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California Governor Gavin Newsom has commuted the death sentences of all 548 people on death row in the state, changing them instead to life in prison.

“We can now let these offenders die in obscurity while we forever remember and honour the victims,” he said in a letter.

The decision to spare death row inmates is largely symbolic in a state that has not executed an inmate since 2006, though experts say it could save millions of dollars in court costs each year. Only 13 inmates have been executed since voters reinstated the death penalty in 1978.

The decision comes as Newsom, the Democratic leader of the most populous US state, has been discussed as a possible 2028 contender for president.

Newsom, who is term limited, is winding down his final months in office. Fellow Democrat Xavier Becerra is projected to take over after the midterm elections on Tuesday.

Newsom explained in his letter that he is exercising his constitutional clemency authority to commute the sentences to life without the possibility of parole.

“After nearly 30 years in public office, I have come to understand the limits of what government can justly accomplish,” Newsom said. “I take this action because I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system and diminishes each of us”.

California has historically had the largest population of death row inmates. Newsom had previously ordered a halt to the death penalty in the state in 2019.

Describing his decision as a difficult but “righteous action”, Newsom said that although many Californians feel that those who commit brutal crimes deserve to die, he has concluded that “the state cannot morally kill them”.

He said that by every measure, California’s system for administering the death penalty “is a failure”, and that it has not and cannot be fairly applied, resulting in the conviction of innocent people.

Life without the possibility of parole is the most severe punishment he can lawfully impose and that the state can ethically enforce, he said.

He acknowledged that his clemency action will anger and hurt some Californians and said that it will “always weigh heavily on me”.

“As governor, I alone bear responsibility for this decision and its impact, just as I alone would bear responsibility for each execution,” he wrote.

“For this reason, I am compelled to follow my conscience and, as authorised by our Constitution, take this action for the welfare of the State of California.”

Because individual states have the power to prosecute crimes and order executions, much of the power lies with state governors.

Bernard E Harcourt, a law and civil liberties professor at Columbia University, told the BBC that it is not unprecedented for a potential presidential candidate to come out as an abolitionist in the run up to elections – despite the overall popularity of the death penalty in the US.

He noted that François Mitterrand did precisely that in his presidential campaign in France in 1981, taking “the higher ethical ground and was rewarded by the public for that”.

“I detect a very similar ethical positioning in Governor Newsom’s statements about the commutations. And here too, it may well be something that the voters respect,” he said.

Newsom’s decision comes after the high-profile botched execution of a woman in Tennessee in late September and while executions have been on the rise in the US. There are three executions scheduled for Thursday in Indiana, Florida and Alabama.

At least four of seven judges on the California Supreme Court will have to sign off on the commutations, CalMatters reported.

It is unclear how Newsom’s decision will affect condemned inmates like Keith Doolin, 53, who was sentenced to death in 1996 for murdering two sex workers, Inez Espinoza and Peggy Tucker, and shooting four others. He maintains his innocence.

Doolin lived on death row at San Quentin for decades, until he was moved to another prison in 2025 when the governor announced the state would reform the prison for all but those on death row.

Doolin’s mother, Donna Larsen, told the BBC that the news of Newsom’s commutations – which includes Doolin – brought mixed emotions.

“At least the execution chamber will not be reconstructed, and no more killing by the people of the state of California,” she said.

Anthony D Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, applauded Newsom’s action.

“These commutations reflect what justice demands: an end to a racist, error-prone, and inhumane punishment that has burdened California for far too long,” Romero said.

“By taking this step, Gov. Newsom has affirmed that the death penalty has no place in California and he showed real courage by confronting racialised injustice head-on.”

Nathan Hochman, the top prosecutor in Los Angeles County, said that while Newsom has the power to commute sentences, only state legislature or voters can eliminate the death penalty.

“Californians have been asked on two separate ballot initiatives to abolish the death penalty and both times they have chosen to keep it for the most serious crimes,” Hochman said in a statement.

On the federal level, President Donald Trump, a long-time supporter of the death penalty, has described capital punishment as “an essential tool for deterring and punishing those who would commit the most heinous crimes and acts of lethal violence against American citizens”.

In 2020, during his first term, he ended a nearly two-decade moratorium on the federal death penalty, by ordering 13 executions over a six-month period.

While the moratorium returned under President Biden, on the first day of Trump’s second term in 2025, he signed an executive order that re-instated the death penalty.

No federal executions have been carried out since he signed it, however. In the US, both the federal government and local states authorities can order executions.

The death penalty is legal in 27 states, but has been abolished in 23 states and Washington DC, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a national non-profit.

California, which primarily uses lethal injection for executions, used to house male death row prisoners in San Quentin State Prison north of San Francisco, and female inmates in the Central California Women’s Facility in the Central Valley.

But a 2016 ballot measure allowed for their transfer to other facilities that provide a necessary level of security, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

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California Governor Gavin Newsom’s term in office comes to an end in January

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Representative Robert Garcia, the California Democrat who is poised to lead the House Oversight Committee in the next Congress, said that he planned to investigate Stephen Miller for his involvement in the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation efforts.

“Just days after the American people rejected his corrupt and lawless presidency, Donald Trump is doubling down,” Garcia said in a statement. “Stephen Miller is the architect of the unconstitutional ICE raids that have terrorized our communities and kidnapped and killed American citizens and immigrant families.”

“Stephen Miller should lawyer up,” he added.

Susie Wiles is one of the most powerful women to have served in Trump’s second term. And she is the latest in a wave of powerful women who have left the Trump administration amid an internal power struggle. On Thursday, Harmeet Dhillon, one of the top officials in the Justice Department, resigned after conflicts with department leaders.One of the disconnects right now is that the Republican midterm losses were a decisive rebuke of the president and his actions in office. But Trump has two years left of the term, and elevating Miller — who is deeply ideological and also the most powerful policy staff member in the modern history of the presidency — is doubling down on Trump’s agenda, not switching course.

Bill Pulte, the administration’s finance housing chairman who Wiles allies believed was undermining her with the president, was quick to praise Miller as the new choice. “Congratulations to my dear friend and colleague, Stephen Miller, on your promotion to Chief of Staff,” Pulte wrote on social media. “I can’t wait to work with you!”

Miller’s pitch for the job, according to people who heard it, was that the president needed to wind down the Iran war, a conflict that the president’s core supporters viewed as a betrayal.

Miller has also echoed Trump’s effort to undermine the legitimacy of the federal judiciary. When judges blocked the president’s tariffs last year, Miller attacked the decision as a “judicial coup” on social media. He has also attacked other judges scrutinizing Trump administration policies as Marxists and “crazy” communists.

Susie  Wiles posted on social media that today was her last day as chief of staff. “Serving President Trump in the White House has been the honor of a lifetime,” she wrote. “I’m so proud to have been a part of what we’ve accomplished together from securing our border and cutting taxes to strengthening our economy and putting America First. More than anything, I’m grateful for the extraordinary people I’ve had the privilege of working alongside. While my role may be changing, my commitment to the president and the mission never will.

”Stephen Miller, a deputy chief of staff, has been the architect of some of the most radical domestic policies in Trump’s second term, particularly on immigration. He has also served as a fiery surrogate for the president’s most divisive moves. Earlier this year, as Trump publicly toyed with the idea of invading Greenland, Miller laid out a vision of American imperialism in which the United States could freely overthrow national governments and take foreign territory and resources so long as it was deemed in the national interest.

In his Truth Social post, Trump said Wiles would be moving over to his political operation. He said Miller would take over as White House chief of staff starting on Monday.

