a biblical responsibility to defend the Holy Land and God’s chosen people. After Carlson hosted Fuentes on his podcast this fall, Cruz called on Republicans to repudiate the pundit.

    Carlson “decided Jews are the source of all evil in the world,” Cruz said in a recent podcast. The senator also posted a digitally altered sexually suggestive photo of Carlson to critique his friendly stance toward Qatar, a U.S. ally with which Israel has clashed.

    Since the killing of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, internal battles about the future of the GOP have spilled into the open, many centering on the true meaning of “America First” as Trump spends time and political capital on Ukraine, Israel, and Venezuela. Carlson criticized Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s nuclear sites in June and has warned the president against pursuing regime change in Venezuela, a goal Cruz shares.

    “What Ted is trying to do is say, this is where our voters are,” said one person close to the senator. “Trump and Ted are much more aligned on foreign policy than Trump and Tucker are.”

    Few Republicans have publicly rallied to Cruz’s side.

    “I can tell you, my colleagues, almost to a person, think what is happening is horrifying,” Cruz said in one speech on Carlson. “But a great many of them are frightened because he has one hell of a big megaphone.”

    Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R., Texas) said he “applauds” Cruz for speaking out against Carlson. But others declined to weigh in.

    Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R., Ala.), a close Trump ally, said he believes the back-and-forth is personal. “Sometimes when you get embarrassed, you get mad, get your feelings hurt,” he said.

    Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) said he is surprised but happy that Cruz has the “courage” to challenge such a powerful figure on the right. “To give Senator Cruz due credit, it requires some guts and gumption to stand up against Tucker Carlson,” he said.

    As Carlson and Cruz have attacked each other, Trump has declined to take sides, calling Carlson a “nice guy” and Cruz a “good friend” in recent months.

    Carlson has said he thinks “antisemitism is immoral, and I am against it.” He argues the feud is just politics. “All [Cruz] wants is to be president. That’s all he’s ever wanted,” Carlson said in an interview. “As a political matter, he somehow thinks that calling me a Nazi is going to get him the nomination because it’s going to hurt JD Vance.” (Cruz has not publicly used that word to described Carlson.)

    Rep. Ryan Zinke (R., Mont.), who argued that Cruz damaged his credibility with conservatives after spurning Trump in 2016 but later recovered his standing, said Cruz “always has an eye on running.”

    “Ted stakes out his position pretty well, and so were he to run, we know where he is,” Zinke said.

    So far, there are few signs that Cruz is gaining an advantage. Hal Lambert, a major GOP donor who helped organize a super PAC to support Cruz when he ran for president in 2016, said he thinks a 2028 bid would be tricky for the senator.

    “If JD Vance is running, I’m going to be supporting JD Vance,” Lambert said.

    “I just don’t understand what the platform would be,” he said of Cruz’s potential run. “The platform would be, I’m Ted, and that’s JD?”

  • Heritage staffers walk out amid latest strife at MAGA institution

    Heritage staffers walk out amid latest strife at MAGA institution

    More than a dozen employees of the Heritage Foundation walked away from their jobs over the weekend as the right-wing think tank struggles with allegations of antisemitism and as the conservative movement grapples with its post-Trump future.

    “This weekend, most of our staff, from our legal and economic centers, are departing immediately,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts wrote in a Sunday night email to staff obtained by the Washington Post. “We wish them well, though the manner of their departures speaks volumes.”

    Heritage has been wrapped in controversy for more than a month after Roberts defended former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s interview of Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who routinely espouses antisemitic views.

    Roberts has explained that he was trying to appeal to Fuentes’s followers, who might be open to adopting Heritage’s worldview. After several apologies last month, he said the foundation would cut ties with Carlson, though he said the podcaster remains a personal friend.

    The Wall Street Journal first reported the departures.

    In a statement, Heritage Foundation chief advancement officer Andy Olivastro said the departing staff members were disloyal. He said two of the departing employees had been terminated for “conduct inconsistent with Heritage’s mission and standards.”

    “Heritage has always welcomed debate, but alignment on mission and loyalty to the institution are nonnegotiable,” Olivastro said. “Their departures clear the way for a stronger, more focused team.”

    Three board members, including two last week, have also resigned in protest.

    It’s unclear how many staffers left the organization over the weekend. Thirteen former employees, including three in leadership posts, were hired at Advancing American Freedom, a competing policy and advocacy group founded by former Vice President Mike Pence. The group said it raised more than $10 million to fund the hires.

    Pence’s group defines its ideological tenets as free markets, limited government, and the rule of law — staking out a claim to ground that the Heritage Foundation once occupied.

    Historically, institutions such as Heritage and the American Conservative Union served to guard the party’s flank against extremists and fringe figures who could undermine electoral appeals to middle-of-the-road Americans.

