Inquirer.com

Nick Foles was a standout during Netflix’s 49ers-Rams blowout

Rob Tornoe — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:31:34 +0000

Nick Foles has a tendency to shine in the spotlight.

He did it in 2018, when he led the Eagles to an unlikely Super Bowl victory against Tom Brady and the New England Patriots. And it did it again Thursday night during his debut as an NFL analyst for Netflix.

The Birds legend was loose and informative during a pre- and postgame show sandwiching the San Francisco 49ers’ 27-7 blowout of the Los Angeles Rams in Melbourne, Australia.

With Foles, Elle Duncan, Hall of Famer Michael Irvin, and former Green Bay Packers defender Clay Matthews III, Netflix shed the blatant self promotion that dominated its early sports broadcasting attempts and put the focus on the game and its setting.

That being said, it’s still a pregame show with lots of time to kill. Foles seemed comfortable mixing it up with his new colleagues. He took the opportunity to troll Irvin a bit about the declining popularity of the Dallas Cowboys.

Putting his hand on Irvin’s shoulder, Foles praised “America’s team — the Philadelphia Eagles.”

Nick Foles just TROLLED Michael Irvin

"I'm gonna talk about America's team... the Philadelphia Eagles"#NFL #49ers #FTTB #Rams #RamsHouse pic.twitter.com/1G6a0roEP2
— Dom (@ZeroChillSports) September 10, 2026

To his credit, Irvin didn’t trash the Eagles. Instead, he devoted some time to defending Jalen Hurts, who has been a frequent target of critics (including on Philly sports talk radio) despite leading the Birds to two Super Bowl appearances and a championship during his five-year tenure as the team’s starting quarterback.

“You wrap his accomplishments around Trevor Lawrence, they’d be the happiest team in the world,” Irvin said. “For some reason, in the City of Brotherly Love, that brother gets no love.”

While he didn’t bring a dog mask to Australia, Foles was the only member of the crew to correctly predict the 49ers would win, noting he “loves an underdog.” He also let his hair down a bit and downed an unspecified beverage poured into a boot, an Australian custom known as a “shoey.”

“Who’s shoe was that?” Foles asked “I tasted a little foot right there.”

NICK FOLES DID A SHOEY pic.twitter.com/IEaqItJ7Ry
— Netflix (@netflix) September 11, 2026

Netflix’s entire broadcast, which NBC helped produce, was solid. Hall of Famer Luke Kuechly impressed critics during his debut in the booth alongside Noah Eagle. The footage was crisp and clean thanks to Netflix’s 4K ultra HD stream (for those on the premium tier). Even the scorebug drew praise.

About the only misstep was a Netflix-branded kangaroo hoodie the streamer had Foles, his colleagues, and even NFL commissioner Roger Goodell wear. The less written about that, the better.

But the best moment of Foles’ trek to Australia wasn’t on Netflix, it was on SEN 1116, a sports talk station based in Victoria. Prior to the game, Foles sat with announcer Gerard Whateley and watched his call of the “Philly Special” during Super Bowl LII.

“When we ran that play, we had no idea what it would represent,” Foles said. “It was aggressive, we weren’t fearful, and that’s what radiated through out team throughout that 2017-18 season.”

🗣️ “When we ran that play, we had no idea what it would represent.”

🏈 Super Bowl hero Nick Foles joins SEN and relives the iconic ‘Philly Special’ with Gerard who called it!#NFL / @NFLAUNZ pic.twitter.com/RByTj0jX5s
— SEN 1116 (@1116sen) September 10, 2026

Foles will be part of all Netflix NFL broadcasts this season, which includes Thanksgiving eve, two Christmas Day games, and a Week 18 matchup.

“These are primetime games. These are important games,” Foles told The Inquirer ahead of the game. “It’ll challenge me.”

Death toll in Philippine ferry fire rises to 35 as more bodies are recovered, with 54 missing

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:27:16 +0000

CORON, Philippines (AP) — Death toll in Philippine ferry fire rises to 35 as more bodies are recovered, with 54 missing.

AP Top International News at 9:25 a.m. EDT

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:25:05 +0000

The US has made progress in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, but the Iran war is far from over

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BRICS leaders gather in New Delhi as wars and rivalries strain the expanded bloc

New Delhi residents face traffic chaos as India prepares to host BRICS summit

UK lawmakers to vote again on whether to allow assisted dying in England and Wales

Nigeria’s parliament suspends engagements with South Africa over anti-migrant violence

US diesel prices soar past $6 a gallon, deepening strain for hauling everyday goods

Poland warns Russia likely to intensify provocations on Ukraine's borders with European countries

Injuries, other plans leave some of track's fastest on sideline for $150K at Ultimate Championship

EDDIE PELLS — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:24:27 +0000

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — It's supposed to be a track meet featuring the best of the best. When Saturday night's sprints roll around at the Ultimate Championship, one thing will be missing: the fastest of the fast.

The fastest man and woman in the 100 meters this year — Olympic titlist Noah Lyles (9.79 seconds) and burgeoning University of Georgia star Adaejah Hodge (10.63) — will both be absent from the track meet offering $150,000 top prizes.

It's part of the reality of track: Even when it tries its hardest to bring the best together, a sport with thousands of athletes — all independent contractors on different schedules and always at the risk of injury — will miss a few here and there.

In Lyles' case, it was a matter of a leg injury that came up at the U.S. championships in July and never fully healed that's keeping him away.

“I was very reluctant and I was saying ‘No, no, no, we can push through this,’” Lyles said. “But in reality, I had to come to my senses and say ‘No, I can’t keep pushing through this, or it's just going to get worse.'”

Lyles wanted to race in Budapest — and, in fact, he's here anyway, serving as an emcee and party planner for an event that's supposed to cater to the athletes.

But this event was never part of Hodge's plans.

She built her schedule around NCAA indoor and outdoor championships, where she won the 200 meters in both and also shattered Sha'Carri Richardson's seven-year-old college record of 10.75 seconds in the 100 meters in a preliminary heat before falling in the final.

Last month, Hodge, who competes internationally for the British Virgin Islands, won gold in the 200 at the Commonwealth Games, which is where she'd always planned to end her season. Not even a chance at the $150,000 first prize could change the schedule.

“We targeted that in training, got that done, stuck to our guns,” said Hodge's coach at Georgia, Caryl Smith Gilbert. “We said ‘Let’s rest.' There are three long years ahead. We've got worlds, Olympics, worlds.”

Track tries adding major to what used to be an ‘off’ year

For decades, track moved to that rhythm — an Olympic year sandwiched between years featuring world championships — and left the middle year between Olympic Games free of major international events.

The Ultimate Championship seeks to change that, banking that a $10 million prize pool will be enough to lure the top 16 athletes in selected events to a season-ending meeting that looks completely different from most in track.

The sport mostly got takers for the first edition of this format. For instance, Josh Kerr, who jettisoned 1,500-meter races this year to focus on the slightly longer mile, where he broke a 27-year-old world record, accepted a special invitation for the 1,500 at Ultimate.

“I think it's a really interesting opportunity for the athletes,” Kerr said. “To be able to go out there and race again against a world-class field is something I always want to do. I'm going to show up at my best. It's kept me going for an extra six weeks and I'm pretty excited about it."

Babies and injuries keep other athletes on the sideline

Not everyone, however, was willing to change plans.

Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, the most consistently excellent athlete in the entire sport, took 2026 off to have a baby. Her daughter, Savannah, was born July 12.

Beatrice Chebet, the Olympic and world champion at 5,000 meters, also had a baby in June.

With Faith Kipyegon shutting down her season due to injury last month, Ultimate is missing the 1-2 finishers in the 5,000 (Chebet-Kipyegon) and the champion in the 1,500 meters (Kipyegon) from the last Olympics and worlds. There isn't a single Kenyan in the women's 5,000-meter race.

Finally, there is the case of Tara Davis-Woodhall, the reigning Olympic and world champion long jumper who suffered a concussion after getting hit head-on while driving in a parking lot on her way to training last month. She returned to training but earlier this week decided she had to shut down her season.

Davis-Woodhall, one of the more vibrant personalities in the sport, was supposed to be a lead content creator for Ultimate Championship.

“This one hurts,” she said in a social media post announcing she would not make the trip to Budapest. “I’m sad, disappointed and just hurt by all of it. I know this has to be part of my story.”

At 20, Hodge's coach promises the best is yet to come

While most of the athletes missing this week are known quantities, Hodge is still something of a mystery to all but true track junkies.

Two years ago, she was quietly suspended for 17 months by the Athletics Integrity Unit after testing positive for a banned substance called Cardarine. That and other positive tests from athletes in her training group at the time in Florida triggered an investigation into the coach of that group.

All parties in Hodge's case acknowledged she unintentionally ingested the substance. Her ban was reduced by seven months after she provided assistance to AIU in investigating the case.

Of the 10.63 Hodge ran in June in Eugene, Oregon, her coach, Smith Gilbert, said: “Part of me says she wasn't even close to that sort of time, part of me says it's what I thought she could do and part of me thinks this is completely amazing.”

“She's an amazing kid, a great person, a wonderful human being,” Smith Gilbert said. “You’re lucky enough to get kids like that maybe once or twice in your coaching career."

Hodge's time is .07 faster than the second-best marks of the season, posted by Olympic champion Julien Alfred and world champion Melissa Jefferson-Wooden, both of whom are racing Saturday.

Smith Gilbert said to expect Hodge to be in that mix starting in 2027.

“She's going to be one of the best ever,” the coach said.

___

See AP’s full sports coverage here

AP Top U.S. News at 9:23 a.m. EDT

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:23:08 +0000

US marks 25 years since the Sept. 11 attacks

Trump commemorates the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks at the Pentagon

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Anthropic says it blocked misuse of its AI that could have supported biological weapons

Nigeria’s parliament suspends engagements with South Africa over anti-migrant violence

DYEPKAZAH SHIBAYAN — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:24:51 +0000

ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) — Nigeria's parliament said Friday that it's suspending official visits to South Africa indefinitely over anti-immigrant protests targeting other Africans.

The violent protests, which erupted in South Africa earlier this year, have forced thousands of migrants to leave and caused diplomatic tensions with other African nations.

Kamoru Ogunlana, the clerk to Nigeria’s National Assembly, said in a statement that the parliament was “particularly concerned by reports of Nigerians being killed, injured, displaced and forced to abandon their businesses, investments, homes and other properties as a result of recurring violent attacks.”

South Africa has for years attracted foreign nationals from across the continent, including many from Nigeria, because of its relative wealth and opportunity. But foreigners have also experienced sporadic outbursts of xenophobic violence. Protesters in the southern African country blame foreigners for high levels of unemployment, crime and pressure on public services.

In June, two Nigerians were killed during anti-migrant violence in South Africa, just two days before an unofficial deadline set by protesters for foreigners to leave. Nigeria's foreign ministry said one was allegedly killed by police officers and the other by unidentified attackers.

Nigeria’s minister of state for foreign affairs, Ambassador Sola Enikanolaiye, hosted South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola in the country’s capital, Abuja, in July to discuss the recurring attacks. At that meeting, Enikanolaiye said that at least 98 Nigerians have been killed since 2022 in mob attacks, hate-related violence and extrajudicial killings.

The move by the parliament in Nigeria on Friday is a "strong expression" of concern over the safety and welfare of Nigerians living and conducting legitimate businesses in South Africa, Ogunlana said.

According to South Africa's latest government figures, almost 90,000 people have either been voluntarily repatriated or have been deported since the migration tensions began. However, figures released by the governments of migrants' home countries put the total at about 178,000.

Trump commemorates the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks at the Pentagon

COLLIN BINKLEY and MEG KINNARD — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:22:56 +0000

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump observed Friday's 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks by attending a ceremony at the Pentagon commemorating the lives lost when al-Qaida militants hijacked planes and killed nearly 3,000 people in three locations, upending American foreign policy and national security.

Trump and first lady Melania Trump listened as the names of the 184 people killed at the Pentagon that day were read aloud at the start of the ceremony. Earlier, in a downpour at daybreak, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and top military officials stood outside and watched as a giant American flag was unfurled on the building struck by one of those planes a quarter century ago.

It's the second year in a row for Trump to mark the day at the Pentagon. The president, who is originally from New York, last attended the ground zero ceremony there in 2024.

Vice President JD Vance is attending the New York observance alongside former presidents, while other administration officials are at the ceremony in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Vance had planned to be in New York for the anniversary last year but instead flew to Salt Lake City to be with the family of Charlie Kirk after the conservative activist was assassinated.

At a Tuesday event at the Ellipse just outside the White House, Trump vowed to "never forget" victims, noting that the Sept. 11 attacks were one of few moments in history that "divide time into really what came before" and after.

That event, spearheaded by the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, showcased a massive, 21-foot, nearly 17,000-pound steel beam recovered from the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. Traveling for months across the country as part of the Steel Across America tour, the beam was to be in New York for a procession Friday retracing the steps of fallen New York City firefighter Stephen Siller.

On Wednesday, Trump issued a proclamation naming Friday as "Patriot Day 2026," recounting the chronology of the 2001 day on which "the peace of our Nation was shattered" and calling his administration "unwavering in its commitment to ensure that our Nation is defended by the strongest and most lethal military the world has ever known."

The Republican midterms convention on Thursday night observed the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with families onstage in Dallas and firefighters in uniform as the song “Ave Maria” was played. The names of the victims appeared on a screen and a bell was rung to commemorate the loss of firefighters.

The Latest: Trump will commemorate 25 years since 9/11 attacks at the Pentagon

The Associated Press — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:23:04 +0000

President Donald Trump is set to observe Friday's 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks by attending a ceremony at the Pentagon. It's the second year in a row for Trump to mark the day at the Pentagon.

The president is originally from New York and last attended the ground zero ceremony there in 2024.

Friday's milestone anniversary will bring memorial rituals — wreath-laying, flag-flying, moments of silence, vigils and readings of victims' names — and volunteer projects in tribute to a day that about half of U.S. adults remember as the most historic event of their lifetime, according to a new poll.

Here's the latest:

Security is tight at the ceremony in New York

Police officers stationed around the perimeter of the event are checking tickets and credentials to ensure only invited guests, such as victim relatives, survivors and first responders, and others connected to the event are allowed through. That’s before a full security screening at the entrance to the site, which is surrounded by the type of steel fencing now familiar at high-profile events.

Along with that, the streets are filled with the apparatus of police and emergency response — NYPD vehicles lining the western perimeter, heavily armed and armored counterterrorism officers patrolling the nearby subway stations, and flashing police lights abound.

As the memorial goes on, so does life around ground zero

New Yorkers going about their days mixed with 9/11 family members, firefighters and other first responders on the streets and sidewalks of lower Manhattan.

People jogged by in brightly colored running attire. Others hoisted American flags. People clasped iced coffees and bagged pastries. A woman outside a church sold buttons commemorating the occasion. A man thanked the two police officers guarding the perimeter for their service.

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wipes away tears at the 9/11 memorial

He was the CEO of the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald when the attack on the World Trade Center killed 658 of its 960 employees.

He survived because he was taking his son to school when the attack happened. His brother, Gary Lutnick, was among those who died.

At the memorial Friday, Lutnick wiped away a tear, but also smiled as he looked fondly at the names of Cantor Fitzgerald employees inscribed on the parapets that ring the footprints of the fallen towers.

Former presidents attend 9/11 ceremony in New York

Four former presidents are in Manhattan for the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks at the city's ceremony at ground zero.

Former presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Joe Biden could been seen mingling with attendees at the National Sept. 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan on Friday morning.

Vice President JD Vance is also attending the ceremony in New York, while President Donald Trump will attend an observance at the Pentagon.

American flag unfurled at the Pentagon

In a downpour at daybreak, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and top military officials stood outside and watched as the giant American flag was unfurled on the building struck by a hijacked plane a quarter century ago.

US marks 25 years since the Sept. 11 attacks

Americans are commemorating the 25th anniversary of 9/11, remembering the shock, the dead and the sweeping consequences of the al-Qaida attacks on symbols of U.S. might and prosperity.

For others it's an occasion for private reflection — or, in many schools, education — about the attack that unfolded in a single morning but left nearly 3,000 dead and a decades-long trail of aftermath, from personal grief to far-flung wars.

Planned remembrances extend far beyond the attack sites, from beams of light projecting from New Hampshire’s Mount Washington to a stair climb at Mississippi State University’s football stadium to a ceremony at Honolulu’s 9/11 memorial.

▶ Read more

Trump to commemorate 25th anniversary of 9/11 attacks at the Pentagon

President Donald Trump is set to observe Friday's 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks by attending a ceremony at the Pentagon commemorating the lives lost when al-Qaida militants hijacked planes and killed nearly 3,000 people in three locations, upending American foreign policy and national security.

It’s the second year in a row for Trump to mark the day at the Pentagon. The president, who is originally from New York, last attended the ground zero ceremony there in 2024.

Vice President JD Vance is set to attend the New York observance alongside former presidents, while other administration officials will go to the ceremony in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Vance had planned to be in New York for the anniversary last year but instead flew to Salt Lake City to be with the family of Charlie Kirk after the conservative activist was assassinated.

During last year's commemoration at the Pentagon, Trump delivered remarks recounting moments from the day of the attacks, including snippets of conversations from passengers who were aboard the hijacked airplanes.

▶ Read more

NBC Sports Philadelphia’s Tom McCarthy will miss the Phillies-Braves series

Rob Tornoe — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:31:38 +0000

A familiar Phillies radio voice will return to NBC Sports Philadelphia this weekend to call the team’s pivotal three-game series against the Atlanta Braves.

Scott Franzke, the veteran radio announcer in his 21st season calling Phillies games, will take his talents to TV to fill in for Tom McCarthy while McCarthy makes his annual trek over to the NFL.

Franzke and John Kruk will call all three Phillies-Braves games at Truist Park, beginning with Friday’s matchup. On the radio, pre- and postgame host Gregg Murphy will fill in for Franzke alongside Larry Andersen, who’s making his first road trip of the season.

While McCarthy’s jump to football isn’t anything new — it’s his 13th season as a play-by-play voice for CBS — the timing is unfortunate. The Phillies have a chance to cut into the Braves’ narrow lead in the NL East, but weren’t helped by Jhoan Duran surrendering a ninth-inning homer Thursday.

Instead, McCarthy will be about five hours south in Jacksonville, Fla., to call the Jaguars’ Week 1 matchup against the Cleveland Browns. This season he’s paired with a new partner: former Indianapolis Colts and Seattle Seahawks running back Robert Turbin, who is in his first season as an NFL color analyst.

Among other things, the game features the controversial return of quarterback Deshaun Watson, a one-time Eagles trade target who was injured last season and was given the starting job despite criticizing Browns fans who booed him.

“As the former voice of their preseason, I’m kind of used to it,” McCarthy said of the antics that seem to perennially plague the Browns.

The rest of the season, McCarthy benefits from a Phillies weekend schedule filled with national broadcasts.

Next weekend, McCarthy will miss the final two games of the Phillies’ four-game series against the New York Mets. The first two won’t air on NBC Sports Philadelphia — Thursday’s game is being broadcast by Fox, while the Sept. 18 game will be part of the Friday Night Baseball doubleheader on Apple TV.

He’ll also miss the final game of the season, Sept. 27 against the Tampa Bay Rays, which will feature former Phillies pitcher turned broadcaster Cole Hamels. McCarthy will call the first game of the Rays series Friday, while Saturday’s game will be broadcast on Fox.

McCarthy’s schedule also benefited from this year’s late Labor Day.

“It worked out that I’m missing less games this year than I normally do because the NFL season’s starting a week later,” McCarthy said.

The Eagles are set to appear twice on CBS — Oct. 18 against the Carolina Panthers and Nov. 22 vs. the Pittsburgh Steelers — but McCarthy isn’t in line to call either and has yet to broadcast a Birds game on TV.

“I would love to do an Eagles game. I think it’d be a hoot,” McCarthy said. “But it’s one of those things where I roll with wherever they send me.”

Why McCarthy hasn’t been posting on X

While social media tends to be a hateful cesspool of negativity toward announcers, McCarthy has been a prolific poster for years.

Sometimes that meant answering a fan’s question about why the Phillies game wasn’t on NBC Sports Philadelphia. Often it was a funny rebuke of a nasty comment. He’s also used Twitter, now X, to defend his allegiance to the Phillies because he spent a couple seasons calling Mets games and his son, Patrick, handles New York’s pre- and postgame coverage on radio.

But his last post on X was more than two months ago. Why the long silence?

“I just got to the point between the algorithms and all the negativity and all the stories that were untrue,” McCarthy said. “It wasn’t something I really wanted to be associated with it anymore.”

If you miss interacting with McCarthy on social media, you can always follow him on Instagram, where he posts photos from the broadcast booth and connects with fans. He also likes that his feed is focused on baseball and golf.

“I can reset it pretty quickly if I feel like it’s too, let’s say, political,” McCarthy said.

NL East standings

NL wildcard standings

Phillies magic number

That is the combined total of Phillies’ wins and/or losses by the teams on the outside looking in that are needed to secure at least the third wild-card berth and a spot in the playoffs.

MLB playoff tracker: Phillies wild-card and NL East standings; updated magic number

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After missing almost a year, Phillies prospect Aidan Miller “feels 100%” and is just happy to be playing again.
The Phillies are building up Tanner Banks to a multi-inning role as he nears a return from the injured list.

Remaining Phillies TV schedule

Phillies at Braves
- Game 1: Friday, Sept. 11, 7:15 p.m. (NBC Sports Philadelphia)
- Game 2: Saturday, Sept. 12, 7:15 p.m. (NBC Sports Philadelphia)
- Game 3: Sunday, Sept. 13, 1:35 p.m. (NBC Sports Philadelphia)
Phillies at Nationals
- Game 1: Tuesday, Sept. 15, 6:45 p.m. (NBC Sports Philadelphia)
- Game 2: Wednesday, Sept. 16, 6:45 p.m. (NBC Sports Philadelphia)
Phillies at Mets
- Game 1: Thursday, Sept. 17, 7:15 p.m. (Fox)
- Game 2: Friday, Sept. 18, 7:10 p.m. (Apple TV)
- Game 3: Saturday, Sept. 19, 4:10 p.m. (NBC Sports Philadelphia)
- Game 4: Sunday, Sept. 20, 1:10 p.m. (NBC Sports Philadelphia)
Brewers at Phillies
- Game 1: Tuesday, Sept. 22, 6:40 p.m. (NBC Sports Philadelphia)
- Game 2: Wednesday, Sept. 23, 6:40 p.m. (NBC Sports Philadelphia)
- Game 3: Thursday, Sept. 24, 6:05 p.m. (NBC Sports Philadelphia)
Rays at Phillies
- Game 1: Friday, Sept. 25, 6:40 p.m. (NBC Sports Philadelphia)
- Game 2: Saturday, Sept. 26, 7:15 p.m. (Fox)
- Game 3: Sunday, Sept. 27, 3:05 p.m. (NBC Sports Philadelphia)

Residents of southern Lebanon gather to watch Israeli drones drop explosives on their village

FADI TAWIL — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:19:25 +0000

HANNIYEH, Lebanon (AP) — A group of men and children gathered Friday at a vantage point overlooking their village in southern Lebanon, watching from a distance as Israeli drones descended, carrying boxes laden with explosives to be dropped on houses.

It has become a daily ritual for residents of Mansouri, who fled the village weeks ago and now are watching its destruction from the neighboring village of Hanniyeh.

Active fighting between Israel and the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has simmered down since they entered into a truce in June, but the Israeli military now occupies large swaths of southern Lebanon, where it regularly carries out controlled demolitions.

Massive clouds of smoke and dust rise periodically from Mansouri, as the men watching debate which neighbor's house has been destroyed this time and look for signs of their own. Early Friday, the Israeli military detonated the village's public school, Lebanese state media reported.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the demolitions.

Villagers decry the Lebanese government's lack of response

Some displaced residents blame the Lebanese government along with Israel, saying that authorities abandoned the village.

Ali Hussein Ghanem, a tobacco farmer from Mansouri, is staying with relatives in Hanniyeh along with his wife and children.

“This is something that should never happen,” he said, watching the smoke rise over his village from a distance. “Isn’t the state supposed to protect our town rather than hand it over to Israel?”

Wissam Khashabi, a beekeeper, also from Mansouri, agreed.

“We are seeing our land being destroyed,” he said. “We have lost our property, our orchards, and all our livelihoods. The state is not really doing anything.”

On Thursday, Israeli officials said they had blown up Hezbollah tunnel networks under the strategic Ali Taher ridge near the town of Nabatiyeh, in a different part of southern Lebanon. The force of the blasts caused the earth to shake in surrounding areas.

The Israeli military said the ridge contained extensive underground military infrastructure built by Hezbollah. It had been the site of clashes between Israeli forces and the militant group in recent weeks, before Israel announced it had taken “operational control” of it.

No political solution in sight

Many residents of Mansouri fled when the latest Israel-Hezbollah war began in March, but returned after the truce in June — only to flee again when the Israeli military issued a call to evacuate the village last month and began striking it again.

Israel said at the time that it was responding to ceasefire violations by Hezbollah. But it’s not clear why it has been demolishing the village since then.

Some of the displaced were taken in by relatives, while others are staying in school shelters in the nearby city of Tyre. At the height of the war, some 1.2 million people were displaced in Lebanon. The ceasefire has allowed most of them to return home, but more than 300,000 remain displaced.

With negotiations between Israel and Lebanon — and between the U.S. and Iran — stalled, there is no political solution in sight that would allow them to go home.

The latest conflict between Israel and Hezbollah began on March 2, when the militant group fired rockets across the border two days after Israel and the U.S. launched a war on Iran.

The Lebanese government and Israel reached a framework agreement in June stating Israel will withdraw from Lebanon as Hezbollah is disarmed, but there has been little movement on implementing it.

Lebanese and Israeli officials are expected to meet for another round of talks in Rome later this month.

——

Associated Press writer Abby Sewell contributed from Beirut.

US marks 25 years since the Sept. 11 attacks

JENNIFER PELTZ — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:14:01 +0000

Friday's milestone anniversary brings memorial rituals — wreath-laying, flag-flying, moments of silence, vigils and readings of victims' names — and volunteer projects in tribute to a day that about half of U.S. adults remember as the most historic event of their lifetime, according to a new poll.

For others it's an occasion for private reflection — or, in many schools, education — about the attack that unfolded in a single morning but left nearly 3,000 dead and a decadeslong trail of aftermath, from personal grief to far-flung wars.

Police Officer Casey Kloepfer plans to spend time Friday at the Brooklyn station house where his father, Officer Ronald Kloepfer, reported to work that day before being called to the World Trade Center. He didn't make it home.

Casey Kloepfer was only 4, but he grew up hearing about his father's affinity for helping people and for a job that enabled him to do so. He became an officer this past June.

“It’s big footsteps to fill, but it’s definitely something that I take very seriously and want to continue to honor him and be the best police officer I can,” he said by phone this week. The 29-year-old wears his father’s badge number and even has joined the New York Police Department lacrosse team, which his dad founded.

Trump to attend Pentagon observance

On Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida extremists hijacked four commercial jets and crashed them into New York's World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The impacts brought down the World Trade Center's twin towers — icons of U.S. economic power, and among the tallest buildings on Earth — and blew a hole in the Pentagon, the U.S. military's fortress-like headquarters near Washington. The fourth plane also was headed for the nation's capital, officials concluded, but the aircraft went down in Pennsylvania after passengers and crew members stormed the cockpit and fought the hijackers.

"In the course of history, there are a few moments that divide time into, really, what came before" and after, President Donald Trump said at a 9/11 remembrance in Washington this week. The Republican, who was in his native New York on Sept. 11 and has often recounted his memories, plans to attend the Pentagon's anniversary ceremony Friday.

Former President George W. Bush, who was in office on 9/11, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden and current Vice President JD Vance convened for the observance at the National Sept. 11 Memorial in New York, where the hourslong reading of all the victims' names began with the tolling of a bell and a moment of silence. Other administration officials headed to the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania.

Planned remembrances extend far beyond the attack sites, from beams of light projecting from New Hampshire's Mount Washington to a stair climb at Mississippi State University's football stadium to a ceremony at Honolulu's 9/11 memorial.

At ground zero, a new tribute to those who fell ill

Traditionally, there are no political speeches at the New York commemoration, where victims' relatives read aloud the long list of names, punctuated with moments of silence at key points in the attack timeline. A crowd of 9/11 family members watched, many holding aloft photos of loved ones who perished a quarter-century ago.

For the first time, this year's ceremony will add a silent moment to honor people who were exposed to the clouds of toxic dust released by the twin towers' fiery collapse and have since died of cancer and other illnesses. Questions remain about how many people developed health problems linked to the dust.

It's a reminder of how the attacks' long shadow has reached into many corners of life in the U.S. and beyond.

The U.S.-led global war on terrorism included invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan — the latter Washington's longest war — and detentions and harsh interrogation of terror suspects in an international network of secret CIA prisons. The U.S. found and killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, but accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed still awaits a trial 23 years after his capture.

The attacks changed U.S. air travel, prompted new federal surveillance and intelligence-gathering powers and banking regulations, and generated ongoing debate over the balance between security and freedom. The Department of Homeland Security, many state anti-terrorism laws and billions of dollars in state and local counterterrorism funding all are post-9/11 creations.

So, too, is the culture of individual vigilance summed up by the slogan " if you see something, say something."

Unity, mistrust and scrutiny of New York's mayor

Sept. 11 generated a wave of patriotism that propelled some Americans to join the military, fire departments, police forces or other public agencies. But amid the national unity that many remember, the attacks also fanned mistrust, prejudice and hate crimes directed at Muslims.

In the quarter-century since, Muslim Americans have played a growing role in public life from statehouses to Congress to New York City Hall, where Zohran Mamdani is the city's first Muslim mayor. Yet he faced some criticism for attending the anniversary ceremony at ground zero, something his predecessors have done for years.

Some complaints came from Republican ex-Gov. George Pataki and 9/11 victims’ relatives, who cited among other things past remarks that some of Mamdani's political associates have made about the attacks. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican, also inveighed against Mamdani attending, though the two shook hands Friday as they and other officials awaited the start of the observance.

Mamdani, a Democrat, said earlier this week that he loves the city and country and wants the anniversary to focus on victims' families, first responders and New Yorkers who helped one another after the attacks, which he called a “horrific act of terror.” The 34-year-old mayor was an elementary school student in New York on 9/11.

Sept. 11 isn't a federal holiday, but Congress has designated it both Patriot Day and a National Day of Service and Remembrance.

“One appropriate way to remember is by serving,” says Jay Winuk, who lost his brother Glenn Winuk and then co-founded the volunteer organization 9/11 Day with friend David Paine. The group helps people find meal-packing and other volunteer opportunities and this year arranged for dozens of Times Square billboards to pause their advertising at 9:11 a.m. Friday.

Instead, they will simply display the time.

AP Top Headlines at 9:14 a.m. EDT

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:14:20 +0000

The United States has succeeded in loosening Iran's grip over the Strait of Hormuz while virtually shutting down Iran's own exports

The U.S. is commemorating the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that left nearly 3,000 people dead and the nation shaken

Donald Trump is still pitching himself as America’s essential repairman, a strategy that has helped him before

President Donald Trump and his Vice President JD Vance teamed up to close out the second and final night of the Republicans’ midterm convention in Dallas

Firefighters have found burnt human remains inside a ferry that caught fire in Philippine waters, leaving five dead and 84 missing

The United States is increasing pressure on the International Criminal Court, leading to more countries leaving the institution

The Trump administration is proposing a dramatic overhaul around the once-a-decade U.S. Census head count that could leave out millions of immigrants based on status and key racial and ethnic data, jeopardizing the allocation of resources and the country’s voting map

Yemen's Houthi rebels have taken the strategic Red Sea port city of Mokha, bringing them closer to controlling key shipping routes

U.S. inflation accelerated last month as gas prices spiked in the wake of renewed fighting in the Middle East, underscoring the affordability challenges that are top of mind for many voters as midterm elections near

U.S. stocks appear to be heading for gains as oil prices give back some of the week’s big spurt

AP Top News at 9:14 a.m. EDT

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:14:20 +0000

The US has made progress in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, but the Iran war is far from over

US marks 25 years since the Sept. 11 attacks

Analysis: Trump's solution to Republicans' midterm troubles is more Trump

Trump and Vance team up at GOP convention as party faces midterm risks, and eyes what's next

Charred bodies found inside ferry that caught fire in Philippines as rescuers search for 84 missing

As Trump squeezes the International Criminal Court, more countries are leaving

Under Trump, census eyes sweeping plan to omit immigrants, race data

Houthis seize strategic Red Sea port in Yemen, and other Mideast developments

US inflation picked up as gas prices marched higher due to conflict in the Middle East

Wall Street heads for gains after oil prices ease and inflation update comes in near expectations

AP Top News at 9:14 a.m. EDT

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:14:20 +0000

The US has made progress in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, but the Iran war is far from over

In recent weeks, the United States has succeeded in loosening Iran's grip over the Strait of Hormuz while virtually shutting down Iran's own oil exports, accelerating its economic free fall. But the war launched by the U.S. and Israel in February — intended to last a few weeks — is still far from over, and the stalemate is costly for both sides. An agreement reached in June quickly crumbled, with no sign of diplomatic progress since then. Low-level fighting persists, and the U.S. does not seem to have an exit strategy. The mounting economic pressure on Iran has yet to stoke an uprising, and if its leaders are backed into a corner, they may opt for military escalation rather than capitulation.

US marks 25 years since the Sept. 11 attacks

NEW YORK (AP) — Americans are commemorating the 25th anniversary of 9/11, remembering the shock, the dead and the sweeping consequences of the al-Qaida attacks on symbols of U.S. might and prosperity. Friday's milestone anniversary brings memorial rituals — wreath-laying, flag-flying, moments of silence, vigils and readings of victims' names — and volunteer projects in tribute to a day that about half of U.S. adults remember as the most historic event of their lifetime, according to a new poll. For others it's an occasion for private reflection — or, in many schools, education — about the attack that unfolded in a single morning but left nearly 3,000 dead and a decadeslong trail of aftermath, from personal grief to far-flung wars.

Analysis: Trump's solution to Republicans' midterm troubles is more Trump

WASHINGTON (AP) — During his first address to a Republican convention in 2016, Donald Trump had an audacious message to a nation yearning for change: “I alone can fix it.” A decade later and nearing the midpoint of his final term, Trump is still pitching himself as America’s essential repairman. It’s a strategy that’s helped him overcome daunting odds before but now guarantees this year’s midterms will be a referendum on his unpopular presidency. And it previews how difficult it will be for his party to prepare for a future without him as he shows little interest in ceding the stage.