Wiles was diagnosed with breast cancer in early 2026. She stayed in her role as she started treatment and recently announced that she was cancer free.

Stephen Miller has worked for Trump since his first presidential campaign, served all four years in the White House during the president’s first term and has amassed immense power since Trump retook office. He has been the driving force behind Trump’s hardline immigration policy and his crackdown on liberal institutions.

On election night, the president blamed Wiles for the midterm disaster in front of others. He has been furious at his political team. Trump had been asking people privately in recent days what they thought about Stephen Miller for the job. He was also asking people’s views on Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence.

For weeks, Miller had been making known his interest in the job if Susie Wiles left, through proxies. But he has deep relationships with a number of key cabinet officials, which may have added to Trump’s consideration.

President Trump announced Friday he would make Stephen Miller, the powerful domestic policy adviser who has helped drive the administration’s immigration crackdown, his new chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles following sweeping Republican losses in the midterm elections.

Ms. Wiles is moving to the president’s political operation, Mr. Trump said. But her departure and the ascent of Mr. Miller will fundamentally shift the circle of advisers around Mr. Trump as the White House absorbs the shock of the midterm elections.

It also signals an aggressive doubling-down by the president, after losses of Republican majorities in the House and Senate that served as a rebuke of Mr. Trump’s handling of issues ranging from the economy to the war with Iran to tariffs to his push for a mid-decade redistricting effort.

“I wanted to make a change,” Mr. Trump told reporters as he departed the White House for a trip to Florida. She had done a “great job,” he said. “Sometimes in life you have to make moves,” he added.

Asked what he wanted Mr. Miller to do differently than Ms. Wiles, who he had previously claimed wasn’t going anywhere, the president said, “Just run things well.”

The Republican wipeout had further inflamed tensions within the administration, with officials bracing for a slew of congressional investigations by Democrats and turnover in the West Wing and the cabinet.

It also signals an aggressive doubling-down by the president, after losses of Republican majorities in the House and Senate that served as a rebuke of Mr. Trump’s handling of issues ranging from the economy to the war with Iran to tariffs to his push for a mid-decade redistricting effort.

“I wanted to make a change,” Mr. Trump told reporters as he departed the White House for a trip to Florida. She had done a “great job,” he said. “Sometimes in life you have to make moves,” he added.

Asked what he wanted Mr. Miller to do differently than Ms. Wiles, who he had previously claimed wasn’t going anywhere, the president said, “Just run things well.”

The Republican wipeout had further inflamed tensions within the administration, with officials bracing for a slew of congressional investigations by Democrats and turnover in the West Wing and the cabinet.

Mr. Trump’s decision elevates one of the most deeply ideological members of the White House, someone known for flexing his power, to a prime role. Mr. Miller is one of the few people in the current West Wing who spent years preparing for a second Trump term from the standpoint of executive power, and who knows how the levers of government function. He is also one of two top West Wing staff members to have been part of the first administration when the House majority flipped in 2018, prompting a blitz of subpoenas from Congress.

People familiar with his views say he is likely to steer the president away from his early instinct after Tuesday’s losses to seek deals with Democrats. That could involve leaning even more into culture war issues, such as hard-line immigration enforcement and efforts to target diversity initiatives.

“Stephen is and always has been the eternal flame of the MAGA movement — putting the president’s words and policy into action,” Hunter Morgen, who worked as a deputy to Mr. Miller during the president’s first term and is now a lobbyist at Ballard Partners, wrote in a text message. “Since the earliest days of the 2016 campaign, he has been a steadfast torchbearer of the president’s agenda.”

In the short term, Mr. Miller’s focus is said to be the Iran war, which has been viewed by the president’s base as a betrayal of the president’s campaign promises.

Mr. Miller has relationships with some of the key cabinet officials involved in Mr. Trump’s top priorities, such as Attorney General Todd Blanche, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. His arrival may help Mr. Hegseth, at least in the short term, as the president has heard myriad complaints about him from Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Mr. Hegseth celebrated Mr. Miller’s promotion with several posts on social media. “Huge CONGRATS,” he wrote, calling Mr. Miller “a true patriot and America First fighter.” He followed that up with a post that said, “Patriots in control,” and a subsequent one that included a picture of himself and Mr. Miller.

Mr. Trump, in his private conversations as well as his public remarks, has not accepted blame for the election results.

Instead, he repeatedly blasted Ms. Wiles and his other political advisers, insisting he was poorly served in the lead-up to the midterms. He criticized Ms. Wiles in front of several people at an East Room election watch party this week, according to people with knowledge of the incident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.

Mr. Trump has also been privately critical of James Blair, Ms. Wiles’s ally, who ran the president’s outside political operation, people with knowledge of the comments said. And for the last several months, Mr. Trump has berated Ms. Wiles in front of other staff members about his frustrations that his administration has not moved faster to find people he brands as “leakers,” as well as the stalled prosecutions of his perceived political enemies, they said. In front of several advisers, he would accuse her of being among the leakers.

Allies of Ms. Wiles described her as prepared to leave her role. Her supporters saw the criticism of her as an effort to assign blame for a political strategy largely driven by Mr. Trump himself. And they faulted her detractors inside and outside the administration for spreading information meant to undercut her with Mr. Trump, including stories about her daughter’s lobbying work.

In her own statement posted on social media, Ms. Wiles described working for Mr. Trump in the White House as the “honor of a lifetime.”

“While my role may be changing, my commitment to the President and the mission never will,” she added.

Ms. Wiles, the first woman to hold the top staff job in the West Wing, helped steer Mr. Trump to his election victory in 2024, playing a central role in his return to power four years after his loss to Joseph R. Biden Jr.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer in early 2026. Ms. Wiles stayed in her role as she started treatment and recently announced that she was cancer free.

Ms. Wiles came into the job having established a rapport with Mr. Trump and a level of trust that none of his four first-term chiefs of staff had enjoyed.

Unlike some of Mr. Trump’s previous chiefs of staff, Ms. Wiles made clear she did not consider her job as trying to fundamentally change the president. But she tried to influence his decisions on core issues including his immigration crackdown, even if only on the margins, according to people with knowledge of her role. She pushed for the appointments of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and both have been seen by many outside the government as stabilizing figures.

But Mr. Trump has relied primarily on his own instincts this term, and few advisers have engaged him in the kind of direct confrontations over policy that characterized his first administration.

Mr. Trump has publicly expressed his confidence in Ms. Wiles in recent months. But behind the scenes, there were signs that her standing with the president was shaky, according to officials with knowledge of the dynamics.

Mr. Trump began cutting Ms. Wiles out of hiring decisions, including when he chose an inexperienced television pundit to replace the departing press secretary, Karoline Leavitt.

And Mr. Trump started to criticize his chief of staff in front of other staff members, including over decisions he had approved, according to people familiar with his remarks.

After the elections, Mr. Trump made it clear to some advisers that he was unhappy with Ms. Wiles and his political team, who persuaded him to sign off on his super PAC’s spending $400 million to help Republicans in the midterms. The president had been reluctant to approve the spending and agreed to it only in September.

Stephen Miller is the architect of Trump’s mass deportation effort and a perennial target of liberal critics of the administration.Maggie Haberman, Tyler Pager and I had reached out to the White House with reporting that the president was replacing Susie Wiles. Shortly before the deadline we had given for the administration to comment, Trump posted on Truth Social.President Trump announced on Friday that Susie Wiles was leaving as White House chief of staff after sweeping Republican losses in the midterm elections. She will be replaced by Stephen Miller, who has worked for Trump since his first presidential campaign and served all four years in the White House during his first term.