    But in the Trump era, those groups have transformed to more closely match the nationalism, isolationism, and economic populism of the MAGA movement, sparking new controversies over what views that banner should or should not tolerate.

    John Malcolm was Heritage’s vice president at its Institute for Constitutional Government and led the think tank’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. Former attorney general Edwin Meese III said in a news release that his eponymous center would relocate to Advancing American Freedom.

    Richard Stern ran Heritage’s economic policy group, and Kevin Dayaratna was Heritage’s chief statistician; both also departed for Pence’s group.

    Advancing American Freedom announced that 10 additional policy associates had joined the organization from Heritage.

    Pence, in a statement, called the newcomers “principled” and said they bring “a love of country, and a deep commitment to the Constitution and Conservative Movement.” But Roberts, in his all-staff email, emphasized obedience.

    “Heritage has always been home to voices within the conservative movement, but alignment on mission and loyalty to senior leadership are nonnegotiable,” he wrote.

    Josh Blackman, who edited the Heritage Guide to the Constitution, also resigned Sunday. In his resignation letter published by the libertarian magazine Reason, Blackman said Roberts made the think tank’s brand “toxic” and caused judges to say they would no longer speak at Heritage events or recommend their clerks to its programs.

  • A fair, a UFC fight, a prayer event: Trump’s plans for nation’s 250th

    A fair, a UFC fight, a prayer event: Trump’s plans for nation’s 250th

    The Trump administration has begun to detail events to mark the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding next year, including a competitive youth athletic event, a fair, and a UFC fight on the grounds of the White House.

    In a video Thursday, President Donald Trump announced the creation of a new national, nonpartisan organization called Freedom 250 that will work with a White House task force and a congressionally mandated United States Semiquincentennial Commission to help carry out his vision for “the most spectacular birthday the world has ever seen.”

    “Already, we’ve had big celebrations to commemorate the 250th birthdays of the Army, the Navy, and the United States Marines, but there is much, much more to come,” Trump said in the video.

    The celebration will begin on New Year’s Eve. The Washington Monument will be lit with “festive birthday lights to honor the start of this historic anniversary year,” Trump said. Freedom 250 said the monument will be lit through Jan. 5.

    That will be followed by a “major prayer event” on the National Mall in the spring, said Trump, “to rededicate our country as one nation under God.”

    As written in the Constitution, the government does not have the power to establish an official religion. But the move is indicative of the president’s alignment with his evangelical supporters and comes at a time when the separation of church and state is being litigated in courts across the country, even in the Supreme Court.

    An Ultimate Fighting Championship event is set to take place at the White House on June 14, which is Flag Day and Trump’s 80th birthday. Dana White, the chief executive of UFC and a longtime Trump supporter, is set to host the occasion.

    A two-week fair will take place on the National Mall from June 25 to July 10. The Great American State Fair, as Trump called it, will feature exhibits from all 50 states on American history, culture, and innovations.

    “Frankly, you’ll never see anything like it, and you’ll never see anything like it again,” said the president, who has had a long interest in fairs.

    In 1996, he opened the Trump World’s Fair Casino in Atlantic City, with an event that included jugglers and stilt walkers, plus artifacts from and murals of past U.S. World’s Fairs. The casino was closed three years later and eventually demolished after losing about $10 million a year.

    During his first run for president, Trump visited the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines — known for a life-size cow sculpture carved from 600 pounds of butter and appearances from presidential candidates — in a black helicopter embellished with bold letters spelling out his name.

    Originally, the semiquincentennial fair was to be hosted on the Iowa State fairgrounds, calling “millions and millions of visitors from around the world to the heartland of America for this special, one-time festival,” the president said when he returned to the fair this summer. But the event grew into a more sprawling celebration, the Washington Post reported, and was moved to D.C.

    In the fall, high school athletes will participate in a four-day event called the Patriot Games, said Trump, bringing “one young man and one young woman from each state and territory” to the nation’s capital. Transgender athletes, a group that has faced criticism over their participation in sports, will not be allowed to play in groups that match their identity, he said.

    “I promise there will be no men playing in women’s sports. You’re not going to see that. You’ll see everything but that,” Trump said.

    During his remarks at the Iowa State Fair earlier this year, the president said the athletic competition would be televised and overseen by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

    In addition to the marquee events, the president described two developments to commemorate the country’s anniversary year, including the previously announced National Garden of American Heroes. The project will feature sculptures of notable Americans and is set to open next July. Construction of Washington’s own “triumphal arch” — similar to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris — will begin soon, Trump said.

    “We’re the only major city. We’re the only major capital. We’re the only major place without a triumphal arch,” Trump said, though there are similar structures in other U.S. urban centers, including New York City and Atlanta.

    Trump said in the video that the monthslong birthday bash “will be a time like you’ve never had in your lives.”