Trump and Vance team up at GOP convention as party faces midterm risks, and eyes what's next

DALLAS (AP) — President Donald Trump and his Vice President JD Vance teamed up Thursday to close out the second and final night of the Republicans’ midterm convention in Dallas, imploring voters to stick together to save their party’s majorities in Congress. Republicans know they are up against history, which traditionally rebuffs the party in power during midterms, but they're relying on Trump’s personal appeal to voters. Vance, with a primetime speaking slot right before the president, was widely watched as a potential heir to the “Make America Great Again” movement. Trump organized the convention hoping to rally voters who turn out for him, but not for other candidates.

Charred bodies found inside ferry that caught fire in Philippines as rescuers search for 84 missing

CORON, Philippines (AP) — Firefighters found burnt human remains on Friday inside a ferry that caught fire in Philippine waters two nights earlier, leaving five dead and 84 missing, the coast guard said. It was not clear how many additional fatalities were found, with officials saying more details will be released on Saturday. Images provided by the coast guard showed the gutted interior of the ship and what appeared to be charred remains, ashes and burnt metal, including a car. A coast guard statement said the fire was declared out, and the response team conducted a safety assessment. Rescuers on Thursday struggled to get inside the burning vessel because of the heat and smoke, and efforts to search for passengers who may been trapped were halted overnight.

As Trump squeezes the International Criminal Court, more countries are leaving

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — As the United States ratchets up the pressure on the International Criminal Court, sanctioning two more high-ranking staff members in recent weeks, a small but growing number of the global tribunal’s member states have announced they will quit the institution. The recent departure of Venezuela and Chad brings the number of countries to pull out of the court in the past year to five, joining Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. The surge in withdrawals comes as the ICC faces hostility from Washington and a leadership crisis after ousting its own chief prosecutor. “Five countries so far have announced plans to withdraw from the Rome Statute, and we welcome more announcements in the future,” a spokesperson for the U.S.

Under Trump, census eyes sweeping plan to omit immigrants, race data

The Trump administration is proposing a dramatic overhaul of the once-a-decade U.S. Census head count that could leave out millions of immigrants based on status and key racial and ethnic data, jeopardizing the allocation of resources and the country's voting map. The potential changes, announced Wednesday, would exclude undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers and anyone without permanent status. Certain demographic questions from the traditional questionnaire would also be eliminated. It echoes Trump's previous idea to add a citizenship question to the 2030 census. The U.S. Census Bureau, in a post on the Federal Register website, argued “illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, as they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politic, or persons with a ‘usual residence’ in the United States due to their lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance to the United States.” The census also “should be colorblind and should not be distorted in any way by questions about immaterial personal characteristics, such as race,” the agency said.

Houthis seize strategic Red Sea port in Yemen, and other Mideast developments

Iranian-backed Houthi rebels seized Yemen’s strategic Red Sea port city of Mokha, according to Houthi and Yemeni officials, bringing the rebels closer to controlling a critical waterway to the Red Sea. Separately, an Israeli strike killed at least four people in northern Gaza, including two children, hospital officials said Thursday. The Israeli military said the attack killed a militant. Here’s a look at the latest news in the Middle East. Full coverage can be found here. The Iran-backed Houthi rebel group on Thursday took over Yemen’s port city of Mokha, Houthi and Yemeni officials said. Mokha is about 80 kilometers (50 miles) from the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a strategic waterway between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden through which about 12% of the world’s oil and other goods are shipped.

US inflation picked up as gas prices marched higher due to conflict in the Middle East

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. inflation accelerated last month as gas prices spiked in the wake of renewed fighting in the Middle East, underscoring the affordability challenges that are top of mind for many voters with midterm elections now just seven weeks away. The consumer price index rose 3.4% last month compared with a year ago, the Labor Department said Friday, the same as in July. But on a monthly basis, inflation quickened, as costs jumped 0.4% from July to August, up from an increase of just 0.1% the previous month. The figures show that inflation remains stubbornly elevated, more than five years after prices first soared as the economy emerged from the COVID pandemic.

Wall Street heads for gains after oil prices ease and inflation update comes in near expectations

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. stock market appears to be heading for gains ahead of Friday's opening of trading as oil prices give back some of the week's big spurt. Futures were up 0.7% for the S&P 500 index, 0.7% for the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 0.8% for the Nasdaq 100 index, with a little less than an hour before trading is set to begin. They got some help from easing oil prices, which jumped earlier this week to their highest levels since May because of the ongoing war with Iran. The price for a barrel of Brent crude, the international standard, fell 3% to $104.44.

AP Top Business News at 9:12 a.m. EDT

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:12:02 +0000

US inflation picked up as gas prices marched higher due to conflict in the Middle East

US diesel prices soar past $6 a gallon, deepening strain for hauling everyday goods

Wall Street heads for gains after oil prices ease and inflation update comes in near expectations

Trump wants to send Americans money. Congress and economists don't seem thrilled with the idea

Anthropic says it blocked misuse of its AI that could have supported biological weapons

Anthropic researcher resigns with warning about the dangers of AI development

China says it hopes to agree with the US on tariff reductions at 'an early date'

Chinese electric bike imports surge as Africa’s EV investments diversify

Body camera video offers a rare look inside an immigration raid at a NY factory

European Central Bank raises interest rates a quarter point to quell energy-fueled inflation

Wall Street heads for gains after oil prices ease and inflation update comes in near expectations

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:11:49 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. stock market appears to be heading for gains ahead of Friday's opening of trading as oil prices give back some of the week's big spurt.

Futures were up 0.7% for the S&P 500 index, 0.7% for the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 0.8% for the Nasdaq 100 index, with a little less than an hour before trading is set to begin.

They got some help from easing oil prices, which jumped earlier this week to their highest levels since May because of the ongoing war with Iran. The price for a barrel of Brent crude, the international standard, fell 3% to $104.44.

That helped take a bit of pressure off inflation, which remains far higher than anyone would like. A report on Friday showed that U.S. consumers had to pay prices for gasoline, food and other costs of living that were 3.4% higher last month than a year earlier.

The data firmed expectations on Wall Street that the Federal Reserve will feel compelled to hike its main interest rate at its meeting next week. Such hikes are the typical way the Fed tries to rein in high inflation, and they work by filtering through the bond market, making it more expensive for everyone to borrow money, slowing the economy and hopefully removing fuel for further inflation.

Such rising expectations sent the yield of the two-year Treasury, which moves with guesses for upcoming Fed action, to 4.58% from 4.56% late Thursday.

Longer-term yields, though, actually eased. That could be an indication that investors in the bond market see upcoming hikes to rates by the Fed as helping to keep control of inflation over the longer term.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.92% from 4.95% late Thursday.

On Wall Street, Oracle looks set to help lead the market higher and was up 7.1% in premarket trading. The tech giant reported stronger profit and revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected.

In stock markets abroad, indexes rose in Europe, and London's FTSE 100 added 0.8% after official data showed that Britain's economy in July grew faster than economists expected.

Stock markets were weaker in Asia, where Japan's Nikkei 225 lost 1.9% and South Korea's Kospi fell 1.8%.

___

AP Business Writers Chan Ho-him and Michelle Chapman contributed to this report.

Putin holds talks with Modi in India ahead of BRICS summit of 11 nations

SHEIKH SAALIQ and AIJAZ HUSSAIN — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:02:11 +0000

NEW DELHI (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin held talks with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on Friday as the two countries seek to strengthen ties ahead of a weekend summit of the BRICS nations.

Modi and Putin discussed cooperation in political, economic, defense, energy and other sectors. They also spoke about India-Russia engagement in BRICS and exchanged views on regional and global issues, including conflicts in the Middle East, India’s foreign ministry said in a statement.

Their meeting came ahead of the BRICS summit on Saturday and Sunday, which will bring together leaders including Chinese President Xi Jinping and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. The grouping faces a test of its unity during the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, as well as rising tensions between the United States and China.

BRICS, chaired by India this year, is a grouping of major emerging markets and developing countries. The group's acronym comes from the names of its founding members in 2006, Brazil, Russia, India and China, as well as South Africa, which joined soon after. It has expanded since and now 11 member countries representing about half the world’s population.

Putin’s visit highlights a challenge for India.

India has maintained close defense and economic ties with Russia for decades. New Delhi has called for dialogue and diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine while maintaining relations with both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

India has declined to join Western efforts to isolate Moscow over the war. At the same time, New Delhi is pursuing major trade and investment agreements with the U.S. and Europe.

Modi on Friday reiterated that dialogue and diplomacy were the way forward between Russia and Ukraine and said India was ready to assist in peace efforts, the ministry said.

Russia also remains a key supplier of military equipment to India, although New Delhi has sought to diversify its defense purchases. India has also sharply increased imports of discounted Russian oil since the invasion, making energy another pillar of the relationship and helping cushion the impact of the energy crisis triggered by the Iran war.

Putin last visited India in December 2025, but earlier this month he met Modi in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan.

Modi was scheduled to meet the Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian later Friday.

US women in familiar place reaching semifinals of World Cup, joined by Germany, France and Spain

DOUG FEINBERG — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:00:08 +0000

BERLIN (AP) — The U.S. put forth a dominant performance to reach the semifinals of the women's FIBA World Cup again. Spain awaits the Americans there.

Host Germany and France will play in the other medal-round game Saturday. The gold- and bronze-medal games are Sunday.

The Americans routed Hungary 108-56, which was the second-biggest margin of victory in the quarterfinals in World Cup history. The 108 points also was the most ever by a team in the quarterfinals. The U.S. also had 31 assists, which was the most in the knockout round as well.

“We talked about just getting better with each game, and I think we did that today, especially with how we shared (the basketball),” Rhyne Howard said. “I think if we continue to play like that and continue to keep everybody on the same page, continue to move the ball, it’s going to be really hard to stop us.”

The Americans had a balanced offense with five players scoring in double figures.

“Everybody’s just all dialed in offensively and defensively,” Angel Reese said. “We talked about our keys, what it’s going to take to win gold, and I think tonight we did everything that coach asked us to do.”

Getting to the semifinals is nothing new for the U.S., which has won 34 straight games overall and the last four World Cup titles. Germany and France are both newcomers to this round. The host nation shocked Belgium, which went undefeated in group play. It's the sixth consecutive World Cup that the host nation has reached the semifinals. During that stretch only the Czech Republic in 2010 made the championship game as the host.

France continued its dominant play in the tournament so far, running past China. The French squad, which lost to the U.S. in the 2024 Paris Olympics by one point, has been incredible on both ends of the court in its four games.

Making the semifinals for the first time meant a lot to French players, but they do have loftier goals in mind.

“It means a lot. I mean, we want to be one of the greatest teams ever to put on the French jersey,” French captain Gabby Williams said. 'Obviously, like we have a big goal for this tournament, but it’s great to check this off the list."

German coach Olaf Lange was thrilled to lead his home country to new heights. He wanted to take the night to savor the historic win before focusing on the tall task ahead with France.

Spain topped Australia in the final game Thursday to reach the semifinals for the first time since it hosted the event in 2018. The Spaniards are led by Iyana Martin, Megan DiLeo and World Cup veteran Alba Torrens. The 37-year-old is playing in her fourth World Cup and has helped Spain win medals in the previous three.

“For us it means a lot because we missed the Worlds in 2022 and now it's been eight years,” Torrens said. “We know how difficult it is so for today it's a big day for us. We are very happy because so many people worked hard for this victory.”

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See AP’s full WNBA coverage here

AP Top Sports News at 9:04 a.m. EDT

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:04:21 +0000

49ers rout Rams 27-7 in NFL's first Australia game behind Brock Purdy's 3 TD passes

Myles Garrett acknowledges knee injury is significant after 0-tackle debut in Rams' Australia loss

Elena Rybakina beats Coco Gauff and will play Aryna Sabalenka for the US Open women's title

High-profile injuries already adding up 2 games into the NFL season

Seahawks QB Sam Darnold has a muscle injury. His status for Seattle's next game is uncertain

US women in familiar place reaching semifinals of World Cup, joined by Germany, France and Spain

Antonelli looks to keep momentum as F1 drivers face unknown challenges of Madrid track at Spanish GP

Europe and US tied at 2-2 after opening session of Solheim Cup as Korda makes hot start

Former hockey players at University of Michigan sue, say they were sexually abused decades ago

Anthony Volpe wins over Yankees fans with grand slam and 5 RBIs in rousing return to majors

Trump administration lends $100M to US-owned cell phone network in Africa to expand American tech

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:04:36 +0000

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — The Trump administration has provided a $99.6 million loan to a U.S.-owned cell phone network operator in Africa to expand American tech presence on a continent where China's Huawei is a leading player.

The loan from the U.S. government's Export-Import Bank was announced by the operator Africell on Friday. It is the only U.S.-owned cell network operator in Africa.

Africell said in a statement the loan would "boost U.S.-based employment in the telecommunications sector and strengthen American technology leadership abroad." It said the money would allow it to invest specifically in American and European technology for its operations in the southern African country of Angola.

Africell also operates in Congo, Sierra Leone and Gambia, it said.

Huawei is the world's biggest supplier of telecommunications network equipment and is estimated to have supplied more than half the 4G and 5G network infrastructure in Africa.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration raised national security concerns about Huawei in his first term and has moved to counter its global expansion.

The U.S. has lobbied Western allies to avoid using the Chinese company’s products in their high-speed wireless networks, while U.S. prosecutors have accused Huawei of stealing technology, plotting to steal U.S. trade secrets and committing wire and bank fraud, among other crimes.

A criminal racketeering trial against Huawei opened in New York this week. Huawei said the U.S. allegations are "demonstrably false."

The Trump administration has also moved to counter China's large influence in other areas in Africa, including in the extraction of critical minerals and rare earth elements that are key in the production of electronics, other new technologies and defense systems.

___

AP Africa news: https://apnews.com/hub/africa

Hong Kong court sentences 3 Tiananmen vigil organizers to prison in national security case

KANIS LEUNG — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:03:26 +0000

HONG KONG (AP) — Three Hong Kong activists who organized annual vigils in remembrance of China's 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown were sentenced Friday to about five to seven years in prison in a case widely seen as a barometer of the city's eroding freedoms as Beijing clamps down on dissent.

Lee Cheuk-yan, Chow Hang-tung and Albert Ho were convicted of inciting subversion earlier this year under a Beijing-imposed national security law.

Lee received a seven-year prison term and Chow was sentenced to seven years and three months. Both pleaded not guilty. Ho was given a lower sentence of five years and two months, partly because he pleaded guilty.

The three were leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, which for three decades organized a Tiananmen vigil that was the only large-scale, public commemoration of the 1989 crackdown in China.

They were charged in September 2021 and have been held in custody for years.

Hong Kong once had a vibrant civil society marked by massive protests and a freewheeling press. But after a 2019 protest movement rocked the city, authorities reduced public choice in elections and prosecuted leaders of news outlets known for their critical reports of the government. Many leading activists were imprisoned under the security law, and dozens of civil society groups dissolved, including the alliance.

Beijing says the law was necessary to maintain stability.

Lee and Chow plan to appeal

After the sentencing, Lee's wife Elizabeth Tang told reporters that there's no freedom of speech in Hong Kong and the sentences would shock and anger many people. She said millions of people attended or supported the candlelight vigils.

“The sentence is also a punishment for many other people. It's very hard to accept,” she said, adding that Lee would appeal the result.

Chow's mother Medina Chow Lau Wah-chun joked that she had to thank those who had prosecuted Chow for helping to write the truth of the 1989 crackdown and what happened in Hong Kong in recent years into the court records.

“Many years ago, my daughter already said that she wants to have a proper debate with them in court one day,” she said.

Chow's friend Lau Ka-yee said Chow also would appeal.

Chow, who represented herself, earlier said the verdict suggested that pursuing democracy is a crime and that she did not deserve even one day in prison.

Court cited demand to ‘end one-party dictatorship'

Three government-approved judges said the defendants had committed a serious offense. The court previously found that their organization’s longtime demand to “end one-party dictatorship" implied an intent to overthrow or undermine the ruling Communist Party’s leadership.

In handing down the sentence, the judges noted the case did not involve violence or threats of violence and the group never proposed specific means or a timetable to carry out their demand. But they said the defendants' offense occurred during a turbulent social atmosphere and that posed greater risk to national security.

The ruling insisted the defendants were not being tried because of their political views.

“Even when the defendants believed their agenda of ‘end one-party dictatorship’ might breach the constitution and the national security law, they acted recalcitrantly after the national security law took effect and vigorously promoted their cause,” they wrote.

Critics say Hong Kong has changed, but authorities defend the sentences

Hundreds and possibly thousands of people were killed as military tanks rolled into the center of Beijing and troops opened fire to end the student-led pro-democracy protests in the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.

The annual vigil drew tens of thousands of people every year for decades. But authorities banned it in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic. The vigils symbolized the civil liberties that set Hong Kong apart from mainland China.

Urania Chiu, a lecturer in law at Oxford Brookes University in the U.K., said the guilty verdicts confirmed that even peaceful calls for democratic change in the Chinese regime are now criminalized in Hong Kong.

"The mere possibility that its activities might stir up hostility against the state by reminding the public of past atrocities is enough for the court to classify the offence as ‘serious,'" she said, referring to the alliance's work.

The British consulate in Hong Kong pointed to an earlier U.K. statement saying the extensive use of the security law to restrict freedom of expression undermines the commitments China made to the city, reiterating its call for rights to be respected. Hong Kong, a former British colony, returned to Chinese rule in 1997.

Anouar El Anouni, the European Union's spokesperson for foreign affairs, said the ruling undermines confidence in the rule of law and harms Hong Kong's reputation.

Hong Kong leader John Lee said the court already had decided that their actions went beyond the lawful exercise of freedom of expression.

“The law has never allowed anyone to use human rights, democracy and freedom as a pretext to openly harm their own country and fellow citizens,” he said in a statement.

Steve Li, chief superintendent of the police’s national security department, said anyone plotting to take action should take heed of the sentences and not test the government's resolve to uphold national security.

China's Hong Kong and Macao affairs office said the sentences were a powerful defense of the constitutional order.

Other democracy advocates and supporters attend hearing

During the trial, the defense denied they meant to end the party's leadership and insisted the alliance had not asked people to adopt any illegal means. Lee Cheuk-yan said their call for "ending one-party dictatorship" and moving toward democracy meant letting the people decide who leads them.

Ahead of the sentencing, dozens of people lined up outside the court.

Roman Catholic Cardinal Joseph Zen was among those sitting in the public gallery. Activists Jimmy Sham and Carol Ng, who have already served sentences after being convicted in a separate security case, were also seen in court.

Former vigil-goer Simon Ng said his heart was heavy as the sentencing approached, adding that he felt accusations were not just against the defendants.

“I took part in the alliance’s vigils for decades; the ruling amounts to an accusation against me,” he said.

High-profile injuries already adding up 2 games into the NFL season

ROB MAADDI — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:00:08 +0000

Sam Darnold played just five snaps. A.J. Brown will be sidelined for a while. De’Zhaun Stribling was carted off the field.

High-profile injuries are adding up just two games into the NFL season. It’s not even Sunday yet.

Darnold got good news about his hip injury. Not so much for Brown. Stribling's status wasn't immediately known.

“It’s been positive news,” Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald said Thursday about Darnold. “Right now we’re just working through the extent of the injury and put a plan in place to get back rocking and rolling.”

Macdonald called it a muscle injury for Darnold near his hip and that the team would have a better idea of his status for the game against Arizona on Sept. 20 when practice resumes next week.

Drew Lock replaced Darnold and led Seattle to a 13-10 comeback win over New England in a Super Bowl rematch Wednesday night. Lock proved he’s a capable backup so the defending Super Bowl champions won’t have to rush Darnold back to face the Cardinals.

“He’s been tremendous,” Macdonald said about Lock. “He operates like a starter does in terms of preparation. The chemistry and the personality of our quarterback room is one that is very supportive of each other and also trying to bring out the best in one another. Drew provides a cool, confident, loose and focusedness to the whole equation, which you need — you need that. On top of that, since he’s got here, he’s played great football in practice and in the preseason. We saw what he could do last night. If he has to play again then we expect the same moving forward.”

The Patriots won’t have Brown for a while after the star wide receiver went down in the second half against Seattle. He has a high-ankle sprain and will miss several games, a person with knowledge of his injury told The Associated Press on Thursday night.

The person, speaking on condition of anonymity because the Patriots haven’t announced the severity of Brown’s injury, said an MRI confirmed the diagnosis. Brown could miss anywhere from three to six games, depending on the way his ankle responds to treatment.

Without Brown, New England’s offense fizzled. The Patriots went three-and-out twice and then Drake Maye threw three straight interceptions.

“I wish life was like that, where you could wait for your guys to come back and be healthy again but, it’s NFL football,” Patriots veteran receiver Mack Hollins said.

New England traded a 2028 first-round pick to Philadelphia in the deal for Brown to give Maye a top playmaker. Now, he’ll be without him for a few weeks. The Patriots have a tough schedule coming up with three games against three 2025 playoff teams. They’ll host Pittsburgh on Sept. 20, and visit Jacksonville and Buffalo.

“You’ve got to stick together and that starts with me getting back to work and having the right intention in practice,” Maye said. “These guys are here for me. I think they’ve done a great job in supporting me and have had my back. I’ve got to earn their trust. I know I have their trust, but I got to keep on putting better football out there. I think it’s Week 1 but at the same time, there’s a full season ahead but you got to get this going early. We got to start off on the right foot. I know what we had last year, but we got a new season, a new team, and we need to build that.”

Stribling, who was San Francisco’s top draft pick in April at No. 33 overall, limped off the field after running a route in the second quarter of a 27-7 victory over the Los Angeles Rams on Thursday night.

He left the game on a cart and was quickly ruled out for the game. The 49ers signed veteran Mike Evans and brought back Deebo Samuel but were counting on Stribling after losing Ricky Pearsall for the season in the summer.

Tight end Jake Tonges also didn’t return for San Francisco after injuring his knee. Rams linebacker Nate Landman got hurt late in the game.

NFL teams have to deal with injuries every week. It’s part of football. The teams with the most depth and best backups find ways to overcome key losses.

The Seahawks and Patriots have to figure it out quickly.

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On Football analyzes the biggest topics in the NFL from week to week. For more On Football analysis, head here.

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AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl

👍 👆Give yourself a hand: Play this week’s Pillars

Sam Ruland — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 17:34:45 +0000

It’s Friday, which means it’s time for the latest edition of our new word game Pillars, presented by Eric The Puzzler. This week, you can shoot your shot and give yourself a hand by decoding the clues to reveal some well-known Philly landmarks. (Yes, those are hints).

If you’re new, Pillars is a game that asks you to find connections between pairs of words. Those pairs then provide the answer to a bigger puzzle. The video below will show you how to play. Once you know the deal, head over to Pillars to play — we update the game every Friday. Previous puzzles are always available in the Pillars archive.

And remember: every final answer forms a phrase you know from around Philly So if you get stuck on the pink Pillar, try to solve the blue one. That answer might help you work backwards to solve pink, based on your Philly knowledge.

Yes, it’s Philly themed. Eric The Puzzler

AP Top Political News at 8:59 a.m. EDT

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:59:02 +0000

Analysis: Trump's solution to Republicans' midterm troubles is more Trump

Vance? Rubio? DeSantis? Cruz? Republicans at Dallas convention ponder options for post-Trump leader

US inflation picked up as gas prices marched higher due to conflict in the Middle East

Trump is to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks at the Pentagon

Smithsonian marks 25th anniversary of 9/11 with a display of rare artifacts

Trump wants to send Americans money. Congress and economists don't seem thrilled with the idea

Justice Department directs states to hold on to 2024 election records as it seeks their voter data

Republican convention pays tribute to Charlie Kirk one year after his killing

Appeals court hands Trump a loss on mail voting as Supreme Court considers his executive order

Prosecutor brought in to lead investigation of Trump foes tells AP that he has resigned his position

Antonelli looks to keep momentum as F1 drivers face unknown challenges of Madrid track at Spanish GP

TALES AZZONI — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:56:20 +0000

MADRID (AP) — Kimi Antonelli is coming off one of the biggest highs of his career — an epic comeback win in Monza in front of his home fans to extend his lead in Formula 1.

The young Italian will look to keep his momentum and add to his points lead this weekend as the Spanish Grand Prix returns to Madrid after more than four decades — in a race featuring the unknowns of a new hybrid circuit that drivers called "crazy" and "insane" even before cars got to the track.

It was a mostly clean first practice session on the new circuit on Friday, with a few drivers going off the track but no major incidents reported. Antonelli and other drivers did struggle to avoid track-limits warnings at the difficult Madring layout.

Antonelli's Mercedes teammate George Russell had the fastest time. Antonelli was second, ahead of the Ferraris of Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton. Red Bull's Max Verstappen and McLaren's Lando Norris came next.

Antonelli rallied from 19th on the grid to win last weekend's Italian GP in what he called an "absolutely incredible" feat.

"Definitely so far the best day of my life, and an incredible memory,” Antonelli said Thursday. "Wish (I had) a bit more time to realize and enjoy it, but now obviously we are in Madrid and we are ready to do our best and we’ll try to repeat.”

Last weekend's victory gave the 20-year-old Antonelli a 66-point lead over Mercedes teammate George Russell with 10 races remaining, including Sunday's debut of the Madring track that has put the F1 paddock on edge.

The Spanish GP ends the European part of the season. The Madrid region last hosted an F1 race in 1981 at Jarama, on the outskirts of the Spanish capital. Barcelona had been the home of the Spanish GP in recent years. The Jerez de la Frontera track in southern Spain hosted races from 1986-90, and in 1994 and 1997. Madring signed a contract with F1 through 2035.

Exciting new track

The 5.4-kilometer (3.3-mile) Madring track, the newest addition to the F1 calendar since Las Vegas' debut three years ago, combines high-speed zones, heavy-braking areas, changes of gradient, blind turns and high-load corners that should give drivers little margin for error. It mixes existing roads with purpose-built areas, and in most sections cars will run extremely close to the walls.

The heavily banked corner “La Monumental” is expected to be the highlight of the new track. It is nearly 550 meters (yards) in length and cars will spend about six second on it. There is up to 10 metres (yards) of height difference between its lower and upper sections.

“It seems a wild track to be fair. It’s mental but excited to experience it. Going to be a real challenge and I think qualifying is going to be important,” said Russell, who hasn't won since the Austrian GP in June. “The level of everyone in F1 is exceptionally high. It’s going to be a circuit where you need confidence. Very challenging, lots of high speed corners, aggressive curbs. Going to be an experience for sure. Just try and keep out of the wall and build up to it.”

‘Insane’ and ‘crazy’ layout

Alpine's Pierre Gasly said the "track itself looked insane" on the simulator. Haas' Esteban Ocon called it a "crazy circuit" with "a lot of risk-reward." Aston Martin's veteran two-time F1 champion Fernando Alonso expected "high-adrenaline" laps.

“The track seems difficult, first of all, to learn, very technical, a lot of curb riding and a couple of high-speed sections where you need to get very close to the walls, which is very attractive and very high adrenaline for a driver,” Alonso said.

Cars from Formula 2 and Formula 3 were the first to take to the track on Friday. F1 drivers will have two practice sessions later in the day. Another session will be on Saturday, before qualifying. The F1 race is Sunday.

There were plenty of red flags when the F3 cars first tested the track last month, and more are expected this weekend.

The first happened during the F2 practice session, when Tasanapol Inthraphuvasak's car caught fire after hitting the wall. It took several minutes for track workers to clear the area. There were no major incidents in the first F3 session.

Ocon said during the F1 session that the “grip is high” on the new Madring surface.

Ferrari says Monza squabble is in the past

Leclerc and Hamilton said they talked after a near collision between the two at the team's home race in Monza last weekend, and their relationship remains strong.

Leclerc on Thursday said he took responsibility for the incident early in the race, and Hamilton praised his teammate's maturity.

Both drivers said the focus now was on helping the team get closer to Mercedes.

“Just making sure we’re executing to make sure we get the best results for the team instead of us working against each other and finishing fourth and fifth,” Hamilton said. “Maybe you can work together and get a podium and pull off more points.”

Spanish drivers face uphill battle

Organizers said tickets for the Spanish GP were sold out, with 350,000 people in total expected to attend the event over the three days of racing.

It's unlikely they will be celebrating a victory for one of the two Spanish drivers on the F1 grid, as Alonso's Aston Martin and Carlos Sainz's Williams have been well off the pace this season.

“I think it’s no secret that it’s still going to be a struggle for us,” Sainz said. “I couldn’t think about a layout that is probably more difficult for our car. But it’s OK. I’m just going to work extremely hard to make sure this is the last year that I come here to Madrid without a chance of fighting for something bigger."

Sainz finished the first practice session in 17th place, while Alonso was 15th.

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See AP’s full auto racing coverage here

Yemen's Iranian-backed Houthis seize an island in a key strait, opening a new front in the Iran war

FATMA KHALED, SAMY MAGDY and CARA ANNA — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:58:57 +0000

CAIRO (AP) — Yemen 's Iranian-backed Houthi rebels captured a strategic island at the southern entrance to the Red Sea, two officials said Friday, opening a new front in the Iran war and further threatening Saudi oil exports through one of the world's key shipping lanes.

The Houthis’ biggest territorial gain in years, along the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, could boost Iran’s strategy of driving up world oil and gas prices to pressure the United States.

Saudi Arabia had no immediate comment but struck the airport in the nearby port city of Mokha that the Houthis seized Thursday, a Houthi broadcaster said. There were no reports of damage or deaths.

The capture of Mayun, a tiny, barren volcanic island in the strait also known as Perim, was confirmed by a senior military official with Yemen's internationally recognized government and by a Houthi official. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to journalists.

Saudi Arabia has increasingly relied on the 28-kilometer (17-mile) wide Bab el-Mandeb channel to get its oil to market as an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran has been striking ships.

Hazam al-Assad, a member of the rebels’ political bureau, told The Associated Press that “no threat will be posed against” non-Saudi shipping through the strait, saying the Houthis "have a bank of big important targets” if Riyadh keeps up its strikes.

But markets are nervous, and experts have described the Houthis as highly unpredictable. Crude prices this week soared once again above $100 a barrel, giving Tehran more leverage in any talks.

Yemen's government shocked by slow Saudi response

The Houthis have been attacking Saudi shipping on the Red Sea since declaring a blockade in July, as well as oil infrastructure inside Saudi Arabia. The rebels said they acted in response to the kingdom's yearslong blockade of Houthi-held parts of Yemen.

A senior military official with Yemen’s internationally recognized government told the AP they were stunned that the Saudi air force did not try to prevent the capture of Mokha, which is within 50 miles (80 kilometers) of the strait, by striking the Houthis as they advanced. He assessed that Saudi Arabia didn’t get a green light from the U.S. to embark on a large-scale air campaign.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t allowed to speak to the media, also blamed “lack of coordination” between Yemen’s army and multiple allied militias, saying it gave the Houthis “a priceless opportunity.”

Shipping through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait had fallen by about 60% since the Houthis began attacking some ships there in late 2023 and expressing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. Shipping increased this year as Saudi Arabia sought alternatives to the Strait of Hormuz, but renewed Houthi threats have “curtailed” that activity, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence.

Iran calls for a return to Saudi-Houthi talks

Earlier Friday, Iran’s government called for an end to Saudi Arabia’s blockade of Houthi-held areas in a show of support for its ally. The Iranian Foreign Ministry also called for a return to negotiations between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis.

In a sign of how important the Houthis have become for Tehran, the spokesperson for Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard on Wednesday called for any negotiated settlement with the U.S. to include Yemen, the first explicit reference to that front. The call mirrored Iran’s past stance that a truce in Lebanon between its ally Hezbollah and Israel must be a part of any deal with the U.S.

Saudi Arabia, which earlier this week said it had always offered “opportunities for negotiation,” also has said it has the right to defend itself in response to the Houthis’ blockade. The foreign ministers of Iran and Saudi Arabia spoke Thursday about diplomatic efforts to “restore stability” to the region, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on social media.

The fighting risks a return to Yemen's civil war

As the Houthis swept along the Red Sea coast toward the Bab el-Mandeb channel, Yemen’s Saudi-backed government called for international support.

In a statement Friday from a meeting the previous day, its National Defense Council said it was on the front line of defending freedom of navigation and condemned the Houthis’ renewed attacks on Saudi Arabia.

The escalating fighting threatens to end a fragile truce that had largely halted Yemen's civil war since 2022. At stake are the 40 million people in the Arab world's poorest country who fear a return to the conflict that killed 150,000 and brought many others to the brink of famine.

The surge in fighting in the past week has sent over 46,000 people fleeing, and “overnight, large numbers of people were reportedly seen leaving Mokha with their belongings,” the U.N. migration agency said Friday.

The Houthis have been at war with Yemen's government since 2014, when the rebels swept from their mountainous heartland and seized much of northern and central Yemen, and the capital of Sanaa. Saudi Arabia entered the war the following year on behalf of the government.

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Anna reported from Jerusalem.

US inflation picked up as gas prices marched higher due to conflict in the Middle East

CHRISTOPHER RUGABER — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:58:51 +0000

The consumer price index rose 3.4% last month compared with a year ago, the Labor Department said Friday, the same as in July. But on a monthly basis, inflation quickened, as costs jumped 0.4% from July to August, up from an increase of just 0.1% the previous month.

The figures show that inflation remains stubbornly elevated, more than five years after prices first soared as the economy emerged from the COVID pandemic. Persistent inflation has presented a major challenge for the inflation-fighters at the Federal Reserve and has soured many voters on the Trump administration’s economic track record.

Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, core prices were 2.4% higher in August than a year ago, down slightly from July's 2.5% and the third straight decline. But on a monthly basis, core prices rose 0.3% from July to August, the largest increase since April.

The larger-than-expected monthly increase in core prices will likely embolden those Fed officials who have pushed for the central bank to lift its benchmark interest rate at its meeting next week. Wall Street investors now see about 70% likelihood the Fed will increase rates Sept. 16, according to CME Fedwatch.

The Trump administration is seeking to counter voter concerns about high prices and rising interest rates as the midterm elections approach. President Donald Trump on Wednesday promised $5,000 payments to every American adult if the GOP keeps a majority in Congress, a move that would require congressional approval and could stoke inflation. And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has stepped up buybacks of Treasury bonds in an effort to keep longer-term interest rates lower. Yet on Thursday the yield on the 10-year Treasury reached a nearly three-year high.

Renewed fighting in the Middle East has pushed up energy costs, with the nationwide average cost of a gallon of gas on Friday jumping more than 7% from a month ago to $4.30.