Calley Means, who resigned as a top federal health official two weeks ago after clashing with the White House, on Friday accused President Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, of bowing to “unrelenting” pressure from industry lobbyists while prioritizing political fund-raising over Americans’ health.

In a two-hour interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan, Mr. Means said that Ms. Wiles withheld support from his efforts to make children’s diets healthier, citing the need for sugar industry money. He said her team demanded more approvals of flavored e-cigarettes, a top priority for major tobacco companies that donated at least $20 million to the G.O.P. in 2026. And he said they gave in to heavy lobbying from the kratom industry to relax proposed restrictions on products often referred to as “gas station heroin.”

“Susie said to me many times: ‘We need money for the midterms, Calley. We need money for the midterms,’” Mr. Means said.

In recent days, Ms. Wiles has become a target of criticism and finger-pointing in an escalating blame game after Republicans’ stunning losses in the midterm elections. In a post on Truth Social on Friday afternoon, Mr. Trump announced that Ms. Wiles would leave her post on Monday and Stephen Miller, a top White House adviser, would replace her.

“Susie Wiles, who has done an outstanding job, will be moving over to the Trump Political Operation. I want to thank her for her service as Chief of Staff — She has done a great job!”

Ms. Wiles was not immediately available to comment. A White House spokeswoman, Allison Schuster, did not respond to questions about Mr. Means’s statements. But she said in an emailed statement that Mr. Trump had “made incredible strides to Make America Healthy Again,” citing the government’s new dietary guidelines and work to eliminate artificial ingredients from food.

Mr. Means, a close ally of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who helped build the Make America Healthy Again movement, avoided criticizing Mr. Kennedy or Mr. Trump. He directed his ire almost entirely at Ms. Wiles, a former lobbyist and political consultant, who he asserted had “spent her career taking money,” including from the pharmaceutical and pesticide industries and from the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a former client.

Mr. Means framed Ms. Wiles and her top deputies as welcoming lobbyists into the White House while sidelining Mr. Kennedy and infantilizing Mr. Trump. Mr. Means made a larger argument about the corrosive role of corporate money in politics, but also suggested that the president should “exorcise” Ms. Wiles and her aides “from the White House.”

Ms. Wiles’s policy interests also aligned with those benefiting her family, Mr. Means said, claiming that any corporation that hired her daughter, Katie Wiles, a partner at the lobbying firm Continental Strategy, “was getting a high priority.”

“So if you’re a special interest and you want to get something done, the secret’s out,” Mr. Means said. “You pay Susie’s daughter, and it was openly discussed when they had a client.”

Mr. Means’s tirade against Ms. Wiles, while depicting Mr. Kennedy as a “hero,” comes as Democrats are beginning to consider their new powers to investigate what they view as the most destructive actions of the Trump administration. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who will lead the influential Senate Finance Committee, has already announced an investigation into Mr. Kennedy’s role in “corruption favoring” of the tobacco and kratom industries.

In the podcast interview, Mr. Means said the administration fumbled a series of issues that had been crucial to the MAHA coalition that had helped propel Mr. Trump to the presidency.

The missteps included an executive order aimed at supporting the production of glyphosate, the herbicide tied to cancer that many MAHA supporters want to see restricted. The order was issued in February, as the Supreme Court was about to hear oral arguments in a case that would determine whether Bayer, the maker of glyphosate, could receive immunity from lawsuits alleging the weedkiller caused cancer.

Mr. Means asserted that military leaders did not believe the order was necessary to protect national security, as the White House said. He described how one of Ms. Wiles’s deputies dropped the executive order on a table and said it was nonnegotiable.

“I read it, I said, ‘This is a political disaster,’” Mr. Means recalled. The aide was insistent. “Please inform Bobby. And this is not up for discussion.” He pointedly told Mr. Means that the health secretary should not call the president, adding, “Susie then called Bobby’s office and said, ‘We’re not discussing this.’”

The executive order was announced the next day, infuriating MAHA leaders.

Mr. Means also claimed that Dr. Heidi Overton, then a White House health official whom Mr. Trump has since nominated to lead the Food and Drug Administration, had helped Justice Department officials create legal arguments urging the Supreme Court to review the glyphosate case and supporting Bayer’s position.

A White House official said that the court had asked the Trump administration to weigh in on the case. The solicitor general drafted a brief and then shared it with the White House Counsel’s Office, which circulated it to relevant policymakers, including Dr. Overton, who commented on it, the official said.

The Supreme Court sided with Bayer in a decision that gave the company broad liability protection and infuriated many in the MAHA movement.

Mr. Means joined the White House after working on Mr. Kennedy’s campaign and helping to broker the partnership between the secretary and Mr. Trump; he later went to work directly for Mr. Kennedy. He is primarily interested in the secretary’s food agenda and has not been involved in more controversial policy-making on vaccines.

But in the interview, he accused Ms. Wiles of pressuring Mr. Kennedy to downplay vaccine safety while relying on the work of a pollster, Tony Fabrizio, who receives funding from the pharmaceutical industry.

Mr. Means also described how some of his efforts to draft policies to make the food supply healthier were thwarted, such as one aimed at pushing the food industry to address whether the amount of sugar in children’s diets was appropriate.

“And that’s where Susie told me we can’t do that,” Mr. Means said. “‘I need the sugar industry money.’”

Mr. Means also said that Dr. Marty Makary, the former F.D.A. commissioner, was “pounded” in numerous meetings to approve flavored e-cigarettes, which James Blair, a former deputy of Ms. Wiles, framed as “a core midterm issue.”

Dr. Makary left the agency in May over the disputes on the matter. Mr. Means said that Dr. Overton did what Dr. Makary would not: “She wrote up a policy to relax standards on fruit-flavored vapes.”

Mr. Means said that his “last straw” came after months of delays on his effort to arrive at a definition of ultraprocessed foods, which could eventually lead to regulation. He said that he and Mr. Kennedy went to Ms. Wiles, who denied any special interest influence on the matter.

“Lied to us to our face,” he said, recounting that he later heard her say we need to “do something” about MAHA.

Mr. Means said he believed Democrats were also guilty of ceding to similar influences and said the solution could come from a presidential candidate running on the issue of amending the Constitution to take money out of politics.

“Americans need to understand that if they are getting whipped up and excited about policy promises through our existing structure, they are being duped and gaslighted and lied to,” he said. “We need to have systemic reform.”

The Latest on the Trump Administration

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• Europe’s Concerns: The Democratic victory in the midterms has brought private relief to some Europeans but no official glee, with Ukraine, Iran and NATO all hanging in the balance along with a politically wounded U.S. president.

• Communities Face Cuts: The Trump administration is scaling back or stalling investments that help disaster-prone places harden themselves to rising flood and fire threats.

• Harmeet Dhillon Resigns: The chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division resigned after conflicts with department leaders, including disagreements over legal strategy in the midterm elections, two people familiar with the situation said.

• National Guard in D.C.: The National Guard is expected to expand its use of military trucks, Humvees and boats for armed patrols in Washington, D.C., escalating a deployment in the nation’s capital that President Trump intends to maintain for the rest of his term.
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Stephen Miller with President Trump in the Oval Office in August. Credit…Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

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A child in upstate New York died on Monday after contracting measles. This marks the state’s first death from the disease in 30 years, as the outbreak continues to spread across the country.

In a statement, New York governor Kathy Hochul said she was “heartbroken” and that the death reflected a crisis of government and public health. Hochul declared measles a statewide disaster last month.