Hotel room prices and airfares also rose last month while new and used cars got more expensive. Apparel and grocery prices were unchanged from July to August.

Inflation as one-time shock, or something more

Many economists and Federal Reserve officials have long considered higher gas prices one of several "one-time" shocks that are lifting inflation, along with tariffs and surging investment in AI data centers. For months, the hope has been that as the war against Iran wound down, and the effects of tariffs faded, inflation would grind lower.

Yet there are few signs of the Iran war cooling, and even Trump has said gas prices won't retreat until after the midterm elections in November. And while Trump's trade fight with Canada will impact a small number of imports, it is a reminder that tariffs remain a threat that could push up other costs.

“This is not one and done,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide. “It's unclear when tensions in the Middle East are going to settle down. ... This seems like it could be a prolonged disruption.”

While core prices are rising more slowly than overall prices, more expensive oil and gas could spread through more of the economy. Pricier jet fuel will likely push up airfares, and more expensive diesel will raise shipping costs, which could make groceries and other goods shipped by truck more expensive. On Thursday, a wholesale price report showed a jump in chemical prices, likely a result of more expensive oil.

What will the Federal Reserve do?

Federal Reserve policymakers are split on whether to hike at a meeting next week, so much so that differences of a few hundredths of a percentage point in Friday's inflation report could determine whether the central bank boosts its benchmark interest rate or leaves it unchanged. The Fed, which is tasked with keeping inflation in check, typically lifts borrowing costs to slow spending and limit price increases.

Investors and analysts differ over whether the Fed will hike rates at their Sept. 15-16 meeting. Chair Kevin Warsh suggested he was leaning toward a rate hike in a high-profile speech two weeks ago, but he did not commit to doing so at a specific time.

And last Thursday, Fed governor Christopher Waller, echoing some other Fed officials, suggested that if Friday's inflation report shows price increases cooling, then he would support keeping rates where they are. Waller is one of the 12 officials who vote on each Fed rate decision.

Waller's heavy emphasis on August's figures has raised the stakes for Friday's report. If the monthly core figure rounds up to 0.3%, some Wall Street analysts expect the Fed would then hike rates. But if it rounded down to 0.2% or lower, then a hold could be more likely. If it is somewhere in between, it's not clear what the Fed may do. One analyst called such considerations “ludicrous precision.”

For his part, Warsh doesn't want to tip his hand about his next moves, which some economists say will make this kind of uncertainty more common before Fed meetings.

Houthis capture Red Sea island in threat to shipping, and other Mideast developments

The Associated Press — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:57:06 +0000

Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen seized a key island on Friday after having captured a Red Sea port, moves that threatened to further disrupt international shipping in the region. Iran called on Saudi Arabia to end its blockade of Yemen and immediately resume talks.

Separately, the AI company Anthropic said it identified and blocked users in northern Yemen attempting to develop advanced missiles.

Here's a look at the latest news in the Middle East. Full coverage can be found here.

Houthi rebels capture strategic island as Saudi Arabia targets airport

Yemen 's Iranian-backed Houthi rebels captured the island of Mayun at the entrance of the Red Sea, a key alternative for shipping Saudi oil and other exports since Iran has been targeting vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.

The island's seizure was confirmed by a senior military official with Yemen’s internationally recognized government and a Houthi official. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to journalists.

Saudi Arabia responded with airstrikes against the airport in Yemen's port city of Mokha, which the Houthis captured Thursday, a Houthi broadcaster said. There was no immediate report of damage or deaths.

About 12% of the world’s goods are typically shipped through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait at the southern end of the Red Sea. It's especially important to Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally. For years, Saudi Arabia has imposed a blockade on Houthi-held parts of Yemen, prompting the rebels to escalate attacks on Saudi shipping.

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By Samy Magdy in Cairo

Iran presses for end to Saudi blockade of Yemen

Iran’s Foreign Ministry called for an end to Saudi Arabia’s blockade of Yemen and an immediate return to negotiations between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis, throwing its support behind its ally.

The statement carried by Iran's state-run IRNA news agency marked Tehran's first public comment since the Houthis entered into the Red Sea port of Mokha on Thursday.

Meanwhile, Yemen’s National Defense Council strongly condemned the Houthis' renewed attacks on Saudi Arabia, saying it would respond to threats across the country.

Anthropic blocks users in Houthi-held Yemen over weapons development

The AI company Anthropic said it blocked users in northern Yemen who were using its AI models to run weapons development programs, some using commercially available smartphones.

Anthropic said its models were being used to pursue sophisticated precision, long-range ballistic and hypersonic missiles. The company said it identified the users during an internal investigation and banned their accounts.

Iran-backed Houthi rebels who control northern Yemen have been smuggling advanced weapons for years despite a blockade and U.N. arms embargo. Iran denies arming the rebels.

Anthropic said the accounts used Claude Code to develop software that “steers and stabilizes a flying vehicle” and were working to develop weapons including a guided rocket that allows mobile phone users to autonomously track targets.

There is no evidence the users in Yemen succeeded in fielding a weapon, the company said.

Man walking in street killed by Israeli strike in Gaza

An Israeli strike on Friday killed a man walking in a street in southern Gaza and wounded several others, including children, according to Nasser Hospital, which received the body and the wounded.

The Israeli military said the strike in Khan Younis had targeted a Hamas member.

Meanwhile, mourners held funeral prayers for two of three men who were killed Thursday in Khan Younis. The Israeli military said one of the men, Mohammad Yazouri, was a Hamas commander.

AP Top Health News at 8:50 a.m. EDT

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:50:38 +0000

Trump promises $500 Obamacare rebate checks for 1M enrollees in 30 states

UK lawmakers to vote again on whether to allow assisted dying in England and Wales

In an age of instant answers, educators say there's a case for letting kids struggle a little

Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo has now spread to the country's seventh province, officials say

The push to remove lead pipes is on. Thousands of water systems still don’t know where theirs are

Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer asks the judge to spare her a second trial for killing her children

Coroner releases details of infants who died amid growing Pennsylvania measles outbreak

An appeals court is considering a push to restrict most common abortion method

Suspected measles cases kill nearly 1,000 as Bangladesh struggles to contain outbreak

As midterms approach, new poll finds that few Americans trust campaigns or Trump

US diesel prices soar past $6 a gallon, deepening strain for hauling everyday goods

WYATTE GRANTHAM-PHILIPS — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:49:23 +0000

CHICAGO (AP) — Diesel prices in the U.S. hit yet another record on Friday, soaring past $6 a gallon on average as Washington's war with Iran disrupts the world's flow of fuel.

The national average of $6.05 is up from $5.85 last week and $3.70 this time last year, according to motor club AAA.

Higher diesel prices mean more expensive transportation for a long list of everyday goods. That's because diesel is used for many freight and delivery networks. And some businesses have already passed along steeper costs to consumers in the form of added fees on online orders and packages in the mail.

Shoppers may feel more and more sticker shock, particularly in the grocery aisle. Perishable foods, like meat and produce, face one of the most immediate strains of expensive diesel because they need to be hauled in and restocked frequently — or may be harvested using farm equipment powered by the fuel.

It can take time for those costs to trickle down. But the surge in diesel prices doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon.

Prices at the pump for diesel and regular gasoline — which hit $4.29 on average in the U.S. Friday — closely follow that of crude oil. And oil has renewed its rise recently. This week, both Brent, the international standard, and U.S. crude surpassed $100 a barrel for the first time in months as fighting between the U.S. and Iran escalated again.

Political ramifications may pile up in the meantime. President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly tried to downplay the effects of the war he co-launched, said that oil prices likely won't come down until after November's midterm elections.

What’s driving the latest jump for diesel

American diesel prices are now over 60% higher than they were before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in late February, when the national average sat at about $3.76 per gallon per AAA. Prices quickly climbed as the cost of crude oil — the main ingredient in refined fuel like diesel, as well as gasoline — soared amid supply chain disruptions across the Middle East, notably with most tanker traffic bottlenecked in the key Strait of Hormuz.

Despite some during hopes for peace earlier in the summer, oil has now renewed its climb as fighting once more escalates. And more supply disruptions are piling up. The International Energy Agency reported Friday that Saudi oil production fell to a three-decade low last month due to Houthi attacks on its energy facilities.

And elsewhere, losses in the Middle East have been amplified by the war in Ukraine, as the IEA also noted Friday. Disruptions in Russia's refining system stemming from intense Ukranian attacks have nearly halted product exports.

When adjusted for inflation, fuel prices have been higher in the past. Ahead of the 2008 financial crisis, for example, diesel hit about $4.74 a gallon, equivalent to $7.20 in 2026, according to the government’s latest data. And 2022’s then-record of nearly $5.82 — reached just months after Russia invaded Ukraine — would be about $6.56 this year when accounting for inflation.

That doesn’t take the pain away from today’s steep prices, which are already bringing ripple effects for the economy and wider costs of living. Drivers are feeling the pain with gasoline, too.

Friday's average $4.29 for a gallon of regular unleaded is up from $2.98 before the Iran war, although still below the 2022 peak of nearly $5.02 a gallon nationwide.

Diesel has been more expensive than gasoline in the U.S. for decades, and its price has risen at a faster pace before. Some reasons include less flexibility in demand and diesel’s position in global commerce overall. Individual households may find ways to drive less when gas prices are high, for example, but there’s fewer immediate substitutes for networks that rely on diesel to haul goods worldwide.

All eyes on food

Diesel is integral to every part of the food supply chain. It powers farm equipment and fishing boats, as well as the trains and trucks headed to grocery stores.

Fuel accounts for roughly 15% to 30% of the total cost of food, according to the Independent Grocers Alliance, a grouping of 7,500 global supermarkets. So higher diesel costs often result in more expensive groceries, although it can take a while for energy shocks to wind their way through the supply chain.

Items that need to stay refrigerated while they’re transported are often the first to see prices rise, according to David Ortega, a professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University. In July, for example, overall U.S. grocery prices were up 2.7% compared to a year prior, but seafood prices were up 7% and fresh fruit prices were up 4.9%.

Ortega cautioned other factors can be at play, too. Lettuce also faced higher transportation costs in July, but a drop in demand due to the cyclospora outbreak caused prices to fall.

Still, consumers could feel more of a squeeze the longer diesel prices remain high.

“Early on, much of the cost increase gets absorbed along the supply chain through existing freight contracts and retailer margins,” Ortega explained last week. “But as contracts reprice and fuel surcharges take hold, more of that cost makes its way to the grocery store.”

Fuel shocks range far and wide

Back in April, e-commerce giant Amazon rolled out a temporary 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge on some third-party sellers. United Parcel Service, FedEx and the United States Postal Service also moved to add fees on some of the packages they ship earlier in the war, citing rising costs for fuel overall.

Experts warn that price hikes could mount the longer diesel remains expensive. A range of other products are also transported by diesel-powered networks, including clothing, cosmetics and furniture.

The ramifications extend beyond consumer goods. Some public transit buses and trains also run on diesel. And diesel generators are often used for backup or emergency power, if not central electricity sources in some remote parts of the world.

Experts warn the consequences could continue to deepen, particularly in African and Asian countries, which rely more on Middle East imports and have already been hit the hardest by energy shocks.

According to the latest data from Global Petrol Prices, diesel prices in Nigeria have surged over 90% since late February — followed by nearly 87% in Indonesia and 80% in Lebanon.

Price tags vary widely between countries, due to factors ranging from fuel taxes to local economic conditions. As of Monday, diesel prices in Nigeria were about $4.95 per gallon (1,730 naira per liter) on average. Meanwhile, the highest sticker price reported by Global Petrol Prices was in Hong Kong, where diesel costs have jumped almost 26% during the war and averaged at $17.78 a gallon (nearly 37 Hong Kong dollars per liter) Monday.

A long road of constrained supply — and perhaps higher and higher prices — could be ahead.

S&P Global Energy said Thursday it now doesn’t project crude oil production in the Middle East to return to prewar levels by the end of 2027.

“The market is not returning to calm, it is adjusting to the new normal,” said Jim Burkhard, VP and global head of crude oil research at S&P Global Energy, noting security and logistical challenges continue to limit oil flows.

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Associated Press writers Dee-Ann Durbin in Detroit and Mae Anderson in New York contributed.

Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo has now spread to the country's seventh province, officials say

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:50:27 +0000

KINSHASA, Congo (AP) — The Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo, the world's fastest-growing outbreak of the disease on record, has now spread to seven provinces in the African country, local authorities said. And it's showing no signs of slowing down.

According to the governor of the northwestern province of Sud-Ubangi, Jean-Rene Galekwa Vundawe, laboratory tests by Congo's national research institute found in a sample the Bundibugyo virus, the rare kind of Ebola that caused the current outbreak.

The statement, which was issued on Thursday and reported by local media outlets on Friday, said the sample was from the Bulu health district in Sud-Ubangi. It did not disclose other information about the source of the infection.

The development makes Sud-Ubangi the seventh province affected by the outbreak — and the first in western Congo — a worrisome spread west from what was previously concentrated in the country's east. A case was detected in Kinshasa in May in a person who had traveled from eastern Congo, but the Congolese capital was not classified as an affected province.

As of Wednesday, 6,942 cases and 3,349 deaths have been reported, according to the latest government figures.

The World Health Organization has said the outbreak remains out of control and is on track to surpass the 2014-2016 West Africa Ebola outbreak, the deadliest on record, which killed more than 11,000 people, primarily in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

In recent weeks, new cases and deaths have declined in Ituri province, the outbreak’s epicenter, but risen sharply in neighboring North Kivu and Haut-Uele.

The outbreak is spreading under extremely difficult conditions, fueled by insecurity, displacement, a health workers' strike and intense population movements. The situation is particularly concerning at displacement sites, where residents already live in extremely precarious conditions.

Sud-Ubangi, which borders the Central African Republic, does not border any of the six provinces in eastern Congo where confirmed Ebola cases had previously been reported. They include Ituri, North Kivu, South Kivu, Haut-Uele, Tshopo and Bas-Uele.

WHO said last month there is a risk the outbreak could spread from Congo to neighboring Central African Republic and South Sudan, which border the affected provinces.

Neighboring Uganda, which had reported 20 cases since May, declared itself free of Ebola in July.

Last month, Congo began vaccinating health and other front-line workers with the Ervebo vaccine that was effective in past Ebola outbreaks caused by a different, more common type called Zaire.

Clinical trials are underway to find a licensed vaccine for the Bundibugyo virus.

The vaccination trials started in the eastern Tshopo, Haut-Uele and Bas-Uele provinces, Placide Mbala Kingebeni, Africa CDC’s director for research, clinical trials and innovation, said Thursday. Vaccinations in Ituri, the epicenter of the outbreak, are set to start next week, he added.

New York ceremony begins marking 25 years since 9/11, with a tolling bell and a moment of silence

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:46:33 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — New York ceremony begins marking 25 years since 9/11, with a tolling bell and a moment of silence.

How a South Jersey woman is honoring her best friend’s memory and supporting kids with disabilities

Sarah Nicell — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:01:00 +0000

Alexus Mackenzye Dick and Trinity Jagdeo were 5 years old when they met on the blacktop at Mary F. Janvier School in rural Franklinville, Gloucester County.

While Dick isn’t around to tell the story anymore, Jagdeo remembers it well: They played hopscotch, but not in the traditional way. Dick zipped through the squares in her wheelchair. Jagdeo, a Vineland resident, said it amazed her.

“I’ve told the story 1,000 times,” said Jagdeo, 25. “But now that I think about it — and I’ve revisited the location — there was nothing else for her to do.”

The pair quickly became best friends. They bickered over the Justin Bieber tattoo Dick got at 15, gossiped at sleepovers, and traded lip gloss recommendations.

There’s a reason Jagdeo repeats those tales so often.

When they were still teenagers, Jagdeo founded a nonprofit, From We Can’t to We Can, inspired by her best friend. She has self-published comic books that turn local kids with disabilities into superheroes, hosted fashion shows for models with disabilities, frequented local TV stations, and gifted thousands of pieces of medical equipment to families denied by insurance or who can’t afford the supplies. Jagdeo has talked about Dick on social media for years, including to her nearly 50,000 TikTok followers.

The daily posts haven’t stopped since Dick died five months ago at 25 due to complications related to spinal muscular atrophy type 2, a genetic disease diagnosed in childhood that causes progressive muscle weakness.

“One of the things she said was, ‘I wish I could help people.’ ... And so, in my heart, I knew that at that point, I wasn’t going to just let that conversation stay there,” Jagdeo said.

Now, another family is benefitting from the efforts to keep Dick’s memory alive.

Domenique Meyer, 33, lives in Aberdeen Township, Monmouth County, with her husband Mike and two children, Mikey and Mia. Born prematurely at 30 weeks, a lack of oxygen to Mikey’s brain left him with severe spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy.

“He knows our voices, loves being talked to and cuddled, and has his own special way of showing us what he likes and dislikes,” Meyer said. “He has been fighting since the very beginning of his life.”

At 3 years old, Mikey is blind, nonverbal, unable to sit independently, and has multiple seizures per day. He receives his nutrition through a gastrostomy tube since he has a hard time swallowing. His disabilities mean a lot of time spent on care, and on one income, it’s been hard to get by, Meyer said. Their family fell behind on household bills as medical expenses piled up.

“When you have a medically complex child, life does not stop because bills are due,” Meyer said. “There have been so many times when Mikey needed us at an appointment, in the hospital, or at home, and work simply had to come second.”

When Meyer reached out to From We Can’t to We Can for a medical stroller that would better suit Mikey’s needs, she explained their financial stressors to Jagdeo. Since the nonprofit had recently received thousands of dollars from anonymous donors, Jagdeo decided it was time to fulfill her best friend’s wish.

The Alexus Mackenzye Legacy Fund provided Meyer and her family with about $5,500 that went toward their mortgage and brought their utility bills up to date. And while times are still hard, Meyer said the foundation’s support gave them hope.

“For the first time in a while, it felt like we could breathe again and focus on our children instead of constantly worrying about what bill was coming next,” Meyer said.

The Meyers will attend Roar for a Reason at the Edelman Fossil Park & Museum in Mantua on Saturday, the first major event and fundraiser the nonprofit has hosted since Dick died. There, Jagdeo said she plans to release a hundred butterflies, Dick’s favorite, and read a letter addressed to her best friend. Kids with disabilities will walk the runway, and Jagdeo will introduce her newest book, Jaiyana and the Jainosaurus, which takes place at the museum and is based on the experiences of a local child with autism and a rare brain condition. She’ll introduce the new legacy fund to the public, which she said she hopes will support a family in need annually from now on.

Jagdeo has kept busy in the meantime. She still posts on social media every day, usually about Dick, and recently flew to Michigan to judge this year’s Miss Wheelchair USA competition. She’s been putting in hours on an outdoor memory garden for Dick in her yard, and she said she hopes monarch butterflies hatch this weekend in time for the celebration.

“Some people say, ‘This person was my world,’” Jagdeo said. “And for me, she wasn’t just my world. She was the world. I created a world because of her.”

UK lawmakers to vote again on whether to allow assisted dying in England and Wales

PAN PYLAS — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:41:27 +0000

LONDON (AP) — U.K. lawmakers will vote again on Friday on whether to back legislation to allow terminally ill adults in England and Wales to choose to end their lives.

The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill has returned to the House of Commons after running out of time when the last parliamentary session ended in the spring — that effort was effectively filibustered by unelected lawmakers in the House of Lords chamber.

Each five-year parliamentary term is subdivided into a number of sessions of the government’s calling, and bills can only become law if they are discussed and voted on within a single session by both houses of parliament.

The bill proposes allowing adults in England and Wales, with fewer than six months to live, to apply for an assisted death subject to the approval of two doctors and an expert panel. Because of the four-year implementation period, assisted dying wouldn't be available across England and Wales until 2031 at the earliest.

The vote is expected to be tight. While the previous incarnation of the bill was twice backed in the House of Commons, the second saw the majority narrow to 23 from 55. The government is taking a neutral stance, saying it's a matter of conscience, meaning Labour Party lawmakers can vote freely.

The new U.K. leader, Prime Minister Andy Burnham, wasn't even in Parliament during those votes. Burnham has said he won't vote on the bill so as not to “unduly influence the debate." His predecessor, Keir Starmer, who has left Parliament, was in favor of the proposed legislation.

Lauren Edwards, the lawmaker steering the bill in the House of Commons, urged her fellow members of Parliament to send the near-identical bill back to the House of Lords “so that they can finish what they started” in scrutinizing the legislation.

Supporters have suggested a rarely used piece of legislation could be invoked to pass the bill this time around, if it ends up being stalled again by the House of Lords. The Parliament Acts allow for bills that have been backed by the House of Commons in two successive sessions, but rejected by the House of Lords, to pass into law without from approval by the Lords.

Proponents of " assisted dying " — sometimes referred to as "assisted suicide" — hope it would mark the biggest change to social policy in the U.K. since abortion was partially legalized in 1967. The intention was to put an end to the practice of those near the end of their lives going to other countries, such as Switzerland, for an assisted death.

Opponents have branded the bill unsafe and unworkable, citing concerns around potential coercion of vulnerable people and a lack of safeguards for those with disabilities.

Lawmaker and cancer surgeon Dr. Zubir Ahmed also noted uncertainty around a doctor’s prognosis.

“I have to be honest with you," he said. “When I am asked to prognosticate as to whether someone has six months to live or not, I am as often wrong as I am right.”

Assisted suicide — where patients take a lethal drink prescribed by a doctor — is legal in countries including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and parts of the U.S., with regulations on qualifying criteria varying by jurisdiction.

In July, French lawmakers backed a similar bill to allow adults with incurable illnesses to receive lethal medication. However, it hasn't become law, because there will be a review to determine if it complies with the French Constitution.

Pakistan trails England by 136 runs in third cricket test after Masood and Awais hit half centuries

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:38:41 +0000

BIRMINGHAM, England (AP) — Pakistan had its most productive batting session of the tour of England but still trailed by 136 runs on Day 3 of the third and final cricket test Friday.

The left-handed pair of Shan Masood and young opener Azan Awais put the off-field chaos behind and struck half centuries as Pakistan progressed to 184-3 at lunch, losing the sole wicket of Awais for a well composed 59 off 84 balls that featured 10 fours.

Masood had two lucky escapes against Josh Tongue before he reached his half century and was unbeaten on 83, while captain Babar Azam started off confidently to reach 26 with five boundaries at the break.

Masood and Awais soaked up the pressure of Ollie Robinson (2-22) and Jofra Archer (0-47) after Pakistan resumed on 52-2 on another gloomy day at Edgbaston with 268 runs still needed to avoid an innings defeat.

England made a strong 453 after Pakistan got bundled out for 133 in two sessions on Day 1 and then Robinson claimed two wickets before Pakistan had scored its first run in the second innings.

That brought Masood and Awais together and the left-handed pair grew in confidence against Gus Atkinson and an erring Tongue, who was punished for boundaries whenever there was width on offer. Tongue, who has given away 60 runs in his nine overs, was unlucky not to have Masood twice before the former Pakistan captain completed his half century off 81 balls.

Masood edged Tongue to the vacant third slip just a ball after Ben Duckett was removed from the same fielding position and then substitute Theo Wylie dropped a regulation catch at point as the ball burst through his hands to the boundary.

The introduction of Lawrence broke Pakistan’s best partnership of the series when Awais feathered a leg side catch to Jordan Cox behind the wickets which ended 125 runs with Masood.

Captain Joe Root was quick to signal the review from the leg slip after Awais was adjudged not out by the onfield umpire and TV replays suggested a spike before Cox grabbed a good reflex catch.

But Babar and Masood continued to score at a brisk pace and the pair added 59 runs in less than an hour as Pakistan closed in on its first score of 200-plus in the series.

England has already sealed the three-match series with two big victories at Leeds and Lord’s before Pakistan pushed the panic button and summoned back seven players and replaced head coach Sarfaraz Ahmed with white-ball coach Mike Hesson and also brought in Ashley Noffke as bowling coach in place of Umar Gul.

___

See AP’s full cricket coverage here

Inflation picked up last month as gas prices rose during clashes around Iran

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:33:37 +0000

WASHINGTON (AP) — Inflation picked up last month as gas prices rose during clashes around Iran.

Phillies miss chance to keep pace in NL East, fall to Astros after Jhoan Duran surrenders ninth-inning homer

Scott Lauber — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:06:59 +0000

Zack Wheeler went to a full count against back-to-back hitters only to walk both and load the bases. His pitch count climbed above 100 on a hot, sticky afternoon.

And rookie reliever Alex McFarlane was ready.

Easy call, right?

Maybe in the playoffs, assuming the Phillies get in, Don Mattingly will act like most managers and be aggressive with the bullpen. Not yet, though. And come to think of it, maybe never. Not with three starting horses who are easier to trust on fumes than any of his fresh relievers.

A fifth straight postseason is in sight. Here are the big things to watch from the Phillies over the final month.

So, Mattingly stuck with Wheeler, who slung a sweeper to escape the seventh inning Thursday, only to watch star closer Jhoan Duran give up a tiebreaking homer to the Astros’ Cam Smith in the ninth in a dud of a 2-1 loss to cap a homestand that felt, well, meh.

“Playoff situation, you’re usually not letting your guys roll like that,” Mattingly said after pushing Wheeler to 110 pitches. “You’ve got to be more careful. But right now, I think he was the best guy for that situation today.”

If Wheeler could’ve thrown 130 pitches, he would’ve been the best choice beyond the seventh inning, too, just as Cristopher Sánchez and Jesús Luzardo would when they start.

Let’s get back to that. First, a check of the standings: The Phillies slid to four games behind the division-leading Braves before hopping on a flight to Atlanta for three games that would’ve felt so much more like a showdown if the deficit was only three games.

Instead, the Braves could finish 7-8 and the Phillies would have to go 12-3 to overtake them.

Not impossible, but also not likely, considering they alternated losses and wins during a 3-4 homestand and haven’t won consecutive games since a six-game roll from Aug. 26 to Sept. 1.

But the Phillies still lead the Cubs by one game for the top National League wild card, which brings the benefit of playing the best-of-three first-round miniseries at home.

“We want to play at home,” Bryce Harper said. “It’s a huge advantage in the postseason, just hearing it from other players coming into here and playing in this environment. We expect our crowds to be loud and crazy and obnoxious and talk the crap that they do to other players. I think it plays a huge part.”

Bryce Harper had his best month as a Phillie in August, and even he is not quite sure how he’s done it

In that case, it would behoove the Phillies to play well over the next nine games in Atlanta, Washington, and New York.

And it sure feels like they wasted an opportunity in the finale against the Astros.

Despite not getting a hit through four innings against Astros righty Cristian Javier (remember him from the combined no-hitter in Game 5 of the 2022 World Series?), the Phillies tied it in the fifth on Luis Arraez’s leadoff single, Alec Bohm’s double, and a fielder’s choice.

Wheeler recorded his third consecutive solid start after his roughest six-start stretch in seven seasons with the Phillies. But after striking out the side on 16 pitches in the sixth inning, he loaded the bases in the seventh on a leadoff bunt single and back-to-back two-out walks.

The Phillies got McFarlane loose. Did Mattingly consider going to him?

“It’s hard to bring in a kid there, bases loaded,” Mattingly said. “[Wheeler] was throwing the ball good. He felt good. I thought it was his.”

Said Wheeler: “He asked me before the inning if I was good, and I said, ‘Yeah.’ But it’s obviously up to him and his call. You’ve got to respect that. I was able to wiggle out of that, and I appreciate him letting me go out there and get that done.”

Across the sport, managers tend to ask less of starting pitchers in the postseason. Maybe Mattingly’s approach with Wheeler foretells that the Phillies will actually ask Wheeler, Sánchez, and Luzardo — all among the top-10 pitchers in baseball — for more.

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“I think a few things probably play into it,” Wheeler said. “Maybe who’s coming up, how much the bullpen’s been used, all that stuff.”

Also, who’s in that bullpen. The Phillies’ main bridge to Duran consists of Jonathan Bowlan (career postseason appearances: zero), erratic lefty José Alvarado, and rookie McFarlane, with Orion Kerkering attempting to get back on the upswing of his roller coaster history.

Even Duran is showing cracks. He hung a splinker — his signature splitter/sinker hybrid — to Smith, who hit only the second homer against him all season. It came a few days after he gave up a hard-hit double and triple and gave up a go-ahead run in the ninth inning against the Braves.

“I feel good,” said Duran, who likely will be asked to get more than three outs in his postseason appearances. “I feel much better than when I started the season. I feel really good right now.”

In any case, Mattingly’s best bet may be to push the starters, at least until it’s time for Duran.

Wheeler conceded that 110 pitches in September often feels different than it would in April.

“Today it felt like that, just because it was hot and that last inning I worked a little bit more,” he said. “Some days are different than others.”

There may be more days like this for the Phillies’ big three starters. Their ability to hold up could determine if the Phillies host a wild-card series — and, ultimately, how far beyond that they advance.

“It’s big, you know?” Wheeler said. “There’s nothing like playing here in the playoffs. It’s probably the best atmosphere there is. To be able to host and play here, it’s important.”

The ‘safe to breathe’ lie that haunts 9/11 — and Christine Todd Whitman

Tom Moran — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:04:59 +0000

Former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman will be 80 years old in a few weeks, with much to celebrate as she marks the moment.

She was twice elected governor and brought a Republican legislature with her both times. She cut income taxes by 30%. She turbo-charged the drive to save the state’s dwindling green space, earning her a seat in the cabinet of President George W. Bush, running the Environmental Protection Agency. She is a woman of grand accomplishment, a pioneer.

And she had the guts to compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, way back in 2015, before it was stylish. So count me among those who would clap and hoot when she blows out the candles at her party.

But … but … but …

She also assured us, one week after the 9/11 attacks, that it was “safe to breathe” the air at ground zero. And we know now that was a mistake of epic proportions; that the dust covering Lower Manhattan was a toxic stew of asbestos, lead, mercury, arsenic, dioxin, and polychlorinated biphenyls. It scorched the lungs of thousands who breathed it, leaving them disabled, and planted the seeds for cancer in thousands more.

“The number of people who have died of 9/11-related health conditions has far surpassed the number of people who died on the day of the attacks,” the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund states in its most recent annual report.

As the illnesses began to pile up, Whitman became an object of scorn to those who felt she had been flat-out lying, bending to pressure from the White House, which was eager to get Wall Street back to work.

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She was called before Congress to answer for this in June 2007, soon after Democrats had taken control of the House, and they were ready to pounce. It was a sweltering day in Washington, nearly 90 degrees, and she had to brave a mob of furious protesters screaming at her as she arrived. This was to be the darkest day of her career.

“Our government has knowingly exposed thousands of American citizens unnecessarily to deadly hazardous materials,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat whose district included ground zero. “And because it has never admitted the truth, Americans remain at grave risk to this day.”

But was Whitman really that much of a monster? I had covered her for years as a columnist at the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., and I had my doubts. Even today, no one has ever proved she lied about what she knew, or knowingly put people in harm’s way. If she were that evil, it seemed to me, it would be a first.

Still, this episode will rightly be remembered as the low point for Whitman. She may not have been a monster, but she was surely a wimp. She stood back and let Vice President Dick Cheney spin the EPA’s scientific findings out of shape, as the EPA’s own inspector general established two years later. The EPA’s recommendation that homes and businesses hire professional cleaners to eradicate toxins was removed altogether.

The changes to the EPA’s draft news releases were made by the Orwellian-named President’s Council on Environmental Quality, which was effectively run by Cheney. The CEQ had final control of press releases, and the IG report spells out each change it made, every time diminishing the danger and adding reassurance about safety at ground zero. Whitman didn’t make a peep of protest.

Whitman may not have been a monster, but she was surely a wimp.

Worse, Whitman personally sounded the infamous all-clear before she could have known it was safe, according to the IG report. In the careful bureaucratic parlance of Washington, the report said she “did not have sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement.”

She didn’t know for certain she was sending people to their doom, as critics like Nadler claimed. But she was going along with the spin, yielding to Cheney. And many people died who might have stayed away.

At that 2007 hearing, Whitman was having none of it, and was more defiant than I had ever seen her. She was not a liar, she insisted. She based her decision on the best science she had at the time. She had no regrets, and said she was still not sure the toxins at the site were causing illnesses.

It was an absurd claim, even then. A preliminary study released a year earlier by the Mount Sinai World Trade Center Screening and Monitoring Program showed that 70% of the first 9,000 workers examined had reported some kind of respiratory problem after working on the debris pile. Whitman claimed she hadn’t read it.

I reached out to Whitman, and she offered a written statement saying, “Everyone at the EPA did the best they could with the information, tools, and knowledge available at the time.” But she declined to answer a more personal question: Does she feel she did anything wrong when she issued the all-clear?

My guess is that deep down, she does.

Tom Moran is the author of the Substack Jersey Lowdown and former editorial page editor of the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.

French military jets launch a 40-day global flight to project power and strengthen alliances

NICOLAS GARRIGA — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:25:26 +0000

EIELSON AIR FORCE BASE, Alaska (AP) — Four fighter jets rose into the air over a French military base and settled into formation at the start of a 40-day flight taking them through the icy Arctic and steamy tropics before ending in a desert.

The aircraft left Istres air base in southern France on Tuesday and will travel 40,000 kilometers (25,000 miles), cross three continents and make nine stopovers, working with international partners along the route to demonstrate the value of alliances at a time when big powers such as China and the United States seem determined to go it alone.

The military exercise called Pegase 26 aims to project military might and prove the nuclear power can defend distant territories and allies by strengthening French cooperation in the air with strategic partners including Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and India.

Almost a year in the planning, the aircraft will be supported by three refueling planes, two transport aircraft and around 300 personnel overseen from a headquarters near Lyon in eastern France.

The Associated Press accompanied French planes this week over Greenland and Alaska and during exercises they conducted with U.S. fighter jets.

Showing commitment to law and freedom of navigation

“In practical terms, we fly together, we land together, we work together,” Alice Rufo, a deputy defense minister, said before the two single-seater and two twin-seater Rafale aircraft departed France.

“If we’re called upon to act together in the face of a threat, we need to be immediately interoperable,” Rufo said. “That doesn’t just happen. It must be prepared, and these exercises and missions allow us to prepare for that.”

Flying halfway around the world also will demonstrate France's commitment to international law and the freedom of navigation in places where these principles face growing challenges such as the Middle East. The aircraft will fly in the Persian Gulf region via Qatar and end their journey in Egypt.

But along with political and practical advantages of navigating through complex new airspace in a range of temperatures, Pegase 26 is highly symbolic.

Aircraft experience new challenges over Greenland

In the early stage of the trip, the twin-engined jets headed for Alaska and passed over Greenland, where an Airbus A400M support plane capable of landing on ice was stationed. The flight from Istres to Alaska took nearly 11 hours, with the jets refueling midair five times to cover the vast distance without stopping.

U.S. President Donald Trump's repeated threats to take control of Greenland have destabilized NATO, damaging confidence between allies meant to defend rather than attack each other. Greenland is a self-governing part of NATO member Denmark.

The flight exercise has been held annually since 2018, but the Pegase 26 commander, General Julien Sabènè, told The Associated Press this is “the first time we are heading up north, over Greenland, toward Alaska.”

“It’s important for us that we explore different routes,” he said. “We never know in case we need to go in the Indo-Pacific region, and there are thermals and it’s difficult to go the other way around. That gives us another option, going up north.”

Global warming also is making the Arctic more accessible to possible adversaries such as China and Russia.

“Climate change is changing the stakes and maritime routes are evolving,” Sabéné said. “There is a need for us to be present in the High North alongside our allies, and naturally alongside the Danes, who are an integral part of Greenland.”

Making a symbolic show of strength through partnership

The exercise also comes six months after President Emmanuel Macron offered to share France's nuclear umbrella with his European partners as concern mounted about Trump's reliability on security matters.

Some Rafale jets can be fitted with nuclear-armed missiles. They would probably be paired with the same Airbus A330 MRTT refueling planes to deliver those weapons over long distances, officials said.

To be clear, Pegase 26 is not a nuclear exercise. The fighter jets carry no real weapons, only mock conventional armaments adding weight and shifting aerodynamics to bring a more realistic edge to the drills. But pilots from France’s Strategic Air Force, which operates part of France’s nuclear deterrent, are involved.

The marathon flight also shows France can rapidly move combat aircraft between potential conflict zones in the Arctic, Pacific and Middle East, where many U.S. refueling planes are tied up with the Iran war, while sustaining operations from French bases.

At a time when great powers are questioning the value of multinational organizations and sometimes seeking to undermine them, Rufo said Pegase 26 proves France can exercise freedom of navigation while respecting international rules with the help of its allies and friends.

“Sovereignty can only be effectively exercised within a network of partnerships, and the exceptional number of partners involved in this mission demonstrates that,” she said.

___

Lorne Cook in Brussels contributed to this report.

America lost its way after 9/11. We don’t have to stay on the wrong path.

Daniel Pearson — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:01:00 +0000

On Sept. 11, 1990, President George H.W. Bush gave a speech to a joint session of Congress with his vision for a “New World Order.” He promised that instead of the spheres of influence and deadly competition that had dominated international politics, there would now be a future where “the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle.”

For a while, it seemed like this could be true. War and conflict did not end in the 1990s, but peace seemed plausible.

A United Nations-sanctioned coalition pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Israeli and Palestinian leaders signed the Oslo Accords, which promised a shared future of two states for two peoples. Genocidal leaders in Rwanda and Serbia were removed from power. Even the Irish conflict, famously “800 years” old, was ended with the Good Friday Agreement.

The United States reigned as the world’s sole superpower, and the next strongest militaries and economies mostly belonged to our allies. The Pax Americana seemed to have reached an unassailable zenith.

Then it all came crashing down.

When the planes hit the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001, most of us did not realize it was the first step in the dismantling of the world we knew. I certainly did not. After all, I was only 12 years old.

My seventh-grade classmates and I initially had no idea what had happened. We knew that our teachers were upset, and we caught a glimpse of maneuvering warships on the faculty lounge TV. The next thing we knew, we were being told to head home. For me, that meant hopping on SEPTA’s 67 bus. My younger brother and I watched news coverage of the devastation from our living room couch.

At first, the attacks seemed to make the country stronger. We heard the inspiring story of the passengers who fought back on United 93, their plane crashing into a Pennsylvania field instead of its intended Washington target. When President George W. Bush threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium on Oct. 30 during the World Series, it felt like everyone was cheering him on, Republican or Democrat, Yankees fan or not. When he delivered a strike despite wearing a bulletproof vest under his pullover, it seemed like a promise that everything would get back to normal.

It never did. Now, 25 years later, Americans overwhelmingly believe the country is on the wrong track, that we’ve strayed from our founding principles, that there is corruption in the federal government, and that the lives of our children may be worse than our own.

Much of what went wrong can be traced to our initial efforts to avenge the dead.

When the U.S.-led international coalition invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 to destroy al-Qaeda and bring its leader, Osama bin Laden, to justice, it seemed like a moral and strategic necessity. In March 2003, the Bush administration expanded the war on terror to Iraq under dubious claims of the existence of weapons of mass destruction. A year later, as the justification for the war was falling apart, revelations of brutal torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq destroyed what little credibility and international goodwill Bush had left.

The reaction to 9/11 itself also presaged what was to come. While most Americans rallied to the flag after the attacks, a persistent subculture insisted they were faked in some way. The so-called 9/11 Truth Movement may have been a collection of cranky conspiracy theorists, but they represented a model for where America was heading — a time when people increasingly cannot agree on basic facts and no longer inhabit a shared reality.

It isn’t just failures abroad that have fostered this sense of cynicism. In the ’90s, there was a great spirit of optimism about new technologies. The internet was heralded as a way to break down barriers and foster international cooperation. Initially, this also seemed to be true.

On message boards, once-lonely hobbyists found one another, sharing knowledge about topics as disparate as model trains, hiking, or fashion. Even fierce political opponents like Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich could agree on letting the internet mostly regulate itself.

Today, 41% of Americans report having little to no confidence in tech companies. Instead of democratizing access to information, social media has flooded the zone with nonsense. Online ad revenue is reaped by tech companies while content providers fight over the scraps. Many local newspapers, their economic model upended, have either disappeared or been hollowed out. More and more, people are getting their news from short-form video apps like TikTok or Instagram, or from influencers who rarely cite their sources or explore the nuance behind any issue. The public’s distrust of Big Tech has somehow not spread to the figures the companies’ algorithms have pushed to the forefront.

The 2008 financial crisis also took a toll. Americans have disagreed over just about everything in our history, but the wave of foreclosures, stagnation in wages, and continued affluence for the country’s wealthiest sapped the public’s faith in the American dream. During the Great Depression, some wealthy figures like Charles Schwab and the Vanderbilts saw their fortunes shrink. During the Great Recession, the big banks received a $700 billion bailout, while 10 million ordinary Americans lost their homes.

In the 2000 election, both Democratic candidate Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush were viewed favorably by most of the American electorate. These days, a more divisive politics rules. Supporters of Donald Trump, convinced by the president that the 2020 election was stolen, stormed the U.S. Capitol. While it is true the 2000 election was itself controversial, with lawsuits about recounts in Florida ultimately reaching the U.S. Supreme Court, Gore conceded “for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy.” Both Gore and President Bill Clinton attended Bush’s inauguration.

Today, roughly 60% of Americans disapprove of President Trump, and just as many disapproved of President Joe Biden at the end of his term. Both major political parties are also unpopular, and railing against the party establishment has become a popular tactic in primaries.

Of course, given the failures of the last 25 years, that establishment deserves to be questioned. The mainstream leaders of both parties share responsibility for the erosion in public confidence. Not only have they failed to anticipate the challenges of the 21st century, but their relentless partisanship has also made crafting sustainable solutions impossible. Nor have they offered new ideas that can compete with pledges to put every American on Medicare or claims that all our problems will disappear if we simply deport enough people.

That doesn’t mean the next 25 years can’t be better.

The beautiful thing about government of the people, for the people, and by the people is that we are in control. Just as our predecessors freed themselves from British rule, destroyed the power of slave holders that was corrupting our republic, reined in Gilded Age trusts, defeated fascism, and marched to finally make good on our nation’s stated belief that all men are created equal, those of us charged with the rights and responsibilities of citizenship today can also change our nation for the better. We must.

Even as the Russian invasion of Ukraine drags toward year five, radical Israeli settlers seize land meant for a Palestinian state, and our nation divides itself over every ginned-up bit of culture war ephemera, we retain the same qualities that made us the world’s hegemon in the first place — ingenuity, openness to risk, and drive.

Like the brave passengers on United Airlines Flight 93, we must recognize our predicament, find our resolve, and fight to ensure terror doesn’t win.

After 25 years, hers is the 9/11 story I can’t let go of

Paul Davies — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:01:00 +0000

In the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, I went to New York to report on a story about Johanna Sigmund, a young woman from Wyndmoor who perished after one of the hijacked planes rammed the north tower.

Over the course of my career, I’ve spent more time than anyone would want writing pieces about people whose lives were cut short prematurely. One of the most memorable was Johanna, whose story and positive spirit remain seared into my soul.

Johanna’s parents invited me, a stranger, into their home at their worst hour. They took the time to tell me about their only daughter, and shared photograph after photograph after photograph — Johanna smiling after she ran the New York City Marathon, Johanna posing with her girlfriends at a wedding, and so on.

One image stood out.

It was a photo of Johanna, 25, and her brother, John, 23, smiling while standing arm in arm at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. The photo was taken two months before the terror attacks. In the background loomed the twin towers.

Johanna’s story has stuck with me for a quarter century, but her life is emblematic of the promise and potential of so many others who were lost. At least 40 people with ties to Philadelphia and its western suburbs were killed in the attacks, including 18 from Bucks County, 11 from Montgomery County, five in Chester County, eight from Delaware County, and three from Philadelphia. It may be impossible for any of us to fathom how many other lives were forever impacted by the horrors of that day.

I wondered how Johanna’s family and friends had fared over the years.

So much has been lost in the 25 years since 9/11. Johanna would have turned 50 on the first day of summer — the longest day of sunlight. Her elegant beauty remains frozen in time, and — all these years later — her life remains a catalyst for good.

A scholarship fund set up in her name continues to help students attend St. Malachy School in North Philadelphia, as well as another at her alma mater, Springside Chestnut Hill Academy.

Johanna packed a lot into her brief time here. She was the captain of the field hockey, lacrosse, and squash teams in high school. She studied economics and played field hockey at Fairfield University, and spent a semester in Paris before moving to New York in 1998 with three friends from Philadelphia.

When I met with Johanna’s roommates a few weeks after the attack, they shared stories of her love of cooking, dancing, and listening to U2, often replaying the song “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” that begins, “I’m not afraid of anything in this world.”

Johanna cared for others. She distributed pizza and McDonald’s to the homeless people in her neighborhood. She helped a woman who was thrown from a taxi get to a hospital. Johanna spent the night by her side and returned home in the morning with blood on her clothes.

Kimberly Ongaro, a roommate and friend from Springside, called her “an angel.”

The toughest interview in the weeks after the attack was with Johanna’s boyfriend, Joe Bonavita. They had dated for several years and had discussed marriage.

Their final weekend together was a whirlwind. They went to the Yankees game Friday night and drove to the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., on Saturday, met up with friends, attended the Army football game, and walked through the cemetery for soldiers, which included Gen. George Armstrong Custer.

On Sunday, Johanna competed in a 5K race down Broadway before continuing on as part of her training for the Philadelphia Marathon. She and Joe shared dinner that night.

Johanna did not feel well on Monday, but went to work. When she was still under the weather on Tuesday — Sept. 11 — Joe urged her to stay home.

But she went into the office at an investment firm on the 93rd floor of the north tower.

Joe worked near the Trade Center. As he exited the subway, he saw the first plane smash into the north tower.

A life upended

I located her brother, John, and emailed him. He responded a few minutes later and graciously agreed to speak. When we connected after 25 years, it almost felt like old friends catching up.

John told me how 9/11 upended his life.

He had planned to move to New York after college, but lost interest after the attack. He visited ground zero to commemorate the first anniversary. President George W. Bush greeted families, including John’s aunt, who offered veiled advice regarding the plans to invade Iraq. “I hope you are making a prayerful decision,” she told the president.

Bush was taken aback, but continued shaking hands before circling back to tell John’s aunt that he prayed every day.

After college, John, a Spanish speaker, spent a year with AmeriCorps teaching literacy to second graders in Kensington. After he explained to one class’s teacher why he wanted to take off for the anniversary of 9/11, she had her students write notes of support. John was struck by how many kids shared stories of loved ones they had lost to violence.

“Everyone has their 9/11,” he said.

Along the way, we all pay a price. Some more than others. But how one responds is a lesson for all as we navigate these trying times 25 years after 9/11.

John said he wonders how his life would have been different if not for Sept. 11. After a year teaching in Philadelphia, he moved to Texas, in part to get away. He earned a master’s degree in art education at the University of Texas in Austin before going on to teach at Say Sí, an after-school arts program in San Antonio.

“Everyone has their 9/11.”
John Sigmund

John’s attempt to get away brought him back to New York. One of his students won an art award that included a trip for the student and teacher to Carnegie Hall. The artwork was displayed at the Winter Garden located near ground zero in May 2010.

“My heart sank,” John said. “I didn’t want to go anywhere near ground zero.”

Even then, nearly a decade after the towers fell, ground zero remained little more than a giant pit with the Freedom Tower slowly rising alongside it. In a macabre daily scene, tourists jammed the sidewalks, gawking and posing for pictures in front of what John could only see as a mass grave, while street hustlers sold photos of the hijacked planes crashing into the towers.

John tried to maintain his composure as he made his way through the gauntlet to the Winter Garden, but a man stepped in front of him and tried to sell him a fiery photo from the attack.

John snapped. He grabbed the stack of photos from the man, threw them in the air, and cussed him out. The two got into a tussle. After the fracas, John tried to gather himself by channeling his sister’s unflappable spirit.

“Johanna, help me,” he said to himself while overlooking ground zero. “I need to get it together.”

‘Beyond coincidence’

John calmed down and carried on. After the event, he met friends at a nearby bar. John was telling them about the run-in with the street hustler when he suddenly saw Johanna’s old boyfriend, Joe Bonavita, across the bar.

Joe had moved to New Orleans but, in a twist of fate, was in town for a 9/11 event. The two were not close but quickly bonded. John viewed the reunion as his sister’s handiwork.

“Some things are beyond coincidence,” he said.

Eventually, John did move to New York. The city helped him better find himself. After years of worrying about disappointing his parents or adding to their suffering, John told them he was gay. His parents, who have a deep Catholic faith, were supportive.

Twelve years ago, John returned to Philadelphia and fell in love with the city, and especially Fairmount Park.

But tragedy struck again in September. Three days after the 20th anniversary of 9/11, his father died.

For John, September remains the cruelest month. But he credits a strong support network of cousins and friends for helping him navigate life’s challenges — and added that Johanna always feels close by.

“I have a thing with the wind,” John said. “When I think about her, the wind will kick up.”

After losing his sister and father in September, John and his partner, Jaime, decided to add some positivity to the month. They got married last Sept. 26 and are planning an anniversary party in a couple of weeks.

Expect a comforting breeze.

In Pa. coal country, local police join with ICE to bring arrests, fear

Will Bunch — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 19:01:00 +0000

SCHUYLKILL HAVEN, Pa. — Brett Sell had a bad feeling about coming to work on July 28. The painting contractor was part of a small work crew rehabbing a two-story commercial property in Orwigsburg — a borough of just over 3,000 people in the heart of east-central Pennsylvania’s coal country — and workers had seen what looked like an unmarked law enforcement vehicle circling the site the day before.

“Yo, look up!” Sell said to his fellow painter, Orlando Rivera.

Police cars from Orwigsburg and neighboring Schuylkill Haven, lights flashing, blocked off the street while agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in tactical vests swarmed the work site. Sell was stunned as he and four other workers were quickly handcuffed by ICE agents — even though Sell and Rivera are native-born U.S. citizens.

Rivera, a biracial Puerto Rican who grew up in Bethlehem and now lives in another Schuylkill County borough, Tamaqua, said he was “embarrassed” as he stood in handcuffs while locals came out into the street to gawk. “I do a lot of work in that town,” he said, adding that “it made me feel like I was portrayed as a criminal.”

And he’s convinced he was handcuffed — even after offering to show the agents his ID — because of his race. “I get that my skin tone is tan,” he said, “but with the Fourth Amendment, they can’t go off my skin color, you know?”

Two workers were detained. One was later released, but the other — Catarino Hernandez Velasquez — a Mexican native who’s lived in Pottsville for at least 14 years, and a well-known contractor who poured concrete for the just-reopened 1928 Miners Hotel — was taken away and sent to ICE’s Moshannon Valley Detention Center in Central Pennsylvania, known for its overcrowding and complaints about lousy food and medical neglect. Kevin Medina, a leader of the local Latino community, bemoaned the arrest of a “very hardworking gentleman with a stable contracting business in the area … very busy.”

Now, gone … in a matter of minutes.

The Orwigsburg raid was a dramatic moment, yet such scenes are becoming increasingly common this summer in Schuylkill County, Pa., a constellation of rusty boroughs where coal was king in the 20th century, and Donald Trump got 71% of the vote in 2024.

‘In Schuylkill Haven, they can’t go there’

Since the start of the year, ICE — flush with a whopping windfall of $170 billion shoveled by Congress to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to amp up immigration raids and detention — has dangled pledges to many tiny police departments. In Schuylkill County, which locals call “the Skook,” more than $1.5 million has been distributed to law enforcement. The police chief and pols all but publicly salivated at the chance — under the controversial program known as 287(g) — to buy a desperately needed new cruiser or other cop tools in return for working with ICE to arrest and hold local immigrants for the feds.

Some 14 law enforcement agencies — the most of any of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties — have inked 287(g) pacts with ICE, launching a new era of beat cops making immigration arrests that has roiled daily life in Schuylkill County. Practically overnight, cops were setting up truck inspections on a busy rural bypass or running checkpoints at places like the Freeze, a popular ice cream joint on the main drag, Route 61. Officers were pouncing on immigrants who showed up at the county courthouse in Pottsville, or assisting ICE on workplace raids like the one in Orwigsburg.

Arrests leading to ICE detention and deportation cases skyrocketed across Schuylkill County — more than 100 since the start of the year, with most the result of ICE cooperation under 287(g) — leaving families torn apart while creating a climate of fear among what had been a rapidly growing Latino community in and around Pottsville. Suddenly, essential workers or their loved ones grew terrified that a busted taillight or failing to signal while shifting lanes could turn their world upside down.

One borough with just over 5,000 residents — Schuylkill Haven — has seen at least 59 immigration arrests in about four months, a staggering number. The figures come from Chicago-based ICE watcher Andrew Thrasher, a law-firm staffer and data expert who regularly crunches federal statistics obtained by the Deportation Data Project through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

“People are afraid to go out,” Medina — who immigrated to Schuylkill County from Honduras, became a U.S. citizen and a notary and insurance agent, and formed a local Latino support group, Puentes de Apoyo — told me when we met in a Hispanic-owned Pottsville pizza joint. “I’ve got one contractor who told me they’ve got to change routes because now they know that in Schuylkill Haven, even they can’t go over there. And the stress, mentally, that I’m seeing in these families of, ‘What am I going to do if this happens?’”

The wave of arrests has put Schuylkill County — mostly rural, mostly conservative, and far removed from the glare of media or the kind of organized ICE resistance you see in big cities — on the cutting edge of an aggressive new strategy for mass deportation. This approach is bringing a xenophobic Donald Trump regime closer to fulfilling its once-unthinkable goal of removing one million immigrants from the United States every year.

Trump Country embraces 287(g)

The tag team of local cops and tactical-gear-wearing ICE agents is the biggest reason why federal immigration arrests spiked in July to a Trump-era high of 49,571, or about 1,600 every day. Statisticians who are tracking mass deportation said that 287(g) arrests — named for the section of a 1996 law that authorized the program — involving local police went from less than 3% of the total under Joe Biden to about 15% now, and will only climb higher as hundreds of new departments sign up.

This year, about 58% of the people nabbed by cops and turned over to ICE under 287(g) have no criminal record or pending charges, a higher rate than the typical ICE arrestee. Thrasher found the number for Pennsylvania is even higher, about 70%.

While not as numerous as in big and heavily conservative states like Texas and Florida, the Keystone State’s 1,216 arrests under the 287(g) program in the first seven months of 2026 rank the commonwealth fourth in the nation — on a Top 15 list made up of states almost exclusively south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Pennsylvania’s outlier status is punctuated by the fact that two large bordering states — New York and Maryland — have moved, with some bumps, to ban their police agencies from signing 287(g) agreements. Almost all of the Pennsylvania arrests came from smaller cities, exurbs, or rural areas — especially the south-central and northeastern regions of the state, and a smattering of western localities — that voted heavily for Trump and his anti-immigrant message.

The small-town nature of this renewed push for mass deportation is a defining feature of the Trump regime strategy, and not a bug. The race among Schuylkill County’s police departments — many with just three or four cops, including the chief — to sign up for 287(g) and its pumped-up pile of cash came exactly as the two Minneapolis murders of U.S. citizens by immigration cops were fueling growing public outrage.

As a brutal ICE winter ended, the Trump regime ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and the notorious field general Greg Bovino, and ended an era of loud, publicity-seeking operations with catchy names in large blue cities that stirred up local protesters who blew whistles and filmed every move by the masked, armed agents.

Under new DHS boss Markwayne Mullin, ICE and its allies are focused on what you might call small-batch immigration busts — in courthouses or on airport security lines, and thanks to 287(g), at local traffic stops or truck inspections. No one is blowing whistles, and few of these busts get caught on video. Yet, even here in blood-red Trump Country, some locals are troubled by the intense police focus on immigrants and what it’s doing to the moral fabric of their community.

‘Arrest them like the Gestapo’

“No one’s telling you not to arrest people — I’m telling you not to hunt for them, to do stops on the side of the road and arrest them like the Gestapo,” a Democratic city council member in Pottsville, Andy Wollyung, told me after he tried and failed to stop the county seat from joining 287(g). He later fretted that immigration arrests “will drive a wedge in people, you know? These aren’t unknown people. These are our neighbors.”

“When local police officers serve as a force multiplier for ICE, we know that people become more afraid to report crime,” Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council, told me. “They become less willing to cooperate with local law enforcement when it comes to investigations, including things like homicides. And there’s an overall mistrust of public institutions.”

The irony is that today’s Schuylkill County was built on the backs of immigrants — initially a wave of Irish who dug the 19th-century coal mines and were also persecuted, including six members of the infamous Molly Maguires who were hanged in Pottsville in 1877. They were followed by Eastern Europeans who filled the local mining towns like Mahanoy City and Shenandoah.

Those who stayed behind after the mines started closing in the 1950s and kept its hillside towns of striking Victorian architecture and utilitarian rowhouses alive got a booster shot in the 21st century with an unexpected new wave: Latinos. Many landed in Schuylkill County when seeking a place with cheaper housing and more job opportunities for hard workers than big cities like New York or Philadelphia.

Four years ago, Pastor Luis Rivera and his wife bought a historic local church building in Pottsville and rechristened it as Iglesia Cristiana El Kairos, under the umbrella of the Evangelical New Life Church, to serve a Latino community now growing by leaps and bounds.

“You see a lot of traffic,” the pastor told me. “You see people remodeling more houses. And a lot of the stores are opening around here … It was really dead before, you know?” Today, it’s estimated that about 1,000 of Pottsville’s 14,000 residents are Latino.

A ‘stable’ life is upended

Six of the more recent arrivals were Venezuelan-born Carlos Moreno, his wife, Wendy Martínez, and their blended family of four teenagers. They’d been on the run from government persecution and armed conflict across South America when they came to America in 2023, and stayed in a cramped public shelter in New York City as the family sought asylum and obtained work permits.

When they moved to a narrow rowhouse on a rugged patch of Norwegian Street on the steep hillside up from downtown Pottsville, the couple found jobs at the county’s large Amazon warehouse and even started a small cleaning business, even though Moreno, 37, is legally blind and has severe hearing problems.

“For the first time in years, it felt like our lives were finally becoming stable,” Martínez would later write. “Then, in the fall of 2025, we learned that I was pregnant. It was an unexpected surprise, but a very welcome one.”

A bigger and less welcome surprise awaited. This spring, a neighbor called police to complain about noise — music from a small boom box — and Moreno received a summons. He decided to challenge it at the Schuylkill County Courthouse a few blocks away, and when he lost, he paid a fine, walked out of the courtroom — and right into ICE agents waiting to arrest him. He was sent to detention in the Cambria County Jail and stayed there as massive earthquakes halted deportations to Venezuela. He was locked up when his son, Noah, was born — on the Fourth of July.

Martínez was alternately rocking and bouncing her then-6-week-old son when I joined Medina in visiting their cluttered, narrow rowhouse in August. The windows were covered with thick blankets that let in only a sliver of light, and Martínez was bookended on a sofa by her two daughters, on their phones, who rarely leave home.

“They told him that he was a dangerous person,” Martínez said in Spanish, interpreted by Medina, as her baby babbled. “There hasn’t been any situation where he was against the law, or anything.” Struggling to pay her bills and support the five children, Martínez launched a GoFundMe page, but has only raised $2,695 of her $4,000 goal. Her husband was recently moved to ICE detention in Louisiana.

Like most immigration arrests since 287(g) swept across Schuylkill County, there is an element of mystery about what exactly happened to Moreno. I twice called the Schuylkill County sheriff, Shawn Butler, to ask if his department — the first county agency to join 287(g), back in January — was involved, but he did not get back to me. Not once in a month of reporting did a police chief or municipal official return a call or email from this out-of-town columnist. Secrecy, and a lack of accountability, seems to be baked into the 287(g) program.

‘You don’t answer anything’

“Any Right-to-Know requests, any FOIA requests, anything — you defer that right down to the Department of Homeland Security,” Jody Long, the then-police chief in Mahanoy Township, told the Pottsville City Council when it was voting on a 287(g) agreement in May. “You don’t answer anything with that. That’s right from their legal team.”

In early September, I attended the bimonthly meeting of the Schuylkill Haven borough council hoping to ask Police Chief Jeffrey Walcott, Mayor John Williams, or other officials how and why their small borough just south of Pottsville had managed to make at least 59 immigration arrests since signing a 287(g) pact with ICE on April 5. I didn’t get very far.

In a brief conversation, Walcott suggested, interestingly, that commenting on 287(g) might bring protesters to Schuylkill Haven. When I asked Williams about the program after the meeting, the police chief interrupted our conversation to say there should be “a unified response,” and then later told me any information would need to come from Homeland Security or a FOIA request.

Most of what citizens and the media in Schuylkill County know about the 287(g) programs comes from borough or township council meetings in which a police chief tells elected officials about all the sweeteners that cash-flush ICE added to the program when Congress and Trump enacted the so-called Big Beautiful Bill in 2025.

Police departments or county sheriffs who join the most common 287(g) Task Force model get $100,000 for vehicles or other equipment and $7,500 for each officer who undergoes 40 hours of mostly online training, as well as additional dollars for their time on immigration matters — all contingent on making actual arrests. In August, Schuylkill Haven officials said they’re expecting a federal check for $152,000 — money the borough wants to spend on buying the currently leased police headquarters.

The cash incentives have sparked a kind of deportation arms race across Pennsylvania, which has gone from just a few 287(g) programs at the start of the year to more than 130, with new ones coming online every day. Most of the council debates tread lightly on the question of liability for an officer who makes a bad arrest — a problem ICE is belatedly looking to fix with a proposal to insure each officer up to $500,000 — or the elevated risk that a traffic stop could lead to violence.

Fighting in the Schuylkill

That’s already happened. On May 20, a Schuylkill Haven cop stopped a car on Route 61 after he claimed the driver had illegally dark-tinted windows. ICE agents who were in the borough and arrived at the stop ran the license of 34-year-old Yensy Rafael Santana Alvarez of New York City and determined he had an immigration removal order.

According to the Skook News, a court affidavit said the man handed over his car keys and stepped out of his car — then ran for it. Alvarez led the law officers on a wild foot chase across the Schuylkill and back, getting tased once, and allegedly pulling one officer underwater as another suffered minor injuries. He was eventually arrested, and felony charges were filed but then dropped.

Some local critics also questioned whether minimally trained cops making immigration arrests is a good idea in a county where some departments have a history of police abuses. “In northern Schuylkill County, over the last 10 years, we’ve had horrendous police … acting very unprofessional in different departments,” John Hampton, a lawyer who has worked with Mahanoy Township, told me.

A heated and emotional debate over the federal 287(g) immigration enforcement program dominated Monday night’s Pottsville Council meeting.

After initially failing in a 3-2 vote, the resolution was reopened moments later and ultimately passed following a council member changing… pic.twitter.com/kSW1QXhgqS
— Skook News (@SkookNews) May 12, 2026

In 2022, two then-police officers in the borough of Minersville were indicted on still-pending federal police brutality charges for allegedly severely beating a man during a traffic stop and falsifying police reports to cover it up. That didn’t prevent ICE from signing a 287(g) agreement with Minersville police in May.

That same month, local activists pleaded with the Pottsville City Council during a meeting that lasted more than five hours not to join the 287(g) program, arguing that immigration arrests would make tourists and new businesses not want to come there. They thought they’d won in a 3-2 vote, only to have GOP council member Scott Price change his position and demand a revote that flipped the outcome, saying that, in the end, “I have to side with our police officers.”

This quaint Pa. borough is a ‘speed trap’ nabbing immigrants for ICE | Will Bunch

One of the few pro-287(g) advocates who spoke at that May hearing was Mahanoy Township’s Long, who said his department had been “the leader in the county” by making 10 immigration arrests, mainly at what he called a truck-safety inspection point. “ICE does not come in and tell you what to do,” Long insisted. “We tell them what to do.”

He was joined by one of his officers, Anthony Maldonado, who cited his own heritage as a Puerto Rican to insist there is no racial profiling. “I have family members who are light-skinned, dark-skinned, everywhere in between, so I would take it very personally if we conducted ourself unprofessionally to that effect,” he said.

‘Because you look like a Mexican’

The room in Pottsville did not hear from Moe Montalvo, a gutter contractor from nearby Tamaqua who, in mid-April, passed through the checkpoint on Burma Road operated by cops from Mahanoy Township and assisted by adjacent Ryan Township officers. He said he was part of a two-truck convoy, and the first one with two white occupants was waved through, while his was stopped to allow the officers to ask Montalvo, a 28-year-old U.S. citizen who is half Puerto Rican and half Egyptian, for his ID and grill him about his identity.

Montalvo posted that day on Facebook that when he told an officer he was born in Montgomery County, the cop replied: “Are you sure? Because you look like a Mexican.” Montalvo also quoted the officer: “Why are you worried? The only thing you should be worried about is when I take my Taser out, because I’m going to aim right for your nose piercing.” I confirmed the incident with Montalvo, who told me that “it seems like there was no doubt that racial profiling was involved here.”

Weeks later, the Mahanoy Township Police Department went dark, at least temporarily, after Long, Maldonado, and its other officer all quit in a disagreement with supervisors. One of the supervisors, Republican Tony Merchlinsky, confirmed to me the entire force had resigned after a dispute with supervisors over its refusal to wear body cameras. He said it was triggered by a civilian complaint over an arrest that did not involve immigration, although he added that “it may have involved racial profiling.”

Maldonado took to Facebook to give his side of the story, saying that a different supervisor had told the township officers they were making too many arrests, and that, as quoted by Maldonado, he preferred “a [B]arney Fife department and have his police drive around and wave at people instead of making arrests.” Merchlinsky confirmed that Mahanoy Township — which recently hired a new, albeit part-time, police chief — has yet to see one dime from the feds of the more than $100,000 that was promised.

The checkpoint drama and police tensions in Mahanoy Township demonstrate some of the many problems when beat cops are drafted to join Trump’s mass deportation crusade. Are police really making their towns safer when one part of the community is taking long traffic detours and covering up their windows in terror of any contact with cops? Is the economic gloom over Pennsylvania’s fading coal country really going to be lifted by clamping down on immigrants who’d been flocking there to pour concrete and rehab old buildings?

Does a region whose very DNA is handed down by the immigrants who once came here to shovel anthracite now want to be known in the 21st century as a “show me your papers” police state?

Few of these questions are being asked as one former coal burg after another races to embrace a Trumpian bargain with the 287(g) program. The latest is Mahanoy Township’s next-door neighbor, Ryan Township, which in June voted conditionally to join the ICE mass deportation program, citing as the biggest incentive its need to replace its run-down Ford Explorer, one of the oldest police cars in Schuylkill County.

Eagles vs. Commanders predictions: Our writers pick a winner for Week 1

Olivia Reiner, Jeff Neiburg, Ryan Novozinsky — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:20:51 +0000

A day more than eight months in the making is nearly here. After a myriad key offseason changes, the Eagles will take the field at Lincoln Financial Field on Sunday (4:25, Fox) looking to prove they’re still the toast of the NFC East, and a viable Super Bowl contender. They’ll do so against a Washington Commanders team trying to turn the page on a bleak 5-12 season in 2025. Here’s how our writers see Sunday going:

Jeff Neiburg

The NFL schedulers threw Sean Mannion a bone. The Eagles have a difficult schedule overall — Sharp Football Analysis rates it the eighth-hardest schedule — but they open with games against the following team defense ranks from 2025: 32, 29, 21.

It should give Mannion and the new-look offense a chance to work out some kinks. Besides the joint practices in New England, the first-team offense hasn’t gotten any work as a unit against a real opponent, and the playbook we saw Andy Dalton, Tanner McKee, and Cole Payton work with during the preseason games is only one small part of what the Eagles have implemented.

Is Sean Mannion ready for his big moment with the Eagles? He’s been preparing for it for years.

We’ll see Jalen Hurts taking more snaps from under center, more receivers in motion, more play action, more middle-of-the-field throws.

The guess here is the offense will have some good and some bad over the first few weeks, but I expect the running game and the new-look wide zone scheme to have some success against a bad defense that hasn’t gotten much better.

Saquon Barkley was my pick to be the NFL’s offensive player of the year, and he should start his 2026 campaign with a lot of yards. The Eagles should run the ball with relative ease and then find high-percentage throws, especially off play-action.

Defensively, the Eagles had an edge before Commanders left tackle Laremy Tunsil’s injury, and it’s even bigger now. They avoided playing Jayden Daniels in each of their matchups with the Commanders last year, but they shouldn’t have much trouble causing havoc Sunday.

Prediction: Eagles 27, Commanders 13

Ryan Novozinsky

The Mannion era is going to start with a bang.

Sure, the Commanders have a new, lauded defensive coordinator in Daronte Jones. But they didn’t exactly make any splashy moves on that side of the ball, which means they’re largely returning a unit that ranked No. 32 in total defense last season.

Their passing defense ranked fourth-worst in the league. Their run defense was even worse, ranking 30th. Mannion’s wide-zone scheme should feast against a unit like this, especially if the run game gets going early, which would set up a play-action attack through the air.