With fewer immune protections, children are especially at risk for measles and its more dangerous effects. And as the outbreak surges, doctors are becoming increasingly concerned about congenital measles. If a pregnant woman has measles, there’s a 25 to 30 percent chance her child will also acquire measles, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Congenital measles is not tracked by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention—the condition had become exceedingly rare, but rising rates are raising fears about its potential effects once more.

As of October 29, the CDC had confirmed 4,852 measles cases across the U.S. so far this year. New York State has had a total of 178 confirmed cases, mainly concentrated in the central part of the state. According to officials, the recent death in New York occurred in Lewis County, which is northeast of Syracuse and has seen 16 cases in 2026.

It is representative of a worsening national picture. The U.S. is currently in the thick of the worst measles outbreak since 1991. Case numbers this year have already doubled those of 2025—previously the worst year for the disease since 1991. (The U.S. was declared measles-free in 2000.) Technically, the country still holds its measles-free status, a title that is marked by 12 months without continuous local transmission, although experts expect that may change soon. Officials are set to meet in the next few weeks to determine whether that status—hailed for years as a symbol of excellence in public health—should be revised or eliminated.

As of October 30, the CDC has reported three deaths from measles nationally—although some states have reported deaths that have been disputed by the CDC—and an 11 percent hospitalization rate. In its milder forms, the disease can cause an itchy rash and fever, but it can also cause pneumonia and severe brain inflammation, which, without treatment, can prove fatal or disabling. The measles virus is the most contagious virus known—but it is not impossible to contain. Vaccines, particularly the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) combined shot, had helped measles fade because of herd immunity. But dwindling vaccination rates are helping the disease break through, with dire consequences.

The MMR jab offers 97 percent protection for life after two doses given in childhood and was the major factor in eradicating measles in the U.S. But with higher levels of vaccine skepticism among the public and the upper echelons of the Trump administration, fewer children are receiving the vaccine: in the past 10 years, MMR vaccination rates among kindergarteners have fallen from 94 percent to 92.4 percent. (A 95 percent vaccination rate is the critical number to ensure community or herd immunity.) Of the cases reported by the CDC this year, 96 percent were among people who were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status was unknown. It’s unclear whether the child that died on Monday was vaccinated.

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Key points

• Socrates believed that our greatest problem is not knowing that we are ignorant.
• We resist challenges to our beliefs because we experience them as attacks on our identity.
• We are not merely ignorant; we are invested in remaining ignorant.

 

In 399 BCE, the Athenians sentenced Socrates to death. His crime? He had spent his life making people look like the fools that they were. Officially, Socrates was charged with impiety and corrupting the youth. For years, this eccentric septuagenarian had gone around asking people questions, exposing the inconsistencies and contradictions in their opinions. In his mind, he had been doing them the greatest favour.Socrates had discovered something about human nature that remains as true today as it was in antiquity: Our problem is not so much that we are ignorant, but that we are ignorant of our ignorance.

The Wisest Man in Athens

According to his student Plato, Socrates had a friend called Chaerephon, who once travelled to Delphi and, on a whim, asked the oracle whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. The oracle replied in the negative: “There is no one wiser than Socrates.”

Socrates was as surprised and perplexed as everyone. He knew that he was not wise—but, surely, the god of the oracle could not have been mistaken? To find out what the god might have meant, he went around questioning people with a reputation for wisdom, beginning with the politicians, then the poets, and finally the craftsmen.

The politicians, he found, could not even explain the words that they were using. The poets wrote beautiful verses but struggled to make sense of them. The craftsmen possessed genuine expertise, but mistakenly assumed that this made them knowledgeable about everything else.

Socrates concluded that he was wiser than these supposedly wise men in one small but critical respect: He did not think he knew what he did not know.

The Trouble With Knowing Everything

From then on, Socrates devoted himself to questioning his fellow Athenians. He would ask a general to define courage, a priest to define piety, or a pair of good friends to define friendship. They would offer a confident answer, only for Socrates to expose some inconsistency or contradiction. He and they would then explore the concept in every direction until everyone threw up their hands in despair at their inability to define even the most important and apparently self-evident things.

This method of questioning, known as elenchus, or the Socratic method, aimed to bring about a state of puzzlement called aporia.

Aporia, if you like, is the honest and fertile state of knowing that you do not know.

One day, Socrates met a youth called Theaetetus, whose perplexity delighted him. Socrates said to him, “I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.”

The Perils of Being Right

But there was a problem. As I discuss in my book, The Gang of Three, Socrates’ interlocutors did not want to be helped. Deep down, in a place unknown even to them, they did not welcome the truth.

Our beliefs are not merely propositions that we hold in our heads. They are bound up with our sense of who we are. To challenge a person’s beliefs is to challenge that person’s identity, standing, and meaning. We defend our beliefs as if we were defending ourselves.

Socrates understood this all too well. To prevent his interlocutors from getting angry or running away, he frequently feigned ignorance or used flattery. His approach rather resembles that of Lieutenant Columbo, the apparently bumbling detective who always has just one more question.

The Price of Wisdom

By exposing the ignorance of prominent Athenians, Socrates acquired admirers, especially among the young, but also powerful enemies.

At his trial, he reproached his fellow citizens for concerning themselves with wealth and reputation while neglecting wisdom, truth, and the proper care of their souls.

He compared himself to a gadfly attached by the gods to a great but listless horse: Athens needed him to sting her into wakefulness.

Even with his life at stake, Socrates refused to change his ways. If anything, he dropped the mask.

Socrates had spent his life showing people that they were fools. In condemning him, the Athenians demonstrated just how right he was.

And two-and-a-half thousand years later, what has changed? We still prefer certainty to doubt, reassurance to correction, and the appearance of wisdom to the difficult business of acquiring it.

We are not merely ignorant; we are invested in remaining ignorant.

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Six days before the election, more than two dozen of President Trump’s top strategists logged onto a private video call.

The mood was grim. The discussion began with talk of cyanide.

“Do you want the white pill first, or the black pill first?” asked Tony Fabrizio, the president’s chief pollster.

Tim Saler, one of the Republican Party’s top data consultants, laid out two scenarios. In the first, the $400 million MAGA Inc. super PAC was reaching the voters that it had wanted and expected to vote. “That’s the optimistic scenario,” he said.

The other was a wipeout.

“I’m getting my affairs in order,” James Blair, who left the White House to oversee the president’s midterm strategy, said to laughter, according to four people on the call. “I suggest everybody else do the same.”

For roughly 30 minutes, the call ran on gallows humor: funeral arrangements, prison food, presidential pardons, even a brief riff on fleeing the country.

“At least Bibi won. He’ll protect us,” Mr. Blair said sarcastically of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, whose country had voted the day before. (Mr. Netanyahu’s bloc fell short of a majority, and his party soon claimed the election had been stolen.)

“Maybe we could get asylum in Israel,” Mr. Fabrizio said.

Collapse at the Polls

The scope of the Republican wreckage would become clear a week later.

Democrats stormed to a huge House majority and won control of the Senate, a remarkable feat powered by victories in Republican strongholds — Kansas, South Carolina, Texas — that few could have imagined a year ago.

This account of the Republican Party’s collapse is based on interviews with more than 70 people — among them lawmakers, political strategists, party leaders, pollsters, White House officials and congressional aides — who were directly involved in the midterm elections, many of whom were granted anonymity to describe private conversations and decisions.

The scale of the defeat was far from inevitable.

Republicans had record fund-raising, the world’s richest man, a favorable Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance and a demoralized, unpopular opposition.

In the Senate, they had a map that required Democrats to compete in states they hadn’t won in decades.

And in the House, the Trump team demolished the tradition of redrawing congressional lines only once a decade in order to carve up new districts to help the G.O.P. bolster its narrow majority.

What Republicans could not overcome was a president who lost the public’s trust on the economy and so much more. And what they had not counted on was an unpopular war in the Middle East — one that would close the Strait of Hormuz and push gas prices past $4 a gallon — that would rage all the way through the election.

And Democrats were ready, this time, to seize on the G.O.P. stumbles.

A Stark Warning on the Iran War

The slide deck that Mr. Blair had circulated over the summer to officials in the West Wing was stark.

One slide linked Republicans’ polling numbers to an Iran war timeline.

It showed how the Democratic advantage had ballooned during active hostilities, shrunk during talks over a “memorandum of understanding” and then spiked again when the cease-fire collapsed.

By the end of July, Democrats had a 10-point edge on the congressional ballot.

The “bottom line” was hard to miss. It was in highlighter yellow: Republicans could still conceivably win the House if Democrats had only a four-point edge. “But that won’t happen without an extended cease-fire, Hormuz open & gas prices falling,” the slide warned.

“A final result approaching D+10 would likely cost us the Senate.”

The results on Tuesday were even worse: Mr. Trump’s party is on track to lose the national popular congressional vote by about 13 points, according to estimates by The New York Times. It is shaping up to be the worst loss in a half-century, since the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.

Even before the polls had closed, Mr. Trump had begun to ruminate on what might have been.

“If we never went into Iran, what do you think would happen in the midterms?” the president had asked privately, according to a person who spoke to him.

An Unchecked Second Term

What made the war such a potent force is that it told a simple story for voters.

As a candidate, Mr. Trump had promised no new wars. He started a new war.

He promised lower prices. Gas prices soared and inflation rose.

The story of the G.O.P. midterm implosion was not only a story of broken promises; it was also a story of radical overreach. After Mr. Trump came back from pariah status after Jan. 6, 2021, some advisers believed he had convinced himself that the rules of politics had been suspended for him alone. That illusion was obliterated on Tuesday night.

Over nearly two years, hubris had become the governing philosophy of Mr. Trump’s second presidency.

There was a seemingly endless string of investigative pieces revealing that Mr. Trump, his family and their close associates had used the presidency to enrich themselves brazenly. Those reports began to resonate with voters; an early October poll from Fox News showed corruption as the top voter concern. (Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said: “The President only acts in the best interest of the American people. There are no conflicts of interest.”)

In 2025, Mr. Trump began a trade war with the entire world — the pain of which was still being felt more than a year later on farms all over the suddenly competitive states of Kansas, Texas and Iowa.

Throughout it all, the president flashed indifference to the struggles of Americans that his policies had exacerbated.

Soaring gas prices? “A small price to pay,” Mr. Trump insisted.

Some members of his team grew exasperated as Mr. Trump spoke seemingly more about his new ballroom than the border, golf courses than grocery prices, interior decorations than inflation.

On the eve of the midterms, he focused his closing pitch on his refurbishment of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, joking that he was considering renaming it for himself rather than Abraham Lincoln.

Unlike in the past, Democrats mostly ignored the daily Trump distractions and sought to connect corruption to costs. They also told a story of a government focused on elites while average people struggled — from Jeffrey Epstein’s protected associates to the president’s $2.2 billion in personal profits.

In the House, Democrats quickly and unexpectedly countered Mr. Trump’s redistricting push and pursued strong candidates deep into red territory to spread the map. In the Senate, they found a series of blue-chip recruits who put once unthinkable states into play. In the final, frenzied weeks of the campaign, Republicans were redirecting cash from the usual swing states of North Carolina and Georgia to try to shore up traditional strongholds in South Carolina and even Mississippi.

The war in Iran, said Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader and now the speaker-in-waiting, helped “supercharge” the contrast between the two parties.

Republicans had tried to frame the midterms as a choice between “common sense and crazy,” relentlessly attacking the rising democratic socialist wing of the left.

Yet Mr. Trump’s own pollster’s final survey, taken two weeks before the election, showed that while both the MAGA Republican brand and democratic socialists were unpopular with voters, MAGA carried more baggage. When Republicans who were not planning to cast ballots were asked what it would take to earn back their vote, their top two answers were ending the war and addressing inflation.

On that final call before Election Day, Mr. Trump’s advisers were both clear-eyed and cynical about the state of the race, referring at one point to a Trump ally who ran for governor of Minnesota and demanded a recount in his primary despite losing in a landslide.

“Look, it’s fine,” Mr. Blair told the group acerbically. “I think we’ll just pull a Mike Lindell and demand a recount regardless of how many points we’re down.”

Alex Pfeiffer, a spokesman for the MAGA Inc. super PAC, said that the group’s “sober and clear-eyed view of the political environment,” led to investing in House races Republicans are leading in, in Maine, Florida, Tennessee, New York and Texas.

“The people peddling these made up quotes and false gossip not only demean and belittle the historic and generous investment by the president into the party’s midterm effort, but they also slander the hard work of the many who contributed to this effort,” he said in a statement. “They are cowards and losers.”

A White House official, who declined to speak on the record, said in response to the reporting for this article: “President Trump was not on the ballot, and it’s proven that Trump voters show up when he is on the ballot. Candidate quality matters, and President Trump did a better job promoting many of the candidates on the ballot than the candidates did themselves.”

The official repeated that the president, who acknowledged earlier on Wednesday that the war affected the midterms, had over and over again said Iran can’t procure a nuclear weapon.

The Anti-Recruiter

While Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, painstakingly recruited top-tier Senate candidates, Mr. Trump took a series of steps that endangered the Republican majority.

After Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa flirted with opposing Mr. Trump’s most controversial nominees and Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina voted against his signature tax-and-spending bill, Mr. Trump’s allies threatened to end their careers. Both decided to retire, creating vulnerable open seats that had been held by Republicans.

In North Carolina, Mr. Trump cleared the field for Michael Whatley, a former lobbyist and Republican National Committee chairman, who proved a lackluster candidate and lost to Roy Cooper, the state’s popular Democratic former governor.

After Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died in July, Mr. Trump supported tapping his sister, Darline, to not just replace him temporarily but also to run for a full six-year term. In doing so, he elevated an inexperienced candidate with no fund-raising base, and she went on to lose in a state that had not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1998.

But no candidate proved more costly to the party than Ken Paxton, the scandal-ridden Texas attorney general. Mr. Trump endorsed him over Senator John Cornyn, the Republican incumbent, ignoring a year of warnings that Mr. Paxton would put the seat in jeopardy. Republicans were ultimately forced to spend close to $300 million in Texas — money that could have gone to shore up candidates in other states. Mr. Paxton lost by 12 points.

On another recent call, the Trump team mocked the haplessness of some of the Republicans they were trying to elect.

“I have seen the enemy,” Mr. Blair told the group a week earlier. “And it is us.”

Mr. Fabrizio replied: “In many places.”

The Democrats’ Playbook

In May 2025, Mr. Schumer arrived at Wildflower Farms, an upscale resort in New York’s Hudson Valley, for a secretive retreat with donors and party officials. He desperately needed to expand the Senate map.

At the Wildflower retreat, James Talarico, a youthful-looking state legislator in Texas, had delivered a five-minute speech for the assembled crowd on the importance of storytelling in campaigns. Mr. Schumer was smitten. He told at least two attendees afterward that he wanted to get Mr. Talarico to run for the Senate.

To win control of the Senate, Democrats needed to hold all of their seats and flip at least four, including in states that Mr. Trump won handily in 2024.