Prediction time: The Inquirer’s game-by-game Eagles picks, NFL playoff selections and major award winners

The Eagles have the backfield weapons to make that happen, too. Barkley looked like his 2024 self in Mannion’s offense this summer and even Tank Bigsby and Will Shipley had their moments. Couple that with the running threat of Hurts — he looked quicker in training camp, as defensive coordinator Vic Fangio pointed out in August — and you should get a relentless rushing attack.

Now, this game isn’t a guaranteed win. The Eagles’ receiver room — sans DeVonta Smith — could prove to be too green or Daniels could take over and drag Washington to victory (like he did many times his rookie season).

But let’s face it: The biggest factor in this game is the Eagles defense, which is arguably their best unit in years. How can you count them out against a team like Washington, which will be without Tunsil.

Fangio’s unit will carry them to victory, but Mannion’s offense will show some flashes.

Prediction: Eagles 35, Commanders 10

Olivia Reiner

This could be a coming-out party for the new-look Eagles run game.

Mannion now helms the offense and is expected to bring a derivative of the Kyle Shanahan/Sean McVay scheme rooted in the wide-zone blocking scheme. The wide-zone runs could help set up the play-action passing game, marrying together both phases of the offensive attack.

Still, the exact playbook remains a mystery, which the Eagles can weaponize to their advantage. Plus, the Commanders have been susceptible to giving up yardage on the ground.

Last season, the Eagles ranked No. 18 in the league in rushing yards. The offense still eclipsed 200 yards on the ground in Week 16 against the Commanders (only one of two occasions last season).

New Eagles OC Sean Mannion ‘loves the run game,’ per colleagues. Inside the designs that could fuel a Saquon Barkley renaissance.

The Commanders have a new defensive coordinator in Jones, who was previously the defensive backs coach and pass game coordinator with the Minnesota Vikings. But Dan Quinn could still have his fingerprints on the defense given his defensive background. Plus, the Commanders didn’t make many dramatic defensive personnel improvements in the offseason that would give the run defense a significant boost.

The other matchup to watch is on the other side of the ball. The Commanders offensive line took a hit when Tunsil tore his triceps in training camp. He was one of the best left tackles in the league last season, allowing the seventh-lowest pressure rate (8%) among 35 offensive linemen with at least 250 pass-blocking snaps at that position, according to Next Gen Stats.

The Commanders could struggle to run the ball behind a shaky offensive line. The Eagles, meanwhile, could thrive. If so, the Eagles will maintain their win streak in Week 1 under Nick Sirianni.

Prediction: Eagles 29, Commanders 18

Charred bodies found inside ferry that caught fire in Philippines as rescuers search for 84 missing

AARON FAVILA, JOEAL CALUPITAN and TERESA CEROJANO — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:16:30 +0000

It was not clear how many additional fatalities were found, with officials saying more details will be released on Saturday.

Images provided by the coast guard showed the gutted interior of the ship and what appeared to be charred remains, ashes and burnt metal, including a car.

A coast guard statement said the fire was declared out, and the response team conducted a safety assessment. Rescuers on Thursday struggled to get inside the burning vessel because of the heat and smoke, and efforts to search for passengers who may been trapped were halted overnight.

Commodore Noemie Cayabyab, the coast guard spokesperson, said the coast guard, police and other agencies were “undertaking the proper recovery and identification of the remains in accordance with established procedures.”

The ferry sailed from the capital, Manila, on Wednesday evening and was around 7.4 kilometers (4.5 miles) off the village of Turda near its destination of Coron in Palawan province when the fire was reported.

The cause of the fire has not been determined.

The coast guard and other vessels have rescued 43 people, some plucked from the dark waters as the ferry burned.

“It’s painful to think that your child was asking for help while she was burning alive,” Lira Daco said as she waited at a rescue center in Turda for word about her missing 20-year-old daughter Cyriel.

“I don’t know how we can find out which one is my child,” she added of the remains found inside the ship. “It’s OK if she just drowned and we can recover her body and give her a proper burial. But now we can’t recognize or hug her.”

Survivor Arnulfo Nokki Villanueva recounted the harrowing night of the fire in a video broadcast by News5.

“The fire quickly spread. That’s when I dropped to the ground and my back was burned,” he said, adding that he jumped from a window. “I wanted to get a life jacket but failed to get one because people were stepping on me. People were in panic.”

According to the manifest, 134 people were onboard, 117 of them passengers and 17 crew. The 53-meter (174-foot) vessel had a capacity to carry 306 passengers and 27 crew.

Two passengers listed in the manifest reported to authorities that they failed to board, bringing the number of missing to 84, the coast guard said.

Two of the survivors were tourists from Chile, according to Rachel Conserman, a staffer of the ship’s owner Atienza Interisland Ferries Inc. They are recovering from injuries in a hospital in Coron, she said, adding that no other foreigners were known to have been on the ship.

The shipping company said in a statement it was assisting those who were on board and their families while coordinating with the coast guard and maritime officials to locate the missing passengers and determine the cause.

Coron is a popular tourist destination known for clear blue waters, limestone cliffs and rock formations.

Ferries are frequently used for transport in the Philippine archipelago. Sea accidents are not uncommon due to storms, badly maintained vessels, overcrowding and spotty enforcement of safety regulations, especially in remote provinces.

In 1987, the ferry Dona Paz sank after colliding with a fuel tanker in the central Philippines, killing more than 4,300 people in the world’s deadliest peacetime maritime disaster.

___

Cerojano reported from Manila, Philippines.

Republican Ryan Mackenzie had the narrowest win in Pa. two years ago. He’s betting Trump will help him again.

Sam Janesch — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 01:17:58 +0000

DALLAS, Texas — As Republicans look to keep their narrow control of Congress by defending the seats they flipped in 2024, there aren’t many places where they can afford to lose fewer votes than in U.S. Rep. Ryan Mackenzie’s district covering the Lehigh Valley and Poconos.

Mackenzie’s takedown of a three-term Democrat by a mere 4,000 votes two years ago was the narrowest congressional race in Pennsylvania — his 1% margin of victory was the seventh smallest out of 435 House districts across the country.

Standing Thursday on the Republican Party’s biggest stage of the year — and likely staring down another razor-thin result this fall — Mackenzie didn’t hold back when laying out the potential stakes.

“I’m running in one of the top races again, and it will determine the future direction for our nation,” Mackenzie said on the second day of the first-ever Republican midterm convention. “Now we must get to work, we must go out and win in November, and we must save America.”

Like one of Pennsylvania’s other vulnerable Republican incumbents who spoke a day earlier, Mackenzie embraced the convention known as “Trump-a-palooza” even as the president’s low poll numbers threaten to hurt their party in the elections.

In an interview after a brief speech that focused on the president’s signature tax cuts, Mackenzie said Democrats’ threats to repeal those cuts and other Trump policies meant the president is, in a sense, on the ballot — so it makes sense to campaign in that way.

“We know the history of American politics is the party who has the White House, their voters end up being less energized in midterm elections, and so I think it was a smart idea to try something like this, a midterm convention, to energize our voters,” Mackenzie said.

Generating enthusiasm for the Republican ticket could be a tough task for Mackenzie and other incumbents, with polling in Pennsylvania showing widespread frustration with Trump’s handling of key issues, including the cost of living.

“Everybody is getting gouged,” said Ron Jones, 79, an Allentown Democratic voter and Navy veteran who said he feels stretched relying on his Social Security and pension checks. “You just can’t afford to live. Period.”

Jones said he hasn’t been following the congressional race closely, but said he plans to help “get rid of all incumbents.”

Going after Brooks on a national stage

Mackenzie told The Inquirer his phone started blowing up with text messages immediately after his speech. The lawmaker said he welcomed the opportunity to have a national audience to talk about his work, and his opponent.

Mackenzie didn’t just applaud Trump’s policies during his speech, he also imitated the president’s ferocious style of politics by blasting his Democratic challenger Bob Brooks as a scandal-ridden, “far-left nutjob.”

Brooks, he contended, was “handpicked by the Democratic establishment,” and has spoken critically about nonunion firefighters. He also accused Brooks of stealing money from his own family, a claim based on a lawsuit brought by Brooks’ former mother-in-law and involving a decades-old debt she says that he owes.

“That’s what crazy looks like,” Mackenzie said.

Brooks, a retired firefighter in Bethlehem and the Pennsylvania Professional Fire Fighters Association president, was recruited last year by prominent Democrats, including Gov. Josh Shapiro and U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio. He quickly got a groundswell of support from moderates and progressives alike, including U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

Those high-profile supporters, and Brooks himself, leaned into his working-class image — highlighting his history of working multiple jobs and his insistence, even as he ran for Congress, on continuing to drive a snowplow and coach high school baseball.

Mackenzie and national Republicans who’ve invested resources into his campaign have repeatedly targeted Brooks for the lawsuit involving his family and for old social media comments.

In one post, Brooks lambasted volunteer firefighters working in areas where other union firefighters operate as “scabs” and other pejoratives.

Brooks has dismissed those and other attacks on his old posts, saying he never thought he would be a candidate for office when he made them.

The Democrat did not directly address those issues in a comment after Mackenzie broadcast them to a national audience.

“Ryan Mackenzie got his wish today: a big boy speaking slot on stage at Trump’s party in Dallas,” Brooks said in a statement that blamed Mackenzie for rising costs and voting against restricting Trump’s attacks in Iran, the two areas that polls show Trump performing the worst among both Republicans and Democrats.

“Mackenzie’s trip to Dallas is a reminder of who he is: a lap dog for Donald Trump, for his party bosses, and for anyone with power and money,” Brooks said.

Just steps from the convention location earlier in the day, a small group of House Democrats that included U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean (D., Montgomery) protested by, mainly, hitting Republicans on affordability.

“If you listen to what’s being said across the street, you might feel like you’re living in some separate reality. Here’s the reality check,” Dean said as she rattled off the higher cost of groceries, electricity and gasoline since Trump took office.

Dean targeted Mackenzie as well as U.S. Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R., Luzerne) and U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) — who each spoke at the convention on Wednesday — specifically, saying they were among the Republicans “happy to coddle a president who is unfit and unwell.”

“Here at the heel of Donald Trump, I don’t know what they think they’re doing,” Dean said behind a podium with a sign reading, “Fighting for an affordable America.”

Both Bresnahan, who is running in a competitive race against Democratic Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti, and Mackenzie focused on an economic message during their speeches.

They did not directly address concerns about inflation, or the Iran war’s effects on the rising cost of gas.

U.S. Rep. Jason Smith, a Missouri Republican who joined Mackenzie onstage, contended the GOP majority had focused its agenda on the working class. He pointed to the tax exemptions for tips and overtime pay.

“If you don’t believe me, just ask yourself, how many billionaires do you know that are tipped employees?” said Smith, the House Ways and Means Commitee chair.

But neither he nor Mackenzie addressed the cuts to Medicaid and food assistance that were included in the same legislation to help pay for the tax cuts they repeatedly touted.

“We delivered tax relief for every American by locking in lower rates and expanding the standard deduction,” Mackenzie said.

Staff writer Alfred Lubrano contributed reporting.

Philly 9/11 responders inhaled a ‘witch’s brew’ of toxic dust. Now they’re sick with deadly diseases.

Wendy Ruderman — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:01:00 +0000

Retired Philadelphia Police Capt. Mark Fisher gets winded and lightheaded while emptying the dishwasher or pushing his gas-powered lawnmower, his lungs forever scarred by the ankle-deep ash that he trudged through at ground zero.

When Fisher arrived at the nation’s worst crime scene, two days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, each step he took kicked up a powdery plume, coating his tan work boots. Dense smoke from fires burning beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center site stung his eyes and clogged his lungs.

Then a lieutenant in charge of the Philadelphia department’s crime scene unit, Fisher scoured the wreckage for nearly two weeks. He helped recover the lifeless body of a firefighter crushed under concrete. A torso. The severed arm of a businessman.

The coughing fits started about a year later. Then, about six years after 9/11, a chest X-ray revealed a thick, hardened fluid around his lungs, making it difficult to breathe. He developed severe pulmonary disease linked to exposure to toxins.

Fisher, 69, needs a double lung transplant soon, his doctors say, that at best will extend his life by five to seven years. His deteriorating health shows how grossly federal and local health officials underestimated the environmental hazards.

“I can’t breathe worth a darn. My lungs just aren’t going to last,” Fisher said, as he sat in his Northeast Philadelphia home with oxygen prongs in his nostrils and a heating pad against his back.

“Everything aches,” he rasped, coughing relentlessly.

Fisher is among roughly 145,000 responders and survivors getting treated through the federally funded World Trade Center Health Program. They are afflicted by everything from respiratory and digestive diseases to mental health disorders and early-onset dementia.

Cancer is the fastest-growing diagnosis, now that enough years have passed for tumors and other abnormalities to emerge, soaring from about 3,200 cases to more than 57,000 within the last 11 years.

Most of the toxic dust — as deep as snow drifts in spots — formed when the concrete floor slabs of the 110-story towers collapsed on top of one another in quick succession. The wreckage, known as “The Pile,” contained more than 350 chemicals and mineral agents: potassium hydroxide in concrete, calcium sulfate in wallboard, jet fuel, asbestos, glass insulation fibers, heavy metals — all finely ground and aerosolized.

“It was such a mixture of stuff, like a witch’s brew,” said Iris Udasin, a Rutgers Health doctor who treats 9/11 responders and studies the long-term health effects of the attack.

The alkaline alone in “the cement from all these buildings was toxic in and of itself,” she said. “It basically burned holes in people’s noses and made them more likely to absorb other chemicals and gases that were in the air.”

From WTC cough to lifelong disease

Udasin directs the WTC Health Program at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J. — one of six clinics created nationally to treat 9/11 responders.

When it opened in 2003, Udasin mostly treated responders for what she calls “World Trade Center cough,” a dry and persistent hacking that improved with asthma medication.

Now their cases are far more complicated and life-threatening, often requiring referrals to medical specialists, from pulmonologists to oncologists.

Udasin can name many of the roughly 3,000 responders she treats annually by their faces alone. She prefers to relay test results, both good and bad, to patients herself, rather than delegate.

On a recent morning, she escorted an older man from an exam room to the clinic’s lobby and asked: “Do you want me to call you with the results? If you are going to be scared, I can have somebody else call you with the results.”

Her patients, hailed as heroes after 9/11, could not have anticipated how working at ground zero would impact their long-term health.

Local and federal officials initially minimized the environmental health hazards. Christine Todd Whitman, who was the head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush, infamously assured the public within days of the attack that the air around the WTC was “safe to breathe.”

However, a 2003 report by the EPA’s inspector general concluded that the agency “did not have sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement.”

“The [EPA] scientists did the best they could with the data that they had and with the knowledge they had at the time,” said Whitman, who had previously served as New Jersey governor.

“It’s a case of you don’t know what you don’t know,” Whitman added in an interview with The Inquirer late last month.

Whitman said her agency did urge responders on “The Pile” to wear protective gear, preferably respirators. The EPA distributed masks, but many refused to wear them, she said.

In hindsight, she said, the masks were not protective enough. Responders are now paying “the price” of breathing toxic air: “It sickens me to say it,” Whitman said.

The Rutgers program grew out of early alarms about air quality hazards, of which details are still emerging. On Tuesday, New York City officials publicly released a trove of documents revealing that toxins lingered in the air for months after the attacks.

Medical monitoring and free healthcare for responders continue to evolve as the responder population ages.

The Rutgers site recently added on-site neuropsychological testing after researchers at Stony Brook University in New York found increased rates of dementia among 9/11 responders. Responders with more exposure to toxins had higher rates of early-onset dementia compared with those with fewer exposures.

Researchers evaluated more than 5,000 WTC responders, with an average age of 53 at the start of the eight-year study.

“As this population ages, we are seeing increasing concerns related to memory, attention, and executive functioning, sometimes at ages when the responders themselves are surprised to be experiencing them,” said Jodi Streich, mental health director at Rutgers’ WTC Health Program.

A stubborn and spreading blood cancer

Udasin’s clinic currently treats 1,177 cancer patients. Research shows that 9/11 responders suffer from thyroid, prostate, lung, and blood cancers at higher rates than the general population.

“The question is: Are certain cancers higher because we looked for them, or are they higher because they’re really higher?” Udasin said. “We really don’t know the answer to that, but my job is to treat everybody.”

In 2023, Udasin successfully lobbied to have gynecologic cancers, including uterine, included on the list of WTC-related conditions.

Greg Masi, 71, a retired Philadelphia police sergeant from the Northeast, was diagnosed with a form of blood cancer known as T-cell lymphoma in 2019.

First, red bumps appeared on his left arm. A scaly rash has since spread over much of his body, killing hair follicles. His oncologists worry the cancer will find “a road map” into his organs.

Light therapy and topical medications did not work. Chemo and radiation would be a last resort. Since there is no cure, the goal is to slow it down.

Masi, an expert in radio communications, can still hear the horns that blared each time responders thought they found someone still alive beneath the rubble at ground zero, or to signal an imminent structural collapse.

The dust that caked cars and blanketed fire escapes struck him as a mere nuisance.

“We figured it was just dust, like dirt,” Masi said. “We had no idea it had harmful toxins in it.”

An avid runner and marathoner, Masi developed bad chest colds with wheezing about five years after Sept. 11. He was later diagnosed with asthma and nodules on his lungs, both common afflictions among responders.

He recently learned that one nodule has doubled in size, and doctors plan to monitor it for signs of cancer.

Mental health toll still mounting

Multiple diagnoses are commonly seen in 9/11 responders. Frank Geffre Jr., a retired firefighter from Central Jersey, has asthma, two types of cancer, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

In 2013, surgeons removed a “grapefruit-sized tumor” and parts of his colon and stomach to treat his stage-four colon cancer. Two years later, he learned the cancer had spread to his rectum.

After more than a decade of chemotherapy and radiation, his cancer is in remission. He credits Udasin, his primary care doctor, with saving his life.

He sees a psychiatrist and a therapist for PTSD, which he finds especially hard to manage as Sept. 11 approaches each year. He lies awake after a recurring nightmare in which he is trapped in Manhattan with his family amid a terrorist attack, and he can’t get them out.

After the first plane struck on 9/11, Geffre and five other firefighters from Fire District No. 3 in Piscataway were immediately dispatched. His team got to ground zero shortly after the second tower violently pancaked.

“It was dark as can be, even though it was daylight. You had smoke clouds so thick you couldn’t even see your hand in front of your face,” Geffre said. “The dust was so thick it was like you had two foot of snow the night before.”

He initially wore respiratory gear, but the oxygen tank ran out as he worked nonstop over the first 30 hours. He saved roughly a dozen people after putting out fires that were blocking their exit from the burning buildings within the World Trade Center complex.

He vividly recalls finding a brown dress shoe with a foot still in it. A blue polyester suit jacket with a torso seared to its lining. A wristwatch. A ring.

In all, he worked The Pile for 20 days, smearing Vicks VapoRub under his nose to cope with the “unforgettable, unbearably horrid smell of burning human flesh,” he said.

Now he can’t use the menthol and eucalyptus goo for his bouts of sinusitis, because the scent stirs bad memories.

“It feels like it was yesterday and a lifetime ago,” Geffre said. “The ‘Never Forget’ vow is not for first responders. We won’t ever forget. It’s embedded in us.”

He is ever-vigilant, prone to panic attacks. He avoids movie theaters and other places with crowds. “Too many variables,” he said.

He has a second home in Florida but drives back and forth. He won’t get on a plane. “I get paranoid that somebody on the plane is going to hijack it,” he said.

Two of the five firefighters with him on Sept. 11 have since died of cancer. He keeps in touch with four of the people he helped out of burning buildings. One committed suicide in recent years.

Geffre, enrolled in the Rutgers program since its start, gets his mental healthcare through the clinic, which has seen a significant increase in demand for these services.

As more responders become ill or die from 9/11-related diseases, some have developed “heightened anxiety and vigilance about their own health,” Streich said.

Having more unstructured time in retirement, along with the loss of job identity and camaraderie, can be detrimental for mental health, she said.

“Things that we once buried — they come fully alive during retirement,” Streich said, adding that the support group she runs for retirees is now the most widely attended after the cancer support group.

Emergency responders who had felt too embarrassed or ashamed to seek help while working — because they feared being seen as weak — are coming in for the first time. Many are unable to eat or sleep, Streich said.

“We see them when they are at rock bottom,” Streich said. “They’ll come in and say, ‘I’m ready to talk about what I’ve been holding in for 25 years.’”

‘Exhaustion, desperation and heartache’

When asked if he regrets being dispatched to ground zero, Mark Fisher is emphatic: “Absolutely not.”

But he is tormented by images of people standing outside makeshift morgues with photos of their missing loved ones.

Fisher recalls becoming so distraught that a Red Cross volunteer pulled apart two tables piled with fresh clothes for responders to reach and embrace him.

“She hugged me for the longest time,” Fisher recalled, blowing air through his lips to steady his breathing and control tears. “I’m an Irish Catholic, so I wear my heart on my sleeve and face. I just had that look of exhaustion, desperation, and heartache.”

These days, he feels exhausted both emotionally and physically as his lung disease progresses. Fisher spent most of this summer in the hospital with a kidney infection that required two surgeries.

Five days after he got out of the hospital, his gall bladder became infected. “If I die, I want to die in a Catholic hospital,” he told his wife. Doctors removed his gall bladder in July.

The once-burly cop is rail-thin. He’s lost 35 pounds.

Fisher’s priority right now is spending time with his wife and former sweetheart at Archbishop Ryan High School, and making sure she will be in decent financial shape when he dies.

Fisher, Masi, and two other responders from the Philadelphia Police Department are seeking written assurances from the city that if they die from their World Trade Center-related illnesses, their families will receive line-of-duty death benefits.

The status would enable their spouses to collect their full pensions, rather than half.

City officials said their families can apply to the Philadelphia Board of Pensions and Retirement, which would review each case individually after death.

Sue Fisher tries not to cry in front of her husband of 42 years; she’ll do it behind the shed in their backyard or on a walk with their golden retriever, Bentley.

He wants to delay as long as possible a double lung transplant, for which the survival rate is about five to seven years. “If they say that’s all he’s got, I’ll take it,” Sue Fisher said. “It’s better than him suffering the way he is.”

At night, she lies awake listening for the sound of Fisher’s breathing. Sometimes, she fears he has stopped. Then she nudges him with her toe until he stirs.

What to know about Sunday's election in Sweden, NATO's newest member

KOSTYA MANENKOV — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:09:51 +0000

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Sweden is holding an election on Sunday that will determine whether a conservative leader remains in charge and a hard-right party wins ministerial jobs for the first time, or whether the center left returns to power.

Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson is seeking a second four-year term at the helm of the European Union nation that is also NATO's newest member. His predecessor hopes to win the job back. The question of who will govern has taken up more space than actual policy issues.

More than 8 million people in the nation of about 10.6 million people are eligible to vote in the election for the 349-seat parliament in Stockholm, the Riksdag, which will elect the next prime minister.

This is an election about leaders, not issues

Kristersson has led Sweden since 2022 with a three-party center-right coalition. It relies on outside support from the Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigration party that has far-right roots but has moved toward the political mainstream, for a parliamentary majority. If the right is reelected, it can expect Cabinet posts this time.

He's up against Magdalena Andersson of the center-left Social Democrats, a party that more often than not led Swedish governments since World War II. Andersson served as prime minister from 2021 until she lost power at the last election.

Experts say the campaign has been fragmented and incoherent, with policy questions such as how healthcare should be organized drowned out by the question of which parties will be able to put together a government.

“Crime has come down, inflation has come down. So these topics are not really what people discuss,” said Zeth Isaksson, a sociologist in electoral behavior at Stockholm University and a political scientist at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. “People discuss who is going to be in government, and that’s what the election is about.”

The winner will need to build a coalition to govern

There are two major political blocs: one with four parties on the right and another with four parties on the left. So the big question is not so much which party wins as which side can put together a majority. Individual parties need a minimum 4% of the vote to win parliamentary seats.

On the face of it, “it would be a sensation if the opposition parties, having been ahead in the opinion polls pretty much for four years since the last election, didn’t now win a majority,” said Nicholas Aylott, associate professor of political science at Södertörn University.

But he said that an “extremely defensive” campaign by the Social Democrats may have cost them some support, leaving some voters wondering why they should support the party. The right-wing bloc's hope of convincing voters that it's more united than its rivals may have had “a little impact,” he added.

A populist right-wing party could be in the next Cabinet

One significant thing is different in this election. The Sweden Democrats, who in 2022 took 20.5% of the vote to become the biggest party on the right, can expect Cabinet seats if power doesn't change hands.

Kristersson announced in April that his conservative Moderates would allow them into government if the right has a majority — though he would remain prime minister, even if the Sweden Democrats are the stronger party.

The Sweden Democrats were founded in the 1980s by people who had been active in right-wing extremist groups, including neo-Nazis. They toned down their rhetoric and expelled openly racist members under Jimmie Åkesson, who has led them since 2005 and overseen their growth from what was once a marginal party.

“There’s some, I won’t say fear, but trepidation, apprehension about the possibility of Sweden Democrat ministers,” Aylott said, and the Social Democrats recently have tried to exploit that.

But even as parties on the populist right gain elsewhere in Europe, for instance in a far-right triumph in a weekend state election in Germany, the election may reinforce the impression that the Sweden Democrats "have peaked to some extent," Isaksson said.

Swedes are united on support for Ukraine

“The biggest threat to Sweden’s security is from the war in Ukraine and there is almost complete consensus in Sweden about support for Ukraine and deep antipathy toward Russia,” Aylott said.

Sweden's Psychological Defense Agency said that the country's election isn't Russia's top priority, as that broad support reduces the incentive for Moscow to interfere.

However, just over a week before the election, Expo magazine published a report alleging that a civil servant working in parliament for the Sweden Democrats had spread Russian state narratives on social networks. Her partner is the head of the party's office for coordination with the government, Gustav Gellerbrant.

Gellerbrant said her posts were taken out of context and were meant as irony and sarcasm. He said he decided to go on parental leave to avoid shifting the focus of the election campaign.

Kristersson, who said that “there is no room for pro-Russian narratives in Sweden,” welcomed that decision.

After decades of post-World War II neutrality and centuries of broader nonalignment with major powers, Sweden joined NATO in 2024 as the trans-Atlantic military alliance's 32nd member. The move to join was initiated by Andersson's government after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and completed under Kristersson.

Poland warns Russia likely to intensify provocations on Ukraine's borders with European countries

CLAUDIA CIOBANU and STEPHEN McGRATH — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:08:43 +0000

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Two incidents along Ukraine's borders with Poland and Moldova this week are a preview of potential intensified Russian provocations at Ukraine's border crossing points with Europe, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said.

Two people died when Russian drones hit the Starokozache border crossing between Ukraine and Moldova on Tuesday night while a "direct threat" to a Polish-Ukrainian crossing point on Wednesday night was only avoided thanks to cooperation between Warsaw and Kyiv, Tusk said on Thursday.

He gave no further details of the incident, nor did he present evidence of Russian involvement.

Tusk said he received a briefing on Thursday from CIA Director Jim Ratcliffe, who was recently in Moscow, about the risks posed by Russia in the region in the coming months.

“Russia already decided to engage in provocative attacks on border crossing points, for example in Moldova,” he said, speaking on Thursday in Bratislava, Slovakia, during a meeting of central European countries and Ireland. “We expect similar actions regarding border crossings with Ukraine in other countries as well, including Poland.”

Tusk added that he received information from Ratcliffe indicating Poland and Europe should be prepared for “various scenarios” on the Russian-Ukrainian front and in the countries on the European Union’s eastern flank.

Ukraine shares borders with Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova, as well as Russia and its ally Belarus.

Moldova confronts a string of border incidents

In recent weeks, Moldova, a former Soviet republic and a candidate for European Union membership since 2022, has been affected by multiple incidents near its southern border crossings with Ukraine.

On Aug. 20, an explosion in a parking lot on Ukrainian territory, about 150 meters (490 feet) from Moldova’s southern Giurgiulesti border crossing, resulted in a vegetation fire that spread about 100 square meters (1,076 square feet) onto Moldovan territory. The same day, border police spotted a crater on Moldovan territory about 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) from the border, where they found debris from a type of drone used by Russia in Ukraine.

A day later, Moldova’s Mirnoe border was temporarily closed after Russian strikes nearby on Ukraine. On Aug. 25, Moldova also suspended activity at its Vulcanesti border crossing after an Iranian-made Shahed drone struck the Ukrainian side. Moldova’s border police urged citizens “who hear drone noises or explosions” to remain calm and take shelter.

After the border incident on Tuesday night at the Starokozache crossing, Moldova’s pro-Western President Maia Sandu condemned Russia, and said Moscow’s “brutal war is reaching our border.”

“To deny the danger while Russian drones and missiles sow death and put Moldova in danger, and to criticize your country’s efforts to strengthen its defense system, is to choose betrayal over the safety of your own people,” she said in a post on Facebook.

Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said a border crossing with NATO-member Romania, in the east of the country along the Danube River, was “deliberately damaged, ... as well as export infrastructure.” Moscow has repeatedly targeted Ukraine's river ports throughout the war.

Romania has also reported an almost threefold increase in drone incursions so far this year compared to the whole of 2025, and more than double the number of drones and drone debris found on its territory.

CIA briefs Poland on upcoming Russian threats to Europe

Tusk has been warning for weeks that Russia could carry out a limited military or more significant hybrid provocation against Poland or the three Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, in the near future.

“In the last few hours, I received a fairly detailed report directly from the CIA director regarding possible incidents in the coming months—and this is exactly what I’ve been saying and warning about for many months now,” Tusk said in Bratislava.

In late August, Ratcliffe visited Moscow and held talks with his Russian intelligence counterparts, with Polish politicians speculating that one of the topics could have been the possible Russian threat to NATO.

On Tuesday, Tomasz Siemoniak, Poland's minister overseeing intelligence services met with Ratcliffe at CIA headquarters in Virginia to discuss Poland's security and cooperation with the Americans.

On Thursday and Friday this week, an American delegation including William Cappelletti Jr. from the Department of Defense and Thomas DiNanno from the Department of State, is visiting Poland to check out several potential locations for a permanent U.S. military base there.

Poland has for years sought to host a permanent U.S. base as a strong guarantee of its security in the face of the rising Russian threat.

Poland's high defense spending and major U.S. arms purchases have persuaded the Donald Trump administration to consider putting a permanent base in Poland even as it reorganizes and reduces its overall military presence in Europe.

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McGrath reported from Leamington Spa, England.

Europe and US tied at 2-2 after opening session of Solheim Cup as Korda makes hot start

STEVE DOUGLAS — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:06:25 +0000

DEN BOSCH, Netherlands (AP) — Nelly Korda played like the world No. 1 in a record-setting partnership with Allisen Corpuz, helping the Americans split the opening foursomes 2-2 with Team Europe in a loud and wet start to the Solheim Cup in the Netherlands on Friday.

The early soundtrack to Day 1 — party music and chants just after dawn on a typically boisterous first tee — quickly turned into cheers from visiting American fans around a gloomy Bernardus Golf as Korda and Corpuz dominated the star-studded opening match against Europe's best top players, Charley Hull and Lottie Woad.

With their 4-and-3 win, the U.S. pairing claimed a fifth straight win — an unprecedented feat at the Solheim Cup.

When Alison Lee and Lauren Coughlin put more red on the board by beating Nanna Koerstz Madsen and Alison Lee as rain started to fall, the United States had two of the 14 points needed to take the crystal trophy back across the Atlantic.

Europe rallied, though, with victories in the final two matches of the session.

The Swedish pairing of Maja Stark and Linn Grant went 4 up after seven holes and wound up winning 3 and 2 against Rose Zhang and Jennifer Kupcho.

Then, in the only match that went beyond the 16th hole, Esther Henseleit and Leona Maguire — who were also never behind — completed a 2-up win over Andrea Lee and Lindy Duncan on No. 18.

Korda and Maguire deliver — again

Korda is one of 12 players in the American team this week but is carrying the expectations of a nation.

She delivered early and improved her Solheim Cup record to 11-5-1, the kind of points tally Tiger Woods wished he'd had in Ryder Cups.

“I always make the joke to Nelly — it’s so nice to be 30 yards ahead of where I would be on my own drive,” Corpuz said. “It just makes the hole so much easier.”

Korda and Corpuz combined for the first time in Spain in 2023, winning two points, and did so again in a winning U.S cause in Virginia the following year.

They were 1 down after the first hole here, after Woad poured in a 15-footer for birdie, but the Americans only lost one more hole in the rest of the match.

As for Maguire, she moved to a 9-3-1 record, the best by any European player who has played at least five matches.

“I think I’ve been just very fortunate to have great partners,” the Irishwoman said.

Party atmosphere on first tee

The first tee is always the place to be in these big teams events and it lived up to its billing Friday inside the horseshoe-shaped grandstand containing around 3,000 spectators.

U.S. captain Angela Stanford danced onto the tee after emerging from the tunnel. Stark and Grant swayed their hips to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.” Duncan, a 35-year-old rookie who never expected to play a Solheim Cup, took video with her cell phone. Maguire teed off after chants of “We’ve got Maguire, USA is terrified!” and cheers for each of her practice swings.

“They’re living the dream,” European captain Anna Nordqvist said of the players, “and as a golfer it doesn’t get better than this.”

It was all very jovial, though, with respectful silence for each drive in front of a banner that read: “Dutch Courage. European Glory.”

Pairings for afternoon four-balls

1:05 p.m. (7:05 a.m. EDT/1105 GMT) — Yealimi Noh and Angel Yin, United States, vs. Charley Hull and Lottie Woad, Europe.

1:20 p.m. (7:20 a.m. EDT/1120 GMT) — Megan Khang and Alison Lee, United States, vs. Nanna Koerstz Madsen and Celine Boutier, Europe.

1:35 p.m. (7:35 a.m. EDT/1135 GMT) — Allisen Corpuz and Auston Kim, United States, vs. Mimi Rhodes and Nastasia Nadaud, Europe.

1:50 p.m. (7:50 a.m. EDT/1150 GMT) — Nelly Korda and Lauren Coughlin, United States, vs. Carlota Ciganda and Julia Lopez Ramirez, Europe.

The United States has an 11-7-1 advantage in a series that dates to 1990.

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See AP’s full golf coverage here

Military power alone cannot keep the Strait of Hormuz open

Oscar Blanco — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:01:00 +0000

Recently, the Strait of Hormuz has become a flashpoint in the escalating conflict between the United States and Iran, with the Trump administration alternating between military strikes and threats of further attacks amid negotiations.

This waterway is one of the world’s most important shipping corridors. It connects Persian Gulf energy producers to global markets and carries a substantial share of the world’s energy trade. This applies further pressure on the need to keep it “open,” even as that story is far more complicated than it appears.