Mr. Schumer spent months wooing Mr. Cooper and took at least three trips to Ohio to coax former Senator Sherrod Brown, who had lost in 2024 but had a populist brand that matched the country’s mood.“If you retire and we lose the majority by one vote, you won’t enjoy your retirement,” Mr. Schumer recalled telling Mr. Brown, 73.

Both ran and won.

In the House, where Democrats had fallen three seats short in 2024, recruiters went hunting in districts Mr. Trump had carried by 10 points or more, betting early that the emboldened president would overreach.

An election post-mortem by the Democratic House Majority PAC circulated in April 2025 found two factors stood out among the party’s stronger 2024 candidates: being “perceived as moderate” and focusing on the economy.

“If we wanted to compete deeper in red districts, we needed to find candidates who are not immediately off-putting,” said Mike Smith, the PAC’s president.

They set about recruiting candidates with distinctive biographies: military veterans, doctors, farmers, a smokejumper, a Tejano music star — just about anyone who didn’t scream professional politician.

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President Trump at a campaign rally in Kalispell, Mont., last month. Credit…

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Major cities across the world—including hotspots such as New Orleans, Mexico City, Jakarta and Rome—are sinking by up to several inches every year.

Those are the findings of an exhaustive new survey published in Nature Cities, in which researchers used satellite radar to track 465 urban areas of more than a million people from 2014 to 2023. The results, displayed in an interactive map, shows that sinking isn’t just “a local curiosity” for a small handful of cities, but “a global urban problem,” says study coauthor Guoquan Wang, a geophysicist at the University of Houston.

Satellites can measure the land’s gradual sinking, called subsidence, by taking radar images of the same area over time to determine the shift in the radar signal’s travel—even a change of mere millimeters (twenty-fifths of an inch) of ground can result in a signal taking slightly longer to return than the past. The new work, which examined small chunks of land—just a few houses wide—all over the world, is “the most comprehensive and systematic exploration of subsidence in urban cities,” says Roland Bürgmann, a geophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study.

Sinking was most severe in Southeast Asia, West and Central Asia and North America, but it also turned up in South America and Africa, both of which are generally less studied in regards to land subsidence; For almost half the cities in the dataset, no satellite radar study had ever been done before.

Different factors can contribute to urban subsidence. In New York City, for instance, the weight of buildings compresses the region’s soft soils. But the biggest driver is usually water utilities, industries and other groups pumping out water from under the ground. Groundwater helps hold up the soil like air in a cushion: pump it out, and the ground slowly sags.

And the real danger is uneven sinking. “If the whole city were to smoothly subside altogether by an inch or so, it wouldn’t be that big of a problem,” Bürgmann says. But when one neighborhood drops faster than the next, the strain builds.

Over time such strain can crack foundations, break sewer lines, damage subway systems and worsen flooding. In Jakarta, the sinking and flooding has become so severe that Indonesia is building a brand-new capital city on the island of Borneo.

Once it happens, sinking is “cumulative and largely irreversible,” Wang says, but cities have successfully stopped continued subsidence before. Tokyo once sank “way faster than many cities today,” says Manoochehr Shirzaei, a geoscientist at Virginia Tech, who was a peer reviewer for the study, until officials drew up policies to halt it. These included regulations around groundwater pumping and a shift toward alternative surface water sources. In China, Beijing and the nearby city of Tianjin “stopped pumping groundwater and replaced it with surface water” piped from the Yangtze River basin, Wang says, and sinking has since halted in parts of the region.

“In most places, we have plenty of time to react,” Shirzaei says, “but we have to do it.”

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Traveling to far-off places for vacation or to visit loved ones during the holidays is fun, but the journey to get there can feel like an endurance event that entails marathon bouts of sitting or racing from one airport gate to the next. And that can leave you with achy joints or stiffness that you didn’t have when you embarked. What’s a tired traveler to do?

Your antidote: Gentle movement, like stretching, which will help you feel refreshed and ready to enjoy the rest of your trip.

“Our bodies are designed to move, and staying in the same position for hours can leave the hips, back, neck, shoulders, and legs feeling tight and uncomfortable. Stretching is a great way to give your joints and muscles some much-needed motion, and you can do it anywhere—like the airport, a rest area parking lot, the car, or even your plane or train seat,” says Lindsey Benoit O’Connell, C.S.C.S., a certified meditation teacher and breathwork facilitator and founder of The LAB Wellness. “Stretching and the breathwork involved in it can also help tame travel stress.”

Next time you take a trip, try these stretches for travel days.

Best Stretches for Travel Days

An on-the-go stretch session doesn’t just help unwind your muscles and mind. Stretching also helps increase circulation throughout your body, including to your legs. That’s important because sitting for long periods (like on a flight or road trip) is a risk factor for deep vein thrombosis, or a blood clot in the leg, particularly in people prone to them.

Aim to hold each stretch for at least 30 seconds, but feel free to hold as long as feels good.

1. Seated Figure Four

Why it works:

This stretch helps improve flexibility and range of motion in the muscles around the hips and glutes, helping to counteract stiffness or joint aches caused by a long day of sitting while traveling.

How to do it:

1. Sit toward the front of a chair, both feet flat on the ground.
2. Cross right ankle over left thigh, flex right foot, and gently hinge forward at hips until you feel a stretch along the outer hip and glute.
3. Hold for at least 30 seconds.
4. Then switch sides.

2. Seated Spinal Rotation

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A $1.4 billion cryptocurrency windfall. Well-timed stock trades. A wedding after-party bankrolled by a Kremlin-connected businessman.

For nearly two years, congressional Democrats were powerless to probe these potential scandals and conflicts looming over President Trump and his family businesses. But after pulling off a landslide midterm election victory that amounted to a sweeping rebuke of the president, they will soon seize control of Congress — and with it, the power to open investigations, hold hearings and issue subpoenas.

Representative Robert Garcia, the California Democrat poised to chair the House Oversight Committee, summed up the threat succinctly in a statement late Tuesday: “Lawyer up.”

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Garcia said that his warning was meant chiefly for people at the White House who “engaged in corruption” and enriched themselves. “The Trump crime family is the top of our investigative priorities,” he said.

Subpoenas, though, do not guarantee a fruitful investigation.

Some of the president’s business associates and allies are expected to fight some of the subpoenas in court, which could become a lengthy process. And even if the Democrats shed new light on moneymaking ventures, there is no indication that the Trump family violated the law — potentially complicating any effort to pursue impeachment proceedings against the president.

Still, Mr. Garcia and other congressional leaders believe they will find a target-rich environment.

After winning back the White House two years ago, Mr. Trump abandoned his first-term pledge to rein in his family’s deal making, enabling new ventures that enriched the president, his sons and some of his advisers. He shrugged off concerns about conflicts of interest, contending that he “found out that nobody cared.”

He turned out to be wrong. An AP exit poll found that government corruption was a crucial issue for many voters, and that roughly seven in 10 voters said Congress was doing “not enough” to provide checks and balances on the presidency.

In the House, the Oversight and Judiciary committees will lead the investigative efforts, which will not be limited to the Trump family business. Senator Maggie Hassan, the New Hampshire Democrat in line to chair the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, is expected to conduct her own investigations as well.

“We need to zero in quickly on the forms of systemic pay-to-play corruption that are destroying the rule of law and have cost the public huge amounts of money,” Representative Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat expected to lead the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement.

Here are some of the main issues that Democrats are expected to investigate.

Crypto

Mr. Trump’s financial returns have multiplied during his second term, largely thanks to his crypto businesses. Those ventures pulled in at least $1.4 billion in revenue last year, a windfall that posed unparalleled potential conflicts of interest.

Congressional investigators will most likely focus on the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial. Last year, an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought a huge stake in World Liberty. Four months later, the Emiratis struck a deal with the Trump administration — over the objections of some national security officials — for the export of valuable computer chips.

Mr. Trump also collected hundreds of millions of dollars from sales of his $TRUMP memecoin, a type of cryptocurrency that is typically treated like a collectible, and World Liberty’s sale of its own digital tokens. The buyers included foreign entities and businesses seeking relief from the Trump administration.

Donald Trump Jr.

The activities of the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., are another top priority for Democrats.

Mr. Trump Jr. has not made things easy for himself. He allowed a Russian businessman with ties to the Kremlin to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to help finance his wedding after-party in the Bahamas this year, drawing outrage from congressional Democrats. The president has said that his son repaid the businessman, Umar Kremlev, but Mr. Garcia has flagged it as an investigative target.

Mr. Raskin has also begun investigating 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a senior partner. Several of the companies that 1789 has invested in have received government funding while others benefited from Trump policies.

In a statement, a spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. said that he “is a private citizen who holds no position in government and has broken no laws.”

The statement added that Mr. Trump Jr. “has never sought to influence government policy or official decision making for the benefit of his personal business interests and has every right to pursue lawful and legitimate business and investment opportunities.”

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President Trump at the site of the White House ballroom on Wednesday. An AP exit poll found that government corruption was a crucial issue for many voters, and that roughly seven in 10 voters said Congress was doing “not enough” to provide checks and balances on the presidency. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

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Happy Monday, listeners! And happy November. For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. You’re listening to our weekly science news roundup.

We’ll start with an update on the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Last Tuesday, data from the country’s Ministry of Health confirmed more than 10,000 cases since May. And nearly half of those people have died.

This is the fastest known Ebola outbreak in history. For context, the deadliest outbreak on record, which occurred in West Africa between 2014 and 2016, resulted in 28,000 cases and 11,000 deaths. But that outbreak lasted more than two years, and the current outbreak in the DRC was declared less than 200 days ago. And the difference in their trajectories is striking. On day 187 of the current outbreak, the official case count was 10,060. On day 186 of the West Africa outbreak, just 544 cases had been recorded.

There are a few factors making this outbreak tough to manage. The first is the actual species of Ebola-causing virus fueling the outbreak. Of the six known species in this genus, four cause the kind of severe hemorrhagic fever you probably think of when you hear the word “Ebola.” The West African epidemic was caused by one of those four viruses, which is somewhat confusingly now called the Ebola virus but used to be called the Zaire virus, and which has the highest fatality rate of the four. Fortunately, an extremely effective vaccine was developed and deployed to help end that epidemic.

This latest outbreak is caused by a different species: the Bundibugyo virus. It’s much less common, having only caused two other known outbreaks in the past.

Another factor in the outbreak’s breakneck growth is that the DRC is really struggling to track cases and administer care. The Associated Press reports that at least half of all deaths have been in people who were never admitted to treatment centers. And contact tracing isn’t going well, either. An outbreak is considered under control when 95% of all new cases come from contact with previously known and recorded cases. But at present, something like 80% of new cases are emerging from unknown sources.

In other words, there are still lots of people out transmitting the disease that haven’t yet been identified by contact tracers. Distrust of the government and, by extension, of health workers is also a huge issue, with many reportedly believing the outbreak is a hoax. Last month a nurse was killed and another health care worker was severely injured as they attempted to respond to reports of Ebola.

However there is some good news, which is that clinical trials are ongoing to find a good vaccine candidate. Last Monday the first participant was vaccinated. The clinical trial is called Tumaini, which means “hope” in Swahili. The trial is made up of people who have recently been in close contact with individuals now confirmed to have the Bundibugyo virus. The first vaccine up for testing is the one tailored to prevent the Ebola virus, but several Bundibugyo-specific inoculations are currently in development and will be tested as well.

Now let’s get into some news about artificial intelligence. Just a few weeks after dropping hundreds of AI-generated math breakthroughs on a field that’s already in crisis, OpenAI is piling on more. Here to tell us more about this shake-up is artificial intelligence and technology reporter Peter Hall. He’s currently working as an editorial fellow at Scientific American. Thanks so much for coming on to chat, Peter.

Peter Hall: Good to meet you and good to talk with you.

Feltman: So could you give our listeners a little bit of backstory for how this has been heating up?

Hall: Yeah. So over the past few months OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as other players, have really been trying to flex the ability of their models by, um, proving or disproving famous math conjectures.

And last week OpenAI introduced these three results across math, physics and theoretical computer science that are quite big. And Anthropic also released the same result, almost at the same time on the same day.

Feltman: And so, to give our listeners a little bit of context, what kinds of problems are we talking about and what does this process usually look like, you know, when human mathematicians are involved?

Hall: So there’s a huge collection of problems that mathematicians have conjectured or guessed over decades of research. For the proofs from last week, these centered around problems related to Millennium Prize Problems, which are these group of seven problems that the Clay Mathematics Institute published in 2000 as a collection of problems that have existed across math and physics and computer science that are so noteworthy and so important and so difficult that they would get a million-dollar prize for a solution to them.

Feltman: So is there any controversy about whether what OpenAI and Anthropic are presenting are actually solutions to these problems, that they’re solved?

Hall: Right. So that’s the other side of the coin is that, usually, you know, math research is published in journals or on preprint servers or in conferences. It’s discussed among mathematicians.

These don’t really follow the same blueprint there. These are just kind of, like, put in GitHub repos as just a collection of AI-generated text and programming that they claim not only shows that the result is true but also has verified it in a programming language called Lean, which is meant specifically for mathematics.

So definitely the aspect of, like, how intelligible these results are and what kind of insights people are gaining from them has been a huge point of controversy—and you know, who gets the credit when a model is just outputting a bunch of ideas that we don’t really know exactly what they’re building off of.

Feltman: It’s like when that monkey took a selfie, except I had more respect for both the monkey and the photographer than I unfortunately do for a lot of AI companies. Well, what are the potential benefits to the mathematics community of these proofs being out there? You know, are there any upsides?

Hall: You know with previous drops, there has been efforts from the communities to go through the proof, really, you know, with a very fine-tooth comb and turn it into something that is expository and something that we can look at the techniques for and really understand some sort of mathematical insight for it.

You know, the hope is that solutions like these and the proof steps, even if they’re not written the best right now, can at some point down the line be turned into something that is useful. Like, you know, I can use the ideas from this to solve some other problem that I’ve seen elsewhere in my research.

Feltman: Well thank you so much for coming on to talk through this with us.

Hall: Of course. Thank you.

Feltman: Now for some research on an extremely timely subject: daylight saving time. DST just ended for those of us in the United States—not counting several territories, including Puerto Rico, and the exempt states Hawaii and Arizona,minus the Navajo Nation, which does still observe DST. Complicated, right? And it’s not like “springing forward” and “falling back” are much fun to deal with, either. Research suggests that shifting our clocks back and forth by an hour takes a toll on the body and the mind.

permanent and therefore “preserve” an hour of afternoon sunlight as we head deeper into fall. Last week President Donald Trump blasted the Senate for failing to take a vote in time to implement permanent DST this year, claiming in a social media post that literally no one wanted to change their clocks. While that’s characteristically hyperbolic, recent survey data does suggest that almost half of U.S. adults are opposed to all the falling and springing.

But according to a new analysis published in Current Biology, making DST permanent could have serious, dangerous consequences for school-age children. Researchers at the University of Washington who study how school start times impact adolescent health decided to quantify exactly how many more trips to school would happen in darkness if we switched to year-round DST. They found that the Sunshine Protection Act would lead to more than two billion dark morning commutes for children. They also confirmed that fatal morning crashes involving kids aged five to 18 are more likely to occur if the sun has yet to rise. So those additional dark commutes really do pose a risk.