The strait is more than a physical waterway. It is also an institutional and commercial corridor sustained by trust, pricing, financing, commodity markets, and insurance premiums. In a modern economy, a waterway like the Strait of Hormuz allows merchant ships to function as part of the circulatory system of global commerce. But passage requires more than the physical opening of the waterway. It also depends on whether insurers, lenders, shipowners, crews, and governments are willing to price, bear, and distribute the risks associated with the passage.

The Trump administration is focusing primarily on one end of the problem: suppressing Iran’s ability to alter the threat landscape in the strait. Crucially, it has paid far less attention to the other end of the equation: owning, transferring, or guaranteeing the residual risk that American military forces cannot eliminate. The history of the Suez Canal crisis shows the consequences of a similar conceptual mistake. It demonstrates how military control of a strategic waterway can prove insufficient when broader risks remain unresolved.

In 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal after the United States and Britain withdrew their financial support for the construction of Aswan High Dam. Nasser announced that, in the absence of external financing, canal revenues would be used to fund the project. Suez was vital for European trade and Middle Eastern oil supplies, so Britain and France saw these actions as a direct challenge to their strategic influence in the region. And so, in coordination with Israel, they took military action against Egypt to seize control of the Canal Zone. Their calculation was that if Nasser were removed and the canal returned to British and French control, then their broader geopolitical problem would be resolved.

Militarily, this plan worked. Their forces advanced rapidly. Israel swept across the Sinai while British and French troops established air superiority and took Port Said at the northern mouth of the canal.

Despite this success, the broader strategic goal remained beyond their reach. Britain’s military might masked a far weaker financial position. The sterling was still a major international currency, but defending its value depended on Britain’s dwindling gold and dollar reserves. American opposition to the invasion, mounting pressure on sterling, disruptions to oil supplies, and Britain’s dependence on external financial support ultimately made the operation unsustainable. As the dollar and oil reserves declined, London increasingly needed the very international financial cooperation, especially from the United States, that the invasion had put at risk.

The crisis left both European powers, particularly Britain, politically humiliated. They had been willing to assume the military risks of invading Egypt, but they overlooked the financial, diplomatic, and alliance risks that also had to be absorbed to sustain the operation and turn their military success into durable strategic control of the canal.

Three decades later a comparable problem surfaced in the region, but this time, the United States responded differently. In 1987, during the “Tanker War” phase of the Iran-Iraq War, Kuwait’s oil exports were increasingly threatened by repeated Iranian attacks on its tankers. With limited options, the Kuwaiti government sought protection from both the United States and the Soviet Union because neither Kuwait nor any private commercial actor could adequately absorb or manage the risk alone.

By July of that same year, Ronald Reagan took action, but he did not rely on warships alone. Instead, he approved Operation Earnest Will, under which eleven Kuwaiti tankers were reflagged as American vessels and escorted through the Persian Gulf. This action did not eliminate Iranian mines, missiles, or the possibility of further attacks. In fact, during the first convoy, one of the reflagged tankers struck a mine. Although no one died and the tanker completed its voyage, the incident made clear that the danger remained real.

Certainly, reflagging the vessels changed the legal and political meaning of these voyages. Sailing under American colors placed U.S. sovereignty and military credibility behind the Kuwaiti vessels. The United States did not absorb every commercial loss, but it assumed enough of the political and strategic residual risk to make continued passage more credible. Operation Earnest Will did not eliminate risk. It instead gave the residual risk a more capable owner.

This does not mean that the military dimension is insignificant. But military measures are not the only instruments available. Washington can also strengthen the ability of governments, private firms, and financial markets to absorb the risk that remains through tools like sovereign war-risk insurance or reinsurance, multinational risk pools, and lender guarantees. These mechanisms can help distribute, transfer, and absorb the residual risk that remains, even when real danger persists.

The region has changed significantly since Operation Earnest Will. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, the United States established an enduring presence in the Persian Gulf while Iran increasingly relied on asymmetric capabilities to offset its conventional military disadvantage. The result is a different strategic environment with the same underlying problem. Even with a superior military presence, Iran’s asymmetric capabilities continue to inject uncertainty into the region in ways that American military power alone cannot eliminate.

As it has done before, the United States can use military power to make Iran less capable of creating risk. But it must also make insurers, lenders, shipowners, and governments more capable of carrying the risk that will inevitably remain. Force can make passage possible, but a durable strategy for keeping Hormuz commercially open will require both.

Oscar Blanco is a historian who teaches history and cybersecurity risk management at Miami Dade College and Florida International University. He holds a Ph.D. in history and researches U.S. foreign policy and United States relations with Latin America.

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

Penn State and Temple will renew their rivalry at the Linc on Saturday. How do the teams match up?

Lexie Linderman, Faiyaad Kamal — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:01:00 +0000

Matt Campbell is familiar with Lincoln Financial Field. He has coached there twice, once as a graduate assistant at Bowling Green in 2004 and as Toledo’s offensive coordinator in 2011.

But it’s also the home stadium of his former Mount Union teammate and roommate, Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni. Campbell said he talked to Sirianni on Monday about playing at the Linc.

“Nick has been a great sounding board,” Campbell said Tuesday. “Obviously that relationship, that friendship, and having the ability to have somebody that’s kind of going through some of the same journeys has been huge.”

Matt Campbell and K.C. Keeler meet for the first time as head coaches. The two once took part in a historic D-III playoff game.

Campbell will face K.C. Keeler for the first time as head coaches when Penn State visits Temple on Saturday (noon, ESPN2). But the two coaches have crossed paths before. Keeler was the head coach of Division III Rowan and gave Campbell his only loss as a player at Mount Union in 1999.

The two in-state programs have played 45 times, with the Nittany Lions holding a 40-4-1 advantage. They last met in 2016, a 34-27 win for Penn State at Beaver Stadium.

“It’s the Super Bowl for Temple,” Penn State defensive coordinator D’Anton Lynn said Tuesday. “We have to have that mindset when we go in there.”

Here’s how both teams stack up against each other:

Penn State’s offense vs. Temple’s defense

Penn State’s offense had a strong performance against Marshall in its season opener, but it also revealed areas of improvement.

The running game struggled, with starter Carson Hansen carrying the ball 11 times for 48 yards. Penn State averaged just 3.6 rushing yards in the game.

Quarterback Rocco Becht and his wide receivers made up for the run game struggles. Starting wide receivers Koby Howard, Brett Eskildsen, and Chase Sowell all present different threats for Temple’s secondary.

Howard excels after the catch, while Eskildsen is the fastest player on offense. Sowell, meanwhile, is the more physical wideout. All three had at least a 20-yard catch against Marshall.

Temple safeties Saboor Karriem and Kolin Dinkins and cornerbacks Denzel Chavis and Asa Locks, the secondary starters last week, may have their hands full disrupting the Nittany Lions’ passing game. The Owls’ defense, however, did account for three turnovers in the opener, which included two pick-sixes and a forced fumble recovery.

Temple’s offense vs. Penn State’s defense

Lynn’s first game as the defensive coordinator at his alma mater resulted in a shutout, allowing just 147 total yards to the Thundering Herd. Lynn said Tuesday they kept the play-calling simple as the defense masters the “core concepts” before adding new things to the game plan throughout the year.

Temple’s offensive linemen also has taken a hit with injuries. Giakoby Hills and Luke Watson are confirmed out. Kevin Terry and Eric King arequestionable for Saturday’s game. It will be even more of a challenge to contain Penn State’s defensive line, who held Marshall to just 44 rushing yards last week.

It’s been a decade since Temple and Penn State met. Here are the top moments of their rivalry.

“Got Penn State coming up, obviously it’s a big deal,” Keeler said. “I mean, they have all the Big Ten prototypical numbers. 6-foot-5, 6-foot-4, 310 [pounds], 330. [They are] long and athletic.”

The injury report doesn’t bode well for Temple running back Keveun Mason, who stepped in for the banged up Sam Brown and exploded for a career-high 158 rushing yards against Rhode Island. Brown’s availability is still up in the air for this weekend.

Temple’s trio of wide receivers, Colin Chase, JoJo Bermudez, and Jayce Freeman, remain a strong suit for the offense. Though Temple didn’t throw the ball much against Rhode Island, Chase and Bermudez were productive in their limited opportunities. Freeman caught the Owls’ lone passing touchdown in his team debut.

Another priority for Penn State will be Temple tight end Peter Clarke, despite his quiet season opener. Clarke had a career year in 2025 and earned second-team American Conference honors.

The Nittany Lions’ secondary was a key reason Marshall was held off the scoreboard, highlighted by cornerback Josiah Zayas, who became the first freshman defensive player to start a season opener for Penn State since John Reid in 2015.

Connections

Penn State had 50 players enter the transfer portal last December after its head coaching change. Four ended up at Temple: redshirt sophomore quarterback Jaxon Smolik, fifth-year defensive tackle Kaleb Artis, redshirt junior tight end Joey Schlaffer, and Dinkins, a fifth-year player.

Each played in the Owls opening win over Rhode Island, with Dinkins and Smolik starting. Dinkins had three tackles and his first career pass breakup.

Smolik, meanwhile, is in a quarterback battle. Both Smolik and Ajani Sheppard played in Week 1, and that’s not expected to change this weekend.

“No one took charge,” Keeler said after Temple’s victory over Rhode Island. “I mean, we’ll watch the tape, we’ll see how they each played. Ideally, we’d prefer not to play two equally, but we’re not going to live by any sort of, like, creed. Basically, we’re going to play whoever can help us win.”

Temple won its opener but didn’t meet expectations. How will it adjust against Penn State?

Schlaffer and Artis didn’t log a stat in their first game with the Owls.

“I think both sides are just worrying about their team that they’re on right now,” Penn State offensive lineman Cooper Cousins said Tuesday. “Obviously have good relationships with all former players that have been here, in the program, outside of the program, but I think we’re all just kind of worried about our teams that we’re on right now.”

BRICS leaders gather in New Delhi as wars and rivalries strain the expanded bloc

AIJAZ HUSSAIN and SHEIKH SAALIQ — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:56:48 +0000

NEW DELHI (AP) — Leaders of the BRICS nations will meet in New Delhi this weekend as wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and U.S.-China tensions test the group's ability to act together.

Host India will seek to balance its ties with China and Russia against its growing partnerships with the United States and other Western powers.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian are among the leaders expected to attend.

BRICS is a grouping of major emerging markets and developing countries, named after an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. It has expanded from its original membership to include 11 countries that together represent about half the world’s population and a large share of its energy, resources and economic output. Experts say its growing size has also exposed divisions as its members want greater influence in the global order but often have competing political, economic and foreign-policy interests.

BRICS faces divisions over Iran and Ukraine

The conflicts in Iran and Ukraine are likely to highlight those divisions. Iran is a member of the expanded BRICS, while Russia remains one of its most influential members. China has close ties with both countries, while India maintains relations with Russia, Iran, the United States and Europe.

That diversity makes it difficult for BRICS to take a strong common position on major conflicts. The grouping includes countries with competing regional ambitions, including India and China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and Egypt and Ethiopia, as well as other nations from the Global South.

“The Global South is not a homogeneous entity,” said Praveen Donthi, senior analyst with the International Crisis Group. “Hence, the grouping will find it hard to manage and mediate in these conflicts.”

Russia's war in Ukraine has already exposed the limits of India's ability to balance competing interests. New Delhi has maintained close ties with Moscow, including through energy and defense pacts, while also deepening its strategic relationship with Washington.

The South Asian nation has consistently called for dialogue and diplomacy rather than taking sides.

The Iran-U.S. conflict poses a similar challenge. BRICS members have differing ties with Washington and interests in the Middle East, making a unified response difficult. China and Russia have backed Iran in international forums, while India has taken a cautious approach. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have their own tensions with Tehran.

India sees BRICS as a way to engage China

For India, the summit is an opportunity to manage its relationship with China. Ties have improved since border tensions escalated in 2020, but China remains India's largest strategic rival.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to New Delhi, his first in seven years, could help consolidate the recent diplomatic thaw but there are few signs of a recovery in trade and business ties.

“The upcoming summit offers India an opportunity to engage with China, make progress on outstanding bilateral issues,” Donthi said.

India also has an interest in preventing BRICS from becoming an explicitly anti-Western bloc.

New Delhi has strengthened ties with the United States, Israel, Japan, Australia and Europe while maintaining its longstanding relationship with Russia.

“India will project its strategic autonomy by being part of a non-West grouping but also finds it useful to engage with China, its primary strategic rival,” Donthi said.

The grouping wants less reliance on the dollar

Reducing dependence on the U.S. dollar is a major issue for BRICS. Members have discussed increasing trade in their own currencies and creating payment systems that would reduce their reliance on Western financial institutions.

The idea has gained momentum as countries such as Russia face sweeping Western sanctions. But replacing the dollar will be difficult, as it is deeply embedded in global trade and finance, while BRICS members have different currencies, financial systems and economic priorities.

Mahesh Sachdev, a retired Indian diplomat, said the goal should not be a direct confrontation with the dollar. Instead, he said, countries want to reduce their exposure to the current financial system that can be used for political pressure.

“It’s a challenge, but we’re not talking about frontal confrontations. It’s not a binary situation,” he said.

Its influence will depend on what it can deliver

BRICS' growing membership also gives it considerable weight, but its influence will ultimately depend on whether the members can agree on practical steps.

The group has called for changes to global financial institutions, greater representation for developing countries and alternatives to Western-dominated systems. Yet its members often disagree on how to achieve those goals.

Sachdev said BRICS needs a “more cohesive attitude and better harmony” among its members.

“If it remains just a periodic talking shop and photo ops,” he said, “then its relevance erodes.”

Donthi said BRICS’ success could be measured in smaller steps. These include keeping the expanded group together, improving ties with China, and deepening trade and financial cooperation. The grouping could also show that it can give developing countries a platform without forcing them to choose between Western and non-Western blocs, he said.

“BRICS allows for incremental geopolitical gains, if not outright wins,” Donthi said.

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Associated Press journalist Piyush Nagpal contributed to this report.

6 Nigerians being extradited to US for swindling women out of $6M in romance scams

MOGOMOTSI MAGOME — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:51:49 +0000

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Six Nigerian nationals linked to an organized criminal network that allegedly swindled American women out of over $6 million through online romance scams will be extradited to the United States on Friday, South African police said.

The men, who were arrested in the South African city of Cape Town in 2021, are set to be handed over to officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Friday and transported to the U.S. to face wire fraud and money laundering charges.

They are accused of belonging to a criminal network known as the Black Axe, which Interpol describes as being part of criminal groups responsible for a significant share of the world's cyber-enabled financial fraud, typically through romance scams, cryptocurrency and investment scams.

According to South African police, the men are alleged to have targeted more than 100 women in the U.S., defrauding them of more than $6 million through online romance or love scams.

Among the alleged victims were pensioners and businesspeople who were reportedly targeted through sophisticated online relationships.

“Through the coordination of Interpol South Africa, the six will today be transported from a correctional facility in Cape Town to Cape Town International Airport, where they will be handed over to officials from the FBI and the United States Secret Service, who arrived in South Africa this morning,” said police spokesperson Katlego Mogale.

A recent operation by Interpol targeting West African organized crime groups led to the arrest of 58 people and the identification of 263 suspects linked to various criminal networks involved in similar crimes, the multinational police body said last month.

The operation aimed to disrupt money laundering, identify high-value targets, seize assets and support arrests and prosecution.

In South Africa, authorities raided seven locations in the city of Johannesburg linked to a syndicate that ran romance and investment scams targeting retirees in English-speaking countries.

In that operation in South Africa, police arrested 39 people, seized $2.67 million and froze more than 250 bank accounts, Interpol said.

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AP Africa news: https://apnews.com/hub/africa

More than 500,000 Russian troops killed in Ukraine, UK defense chief says

HANNA ARHIROVA, EMMA BURROWS and BARRY HATTON — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:44:40 +0000

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — More than half a million Russian troops have been killed in Ukraine since the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, a senior British defense official said Friday.

The dead are part of 1.5 million Russian casualties in Ukraine, Air Chief Marshall Sir Richard Knighton, Chief of the U.K’s Defense Staff, said.

The U.K. figures roughly coincide with those published by the Ukrainian military. There was no immediate comment from Russian officials.

Moscow’s bigger army is struggling to make headway on the battlefield. Western officials and analysts say the Russian rate of advance has slowed significantly this year.

Russia’s armed forces have also lost an “enormous” amount of military materiel, Knighton told reporters. That includes more than 10,000 armored and protected vehicles, close to 3,000 air defense and artillery systems, and over 370 aircraft and helicopters, Knighton said.

He didn’t say what Ukraine’s losses were.

Neither Moscow nor Kyiv give regular updates on their battlefield losses.

Russian drones target Kyiv gas stations, aiming to rattle civilians

Russian drones targeted roadside gas stations in Kyiv for a second straight day Friday, as Moscow broadened its air war in what Ukrainian officials say is an effort to rattle civilians.

The attacks struck two Ukrnafta gas stations, killing two people and wounding six at one of them, the prosecutor’s office said.

Russian strikes on urban gas stations have intensified in recent months, mostly in regions near the front line in eastern and southern Ukraine. It is part of a campaign to disrupt civilian life and weaken morale that has also included attacks on food distribution hubs, sporadically leaving some supermarket shelves bare in the Ukrainian capital.

“Russia is systematically attacking places where it knows people will be spending their time going about their daily lives, seeking to maximize casualties, spread fear, and put pressure on Ukrainian society,” Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said on X late Thursday.

Authorities have urged residents not to linger near gas stations and other exposed infrastructure during air raid alerts.

Ukraine is urgently trying to improve its air defenses as Russia's invasion stretches into its fifth year, and on Thursday won pledges of more support from Canada.

Russian shopping mall strikes kill 5 in central Ukraine

Pavlohrad, a city in central Ukraine, observed an official day of mourning Friday for five residents killed near shopping malls in broad daylight by Russian drones the previous day.

The attack also wounded 67 people, Sybiha said on X.

In the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, a 32-year-old woman and her 10-year-old son were wounded in an overnight Russian drone attack, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said. The drones struck a nine-story apartment block and a shopping mall, it said.

Efforts to put out the blazes were slowed by the constant threat of repeat strikes, forcing firefighters to stop working and take shelter, it added.

Russia says it stopped 777 Ukrainian drones

Ukraine, meanwhile, has extended its own long-range drone campaign deep into Russia, straining air defenses across its bigger neighbor's vast territory. On Thursday, its military reported hitting a refinery more than 3,000 kilometers (1,800 miles) away in Siberia as Kyiv tries to hurt Russia's vital oil sector. Its strikes have caused fuel shortages in Russia, one of the world's biggest energy producers.

Russia’s oil product exports hit record lows in August, and Moscow is importing fuel from South Korea and India, the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air said in a report.

“Ukrainian strikes on Russia’s refining capacity have turned tables on the world’s once largest oil product exporter to see them start importing fuels, with imports surging to a record 172,000 metric tons (189,600 tons) in August — more than seven times the previous monthly high,” the Finland-registered nonprofit said Thursday.

Ukraine launched a major barrage overnight from Thursday to Friday, with the Russian Defense Ministry saying air defenses intercepted 777 Ukrainian drones over 16 Russian regions, as well as occupied Crimea and the waters of the Azov and the Caspian seas.

Two people were killed and three others wounded overnight in a Ukrainian drone attack on the Tula region south of Moscow, local officials said Friday.

A Ukrainian drone strike during the night started a fire at the Saratov oil refinery in southwestern Russia, Russian independent online outlet Astra said Friday. Kyiv has repeatedly targeted that refinery, which was last hit in early August.

Major online retailer Ozon said its logistics facility in the same city was struck and set ablaze by a Ukrainian drone, though no casualties were reported. Ozon is a competitor to Wildberries, whose facilities Ukraine has also targeted.

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Burrows reported from London and Hatton reported from Lisbon, Portugal.

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Follow the AP's coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

The Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo has now spread to the country's seventh province, local officials say

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:28:56 +0000

KINSHASA, Congo (AP) — The Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo has now spread to the country's seventh province, local officials say.

Trump’s grand midterm convention finale: ‘I’m a little bit tired of politics’

Katie Rogers — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:20:25 +0000

DALLAS — In 2024, President Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination by promising to “lead America back to the summit of human achievement and greatness.”

In 2026, he closed out an unusual midterm convention organized in his honor by saying he was a little bored of politics. He seemed more interested in telling supporters to swear on something holy — which seemed to be himself — that they would go out and vote for Republican candidates in November.

“Please raise your right hand,” Trump instructed a rowdy crowd of thousands inside a Dallas arena on Thursday evening. Many of them complied. “I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe that I will go out with my family, my friends, I will do it any way — I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell, like they do.” (Trump usually frowns on election fraud.)

He added: “I am going to go out, and I’m going to get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on November 3.”

Speaking for a grand total of nearly 2 1/2 hours over two days in Texas, Trump made it very clear, onstage and in interviews, that he would be relying on the strength of his political brand to see his party through what appear to be daunting midterm elections. He would not be straying much from his comfort zone to help vulnerable Republicans. In fact, the president said Thursday evening, he was kind of over this.

“We’re going to have a good time listening to music,” Trump said, name-checking Christopher Macchio, an opera singer who closed out the evening. “I’m getting a little bit tired of politics now.”

Before taking the stage for the second night in Dallas, Trump was asked by Laura Ingraham of Fox News whether he intended to campaign harder than he ever had before.

“No,” he replied bluntly. Asked by Ingraham whether or not he thought his legacy was on the line ahead of the midterm elections — “Isn’t this just as important, Mr. President?” — Trump seemed almost blasé about the possibility of Republicans losing one or both chambers of Congress. “I’ll block all their bad stuff for two years. It won’t be the same, but I’ll be a blocker, what can I tell you?”

The whole spectacle was a window into the mindset of Trump and his advisers, who point to recent history as proof that he is capable of beating long odds through brashness, sheer will and an intense connection with his supporters. That relationship is unmatched in modern politics. During his own speech, Vice President JD Vance, the perceived front-runner for the 2028 Republican nomination, asked the crowd to chant his name because it felt “pretty cool.”

Trump does not have to make such requests. But instead of focusing his energy on Republicans in difficult races — some of whom skipped the event completely — he directed the focus back to himself while he was in Texas. He pleaded with voters to engage in make-believe, and to “please pretend” that he was the one on the November ballot. That exercise might work against him in competitive races where the war with Iran is unpopular and where voters feel that their worries about the prices of gas and groceries are being ignored.

He put a new twist on an old tactic by offering free money — $5,000 to every American adult — if Republicans keep control of Congress. On his first night in Dallas, he asked voters for patience: The war with Iran, he assured supporters, “will be over very shortly after the election.” All of these promises and pleas amounted to a maximalist, midterm-era version of the “in two weeks” rhetorical tool he relies on when he is under pressure, to vow that something good will happen a few news cycles down the road.

“Food prices and almost every other item are rapidly going down,” Trump told the crowd Wednesday. “And by the way, oil will be going down as soon as we win the war with Iran, which is taking place right now. We’ll win it. We’re winning it. We control the Hormuz Strait. I think we should call the Hormuz Strait, we should call it the Trump Strait.”

At moments, Trump almost seemed to be in conversation with himself about his endorsement style, which, in one crucial race at least, has featured a mix of insults and shrugging. On both nights, he defended the disparaging way he has talked about the appearance and character of Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general running for a Senate seat after Trump directed primary voters to oust Sen. John Cornyn. Those voters complied and put an otherwise reliable seat into play.

“I said, ‘I don’t really like the way he looks. I don’t like it,’” Trump said of Paxton on Wednesday. “But you know what I do like? He was the greatest attorney general in the history of Texas.”

By Thursday, he was basically saying to hell with it: “You better do me a big, the biggest favor you’ve ever done me,” Trump told supporters as Paxton watched from the sidelines and smiled through what was at least his third humiliation ritual of the Texas event. “You’ve got to do this for me. You’ve got to pretend I’m on the ticket.”

Again and again, Trump turned to other priorities, the most pressing of which seemed to be the crowd size in Dallas. There is a reason that political conventions are not held during the midterms. This expensive, two-day event, designed as a tribute to Trump, functioned more like a temperature check, and there were moments when interest seemed lukewarm. Rows of seats in the American Airlines Center stayed empty throughout the affair. Endangered Republicans, sensing a brush fire rather than a lit torch brightening the way forward, steered clear.

“No empty seats! Fake news,” Trump exclaimed Thursday, spending about three minutes affirming that the busy arena was packed when it wasn’t.

And so it went on in that vein in Texas, with little new except for a promise of free money, a pledge of allegiance gimmick, and a few glimpses of an 80-year-old president pondering a future in which he is not firmly in control.

“I want you to remember me in four or five years when this country’s rocketing,” Trump said Wednesday, somewhere near the beginning of a meandering and nearly two-hour speech. “Remember, I’m the one that got it started.”

By the time he was ready to depart Dallas, he didn’t seem too interested in the particulars of the future, the strength of Republican candidates or the validity of his promises. He suggested to his devoted supporters that he might be “standing with you one of these days.” But for now, he just wanted to chill out and listen to music. He sped through the last lines of a speech finale he knows by heart after a decade at the center of national politics.

“I just want to say, we will make America great again,” Trump said dutifully. “We will make it greater than ever before.”

Then the tenor took the stage. Red, blue, white and gold balloons began to fall from the ceiling. The president swayed to the music, lost in the moment.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

‘You know what happens if you don’t vote’: 7 takeaways from the GOP convention

Shane Goldmacher, Lisa Lerer — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:00:26 +0000

Vice President JD Vance was billed as the headliner of the second night of the Republican convention, but President Donald Trump stole the show.

With a hug and a handshake, Vance exited stage right after his speech as Trump returned to the place he likes most — center stage — to make his final pitch of the convention to keep Republicans in power.

At one point Trump asked attendees to raise their right hands and pledge to him that he would vote with their family and friends. Dutifully, they did.

“You know what happens if you don’t vote?” Trump said. “You go to hell.”

The two-day rally in Dallas came as Trump’s approval has sagged below 40% and Republicans fear losing control of both the House and Senate. Republicans hoped the gathering would help energize a base beleaguered by high prices and the Iran war to turn out in droves. But the two days of red meat tossed from the stage seemed unlikely to satiate independent voters whose support has flagged.

Here are seven takeaways from the convention:

Vance makes his 2026 (and 2028) pitch

Vance arrived in Dallas widely considered the front-runner in the 2028 Republican presidential primary. His speech offered some early clues about how he might approach a campaign.

Vance focused on restoring the primacy of the traditional nuclear American family, a theme he has championed in the administration. He did not mention the war in Iran, an operation he has defended publicly but raised concerns about privately. But he issued a plea for conservatives not to abandon the White House over policy.

“Do not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” he urged.

Vance speaks in a far more scripted political style than Trump. He caught fire with the crowd when he snapped back at a protester who interrupted his remarks by waving Palestinian and Mexican flags. “My friend, if you love Mexico so much, get your ass over there,” he said.

But he failed to sustain the kind of enthusiasm that Trump commanded either night. Nor did he win anything beyond perfunctory praise from the president, who quickly ushered him off the stage.

As the balloons fell, it was the president alone, along with a tenor singing. Trump is not giving up his crown quite yet.

Trump throws an affordability Hail Mary

Trump has called affordability — a top buzzword for Democrats this year — a “hoax.” In his speech Wednesday night, the president claimed that prices are on their way down. At the same time, he rolled out an audacious plan to address people’s concerns about costs: a massive cash giveaway.

He branded his dubious and detail-free plan to send $5,000 to every American adult a “Trump Dividend.”

But Trump was virtually the only one talking about it.

A day later, the splashy $1 trillion-plus plan barely made a ripple on the convention stage.

The president’s own son, Donald Trump Jr., didn’t so much as mention it.

Neither did the speaker of the House.

Neither did the vice president.

Only Trump did.

If the president wants the dangled cash to be a major factor in the midterms, the rest of the Republican Party didn’t use the rest of the convention to sell it.

Republicans have a new rogues’ gallery of liberal villains

Forget about Nancy Pelosi.

In Dallas, Republicans made clear that the former House speaker has been dethroned from her decades-long position as the party’s favorite political villain.

Speaker after speaker assailed Hasan Piker, a leftist online streamer, and Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, for pushing what they described as an extreme and anti-American agenda. Their images, including Piker’s naked torso, were broadcast on the jumbotron over the stadium. Even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who is a frequent target of the right, got less airtime.

At one point, Speaker Mike Johnson outlined the new rogues’ gallery of liberals — “Hasan Piker and Bernie Sanders and AOC and Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani” — while casting the rest of the Democratic Party as squishes who would succumb to them.

In their attacks on Piker and El-Sayed, several convention speakers embraced anti-Muslim rhetoric, including a promise popular among conservative activists to “ban Shariah law.”

“We must stand and defeat the Islamists,” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said in his speech.

GOP frames the election as common sense versus crazy

Republicans know that Trump is unpopular. They are banking on making Democrats unpopular, too — or at least unappealing and unelectable.

Over and over, speakers cast Democrats as out of the mainstream, frequently calling them socialists, communists and even worse. At times they stretched the truth. Democratic socialists might have won a number of Democratic primary victories since 2024, but no serious figure in the party is promoting communism.

“You guys are going to trigger the commies,” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, said at one point as the crowd chanted “USA! USA! USA!”

Vance, in the closing of his speech, summed up the message so many had delivered before him over two days: “It’s about the party of common sense beating the party of the crazies.”

Texas is a 2026 battleground

Six months ago, when it first emerged that Republicans were likely to pick Dallas for this convention, it was unclear whether Texas would wind up as a top midterm battleground.

It’s clear now.

A parade of speakers — from the president on down — used their precious time onstage to talk about Texas’ razor-close Senate race. They sought to boost Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general (even as Trump mocked his sartorial choices on back-to-back nights), and tear down James Talarico, the Democratic nominee. On the eve of the convention, Trump’s super political action committee had reserved $10 million in ads to help Paxton.

“Tala-freako maybe tops the list,” Vance said of Trump’s nickname for Talarico.

But it wasn’t just the Senate race. Republicans gerrymandered the state in 2025 to create as many as five new safely Republican House seats. But Republicans running in several of those seats appeared at the convention, seeking a boost in regions that Trump won handily.

Was it must-see TV? Early signs suggest no

Trump has long been known as a master of the television audience. Not this time. An average of 2.5 million people tuned in to watch his Wednesday night speech on Fox News, one of the few major TV networks that aired the remarks in full, according to preliminary figures from Nielsen. That was an average primetime audience for the network, based on the most recent quarterly statistics, and below the usual viewership for programs at that time.

In other words, no Trump bump.

To be fair, the president’s programming faced some steep competition. The first game of the National Football League season was on at the same time as his speech. The season’s second game was on Thursday during Vance’s and Trump’s speeches.

Republicans make their bid to buck history

Parties in power traditionally attempt to expand their appeal in midterm elections through targeted outreach to independent voters. That was not the strategy charted by Trump and his allies in Dallas.

Only a handful of speakers offered any kind of outreach to moderate voters (one of those exceptions was Rep. Mike Lawler of New York). Far more focused their remarks on stoking fears of Shariah, transgender athletes and Democratic candidates who were repeatedly described as communists. Again and again, Trump begged his supporters to “pretend” that he would be on the ballot — an attempt to get enough of them out to prevent the usual losses for the party in power.

Trump and his allies are staking their chances on their ability to drive their own voters to the polls. At the top of the list are Trump loyalists who typically skip midterm elections.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Emma Bonino, leader of abortion and divorce battles that changed Italy, dies at 78

GIADA ZAMPANO — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:11:17 +0000

ROME (AP) — Emma Bonino, who rose to political prominence as a leader of campaigns by the Radical Party that legalized abortion and divorce in the 1970s in heavily Roman Catholic Italy, against the objections of the Vatican, has died. She was 78.

Her party of recent years, +Europa, announced her death.

“Her life was a long struggle against everything that denies freedom: against clandestine abortion, world hunger, the stranglehold of party politics, female genital mutilation, punitive justice, genocide, and every form of authoritarianism,” the party said.

Italy’s conservative Premier Giorgia Meloni paid tribute to Bonino, saying their different backgrounds and perspectives "never prevented me from acknowledging her significance and her role in our nation’s public life."

“For decades, Emma Bonino has been a strong and recognizable voice in Italian politics, championing her ideas with determination," Meloni wrote on social media.

Even after the Radicals’ political star faded, Bonino remained a key political figure and human rights campaigner active in Italy for over five decades. She served as a European commissioner for then-Premier Silvio Berlusconi and was a co-founder of the death penalty watchdog Hands Off Cain. But her bid in 1999 to become Italy’s first female president failed.

She remained known to younger generations as a sought-after political pundit, appearing frequently on Italian TV with her sharp wit and cutting insights. After her cancer diagnosis in 2015, she invariably appeared in public wearing colorful headscarves.

Bonino's passing follows the recent death of several other feminist heroes, including activist Gloria Steinem and poet Robin Morgan.

Bonino challenged the Vatican and a conservative political establishment

Born on March 9, 1948, in Bra — not far from the northwestern Italian city of Turin, where carmaker Fiat’s factory drove the economy — she spent her childhood on a farm, where she was often tasked to pasture pigs, a lifestyle she described as “deadly boring” in a 2023 TV interview.

Bonino first got involved in Italian politics because she wanted to change the law. At 26, she became pregnant and had an abortion, even though it was illegal at that time.

Recalling the experience as one of the most humiliating of her life, in 1975 she was among the founders of the Information Center for Sterilization and Abortion, an organization that provided information and performed abortions before they were legalized.

The following year she was elected to the Italian parliament for the maverick Radical Party, a bastion of anticlericalism, civil libertarianism, feminism, liberalism and radicalism in Italy.

The party proposed itself as the strongest opposition to the Italian political establishment, seen as corrupt and conservative, and to the Catholic Church’s extensive influence on Italian society.

In 1978 abortion was legalized. That particular campaign may have been over, but Bonino had found her vocation: Politics was her life, and she became one of the most active leaders of the Radical Party and its successors.

She held key political roles in Italy and at the EU

A veteran legislator in Italian politics and an activist for various reform policies, she was elected six times as a Lower House lawmaker and two times as a senator. In 2017, she became the leader of +Europa, a liberal, European federalist party slate she launched ahead of the 2018 Italian general election.

An explosive presence in politics during her 50-year-long career, Bonino was one of the few Italian political figures who scored important achievements both at home and internationally.

Bonino won European exposure in a role she owed to then center-right Premier Berlusconi who, in 1995, offered her one of Italy’s two seats in the European Commission.

As a Commissioner she forged the EU’s consumer protection policy and created the European Commission Humanitarian Office, which is now the primary European humanitarian arm. It was this last portfolio, the humanitarian affairs, that she felt most strongly about.

She traveled to war zones — former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan, Afghanistan — and convinced Europe that humanitarian assistance couldn’t be an excuse for lack of political or military intervention.

In June 1999 she headed a slate named after her — Lista Bonino — at the European elections. It was an overwhelming success: The party got 8.5% of the votes and became Italy’s fourth political force.

Bonino served as foreign minister, trade minister and EU affairs minister in Italian center-left governments of the 2000s and 2010s.

She was one of the strongest advocates for a common European foreign and defense policy. “My passion is humanity,” she said in May 2025, when her hometown Bra granted her honorary citizenship. “I’ve got roots, I’ve got a homeland, a family, but precisely all that allows me to be a citizen of the world.”

She got involved with Arab women’s battle for equality in 2001 and started spending half her time in Cairo. She became fluent in Arabic — she had graduated in foreign languages at Milan’s Bocconi University — and built a network of intellectuals, politicians and prominent civil society figures.

She shared a humanitarian mission with Pope Francis

Never married, she maintained strong bonds with her family in Piedmont. “My father died before I could show him I could accomplish something,” she recalled in a 2020 interview with Vanity Fair. “He never understood my restlessness. He used to tell me: Emma, you are like Japanese poetry: beautiful, but I can’t understand it.”

In January 2015, she announced on Radio Radicale that she was suffering from lung cancer and was being treated with chemotherapy but didn’t plan to stop her political activity. In May of the same year, she said her cancer was in complete remission and eight years later appeared on a popular TV interview program announcing she was healed.

Over the years, Bonino cultivated a deep friendship with the late Pope Francis, despite their conflicting views on key ethical issues, including abortion and euthanasia.

In November 2024, Francis paid a home visit to Bonino — who had been just released from the hospital after treatment for respiratory problems — bringing her a bouquet of roses and chocolates.

A photo posted by Bonino on social media showed them both sitting in wheelchairs on her sun-drenched terrace in Rome.

Bonino said that during their conversations Francis always encouraged her to bring forward her humanitarian battles, defending those most in need.

When asked what battles she still needed to fight, Bonino used to say: “Many, too many. Human rights, world hunger, free scientific research ... Ten lives won’t be enough.”

Bonino is survived by her siblings, Domenica and Giovanni, and their children.

Trump loyalist steps down from ‘grand conspiracy’ case

Alan Feuer — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:11:23 +0000

A loyalist prosecutor handpicked by the Justice Department to lead a contentious conspiracy investigation into several of President Donald Trump’s political opponents abruptly quit his job on Thursday, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The prosecutor, Joseph diGenova, had been in charge of what Trump’s allies have often referred to as the “grand conspiracy,” a sprawling inquiry based in the U.S. attorney’s office in South Florida that has sought to implicate federal officials who have investigated Trump in a single plot to deprive him of his rights.

DiGenova’s resignation was the latest setback in the case that began last year and has dragged on for months. Even though members of his team have issued numerous grand jury subpoenas to federal law enforcement and intelligence officials who have sought over the past decade to hold Trump accountable in a series of criminal inquiries, diGenova had yet to obtain an indictment.

“It was an honor and privilege to serve the president and the department,” DiGenova told CNN and CBS during phone interviews on Thursday.

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Trump has repeatedly put pressure on prosecutors to bring criminal charges against his opponents, calling them out in private meetings and in social media posts. He has also expressed displeasure about the slow pace of the retributive investigations he has helped to set in motion.

But time and again, Trump’s desire for vengeance and his willingness to break through the walls of independence that have traditionally separated the White House and the Justice Department have resulted in failure. Judges and grand juries have repeatedly stymied his attempts to strong arm prosecutors into bringing charges.

Sometimes, as in the case of diGenova, prosecutors themselves have effectively reminded him that it is no simple matter to file indictments against people without real evidence or viable legal reasoning. The resignation was likely to cause consternation among far-right influencers who have long heralded the grand conspiracy case as the Trump administration’s most aggressive effort to go after the president’s critics.

From the beginning, the influencers pushed for charges to be brought against the widest array of Democrats possible, asserting that a cabal of “deep state” operatives — led by former President Barack Obama — had worked for years to destroy Trump and deserved to be punished.

With his move, diGenova became the second prosecutor who has either resigned or been removed from the case. The prosecutor in charge of an early phase of the investigation was forced to leave in the spring after telling her superiors that there was not sufficient evidence to bring charges against one of its first targets, John Brennan, a former CIA director who provoked Trump’s ire by helping to assemble an intelligence assessment that determined that Russia had sought to interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign.

The grand conspiracy inquiry has long been the most fevered of the many revenge investigations that Trump has demanded the Justice Department undertake. It has involved prosecutors seeking to link disparate criminal inquiries into the president — including the Russia investigation and a separate investigation into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents — as an overarching, multiyear scheme to damage his political prospects.

From the outset, diGenova faced an uphill battle in seeking to prove the basic theory of his case: that the various inquiries into Trump — conducted by different prosecutors and spanning nearly a decade — could be reasonably tied together in a single conspiracy. Those hurdles have led several current and former prosecutors in the office in southern Florida to wonder whether the investigation was largely a show put on to placate Trump.

DiGenova, a former U.S. attorney from the Ronald Reagan era who had not worked as a prosecutor in nearly 40 years, took control of the case in April after his predecessor, Maria Medetis Long, was kicked off the investigation. At 81, he was an unusual choice to oversee an inquiry involving multiple targets that quickly grew to include at least a dozen prosecutors, including his wife, Victoria Toensing.

Moreover, diGenova was a longtime ally of Trump’s who had publicly claimed that the Russia investigation was a plot by law enforcement to frame him and keep him out of the White House. DiGenova had also worked as a lawyer for Trump’s 2020 campaign, supporting his false assertions that the election that year had been rigged against him.

While Brennan was the initial focus of the inquiry, it has also involved an effort to implicate former FBI Director James Comey, who has been charged in a separate case in North Carolina. Late last month, diGenova’s office issued a subpoena demanding testimony from one of Comey’s close confidants.

More recently, subpoenas had been issued to federal agents who took part in the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, in the classified documents investigation.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

In an age of instant answers, educators say there's a case for letting kids struggle a little

CHEYANNE MUMPHREY — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:01:08 +0000

When children forget their lunch, can't solve a math problem or don't know how to get somewhere, the instinct for parents can be to step in immediately. But sometimes, the problem is an opportunity.

Developmental experts and educators say children need chances to struggle with everyday problems because figuring them out is a skill that has to be practiced.

The challenge for parents is knowing when to help and when to step back. There is a difference between helping children through difficult situations and removing the problem before they have a chance to try. At a time when an answer or AI-generated help can be seconds away, giving children room to figure things out for themselves can be hard to do.

What independence looks like depends on a child’s age, abilities, and circumstances, but experts say it means learning to plan, make decisions, solve problems, recover from mistakes and figure out what to do next. Here’s how experts say parents can give children more opportunities to practice those skills.

Pause before stepping in

Children have unprecedented access to information, while technology has given parents more ways to monitor their kids' lives. They can track their children's locations, see grades in real time, and email teachers immediately. That means parents can intervene before their children have had a chance to realize there is a problem, let alone figure out a solution.

There is a downside to that convenience, said Dr. Dana Suskind, a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago and author of the book “Human Raised.”

“I think the most important thing we can give children is not the answer, but the experience of figuring it out,” Suskind said. When parents swoop in, she said, children are deprived of opportunities to practice skills like pausing before acting, remembering what worked previously, and trying new solutions.

If children rarely have to struggle, it can lead to severe anxiety when they have to figure out something on their own, said Dr. Stephanie Carlson, director of the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota.

When there is a real danger, parents should step in, but when stakes are lower, they can slow down and talk through the problem. That could mean asking children open-ended questions: What do you think? What could happen? How could you solve this? What else could you try?

Allow children to experience boredom

Allowing children to be bored, frustrated, impatient or nervous can support their learning and better prepare them for adulthood, experts say.

Boredom can facilitate creativity and play while helping children build confidence and resilience, said Kiryn Hoffman, CEO of the National Children’s Museum in Washington, D.C.

In “10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World,” psychologist Dr. Jean Twenge writes that children and teens have fewer opportunities than previous generations to spend time with friends, get around on their own and make decisions outside the watchful gaze of adults. By their senior year of high school, fewer teens have a driver’s license, go on dates or work paid jobs than in previous generations, she writes.

Give children a little more to handle

Parents don’t have to manufacture situations for children to navigate. Routine tasks naturally provide children with opportunities to practice agency, experts say.

Nicole Knoth, a mother of two teen girls in Flagstaff, Arizona, started giving her daughters small decisions to make when they were young. At age 5, for example, she would give them $5 at a store and have them calculate what they could afford, including tax and discounts. Now, as teens, they are grocery shopping and her oldest is managing her own credit card.

Jemia Cunningham-Elder, a mother of four daughters in Chicago, learned there isn’t a set age for when children should be expected to do something on their own. She looks at what each child can handle, then gives them a little more freedom and watches what happens.

If they manage it, they get more independence. If they struggle, she considers whether it was a useful learning experience or a sign they weren’t ready yet.

That approach also recognizes something important: independence doesn’t mean doing everything alone.

Children who realize they don’t know how to solve a math problem and ask the teacher for help are practicing independence, too. So are children who forget their assignments and figure out how to find the information rather than having parents call their teachers.

Know when to step in

The same approach doesn’t apply to every situation. Parents have to weigh safety, maturity and circumstances.

Caroline Chirichella, a 37-year-old mother who lives in the Campania region of southern Italy, had been trying to give her 8-year-old daughter, Lucia, more freedom. But she hesitated to let her spend time outside with friends on her own because of concerns about traffic in the street.

There are other situations where the stakes are lower.

Chirichella said she and her husband eventually stopped calling other parents or teachers when Lucia forgot to write down an assignment. She told her daughter: “Your homework is your responsibility.”

___

The Associated Press' education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

After 9/11, Islamophobia shaped a generation of Muslim New Yorkers

Liam Stack, Maya King — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:04:51 +0000

NEW YORK — Once-friendly neighbors started to keep their distance. Undercover police officers began to monitor community events. And passersby would give them dirty looks on the street, and sometimes harass them, when they left home in hijabs or other religious garb.

Many American Muslims have faced a quarter-century of suspicion and hostility since the Sept. 11 attacks, which reshaped life for all Americans.

In New York, a generation of Muslim New Yorkers responded to the Islamophobia by organizing their communities. Mosques hosted makeshift legal clinics. Small businesses became hubs in a citywide civil rights network. Muslims of different racial, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds formed alliances the city had not seen before.

Their political organizing helped, years later, to elect the city’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani. But anti-Muslim prejudice endures, echoing the Islamophobia that arose in the earliest days after Sept. 11.

Murad Awawdeh was 14 in September 2001. The post-9/11 backlash, and the grassroots response of his friends and neighbors, led him to trade his biochemistry studies — and his mother’s American dream of having a doctor in the family — for a career in civil rights.

“I think that day belongs to everyone who lived it and what came after belongs to a smaller group of us,” said Awawdeh, 39, who is now the president and chief executive of the New York Immigration Coalition and a confidant of Mamdani. “That part of the story this country still has not told itself honestly.”

The Sept. 11 attacks left many Muslim American communities scarred by heavy-handed law enforcement tactics and the suspicion, if not outright hostility, of classmates, co-workers, elected officials and cable news commentators who blamed all Muslims for the terrorism they, too, had experienced that day. That experience spurred many to take political action.

“If you look at prior to 9/11, for the most part, Muslim Americans were not politically involved,” said Afaf Nasher, the executive director of the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. But, she added, “When you’re pushed against the wall, you’re either going to run in fear or you’re going to push back, and political empowerment was certainly one way that we are pushing back.”

The ascent of Mamdani has turned New York into perhaps the most prominent example of American Muslim success in the post-9/11 world. But the history of the city since the attacks has also highlighted the many challenges that Muslims in the United States continue to face.

Those include a history of police surveillance, backlash faced by high-profile Muslims in politics or the arts, and attacks on Islamic religious expression, including the construction of mosques and the wearing of religious clothing such as hijabs. Those biases have also affected followers of other faiths, in particular observant Sikh men, whose turbans are often mistaken for a form of Islamic dress.

Such sentiments have compounded in many ways since the start of the war in the Gaza Strip, which most Muslim Americans have vigorously opposed. Opponents of that war have been accused of terrorist sympathies, and some, including Columbia University protester Mahmoud Khalil, have been arrested and threatened with deportation for their advocacy. That has led some Muslims to say the war in Gaza has created an environment akin to the months and years after Sept. 11, when Muslim Americans feared that they could be marked as terrorist sympathizers for speaking out against the war on terror.

After Sept. 11, many Muslims in New York found themselves under covert police surveillance. Asad Dandia, 33, a public historian, was a plaintiff in a 2013 class-action lawsuit against the Police Department over its surveillance of the city’s Muslim neighborhoods, a program that was assisted by the CIA.

He had come under police surveillance after starting a charity as a teenager to feed poor families in his neighborhood. The police spying program was exposed in 2011 and caused a public uproar that led to its ending by 2018 after a series of legal settlements and other initiatives.

Today, Dandia is the official historian of the borough of Brooklyn and an informal adviser to Mamdani. One of his lawyers in the 2013 lawsuit, Ramzi Kassem, is the mayor’s chief legal counsel.

“We went in the span of 10 years from suing the government to being the government,” Dandia said. “And I think that is a classic and quintessential New York and American story.”

Mamdani is one of several Muslims who have become prominent in American public life in recent years. Others include Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, Academy Award-winning actor Mahershala Ali, model Bella Hadid, and comedians Ramy Youssef and Hasan Minhaj.

“Muslim America now has a greater cultural footprint, more institutional power and a lot more support from allies, comrades and friends all throughout the country,” Dandia said. “Now when people think of Muslim America, they have names and faces they can point to.”

But despite these successes, many challenges remain. Mamdani, who was 9 on Sept. 11, has said the Islamophobic backlash to the attack lingered and “became a fact of life.”

According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted this year, 43% of American adults said Muslims are less patriotic than other Americans, and 42% said Muslim Americans are having a negative impact on the country. When asked to explain their views, respondents often cited the Sept. 11 attacks.

By some measures, the survey showed that public attitudes toward Islam were more negative now than they were immediately after the attacks. In March 2002, 25% of American adults said Islam was more likely than other religions to encourage violence, but that number rose to 51% in the survey conducted this year.

Those views have become highly polarized, with Republicans expressing far more negative views of Islam than Democrats, a change from after the attacks when supporters of both parties held similar views. Today, anti-Muslim sentiments have surged anew in some parts of the country with almost every election cycle.

Donald Trump campaigned for president in 2016 on a pledge to bar immigrants from Muslim countries and has restricted immigration from those nations and others that he views negatively during both his first and second administrations. In his second term, Trump has cracked down on students and universities over protests against the war in Gaza, portraying student demonstrators as supporters of terrorism and equating their arguments with antisemitic hate speech.

That has included the arrest of young Muslim activists, including Khalil at Columbia and Rumeysa Ozturk, who helped write an opinion piece critical of Israel for the student newspaper at Tufts University.

Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, a professor of religion and politics at Washington University in St. Louis, said the embrace of Islamophobia by the Trump administration posed a serious threat to Muslim Americans. But for Americans who are skeptical or critical of Trump, it may have also helped to undermine anti-Muslim arguments.

“People forget now the degree to which Islamophobia was not something that was just on the right but was present on both sides,” GhaneaBassiri said.

As an example of the reaction to Trump’s policies, he pointed to protests at airports against the president’s immigration restrictions in 2017 as a moment that “kind of shocked” some Muslim activists and organizations. They had become accustomed to pushing for their rights with few allies and little positive coverage in the news media, but the airport protests were filled with non-Muslims.

“Before that moment, if they criticized the state, their loyalty was always questioned by people on both the right and the left,” GhaneaBassiri said.

But in New York, Mamdani’s election has shown the resilience of anti-Muslim suspicion in both parties.

During last year’s mayoral campaign, Mamdani was accused of supporting terrorism by critics in both parties, including the campaign of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, his main rival in the race, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who apologized after she falsely claimed in an interview that he had made “references to global jihad.”

The hate is nothing new to the mayor’s allies. Shahana Hanif, who in 2021 was the first Muslim woman elected to the New York City Council, was in elementary school when the attacks took place. She came of age as American policy and cultural attitudes shifted against the nation’s Muslims.

At age 10, she wrote a letter to President George W. Bush asking him to put a stop to the hate that seemed to engulf so much of the country. For Hanif, a Bangladeshi native of Brooklyn, it was an early form of organizing that helped inform her political career decades later.

“Seeing the injustice my community experienced” propelled her into progressive political organizing, Hanif said. “I can’t take away the Muslim part of it and just say, ‘Oh, no, this is only happening to us because we’re Bangladeshi immigrants,’ or ‘This is only happening to us because I’m a daughter of immigrants or I’m a woman of color,’” she said. “That association of being Muslim is certainly part of it.”

New York’s Muslim political and civil rights leaders said they also saw opportunities to keep building on their post-9/11 organizing work.

Nasher, the executive director of CAIR, said that her group and others like it saw their efforts as an outgrowth of the discrimination they faced and a way to guard against its happening to others.

“That’s not just because we’re Muslim — it’s because we’re American,” she said. “And you would think that as our fellow Americans, people would want every American to be politically engaged.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

🍎 Let’s pick apples | Outdoorsy Newsletter

Paola Pérez — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:01:00 +0000

The first day of fall is just around the corner.

In this edition:

Grab a basket: We have your guide to apple-picking near Philadelphia.
Around the world: Follow a rower’s journey from the Philly suburbs to Bulgaria and beyond.
Closures to know: A historic amusement and water park, and a beloved beer garden.

☂️ Your weekend weather outlook: Friday should be clear and sunny, but showers may put a damper on Saturday and Sunday.

— Paola Pérez (outdoorsy@inquirer.com)

If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

Apples await

Between freshly baked pies, warm apple cider, or pillowy soft doughnuts, you’re in for a treat at any of our favorite apple-picking spots.

To ring in the season, we rounded up the top places to check out, in order from closest to farthest from Philly, including:

🍏 Indian Orchards Farm, a century-year-old farm in Media growing about 25 apple varieties like honeycrisp and smokehouse.

🍎 Linvilla Orchards, a must-visit orchard in Delco where you can fill a two-quart bag for $11 per person.

🧺 Note: You may want to call ahead and confirm specific availability ahead of visiting. Some may be limited this year due to spring’s freezing temps.

See our list of the best orchards for apple-picking in the region.

News worth knowing

The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s popular pop-up beer garden in Manayunk will close permanently Oct. 5.
The century-old Clementon Park & Splash World, which spans 50 acres in South Jersey, has closed its gates and will soon be back on the market.
Collingswood neighbors could soon seek licenses for backyard hens after an 18-year push from advocates.
A “critical” Peco project to install new utility poles in West Philly has been paused after residents expressed outrage over plans to trim their tree canopy.
A new tool may help Delaware County officials manage intense flooding and track data.

🌳 Your outdoorsy experience

I’m looking for new stories to highlight. This is your time to shine, dear reader. What are you doing or seeing outside?

In 200 words, tell me about your favorite adventures or unforgettable moments outdoors. Pictures, if you have them, are awesome. You might see your memories featured here.

🚣‍♂️ Racing on

🎤 Here’s Becca O’Reilly with a story for The Inquirer on a rower’s “surreal” journey.

On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Ava Smith crossed the finish line in Bulgaria as a proud member of an elite eight-person boat representing the U.S. Under-19 national women’s rowing team.

“Crossing the finish line, it was a feeling of accomplishment,” said Smith, who took up the sport only four years earlier at Mount St. Joseph Academy in Flourtown, Montgomery County. “A sort of relief, in a way, just knowing it’s done. We put it all out there.”

Smith picked up an oar for the first time as a freshman at Mount St. Joseph, but rowing runs in her blood. Her father, Don Smith, competed for the U.S. at the 1996 and 2000 Olympics; her older brother, Luke Smith, rows at Stanford and made the Under-19 national men’s team; and her sister, Addy Smith, now rows at Texas. Even the youngest Smith, Arden, plans to row as she starts her freshman year at Mount St. Joseph.

This summer, that legacy came full circle. After years of sibling-fueled rivalry, Ava earned a spot in the women’s eight as the seven seat and traveled to Plovdiv, Bulgaria, to compete at the World Rowing Under-19 Championships, a spot secured after a whirlwind six weeks that took her from a selection camp in California to the start line across the world. And all of it just days before she leaves for her own next chapter: Rowing at the University of California, Berkeley. — Becca O’Reilly

Read the full story of how Smith joined the women’s eight, and her next endeavors.

Paola’s picks

🌊 A track: “Water of Love” by Dire Straits.

💡 A pro-tip: Halfway through walking or cycling the Manayunk Bridge, you might be surprised when the lane switches sides. It’s on purpose.

🦈 A tale: How Cape Cod is learning to live with sharks.

🥳 An amazing feat: At 91, Dale “Grey Beard” Sanders has reclaimed his record as the oldest hiker to complete the Appalachian Trail. His favorite days were spent in “Rocksylvania.”

🎸 An activity: Bryn Mawr Twilight Concert series with Mdou Moctar (solo) and Tim Motzer (Friday; $26), and the third-annual Spring Garden Sunflower Fest (Saturday; free).

A blissful view

Take a moment to soak up this sunrise with me. I was blessed with it while visiting family in Florida.

👋🏽 Have a good one out there.

By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer’s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.

Saudi airstrikes hit Yemen's rebel-held Mokha airport as Houthis take an island near a key strait

Fatma Khaled, Samy Magdy and Cara Anna — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:54:09 +0000

CAIRO — Yemen ‘s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels captured a strategic island in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait at the entrance of the Red Sea, two officials said Friday in a swift advance that further threatens Saudi oil exports through one of the world’s key commercial lanes.

Saudi Arabia responded with airstrikes against the airport in the key port city of Mokha that the Houthis seized on Thursday, a Houthi broadcaster said. There was no immediate report of damage or deaths.

The capture of Mayun, a tiny, barren volcanic island in the strait, was confirmed by a senior military official with Yemen’s internationally recognized government and by a Houthi official. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to journalists.

The island, also known as Perim, is about 3.5 kilometers (2 miles) off Yemen’s west coast.

The strait is a key alternative to the Iran-choked Strait of Hormuz. But there is “no need for international concern,” Hazam al-Assad, a member of the rebels’ political bureau, told The Associated Press, saying they are responding to Saudi aggression, and “our forces have a bank of big important targets” in case Riyadh keeps up the strikes.

Earlier Friday, Iran’s government called for an end to Saudi Arabia’s blockade of Yemen, throwing its support behind its ally, the Houthis. In its first statement since the rebels entered the port, Iran’s Foreign Ministry also called for a return to negotiations between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis.

There was no immediate Saudi comment on Friday.

The rebels’ capture of Mokha, overlooking tanker routes out of the Red Sea, could boost Iran’s strategy of driving up world oil and gas prices to pressure the United States, experts say. It also raises concerns of a new front opening after more than six months of war in the region – one in which Saudi Arabia is forced to respond.

Experts say the developments in Yemen could give Tehran more leverage in any negotiations with the U.S. On Wednesday, the spokesperson for Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard called for any negotiated settlement with the U.S. to include Yemen, the first explicit reference to that front.

Events threaten a key Strait of Hormuz alternative

The Houthis’ entry into Mokha on Thursday was their biggest territorial gain in years against their Saudi-backed Yemeni opponents. It brought them within 50 miles (80 kilometers) of the Bab el-Mandeb, a strait that has become an important alternative for global shipping as Iran targets vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.

A senior military official with Yemen’s internationally recognized government told the AP they were stunned that the Saudi air force didn’t strike the Houthis earlier, as they were advancing on Mokha. He assessed that Saudi Arabia didn’t get a green light from the U.S. to embark on a large-scale air campaign.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t allowed to speak to the media, also blamed “lack of coordination” between Yemen’s army and allied forces, saying it gave the Houthis “a priceless opportunity.”

The Houthis had already attacked Saudi shipping in the Bab el-Mandeb and Red Sea since declaring a blockade there in July, as well as oil infrastructure inside Saudi Arabia. The Houthis said it was in response to the kingdom’s blockade of Houthi-held parts of Yemen, in place for years.

New disruption to the waterway could mean trouble for all shipping and for the price of crude oil, which has now soared again. Saudi Arabia has increasingly relied on the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb to export its crude since Iran has been targeting vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. About 12% of the world’s goods are typically shipped through the strait.

Shipping through the Bab al-Mandeb had fallen by about 60% since the Houthis began attacking some ships there in late 2023 while expressing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. Shipping increased this year as Saudi Arabia sought alternatives to the Strait of Hormuz, but renewed Houthi threats have “curtailed” that activity, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence.

Saudi Arabia, which earlier this week said it had always offered “opportunities for negotiation,” also has said it has the right to defend itself in response to the Houthis’ blockade. The foreign ministers of Iran and Saudi Arabia spoke Thursday about diplomatic efforts to “restore stability” to the region, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on social media.

The fighting risks a return to civil war

In a statement released Friday, the National Defense Council of Yemen’s Saudi-backed and internationally recognized government on Thursday strongly condemned the Houthis’ renewed attacks on Saudi Arabia.

The council also acknowledged that Yemen’s government is on the front line of freedom of navigation, and called for international support as the Houthis swept along the Red Sea coast toward the Bab el-Mandeb.

The escalating fighting threatens to end a fragile truce that had largely halted Yemen’s civil war since 2022.

At stake are the 40 million people in the Arab world’s poorest country who fear a return to the conflict that killed 150,000 and brought many others to the brink of famine.

The Houthis have been at war with Yemen’s government since 2014, when the rebels swept from their mountainous heartland and seized much of northern and central Yemen, and the capital of Sanaa. Saudi Arabia entered the war the following year on behalf of the government.

Historic amusement and water park closes | Inquirer South Jersey

Taylor Allen — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:30:00 +0000

Good morning, South Jersey.

Clementon Park & Splash World closed its gates, and the century-old amusement park will soon be for sale once again.

And a local woman keeps her best friend’s memory alive through a nonprofit created to help children with disabilities.

Plus, first responders and survivors are being diagnosed with deadly diseases 25 years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, two New Jersey Congress members appeared with EMR scrapyard’s CEO to call for more oversight on lithium-ion batteries, and more news of the day.

— Taylor Allen (southjersey@inquirer.com)

P.S. Thank you for continuing to support our work. This daily newsletter is approaching three months and we want your thoughts! Let us know how we’re doing by taking our survey.

If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

Clementon Park & Splash World’s closure

Clementon Park & Splash World has closed, again.

The amusement park’s owner announced the shutdown of the longtime regional attraction for South Jersey families on its website and social media accounts Wednesday, just five years after it was bought at a public bankruptcy auction.

IB Parks & Entertainment, the owner, shared the news after its final day of operation on Labor Day. The park will soon be put up for sale.

The company bought the century-old park in 2021 for $2.37 million after financial struggles led to the previous closure in 2019.

The Inquirer’s Lacey Latch has more on the history of the park.

Honoring her best friend’s memory

Alexus Mackenzye Dick and Trinity Jagdeo quickly became best friends at 5 years old while at a Franklinville elementary school.

It began with a game of hopscotch, when Jagdeo was amazed how Dick zipped through the squares in her wheelchair before she fully understood her soon-to-be friend’s condition.

Inspired by Dick, Jagdeo founded the nonprofit From We Can’t to We Can while the two were teenagers. In the years since, she has self-published comic books about local kids with disabilities who transform into superheroes, hosted fashion shows with models with disabilities, and gifted thousands of medical devices.

Dick died earlier this year at 25 due to complications related to spinal muscular atrophy type 2, a disease that causes progressive muscle weakness.

Now, Jagdeo is dedicated to running the charity to honor her friend’s wish to help people.

Reporter Sarah Nicell provides a look inside Jagdeo’s recent efforts to keep her friend’s memory alive.

What to know today

U.S. Reps. Donald Norcross and Frank Pallone Jr. appeared with the CEO of the EMR scrapyard in Camden Thursday to call for more oversight on lithium-ion batteries, which the recycling plant blames for causing fires at the site.
About 145,000 first responders and survivors of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are getting treatment through the World Trade Center Health Program. The program at Rutgers University in Piscataway is one of six clinics created nationally to provide care to responders.
Cooper University Hospital in Camden has one of the nation’s leading military medical training programs, and it was established by a surgeon who was part of the crew that saved a police officer trapped in the World Trade Center rubble during the 9/11 attacks, CBS Philadelphia reports.
Burlington Township’s Kelly N. Moore, the award-winning clinical psychologist, Rutgers professor, and mental health activist, has died at 46 of kidney cancer.
A new Sprouts Farmers Market will open in Washington Township on Saturday.
Cherry Hill Zone PTA will host a forum on Sept. 15 for residents to meet the district’s board of education candidates, 70and73 reports. Submissions for questions are due by 9 p.m. tonight.

🧠 Trivia time

Which Sixer launched his own sneaker brand called 741 Performance?

A) Jaylen Brown

B) LeBron James

C) Joel Embiid

D) Tyrese Maxey

Think you know? Check your answer.

What we’re …

🍎 Planning: An apple-picking trip to Duffield’s Farm in Sewell.

🦅 Previewing: The new food items coming to Lincoln Financial Field for Eagles games.

🐈 Following: The Rock Cats, the (almost) all-cat band on Instagram.

📸 Photo of the week

✏️ One last back-to-school thing: Follow a class of kindergartners as some brought jitters — but mostly excitement — during the first day of school at Cinnaminson’s New Albany Elementary.

Enjoy your weekend! I’ll be back with more South Jersey news on Monday.

By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer’s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.

Her back hurt, then she couldn’t button her pants. The cause was alarming. | Medical Mystery

David Wahlberg — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:00:00 +0000

When her back began to ache, Maria Morales attributed the soreness to her job as a therapist for children with autism, where she often moved around and sat in “little kid” chairs.

Then after a week with this pain, the 26-year-old from Miami started to feel like she had the flu, but a test for influenza was negative. The next day, she woke up with abdominal pain. At work, it seemed like her belly kept growing. “I couldn’t button my pants,” she said.

She went home, where later that day her boyfriend checked on her. “He put pressure on my stomach, and I yelled out in pain,” she said.

He took her to the emergency room, where a scan showed a mass on her right kidney surrounded by a pool of blood. Doctors said she had an angiomyolipoma, a benign tumor that is more common in women than in men. After undergoing a procedure to stop the bleeding, she was released from the hospital with a plan to monitor the tumor.

But four months later, her bloating and fatigue persisted, and the mass continued to grow. The diagnosis she eventually received was much more serious, requiring treatments that caused life-changing complications. The diagnosis was also surprising, given that the condition is almost always found in young children.

Scan finds a mass

Morales, now 34, grew up healthy. She ran regularly and participated in CrossFit programs as a young adult. A cousin’s Down syndrome sparked her interest in helping children with special needs, leading her to become a behavioral therapist for kids with autism.

When her back started to hurt in November 2018, she wasn’t surprised, given that therapy sessions can involve lifting children and twisting on the floor. But the abdominal pain she developed made her worry. When she arrived at the ER, doctors initially thought she might have appendicitis.

A CT scan revealed a kidney mass nearly the size of a baseball, with bleeding around it. Morales was admitted to the hospital, where additional scans suggested the growth was an angiomyolipoma, doctors said. The noncancerous tumors, made of fat cells, muscle tissue, and blood vessels, are somewhat common, especially in women, typically in middle age. They are often discovered when people undergo imaging tests for other reasons.

Morales said doctors assured her the problem wasn’t serious. “They said it was a very vascular tumor that burst, but it’s nothing to be concerned about,” she said. “We trusted them.”

Four days after Morales arrived at the ER, doctors performed an embolization, using a catheter to insert tiny beads of gelatin into blood vessels around the tumor to reduce the risk of additional bleeding and to try to shrink the mass. The doctors continued to refer to the tumor as a likely angiomyolipoma, even though their report from the procedure said “its appearance was not characteristic” of that.

Five days after the procedure, Morales was discharged from the hospital. Her pain subsided, but she still felt tired and her abdomen still seemed swollen.

The next month, she had clinic visits at separate health systems with two urologic oncologists, who specialize in cancers of the kidneys and the urinary system. Both agreed with the diagnosis of an angiomyolipoma and called for another CT scan in three months, with the first urologist saying it would be better to wait until the bleeding subsided so the image would be clearer.

By the time Morales next saw the first urologist three months later, in March 2019, a new CT scan showed the mass was growing. The doctor said he would continue to monitor the likely angiomyolipoma. He considered doing a biopsy to check if the tumor might be cancerous, according to medical records, but Morales said he didn’t do one. Doctors had not previously suggested she get a biopsy.

Surprising diagnosis

Morales returned to the second urologic oncologist, Mark Gonzalgo, at the University of Miami’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center. Gonzalgo, noting the large size of Morales’s apparent angiomyolipoma and now suspecting possible cancer, recommended removing the kidney, which would eliminate the root of the problem and allow for confirmatory testing.

But Morales and her parents, having been told by the other doctors that her condition wasn’t serious, were taken aback by the idea of getting rid of her kidney. What if she developed a problem with her remaining kidney?

Gonzalgo referred Morales to an interventional radiologist, who in April 2019 did two embolization procedures, like the one performed earlier in the hospital. When a CT scan showed the mass was still getting bigger, that doctor did another embolization in June 2019.

In July 2019, an additional CT scan was troubling for two reasons. Not only was the mass continuing to grow, but lesions also appeared on her liver. Biopsies of her kidney and liver tissue revealed that she had Wilms tumor, a type of kidney cancer found almost exclusively in children younger than 5. About 600 cases are diagnosed each year in the United States, only about 3% of them in adults.

The prognosis for children with Wilms tumor is good, but the outlook for adults is not as promising. A study in 2020 found that nearly 92% of children with the disease were alive 10 years later, compared with 70% of adults and roughly 52% of young adults.

In August 2019, Gonzalgo removed Morales’s kidney and the tumor, confirming she had Stage 4 Wilms tumor that had spread to her liver. The mass had doubled in size from her initial scan nine months earlier, to the size of a large grapefruit. When Gonzalgo saw Morales in March 2019, he thought she might have renal cell carcinoma, the most common type of adult kidney cancer, though the condition is typically seen in older adults. He did not suspect Wilms tumor, which is named after the German surgeon who first described it in 1899.