The researchers aren’t arguing in favor of continuing to swap our clocks back and forth; in fact, they point out that while permanent DST would be the worst-case scenario for dark school commutes, our current system creates twice as many dark mornings as would occur under permanent standard time.

Listen: I’m as bummed out by an afternoon sunset as anyone else. But as long as we can get rid of the twice-a-year upheaval, I’m personally good with whatever. And keeping kids safe as they wait for the bus—or, even better, as they walk or bike to school, because we love a pedestrian-friendly commute—seems pretty worthwhile to me.

That’s all for this week’s science news roundup. We’ll be back on Wednesday to talk about how soybeans quietly swept the nation and on Friday we’re going to talk about how AI swept everywhere.

Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak, Allison Rodgers and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Marielle Issa and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for m

ore up-to-date and in-depth science news.For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great week!

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Good lord, it’s been a bad week for gaming. You don’t need to be a news hound or a Nostradamus to see where the problems are coming from: AI. From hardware to software to platforms to funding, “AI” is causing nothing but headaches for most gamers, and anyone else connected to the industry.

The billionaires want your RAM

Over a couple of cheeky pints with a fellow CEO, ChatGPT’s chief Sam Altman said the quiet part out loud: Your computer’s RAM would be far better utilized in one of OpenAI’s data centers. He was talking specifically about running AI models — which is possible to do on local hardware, especially on newer designs like Nvidia’s RTX Spark chips — but the sentiment follows for gaming PCs and consoles, too.

From Altman’s perspective as a billionaire profiting off the AI boom, yeah, of course all that hardware would be better in his hands, rented back to corporations and consumers one token at a time. The sentiment comes off as unimaginably elitist, even if it makes cold, robotic sense for pure allocation. One of the richest people on the planet thinks he should have powerful hardware, not you.And that sure seems to be the way the market is trending, with RAM in laptops and phones going backward for the first time in recent memory, even as every new device crows about AI capability. Remember that big push Microsoft had for “Copilot+” laptops that met a minimum spec, a minimum that its latest (and still very expensive) Surface devices can’t even meet?

It’s kind of ironic that Microsoft is having so much trouble with its Xbox platform. The cheapest Xbox is now $500, and the next-gen “Helix” model is projected to cost $1,200 to $1,800 to produce. Microsoft has been struggling to keep Xbox competitive for over a decade, but it’s hard to feel bad for the company that’s also pushing AI in every one of its products, so much that it had to apologize to Windows users.

Pity Sony and Nintendo, at least theoretically, as their price increases are beyond their control. Pity Framework and Valve for trying to make cool hardware at the worst time imaginable. But don’t shed a tear for Microsoft — it has sewn the wind.

AI slop floods the game platforms

CEOs being out-of-touch elitists isn’t new (here I’ll mention Epic CEO Tim Sweeney for a very specific reason), and we’ve been dealing with a nightmare of hardware prices for a year or so. But Steam’s recent Next Fest event highlighted how the AI problem is affecting the software side, too.

Next Fest has become a calendar event for gamers, a time when developers and publishers release demos for their exciting upcoming titles. But this year, with Steam absolutely infested with AI slop, things felt a little different. Though there was plenty of new stuff to try for PC gamers. But some developers are now wary of publishing demos, for fear that their games will be used as templates for vibe-coded copycats.

The fears are not unfounded. While shovelware and clones have always been a part of the gaming market, being able to point an LLM at an existing game is a new problem. It’s not as if you’re just slapping the cover into a Xerox machine and getting an instant, perfect copy…but it’s not so far removed from that, either. Fraudulent copies of games have already appeared on Steam and other platforms, and developers have been sent extortion messages threatening to use AI to copy their games if they don’t pay up. The problem is so widespread that Anthropic added more stringent, game-specific copyright protections to its Claude LLM.

Steam has moderation tools to stop outright fraud and intentional customer confusion. And Steam, more than other platforms, has at least made token attempts to inform players when generative AI is being used. But Valve has stopped short of allowing end users to filter out projects that are partly or mostly built with generative AI.

Valve is either unwilling or unable to be the slop police. It’s trying to walk a fine line between quality control and developer freedom. On one side, you get a walled garden that’s inaccessible to indie developers. On the other…well, you get the hellscape of slop that open platforms like Itch.io are turning into. New games and programs are flooding the market, growing exponentially, and almost all of it appears to be low-quality, vibe-coded garbage. It’s only accelerating the problem of discoverability.

Big games are becoming unsustainable

The problems don’t end with the smaller side of the game industry, either. Even while hardware becomes unaffordable, the trend of ballooning costs for AAA game development is making those games harder and harder to make. As graphics and game scope are pushed ever higher, reaching a possible pinnacle with the upcoming GTAVI, big games are getting the same budgets and gambles as Hollywood blockbusters. And it’s becoming a higher ratio of losses to wins.

Nowhere is this more evident than Mass Effect. After spending years in development, the much-anticipated sequel to the sci-fi RPG series was cancelled. EA also shut down its subsidiary Bioware, a legendary developer that struggled to deliver hits in the age of live services. It came shortly after the publisher went private, acquired by a private equity firm. EA seems to want lucrative sports games (and their associated gacha gambling) and more bankable IP like Star Wars. And, yeah, that also mirrors Hollywood woes.

But Mass Effect isn’t the only recent casualty. Microsoft returns to this tale of woe, as Gears of War: E-Day is estimated to have cost half a billion dollars to develop, yet sold less than half a million copies. Highguard, Saros, and Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 are all examples of recent releases for massively ambitious games that flopped hard enough to result in massive layoffs.

AI is a factor here, too. Aside from the bubble taking up room in terms of pure investment, publishers appear to be pointing to AI as a means of cutting headcount. The game development industry has been a bloodbath of layoffs for years, and it only seems to be accelerating, as companies like Nvidia and Epic promise they can pump out AAA-quality titles for a fraction of the cost by utilizing AI. Generated assets are starting to appear consistently in games as big as Fortnite and Call of Duty.

But those tokens aren’t free, and they’re getting more expensive. It remains unclear whether AI code and assets can consistently deliver returns for game developers big and small, no matter how hard the CEOs try to will them into being. This means the trends will continue, and accelerate. There will be more consolidation around existing, bankable franchises like GTA and Madden, and fewer new ideas coming from the biggest developers with the most resources.

No light at the end of the tunnel

Here’s where I offer a ray of hope to you, newsletter reader. Or at least it’s where I should offer that ray of hope. In a typical editorial, we’d place the good news here.

But I can’t. Because as amazing as some parts of the game industry have so recently become, the bad far outweighs the good. There is no ready solution to a tidal wave of AI slop making platforms unusable. No reining in CEOs who want to own everything of value and deliver as little as possible to consumers. No reversing the trend that drives creation costs higher and higher, and sends developers into unemployment lines.

The natural end to all of this is a crash, reminiscent of the video game industry collapse in the 1980s or the dot-com bubble pop of the early 2000s. With prices for the next generation of consoles looking more like used cars than entertainment devices, that crash seems almost inevitable. PC gamers would be spared that particular tribulation, but would find cold comfort as gaming hardware remains unaffordable, and the industry shifts further towards integrated graphics.

All of that may be academic, as the more likely catalyst for a game industry collapse is just the pop of the AI bubble. That would have catastrophic fallout for electronics in general and the economy as a whole.

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Credit: EA/OpenAI

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