“It wasn’t at the top of the list, that’s for sure,” Gonzalgo said.

Morales doesn’t have inherited genetic mutations that account for a small proportion of Wilms tumor cases, said Aditi Dhir, a pediatric oncologist at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center who treated her. She does have some family history of cancer: Her maternal grandmother died of breast cancer at age 62, and her father, a former smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer last year.

Treatment complications

Morales received two weeks of radiation treatments and an intense regimen of chemotherapy, getting combinations of five drugs over more than a year. The infusions, overseen by Dhir and other pediatric oncologists familiar with Wilms tumor, were delivered at the cancer center’s clinic for children, where nurses wore scrubs festooned with cartoons.

“It was me and a bunch of kids,” Morales said.

A few weeks after the chemotherapy began, Morales’s skin turned yellow. She developed veno-occlusive disease of the liver, also known as sinusoidal obstruction syndrome, a potentially fatal side effect of chemo and radiation. Small blood vessels in the liver become blocked, causing jaundice and a buildup of fluids.

Morales spent 10 days in intensive care, not allowed to leave her bed even to go to the bathroom. She had low levels of platelets, the blood cell fragments essential for clotting, and doctors worried movement might cause bleeding. Even today, her platelet count remains low, and she must be cautious about her activities.

The cancer treatments triggered early menopause and left Morales infertile, with ultrasounds detecting no follicles or eggs. To manage menopausal symptoms, she wears an estrogen patch and has an intrauterine device that releases progesterone. If she wants to have children, she will need to use an egg donor or surrogate.

For now, she and her husband, Octavio Goren, are uncertain about becoming parents. “I’ve had so much medical trauma. I don’t know if I want to experience more,” Morales said.

She wonders if she could have avoided the complications of her aggressive treatments if the cancer had been diagnosed earlier, before it spread. “What would my life have been like if they’d done the biopsy right away and took it out then?” she said.

Dhir said Morales’s cancer has been in remission since she finished chemotherapy in October 2020.

“The five-year mark was a good celebration point,” Dhir said. “The further and further she keeps going on, the lesser chances of it ever coming back.”

Shortly after Morales and Goren got married in 2024, they moved to the Denver area, where they enjoy hiking, camping, and exploring parks in the Rocky Mountains. They had visited Colorado in 2017, before Morales got sick, and became enamored with the scenery. When she later struggled with her cancer treatments, she vowed that if she survived, she would relocate and spend more time doing what she loves: appreciating nature.

“You can be on the highway and there’s a hike right there, so we’ll just stop and do it,” she said. “Everything is breathtaking, no matter what angle you look at it.”

Iran-backed Houthis now control a Yemen island in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait at the entrance to the Red Sea, officials say

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:19:12 +0000

CAIRO (AP) — Iran-backed Houthis now control a Yemen island in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait at the entrance to the Red Sea, officials say.

Trial remains elusive for purported mastermind accused of plotting 9/11 attacks

LARRY NEUMEISTER — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:12:09 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — Two decades after U.S. authorities locked Khalid Sheikh Mohammed away at a military detention center in Cuba, the purported mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks sometimes seems barely any closer to being put on trial than the day he arrived.

A judge recently set a 2028 date for Mohammed to finally be tried before a military tribunal, but some lawyers predict it will never happen — not that year or any other year. They say the maze of legal issues that arose because Mohammed was tortured following his 2003 capture in Pakistan is too twisted to ever be straightened out.

A fleeting bid to put him on trial in a civilian court in New York City was shouted down years ago over security concerns.

A plea agreement that would have kept Mohammed imprisoned for life, but spared him from a possible execution, began to collapse shortly after it was announced in 2024, and finally died for good last year.

“It’s all contaminated by politics and the lack of accountability on torture,” said Joshua Dratel, an attorney who played a part in assuring that Mohammed has proper legal representation.

In late August, the U.S. military judge who set a June 5, 2028, trial date for Mohammed and three others charged in the Sept. 11 attacks ruled that prosecutors could not use an alleged confession he made to the FBI in 2007. Those statements were deemed tainted because Mohammed was subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” overseas, including the simulated drowning technique called waterboarding.

While the ruling was a blow to the prosecution, the U.S. government decided not to appeal, in part because doing so could have further delayed a possible trial.

Meanwhile, Mohammed remains jailed in Guantanamo Bay, where he was brought on Sept. 5, 2006, following more than three years in secret prisons in other countries.

Victims' families still hope a trial will happen

Terry Strada, whose husband, Tom, died at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, said that she and other people who lost family members still hope a trial will someday happen.

“We very much want to see this come to an end at some point. We do want to see justice served. It’s just as important as 25 years ago,” she said.

But Strada, the national chair of the group 9/11 Families United, also said she would rather have Mohammed rot at Guantanamo Bay indefinitely than get behind a resolution that would involve dropping the death penalty as a possibility. Strada said she worries that if Mohammed is not executed, future U.S. leaders might someday be tempted to swap him for Americans held prisoner elsewhere in the world.

The death penalty, she said, “fits the crime and it would prevent that from ever happening. And that’s important to me.”

Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003, accused of developing and directing the 9/11 attacks, as a leader of the Islamic militant group al-Qaida. Some of the delays in his legal proceedings have stemmed from his treatment after he fell into U.S. control. A U.S. Senate report pointed to his extended torture in CIA custody, including 183 sessions of waterboarding.

Plans for a civilian trial were dropped

For a time in 2009, it seemed Mohammed was headed to New York after then-Attorney General Eric Holder announced plans to try him and four other men charged in the Sept. 11 attacks in a Manhattan courthouse just blocks from the World Trade Center site.

Then-President Barack Obama, who had pledged to close the Guantanamo detention center, said Mohammed would face “the most exacting demands of justice.”

Almost immediately, opposition arose. Some critics predicted Mohammed would use a trial as a platform to spread hateful views of America and its allies. Others cited security concerns, saying it could again make New York a terrorist target. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican, called the plan unwise and said it showed “a lack of concern for the rights of the public.”

Plans for a civilian trial were dropped.

“It was a charade in many respects,” Dratel said.

The military tribunal system, he said, has proven itself to be a worse solution, unable to function efficiently, without a proper structure and without fidelity to federal courts.

“Each time you reach an impasse, no one knows what to do,” he said.

David Raskin, a Washington lawyer now in private practice who would have led the government’s prosecution of Mohammed in New York if it hadn't been abandoned, said in an essay published in The Washington Post on Wednesday that he is confident a civilian trial would have ended with a conviction. The military commissions, on the other hand, “became a defense lawyer's dream,” beset by “endless litigation over their legality and procedures.”

“I predict there will never be a completed military commission trial for Mohammed and the other Sept. 11 defendants,” he said.

Bankrupt Chester City is getting nearly $100 million in state and private funding

Anthony Wood — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 18:24:30 +0000

Approaching the fourth anniversary of its rare and historic bankruptcy, the City of Chester is about to get $97.1 million in public and private investments, Gov. Josh Shapiro announced Thursday.

“I might just be the happiest mayor in America,” said Chester Mayor Stefan Roots, among those who joined Shapiro for the announcement in Delaware County’s only city.

Shapiro, noting that the resolution of the protracted and often acrimonious bankruptcy “would take far longer than I’d like,” said “the time to invest in Chester is now.”

Roots said the money would go toward beautifying neighborhoods and dealing with blighted properties in the city of 33,000. “We’re going to be repairing homes. … We’re going to be improving roads and sidewalks,” he said.

The majority of the funding, $52.6 million, will go to “revamp and redesign” a section of Route 291/U.S. 13, part of the old “Industrial Highway,” which separates the riverfront from the city neighborhoods. The bulk of that money would come from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Council.

The highway has long been a serious safety hazard for motorists and people who live along it, Roots said in an interview after the event. Speeding has been a major issue, he added.

PennDot also would be putting up $7.3 million for new sidewalks and walkways to Widener University, at the north end of town, in an effort to integrate the campus with the rest of the city.

“How do you be a city with a college, and not be a college town?” Roots said.

He said major efforts would be made to spruce up the Avenue of the States, which is a thoroughfare from City Hall to the campus about 10 blocks away.

The state and the Philadelphia Union soccer team are putting up $27.5 million to build “new outdoor fields, a 100,000-square-foot field house, indoor courts, academy space, and a performance center to expand youth programs and support school and community sports” at the riverfront Sportsplex in the city’s West End, according to a state news release.

Wawa, Essential Utilities Inc., Power Home Remodeling, and Delaware County are contributing $2 million for demolition work and to acquire 10 lots and two buildings, along with fixing up 25 other structures.

Shapiro said that Chester was now an “enterprise zone,” a Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development program in which tax breaks and grant money would be made available to investors.

The department is overseeing the city’s bankruptcy process, which began in fall 2022, in part due to several years of missed pension payments.

But the city’s financial distress has been about 70 years in the making, as it has struggled to pay bills with the loss of businesses and its once-formidable industrial base. Among its prime sources of revenue today are an incinerator and a casino.

Among the nation’s more than 35,000 municipalities, only about 30 have filed for bankruptcy.

Neither Shapiro nor Roots made any mention of the bankruptcy beyond the governor’s opening comments.

State-appointed bankruptcy receiver Vijay Kapoor said in a statement: “We are very grateful for the commonwealth’s and the private sector’s investment in the City of Chester’s future.”

Gameday Central: Eagles vs. Commanders preview | Sponsored by xfinity

Jeff Neiburg, Olivia Reiner — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:29:10 +0000

The Eagles are back! Ahead of Sunday’s season opener against the Commanders, Olivia Reiner and Jeff Neiburg preview the matchup, break down the biggest storylines and share what to watch for when Philly kicks off its new season.

South Philly is celebrating chiles en nogada season, but not for long

Kiki Aranita — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:01:00 +0000

Chiles en nogada, no matter who makes them, are visually arresting dishes. They’re distinctive for their colors: a base of a deep green poblano pepper, a blanket of creamy white walnut sauce (the titular nogada), traditional pops of red from fresh pomegranate seeds, and a sprinkling of more green from parsley. These components represent the colors of the Mexican flag. The poblano is stuffed with picadillo, a mix of ground meats and fruits that marry savory and sweet flavors and can often be time-consuming to prepare.

Chiles en nogada season is fleeting, lasting just two to six weeks in late August and early September, when the dish’s main ingredients — poblanos and walnuts — are aligned and in season, along with the apples and peaches that are also at peak ripeness in Puebla, where the dish originated.

In Mexico, chiles en nogada has become a national dish, treated with great reverence and ceremony. At fine-dining establishments in Mexico City, diners can select which poblano they’d like stuffed, just as one might select a fish from a tank to be cooked. But you don’t have to go to Mexico to eat it — there are several excellent versions found in Philadelphia.

Chelo Manzanarez, the chef and owner of El Mictlan, which generally focuses on the food of Guerrero (the Mexican state located southwest of Puebla), has worked to make this fundamental Mexican dish his own.

“It’s usually a sweet and heavy dish, but I’ve tried to make it more flavorful and more personal,” Manzanarez said of the chile en nogada at his South Philly BYOB at Beechwood and Snyder Streets.

Manzanarez switched out beef in favor of a mix of pork and chicken, and he swapped raisins for dried dates. He seasons the picadillo with cinnamon, clove, and anise. He uses both green and red apples, “to get that contrast between sweet and sour.” He adds plantains and pineapples “for their tropical flavor.”

Making his chile en nogada is truly a labor of love for Manzanarez. “I cook each fruit and vegetable individually and caramelize them separately. Most of the work comes from dicing everything very small.” After mixing all cooked components together for the filling, he still has to roast the peppers, which he does for three to four minutes on each side before letting them sweat in a plastic bag, making it easier to remove their skins. “It’s complicated — getting the poblanos to the right consistency so that they don’t lose their shape,” he said.

For the white of the Mexican flag, Manzanarez eschews the traditional goat cheese, instead mixing cream cheese with queso fresco, walnuts, almonds, and a touch of milk. The result is creamy, luxurious, and not too rich.

Manzanarez finishes his chile en nogada with bright cilantro oil and red chili oil, doubling down on the colors as a deeper tribute to the Mexican flag.

He first came up with his recipe while working at La Llorona, also in South Philly. It’s a dish customers ask for every year.

Restaurants traditionally stop serving chiles en nogada after Mexican Independence Day, on Sept. 16. “But now we celebrate Independence Day for the whole of September,” said Manzanarez, which is how long he plans on serving it at El Mictlan.

More traditional iterations of the dish can also be found at La Llorona and El Chingon (usually only available at dinner).

La Llorona serves a richer but very classic version with the roasted poblano battered in egg whites and gently sautéed before being blanketed in an especially rich and dense nogada. The pepper is stuffed with ground beef and pork, peaches, and apples. Its parsley, sliced almond, and pomegranate seed garnishes replicate the stripes of the Mexican flag precisely.

The availability of chef Carlos Aparicio of El Chingon’s chile en nogada ($30) is entirely dependent on the fresh walnuts he flies in, one kilogram weekly, from his hometown of San Mateo Ozolco, located in the Calpan municipality of Puebla — the same municipality where, according to legend, chiles en nogada were first invented by Augustinian nuns. They created the dish in 1821 in honor of General Agustín de Iturbide, after he signed the treaty that recognized Mexico’s independence from Spain. He became the first emperor of Mexico, and the dish represents the colors of what was then the Mexican Army’s flag.

“This year, [Puebla] had a lot of rain so the walnuts fell off the trees too soon,” said Aparicio. “They really have to be fresh, and we can’t preserve them. As soon as they get here, we wash and clean them and put them in milk immediately.” After their milk bath, the walnuts get mixed with goat cheese, cream cheese, cinnamon, and sugar.

Aparicio’s chile en nogada is stuffed with beef, pork, and fruits, and garnished sparingly. Hewing to tradition, Aparicio’s serves it at room temperature.

Aparicio is hoping that this year he will receive at least one or two more shipments of walnuts, which means he can serve chiles en nogada for one or two more weeks. (El Chingon sells about 12 to 15 per day when it is available.)

Chiles en nogada season brings out the competitive nature in chefs and customers. “People will try to get every different chile en nogada in Philadelphia, make comparisons and [argue] about which one is the best,” said Manzanarez.

You have one, maybe two weeks left to decide for yourself.

Is Sean Mannion ready for his big moment with the Eagles? He’s been preparing for it for years.

Jeff Neiburg — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:01:00 +0000

Mike Riley and Sean Mannion were having one of their catch-up calls when Mannion, who played quarterback at Oregon State under Riley, told his former coach the latest project he was working on during the nascent days of his own coaching career.

Mannion, the most prolific passer in Oregon State history, told Riley that he was putting together and digitizing all of the passing concepts he could find dating back to the 1960s.

“This is what he does in his spare time,” Riley explained recently.

Mannion is just 34 years old and only three years removed from his playing career. He has never called plays in the NFL before and now is tasked with turning around an Eagles offense that was too stagnant in 2025 under another first-year coordinator and first-time play caller Kevin Patullo. Nick Sirianni said in February that he was looking for someone who was detailed and had “conviction in what they believed and why they believed in it, and the vision and conviction of how they went about it.”

Those traits seem to describe Mannion, whose father, John, called him “a saver” who took and saved detailed notes at every stop along his football path and even has comprehensive notes on concepts that pre-date his own life by some 30 years. Eagles quarterbacks coach Parks Frazier raved recently about Mannion’s attention to detail and his ability to recall and reference something he has learned along the way.

“He remembers every detail about all of those things and he’s constantly applying it to what he’s doing moving forward,” Frazier said. “He has extreme, detailed, categorized notes and film of everything he’s been through.”

Mannion is installing a new offense for Jalen Hurts and the Eagles, one rooted in the flavors of the trendy Kyle Shanahan-Sean McVay scheme. But Mannion’s history and influences suggest a style that ultimately will pull from every resource imaginable as he guides the Eagles offense into the future.

Sirianni and Howie Roseman took a calculated risk on a young and fast-rising offensive coach when they landed on Mannion, who spent two years on the staff in Green Bay, most recently as quarterbacks coach, before his big promotion. But a lack of experience doesn’t necessarily mean Mannion is any less equipped to succeed than a more experienced candidate. In many ways, Mannion, the son and grandson of football coaches, has been preparing for this job for most of his life.

“His thing was, he wanted to play as long as he could,” his father said. “The unsaid part was that when those days were done that he would turn his attention to coaching.”

Like father, like son

At its roots, coaching is teaching. In that sense, Sean isn’t just the son of a football coach; he is the son of two teachers, and his earliest influences can be traced to the classroom. He’d mess around in a playpen while his mother, Inga, an elementary school teacher, finished work in her classroom after school.

He was around his father’s football teams as much as he could be, too. One Saturday, John, who also has been a teacher for 36 years, was going to scout an upcoming opponent with a coaching friend and Sean wanted to tag along. He was around 7 years old and an inquisitive kid at the time, so he brought with him a yellow legal pad. While he watched the game next to the two adults, he doodled and drew notes and observations from the field.

“He spent a lot of time doing what we were doing,” John said of his son’s early days. “That notepad probably was a byproduct of all that time spent.”

Sean grew up in Pleasanton, Calif., Alameda County, about 20 miles east of the San Francisco Bay in a household that valued education. He was a good student who also excelled in sports. Football was his main sport, but he also played baseball and basketball.

When Sean was a rising sophomore at Foothill High School, John, a former assistant, was given the job as the school’s head football coach. He was nervous, though, about any appearance of nepotism, so from the outset of that season he had Sean playing on the JV team. Foothill was 12-1 the previous season and had two upperclassmen ahead of Sean on the depth chart. A week before the season, the senior quarterback hurt his ankle and was on crutches. Later that week, after throwing at least four touchdowns in a scrimmage, the junior quarterback showed up on Labor Day, the first practice of the first game week of the season, and complained about a back injury that eventually forced him to miss the season.

John called home right away. Sean had to get to the field and get to practice.

Sean’s freshman coach at Foothill was Mike Madden, the son of Hall of Fame coach John Madden. Mike approached John Mannion/ that first week and asked him if he was nervous for Sean.

“Gosh, I hadn’t thought about it,” John said. “I’m nervous for myself at this point.”

John’s first game as varsity head coach was also Sean’s first game as varsity starting quarterback. Asked if he remembered it well, John responded the way many coaches would, and the way the father of a detailed note-taker would: “Oh yeah,” he said. “Of course I do, yeah. We lost, 26-21, and Sean did really well. It was a really hot day and there was a lot learned by me.”

The team they lost to went to the state playoffs, but so did Foothill. Sean “knew the offense from all those years growing up around it” and “really absorbed a lot of things along the way,” John said.

“We kind of went through it together,” John said. “There was no plan of him ever being on the team that first year, but sure enough there he was. There’s challenges in there but I think it was a great experience for us to be able to do that.”

Sean finished his high school career as Foothill’s all-time leading passer and, after throwing for 3,521 yards and 27 touchdowns as a senior, was off to Oregon State.

That yellow legal pad Sean doodled on during that football scouting trip was part of a full-circle moment some 25 years later.

“When I got my first coaching job with the Packers, as a gift, he framed it for me,” Sean said. “So I still have it in my house. It’s pretty cool. The scheme has evolved since then, I will say, but it was a really cool, special gift that he kept.”

Jalen Hurts’ play is again under the microscope. His latest effort to evolve could determine his future.

The Machine

Riley’s favorite word to describe Sean is “diligent.” How many coaches born in the 1990s are digitizing passing concepts from the 60s?

Sean was the top quarterback Oregon State pursued in the class of 2010, and Riley and his staff were thrilled when he committed and later signed. The program had produced top quarterbacks like Derek Anderson and Matt Moore, and Riley thought Sean would be the next great one to come through Corvallis.

The diligence showed up right away. Sean was supposed to redshirt during his first season on campus, but the summer before his first camp with the Beavers, Sean got the keys to the facility from the graduate assistants to go in early and watch film.

“That was him the whole time,” Riley said. “He could really throw the football and he was a very hard worker physically, and then he was a very hard worker off the field. He wanted to know and learn and he’s one of the most diligent people that I’ve ever been around.”

That part of Sean made it easier when, during the second half of the first game the following season, Riley put Sean in the game over a junior who started. He was just a redshirt freshman, but he was Oregon State’s starter from that point until graduation.

“That was one of the first times probably in my career that I actually had the faith in a redshirt freshman to insert him sometime early in the year as a starter,” Riley said. “I think that said a lot about what we felt about his early development and what we thought he could do on the field.”

Sean became a captain the following season. He is soft-spoken by nature, those closest to him say, but his leadership showed up in the way he carried himself and how he approached the game. By senior year, he had a nickname: “The Machine.” That year’s offensive coordinator, John Garrett, referred to Sean by that moniker during a film session one day and it stuck, much to Sean’s chagrin. Oregon State’s offensive linemen sometimes walked robotically around Sean.

“That is a pretty appropriate nickname because he was just like that,” Riley said. “He just went to work and put in the work and everybody knew that about him. I think he’s one of the most probably respected teammates that I saw through all my years of coaching.”

Sean exited college as Oregon State’s all-time leader in passing yards and ranked in the top 10 in college football history. He’s still 19th.

The quarterback and coach have stayed in touch over the years. Riley, who left Oregon State for Nebraska after Sean’s senior year, is now retired, though he’s still on the College Football Playoff selection committee. Sean isn’t the most recent Mannion whom Riley had talked to as of a few weeks ago, though. John, who no longer coaches, now writes a newsletter on Substack called “John Mannion’s Coaching Playbook,” and recently interviewed Riley.

Sean’s most recent catch-up call with his college coach came after OTAs this season and just before camp.

“He sounded excited and he sounded like he would be because he’s always prepared — he sounded confident,” Riley said. “And I could also tell he was having a lot of fun.”

‘A 30,000-foot view’

Sean has described his father and Riley as his two biggest influences along the way. But his most relevant football influences when it comes to his current job came into his life in 2017, when Sean was backing up Jared Goff with the Los Angeles Rams and the team brought in a new coach, McVay, who hired a new offensive coordinator, Matt LaFleur. Both had been schooled under Shanahan and brought to the Rams a new style of offense that Sean took to.

“I just felt like I was learning so, so much,” Sean said. “It was such an exciting way to match the run and pass. They had such a way about teaching the game where we could feel ourselves challenging a defense, but it felt simple to us.

“Those are the things that really stood out to me going through that experience that really resonated with me as a player and certainly resonate with me as a coach. That was a very exciting point in my football life, just the exposure to that type of teaching, that type of scheme. I know Matt, obviously a mentor of mine, getting to play for [McVay]. I learned so much from those people. It’s certainly a big part of molding me into the type of coach I am now.”

How the Eagles offense will look come Sunday still remains a sort of mystery. There certainly will be more motion, more snaps from under center, and more play-action. But the Eagles ran a bland offense during the preseason in an effort to hide most of their playbook, and the first-team offense was rarely fully healthy during training camp and also had to go against one of the best defenses in the league.

The Eagles have a new style of running the ball, which will be a key to unlocking the passing game and play-action. The base of the Shanahan-McVay offense is outside, wide-zone runs that stretch the defense horizontally. The Eagles and longtime offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland parted ways this offseason, and new offensive line coach Chris Kuper has been in charge of implementing the new blocking scheme.

Kuper was the offensive line coach in Minnesota when Sean spent part of the 2023 season with the Vikings.

“He sees the game from a 30,000-foot view as well as being on the sideline and being into it with the players,” Kuper said. “I think it speaks volumes, his experience as a quarterback in this league and being able to connect people and become a glue guy has been incredible.”

There may be a misconception that Sean, a quarterback by trade, just focuses on the quarterbacking. But Kuper described a coach who is involved in every facet of the offense.

“What I love about Sean is how much he loves the run game,” Kuper said.

Kuper said part of Sean’s responsibilities in Green Bay when he was an offensive assistant in 2024 was to draw some runs. The Eagles do have a run-game coordinator in tight ends coach Ryan Mahaffey, but Kuper is confident Sean could handle it all.

“Sean could game plan and call a game all on his own, I think, if he wanted to,” Kuper said.

First-time play caller

The Mannions relocated to Oregon when Sean was in college, and one spring after John had taken over as the head coach at Mountainside High, he needed help.

The 2021 football season came together rather late in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a shortened spring season was on the table. Sean was home in Oregon doing remote OTAs with the Vikings when John asked him to be the offensive coordinator that season.

Sean’s younger brother, Brian, was the starting quarterback. It was a family affair.

On the day of the first practice, John walked out on the field and handed Sean his handwritten practice plan.

“You know there’s software for this, right?” Sean quipped.

John was calling plays, but after Mountainside was shut out in the second of their six games, John made a change.

“I handed the torch to him. It was fun,” John said.

John has watched the oldest of his four children become a loving husband to his wife, Megan, and the proud father of three children. He always knew Sean could and probably would eventually become a successful coach, but that spring offered his first real chance to witness Sean’s future in person.

“I could see clearly he had a real knack for it,” John said.

Sean was still in the process of talking to the Eagles when he was tapped to call plays in January’s East-West Shrine Bowl. He called John during his father’s lunch break.

“You haven’t called a game since Mountainside vs. Grant High School back in March of 2021,” John joked.

The two shared a laugh. A few days later, Sean was hired to call plays for the Eagles.

All roads lead to Delco

Margaret Mannion was around 20 years old when she moved to California, but John’s mother spent her early days in Delaware County. She lived in Drexel Hill, graduated from Archbishop Prendergast High School, and worked at Villanova before moving west, where she met Jim Mannion, John’s late father.

Margaret, 84, has dementia now and still lives in California in an elder care facility, but John is pretty confident there will be at least one “proud Philadelphian” and Eagles fan watching the games this year from the elder care facility.

As for John, he’s a self-described “worrier.” When Sean redshirted at Oregon State, John loved the ease of watching the games with no pressure in the family section. After Sean was inserted as starter the next season, John called the box office. He wanted to sit in the far corner of the stadium in the last row. Tickets in the family section were free and required no work on his end, but every year he’d call the ticket office to secure his seats at the top of the stadium.

Sean rarely played in the NFL — he threw just 110 passes over nine seasons in the league — so Sunday Ticket usually sufficed. When Sean was hired by the Packers, they were on national television frequently enough, and for the games they weren’t, John would drive to his local Buffalo Wild Wings, where he’d watch quietly and hope the quarterback play was up to snuff.

Last year, while watching a game at the restaurant, a few Green Bay fans in their 20s complained to John about Packers quarterback Jordan Love. The group had a laugh when John told them, no, he wasn’t from Green Bay, his son coached the quarterbacks.

“I’m going to call him tonight and tell him there’s some guys in Oregon who say he’s got a lot of work to do,” John joked.

This year, it’s back to Sunday Ticket. John, who was in town for a few days in August observing the Eagles and Sean during camp, said he’ll build a fire at home, watch the game in peace, and “keep our fingers crossed.”

His son’s new job comes with a lot of pressure. Patullo was the most criticized person in the building last year and eventually took the fall after the team’s first-round exit, so all eyes will be on Sean as the season gets underway.

Margaret’s older sister, John’s aunt, still lives in New Jersey and called John after Sean got the job.

She was excited Sean was in a new, high-profile job back where his family has roots. But her excitement also had a tinge of nervousness: “Hopefully everybody is nice to him,” she said.

9/11’s toxic legacy | Morning Newsletter

Laura Benshoff — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:01:00 +0000

Welcome to Friday, Philly.

Today, we start by hearing from local 9/11 first responders, whose heroic work pulling bodies out of the rubble unknowingly exposed them to deadly toxins they’re still grappling with.

Then, we explore how a Pennsylvania company that administers Medicaid benefits is trying to amass political clout.

Plus, Sen. John Fetterman’s colleagues speak out about his Trump-a-palooza comments, and more news of the day.

— Laura Benshoff (morningnewsletter@inquirer.com)

If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

Toxic dust

They called it the World Trade Center cough. Or at least, that’s how it started for retired Philadelphia Police Capt. Mark Fisher.

Now, when Fisher empties the dishwasher or mows the lawn, he gets winded and lightheaded. His doctors say he requires a double-lung transplant soon. At best, the surgery could extend his life by five to seven years.

Twenty-five years ago, Fisher was among tens of thousands of responders who poured into Lower Manhattan after 9/11. He waded into the wreckage to search for survivors, trudging through toxic dust and breathing in smoke from fires burning below the rubble.

The cough started about a year after. Six years later, he was diagnosed with a fatal pulmonary disease.

The Inquirer’s Wendy Ruderman has this story on the wave of complex diagnoses now hitting 9/11 emergency personnel.

Medicaid insurers flex political spending

Medicaid, government-backed health insurance for low-income Americans, seniors, and people with disabilities, is a big business. And that business is about to change in a historic way, as the federal government plans to cut $900 billion from program spending over the next 10 years.

As a result, insurers such as Newtown Square-based AmeriHealth Caritas have radically stepped up their lobbying efforts to try to shape how the cuts roll out.

An Inquirer dive into the company, which is the largest Medicaid provider in Pennsylvania, found that it spent more on federal lobbying last year than any since 2008. It also donated to groups that elect state leaders — both Republicans and Democrats.

That’s drawn criticism from Republican elected officials who say that money should be spent on hospital bills, not building political clout.

The Inquirer’s Andrew Seidman and Joe Yerardi have the full report.

What you should know today

Pennsylvania Democratic officials said their constituents are “livid” at Democratic Sen. John Fetterman for his remarks at the midterm GOP convention, an event aimed at boosting Republicans at the polls this November.
Four prisoners serving life sentences in Pennsylvania have asked the state Supreme Court to make its ruling striking down automatic life sentences for second-degree murder apply to all.
East Norriton police are searching for more information about a hit-and-run driver who struck and killed a man over Labor Day weekend.
The City of Chester is getting an infusion of cash, to the tune of nearly $100 million, much of it going to road and pedestrian safety.
The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society is shutting down its popular pop-up beer garden in Manayunk on Oct. 5, making way for a controversial apartment development.
A Clementon, Camden County, amusement park is shuttering again, just five years after it was reopened following a bankruptcy auction.
The Flyers updated their rendering of a new arena proposed for South Philly after some fans criticized the lack of women in the digital illustration.

Plus: Why some blocks have Christmas lights all year round

Welcome back to Curious Philly Friday, our forum in which readers ask about the city’s quirks and then we report the answers.

It’s not just the Miracle on 13th Street. On certain South Philly blocks, twinkling string lights zigzag between the houses, lending a festive air all year round.

This week, a reader wondered: “How does one get the decorative street lights and who looks after them?”

Reporters Michelle Myers and Isabel Maney tracked down the answers about these winking displays, and found that many have been maintained for generations.

Have your own burning question about Philadelphia, its local oddities, or how the region works? Submit it here and you might find the answer featured in this space.

🧠 Trivia time

This longtime Eagles legend announced this week he’s retiring from the NFL — for real this time:

A) Dallas Goedert

B) Brandon Graham

C) Lane Johnson

D) Jake Elliott

Test your local news knowledge and check your answer in our weekly quiz.

What we’re …

📖 Considering. What happens when ICE pays local police departments to arrest immigrants? Inquirer opinion columnist Will Bunch traveled to Schuylkill County to document the impacts.

🥩 Grilling up. “All-you-can-eat” and “wagyu beef” are not usually found in the same sentence, but Ardmore’s Ogyu Japanese BBQ & Bar has thrown down the gauntlet. Inquirer food critic Craig LaBan put his body on the line to try to eat as much of the luxury meat as he could in 90 minutes.

🌀 Thankful for. This year’s El Niño has contributed to a historically quiet Atlantic hurricane season, writes The Inquirer’s weather reporter, Tony Wood.

🧩 Unscramble the anagram

Hint: Hospital system headquartered in West Philadelphia.

MID NINEPENCE

Email us if you know the answer. We’ll select a reader at random to shout out here.

Cheers to Karthik Balasubramanian, who correctly guessed Thursday’s answer: Offensive coordinator. Sean Mannion, the new Eagles OC, has a plan to breathe new life into the team’s run game this season.

Photo of the day

Thank you for spending some of your week with The Inquirer. Paola Pérez has your weekend editions and I will see you again on Monday. 👋

By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer’s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.

A fudge shop magnate was killed outside a Jersey Shore nightclub on this week in Philly history

Tommy Rowan — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:01:00 +0000

A Philadelphia man made a name for himself in the middle of the 20th century at the Jersey Shore by opening a series of flashy candy shops.

He also made enemies for fighting blue laws, and because he was gay.

On Sept. 7, 1964, Harry Anglemyer, the 37-year-old owner of the chain of Copper Kettle fudge shops, was found dead on the floor of the front seat of his Lincoln Continental.

Start of an empire

Anglemyer learned the fudge trade working summers at a Wildwood shop.

After serving in the Navy at the end of War War II, the 20-year-old high school dropout opened his first fudge shop on the Ocean City boardwalk in 1947.

The shop rose to prominence by churning out — by hand — pounds of creamy fudge in the shop’s namesake: real copper kettles.

Anglemyer opened several locations, amassed a fortune, and became civically involved.

He was an outspoken rabble-rouser as it pertained to the town’s blue laws, which prevented most boardwalk businesses from operating on Sundays, which were reserved for church business.

The bachelor was also indicted in 1963 on three counts related to his sexual behavior, which was criminalized at the time.

By Labor Day 1964, he had been acquitted of one charge, but was awaiting trial on the other two.

Considering his penchant for ruffling feathers, and the prejudice against LGBTQ+ people at the time, some people were not surprised by what came next.

End of an empire

He was found beaten to death inside his car early Labor Day morning outside the Dunes, a rock and roll club in Egg Harbor Township, outside Ocean City.

Many have theorized on the mystery, with some believing the crime was the work of an extortion ring that preyed on gay men.

A man who served time in federal prison for the ring was tried in Anglemyer’s death in 1969.

Ultimately he was acquitted when a star witness refused to take the stand.

After Anglemyer’s death, his sister Elaine Stasak and her family ran the business.

By 1980, the family counted five locations spread over the Shore in Ocean City, Avalon, Sea Isle City, and Stone Harbor. But by turn of the 21st century, all the shops had closed, and the sun had set on the fudge empire.

Know your news? Test your skills with our News Quiz.

Emily Bloch — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:01:00 +0000

Know your news? Test your skills with our News Quiz.

Take our news quiz on the Eagles, a restaurant expansion, and Philly teachers’ biggest struggles.

Emily Bloch

Published Sept. 11, 2026

Think you know your news? There’s only one way to find out. Welcome back to our weekly News Quiz — a quick way to see if your reading habits are sinking in and to put your local news knowledge to the test.

Question 1 of 10

This longtime Eagles legend announced this week he’s retiring from the NFL — for real this time: